Woman in the Dunes, an art-house film from the 60s still worth watching

The Woman in the Dunes (dr. Hiroshi Teshigahara) was one of the great so-called "art house" pictures of its time (1964) and for many Americans their first look at a serious, postwar Japanese film (I don't know what became of Teshigahara - for some reason his stature never rose to the level of Ozu, Kurosawa, et al.); I recently read (see Elliots Reading blog) the source novel, by Kobo Abe, and as Abe did the screenplay for the movie it's not surprise the that the movie adheres closely to the novel: 30-something school teacher and amateur entymologist ventures into a vast area of sand dunes on the coast of Japan. He misses the last bus home and is offered overnight accommodations in a small house in a deep hollow among the dunes, inhabited by a young widow. Once he's lowered down to the house, he's kept imprisoned there and forced to join the woman in nightly labor of shoveling away the ever-encroaching sand that threatens her dwelling. We later learn that the villagers sell the sand to a concrete company in an illicit scheme. The man makes several failed attempts at escape; he also begins sexual relationship with the young woman. Ultimately (spoiler!) he foregoes a final chance to escape and stays on with the woman - written off in Japan, as we see in the last pp of the novel and final shot of the film - as a missing person. In both novel and film we know little about his "outside" life - though the novel makes it more cleat that he's not married and has a cynical and loveless ongoing sexual relationship with a woman. The narrative is a stretch, though just barely plausible, if taken on the literal level, but of course it's impossible not to think of the movie/novel in figurative, symbolic, or allegorical terms: are we all just spending our lives shoveling sand away in order to survive/endure? I don't adhere to that interpretation, and, as noted in my other blog, I believe the film is about Japanese culture post WWII, digging out from the wreckage, feeling hopeless and ashamed, at the mercy of corrupt contractors, struggling to uncover and preserve any vestment of Japanese culture, society, architecture, public services. The novel is very good and, in a rare instance, I have to say the film is even better: Teshigahara really makes us feel the frightening hopelessness of life in this flimsy structure and the base of a frightening hill of heavy sand - just a terrific job of stage and design, in a project that would have seemed almost impossible. The scene in which the villagers crowd the rim on the sand cliff taunting the man and woman and urging them to engage in sex spectacle is creepy and fantastic, unforgettable. All told, this is an art film that doesn't feel quaint and dated - still worth watching both for its literal story line and its many allusions.

The best New Wave French Senegalese movie ever

Djibril Diop Mombety's totally odd film, Touki Bouki (1973) clearly stands as the best example of New Wave French cinema to come out of Senegal, though I'm not sure there's a lot of competition for that laurel. This film that on the surface is about a college-age couple trying to flee the poverty and isolatoin of their Senegalese village, travel to the capital, Dakar, and embark via ship for Paris, is actually an improbable and sometimes surreal romp through Senegal in the style of Godard - full of quick jujmp cuts, plot oddities and impossibilities, appended political commentary, and a touch of surrealism. Many, in fact most, of the scenes are visually striking: the ghastly slaughter of cattle at the opening (as well as slaughter of goats and I think a pig), the scary scenes in which the woman stares for minutes at the crashing ocean waves and she (and we?) keep expecting a body to wash up against the rocks, the wrestling match in the arena w/ a great look at the crowd dressed in bright African finery, the dusty marketplaces and the scene with the card sharp, the travels by bicycle (replete with steers horns attached to the handlebars) across the flat landscape, stealing the boxes from the sleeping soldier and the scene in which the taxi driver carries one of the boxes to an abandoned construction site and is shocked by what's in the box, the couple stealing all the clothing from the wealthy gay big shot/politician (and his call to the police), even and maybe especially the scenes of industrial Dakar with the ship at dock ready for departure for France. The film makes no sense if you try to make sense of it - it's best appreciated as a viewpoint into a nation few westerners will ever know or experience and as a visual romp - in other words, both a travelog and a road movie, but a movie that take no genre too seriously and that eschews the conventions of plot and even of character (we really don't know much about the background or personality of either of the two leads) and that takes some risks - some long scenes, some really bumpy scenes on which most directors would have used a steady-cam - and takes great pleasure in finding odd locations and moments of local color and culture along its way.

Sometimes a fine director comes up with a clunker - like Downsizing

Every once in a while a great artist/writer/director comes up w/ a terrible clunker that should probably just be erased from his or her collected works - and it usually happens at mid or late career when the artist should be in top form. This probably occurs in late life because, first, nobody would have backed/published the project if it were pitched by an unknown and, second, the artist has reached a stage where nobody will second-guess, everyone in the production assumes the artist knows best and this will be another work of genius or at least a commercial success. So after the excellent Nebraska and a string of really good adaptations of generally little-known novels (I have to admit that I'd always hoped he would read Exiles), Alexander Payne comes up with a stinker that one can only wish had been killed in the bud: Downsizing. The premise: A team of Norwegian scientists has come up w/ a process of shrinking humans down to the size of a small bird, and this - if only everyone would go through the simple process! - will save our wasteful planet and species. The absurdity of this is almost beyond discussion, but let's stay w/ it for a while. A small % of people around the world agree, and after the medical procedure they live in tiny communities of "little people." One such little person is Matt Damon, with the problem that he and his wife (Kristin Wiig) agree to downsize and live in "Leisureworld," but she freaks out during the medical process and leaves him alone, in fact she leaves the movie altogether at that point. At least someone got out! The movie is not only devoid of any credible plot or story line, it's also not even funny or frightening - as is, to cite the most famous of parallels, part 2 of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, q.v. By the end, Damon has come to the startling realization that even in Leisureworld (which looks and is meant to look much like an expensive retirements community or perhaps time share) there lives a subculture of workers and manual laborers (cooks, cleaning crews, etc.) who make the life of leisure possible for others. About the only appealing person in the movie is a Vietnamese worker played by Hong Chou - although I suspect Asian-Americans may find her broken-English dialog to be culturally obtuse. Joining forces w/ her, Damon first travels to Norway where the original scientists are planning some weird underground community that will survive an expected methane leak that will wipe out human life; they decline to join, and who can blame them? If the future holds more movies like this, bring on the methane!

A fine crime and action series top to bottom: Ozark

The Netflix/Bill Dubuque series Ozark, starring Jason Bateman and Laura Linney in a terrific against-type casting as the unfaithful wife, seemed to me somewhat preposterous - a Chicago business analyst and investment advisor (Bateman) runs afoul of a Mexican drug ring and gets ordered to the Lake of the Ozarks resort area w/ the mission of "laundering" $8M in drug money in a span of a few months - but despite the improbabilities of this set-up the series gets going right out of the blocks and far exceeded my expectations. Over the 10 episodes of the first season - and I'm sure more are to follow - the plot takes numerous strange twists and turns, and Bateman emerges as a great character - a smart and ruthless guy who can talk himself out of almost any jam by appealing to the basest interests of his antagonist. He's completely brazen about buying or muscling his way into any business that will give him access to a ledger of expenditures that he can vastly inflate to clean the bills he's stashed. Of course there's a scary, rival drug gang already entrenched in the region - that's one problem - plus an FBI team on his trail. His family, of course, is not totally keen on this sudden uprooting and the move to Missouri, and both teenage daughter and preteen son act out in strange but credible ways; Linney in particular is great, trying to protect the family, which of course forces her ever deeper into the money laundering schemes that Bateman (and later she herself) devise. Of particular note is the terrific Episode 8: Kaleidoscope, which gives us - late in the season, by the way - the back stories of all of the major characters. In short, Ozark is top to bottom is a fine crime and action series with in my view not a single weak link, stretching credibility to the breaking point but never beyond.

Why Moon feels quaintly out of date

Duncan Jones's 2009 sci-fi film, Moon, gives the recently anointed Sam Rockwell a chance to play three roles: 3 cloned versions of the protagonist, Sam Bell, who is finishing, or so it seems, a three-year stint on a lunar mining outpost. Inevitably, this film seen today will call out for comparisons w/ its most obvious antecendent (2001: Rockwell's only "partner" in his lunar expedition is an even-tempered computer servant w/ the voice of Kevin Spacey - this is already seeming like a horror movie! - reminiscent of Hal) and the more recent The Martian, about an astronaut mistakenly abandoned on the surface of Mars. Sadly, Moon comes up on the short end of these comparisons, primarily, I think, because it's a movie with a lot of weird technical twists and a very hard to follow plot sequence - including a lot of confusion that isn't well resolved about the time setting - the future? the present? the recent past? - (The protagonist watches 1980s TV to pass the time and all of the computer gadgetry looks weirdly out of date - but if the setting is 20 or so years ago, how come we don't know about these lunar outposts?) - but with no real development of character. (The Martian was all about human ingenuity, and 2001 was about the surprising, in its day, bond between man and machine.) In other words, it's a film that's all in the head and not in the heart, and that requires an extraordinary suspension of disbelief from the outset. There are a few clever twists, granted - we do get an answer, for ex., to the initial question that will trouble all viewers: Why is one guy left alone on the moon to run this entire operation? That said, Moon feels surprisingly quaint and out of date; maybe that's the point - with this 80s retro look and unglamourous lunar settings - it's about a mining expedition after all, not about experiments w/ life in orbit. (Additional note: DJ seems unaware of the meaning of the "dark side of the moon," where this film is set; all of the exterior scenes are filmed in darkness. Of course there is darkness on the dark side of the moon, but there is an = amount of daylight; The dark side of the moon is never exposed to Earth, but it is exposed half the time to the sun.)

The beauty and despair of Bergman's darkest film, The Passion of Anna

Nobody goes to an Ingmar Bergman movie (pace Smiles of a Summer Night) to be cheered up, but perhaps The Passion of Anna (1969) is the darkest of all his movies, and this darkness of mood and vision is made all the more weird and striking by the look of the film, one of the first (maybe the first) Bergman film shot (by Sven Nykrist) in color. The look of the film is beautiful throughout, lonely but striking winter exteriors on a Baltic island, interiors with warm lamplight and muted sunlight through shades, incredible close-ups with beautiful half-light on the attractive lead actors (most notably one sequence on Liv Ullman in which the only light seems to come from her blue eyes). But the story Bergman tells in yet another chamber drama - only 4 main characters, and one secondary character - is of a world in which everyone is debased, full of shame, struggling against pent-up violent urges that occasionally explode with ruinous results. Bergman has often been criticized, rightly in my view, for his misogyny - in so many films his female leads are mentally unstable, clingy and dependent, out of touch w/ reality, unfaithful, threatening - but in this film he goes one better, now his a misanthrope altogether. The lead, Max von Sydow (Andreas) among other things drinks to excess and then brutally slaps around his partner, Ullman (the eponymous Anna). One of the mysteries of the film - never quite resolved in fact - is that someone on the small island kills and brutalizes animals. One of the misfits on the island gets blamed, and beaten, for this, leading to his suicide. Perhaps he was guilty; or perhaps it was Andreas's only friend, an architect who keeps a weird collection of news clippings and other documents are crimes and social aberrations. Who knows? (Perhaps a second viewing would clear some of the mysteries, though I doubt it.) The point is that everyone on the island is duplicitous, guilty, escaping from something, abusive, and dangerous. There appears to be no way out and no possible resolution (the island setting adds to this feeling of isolation); this is a film - great at times despite its harrowing, dark vision - from an auteur whose mind, at that point in this life, was at a point of despair.

There's one good thing I can say about Wonderstruck but that's it

Let's start with something positive, OK? Todd Haynes does a fine job in re-creating the look and feel and sound of life on busy midtown Manhattan streets, mid-day, in 1977 (although his re-creation of E 81st Street looks more like E 181st Street) and he does a fine job as well w/ his extended interior sequences in the Museum of Natural History - following 2 boys rushing around among the crowds of visitors and then after hours tucked away in a museum cranny: nice sequences, interesting lighting and pacing - even if the museum is already a bit of a cinematic trope (Squid & Whale, q.v.). That said, Wonderstruck is a horrible film in almost every imaginable way. How shall I count them? (Spoilers to follow, I guess): First, how can we possibly believe that a 12-year-old boy, stricken deaf (temporarily? That's never discussed) when he is on the telephone during a lighting strike who leaves a hospital bed and takes off - from rural Minnesota no less! - by Trailways bus for NYC where he spends several days roaming around - and no one misses him or seriously searches for him? And what the parallel plot (in 1927) about a 12-year-old girl who has complete deafness who leaves her wicked, wealthy father in Hoboken and crosses the river to NYC, tracks down her mother (a famous actress of the silent screen), wanders around in same history museum and eventually is taken in by her older brother who then - for the first time! - enrolls her in a school for the deaf and her life turns around so that 50 years later she's a gorgeous (Julianne Moore) grandmother of Trailways boy? OK, I can accept, sometimes, extremely unlikely plot developments but this movie goes beyond the beyond: Trailways boy goes to NYC in search of info about the father he's never known. He sets off because he found a bookmark w/ the name of a bookstore among some papers Dad left behind. And this is a clue that will lead him to his father? A bookmark? Anyway, he arrives in NYC, almost immediately meets another young boy who takes him on a tour of the Nat Hist Museum - and it just so happens that the long-lost father had worked setting up diaramas for the museum! Seriously? I won't belabor these and other absurd plot elements any further but have to point out the central problem: Why is this young boy in desperate search for into about his father? True, his father and mother never married - but what's w/ the big secret? Why won't his mother (conveniently dead now, from a car crash) - or anyone else in his family or small town - tell him who is father is or was? Especially in that his mother (Michelle Williams) took him in youth to see the Nat Hist Museum and a ceremony for this father (which the boy oddly cannot remember)? And as to the father - after all the build-up - there's nothing whatsoever mysterious about his life or his death. He came to Minnesota to work on this project, had a relationship w/ Williams, that ended, he went home, later died of "a bad heart." Without tension, build-up, or surprise, there's nothing to hold our attention or engage us in any way w/ this young boy and his journey of discovery.

Further note on the retro style of The Lure

An additional note on the extremely odd Polish film The Lure, probably (certainly) the only mermaid-zombie musical: Having watched a brief documentary on the making of the film, I'm glad to note that it is in fact a period piece, set in the mid 1980s, so the retro feeling of the film does not reflect contemporary styles and trends in Polish culture. The filmmakers started off with the goal of making a film about the mermaid myth, but updated with a horror/zombie touch and with the mermaids made to look grotesque rather than alluring; when they found that a well-known Warsaw nightclub, now defunct, was available as a location they built the look of the film around that club: very disco, with revolving lights and glitter all around, and then the musical score seemed to follow that style lead, with a not of #s in the style of 80s music videos as well as a few big staged traditional musical #s, for which the director credited the influence of Fosse. I'm not sure if the film rose to the level of fulfilling its vast ambitions or whether the filmmakers even recognize that many people will find the film comic, even ludicrous, but my guess is that they're open to all reactions: It's a copious film and one of a kind.

The best ever Polish zombie-mermaid musical film: The Lure

There can't be any other film like this one: a Polish musical about zombie mermaids. Sounds like a joke, right? And in some ways it is; The Lure (2015), by Agnieszka Smoczynska (I had to look that one up!) is so over the top and beyond the pale that you have to completely give yourself over to the world of this movie or not even bother to watch it. It's beyond criticism, in a sense, as it AS and her team deliberately break all the rules of credibility - combining into a surprisingly successful mashup of several movie genres. Though nobody would or should go to this movie for its plot, here, as best as I can understand it, is what happens: Two attractive young mermaids (Golden and Silver are their names; oddly, the blonde is "Silver") surface in present-day (I think) Warsaw (I assume) and get a job as part of a rock group (The Lure) performing in a sleazy nightclub. Silver falls in love w/ the guitarist, which is fine, except that she can't have sex because she has no human sexual  organs below her waist. She arranges for a "transplant," her lower half replaced by a standard female lower-half complete w/, as she says, "pussy," but there's another catch: If a mermaid has sex with a human male she much bite his throat out and gorge on his heart and other organs. This sometimes gruesome narrative is told via several musical #s, reminiscent a little of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, including a few #s performed in the nightclub and others in the street, such as romping with a vice officer through the streets and tunnels of the city. The nightclub, the music, and the city itself all look and sound as if they're about 1975, and I can't tell if that's meant to be the period setting, if that's the way contemporary Poland actually looks and sounds, or if that's just another weird facet of this mash-up. With better distribution, this film has the potential to be a midnight-screen cult classic, a la Rocky Horror, but failing that, though it's by no means a film for all viewers, it's worth a look if you're seeking something completely different and you're willing to suspect all disbelief.

The Darkest Hour is Oldman's film all the way

Director Joe Wright's The Darkest House (2017) is really Gary Oldman's film, as his portrayal of Churchill is what the movie's all about, a tour de force, of course, as he's in virtually every scene and totally dominates the screen every time he appears. Of course he has all the good lines, in his public speeches, his cabinet and war-room meetings, and in his private conversations; all of the other characters are a blur or a vacuum. The movie begins w/ WC's surprise appointment as PM and follows him through his management of the Dunkirk crisis, with the UK army entrapped in France and near total collapse and defeat. There was pressure on WC to begin peace negotiations w/ Hitler, and the core of the movie is his resistance to those pressures and insistence that the UK fight "on the beaches, on the hills, etc." - in his famous oration to Parliament. The film will give you a good sense of the political forces in place at the start of the war, of how close the UK came to defeat and surrender, which would have had untold consequences across the world, and of the awesome responsibility of wartime leadership. That said, the film will not give you much sense of the personal and private Churchill or of his relationship to anyone but himself - compare The Crown, which showed very well his relationship later in life w/ QE2 and his artistic and literary side (in retirement). Some of the elements are already familiar tropes: WC's overbearing personality as he works w/ a young secretary/typist - didn't we have the same overflowing-bathtub scene in The Crown? - and the episode in which WC rides the Underground to meet "the people" - whether it's based on fact or not, I'm not sure - is handled with such clumsy earnestness that it's almost painful to watch. Yes, Academy voters tend to bestow the top acting awards on those playing either historical figures or people with disabilties - but in this case it's hard to quibble: This film is Oldman's all the way.

A totally likable if not exactly groundbreaking film: Lady Bird

Greta Gerwig's 2017 film Lady Bird, the directorial debut of this excellent actress, breaks not much new ground but still it's completely watchable, enjoyable, witty, and strangely moving at the end, graced by a terrific performance in the title foel by Saorise Ronan with backup from a strong ensemble cast. OK, so this is one of about a thousand movies about the agony and ecstasy of the last year of h.s., in this case the self-dubbed Lady Bird (birth name Christine) yearns to get out of her home city, Sacramento (also GG's home city, as seen in several of her comedies), and go to an East Coast college, which her parents, specifically her mother - played well by Laurie Metcalf, in fact she could have done a trading spaces w/ I, Tonya's Allison Janney and maybe taken that Oscar - insist they cannot afford (affable but feckless father has been laid off from his job as a programmer). So she proceeds to apply surreptitiously, w/ a little help from Dad - haven't we seen that before (was it Real Women Have Curves?)? Much of the film is about LB's life in high school, through which she follow the familiar path of moving away from her rather plain but sweet bestie and hanging w/ a new set of friends, more hip, aware, good-looking, and wealthy. Again, you can see the antecedents and the likely outcome of this narrative strand (Clueless, et al). Where they movie does break some new ground, however, is its altogether sweet and understanding portrayal of a Catholic girls' high school, in which for once the teachers and school leaders are not all monsters and fanatics: the principal is kind and helpful, the drama coach is sympathetic and engaged w/ the kids, even the woman called upon to lecture the students about the evils of abortion is at least not made out to be a fool. GG has a great sense of comic timing, and gets a lot of laughs out of a scene in which the JV football coach subs for the drama teacher - as well as from some one-liners: Dad knocks on door. LB: Dad? Come in. Dad: How did you know it was me. LB: Mom doesn't knock. She also handles some highly emotional scenes w/ great aplomb, notably a beautiful scene of mother-daughter talking about sex, filmed in reflection from the bathroom mirror, and a terrific scene of LB consoling her ex-boyfriend. Altogether, a likable if not monumental film and suggests good things about Gerwig's potential directing career, which perhaps may follow the acting-to-directing course of Sarah Polley.

The conflicts that drive Season 2 of Halt and Catch Fire

Still going strong on Season 2 of the AMC/Netflix series Halt and Catch Fire, the dramatic and imaginative examination of the formative years of the PC revolution and the establishment of the Internet - not really so long ago in time (the first 2 years of the series cover roughly 1983-85) but a million years away in regard to technology. The creators (the Christophers Cantwell and Rogers) do a great job capturing the look and the mood of the era: everything from period details in the rundown offices of the early gamers and programmers to the country clubs, bars, and corporate HQs of the dominant industries of the old order. The first 2 seasons are set in Dallas, and part of the drama involves the upstarts edging out the old order - an electronics company, a gas and oil conglomerate - with their new ideas: personal computers you could buy at a store and plug in and play, online gaming, online communities (a radical idea that many of the gamers and other early adopters resisted), shared electronic space (ie the Internet), instant communication (ie email), and, in an ominous conclusion to season 2, hacking and viruses and antivirus software. The season ends w/ all of the principals headed for the Bay Area, a necessary transition if the series is truly to track the rise of the new industry, though handled rather awkwardly in the narrative (all of the main characters hopping on the same airplane like a class trip). What propels the series of course is the character creation and development: each of the main characters (a garage-based electronics whiz, a rogue programmer, and business whiz, a super salesman, a good ole' boy who can mix w/ the suits) is both driven by the need to succeed and prosper and hindered by serious character flaws, for the most part an ineradicable urge toward mortification and self-destruction. As they move toward Season 3, the stakes - the possible riches and the potential for spectacular failure - get even higher (we end w/ a skyline view of SF by night, seen from the empty floor on an office tower, soon to be a new corporate hq).

Bergman at his darkest in The Silence

I don't exactly see how Ingmar Bergman's The Silence (1963) fits as the 3rd of a trilogy except perhaps that all three (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light) are about people in severe emotional distress and isolation, feeling alone, having no connection w/ the lives of others, no spiritual life, and suffering from stifling and artistic or professional failure and misunderstanding - except this list could characters almost any Bergman film over the first half of his career (comedies excepted). It's amusing to see that in its day The Silence was considered by many to be pornographic, making the film a success de scandale and one of Bergman's most financially successful. Today the sex scenes seem understated and discrete; things have changed. The film itself is a powerful and mysterious chamber drama, focused on 3 people: two sisters perhaps in their 30s - the elder, Ester, apparently unmarried and childless and working as a literary translator, and the younger, Anna, and her son, about 10?, Johan. We know almost nothing about their back stories; the film begins as they're traveling by train - presumably heading home to Sweden though it's never clear where they have come from or why - when Ester becomes ill and they stop in an unnamed city in what seems to be Eastern Europe, perhaps under Soviet siege (there are tanks at the train station and in the streets). They take a suite in an old hotel - high ceilings, long corridors, many chandeliers, the kind of place typical of Eastern Europe and Russia at one time - where Ester tries to recover and Anna goes off into the city in search of sex. They, particularly A., ignore Johan, who roams the corridors alone and has several odd and disconcerting encounters, especially toward the end when he sees his mom w/ a man she's picked up. Neither of the women speak or understand the local language, not can they find a common language (other than sex) w/ anyone whom they meet. The film ends as A and J head home on another train, leaving they dying E behind. As with many Bergman films, there are striking tableaux and close-ups of half-shadowed faces, and many mysterious moments: an encounter with a vaudeville troupe of men w/ dwarfism, views from the window of military maneuvers, meetings with the strangely sympathetic, elderly man who seems to be a concierge - although maybe a spy? There are no clear answers or resolutions - we never learn where the women have come from, where they are going, or why they seem to hate each other - but the film is imbued with a mood of dread and despair. It's Bergman at his darkest - but I think we're also meant to see the failure of these two women to connect w/ anything in their world - the child, the country they are passing through, the turmoil in the streets - is a malaise that can lead only to death and isolation. His portrait of a lonely young boy who sees more than he should is also significant: Johan could have "grown" into the young, artistic man in Glass Darkly, and he foreshadows the young Bergman avatar in Fanny and Alexander.

A powerful film about a sorrowful moment in American history: Detroit

Kathryn Bigelow first in The Hurt Locker and now in Detroit has shown that she is the absolute master at directing scenes that put us in the midst of chaos, confusion, danger, and disaster - in this case the Detroit riots of 1967. The movie, like Gaul, is divided into 3 parts: Act One follows the breakout of rioting in the tight, terribly impoverished black neighborhoods in Detroit. We are right in the midst of the action for a nearly unbearable 45 minutes, and while the movie is highly sympathetic to the frustration of the black community we also see how terrifying and confusing it was for law enforcement during the riots (that includes Detroit and state police, firefighters, and National Guard) as well as the terror for the residents of Detroit trying trying to live their lives in peace and safety. Part 2 focuses on what became the central image of colliding forces, rioting citizens and a sadistic and brutal police force: the Algiers Hotel incident. For the next hour or so we are inside this strange hotel in the midst of the black neighborhood in Detroit, following a few of the residents, two of whom become central figures in the movie, an aspiring Motown singer and his friend-manager. Police suspect a sniper has been shooting from the hotel, they storm the building, shoot to death one of the residents, and brutalize and terrorize over a course of hours a group of ten whom they've rounded up - a completely gripping, chilling story, based on fact as closely as possible, a difficult task in that the facts were and still are in dispute. The third "act" of the film involves the trial of 3 police officers accused of murder and various other crimes in the wake of Algiers; for those who don't know the outcome, I won't give anything away - but I do have to note that the film has lost its steam by this point and the writer-director team have trouble, in limited time, w/ presenting the conflicting testimony at the trial (it's not even clear precisely who is charged; one sympathetic character, a black security guard who'd drifted into the Algiers to try to help, seems to be charged at one point and later not). Despite my quibbles, Detroit is a powerful film on a sorrowful moment in American history, and it bears obvious resonance today.