Big Days in Little Rock

Five years into the Bill Clinton presidency, many in the large cast of characters who helped him get to the White House have gone their separate ways. Some went to jail, others went to TV, still others to the obscurity of academia.

A few have written memoirs about their experiences--both political and personal--as Friends of Bill, or they’re about to write them--all with the general idea of revealing the secret to Clinton’s fabled schmooze quotient.

Some of have been overrated, Robert Reich’s “Locked in the Cabinet,” for example; some underrated, Dick Morris’ “Behind the Oval Office”; some have gone virtually unnoticed, Webb Hubbell’s “Friends in High Places.”

The book that sold best, “Primary Colors,” was not by any Friend of Bill but by Joe Klein, a journalist who took the name “Anonymous.” A roman a clef full of recognizable characters, it largely told the story of Clinton’s come-from-nowhere 1992 presidential campaign.

The movie of that thinly veiled novel opens March 20 with John Travolta and Emma Thompson doing their impersonations of Bill and Hillary Clinton, a frisson that even the novel didn’t have.

But if you want the colorful and factual screen version of the 1992 campaign, including a great scenario and a compelling star performance by an actual politico, “The War Room” (1993) is the film to see. It screens today, 3 p.m., at Irvine Valley College (Room B209), 5550 Irvine Center Drive. Free. (714) 451-5376.

Directed by D.A. Pennebaker and longtime collaborator Chris Hegedus (also his wife), this cinema verite documentary has the inimitable “[James] Carville playing Huck Finn to [George] Stephanopoulos’ Tom Sawyer,” wrote Times film critic Kenneth Turan.

“With his impish death’s head grin and the personality of a sardonic Ichabod Crane,” he noted about Carville, “Bill Clinton’s preeminent campaign strategist is a natural actor, and ‘The War Room’ gives him the starring role he thoroughly deserves.”

The 96-minute documentary, culled from 50 hours of footage, got its most telling material, Turan noted, “by the time-honored fashion of simply hanging out” until the participants forgot the camera was there.

The so-called war room was a large space in an old newspaper building in Little Rock, Ark., where workaholic campaign volunteers pulled duty in the trenches amid an “aura of ragged camaraderie,” sincerity and cynicism.

Turan’s verdict? “A candid and entertaining backstage look at a most unlikely electoral juggernaut.”

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Also screening in Orange County:

* “I’m Gonna Get You, Sucka” (1988) 7:30 p.m. today in Argyros Forum Room 208 at Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Part of Chapman University’s Entertainment Art Forum. Free. (714) 744-7694. Directed by Keenan Ivory Wayans, “Sucka” is a parody of blaxploitation films of the 1970s, with characters named Fly Guy, Hammer, Slammer and Slade.

* Jane Campion’s “Two Friends” (1986), 7 and 9 p.m. Friday, UC Irvine Student Center, Crystal Cove Auditorium, Pereira Drive and West Peltason roads. $2.50-$4.50. (714) 824-5588. The film tells about the evolution of a friendship between of two high school girls pressured by peers and parents.

* “The Visitors” (1993), 7 p.m. Friday, Science/Math Building Room 313, Saddleback College, 28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo. Free. (714) 582-4788. It’s a French comedy about two time-traveling knights from the Middle Ages who get stuck in the 20th century.

* “Monday’s Girls” and “Becoming a Woman in Okrika,” 7:30 p.m. today, Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana. Free with museum admission: $2-$6. (714) 567-3600. Both film are part of a celebration of Black History Month.

* “The Mist” (1967), 4:30 p.m., and “Killer Butterfly” (1978), 7:30 p.m., Saturday in the continuing series of Post-Colonial Classics of Korean Cinema at the UCI Film and Video Center, Humanities Building, Room 100 (on West Peltason Road) on campus. Separate admissions: $4-$6. (714) 824-7418. Both are U.S. premieres.

“The Mist,” written by novelist Kim Sung-ok and directed by Kim Su-yong, centers on a young man who marries into the family of a powerful businessman, thus enabling him to move up the social ladder. But when he returns to his hometown--a remote coastal village--he realizes there are values in life he has yet to explore.

“Killer Butterfly,” directed by Kim Ki-Young (a B-movie auteur of the 1970s), centers on a depressed young student who wants to kill himself. But every time he tries, a ghost (in the form of a bookseller) prevents him.

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In L.A. and beyond:

The American Cinema Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization formed to promote films addressing social values and the worth of the individual, launches its Freedom Film Festival tonight at 6:30 at Paramount Studios with a premiere gala featuring Filip Bajon’s powerful and dynamic “Poland ’56.” A middle-aged man recalls the events of June 28, 1956, when at the age of 12 he and his best friend become caught up in the chaos of a failed workers’ strike.

The increasingly cataclysmic events of the day unfold with a documentary-like immediacy that recalls in its impact such Rossellini classics as “Open City” and “Germany Year Zero.” The festival runs Friday through Wednesday at the Monica 4-Plex. (310) 394-9741.

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The American Cinematheque opens its Recent Spanish Cinema series tonight at 7:15 p.m. with the Los Angeles premiere of Manuel Gomez Pereira’s sweeping romantic comedy “Love Can Seriously Damage Your Health,” which traces the tempestuous secret love affair through 30 years between a middle-class youth, Santi (Gabino Diego and Juanjo Puigcorbe), who works his way up through the air force to become a key security aide to the king of Spain, and Diana (Penelope Cruz and Ana Belen), a famous society beauty who moves from one glittery marriage to the next. She (more than he) realizes that what keeps the flame alive is the impossibility of actually ever living together. This is the kind of inspired charmer Hollywood has pretty much forgotten how to make.

Screening at 9:30 p.m. is Jose Luis Borau’s 1975 “Poachers.” Inspired by Franco’s remark that “Spain is a peaceful forest,” Borau takes us into an actual forest and, in a bleak, often savagely funny allegory, shows us that it, like Spain at the time, is anything but tranquil. Borau is scheduled to appear after the film.

Emilio Martinez-Lazaro’s 1997 “Backroads” (Friday at 9:45 p.m.) is a highly affecting depiction of a father-son relationship in which a teenager (Fernando Ramallo) moves from contempt and resentment to love and respect for his ne’er-do-well vagabond father (Antonio Resines, in a remarkable portrayal). Significantly, the year is 1974, a time when a rigid sense of class and propriety were still in full force. It will be preceded by a sneak preview of Alejandro Amenabar’s fantasy thriller “Open Your Eyes.”

Pilar Miro’s 1996 “The Dog in the Manger” (Saturday at 7:15 p.m. and March 20 at 7:15 p.m.) is a sly and sumptuous filming of the Lope de Vega classic romantic comedy, in which a gorgeous Neapolitan countess (Emma Suarez), much concerned with her status and reputation, is thrown into a tizzy when when she falls inconveniently in love with her dashing and clever secretary (Carmelo Gomez). Jose Luis Borau’s 1997 “Master Nobody,” his first film in a decade, is a complex, highly verbal philosophical comedy in which an intense professor (Rafael Alvarez) turns his life upside down when he attempts to follow the seemingly mystical message of an elderly poet (a robust and witty Jose Castillo). Borau will discuss the film following its screening. (213) 466-FILM.

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Heddy Honigmann’s “O Amor Natural,” which opens a one-week run Friday at the Grande 4-Plex, celebrates the erotic poetry of famed Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987), which was not published until after his death, apparently because he feared some might regard his work as pornographic. But as read by a cross-section of elderly Rio citizens, all of whom admired him--and clearly none of them prudes--they are truly beautiful, envisioning love and sex as one and the act of love as cosmic as it is personal. This is a sunny, lovely film, touched by the poignancy of the passing of time. But as one woman remarks of herself and her husband, “We’re old, but we’re not dead!” (213) 617-0268.

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Documentarian Yale Strom will present and discuss his irresistible and poignant “Carpati: 50 Miles, 50 Years” between 3 and 6 p.m. Sunday at Mishkon Tephilo Conservative Synagogue, 206 Main St., Venice. Strom and his cinematographer-editor and co-producer David Notowitz traveled to Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains, once the cradle of the Hasidim and home to nearly a quarter of a million Jews, whose population has dwindled to less than 1,500 because of the Holocaust and subsequent emigration.

Once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the region became part of Czechoslovakia after World War I. Jewish culture there flourished between the wars. After World War II it became part of the Soviet Union, ushering in a long period of hardship, hostility and injustice for Holocaust survivors; it’s now part of Ukraine.

In the shabby, picturesque town of Beregova in 1994, the filmmakers met Zev Godinger, then 66 and much-beloved as “Uncle Zev,” a hearty, outgoing ice cream merchant. Strom ever so gently persuades Godinger to start talking about his tragic past as an Auschwitz survivor and even to travel 50 miles to his birthplace, Vinogradov, which he had not visited in half a century. What Strom and Notowitz are doing so lovingly--and so entrancingly--is to record remnants of a culture on the brink of extinction. A rich part of those remnants is the Jewish music preserved by local Gypsies. Strom makes audiences understand that Gypsies were also sent to Auschwitz and today survive in often severe poverty, and he celebrates their own music as well. (310) 392-3029.

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The UCLA Film Archive’s major Shohei Imamura retrospective continues this weekend in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater. Screening tonight at 7 is Imamura’s “Pigs and Battleships” (1961), followed by “Intentions of Murder” (1964).