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.