By Jim Ridley, Donna Bowman, and Noel Murray

Man, have I missed the Sarratt Cinema. Back when I was a college freshman, Vanderbilt’s student theater constituted an education in itself: Its mix of art movies, revival programming, and midnight movies killed my grades but changed my life. But that was before video came along. Now students confine their movie curiosity to Blockbuster, and college cinemas show megaplex hand-me-downs in order to survive.

Sarratt seemed doomed to follow the trend, as its spring semester showed. However, Nashville’s moviegoing landscape has changed a lot in a few months. The closing of the Watkins Belcourt, Sarratt’s main non-video competitor, may have left the city poorer for movies, but it has given Sarratt a shot at a niche that Regal’s feast-or-famine Green Hills 16 hasn’t rushed to fill.

In addition, the theater itself has changed. As part of the Sarratt Student Center’s ongoing $11 million renovation, the cinema now has improved sound, fewer seats, and a stage more accommodating to live performances.

Now, after this summer’s remodeling, Sarratt reopens with its most promising calendar of movies in several semesters. Granted, you won’t find extreme arthouse items like I Stand Alone, Mother and Son, The Saragossa Manuscript, or the reissued Grand Illusion—the sort of movies Sarratt and the Nashville Film Society showed every week 10 years ago. More of these would be great, if indeed anybody on the Vanderbilt campus gives a damn about them.

Credit Sarratt, though, with making an effort to show at least one foreign, independent, or documentary film each week. And one innovation this semester may relieve some headaches: valet parking for specific features—a sign that Sarratt wants to build an off-campus audience for these movies.

The calendar kicks off Thursday through Sunday with one of the year’s best American movies, the high-school satire Election. After that, you have Marilyn Monroe double features, Steve Martin and Rocky Horror at midnight, and these must-see items:

The Dreamlife of Angels (Sept. 9-12) In the roles that won them a joint Best Actress prize at Cannes last year, Elodie Bouchez plays a young, withdrawn drifter in the industrial city of Lille who’s given shelter by outgoing free spirit Natacha Regnier. When one of the girls falls for an abusive, amoral club owner, their friendship takes an unexpected reversal, recorded by director Erich Zonca in gripping naturalistic style. If you missed this award-winning French drama last June in its week-long stay at the Green Hills 16, we can’t put this any plainer: Don’t miss it now.

A Letter Without Words (Oct. 19) Ella Arnhold Lewenz, a member of a prominent Jewish family in prewar Germany, led a secret life—as an amateur filmmaker who chronicled vacations, daily life, and friends (including Albert Einstein and Brigitte Heim) in the 1920s and ’30s even after Goebbels’ ban on home movies. More than 40 years after her grandmother’s death, Lisa Lewenz returned to the places Ella Lewenz filmed for this one-of-a-kind documentary. Lewenz will appear at the screening as part of Vanderbilt’s Holocaust Lecture Series, which is also sponsoring James Moll’s Oscar-winning Holocaust documentary The Last Days (Oct. 25-26) with producer June Beallor in attendance.

Autumn Tale (Nov. 2-3) A movie we’ve received several calls about. In this warm romantic French drama from director Eric Rohmer (Chloe in the Afternoon), winegrower Béatrice Romand grows lonely after her children leave home, prompting her best friend (Marie Riviere) and her son’s girlfriend (Alexia Portal) to use a little deception to find her a lover.

The Last Cigarette (Nov. 16-17) In his new documentary, Kevin Rafferty does for the tobacco industry what he did for the Atom Age in his classic The Atomic Cafe. Here Rafferty and Frank Kerauden sift through decades of vintage cigarette ads and commercials to chart the brainwashing—and lung-blackening—of America.

After Life (Nov. 30-Dec. 1) If you can’t see but one movie on the fall schedule, this is the one you should choose. The brilliant premise of Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film: On their way to the hereafter, the newly deceased are detained for a week. Instead of purgatory, however, their waiting place is a movie studio—where each person gets to select and stage one memory from his life to keep forever.

Schedules are available at the Sarratt main desk, or call the theater hotline at 343-6666. Congratulate Sarratt Film Committee co-chairs Carina Kak and Drew Shirley—and use your ticket money to encourage them to go even further next semester.

—Jim Ridley

Grecian formula

Every couple of years, when Albert Brooks releases a new project, profiles appear in magazines and newspapers dubbing him “the comedian’s comedian.” Revered among his peers for his cerebral humor, inventiveness, and commitment to personal projects, Brooks counts the entertainment elite as his biggest fans. He’s often compared to Woody Allen not only for his neurotic, self-deprecating style, but also for the relative freedom that his standing in the industry affords him.

But as Woody found out during his Bergman-fetish, Stardust Memories years, the laurel wreaths flung by the cognoscenti can become shackles. Being crowned master of your genre often means that people get miffed if you strike out in new directions. Even a subtle shift of theme—from the frustrated lover to the husband facing career crisis, for example—meets with frowns. “It’s not as funny as Modern Romance,” Brooks’ fans mutter as they leave his new film The Muse. And the critics among them write reviews full of heartfelt disappointment that their favorite comedian has “lost his edge.”

To be fair, few critics are likely to be irony-impaired enough to use that phrase. After all, The Muse is about a Hollywood screenwriter whose standard-issue scripts are suddenly getting rejected by studio suits who repeat the meaningless “lost edge” platitude ad infinitum. Brooks’ character, Steven Phillips, doesn’t have the slightest idea where to look for edge, since he’s unaware of ever having possessed it, much less having misplaced it. It’s a situation that Brooks himself might have experienced after his last film, Mother, was met with sighs and sad head-shaking from the press.

In the case of The Muse, the negative reaction concerns the way Brooks develops the movie’s can’t-miss satirical premise: Steven is introduced to a muse, one of the nine daughters of Zeus, whose job is to inspire creative artists. He’s ecstatic when Sarah (Sharon Stone) agrees to take him on as a client, but he quickly chafes under her capricious and expensive demands. Stripped of its mythological overtones, the premise is that creativity is a fickle mistress to be placated in the desperate hope that she will bestow her mysterious gifts. And if that’s all there were to The Muse, the critics would be right to carp that Brooks doesn’t take this idea as far as he should.

Their error is not recognizing that Brooks has several other themes on his mind. For example, there’s a fascinating ribbon of jokes running through the film about ideas as currency in the entertainment culture; everyone from writers to executives has a million-dollar idea and is paranoid about having it “stolen.” Steven himself sees ideas strictly in dollar-sign terms. The Oscar he craves doesn’t signify integrity or genius, just success and marketability. He doesn’t employ his muse to make great art; he wants a big summer comedy hit.

When Steven’s wife Laura (Andie MacDowell) takes the muse’s advice and starts her own cookie company, Steven is apoplectic. The reasons he gives for his anger have to do with needing the muse for his own work; the unspoken reasons have to do with jealousy. But there’s a further level of subtext. Steven writes because it’s the one skill he has to support his family. The suggestion that his wife might become a creative success out of passion rather than mercenary need, supplanting him and proving his talent petty, fills him with fear.

The Muse, while consistently funny, doesn’t register as many belly laughs as the work that made Brooks famous. But Brooks is developing new characters to express himself, and if jokes are sacrificed for deeper reflection on family, work, and self-image, audiences are the richer for it. Those arriving without labels and preconceptions pinned on the filmmaker won’t make the critics’ mistake. They’ll see a film rather than a bid for more worthless laurels.

—Donna Bowman

Married to the Blob

Johnny Depp is the astronaut and Charlize Theron is The Astronaut’s Wife in a spiritless sci-fi horror exercise from first-time director Rand Ravich. After Depp is involved in an accident in space, Theron begins to suspect that he has been inhabited by an extraterrestrial intelligence, and that the babies in her womb may be the vanguard of an invasion. Apparently, the creatures are beaming themselves to earth in a radio transmission (although they can be seen by the naked eye), they require two bodies to communicate their dastardly plans (although one of them dies in the first reel), and they’re building a computer in a fighter plane to beam more of themselves down (although they needed no such computer for the first trip).

So Ravich’s script is a mess. The real hero of the film is cinematographer Allen Daviau, who lights normal spaces like hospitals or schools as though they were futuristic space labs, heightening the feeling of the alien in the everyday. Unfortunately, Ravich takes this minor design element and expands it over the entire blueprint, making everything muted and spare. He even directs the actors this way, convincing two of our most expressive performers to play it stiff so that they won’t clash with the decor.

Notwithstanding Depp’s fumbling approach to action roles (remember Nick of Time?) or the fact that Theron has already played this part once (remember The Devil’s Advocate?), The Astronaut’s Wife mainly suffers from a lack of vision. A smart filmmaker (as opposed to Ravich, whose hottest prior credit is as screenwriter for Candyman 2) might’ve used the “bodily possession” angle to have some fun with the communication problems of young married couples, or to comment on bullying husbands. Instead, Ravich just wants to creep us out. What he doesn’t realize is that if our minds aren’t engaged, our stomachs won’t tighten.

—Noel Murray

So Ravich’s script is a mess. The real hero of the film is cinematographer Allen Daviau, who lights normal spaces like hospitals or schools as though they were futuristic space labs, heightening the feeling of the alien in the everyday. Unfortunately, Ravich takes this minor design element and expands it over the entire blueprint, making everything muted and spare. He even directs the actors this way, convincing two of our most expressive performers to play it stiff so that they won’t clash with the decor.

Notwithstanding Depp’s fumbling approach to action roles (remember Nick of Time?) or the fact that Theron has already played this part once (remember The Devil’s Advocate?), The Astronaut’s Wife mainly suffers from a lack of vision. A smart filmmaker (as opposed to Ravich, whose hottest prior credit is as screenwriter for Candyman 2) might’ve used the “bodily possession” angle to have some fun with the communication problems of young married couples, or to comment on bullying husbands. Instead, Ravich just wants to creep us out. What he doesn’t realize is that if our minds aren’t engaged, our stomachs won’t tighten.

—Noel Murray