January 2022: Lost Daughter, Beau Travail, Ozark, Magnificent Ambersons, Spirit of the Beehive, and others

January 2022: Being the Ricardos, The Lost Daughter, Beau Travail, Ozark, Magnificent Ambersons, Spirit of the Beehive, Fanny and Alexander, and some series I abandoned 

The Prime feature Being the Ricardos by writer/director Aaron Sorkin and starring Nicole Kidman as Lucy (w/ a NYC accent that I don’t think Lucy shared) and Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz (and J.K. Simmons in a show-stealing role as the actor who portrayed the Ricardos’ neighbor, Fred) is a lot of fun to watch at least up to a point; in particular I liked its dissection of how a 22+-minute comedy broadcast is put together over the course of a week, with close focus on the writing team and on nuanced directorial decisions, many or most of them developed by Lucille Ball (not sure if that’s true at all but I makes for a good story); would have liked to see more of the actual show, but so be it. Some of the scenes - notably Lucy w. Simmons in a neighborhood bar and lucy meeting with the woman only woman in the writers’ room - are of the kind of excellence we’ve come to expect from Sorkin w. the only quibble being that: Everyone sounds like Sorkin! Can’t have everything. Not sure how close any of these events come to the real lives of the characters - as they struggle through a # of crises, notably accusations that Lucy was a Communist - but, though it’s about 20 minutes too long, it’s still a good show that helps us understand (as the Dick Van Dyke show did some years after Lucille Ball) how difficult it is to write, direct, produce, and perform a weekly comedy show. 

Whether it’s the fault of the author of the based-upon novel (Elena Ferrante) of of the screenwriter (Maggie Gyllenhaal) or of the Director (ditto) the much-anticipated Netflix feature The Lost Daughter is a mess. Fast it, anything with the suddenly omnipresent Olivia Colman is worth watching - for her facial expressions alone! - and the cast is good overall, but does this movie make any sense on any level? Does any woman in her right mind behave the way Leda (Colman) acts throughout? What explains her decision to keep in her possession a baby doll los by a little girl on the beach, as the child spends a week (unlikely) mourning the disappearance of her toy? Especially in that we get many broad hints that the child’s family are bunch of ruffians, often threatening and malicious? This behavior is not in any serious way accounted for by mistakes Leda made in her youth (young Leda played well by Jessie Buckley, a convincing young Leda/Colman); OK, so Leda was a bad mother who for a time abandoned her children rather than manage the pressures of young motherhood. But why the pointless cruelty some 25 years later? She’s an enigma, a mystery without a suitable clue. 

The Claire Denis film Beau Travail (1999) is at once a social documentary - tremendous footage of a French Foreign Legion company going through intense training and deprivation - this looks and feels like documentary, though I’m not sure if that’s true - set against the extreme poverty and barren landscape of Djibouti, where the company is deployed; it would have been enough just to do a documentary or if need be a docudrama about life in the legion, but CD takes the film to another level in that this film is a re-imagination of Melville’s Billy Budd (actually, it’s closer to a re-imagination of Britten’s BB opera, which emerges from a few of the scenes). Spoiler alert here: The film diverges, however, from the source in some key ways, most notably that the BB character, who punches out the cruel mid-rank officer, similar to the book, is not sentenced to die by the code of conduct - so, unlike the short novel and the opera, the captain remains largely guiltless, and the BB character survives. I think I like the original better, but this is a really daring and thought-provoking film; although it’s an adaptation, there’s really no other film quite like to my knowledge. (and would add on further reflection that Melville/Britten are wise to stay closer to the original as it makes both BB’s death and the Captain’s lifelong struggle w/ this execution far more poignant and searching)

Series I’ve started that are clearly not meant for me: Love Life and Starstruck, both appealing rom coms (the sex/love/romance life of a young woman single in NYC, ditto in London) but clearly for a much younger viewer and Stay Close, a Harlon Coben genre pic about a beautiful woman on the cusp of marriage with a mysterious past - so preposterous, cliched, and predictable as to be literally unwatchable. What’s with Coben, a highly respected writer? Sometimes what works on the page is exposed as vapid on a screen, not sure why. Truth is unmasked by the reality of the camera? 

Watched all of Season 4 Part 1 of Ozark, which continues to be an exciting and plot-driven series, w/ plenty of violence, tension, and dark humor. The lead performers have all grown into their roles - Jason Bateman, Laura Linney, Julia Garner in particular - the series has lots of surprises and overall makes you extremely grateful that you’re not part of an international drug cartel; all the chimes are run, so to speak, including a take-down of the sanctimonious Rx manufacturer who pushes her additive product on the world as recklessly as do the pushers of heroin - no difference, morally - just legally.

Watched for 2nd time Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, a great though fatally flawed film: I love films that give us the portrait of an entire community, an extended family, a time and a place, which this one does - along with some incredibly powerful dramatic passages, notably with Agnes Moorehead, and extremely complex cinematically episodes such as the first evening ball and the sleigh-ride through the snow. Yet the film marred by extensive post-production cuts and re-shoots, including a ridiculous ending, and also by the relentlessly obnoxious George Minafer (Tim Holt), a character with huge mama-problems and an irredeemable personality. (Read some of the novel to make more sense of the story, but found it sadly dated and unreadable.)

Saw Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive (1973), a little dated now with its interest intentional ambiguity and obscurity, but still worth watching for the visual imagery if nothing else: terrific moments as we follow over the course of a few days the lives of two young (8 at the most) sisters who play mind games w/ each other and who get glimpses of an adult life - e.g., discovery of a fugitive soldier - film sent in the 40s post Spanish Civil War - hiding in an abandoned farm shed - that they can neither understand nor explain. Nor can we, exactly: Is this soldier in fact the former lover to the girls’ mother. Is he trying to get back to her? Or is he just a random presence fleeing the authorities? Many of the scenes and events in this film cannot be definitively explained - very 1970s - but the accumulated moments - including a weird sequence incorporating footage from the silent v. of Frankenstein - spliced in to boot. 

Will also note that I’ve started watching Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, television version, and found the first episode to be fantastic - a portrait of a bourgeois Swedish family in the early 20th century celebrating xmas with what at first seems to be a grand, lavish entertainment - but over the course of the evening (and of this first episode) we see the fault lines, the misery, the lies, the infidelity (as well as, to be fair, the creativity) that lurk just beneath the glamour surface - this brilliant celebration is a facade, beneath which lies ruined and failed lives and class exploitation. 

Finally, saw Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (how nervy is Coen to take credit for re-writing this play, “adapted” from Shakespeare. It’s no more adapted than, say, 98 percent of productions - in essence, he introduces one - needless - character and makes some cuts esp among the witches’ chants). On the plus side, there are some visually striking moments - in particular the movement of Biornam Wood - but the film suffers from, for some reason, imagining a Scotland inhabited by about 10 people, for the weird choice of a setting in a castle that’s all weird angles and tall staircases - as if right out of Calgary rather than the Scottish moors - and especially because of the poor performances of Denzel Washington, star though he may be he is terrible at delivery of MB’s lines, which is kind of essential to any production, and a surprisingly tepid and understated performance from Frances McDormand sharing the lede.