I'm Not There

Todd Haynes' I'm Not There reminds one of a great Bob Dylan song. There are several styles of verse that contain startling imagery, and the chorus catches you right away and has you humming along long after the movie wraps. I'm Not There is a non-linear biopic of Bob Dylan that's so noble it takes multiple actors to play the lead. Dylan followers will gain a lot more from the film, due to its use of key songs during important moments, than the average movie going bear but its cinematic rewards are spread equally among viewers. 
I'm Not There stars four actors you've heard from and two more with whom you may only be marginally familiar. Cate Blanchette has been getting all the love from filmblogs but there are some equally insightful performances from all the cast, not least Christian Bale (the Greenwich Village Dylan) and Bruce Greenwood (first as a BBC reporter and then secondly in a guise where I didn't realize it was also him until the credit roll). Plus Haynes semi-regular Julianne Moore playing a character molded by Joan Baez. None of the characters are named Bob, but rather Jude, or Billy or Woody.
It's easy to get lost in the different elements of Haynes' film. It crosses lines between surrealism and non-reality. It evokes the power of songs like Idiot Wind or Stuck Inside of Mobile with the same ease it slips between Dylans' personas. The heavy make-up Live at Budokon Dylan exists in a Wild West of Basement Tape characters while the Factory Girl scene of the mid-60s transforms into a Sapphic showdown. There's even the idyllic 50s with thick furniture and complex wall patterns that evokes Haynes most serious effort Far From Heaven. To put things into perspective, Haynes' first film was banned because he violated copyright by having a Barbie doll play Karen Carpenter. There's a bit of that anarchy on display in I'm Not There.

The Mist

The very first shot establishes Tom Jane as an alpha male / sensitive artist (he draws movie poster art) in rural New England. Before long this Stephen King adaptation by Frank Darabont has an assorted cast of characters holding out for dear life, trapped in a supermarket. When we first see Jane he's surrounded by posters including one for John Carpenter's The Thing. The Mist wants to play Carpenter type games creature wise. Frankly between Carpenter and Darabont, those two have helmed some of the better King stories (Christine, Shawshank).
Darabont gives the film a stripped down B-movie feel and look. The mist contains demons from another zip code and appears to be the result of a supernatural lab experiement conducted by the military. The small group of survivors includes a serious whacked out religious zealot played by Marcia Gary Harden. Her interplay with the others and her character arc provide a lot of the film's edge. When winged insects from hell break through the stores barriers there are some truely scary moments. When the end finally arrives it takes a deadly ironic twist that will chill the viewer in no uncertain terms.

Kitch and Class at the MFA

There will be no turkey served at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in the next few days - just some classy movies from a bygone era.On Friday, Saturday and Sunday night at 7 p.m. the MFA unwinds The Holy Modal Rounders: Bound To Lose. Director Sam Wainwright (originally from Houston) will intro the film the first two nights.You will remember the HMR from the soundtrack to Easy Rider. The song If You Want To Be A Bird plays as Jack Nicholson rides on the back of Dennis Hopper's chopper. This docu fills in what you don't remember. Like the time the group appeared on Laugh-In. Actor/playwright Sam Shepard played drums for a few years and pops up here but the meat of the band came from main members Peter Stempfel and Steve Weber.Monday, November 26 (7 p.m.) the MFA presents the 1951 airliner drama No Highway in the Sky. The film will be introed by John Lienhard a local professor and cultural historian who will talk about the physics of aviation before the film.

Beowulf

Place this one on the list of films to see. Not because it's film of the year. Not because it pushes PG-13 boundaries past any previous line of demarcation. See it in 3-D IMAX because that's the state of the art in current cinema projection.Directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by no less a team than Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary this version of Beowulf changes things in a manner that won't offset fans of medieval literature. Of course it would be hard to imagine that said fans are constant movie goers.Specifically there's a flying fire breathing dragon not in the original and, as one expert in the preview audience pointed out, ramparts in this era were made of wood, not of stone. There's a few other things but really who's a stickler for realism when we're watching a CGI movie that animates well known actors using motion control technology.You won't see Angelina Jolie this provocative even in an R rated film. Malkovich is wonderfully snide and Crispin Grover (not easy to recognize like the other actors) will give younger viewers nightmares. So see this film - not because it's great, but because of what it portends for the future of movie making.