Critic’s Notebook: The Mystery That Won’t Go Away

  Cook Allender/Lifetime TelevisionTracy Pollan, who plays Beth Holloway, with Stephen Amell in “Justice for Natalee Holloway.”

It is hard to think of another mystery in recent history that has fired the engines of cultural production quite like the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, the Alabama teenager presumed to have been killed during a senior class trip to Aruba in 2005. The case has been the subject of more than a half-dozen nonfiction books (the latest, “Portrait of a Monster: Joran van der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery,” arrives in July), episodes on both “Law & Order: SVU” and “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” uncountable hours of “Nancy Grace” on CNN and an entire subspecies of dramatic programming on Lifetime.

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The real Beth Holloway.

When the story first broke six years ago, the cable-news media received scrutiny for devoting so much time to the disappearance of one pretty, white young woman from an affluent suburb when similar attention was rarely, if ever, paid to the lost, mistreated children of the urban underclass. Lifetime broadcast a movie about the case — titled simply “Natalee Holloway” — in 2009 and set a ratings record for itself. An insidious franchise was born.

“Justice for Natalee Holloway,” to be shown on Monday, is the sequel, and after it comes “Vanished With Beth Holloway,” a new documentary series about the disappeared featuring Natalee’s mother as its host. Tragedy ages most of us, but it seems to have had the opposite effect on Beth Holloway, a special-education teacher who has been a persistent television presence since interest in her harrowing experience swelled.

Exhausted and distinctly middle aged looking when she first emerged, Ms. Holloway is now smoother skinned, sleeker and blonder, as if she had committed to being reborn as a young Deborah Norville. The makeover is the most unsettling thing about the show, because it suggests that Ms. Holloway has embraced her circumstance with a certain Canyon Ranch enthusiasm. It is doubly jarring that Tracy Pollan, who plays her in both of the Lifetime movies, doesn’t look as good as her model.

“Justice for Natalee Holloway” and the first half-hour of “Vanished” devote themselves to excavating the cruelties of Joran van der Sloot, the Dutch student among those last seen with Natalee. Now awaiting trial in the killing of a young woman in Peru, he has offered various versions of his encounter with Natalee in Aruba and then recanted them as lies. Despite Mr. van der Sloot’s untrustworthiness, Ms. Holloway keeps returning to him in hope of honest explanations.

It is not merely that she has lived the reality quietly threatening every mother that makes her a kind of signature Lifetime heroine; she also embodies a maniacal, crusading spirit that rightfully mistrusts law enforcement to get the job done.

Lifetime began as a network devoted to narratives of female suffering — at the hands of adulterous or abusive husbands and all manner of male miscreants. It has since created a fief of mini-niches, one of which lionizes women who operate beyond the bounds of the law to find kidnapped children, missing sisters and so on. In the Lifetime worldview institutions are often objects of suspicion; a psychiatric facility, for example, might commit you for no good reason (“Committed”).

Portraits of brazenness born of desperation are part of the Lifetime mission, and the network seems compelled by the notion that Ms. Holloway has defined her life by her daughter’s absence. She tirelessly pursues the truth. She ventures around the country speaking about the dangers of international travel. She has founded the Natalee Holloway Resource Center to help families of the missing. But what the films suggest, almost accidentally, is that Ms. Holloway perhaps didn’t know her daughter as well as she thought. Natalee might have been more of a rebellious, partying, risk taker — which is to say an average teenager — than her mother had realized.

In the end what is compelling and cautionary about Ms. Holloway’s story is not simply that something terrible happened but that she was too wedded to the idea of her daughter’s straight-A exceptionalism. In her view Natalee was not the kind of girl to allow a boy in a bar to use her belly button as a shot glass and then stumble off with him into the night. At a time when we are expected not only to love and care for our children meticulously but also to befriend them ardently, the prospect of self-delusion is the real

Critic’s Notebook: Casting Light on Taiwanese Cinema

 

That country was even represented at the multiplex, where “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” from the Taiwan-born Ang Lee, was becoming the highest-grossing foreign-language film in American history. (Unless you count “The Passion of the Christ.”)

But the moment didn’t linger. Mr. Yang, who died in 2007, never made another movie. Mr. Hou and Mr. Tsai remained famous all over the festival circuit, while Mr. Lee made most of his movies in the United States. A domestic box-office slowdown in Taiwan that began in the mid-1990s lasted well into the new century.

Taiwan Stories, through May 19 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, is an attempt to shine some light on this vital national cinema, which has operated in the shadow of Hong Kong, China, Japan and, more recently, South Korea and Thailand. Of the 20 movies in this series nearly half are from the 1960s and ’70s (including the martial-arts blockbuster “A Touch of Zen,” made in Taiwan by the Hong Kong-based director King Hu), while a handful represent the commercial resurgence of the domestic film industry during the last three to four years.

The biggest attraction, though, is the selection from the New Wave filmmakers, which avoids the familiar, benchmark works of Mr. Yang, Mr. Hou and Mr. Tsai in favor of earlier movies that are less known and rarely screened in America. Here you can see them working out a hybrid of kitchen-sink naturalism and moody, romantic melodrama that each would take in his own direction in years to come.

The film with the most historical interest, especially for cinephiles, will be “In Our Time” (Thursday, 1 and 6:15 p.m.), a four-director omnibus considered one of the earliest examples of the New Taiwan Cinema; it was released in 1982, around the time of the first stirrings of political reform in what had been a repressive, totalitarian state.

The second segment of that film, about a teenage girl and her interest in the college student who rents her family’s spare room, was Mr. Yang’s debut as a writer and director. It’s a period piece, like many other 1980s Taiwan films, made when commenting directly on contemporary life or politics was a dangerous business. The girl’s older sister listens to the Beatles (“Hello Goodbye”) on her transistor radio, and the presence of twangy British and American pop on the soundtrack is another New Wave trope.

“In Our Time” has some style, but it’s a long way from the Altman-like complexity and assurance of “Yi Yi.” By 1985 Mr. Hou’s fifth feature, “A Time to Live and a Time to Die” (Sunday, 4:15 p.m.), was a complete realization of the early New Wave style: the slow pace, the distant camera, the way the most dramatic or pertinent parts of the story are often conveyed indirectly, as anecdotes or passing remarks.

Mr. Hou’s story, an autobiographical tale that begins shortly after the main character’s family is cut off from the mainland in 1949 by the Chinese civil war, is suffused with the feelings of dislocation and grief, of bewildering exile, that run through Taiwanese film. Its style is sufficiently pronounced that perfectly reasonable viewers can find it profoundly moving or profoundly slow and boring, but anyone should be able to appreciate Mr. Hou’s craftsmanship: a kind of meticulous fluidity that gives a sudden close-up tracking shot of the young protagonist at the end of the movie a joyful, kinetic charge.

Mr. Tsai is represented by his first feature, the 1992 “Rebels of the Neon God” (May 17, 6:15 p.m.), a contemporary story of disaffected Taipei youth that’s rougher and more vital than his later work. (It is an obvious precursor to “Unknown Pleasures,” the breakthrough film of the Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke.)

Lacking a famous director but packing in a lot of pleasure, guilty and otherwise, is Chang Yi’s 1985 “Kuei-Mei, a Woman” (Thursday, 3:45 p.m.; Saturday, 5:45 p.m.). Stylistically it’s of a piece with the other new wave films, and it shares their mood of intense nostalgia, but it’s resolutely traditional — or Hollywood-like — in its unabashed four-handkerchief, women’s-picture plot. Among the challenges surmounted by Kuei-Mei, a spinster from the mainland pressured into a bad marriage, are a gambling and philandering husband, an ungrateful stepdaughter, an evil boss and a typhoon.

“Kuei-Mei, a Woman” is a classicist’s melodrama, a dry-eyed tear-jerker, because of its restrained direction and the impressively controlled, realistic star performance of Yang Huey-sian. When Kuei-Mei goes into labor in a gambling den while holding a kitchen knife to her husband’s throat, Ms. Yang shows an aplomb that would have done Joan Crawford proud.

Among the recent films in the series are two big box-office successes, the love story “Cape No. 7” and the gangster story “Monga,” as well as artsier fare like “The Fourth Portrait” and the Shakespeare-inspired (but not Shakespeare-worthy) trilogy “Juliets.” The Government Information Office of Taiwan, a sponsor of the series, would probably be very happy if you went to see these newer films, but the greater rewards of the series still lie in the feel-bad films of the 1980s, which feel just as bad as real life.

Taiwan Stories runs through May 19 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater; filmlinc.com.

 

Critic’s Notebook: Busy Job of Judging Video-Game Content to Be Ceded to Machines

That was then. This is now. Starting on Monday the ratings board plans to begin introducing computers to the job of deciding whether a game is appropriate for Everyone, for Teens or for Mature gamers (meaning older than 16). To do this the organization has written a program designed to replicate the ingrained cultural norms and predilections of the everyday American consumer, at least when it comes to what is appropriate for children and what isn’t.

Faced with an explosion in the number of games being released online, the board plans to announce on Monday that the main evaluation of hundreds of games each year will be based not on direct human judgment but instead on a detailed digital questionnaire meant to gauge every subtle nuance of violence, sexuality, profanity, drug use, gambling and bodily function that could possibly offend anyone.

The questionnaire, to be filled out by a game’s makers (with penalties for nondisclosure), is like a psychological inquest into the depths of all the things our culture considers potentially unwholesome.

Offensive language, for instance, is broken down into six subcategories: minor profanities, epithets, scatological vulgarities, racial obscenities, sexual vulgarisms and a final category devoted to one particular three-letter word that refers to both a beast of burden and, colloquially, to a part of human anatomy. (Interestingly, the survey does not ask about religious slurs, perhaps because those are relatively rare in popular Western culture.)

The sexuality category is fairly straightforward — basically, if there’s sex, how much of it can you actually see? — as are the sections on gambling and drugs. And surely every consumer is grateful that the portion on bodily functions makes a point to ask separately about flatulence sounds, “whimsical depictions of feces,” realistically depicted feces and the “act of human (or humanlike character) defecation visually depicted.”

This is the sort of stuff that major international corporations generally like to know about before they offer a mass-market media product for sale to the world.

As the Supreme Court prepares to release its potentially groundbreaking decision on a California law that intends to regulate the sale of video games (an announcement is expected any week now, and potentially as early as Monday), it may bear remembering that Justice Potter Stewart found it impossible to reduce obscenity to a definition, declaring, “I know it when I see it.”

And yet in this digital age it is inevitable perhaps that a group that is paid to sort creative entertainment endeavors into neat and tidy categories based on content would eventually start outsourcing its mission to computers. After all, major companies, including banks, credit-rating agencies, Amazon.com, Netflix and Google, have made it their business to reduce consumer behavior to an algorithm. For video games, the publishers’ answers to the questionnaire will determine the rating.

The rating board was founded in 1994 by the video-game industry’s main trade organization in an effort to mimic Hollywood’s popular system for rating big-studio films. Major retailers require a video game to have a board rating before they will stock it, just as major theater chains refuse to screen films that have not been rated by the Motion Picture Association of America. Perhaps even more important, the big global game console makers — Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony — won’t allow a game on their systems that has not been rated.

And yet the big growth in video games these days is on systems in which the games are not rated by age category: mobile phones and social networks like Facebook. Instead, those systems are under the exclusive control of the companies that run them, and Apple and Facebook have not developed detailed age-rating schemes of their own.

So the game-rating board is trying to come up with a system that allows it to quickly, reliably and consistently rate the thousands of games that are appearing each year on digital devices. In an interview, the board’s president, Patricia Vance, refused to comment on any negotiations with Apple, Facebook or other companies about adopting the ratings.

Last year the board rated about 1,600 games, of which up to 30 percent were only online. A few years ago there were almost no online games to review. By contrast, the motion-picture board considers around 850 movies a year. (And most video games are far longer than the average film.)

The human game classifiers who will soon be ceding work to machines don’t actually play the games. Instead they watch a DVD submitted by a game’s publisher that is supposed to include the raunchiest and most violent scenes, if any. So they have not been experiencing games as they are played.

This week the board intends to start using the new computerized system for games released online on systems controlled by Microsoft (Xbox Live), Sony (PlayStation Network) and Nintendo (Wii and DSi Shop). That’s about 650 games a year. The board says that publishers’ answers to the digital questionnaire will determine a game’s rating and that a human won’t review it until after the game is out the door.

As stated in a draft of the board’s news release, “All games rated via this new process will be tested by E.S.R.B. staff shortly after they are made publicly available to verify that disclosure was complete and accurate.”

What could possibly go wrong?

Major retail games — the ones advertised on television and stocked by Wal-Mart — will still be evaluated by real people. For now.