Lenox Hill is a terrific, moving look at medical care in the NYC hospitals

 The Netflix 8-part series Lenox Hill (2020) should be on everyone's list, a terrific documentary from Ruthie Shatz and Adit Barash that follows over the course of a year or so 4 doctors in the Manhattan hospital: 2 neurosurgeons, one OB-GYN resident, and one ER doctor. We get incredible scenes of these doctors at work in their practice, plus plenty of life-information about each of them and about many of their patients as they deal with life-and-death, critical issues and conditions. The 4 physicians who participate represent, obviously, two extreme ranges of the medical profession: the neurosurgeons are treating the most critically ill, any of them younger patients, all of whom must undergo the most stressful and difficult of surgeries, not all w/ good outcomes by the way. The OB-GYN doc, who is herself pregnant and expecting her first child (in the face of some scary genetic information) in a sense represents the other extreme: her practice, as we watch her work w/ a # of women in their delivery, deals with women (and to a MUCH less extent their partners and families) in the process of giving birth - an extremely stressful passage toward a wonderful life, and a practice that probably has not changed much, for most pregnancies, for many years. The ER doctor, although she, too, must at times deal w/ life-endangered admissions, for the most part depicts here at completely different aspect of the hospital work, the hospital as a de facto social institution: Many walk-ins, generally with cuts, abrasions, dislocations, but also many who clearly one to the hospital for a bed and a sandwich, although their life conditions are generally awful, due to all of the stresses of homelessness and often Rx and alcohol; their presence in the ER is an indictment of the entire health-care and social-services systems in the U.S., and the doctor is heroic in her treatment of these patients whose needs go well beyond the scope of Lenox Hill. The series has its moments of joy and of deep sorrow, not all of it involving the patients, and we see these highly skilled doctors as valiant but also plagued at times by self-doubt. Viewers will not, for the record, that the neurosurgeons in post-op tend to present the most optimistic assessment of their treatments to the patients and their families, when in fact they keep to themselves their doubts and concerns - an extra burden that they carry, as they, unlike the other 2 docs, generally deal w/ long-term cases and often w/ multiple highly invasive surgeries. 

Some innovative style in an early Mizoguchi film, although good luck making sense of the Kabuki scenes

 Okay it's not as great a film as his later-career masterpieces Sansho the Bailiff and Ugetsu but it's still worth taking a look at Kenji Mizoguchi's early (1939) piece, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums. Yes, even on the formidable Criterion release the print and sound quality are horrible and yes the plot feels familiar - young man who's an aspiring (Kabuki) actor (ca 1890) who at first has limited talent falls in love w/ a young servant woman (his baby sibling's wet nurse) who inspires him to continue striving toward excellence in acting; they fall in love, but the young man's (step)father, who's also the leader of the Kabuki troupe, forbids him to see the woman; they run off together to the provinces, live as man and wife as young man (Kiku) perfects his craft leading to a triumphal return to Tokyo and renown, but leaving the ever-faithful wife (Otoku) in the dust - but the film is significant for its sympathetic depiction of the sexist and class prejudice and for its depiction of the struggle Kiku undergoes as he's torn between family loyalty, career, and love. The style of the film is particularly notable and ahead of its time for its use of extremely long takes and careful attention to the topical details of life on the road, in the theater, and in Tokyo from the POV of a theater troupe. Some really imaginative and evocative nighttime scenes and a terrific final sequence showing Kiku at the head of a boat parade celebrating the success of the theater group and Otoku lies dying in a dingy nearby small apartment. The biggest stumbling block for, I assume, most non-Japanese viewers will be the 3 (I think) Kabuki sequences, almost entirely incomprehensible to those not familiar w/ this form of theater; there's much talk about Kiku's, at first, limited talent and, later, of his acting genius, but I'll be damned if I could tell the difference - in fact, only from reading some notes on the film did I learn that Kiku was playing female roles. (Only Ozu, to my knowledge, successfully integrated Kabuki into one of his films, can't recall which one, mainly because we were watching audience interaction rather than the unfolding Kabuki drama on stage.) 

Borat sequel worth watching for highlights, even though some of its episodes fall flat

 Sacha Baron Cohen's 16-years-later sequel, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (aka Borat 2), doesn't rise to the level of hilarity and astonishment of the first go-round, largely because, as noted in some reviews, SBC's success is in part his undoing: Whereas almost all of Borat 1 seemed to be a series of punks on many unsuspecting people who thought they ere being interviewed for a profile or news segment for a legit Kazakh TV network, in the sequel it seems that many (not all) of the encounters were at least to a degree scripted or orchestrated by the filmmakers. That said, there are some great segments: Everyone's talking about the "interview" with Giuliani in which he comes across as a sexual predator and rightfully so, it's an astonishing take; also of note Borat's crashing a speech by Pence to a conservative (of course) audience: How the hell did he manage to get into the meeting dressed in a Trump mask and fat suit, carrying his "daughter" (played well by Maria Bakalova) over his shoulder, without drawing immediate hostile response of SS? The sequence of Borat leading a right-wing rally in singing a dreadful diatribe attacking Fauci et al is painful to watch - the glee on their faces as they sing these hideous lyrics - and what can we make of a woman in a bakery who obligingly writes in icing, adorned w/ little smily faces, "Jews will not replace us" - or the supposed minister/counselor who listens blithely and offers palliatives as Borat tells the him that he's had sexual relationships w/ his own daughter? The film, however, does drag along w/ a few episodes that seem just silly or ludicrous - the crashing or a debutante ball, addressing a small group of Florida Republican women - who, by the way, handle this intrusion calmly and with reasonably good sense. Still, the film is worth seeing for its highlights, even if there is some meandering along the way. 

An excellent film about the world of urban arts in uptown NYC, as seen by struggling playwright Radha Blank

I have to say that on when I'd first heard about the new (2020) Netflix film The 40-Year-Old Version (written, directed, starring playwright Radha Blank) I though, despite strong reviews, that this would be a film for which let's just say I would not be the ideal audience. All the more props to the amazing R Blank in that I was totally captivated, entertained, and moved by her really intelligent and imaginative film. She plays, in a role that seems autobiographical but honestly I know nothing else about her life and work, a 39+-year-old Black playwright/director who'd been honored a decade back as one of 30 Under 30 playwrights on the rise and now, producing no new work over the past decade, beginning to question all aspects of her life and career. We see her in the various aspects of her current life, dealing w/ a range of problems and issues: she teaches a high-school drama class to make ends meet, but, despite her obvious affinity for the work and the kids, realizes this is not her life plan; struggles with her brother over the disposition of her late mother's estate; spats and make-ups with her long-time agent and lifetime friend; pressure from a theater troupe eager to stage a play she's been working on about the gentrification of Harlem, but at great cost to her integrity and her vision; and most of all her strange desire to channel her work into a rap mixtape. She's surprisingly good at it - in spite of the obvious differences in class and age between her and others in the rap community, of which we get a glimpse. Surprisingly, she develops a relationship with the sweet but much younger rap entrepreneur, who goes by the name of D. The film has many great seasons on and off various stages, and overall a jaunty, sometimes sweet style and an unflinching look at life on the streets and the subways in contemporary uptown NYC. Anyone who's worked in, dabbled in, or dreamed of joining the world of urban arts will or should enjoy and gain insight from Blank's film. 

A film worth watching, especially for those who know little or nothing about TheTrial of the Chicago 7

 Like it or not, Aaron Sorkin has a certain style and an undeniable talent for building entertainments out of the wheelings of government, the media, and the business world - and his current (2020) Netflix movie, The Trial of the Chicago 7, exemplifies his work, for better or worse. And I have to admit I was entertained and sometimes astonished by this film, which recreates, using only a small amount of documentary footage, the epochal political trial of the '60; for those who didn't live through the era, it may be astonishing to watch this film, which may lead some to think that it had to be made up. It's not - the courtroom drama, to the best of my memory - is quite closely (though not entirely) based on the trial itself - 7 political leaders from some widely diverging factions on the left arrested by the Nixon administration and charged w/ conspiracy based on their loose association and general proximity during the demonstrations in Chicago during the '68 Democratic convention. It was widely known at the time that the Chicago police were ordered to storm and brutalize the unarmed street protesters; the news footage of the era was astonishing and sickening. It was also obvious to all of America the Judge Julius Hoffman was incompetent and completely unjust - culminating with this order for literally gag Bobby Seale, the only Black defendant - a judicial order so outrageous as to get up the ire of even the prosecutors. So in that regard the movie is powerful and a welcome document and remembrance even generations later. Of course the film at times gets waylaid by the Sorkin style: All of the characters sound sharp and witty and pointed, but they all sound like the same person (Sorkin?) and he never really succeeds in building sympathy for Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman (couldn't anyone help Sacha Baron Cohen in his hapless struggle w/ a Boston accent?) - they annoyed me as much as they annoyed the judge, though maybe that was the intent? In any event, the film is entertaining and informative, worth watching especially for those who think the times could never be more out of joint than at present. 

 The little-known Belgian TV series The Twelve (on Netflix) is one of the best courtroom dramas I've seen in some time - highly intelligent, challenging, provocative, and, unlike so many series that die dreaming of a 2nd season, conclusive. American viewers will be particularly interested in seeing how different a criminal trial in Belgium is from one in the U.S.; among other things, the accused sits (or stands) in isolation, the lawyers sit with one another alongside the 3 judges, the accused is interrogated during the course of the trial, the even-#ed jury faces no prohibition against speaking about the case with one another nor about following news accounts of the trial (though they are strictly forbidden to speak w/ members of t he media about the trial). The case is brought against a 40-something woman accused of killing her best friend some 18 years previous and her 2-year-old daughter some 2 years back (that's another major difference: in the U.S. the cases would definitely be tried separately). Over the course of the 10 episodes we continue to get facts and information about the accusations - most of seem credible and not crackpot, all of which will keep viewers guessing and thinking along the way. At the same time, we follow several story lines about several of the jurors, w/ particular scrutiny of their questionable interactions during the course of the trial. Amazingly, the final episode brings all (or most) of the strands together and resolves all or most of the conflicts and all of our doubts. It's a demanding series for American viewers, in that none of the names will look or sound familiar and the trial itself will seem strange - but it's a series that merits more attention and talk (and maybe other work from the creators: Sanne Nuyens and Bert van Dael. 

A gangster film that should be much better known and appreciated: Le Deuxieme Soufle

 Jean-Pierre Melville's 1966 film, Le Deuxième Souffle (Second Wind is the best translation) is one of those gangster movies closely modeled on the American hardboiled crime films that the French seem to do so well - and this, though little known today, is one of the best. The plot is a bit tangled at the start, but the essence of the crime and punishment becomes clear and stark and inevitable as the film progresses (it's pretty long, at 2:30). The basic story line concerns a gangster (Gu, played well by Lino Ventura, who worked with JPM on many films I think) who escapes from prison near Paris and needs to make one big score big score before fleeing, with his "girl," Manouche (Christine Fabrega) by boat to Sicily. Of course things go wrong. In the process, there are some extraordinarily powerful scenes: the prison break (fantastic start to the movie!), the shootout at the gangster bar/hangout, the terrific show put on by the wily and unexpectedly insightful Police Detective Bolt (Paul Meurisse), most of all the heist (of bars of platinum!, being shipped, stupidly, from one bank to another with somewhat flimsy police protection) that Melville shoots in real time - far more intense and intelligent than any other heist I've ever seen on film. Things go right, and then they go wrong, as Gu gets picked up and risks his life to protect his honor-among-thieves demeanor. Yes, it's just a gangster movie, in the end, but there's so much to look at and think about throughout that it rises well above its genre and should be as well known as its American counterparts, in film and TV/cable. 

A powerful and unusual personal film memoir about the city of Liverpool

 Terence Davies's documentary film, Of Time and the City (2008), is a personal recollection and evocation of his childhood in Liverpool (in the postwar years, the 50s and 60s), the type of memoir cinema that we're likely to see more of as the format requires no sets and actors and directors, a Covid-possible format for aspiring or established filmmakers (there have been other films like it over the years, of course - e.g. My Winnipeg). There are a few unusual aspects to Davies's project: First of all, the film, which Davies narrates, tells us little about the salient facts of his childhood and nothing at all about the overall course of his life. It's not his story so much as his setting. Second, the film is a melange of several media: extensive use of both still and video photography to capture the look and feel of life in Liverpool in the mid to late 20th century; a really unusual soundtrack with some music typical of the era and the locale plus many passages from the classical repertoire (Mahler - great; Bruckner - what does Davies possibly hear in him?); many passages of poetry and other literature, through which Davies highlights some of the visual sequences - passages from Eliot (which I recognized), the Psalms (ditto), though note that none of these passages are identified, in the film proper or the credits. Most of all, though Davies indicates that he yearns for his childhood in this grim and then-impoverished city, he also makes it clear that Liverpool was a visual and spatial horror: in the early years just an incredibly awful place, truly ugly and frightening housing much of it ij the shows of the gasworks, public buildings of a Gargantuan sort, a waterfront entirely given over to industry, soot and grime and jam-packed crowds everywhere, and, in the later years, public housing of an extraordinarily oppressive design that, as Davies notes, encapsulates the English propensity for the dismal. All told, it's a moving and sometimes frightening testament to the hardships of poverty then and now - and I have only one quibble, which is that Davies barely touches on the music scene and is particularly condescending about the Beatles, a ray of light in the dark past of his home territory. 

Lots of reasons to watch Antonioni's early film The Lady Without Camelias

 Michaelangelo Antonioni's 2nd (?) film, the seldom-seen The Lady Without Camelias (1953), is by no means a great film and I'm not even sure that it was predictive of the success Antonioniha had through the long arc of his career, from Italian neo-realism to such personal statements as L'Aventura and Zabriski Point - but that said it's a lot of fun to watch. On one level it's a typical film-ingenue story: A young woman (Clara - Lucia Bose) working in a shop is spotted by a director and is an instant success, which upends her world: She marries badly, is abused and exploited by her husband, is pushed by various producers into ever-more-demeaning roles, her world's coming apart. But then, a twist: She recognizes that she can never be a star and be content w/ her life, she tells a long-time confidant that she's going to quit the business, but her persuades her to take acting lessons and to become a true actress and not just a beauty, a prop. She follows this advice, but then - surprise again! - nobody wants to cast her in serious roles, and the film ends w/ her doing some publicity still for an obviously terrible and exploitative film. Every view, I think, will get a kick out of the hilarity of a bunch of Italian directors and producers trying to put together a film that will be under budget and that will make revenue. And everyone interest in film - which would include most viewers of this piece of film history - will get a kick out of the many scenes filmed on the famous Cinecitta studios lot, with lots of scenes taking place among half-abandoned sets for other films. Antonioni indulges in some really sharp filmmaking, pushing this melodrama right to the edge: lots of shots using mirrors, complex interior shots in the multilevel ultramodern extravagance where Clara lives, some interest us of jazz piano in the score. It's kind of funny that Lollabrigida and Loren turned down the lead in this film; they obviously would not be convincing as a beautiful starlet whose career was going nowhere. Sadly, Bose is convincing in the role - she's beautiful but suitably plastic and cool-tempered, perfect for a story about a star who can't really act. 

Four excellent episodes in the police-interrogation series Criminal UK

 I'm really glad to see the return for Season 2 of the Netflix series Criminal, with the first installment the season 4 episodes of Prisoner UK (if the pattern of Season 1 is to be continued we should soon see return of Criminal France and Germany). Each 50-minute segment centers on the police interrogation of a suspect, with most of the drama taking place inside the interrogation room with some of the drama involving as well other members of the police team watching the interrogation through a one-way mirror and w/ occasional meetings and discussions in the hallway outside the interrogation room (and some whimsical touches amid the extremely tense dramas, usually involving the vending machines in the hallway). Each segment is like a powerful one-act play - some better or at least more credible than others, but all well acted and with the tension heightened by an eerie soundtrack. Of the 4 in the new UK series I found the strongest to be the interrogation of a young businessman/entrepreneur accused of raping one of his employees. Other episodes entail a would-be jailhouse snitch who offers up info on the casing of a missing young boy, a woman who poses online as a teenage girl in order to entrap and she hopes convict sex offenders, and a woman charged w/ murder in a case involving administration of Rx to someone supposedly in her care (I had a lot of trouble following this one - made even more difficult by the unfamiliar British accents and by the disconcerting echoic effects that distort some of the dialog - my bad).   Despite these quibbles, each episode holds you fast start to finish, and as Season 2 rolls out, I hope, we will once again see some of the cultural contrasts between the police procedures in each of the countries (all quite different from police interrogations in the U.S., in a # of ways). 

The life and death of a troubled young woman in Varda's Vagabond

 Agnes Varda's 1985 film, Vagabond, is one of her best and about as close as she ever came in her rich career to a conventional narrative film: She establishes the story line in the first sequence as some field workers find in a ditch the body of a young woman; the police are called in to investigate a possible homicide, and the rest of the film is a re-creation of the woman - Mona's (in a terrific performance by Sandine Bonnaire) - recent life as a homeless vagabond. AV doesn't stick to the structure that she creates - we learn much more about Mon's life that we could possibly have learned from the people whose path she crossed and who are "interrogated" not so much by the police but by Varda's camera. In the end, Mona's life is still a blank - we know almost nothing about her family or early life; over the few months that the film covers she seems to be about 20 and living alone most of the time, hitching w. no obvious purpose or destination, picking up odd jobs and getting involved in a few minor scams, having and ditching a few relationships, undergoing abuse and rape and terrible conditions, begging and scrounging. She's like a thousand faces each of us has seen in various train stations and city squares and parks, a person most of us would pass by w/out a thought - yet she's no hero, never truly sympathetic, ungracious to those who do try to help her, a difficult and even dangerous person; one sequence, for example, shows her taken in by a sympathetic family trying to "live off the land" through farming and who offers her a place to stay and a start in the outdoor life that she seems to want - and to whom she becomes incredibly gruff and ungrateful. It's a sad film and a puzzling one, particularly in Varda's reluctance to fill in the blanks re Mona's personality and background. We see who she is, but how did she become that person? Childhood abuse? A struggle w/ mental illness? Some other malady? We don't really know, nor do we know how we would have behaved had Mona crossed our path. 

Rectify is still a powerful and under-appreciated series, despite some shortcomings in its final season

 It's a shame that the Sundance (now on Netflix) series Rectify was scratched after Season 4; overall it's a highly intelligent and moving socio-drama about a man released from prison after 20 years, half of his lifetime, on death row. Though it's primarily a personal drama focusing on the now severely traumatized man, it's also a family drama, a legal thriller, and, to a lesser extent, a film about the rights of prisoners and  of ex-prisoners trying to make the best of what's left of their lives post-incarceration. Each season develops largely through lengthy and thoughtful dialog among the various characters; it's not a thriller in any sense of the word. I wish Season 4 were as good as the first three, but it does seem that the creator of the series, Ray McKinnon, had to rush into some wrap-ups of some final plot points that he would have preferred to dramatize more at length in a subsequent season that was never to be. Not that it feels rushed - if anything, the pace is glacial - but there is far too much exposition, development and conclusion of plot through talk rather than action, melodrama rather than drama. Still, worth seeing the whole series and by the time you're at Season 4 you'll want to stick w/ the show right to the conclusion despite the quirks and of the final season.