Shakespeare our contemporary? Not quite, in Hopkins's King Lear

Last night I watched the first half hour - into Act 2 I think (the expulsion from Goneril's estate) of the Anthony Hopkins King Lear (on Prime); I doubt I'll watch any further. Not that it's a terrible production or anything - it has many strengths - but there's also something about it that's entirely wrong. They set the play in contemporary London - with the opening sequence showing the bright lights of the financial-district towers at night - slowly moving us toward a government building, an appropriate locale for the first act, the king's division of the country among his daughters. But soon I recognized that the contemporary setting just feels ridiculous - at least without major modifications to the text. It's OK I guess to have an aged king of England dividing up the realm but it's totally weird when he says things like "By Appollo!" And gradually, the realistic-contemporary setting seems more and more absurd: A king sitting in a darkened room with just his three daughters and some of the upper nobility dividing the kingdom into sections on a hand-drawn map? How could this be? And the visit to Goneril, with the crowd of soldiers in camo acting like a bunch of louts? And the king has a jester, too? No, it makes no sense at all. There have been other updates of Lear - Jane Smiley's Thousand Acres; Kurosawa's Ran - that work well (at least Kurasowa's does) because they just use the dynamics of the plot, rebuilding as necessary (Shakespeare would approve of course, that greatest of adapters). But to take the play literally and stage it in contemporary setting is ludicrous; it's a medieval play and should look and feel that way - ghostly, dark, brutal, sparsely populated. That said, the English are always great at certain aspects of Shakespeare: The look of the setting is visually fine, even if it makes no sense, and the cast, especially Hopkins and Emma Thompson (Goneril) are great at line readings. It won't do you any harm to watch the whole movie - though I would definitely say it is totally unsuitable for a first-time viewer/reader of King Lear. I'd start with the Peter Brook 1971 film if possible and work down from there.

Perhaps the best and most credible h.s. drama since FNL: Elite

The 8-part Netflix series Elite (2018) has gotten little attention so far - perhaps because it's in Spanish and easily confused w/ a Telanovela - but in my view it's a series well worth watching for a # of reasons: Excellent narrative line w/ many strands that intersect intelligently and surprisingly, fine acting by a young cast (all of the principals are student in an "elite" high school in, I think, Madrid), a mystery and a murder investigation revealed in the first scene and carried through till the conclusion but that never dominates the plot, which is really about the students and their complex inter-relations; a high-school drama that is both sympathetic and highly credible (the only comparable piece I can recall would be the great Friday Night Lights). Yes, maybe there's a touch of melodrama and yes it's a litle hard in the first few episodes to keep the many characters and their back stories straight and yes the cross-cultural crushes and relationships are not always totally believable - a fact that the characters recognize themselves and joke about, calling these cross-class relationship "Disney" - but there's a lot of veracity throughout and it will hold your interest and attention top to bottom. In brief, the story line is that 3 kids from an impoverished public h.s. win scholarships to attend the elite school and their doing so and their falling in love with kids already in the school creates waves of social pressure and reaction.Among issues touched upon include homosexuality, Muslim fundamentalism, political corruption, grade-grubbing, and more, all done without didacticism and as part of character development. All told, though Madrono and Montero have come up with a really good series w/ a lot of insight into many social issues - in all cultures today - and it seems definitely headed to a Season 2 (and who knows?, an English-language remake, that would probably ruin the whole thing?).

The Dawn Wall has plenty of thrills for those who love heights and those who fear them

The Lowell-Mortimer 2018 film, The Dawn Wall, has plenty of jaw-dropping moments of awe and is a thrill for those who love heights and for those who fear them, though it doesn't break any ground in documentary cinema - pretty standard techniques throughout with too much emphasis on talking heads - in what has become a mini-genre, the mountain-climber movie (the recent Meru was one of the best). That said: Aren't these movies always pretty good and worth watching (one of my household members says an emphatic: Yes!). And I have to say that the saga of Timmy Caldwell is one of the best: He's a kid who grew up w/ learning difficulties and w/ a loving dad but one who pushed him to extremes from the earliest age and, fortunately, instead of growing up in rebellion fell in love with rock climbing and by teenage years totally excelled (and dad never became too pushy of too invested in his son's life). Timmy became obsessed with completing unique climb up the wall of El Cap (Yosemite), and the film centers on that climb - and gives us a great sense of the extraordinary difficulty of some of the 32 "pitches" en route to the summit. We get a really intimate view of the struggles of Caldwell and his much less experienced climbing partner (Kevin Jorgeson) as somehow the filmmakers followed them closely throughout the challenge (there's no info on how they shot this film - which is good; the film isn't about itself). Moreover, Caldwell has a fascinating back story, involving an ill-fated climb with his then-girlfriend and a climbing partner, in Krygyzstan, during which they were assaulted and captured by a team of rebel soldiers. So there's plenty of great material in this film, and it's especially worth watching for those who like documentary films that take us for 2 hours to places we'd never go in a million years.

An quirky search-for-the-truth documentary about a missing film: Shirkers

Sandi Tan's 2018 documentary, Shirkers, gets off to a bumpy start but by the end catches us up in its pathos and humor. Tan narrates the story of her life as a filmmaker, centered on the creation and then the mysterious loss of a film she and some friends produced when they were college students, the eponymous Shirkers. ST, now about 40 years old, grew up in Singapore, where she and 2 girlfriends were into punk, alternative rock, world cinema, and all forms of creative expression; there are and were kids like them in every single school in the U.S., but in Singapore they were complete outliers. Pursuing their mutual interest in film, they took a course in what looks to be some kind of community school, a class led by a 30ish man, Georges Cardona, who turns out to be strange to say the least. The 2 young women leave Singapore for first year of college - 2 to the US and Tan to England - and continue communications w/ Cardona (he primarily sends odd tape recordings of his brief messages to them rather than calls, cards, letters); he encourages the 3 to return to Singapore for the summer to make a movie. Tan writes a screenplay that everyone raves about; at this point her film looks to be incredibly disorganized and amateurish, but they get enough money to spend the whole summer shooting. They all return to school in the fall, leaving the film - about 70 "cans" - with Cardona to edit. And that's the last they see of the film - Cardona disappears along w/ all the video and audio. I won't provide any spoilers; however, I'll say that up to this point in the film - a bit more than halfway in - I was disappointed: Cardona is such an obvious phony and pathological liar, perhaps even a predator, that it was hard to believe these young women were so trusting in him. And the film they were working on looked to be a disaster - perhaps it was best that they just move on. The 2nd half of Shirkers, however, really picked up my interest, as Tan in particular tries to sleuth out what happened to Cardona and to the film. Without divulging anything, I'll say only that it's nice at the end to see where the 3 filmmakers are today and how much - or how little - they've changed over the years. This documentary will recall in some way other search-for-the-truth dox such as Searching for Sugar Man; I don't see this film as a likely commercial success - a little too quirky for that - but it's worth a look.

Why to watch Orson Welles's final film - and why not to

We shoujld be grateful to Nettflix for bringing us the finished version of Orson Welles's final movie, The Other Side of the Wind, which remained incomplete when he died in 1985 - leaving behind about 100 hours of footage, shot in various formats (some full screen 35mm, some square forma - maybe Super8?, some b/w, some color) - with a few edited segments, many notes, but far from coherent. He never was able to get full backing that would have enabled him to complete the film within a set time-frame and budget - typical of his late films, which were always hanging on by a threat and filmed over a too-long span of time - and the footage sat in various vaults and warehouses in Europe until a few years ago. The job of putting this together was heroic, with many obstacles - including transfer from celluloid to digital - but the team has at least created a reasonably coherent 2-hour film. But is it any good? I would say it's a curiosity worth watching because of what it shows us about Welles, but conceptually the film is a huge ego trip that's willfully disorienting and deliberately obscure. In brief, the movie tells the story of an aging director celebrating his 70th bd with a crowd of acolytes, hangers-on, and a host of media invited into the house director (played by John Huston, clearly meant to be a stand-in for OW) to document the celebration and to screen a cut of his latest film project - a film within the film. The evening comes to a tragic end - which we learn of at the outset; much as we might (or might not) love OW, there's nothing lovable about the overbearing, gruff character at the center of this film, much less about his swarm of parasites and acolytes and exes. That said, on the plus side this film is like an anthology of OW's innovative and groundbreaking directorial style or styles: The unusual shooting angles, many from the ground up, that we know from Citizen Kane, the strange effect of bright illumination in dark rooms and spaces that we've seen in Chimes at Midnight, the quick cuts in the editing - assuming the editors of this final version emulated OW's technique in the scenes he'd completed - so that the camera never lingers on any one character or moment, which recalls the above-mentioned films and also Mr. Arkadin. This directorial abundance is worth watching, even studying, as least for a while, though eventually most will agree that all this technique is in service to no good end. The "film within a film" is dreadful (maybe it's supposed to be?), a near-pornographic film that looks like a bad music video from the 90s (so maybe OW was ahead of his time once again, but it's a time well forgotten); the screenplay at times impenetrable. It's no wonder he could get no financial backing for this film as it had flop written all over it - which makes us wonder about the director's blathering about the decline of taste and the ever-lower standards of the movie biz. So, yeah, it's worth seeing for technique alone and for historical value, but I doubt anyone will want to rank this among other Welles classics. Sometimes, an artist's days are done.

Homecoming will hold your interest despite some of its flaws

The Blooomberg/Horowitz/Esmail 10-part series Homecoming, on Amazon Prime is a mixed bag, w/ some strong points in its favor and some deep flaws as well. The story, briefly, involves a social worker/therapist, Julia Roberts, working in a DOD-financed program to help returning war vets overcome PTSD and transition into society. OK, but we see right away that this project is deeply flawed and completely sinister, in ways that we don't comprehend fully until the conclusion of the series. Her supervisor, running the program from afar - all by cell phone while he engages in various sybaritic activities - is played by a hilarious Bobby Cannevale, who brings a lot to the show. On the plus side, the creators to a fine job w/ the plot strands, doling out information in pieces and letting the picture in stages come into focus; this works bcz JR herself is unclear about the program and its true intent. The show is done half in the "present" - a few years after the program was shut down, and w/  JR working in a crappy job in a diner - and half in the he past, when JR was a well-groomed, devoted social worker involved in a good cause, with particular focus on one returning vet and their completely inappropriate flirtation (the use of different frame dimensions - portrait-frame for the present and wide-screen landscape for the past, was visually distracting and not even used consistently). JR once again shows she's a fine and resourceful actor, able to show a range of emotion. It's obvious why they cast her in the role - star power mega! and prestige for streaming and TV - but she is perhaps 20 years too old from the role (to everyone's credit, they do not make her "glam"). No spoilers here, but the ending had a nice twist that surprised at least me; that said, toward the end there's a lot of schmaltz and improbability re the relation between JR and her patient. I personally do not see how they can use this material for a second season; it would be nice if they quite while they're (mostly) ahead. I will also endorse the comments of a NYT TV critic who gave thumbs-up for a drama series using 30-minute episodes - a rarity, and a welcomed change for pace.

A 1940s melodrama that rises above the level of the genre to examine issue of unwanted pregnancy

Ida Lupino's 1949 melodrama, Not Wanted (she isn't credited on all sources as director because she took up the reins when the original director became ill), is a deceptively powerful work that in some ways goes beyond the conventions of its time and of its genre. The film shows us the plight of a 19-year-old woman (Sally) who has a difficult home life with an overbearing mother, she starts to date a jazz/classical pianist who wants to break out of his life playing in local saloons and clubs; they have a brief (one-night?) relationship and he leaves for "Capital City." Completely misreading his supposed affection, Sally follows and is immediately rebuffed: He wants to get on w/ his career and has no use for her. Meanwhile she meets another guy, a sweet and very dull injured war vet, who pursues her avidly - but as these things happen, she's not that into him. (In a twist that makes us squirm today, he gives her a job in his gas station, then pressures her to go out w/ him. Good thing he's such as "square," as they used to say.) To this point, the movie's a straightforward melodrama, with a ridiculous, swelling soundtrack and with many stagey and stilted one-on-one scenes. The movie takes twist, however (is this where Lupino took over?) as Sally discovers she's pregnant - a pretty cool scene of her passing out at a small amusement park leads to their calling a doctor - and from this point forward the movie has almost a documentary feeling, exploring the issue of "unwanted" pregnancy (the title is a clever double-entendre) and the unfairness of the woman's plight. More fortunate than some, Sally gets taken in by a have for expectant single mothers, a very caring environment, but she's faced with the terrifying decision as to whether to keep and raise her child. The birth scene at the hospital is terrific - all filmed from the mother's semi-conscious point of view - and then the scenes of Sally post partum, working a menial job, living in a tough neighborhood, drawn to all the children that she sees playing on the sidwalks and "stoops," is really powerful, culminating in her snatching up a baby from an untended carriage. As a brief note in current New Yorker pointed out, the film concludes w/ some fine scenes of 1940s LA (Angel Steps, I think) as Sally races away, pursued by would-be "square" suitor; I don't know why the film didn't acknowledge the LA setting, would have made it more real rather than faux-universal (Capital City??); the ending, which some might see as "happy," has enough ambiguity and uncertainty to balance out the occasional schmaltz that seems inevitable for a melodrama from the 1940s. (Note to Amazon Prime: for some reason the left-side stereo channel dies in the final "reel" of the film.)

Why The Salesman deserved its Best Foreign Film award

Asghar Fahradi's 2106 film, The Salesman, is completely deserving of its Best Foreign Film Oscar - a highly literate and well acted film start to finish, the kind that we see more and more coming from Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, Iran, and South Korea - and less and less from the U.S., sad to say. In brief, the film is about an 30-something couple in Tehran (I think); the man teaches literature in an all-male high school (the students are delightfully inquisitive and rambunctious; the classroom scene near the top of the film is a delight) and both husband and wife are actors by night, in a lead roles in a translated version for A Miller's Death of a Salesman. Over time, we see how the plot of this movie reflects on the plight of the characters in the play - but Farhadi is subtle about the point, with the strands not coming together till the last scenes. The essence of the plot is that the teacher's wife and co-star is assaulted by an intruder in their new, somewhat sketchy apartment and the man's search for the perpetrator, which leads him, and the film itself, in some completely unexpected directions. Ultimately, he becomes a man in crisis, torn by different forces - anger, fear, protectiveness, masculine pride - to make a moral and ethical decision. The pace of the movie is steady and unrelenting, keeping us thinking and engaged at every moment; we also get a rare view into cultural life in contemporary Iran - who would think that actors are performing Arthur Miller plays of all things? Fahradi hints at the heavy hand of the government - the actors have to wait for approval before staging the play, and they're concerned that some scenes or passages may be cut  but he doesn't belabor the point; people seem free to live their own lives of quiet desperation, just as in any Western city (save for the required head-dresses and all-concealing robes for the women - which of course gives the assault, which takes place in a bathroom shower, more poignancy and emotional weight for both wife and husband). The film is worth seeing both as a cultural document and as a highly intelligent and cinematic drama.

Lubitsh's Shope Around the Corner shows what Hollyood could achieve - and ignore

Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 film, The Shop Around the Corner, a Hollywood studio comedy-drama based on a Hungarian play an set in Hungary ca 1930 or so is obviously dated but still worth watching of for nothing else for the fantastic first "reel," in which EL brilliantly establishes the culture of 6 employees and an irascible boss in a little high-end gift shop on a busy city street - a world of employee loyalty and dependence, of personal shopping and retail commerce that was probably already near extinction, at least in the U.S., at the time of filming - and with a special poignancy added by the European setting, as that world was already under siege and about to change forever - although there are no elements that reference or even foreshadow then-contemporary unease in Europe and the world. EL - known for what has been called the Lubitsch Touch - uses great camera angles and fluid motion, terrific period settings (right down to the luggage and leather goods in the showroom, the dreary back rooms where the staff congregate, the filigreed cash register itself a monument to commerce long gone, and in later scenes a gemutlich coffee house w/ a live band of all things. The action is crisp, the dialog entertaining and even LOL funny, and the characters quickly established, most notably Jimmy Steward and Margaret Sullivan as a Benedick-Beatrice romantic couple who despise each other until they discover their love. OK, but after the first hour or so every viewer in the world can see exactly where the drama is headed - and eventually I didn't care to see how EL unwinds all the strands and I turned it off 20 minutes shy of the ending and I don't think I missed a thing. It's a great piece of craftsmanship, some fine and funny acting among the leads and among the various "types" that work at the store, but overall it's a period piece and a curiosity, worth watching, at least up to a point: It shows us what Hollywood (esp the refugee directors) could achieve, as well as what they could ignore.

Among the most intense of thrillers on Netflix, with no gratuitous violence - The Bodyguard

The BBC One six-part series, Jed Mercurio's The Bodyguard (Season 1) is about as intense and compelling as any short series that's come across from Netflix in the past several years, ranking alongside Fauda I would say: a tense and tight plot with many strands and many surprising twists and a few of the most tense scenes ever involving suicide bombs and assassination attempts. The entire cast, led by Richard Madden as a special agent in the UK counterpart to the U.S. Secret Service, assigned to cover and protect the Home Secretary Keeley Hawes) , an extremely controversial figure because of her support for the war in Afghanistan and because she's a potential rival to the PM. Somehow the team of creators manages to tie in many themes and they all cohere and make sense: terrorists from radical Islam, the criminal underworld in London, turf rivalries among the various police and protective services, political rivalries between various ministers and members of Parliament, PTSD among war veterans, intra-office rivalries among various aides and underlings, family drama, and top-secret love affairs involving some of the principals - and maybe more. To be honest, some of the plot twists are hard to follow, at least for an American viewer, as some knowledge of the UK cabinet and protective agencies is presumed - and the variety of accents is a challenge as well (In the final episode, we resorted to closed caption, which did help), but you always get the drift of the story line and the key points and issues, many of which remain open mysteries until the conclusion. The tension in the first and final episodes is almost unbearable - and to its credit this series, unlike so many other European dramas that have made their way to Netflix, does not try to be sensational or shocking through use of gore, mayhem, gruesome injuries, or gratuitous violence. It's a narrative driven by plot and character, and definitely should be on the must-see list; and, yes, the door is left slightly open for a Season 2.

A 3rd great film from Romanian director Cristoph Mangiu

The Romanian director Cristian Mungiu now has three fine movies available for English-language viewers, the most recent being Graduation (2016), on Netflix. If you want films with action, thrills, A-list stars, and a powerful score, he is definitely not the director for you; but his films all have a high literary and dramatic value, powerful and well-crafted plots that focus on ordinary people facing and confronting real crises, an incisive look at contemporary life in present-day Eastern Europe, great pacing, subtle editing, and terrific use of ambient sound throughout - each a masterpiece (the others: 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days; Beyond the Hills) in its way, making me think that someday he (like the Dardenne brothers) should be considered for a Nobel prize (why Bergman never got one is yet another Nobel committee disgrace). Graduation centers a middle-aged doctor in a loveless marriage (he sleeps every night on the couch; his wife seems to be ill in some manner not explained, and is a constant smoker); their daughter is about to finish high school and mus pass some rigorous finals to receive a scholarship to study in Cambridge. The father (Romeo is his name!) is obviously over-involved and over-identified with his daughter's success; as he explains to her in one of the many powerful scenes, he and his wife have sacrificed so that their daughter can have more opportunities in life - even if it means she will be far from them. En route to final days of class, the daughter is attacked by a man who attempts to rape her - or so she says, though there are some ambiguities and discrepancies in her report. The father worries that she will perform poorly on her exam, and sets about trying to get her some accommodations; ultimately he pulls strings and sets it up so that her test booklet will be "pulled" and she will get a pass. This bit of corruption - and we see throughout that life in this culture constantly involves payments and payoffs and favors earned and returned - leads to various family crises, arguments, and threats that test the moral fiber of everyone, especially the father/doctor. The whole narrative unfolds as a series of scene, most of them involving just 2 speakers, seen in long-take closeups - the power of this film comes not from is showmanship but from the language and the gradually building tension around a man in crisis, almost like an Ibsen or Chekhov play. Not for every taste, but Graduation is by any measure a great film.