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

See also my blog on books: Elliot's Reading

Saturday, August 31, 2013

Best Icelandic film in years!: The Deep

This has to be the best Icelandic film I've seen this year, maybe ever! (Joke) Actually, The Deep is a pretty good movie by any measure, interesting and engaging, pretty much accomplishes the goals it sets out to meet - which is a measure of success in any art form. As noted in previous posts, I always prefer a B movie that knows it's a B movie and hits the mark than a pretentious, over-stuffed would-be A movie that bores us for two+ hours. The Deep comes in at a respectable 90 minutes - and I wish more movies would try for that mark, almost any commercial movie released these days could benefit from judicious edits. The Deep is one of those "based on true events" movies - in this case about an Icelandic fishing boat that goes down in the Arctic in winter; one of the six crew members survives and swims several hours through the 40-degree water, to a remote, rocky island; scales a cliff, walks barefoot across a lava-rock field, finally gets to a small community where he collapses and is brought safely to a hospital and recovers. This is the first hour of the movie - after an initial set-up in which we meet some of the crew men at home with their families before the leave port, most of the movie is about the wreck and the journey home. The last 30 minutes feel rather deflated, as we some doctors and researchers become interested in how this guy could have survived and run some tests on him and determine what we already knew - that he has (perhaps because he's quite fat) a tremendous resistance to cold and to lower body temp. That said, the final minutes of the movie are very sweet - as the sailor, Gulli, remembers his thoughts - which he'd articulated - about what he'd do if he survived; he had dreamed of a rendez-vous with a beautiful girl in town (we'd seen her briefly in a bar scene early in the movie) - in his fantasy while swimming, she met him at the door, like in a Viagra ad. In the reality, at the end of the movie, he just looks up at her house, her lighted window. This, to its great credit, is not a Hollywood ending. The guy, injured though he is, has only one, lonely course through life, and at the end he boards another fishing vessel. Over the credits we see something that has become a bit of a cliche but always draws my interest - actual newsreel footage of the guy on whom the story was based - heavier, and homelier, than the lead actor - which grounds the movie firmly in reality. That's a good thing, actually, as if this movie had been entirely fictional our reaction would be: nah, could never happen, and we'd be much less interested and caught up in his plight and danger. Some great scenes, both of his trek and of his re-adjustment to small-city life, in a movie that's not actually great but is worth watching.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Breaking Bad - the only series to get consistently better episode by episode

I will join the chorus and sing in praise of the final season of AMC's Breaking Bad - if there was ever a series that got consistently better season by season and even episode by episode it's this one. This final season once again contains great drama, with all the characters in crisis - as Hank moves in on Walt and tries to arrest him while protecting his sister-in-law Skylar, not realizing, at least yet, how deeply involved Skylar is in the crimes. Each of the first three episodes has tremendous surprises - e.g., the DVD "confession" that Walt records, which has everyone, I'm sure, completely fooled until Hank and Marie play it at home and we see Walt's message, or threat - and scenes that could be studied and played out in any acting workshop anywhere: a great example being the long diner scene with just Skylar and Hank - he doing most of the talk, trying to convince her that he can protect her if she'll just tell him about Hank's crimes, and we just watch her face go through a transformation as she croaks out that she thinks she needs a lawyer, and Hank just can't understand - tremendous scene. It would be a great scene to improvise of course - give the two actors their basic condition and motivation and see if he can persuade her and if she can resist without drawing down too much suspicion. Clearly, over the course of the season, we are seeing Walt (and Skylar) as increasingly monstrous, but in that crazy way of this series also as utterly conventional and fiercely protective family. As M pointed out, it's the counterpoint to the Sopranos, in which in this case an ordinary, good, high-minded, somewhat nebishy man becomes increasingly evil - a villain in sheepish clothing.

Saturday, August 17, 2013

An old-fashioned melodama - Rocco and His Brothers

Lucchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers (1955?) is a long and old-fashioned melodrama, largely interesting for a few very powerful scenes and for its overall vision and documentation of postwar urban Italy, still reeling from poverty and ruin. In brief, story involves recently widowed mother and 4 sons who leave small southern town and take a train journey to Milan to join the oldest son who has settled there successfully. The opening sequence is disturbing and kind of hysterical - as the five arrive at brother's small place just as he's gathered with a large group of future in-laws; the family arrives mid-celebration, unannounced, all very poorly planned, and expect to move in right away. Mother and future mother-in-aw get in a screaming match - and oldest son, Vincente, torn between mama and fiancee - a theme for the entire three-hour movie, in which mother is constantly wailing about her boys, who can do no wrong and are beset upon by the world. First half of the movie shows their gradual assimilation into life in Milan, as they move into very crowded public housing, find work in various places (youngest son does not appear to go to school at all). About half-way through the story shifts into a battle between two of the brothers - Rocco and Simone - over the love of a former prostitute. Simone is a professional fighter. In by far the most powerful sequence of the movie, he and a gang of thugs pursue Rocco to a remote water works where he's gone with the girl. Simone rapes her right in front of Rocco, then the two of them engage in a lengthy, and kind of stagey fist fight. Simone continues to deteriorate, Rocco becomes the good brother, devoted to family, and all ends in one of those insane and operatic conclusions with everyone wailing and falling all over each other. In the last sequence, the two youngest brothers meet and reconcile at the fates of an Alfa Romeo plant, where the older works - and at the end we see him ambling back to the factory among a crowd of fellow workers - Visconti's Marxists politics envisioned in a tableau, the opposite of, say, Metropolis - and then the youngest walking alone back toward one of those massive ugly postwar housing complexes on a wide treeless street - someday, we know, to be jammed with traffic but not yet - in a final note that reminds me a little of the end of Der Rosenkavalier, the young boy who, unlike the others, has a whole life in front of him. A pretty good movie but hindered by its own ambitions - it's very hard to tell a tale of (maybe six) distinct characters over quite a long and eventful period of time without spending far too much time on basic exposition. Too much of this movie entails just moving the grand mechanism forward, rather than examining character and emotion.

Sunday, August 11, 2013

Shu-do-run-run-run-shu-do-run-run: Back-up singers (Tewnty Feet from Stardom)

Though it's probably about 20 minutes too long, the documentary Twenty Feet from Stardom is a terrific look at several backup singers - most of them black, all but one women - and their careers and their aspirations and in some cases frustrations and disappointments. Part of the message of the film, at least its intended message, is in the title: these women are fantastic singers who have come very close to being stars in themselves but for one reason or another have just missed. The film seems to be edging us to think that their missing out is a matter of luck and chance and exploitative producers, and those are factors, but I think, whether it means to do so or not, the film also shows that it's also a matter of talent (and drive). Backup singers, to an extent, learn to self-efface and to erase the individuality of their voices, and even their look - they have to blend into a group, and highlight the star but not supplant the star. So their voices and their style tends to be homogenous, and replicable. You have to imagine that there are dozens of great backups ready to fill in - just as there are dozens of great studio guitarists in Nashville, for example, none who will ever have a solo career. Some of the backups are just fine with this and have great careers - the Waters Family in LA is one example in the film - and one or two break the stereotype and begin to solo (Darlene Love) and others feel they've been the victims of chance. But when you see them in performance you understand - they're not stars, their "original" songs are derivative and dull, they don't have the look or the moves. Interestingly, of the many white singers for whom the women in the film sing backup, all but one are British - the British stars used the backups to make their sound more Afro-American, more blues - they needed that element in a way that American rock stars, many of them Southern in any case - seem not to. All that said, there is an element of destiny in stardom, as Sting notes in one of the interviews - on top of talent and drive - and some of the backups clearly were exploited by nasty producers, notably Phil Spector: one backup (Darlene Love?) recorded and had her voice dubbed into hit songs supposedly by the Crystals, who were just lip-synching. If it's any consolation to her, the Crystals probably got no money either, and very fleeting fame.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Why Season 3 of The Killing was disappointing

I've really enjoyed the AMC series TheKilling though let's face it Season 3 was a big dropoff in quality. Not only because I figured out the killer by half-way through the season, or sooner (I won't give it away - but will note that any attentive viewer will recognize the pattern from Seasons 1 and 2 and systematically cross every character about whom "suspicions are raise" from the list of likely suspects - no series indulges more in red herrings than this one). I continue to really like the two lead characters, Linden and Holder (played so well by Enos and Kinneman) - but have to say that I probably would not get the characters so well had I not seen the first 2 seasons - season 3 does not stand well on its own in that regard, as Enos's opaque qualities become even darker and more obscuring - and most of all we don't have a complex relation between the two). The relative weakness of Season 3 touches on something Enos said in her NYTmag interview recently: what makes the series special is its particular concern for the lives and the plight and the feelings of the victim, and her family. That was a huge element in Seasons 1 and 2 - Rosie Larsen's family were as deep and significant to the plot as the cops (and the politicians - completely eliminated from 3); in season 3 we barely know the victim(s) - after all there are 21of them, a real mayhem, with no clear motive - unlike the killing in seasons 1 and 2 which were all about figuring out the motive - let alone the victims' families, thought there are some half-hearted attempts to highlight the mom of one of the missing girls, esp. in the last 2 episodes. So, you get right down to it, and The Killing becomes a pretty good cop drama, but it's lost most of the unique qualities that made the first two seasons a real drama about a city, and a family, and a couple of cops, in various forms of crisis. I wouldn't mind seeing the series continue - there's a bit of a cliffhanger at the end of 3 - but I hope it can regain its mo-jo.

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Children of the Holocaust - but Nazi children

It would be easy to dismiss the Australian-German 2012 film Lore Homeward Bound with a group of Nazi children instead of the dogs and cat. And actually for half the movie that's about it - that's in fact the very challenge of the movie, trying to get us to sympathize with and care about these children, largely blameless despite the sins of their parents, as they make their way across Germany at and just after the end of the war, knowing very little about the current status of anything - hearing vague rumors about Americans controlling certain sections, Russians - much more dangerous - others, trying to get to the house of their Omi (grandma) where they believe they will be safely sheltered. (Dad, a high-ranking Nazi soldier, has fled, and mom, a totally nasty character in the few early scenes of the movie, leaves the children to be with her husband, leaving the oldest, the eponymous Lore - it's a proper noun, not a reference to folk lore - with some money, some valuables, and vague instructions on how to get to Omi - useless, in that the trains apparently have stopped running.) Lore owes a big debt to the great Japanese postwar film, The Human Condition, and there are of course many other movies of people crossing a dangerous landscape in search of shelter and security - and in the best, the journey is not just one from place to place but a journey from innocence to experience. About half-way through Lore this mode comes into play, as Lore begins to learn about the horrors her country - and in particular her father - perpetrated. Fortunately, does not wallow in self-righteousness and does not make Lore heroic or bold - she just gradually puts the pieces together, and we can watch as her world view changes very slowly, like shifting sand under her feet. She's still in some ways infected by the Nazi ideology that her parents spewed, but she starts to see around the edges and develop a consciousness. At the end, she strikes out with one symbolic but defiant action. It's a somewhat slow and somber film, but it does have some startling moments of high drama, and it truly follows the arc of a story - a film, like so many foreign, indie, or low-budget films, that flies completely below the radar and no doubt deserves a wider audience than it will ever have. Based on novel by Rachel Seifert, who deserves a lot of credit - she's an English or maybe American novelist, I think, and has taken on a very challenging task in bringing some sympathy and humanity to these children whose parents were pretty much monsters.