Two films we abandoned

Started and abandoned two movies last night, for two different reasons. First tried "You Kill Me," a supposed mob comedy with a fairly elite cast (Ben Kingsley stars) - alcoholic mob enforcer in Buffalo screws up a job and the boss sends him to SF to dry out. Why San Francisco, he asks? Because I said so, boss replies, and that's about the level of dialog and credibility. Nothing (in the first half-hour) was believable in any way - it was just a script writer's lark, some guys trying to latch on to success of other mob comedies that actually had some wit and some characters you could believe in for 2 hours or even 20 seconds. Finally gave up when Kingsley takes a job in a funeral parlor (have we ever seen that before?) and comes on to a client maybe a third his age and she's pleased about that. A Hollywood, and the aged male titans of the realm! Second we started is the somewhat renowned Cleo from 5 to 7, Agnes Varda's best-known film, circa 1960. It's actually fun to watch some of the great sequences of Cleo walking along the streets of Paris, looking great (she's a pop star) as Paris looks poor and dirty, as it did then still recovering from the war. Varda's camera follows her in long takes, shot from above, to a jazzy soundtrack (also some Bizet?). Compared with movies of its era, it's much more documentary in look, filmed on location, almost improvisational at times, lots of rough edges, shot as if in real time (two hours), and focused on the woman's POV by a woman director - and yet, today, after a half-hour, it seemed tedious, the wit highly dated, the tension flaccid - an important film of its day and worth watching if you have a lot of time and patience, but not a film that stands up well today, sadly.

A nearly great and nearly completely ignored movie: Lantana

"Lanatana" is a movie too good, too quiet, and too true to really ever find its deserved audience - makes you sick. This Australian film is one of those multiple point of view, several strands to the story, you're not clear how or if the strands will intersect, then ultimately the whole design become clear to you. LA Confidential did this well years ago; Crash won an Oscar for this a few years back, and I thought it was a pretentious, phony piece of crap (though I do like Thandi Newton, who doesn't?). Lanatana was low budget, and so much smarter than Crash and its ilk - following the story of a cop (Anthony LaPaglia) as he embarks on an affair and puts his marriage at risk, a psychiatrist (Barbara Hershey) who's grieving the death of her daughter and worried about the state of her marriage), a single woman (seductress, separated, dangerous), a young couple (stressed, tempestuous, sweet), a gay man (patient of Hershey's, comabative), a few others. The movie's so smart that it sets out some clues that each of the 4 of us watching thought we were following - we said, come on, this is so obvious, we thought the movie was heading toward trightness - then it surprised us in a lot of ways - and unlike so many movies and TV series with "surprises," these were all credible and in character. And the film also has a serious dramatic dimension. Yes, it's about a murder investigation (we see the body in the first frames), but it's truly about people coming to terms with marriage and trust and faith and infidelity. My only quibble really is the relentless jazzy mood music (I think Crash had this, too - why?). Otherwise a near-great and nearly completely ignored movie.

Why "Mother" is a great movie

"Mother" is a hugely powerful and totally engrossing Korean movie and though I'm not sure, I'll have to check this out, I believe the writer-director must also be the force behind the equally great (maybe superior) film Oasis. Mother is in many ways a conventional crime & punishment story - young man with significant mental disabilities (retardation, at the least) is accused of murdering a young woman and is clearly unable to defend himself in any way. His way over-involved mother, an impoverished vendor of herbs and unlicensed acupuncturist, takes up the case and investigates the facts to try to prove her son's innocence. I will not reveal any spoilers here for all should see this film. At times, the investigation does fall prey to the movie convention of many unlikely clues and hints falling easily into the hands of the investigator - though it does stay on the near side of credibility - unlike the utterly ridiculous plotting of Dragon Tattoo, for example. But more than the mechanism of the plot, it's a great movie because of its exploration of characters and relationships, especially that of the boy and his mother, and because of the mother's gradual and surprising awakening as the movie progresses. Great movies (and novels) are about crisis, collision of forces, leading to growth, change, knowledge - and this is the epitome. Could it be remade as an American movie, and (sad to say) find the audience it deserves? Possibly, though a big part of its beauty is its exploration of a Korean culture, poor, gritty, uneducated, that we in America never anticipate and don't often see.