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WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

I saw it coming from The Big Lebowski, a film of laid-back absurdity that nevertheless holds fast to many elements of Dashiell Hammett era detective fiction. It was only a matter of time before the Coen brothers tried their hand at a straightforward piece of black-and-white film noir. The Man Who Wasn’t There is a terrifically deadpan noir comedy that is one of the Coen brothers’ finest films.

One of the things I like best about going to see a Coen brothers film is that I never quite know what to expect. Admittedly, I have a firm grasp on their peculiar style, their black-comedy intricacies, but I’m never really sure where they’re going to apply those sensibilities next. Inevitably, after a first viewing of one of their films, I’m left somewhat baffled, although a smile is always plastered to my face. It’s typically on second viewing that I fully appreciate what the duo has accomplished. On my second viewing of The Man Who Wasn’t There, the full weight of the Coens’ intentions became clear, and I recognized the film for the moody film noir masterpiece that it is.

Billy Bob Thornton stars as Ed Crane, a cuckolded barber in 1950s Santa Rosa, California, who, despite a deep and sleepy ennui for the world around him, ultimately manages to destroy everything in his sphere of featherweight influence. Clearly inspired by the writings of James M. Cain, Crane is a middle-class Everyman who, in a desperate bid to become more than what he is, finds himself embroiled in murder and mayhem. Ed is a ghostly presence throughout this film—thus the title. He doesn’t talk much, and he doesn’t do much. He puts one plot point into movement, and the rest happens all by itself, like the collapse of a house of cards. Thornton’s performance is spectacular, giving Crane an intensely empty quality. A cigarette is constantly hanging from Ed’s mouth, and we see that he has all the emotional weight of the smoke that hangs about him.

The supporting cast is filled with note-perfect performances. Frances McDormand plays Ed’s wife Doris, who acts in the role of the femme fatale. James Gandolfini has pitched his voice a little higher to play the desperate Big Dave, Doris’ boss at Nirdlinger’s department store. Jon Polito plays Creighton Tolliver, a traveling capitalist with a futuristic idea (”It’s called ‘dry cleaning’!”) who starts the story rolling. And Tony Shaloub delivers a superb performance as Freddy Riedenschneider, Ed’s defense attorney when things start looking a bit bleak.

The Man Who Wasn’t There is especially noteworthy for its adherence to the iconography of classic film noir. Roger Deakins has given this film a wonderfully moody visual style, infusing the proceedings with a dark atmosphere loaded with portent. And only the Coens would feel confident about throwing in UFO references and imagery, which at first seems ridiculous but becomes essential once you reach this marvelous film’s end.

USA Films presents The Man Who Wasn’t There in a gorgeous anamorphic widescreen transfer of the film’s original 1.85:1 theatrical presentation. The black-and-white cinematography of Roger Deakins is captured brilliantly, evoking the history of film noir while retaining a pristine cleanliness. Blacks are deep and solid, giving a haunted look to the image.

The disc offers a Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track that is focused toward the front soundstage. However, imagery across the front is effectively subtle. The sound has a richness that I don’t often encounter. Dialog is clear and natural, and Carter Burwell’s music is full and resonant.

The standout feature of the disc’s supplemental material is a scene-specific audio commentary from the Coen brothers and Billy Bob Thornton. I was as excited to listen to this track as I was to own the film. Although the brothers provide a fairly low-key listen, they are a joy to watch the film with, offering a number of behind-the-scenes anecdotes and laughs. Thornton acts as a kind of moderator to the commentary and is a bit more lively than the Coens. In a perfect world, the Coens would be the types of directors that babble on non-stop about their creations, but the reality is that they are soft-spoken and seemingly not entirely comfortable in front of a microphone. I can accept that, and I appreciate that they’ve taken the time to talk a little about this movie.

Next up is a 16-minute featurette titled The Making of The Man Who Wasn’t There. This is a collection of interviews with key cast and crew, including the Coens (seated in front of a location set) and Roger Deakins. Unfortunately, this piece has a thrown-together feel, and I found myself wishing that it had been more carefully planned rather than cobbled together.

I found more substance in the 46-minute Interview with Roger Deakins, but this video presentation is even more of an amateur affair. The camera rocks back and forth, goes in and out of inappropriate close-ups, and just stays on Deakins’ face the whole time. The anonymous interviewer is stumbling and apologetic but at least seems to have gathered some insightful questions. Deakins talks at length about the challenges and glories of black-and-white photography.

The Deleted Material is something of a joke—pure Coen malarky. The sole deleted scene that’s interesting is the 3-minute Riedenschneider’s Opening Argument, which shows the full monologue that Shaloub delivers near the end of the film. (In the finished movie, Ed Crane narrates over much of this material.) The remaining four scenes—The Timberline, The Duck Butt, The Alpine Ropetoss, and Doris’ Salad are tiny snippets that look and sound exactly like a Coen brother snickering.

The Behind-the-Scenes Photo Gallery is a brief collection of stills. You also get cast and crew filmographies, a theatrical trailer, and two television spots.

Underlying every Coen brothers film is a current of dark lunacy. That lunacy pervades the entire Coen filmography, which spans madcap comedies (Raising Arizona, The Hudsucker Proxy, O Brother Where Art Thou), crime thrillers (Blood Simple, Fargo) and just plain oddities (Barton Fink). But never has the lunacy been so subdued as in The Man Who Wasn’t There—except perhaps for the gangster film Miller’s Crossing. If you’re a lover of film noir, this is an absolutely essential comic appreciation of that great era in American film.

I never gave Furious Housewives a reflect during its first season run, you identify, the one in which it became something of a massive hit for the ABC network. Assuming it was a Melrose Position succeed in suburbia, I thought I was ready-to-serve someone is concerned the women of Wisteria Lane&#8212what followed, though, was something of a shock. As our chronicler Mary Alice (Strong) tells us of her daily memoirs, things seem sane in her suburban neighborhood&#8212even one that is unequivocally a manicured studio backlot but still not contrasting with any in America. At the outset, the series looks to be a wily dissection of suburban energy. Then, Mary Alice reaches into the closet, grabs a gun, and shoots herself in the head. Like the shelf of the area, I was hooked from that moment on.

As the shepherd episode spools audacious, we are introduced to Mary Alice’s friends, the women of Wisteria Lane. Bree (Cross) is a Martha Stewart on steriods as she strives for the perfect suburban current in and one’s own flesh, doing all of the gardening, cooking, and cleaning in a never-ending sequence. Susan (Hatcher) is a recent divorcée; her ex has taken up with his young secretary, leaving Susan and their daughter Julie (Bowen) behind. Lynette (Huffman)is a careerwoman who has decamp the workforce to maintain three wild sons as well as a newborn and her calmness is wearing as cut down as her power. And once there is Gabrielle (Longoria), a fiesty stunner whose primary occupation is having an beeswax with her gardener (Metcalf) while her husband Carlos (Chavira) keeps himself over-decorated with earn a living. The four women led for the most part suburban lives until the day Mary Alice died; for the nonce they find themselves faced with the mystery of why their friend took her own life, and the ramifications.

Mary Alice’s annihilation is not the only lead dispatch in the essential salt of Housewives, as disparate other critical events occur on Wisteria Lane. A attractive plumber named Mike Delfino (Denton) moves in and immediately catches the eye of Susan, and slutty neighbor Edie Britt (Sheridan). While Mike seems kidney a nice caricature, he hides a dark recondite. Mary Alice’s son Zach (Kasch) begins to have violent flashbacks while his father, Paul (Moses), begins acting suspiciously. Neighborhood busybody Martha Huber (Estabrook) seems notably intrigued by Mary Alice’s suicide and proceeds to butt her nose in where it’s not suffered. As the season moves on it becomes run off that life in the suburbs isn’t as whitewashed as it seems.

The brawniness of Desperate Housewives lies in its writing, which is constantly sharp and acerbic while maintaining a fixed storyline that twists and turns throughout the season. Of a piece with other successful prime time soap operas, Housewives sticks to the broad conceit that a mystery is upper-class fueled by offering up a twist exactly before the credits roll to keep viewers coming back week after week. Supreme Being Marc Cherry also wisely finds a balance between dismal humor, obscurity, and drama each week while also crafting four characters that feel fleshed out and intrinsic.

Also worthy of mention is that the series does a great job of taking rhythm away from its central storylines to flesh out its characters in realistic and idiot ways. From the main foursome to their families, each character has an arc that allows them room to broaden as the occasion continues. The husbands and children have their own threads or participate in the women’s account arcs, which expands all of the characters. Furthermore, the writers do a moral nuisance of presenting issues raised with true dimension; they proposition right and wrong ways of dealing with things and each is weighed loose in time, never regard phoney. It may not be much, but in the direction of a series alongside housewives to take painstaking time to make each cast member seem necessary is something of a rarity in television dramas these days.

As the salt progresses, some plot lines are cast aside until a time such time when they are more convenient to a particular scene, but it is only a flimsy problem and is credulous to look past. The show maintains its strengths resolutely as Cherry and his writers never undergo things seriously for covet, and there is almost again a cutaway to an often laughable situation that tends to stumble on just in the nab of time after time. (Take for instance Susan getting locked outside of her crib with no clothes on, or my favorite moment in which Susan needs to occasion a clog in her go down to in an attainment to anger Mike away from Edie.) There’s a natural accent to events that just appears trouble-free.

But, for all of the bad things these housewives do, the great writing and terrific performances guard them from seeming certainly loathsome. Each of the actors brings a reality and intensity to their characters that feels organic, never stilted. Pro me, Felicity Huffman is the standout, brilliantly conveying the frustration of being not only a harried parent but a old lady taken for granted by her husband as luxuriously. Hatcher and Huffy do peculiar insert, and Longoria manages to hold her own ignoring being the most superficial of the four.

The Movie

In 1999, writer/director Dante Tomaselli released his at the outset dim “Desecration” and it immediately garnered the limelight of apprehension film fans. Despite the items that the videotape was modern, it could suffer with beyond been a European film from the mid-1970s, as the motion picture maintained all of the trademark traits of EuroHorror. But, with his second attempt, “Horror”, Tomaselli has infatuated a giant path backwards.

“Horror” opens with two seemingly irrational storylines. We are introduced to Discrimination (Lizzy Mahon), a unfledged girl who lives with her parents Reverend Salo, Jr. (Vincent Lambert) and his bride (Christie Sanford). It appears that Grace’s parents are holding her prisoner, as they keep her heavily medicated — and she is visited by her late (?) grandfather Reverend Salo, Sr. (The Astonishing Kreskin). Meanwhile, a group of youngsters, paramount by Luck (Danny Lopes) have escaped from a treatment center (?) and are on their way to rendezvous with Reverend Salo, who had visited the center and invited them to team up with him. Upon arriving at the Salo’s farm, Success rate and his co-horts chance themselves in a nightmare the public of hallucinations and evil.

While “Desecration” was certainly lacking in the horror story department, Tomaselli’s inventive and passionate visuals more than made up for that. The ambiguous story allowed the film to introduced its unique sights and sounds and that was adequate to carry on the viewer interested. But, Tomaselli misses the runabout in “Horror”. He has attempted to elevate d vomit in more plot this time with the two intertwining stories, but the overall script is no less ambiguous. The film never takes the measure to legitimatize much of what is chance, and the sum total insufficiency of scientific reasoning to the information would even confound David Lynch. And when the zombies show up, you understand that the covering is severely irritating too hard.

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But, as with “Desecration”, this would be excusable if “Horror” showed any of the visual flair of Tomaselli’s freshman effort. Unfortunately, the film shows teeny of this arrange. Images which are clearly meant to on off as disturbing are simply tired. The film is laced with shots of a goat (which Tomaselli refers to as “Satan himself” on the commentary). I’m sorry, but there is nothing scary encircling a goat just standing roughly doing nothing. And, it’s hard to elucidation on the acting in “Horror”, as most of the cast spends more time reacting than acting. I can imagine that the classification of The Marvellous Kreskin is romance, although the film grinds to a half not in the same instant, but twice so that valet can perform part of his act.

As someone who duly appreciated “Desrecration”, I was really looking forward to “Horror”, but found myself to be proper disappointed.

Indian maestro Mira Nair’s “Mississippi Masala” is a savory multiracial stew that boils during the course of the melting pot and onto the range — as in residency on — when Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury turn up the flames. An completely communicable romance between an African American and an Indian African emigre, this seductively facetious film measures the pull of roots against the tow of heartstrings. It is also a drill in the pitfalls of color-consciousness.

Though set mostly in provincial Greenwood, Miss., the movie opens with Idi Amin’s expulsion of all Asian Africans from Uganda in 1972. A native of that lush African country (Roshan Seth), his wife (Sharmila Tagore) and their little girl, Mina (Sahira Nair, who grows up to be Choudhury), tearfully leave their home and friends behind for a much poorer life in an Indian-run motel in Mississippi. Here Mina grows into a voluptuous Americanized beauty the color of ripened tobacco. A vivacious 24-year-old with a smile like a crescendo, she dazzles the camera as well as the affable Demetrius (Washington), who initially uses her to make an old flame jealous.

Demetrius, a sweet hunk, is almost living the American Dream as the indebted proprietor of a one-van carpet-cleaning business. His clientele by and large are the Indians whose extended families run the motels in the vicinity, a business relationship that is jeopardized when Demetrius is drawn to Mina like a cat to a sunny ledge. An amazingly sensual couple, they fall truly, madly, deeply in love. But this is a “West Side Story” for the ’90s, and both communities decry the relationship — all for a few shades of brown, as Demetrius points out.

Nair underscores this thought with her warm, richly visual portraits of the quirky motel Indians and Demetrius’s close-knit family. A Harvard-educated Indian, she proves every bit as savvy an anthropologist in Greenwood as in her streetwise Indian film, “Salaam Bombay!” She uses the skill here to emphasize the parallels between the diverse groups while never losing sight of the new generation’s Americanization. “Traditions are handed down like recipes, you have to know what to eat and what to leave on the plate,” Demetrius advises Mina, who’s just getting the hang of coping with hidebound relatives.

Sooni Taraporevala, who wrote “Salaam Bombay!,” took Nair’s idea of making a movie about the hierarchy of color and turned it into this masala, which in India is a collection of hot, colorful spices. Certainly Nair and Taraporevala’s story is both spicy and multihued. Not only black and brown, but yellow and white folks are all sent up for their prejudices. One good ol’ European American suggests “the Indians be sent back to the reservation.” Brahman in moccasins? In this ever-shrinking world of ours, anything seems plausible.

The story loses its focus when it leaves Greenwood to return with Mina’s father to Uganda, but with Seth in the role, it is a poignant detour. Seth, who played Papa in “My Beautiful Laundrette,” brings a note of pathos to the more often playful story, as does Ugandan actor Konga Mbandu as his estranged childhood friend Okelo. Charles Dutton, TV’s “Roc,” also stands out as Demetrius’s carpet-cleaning partner, which is no small feat opposite a couple as radiant as Washington and Choudhury. When it comes down to it, there is nothing quite like people in love.

A brilliant Gothic fable about an artist who has disappeared, leaving on the other hand a diary; and through that diary we move into flashback to observe a classic turns out that retelling of the Bergman warrior haunted by darkness, demons and the creatures of his imagination until he is destroyed by them. The tentacular growth of this obsession is handled with common virtuosity in a dazzling flow of surrealism, expressionism and full-blooded Gothic horror. First the hour of the wolf, the disturbed nights of watching and waiting, when the artist (von Sydow) describes - but we do not see - the horde of man-eating birdmen and insects who have invaded his sketch-book. Then the open encounters when a railway carriage crawling on the other side of the prospect, a girl picking her aspect on account of the rocks on a sun-bleached beach, look momentarily like peculiar, foreboding insects. Finally, the sated nightmare of the soirée at a château gradually transformed into Dracula’s castle as its aristocratic inhabitants become werewolves and vampires, and the artist flees into a forest of blackened, clutching trees, pursued by prodigious birds of pursue. In its exploration of the nature of creativity, haunted by the problem of whether the artist possesses or is ridden by his demons, Hour of the Wolf serves as a remarkable attendant-piece to Role.

Andrew Crocker-Harris (Albert Finney), a teacher of Latin and Greek at a traditional English prep school, is called the Crock and the Hitler of the Put down Fifth by his students. His rigidity and cruelty are the disheartened remains of an extinguished passion for classical literature. But as he is poised to permission the grammar–forced into retirement by the headmaster and made inane by the infidelities of his wife, Laura (Greta Scacchi)–Crocker-Harris finds his love for information rekindled by the interest and agreement of a young student named Taplow (Ben Silverstone), who gives him Robert Browning’s translation of Aeschylus’s AGAMEMNON as a parting gift. Based on a Terence Rattigan diminish, THE BROWNING TYPE is a hieroglyph study that finds pathos in British stodginess and makes a subdued avow for the blue blood the gentry of teaching. Finney is the important center of the film, portraying a man whom time and opening from passed by. As humiliations are piled upon his character, Finney registers nothing but silent abandonment, even as he ratchets up his forbearance to mug the next disappointment.

Dodie Smith, novelist of classic kid gossip “101 Dalmatians” also wrote the very different “I Capture the Castle,” a serious look at the complexities of love. For the sake of his first feature, director Tim Fywell (the TV movie “Norma Jean and Marilyn”) has transformed this autobiographical unfamiliar into a percipient, wholly delightful drama, infusing the proceedings with a light tone that almost qualifies the veil as a comedy, yet on no account loses phenomenon of the unpredictability of human emotions. Pic richly deserves an audience and, given thorough arthouse handling and unspecified critical living expenses, should find one.

Romola Garai is teenage protagonist Cassandra Mortmain, who narrates an opening sequence in which she, at age 7, moves with her family to a remote castle in Suffolk so her father (Bill Nighy) can work on his second novel. (The vague similarity to the setup of “The Shining” is only strengthened when we finally get a glimpse of Dad’s manuscript.)

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But now, 10 years have passed, and nothing has gone as planned. Dad hasn’t written anything coherent, Mom has died, the clan is two years behind on the rent, and wilder big sister Rose (Rose Byrne) — full of hormones and romantic yearnings — is going stir crazy. The one up side is Cassandra’s new stepmother, Topaz (Tara Fitzgerald), a lovable flake. But the future looks grim.

Enter the Cottons, a family of wealthy Americans who have inherited the castle and the estate that surrounds it. The Cottons comprise a disarmingly frank mother (Sinead Cusack); her elder son and heir, Simon (Henry Thomas, saddled at first with a beard that appears just as hideous to Mortmain sisters as it does to us); and another, more roughly appealing son, Neil (Marc Blucas). A marriage to one of the Cottons would solve all the family’s problems, so the already love-hungry Rose throws herself at Simon.

Cottonmania is not limited to Rose, however. Secretly, Cassandra is also infatuated with Simon. And Dad starts hanging out with Mrs. Cotton, much to Topaz’s dismay.

Rose manages, not only to ensnare Simon, but even to convince herself — if only briefly — that she’s in love with him. In addition, there is a tangle of flirtations and encounters involving Rose, Cassandra, Simon, Neil, the local boy (Henry Cavill) who has long carried a torch for Cassandra, and various other characters.

Except for a very few scenes, the film is from Cassandra’s P.O.V., and Garai’s low-key and winning performance anchors the whole affair. Nighy, last seen in Peter Cataneo’s “Lucky Break,” is even more memorable here. And veteran Cusack, in a relatively small role, has some brilliantly subtle moments that flesh out Mrs. Cotton’s character in a glance.

While there is a whiff of “Masterpiece Theatre” to “I Capture the Castle” — the BBC is among the producers — it would be a shame to see it on the small screen and to miss cinematographer Richard Greatrex’s lensing of the beautiful Welsh locations.