Why not to watch Godard's Every Man for Himself

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

A Soviet filmmamker's vision of future space exploration

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


(Note: Failure in transmission yesterday, posted today

M. Night Shyamalan can do better than this

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

Possibly the most loathsome and inane movie ever: Mother!

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

What The Wife gets right, and wrong

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

Reasons to watch the Senegalese film Hyenas

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

A reasonably entertaing series that requires extreme willing suspension of disbelief

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