Reviews

The Eyes of Orson Welles examines the actor, director, writer, producer, (private) painter, magician, newspaper columnist and commentator and political activist through the aspect of Welles he himself least regarded -- his drawings and paintings -- and the result is marvelous.

Mark Cousins' take on Welles is therefore unique and refreshing, for aside from music -- which Welles knew deeply but never actually performed publicly after his 10th birthday so therefore is a dead end -- drawing was something he did even before he learned how to write and practiced all of his life, making it something so deeply fundamental to the man and his art that Cousins' examination of it opens Welles in a way never before seen. That's damn difficult to do and a feat, if not a triumph, given how hard it is after all these decades of Wellesian examination to do something original.

People here have rapped Cousins for his somewhat elliptical narrative, but to me, that criticism is off the mark, pun intended. Cousins' personal essayist approach relieves the film of the dry structure of biographical narrative, and his fancifulness shows that Cousins is engaged with his subject. Besides, Cousins' camerawork is lovely. His shots of the places Welles has traveled, and his connection of Welles to those places through Welles' work, bring the cosmopolitan, wandering gypsy that was also Welles -- so many Welles' there were! -- alive in a way few have.

It is a work so thoughtful that I find myself returning to it repeatedly just to be transported on the journey that Cousins takes us into this brilliant, troubled, endlessly fascinating man. Thank you, Mark, for such a great, illuminating ride.

Some historical fantasies never go away. And so it is with the Patton assassination theory. Not science, not history, just a far, far right-wing posthumous stab at FDR and Eisenhower that ignores hundreds of relevant facts. Allied Forces could never have matched Soviet forces without using the atomic bombs that ended Japan's involvement in the Second World War. And though we'll never know for sure, starting World War 3 right at the end of World War II probably wouldn't have gone over very well with anybody. That Stalin was a butcher worse than Hitler is horrifically lamentable, and it's never a bad idea to remind people of this -- especially if Trump people connect Vladimir Putin to Stalin, his political model -- but you'll find better history in the movie The Death of Stalin than you will here.

Mac is a movie to prize if you are of Italian-American heritage, grew up or live near Italians, or want to look beyond the mobster cliché that surrounds them. It portrays Italians far more realistically than "The Godfather" -- a classic, but only concerned with a tiny fraction of Italian-American life -- as superior and extraordinarily hard- working artists, craftsmen, builders and family men, naive with money, awkward at sex, unprejudiced, and bewildered by women. It is funny, wistfully sad, compelling, sweet and powerfully LOUD. It is a treat of a movie, one of a string of small independent films to emerge out of the so-called "video auteur" age of the early 1990s. Its director and star, John Turturro, based the movie largely upon is dad and his own early years, and the film rings true with that kind of authenticity.