Elliot's Watching - July 2022
Chloe, Il Sorpasso, Raging Bull, Cobra, Mind Over Murder, The Harder They Fall
I guess the Amazon Prime film Chloe (2022) is worth watching, in that it kept us interested enough to watch it to the end (8 episodes, I think), thanks largely to the portrayal by Erin Doherty, but really how stupid are the characters in this drama? Anyhow likely are its events. Zero and zero - stranger comes to town (a good narrative trope at the outset) and immediately assimilates into a crowd of Bristol (England) artists and politicians. We know, and they don’t, that part of her raison d’etre is to get at the truth about the apparent suicidal death of a friend from her youth - but the cover story is so flimsy, the recklessness of the guy she begins to live with (on the rebound recovering from the death of his wife, running for office … - come on, he’s too smart to fall from this erratic and peculiar woman from out of nowhere). So, no, I didn’t believe it for a second, but it was act least fun to watch the plot unfold and to try to figure out what drives this woman, is she evil or dangerous or unbalanced or a loyal friend on a mission?, that it kept us going. Can’t say it was a great series by any measure tho.
On the other hand, Dino Risi’s Italian road movie, Il Sorpasso (1962), is totally watchable and fun and sad and touching. “Road Movie” doesn’t to it justice; it’s a comedy w/ much pathos, w/ two guys, strangers essentially, taking a weekend drive away from Rome and along the Coast - with Vittorio Gassman as the extrovert, risk-taking, domineering personality and the recently gone Jean-Louis Trintagnant as the timid, cautious, nerdy guy. So many funny scenes and incidents throughout, but it’s not Animal House or Easy Rider - everything that occurs along this jaunt develops the characters and examines their unexpected friendship: many laughs, perhaps some tears as well.
Clark (2022)? No, sorry, after a clever and jaunty intro to the life of a Swedish bank robber and ne’er do well, the series devolved into much material about how cute and charming the eponymous Clark with his seductions and unlikely escapes - hared to believe in the reality and hard to care about such a dislikable characters - couldn’t carry me through 2 episodes let alone or 10 or whatever.
Martin Scorsese’s decidedly non-adulatory biopic Raging Bull (1980) stands even a half-century) later as a great film in its own right and as a seminal work of American noir, a passageway that extends from the Cagney gangster films of the 30s/40s through the Godfather then on to Scorcese’s own work e.g., Mean Streets and Goodfellas, and then all the way toward the Sopranos and beyond. (Some claim this film is not “noir” but I disagree.) The heart of the film is De Niro’s portrayal of middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta (a sad forewarning that there’s no glory in the life of a fighter post-career) based on his autobio/memoir in which he must hold nothing back. The film moves from balletic beauty to frightening ferocity, esp in the boxing sequences - but the greatest agony for viewers are the tense family sessions, marked by silence, seething, and fury. Some of the dialog is incredibly revealing (as I suspected and later learned was the case, much of the dialog was improvised over the course of many long takes) even with or maybe especially with the awkward brute language of Jake, his bro. (Joe Pesci), his “moll” - the guys are not Rhodes Scholars, but they make their point. The nightclub fight is probably more tense and seething than any of the fight scenes - ditto De Niro’s trashing of his apartment or bashing his fists and forehead into a wall upon his imprisonment. Greatest sorrow is probably his pathetic attempt in a parking garage to reconcile w/ his brother, Joey. And then there’s the demise - Jake’s painful attempt to do a routine in one of his nightclubs - let’s just say he’s not a natural jokester - (and De Niro must have tortured himself to put on all that weight!), scenes that reveal all about the afterlife of a man once a star. An incredible movie that definitely does not glamorize brutality, infidelity, or organized crime.
The somewhat under-the-radar British series Cobra (season 2) gives a good and frightening account of a country under siege and held hostage by cyber warfare - disrupting all financial transactions, threatening the water supply, and others. The series feels plausible and realistic, for the most part - although I had to wonder why the Brits were taking this attack completely on their own (there were some snide portrayals of ugly Americans - not likely, I hope, at least in current admin.); at times the series reminded me of Borgen, with lots of insider dope about the by-elections, but, this being a British show, all or most all came together at the outcome. The acerbic conservative MP played David Haig steals the show. A mostly good, watchable series - too bad there are some cheesy elements such as the breakdown of the PM’s wife and the revelation that the PM had a long-time crush on his Chief of Staff - those being avenues I wouldn’t want to pursue any further in a 3rd season.
Nanfu Wang’s terrific 6-part documentary series, Mind Over Murder (2022, HBO) tells of the conviction of a six people known as the Beatrice Six. This gives nothing away as you will learn in the first 60 seconds of so of the first episode that the 6 were later exonerated and released from prison after some 20 years after their conviction. The series shows us the brutality of the crime, a rape and killing of an elderly woman who lived alone in an apartment building in downtown Beatrice, Nebraska - a town so typical of rural life in the Midwest, or so it would seem. We see the efforts to determine who committed the crime, the questionable police tactics, the inability of most of the 6 to make any sort of defense - it appears that some of the accused suffered from some developmental disabilities; others had poor counsel or none - the efforts of some lawyers to reverse the verdict and, more important, to follow ignored clues to reveal a more likely criminal, the sanguine and self-confident police officer who pushed most of the 6 into false confessions, and most of all the effect in the small community of the crime, the trial, the imprisonment, and eventual release six people - who knew one another only slightly if at all. Capping all this, and holding the series together, was the enterprise of the local community theater to tell the story in a one-act play in which the dialog consisted only of on-the-record statements from the police, the accused, and others involved in the case and the trial - and the effect that this drama had on the community and in particular on the descendants of the murder victim - a truly engrossing and perhaps unique documentary (itself comprised entirely of interviews).
Mark Robson’s 1956 film The Harder They Fall (other films have also used this title), based on a Budd Schulberg novel, stars Humphrey Bogart in his last film - and though Bogart performa well as an out-of-work boxing writer who’s recruited by a sketchy syndicate to run a massive publicity campaign for their newly discovered boxing phenom, the S. American “champ” Toro Moreno, a gigantic man who can’t fight a lick. Strangely, Bogart was cast against a woman who played the part of his long-suffering wife - who looks about a third his age, which makes the whole domestic angle look absurd or even perverse. The film is funnier that the other boxing film I watched recently, Raging Bull, in that the lead boxer is a comic misfit; it’s meant to be in part an indictment of the boxing industry, in particular that every lead-up fight toward the championship bout was thrown - and the boxers just seem to go along with this fraudulence - whereas in RB the lead was tormented and wracked with pain being forced to hit the floor - it called his whole being into question, whereas here it’s all part of the night’s work. In that regard, the film is less credible than it ought to be - although it goes give us a glimpse into the world of pro boxing in its heyday - the negotiation of crooked contracts, the sense that boxers were just chattel rather than skilled athletes, the machinations of fight promotion, the incompetence of the working sports press. Worth a look, esp for Bogarts’s last gasp, but not a profound study in the boxing mentality.
