"The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill": Love and death in something like paradise
I finally caught up with the sleeper documentary hit of the season, Judy Irving's "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill," and came away wondering why I'm such a cynical bastard that I waited so long. Yeah, it starts out like a sweet, dozy tribute to the almost-tropical oddities of my hometown, Sarrazisco (as natives pronounce it), which include both unlikely wildlife and the unlikely human beings obsessed with it. Before long, though, it becomes other things: one of the most beautiful and endearing nature films you've ever seen, despite being filmed almost entirely within a major metropolis, and a love story that will repeatedly reduce you to tears.

Irving's movie is partly about the improbable fact that San Francisco has two different flocks of wild parrots that have completely gone native, subsisting on the local fruits and flowers and breeding new generations of a hybrid urban subspecies. (Actually, Baghdad by the Bay is not unique in this regard; several other American cities have wild parrots, including such frigid burgs as Chicago and New York.) But it's more about Mark Bittner, the onetime hippie-era musician who washed up in North Beach, the city's aging-bohemian ghetto, a quarter of a century ago and gradually became the wild parrots' principal friend and defender.

As Irving marvels in her narration, Bittner lives in a garden apartment on Telegraph Hill, a vertical wonderland overlooking North Beach, with no visible means of support. We see him doing his wash at the laundromat and enjoying a latte at Caffé Trieste, the former hangout of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. But his only job seems to be to stand on one of the hill's lushly overgrown stairways and feed his flock of squabbling, squalling cherry-headed conures, who will seem to you more like monkeys or small children by the time the movie's over.

Seriously, it's like watching Jane Goodall with her chimps, except funnier and less expected. Bittner has named almost all of the 45 or 50 parrots he personally encounters; he understands their pair-bonding, he shelters sick or dying birds in his apartment, he grieves their losses and celebrates their new arrivals. So will you, and Bittner himself will transform before your eyes from a washed-up '60s loner into a genuine urban hero (and an amateur ornithologist of some importance).

Eventually Bittner has to move out of his paradisiacal, completely free Telegraph Hill digs and say at least a temporary farewell to his feathered friends. It's a tremendously sad moment, but don't let anyone spoil where the movie goes from there, toward a perfect and astonishing ending you could never script. You have to get past the lovely surface of "Wild Parrots" to appreciate its Zen-like profundity, and the fact that it's a smash hit on the West Coast but has already disappeared in New York tells you that the profound cultural gulf between the coasts has not been closed by Starbucks and Whole Foods. I guess I'm still a crunchy Cali boy at heart; I loved this movie without reservation.

"The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill" is now playing in numerous cities, including Baltimore, Berkeley, Calif., Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., Santa Fe, N.M., and Washington. It opens soon in Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Sacramento, Calif., and many other places.

"Intimate Stories": A cake, a dog, a game show and Patagonia
I didn't find Carlos Sorin's "Intimate Stories" to be a life-changing experience or anything; it's more like a beautiful, meditative space where you remind yourself that your job, your car and your constantly beeping Blackberry don't actually matter. Hey, I'll take it. Sorin's Spanish title ("Historias mínimas") really means "small stories," but the distributors probably didn't think that sounded good in English. This is a charming, low-key entry in the burgeoning tradition of travelog indies -- by which I mean feature films that take you to some godforsaken outback you're unlikely to visit personally.

In this case it's Patagonia, the vast and impressive high desert of southern Argentina, where three characters are trying to get from the tiny town of Fitz Roy to the coastal city of San Julián (which we never really get to see). One is a borderline-hapless traveling salesman named Roberto (Javier Lombardo), who carries with him a birthday cake for the child of a young widow he is courting. But wait -- is the child a boy, as he has assumed, or a girl? Should this expensive cream-filled confection be a black-and-white soccer ball, or a two-tone green turtle?

The story of Don Justo (Antonio Benedicti), an aging grocer with a courtly demeanor, is the saddest, sweetest and most successful of the tales in Pablo Solarz's screenplay. He has heard that his long-missing dog has been seen outside the big city, but his voyage, and indeed the vanished pooch, soon assume a larger, almost mythic significance. Treated as a senile buffoon by his son and daughter-in-law, Don Justo is readying himself for a much longer journey than the one to San Julián, and the canine reconciliation he seeks seems more like the final forgiveness of sin.

Least interesting, I'd say, is the mild comic fable of María (Javiera Flores), a young mother who takes her baby along on her long-dreamed-of trek to the set of San Julián's most popular game show, where she hopes to win a "multiprocessor," whatever that may be. For all these characters, and for us, the trip across the spectacularly empty horizontal spaces of Patagonia has to be its own reward. All three suffer losses and ambiguous little victories; all are reminded that human existence sometimes seems like a comical scratching across empty space toward some intangible purpose. But Sorin's vision is fundamentally a generous one, and even in the flat, hard Patagonian light, the struggle seems worth it.

"Intimate Stories" is now playing in New York. A wider release may soon follow.

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