The film we saw was the documentary My Architect, the biopic of physically diminutive but reputationally giant Louis Kahn, directed and *starring* his “illegitimate” son, Nathanial Kahn. While not experimental in form or approach, the younger Kahn narrates and directs with the kind of earnest simplicity that disarms most viewers and makes them wish they, too, could be less acerbic about their attitudes toward filmmaking and family. The film’s focus is likewise split (yielding, therefore, foci) between the godlike genius of his work and the human failing of his families — and, given Nathanial’s emotional envolvment in his subject, it cheats to the human side.

The documentary is atypical in two ways: its settings and its director’s relationship to the subject. As Emily noted, many traditional documentaries suffer from interviews conducted with stuffy academics sitting in front of their tidy bookshelves stuffed with books (although, as long as the dialogue is stimulating, the backdrop is usually easily disregarded anyway). In My Architect, Kahn successfully chokes up at least two of his more scholarly interviewees by conducting the interview in one of Kahn’s buildings. A younger Bangladeshi architect can barely finish his obsequious praise of Kahn and his masterpiece, the Capital building of Bangladesh, because they’re standing on one of its interior parapets. The man cannot stop his tears. Earlier, on location at Kahn’s Salk Institute, the film swells in spirituality while accelerated photography reveals the ingenius presence of time in this masterpiece by the ocean. Kahn built in stone, iron, brick, glass, and time. Even when trying, in layman’s terms, to explain the qualities of Kahn’s designs that make them art, the specialists cannot help but drift into the spiritual or the irrational. The buildings are too monumental (the film suggests Kahn was heavily influened by the timelessnes of the great ancient works of the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians); his admirers run up against them with their senses and are left too devestated to comment articulately.

Time is also how the Nathanial Kahn — at times purposefully, and others inadvertantly — makes such a unique presence of himself as the interviewer. With all the archival footage of the iconic Louis Kahn spliced into the interviews and footage of Nathanial Kahn on his odyssey, their facial resemblance is irrefutable. Nathanial’s very existence, in the flesh, moves another of his interviewees to tears. As Kahn questions his mother on camera, asking some rather sharp but honest questions, one cannot but feel the tension and reality. This is real reality, even for a documentary. And the questions, about family and committment, are sharp because of L. Kahn’s shady personal life. He managed to father a child with three different women, and be at least part of their lives, secretly, until his death in 1974. Nathanial was concieved when his father was just over 60, and was the legend’s only son. One scene unites the three siblings for a conversation about the funeral, at which the two unmarried mothers were almost banished from the service by Kahn’s wife. Witnessing Nathanial searching the figures and spaces of his father’s past, in order to color this gap in his childhood, elevates the interviewer to subject, while at the same time maintaining his status as director. His roles in producing the film become inextricable from each other: photographer and on-screen presence, director and lost son.

In the closing moments of the film, Nathanial confesses to some sense of closure after completing the project, which was mostly filmed four years ago and had been in post-production ever since. Like any great attempt at biography, most enigmas are unsolved, even if their outlines have been traced. Like trying to define Charles Foster Kane after the closing shots of Citizen Kane, we find the film has only given us tools with which to ponder the mystery of Louis Kahn. He’s still a mystery, and that is how it should be.

Addendum: My Architect has been nominated for an Academy Award, for whatever that’s worth.

We need to remember that there are islands of simplicity on Earth that are not necessarily marked by ignorance or contrivance. They float in places like the memories of our elementary education, rural France, and some films. Without wandering into sentimentality, the documentary Étre et Avoir presents the awkward wonders of education with a glow that can only be called joy.

Director/cinematographer Nicolas Philibert films the delicate dramas of a one-room classroom with the same hushed patience of his subject: an aging, but youthful, master educator, Georges Lopez. A quiet and firm mediator, Lopez navigates his pupils individually and collectively, with love and with reserve, through a school year. Even after thirty-five years of teaching experience, he is challenged daily by his eleven students who range from three-year-old Alizé to eleven-year-old Nathalie. They are formed into two groups, the Big ones and the Little ones, and Lopez shifts his attention with graceful intermittence.

Philibert has admitted that his principle throughout this project was not to “illustrate in images a notion worked out in advance,” but to record Lopez’ natural methods and interactions with the children. The resulting film is notably genuine. Some prolonged takes he captures could not be written or acted with more precision and effect. A calm but intense dialogue between Lopez and his two oldest boys — who had been at blows during recess — unfolds, for example, over an uncut span of ten minutes.

Elsewhere, Philibert edits his footage economically, establishing each singular member of the class starkly. Jojo, at four, is restless and unfocused, bursting with melodrama and pushing with his new brain at the boundaries of his universe. At one point Lopez challenges him to find the biggest number, and a cavalcade of half-surprises overcome the boy as he incrementally soars from twenty-nine to a five billion. Contrarily, the eldest, Nathalie, is tightly introverted, petrified of the social world. She will be moving onto middle school after this year, and the most vital teaching Lopez shares with her is not mathematics or geography, but his warmth as a teacher and friend. Anytime four-year-old Marie can point out the failings of her peers, and her dominance in anything, she does.

The longer sequences of the film are tastefully punctuated by shots of local nature, the most revelatory of which might be the sight of fir tree branches in winter being swung by a night flurry. The film’s pace and posture are as steady and as buoyant as this wind, while its richest moments of human interaction are as weighted as these boughs sagging with snow. Or consider the class’s spring picnic near an impossibly thick field of wheat; a mischievous child wanders into the golden straw to hide, while a visibly nervous Lopez and another student call her name: a startling metaphor for how some children, despite the best guidance, will erase themselves, or the promise of themselves, at an early age.

This is an even film, to be commended for its reality. Philibert tempers the adorable with the harsh, the grins with lectures on respect, the uncaring rain with small umbrellas (French for “umbrella” is parapluie, a word too lovely and melopoetic to omit) and puddles. And since much of the dialogue is in rudimentary, your high school French education might be tickled into surprising use.

It is really only because of the politeness required of a host — that acquiescence we like to think is a kind sacrifice — that I suffered through The Cooler, a new Vegas-drama released with fogs of critical musk by Lions Gate just in time for the pre-Oscar season. I can only in painful hindsight wish I had used my acclaimed capacity for passive-aggressive persuasion to sway our group to choose Gus Van Sant’s Elephant instead, but something about the careful way my guest and I have studied each other’s character since elementary school warned me that he would detect this, and be annoyed in the way only he can.

The Cooler is credited as having been crafted by freshman feature filmmaker Wayne Kramer (b. 1965, and thus, not the guitarist of legendary 60s anti-establishment punk outfit MC5), but the whiplash generated by a collection of ill-advised, melodramatic twists parading as a film seems to suggest that the script was the coveted pet-project of an former casino insider who is coincidentally a hopeless writer, and then subsequently hammered out of amateurism and into pat drivel by a slightly less hopeless committee of “screenwriters.”

If William H. Macy, one of the few subtle and gifted character actors of this era, goes down in cinema history as having won an Oscar (for whatever that distinction is worth now), it should not be for his work in The Cooler. Nevermind the contemporary trend of make-up awards for previously deserving artists, I just do not endorse anyone remembering this abominable film for any reason other then the new lows it notches on the scale of bad moviedom. He is, of course, interesting as the unlucky Bernie Lootz, a career looser resigned to a life of indentured servitude as a “cooler,” or, as the film awkwardly explains in a clumsy opening sequence, “the guy in the casino who has the ability, apparently through tactile contact, to cool the luck of hot gamblers poised to unburden the Shangri-La casino of an inordinate amount of cash.” Macy’s physical work is most impressive, as he allows the aging, reserved Bernie to blossom into a receptive sexual partner to would-have-been showgirl, current waitress, Natalie (Maria Bello). Over the course of several intimate, frank love scenes, Macy succeeds in rubbing his nose all over Bello’s upper body. We also witness both of their naked asses and all but the very skin of Macy’s penis. They’re caressing is real and human, and should be lauded for its eschewal of glamour and youth. Alec Baldwin would be outstanding as Shelly, an amoral boss and casino manager, were it not for the lines he is ashamedly forced to utter.

Why do all films about Las Vegas seem to suffer from the same squeamish taste of extreme immorality? Have filmmakers over the years simply been so attuned to the miasma of sin permeating the city like smog that its unmistakable presence inevitably transposes to the screen? Or is Vegas really just so corrupting that any attempt to convey its culture seems to rake sore nails across the blackboard of our souls? As entertaining as characters have been in Vegas, whether honeymooning, vacationing, leaving, fearing and loathinging, these films do not settle easily, like a hazy Sunday afternoon spent reflecting on a Saturday night full of very bad things. Even Scorcese could not get it right. Specifically, The Cooler is more manipulative in its moral dealings than most. While shock is an effective tool in any medium, shock accomplished underhandedly and without purpose is merely gratuitous. It wants to decry the loss of “old school” casino culture to the more tame, family-themed attractions now dominating the strip, but does not make many original or convincing jabs.

Hardly two scenes in the entire film run longer than a couple minutes, but The Cooler somehow seems longer than it is; this is testament to its jerky lameness. Even Ron Livningstone, in a cocky supporting role, cannot redeem this tragedy that proves it is nearly impossible for a narrative film to succeed without solid writing.

And then there’s the whole question surrounding Macy’s “ability” to be unlucky. Is this magical realism? The film’s uneven and unfinished treatment of its central concept is the most damaging of its flaws. A sub-trope of deceiving appearances is forced, leading nowhere. Most entries in any art form are mediocre at best, but The Cooler rounds out the bottom of the bell curve.

While I won’t bellyache about missing out on Elephant, I will encourage you to make a different choice. Or see Van Sant’s other 2003 release, Gerry, the most intense experience I’ve had in a theater since Mulholland Drive.