Elliot’s Watching Feb 2022
West Side Story - barely watchable. Spielberg and Co. decided to expand and narrative aspect of the story, which is by far the worst part - if anything it should be trimmed and just get us to the music and even to the dancing. Overall, the two gangs looked like a ballet corp (or corpse for that matter) and it was hard not to laugh when the gangs get tough, so-called, with each other. Ditto when the do flying leaps, jete’s, pirouettes, whatever on the mean streets of NYC. The 1960s v wasn’t great and probably has not aged well (not as well as Rita Moreno) but it was far, far, better than this mess of a film.
Somebody, Somewhere - speaking of musicals - didn’t do much for me in the first 2 episodes, despite its good hear and good intentions. Just not funny (or sad) enough. As We See It, about a group home for adults on the “spectrum” was much more moving and credible for me, though my viewing partners were not in agreement so I probably won’t see much more of this one, either.
On the other hand…there’s Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, which I first saw around its release date (1982) and I think I was too young to understand or appreciate this work. Or maybe it’s that I saw the movie version and have just finished watching, for the first time, the “theatrical” v., at 5 hours or saw and 5 episodes. I suspect that the film version included all of the emotional highlights, most notably the horrendous interrogations that the evil bishop/stepfather inflicts on the intelligent and sensitive Alexander (young Bergman) - in other words, the movie version was almost unrelenting horror whereas the theatrical presents a broader social canvas - esp in the amazing first episode that intro’s us to the Ekdahl (Bergman) family, which at first seems fun-loving the boisterous in their lavish xmas celebration - and we recognize, over the course of the episode, one night, we see that the family is deeply flawed by infidelity and failure. In any event, the series is breathtaking, and the Bishop has to be about the most noxious and hateful character in any dramatic film of the century.
Other shows I will not finish include: The After Party, juvenile and preposterous; Red Notice (feature film) thinks it’s another James Bond except the characters are bits of fluff and the plot is absurd without being funny, charming, or devious; South Side, yes I did laugh a few times at this series about the Black community and its denizens in Southside Chicago - but not funny enough to hold my attention over a full season; Gilded Age, paper thin and completely unengaging in first episode, not even close to the standards that the BBC has - can anyone not see where this is headed? - so why not just adapt one of the great novels or stories?of the era rather than try to write something anew? And adding more to this list: What went wrong for Julia Garner/Shonda Rhymes on the interminable series Inventing Anna, which seemed phony and strange and just plain uninteresting from the outset, despite the all-star lineup. Do they have any idea how a newspaper/magazine office manages? Do they have any sense of how to create dramatic tension as reporter tries to convince her editors that this story, of a woman who faked her way into the upper crust of NY society, would be interesting or tense in the least? No, no, and no. Sorry
However, what a nice surprise to come across the under-the-radar Best Pic nominee Coda; it won’t win the Oscar, for obvious reasons (sorry, Apple TV), but it sure could attract a wider audience - a terrific, heart-warming, never soporific or gratuitous, of a teenager girl who works on her family fishing boat out of Gloucester while a full-time h.s. student with dreams of becoming a pro singer, with the catch that her family member all have complete deafness. The film gives us unusual insight into the world of those without hearing and is full of surprises and twists of fate as the young woman breaks free, to a degree, from her family - but finds a way to bridge the gap between her aspirations, which her parents and bro can obviously only partially appreciate if that, and the need and desire to be close to those who love her no matter what.
Hagai Levi’s re-take on Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage doesn’t quite measure up against the original, but it’s still a powerful and sometimes frightening intense, close look at a youngish (30+) Boston-area couple and who they deal directly and painfully with issues that arise over the course of their endangered marriage: pregnancy and medical abortion, infidelity, separation, sexual longing, and, in the episode closest the Bergman original, heart-felt reparation. The series reads like 5 intense two-person plays, and the leads, Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac give it their all. Probably not a show for everyone, but in an age of too much streaming drivel and lackluster comedy, this series wins props for intensity and credibility.
Then there’s Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959); in my admittedly fading memory the 1934 v was more powerful and moving, but the Sirk remake (both based oh Fannie Hurst’s novel) is far the more lush and operatic - too much so, by today’s standards, which tend to favor minimalism and subtlety rather than over-the-top melodrama. So much depends on the score! As you watch it try to imagine it w/out the scare and it would be laughable. The story, groundbreaking in its day for its honesty about race relations, today looks too condescending at best and puzzling in ways that really aren’t so great: It’s a “passing” story, with the young girl, a light-skinned Black child who identifies even from an early age as “white” and as she gets older she rejects her Black mother and is embarrassed any time her mother is on the scene. Despite its strengths as a mother-daughter drama, the film doesn’t really give voice to the Black girl’s struggle: She’s right, in a way; to ID as black in the 1950s was to cut oneself off from most opportunities for success. The overacting, the schmalz, make the film laughable at ties, but it’s best to accept it as a product of its era and ponder: How would a director/writer take on this theme today?
The much anticipated season 4 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, at least based on the first episode, is a crashing bore with almost no good laugh lines and some long passages that are painful to watch, notably the long ride on the ferris wheel; yes, Rachel Brosnahan can still bring it - and Susie Myerson commands the screen at times, but something’s missing here and I think it’s comedy. I can’t be the only on who thinks Tony Shaloub is just plain not funny. But what about Brosnahan? In this season so far, which is as far as I’ll get, she just seems angry and deranged. Anger is not necessarily humor. This show has drifted far from its roots. And btw the same holds true for Ali Wong, whose 3rd Netflix comedy special is, based on the first half-hour, just a rant - provocative, sure, but not really funny, just gross and indecourous. Loved her previous special - which has real insight into relationships, class, ethnicity - but this one just was going nowhere good, despite the hilarity from the audience (much good-will laughing and cheering, as with so many comedy audiences - handpicked?).
First noting that we have returned to As We See It, a moving and provocative series about a group home for 3 young adults with severe autism and their medical aide, a terrific series that gives us insight into a world and a malady about which most of us know little, plus it’s comic without being condescending and dramatic without being melodramatic or, for that matter, predictable.
Over past couple of days have watching Max Ophuls’s late (last?) film, The Earrings of Madame de… (1953), which unlike above series (in every way) is melodramatic and romantic and an evocation of a long-gone era - Gilded Age Paris - with a distinct focus on the world of the aristocratic and privileged, though not without several snide remarks and actions throughout that, if we absorb these moments, show us privilege, cruelty, and obduracy of the aristocracy on its last breath. The main reason to watch the film is a technical one: the astonishing camera work of Ophuls, the camera moving so much as it follows the characters through and across various settings, most of them interiors of a belle-epoch mansion somehow brought to life and re-created by MO’s design team. The camera work - esp in the ballroom-dancing sequences - is literally dizzying. And how can you get enough of the performances of the 3 leads, Charles Boyer, Danie;le Darrieux, and especially famous director Vittorio DeSica? The plot - based on a then-current novel set ca 1900 - is almost incidental; the eponymous earrings figure in several white lies and social upheavals and by the end I couldn’t keep the earring-story clear in my muddled head - but there’s no need for that, just watch what’s before you and it’s amazing and unlike that of any filmmaker since (and few previous, Welles being one). BTW we never learn Madame’s name - every time its uttered some intrusion - the noise of a passing carriage, for example - blurs it out.
I had it completely wrong about the Netflix doc Crit Camp, for some reason expecting this doc to be a heart-warming visit to a camp for children with disabilities, much like Paul Newman’s much-touted camp, but it happens that Crit Camp is so much more and so different from my expectations. It begins as a focus on a camp called Jen Ed, but always by the participants called Crip Camp, using much documentary, low-quality video footage from the 70s or so (not sure of precise dates) of a left-wing, counterculture camp for these admirable and brave young people; the spirit of the camp led to the formation of an advocacy group by some of the campers, who over the years built a national, even an international, recognition of the rights of those w/ disabilities and fought some valiant battles against authority, many of whom - even in the Carter administration - were reluctant to sponsor legislation guaranteeing most basic right: access, transportation, housing, schooling that was not “separate but equal” - a tremendous example of the power of advocacy and peaceful demonstration. The world has changed radically, thanks in this regard to the brave souls who found their voices in youth in this “special” camp - a powerful documentary that will bring you near tears and make you proud of what can be and has been accomplished.
I’m no big fan of ballet - in fact I don’t understand it at all and I skip any story in the arts section that’s about dance - but the 1948 weepy The Red Shoes (Powell and Pressburger) is a good entertainment in so many ways: start w/ the highly stylized Red Shoes dance full of illusion magic, something not able to re-create in a live performance but that lifts the performance to another level in film; also, Red Shoes gets as well as any other film I’ve seen at the real tensions and emotions of the cast - stars, extras, business interests - all the love and jealousy and camaraderie and exploitation and irascibility, all there and seeming to this viewer on the money, nothing romanticized. The end of the show is operatic and over the top, but it’s earned the right to that - stepping out of the real world of dance/the arts and all of the attendant struggles for success and balancing stage life with personal life; a beautiful film just to watch, right up the the conclusion which is a cornball. Reminded me altogether of Children of Paradise - which was made at roughly the same time, but Red Shoes feels much more contemporary (of course it was a present-day setting, unlike CofP) and also of Day for Night. Fun to watch, and, as the Criterion Channel notes, beautiful use of technicolor.
