His name is Mud

Jeff Nichols's 2012 Mud really ought to find a wider audience, as it's a tremendously appealing and engaging film that's suitable for all ages - basic plot is two Arkansas boys exploring the river and its islands meet up with a homeless man who asks them to do him a favor and get some food (he promises a boat and, later, a pistol in return for their help), they soon learn that the eponymous Mud is wanted on a murder charge - and that there's a team of bounty hunters on the lookout for him. The plot kicks into gear very quickly, and Nichols keeps it moving and keeps the tension high without resort to gimmicks, pyrotechnics, violence (up to a point), or too much melodrama (there's some - but hey it's just an entertaining movie - not a movie with a message). The acting is strong all across the board - it will remind you of Stand By Me (boys bonding over a secret discovery) or to an extent Beasts of the Southern Wild (parent-child relationship, impoverished gulf community) though without the fantasy and extravagant narration. +2 hours but moves along well and doesn't feel drawn out; at times the dialect is very difficult, at least for New Englanders, to parse, but you don't need to comprehend every word to follow the story line. Some very beautiful outdoor photography - both of the waterways and of the tacky gulf town where some of the action takes place. All around good film and in a just world it would be out there fighting Gravity at the box office but will have to settle for a lot of rentals and downloads.

Baumbach's best

I've been up and down on Noah Baumbach but I think Frances Ha is his best movie to date by far, in large part because of the great comic-emotional performance of his lead, Greta Gerwig, as the eponymous "undateable" Frances but also because it seems to truly capture the mood and mode of a generation in a particular time and place - the young and artistic and career-ambitious but (most of them) spoiled and pampered 20-somethings in the maelstrom of NYC - a world of underpaid internships (except for Frances, most or all of the people are from wealthy families who allow the kids to live in seeming poverty but to all of a sudden have enough $ to spring for beautiful clothes, expensive liquor, constant cigarettes) and overpriced rentals. The movie is about Frances's tempestuous friendships, her frustrations as a would-be dancer who's competent but not good enough to move up to the next level, constant anxiety about rent money leading to frequent moves among th boroughs, with a lot of talk, much of it very quirky and funny - Baumbach and Gerwig co-wrote the excellent script - a cool and casual attitude toward sex and a complete failure at long-term relationships - and way too much drinking and self-indulgence. Despite all this we like (or I did anyway) all of the characters, can understand them and forgive them their faults - and we particularly like the buoyant and athletic but socially clumsy Frances/Gerwig - and feel sorry for her as she tries to hang on to her friendships in changing seas, to remain optimistic, and to make the rent - even as her fortunes decline. The movie is shot in Allen-esque b/w, mostly in New York City - but with three excursions: Frances goes home to see family in wholesome and middle-class Sacramento, goes to Paris on a stupid lark that makes her sad and wastes $, and takes a summer job at her alma mater, Vassar, which makes her feel, rightly, that she's going nowhere w/ her life: and w/ each of these locales we see how Baumbach's vision is so different from W. Allen - these are not scenes of beauty but of crowded streets and lonely cafes and scrubby woodlands and at a young woman miles removed from her very conventional but loving and supportive family. Gerwig pushes the age limit for this part, but it will be interesting to see how she grows as an actor and what's next.

Revenge of the whales

Blackfish is a good old-fashioned documentary, using plenty of archival video (much is available, as this documentary is about the abuses - to the orca and to the staff - at Seaworld, where just about every moment is captured on someone's camera) and lots of interviews (except of Seaworld people, who repeatedly refused - stupid strategy I think) with former trainers/entertainers. Nothing new or noteworthy about the techniques, but this film, which proudly wears its heart on its sleeve, is a very effective advocacy - who will ever go to one of these water shows again after we see how the whales are captured, held captive, often mistreated and abused - an how at-risk the trainers are and how they're forced to spew - or spout - the company line. There is some absolutely horrifying footage (and voice recording) of whales attacking trainers at various points, and some sorrowful accounts about trainers whom the whales killed. And yet we certainly don't "blame" the whales - they, like the trainers, are the victims of a system. it's incredibly moving to see a huge tough guy who was part of one of the orca roundups in Puget Sound recounting his experience and tearing up, choking up, as he realizes what he's done to these beautiful creatures. To see them in the show, they look playful and happy - but what most never see or never saw until this film is that the orca are dangerous and unpredictable and the conditions of their captivity may exacerbate their danger and make them potentially violent and malicious - or, at best, unaware of their own strength when "playing" with their trainers. Totally captivating movie that may very likely change your views about whales and the whole water-show entertainment business.

Fine character study - but not much plot - Welcome to Pine Hill

Keith Miller's 2012 Welcome to Pine Hill is an indie about a street hustler in Brooklyn, in his 20s, who's trying to put the street life behind him - he's a petty drug dealer, apparently - and earn an honest living, working 2 jobs, a bouncer at a Brooklyn bar which has, to his annoyance, become increasingly
yuppified, a hangout for white guys with designer eyeglasses who try to befriend him and ask him about street life - very offensive, obviously - and as a claims adjuster for an insurance co., where his workday involves hearing the sad stories of policyholders who've been in crashes and are hoping to collect. Things go poorly for the guy - played by an actor named Shanon Harper - and the movie ends with (spoiler coming - though honestly the plot is the least important element of this film) him waling off into the woods in the Catskills and vanishing among the trees, disappearance and a suicide and a bit of a movie cliche, easy ending, if you ask me. Miller does a fine job with many of the scenes in this film, shot in documentary style, with little camera movement and a great deal of patience, letting the various scenes unfold slowly and as if in real time - many of the scenes seem to have improvised dialogue. Some the best include the opener - in which Harper tries to scam a neighborhood guy (played by Miller) into giving up his pit bull (Harper claims it was his, had run away, had cost $250, and the guy - "I really love this dog," he says, tearfully - will have to pay up to keep the dog), a scene in which Harper sits silently heating a crappy meal in a toaster oven, worried about his health, a scene when he in near-silence gets bad news from a clinic doctor, and a backyard drinking binge with some of the guys from the neighborhood. Scene by scene, that is, Miller has a fine style, but by the end, the promising tensions of the opening sequences fade rather than build and the movie, laconic in style to the extreme, becomes somewhat less than the sum of its parts - lots of great potential here and Harper is a great study of a character but the materials never quite come together to form a narrative or a story.

2 films we couldn't finish

Started 2 films last night and could not get beyond 20 minutes on either. One we should have known better, Cabin in the Woods, a "horror" film about a group of college friends who go off to a remote country cabin for the weekend, Blair Witch meets Deliverance, I think - moral of story:don't go! The other seemed more promising, Upstream Color, I even liked the title, but after 20 minutes neither of us could understand what was happening nor did we care. Maybe I was too tired and didn't give it a fair chance. Promos and reviews call it technically brilliant and abstract, about a couple struggling to put together their identities from fragments. Sorry, I just could not make sense of this - though it seemed like other films I often like, e.g., Holy Motors, this one was unfathomable.

A postmodern family documentary : Stories We Tell

No doubt Sarah Polley has become a major film talent and Wellesian polymath - first as a comic actor (who didn't enjoy watching her Juliet in Slings and Arrows?), then as a fine director and screenwriter, in her smart adaptation of Alice Munro's story into Away from Her, now as a writer and documentary filmmaker in Stories We Tell - a magnificent and subtle examination of the dynamics of her own family, centering on her mother, who died when Polley was a young child - and on her father, Michael Polley (also an actor - played a comic good role beside Sarah P in Slings and Arrows - I had no idea then that he was her father). I won't give major elements away, but just will say these few notes: Michael Polley comes of as a complex and difficult but very kind and loving father of this complicated family, at times in the film - much of which he narrates, as he reads a hand-written family memoir he's been working on - we feel that he's a terribly sad and repressed man, unable to express and even hold feelings of grief, shame remorse - and we know nothing of his family background and childhood - but then we step back a little and realize how courageous he is to take on this project, and what a great father he was to Sarah during a very difficult time, and we see his generosity and open-mindedness - and I'm reminded of a line of his in Slings, in which he recalled some difficult passages in life, but then remarked that we look back on these "stories" and tell them and that's how you know: "you've led a life." I think that may have been Sarah Polley's inspiration (and title source perhaps). Second, S. Polley does a great job using family interviews documentary style, some archival footage (including I think some family super-8 movies), and lots of re-enactments that look like family videos or film - very convincing and beautifully filmed, directed, and edited. Third, she is something of a post-modern documentary filmmaker, as she allows us to look around the edges of the film - leaving the DP and other crew members in the frame from time to time, leaving her own questions in at times, asking her dad to "take back a line" while he's reading the script, which he does with great professional skill. Fourth, she gets so much out of her cautious and wary sibs, from the nervous titters as they begin this project till, eventually, each (I think) breaks down and then tries to brush the emotions aside. Very strong and totally captivating small-scale documentary film that has a lot to say about a unique family, and about how all of us make sense of our lives and our past through art.

A rare film that is very suitable for all ages: Kon-Tiki

When I was a kid everyone knew about Kon-Tiki, from Thor Heyerdahl's book, from the documentary, from the general knowledge of pop culture - he was one of teh few explorers of the 1950s, and his story - the daring journey by raft from Peru to Polynesia - was soon displaced by other adventurers such as the Mercury astronauts and, much later, Robert Ballard and the Titanic - but for a time Heyerdahl was a cultural icon. The new move Kon-Tiki brings him back for the 21st century - so strange to think that for young viewers this story will be as remote in time as Stanley and Livingston were to me. The movie, while breaking no new ground, is successful on its own terms: easy to follow and to enjoy, though the outcome is never in doubt there are many exciting scenes, especially once the crew is at last aboard the raft - and encountering a great storm, near-mutiny and perhaps suicide attempts, attacks by sharks and whales, as well as some beautiful sequences like the passage through a crowd of phosphorescent fish. The movie is very suitable for all ages and neither condescending to kids or pandering to adults - such a rarity these days - as well as quite upbeat, with a nice synopsis at the end of what became of each of the men on the raft (seeing real photos of them would have been a plus). Film is Norwegian but acted in English, in an obvious attempt to reach a wide audience and convey Heyerdahl's story to the world once again.

Drug War likely to be remade (and ruined?) as a U.S. film

I wasn't the idea viewer for Johnnie To's Chinese action movie Drug War last night as still sleep deprived from World Series but can say that the film, though there's no particular depth to it, the title says it all, it's basically a story of some drug-enforcement agencies trying to break up a massive manufacturing and smuggling ring, it meets all its goals - fast action and some very imaginative and gripping sequences. Essentially, story, set in a small Chinese city - perhaps near the Hong Kong border? - flat and industrial and ugly (the kind of landscape the Dardennes brothers film so often in Belgium) get a tipoff about a bus coming in transporting a whole crowd of impoverished Chinese who'd been paid to stuff sacks of cocaine (?) into their rectums. Some pretty gruesome and probably realistic scenes as the police extract the evidence in various ways. One guy involved with the ring - a meth manufacturer it appears - nearly dies in an explosion, is captured, and agrees to help the cops (his wife and her sibs did die in the explosion, as we see in another gruesome visit to the site). The lead cop ultimately impersonates a rather bizarre and frightening mega-dealer called HaHa because of his propensity to laugh at everything and everyone. Many frightening and powerful moments of tense confrontation - in particular, a sequence in which the cop is forced to ingest some coke (or smack?) and nearly dies. Everyone's caught, ultimately, of course, but the ending is darker than you would imagine - going places where no American film is likely to venture, especially if this were remade at the U.S.-Mexican border, which I can imagine it might be.

Before watching Drug War we started watching the much-touted documentary, Leviathon, which is of the style now quite popular in which there is no voice-over, no interviews, just actually filming of the subject over a long period of time - very successful in the excellent documentary Sweet Grass - but much less so here. Topic seems to be deep-sea trawling fisherman, and after 20 minutes of sometimes beautiful footage - in an abstract way - it's obvious that the work is cold, dangerous, almost inhumanly difficult, but very hard to ascertain what's happening in any of the sequences, filmed at night with a juttery hand-held camera. Couldn't go any further - got the point.