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.