My thoughts about movies and TV shows I've been watching

See also my blog on books: Elliot's Reading

Saturday, February 24, 2018

The beauty and strangeness of Bergman's Winter Light

Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (1962) is dark and depressing even for Bergman, which says a lot; it's not a movie for everyone - there's not a moment of humor or levity, and the action is subdued and cerebral to say the least - but it's a beautiful movie to watch and it's a serious, thoughtful depiction of a man in the midst of crisis. In short, the film is about a pastor in a small Swedish village in winter, and there's not much more depressing than that: everything looks cold and isolated, the church is sparsely attended, everyone's bundled against the cold, even indoors, and the priest (Gunnar Bjornson) is suffering from a cold or the flu as he conducts his service with slow, deliberate grace. After the service the priest councils a parishioner, Max von Sydow, who is depressed and morose, worried about the fate of the world (a nuclear attack from China, of all things). The priest's words ring hollow, and shortly after their discussion the man shoots himself to death. Meanwhile, the village "schoolmarm" throws herself upon the priest - they have apparently conducted an affair for about 2 years - but he pushes her away. We learn that he's been widowed for 4 years and still mourns his late wife. Most of all, he's at a crisis of faith, he believes his life has meant nothing, and he has the hubris to ask why his god has forsaken him - seeing himself as in Christ's image. Later, he visits the schoolmarm in her home, which she shares w/ an elderly aunt (and w/ a room that serves as the schoolhouse); there, he tells her that she repulses him, he doesn't love her and never has, tells her to leave him alone - a brutal scene - after which he visits the wife of the dead man and offers no kind words of consolation and then goes to another even smaller church where he is to lead an afternoon service. In this church, the rector, a chatty fellow, talks to the priest about his interpretation of the death of Jesus, and his view, humble and sincere, is that the greatest pain that Jesus felt was his apparent abandonment by God, his father. This insight leads the priest to think, even for a moment, that it would be a worse sin to think that God has abandoned him - there's a glimmer of hope, at the end, that the priest will go on with his calling as he begins the service, in the nearly deserted church. Worth watching? Yes, though it's not "cinematic" by any contemporary standard, the lighting and photography by the great Sven Nyquist is fantastic: beautiful well-lit closeups, mysterious use of interior details (the crude statute of Jesus, the bathroom keys in the schoolroom) and external detail (the horse approaching the car as the priest sets out for the afternoon service); yes, there are continuity issues (disappearing snow) that are kind of funny, unintentionally. You have to think of this as an interior drama, a place that Bergman established for cinema and that is seldom examined today - he's obviously in the Swedish dramatic, rather than cinematic, tradition here. Winter Light was the 2nd in a trilogy, all of which examine issues of crises of faith and mental illness/depression/delusion (Through a Glass Darkly, The Silence).

Thursday, February 22, 2018

The ideas behind Haneke's Funny Games

Micheal Haneke's 1997 film Funny Games (the original German-language version; he remade it in English ten years later) is a cruel and frightening movie, like many of his movies btw, about a home invasion in which two men, intelligent and psychopathic, torment and torture a family of 3 - parents and young son - in their vacation home. It's almost unbearable to watch (though hard to stop watching), which is as it turns out the point of the film. If it were just a horror/snuff picture, we wouldn't even be talking about it, we wouldn'e ever have seen it. But Haneke is into something deeper and more reflective (spoilers coming) as he breaks the 4th wall of cinema and has one of his characters - one of the invaders (Paul) address you the viewer at several points - particularly near the end when he alludes to the process of watching a movie: We viewers expect that the movie will have an ending that makes the film "real" or "credible," something in the script that will explain who these killers are and what motivates them. But no, nothing like that happens, it's just motiveless malignity (cf Iago), which makes us think about the "reality" of this film or any film: A film is always an illusion, it is not reality, and we're wrong to expect everything to be tied together in a film, or for that matter in life - there are no answers, and when films wrap everything up in 90 minutes (or, today, 2 hours and 40 minutes) that's just an illusion, a convention. In the strangest element of the film Paul grabs a remote and rewinds so as to re-take one of the action scenes; this tripe makes the film both less realist - the wall is broken, we no longer think we're watching something w/ a plot - and more realist, as we are rminded that we are watching a film: Art is the reality.

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Why to watch season 1 of Halt and Catch Fire

Watched the AMC/Netflix series Halt and Catch Fire Season 1 largely on the premise, or promise, that the series would inprove as it developed and would merit the glowing reviews that many bestowed on the final seasons (similar to the arc of improvement in Breaking Bad), and I still have hopes for that. Season 1 was OK but only if you consider it the groundwork for further developments. The series is about a topic of interest to just about everyone: the development of the first personal computers and the people and forces behind the first PCs. The first season centers on 4 characters, w/ two significant bit players, working for an imagined Dallas electronics company that is on the skids; a charaismatic marketing guy,  Joe McMillon, on the run from IBM, talks the boss, Bosworth, into going all in on developing a new PC that will sell to the home market, not to businesses only. Much of the drama revolves around the interplay among McMillan, the key engineer (Gordon), and a software prodigy sexy hipster woman (Cameron), each w/ his/her own vision of the end product, all in collision: Should it be faster, more beautiful, more edgy (i.e., should it "talk" to the users?), lighter, cheaper, all of the above? We watch the product take shape, and the team fight off various rival companies, all leading toward a big product display a the trade show in LV. Watching this series of course reminds all of us that IBM once seemed invincible and that Apple was by no means inevitable: So many tech companies emerged in the early 80s and died a slow death, e.g., TI, which plays a role in this show. Obviously, by the end the main characters are heading off literally into the sunset, to start their own company perhaps but in the promised land of Silicon Valley. Yes, I am hooked and will keep watching.

Friday, February 16, 2018

Ths significance of John Cassavetes's Shadows

In some ways John Cassavetes's Shadows (1959) is a curiosity, but it's one worth watching, especially for its open spirit and its inventive cinematography. The story line, such as it is, follow a group of young men in Manhattan, kind of well-dressed thugs and party-boys whose life seems to involve drinking, clubbing, and trying with varied success to pick up women in clubs and at parties. We follow a few story lines that intersect at points: an aspiring jazz singer and his agent head off for an out-of-town club date, at which the singer badly fails; one of the young men meets and pursues a 20-year-old woman who aspires to become a writer and begins a sexual affair w/ her - her first sexual experience as it turns out; the same young man later learns that the woman he's been w/ is either black or of mixed race, and he's visibly disturbed by this information; the group of guys spends aa rainy afternoon in the MOMA sculpture garden, to hilarious effect; and so on. This film was one of the first and one of the few to use a mixed-race cast and to touch on issues of racism, inter-racial relationships, and bi-racial families. The photography is mostly done in close-up b/w, probably w/ handheld cameras, shot mostly in often-crowded interiors - which makes the few open-air sequences, such as a walk through Central Park and nighttime scenes on the garish 42nd Street all the more striking by contrast. The dialog is rough and awkward, and it's not surprising to read on the closing credits that the scenes were improvised by an acting group (which JC led, I believe). The film captures a mood of a NY long gone - a time when the city was rougher and more affordable; the group of men reminded me of the "boys" in early Fellini films such as I Vitteloni; the women seem to be the precursors of some of the artistic aspirants in early Woody Allen comedies. The movie has a great jazz score - mostly solo tenor sax - and the jazz melodies are perfect counterpoint to the improvisational nature of the whole enterprise, which has an open conclusion rather than a plot build-up and wrap-up, much like the short fiction that was beginning to emerge in American literature that was emerging at that time (e.g., Salinger) and shortly thereafter - influenced in part by this film and others like it from Europe.

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Homeland season 6 despite some fine moments is losing its mojo

Getting set to watch season 7 of Homeland (maybe) caught up by watching all of season 6 and was not inspired.  S6 is filmed mostly in NYC or in an imagined NYC when no one's caught in traffic and parking spaceship are always available when you need one.  Guessing that star Claire Danes may have requested a season in NYC to be w family? Anyway in part by moving the setting the series seems to lose its mojo in S6 - it only remotely feels like a CIA dram, which truly was its raison d'rtre. The first three seasons were entirely focused on the terrific Brodie story - hero or turncoat and if the later why? And is Danes/carrie Mathison deranged or a genius in suspecting the worst? Since Brodie's death the series has foundered, entangled in multiple plot strands and this is especially true in S: defense of a young man accused of terrorism, a bo,bing in manhattan, a black, ops team in a house in queens, the mental and physical decay of agent Quinn, a rush limbaugh -like character, and dar (f Murray Abraham) plotting for greater control of the CIA (btw if he's not the director what is he?). Central to it all as if these weren't enough plot lines (and I have left some out) is a pres elect Keane - Iranian ambassador in s4 - putting together her leadership team and getting counsel from Carrie. It appears the creators guessed wrong in having a female prez elect w a foreign policy background and a crisp demeanor - but they were adept enough to pivot mid season into a pres as female trump avatar replete w paranoia, fake news (in this case the news truly is fake) and  protestors chanting not my president. By the last two episodes w an assassination plot in the works that for some reason I still can't figure out involved a us senator I was really lost - and uninterested.  All this said the season does have some moments of tension and Danes remains the most expressive actor on tv - it's as if she could conduct an entire dialog via facial expressions alone.

Monday, February 5, 2018

An under the radar film that deserved a better fate (and title)

With all the crappy, overhyped, too-long movies out there it's great once in a while to come across a little-appreciated, low-budget, unpretentious feature like the (weirdly title) I Don't Feel at Home in this World Anymore, Macon Blair's Netflix-produced (2017) movie about a social misfit, Ruth played by the very likable and non-glam Melanie Linskey. The movie starts off as a mostly realistic story of this young woman for whom nothing seems to go right: she's a social doormat, with few friends, no love relationship, apparently no close family, in a low-wage, low-status job, living in a hand-me-down furnished small ranch house (this is one of the few movies to get near-poverty dead on), and the plot kicks into motion when she comes home from work and finds her housed trashed by a thief. Of course nobody least of all the police can help her in her plight or with her feelings of depression and violation. Eventually she finds one ally, played by Elijah Wood, and the two of them embark on a search for her stolen property - and for the thief. Without giving any spoilers, it's interesting the way Blair shifts the dynamic and even the genre of the movie: what started out to be a film very much in the indie spirit of sad outsiders against the world gradually becomes a dangerous, bloody, at times comic crime story as the two ledes narrow in on the thief, at great risk to themselves. Somehow, Blair manages this double-helix of a plot line, and the movie feels right and credible (at least while you're watching it - perhaps less so on reflection, but who care?) with a nice mood and a sweet relationship developing between the two leads start to finish (at only 90 minutes. Yay!) - not exactly a feel-good movie but a movie with some real emotion, real sympathy for (most of) its characters, and a good pace - an under-the-radar film that deserved a better fate.

Saturday, February 3, 2018

Contenders: The flop of Dunkirk and the beauty of Loving Vincent

Double Feature of Oscar contenders: First, Dunkirk. What a disappointment and what a waste. Give Christopher Nolan some credit for trying to break out of the Batman and the scifi mold and developing an original historical drama, a vivid account of the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk, employing the aid of a fleet of volunteer private boats, ranging from fishing trawlers to pleasure yachts, that crossed the Channel to aid in the evacuation, but this movie is a serious mess: Extremely hard to follow the 3 plot strands such as they are, no development of character, little sense of the overall scope of the evacuation (which looks like it involves 3 airplanes and two boats!), terribly muddied dialog, so imprecise that we had to resort to closed-caption to decipher it. Much of the movie, intentionally I think, looks as if it was shot on a cell phone - which did give the evacuation (treated much better in Atonement, btw) a contemporary look, like coverage of a breaking news event today - but ultimately the film devolved into a few overproduced, over-scored scenes - flooding the hold of a ship, rescue of a sinking aircraft - and by the end I just had a bunch of question marks floating over my head. I felt I knew less about the historical event than before I started. Oscar? No chance. Second: Loving Vincent, an animated film (will probably win the Oscar this year) that "brings to life" many Van Gogh settings and characters from his landscapes and portraits. remarkable above all for the beautiful animation artwork done by they say 100 artists working in VG's style and from his templates. It's a pleasure to watch (and would have been more so in a theater). The narrative involves one of the portrait-characters, the Roland, the son of the postmaster of Arles whom VG painted often, who embarks on a quest ostensibly to deliver a letter from VG to his late brother's family but eventually into an examination of the report that VG died after shooting himself in the gut. There are no definitive answers, but the movie raises # of questions and points of doubt. As a plot, it wears a little thin - but the plot is just the line that leads us to the beautiful artwork and the imaginative evocation of Van Gogh's style, worth watching for that alone.