Every word and action is revealing and true to character: Friday Night Lights

What makes "Friday Night Lights (Season 4)" so powerful is that it's a wonderful balance between the expected and the unknown or unpredictable. As with all really good dramas, you find yourself thinking: what will he say? what will she say to him? In this case: how will Coach Taylor speak to his team? What will he say when Matt shows up at his house distraught? How will he speak to the two players arrested for fighting? Even more so for his wife, Tammy: what will she say to daughter Julie? And, in episode 5, what will Matt say at his father's funeral? There's always a bit of surprise, you can never quite predict what they will say - but once the characters speak and act, it seems so inevitably right that you can't imagine they could have said or done anything differently. Matt's eulogy, about his father pulling toilet paper off the shelf in the supermarket - tells us a great deal about Matt (his clumsy inability to come up with a real memory), the grandma (fussy, picky, cross, wrong brand of toilet paper), the dad (angry, impulsive, we see why he left home), most of all Matt's awkwardness in this situation tells us everything he says his dad was "funny" but this shows us a 6-year-old boy scared of his father's impulses - anyway, you could analyze this one scene for pages. All of the scenes are like this. It's not that there is never an extra word, which was the case with The Wire, but it's that every action is revealing of character and true to the essence of the character - kids, adults, all.

Racism right out in the open: Friday Night Lights

Why so few people watch "Friday Night Lights" remains one of those unfathomable mysteries. Season 4 (?), as Coach Taylor takes over the East Dillon team, is just as great as the preceding seasons - very likable and wise and funny and credible characters, including all the high-school kids and recent grads as well as the adults, And in this season a whole new theme opens up, the history of racism, segregation, and unequal opportunity in Dillon, Texas. Up to now, though the show always recognized that the town had haves and have-nots and that the black kids on the team faced a particular barrier that the white kids do not (the black star running back is all but ignored by recruiters after a run-in with the law, which would not and did not happen to other players), this season puts the theme right out in the open. East Dillon High is a disgrace compared with Dillon, the resources and conditions are horrible - and what's more incredible, actually it's all to credible, is that nobody in the community owns this problem. The Dillon boosters continue to do all in their (ample) power to build a football dynasty and they let the other school - not just talking about football here - and its kids take the dregs and suffer. We see this in every community! It should be a crime, someone should go to jail for that. Football cannot and will not be the savior, but we can see how Taylor's dynamism will help build pride in the team and then, perhaps, in the whole East Dillon community, but they will face man struggles and confrontations along the way. Great series.

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.