Vahina Giocante in The Bare-Breasted Blonde (2010)

Nicole Kidman and others in Fur (2006) in 1080hd

Fur is, as noted in its subtitle, an imaginary portrait of a real photographer, Diane Arbus, a woman who made a rather sudden transition from a repressed 1950s housewife to a daring photographer of the fringes of society, as well as a participant in those fringes. When she was about 35, she separated from Allan Arbus, a successful commercial photographer who later became an actor (he was the Sydney the psychiatrist on the TV version of M*A*S*H), and started her own career. In her twelve years as a solo act she managed to test the outside of the envelope of alternative 1960s lifestyles in New York City, all the time chronicling with her lens the people she met along the way. She photographed visions of bourgeois ennui, but she specialized in the downtrodden, marginalized people of society.

In Arbus's own words, "Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don't quite mean they're my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats."

Her work became popular enough to warrant one-woman shows in the important New York museums and galleries, and to inspire a collection of articles by Susan Sontag, On Photography, in which the formidable essayist tried to expressed why she was simultaneously fascinated with and repulsed by Arbus's work.

In 1971, at age 48, Diane (DEE-ann) swallowed a vast quantity of barbiturates and cut her wrists, thus assuring that she would die from one or the other, and elevating her to the pantheon of rebellious, romantic, troubled, unconventional 1960s artists who would die from suicide or O.D.: Joplin, Hendrix, Sylvia Plath, Jim Morrison, etc.

The movie Fur pays essentially no attention to Arbus's career as a photographer. In fact, if you do not already know about her work and its themes, you will leave the theater no more enlightened, other than to realize that she was interested in freaks. The film never really shows the part of her life when her career had blossomed, nor does it not explain how she developed her technical or artistic skills. (It wasn't from her experience in fashion photography with her husband. When she decided what she wanted to do, she studied the art of photography under a master.) What the film does do is to ask a theoretical question, "What set of circumstances could have transformed a Good Housekeeping housewife of 1957 into a kinky fetishist in 1967?" It imagines those circumstances as follows: Arbus meets Lionel, a sideshow freak with a condition that makes him appear to be Michael Landon in that Teenage Werewolf movie. (This is a completely fictional character.) She is immediately fascinated by him, then attracted to him. Through her Beauty and the Beast affair with the human werewolf, she meets the people who used to be his colleagues on the sideshow circuit, and is transformed by her fascination with their world, and is astounded to find out how essentially normal and mundane it is beneath the sensational exterior. She begins to ponder the nature of normality itself.

Fur was directed by Steven Shainberg, who also directed the kinky Secretary. He seems to have a bit of the Arbus spirit in his own soul. Shainberg does an excellent job at capturing the tension inherent in Arbus's point of view, as she takes her first tentative steps from the mainstream into an underculture which both excites and terrifies her.

The presence of Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey provides some real heft to this project, but the film still ultimately fails - for two reasons:

First, Downey's wolfman make-up is inadvertently hilarious when it should convey dark mystery and an ominous sense that the forbidden and outré are nearer than they seem. The film works perfectly when Downey is covered by grotesque masks, but falls apart when the teenage werewolf faces the camera squarely and makes us giggle.

Second, the film drags on and on as we wait for Diane's transformation and then fails to show us the results after the great awakening finally arrives. It feels as if the Ben Hogan story ended with the car accident and a question about whether he could ever come back. In fact, the film never shows any examples of the art which Diane would develop after her cultural epiphany. Fur is Diane Arbus without the photographs, just as a recent Paltrow movie was Sylvia Plath without the poems.

It might be a better movie if it had committed to being 100% fictional or 100% biographical. With a better make-up job on the Beast, the movie could stand by itself with no anchor to Diane Arbus as the Beauty, since the story treats the biographical details as mere background elements in the dream-tale of how the Arbus metamorphosis might theoretically have happened. As it stands, Fur is an earnest and slick art film with only cult appeal. Most people are reluctant to watch a pretentious real biography of a tortured artist, let alone a make-believe version of same.

Tara Fitzgerald in I Capture the Castle (2003) in 720p

I mentioned at one time that Love Actually was not just a Hugh Grant movie, but was all Hugh Grant movies rolled into one. By the same token, I Capture the Castle is not just a film of a juvenile romance novel, but a film of all juvenile romance novels. I mean the lobby poster for this sucker should feature Fabio shirtless in front of a castle.   

The story is told by an 18-year-old girl through her diary, starting with the time when her brilliant author of a father moved the family into a picturesque old English castle in the 1920s. Except for one sister, each of the members of the family is brilliant, and each matches his or her genius with eccentricity. The one sister who is not a genius is beautiful beyond imagining (played by Rose Byrne, who fails to get naked)

The father is not writing. The stepmother is not selling her paintings. Since they are eccentric types, not the kind who work as shop clerks, and since they live out in the countryside where there is no meaningful employment anyway, they live a life of genteel poverty, or at least as genteel as is possible without any money in a 600-year-old castle.

As it turns out, they are only renting the castle, and they are about to be evicted in the 1930s when a turn of fate takes control of their landlord's estate from some impersonal bankers to a family of very rich Americans who come to England to check out their newly inherited English assets. The principal new landlords are two very handsome and single young men, who take one look at the poor girls (the diary writer and her too-beautiful-for-words sister), and decide that eviction is not in their immediate future.

Oh, yeah. Did I mention that the gardener for the castle is the greatest, most humble man in the world, has worked for the family without wages for the past seven years, and is so good looking that he makes Brad Pitt look like Marty Feldman? (It's played by future Superman Henry Cavill.)

From that point on, you can guess how it develops. Three pleasant and handsome young men, two eligible young women. Rich men, poor but beautiful women. Each of the five falls in love with one of the others, and of course none of them loves anyone who loves back in return. Also, stepmother and father get involved with some romantic flings of their own.

You have the ingredients there for a really sucky film, what I call a "so" film, because they are usually characterized by excessive use of the emphatic "so" and the even more emphatic "ever so", as in "I do so love horses, Uncle Nigel", or "I do so want him, ever so much".

As you can imagine, I was prepared to throw up a few times during the screening, and I had barf bags handy, but they were never necessary. In fact, it is a pretty good movie. I liked the characters. The script is witty, and even the sappiest parts felt authentic enough that I never felt a break in the dramatic illusion. It's a movie about nice people trying to do the right things. OK, it's fluff, but I just let it flow over me, and it wasn't bad at all.

Sidebar: Bill Nighy must be the most underrated actor in the business, now that Sam Rockwell is highly regarded. Nighy is kind of a rough-around-the-edges version of Peter O'Toole: kinda dotty, kinda rhetorical, able to handle eccentricity and genuine moments equally well, very comfortable with sentimental moments, and hilarious when the script calls for it.

Olivia Williams in The Postman (1997) in 1080hd

Helen Shaver in The Believers (1987) in 1080hd

otherwise known as "the one where you can see Helen Shaver's asshole"