Moody music, mumbled dialog, grainy photography - do not necessarily make a movie a work of art

So we sit down with the fam last night to enjoy some good quality time watching a movie about a serial killer - and what do we get? A pretentious, crappy movie in which the villain (spoiler, I guess, but if you can't figure it out why are you even reading this?) turns out to be the evil SHOPPING MALL DEVELOPER! Gosh, why don't filmmakers leave these guys alone? All they wanna do is make shopping better and more convenient for everyone. So what if they clear away slum housing to build their palaces? Does that mean they also have to be child molesters, too? I'll never see a shopping-mall developer again without a shudder of fear, thanks a lot. The movie - "Red Riding Trilogy Part 1: 1974" - is allegedly, supposedly based on the story of the Yorkshire ripper of the 1980s, but a quick look at any reference will give new definition to the word "loosely," as this killer is a child molester and torturer, not a slayer of prostitutes. Just call it a series murder investigations and police corruption - at least that would be more honest. It starts off reasonably well, but becomes increasingly preposterous as the plot unfolds - one of those stories in which the improbable hero (in this case, a journalist eager for a scoop) - endures way, way beyond the possible realm of physical endurance, and ultimately you have to say: why don't the bad guys just kill him? They've killed everyone else? They obviously leave him alive just so that there will be a story. All the moody music, grainy photography, and mumbled dialog in almost incomprehensible dialect will not turn an ordinary police procedural into a work of art, sorry.

Two films we abandoned

Started and abandoned two movies last night, for two different reasons. First tried "You Kill Me," a supposed mob comedy with a fairly elite cast (Ben Kingsley stars) - alcoholic mob enforcer in Buffalo screws up a job and the boss sends him to SF to dry out. Why San Francisco, he asks? Because I said so, boss replies, and that's about the level of dialog and credibility. Nothing (in the first half-hour) was believable in any way - it was just a script writer's lark, some guys trying to latch on to success of other mob comedies that actually had some wit and some characters you could believe in for 2 hours or even 20 seconds. Finally gave up when Kingsley takes a job in a funeral parlor (have we ever seen that before?) and comes on to a client maybe a third his age and she's pleased about that. A Hollywood, and the aged male titans of the realm! Second we started is the somewhat renowned Cleo from 5 to 7, Agnes Varda's best-known film, circa 1960. It's actually fun to watch some of the great sequences of Cleo walking along the streets of Paris, looking great (she's a pop star) as Paris looks poor and dirty, as it did then still recovering from the war. Varda's camera follows her in long takes, shot from above, to a jazzy soundtrack (also some Bizet?). Compared with movies of its era, it's much more documentary in look, filmed on location, almost improvisational at times, lots of rough edges, shot as if in real time (two hours), and focused on the woman's POV by a woman director - and yet, today, after a half-hour, it seemed tedious, the wit highly dated, the tension flaccid - an important film of its day and worth watching if you have a lot of time and patience, but not a film that stands up well today, sadly.

A nearly great and nearly completely ignored movie: Lantana

"Lanatana" is a movie too good, too quiet, and too true to really ever find its deserved audience - makes you sick. This Australian film is one of those multiple point of view, several strands to the story, you're not clear how or if the strands will intersect, then ultimately the whole design become clear to you. LA Confidential did this well years ago; Crash won an Oscar for this a few years back, and I thought it was a pretentious, phony piece of crap (though I do like Thandi Newton, who doesn't?). Lanatana was low budget, and so much smarter than Crash and its ilk - following the story of a cop (Anthony LaPaglia) as he embarks on an affair and puts his marriage at risk, a psychiatrist (Barbara Hershey) who's grieving the death of her daughter and worried about the state of her marriage), a single woman (seductress, separated, dangerous), a young couple (stressed, tempestuous, sweet), a gay man (patient of Hershey's, comabative), a few others. The movie's so smart that it sets out some clues that each of the 4 of us watching thought we were following - we said, come on, this is so obvious, we thought the movie was heading toward trightness - then it surprised us in a lot of ways - and unlike so many movies and TV series with "surprises," these were all credible and in character. And the film also has a serious dramatic dimension. Yes, it's about a murder investigation (we see the body in the first frames), but it's truly about people coming to terms with marriage and trust and faith and infidelity. My only quibble really is the relentless jazzy mood music (I think Crash had this, too - why?). Otherwise a near-great and nearly completely ignored movie.

Why "Mother" is a great movie

"Mother" is a hugely powerful and totally engrossing Korean movie and though I'm not sure, I'll have to check this out, I believe the writer-director must also be the force behind the equally great (maybe superior) film Oasis. Mother is in many ways a conventional crime & punishment story - young man with significant mental disabilities (retardation, at the least) is accused of murdering a young woman and is clearly unable to defend himself in any way. His way over-involved mother, an impoverished vendor of herbs and unlicensed acupuncturist, takes up the case and investigates the facts to try to prove her son's innocence. I will not reveal any spoilers here for all should see this film. At times, the investigation does fall prey to the movie convention of many unlikely clues and hints falling easily into the hands of the investigator - though it does stay on the near side of credibility - unlike the utterly ridiculous plotting of Dragon Tattoo, for example. But more than the mechanism of the plot, it's a great movie because of its exploration of characters and relationships, especially that of the boy and his mother, and because of the mother's gradual and surprising awakening as the movie progresses. Great movies (and novels) are about crisis, collision of forces, leading to growth, change, knowledge - and this is the epitome. Could it be remade as an American movie, and (sad to say) find the audience it deserves? Possibly, though a big part of its beauty is its exploration of a Korean culture, poor, gritty, uneducated, that we in America never anticipate and don't often see.

Makes Bergman look like a Disney cartoon : The White Ribbon

Haneke's (sp?) "The White Ribbon" is a totally unusual and completely engrossing movie, even at nearly 2.5 hours, and I'm going to give a lot away so if you haven't seen it, do so before reading this any further. It's a movie in which evil doings permeate a small village in early 20th-century Austria (I think, maybe Germany) - the village doctor badly injured when someone sets up a tripwire for his horse, a boy abducted and abused, a boy with Downs severely beaten, a man hangs himself, a woman falls through floorboards to her death, an angry field hand destroys crops, a girl mutilates a pet bird, and so forth. There are implications that these evens are caused by one person, and as the movie progresses just about everyone in the village is suspect: kids are strange and mean, as in say Lord of the Flies or any of the movies about possession, the minister is a martinet and totally cruel to his children, the doctor is an embittered horrible soul, the baron is mean and a martinet, and so forth. Ultimately, it is clear that no single person could have done all these things, and you suddenly (or maybe gradually) realize that the whole village is sick and capable of any sort of atrocity - and all are responsible - it's a geopolitical allegory, without the allegorical trappings. Beautiful to watch in a start and mysterious way (it's in b/w), and some of the scenes of nastiness and marital strife and verbal cruelty are painful to watch and powerful and make Bergman look like a Disney cartoon.

Rules of the disaster genre : Fat people die, crude foreigners die...

Another entry in the movie as special effects marathon video game gone gargantuan is "2012," a ridiculously titled movie that will fall at the top of most alphabetical lists unfortunately. It's not a horrible movie by any means, although it ought to be - there are so many lines spoken with such grave earnestness that the script must be a hoot to read, if there even is one - because there are enourmous stretches with no words at all (good for foreign distribution!), just orchestral crescendos and amazing scenes of disgitalized disaster. The stakes just get higher with each one of these movies - back to The Day the Earth Stood Still or Godzilla, which would look so tame and lame today on through Titanic, through Independence Day and Armageddon - and now it's not a matter of seeing some buildings fall but here we see the Earth's core give way and the entire continent slides into the ocean, creating a new Waterworld (to summon another movie that was a disaster in every possible way). Guess what? It's fun to watch this stuff, for a while, until you (or I) eventually can't take any more - not from excitement but from torpor. Ugh, the plot line such as it is, so banal and so predictable - which couples will get (back) together, who will survive. Law of the genre: fat people die, crude foreigners die, sensitive/weak scientists die, lead actors survive, cute kids survive. I guess you could call this movie summer escapism, but it's escapism without a heart or a purpose - the few artful movies in the disaster genre do tell a good story and do get you to feel for the characters and root them on - but this one will keep you entertained and leave you with thrumming eardrums and that's all.

Exotic, Universal, Silent - Ozu's I Was Born, But...

Because it's Ozu, you know that one way another, even though it's a silent film (!) and probably 70 years old and a grain print and outdated in many ways - it's got to be at least worth watching once, and so it is with Ozu's "I was Born, But..." (great title!). Not a great movie but a valuable curiosity, both for its exoticism and its universality. Exotic: Japan in the 20s/30s looks almost like another planet, the suburbs (of Tokyo?) abject rural poverty, without even roads, just ruts for cars to go through, houses and buildings appearing randomly with no planning, like a spreading blight, yet families trying to make their lives clean and tidy - a picket fence and a doghouse, in the middle of nowhere! - and everywhere a chaos of poles and electrical wires overhead and most of all the trains, single cars, going back and forth all the time like a mechanical heartbeat, Ozu's true signature. As to the story, a sad and touching one of a family moving to the suburb, the two young boys having to fend off bullies at school, with no protection or sympathy from the parents who are only concerned about showing respect for the factory boss, a wealthy phony. The boys ultimately see through the dad and his pretensions and tell him he's a total failure, the family near breakdown, but then the boys realize dad is the best he can be, and there's a sweet reconciliation at the end - not a Hollywoodish thing where Dad would do something heroic, but just a quiet, unspoken understanding. By today's standards, the story is slow and the somewhat stagy - but still far, far ahead of so many other stilted silents - some beautiful shots of the family gatherings, of the boys in the landscape, of the father walking the boys to school. You can see the beginning of Ozu's sensibility - which will culminate in Tokyo Story - but he was a director with all the skills but yearning for dialog.