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

See also my blog on books: Elliot's Reading

Saturday, December 27, 2014

The Top 15 Movies (I Saw) in 2014

Rounding out my picks for best movies of 2014, here are the Top Five Documentary Films (I Saw) in 2014:

The Act of Killing (a 2013 film that I saw this year). Incredibly bizarre and brave movies about political terrorism in Indonesia, in which the murderers of thousands try to explain and justify their lives.

Finding Vivian Meier. Film about the the posthumous discovery of the works of a mysterious amateur photographer who lived and died in obscurity.

Muscle Shoals. The handful of white guys in a tiny Southern town who helped make some of the greatest rock, soul, and blues recordings in the world. 

Particle Fever. Incredible as it may seem, a movie that can help you understand particle physics and care about the results of the world's biggest physics experiment.

Virunga. A frightening and courageous documentary about those risking their lives to protect a national park in the Congo. Some footage shot while the cameras and crew were literally under fire.

With a nod also to the documentary on environmental activism, If a Tree Falls.

So that concludes my list of the top 15 movies I saw in 2014 (with Birdman replacing one earlier on the list, sorry Judi Dench), which are:

12 Years a Slave

The Act of Killing

L'Atalante

Birdman

Dr. Strangelove

Finding Vivian Meier

The Great Beauty

In a World

Man with a Movie Camera

Muscle Shoals

Particle Fever

Playtime

The Selfish Giant

Two Lives

Virunga




Friday, December 26, 2014

One word for Unbroken: Unwatchable

Yes Louis Zamberini was an incredible athlete and an incredibly brave and honorable man and yes I am sure that Lauren Hildebrand's book about him is great as she's an excellent writer and yes I'm all for movies that tell a true story especially with an uplifting and positive moral energy and yes I admire Angelina Jolie for managing a successful transition from movie star to director but, let's face it, her Unbroken is a just about unwatchable movie: well over two hours of suffering a torture inflicted on the stoic Zamberini - an Olympic distance runner who joins up in WWII, crashes in the Pacific, suvives 47 days on a life raft only to be "rescued" by the Japanese and tortured and abused in various POW camps. What may sound like an exciting, Odysseyan epic of adventure is really monotonous, cliche-ridden mash-up of a thousand movie tropes we've see many times before: the ethnic kid ganged up on by the neighborhood bullies, the scrawny kid struggling to make the [fill int he blan] team, the come-from-behind runner who earns the medal with a near-impossible last lap, the ethnic family offering sage and pithy advice (If you can take it, you can make it) to the sound of orchestral crescendos, the mother making pasta by hand in golden light and the family gathered around the Philco mothers hands clutched together in prayer, the aerial combat (to be fair, this was probably the best sequence in the movie), the survival at sea through storms and shark attacks (a novelty here was the attack from above by a Japanese warplane), the terrible cruelty of POW camps (the Japanese were apparently just as bad to their own soldiers, see the great Human Condition), and so on. The scene I really wanted to see - Zamberini confronting his torturers years later - is not even in the movie, just int he closing supertitles. All in all, a promising project that was maybe just too promising (which may be why it sat unmade for decades) and has led to a movie that is earnest, self-consciously virtuous, over-produced (the score especially - dreadful!), and in the end a bloated bore.

Thursday, December 25, 2014

What's right and wrong with Gloria

Let's start off with what's right about the 2013 Chilean film Gloria: It was a pleasure to see a film about people who are 40+ who look and act like real people, not like movie stars and not like some 20-year-old screenwriter's idea of what people say to one another. It's also great to see a movie about a strong-willed, optimistic, relatively independent working woman of modest means who overcomes a difficult relationship and learns or realizes that she need not be dependent on a man to feel whole, complete, or happy. Those noble sentiments aside, and aside from the smart and brave presence of the lead actor, Paulina Garcia (she had to go through a number of full-body sex scenes with a not all that attractive co-star, as well as a scary bungee jump that as far as I could see did not use a stunt double), there's plenty wrong with this film as well. Most of all, it takes an f-ing hour for the plot to even begin! It's fine to establish a character, to let us see something of her home life, work life, social life, family life, but I was pretty much on the verge of checking out about 60 minutes in that nothing at all seemed to be happening; I'm all for experimental narrative style, but a story does need some kind of arc and a sense of beginning-middle-end. At last the plot begins when we see that her male companion, as I think she calls him, is a kind of a shit: he treats her badly, she refuses to take his calls, at least for a while, then they're back together again, and then things get even worse and she learns her lesson. Pretty simple. But one has to wonder (some spoilers here): Couldn't she tell that he was duping her all along? She's a smart woman and not overly dependent of clingy, and she couldn't tell that his claim to be a divorcee was shaky at best? Wasn't his refusal to introduce her to his daughters who are always calling him some kind of tipoff? And even then, he can be a shit to her, sure, but the movie, so realistic in some ways, goes a bit off the rails when he literally abandons her in an expensive hotel room leaving her to foot the bill - for no apparent reason other than that he realizes he can't continue to deceive her about his family. He's either a terribly disturbed even psychopathic guy - which he doesn't seem to be - or he's made into a monster for the convenience of the plot design. Finally, and this is emblematic: In any movie that opens with a plain-looking woman wearing glasses, the woman will eventually ditch the lenses and look great. I was really pleased that Gloria continued to wear her dopey glasses throughout the entire movie, that she didn't have to lose them to win the guy - until, in the final scene, dancing at a wedding, suddenly she loses them. Damn, what a disappointment, what a cave-in to movie convention. Couldn't the movie be as bold and brave and independent as Gloria? (There are at least 3 good rock songs called Gloria, I'm not sure why, and one of them is used over the closing credits - as well as throughout the trailer that I saw months ago and gives a completely wrong picture of the movie, no surprise.)

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Please add Birdman to my "Top Ten" (now 11) list of films I've seen this year

I'll join the chorus in praise of Birdman and of director-writer Alejandro Inarritu who now definitely established himself as one of the few thoughtful, intelligent, and imaginative directors - in fact one of the few to maintain his cred when moving from his native (Mexican) cinema into the big-budget studio world. Saw his Amores Perros earlier this year and was very impressed; didn't truly love Babel but have to give it credit as ambitious and smart guilty only of over-reaching, which is not such a sin or crime in the world of under-reaching drek. Birdman takes on Hollywood and celebrity culture, yes, admittedly an easy target, but in a way that I've never really seen before in film or any other medium. The plot, very briefly, concerns a washed-up actor Riggen Thomson, played perfectly by Michael Keaton, who made his fortune playing the superhero of the title (a tremendously brave role for Keaton to take on, given the personal references) and now wants to buy back his artistic soul by directing a Broadway production of a play he's written based on a Raymond Carver short story. He comes in for some criticism, esp by his saucy and troubled daughter, for his devotion to a period-piece story by an old white guy - true of course, but part of the joke is that Carver's stories were adapted from film some years ago by Hollywood icon Altman. This is truly a backstage drama, running from various disastrous previews to opening night - and Inarritu captures the mood, feel, and look of the inglorious life behind the scenes and of the tempestuous personalities of the actors and crew, as well or better than any film I've ever seen. One of the many great pleasures is the way he shrewdly shows us bad acting (a guy who over-acts in the first preview, to Keaton's distress) who's replacement turns out to be Edward Norton, who (I think) is supposed to be a successful stage actor. Norton works the same scene with Keaton and we can see instantly the difference between stentorian over-acting and sensitive, impassioned acting - and can also see how an actor and director can sharpen a script through the production process (the only similar example I can think of in films I've seen was the pair of great sequences with Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive; she of course is in Birdman as well, great as always). All that said, this is not just a backstage melodrama but an exciting and imaginative examination of Keaton/Thomson's personality: we see from the outset that his is somewhat imbalanced and irascible, and his psychological troubles play themselves out to surprising and effect throughout the film: we watch a personality develop, emerge, and self-destruct under great stress. Inarritu's framing of scenes throughout is always breathtaking and, once again, imaginative: from long tracking shots back stage, a camera rotating around the actors on stage, unusual but never inappropriate or annoying perspectives, some hyper-real imaginary sequences, tremendous en plein air shots on the streets of Time Square; the score, too, is excellent, ranging from the syncopated jazz beat of street drummer that brings the outside world into the frame of the screen to some beatuiful excerpts from Mahler and others. In short - I have already posted by top ten films of 2014, but, having seen this one, will ex post facto add to my ten best list.

Monday, December 22, 2014

Extraordinary b/w cinematography in Polish film Ida

The 2013 Polish film Ida should definitely has a shot at the foreign-language Oscar, for which it's nominated. It's a pretty simple, almost stark narrative, sent in a remote area of Poland circa 196655. It opens with novices in a monastery, scenes almost in silence except for the prayers; the mother superior tells one of the novitiates she has to visit her estranged aunt before she can take her vows; against her will, the young woman goes to visit her aunt, who informs her that she was born a Jew (named Ida) and that her family had been killed during the war. The two - very different characters, Ida shy and saintly, the aunt a stern judge with a serious drinking problem and a promiscuous streak - set off to the village where Ida's parents hid during the war to learn what they can about the wartime fate of her family. In a way, it's a journey of discovery; in a way, it's a road-trip buddy movie; in another way, it's about Ida's grappling with her faith and trying to determine the course to take in live: secular or religious, in the world or withdrawn from the world. Despite a few plot aspects that are opaque at least to non-Polish viewers (how did Ida's aunt avoid the assault on the Jews?, for example), the story line is simple and has a few surprising twists. What makes this movie exceptional, however, is the extraordinarily beautiful cinematography - all in b/w, capturing the look and feel, I imagine, of Poland in the darkest years of postwar poverty and communist rule - the impoverished countryside, the drab cities, the freezing cold austerity of the monastery, the cheesiness of a "tourist" hotel with a trashy nightclub that seemed 20 years removed from the music scene of the West. The look of the movie recalled for me the stark beauty of Nebraska, though not filmed in wide-angle, or some of the beautiful b/w films from Italy in the early days - but with a crispness and image clarity that would not have been possible in that era.

Sunday, December 21, 2014

The Top 5 Foreign-Language Films I Saw in 2014

Her is part 2 of The Best Movies (I Saw) in 2014, this one being:

The Top 5 Foreign-Language Movies (I Saw) in 2014

L'Atalante, Jean Vigo's terrific 1934 film shot almost entirely aboard a small boat plying the canals and riverways around Paris. Great, sorrowful story about a newlywed couple and a difficult marriage, filmed with extraordinary care and at great cost (essentially, the horrible filming conditions cost Vigo his life).

The Great Beauty. A movie set in contemporary Rome about a frustrated novelist become a successful celebrity journalist - in other words, a modern-day La Dolce Vita, and possibly just as good. Need I say more?

Man with a Movie Camera. Vertov's is one of the most imaginative and enduring of all the silent films, filled with witty visual imagery and creative shots and angles, a true cinematic portrait of a city (Odessa) in a time and place long gone that, in a way, still feels contemporary. 

Playtime. Jacques Tati's 1967 dystopian, comic look at what he envisioned life would be like a major world cities some 20 years hence. His love-hate with the glass-steel structures of modern architecture was prescient in some ways and way off the mark in others, as he had no sense of the preservation and gentrification movements that would come. The 45-minute scene in which the horribly designed restaurant-night club literally begins falling apart is a great sequence.

Two Lives. An under-appreciated Norwegian spy thriller with a complex plot that isn't just cloak-and-dagger but is about real people and their lives and culture. Almost unique among spy films in that we care about the characters and can actually believe their story.

With nods as well to: Amores Perros, The Intouchables, A Man Escaped, Omar, Pandora's Box, Reprise, La Terra Trema, and Together. 

Coming within the next few days: The Top 5 Documentary Films (I Saw) in 2014.

Saturday, December 20, 2014

Reese Gone Wild: Totally watchable film

Wild, the Reese Witherspoon vehicle based on the memoir by Cheryl Strayed, is a totally engaging movie that follows Witherspoon on a three-month solo hike north on the Pacific Coast Trail from the Mojave Desert to the Columbia River border between Oregon and Washington State. Witherspoon, as Strayed, is inexperienced and unprepared for this trek, so part of the adventure is watching her learn and grow and get smarter and tougher, and part of the fun is rooting for her survival - and who could be more winning or appealing in the role the Witherspoon, trudging along with that enormous pack looming over her back as if she's carrying an entire wall? The great thing about this movie is that it so effectively brings together the journey of discovery and recovery with the elements of Strayed's troubled past, very well revealed through many flashbacks that are truly flashes and not long narrative interruptions: he childhood with an abusive and angry father, raised by a single mom who's a bit flighty and goofy, her mother's early death, and the terrible grieving process that leads Strayed to infidelity, serial sex with strangers, drug abuse, divorce, and finally to this hike to learn about herself. for those who may have seen the recent James Brown bio-pic, contrast is textbook revealing: that movie was a mess of scenes told out of sequence to no clear effect or benefit; this one has a strong narrative line and the back pages fill inform us more deeply about the character we are traveling with. Nick Hornby did the screenplay and deserves recognition for that. This movie is adventuresome, tense, funny at times, beautiful often, thoughtful, credible, and fun to watch.

Sunday, December 14, 2014

The 5 Best Movies (I Saw) in 2014: English-language

The year's not over, and I hope to see a few more good movies by the end of the month, but, spurred on by other "top ten" lists popping up all over the place, here are the best movies (I saw) in 2014. Unlike movie critics, I don't see most films immediately on their release, so some of the films I saw early in the year were clearly films of 2014, but never mind that. I've built the list from among all movies that I saw during the year, which ranges from the silent era to the just released. I'm breaking list up into several sections for an eventual total of the 15 best (with nods to some also-rans), staring with

The 5 Best Movies I Saw in 2014 (English-language):

12 Years a Slave.

Obviously a 2013 film and totally deserving of its best-picture Oscar. The movie was completely engaging, terrifying, sorrowful, had me literally in tears. A dreadful episode in American life, apparently chronicled in a memoir by the protagonist, a free black man living in Sarasota who was captured and sold into slavery in the Deep South. Very hard film to watch, impossible to forget.

Dr. Strangelove

Still holds up! Every bit as funny and troubling as it was when it came out in 1964. Peter Sellers in 3 roles is perfect, George C. Scott ditto in 1. Although the issue of nuclear annihilation isn't in the forefront any longer, the international brinksmanship and the bizarre behavior of world leaders and military fanatics is still with us, in a different form.

In a World ...

Clever, funny, touching, and weirdly informative - who knew there was such a subculture of voice-over announcers? Lake Bell - writer, director, star - shows she's quite the talent. Hard to imagine anyone not enjoying this film.

Philomena

A great Judi Dench vehicle, but more than that as well - funny, moving, based-on-truth story, chronicling a good piece of investigative journalism and exposing the evils of the church and about family relations.

The Selfish Giant

Horrible title aside, this a hugely powerful movie about some touch working-class kids on contemporary England struggling to get by, fighting tough odds, victims at every turn. Reminded me a little of the great Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Challenging to watch, and very powerful.

With nods as well to several big-studio American films that were actually quite affecting, All Is Lost, Gravity, Her, and Whiplash, and to the totally whacked-out British comedy World's End.

Coming witthin the next few days: The 5 Best Movies I Saw in 2014: Foreign-Language

Saturday, December 13, 2014

Funny, provocative, a pleasure to watch: Tati's Playtime

Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967) is a pretty great movie by any measure - funny, provocative, a pleasure to look at start to finish. Essentially, it's a movie in which architecture and design are the villains: Tati sets the entire film in what I think is called Le Defense section of Paris - a district that is made up of gleaming international-style glass and steel (or aluminum) towers, with lots of traffic and no street life or neighborhood life. Part of the joke of the movie is that we follow a gaggle of American women on a group tour of Paris, and they stay in this neighborhood and love everything they see and visit - a few shots show us the Eiffel and other monuments in the far distance. It's clear that Tati is not skewering just Paris but the whole modernist movement - one shot in travel agency shows posters of various world cities, all looking pretty much the same. The story line such as it is follows Tati's Chaplinesque protagonist of several comic romp, M. Hulot, through what seems to be a 24 hour journey: arrival at a gleaming airport (at first it looks like a hospital), then a hilarious visit to an office building where he can never get the attention of the man he's trying to see, a walk through an arcade of shops - a modernist take on le marche des puces, I think, with a very funny scene at the stall of a company that makes doors that are silent even when slammed shut. The highlight of the film obviously is the long section in a nightclub - to drive home the point the club is still under construction and the architect is on site with his plans and measures - and everything goes wrong: the furnishings with sharp edges slice up the clothes of the waiters, the service slot is too narrow for the kitchen staff to pass the plates to the waiters, the bar is designed so that the bar tender can't see what he's doing. The scene ends in riotous chaos - and some pretty good dancing - and then the characters head out to a corner drug store for coffee and drinks: this sterile place has replaced the bars and clubs that (used to) constitute the life of an urban neighborhood. Even the drug-store scene is beautiful with strange green neon illuminations. Also a very funny scene in which Hulot visits the apartment of a friend (people keep recognizing him on the street)  with sheer plate-glass walls: the visual juxtaposition of what's going on in the apartment and the one next door is hilarious. Glass doors play a big role in the movie, as characters are continually walking into glass or mirrored pillars, tipping over on poorly designed but sleep furniture, etc. There's very little dialogue - the film almost harkens back to the silent era - but you don't need words to make these points and visual puns. The world hasn't quite come to the horror Tati envisioned - he did not anticipate preservation and restoration efforts and the migration back to the heart of many cities - but the movie still feels in some ways contemporary, or at least timeless.

Monday, December 8, 2014

Climbing towad the unknown: Everest

Though I'm sorry I missed the 3D version in the theater, I enjoyed watching Beyond the Edge in 2D at home; it's not the first movie to take on the theme of Himalayan mountaineering, but it's probably one of the best. The movie, about Hillary's ascent of Everest in 1053, aptly blends archival film footage, voice-over narration (probably from historical archives I would think) of participants in the trek and their descendants, and re-created scenes using contemporary actors and up-to-date equipment and film technology - all to create a seamless documentary about the ascent that makes you wonder how or why anyone would try it in the first place: some harrowing scenes of crossing the ice field and climbing the last knife-edge ridge to the summit and a vivid sense of the daily suffering and misery on the trail and in the many base camp. Makes you appreciate not just Hillary and Tenzing's ascent but the others in the team as well, the poor Sherpa schleppers especially, climbing barefoot with huge crates balanced on their backs. The equipment was so primitive by today's standards. You have to imagine that today the path to the summit, by comparison, must be a superhighway - but in 1953 they weren't even sure if humans could survive at that 29K altitude, and many had died trying to get there. I know some of the reviews weren't that strong, as some were put off by the 3D hype and others probably jaded by a thousand NG specials on this and similar topics, but it's still a pretty thrilling movie that helped me see not what it's like to make an ascent today but when it was truly a climb toward the unknown.

Saturday, December 6, 2014

High School Not a Musical: Very realistic - for the most part - movie about high-school kids

Although it's a pretty slight movie all in all and covers very familiar ground - yet another movie (based on what is no doubt a very sensitive and readable novel) about high-school kids mixing with the "wrong crowd" and maturing as they prepare to take the big step toward graduation and college - The Spectacular Now stands out among the rest as being far more realistic and credible than we've come to expect from feature films about youth. The kids - particular the two leads, one a seriously addicting fun-loving popular guy and the other a serious and focused girl who's not in the "cool" crowd but is not, thankfully, a loner or outsider - who come together on a "cute meet" (he wakes passed out on her front lawn as she's about to begin her paper route - it's a cute meet, sure, but also relevant to the plot). Their awkward and flirtatious conversations seem very real, even the sex scene, tentative and a bit clumsy and not at all graphical, seems about as real as any teen sex scene on film. A real strength of the movie is how they each grow and change, influenced by each other, but not entirely in positive ways: he brings her out of her shell a bit, but it's not such a great sign that she can match him in drinking, and we sense her uneasiness; he, on the other hand, sees - especially during a very painful visit to his estranged father (played completely against expectations by the coach from Friday Night Lights - so interesting that he's appearing in piece about high-school kids coming to maturity and in a antithetic role) - the kind of person he will become if he continues with his drinking and his careless attitude toward women - and yet he can't quite help himself, either. In other words, this movie defies convention and expectation, to a large degree. On the downside, this movie like many others has absolutely no clue as to how middle-class kids in this kind of high school apply to, think about, and talk about college; and, unfortunately, a few of the scenes are so painfully wrong - the dinner at the home of his wealthy sister, the confrontation with the class president/star athlete - that they stand out against the many very fine and true moments in this movie.