Ozu classic Late Spring easy to appreciate but hard to enjoy

Ozu's 1949 classic Late Spring has the Ozu qualities right from first frames - a domestic drama told and seen from the "tatami POV" - with the very low almost floor-level shots as the characters loom slightly above us, long shots down the hallways of the small apartment, and many establishment shots that give us a great and haunting sense of the beauty and the devastation in occupied Japan - many will note the bicycle riding scene when we see various English-language signage along the roadway, including Drink Coca-Cola. That said, it's a movie better to study than to enjoy. Yes, the plot is simple and beautiful and contains a surprising twist at the end (I won't give it away) - a young woman very devoted to her aging, scholarly father (and he very dependent on her) who believes she should never marry. Lurking beneath this placid surface - including about a 15 minute scene when father and daughter attend a Noh drama, spare me from another such cinematic 15 minutes please - there's a lot of sexual turbulence and undercurrents: the woman's health is not good because of the stress of her work during the way - never exactly specified or clarified - her attraction to her father's editorial assistant, and his to her, and her laughing dismissal that he is long engaged to a mutual acquaintance, her conversations w/ a divorced friend who's "modern" (her apartment is entirely western in decor) and perhaps "loose," and most of all the odd day she spends in Tokyo shopping with her father's colleague - divorced and remarried - and whom she accuses of being "filthy." She's a very upbeat young woman - might remind you of Poppy in British film Happy Go Lucky (?) - but there is much that's disturbing within her and in her background, and she enters into marriage with a lot of foreboding and doubt (not sure, but Ozu may have done a sequel - or he certainly could have). A very smart movie but even at its reasonable 1 hour 50 it seemed very long and slow, even for its time.

Can 10 million viewers be wrong?: Interstellar

God knows why but I did watch the rest of Interstellar last night and I feel as if I went through one of the gravity holes or whatever they are, as if I was about 40 years older by the time the movie ended. I wasn't 100-percent right in predicting the ending, I admit, but the ending certainly held no important surprises - not that anyone cares. Can anybody follow the plot line here, with all these ridiculous time warps, McConaughey talking to his daughter across all sorts of time dimensions? And does it matters? I watched the whole damn thing to see Iceland location setting and got to see about 20 minutes on a glacier that might as well have been a studio set of a digital manipulation. There is nothing in the least original about this movie - neither its apocolyptic premise (plant must be saved from peril), its team of experts (direct knockoff of that scifi thriller - Asteroid? - of a decade or so back), even the friendly robot companions are a weak-tea version of the bos from Star Wars and a million sequels. Christopher Nolan and brother Jack Nolan used to make smart, small, literary films (Memento) that nobody watched and now they make huge, bloated, preposterous, boring films with major stars, major budgets, and everybody watches them - so can you blame them? I can only recall an NYT book review in which the reviewer, writing about some international bestseller, quoted the promotional copy that said: Can 10 million readers be wrong? And the answer is: Usually, yes.

Interminable: Three hours you'll want back after you see Interstellar

Maybe, just maybe, I'll watch the rest of Interstellar tonight, and if I do it will be only to see the sequences filmed in Iceland, which I guess look more like scenes from another galaxy than any other place on earth - but my god how long is this movie? (Last night Red Sox played longest game in franchise history, and Interstellar might seem longer.) Though I'm told the producers and writers made some attempt to base this story on the principles of physics - essentially a team of astronauts is sent to explore possible resettlement options in other galaxies, as earth seems to be a doomed planet, but because of the heavy gravity on some of these planets time proceeds differently and for each hour they spend there people back on earth age several years. As one of the astronauts so wisely puts it: That's relativity! Aside from the idiocy of the entire premise and the obvious consequences of the journey - the film begins with some aged people recounting what it was like on earth back in the dust-and-plague filled era, and if you can't figure out who these people are you probably should be condemned to watch the whole movie - we have to see Matthew McConaughey do a ridiculous reprise of his quirky performance in True Detective, but this time he's a farmer and former astronaut yearning to fly again. Sure. And then there's the ever unlikable Anne Hathaway, as an astronaut-scientist no less, explaining why, in choosing which distant planets to explore, she is following her heart. Yes, the technical effects are good - esp the looming giant waves that almost wipe out the mission on the first planet visited. But the plot is so preposterous and the planet-rescue-discovery mission so threadbare that I found it impossible to engage w/ this film in any way. That's relativity.

To Live Outside the Law: The good and the bad in the finale of Season 1 of Better Call Saul

Each episode of Better Call Saul has at least one damn good scene with Breaking Bad-quality writing that makes the episode and the series itself worth watching: the scene in which the ex-cop takes signs on as a bodyguard for the hapless young man who's selling some stolen pills to a gangster-thug is one great scene in the penultimate episode, and in the finale for Season 1 Jim's mental and emotional breakdown during the Bingo game is a classic: the kind of one-man scene that would be a great exercise for an acting class or for an audition. That said, some aspects of season 1 were quite disappointing: overall, it felt as if this should have been a one-season prequel, but perhaps, realizing they had a pretty good show going, Gilligan and Gould decided to stretch out the timeline - so this season ends with Jimmy's decision to go to the dark side, to live outside the law and, presumably, to represent those (like Walter White) who do so as well - not the sweet clients he's built up in his elder-law practice. Some of the plot mechanics, as Jim/Saul/Odenkirk would or might say: Just didn't do it for me. For example, I never bought into the fact that his brother, Chuck, would want him out of the law firm because he's "not a real lawyer" - when everything up to that point suggested Chuck was proud of Jim and grateful for Jim's devotion. Similarly, I found it very hard to keep in mind the various schemes and scams that Jim gets involved in - which tells me that none of them, really, were particularly important to the story line. I guess ultimately I can never really accept this character as an Irish-American hustler from Cicero when, throughout Breaking Bad, he seemed so quintessentially Jewish, didn't he? In season 2, which I no doubt will watch, it'll take a lot to convince me that this guy could so easily morph into a new persona - Saul Goodman - and set up a practice in the same city where he used to practiced as Jimmy McGill?

Introducing two great talents - Witherspoon and Payne - in Election

The 1999 film Election was a debut of sorts for both a great actor, Reese Witherspoon, and a great director, Alexander Payne, and we see from this film, which holds up perfectly as a high-school comedy with many sorrowful, painful, and truthful dimensions, the Witherspoon was bound to become a star playing many type-A characters like Tracy Flick - the driven, focused, independent, but friendless candidate for school president - and that Payne was bound to become one of our best story-driven directors. In fact, I think he's the best working director at adaptation of literary fiction (this one based on a Tom Perotta novel - just Perotta's Little Children for an example of how not to adapt literary fiction). I think Payne's excellent Nebraska (the setting for Election several other Payne films as well) was his first from an original screenplay. In short, the story is tight, consistent, well-paced, and well acted y W and others, notably Matthew Broderick in the lead as the faculty adviser who gets caught up and caught in election shenanigans - and in the complexities of his own marital infidelities. The lead characters in Election are not generally likable (though some of the peripheral ones are, notably Paul, the dull-witted popular athlete whom Broderick draws into the election fray), but for the most part we sympathize with them. How can you imagine liking Witherspoon/Flick, with her hand thrust high into the air in class - call on me, call on me! - yet how can we not feel sorry for her, when we see her up all night printing campaign material, and at home sobbing in her room after she loses her bid? On the other hand, the movie is a little light, by today's standards, on the mis-doings of the faculty members, particularly the sleazy guy who has an affair with Witherspoon/Flick - she's not only his student but she's under age! - and is quietly shoved out of his job, when he should probably be imprisoned. Flick seems so strong, but she's actually very vulnerable - fatherless, only child, lonely, and exactly the kind of young woman predators often victimize. Though very funny and even slapstick at times, this film is far more, far deeper than a raucous high-school comedy and still worth a look.

A dark comedy of almost Shakespearean scope: Sullivan's Travels

Hadn't seen Preston Sturges's 1941 Sullivan's Travels since, I don't know, grad-school days, but decided to turn back to some classics that I've seen but largely forgotten and was completely enthralled with this one: sure it's quaint to see a b/w film with the many long reaction shots, the strong emphasis on dialog (more out of the stage tradition than into the cinematic tradition),, and the odious orchestral score that directors still favored back in that era, but these antiquities aside it's a great story - funny, moving without being corny (it does take a shot at Capra, and at a few other directors of the day as well), meaningful without being preachy. In fact, that's the theme of the movie: a great movie doesn't have to carry a message, it's OK just to make people laugh, and perhaps think a little, as well. Briefly, movie is about director of successful comedies, Sullivan (Joel McCrea) who wants to make a meaningful film about all the suffering people in the country (this is still a Depression-era film, shot just before U.S. entry into the war); the studio guys tell him he'd do a lousy job because he knows nothing about suffering (true for all of them, as they recognize), so he goes off on his travels to see how the poor and desperate live. What starts off rather comically - with a whole film crew following him on his journeys, and he can't get away from Hollywood - gradually becomes darker, as he hops a freight with other desperate people, mostly men, and does manage to get a sense of their dangerous lives. Among the tremendously beautiful scenes are the crowds in the railroad yards, the men sitting in the church service and then crowded together on the church floor during the night, the prison barracks, and especially the black country church - the service, the hymn (Go Down, Moses), and the prisoners shuffling in to join the congregation. The dialog is sharp and witty, the ending a sweet and romantic, but there are many dark moments in this comedy that give it a broad, almost Shakespearean scope.

A series that takes on issues rarely confronted on network TV : American Crime

OK it's by no means as subtle, well written, or beautifully produced as some of the great HBO, Netflix, or even Showtime pay-cable series but the new ABC series American Crime is pretty engaging and very forthright about issues rarely dealt with or confronted in any TV dramas: race, bias, hatred, and bigotry. Plot involves a the murder of a young man and the sexual attack on his wife, in their home; pretty quickly police investigate and arrest a young Mexican-American (clearly he let some gang members use his hot car, which was spotted at the scene of the killing), an "illegal" Mexican immigrant who's not very sympathetic and has a series criminal background, a black man who's deeply involved in drugs and is living w/ a young white woman who's addicted to meth. What adds a huge dimension to this crime drama is the intense involvement of the parents ad siblings of both victims and accused: the central figures are the (long-divorced) parents of the murdered man: dad (Timothy Hutton) is a feckless ne'er do well father who just wants all this trouble to go away, yet gets drawn in more than he'd like, and completely cold and acidic mother, Felicity Huffman, who plays the race card and is angry at everyone, police and prosecutors especially, for, among other things, not treating this as a hate crime. Over the first four episodes the parents learn increasingly painful information about their children, and they react in a wide variety of ways, ranging from outrage to denial. Yes, at times it's schematic, and yes, the writing is at times strained, but the characters and the plot setup are a real tinderbox and it's hard not to watch and to wonder when everything will explode.