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.