Moonlight is a perfectly successful movie that tells its story by indirection

Barry Jenkins's Moonlight is yet another strong and serious American film from 2016, a terrific, sorrowful account of a black child coming of age in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami. The child, called various Little, Chiron, and Black, is from the start - at the outset he is in grammar school, about 10 years old, an outsider, sensitive and unathletic, terribly shy, and bullied. A neighborhood drug dealer befriends him and acts like a "big brother," but the relationship goes off the rails when the child learns that the dealer has been selling to his neglectful and unstable mother. In the 2nd section of the film, the child - Chiron - is an awkward high-school kid, still the subject of taunts and bullying. In this section his homosexuality begins to emerge. There's one terrifically sad and moving scene as Chiron and his only friend gaze out at the ocean (or maybe Bicayne Bay) and reflect on their place in the world and their future. We see their "future" in section 3, with Chiron now buff and dangerous, a drug-dealer himself with a prison background. Another great scene in this section is his attempt at a reconciliation with his mother, now gone straight but seriously damaged by her years of abuse. It's hard to convey the essence of this movie except to say that, where the movie in lesser hands could have been mawkish, sentimental, melodramatic, violent, or didactic, it's none of these things. Jenkins's storytelling is cool and distant, he lets the characters speak for themselves and in their own tongue - street-smart, hesitant, sometimes w/ bursts of insight, sometimes just meandering: Chiron is shy and understated throughout, for example, and many significant scenes and life stages - Chiron's time in prison, for example - are hinted at but not depicted. The cinematography is quite beautiful, contrasting the hard lives of each of the characters with the bright, tropical colors or Miami architecture and commerce. The movie reminded me of the excellent examination of a young white man's life over a long course of time, Boyhood, though Jenkins followed the more conventional path and used 3 actors to play the lead at different life stages. This is a completely successful movie - sure to win major awards for its beauty, insight, and timeliness.

Shocking! Film about Stanley Milram's experiments

The Experimenter, Michael Almereyda's biopic about Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) gives a great depiction of the controversial and disturbing experiments Milgram conducted at Yale in the early 60s: getting a subject to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks to another "subject" (who was part of Milgram's team) at the urging of a lab scientist. The first sequence of the film shows re-enacts one of the experiments, and it's as tense and disturbing a scene as you're likely to see. The surprise was that the vast majority of subjects were willing to administer near-lethal doses (or so they thought - in fact, of course, no shocks were administered), even when faced with howls of pain from the adjacent room. With that powerful beginning, the movie is off to a great start, and it's no wonder that it founders a bit from that point. To its credit, the film shows that Milgram's experiment was widely criticized; it brought him fame, but also notoriety. The drama of the film, however, is kind of tepid; an academic's life is rarely filled with excitement (pace A Beautiful Mind, Theory of Everything), and we don't exactly feel sorrow and pity for Milgram: sure, he was denied tenure at Harvard, but he landed a really great job at CUNY; sure, he didn't get full credit for the TV dramatization of his experiments, but how many social-psychology books are adapted anyway? His life, though cut short by a heart attack at 51, looks pretty good to me. I'm glad they took time with some of his other experiments as well, including the "degrees of separation" mailing experiment - who knew that was the same guy who did the electroshock experiment - one showing the depravity of mankind, the other our connectedness and proximity. Almereyda's script is at times whimsical and imaginative - with Sarsgaard often addressing the camera directly and commenting on his own work. Winona Ryder, who seems to be on a comeback trail (see Stranger Things) valiantly plays Milgram's devoted wife (an academic cliche but there you have it; see again A Beautiful Mind); the other secondary characters never seem to emerge.

The farther we are from the target the better? Not necessarily.

When a movie begins with a girl playing with a hula-hoop that her dad fashioned for her, can you guess that things are not likely to go well for said girl? Eye in the Sky, an intense re-creation of a drone attack on a group of terrorists holed up in a small house near Nairobi, is a great examination of the ambiguities and moral dilemmas of contemporary warfare. In this case, the authorities have to decide whether to attack the building and wipe out several terrorists who seemingly are about to don suicide vests and explode in a local, crowded market - even though attacking the terrorists will create "collateral damage," that is, the injury of death of nearby, innocent civilians. The incident becomes personal and emotional (for us) as we focus on young Kenyon girl who is selling goods from a stand near the house that will be attacked: Should they risk killing this girl? If put off the mission to spare this child, hundreds may be killed by the terrorists. We see the decision played out in several venues, as this drone attack involves a team of Kenyan soldiers, two Kenyans who are apparently civilians and are experts in the use of drones, a team of English soldiers in a war room near London (led by the ubiquitous Helen Mirren), a British Cabinet meeting (the late Alan Rickman represents the military), a team of American soldiers in (I think) Nevada, two American drone "pilots" (Aaron Paul is one), and someone in Hawaii - and honestly I have no idea what she was doing. (You can guess who's the most vulnerable and expendable in this plan.) It's never clear to me why so many are involved or why an American drone pilot would take direct orders from the UK military  - and in fact the many locations make the move too diffuse and confusing - it would have been more powerful to focus on a small group intensely involved (and more typical as well of this type of movie, an attack on the ground managed from afar). The catch in this film is the use of drones, and part of the strength is that it helps us understand how these "pilots" suffer trauma and guilt - they can see so closely and vividly their targets and the ruins that their bombing creates. It sort of blows apart the myth that drone attacks are any better or more humane or even more safe (for the pilot) than attacks from fighter jets and bombers. We have always had the sense that the farther removed our soldiers are from the target, the better (for us). Not necessarily, however.

Wilson - one of the greatest American playwrights - and fine adaptation of Fences

Watching the Denzel Washington-directed Fences made me wonder why I've seen and read so little by the great American playwright August Wilson, who won a Pulitzer Prize, deservedly, for this excellent play - he was without doubt on a par with the other great American playwrights of the 20th century - O'Neil, Williams, Miller - as this play, and this terrific film adaptation (Wilson wrote the screenplay - has to have been a long time ago) evidences. In some ways it's a typical motif of American (maybe world) drama: a cruel and domineering patriarch struggles with his son, who wants to break free and find independence and a life of his own; in the process the father's flaws are revealed and lead to his tragic un-doing, and in the process we come to feel by "fear and pity" as we understand the world of this damaged and damaging man. What sets Fences and other Wilson plays apart, however, is the cultural setting; a decade by decade examination of life in the black urban communities of America, specifically in Homestead/Pittsburgh. Despite the breadth of its material, this is really a two-person play, and Washington as Tyler and Viola Davis as his wife give extraordinary performances throughout. Washington's direction is surprisingly deft, as he keeps the word-dense story moving along quickly and opens the scene up so that we feel we're not confined to one household but we're looking at life in an entire community. If there's a flaw in the play, it would have to be the last act, with the characters gathered for Tyler's funeral; with the lead character gone, the energy is drained from the play - it's like having an Act VI to King Lear. And - a quibble - why did they screw up the baseball references? Koufax definitely was not leading the league in strikeouts in 1955.

The 10 Best TV Programs I watched in 2016

Each year, TV seems to provide us with more great dramas, comedies, and documentaries. Can we doubt that if Shakespeare were alive today he'd write for TV? Or at least watch it? Here are the 10 best TV programs I watched in 2016:

American Crime (Season 2). This excellent anthology series uses many of the same actors to tell a completely different crime narrative in each (of the first 2) season. Season 2, about an allegation of homosexual rape at a high-school party, is just as good as Season 1. Kudos to Felicity Huffman for her lead role.

Black Mirror. The totally disturbing and provocative series from England, picked up by Netflix in Season 3, about how technology could further change and disrupt our lives in the near future. Suggestion, skip the first 2 episodes (this is another anthology series; no need to see all or in sequence) and begin with episode 3.

The Crown. Possibly the most expensive TV series ever made, accurate in period detail both at the macro (WWI-era airplanes, cars, and Jeeps) and the micro (the flowers, the chinaware, the clothing), and on top of that a fine personal and political drama about the first years of QEII's reign.

House of Cards (Season 4). The Kevin Spacey-Robin Wright White House psycho-drama continues, with his career (and their marriage?) on the wane and hers on the rise?

Last Chance U. A great and under-the-radar Netflix documentary series about the players at a Mississippi junior-college football powerhouse, with particular focus on the academic counselor who does all she can to keep these young men, who are completely unprepared for (and largely uninterested in) academic work, in the program.

Making a Murderer. The extremely popular series about a man who was unjustly convicted of rape and, on release from prison, runs into deeper, and more suspicious, problems with the law.

The People v O.J. Simpson. I know you think you're already familiar with this story - but believe me you're not. Even if you don't care about football, this is a totally gripping account of the trial and its effect on the involved parties, the LA communities, and the nation. Good idea to see this first and then, if your curiosity is aroused, watch the ESPN documentary.

Stranger Things. Yes it's rather preposterous even as sci-fi, but it's effective and moving as a portrait of teenage and preteen life in the U.S. in the 1980s. In the spirit of ET: innocent kids v evil scientists, clueless parents, and the establishment in general.

Transparent. Would have been so easy to make this series lurid and sensational, and it's anything but: It's smart, informative, sensitive, sexy, funny (esp the opening sequence of Season 2), and credible. A must-see.

Veep (Seasons 1 and 2). Really funny, esp but not only Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and an over-the-top but recognizable image of what life is like on the staff of a high-level government agency. Hoping that HBO/Amazon will make subsequent seasons available in Prime.

Almodovar's first international film shows all the traits that will develop throughout his career

Pedro Almodovar's 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which I think was his first film widely seen outside of Spain, is prototypical of his work: funny, farcical, characters in extreme distress and full of anger and passion (setting a bedroom on fire, hurling telephones through plate-glass windows, jumping off a balcony). It's fast-paced, has some really quirky minor characters (the cab-driver who vehicle includes nearly every amenity - magazines to borrow, snacks, a sign: Thank you for Smoking). As in most farces, everything comes to a head when the various plot strands converse, or perhaps collide, in a big smash-up scene, which Almodovar makes especially funny by having the characters, including police officials there to investigate a terrorist threat, drink from a pitcher of gazpacho that's been laced with a sedative - one by one the characters slump to the floor. Also notable and typical are the garish colors throughout the whole movie: everything, the costumes, decor, outdoor scenes, is filmed in harsh light w/ lots of blue-red color clashing. The plot is intentionally ridiculous and frenetic, a story of love and revenge in essence but with so many peculiar twists and coincidences all you can do is just laugh. Almodovar over the years has developed into a more thoughtful filmmaker with a deep interest in strong female characters (already evident here, with the women completely in control - or out of control, as the case may be - and the men comically feckless); this film is more raucous than insightful, but we see the artist at an early stage in his career - a bright star rising.

A classic Japanese film with the most haunting musical score ever

Mizoguchi's 1953 classic, Ugetsu, is another one of the great post-war Japanese movies that seems extremely old and quaint today - but then of course we realize that it seemed old and quaint even in its day, as it's set in rural 16th-century Japan, during an era of war among various shogun clans. The focus is on two men, and their spouses, who see the ongoing war as an opportunity: one of the men, a potter, recognizes that he can get a high price for his wares and sets off for a nearby city to cash in on the wartime economy; the other man wants to become a samurai warrior and gain social status as well as wealth. Obviously, both fail in their quests, with disastrous, even tragic consequences. The film is great in part because of how well Mizoguchi establishes the sense and feeling of life in this distant era - both in the small village, in the countryside, and in the crowded city, with its bustling outdoor bazaars. Particularly of note: the beautiful scenes in which the two men and their wives (and one child) cross a lake on a foggy night to bring the wares to the city. The film also has by far the strangest, most mysterious score I've ever heard, haunting the movie throughout. And it's also a ghost story - and Mizoguchi weaves the supernatural elements through threads of his realistic narrative, so that we're constantly off-balance, not knowing which elements of the plot are natural, which are supernatural. It's impossible to see this film and not think about life in postwar Japan in the 50s, a society still impoverished and full of ruins - much like the 16th-centural landscapes that Mizoguchi creates, and no doubt full of stories similar to this one, of husbands who abandoned wives in search of wartime profiteering, of would-be warriors who had hoped to be lifted from poverty and whose dreams were ruined, and of soldiers far from home who forgot their families and began new lives.

Focus on a CO as a hero of a war movie is an unusual twist

Say what you will about Mel Gibson and his fascination with violence and machismo, but I have to admit that he can direct an incredibly powerful, harrowing battle scene - as we see in Hacksaw Ridge and its depiction of the three-day assault in 1945 on Okinawa. It's almost too much to watch (and listen to), and I probably wouldn't have done so - except that it's an unusual (and based on fact) story of heroism, and to understand it fully you have to see the horror and danger of battle, especially an assault from lower ground. The story is unusual in that the central character, Doss, is a medic and conscientious objector who refuses even to carry a weapon. Of course the movie is too long, that seems inevitable today for almost any film of ambition, and Gibson's footing is much less sure in the early scenes that give us Doss's family background (alcoholic father who lost many friends in the first World War and doesn't want his sons to enlist for the 2nd), clumsy romance with a young nurse, etc. The movie picks up when Doss enters basic and is hounded, humiliated, and beaten for his refusal to fight; the movie needs to lay this groundwork, as the whole point of the movie is to show us how Doss earned the trust and respect of his fellow-soldiers (in fact he was the first and maybe the only CO to win a Medal of Honor). I did wonder if the basic-training scenes were exaggerated; it would seem he could not have been the first medic-CO to appear in the entire division, although maybe they all endured such torment. The movie fully comes into its own in the battle scenes; thought they're assaultive on our nerves and ear drums, they to tell a powerful story and (spoiler coming) and have to give Gibson credit - I was sure throughout that at some point Doss would have the "prove himself" through use of a weapon, but, no, he and Gibson say true to the facts and to his faith, so kudos there. It's not an innovative and groundbreaking movies - hard to see what ground is left to break re WWII films - but the focus on a CO is an unusual twist that kept our interest alive for 2+ hours.

The 10 best classic films I watched in 2016

At least half the films I watched in 2016 were so-called "classics" (thank you, Criterion!, and the Providence Public Library!), most of which lived up to their reputation. Here's the list of the 10 best classic films I watched in 2016:

All About My Mother. Pedro Almodovar's great 1999 film about the complex relationships among a disparate group of Spanish women: actors, prostitutes, transgendered people, addicts, gay, straight, and even Penelope Cruz as a pregnant nun.

Aparajito. Part 2 of Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy (1957), this part following the young man from rural India as he earns a scholarship and moves to Calcutta to pursue a college education.

Autumn Sonata. A really dark (even for) Bergman "chamber film" from 1978, in which Liv Ullman and Ingrid Bergman as troubled daughter and neglectful mother go at one another. 

Coup de Grace. A little-known film from German director Victor Schlondorff (1978) about a group of German aristocratic soldiers holed up on an old estate toward the end of the first World War fighting against the Communist insurgents. Strangely, it reminded me of Seventh Seal.

A Day in the Country. A 1936 film that Renoir never completed but that, even in its truncated form, beautifully evokes the complex relationships among a group of Parisians who set off for the day. Typically Renoir open-air settings.

I Vitelloni. Early Fellini - 1953 - about a group of young men, each with his own ambitions, stuck in a provincial Italian town and dreaming of getting away.

Jeanne Dielman. Chantal Akerman's feminist classic from 1975, a close-up of the life and pent-up rage of a seemingly conventional young widow who is anything but conventional.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Tony Richardson's 1962 British b-w classic about a  working-class teenager sent to reform school where he earns some renown as a runner and makes a courageous decision.

Loves of a Blonde. Milos Forman's 1965 Czech film about a group of women working in a factory and dreaming of a better life - with some great comic scenes when a troupe of older reservists come to town and try to strike it up w/ the much younger women.

Through a Glass Darkly. Another Bergman chamber film, this one from 1961: Put 4 people, one of whom is a severely disturbed young woman and another of whom is a sensitive aspiring artist, and see what ensues.

The best (relatively new) films I watched in 2016

This might be my own personal anti-Oscar list, as the best films that I watched in 2016 are, with maybe one or two exceptions, unlikely to turn up on any list for major award nominations (some of the "new" films I saw in 2016 were of course released in 2015 or earlier). So here are the 10 best relatively new films I watched in 2016 - five English-language films, five world-language films:

English-language films:

The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer's sequel to his great documentary The Act of Killing; an Indonesian optometrist sets off to interview those who killed his older brother.

Love & Friendship. If you read the source book - Jane Austen's Lady Susan - you'll wonder how anyone could adapt this material (an epistolary novel) into a movie, but Whit Stillman does so brilliantly.

Manchester by the Sea. This Kenneth Lonergan film will be on many awards lists, and deservedly, as it's a smart, understated, and often moving study of a troubled personality in a time of personal crisis.

OJ: Made in America. Another documentary on the list, a terrific examination from ESPN on the rise and fall of a great American athlete and public figure, making excellent use of a vast range of archival footage.

Youth. Paolo Sorrentino's examination of love and fame, a darker, older English-language follow-up to his Italian-language masterpiece, The Great Beauty.

World-language films:

Aferim!, a Romanian film modeled closely on American Westerns, with a harrowing conclusion.

Jafar Panahi's Taxi, a terrific and brave film about life in contemporary Tehran.

Mustang. This film from Turkey is a disturbing indictment of the sexist, repressive culture that still exists throughout the world, and not only in the Third World.

Timbuktu. A truly scary film about how radical Islamic forces can sweep into a village a seize control.

A War. Tobias Lindholm's terrific film about a Danish platoon engaged in peacekeeping in a remote part of Afghanistan; a great follow-up to his previous film, A Hijacking

And some honorable mentions: 45 Years (a fine British film about an aging couple and their endangered love), Love & Mercy (Brian Wilson biopic), and The Story of the Weeping Camel (an unusual documentary about Mongolian villagers who face a crisis when one of their camels rejects its young).

Next post will be on the best classic movies I watched in 2016. Stay tuned.

One of the best treatments of character development in any recent American film - Manchester by the Sea

It's anything but a feel-good movie but the Kenneth Lonergan film Manchester-by-the-Sea is one of the best treatments of character establishment and development in any recent American film. Over the course of the totally gripping 2+ hours we come meet Lee Chandler (Casey Afflek, a lock for an Oscar nomination) and get a real sense of his life at a dead-end as a handyman for a small, low-rent apartment complex in Quincy, Mass., and then we see his life take a start as he learns of the death of his older brother, the more successful (a little) and ebullient Joe (a surprising stretch for Kyle Chandler). Through alternating sequence in present time and in flashback, we learn about failure of the marriages of both brothers, about the tragedy that sent Lee into isolation and misanthropy, and about why he dreads coming back to the posh coastal home town (you will pick up the mood of several New England writers who have described the caste relationships between the wealthy and the working - Eliz Strout, Richard Russo, Anthony Dubus, et al.). To Lee's surprise he's entrusted w/ the responsibility for his teenage nephew, and their touchy, strained relationship and is development over the course of a few months is the heart of the movie - full of surprising twists, a lot of humor much of it dark, and true development and maturation of both characters. There is not a moment of false sentimentality in this movie and not a missed note (well, a few "goofs" - like the snow that mysterious appears and disappears from shot to shot, and the claim to be on the hockey team and the basketball team - really? at the same time?). It's by no means an action-packed movie, the pace is sometimes slow and deliberate (though the film editing is not - a lot of back and forth cuts during slow dialogue, which can be enlivening or distracting, depending on your preference), a beautiful score, and a fine star turn by Michelle Williams as Lee's ex, in a beautiful scene of a strained attempt at reconciliation toward the end. A work of art.

A shameful chapter in American history exposed in Loving

I know Loving had received great reviews but I feared it would be too schmaltzy, too self-righteous, and perhaps too violent, but in fact I was wrong and found the movie - none of whose lead players were familiar to me at all - to be engaging, well-paced, moving, and informative. The writer-director (looking this up), Jeff Nichols, balances all the elements well: developing the relationship of the two lead characters - Richard Loving, a Southern working-class white man from impoverished rural Virginia, and his wife, Mildred, a Southern working-class black woman. He creates a palpable sense of their constant state of danger once the marry and he also creates strong, nuanced, and complex relationships among the Lovings and their two families - some real family bonds and warmth, some cross-racial acceptance, but also significant anger, resentment (and the torment they are putting the family through), jealousy (why would Richard forsake his white privilege, one of the black men wonders in powerful scene late in the film). The Lovings are exiled from Virginia, where inter-racial marriages were illegal - in 1958!, this is not a Civil War drama! - and move to D.C., but they want to be able to return and settle near their families, and here's where the movie enters the public sphere, as the ACLU takes up their cause in brings the matter up to the Supreme Court. Mildred throughout is more comfortable with challenging the system and with the attendant media obligations; Richard, more stolid and conservative in many ways, just wants to be left alone. They are not crusaders and political advocates - just a family (3 kids, eventually), ordinary and typical in most ways, brought unwillingly into the spotlight and brave enough to stand their ground. Without histrionics, the film exposes a shameful chapter in American history, and does so through dramatization and character development rather than through polemics. Could earn Oscar nods for the leads (Ruth Negga, Joel Edgerton) and for Nichols.

With enormous suspension of disbelief, you can enjoy Arrival

The Villeneuve/Amy Adams vehicle, Arrival, treads familiar ground - invasion of space aliens puzzles scientists and diplomats around the world and stirs fear in the hearts of millions excepting the select enlightened few who make a sincere effort to communicate with the invasive force (think ET, for ex.) - but admittedly the movie has some good twists of plot especially toward the end, which is perhaps needlessly complex but does tie the strands together. One of the nice twists is that Adams plays an academic linguist whom the Army dragoons as they need someone who can possibly learn the language of the aliens or teach them (one of) ours. So it's a movie, in some ways, about language and communication. Yes, it requires an enormous suspension of disbelief to go with this movie, but that's what much of sci-fi is about: not just a "what if" but more of an "imagine this." So, yes, there's something automatically creepy and disturbing when we enter into the world of this film: huge alien space ships hovering over 12 seemingly randomly selected spots across the planet. And the use of news clips of rioting and chaos across the world are too close for comfort. And, like all invasion movies (I think), human life will prevail - and in this movie with, in some ways, an upbeat, feel-good ending. You don't have to buy into the whole show; probably best not to think about the unlikelihoods and the improbabilities and just enjoy the ride and Adams's fine performance in the lead role.

The power of and the problems with the Netflix doc 13th

The Netflix documentary 13th, an examination of the unforeseen consequences of the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery except as servitude for punishment for a crime. The argues, and the filmmakers document the argument in detail, that the South needed slave labor after the Civil War so they created draconian laws that enabled long prison terms for crimes such as "loitering," which brought blacks back into involuntary servitude via the prison system. This led to the image of all blacks as dangerous criminals, particularly threatening, first, to white women of the South and, generations later, threatening to life and property and civic order. We follow the treatment of black prisoners from the lynch mobs and the rise of the Klan to law-and-order candidates for office such as Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. (remember Willie Horton?), and Trump - leading us to the current state in which 1 of 3 black men is likely to spend part of his life in prison. The 2nd half of the film documents how the prison industry needs a steady supply of prisoners to meet its profit goals - and how prisoners work for free for many major corporations, whose best interests are also served by building up incarceration levels. All this is appalling and frighteningly true on both levels: the psychological fear mongering that stirs up white masses and the cold economics, America driving toward short-term profit and cheap or free labor. It's a powerful and necessary message though, unfortunately, unlike other recent polemical documentaries such as An Inconvenient Truth, the filmmakers offer no obvious solutions. On the plus side, the filmmakers have a tremendous archive of news and film footage and stills going back a century or more and they have a huge # of top-line experts and analysts contributing their views: Henry Louis Gates, Angela Davis, Corey Booker, Newt Gingrich (surprisingly progressive on this issue), and many more. On the downside, the entire film is archive footage and talking heads - there's no real documentary footage, nothing within a prison, no interviews w/ prisoners or the unjustly accused, all of which would have made 13th more powerful emotionally and viscerally - as it is, it's well meaning and persuasive but a little dry.

A template for Almodovar movies

No doubt Pedro Almodovar is a great cinematic story-teller and, more than any other male director, he's the writer-director with the most enduring and intense interest in the lives and inter-relationships of women, and his early (1999) breakthrough, All About My Mother, is a template for Almodovar movies. Central figure is a nurse on a transplant team, a single mom whose son, an aspiring writer, has just turned 17. To celebrate his bd they go to a show of Streetcar, and after the show, as he's trying to get an autograph from the star who played Blanche, he's struck by a car and killed. One would think this would be a story examining how a transplant nurse faces the world differently once her son is killed. Does she donate organs as she's encouraged to many to do? (She does.) Does she follow the man who's received her son's heart? (She starts to.) But there's nothing conventional about this film or about Almodovar's narrative style. This is anything but a Lifetime movie; the nurse heads off (from Madrid) to Barcelona where she begins hanging around at a remote traffic circle where people go for hook-ups or worse and she finds a trans woman prostitute w/ whom she'd been close about 20 years ago, and thus she embarks on a completely new life, involving several prostitutes, some of them trans, a young nun (Penelope Cruz) who strays from her vows, the Streetcar theater troupe, wracked by drugs and jealousy, and ultimately the man who was the father of her late son. Lots of complicated and relationships here, many of which bend of break stereotype; lots of struggle and heartache, but all told in a jaunty style carried along by the confident personalities of these strong women - and lifted by humor and by Almodovar's rapid narrative pace and by some beautiful cinematography, especially in Barcelona by night.

A futuristic series that is more about the people than about high-tech

Season 2 of of the Netflix series Black Mirror is strong start to finish, each of the narratives standing up well as intense interpersonal dramas as well as staying with the theme of the series: the potential effect of technology on life in the future. The world of these dramas is recognizable and familiar in every way except that, in each, there have been significant and at present almost incomprehensible advances in technology: virtual reality in particular but also social media, spyware, robotics. The final episode in the season, for example, has John Hamm running a live dating-advice service (through some kind of cranial implant he speaks to a young man guiding him - like "Bogart" in Play it Again, Sam" as he tries to pick up a woman at an office party, with tragic results) and also as an expert in downloading brains: through some sort of operation scientists and doctors are able to download an reproduce the entire electrical code of a human brain and make a copy, so the person is actually leading two simultaneous lives. It sounds cumbersome and kind of hoaky, and it could be, except that the technology an scifi elements are never what the show is about - they are accepting aspects, part of the fabric of future life. In another episode a virtual figure, a cartoon character seen only on a video screen, runs for Parliament. Hm. Could happen. A theme that runs through most of the episodes is martial infidelity - the technology plays a role in the discovery of the infidelity, but again the story is about the people their difficult, sometimes violent, often confused inter-relations and not about the wonders of high-tech.

Why it's worth seeing even a few minutes of The Jungle Book

Disney's The Jungle Book (2016) is what it is - a highly entertaining movie for kids that will hold the interest of adults as well; from what I remember of the original this update does little to add to or update the plot and characters, but why should it? Even though it's not the kind of movie we'd usually be drawn to, I have to say we were completely blown away by the graphics and animation - in look, pacing, realization it is as far beyond the old animated cartoons of the 80s and earlier as, say, an iphone is far from a Univac. It's truly astonishing to see how everything in the jungle, the flora and fauna and landscape - all seems not just vivid but real: if there weren't talking animals you could truly think this was a nature doc - and then how the seamlessly built in the live action of Mowgli, played apparently by a real kid (Seethi?). If nothing else watch the opening sequences as he runs through the jungle pursued by a pack of wolves - it's so real it's unreal (and I hate the fake realism of the zombie-like creatures in films like Polar Express).

The most honest film about mental illness, creativity, and bipolar disorder

There have been many films about young people confined, sometimes against their will, to mental hospitals - from David & Lisa to Cuckoo's Nest to Girl Interrupted to Silver Linings Playbook and many more - but I have to say Paul Dalio's Touched with Fire treats the mental illness more directly, accurately, and honestly that any film in this genre that I've seen. The temptation in all of these films is to romanticize mental illness and demonize the mental-health workers, and, from the title - which is also the title of a book by a psychiatrist about the link between creativity and mental illness (Dr. Jameson, and she actually appears in this film as herself, explaining some of her findings to the lead characters), we see starkly in this film how bipolar disorder is tragic and can ruin the lives of those it touches (including family members of the sufferers). The film is about two 30-somethings, each a poet afflicted with severe bipolar, who meet in the hospital and try to make a life together upon their release. They're good writers, at times - serious poets, not amateurs - but they push each other to extremes, their relationship see-saws as they together go on and off medications. Their family members try, with varying degrees of success and comprehension, to help but they are off on their own dangerous course, seemingly beyond help - although at the end one is doing somewhat better -  I won't give anything away - yet we sense that both are always in danger. There are many fine scenes, but among the very best are the group therapy session in the hospital and the first get-together of the couple and their well-meaning but uncertain parents. Despite romantic claims and associations, despite the lengthy list at the end of this film of great artists who have suffered from mental illness (not sure the list is accurate), despite quotes from Byron and Shakespeare, bipolar is not a blessing, as this film makes abundantly clear.

Not profound, not trying to be profound, totally worth it - Hell or High Water

It isn't Bergman or Renoir but (David) Mackenzie's Hell or High Water is about as entertaining a movie as you can find in the well-worn genre of sympathetic (to a degree) bank-robbers slash buddy movies - in this case the buddies are brothers, one a generally good guy who's never been in trouble w/ the law and the other his older brother just out of prison and a hothead trouble-maker. They begin a string of low-stakes bank robberies in north Texas, and it first we have no idea why they're taking such risks for such small payouts, but they have a pretty clever scheme going that we piece together as the movie slips along; meanwhile, on the side of the law, Jeff Bridges plays a down-and-out Ranger on the verge of retirement, and in a very sleepy way he and his partner, a part-Mexican part Comanche sidekick, and yes, obviously there are Lone Ranger echoes, though these rangers are in a fallen world. Part of the beauty of this film is the outstanding cinematography - we really get a sense of the desolation of the North Texas land, the dull open spaces, the lonely small towns, and cheap restaurants and motels and casinos along the highway, the beautiful sky. The movie also has a terrific soundtrack, thanks to Nick Cave. And the script is sharp and witty - though at times I lost some of the dialogue in the mumbled, low-key delivery by Bridges et al. I don't like films that glorify crime and violence, and this film comes close but withholds moral judgment. And - as with so many crime movies - some elements don't quite ring true when you think about them the next day, but it sure takes you along for the ride. There are surprises along the route, leading right up to a very interesting conclusion - not profound, not trying to be profound, totally worth watching.

A surprisingly moving and pure documentary - or is it?

This movie had been in our Q for a long time and I'd pushed off watching it largely because of its ridiculous title - The Story of the Weeping Camel - but did watch it last night and to my surprise we were very much caught up in this sweet and exotic tale which turns out to be a documentary, at least of sorts. We're with a small outpost - seems to be just 2 extended families - of Mongolian animal herders, with the flock of sheep, maybe goals, and of course camels. The simple narrative line concerns the eponymous camel who, during birthing season, has a traumatic, two-day labor to give birth to a white colt; as a result of the traumatic labor (which we see in vivid detail) the mother camel cannot bond with her child - so the families that raise the camel do all that the can to try to get the mother to allow the colt to nurse. The human nature and the emotions on the very expressive faces of these camels are astounding, and it's impossible not to feel for or toward them: anger at the mother so mean to the colt, sorrow for this infant animal trying so hard to approach the mother and possibly starving to death - and of course we feel for these people struggling to make a living in a culture that has hardly changed for a thousand years - although we see a bit of the changes being wrought as two of the children set off for a nearby village to get some help in their quest. I won't give anything away except to say that the end is extremely moving and touching in ways I would not have anticipated. On one level, this is a pure documentary in the emerging documentary style: no interviews, all filmed live, we never see or hear a word from the film crew. On another level, I'm not so sure: the credits note that this is "written and directed by" a team of 2, based on a "story idea" by another - and I do think, while much of the film is pure documentary footage, other parts are set up by the filmmakers - including the trip to the village and, throughout, the beautiful costuming: it always looks as if the herders and children are dressed for a religious celebration - colorful embroidered silks, even on the children - rather than for a working day of a trans-Gobi camel ride.

Extremely uneven yet extremely provocative series about future-tech: Black Mirror

The British series Black Mirror, picked up by Netflix for season 3, is unlike any other - which in some ways is good but not always. First of all, it's an anthology series rather than a serial drama (I didn't realize this until the end of episode one, when it became clear we would not follow these characters across 13 episodes). I wondered how they could develop a full season with each episode an entirely new concept, but then I saw that "season 1" consists of only 3 episodes - I believe there are 13 altogether over 3 seasons. In any event, what makes it a series is the consistent theme - examination in various forms as to how technology - VR, social media, digital storage, etc. - will change our lives in the future, in a dystopian future, anyway. My opinions about the first 4 episodes vary so widely I can't even say whether I would recommend this series or not, so see for yourself. But the first episode - which is the only one out of the 4 I've seen in which the future has caught up with the futuristic narrative: the premise, in 2011, was that social media would displace mainstream media in news coverage, and that via social media politicians could have instant readings for public moods and views - we're already there! This episode was extremely tense and kept us entirely focused, but it is so bizarre and disturbing that I would recommend extreme caution before you watch. The 2nd episode, about a world in which people, for no clear reason, are confined to an ultramodern fitness center where they earn "merits" by miles cycled - an they can trade these merits for various pleasures. I found this so incredibly boring I couldn't watch more than 25 minutes - I have enough screen time in daily life, thanks. But then, things changed: episode 3 - in which people have implanted devices that capture all experience and can be played again repeatedly via a "re-do" was a terrific drama about marital stress and failure, infidelity, and anxiety - even without the scifi premise it could stand alone as a really good play or drama. Episode 4, which kicked off the 2nd season, is about creation of a virtual life using a superexpansive search engine - in the way the Google anticipates what we're going to type and FB what ads we "want" to see, this is about service that can re-create a dead person to speak to and comfort the surviving, in this case, spouse. Another excellent drama, disturbing and provocative - will remind some of the movie Her, but is stranger in that the VR presence is an uncanny re-creation of the late husband. So, yes, I'm still in.

A great yet seldom-seen Fellini film from the 50s

Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953) not only still stands up as a great film after +60 years - it's probably even a better film today than on its release, as today it's a look at a culture that in some ways is long gone, as distant and peculiar to contemporary Europeans, say, the rites of an Amazon tribe - yet in some aspects we can see the same forces at work today, today in particular. Does this remind you of anyone: the film is about a group of guys who, we learn, are about 30 years old, but behave as if they're about 15, led by a large, somewhat handsome type A who shamelessly gropes women, cheats on his new wife, mocks the disadvantaged and the disabled, takes advantage of others including his father, his in-laws, his employer. The group of 5 pals are the vitelloni of the title (the word means, if my memory serves, young calves; a good American approximation of the title might be: The Boys); the film follows the group through roughly a year in the life. Though the 5 "boys" are irresponsible they are, with the exception of their gang leader, Fausto, in many ways lovable and sympathetic characters, each with his own stunted ambitions. One in particular, Leopoldo, seems close to Fellini's heart - an aspiring playwright whose hopes are smashed when he has as opportunity to show his work to a supposedly famous actor - a pompous, outmoded blowhard who leads him on and then comes on to Leopoldo. The other prominent character is Fausto's brother-in-law who is repulsed by Fausto's treatment of his sister and of his father but who is too weak to stand up to Fausto, following along w/ him meekly, even when it comes to petty theft (the scene in which they rob Fausto's employer, who runs a shop selling sacred objects, was echoed a few years later in Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner); the brother-in-law has his own dark secrets: he seems to be a homosexual and perhaps even a pedophile, though Fellini leaves this intentionally ambiguous. There's a lot of humor - especially around their melodramatic attachment each of the "boys" (Fausto excepted) has for their dear mama - each dreams of leaving the small coastal town but is far too attached to the family to take any step toward doing so (one does get away at the end, as of course Fellini himself did). Among the many great scenes: the Miss Mermaid 1953 beauty pageant, the Carnival (in which the boys telling all cross-dress), the walk along the beach; the interiors of the petit-bourgeois households are a time capsule of provincial Italian taste and decor; the exteriors of the bleak public squares and alleyways show the impoverished post-war Italian social structure - not a car in sight, most of the time - so different from any Italian city today. Yes, there are a few flaws: we never quite buy into the runaway of Fausto's wife toward the end, and the scenes in which F's father supposedly beats him with a belt is not in the least credible. Quibbles aside, it's still an amazing film that has been largely eclipsed by the many other great (perhaps better - and more commercial and conventional) Fellini films of the 50s.

Terrific conclusion to Season 1 of The Crown - more, please!

Season 1 - and we definitely hope there will be more! - of The Crown keeps up its high standard start to finish, with the last episode, in which we see that he young Queen Elizabeth has slowly, almost without our noticing, become a kind of monster - willing to give up everything in her personal life and family life to serve the interest, as she sees it, of her monarchy and of the UK: she tosses her sister, Margaret, aside, breaking promises both to her and to their late father and telling her she cannot marry against the will of the Church of England. Elizabeth seems like a strong leader but she is actually a follower - she's popular enough to stand up to the fogies of the church and the Cabinet, but she's not strong enough to do it - and part of the tragedy is that she's all alone, w/ no one to counsel her (esp in episode 10, the finale, w/ Churchill gone and feckless and devious Eden in his stead). Have to particularly call out episode 9, about the official portrait of Churchill: the scenes in which Churchill, both cranky and exceedingly vain, poses for his official portrait and engages in a range of discussion w/ the artist - Sutherland (had to look it up): their conversations start of mundane enough but gradually get into the nature of art and illusion and, most important, the tragedies of family life both had endured and how they used art to help them understand and come to terms with their fate. Terrific writing - by Peter Morgan, who wrote each episode; I an even imagine the portrait sessions blown out into a full-scale play (though maybe less is more - it usually is).

Good luck if you can make sense of The Lobster

The Lobster is an entirely peculiar movie from start to finish that will no doubt hold your interest but as it held ours but in the end I just shrugged my shoulders and thought why did I waste 2 hours on that? The premise, such as it is: we are in some kind of alternate world (maybe in the future, maybe in another state of being) in which there seems to be some kind of great societal battle between people in couples and "loners." The film opens as a middle-aged man recently widowed or in some way separated from his wife is taken away by some unexplained posse for a stay in a resort-type hotel where he has a set amount of time - 45 days I think - to become a couple with one of the women at the hotel. The trick is that two can form a couple only if there share some kind of malady or shortcoming, ranging from the trivial - near-sightedness, for example - to the more profound: complete lack of empathy. If he fails to couple, he will be transformed into an animal of his choice (his choice is a lobster because he loves the sea). Eventually he escapes the premises and allies himself with a cadre of loners, who have equally strict prohibition against building any sort of relationship with anyone else in the group - a taboo he breaks by falling in love (w/ loner Rachel Weisz). Ok so this movie is not meant to be realistic on any level - so I guess it's allegorical or symbolic somehow? But symbolizing what? The triviality of many supposedly happy relationships? Our societal obsession with family values (or with individual expression)? Maybe, but none of this felt in the least enlightening to me. There are some tense moments and some funny ones - the dialogue among the hotel guests and between the loners can be weirdly ludicrous at times - but the movie is also stunningly cruel, even sadistic at many points, and the score is infuriating - using a beautiful passage from a Beethoven quartet repeatedly to the point where I'm afraid I'll never hear that passage without thinking of this stupid movie.

The most expensive TV series ever made?

The Netflix series The Crown is not the type of thing I usually buy into - all those many Masterpiece Theater productions and their ilk - I have to say, based on the first 5 episodes (out of 10) that it's a truly great series: taking the events of British history and the British royalty and building a series that's political, personal, and historical: We see all the drama surrounding the abdication (in the background), the death of George VI, the ascension of the young and newly married Elizabeth - amidst all the pressures and conflicting demands - upholding tradition while recognizing the changes in the world and in English culture, still reeling after the War, led by a dyspeptic and perhaps incompetent elderly Churchill; we see the marriage tensions between Elizabeth and Philip, and we see in a way that never ironic or didactic the basic simplicity of the monarchs - a clan that loves only dogs and hunting and shooting and sport and has little interest in anything else. OK, it makes Eliz a bit too much of a hero: it's hard to believe she really was strong-willed enough to push for a modern monarchy; and it glosses over, in fact ignores entirely, the dark history of Edward, a Nazi sympathizer if I remember correctly - you want see that here. But you will see the most lavish and expensive production values of any series ever - Netflix out-doing the BBC by a million pounds, at least. Everything, large and small - from bi-planes to steam locomotives to Rolls Royces from 1955 to teacups and garments and flower arrangements is of the period and lavish and must have cost a fortune to create or re-create. Even for a non-royalty junkie it's an amazing series just to look at. Beyond that, the leads are good, in fact Claire Foy, who's making a career of playing monarchs, is excellent in the lead and Jared Harris, late of Mad Men, makes a great weak and shy George VI thrust into a fame and responsibility he never wanted. Jonathan Lithgow is a fine doddering Churchill as well. Worth watching for sure - and more seasons anticipated.

Is everything smarter and funnier in an English accent?: Fleabag

Have watched half (3 episodes) of season one of the BBC3 series Fleabag, a comic vehicle for a terrific British actress whom we don't really know yet in the the U.S., Phoebe Waller-Bridge - playing, like many contemporary comedians, an exaggerated version of herself: 30-something, pretty but slightly awkward, very driven by and frank about sex, going through multiple break-ups and make-ups with a goofy boyfriend, in a constant struggle with the type-A sister, trying to eke out a living in a tiny bakery-coffee shop that she runs alone (her business partner died in a traffic accident, possibly suicide after a break-up), difficult relation with widowed and re-married father. Some really funny scenes and in fact part of the charm and humor is PWB's crisp fresh delivery and her perky asides to the viewers. Doesn't everything sound better, smarter anyway, in British English? Lots of laughs for sure but you also need a pretty high tolerance for the grotesque and the crudely sexual. What keeps this from rising to a higher level is the overall lack of plot direction: there's no significant narrative thread running through this series, so we don't come back to it, if we do at all, to find out what happened next - just to get more laughs. Also, the series would be stronger if the secondary characters were funnier or at least more distinct personalities. Her sister, yes, maybe - but nobody else really. Is PBW strong enough to carry the series? Possibly at this microscopic six-episode length but for anything grander she'd need a more sporty vehicle.

Some great things in The Wailing but it's ultimately crushed by its heavy ambitions

If you can imagine is mash-up of Night of the Living Dead and The Exorcist set in contemporary, rural Korea, you've got the essence of The Wailing, a really weird horror film that plays on our deepest cultural fears and anxieties: particularly possession of children - the horror that a child can be transformed into a demonic creature beyond morality, completely evil and deranged. Add to this a remote community where people attacked by zombies become infected and turn into ghouls that gorge on flood (and on fish, it seems), and add to that a few other themes: the irrational phobia against outsiders and foreigners (build a wall!) the torment of sin and expiation - a lot going on in this movie. It differs from many other horror films in that it's structured as a police procedural: a local police officer is called out on a rainy morning (torrential rain is a feature and a torment throughout the film) to investigate a murder, which turns out to be the first in a sequence of ghastly, unexplained death - gradually we see that each is carried out by a crazed zombie bloodthirsty screaming demonic person - but who or what is infecting these people? The police officer has a good relationship w/ his young daughter, but in a strange sequence the daughter spies him having sex in the back seat of his patrol car with the family maid. He later takes the daughter for a walk in a park, and she blithely indicates she's caught him in the act before - but she says "Don't worry, I won't tell." On a psychological level, it's this repression - his, and hers - that leads to her infection and possession: She doesn't "tell" but she becomes a monster, screaming obscenities at her father and others. The cinematography in this film is extraordinary - with a great range of palette, from beautiful mountain landscapes to the run-down remote town with its grim main street and modern but threadbare hospital and police precinct to some haunting scenes of possession and attempted exorcism. All told, though - I wish I could like this movie more. It held my attention, and had a lot of working themes, but in the end I couldn't help but think: what was that all about? Sure, you need to have a willing suspension of disbelief to engage in any horror film, but this one seems weighted down by its own ambition: to many themes, too many ideas, and an ending so convoluted as to defy any normal attempt at comprehension.

Season 3 of TransParent disappoints, and here's why

Sad to say this but I'm afraid Season 3 of the Amazon series TransParent just does not live up to the high standard that it set in Seasons 1 and 2. The characters face the same struggles and dilemmas - struggling to find their identities, sexual and otherwise, to make sense of their lives and their feelings, to advance in their careers, to find someone to love them - and it's great to see that these struggles enacted by 30 somethings and 60 somethings, not just by teens and young professionals. But Season 3 does not advance the plot of push the characters to moments of crisis and decision, as did the first two. Oddly, the 2 main characters in this season seem to be not Maura and her kids but Shelly, the ex, and Raquel, the rabbi. The best episodes were the one with the turtle, which mostly focused on the early years of the Pfefferman family, and Raquel's breakdown on the eve of the Seder. Others didn't come close: I could never quite believe the josh-moves-to-Colorado and becomes a Xtian - and neither could the Solloways, as they quickly back away from that plot twist. And what about the Season finale, which seems like an infomercial for Norwegian Cruise Lines? Aside from hardly believing this family would go on a cruise together, the narrative just leads us to nowhere - that is - to Shelly's performance on the cruise cabaret in which she sings - quite effectively - an Alanis Morissette song. What's the point? I though her one-woman show was to be about her life's journey, not a performance by a cover artist; was this to gratify a whim of the very talented Judith Light, who is emerging as the show's star? Sorry, but maybe there are now too many plot elements, some getting lost, and the next season should bring the focus back to where it belongs, i.e., Maura's journey.

An overlooked film that deserves a place among the fine films of its era: Coup de Grace

Who knew about the war in the "Baltic States" after WWI and the Russian Revolution, in which the Baltic (mostly German) soldiers and aristocrats fought the Bolshevik and Communist guerilla armies trying to spread Soviet state further into Europe? Victor Schlondorff's 1978 Coup de Grace tells of these long-forgotten battles (the movie is based on a novel by Marguerite Yorcenour), focused on a group of aristocratic German fighters housed in the ancestral castle of one of the officers (the castle had been abandoned to servants and the long-suffering sister and aunt of the officer during the war - reminds me a little of the castle in The Seventh Seal abandoned by the men during a Crusade). This is only to a degree a war movie - though some of the scenes of trench warfare are among the highlights; it's really movie about sex and power - with the sister, Sophia, at the center of all of the complex tensions and relations. The movie is tense and engaging throughout and requires pretty close attention, as the relationships among the characters are nuanced, full of surprises, and in constant transition. Some of the great scenes include the movement of troops in the snow, the New Year's party that goes out of control, and the final scenes, a confrontation of the officers and a rebel troupe, at a remote railroad station. This film is pretty obscure - I don't know anything about the director and not much about German cinema from the 1970s - but I think it deserves a place among the fine movies of its era, many by much more well-known "auteurs." Criterion thinks so, too.

OJ and the racial divide and a troubled mind

OJ world finally finished after we clocked in on the 5th and final episode of the excellent ESPN doc OJ: Made in America. Overall sense: it was horrible and frightening how the trial and its outcome split the nation along a racial divide or, maybe more accurately, made the divide apparent to all. The case was prescient - at the time the verdict was clearly seen as a payback for the LAPD beating of Rodney King; the black community in LA saw it as a case against the LAPD in general, the white community could not comprehend how a jury could let a man so obviously guilty based on the facts of the case and the evidence, his history, his motive, his inconsistent story, his lack of an alibi, go free - provoking righteous anger, especially among white progressive women. And today we see that both were right: police brutality against blacks is even more evident today thanks to social media, and violence against women is also more evident. We also sense, from the documentary more than from the Fx docudrama, that OJ was a peculiar and deeply troubled man: incredibly talented, good-looking, charming - who wouldn't want to be his friend? - that that he had a mysterious dark side: clearly beat Nicole on many occasions, flew into rages, at lives lived the thug life and at times the country-club life of the elite. As he himself said he was neither black nor white - or, we might say, he was both - and he was both a hero to the black community and a betrayer. I suspect that to this day he literally does not know if he killed Nicole and Ron Goodman; his mind is so troubled that I think he can just erase parts of his memory. The ESPN is particularly sorrowful as we see OJ in prison at the start and the end, an old man, a broken man, and we think what could have been.

Should you watch People v OJ Simpson or OJ: Made in America?

The ESPN documentary OJ: Made in America continues to fascinate and inform and what more could we ask of a documentary? Perhaps even more than the great Fx series The People v OJ Simpson, this doc reveals how the Simpson defense put the LAPD on trial than OJ, and how Cochran's brilliant if sometimes way over the top arguments led the jury to believe that they were fighting a history of racism and oppression and: If you don't stop it, who will? He completely took the focus off OJ and the evidence - and everyone in the courtroom knew that, you could see it on their faces. And in fact he was right: the trial caught the attention of the whole nation (even the world), dominating the news for about 7 months - in the dawning days of cable live news coverage and well before the Internet and social media - and we were not so interested in whether OJ killed Nicole and Ron but in the horrors revealed about race relations in LA and police brutality - a topic, amazingly, that we're focused on today as well. The documentary can catch the courtroom drama far more effectively than the Fx drama - the look on Marcia Clark's face after her tepid and technical closing argument; the dramatic scene of OJ trying on the gloves and showing the jury that the don't fit, his face stone-cold and mute - these are far more powerful when we see the actual footage. What the documentary can't capture is some of the internal debates and relationships within and among the legal teams (I assume these are based on Toobin's reporting; he was involved w/ both projects): the developing relationship between Clark and Darden, Darden's history with Cochran, the fights within the Dream Team about legal strategy, the fights w/in the DA's office about whether to rely on Mark Furhman (turned out to be the worst decision in the entire trial) and whether to ask OJ to try on the gloves (2nd worst). For these reasons, it's good to see both productions, for People v coming first  - but overall I'd say People v OJ is more about the legal strategies and Made in America is more about the national issue of race.

TransParent season three first half - hits and misses

Season 3 of the Amazon series TransParent is still pretty great - Seasons 1 and 2 may have been the best, most moving, most informative and socially significant series on TV in the past 2 years, and there's plenty of competition (People v OJ, Making a Murderer, Veep, to name a few) - but not quite yet at the level of the first 2 seasons. And I think that's because for the first half of Season 3 at least we've been consistently on a down note: Sarah and Josh are terribly depressed (Josh is letting his music business slip away, too bad because music has been a huge plot element), Ali seems supposedly happy but I find the older, super-hip poet-prof she's involved in to be a truly dislikable and untrustworthy character - it's really hard to believe in her professions of love; she seems to be dangerous and exploitative - the wonderful rabbi is a woman of constant sorrow in this season, and Maura is distressed about her body image and seems to be pulling away from the trans friend but toward what we don't know. The only upbeat character is the mom, Shelly - but she seems heading for a fall. The humor has been pushed aside, for the most part. That said - I continue to really like all of the main characters and hoping for the best for them; the lost turtle episode was one of the best of the whole series so far (written and directed by the creator, Jill Soloway), the opening sequence of rabbi in distress was surprising and good (though nothing could top the opening sequence of season 2, the wedding photos), and I think the character of Sarah in particular is becoming ever more complex as she wrestles w/ faith, acceptance, commitment, and her kinky sexual drive. On the downside, I think they did a lousy job with the Rita subplot; I won't give anything away but will only say it all would have worked better had they built up Rita earlier as a key, sympathetic character, and the Ali-hip professor romance is very unpleasant - I keep hoping she'll see this woman's phoniness and get her out of her life. I miss her former partner, the singer from Sleater Kinney (sp?) and from Portlandia, and what happened to Ali's research on the family history?

Resurrecting LBJ: All the Way

The HBO Jay Roach All the Way, with Bryan Cranston as LBJ, is a really good adaptation for screen of a successful play (by Robert Shenkkan, had to look that up) and it gives Cranston and several other of the lesser-known leads opportunities for some fine soliloquies about politics and power. It kept me engaged for + two hours - beginning with a great and harrowing sequences of the assassination of JFK and then taking us through LBJ's first years in office, focusing on his fight to get Congress to pass his civil-rights bill and to win the nomination and ultimately e elected to his own term in 64. All of the interest centers on the civil rights struggle - which we see not only from Johnson's perspective as he threatens, cajoles, charms, and cons various congressional leaders to win passage while trying to appease MLK and other civil rights leaders who cannot fathom the political process and the need for compromise and delay. The play/movie makes the process clear and has some pretty entertaining scenes: LBJ's many meetings with "Uncle Dick" Russell, of Georgia (Frank Langella) and HHH, the hapless liberal and later the unhappy second fiddle; LBJ's instant dismissal of Walter Jenkins after Jenkins was picked up on a "morals" charge - and LBJ's probing Hoover about how to identify a homosexual; his brutal treatment of Lady Bird (one of, I think, only two female roles in the play/film - a reflection of the time, I guess). Overall, though, here's little or no new ground in this story; anyone who's read the Caro LBJ bio will be familiar w/ all this material and w/ LBJ's domineering and bullying personality, and his deep insecurity. Vietnam is a shadow - only barely referenced, but of course we know that it was LBJ's undoing; this play (and Caro's bio, to a degree) serve to resurrect LBJ's posthumous reputation; for decades, his legislative accomplishments, which were significant - far more than any president other than Reagan (unfortunately) has accomplished in the past half-century, has been completely obscured by the tragedy and folly of the war.

Stillman's period piece with a contemporary mood and energy

Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship, based on the Jane Austen (unfinished?) short novel Lady Susan, is a little baffling at first as Stillman intros a slew of titled characters (doing so in a campy way, with the characters in pose with names and titles beneath them) but it gets under way as once the eponymous Susan, rumored to be the biggest flirt in England, played very well by Kate Beckinsale, takes the screen and completely holds our attention and engagement as she plots and schemes and manipulates everyone, especially the men, in the movie - a cruel woman, indifferent to her suffering daughter, heartless to all, willing to sacrificed love, friendship, anything to serve her selfish needs - in other words, not exactly a typical Austen heroine. The acting - an all British cast save for Chloe Seveigny as an exile from Connecticut (whose husband threatens to send her back to Hartford - to which Susan archly remarks: You could get scalped!). There are some really funny scenes, especially involving the suitors - Tom Bennett? - for Susan's daughter who's considered a bit of a "rattle," in other words, a kook. Not sure how many liberties Stillman took with Austen's prose or with the plot itself, but the film set in period feels lively and contemporary, with each of the characters vivid and distinct. The one flub, I think, was the annoying soundtrack, much of it medieval motets about 200 years out of synch w/ the narrative period (though nice use of Mozart/Figaro I think at the conclusion as couples awkwardly and surprisingly pair off).

People v OJ series: They know too much to argue or to judge

I'll continue in the chorus of praise for the Fx series The People v OJ Simpson - smart and engaging from start to finish, a great story about the justice system, about race, about celebrity, about the media - very contemporary in some ways and, in others, showing how far we've come since the 1990s - when it was a big deal to see this story unfold live, way before social media made everything live - and how little we've traveled: the same issues of police brutality and racism haunting us today. The cast was excellent throughout, with special nod to Davis Schwimmer as Rob Kardashian, OJ's best pal who lived in anguish throughout the trial, in doubt about his friend's innocence, and to John Travolta as the insider-lawyer Bob Shapiro, another OJ pal who could never quite stomach Cochran's theatrics. Each script -- 10 episode -- was smart and succinct and, as noted in earlier post, even if you think you remember the trial I can almost guarantee this series will bring you new information and new insight. Though at the end we can be furious with the jury for it's almost instant decision to acquit, we also understand their perception and their distrust of all evidence presented by the LAPD and the DA - the team behind the series leaving it up to us to figure right from wrong: they know too much to argue or to judge.

Terrific Netflix doc that's about much more than football

Just as Friday Night Lights was not exactly about high-school football - football was the device through which that great series told about the lives of American teens and their families at the dawn of the 21st century - the Netflix 6-part documentary Last Chance U is only nominally about football: It's also about race, poverty, American education, competition, and ambiguity. We follow for football players at Easter Miss Junior College, the national champion, each hoping for a football scholarship to a d-1 school and each carrying a burden of his own. These kids are from the direst poverty in the Deep South, troubled families, troubles of their own (2 had washed out of d-1 programs for some kind of malfeasance, not closely examined), and some with significant learning disabilities. EMJC is their potential ticket to or back to serious college football and, they hope, the NFL - that slight possibility of wealth and fame. But it's such a long shot, such an illusion, no matter what their talent. What to think about the school and its coaches, who push the men diabolically to play and win and run up the scores (perversely, the score spread is a factor in the all-important national rankings). The football program in Scoobie, Miss., is the point of pride for the school and for the entire town - so maybe it's great that they have focused so much time and $ on this program, in a town that otherwise is deeply impoverished and school that otherwise would, it seems, be, let's just say a long way from Princeton. The football team lifts the school and the community into national prominence - but it also raises some concerning questions. On the positive side, it's made clear that the players need to go to class and maintain a decent gpa to stay in school and on the team - and the tireless and extremely devoted "academic athletic advisor," Brittany Wagner, is completely devoted to keeping the players going academically - she's truly the hero of this series. But it's also clear that, even with all her counseling, some of the guys just can't do academics at a j.c. level - and the profs must be pressured to cut them a lot of slack. And then what? They go off to a college where football will be their full-time occupation; maybe that's good - a few will earn degrees that may help them even if they don't get a pro career - but others, it seems, are being exploited by the system: playing for big-time, big-money college programs and then spit out with no knowledge or skills except knowing the game (which for some may be enough) and often without a degree. Makes you think we ought to just make college teams part of the pro system and put aside the hypocrisy.

The real Friday Night Lights: Last Chance U documentary

Thumbs up for the Netflix documentary series Last Chance U., about the premier junior-colloge (Juco) football program in the U.S., at Eastern Mississppi Junior College, where they essentially take kids who washed out of a D-1 school because of grades or arrests or bad attitude and kids from high schools with the talent but not the grades to even start D-! - so it's a team w/ a lot of ability and where each kid carries a huge burden. The series clearly shows the incredible poverty in which these kids lived, and for almost all football is the ladder up and out, if possible - but it's also clear to us that very few of these kids will be able to go pro, and those who don't will have few or no prospects. The school itself is really strange with a lot of resources pouring in because of the success of the football team, but the team itself is a world apart. The players for the most part completely blow off their academics' they're poorly prepared, barely literate, and uninterested. Perhaps the most appealing person in the show is the stalwart young woman called the Athletic Academic Adviser, who works really hard to make sure the guys show up for class, hand in assignments, and show at least a vestige of understanding - she's truly devoted to a very difficult cause. The coach is an ambiguous figure - really tough and brutal to the players, but that's also obviously what they need if they have any hope of moving on in their athletic careers. We also see how football dominates the whole culture of the school and the region - the way pro sports do in many regions. As I'm sure many have commented, this is the real Friday Night Lights, or at least the other side of FNL - much more poverty, despair, and even callousness toward the players and exploitation of them: they're worth only what they can bring to the school, and you get the sense that everything else in the life of the school, for the players and for the students, is ancillary.

So many great things about The People v OJ Simpson

Now halfway through the great Fx series The People V OJ Simpson: American Crime Story, and no matter what you know or think you know about the OJ case this series will bring the case and those relatively innocent days alive - and perhaps its greatest strength is its head-on approach to the many issues that rattled and captivated Americans over the course of that trial: race, celebrity, police brutality (this was in the wake of the Rodney King arrest, the first of now thousands the exposed police brutality against blacks - a case that now seems almost quaint and innocent - at least he lived), sexism (some of the best material is in episode six as Marcia Clark is purloined in the tabloids that focus on her hair and clothing style - she's just devastated and we really feel for her - quite an accomplishment of writing and directing, as she's such a tough and sharp-edged character but now we see her vulnerability), politics (why didn't the LA DA take this trial on himself? Obviously, because he didn't want to alienate black voters), and the legal system (the so-called dream team of lawyers defending OJ do a great job, or course, and Johnny Cochran is always great to watch in action - but it all feels unfair, like the Red Sox playing against a high-school team). Though the case comes alive to us 20 years down the road and it's a harbinger of many future police on black conflicts even more in the news today, the case also seems so long ago - yes, it was the first celebrity event to go 24/7 on the news channels and to become unending tabloid fodder, and the OJ chase (episode 1) was probably the first crime scene watched live on national TV - but we've moved far beyond that today, as we're no longer depending on news media to present the news, we get it instant and unfiltered and all the time from social media: the news media has been the victim of its own success and has been pushed to the margins of the picture

Where's Woody Allen when you need him?

Where's Woody Allen when you need him? The characters and social setting that he depicted so well, with wit and sympathy and imagination and credibility, in so many of his movies have been usurped in Rebecca Miller's Maggie's Plan and to ill effect. Here again we have young professionals and intellectuals in Manhattan and environs wrestling with issues of love and commitment, forming good friendships and enduring lousy relationships - but such a differences here in tone. These characters, led by the talented but getting-too-predictable (must she always portray an awkward, strangely costumed, single woman on the edge of worry about commitment?) Greta Gerwig, just never feel real or believable, not for a second: we always sense that they're actors playing their lines, and, as in too many movies, they are characters, not people - from the "cute meet" to the preposterous skewering of an academic debate to the bratty bright kids to the clumsy gags about artificial insemination to the cheesy Gerwig-Hawke falling-in-love, just nothing, nothing worked for me. Has Ethan Hawke ever played a less likable character? And what's Julianne Moore doing with that Russo-Franco accent? Honestly, I had to bail out after Act One but have it on good authority that it was downhill from there. (Gerwig was far better in Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha, which treated similar moods and anxieties, albeit at a slightly younger stage in life, with sensitivity and brio.)

Surprisingly great series that gets to the heart of the OJ case

Like many others, we have been blown away by the quality and drama of American Crime Story: The People v O.J. Simpson; who would have thought Fx could rise to such quality (it definitely helps to be watching this on DVD rather than w/ commercial interruptions, of which there would be many) or that we could re-engage with this dramatic case. I thought I pretty much knew the whole story  - it wasn't all that long ago that the case dominated news for weeks - but to see it play out from the inside, with all of the conflicting forces and psychological complexity - race, money, big-time sports, politics, legal wrangling - just translates so well to the form of an episodic drama: we see the troubled mind of OJS up close, the conflict brewing between the DA's office (Marcia Clark) and the ridiculously high-priced defense team. Great use of occasional documentary footage, and some really fine acting, Cuba Gooding Jr obviously as a tormented (and deranged) OJ, David Schwimmer as his sycophant best friend Kardashian, and in particular Jon Travolta as OJ's first lawyer, the suave insider, Robert Shapiro. Will keep watching this series for sure.

Talking heads (of the CIA): The Spymasters

A few words on the Showtime documentary The Spymasters - have to give the filmmakers credit for the amazing of getting all living ex-directors of the CIA (including former Prez Bush 41) to speak on camera and on the record, some in more detail than others. That said, the movie does feel like a lot of talking heads with spliced in video clips of news footage, primarily from 9/11 and from several attacks on U.S. embassies, some of it pretty dramatic and disturbing but none we hadn't seen before. I don't think there were any great revelations or turning points in the interviews (I didn't make it quite to the end) but we do get a sense of how these guys have to deal with life and death decisions all the time and that a few of them - Panetta in particular - struggle w/ guilt and anxiety about decisions they made that cost lives. Others are on camera more to burnish their reputations: there's a lot of talk about 9/11 obviously, with some of the CIA people (some lower ranks spoke as well; we wondered if one of them was the inspiration for Homeland) emphasizing how they tried to warn the Bush (43) White House about 9/11 but unsuccessfully - I'm no fan of Bush-Cheney yet it seems to me the CIA kept saying there was an imminent threat but without knowledge of the specific plot what could the admin  have done to prevent the strike? One thing that was obvious - there was no communication between the CIA and the FBI, and probably not a lot between the CIA and the White House, either. It's a lonely job, and I'm amazed this film team got such access, including footage of CIA hq that I'd thought was always way off the record.

Niether enough comedy nor enough drama, just TMI

Really wanted to like Tig Notaro's series One Mississippi but found it pretty thin gruel - not funny enough as a comedy (Tig playing herself has a wry, or maybe dry, sense of humor and her two radio bits - her character apparently has a talk and music show on an indie station - telling winsome stories largely about her cancer and her mother's untimely early death are a highlight - but not enough of a highlight) nor engaging enough as a drama. Tig goes home to her stepfather's house (I guess it's in Miss but all the references are to N.O. - which maybe is just the nearest airport or major city?) in time to be w/ her mother in her last moments. The stepfather (oddly, we learn from snatches of home movies that he seems to have been w/ the family from T's childhood, though she treats him as a stepfather from a much later re-marriage) is cold and controlling, but begins, by episode 2, to show some flashes of feeling and caring. I guess, over time, we will see Tig grow to love or at least like him - but how much time do we have? There's no drama or crisis or mystery built into this family or this narrative and tho Tig is an appealing character and presence her struggle through her illness - cancer, seemingly now in remission, but leaving her debilitated and suffering from continued diarrhea - is not all that pleasant, nor all that interesting - just TMI. Sorry, but I found the series flat, dull, though maybe not unprofitable.

The crrepy use of puppets and stop-action in Anomalisa

Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa is a disturbing but for me hugely disappointing film - a 90-minute drama told entirely through the use of felt puppets and stop-action animation. The story such as it is tells of a motivational speaker traveling to Cincinnati for one night to give an address and who's going through a crisis in his life - marriage falling apart, he seeks solace first from an old beloved in Cincinnati and then from a woman he meets in the hotel hallway. What if this movie were made w/ actors and not puppets? We wouldn't watch it - it wouldn't even have been made. There is nothing special, unusual, engaging, or except in extremis even credible in Kaufman's story. But does the stop-action make it worth watching? It of course makes the characters less human and recognizable, as if these events could not take place in our world but only in a world of disassociated voices, strange and awkward physical movements, an alternate world that I found creepy and monstrous right from the start. I guess that's the effect K wanted, but for me - it pushed me away from the movie rather than drew me into it. Technique needs to serve a purpose; in this movie, it just fills a vacuum, but fills it with mud.

The surprising success of Stranger Things

Obviously the Duffer Brothers were not going to tie up all the loose ends and the conclusion of season 1 of Stranger Things, but it's a pretty solid ending to this surprisingly good 8-part series. I kept wondering why I was so interested in this story, as it is on one level just a pastiche of about a hundred sci-fi, fantasy, monster, government conspiracy movies and you can't really buy into the facts of the story - a secret government agency has been kidnapping children and using them as subjects for mind-control experiments but something went wrong and they ended up creating a carnivorous, grotesque monster that is haunting this small Indiana town, whew - but what you can buy into is the relationships among the kids: the 3 pre-teen boys who set out to find their friend who disappeared and step into the middle of this government conspiracy, the high-school kids who take on the monster and who grow and mature over the course of the series, most of all the young girl who was the mind-control subject who escapes from the Energy Dept facility and who yearns for a normal life. The D Brothers to a fine job re-creating the look and mood of the 1980s; one of the sad things about the series, for me, is to watch the boys play gathered in the basement for hours and days playing their fantasy game (seems to be Dungeons and Dragons, or something like it) and to think that, today, they would each be at home online playing the game alone or perhaps in consort with other players around the world. That human bonding of kids at play seems something we may be losing or have lost.

Two versions of a Hemingway story

Watched parts of 2 versions of The Killers, two movies, one from 1946 the others from 1964, both based to varying degrees on the excellent Hemingway story from, I think, the 1930s. The '46 version is considered a classic or at least an early instance of American film noir. In this version, the director and screenwriter stay very close to the text of the Hemingway story - which is the movie's strength and its downfall. For a while, I was completely engaged, thought this was an absolutely terrific noir movie: the first 10 minutes or so show the H story: to hired guns enter a small-town diner and make it clar they're waiting for the arrival of a regular patron and that they're going to kill him. He doesn't show, and a young man who was in the diner - Nick Adams, a frequent H alter ego - goes off to warn the man; the man is dull and listless and says he'll just wait for them to come and kill him, there's nothing he can do. All of this is handled beautifully - the dialog (all almost direct from H) is of course shart and perfect and scary, the lighting is gloomy and sinister, everything's good. The only thing they changed was not telling us the target was a prize fighter (presumably he threw a bout, or failed to do so). But once they're done with the Hemingway part the start to build what becomes pretty quickly a conventional police procedural, as an investigator sets off to figure out who got killed and why. Here the contrast with the Hemingway dialog and scripting does the movie in - what we'd probably tolerate if it were in and of itself, looks and sounds tepid and forced and strained compared with some of H's best writing. The 1964 v., directed by Don Siegel and starring a great Lee Marvin as one of the killers, changes the story radically: now the fighter is a race-car driver, and the killers gun him down in the first 5 minutes or so and spend the rest of the movie trying to track down a million $ that the race-car driver may have absconded with and stashed away. There's a lot of back story about the driver, and it's not all that interesting. The highlights, I hate to say, are the violent acts of the killers - esp the first sequence in which they corner the driver at a school for the blind where he's working as an instructor - so against convention to have these thugs push around a bunch of blind adults to get at their quarry. Another side highlight is R Reagan as the heavy. Hah! The love story is dull and distracting; the movie's OK but it's only very loosely based on the Hemingway original, and the original is much, much better.

Very entertaining Stranger Things - as long as you can willingly suspend your disbelief

Half-way through the first season of The Duffer Brothers' Netflix drama, Stranger Things, and finding it surprisingly entertaining. Yes, it requires and enormous suspension of disbelief - as the story involves some kind of conspiracy centering on the U.S. Department of Energy facility in Indiana, with scientists using a young girl ( the daughter of the lead scientist) as a subject for mind-control experiments that someone get way out of control and produce a blob-alien all-devouring monster that is attacking children in the small Indiana town, got it? You really don't have to, as I find the sci-fi-conspiracy elements uninteresting in and of themselves - but they're a vehicle for the Duffers to get at the personalities of the town, in particular the children in the schools whose friends are abducted and who pledge to find them. Also, Winona Ryder is very good as the mom of the first abducted child and who believes he is communicating with her via electric currents. As in so many scifi movies, everyone thinks she is delusional, suffering from a serious breakdown, while of course her only problem is that she's in a movie about the paranormal - we get it, and we feel for her in her misery. The Duffers do a nice job w/ the 1980s period setting - the topical details and the style all seem right, and give the series a little bit of a creepy flavor - a la Blue Velvet, perhaps. The greatest influence, though, is the huge debt to ET (as M pointed out): the adult scientists cruel and lacking in understanding, the sensitive lost alien (in this case the girl who's been the subject of the experiments), the contrast between the dramatic and unusual plot and the mundane domestic life of the town and of the time - kids riding around on bikes in a seemingly safe community, w/ the unknown lurking around the bend.

A great start to My Golden Days, and then what happened?

Arnaud Desplechin's My Golden Days got off to a great start - but then what happened?! A great beginning as Paul Dedalus (yes, we catch the allusion), a middle-aged anthropologist (as we later learn) leaves a central Asian republic heading home for France (where he had not lived for many years) and says farewell to a woman who works in the embassy and w/ whom he's been in love, or at least having an affair. All OK until he's stopped in a French (I think) airport and told there's a problem w/ his passport. That leads to an interrogation - French officials think he's been a Soviet spy - and flashback to his youth in southern (?) France and an adventure in Russia (I won't give it away), and a great story seems to be building: Apparently there's another Stephan Dedalus elsewhere in the world, same name, dob, place of birth. Now the spoilers: After the matter is explained, and we think we're building toward a crisis, the pin gets pulled and we learn the other Paul has been dead for 3 years, so what's the point? Then Paul has other youth memories, in particular, of his first huge college crush - and for the next hour we are faced with the tedious, predictable, terribly familiar romance story: his pursuit of "unobtainable" girl, he wins her heart, he goes off to college, they write to each other (dutifully captured in voice-over, a device that Truffaud used well and more or less retired). Completely uninteresting stuff, made worse by the fact that there are interesting characters on the periophery whom Desplechins (had to look up his name) leaves unexamined: the odd mother who dies when Paul is 11, the brute of a father who for no apparent reason later in life turns out to be a kind and friendly dad, the younger brother who's drawn to guns and violence, the attractive sister who believes she's "laide" ie ugly - why can't we learn more about these people? Why start a really good story and let it spin away into thin air? I couldn't finish watching - just didn't care after 1+ hour. Rather be reading.

A German domestic drama that's honest but neither cold nor hot

Maren Ade's (had to look that up) German domestic drama Everyone Else (more accurate translation of title would be All of the Others) is really about one couple, Chris and Gitta, unmarried, not living together, maybe early 30s, on a vacation staying, as we gradually learn, in Chris's mother's vacation home on Sardinia (beautiful!, and mostly unspoiled, it seems) and about their troubled relationship, their alternating variously between verbal abuse, humiliations, worries about careers (his, mostly), physical abuse (self-abuse, mostly - Gitta jumps out of a window for example) and some playfulness (at times), sex (several times, and the only time he actually says he loves her) - in other words about a week in a very rocky and difficult relationship that seems to be heading toward dissolution; they contrast with another far more successful (and conventional) couple they run into on the island - a couple who's professional success and generally peaceful relationship with and commitment to each other (she's pregnant) brings out the worst, most passive-aggressive and then aggressive behavior in Chris and Gitta's relationship. I have to admire the movie for its honesty and its emotional scope - a whole range of emotions and attitudes in its two-hour span - but also have to say that I kept waiting for something actually to happen, something other than the relentless bickering and posing: something dramatic, some revelation, something that would move their relationship toward a conclusion or dissolution if need be. This is not Albee's Virginia Woolf nor is it a Bergman domestic drama; it's much more low-key and even civil  (it's closer maybe to a contemporary take on Antonioni). It seems to me that for a film like this to work we have to empathize with the main characters and their troubles or loathe them, and in this case it's neither, we're left like the Laodiceans - neither cold nor hot, which is maybe worst of all, for a drama anyway.

Is the future really theirs?: Riots in the Paris suburbs circa 1995 - La Haine

Watched the 1990s French film La Haine (Hate), (dir M Kassovitz, looked it up) which seems especially on point today - about the street demonstrations and the thug life in the Paris banlieux (sp?), the suburbs that, in the reverse of the American topography, house the poor, the immigrants, the outcast. Film begins with terrific documentary footage of the street riots and clashes w/ police outside Paris and then breaks into a narrative, beginning on the morning after the riots w/ one of the rioters in critical condition in a local hospital. We follow 3 guys - late teens, early 20s, affiliates through a loose gang association w/ the guy in the hospital - and we follow the 3 over the next 24 hours as they get in various scrapes, commit a # of crimes, beginning with the petty and building in gravity and intensity; a lot revolves around a gun that one of the gendarmes lost during the riots and that one of the 3 guys has found - this seems so odd to us in American, where half the people on the streets probably own guns legally - and, as all movie and theater-goers know, if you show us a gun in the first act, someone will have to shoot it in the 3rd. It's a really dark movie about these three estranged and somewhat dangerous guys, representative of an entire culture; though one is Arab (the others are black and Jewish), this movie predated the age of terrorism and the culture clash with the vast Muslim community in and around Paris - it's nonideological and a little dated in that sense. There's some humor, at times, but dark and vulgar and sexist humor - at times it reminded me of the young toughs in Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, but it doesn't really build in us much sympathy for these characters (the black guy maybe an exception - he's been trying to rise above his circumstances) and we know little - intentionally - about their families, education, aspirations. They scrawl on walls the slogan "The Future is Ours" - but it's just a slogan. They seem to have no thoughts beyond the present moment.

Veep season 2 builds toward its inevitable conclusion

Season 2 of the Julia Louis-Dreyfus vehicle, Veep, builds inevitably toward her decision to split with POTUS (the president is never named, nor seen) and run for president herself. The last episode is a terrific back-and-forth as she struggles with her decision, sending each of her staff members into a frenzy, each reacting differently but each one immediately looking out for self - loyalty to a boss in politics can evaporate in 2 seconds. A particularly strong episode in season 2: the TV crew visit to Veep in her home, a seemingly puff-piece feature interview that turns at various times extremely nasty when the interviewer (Allison Janney) drops a few provocative questions. Entire episode filmed in one location, all interior, and very smartly cut from interview footage the the various prep actions of both the news crew and the Veep staff. Consistently, this series gets the personalities and the predicaments right - exaggerated for comic effect, of course. JLD carries the show, w/ her malicious smile and her wilful blunders, but the supporting cast, each a type: the steely and dead-serious scheduler, the affable and rumpled media guy, the smooth and ambitious top aide, the equally ambitious but maybe just slightly yearning for a life of her own chief of staff, the idolatrous personal aide - all will be instantly recognized to anyone who's been around elected officials and their entourage.

Exxcllent South American film about 2 ethnographers exploring the rain forest - 30 years apart

The Embrace of the Serpent looks like the kind of film that Werner Herzog might have made (he didn't; it's by a team from Colombia), an ethnographic drama that follows two anthropologist/explorers in South America (undefined rain-forest area, could be Columbia or Brazil), two stories told in tandem: the first is of a German man interested in learning about and preserving the native cultures, brought by a native Indian who is slightly westernized (wearing the same type of tropical khakis as the German) to an Indian shaman and healer who seems to be living alone in the jungle - angry and resentful about the way white settlers have taken over tribal land and corrupted (or killed) native people. The native man agrees to a river journey to find healing medicines for the German. In the parallel story, set about 30 years later (the 1940s) an American, having read the posthumous journals of the German ethnographer, locates the same native healer and asks him to help him find a tree of great value - he agrees, and the go on a river journey the recapitulates the earlier journey 3 decades later and we see some of the increasing devastation and native people are enslaved and oppressed. There are some very beautiful scenes (movie shot in b/w widescreen, except for 1 sequence) and some harrowing moments, particularly the 2 visits to a Catholic school for boys - later corrupted into a Jim Jones-type settlement. Late in the movie we learn that what the American is seeking isn't some powerful hallucinogen but a rare form of rubber tree - something desperately needed - and highly valuable - at the start of WW2. A totally engaging and often weird movie, and we learn at the end - but good to know at the outset - that it's based on the actual journals and papers of the two white explorer/ethnographers/exploiters.

Why Campion's Janet Frame biopic misses the mark

Jane Campion's film about the life of the New Zealand author Janet Frame - originally a 3-part TV series, later distributed as a 2.5 hour movie in 3 parts, An Angel at my Table - based on Frames three-volume memoir (the title is the title of Frame's 2nd vol.) - has many of Campion's strengths as a director, and some serious weaknesses, unfortunately (I watched only the first two parts). Campion is great at establishing a historic period and giving us a vivid, almost tactile sense of the hardship of life for a large, working-class family struggling to get by in a remote NZ town in the 1940s: the cramped bungalow, with 4 girls sharing a mattress, the dismal outhouse, beautiful mountain scenery all around but the living conditions bordering on squalor. Also she gives us a good sense of Frame as a young misfit, strangely homely, awkward with others, withdrawn, lacking in social graces and boundaries (in one powerful scene completely misreading a whole situation and letting the family know at dinner that she saw her older sister "fuck" the boy next door). So the first section is pretty good, especially in that we know we're seeing a portrait of the artist as a young girl. The second section or chapter really misfires, however: in this section Frame goes off to college (in Christchurch, I think) to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. At one point in despair she tries to kill herself w/ an aspirin OD; a well-meaning but feckless teacher suggests she go to a hospital, which apparently leads to a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia and 8 years in an institution under-going hundreds of electroshock treatments. I say "apparently" because none of this is dramatized, Campion skirts over that entire section of Frame's life (she may have done the same in her memoir), and the next we know she's out, living in a rural spot with a fellow writer (a mentor, not a partner) and writing - and lo and behold her first book is accepted on first try! But what does she write about? We really have no idea (and from the little I've read about Frame I think she was published pretty widely before her hospitalization - the movie seems to distort her chronology for dramatic effect). Too much left unexamined and unsaid her, and Frame in part 2 is just a blank canvas. I really want to know more about Frame, but will have to go to her books for that to happen (maybe that's as it should be).