Elliot's Watching - November 2021: Godard, Mizoguchi, Battle of Algiers< Unlikely Murders, Spencer, Passing, Home for the Holidays, La Jetee

 Elliot’s Watching - November 2021 

Jean-Luck Godard’s 1965 film Pierrot le Fou sends a young(ish) couple, played of course by Belmondo and Anna Karina, off on a jaunt across France, leaving a dead man behind, traveling in stolen car, and facing many close calls and adventures - in other words, a conventional gangsters on the run film, except that it’s Godard so there are numerous weird, incongruous, convention-breaking elements that gives the movie its charm and interest, even today. Especially notable are such plot elements or segments as the decision to put on a play for an audience of American GIs about the Vietnam War, with some screen moments simply filled w/ flames; the constant bickering about Belmond’s character’s name - Karini calls him Pierrot (the title translates roughly as Pierrot the Nut - to which he always replies that his name is Ferdinand; a long interval in which Karina sings as in a choreographed Broadway musical; some odd characters introduced toward the end - a woman who claims to be the Queen of Lebonon and a man who goes on at great length telling Belmondo of his failed seductions; even the unusual typography that prevails from the opening credits onward. Does the plot make any sense? Not at all - nor is it meant to; life is a jumble of improbabilities, in Godard’s world; the film is not for all viewers of course, but is still maintains its liveliness and imaginative spirit even a half-century down the road. 

However: Last night we watched the first episode of the Danish murder-mystery The Chestnut Man (based on a novel by the author of The Killing, which was an excellent series), which is OK if you can believe that a serial killer leaves behind little toy “men” built from chestnuts and matchsticks, and that this would go on for years before anyone made a serious connections, and, hell, I don’t know, a totally improbable an uninteresting, despite its obvious debt to the great Danish series about national politics, Borgen, start to a series - we’re through. 

Kenji Mizoguchi’s A Story from Chickamatsu (1954) is not his best or best-known film but still worth a look - particularly the 2nd half of the film.  In fact the first half, set mostly in a print-shop that’s a major source of revenue for the irascible owner, who has “”won” a monopoly contract for a # of printing jobs such as the annual almanac, is kind of hard to follow and to distinguish among the many competing factions in this complex factory/estate - but the film comes into much more clear focus in the 2nd half as the story from that point on centers on a couple on the run - strangely, much like Pierrot that I recently viewed - at first the man is simply the servant rushing the woman to safety from her violent husband but soon they realize they’ve been secretly in love w/ each other the film changes direction and is much more emotional and strange. Fans of Mizoguchi will recognize the setting in which the loves make their escape by boat - same setting as in the famous Ugetso lake crossing; the ending is particularly bizarre as the couple head off toward their inevitable destiny.  

Here’s another miniseries that builds to a great conclusion/final episode, the little-known Italian series (or 4-part movie, if you prefer) from early in the century: The Best of Youth. I remember watching it, in the old days, on CD from Netflix, saw the 1st half with 2 friends, had to take the disk home, said we’d watch it at home the next night, and they said: No way you’re watching this alone! We’re gonna come over to watch it with you!

The docudrama Colin in Black & White, in which ex-NFLQB Colin Kaepernick narrates and comments, with emphasis on the racial discrimination that afflicts all young Black men, an enactment of his youth: He’s adapted by a white California couple who nurture and support his dream of becoming a high-school QB as he faces opposition on many fronts. Good information here, although most viewers will hardly be shocked by anything new, and imaginative presentation esp use of graphics, thanks I would guess to producer Ava Duvernay - but the problem is that the story line that CK narrates is full of cliches and obvious points that we can see from miles away. I hope it changes minds, but it will probably preach only the knowing. Watched only half the of the episodes.

Ryusuke Hamguchi’s 2015 giant of a film (5+ hours!), Happy Hour, follows for 30-something women friends over a course of a few months as we gradually (!) learn about their problems and their histories, especially about their past or ongoing divorce suits (handled very differently in Japancf with the U.S. - much more adversarial and litigated). I really wanted to love this film, as I tend to like films that build gradually and that seem true and organic, but the pace is so slow here that I finally had to give up after 3 hours: the 40 minutes or so spent at a yoga class the women attend seemed pretty tedious but I was willing to forego that in the interest of getting to know the characters - a celebratory evening of drinking with friends after the class with some outbreaks of anger won me back over - but then a later scene at a literary reading in which the author, a young woman named Ms. Nose (not sure if that a name in Japanese of a mockery) reads in the most dreadfully disaffected manner from a truly terrible story, followed by the most awkward author Q&A - why people didn’t walk out was beyond me. I did. 

Gillo Pontecorvo’s amazing film The Battle of Algiers (1966 - GP directed and co-wrote w/Morricone the great score) re-creates the struggle for independence events from the mid-50s; it looks exactly like a documentary film, and you have to wonder: How could he possibly have reenacted these events with such fidelity? Everything about this film looks “real,” but of course it would have been impossible to document the uprising at the time. The wheels are set in motion so to speak when a young Algerian/Arabic man (Ali) is arrested for some kind of street crime; in prison, he’s recruited to work for the Algerian resistance, and from the moment forward we are introduced into many of the strategies for terrorism and disruption, for example: women dressed for a day at the beach carrying handguns in their purses; bombs surreptitiously planted at night and in places of congregation, first by the Fr. in the Casbah (Algerian quarters), then in retaliation at public places in the “European” section. Of particular interest, the way in which Ali is tested for his strength and fidelity. By mid-point in the film, the French, for the first time aware of the likelihood or even the possibility of a successful Algerian independence movement, send massive troops and a skillful and tough Colonel to stop the terrorism - with predictable lack of success and increase in the carnage. Clearly the film is from the Algerian POV and builds our sympathy, even when the Algerians adopt the crudest forms of terrorism - quite a feat, I’d say. On one level, the events seem so remote today - why don’t the French just give it up? - and in other ways we can extrapolate and re-apply some of the lessons here to many independence movements that have ensued, from Vietnam to African nations to Israel-Palestine, and the list goes on. A remarkable and engaging film first to last. 

Is it possible to create a murder story in which we know from the outset who’s the perpetrator? Well, it worked out OK for Dostoyevsky. Can’t entirely say the same for the Swedish series on Netflix, The Unlikely Murderer. Based on a nonfiction account of the assassination of PM Olof Palme on a Stockholm street=corner in 1982 - a case that, as each episode informs us, has never been solved. But there has been from the outset a prime suspect, Stig Engstrom, and it’s he the series follows. And he is an unlikely murderer, at least what we see from the outset - yet at first he seems like a wannabe who claims to have been among the first to rush to the aid of Palme and his wife - but we also see footage of the killing (all re-created of course, though there are a few scenes using original footage) which puts the lie to Stig’s claim. And by the end we see that he was a tortured and troubled man, a lifelong victim of bullying, perceived lack of recognition at his workplace, troubled in love of course, seeking attention, nursing grudges - it all makes sense; wouldn’t have cared for the series as much if it weren’t based on fact - truth stranger than fiction sometimes - and it’s a little hard to follow with many jumps back and forth in time, but worth a look. 

The Pablo Lorrain disaster film, Spencer, wait, I mean, just disaster, invites comparison w/ the Peter Morgan The Crown, so here goes: Whereas TC makes the Eliz. II Royal Family into “round” characters - and in particular the episodes that introduce Diana and show us what life, we imagine, is like in the Scottish castle, Spencer reduces all of the characters, including Kristen Stewart’s Diana, to stick figures and seems to me to get the entire royal family dad wrong - it’s not that they’re strict formalists completely uptight and rigid - it’s that they’re at base shallow, protected, uncaring, and incurious: nights spent watching “telly” playing parlor games and days spent in the fields hunting and shooting ( see in TC how Thatcher was mistreated and unprepared for visit to Scotland). Among the disastrous elements the first rank goes to KS whose attempt to talk-British makes her largely unintelligible throughout: everything from her is in a hushed whisper and rushed, then pause, something that comes naturally to the Brits (and to everyone else in the film, therefor) but in KS’s nobody taught KS how to enunciate to make this work - or even understood. Many other complaints, notably that Diana’s breakdown is presented in the stupidest, heavy-handed manner - driving to the castle she gets “lost” - Oh, I get it! - and there’s no dimension to her misery other than a weird desire to visit her childhood home - now a boarded-up ruin (after maybe 20 years of misuse at the most?)  - and of course the ending, in which she heroically stands in front to the shooting party to get them to stop shooting pheasants (or peasants?) , one of which (pheasant) was found ominously dead on the roadway in opening scenes, oh, gosh, will Diana ID w/ the bird? What do you think? Anyway, she “demands” that Charles let go of the two boys  and come to mama - something any boy out on his first “shoot” would say: Leave me alone, Mom, I’m not a baby, but, no, Will and Harry run into her arms and they eventually dash off in her sports car at reckless speed (far more dangerous and bad modeling than the pheasant shoot), with amazingly no press or staff in pursuit?, an American song no less blasting from the radio, taking them out for ice cream on the banks of the Thames, with nobody nothing. (I will add only that the score is bizarre, including jazz trumpet pieces and a string quartet playing dissonant music - Shostakovitz sp.? - during the formal dinner. nonsensical. ) 

A lot of positives for Rebecca Hall’s current film on Netflix, Passing, based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel. Hall and her team perfectly create the look and feel of the era in part by making the film look very much like a (visually heightened) film from the Prohibition Era: the square screen format, sharp b/w cinematography, a smart and inventive jazz-age score, ingenious (and challenging) interiors in a NYC brownstone with furnishings or the era in particular many mirrors, and most of all an intelligent script and fine lead-actor performances as in a play, maybe too much so, as the film does take a good deal of time before liftoff. Three lead roles - Ruth Negga as Clare, a Black woman “passing” for white; Tessa Thompson as her (Black) friend and confidante, Irene Redfield; Andre Holland as TT’s husband, an MD, and one of the few in on Negga’s secret life. The only flaw in the design, for me, was due to the only minimal exploration of the conflicts and terrors and shame in Negga’s life (her husband and daughter don’t know her true race - and husband, we see in first segments, is a bully and racist); the film is largely about Negga’s Clare trying to insinuate herself in the the Redfield family and marriage. The film had surprisingly little to say or examine re the great secret of Clare’s life - her brutal husband appears only at the beginning and end. 

Would not recommend A Cop Movie unfortunately - the idea seemed good, a docudrama that follows the lives of 2 police officers (brother & sister?) in Mexico City, but in the portion we watched the blending of documentary footage (it starts w/ a dramatic scene in which the female officer assists in a birth and delivery) and scripted material - a long monolog in which the officer discusses how and why she joined the force - was awkward (several re-staged events, some brutal) and eventually just dull. Good idea, but not brought to fruition. 

Nop doubt Chaplin films were innovative and hilarious … in the 1920s, and the opening sequence in City Lights, in which CC is revealed as sound asleep in the arms of a statue that is unveiled as part of a big ceremony, is still quite funny, but overall the gags seem to me tiresome and long past their due date. I guess when you get down to it I don’t like silent features - yes, they are important as part of the history cinema but the advent of sound, and even better live sound as opposed to post-synch, has obviated the Silents. City Lights just seemed to me, over its first half-hour, utterly quaint and remote; I can only take or care about so many pratfall. At least, I’ll say this, it’s better than Keaton’s The General, in part because its sympathies are with the poor and oppressed. But I won’t stay w/ it for another hour or so, sorry. 

The Perfect Candidate (set in Saudi Arabia, about a young md. whose plans go awry and finds herself as a candidate for municipal office, through which she hopes to make repairs to her medical clinic) is earnest and offers a close-up view of life in Saudi Arabia but for all that it moves at a snail’s pace and was just plane movie-of-the-week predictable and obvious, despite its best intentions. Moved on to a similar movie (in Perfect Candidate the father is a renowned performer on the old and dragoons his daughters into performing w/ him) called The Disciple, about young man who aspires to be a great sitar performer - first 10 minutes or so mostly consumed w/ performances by his master/teacher and the student’s inept attempts at mastery and it’s altogether unfunny and even unwatchable. And these films make their way to respectively the Criterion Channel and Netflix, plus strong reviews of the latter. Grouch, grouch! 

The 1995(?) Jodie Foster film, Home for the Holidays, aimed, I think, to be for Thanksgiving what It’s A Wonderful Life has become for xmas, and it succeeds in a limited way - the closing sequences do pack an emotional wallop no matter what your view of the movie as a whole - but overall the film is a high-jinx, slapstick dysfunctional family vehicle with many star turns, some better than others. Basic plot: 40ish woman laid off from her job (for some reason they keep saying she was “fired” when that’s clearly not the case) goes home to family in Boston (apparently filmed in Md., tho) where sisters and brother converge and squabble; the house itself is a madcap jumble, a complete crowded mess at the outset and you wonder how they’ll ever clear up the post-dinner wreckage. A major plot line involves the “gay marriage” of the brother (Robert Downey Jr. in an over-the-top, nearly unbearable manic performance), making the film somewhat ahead of its time and suitably progressive. The lead is Holly Hunter - far too young (or young-looking) for the role, and for some dumb reason she speaks throughout in her native Southern accent, which makes no sense here (her mother, Ann Bancroft, speaks in a NY/Jewish-Italian accent so go figure). Some of the scenes are hilarious, most are head-scratchers - the family never seems credible or even bearable, but the idea, I guess, is to just write them off as lovable eccentrics. The movie feels as if it’s adapted from a play, but the credits tell us it’s from a short story - and many of the passages of dialog sound more “authorial” than natural. Overall, the film won’t kill you to watch it once, but this - some 20 years down the road (and the technology of the era gets a few laughs inevitably) this has not become a TGiving staple nor will it. 

Chris Marker’s film, La Jetee (1962) is sometimes called a sci-fi film though I think it’s more of a dystopian film with some speculative elements of the supernatural woven throughout. Marker’s film has the advantage of being short - 28 minutes - and that seems just about right, as the film makes its point and then moves on, unlike similarly ambitious apocalyptic films of recent years which belabor the narrative to the point of nausea, and that’s not even counting the inevitable sequels. In brief, Marker’s film posits the outbreak of a 2nd WW, in this case a nuclear, which leaves the entire nearly depopulated through radiation contamination; some of the survivors (German?) who’d taken refuge in underground crypts and caves beneath what once was Paris, embark on experiments (why?) that culminate in sending resuscitated man to the past and, in a 2nd “voyage,” to the future; in both narratives he meets and falls in love with a young woman. I won’t give away all plot twists, but it’s worth noting that this film, for all its apparent pretentiousness, is designed to make us think: Is anyone I know actually an emissary from the past? from the future? Am I a robot? The most striking feature of this short is that it is (with a minor exception) composed of b/w stills, many of them quite imaginative (the postwar ruins of Paris), and a few are quite beautiful in and of themselves. I think the film has been oversold by some rapturous critics - it does feel a little dated - but it’s worth a look, especially given its run time. 

Anyone watching the HBO series Black and Missing will be informed, troubled, and moved by the issue this series takes head-on: For too many cases of missing children are Black, missing Black children draw far less media (and police?) attention than other missing children, too many missing children are labeled “runaways” rather than victims of abduction and exploitation. The series focuses on a foundation, staffed largely by Black retired law-enforcement officers, that takes on cases of missing Black children, providing materials (posters etc.), expertise, and support to families or single parents seeking their missing children. The series does a great service and may help to shift priorities and assumptions on this issue. All that said, this series, based on the first episode at least, doesn’t have the dramatic focus we have come to expect from doc-dramas; it’s hard if not impossible to follow a case front to finish - like, say, the recent French series about a missing adopted daughter. There are way to many talking heads in the first episode, and only one case that we learn much about. Perhaps other episodes will be more dramatic, in the traditional sense (beginning, middle, end), but I feel I’ve got the message from episode one and can’t really bear further episodes of sorrow and loss. 

Elliot's Watching - October 2021

 Elliot's Watching - Notes - October 2021

Buster Keaton’s The General (1926), about which let’s just say that the humor does not age well. Yes, some of the scenes, especially aboard the runaway train, difficult to film and impressive Keaton gymnastics, but honestly is it really so funny? Silents do not age well, I’m afraid. Most of all, why is this film a glorification of the Confederacy - making the Confederate soldiers skilled and heroic and the Union troops and their leaders clumsy, incompetent boors? Totally unneeded, and disgraceful to se the stars and bars glorified in a so-called classic American film. 

The based-on-true-events docudrama on PBS and Prime, A Confession, centers on a police office in SW England ca 2010 investigating the murder of a young woman; as evidence leads the police toward one suspect, the cops begin questioning him intensely - the key, though, is that they have not found a body nor heard from the woman and they hope that she’s alive and that he can lead them to her. As it turns out, he leads them to her body - but then indicates to the lead detective that he is responsible for other murders and can lead police to a body of a young prostitute who he says he killed. The catch: the cop took this info from him before he got to see a lawyer - the cop knew the lawyer would tell the suspect to say nothing - and a storm was unleashed so to speak, some blaming the prosecutor for blowing the case; others, praising him for his aggression. The story is rich and crosses many class and social lines; it’s also far more emotional and moving than most crime docudramas - and is should be especially telling for American viewers, as our Miranda rights are much like the procedure in British law (even though the court proceedings differ significantly). 

Roberto Rossellini’s 1954 film Journey to Italy is a bit of a puzzle on the Sight & Sound 100 best films list. It has some strengths no doubt, which link it in a technical sense to the Italian neorealism classics - notably the crowd scene in the closing sequence, the weird visits to a catacombs, to Pompei, and to a castle and museum where the obligatory guides are obsequious and temperamental, and to the pickup of the prostitute on a quiet Naples street; these scenes are great!; but the movie itself feels really stilted and dated. Ingrid Bergman’s husband, George Sanders, is fully repulsive from the first moment - bossing around the help and scornful of everyone esp Bergman - but he’s the same throughout the film. The first question is why did she marry him? Second, why does she still put up with him? And when they finally reach the verge of a breakup, we can only think, at last. But to be a great movie there has to be some change in character, some obstacle over come, some wisdom derived from experience, but the story line gives us none of this. We are smarter than any of the characters, which makes for a lousy film, at least on the narrative level. 

What can you say about Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955) aside from that it’s as powerful, moving, and unmediated as it was 70 years ago, a seemingly documentary portrayal of life in a village in rural India in the early 20th century; we are brought directly into the lives of the villagers through a series of vignettes that touch on all aspects of village life, literally from birth to death, with some incredibly moving scenes and some harrowing moments as well - the treatment or mistreatment of the super-elderly aunt, the cruelty of the mother, the irresponsibility of the father, and mostly the lives and struggles of the 2 children, particularly the young boy, Apu, whom we will follow across the course of this life in the next two segments of this trilogy. The range of emotion is enormous - from the joy the children feel at the simplest of pleasures (the arrival in the village of a man selling candies, or another man with a stereopticon) to the hardship of the parents, with the father off for months at a time - even sending a post card home was an ordeal, it seems - the father’s failure as a writer (what chance did he have?), the horrible schooling young Apu endures (how did he ever learn to read? Most probably didn’t), the frightening storm near the end of the movie, the primitive at best medical treatments - and always the hint of a greater and wider world as the children see passing by the village the near-miraculous, otherworldly appearance of a train cutting across the horizon. 

The HBO 3-part documentary by Ry Russo-Young, Nuclear Family, is a terrific examination by the film-maker about her pioneering, progressive family - she and her sister were raised by their 2 moms as a family of four. The 2 girls were conceived via sperm donors, whom the moms recruited and selected, and the donors agreed that they would take no part of the children’s lives. The Russo-Youngs were a happy and stable family of 4 until - first big mistake - they invited the donor-dads to meet their daughters, which lead to unforeseen consequences and anguish - all of which is presented here raw and in present time, as the filmmaker grills her moms about mistakes they may have made and the moms fight back - an incredible scene. For any who think this film might be a maudlin, pity-me, sob story - it is anything but; it’s a great psychological and political/legal drama with many surprises and w/ many questions unanswered - because they’re probably unanswerable. Many props to the director for taking on this deeply personal topic fearlessly and w/ eyes wide open.

The successful Apple+ series The Morning Show, in brief, is a great venue for the always-good Reese Witherspoon, cast as a volatile, combative TV reporter who jumps from a small-city Southern TV reporter to a national role. Other than RW and some of her scene-chewing tirades, I don’t have much that’s positive to say about this at least the first 2 episodes of this series, which seem wildly improbable and incongruous. Even w/ the help of an all-star cast, it’s impossible, at least for me, to buy into this series about, obviously, the national good-morning TV shows, which I never watch anyway. 

Carl Theodore Dreyer’s film Gertrud  (1964, incredibly - looks more like 1934) makes the Sight and Sound 100 best films list, and that has to be based on the strength of his other films (E.g. Passion of Joan of Arc, silent; Ordet) and sentimental judgment about last film of his long career, as it’s so wooden and stilted as to be, unintentionally, comic, ludicrous, almost hysterical. Dreyer is great as b/w film and lighting and I’ll admit that the visuals throughout this film, while frozen in time and seemingly untouched and uninfluenced by anything in cinemas since the advent of sound, are striking, at least for a while. But virtually every scene proceeds glacially (it’s a good film to watch if you’re brushing up on your Danish!) and, even more strangely, at the scenes lmost always involve the two protagonist allegedly speaking to each other but sitting/standing side by side and looking away from each other and toward the imagined audience. Just weird. The story line - based on a novel from the early 20th century, and seeming even older - involve the eponymous Gertrud and her search for love, after announcing to her husband that the marriage is over, pursuing a composer who’s a real jerk of a man, rejecting the overtures from a lover from her youth now a famous (!) poet, and in the end striking out on her own - making this film I would think a rallying point for women’s rights (a much, much later Doll’s House), but we can’t forget, either, that she’s pretty nasty to her husband whom she chose to marry and who does not wrong or harm to her. 

The Ricky Velez comedy special, Here’s Everything, on HBO is really funny , even thou so many of his riffs go right by we Boomers - others are fantastic, such has his buying marijuana “in the ocean!”, a proposed ad for Trojans, and his unique interpretation of “fracking.” Worth the hour for sure. 

After some good luck checking out Ricky Velez’s comedy special, we pushed our luck and watched some of Theo Von’s Regular People on Netflix - watched the first interminable minutes as he joked about his gender-neutral (haircut) and then things got worse as he mocked people from his youth who had disabilities - and the audience (packed house) laughed at everything he said but we didn’t. Terrible.

Then we watched the first hour of David Chase’s The Many Saints of Newark and it was if not as dreadful as some of the reviews indicated it was pretty much a hot mess. The problem is that he had to balance those who came to the show to get all the info they could about the background of the Soprano family - which is to say 98 percent of the viewers? - against the need to make a gangster-family movie that could stand on its own within the genre, which this movie decidedly cannot; it would be utterly forgettable if to anyone (2 percent?) who knows nothing about the Sopranos series. The main problem is that we were captivated by the Sopranos because of the unexpected and the incongruities - Tony as a likable father devoted in his manner to his wife and his kids, but he’s also a cold-blooded killer if need be: the two “families,” in short, with both families full of love and support - and the many everyday crises of raising teenage kids - and both dreadful and malevolent. All of that - everything that drove Tony S to seek therapeutic assistance - is missing from this flat and uncertain prequel. Which leads me to think about the conclusion of the Sopranos, sudden, anticipated, and unsatisfying - which in fact is true of almost all TV series. How many recognize when it’s time to pull the plug (think of the dreadful House of Cards, or the going-nowhere Mrs.Mazell); how many patch a conclusion together that satisfies nobody (think of Mad Men chirping off to a Coke ad). Here a quick list of the very few that build to an emotional, intelligent final episode that does the series justice:

Battlestar Gallactica

Friday Night Lights

Halt and Catch Fire

Breaking Bad

Schitt’s Creek

Any others? 

Elliot's Watching Week of 10 Oct 21: Bicycle Thieves

 Elliot's Watching Week of 10 Oct 21

If you’ve already seen Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948 - sometimes listed as The Bicycle Thief, which is incorrect), as you probably have,  you should see it again because I can almost assure you it’s better than you’d remembered: socially and political on point, brief with hardly a wasted moment, dramatic from the first frame, poignant, simple, straightforward - values so seldom seen in contemporary blockbuster cinema. Set in postwar Rome, from the first shot - men gathered at a government office where jobs are doled out as and if available; the protagonist - Ricci - gets one of the coveted jobs, but needs a bicycle for this chance of a lifetime. His is in hock; ever-loyal wife pawns their bedsheets to reclaim the bike - in an amazing shot we see a figurative mountain of sheets that others have hocked, an incredible visual statement. Shortly, the bike is stolen and we embark on an odyssey as Ricci and 6-year-old son - w/ few words he’s the star of the show - embark on a quest to reclaim the bike, which leads to some terrifying moral/ethical decisions. This film was foundational, leading to many of the great neo-realist dramas of the 1950s, and has influenced probably hundreds of quest films - and it stands up well to time, improves with time in fact, as there’s an added fascination of seeing Rome in such dire poverty, far different from the epicenter of tourism and business that it is today. 

Elliot's Watching Week of 10-3-21: 2 HBO dramas

 Elliot’s Watching week of  10-3-2: Two HBO dramas

Monday: Finished watching HBO series The White Lotus -about the super-rich on week’s vacation on privately owned Hawaiian island and during which, actually from the outset, we despise all of the main characters, incredibly spoiled and self-centered people so loathsome we almost gave up on this series - though it turned out to be quite good, both in production values (the Hawaiian/contemporary score particularly good), acting (how ca you not like Connie Briten, this time in an unsympathetic role), and writing - especially the well-done scenes in which the three main groups of guests each work through their own issues and relationships. Series begins with a knife in the throat: There’s one body, apparently murder victim, being taken off the island - but who is it? And this keeps us guessing and analyzing and thinking right to the end. Good! Though there are some loose ends and improbable elements  that I won’t divulge. Worth watching, and discussing - despite the noxious personalities on display. 

The French documentary Laetitia, on HBO, is sad and engrossing and all the more so in that it’s a docu-drama based on a distressing murder case on the Atlantic coast in Fr. We see right off that one of twin sisters adopted by a strictly disciplined family is killed, and in short order we learn who most likely killed her, but there are many distressing elements to the story that come to light painfully and gradually, notably issues of child abuse and neglect and the failure of the French social service and, to a less extent, the legal and police community - despite the efforts of 3 heroic people - failed to recognize abuse in process and to protect the two likable girls from harm. Though the ending is slightly upbeat, we certainly see how the surviving twin has had her life thrown into disorder and we don’t expect her later years will be the end of her trauma. 

Elliot's Watching Week of 9-26-21: The Jinx, and Rashomon

 Elliot’s Watching 9-26-21

A few years ago everyone was watching and talking about Andrew Jarecki’s 2005 documentary, The Jinx (HBO), but we didn’t have that channel back then and are just now catching up as the subject of the investigation, Robert Durst, is back in the news re his complicity in the deaths of 3 people - and I won’t give anything away, and I don’t even know exactly why he’s back in the news. This 6-part documentary, though, is quite engaging and provocative, as we see the extremely strange behavior of Durst, who, amazingly, agreed to extensive on-camera interviews w/ the documentarians in order to give the public his “side of the story,” as well as into the strangeness that not 1, 2, but three mysterious deaths/disappearances occur involving Durst’s life and family, and we speaking of strange we see his absurd attempts to escape detection after the 3rd killing, and along the way we see how his wealthy family could grease the wheels - we see it by implication only, but we have to wonder how and why the NYPD detectives flubbed the case so badly, and we see the one murder trial, in Galveston, Texas, in which the high-priced Stetson-wearing defense counsel completely befuddle the overwhelmed prosecutors leader to a terrible miscarriage of justice, so to speak. Definitely worth watching as a rare close-up view of the ultrarich and ultrastrange. 

Not much to say about Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 career-making masterpiece, Rashomon - probably the only Japanese film title that’s made it into the English-language lexicon: a single event viewed from more than one point of view, and in which none of the points of view lead to the same conclusion or insight. In this case, the three “narratives,” set in about 1550, each involve a roving bandit (Toshiro Mifune) who comes upon a well-armed man transporting  (via some kind of cart of carrier) a woman - we learn that she is his beautiful young wife - through a forest. In each version, Mifune lures the husband to a more remote part of the wilderness; the wife follows, and in each version Mifune rapes the young wife. There the stories diverge, though each leads to the death of the husband: Was it in a fight over the woman’s love?, shame on his behalf leading to suicide, shift in allegiance/alliance that leads the wife to betray her husband and run off with the bandit? The movie is beautifully paced, a great balance of still pastoral scenes and violent, sometimes balletic sword fights. The “framing” story, about an itinerant monk who despairs for all of humankind on hearing these dreadful tales, adds a band of melancholy to the whole narrative - right up to the twists of fate at the end of the tale. 

Elliot's Watching Week of 9-5-21: Bergman, and Mexican sociodrama

 Elliot’s Watching - Week of 9-5-21

The 8-episode Diego Luna socio-drama Everything Will Be Fine, from Mexico (2021) and on Netflix, is far better than one would expect from any brief description: A story of the break-up of a marriage where both (though mostly the man) are at fault, and the attendant suffering of the adorable child about 8 years old - scenes from a marriage Mexican-style we might call it, except that it’s amazingly au courant (it ends mid-Covid) and often surprising. I don’t know that I completely buy into the conclusion, but will say that it’s almost impossible to foresee and that it leaves things open to a second season, of course. Among the 5 lead player there are some powerful scenes, some showing a lot of frankness about sex. The plot twists are at times ingenious, but always credible, and the photography is always beautiful, imaginative, and, at least to this viewer, informative about contemporary life in Mex City. Of particular note, the visit the young girl takes to the home town of the family maid (reminded me of a similar sequence in Roma). In short, this type of film may not be for everyone - it wasn’t something I’d ordinarily be drawn to - but it accomplish its goals efficiently and effectively and will keep you engaged without ever pandering. 

When I first watched Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) I was put off; I felt that it was pretentious, obscure, and heavy-handed, and not nearly as truthful and provocative as his more conventionally scripted works, such as Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, or even the quite different Seventh Seal. Now, I’ve come around - watched Persona over the past two nights and blown away by the tension, reach, and creativity of this film. How so? Well, it still is at times pretentious, especially in its dream-like imagery near beginning and end of film - the little boy watching on a screen this very story about his emotionally distant mother, the bit of celluloid film breaking and incinerating - yes, we get it, we’re watching all this on a long strip of film. But at the heart - a story of two women, one (Liv Ullmann, playing Elisabet) an actress who had a breakdown during a performance and since them (several months) been silent, the other (Bibi Andersson, playing Alma) a nurse assigned to give full-time care to Elisabet - including several weeks (months?) on a Baltic island where it appears that they are the only inhabitants. Over the course of the treatment, Alma becomes so disturbed and angry at her patient’s intransigence that she becomes abusive and furious. Probably the most powerful sequence is Alma’s long narration of a sexual encounter that led to a pregnancy and abortion, and later learns that Elisabet wrote a letter about this encounter in which she was mocking and scornful toward her nurse. The drama is incredibly taut and powerful throughout - a tour de force for Andersson for whom the 100-minute film was a single narrative and Ullmann, who commands through expression and gesture, as well as a strikingly original and beautiful b/w masterpiece by photog Sven Nyquist, in which every frame - from intimate close-up portraits to stark exterior landscapes to the all-white hospital room where Elisabet is more or less imprisoned. On one level, it’s a powerful film about power relationships and torment - but there’s a wider sense as well: In part, it’s an allegory about contemporary life, in which Elisabet’s silence is the silence of an indifferent, inaccessible God (early in the film we see Elisabet disturbed by film clips of violence in Vietnam and, perhaps?, from the Holocaust); the film also examines what it means to “wear a mask” or “play a role,” the many personalities that we adopt and adapt each day and every moment. And also it asks: Do we all have a limit or breaking point after which we will become violent? After which can no longer tolerate the violence of others? And what about the little boy who “watches” this film in silence, this film of his mother: You can’t help but see Bergman himself in this young boy, sensitive, distant, fearful, observant, silent. 

Added notes (9/12/21): The passages in the opening sequence and about half-way through the film when the film strip itself seems to break and incinerate has in the present age lost its significance; of course today we all are watching this “film” through digital streaming services or, for the old-fashioned, on a DVD. At the time of its release, of course, viewers would watch this only on “film” - so imagine yourself in a theater and watching the opening sequence and then the film itself starts to disintegrate. Your though of course would be that there was an accident in the projection room and that the film has been damaged or destroyed. It will take a few moments before the film gets “back on track,” and would be extremely unsettling and challenging for first-time viewers in the age of celluloid. 

Kurosawa's Masterpiece: Seven Samurai

Akira Kurosawa’s 1956 masterpiece, Seven Samurai, is rightfully included on any best-picture list or ranking and has from its incarnation been recognized as one of the greatest films of all time. The story is at once extremely remote and unfamiliar to virtually all (first-time) viewers yet also universal and comprehensible across all cultural divides - which is why SS has been so successfully adapted in the famous American Wester The Magnificent Seven. Story in brief: in the late 1500s in rural Japan a small village of rice/barley farmers fear that once their harvest is in they will be overrun by a marauding team of bandits on horseback. Unable to counter such powerful armed assault, the village sends a team of elders to the nearest “city” (more an outpost or trading post) with the goal of hiring 7 Samurai to defend the village from attack; the 7 men recruited each has his own personality and role within the narrative, which is rich with elements (the youngest of the Samurai falls in love w/ a village girl, with many consequences, for example). To me the coolest of the Samurai has always been the world-expert swordsman who is focused on perfecting his art and a bit reluctant to take on this paramilitary assignment. The most famous is played by the great Toshiro Mifune, is miscreant who creates comic havoc but is always true to his commitments. There are so many great scenes, but to cite just a few: the test that head samurai (Takashi Shimura, another great actor) devices to test each samurai before the recruitment interview; Mifune following the other six on their way to the village, hoping to win them over; Mifune sounding the alarm when the samurai enter the village; the initial attack scenes, which show the brutality of medieval warfare ass well as any other film except maybe Chimes at Midnight; the village girl’s remorse when her father beats her after she’s had sex with the youngest samurai; and the closing moments, of course, with the rice harvest under way and the winds rustle the pennants over the graves of the fallen soldiers. Three + hours - but so engrossing and easy to watch. 

Elliot's Watching Week of 8-1-21: Ronan Farrow, Fassbinder, J.K. Rowling, and a classic Western

 Elliot’s Watching - Week of 8-1-21: Catch & Kill, Despair, Strike, and 7 Men

Ronan Farrow’s 6-part documentary, Catch and Kill (HBO), is pretty much as it says: The Podcast Tapes. If you’ve listened to the podcasts (I hadn’t) there’s not much value added in this cinema/documentary version - almost all of the significant footage consists of the interviews that formed the basis of RF’s reporting on the Havey Weinstein, rapist. That said: This is still a great series for a lot of reasons: RF’s intrepid and brave reporting, the nefarious nature of HW which no doubt was well known and quietly tolerated across the whole entertainment industry, the cowardice of NBC news in ordering RF to kill the report and walking away from it, the boldness of the New Yorker in choosing to stick with RF and to run the story after scrupulous fact-checking, and the frightening attempts to intimidate RF and to dirty him up in fruitless efforts to kill the report or tarnish its veracity. I have nothing but praise for RF, a guy who could have chosen a much easier pathway in life, could have gotten all kinds of jobs and opportunities based on his connection to Hollywood/cultural elite, but who chose to pursue journalism and not in some half-assed, celebrity-kissing way but through the rigors or serious and dangerous reporting over many years and the extreme difficulty of writing a nonfiction book as well. We can see from these recordings that he’s a terrific interviewer and willing to push and probe and follow up on leads to get to the truth. And the truth - the power the HW wielded in the industry and the sense that his criminal behavior was so widely tolerated and the a major media outlet could be bullied by him and his minions into silence - all quite astonishing and depressing, but many kudos to RF for pursuing this path and bringing the truth to light. 

Seldom, maybe never, have such an array of illuminati and the talented been brought together in such a dismal failure as the 1978 film Despair: based on the novel by Nabokov (high literary props), adapted (I’ll say!) for the screen by Tom Stoppard (higher props), directed by Rainer Warner Fassbinder (first English-language film), starring Dirk Bogarde (art-film star) - and finally what a mess. First of all, Nabokov’s novel (1934) is ridiculously inappropriate for a film; like most of his work, this novel was a vehicle for VN to show that he’s smarter than his readers, knows more languages and can write well in any, and he’s a master at creating thoroughly unlikable narrators - all of which says to me, lousy movie. Then, how did Stoppard get involved? He seems to have had no sense in how to build a dramatic plot. The plot such as it is involves a German  Hermann (Bogarde) in Prague (?) on a business trip encounters on the street a man who looks like his double; he concocts a plan to “murder himself” in order to, I guess, start a new life under the now dead man’s ID. Potentially good - but Stoppard was unwilling to break the bonds of VN’s meandering narrative and make this an exciting story of murder and doom. Not much happens; the killing itself is ridiculous; and the film (not sure about the novel, I didn’t finish reading it) ends in some postmodern nonsense: I’m just a character in a movie, wearing for freedom, blah blah. as for Fassbinder, he seems to have been lost in the English language, as the speeches are wooden and strange without being moving or provocative; he does seem interested in the somewhat louche aspects of the novel, in particular the failed artist who hangs around with Hermann’s wife - a chance it seems for RWF to peer, as he so often has in much better films, at the underworld and the eccentricities of temper and tempest in the art scene. How that all hangs together, what type of despair could motivate or drive Hermann to kill an innocent man - no answers lie in this film. Despair? Disaster. 

First season (Lethal) of the British (based on J.K. Rowling detective-novel series - I guess she needed the money?) C.B. Strike breaks no new ground - private eye, wounded war veteran, setting up his business in a rented walkup, takes on temp as his secretary, she thrills to and excels in the business as the form a good working partnership with of course the tension being do they fall for each other or remain simply professional colleagues - we’ve seen this before (think: X-files for ex.) - but it’s reasonably entertaining, as Strike ushered to find out whether a London supermodel’s death was suicide or murder and as of course it’s gonna be murder: Who dunit? Like so many detective or police procedurals, the probability of the entire search and research is based more on plot convenience than on any possible reality, so if you can acknowledge from the top that all the stupid clues and leads don’t really matter, that this is a series about a developing relationship/partnership, then it’s OK if not great. If nothing else, Rowling is a total all-star at developing a plot into a series, so this may be worth watching beyond Season 1, though I probably won’t persist. Also worth noting that many of the key lines/important dialog is delivered in a mumbled South London accent that was extremely hard to discern, at least for this American viewer - but if you get only 80 percent of what’s said you’ll get enough to follow along. 

To my chagrin, I’ve never been a fan of Westerns; as a kid, I couldn’t follow the plot lines and never understood the whole mythos of the West. Who were these people in covered wagons, where did they come from, where were they going? Why was everyone so afraid of the “Indians”? Who were the sheriffs and deputies and other “lawmen”? So I’ve pretty much ignored this genre of film except for the absolute highlights such as The Searchers and High Noon. But this week a watched a 1956 Western. Budd Boetticher’s Seven Men from Now,  that’s not on the 100 greatest list by any means, but it totally held my interest and attention - proving once more that a B-movie that accomplishes its goals is better to watch than an A-movie that falls short. Without going through the whole plot line - which holds together far better than most B-movie scripts (thanks, writer Burt Kennedy), it involves a theft of gold from a Wells Fargo branch, an attack in which a woman clerk is killed - and she’s the wife of a out-of-favor lawman, who proceed to search for the 7 robbers who killed her; in the process, he’s called upon to help a totally feckless wagoner who’s heading for California with his young wife. En route, among those whom they cross, is frightening, evil guy - the young Lee Marvin! More than most Westerns, this one game me the sense of the risks and difficulty (and sometimes stupidity) of heading out in wagon without knowing the requisite skills. You get from this film a real sense of the dangerous landscape and the need for grit and independence to get cross-country, let alone to succeed in the West. Among other notable aspects, the score (Henry Vars) captures the mood of the film without overwhelming us with bathos, and of particular note it’s one of the few films of the era,  I think, in which the protagonist seems to understand and sympathize with the soon-to-be oppressed native cultures. It’s not the greatest Western of all time, but it’s an entertaining diversion that carries both a wallop and a message. 

Elliot's Watching week of 7-28-21: Godard's Breathless

 Elliot’s Watching - Week of 7-28-21: Godard's Breathless 

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 debut, breakthrough film, Breathless, remains some 60 years later as still total fun to watch - all the more impressive in that the moral stance of the movie is despicable. But how can you not enjoy free-wheeling through Paris (in the days before traffic and tourist jams) in a stole American car? The adorable French with accent American of the young Jean Seberg? The super-cool demeanor of the young Jean-Paul Belmondo, cigarette dangled from lip a la Bogart, the weird caressing of his own lips a la … Belmondo? The fast pace of the film, relentless, except there in the middle is the scene in Seberg’s tiny apartment and Belmondo spends what seems like days struggling to get her into bed with him - one of the longest scenes in film at that time, I would imagine? The hilarious news conference with the famous visiting novelist (played by Melville) whose ambition is “to become immortal, and then to die”? Belmondo’s take on a poster of a Picasso: “J’ai dit pas mal!”? Or his choice between grief and nothing: Rien. And so on. And yet … we know nothing about the back story of either of the two leads, except that Belmondo uses 2 names and has been involved in some shady deals in Nice and that Seberg is in Paris for as long as her parents will foot the bill for the Sorbonne. So she’s bright and ambitious, landing a p-t job, partly on basis of her looks, writing for (and also hawking) the NY Herald Tribune. But we do know that she “makes bad choices,” linking her fate to this obviously criminal careerist who has shot and killed a police officer w/out regret or remorse. How can we like or pity either of them? So it’s a film into whose moral ambiguity, at best (nihilism at worst) that viewers have to buy into, at least for 90 minutes - not hard to do, while watching the film, but not a world we’d want to inhabit or have our kids inhabit for a second. 

Elliot's Watching week of 7-18-21: Bergman on TV

 Elliot’s Watching - Week of 7-18-21

Ingmar Bergman’s 6-part TV series, Scenes from a Marriage (1973), was a precursor to the many great series that everyone in the world watches today - a true innovation and a daring experiment in its time (Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz may be the only equivalent - though that was based on a famous novel, whereas Bergman’s was his original script - in essence, a 5-hour drama. SfaM focuses closely and intensely on one couple, Johan and Marriane, played brilliantly, through some extremely difficult and challenging scenes, by Liv Ullman and the less-well-known Erland Josephson. We follow these two - with only a few isolated scenes involving others - over the course of about ten years and through all the tempests for marriage, affairs, break-ups, divorce, reconciliation. The film is in its way typically Swedish: A lot of repression and social nicety, with problems “swept under the rug” (the title of one of the episodes), and then with sudden sometimes violent explosions of feelings and pent-up rage or tearful remorse. The cinematography (Sven Nyquist of course) is exquisite, almost all at full or close focus - very few exteriors, tracking, or panning shots. It’s a troubling and demanding 5 hours but a landmark for both cinema (one of Bergman’s early forays into color and into a study of contemporary life - though often criticized for its focus on only one social class, the comfortable Swedish professionals) and, years later, television. 

Elliot's Watching week of 7-11-21: Godard et al

 Elliot’s Watching - Week of 7-11-21

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film, Band of Outsiders (Bande a part) must have been, at least in part, a response to Truffaut’s sweet and sentimental story about a threesome, Jules et Jim. Godard’s is also about a 3-some, two guys and a girl (Anna Karina in a great role!), that is not in the least “sweet”: the 3 meet up in an adult-ed English class (one of the men presciently notes that he’s going to drop English and study Chinese, as that will be the dominant culture in the future), where the Karina (Odile) lets slip that in one of the other tenants in the suburban house where she’s rooming has a huge stash of francs - and the two guys, Arthur (he tells the naif Odile that has last name is “Rimbaud, one of several literary in-jokes) and Franz, hatch a robbery plot. But these guys (and they seem a bit too old for the part) are dopes and their entire plan is cock-eyed from the start; for most of the movie the robbery scheme is played as a high comedy of blunders, but in the end, no surprise, things go radically wrong in every imaginable way. We don’t watch this film, today, for its plot; rather, for its highly imaginative use of cinematography - most notably in the dash through the Louvre (how did they get permission to film that? Maybe they didn’t) and the terrific scene in the diner, with the great dance sequence and the surprising minute of silence. Also, we watch this film to see a Paris that is no longer - mostly grungy and not at all scene or touristic (scars of the war seem still evident), yet in some ways an idyllic setting - esp. the rooming house in one of the Paris suburbs; lots of scenes involving driving - easy to do in Paris and environs back in the day, no traffic jams, parking everywhere - it seems many lifetimes ago, and not at all the way we think of Paris on film - it’s the dark flipside of the record. 

John Dower’s true-crime documentary Sophie (2021, on Netflix) is a three-part examination of the death of the eponymous Sophie (Toscan du Plantier  in remote West Cork, Ireland, in 1996 and the failure of the Irish police to come up w/ sufficient evidence to charge and convict anyone of the murder - though not without arresting a villager who aroused many suspicions through his bizarre and at times self-incriminating behavior (he was a known eccentric even in the small, highly tolerant community in which he lived). The series gives us a great sense of the small town of Schull and a pretty good portrait of the late Sophie, through interviews with her family members and friends, although mystery surrounds her throughout the series: Who was she? Why did she retreat to Ireland sans family? Why did her prominent husband make no appearance in the film? The film will keep you thinking and guessing, and the crew knows well how to end each of the first two episodes at a cliffhanger or crisis point. On the other hand, like so many t-c dox, the film could be cut by about 25 percent - like, we know already that this is a town with great diversity and with tolerance of artists and others with “alternate life styles,” one might say. Still a good film - and spoilers will occur right here so skip this if you haven’t seen the film: Although the film does everything possible to build toward a satisfying conclusion with the trial in absentia of the local suspect,  it’s impossible to think that the case was really closed. Yes, there’s a lot of behavior (and hearsay) about the suspected killer, but none of it comes close to conviction beyond a reasonable doubt; the cops came up w/ no forensic evidence, and no witnesses - and I can’t imagine an American jury convicting him on the basis of suspicion - yeah, he seems like a self-important oddball and would-be writer, w/ a violent streak, but that’s not a enough to convict a guy, I would hope - at least not in the U.S. In my view, he was railroaded and the Irish cops, who’d never encountered a murder investigation!, screwed up big time. 

Elliot’s Watching - Week of 7/4/2: Lupin and Bunuel

 Elliot’s Watching - Week of 7/4/21

Luis Bunuel’s 1972 film, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, is far from this best work, but it has its moments of weirdness, maybe too much weirdness and not enough charm. Posing as a social satire - in which the wealthy lead corrupt lives of selfishness and dissolution while maintaining throughout a strangely courteous and acquiescent demeanor, the social commentary is mild rather than biting and obvious rather than subtle (or discreet, for that matter). The film begins as two well-to-do couples arrive at the country house of another couple for an expected dinner party - but the hosts are nowhere to be found. When they turn up, it seems there’s been a confusion about the date - so the 3 couples go out for dinner. At the restaurant nearby, it seems that they’re open, but no food is available. Profuse apologies, but their founder has just died and he is lying in state in just off the dining room. And thus begin a series of missed connections - and the 6 never really get a chance to eat anything (some repulsive appetizers aside). This apparent reality mixes with many scenes that seem and feel realistic and vivid, at least within the established terms of this film, but turn out to be dreams - usually involving shootings and death (one of the sextet, played by the great Fernando Rey, is an ambassador from Latin America and involved in Rx-running). The film ends with the six, still hungry I guess, walking down a long, flat stretch of (Normandy?) highway, aimless and confused. I’m not really sure what any of this amounts to, though it’s worth watching once for the dark humor and for the depiction of a group of the privileged who get what they deserve. 

The George Kay Netflix series Lupin Season 2, based on the detective stories about the eponymous Lupin from early 20th century and set in present-day Paris, is a great star vehicle for Omar Sy and is entertaining but also totally preposterous, so much so that the unlikelihood of any of Sy’s escapades and schemes working out becomes part of the humor. Just to imagine Sy himself - a distinct and massive star - going unrecognized on the streets of Paris when his face is on every screen as the most wanted man in France - well, it’s all part of the joke. His schemes are so outlandish, elaborate and dependent on every step along the way going right as to be comically absurd. The episodes are well-paced, even frantic, with a dominating score (I enjoyed watching some of the chase and fight sequences while imaging no background track - and without the music they were for the most part mundane and boring. Bring it on!) So, OK, yeah, quite binge-able, but in the end you’ve feasted on froth and air. 

Elliot's Watching week of 6-27-21: Golden State Killer doc

 Elliot’s Watching week of 6-27-21

Liz Garbus’s true-crime documentary I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (2020), based on the posthumously published book by Michelle McNamara, is a harrowing account of MM’s pursuit of the murder/rapist known as the Golden State Killer who terrorized California communities through a string of unsolved house invasions in the 1970s and 80s that involved extreme cruelty and weirdly morbid behavior. I won’t give everything away, though it’s important to note three aspects of this unique project: First, MM, a young mother married to well-known actor Patton Oswalt, devoted most of her life to trying to track this killer, who had been largely (and criminally I would say) ignored for much of his reign of terror, mostly because police departments notoriously fail to cooperate across jurisdictional lines and also because the communities want to downplay violent crime in their midst to protect property values (!) I guess; second, writing her book actually cost MM her life, as she felt pressured on deadlines and expectations and eventually addicted to Rx that killed her - her editor and agents have some soul searching to do; and third, this can be an extremely upsetting film, as many of the dozens of victims cooperated with the filmmakers and told their stories in horrifying detail. With those warnings, it’s a brave and necessary documentary that still may have some repercussions, as amateur detectives are at present seeking info on a string of unsolved murders in the Chicago area - where MM was raised and where her interest in a frightful killing near her home led her to her career as a crime writer and case solver. 

Elliot’s Watching week of 6-20-21: In the Heights, the movie

Elliot’s Watching week of 6-20-21

The Jon M. Chu film adaptation (2021) of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s debut musical, In the Heights, is an over-the-top extravaganza that in my view turns what on stage was probably a straightforward and moving personal drama, about LMM’s youth and background, into a bloated and saccharine mess. Terrible to say - because there is much to like about this project and some powerful moments for sure, notably the opening eponymous musical tribute to and evocation of this Manhattan neighborhood. The highlight of course comes from LMM’s original songs and his fantastic use of imagery and rhyme, in part in the tradition of rap and in part in the long tradition of musical theater. We can see and hear the seeds of the confidence and originality that blossoms in Hamilton - LMM’s unique use of recitative, in particular. That said, in the end Heights is not so much a tribute to or evocation of the neighborhood as it is a romanticized and idealized bit of memory: In the Heights there seems to be no crime, no poverty, no significant conflict among the denizens, a complete unity and brotherhood. The framing device, in which the protagonist tells a story to a group of adorable and supernaturally attentive children, is trite and corny. The dance sequences are a marvel of technicality but they are completely overwhelming - hundreds of dancers in synch, whereas 6 would be great. A movie doesn’t have to be bigger - just faithful, and maybe better. And this is in part me, but the sound engineering of this film seemed to me way out of whack: In every song, even simple solos and duets, the bass vibe was cranked way, way up to the point where LMM’s beautiful lyrics were simply drowned. I wish I’d seen the play on Broadway, and I came to this movie with high expectations, which were not met. 

Elliot’s Watching week of 6-13-21: A great series, a special, and a classic

 Elliot’s Watching week of 6-13-21

The second season of Saverio Costanzo’s HBO miniseries My Brilliant Friend, based (very closely!) on Elena Ferrante’s quartet of novels, in my opinion is stronger and more visceral than the very good Season 1. In season 2 we see the two main characters - best friends, rivals, antagonists - move from late adolescence to young womanhood, as their ways of being and living gradually diverge. The central character and narrator, closely modeled one would suppose on Ferrante herself, is Lenu, played with enigmatic shyness and insecurity by Margherita Mazzucco, but the real driving force is the spirited and tempestuous best friend Lila, a killer role for Gaia Giriace. I don’t want to give away any plot details, but let’s just say that this season follow two arcs: Lenu begins to separate from her working-class family in Naples and finds that she’s an outsider in the academic circles of her college community in Pisa so that, by the end of the season, though she has found unexpected literary success, she is torn between her childhood and family world and the new (to her) world of literature and scholarship. Lila, in contrast, is mired in a terrible marriage and living in near poverty; she pretends indifference to her desperate fortunes and on one devastating scene she cruelly mocks Lenu’s attempts to speak as an equal among the literati - but it’s obvious to all that she’s deeply jealous of her friend’s success; we surely sense that her suppression is nearly tragic - a wasted life and talent, at least up to this point in the story. Throughout, the acting is excellent, the visuals - the interiors and the many long shots of the neighborhood streets in Naples - are beautifully and I would guess accurately re-created; I’ll also not the effectiveness of the understated score, which guides us in our perception of the characters without ever overwhelming us with bathos or emotional overload. Looking forward to the Covid-delayed season 3. 

Bo Burnham’s special for Netflix - Inside (2021) - is a tour de force, written, directed, photography, recorded, everything by Burnham, all done from inside a small (one-room?) apartment where he supposedly (at least in terms of this film) lived in isolation during the year of Covid. He’s a multi-talented guy by any measure: actor, stand-up, musician (keyboard the guitar), singer, song-writer, photographer, satirist, commentator. Most of the skits, if that’s what they’re to be called, are musical, with BB accompaniment usual on electric keyboard; his singing/songwriting is in the vein of much of today’s musical theater - you can sense the influence of Hamilton, and hear the distant echo of Rent. A lot of the skits are are superb, notably White Woman’s Instagram, FaceTime with Mom, Everything All the Time (his take on the Internet), Socko (sock puppet w/ strong opinions), to cite a few of many. The story arc itself is sad, even painful; we know he’s “acting a part,” but still we sense something personal about his ordeal - and something universal: a poignant scene to mark the moment he turned 30; another when he tries to recognize the first anniversary of his starting this project. He’s a skeptic about social media and about the amount of time most of us spend online - but of course, as he well knows, he’s equally dependent and his show is entirely digital - a show without an audience, and he has a clever take on that aspect as well. It’s hard to imagine not liking this 90-minute special - and to be thankful that it’s in the past. 

Federico Fellini's classic 8 1/2 (1963) sill feels fresh and original today and you can see how it was ground-breaking as one of the first cinematic portrayals of a man in psychiatric distress and part of the 60s wave of film as surrealism - the debt to Dali and Bunuel is evident, but there’s a socio-political aspect to 8 1/2 that early surrealist cinema dodged. In other words, it’s a film still worth watching both for its unique achievements and its groundbreaking status - that’s assuming, of course, that you can get beyond the cynicism and the degrading treatment of women (in the guise of adoration of women) throughout the film - as the central character, Guido (a career performance by Mastroionni) belittles and degrades his mistress, his wife, and his “ideal woman” (Claudio Cardinale) all of whom cross paths on the set of the film Guido is planning to direct. Guido is, quite evidently, a stand-in for FF - portraying a film director who, like FF, has completed his 8th film, a huge success (La Dolce Vita) and who is at sea as to how to proceed with his next film, now that he has all the resources he needs for a breakout film. As he struggles to pull his movie together, he’s pressured by the producer, the screenwriter or script advisor, and by many women who parade before him seeking to be cast - none of which advances his project in any way; it appears that he has no idea what he hopes to film and when he hopes to begin the work (one excellent scene shows a casting session in which, indifferent and distracted, he rejects one actress after another). What really drives the film, however, are the strange sequences in which he dreams of his youth, dreams of a graveyard encounter with his deceased parents, and the night-time visit to the enormous skeletal structure of a racket ship that he somehow plans to incorporate. Of course FF is well aware that this is a film about a film, and all of the mis-steps Guido makes of course contribute to and advance the meta-film narrative: FF really did construct the rocket ship and use it in his film. Films (and books) about the struggles of an artist, esp a successful one, usually come off as a whine and a complaint, but this has so much more inventiveness and imagination as to surpass all others of the mini-genre. As to Guido’s mistreatment of and contempt for the women in his life (except for his mother?), perhaps we have to read that as the beginning of FF’s own breakout as a homosexual: Perhaps he had to purge his system of his heterosexual history and desires in order to proceed with his 9th picture. 

Possibly the best recent movie you've never heard of, and Mare of Eastown

Possibly the best recent movie you’ve never heard of - why it’s gone so unrecognized is beyond me - is the Sarah Gavron’s British film (on Netflix), Rocks (2019), about a group of h.s. girls attending an all-girls school in London, which seems to have a pretty broad, multi-racial enrollment. The film focuses on the eponymous Rocks (her nickname, and not a very good movie title, I think) played beautifully by Bukky Bakray. After some reasonably jovial scenes among her friends and in her council housing w/ mom and grade-school-age brother, she learns via a brief and unfeeling note that her mother has gone away - not the first time this has happened - leaving her suddenly in care of young brother, maybe for a few days, maybe forever, we just don’t know. The film follows their odyssey through a # of painful and quite credible encounters (a note at the end off the film informs us that many street children in London helped w/ the development of the plot and the dialog) as Rocks seeks the basics, food, clothing, shelter, while keeping her spirits up and keep her and her brother in school. There are no villains in the film and no heroes either, but there are many painful, sorrowful encounters as well as many scenes that show the resilience and spirit of the Rocks and others in her clique. The film resolves, sort of, with a lot of ambiguity, much like another great film about a lonely child fending for himself, 400 Blows. Some may opt for subtitles on this film, which would be essential esp for Americans if you want to get every word of every exchange, but in my view a better way to appreciate and experience this film is to get what you can from the dialog, which is hardly Shakespearean, and just focus on the mood and impact and general import of all of the exchanges, which you can easily do. 

The Kate Winslet vehicle Mare of Easttown (Brad Ingelsby) on HBO is a good police-procedural murder mystery that has many strands and involves multiple families and in a broader sense the whole eponymous town, modeled I would say on Easton, Pa., and in fact all shot in Pa (I’m guessing in Harrisburg?) with a real sense of verisimilitude. Unlike most such series, this one actually wraps, tying up all the loose ends and not leaving us with teasers that carry on to a 2nd season; this one seems to be a one-and-done. The extremely complex plot does not quite stand up to close inspection - I won’t give anything away here, but will say that there’s an awful lot of luck, or screenwriters’ heavy hand, in the resolution of some of the story lines, but that’s made up for by the true sense of an ending achieved in the final episode of this series that’s worth watching and will lead to many discussions as to who dunnit; the resolution is plausible if not obvious, though I did find the resolution a bit strange and unlikely and will say no more here on that. One completely separate quibble, though: How come so many movies and TV series seem to have absolutely no sense as to how the college-admissions process works  in the real world? Mare’s daughter’s college-ap process is ludicrous and could so easily have been done right; writes care so much about the accuracy of police and court procedures - why can’t they get this simple stuff right?