Sweet Smell of Success (Criterion)

Release date: Feb. 22

Standard list price: $21.99

Ahead of its time in 1957, Sweet Smell of Success is, like Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, one of Hollywood’s most sordid exposes of the entertainment/media complex. It dismantles the promotion industry as an intractably corrupt system, while tapping into deeper, more sinister subtext in every nook and cranny.

Burt Lancaster, starring as a Walter Winchell surrogate named J.J. Hunsecker (one of the best monikers in screenwriting history), oozes menace and power – a soft-spoken sociopath with a bullhorn reaching millions. Like Winchell, Hunsecker writes a daily newspaper gossip column that can skyrocket to fame the people he publicizes or break the careers of those he derides with his acid pen. He is as close to as the nation’s entertainment sector has to a king, even if his monarchy is corrupt and his minions despicable.

Lancaster’s deliverance of one of the film’s famous lines – “I love this dirty town” – is convincing in its noirish cynicism. Shooting on real New York City streets at a time when studio backlots were still the standard operation procedure, director Alexander Mackendrick realizes Hunsecker’s declaration, both in the physical filth of the on-location realism and the mental, emotional filth of its protagonists.

Hunsecker was voted one of the AFI’s top 50 movie villains of all time, but his industry compatriot in the picture is almost as vile. Tony Curtis plays Sidney Falco, a guttersnipe press agent who, like most of this film’s denizens, is only it for himself. To get back into Hunsecker’s good graces – and guarantee his upset clients the ink they desire – he agrees to plant a smear in a rival newspaper column about Hunsecker’s sister’s latest beau. The poor boy seems to be an upstanding gentleman, playing in a popular New York jazz band, but Hunsecker seems to have it bad for his sister; at least as bad as a screenwriter could get away with in ‘50s Hollywood.

While most of the significant players in Sweet Smell of Success are appalling, the incestuous lust Hunsecker harbors for his sister – whom he treats the way a lecherous father might – makes him much more repulsive than the run-of-the-mill leeches puckering his posterior for a column inch. And it makes for a fascinatingly subtextual film, bubbling with unspoken depravity underneath the already grimy surface.

Criterion’s exhaustive double-disc release of the film analyzes it from every angle – historical, trivial, formal, theoretical. The luminous chiaroscuro lighting that makes New York feel so alive in this picture is given a flawless transfer, as well as its own bonus featurette on the craft of cinematographer James Wong.

The supplemental disc has four features total. The 1986 documentary Mackendrick: The Man Who Walked Away looks at the director’s ascent from graphic illustrator and adman through the top ranks of Britain’s esteemed Ealing Studios and finally on the streets of New York, making this progressive masterwork. In a new video interview with director James Mangold (most recently of Knight & Day), who took a film course under Mackendrick’s mentorship, Mackendrick is revealed to be an astute film mind and an Aristotlean philosopher of narrative.

And finally, Neal Gabler, author of Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity, offers a brief, compelling history of Hunsecker’s inspiration, and particularly on the differences between the populist Winchell and Lancaster’s more elitist interpretation. According to Gabler, the specific story that inspired Ernest Lehman’s script for Sweet Smell was a lot more interesting and eccentric than the tame onscreen enactment.

In real life, it was Winchell’s daughter, not his sister, that he was “protecting,” and the man she was romancing was not a fresh-faced jazzman but a Broadway hustler out to get Winchell’s money. So Winchell had his daughter committed to a mental hospital and used his considerable influence to convict the boyfriend to 18 months in prison for not claiming $4,000 income on his taxes.

By Gabler’s account, the real wheeling and dealing of this larger-than-life media personality is indeed more interesting than Hunsecker’s quid pro quos – proof, once again, that truth remains stranger than even the most imaginative fiction.

Promised Lands (Zeitgeist)

Release date: Feb. 15

SLP: $27.49

Promised Lands is writer Susan Sontag’s only documentary, shot in Israel during and immediately after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Influenced more by Jean-Luc Godard’s oblique essay films than the Maysles Brothers’ fly-on-the-wall observations, Sontag’s film ignores most documentary-film protocol in a directionless portrait of a tenuous nation. She lingers contemplatively on daily life in the Holy Land and conveys the history of the young nation not by rote recitation of key events but by the silent filming of wax-figure recreations at the Israel Defense Forces History Museum. Refreshingly, the movie is absent ideological pandering; it’s obvious that propaganda cinema was the last thing on Sontag’s mind. But it’s frustrating that Sontag declines even to identify the supposed experts she interviews for the film’s narration and, without the benefit of a structure, the viewer is simply taking in isolated vignettes that strive for coherence. The best segment finds Sontag filming a sort of kamikaze hypnosis by an unorthodox Israeli psychologist on a shell-shocked soldier. The poor man is terrorized to within an inch of his life by a programmed sensory assault that is difficult to watch.

Birdemic (Severin Films)

Release date: Feb. 22

SLP: $22.49

Birdemic has been labeled, both derisively and affectionately, as this generation’s Plan Nine From Outer Space. But this completely inept, Z-grade “horror” feature makes Ed Wood look like John Ford. It doesn’t sound totally awful on paper; it’s about a pack of eagles and vultures that attack a small town in Silicon Valley, where a software salesman and an aspiring model are beginning a romance. But the torture here is in the technique, not the story. As far as staging goes, all the invisible “lines” are ignored and crossed, with awkward results. There is no blocking, and no continuity between edits – a scene will be sunlit in one cut, dark in the next and back again. The dialogue is smothered by nature’s ambient noise. The tripodless camera wanders for no apparent reason. The acting is an insult to cardboard. The film plays out like Hitchcock’s The Birds if it was directed by someone who had never seen a movie before – or by a seasoned hand who set out to deliberately break every rule of basic film grammar as a way of subverting convention. Interviews with writer-director James Nguyen suggest he is most definitely not the latter. You’ll be laughing at this film, not with it, but either way, it’s a movie destined for cult success. God help us, there is already a sequel in the works, in 3D no less.

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within (Oscilloscope Laboratories)

Release date: Feb. 15

SLP: $23.99

Oscilloscope Laboratories has released its second DVD of the year about a Beat writer, but compared to the formerly audacious Allen Ginsberg collage Howl, its new William S. Burroughs documentary is downright conventional. And there’s nothing wrong with that when the subject matter is so compelling. Director Yony Leyser does a fine job of pinpointing Burroughs’ contradictions as both a left-wing, gay, countercultural rebel and a model NRA member, obsessing over firearms and sleeping every night with a loaded gun (he would later accidentally kill his wife Joan with a gunshot to the head). Leyser also reveals the impact Burroughs had on other art forms – he is credited for the origin of the terms “blade runner” and “heavy metal.” Sonic Youth scored the documentary, musicians from Frank Zappa to Kurt Cobain are shown snapping photographs with Burroughs, and filmmakers as wide-ranging as John Waters and Gus Van Sant pontificate about his influence. That being said, the movie could have gone further into Burroughs’ literary contributions and what made his books so admired besides their status as censorship magnets.

Art: If you’ve got a hankering for hitting the links but can’t get to it right now, perhaps an ongoing exhibit at the Lighthouse ArtCenter in Tequesta will help slake your fairway thirst. Gary Wiren’s nonpareil collection of golf memorabilia is on display along with paintings, photographs and sculptures from the Academy of Golf Art. Included are paintings by David Coolidge, Leslie B. DeMille, Linda Hartough and George Lawrence, photographs by Dick Durrance II, Dom Furore and Harry Labrecht, and scuplture by Brad Pearson. The exhibit runs through April 6 at the center, which is in the Gallery Square North Plaza in Tequesta. Wiren will give a lecture about his collection at 6 p.m. Wednesday, followed by a book signing at 7:15 p.m. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Tickets: $10 for non-members. Call 746-3101 or visit www.lighthousearts.org.

Film: As sort of a follow-up to last year’s Inception comes another science-fiction look at the way the world works, the clever and smart The Adjustment Bureau, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick (Blade Runner, Minority Report). Matt Damon is a U.S. congressman on the rise, with his eyes on a Senate seat and perhaps beyond, if the title bureau operatives have anything to say about it. But Damon meets an alluring modern dancer (Emily Blunt) and romance gets in the way of his political ambitions, so the bureau -- a team of fedora-wearing, button-down Mad Men types -- gets involved in keeping them apart. The movie is an action-packed meditation on free will versus destiny, so you are advised not to leave your brains at the movie theater door. At area theaters beginning Friday. – H. Erstein

Theater: You’re probably thinking: Where can I go for a good supernatural love story, right? The answer is Florida Stage at the Kravis, which opens Friday night with the regional premiere of Michael Hollinger’s Ghost-Writer. Hollinger has been produced three times before by the company, with such eclectic works as Incorruptible, Red Herring and Opus. Ghost-Writer has a similar reverence for words and wordplay, and is about the act of writing and literary inspiration. Hollinger takes us back to 1919 New York City, where fictional novelist Franklin Woolsey spends his days dictating his new book to his efficient, smitten secretary. But when he dies, the dictation continues, as she insists she is still receiving his words from beyond the grave. Producing director Lou Tyrell stages the three-character play, which continues through April 3. Call (561) 832-7469 for tickets. – H. Erstein

Music: The Festival of the Arts Boca gets under way for the fifth year tonight at Mizner Park in Boca Raton with a Rotary Club-sponsored night of young performers, then moves on Saturday to the Canadian Brass, and then to Montenegrin classical guitarist Milos Karadaglic on Sunday. The Canadian Brass, founded in 1970, may be the best-known such brass ensemble in the world, with more than 90 recordings to its credit and countless appearances for audiences far from their Toronto base. The group appears at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Count de Hoernle Amphitheater.

On Sunday night, it’s Karadaglic, a 27-year-old who is making his first American appearance with his concert at 7:30 p.m. Karadaglic also is in the process of recording his first album. For more information, call 368-8445 or visit www.festivaloftheartsboca.org.

The Tropical Baroque XII Festival is currently under way down south under the aegis of the Miami Bach Society, but come Sunday, one of the groups appearing in the festival, Fuoco e Cenere, brings a program of 18^th-century Italian music to the St. Paul’s series in Delray Beach. Fire and Ashes (or Ash), which is the translation of the Paris-based group’s Italian name, was founded by Jay Bernfeld, a New York-born viol player. Sunday afternoon’s program offers music by Alessandro Scarlatti, Francesco Durante, Francesco Mancini and Antonio Vivaldi. Soloists are soprano Isabelle Poulenard and mezzo Guillemette Laurens, accompanied by a small chamber group of recorder, viola da gamba, theorbo and harpsichord. The concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Delray starts at 3 p.m. Tickets are $15-$18. Call 278-6003 or visit www.stpaulsdelray.org.

Opera: The Palm Beach Opera closes its fascinating Opera in One Hour series tonight with another first: A zarzuela. Luisa Fernanda, written in 1932 by Federico Moreno Torroba, is a pleasant piece about a love triangle in the politically turbulent Spain of the 1860s. Soprano Alison Bates stars as the title character, with Kenneth Stavert as Vidal Hernando, Greta Ball as Duchess Carolina, and Evanivaldo Correa as Javier. The abridged opera begins at 9 p.m. at the Harriet Himmel Theater, CityPlace. Admission is free. For more information, call 833-7888 or visit www.pbopera.org.

There's something to be said for the sort of tradition that manages to intrigue upon each arrival, and when it does so in the guises of filigreed robots, childhood make-believe, or the lipsticked grit of a Bayou starlet -- all the better, I say.

So unfolds this year’s southXeast: Contemporary Southeastern Art at Florida Atlantic University’s galleries, which presents the efforts of 13 Southeastern artists, including three of Florida’s own (Carl Knickerbocker, Clive King, and Beatriz Monteavaro). Housed in both the university's Schmidt and Ritter galleries, the show strips the term “regional” of its aw-shucks connotations and addresses the texture that may be found when playfulness is executed with an eye towards the hallucinatory, whether rooted in the real or in the wholly imagined.

Let’s be clear: this assembly of works is not reinventing the aesthetics of identity. The collage, installation, video, drawing, and paintings found here utilize recognizable tropes to address gender, or to lift the banal into loftier realms of contemplation. Pop-culture personalities such as Elvis, or the racially charged appropriation of a “Sambo” character, for example, are once again introduced as metaphors for desire or perception.

But our recognition of them serves as context for many of these studies, and as a way of entering the psychologies they inhabit. Thus, the familiar is but a doorway to enjoyment, particularly of the skillful use of materials found here.

Upon first entering the Schmidt, visitors will encounter Renella Rose Champagne, a hard-knocked but hopeful singer whose life is portrayed by Louisiana-based performance artist Stephanie Patton. The clichéd details of a life are pinned to the gallery wall like dead and dusty butterflies: turquoise cocktail napkins stamped with Renella’s wedding date, cheap nylon nighties, a CD listening station (You had your eye on everyone at the party/All the girls resembled Pamela Anderson Leeee...), and some photos of Renella as a spokesmodel for weirdo comfort products, such as an anxiety harness and a heart pillow (“a soft cushion that gently supports the weary heart”).

The impression is twofold: First, Patton, who has played Renella for 18 years, confidently speaks to how humor and the careful indexing of personal objects can be used to explore the self. Second, the installation preps viewers for the works to follow, many of which also use levity and the commonplace to investigate how we present ourselves and how we are perceived.

We see this in Kathy Yancey’s mixed-media collages; they enshrine the wishful thinking of the young in settings which blend fables with the common, such as a Hieronymus Bosch-like garden assembled from the plastic petals and leaves one might find at a dollar store. Within this thicket, a little cowgirl rides a white pony alongside Elvis Presley, who appears in pre-bloat form and looks upon her with fatherly love.

A thumbnail of this same image appears as a painting in Yancey’s Vision in the Waiting Room, which also portrays how invention can allow us to escape our immediate surroundings and transport the self from drudgery, or even misfortune, to faraway places filled with color and light -- in this case, an ocean buoyantly cluttered with bright fish and coral. Yancey’s nod to Bosch, as well as Matisse’s dancers, gives another layer of context to her assemblages, and they are some of the most accomplished offerings found in the show.

Also notable are Damond Howard’s transformative wall-sized charcoals of African-American men. Their side-by-side analysis of legitimacy and stereotyping expand figurative drawings into historical and social condemnations.

On to the Ritter Galleries, where the exhibit continues in darker confines that are illuminated by Carl Knickerbocker’s raw and garish palettes. In this self-taught artist’s hands, what might typically appear as a cheering living room is instead a fairy tale gone awry, sort of along the same lines as Neil Gaiman’s novel-turned-movie Coraline. As with many of the works in this show, all is not as it initially appears, and one is left to consider not only what’s before the eyes but what has been left out, and why.

In Knickerbocker’s work, this includes the featureless face of an elongated woman, looming in a doorway while a smaller version of herself emerges from a garden pot. It sounds amusing, but the artist’s disjointed perspectives indicate something is wrong.

SouthXeast closes with an installation by Miami-based artist Beatriz Monteavaro: We Saw Creatures groups 62 drawings, four amorphous soft sculptures, four latex heads and a “Serpent to Sting You.” First off, black light rules, and is an element woefully underused in contemporary art because ignoring it discounts the power of time travel. By this I mean black light’s ability to instantly transport us to the tastes of pre-adolescence, such as collecting glow-in-the-dark posters or visiting haunted houses at county fairs.

Monteavaro, however, is unabashed in her tribute to this age, and her monster art features devils, mummies, lizard creatures, and other old-school horror villains. The whole gallery has become the room of a child who’s spent hours reading horror comics or watching Creature Features. Rather than gruesome, the installation is nostalgic and delightfully innocent in its backward glance toward youth, before we learn that there are worse things in the world than the ones we dream up.

southXeast: Contemporary Southeastern Art runs through April 9 at the Schmidt Center Gallery and through March 5 at the Ritter Art Gallery, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton. Hours: 1-4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 1-5 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free; donations welcome. Call 561-297-2966 or visit www.fau.edu/galleries.

If most of Philip K. Dick’s writing was ahead of its time, the latest movie adaptation of his work, The Adjustment Bureau, is behind it.

The movie transforms Dick’s ̓50s short story The Adjustment Team from a politically conscious story about free will and Cold War panic to a quaint, love-conquers-all story about free will and following your heart, consequences be damned.

It isn’t just that writer-director George Nolfi (who penned The Bourne Ultimatum and Ocean’s Twelve) has adapted a story for dads into a movie for moms; it’s that he’s modified Dick’s dystopic work into something corny and comfortingly theistic, without so much as a hint of lingering cynicism. If you didn’t know better, you’d think the source material came from Harlequin’s science-fiction imprint.

The Adjustment Bureau opens promisingly, though, even for Dick’s fans.

Nolfi expands the political awareness of Dick’s story by changing the author’s real estate agent protagonist into an aspiring New York Senate candidate named David Norris (Matt Damon). Norris’ party affiliation is never given, but judging by the luminaries he hobnobs with – Madeline Albright, Jesse Jackson, Mike Bloomberg and others appear as themselves – we can assume he’s a good Democrat. This is pretty much confirmed when, shortly before Election Day, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post publishes a smear piece about Norris’ rough-and-tumble past, causing him to drop a double-digit lead and crater toward an electoral defeat.

In the men’s bathroom of the convention center where he will give his concession address, Norris meets cute with a sassy hottie named Elise (Emily Blunt), who inspires him to abandon his canned, platitude-heavy speech and speak truthfully about the phony engineering required to be succeed in politics, right down to the proper amount of scuff on one’s dress shoes. Nolfi’s writing sparkles in this cerebral set-up, opening the doors for a biting satire on the politician as corporate puppet – a slave to machinations beyond his control.

The latter is, in fact, a major theme from Dick’s story: We are slaves, though we don’t know it. Free will is a myth. We’re really being controlled by a team of dapper men acting behind the scenes, with godlike powers, to ensure that everything goes according to their blueprints for the future. The main character, in this case Norris, creates ripples in the plan by seeing behind the invisible curtain and communicating directly with these mysterious controllers of fate.

Nolfi switches things up by making Norris’ quest to be reunited with Elise the crux of the drama (in Dick’s story, the protagonist is already married, and love is not an issue), and, in the process, the potential for a dynamite political satire is discarded. When one of the Adjustment Bureau members falls asleep on the job, Norris winds up meeting Elise a second time and scoring her digits – a grave deviation from the Plan. Norris spends the rest of the picture trying to find Elise, over a period of months and even years, assisted only by a disillusioned Adjustment Bureau agent who has gone rogue (played by Anthony Mackie).

There are shades of recent science-fiction films throughout. The idea of a man realizing he’s in a controlled environment by stealing a romance resembles The Truman Show, while the overarching theme of love thwarting all scientific gimmickry conjures Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And the thought that your mind is being shepherded by a bunch of men existing in some metaphysical nether region triggers Inception.

But compared, at least, to Christopher Nolan’s overrated, overplotted, overcooked mind-boggler, The Adjustment Bureau is a breezy walk in the park, and ultimately a hell of a lot more enjoyable. Damon and Blunt have satisfying chemistry, and Nolfi regularly provides them with interesting things to say. It’s an example of entertaining fluff, a guilty pleasure carried by an old-fashioned, buoyant tone.

But those looking for a faithful Dick adaptation a la A Scanner Darkly would do best to skip this one.

THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU. Director: George Nolfi; Cast: Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, John Slattery, Anthony Mackie, Terence Stamp; Distributor: Universal; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Friday

This refined, delicate, good-looking production of Mozart’s Così fan Tutte, with swaths of brilliantly lit open spaces, marble statues and lovely costumes, harks back to productions at the Salzburg Festival in 1982 -- even down to the same sunshade beach umbrella.

There’s nothing wrong with that: Imitation is the finest form of flattery, after all. It shows the careful planning that went into this staging, because this opera, a bit of puffery really, demands focus on the music. And what brilliant tunes Mozart writes for Lorenzo Da Ponte’s crazy libretto about faithfulness, trust and constancy, especially in this opera, where one man bets his two young friends their sweethearts will not be true to them.

Così fan Tutte came from nowhere. There’s not a line of scholarship to suggest it was commissioned. My guess is that having worked together on The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, Mozart and Da Ponte decided to have some fun and write about what they knew best: romantic adventures. Mozart’s many love affairs with his lead sopranos are legion. And Lorenzo Da Ponte had been kicked out of Rome and Venice for his womanizing before arriving in Vienna.

It’s not that he was out of ideas. He wrote 50 libretti in his 90-year span. Also, I bet they split the profits. Mozart, hard up as usual, asked his friend Michael Puchberg for a loan in December 1789 on certain repayment from the management of the producing theatre the following January.

“Come to the theatre on 20 January at 10 a.m.,” he wrote Puchberg, “and only you and Joseph Haydn will be allowed to see a rehearsal of my opera.” This is all that’s known of the origins of Così fan Tutte.

I saw Palm Beach Opera’s production of the opera Saturday. Stage Director Stephen Lawless’ handling of the cast in movement and set situations is almost flawless, but there’s too much plopping down, using steps for seats. Give them benches, please!

Also missing was the huge Mesmer magnet Despina uses to revive the “sick” men. Instead, a Benjamin Franklin kite charged with electricity in a storm, replaces the magnet. It fits the time frame of this opera perfectly.

Conductor Gianluca Martinenghi conducted beautifully, letting the orchestra accompany the singers in softer tones than is usual, which highlighted their singing. The refinement began with Martinenghi’s subtle baton in a remarkably exquisite reading of the overture.

Caitlin Lynch as Fiordiligi was superb, especially her Come scoglio in Act I. Her acting and singing mark her as a young soprano on the cusp of a great opera career. Dorabella, sung by Patricia Risley, has a distinct mezzo soprano voice that blended well with Lynch’s, her every acting gesture just right, never overdone.

Abigail Nims, a lovely mezzo, had little to do in this “refined” production. I’ve seen productions of Così where this small role steals the show in vulgar ways. Not so here.

Baritone Andrew Schroeder gave a magnificent account of his role as Guglielmo. He has a finely tuned instrument that flows along like golden honey. And Joel Pietro, the lovesick tenor Ferrando, gave a very fine reading of Un’aura amorosa, the Mozart tune that is most remembered for its phrasing and absolute beauty.

The Don Alfonso of bass Matteo Peirone moved about the stage well but was vocally tired that night; he sings in all performances.

In the Vienna of 1790, this opera had one month’s run in January and a three-month summer run, so if the two authors got their fair share of the receipts, they did well.

Rex Hearn founded the Berkshire Opera Company in Massachusetts. He has reviewed opera in South Florida since 1995.