Although the film’s first act spotlights puzzle maven and New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz, the film wisely and agilely widens its radius to encompass personalities as diverse as John Stewart, Mike Mussina, and (as he is honorably billed in the credits) William Jefferson Clinton as they expound quite articulately on their relationship with and understanding of the crossword puzzle. With the exception of dome-haired ass-clown Ken Burns (whom Christopher Guest has been unintentionally, retroactively mocking for years), the interviewees’ commentaries are keen and illuminating. In perhaps the most provocative moments of the film, Clinton’s candor and intelligence make our current chief executive officer seem even more the dufus (if that is possible) by contrast. John Stewart is typically amusing in the ironic trash talk he hurls at Shortz through the camera while engaging in the latest challenging grid. Although a variety of puzzle philosophies are offered, one unifying tenet seems to be the unanimous respect and worship of the New York Times‘s crosswords puzzles as the long-standing pinnacle of the art form.

Plenty of hardcore puzzle enthusiasts earn due screen time, especially through the film’s final act, a play-by-play tour through the 2005 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, held each year since Shortz established the contest in 1978, in Stamford Connecticut. In this aspect, the film most resembles its obvious forerunner in contemporary American language-game documentaries, Jeffrey Blitz’s 2002 hit Spellbound — in this case, the focus is a more relaxed adult pastime rather than adolescent obsession. While Wordplay lacks the wonderfully taught suspense of Spellbound, its portrayal of people like Shortz who have followed their bliss and achieved rewarding success with a hobby is just as vital a glimpse into what sustains human happiness. Shortz, the ultimate example of this phenomenon, claims never to have expected the financial success (with dozens of books of puzzles in print) or minor fame (in the puzzle community he is a demagogue) that followed his graduation from Indiana University with a self-styled degree in “enigmatology” (the study of puzzles), but always expected to be rewarded by making his lifelong passion his line of work.

The film is most brilliant in how it uses innovative but sound tricks to keep what many would regard as banal subject matter consistently stimulating: crisp but unpretentious title sequence, effective and creative editing, and (like any great documentary) the luck to have captured a string of legitimately meaningful human moments on film. Most of all, it manages to be glossy without coming off as slick (or vice versa), insightful without seeming pedantic or condescending. It plays to all audiences, but especially to those already interested in puzzles or in trivia in general. Shortz put it best when he observed his greatest happiness being his privilege to work for both the Times and NPR, to create work for an audience he knows will appreciate and understand it.

Although it didn’t need it, the film’s excellent soundtrack only adds to its appeal. While the Indigo Girls’s affinity for the pastime is featured in the film, tunes from Cake, They Might Be Giants, and a charming cover of The Talking Heads’s “Naive Melody” performed by Shawn Colvin somehow lend even more credibility to the project, in that in choosing to share their craft with the filmmaking process, the musicians likewise submit their genuine approval of its aims and merits.

Anyone who has ever wondered how a crossword is constructed (those who write them are known as “constructors”, not authors), or has ever tried, will no doubt gain some appreciation for the talent and dedication it requires, even as professional constructor Merl Reagle drafts one from scratch for the camera with apparent ease. Like Spellbound and The Stone Reader, Wordplay will surely make any lover of words and language quite pleased. No hard feelings, Leonard.

The movie is worth seeing more for its wit than for the risks it takes. Vaughn, playing an overweight, slightly weary, version of his suave swinger type, carries the show. His banter, both friendly and mean-spirited, heightens any scene to manic brilliance; John Favreau holds his own in such dialogue (as usual) while Aniston’s acting improves by it. The excellent supporting (Favreau, Judy Davis, Joey Lauren Adams, Justin Long) cast is largely wasted on C-grade “character”-parts, especially Davis (who nonetheless gets one of the film’s funniest bits, a sly Telly Savalas reference). Favreau is favored with solid screen time, playing his scenes with conviction but also a bit of the arrogance afforded by a bit-part he knows those in the vanguard of the pop-cultural know will appreciate.

In fact, the film’s appeal is doubtless special to those who came of age with 90s fare such as Mallrats, Chasing Amy, and Swingers; who, like the film’s stars, are now also encountering the malaise of life around thirty.

• Grizzly Man: An incredible documentary (for reasons I list below and here) about one man’s inability to acknowledge the chasm between man and beast over which he is attempting to fly. Superb filmmaking.
• Brokeback Mountain: A true tragedy filmed and paced with genuine elegance and emotional intelligence. The best performance of the year is Ledger’s. Great sheep footage. Reduces notions of masculinity to mere byproduct of predominant culture, revealing the genderless joys and agonies of genuine human love.
• A History of Violence: A possible criticism of this film is that it’s as close as Cronenberg will ever come to Lynch — although that can also be construed as a compliment. Although it contains elements of the auteur’s body of work (bodily mutilation, mental illness, antiseptic tone) it follows a late trend initiated with his previous film (Spider) away from science fiction and technology and into archetypal family tragedies (even if they are dysfunctional families). Certainly well-crafted, with an excellent third-act performance from William Hurt. Mortenson and Bello are also strong in their work.
• Fateless: Most reviews have referred to this Hungarian historical fiction as a real stand-out in the Holocaust film genre, and in this case I think that is justified praise and not just reductive pigeon-holing. With such a topic and subject (a Hungarian teenaged boy), there is always the risk and responsibility of treating each respectfully, accurately, and meaningfully. But can we add “originally” to that list? Yes. Otherwise the films lumped together in this category would never be seen as individual takes on this great human tragedy. There is not just one truth to the events of the Holocaust, and as such there is not — can never be — simply just one cinematic truth about it. What distinguishes this film is its use of formalism to convey the process of dehumanization of one soul as he processes through the ____ (to say “horrors” or “tragedies” would be of course inadequate, so I’ll leave this blank for now)s of concentration camp. Although filmed in color, the compositions grow increasingly grayer and bleaker; near the end, it could pass for black and white. Also worthy is its portrayal of Hungarians in this time period, a viewpoint previously mostly uninvestigated in feature filmmaking.
• Munich: A film made with careful attention to portraying moral characters moved to commit immoral acts. It’s still the typically dumbed-down approach to script-writing, but Eric Bana’s character is thoroughly developed and provocatively understandable. Cleverly, it’s a thriller with a moral center, which makes each murder more squeamish for the audience than the previous. A well-edited film, slightly more ambitious than usual from Spielberg, and unconventional-for-him use of slow motion during a sex-scene to complete a character arc. Also, meticulous use of documentary footage to enhance fictional reenactment. Also also, probably his most graphically violent film (yes, more so than Saving Private Ryan or Schindler’s List).
• Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room: I didn’t learn anything new from this film, but I learned more about what I already knew — which is probably better. Despite the human, political, and economic flaws pointed out in this film, it is probably most disturbing that nothing is really changing in our culture to prevent it from continuing to happen.
• The Squid and the Whale: It’s comedically-tempting but disingenuous to say that Jeff Daniels’s beard is his greatest feat of acting in this period-Brooklyn coming-of-[divorced-parents]-age drama; he’s actually quite good at embodying blind, unscrupulous sophism (even as he decries his son’s intentions to be a philistine). The brothers have all the best lines, and the set design is great. The movie follows a predictable arc, but arrives at its conclusion soundly and movingly. A great New York movie.

A winner? Some of these films will likely be forgotten. Only half will probably linger with me for good; only two or three would ever be useful as a pedagogical tool; and probably only Grizzly Man will enter my own personal canon. These were the films that were most immaculately written, acted, shot, crafted, and assembled. I endorse them as worthy of their running time, worthy of their medium. They communicated important ideas about humans of the past and the present, how and what we loved and how and what we coveted.

Of all these, I can credit only The Squid and the Whale with eliciting genuine laughter (although its tone is mostly one of somber, confused crisis). On the whole, these were staid, stark, sober works. They questioned, unsettled, weakened, and challenged the good things we like to think are true about humanity; they confirmed what we secretly know to be. They are all, fundamentally, tragedies: historical, marital, personal, American, ecological, economical, and mostly masculine. Maybe I just don’t see enough mainstream comedies anymore.

Most disturbing moment in a fictional film: Despite the atrocities portrayed in Schindler’s List, I think perhaps the single most disturbing shot Spielberg has ever composed was scene in which the female assassin is murdered in Amsterdam. It is graphically violent not because she is shot (we see that all the time) but because she realistically suffers in real time, gasping for air. She is also partially nude. Somehow, the scene is not merely lurid or R-rated, but beyond: it is cruel. What redeems it is its significance to the moral climate of the film, to the characters’ attempts to justify their revenge. I have seen plenty of death in movies, and this is one of the spookiest.

Most disturbing moment in a documentary: Herzog wisely avoids allowing his audience to see or even hear the recording of this most disturbing moment: it’s when his subject — the deceased Timothy Treadwell — is fatally mauled by a starved male grizzly bear. This is a moment so powerfully dark and awful and real that even approaching its periphery I was moved to the limits of emotional composure. Instead, Herzog burdens himself with the role as witness: we see him listen to the recording on Treadwell’s camera of the killing for the first time. His reaction is what ours would have been, but we are spared its full force. Although perhaps merely following the common wisdom once perfectly expressed by Dickinson as “Tell all the the truth, but tell it slant/ success in circuit lies”, in a way I think this shows how all great artists are responsible for sharing some vision of truth they have glimpsed, even though in its purest form that vision can never been fully expressed. In this case, the purest documentary form of truth was too dangerous to fully express without the director as middle-man. Had we been allowed to hear it, I suspect I would have been momentarily satisfied but soon after, and permanently, regretful for have to carry it around in me; and I would have lost a lot of respect for the film.

Best Actor: I love awarding actors, but not the way as is normally done. Why nominate five actors each year? Why not just award as many as seem worthy of the award? Aren’t we diminishing the value of a nomination (if not the award itself) if there is a designated quota to fill each year? How do these arbitrary quotas relate at all to the standards of artistry for which they purportedly commend? This goes for all the categories. Shouldn’t we use up those extra spots to give decent films more exposure? Only if they are good enough to deserve that exposure. If something or someone is not thoroughly worthy of winning the award, it or he or she should not even be mentioned with the other deserving candidates. Perhaps in some years, there may not even BE a Best Actor or Supporting Actress. It is possible for ONE YEAR to pass, is it not, that there is not an EARTH-SHATTERING PERFORMANCE. Okay, okay. I know, the awards are just to award the Best of the Year…but doesn’t that detract from the value previous wins? Anyway, this year only one actor truly astounded me: Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain. This is far and a way the biggest accomplishment of the year: every bit as technically challenging and nuanced as P.S. Hoffman(who has been just as good and better in countless other roles)’s Capote, while also carrying and enriching a tremendously tragic story behind and inside of it. At times Ledger was so convincing and compelling that Gyllenhal came off cartoonishly ridiculous alongside him (especially attached to that lame moustache late in the film).

Films I Didn’t Get to See But Wanted To: Murderball, March of the Penguins, No Direction Home.

Finally, I’d like to comment on something else that makes reviewing the value of a year’s worth of films difficult: what about all the films I saw this year that were not necessarily new, but which left indelible impressions upon my understanding of love, life, art, history, faith, etc. ? This year I started using Amanda’s library card to access the outstanding media collection at the Middle Country Public Library. The number of great films I’ve taken in just in this past few months is far greater than that of the new films I appreciated this year. Midnight Cowboy, Jazz on a Summer’s Day, The Last Waltz, Mean Streets, Fanny and Alexander, Hoop Dreams, All About Eve, Throne of Blood, The Stones of Summer, Cheers: The Complete 4th Season, Slacker… The list goes on, and I’m still just trying to break even.

Despite all the foreboding personal baggage behind Young’s wily visage, the performance is rich, worthwhile, and life-affirming. The lighting and “set” design are sentimentally warm, glowing variations on the wheat-hued horizons backdropping the songs of Prairie Wind. Buoyed perhaps by the presence of friends and family on stage (Stray Gators Ben Keith and Spooner Oldham, for example, or wife Peggi Young), Young and his songs betray not one shred of bitterness at the foot of life’s twilight. In a revealing bit of banter, after mentioning his daughter’s recent 21st birthday, he jests at how he once wrote love songs for girls her age. Never indulging beyond a few sentences between songs, he nonetheless makes genuine recognition of the memories behind his new material (his Canadian hometown, his father, his influences), most notably a song written ostensibly for the very acoustic guitar slung from his shoulder in the film — former owner: one Hank Williams, Sr. A poster of country music’s progenitor grinning mug shows up in the film’s introductory shots, and Young’s outfit (in addition to his guitar and the stage he commands) is worn in homage to Nashville’s great forefather.

Demme having already crafted perhaps the quintessential rock movie (Stop Making Sense, with the Talking Heads), does not make any bold directorial moves, and wisely lets the performance stand for itself. While the aesthetic of Byrne et al. circa 1985 certainly involved high-concept, postmodern smoke and mirrors; a Neil Young show in 2005 brings an entirely different agenda. The presentation of concert is straightforward, unpretentious, even obvious — fitting the feel new tunes like “The Painter”, “When God Made Me”, and the album’s title track.

So, if the set opens with over forty-five minutes of music from Prairie Wind only, why title the film Neil Young: Heart of Gold? Considering that, to many diehard fans, Young’s greatest hit (and Harvest, the biggest selling album whence it came) is considered an over-played and merely mediocre number, why not just call the film Prairie Wind? The answer is also the reason why the film merits being released as a feature and not just as a DVD component to a limited edition release of the album: performing in Nashville, where he cut Harvest, with the musicians who helped craft some of his most enduring songs, where the greats of American music soared and fell, Young completes a circuit of work capturing the effect of time on human perspective he began when he first composed “Old Man”. When the lights come back up on the stage nearly an hour in, and the chords of that song ring from Williams’s guitar, the moment is soulful, shattering, human to the core. Here is Neil Young singing to himself from 1970 in 2006, simultaneously the young hippie and the hexagenarian spook, as if he had planned it from the start. He closes the concert with oldies: “The Needle and the Damage Done”, “Harvest Moon”, “Heart of Gold”, and an incandescent rendition of the aforementioned “Old Man”.

Although he already revisited Harvest in the 90s with the critically favored Harvest Moon, this re-revisiting of the country-rock sound and country-rock personnel (minus Taylor and Rondstadt but plus the ageless Emmylou Harris) that gave him his one big commercial success debunks the idea that swan songs need always be swan songs. With two under his belt, we anticipate what this visionary will see as he moseys toward seventy, and how he will turn those visions into music fashioned from the bottom of his golden heart.

Timothy Treadwell was, by society’s standards, a failure. A college dropout who fled native Long Island for California at 19, he was by midlife an unsuccessful actor, an alcoholic, and a drug addict running in dangerous crowds. Had his life ended in a shootout or an overdose, his would be no different than thousands of other common tragedies – an inconspicuous absence from your high school reunion.

Instead, he reinvented his persona as an amateur expert in the behavior and well-being of grizzly bears, fooling everyone from Animal Planet to David Letterman. Starting in the summer of 1990 (coincidentally the year I obtained the aforementioned chronicle of mauling), Treadwell spent the summer months in the habitat of one of the most ferocious carnivores on the planet, toting only camping gear and, for the last five years, a video camera.

Narrator and veteran director Werner Herzog (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Lessons of Light and Dark) stumbled upon Treadwell’s story after his death in 2003 and found in the hundreds of hours of raw footage left behind a complex, immeasurably moving account of the human condition. From the start, Herzog’s intentions with Grizzly Man are clear: man is far more compelling than beast.

Were he alive to screen the finished film, Treadwell might adamantly contradict. Although many of his former love interests and friends make substantial appearances, the Treadwell captured on his own videotape is hopelessly enamored of bears (and foxes), and to an abnormal degree. A fervent vigilante, he constantly makes reference to his dual mission to both study his companions and protect them from poachers, despite his lack of any formal training. In his off-seasons, Treadwell toured his information from school to school educating elementary students free of charge. Herzog observes a gradual turning away from civilization in Treadwell’s last few summers, and letters to friends at this time likewise indicate the man’s almost spiritual identification with bear culture and his desperate wish to, in his word, “mutate” away from humanity and into bearhood.

A less experienced or sensitive filmmaker might have spun this material into something with more immediate shock value, but Herzog has managed to craft an incredibly rich piece rife with pathos. Ever the chilly existentialist, Herzog cannot share in his subject’s idealistic and perhaps deluded conceptions of man and nature, even when he sympathizes with Treadwell. In one of his most helpless moments, Treadwell mourns the body of a fox pup that had fallen prey to a starved male grizzly, muttering between tears “I just don’t understand.” It is this confusion which fascinates, which so effectively elicits empathy from the audience. This is not an escapee from the psych ward, but a real human as confused and afraid as any of us; although we observe him at numerous moments of seeming madness, it is inaccurate to write Treadwell off as a freak. Were that the case, the film would be merely a nasty exploitation.

In perhaps his most adept maneuver, Herzog’s manages to treat the fatal attack tastefully, approaching the moment from all angles save the most devastating. In the film’s most moving moment, Herzog himself appears on camera from behind, listening through headphones to the audio recording of their demise. His reaction is the closest we get to the horror; were we allowed any closer, it would render the film almost unwatchable.

Nevertheless, each segment of Treadwell interacting with the immense creatures is more squeamish than the previous. Lost fool or flawed genius, he lived longer on the edge than most humans can conceive; and although he may not have achieved any of the goals he so passionately, obsessively pursued, he has left us with a more honest and naked self-portrait than most would dare begin.

As Oh, Choi Min-Sik carries this character study with all the requisite depth; the audience’s interest is fixed on this aged yet youthful face as the former family-man encounters bewilderment, rage, shame, and redemption. Oh’s complexity emanates from the ironic contrast between lust and familial piety, a tension which sustains his will for vengeance. The film suggests the moral vacuity of film noir until its final act, when, cleverly, its true nature as an archetypal morality tale is revealed as Oh’s fragilely pieced-together reality disintegrates.

More off-putting than off-beat, certain sequences involving the carpenter’s approach to dentistry or seafood are only the starkest moments in a film which challenges its audience’s ability to comprehend what it is seeing (and stomach it, too). Even though the convoluted structure and shot compositions are appropriate to Park’s artistic aims, the film is frequently perplexing and at times purely abstruse. If, however, the viewer invests enough into Oldboy, the elemental impact of the climax and epilogue is more than rewarding.

Some of the finest moments in the original film (Terry Jones’s effeminate prince, the Camelot scene) were funny precisely because they skewered the inanity of musical theater. So how is it that someone (Erik Idle), or some persons (Erik Idle and Mike Nichols), thought that they could transpose Holy Grail into a musical without losing what was quintessentially brilliant about the original project?

The appeal of this massively hyped show lies completely in its billing: Tim Curry, David Hyde Pierce, Hank Azaria, Mike Nichols, and Monty Python and the Holy fucking Grail. How could these components fail to add up to the good? They do, and in the most embarrassingly flat ways.

The show merely retreads all the cult-canonized routines from the movie, only without the magical timing of the original. It has the typical shortcoming found in a hollow cover of an Otis Reading tune: all the sugary hooks and none of the soul. They even felt the need to “Americanize” some of the dialogue – as if the American audience never understood that “filth” meant “mud” in the film – and tone the accents (in the original as varied and regional as an assortment of fine cheeses) down to bland “stage British.”

The new songs are rarely amusing and instantly disposable. “The Song that Goes Like This” spends all the witty effect it will ever have within one listen (a trait which mirrors the sing-about-what-is-happening-as-it-happens gimmick of the lyrics). “His Name is Lancelot” runs with the Lancelot-is-really-gay joke several kilometers too far; Idle is unaware that the spontaneous-coming-out-number gag was already invented and mastered by fellow sketch-comedians The Kids in the Hall in their under-valued 1996 movie Brain Candy.

Alongside the new tunes, the established Python classics – “Knights of the Round Table” and “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” – seem like tasteless preaching to the eccentric choir, but they even manage to bungle these, too. The former is ruined by the decision to set it in Las Vegas’s Disney-version of Camelot, while they erroneously put the latter back into a sincere context when all its ironic bite originally derived by having it sung, in the final moments of their 1979 film Life of Brian, by a chorus of crucified men recently nailed to crosses. When Patsy (a character who remained likeably mute in the film) sings it earnestly to cheer up Curry’s Arthur early in Act II, Spamalot finally succeeds in becoming the very musical the Pythons so adeptly lampooned when they founded this cult in 1974.

The performances are, of course, immaculate. Songbird Sara Ramirez, who plays the new role “The Lady of the Lake” is the only genuinely fresh part of the show, with her arresting vocal acrobatics and spot-on comedic sensibility. Her ornate inflections and arpeggios, combined with her hilariously accurate facial contortions, aptly mock the parade of “divas” who top the charts and the Grammy awards (Christina, Alicia, Britney, Mariah). Pierce and Azaria are highly entertaining, but only as much as their parts allow them to be. Curry is wasted as the straight-man “King Arthur,” a role which only works if you have the crotchety and withdrawn spirit Graham Chapman.

Perhaps the show’s biggest misstep is its blundering attempt to ingratiate itself with New Yorkers. Giuliani and Sondheim references, a Gene Shalit gag, and a nearly-offensive song about needing Jews to make-it on Broadway. The play’s deus ex machina ending (far inferior to that of the film) even guides the plot to Broadway, in a cheek-tweaking “look at how clever we are for being post-modern/ self-conscious” moment that just makes your guts heave.

This is not a case of Python fanatics (and they are fanatical) being impossible to please, it is a case of undelivered goods. In trying to bridge the worlds of filmed/televised lunacy and musical theater, the writers came up with something which lacks the appeal of both, alienating both the Broadway enthusiasts and the Python-addicts. Spamalot is as undercooked a show as there has ever been.

The sad paradox is that the masterpiece Monty Python and the Holy Grail was made despite countless limitations – of time, of money, of experience – while Spamalot is a dud despite all the resources and talent imaginable.

The enthusiastic audience was ready to rip into applause the instant a recognizable bit from the movie hit the stage (and they were helped by meticulously reproduced costume design) or the instant one of the celebrity stars made his first appearance. While any active audience enhances the quality of live acting, it was far too obvious that they were merely thrilled by that with which they were already familiar. They were not applauding finely developed new comedic characters; they were really applauding Niles, Moe, Dr. Frank, and the guy who directed The Graduate. They were cheering not for the Trojan rabbit, the Tim the Sorcerer, or the Knights of Ni they had just seen, but for these icons as they exist in their memory of the film they love so much (to which they might just as well have bought tickets for that afternoon instead).

Nine years later, Linklater revisits the characters, passion, and ideas of that momentous night in a sequel, Before Sunset. To fans and skeptics, the title may have been misleadingly awkward or facile at first, but Linklater is no patsy for marketing suits. Dubious as any sequel to a meaningful film might be, doubts fade within the first minutes of the new release. Mirroring filmically the closing moments of the original, Before Sunset opens with series of shots canvassing tranquil morning locales in Paris. A quiet street, another quiet street, a cafe are established as places of “potential,” and as the film unfolds (mostly in real-time) Celine and Jesse’s reunion takes them to these locations. While the first film ended with the immediate past, the companion begins with the immediate future.

Jesse has written a successful novel based on the events of Before Sunrise, and Celine comes to his reading at a small bookshop in Paris. They share an hour transfixed by the sudden presences of each other before Jesse leaves on a plane for New York. Nine years of adulthood have taxed them in their seperate lives. Ideals have proved to be burdons, disappointing routines have uprisen, and love has been fleeting and rare. Although each tries to conceal it, a truth about their one night in Vienna escapes: it was the one moment in their lives of true connection, of real love. And nothing has touched the same extreme since.

For anyone who saw Sunrise prior to Sunset, the simple sight of Hawke and Delpy together is transcendent. Both have incurred baggage, wrinkles, defeat, but each remains beautifully alive and quick. More confident, more experienced, but no less fragile, their chemistry defies the logic of acting — defies those who scoff at the admittedly pathetic parade of hopeful but soulless rom-coms released each year. Hawke and Delpy co-wrote the script with Linklater, but a testament to their skills as actors is that it seems more like Jesse and Celine deserve credit. Hawke suffers far too many bad reviews; he is a master at this kind of naturalistic, conversational acting. The weight of intelligence behind each incredibly accurate exchange of lines is reflected in the expressions and timing he conjurs of an actual, self-conscious man trying his best to articulate the heavy thoughts occuring to him. Add in the weight of time — nine years — and the rendezvous is overwhelmingly convincing.

Small-talk transitions carefully into trusting familiarity, and as the time for Hawke’s character to leave grows near, Delpy delivers a moment of moving vulnerability. They both open the truths about themselves unabashedly, absurdly sustained by the understanding of what should be the talk of two strangers. If the film sounds schmaltzy, worry not ye cynics. There are heaps of harsh reality to balance. Their realist script deftly allows for the presence of both, and it is both engrossing and affecting to observe two not-as-young lovers grapple with the ambiguities, the fleeting possibilities, of the life right in front of them. That the teetering, smoldering emotions are never allowed anywhere near melodramatic temperatures renders the film’s brilliant, Carve-esque ending all the more rewarding. The viewer, gripped, finds his heated mind flip-flopping feverishly “Don’t get on the plane! No, just go…wait, yes stay!” while Hawke, cool on the surface, willingly lets Delpy delay his concerns and allay his regrets. Title included, Before Sunrise should be chiseled in as one of the few succussful sequels in cinema history, (demonstrating that one does not need a clever title if the movie is real).

150 digital cameras were distributed to Iraqi citizens along with a few pages of guidelines about what and whom to film. The cameras were passed from friend to friend, spreading across the disperate regions and cultures of Iraq: children, college students, Kurds, clerics, Christian priests, rich sheiks, poor farmers, urbanites, mothers, friends, intellectuals, artists. Edited chronologically, closing with footage from as late as Septemember 2004, the film presents an invaluable panoply of popular opinion on Iraq as a country at a dubious cross-roads. More sensistive than any paper poll, what the fragile, the irate, and the relieved people of Iraq lend to the camera is their very humanity, live and in person.

The tagline,”filmed and directed by the people of Iraq,” is telling. The camera jitters and scans amateurishly, as the cinematographers react to their subjects. One filmer is moved to put down the camera and embrace her mother, who is brought to tears by memories of the torture she endured by preparing with self-inflicted cigarette burns. Another interview, in an office, is interrupted by explosions outside, and everyone hastens to safety.

The film is a pastiche, by nature of the project, but is tastefully edited and structured by the producers to give it cohesion. The most effective post-production, aside from the editing, is the use of headlines from American newspapers to punctuate various segments of the film. Not astonishingly, the image of Iraq presented by these leading journals is debunked by a slew of footage suggesting the contrary. The most ironic example of this technique is Iraqis’ reaction to the U.S. media’s coverage of the Abu Gharib prisoner abuse scandal; they laugh when they hear of the abuse of former guards and assassins of Saddam’s inner regime at the hands of U.S. military, men who had previously committed far more brutal acts of torture on the citizens of Iraq (many of whom record their stories) under Hussein and who deserve, in their eyes, all they get (which, according to several interviewees, doesn’t even qualify as torture). The film then cuts to homemade videotapes made by Hussein’s sun, Uday, in which prisoners have body parts (tongues, hands) hacked-off in public. It is important to note that it is not the moral equivication that is of interest here, but the distorting of opinion committed by Western media. The danger is in not accurately conveying exactly what common people are actually angered by.

It’s not prisoner abuse that angers them, it’s simply the horrors of war. Families torn apart, crushing grief, the liberation of Iraq is not unlike any armed conflict: gruesome and dehumanizing. Hussein’s record of genocide against the Kurds does not match up well, either, as shots of excavations of mass-graves evince. War is the enemy here, whoever the perpetrator, and the film wisely presents both sides evenly, endorsing none. They resent both America and Saddam for this pain, and this is something more polemic docs (like, obviously, Farenheit 9/11) fail to convey. In a sense, Moore is no better than mainstream media in the amount of distortion he creates. Voice of Iraq escapes this pitfall by simply letting people speak for themselves.

The most striking images of the film are the numerous smiles. Here are people whose streets are littered with debris and flaming wreckage, whose homes have been bombed, and they are managing, in some cases, outright glee (graduating college students in May). Even the skeptics, who see economic chaos and looming collapses, seem cheerful about trying to make it work. After a quarter century of repression, the exuberance of personal liberty and the lure of democracy must be thrilling. With elections slated for January of 2005, the end of the film sees a citizenry flooded with questions: now that we have a choice, what will we choose? Issues of separating church from state, of the role of women in Iraq, and of establishing stability in an volatile region of the world are the sobering burden of a new nation.

At least three times in the new documentary Moog, Dr. Robert Moog tries to convey to the camera his belief in the possibility of a connection between man and machine that is neither tactile nor scientific, but mystical. He is quick to qualify that by “mystical” he does not connote “religious”, but rather “possessing a true power that is yet ungrasped by science.’”

The image of the seventy-year-old engineer, pioneer, musician, and inventor of the analog instrument known as the Moog staring intently at a circuitry board while trying to explain this unexplainable phenomenon is emblematic of the film’s approach to its subject: focused less in technical definitions and textbook diagrams than on the spirit of human ingenuity and collaboration. Jargon arises here and there, but the basic defintion of what the Moog synthesizer is is presented by Dr. Moog himself, a simple-spoken and proundly humble man, while standing around tables piled high with half-finished circuit boards and casing materials. No graphics, no montages, just a man talking about his invention; rather, he calls it not invention, but discovery. He allowed himself to be open to the possibilities of electronic music, and one day about a half a decade ago, it was made visible to him: discovery.

The risk in such an organic approach to a tech-heavy topic is that it leaves the viewer wondering if he or she is actually learning anything about the instrument; the genius is that such an approach matches Moog’s carefully articulated belief in the preservation of performance, his corollary intending the users of his technology not to forget in their rush to make and record new sounds, that the creation of these sounds should be a public event, in which the creator and the audience share in the power of the music. Only in such an environment, Moog warns, is a culture created.

It is exactly this imprecise, quasi-mythological attitude toward music that makes Robert Moog such a fascinating subject. An engineer, a doctor of science, balanced by a conviction of the untangible.

Filmmaker Hans Fjellestad follows Dr. Moog as he travels to performances and visits with former colleagues and musicians who agree that the Moog transformed the face of music: Rick Wakeman, Keith Emerson, Money Mark.

So what is the Moog synthesizer? In a revealing interview between Moog and DJ Spooky, Moog reveals the misconception that the term “synthesizer” means that the sounds made by the machine are “synthetic”; rather, the term was first used because of manifold elements on a circuitry board being brought together to produce an authentic sound, this “synthesis” ultimately creating sound. Spooky relates this to his theories of sampling, which is the process of arriving at a new music through the synthesis of elements from old jazz records, 70s funk records, 90s pop records, etc.

According to the liner notes from one of my favorite albums (Moog Indigo, by J.J. Perry, who’s seen in vintage footage in the film), the Moog is “the remarkable instrument or our electronic age…[that] operates a system of of interconnected oscillators, amplifiers, generators, filters, mixers and voltage controls which can produce any variation of pitch, wave frequency, overtone mixture, timbre, dynamics and tone duration.” More vintage footage of a Bob Moog in the late 1960s reveals the joy he and his colleagues felt from experimenting with these sounds, never before heard by human ears.

The film cleverly presents historical context, however, by contrasting popular and critical opinions of electronic music in its early days with its prevalance in both popular and avant garde music ever since. Journalists were shocked at the Moog’s attack on the purity of “real” instruments. Also questionable were the perversions of the technology for commercial use. The first to buy Moog synthesizers were advertising executives and producers, hoping to allure consumers with “space age” sounds and melodies. Never taking definite sides on the money vs. art issue, Moog is presented as simply a man making the music possible. A businessman as much of an inventor, his allegiance seems more than once to side with more experimental musicians than commercial ones (although he firmly retains a sense of humility throughout the film).

At one point, Moog tellingly recalls an early debate over whether a keyboard was necessary. It would ground the player with a familiar format, but was absolutely unecessary, and in fact misleading. The theory of the Moog was a machine that processed a single sound through a series of circuits, changing all of its qualities in infinite combinations. The musician could manipulate these combinations using any means: levers, knobs, sliders. Keyboards connoted melody, from which the early inventors were trying desperately to flee. Unavoidable was the seizing of the instrument for commercial appeal (see Perry and Kingsley, Wendy Carlos).

And, truly, the noise-machine has entered the cultural soundscape: A Clockwork Orange‘s soundtrack, Guided By Voices’ “Teenage F.B.I.”, Sun Ra, t-shirt collections of geeks everywhere, Saturday morning cartoons, everywhere. The reverence for Dr. Moog in the film is overwhelming, and deserved for such an unassuming but bonafide genius (he built his first therimin before he was old enough to vote).

The documentary often seems amateurish, or rather, organic and homegrown, but not to a fault. To explain the mystery of the Moog machine would be to eliminate its dependency on the human element, the creative element. Moog is correct to assert that the convergence of musician and machine, of music and audience, is the crucial, and magical, component in electronic music.