Elliot’s Watching September 2023
Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960, co-author I.A.L. Diamond) was a tremendous hit from the start and beyond with many adaptations over theist 80+ years - They say the public can’t be right all the time, but here’s the exception: The public is right some of the time. This film retains its tone and value throughout - basic plat nerdy guy (Jack Lemmon) who works in a giant faceless insurance office (think more Mr Hulot less Mad Men) where the top execs have imposed on him and have set up a scheme where they borrow the keys to his apartment to carry out the extramarital affairs with various women in and out of the company - a situation, repulsive enough in its time and today and least for the most part quashed. Lemmon, though, is such a doormat that he never sticks up for himself - until at last he falls for someone (Shirley MacLaine), an elevator operator in his office building - but she’s having it on w/ theCEO, Fred MacMurray). The casting is perfect, and Lemmon is fantastic the role, a likable doormat of a guy, a hilarious goofball and though we know obviously who’s gonna end up with the girl, who cares: the plot is clever and tight, the dialog wonderful, a laugh and a cry film for sure, lots of fun and not a bit aged.
The French film Entre Nous (Between Us), 1963 (Diane Kurys, w/ Olivier Cohn and Alain le Henry) set near the end of WWII as a woman, Lena Isabelle Huppert, who marries a Frenchman to get sprung from a POW camp, and we follow this couple through a large segment of their tumultuous married life (film based on Kurds’s memories of her difficult family and her childhood, DK’s skills are not really in the narrative form, as the story line is difficult to follow at times, settings not clearly enough established, too many similarities among several characters’ appearances making the story even harder - yet there’s something here, as she conveys little-known communities of Jewish families (mostly?) in post-war Italy. She’s particularly good a creating and carrying through with bursts of outrage, jealousy, and destruction - who will ever forget the demolition of a dress shop? Worth watching, though not part of the New Wave - although some similarities to 400 Blows will strike viewers.
The terrific and unusual thee-part documentary on Max, Telemarketers (Adam Bhala Lough and Sam Lipman-Stern), is a great expose of the industry by two amateurs and former employees of one of the larger telemarketing firms. The two movie makers are completely clueless about how to shoot a documentary, how and whom to interview, how to unearth the truth if even inadvertently. It’s the kond of story that the NY Times and others should have broken but other than one valiant freelance the mainstream media failed on this test. So it’s up to these 2 almost comical guys and assorted helpers to go after these crooks with the inside knowledge, and what they uncover in astounding and explosive. Most of us recognize these telephone pitches are a scam and many give a few bucks any way, and that’s what the guys started out with: Ripping off people by calling the pretending to be a police officer raising$ for a\any you name it good cause. The marketers are no such thing of course - just a bunch of hard luck guys out on parole and going with the only employer who’d hire them. But the story gets bigger and more ominous as they realist that the police themselves are behind these scams and that the $ they collect goes right to the FOP rather than to charitable causes. The filmmakers try to get officials and lawmakers to pursue these criminals 0 but no such luck.Though they meet # of people who a free that it’s a criminal enterprise, they won’t goto the mat: The police are powerful, and popular. To go after them would lead to a lost campaign for re-election, or worse.
Quick notes on 2 fine TV series, first The Bear (Christopher Storer, 2022) a behind-the-scene drama about the failure of a conventional beef-oriented restaurant in Chicago that goes under because of mismanagement by one of the co-owners; the youngest bro in the clan and his efforts to resurrect the restaurant as a super-high-end bistro molded on the great European restaurants where the lead, “Bear” (Jeremy Allen White), apprenticed. Numerous disasters mistakes, torments, breakdowns, fights, brushes with the law and the underworld keep this one going; strangely, there’s virtually no love interest, although sparks between Bear and a souchef could ignite in Season 2.
Wanted: The Escape of Carlos Ghosn (2023) is an excellent 3-episode doc about the eponymous business leader, at one time leading 3 major cars in France and Japan, accused on pilfering funds from all of them and widely loathed by his layoffs and other cost-cutting to line the pockets of top management - the doc focuses on his daring escape from a prison in Japan, settling in Beirut, and ensuring that he life of comfort persists as others around him suffer.
Werner Herzog’s terrific Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) tells of a band of Spanish soldiers and their accomplices (including several women) travel down a unnamed South American river in search of new territory for Spain - with the eponymous leader, played to the hilt by Klaus Kinski, suffer numerous calamities in this pointless, hopeless journey - including starvation, lack of salt in diet, uprisings, attacks from Indian tribes ashore using poisoned arrows, near drownings, damages to the fleet of handmade rafts, and more - who can forget the encounter with a cannibal tribe?- open the mission driven by greed and hubris that ends nowhere - based perhaps on manuscripts left behind by a priest traveling with the brigade - or more likely a feat of WH’s imagination -with some obvious themes of obsession, failure, and journeys to nowhere.
Stanley Kubrick’s early film The Killing (1956, based on a novel by Lionel White) is about as noir as film can get (it’s in b/w of course) in which a loose alliance of thugs and thieves together come up with a plan to shoot to death a racing horse mid-race and to use the ensuing chaos and confusion as a time to clear out all of the day’s receipts for the featured are; the plan requires lots of split-second timing as well as some dumb luck (e.g., the driver talks his way into a parking lot that offers a clear view of the race track). The elaborate plot succeeds, until it doesn’t and everything unravels in the closing minutes - they gang has all the luck, at first, but luck turned. Fine performance from Sterling Hayden as the sorta-mastermind and some equally strong supporting roles, esp. the nerdy guy who runs the receipts room at the track and things this episode can buy the love of his abusive wife and prove his manhood. Fat chance. There’s blood on the tracks at the end, and it’s exciting to get there - no great social values of commentary but holds up well after 74 years - in fact, the quaint settings from another era add to the noir atmosphere.
The 2nd season of Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht, book by Jeff Pearlman) is just as good maybe better than the first season, built on the hateful rivalry between the newly risen Lakers and the long-tie leading bball ten, the Celtics, culminating in a brutal on the court fight involving rapid Celtic fans - but th heart of the story is still the enigmatic Kameer and the sensitive Magic - with a lot of focus on the evolving and revolving coaching system that the mercurial owner Dr Buss endures. Soem fine acting from A and B list stars motably John C Riley, Jason Clarke, Jason Segel, Gaby Hoffmann, et al. Enjoy while you can, there will evidently be no season 3.
Tori and Lokita (2022) is the latest from the great Dardenne brothers (Jean-Pierre and Luc), about whom I’v said in previous posts should be considered candidates for a Nobel in Literature - as if that could happen. This latest film (Criterion) is excellent and topical and almost too sad and dangerous to lake - it’s not a good time nor escapist by any means, but it’s one of the finest films of the decade: This one centers on the 2 title characters, living in Belgium after escape from the war among the Serb countries, both fluent in French, the older sister applying (unsuccessfully, after repeated attempts) for work papers - in part because of lack of documents and the dubious claim that she’s caring for her 10-year-old brother (they don’t believe they’re sibs, nor do we, ultimately). Keeping alive is a constant challenge that leads them into serious rx dealing on the streets of this unnamed Belgian-French industrial city - Dardenne territory - and eventually into prostitution and serious and dangerous captivity by a rx ring (L. more or less entombed in a cellar where she attends to the field of cultivated marijuana) - an exciting film along the way, will leave you gasping for breath, few films like this though there may be some hints and distant echoes, eg 400 Blows, and not for the faint but in important work.
The British series on Netflix Who Killed Jill Dando? is weird and scary and puzzling the extreme as it is on some level a police procedural on a murder case but what separates it from other cases is the fact that the victim was a prominent TV news presenter, as the Brits call it, who had done many TV specials and was by all accounts a delightful person whom nobody hated - though someone either hated her enough to shoot her in broad daylight on her front steps or else someone just took a random shot? Hard to say and hard to explain - some forays concerned her support for Slovaks in the Bosnia war - but if that’s so the killers got little of northing by the shooting - if they did it for political retribution that never made the claims. All told a good three-parter but not a great one, as we come to no conclusion at the end - a man convicted of the murder, who looked like he could be the guy, d was freed on appeal.
Three Colors: Blue (1993) is the first of a trilogy from the late Polish director Krzszlof Korslowski, starring now-famous Juliette Binoche, whose husband and young caught are killed in a car crash that JB survives, but not without months of depression and seemingly irrational behavior, e.g., destroying all the copies she cab find of her late husband’s compositions and performances. We learn that he had been unfaithful; same for JB - ah, the French! Movie largely known and appreciated for it’s beautiful music (by Zbigniew Preisner), for beautiful photography (S. Idziak); I’m not sure of the meaning of this film and will watch the other two “colors” fro get a better sense of the filmmaker’s intent and cross-cultural observations.
