Some truly creepy Hitchcock moments in Marnie

Inspired by the HBO movie The Girl, we watched Hitchcock's 1964 movie, Marnie, with Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery - suprisingly the movie stands up very well over time. By today's standards, yes, it's about 30 minutes too long, far too much talking exposition, too much emphasis on the plot (as if every scene in the book, which was the source, must be dramatized), the score seems incredibly old-fashioned and orchestrated and annoying, it's painfully obvious that so much was filmed on studio lots, and the Fx, notably the scenes in which Hedren is supposed to be horseback riding and in which she and Connery are driving, as technically primitive - and yet - the movie is compelling and keeps you thinking all the way through until the last sequence reveals the trauma that has led Marnie to become a thief and a hater of men, that has led to her weird phobias of lightning and the color red. Along the way, the movie has some really excellent scenes and sequences, from the famous opening shots of Marnie on a deserted train platform carrying an unusual satchel (filled with cash, we soon learn), the after-hours scene in which she robs the company vault while a cleaning lady just out of her line of sight mops the floor; the odd scenes at the race track when Marnie freaks out about one of the jockey's colors (red and white) and they're confronted by a man (a detective?) who seems to recognize Marnie/Hedren; and everything on the honeymoon voyage to the South Seas when Marnie/Hedren refuses to allow Connery to touch her. Hitchcock more than any other director knew how to frame a scene - he obviously didn't care a bit about his actors or their craft, the characters are props and he is obtuse to their inflections (Hedren, like most of his heroines, is breathy and monotonous, and Connery, weirdly, slips into Scottish dialect at various key moments); H. also was enamored of pop psychology - everything can be resolved once the childhood trauma is played out in the present (would it were so simple), and the conclusion here will inevitably remind one of Spellbound, Vertigo, et al. But, still, a very entertaining movie with some of the true Hitchcock creepy touches (the mother with her distorted face and strange Southern drawl, the kids playing a rhyming game on the rain-soaked street), worth watching once at least.

BFFs?: Friends with Kids

My past few posts have noted movies that I went into with pretty high expectations and that disappointed - movies that for the most part took on big themes and fell apart under the weight of their own pretensions (and audience expectations), but last night saw a movie that kind of slipped in beneath the radar and in fact was far better than I'd expected - a light-hearted genre romantic comedy that turned out to be both genuinely funny and in my view true to life, with ample plot twists and unexpected developments that showed the growth and evolution of the character, perhaps of all of the (6) main characters without feeling scripted or arbirtrary: Jennifer Westfeldt's Friends with Kids - which starts out with 6 Manhattan yuppie types meeting for dinner and drinks in a rather sleep restaurant and from the start you don't particularly like them, they seem spoiled and wealthy and narcisstic, seemingly a bad start, but we watch them grow out of this - into the next phase, when 2 of the couples have kids and the third "couple" the main characters, played by Westfeldt (who also wrote and directed!) and Adam Scott are just old friend, not even attracted to each other - observing the stresses that kids put on a once-successful marriage, they decide they want to have a baby but not be married not even a couple - seems quite unlikely but Westfeldt brings it off and the various complications ensue - the jealousies, arguments about responsibility, shifting affections, etc. - this is another in the long history of movies of girl-boy best friends who do/do not become a couple: think of Annie Hall, Jules & Jim, When Harry, and the very recent and very weak Celeste and Jesse Forever - this one stands with the best, some absolutely terrific scenes (the ski weekend, the first visit to the home of the couple in Brooklyn since parenthood, the parents' visits to see the newborn, and many others) - Westfeldt has affection for her characters with all their faults and mistakes, never takes a superior attitude, lets their lives unfold in a variety of ways, some good some not so good. Not a deep or profound movie, nor does it mean to be, but a solid comedy that feels accurate and real.

A film that could have been another Citizen Kane

No doubt about it that Philip Seymour Hoffman improves every movie he's in, and his performance in The Master is terrific, and Joachim Phoenix, as Fred the disciple, is also very good and strange and edge, if had to understand with his mannered, mumbling dialogue - and the movie has some terrific scenes as well: Phoenix's various violent outbursts, always just beneath the surface and expected but terrifying when they occur; and the great "sessions" during which Hoffman interviews Phoenix, in the movie called "processing," but obviously derived from the mysterious "auditing" in Scientology. These sessions are scary and weird and aggressive (the ones where Hoffman interviews the various society lady acolytes are less frightening and just strange and exploitative): in short, there's a lot in this movie and a lot I liked and I wanted to like The Master more, but ultimately it felt flat and cold and in some ways a narrative muddle: aside from the difficulty in following the timeline or the obscurity about how JP got connected with this religious cult in the first place or why Hoffman was so eager to take him into the inner circle - the main problem is that this is a narrative movie with no narrative arc. It seems to want to be a story about a lost man - shell-shocked veteran of WWII - who latches onto a cultish religion and is taken in and changed (or ruined) in some way. Instead, it seems to be scene after scene played at the same level; we do not see JP becoming increasingly devoted or devout; though there are dramatic, climactic moments - the arrest of Hoffman, e.g., they happen and then get brushed away - they do not transform the characters or the story - so in fact there really is no story The sensibilities that the director, Paul Thomas Anderson, establishes when JP and PSH first meet are the same that hold true throughout the movie. It's a film about an idea, a concept - but not about people and their lives and emotions. It could have, probably should have, been about PSH - maybe as scenes through or "told by" JP: sounds like Citizen Kane, right? It had that potential, but rarely rises above the level of Citizen Mundane.

What you can learn by watching scenes of running in movies

"Silver Linings Playbook" could have been a really good movie, but it takes so many wrong turns and it misses so many opportunities that both M and I found it extremely discouraging and disappointing. The first half-hour is quite good, if a bit over-acted and overly scripted: Pat, a 20ish guy from a working-class Philly neighborhood (or suburb) gets sprung from a state hospital where he'd been confined by court order because of some incident, which we learn more about later. We soon see that he (and his friend, another "inmate" whom he springs for a short time) is severely disturbed and troubled - later learn he's diagnosed as bipolar, which seems accurate. There are some terrific scenes early on of his bizarre interaction with his hapless parents who clearly love him abut have no idea how to help him, and some very edgy scenes as her stalks his estranged wife: that's the main dynamic of the movie, he, Pat (Bradley Cooper) wants to get back with her, or so he thinks. At first this seemed to me like the male and working-class version of the excellent Rachel's Getting Married. But the filmmaker (David O. Russell) then starts to build up the plot dynamics and, for me, the movie takes all kinds of wrong turns: becomes a very familiar offbeat guy meets kooky girl (Jennifer Lawrence, who's great in this role) and he slowly gets better through the love of a good woman. We also have the cliches of the family drawn together by sports, of preparing for the big dance competition, and so many other familiar movie tropes - none handled well. I nother words, the characters are adults and they have adult problems and issues - unemployment, rap sheets, medical issues, sudden and tragic death of a loved one, broken marriages - but they behave like teenagers, like refugees from Stomp or Glee. For example, the dad, who has OCD (Pat Sr., Robert De Niro, who's supposed to be an Oscar contender for this part - what a shame, he needs a great dramatic role not this lightweight comedy) is supposed to be a small-time bookie; no bookie sits around with the family cheering for the Eagles the way De Niro does, good wholesome American fun loving family making a little book on the side. Not likely. Or the dance competition: it's just never clear why or how two rank amateurs like these guys would or could enter. And many other scenes: there seems to be only one cop at work, for example, in the entire city of Philadelphia. I use as a touchstone for movies that get the details wrong scenes of running - actually one of the least realistic elements in hundreds of films, with totally out of shape characters chasing one another endlessly. In this one, Pat Jr. runs in a sweatsuit and a garbage bag over the suit - nobody does that - and he and Jennifer L. have many long dialogues as they're prancing along on the oddly car-free streets of their neighborhood. These seem like quibbles, but it shows me that the filmmakers had an idea for a main character who could make a comedy interesting but the comedy itself was entirely shopworn. I didn't buy.

The 10 Best Films (I saw) in 2012

If I were a professional critic and had seen (and suffered through) nearly every new release of the year, I'd give you my Top 10 (or 100) Films of 2012, but I'm not so I can't. There are few that got great reviews this year that I haven't seen yet (The Master, Zero Dark, Silver Linings) that I plan to see and a few that got great reviews (Lincoln, e.g.) about which I was indifferent or worse. Based on what I've seen this year, which includes as usual a lot of foreign films, indies, classics, and documentaries, here is my list of the Ten Best Movies (I saw) in 2012, arranged alphabetically (with older movies so noted), with a few also-rans at the end:

Argo. What a surprise. Who would have thought anyone could make a movie that weaves together great suspense and drama and broad, satiric comedy? In my view, the best new movie of 2012 so far.

Coriolanus. The history of Shakespeare on film is a pretty dismal record, adaptations (e.g., Ran) and the occasional genius (e.g., Welles) aside. Coriolanus, therefore, was another surprise of the year - a terrific film-version of a smart production in present-day setting of a S. tragedy that is rarely performed and very much on point today. One of the plays, I think, in which S. actually anticipated the capacity of cinema to do his vision full justice.

Monsieur Lazhar. Amid all the crappy, sentimental, cliched movies about the life of a schoolteacher, Monsieur Lazhar stands out as one of the best school-based movies ever. An incredibly moving, well-paced, beautifully acted story about a teacher who takes on a very difficult situation in a Montreal elementary school and does the best he can - while struggling with some personal demons.

The Nasty Girl. A powerful German film from 1989, loosely based on true events, apparently, about a German schoolgirl who wrote an essay about the role her town played in the Holocaust and suffered public outrage and ostracism. This couldn't happen today of course (ha).

 Onibaba. A Japanese b/w classic from 1964 that's about as scary and horrifying as anything you're likely to see, including some of the most visually striking scenes ever filmed. All takes place in and around a hut in a marsh, everything surrounded by tall sawgrass that gives the entire movie a weird perspective and keeps everything on edge.

Pariah. Among the many recent (and not so recent) films about misfit teenagers struggling to find their identity, to fit in some some of the peers, and to win the love of their difficult or indifferent parents, Pariah is one of the best. A simple story of a young girl in an NYC high school struggling with her sexual identity and with overbearing parents. Very realistic and very touching.

Sleepless Night. This French film from 2011 is just about a perfect genre action drama - cops, gangsters, drugs - all very fast-paced and exciting, expertly scripted, takes place over a classic 24-hour span, will keep you riveted. I hear an English-language version is in the works, but they'll probably make it big budget and screw it up, so see the original.

 Sweetgrass. Another one of those films that you think would be impossible, but turns out to be astonishing. A documentary from 2009 about Montana sheep farmers. Huh? But it contains scenes and footage of extraordinary power and beauty. This is an absolutely pure documentary - just the edited footage, no voice-overs, sound track, B-role footage, nothing but what the filmmakers observed over time.

The Taste of Others. A very entertaining French film from 2000 that follows the paths of several characters, each pursuing a separate line of plot, and the lines cross occasionally - bringing together various unlikely compositions. It's about gangsters, corporate execs., and a theater troupe, among other things. This technique is often pretentious or preposterous (e.g., Crash), but here it's understated and effective.

Tuesday After Christmas. Like many Romanian films, this one starts slowly and build gradually, drawing you in - and by the end you're completely engaged in the lives of these difficult characters. Very little exposition, and we learn about the characters and their interrelations only by careful observation - each scenes gives us a bit more information, and we gradually put all the pieces together (much like in life) - as the film moves inexorably toward its powerful closing scenes.

A few others worth mentioning: The Iranian A Separation, which I liked though maybe not as much as some others did; the Israeli Footnote, which was marred by the jaunty score; the classic Billy Wilder film Ace in the Hole, for its unique and prescient look at social forces in conflict in the American West; the classic documentary The Thin Blue Line, an anatomy of a crime and conviction; and two from 2011 that I didn't see until this year and that were both good if not great: The Help and The Artist.

An amusement park ride through Lincolnland

Despite the paeans and choruses of praise, I'm not on board with Spielberg's "Lincoln," which, despite Daniel Day-Lewis's great performance which will probably earn him an Oscar (sorry, Denzel) was to me a pompous and pious bore. Yeah, I was kind of interested in learning details about this moment in history - Lincoln's efforts to secure passage of the 13th amendment, and it's always great to hear (or read) the words of Lincoln; his Shakespearean orations and his folksy Midwest tales, which Day-Lewis captures with a slightly nasal, Midwest accent, Lincoln the super-smart hick played perfectly, who holds in his head an amazing store of knowledge, all the more disarming and surprising because of his bumbling and folksy demeanor. But is it a surprise to anyone to see Lincoln portrayed this? Does this movie add anything new to our understanding of the way Lincoln thought and acted? And can it possibly surprise anyone to see that in the 19th century politicians bought votes by promising patronage jobs? The movie is about the various conflicts of forces around the Amendment abolishing slavery: Lincoln wants it to pass because he fears that once the war ends and the Confederate states rejoin the Union it cannot pass; also because he abhors slavery (though does not necessarily believe in racial equality - which to their credit, Spielberg and Kushner make evident); also, I believe, thought "Lincoln" does not emphasize this, because he believed a U.S. with both slave and free states could not endure - his main motive, always, was saving the Union (that's not entirely clear from this movie). So the movie veers from self-righteous speechifying, rather improbably scenes of Congressmen screaming at one another on the floor of the House, and, for "comic relief," a small gang of partisans that Lincoln hires to buy off recalcitrant lame-duck Democrats. Ultimately, the movie felt to me lik a civics lesson, like the kind of "educational" film they'd show back in 7th grade when I was a kid; it's somewhat interesting because the events are "real," but it was of minimal interest, to me, as a movie: insufficient conflict and tension (none), despite Day-Lewis's bravado performance the acting is all caricature - and I'm not sure whether D-L's role should be called acting or impersonating, for that matter; and worst of all, will someone please put a stop to John Williams's horrible scores?! Those incessant horns, rising to a crescendo with very uttered piety - how pitifully sanctimonious. Those fiddles every time there's a moment of levity. Please, let the drama just unfold, let us feel it for ourselves - Williams's score is to movies what Disney World is to the National Park System. The one thing you do get from a Spielberg movie, always, is high production values - as in the terrible War Horse of recent years - so if that's enough for you, the costume drama, the battlefield scene that gruesomely opens the film, the muddy Washington during war - then, OK, you've got what you paid for: an amusement park ride through Lincolnland.

An entertaining but reprehensible movie

"Arbitrage" is a reasonably entertaining story about a guy who has it all and then totally screws up,putting his family, fortune, and status at risk - except that we've seen so many movies and stories of this type, especially since the crash of 08, that the movie feels old and shopworn already. Essentially, it's Bernie Madoff meets Bonfire of the Vanities: two strands to the plot, loosely but effectively tied together. First Robert Miller, aptly played by Richard Gere, runs some kind of huge eponymous hedge fund, and he's trying to sell the firm to a large bank at huge profit but to do so he puts all kinds of fake transactions on the books, to make firm look bigger and more secure than it is. If this scheme, similar in some ways to Madoff's, is discovered he'll face major jail time - and maybe his kids will, too, as this is a family operation, with his beloved daughter, improbably, as his chief of finance. Other side of the plot: Gere is carrying on with some ridiculous French gallery owner about a third his age; he take her for a drive upstate,car crashes, she dies, and he tries ineptly to cover his tracks. A rumpled and unfastidious detective takes pursuit. Gere's world seems about to crash down upon him: on the family side, daughter discovers the fraud and is furious that her dad is a fallen idol (wife, Susan Sarandon, in a small role, too bad, because she improves every movie she's in) has known all along that Gere is a callow cad. On the business side, Gere and his legal team come up with a highly unlikely discovery of evidence tampering, Gere is cleared, everything's good. The ending - Gere receiving a charity award - is slightly ambiguous, as we wonder whether Gere might confess all, though it should be obvious he won't: he's a despicable character from the first frame. What really troubles me about Arbitrage is that I think so many who see the movie will salivate about his gorgeous lifestyle - the penthouse, the private jet, the limos, the clothes, the babes, the fine wines and liquor - and think, yeah, it's worth it, why not go for the the $, cheat if you have to, they all do it. It's Wall Street advanced 20 years, but now it's not greed is good - that's just a given today - but now it's crime pays. In Bonfire (the books, not the movie, which along with everyone else I did not see) the character suffers Job-like for his sin (leaving a dead boy after a car crash in the Bronx) and finally he grows, changes. Nobody changes in Arbitrage - everyone's vindicated. Entertaining movie, but in some ways a reprehensible one as well.

The first South Korean film I didn't like

Hard as this is to believe: a South Korean indie-arty film shot in black-and-white - and I didn't like it? Yes, in this case, though the film had all the earmarks of the kind of work I usually go for in a big way, I couldn't stand watching "The Day He Arrives" and abandoned it after 40 minutes rather than waste even more of my time. If I were to describe the film, which I will, I will no doubt make it sound better than it actually is, which is exactly the problem - it's a very "teachable" film, that one could discuss and analyze and try to figure out - but that seems to be its whole purpose, to be enigmatic and elusive, and it essentially comes off as a film professor's experiment, not as a work of art or a work of entertainment. Briefly, this short (80-minute) movie opens with a voice-over narrator telling us he's arrived for a few days in a city (Seoul) where he hopes to meet up with an old friend. He tries to reach the friend by cell, no answer. Suddenly, a young woman - one of his film students apparently - sees him, is surprised to run into him in Seoul, and they have a very awkward conversation in which she is clearly in awe of him; she's going for coffee with friends but, instead of joining her, he decides just to walk around the cit with his little backpack. This behavior seems odd, but we, or at least I, wrote it off as perhaps a cultural difference between the U.S. and South Korea - but eventually we learn otherwise, as scene after scene involves odd behavior, and we figure it's either the oddity of this filmmaker or the intentional desire to depict abnormal behavior that is nonrepresentational. Among scenes: three film students recognize the director/narraator, he joins them for drinks, he takes them by cab to some other city neighborhood, then runs away from them screaming, telling them to stop "copying" him; he goes to an old girlfriend's apartment, bursts into fake sobbing, the have groping sex, and in the morning he leaves and they say they love each other but will never communicate again. And it goes on. Okay, there may be some deeper meaning to these mashups, for example, this may be a South Korean version of 8 1/2, the torment of a frustrated filmmaker or artist. Or, the "He" may be a Christ figure, returned to earth (to Seoul) and misunderstood by all: some are in love with him but will not communicate with him; some recognize him and "copy" him but in foolish ways, and so forth. As noted, there could be a lot of "meaning" in this film but it's so heavy-handed an awkward in its narration that it keeps us unengaged rather than open to its message, whatever that may be.

Flight soars, then sputters - but Denzel is awesome

"Flight" is pretty exciting right from takeoff, and in some ways the best part of the movie is the first "act" of about 30 minutes, the airplane losing control and the pilot, Denzel Washington, bringing it safely to ground in a field with a lot of injuries but with few lost lives - terrifically tense moments in the cockpit and he calmly figures out how to control the plane while his co-pilot more or less freaks. It would be hard to pick the movie up from there, but the rest of this very long movie is admirable if not terribly original - a good if familiar story, along fairly predictable lines, of Denzel's addiction (mostly alcohol, but also cocaine), his cover-up, and his eventual recovery, inspired by a recovering drug addict whom he meets and, sort of, falls in love with and, ultimately, by his own moral code: the NTSB investigation at the end, when Denzel is faced with a Hobson's choice of whether to besmirch the posthumous reputation of one of the victims of the crash or to confess his own complicity, is a powerful moment and an important turning point - but very late in the film. What mostly makes the film is Denzel - in a terrific performance that covers a vast range of emotions and behaviors and should win him a Best Actor Oscar I would think (though I don't know what else is out there). I do wonder how on earth or why on earth the producer was cleared to show Denzel drinking a Budweiser while driving.

Real Housewives for the PBS crowd: Queen of Versailles

As M pointed out, "The Queen of Versailles," a documentary about the Siegel family, David and Jackie and their 8 children, is like Real Housewives for the PBS crowd. David S is/was the CEO and founder of the largest timeshare resort company in the world; Jackie is his trophy (3rd) wife, about 30 years younger than he, and mother to 7 of his brood of children. Documentary begins in about 2007, and obviously the filmmaker started out to document their lavish and ridiculous lifestyle - they are in the process of building a new house called Versailles and modeled after same that will be the largest single-family house in America. In 2008, the project took an unexpected turn, as the market crash basically wiped out all of Siegel's capital and spun his company toward bankruptcy. The Siegels have no ready cash, and it changes their style of living in some ways, but not in all ways, as Jackie in particular is completely unable or unwilling to relinquish many of her luxuries. So is the film any good? Yes, in its lurid way: the Siegels are not entirely evil people: David is a rather dull business guy who took huge gambles on a new industry, made a fortune, but was too stupid to diversify or protect his assets and lost it all. Jackie S. is a little smarter than you might expect, but basically she's a child - she acts like one of her kids, and she is totally incapable of running any element of her life, or theirs, without a legion of helpers. Their taste is horrendous in every way you can imagine - starting with their bizarre desire to model their house on Versailles without any awareness of the irony. Their chairs look like thrones, they have hideous statuary everywhere, way more of everything than anyone would need - but as their fortunes fall they don't even have the sense to pick up the dog shit on their carpets. Most significant, David S. - a huge backer of GW Bush (he claims to have been instrumental in getting Bush "elected" though he won't discuss how because it may have been illegal) - has no interests outside of work and his charitable donations seem to consist of checks to the Miss America fund, mainly so that they can host an annual gala at their house with all the contestants, who must painfully put up with David's flirting (Jackie was a beauty "queen" once upon a time - and he keeps "joking" about trading her in for 2 20-year-olds). When the Siegels lose their fortune, David (and to a lesser extent Jackie) blame the "banks" and the "bankers" - who are behaving in exactly the same ruthless, unconscionable way the Siegels did and do: the bankers are trying to squeeze every dollar out of him, good old capitalism, without interference of the government or regulators, just as he and his republican pals want it to be: we do see some great scenes of the sales for at one of the timeshares (led by his oldest son) at work bilking poor people out of their meager funds. What goes around comes around, dude! Some other great scenes in the movie: Jackie shopping for xmas (glad that David appears to be a nonobservant Jew, who wants him) at walmart, filling multiple carts with stuff they can't afford and not a single thoughtful present, just junk, box after box; Jackie renting a Hertz car for the first time. Watch it and weep.

Possibly the best movie of the year: Argo

Let me join the chorus in praise of "Argo," surely one of the best if not the best movie of the year, a totally and improbably captivating story. I must have underestimated Ben Affleck - this movie shows he has great directorial talent, so more power to him and keep 'em coming. Argo is improbable because you'd think it would be completely impossible to combine a razor's edge tension story about the taking American hostages in Iran with a Hollywood satire, but Affleck brings off both elements and weaves the strands together perfectly. In short (spoilers here), the story involves an effort by the CIA to free a group of 6 Americans who escaped from the U.S. embassy and found temporary sanctuary in the Canadian embassy - if the Iranians knew that the Canadians were sheltering the 6, all would be executed, including some of the Canadians. Many absolutely exciting and well-placed scenes build up this drama, including the action of the taking of the embassy, largely seen from inside the walls, as well as the incredible tension of the six Americans living in relative comfort in the Canadian embassy while constantly fearing for their lives. The CIA considers several ridiculous plans for extirpating the Americans and then settle on one that seems at first the most ridiculous of all: they set up a fake film production company and send an undercover agent who claims to be scouting locations for a sci-fi film (called Argo); they get some fake papers and pretend the 6 Americans are part of the crew. This fake company leads to some terrific comic scenes in LA, with John Goodman and Alan Arkin buying a crap screenplay and pretending to greenlight the project - obvious echos of The Producers, but all this against the real-life tension of the hostages in fear of their lives. Affleck is the undercover agent, pretending to be an associate producer. Probably the best scene in the whole movie, of many great ones, is the fake location-scouting excursion, when Affleck takes them to the Tehran bazaar, and they get assaulted by an enraged shopkeeper. The final scenes at the Tehran airport, as authorities question the authenticity of the documents and as they use their fake storyboards to persuade the revolutionary guard thugs that they're truly making a movie is excellent - there's no reason any sane person would make a movie in Iran at that time, but the guards are so enamored with the very idea of a movie that they buy it. So do we - and final fillip is that the the story, as wild and improbable as it is, is based on true events, probably pretty closely. The facts were kept secret until I think 1997; the closing credits show us images of the real hostages, all of whom returned to work in the foreign service.

Why Hitchcock fans should avoid watching The Girl

Hitchcock fans should probably not see the HBO film "The Girl" because it will forever tarnish and besmirch your sense of the director and his accomplishments, but aren't we all Hitchcock fans? Watch it and beware. There's no doubt that Hitchcock was by by no means an actor's director - I'm sure he's written, in a sly and dry manner, that actors were for him essentially props, part of the look of the film. He had his films sketched out shot by shot, and then he arranged the actor in the frame and shot his dailies. That is his own exaggeration of course, but there's a lot of truth - his films to seem cold and inhuman, even cruel at times, and he's very uninterested in developing relationships between characters or depths within characters - we accept his films for their greatness, but we don't warm up to them. The Girl is about H's relationship with Tippi Hedren and The Girl is about their work together on The Birds and Marnie: H. starts off as a debonair and witty old Englishman who casts Hedren and charms her and invites her into his home, meeting Mrs. H, whom he presents as his near-equal partner in casting and direction. But gradually he comes on to her more directly and grotesquely; when she pushes him away, he takes out his anger on her during the filming, eventually literally torturing her through more than 60 takes of scene in which she's attacked by live birds. On one level, it shows his dedication to getting the perfect shot (as well as his cruelty and indifference toward actors - Bresson known for the same ruthlessness, BTW), and on another - less explored by cineastes - it shows his pettiness and perversion: he's not looking for the perfect shot, in fact he's endangering his whole project by torturing his star for personal vengeance. H has many vulgar and nasty outbursts, as well as some drunken scenes of self-pity in which he laments his homeliness (in an industry surrounded by the glamorous) - and we see this dark side of H., compared with the public avuncular and witty British image that he so carefully crafted. It all seems to make sense, but I don't know - perhaps the film (and the book on which is it's based) took many liberties with the known facts. H's work still stands, but this film - rightly or wrongly - has made the pedestal a lot more wobbly.

A movie that blasts all thought away

Sorry, I didn't want the walls to be knocked down by the score and the sound fx of "The Dark Knight Rises" so I turned down the volume and I may have missed some of the Shakespearean dialogue and the Aristotelian wisdom that may have passed between Christian Bale and Anne Hathaway, or between Christian and butler Alfred/Michael Caine - but I still got enough from the movie - who wouldn't? The Nolans' Dark Knight Rises is what it is: the polar opposite of the kind of low-key low-budget no-stars on location interior indie social drama or foreign psychodrama that I usually watch. The characters are, uh, cartoons - and the plot is idiotic, requiring more suspension (of disbelief) than the Verrazzano Bridge - and yet, hey, it's a DC Comic. It's just plain entertainment, pure and simple, and you know what on it's own terms it's a damn good movie. In a way, it's what American cinema does and always has done best: tremendous effects, edge-of-the-seat chases and predicaments, high, brassy, overdone, too big, too long, way too loud - but you totally get your money's worth, with too many great scenes to tabulate: the plane hijacking at the outset, the imploding city (especially at the football stadium, the endless motorcycle chase, the Wall Street heist, the climb out of the dungeon, the dead-man's-float through the sewers, and others. No one will ever believe Bale is a tough guy or Hathaway's a bone-breaker, but that's part of the fun of it. The villain, Bane, is suitably creepy and menacing, talking through that insect-like proboscis he's got affixed to his face (a page from Blue Velvet, magnified a thousand-fold). When I step back for a moment from the loud entertainment, a few things do bother me: what's with the total desexualization of Caine? Can't the butler have a life, too? And what's with the attacks on Wall Street and on the wealthy dwellers of Gotham/Manhattan, with its French Revolution-like trials and executions? Is there a hidden message that the Army of Shadows, or whatever it's called, that wants to destroy civilization, is the rising "47 percent," clamoring for "class warfare"? Is this movie on some level the revenge, or the fantasy revenge, of the Romney Republicans? I know that's a subliminal message at best (or worst), but it's something I couldn't help think about in the midst of the mind-numbing blasts of sound in this movie that's really meant to blast all thought away.

Baseball's dirty little secret

Though mostly of interest to baseball fans, the documentary film "Ballplayer: Pelotero" is an excellent film that shows us an exploitative culture about which U.S. fans see and no little to nothing, till now (there was also a feature film on this topic, can't recall the title, that was great - showing the long odds of a Dominican player making it in the MLB). Ballplayer is a look at the development of players in the DR, particularly San Pedro de Macaras, the center of the baseball "industry" in the DR. The narrative notes that an amazing 20 percent of MLB players are from the DR, including numerous HOF members and potential members. The feature film noted above focused on one player going through the process, getting drafted for a modest bonus, and then being completely overwhelmed by the adjustment to life in small, midwest American Minor League towns. This film is entirely in the DR and focuses not on the typical player but on two exceptions: the two top shortstop prospects in the 2008 season. Players cannot be signed until they are 16, and first day of potential signing is July 2, so this creates a "class" of players who will be 16 on that date - the scouts follow them closely when they're 15 and build up to that signing date. It's very clear that the player's signing value drops quickly after that date and a 17 year old is far less valuable than a 16 year old - so there's huge pressure to sign on 7-2. Film also shows the incredible hard work these guys go through, with their trainer - who gets up to 35 percent of the signing bonus - and sometimes with an agent. Also shows the incredible poverty of the families, living in horrible, crowded housing - and the anticipation (and exploitation) as they hope and wait for bonus signings that can be in the millions. The two players each show hugely different aspects of exploitation, each disturbing in a different way. The no. 1 prospect is a kid named Juan Miguel Sano (will his nickname inevitably be "Just"?), 15, seems to be very goofy and immature. Suddenly we start to see stories in the press suggesting that Sano may be older than 15,that they may have faked a birth certificate of something. The Pirate scout mentions this in conversations that the filmmaker captures. MLB begins an investigation, and Sano rightly worries that he can't sign while under investigation. The Pirate scout talks to his family (captured on hidden videocamera) and says that no one else will want Sano while the investigation is under way, but he's willing to sign him for the Pirates - and he warns that if he doesn't sign now, nobody will take him. Ultimately, Sano is cleared and signs with the Twins (and is still their top prospect) - it's obvious that the Pirates scout created the rumor (the kid does totally look and act 15) in order to scare the kid and his family and get him cheap. We see Sano driving around in a huge SUV and the family now in a vast, rather hideous house. The other kid, whose name I don't remember, also becomes the subject of an investigation and in fact the family did fake his age - he's 17 (and looks it) - ultimately signs for much less than they'd though, and his trainer is furious - actually brings a lawsuit against the kid and his family, as he'd been misled all along and calls the kid a complete liar, which he seems to be. He's now a prospect with the Astros. All in all, it'll make you think differently about the players we follow and cheer for - the DR system is just as exploitative as steroids or as any weird system like lotteries and casinos that holds forth for many impoverished the illusion of sudden wealth.

A movie about losers? As if.

I really wish I could get behind "Perks of Being a Wallflower" but in the end it's a preteen feelgood movie and not much more, and I should maybe just leave it at that. The movie covers really familiar ground: kid newly arrived in school feels at first like an outcast but gradually makes friends (primarily among other outcasts) and eventually proves his mettle - usually though some form of physical combat. We've seen it in among others My Bodyguard and History of Violence, each with its own variants. The goal, ultimately, is to be the touchstone feel-good movie of the decade, a la Clueless, as one good example. Perks falls short on many levels: like all, it has a bit of a twist, in this case the newly arrived outcast is actually a returning student who'd spent (part of?) the previous school year in some kind of psychiatric unit - we learn more about this in the big payoff at the end of the movie. So among other issues: the new kid, Charlie, a high-school freshman, is not just ignored on his first day in the new high school but picked on and bullied - I know there are mean kids at every school, but there's no way that he would enter as a pariah. He would clearly have had some friends and acquaintances from the past, and other kids would probably just ignore him. But, OK, it's a movie - and it doesn't take long for him to approach a cutup from his shop class, and then to meet the guy's stepsister, Sam - Emma Watson, terribly miscast. Charlie is immediately welcomed into Sam's crowd - which should probably be the end of the movie, he's found his friends - but they keep stressing that these kids are the misfits. As they said in Clueless: As if. Emma Watson is not a misfit loser, nor are any of the others - this is a Disney, sanitized idea of the social outsiders. (To see a much more powerful and realistic version of a similar theme, check out the recent Pariah.) There are many other missteps and misjudgments throughout - a few of note: Charlie's brother plays football for Penn State? Wouldn't this be a dominant theme in the family - going off to games, etc., and Charlie doesn't measure up, etc. - but it's barely mentioned. Charlie suddenly becomes tough enough to take on four varsity football players who are hitting his friend? Not likely outside of the world of superpowers. Perks also plays on the very familiar theme of the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Nerd: almost every writer (maybe not Paul Auster) has felt like an outsider, an observer rather than a participant (see Tonio Kroger), but it's a very tired theme here: the English teacher giving Charlie books and saying that someday he might write one himself. Nothing in the movie is evidence of that; the book Charlie should read, aside from the trite and obvious classics that his teacher hands him, would be The Idiot - Charlie's best and most endearing quality, like Prince Myshkin's, is his inability to say anything but the truth, which gets him into trouble in many ways. I don't mean to make the movie sound worse than it is - it's diverting and charming in a bland, vanilla way (the lack of diversity in Charlie's high school is quite astonishing), but at bottom, despite brush with social issues (homosexuality, child abuse) lite, it's a movie for kids, many of whom will spot it as a phony.

Almodovar's obsessions

Pedro Almodovar has written and directed some great movies but his latest, "The Skin I Live In" is not one of them. Like many Almodovar works, it's complex, kinky, edgy, pushing the boundaries of the probable, interested in gender and power, garishly colorful, brightly contemporary. Unlike his good and great films, it is so weird and extreme in its premises as to be impossible to buy into other than as some kind of allegory or parable. And even then, its characters are so unlikable and their behavior so depraved and reprehensible that we have no way to approach this movie - there's no one we believe in or care about and by the end, before the end, actually, I just couldn't take any more and had to bail out. Almodovar in recent films has become increasingly interested in powerful women and in the power of women working in consort - that's great - but also, more disturbingly, in this sense that men, heterosexual men anyway, are brutal and cruel, and this movie is a paradigm of that. The main character, a plastic surgeon (Antonio Banderas) invents an artificial skin that will help burn victims. Sounds good - but in order to create this skin he holds a woman subject captive for many years, the subject of his ghoulish experiments. This is beyond the pale on so many levels - medically, morally, criminally. Over the course of the movie we learn that (spoilers here) this "woman" is a young man who raped the doc's daughter; in vengeance the doc captured and tortured him and then transgendered him - and now he and the doc have fallen in love. In other words, the doctor is extremely sick and disturbed - but Almodovar doesn't play it as such. The doc is actually a tender lover, compared with every other male we come across in this film - sex between man and woman is brutal rape and exploitation, in the world of this movie. Worse, women, so powerful in other Almodovar films, are suicidal and psychologically frail, dependent on men to rescue them - and then what? Sometimes artists reach a point in their careers where they push their themes to such an extreme that they become parodies of themselves: great art is about the interaction of an artist's vision with the world in which we live, not about exalting the artist's vision above the world of nature, of human relationships, of the interior life of the characters. This is recognizably an Almodovar film, but nothing in the film is recognizable as the world in which we live. He's a great enough director that he can produce whatever films he wants, but he's become ensnared in his own obsessions.

Forever? Never.

From the first scene, "Celeste and Jesse Forever" is pretty much insufferable - this unbearable cute and cloying couple driving through the streets of Los Angeles and acting not like real people but like a screenwriters bizarre idea of how a couple ought to act - and it gets worse from there, as we learn in the second long scene, as the title couple goof around in some sort of expensive LA restaurant that in fact they are an ex-couple - they're divorced but they're still best friends. Their dinner partners bolt from the table because they find this behavior "too fucking weird" (they almost shout this out, which no normal civilized person would do in any public space) - and that's about when I felt like bolting, too. There is nothing you can believe about either character or their relationship or their behavior. The movie is trying so hard to be a contemporary version of Annie Hall or Harry Met Sally - couple that everyone else knows is perfect but they just can't see it or make it work. Well, ultimately, there are a few twists on this theme and a bit of a surprise at the conclusion (as reported to me by M, I couldn't make it beyond the one-hour mark) - but many unbearable trope along the way: the one-night nostalgic hookup with regrets (on her part) the next a.m., many bad dates at many highly expensive hangouts (and then she has a great date at an underground dive dancing bar), his date with a vapid young woman during which he does nothing but pine for the true love of his life, the get-tired riff on putting together Ikea furniture, shall I go on? She, Celeste, has an apparent job as a "trend spotter," and who wouldn't want to do that? - just mouth off on where you see the culture to be heading. As M pointed out, she can spot trends in the culture but not in her own life. It would have been great if that had been a real theme that the movie developed - let's see her perspicacity at work, for example - but it doesn't; also, might have worked if we'd begun earlier - seen C & J getting married, or married, then breaking up, then moving onward. Anyway, a little fluff of a film - not harmful or anything, but no more real or substantial than a snowball in Beverly Hills.

Quirky Wes Anderson

You have to have a really high tolerance for quirkiness and whimsy to be a big fan of Wes Anderson's films; I don't, and therefore I'm not - but "Moonrise Kingdom" is more appealing than his other films - it's actually one of the few films aimed at a wide audience - a PG-13 film clearly hoping to draw in a preteen audience - that isn't condescending to kids, that might actually appeal to kids, and that isn't a gross-out slapstick pseudo comedy. It's actually a very sweet story about two misfit kids, boy and girl, who met almost by chance, start a secret correspondence, and then run off together, confounding most of the adults around them - they take off for the woods - a version of the pastoral - and eventually are caught but manage to maintain their friendship and fledgling love despite the obstacles. Echoes here of many adolescent escapes: notably Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but also As You Like It, Night of the Hunter, many others. What makes this film distinctive - and that will be a plus for some and a minus for others - is Anderson's unique cinematic vocabulary: nothing is actually believable about the relationship between the two or the mechanism of their escape and hiding. Just to cite one example, they seem to have enough materials with them to set up an entire wilderness campsite with tent and cooking gear and all sorts of equipment - and he's carrying just a small backpack and she's carrying a suitcase filled with books! OK, but we're not meant to actually believe in this plot - just to take each scene, each segment, at its face value. The scout camp, with Ed Norton as the scoutmaster, is odd, both lots of fun like PeeWee's funhouse, filled with weird gadgets and contraptions, and oppressive, with Norton as a martinet (though he softens over the course of the film) - not sure how to relate to that. Similarly, the home the girl escapes from - just hard to understand: her siblings totally improbably gather around a portable record player each morning to listen to Britten (year, right); the parents - Bill Murray and F. MacDormand - are crass fools, and lawyers to boot! Other than Bruce Willis as the island cop, adults are there to be loathed: who wouldn't want to run away? A more thoughtful movie would include some nuance and even some sympathy for the parents left behind, but Moonrise is all about broad strokes with bright colors, not about nuances and shading. Anderson is truly a "child" of J.D. Salinger - a world of impossibly precocious, overly sensitive, largely abandoned kids at the mercy of insufferable adults. We know where our sympathies are meant to lie - and Moonrise to me is more successful than some of his other works because the two kids are appealing and vulnerable, not troubled and snarky.

The price of sushi: $300 a plate!

As I (and no doubt others) have noted before, a good subject does not make for a good documentary. Case in point = D. Gelb's (?) "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." There are many really cool things you'll see and learn from this 82-minute documentary: It's about an 85-year-old master sushi chef who runs a restaurant with 10 seats at a counter, in a Tokyo subway station, and it's considered the best (and most expensive) sushi restaurant in the world - $300 a plate, reservations months in advance, no menu to choose from, meal of 20 pieces of sushi - and Michelin 3-star rating, the only sushi restaurant in the world at that level I think. How can this be? That's a great question - and to that extent, the film does provide answers: we see how much time and care and attention to detail goes into every element of the prep, from selection of fish at market to time-consuming even tedious preparation (massaging the octupus for 50 minutes, warming each seaweed wrapping individually over a gas flame, special high-pressure technique for cooking the rice, and so on) to exquisite skill at slicing the fish and preparing each item individually by hand, to ridiculously high standards _ Jiro continually tasting fish throughout the day and rejecting many. So that much, plus the long apprenticeships and the complex teamwork, is interesting to see - especially scenes at the fish market. But a good, let alone a great, documentary needs some sort of collision of forces and some kind of narrative arc - in other words, it has to appropriate some of the elements of narrative cinema - and that's where Jiro Dreams comes up short: the filmmakers try really hard to build up a few themes, for example, the tension between father and older son, who's now 50 and still hasn't been able to run his own restaurant; Jiro's sense of abandonment by his own alcoholic father - but the material and tension just is not there, or in any case the filmmakers are unable to elicit much interior strife from the reticent chef and his staff. The result - the film feels long an overly long video promo, and it could probably have been much better as a half-hour TV special. Its methods are kind of old-fashioned, especially when seen against some of the more edgy contemporary documentaries like Sweetgrass, e.g., in that it uses lots of interviews for context, intrusive editing (such as fast-forwards), and a pushy score mostly by Philip Glass (with some Mozart concerto 21, making the cliched point that a meal is like a symphony). The film is definitely worth seeing for those interested in the topic, but as a piece of documentary filmmaking it's limited.

36 hours in the death of a Wall Street firm: Margin Call

"Margin Call" from 2011 (?) is a very good movie that fell a little below the radar, probably because of its relatively low budget and sparing use of star actors, but that fulfills its ambitions very well: a strong, seemingly quite accurate, inside look at the tensions in a major (unnamed, but seemingly based on Lehman Bros) Wall Street firm that, over a span of 36 hours, learns that its losses from investments in crappy mortgages for credit swaps will wipe out all of the capital of the firm, sending the economy into a fatal tailspin. The movie does not explore the meltdown - that was done pretty well in the TV movie Too Big to Fail - but instead looks at the efforts of one firm to save its life by dumping all its weak assets as quickly as possible before the street realizes that this is an act of desperation and what they're buying has almost no value. The strengths of this movie - written and directed by someone named Chanda? - are: very tight plot, great sense of the Wall Street ethics or lack thereof, excellent opening sequence that show how the corporate world coldly fires fine employees (think of Up in the Air - or of the sad situation we have seen this week at the beloved Providence Journal), a good dark atmosphere as a crew pulls together over the course of a sleepless night to develop a plan, technical information conveyed in a simple and straightforward way (the CEO wisely asks one of the underlings to speak in plain English, faux-naively claiming he's not smart enough to understand the jargon), smart development of a dilemma that the main characters must face - sell bad assets gradually and smartly with the idea that the firm must maintain relations over the long haul or dump everything right away, even though the firm will have poisoned its relations with the street. CEO (well played by Jeremy Irons) makes a bold decision: sell it all. As he notes, he's paid to make just a few decisions, such as this one. Biggest strength: Kevin Spacey, head of trading desk, who changes and evolves over the course of the movie and ultimately has to make a decision - go along with the boss or get out - and to face the consequences. Movie does not take the obvious path. (Spacey was really nasty once of one of my best friends, but I have to say he improves every movie he's in.) Weaknesses are few, but the two young risk-management guys don't really come clear as characters and are almost expendable to the plot. Film should have been on more best-of lists, but perhaps by 2011 people had their fill of this dark topic.

Not disappointed in the end of Season 1 of The Killing

Lot of spoilers to come so don't read this if you haven't seen the first season of "The Killing," an excellent series that was worthy competition to the slightly more upscale and broader in scope thriller Homeland in competition for this year's awards. Both were deserving - and make of this what you will but both are based on original series from Europe. Since when did America begin importing pop culture? Many have noted that the final episode of The Killing was a disappointment in that at the end of Season 1 we still don't know who killed Rosie. I disagree - I don't think we need to have the same expectations for closure in a series that we have in a traditional detective novel of segment of episodic TV. The season ended with the sense of completion of a full arc of the story - the arrest of mayoral candidate on the murder charge - but it should have been obvious to most viewers that his arrest does not resolve all of the unanswered questions and open problems. So at the very end there's that surprising twist: Det. Holder, Det Linden's partner, appears to be a crooked cop - faking evidence, on someone's behalf, to pin the crime on the yuppie mayoral candidate. Of course, I'm sure that's not what it seems, either, and we'll learn much more about Holder - whom all of us, including Linden, were beginning to like, thanks in large part to the unusual episode 11 that pulled both of them away from the murder investigation and built their friendship, as Linden searches for her son who's been cutting school. Marielle Enos as Linden is the heart and soul of The Killing, just perfect for the part of the tough, smart, stubborn, emotionally troubled detective. Among the elements left loose at the end of season 1: why would Holder fake evidence in the investigation and on whose behalf? why would the candidate get so involved with a prostitution ring, and did he in fact have Rosie in a campaign car on the night she was killed? Why does he come home soaking wet - what's his explanation? If he didn't kill Rosie, who did and why? What's with Rosie's mother - why was she so uninvolved with Rosie? And Rosie's aunt - is there more to her than meets the eye? She actually drew her young niece into a prostitution ring? Why on earth? We know very little about the death of the candidate's wife. What's the story there? Is there anything to Rosie's father's ties to the mob, or is that just a red herring. What about family friend Belco - the last scene shows him shooting the candidate (echoes of many political assassination attempts in the U.S., as well as All the King's Men) - he obviously fails, but is he involved with Rosie in any way? Is there more that the teacher can tell us if he recovers from his coma? These are just some of the questions - and it's to the great credit of the plot that almost every element seems credible, part of a fairly typical, though high-profile, murder investigation in an American city.

The Killing v Homeland: Two great, but very different, series

Finished episode 9 (of 13) of the excellent series "The Killing," and it still completely holds our interest: I love the simple structure, each episode a single day in a 13-day investigation of a murder - no flashbacks, and much (though not all) scene from the main detective, Sarah Linden's (?) point of view. The story, you'd expect, is full of false leads and even red herrings, but they are very well worked in: they don't seem like a screenwriter's attempt to keep the story moving (as in, for example, the popular but to me idiotic The Usual Suspects and many other movies of that ilk); the twists and turns are exactly what a detective would deal with in a complex murder investigation. This is also one of the few murder mysteries to get the scope and mood of the operations down right: it really feels like the kind of crime and investigation, against the background of a mayoral election and neighborhood racial tensions, that would and does take place regularly in every mid-sized to larger city (Seattle, in this case). As M. points out, this series actually carries a message to viewers, which is: don't jump to conclusions. The detectives, particularly one of them, are pushing against the edges, eager to make an arrest before they have all the facts in hand, and, in episode 9, this leads to some dire consequences. In a very plausible way, as the plot unfolds, we see that our first impressions may be way off the mark and the seemingly guilty may be innocent - but finding out who is actually guilty proves to be extremely elusive, which is what makes this series work. The actress in the lead is terrific as well. The theme of terrorism and of American Muslim communities becomes important at about episode 7 or 8 - this has become a real trope of mysteries and thrillers these days, and seems to echo some of the same notes played in the equally strong Homeland - but the two series are vastly different in mood and in context: Homeland, on the surface, is about a vast conspiracy to destroy the U.S. government, and, in fulfilling this end, becomes a story about people and their emotions and flaws and weaknesses; The Killing, on the surface, is a story about the murder of a young girl who was otherwise a completely ordinary high-school kid, and, in fulfilling this end, becomes a story about the conflicts and forces and hatreds pulling apart American society.

Who dunnit?: My prediction, after 4 episodes of The Killing

Very much enjoying Season 1 of "The Killing" 4 (of 13) episodes in; it's adapted from a Danish series, and I kept waiting and hoping that the original would show up on netflix, but I guess it never will - we'll have to settle for the U.S. remake, which is pretty good in its own right, though I wonder about the Seattle setting - can we really accept Seattle as a hotbed of corrupt municipal politics? In any case, the mayoral race is one of many strands in this inriguing plot, about the murder of a high-school girl and the attempt of a detective who's about to leave the force and move to California, remarry, and start a new life (day after day, she's never quite able to leave) and her partner, in waiting to take over her post, who looks like a slacker but shows surprising interrogation skills, especially in his forte, undercover drug work (to say he looks the part puts it mildly). The many strands include the dead girl's working-class parents, of whom the mom, M. thinks, has a back story to tell; the wealthy and gentrified reform candidate for mayor in whose car trunk the dead girl was found, various slacker friends from high school, a teacher who may be getting a little too close to his students, any number of people who'd want to put the mayoral challenger in a bad light, including possibly double-dealing campaign workers and the mayor himself, and other less likely suspects. The plot is very tight, mostly credible (though as in almost every detective movie or book, clues fall just a little too easily into their hands, in order the move the story along), and I really like the austere structure - the Danish influence maybe? - of having each episode cover a single day in a sequence of 13. Just for the record, I'll predict right now the murderer (though from what I've read there may not be a clear answer at end of Season 1): I think it's the bullying dad of Ames, the rich kid who'd had a brief fling with the dead girl: we know he's cruel and physical (the girl was brutalized before death), he could have known the girl through his son, and there are a number of unanswered questions around him: why wasn't he present at his son's interrogation? why no reference to a wife or partner? I don't, however, know how he could have come into possession of the candidate's car.

Improving on Shakespeare?: Verdi's Otello

Met Opera Live HD broadcast of Verdi's Otello yesterday had its ups (Renee Fleming is a great Desdemona, beautiful voice and delicate presence), Iago (suitably gruff but also lyrical and conniving), Cassio (a Met star on the rise no doubt), if you could overlook the shortcomings of Botha's Otello - the voice seemed thin and strained (he had missed 3 previous performances with illness, so that may have been a factor), acting very clumsy - and HD is no friend to a nonglamorous presence like Botha: you're better off in the 20th row rather than seeing the sweat pool and the makeup run. In fact, HD will or maybe has changed the way operas are cast and staged - the singers have to look and act the role, not from 100 rows away from from 10 feet away. Even Fleming, great though she is, pushes the line of credibility when you try to imagine her and Botha as a couple of love-struck newlyweds. Anyway, still a great production musically and all the Met production values are there - and a lot of fun to watch the backstage prep in between acts. Otello is a true rarity, an operatic adaptation of Shakespeare that improves, in some aspects, on the original: obviously Desdmenona's great 4th-act scene and the willow song take a small moment in the play - and the strange incident in which Desdemona recalls a servant from her childhood who dies of love (so odd that she even mentions her name - a character we will never meet - but vivid in our minds as Barbara) - Verdi expands on this with amazing beauty - which is the great gift of lyric opera - taking a dramatic moment and opening it emotionally. In other ways, the adaptation is not an improvement: though the opening scene, as the crowd in Cyprus watches Otello's ship arrive in a storm, is exciting and beautiful, but, to gain unity of place, Verdi sacrificed the scenes in Venice - and as a result we never quite get that Otello is completely ill at east with the sly Italians, and that they're a bit contemptuous of him: they knew they had to hire a stud to be their general, but it doesn't mean they have to like him or let him marry their local beauty - still a familiar theme (in war, and in sports). So in the opera, Otello just seems stupid but in Shakespeare he is more subtly played as a general who doesn't understand the cues in the world of civilians.

A quiet film that will astonish you: Pariah

I wasn't sure I'd like Dee Rees's "Pariah," and I would definitely say don't be put off by the graphic nature of the first scene, in a black Lesbian NYC nightclub - it is by no means an exploitative or sensational movie - it's a very low-budget indie and, like most good indies, it tells a very simple story about a few characters leading ordinary but troubled lives: in this case it's about a teenage girl just coming to terms with her own sexuality, and by the pressure she feels on all sides from so-called friends who betray her and misunderstand her, by fellow students who are cruel and mocking, and most of all by her parents, a black family in, I think, maybe west Harlem or Morningside Heights, the mom in particular with social aspirations - the parents are not bad people, but they don't know how to react to their daughter's growing and evolving sexuality, which leads to some real conflict between them and finally a tremendous family fight. Within this very tight little plot structure there's a lot of emotion and drama, and you'd have a heart of stone if you don't feel for the young girl - but it's by no stretch schmaltzy or sentimental - feels as real as a documentary. Truly a film that knows exactly what it wants to accomplish and does so perfectly. Not a big knockout film but a quiet one that will astonish you I think. Too many people would write this off as a film that wouldn't appeal to them because of the subject, but the subject isn't homosexuality, it's life and maturity and families and race and class and education. Memorably, at the end, the young girl, about to leave her familiar life, says she's not running away, she's choosing. Very smart conclusion to this surprisingly strong film.

Hitler, Shylock, flower power - and The Piper

Musical in workshop production at Harvard, The Piper, written and directed by Christian Fohrby, co-author Richard Plum, was a charming and intriguing show that still needs a lot of polishing but has a lot of potential as well. We've gone to a # of Harvard shows over past few years at invite of the Wolks, and would say that The Piper may be the most fun of all = not only because it's clearly Susanna Wolk's best role, as we've watched her acting get better and better and her voice mature into a beautiful instrument, but also because of the energy and creativity and openness to ideas and discussion (the cast included stickies in he program, asking audience for comments). This version of the Piper legend does focus on SW's role, the Mayor's daughter - she is the emotional center of the play, and as the process moves forward I would think the writing team would want to build on that. There are several elements to the Piper legend. Most familiar (actually popularized in the 1970s or so with a very bad pop song) is that of the Piper as the Tambourine Man who leads the younger generation off to a different land, drawing them away from the families - as every generation goes through, and particularly in the Vietnam era when the cultural divisions were so stark. This is the version most closely aligned with this production: the Mayor's daughter hates her hometown, everyone looks alike and dresses alike, no one has an original idea, the parents just want to make $, and the politicians all are phony - she sees the Piper as an escape - the stranger comes to town - but she can't make the break with him. I hope the production will build on this theme and not just leave the daughter alone in the spotlight at the end lamenting her plight. To me, the most striking and scary moment in the legend, at least as I remember it, is the Mayor's daughter leaving with the kids but - does she turn to look backward? - and not making it over the mountain - she's the only child left behind. Piper could do something with that, too - which brings me to the biggest gap in the production. No rats? and no kids? We really need to feel the full population of children early on (as AW noted to me) - and more important feel the emptiness once they're gone. There are two other Piper versions (at least), and The Piper steers away from these darker elements, but they might be worth thinking about: Is the Piper an avatar of Hitler - getting rid of the "rats" and making the society so much cleaner and better - but with a huge price to pay? Or, a third version: the piper is like the wandering Jew( or perhaps the illegal immigrant?), he comes into Hamelin to do the dirty work that no one in Hamelin will take on - he conducts his business but then nobody will pay him a fair wage because he's weak, different, foreign. And, like Shylock, he exacts his revenge. Some things to think about as this intriguing production moves forward.

A four hour movie in which every moment is beautiful

Last night finished Raul Ruiz's 4-hour epic "Mysteries of Lisbon," making four nights of it - actually really like the film, despite many things. First of all, the byzantine plot, full of Dickensian coincidences and improbably reveals, is very hard to follow - it would really help to have read the novel or seen a cribsheet or seen the film twice - and the narrative made more difficult by characters who change appearance somewhat over the course of the long narrative, by overdubbed narrative voices that are hard to identify, and the general confusions of know piecing together the many complex family relations, some of which are not explained until late in the movie. So - don't worry about that, and just enjoy the movie scene by scene and moment by moment. Ruiz does an astounding job with bringing this world, mid-19th-century Portugal (with forays into France) to life. Though the movie is very short on action and though most of the scenes are very simple, constructed around dialogue, often with just two actors in frame, with relatively few closeups, Ruiz frames every single scene beautifully and imaginatively: the scenes in the chateaux, the ballrooms (will remind of Visconti), the occasional scenes out in the open with carriages crossing a wide green expanse (reminds of Renoir), and most of all the dialogues in rooms: in the school early on, in convents and monk's cell, many in rooms in the chateau or a hotel - each one vivid and many having very odd elements that set them off and surprise us: the many eyes watching the dialogue between the priest (Father Dinis) and his mentor, when they think they're alone; the creepy footman in one of the palaces who prances across the polished floors on tiptoes, a scene shot mostly as reflection in a mirror. Some of the court scenes are as strange and elegant as one of those huge Baroque canvases, a Velasquez maybe. Despite my warnings above about difficulty of following the plot, you can get enough of it even on first viewing, and the mysteries do become more or less clear at the end; though it's not as great and profound a series as, say, The Best of Youth, and not as great an adaptation as some of the British adaptations of Dickens, especially the recent Bleak House and Little Dorrit, it's a memorable film and an access, for most Americans, to a time we know little about and to a source not that till now was unknown at least to me.

Portuaguese soap - but a very good movie none the less - Mysteries of Lisbon

It's maybe too easy to dismiss Ruiz's four+-hour project, "Mysteries of Lisbon" (2010?) as a glorified soap, and it does have the complex web of loves and hatreds and betrayals of any soap - but there's a lot more to it, I think, at least from the first half (Part one). First of all, the production quality alone makes it worth watching - Ruiz does not work at an exciting pace, it's leisurely and majesterial, but that tone perfectly suits the material, a story that unfolds gradually - set in mid-19th-century Portugal, basic plot summary: wealthy young woman falls in love with a 2nd son of a Count, but her father refuses to allow the marriage because he will inherit nothing; she (Angela) and he continue their relationship; she becomes pregnant, gives up baby, father of baby flees, and her father forces her to marry a wealthy suitor. She's very cold to the suitor - she has turned inward and against the world - and he treats her cruelly. Meanwhile, boy raised as an orphan, under tutelage of Father Denis, who seems to know everything and everyone; mother finally sees her son - around time the husband dies, confessing his sins - and she forgives him, realizing she never should have married. She leaves her son and enters a convent. Priest playing a central role, as we move toward part 2: how does he know so much? Why is a fierce self-made wealth Lisbon guy defending Angela (Countess of Santa Barabara) against slander? Lots of things to explain and relationships to develop in part two. The film at its best reminds me a bit of great Italian series The Best of Youth in its focus on character and its broad historic scope. Mostly it's appealing because of its unusual - to American viewers - look and setting. It's of the Masterpiece Theater quality - in its ballroom scenes (which reminded me a little of The Leopard), its scenes in the convent and the school and the various mansions, and most of all in the beautiful outdoor sequences, carriages moving across an open plain, for example. It has the strange sense for me of looking very familiar - we've all seen many 19th-century costume dramas - but just slightly off: it's neither England, France, Italy, nor Spain - Portuguese architecture and landscape are just slightly different and interesting to behold. We'll see how well the strand come together in part 2 - some of the elements are pretty confusing (apparently its based on a well-known novel of same title - but the novel probably had a lot more material, and it's a challenge to weave all that into a film or series, even at 4+ hours.)

Tip for U.S. film producer: pick up the rights to Sleepless Night

The 2011 French-Belgian film "Sleepless Night" (Nuit Blanche, actually) is just about a perfect genre film that completely satisfies on its own terms - it will never be mistaken for The Seventh Seal or The Godfather - it's just a great cops-drugs-gangsters action drama, with a super-tight plot, lots of twists and turns, enough but not too much ambiguity (slight spoiler here, but I could never be sure, even after the film, whether the main cop was truly working undercover or if he was a crook - I think the latter). Simply put, story about two cops who rob a drug runner, shooting him to death in the process, leading to an investigation. When a Sicilian mobster nightclub owner - a truly ugly an sinister guy - learns that the cop has the Rx headed for him hie grabs the cop's preteen son and holds him in the huge nightclub he runs until the cop returns the Rx. So this becomes a story about a bad guy trying to do whatever it takes to rescue his son - and the father-son relationship adds a human dimension to the story and draws us in emotionally. The whole story takes place within 24 hours, and most of it during the nighttime hours in the club, so there's a great sense of unity of time and place, very unusual in contemporary movies. The pace is lightning fast, some terrific fight and flight scenes, tension throughout every moment - and also lots of incidental humor, especially the scenes in the night club's restaurant kitchen (the staff reactions as they watch two thugs grapple in the kitchen is hilarious). Main cop - christlike? - has a scary knifewound in his side through the whole ordeal - he can't go to a hospital for fear of being linked to the killing. The only reason this film has flown below the radar is that it's in French with no familiar actors and with rather drab settings; I would guess some smart producer will buy the rights and make an American version, set in Las Vegas or LA - and they'll probably ruin it. Or maybe not.

A completely tense series from start to finish: Homeland Season One

Season 1 of "Homeland" did not disappoint in the least - unlike so many other series, it kept me thinking and engaged and tense right to the last moment, and had enough unresolved plot lines and hints and suggestions of further developments to keep my thinking and waiting without leaving me with the feeling of a plot in search of itself or a blatant, pandering cliffhanger. Claire Danes great throughout the season and outdoes herself in last episodes, when her bipolar disorder comes into play and becomes a major plot point: the conspiracy she sees all around her could very well be, to others and even to herself when she realizes how sick she is, just a paranoid fantasy - except we know she's onto something, though we're not entirely sure of all of the parameters of the conspiracy. We certainly understand why her CIA colleagues and others would elieve she's just mentally deranged. I had suggested two big plot outcomes in earlier posts - neither of which came to fruition - but I still suspect these elements might be developed further in Season 2: (spoilers): We know that Estes was involved in a cover-up because he didn't want it known he gave the OK to drone bombing of civilians. Is it worse than that? Is he actually taking funds from Al Qaeda? Second, we know that "Isa" was killed in a drone attack on Iraq; is it possible that Abu Nazir sacrificed his own son to the cause? We still don't really know how the terroristis communicated with the "turned" POWs Brody and Wallace (?), and I for one am not ye completely convinced that Brody would turn against his country because of the drone bombing that killed children. There may be more to this yet. In any case, of all the thriller series I've seen over the past few years, several of which involve domestic terrorism (Sleeper Cell one of the best), Homeland is by far the best crafted and probably the best acted as well, at least among the leads (yes, I have come to kind of like the rumpled and mumbly Mandy Patinkin as Danes's mentor and father-figure).

A new old-fashioned British spy film: Page Eight

The relatively new Masterpiece movie, the British "Page Eight," has everything going for it that we have come to love and expect from so many British films, starting with great acting (that famous British tradition still extant - these actors all must come from the world of live theater rather than, as do U.S. actors, from the world of fashion runways), starting with Bill Nighy and Rachel Weisz (though either she's too young and pretty for the part or, in any case, hard to accept that she would have any romantic interest in the much older Nighy), crisp directing and really smart writing scene by scene, thanks to David Hare, and of course the fine production values - not as evident in a contemporary piece, but still, the film does capture the essence and look of a variety of contemporary London settings. All that said, Page Eight ends up fading from the mind and memory very quickly - like eating a piece of candy that just doesn't satisfy a real appetite - in that at the end it's like about a thousand other British films and shows about British spies, moles, sources, interagency conflicts, duplicitous prime ministers, overbearing subordinates, and so forth. Very briefly, story revolves around a source who claims that the PM knows and has known about secret American prisons and torture interrogations - Nighy tries to ferret out the truth, and ends up in conflict with one of his co-workers. There are some odd twists - is Weisz spying on him or not? - but ultimately I didn't find anything that distinguished this film from the masses. Though there's a nod to technology and social media - some joshing toward Nighy about his being very old fashioned, but he triumphs by using a camera that uploads automatically to "a computer" as he so quaintly puts it - the spy and counterspy techniques in Page Eight would have fit right in with a Le Carre novel: would be interesting to see a British spy film or show that really pitted the old techniques, good sources, occasional lock-picking and break-ins, against contemporary techniques, cold and analytic and dependent on technology rather than on people skills and social savvy.

God said to Abraham: Kill me a son. Homeland and the Bible.

Spoiler again here but just a quick note on Season 1 of "Homeland": in previous post I speculated on some plot developments that I can foresee, one of which, I suspect, will be a revelation that the terrorists arranged the bombing that killed Abu Nazir's son, Isa - a death that was blamed on the U.S. and that supposedly leads Sgt Brody to "turn" away from the U.S. and toward Al Qaeda. I noted that this may be an enactment of the sacrifice of Isaac - which, if I'm not mistaken, Muslims unlike Jews believe actually was carried out. Let me point something out - have others noticed the very names of these characters? The father, Abu (Abraham?) Nazir, and his son, Isa (Isaac)?

Trying to figure out where Homeland is heading in Season 1

Spoilers here: but about 8 episodes into the excellent Showtime series "Homeland" (Season 1) I'm completely convinced that my surmise in previous post is on the money: Estes, the CIA boss, is clearly the mole within the CIA, giving away information to Abu Nazir and the terrorists: he has the means and the motive; they made it really clear that he's in a terrible divorce situation and he needs the money. If you closely watch the interrogation scene, he had the opportunity to slip the terrorist subject a razor blade. He was completely uncooperative on the lie-detector test, and they didn't call him on it because of his rank. He's tried to hinder Kerrie (the excellent Claire Danes) except when he can use her, and he knew of all the intelligence info and had time to convey it. OK, so maybe I figured that much out; but what about Brody himself, the returned POW whom Kerrie suspects has turned? We do know that he has been working with the terrorist Nazir - but is he some kind of double-agent or triple-agent? In these latest episodes they dramatize how and why he supposedly "turned" - anger about the American drone bombing, and then the cover-up, that killed Nazir's son, whom Brody was tutoring in English. I wonder, though, if the bombing could have been done or staged by the terrorists: we know they faked the death of an Marine in order to get Brody to believe his was guilty of murder. My first thought was of the Muslim interpretation of the Abraham-Isaac story: Abraham would have and did kill his son, in service to the cause. But I'm actually thinking that maybe Nazir never had a son, that the whole tutoring arrangement was plotted out to ensnare Brody: the kid may have been just a street urchin. Very hard to figure out Brody's motives and objectives. Also hard to figure out how his fellow POW survived or why he's turned into terrorist himself.

Congratulations to Homeland

Congratulations to the crew from "Homeland," well-deserved best drama Emmy winner this week - though I'm still a big fan of Mad Men, the recent series seems to have lost of bit of its edge I thought. Homeland was a complete surprise - I've generally been down on Showtime series, which I find very formulaic and just a step up from Lifetime: all featuring a star actor from network TV or films, playing a: woman in distress (C Word, Nurse Jackie) or ordinary person suddenly found in extraordinary circumstances (Weeds) or extraordinary people are really "just like us" (Big Love, Dexter) or just plain exploitation of sex and rx (Californication) - but all of them pretty much two-dimensional and predictable (Dexter maybe an exception there) - and Homeland could have gone the same way (CIA agent with a drug problem) - but it's so much more, at least through the first 5 episodes of season 1: Claire Danes is awesome in the lead, dominating every scene she's in with her big eyes and her expressive features and her strong personality, yet she stays within the boundaries of the character - we genuinely feel we're watching Kerri Mathisson (?) and not C.Danes (not true of most of the other Showtime stars). The plot is suitably complex and tense without being gratuitous in its violence or overly clever or baroque with its plot twists - so far, it all makes sense, and we know just enough to stay interested and engaged, but not all that much more than the main characters. Is Sgt Brody a turned POW, or are Kerri's theories unfounded, or even products of her own drug-induced delusions? We have no clear answer, yet. I will share my suspicion and see how it plays out: I think K's boss, Estes, is the actual turned agent, that he slipped the razor blade to the prisoner - lots of evidence and clues point this way, but I'd be a little disappointed in that his guilt would perpetuate the stereotype: the black/ethnic characters always get the shaft.

Realism to an extreme: a movie as slow as life (Lake Tahoe)

The 2006 Mexican film "Lake Tahoe" is a completely honest film in the "dogma" style: shot in near real time (takes places over course of one day, with real-time sequences broken by black screen visual ellipses) with no special effects, no soundtrack, mostly amateur actors probably, real settings in what appears to be a small city in the Yucatan. If you watch it for plot (or for that matter for images of Lake Tahoe, which you'll never get) you're on the wrong track: plot is super-simple (spoilers here, though not much to spoil): teenage boy drives his old car into a post and spends much of the morning trying to guy a part to get the car started again, in the course of which he meets a young guy who will befriend him and a young woman with whom he'll have a brief fling; boy is very distracted and withdrawn, and we gradually learn that his father has died perhaps the day before - he goes home a few times - his home is quite a bit more upscale than the other places he visits during the course of the movie - where his mother is drowning her sorrows and his kid brother is left more or less unattended. That's pretty much it; nothing truly happens, and there's no resolution. I admire the movie for fulfilling its intentions, but have to say I found the pace soporific; I don't need an action film or any complex plot design to draw me into a movie, but this one was so austere and glacial that it almost defies the audience. Also, would have been a stronger movie if it had less ambiguity: I know things are never wrapped up in real life as they are in a 90-minute commercial film, but still I was left scratching my head: how did the dad die? why are there no funeral arrangements or crowds of family and friends at the house of the mother (even if she's not still with the father? that was unclear)? Why such a distinction in social class between the boy with the car and everyone he meets or visits? Where was he heading at the outset and why? And what's the significance of the title (whose only reference in the movie was a bumper sticker on the car from Tahoe, which kid brother pastes into his scrap book)? Mystery and ambiguity are certainly welcome elements in films, but in this one the mysteries are huge black holes in the middle of an already extremely spare movie - director and writer have some obligation, I think, to fill in at least some of the blanks.

Bringing it all back - Homeland

"Homeland" so far (3 episodes) is one of the best and most promising Showtime enterprises ever - the lot is really engaging and manages to stay just on the near side of credibility. Clare Danes in the lead is terrific as a CIA agent based in DC with no personal life, a slew of problems (including some drug addiction), a need to prove herself to herself (making up for a botched case in which she missed a vital piece of evidence) and to her mentor (a grumbly older CIA operative who begrudgingly gives Danes advice but is a bit of a malcontent - played by the highly mannered Mandy Patinkin) - Danes has eyes on a returned Marine POW whom she believes to be a "turned" prisoner passing some kind of secret messages to a stateside terrorist group - we believe she's right, based on some clues, but there are so many possibilities for double-crosses and double-agents it's hard to know if she's seeing the whole picture. She has set up a rather elaborate surveillance mechanism on the Marine's home, and therefore watches way more of their domestic troubles than she cares to, or needs to - and as for us, we're following both a domestic psychodrama (the Marine's wife had been pretty deeply involved with his best buddy, when they both assumed that he was missing or dead) and in his internal psychic problems (weird sexual hangups following years of captivity) - but there are things we see that she doesn't, including his use of a Muslim prayer mat. Of course my suspicion is that somehow he hasn't been turned but he's trying to get access to a sleeper cell in order to expose it. Anyway, plenty of tension and lots to keep us interested and to keep us guessing, without too much gratuitous sex or violence - very smart series so far (based on an Israeli series, which I'm betting was as good or better - the originals usually are).

The strengths and weaknesses of Game of Thrones

The great strength of "Game of Thrones" (Season 1), like other HBO productions, particularly the British-born ones, is the no-expenses-spared way in which the show creates an entire world, visually before us - Rome did the same, but in some ways Thrones is even more impressive in that the world is medieval-inspired but also imaginary and fantastical. The jousting scenes, the village life, the castles, the roadways - all are based closely on our images of life in the middle ages in Europe; but then there's that odd barrier castle, The Wall, protecting against invasions from the North, and the kingdoms across the "Narrow Sea," based loosely on African or Arab tribes, that are unique visual creations for the show. For the first two or three episodes, I was constantly interested in the look of the series, but that interest, by the end of 5 episodes, has begun to wear thin. Unfortunately, the characters, though each a vivid type, have failed to draw me in - it's not, at least so far, a series about changing characters and their complex relations but about unchanging types and their clashes and interactions - types familiar from many other series: the vulgar king, the tough and honest old soldier (just like the centurian from Rome), the narcissistic upstart (channeling Baltar from Battlestar?), and so forth. Over the course of the series of source novels I'm sure there is some character development, but I don't see it yet in the series. There's a lot of plot material to deal with as well and though I can follow the main strands way too many elements are simply put forth in narrative rather than through dramatic action. Series with many strong elements and lots of promise, but not sure if I'll follow through multiple seasons.

What documentary film can do: Sweetgrass

Inspired by NYT article yesterday watched the very unusual 2009 (?) documentary "Sweetgrass" - about as pure a documentary as you'll ever see, and like nothing else you've ever seen most likely. The director - (looking it up) : Lucien Castaing-Taylor, and she calls herself the "recorder," not the director - builds this great film from footage shot over two years with a group of sheep farmers in Montana - on the surface, not an immediately appealing topic to most people, but amazing what C-T gets out of this: it's a sorrowful elegy to a whole way of life and one of the finest examples I've ever seen of a study of the interaction between people and nature. Very unusual in that the people - grizzled cowboys, mostly - are secondary to the livestock, the thousands of sheep, and the herding dogs. The film has no script whatsoever, no interview, and, except for the opening and closing moments, no title screens - we just observe, through the camera, a way of life: birth and nurturing of lambs, shearing, herding, and then moving the herd up a rocky, difficult trail to the summer grazing pasture. Who the people (cowboys) are, what they think, what brought them to this life, where they're heading: we know nothing more about them than we know about any one of the sheep, really. This film is in the tradition that goes back to Vertov's I Am A Camera (I think the nyt mentioned this as well), but with today's portable equipment documentarians can do so much more. C-T captures some astonishing moments, both emotionally and visually: a younger cowboy breaking down in tears during cell-phone call to his mother, confusion when a bear or wolverine attacks some sheep in the middle of the night, the rough hands of a sheep farmer assisting with the birth of a lamb. The movie gives us no context - we (or at least I) don't know if ultimately these sheep are bound for slaughter, or if they're raised for wool only - but it's a great demonstration of the power of film: putting us right into a life, immersing us in a another, largely inaccessible world, and let us see and hear it with our own eyes and ears - the camera, the filmmaker - are just invisible, a clear lens through which we peer.

The captivating Game of Thrones and its many strands and strengths

Visiting bro in law J was regaling me with tales from the series of novels that forms the basis for the HBO series "Game of Thrones" - told J I would definitely never read the books, but was interested in seeing the series. Started with the first two episodes and, so far, very impressed: the series has the extraordinary production values we've come to expect from HBO and its British allies, as interesting to look at as Rome - an entire medieval world, with castles and villages and great open spaces and mysterious huge human construction - The Wall - creating beautifully and perfectly. The acting is good, in that highly trained British way - from the grizzled old knights (and King) to the insufferable King in exile to the forlorn mother and wife furious as her husband heads off to a war she considers avoidable to the obnoxious and self-centered queen and the bratty kids in the royal court. Some really nicely developed scenes and situations and character conflicts - a fight between a prince and the butcher's boy that turns out bad for guess who, two attempts on the life of the knight's youngest son (he saw the queen and her brother engaged in incest so they have to wipe him out) - especially one where he's rescued quite dramatically and gruesomely by wolf pup he's raised, and the long trek of the king's bastard son to his new post on The Wall guarding the northern kingdom, as it becomes more obvious that The Wall is really just a glorified prison camp. The story is a fiction set in quasi-medieval Europe with elements of fantasy (ghosts and such) weaved through. Takes a lot of concentration in first two episodes to get the strands of the story fixed in your mind - various rulers and kingdoms and vassals and their families - and the dialogue, esp in the first episode, can be very hard (for an American) to pick up in its entirety, but I find it a very captivating series and will keep watching, at least for a while (M less enthusiastic, btw).

Iran - A man's world, and not that great for men, either: A Separation

Wish I like the recent Iranian movie "A Separation" more than I did because there are some really great things in it and it's a tremendous cultural document, a view into Iranian families and contemporary life that is shocking in some ways to American audiences - in some ways because it shows the similarities across our great cultural divide and in other ways because it makes evident the vast differences. On the plus side, the movie is completely honest, very well plotted - influenced both by reality TV and by the recent spate of documentaries made with small, light, unobtrusive digital equipment, it's a story of a 40ish married couple with a 10-year-old daughter breaking up: the wife wants to go to live abroad, the husband wants to stay to take care of his elderly father, the daughter torn between the two. Movie opens with a great scene in which the man and wife argue their case before some kind of court magistrate - who refuses to allow the separation - obviously, he favors the man's position and he's particularly put out by wife's desire to live abroad (this scene filmed from magistrate's POV, we never see him). Wife leaves to live temporarily with her mother, and much of the film focuses on father's attempt to manage household - but it's as far from single-dad comedy, and even from single-dad drama (Dustin Hoffman learning to make French toast and becoming a better mom than estranged Meryl Streep - right) as you can imagine - lots of complications ensue with hired household help, which leads to various court scenes and confrontations, some very well dramatized. Overall, unfortunately, I found the movie about 30 minutes too long and tediously paced in sections; I credit the writer-director for not pandering and making the film "popular," but my mind did wander at times. That said, some great scenes: the fight in the waiting room of the hospital, for example. You wonder if this film would be as good or as well received if it had been made in America, the family transposed into an American family, and the first-thought response is, no, it wouldn't, we cut it a lot more slack and take it more seriously because it's a foreign film. On deeper reflection, however, that's really an unanswerable question: what makes this film excellent is its view of Iranian society in particular: part of the plot hinges, for example, on the housekeeper's unwillingness to clean up when the elderly dad pees in his pants because seeing him naked might be a sin; she calls some kind of hot line for advice. Though the mom in this film seems much more free-thinking than we'd imagine an Iranian woman to be, it's also obvious from every shot that Iran is a man's world - and not that great for men, either.

Footnote is a really good movie - but what's with that ridiculous musical score?

The recent Israeli movie, Footnote (writer and director, Cedar), tells a really good, concise story of father-son rivalry and competition, within a context very unusual, at least unusual in American films: both father and son are in the field of Talmud studies and philology, the father more of an old-fashioned, stuffy academic who's got a pretty high position in academe but has never been fully recognized or rewarded (he thinks) and has published little (the joke is that his greatest recognition is being cited in a footnote by a legendary Talmud scholar); the son is more up to date and much more widely published, and the father, instead of paternal pride, feels seething jealousy and depression. (Spoilers here): Plot gets in motion when father gets a call telling him he's won the Israel Prize (something like a National Medal, I think), but we soon learn that the call was mistake, it was actually the son who won the prize, and the committee calls on the son to set things right with his father, which leads to many complications. Part of the beauty of the film is its avoidance of easy answers and happy conclusions: the father indeed learns that the award is not rightly his, but the movie ends with his accepting the award and with he relation with everyone in jeopardy: his family knows he took something not rightly his, the son is even more embittered. The movie is not kind to academics in any form - the logrolling and politicking of academic awards exposed for what it is, in case anyone out there ever thought these things were given out on the basis of merit. Footnote is a very dark movie, with many interfamily scenes of high drama worthy of Pinter or O'Neil, so what's with the ridiculous up-beat, intrusive musical score? Was the director trying to lighten his difficult material to make it seem more jaunty or palatable? Did he think the contrast in moods would give the film an edge? Is this stuff funny in Israel but not in the U.S.? Or was it just a horrible decision - a score that nearly ruins the mood of an otherwise very strong film?