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

See also my blog on books: Elliot's Reading

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Hugo is a mash-up of two other films. Can you guess?

You'd almost think it's a weird conspiracy but has anyone else noticed that, among the Oscar best-film nominations this year, "Hugo" is essentially a mash-up of two of the other films: extremely annoying precocious boy loses father, who was devoted to him and playful and engaged him in games (while mom is basically out of the picture), in tragic fire and then becomes isolated in the city and engaged in extremely implausible pursuit of a "key" that will unlock the mystery of his father's prized possession, as in the pretentious and almost unwatchable Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - meets - master of the silent film era slips into obscurity but is later recognized and acclaimed for the brilliance of his work, in a Hollywood self-aggrandizing tribute to the glories of a bygone era, as in The Artist. Pt it all together and you have Hugo, not one of Scorcese's masterpieces, to put it mildly. The production values are extraordinary - they essentially created an entire 1930s (I guess) Paris through digital imagery - but the plot is plodding and predictable - it's clearly a movie that adults think is for kids but has no sense of what kids actually like in movies: it's not over-explication. The Melies tribute is actually pretty good - it's fun to watch the clips of his old, colorized films - never struck me so strongly how weird they are and how much they're a precursor to Monte Python imagery. Some good things in Hugo but it's selfindulgent and would have been a much better film if it could have clocked in at 90 minutes (not 2+ hours, god help us).

Saturday, March 17, 2012

The exploited women in Boardwalk Empire

Though I am kind of enjoying "Boardwalk Empire," we will most likely abandon Season 1 at this point, after 8 episodes - M. very frustrated and annoyed by the demeaning treatment of women throughout the season, and, though I can more easily accept that there's some verisimilitude in that no doubt this is how the mobsters of the era did treat women, there's also a sense that the series itself exploits the women characters in that they are props, lurid little toys that get to play in a lot of sex scenes and cat fights; the women characters include whore-with-a-heart-of-gold and serious drug addiction, sex crazed show dancer with major oedipal issues, uptight suffragettes, sickly and barren wife left behind by self-righteous federal agent and who seems like Ethan Frome's hapless spouse, nasty dress-shop owner, pea-brained concubines, and so on; the main female character, Marguerite Schroeder, is by far the most sympathetic, smart and bold and very sweet - but she's also, incomprehensibly, an incredible fool, naively agreeing to live as the main mobster's kept woman without, seemingly, realizing how deeply he's into corruption, gambling, and rum-running. Perhaps, on "discovering" his criminal behavior, she will turn against him - but really, is that probable? possible? She's either far too smart to get involved with him in the first place or far too selfish to care how he treats her and how he gets his money - she can't really be both.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Is Jean-Pierre Melville as good as Hitchcock?

I've felt at times when I revisit a Hitchcock film that he's a bit overrated - is North by Northwest really that good, by today's faster-paced standards? - and I'm starting to feel, watching two Jean-Pierre Melville films on back-to-back nights, that he's under-rated, or at least under-recognized: Surely Melvilles 1970 "Le Cercle Rouge" is as good a jewel-thief movie as you're going to get - not perfect by any means, but smartly told and acted, well paced, and clear about the multiple strands of the plot. I have some quibbles that I'll get to in a moment, but first of all I was struck, in Cercle, as I was the night before in Bob le Flambeur, by the great use of location shots - in this movie, some in Marseilles, many in Paris, beautifully capturing the look and feel of the neighborhoods, with the old Hotels and apartments in some "quartiers" and the trashy shops and clubs and bars in some of the other - and also great outdoor footage - the chase through the snow, the shooting in muddy field. And: the escape from the moving train, perfectly choreographed and surprising. All that said, the plot turns out not to be as challenging or imaginative as it seemed at first: what happened to the whole element of a prison guard setting a prisoner up for the great robbery? I thought there would be a huge payoff there, like it's all a trap or like the police inspector is in on it - but that was just dropped. And how can anyone explain the ending? What leads the jewel thief to the final location? How did he know it was a trap? How did he get there? lots of unanswered details at the end - but, still, a really entertaining movie that doesn't feel dated at all, except for the 1960s-era Plymouth barreling along the highway.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

A true time capsule of Paris 1956: Bob le Flambeur

Jean-Pierre Melville's 1956 noirish French gangster movie, "Bob le Flambeur" (Bob the Gambler - you won't find the word in your Larousse) is a sharp, well-narrated, well-paced movie that doesn't feel dated at all. Bob (does the name sound exotic to the French?) is an elderly, distinguished looking sharpie who makes his living through gambling in the Montmarte/Pigalle neighborhoods; after string a bad luck he gets the idea to rob the vault in a casino (Deauville), assembles a team, but one of the weak links blabs to his girlfriend, she blabs or boasts to a guys she's carrying on with on the side, he's a mug who owes a favor to the police, he squeals, but the cops are also in with Bob - the whole plot clicks together like a fine piece of machinery. Few people have seen this movie I suspect, though it's a natural for a contemporary remake - maybe that's already been done, in fact, in one version or another, though I think an action-filled, glossy color remake would spoil all the charm, as part of the pleasure of watching Bob the Flambeur is the period locale, Paris in 56 still impoverished from the war, very few cars - Bob drives a huge Plymouth, a real stylist - and the gorgeous scenes at night all evidently shot on location on the streets of Paris with the trashy nightclubs and bars of the Pigalle, and even some background music from some of the jazz bands who must have been playing the clubs at the time: a true time capsule, one of the great pleasures that film can still provide.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Buscemi makes Boardwalk Empire worth watching

Now through the first 3 episodes of Season 1 of "Boardwalk Empire," and, though it's flawed in many ways, it's still a very watchable series - mostly, because of Steve Buscemi, who makes every scene he's in compelling. Nocky Thompson is a perfect role for him - sarcastic, tempestuous, unpredictable, and super-smart - a corrupt pol more than a gangster, in that's he's not particularly tough but the threat of terrible violence is beneath or behind every insinuating smile. He's a contrast to the gangsters that are trying to move in on his territory, some of them historical figures: the sly Rothstein, the tempestuous Luciano, and most of all a very young and very cruel Al Capone - each of these minor figures delineated and portrayed very well. The superstraight federal agent is also a good foil against Nocky, and N's brother Eli, the corrupt sheriff, so stupid and so malleable, is another good foil - though I wish they were more credible as brothers. The weakness continues to be the subplot of his protege Jimmy, who gets expelled from the garden and links up with the young Capone in Chicago, and also the love interest, the working-class Irish girl Marguerite: neither of these characters quite holds together. Jimmy doesn't seem tough enough for the role, and Marguerite is confusingly portrayed: she seems too innocent to seek out Nocky for help, at the outset, and then, as the plot develops, far too intelligent and wily to stay within his orbit.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Can Boardwalk Empire reach Sopranic heights?

Based on the first two episodes, the HBO Terence Winter series "Boardwalk Empire" is worth watching for Steve Buscemi's Nucky Thompson alone - Buscemi, as he did in Reservoir Dogs and episodes of The Sopranos, makes every scene he's in better, makes many scenes great - and he's perfectly cast here as the kingpin of the East Cost prohibition mobsters. HBO itself set the bar for this kind of series extraordinarily high, and from the first two episodes it doesn't seem the Boardwalk can climb to Sopranic heights - what made The Sops so great was the focus on the family life and the interior life of Tony S., whereas in Boardwalk Nucky T. doesn't have much of an interior life - the various references to his late wife and his loneliness to not ring true and his relation with his brother, the corrupt country sheriff, have not yet developed at all - the sheriff might as well be any corrupt official, the writers have done nothing to develop the family dynamics. The weakest link, however, is that between Nucky and the young mobster aspirant, Jimmy, who's supposed to be a war vet and Princeton dropout, yet there's no clear or credible explanation as to why he would choose to stay involved with Nucky - this part obviously modeled on Christopher in The Sops but the relations are vague and the character is ill-conceived. That said, there are excellent scenes in the first two episodes, particularly the huge parties and crowd scenes in Atlantic City in the '20s - Scorcese directed the first episode, and it's clear once again that nobody today can direct these massive party scenes as effectively as he does.