There is noting better in the critic biz than a glorious surprise… I got three in a row on Tuesday.

White Oleander is headed to Toronto, so it was a good film to get out of the way.  I headed to the screening, expecting a decent weepie.  I don’t mind a good weepie.  So in I headed.

Halfway through the movie, I moved seats.  Not because I was antsy.  But because I needed to know more about the director whose work I was watching.  Because I had to know who some of the supporting players, whose faces weren’t familiar, were.  Because I had to know what daring cinematographer was shooting this thing.

Peter Kosminsky is well established in England.  He’s won awards and acclaim.  But this is his first American theatrical release.  And he has leapt, for me, right into the top echelon of drama directors in Hollywood.  He’s not Soderbergh or Scorsese or Coppola.  He’s not quite that inventive or singular.  But with this film, he’s gone right to the top of the next tier, past the Luis Mandokis, Penny Marshalls and even the Rob Reiners of the world… directors who make good, sturdy dramas with skill. 

Kominsky raises the form.  His transitions are masterful, if not eye-popping.  He moves the camera in ways that I have seen over the years on Brit TV, but he freshens them up and finds way to make them stirring.  It was not a surprise when I saw that the DP on this film was Elliot Davis, coming off of I Am Sam, also starring Michelle Pfeiffer. The way Davis handles actresses’ faces felt like a form of brutality when he shot Madonna for The Next Best Thing and is remarkably beautiful here, when photographing Michelle Pfeiffer, Renee Zellweger, Robin Wright Penn and even Cole Hauser.

But Kominsky does the most remarkable thing of all in White Oleander.  He takes his time.  He lets the movie breathe.  He lets the emotions breathe.  And for his effort, he gets career-topping work from Pfeiffer, Zellweger, Hauser and Noah Wyle.  He also gets a solid performance from a young actress who could easily have left him hanging.

As for Pfeiffer, I would now put her right on top of the list of candidates to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.   Pfeiffer is always better when she plays power instead of weakness.  She broke through with Scarface, where she played both ways.  But in Tequila Sunrise, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Batman Returns, Dangerous Minds and this, Pfeiffer is more than one of the most beautiful faces ever in Hollywood.  She is raw and real and smart and sexier than in any of her “softer” roles.  And at this time, I would be surprised if it doesn’t win her an Oscar.  (Of course, there may well be a future performance that changes that surprise… but she is a lock for a nomination.)

I’m not going to write too much more.  But as a point of reference, White Oleander is a coming-of-age movie like you have rarely seen… sort of Anywhere But Here by way of At Close Range.  The intimacy Kominsky attains with Zellweger, Hauser and the young lead, Alison Lohman is fresh and unexpected.  The high level coming from Pfeiffer and Robin Wright Penn is expected, but their roles are not.  A really fine film…

Even further from left field came the Miramax film, City of God.  I have to tell you, I had zero awareness of what I was walking into when I got to the screening room.  I knew it was scheduled for Toronto and that Miramax was showing it early… that’s it. 

And all it turned out to be was one of the most impressive directorial debuts in what has been an exceptional few years for directorial debuts.   This film is better than Amores Perros.  This film will be more influential than movies like Chungking Express.  This film suggests that director Fernando Meirelles has even more upside than Christopher Nolan.  This film is the most original synthesis of pop storytelling into a new form since The Matrix.  And this film offers Meirelles managing to top the work of a highly talented and experienced director, Barbet Schroeder, in a similar look at violence, Our Lady of the Assassins. 

I don’t know whether Brazil will off the film up as their Best Foreign Language Academy Award nominee.  But if they do, it’s pretty hard to imagine that any other film will be any better.  It is possible that Oscar voters will turn away from the violence of the story and find something “nicer.”  But that would be a shame.  You never know quite whom you have after just one film, but Fernando Meirelles looks like he could be up on the very, very highest level of directors. 

The title, City of God, is the name of a poverty-stricken area in urban Brazil.  The story is told by one of the many characters we get to know in this story of rising and falling top hoodlums.  This is a world where working people live in fear, where children carry guns, and where hope is a lot more hard to find than a baggie of cocaine. 

This is movie of extreme violence, which will certainly put of much of the audience.  But, like Our Lady of the Assassins, the violence is directly attached to the moral ambiguities of its characters lives.  One of Meirelles strong influences, visually and on the soundtrack, is blaxplotation.  This makes enormous sense, since this is, in its way, a ghetto exploitation film.  Another film it reminded me of was last year’s Toronto attention-getter, Malunde, which told the story of a black street kid in South Africa who hooks up with an older white man.  In what was a pretty soft-hearted film there were shocks, like kids sniffing glue in brown paper bags.  Here, there are entire mini-gangs of kids 10 and under.  But their motivations and the growth of their anarchic attitudes is a key part of the storytelling. 

I was taken, time after time, by the way Merielles wove this story, with a skill that made Pulp Fiction seem simplistic, Memento confusing and Guy Ritchie as shallow as he obviously is.  Meirelles uses time and space and movement with wild abandon and absolute authority. 

My day of movies closed with an easy win, Artisan’s Standing in the Shadows of Motown, directed by Paul Justman, the man who gave us T&A Academy 2.  Of course, he also directed three rock-n-roll films as well.  And he does a nice job with this film as well.

Here’s the deal – this is a movie about the band that played on virtually every Detroit-era Motown hit.  As asked in the movie, “Did you ever think about who was playing the music on (name you Motown hit with a big name singing)?”  I have.  But not long enough to find out the answer. 

This is the story of The Funk Brothers… 13 musicians who worked together day in and day out, building the aural ark that greats like Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross and Martha Reeves, etc, etc., floated on for all those years.   They tell their stories of glory and failure, ecstasy and agony.  Some had women trouble, some had drinking problems and two were even white. 

Justman is very clever in how he builds his movie, giving us a new performance of a classic hit every ten minutes or so throughout the film.  (Ironically, the one that seems to be missing is “Standing in the Shadows of Love”.)  The songs are performed by The Funk Brothers and guest singers Joan Osborne, Gerald Levert, Meshell Ndegeocello, Bootsy Collins, Ben Harper, Chaka Khan, Montell Jordan and Tom Scott.  And in between the songs, the tales of their lives. 

If you love the music, and I do, its hard to imagine having more fun watching a documentary… all the more so because it reminds you of how the standards that have been playing on your radio for years came to life by way of the efforts of real, flesh and blood people with real strengths and weaknesses.  And in the singing of Osborne, Levert, Ndegeocello and Jordan, there is the realization that the music is the music and the performance is only one of the colors, no matter how wonderful the new renditions of these songs may be. 

Of course, the movie got me before the credits even began.  As soon as I heard Andre Braugher doing the narration, I was there.  I even applauded quietly. 

Three great films back-to-back-to-back.  A hell of a day. 

READER OF THE DAY:  IN A HUFF writes:  “Correction: You love a set of yabos more than the next MILLION guys, as evidenced by your (seemingly) daily breast fixation in your column. So for you to condemn Van Wilder for its crude and base breast menus on the DVD... it must truly be crass to earn your wrath!    : )”

DAVID WONG (his real name) is funny enough to get his own link, writing:  “I've used my position as editor of my own website and as one of the few people who disliked Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings to enumerate an almost airtight case against the franchise, point by point, using logic that most experts agree is unassailable.  I'm confident that if the filmmakers read this they'll abandon work on The Two Towers immediately:
http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/film/50reasons.html”

And  NOT HILTON writes:  “I can see his point re: Tarantino's output (THB 8/26).  It's unfortunate that so many feeble imitations followed in the wake of his films that when you watch them you can forget sometimes that you're seeing the well from which all these also-rans drew, and just see it as more of the arch, too-hip and full of trivial gangsta near-noirs that followed (Things to do in Denver when you're dead, anyone?).

Another film that suffers this fate is John Carpenter's Halloween.  It's nearly impossible to watch the film now and enjoy it as the gleefully demented hoot it is ... all you see now are the points where Prom Night, Friday the 13th and all those other slasher films that followed in its wake took their blueprints from.  It went from being a well built little cabin to being the model for a bunch of pre-fabs in a housing tract.

I think The Matrix may already be heading in this direction, since every action movie seems compelled to include a "freeze motion" shot and the Hong Kong movie vogue has been providing a lot of the sensibilities we've been seeing in action pictures lately.  While that stuff was still sort of underground (and fresh to Western eyes) a few years ago, it's all over the mainstream now.   Time will tell, and we'll see what surprises are in store in the sequels, but the writing is getting easier to read on the wall.”

E-ME:  Will the guys out there go see White Oleander even if it looks like a chick flick?