Elliot's Watching December 2021 - Sunset Boulevard, Eclipse, Hand of God, Children of Paradise, Succession, Landscapes, et al.

 Elliot’s Watching - December 2021

The Billy Wilder classic Sunset Boulevard (1950) holds up really well after all these years - the retro look that, say, 30 years ago looked quaint and out of date now adds to the beauty of this film, a hard-boiled narrative with not a surprise ending but a surprise beginning of all things. It’s a lot of fun watching William Holden get caught in the web of “Norma Desmond” (Gloria Swanson), a star from the silent era now pushed aside by the completely different skills and demands of the “talkies.” Her over the top performance is great - we’re repulsed by her bossiness and sense of privilege, we’re astonished by her lack of insight (and charm), yet we feel sorrow for her and her pathetic attempts to revive her career. Cecil B Demille, playing himself, does a brilliant turn as a kindly director who feels sorrow and pity for the diminished Swanson; there are other Hollywood cameos of the era (or earlier), including a surprise appearance by Buster Keaton (and Swanson herself does a good Chaplin impersonation. Holden is cruel and manipulative, but we feel sorrow for him as well, used onto the margins of Hollywood because of his own real but limited talent as a would-be screenwriter. All told, the film moves right along, and we go along, too - right to the gruesome and weird conclusion, where we all pause to look at the wreckage. 

The Torquil Jones documentary (on Netflix), 14 Peaks (2021) is worth watching if you’re into films about (mostly) guys who take incredible risks involving surfing, diving, hiking, free climbing, or as in this case scaling huge mountain peaks. There are moments of incredibly frightening footage involving injuries and white-outs as we follow Nepalese climber Nurmal Punjab leading an all-Nepalese/Sherpa team in a quest to scale the 14 +2,000-meter peaks in  months. (I always remember the Mad Mag spoof that suggested the Nat Geo photogs who take the pictures deserve all the accolades.) The quest itself is egocentric and in some ways cruel; I’m just not into these stunts that put not only the leader but the whole support team at great risk. Nurms’s quest is in some ways political - the first all-Sherpa team giving credit where its due - but for all that we learn little about anyone else on the climbs other than Nurms. Moreover, he/they never seem to appreciate the beauty of the mountains - they’re just objects to “conquer.” Still, you can chalk this up alongside 100-foot Wave if this type of adventure rings your bell.

Chris Marker’s 1982 film, Sans Soleil (Sunless), is built on 90 or  so minutes of Marker’s fantastic photograph, an incredibly visually interesting and complex visual study of street life and iconography most in Japan though some in Africa; scenes as diverse as street theater, department stores, pinball arcades, zoos, long train rides with most passengers asleep, all of which work together and give a portrait of developing and developed countries far from Europe (not sure the dates of the actual footage, though suspect some of it from well before 1982). Unfortunately, though, by about an hour into this 90+-minute film I felt I’d had enough; there’s no narrative line of shape to encompass these phots and film clips, and the voiceover narration - recited by a woman who supposedly received these images along with messages from CM - seem to go nowhere and by 60 minutes just feel obtrusive, and I bailed out. Got the picture. 

Going against the consensus here but I found Jane Campion’s “Western,” The Power of the Dog, (filmed in NZ?) to be largely unwatchable: The characters are drawn with such a heavy hand that nothing they say or do makes any sense.We’ve got here a cross between East of Eden and Brokeback Mountain, and the basic arc of the story is a preposterous tragic relationship between two of the men in the film. Jesse Plemons does his best to bring off is stupid and enigmatic character, owner of a cattle ranch and newly wed to a seemingly naive woman, Kristen Dunst, who biomes increasingly addicted to alcohol and bizarre in performance as the movie edges along. Benedict Cumberbunch show that the can do a decent American/Western accent, but who can believe his repressed homosexual character for even a minute? And then there’s the over-the-top effeminate Kodi Smith-McPhee. Who are these people? What drives them? What do they hope and think, why are they so mean to one another, does the death at the end of the movie make any sense at all? Is it a murder? Who knows or cares at that point? 

Jean Renoir’s 1937 classic, Grand Illusion, loses nothing even after 80+ years and multiple viewings, a totally engrossing narrative whose basic underlying image is that social class is more of a bond among men at war than patriotism - at least up to a point! Story is of a group of French POWs held in a German camp near the end of the first WW - and it’s a camp for “officers,” so they’re treated quite well compared w/ POW camps for the ordinary grunts, which we never see. The head of one of the camps (Von Stroheim again!) thinks he has a special bond of understanding with his fellow aristocrats, and French play along - but all the while concoct an escape plan. The German officers are astonished at such effrontery - esp. in that some of the Fr. officers come from bourgeois backgrounds - one of key players is a Jew! Ultimately, class and country don’t matter, as we see in the touching concluding episodes when 2 of the escapees are taken in and protected by a German war widow; the last scene, which I won’t divulge, with the escapees struggling to cross a field of snowbanks, is famous and rightly so. Sadly, this film, with its sympathy for most of the German soldiers, could not have been made a few years later or at any time since; the Jewish POW would have been doomed, and the other French POWs could not possibly have felt a shared ethos with those serving under Hitler. 

Everything you’ve heard about Succession is true; at end of Season 3 (no spoilers) the characters are just as loathsome, intelligent, driven, and clearly defined as established in Season 1, and this series - of course it will be picked up as a Season 4 - seems likely to be one of the few that builds an arc from opening to conclusion and that satisfies viewers to the end, that is, doesn’t tail off as every aspect of the series runs out of steam and the final episode is on fumes. No, these characters and their milieu (I hate myself for envying how they travel in luxury around the world and around NYC) are so fascinating and well delineated that to start watching is to stay hooked.  don’t think this series does any form of justice or benevolence, but it lets us into what appears to be the inner workings of a right-wing media giant (read, Fox news) and satisfied us by showing that these people are so mean-spirited and self-centered in every aspect of their lives: Nobody to root for; just watch the carnage. Huge props to writers/creator Jess Armstrong, as to the cast too many to mention; no misfits or lightness among them. 

Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1962 film, L’eclisse (The Eclipse) will knock you over if you like cryptic, enigmatic features - because that’s all you’ll get here, no plot to speak of, the characters are strangely abstract, the pace is glacial (for the most part). But it’s a film that accomplishes its ends, so props on that. Essentially the story is about  beautiful 30ish woman in Rome (I think), Monical Vitti as Vittoria, who breaks up w/ her fiancé for no clear or distinct reason, and after much meandering has a fling with a handsome ne’er do well young stock broker, Alain Delon, and that just plain ends leaving her alone on an empty street. What works well in this film, however, are the vast empty spaces on the streets of Rome; I know that by in the ‘60s we didn’t see the street-choking traffic of Rome today (that’s part of the fun in watching European films from this era) but MA engineered these streets for his movie so that they’re vast empty spaces, kind of like a Magritte painting - unsettling in their emptiness, an emptiness that is matched by Viti’s insecurity, inability to know herself or to connect with anyone else. MA balances these empty street-scapes against 2 long scenes on the trading floor of the Rome stock market, where buyers and sellers literally scream at one another constantly, a furious babble of noise that no outsider can comprehend; it turns out to be a terrible day for the market, and we see in some of the characters the aftermath of a big paper loss. The stock-market scenes seem almost like documentaries, and maybe they are, with the key actors emerging gradually from the crowd. Overall, the film won’t answer any of your questions, but will leave you with a weird unsettlement, such as after reading a troubling poem or hearing dissonant chamber music. 

Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013) stands as one of the greatest European films of the century, and he continues that reign of excellence with his 2021 film, The Hand of God, marking him really as the living heir to the style of Fellini, the obvious avatar for TGB which was PS’s homage to La Dolce Vita - and HofG continues that reverence: The complex family and public gatherings and celebrations, with so much explosive passion and anger and a fascination with eccentric characters and body types; in HofG the celebrations range from the purely familial (often over dinner, of course - with one spectacular family outdoor gathering), outbursts of passionate anger and sorrow (in HoG in particular a tremendous scene of the adult children reacting to a family tragedy), and flirtation & fascination with the criminal underworld. The main divergence of these two masterpieces is that TGB was about a man in late-life crisis, feeling that despite profuse outbursts of admiration and respect from all of his many acquaintances realization that he is close to none of them and that he has wasted his life in not completing his 2nd novel; in HoG we have a more conventional “coming of age” narrative, centered on a young man, Fabietta (a diminutive), whose aim in life is to be a filmmaker - so we obviously suspect that there are deep autobiographical elements in this film, which, like many Italian films of 20th century that encompass a relocation from the provincial towns and cities toward success in Rome. Fabietta’s seduction is one of the greatest of sex sequences; his obsession with his beautiful and deeply disturbed aunt is one of the great depictions of hopeless young love and “sentimental education.” Not sure how I feel about the film director (based on Fellini? didn’t seem like it) who makes a late appearance and gives F hell for not pursuing his dream - seemed a bit crude and too much “on the nose.” But F emerges from that tongue lashing, as we see him recognize the vapidity of his earlier passion - pro soccer, which, as he recognizes, is a stand-in for and an obstacle to his pursuit of filmmaking. All told, an excellent film that almost demands another viewing, as you can only absorb so much of this beautiful film - including the art direction and the excellent dissonant score. 

If you can’t get enough of the one-man (or -woman) conquering incredible odds and surviving in a challenge against topography and against all reason - mountain climbing, endurance running, surfing in 100-foot waves, etc. - you should add The River Runner to your viewing list, as it’s probably the best ever of films about kayaking the world’s most dangerous rapids - and it has a pretty good back story as well about personal hazards and obstacles that the greatest kayaker faced and survived. Maybe too many talking heads in this Netflix (2021) film, but the kayaking passages make it worth at least a good look. 

A better man-against-nature and facing incredible risks is The Alpinist, which follows the endeavors of possibly the world greatest free climbs - enormous peaks in Canada and Argentina that he climbs without ropes, only equipment he can carry by hand and in a small pack, unsupported, climbing solo with no backup crew, truly incredible, though we see it with our own eyes thanks largely I guess to drone cameras. Heart in mouth the whole way.

Marcel Carne’s masterwork, Children of Paradise (1945) feels today, obviously, somewhat dated - in particular because it’s set in Paris in the mid-19th century and is completely old-fashioned in its narrative, a beautiful (supposedly, something I’ve failed to see) woman (Arletty) adored by 4 men: a criminal, a wealthy aristocrat, a young aspiring actor, and a great mime (Jean-Louis Barrault), in a particularly sensitive role. So, yea, it’s kind of corny - when I first saw it in youth I was moved by the sentiments of love lost, love regained, and despair, later viewings have taken the polish off - but it’s grand in its way, too, much like a Balzac or even, though not quite as beautiful, like a Flaubert or Stendahl. Well those are high peaks to summit, and CofP definitely accomplishes its goals of a throw-back romance and a re-creation of the world of theater from long ago - the crowded street scenes, the behind-the-scenes chaos, and the rowdy audience crowds are extraordinary, even today. Part of anyone’s dismay, however, in watching this film today comes from knowing that Arletty was later convicted of treason for her ongoing relationship w/ German officer. The film was meant to be, weirdly, an escape from the war and the Occupation, but of course there had to be many compromises that allowed for the film to be made; certain topics and plot elements, which we can only imagine, must have been “streng verboten.” 

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza is about as appealing as the afore-mentioned snack. This preposterous account of a 15-year-old h.s. senior in a  Central California town who falls at first sight for a 25-year-old woman in a dead-end job just makes no sense from the first moment: We don’t believe the male character is possible or likely or even likable and the woman, though more sympathetic, is so out-of-character in falling for a guy about half her age - well, it makes no sense at all. So it could still be fun or funny if these two were powerful and eccentric characters, if their pursuit of wealth and of one another and weirdly of a career in acting led to some wit, humor, or even development and maturation of 2 of the misguided, but there’s nothing her I could believe in or care about even for a moment - well, there was one moment (no spoiler but, here: when the guy is arrested by 2 tough cops who rough him up) though that promising episode ends w/ a puff: Sorry, wrong guy.  PTA has a lot of stature in Hollywood, but who really likes or liked this movie. It’s a holy, wholly, mess. 

Another under-the-radar series you’ve probably never heard of is Ed Sinclair and Will Sharpe British true-crime miniseries (4 episodes), Landscapers (2021). Based on a true crime about which there’s no mystery - the first episode begins with the VO that the couple was convicted of murder some 20 (?) years back and still proclaim their innocence - this series follows a strange, middle-age couple, Susan (Olivia Colman) and Christopher (David Thewlis) charged with killing Susan’s abusive parents and burying the bodies in the back yard. It’s not so much the details of the case and the trial that make this series work: It’s the suffering and sorrow of the couple, our empathy for them mixed with disgust even revulsion, and some highly unusual narration that at times breaks the 4th wall and that delves into dreamwork and fantasy - and most of all for star turns by the two principals: Colman’s face can express every known emotion, in a flash, and Thewlis is unmatched in various roles as the British misfit and intellectual weirdo. This series deserves more recognition. 

Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm hardly needs a boost from me but I’ll just say that Season 11 loses nothing in the hilarity department. How many series can say that? I’ve only watched a scattered few of the episodes in past years but, new to HBO, we enjoyed watching a full season of the show and I was particularly impressed at how well individual episodes stand up - thanks to the continued wrangling about the smallest aspects of the protocols of life, e.g., tucking sweaters in our not, how men should and shouldn’t embrace, et al, while maintaining a narrative arc of equal hilarity across the 10 episodes of the season: in this case LD’s attempt to repeal the local ordnance requiring a “five-foot fence” around a swimming pool - all because a burglar drowned in LD’s unfenced pool and he finds himself threatened by a relative of the deceased with a huge lawsuit for negligence - but there’s an out, case will be dropped if LD casts guy’s daughter in his latest sitcom, which is OK but she’s terrible and so forth. All funny and at times poignant. 

Carol Reed’s 1949 thriller, The Third Man, is fun and beautiful to watch, all filmed in eerie b/w on streets of the near-deserted postwar Vienna as the protagonist, Holly played Joseph Cotton, seeks his vanished friend Harry Lyme, played brilliantly by Orson Welles, in fact many people probably think OW directed this or starred in it - in fact he has only one speaking scene before the long, complex chase at the end through the underground sewer system of Vienna, a symbol, obviously of the sinuous and rotting system of postwar management - and perhaps of European prewar life as well. The plot doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense - script by Graham Greene in the all-star production - but that doesn’t matter as the acidic, disillusioned dialog, the great manhunt at the end, and the weird ride on the Ferris wheel all are fun to watch. As to listening, I am definitely not a fan of the zither music that scores the entire film - totally annoying and not especially appropriate for the setting, either. 

The rogue McKay-Sirota comet heads toward Earth and global extinction, Don’t Look Up, turns out to be not a conventional world-on-the-brink thriller at all but a serio-comic, ironic, message-bearing, fun if too much on the nose and too easy to gloat about look at how a corrupt administration hand-in-hand with high-tech heavy donor trillionaires creat global confusion as half the world (or at least the country) fails to recognize the global threat and mocks those who do - does this sound familiar? DiCaprio as scientist though hardly world-renowned is part of team that discovers the comet gives a career performance in stepping out of character, Jennifer Lawrence good as always, Timothee Chalamet shows some range, Mark Rylance as a Steve Jobs-type is great, too - lots of fun in this sometimes message-heavy production that, like the comet, feels at times too close for comfort. 

Elliot's Watching February 2021: The Dig, Tavernier, Barry, The White Tiger, Call My Agent, Antonioni, Grigris, Promising Young Woman, The Father, Tarkovsky, First Cow, Minari

 The British film The Dig (2021) tells of the “based on a true story” account of the excavation of an Anglo-Saxon funeral ship (a great leader or warrior was entombed in this ship, hauled to land) in a Sussex field of burial mound in 1938. The excavation was commissioned by the widowed landowner, Mrs. Pretty (!)(Carrie Mulligan and overseen by an excavator whom she hired, against the encouragement of, well, just about everyone who tried to get her to hire a respected archeologist rather than this unassuming, working-class guy with a passion for historical preservation. Against all odds (except those of movie plots) the dig was successful and led to contributions to the British Museum - tho the excavator, Basel Brown (Ralph Fiennes) received no credit until decades later (the film never clarifies exactly when, nor whether Brown was even alive to see his name in the museum). This is all to the good, yet I wished this story could have been told as a documentary; rather, the film indulges in numerous cliches, strives to build a back story about a young woman on the dig who’s in an unhappy marriage, lots of stuff about the eve of WWII - has there ever been a British film about the first half of the 20th C that did bring in the war?, about the early death of Mrs. Pretty, the plight of her poor, sweet 9-year-old son, and characters who are either extremely likable or extremely not. All this claptrap made the potentially good film, w/ lots of good information and much beautiful photography of the region, seem about least  half-hour too long. Special criticism for the musical score, drenched in melodrama and intruding on virtually every potentially moving scene, blaring at us and telling us what we should be feeling rather than letting the British actors, all of them pros, tell the story. 

Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon (1981 - aka Clean Slate) is a kind of weird but interesting film about a hapless chief of police in a small village in French West Africa, a place ripe with corruption and racism and w/ extremely loose morals. The protagonist, Philippe Noiret, is at first picked on and kicked around (literally, in one memorable scene) but various tough guys and gangsters in the town, and his wife, clearly, is cheating on him w/ a man whom she pretends is her brother - and there’s little Lucien (Noiret) can or will do about these humiliations - but eventually, he strikes back and takes advantage of his position and of the lack of any overbite and kills those who mistreated and humiliated him - including the husband of the woman with whom he’s having an affair, played by a young, dynamic Isabelle Huppert. The story line is surprisingly engaging, though any viewer today will be troubled by the treatment of the black community, quite peripheral in most of this film, which in itself is a commentary. When the characters do interact w/ the black population, it’s only to mistreat and abuse (or kill) them - a terrible expose of the worst of colonialism. Noiret is a bit of a philosopher as well, and his comments on the colonial culture in Africa are sometimes surprising and illuminating. Interestingly, this film was adapted from a novel by American author Jim Thompson, whose novel was set in the American South (I would guess Noiret’s philosophical bent owes something to this source material); it’s strange how well this film fit in with a completely different culture and milieu - or was it really that different? Viewer, be prepared for a # of scenes of abuse of women - although rest assured that the women get in their own licks as well. 

Some of the good comedic miniseries work because we can identify w/ the lead characters or we can at least recognize in them the characteristics of people we know. Others work because they are so different from anyone we know or are likely to encounter. Some of the best combine the two elements, bring a character who seems somewhat “like us” and thrust him/her into an entirely alien world: best example probably Breaking Bad. The HBO series Barry, starring Bill Hader, does Breaking Bad to a comic rather than dramatic effect, and does so really well, at least thru the first season. Hader’s Barry Block is an extremely unlikely hitman for hire; at the outset, he’s preparing to assassinate a young man in LA, and as part of his scheme he follows the targeted victim who, as it happens, is attending an acting class. Barry finds himself drawn into the class dynamics and realizes that he wants to give up his life of crime and become an actor - a premise that leads to all sorts of plot twists and hilarious predicaments: A group of Chechen criminals get Barry into their sites, and a rival gang of comically inept Bolivians declare war on the Chechens… well, you’v got to see it. A particular strength is the focus on the acting class, where many of the characters have to excel at something really difficult, deliberately bad acting. Barry/Hader does plenty of that as well, but in the scenes that he plays with passion - including some Shakespeare and some “improv,” we see Hader’s ranger, which is wide 

Ramin Bahrani’s The White Tiger (2021), based on Aravind Adiga’s novel, has so much going for it that I feel a little guilty about some quibbles, which I’ll get to in a moment. First, the strengths: extraordinary cinematography capturing, as best I can tell, the look and feel of a variety of contemporary Indian landscapes and peoplescapes, including impoverished village life, crowded urban settings, luxurious living in the new India of commerce and skyscrapers (much like Miami, as M noted). We see the sometime beauty of the countryside, but never sentimentalized, always fringed with the dangerous or the unsavory. No film I’ve seen gets down better the contrast in India, far beyond what we know in the States, of extreme poverty and extreme wealth, the high and low of life - one comparison would be the great, under appreciated Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance. Adarsh Gourav owns the movie, playing the title role of Balram, raised in extreme poverty in a remote village but with an acute intelligence that rises above the total incompetence of the educational system in the village and aspires to wealth and greatness and who sees his opportunity open as he becomes a driver for a corrupt, noxious family of businessman/mobsters. We see the many moral, ethical, and psychological accommodations B must make to wile his way into this family and to please his “master,” a young, liberal, somewhat “westernized” man who thinks he can be pals with his driver without the slightest understanding of the social distance between them. A crisis ensues - foretold in the opening sequence - that tests everyone’s morality. I won’t go into that, but without any spoilers it’s worth noting that the film seems to diminish in its last 20 minutes or so, as B improbably gains a foothold in the new economy and accrues some wealth; this element of the plot seems rushed through and not well conceived. I’m also a little bothered that the film, obviously hewing closely to the source novel, is narrated scene by scene by B, through the strange device of his writing a letter to a visiting politician from China: Wha worked in the novel, at times feels a little tedious and over-controlled in the movie, where I’d have preferred that Bahrani had let some of the scenes play out longer on their own.That said, still worth watching!

Giving lots of props here to the team that put together the great series from France, Call My Agent/Dix Percent, a hilarious, insightful, and at times moving series about the daily struggles, life and work, among a team of film movie agents in a Paris office. The catch is that in each episode a different actor plays himself/herself, usually as a neurotic narcissist. This tack was I’m sure much more of a hit in Fr., as few of the “stars” are known to American viewers - w/ exceptions of Sigourney Weaver and Isabell Huppert (in finale to season 3). What’s particularly creditable in S4 is that it was obvious that the plot lines were just beginning to become repetitious and out of steam; parting of knowing how to do a great series is in knowing how to quit - and to go out on your own terms, and this is 100 percent true for the CmA team. The plot lines in the final series all point toward the end, and the final episode (#6) is what I would call a brilliant denouement, right down to the hilarious last line (which I won’t divulge!). By the end, the characters are much more than just “types,” and the show is more than just a send-up. Check it out - unless you want to wait for the rumored English remake from the UK? 

I’ve seen Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) several times over the course of many years, but of course as one of the true classics of world cinema, it’s a movie worth coming back to time and again - so much I didn’t see or comprehend in earlier viewings, so much I’d forgotten. The story line, pretty elementary as such, is that a young woman from a wealthy but perhaps unsavory business/construction family goes off with her lover (Sandro), her best friend (Claudia - a killer role for Monica Vitti), and a few other pals for a weekend jaunt via yacht to explore some unpopulated island off the coast of Sicily. During the course of the visit, Anna vanishes (and we never learn precisely what happened to her); a rescue crew finds no sign of her - but Sandro and Claudia return to the mainland and embark on a search for the missing young woman, during the course of which they become lovers - leading us to suspect Sandro of some ulterior motives, but nothing’s quite nailed down. It’s this ambiguity that drives the film, as well as MA’s unique style of editing and storytelling: many key moments in the narrative are just skipped over or unexplained, and some of the scenes, though the lead us nowhere, are just plain weird and mysterious (without being supernatural or “dream-like”), notably a brief visit to an uninhabited village (It’s not a town, it’s a cemetery, Vitti says),a weird encounter with an apothecary and his extremely unhappy young wife who claims to have seen the missing Anna, a small city that seems to be inhabited only by men, the crowded nightclub toward the end that arises out of nothing at all. While Anna/Vitti is sympathetic throughout, much less can be said for Sandro, a liar, cad, and opportunist, evident to us all time but never to the naive if tough-sounding Anna, who, we learn late in the film, is the only one in her group of so-called friends who wasn’t born into wealth. MA doesn’t ay it all out - so much is told by nuance and innuendo - but it’s in many ways a tragic film, moving toward a cool, strange, yet perhaps inevitable conclusion. 

A brief note on Season 2 of the HBO series Barry (Bill Hader), which continues the pace of Season 1 w/ some really hilarious sequences, often based on the most unlikely of premises (as is the show itself, in which Barry, an ex-Marine, enters post-military life as a hired assassin, but is never comfortable in the least w/ his work - and tries to break away from the life of violence to become an actor) such as Barry taking on the role of combat trainer for a Chechen drug/crime gang or Barry hired to assassinate a guy who turns out to be a Tai Kwan Do Olympian so during the killing scene the two of them pretty much destroy the guy’s apartment and a nearby Fields supermarket - never for a second believable but, as with all the violence in this series, so far beyond the pale that it’s funny. The particular highlight, for me though, is Barry’s struggle to become an actor, with the terrific theater director played by Henry Winkler pushing him to tell his life story in his class exercises, which is the last thing he wants, and in particular Barry’s attempt stage a scene from the life of his sometime girlfriend, Sally, played by Sarah Goldberg - a rising star I would think -, as she tells the story of breaking up w/ her ex and Barry nearly cracks up during the sequence, all the more painful for him and her but all the better for the routine. Great look at inside the life of aspiring actors w/ varying degrees of talent and integrity - seemed quite accurate from what I know.  2/14

It would be easy and unfair to say of Mahamat Saleh Haroun’s 2013 film Grigris as the best film from Chad you’re likely ever to see. It’s actually a really excellent feature by any measure - short, emotional, and to the point. The plot involves the eponymous Grigris (his stage name or nickname), played beautifully by Soulémane Démé, who has a fantastic bar/nightclub act of solo dancing - worth seeing this just for the first few minutes if nothing else; after the opening sequence we recognize that GG has some disabilities, which I won’t divulge, and that he is struggling with some family crises, notably his beloved stepfather is dying of some kind of lung disease and needs money to pay for treatment and care. Over the course of the film we see the incredible poverty that permeates every facet life in this struggling country. One way out, of course, is crime, and GG stupidly gets involved in a ring that smuggles gasoline out of the country - which nearly becomes his undoing. Meanwhile, he develops a huge crush on a beautiful woman who hired him to shoot photos (his sideline - he recognizes it’s not a likely enterprise in the dawn of iPhones) for a fashion-modeling contest (which she does not win) - they are the most unlikely of couples, esp when GG learns about her unsavory history. In the end, after much drama, they make a great escape and settle for a time in her native village, which is entirely populated by women and children, as the men are all off for season field work. The conclusion is a powerful and surprise demonstration of the power of women. I totally enjoyed watching this film, and my only question is: Why hasn’t it been adapted and made into a contemporary American film?, which of course would probably totally ruin it. C’est la vie. 2/14

The Emerald Fennell (writer & director) film Promising Young Woman (2020), another star vehicle for the versatile Carey Mulligan (compare w/ her completely different equally convincing role in the recent The Dig), who even does her mid-American accent perfectly, is a dark thriller (though w/ its amusing moments) that requires an incredible amount of willing suspension of disbelief (I don’t want offer any spoilers but let’s just say it would be literally impossible for Cassy/Mulligan to embark on her vendetta against men without herself coming to serious harm) and a willingness or even eagerness to buy into the story premise that - there’s no other way to put this - literally all men are sexual predators, aided by pretty much everyone in a complicit society. Get over these two hurdles, however, and the film is, I have to concede, witty, surprising at times, and, most important, a dire warning to those who would exploit or condone male sexual brutality and a flag-raise to feminism and female solidarity. The film, for a time, tricks us into thinking that there may, somewhere, be a few good men - I wish it hadn’t been so tendentious - but I have to admit I was totally caught up in the developing story line and felt some glee in seeing the right guys get their comeuppance, to put it mildly, even if the plot kind of creaked its way through the final scenes as loose ends were (loosely) tied. Clearly, Fennell and her team never shy from controversy the need to make lead characters “likable” (sad to see Connie Britton in a villainous role) - they go all out from the first scene. So I don’t think it’s a “likable” film, but it will get you talking, thinking, and taking stock: Who hasn’t done something in their past that now is shameful, or worse? 2/15

Florian Zeller’s The Father (2020), never quite get away from its place of origin as a stage play (also Zeller’s in French no less) but no matter - it’s an extremely powerful and disturbing portrayal of a man (Anthony Hopkins, who owns this show) in the throes of Alzheimer’s, being cared for to a degree by his daughter (another fine role for the ubiquitous Olivia Coleman) who tells him she will be leaving shortly to live abroad in Paris with the partner - or will she? The genius of this film - one of several in recent years on this heart-breaking topic, including the recent Elizabeth Is Missing - is that we’re never quite sure of our point of view. Are we seeing the family and caretakers as they try to manage The Father’s illness and needs - a process that strains and upsets all of the characters - or is everything, including the betrayals and major and minor spats about their obligations to the father, seen only in the mind of the father, who is always disoriented and suspicious (suspects that his caretaker stole his watch - obviously she didn’t - and also “suspects” that egoistic son-in-law wants him out of the flat and placed in a home: We see that scene, but is it “real,” or the father’s hallucination and paranoia? The result is an especially provocative film that keeps you thinking, and closely watching, straight to the end.  2/17

It’s hard to believe that Andrei Tarkovsky’s Soviet-era scifi (loosely) drama Stalker was filmed in 1979; if you didn’t know the date, you’d for sure think it was Tarkovsky’s take on the ruins of Chernobyl (which imploded in 1986). In brief the novel follow three men - The Writer, the Professor, and the eponymous Stalker, who serves as their guide on a journey of discovery through what the call The Zone and The Room. Why they make this journey is never entirely clear, at least to me, but it seems to be some sort of existential challenge and voyage of self-discovery. None of that made sense to me at any time in the movie, in particular at the conclusion when they wax philosophical - so don’t watch this movie for plot or character-development in any conventional sense. But the movie is a visual and atmospheric masterpiece, as we watch the 3 men pass through a landscape of industrial ruin and devoid of any human habitation of presence - very much as we would imagine part of the abandoned land around the Chernobyl plant might look today. Tarkovsky is known for his long takes, and he uses them abundantly here as the men proceed on their torturous journey: an allegory for life itself? for history? Who knows? At the end, the Stalker, returned to the good graces of his family (at the outset his wife was furious w/ him for his taking on another visit to the Zone), lies in bed, comforted, and talks about his lack of respect for the men he’d guided because of their obsession with wealth and success - which is not anything I picked up anywhere in this movie and I suspect was carved into the story line so as to please Soviet censors. All told, Stalker is a nearly unique and a uniquely powerful film for its visuals and its landscape, though when it strives toward meaning, insight, or allegory the film is pretty much a mess.  2/21

Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2020), based on Jonathan Raymond’s novel The Half Life, has gotten tremendously positive reviews across the board, but I have to dissent and suggest that part of this enthusiasm has built on Reichardt’s terrific line-up of indie favorites that combine in a unique way the quiet subtleties of characters lonely and distressed with elements of adventure and expeditionary travel (see Meek’s Cutoffk, Wendy & Lucy, Old Joy, e.g.). This film though seems off the mark; yes, she gives us a terrific sense of the hardships and brutality of life on the Western frontier in the early 19th-century. The narrative concerns two men who meet tip at a trading post for the nascent trapping (beaver pelts) enterprises in the Oregon territory. We see and feel the difficulty of life in these rugged, nearly primitive conditions (for most - the mayor or governor of the territory lives pretty nicely).. The plot, such as it is, involves the two men (one is a baker by trade, the other - far more intelligent and enterprising - is the driving force) concocting a scheme to cook and sell fresh biscuits (they look like fried donuts) in the outpost. To do so, they need one key ingredient - milk - so each night they go out after dark and milk the “first cow” in the settlement, the one owned by the governor. Bad idea! How long could that work? And of course they’re found out, pursued, and eventually the collapse in exhaustion and, we surmise, are found and shot to death by the governor’s men. This is not a spoiler, as the film begins, for some reason, in present-day with a young woman coming across two skeletons side-by-side in a forest clearing. Why begin w/ the end? And aside from the visuals what’s so great about this improbable story line? I admire the film for its simplicity and lack of pretense, but overall I found it to be thin gruel.  2/23

Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical film, Minari (2020), about a Korean-American family of 5 (Dad and Mom, young girl and boy, elderly but lively grandma) trying to establish a small Korean-vegetable farm in rural Arkansas in the 1980s. Chung beautiful captures the struggle, the obstacles (interestingly, never any overt racial discrimination, which surprised me), the aspirations, and the challenges that the family members face - not all that different save for setting than that of almost any immigrant family hoping to attain success in the U.S. Happy families are all alike, etc. - but then again this is not exactly a happy family, which gives the film its strength: relations among the parents are always strained, and the young boy - a terrific Alan S. Kim (David), who was I think 6 when filming started - carries a burden: various medical and psychological issues. At its heart, the film is about the film is about David’s establishing a relationship - at first hostile, but gradually, loving - with his grandmother Youn Yuh-jiong (Sonja), who is also terrific in this sometimes comic role. The film is subtle and moving; though there’s one highly dramatic sequence toward the end, it’s for the most part a domestic drama, full of interior tensions and subtle changes in relationships and attitudes. Much of the film is short from the POV of the children - the camera set just a foot or two above floor or ground level - the Tatami style, which Ozu established - all of which adds to the intimacy that this film establishes and maintains. The title refers to a Korean herb, perhaps similar to arugula?, that thrives on its own when planted in the wild near a source of water. 2/28

Lots of reasons to watch Antonioni's early film The Lady Without Camelias

 Michaelangelo Antonioni's 2nd (?) film, the seldom-seen The Lady Without Camelias (1953), is by no means a great film and I'm not even sure that it was predictive of the success Antonioniha had through the long arc of his career, from Italian neo-realism to such personal statements as L'Aventura and Zabriski Point - but that said it's a lot of fun to watch. On one level it's a typical film-ingenue story: A young woman (Clara - Lucia Bose) working in a shop is spotted by a director and is an instant success, which upends her world: She marries badly, is abused and exploited by her husband, is pushed by various producers into ever-more-demeaning roles, her world's coming apart. But then, a twist: She recognizes that she can never be a star and be content w/ her life, she tells a long-time confidant that she's going to quit the business, but her persuades her to take acting lessons and to become a true actress and not just a beauty, a prop. She follows this advice, but then - surprise again! - nobody wants to cast her in serious roles, and the film ends w/ her doing some publicity still for an obviously terrible and exploitative film. Every view, I think, will get a kick out of the hilarity of a bunch of Italian directors and producers trying to put together a film that will be under budget and that will make revenue. And everyone interest in film - which would include most viewers of this piece of film history - will get a kick out of the many scenes filmed on the famous Cinecitta studios lot, with lots of scenes taking place among half-abandoned sets for other films. Antonioni indulges in some really sharp filmmaking, pushing this melodrama right to the edge: lots of shots using mirrors, complex interior shots in the multilevel ultramodern extravagance where Clara lives, some interest us of jazz piano in the score. It's kind of funny that Lollabrigida and Loren turned down the lead in this film; they obviously would not be convincing as a beautiful starlet whose career was going nowhere. Sadly, Bose is convincing in the role - she's beautiful but suitably plastic and cool-tempered, perfect for a story about a star who can't really act. 

Signs of early greatness in Antonioni's first film

I'm not sure if you could tell from his first film - Story of a Love Affair (1950) - that Michelangelo Antonioni was destined for a great career (Le'Avventura, Blow-up, The Passenger ... ) but it sure stands as evidence that right from the start he could, w/ minimal budget, create a good noir narrative, a distinct sense of time and place, and a few powerful dramatic scenes. The film starts out as a conventional detective story - a middle-aged PI gets the mundane assignment of checking up on the fidelity of the wife of a wealthy manufacturer - and we follow the detective through about the first 3rd of the fil: He checks out the wife's background and we soon learn that before she was married there was suspicion that she and a boyfriend (Guido) were present when Guido's then-fiancee fell to her death in an elevator shaft. Fell? Pushed? It's unclear - but when Guido and the wife learn that a detective has been snooping (they hadn't seen each other in 7 years) they suspect he's investigating the elevator accident. Their suspicions make matters much worse for them, as they plot to do away w/ the husband. Aside from the clever plot twists, which go right to the end of the movie, some of the highlights are the cool jazz score (sax and piano duo); terrific location shots of Italy just 5 years post war w/ some new construction, much war damage, and poverty all around - the vast boulevards and traffic circles almost devoid of cars and trucks and you could just part anywhere anytime even in Milan!; great rich/poor contrasts (the lavish apartment, baronial apartment of the wife/husband and the dingy hotel room where Guido makes do); a great charity dress-auction scene; the argument between Guido and woman on a bridge above railroad tracks and a muddy canal; the test drive of the Maserati; and for a lighter touch the somewhat comic scenes between the detective on the street and his boss back at the office pressing for results. All told, a really good film by many measures - surprising that it hasn't been adapted and remade in a contemporary setting (which would probably miss the whole point and ruin it, but still ... )

The cruel and destructive people in Antonioni's The Red Desert

Antonioni's The Red Desert (1964) is worth watching for the cinematography and design alone - so many great shorts of weirdly colored interiors, of the horrifying nightmare landscape of a vast gas-fired power complex, of the ruination of the earth around the complex through toxic pollution of water and air (this was set far before there were any serious attempts at environmental regulation - progress and industry at all cost), beautiful shots of vast commercial freighters passing through fog-shrouded harbors, and of course about a million close-ups of Monica Vitti playing a severely disturbed young woman who's at the center of this movie. It's Antonioni, however, so the pace is deliberative and he dispenses w/ the usual continuity and transitions; many of the sequences make no sense if taken literally (e.g., Vitti in one of the first scenes is with her young son at the scene of a workers' strike at the power plant; she wanders off into the woods and reeds to eat a sandwich - where did her son go?). Essentially, it's a story of distress and despair - Vitti has been suicidal since a strange auto accident, and none of the people in her life seem able, or even willing, to communicate w/ her about her anxiety and disturbances. In fact, the people around her are horrible: trying to take advantage of her emotional fragility, casually destructive and violent with one another, and equally destructive with their environment, social, political, and physical: many great scenes of air and water pollution, and the casual indifference of the managers of the power plant to safety and health, from small things like tossing away a sandwich wrapper to the vast, like the yellow poison gas spewing from the huge smokestacks. Great scenes include the drinking scene with 4 couples in a little shack on a commercial wharf that they begin tearing apart incinerating, Richard Harris's crude sexual attack on Vitti, the "tour" of the power plant, the visit to the installation of the telescopes, and ships passing by the wharf in the fog as Vitti wrecklessly drives along the wharf.

Early indicators of Antonioni's style, in Il Grido

I'm not sure if you can really see from Antonioni's 1957 neorealistic, somewhat melodramatic "Il Grido" just how great a director he would become, but it's certainly a film worth watching and it has many of the elements that would come to define Antonioni's later style: first, his willingness to shift the plot focus from one character to another - as Il Grido begins by focusing on a woman who breaks up with her 7-year live-in boyfriend (and father of her daughter), and then rather surprisingly the movie turns out to be about him, not her (think of how the main character in L'aventura is more or less dropped from the plot; his penchant for road movies and travel - as the working-class protagonist of this film leaves his small home town, travels up (?) and down the coast of Italy, trying to find some kind of new, stable, satisfying relationship - eventually returning home in despair (think of the travel in l'aventura, the Passenger); the alienation of the protagonist (see above, plus Blow-up). And then, some unique touches: the extraordinary look at small industrial communities (refineries, mostly) in Italy postwar - the incredible poverty and isolation - seemingly closer to the middle ages than to the modern world, except for the occasional, rare appearance of a bus, a motorcycle, and a motorboat - and interesting that the protagonist works in a refinery (oil?) and takes up a job in a gas station; an incredibly odd scene in which the young daughter walks through a field and finds herself among a crowd of zombie-like men - are they mentally ill? shell shocked veterans? it's never explained - it just scares her, and us - the kind of scene that Fellini (and many imitators) would make their signature, but here it is, on a field off a highway, seemingly out of nowhere.

After all these years, Antonioni's Blow-up holds up well

After all these years and countless pop-culture references, Antonioni's "Blow-up" holds up very well, and not just as a cultural artifact, though it is that - in fact it was a a cultural artifact even in its own time, as people watched it to get a glimpse of the swinging, artistic London scene of the 60s, seems a million years ago, Pleistocene, you could drive around London in an open Rolls Royce and find parking on the street, anywhere (at least in this movie) - but as a beautiful and well-crafted story of alienation and mystery. I encourage anyone to compare this story about a commercial artist (photographer) so alienated from life and emotions and feelings and sexual drive that he is callous to everyone and experiences life, to the extent that he does at all, only through his lens, with the recent and entirely drab and unimaginative Somewhere - well, there's no comparison. Not that this film is truly about personality - we learn and know nothing about the background or back story of any character and I believe, I may be wrong, that only one character, the photographer's agent, even has a name - but it's about a certain style and mood that Antonioni captures perfectly, with his many unusual shot compositions, the strange pastoral scenes in the London park where a crime may or may not have been committed, the studio and apartment seemingly built of oddly juxtaposed angles and facets, the streets of London, what appears to be an industrial SE district, not yet populated by artists but ready for discovery - and most of all the central mystery, never truly resolved as to what the photog sees in his blown-up prints - with the ultimate meaning that it doesn't matter, it's not about a crime but about his life - and then of course the famous closing sequences of the mimes on the tennis court - what a beautiful film!