My thoughts about movies and TV shows I've been watching

See also my blog on books: Elliot's Reading

Friday, December 30, 2011

The (6) Most Disappointing Movies (I Saw) in 2011, or, can I get these 90 minutes (or 120 minutes) back?

As you can see from previous posts, I saw a lot of great movies this year (as well as several great TV shows and series), and I enjoy tipping readers off to the 10 best new and 10 best classic films I saw in 2011, but I also want to make note of the movies that disappointed me in 2011 - not the worst movies of the year, because obviously there are thousands of horrible films that I would never think of seeing (that's what we pay professional critics to do); I have high expectations for every movie I see or start to see - I've obviously chosen each movie out of the million or so available because I thought I'd like it, but inevitably we come upon some duds, so here is my list of the Most Disappointing Movies (I Saw) in 2011, which, fortunately, is not long:

I'm Going Home (2001) and A Talking Picture (2003): Readers of this blog will know that I love classic (and recent) European cinema, so I was really interested to learn about Manuel de Oliveira, a Portuguese director now a centenarian - I was really interested in seeing some great films from Portugal, which has for me been off the map of movies. Ugh - honestly, I started watching each of these two films and could not finish either - terribly stilted, stagy, seemingly going nowhere - one about a woman on a boat journey with her young daughter (?), stopping at various ports to meet local folks, no better than a travelogue (plot developed later apparently, but I could only give it so much), the other something to do with a long and dull stage show and some backstage maneuverings. I'll never know.

J. Edgar: There's got to be a great story in the life of J. Edgar Hoover, but this Eastwood vehicle doesn't tell it. Scene after scene of stilted dialog, boring biopic episode by episode unfolding of a life story, confusing regarding politics and sexuality, a classic example of way too much tell not enough show. Nothing from this film stays with me.

Tree of Life and Days of Heaven (1978): I keep thinking I ought to like Terrance Malick, he's thoughtful and serious and scrupulous, so I tried twice but honestly Tree of Life was one of the most pretentious movies I've ever seen - the story of one family and its tragedy (very poorly portrayed with extremely awkward and confusing jumps back and forth in time and huge gaps in the plot) set against weird footage of the origin of the universe, from the big bang onward. Huh? Days of Heaven was at least gorgeous to watch, but the plot was absurd: movies, even art-house cinematographic films, have some obligation to narrative consistency and coherence, which Malick disdains.

War Horse: Big, expensive, epic, dull. Do you care about a boy (actually, not even a boy - 18-year-old farmer's son who becomes a World War I soldier) and his horse? I love some animal films - e.g., Homeward Bound - but they have to have true feeling, humor, pathos. This Spielberg vehicle, despite its excellent production values (which may well earn it a few Oscars), has thoroughbred aspirations but plods along its tedious narrative path like an old workhorse bound for the glue factory.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

War Horse finishes out of the money

Above all, Steven Spielberg tries hard to make great entertainment for the broadest possible film audience, his films have high moral aspirations, he insists - from the very first - on great narratives with a clear plot line and a final resolution, the characters generally are sharply drawn and they evolve through action, and the production values are always of the highest order - including cinematography, art direction, musical score (John Williams) - can anyone today do a crowd or battle scene better than Spielberg? Can any say Oscar? All that said - why is "War Horse" such a dud? The movie has all the qualities I've just referenced, yet it feels to me as if it just doesn't have a heart. First of all, entertainment, even epic entertainment, does require a reasonable pace, and at 2.20 this film is way too long and indulgent. Second, though Black Beauty may be an exception - these films work when best when we care about the human characters at least as much or more than the animals. WH follows the horse from auction to farm work, to war (WWI in France) as he passes through a string of new owners and rescuers and abusers - so at the end (spoilers here, I guess) we don't really feel much emotion when he's restored to his original owner - we've forgotten about this guy, who, by the way, seems far too old for the part. Over all, the whole film wears its intentions on its sleeve - there are no surprises or mysteries, lots of shopworn cliches (the evil landlord, for one) and other feckless sorts. Though Spielberg does a fine job showing the horrors of trench warfare, the movie is so drained of politics (no sense what the war is about), of desire (it's a family movie after all), even of serious villainy (we may be blasting one another to smithereens but we all like horses!) that it's hard to know who will really like this movie. It's a film the whole family can enjoy - or maybe not.

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Breaking Bad gets better with each episode

Last night finished Season 3 of "Breaking Bad," and find it's a series that gets better with each episode. Initially I had some trouble buying into the premise - Walt is a high-school chem teacher diagnosed with terminal cancer who gets into cooking meth to raise a great deal of cash for the family he will leave behind, and then inevitably gets in way over his head with various drug runners and gangs - but over time came to care less about the likelihood of the premise and more about Walt and the other characters and what will happen to them. Walt (Bryan Crandall) is an underplayed, serious, analytic guy - not the typical protagonist of a TV series, especially a drug/crime series (and it's not a "comedy," despite the weird genre labeling sometimes attached). Other characters are adequate or better, but the series is really his. What's most striking of all, to me, is the writing - highly smart, literary, some very long monologues that are almost unique in TV, in any medium. Many of these episodes could be stage plays, and certainly some of the dialogs/monologues could be used very well for auditions or for acting workshops. One episode in particular, Fly, is a classic in that the entire 47-minute episode has only two speaking characters, most of the time in a meth lab, and it's completely captivating - again, could be done very effectively on stage. A strong series, and we await availability of Season 4.

Monday, December 26, 2011

An encyclopedia of fight-movie family-saga redemption-story cliches

"Warrior" tries really hard to be a great movies and strikes many of the same notes that have worked for the several successful films that have linked personal combat with family drama: Million Dollar Baby, The Fighter, The Wrestler, to name some recent ones - but the problem is that Warrior comes off as a encyclopedia of movie cliches. Though I was with it for a while, quite interested in the mixed-martial arts and ultimate fighting that the film establishes as its milieu, by the end the only real enjoyment in the movie was to try to predict what the characters would do in the next scene - not hard to do, by the way. Movies is a drama of conflict between alcoholic father on the mend once a great Marine and fight trainer and his two estranged sons, one a kind of bad boy with a mysterious past - he has been absent for about 13 years - and the other a good boy who's now a physics teacher and a father of 2 girls. totally improbably, the teacher loses his job (because he did smoker fight outside a bar - what? he has no contract and no union?) and takes up fighting to pay the mortgage (heartless banker will take house away - hasn't he seen It's a Wonderful Life?); other brother, equally improbably, asks dad to coach him - as both brothers enter a $5-million tournament. Can you guess that they will meet in the final? That Dad will come around? That the skeptical wife will show up to cheer? That the high-school principal will join the students in cheering on their favorite teacher? That the "bad brother" was actually a Marine hero? You couldn't guess? Anyway, despite some total wierdnesses, such as one of the trainer/coaches insists his fighter listen to Beethoven! - the fighting scenes are pretty good and Nick Nolte (the Dad) makes every movie he's in a little better - but in this case, not better enough.

Sunday, December 25, 2011

The 10 Best (classic) Movies I Saw in 2011

A few days ago I posted on the 10 Best Movies (I Saw) in 2011, but they weren't, actually, the 10 best movies I saw in 2011 - they were 10 Best 2011 movies I saw in 2011. I also spend a lot of time watching, usually re-watching, great movies from the past - as we all should, why not go back to movies we loved or explore the great ones we've missed? - same with books - so to complete the picture so to speak, here are the 10 Best (classic) movies I saw in 2011 (in alphabetical order):

Au Revoir les enfants: Louis Malle's great (autobiographic?)film about boys in a boarding school in rural France during World War II - including several Jewish boys protected by the priests. Some amazing scenes, especially the conclusion.

Blow-up: Maybe not Antonioni's best but one of his most accessible, at least to an English-speaking viewership, really captures its moment in history and stands up well as a portrait of alienation - way better than I thought it would be on a re-visit.

Casablanca: Could anyone not like this movie? Such total entertainment from opening moments to the famous conclusion on the tarmac. Great characters, Bogart's most famous role, romantic, funny, moving.

Les Diaboliques: Clouzot, more Hitchcockian than Hitchcock himself, another boarding-school movie, but this one focused more on the so-called adults, mean and nasty people, and a terrifically taut and surprising plot with a great bathtub scene.

Godfather and Godfather II: masterpieces, then and still. After seeing each, I tried to post lists of the great scenes in these movies and ultimately realized I would just be recounting the entire film. American epics, in every sense of the word.

Knife in the Water and Repulsion: These two by Polanski, both stark and simple, very few characters (esp in Knife, with only 3), psychologically for of weird twists and insights, Repulsion especially imaginative as we probe the mental breakdown of Deneuve, with the camera adopting her POV - he was obviously such a major talent, and it's such a tragedy that his personal life and failings have gotten in the way of the director he might have become.

Little Fugitive: a rarely seen or discussed film, one of my faves from childhood, even better seeing it today as it's an extraordinary time capsule of Brooklyn/Coney Island in the 50s, story of a young boy lost on Coney Island and older brother's search for him - fun and moving.

Rules of the Game: Renoir's greatest, and one of the greatest of all time, better and more deep on every viewing, no film has taken on issues of social class in pre-War Europe (or anywhere, for that matter) with greater insight, humor, poignancy. The hunting sequence one of the best ever filmed, and the image of the Buddhas and of the count next to his latest musical toy are unforgettable.

- Thank you, Tom B for two corrections: it's Deneuve, not Bardot, in Repulsion; it's Clouzot, not Chabrol, who directed Les Diaboliques. And I agree with Tom that Wages of Fear is even better than Les Diaboliques - but I didn't see it in 2011.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

The 10 Best (new) Movies I Saw in 2011

Not being a film critic and not being in New York or LA, I don't get a chance to see every Bulgarian or Congolese independent film and sometimes I don't even see some of the major (or minor) movies till the year after they're releases - so my 10-best list is not necessarily the 10 best films of 2011 but:

The Ten Best films (I saw) in 2011
Current or recent releases only, listed alphabetically:

Blue Valentine. Yes, a dark movie, but thoughtful and troubling and credible, with great lead performances - everything we expect of an American indie release but rarely get

Bridesmaids. Raunchy, sure; a bit of a fantasy, yes. But very funny, Wiig is terrific, and so is Rose Byrne as the evil friend.

The Descendants. Not Alexander Payne's best movie, but still one of the best movies of the year - and one of the few movies about adults. Payne works better than any other director at adapting novels, and not the obvious best-selling genre novels, either.

A Film Unfinished. A strange and haunting documentary using recovered footage from the Warsaw ghetto.

Fish Tank. Very dark movie about a young girl in the projects in Britain. Came and went, almost unnoticed. Andrea Arnold is another hugely daring and interesting director who has not received the attention she deserves.

The King's Speech. Yes it was a 2010 film, I saw it this year - and it certainly lived up to expectations. Screenplay among the best - including incredible scene when king "sings" to his therapist.

Midnight in Paris. Best Woody Allen movie in years - very well scripted, funny, tight story, moving - scenes with Hemingway are classic.

Of Gods and Men. Beautiful and unusual movie about a monastery on North Africa under siege - incredible concluding moments.

Poetry. Korean director Chang-dong Lee about the most interesting filmmaker in the world right now. Very strong movie about a woman struggling with Alzheimer's and with her life. His movies are like grand novels - rich with character and event.

Secret Sunshine. Another great movie from Lee, about a recently widowed woman trying to build a new life for herself and her son in small Korean city.

Within a few days will post on the 10 best (classic) movies I saw in 2011.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Engrossing movie about the Middle East - if you can suspend some disbelief

The recent French-Canadian film "Incendies" (the incendiaries? those who burn? people on fire?) is a very engrossing film - if, and it may be a big if, you can suspend disbelief and accept a string of unlikelihoods and narrative contrivances that make Girl with the Dragon Tattoo look like an exercise in documentary photorealism. The rather long and complex stories, told in both present tense and interpolated flashback scenes, involves a brother and sister fulfilling requests in mother's will by going back from their Quebec home to unnamed Mideast country (obviously meant to be Lebanon) to find their father, whom they'd believed to be dead, and their brother, whom they'd never known they had. Their search reveals some startling family secrets and also becomes a window through which the film can observe some of the horrors of the civil war in Lebanon and of the religious and cultural strife that has torn apart so many countries in the Middle East. In some ways, the movie is brutally honest - few if any other recent films from outside the U.S. have been so unsparing in depiction of religious violence and terrorism by fundamentalists on both Arab and Christian sides (Jews and Israelis are unmentioned in this film); in another way, it does pull its punches by never really even mentioning Arabs or Muslims - the strife is depicted as Christians versus "nationalists" in some unnamed country - although we can all read through the code. Altogether, though, a very well-paced and compelling movie - and this Notary Public also commends any film that can make not just one but two notaries into heroic figures (very funny dialog about how the whole Middle East struggle would have been obviated if there were notaries back in the days of Moses).

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Alexander Payne works with novels better than any other U.S. director

I really like the movies of Alexander Payne, and "The Descendants" continues to make the case that he's one of the few writer-directors around, at least in the U.S., making movies on serious themes about adults and their problems, issues, and pleasures. He casts George Clooney against type here, as a wealthy member of the Hawaiian landowner class whom we meet at his wife's bedside as she lies dying from a boating accident brain concussion. Clooney, suddenly forced to be resposible dad, has to deal with younger two daughters acting out and out of control, plus the snarky disrespectful boyfriend of older daughter - all this, yet it's not a domestic comedy about a single dad becoming wise and competent, it's a moving drama that involves all of the characters - as Clooney learns (spoilers here) that his wife had been having an affair, which forces him to rethink everything about his life and his marriage. This movie adapted from a little-known (at least to me) novel - Payne works with novels better than any other director out there, most won't even approach a novel unless it's already a best-seller, and then they tend to ruin it. This smart movie starts off a little slow (too much VO narration - compare with opening of Payne's Sideways, which quickly established Giamatti's sad-sack character as he did a crossword while driving the LA freeways) and the end a bit drawn out, but it's probably the most intelligent, understated American film I've seen this year. I also liked the Hawaiian guitar soundtrack - though I may be alone on that one.

Friday, December 16, 2011

And in the End: Battlestar Galactic answers all the questions, almost

At last after 77 episodes we've come to the end of that great, 4.5 season epic, "Battlestar Galactica," and what a ride - for those who haven't seen it, it's a surprisingly moving and thoughtful and evocative narrative, and you ought to stop reading right now because I'm going to discuss: The End of the Series - and readers of this blog may recall, or you can go back and check, but I pretty much predicted the ending of the series on the nose way back at the outset of season 1: the space travelers from the 12 colonies are not our descendants but our ancestors. It's a totally apt and fitting conclusion to this series, and, though everything is not perfectly explained at the end - how is Starbuck able to be alive and dead at the same time, and why do Gaius and # 6 appear in the contemporary world? - the series does amazingly wrap up virtually every loose thread in a way that kind of makes sense, given the great suspension of disbelief you must commit to in order to enjoy the series. Though the series leads us to ponder some of the basic philosophical questions: e.g., what is the difference between a human and a machine, do we have free will or are we destined, and if so by whom? or what? why was Bob Dylan's music around 150,000 years ago? - it's not heavy-handed at all, but lots of fun and with characters we come to care about. All told, a series that is much better than most would ever expect, and a great entertainment.

Monday, December 12, 2011

A movie that's willing to kill off one of its stars is usually pretty good

"Contagion" is one of those movies that surprises you (or me at least), it's a lot better than I would have thought of expected. It's a medical thriller on a fairly grand scale, with a narrative taking place across the globe, on various continents, with several megastar actors all playing relatives small roles in this ensemble piece: Gwynyth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Marilyn Cotillard, Laurence Fishurne (if anyone's the lead, it's him) - all pretty good - and this from someone who generally hates this kind of multi-narrative ensemble story, such as Crash, with all its heavy-handed imagery and sociopolitical pretensions. Contagion is about an outbreak, an epidemic, of a plague related to avian flu, that seems to start in China or Hong Kong, and is brought to the States by a world-business traveler (Paltrow) who spreads the disease not only to her home in Minneapolis, where she had a brief fling with an X on her way home (this fact nearly makes her husband, Damon, question everything - he never would have known but for the forensic investigation. To give you a sense of the honesty of this movie (spoiler alert): both Paltrow and Winslet die of the disease. Wouldn't you think they're too important characters (or actors) to dump into a grave halfway through the film? In most films, at least one of them would heroically beat the odds and survive. Contagion is a very compelling and largely credible dramatization of how this plague would or could play out on many fronts: the medical investigation, the media coverage, the local panic, the CDC response, the profiteering, the allegations of favoritism, the effect on a single family (Damon's). I have only a few quibbles: movie makes the CDC doctors (with one possible minor exception) and the WHO doc into the great heroes and everyone else (local doctors, media) is villainous. But by and large it's very good, avoiding both sentimentality and sensationalism. The ending, which in a montage of just a few moments, traces for us the progeny of this plague, is very provocative as well. Steven Soderbergh directed - very professional, well-paced, and for the most part on the money.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

A textbook case of telling not showing: Why J. Edgar is a failed movie

One would think that there's so much material in the life of J. Edgar Hoover that you could make not just one great film about the man but many: the rise of the FBI and its fight against crime, the delusions and paranoia that destroyed the old man at the end of his career, the Lindbergh kidnapping case that made the FBI a world-famous organization, the conflicts with great leaders such as JFK and MLK, the repressed or secret homosexual life of the director, and so on. All of these elements are in Clint Eastwood's "J. Edgar," but you know what - it's a totally boring movie. It just goes on and on (2-plus hours, or course) with endless exposition, everything explained and laid out in dialog, a textbook case of telling not showing. There are very, very few actual dramatic scenes - and it's not that I need a movie to be full of action, but characters need to be doing something other than talking, unless we're watching an Eric Rohmer movie, which this is not. Yes, we see that Hoover was a complicated guy - that he was prescient in bringing modern crime-solving techniques to the bureau but that he was delusional and power-hungry and personally tortured. But it seems as if we're watching a textbook documentary, there's no life to this movie at all The most interesting part, for me, is Hoover's relationship with his partner, Toleson - their scenes together are the movie's best - but there's nothing developed. The movie takes no real stance on Hoover, it's cool and distant, most of it shot in dark interiors, the only really strong image is DiCaprio's ever-present face: he does well at portraying Hoover throughout his long career, the makeup artist did a great job on this, but we always feel DiCaprio is playing a part, not living it.

Adding one note re "Midnight in Paris": I'd forgotten that Carla Bruni was in this movie, and when I saw later that she played the sculpture-garden guide, it explained something to me: I wondered why Wilson didn't end up with the guide character (whom he revisits in order for her to translate a French diary for him), and my guess is that in the original script he did end up with the guide but when Woody Allen was able to stunt-cast Bruni in the part he had to rewrite - would have been too weird for Wilson to walk off into the rain with the First Lady of France, so Allen added the periperhal character of the flea-market sales girl, who in the end walks into the rain with Wilson. BTW, the lovers walking into the rain is I think a slight homage and reworking of the end of Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, when the lead character walks off alone into the rain at the end.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Owen Wilson meets Ernest Hemingway - some of Woody Allen's best dialog ever

Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" is a throwback and a return to the form and sensibility of some of his best movies. We get the familiar enamored look at a beautiful city, the tortured relation between a young guy and the beautiful girl with whom he's obviously mismatched, and most of all the playful fascination and complete devotion to art, music, ideas, and literature, and withering (though funny) contempt for pseudo-intellectuals (as in the great McLuhan scene in Annie Hall or the literary-magazine party where W.A. sneaks off to watch a Knicks game on TV in - which film was it?) Allen always casts his movies well, and the choice of surfer-slacker Owen Wilson to play the would-be novelist, a character that Allen himself would have played a generation ago and that is so deeply imprinted with Allen's tone and voice and wit, is shrewd and surprising and effective. Wilson leaves his beautiful and shallow and vain fiancee behind to walk the streets of Paris at night, where he is transported into the 1920s and meets a # of his heroes, including FS Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates is hilarious) Luis Bunuel (Wilson suggests a movie plot to him - Exterminating Angel - and Bunuel is just puzzled: How come they can never leave the room? Why don't they just get up and leave?), and most amusingly Hemingway (some of Allen's funniest dialog ever). The film recalls the time-transports of Play It Again, Sam and, even more so, the great short story The Kugelmass Episode. Autobiographical elements aside (hero leaves rich and cold fiancee for a very young woman who at last seems to understand him and his romantic obsessions; I hate to think that Allen thinks of himself as a Hollywood hack with dreams of literary greatness, however), the timing and plotting is clever and well-paced and it's a totally fun movie to watch - a bauble at times, but also a tribute to the great writing and ideas and well-made plots and rich cultural life of a time long past.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

The Gamm Theater's great Hamlet production - with an original insight at the end

Last night saw a great production of "Hamlet" at the Gamm Theatre, in Pawtucket, R.I. - very fast-paced with excellent timing, 2.5 hours and completely riveting for the entire audience in this intimate house - stark set with simple red drapery backdrop and bare minimum of props kept our focus on the characters, the action, and the language - Tony Estrella's Hamlet was particularly excellent, played in near-contemporary dress, with good American inflection on the lines, especially the soliloquies, which made all seem natural and free, a character wrestling with a terrible fate and a troubled soul. I'd say the emphasis from direct Frederick Sullivan Jr. was on the craft in Hamlet's behavior - they seemed to go with the interpretation of Hamlet as a shrewd plotter who puts on his madness to provoke others and to draw them out - and yet the character still has edges and ambiguities, e.g., if his madness is a strategy, why is he so brutally cruel to Ophelia? There may have been a few moments over the top - some of the physicality was a little too much (e.g., the Ghost on the floor re-enacting the poisoning) but for the most part the action was just right - not too stagy, not too staid - the fencing very well staged, and frightening. Finally, worth noting is the interesting emphasis on Fortinbras and the troops from Norway, especially at the end (the Norwegian army scene and the rarely heard "How all occasions" soliloquy is very effective, too) - at the end, as Fortinbras settles in on the throne and a Norwegian flag unfurls, the it's an obvious echo of the German occupation of the 40s, and Sullivan does something I've never seen or heard of: the Norwegian soldiers execute Horatio, offstage, at the end, leaving nobody left in the Danish court to tell Hamlet's story. Made me go back and read the last line again, this time with new appreciation of the possibilities. (BTW, I've always hated Horatio and found him to be a terrible and feckless friend to Hamlet, not much more helpful that R&G. I think Charles Marowitz was first to discuss this aspect of Horatio's character.)

Saturday, December 3, 2011

A likable enough movie that could have been so much better: Beginners

Mark (?) Mills's "Beginners" is a likable enough movie despite, in my view, some major flaws - almost the definition of a three-star (out of 5) movie: It helps, getting into it, to know that the movie is to some degree autobiographical - the story of a late-30s single guy whose father reveals to him, shortly after he's widowed, that he's gay and that, in his late years, he intends to (and does) lead an openly gay life, after a lifetime in the closet and in a loveless marriage. This is very rich material, and Mills handles it effectively, with warmth and humor - helped a lot by a terrific Christopher Plummer as the dad. This part of the movie feels like a documentary, especially with some good archival clips that convey changing mores and several flashbacks that show the 30ish guy, played well by Ewan Magregor, in his childhood with a very lonely, troubled mom - some of this reminds me of a few of the recent extraordinary documentaries about ordinary people, such as Dear Zachary or Capturing the Friedmans. All that said, the parallel plot - young man meets a girl and they engage in a romance that reeks of a thousand other indie films and that never seems engaging or even credible for a moment: roller skating through a deserted mall and a hotel corridor, spray-painting graffiti on massive billboards over LA, the cute meet (at a costume party where he's dressed as Freud), the pop psychology (her father burdened her with tales of loneliness), the improbable setup (she's an actor put up in a posh hotel - but we never see a moment of her work), and finally the cute re-connect (he shows up, surprise, at her nyc apartment but she's in LA) - all this like a dead weight on a movie that could have been so much better.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

The audience booed Renoir in 1939. What would they do today?

Watched the "commentary" version and some other supplementary material on the Great Jean Renoir "Rules of the Game" (1939) and though the commentary was adequate, not extraordinary, the more you learn about the film the more you appreciate it: the wonderful composition of shots, the use of long shots with slow moving camera, the depth of focus (many of the interior shots), the brilliant editing of the hunt sequence (only place in move with many short takes - creating a totally different pace and mood). Also commentary discusses the social classes, making clear that Octave and Andre are the two outsiders, and spends a lot of time discussing the balancing of relations among the characters - like an elaborate dance - some of this lost me and didn't interest me much. Most interesting of all was Renoir's own brief intro, in which he said that the film was a horrible failure on premier, with the audience booing - they hated the film for its point of view, which was a savage attack on the French so-called nobility, a society I find rotten to the core, Renoir said - so that should put an end to any thought that he was sympathetic to this social milieu (though he is sympathetic to the characters within this milieu, because he is humane) - today, I fear, an audience would boo because he criticizes the members of the nobility, not because he devastates them.

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Rules of the Game: One of the best movies, if not the best movie, ever made

It's been many years since I've seen Jean Renoir's 1939 "The Rules of the Game," and it still holds up as no doubt one of the best movies if not the best movie of all time. This is surprising in a lot of ways, most notably in that you have to hate most of the main characters: French aristocrats who live in idleness and luxury, playing games with one another, cheating on their spouses, behaving recklessly with the feelings and emotions of others, living off the labor of others while contributing little or nothing to the betterment of their world, oblivious of the war that is about to erupt all around them - and yet, and yet - each character is so fully developed in such a short time and space: De Chesney, the pompous count - collector of musical toys (the image of him next to his grandest acquisition is one of the great portrait moments in cinema) who is also a Jew, we learn, and therefore just not quite as secure socially as he seems to be; Octave (a bit overplayed by Renoir) a ruined man at the end, a participant in a crime, friendless, an artistic failure, cut off from those he has tried to love; the countess, desperate for love and alone in a country she does not understand; Lisbeth, the maid with social aspirations; and many others. No film has ever explored class relations with more acuity and wit (The Leopard comes close - but it's really Lampaduso's novel that deserves the credit there) - and none has a higher level of both cinematic and literary excellence: some of the scenes are so extraordinary that they can match Citizen Kane any day: the animals killed in the hunt, twitching to death, showing the cruelty of those who would kill - animals or one another - for sport; the conversation between the count and his mistress, as she leans against a Buddha statue; the gamekeeper, Schumacher, crying his eyes out in the night - just three examples among many, and the dialogue, among all characters - not just the aristocrats but the servants as well - is so smart and insightful and revealing: "iets (regimes) I can accept, but not lunacy (the chef)"; "Me? I don't have an old mother!". It takes a little while to get into this film - as is true of so many great works of art - but by the end you have experienced an entire world.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

An antidote to the pretention of Tree of Life: Nostalgia for the Light

"Nostalgia for the Light" (2010?) by the Chilean filmmaker Guzman is a most unusual and moving documentary. It starts off quite slowly with many still camera shots of what at first looks to be heavy machinery but we soon see as an observatory telescope, then some stills of a rather antiquated kitchen and some old furniture, with Guzman's voice-over noting that this is his childhood home and where he first learned to love astronomy - gradually we shift to the Chilean mountain desert, apparently one of the best places for stellar observation and we start to learn about astronomy and then we learn that the same landscape, arid and hot, is a great place for archaeologists studying early people of Chile - two kinds of scientist/observers - and then, slyly, we learn that this same territory was part of the mining industry (and slavery) in Chile and more recently the locale of the Pinochet prisons and the burial site (mass graves) for political dissidents - and we meet people scouring the grounds for the remains of their loved ones - all different kinds of observation and science and examination of the past - billions of years ago, or 20 years ago - and all are connected in many surprising and subtle ways. Not long ago I watched the extraordinarily pretentious and overbearing Tree of Life, and this simple film makes many of the same points - connections between the cosmos and the individual - in a simple, clear, and moving way: one bloated highly publicized film compared with one simple, barely noticed film. Why would that be?

Friday, November 18, 2011

They're not home - yet - in Season 4 of Battlestar Galactica

Many spoilers here, so if you're watching "Battlestar Galactica" and don't want to know how it turns out in Season 4 stop reading - but we're now at the end of part one of Season 4 and the human race and the Cylons have formed an uneasy alliance and have found earth - and landed - only to see the landscape as a postnuclear ruin. Just amazingly haunting scenes at the end of this half-season, with the characters on a beach and charred ruins all around them and, across a harbor or channel, the ruins of a city, perhaps Manhattan. The planet looked beautiful from above, but not on the ground. At this point, it's unknown whether there are any living inhabitants - human or otherwise - on Earth. The dire disappointment of this discovery could break apart the alliance - or maybe it was a Cylon trick, maybe they led the humans to a false earth? Or maybe it has something to do with the "jumps" and the time barriers, maybe they will be able to jump back to an earlier time and try to avert the holocaust? Or just to blend in? We still don't know how Kara/Starbuck could have seemingly risen from the dead to come back from Earth, nor how her fighter plane could have been restored to pristine condition - must have something to do with time travel. And what about the prophecy that the leader - President Roslin - would die "of a wasting disease" before she could lead her people to Earth? Something tells me they're not home - yet.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

The epitome of cinematic pretention: Tree of Life

Somewhere in Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life" there's a half-way decent movie trying to get out, but this story line gets absolutely smothered beneath the cinematic pretension, the heavy-handed symbolism, the mish-mash of new age music and cliched imagery, and the fuzzy-headed ideas, if you can call them that - and we're left with a movie that's painfully confusing, way too long, and ultimately, in my view, ridiculous. Story, such as it is: family in Waco in the mid 50s (I think) with 3 sons and autocratic dad (Brad Pitt surprisingly good in this role), which leads to some powerful scenes of cruel discipline and family fights - Pitt is also a musical prodigy manque and a would-be inventor or entrepreneur, but these aspects are barely developed. We learn in first moments, flashing forward to the late 60s, that the middle son has died (never learn how or why, possibly in Vietnam?), and then the mom and dad talk in whispers for about 30 minutes about trying to reach him: as we see some rather beautiful imagery of the creation of the entire cosmos, which will remind you maybe of National Geographic World perhaps - honestly, I have no idea what this is about. Reminded me a little of the obelisk in Kubrick - no one understood it but some bought into its ineffable significance, and I didn't. Sean Penn plays the oldest brother (for most of the film it's not clear whom he plays) in the present day, talking about missing his brother every day - believe me, nothing is made of these father-son or brother-brother relationships, they're just stated, presented - as if Malick doesn't care about relationships, or people - we're all just insignificant blips within the cosmos I guess. (For a good film on similar themes, in comparison, think about The Great Santini.) Tree of Life ends with characters at various ages all meeting up as they walk in criss-cross along a wide strand, with hundreds of others, too - one of the most idiotic visions of postlife or heaven if you will that I've ever seen - even worse than The Lovely Bones. Perhaps its an homage to the many mysterious movie endings from the great days of European film: Nights of Cabiria, Discrete Charm, Seventh Seal. But here it feels not mysterious and odd but forced and pretentious and no longer original. And what is the message? That we all will be redeemed - even the cruel, tormenting father - for no particular reason, just because that's the way the cosmos works? Can anyone honestly tell me that you learned a single thing about this movie or that it provoked any single original thought in your mind?

Monday, November 7, 2011

What will the crew of Battlestar Gallactica find when they get to Earth?

Some thoughts on Season 4, the final season, of "Battlestar Gallactica," as we have just begun watching: what to make of the reappearance of Starbuck, in a fighter plane in brand-new condition and believing she's been gone a few hours with the Gallactica says it's been several months and she was presumed dead? She says she's found Earth (and her descriptions of Saturn, for example, suggest that she has). Possibilities: there is an obvious time warp separating BSG from Earth, which she must have passed through; part of the question isn't whether she and her crewmates will find Earth but what will they find when they get there? A future civilization? A past one? A place that they themselves had left in an earlier millenniuum? Perhaps it's an earlier civilization and the Caprica survivors build things and leave signs for the future: e.g., the Pyramids (as in their national sport)? Second: who is the 5th Cylon, and why did this season begin with a flashback episode about a group of Cylon-human hybrids under development? Is Starbuck a hybrid? What role will they play if any (or was it just a random episode that didn't fit anywhere and that they popped in between seasons 3 and 4?

Saturday, November 5, 2011

A great ensemble comedy - and the characters aren't all zillionaires (just one is): Bridesmaids

Finally saw "Bridesmaids" on DVD, and of course it would have been better to see it on screen surrounded by laughter, but it's pretty great to see it anywhere - even skeptics and Apatow doubters should know that this is a hilarious movie that's also very warm, caring about its characters, and thoughtful - and to some degree realistic (it is after all at heart a farcical comedy about a marriage - don't expect Ingmar Bergman or Woody Allen). Most of all what's great about it is Kristen Wiig, who was a huge scene-stealing surprise in her minor role in Knocked Up and now shows she's a really good comic writer and an actor who can carry a film; the ensemble cast also really solid, with Rose Byrne, who earned dramatic chops in Damages, showing she's a really funny comic actor as well, and a few others whom I didn't know but especially the heavyset woman who dominates every scene she's in - This is one of the few comedy movies largely aimed at women that's totally appealing to guys, too, and that is I think pretty accurate about feelings and friendships and relationships and doesn't place everyone (just one) in amazingly upscale houses and cars but catches the sense of the real life of someone struggling to get by in tough times, without being gloomy like an Indie pic - two quibbles: why does Wiig have to be a boutique baker - that's become a huge movie cliche, the fallback occupation for women on the rise who aren't corporate sharks; 2nd, I never bought into the character of the good cop - another movie/TV cliche, as if these guys just fall out of the sky and into the lives of the protagonist, with no girlfriend, no ex, no family, no life, no baggage - at age 30+ - sorry, it doesn't happen except on film. Final note: John Hamm aka Don Draper very funny as totally self-centered nasty guy, in an uncredited role I think.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

10 Best TV series

Starting final season of "Battlestar Gallactic" led to conversation with fellow BSG fan, AC, about our favorite TV series. We traded some suggestions; here's my tentative list of the best TV series in recent years (that I've seen - and I'm probably leaving something off...):

The Wire. Let's just acknowledge this as the gold standards for the possibilities of episodic TV.
The Sopranos. And yet - everyone forgets how great this was now that everyone talks about The Wire. The Sopranos is totally different material but broke every possible boundary and set the initial standard.
Friday Night Lights. The most likable series ever on TV.
Battlestar Gallactica. Yes it's cheesy, corny, too much video-game stuff - but what a great, well-designed, complex story.
Mad Men. There's no one you like on the show. And you can't stop watching it.
The Staircase. This may not belong on the list, in that it's a documentary series, about a murder trial, but it is so full of drama and surprise - you can't not watch this.
The Office (British version). Hysterical. So dry.
Sleeper Cell. Very compelling and scary and very contemporary. One of the few to air on consecutive nights. Domestic terrorists.
Slings & Arrows. Grows on you. Very funny series about Canadian Shakespeare troupe - anyone who's been around theater will no how true this is.
Huff (Season 1): one of the best family dramas, had a lot of potential but could not carry through beyond season 1, unfortunately.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Early indicators of Antonioni's style, in Il Grido

I'm not sure if you can really see from Antonioni's 1957 neorealistic, somewhat melodramatic "Il Grido" just how great a director he would become, but it's certainly a film worth watching and it has many of the elements that would come to define Antonioni's later style: first, his willingness to shift the plot focus from one character to another - as Il Grido begins by focusing on a woman who breaks up with her 7-year live-in boyfriend (and father of her daughter), and then rather surprisingly the movie turns out to be about him, not her (think of how the main character in L'aventura is more or less dropped from the plot; his penchant for road movies and travel - as the working-class protagonist of this film leaves his small home town, travels up (?) and down the coast of Italy, trying to find some kind of new, stable, satisfying relationship - eventually returning home in despair (think of the travel in l'aventura, the Passenger); the alienation of the protagonist (see above, plus Blow-up). And then, some unique touches: the extraordinary look at small industrial communities (refineries, mostly) in Italy postwar - the incredible poverty and isolation - seemingly closer to the middle ages than to the modern world, except for the occasional, rare appearance of a bus, a motorcycle, and a motorboat - and interesting that the protagonist works in a refinery (oil?) and takes up a job in a gas station; an incredibly odd scene in which the young daughter walks through a field and finds herself among a crowd of zombie-like men - are they mentally ill? shell shocked veterans? it's never explained - it just scares her, and us - the kind of scene that Fellini (and many imitators) would make their signature, but here it is, on a field off a highway, seemingly out of nowhere.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

The best movies in the world today are from ... Korea?

Amazingly, quietly, almost secretly - Korean cinema has become the most interesting and thoughtful in the world - why is this? I have to plead guilty here, I don't know the names of most of the directors or stars of the recent great Korean films, so I don't even know if it's one or two people or many who are responsible for this renaissance - but I'm thinking about the terrific films Mother, Oasis, The Host, Poetry, two of these made by Lee Chang-dong(?) - and now add a third of his to the list: Secret Sunshine - why don't more people know this film or his work? Secret Sunshine like his other works is a masterpiece, a tender and unflinching examination of a woman undergoing great suffering [ spoilers ] loss of husband and son - and how she copes and survives, without a bit of schmaltz or fakery, Lee takes follows her to the depth of despair, it's one of the greatest acting performances ever, as she at times is sweet and whimsical and tender, and then howls in misery - just an enormous range of emotion in one film. Most dramatic part of the movie for me is her battle with her faith - drawn to a church revival meeting, the greatest scene in the movie, beginning with her silent and stolid ending with her sobbing as those around her pray, then she joins a faith group but soon loses her faith, and all of her bearings, after meeting with the man imprisoned for killing her son. Smart, scary, built on scene after scene of smart writing, tremendous acting by a wide range of characters, camerawork that captures the life in a small but modern and growing city - terrific movie that just will never find a wide audience, has barely been distributed in u.s. as far as I know. Wake up!

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Spelling Bee - at Harvard?

Another great and completely fun Harvard student production - "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee" - done in a faux middle-school gym, with a really fun and sharp cast of 10 plus four befuddled audience "volunteers." The show obviously inspired by such films as Spellbound and built on a lot of improvisation, as we watch the six young contestants (plus the volunteers, not all young) pass through the rounds and in the process, through some energetic numbers and snappish dialog, reveal who they are, where they've come from, and in the end where they're going. You can kind of predict the types: the nerdy brainiac, the driven overachiever, the girl who's pushed by needy parents, the girl who's ignored by her parents, the kid who's surprised he's even there because he thinks he's not smart, and so on. But you can't predict what will happen to each over the course of the 90-minute no-intermission show. Our friend the delightful Susanna Wolk gives a great performance as a nerdy but politically energetic kid with a comical lisp and a superabundance of energy - go, Susanna! Also have to shout out to the showstopping # from MG Presioso, "chimerical," wishing her parents would pay attention to her and love her; to Justin Pereira's William Barfee and the broadly comical # about his "magic foot" (replete with some pretty good tapdancing), and the beautiful voice of Elizabeth Leimkuhler as an ex bee queen; the direction of this very challenging show (by Alex Willis) was superb, keeping it clear and quick and at various times witty, touching, troubling. Show's a lot of fun, and if I ever get to see it again, I will volunteer. (Sorry, guys - I am using spell-check.)

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Civlizations in conflict - an a metaphor for life itself - in Meek's Cutoff

"Meek's Cutoff" is an entirely thoughtful and from first shot to last an entirely captivating low-budget movie that could only an Indie director with a cast of little-knowns (except for Indie queen Michelle Williams - who is terrific in this movie) could have made. The story is about a 19th-century stage crossing, a group of three families (two couples, and one a couple with a young son) crossing toward Oregon with a grizzled guide (Meek) who gets them good and lost. The dramatic tension comes when they capture an Indian whom Meek believes is going to bring a tribe with him to kill, torture, rape, or kidnap - he wants to kill the Indian immediately, but others in the party have different ideas: barter with him, befriend him, ignore him - various ways to get him to lead to desperately needed water. It is never clear (until perhaps the very last shots) who is right - is the Indian a victim, is he truly leading them to water, or is Meek right and the Indian is leading them to certain death? The movie subtly explores all the different ways civilizations in conflict respond to one another (the Indian has choices, too: should he help them when their wagon is stuck?, for example). It's also in some ways metaphor or allegorical, without being heavy handed: the crossing in some way represents a life course each of us takes, in partnership with others and perhaps with a guide, who may be faithful or cruel or indifferent. Movie seems to be shot in 4:3 scale (unless my Blu-Ray was being weird), unusual for a film with the great vistas of the West. Williams is great - what a beautiful speaking voice. She alone among the characters sounds natural - the others, a bit stilted, with their archaic dialog. The film intentionally blurs some of the conversations (many are virtually unintelligible, in some cases because we are meant to be with the women, closed out of the men's serious discussions and decisions). Ending to some may seem abrupt and too ambiguous, but if you think about it for a few seconds you will know exactly what becomes of these travelers.

Monday, October 3, 2011

Why the supernatural doesn't quite work in Uncle Boonmee

Why is it that I'm reading a Japanesenovel about an 60ish man who is facing intimations of his own death (Sound of the Mountain) and also find myself last night watching a Thai movie about a 60ish man facing intimations of his death - don't read anything into that, please! I feel great! But something last night drew me to watch "Uncle Boonmee ho can recall his past lives," a very unusual movie that got some really strong reviews. What can I say? Best Thai movie I've seen this year? Among the pluses, some very beautiful scenes of the Thai countryside and some truly haunting sequences when ghosts come alive - not only to Uncle Boonmee but also to his caregiver and his relatives, who have come to see him in what may be his last days. When the ghost of his long-dead wife, and then of his lost son, who has been transformed into a werewolf-like monkey god, with bright red eyes, show up at the dinner table on the veranda, at night - it's truly a spectacular sequence. Other good sequences include a wealthy woman or princess, being carried on one of the chairs on poles perhaps to her wedding, stops by a pond and is seduced by - a catfish! Strange indeed. Could have been a really good movie - except that the filmmaker takes very little care in introducing the characters so that from beginning to end I was unsure of who was who and what was happening to whom. Mystery and the supernatural is fine in a movie - think of the great Pan's Labyrinth, for example - but to make the supernatural work you need to also pay attention to the natural world and make it credible and clear. Also, the acting is wooden - actors seem to be amateurs, learning their lines - and the pace is glacial, many scenes could have been more effective at half the length. One interesting sidelight is the xenophobia some of the Thai characters express toward the Lao neighbors - coming into Thailand illegally, taking away jobs, and so on - all sounding so painfully familiar to the racist rhetoric we hear in the U.S. today.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Some love this film, but ... not I

There are movies that are "not for everyone" and then there's "Le Quattro Volte" (loosely: the four seasons, or the four turns?), which is beloved by some and for others - me and M - left us totally cold and bewildered. It's one of those movies that on the surface sounds so improbable that you think it has to be amazing or it would never have been made, let alone distributed: a movie without any dialogue that follows a season in the life of a small Italian mountain village, particularly an elderly goat shepherd, as a way to look at the interconnection of all life: people, animals, vegetables, minerals, water, earth, fire, and air. Okay, let's give it a look! Great, except: I don't need every movie to be 13 Assassins, but a little plot and character development goes a long way. We watch the old shepherd coughing and spewing up flem, brushing a gnat from his face, fixing and drinking some weird health potion. From a fixed camera, like a spycam almost, we watch some interactions in the village square (a parade passes by, a dog barks, a truck pulls up), we see the villagers saw down a tree, cut up the tree, build some weird structure in which the wood is turned into charcoal - used for heating (and for medicinal purposes?). A little goes a long way. Most interesting sequences involve: the goats, particularly the birth of one, and its first days, and how it gets separated from the herd and, presumably, dies at base of tree that later fuels the hearths of the villagers. It all connects - but it left me pretty cold and uninterested.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Godfather Part II is as great as you remember - or greater!

Sorry haven't posted for a while because haven't been "watching" for a while - been traveling - but made up for lost time last night and watched "The Godfather Part II," the Coppola restoration, which clocked in at 3 hours and 22 minutes, a true epic, and worth every second. If you wonder whether it's worth re-watching this movie, the answer is an emphatic yes - it's as great as you remember or greater. It builds on the first part in amazing ways, by not only advancing the life story of the Corleone family, this part of the cycle focused on their life in Nevada and attempts to control the gambling industry there and in Miami and Cuba, but also, memorably, on the back story of Don Corleone, his childhood in Sicily, immigration to New York, and most interesting how he took on the local boss in Little Italy and became a player. Part II not as gorgeous visually as The Godfather, which was composed like a series of Renaissance paintings, but far grander - man amazing crowd scenes, notably the street scenes in Little Italy, the revolution in Havana, and the Senate hearings. Some of the (many) great scenes include the assassination attempt in Lake Tahoe ("why are the blinds open?"), the revenge in Don Cicci in Sicily, Kay leaving Michael ("it was an abortion!"), and everything involving Fredo. The restoration version is, I think, longer than the theater version - I wasn't complaining, but I think in some ways shorter is better. My memory of this may be wrong, but I think the theater version begins with the party in Tahoe - this one begins with the childhood in Sicily - and the Tahoe makes a stronger opening and a good match with The Godfather; also, in my memory the Nevada senator plays no role after the whorehouse scene in the theater version, but appears again a few times in the restoration, to diminished effect. In any case, movie is a good or better than you remember and you should definitely see it.

Monday, September 5, 2011

Debt be not proud: One move that pomises much but doesn't pay off

"The Debt" has some redeeming qualities and it probably could have been a good movie or at least a better movie if it were 20 minutes shorter, but ultimately at most it's a reasonably entertaining, often exasperating thriller that breaks no new ground. J Chastain is excellent in the lead as a young Mossad agent, dispatched to East Berlin ca 1965 to capture and bring back alive to Israel a doctor who's much like Mengele. The movie has one really interesting twist: the movie takes place in the near present (the 90s, anyway) and in the 60s, and in the present Helen Mirren places an older version of the Mossad agent; in the present we see a scene of Mengele's escape, as Mirren remembers or retells it, but over the course of the movie we learn that her version is not accurate at all: a little bit of Rashomon, and also a little bit of an examination of the accuracy of historical accounts, as well as an exploration of a moral dilemma that the team of 3 Mossad agents faced when their captive escaped. That said, much of the rest of the movie is a mess - the attempt to steal the doctor out of East Berlin is very poorly staged and almost impossible to understand, much of the movie is highly unpleasant (the long captivity of the doctor, the force feeding, etc. was just plain repulsive and unredeeming), the brilliant Mossad plot to extirpate the doctor is utterly ridiculous if you think about it for 2 minutes (why, for example, would they have Chastain attack him while he's giving her a gynecological exam? Could she ever be in a more vulnerable position? it's just a cinematic ploy, like much else in the movie), and, as noted, the final 20 minutes or so when Mirren puts her spy cloak back on and goes on a far-fetched mission to the Ukraine is beyond absurd. Had this movie been a little more modest and little better thought through, it could have been much more powerful - true of so many American commercial films, by the way. I wonder if the Israeli original version was better - would guess so.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Don't worry, I won't give the ending away (Les Diaboliques)

Clouzot's "Les Diaboliques" (mistranslated as "The Devils") is a bit creaky at times but overall an entertaining and captivating suspense film that gives a great look at the poverty and desperation on post- WWII Europe (France, in this case); set in a boarding school in a Paris suburb, run by a horrible tyrant and misogynist, who's terrible to his wife, flaunts in her face the fact that he has a mistress (Simone Signoret) whom he's nasty to as well, mean to the students, a brutal bully to his staff. The two women plan to kill him, and though we rarely root for the killers in a movie in this case we do - we can't wait for them to off him. But things don't go the way the expect. At the end of the movie, a hilarious title screen tells us: Don't be devilish; do not give away to your friends what you have just seen. So I won't, but the ending is a quite a surprise, even if it strains credulity. The movie is or ought to be well known for its several very powerful scenes: the dining room in the boarding school when the schoolmaster, Delaselle, commands his wife to swallow a mouthful of fish; the two women drowning Delasselle in a bathtub while the tenants upstairs try to listen to a radio quiz show, and most of all the final sequence, as Madame Delasselle stumbles through the hallways of the boarding school pursued by a phantom. A clever movie whose techniques of editing (the man appearing from behind the door in the otherwise empty hotel room) have been used successfully by many suspense directors over the past 50 years.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

The haunting and mysterious end of Season 3 - Battlestar Gallactica

Finished Season 3 of the always entertaining "Battlestar Gallactica" and it actually ends with the resurrected (?) Starbuck flying in a Viper and pledging to lead the colonies to Earth - she says she's been there, and we close on an image of our familiar little planet. But it will take a whole season (4 is the final) to get the colonists there. Season 3 explores the guilt or innocence of a collaborator with the enemy (Baltar), who was compelled by force to work with the Cylons and, though we know he will do anything to save his skin, may have helped the humans by refusing the resist the occupation. Most interesting, the series continues to explore the idea of the difference between humans and machines that are programmed to be like humans, i.e., the Cylons - if they are in fact programmed to destroy the human race, can they also fall in love with humans, act against the interest of their own programming - in other words, do they have free will? And for that matter to humans have free will? Aren't we also programmed - socially, and genetically? The gripping conclusion of season 3 [ spoilers here ] has 4 of the key resistors among the colonists realize or seem to realize that they are Cylons and have always been. Is this possible? More likely, I think, is that the Cylons have found a way to infiltrate and affect their brains - perhaps through music (strikingly absent among the colonists) and perhaps art (scene in some visions). The scene in which the four come together in a remote corner of the ship and they seems suddenly to realize what drew them there - their terror and confusion ("Like a switch turning on," as one says) - is among the most haunting and affecting in the whole series.

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Poetry in (slow) motion: Another excellent Korean film

The Korean movie “Poetry” is a bit slow-moving and maybe a bit too
long but still worth watching and thinking about – a really
intelligent and thoughtful examination of a very kind person faced
with difficult moral decisions and with tremendous social obstacles.
I’m almost sure this movie must be by the director of the great Oasis,
and maybe the same director also did the even better Korean film
Mother? The three films do share a sensibility; Poetry probably the
weakest of the trilogy because of some improbabilities in the plot
development and the very slow pace – doesn’t have the dramatic tension
and suspense of Mother or the pathos of Oasis. In Poetry, a 60ish
woman, facing first signs of Alzheimer’s, is caring for her teenage
grandson, a sullen and difficult brat, and she learns that the
grandson may have been part of a group of boys who bullied a young
girl in school, driving her to suicide. Strangely, the reaction of
school officials is entirely to cover this up by getting the families
to pay off the family of the dead girl. That seems to me not only
morally repugnant but unlikely – though the film does set up Korean
society as a place where people smile at one another and brush trouble
and difficulties under the rug, so to speak. One problem with the
movie is that it is inconceivable as this very kind family of the girl
who died would not have seen many signs of her distress and tried to
get her help of some kind. It’s convenient for the structure of the
movie to make the family unaware but if the director wanted that to be
so he should have made the girl’s family highly dysfunctional. That
aside, the movie follows the 60ish woman through her many painful
decisions as she tries desperately to preserve the reputation of her
grandson. It’s a burden she cannot, and should not even try, to
carry.

Monday, August 22, 2011

Unique among French films? A movie with no sex: Leon Morin, Priest

"Leon Morin, Priest" - a movie just about as interest as it sounds. Not. I expected so much more from this vintage (1961) Jean-Pierre Melville movie - which is briefly described as a story of a priest in Nazi occupied France during WWII. Melville did the truly great movie about the Occupation and French Resistance, Army of Shadows. But Leon Morin has none of that greatness - it's just slow and ponderous, something like an Eric Rohmer movie, lots of talk, but with even less action. The only truly interesting element is that Belmondo plays the very chaste and upright Morin: kind of like casting James Dean as a Mormon minister back in the day. Belmondo actually plays the part quite well, for what that's worth. It starts off promising: some women in occupied France send their children off to the countryside so that they won't be singled out as half-Jewish. One of the women, Barny (what a name!) goes to Morin for confession, and then begins a relationship of many years that she sees as perhaps flirtatious but Morin sees as purely spiritual - when at last she comes on to him, just a little, he storms off in outrage. They pass blithely through the Occupation - it's all happening offstage, there are no daring Resistance activities and no big conflict with the Nazi troops, and then it ends. By the end, Barny, a very sensual and probably bisexual young woman, realizes she can have a relationship with a man, Morin, that isn't based on sex and that doesn't become sexual (that in itself unusual if not unique in French cinema!), that Morin is interested in her as a person and as a soul to save. OK, possibly - but there's no drama as this works out - partly because Morin himself is such a stiff straight-arrow, never tempted even for a moment as far as we see. If he is tempted, it would be good of Melville to show us that - his own confession, his own torment - but within the borders of this film, Morin is saintly. Saints are boring.

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Top 10 recent suspense movies for intelligent viewers

Friend WS is off to the Cape for a week and asked me for suggestions for recent movies - suspense or action - that they might enjoy watching with their (adult) kids. Here's my list of the top ten recent suspense movies (for intelligent viewers):

5 in English:

The Hurt Locker - definitely great suspense, keeps your attention start to finish
District 9 - a little weird and unconventional, comic at times, provocative, makes you think about racism and oppression in new, unexpected ways
Red Road - dark, serious, tense for every second, strains credibility if examined closely, but, still, well acted - does include highly graphic sex scene
Fish Tank - by same (Scottish) writer-director, very raw presentation of working-class British life, very well plotted, moving, surprising
Winter's Bone - meth dealers in the Ozarks, another great American indie movie with a strong, young protagonist struggling to keep her dysfunctional family intact

5 subtitled:

The Secret in their Eyes - Definitely one of the best movies I have seen in years. Complex, thoughtful, shocking (Argentine, I think)
Pan's Labyrinth - The most unusual, eccentric movie on this list, not sure suspense is the right word to describe it but it's full of drama, some exciting moments, totally its own world (Mexican, but set in Spain?)
Revanche - great little-noticed Austrian movie about an outsider, ex-con trying to get his life on the right track and making terrible decisions
Mother - Korean movie, a son accused of murder and a mother tries to find out the truth
Lantana - A little-known Australian movie that may remind you of Crash but it's far more true to life

Saturday, August 20, 2011

Battlestar Gallactica Season 3: A series that's far better than you'd think

A little more than half-way through Season 3 of "Battlestar Gallactica," and worth checking in on this very enticing series - far better than you'd (or I'd) expect it to be: the season began with the humans held in captivity on Cylon-occupied Caprica, and we follow the resistance forces as they contact the Battlestar, stir up rebellion, and get rescued - obvious echoes here of native resistance forces in Iraq and the mideast, but here the terrorists are the humans, the heroes - one of the many clever ways in which BSG plays with our minds and our conceptions. Now that all (almost all) are reunited on Gallactica, the series heads again toward the planet they are seeking, Earth, with the Cylon forces in pursuit. Season 3 takes a sharp turn toward the mystical as we learn more about the Cylon mysteries - how they are reincarnated, their prophecies, their own power struggles - with an increasing focus on the 5 cylon faces we have never seen: who are they? Balthar, the traitorous human president, aligns himself with the Cylons, of course, while they are in power, but later captured by the humans and imprisoned on BSG (along with # 6 cylon, Caprica) - and of course he tries again to make a deal: he will obviously survive through the whole series. Aside from strong character development and genuinely captivating plot, the strength of this series involves the way it raises questions about race, xenophobia, genocide, and even about the nature of free will, without ever being didactic, preachy, or (for the most part) heavy-handed. Has a great balance of personal drama (the love affairs get rather complex in season 3), excitement, and occasional real comedy - especially the goofy scenes in which Baltar envisions Caprica speaking to him, as she leans over him in some slinky red dress - the cast must have had a great time filming those scenes!

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Days of Heaven: A potentially beautiful film gone to waste

Let's start with the positive: Terrence Mallick's 1978 film "Days of Heaven" is absolutely beautiful to watch, and the Criterion blu-ray version on a big screen is just great - one astonishing landcape shot on the Texas prairie after another, and each shot composed with a delicacy and sense of balance, line, and color - you couldbe watching "The Gleaners" come alive in cinematography - and then there are the close-ups, the faces like Evans photos, stolid and full of character, even the locusts consuming the wheat, and the fires at night on the plains like Whistler, dark and mysterious - so I'd say get the DVD and then - turn the sound off and just watch it, because the story is preposterous, poorly constructed, dragged down by a stolid script, clumsy acting, poor casting, and a melodramatic score. Anything else? Well, the narrative voice, meant to be a teenage girl?, never clear from what vantage she is telling the story, sometimes seems like a kid, but her vocabulary and sentence construction sounds like: a screenwriter. Richard Gere and whoever plays his wife/lover/sister - who knows what she is? - are OK, but the young Sam Shepard as a lonely, wealthy rancher is absurd - way to handsome and cool for this part, meant to be lonely and bit of a loser. Most of all, we never have any idea why Gere and (unnamed) girlfriend/wife pretend to be brother-sister, it's never clear whether they are scam artists trying to capture Shepard's fortune or if they're unfortunate lovers. As a result, we don't understand them or their motives, don't care at all about them when they're in flight after Gere kills Shepard (his 2nd killing - is he a sociopath, or a victim of a bad screenplay?). And lest we forget this is the swinging 70s, for no reason at all two airplanes suddenly land on the prairie, replete with an Italian flying circus (what hath Fellini wrought?). Mallick (sp?) apparently does not develop traditional narratives and works on the level of symbol or allegory - but whatever he's after her totally eludes me. Clarity of narrative would help. A potentially beautiful film gone to waste.

Monday, August 1, 2011

Questions left unanswered at the end of Season 3 of Damages

Season 3 of "Damages" does keep you watching and totally intent right up to the last moment but then, ultimately, is it a great series? For entertainment, certainly; for acting, Glenn Close is a force of nature, powerful and dominating, and Rose Byrne is maturing as an actor season by season; and many of the secondary characters - notably Lillie Tomlin, Ted Danson, and Martin Short - each primarily known as comic actors, give some of the best dramatic performances of their lives. And yet - by the end I still feel that not all the questions of the extremely complex plot were answered, not all the answers were really credible, and there are far too many loose ends, false leads, and red herrings - it definitely has the sense of something that the writing crew was building as it ran along the tracks. The 3rd season takes on a family obviously modeled on the Madoffs, but in this case the son, instead of being a hapless suicide, takes over the family enterprise and tries to access the money that dad had sheltered. In opposition, Patti Hewes (Close) tires to access the money as well to make whole those who'd lost their fortunes in the Ponzi scheme. Where this season becomes a little weaker than the first two is in that Patti plays a less central role, we don't see her wiles, smarts, and ruthlessness at work in service of her clients - most of the dirty work is done by Ellen (Byrne) and Tom (Tate Donovan). Patti's animus isn't so much against the malefactors as against the older woman who's ensnared her son, and these scenes are not too well developed and they end kind of abruptly. Lots of scenes in which Patti tries to recollect a memory of her youth regarding her first pregnancy - mysterious in a way, but a bit distracting from the main line of the plot. Lots of business about a stolen purse and a car crash in which the driver takes off - all answered, more or less, at the end. But who was this architect stalking Patti? And who was the British assistant that she fired - and why did she do so? And why is Ted Danson even in this season? And, and ... Well, overall, it's a totally fun series, especially if you can forgive a few ragged threads at the end - this is a patchwork quilt of a series, not a Swiss watch.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Surprise: 9 episodes into Season 3 of Damages, and more questions keep arising

Nine episodes into the terrific if highly challenging Season 3 of "Damages," the plot is starting to clarify, as the two time layers - the present moving forward the gap narrowing between the present narrattive and the end of the story, with Tom dead, Patti in a car crash, Ellen being interrogated (as in the earlier seasons), which we have seen in pieces since the first episode. Patti/Glenn Close remains a force of nature, and I think Ellen/Rose Byrne has matured as an actor throughout the whole series. At end of episode 9, we at last understand how Tom came to find boots and a phone in the possession of a homeless man. We see a side of Patti we rarely see as she totally loses control, angered by her son's relation with an older woman - which seems to have some echo from Patti's earlier life (a weird reference the son makes to his father's being in prison is left unexplained, for now). As is so typical of Damages, questions still raised by late-season episodes - usually the late-season episodes resolve puzzles rather than add to them. What's the deal with Martin Short's estranged father, and why is it so important to him that nobody know that his parents lived in poverty upstate? What is Arthur Frobisher/Ted Danson, industrialist who now claims to see the light and supports the environmennt, introduced again as a major character, and why does Patti intentionally provoke his anger? What's with the strange Statue of Liberty icon, where some key evidence was hidden back in Season One, and now reappaears in the car that struck Patti? Is the interrogating cop as dumb as he seems, or is it his strategy? And why is that architect pushing Patti to tear down the walls of her apartment and remodel - what will she find behind the walls? What did her ex-husband leave there?

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Am I missing something? Can anyone really watch the (late) films of de Oliverira?

Started watching de Oliveira's "I'm Going Home" last night - apparently a film about an aging French actor - and I have to say the first 10 minutes were the worst 10 minutes of film I have ever seen in my life, with possible exception of a few experimental films of water dripping and the like that at one time were considered artistic. The opening of this film shows an actor on a stage, an aged king, bumbling through is lines, his back more or less to the audience, audience at first laughing (is this meant to be funny?), then silent, a few men step off into an alcove and watch this through a window, the play goes and and on for the whole time - if there's a point to be made, couldn't it be done in one minute? Honestly, I could not bear it any longer. I remember watching another de Oliveira film, about a woman and her daughter on a ship from the UK to, I think, India, that was equally tedious, poorly paced, utterly ridiculous. Look, I know the guy is considered a giant of Portuguese cinema and perhaps it's amazing that he's still making films @ 90 or 100 or whatever he is, but who backs these films? Who invests their time and money in this stuff? Can anyone watch them? Am I missing something here?

Monday, July 18, 2011

Damages: A really smart series, with great acting from Glenn Close

I know I'm a year behind, but Season 3 of "Damages," at least from first 5 episodes, is every bit as interesting and challenging as the first two seasons. With this series, it's virtually impossible (a year after watching it) to recall the intricacies of the plot, the many twists and turns and double-crosses, but what remains is the excitement and the provocation - in part because of the odd use of time, narrrations in all three seasons told in jumbled time sequence, with cues - 6 months later, or 6 months earlier - and because we always see, right from the start, how things ended up - the various dead bodies, etc. - it's not so much that we follow a story but, detective like, we see the outcome and are trying to figure out the clues. Though it's suspenseful, it's not about suspense but about engagement. At times, I feel as if the writers themselves are trying to figure out the plot as it goes along, setting themselves a premise and figuring out how to get there, but most of the time we're in sure hands. And of course Glenn Close as Patti Hewes is a force of nature - every bit as great in Season 3 as in the earlier seasons, this time a bit more vulnerable as her husband's gone and her son is more or less out of her life. Patti, becoming increasingly isolated, is all the more ruthless - and if there's a problem in the series it's that she has no real counterpart, nobody can stand up to her. Ellen (Rose Byrne) is a stronger character in Season 3 than ever before, now working in the DA's office as they investigate a Madoff-like Ponzi scheme and as Patti fights to claim the assets for the victims - you'd think they'd be working in partnership, but there's a lot of opposition and jealousy, that for some reason - we don't yet know why or how - lead to the murder of Patti's partner, the hapless Tom Shayes. A really smart series with great acting from Glenn Close.

Monday, July 11, 2011

A bit of classic cinema noir: Out of the Past

Mobster-gambler Kirk Douglas hires straight-shooting detective Robert Mitchum to track down the gal who pumped him with slugs from the 45 and went on the lam with $40K, but when Mitchum tracks the dame to Acapulco and spots her at a lone cafe he falls for her hard and double-crosses his own client. Mitchum and the gal make plans to head off on their own, but Douglas won't give up this gal - he wants back his 40 grand and a shot at revenge for the slugs to the gut. Douglas hires Mitchum's former sidekick, who tracks the lovely couple at a mountain hideaway, where the gal performs her old trick with a pistol and shoots the sidekick dead. Worried about the rap, the no-good gal goes back to Douglas, who sets a trap to knock off a rich oldster and pin it on Mitchum, but Mitchum sees through the scheme. That's the basic hardboiled plot outline of the 1947 "Out of the Past," a not-bad noirish detective thriller that has an unusual element I didn't catch in the summary above: Mitchum leaves the biz and creates new life under a new ID as a gas-station owner in the High Sierras, where he falls for a sweet young girl in town, but has to tell her ultimately about his troubled past. Will she go for him anyway? Can he make one last foray into the dark world to clear his record, pay off old debts, and spend the rest of his life changing tires? Some of the dialog is pretty funny and outdated, other dialog sharp - though not at the Chandler level, to say the least. Movie marred by some wild improbabilities, such as the likelihood of Mitchum's ever tracking the woman to Acapulco, on a hunch. Has some nice elements, too, including some good outdoors scenes, a rarity in noir films, a very good first scene at which a menacing sidekick finds the under-cover Mitchum, interesting deaf-mute character (played by a deaf actor, I wonder?), and a terrific scene when the thugs visit Mitchum in Acapulco, where he says he hasn't found the girl, and he - and we - expect that the girl will show up at any second and blow his cover.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Can Modern Family become one of the all-time great TV comedies?

Is there anyone who doesn't like the comedy series "Modern Family"? How could you not like this show, with its totally adorable characters, a wide variety of types who, as in so many complex modern families, are all somehow related and somehow manage to relate to one another. The episodes are not only very funny, beautifully scripted both line by line and in the odd twists and connections that links the various plot strands in each episode in surprising ways. They're also uplifting, feel-good without being (too) schmaltzy and without being tendentious. Many of the great comedy shows have been largely about character, but this one is almost unique in that it's about character-driven plots, three separate strands generally, one for each family "branch," that neatly tie together in a sharp conclusion - some of the best-written short scripts since the Dick Van Dyke Show, in my opinion. Not as comically funny as shows like Seinfeld or The Office - no one in modern family is a well-known or rising comic star building his or her own career - they're all "in character" in this ensemble rather than comic actors using the venue of a series to spin material. But the show is very funny in the broadly comic sense of humor as an illumination on the oddities of life - we continually recognize ourselves and our friends (and family) in these characters - and yet each is so distinct, and so different from one another. I'm not sure if it's yet one of the great TV comedies, but over time as the characters grow and develop and change it will have a chance to rise to those ranks. For now, it's surely one of the most likable shows on TV.

Saturday, June 25, 2011

An early - and not as good - version of Bonnie & Clyde

Post of a week or so ago has led to some suggestions for the list of best American movies in black-and-white, including TB suggestion of "They Live by Night," which I watched last night and - well - you can certainly see the raw material here, and maybe it's hard to gaze back at it through blinding light cast by the later remake, Bonnie and Clyde, but Live by Night is hardly a great movie. Story of 3 guys who break from prison and the youngest of the 3 in particular who hooks up with a young woman and hopes to live with her like "normal people" but is inevitably drawn back into the life of crime, robbing banks. There are some terrific scenes, beautiful shot and conceived by director Nicholas Ray: the opening sequence of the getaway car chase on dusty rural roads (maybe the 40s? but largely unchanged from the 20s I'd say), the terrific scene in the "marriages performed" office, especially the approach to the office as seen through the neon window sign, the hero (Bowie) scouting out the town of Zelton for the next bank robbery, the weirdness of the rustic cabin that Bowie and Keechie (girlfriend) rent and try to fix up "like normal people." What draws the film down, though, are first of all the terrible miscastings or maybe the horrible acting - the gang of thieves looks like a bunch of guys from a method acting class, and Bowie looks like a GQ model - there's nothing here that makes us think even for a second that he could be an ex-con or torn between crime and love. Second, their naivete about being able to break away from the life of crime is totally absurd - it would be obvious tht cops all over Texas would be looking for these 2 and would find them in 5 minutes - it's almost as if the codes or conventions of the era had to make the criminals either totally bad guys or totally good guys and we didn't effectively explore the ambiguities until much later.

Friday, June 24, 2011

The most entertaining series on TV: Battlestar Gallactica

"Battlestar Gallactica" is far from the best series ever to be on TV but it is certainly among the most entertaining ever - once you buy into the premise of the series, which you will inevitably do after the first few episodes, it's impossible not to want to know what happens next to the characters. True, it's often over the top with the cartoonish extremes of its characters and yes the Cylons and all the starship battles are straight out of a video game, but overall the series as a lot of fun, filled with lots of well-drawn characters whom we come to care about, and most of all very smartly written and well plotted - you never feel that they're dragging this out or making it up as it goes along, but rather it has the feeling of an epic drama unfolding slowly over time. The main premise in a nutshell: a force of humanlike robots (the Cylons) attack the "12 colonies" and only about 50k survive, in a fleet of battlestars and civilian aircraft - they continue to fight the Cylons while searching for legendary home called Earth. The Cylons, who can look human and can clone themselves (there are many copies, as we're reminded) infiltrate and are a constant threat - but over the course of seasons 2 and and 2.5, some personal relations develop between Cylon and human, which leads to the inevitable question of: is love possible between these two "species," or are the Cylons just feigning these emotions in order to conquer once and for all? Won't give anything away here except to say that season 2.5 ends in a situation of true despair, but there are some 35 episodes to go, so all is not lost, yet.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

A film without fascism: why the fascists were whitewashed out of Paisan

Watched some of the supplementary material on the Criterion disc of Rossellini's "Paisan" (thanks, Criterion/Janus - your discs remain unsurpassed!) - and got some new appreciation for and understanding of this groundbreaking but uneven movie. Interesting to hear in one of the Rossellini interviews that he says he hates (I think that was his word) the earlier Rome, Open City and loves Paisan. Why would this be? They are both part of his so-called War Trilogy, from the postwar Italian cinema, they both ushered in the Italian neo-realism (a term he also "hates," - why not just realism, he asked). But seeing a few clips from each I could see that Rome, though much more tight and tense as a narrative, and much better acted, is a traditional story with all the elements of Italian melodrama - it's almost operatic (Maganini shot dead in the street - a clip shown thousands of times). Paisan is by contrast much more experimental and unusual - an attempt to create a portrait of a nation in time through 6 unconnected vignettes. The pacing is therefore more erratic and uneven, but perhaps grander in the end - Canterbury Tales compared with Troilus & Cressida, as an analogy. Rome is obviously more appealing, but Paisan may have opened more artistic possibilities. One of the commentaries took on the issue rarely discussed: what about the Italian fascists? They are largely washed out of both films as we seem to see the partisans v the Germans as if Italian fascism played no role at all in the country's devastation and shame. Apparently the government at the time was focused on reconciliation and would approve no film that took on the fascists for what they were. The much later Night of the Shooting Stars, though not as good a movie, was more honest on this score.

Monday, June 20, 2011

If you remember liking Closely Watched Trains - don't see it again

Everyone watched "Closely Watched Trains" when it came out (in 1966), I remember seeing it at the Ormont, the "arthouse" cinema in East Orange!, though I remembered nothing else about it. Seeing it again last night brought back almost no memories of the original. If you do remember it, don't see it again, you'll be disappointed. I'm sure at the time it was a huge shock and breakthrough: hailed for frank sexuality, narrative simplicity, seriousness of purpose, sensitive portrait of youth, stark black and white imagery, noble sacrifice, captivating title, and to top it off - who would have expected such a film to emerge from behind the "Iron Curtain"? Today, though it still holds up on the level of cinematography, other elements seem tepid and boring. The sexuality - girl after girl throwing themselves into the arms of the rather unattractive railroad station workers - seems more of a male fantasy: it's not about sexual liberation but about female degradation. The sensitive youth - leading to a suicide attempt because of his sexual impotence - is a very poorly developed character: for example, movie begins with lots of set-up about his family, whom we never see again after the first ten minutes; his naivete seems cute and funny but is actually preposterous and makes light of his torment. The politics - the railroad workers sabatoge a German munitions train (movie set during WWII) - doesn't kick in till well into the film and is not believable in the last; though hailed at the time as a metaphor for Czech resistance to the Soviets, today it seems like a way to make heroes out of guys who were probably just buffoons. Most of all, the movie is painfully, dreadfully slow-paced and at times confusing. What may have seemed serious and profound years ago now just seems like a movie that can't get its plot under way. Sometimes, it's best to leave the past alone.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Nobody films open-air cinema better than Jean Renoir

Even mediocre Jean Renoir films have some wonderful and amazing elements that make them worth watching at least once. "La Bete Humaine" is mediocre Renoir, and therefore a cut above move movies of its era or maybe ever. The problems: a rather confusing, melodramatic plot with a couple of murders and potential murders and with a weirdly unexplained plot element in which the seemingly nice-guy protagonist, a railroad station manager, nearly strangles the girl he loves - and then she disappears from the picture. The film is adapted from the Zola novel, and I think we see here the problem of trying to manage the social and narrative complexities of the great 19th-century realism novels - Zola, Dickens, above all - in a 90-minute span. Today, these works can be and are often told through the miniseries - Bleak House and Little Dorrit two excellent examples, and isn't there a Germinal miniseries out there, too? As to the strengths, two elements come to mind: an absolutely beautiful opening sequences on the French railroads, as we see the engineers dealing expertly with the difficult and dangerous job of managing these locomotives and some great footage shot from a moving train racing along the tracks - a vanished world for sure and still very interesting to see from the inside (Cousin Fred, take note!); second, to this day nobody does en plain air cinema better than Renoir (the legacy of his father is obvious) - this film has a stunning sequence when the station manager visits his godmother in the country, as well as other beautiful nighttime exteriors. Renoir fans will remember the many great country scenes in Rules of the Game. Bete is no Rules of the Game, but it's pretty good in its own right.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Beauty v Truth: Rossellini's Paisan

Roberto Rossellini's 1946 "Paisan" is a curiosity today but highly influential on world cinema and still worth seeing and enjoying, at least once: made up of 6 episodes, each of about 20 minutes, it follows the invasion of American forces as they move north through Italy, from Sicily to the Po Valley, encountering some German resistance and linking occasionally with the Italian partisans. Some of the episodes are kind of melodramatic, but each presents a little story and each is a remarkably different setting: soldier picks of prostitute (and doesn't recognize her as someone he knew in the past), three chaplains stay in a monastery and are overwhelmed by the devotion, a partisan soldier and an American woman try to cross the Arno into partisan territory, a black soldier befriends a street urchin, and so on. Some of the scenes are strikingly beautiful, especially those shot along the Po river and the deserted streets of Florence, which looks like a DeChirico painting. Some are beautifully composed: the dinner in the monastery, with the monks fasting, which looks like a Renaissance tableau. Some of the production is ludicrously amateur by today's standards - Rossellini must have been working on a shoe string - with terrible shot-to-shot continuity. The terrible acting, especially among the American soldiers - who were these guys? GI's who stayed on in Italy after the war? - is a huge detraction. All of us should admire the resistance fighters, and who know whether any of us would have had the courage to take on the fascists or the occupiers, but this and other postwar films make it seem as if virtually the entire nation was partisan - someone must have supported Mussolini (and Hitler) or at least remained silent and unaware - the glorification of the Partisans may have done much to boost postwar morale but I suspect it's a bit of a fiction.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Close to the Brink: HBO's Too Big to Fail

"Too Big to Fail" is one of the best HBO movies in some time, based on the Andrew Ross Sorkin book, it is a highly dramatic, thoroughly credible account of the days in September 2009 when the entire American (and global) financial system nearly melted down. Focus is on Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen and his struggles, personal and political, as he sets aside his ideological belief in free markets and gets the government to step in and bail out the banks. Paulsen does some heroic things, but he's not a hero, as few in politics ever really are - movie makes clear that he could have and should have demanded more from the banks - he had to push to get them (especially the supposedly healthier ones) to accept federal involvement (government bought billions of preferred stock in 9 banks), and refused to require the banks to give that money out in loans to spur the economy. Also, his entire focus was on saving the banks, and not a word about saving the people whom the banks had screwed, through foreclosures and, ultimately, through unemployment. Never the less, I part with many of my progressive friends on this in that I do give him a lot of credit for taking action - as few Republicans would have done. The movie largely gets the tone of government workers during time of crisis just right - the many meetings, conferences, cell-phone calls, lots of good acting from a range of (mostly white male) actors, notably Giamotti (William Hurt OK in lead, too). Only one stilted scene, when concept of credit default swaps explained in a totally stagy office conversation. Otherwise, movie is tense and dramatic and kind of scary as we see how close we were to the brink.

Monday, June 13, 2011

Could anyone not like Casablanca?

Could anyone possibly not like "Casablanca"? It has to be one of the most if note the most universally appealing movie ever made - it's got everything, a great story line with a terrific love interest, politics, international tension, history, wit, sharp dialogue, beauty, music, visual interest, great acting, great characters, beautiful ending. Remarking on just a few elements: Humphrey Bogart's Rick and the laconic dialogue that made his image and made this movie so famous and so often-quoted, including: Why did you come to Morocco? For the waters. But we don't have any waters here; this is a desert. I was misinformed. Bogart/Rick is the classic tough guy (I don't stick my neck out for nobody) who is actually a romantic and deeply sentimental. His decision at the end to send Ilsa off with Laszlo is so famous, and so beautifully scripted, that it's been forever memorialized in Woody Allen's hilarious reprise/parody, Play it Again, Sam. It's one of the rare movies in which the protagonist faces a true moral dilemma - should he take the safe passage and leave with the woman he loves or let her go off with her husband, Laszlo, the noble freedom fighter and total stiff? Throughout the film, the tensions between the Nazis and the European refugees in Morocco are huge, serious, menacing - who can forget the great scene when the Europeans at the cafe sign the Marseillaise? - with the two most interesting characters, Rick and the police chief (Claude Rains) in the middle, cutting their own deals, Rains cynical and blithely corrupt, Rick a mystery, a true American existential hero.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

A short list of the best American movies in black and white

Watched "Casablanca" last night - because it's next up for our film-discussion group @ work; we picked it because one of the younger members of the group said she had never seen a movie in black-and-white. Amazing! So many great movies in b/w, so, for Nicole and her cohort, here, in no particular order, is a list of 12 great American movies in b/w that everyone of every age ought to see. Seeing these would be a quick course in American life, art, movies, culture, and would be lots of fun:

Casablanca
It's a Wonderful Life
Psycho
High Noon
Citizen Kane
Manhattan
Mean Streets
Duck Soup
His Girl Friday (The Front Page)
Some Like it Hot
Night of the Hunter
A Streetcar Named Desire

Other suggestions?

And this is American films only. In a future post, I'll suggest films from Europe and Asia.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Laughing out Loud: The First Ever Reality TV Show

M liked the HBO film "Cinema Verite" more than I did, though I found it mildly interesting. I was quite interested in the topic - the first ever reality show, American Family, 10 episodes on PBS about the Loud family of Santa Barbara, which truly captured national interest and attention back in the early 70s. I wondered how it would look by today's standards - whether it would seem more (or less) stagy that contemporary reality TV, which I find totally dull, whether it would look today like a real documentary or whether we'd see all the flaws and the seams. Movie doesn't answer those questions; does use some clips from the original, which I found more interesting than the movie itself. Diane Lane and Tim Robbins play the Loud parents; Gandolfini plays the filmmaker. Movie totally takes the POV of Patti Loud as the victimized wife, and so she is - but my memory was that she's no prize herself. The kids, particularly Lance, are made far more extreme and unconventional than I recall back in the day. Movie touches on a number of themes, most particularly the difficulty in defining the "threshold" of privacy: when the crew should leave the Louds alone, when the Louds are using the filmmakers for their own purposes. Also touches lightly on whether the series itself caused the breakup of marriage or merely captured on film what was going to happen anyway. Seems to suggest that the series made reality rather than captured it - and therefore was not the anthropological study that the filmmakers hoped - it's impossible to observe people without affecting them. Good topics for discussion, but they never came fully alive as a drama for me during this movie.

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Cosi Fan Tutte - a great community production all around from Opera Providence

Opera Providence this weekend is doing a totally delightful production of Mozart's Cosi fan Tutte - in contemporary setting (a clever transition to Naples, Florida, and a luxury hotel, with Don Alfonso as the owner/manager and Despina as the concierge - works really well, better even the the Sellers version that set the opera in Despina's Diner). Story sung in English - nice to not have to read supertitles, though English of course never sounds as beautiful and open as Italian, in the arias. Could they do the recitative in English and the arias in Italian? Just thinking. The staging was great - all of the chorus was the staff of the hotel, bustling about, carrying luggage, etc. - and during the chorus, very cleverly, Alfonso distributed to the "staff" copies of the sheet music he is asking them to sing to the departing soldiers. Beautiful set done on a low budget, terrific theater venue at the restored Cranston Center for the Arts (I'm not joking). Most of all, the leads were excellent, especially Fiordeligi and Dorabella - beautiful voices (esp. McVey's) and they were both totally charming and gorgeous. The small orchestra was right on tempo and crisp and sharp - really, this was everything you could hope for in a community opera - more, actually. Beautiful singing, very lively and funny production that never lagged for a moment (personally, I have always thought the 2nd half/act to be a bit slow and reptitious, but who am I to judge Mozart?). Only disappointment: Why so many empty seats on a Saturday night, in a place like Rhode Island, where opera-lovers have filled the Vet for visiting companies not nearly as good as Opera Providence? Hope they can build more support from the community.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Scenes from a bad marriage: Blue Valentine

It's not a very likable movie, but "Blue Valentine" is a truly impressive account of a marriage gone to hell - echoes of many recent Indie films, though its characters (played really well by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams) and its narrative are more complete - film goes to great lengths to build in the back story so we see not only the marriage falling apart, with a unity of time (the "present" action takes place over a two-day span) but also of the back story - we see not only that these people are together but how they got together: very effective how we see them in some scenes as young and attractive and terribly needy, each in his/her way, and in others somewhat (about 5 years, but looks like more, especially Gosling) older, and having moved on in different directions, Williams thinking at least a little about her career (nursing) whereas Gosling has lost all the boyish charm that won Williams over and now sunk into laziness and alcoholism and self-indulgence, though he's not a complete loser, he's a devoted dad for example. The true roots of Blue Valentine are probably the films of Cassavetes - it seems to be a movie that allowed the leads (and there are no other significant characters) to improvise scenes, to build their own dialogue based on the established situation, in other words, a film that draws heavily on the theatrical tradition, a bit of a throwback in that way. Film is totally credible and grows on you as it moves along and we get deeper and more complex info about the two lead characters. One of those films I admired more than loved, in part because it's very dark and in part because in capturing the inanity of Gosling's life and the failure of the marriage the film at times seems to be running on empty.