Even 2nd-tier Bunuel is beter than most movies made today

Even 2nd-tier Luis Bunuel is far above most movies made today (or ever), so his distinctly 2nd-tier but still engaging "Death in the Garden" (1956) is worth seeing, especially for the 2nd half, when the exiled characters make their way through the South American (Mexican, actually) jungle to escape the pursuing armed soldiers. The trek through the jungle has some amazing scenes, as the characters gradually lose their sanity through hunger and privation: cooking the snake, the priest sitting in a rainstorm talking about soft-boiled eggs, most of all the discovery of a wrecked airplane. This is a truly Bunuelian moment in a film that in other ways doesn't bear the marks of his style throughout (it's an adaptation of a novel, and a truly commercial venture). As the scholar Victor Fuentes notes in an interview extra on the disc, the characters in the jungle suddenly are taken with the trappings of bourgoise society - makeup, jewelry, luggage - right in the middle of the jungle. Only the priest gets them to think about the rites for the dead - in fact, the priest comes off better than any other Bunuel religious figure I think. The film does have Bunuel's contempt for authority and for conventional values (Simone Signoret, as Djin, a prostitute, is really great in the role), the diamond miners' riot after an unjust execution is very exciting, reminds me of Battle of Algiers. Film doesn't have the depth and the wonder of some of Bunuel's greatest but worth watching to see how well he handles more commercial material.

Modern Family is a totally enjoyable series that's never condescending

The sit-com series "Modern Family" is a totally enjoyable, funny, clever little romp, never condescending to its characters and, though far-fetched and slapstick at times, always on the near side of credibility. The likable ensemble cast includes a 40ish prosperous couple in which the mom (Julie Bowen) is a bit overprotective (especially as she recalls her wild youth) and the dad (played too much like a 2nd-tier Steve Carrell) buffoonishly thinks he's in "hip" (I text!), the 3 kids includes a young teen daughter somewhat rebellious, brainy daughter, adhd-ish son. In the extended family - an gay uncle and his partner and their adopted baby girl, and the grandpa newly married to a hot Latina and fathering her chubby 10-year-old son. Hm. That's a lot, and a bit hard to follow when you first start watching - even after several episodes I don't have the names of the characters in mind - but the plots of each episode click right along, very well written, clever dialogue, good laugh lines, and a nice feeling of good will without smarminess throughout. We like the characters and tend to laugh with them and at their foibles, as they obviously mean well and try to do well. Series has a bit of a mock-umentary style, a la the Christopher Guest movies and The Office, in which the characters from time to time will address the camera as if sitting for an interview. Not sure how successful this series has been or how long the Lloyd-Levitan creative team will be able to sustain the mood and storyline, but it's an entirely enjoyable series.

Bad is good but not why not great? : Breaking Bad

Haven't watched a lot lately but now have seen most of season 3 of "Breaking Bad" and Bad is good. Not great, but a big step above the many formulaic oddball concept series out there: what if a woman had to raise money by growing pot (weeds), e.g. Breaking Bad (what if a teacher thought he was dying and raised money by cooking meth?) rises above the cheap concept level by treating the characters and their anxieties with real insight and sympathy. The chem teacher, Walt White, is a good guy who's made a bad decision. His wife is a good person trying to do the right thing. It doesn't, however, rise to the level of the greatest series like Sopranos, Wire, maybe Friday Night Lights, because the main characters are not grand enough to carry the whole show (cf Damages, The Shield) and the secondary characters are more like sketches, interchangeable. The plot is good, pretty tense, nicely paced, and the dialogue is generally strong, but again it falls short of greatness - it doesn't give you a sense of a whole world, it doesn't have the assured inside knowledge of the underlife of the drug dealer's world. It flirts a bit with cornball staginess, as the two sinister dealers (twin brothers, apparently) pursue Walt, coming closer to him in each episode, but they're characters out of a comic book or a dumb movie - nobody in real life behaves that way, with silent cruelty. On the plus side, the noose tightens very slowly around Walt, and he's increasingly driven to do crazy things to keep his family together, and it's interesting to see his brother-in-law, a DEA agent, very gradually piece together the truth about the meth manufacturer he's pursuing.

If you can buy in to the premise, a harmless entertainment: Men Who Stare at Goats

It's not hard to like "The Men Who Stare at Goats," but it takes a lot of buy-in to get there. If you can accept, even in a comedy, that the U.S. Army would hire a Vietnam vet officer who's spent years in the counterculture (doing research, supposedly) to develop and lead a special unit devoted to peace and harmony and new age techniques, able to kill without weaponry (that's the staring at goats part), then maybe you can accept this film for what it is - I couldn't make that buy in, but still appreciated the broad humor of the officer, Jeff Bridges - he's getting better with each movie, isn't he? - having his team of soldiers dance and get high - far, far more humor in these scenes than in most other "trippy" scenes from other movies, e.g., the totally flat Steve Martin & Meryl Street It's Complicated. So the plot is preposterous, but there are some laughs along the way: the loathesome Kevin Spacey going into a snit when his psychic powers fail him, for example. Casting of the film is weird, however. Spacey, Bridge, and Clooney are all way too young if we're to believe that they were Vietnam vets or recruited shortly after the war. Ewen Macgregor, as a reporter trying to cover the Iraq war, is way too old for the part and continually has trouble with his American accent. Filmmakers obviously know nothing about American journalism, by the way. All that said and the premise as ridiculous as it is, the movie goes along at a pretty good clip, with some funny scenes - it has nothing to do with real life and nothing to do with war, but it's a harmless entertainment.

Could Shakespeare really have written Henry VIII? Give me rewrite!

Let's go far out on a limb here and criticize...Shakespeare. Well, he didn't write all of "Henry VIII," that's obvious. Had a rare opportunity to see Henry VIII last night, outdoor performance recollecting the many S. in the Park performances I saw as a kid in nyc, my introduction to many of the plays. Never saw HVIII before, which led me to wonder how many in the canon I've seen performed - I know I've missed a few of the giants, oddly enough, over the course of a lifetime. Hm. Anyway, parts of HVIII are typically S-ean, and you can hear when the language, obviously his language, picks up - Wolsey's last speech of course, probably Buckingham's, too, and a few other passages, during which it's not just Jacobean verse, but you start to here working metaphors and images, bringing the characters' thoughts and interior life into shape and form. I also suspect S. wrote several of the more "comic" scenes, teh taverns and the ladies in waiting. If someone else collaborated, it had to be on the long, expository court scenes in which thoughts are not dramatized but just articulated at great length (unless S. was very young when he first wrote it, or very old and mailing it in). Also surprising how S. avoids some of the obvious moral conflicts that should be tearing Henry apart - he would not be so kind to other monarchs he portrayed in the histories and tragedies (and dark comedies, for that matter) - the whole architecture of the play seems to simple for S., at least for the mature S. And of course at the end the whole play becomes a suck-up to Queen Elizabeth - either S. totally caved in (let's just forget that HVIII had a bunch of other wives after Anne Boleyn, none of whom fared well), or a hack was called in to deal with the ending. Give me rewrite!

A movie about social class that avoids all the cliches : The Maid

Among the many things I liked in "The Maid" (La Nana), a Chilean (?) movie cast with, to me, complete unknowns, is how well writer-director stays clear of the upstairs-downstairs cliches; this story about a housemaid in a wealthy South American household, family with 4 kids of a wide range of ages, and how she/the maid feels put upon, overworked, mainly lonely and depressed about her life, at 41 (it opens with her birthday) and with no family of her own and the children in this family growing up to inevitably leave - as it's pointed out to her, they will never care about her to the extent she cares about them. What's great is that the family is really nice - they're not made into cheap targets and caricatures, they try very hard to do what's right for their maid, they get along nicely with one another, their well-to-do but by no means garish or crude, but they're not sentimentalized either, they have flaws and squabbles and make mistakes as we all do. Through the course of the movie we learn more about the maid and her loneliness - she is apparently a virgin at 41 - but she, too, is not sentimentalized of made heroic, she has plenty of faults and she's difficult - you'd probably fire her, if you could. But she grows during the movie, has a breakdown and comes out of it stronger and ready to learn how to get along with others and how to take care of herself and make the best of life. It's by no means an upbeat movie, but much more positive than you think it's going to be. Very well acted and scripted, very simple, like a great play - almost all of the movie takes place inside the house, including the entire first 25 minutes.

Why Big Love does not measure up against The Sopranos

To see two episodes of "Big Love" is to see about 1.5 too many. Episode seen last night, about Bill Hendrickson's announcement of his run for State Senate, complete with about 30 other plot complications including cult happenings, kidnappings, marriages, oedipal strife, border smuggling, meth on Indian reservations, legal wranglings, INS raids, shall I go on?, this list tells you all you need to know about the series. Interesting at times, but jammed with improbable plot elements to the point where you don't understand the characters, much less believe in them. Contrast this with the HBO gold standard, The Sopranos. One of the many things that made that series so great was that it took on a unique culture and both played up the stereotypes and blasted through them. Life in a mob family was in some way completely different from anything you could imagine and in other ways was just like an ordinary American family, with the typical teenage angst, marital squabbles, family jeolousies, and so on. We believed in the more outlandish aspects of the Sopranos way of life because the story was so well grounded in a life we know and understand. In fact, we were equally interested in both aspects of the Sopranos life, and they two - violent and immoral versus ordinary suburban America - played off one another very effectively: could others really treat the Sopranos as an ordinary family? Did they try? Big Love is the opposite - it's a totally whacked out family, and our interest in the series, such as it is, lives or dies totally on the degree of our interest in the exotic. Mine is close to nil.