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

See also my blog on books: Elliot's Reading

Monday, March 28, 2011

One of the greatest films - and no doubt for less than $100k

Roman Polanski's (first?) movie, "Knife in the Water," from 1962 I think, is just as great and powerful and impressive today as it must have been 40 years ago - so clean and simple in its plot, structure, and elements - just three characters, beautiful clean b/w photography, cool jazz background from time to time but mostly just the ambient sounds, takes place in a classically defined 24 hours, most of it on board a small sailing yacht, the Christine - you'd think it's impossible to get so much variety and so much interesting footage in such confines, but Polanski does an amazing job with very limited resources - film couldn't have cost for than $100k to make. Three character - a couple, Andrez 40ish and rakish, the skipper of the boat and bossy and aggressive, his beautiful 20ish wife, Krystina, competent and somewhat demure, and a 20ish hitchhiker they pick up, unnamed, whom they invite to join them for a day and night of sailing - the men immediately begin fighting for dominance, there's danger and aggression in every frame, the hitchhiker carries the knife of the title, which is always a menace, and turns out to be the catalyst for the final conflict but not exactly in the way you'd think. The ending is totally provocative and disturbing - won't give anything away here, you ought to see it or re-see it. Polanski's career has been enormous and I think perhaps unappreciated because of the troubles he's had with the law - and of course the tragedy in his life must have hindered his talent in some ways - but I think a retrospective on his work would show him to be one of the giants.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Why Macbeth is Shakespeare's most challenging play (for directors)

Barker Community Playhouse, in Providence, calling itself America's oldest community theater (maybe so), performs "Macbeth," and does a pretty good job with it. Honestly, you're not going to get the Royal Shakespeare or Orson Welles in a community theater, but we're lucky to get a solid and serious production of this great play that so few amateur companies would ever fathom, both because of the superstitions that surround it and for the daunting challenges of production: how do you handle the multiple scenes and settings, the need for a castle and a battlefield, a moving forest, a blasted heath, ghosts and visions, the weird sisters, the battles and the hand-to-hand conflict, all that blood and gore, and most of all the incredibly stark and unstable mental status of the two leads, Macbeth and Lady M? Tough for any theater, perhaps a play that presupposed the possibilities of film - and a real challenge for a small theater with basically no backstage space. That all said, the leads were competent or better (Lady M. the best), and though the stage gestures were awkward and melodramatic at times (I hated Macbeth's kneeling through "Tomorrow and tomorrow...," some were nicely understated, such as the great Macduff scene or imaginative - the 3 witch scene in which the sisters mouthed the prophecies as ghostly voice spoke the words through the sound system. Iconic lit prof from SUNYAB Lionel Abel used to say the Macbeth was Shakespeare's only true tragedy, which I think is kind of absurd, but seeing the play live reminds that it is no doubt his most intense and psychologically focused tragedy and still evokes pity and terror - I had thought it could not be done in contemporary setting (this production was in period), but perhaps it could be set right in the corporate hq of Enron or Citibank?

Saturday, March 26, 2011

School of Rock a la Japan - can you guess the ending?

The Japanese version of School of Rock is a 2005 picture, "Linda Linda Linda" (lyrics from pop song, probably composed for this movie by a former Smashing Pumpkin member) - about a trio of high-school girls who need to perform for a school fair and lose their lead singer - sounds like a million others, and it is like a million others, except for the setting, which gives U.S. viewers a window on what high-school life is like in what seems to be an industrial small city in Japan - it's very different from here, if the film is accurate, students far more deferential and shy and conventional that in any typical U.S. high school. I wanted to like the film but just never warmed up to it, and oddly the films seemed to melt away in our Blu-Ray and died about 65 minutes in, so I don't know the conclusion, though any idiot can make a solid guess. Part of the charm of the film I suppose is that much is left unsaid and unexplained: there's some kind of falling out among the band members before the start of the film, causing one to walk and somehow inexplicably causing another to injure her hand - we don't know how or why. The girls recruit the Korean exchange student to join the group - again, totally inexplicably. She doesn't know the music, she's not popular or glamourous. In another picture, this would be a huge plot element: why did they have to work with an unpopular girl? how do they get along? does she change? does she win them over? and so forth. Here, it's just a given. The main problem with the film is that there are no obstacles and no antagonists - no angry parents, jealous boyfriends, rival band, internal rivalries in the band: the girls just move forward with their project, getting gradually more competent, toward the obvious conclusion that I never reached.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Can you trust a Cylon? : Battlestar Galactica Season 2

"Battlestar Galactica" Season 2 remains totally entertaining, incredibly smart in its script, well acted, and a surprisingly funny (how can you not laugh at the scenes of Gaius and his Cylon paramour, Number Six?) - not perfect, still kind of cheesy and over the top melodrama at times, but very different from most other long TV series in this key way: you have a sense throughout that the creators (like the characters?) have a real destination or destiny in mind, that they know exactly where the story line is heading and how to get there, and they move us artfully along the way. The major theme of Season 2 is the evolving relation between humans and Cylons, the human-created machines built as robot servants who have rebelled against humans, begun the Cylon war, wiped out the "12 Colonies," and, most important, have created clones that look exactly like humans. Season 2 focuses on the clone of one of the Galactica pilots, Sharon/Boomer - the crew knows she's a Cylon, they imprison her, but she says she loves one of the pilots, is carrying his child, and gives valuable information to the crew about the Cylon enemies. But can they trust her? Or is she programmed to win their trust and then betray? If so, does she even know that? Moreover, the question is how to treat her - and we see a sharp contrast at the end of the season when Battlestar Pegasus arrives, the counterpart to Galactica, where the Cylon prisoner is terribly abused and the crew is sexist and the Admiral is a martinet. The current political analogies (Iraqi prisoners) are obvious, and it's obvious where our sympathies should lie, but is the Galactica crew making stupid decisions based on sentiment or the right decisions based on both good ethics and good tactics? Can they really gain useful information from the "friendly" Cylon, or are they being led into a trap?

Saturday, March 19, 2011

A monumental documentary about the Nazi horrors - A Film Unfinished

It's hugely important that this movie and that others like it are made and shown - in the same spirit that it's a vital part of our culture and historical responsibility that we have a Holocaust Museum - but watching it, like visiting the museum, is painful, almost unbearable. The movie is "A Film Unfinished," a most unusual Holocaust documentary. Apparently the Nazis in their amazingly demented manner saved all kinds of film footage in an archival vault, and one of the discoveries in the vault was 4 reels of uncut film, apparently the raw footage for a propaganda feature never made or completed; the canisters are labeled "Ghetto," and film is of the Warsaw ghetto in 1942, before the deportations and killings. It's clear from the footage that the Nazis were developing a film that would show Jews living in luxury in the ghetto, while their fellow Jews were living in dire poverty - ah, the cruelty and inhumanity of the Jews! Perhaps this concept was too absurd even for the Nazis, or perhaps they abandoned the project because the leaders decided just to wipe out the ghetto altogether - nobody knows. Amazingly, the filmmakers were able to track down a German who was one of the photographers on the project, then just a young man obviously, and he talks very frankly about the filming. Most horrendous is that, though the film was meant to be Nazi propaganda, the unedited footage is the strongest graphic evidence we've ever seen about the horrors of life in the Warsaw ghetto - truly unbearable to watch at some points. This film is truly monumental, a visual record of the horror - one of the great documents of our time.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Going after the perps : Who caused the meltdown of 2008

"Inside Job" won the Oscar this year for best documentary, but surely that category needs some rethinking. I'm sure others have noted this, but I really don't think we should think of films like this one, like Waiting for "Superman" or An Inconvenient Truth, as documentaries: they're really what I would call Nonfiction Films. In a true documentary, the director and crew use their recording equipment and all their cinematic skills, including during post-production, to record or document an event, action, society, person's life, or way of life. In films like Inside Job and many others of its type, the director is investigating a topic or event or issue, but not exactly documenting it - it's like an essay, it has a strong point of view, its didactic and instructive, but not documentary. I know there is overlap and many films that would be hard to categorize (e.g., personal family histories such as Zachary, the Friedmans), but this is a useful polarity that might help us think better about these films and their intent. Inside Job is very persuasive and powerful, the most courageous and thorough look (in film at least) on the 2008 financial meltdown, in particular at who was responsible for it. At times it goes after targets that are just too easy and obvious - some idiotic and totally corrupt academic whores who will sign their name to anything for big pay, and a few Bush-era underlings unable to defend their absurd positions - but it also makes clear that the heart of the whole meltdown wasn't the greed of banks - that's to be expected - but complete deregulation and the complete lack of government oversight, all in service of the wealthy oligarchs who control our elected officials. I wish it had been a little harder on Reagan (and Bush II) and had drawn a tighter line between their ideologies and the interests their ideologies served - but Inside Job does make the right connections and it puts more than a few blowhards in their place.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Love and squalor in a Philippine movie theater

If you've always wanted to see a Philippine movie, well, then I guess you could add "Service" to your queue, because there aren't that many that have made it to the U.S., but other than that I don't know why you'd watch it. For the first 20 minutes or so, Brillante Mendoza's film seems to have a lot of promise - in its grim, dark way. We are placed right within the world of a large and complex matriarchal family that runs a rather large porno-movie complex (called Family, oddly), and we begin to focus on a few of the main characters in the family, especially a pretty young sister (teenage) and a cut schoolboy, also the strong mother and grandmother. Mendoza films with a documentary style, hand-held camera for the most part, grainy, poorly framed - giving the film a distinct realistic look that's very effective. Except for a moment toward the end, there's no musical soundtrack, just the ambient sounds of the theater and the ever-present noise from the street. All promising stuff. But to be honest the whole movie is one scene of squalor after another - cheap sex, pickups, wounded bodies, a horrible scene of cleaning up a flooded bathroom, and so on. Despite all the realistic setup and the promising intro of characters and even a few plot elements (there's a family lawsuit going on, for example), the film does nothing to bring these strands together. I'm sure it's a realistic portrait of a certain kind of life and place that most of us are (thankfully) not familiar with - but for all its realism, its intensity, its honest look at the lives of the alienated and marginalized, its squalid exoticism, in the end it was painful to watch and the film as a whole amounted to much less than the sum of its parts.

Monday, March 7, 2011

Poverty, despair - and a great film, in the mode of Winter's Bone

Not positive but pretty sure that Andrea Arnold, who wrote and directed "Fish Tank," is also the writer/director of the great Red Road - the two movies share a setting and a world view that you rarely see in movies, thoughtful and powerful presentations of a young woman (in Fish Tank the 15-year-old Mia) in Britain's dreary industrial suburbs and projects (setting not specified in Fish Tank, perhaps outside London?) who faces a crisis in her life and through strength and wherewithal and cunning takes life into her own hands at great risk, in the process gaining some victory but suffering great loss, too. Mia, in Fish Tank, is a totally tough customer, not at all sympathetic, at least at first, but you see the horrible family she comes from, the endless cycles of poverty and despair, and you wonder what hope she has - though she does have some because of the strength of her personality. There's not a moment of sentiment or sweetness here. Also, not a moment that's anything but completely credible (in this regard, FT is better than Red Road, which, for all its strengths, relied on several improbabilities and even impossibilities to bring its plot to conclusion). Katie Jarvis is, I think, the name of the actor playing Mia; she's great. Arnold has staked out a territory all her own, though she shares a lot of the world view of the Belgian directors, the Dardennes (L'Enfant, et al.), and maybe a little of view of a few American indies such as Winter's Bone. But there aren't many others. You wouldn't want all films to be like this, but it's great that some films take on such difficult subjects, settings, and people with honesty and compassion.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Most stilted dialog in the history of cinema - but intentionally so

The 1948 Chinese low-key melodrama (bet you didn't know there was such a thing) "Spring in a Small Town" is more of a curiosity than a great film, but still worth seeing once anyway - it's about the most low-budget film you can imagine, film in grainy 4:3 BW with a crappy soundtrack that jumps in and out, musical overdubs sound as if they're picked up from a mic held in front of a cheap speaker, editing is a patch job, the print is grainy and poorly lighted - all of which add to the charm of this artifact, as we have to imagine what the Chinese film industry must have been like in 1948 and then wonder how this film survived at all through the revolution and the Cultural Revolution, but here it is: a man and his wife live in a house that was once a fine estate and is now ruined from bombings, apparently, during the war; he's depressed and suicidal; she is cold to him and frustrated at the limitations of her life, her only freedom is in walking along the "city wall," another crumbling ruin out in a field by a river. In fact we never see the small town in which they live - the whole film done a very small location, with a cast of 5. Story concerns arrival of husband's best friend who, it turns out, has a past relation with the wife - and then various tensions as they try to determine whether to reignite their passion. The scene in which she visit his room at night to bring him sheets and blankets is the most stilted dialog in the history of cinema - intentionally so, totally capturing the awkwardness they feel together and the incredible repression, particularly hers. It's a good story, and I was pleased to see in the notes that it has been remade - but there's definitely a certain charm in seeing the original. It looks not 60 years old by 600 years old - from another world.