Alaska Employment Law

Surfwise:  This is a true story, a documentary, just out on DVD. A young doctor, Dorian Paskowitz, with a successful medical practice in the late 1950s decides his life is missing something.  He quits his practice, travels the world, finds a woman and marries her, returns to America, and becomes a very odd drop-out, living and traveling in a 24-foot RV for several decades.  He fathers 9 children in that RV, 8 boys and a girl. The family – all 11 of them – live in the RV, spend nearly all of their time off the grid, roaming, disdaining money, eating healthy and … surfing. They become phenomenal surfers, they set up surfing schools, and the Paskowitz name becomes legendary in surfing circles. The children, who are smart, receive no schooling.

And gradually a film about a crunchy granola existence, with beach music, sun, and tanned slim children, becomes a film about a despot and the children who become disillusioned, and then angry, the oblivious mother, the family that falls apart. Dorian Paskowitz, age 84, is still eating healthy today. His is a very odd story about a man who solved his problems by creating and then imposing his will upon a world of his very own.

The Visitor: Like the real Dorian Paskowitz, the fictional Walter Vale, played by Richard Jenkins in this outstanding film, is an unhappy man when we meet him. Bored with teaching at a small, stultifying Connecticut college, Professor Vale is a middle-aged widower trying vainly to maintain some link with his late wife, a concert pianist, by taking, and hating, piano lessons. He drinks too much wine. He’s depressed, unmotivated, unsatisfied. Then, circumstances take him to New York City to present a paper for a colleague who is unable to do so herself. When he arrives at his small, seldom visited apartment there, he finds it occupied – the management company has “rented” it to Tarek, a Syrian drummer (Haaz Sleiman), and Zainab, his girlfriend from Senegal (Danai Gurira). It’s late at night, it’s cold, and though they volunteer to go, he lets them stay. In the days that follow, a slow transformation occurs; Tarek teaches Walter how to drum, in scenes that are as hilarious – Walter, to be sure, is a shy, arrhythmic bald man, and Tarek is a kind, energetic, youthful performer – as they are touching. Alas, Tarek is illegally in the United States, and when he is caught, allegedly for fare jumping, he vanishes into a bleak detention center, headed for deportation. Tarek’s mother Mouna (Hiam Abbass) arrives from Michigan to help, and Walter does what he can to free Tarek. It is not an easy task. In the end, and at the end, Walter has his own drum, and he drums it furiously. Rent or buy this film, see it in a theatre. Go. (The Visitor is from writer/director Tim McCarthy, whose other work includes The Station Agent.)

Tell No One: Based on a thriller by Harlen Coben, Tell No One actually works better as a French film (even with subtitles) than it does as an American novel – and it’s a pretty darn good novel. It’s a tremendously complicated, fast moving story, but it never seems false, and after a while I just waited patiently for things to become clear to me.  Our hero is Alex Beck (François Cluzet), a pediatrician in Paris, madly in love with his wife and childhood sweetheart, Margot (Marie-Josée Croze).  While swimming with her husband, Margot vanishes under mysterious circumstances.  Her mutilated body is soon found and identified.  Flash forward eight years to the time in which most of the film’s events transpire, when Alex, still grieving the loss of his wife, is interrogated by police following the discovery of two bodies buried near the crime scene.  With the bodies is a key that opens a safe deposit box – the contents of which, the police believe, implicate Alex in his wife’s murder.  Then things really get strange.  Alex begins to receive anonymous e-mail messages with webcam videos of a woman who looks astonishingly like Margot, along with the words:  “Tell no one.  They’re watching.”  Alex concludes that Margot is alive.  Suffice to say that Alex is forced to go underground to save his skin, where he encounters some of the most impressive killers and gangsters I have seen in film in quite some time.  There is a dynamite chase scene, too.  Kristin Scott Thomas is terrific as Hélène, Alex’s confidante and the lover of Alex’s younger sister.  Alex’s defense lawyer, played by Nathalie Baye, is also a formidable character.  I would love to see Tell No One a second time; it’s that sweet and stylish.  Highly recommended!