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

See also my blog on books: Elliot's Reading

Saturday, July 25, 2015

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.

Sunday, July 19, 2015

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.

Saturday, July 18, 2015

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.

Saturday, July 11, 2015

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.

Sunday, July 5, 2015

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.

Saturday, July 4, 2015

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!