Coppola's "Tetro', and Argentina

It took me a while to catch up with Francis Ford Coppola's "Tetro,'' released last year and regarded by both its boosters and detractors as a return to edgy, experimental filmmaking. The feature film, shot with digital cameras on location in Argentina - namely, Buenos Aires and Patagonia - is beautiful to look at, has a knotty emotional core, rides on the success of strong acting and effortlessly evokes the texture and mood of Argentina.

My wife and I visited Argentina (and Chile, and Uruguay) in late 2007, and the movie brings it all back. "Tetro'' is far from a travelogue, yet feels so much like Argentina, I felt I could crawl inside the frame and be right there among the noctural city cafes and broken sidewalks, chilling out with the street characters and trolling the quasi-industrial cityscapes of La Boca, the gritty central-city district where the movie was filmed. Us, we stayed in Palermo, an up-and-coming neighborhood of restaurants, bars, shops and artisans, where Coppola maintained an office during the making of the movie. It was big local news in Buenos Aires when someone broke into the filmmaker's office and made off with the laptop that held the script for "Tetro.''

All's well that ends well, though. The film is exciting, emotionally affecting, lovely to behold, shot mostly in lustrous black and white, with dialogue in English and Spanish. It wanders a bit off course in the last half-hour with an operatic embrace of "family.'' The title character, Tetro - a blocked American writer, played by Vincent Gallo as Mr. Intensity, reinventes himself when he flees New York for Buenos Aires; he is a member of a very fractured family, indeed. "Tetro'' the movie has so many strengths, its weaknesses must be forgiven. Moreover, "Tetro'' boasts a confident performance by 20-year-old newcomer Alden Ehrenreich, who looks like a younger Leonardo DiCaprio and radiates ambition behind the baby fat. Maribel Verdu, as Tetro's wife and former therapist, turns in an assured, honed performance.

A bit of the film was shot in Patagonia, where, alas, I have yet to go. Seeing the sun glinting off the region's glaciers - massive, pearl-white, craggy - is enough to convince me to take a road trip there, as Coppola's characters do toward the end of the movie. Coppola, now 70, with the energy of a much younger man, directed and wrote the script. It is his first original screenplay since his brilliant "The Conversation'' during his golden age: the 1970s.

Most critics have applauded Coppola's artistic courage and return to form; the film makes few concessions to Hollywood or anyone's idea of easy commercialism. My old pal and former colleague Michael Sragow, the Baltimore Sun's lead movie critic, observed that Coppola made the film the way Elia Kazan would have done it: "This film's hypnotic, tremulous black and white makes you feel as if his camera lens refracts emotion and light simultaneously.'' Peter Howell, writing in the Toronto Sun, had a nice turn of phrase, too: "Cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. films in luscious widescreen monochrome that looks almost wet.''

This movie shares little of the well-made if conventional narrative arc of Coppola's classic "Godfather'' movies or "The Conversation,'' but "Tetro'' does something else they did: It makes you care about movies, makes you want to think and talk about what you see in them. And, for me, it makes me want to go back to Argentina, too, pronto.

LAN - South America's Best Airline?

South America is about to get a little bit closer to North America - no, not from continental drift - but from a new nonstop service between San Francisco and Lima, Peru, aboard LAN Airlines. The four times weekly flights are set to start July 1.

This will make San Francisco the fourth United States gateway for Chile-based LAN, considered by many airline pundits to be South America's best airline. I haven't flown all of South America's many national and regional airlines, to be sure, but I share the high regard for LAN, an 80-year-old company that also flies to New York, Los Angeles and Miami.

My wife and I flew on LAN in 2007 during our first visit to South America and were impressed by the smart cabin crew, the toothsome food, the modern aircraft and a generally fine record of punctuality. (There was a one-hour delay in our departure from Santiago, Chile to Mendoza, Argentina; it happens.) All told, our three short-haul flights between stylish Santiago, Mendoza with its high, dry wine country, and Buenos Aires with its hearty food and superb cafe life, were among the highlights of our trip. Of course, it would have been nice to fly Down Under from Up Over on LAN, too.

Come July 1, that will be possible. Nonstop San Francisco-Lima service, with connections to major South American cities such as Sao Paolo, Brazil, will run on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. LAN, a member of the oneworld alliance with British Airways, Qantas, American Airlines and others, plans to fly with business class (think 100 percent fully flat sleepers and individual 15.4-inch video screens) and economy class on the long-haul route (think complimentary wine and liquor and more than 350 music CDs). So, it shouldn't be too painful.

Despite the global recession, LAN is one of the few international carriers that seems to be doing alright. Aviation is continuing to grow in Latin America and LAN has a rep for being well-managed. LAN actually moved up requested delivery of Boeing's soon-to-launch B787 Dreamliner to 2011 from 2014, a rare move. Certainly, the airline's executives sound confident.

"This announcement represents LAN and its affiliates' continued commitment to growth in North America and expanding the travel options available to its passengers in this market,'' said Pablo Yunis, vice president of North America and the Caribbean, of the forthcoming San Francisco service.

LAN plans to fly the new route using Boeing B767-300s configured for 221 passengers.