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

See also my blog on books: Elliot's Reading

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Birdland: The Central Park Effect

All birders and in fact all nature-lovers will enjoy watching The Central Park Effect, which takes us swiftly through 4 seasons of bird-watching in Central Park New York - much of the film focused on the birds themselves and a small cadre of devoted bird-watchers who roam the park, often led by a stalwart guide, Star Sapphire, a true New York character, smart, obsessed with her little niche of life, strong, independent, and surprisingly open about the cancer she suffers from. There's some background information as filmmaker J. Kimball talks to a few experts, from Cornell and elsewhere, about migration patterns and why CP is a major stopover from migrating birds. All that said, I don't think nonbirders will care much for this film as it's not a great narrative documentary by any stretch. Kimball gives the film a shape by demarcating the 4 seasons - we go from spring to spring, actually, for an upbeat ending as the songbirds return - but there's no narrative tension or conflict and no sharp focus on any one character or small set of characters, elements that life documentaries like this above the level of nature special and into real storytelling. There's also, I found, too much time spent interviewing various birders (notably, J. Franzen) about their passion for birds - point made, and made again - and too much use of a musical soundtrack, while what most of us would want is the simple sound of birds and of the soft conversations of the birders. So, not a film for everyone, but for those of us who do care about birds it was a pleasure to watch and it succeeds in the way Kimball probably wants - made me want to get outdoors.

Friday, March 29, 2013

The streets of Rome are paved with rubble: Shoeshine

Few movies are more painful to watch that V. DeSica's 1946 Shoeshine, a great and disturbing highlight of Italian postwar neo-Realism. All done in gritty, grainy black and white (of course) probably on location on the streets of postwar Rome, still suffering from tremendous poverty and destruction, filmed with I would guess mostly amateur actors, the story has both the simple and elemental qualities of a tale and the grand emotions of a lyric opera, especially at the tragic conclusion. Story is of two shoeshine boys who, improbably, are trying to save money to buy a horse (the equivalent at the time of teenagers yearning for a sports car - flash and freedom); through the lead of the older teenage brother of one of the boys, they get involved in selling some stolen goods (American blankets - movie is set during the war) and inevitably the get caught (partly because they stupidly use the windfall to buy a horse and then prance around the city). They get sent to juvenile prison, with all of the horrors, or most of them, that you can imagine - brutality, indifference, overcrowding, unsanitary, etc. Police squeeze the boys to give up info on the older sibling, which of course breaks a huge social taboo and leaves the two boys at odds, estranged from family, and even more vulnerable. It's a very dark movie, so not for everyone, and much of it is an expose of the horrible social conditions in Italy at its time (and no doubt still the case, with some modifications, in many cities in the U.S. and the world today) - thousands of kids working the streets of Rome with no chance of ever receiving an education, families living impoverished and crowded conditions, social services that are just warehouses for kids who have nowhere else to go, everyone taking advantage of them, treating them like dirt - notably, the American GI who gets his shoes shined and dismissively refuses to pay, mumbling as he leaves the stand: "Tomorrow." As with so many movies of this period - Rome Open City, Bicycle Thieves, to name two - the street scenes of Rome are incredibly interesting to look at, and nothing like the tourist mecca we expect: yes, we see some squares with fountains, but decidedly not the Trevi of Fellini - these are ugly, dark streets with broken stones and facades. The waterfront (along the Tiber presumably) is cindered and industrial - Rome looks like a place you'd want to escape from - but how can you do it? Where would you go? The boys' hopes of buying a horse, though briefly realized, are absurd and doomed. One child in the prison talks longingly of Florence - and you get the sense that they understand that anything would be better than where they are now. Part of the wonder of watching this and other post-War Italian films is thinking about how much that culture has changed in the past 70 years - from a dank ruin to a gleaming metropolis. It's like watching a film not just from another era but from another world.

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Unusual Suspects: Everyone in The Killing is a potential perp

In a rare disagreement, I am surprised that friend AW completely dismisses The Killing, which M and I continue to find very engaging on almost every level - sure, it's over the top at times and highly manipulative, adding new clues and information episode by episode though we would expect that the cops would have uncovered a lot of these leads in the first few days of investigation, and, more disturbing, many of the leads are there just to tease us along and keep the series moving. Still - the series does keep moving. Enos/Linden remains a strong if somewhat opaque lead character, her partner, Holder, a very funny and sympathetic sidekick as a unconventional undercover cop with a troubled past and a hip-hop attitude. At end of episode 8 of Season 2: the story obviously now focusing on the Indian casino as the scene of the crime, but it's less clear by the day (each episode = one day) what Rosie was doing at the casino - as we hear now that she may have been a maid (not a juvie hooker). How her family would not have known this is mysterious; and why the cops top brass would go to such lengths to cover up this murder is also mysterious, and my never be satisfactorily answered. Some issues that need clarification at this point in the series: why is Richmond, paralyzed from a shooting and running for mayor, still key to the story? I suspect that he will again become a suspect - there's something suspicious in his refusal to say where he was on the night of the killing. What will Stan Larssen uncover through his posting of a reward for info (the scene when the woman tries to convince him she knew Rosie was excellent)? What about Stan's wife, Mitch, who's basically fled from the family and from the marriage - M has always been suspicious of her, her lack of concern about Rosie's initial disappearance? I think some of the early-on suspects, particularly father of Rosie's boyfriend, will circle back into the story - even Holder, we suspected him at one time - but I don't expect a rapid or clean conclusion, as apparently there is a Season 3 en route. Who dunnit? Coulda been anyone.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Why Zero Dark Thirty is watchable - and why it won few awards

If you missed Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty on screen it's definitely still worth watching on DVD, maybe better on DVD. I was daunted by two things: the length (2.5+ hours!,) and the torture. Watching at home, with short break for T, the length was not an issue - we were totally captivated by the fast-paced, focused, dramatic narrative - kudos to M. Boal (?) for fine screenplay. The torture, which all occurs near the beginning of the film, is difficult to watch, as it's meant to be, but important, essential for the context of the whole movie - not at all gratuitous or overdone. All of us have seen various forms of torture on film by now, so it's no longer terribly shocking to see torture presented graphically (sometimes it's revolting, however). What's really different about the torture in ZD30 is that it's perhaps the only time where your sympathies are in doubt: other torture scenes (coming to mind quickly: Reservoir Dogs, the McCain biopic, Deer Hunter, to cite three very different ones) we are completely in sympathy with the victim. Here, we know the victim is a cold-hearted terrorist partly responsible for thousands of deaths, and the torturer (Jason Clarke) is working to save American (and other) lives. All true. And yet - what he's doing to the man is so against our national principles and values that we are aghast and hate him for it. Our feelings are shared by the new CIA agent on scene, Jessica Chastain (Maya) - she is our entree into the narrative. She too is appalled -but she's part of it, it's her job. Gradually, she figures out how to extract info without direct violence (though the threat of violence is always there - part of the equation); then the film moves on to its second phase, which is using the evidence to track down OBL or UBL as they call him, and finally to persuading the reluctant bureaucracy to move on the evidence. Chastain, in her single-mindedness and passion, is like an avatar of C. Danes in Homeland - in fact, that probably didn't help ZD30's chances at major awards - it felt a little like we've already spent 13 episodes with this character. Alos, ZD30, which won only a single Oscar I think, was hurt by the obvious comparisons with the similar but more likable Argo, which was tighter in construction, more unusual in topic, and had great sense of comedy as well as danger. ZD30 apparently based on real accounts of those who caught and killed OBL, and Maya apparently a composite of several people. Really engaging movie to watch, but it does lose a bit of its edge toward the end - the attack on the compound - because we are so certain of and familiar with these events and the results.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

The Killing - or, The Red Herrings

Watching now Season 2 of The Killing and despite the fact that it's an obviously manipulative show - honestly, it should probably be called The Red Herrings because we soon see that the pattern of the show is to introduce one likely suspect after another, only to exonerate in one manner or another and leave them in the rear view mirror, to the point where, by Episode 4 of Season 2, we're thinking not could this guy be Rosie's killer but why is he innocent? And how? - and you do get the dreaded feeling that the show will never conclude, at least not in a satisfying way - and yet - it's still very compelling episode by episode, especially because of the two leads, Mareille Enos as Linden and her partner, Holder (sorry I don't have actor's name), who's like what Eminem would be if he were a cop. The plot twists do keep me thinking, and I do have my theory - from way back early in Season 2 - that (possible spoiler) it's the angry dad of Rosie's rich boyfriend who did the killing; we'll see. Maybe. Love the look of rainy Seattle, even though I know it was filmed in Vancouver. But it does convey the feeling of a small and somewhat out of the way city with its own hip counterculture, and culture.

Saturday, March 16, 2013

My True Story: Memoir, Documentary, and The Flat

Personal documentary films are the analogue to literary memoirs: they're interesting and successful because of the material they convey and not necessarily because of any great artfulness or style or originality; in fact, style may be a disadvantage in both personal documentary and memoir: we want the text of the film to be essentially transparent so that we can peer right through it to the essential facts about the life of the author or director. Memoirs have been a ridiculously popular literary form; they demand less of the writer, in my opinion, and they at times create a false expectation: very few writers have more than one memoir "in them," but the success of one pushes writers to return again and again to the same well, until it runs dry. There are many different types of documentary film, some in which the life of the filmmaker plays no role at all - but there have been a # of these memoir films in the past few years (one about a Long Island family in which filmmaker's dad turns out to be a pedophile; one about another LI, I think, family in which the mother had led a long and secret fantasy life about her therapist - to recall two), and last night we saw an Israeli film, The Flat, which is a really good film and a good example of this subgenre: the filmmaker, Aron Goldfinger, begins to document the family's task of stripping down the apartment left by the death of his 98-year-old grandmother. It's not clear why he thought that would make an interesting film; probably he's one of those guys that film everything, hoping to find nuggets? Or maybe he suspected what they would find: a stack of virulent Nazi newsletters from the 1930s, and following strands he learns that his cultured, peaceful, German-Jewish grandparents who'd been in Israel since about 1940 were close friends with a high-ranking Nazi official, whom they'd actually accompanied on a tour of then-Palestine (oddly, Nazis and Zionists in the 30s share a hope that Jews would resettle there) - this friendship continuing for years after the war. What's amazing in the film is the extent of the denial: nobody in Goldfinger's family wants to accept this fact, they all "knew nothing" about the grandparents/parents; G. finds the daughter of the Nazi, von Mildenstein, and meets with her in Germany where she, too, denies everything: her father was never a Nazi, he was defamed, etc. It's amazing and appalling that these people could carry on what they considered a friendship, and it's even harder to fathom how a man like von Mildenstein, who after the war worked for Coca-Cola!, could reconcile the horrors of his life with his supposed friendship with these people - self-hating Jews, no doubt, and collaborators, whether they knew it or not.

Monday, March 11, 2013

The best director of all time in the open air

It's clear to me that no one - with possible exception of John Ford? - directed in the open air better than Jean Renoir. We all remember his great en plein air scenes in Grand Illusion and even more so in Rules of the Game (the hunt especially) and last night I saw for the first time one of his lesser-known, undeservedly, American films, The Southerner (1945) - a truly terrific film of its type. The Southerner is beset by a few handicaps, not only it dumb title and its lack of marquee stars and its timing - did Americans really want to watch a movie about farmers trying to make it in the cotton fields as the war was ending? I think they wanted either escapism or war dramas - and it looked old-fashioned even in its day, in grainy black-and-white and narrow-screen format. Yes, the film is kind of a campy melodrama, but told with such passion, humor, and visual imagery that it rises well above all of its limitations. The story is of a small family that leases a field in hopes of getting out of the life of sharecropping and migrant labor, and they suffer all the privations you can imagine during their first year of life on the homestead, flood, illness, poverty, well runs dry, nasty neighbors, and so on. the reasonably happy ending seems tacked on - perhaps a sop to the need of the day for some kind of moral uplift. But such great scenes throughout the movie!: opening in the cotton fields when Uncle Pete falls over and dies, his last words: Plant your own seeds; grandmother stuffing her face with fox grapes, and her fear of snakes as she walks through the rows of cotton (sets us up for ominous dangers everywhere); the flood washing away the farm and the cattle - I actually have no idea how Renoir was able to film this; the knife fight beside the well, one of the more credible film fights ever, much more so that, for example, the balletic knife fighting in West Side Story; the square dance, with the grandma starting to sing hymns; the wedding party (one of the few indoor scenes); the family gathering around the stove for a meal of stewed possum (and hot coffee) - scene by scene, few films can match this one for imagery, oddity, and beauty.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

A world of his own: Marwencol, a great documentary about outsider art

In the tradition of really fine documentaries about really odd people and events (Dear Zachary, The Staircase, to name two) let's add Jeff Malmberg's Marwencol (2010) to the list - a terrific, thoughtful, respectful look at the totally strange world of Mark Hogancamp who was severely beaten outside a bar in his impoverished upstate New York town and, over the years of recovery from serious brain injury, faces his trauma and adjusts, in a way, to the world around him by literally building an entire fantasy world from scrap lumber and populated with plastic dolls that represent him and the various people in his life. Hogancamp's world is set in the imaginary Belgian village of Marwencol during World War II, and involves conflicts between the GIs (including a heroic soldier doll who is Mark) and German SS troops; the village is populated as well by 27 Barbie dolls, each with a name and personality and role and many modeled on people he knows from town and from the restaurant where he works for a few hours each week. The whole concept is on one level amazingly creepy - Mark has a complex fantasy life with the dolls that represent various women in town - and also on another level sweet and therapeutic. He seems incredibly nice and kind to all of the people he knows in town, and they are willing to put up with his peculiarities and apparently honored to be represented in his village (though one woman understandably  upset when her character is shot to death). What brings this to a higher level: Hogancamp is a fantastic "outsider" artist, whose photographs of the life of his village are absolutely outstanding - he has a terrific sense of composition and a director's sense of how to stage dramatic scenes among his dolls and within his settings. Ultimately, his work gets "discovered" by a photographer living nearby and is displayed in a Village gallery, to some acclaim - which sits uneasily on Hogancamp's shoulders. The scenes of his preparing for the exhibit and his travel to NYC are quite powerful - actually, everything in this documentary is powerful and disturbing and also reassuring in some way about the healing powers of art.

One other note: Tried to watch Compliance but could not get past 30 minutes or so, despite the fine, understated acting: takes place in a fast-food restaurant where a prank caller pretending to be a cop gets the manager to hold an employee in a back room and strip search her on suspicion that she may have stole $ from a customers. Apparently some events much like this actually happened in a McDonalds in Kentucky, but that doesn't make it any more watchable as a movie: it seemed so far-fetched and ridiculous; even though there may be some twists at the end, it's impossible for me to believe these characters would go through with the actions as depicted (maybe would have worked better if the suspect were not so obviously a mature and pretty young woman - maybe she should have been much more vulnerable?).

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Sounds of Silence: A censored Iranian filmmaker says his piece

Iranian director Jafar Panahi's This Is not a Film is a tragic artifact making plain to all of us the brutality and stupidity of the Iranian oligarchy and in fact of all idiots who try to repress the voices of artists. This documentary that claims not to be what it so obviously is represents the end result of political censorship : the art blows up in the face of the tyrant and becomes even more devastating it would have otherwise been. This film is not great in and of itself but becomes great because of the facts that surround it: Iranian government convicted Panahi of making films against the state and sentenced him to 6 years in prison and barred him from making or writing films for 20 years. But he is an artist and thinker and creative soul - and very brave. So, confined to his apartment while his case is on appeal, he sets about making this documentary about a day in his life - with the aid of one of his filmmaker friends, very brave guy whose name appears on the credits and who is photographed in the film (a number of others helped anonymously and the credit are filled with dashes and ellipses, not names). The movie is superficially boring: not a hell of a lot happens. But the subtext is really powerful: Panahi decides to act out a screenplay that he can never film, so he puts some tape on his carpet to demarcate various rooms and walks from "room" to "room" describing the movie, which is and always will be in his head only - ultimately, he breaks down and cries over the sorrow and futility of this desperate and clumsy attempt at expression. The end of the movie is extremely odd and powerful (spoilers here) as Panahi, saying good-night to his friend, opens the door to find the building "janitor" in the hallway, supposedly collecting garbage. He and Panahi engage in a very strained conversation, and it's clear to us that the guy is a cop or a spy - very unsettling, scary, as we see the life that Panahi will lead (unless he can flee from Iran, I guess). It's a great tribute that he could make this film and that brave people smuggled it out of Iran on a flash drive - as pure a documentary about the effects of a regime of censorship - on the artist and on society - as we'll ever see.

Monday, March 4, 2013

Two absolutely unforgettable scenes in the great Human Condition

Yes it's clunky and old-fashioned in its way, and what do you expect of a Japanese studio piece from 1959 - the melodramatic score, the acting that at times is almost out of a silent movie - filled with buy-eyed stares of amazement - and yes the story itself at times seems like a grant historical melodrama of star-crossed lovers and fights against tyranny and injustice - but Kobayashi's The Human Condition (1959) is not only perhaps the longest film ever made (actually, it breaks nicely into 6 90-minute or so parts, and today would be presented as a series, not as a single movie) is also one of the greatest, in my opinion and based so far only on parts 1 and 2: a grand narrative equal in scope to Doctor Zhivago or Gone with the Wind but more than either of those two movies a real study of moral values and clashes of culture in time of war. The historical elements may be unfamiliar to Western viewers, but the movie, in its simple plot outline, is very easy to enter and soon becomes thoroughly engaging: a young man, Kaji, becomes exempt from WWII (it's 1943) because he works in a vital industry producing ore. He has theories of how to treat the laborers, notably, treat them well and they will be more productive. He's sent out to a remote Manchurian mine, where the brutal local mine managers test him in every way. Aside from the extraordinary visual interest of many of the scenes, such as the arrival at the mine in the midst of a dust storm or the long tracking shots of the mine community, sometimes seen from an ore hill and sometimes looking up at the lines of laborers climbing trails to the pit entrance, the first two parts of the movie have a few sequences that are simply unforgettable: the arrival of the prison laborers, left in boxcars at a railroad spur, and the execution scene, punishing so-called escapees. The story itself is very compelling as we watch KAJI struggle with his ideals and try to build a life for himself in a remote place and culture - no place to bring his young, perky, somewhat naive wife Michiko. Part 2 ends with the man suddenly and surprisingly drafted into the Japanese army - a reprisal for his too-liberal management of the mine workers, perhaps.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Despite its strengths, a feel-bad film: Amour

It's chance of winning an Oscar for best picture were about the same as my chance of winning the Boston Marathon, but Michael Haneke's Amour is an excellent movie of a certain type, so know what you're in for; it's been widely publicized as a movie about the relationship of an elderly couple, which is true, but generally that calls to mind the sweet and adoring old folks that people many American films. Amour is anything but a feel-good movie, in fact it's kind of a feel-bad movie - Haneke is known for his severity, austerity, and generally dark view of human behavior. Amour is not as harsh as his previous film The White Ribbon, with its brutal and nasty woman-hating protagonist, nor as creepy (nor as dramatic) as Cache, but it's grim in a different way. First of all, this is one of those movies that eschews narrative tension: first scenes shows us the outcome, and then the film steps back and brings us up to that point, so no spoilers possible. We start as police enter a Paris apartment and find elderly woman dead, some kind of assisted suicide it appears, and no sign of her elderly husband. Then we go back a few months, we see the couple, very devoted to each other (Trintignant's tender devotion to his wife may be Haneke's attempt to atone for the bitterness of the male lead in White Ribbon, though whether T's affection is finally truly l'amour or just selfish and expedient is one of the ambiguities hovering still at the end of the film, as in other Haneke works), each slightly eccentric and cranky - what 50+ couple could possibly watch this and not think: that will be us someday? Suddenly, she suffers a transient attack, a stroke it appears, and the rest of the film, essentially, is an intense observation of his increasingly ineffective efforts to care for her. They're a very isolated couple - seeming to have few relations other than with the sharp-edged and sometimes elusive married daughter. The pace is deliberate and careful, some very long takes with almost no sound, no motion even. The scenes of T. helping R. as she learns to walk are painful to watch; one great scene involves T's firing of an incompetent home health aide. Amour - the title is both apt and ironic - is brutal, narrative on the verge of documentary reality, and makes a strong impression on any viewer, but for all its strengths Amour unlikely to be a film on anyone's list of favorites or a film - despite some puzzling aspects at the conclusion, typical of Haneke - that anyone's going to want to see twice.

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Cynical, jaded, entertaining - House of Cards 2013

House of Cards (2013), in what is obviously season 1 of several, does come together in the final third - a series worth watching, even it at times it suffers in comparison with the British original. No matter how sly and smarmy Spacey is as Congressman Frank Underwood, he's not as slick as Ian Richardson in the original. And in the 2103 v. we do have to accept a tradeoff: Spacey makes much less use of the reporter, Kate Mara/Zoe Barnes, to achieve his ends, but on the plus side the role of his wife, Claire/Robin Wright, is greatly enhanced, and she becomes a terrific character. For better or worse, like so many recent TV series (e.g., Mad Men), this is a feel-bad series: though we're spellbound by the plot twists and by trying to stay a step ahead of Spacey as he manipulates others in pursuit of power, we don't really like any of the characters - even the reporters, though they do become  more sympathetic as they band together in the final few episodes to try to figure out the truth about the death of Congressman Russo. It's kind of improbable that the 3 reporters would click so well as an investigative team, and as in so many mystery movies and stories, the clues just fall into place for them far too easily, but that said by the last few episodes we watch in fascination as they get ever closer to the truth about the role Spacy/Underwood played in Russo's rise and fall. Spoilers here: As I watched the whole season I kept wondering how or whether Spacey would kill Mara/Barnes as Richardson killed the reporter in the original. It seemed to me impossible - on a literal level, in that he would obviously be found out (that was a flaw in the original) and on a marketing level, as Mara is too good an actor and Barnes too good a character to lose. I was right - she's still on his tail at end the season - but the possibility is still out there: how can Spacey tolerate a team of reporters on his case as he tries to rise to the vice presidency and higher? Yet how can he kill anyone and get away with it, being such a prominent public figure? In fact, you have to say that the death of Russo should have raised more flags: why wouldn't the cops be suspicious about a "suicide" by CO poisoning if the dead man is in the passenger seat? Anyway, this is a series that picked up in momentum as it moved along - maybe not a great series, but fully entertaining in its cynical, jaded way.