Hitchcock, Mike Leigh, 2022 Oscar Nominees, Ferrante, Madonna Street, Tick...Boom
The already famous Slow Horses, based on the extremely well-reviewed spy novels from Mick Herron, continues on to Season 2 (2022) with the sameverve and with the anti-hero premise based on the premise of a series about the British MI5 but as far removed from James Bond and Smiley’s People as possible - a team of outcasts and malcontents whom the bureau could not risk firing but instead send the to Slough House, aka Slow Horses, to be under the cantankerous leadership of Jack Lamb played to the disgusting hilt by Gary Oldham - think him what you will but he makes this series fly. In Season 2 the focus is not on the plight of one hapless soul who falls into the clutches of a right-wing clique; rather, it’s about what appears to be an attack engineered by Russian agents on London itself, a reprise of 9/11. The plot gets complicated - in fact I’d recommend watching in in daily sequence rather than week by week as released - but the details of the crackpot attack aren’t so important, as we watch the characters develop a set of inter-relations and played with a core of indifference and toughness, which they don’t really have. There are deaths, including among at least one major character - another’s a sense that we are privy to an insider’s view of the MI5. At least, it’s as different from but as credible as LeCarre’s - so which one is real(istic)? Both, probably.
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film Flowers of Shanghai (1998), based on the 1892 novel by Han Bangqing is a beautiful and sensuous movie with a plot that barely exists and doesn’t really matter. The film is set entirely in a Shanghai brothel of the 19th century, and we see the young women as completely exploited, just property, or worse - and the men who consort with them (and the Madam who runs the show) as cruel and heartless. The thin plot involves one of the somewhat older prostitutes trying to negotiate the terms of her release from bondage. Over the course of the film we don’t really get to know any of the characters as individual - they’re all just part of a process: the women taken into captivity when they were young girls, children really, and they work their way “up” to be consorts on beck and call - the madam keeps track of who’s bringing in the dough and who’s past her prime. So what makes the film memorable and worthwhile is beautiful creation and rendering of a particular practice and scene: the brothel itself richly decorated with Asian pottery and statuary, the curling of the opium smoke, the mournful and beautiful background music (Yoshihero Hanno), the elaborate costumier of the women and their clientele as well, and a few incredibly powerful scenes of range and wonton destruction and of the menfolk - surrounded by weary sex workers - engaged in loud and boisterous gambling and monumental drinking. This film is not a great joy to watch, but it’s a seemingly accurate portrayal of a practice that’s maybe not so long gone, even in the U.S.
Mario Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) must rank among the greatest Italian films and film comedies of all time - a hilarious account of the most discombobulated, cockamamie robbery schemes ever imagined. A group of Italian men of middle age, who more or less met one another in prison - they were all part of a (failed) scheme in which one of the guys would pose as another and serve his time for petty theft in order to get a payback - never really works of course - and this quintet of small-time crooks go after a big prize, knocking off a pawn shop. As none of the men is master criminal, everything goes wrong, as we can foresee. Plus the guys are always yelling at one another and one of the guys is a hopeless skirt-chaser which in several instances almost details the theft - all sorts of minor plot scams, all of the funny - I particularly liked the “clinic” in safe-cracking run by an old-timer who provides the knowledge and the tools but stays far away from the crime. And we know everything will go wrong, which of course it does, and in hilarious fashion. There have been many comical crime-scheme since, many of them funny, but Big Deal has be at or near the top of them on any list. (And I almost forget the excellent jazz score by Piero Umilliani.
Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light (2022) consists of strands of various sorts: First strand: A weepy story about a woman who finds happiness or at least inner peace by standing up for herself in the face of (second strand) workplace sexual harassment/rape as well as through (3rd strand) recovery from severe mental illness giving us a scary picture of the indifferent medical care provided to the mentally ill though she does recover thanks to a few good providers and especially (4th strand) through building a relationship - at first carnal, later as supportive friends - with a Black co-worker (5th strand) about half her age in this star vehicle (6th strand) for the always great - can any actor today do more with facial expression than she? - Olivia Coleman and along the way (7th strand) there are race riots - with violent skinhead (this is England, 1981) roaming the streets and bating up Black residents whom they see as invaders and tying it all together (8th strand), as the setting for the film is a movie theater in the last days of glorious cinema and reel to reel projection (9th strand) and, hey, I’m losing count, but there are numerous literary references - snatches of Auden, of Larkin, and some heavy-handed imagery - the Black co-worker tenderly nursing an injured pigeon to health and watching it fly away free - could any symbol be more obvious? - all in a film-good film that doesn’t quite make its case: Can we truly believe in her recovery?, Is she as doomed as the theater in which she works?, Is her relationship with the young co-worker believable in the least? - but at least the film held my interest, clocked in at less than 2 hours - a miracle! - provided us a soundtrack that includes It’s Alright, Ma, among the greatest songs of all time.
High Hopes (1988) is an early and archetypical serious comedy from the unappreciated though successful Mike Leigh - a domestic drama of sorts, a family crisis and eruption, and an exploration of class and culture into contemporary English life. The film starts with the entry of a young man lost on the streets of (North?) London, and is helped out by a gentle, friendly bike messenger and his partner - girlfriend, as we learn later - who put him up for the night; this generosity contrasted with the societal mistreatment of the bike-man’s elderly mother, who is locked out of her apartment and given reluctant shelter for the next-door neighbors, a hilarious portrayal of snobbery and self-importance. The film for a time feels harsh and weighty, after a few outbursts and the riotous events of an 70th b-day party for the mom - but in its final segments the film, and the characters, soften and we close on a sweet discussion of potential marriage and children - heart-warming to be sure. As always, Leigh gets tremendous performances from his cast, and one gets the sense that there was a lot of improv encouraged the actors develop and round out their characters. Laughter and tears - it might have been called - and as always with Leigh a film to catch.
Lighter and less complex (really just 5 characters) than most of his work, Mike Leigh’s 1976 comedy Nuts in May presents a couple on their way to a weeklong “holiday” to be spent at an understaffed campground - the guy is almost unbearably effusive, know-it-all, mansplainer as we might say today and his wife whiny, spineless, and submissive - though with at least more than a humane touch than her husband. Over the course of a few days camping, the guy upbraids a nearby camper for playing his radio too loud. Offended, the guy refuses (as is his right), which leads to hostility, somewhat alleviated by wife’s attempts to make amends. Things continue to get worse, spoiling their holiday - esp as another couple enters the fray, leading to some knockabout of the guy - well deserved! These two seem to have stepped out of a Monty Python episode of the era - they probably did! ML as is his wont lets the characters develop much of their dialog, much of it hilarious - though at the end there’s not quite anything for viewers to hang on and remember - it’s not, as is ML’s best work, a look at love, hate, and social ills; it’s just darkly funny.
As part of my personal Leigh-quest we watched his television film (remember those?) Four Days in July (1984), set and filmed in Belfast during the heart of “the struggles” and the deadly rivalries between Cath and Prod and overall animosity of the Irish toward the English occupying Army. A lot of the nuances will no doubt be confusing to most American viewers, especially nearly 40 years down the road, but the heart of the film - at times hilarious - will be easy for most to grasp; in essence the story line follows the lives of two families, one from each side of course, in which both wives are pregnant (and deliver, on the last of the 4 days) and through the process we see the great overlap in sympathies and style as well as the huge gulf that separates the two couples/factions/forces. The humor often involves long conversations about mundane matters - repairing a toilet, e.g. - that go off on various tangents - and with a lot of mockery, drinking, and smoking (tobacco). The film is also an examination of poverty, of the mistreatment of the native Protestants (shabby housing, little economic opportunity), the problem of excessive drinking, and a pervasive chauvinism which shows the women serving the hapless men even hours before delivery. It’s not an easy film to get into, at least at first (the first scene, at a police checkpoint - without any further development except that it introduces one of the protagonists, the British soldier on alien turf). But as we become somewhat accustomed to the dialects, the film builds intensity and insight, right up to the conclusion that finds the two wives from different cultures find themselves in adjacent beds in the delivery room - a beautiful closing image.
The Netflix series The Lying Life of Adults (2023), from Edoardo De Angelis, based on Elena Ferrante’s novel, has a lot to stand up against and will inevitably not match its source material, much less and outstanding series based on Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, but it still ranks as a good series with strong characterization, esp. by the Giordana Marengo as the troubled, highly intelligent, but underachieving Neapolitan teen, whom, over the course of six episodes we see her establishing her independence from her family, standing up to her difficult and eccentric aunt, learning about her sexuality, and for the first time making wise and thoughtful decisions. Of course the series gets a lot of its ignition from Biagio Forestieri as her egocentric, selfish father - as the story revolves around the family breakup, the result of his serial infidelities. Ferrante’s fiction seems a vein that has hardly been tapped, and any attempt to embody her novels is probably for the better - I liked both this and Brilliant Friend more on screen than in print (it was excerpted in the NYTimes), a rarity.
The biopic Tick, Tick … Boom! (2021) from genius playwright/actor/director (here, “only” the director) Lin-Manuel Miranda portrays the pre-Rent artistic struggles, and genius in his own right, Jonathan Larson, one of the many who died prematurely. LMM focuses on Larson’s early musical which had a lot of intriguing songs - very much in the tradition of or the precursor of testimonial Broadway musicals of the 90s. The music is still beautiful and the evocation of life in NY in particular among gay men in the age of AIDS is presented with great personal insight and sensitivity. (Note: Larson in this film and in his life was not homosexual and died not of AIDS but of some sort of heart aneurism). The music is really fine and we can see that he’s on a pathway that will bring him to cult phenomenon Rent - although the pathway, as w/ most artists and geniuses esp because they break the rules and the conventions - is difficult and demoralizing - until he gets advice from his tough-as-nails agent: Write what you know (advice given in most writing courses of any sort). Jonathan Garfield as the energetic Larson deserves special praise for a long, challenging performance; LMM shows here that he’s great with musical numbers, obviously, though his frantic cuts and edits make the going too difficult for most viewers (same with his later In the Heights film), but who am I to give any advice? All told an exciting but ultimately sad film about a moment in tine.
For any who think of Alfred Hitchcock as primarily a director of thrillers I’d recommend a look at (the original) The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), one of the great films from his British period. Yes, it’s in a way a thriller - I mean in involves a man and woman Leslie Banks and Edna Best), on vacation in the Alps, who via miscommunication come to learn of a terrorist plan destined for an assassination in England (plan to shoot an ambassador during a performance at the Albert Hall) and which leads to a kidnapping of their child and ends in an endless shootout outside of a church - and despite all the tension of the plot the film is at many points laugh-out-loud just plain funny - a great example of AH’s sense of humor and his highly inventive storytelling and image-making: the gang of terrorists is led by an extremely unctuous Peter Lorre in his first English-language film, and he himself provides enough laugh lines - but then you’ve got a terrorist group meeting in one of funniest ever church services (the “minister” is hypnotist who puts Best into a trance and we watch him in various cuts sleeping through a gunfight; the London cops arrive to take on the terrorists but they have no weaponry and have to contact a local “gunsmith” to provide them w/ rifles, lots of other moments - but all culminating with a scary sequence in which the kidnapped child stands at the edge of a 3rd-story rooftop as the bullets fly all around here - overall, a a film with much but not too much excitement and with lots of laughs, sight gags, and surprising imagery that seem to put the whole crime/thriller aspect of the story in “ ”.
Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) was preceded by a 1930 silent (?) v from Germany in turn based on the 1929 German-language novel by Enrich Maria Remarque who was forced to flee from Germany as the anti-war message of his novel didn’t exactly jibe with the rise of Hitler (see Elliot’s Reading for my take on Remarque’s novel). I first saw the film when I was in high school, and it was foundation and incarnation of my pacifist views and opposition to the Vietnam war. So here we have another take, a century later, again from Germany and again at a time when nations opposed each other in a pointless and horrible war - and I don’t think pacifism can stop this one. Given the huge advanced in cinema technique and skill since 1930, this film is so much more powerful and chilling than its predecessor and it ranks well w/ any war (or anti-war) film ever - as it’s entirely focused on trench warfare, which has to be the most ghastly, brutal, and terrifying form of armed combat. And in this film we’re right in the trenches; the focus is, loosely, on 5 young German lads, entering the fray w/ visions of glory and of patriotism, visions that are immediately abolished. For the next 2 hours we suffer w/the terrors these young men face, paid and gruesome death, mostly, with no clear objective - especially under the delusional leadership of the top generals who are completely unconcerned about suffering and death - just glory and the fatherland. To my memory, the book and the1930 film ended with a return home and a confrontation w/ the cocksure professor who inspired by boys to go off tonight for the homeland; the film also had a beautiful closing image of a soldier reaching out from a trench, or at least so I remember. This film is even more bleak and dark, and the soldiers go on one final suicidal mission, just because their commanding officer feels betrayed by the incident peace treaty. This film’s a much - scary, sad, brutal - although there’s little hope offered at the end, much like the present time.
Another stop on my Mike Leigh journey, this one the first to appear after his perhaps most famous low-budget piece (Secrets & Lies) to which not doesn’t entirely measure up but it’s still worth watching and appreciating, Career Girls (1997) about two women in their 20s, roommates via bulletin-board posting in college (unnamed) in London ca 1995, of quite different temperaments, who get together for a weekend of catching up (they hadn’t seen each other for 6 years) and we see through a beautiful matching alternation of narrative from the present - 2 career girls, single, trying to get a start oink life, each in her own way, and 2 college kids w/out much focus or direction and involved in a series of dank relationships with unsuitable guys, some of whom cost their paths via extremely odd coincidence during their reunion visit - especially notable was the man who now seems to be homeless, addicted, and suffering from some kind of derangement. As w/ so many of Leigh’s films, there are moments of darkness and despair and light-hearted comedy, alterations between the sorrows and insecurity of youth and the fear, post-college, that the world is slipping by too fast.
Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2022) is no doubt the least-qualified film to make a nomination for an Oscar for Best Picture. Really? Nothing better out there? Throw a dart at the board and you’ll get a better nomination, which must have been fueled by admiration for his earlier work. From the start - a completely pointless 20-minute digression to look at shirtless male models - we move to a luxury cruise on which the passengers all seem to be despicable - wait! haven’t we seen this before? like, White Lotus??? - without any of them being sweet and redeeming. Lots of allusion to the disparity between the wealthy buzzards and the hard-working crew (the captain excepted - a drug and lout Woody Harrelson); the cruise turns into a vomitation - absolutely disgusting and repulsive and pointless - talk about easy targets. Anyway, Bunuel did something like this 50 years ago, ditto Godard’s weekend - great for their day but pointless now. The final segment as some of the rescued passengers on a seemingly deserted island waiting for rescue - again, completely preposterous and terribly dated - think, Lord of the Flies for adults? - that leads to a conclusion that I won’t disclose except to say that Ostend has just given up. Me, too.
There’s been a lot of noise about Michale Morris’s film To Leslie (2022), which many think should have been an Oscar vehicle esp for the leading actress, Andrea Riseborough, who no doubt did a terrific job portraying a troubled middle-aged mom who won a big lottery prize then blew all the $ in a few years as she dived ever deeper into alcoholism and poverty and more or less abandoned her young - not 20-year-old son. Is it a great movie? No, it is not great exactly - it feels as if the story of an alcoholic in distress is pretty familiar movie territory and this movie, for all its strengths, overplays its hand on both ends: the alcoholism seems overdone (most do a much better job of concealing the addictions), the scorn of the townspeople seems not quite credible (wouldn’t some be sympathetic?), and the ending strains belief. All that said, it has its strengths - notably it’s nicely low-budget, just a straight-forward story without much diversion or spx, and, as noted, AR’s performance is excellent. Much of the Oscar push came about because of the web of connections that MM brings to the fore; it doesn’t feel truly like a deserving underdog but more of a good not great movie. There must be dozens of others.
The Richard Peete/Robert Yapkowitz documentary Karen Dalton: In My Own Time (2020) resurrects that obscure Greenwich Village folk/blues singer who played coffee houses and the like in the 1960s, brushing sleeves w/ the most famous denizen of that den, Dylan, who extolled her in his own autobiography in words that left even close aficionados of that era wondering: Who was she? She was a then-young white woman from OK who sang like a strung-out Black blues singer from the 40s, most notably like Billy Holiday. She had a lot of vocal and guitar-picking style that could have led to more acclaim, however the virtually never composted or sang any originals and she had a stubborn resolute personality, refusing in any way to build a bonding or rapport with her audiences. Other singers revered her, but she never caught on commercially despite many leads, opportunities, and supporters. Ultimately, she descended ever deeply into hard drugs, contracted AIDS, died young and largely unrecognized, barely known even to her children and granddaughter, and it’s her posthumous good fortune that this documentary team came to her doorstep as, while film was in production, her entire home and studio with all of her mementos, writings, and recordings was destroyed by fire (this documentary had saved many of these materials and records). Though I can’t imagine her in any successful singing career, this account of her demise is powerful and thoughtful and at times unbearably sad.
Santiago Mitre’s documentary drama (that is, all acted and scripted but as accurate as possible in re-creating historical events) Argentina, 1985 (2022) is one of the Oscar nominees for best international film; it probably won’t win as the technique of the film is never groundbreaking or unusual and the streaming version, at least as far as I could figure, gives you subtitles above a dubbed English version, very unpleasant to watch in that regard. N.the.less the film tells an international audience the to most of us an unknown series of events in which a team of brave prosecutors - with the lead being a dedicated, fearless, but emotionally drained Ricardo Darin playing Julio Cesar Strassera with a cast of supporting young brave eager lawyers and law students who pushed the historic case against all odds of the leading military figures - in the US that would be the Joint Chiefs - who oversaw the capture, torture, imprisonment, and murder of thousands of citizens, some of who bravely testified in this case that seemed doomed - the highlight of the film, I would say. Greatly informative, worth watching, hope you can get this in a more viewer-friendly format.
