David Mamet's House of Games

House of Games, David Mamet's 1987 directorial debut, was and still is like no other film.

Mamet had already established himself as a successful writer for both stage and screen, receiving Oscar nominations for a couple of screenplays and Tony nominations for his plays. His 1984 play Glengarry Glen Ross won the Pulitzer Prize.

When it came time for Glengarry to adorn the silver screen, Mamet had to break the news to his long-time collaborator, actor Joe Mantegna, that he was going to be replaced in the lead role by Al Pacino. As Mantegna recounts in an interview in Criterion's new DVD release of House of Games, Mamet walked into the actor's backstage dressing room after a performance, broke the bad news, and immediately dropped two screenplays on the table, saying, "But I won't make these without you."

The two screenplays were House of Games and Things Change, films that would firmly establish Mamet as a film director and Mantegna as a solid screen actor.

Mamet is known for his precisely mannered, crisply delivered dialogue. It is his hallmark, a unique approach that brings the enunciation and stylization of the stage to the screen, but without the requisite staginess that hinders the efforts of so many lesser talents. Mamet instills his words with a heightened dramatic tension, much in the way that the rapid-fire cadences of the Warner Bros. gangster films and noirs of the 1930 and '40s brought a dramatic hyper-realism to their melodramatic plots.

Like those earlier films, House of Games is full of deep shadows and drifting smoke that obscure motivations; of steam rising from sewers like forbidden thoughts rising furtively to the surface; of backroom dealings and shifting alliances that remake the world as a dangerous game of intrigue and deceit.

Twenty years later, the film still packs a punch. Mike, Mantegna's smooth, street-wise hustler, is captivating as he dismantles the pretensions of respectability that shackle Lindsay Crouse's Margaret to an unsatisfying bourgeois life. The labyrinth of lust and greed, of cons and revelations, is still mesmerizing even after multiple viewings.

Extra features on the new release include current interviews with Crouse and Mantegna, the two actors reflecting on the film and their work with Mamet; a commentary track by Mamet and Ricky Jay, a con artist turned actor who served as a consultant on the film; an essay by film critic Kent Jones; and a short documentary, made at the time of filming, featuring interviews with Mamet, information on the genesis of the film, and rehearsal sessions in which Mamet walks his principal players through their characters' motivations.

House of Games (1987). Written and directed by David Mamet. Starring Joe Mantegna and Lindsay Crouse. 102 minutes. $39.95. www.criterion.com.

Berkeley, San Francisco Host 2007 Arab Film Festival

The 11th annual Arab First Festival continues this weekend at the California Theater in downtown Berkeley.

This year the festival has turned its focus to issues of youth and urban life, with a range of films on these topics showing at venues in San Francisco, San Jose and Berkeley.

The festival’s mission is to explore the depth and diversity of filmmaking in the Arab world with an array of documentaries and feature-length and short narrative films.

Hisham Zaman’s Winterland makes its American debut at 7 p.m. Sunday. The film examines the relationship between Renas, a middle-aged Kurdish immigrant from Iraq who has made his home in the snow-covered hills of rural Norway. Renas has been looking forward to the arrival of his bride-to-be from Iraq. It is an arranged marriage with a woman he has never met, except by way of a few letters and phone calls. He has pictures of Fermesk, however, that depict a young woman, perhaps still a teenager, gently smiling and wearing a flowing dress.

Upon her arrival, however, Renas is perturbed to find a larger and older woman. She is still young, but it is clear that the photos are quite outdated. And Fermesk too faces disillusionment, for Renas too sent photos of his younger self, dashing and svelte in military garb, and also managed to greatly inflate his status and income from his humble job in Norway. And each has still more surprises for the other along the way.

What follows is a tense drama of disillusionment and reconciliation, of hopes dashed on the snowy banks of cold reality. Renas and Fermesk must deal simultaneously with their estrangement from one another and from their home country, from family, friends and culture. The stunning photography of the wide-open fields and snow-blanketed hillsides of rural Norway presents a beautiful but alienating environment, pristine and harrowing at the same time. Zaman’s camera transforms the landscape into a vast white desert, where the two protagonists have no reference points other than each other.

Nasser Bakhti’s Night Shadows examines similar themes of Arab displacement but in a dark, urban environment. His film follows the interlocking lives of five characters, each adrift in the darkness and decadence of Geneva nightlife.

A jaded cop, nearing retirement, faces another night on the beat with his obnoxious brute of a partner. Hans’ dedication to his job has cost him his health and his marriage, and those losses have in turn cost him his passion for his job. His partner, a brash, insensitive thug, cares nothing for the immigrants he is tasked with tracking down, and his cruelty and ignorance are only brought to his attention when his wife threatens to pack up the kid and leave him. Claire is a down-and-out junkie with no friends or family, forced to consider prostitution to sustain her habit. Adé is an illegal Malian immigrant who dreams of a professional soccer career while working as a waiter. And Mohammed, a Moroccan immigrant, has been forced to abandon his medical studies just to get by while supporting his family back home.

Each, whether a native or an immigrant, faces the same hostile environment, one that undermines their common humanity and puts them at each other’s throats much of the time in a thoughtful parable of ignorance and xenophobia.

2007 Arab Film Festival. Through Sunday, Oct. 28 at the California Theater in Berkeley and at the Castro Theater and Roxie Film Center in San Francisco.

Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains

Jimmy Carter is more active in his 80s than I was at any time during my 20s. If that’s an exaggeration it’s not much of one. The man’s zest for life is well known, but it is still awe-inspiring to see. In addition to his work with Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center and a writing career that results in a book per year, the man somehow manages to find time to paint, preach, hike, bicycle and travel the world.

And that seems to be at least one of the points director Jonathan Demme is trying to make with his new film, Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains.

The film follows Carter during his 2006 book tour after the publication of his best-selling book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Demme and his crew tracked Carter across the country as he answered myriad questions on countless radio and television shows, defending his positions and clarifying his arguments in the face of a storm of controversy. Usually the debate in these appearances centers on the title of the book, since that is as far as most of these media types, and, it seems, many of Carter’s critics, have read. The result, as so often happens in discussions of the Middle East, is a debate that can quickly degenerate into name-calling and deeper entrenchment into opposing camps. Throughout the film Carter is seen struggling to keep honest debate alive, never allowing himself the luxury of the tactics chosen by many of his critics.

Demme too has problems with his title, for one might easily get the impression that the film will provide an overview of Carter’s life and career, or at least his post-presidency career. Nothing doing. The film might well have been titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid — The Movie. If you subscribe to the Hemingwayesque notion that a man is best defined by his performance under pressure, the film does indeed provide something of a portrait of the man, with plenty of evidence of his honesty, his optimism, his sincerity and his mettle. And though it touches on the depth and range of Carter’s work, with side trips to Habitat for Humanity projects in New Orleans and to meetings of the Carter Center board, the film consists primarily of countless scenes of media interviews and behind-the-scenes chatter in transit to and from those interviews. Most of it is fun and fascinating, but some of it is simply repetitive, and at 126 minutes, the film drags a bit, with Demme at times losing sight of any larger purpose for the production.

Still, it is instructive and inspiring to see Carter in action, still working for a better world at a time when most of his fellow former presidents were content to while away the hours on a golf course.

Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains (2007). Directed by Jonathan Demme. 126 minutes.

Sergio Leone: Once Upon a Time in the West

Sergio Leone is often thought of as an ironic filmmaker, a mischievous genre deconstructionist. But though his films have plenty of humor and wit, they also contain great beauty and depth and insight. Though he may have worked most famously in a genre largely considered pulp—the Western—Leone was one of the great cinematic artists.

Pacific Film Archive is presenting seven of Leone’s best films, starting Saturday and running through Oct. 28.

Leone is best known for his films with Clint Eastwood, the so-called “spaghetti westerns” in which the director deconstructed and built upon the traditions of a uniquely American genre. The “Dollars Trilogy” culminated in perhaps his most beloved film, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967). But his masterpiece is Once Upon a Time in the West, (1968) a nearly three-hour epic that re-imagines the great myths and imagery of western expansion.

Leone did not merely deconstruct and caricature the Western, he revitalized it, bringing a greater depth and mystery to its vistas and villains. He delved into the roots of the form’s archetypes, digging up the primal thoughts, emotions and characters that inhabited the landscape. And then he magnified it all; he distilled the genre to its essence and then spread it on thick in deep sepia tones.

But it is the faces of his characters, even more than the dramatic Monument Valley backdrop, that provide Once Upon a Time in the West’s most enduring images. Leone deepened the impact of the close-up, juxtaposing and equating the rugged terrain of the landscape with the equally rugged terrain of the human face, each giving greater significance to the other. The eyes of his sweat-soaked, sun-scarred outlaws reflect the landscape and imbue it with meaning, and the landscape shapes the characters who survey it.

Though the widescreen format is ideal for shooting vast panoramic landscapes, it poses problems for photographing people. Close-ups must crop the face above the eye, and yet they still leave wide swaths of wasted open space on either side. Leone made use of these limitations, however, bringing his camera in even tighter and expertly balancing close-up faces on one side of the frame with open vistas on the other.

Leone’s masterful use of the widescreen format is particularly evident in the scene where Jill arrives at the McBain ranch to find the bodies of her husband and his children laid out on tables in the dooryard. The body of her husband, his head in the lower left corner of the frame, slants upwards across the frame to where Jill’s grief-stricken face is positioned in the upper right. Across the frame to the left of her is a group of attentive neighbors dressed in black, and behind them the rugged hills as backdrop. In one expertly composed image, Leone tells the whole story.

Leone knew how to move his camera as well. One of the most stirring moments in any Western comes when Jill first arrives in Flagstone, hoping to find her new husband waiting for her at the train station. She waits and watches in vain as the throng of passengers moves past until she finally heads into the station office. And here begins a brilliant marriage of form and content: Leone’s camera follows her to the door and then watches through the window as she asks for directions from the station agent. The agent guides her through a door on the opposite side of the building as Leone lifts his camera above the window, up the wall and over the roof, and as the music swells we get our first look at the town, all construction and bustling activity. It is the birth of the West, and we encounter it along with Jill, who is soon to become its guiding feminine life force. Indeed, it is as if the town only comes to life once she lays eyes on it. It is a shot full of the promise, the legend, the myth and the glory of the West, achieved with simple but masterful technique.

Claudia Cardinale, as Jill, is in fact the cornerstone of the film. Though the photogenic Italian’s voice was dubbed by an actress with a better grasp of English, Cardinale was not cast simply as eye candy, but for her expressive face and her ability to project a mix of weariness and determination. In the scene at the station and again toward the end of the film, when Harmonica walks into the house only to announce his departure, Cardinale demonstrates her talent in a close-ups that sees her effortlessly transition from joyful anticipation to crestfallen disillusionment to iron-willed perseverance. Her face is beautiful yet damaged, once by the life she has escaped and again here while she watches as the life she hoped to escape to is ripped from her grasp. And again Leone demonstrates his knowledge and faith in the terrain of the human face, patiently holding the camera’s gaze on Jill as the emotional change overtakes her features.

As the New Orleans hooker turned pioneer homesteader, Jill may at first seem like a mere variation on a stock Western character. But Leone is after something else here. Throughout the film, Jill is consistently associated with water—the water that runs beneath the dream of a town that will be known as Sweetwater; the water that will fuel the heaving, churning steam train that represents progress; the water she heats for the weary Cheyenne’s coffee; the hot bath with which she renews herself after suffering the world’s degradations; and the water she brings to the thirsty railroad workers in the film’s closing shot. She is the life force of this brave new world, the madonna that gives birth to this new land. And though the moments when her clothing is torn or barely held together by flimsy string may seem at first like simple exploitation, there is greater significance in these images. For in the end it will be her strength and determination that shines through the dust and violence, just as it is her beauty and courage that are unleashed once her dandified city clothes are torn apart, the phony veneer of sophistication and respectability giving way to the earthy mother of the West.

Berkeley Video and Film Festival 2007

The Berkeley Film and Video Festivals marks its 16th year this weekend with another vast and varied program of independent productions. If there’s a theme to the annual festival, the theme is that there is no theme; it simply showcases independent film in all its unruly diversity, from the brilliant to the silly, from mainstream to left field, from documentaries and drama to comedy and cutting-edge avant garde.

The festival, put on annually by the East Bay Media Center, runs today (Friday) through Sunday at Landmark’s California Theater in downtown Berkeley.

Festival Director Mel Vapour takes pride in one participant’s description of the festival as a bastion of artistic integrity among film festivals, and one that remains blissfully celebrity-free. This year’s program is no exception, providing a feast of cinematic pleasures untouched by commercial considerations.

One of the most extraordinary films on this year’s program is George Aguilar’s Diary of Niclas Gheiler. Aguilar has created what he terms a “documentary mashup,” consisting of old family photographs and found footage combined with words from his grandfather’s diary. The result is a stirring poetic reverie on his grandfather’s life in Germany from World War I, when he served alongside a young Adolf Hitler, and the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in the run-up to World War II. It’s a 32-minute tour de force that approaches history from a deeply personal perspective.

The Big Game, by L A Wood, presents a sympathetic view of the Memorial Stadium oak grove tree-sit. Regardless of where you come down on the myriad issues surrounding the UC Berkeley’s plan to build an athletic performance facility along the stadium’s western wall, this entertaining 30-minute film is sure to provide grist for your political mill. Though university officials declined Wood’s invitation to comment on camera, he does little to fill that gap in the narrative, at no point providing the viewer with an account of the university’s reasoning behind its plans or its responses to the protest. The result is a film which may be endearing to the like-minded, but which will only fuel the ire of those on the other side of the debate, encouraging rather than tempering the tendencies of each side to paint the other in broad strokes. Familiar faces abound; in fact, the film is a veritable who’s who of Berkeley Daily Planet opinion page contributors.

Henry Ferrini and Ken Riaf’s Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place provides a compassionate portrait of the larger-than-life poet—his work, his humanity and his influence—using archival footage and audio along with testimonials from friends and colleagues. The central narrative concerns Olson’s quest to preserve the unique qualities of his hometown, a quest one fellow poet likens to a Superbowl match-up between the Minnesota Vikings and the Miami Dolphins, in which the Dolphins abandoned their game plan in favor of tactical improvisation that reached the level of poetry. It’s an analogy many tree-sitters would be loathe to accept, but in the context of Olson’s all-encompassing, all-embracing, big-picture view of life and community, such supposed polarities as football vs. poetry are exposed as meaningless.

Other films from this weekend’s program:

• Orit Schwartz’s The Frank Anderson, a sharp comedic short (featuring several familiar faces from larger-budget Hollywood productions), tells the story of an insurance agent who pays a price when he denies coverage for a man’s breast reduction surgery while enthusiastically offering to pay for enhancement surgery for a woman he hopes to bed.

• Flaming Chicken, Gerald Varney’s 20-minute impressionistic musing on San Francisco, is comprised largely of hitherto unseen footage Varney shot while working as a Bay Area journalist in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

• Silhouettes, a seven-minute short by Acalanes High School (Lafayette) students Patrick Ouziel and Kevin Walker, details the plight of a teen whose shadow, which takes the form of a rabbit, leads to bullying from his peers.

• Chronicles of Impeccable Sportsmanship, Erika Tasini’s excellent silent short that depicts curious dynamics among a rooftop-dwelling family.

• The Homecoming, a solemn and mysterious 10-minute film, consists of evocative scenes that almost play like trailers from longer films.

• Tile M for Murder, an absurd, almost cartoonish comedy, features a hostile couple squaring off over a game of Scrabble on a sweltering summer day. “It’s a hot day and I hate my wife,” says the husband, and off we go on a bile-fueled ride in which the words spelled out on the board dictate the course of events.

• Mark Hammond’s feature film Johnny Was boasts an excellent performance by Vinnie Jones as a former Irish Republican Army fighter hiding out in London. The film also features the screen debuts of boxer Lennox Lewis and former Who frontman Roger Daltrey.

But this sampling just scratches the surface. There are simply too many films on the program to do justice to them in the space allotted here. Suffice it to say, this is a film lover’s film festival, one that eschews the predictable fare that so often passes for independent film these days in an effort to present an engaging and wide-ranging program of cinema artistry.