Not one of Eastwood's best films

Clint Eastwood, now 88, has made some great movies over his long career but his 2018 film The Mule isn't one of them. Granted, Eastwood does a find job of acting playing the lead - an 87-year-old man whose run into financial straits and takes on a job as a drug "mule" for a Mexican cartel, carrying every-increasing shipments of narcotics in the bed of his pickup truck from El Paso (I think; the movie is very confusing about locations and about Eastwood's route) to Chicago. Apparently this movie is based on the exploits of a real man, who came to no good end; it's based on an NYT feature story. That doesn't help matters, though. The scenes of his several drug runs and of his various meetings w/ cartel members at several levels, including the head of the cartel, just feel like so many cartel movies and TV shows we've all seen in recent years (see for a good example Oazark), but without the tension (obviously, Eastwood will make it to the end of the movie. There are some humorous moments, however, because of Eastoowd's naivete and lack of facility with the basic tools of communication: he can't figure out how to send a text, he has a propensity for stopping for sandwiches, to help stranded motorists, and for hookups w/ prostitutes when he stays overnight on his routes; he also foolishly flashes around his cash payments and spends the $ extravagantly. On the other hand, he's shrewd in some ways, steering the police away from his truck on a few stops. So is he wise or a fool? The movie never decides that. The real lead weight on the film, though, is Eastwood's broken relationship w/ his ex wife and his daughter (and granddaughter); these scenes are so tendentious, poorly written, and logically inconsistent as to stop the momentum such as it is dead in its tracks every time the home life gets introduced; my guess is that the original story had none of this, that the family life was shoe-horned in to give the drama some human context, and it just doesn't work. In the end, this film is a minor work w/in a well-worn movie genre - worth seeing if at all for Eastwood's performance only.  

The timing is all wrong for this Cheney biopic, Vice

Adam McKay's biopic about the life and times of Dick Cheney, Vice (2018), comes at us as almost a parody of the conventions of documentary cinema and with a huge warning flag: So much of Cheney's life has taken place in the darkness, there's so little known about what he said or might have said in various moments of crisis in his life and in our world (most notably 9/11, when he took charge in the White House w/ W on the road), so many of his meetings were private and secretive, that McKay and his team acknowledge they're going to just fill in the blanks as they see fit. Sometimes, that works well, as they have some lighthearted fun w/ a documentary about an subject who remains obscure and hidden: playing out one scene as if Cheney (Christian Bale) and his wife, Lyn (Amy Adams) - both of them giving great performances - speak to each other in Elizabethan English (So embarrassed that I don't know if they were actually quoting Shakespeare - Richard II maybe? - or talking in pastiche), a funny moment when the credits role halfway thru the movie, and other jaunts. All to the good - but there are major problems with this movie that kept me from enjoying it or even in fact making it to the end (2 1/4 hrs!). First, the timing is horrible. Do any of us really have room in our hearts or minds to hate Dick Cheney or any other public figure at this time when our hatred and fear is well focused on you know whom? The movie feels quaint and unneeded. Second, OK, though I'm sure I agree w/ McKay and all  of his political beliefs, the film relentlessly pushes us to loathe and despise Cheney entourage. Clearly, less is more: The facts alone, in a straightforward documentary, would be enough, and I don't need or want to be manipulated by spliced in footage, ludicrous characterization, and heavy-handed moralism In the end, therefore, the movie is kind of a bore and an unnecessary one at that: Cheney was a fright and a danger, but times have changed and the movie feels about as relevant as a take-down of the Buchanan administration.

Cuaron's family saga Roma depicts thet passage from innocence to experience

Roma (2018) is another fine work from the Mexican writer/director Alfonso Cuaron, quite a shift from his previous movie, Gravity, and apparently a highly personal and autobiographical work. The movie, set in 1970/71 and shot entirely in b/w (not sure why as by 1970 there were few b/w movies, at least in the U.S., but it looks great throughout) tells of a well-to-do family in Mexico City (apparently in a neighborhood called Roma; I had to look that up - not a great title for this movie I think) with four young children (the oldest maybe about 12?), two servants, and a marriage that's coming apart - a fact that the parents try to keep from the kids, which just increases the tension and uncertainty of their lives. At the center of the story is the teenage servant Cleo, a young woman who seems to be of Mayan descent and is from a remote country village - shy and unsophisticated and the victim of the mother's wrath, wrath that should have been directed toward the faithless husband/provider. Yalitza Aparcio - with no acting experience - is the megastar in this show, as she endures a number of traumas and hardships while doing her best to provide a loving environment for the young children, largely ignored by their parents, while meeting the many demands of keeping this large family clean and clothed and fed. It's a story that could so easily have been mawkish and sentimental, but there's not a wrong or melodramatic note in this film. In particular, there are several tour de force sequences, from the deceptively difficult 360-panning shots that show us the elegant household from Cleo's POV to some terrific crowd sequences - the New Year's Eve forest fire, the riots in the streets of Mexico City, the delivery room in the city hospital - and some quieter and more intense personal moments that dramatize her passage from innocence to experience: Cleo's bus ride, Cleo in the furniture store, Cleo and the children on the beach at Veracruz. This is certainly Cleo's story start to finish, but we also get a sense of the family dynamics; at the end, we feel sorrow and pity for all (except the father), and we're left wishing there were more - which is the best possible way to end a movie, or any narrative.

A genre picture that will hold your interest

Jacques Audiard's English-language debut, The Sisters Brothers (2018) is an American movie of the most traditional kind - a Western involving gunslingers, brothers at odds w/ each other, a manhunt, a strange alliance between the hunter and the prey, treks on horseback across the rugged Western plains and passes, a Gold Rush element, bar fights, prostitutes with kind hearts, many shootouts, wildlife attacks - in short, everything that over the past 80 years have drawn French viewers and filmmakers to American cinema. There's no groundbreaking element to this film (although there's a bit of twist involving a chemist who claims to have a formula that will revolutionize panning for gold) but to his credit Audiard traverses the familiar ground with ease and confidence. A strong cast of lead characters - particularly the ever-present John C. Reilly in a career role - carry this story (from a novel by Patrick DeWitt) along briskly; the lead characters are (for once) clearly delineated, making it easy to follow the narrative line, there's plenty of tension, and a few really ghastly scenes not for the faint of heart. I wonder why the set-up - gunslinger brothers who argue about language and syntax - gets dropped somewhere in the middle of the film, and I quibble with the ending, which seems to me to wrap things up too easily and to leave threads dangling, but overall this is an entertaining genre piece that should hold your interest - more than I can say for most 2-hour (the current requisite minimum for films w/ prize ambitions) movies.

If Beale Street could be a great movie this isn't it

I have to think that Barry Jenkins made a really bad decision in following up his AA winner, Moonlight, with an adaptation of the (last?) James Baldwin novel, If Beale Street Could Talk. Jenkins must be a huge Baldwin admirer (he dedicates the movie "to Jimmy"), as who isn't, and must have been taken in by reading Beale Street, but his very faithfulness to the novel as a sacred text from his literary hero is the undoing of the work. This movie - well-intentioned, well-acted at times (w/ particular props to the excellent Regina King) is terribly slow-paced, sentimental, and didactic, clocking in at two hours that felt like 4. I'd re-read Beale Street not too long ago, and it struck me as Baldwin's attempt to write a mass-appeal best seller while also scoring some points about the injustices black Americans experience in the legal system. Right on for this second point: Baldwin write about false arrests and the pressure to plead guilty in this book (and now movie) set in the 60s - true then, true when Baldwin wrote it (the 80s?), true today - as we all know. At least today it's better documented and made public through social media. Jenkins, hitting home of the obvious, includes a few stills of blacks under arrest and working in prison gangs, an unneeded, heavy-handed message. Overall, the pace of this movie is so slow because, in following the novel, a lot of the key scenes are elided and the only really great scene, in book and film, is the argument between the warring black families over the fate of their children, an homage to Romeo and Juliet, perhaps. In brief, the film and book begin with a young man, Fonny (sp?), in prison being told by his girlfriend, Tish (the narrator) that she's pregnant. The drama, such as it is, involves trying to get Fonny out of prison, where he's being held unjustly, the result of a police frame-up. Compare this, say, to the great series on this topic, The Night Of, and you can see how all the tension, conflict, and ambiguity is strained out of this film and replaced with what?: Many scenes of the young couple in love, having their first night of sex, setting up their first apartment, planning to move up in the world to a vacant loft space, and so on. At best, the movie is heart-driven if not plot-driven, but the end is a long time coming and leaves open far too many questions. The fault lies in part w/ the material - I'm not sure there's any way to make a great movie out of Beale Street, which is not necessarily a bad thing to say about a novel - but if there is this isn't it.

A feel-good film that actually works: Green Book

Okay to Peter Farrelly's Green Book (2018) is about the one-millionth road trip-buddy movie in which two seeming opposites (2 guys, 2 gals, one of each) come to loike and appreciate (or even fall in love w/) each other as they overcome various obstacles. And okay, so Green Book is the cinematic equivalent of Newton's Law, every action leads to an equal and opposite reaction, so if a gun is introduced early on it will go off before the final scene and if the wife says "you better be home by xmas" there will be a made dash through the snow to make it from Birmingham to NYC just in time and if ... I could go on. Yes, it's totally predictable; and yet ... it's also totally watchable and  enjoyable, with plenty of tension and plenty of light comedy, too, along the way. And it's also a social commentary, based on - or as the opening credit puts it - inspired by - a true story. Farrelly,who earned his comic chops in such early, hilarious moves as Something About Mary and Dumb & Dumber, shows great comic pacing throughout and he gets terrific performances from the leads, Maharshala Ali as jazz/pop pianist Don Shirley and Vigo Mortensen Tony (Lip) Vallelonga. As actually happened, Shirly hires Tony Lip to be his triver on a concert tour that concludes in the Deep South (in 1961), where they encounter various forms of suspicion, hostility, and outright racism. The two men completely differ in personality and background, and their presence freaks out a # of people in the South and elsewhere, as they cannot understand a black man's being the "boss" of a white man. You can easily figure out how things will develop, but that still leaves space for a few really good scenes (notably, the arrest of the two when Tony assaults an officer, Don Shirley's helping Tony write letters home to his wife, and the tense moments in a private dining club in Birmingham) and of course we expect to hear Don Shirley place some classical pieces - his true passion, though he was discouraged from pursuing a classical career), and Farrelly doesn't disappoint us there, either. I usually don't feel good about feel-good films, but this one is an exception,;hard not to like it.

Why First Man is such a yawn

Damien Chazelle's First Man (2018), about Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) and the path that led him to be the first man on the moon, is far more technically demanding (tons of flight simulations and recreation of space capsules and lunar modules, all of which led to nerve-shattering journeys, all depicted brilliantly and probably accuratel, so far as I know) than his previous highly successful films Whiplash, La La Land) but it will not earn him the coveted BP Oscar toward which he seems to be striving. Bigger and longer is not necessarily better, and definitely not in this instance. First of all, by now the space race so called is overly familiar ground, in biopics (Apollo 11, The Right Stuff), miniseries (From the Earth to the Moon), fiction Gravity) - and it's not clear what new ground Chazelle hopes to find here. More problematic, he tries to cover a long span of time involving many space missions and it's really hard to keep track of the development of the Apollo program - too much material to over even in a bloated 2.5 hour slog. Third, and more important, Armstrong is a vapid character, terse and uncommunicative, which may be true to life (the astronauts by and large were not the most effervescent group) but is deadly for this movie; we know little more about him at the end than at the outset, and as a personality he never holds our interest - nor to the other players, none of whom has a distinct role or identity. The movie tries for some family background - the long-suffering wives and children, etc. - which we have certainly already seen; Claire Foy does her best as Mrs. A., but she has little to work w/ aside from one powerful seen when she tells her husband off. Obviously any real tension about Armstrong is minimal, as every viewer knows the outcome of his mission. All in all it's a technically proficient project - and a stretch into a new area for Chazelle - but it's a yawn of a movie, unable to live up to its ambitions.

The 10 Best Miniseries I watched in 2018

As with everyone else on the planet, we continue to shift our viewing preferences away from discs (and theaters) toward streaming, with particular interest in the miniseries format - which continues to provide the most absorbing, entertaining, and informative cinematic material and remains a great venue for new artists, established artists seeking new challenges, and in particular for creative teams from around the world to find larger, international audiences. Of course there's a tremendous amount of junk - pretentious, needlessly gruesome and violent, obvious ripoffs - out there, and perhaps in a future post I'll go through some of the many series that we looked at and immediately of after one episode or so abandoned. But for today, here are the Top Ten Miniseries I Watched in 2018, arranged alphabetically:

Babylon Berlin. A tremendously accomplished police-procedural series from Germany, set in the 1930s and brought to life with exquisite period detail, great acting from the leads and a provocative story throughout its 16 episodes, with many plot lines, betrayals, and reversals of fortune.

The Bodyguard. Jed Mercurio's series from the UK is about as intense and compelling as any short series that's come across from Netflix in the past several years, a tense and tight plot with many strands and many surprising twists and a few of the most tense scenes ever involving suicide bombs and assassination attempts against a cabinet member.

Call My Agent, Seasons 1 and 2. This six-part  (per season) series is a really good comic drama about a small but powerful Paris agency representing major French film stars, with the amusing kick that each episode involves a star (or 2) playing himself/herself, often against type - and this series seems to be hinting at an American setting for the next season.

Elite. An eight-part series from Spain about students from different social strata and their complex inter-relations, a high-school drama that is both sympathetic and highly credible (the only comparable series I can recall is the great Friday Night Lights).

Fauda, Season 2. Right up to the last moments of the last (12th) episode in Season 2, the Israeli Netflix series Fauda maintains its tension, excitement, and complexity, holding us from start to finish; this series has been criticized by all sides in the Israel-Arab conflict, which probably means it's doing something right - and it seems to be headed for more of an international plot in Season 3.

Halt and Catch Fire, Seasons 1-4. We're a little late catching up on this one, which depicts the many ups and downs that a close-knit group of techies in Texas (and later in Silicon Valley) experience as they go through various startups and shut-downs throughout the early years of the PC industry and the founding of the Internet.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Seasons 1 and (so far) 2. Amy Sherman-Palladino's series on Prime, starring the great Rachel Brosnahan in the title role and perfect sidekick Alex Borstein, is a pleasure to watch start to finish, especially for Brosnahan/Maisel's comic routines that continue to surprise and delight us in every episode.

Ozark, Seasons 1 and 2. Jason Bateman's series has become the best crime-drama miniseries of its type since Breaking Bad, as another good guy gets involved with narcotics to help his family, or so he thinks, and ends up putting everyone at risk.

Trapped.  This beautifully photographed 10-part series from Iceland is a murder mystery with many twists and tendrils, as   fishing trawler pulls up a dismembered body in the harbor just as a huge Danish passenger ferry pulls into port, and the local police force - consisting of a chief and 2 beleaguered officers - begins an investigation that leads them down many paths

A Very English Scandal. A 3-part series based on historical events, this is a terrific drama in the mode that we have come to expect from the best of British TV, with terrific writing, acting (with Hugh Grant in the lead), and production values as well as some surprisingly effective against-the-grain decisions, such as the use of a jaunty, upbeat score that at times is so jarringly at odds with the emotional subtext of this series that it brings the project into sharp relief.

And some other contenders include the hilarious American Vandal Season 1, Collateral from the UK, the creepy Homecoming, the German spy drama The Same Sky, and the documentaries Evil Genius and Wild, Wild Country. 

Melissa McCarthy's excellent performance as a forger

Marielle Heller directed Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) but there's no doubt that it's Melissa McCarthy's movie start to finish. She is completely convincing as Lee Israel, the protagonist, a struggling author of biographies, suffering for alcoholism and from a sour and vindictive personality. Pushed to the edge of poverty, she stumbles across a few letters from Fanny Brice, old vaudeville star, while doing research for a biography (which her agent tells her nobody will want to publish); she steals the letters (they were tucked away in a library book) and sells them. When the bookstore owner who buys them indicates they'd be much more valuable if they contained more unusual information that shed light on the author, McCarthy gets the idea of forging other letters and documents, and she continues over the next year or so to create and sell at least 400 forged letters - until she at last is busted. This film - with a good screenplay by Holofcener (a fine director in her own right) and Whitty - breaks no new ground in cinema but the story line is straightforward and clean - and the movie is of particular interest because it's based quite closely on Israel's confessional biography; the case was and is quite well known among book dealers and antiquarians. McCarthy is an unsympathetic character, for the most part (her character is very witty, which helps cary the movie and helped w/ her forgeries), who has little remorse about the many people (including a sad young woman whom she befriends) she's duped, in effect, robbed from - but there are dark hints throughout that her actions are not necessarily unique except in scope and that dealers are more than happy to buy dubious material so long as they think they can sell the documents at a higher price to naive collectors (which may be why Isreal got off so easily). McCarthy shows that she can range beyond the comic roles that have made her famous; this show is all hers.

The 10 Best Movies I Watched in 2018

As we gradually transition from cinemas to discs to streaming, I watched relatively few recent movies over the past year and watched a lot more episodic series, increasingly are the source most entertaining and literary form of cinematic expression, but here is a list, alphabetically arranged, of the 10 Best Movies I Watched in 2018, w/ a few runners-up:

Andrei Rublev, by Andrei Tarkovsky (1966). It's best to give up any pretense of trying to follow a traditional plot or narration in this Soviet-era film and just focus on what you're seeing on the screen: an amazing and beautiful series of scenes the re-create better than anything I've ever seen the look and feel of what life must have been like in the middle ages.

An Autumn Afternoon, by Yasujiro Ozu (1962). The great Ozu's final film centers on a old-school Japanese businessman who wrestles with the idea that his daughter at 24 may be ready for marriage and who, over time, comes to accept that she must begin her own life no matter what the cost to him.

Beyond the Hills, by Cristian Mungiu (2012). For those (like me) who love long and thoughtful narratives about "real" people, movies in the tradition of great 19th-century naturalist (and realist) fiction, Romanian director Mungiu's Beyond the Hills, about a 20-something woman, recently "released" from the orphanage where she was raised who has now entered a strict Eastern Orthodox convent in the hills beyond the borders of a small city, is a must-see.

Blackkklansman, by Spike Lee (2018). Lee's bold and exciting drama Blackkklansman tells the story of Ron Stallworth (based on his book Black Klansman and played well by John David Washington), who in the 1970s became the first black police officer in Colorado Springs and on his own initiative began the infiltration of a violent and sadistic local chapter of the KKK.

Funny Games, by Michael Haneke (1997). Funny Games (the original, German-language version) is a cruel and frightening movie about a home invasion; if it were just a horror/snuff picture, we wouldn't even be talking about it, but Haneke is into something deeper and more reflective as he breaks the 4th wall of cinema and has one of his characters address you the viewer.
Layla M, by Mijk de Jong (2016). Layla M is a terrific drama that's both topical and universal: the story of a young (last year in high school) girl in Amsterdam, of Moroccan descent, who gets drawn into a jihadist movement.

Life Is Sweet, by Mike Leigh (1990). Life Is Sweet, from the under-appreciated Leigh, is a domestic drama about a working-class family in an English row-house suburb, generally making the best of tough times, spirited and, at least at first, seeming to love one another so that at first we think we're seeing a sweet domestic comedy but then the fissures appear in the wall, the cracks widen, and we see the trauma and trouble at the heart of the family.

The Salesman, by Asghar Fahradi (2016). Farhadi's Oscar-winning Iranian drama is about an actor/school teacher whose wife (and co-star, in Death of a Saleman) is assaulted in their new, somewhat sketchy apartment and whose search for the perpetrator leads him, and the film itself, in some completely unexpected directions.

The Unknown Girl, by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (2016). The Dardenne Brothers mvie (from Belgium) tells of a young doctor who single-handedly runs a clinic that treats many immigrants, all of them working class, none wealthy, whose world is upended when she learns that a woman has been killed outside of her clinic.

Woman in the Dunes, by Hiroshi Teshigahara (1964). One of the great art-house films of the 60s, with a screenplay by the author of the source novel, Kobo Abe, about a man held captive by a mysterious lady and by malevolent villagers in a small house in a swale beneath enormous sand dunes - a drama, an allegory, and in some ways better and more frightening than the novel.

And also worth watching are: Orson Welles's adaptation of Henry IV, Chimes at Midnight; Bergman's The Passion of Anna, Silence, and Winter Light; two key 2017 films, The Post and The Shape of Water; the low-budget I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore; and Mungiu's Graduation.

Notes on Blackkklansman and Mrs. Maisel

Two notes, first on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 2. Far too often the 2nd season of a hit series falls way short of the mark. We watched the first episode of Maisel 2 last night and I'm pretty sure we'll stay with the series but  what a mixture of the good and the bad in this season kickoff! As to the good: Once again Rachel Brosnahan is a completely winning presence in every scene she's in. Her standup routine in this first episode is completely clever and surprising and hilarious; her stint on the B.Altman switchboard in the opening segment is great, too. The biggest surprise, though, was the hilarious episode w/ Alex Borstein (playing Susie Myerson), waylaid by a pair of thugs and talking her way out of trouble and winning them over. OK, but on the downside: The trip to Paris to bring back  Midge's mother is just awful, completely nonsensical, never funny, and never helped by the one-note whining of Shalhoub.

Second, on Spike Lee's Blackkklansman, on which I posted yesterday. First, sorry but I got the date of the setting wrong - it must be about 1972 (not 68), though I'm not sure of the exact year. Sorry. Also, I've since learned that Lee took major liberties with the facts and the source material in turning Stallworth's memoir into this movie. For example (possible spoilers), there was no bombing and "Flip" was not Jewish. I don't object to his doing so - and I think any viewer would know that the relationship with the college activist was Lee's invention. Lee's changes made the narrative far more exciting and didn't belie the truth at the heart of the story - the racism of the klan, the bravery of Stallworth (even if somewhat exaggerated), but I do think Lee should have been more forthright, with some kind of cue that some facts and incidents have been changed and that the film is only loosely based on this true episode.

Spike Lee's exciting drama celebrates the bravery of police officers who infiltrated the Klan

I'll join the chorus in praise of Spike Lee's bold and exciting drama Blackkklansman (2018), which tells the story of Ron Stallworth (based on his book Black Klansman and played well by John David Washington), who in 1968 became the first black police officer in Colorado Springs and on his own initiative began the infiltration of a violent and sadistic local chapter of the KKK. I won't give away precisely how a black cop is able to infiltrate a Klan cell, but he does so in alliance with another police officer, in another challenging and unusual role for the talented Adam Driver. Lee keeps the tension ratcheted right to the top throughout this movie - there's hardly a moment of rest or relaxation, as the two men are in constant danger throughout their investigation - hindered in part by at best lukewarm support from the PD and some outright racist behavior by a fellow officer. This movie of course is painfully relevant today, a half-century later, but I do wish that Lee had let the plot speak for itself rather than pounding home the point through use of contemporary footage of Charlottesville and its aftermath. I'd also quibble with the strangely jocular behavior of the police officers in the final segments and would have liked a little info on the fate and fortunes of Stallworth (and the klan cell in Colorado Springs) since 1968 - but these are small points in the face of a movie that celebrates the bravery of a few people who fought racism and terror in their community and that reminds us to be ever vigilant and to have no tolerance for bigotry.

A film that offers a brave look at a highly charged sociopolitical issue: The Hate U Give

George Tillman Jr.'s The Hate U Give (2018) deserves much praise and credit for taking on the vital issue of police brutality and racism in a serious manner that largely avoids melodrama and sensationalism. This film, based on the novel by Angie Thomas, focuses on a 16-year-old black girl, Starr (played very well by Amandla Stenberg), who witnesses the the death of a black friend, shot by a white police officer in what should have been a routine traffic stop. Among the strengths of the film: none of the (major) characters is all good or all bad, we get a good sense of various views of the shooting death, including an important conversation Starr has w/ her uncle, a black police officer; we see how the reports of the shooting bring out all kinds of tensions and animosities in the black community; we see Starr's character grow in bravery and independence over the course of the film; and we get nuanced but largely affirmative portrayal of the a black community in crisis and confrontation. One the drawback side, however, it seems to me that the filmmakers had little sense of Starr's back story as one of the few students of color in an elite private school. For the first 20 minutes or so, establishing Starr's relationships w/ her schoolmates and her (white) boyfriend, I thought I was watching a black version of Clueless - with way too much voice-over and no credible character except for Starr herself. I also think the one of the plot strands - the drug gang's anger at Starr for her grand jury testimony - was a bit of a stretch: Would the gang really care that she named them as a source of drugs in her community? Isn't that something everyone would know? Why pick a fight over that? That said, some parts of the film were really strong, notably the filming of the Black Lives Matter protest march turned violent and a powerful scene on campus in which Starr demonstrates to a so-called friend what it feels like for a black person to be threatened by a cop. And really I don't quite buy the ending. Still, it's a film that easily could have been maudlin and didactic but turns out to be dramatic and frighteningly informative - a brave look at a highly charged sociopolitical issue.

One of the best police-procedrual series, with credible characters and a plot that makes sense

The Icelandic 10-part series on  Prime, Baltasar Kormakur's Trapped (2015), works really well start to finish on many levels. First of all, it's a murder mystery w/ many twists and tendrils - a fishing trawler pulls up a dismembered body in an Iceland harbor just as a huge Danish passenger ferry pulls into port, and the local police force - consisting of a chief and 2 officers - begins an investigation that leads them down many paths: what's the tie-in, if any, to a suspicious fire that sent a young man to jail for arson - and the man has just returned to town; what's the connection w/ a guy aboard the ferry who was transporting two captive Nigerian women to work as sex slaves; what's up with the plan for the government of China to build a massive port facility in this isolated harbor; and so on. Add to that strong character development, particularly of the ursine, beleaguered police chief, Andri, carrying the burden of a broken marriage and a failure in his previous post with any police agency, and in particular the stark, harsh beauty of the Iceland setting and this turns out to be a fine series start to finish, with the plot much more elegantly built and completed than in almost any other police-procedural drama (Sure, there could be a sequel, but the end doesn't leave you hanging on for more, either.) and awith ll of the characters coming across as lifelike, flawed, and credible - for the most part (excepting the one or two "heavies") they're "round" characters who seem to have a life beyond or outside of this narrative.   I have to say that the plot can be hard to follow for American viewers because every character has a name that's unusual or unfamiliar to us - I'd advise paying close attention to the names in early going, as that will make it easier as you go alone when the characters refer to one another by name. We had to laugh at times at the lack of "continuity" - sometimes the village was supposed to be caught in a paralyzing blizzard and in the next sequence the roads are clear - but, hey, it must be just about impossible to film a series in Iceland and literally impossible to do so in winter, with about 10 minutes of daylight. Great series to watch, though, even for the setting alone.

A dramatic expose of conversion therapy that avoids the maudlin and melodramatic

Boy Erased (2018 - does the title echo Gerl, Interrupted?)), directed and written by Joel Edgerton (who also plays a key role) and based on the memoir by Garrard Conley, tells in vivid and dramatic detail of the horrific practice of so-called conversion therapy, in which seemingly well-meaning families, usually devout Bible Belt Christians, send their children who seem to be homosexual/bisexual/lesbian to a program that promises to get them to change their sexual identity - through prayer and various "acting out" scenarios that become increasingly cruel and even dangerous. In this case, a young man- Jared, in the film - admits to his devout parents that he has "thoughts about men" and, after seeking guidance from several ministers, his parents - in particular his father - send him to a conversion program. We see the young man's struggles with his identity, his faith, his rightful skepticism of the whole underlying principle of the therapy, and the criminal abuse that takes place in at least this program - unlicensed therapists whose main goal seems to be to keep the young people in the program as long as possible. This movie could easily have descended into the mawkish, melodramatic, or didactic - but it never does. Jared's father (played well in a real casting against type by Russel Crowe) for example, could have been a bigoted ogre, but he's not - he truly loves his son and is trying, in his misguided way, to help his child. Similarly, the conversion-therapy center (Edgerton himself plays the lead so-called therapist) is horrendous and scary but many of the techniques used - role playing, journal keeping, sharing w/ the group, professions of love and support - are not horrendous in and of themselves, at least initially. Like many such films, this one ends w/ some factual info about the extent of conversion therapy in the U.S. - estimated to damage the lives of some 700k young people and legal in, I think, 33 states - and we also see some snapshots of Conley and his family; thankfully, they're not erased.

Shakespeare our contemporary? Not quite, in Hopkins's King Lear

Last night I watched the first half hour - into Act 2 I think (the expulsion from Goneril's estate) of the Anthony Hopkins King Lear (on Prime); I doubt I'll watch any further. Not that it's a terrible production or anything - it has many strengths - but there's also something about it that's entirely wrong. They set the play in contemporary London - with the opening sequence showing the bright lights of the financial-district towers at night - slowly moving us toward a government building, an appropriate locale for the first act, the king's division of the country among his daughters. But soon I recognized that the contemporary setting just feels ridiculous - at least without major modifications to the text. It's OK I guess to have an aged king of England dividing up the realm but it's totally weird when he says things like "By Appollo!" And gradually, the realistic-contemporary setting seems more and more absurd: A king sitting in a darkened room with just his three daughters and some of the upper nobility dividing the kingdom into sections on a hand-drawn map? How could this be? And the visit to Goneril, with the crowd of soldiers in camo acting like a bunch of louts? And the king has a jester, too? No, it makes no sense at all. There have been other updates of Lear - Jane Smiley's Thousand Acres; Kurosawa's Ran - that work well (at least Kurasowa's does) because they just use the dynamics of the plot, rebuilding as necessary (Shakespeare would approve of course, that greatest of adapters). But to take the play literally and stage it in contemporary setting is ludicrous; it's a medieval play and should look and feel that way - ghostly, dark, brutal, sparsely populated. That said, the English are always great at certain aspects of Shakespeare: The look of the setting is visually fine, even if it makes no sense, and the cast, especially Hopkins and Emma Thompson (Goneril) are great at line readings. It won't do you any harm to watch the whole movie - though I would definitely say it is totally unsuitable for a first-time viewer/reader of King Lear. I'd start with the Peter Brook 1971 film if possible and work down from there.

Perhaps the best and most credible h.s. drama since FNL: Elite

The 8-part Netflix series Elite (2018) has gotten little attention so far - perhaps because it's in Spanish and easily confused w/ a Telanovela - but in my view it's a series well worth watching for a # of reasons: Excellent narrative line w/ many strands that intersect intelligently and surprisingly, fine acting by a young cast (all of the principals are student in an "elite" high school in, I think, Madrid), a mystery and a murder investigation revealed in the first scene and carried through till the conclusion but that never dominates the plot, which is really about the students and their complex inter-relations; a high-school drama that is both sympathetic and highly credible (the only comparable piece I can recall would be the great Friday Night Lights). Yes, maybe there's a touch of melodrama and yes it's a litle hard in the first few episodes to keep the many characters and their back stories straight and yes the cross-cultural crushes and relationships are not always totally believable - a fact that the characters recognize themselves and joke about, calling these cross-class relationship "Disney" - but there's a lot of veracity throughout and it will hold your interest and attention top to bottom. In brief, the story line is that 3 kids from an impoverished public h.s. win scholarships to attend the elite school and their doing so and their falling in love with kids already in the school creates waves of social pressure and reaction.Among issues touched upon include homosexuality, Muslim fundamentalism, political corruption, grade-grubbing, and more, all done without didacticism and as part of character development. All told, though Madrono and Montero have come up with a really good series w/ a lot of insight into many social issues - in all cultures today - and it seems definitely headed to a Season 2 (and who knows?, an English-language remake, that would probably ruin the whole thing?).

The Dawn Wall has plenty of thrills for those who love heights and those who fear them

The Lowell-Mortimer 2018 film, The Dawn Wall, has plenty of jaw-dropping moments of awe and is a thrill for those who love heights and for those who fear them, though it doesn't break any ground in documentary cinema - pretty standard techniques throughout with too much emphasis on talking heads - in what has become a mini-genre, the mountain-climber movie (the recent Meru was one of the best). That said: Aren't these movies always pretty good and worth watching (one of my household members says an emphatic: Yes!). And I have to say that the saga of Timmy Caldwell is one of the best: He's a kid who grew up w/ learning difficulties and w/ a loving dad but one who pushed him to extremes from the earliest age and, fortunately, instead of growing up in rebellion fell in love with rock climbing and by teenage years totally excelled (and dad never became too pushy of too invested in his son's life). Timmy became obsessed with completing unique climb up the wall of El Cap (Yosemite), and the film centers on that climb - and gives us a great sense of the extraordinary difficulty of some of the 32 "pitches" en route to the summit. We get a really intimate view of the struggles of Caldwell and his much less experienced climbing partner (Kevin Jorgeson) as somehow the filmmakers followed them closely throughout the challenge (there's no info on how they shot this film - which is good; the film isn't about itself). Moreover, Caldwell has a fascinating back story, involving an ill-fated climb with his then-girlfriend and a climbing partner, in Krygyzstan, during which they were assaulted and captured by a team of rebel soldiers. So there's plenty of great material in this film, and it's especially worth watching for those who like documentary films that take us for 2 hours to places we'd never go in a million years.

An quirky search-for-the-truth documentary about a missing film: Shirkers

Sandi Tan's 2018 documentary, Shirkers, gets off to a bumpy start but by the end catches us up in its pathos and humor. Tan narrates the story of her life as a filmmaker, centered on the creation and then the mysterious loss of a film she and some friends produced when they were college students, the eponymous Shirkers. ST, now about 40 years old, grew up in Singapore, where she and 2 girlfriends were into punk, alternative rock, world cinema, and all forms of creative expression; there are and were kids like them in every single school in the U.S., but in Singapore they were complete outliers. Pursuing their mutual interest in film, they took a course in what looks to be some kind of community school, a class led by a 30ish man, Georges Cardona, who turns out to be strange to say the least. The 2 young women leave Singapore for first year of college - 2 to the US and Tan to England - and continue communications w/ Cardona (he primarily sends odd tape recordings of his brief messages to them rather than calls, cards, letters); he encourages the 3 to return to Singapore for the summer to make a movie. Tan writes a screenplay that everyone raves about; at this point her film looks to be incredibly disorganized and amateurish, but they get enough money to spend the whole summer shooting. They all return to school in the fall, leaving the film - about 70 "cans" - with Cardona to edit. And that's the last they see of the film - Cardona disappears along w/ all the video and audio. I won't provide any spoilers; however, I'll say that up to this point in the film - a bit more than halfway in - I was disappointed: Cardona is such an obvious phony and pathological liar, perhaps even a predator, that it was hard to believe these young women were so trusting in him. And the film they were working on looked to be a disaster - perhaps it was best that they just move on. The 2nd half of Shirkers, however, really picked up my interest, as Tan in particular tries to sleuth out what happened to Cardona and to the film. Without divulging anything, I'll say only that it's nice at the end to see where the 3 filmmakers are today and how much - or how little - they've changed over the years. This documentary will recall in some way other search-for-the-truth dox such as Searching for Sugar Man; I don't see this film as a likely commercial success - a little too quirky for that - but it's worth a look.

Why to watch Orson Welles's final film - and why not to

We shoujld be grateful to Nettflix for bringing us the finished version of Orson Welles's final movie, The Other Side of the Wind, which remained incomplete when he died in 1985 - leaving behind about 100 hours of footage, shot in various formats (some full screen 35mm, some square forma - maybe Super8?, some b/w, some color) - with a few edited segments, many notes, but far from coherent. He never was able to get full backing that would have enabled him to complete the film within a set time-frame and budget - typical of his late films, which were always hanging on by a threat and filmed over a too-long span of time - and the footage sat in various vaults and warehouses in Europe until a few years ago. The job of putting this together was heroic, with many obstacles - including transfer from celluloid to digital - but the team has at least created a reasonably coherent 2-hour film. But is it any good? I would say it's a curiosity worth watching because of what it shows us about Welles, but conceptually the film is a huge ego trip that's willfully disorienting and deliberately obscure. In brief, the movie tells the story of an aging director celebrating his 70th bd with a crowd of acolytes, hangers-on, and a host of media invited into the house director (played by John Huston, clearly meant to be a stand-in for OW) to document the celebration and to screen a cut of his latest film project - a film within the film. The evening comes to a tragic end - which we learn of at the outset; much as we might (or might not) love OW, there's nothing lovable about the overbearing, gruff character at the center of this film, much less about his swarm of parasites and acolytes and exes. That said, on the plus side this film is like an anthology of OW's innovative and groundbreaking directorial style or styles: The unusual shooting angles, many from the ground up, that we know from Citizen Kane, the strange effect of bright illumination in dark rooms and spaces that we've seen in Chimes at Midnight, the quick cuts in the editing - assuming the editors of this final version emulated OW's technique in the scenes he'd completed - so that the camera never lingers on any one character or moment, which recalls the above-mentioned films and also Mr. Arkadin. This directorial abundance is worth watching, even studying, as least for a while, though eventually most will agree that all this technique is in service to no good end. The "film within a film" is dreadful (maybe it's supposed to be?), a near-pornographic film that looks like a bad music video from the 90s (so maybe OW was ahead of his time once again, but it's a time well forgotten); the screenplay at times impenetrable. It's no wonder he could get no financial backing for this film as it had flop written all over it - which makes us wonder about the director's blathering about the decline of taste and the ever-lower standards of the movie biz. So, yeah, it's worth seeing for technique alone and for historical value, but I doubt anyone will want to rank this among other Welles classics. Sometimes, an artist's days are done.

Homecoming will hold your interest despite some of its flaws

The Blooomberg/Horowitz/Esmail 10-part series Homecoming, on Amazon Prime is a mixed bag, w/ some strong points in its favor and some deep flaws as well. The story, briefly, involves a social worker/therapist, Julia Roberts, working in a DOD-financed program to help returning war vets overcome PTSD and transition into society. OK, but we see right away that this project is deeply flawed and completely sinister, in ways that we don't comprehend fully until the conclusion of the series. Her supervisor, running the program from afar - all by cell phone while he engages in various sybaritic activities - is played by a hilarious Bobby Cannevale, who brings a lot to the show. On the plus side, the creators to a fine job w/ the plot strands, doling out information in pieces and letting the picture in stages come into focus; this works bcz JR herself is unclear about the program and its true intent. The show is done half in the "present" - a few years after the program was shut down, and w/  JR working in a crappy job in a diner - and half in the he past, when JR was a well-groomed, devoted social worker involved in a good cause, with particular focus on one returning vet and their completely inappropriate flirtation (the use of different frame dimensions - portrait-frame for the present and wide-screen landscape for the past, was visually distracting and not even used consistently). JR once again shows she's a fine and resourceful actor, able to show a range of emotion. It's obvious why they cast her in the role - star power mega! and prestige for streaming and TV - but she is perhaps 20 years too old from the role (to everyone's credit, they do not make her "glam"). No spoilers here, but the ending had a nice twist that surprised at least me; that said, toward the end there's a lot of schmaltz and improbability re the relation between JR and her patient. I personally do not see how they can use this material for a second season; it would be nice if they quite while they're (mostly) ahead. I will also endorse the comments of a NYT TV critic who gave thumbs-up for a drama series using 30-minute episodes - a rarity, and a welcomed change for pace.

A 1940s melodrama that rises above the level of the genre to examine issue of unwanted pregnancy

Ida Lupino's 1949 melodrama, Not Wanted (she isn't credited on all sources as director because she took up the reins when the original director became ill), is a deceptively powerful work that in some ways goes beyond the conventions of its time and of its genre. The film shows us the plight of a 19-year-old woman (Sally) who has a difficult home life with an overbearing mother, she starts to date a jazz/classical pianist who wants to break out of his life playing in local saloons and clubs; they have a brief (one-night?) relationship and he leaves for "Capital City." Completely misreading his supposed affection, Sally follows and is immediately rebuffed: He wants to get on w/ his career and has no use for her. Meanwhile she meets another guy, a sweet and very dull injured war vet, who pursues her avidly - but as these things happen, she's not that into him. (In a twist that makes us squirm today, he gives her a job in his gas station, then pressures her to go out w/ him. Good thing he's such as "square," as they used to say.) To this point, the movie's a straightforward melodrama, with a ridiculous, swelling soundtrack and with many stagey and stilted one-on-one scenes. The movie takes twist, however (is this where Lupino took over?) as Sally discovers she's pregnant - a pretty cool scene of her passing out at a small amusement park leads to their calling a doctor - and from this point forward the movie has almost a documentary feeling, exploring the issue of "unwanted" pregnancy (the title is a clever double-entendre) and the unfairness of the woman's plight. More fortunate than some, Sally gets taken in by a have for expectant single mothers, a very caring environment, but she's faced with the terrifying decision as to whether to keep and raise her child. The birth scene at the hospital is terrific - all filmed from the mother's semi-conscious point of view - and then the scenes of Sally post partum, working a menial job, living in a tough neighborhood, drawn to all the children that she sees playing on the sidwalks and "stoops," is really powerful, culminating in her snatching up a baby from an untended carriage. As a brief note in current New Yorker pointed out, the film concludes w/ some fine scenes of 1940s LA (Angel Steps, I think) as Sally races away, pursued by would-be "square" suitor; I don't know why the film didn't acknowledge the LA setting, would have made it more real rather than faux-universal (Capital City??); the ending, which some might see as "happy," has enough ambiguity and uncertainty to balance out the occasional schmaltz that seems inevitable for a melodrama from the 1940s. (Note to Amazon Prime: for some reason the left-side stereo channel dies in the final "reel" of the film.)

Why The Salesman deserved its Best Foreign Film award

Asghar Fahradi's 2106 film, The Salesman, is completely deserving of its Best Foreign Film Oscar - a highly literate and well acted film start to finish, the kind that we see more and more coming from Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, Iran, and South Korea - and less and less from the U.S., sad to say. In brief, the film is about an 30-something couple in Tehran (I think); the man teaches literature in an all-male high school (the students are delightfully inquisitive and rambunctious; the classroom scene near the top of the film is a delight) and both husband and wife are actors by night, in a lead roles in a translated version for A Miller's Death of a Salesman. Over time, we see how the plot of this movie reflects on the plight of the characters in the play - but Farhadi is subtle about the point, with the strands not coming together till the last scenes. The essence of the plot is that the teacher's wife and co-star is assaulted by an intruder in their new, somewhat sketchy apartment and the man's search for the perpetrator, which leads him, and the film itself, in some completely unexpected directions. Ultimately, he becomes a man in crisis, torn by different forces - anger, fear, protectiveness, masculine pride - to make a moral and ethical decision. The pace of the movie is steady and unrelenting, keeping us thinking and engaged at every moment; we also get a rare view into cultural life in contemporary Iran - who would think that actors are performing Arthur Miller plays of all things? Fahradi hints at the heavy hand of the government - the actors have to wait for approval before staging the play, and they're concerned that some scenes or passages may be cut  but he doesn't belabor the point; people seem free to live their own lives of quiet desperation, just as in any Western city (save for the required head-dresses and all-concealing robes for the women - which of course gives the assault, which takes place in a bathroom shower, more poignancy and emotional weight for both wife and husband). The film is worth seeing both as a cultural document and as a highly intelligent and cinematic drama.

Lubitsh's Shope Around the Corner shows what Hollyood could achieve - and ignore

Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 film, The Shop Around the Corner, a Hollywood studio comedy-drama based on a Hungarian play an set in Hungary ca 1930 or so is obviously dated but still worth watching of for nothing else for the fantastic first "reel," in which EL brilliantly establishes the culture of 6 employees and an irascible boss in a little high-end gift shop on a busy city street - a world of employee loyalty and dependence, of personal shopping and retail commerce that was probably already near extinction, at least in the U.S., at the time of filming - and with a special poignancy added by the European setting, as that world was already under siege and about to change forever - although there are no elements that reference or even foreshadow then-contemporary unease in Europe and the world. EL - known for what has been called the Lubitsch Touch - uses great camera angles and fluid motion, terrific period settings (right down to the luggage and leather goods in the showroom, the dreary back rooms where the staff congregate, the filigreed cash register itself a monument to commerce long gone, and in later scenes a gemutlich coffee house w/ a live band of all things. The action is crisp, the dialog entertaining and even LOL funny, and the characters quickly established, most notably Jimmy Steward and Margaret Sullivan as a Benedick-Beatrice romantic couple who despise each other until they discover their love. OK, but after the first hour or so every viewer in the world can see exactly where the drama is headed - and eventually I didn't care to see how EL unwinds all the strands and I turned it off 20 minutes shy of the ending and I don't think I missed a thing. It's a great piece of craftsmanship, some fine and funny acting among the leads and among the various "types" that work at the store, but overall it's a period piece and a curiosity, worth watching, at least up to a point: It shows us what Hollywood (esp the refugee directors) could achieve, as well as what they could ignore.

Among the most intense of thrillers on Netflix, with no gratuitous violence - The Bodyguard

The BBC One six-part series, Jed Mercurio's The Bodyguard (Season 1) is about as intense and compelling as any short series that's come across from Netflix in the past several years, ranking alongside Fauda I would say: a tense and tight plot with many strands and many surprising twists and a few of the most tense scenes ever involving suicide bombs and assassination attempts. The entire cast, led by Richard Madden as a special agent in the UK counterpart to the U.S. Secret Service, assigned to cover and protect the Home Secretary Keeley Hawes) , an extremely controversial figure because of her support for the war in Afghanistan and because she's a potential rival to the PM. Somehow the team of creators manages to tie in many themes and they all cohere and make sense: terrorists from radical Islam, the criminal underworld in London, turf rivalries among the various police and protective services, political rivalries between various ministers and members of Parliament, PTSD among war veterans, intra-office rivalries among various aides and underlings, family drama, and top-secret love affairs involving some of the principals - and maybe more. To be honest, some of the plot twists are hard to follow, at least for an American viewer, as some knowledge of the UK cabinet and protective agencies is presumed - and the variety of accents is a challenge as well (In the final episode, we resorted to closed caption, which did help), but you always get the drift of the story line and the key points and issues, many of which remain open mysteries until the conclusion. The tension in the first and final episodes is almost unbearable - and to its credit this series, unlike so many other European dramas that have made their way to Netflix, does not try to be sensational or shocking through use of gore, mayhem, gruesome injuries, or gratuitous violence. It's a narrative driven by plot and character, and definitely should be on the must-see list; and, yes, the door is left slightly open for a Season 2.

A 3rd great film from Romanian director Cristoph Mangiu

The Romanian director Cristian Mungiu now has three fine movies available for English-language viewers, the most recent being Graduation (2016), on Netflix. If you want films with action, thrills, A-list stars, and a powerful score, he is definitely not the director for you; but his films all have a high literary and dramatic value, powerful and well-crafted plots that focus on ordinary people facing and confronting real crises, an incisive look at contemporary life in present-day Eastern Europe, great pacing, subtle editing, and terrific use of ambient sound throughout - each a masterpiece (the others: 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days; Beyond the Hills) in its way, making me think that someday he (like the Dardenne brothers) should be considered for a Nobel prize (why Bergman never got one is yet another Nobel committee disgrace). Graduation centers a middle-aged doctor in a loveless marriage (he sleeps every night on the couch; his wife seems to be ill in some manner not explained, and is a constant smoker); their daughter is about to finish high school and mus pass some rigorous finals to receive a scholarship to study in Cambridge. The father (Romeo is his name!) is obviously over-involved and over-identified with his daughter's success; as he explains to her in one of the many powerful scenes, he and his wife have sacrificed so that their daughter can have more opportunities in life - even if it means she will be far from them. En route to final days of class, the daughter is attacked by a man who attempts to rape her - or so she says, though there are some ambiguities and discrepancies in her report. The father worries that she will perform poorly on her exam, and sets about trying to get her some accommodations; ultimately he pulls strings and sets it up so that her test booklet will be "pulled" and she will get a pass. This bit of corruption - and we see throughout that life in this culture constantly involves payments and payoffs and favors earned and returned - leads to various family crises, arguments, and threats that test the moral fiber of everyone, especially the father/doctor. The whole narrative unfolds as a series of scene, most of them involving just 2 speakers, seen in long-take closeups - the power of this film comes not from is showmanship but from the language and the gradually building tension around a man in crisis, almost like an Ibsen or Chekhov play. Not for every taste, but Graduation is by any measure a great film.

Why not to watch Godard's Every Man for Himself

I've watched all but the alst 10 minutes of Godard's 1980 film, Every Man for Himself (Sauve Qui Peut), and probably won't watch the final segment, "thanks" to the Filmstruck decision to end its services (which has probably led to thousands of subscribers jamming the streaming service yesterday - I was unable to connect), but that's no great loss. This movie at one time drew a lot of attention as the "rebirth" of Godard's career, and it still may draw attention in that one of the stars is a young and beautiful Isabelle Hupert - but really the film today seems sadly dated (jammed up with postmodern trickery, such as disconnected narrative strands, actors cast in roles using their actual first names, a lead character called Godard, which I don't think is Godard himself but who knows?, I'll look it up)and by today's measures even offensive. Godard was and still is a radical progressive, and part of what he wants to document here I think is the oppression of women, but in doing so he comes dangerously close, too close, to exploitation himself: Isabelle, for example, plays a high-end prostitute, which actually has the effect of glorifying the profession, and in one long segment she and another woman are put in various humiliating postures by the man who hires them; the scene verges on humor at few points, as the various participants, on the patron's orders, make a chorus of grunting and gasping noises - but it we take this kind of scene serious at all, and there are others across this film, the effect is one of treating a really nasty and horrible guy with benign neglect or even sympathy. Other strands of the film make no sense to me at all, including a painful scene in which a girls' soccer coach expresses to the dad of one of his players he desires to have sex with the teenage players - and dad nods dispassionately. Come on! This is not the world we live in, even in 1980, even in France. There may be some lame attempts to ascribe these bizarre attitudes as the result of living in a capitalist society, etc. - but to me those are cheap assertions, unfounded and not validated. Maybe I'm missing something, maybe I'm missing the whole point, but to me it's a film gone awry that scores political points in unsubtle ways while missing the obvious.

A Soviet filmmamker's vision of future space exploration

Tarkovsky’s 1972 sci-fi epic, Solaris, takes a long time to get in gear but eventually it get ahold of you as you become gradually aware that it’s not only a drama about space exploration but also about what makes us human. In short, a psychologist sometime in the far future is sent to a space station in a distant galaxy now down to a crew of three (initially it appears it had a crew of hundreds) to see if the mission - observation of a planetary ocean that seemed to teem w life forms - should terminate. When he arrives he learns that one of the three had committed suicide w a warning that anyone on the station would be likely to suffer intolerable hallucinations. The man envisions the appearance of his late wife - but learns she is an inhuman specter generated by the oceanic life force. He decides he would live w her and love her even knowing she is inhuman - and we can see that this concept was foundational to other works, notably the great Battlestar Gallactica. So this is a movie w weird and provocative ideas, and it’s also fun to watch to see how Russians in the 1970s envisioned future space exploration: the donut shaped space station looks kind of like an unsuccessful disco club w cheap crystal decor and vinyl wall coverings, and no one imagined the miniaturization of technology, as there are hundred of red computers that look like 1970s boom boxes lining the central corridor (plus a hilarious attempt to re-create a British-style library and reading room. Some beautiful photography throughout, notably a drive along Russian highways into the night and 30 second of weightlessness aboard the station - plus many provocative discussions among the stressed and maybe unbalanced remaining members of the crew, the psychologist, and his “wife,” human, hardly human.


(Note: Failure in transmission yesterday, posted today

M. Night Shyamalan can do better than this

M. Night Shyamalan has to his credit one of the best films of the past 25 or so years, Sixth Sense, and he's been trying to replicate the success and originality of that debut feature ever since, and more credit to him! I love that he works independently, that he sets all (I think) of his movies in or near his home (Philadelphia) and shoots them on location, and most important that all of his films have high ambitions and aspirations, some achieved more successfully than others. His 2016 film, Split, is not one of his most successful, although it has some merit. The film is ostensibly a crime/horror/suspense vehicle, centering on a man who has multiple (or split) personality, known in the medical world as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). This character - actually, 24 characters - is portrayed with skill by James McAvoy, who seamlessly shifts from one "voice" to another throughout the film. The plot - and this is problematic - gets underway when McAvoy abducts 3 teenage girls, one of whom has her own significant psychological problems, and holds the captive in an underground warren of locked rooms. It's important to note right off the top that those suffering w/ DID are not monsters and predators, and it's a real disservice to those w/ this malady to suggest that they are a danger to others. That said, MNS does capture some aspects of the illness effectively, in particular in scenes w/ McAvoy's therapist - although the therapist herself makes some serious misjudgments over the course of the film. There have been plenty of other shows about DID - notably, Sybil (a classic) and The United States of Tara, both of which were quite sensitive the nuances of the illness. MNS follow a different course and makes this a film of crime and terror - yet another of the young woman held captive genre (e.g, Lovely Bones, Room) - do we really need another? About 2/3 of the way through the film MNS seems to shift gears altogether and to focus on an identity that has not yet emerged - The Beast; the therapist believes that those w/ DID can actually change their bodies to conform to the adopted personality, and one of McAvoy's identities is a bestial, flesh-eating monster. When that ID emerges, the movie slips into the horror genre, and at the end (spoiler) we're left with dead girls, dead therapist, and a monster on the loose - heading toward a sequel, and toward a thoroughly unsympathetic and unrealistic portrayal of those suffering w/ mental illness. MNS can do better than this.

Possibly the most loathsome and inane movie ever: Mother!

There may be some but it's hard to imagine a movie more loathsome and inane than Darren Aronovsky's Mother! (2017). After a few odd and pretentious shots of what look like amoeba the movie settles into its gothic mode. A recently married couple - Jennifer Lawrence and her much older husband, Javier Bardem - are living in a - Surprise! - rundown Victorian mansion. JL is heavily engaged in restoring the building while Bardem is a poet suffering from "writer's block." Poor soul. Someone knocks on the door - Ed Harris! - seems to be lost, they invite him in, and Bardem asks him to stay the night. Trouble brewing - esp when his wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) shows up the next day and the two of them trample through the house, breaking not only the house rules (no smoking!) but Bardem's valuable and fragile crystal. Then their sons show up, get into a fight about their inheritance, one kills the other in a brawl - and the next day the whole family shows up for the funeral. Through all of this Lawrence steams and stews and does nothing while Bardem keeps saying these people are great, they have nowhere else to turn, etc. In other words this makes no sense whatsoever, and isn't even a touch frightening: Its like a Bunuel film, without the humor and without the social commentary. Finally everyone clears out, JL and JB fight, then have sex and: Writer's block cured! He writes in a flurry (using longhand - and btw he never has a word to say about his poetry or about anything else having remotely to do w/ literature). We jump forward, JL is pregnant, JB has finished his book - she tells him, with tears in her eyes, that it's beautiful - and further jump in time and the book is published - and first printing sells out immediately. Crowds of admirers show up, at first seeking autographs and photos, eventually overrunning the house and wrecking it - to the sounds of much screaming, yelling, explosions, and an explosive soundtrack - leading up to a dramatic conclusion - I guess you could call this a spoiler - in which JL gives birth and the crowd of idolators consume the flesh of the baby. I can imagine nothing more repulsive than this. Apparently it's been said that JL represents "Mother Earth" and that the horde of invaders and intruders represent our neglect of our Earth and our environment. OK, so what's the point? There's nothing remotely in this movie that helps us think about the destruction of the environment, much less what to do about that. First of all, I guess: Don't let intruders into your home and when they start to piss on the floor make them leave! (There are hundreds of intruder movies, none as bad as this; a good one recently was Funny Games, btw.) Second, don't marry a poet. And what is it w/ movies about poets - they not only have no idea how poets work (not in fits of inspiration), they seem to think poets attract legions of followers. They don't; a slightly more credible story line might have had JB as an aging rock star. I can only begin to tell you how annoying the photo editing - cuts and reverses every five seconds or so - and dialog are. Throughout the movie, Bardem leaned toward Lawrence, or toward the camera, with a goofy smile on his face. Did he recognize that this film was ludicrous and malevolent? Didn't everyone?

What The Wife gets right, and wrong

Glenn Close is as always terrific in the title role in Bjorn Runge's adaptation of the Meg Wolitzer novel, The Wife, and I have to say I liked this movie more than I thought I would - a tremendously acute and, sad to say, credible portrait of a marriage in distress, with the husband (Jonathan Pryce) playing a famous novelist, Joe Castleman, who has just won a Nobel Prize and who is from the first moment an insufferable egotist and bully, and with Close as the resentful, perhaps jealous, and cranky spouse. But what the film gets right about marital dynamics it gets wrong regarding literature and publishing. Spoilers coming, though they're hardly meant to be stunning surprises, as we can easily see, thanks largely to the flashback scenes, where this narrative is headed: Over time we learn that Joan, not Joe, Castleman has actually written all the novels that have brought Joe the highest level of acclaim and brought both of them a lot of wealth and comfort. How did this come to pass? We see early on that Joan, back in college (Smith, 1958) was told that it would be pointless for her to become a writer, as no woman writer could expect to succeed. Even in 1958, that was ridiculous advice; aside from the challenge that any writer of serious literature had and will always have in getting published and getting a readership, there were plenty of highly successful women writers throughout the 20th century: Cather, Wharton, O'Connor. Welty, McCarthy - just to name a few Americans, and even more in England. Joe - who leaves his teaching post when they marry and move to NYC - is deemed the writer; when he completes the ms of his first novel, she reads it, tells him point blank it "doesn't work," and claims she can "fix it." That in itself is absurd, unless all the ms needs is some heavy editing. Nevertheless, she "fixes" his novel, and it launches his career. The narrative waffles a little on exactly her role: are they writing  partners (his experiences of life in a Jewish immigrant family - aspects of Saul Bellow and maybe Philip Roth here?) or, as suggested later in the film, does she literally do all of the writing, with Joe playing the role of supportive spouse, making tea, backrubs etc. You can only imagine the absurdity of that. No one knows? And why would she keep up this sham? I can imagine it if they were writing some kind of genre fiction - crime novels, for ex. - but even then, why not a pseudonym, or joint authorship? But I can't imagine this for a second at the Nobel level. OK, all that said, the tension in the movie, such as it is, involves an eager literary biographer who figures out the truth and threatens to reveal it all in his book on Castleman. In a final scene, Close threatens him with a lawsuit if he "maligns" Castleman "in any way." Wrong! Any writer would know this is a baseless threat in the U.S., as we still have this thing called the First Amendment that protects freedom of speech and expression.

Reasons to watch the Senegalese film Hyenas

Djibil Diop Mombety, the Senegalese director, made only two full-length films, Touki Bouki (qv) and Hyenas (1992) - both worth seeing. Hyenas closely adheres to its source, the play The Visit by the Swiss writer, Frederic Durenmatt; the visit, naturally, takes place in Europe (most of it in a train station - in fact the last production I saw of The Visit was staged in an abandoned train station!); DDM transposed the drama seamlessly to a small, remote town in the dusty and sandy landscape of Senegal. He also cast himself in the lead role, which is generally not a good decision - he's the strongest actor in the cast, but he seems indifferent to the performances of others, who routinely speak in a declarative mode. That said, the film offers a lot. The story line is that the villagers await the arrival of a woman who'd left town in her youth and is returning as a rich woman; on arrival, she promises bountiful endowment to this dying town, but on the condition that the only shopowner - the Mayor-to-be, played by DDM - be executed: He had disowned her in their youth when she became pregnant, leading to her leave the town and take up life in the city (Dakar?) as a prostitute. Faced with this choice, the people of the village turn on the shop owner and become weirdly fixated on goods and appliances and various riches - from cars to sneakers to cigarette brands. It's a story about how money corrupts (the title refers to the transformation of a community into a group of predators and carnivores), and in particular how $ corrupts politics and civic life - a theme that surely resonates today. The highlight of the film are some terrific open-air scenes show on the dusty, nearly deserted landscape - fully evocative of extreme poverty and isolation - and a terrific soundtrack start to finish.

A reasonably entertaing series that requires extreme willing suspension of disbelief

On the one hand I did watch all 8 episodes of season one of The Sinner, a Jessica Biel showcase on USA/Netflix, but one the other hand I wonder why I did. JB does a good job in the lead role and sheds more tears than Naiobe and I liked the small, upstate town setting (I wish tho they'd name s and use different a real location e.g. Amsterdam or Poughkeepsie NY). Story line is that JB kills a man seemingly unknown to her in an unexplained fit of anger when she encounters him on a beach. She is charged w murder, and a detective, played by bill Pullman, convinced she must have had a motive that could explain this sudden act of violence, begins working w her to investigate. Over time he figures out that she suffered a trauma that caused her to forget a period of her life and the sudden appearance of the victim triggered her memories and her action. Ok, but a unfortunately most of the series involves her recovering her memory piece by piece until the final twist at the conclusion. So the series isn't about an investigation so much as about her recovered memory; the memories she uncovers fill in her back story, but there is no drama - these memories are dragged out slowly seemingly to fit the need of the screenwriters rather than to develop character. Worse, so many aspects of this series are wildly improbable or completely ignorant of legal procedures. For ex., no woman in her circumstances would be forced by a judge to enter a binding plea with only minimal help from counsel. Similarly, without divulging anything here, to accept the resolution you have to believe that a middle age couple would never report to police the sudden disappearance of their two daughters, one of whom was gravely ill. Other examples abound.  In short, a reasonably entertaining series but without anywhere near the drama or verisimilitude of most feature films or many police procedural series, such as the recent The Night Of.

Can making a film chnage minds and ideas? A documentary and experiment in race relations

Jean Rouch - anthropologist (with a particular interest in French ex-colonies in Africa) and filmmaker (and co-director of Chronicle of A Summer, qv) - filmed The Human Pyramid 1961 as a bold experiment in form and culture. He went to a mixed-race high school in the Ivory Coast and enlisted the students in one class in his project: They would create and direct a film about race relations; he would assign them roles - for ex., one of the black students was assigned to argue against fraternizing w/ whites - and they would play out the roles and develop a narrative and a film. The film they develop - it seems that they had a loose idea of where each scene was heading, but the dialog is always improvised on the spot - begins when one of the white students approaches the African students and suggests the two groups get to know one another; this leads to internal arguments in each group as to whether that is a good idea, or if the whites are patronizing, etc. Over time - the film seems to take place over maybe half a school year? - the groups begin to socialize, some friendships form, there are some interracial couples, leading to arguments and jealousy, there are a few social gatherings - dances and parties - and ultimately there's a fight between rival suitors. (A final scene was apparently staged by Rouch w/out student input, to test their reactions to the supposed death of a student - how this worked was unclear to me.) At the end, there's a little discussion about the project among the students at a screening, and a final shot of 4 of the students, seeming to be good buddies, on a street in Paris. The film is engaging and provocative - especially when the students get in some very heated discussions about Apartheid - but I think it did need a little more context. We don't have a sense as to what students truly thought about one another before them film nor whether the film actually changed attitudes and ideas; I expect it did, but before and after interviews might have helped (Rouch seems to have realized this, too - as his famous Summer Chronicle does including follow-up interview w/ key participants, to great effect).

Can anyone understand the ending of The Shooting?

The Monte Hellman (screenplay by Carole Eastman, of Five Easy Pieces) 1971 movie, The Shooting, is a strange and moody Western, all of it shot among the deserts, mountains, and bluffs of the far west, probably mean to be Nevada mining territory, and completely focused on 4 characters: Two miners, one of whom is a good trail guide and the other who is almost like a child in his naivete, a beautiful young woman who shows up out of nowhere and hires the men to guide her across the desert, and a malevolent hired gunman (played by Jack Nicholson), who turns up about halfway through. It's tightly scripted - almost like a domestic drama - and full of tension and mystery; we're pretty sure that the woman hired the men so that she could pursue and presumably kill a man (a friend of the miners) who may have harmed or killed her child - but this is all left vague and unresolved. It's entirely a film about mood, and it has many fearful moments, especially as supplies dwindle and they're faced with decisions about who to leave behind. The landscape is always terrifying and beautiful, and you can't help but think about how the actors, in their heavy Western outfits, must have suffered through much of the filming. All that said, the ambiguous ending completely eluded, and even after a re-watch I still have no idea who shot whom; ambiguity can be great, but filmmakers ought to at least throw a lifeline to their viewers. It's a film worth seeing, but having done so, I can see why it was a career backward-step for Nicholson and a dud with audiences.

An OK romance drama from the UK, but with a ridiculous title

Aside from its utterly ridiculous title - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - which makes it sound like one of those silly, concocted books - e.g Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants - the Netflix movie v of the bi-authored novel is at least pretty good as a romance drama, pretty good because, well, you can see where the romance is heading from minute #1, but better than average because of its unusual wartime setting. Yes, it's about the 1 millionth British movie set during World War II and the bombing of London (does anyone else find it astonishing how important that era is, still, to British writers and filmmakers, now about 75 years later?), but it has the unusual twist of being largely set on the island of Guernsey, which, apparently, was over-run and completely controlled by the Nazi forces, who brought in war prisoners to do all the dirty work (construction of ugly lookout towers, still standing apparently), seized property, enforced curfews and bans on assembly, and deported resistors to prison camps in Germany. So we get a romance set against this background in the immediate post-war years. Basic story line is that a beautiful, young, single (but engaged), author goes to the island at the request from a fan letter received from local pig farmer and while there begins an investigation of a deportation during the Occupation. The narrative is plot driving but somewhat mechanical, as the author, improbably, pieces together the story as one after another character speaks to her in confidence. The filmmakers bring to the fore all of the qualities we've come to expect from British film and TV: great landscape photography, incredible attention to period detail (including London street settings, buses, trains, cars, and even military transport planes), and really good acting. At risk of giving away what really should not be a surprise to any viewer, I think they took too many easy shots at the woman's crass and insensitive Yankee fiance, whom she, thankfully, throws over and moves in with the handsome, sensitive, even literary pig farmer. Possible? Maybe. Likely? No. Obvious? Way too.

Ozark may be the best cime miniseries since Breaking Bad

I'll be among the many to weigh in on the Netflix series Ozark, Season 2, and note that in my view it's become the best miniseries of its type (crime drama) since Breaking Bad (in fact the two miniseries share a number of elements: good guy gets involved w/ Rx to help his family, or so he thinks, and ends up putting everyone at risk). Like many, I was put off at first by the plot premise: Investment counselor/accountant gets drawn into working with a Latin drug cartel and forced to go on the lam w/ his family to try to make good on the demands of the cartel that he launder for them vast mounts of cash. Probable? hardly, except in movies. Possible, yes. And to its credit, the series - created and led by Jason Bateman in a fabulous performance - brings us in right away and gives sufficient background to help us see and understand that, yes, this would not happen to us but could happen to someone else. Season 2 does not miss a beat, further developing and building upon the events of Season 1 (tho we didn't do so, it might be helpful to re-watch Season 1 before starting #2) - while maintaining constant tension, keeping us guessing and thinking at every minute, constantly tightening the web of crime and conspiracy that is strangling the Byrd family, and building sympathy and understanding for all of the key characters and loathing toward some of the others). Aside from Bateman, Laura Linney gives a fabulous performance throughout the season, as Wendy Byrd (Bateman's wife) - in particular in the kidnap episode (#7 of 10) - but really throughout as she and Bateman in a sense gradually shift roles. And then can one say enough about Julia Garner's performance as Ruth, a tough as nails impoverished and uneducated woman who's smarter than everyone else and brave and loyal to her nephew and caught against her will in a terrible situation? You want to watch every scene that she's in and you root for her at every moment. In fact, there's not a single role that's miscast (though the actress playing daughter Charlotte Byrd is getting a little to old and mature for the role) and not an episode or scene that lagged.

Melville's French New Wave tribute to American noir

Like so many French movies from the New Wave era, Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (1967) owed a huge debt to American noir - and it pays off the debt as well. The title is a bit of a joke, as the central figure, Jef Costello, portrayed really well by Alan Delon, is not a Japanese feudal warrior, but he does share the morality or nonmorality rather of the Samurai: He is a hired killer, who can off someone just for the payout, without a shiver of fear and without emotion. We see him in the opening sequence set up an alibi, steal a car, enter a nightclub, and without flinching he shoots the owner in his office. Then the trouble begins: by coincidence, he's one of the suspects rounded up by the Paris police; a beautiful woman jazz piano player at the club witnessed him fleeing after the shooting, but she refuses to ID him to the police. When Delon goes to collect his pay, he gets shot in the arm - the team that hired him thinks he's double-crossing them. From that point we go on an elaborate chase and escape, some seen from Delon's POV and some from the police, as the police close in on him; throughout, he remains incredibly cool, and a highlight is a cat-and-mouse game as he eludes about 50 police officers pursuing him through the Metro (part of the fun of this film is getting a look at Paris in the '60s - many fewer cars, a lot more urban poverty, and the Metro pretty much the same). To be honest, the complex conclusion of this drama swept right by me; I never quite get who exactly hired Delon or why and have no idea of the role of the supercool (and living in luxury) jazz pianist, whom Delon confronts in the final sequence (I won't give anything away), but this movie isn't really about plot, it's about atmosphere, which Melville creates beautifully: the dark streets and long alleys, the seedy apartment, the excellent use of tracking shots through long scenes of investigation and interrogation, the contrast between the flashy nightclub and the grim world on the streets, and most of all the presence of Delon throughout, always in moxie, with his trenchcoat (he chases from beige to blue after he's shot in the arm), white dress shirt, cocked fedora.

Amazing cinematography in Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev

To best watch Tarkovsky's 1966 Soviet film, Andrei Rublev, it's best to give up any pretense of trying to follow a traditional plot or narration and just focus on what you're seeing on the screen: An amazing and beautiful series of scenes the re-create better than anything I've ever seen (only other possible contender may be Chimes at Midnight) the look and feel of what life must have been like in the 15th century. Loosely, the film follows the eponymous Andrei  - based on a real Russian painter of church icons - as he travels with a few companions - an older mentor, a protege, a woman he at times protects - across a forbidding landscape, bound for one church or another at which he will practice his art. The film is a series of discrete episodes, and the main characters are in some, not in others, and it really doesn't matter: Each scene is discrete and can be taken as such. We see an encounter w/ a jester or comedian (extremely strange) in a hut where many have gathered in shelter from the rain, at attack by Tartar fighters and some Russian allies on a small city - an incredible re-creation of a battle scene, with unfortunately much abuse of animals, a scene in a churchyard (at which time Andrei has taken a vow of silence and is giving up his art), a long sequence about the fabrication of a bell for a church steeple, in which Tarkovsky directs probably thousands of extras, each in period dress and engaged in some aspect of the communal work - like a Bruegel painting, though all in muted gray tones, and at the conclusion an intimate look at Rublev's work (not sure if these are truly his icons or representative other icons of the period), all of which are painted on damaged or rotting wood panels in churches that are in near ruin (some amazing cinematic feats here, which I won't spoil or give away). We can see why the Soviets immediately suppressed this film, not because the religious overtones (easy to dismiss those as ancient relics) but the implication that a group of rebels can attack a city and toppled the government, the depiction of an artist remaining devoted to his craft in the face of official opposition, and the glorification of the individual hero or creator without even a hint of social realism of collective identity (except maybe in the community involvement in construction of the church).

An intelligent documentary about war photography

The Netflix 3-part series Five Came Back is an examination of the role movies, and prominent movie directors, played in creating propaganda films and documentaries at the outset and throughout World War II, with particular focus on the lives, contributions, and finally postwar careers of 5: Capra, Ford, Huston, and Stevens, Wyler. The footage, raw and completed, is great, as are the accounts of the challenges and risks of wartime photography: accompanying crews on bombing runs and in airfights, joining the forces to capture the first landings on D-Day, and of course the famous footage of the first revelations about Dachau. Some of the footage was too sensitive ever to produce and remained for years in vaults; military leaders were concerned about showing the carnage of war. That said, the military was quite progressive in recognizing the way in which documentary movies could inspire patriotism, valor, and sacrifice - and the film recognizes that the American military learned from the success of the hideous films of Refenstahler that inspired Germans before the war. Some of the most interesting material in this documentary showed the postwar work of these directors, who clearly became more profound and serious in their work following the war - the experience changed them at the core, leading to such films as The Best Years of Our Lives (directly about the struggles of returning soldiers) and what was apparently the first serious documentary about what we now call PTSD, a close examination of military veterans in a psychiatric facility. At times 5 Came Back is a little too celebratory - reminded me of some of the Oscar ceremony This is Hollywood clips - and there's probably too much use made of talking heads, although the directors (Spielberg, Coppola, et al) who comment on the war footage are top rank and have some intelligent observations and background info.

An excellent under-the-radar spy and social drama: The Same Sky

The Same Sky - a highly intelligent spy thriller from Germany - is one of the many Netflix imports that flies well below the radar; I saw it mentioned in an article, but I don't know anyone else who's seen it or even heard of it, which is a shame because it has a lot going for it. Set in 1974 (the Nixon impeachment comes up from time to time in the back story), the narrative focuses on a young East German agent sent into West Berlin as a "Romeo," that is, his assignment - closely monitored and controlled by his bosses - is to meet a woman target (she's working in a top-secret NATO surveillance center), engage her in romantic and sexual relationships, and pry out of her vital information about allied forces in Germany. In addition to this main story line, dramatic and disturbing as it is, we get a few secondary narratives - all of them clearly related and tied together closely by various family relationships, notably a teenage girl pressured into competition for the Olympic team from EG, which entails massive doses of illegal hormones, and a young h.s. teacher in East Berlin, who is gay and who hopes to begin a new life in the West, against all odds. Throughout, we see not only the spy story itself but we get a sense of the daily life in East Berlin, under the constant surveillance of the state, with families, workers, children kept under constant pressure to rat on one another and to toe the line. But the West is no utopia, either, and we actually have a sense of the nobility of those in EG who truly believe in a socialist rather than a capitalist state and economy - although holding fast to this belief become increasingly irrational and troubling over the course of the brief (6 episodes) season. At the end, all major characters are under stress and forced to question their beliefs and their relationships to one another, sexual, romantic, familiar, and otherwise. My only quibble is that 6 is not enough; many plot developments are far from resolved at the end of Season 1. Leaving some opening lines at the end of a season is fully expected, of course, but there is so much unresolved the end of this season it feels as if the narrative stopped in midcourse. (Maybe there are more episodes but just not read for English-language viewers?)

An experiment in documentary filmmaking: Chronicle of a Summer

Chronicle of a Summer (Paris 1960), directed by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, is considered a seminal work of "cinema verite," and w/ good reason - it's an unusual, experimental documentary, of course w/out actors, but also without conventional boundaries: we see not only the film that M&R are directing - a investigation into whether people in Paris at that moment in time consider themselves to be "happy" - but also we see the directors and crew planning the film, discussing the progress they're making along the way, and near the end we see those interviewed in the film gathered for a screening and then asked their opinions about the film - in which they're honest, finding some of the interviews (as did I) to be trivial and insincere - and finally we see the two directors in an ambulatory discussion about the project they've just completed - so there are many layers to this project, something much imitated in later movies and fiction from the '60s. As to the film itself, it begins w/ the hiring of a young woman (trained in sociology?) to help w/ interviews, and then we see her stopping people on a Paris street and asking "Are you happy?" Of course, she gets trivial responses and many brush-offs. Later we see longer sit-down interviews, though it's unclear how the directors chose their subjects (some seem to be their friends). As the French will do, we get much esoteric puzzling about what is happiness, plus some commentary on work and alienation - including some good footage inside a Renault plant. Other strands develop, including what all concur is the most powerful segment, two interviews w/ a young woman who's moved to Paris from Italy and feels frighteningly alone and alienated (Mary Lou, I think), plus one genre-breaking segment about the young woman helping w/ the film whom we learn had been imprisoned in a concentration camp - her story told in voice-over narration as we see shots of her walking near Concorde (Marceline, I think her name is). Viewers today will be struck by the apparent poverty rampant then in Paris - so few cars!, and no evidence of tourists, nor of lavish bistros, bars, shops (even in a sojourn to St Tropez). Though in its day the film was avant garde, oddly, today it feels like a time capsule.

Further thoughts on William Greaves and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm

Last night I watched an hour-long documentary on the direct William Greaves, which cleared up some of my confusion about his astonishing and unique documentary/drama, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. The documentary made it clear that Greaves had a lot of acting experience in his youth, including training at the famous Actors' Studio in NYC, where he was imbued with the technique of Stanislavski: Actors inhabit and create the characters; use of lots of improvisational exercises to learn the craft. Greaves walked away from a promising acting career and studied documentary film and became an extremely successful and appreciated documentary filmmaker, focusing primarily on various aspects of black life and culture in America (his work includes what may have been the first documentary bio on Muhammed Ali). All this before he began to shoot Symbio (in 1968). So with that background it's obvious that Greaves knew exactly what he was doing in shooting Symbio and all the directorial bumbling, the indirection, the unfamiliarity with equipment and with shooting protocols, the weird instructions to the actors, the lack of clear instruction to the crew - all this was an act, playing a role - with the goal of provoking the crew the bridle at the director, to express their doubts about his skill and about about the whole project, and to begin a mini-revolt against the project itself: 3 layers, in a sense, with Greaves at the center, playing the role of a director in over his head; the "actors" several man-woman duos of pro actors whom Greaves directs (or misdirects) in various readings of a lovers' dispute,\ (the script is intentionally bad) seemingly auditioning for a part in a movie to be; and the crew (not actors, just the actual team of photographers, production managers, sound and light, etc.) filming the project, itself in 3 layers, one filming the "actors" as if that's to be an end product in itself, the 2nd filming the making of this film, and the 3rd instructed to shoot anything of interest, including people passing by in Central Park. When Greaves pulls it together in the final edit, we have a film that like non other shows the filmmaking process and captures the anxieties and tensions among cast and crew.

A film (like none other) about the making of a film

William Greaves's quasi-feature/quasi-documentary from 11968, Symbiopschotaxiplasm: Take One (you know I had to look that title up to get the spelling!) is an experimental and unconventional film, to put it mildly, like no other film that I've ever seen and not a film that produced a host of imitators, either, but it will make you think and will open your eyes to some of the challenges of filmmaking, and it will make you laugh, too, at times - though, echoing Samuel Johnson on Paradise Lost, none I think will wish it longer. In essence, this is a documentary about the making of a film, sort of: Greaves and his crew, shooting en plein air in Central Park, run a series of actor couples through a short scripted scene involving a fight and a breakup (the movie focuses on one of the couples, a pair of pro actors who clearly dislike each other,  but we see I think 3 other "couples" take on the same scene briefly). As was common in the era, Greaves's directing is open and unobtrusive, encouraging the actors to "live the parts" and come up w/ their own dialog - again, a common drama-class exercise in the time and probably still. While one camera if filming the actors in a conventional manner, another, or sometimes 2 cameras, are shooting the production in progress - as well as some of the goings on in the park (a group of kids watching the filming, ambient noise from passing traffic, etc.). On one level, Greaves seems to be an incompetent director - confused about the production equipment and process, unclear in his instructions to cast and crew, completely weird in some of the instructions he gives (he asks one couple to sing their lines, to the befuddlement of the crew). But in other ways he's perhaps a genius, and we even at times wonder whether the whole scene is not really a documentary but scripted to look like one (I doubt it, but I had that thought at times). In fact, there are 2 long sequences in which the crew gathers to in what may be an apartment or hotel room to discuss the film-in-progress - Greaves, apparently, is not present (though the production manager says that someday audiences may watch this scene and surmise that Greaves is present off camera - which again I doubt) and some of them raise doubts about Greaves's competence while others defend his artistic vision - exactly the debate that viewers have watching the film today. Kind of amazing that Greaves kept these sequences in the final cut. Sure the sequence with the homeless man who'd been watching the shooting should be 1 minute, not 5 - but overall it's a film worth watching (once) as there's none other like it nor will there most likely ever be.