An engaging Western that breaks no new ground but will hold your interest

Scott Cooper's The Hostiles breaks no new ground as a Western, but it's an engaging and at times moving journey across familiar territory. Set in 1892 initially in NM, the film is about a U.S. soldier (Christian Bale) who is outspoken in his loathing of Native Americans ordered to lead a team of selected soldiers (one a West Point grad, one a rookie, one among the few black soldiers, et al) in escorting a Chayenne chief and some members of his family to their native grounds in Montana. You can probably guess whether Bale's racist attitudes will undergo transformation; you probably can't guess, though it's worth trying, who will survive the journey. In addition to some beautiful Western settings, Cooper provides plenty of adventure along the route and a few twists to the plot as well, including at the very end of the film (a twist I wish he'd left unknotted). Altogether a familiar story well told, clocking in at the what seems to be the new movie standard of 2:15. My only real quibble is that Cooper has a penchant for long, slow scenes in which the male characters speak in deep tones just barely above a mumble - made even more obscure in that many of them sport bushy frontier beards and thick mustaches. Sometimes these conversations involve key plot points that become almost impossible to discern. Show, don't tell - but if you must tell, speak clearly!

Despite its illogic, still worth seeing the first Coen Bros film

The Coen Bros first film (Joel director, both co-wrote), Blood Simple (1984), is a compulsively watchable crime story that is great on atmosphere, has some fine performances - including the breakout for a Texas-tough Frances McDormand - and a few hints at the Coen Brothers' style that would go on to serve them well in a varied career spanning +30 years. The plot is elementary: jealous husband/bar owner (played by Dan Hedaya - later a completely different character as the indelible dad in Clueless) hires a sleazy and weirdly comical private detective to kill his unfaithful wife (FMcD) and her boyfriend (Ray/John Getz, a bartender at husband's place). And things go awry, of course. The strength of the film lies in its look - some great, weirdly lit nighttime interior shots, lots of shards of broken glass shimmering like diamonds and blood like red putty, and great landscape scenes, especially on the roads of Texas at night, a burial in an agricultural field, men tossing huge bundles into a massive incinerator, to cite just a few examples that come to mind. The dark humor - the detective's goofy laughter at the most inappropriate moments, the desperate and over-the-top villainy of Hedaya, Getz's idiotic attempt to clean up a crime scene - all add to the out-of-whack atmosphere: this is no ordinary crime movie. That said, the closer you examine the plot the more ridiculous it seems, with its many glaring holes of logic and improbability. For one: Why would Ray try to clean the crime scene (he suspects his wife committed the shooting because he finds her pistol on the floor) rather than just dispose of the damn gun? Plus many others. But I won't give anything away or spoil the fun: for Coen fans especially, this is worth a look at see some smart filmmakers figuring things out and having a lot of fun, it seems.

The Shape of Water, a movie like none other

At his best Guillermo Del Toro has definitely earned a place as one of the top directors in the world today - first with Pan's Labyrinth, one of the best films of this century, and now w/ the multi-nominated Oscar contender The Shape of Water. This film is so unusual that no plot summary can do it justice; a movie about a young woman (Sally Hawkins - who was awesome a few years back in the comedy Happy-go-lucky), who is mute, who works in janitorial service at a highly classified defense plant and who lives alone w/ almost no social life, befriends a fantastical creature - a river god from South America - that is under study in a top-secret project at the defense plant and eventually, with the aid of her neighbor, a homosexual, alcoholic, failing commercial artist (Richard Jenkins) and a co-worker (Octavia Spencer), captures the creature, falls in love w/ him/it, has sex with him/it, and sets it free. The setting is ca 1960, deep in the "cold war," and a group of Russian infiltrators are also seeking to capture this sea creature. Enough? Sounds ridiculous, and of course it is ridiculous if taken literally, but whether you have a taste for fantasy in films or not (generally, I don't), there's no question that Del Toro realizes (makes real) every aspect of this haunting and unusual tale - through great attention to detail (the settings are weird, dreamlike) and through use of every facet of cinematography. In effect, he tells a story that can only be told on film - as purse a cinematic narrative as you'll ever see. On top of this, he gets fine performances from his leads (also including Michael Shannon as the heavy and the ubiquitous Stuhlberg as a Russian agent). Does this movie have everything we expect from a great picture? Maybe not quite - it's a little heavy-handed (the time period allows for some too-easy jabs at American apartheid of the era) and it's not exactly a laugh riot and some of the improbabilities, even w/in the world of fantasy - could a bathwater tap actually flood an entire bathroom, leaving the rest of the apartment in the dry?, could or would neighbors and co-workers learn sign language so readily? - strain credulity. All that said, it's a movie that falls w/in 2 genres - spy v spy and woman falls in love w/ "creature" (e,g., King Kong, the once well-known novel Mrs Prospero, by Rachel Ingalls) - and comes out as a complete original, perfectly capturing Del Toro's intent and vision, a movie like none other.

Why to watch The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Amy Sherman-Palladino's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Season 1, starring the great Rachel Brosnahan in the title role - who knew, from what we saw of her in House of Cards that she had such tremendous comic flair? - and perfect sidekick Alex Borstein is a pleasure to watch start to finish, it's many strengths far outweighing a few clunky performances and plot points. In short, the narrative - which will surely carry on for at least another season on Amazon Prime - involves a young mom living in splendour on the upper West Side in NYC in 1958, living too close to her domineering parents, hangs at comedy clubs w/ her husband, a handsome young businessman (set up by his dominating father) who aspires to be a stand-up comic but who does not have the chops. The marriage breaks up (he goes off with his hilariously dimwitted secretary after he embarrassingly flops at an audition) and, strangely, she finds herself drawn into the comic milieu and finds she has smashing talent. But she has to keep this double life a secret not only from humiliated ex but from her socially ambitious parents. For me, the subplots involving the parents of both she (Midge Maisel) and he (Joel Maisel) are way over-acted and cliched, and I was on the verge of giving up on the series in episode 1 - until Brosnahan did her stand-up routine, at which point I realized there were special talents at work here. Not only to we watch Midge/Brosnahan do some great standup (and improv) routines, but through these we watch not only her development as a character but also as a strong, independent woman; the comedy isn't an add-on schtick - as it often was in Seinfeld, for ex., - but it's completely integrated into the plot: her change and growth is part of the arc of her character and of the narrative (in one clever late episode we see her work variants on a punch line until she gets it just right, as measured by audience reaction). From personal experience I can say that Sherman-Palladino gets the aspiring comic scene down right, at least to a degree - though I would say that aspiring comics are generally quite supportive of one another (laughing generously at one another's lines, regardless of quality) and would note that no comic in his right mind would do an entire Bob Newhart sketch on stage and try to pass it off as his own. All told, though, a really good series that's leaving a lot of people waiting for Season 2.

The missed opportunity of Okja

The Netflix film Okja from South Korea feels like a missed opportunity. The movie is both entertaining and provocative yet anything but subtle: There are good guys and bad guys and not much space in between (nor, w/ one minor exception, does any character evolve over the course of the film). The plot: huge manufacturing conglomerate announces a new product, a genetically engineered pig, which it launches with a campaign: selected farmers from around the world will raise the baby pigs over the next 10 years; corporation will select a "winner" for a big ceremony 10 years hence in NYC. (Tilda Swinton plays the CEO in a hilarious over-the-top performance.) W/ the aid of a totally goofy animal-show celebrity host (Jake Gyllenhaal), they select a pig from S. Korea as the winner; the young girl who has grown up on her g-father's farm w/ the eponymous pig is distraught that the pig will be sent off to America. She pursues the pig, which is soon hijacked by a militant animal rights group, and complications follow as everyone follows the pig to NY for the grand ceremony and the inevitable denouement. OK, not subtle, but there's a lot of humor and a strong message: Anyone who watches the long slaughterhouse scene near the end of the film will think twice before the next BLT. The missed opportunity is that this could have been a really good PG, family-friendly film - which would entail scrubbing the dialogue (there's a lot of swearing, esp among the activists), toning down the violence (the beat-up following the attack on the grand ceremony could be less graphic), and some kind of parental warning before the slaughterhouse scene. As it stands, the movie is probably too harsh for children and a little off-putting for adult viewers, who rarely go for girl-and-her-favorite animal, anthropomorphic films such as this one.

The good and the bad in Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread

First, the good thinks about Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread (2017): It's a movie about the head of a highly successful, exclusive fashion line (Reynolds Woodcock, played by Daniel Day Lewis), so as you can imagine the costuming - not just the dresses but everyone's attire, including seamstresses and maids - is fantastic and beautiful, even to someone (me) who could care less about fashion, in fact hardly agree to recognize the field as anything other than a commercial scam to get people to buy new clothes every year. Second, PTA does beautiful camera work and always has - wonderful tracking shots, and a kind of trademark fantasy scene near the end of the film (balloons floating down from the ceiling following a raucous New Year's celebration). Third, nice art direction as a late 40s period piece, including not just the styles but the cars, the London streets and interiors. Fourth, a surprisingly beautiful original score (overplayed at one point, but otherwise ah homage throughout to fine chamber music). I see a # of academy awards there as well as a nomination for DDL, esp as he's indicated that this will be his last film. On the other hand, of course, is it a good movie? Frankly, no. Woodcock is throughout a thoroughly unlikable, self-centered egotist - not that all characters must be likable but we should at least have some sympathy for or empathy w/ the central character and w/ him I had none, zero. Why his love interest lets herself be such a doormat for him - well, that's never explained either. And the conclusion of the movie is so over-the-top ridiculous that even if you've stayed w/ it till near the end you're sure to shrug your shoulders at the wrap-up and say, really? Can anyone believe this? Aristotle identified "spectacle" as one of the key elements of drama (along with character, plot, setting, music, language - am I remembering this correctly or are some of these modern emendations?), but he was wise enough to note that spectacle is the least significant of them all. Buyer, beware.

Why it's worth watching Welles's Falstaff

It's by no means his best movie and it's too quirky to be considered among the greatest of Shakespeare interpretations, but there are plenty of reasons to watch Orson Welles's adaptation of the Henry IV plays, Chimes at Midnight (1965?). First, with his enormous girth (obviously in part a body suit, but let's say that Welles fit the part) and growling, acerbic elocution Welles is a great Falstaff. Second, Welles did a fine job using sections of HIV 1 and 2 (and could there also be some passages from HV and Merry Wives?) and narration from Holinshed's Chronicles to make this a production about Falstaff, with just enough political background about the War of the Roses to give context and meaning. Third, John Gielgud is worth watching as HIV for his lie delivery alone - the essence of Royal Shakespeare Co style and values of his time. Fourth, Welles keeps us consistently interested and attentive through his odd camera angles (sometimes looking up at characters almost from ground level, a la Citizen Kane) and quick cuts and edits. Fifth, the black/what lighting is fantastic on the many interior scenes in what is apparently an abandoned Spanish castle and some strange building composed of raw timbers that serves as the tavern where much of the comedy takes place, plus a few of the night-time scenes, especially of the old, ruined F and his crew. And sixth and most of all, the battle scene is one of the greatest every filmed - I can't even imagine how they managed to get so many horses and knights with lances charging at one another in the chaos of battle without someone's getting killed; no other scene on film has ever conveyed the horror of hand-to-hand medieval warfare. Overall, Welles makes us feel sorrow for the abandoned Falstaff - even though he's quite an ass who, despite his joviality, thinks nothing of stealing from friends and strangers. Ono the down side, Welles is much less convincing on the transformation of Prince Hal into Henry V; he let Keith Baxter overplay the comic part to such a ridiculous extend in the HV1 scenes that we never quite understand or believe in him - he needed more of a remove, isolation, and discomfort in his libertine role right from the start. Also, as all readers/viewers of Sh know, the humor in HIV2 begins to feel forced and uncomfortable - which may be intentional; the act is getting old. That aside, the film is worth watching, and it's notable how this adaptation shifts the focus from court to tavern, from the nobility to the working (or not working) poor, from blank verse (although there are the famous soliloquies, most powerful being Gielgud's Uneasy lies the head ... ) to extraordinary (nad very funny) prose.

A buddy movie that a lot of humor and pathose and something to say about military adventurism

The Amazon-produced, Richard Linklater-directed Last Flag Flying is another under-the-radar strong movie, this one about 3 Marine corps buddies (played by Steven Carell, Brian Cranston, Laurence Fishburne) who served together in Vietnam re-uniting 30+ years later (2003) to help arrange funeral services for Carell's (Doc's) son, who died in a shooting in Afghanistan. In some ways it's a very familiar "buddy" movie, in which the tensions that make the journey initially extremely uncomfortable (Fishburne is now a devout minister, and over the course of the journey his personality changes as the 3 men recollect their wartime adventures and misadventure). That said, their journey is by turns hilarious and deadly serious, with some poignant commentary and observations about American military adventurism. The scene of the 3 men telling tales while in an Amtrak baggage car, seated next to the Doc's son's coffin, is a highlight - so funny that it's obvious that Carell is truly cracking up, not acting. Cranston gives the film most of its energy - his Salvatore is a highly wound, extrovert and an antagonist to everyone in authority - but Carell, once again showing the range of his acting abilities, is the quiet center that holds it all together. Yes, the film lags a little toward the end, with a long and pointless episode in which the 3 men acquire their first cell phones and a needlessly saccharine funeral service (spoiler: I found it ridiculous that Cranston and Fishburne had the Marine dress blues and wore them at the service), but by and large it's an entertaining and humane movie that prods us to think a little about authority and duplicity.

The Post is a great movie about how great newpapers used to be

Lest there be any doubt. The Post makes clear once again that Spielberg knows how to tell a story; this one in other hands could strangle among its many narrative threads or smother in the blanket of its own good intentions, but Spielberg and his screenwriters keep the narrative clear, intense, informative, and entertaining, top to bottom. Of especial note, the fine performances from the 2 leads - Hanks as Ben Bradlee, editor of the Post during the Nixon administration, and Meryl Streep as his boss, the publisher Katherine Graham - as well as terrific re-creations of the tensions of the newsroom as the Pentagon Papers story breaks and, w/ some fine tracking shots, the madhouse atmosphere chez Bradlee as a team of editors race against deadline to publish on the papers as Bradlee tries to persuade Graham to defy the courts and publish, putting at great risk not only their reputation but the well-being of the Post itself, which was in the midst of its first public stock offering. There's also some smart use of actual recordings of Nixon bashing reporters and bashing the Post in particular. We get great background on the secret papers, which documented for all time that multiple administrations had consistently lied to the public about the course and cost and purpose of the war - which in the end was maintained at the cost of thousands of lives just because no president wanted to be the first to lose a war. Part of the story as well involves the competition against the NYT, which was the first to publish, which in the end led to an alliance w/ the Times in a court battle, successful, against prior restraint. Oddly, and sadly, this great film is something like a bookend paired against All the President's Men, also about the Post and the Nixon admin: All the President's Men, from the 70s, established investigative journalists and their brave and smart editors as heroes of our time and inspired thousands of students to enter the noble career of journalism; now, 50 years later, The Post has us looking back at that era and forces us to think about how much has changed - not only the old lead type and land lines - but the whole culture of newspapers: Spielberg captures the spirit of the time, but it now seems so long ago and so antiquated, though of course needed now more than ever (admittedly, there are now more sources for information and communication - but few w/ the integrity or resources of the great American newspapers).

A film worth watching for Huppert's performance alone

Over the past several days I have watched, in stretches, Catherine Breillat's film Abuse of Weakness (2013), and it's definitely worth watching if for no other reason than seeing a fabulous and strange performance by Isabel Huppert, who portrays a film director (modeled on Breillat I believe) who suffers a serious stroke at the age of about 50 and struggles to continue her work. In this film - I don't know if it's true of CB's life - the director/Huppert sees a "reformed" criminal on a TV talk show touting his memoir of crime and prison life and she decides he should star in her next movie (he has no acting experience and is intellectually the opposite of Huppert). Over time he weasels his way into her life and begins borrowing money from her, eventually getting her to write him checks for many thousands of Euros. He eventually leaves his wife (and daughter) and moves in w/ Huppert, sleeping on a cot in her post Parisian house undergoing major and expensive renovations; though he suggests is a few times, they never have sex - and in fact he probably doesn't really want to - she's too valuable to him as his personal ATM. The movie ends with her in financial ruin and sitting around a conference table w/ some lawyers and her adult children, who cannot understand what compelled her to give this crook so much money. She can't really explain to them - and neither can we - although I had a sense that her bizarre behavior may have followed from some kind of undiagnosed brain injury that happened during her stroke. In this case, it's to Breillat's credit that she doesn't neatly tie everything together at the end; Huppert seems indifferent to her financial loss (she says giving up her house is "not on option," however), and we sense that what she really wanted to assert was her independence - she's constantly rebuffing the unsolicited offers of help during her illness, and her struggle just to walk, eat, and write is poignant and painful throughout the film - even her freedom to act the fool. Her independence was her own undoing, and led no doubt to greater dependence on others.

Two miniseries about investigations - one disturbing, one hilarious

Two short miniseries that at first seem entirely different but that actually have a lot in common. First, the Erroll Morris series Wormwood, a documentary about the famous case of a CIA agent, Frank Olson, who mysteriously "fell" from a 10th-floor hotel window in NYC in 1952. Morris almost single-handedly created the contemporary investigative documentary style w/ his famous Thin Blue Line; in that style, this series uses a mix of documentary footage (home movies from the Olson family and many news clips relating to the case over 40 years), an extensive interview w/ the principal - Olson's son Erich, who has made investigation of his father's death his lifetime's work, or even obsession, as he concedes, plus interviews with several other participants including lawyers involved in the case and the journalist Seymour Hersh, and re-enacted scenes of what may (or may not) have happened in the hotel in 1952. The results is that we see the evolution of this case is it unfolds, and darkens, over time: At first in the 1970s, the CIA admits that the agency tested various Rx, including LSD, on unwitting agency members, including Olson. We assume at first that the drug screwed up his mind and he committed suicide. But as Olson's pursuit of truth continues, we learn more: the LSD admission/concession was itself a cover-up, as the CIA was involved in much more hideous schemes (I won't give it away). Like so many documentaries, this one ends w/ probability but still w/ some uncertainty - like life.

Similarly, the Netflix "documentary" series American Vandal ends with probability but some uncertainty; this series is high (sometimes low) comedy, a parody with direct-hit references to Serial and Making a Murderer (the sense that the authorities framed the suspect not because of this case but because he was a bad egg they wanted to remove, extensive and esoteric discussions of cell-phone "pings" and records, emotional statements by the narrator such as "But this is what keeps me awake at night ... "), but in this case the crime is ludicrous (a student, Dylan Maxwell, is suspended from high school, accused of spray-painting 27 "dicks" on cars parked in the faculty lot) and the investigators are earnest, talented, but still immature high-school kids who run the campus radio show. The kids set out to get "the truth," which they suspect will show Dylan's innocence (at least of this vandalism - he admits to numerous other "pranks"). The pursuit of truth leads the student journalists into some hilarious encounters as well as into some really tricky situations, particularly because they and all their peers are so imbued w/ technology and social media; every private moment and encounter seems to be recorded somewhere by someone, which leads to some embarrassing revelations, and the journalists pay the price. I wish the series were not so hard on the journalists - there's a sense that they have gone "too far," which I think is all part of the business - but where the series really pays off is toward the end as we watch the changes in Dylan's behavior and in his sense of himself as a student, person, and friend. It's not a sentimental ending, but it's open, a little disturbing, and seems quite real.

Wonder Woman exceeds (my) expectations

The DC comics movie Wonder Woman, starring the excellent Gal Gadot, is much better than one might expect or at least way better than I expected. Of course the film is not aimed at viewers like me, but at least there's something more to it that just a superhero comic romp. Among its attributes: excellent editing of sound and visuals, making this a likely Oscar nominee in the technical categories at least - the various sword fights and hand-to-hand fighting are beautifully choreographed; witty dialog and funny scenes at times, notably when WW steps into the chamber as the hero is taking a bath, and their discussion aboard the sailboat about sleeping side by side, and her arrival in London - like the awakening in The Tempest; a clever way of dealing with the accusations of sexism re WW's skimpy costuming: when they get to London there's much ado about finding the proper clothing for her because she "can't go around dressed like this"; the failure to properly establish the traits and qualities or even the names of the small "team" of talented misfits assembled to take on the German army at its base; and of course the depiction of strong women characters. That said, there's also a lot of hoodoo and hokum about world peace and about WW's origins among the Amazons and about her quest to kill the god Aries - but probably there's no need to try to make sense of the plot anyway. The closing sequence involving an enormous firefight and the heist of a giant biplane and release of a potent noxious gas and so on is technically impressive but for me was far too long - although obviously scenes like this are what draw in the target audience. Not a film for everyone of course but a good piece of genre work that exceeds expectations, at least mine.

Powerful documentary about a cult and its tyrannical leader

The Showtime Amy Berg documentary Prophet's Prey tells the horrific of the abusive, tyrannical, megalomaniac leader of the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints, Warren Jeffs, now thankfully behind bars though his influence apparently lives on through his equally sick brother. Everything about this film is creepy - and seldom seen except in glimpses of the women in their 19th-century farm clothes that sometimes make the news after a raid or mass arrest. We get lots of inside footage - though never in close-up of course - of the cultish, polygamous outposts that Jeff built in Utah, Col., SD., an Texas, plus interviews with several who left the church (none with people still in the church of course), and powerful footage of recorded evidence submitted at Jeffs's trial and recordings of some kind of jailhouse deposition in which he sounds just strange and ruined. The big mystery at the end is: how could this man, so obviously disturbed and weak, have exerted such power over so many people, abusing children (of both genders), stealing $ for his own gain. The church will remind most viewers I think of Jim Jones, and it seems Jeffs and his cronies have so destroyed and even enslaved the church members that they probably would die at his command. Anyone who's driven through southern Utah will have a sense of the lay of the land and of how there could be all kinds of pockets of polygamy and abuse in the small, unwelcoming communities in that region. All told, Berg et al do a good job getting enough access to tell this difficult story - we get a sense that they were often threatened and endangered and maybe still are; my only quibble is that the narrative is needlessly difficult to follow, as it jumps back and forth in time and never lays out a clear, definitive chronology. Perhaps this should have been a longer series, a la Making of a Murderer, to really lay all the facts out w/ clarity.

What works in Molly's Game and would could have been better

Didn't realize while watching Molly's Game that the screenplay was by Aaron Sorkin, but of course that made a lot of sense - this film is a vehicle for fast-paced and clever, often too clever, repartee, some of which does work really well, especially in the many scenes involving the lead, Jessica Chastain as Molly Blloom, and Idrus Elba, as her defense attorney. Too often in Sorkin productions the cleverness of the writing overwhelms everything else (Social Network a notable exception, where one could believe the brainiac characters may well speak the way Sorkin writes), but here his quips are pretty much confined to the scenes between those 2 characters, so the brainy humor is supportive rather than obtrusive. The story, based on Blooms book, is about her years running a series of high-stakes private poker games frequented by many famous people in entertainment, business, and, later, the underworld; none is identified by name, which some may quibbler w/, but I don't think this movie is meant to be an expose - but it does give us a good look at how these private games are managed and mismanaged - and how destructive they can be to those in way over their heads. The film seems a bit too long - about 2.5 hours! - given the material (a lot of the final act could have been conveyed in a few closing-credit slides) but the pace is pretty good, the material was unfamiliar, at least to me, and the leads do a good job holding our attention and sympathies.

A fine movie about a sorrowful place and time in American history

The 2017 Netflix original film, Mudbound (Dee Rees, dir.) has its flaws but overall it's a dramatic and engaging film that takes an unflinching look at a sorrowful and shameful timeand place in American history. The film is about rural life on farms in central Mississippi in the 1940s; we see a small black community, deprived of land ownership through some sort of chicanery regarding deeds of property, living not even as sharecroppers but as tenant farmers, completely depending on the good will of the while landowners, themselves struggling to eke a living out of the land. The white family we focus on thinks of themselves as benevolent partners w/the black families, but in fact they are at best indifferent and often cruel and unfeeling. Two characters, one black one white, go off to war and come home changed in different ways: the black man for once has been treated as an equal and even a hero, and he resists the racist segregation when he returns to Miss., with obvious consequences; the white man comes back and can relate to nobody who has not experienced the war, so forms a friendship w/ the black soldier, also w/ obvious consequences. The acting is fine, and the soundtrack is really good, w/ some great gospel moments. The film is based on a novel and suffers from hat, especially in the first half: way too much jumping around among the various families and plot lines, and far too much info conveyed through lengthy voice-over narratives. I also wish the movie had more nuance - you could almost say that the movie is too "black and white," with all the black characters noble in suffering and all (but one, maybe 2) of the white characters narrow-minded and bigoted. That said. the film has a strong impact, and it's important to keep in mind the painful moments in American history, especially for those who subscribe to American exceptionalism.

I, Tonya and the rigged world of competetive skating

The Tonya Harding biopic, I, Tonya, gives us a good sense of the competitive world of Olympic figure skating but, more so, of the troubled life of the oft-maligned Harding - raised by an cruel, bitter, violent mother (her sympathetic father left the family when TH was a child and seems to never have appeared again in her life) and married far too young to a violent and abusive husband. The movie, narrated by actors playing the principals in present day, so as to give the effect of a documentary, of course centers on what the characters call "The Incident," the famous attack by a hired thug on her skating rival, Nancy Kerrigan (who has virtually no role in the film). The facts of the badly blundered attack are pretty well known, but the account in the film, in which we see the complete idiocy of her husband and his so-called friend and Tonya's apparent body guard, Erich, are hilarious - stupidity of such magnitude that we wouldn't believe it were it not based on fact. TH was no angel or innocent, but we come away from the film with great sympathy for her and with a more firm conviction that the world of skating has for a long time been rigged to steer the awards and honors to those who have the proper look, demeanor, attitude, backing, and sponsorship; TH was an outsider from the start who refused to conform and who did little to help herself; it's amazing she got as far as she did, on her abilities alone.

A fine movie that's a story of a life against a historical background - The Marriage of Maria Braun

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) is a great movie of a type rarely done successfully today, a story of a life, across a background of historical events and culturally transformations, much like a novel, told in a straightforward narrative manner but w/ some inventive touches of style and vision, starting w/ Maria Braun's marriage ceremony, interrupted by a bomb explosion in the first seconds of the movie - a great shock, with echoes throughout the film. Maria marries Hermann during WWII, in an unnamed German city - and we see the rubble and destruction all around - in this and in many later segments. Maria apparently knew her husband for only a short time, and their marriage lasted just a day or two before he was called back to action - and then declared missing in action. Throughout the first "act" of the movie Maria searches for him, which entails joining many other women at a train depot, walking around wearing a placard asking if anyone knows the whereabouts of Hermann Braun. I could, but I won't, go through the whole plot, but suffice to say there are many transformative events, as Maria post war takes a position in an office of a company selling some kind of parts or machinery and, along w/ the company, she rises from extreme poverty and becomes quite wealthy into the 50s - but at great personal cost - symbolic of course both of the recovery of the German economy post-war and the ways in which capitalism and the world of commerce can wreck families and relationships. Striking for its absence throughout - there is no sense of German guilt about the war and about the Nazi era, much less about the Holocaust; I wouldn't say that every work of German cinema and literature should focus on these themes, but wouldn't it be part of anyone's consciousness and environment in postwar Germany? It's not the Maria and others in her family and her milieu are Holocaust deniers or anything of the sort, but it does seem strange that postwar guilt or at least recognition never enters into their conversations and never seems to affect their lives, directly or indirectly. Still, a fine movie in some ways a throwback (it will recall movies like Imitation of Life) but with a contemporary look and style (the interiors of the apartments and housing, and how they evolve over time, are particularly notable - some shot from the Japanese tatatmi-mat perspective) .

Brando's fame and misfortune

Listen to Me Marlon (2015) is a documentary about Brando that doesn't dwell on his celebrity but, rather, tries to examine his personality, to figure out where he came from, what drove him to fame, and how fame drove him to become somewhat of a recluse. We see quite a few clips from his films - many of them terrific, making it obvious why he was such a star, many also ridiculous, making it obvious that even the top stars had to take on really bad parts in order to stay in the game. The highlight of the film is its use of a  # of audiotapes that Brando made over the years, in which he speculates about the role of the artist - apparently these had not been heard before; not sure how the director (Stevan Riley, sic, had to look it up) got access but there it is. There's also some interesting childhood footage, some clips from interviews in which Brando talked about his tough father and this alcoholic mother who abandoned him at an early age. And there's a clip from some TV interview show (Edward R Murrow maybe?) in which Brando appears, very awkwardly, alongside his aged father. Not sure what the message is in the end, but may be something like acting was for him, and maybe for many other stars, a way to heal a wound or fill a void; also, acting is a craft that required a lot of study and practice. And also, the true stars are really of a different order of being: When we see him in Streetcar, On the Waterfront, The Godfather, and maybe to a lesser extent in Guys and Dolls and even Apocalypse Now (even tho Coppola apparently indicated that Brando was nearly impossible to work with), we see how he made a movie his own, totally dominated the screen - like Welles, the only near counterpart I can think of. The movie also touches on the tragedy of his life - the murder charge against his son, his daughter's suicide, headline items from years ago now mostly forgotten - which carries the familiar schadenfreud (sp?) message that with great success often comes great suffering. The famous are different from you and me.

Among the most amazing documentaries of all time: The Sorrow and the Pity

Have watched Marcel Ophuls's 4+-hour 1969 documentary, The Sorrow and the Pity, over several takes; though the work is technically and technologically really dated - the grainy b/w film, the poor sound quality, the awkward framing of images, the clunky subtitles, the jumpy editing - it's still in its raw power among the most amazing documentary films of all time. Ophuls and his team focused on one town in France - Cleremont-Ferrand - to unravel the many complex relationship among and between the French residents of the town and the German occupiers during the years 1940-44. Incredibly, Ophuls received cooperation from and interview footage of not only the obvious sources - membes of the French resistance, mostly tough, agrarian workers who don't seem especially political but who proved themselves to be strong and brave patriots, but also from French collaborators, now 25 years later ans till smug and self-assured, and even from several of the German occupiers, one in particular who speaks while smoking a fat cigar at some kind of  celebration in Germany - perhaps a wedding? - and surrounded by (silent) members of his family. The film makes in clear the Petain, though he may have thought he ws saving France by forming an alliance with the occupying Germans, was a horrible coward and traitor, and those who backed the Petain government were motivated by cowardice, self-interest, class prejudice, and anti-Semitism: Who can forget the shopkeeper who calmly explains why he took out newspaper ads proclaiming that, though his name (Klein) may sound Jewish he was not a Jew? The Germans all say they were treated well by the French and had good relationships with the people of C-F, which may be how they perceived the matter (and there were plenty of willing collaborators), but it's amazing how little they sensed of the hatred beneath the surface. The long film ends with an interview w/ a woman who had her head shaved in public after the war in retaliation for her relationships w/ German soldiers - now an elderly woman, harshly maintaining that she was framed. Then we see Maurice Chevalier proclaiming his innocence - he only visited a German prison camp to keep the French soldiers happy! - and shots of De Gaulle's reception in Paris. The film does not dwell on this point, but you can't help but think as you see the screaming crowds: Where were you during the war? And where, now, are all the Jews of France?

Learning from Nora Ephron: Everything Is Copy

Jacob Bernstein's HBO documentary-biography Everything Is Copy, about his late mother, Nora Ephron, is clearly driven by his own struggle to come to terms with his relationship to his father (Carl Bernstein) and his father's troubled relationship w/ Nora. JB is pretty much unflinching in his portrayal: Nora E comes off as extremely talented and intelligent, a sharp wit, a good friend to many (most famous) NYers, but also one with a cutting edge and one who died under some mystery: None of her friends (or sisters) knew that she was ill w/ a form of leukemia and her death came as a shock to many. The movie is star-stuffed if the literary world is your key constellation - so many famous editors, authors, agents, directors, producers, journalists, et al. willingly spoke with JB, which sometimes gives the documentary a sense of being a hagiography, but her 3 sisters ground us in reality, and the movie gives us a good sense of her difficult childhood (talented parents more engaged w/ their own work, and later with alcohol, than w/ their daughters) and her 2 troubled marriages. The third marriage, to author Nicholas Pileggi, was apparently the great love of her life, but it seems that he did not want to participate in this project. Nora became the ultimate insider through her wit, skill, chutzpah, and star-crossed marriages, and she had the talent to back it up; I found, however, that the film did not make me want to read or re-read anything she wrote, all of which seems to center on the pronoun "I" - a style breakthrough in the 70s and 80s but a bit stale today. Her greatest skill no doubt was as a screenwriter - each of her major screenplays, whether they're for your kind of movie or not - was fantastic, a breakthrough artistically and commercially, and the documentary includes excellent clips from her movie work: it's as if she needed the screenplay form to get herself out of the picture and to focus on people, drama, ideas, emotions. (She was less successful as a director, as the program recognizes.) I suspect a film student could spend a year learning from Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You've Got Mail.