A great documentary on clasical music and an unwatchable Russian film

Ethan Hawke's simpler, low-budget documentary Seymour: An Introduction (yes, we get the reference, thanks), is a completely charming and absorbing look at a brilliant piano teacher in Manhattan, Seymour Bernstein, a man who had a very promising career as a performer which he abandoned in his 30s or 40s to devote the rest of his career to teaching just a few very high-end students. The documentary, which includes a lot of interviews with Bernstein, a captured very intelligent discussion between Bernstein and one of his former students and NY Times writer Michael Kimmelman, and a few interviews about Bernstein. It doesn't totally unravel the mystery as to why Bernstein gave up performance - he indicates he suffered from stagefright - and it leaves his personal life largely to the side - but what really makes the film great are the many segments of his working with his students, including a terrific master class, and a final segment in which he performs (first time in decades) before a small group of Hawke's acting students in the Steinway grand hall - and he narrates as he plays. His insights into music and performance are extraordinary; even those not well versed in the classical piano repertoire will get a sense of the nuances of performance and the small things that performers at the highest level can do, must do, to attain excellence (and, you could add, to finally break free of their mentor and find their own style). The demands on professional musicians, we see, are almost beyond comprehension - no wonder they have stage fright; they should! The closing credits list all the pieces; I almost wish - and I usually don't feel this way, would rather just have the film without intrusion - that they could have put a sub- or super-title on the screen with the name of the piece as each was performed.

A note on the recent Russian film Hard to Be a God, which got great reviews - and yet - well, though they are entirely different films it's similar to Mad Max Fury Road in that it creates an entire alternate world, which is an incredible accomplishment in itself; in this case, the world is supposedly on some other planet and we are among scientists viewing this world as though through a scope; OK, but the world is the most disgusting, repulsive place you can imagine and I could not imagine watching it for the full 3 hours and gladly abandoned this ordeal after 20 or so minutes.

An excallent Scandinavian film - remade later and set in Alaska - Insomnia

Saw the Swedish-Norwegian original v of Insomnia (1997), about a Swedish cop who flies to the far north of Norway to help with a murder investigation and who screws things up in a big way in the process, partly because he's sickened and disoriented by the constant daylight and consequent lack of sleep. This film was remade about 5 years later in English, set in Alaska - a faithful and classy remake, as I recall, which is very unusual in itself. The original is a good film that holds up well - extremely well plotted, particular for the murder-mystery genre which far too often is driven by ridiculous coincidence and fortuitous uncovering of clues. The movie works well because it's partly a study of personality - the gradual ruin and corruption of a man in a crisis. There are a few standout scenes and sequences as well, particularly the chase of the potential killer along the rocky, foggy Norwegian shore, with gunshots coming seemingly from all directions. I don't know anything about the director - looking up his name and it's Erik Skjoldbjaer - or cast and crew, and that's too bad - wonder why some would ride a classy movie like this to fame and opportunity and others not.

Better not watch Saul - he's run out of gas

Season 1 of Better Call Saul was an interesting jaunt with a few really good scenes - Mike helping the nebbish pharmacy worker in a drug-for-cash exchange, Saul's (Jimmy McGill, in this series) ill-conceived scam to entrap motorists into a drive-by collision, his pathetic little office in back room of a nail salon, his frustrating attempts to manage a potentially huge class-action case - all good, as he might say, though in truth I was never convinced that this was really the back story of the Saul who became the injudicious lawyer who helps Walt throughout Breaking Bad - this seemed like just another character played by same actor (Bob Odenkirk). Saw the first episode of Season 2 and will watch no more - it was plain evidence that the creators of this series have no idea where it's going nor do they care. We see Jimmy and his appealing lawyer/girlfriend scam a guy (himself a scammer) out of an expensive meal (Jimmy pretends to be a naif seeking stock advice from a man who's clearly trolling for suckers - and gets what he deserves) - but there's nothing especially clever, funny, or significant about that. The episode reprises the drug-sale scene of the previous season but in doing so makes it worse, not better. In short, the idea has run its course and the show has run out of gas, and I think fans of Breaking Bad, and of Odenkirk for that matter, should just let it alone so as not to ruin the recollections.

A series that's gone below the radar: American Crime

American Crime now in season 2 on ABC is definitely the sleeper series of the year, so easy to overlook because it's a commercial broadcast on an old-line network but it far exceeds expectations, as it did in Season 1 as well. This series is similar to Fargo and, I think, True Detective in that each last season was a complete narrative and this "season" is a completely new story done by the same creative team, w/ a # of the same actors, most notably Felicity Huffman, now playing the steely head of an expensive private school in Indianapolis (in Season 1 she was the embittered mother of a murder victim) and Timothy Hutton as the basketball coach in the school (he was the milk-toast father of the victim in AC1). This season is about a scandal that rocks the school and community after the basketball team "captain's party" leads to an accusation of rape - I won't go into any details for fear of spoiler alerts in this on-going narrative. Will note only that, like AC1, AC2 does a great job with a very efficient plot tying many community elements together and in opposition and in reaction to this crime - similar but in my view a lot better than celebrated movies such as Crash. The series has its own visual style as well - many scenes shot in extreme close-up with no reaction shots at all, and with the characters using minimal make-up at best - so we get a sense, literally, of being "in their faces" during moments of high crisis and tension.

Social Climbers: Everest

This household has an inordinate fascination with survivor movies - in space, at sea, western, eastern - but atop them all are mountain-climbing expeditions, who knows why? Certainly something I could never see myself doing even for a moment or at any stage of my life. Maybe that is why. Anyway, the recent Everest, a retelling of the fatal 1996 attempts at the summit that Gary Krakauer recounted in Into Thin Air (he is one of the characters in Everest), about the year when there was an onslaught of commercial expeditions, with pros helping amateurs who had no business being there but could fork up $65k fees, up the slope. Not only does the film show, as many others have, the difficulty of the climb, but it also shows how Everest was becoming perverted, like a theme park, w/ so many expeditions crowding each other out and making the ascent even more dangerous, and with the leaders feeling compelled to get their clients to the top even when they had no business doing so - leading to a #of deaths, injuries, and disfigurements. The climbers had totally unreasonable expectations of their guides, as if they'd make everything possible, when of course they, too, were up against terrible odds and conditions and, being human, made some bad judgments when exhausted and deprived of oxygen. Though the movie covers familiar ground and though the attempt to broaden the appeal by splicing in various conversations between the climbers and their spouses at home (Knightly and Robin Wright in thankless roles), it does hold you wrapt over the full 2 hours which says a lot.

The Danish House of Cards: Borgen

The Danish series Borgen (I think it means The Castle?), from abut 2010 (at least that's when it's set) is the Scandinavian House of Cards - not a direct remake, as the American HofC is of the British original, but a story about electoral and back-room politics in Congress, under the scrutiny of a highly aggressive media and with a subplot weaving through the main narrative about a TV journalist and her complex relationships with two "spin doctors" (the Danes use the American term). This particular series is about member of the moderate party, Birgette, who struggles to put together a coalition of minor parties to become the first female prime minister in Denmark. It's very different from American politics, even more about horse-trading than our two-party system, and it's a little hard to follow at least for most American viewers - a lot of talk (which means a lot of subtitles) and a lot of subtle distinctions. It's very good and probably quite true to life, but from the first three episodes it's a little bloodless as well - we certainly like Birgette and her family, and maybe that's the problem: She needs to be a little more unscrupulous and cold. And maybe that's what she learns over the course of the series. It all seems a little quaint and I'll be very jingoistic here - but, truly, it's hard for an American viewer to get all that caught up in a drama about the Danish parliament - the pressure is so high but the stakes seem so low.

Don't ask too much of it and Mozart in the Jungle is a pleasant comedy

Mozart in the Jungle Season 1 doesn't quite live up to its early promise but if you accept it for what it is - a comedy set among the classical-music scene if NYC without making any serious attempt to show us what life is actually like for classical musicians - it's pleasant enough. The great strength is the strong and highly likable cast of characters - most of the secondary characters are just types and not meant to be much more - but the leads, Rodrigo (the always excellent Gael Garcia Bernal) and Hailey (Lola Kirke, unknown to me till this series), the maestro and the novice (his assistant, yearning to join the symphony but not quite ready), are entirely pleasant and fun to watch. The series itself is very uneven: three episodes stand out as particularly good: the outdoor rehearsal, the dinner party at the home of one of the benefactors, and the opening night final episode, that deftly brings all the major characters back together for some clever interactions, leaving a few loops open (will Rodrigo and Hailey, or Jai Lai, as he amusingly misprounces her name, be a couple, or will she go back to her dancer boyfriend?) for season 2. Other episodes are choppy w/ multiple plot lines and strain credibility even for a comedy (e.g., why on earth would R risk his entire career and hire his demented ex-wife to headline his opening concert?). OK, so don't ask or expect too much of this series and it will treat you kindly.

The Rights of Women: Suffragette reminds us of the struggle and danger

Sarah Gavron's 2015 Suffragette has its heart and its head in the right place: It's important to remember the struggle women went through, in Great Britain in particular, to win the right to vote, the danger suffragettes faced, and their bravery; and, as the movie makes plain in its closing credits (a la Spotlight), it's an on-going struggle, with so-called modern countries such as Saudi Arabia still denying women the right to vote (though it's not clear to me that anyone has the right to vote for anything meaningful in Saudi Arabia). Although Suffragette is by no means the first recent work to take up this theme, it's particularly eerie to watch it today, as we see the women engage in vandalism and even terrorism in service of their cause - acts that we so roundly condemn in other contemporary contexts. So the film forces us to think: Is the use of force justified? How much? Smashing windows (as the film begins)? Setting off bombs? Burning houses? More? All this thought-provocation is good, but I just wish it were a better film - though in fact it's so heavy-handed, with the women beatific and the men classic movie heavies and dolts, with the melodramatic score trying to hard to lift our emotions during key scenes that I wish could have been left alone to speak for themselves. The lead actors - Carey Mulligan especially - are fine, as is always the case in British films (though some of the lines are spoken so softly I almost needed subtitles); the period setting and details are also great: I've seen a lot of images of life in the mills, but this is the first I can recall that shows the difficult and dangers that women faced working with scalding tubs of water in an industrial-scale laundry. Some good, grainy documentary footage at the end highlights the factual basis behind the story - one of the suffragettes (not one of the leads) was based on a true martyr - I kind of wonder why the movie didn't opt to tell her story rather than a fiction about a woman slowly won over to the cause but at great personal cost.

Some heartbreaking scenes in 99 Homes

By and large Ramin Bahrani's 99 Homes is a melodrama about the conflict of good and evil with the evil (realtor Rick Carver) so instantaneously and consistently despicable that he almost flattens out the movie, which is too bad because had Carver had a few redeeming qualities the moral dilemma that protag faces would be more complex and engaging. That said, it's still a plenty engaging movie and it shines a harsh spotlight not so much and the banks and their political cronies that caused the housing bubble and the recess of 2008 as the second- and third-tier plays who actually made $ (and still are) in the crisis: Realtors who snapped up foreclosed houses, forced the residents (usually homeowners) out in brutal fashion often illegally, construction crews in league w/ others who stole appliances and materials and then billed the replacement costs onto the various federal agencies who took the foreclosed properties, thereby profiting twice, and so forth. The movie is great on showing the workings of these schemers, and does a fine job placing the protagonist in a dicey moral position: he's kicked out of his family home by an illegal foreclosure (the movie shows how the judges are in league w/ the banks and realtors), living in a scary transient motel w/ mother and son (it's never made clear why there are no spouses or same gen partners), teh nasty guy who kicked him out recognizes a talent and brings him a long as a protegee - and he soon finds himself pushing people and their belongings out into the street, in hopes of earning enough quick cash to buy back his foreclosed house. So he sells his soul to the devil - but only up to a point - and the movie ends on an ambivalent and open note, as we never fully learn the protag's fate, which is fine - everyone's fate is open, to a degree. The best and bar for most sorrowful part of the movie is the sequence of eviction scenes, people literally pushed out on the street with the belongings piled up like trash. The most pathetic is the eviction of the very old man who clearly has some kind of dementia and no connection to any relatives or neighbors, heart-breaking, and sadly incredibly likely and real.

Another survivor movie, and the opposite of Birdman: The Revenant

Some really great things and some not so great as well in Alejandro Inarritu's The Revenant: So, yes, it's a story of great suffering and endurance as a man - unnamed? - played by Leonardo DiCaprio - struggles to make his way across a frozen wilderness (the Wyoming territory, it seems, in the mid-19th century) and to get revenge on the heavy (Tom Hardy) who killed his son. As a trek-adventure-survival story, it's very good with some powerful scenes - including the already famous attack of the grizzly bear, as well as numerous fights, attacks, treks across ice and rapid water, great heights, and so on. The photography is open, beautiful, expansive, and the score - unusual for a movie these days - actually enhances the action with its mysterious tones and timbres. So it's great to watch and, if you can endure the suffering and cold, will hold you rapt, even though it did not have to be another goddamn 2 1/2 hour movie, sorry, It feels as if Inarritu was trying to expand his range after the terrific Birdman - which was the polar opposite, in a way: mostly interiors, tracking shots, urban, contemporary, and highly literary (excellent screenplay). He succeeded, but lost in the process was writing and narraative development: it's almost impossible to figure out early on who the characters are, what they're doing, whom they are opposing, all the basics of narrative art (ultimately we realize that we are following a bunch of fur trappers who are trying to avoid both the brutal French army troops and the Pawnee Indians, particular one group looking for a kidnapped daughter; LdC seems to have been raised by Indians himself, though that's never made terribly clear). CiCaprio has almost no significant dialogue but his antagonist, Fitzgerald (Hardy, the go-to tough guy all of a sudden) has a lot of dialogue, most of it incomprehensible. As a survival movie, the Rev (a spirit come back from the dead, btw) makes a good contrast w/ The Martian, and though both have their strengths The Martian edges out Rev in my view, largely because of more clear development of a narrative arc and a central character (Damon) whom we come to root for and like.

Truth - and Consequences?: A movie about investigative journalism that misses the mark

The James Vanderbilt 2015 movie, Truth, about the 60 Minutes botched investigation of GW Bush's service in the Air National Guard, which lead to Dan Rather's downfall. The movie had the misfortune of going up against another and far better movie about investigative journalism, Spotlight. Truth is OK, but not nearly as a dramatic, well-paced, and well-written as Spotlight. Except for the central character (and author of the source book), Mary Mapes (played very well, of course, by Cate Blanchett), none on the investigative team come to life at all. Further, we see very little of their actual investigation; rather clumsily, we're filled in on the whole process when a new member joins the team. What we see is the final rush toward broadcast, when producers pressure Mapes et al toget confirmation on some key documents. Partly but not entirely because of network pressure to move fast, they do an amateur job of checking the documents, with the result that the whole story was discredited; Rather, who pretty much just reported what the team handed to him, went down in disgrace, as did the whole team, Mapes in particular. Among the problems with the movie: we can't and don't root for any of them; though there's a half-hearted attempt to portray the corporate bigwigs and their stooges at CBS as villainous, the fact is that the 60 Minutes team screwed up: they were duped - it's not clear by whom - and they failed in their job. Second, comparing perhaps unfairly with Spotlight, the story of GWB's "military service" was necessary - esp in a climate when right-wing zealots were trying to discredit John Kerry's actual service - but in the great scheme of things, who cares? Every knew Bush got out of the military thanks to the pull of his family, and that he didn't even fulfill his minimal obligations. People voted for him anyway, twice, amazingly. The CBS story was interesting but wouldn't really have changed anything even if the reporting were airtight. And that's the final frustration: the story was accurate, though the reporting was not. It all could fly if the movie were more clear about its goals; however, while showing us the crappy job the 60 Minutes team did w/ this story, it also tries to make Mapes and, even more so, Rather into heroic figures: Rather's final sign off, replete with orchestral crescendos (please stop this misuse of musical scores!) stage lighting, tearful faces is ridiculous, especially in this context. The movie is a reasonably engaging look at journalism at its highest level, but lacks spirit, soul, and clear point of view.

A little bit of night TV: Mozart in the Jungle

At a conference I just attended we all had to, as part of an "icebreaker" session, confess to our guilty-pleasure TV show. Since a I don't watch much TV and b I don't feel guilty about what I watch, this was kind of difficult, but I put forth the TV show we're now engaged in - 5 episodes into Season 1 - Mozart in the Jungle. It's the story of the NY Symphony (aka Philharmonic), which has hired a new dashing daring conductor, goes by one name, Rodrigo (Gael Garcia Bernal) - about his relationships with the players, particularly the fledgling oboist whom he takes on as his assistant, the board chair (Roberta Peters), the stuffy and proud conductor emeritus, the public, his celebrity, and the mix of personalities in the it, from the union hacks, the druggies, the cynical old pros, and aspirants. Lots of scenes of life among the 20-something Boheme types, and various sparks of romance among the characters, The show is charming and fun and light as a feather - hardly any of it is believable, which is a shame because a realistic comic-drama in this setting would be entirely fresh material and ripe w/ promise. You don't have to like classical music to enjoy the jauntiness of this series, but I would say it helps - as I watch and listen I'm trying to figure things out, to recognize phrases, to see if there's a glimpse at least of how people in this world live. Not sure I'm finding that, but it's fun anyway - and a good score at least.