Cracked Window

I can’t imagine a more poignant or tragic portrayal of classroom chaos than that depicted in the French film The Class. Fictional but shot documentary style, the story shows a teacher’s persistent but futile attempt to reach students mired in pubescent rebellion and complex culture clashes.

Throughout the film I kept thinking of my school days, serene and boring in comparison. But that was the 1960s in Central Florida, when classroom order and conformity resembled the symmetry and prevalence of orange groves. Everything has changed there, too.

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Until seeing Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler last week, I thought only Daniel Day-Lewis could so completely inhabit a movie character. Or Robert DeNiro when he did serious roles.

Battling frailties and demons galore, Rourke’s character makes one ponder the fates of wrestlers once age and countless poundings have taken a despairing toll.

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Hard to correlate these two disparate ideas: airplane crash victims lost high in the Andes resorting to cannibalism, and stark humanity imbued with love.

But that’s what played out on the movie screen tonight in the documentary Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains. After the plane carrying the Uruguayan ruby team went down in October 1972, sixteen of the forty-five passengers survived for more than two months. Had they not eaten from the bodies of their dead companions, they too would have died in the aptly named Valley of Tears. They were rescued when two team members trekked for days through towering peaks.

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Sometimes, rarely actually, a movie stuns me. Leaves me in awe. Not fully grasping what I’ve just seen, I want to watch it again and again.

That’s how I feel twenty-four hours after watching “A Christmas Tale.” The French film examines the complexities of a dysfunctional, estranged family reunited for the holiday. Typically that subject wouldn’t interest me. But there’s so much more to it in this film.

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Until HBO’s True Blood, I can’t recall a television series with an opening sequence more riveting than the show itself. A foreboding mix of lust, religion, and evil, the montage casts a memorable spell. With each viewing, I’m drawn deeper into the stark settings.

While I enjoyed the series’ first season, which wrapped up Sunday, it fell short of HBO classics The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, and The Sopranos. I learned tonight via MetaFilter that a documentary inspired the opening, propelling Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus to the top of my must-see list.

The visceral appeal of True Blood’s opening isn’t the sex. It’s the southern swamps. I trudged through them in my youth. They entered my blood.

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