Season 2 of Fauda build upon the excitement and tension of the first season

The first 6 (of 12) episodes of Season 2 of the Israeli series Fauda carry on with the excitement and tension from Season 1 without missing a beat or a step. It takes a while to regain our familiarity w/ the key characters and the complex events of Season 1 (a longer recap would have been helpful) and the plot lines are every bit as complex, so the first episode or two require a lot of a attention, but soon we're into the pace and the tension as Doron and a squad of Israeli counter-terrorists deal with the Hamas forces out for revenge - a quest that splinters along ideological lines: The Hamas leaders are urging a degree of caution and restraint while a young hothead is out for family revenge and is building an alliance with the more frightful ISIS. Among the strengths of the series, aside from the excellent pacing and continuous tension, are the glimpses of family life of both Israelis and Palestinians - it's not exactly a Sopranos, but we see enough of the strained father-son, husband-wife, parents-children relationships on both sides to help us understand the forces that drive the action and the lives taht are at stake. There's a lot of violence of course, some inexcusable and cowardly - on both sides (it's especially painful to watch Israeli officers beat a Palestinian prisoner, who is in fact a terrorist, while his hands are cuffed to a chair). I also tip my hat to the sound crew: the soundtrack is subtle but relentless and does a lot toward maintaining the constant sense of living on the edge of crisis.

An unconverntional and beautfiul film about the last days of colonial occupation in French-speaking Africa

Claire Denis's White Material (2009) is a tense, thoughtful, unconventional depiction of the struggles of a 40-womething woman, played by the ubiquitous Isabelle Huppert, to hang on to her family-run coffee plantation in Africa - country unnamed but the movie was shot in the French-speaking Cameroons (many beautiful scenes of the often-hostile and dangerous landscape) - during a time of political and military upheaval, as a militia of black revolutionary soldiers are in the process of seizing control of the country and in particular ownership of white-held, colonial property. Strangely, the movie begins with the plantation in ruins and Huppert confused and in despair; then we jump back in time - a few days? weeks? months? - as we see the first threats and the beginning of the uprising. The movie is often scary, as the revolutionary forces home in on the plantation and Huppert refuses to budge - even when she finds a goat's head tossed in among the harvested coffee beans, even when her power line is cut, even when a young man with a spear threans here teenage. At one point her husband abandons the cause; it wasn't clear to me, but it's possible that he actually sells the plantation or turns over the ownership anyway to a group of rebels. Huppert's doomed and valiant attempts to keep the farm running are at the heart of the narrative, and the film is unusual in building sentiment for a colonial property owner - although for the most part the rebels and other native Africans are portrayed with some sympathy and Huppert is portrayed as ice-cold and indifferent to the fate and safety or her family members and of the few employees who stay on with her during the crisis. She's brave, but she's fighting a lost cause. A key element in the film is H's relationship with her severely troubled son, a completely feckless character who, under stress, acts in an increasingly bizarre and self-destructive manner. I found the end of the film somewhat confusing, hard to make sense of a mysterious character called "the Boxer"  who dies on the plantation (we see that in the first scene). I'm curious about the reception of this film in France and in Africa, whether politically aware viewers (most people likely to see this film) were troubled by the largely sympathetic portrayal of a colonial property holder reluctant to give up her control and privilege; I'l probably watch the short documentary Denis shot about the film's premiere in the Cameroons for some insight on this.

The strange opposition of squalor and beauty in Kurosawa's Dodes'ka-Don

Akira Kurosawa's 1970 movie, Dodes'ka-Den is strange and strangely captivating in almost every respect. It's a movie about the plight and the sufferings of several people and families living in squalor in a small community - much like what today we might call a tent city - on the outskirts of a major city (presumably Tokyo) that we never see in the film. There's a lot of suffering in this movie: sexual abuse, serious alcoholism, promiscuity, mental illness. And though it's by no means a plot-driven movie, a # of the story lines come to sorrowful or tragic conclusions. That said, the movie doesn't have the ponderous and misanthropic feeling of Kurosawa's earlier "class," The Lower Depths, which I consider the most unwatchable classic film of all time. AK intentional and almost perversely contrasts the misery of the lives of the characters with settings of extreme beauty; the rice-paper walls of all the dwellings are beautifully colored, there are many scenes with striking lighting effects, the costumes are bright and witty, and even the uptempo theme music (which evokes for me each time a passage in the Dylan song I Want You) is in jarring contrast with the lives on display. Throughout, a group of women gather at what appears to be the only water source, where they scrub pots and do laundry and gossip - kind of like a Greek chorus. This was AK's first film in color, and he seems to revel in this new (for him) cinematic tool - like a blind man who can see for the first time. Whether his use of color makes any sense in this movie is an open question, but he does manage to attain some heartbreaking moments and well as scenes of riotous beauty amid lives of squalor. The major shortcoming in the film, however, is its complete indifference to the source of this poverty and despair, much less to any remedy. What brought these poor people to this slum? What can the city or the nation do to help them and others? It seems, in this film, that the poverty and squalor are just a given and it's up to the residents, or victims one might say, to make their lives better somehow. As to the odd title, as far as I can see it has no meaning but is the sound - perhaps the Japanese equivalent of "choo choo"? - that a young man, with significant mental illness, makes as he walks through the settlement pretending to be a train conductor (he imagines he's driving one of those single-car electric trains familiar to all viewers of early Japanese cinema).

Pretty hard to stop watching Evil Genius once you start

There's only one thing wrong w/ the new Netflix documentary 4-part series Evil Genius (Barbara Schroeder and Trey Borzillieri): the title. I'm not going to give anything away (i.e., no spoilers), but I can say that the 2 prime suspects in this investigation may well be evil but they are by no means geniuses except in their own minds; each repeatedly tells the investigators and the filmmakers how smart they are - but neither got anything but trouble out of their totally bizarre bank robbery gone wrong. The robbery took place in 2003 in the appropriately named city of Erie, Penn, and the series begins, after some intro material, with live footage of the bank robbery - a man with seeming to be wired with explosives robs a small strip-mall bank branch, with catastrophic results. We soon go into Bizarro World, as we learn we see the totally weird ransom note the robber was carrying, we learn of a series of mysterious deaths that are seemingly but not evidently related to this crime, we meet the two main suspects who continue to rat out each other, neither of them convincingly, we accompany investigators - there's a great deal of footage available to the filmmakers, and they had a lot of cooperation from the various police agencies (state and federal) as well as from some though not all of the suspects and participants, we enter the homes of some of the suspects where we see squalor almost beyond belief, and ultimately we see a lot footage of jailhouse visits and, less so (cameras not allowed in courts at that time) of a trial and appeals. The story is odd at times that I kept thinking that if this were fiction nobody would believe it - and yet, to what end? At bottom, it's an examination of mental illness more than a crime story; their plot was doomed to failure, though the case against the evident perpetrators was devilishly difficult to prove in court. In the end, I'm not sure that we ever get all the answers, although for a # of reasons the case is now closed if not fully resolved. Pretty hard to stop watching this doc once you're in, and at 4 episodes it seems just the right length for this story.

A beautiful and meaningful urban documentary, Stations of the Elevated

Manfred Kirchheimer's 1981 documentary, Stations of the Elevated, weighs in at only 45 minutes, which turns out to be the perfect length of time for this extended look at the NY subway system (specifically, the elevated cars and tracks of the Dyre Street line), which become a metaphor and viewpoint for a look at an entire society. Right from its witty and allusive title, with its religious connotations, the film promises to be much more than an art project - it's as meaningful and deep as any movie about contemporary urban life, even though it has no plot and no scripted dialog. The film begins with a long study of the elevated cars in their yard at the start of a day, as they slowly begin moving, like prehistoric giant beasts - with the only soundtrack the squeals of the cars emerging from the barn - strange and beautiful shots (who hasn't wondered where these cars go at night, btw?), but also hideous shots: Every car is nearly completely covered by tags from the thousands of urban graffiti artists. Are these tags art or are they desecrations of public space? Our thoughts on this go back and forth: There is a strange beauty and a lot of skill (MK makes no attempt to show the artists in action; for that go see Exit Through the Gift Shop), but you also look at these and think we're seeing a city and a civilization in ruin, where public given up all hope of maintaining clean public transportation. Over the course of the film we see scenes from some of the neighborhoods the cars pass on their route, with a particularly striking sequence in what is probably a project in the South Bronx, one which looks like a war-ravaged city, which in a sense it is. Kids play some dangerous games jumping out of a window onto an old mattress, and at one point they pause to admire the artwork on a passing car: This to them (and in a way to us) is a thing of beauty, possibly the onlyl beauty and color in their frightening lives. What chance do these kids have, we wonder? What kind of society would let families live in projects such as these? Oddly, the end of the line (South Ferry, I looked it up - the film gives us no direct markers) includes a view of the State of Liberty - MK doesn't dwell on this oddity, but just gives us a flash of an image, enough to make us wonder about art and culture and public space. Most of the sound is ambient, but there are some fine moments that include a jazz score by Mingus and, at the end of the day when the cars return to their "yard," Aretha Franklin singing a gospel song (was it Amazing Grace?) - and we sense that there is something holy and otherworldly about these passing trains, uniting a city, floating along above ground, screaming and grunting like a dying animal, an artist's composition in motion and evolving from night to night and even as we watch. 

A final iimage from Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon

Adding one note to yesterday's post on Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon: HOw could Ihave forgot to mention the final scenes in which the father and daughter prepare for her wedding ceremony and we see the father (Rya) buttoning himself into a "morning coat" - further evidence of the adoption of Western fashions especially for business and for formal occasions - and then the daughter makes her entry, in a traditional Japanese wedding dress, like someone stepping forward from the 18th century: a striking visual presentation of the clash of two cultures in postwar Japan, an attempt to hold onto traditional values and ideals against the tidal wave of Western ideas and commerce. The irony is that she is giving up the traditional role of daughter tending to aging father in order to pursue her own life as wife and mother - though of course she is doing so at the urging of her father. Her bridal attire is a way to say: See what you've sacrificed, see what you're giving up.

The power of Ozu's last movie

Ozu's final movie (1962), the enigmatically titled An Autumn Afternoon (many Ozu films are named for a season or part of a season, but this moniker seems particularly odd as the film is shot almost entirely as interiors - it hardly matters what the season might be - and takes place over several weeks or even months, although maybe the title refers to the autumnal years of the elderly central character and to the afternoon of the final scene?) touches on many of Ozu's key themes, especially father-daughter relationships and the obligations and expectations of families, especially the expectation that daughters forego or at least delay marriage in order to run the house for their father and brothers. In this movie the father - a successful business executive in some sort of vast factory in 1960s Japan, in an era when biz execs don't appear to work at a very fast pace and in which offices are run as strict hierarchies with the women in completely servile roles - wrestles with the idea that his daughter at 24 may be ready for marriage and over time comes to accept that she must begin her own life no matter what the cost to him (a similar theme in Ozu's Late Spring, with same lead actor, and a reverse on Ozu's masterpiece, Tokyo Story, in which the father, again same lead actor, and mother recognize that they are no longer central to their married daughter's life). Over the course of the movie we see a few scenes from several marriages, each exploring different aspects of or degrees of female independence: for ex., in one segment a young businessman tries to buy some expensive golf clubs and his wife forbids him to do so, an almost unheard of breech of protocol, at least of the older generation. We also see the business exec/father meet with some of his high-school buddies for evenings of serious drinking; they invite one of their former teachers - one whom they apparently did not care for - to one of their outings and get him severely intoxicated; they are a little surprised and dismayed, on helping him to get home, to see that his lives in poverty. A sub-theme is the changes in Japanese life and the self-image of the Japanese in postwar years: Not only such details as neon signs advertising "coffee" bars and the fascination w/ golf and w/ baseball but also a scene in which the business executive (Chishu Ryu, looked it up - a terrific actor) drinks with a man who served under him in the Japanese navy - a time of their lives when they were proud and hopeful; the defeat and partial destruction of Japan are never mentioned - history lives between the lines - but we sense that the younger men and women are changing to more Western, "modern" ways and the older men are ashamed of their past and drinking to blot out the bad memories and to blind themselves to the change on-going all around them.

The excellence of Babylon Berlin and some concerns about the end of season 1 (no spoilers)

A few quibbles aside, the German miniseries Babylon Berlin is a powerful and provocative story throughout its 16 episodes, with many plot lines, betrayals, and reversals of fortune that keep you thinking and engaged throughout. The writing and acting are smart; the lead characters - Gereon Rath (Berlin homicide detective who finds himself investigating a plot against the state and a potential military coup) and Charlotte Ricker (a young woman in an impoverished and derelick Berlin family, working nights as a prostitute in a decadent nightclub frequented by vice-squad members among others and who aspires to become a police detective - are intelligent, complex, flawed, and appealing; and the whole company does a great job re-creating the louche atmosphere of Berlin in the 20s, complete with political instability, extremes of wealth and poverty, frenetic entertainment, cross-dressing and overt sexuality, hyperinflation, political battles, clashes between right- and left-wing forces. The season brings a few surprising twists (don't worry, no spoilers here) in the final episode and wraps successfully - while still managing to look forward to an anticipated season 2. That said, the final episode, while dramatic and exciting, seemed, unlike the preceding 15, more 007ish, with a shootout on a moving train, a dramatic underwater rescue, and other theatrics involving near superhuman skills and effort. Similarly - and I wonder if here it went off script from the source novel? - the final episode introduced some startling though hardly credible final plot twists and revelations that seem out of place in this series but admittedly leave the door open for further development and complications in future episodes.

The weirdness of Samual Fuller's vision of mental illness and its treatment in Shock Corridor

Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963), which he wrote/produced/directed is a deliberately sensational and over-the-top drama with an absolutely ludicrous plot, some truly weird scenes, and a haunting vision about life in a mental-health institution that, for all its campy exaggeration, is both scary and sad, rising over the obvious flaws in this film. The plot involves a newspaper reporter who thinks he'll win the Pulitzer Prize (which everyone in the movie mispronounces btw) by getting himself admitted to a mental institutions as a patient and while there he will interrogate other patients to find info to solve a murder. His investigation such as it is consists of asking patients "Who killed Sloan," until he gets an answer, and eventually the Pulitzer - so ridiculous a plot line it's not even worth ripping it apart. That said, Fuller's real interest is in showing the life in the halls of the institution, and his vision is quite harrowing: We see the reporter attacked by a group of "oversexed" women (a hilarious scene), get in a tussle with a black man who is a virulent white supremacist, engage in weird conversations with a man who thinks he's a Civil War general, a famous scientist who behaves like a 6-ear-old boy (they play hide-and-seek), and a man who goes by Pagliacci who thinks he's an opera singer. While these eccentric behaviors dominate the foreground, the real interest, visually and viscerally, comes from the deep focus, where we see many men standing in the hallway, in zombie-like states or stuck in loops of repetitive motion (one man, for example, rows like a member of crew throughout much of the film). The twist of the plot, obvious from the outset, is that the reporter, who enters the asylum healthy, becomes increasingly like the patients until at the end he's seriously ill. This concept - the hospital as infectious - was reversed not long after in the adaptation of Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest, in which we sense that the hospitalized men are healthier and more sane than their so-called caretakers. That was a '60s concept, and Fuller is definitely in working in the spirit of the '50s (one man against the system), even filming in the nearly antiquated b/w though using color for some bizarre dream/hallucination sequences.

A good Netflix documentary about the rise and fall of a cult; did it really need to be 6 episodes, though?

The Netflix 6-part documentary Wild, Wild Country (by McClain and Chapman Way) recounts the history and brings us up to date on a weird event that apparently was a huge part of the news cycle in the early 1980s although, oddly, none of the 3 of us watching nor any of a few people I've discussed this series with has any memory of these events in the news at all (admittedly, these events got much bigger play on the NW, but the were part of the national news, as we see from many interpolated news clips). The story involves and devout group of followers of an Indian guru, Rajneesh, who, forced from their base in Poona, India, resettle in a remote part of Oregon. They went there to build a new community and to live life their own way - evidently, with a lot of frenetic dancing, open sexuality, and communal sharing of property - and one would think all could have been well for them. But instead of quietly going about their lives, they made a nuisance of themselves in the tiny nearby town of Antelope - having sex in plain view, taking over a park, crowding the streets, just generally being provocative and obnoxious, which led to community opposition, The central figure is a woman named Sheela who was the public face and voice for the group - the Rajneesh was spending 3 years in silence (at least publicly) - and Sheela relished the opportunity to be combative and belligerent, eventually to a criminal degree: poisoning people and event taking steps to kill a rival w/in the cult. The cult members were armed and dangerous and they had a huge amount of money - perhaps from sales and memberships world wide, though that's the documentary doesn't examine the source of the $. Sheela was either the iron fist in the velvet glove, carrying out Rajneesh's wishes and orders, or else she went off on her own ego trip, ruining the life the commune through her paranoia and aggression, for which she ultimately paid a price. In many ways it's fascinating to watch this story unfold - aided by a trove of contemporary film footage, supplemented by interviews with Sheela and others who lived through both sides of this struggle, and to wonder how we could have missed this story (which came about in the wake of Jonestown, which everyone remembers); however, most points were well made early on and at least by episode three I became annoyed at how slowly the filmmakers were revealing key information; they didn't need 6 hours to tell this story.

A mediocre work by a great Japanese director

Did someone say that I like any movie as long as it's by a famous Japanese director and completed before 1970? Well that person is wrong. Sadly, I did not like Ozu's 1959 film Floating Weeds (apparently a remake of his own 1930s silent movie). Yes, it was promising at first, a simple plot about troubled a generational clash and troubled family relationships, and yes it has many long takes from Ozu's signature camera position, the "tatami point of view" (i.e., shot as if seen from a tatami floor mat). But this is by no means a Tokyo Story or a Late Spring - it's a melodrama in which the characters are wooden and unchanging and in which Ozu seems to have no feelings for his characters, as if he was just pushing to get the actors through their paces. The story in brief: an itinerant kabuki theater troupe comes to a small seaside city (time is undetermined, but it seems to predate the automobile), where as it turns out the head of the troupe years back had a relationship with a local prostitute that led to the birth of a son. The man has continue to support the son, who thinks the man is his uncle (he's now a young adult - and obviously a gullible one). When the man's current partner, a lead actress in the troupe, figures out what's going on, she induces the beautiful young star of the troupe to seduce the son, leading to a # of conflicts and arguments - in many of which the man is brutal and bullying (enough today to get arrested for spousal abuse). There's potential here, but undeveloped beyond the simple melodramatic plot line (though the final scenes, after the troupe breaks up and leaves town are moving and understated) and the whole approach is wooden and eclectic: This never looks or feels in any way like a real city (no street life, crowds, etc.), the music is sometimes absurdly inappropriate to the action, there's little differentiation among the settings, and we don't know enough about the troupers to care about their individual fates, such as they are. At times this movie even feels like a stage play, which perhaps is part of its provenance? Either way, to get a sense of Ozu at his best, start w/ Tokyo Story and pass Weeds by.

Terrific and complex start to Season 1 of Babylon Berlin

Weighing in on the first half (8 episodes out of a massive 16-episode season) of the Netflex/German series Babylon Berlin, based on a set of crime novels that begin in the mid-90s and are set in the highly atmospheric time era of late 1920s Germany - which we've seen in numerous books (Berlin Alexanderplaz, e.g.), plays/movies (Cabaret), memoirs, even TV series (the aforementioned BA, by Fassbinder, which I'm waiting for Criterion to make available via streaming) -but maybe none as powerful and effective as this series, which will grip you from the first episode and never let go. It's smart, well acted, beautifully produced (astonishing re-creation of the era that rivals anything the BBC has done in its numerous historical dramas, except maybe the superior The Crown), and well written throughout. There's no doubt that it gets off to a violent start, but I encourage viewers to say w/ the series; there is some violence and grotesqueness, but it's always in service of the plot, never gratuitous or sensational. Also, the series introduces many plot lines at the start, and not all will be clear over the course of the first few episodes, which is by design, but as you stay w/ it these plot elements will clarify and cohere in smart and surprising ways. The central characters is a police detective, Gereon Rath, sent by his father - the chief of police in Cologne - to work on the vice squad in the Berlin police force on a particularly sensitive case - which we learn about over the course of # of episodes. He's in a dark and scary world, in which just about everyone is double-dealing and double-crossing, and Rath has a # of issues of his own, including a drug addiction and posttraumatic stress from his war experiences. Possibly the best character in the series is the young Charlotte who lives with her mother and siblings in Dickensian squalor and who gets by via temp work as a clerk/secretary in the Berlin PD and, at night, prostitution as an underground dance club. Working in the PD she develops a taste for detective work and shows herself to be really good at discerning info from clues - but her possibility of advancement is limited by a # of factors, blackmail, sexism, and the mores of her time and place. She's a strong, witty, and appealing character and it's obvious that the season (and more to come perhaps) needs her - even though her position is in jeopardy at the end of episode 8. There's a whole world of politics (both German and Russian), crime and vice, smuggling and arms dealing, addiction, PTSD, plus some family dramas, all played out within a world of fast living, high inflation, terrible unemployment, strikes and street demonstrations, police brutality, and of course, over the horizon, the imminent rise of fascism.