Move Over, Roger Ebert

It was a pretty quiet, especially considering where we are in the calendar, mid-way through what we call the "holiday season."

I was invited to my former boss's house for a party on Saturday evening, so it wasn't what I'd call a desolate weekend; all the same, there wasn't much else on the calendar for Friday night or all day Sunday. So, I did as I am wont to do. I watched movies.

And I saw two movies this weekend that could not have been more different from each other. First up, Julie Christie in first-time director Sarah Polley's Away from Her. Formerly known as an actor and sometime singer, Polley is a brilliant director, and way too young to be able to comprehend aging, ageism, and lifelong relationships the way she clearly does. What everyone has been saying about this movie, and what I can validate, is that this story -- a man watches his wife lose her mind to Alzheimer's Disease -- should have been melodramatic and awful, more at home in the Hallmark Hall of Fame than your local art-house theatre. But because of ... something -- Polley's direction, her brilliant script, her brilliant cast, or more likely a combination of all three -- it transcends every possible cliche. Far from being depressing and unsavory, it does the near impossible, and becomes something delicate, surprising, and lovely.

I won't give much away, but in one of the very first scenes, the husband and wife are cleaning up from dinner. The husband is washing dishes as his wife dries. He hands her a frying pan. She smiles, dries it off, and places it in the freezer. She leaves to start the evening fire. He waits for her to leave, removes the frying pan from the freezer, places it in the cupboard where it belongs, and resumes his domestic task. Not a word is spoken, but it's clear where her journey will soon lead, and how afraid he is of what is to come, enough that he does what needs to be done and immediately puts it out of his mind, preferring memory and denial to reality and the mess that comes with it.

Julie Christie will probably be nominated for an Oscar for this role, and without having seen Nicole Kidman in Margot at the Wedding or Laura Linney in The Savages, my bet is she'll win it. But equally deserving, if not more so, is Gordon Pinset as a husband who, powerless to stop this unseen thing attacking his wife, eventually finds the courage to love her as she needs to be loved rather than as he would prefer to love her. And I'll go on record right now as saying that if Sarah Polley isn't nominated and doesn't win for Best Adapted Screenplay, there is no justice in this world.

My second film of the weekend was American Gangster, starring Denzel Washington as a real-life Harlem drug lord and Russell Crowe as the New Jersey cop who brought him to justice. Before seeing the movie, I called my mom, who advised, "Oh that's a wonderful movie. Awfully violent, I suppose, but very good." And there you have it.

I saw Gangster with my friend, the Country Gurl. And, like all good movies, the after-movie discussion was as good as the film itself. During the movie, I found it difficult to like Denzel's character. First of all, let's dispense with the obvious: he was a drug lord responsible for the deaths of many an addict in the neighborhood he supposedly loved -- and the movie does not shy away from the terrible effects of heroin addiction; it's right there in widescreen. But ... and this is confession time: I have difficulty liking Denzel in any movie he does. I don't know if it's absolutely true, but there have been many rumors about Mr. Washington and homophobia, including coaching Will Smith not to kiss another male actor in the film version of Six Degrees of Separation -- so every time I see Denzel, that's there for me. I'd like to get past it, but it's stuck in my craw, as it were.

Country Gurl had a very different and more ambivilent take: she knew, obviously, that Frank Lucas, as played by Denzel, was a bad guy. Drug lord, worked against his own people, yadda yadda. At the same time, she found herself admiring his business savvy and, for the lack of a better word, his courage. Here was a poor black kid from North Carolina who worked as a driver and stooge who, in the 1970's, outsmarted the mob and skirted the corrupt cops from the DEA in a way that no crime boss before him had ever been able to do. "I have this weird sense of pride," she said to me on the way from the theatre to the post-cinema coffee shop. And while I couldn't quite connect to that (still simmering in my Denzel-hates-the-gays stew), it was an interesting learning moment for me, watching her struggle with what she knew (bad guy) and what she felt (you show 'em, Frankie). And that's you know you've seen a good flick; just sayin'.

So ... seen any good movies lately?