History has not been kind to Dreyer's Vampyr

History has not been kind to Carl Th. Dreyer's Vampyr (1932), one of the first, though not the first (see, Nosferatu) cinematic depictions of the vampire legend. It was one of Dreyer's first films in the sound era but to be honest it could just as well have been a silent, as there is virtually no dialog and a lot of film-time is wasted w/ a scrolling text from an "ancient" book about vampires, filling is in on the whole legend, with which everyone now is well acquainted. In this telling, we follow a young man visiting the country (outside Paris, apparently) who stops at a decrepit country inn where his sleep is interrupted by horrid noises - and eventually by the death of another guest! The young man wanders over to a nearby half-ruined estate where he learns about the vampire legend and somehow feels obligated to help break the curse by keeping a stricken young woman awake through the night and aiding in the plunge of a stake into the heart of a vampire corpse. The plot elements are extremely difficult to keep straight, not is there any need to dwell on the story line. Main the film is memorable for a few striking images and some groundbreaking photography: misty outdoor scenes in which the protagonist seems to drift away from his own body (probably shot in double-exposure?), skeletal hands, a woman's face in possession and slowly transforming into a vampire grin, a deadly scream in the night, the entombment of the camera and the illusion we have of being carried to a waiting gravesite, the death by live burial of the vampire's assistant, plus others. But there are so many more frightening and imaginative vampire and zombie movies over the past 50 years or so: Night of the Living Dead (the best!), Let the Right One In, the Twilight series - to name just a few - that Dreyer's comes off today as perhaps foundational but not especially weird or scary or thoughtful. Unlike his other great films of this era, such as the Passion of Joan of Arc, this one comes off more like a relic than a masterpiece.

The strange beauty of Dreyer's Day of Wrath

Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer's film Day of Wrath (1943) was shot in Denmark during the Nazi occupation, and one might look for sly or subtle analogies between the persecution and execution of young women accused of witchcraft and the Nazi genocide and the fascist ideology. In some ways, it's amazing the was even made, but perhaps the contemporary reference points were too subtle for the censors to comprehend. In any event, it's a terrific and unusual - clearly an influence on fellow-Scandinavian Bergman is evident throughout (especially The Seventh Seal, with its medeival setting and its execution scene). Yet Day of Wrath is unmistakable Dreyer's - shot very much in the same style as his silent classic The Passion of Joan of Arc: Spare settings, mostly interiors, lots of closeups on the tortured faces of the principal actors, beautiful lighting that will remind most viewers of Vermeer and Rembrandt, a remote historical setting, male dominance and cruelty in the guise of religious decree and Christian faith, and an extremely slow and deliberate pacing of every scene. Day of Wrath, set in 17th-century Scandinavia, in b/w - although if it were in color it would look almost the same, as everyone wears funereal black with those odd Dutch/Danish collars and wimples  - is about an older man, a priest, married to a much younger woman (Anne - the central figure in the movie); when the old man's son arrives from somewhere abroad - where he's been or why is never stated - the son and Anne fall in love, eventually driving the old man to his death and thereby raising the possibility that Anne may have brought about his death through witchcraft. The movie feels much older than it is - perhaps because of the setting, perhaps because Dreyer was imbued with the look and pacing of silent films - but it's beautiful in its own way, especially in its portraiture of the main characters and in its creepy re-creation of church rituals: a funeral, an execution, and the chorus of young boys chanting prayers as if burning a woman to death were just an ordinary event in their lives, which perhaps it was.

A powerful Ozu film of social realism and a prelude to Tokyo Story

Yasujiro Ozu's 1957 film Tokyo Twilight (once more, the title gives us little info about the film) is a stop toward his masterwork, Tokyo Story (1960), with many of the same actors and similar themes - generational conflict, father-daughter relationships, sibling relationships, the changing mores of postwar Japan, the breakdown of the urban Japanese family. This film centers on a somewhat well-to-do banker, play by Ryu who stars in dozens of Ozu films, living w/ teenage daughter and whose young married daughter has arrived unexpectedly with infant daughter (somewhat of a reverse from Tokyo Story). As we learn, both daughter have major problems: the married daughter, played by Ozu's usual female lead S Hara, is in the midst of a marital breakup, as her husband - who'd been championed by the father (he dissuaded daughter from another suitor) - is drinking heavily and becoming at times violent. The younger daughter, a part-time student who spends most evenings in mahjong parlors and in dubious bars, finds out that she's pregnant - and of course he sketchy boyfriend gives her the quick brush-off. These plot elements, particularly the struggles of the pregnant daughter to get a legal abortion and some financial aid, present a graphic picture of Japanese urban life, a rare bit of social realism in Japanese films of the 1950s. The film also as some wildly improbable and melodramatic elements as well - notably, the appearance in Tokyo of the man's estranged wife/mother of the two girls - which are emotionally effective, especially in the final sequences as the estranged mother leaves by train for northernmost Japan - but as Ozu matured more in his work these he purged his plots of these extreme elements and let the characters and the setting tell the story in simpler terms. Still, overall, Tokyo Twilight is a powerful, mostly overlooked Ozu work, whose only glaring flaw are the portions of the soundtrack in which Ozu incomprehensibly used an endless loop of what sounds like carnival hurdy-gurdy music, completely at odds with the sad and sensitive unfolding plot.

Farhadi's breakout film falls flat

Everybody Knows (2018) marks a big shift in the career of Iranian writer-director Asgar Farhadi: first film outside of his native Iran (the setting is Spanish wine country, tho never explicitly identified)? First work w/ major world talents (Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem), and I would guess his highest-budget film and first major release via Netflix and despite all this - plus "nominations" for many top awards this film is a disappointment - especially on the heels of his fantastic film The Salesman. IN short, the film depicts a family gathering for a wedding, and during the post-nuptial celebrations Cruz's 16-year-old daughter starts to feel woozy, goes off to be early, and disappears - as a ransom note and some news clippings about kidnappings arrive in Cruz's in-box. Over the course of this complicated film - and I must say that Farhadi's strength lies not in his setting forth a clear plot w/ well delineated characters - we watch the struggle of this not-wealthy family to gather the money to meet the ransom demand. The questions raised are: Why would the kidnappers choose this child to nab? Why would they target this family, which has no significant wealth of stature? And who dunnit  (as we never see the kidnappers until the denouement)? I think most viewers will find the answers to these questions to be require far more willing suspension of disbelief than I was able to give: It's one of those criminal acts that maybe could have succeeded if 500 things had gone as planned but that in reality would have failed in any # of ways. Although this film is over all emotionally cold - particularly as we never see the kidnapped girl during her ordeal - I will say that Bardem and Cruz do a fine job w/ the roles they're given - Cruz in particular, who is her beautiful self at the outset and, over the course of the film, crumples into a state of loss and despair. All this said, good luck to Farhadi, and I hope he will find his footing again and give us some great film dramas like The Salesman and A Separation.

A terrific experiment from Netflix: the 12 episodes of the series Criminal

I'm not sure who organizes the project for Netflix, but despite its unevenness at times, the 12-part series Criminal is a terrific project of high ambition, worth watching straight through. The project consists of four sets of three dramas; each set of three is from a different European country: UK, Germany, France, Spain. Each episode uses exactly the same parameters and the same setting: a 40-minute (approx.) police interrogation of a suspect (or in one episode of a convicted criminal whom they are hoping will provide additional info about her crime), with the "action" confined to the interrogation room, the room where others on the team watch the interrogation, and the hallway outside of the interrogation rooms (the vending machines provide some comic moments). Each of the 4 sets is independent, and to a degree each interrogation is independent, though with in each set there's a bit of drama involving the police team - love troubles, office rivalries, etc. All of the interrogations involve some kind of surprise or twist at the end; sometimes they end w/ some ambiguities; the best involve the characters in some moral and ethical thickets: How far can the police go in fabricating information or providing false information in order to elicit a confession, to "break" a suspect?" The ground rules for these interrogations will surprise most U.S. viewers: There seems to be a time pressure, in that they cannot hold suspects w/out charges for +24 hours; the use of attorneys in these also differs from the rules for defense lawyers in the U.S. (in these episodes, the police can order the attorneys to back off). On the other hand, these sets don't seem to be "windows" into 4 different European cultures - all 12 episodes are similar in tone and convention. In the end, these are like 12 fascinating short dramas, and I think they could play well, with some minor adjustments, on a stage.

Ozu's Tokyo Story, a masterpiece by any measure, is worth multiple viewings

It's pretty much impossible to over-praise Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953), from a screenplay by Ozu and Kogo Nodo, his collaborator on all of his major films, and with leading roles for several of the leading actors who appear in dozens of his film, most particularly Chishu Ryu as the father. This film, simple on the surface, is the story of an elderly couple living in a city a day's train ride away from Tokyo, go to the city to visit their children, in what perhaps will be their last such visit (and evidently their first in many years). We see right away on the arrival that the sudden appearance of these two quiet and submissive souls is seen by the children as nothing for a nuisance; in this culture, which traditionally had been built upon reverence for and deference to parents and the elderly, is shifting in postwar Japan to a get-ahead capitalism in which the elderly parents have no place. Everyone at first is painfully polite, but we can see that the children feel put out - even their children seem bratty and entitled, as the little boy whines about having to move his desk (we later see him working on an assignment for an English lesson - a glimpse at from where the postwar attitudes derive). Ultimately, rather than deal w/ the parents the children send them off to a so-called resort - they seem to delude themselves into thinking the parents would like that, when obviously the whole point of their visit is to spend time w/ family - and that's a further disaster. Rather than go through the whole plot, which includes some twists and surprises, it's important to note that Ozu's touch always allows for ambiguity and depth of characters; the father is no angel himself and no doubt was a difficult and distant father when the children were young. The conclusion, which brings many of these tensions to the fore, is stunning and heartbreaking - and all in the understate, almost ceremonial tone that characterizes most of Ozu's mature work - no hysterics or violence, in complete contrast to the more conventional Western family dramas. This film is worth multiple viewings, and it's worth watching frame by frame - it's impossible not to feel great empathy toward the lead characters, and in particular to one of the younger family members (played by Setsuko Hara, another Ozu regular), a figure who will remind viewers, I think, of Cordelia or the Book of Ruth.

An unusual documentary short subject in which h.s. friends recall the youth of a possible terrorist

The recent (2019) Netflix documentary short subject, Ghosts of Sugar Land (directed by Bassam Tariq) is a potential Oscar nominee but probably without enough substance to take the prize. Tariq interviews five or so guys - friends of his from high-school days? - from the small Texas city of their youth; the interviewees are all Muslim-American, and they are struggling to understand the life course of one of their h.s. friends, whom they refer to by the pseudonym Mark. Mark was the only African-American in their otherwise diverse high-school class. He become close friends of these Muslim-American classmates and eventually converted to their faith. Once he did so, he became a fanatic believer and eventually left the U.S. and made his way to Syria where he pledged loyalty to Isis and began an active anti-American cyber-presence. His behavior mystifies his friends, and they speculate that perhaps all along he was an FBI plant spying on the Sugar Land mosque and that he may still be an FBI operative trying to smoke out potential terrorist threats. There's not much drama in this story, as it's entirely told by talking heads - or, I should say, talking masks, as all of the interview subjects wear Halloween masks throughout their interviews, probably to protect their identities (though Sugar Land residents will probably be able to ID them all) and in part to give the film a weird, almost psychedelic and spooky atmosphere - a Stephen King nightmare come to documentary life. In the end, through closing credits, we learn more about Mark's fate. Props to Tariq for recognizing that he had about a half-hour of material here and for not making this film any longer than it needed to be.