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?