Elliot’s Watching
August 2023
Melvin Van Peebles’s strangely appealing The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1967) is just as it says: A low-ranking soldier is entrusted by his Captain to take a 3-day pass (from barracks north of Paris, late 60s) - and the somewhat comical captain emphasizes that he trusts the soldier (Turner), a Black man and one of the very few in the outpost. It looks as if we’re being set up for a comedy - he’s sure to disappoint his superior officer, in particular damaging the car to which he’s been entrusted. and in fact it’s somewhat funny following Turner on his hapless visits to a few sights in Paris - but the comedy switches when Turner visits a nightclub and is rebuffed by several women he approaches - seems to be racial bias but not clear on this - and a 3rd woman he approaches joins him in a dance, which leads to a date for the next day - a car trip to Normandy,. As the relationship between Turner and the woman develops, Turner has more encounters with racism, one of which leads him to a bar fight (as it happens, his attack was unprovoked, he misunderstood the Spanish singer’s reference to him as a Black man - much of the film is about language difficulties and failures). Tension rises when some of the soldiers from his barracks spy on Turner and his newly beloved - and he wonders how this sighting will affect his return to the base- which we will see, along with more surprises and misunderstandings, right up to the ambiguous conclusion. Excellent musical soundtrack throughout thanks to the multitalented author/director/performer M Peebles, in early career.
Brigid Delaney and Benjamin Law’s comedy series set mostly in Australia, Wellmania, follows Liv (Celeste Barber) over the course of a few weeks in her homeland trying to get a Green Card so that she can return to the US for the making of a TV series (pro chefs judge various cuisines) in which she will star. Her hyperkinetic entanglements - medical, sexual, familial, bureaucratic, narcotic - keep her and the series on the move; the story line isn’t quite believable, nor is it meant to be - it’s just a lot of fun to watch, esp Barber’s star turn, a rare case of a female lead who’s not especially attractive - but who is no doubt dramatic: some whom she encounters consider her the biggest pain and most neurotic presence, yet she gets from people what she needs - and the season brings us right to the brink of a new stage in her life, which is apparently (Season 2) already in the works at present.
The Sidney Lumet (dir.), Al Pacino (super star), and Frank Pierson (writer), Dog Day Afternoon is more than a half-century old (1975) but doesn’t feel a minute away (though some of the surprise twists near the end seem quite familiar to us today but were unusual even shocking in ’75). The film, based on an actual bank robbery is something like an acted-out documentary - it feels real from the start, from the opening montage of scenes of NYC mid-summer, not at all glamorous quite the opposite - definitely a film of the outer boroughs, a small Brooklyn bank held up by3 guys terribly nervous and terribly organized. What they saw as a quick hit and run turns into a citywide sensation (would be much more so using contemporary media communications), as the police, the FBI, and many others are drawn into the drama, with the bank employees, most of the female tellers, huddle in the bank as hostages - yet Pacino’s Sonny obviously hated and thought he could make a getaway with no fuss and nobody hurt - he’s torn from the start by his greed and his attentiveness to the hostages. What at first seems like a comedy a la the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, it becomes increasingly tense for viewers, by the end a real nail biter. How Pacino could range through the moods and anxiety of the film is almost beyond compression - it couldn’t be done any better. And Lumet deserves a lot of credit for excellent handling of complicated crowd movements, the collision of law enforcement and media (covered live by helicopter teams) = as a sweltering city wakes to this tense drama taking place all around them.
Spike Lee’s film, his first, She’s Gotta Have It, was innovative for its time (1986) as one of the few general release all-Black productions; the film focuses on one young Black woman in Brooklyn who has multiple sexual encounters with several Black men (and one Black woman?), and in today’s world there’s a feeling of exploitation and male fantasy going on here, but in its time the film was recognized for its originality - mostly but not entirely in b/w, some big production #s, some comic scenes, a film influenced by the New Wave w/its breaking from conventional narrative structure into more of a fee-form environmental portrait - Brooklyn in the summer. Ultimately, though, the film seemed more and more at loose ends, though a promising career-starter for Lee, but we abandoned it about half-way through. One of the problems throughout was that the actors - with the exception of Lee himself who has a small role - seem stilted and stagey, as if they’re reading from a script; this will change as Lee’s work develops and and learns more about ow to get a naturalist performance from his team, how the actor can live w/in the character, as he career flourishes, e.g., Do the Right Thing et al. Also: high props for Bill Lee (Spike’s fa) for an excellent jazz score throughout.
Susan Seidelman’s comic drama w/ the catchy title of Desperately Seeking Susan (written by Leora Barish) might as well have been called Desperately Seeking a Role of Madonna. Didn’t work out; but she did OK as a singer, dancer, songwriter, megastar. As to this film, it draws on a # of Hollywood tropes, most notably the characters who bangs his/her head and loses his/her memory or even his/her identity. It’s also the story of the bad girl who makes good (standing up for other women) and of the contemptuous, self-centered husband who obviously is part of a mismatch with his wife (Rosanne Arquettte) - who’s saved by “the handsome stranger” and with whom she walks off; as the plot details, who can really make sense of them and who cares? Film best watched by Madonna-natics - although you’ll have to stick around for the closing credits other her at her best.
The Apple-TV 10-part series Shrinking (2023), by Bill Lawrence, Jason Segel, and Brett Goldstein, which in alongside Segel brings some terrific performances from old and new - Jessica Williams seems as a sexually prolific therapist, Harrison Ford as the ailing patriarch of the team of therapists, Lucia Maxwell as then daughter, and Christa Miller as fast-talking neighbor. The content is that the team of 3 therapists have little control of their own lives - nothing so new or surprising there - and in fact there’s no possible way one can accept any of the characters as “realistic: - they all are mouthpieces for the biting humor of the screenwriter(s). Yet despite my failure to believe, I still found the joke, insults, tantrums, and other foibles and mischief to be really funny, and I ended up liking all of the characters, each with his/her own personal demons and failures. Season 1 ends with a clear pathway onto Season 2, so we’ll see more of these people and tie up more of the loose threads, presumably.
A Running Jump (2012) is a short (32 min.) from the great British director Mike Leigh; though there’s not much deep social comedy or the complexity of relationships that we expect from ML, this short is funny and absurd, a portrait of a small family constantly squabbling and moving (and talking) at 78 rpm: the main characters are the grandfather, a tiresome cab driver who is constantly lamenting the passing of the good ole days of British “football” to the great amusement of some of his fare; the highlight of the film is the interaction between the adult son, who runs some kind of dubious auto dealership, and we see him take advantage of a polite young man succored into buying a car doomed to died within a few miles of traffic -it’s funny yet in a mean way, as we (or I anyway) expected the kid to get the last laugh; we may have laughed along the way but on reflection we see that our laughter was a debasement - we were adjuncts to cruelty.
Simon Stone’s National Theatre update in contemporary setting (and revision) of Euripides’, Seneca’s, amdRacine’s Phaedra is striking mostly for it’s amazing stage setting, a revolving stage that transports us into a $ of varied interiors and exteriors seamlessly and for the incredibly complex script in which the dozen of so family members - an upper-crust, intellectual/artistic family of 2 adult and 1 teenage children all of whom speak over one another and constantly interrupt and break off the whole play into phases - it’s not that it’s so difficult to follow though it will require close attention nor that it’s a feat for the talented dozen of actors but troublingly there’s not much there there - and least half-way through, which is all we watched - in that you’re impressed by the work, at least I was, but in the end the main story line- 20-something Moroccan writer/journalist moves from home where he’s had an affair some years back with the considerably older matriarch and insulates himself into the life of her volatile family - toward what end we don’t really know nor do we really believe in the premise, either - but still worth watch for those who are curious about British theatre - how could they bring this off? - and who have the time and mental acuity to follow the thin story path.
This Adi Barash & Ruthie Shatz doc Emergency NYC (2023), like their previous Lenox Hill, gives us an almost inconceivable access to watch the medical profession in action, particularly on the most delicate and skill-demanding procedures, such as brain surgery or surgery adjacent to the optic nerve. This season (2023) focuses on emergency care; most or maybe all of the cases we see involve high-speed rescue vehicles - ambulances tearing through the boroughs; and I think all involve skylift choppers bringing cases into NYC into Lenox Hill for life-or-death procedures. We get to know a # of employees at various levels as well as some heart- or gut-racing procedures, notably fa son kidney transplant, a brought back to life case, and one case that affects the medical team directly. I wouldn’t recommend bilging - rather, perhaps stretch out ver 8 days for full comprehension and impact.
Abbas Klarostami’s film from Iran The Traveler (1969) recounts a few days in the life of a young boy living in a rough, impoverished city somewhere outside of Tehran; his father is a carpenter, mother runs the cramped and inhospitable apartment. The boy - Quassem - is a lackluster student, often in trouble and inattentive to his studies; his passion is soccer (aka football) and his mission is to get enough money to attend a big soccer game in Tehran; he and a friend raise money through various scams, notably stealing a camera from his father’s bedside and selling it on the street. Street life is harsh and dangerous, and they’s little solace anywhere. Trouble by his absence from school, his mother brings him in for a consult with the school director, a mean and sadistic man with no interest in his school. The teachers, too, seem bored and angry - it’s a terrible place to learn. Q eventually pulls together enough money to attend the big game, which involves sneaking out of the house as darkness falls and taking a night bus to Tehran, some hours away. Various other obstacles confront the boy as he tries to get tix, etc. In short, he’s lost and with nowhere to go. This film may remind some of the Coney Island film Little Fugitive or Truffaut’s 400 Blows - 2 other great films about lost boys resisting confinement, trouble at home, too many responsibilities, and indifferent at best schooling.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), based on a story by the uncredited Mary Orr, was old-fashioned even in its day and today looks like a relic of a bygone time - but a valuable and significant relic: it’s the classic story of the ingenue (Anne Baxter as the eponymous Eve) who dreams of success on the stage and works her way into the entourage of a great but old-fashioned Bette Davis as star of stage Margo Channing, and as the film unfolds we watch the disintegration of Margo, in a desperate last gasp to retain her prominence but in a dying culture - the Broadway stage, with Hollywood the rising star knocking on the door - and we watch as Eve claws her way to the top leaving destruction in her wake, ending up en route to Hollywood but a personal ruin. Can’t help but think of Sunset Boulevard, which touches the same notes - but AAEve is more melodramatic and “stagey.” It’s moral if there is such a a thing as morality in this culture: What comes around, goes around - nastiness, bitchiness as one critic called it - is the air they breathe.
Martin Webb’s 10-episode, 2-part season 1, Break Point (2023), on Netflix, gives us great access to the the thoughts, tensions, eruptions, fears, and hopes as we watch, with great access to at least some of the personal and private lives, the process for a top-tier but not quite yet full-fledged stars at the Rafa/Serena/Djokavitch (sp?) level as they compete in the major tournaments with hopes of rising in ranking or at least knocking off a star-ranking player. The doc includes many terrific high-light reel points and player eruptions that, taken together, show the challenge (# of games/sets they have to win to rise to win a tournament) and the passion - eruptions of joy, of anger, of frustration, and of sorrow - really taking us into the heart of the sport in ways that most team sports and “unopposed” sports such as golf can never quite rise to. Webb et al. had unprecedented access and a lot of patience to put together this doc over the pan of nearly a year. More sports dox are on the way, as well as season 2 of BP, according the Netflix.
Laura McGann’s The Deepest Breath (2023, Netflix) is a look at a small group of excellent swimmers who have created a sport in which the winner is the one who can, without oxygen, dive to the deepest depth and return to the surface. What’s especially scary is that you have to recognize and assess how long they can survive underwater during these dives - if you run out of oxygen to soon, you die (a team of aides follow the divers and help if needed. In my view it’s an idiotic sport that pushes participants beyond their capacity often with fatal results. To watch the sport is intensely dull - you don’t see a thing until the diver emerges, if he/she does; and then it’ as of you’re a voyeur, waiting so see a a struggle with death. This stupid and dangerous sport is hardly a crazy - there’s lots of talk about reaching one’s extremes etc., but the so-called deepest diver is one achieved or even sought after by a hell of a small group of athletes (and virtually no spectators) - so, guys, you’re great and brave athletes butter God’s sake find another sport!
