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.

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

The old saying, attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald, declares that there are no second acts in American life.

But West Palm Beach’s Steve Caras has had a second, third and fourth life, re-inventing himself at regular intervals or at least tackling and mastering new careers.

He began as a classical dancer in the New York City Ballet, mentored by the great George Balanchine as what Caras calls “his youngest male, least-trained dancer.” Then Balanchine had a hunch about Caras’s talent with a camera, so he encouraged him to become the company’s photographer.

When he moved to South Florida, he taught classes and became the ballet master for the Miami City Ballet. Eventually, he specialized in fund-raising for Edward Villella’s troupe, a skill he later employed for Palm Beach Dramaworks.

But he has had to put that job on hold for yet another one, assisting filmmakers Deborah Novak and John Wittig in the creation of a documentary about himself, Steven Caras: See Them Dance. It receives its first public viewing Thursday at the Kravis Center’s Persson Hall, before airing at various public television stations around the country. Caras estimates he will be busy appearing with the film on pledge breaks for the next three years.

This cinematic journey began nearly two and a half years ago, when Caras got a phone call from Novak asking to meet with him. He assumed they wanted to use some of his photos for a project, a frequent request.

“Deborah did most of the talking and she started to tell me in detail about my life, since my starting dancing at 15, the bullying that accompanied it, the issues with my father about it, then my getting into the New York City Ballet just three years later,” Caras recalls. “And she went on and on. It was puzzling that she knew so many personal things about me.

“She had been fascinated quietly with my career and has watched me reinvent myself over and over again, in order to remain in reach of my beloved ballet world,” he says. “I was kind of stunned when they said they would like to profile my life, saying it’s an interesting story, very Billy Elliot-esque in my beginnings. Against all odds at a time and at a place when ballet was not what boys dove into without consequences.”

Caras’s reaction to the idea? “At first I thought it was my friend Sean fooling around. And then I recognized it was for real and I was stunned. But thrilled.”

He liked the filmmaking husband-and-wife team from the start, and simply went with his initial positive impression. He is glad he did, saying, “Very much so, which is not to say that there haven’t been tense moments. Because unlike a major motion picture, there is a very lean team and the budget coincides with the leanness of the team.”

Caras estimates he was interviewed and filmed in action -- on a photo shoot and conducting a dance class -- for about 12 hours, most of which wound up on the cutting room floor. In addition, the film features dancers and choreographers Peter Martins, Jacques D’Amboise, Virginia Johnson, Kay Mazzo, Allegra Kent and Sean Lavery, as well as fine art and photography expert appraiser Sarah Morthland, the executive director of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, Jacqueline Z. Davis and Mia Michaels from TV’s So You Think You Can Dance, all talking about Caras.

The Kravis premiere screening came about because of a special request by Caras. “I had asked early on if it was possible, before it airs on television, to do a screening in my hometown, because I have really embraced South Florida as my home,” he explains. “And they said yes and the Kravis Center said they would love to put it on their calendar.”

Following the screening, Caras and Novak will be interviewed live by Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout.

And Caras made one more request that was granted -- each couple in attendance will receive a DVD of See Them Dance, unavailable in stores, but destined to be a coveted public television pledge thank-you gift.

“On the DVD is a bonus feature called, ‘All About Steve.’ It’s me speaking at an informal lecture about my life,’ he says. “Can you believe it?”

STEVEN CARAS: SEE THEM DANCE, Kravis Center, Persson Hall, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Thursday, Feb. 24, 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $20. Call: (561) 832-7469.

As far as studio actioners go, Unknown has its share of well-crafted set-pieces and steely suspense, but well-versed viewers of modern thrillers won’t help but feel an almost immediate sense of déjà vu.

The most obvious reference point is Taken, whose star, Liam Neeson, Unknown shares, and whose color palette of dark blues and antiseptic off-whites are mimicked here by director Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan). Even the narratives are similar; instead of a bad-ass in search of his daughter, Neeson’s Dr. Martin Harris is a bad-ass in search of his identity.

Arriving in Berlin for a biotech conference, with his lovely wife (January Jones) in tow, Harris conspicuously leaves his briefcase, full of important scientific documents, on an airport baggage cart. He hops in a taxi and speeds back to get it, only to find the cab plummeting off a bridge after a series of traffic “accidents” propel it off the road.

Harris wakes up in a hospital four days later, only to find that another man (Aidan Quinn) has assumed his identity, his life and his wife, who seems all too happy playing along. He is the invisible man, the wrong man and the unknown man, alone in a foreign country without identification. Danger darkens every corner, and Martin spends as much time beating off stalking baddies with uncharacteristic skill as he does decoding the mystery of his identity theft.

The more Unknown plunges into a netherworld of spies, espionage and assassination plots, the more it wears its myriad influences on its overlong sleeves. Echoes of countless mistaken-identity and wrong-man thrillers from North by Northwest to A History of Violence to The Ghost Writer to Salt inform, if not completely subsume, Unknown’s serpentine plot. At one point, you half-expect a helpless Harris to be strapped to a dentist’s chair, waiting for Laurence Olivier to ask him if it’s safe.

Unknown has some tricks up its sleeve, but they’re tricks we’ve seen performed before, by better directors. The film’s familiar mechanics unconsciously tell us that Harris’ problem is part of a more elaborate, conspiratorial plot, so when said plot is revealed, the sense of surprise is nil. Inconceivable paranoia is the new expectation.

And Unknown takes a long, long time to complete its predictably labyrinthine narrative, stuffing itself with an obligatory love story between Harris and his taxi driver (Diane Kruger), a Bosnian refugee working illegally in Germany. The film’s 113 minutes begin to feel like a never-ending epic, what with all the false climaxes written into the film’s supposedly thrill-a-minute final act. And, as is often the case with films of this type, the dot-connected conclusion is never as exciting as the existential premise.

But the movie’s biggest disappointment is that it could have been a politically aware, big-business-attacking thriller along the lines of Michael Clayton, already one of the film’s many points of reference. Some of the drama of Unknown involves an Arabian prince targeted by extremists for his “progressive” energy policies and a scientist who is developing a groundbreaking strain of corn that will render avaricious agribusinesses obsolete.

To say that such information is delivered in passing is an overstatement. It’s barely there at all, and it should have formed the movie’s intellectual backbone. Instead, the film’s creative team has crafted a benignly apolitical thriller that decides, in its final few minutes, to be About Something.

UNKNOWN. Director: Jaume Collet-Serra; Cast: Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, January Jones, Aidan Quinn, Bruno Ganz, Frank Langella; Distributor: Warner Bros.; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Friday, most area theaters

Santa Sangre (MPI)

Release date: Jan. 25

Standard list price: $21.99

So Santa Sangre, one of cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s most controversial films, is finally released on a beautiful Region 1 DVD, ensuring all of the red paint spilling forth from the body orifices will look as vivid as it should.

Jodorowsky has an intensely devoted following of adventurous aficionados of horror and experimental cinema – a cult that never included me. Reviewing El Topo – the director’s influential 1970 “hippie Western,” to quote J. Hoberman – at the time of its Anchor Bay DVD release a few years back, I rather decimated it: “A curious and pretentious bit of nostalgia that strains for relevance or even basic entertainment … He gave us a movie so of its time — filled with bare breasts and penises, scandalous scenes of guys kissing guys and gals kissing gals, rape, old-time religion, flagellation and self-immolation as a mirror to Vietnam — that the ostentatious importance he attaches to his spelled-out surrealism comes off today as a dated counterculture goulash long hyped as art by a blank generation desperate for something different.”

Santa Sangre is another beast entirely. After nearly a decade of inactivity in the movie business, the 1989 psychological slasher found the director embracing the Grand Guignol poetry he excelled at, only this time with an extra helping of Gothic expressionism. Best of all, the film is, for the most part, absent the leaden religious symbology that weighed down his 1970s antiestablishment jumbles.

Flashing backward and forward in time, the story centers on Fenix (Jodorowsky’s son Alex), a young boy who, while growing up in a Mexican circus, watches his adulterous father – the circus’s knife-thrower – dismember his mother’s arms and slit his own throat after being caught in the act with the tattooed woman. Sent to a mental institution after the traumatic experience left him in a mute and animalistic state, Fenix eventually rises as an adult, Christ-like and apparently cured (some religious symbolism remains, but it’s only peripheral to the film’s appeal).

Except he’s crazier than ever, hallucinating harrowing scenes from his childhood as well as current terrors such as a python emerging from his trousers. He spends his days shadowing his armless mother, acting as her appendages for everything from walking to eating to murdering people. Serially killing a series of women – most of whom inhabit a freak-show milieu similar to Fenix’s circus upbringing – at his mother’s bidding, Fenix believes he has no control over his hands. Only the salvation of a deaf-mute girl from his past (played by Sabrina Dennison, an actual deaf-mute) can save him.

Influenced as much by the giallo horror excess of the Italian masters (Cluadio Argento, brother of Suspiria’s Dario, co-wrote the screenplay) and Roger Corman’s exceptional Edgar Allen Poe adaptations, Santa Sangre does not appear to be “about” anything other than the masterfully directed horror-camp we see on screen, and it’s all the better because of it.

Still, no praise of Jodorowsky’s directorial intensity or visual poetry can be offered without acknowledging the head-shaking silliness of his English-dubbed dialogue. None of Jodorowsky’s movies has the screenwriting chops to match his visual ambition, a flaw his supporters never seem to concede.

Because Jodorowsky is such an eccentric character, and the stories behind his films are so unorthodox, the extra features on his discs are more worth your time than most studio-packaged supplemental fluff. MPI’s two-disc Santa Sangre release is a generous package, anchored by the feature-length, seven-part documentary Forget Everything You Have Ever Seen: The World of Santa Sangre, featuring all-new interviews with cast and crew. Even better is a 1990 documentary show from the United Kingdom titled For One Week Only: Alejandro Jodorowsky, in which a straight-forward, non-reverential film journalist exposes some of Jodorowsky’s flaws to his face.

These documentaries reveal fascinating trivia about the director: Santa Sangre’s circus plotline is in part inspired by his own experience growing up in a circus; he liked to dress entirely in purple; as an aspiring artist, he studied mime under Marcel Marceau; and in his 10-year absence from moviemaking, he became one of Paris’ foremost masters in the mystical art of tarot reading.

Jodorowsky is also refreshingly blunt and non-hypocritical. “I don’t care what the public thinks!” he exclaims about his controversial films, a clarion call to artists everywhere but a philosophy rarely adhered to in the movie-making establishment. And when the British reporter probes him about the misogynistic nature of his movies, where the male characters are always more three-dimensional than the females, he responds by saying, “That’s because I hated women!” Needless to say, Alejandro Jodorowsky could never expect to succeed in politics.

Broadcast News (Criterion)

SLP: $19.49

Release date: Jan. 25

Word has it Aaron Sorkin is working on a new series set in the backstage world of a prime-time cable news show (with Keith Olbermann rumored to be a contributor). If he’s looking for drama, romance, humor and social commentary in a television news setting, Sorkin couldn’t find a better blueprint than this 1987 classic from James L. Brooks, reissued in a scrumptious double-disc set from Criterion. Set long before the encroaching obsolescence of the network news telecast, Brooks’ behind-the-scenes love triangle doesn’t feel at all dated, having the prescience to predict the dominance of infotainment over hard news years before the development of the Fox News Channel. Brooks’ script is witty and elegant, and the casting – Holly Hunter as a feisty but damaged news producer, Albert Brooks as a passionate but meek reporter, and William Hurt as a vapid but telegenic anchor-hunk – have become indelible landmarks of a an era and a culture. The bonus disc includes a documentary about Brooks’ career, an alternate ending, deleted scenes and an interview with a CBS news producer who inspired Hunter’s character.

The Prowler (VCI)

SLP: $14.99

Release date: Feb. 1

For years, this 1951 kitchen-sink noir, written by blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and directed by art-house favorite Joseph Losey, has become something of a “lost classic” thanks its out-of-circulation status. The character of a prowler, snooping outside the home of dishy housewife Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes) is essentially a red herring: We never discover the so-called prowler’s identity, but his presence incites the appearance of Webb Garwood, a smitten cop (Van Heflin). Webb returns to the house again and again to seduce Susan, whom we learn is slaving through a loveless marriage to a local disc jockey. Webb hatches a plot to make Susan’s husband go away, but the plan falls apart, as noir plots are wont to do. The Prowler is a very good noir, if elevated erroneously to the level of suppressed masterpiece by circumstances outside of its control.

WUSA (Olive Films)

SLP: $22.49

Release date: Feb. 8

WUSA has, for years, been one of a small handful of Paul Newman pictures not released on DVD; in fact, it’s never even been released on any home video format until now. It’s easy to see why. Though stocked with an all-star cast – Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anthony Perkins, Laurence Harvey and Cloris Leachman – and directed by Cool Hand Luke’s Stuart Rosenberg, WUSA is dreadfully dull. Its pacing is like watching concrete form. Basing the movie on Robert Stone’s novel Hall of Mirrors, Rosenberg offers up a dreary, somnambulistic depiction of America – and New Orleans, in particular -- as a decaying corpse of titty bars, run-down five-and-dimes and ghettos of abject penury. In this squalid 1970 milieu, failed musician Rheinhardt (Newman) lands a job on a homegrown, right-wing hate-talk station espousing hard-hat values to Richard Nixon’s silent majority. What sounds like a prophetic study of a proto-Glenn Beck is anything but, particularly because Stone (as screenwriter) and Rosenberg choose to ignore any on-screen depiction of Rheinhardt’s on-air talent; we’re supposed to assume that he’s whipping up the unwashed masses into a psychotic frenzy, while we waste time watching him develop a sluggish relationship with Woodward’s abused trollop. Curiously, Newman once said this is the most important picture he ever made, but compared with a film as compelling and decade-defining as Nashville or The Parallax View, WUSA has not an iota to say about the times we lived in. Olive Films’ transfer is fine, but the sound on this disc is abysmally bad; the roar of ambient noise is deafening, while intimate conversations are inaudible.