What's it all about?: The power and confusion of Sicario

Sicario is a movie that you have to take on two levels: One one plane it's a story about a group of rogue CIA officers, military combat vets, FBI agents, and a recruited drug-cartel expert from South America who uncover a scene of grisly execution and set off to nail the head of the Mexican drug cartel that called the shots. On this level, the movie is gripping from start to finish, with some terrifically tense scenes, notably the discover of the mass killings at the outset, a scary journey into the heart of Juarez in search of a kingpin, the invasion of the smugglers tunnel leading into the Mexican desert, the final approach to the drug lord - well-paced, terrific pounding music, and at least once cool tough-guy character (played by Josh Brolin) who holds out interest. That said, there's a second plane: the plot itself is so elaborate, confusing, and in fact on looking back kind of ridiculous that it's almost impossible to figure out what's going on; and the two central characters, a man and woman (Emily Blunt) FBI agents as so bland that I kept wondering what they hell are they doing on this mission, or in this movie? There's a really thin attempt to explain why these novices are on the ride: the CIA guys say they need an FBI member of their troupe in order to justify acting outside of U.S. borders. Really? Or did I miss something? And if you need an FBI agent to come along why not a veteran rather than a doe-eyed novice who will gawk in surprise and awe at everything she sees - other than to give Brolin a reason to explain things to her and thereby to us? So overall it's one of those powerful movies that has you in its grip for two hours and when it's done you have to wonder whether any of it made sense and what mission was all about.

Root, root, root for the bad guys?: The upside-down world of The Big Short

They used to say economics was the dreary science, but no longer, as there have been a # of movies about the high jinx of Wall Street, hedge funds, and esp the collapse of the economic system in 2008. The Big Short is the latest and certainly ups the ante and the frenzy. As the director Adam McKay notes, it's "based on truth," in fact on a Michael Lewis book about three sets of hedge-fund investors who went "short" in 2008: each in his own way saw that the housing market was a bubble that would burst and bet against the housing market - leading to incredible stress and distress, to eventual huge profits, but not to much satisfaction or salvation. McKay does a good job establishing the personalities in each of the 3 groups - and he's helped in that each is distinct and colorful. He also does a fantastic job keep the movie going at a fast pace - with lots of quick edits at times, with some amusing scenes in which B-list celebs address the camera and explain some of the arcana of credit default swaps at al., and with some shrewd asides from the lead characters, assuring us at various times (e.g., when one of the traders confronts Alan Greenspan) that "this really happened," and one, amusingly, admitting that a scene (specifically, two of the hedge guys learning about the potential collapse from a brochure left in a bank lobby) actually never happened in reality. The film faces a really tough challenge and manages to make it work: we kind of root for these guys, underdogs in the trading world, even though, a., several of the players are pretty nasty, self-centered, and sexist, and, even more odd, to "root" for the is to root for the collapse of the whole financial system, a travesty and a disgrace. There's no real positive message here - in fact, the film makes us look over our shoulders and wonder if it could happen again, when it will happen next in fact. That's probably the goal. It makes a good companion piece with another recent film that shows the crisis from the POV of a homeowner under the water: 99 Homes.

Movie Brooklyn: Better than the book?

John Crowley's 2015 movie Brooklyn, extremely closely based on the Colm Toibin novel and with a smart screenplay by novelist Nick Hornsby - a powerful two-barreled literary phenomenon here - was in my view actually better than Toibin's novel, a rarity. Though it's not entirely the kind of movie I would see (or book I would read for that matter), a somewhat over-the-top romance with a thin plot line, what was a little disappointing in the novel opens up very well on screen: the humor of the dialogue comes much more to light in the very well written and acted encounters, in particular the boarding-house dinner conversations with Julie Walters stealing the show. And the sweetness and innocence of the two main characters, especially Saoirise Ronan in an Oscar-likely lead as the Irish immigrant Ellis really come to life beautifully throughout the film. What felt a little unsettled at the end of the novel is much more complete and gratifying on film (spoilers here, but they won't be much of a surprise in any event): We can really see by the end, why, after Ellis/Ronan came so close to moving back to her small village in Ireland and settling in with the gentle and thoughtful publican's son, she close to return to the US and begin a life with young, hard-working, devoted plumber: Of course it's a better world in the States, which she realizes after her return to Ireland - more open, diverse, with more opportunity, acceptance, joy, and space. Everything's more extreme - the climate and changing seasons serve as a metaphor for that - but we can see by the end of the film why US immigrants virtually never move back to their homeland. In a sense, the movie as a paeon to all that's great about American (not just Brooklyn tho that's where she begins her life in America - I never like this as a title for the book, or the movie), and of course it makes us think about immigration today and the anger and bitterness toward so many immigrant groups - the movie does not touch on this, but it could fuel both sides of the debate. My quibbles would be with the way over-the-top score - please just shut up and let the characters act! - and I thought the street scenes and styles looked a decade older than the apparent setting (based on various references to new movies) of 1952.

Survival stories: The Martian et al

Ridley Scott's 2015 space movie The Martian is totally entertaining and engaging - especially given that you obviously know right from the outset what's going to happen (what? you'd thought they were going to leave Matt Damon to die alone on Mars?) - but still engages our interest all the way. Compared with such grand, boring epics as the recent Interstellar, The Martian is easier to approach because it feels real, almost plausible right from the beginning - there' no super scifi element (frozen bodies that allow for interstellar travel, etc.) - plot is simple - after a Mrtian landing by a crew assigned to examine the minerals and resources of the planet, crew takes off after a violent dust storm, thinking Damon had been killed by debris - turns out (of course) not, and most of the movie captures the many smart things he has to do to survive on the planet, long after his rations would have been consumed. While his survival drama is happening on Mars, we watch the NASA hq suddenly learn that he's alive (there's no direct communication) and wrestle w/ the difficult task of bringing him home alive. Both parts of the drama are quite credible and filled with constant tension and a degree of danger. Man lost in space seems to be an emerging genre - think of Sandra Bullock/George Clooney recently in Gravity - and this genre overlaps with the whole Survivor genre - from Robinson Crusoe through, more recently, the Robert Redford film about the solo sailor lost at sea. There's something eerily frightening about being alone or abandoned in such circumstances, and something reassuring and satisfying about watching the hero (or heroine) take the slow, deliberate steps that can bring them back to safety and civilization. These movies are celebrations of (American) competence - something that I think cheers us and reassures us about the goodness, or blessedness, or our nature and our capacities as a species. Most of us - certainly, I - would not survive a day in most of these circumstances, but to know - or to believe - that such survival is possible with the right attitude, the right "stuff," gives us a (false?) assurance that America will prevail and that all's right with the world, or the solar system anyway.

Best (classic) films I saw in 2015

My previous post was on the best new films I saw in 2015, but of course many of the great films I saw this year were classics, reaching all the way back to the silent era - so here's a list of the 5 best classic films I saw in 2015:

Late Spring (1949). Another great, if extremely thoughtful and methodically paced, domestic drama from Ozu (Tokyo Story), this one about a young woman completely devoted to her aging, scholarly father. She believes she should never marry. Her father believes otherwise.

The Passion of Joan of Arc. Dreyer's 1928 silent is simple, dramatic, and has some of the most amazing cinematography of any movie before or since - an incredible drama of interiors and faces, many of them Joan's, many others hideous.

Sullivan's Travels. Preston Sturges's 1941 masterpiece starts out as a rollicking comedy, and it's funny enough, but becomes increasingly darker, more mysterious, and more socially conscious, culminating in an incredible sequence in which chainbound prisoners shuffle into a black church and watch a movie.

Umberto D. In Vittorio de Sica's 1952 drama social realism takes a turn toward the personal and interior, as an elderly man struggling to get by on his meager pension has to determine what to do with his only true companion, his beloved little dog.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Jacques Demy's 1962 movie musical (not a word of spoken dialog) is colorful, romantic, over-the-top emotional, an homage to American musicals such as West Side Story, all filmed on location, and completely different in look and style from any other movie.

The 10 best (new) films I saw in 2015

Unlike pro movie critics, I didn't manage to see every worthwhile movie over the past year and a # of the contemporary movies I saw probably came out in 2014 or even in 2013 but with that caveat in mind here is the list, in alphabetical order, of the top 10 (new) movies I saw in 2015:

Another Year. A tremendous family drama that unfolds over the course of four seasons by the under-appreciated British direct Mike Leigh.

Leviathon. A powerful film about political corruption and bullying in a small town in contemporary Russia; the film evokes sorrow for pity toward the most unlikely and initially unsympathetic of characters. Amazing that Putin didn't squash this film like a bug.

Norte, The End of History. This four-hour Philippine film is not for everyone, but watch it over 2 nights if you must - it's a powerful drama about a disturbed young man who commits a heinous crime, and it's loosely based on Crime and Punishment.

The Overnighters. The only documentary on the list - a harrowing and painfully honest account of migrant oil-workers in the northern Plains and a minister who tries against all odds to make the workers at home in his community - and with a disturbing twist near the end.

Spotlight. The only other American film on this list - a film that perfectly captures what it was like to work on a large urban newspaper (15 years ago, when newspapers still ruled) and tells a heroic story of investigative journalism as Globe reporters take on the Catholic hierarchy.

Stray Dogs. A Taiwanese film composed almost entirely of long, nearly still shots - each a moving image of unbearable pain and worthy of display in a museum; it provides a harrowing look at the lives of some homeless children in Taipei.

Tangerines. An Estonian-Georgian film with a small cast that tells a highly dramatic story of two soldiers on opposite sides of a civil war who face off in a life or death struggle and are forced to come to terms with one another, with the inevitable dire consequences.

Two Days, One Night. The Dardenne Brothers give us another great movie about working-class life in the industrial wastelands of Belgium, in this case a socio-drama about workers' rights (and wrongs) as bosses pit co-workers against one another in a struggling factory.

Wild Tales. An Argentine film that tells six (I think) stories in sequence, each better than the next, culminating in the most incredible wedding scene ever filmed.

Winter Sleep. A strong, engaging, highly literate drama about a semi-retired intellectual running a resort hotel in the mountains of Turkey and navigating complex disputes with his (much younger) wife, (demanding) sister, and (threatening and frightening) neighbor.

A sanctimonious movie worth seeing for what it exposes about the Holllywood blacklist

Trumbo is a sanctimonious movie on an important theme and, despite its limitations as a dramatic movie, is definitely worth seeing as it exposes some of the horrible things that happened during the Cold War era. We're all familiar with the Hollywood black list, but this movie, as effectively as any I've seen, shows its effect on a individual - in this case a group of screenwriters barred from their profession by the right-wing bullies in Hollywood (Hedda Hopper, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan) and in Washington (RMN, McCarthy, et al). What's special and unique here is the way in which screenwriter Trumbo, after doing time in a federal pen (where there's a good and surprising scene in which has a confrontation with a highly resentful black prisoner - although I wondered what the guy was doing in a fed pen on a murder conviction), begins writing under various pseudonyms and when he actually wins not one Oscar but 2, pseudonymously, he gets to work again under his own name. Most of the Hollywood people depicted are either craven (EG Robinson, various studio heads) or crass - and you can't help but think they were willing to embrace Trumbo once again not because they changed their views but because it would be profitable to do so. Kirk Douglas comes off very well, as does Otto Preminger (one hilarious exchange: OP reads a scene from a screenplay Trumbo is writing for him and says it's brilliant, make sure all the scenes are brilliant. Trumbo says: then the movie would be monotonous. Preminger says, don't worry: I'll direct it unevenly.) The movie is based on a Trumbo bio, and I hope he heeded closely to the facts because that was my main interest here - the dramatic line itself was rather flat and polemical, and Trumbo's relationships with his wife and children never seemed to ring true to me. Dialogue with younger daughter was particularly strained: Am I a communist daddy? Well, what would you do if you had a sandwich and another girl didn't? I'd share! You little Commie! (Would that it were so simple.) Throughout the movie I think Bryan Cranston was over-acting, with a pseudo-British stage accent, as if every utterance were an aphorism for the ages. Then, over the closing credits, there were clips of Trumbo himself, and that's how he spoke - so I have to admit that, annoying tho it may be, Cranston has him dead-on.

The curse of great talent: Almost unbearably sad documentary Amy

Kind of odd that Amy Schumer's movie is called Trainwreck and ought to be called Amy, while Asif Kapadia's documentary Amy (about the life and death of Amy Winehouse) ought to be called Trainwreck. The message of this excellent documentary is that great talent can sometimes be a great curse, as it was for this poor girl who never really had a chance. A very middle-class North London Jewish girl who had the voice of a 60-year-old black American jazz singer - we hear this right at the top in home-movie footage when she sings Happy Birthday at about age 14 - she gets discovered very early and paid a huge signing bonus with a record label on the basis of voice and potential alone (her early performances are awful; she doesn't truly emerge until she stops playing guitar and works with a solid back-up band). We learn right off that her parents were both completely feckless, and her father abandoned the household when Amy was a preteen. She uses the signing money to buy or rent a place of her own, where she hangs w/ girlfriends and spends most of her time smoking weed, as she notes. It's downhill from there. One of the great things about this film is that her life was very thoroughly documented on film and video - tons of footage, much of it intimate, from which to select. There are a # of voice-over interviews about Amy but almost never do we see the subjects as they speak - a device that's like a dead spot in so many documentaries - it's almost always voice-over live video of Amy and friends. Despite one or two good life-long friends who try to help, her life spirals rapidly downward - and she's spurred on by malevolent husband, greedy manager and father, and the celebrity machine to continue performing when she is obviously extremely ill and deranged. She created for herself the role of in-your-face addict and bad girl and became almost trapped in her own image. She makes a few rehab attempts, and perhaps the saddest moment in the film occurs as she is at a celebration, clean and sober and a little wan, and says to a friend: This is so boring without drugs. Another almost unbearably touching moment is her recording of a duet w/ one of her idols, Tony Bennett, and she can hardly sing at all and he kindly coaches her along, very patient and worried. Watch it if you dare.

What it was like to work at a great newspaper: Spotlight

If All the President's Men heralded a new era of journalism and inspiring thousands to join much-romanticized profession,Spotlight (Tim McCarthy) is the swan song, a nostalgic look back to a time not all that long ago - 2001 and 2002 - when newspapers were still hugely influential, were the primary source of information, and boasted robust staffs that generally coddled an elite few on an investigative team, an I-team, that could had virtually all the time and resources needed to pursue a long-term story. Today, the largest papers still have these teams, but mid-sized papers rarely or ever do and none can influence public opinion in the way or yore. Spotlight looks at the Boston Globe Spotlight team in one its greatest moments, the investigation of sexual abuse by Catholic priests and, more significantly (as the new editor Marty Barret cozened), the cover-up by the Church leadership. This movie is dead-on accurate about (virtually) every aspect of newspaper life, style, and methodology; the newsroom looks exactly like the Globe newsroom did then (I'm sure there are fewer staffers there today, sadly), the people look right, their reporting style and lifestyle are exactly correct, and it was a kick to see how different reporting was just 15 years ago as electronic communication was just emerging and email was not yet born. But that's how it was: old stories literally clipped from newspapers and preserved in envelopes and brown folders; photographs printed and file; the main reference sources being old catalogs and directories stored in the library or in the "morgue." The movie gets the pace of reporting perfectly; the misses are minuscule and mostly understandable: e.g., a top editor would rarely if ever stop by a reporter's house at night for pizza and talk (but it's better on film to do it that way rather than a phone call), a reporter would never go on his own to speak to a judge (we used to keep cards in our wallets with procedures for calling the newspaper attorneys on demand), and wouldn't a report and top editor know it's "pickets" not "picketers"? These are quaint quibbles - Spotlight is a great movie that holds your complete attention for two hours and shows you exactly what it was like to work at a great newspaper in its heyday.

Joining the chorus in praise of Transparent (and a note on Justified)

I'll join the chorus in praise of the Amazon series Transparent (watching Season 1, through first 5 episodes), a series that I would have thought to be sensational and exploitative and not especially appealing but it's none of the above. Summary can't really do it justice because if I tell you this is a series about an LA family in which the father - a divorced, retired college professor - is gradually coming out to his 3 adult kids as trans and that each of kids has significant sexual-relational problems of his/her own - it sounds like a melodrama or old-fashioned soap opera doped out with contemporary sexual terminology. It's much more than that and much simpler. Each of the characters is completely recognizable and believable - as types, and as individuals. Our sympathy for them varies - and fact probably varies among viewers - but our interest in them never wanes. The director Jill Soloway conveys an incredible range of mood and emotion in each 30-minute episode - humor, sexuality, anger, sorrow. She handles some really serious and complex issues w/out a moment of condescension or exploitation and with a great deal of sensitivity toward the central character, Maura, as she navigates her new world. Some of the extraordinary short scenes include the moment when older daughter Sarah first sees her father in a dress and wig; flashback scenes when we see a younger Maura leading a secret life as a cross-dresser; Maura's first visit to a shopping mall; and the moment in a restaurant when an old-time family friend tries to flirt with a young girl (also a trans), recognizes Maura, and is humiliated and ashamed while she keeps her cool and her dignity - painfully so, however.

A note on another very popular series that we abandoned after 2+ episodes: There's nothing really wrong with Justified, plenty of action and reasonably good entertainment with appealing and attractive lead characters, but maybe that's part of the problem: This series never seemed to me an authentic depiction of life and crime in Appalachia nor of the life and work of a federal marshal. The characters are cast right out of the Hollywood glamour mold and just don't ring true. Essentially, based on the first 3 episodes, each is a pretty good hour-long crime story, but the series lacks the crucial element that makes a series work: an on-going plot line that develops, evolves, and keeps us engaged over multiple episodes.

Alone in the crowd - a lost boy on the NYC subway

Stand Clear of the Closing Doors (2013) is a largely realistic tightly focused sociodrama with the look and feel of a documentary and with a small cast of unknown (to most), possibly amateur actors - tells the story of a preteen w/ severe autism, Hispanic family, living w/ mother who works as a house-cleaner and older sister fully Americanized, in a small house near Rockaway Beach - director Sam Fleischner does a great job establishing the look and feel of the remote NYC neighborhood and establishing quickly the dynamics of the family: children speak English to mother who speaks Spanish to them; brief scenes of her at work tell all we need to know of her working life as a servant to the slightly better off. Sister who chaffs a little at her responsibilities for brother one day neglects to bring him home from school and he wanders off and spends next several days lost in the subway system - and at least half of the footage of the film follows him on the cars and platforms. Meanwhile, his family - later joined by somewhat neglectful father, search for the boy with only minimal help from school, police, neighbors, church members. Whether that's because the family is too timid and afraid of authority - there's some issue about the father's papers and immigration status - or because the social services are incompetent is left open - perhaps a little of both - but to me the only significant flaw in the movie is that I would think with a good description - and the kid is very unusual looking - transit police would have picked him up fairly quickly. (Movie also cops out a little at the end, teasing us into thinking we're heading in one direction and then surprising us - for a movie so devoted to realistic footage that's a big slip.) Hardly a cheerful movie in any aspect, difficult to watch, but a worthwhile social statement - a contemporary take on the class Little Fugitives.

Leapin Lizards

If you can really, really suspend disbelief then I guess Jurassic World can keep you entertained for two hours but in a way I'm with the throwback guy in the movie who yearns for the simpler world of the old Jurassic Park in which the dinosaurs were "real," not the new generation of giant lizards conjured in a genetics lab. They're bigger, faster, smarter, and more fierce and, strangely, much less scary than the dinos of 20 years ago because they're so obviously fake. The plot such as it is is pretty much what you'd expect, a mish-mash of pop movies genres and cliches - boys sent off for xmas vacation at the Jurassic World theme park (run by their Aunt Claire who's a corporate type in conflict with the he-man dinosaur-whisperer - guess who evolves over the course of the movie and it's not the dinosaurs), the younger brother weepy at times because he believes parents are headed for a divorce (guess who's reconciled at end of movie), the corporate PR types and the mad-scientist lab types go head to head with not only those who love the "real" dinosaurs but with a militant Green Beret type who wants to commandeer the most fierce dinos for battlefield action (not a bad idea, really). Though there was not a single scream or even gasp in our limited audience, some of the chase scenes are quite well done, the park itself is well realized with crowd scenes rivaling even the crowd scenes in the great silents and Biblical epics, and there are a few laugh out loud moments, I have to admit, such as the kids rescued by Aunt Claire and he-man boyfriend pleading: Will you stay with us? and the neglectful Clair saying: I won't let you out of my sight. The boys: No, him! Pretty good entertainment, if you can swallow the irony of Universal doing a movie that laments the corporate exploitation of these dinosaurs. What about the beam that is in thine own eye?

Italian neo-realism meets the sentimenal: Umberto D.

Vittorio De Sica's film Umberto D. is a double-past-tense film, made in 1952 in b/w like most of the great postwar European films but set sometime before the war, probably about 1935-40?, hard to tell that at first except that the cars look vintage though later in the film there's a single reference: Do you think there will be a war? That puts it in context for American viewers - clearly a time of great economic distress, but not a time of ruination in Italy, as we see in the other great neo-realist films of the 50s such as Rocco and His Brothers or Bicycle Thief. Though this film, too, is neo-realistic it's much more of a personal drama (based on a novel, I suspect) about a single elderly man who's caught in an economic vise. Film opens with a great and famous sequence of a large group of elderly pensioners marching on what I think is Rome City Hall demanding a raise in their pensions - they're being squeezed by inflation and facing dire poverty, in this time of very few social supports if any. We gradually focus on the eponymous Umberto - but bcz of the opening sequence we realize his story is one among  many - probably each man in the demonstration could have a similar tale. But his is especially sad and moving because he is completely alone - in fact over the course of the whole movie we learn nothing about his back story other than that he worked for the Department of Public Works (probably in an office job, judging by his manner of dress - suit and tie and hat). He cannot afford the monthly rental for his somewhat squalid room; his landlady is hard-hearted and is primed to evict him - his only solace is the maid who works in the rooming house (this was a time when the grand houses and apartments in Rome were often broken up and into rooming houses; today, these are either highly expensive private dwellings once again or expensive boutique hotels) who helps him out despite troubles of her own, and, most significantly, from his little dog, Flike. The man-dog relationship always pulls heartstrings and no doubt it's what keeps this movie fresh and vivid, but it's not just a sentimental weepy - we see along the way some incredibly powerful and sad scenes: the elderly men dining in a communal mess-hall style restaurant, where Umberto tries to sell his pocket watch; Umberto tentative and shamed starting to beg for money on the streets, his visit to the animal pound in search of the strayed Flike, his stay in a city hospital ward - a glimpse of what medical care was like ca 1940. Some may balk at the open ending of the film, but it's still stands 70 years later at one of the best cinematic portraits of an elderly man in great distress and buffeted by forces far beyond his control (Tokyo Story would be another).

New Testament (of Youth) - the movie verion

Being among the few who've actually read the book, we embarked on watching the move Testament of Youth, based faithfully (to the best of my memory) on Vera Brittain's war memoir of the same title. Brittain's memoir, at least the first half of it describing her service as a nurse to the troops in the First World War, was very powerful and presented a view of the war that, for once, seemed fresh and original (the 2nd half was about her early struggles as a writer and her advocacy of pacifism and feminism, valid and valuable pursuits but not as gripping a tale). The movie hits the same high marks: it's grand, epic, and gives us a different view of the war, which you might think by this time is impossible. The British obsession w/ both world wars as topics for books and films continues to amaze me, and in my mind I can't help but blend this account w/FM Ford and, I think, Grave, and others, in fact the 2 wars tend to blend - am I going nuts are am I just super-saturated? In any event, this movie has those high production values that we expect from British film - the acting, the settings (interior and landscape), the re-created war hospitals at home and in the field - and the story is full of drama and sorrow w/out ever being maudlin or wanly predictable. Vera's first struggle is to get parental approval to go to college (Oxford) - they expect a young lady to stay home and play piano and marry well. Just as her life is blooming and as she falls in love with a young man her equal in intellect and talent, he and her brother and their coterie of school "chums" head off to what they think will be a short and glorious war. Vera gives up her studies and volunteers to nurse. Though you've seen it before, it is painful to watch what she sees and endures - and the battlefields as seen from the medical camp are in a way more gruesome and frightening than those seen from the trenches. It's a powerful film, not over the top in any way, and stronger still for being based closely on a woman's life story.

Reasons to like Trainwreck

The Judd Apatow-Amy Schumer vehicle Trainwreck breaks no new ground on the rom-com front - another seemingly mismatched NY couple cute meet, fight and break up, yearn for each other from afar, and reunite at end to fireworks and Bollywood-style musical dance # - but that said it's charming in its way, upends a few of the genre stereotypes (Schumer is the aggressive partner, a sexual polymath, while the guys she's with are sensitive and focused on "relationships"), and is frequently hilarious, so what more can you ask of this kind of movie, right? In particular, some of the great scenes include the opening sequence in which Amy's dad explains to his preteen daughters why he's divorcing their mom (You like your doll, right? What if someone said you could never have another doll in your whole life, right?), Amy (that's her name in the movie as well) with asking her muscle-bound boyfriend to talk dirty to her (There's no I in Team ... ), and above all the stunt-casting scenes with Lebron James, who turns out to be an astonishingly good actor, who knew? Apatow-Schumer have a lot of fun casting him as the sensitive guy always trying to mend others' relationships (Amy's love interest is his knee surgeon, Aaron) and watching his spending: when he has to return to Aaron's office because he left his $30 sunglasses there, he asks Aaron to validate his parking receipt. A bewigged Tilda Swinton is also very funny as Amy's boss, a snooty sendup of a mag editor in the mode of Tina Brown. A few scenes were DOA - e.g., the panel of experts LeBron calls to together for relationship counseling - but overall the film has another laugh lines to keep you watching and shows that Schumer's writing talent as well as her deadpan comic delivery are for real.

An emotionally wrenching film based (loosely) on Crime and Punishment

It takes a lot of commitment to watch Lav Diaz's Norte, The End of History (and I still don't get the title, except maybe it takes place in a Philippine region called Norte, the North?), but the film has many rewards and once you adjust to the pace and, possibly, to the odd conglomeration of Tagalog (I assume, the Philippine native language?) and English you may find yourself completely absorbed, as I was - although I had to watch the film in several "takes" - who has 4 hours for anything? It's a highly original film but based loosely on Crime and Punishment - yet far more melodramatic and tragic. Diaz composes the entire film from long takes; there is virtually no editing with any take, just single shots of up to 5+ minutes - sometimes the camera tracks, sometimes pivots slightly, sometimes holds steady. (Taiwanese director Ming Liang Tsai uses a similar cinematic technique, and must have been a huge influence on Diaz, or on one another?) Often the perspective is waist-high or lower, as in an Ozu film In some of the scenes there is no dialog or little dialog; others are extremely violent and brutal - but more suggestive than shocking, and therefore even more powerful for that. Many of the scenes (including some from documentary footage of a typhoon aftermath) give is a vivid sense of Philippine daily life, especially in the crowded side streets of a small city, unnamed. The story is grand, even epic - yet focused on two men and their crossed lives. Brief summary: A young man, law-school dropout, generally considered the smartest in the who class, has several lengthy, abstract political discussions with his law-school friends; same time, we follow a young family getting by selling vegetables from a cart and saving to open an "eatery" who get deeply in debt to a nasty money-lender. The husband physically threatens the money lender. Shortly after, the law-school dropout (I forget exactly why he does this) kills the money lender (a la C&P) and her daughter (unlike C&P), reasoning that the world is better of without her. The husband of course gets charged w/ the murder, has horrible legal counsel (we see none of the legal back-and-forth), sentenced to life. From that point on we watch the horrors and later the adjustments to life in prison, while in other segments watch the killer - Fabian - struggle with his guilt and remorse. Clearly, in today's terms, we can see that he has serious mental illness, perhaps bi-polar or schizophrenic. He essentially disappears, and then returns and encourages his law-school friends, now attorneys, to take up the case. We never quite learn the outcome, but we see several lives ruined by these terrible events. It's an emotionally wrenching movie that probably could have been successful if it were half the length but that you have to take on its own terms or not at all.

The other side of the tracks: White rural poverty in Rich Hil

Not to be confused with the Red Sox pitcher of the same name, the documentary Rich Hill (Andrew Droz Palermo and Tracy Droz Tragos) is a close study of three families literally on the other side of the tracks in the eponymous middle-class Missouri town. We get a few glimpses of high-school life as experienced by most kids in Rich Hill - football games, cheerleaders, clean hallways, bustling activity, a typical American small-town or suburban high school, and then we focus on 3 kids and their lives, each different, each sorrowful and terrifying in their poverty. Two of the kids seem to have virtually no chance for success: a very angry and troubled young man who's far beyond the control of his beleaguered mother and a young man who seems of limited intelligence who's a victim of sexual abuse and is being raised by his grandmother while mother is in prison. Sadly, these kinds of stories are present in almost every community, and though usually associated w/ extreme poverty, as in this film, that's not always so. The 3rd and most troubling (and also most appealing of the 3 kids) is a teenage boy whose family has lived in what seems like a dozen communities - his father tries unsuccessfully to make a living doing odd jobs and, pathetically, performing as a Hank Williams tribute act - he's musical, and has no capacity to earn a living or raise a family. The mother as well is extremely incapacitated - Rx probably, but that's never made clear - and yet throughout it all this young man has great spirit and drive and is very loving toward his sister and his parents, who have utterly failed him. So what chance does this kid have, either? Other than the correctional system, social services seem to have done nothing for these families, and there's no hand of charity from churches or anywhere else. It's a very powerful and honest look at mostly forgotten white semi-rural poverty - and the only drawback to the film, unfortunately, is that it successful portrays the hopeless situations of these characters and there for has no narrative arc. At the end, we're almost exactly where we started, unfortunately. I would also note that I hate the use of musical scores in movies of this sort and think that documentary footage should stand on its own without orchestrated crescendos.

A genre film that goes above expectations - Me & Earl

Despite a few missteps there's something very sweet and winning about Alfonso Gomez-Rejon's Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (from novel of same title, a YA book maybe?). Yes it's about the millionth senior-year-lovesick-screwing up while preparing to leave home movie, but it brings something new and fresh to the shopworn genre: the 3 lead characters are very winning and actually quite funny, the relationship between the main character/narrator and the dying girl is quite beautifully handled, not nearly as maudlin as you'd imagine, and quite unpredictable over the course of the movie, the ending is a well-earned emotional high, the occasional use of animation or really I guess it's claymation is funny and unobtrusive (the cutesy supertitles less so), bravo for Connie Britton taking on a less-glam role with glasses and no makeup, and the films that the narrator and Earl make over the years, send-ups of various film classics e.g., 2:48 Cowboy, Death in Tennis, The Seven Seals - are very funny, a successful bon mot to the filmmaker's desired audience. Ok, sure, there are some wild inconsistencies in the handling of the high-school scenes: Narrator Greg talks about being an outsider unnoticed by anyone etc though when we see him in school he seems almost like he's running for president of the student council (I realize his self-image differs from the image others have of him), they make a point that the dying girl is part of a Jewish girl clique but the casting does not support that inference in any way, the adult male characters are weird and confusing (the hip teacher - how does he fit in?; same w/ the annoying intellectual father - they both seem as if they'd wandered in from a different, worse movie), and the characters sometimes talk in ways that no teenage kid ever speaks outside of a Wes Anderson movie. But all that said it's a good story with likable and mostly credible central characters, with some laughs along the way - not a ground-breaking film exactly but a little more ambitious than most in the genre and mostly successful.

Why to watch The Passion of Joan of Arc

Even those who cannot imagine watching a silent-era film - i.e., b/w, 1920s or earlier - let alone a silent in a foreign language (French in this case, though the director, CT Dreyer, was Danish), would probably be interested in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928): It's pretty short (87 minutes), the story is simple but dramatic, and the movie has some of the most extraordinary cinematography of any film before or since. It's the story of the trial - mostly pitting the 19-year-old Jeanne against a panel of high-church interrogators who try to browbeat her into confession and she won't budge: She says she has been chosen by God (through St. Michael, who appeared to her in a vision) to save France, by leading King Charles in a fight to expel the English conquerors. The film touches only lightly on Jeanne as a military leader and barely mentions the politics behind her trial - obviously, the leaders of the church were treated well by their King and by the English invaders and did not want to upset the status quo - and mainly it's a drama of interiors and of faces, Jeanne's with eyes wide open variously in terror, devotion, or mania - you decide - and almost always tear-stained - she cries enough in this film to be dehydrated. The inquisitors look brutal and hideous, even deformed. If there's a hell, that's were they are now for sure. Of course they fail to get Jeanne to give up her views - in fact they can't get her to give up wearing men's clothing (something about that seems to have really disturbed them), and of course the film ends with her execution - beautifully and terrifyingly photographed, as she burns at the stake. Only at the end does the film open up and allow us to see the people of France (and one rebellious cleric) who believe Jeanne was a visionary and saint. The film both humanizes her, sanctifies her, and does leave open the possibility that she was a troubled young woman. From the commentary I learned that she was sainted only in 1920, so the film had a bit of contemporary edge - and of course the film was frighteningly prescient, as anyone watching this movie singed the 1940s (it was apparently lost for many years and a good copy discovered only in the 1980s in a mental hospital in Norway, of all places) can't help but think of the French government and the appeasement of the Nazi invaders, the expulsion of the Jews, the prison camps and suppression of the resistance. You could imagine the same trial taking place in Occupied France circa 1944.

Reasons to watch Straight Outta Compton

There's a sameness, a standard arc, to the many movie biopics about musical artists, and you can see the same contours, for the most part, in the dynamic (up to a point) and too long (unfortunately) F. Gary Gray's Straight Outta Compton: the early struggle, no one can imagine that this poor boy/girl will emerge as a musical power, the struggle through the early years playing crappy clubs and dive bars, surprising discovery and breakout, early relationship w/ agent - usually white, often Jewish - which becomes contentious and often ends in the disposal of agent, the success and big concerts, the inevitable struggles w/ fame and the sybaritic lifestyle that ensues - sex, rx, alcohol, ridiculous expenditure on luxuries - trouble w/ family especially the faithful spouse who'd stood by in the early years and is now shunted to the side, and usually some form of hard-earned self-awareness and settling into late-career success and sainthood - apotheosis - and this pretty much describes SOC, which is the biopic of the hip hop group NWA, with particular emphasis on the late leader of the group, Eric Wright/Easy E, and lesser emphasis on Ice Cube and Dr. Dre and their courtship by and eventually war with West Coast rap leader Suge Knight (w/ Paul Giamatti unconvincingly playing their Jewish manager). A few things do set SOC apart: the first pic of this magnitude I know of to focus on the world of hip hop, which makes it an interesting social document, the great portrayal of the many conflicts w/ the police that formed the psyche and musical mentality of the group members - the Ray Charles biopic took on racism in a different way, but this is the most political of any of the biopics I've seen - terrific drug-bust scene opens the film, the untimely and sad death of Easy E at the end, which breaks the narrative model, the ambivalence we feel about the crudity and danger of some of the songs - especially Fuck the Police - in which we can understand why authorities tried to shut down some of these performances but we also understand the context, we see how NWA were telling a story that, back in the 1990s, few outside the black community had heard or understood. Yes, the movie's too long, and yes it's a little hard to follow as the narrative thread spools around several key characters not one only, but worth a look and a listen, even if hip hop is not your genre, maybe especially if it's not.

Love and Squalor: Rebels of the Neon God

Rebels of the Neon God (1993?) is the just-released in US first film from Tsai Ming-Liang - and should definitely be of interest to those who, like me, were blown away by his most recent film, Stray Dogs. While SD is much more daring in its cinematography - virtually the entire movie consisting of long single takes from a fixed point - Rebels is a pretty astonishing break-out movie and shares the same topography as Stray Dogs. It's a place none of us would want to live or even visit so fair warning this filmis not for everyone: Ming-Liang is interested in the underside of the Asian prosperity, and both movies focus on the outsiders, squatters, petty criminals (at least in Rebels), toughs, and thugs on the margins of Taipei life. Rebels tells of a few days in the life of two teenage petty thieves (who get in a little over their heads when they rip off a video-game parlor), another very lost and disturbed teenage boy whose hatred for his gruff taxi-driver dad eats him alive, and a pretty young woman who works in a roller-rink and hooks up with the boys for no clear reason - we have to believe she's deeply troubled or addicted, though we don't see direct evidence for this in the film (one of its few flaws). As with SD, the scenes create a disturbing picture of the squalor and tawdriness of city life: many scenes of noisy video parlors - the gleaming neon of the title, and the incessant pings of the sound track; a squatter's apartment revolting in its decrepitude, and many night-time rides on the ever-present motorbikes along the crowded neon-lit streets of Formosa, construction going on everywhere - just looks like a city you'd never want to visit, the polar opposite of the many cinematic romances of NYC, Paris, and Rome.

Homeland Season 4 great - for 10 episodes. And then what happened?

Season 4 of Homeland was absolutely terrific, exciting, engaging, sometimes surprising, propelled by the always fantastic acting of Clair Danes with strong support from the grumpy Mandy Patinkin and just great action directing, art direction (how do they so effectively create an embassy under siege in what purports to be Pakistan), and the music - most of the time you don't notice it but it always adds to the mood and aura, esp in the cool opening credits montage. Unfortunately, they should have stopped at episode 10, the attack on the US Embassy by the the ISI (obviously modeled on ISIS, and the attack roughly modeled on Bengazi). The final two episodes of the season were a let down - all the drama had taken place and we're just tying some loose ends - Carrie/Danes trying to find Peter Quinn and get him out of Pakistan (a drama largely played out off screen), and finally Carrie at home bonding with her baby, visiting her estranged mother, squabbling w/ sister - it felt much more like a soap, and a bad one at that, as lots of time wasted in resolving a relationship (Carrie and Mom) that was never even established in the first place. Too bad because otherwise I'd give this season a rave. Will watch Season 5 anyway, but hope it doesn't pick up where this season left off.

Uneasy Lies the Head: The future King Charles III

Saw and totally enjoyed the completely engaging and provocative drama King Charles III: A Future History Play (by Mike Bartlett, director Rupert Goold), which brings us to an indeterminate time in the future, opening with a spooky vision of Queen Elizabeth's funeral and then segueing into the first weeks of the reign of KCIII. The drama entails Charles's attempts to assert regal authority: In his first meeting with the PM, who expects KCIII to routinely sign every piece of legislation, as his mother had done, Charles refuses to sign a bill and cannot support - which leads to a crisis of governments: the PM tries to push through Parliament a bill that would make bills into law w/out the King's assent. Although this dispute may sound a little abstract or abstruse, the many angles are quite fascinating, even to an American audience: Our sympathies would on the surface be w/ elected officials rather than inherited monarchy ("all [people] are created ="), but Charles is trying to block a bill that would all much greater press censorship - the UK has no constitution and certainly no bill of rights, so in this way we are on Charles's side - except that the rights he's protecting are pretty much the rights of thugs like Murdoch to print sensational and sometimes libelous material, so maybe he's int he wrong? In any event, the controversy becomes national, putting the whole royal household into jeopardy. What's really cool about this "future history" play is that, in homage to Shakespeare, it's in somewhat loose blank verse, with occasional rhymed couplets at the conclusion of key scenes (I hope someday to read the script to see how Bartlett managed contemporary speech in blank verse). Though there are no direct allusions to or quotations from Sh, at least none I picked up, there are many evocations of Shakesparean themes, most notably the woman driving the man to seize power, the ungrateful offspring, the monarch mixing with the "commoners" to see what life outside of the royal bubble (thinking of M4M here), the revival of the soliloquy (so rarely used in contemp drama), the hapless monarch (RII), the scheming monarch (RIII), and the dissolute son (HIV) - and probably more. Tim Pigott-Smith is terrific in the lead and the supporting cast is great, with a special nod to my good friend Margot Leicester who kills as Camilla. Though there are many laugh lines, and play is not a comedy, as some have asked me - it's a real drama, and KCIII is a flawed hero of near tragic proportions. I can't say this play is of Shakespearen proportions - what would be? - but it draws on all that's best of British theater past and present: great acting, subtle and imaginative stage direction, smart visuals, stirring but never distracting music, great show.

In defense of Homeland Season 4

I don't get what the Homeland nay-sayers want out of a series. I understand that maybe nothing can rise to the level of Season 1 when we were constantly in doubt about whether Brodie was a terrorist agent or a traumatized soldier, and we first understood and recognized the complexity of Carry's character - and how her illness was a tremendous burden, making it all too easy to dismiss her unconventional ideas as delusions or worse. But Season 4 - 8 episodes in now - is as exciting a spy thriller as you'll find in any movie, w/ episodes 7 and 8 being two of the strongest and strangest - esp the terrific cinematic presentation of Carry's drug-induced breakdown and in episode 8 Saul's escape from captivity and the incredibly tense struggle to bring him to safety and the toll that takes on everyone at the CIA/Embassy. The characters may not be as multi-layered in this season as in some of the earlier, especially the bad guys and the heavies - is "Duck" now typecast for life? - and we do miss Brodie (who makes a cameo in 7), but the plotting is tight as a drum, the pacing is fast, and all the technical details - the art direction, the score, even the credits - meet the really high standards that used to belong to HBO alone but now SHO giving them a run. If this season doesn't hold her interest and at times keep you on the proverbial edge of your seat, what will?

Don't give up on Homeland yet

I understand that many viewers have bailed on the Showtime Homeland, and I guess I can see why, as Season 4, without the dynamic relationship between Brodie and Kerry (Claire Danes) and without the enigmatic issue of whether Brodie is a wounded hero or a conniving traitor, or both, the show does lose some of its moxie, its raison d'etre. That said, we still have Danes, she of the most expressive face in pictures, and a pretty good if sometimes convoluted narrative about the CIA efforts to get to the heart of a terrorist ring in Pakistan. There are some tremendously exciting street scenes throughout the first 4 episodes, some really good cinematography that captures what we (or I) at least imagine the far east to look like (I think I read most is filmed in Jordan?) - scenes that had to be a tremendous challenge to stage and capture. The story centers in a Benghazi like uprising, which initially seems to be a crowd outraged by US air strikes against a target that ended up killed nearly an entire wedding party; soon, this becomes a little more complex, as they realize that attack was engineered and planned - and then we learn even more layered and nuanced information about the air strike - which I will give away here - that it was a set up, feeding false info to the US to get us to bomb an innocent target and create an outrage (also to get us to think that the target was killed, allowing him to go on living outside of surveillance). There are a # of subplots, including an ambassador's husband who sells state secrets - the mirror image of a plot element in an earlier season in which CIA honcho Mandy Patinkin was betrayed by his wife - though the wife betrayal was far more degrading. In episode 4 Danes, quite improbably I think, seduced a young Pakistani in order to win him over - using sex for political (and personal?) gain - I know Danes/Kerry is a troubled and impulsive figure, but I think she should feel degraded by or at least ambivalent about her actions - as did, for example, Xtina Hendricks in Mad Men - but I'm afraid that they may play this as: Kerry will do anything to win, to get her way. Intrigue between her and Patinkin is strong, the silent rage of her partner Quinn, who also seems to carry a torch for Kerry, is a promising plot element, and Kerry's abandonment of her daughter tells us a lot about her personality - if it does strain credibility (would she really have carried the pregnancy to term? for that matter - does a CIA station chief have any authority to call for an air attack on a civilian target?).

A last gasp for Italian neo-realism - Ermanno Olmi's I Fidanzati

Watched the 1962 film by the not-well-known Italian direct Ermanno Olmi, I Fidanzati (The Fiances) - Criterion collection, which pretty much tells you the film is worth watching at least once (Olmi best known for his earlier film Il Posto, which I've never seen in any event). Fidanzati is clearly a period piece - shot in b/w and seems old-fashioned even by 1962 standards - it's part of the great Italian neo-realist tradition, but a last attempt to hang onto that integrity, I think, as Italian cinema at the time was already moving toward spaghetti westerns and spectacles. This one is about an engaged couple (obviously) living in mainland Italy - I think Naples, but I'm not sure, there was also a Milan reference somewhere maybe? - he works as a machinist of some sort building jet engines - and he's tapped by his employer to move to a plant in Sicily, seemingly a big job advancement - but it means leaving his fiancee behind indefinitely. When he gets to Sicily he finds life there pretty difficult, lonely, and expensive - it's a boom-town all of a sudden and the prices are jacked up accordingly. The plot is wafer-thin, and made weaker by Olmi's completely clumsy handling of the conclusion, as the guy and girl write to each other to reconcile, and we get the letters narrated in voice-over, very clumsy and non-cinematic - but we don't watch this film for its plot. The strength is the vivid almost documentary realism in which Olmi shows the life in industrial Sicily in the early 60s, Italy still reeling from the war (there are bombed out and ruined buildings everywhere) - a completely non-tourist view of Italy, grim and in its way beautiful (at times) and interesting to look at (always). Some of the great scenes in Sicily are the jam-packed street fair with thousands of participants, many masked and costumed (he must have used a real street fair to get this footage), the night-time visit to the espresso bar, the search for an apartment, the bus ride to the factory - and in mainland the swimming episode (he cheats on his fiancee, as she later learns) and most of all the opening sequence in the dance hall - the strange, awkward silence of the assembled couples before the music starts, the evident tension between the two fiances of the title (we don't know why they're so tense until later), and the beauty and grace of the dancing, in this very spartan dance hall, once the music starts. Hey, the film is only 77 minutes - definitely worth that amount of your time.

Ascent - a near impossible climb captured live in the documentary Meru

The documentary Meru, in limited distribution, is another one of the endlessly fascinating reports on the guys who live to climb - this one particularly notable for the incredibly dangerous and life-threatening challenges this group of 3 climbers faced on their two attempts to be the first to scale the till-now unclimbable Himalayan peak of the title (also known as Shark's Fin, perhaps a better title). What separates this from many others is that the climb is captured on video almost entirely during the process, by one of the climbers (Renan Azturk) as cinematographer - there's no "re-creation" of the climb, though there are post-climb on-camera interviews with the 3 climbers, their souses/girlfriends/siblings, and Gary Krakouer (sp?) author of Into Thin Air, who gives good context and perspective. Won't give too much away here, but the center of the film is a serious injury Renan suffered not climbing but skiing and the great risk he and the team took allowing him - recovering from fractured skull - to attempt the near-impossible ascent. The live footage of the three in their cliff-hanging bivouac at night and in storms and, during the day, their meticulous ascent up sheer ice at what seem to be impossible angles, is astonishing - without question the end of this film could have been the death of the team in sudden catastrophe. We have a personal interest in this film, btw, as Renan grew up in town and was one of our daughter's friends and in fact I can claim (accurately) to have hiked (though not "climbed") in the Whites with Renan - perhaps it "all began" when he ascended the peaks of Lafayette and Lincoln, back in the day?

Series tv v episodic TV and one missed opportunity

On a friend's recommendation watched the first two episodes of Longmire and overall think, OK, it's good if you like police procedurals but it doesn't rise to the level of great or even very good series-TV, and here's why. It seems in Longmire that in each episode the eponymous Wyoming sheriff solves a case. A had a modicum of interest for a few reasons - the Wyoming empty landscape and scruffy small-town life was appealing and credible and unusual for a TV setting, esp for a police-like drama (usually in NYC, LA, Miami, et al). The main character has a certain gruff, laconic style not typical of most TV, and he's offset by his chatty assistant sheriff, Vic, better known to me as Starbuck from Battlestar. All that's a plus. But to make a great series there has to be an ongoing story line and in fact the ongoing story line has to predominate - so that we really want to know what happens to these characters, how they grow and develop and interrelate over time: e.g., Mad Men (each episode had a commercial "sell" but the plot of the episode was always subordinate to the plot of the series), or, closer in style to Longmire, the overlooked TV series The Shield - each of the many episodes involved solving some kind of case before the detectives but we mainly were interested in the developing characters, their tensions, the side-stepping the law and protocol. There's almost none of that in Longmire - a few hints about a campaign for reelection as sheriff, some tepid stuff about the secret relationship between L's daughter and his election rival and subordinate - but these are very minor elements at least through 3 episodes. The plot of each episode benefits from the unusual setting - some promising themes about tensions between U.S. and Indian law enforcement, though this has not been picked up after the initial/pilot episode - but overall the plots fall victim to the bane of many procedural shows: the crimes are too weird and exotic to be believable week after week in a small town (compare Fargo, which takes just one complex crime across the whole season, or similarly A Killing) and the solution to the crimes is so engineered and improbably - every clue falls into place, every suspect fesses up eventually - that we just don't feel there's authenticity here. And you've got one of the most appealing of TV actresses here - Katee Sackhoff aka Starbuck - and you can't give her a back story or more than a sexy sidekick role? Serious missed opportunity there, and everywhere.

The incredibly disappointing Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Unfortunately I was incredibly disappointed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan's 2011 film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia - in that his more recent Winter Sleep was clearly among the best films I've seen this year. Once Upon has a few of the same qualities - a deliberate pace, a serious theme, a cast of thoughtful and introspective characters - and in some ways an even more promising premise: a team of law-enforcement officials (a police chief, medical examiner, public prosecutor, and their legion) take two suspects on a night-time odyssey across a stretch of rural Turkey in search of the field where the men buried the body of a comrade whom they're accused of murdering. The problem: there is virtually no dramatic tension throughout the film, it moves not at a deliberative pace but at a glacial pace (Ceylan is one of the few writer-directors who approaches presenting action, or I should say scenes, in real time - letting characters debate and discuss a point for, say, 20 minutes, as people do in life - not the truncated, highly pointed semiotics of screenplays and movies: he makes us see how even the most "realistic" movie is actually not realistic at all - it's selective, edited, highlighted, and "treated," like a synthetic fabric). Real time practically kills this movie as the search for the grave site is just a series of episodes w/out increasing stakes and the follow-up, particularly conversations between the prosecutor and the medical examiner, the two most highly educated people in the film, are cool and abstract (not dramatic and revealing, as are the conversations in Winter Sleep). Worse, we know little or nothing about the crime itself that sets this story in motion - a curious decision on Ceylan's part. The men accused therefore are complete enigmas to us, which further alienates us from this strange film of missed opportunities. Plus, it's very long - pushing three hours; plus, I have to note that there is not a single female speaking part in the entire movie (again, Winter Sleep is very different, with strong female characters central to the movie).

Two films that were non-starters - or actually non-finishers

Started and abandoned two very different movies for two very different reasons this weekend, so can't comment fully on either - maybe we missed the crucial moment when everything fell into place - can give a sense of why sometimes 45 minutes or so is more than enough. First, the 1952 John Ford "classic" The Quiet Man, with John Wayne breaking stereotype and playing a middle-aged American returning to family homestead in Ireland, buying up the near-abandoned family farm, falling in love w/ the hot-tempered beauty (Maureen O'Hara) and wining over the natives of the village including. The scenery is beautiful, and Ford has a light touch w/ the antic Irish (and includes a kind of funny trope in that the local pub seems to be owned by Jewish guy: We pronounce it Co-han's, says one of the locals). That said, the pace is glacial and the story told in such broad strokes and the characters so close to stereotype that 45 minutes in I was sure I had no desire to see how J Wayne wins the girl. Reading the liner, you learn that he's an ex-boxer, and there are a few hints of his prowess, but Ford holds onto that "secret" forever. Fro the heavy-handed musical score to the languid pace to the corny dialogue - this is clearly now a period piece for those interested in deconstructing the elements of a Hollywood blockbuster from the Eisenhower years. The other non-starter (or non-finisher): La Sapienza, with the subtitles unhelpfully translated as Sapience, a Swiss-French-Italian mishmash about supposedly award-winning architect and his think-tankish wife who, each frustrated in their careers - he especially, as he believes his many public projects have not made life better for anyone - head off for Italy - where they encounter a young man and his sickly sister. The young man wants to become an architect, and he and the protag - Schmidt - travel on to Rome and engage is some of the most stilted, tortured dialog imaginable on the purpose of architecture and design (while wife stays with the sickly sister and they talk about - I don't even know what - basically nothing). The movie is arch and self-consciously stylized - characters often standing shoulder to shoulder and addressing the camera rather than each other - a cheap Godardian effect - and it all would be bearable, perhaps, if the characters were likable, dynamic, funny - think, just by comparison, about how Owen Wilson learns about writing in his midnight journeys through Paris in the Woody Allen jaunt - but these characters are stilted and lifeless and seem to be nothing more than vehicles for the director to espouse his or her theories on art. Cut!

There ought to be a lifetime achieement award for the Dardenne Brothers

The Dardenne Brothers continue to make astonishingly good films about life among the working class in northern France/Belgium, and the latest, Two Days, One Night, continues their examination of people in the France that is not about wine and tourism. They are unflinching in their realism, honest and open in their examination of characters, masters at building plot and suspense within a framework of realism, and subtle but provocative in their political point of view. Two Days is the story of a young mom (Marion Cottilard, playing Sandra) who faces an immediate dilemma: her factory co-workers (they make solar panels, a nice touch) have been forced to vote on whether to bring her back to work (she has been on medical leave because of panic attacks), which, if they do, means forfeiting their 1,000 Euro bonus. They vote something like 12 to 4 against her - but spurred by a friend Sandra gets the coolly indifferent boss to let them vote again on Monday (because the foreman put unfair pressure on the workers to vote for the bonus). Sandra has the task, w/ help from her kindly husband (husbands/boyfriends are not often so devoted in Dardenne films) she sets about speaking to each of the co-workers to make her case - building up the the vote on Monday. Her visits to each - each of which is a story unto itself, in a way - present vivid portrait of the lives of the working class in one of the ugly suburbs or industrial cities: the landscape of crappy housing, cheap bars and grocery stories and Laundromats - so far from the American image of France. And these meetings expose the class exploitation - getting workers to go against one another so each can hold onto his or her job - when it's obvious that the next year it will be someone else's neck on the block. I will not give the ending away - only will say it's both surprising and satisfying. The look, the feel, the pacing of this movie, all are beautiful and subtle - the kind of movie just plain not made in the US these days, where Indies are all about "relationships" and youth and rarely about politics and labor, or not so directly anyway. I know the Dardennes have won many awards, and I expect they will continue to do so - but there ought to be a new kind of award for them, a lifetime achievement award even for younger filmmakers, as their films are of a piece and form a comprehensive and provocative world view.

A "pure" documentary from Wiseman on the National Gallery

As with too many documentaries, Frederick Wiseman's National Gallery at 3 hours is too long and could have more of an impact had it been cut two an even 2 hours but that said the film is a great mixture that shows so many of the astonishing paintings in the collection and gives a great look behind the scenes at the life of this museum and cultural institution. I in particularly liked the several scenes in which the museum director and staff member or perhaps consultant on communications go toe to toe (in their polite and reserved British manner): the communications person goes an a long discourse arguing that the museum has to be more open to the public and more in dialogue with its audience, which she defines as the entire British population plus the millions of visitors, and the director - obviously made even physically uncomfortable by her monologue (I have to wonder whether she's carrying water for someone of higher rank, such as a the chair of the trustees? - otherwise, he'd just shut her down) argues that the gallery need to hold fast to its high principles and to serve the people truly devoted to art: she wants them to do a big promo around a marathon that ends near the gallery, and he thinks that's ridiculous and has nothing to do with the mission of the gallery. He's right, in my view. He says he'd rather do a show that's a spectacular failure rather than an insipid success - and we get the impression she'd want the gallery to do shows like the art of football or some such thing to draw in the crowds. The documentary also shows a # of the gallery guides speaking to groups of visitors - one guide in particular - describing and triptych from the middle ages and other pieces is extraordinary. We also see and hear from some of the curators, the restoration work in progress, the odd behind-the-scenes activities like repairing frames, setting up an exhibit, and some great shots of the many museum-goers. In Wiseman's characteristic style there are no interviews or voice-overs - the entire movie is made up of observation, and truly pure documentary - on an institution that at first seems austere and foreboding but that gradually, as we realize, is full not only with classic works of art but with people and with life. Inevitably, this will recall the great film about the Hermitage, The Russian Ark - which is entirely different in concept but, like National Gallery, is a confluence of cinema and painting.

Snowden: Hero or traitor?: Citizenfour

Laura Poitras's Citizenfour, her documentary account of Edward Snowden and how he unleashed the story of NSA grabbing millions of phone and email records and spying on millions of Americans without authorization, and how American officials repeatedly lied about the operation and its scope, will provoke you into asking the basic question: Is Snowden a hero or a traitor? It's a free country and we Americans have the right to speak our minds, but did he betray a trust in doing so? Though Poitras is no doubt in the hero camp, I am really torn by this - in some ways I see him as heroic (and brave in all ways, putting his life on the line for his beliefs), much like the war resisters of the Vietnam era, deciding on their own that the U.S. government was wrong and that the war was immoral and acting on their beliefs at great risk and sacrifice. But in this case - are we willing to give up our privacy for the protection against terrorism? We say we hate the government snooping, but weren't we glad at how quickly investigators nailed the Tsarnaevs? Or the London subway bombers? I guess it comes down to the checks and balances; there should have been a more clear pathway of authorization, reporting, and accountability in setting up these surveillance programs - and though I truly think the Obama admin used the information only to combat terrorism, we can only imagine the potential future uses of this kind of capability, data, and info - use against political opponents, activist movements, for 2 examples. This film is our first and maybe only look ever at Snowden the person, and it was kind of cool to see him, on film, give literally introduce himself to a small set of investigative journalists and slowly and meticulously, in his pleasantly dorkish manner, explaining the information he has and its import. On the downside, other than the Snowden interviews in a Hong Kong hotel room where he was in hiding for eight days as the story was told and revealed to the world, there isn't a lot for Poitras to actually film, so too much of the film is made up of news clips of the coverage of the unfolding story. So it's not a great documentary from a cinematic standpoint, but it does give real insight into this complex issue and at least a glimpse of the personality of the man who made it happen.

Lives of the Preps: Metropolitan

Whit Stillman's work has completely slipped by me - I seem to remember a lot of talk about him back in the '90s - but watched his 1990 debut film (written, produced, directed), Metropolitan, last night and liked it more than I thought I would, or should. It's a classic ensemble piece with about 8 actors more or less sharing the lead - reminds me of a few other films of that era such as Big Chill or Return of the Secaucus 7 or the Breakfast Club: the age cohort is roughly the same but the social milieu entirely different. These are a group of debs and preppies (though one prefers the term urban haut-bourgeoisie) on a winter break from their schools socializing in high style in Manhattan, probably set circa 1970 though Stillman is coy about the time ("not so long ago" say the credits). (The look and feel is also an obvious homage to Woody Allen's Manhattan films, though Stillman's is slightly more realistic and gritty rather than the b/w romantic glow of Allan; his retro score seems straight out of Woody Allen, however.) They're kids who on the surface are easy to dislike: privileged, cocky, prejudiced. But we also see, gradually, that they are not all of a piece, a few are pretty smart, and like any other group of friends they have their own loves, loathings, and social dynamics. Plot involves an outsider who joins the group (he's a boarding school Manhattanite as well but from the West Side - horrors - and not quite as well off, because of a divorce - he has to rent his tux - eventually he buys a used one - which by the way is very socially accurate, as I know from my boarding-school friends from college - they spent a lot less on clothing than anyone else would have thought). One striking elements is that parents are virtually nonexistant in this film, it's a world entirely of the young - who of course live the life that can live, parties every night, cabs, tips, serious drinking - thanks to parents' largesse and indifference. Over the course of the film we come more and more to like the lead "outsider," Tom, and Audrey Roget, with whom he's partnered but whom he only gradually comes to like, even love - they're both very sweet and innocent - and we begin to see that it's true of all of the cast: their tough, cynical demeanors are for show and for protection from feelings. They all have friends - but, like many boarding school kids - they really need families. Oddly, it appears that no one in this cast went on to a particularly successful acting career.

The Reign in Spain: Three sisters in Madrid

I'll say this about Carlos Saura's Cria Cuervos (1976), Cry of the Crows? - I have no idea why it's called that: I fell asleep for about 15 minutes, woke up, hadn't missed a thing. It's a slow and careful, at times tedious movie, very much in the vein of "art cinema," and yet there are some rewards in watching it carefully and with patience. The story line is good: three young girls, sisters, in Madrid, lose both their parents and are being raised by a young aunt, along with a buxom, middle-aged household servant. The focus is almost entirely on the middle sister, the doe-eyed Ana, (spoiler, sorta) who has repeated visions/fantasies of talking with and inter-acting with her mother (I didn't figure out till quite a ways in that the "mother" is seen only through her imagination). In the first sequence, Ana hears noises from her father's bedroom and comes downstairs, sees a beautiful woman (a family friend, we learn later) rush out of the house in disarray, goes into the bedroom, sees father lying dead. She calmly takes a bedside glass, rinses it out, and goes back to bed. We gradually learn that she believes (wrongly) that some powder she's mixed into the milk has killed her father - a guilty she carries w/ her, but wears lightly. The father was a high-ranking member of Franco's Army, an old Nazi-lover and a truly nasty guy, as we see in various scenes (or at least 1 scene) from Ana's recollections. Over the course of the movie we see her coming to terms with her sisters, her aunt, and her new life, working through the guilty she'd felt at her imagined poisoning of her father (and later of her aunt), and in the final sequence the three sisters head off for the first day of school (the movie seems to span the course of one summer, though there are several scenes that Ana recalls from the past, in which she "appears" as a silent witness - to a fight between her parents, for ex.,and several scenes of a more mature Ana, maybe about 25 years old?, reflecting on the events of the summer). It's a movie with high ambitions that doesn't over-reach and accomplishes its goals, including a hint at the brutality of the Franco regime - although by today's standards at least the movie proceeds at a glacial pace that may put off some viewers or put them (me) to sleep.
(Note: Just looked up title, which is translated as Raising Ravens, which may make some sense as all three of the sisters have strikingly dark hair.)

Movies about actors: The good and the bad

There are a lot of movies about actors, which does make sense as actors make movies and they're obviously interested in an knowledgeable about their own craft and profession - some more successful than others. I thought Birdman was a terrific examination showing how actors work and develop a role and how they navigate the conflicts between the roles they are playing and the lives they lead, with the many entanglements and the confusion between love (and sex) on the stage and off. It was great to see how the characters rehearsed, changed elements as they worked - and at times we couldn't be sure when they were speaking lines and when they were speaking (and of course they are characters in a movie, so always speaking lines). Another good example - though it's more about the play in rehearsal than the actors themselves: Vanya on 42nd Street. A terrible example was the recent Argentine (?) film about a production of Twelfth Night, can't remember the name but found it so tedious and repetitious I bailed out. So what about The Clouds of Sils Maria (incomprehensible title) but Olivier Assayas?: well, Juliet Binoche improves any movie she's in, but this one had a lot of room for improvement. It's about La Binoche playing a great actress in mid to late career, who rose to fame in a play some 20 years back in which she was an office assistant who essentially displaces her 40-year-old boss. Now, she's asked to play the role of the boss in a revival, which causes her to ponder her youth and her career and leads to much angst about whether she should take the role at all. There's a lot of inside-the-industry stuff which is OK although doesn't seem esp. fresh: dodging the paparazzi, the politics of presenting awards, negotiations with directors and lawyers, most of all her own relationship with her personal assistant, played v well by Kristen Stewart - who perfectly captures the voice of her cohort, fast, clipped, on several phones at once all the time, really busy but about what - just a lot of crap really. The big downfall of the movie is that the ridiculously named play under consideration seems absolutely absurd - impossible to believe that the late playwright was a world-famous genius, that it would in any way be a career-making role, that the new production would attract any attention beyond a minuscule cult, that the Lindsey Lohan-type, played well against a very confusing and inconsistent script by Chole G Moretz, would be drawn to this role in any way, and incredibly stilted dialogue whenever the characters talk about the play - they sound like characters Woody Allen would create as a joke or send-up. On the upside, some beautiful photography of rustic Alpine scenery.

An old formula that always works, this time in a different setting: Tangerines

It's an old trope in movies (and in literature) that, trite though it may be, always seems to work: two men who hate one another because of race, ideology, politics, e.g., linked together by fate and forced to work together or get to know each other, eventually leading to some kind of reconciliation and mutual respect: The Defiant Ones, Grand Illusion, Heat of the Night - many variations on the theme - and a recent one, Tangerines, an Estonian-Georgian film production (first I've ever seen) is one of the best of the genre: soldiers from the opposing sides in a 1980s or 90s civil war in Georgia - one a Chechen mercenary (hired by the Russians, I would guess, though the film deftly side-steps that loaded issue) the other fighting for Georgian independence - both injured in a firefight and rescued by an elderly but very fit Estonian man (Estonians are an ethnic minority who have been leaving the wartorn country, but this man stays on to help a neighbor harvest a crop of the eponymous fruit). As the 2 soldiers recover, they despise one another, threaten each other's lives, almost come to blows - but out of respect to the Estonian pledge not to fight while they're in his house. Film is very tight and taut, only 4 major speaking parts (at times it seems as if it could have been a play - although the 3 scenes of firefights would strain the capacity of a stage) w/ actually no female parts at all. It may stretch credibility to believe that the two men could have shed their hatred and become so close so fast, but it does show that the two - one a pro soldier and the other, as we learn late in the film, an actor by profession but an awesome fighter - have more in common that civilians. The war of course seems pointless and brutal; the Georgian soldiers who 3 times crash the scene of this idyll are horrible thugs; but at the end there are some sad and uplifting moments, especially as we learn why the Estonian man stays on his small patch of land.

Jackson's Action: Reasons to watch and not to watch Heavenly Creatures

Peter Jackson's early (1994) film Heavenly Creatures is maybe worth watching to get a sense of how much energy the later-famous Jackson could bring to this sordid materials - movie based on the true crime case from NZ in 1954 in which two teenage girls carry out gruesome plan to kill the mother of one of the girls. Jackson is far less interested in the crime itself, and not at all interested in the investigation, conviction, life up to the present - his entire focus is on the girls: who are they?, what could drive two ordinary schoolgirls of different backgrounds (one the child of working-class parents who run a boarding house, the other the child of a college dean) to plan, execute, and actually document such a crime (one of the girls kept a detailed diary, which forms the spine of the story and which led to their quick arrest and conviction). Jackson tells the story with a lot of odd camera angles - note the weirdly titled sequence showing one of the girls, Pauline, sitting in bed and writing in her diary - some crazy montages, especially when Pauline has sex for the first time, with one of the boarders, and some utterly bizarre sequences in which the girls' fantasy figures - various singers and movie stars - come "alive" as life-sized claymation like objects, dancing with the girls and singing. (They're fantasy world built around dolls and action figures may remind some of the fascinating documentary Marwencol.) The movie introduces Kate Winslet, who's really good in a demanding role, physically, emotionally, and sexually. You might catch the then-unknown Jackson himself in a cameo as a disheveled street person. Ultimately, however, despite all the flare and flash, the movie's a bore - after a teaser of an opening sequence with the 2 girls running bloody through the woods - we wait a long, long time for anything to happen; Jackson spends for ever establishing the weirdness of the two girls and the horror of Winslet's family - and we keep wondering, OK, so what's next, why am I actually interested in this - if in fact I am.

Genius at work: Documentary about our greatest living photographer (Salgado)

If I were to watch it again, which I might, I would watch the Wenders-Salgado documentary, The Salt of the Earth, on mute, as the movie is essentially an opportunity to see Sabastiao Salgado's amazing (mostly b/w) photography - grouped, in this film (and I think in his published books) into a few sections: Other Americans (early visit to Latin America), war photos, work, the Sahara (famine in Africa), displaced people (African wars), and finally nature (and anthropology, undisturbed tribes in the Amazon - near Salgado's home town). Virtually every image of Salgado's work is astonishing - the composition, the clarity, the capturing of emotion, the sympathy for the dispossessed and the grand sense of the forces of economics crushing individuals - particularly notable in his work on the gold mines of Brazil, which open the film. Wenders - himself an amazing cinematographer who, like Salgado, has brought us to many odd places - Siberia, Alaska (Grizzly Man), the cave paintings of Southern France, the Amazon (in his feature films) [[Note in 2020: Obviously I made a mistake here; Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams are films by Werner Herzog, not Wenders]] - gives us I think just enough info about Salgado and his working methods so as to inform but not obstruct Salgado's work and imagery. It was interesting to learn that he began his career as an economist, working mostly in 3rd World settings, which explains the ideas behind his many great projects. Also very important and eye-opening to see him at work: as we see the published photographs, so meticulous and precise, we never think about the incredible danger Salgado himself faced to get these images - the film lets us see that - or about the difficulty of capturing moving and evolving events of work and war into single, deeply expressive stills. There are a couple of sequences in which Wenders and Salgado's son (the co-director) film S. at work - although it's clear that in his later years he's not taking on the monumentally ambitious (and dangerous) projects of his youth - but how often to we get to see live footage of a genius at work? The film breaks no ground per se as a documentary or work of art in its own right, but it's a valuable and perhaps definitive account of the work of probably the greatest living photographer.

Baumbach slips in While We're Young

I have generally liked Noah Baumbach's movies, especially his previous one, Frances Ha, which seemed to me to beautifully capture a moment in time and place, the mood of a generation of young people struggling to get by in a biog city and to find themselves, their personalities, their friends, and their mates. I wish I could say the same about While We're Young, his attempt in the same way and in the same urbanscape - NYC with its crowded gritty streets and crappy looking building within which people live lives of eccentric creativity and lavish self-indulgence - an a slightly older generation, early 40s, w/ the central couple, the somewhat more talented as a dramatic actor than you'd expect Ben Stiller and the always watchable Naomi Watts as an early-40s childless couple, struggling w/ that issue esp as others in their cohort enter late parenthood, and latching on to a much younger couple in some misguided attempt to rejuvenate. Unfortunately, despite a few a amusing scenes with Baumbach's usually sharp, acerbic dialogue, all of the characters in the film are unlikable narcissists and I could never for a moment buy into why Stiller and Watts, Stiller especially, fell into the clutches of the younger couple who were obviously scamming them. Although it's unsaid, it appears that all of the characters are trust-fund babies, as none seems to be working other than nominally yet they lead lives of great material comfort - the realism that guided Baumback in Frances Ha and others (Squid and Whale, e.g.) slips away from him here as he seems to imagine that struggling documentary filmmakers in NYC can live in 50k square foot apartments? This may be another case of filmmakers moving ever farther from their audiences as they have no idea how to represent lives of squalor and poverty - the Woody Allen syndrome. In fact, Allen is a guiding light here, as the Stiller character, especially in a few hilarious scenes in which he tries to explain or pitch his obviously dreadful documentary in progress, seem to make him an early Allen avatar incarnate. Also some very funny scenes of Watts learning to dance hip-hop - she actually becomes really good at ti. The good will that those scenes create, however, get pissed away, sadly, in some awful scenes such as Stiller bloviating at an awards ceremony about how documentaries should be real and not fake or staged, blah blah blah, or the totally grotesque scene in which Watts and Stiller get high on peyote with a group and then everyone vomits into various basins and elsewhere. Film has a seemingly happy ending, but by then I was way checked out.

Lost in transaltion, or gained?: I Wish

I'll give the Japanese filmmakers who put together I Wish some credit, as it's a cool idea and a real technical challenge to do a film about preteens filmed almost entirely of and about a small group of preteen boys. This film tells the story of two brothers approx 10 years old, one living in Tokyo w/ father, a would-be rock musician and most likely an irresponsible if lovable dad, and the other recently moved w/ his mother to her hometown in southern Japan on the cusp of a live volcano spewing ash. The brothers communicate by phone a lot; most of the movie is centered on the brother living w/ the mom. What the boys want of course is to bring their parents together and to reunite the family. All very sweet but the movie never gets off the ground - there's not enough plot, there's no particular conflict, once the motive is established nothing much happens, at least over the course of the first hour, which is as far as we got. It's hard to say whether the film loses in translation - clearly, there are some cultural references that eluded me, and it's more difficult to follow the film if you don't know the Japanese landscape and cultural landmarks - or actually gains in translation, as it may be that the same story told and set in the U.S. would feel completely bland and familiar, whereas this one at least let us see inside the workings of a Japanese middle school, ordinary routine Japanese shopping malls, and just different cultural behavior: notably the insouciance with which Japanese families send their children off to school alone, crossing railroad tracks etc. - a real sense of trust and faith that we've totally lost in the U.S.

The possibilities of short-form fiction: Wild Tales

The Argentine (?) 2014 film Wild Tales is justly described - a sequence of five short stories, with no plot connection or common theme drawing them together, except that each of them is wild for sure and incredibly engaging and entertaining. I won't give anything away, but the stories include a revenge fantasy executed with incredible precision (and creepily predictive of a recent disaster), another revenge fantasy involving a middle-aged waitress and a customer who destroyed her mother's life some years back - should she take vengeance or not?, a road-rage story of incredible inventiveness, a man who fights back quite inappropriately against bureaucracy and government ineptitude with surprising consequences, a weird and sick plot to cover up for a kid involved in a fatal hit and run, and the most astonishing wedding sequence every filmed I think. Each one of these is great, and together they make a terrific set - so pleasing to see a smart writer-director working in short format - bigger and longer is not always better, in film or in any art form. I still remember Steven Wright's comment when he won an Oscar for best short subject: Thanks, and I'm glad I cut the other 60 minutes. Writers are often warned away from spending too much time early in their career on short fiction - you'll burn up all your material, it's said, w/ some truth perhaps - but here's a director not afraid to burn up material, he or she (i'm going to look it up in a moment) has an abundance of inventiveness and wit, including not only visual wit but some great dialog (esp in the opening story) and I hope we'll see more from this direct or and that others will be inspired to play around with short-form cinema. Director is Mr. Damian Szifron, of Buenos Aires. Keep going, Damian!

A rare film about the development of a character: Leviathon

The Russian 2014 film Leviathon (not to be confused with documentary of name about deep-sea commercial fisheries) is  totally powerful, engaging, often surprising film that had me from the start and kept me for the full 2 1/2 hours. It tells of a middle-aged Russian tough guy, Kolya, a real hothead, involved in a legal dispute with municipal authorities (lives in a small town on what I think is the  Arctic coast) who want to take his land and home by eminent domain to build a new municipal center (in essence, a palatial showcase for the party thug mayor of the town). Movie begins as Kolya's army buddy, now a Moscow lawyer, comes to town to help and reveals he has a folder full of dirt research on the mayor, which he'll use to muscle a deal. Kolya in particular is completely unsympathetic from the outset - not at all in the expected mode of the heroic man fighting city hall, or the winsome old couple in the cliched recent movie about a guy who wants to build a new house his way and the hell with the authorities (Still Mine) - he slaps his sullen teen son around and seems to have various shady dealings with corrupt cops. Part of the beauty of this film is how, without reliance on stereotypes of two-dimensional characters, the film shifts our sympathies gradually, incrementally, until we come to see Kolya as not only a victim but as a noble sort - truly a rare film about the development and deepening of a character, about his growth in response to crisis. There are several references to the suffering of Job, and Kolya does suffer almost to Biblical proportions, but Job was the plaything of the O.T. God whereas Kolya is a victim of people and their greed and their unchecked impulses. The film will certainly reinforce your hatred of Russian politicians - about as corrupt and brutal as they come - but it will also open your eyes into a new way of thinking about characters, moving beyond initial judgements and impressions, understanding and accepting ambiguities - and there are ambiguities in the ending, some elements in the film, as in life, cannot be answered or explained - I won't give any away - but will say that the questions at the end, who is responsible for the death of a main character and for the ensuing consequences, only add to the richness and veracity of this movie.

The quintessential Merchant-Ivory production: Howards End

How well you like Howards End will depend entirely on whether you (still) have a taste for the Merchant-Ivory formula because this 1980s film is the quintessential M-I production: selection of a classy British novel from early in the 20th century, staying slavishly faithful to the novel in the screenplay (Ruth Prawer Jhaabvala, as always), meticulously selected period details no expense barred - many vintage cars and horse-drawn carriages and English country houses and London flats that look as if they've been lifted whole from a museum diorama, typically fine classically trained lead actors and secondary cast - and in the end you feel you've done something noble by watching a classic instead of the 6th remake of Star Wars. But have you? Why not read the book, after all? (Maybe many people did both.) There's absolutely nothing wrong with this production (other than maybe the length - 2.5 hours!), and Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham-Carter are particularly excellent as the two Schlegl sisters (even if they're both too good-looking to play the part of as they put it "spinsters" - movies have to make some concession to un-reality). Forster's plot is excellent of course - and the movie does get at the class divisions and at the loathsomeness of some of the family that owns Howards End - and maybe at the deeper themes Forster is just hinting at: the break-up of social class, the very beginnings of immigration into London and into England, collision between ruthless capitalism/finance and urban/agrarian tradition. Who owns Howards End, and who should own it, and what does "owning" property entail? - the book, and the movie, make us consider all these questions. Though it's a formulaic film - a grand version of Classic Comics - it's a shorthand way to get at Forster's thinking and expression and at his central mantra: Only connect.

TV series Triple Crown: Acting, Writing, Directing - Olive Kitteridge

Let me join the chorus in praise of the HBO/Cholodenko series (4 parts) Olive Kitteridge, a rarity in that it's an American series based on serious literature and manages to bring the book up to a higher level - most American TV adaptations - think Empire Falls - that attract an entourage of stars earn a bunch of Emmys from TV industry inferiority-complex types who are just thrilled to have a movie star step into their world for a moment, a bit of media slumming. This one's the exception - there are a # of pretty high-caliber stars - Macdorman, Jenkins, Bill Murray notably - and they only add to the quality of this excellent series. I have a few quibbles w/ the ending of part 4 - a little too pat in how it brings us back to the beginning point, and maybe a little too cute-meet and too optimistic when OK seems to find a new relationship (w/ Murray), although of course we have to wonder, as she says about her husband's flirtation, it wouldn't have lasted two weeks. That said, so many strengths in the series, esp in the big 3 components - writing, acting, directing - but also beautiful yet never flashy cinematography and art direction that captures a period and place, evocative but never overwhelming musical score. The scenes in the last 2 episodes between mother and son, especially OK visits her son's family in Brooklyn, could be worthy of study and emulation in a screenwriting class - and in fact would make great exercises for an acting class as well. Part of the strength of this series is the complexity of character, Olive's especially (but not exclusively): she's blunt almost to the point of being "on the spectrum," seeming to have no understanding of the effect of her observations and recriminations on others (her son painfully calls her out on this), yet she's not exactly unlikable - she's witty and most (not all) of her critiques are on the money and justified. We shake our heads in wonder; she's the teacher you hated but respected (and feared), grudgingly. As her husband, Henry (Jenkins, in maybe his best performance ever) says: How fortunate I am to have you, Olive, to always tell me what I'm thinking.

A rare TV series adaptation that improves on the original

I liked the novel - collection of linked stories, actually, Olive Kitteridge when it came out some years ago but didn't completely warm to it as others did, finding it hard to sympathize w/ the ever-bitter OK and finding Elizabeth Strout's overwhelming interest in darkness and despair - the novel is filled with sudden deaths, suicides, suicide attempts, and the silent suffering of many - to be almost too much: a gorgyle view of life on the coast of Maine. It's very rare that an adaptation actually improves a work of serious fiction but the HBO 4-part series on OK is the rare exception: condensing the novel into four episodes (I've seen only the first two so far) sharpens the story line advances the narrative. The screenplay is extraordinary - full of wit of the rarest sort, the kind of things that smart people actually so to one another, and also unflinching about moments of cruelty, despair, and serious mental illness. The two leads - Frances McDormand as OK and Richard Jenkins at her husband, Henry - are fantastic, bringing these characters to life in a way I've almost never seen in a TV dramatic series: they are deep characters, with a complex and ever-shifting relationship, hard to pin down and hard to anticipate, but always credible. The supporting cast is fine as well, especially challenging as the series covers a fairly long span of time - so we see the characters age and mature (or the opposite) yet the characters seem whole and unified. The director, Lisa Cholodenko (had to look up name) deserves much credit. The series in no way diminishes the darkness of Strout's vision of the world but does make this dark story more more vivid and case-specific by presenting everything through dialogue and action rather than narration and evocation.