From the IFC: SNOW CAKE

This is an unpredictable and interesting UK/Canadian flick with Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman about the often misunderstood condition of autism. As the movie opens, we find Englishman Alex (Rickman) stopping in a diner during a long drive to Western Canada. He has a secret, which we quickly learn. Vivienne, a kooky teenage girl, played by Emily Hampshire, ends up sharing his table and he reluctantly gives her a ride to Wawa to see her mother Linda, played by Weaver. Mom is autistic, a term that describes a spectrum of behavior from low- to high functioning. In film, RAINMAN contains the most recent well-known depiction to the mass audience.

When Rickman makes it to Wawa, he ends up getting involved in the life of the autistic mom and her neighbor Maggie, played by Carrie-Anne Moss. Weaver's portrayal is similar in acting discipline to Peter Sellers in BEING THERE, in the sense of keeping in character throughout, but with the leeway of a greater emotional range. The one emotion that Weaver's character lacks is empathy, and Rickman, whose stock in trade is sarcasm, makes every effort to break through and pull out empathy from her autistic world.

Semi-spoiler alert: a very appealing character leaves the story early on and it must have been a challenge to screenwriter Angela Pell to write a script that was compelling enough to hold the audience after that point. She succeeds. A tip of the snowman's top hat to director Marc Evans and cinematographer Steve Cosens for making a film as bright and beautiful to look at as a Canadian sunset.

Sigourney Weaver has created a character that will seem impossibly high-functioning to parents of children who have little or no speech but autism is many things. Her portrayal is accurate as far as the current wide-ranging definition is applied. I believed her.

Anything that Alan Rickman does has a quality seal on it. His retirement is secure thanks to the Harry Potter series but that work doesn't compare to his brilliance in many other favorites of mine, including GALAXY QUEST (also with Weaver), MICHAEL COLLINS (as Eamon De Valera), DIE HARD (the first installment of the holy trilogy), and DOGMA (not a fave but he's great in it). He's going to play Judge Turpin in the SWEENEY TODD movie directed by Tim Burton and that makes it a gotta go to for me.

Recommended with a money back guarantee.

SNOW CAKE is showing at the IFC Center Theater, located on the site of the old Waverly on Sixth Avenue. I get the IFC On Demand Channel on Cablevision for $4.95/month and this is where I saw it from my couch. They show first-run films as they are still running theatrically and also show older films. About once a month they run something I like and this month it was SNOW CAKE. You'll find out what a snow cake is in the last reel and it's a very nice scene.

From the IFC Theatre: Private Fears in Public Places

From Ira Gershwin: He loves, and she loves, and they love, so won't you love me as I love you? PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES, directed by Alain Resnais, tackles the age old question in this Parisienne tale that takes place in a constant showfall. Several plots interlink like a Seinfeld episode without the laughs.

Couple number 1: Thierry, late middle-aged, is attracted to somewhat younger Charlotte as they work together at a real estate office. Right away I was gratified to see a film featuring people in my AARP demographic. Charlotte shares her religious videos with Thierry but who is that woman dancing provocatively at the end of the tape? Could it be Charlotte? [Charlotte reminded me of Diane Keaton.]

Couple number 2: Dan and Nicole, in their 30s, are in a rotten relationship. He was cashiered out of the army for some infraction and now he's unemployed. Thierry spends a lot of time showing apartments to Nicole, who wants marriage, babies, etc.

Couple number 3 is not an actual couple but is Thierry and his younger sister Gaelle. Their age difference is too great to look like brother and sister. There's a joke she makes when she's annoyed with him about being glad she doesn't have to sleep with him. This is how you know it's a French film. [If it were Italian they might actually go for it.]

Couple number 4 is Dan, of Dan and Nicole, and Gaelle, of Thierry and Gaelle. Dan separates from Nicole and meets Gaelle on L'Internet.

Lionel is Dan's bartender and employer of Charlotte in her night job as home caretaker of his angrily senile father. Lionel likes Charlotte, who is religious, saying she's the best caretaker his father has ever had, marveling at the smile on the old gent's face as he sleeps. He is a non-believer, as I had assumed most Frenchman were. What is her secret? Could it be the Bible she carries or is it French-style Christian charity?

Dan and Gaelle have a booze-fueled night on the town and it ends chastely with a promise to meet again tomorrow but it doesn't come off as planned. Charlotte is a bewitcher of men and as the film ends another of her videotapes is in the mix, a funny scene. Thierry is the saddest character and must have grown up not watching French movies. I learned that some Frenchmen lead lives as boring as anyone else's.

In THE GREAT MOVIEMAKERS OF HOLLYWOOD'S GOLDEN AGE by George Stevens, Jr., Ray Bradbury talked about how he would rewrite endings of movies and publish them in the New York Times. As this film came to a close I imagined how the American version will end. There would probably be a wedding or two and a flashforward to one year later with the new baby.

CALLING ALL ENGLISH LIT MAJORS: There's a scene with Lionel and Charlotte connecting in his kitchen that breaks from reality and switches to symbolism, as suddenly they are sitting in snow in the same kitchen. Then it cuts back to realism as they continue a heart-to-heart talk. I'm still trying to figure it out. Could be a reminder that no matter how pleasant kitchen chats are, the outside world will intrude.

PRIVATE reaches a Stan Lee illusion-of-change conclusion, where some go back to their routine, some move on a little bit, and time passes pleasantly under a constant, gentle snowfall. SPOLIER ALERT FOR 80s television: The falling snow reminded me of the last episode of ST. ELSEWHERE, where the entire series is revealed to be the imaginings of an autistic child looking into a snow globe.

A pleasant deux heures.

Must See Radio: TALK RADIO on Broadway; Don Imus; the politically incorrect Stan Musial on Larry King

TALK RADIO by Eric Bogosian at the Longacre Theatre [where even the next-to-last TDF ticket in the last row is a great seat] is a great play about radio. Liev Schreiber, who I have always enjoyed in a wide range of movies [THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, HAMLET, RKO 281] and voiceover work, plays Barry Champlain, a talk radio host in Cleveland, 1987. We get to watch him do his show on the most important day of his career. He's been offered a national syndication deal and it's his job to lose. Will his abrasive, abusive style lead to saying something that will ruin the deal? Will he be killed by a crazed fan before he gets a chance to go national?

Schreiber is a master thespian and wrings every drop out of the role. Highly recommended, a terrific supporting cast, some doing triple duty as the nutty callers, make this $30 well spent. A clever set makes you feel you're in a working radio studio. I can't remember ever seeing fluorescent lights on stage before and this cleverly set the off-the-air scenes in a very different mood.

When the play was first performed by the author in 1987, the writing and performing was said to be partially inspired by Don Imus. If I can go back further, I saw a lot of Joe Pyne in the character. Joe used to appear on Channel 5 in New York in the '60s. His most famous line to guests he hated was, "Go gargle with razor blades." The F-bombs in TALK RADIO may have still been shocking to an audience in the waning years of the Reagan era but no longer in our enlightened Sopranos culture.

DON IMUS

This week Barack Obama compares the psychic violence of Imus remarks and the issue of outsourcing to the Virginia Tech shooting of people of all races by a mentally ill loner. I thought it might be a hoax because only right wing sites picked it up, like they did the phony Muslim school report. But the mp3 removes any doubt about the quote or its context [see below from the site wispolitics.com].

This is so intellectually dishonest that I think mainstream media has chosen not to cover it because they like Obama too much to knock him down this early. They're waiting. Can you imagine if Hillary Clinton had said it? She'd be attacked for lack of taste, gravitas, and perspective.

The Imus remark is 4-5 mins in.

http://www.wispolitics.com/1006/20070416obama.mp3

STAN MUSIAL

XM Radio is running LARRY! on XM 130 on the 50th anniversary of the King's start in broadcasting. The channel is all Larry, all the time. Stan Musial was on today from one of Larry's local shows in D.C., 1976. The discussion turned to the way baseball wasn't promoting to the youth, the way they did in Musial's era with the Knothole Gang, which gave tickets to youth groups and promoted off-season activities for kids. He said that maybe 1/4 of the Cards were from Puerto Rico and went home during the off-season. Of the rest of the squad, there weren't enough Americans on the team who stayed in town for off-season promotion.

I'm hoping no one else heard this because I can imagine someone will demand that Stan apologize for implying that Puerto Ricans were not Americans. It's also possible that at least one Latino Cardinal was not from Puerto Rico, and this would also be an unforgivable error. They do field separate teams in many international competitions so it would be easy for Stan to get confused about this.

Perspective: If Imus had committed his gaffe this week of the Virginia Tech shootings, it is likely he'd still have his job. He might have made a tasteless Korean joke, outraged someone who never listens, and even helped heal some pain with the gift of laughter. A racist is someone who sees someone and hates them because of their race. That is not the guy I've listened to for 36 years. I stopped listening for awhile in the past, once for an albinism joke and another time for the lesbian bashing [family concerns in both areas], but I believe Imus when he said in the past, "I'm not prejudiced, I hate everybody." Just as I wouldn't listen to the David Duke show or send my children to Bob Jones University, I would listen to Imus because he is not a hater. He's a guy who said a hateful thing, not a man who hates.

Don Rickles career is over too. He'll have to come out and start the act with his end song, "I'm a Nice Guy," then leave the stage. In Tony Bennett's autobio there's a great story about the first time Bennett saw Rickles' act. He had never seen the insult king before and as Tony's party entered the room, Mr. Warmth laid into him bigtime. After the show, Tony and his friend paid a visit backstage and beat the hell out of Rickles. Since that time, Bennett said, Rickles was always nice to him.

The B Movie Musicals at the Film Forum in New York

A recent bout of unemployment gave me the time to see the opening program of the Film Forum's B Movie Musical festival. Full-disclosure: Like the president of the Hair Club for Men, I am also a card-carrying member of FF.


RISE AND SHINE (1941)

When I was a boy in the '60s, Channel 5 in New York showed this movie and my whole family still remembers one scene from it. Jack Oakie is a dumb-lug college football star and needs to pass the history final. He is asked to name any form or transportation. The class is encouraging him, choo-chooing and chugga-chugging, until he's asked, "What do you do to get in shape before the season?" He passes the test, a signal is passed out the window, and the whole campus celebrates.

George Murphy couldn't act as well as Reagan or dance better than Astaire but he's a lot fun to watch in RISE. He's a night club entertainer sent by the boss to keep tabs on Jack Oakie, the star of the team that he's betting on. Some terpsichore by Murphy, Linda Darnell as the charmer, forgettable tunes by Robin/Rainger, clowning by young Milton Berle and Sheldon Leonard as henchman and mob boss, and funny business by Walter Brennan playing a Confederate veteran hiding his old money make this a B movie. That's a movie where cast and crew on the way up meet performers and company on the way down.


HOLD THAT COED (1938)

This was the next feature on the double bill. The credits rolled on a rotating pigskin, just like in RISE AND SHINE. Murphy stars again, this time as a football coach for a poorly-equipped state college. John Barrymore plays the governor, who first wants to cut their budget so he can run as the austerity candidate for U.S. Senator. Coach Murphy leads the team in a march to the governor's office [his only chance to dance] and stages a near riot.

The governor does a 180 and decides to build a new stadium and recruit good players to drum up publicity for his Senate race. This is a team without stars but one is discovered in accidental Gump-style. Joan Davis, a gender-bending co-ed who can kick the football, leads the team with her kicking and more in the big game against Barrymore's Senate opponent's team [the loser drops out of the race!]. Joan is a lost comic legend. My mother has talked for years about her TV series I MARRIED JOAN, with Jim Backus, as one of the great shows of the 1950s.

Forgettable tunes by Arthur Lange, tepid love interest Marjorie Weaver, almost no dancing by Murphy, some weak-kneed comedy from Jack Haley as the governor's secretary, but the Joan Davis payoff in the last reel makes it worthwhile.