An excellent film about a father and daughter living off the grid: Leave No Trace

Debra Granik's 2018 film, Leave No Trace (she also co-wrote the screenplay w/ Anne Resellini, basedon the novel My Abandonment, by Peter Rock), is an intense and gripping story start to finish (well, the pace slows quite a bit in the final, near-idyllic act) of a father (Ben Foster) living in a tent on public land w/ his daughter (Thomasin McKenzie) whose probably about 14 years old. He trains her in survival skills and instills in her the attitude that the world is out to crush their souls and they must resist. This motif recalls a # of recent works, such as Educated and My Absolute Darling, though what sets this apart from some of the more ghastly works in this genre is the sympathetic portrayal of the obviously troubled father: Foster cares without question for his daughter, and they have a loving relationship without a hint of sexual perversion or mistreatment - though it's by no means a rosy existence: their life is difficult, and the young girl is starting to feel the need to break free from her dad and to be with others her own age. Over the course of the film they are found and brought into protective services and offered good housing and support - it's a pleasure to see that the there are no cheap shots at the welfare workers, who are humane and who do their best to help both father and daughter, after ascertaining, rightly, that this is not a case of abuse. Just as the daughter - whose character is also named "Thom" - is getting comfortable in new surroundings, the father forces them to pull up stakes and hit the road, which leads to a series of adventures and misadventures and finally to an ambiguous but quite credible denouement. All told, the film is much more humane than other "road" movies - and much more believable as well. I wonder about the source novel - and whether the protagonist was a boy or a girl. Intentionally, I assume, this film gives us virtually no back story; we have no idea how long father and daughter have been off the grid, whether she's ever been in school, in short nothing of their life from her earliest childhood, when her mother died, up to the present, at least 10 years later. The father's life story, as well, is left vague, except for hints that he had a traumatic experience in the Marines, perhaps in the Gulf War? So it's a movie very much in the present tense, a movie sympathetic to all of the characters (except one, a rather tough boss/landlord in their first housing - though he's by no means abusive or exploitative) that keeps us engaged throughout.

A fun and funny and inventive contemporary-setting film of Midsummer Night's Dream

I would not suggest that your first exposure to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream be the highly inventing, contemporary-setting take by writer-director Casey Wilder Mott (2018) as her version is so eccentric and unusual and fast-paced as to lose many viewere unfamiliar w/ at lest the basics of the plot - but that said this film is as much fun and as inventive or at least as clever as just about any Shakespeare-on-film project I've ever seen. CWM takes great liberty w/ the plot - many cuts and excisions, some shifting of chronology - but that said she also gets at the spirit of the play, the frenzy and confusion and the strangeness of desire, including the "narcissism of small differences." She keeps the Athens setting but in name only, shifting Athens to Los Angeles, with Duke Theseus a super-agent or studio mogul and his wife-to-be, Hippolyta, a pencil-thin eye candy beauty who has I think 2 lines in the whole film. Of the forest spirits, Puck is a Malibu surfer dude - and we learn of him, in a clever closing sequence (spoiler here) that he's in a sense the writer-director of the movie we're watching; Oberon-Titania, the "fairies, are, as it turns out, the sound machine hired to entertain at the Duke's wedding. The 4 young lovers, whom every reader (and viewer) confuses, which is of course the intention, are contemporary LA industry types; their romps through the forest under various spells play out well, w/ Lily Rabe as Helena ddoing a particularly powerful rant. The highlight , probably, is the Pyramus and Thisby crew, which CWM brilliantly sets up as an AFI (Athens Film Institute) student production, leading to a hilarious "for your consideration" disc that they present to the Duke for a post-wedding screening (His "get her name" to one of his assistants, halfway through the hilariously bad video, is great); special props on this plot thread to Charity Wakefield as Quince, the director. Thought this MSD is by no means definitive, it's as much fun as just about any production of a Sh comedy as I've seen on film

The surprisingly good series on wedding planners in India - Made in Heaven

The Indian miniseries streaming on Amazon Prime, Made in Heaven (2019), at first seems as if it's an escapee from the Bravo channel - a 9-episode series about a team of wedding planners who cater to the wealthiest of Delhi society w/ their gorgeous but completely over-the-top celebrations and ceremonies - colorful, musical, well choreographed, extravagant in every way - but we quickly see that it's far more than a lifestyles of the rich fantasy indulgence: There's a terrific and compelling through story that makes us think of the class structure in India and all that it still entails and the struggle in India, and by extension elsewhere, for the rights of the homosexuals not only to marry - we're not there yet in India - but to live their lives in peace in a tolerant (ofrat least indifferent) society. In essence, series creators Zoya Akhtar and Rema Kagi (along w/ writer Alankrita Shrivastava) tell of a young man (who is gay) and a woman (who is from a poor background and has married into the family of a leading industrialist) set of the eponymous wedding-planning agency; in each episode they take on a new client, and over the course of the series we see, through the work of their agency, many facets of contemporary life in India, in particular the clash between tradition and the lives of contemporary, somewhat Westernized, highly educated youth. We also see from the two principals a personal struggle: Tara's trying to hold onto her marriage in the face of gross infidelity; Karan's struggle w/ this homosexuality (including painful back-story flashbacks to his youth), which puts him in the unexpected, dangerous (and bad for business, potentially) in the position of public advocate for the LGBTQ rights. (Looking these up, Tara is played by the beautiful Sobhita Dhulipala; Karan by the excellent Arjun Mathur). Literally all of the secondary characters present strong performances, giving us a great panoramic sense of life in a changing culture. (There are some similarities in structure to the excellent French series, Call My Agent, with its focus on life in a business that caters to the privileged and self-involved, with each episode focused on a new "client.") Looking forward to season 2, apparently in production.

A seldom-seen faoundational film of American noir: Detour

Edgar G. Ulmer's 1945 film, Detour, which for many years was unavailable to contemporary viewers and is now available in a good print streaming on Criterion, is rightly regarded as a foundational film among American noir. It begins w/ a man in an all-night roadside diner (the Nevada Diner), a venue now more or less vanished from the American landscape, quietly drinking coffee and staring ahead like a zombie and rudely brushing off a truck driver trying to offer him a lift. This guy is troubled, but we don't know, and the movie tells his story. The first 1/3 of the film is fairly conventional - the man is a nightclub piano-player in NYC with dreams of performing as a classical artist; he and the lead chanteuse are a couple, and she - after a really cool long walk through foggy NY predawn streets - tells his she's going to Hollywood to make it as a star. Eventually he follows her, and here the story begins: he hitches a series of rides, finally w/ a strange, somewhat threatening man in a big convertible. The piano player takes up some of the driving as the car owner falls asleep; when the driver stops in a rainstorm to put up the top, the car owner falls out of the front street, hits head on a rock, and (probably) dies from the impact. Here's where the film strains credibility, as the piano guy, afraid of being accused of killing the car owner for his $, drags the body off the road and continues driving toward LA, but assuming the dead man's ID. (It's really hard to believe he wouldn't try to flag down some help right away - if he did, why would anyone accuse him of murder? But we're on our way.) The movie jumps up a notch as he picks up a woman hitchhiker who turns out to be a near-psychotic harpy and criminal schemer, who persuades him to continue posing as the dead man and to sell the car when they get to LA. Tey fight and threaten each other constantly, and the piano player feels stuck, imprisoned, in this developing scheme. The movie is full of dark and threatening moments and w/ many glimpses of a world that's now almost a century away: Hollywood Blvd teeming w/ car dealership, all-night diners, crummy one-bedroom apartments that are easy to rent by the week, hitchhikers everywhere - a culture much more mobile, transient, and trusting than anything we know of today. There are some surprising plot twists, especially toward the end, but throughout Ulmer et al - his actors are and were entirely unknown, at least to most people - maintains the mood of darkness, loss, and endless wandering.

A quaint example of Ozu's early work - Dragnet Queen

For the most part Ozu's 1933 silent, Dragnet Queen, is little more than a curiosity and a chance for us to see some of the intimations in this early work as to what will constitute the Ozu style - most notably his famous "tatami" angles, shooting domestic scenes from the viewpoint of one sitting on a tatimi mat, which gives each scene a personal and intimate mood while, oddly, at the same time making some of the characters loom over the action, godlike and frightening. The downside is that much of Ozu's later work depends heavily on dialog, closer sometimes to stage drama than to film, and all of that is lost in the truncated dialog of a silent film. Still, the plot is a bit unusual, as we follow a small-time gangster (and former pro prize fighter - I kept thinking he'd go back into the ring by the end of the movie. Wrong) whose "moll" works as a typist in some kind of office/business enterprise, where he's hit on by the sleazy boss (and son of the business owner). She uses his come-ons to her advantage, as she and the prize fighter put the squeeze on the guy at the end when they need money for a getaway. The highlight of the film is the gang leader's relationship with a young, wannabe whose pathetic attempts to join the gang - a rather feckless gang, by the way, that seems to be into nothing for notorious than an occasional brawl in a pool hall - despite the pleadings of his attractive and devoted older sister (with the the prize fighter, naturally, falls in love). The film notably has lots of night-time shots on the near-deserted streets of an unnamed Japanese city, and some claustrophobic shots in the fighter's apartment, whose walls are adorned w/ news clips and posters for various famous fights - the whole look of the film is dark and claustrophobic. We don't see much that's specific to prewar Japan - I suspect most or all of this was filmed on a stage lot - but we do see the beginnings of Ozu's interest in character relationships and settings - yet it's a long way from here to Tokyo Story.

The startling true-life drama Mrs. Wilson

The surprisingly good 3-part series on PBS, Mrs. Wilson, is a rarity - one of the very few cases in which it helps to know a little background before watching the series, so here goes: The show begins w/ a very standard declaration that this series is based on true events, but it's a little more than that. The series is based on the diary or (unpublished) memoir by Mrs. Wilson herself, who in fact was the grandmother of the star of the show, Rita Wilson. The story begins in the 1960s when Mrs. Wilson's husband, a man of about 70 or so, falls to the floor and dies unexpectedly. Mrs W goes through the usual travail of planning a funeral service and dealing w/ the various loose ends and her sorrow and despair and the emotions of her two teenage sons. So far, everything's unexceptional - and then, bang, someone shows up at her doorstep and claims to be the wife of Mrs. Wilson's late husband. What's going on here? From that point on the series becomes increasingly complex and bewildering, and I won't give anything away - but here's where it helps to know that this is a true-life series, because the events are so odd that we wouldn't believe them in a fictional narrative. (There's a line in Shakespeare: If this were a play, I wouldn't believe it. Same idea.) Mrs W sets off to find out the truth about her husband, and in particular about his role as an undercover agent during WWII - and the more she learns about him, the less sure she is: Is he a war hero? Or a philanderer? A genius? A fake and a liar? A devoted father and husband? Or a creep? Is she endangering herself and the future of her sons if she pursues this inquiry further? The narrative moves gracefully across a few time spans, gradually filling in the picture of an entire life, and it will keep you thinking and guessing and wondering right to the startling closing sequence.

Cold War as the anti-Star Is Born film of 2018

Pawel Pawlikowsky's film Cold War (2018) is a great story of doomed lover and their tempestuous relationship that plays out in a series of episodes across a 20-year time span and that jumps back and forth across the East-West borders in Europe in the Soviet era. The film is beautiful to watch, shot all in b/w in a "square" format, as cinematicly attractive in its retro way as the much-more-recognized film from the same year, Roma. In essence, the film begins as a team of musical ethnographers - much like say Alan Lomax in the U.S. - travel across rural Poland in about 1946 in search of folk music and musicians for a state-sponsored traveling troupe. The man leading the search eventually falls for a much-younger and hard-knock-life woman who's one of the stars of the troupe. Over the span of the movie we see how state officials put the squeeze on the troupe to ditch their folk tunes and sing in pieces in praise of the great Soviet leader; there's lots of spying and subterfuge - and eventually a sprint for the West when the troupe performs in Berlin. We follow the two lead characters as their love develops and dissolves, as do their careers - the man settling for work as a piano-player in various Paris clubs, seemingly far below his ambition and talent, and the woman, Zula, crossing back and forth East to West and back, as restrictions are gradually lifted - but she still makes some terrible decisions, under great pressure from one of the Communist stooges, and at last we see her performing in a ridiculously bad night-club routine. (I can attest that in a visit to Moscow in the early '70s the powers that be were still steering tour groups and visitors to incredibly boring performances of ethnic dance - from the various Soviet "republics" - and to supper clubs with almost hilarious bad and out of date chanteuses and so-called jazz bands.) Like his previous political-historical film, Ida (which also used jazz music in an intelligent and surprising manner), Cold War is hard-edged and sad, sort of the anti-Star Is Born film of 2018, as we see the struggles to build a life and a career and to be true to one's self not just against a wave of commercial pressures but against political pressures that can shut you off completely - or lock you up.

Why King Charles III is a great play - both on stage and on film

This post on Mike Bartlett's "future history" play, King Charles III, which imagines the outset of the reign of the likely future king of the UK, will inevitably touch on the same points as the play, which we saw a few years ago - and will begin with kudos for dear friend Margot Leicester, who plays with solemnity and dignity and role of the once-outcast wife, Camilla. And in fact every performance both on stage and in film - with special praise for the late Tim Pigott-Smith, faultless in the title role. The great beauty of both play and film comes from Bartlett's ingenious use of blank verse in contemporary prose, including a few rhymed couplets to end scenes, which immediately and inevitably calls up comparisons w/ Shakespeare, the King plays/history plays in particular - and can stand up to the comparison! The Sh echoes abound throughout the show, allusions to the Scottish tragedy (with Kate/Katherine in the villainous role and William as her pliant stooge), Lear, Hamlet (esp in the use of soliloquies, the best use of such since House of Cards, British v.), Henry IV (with Harry pursuing a path similar to that of his forebear - though with more of a focus on his romance w/ a "commoner" - and, though I may be wrong here, a different outcome in the movie cf the play), and possibly even Measure for Measure (the prince learning from his time with the "common-folk," and maybe Lear as well. The film does a nice job, under Rupert Goold's direction, opening the play up with more ambitious scenes of rioting in the streets, and both film and play make the seemingly esoteric fight between the new King and "his" prime minister engaging and high-stakes: as thoughtful, powerful, and ambitious political drama that pays homage to a great theatrical tradition but that seems completely contemporary - not jsut to the British but to American audiences as well.