Tilda Swinton doesn’t have a co-writing credit on Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control (which triumphed over dismissive reviews to top the speciality box office over the weekend), but maybe she should. According to an interview with the actress in Movieline, Jarmusch cribbed one of the film’s most memorable (and self-reflexive) monologues, in which Swinton muses that “Movies are like dreams you’re never really sure you’ve had; sometimes my favorite films are the ones where people sit there and don’t say anything,” from a State of Cinema speech Swinton gave at the San Francisco Film Festival in 2006. That speech, which was structured as a letter to Swinton’s young son, after he wondered “what people’s dreams were like before the cinema was invented”, is online at SF360.

It’s hard to know how to go about using words to do justice to Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, a film seemingly designed to reveal the folly of associating language with meaning, so concerned it is with the rhythm and atmosphere of code over courting traditional satisfaction by suggesting conceivable systems for breaking it. In talking about a picture in which everything is surface (or else nothing is), and the relationship between all signs and their meanings are scrambled (or none are), is everything a spoiler? (Or, perhaps nothing is?)

It’s possible that you’re frustrated already, and you wouldn’t be the only one; Jarmusch’s film is the first to be released this calendar year to truly polarize critics to the point where some of my colleagues have suggested that it’s one of the filmmaker’s worst efforts, while others champion it as one of his best. As such, it seems necessary to be more transparently subjective than usual: I like it. The Limits of Control seems to work best for those who can roll with the fact that Jarmusch is trafficking in vague genre promises that he only barely cashes in on, and that the story’s perceived mystery is a MacGuffin to pave the way for a rumination on creative idealism as a code that crosses transnational lines, bridging gaps of language and ethnic difference to unite dreamers/travelers (signified here as one and the same) in a common fight against those who seek to destroy their philosophy in the name of global capitalist homogeneity.

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All comparisons between Dick Cheney and Darth Vader were rendered moot recently when George Lucas told Maureen Dowd, of The New York Times, “George Bush is Darth Vader. Cheney is the emperor.” In response to that clarification, David Edelstein wrote a piece in this week’s New York magazine in which he attempts to find another movie villain who Cheney resembles even more than any character in Star Wars. Ultimately, though, he settles on the former vice president being something of a villainous mutt: “Cheney is Palpatine with a soupçon of Sauron, a pinch of Voldemort, a dash of Mabuse, a jigger of Fu, with some Elmer Fudd and Richard Nixon folded in.”

That’s an interesting conclusion, but do we really need to soil our memories of these cinematic evildoers by likening Cheney to them, and worse, vice versa? It’s bad enough the guy has shown up in a lot of contemporary movies, both officially (W.) and unofficially. In Jim Jarmusch’s new film, The Limits of Control, which opens this week, a certain character is an obvious, albeit somewhat veiled, stand-in for Cheney. And at least seven other recent films similarly feature a character who is a dead-ringer for the old VP. We count them down, in order of most intentionally Cheney-like, below.
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The Tribeca Film Festival has often shown a predilection for a certain type of New York feature and filmmaker — see this year’s Woody Allen-directed opener, or last year’s opening night film Baby Mama, or the many virtually interchangeable Ed Burns pictures that have played the festival in previous years –– all reflecting a version of the city so plasticine that their use of actual locations seems to offer no more authenticity than a Hollywood soundstage.  But within 2009’s pared-down, recession-conscious lineup, a number of titles call back to a very different, dirtier aspect of the hometown’s filmmaking legacy, one which seems all the more ripe for a revisit in this climate of financial pain and industrial upheaval. Bette Gordon’s 1984 postfeminist noir Variety is the centerpiece of this unofficial strain, and it finds cousins in at least three program mates: Gordon’s latest feature Handsome Harry (starring Steve Buscemi), as well as the documentaries Blank City (in which both Gordon and Buscemi appear, discussing the downtown filmmaking scene of the late 70s-early 80s) and Burning Down the House: The Story of CBGB.

If Celine Danhier’s Blank City plays as an anthropological study of the interconnected community of downtown artists shooting transgressive provocations for no budget on low-gauge media, Variety is the prototype of a product of that community; co-written by Kathy Acker, featuring appearances from Nan Goldin, a young Luis Guzman and Spalding Gray, produced by Gray’s girlfriend Renee Shafransky, co-lensed by Tom DiCillio and scored by John Lurie. The two latter names would shortly move on the Stranger Than Paradise.

Sandy McLeod stars as Christine, a wannabe journalist who takes a job selling tickets at a Times Square porno house to pay the bills. She soon finds herself caught in an economic, moral and generational limbo, surrounded by women who are driven, by some combination of liberated curiosity and economic panic, to explore the sex industry, and yet find themselves in beyond-traditional, passive-aggressive relationships with their boyfriends. Increasingly fascinated with the tension between watching and being watched, Christine begins tailing a regular visitor to the theater, ultimately playing with the option of choosing her own sexual objectification. All of it unfolds in grainy 16mm against the backdrop of a pre-gentrified Manhattan where, as John Waters puts it in Blank City, “just walking home was like going to war.”

Speaking over the phone last week, Gordon described the means and tools of production that made Variety possible, considers why the film had an impact then and why its assessment of the choppy waters of female sexual empowerment is perhaps even more relevant now, and explains why she doesn’t want to be a “woman filmmaker.” A restored print of Variety screens on Wednesday at 5pm at SVA on 23rd Street; it’s also available on DVD.

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Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to the much-acclaimed Old Joy, stars Michelle Williams as Wendy, a young woman traveling across the continent in search of a canning job in Alaska. Wendy has little to her name but a car, some pocket money and Lucy, her dog. When problems arise with one pole on that trinity, the others follow, as Reichardt takes us through an intimate procedural examination of how quickly a life can unravel when balanced on a precipice.

With Wendy and Lucy opening in New York tomorrow, I sat down with Riechardt to discuss Michelle Williams’ desire for invisibility, smashing the indie film glass cieling, and the “ever-evolving American Dream.”

Karina: I saw the movie in Cannes, and obviously every month it seems like a movie about economic despair is becoming more and more relevant.

Kelly: Give it a week.

Karina: [laughs] When you think about some of these economic problems, so many of them seem to stem from people being in denial, and just sort of a general unwillingness to talk about the how the way that we live has consequences.

Kelly: Yeah. The consequences are like the guy who got trampled at the Wal-Mart.

Karina: Yeah. So when you think about getting the film out there, what audience are you hoping it will speak to?

Kelly: I don’t really have a plan for the audience, just questions. Like, are we related and do we owe each other anything? Are we supposed to take care of each other to any degree?

And we know we’re connected. Because I didn’t run up my credit card, and now my 401K is disappearing. So, we’re clearly connected. I guess, it’s just that question of are strangers… Are we supposed to do anything for each other, or is it each man for himself? What is the American Dream?

Karina: Do you think that the American Dream is something that even exists anymore? This idea of being able to go West, and if you work hard enough you’ll be fine?

Kelly: I think it’s an ever-evolving thing. I once heard a show about this guy who coined the phrase “The American Dream.” Do you know who he is?

Karina: No. I’ll look him up. [Ed: it's this guy]

Kelly: Yeah. I need to look him up. Because I believe that what it was all about was that it was like a frontier kind of idea. And the American Dream at that time was, let’s say it was a really harsh winter, but my crop survived. Your crop died, but my crop is enough to feed both of us. That was the American Dream.

But, that guy never foresaw class. Like he didn’t imagine that there would be class divides in this country. He didn’t anticipate that there would be such a vast divide.

I guess that the idea of the American Dream is an evolving thing, or devolving thing. Has it really just come to my TV is bigger than your TV? What is it? What do we want this country to be - the great experiment? What’s it supposed to be? We just lived through such incredibly dark days. And even though the economy’s crashing now, there is like at least there’s hope. We’re living in the days of hope. [laughs]

Karina: Just because of Obama?

Kelly: I think, he is redefining - he talks about us being connected. He doesn’t talk about poverty a lot, I’ll admit that. But, just to change the conversation from something other than, “Go out and shop.” Or to give the impression that opportunity is just at everybody’s feet and all you have to do is bend down and lift it up. You know, it’s not the same for someone who grows up with an education to someone who doesn’t. At least he’s more aware of that. To not have a total elitist asshole running the country, I think will be somewhat better.

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This is the first in what will be a series of posts examining the artistic life cycles of Oscar winners who failed to find continued mainstream success after taking home the statuette. If you have suggestions for stars or filmmakers that you’d like to see profiled, let us know in the comments.

Roberto Benigni swang from general obscurity in the United States to media darling following his Academy Award for Life Is Beautiful. But what’s happened to him since? He was only the second filmmaker since Sir Laurence Olivier to direct himself in an Oscar-winning performance. That’s a long way to go for someone who had only been seen here in Blake Edwards’ terrible Son of the Pink Panther and as a sex-obsessed cabbie in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth. While we love the underdog success story, we also love the fall from grace, and we’re in search of the crater that Benigni must have left somewhere.

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