Elliot’s Watching - June 2022: Double Indemnity, The Ascent, plus Borgen, Barry, Rothaniel, any others
Jerrod Carmichael: Rothaniel (2022) - the title will become evident a few bits into this 60-minute program, directed by Bo Burnham - is an absolutely unique (and excellent) piece of cinema. It’s something like an hour-long comedy sketch, sure, but also like a 60-minute one-man play and like an hour-long discussion unrehearsed and like an hour-long therapy session - all of these elements, and I would add only that it can never be staged more than once (without significant changes in the material) - it’s bold, brash, funny, and moving, and even a little scary, as JC opines on race, queerness, family, friends, and on the audience itself (I’ve read it was performed at the Blue Note, not sure if it was by invite). JC is a totally likable stage persona, completely open - well, almost completely - about his life and his struggles with family and w/ relationships; impossible to watch this film without thinking you could be friends w/ this guy. But could you? Or is he all an act? Definitely worth watching.
I should have better discipline when watching a series from HBOmax or Apple+ but I can’t help it; they do us no favor by their stretching out the premier one episode per week. And that works just fine for a traditional comic series, esp of 30 minutes, such as Curb Your Enthusiasm, for ex., or Veep - episodes connected in spirit but only loosely bound by plot and it would be, and is, very funny even with long time gaps or mixed order for that matter. But for a comedy such as the weirdly entangled series Barry - that’s when I wish I had the patience to wait till all episodes are releases and then watch in consecutive nights. The plot of Barry, hilarious as it is, is just too byzantine to expect that we remember all of the necessary details - at least, I can’t do so. That said, this Bill Hader and Sarah Goldberg (who increasingly takes on the star role with her terrific outbursts and her what feels like an authentic look at the idiocy of much of the TV/media entertainment industry from the POV of a groundling) is fully of laughs and surprises and delightfully off-center characters from Hader’s struggle between his role as violent hit man and his yearning for an acing career, or Anthony Carrigan’s portrayal of a homosexual Chechen assassin or Henry Winkler as an acting savant. Watch it, but watch out - it gets really complicated (maybe that doesn’t matter?). The final episode of the season (2?) is somewhat more straightforward, with each of the 3 main plot strands culminating in great violence and potential for further explication in an on-coming season, one assumes.
Larisa Shepitko’s Russian-language film The Ascent (1977), adapted from a (little known?) novel by Basil Bykau, tells a harrowing tale of two Soviet “partisan” soldiers during WWII who depart from the unit, in the midst of terrible blizzard conditions, to find food from any source, a journey that ultimately leads them into the hand of Nazi soldiers who horribly abuse their captives, leaving each of the two to decide his fate - one of whom becomes a martyr and the other who betrays his fellow prisoners: the religious allegory here is really evident. The film is shot in stunning b/w with many extremely long takes, and the suffering endured by the Russians, soldiers and others, is nearly unbearable to watch - a beautiful but harrowing film whose stark images - the mother calling to her children as she’s abducted by the Germans, the torture devices in the German camp, the 5 dangling nooses, to cite just a few - will stay w/ any viewer for a long time.
This series is for adults only. It has no sex, no violence, no swearing, no smoking (I think) - but it’s adults only because it’s about politics and media and ecology and economics - all set in Copenhagen and, for this season, in Greenland. Borgen: Power & Glory (2022 Netflix) has an unusual history: 3 years to the original series, ending about 10 years ago, and now the characters are back for not a 4th season but a “new” series, which picks up 10 years after the predecessor bid adieu as Brigitta, the Danish PM, bids adieu. Now we have most of the same characters and all of them are portrayed by the original cast members, to it has a feeling of verisimilitude unlike most other reprises. This series centered on a discovery of a massive oil field in Greenland, enough potential revenue to lift the colony into prosperity and trend dependence on grants from Denmark; but - is it OK for the super-liberal Danes to support an oil terminal on their territory? The discover draws into the fray not on the US but also China and Russia, with all sorts of complications, which unfold with novel-like precision. That said, it’s almost amusing for an American viewer to see how seriously the Danes take their politics (if this is accurate) - the media focused on every facet of domestic policy in a way we never see with the crime/mayhem-obsessed American media (TV mostly). And the moral standards in Denmark compared w/ US are laughably high; for one example, the main character, Birgitta Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen), is once again terrific in her ministerial role, gets chewed out for responding “no comment” to media - this is evidently not the expected behavior of a Danish cabinet member. Ditto for her equivocations about comments she made at a Cabinet meeting - which in the US would be a big who-cares. Any, it’s a serious, thoughtful, entertaining, non-exploitative drama, one of the few (sadly).
Kenji Mizoguchi had many great films to his credit, notably Ugrestsu and Sansho the Bailiff, but as for his monumental 47 Ronin (1941), come on, today it’s mostly unwatchable (I stood with it for an hour, passed on watching the next 3 hours): slow, static, almost completely unfathomable to non-initiates - how some obscure breaking of protocol led to years of civil war - none of which was dramatized or depicted in the first long hour. The film is based on historical events and has been mined by other directors since ’41 but today it’s at best a historical curiosity.
Tehran Season Two doesn’t have quite the suspense of the first season, in which time was compressed and life was on the line every moment and the Israel and Iran were on the verge of all-out war but it’s still a good adventure, with plenty of tension and surprising twists. Niv Sultan is a great lead, playing an Israeli agent under cover in Tehran and assigned to a dangerous mission before the Israelis pull her out safely - if they do. OK, there are many highly unlikely twists of fate and some preposterous hair-raising escapes, but it’s still pretty good entertainment without too much violence and without vulgarity or exploitative sex. The characters are largely believable - with the exception of badly miscast Glenn Close who seems lost in her roll as an undercover agent in Tehran. Definitely leaves the plot open for a likely 3rd season.
There is no way I’m going to watch beyond the first episode of the HBO series Irma Vep, about an American actress who goes to France to star in a remake of a famous French vampire film from the silent era. Nothing about this show appealed to me, nor was it really meant to - you’d have to ID with the lead (admittedly, a charming actress) and her sexual trials and tribulations and to care in the least about her director, who suffers from some kind of mood disorder. I didn’t. If you wanna see a better film about the making of a movie try Day for Night (Trufault) or, for a more personal and idiosyncratic version try Fellini’s classic 8 1/2.
Khalik Allah’s documentary Black Mother (2018) provides us with a rate and painfully honest look at urban black street life in Jamaica, mostly in or around Kingston, I think, much of which, I think, must have been footage of KA’s family (he is American, his mother is Jamaican), particularly his elderly grandfather. There are some beautiful passages, many of which involve music and prayer, some philosophizing among the elderly, and, most striking, straightforward footage of the street prostitutes at work. Nothing in the film glamorizes life on the streets - life is tough and sometimes scary, housing and living conditions are terrible, education of the young seems to be sporadic. We see nothing about prosperity in Jamaica, nor anything at all about tourism or the wealth of Jamaica in the colonial era. Few filmmakers would have access to the material that KA uses. He frames the film with a check-in on a woman (part of his family?) who is pregnant, and at the end we see the birth in close-up - like every other birth, it seems a miracle! There’s no obvious proselytism here - just an unflinching look at the reality of life in this community.
The Billy Wilder classic Double Indemnity (1944) is one of the best ever among American films noirs - from the look of LA ca 1938 (the setting for the plot), the fantastic hard-boiled dialog (screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, based on a novel by JM Cain, so how could you go wrong?), great acting by the 3 leads, each cast against type (McMurry, Stanwyck, EG Robinson), and a fun plot that will have you thinking all the way through - it’s about McM and Stanw concocting a scheme to collect $100k (a fortune, back then) on an insurance claim that they believe is the perfect crime, but we know from the outset it isn’t, as the first scene is the beginning of McM’s confessional, but if so then what went wrong? Can we figure out what they screwed up in their ingenious planning? Lines such as he’d wring life insurance on a guy who goes to be w/ 4 live rattlesnakes, or, when adding a shot of rum to his iced T: That’s put legs on it!, and many others. Stanw is a particularly intriguing character: naive? smart? dumb? loyal? duplicitous? Figure it out as the story moves along. I remember watching it decades ago, and loving it, and it hasn’t aged a bit (though I have).
