The Center of the World (2001)

THE CENTER OF THE WORLD  (2001)  ¢ ¢ 

    D: Wayne Wang

    Molly Parker, Peter Sarsgaard, Carla Gugino

Wayne Wang and Paul Auster try a variation on "Last Tango In Paris", with a story about a stripper and a computer geek on a weekend in Las Vegas. It's a case of opposites attracting (or at least coming together briefly) and not knowing how to connect. Richard (Peter Sarsgaard) thinks he's found the center of the world with his computer. Florence (Molly Parker) thinks she's found it in a more intimate place. She's a heartbreaker, a ballbreaker, a drummer in a no-name band. He's a disheveled recluse, a virtual millionaire who lives on leftover pizza and spends too much time in cyberspace. She's deceptive, elusive, the same defense mechanisms that protect her in the skin trade cutting her off from expressing or accepting genuine emotion. He's an emotional open book, with no defense mechanisms at all. Parker and Sarsgaard both work real hard to make something out of this, and if the movie clicks at all, it's because of them. What's missing is the kind of background information that could suggest who these people really are, or what they have in common beyond this three-day lap dance. The same remoteness that keeps Richard and Florence from getting very close to each other, keeps the audience from getting very close to them. One thing they both know by the end of the film: Life can be empty at the center of the world.

The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964)

THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE  (1964)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 

    D: Anthony Mann

    Sophia Loren, Stephen Boyd, Alec Guinness,

    Chirstopher Plummer, James Mason, Anthony Quayle,

    Omar Sharif, Mel Ferrer, John Ireland

This movie covers roughly the same historical ground as Ridley Scott's "Gladiator": the last days of Marcus Aurelius, followed by the disastrous reign of his son Commodus. It's stately and a little stiff, but there's some intelligence in the script and the all-star cast gets the job done. James Mason orates, Christopher Plummer smirks, Stephen Boyd races a chariot, Alec Guinness brings a touch of humor to Marcus Aurelius, and Sophia Loren never looked more regal. The production values, predictably, are colossal. For anybody keeping track of the mounting comparisons between ancient Rome and 21st-century America, the last line of voiceover narration is ominous.

City of Ember (2008)

CITY OF EMBER  (2008)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢  

    D: Gil Kenan

    Saoirse Ronan, Harry Treadaway, Bill Murray,

    Tim Robbins, Martin Landau, Toby Jones,

    David Ryall, Mary Kay Place, Mackenzie Crook

Two hundred years after its first inhabitants tunneled down from the earth's surface, the once-gleaming underground city of Ember is falling apart. Lights flicker and dim and go out, powered by a dying generator. Food is becoming scarce, at least partly because the corrupt mayor (Bill Murray) is hoarding as much as he can for himself. Water pipes are repaired with rags, tape, spit, whatever's available. Gears and wheels creak and rust. In fact, Ember with its retro-industrial design looks a lot like Fritz Lang's "Metropolis", and that's not an accident. "City of Ember" is a juvenile reworking of "Metropolis", with Saoirse Ronan and Harry Treadaway as its teenaged protagonists, the only citizens of Ember, apparently, with the imagination and courage to look for a way out. It might be aimed squarely at kids between 8 and 12, but unlike a lot of kids' movies, it doesn't play it too cute or insult anybody's intelligence. The story holds your interest, and Kenan and the design team conjure up a credible vision of the ways an isolated society and its infrastructure could evolve and decay over time. Tim Robbins plays an eccentric inventor. Martin Landau plays the wild-haired workman who helps Ronan and Treadaway navigate the pipeworks. And there's a rat. A big rat. A great big rat with red, slimy, tentacle-like things growing out of its face. Ew. Yuck.

Movie Star Moment: Cary Grant

Cary Grant as Adam Canfield

in "Charade" (1963)

    It's night in Paris, and Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn are on one of those dinner barges that cruise the Seine. Suddenly the lights go out and a spotlight from the boat starts to pan the shore. Hepburn and Grant move to the rail to watch, as the spotlight reveals young couples making out on the river's edge. Grant, close to 60 and approaching the end of his career as one of the screen's great romantic leads, looks out over the water toward the lovers on the bank. "Pretty good, huh?" he says. "I taught them everything they do."

Flashback: "Charade"

    My all-time favorite movie is "Charade".

    I couldn't tell you why.

    It's something I tried to explain to Ms. Applebaum once, on a day-long road trip from Spokane to Seattle. I failed.

    It's something my old friend Sporgersi and I have tried to get a handle on, individually and collectively, for close to 50 years. No luck there, either.

    Dr. Sporgersi and I first saw "Charade" at the Orpheum Theater in Madison in 1963. Our m.o. back then, when we could afford it, was to grab lunch at a hole-in-the-wall burger joint off State Street called the Red & White, and then buy bags of doughnuts at the Federal Bake Shop and sneak them into the theater for the one-o'clock matinee.

    The doughnuts were crucial, because we were 16 and always hungry, and because they'd keep us going in case we really liked the movie and decided to stay and see it twice. (This was before theaters ritually emptied out between shows. For the price of a ticket, you could sit in the dark all day if you wanted to, and we sometimes did. Imagine.)

    I'm pretty sure the day we saw "Charade" was a day we bought doughnuts. It was definitely a day we stayed to see the movie twice.

    What made us do that? What compelled us to spend not two, but four hours that day in the cavernous old Orpheum with its stale popcorn smell and sticky floor? What makes me go to the video shelf now and reach for "Charade" more often than any other film? Why "Charade"?

    Maybe it was a case of all the elements lining up and coming together in a way that to us at the time seemed perfect: the script (Peter Stone), the direction (Stanley Donen), the leads (Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant), the location (Paris), the supporting cast (Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy, Ned Glass and Jacques Marin), the music (Henry Mancini), even the eye-popping, protopsychedelic opening credits. Everything clicked. Everything worked.

    Maybe it was because we were young, would-be romantics who both had a thing for Audrey Hepburn. Or because we were still in the process of finding out how much we loved films, and this was the picture, at the right time and place, that put us both over the top. Or maybe the cinema gods were just fooling around that day, laughing, smoking some weed, and deciding, just for the hell of it, let's fuck with these guys. 

    Whatever it was, it stuck.

    "Charade" is still my all-time favorite movie.

    And I still couldn't tell you why.

The Truth About Charlie (2002)

THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE  (2002)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Jonathan Demme

    Thandie Newton, Mark Wahlberg, Tom Robbins

Thandie Newton plays a young woman who returns to Paris after a holiday in the Alps and finds that her apartment's cleaned out, her husband's in the morgue, and $6 million she didn't know existed has vanished without a trace. Three menacing characters, old colleagues of the deceased, think she has the money, and they want it, bad. An American embassy official (Tim Robbins) wants the money, too - apparently it was stolen from the U.S. government - and wants her to help him get it. Then there's this handsome stranger (Mark Wahlberg) who, well, it's hard to tell what he wants, but he always seems to turn up where she does, ready to lend a hand. Jonathan Demme's remake of "Charade" not surprisingly fails to live up to its classic model, despite some playful references to Peter Stone's original script and an affectionate nod to the French New Wave. It's not Newton's fault that she's not Audrey Hepburn, or Wahlberg's that he's not Cary Grant. They're just not Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. Robbins is a decent replacement for Walter Matthau, even trying out a New England accent, but "Charade" gave Matthau more funny stuff to do. The villains filling in for Ned Glass, George Kennedy and James Coburn are fashionably multicultural now, but Coburn's corduroy suit had more personality than all of them put together. Demme obviously loves "Charade", and you can't blame him for wanting to do a version of his own. But with the prospect of comparison not just a risk but inevitable, his chances of pulling it off were slim from the start. Like Gus Van Sant's meticulous reconstruction of "Psycho", it's an interesting cinematic exercise, but ultimately kind of pointless.

A Woman of Paris (1923)

A WOMAN OF PARIS  (1923)  ¢ ¢ ¢  

    D: Charles Chaplin

    Edna Purviance, Adolphe Menjou,

    Carl Miller, Lydia Knott

At the time he made this, Charlie Chaplin was probably the most famous human being on the planet. So he took a risk. He made a movie in which he doesn't star. It's not even a comedy. It's a romantic melodrama about a young woman who moves from a small town to the City of Light, where she learns to enjoy the good life as the mistress of a playboy millionaire. Complications develop when she encounters her old boyfriend, now a struggling painter, and the millionaire announces his engagement to another woman. The humor is incidental, and all does not end well for everybody. Without Chaplin the star at the center of things, this is a good chance to appreciate Chaplin the filmmaker, and Edna Purviance, Charlie's frequent leading lady from the early days, has the best role of her career. You'll really have to look to spot Chaplin in a tiny cameo role.