Winter Sleep and Ibsen

Just to add a coda on Winter Sleep - I was surprised Ceylan didn't cite Ibsen as an influence, as it seems to me that the personality and struggle of the young wife is a contemporary take, in some ways, on A Doll's House - the woman struggling to be free and independent and to have a meaningful life, and treated by the men in her life with nothing but condescension.

The most literary movie ever: Winter Sleep

The Turkish 2014 film Winter Sleep is one of the most literary movies I've ever seen, a movie that's not for all or even most viewers - very long (well over 3 hours), very intense, very interior. In some ways the director (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, I had to look it up) is striving toward hyper-realism: he lets scenes play on far longer than any other director would or has, even Rohmer. If you think about it, most movies despite their look of reality and authenticity are artificial in this regard: Conversations don't occur in two-minute takes, they don't resolve simply, with punch lines or quips - most conversations extend far longer than those in any movie and they're much more ambiguous and tentative than movie scenes or "takes." In WS some of the conversations - a lengthy argument between man character and his cynical and malicious sister, an argument between main character and his wife as they ponder separation and really dig at each other about emotional control and blackmail - seem to go on for 20 minutes or so. The effect is extremely powerful, but you have to meet the movie on its own terms, which are demanding. WS is a self-consciously literary work, with references in the credits, as best I could tell (they are not translated) to inspirations, specifically Chekhov (yes, that one's obvious probably 3 sisters, smart people, one an actor, in a remote setting with various unfulfilled artistic yearnings, particularly about moving to the city), Dostoyevsky (yes, if you've read The Idiot you will pick this up by the end, but I won't give it away), Shakespeare (doesn't seem Shakespearean particularly, but the lead character quotes S at times), and Voltaire (I don't know, you tell me). Story centers on the 40- or maybe 50-something man, Aydin (looked that up, too) a retired actor with a lot of money (born into poverty tho) who runs a remote hotel in the mountains of Anatolia, but obviously doesn't make his living off the hotel; his much younger wife has visions of being a philanthropist and supporting local schools - and there's a real power and ego play between the two of them right from the start. His dream is to write a book about Turkish theater, but he seems to be doing everything but writing, at least at the outset. In the background, there's a conflict on-going w/ tenants in an apartment he owns - a very menacing crowd, with scary occasional threats of violence. Many films try this, but Winter Sleep succeeds in being a film about character (rather than action) the development and evolution of two characters as the interact with each other. That said, there are also extraordinarily beautiful shots - interior and exterior - with imaginative but not flashy composition, and a subtle, classically based (Schubert) musical score that touches up the film at just the right moments. Could the movie have been done in 2 hours? Of course. Should it have been? No, it's real quite a masterpiece in its current form - and you can watch it over 2 nights, as we did.

A bomb from Netflix: Grace and Frankie

Usually I give a new series a couple of episodes before deciding whether it's worth my time, or anyone's, but Grace and Frankie, from Netflix, a star vehicle for Lili Tomlin and Jane Fonda, is so idiotic, unfunny, and unbelievable that it's easy to pull the plug after episode one. Starts in post LA restaurant, Tomlin waiting for Fonda to arrive, we see all too obviously that they don't like each other and that they're entirely different personalities - Tomlin and New Age spiritual type and Fonda a social x-ray former model heavy drinker sharp-edged and shrill. Their husbands, law partners, are due to arrive soon to make an announcement - they're pretty sure the guys will tell them they're retiring. But lo and behold, they show up and tell G&F that they're in love with each other and are leaving their wives and getting married. Leads to a series of hysterics, including throwing food and silverware, and so off we go. If you can believe this plot set-up for two seconds, good for you, but I found that not a single line of the entire first episode rang true to life, the plotting is so schematic and over-determined - will you be surprised that G&F overcome their differences and become edgy friends, allies against their exes, who knows maybe a couple in their own right? - and will you care? This show aspires to comedy, but there's not a laugh along the way (maybe a little bit of a smile at one or two lines - Tomlin high on peyote saying she's on a desert but there's water - to which Fonda says: You mean you're on the beach?) and if the writers and director can't get laughs out of Fonda and Tomlin high together on peyote then they're in the wrong field.

Why all should see Selma

Selma is one of those film events not particularly great as a movie but extremely powerful to watch anyway as it evokes or unearths our memories of relatively recent history and helps us see once again the incredible but real bravery of those who fought for civil rights, voting rights in particular, in the South in the 1960s and, in particular, the courageous leadership of so many but none more so the MLK. The film wisely uses many extended passages of his oratory, beautiful and inspiring today still. Many of the reviews commented on the film's being unduly harsh on LBJ - so maybe I was expecting that the film really demonized him, unnecessarily (he had plenty of other demons) but I found the film to be a pretty fair treatment of the complex president - truly committed to civil rights it seems but also a victim of his own obsession with power and political dealing - he couldn't move as fast as King wanted him to, or at least he didn't do so, but I think that's always the case - political activists and the people pushing elected leaders faster and farther than they necessarily wanted to go. Sure he missed a chance to be truly brave and heroic, like King and his followers, but he came thru OK, standing up to Wallace. As to the freedom fighters - the movie helps us see the powers that they were up against in Alabama, the spirit they brought to the fight, and the astonishing bravery and dignity that the black people of Alabama, many of them very poorly educated, summoned in this fight to win their constitutional rights. The Pettus Bridge scenes are particularly powerful - made even more so by the smart use of actual b/w documentary footage near the end, played against the re-created march to Montgomery. Daniel Oyelowo does a great job as King; Tom Wilkinson a little less so as LBJ (couldn't anyone teach him a Texas accent?). Though touching on sanctimony at times and beset with a sometimes heavy-handed score - the bane of so many historical dramas I'm afraid, see Spielberg's Lincoln, e.g. - a movie all should see, espcially those for whom these events seem like a closed chapter in our sad history. They're not.

Why American Crime is better than Crash

Season 1 of American Crime - it will be back next year they say, though obviously with a completely new cast of characters, as this season ended with multiple deaths - is a lot better than I would have hoped or expected. I think it's by the team that made the award-winning movie Crash - if not, it's influenced by that movie, which I found manipulative, overdetermined, and fake at its heart - but I never felt that about American Crime, and I think the difference is that the movie relied too heavily on the convention of dramatic unities - all unfolding on one night - whereas this series, working in the long form, can develop the repercussions of a single crime across a range of characters, an entire community, and season of time. Essentially, it is a character-driven drama, and what struck me the most is that it's a series told almost entirely through close-ups - there are few if any location shots, wide angles, etc. - we see little of the city of Modesto and the interiors are bland and convention, intentionally: generic motel rooms, wood-paneled courtrooms, cubicle offices, etc. But we see a lot of faces, close-up, all of them scarred, pitted, the faces of working people and addicts and thugs, ruined by time and by battle scars. The lead, Felicity Huffman, super-brave, letting herself be filmed with no make-up, a totally harsh and deliberately unlikable characters; her ex, Timothy Robbins, much more likable though completely feckless, seen throughout with greasy, stringy hair - all told, a completely anti-Hollywood series. The characters may be types, but they tend to surprise us in various ways, and the concluding episode is full of unusual twists and encounters - without ever feeling forced or fake - and the series ends with suitable ambiguity. We never actually learn what happened in the murder that set off this series - and never will learn - except we learn that it doesn't matter, it's not about who dunnit but about the effect of the crime on the many people it touches (none of them lawyers or law-enforcement officers - just the victims, the accused, and their families). Not a perfect series by any means - for one thing I could never quite buy into the central love relationship (between the two addicts) nor could I see why the community would rise as one in defense of someone who was obviously involved in the murder if not the actual killer. Still, very underplayed, very honest for commercial TV, consistently engaging, a big step above most American network TV shows.

How and why Mad Men won me over

I'll be the 2 millionth person to weigh in today on the conclusion of Mad Men, and I've scrupulously today avoided reading what others had to say so I don't know if I'm w/ the mainstream or on my own but I found the final episode to be pretty much a success: yes, there were too many strands to untangle and too many plot lines that were just a check-in, and no I cannot buy the relationship between Peggy and Rizzo - and maybe we're not supposed to imagine it could last more than a few hours? - and yes it was hard to keep in mind the complexities of Don's switched identities and his obligations and loyalties to the family left behind in LA - but overall I think the final episode had a suitable balance of mystery, resolution, surprise, and inevitability. I love that we see Don change at the end - maybe not permanently, maybe not forever, but the scene in which the "ordinary man" whom everyone ignores tells his life story in the group session - he's a guy completely the opposite of Don, Mr. Anonymous, Mr. Nerd - and he breaks down into tears about his life and Don comes to embrace him and he, too breaks down - wonderful - it's not that Don saw himself in the man (as he did w/ the hustler to whom he left his Cadillac), as that he sees everything he isn't, he sees that he's the one everyone envies and he, too, feels hollow and insignificant. But it's also great that he doesn't disappear or die - rather, we see very subtly that he gets back into advertising - the Coke commercial closeout - but perhaps with new responsibilities and insights. His teach-choked farewell to Betsy was also quite painful and beautiful - he offered to take their children, and we kind of know he won't, but the very nice family scene in which his daughter is very sweet to Bobby, the now growing up kid brother, reassures us about that family without being saccharine. I know that many viewers were put off by the whole series, but if you stayed with it and began to care about the characters and to forgive them their trespasses, I think the journey was worth the candle so to speak: we really got to see characters, and actors, grow and evolve over a long course of time - in weird way it reminds me of that movie Boyhood - and, unlike other weaker series they may have started w/ strong characters or a great premise and then just lost stem and interest (Damages, The Killing) Mad Men continued to improve and grow (cf Breaking Bad) and it felt always in control, as if Weiner knew if not exactly what would happen episode by episode how he wanted to build the grand arc of his story: women coming of age and becoming themselves, men looking into their past and beginning to be held accountable for their bad behavior, with a few unrepentant scamps thrown in there as well. It's a show that was always on the verge of being cynical and immoral, but ends up being neither. It's a show about people I never thought I would follow or care about or care to know but it won me over - one of the best.

Good riddance to Marie Antoinette

Saw DAvid Hajmi's Marie Antoinette last night at the Gamm Theatre, in Pawtucket, and, starting on a positive note, everything I've seen to date at the Gamm has been smart and professional on every level, the acting, stage direction, design, sound - and in a terrifically intimate setting where every seat has a great sight line and the audience feels almost a part of the action on stage. Especially notable was the tour de force by Madeleine Lambert in the title role - showing a wide range of feeling and emotion, moving from cocky narcissism to deep suffering, and never learning a damn thing. She's in every single scene in the 90 minute , no intermission production. That said, what's the great fascination w. Marie Antoinette, especially by American writers and directors? Over the past 15 years or so, maybe beginning with the despicable opera Ghosts of Versailles, a # of American writers and directors have looked back in awe and envy at MA: she was just a kid, she wasn't so bad, she was rich, sure, but she loved beauty (just like you, the patrons, right?). This play is a little more complex, but it also is sending some mixed and confusing messages: Overall, they portray MA as a simple-minded victim of her birth and of her times: think real housewives, or Kim Kardashian in the role. So we see and understand that she's in way over her head, that she's suffering, that she's stuck w/ a horrible marriage and a horrible life. But then when the revolution breaks out and she's imprisoned and (after a failed escape attempt that she totally screws up because of her stupidity) executed - Adjmi also seems to be saying that the revolutionaries are brutes - there are hints that they're being compared with IS terrorists, and other hints that they are like the U.S. military guard at Guatanamo - so I don't know, what's the point, is everyone just crude and evil? The French revolution obviously became a blood bath and fell apart and led to the First Empire - but that doesn't mean the revolutionary impulses were wrong or that the extravagance and narcissism of the monarchy was right. Having seen this - and other works on MA - I'm left each time thinking the same thing: Why are we even thinking about you 200+ years later? Good riddance.

Final episodes of Wolf Hall come to life, at last

As noted in previous posts I have not been a big fan of Wolf Hall, neither book nor BBC series, which seemed to me very stodgy, slow-moving, and underplayed, but I have to admit that WH - BBC really picked up quite a bit in the last two (of 6) episodes of the season. In episode five, for the first time, we had a scene of dramatic action - King Henry thought to have died while watching joust, incredible chaos and anguish before Cromwell/Timothy Rylance saves the day with a 16th-century version of CPR - and a powerful dramatic confrontation between Cromwell and Henry. For the first time, the series had some light and heat. The final/6th episode was even better, as we see for the first time the evil and vindictive side of Cromwell's ambition, as he builds a case against Anne Boleyn, leading to her execution (sorry for the spoiler - what, you didn't know?) as well as to the banishment from favor of serveral courtiers who'd dissed Cromwell and his then-patron, Wolsey, sometime previous. Rylance throughout does a great job in his understated way, playing the part as cool and interior rather than as greedy and conniving. Though the key to Cromwell's success is his extraordinary perspicacity, neither the teleplay nor the novel, in my view, make his intelligence particularly remarkable - but he is very bold, and willing to do anything including murder to keep in favor. Perhaps it's because at last we're familiar with (most of) the figures, but the 6th episode was by far the most accessible in the series. Obviously, there will be another season and I'll probably watch it - it helps that we're seeing an interpretation of history, so there;s an edifying aspect to watching this TV show, but I don't think Cromwell is as compelling a lead, evil character as some of his TV counterparts - Walter White, Stringer Bell, even, in the legal field, Patti/Glenn Close in Damages.

Portrait of the Artist: Mr. Turner

Artist biopics are clearly not the most exciting of cinematic genres - thought they keep trying (Pollack, Vermeer, Kahlo) - and it may be faint praise but Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner is one of the better. Though he's done biopics before (of WS Gilbert, e.g.) he's best known for his semi-improvisational accounts of contemporary British life - Another Year, most recently - and the biopic will obviously not have the freedom of form and expression that Leigh imbues into his films and his cast (some of the cast from Another Year have roles in Mr. Turner - the lead played by Timothy Sprall, quite well, if you can tolerate a lot of grunting, snorting, and mumbled lines nearly unintelligible, at least to this American). After a somewhat slow start, we do get a picture of a troubled artist genius - and not troubled in the typical dramatic, bipolar, struggling for success against a hostile world mode but just a disturbed man, anti-social and secretive, hostile to women (up to a point) and then quite docilely falling in love with a woman who's certainly no raving beauty, cruel to (some of) his family and loyal to others, most notably his ebullient father. All that would be of little interest except that Turner was such a great artist - and Leigh has a terrific feeling for that, in fact the best scenes are those that show T at work - en plein air - with many scenes of extraordinary beauty, perfect counterparts if not re-creations of beautiful Turner landscapes and water-scapes - sketching all the time, working frantically in studio, and probably the bests scene in the film: the many artists gathered in a gallery putting finishing touches on their work in preparation for a grand exhibition - a scene full of rivalry among artists and devotion to craft. It's obvious that T was far ahead of his time - but Leigh doesn't romanticize that and makes it clear that he had many supporters and was well aware of his place in the history of art. From the little I've read after watching the film, it appears that Leigh stayed fairly close to the facts of T's life, save for some narrative compression of characters; he chose to focus on the latter part of T's life - nothing about his childhood or early fatherhood - which is probably what makes the film - focusing on the artistic accomplishment rather than a dutiful lifelong bio such as the Ray Charles or Johnny Cash recent artist-biopics. One key element that Leigh brings in subtly is T's uneasiness with the modern world (steamships, railroads, photography) and how that affected his painting. One mis-step I think was spending so much time on the pathetic minor artist who borrowed money from T and was a total ingrate.

A serious mis-step for the usually excellent 2nd Story Theater

It literally pains me to write this as I like to be an advocate for local theater companies in all venues and we have a damn good one here on the East Bay, 2nd Story Theater, but the show we saw there last night in previews is just dreadful, a major mis-step for a company that has been consistently top-shelf in all the shows I've seen there over the years. So what went wrong? First, Joe Orton may have been right on the cutting edge circa 1965 and his reputation has lived on based most only 2 plays (Loot, What the Butler Saw) and the tawdry and sensational aspects of his short life and violent death. Can't say anything about those two shows, but why would anyone want to revive Entertaining Mr. Sloane. As Ed Shea, the director, noted, it was written nearly contemporaneously w/ Virginia Woolf, and yes it has some of the biting satire and toxic family dynamics of that play - but whether Woolf holds up today or not, and I think it does, Sloane surely does not: the jokes seem stale, misogynist to put it mildly, and cheap. The plot, though promising as a premise - lonely widow takes in teenage ne'er do well (Sloane) as potential boarder and seduces him, her elderly and somewhat doddering father knows that Sloane has committed a murder, her wealthy homosexual brother becomes a rival for Sloane's affections - all building up to a killing on stage that each character, for reasons of his or her own, wants to cover up. Well, it's hardly a well-made play, and it requires an extraordinary suspension of disbelief to accept these coincidences and happenstances - which I would gladly grant if I cared a whit about any of the characters - but each one seems ill-tempered, nasty, and selfish. As to the particulars of this production, Shea always gets good performances out of his ensemble, and that's true here to a degree, but the young man playing Sloane seems to be seriously miscast or misconceived: he never for a second seems like a 17-year-old hustler; from the opening scene, with the woman is showing him her apartment, he seemed to me like a young businessman new to town who'd been seeking "lodging." He's far too clean cut, well-dressed, and polished for the role. Also, quite oddly, Shea seems ill at ease with the stage dimensions - most or all of the other shows I've seen there have been "in the round" and Shea keeps the actors moving and using all dimensions of the set; in this show, the character consistently are addressing the audience rather than one another - they almost never make eye contact w/ one another, which only adds to the abstraction and alienation of the program - the characters don't believe in one another and neither do we.

Heroes for a day?: last days in Vietnam.

Most of us or I at least would have said that the famous airlift American evacuation from Vietnam occurred when the war ended w the Paris peace accords of 1974 but Tory Kennedy's documentary Last Days in Vietnam reminded me that no the evacuation was a year or so later -1975 after the north Vietnamese "violated" the peace accord and invaded the south and closed in on Saigon. Her film v effectively brands archival footage mostly for journalists - rather blurry and low deaf by today's standards and extremely brave examples of great photojournalism give the cumbersome equipment of the era - with contemporary interviews with participants well known (she gets v special access obviously) and not such as several marine embassy guards. She also does a great job setting forth the complexity of the moral dilemma the Americans esp the ambassador felt and had to resolve under great pressure. Obviously we made this mess and there were many Vietnamese who helped the Americans in many capacities soldiers cooks the embassy tailor - and also the wives and girlfriends nor the 5k or so Americans in country at the time. They would all be dead if left behind or so we thought but that said the ambassador did not want to create a panic by beginning an evacuation too soon. Perhaps he did wait too long but the film makes clear his bravery and that of other Americans who managed to get thousands to safety. As it happened the north Vietnamese were not as horrendous as pol pot and did not I believe massacre those who stayed behind - tho no doubt things were not easy either. Although we Americans were at our best in these final days of the war the whole episode is weirdly tragic - a film about heroism that never should have been necessary in the first place.