“Bride of Frankenstein,”  while technically a sequel, bears so little resemblance to the first Frankenstein movie that it almost belongs in a different genre.   While “Frankenstein” was chilling, sombre, scary, and only funny by accident,  “Bride” is both campy and humorous, philosophical and sentimental, daring and shocking and bizarre.   And not really scary at all.   Director James Whale resisted making a sequel, and when the money got to be too much to resist, he insisted on complete creative control, which he got, and then proceeded to throw the kitchen sink at the screen.  If the theme of the original movie was “when man tinkers with the source of life, terrible things result”   the theme of the second must be considered “when man tinkers with the source of life, just about any crazy thing is bound to happen.”    It’s amazing that “Bride” works as a film at all;  it’s a miracle that it works as well as it does.   It veers from comedy to horror to melancholy and back again in the blink of an eye, introduces absolutely unbelievable but entertaining characters at every turn, and is a real hoot to watch.   And underneath all that run powerful themes of loneliness and alienation.  Which is why it’s often considered one of the best horror films ever created, despite its complete lack of anything even remotely frightening.

The weird thing is, despite the movie poster’s proclamation that the Bride of Frankenstein is “..more fearful than the monster himself!”  the movie isn’t really about the bride at all.   She has an extremely short life – she is brought to life in the final ten minutes of the film; enough time for her to see the Monster, scream in terror, and then die as he flies into a rage and tears down the laboratory on top of them all.   Instead, it’s really about the coming of age of the Monster — a giant child in the first, he learns to talk in the second, and to make friends, and then, finally, to long for companionship and thus demand a bride.   Really, he’s maturing pretty quickly, all things considered.   Give him time, and he might become a decent human being.   Alas, time is not on his side.  This is a horror movie, after all.

James Whale was one of the few openly gay men in Hollywood, and that must’ve been a lonely life.    Some scholars and movie historians have written page upon page about the homosexual themes in the movie, but I think they mostly miss the point.   There are plenty of sex jokes and double entendres, but I don’t think Whale ever intended us to see the hermit and the Monster living as a gay couple, for instance, or Frankenstein and Pretorius and gay men procreating when they make the Bride.   However, outsiders abound in “Bride of Frankenstein.”   Of course there is the Monster, who’s just looking for someone to be nice to him, but also the gypsies (historically outsiders,)  the hermit, who has chosen a life away from society for religious reasons, and Pretorius, who has made a choice just like the hermit’s, but for opposite religious reasons (ie, he can’t stand the rules and restrictions of religious people.)  It’s not about being gay; it’s about being lonely, which was certainly part and parcel with being gay in Hollywood in the ’30s.

“Bride of Frankenstein” opens on a group of friends, telling each other stories on a rainy night.  Remember the unnecessary opening on the first one, with whatisface smugly telling us that if we didn’t like scary movies, “well, we warned you?”   This one does its best to top that, introducing Mary Shelly, her husband, and Lord Byron.   The actress who plays Mary Shelley here at the beginning, Elsa Lanchester, will also play the Bride at the end of the movie.   What does it mean that Mary Shelley conceives of herself as her own Monster’s bride?   Decide for yourself.   And off we go…

Minnie

After that mostly unnecessary prologue, we return to the scene of the burning windmill, the last place we saw the Monster.   We are introduced to Minnie, played with cackling delight and great comic timing by Una O’Connor. She wasn’t in the last movie, but will be the comic relief in this one- a role filled, last time around, by the elder Baron Frankenstein. I don’t know why he’s not back, as he was great, but Minnie’s even better.

Horror Movie Lesson #1 – Nobody ever dies in a burning building.  In fact, if you suddenly find yourself transported into the body of a monster in a horror movie, get yourself inside a building quick and set it on fire.  It’s the safest place you could possibly be.    After the crowd disperses, Hans – father of Maria the flower child – finds the Monster underneath the windmill in a subterranean pool, but doesn’t live to tell about it.   Neither does his wife, who reaches down to grab her husband’s hand, only to find she is holding the hand of the Monster.   A creepy owl looks on.

The mob takes Henry back to Elizabeth (played this time by Valerie Hobson, who doesn’t look a thing like Mae Clarke.)   Everybody thinks he’s dead until he wakes up, and Minnie shrieks, “He’s alive!”   Apparently no one knows how to take a pulse.   Henry’s not quite feeling himself, but still hasn’t learned his lesson.

–

Elizabeth’s not quite well either, it seems.

Enter Dr. Pretorius, played by Ernest Thesinger.   Vincent Price must have studied this performance every day of his acting career.      It takes a special guy to seek out a mad scientist who has just invented a monster that terrorized the village, and offer to partner with him in another “creative” endeavour, but Dr. Pretorius is that guy.   He is tall and skinny,  with wild hair and an effeminate manner.  This is the definition  of “camp,”  and it doesn’t take long to guess that Pretorious is a  coded homosexual.   He convinces — practically blackmails – Dr.  Frankenstein into continuing his experiments, and promises him  that he has some interesting things to show him.      Frankenstein’s curiosity overwhelms him, of course, and off we  go.

It’s interesting to note the change in Dr. F from the last film to this one.   In “Frankenstein,”  he is drunk with power, mad, obsessed with the possibilities of creating life on his own.   Here, he is hesitant, afraid, cajoled into further experiments – and later, forced by the Monster to do what he refuses to do.   He has gone from being our villain to being simply caught up in forces already in motion — doomed to play the role he has unwittingly chosen for himself until the drama is played out.   The Monster, ostensibly the villain of the first film, was transformed into a character we cared for; here, the same process begins for the Doctor.

What follows next is the most ridiculous, campy scene in the movie.   Dr. Praetorius takes Dr. F to his lab, and shows him that he has managed to create miniatures – homonculi, little people who sing and dance, dress in fancy clothes, fall in love, and protest moral outrages — all with brains smaller than walnuts.  Frankenstein’s monster merely stumbles around and moans.   And yet Praetorius insists that Frankenstein’s achievement is the greater one.  Apparently size does matter.

–

Praetorius is clearly evil where Frankenstein is simply mad -  he shows great contempt for religion, morals, good and evil, anything that might stand in the way of him achieving his goals.   He makes Dr. F look like a babe in the woods, and preys on his innocence.

Cut to the Monster, stumbling through the woods.  He happens upon a pool, where he rages against his own reflection.  (I told you it got all philosophical.)   Little Bo Peep appears, and when she sees the Monster, she screams and falls into the pool.   Clumsy Bo Peep.   In a stunning reversal of the flower girl scene in the first movie, the Monster jumps in and saves her, but she won’t stop screaming.

Some hunters hear her, and unload some lead into the Monster, wounding him but not slowing him down much.  But now the town knows again that the Monster is alive.   So out come the pitchforks and again.   They manage to capture him, the

Burgomaster barking orders and complaining, “I get no cooperation — no cooperation at all!”  and being hassled, of course, by Minnie, who offers to help bind the Monster, all 98 pounds of her.   But they manage to get him tied up without her help, and, to be honest, he looks an awful lot like Christ on the cross.  (Film historian Scott McQueen notes the reversal of traditional religious narrative occuring here — Christ was crucified, then resurrected; the Monster was resurrected, then crucified.

They haul him off to jail, and manage to hold him there for about five minutes.   He rages through town, managing to kill a little girl named Frida and both Herr and Frau Neuman.   The body count is piling up – the Monster might still be a tragically misunderstood character, but one can’t argue that he’s an innocent one.   He has little value for human life; it would follow, I guess, from his own beginning, that he has little understanding of what human life is.    Perhaps he thinks the people he kills can simply be put back on the laboratory table, zapped with lightning, and brought back to life.

The Monster makes his way out of town – he must have slipped away while everyone was running and screaming – and is drawn to the smell of meat cooking on a gypsy campfire.  Now here is an odd scene, with no apparent purpose.    He scares them away, but doesn’t take the meat, and then hears sweet and heavenly music – being played by a hermit on a violin.   The hermit is blind, and so doesn’t know his

Regardless of whether it’s through ignorance or enlightenment, the two of them get along happily.   And – gasp! – the hermit teaches the Monster to talk – and to smoke.    (This is one of the scenes that people like to mention when they talk about homosexual undertones in this movie, but I think it’s a stretch.   It would be pretty easy to include double entendres and other latently sexual language an imagery into the scene, but it’s just not there.   Instead, the hermit prays to God, and there is a crucifix on the wall.   And besides, if these two men were happily enjoying a homosexual relationship, why would the Monster go in search of a bride?)

But, alas, the outside world must intrude, in the form of two lost hunters who recognize the Monster and attempt to shoot him.  In the struggle, the hermit’s cabin catches on fire, the hunters help the blind hermit out, and leave, apparently assuming, once again, that burning buliding=dead monster (see Horror Rule #1)

And now the Monster is mad again, burned and abandoned.   The mob chases him into a graveyard, where he hides in a tomb, only to encounter Praetorius and Fritz robbing graves.   They uncover a 19 year old girl – “Pretty little thing in her way, wasn’t she?”   Fritz whines.   “I hope her bones are firm!”  Praetorius answers, a gleam in his eyes.

The Monster follows Praetorius back to his laboratory and approaches him, perhaps mistaking the austerity of this tomblike lab for another hermit’s residence.   (Interesting to contrast the hermit’s existence away from “the world” with that of Praetorius.)  Praetorius is not frightened, and offers him a smoke and some food.

–

Notice the Monster’s expanded vocabulary and morbid leanings.   Notice the way Pretorius sizes him up, with a certain…lust in his eyes.   The Monster is putty in the evil scientist’s hands.   Interpret that however you choose.

Now it’s time to get down to business.  The rest of the movie proceeds along at a much quicker pace, and with a new urgency and grim tone.   Pretorius visits Henry again, and Elizabeth tells him off royally.   But Henry looks weak and tempted once she leaves (if there are homosexual undertones, here they are.)  When Henry refuses, all sweaty and trembling, Praetorius brings the Monster into the room.    He insists that Dr. F make him a bride.  Henry refuses to even talk about it with him there, and the Monster leaves – to find Elizabeth’s window.   If Henry won’t give him a bride, then he’ll take Henry’s.   Here we get the best horror screams in the movie – first from Elizabeth, and then from Minnie.

Pretorius takes control of the scene before the mob with the pitchforks are brought in .   “I charge you,”  he says, “as you value your mistress’s life, to do nothing and say nothing of this episode.  I assure you the Baroness will be safely returned if you leave everything to me.   Nothing, that is, except what HE demands…”

The Monster has taken Elizabeth to a cave in the mountains, and Henry can’t find her, so he agrees to cooperate with Pretorius.   They take Pratorius’s experiment to Henry’s lab, and hook “her” up to the same machines that brought the Monster to life.   Praetorius keeps on about good and evil, evolution

"It was a very fresh one!"

and morality, but Henry has a job to do.    Their heart is defective (clears throat) so they send Karl (played by Dwight Frye; his name was Fritz in the last movie) to get another one.   But instead of going to the hospital, he just goes and finds a young maiden in the street and murders her.   “It was a very fresh one,”  he tells Henry, when he brings it back to the lab.

Henry’s having trouble, but the Monster’s not interested.  “Work!  Work!…Then sleep!”  he demands.  And so Henry does.   Pretorius lures the Monster away with a drugged beverage… there’s definitely a bit of the child molester in this guy.    Also quite a bit of genius – apparently he’s invented a wireless telephone way ahead of A.G.  Bell.   Too bad Praetorius isn’t interested in getting rich… the money might’ve distracted him from his darker impulses.   Instead, they reign supreme, and the storm moves in that will bring to life the second Frankenstein Monster.

A lot more money has gone into creating the lab this time around — – many more sparks and buzzes, zaps and smoky explosions – but the scene pretty much mirrors the one in the first movie.   A bandaged body is raised into the storm, and then lowered.  The Bride blinks her eyes.   Then we cut so that her hair can emerge from the bandages.   She moves like a bird; all jerky and nervous.

And here is the scene that always gets me, and proves to me that Boris Karloff is an actor, not just a guy in a monster suit.

–

I feel so sorry for him…his one last effort to find a partner, a companion in a cruel world has failed miserably.   There is nothing left but death.

Elizabeth arrives (did she escape?) and the Monster allows Henry to leave with her – they are paired, they can be happy.   But he forces Pretorius – the loner – to stay, and then burns the laboratory down around them.  The message is clear: loners die. Couples live.

The Frankenstein franchise would continue on after “Bride,”  but never reach the same heights again.   The next, “Ghost of Frankenstein” is a perfectly good little movie, introducing Bela Lugosi as Igor.   After that, Karloff quit, Lon Chaney played the monster, and it just got worse and worse.   But for what it is, “Bride of Frankenstein” is an undisputed classic.

  If, for some reason, you ever wanted to screen a film festival at a retirement home, this year’s indie/arthouse crop would yield three films you could show in succession.   

Start with “Alexandra,”  a Russian film about a elderly woman who visits her grandson, who is in the military and engaged in the Chechnyan conflict.   She wanders around and clucks a lot, and builds an unlikely friendship with a Chechnyan woman.    Then show “Cherry Blossoms,”  a German film about an elderly man who visits his son in Tokyo, who isn’t very excited to see him and leaves him alone most of the day.   He wanders around and marvels at how different things are in Japan, and builds an unlikely friendship with a homeless dancer.   

Then you can show “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,”  an American film about an elderly Chinese gentleman who visits his daughter in America, who isn’t very excited to see him and leaves him alone most of the time.   He wanders around and takes notes on English slang, and strikes up an unlikely frienship with a Lebanese neighbor.  

His daughter doesn’t like him very much, and we get the sense that he wasn’t a good father while she was growing up.   She also doesn’t much like that he’s still a believing Communist.   He is very worried about her, her marriage prospects, and the way she eats.   She doesn’t seem very happy, but she certainly doesn’t want his help in fixing that.  

Part of the problem with “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” lies in its structure.  In the last few minutes of the movie, there is a revelation that changes just about everything the daughter thought she knew about her father and his life.   It is a heartbreaking revelation, but it comes so late in the movie that it’s hard to start caring.    The movie is based on a short story by Yiyun Li, and I can imagine this kind of heartbreaking revelation working much better at the end of 25 pages of mostly nothing happening.  2 hours of mostly nothing happening is a lot to take.

Seems like so many independent/arthouse movies these days absolutely revel in being “demanding.”   They demand that you find some significance in the slow pace, the lack of plot or characterization or dialogue.   They hold on a kitchen table scene for six seconds too long, they revel in scenes of characters doing pretty much nothing.    They call this realism, and mock you in your desire to see movies in which things happen.   As if an interesting conversation were equivalent to a car chase or an explosion: only Philistines demand such things in their movies.   

“Reprise” puts all those movies to shame.   Like them, it’s not really about much.   There are two main characters (Anders Danielsen Lie and Espen Klouman Heiner)who write and want to be writers; there’s a circle of friends around them, some who embarass them, some who inspire them, and some that just seem to have nothing better to do.  Lie gets a novel published, and then has a mental breakdown.  A girl(Viktoria Winge) is involved, or gets blamed, or perhaps she’s just in the wrong place at the right time.   Klouman-Heiner cares about him, and struggles to strike the right balance between checking up on him and letting him live his own life.  They go to parties and punk rock shows, they meet their idol, they go on TV shows to promote their books, which nobody reads.  None of this really amounts to a plot.   It all happens pretty episodically.   Essentially, it’s a movie that follows a group of guys around for a few years, and hopes that you find them interesting.   

What sets “Reprise” apart is that it really does hope that you find them interesting; it never demands that they are interesting.   Director Joachim Trier’s filmmaking if full of energy and life; he is clearly a student of the French New Wave, though he’s able to bring the techniques of that movement to the screen without the nihilism or arrogance.    The result is that you do care about these two young men, and you don’t mind that nothing in “Reprise” really leads to any big climax or story arc.   Perhaps because the movie invites you to care, instead of demanding that you do so.

“Star Trek” launches the 2009 summer movie season (forget “Wolverine,” at least for now) in much the same way “Iron Man” got last year’s season off to a great start.    It’s bright and fast, fun and fizzy, witty and, really, kind of wonderful.   It reminds us that sometimes we go to the movies just to get a kick out of what we see on the screen.

For this movie to be fun is quite an achievement.   This is a “Star Trek” movie, after all.   And there have been plenty before it, some of them kind of great (like “Wrath of Kahn”) and some of them pretty awful (like “Nemesis”) but none of them ever approaching fun.   Going Where No One Has Gone Before has always been terribly serious business; there are leagues of Trekkies out there, after all, who are checking every detail, cross-referencing every serial number, and making sure it’s all “canon.”  Everything has to measure up.   Everything has to match.   It’s hard, headachy work to make a Star Trek movie, and almost as much work to watch one.   Until now.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w4vk5OZmn8[/youtube]

J.J. Abrams sidesteps all the fretting about canon quite deftly, and in a way I didn’t notice, until it was pointed out to me by a more passionate Trekkie; he places almost all of his movie in an alternate universe.   Very early on (like, in the first two minutes) a very large and ominous spaceship breaks the space/time continuum, radically changing the course of events, and voila – none of that canon matters anymore.   That all happened before, and this is after, even though it’s before, so there you go.   (If you didn’t understand that, ask your nine-year-old to explain it.)

And that gives him the freedom to make a movie that both quotes the old series and movies, and so on, and also to plot his own course where no one has gone before (it’s also not afraid to quote “Star Wars,” and quite liberally at times.)  And so we get the same characters, but different.   It’s hard to distinguish between back story and new twist, but that’s half the fun.  We get a much sexier Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and a smoky, secret relationship between her and Spock (Zachary Quinto, of “Heroes” fame wears the ears quite nicely.)   We get a goofy, kid genius Chekov (Anton Yelchin) and a kung fu Sulu (John Cho.)  Abrams adeptly uses these supporting characters to provide one liners, side quips and comedy throughout the movie; they function like Tony Stark’s robots.   The movie is so much better because of them.

And while Kirk is basically the same, though Chris Pine doesn’t chew scenery or spit lines like Shatner did, Spock is a whole new character.  Unlike Nimoy’s Spock, who never betrayed a hint of emotion, real or buried, Quinto plays the Vulcan as the most emotional character in the movie.   He always seems to be simmering, when he’s not outright boiling over.   Even when he’s clinging to logic like a plush toy to a car window, he seems arrogant, secretly loving the power that being right gives him.   He makes Kirk’s blatant emotional displays seem shallow and harmless.  And then there’s the whole thing with Uhura.  Yowza.

It seems to be a requirement that “Star Trek” villains be barbarous, monosyllabic, leather-clad Philistines who are more comfortable roaring and growling than conversing.   Eric Bana fits the bill surprisingly well as a Romulan who has come back from the future to get revenge on Spock for something he’s going to do…someday.   Why he doesn’t just wait around long enough to prevent the terrible act is beyond me, and, maybe, beyond him as well.  He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who is capable of much forward thinking.   For some reason, at least certain decks of his ship are filled ankle-deep with water.

He manages to destroy an entire planet (a pretty important one, too) and to kill Spock’s mother (played, in one of the most bizarre casting choices in recent memory, by Winona Ryder) before heading after Spock himself.   Um, one of the Spocks.   Because Nimoy appears, late in the film, another visitor from the future, and if you want, a connecting point to all the other “Star Trek” movies (like I said, this one manages to take place both before and after the others.)   Spock must rely on Kirk’s shoot-from-the-hip, one chance in a million decision-making to save all of them.  Or, um, something like that.   “Star Trek” moves quick and dizzily, rarely slowing down for explanations – and this works mightily to its advantage.  (Central to the plot is something called “red matter.”  We learn, to some extent, what it does, but never what it is.)  To tell the truth, the plot got away from me a bit, and it didn’t matter at all.   “Star Trek” was a fun movie, a great ride, a trip down memory lane and into the future, and one I look forward to seeing again.  Soon.

Recommended

• if you liked “Iron Man” last summer.
• if you are looking for something big, fun, summery, full of action and laughs.
• if you’re a Trekkie.  But of course you’ve seen it already, haven’t you.

Not Recommended

• if you’re a hardcore Trekkie, way into canon, and can’t imagine anything going this off-book being any good.
• if you’re really into science and can’t handle a sci fi movie that is more “fi” than “sci.”

1. Gone Baby Gone
Hands down my favorite movie of the year. I think more attention was paid by critics to the nespotism – Ben Affleck behind the camera, Casey Affleck in front of it – than to the actual story, and the telling of it. A movie that wrestles with difficult moral questions, while still managing to me a remarkably good detective story.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YOriOoaSbY[/youtube]

2. Lars and the Real Girl
The funniest, saddest, sweetest movie of the year. Granted, it’s a strange premise, but if you can look past that – as the people around Lars were able to – you’ll find a heartfelt movie about loving broken people where they’re at, and hoping for better things for them. I’ve been recommending this movie to just about everyone I meet since I’ve seen it.

3. Michael Clayton
Smart, sharp, and committed to its story and its characters. Tom Wilkinson chews scenery in the best possible ways and George Clooney shows he’s no slouch as an actor. As a corporate thriller, it dwelt in the real world far more than other movies in the same genre.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6WDO0VKIns[/youtube]

4. The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford
If I had an Oscar ballot, Best Actor would’ve gone to Brad Pitt and Best Supporting Actor to Casey Affleck. Or you could switch that. Such different parts, but both actors load their performances with nuance and subtext. Which makes this a fascinating movie to watch, gloomy though it is.

5. Juno
Everyone’s been talking about Juno. Either you love it or you hate it. I loved it – I thought Ellen Page did a remarkable job straddling the line between sarcastic and snarky. An inch further one way and she would’ve been unbearable, and inch further the other and the movie would’ve lost its edge. As it is, it is sweet, sarcastic, and incredibly funny.

6. I’m Not There
This bizarre biopic found unity in diversity, and reinvented the genre. Bob Dylan has always been an enigma, which is probably why a movie’s never been made about him before. Kudos to Todd Haynes for taking on, and pulling off, such an ambitious project.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoAhT0mk2t0[/youtube]

7. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

It could’ve been depressing, and it coud’ve been schmaltzy – a story about a paralyzed man who writes his biography by blinking his eye. But instead it feels like a stubborn tribute to the human spirit – and an incredibly artistic technical achievement.

8. No Country For Old Men

Twenty minutes longer than it needed to be, and so terribly bleak – besides that, it would’ve been higher on this list. An absolutely masterful, completely spellbinding cat and mouse story shows the Coen Brothers back on their game.

9. Once

Witness the reinvention of the musical. Instead of overwrought and melodramatic, it’s simple, underplayed, and completely lovely. And the songs still get stuck in my head.

10. The King of Kong

A documentary that forgets it’s supposed to keep its distance, and just gets wrapped up in its story — which might be the best sports rivalry since, I don’t know, Magic and Bird?

Honorable Mention (the top 30)

11. Breach
12. This is England
13. Knocked Up
14. Deep Water
15. Zodiac
16. Sweeney Todd
17. Black Book
18. Into the Wild
19. No End in Sight
20. Atonement
21. Control
22. Across the Universe
23. In the Valley of Elah
24. Superbad
25. Away From Her
26. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
27. Eastern Promises
28. The Savages
29. There Will Be Blood
30. Offside

Apologies for the short, rather slapdash review. I am at a conference with my “real” job this week and have little time or internet access.

“The Band’s Visit” is a small miracle of a film, about the small miracle of real communication. A lot of love went into this filmmaking. Shots are carefully composed, scenes are skillfully underacted. It moves slowly, but never a moment is wasted; it’s directed with a patience and purpose that conveys the director’s confidence that, if the story is told well enough, the audience will wait for it. It was a sweet break from the frenetic pace and overzealous production of most American films. I was so impressed with the composition of this film that I just kept pausing it and looking at the images; I’m going to litter this review with those images so that you get to see how good they are, too.

The film follows an Egyptian Police Orchestra – one of those totally pointless but absolutely important institutions – who get stranded in a small Israeli town and must rely on the hospitality of the Jews there to get back on track. Traditionally enemies, “The Band’s Visit” shows them to be simple folk, often lonely or confused, often relying on protocol to get through life, and woefully unequipped to cross the borders between each other. And yet they try, and sometimes, they succeed. Those are the sublime moments, the kind of moments you go to movies to experience.

Much of the movie is concerned with the ability of music to bring people together, in small ways. Almost all of the band members are clearly the kind of guys who took to music because normal human interaction just wasn’t working for them, and they’ve found a way to express with their instruments something completely beyond their ability with words or gestures. Even the one handsome band member, a ladies’ man, woos women with a Chet Baker pickup line and tune. He uses the same line and hums the same tune every time. Music is great stuff, “The Band’s Visit” seems to say, and we completely agree.

But the heart of the movie is the relationship between Tewfiq, the aging conductor, and Dina, the owner of the restaurant where the band ends up. Both have lived lives full of regret, and are old enough to know that they don’t have much to look forward to. Dinah gravitates to Tewfiq, even though the younger men pursue her, and Tewfiq hides behind protocol and immaculate manners, which maybe is what attracts her to him. In a “traditional” movie, these two would sleep together, and that would be called a payoff. In this movie, it would cheapen their relationship.

Recommended

• For those with patience, and an eye for small wonders

Not Recommended

• For those who needs lots of explosions, bank robberies, affairs, and/or heart-on-their-sleeve characters in their movies.
• If you hear “Arabs stuck in Israel” and you think geopolitical tensions. It’s there, but deeply buried, and not what this movie is about.