February 2023: Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, Mike Leigh, Elaine May, Godard, Eo, Manchurian Candidate, and Bollywood

 February 2023: Hitchcock, Cunk on Earth, Tarkovsky, Mike Leigh, Elaine May

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) is further evidence, as if anyone needed that, to show at AH was one of the greatest film entertainers of all time, perhaps especially in the 1930s British period when he had fewer resources, distractions, and expectations that sometimes overwhelmed his films from the American period - a return visit to a few, such as North by Northwest, found them surprisingly long and convoluted, whereas the British films cut right to the chase so to speak. That that Lady V isn’t convoluted - who can possibly follow the machinations of the plot?, and yet who cares - there’s so much fun and verbal wit here, and lots of playing with our own perceptions: Did the lady truly vanish? Or are we seeing things, as the protagonist (Margaret Lockwood) seems to be? Are we fellow passengers, befuddled by her insistence that Mrs. From has been abducted or otherwise disappeared? Are are do we concur with her and assume a plot is afoot? AH keeps pushing questions at us: Whom to we believe? And if she hasn’t truly vanished, how do we explain the numerous coincidences? Throughout, there’s a lot of foolery, esp by the witty Michael Redgrave - animist of all AH gives us some amazing scenes: the daring ride outside the moving train, the British businessmen obsessed with the cricket results, the fight with the magician in the baggage car of the train, the big pointless shootout at the end that seems lifted from a Western, and more. Lots of fun to watch, and just don’t try to make sense of everything because, well, neither did Hitchcock. 

Lovers of the unique world of Bollywood movies will sure get their money’s worth out of V. Vjayendra Prasad’s epic RRR (2022), which has lots of everything: song, dance, extended fight sequences, chases, a dangerous rescue attempt, clear and two-dimensional heroes and villains, lavish set design, enormous crowd sequences - and all in the first hour of this 3-hour drama, which is clearly not meant for all viewers, which is to say one hour for me was enough but if it’s your cup of Darjeeling go for it. 

John Frankenheimer’s noirish film The Manchurian Candidate (1962 - based on Richard Condon’s novel, and remade in 2004)) is one of the great cinematic portrayals of psychological disorder - in this case, a popular concept of the Cold War era: Brainwashing (a trope that caused one Republican candidate to drop a presidential campaign [Romney sr.] - here treated as if brainwashing were possible - a way to get people to a permanent state of hypnosis and then to control them into, in this case, high-profile assassins. The concept on the face of it is absurd, but it was creepy enough to lead to mass hysteria, of which this film was the epitome: a group of US soldiers on patrol in Korea is captured and somehow “brainwashed” into doing anything they hear as a command, including the lead actor - Lawrence Harvey - in cold blood shoots to death one of this mates. Harvey, playing Sg Rayman Shaw returns to the states as a supposed hero but actually as an automaton who will kill on command. Others in the patrol group have vague memories of their imprisonment - notably an improbably cast Frank Sinatra, who does himself well. Frankenheimer used this film as a springboard to direct several other political thrillers of the 60s; this one has to be one of his best and most imaginative, with lots of superimpositions to get us into and out of Sgt Shaw’s head, and amazingly fast cuts, especially in the climactic sequence at the Republican National Convention in NYC. 

Chalk up more 2022 films that I couldn’t finish watching: Armageddon Time (what a bad title!) and You People, the first of which had serious intent but seemed to me to ha ve no sense of what it’s like to be an artistic young man from a relatively wealthy Queens community, ca 1980?, who crosses some boundaries (smoking marijuana in a hallway) and gets transferred to a private school - I could not buy into the character, his horrible teaches, his mean parents; the other, You People, had some broad comic scenes but ultimately none of the lead characters - 2 30-somethings (white male, Black female) who very quickly fall in love and get engaged only to face family issues on both sides of the family, funny at times but never for a moment true to life. 

There’s only one word for the British 5-part mocumentory series Cunk on Earth (2022) and that’s “very hilarious” (joke). A terrific sendup of pretentious and socially awkward mostly British academics and the grandiosity of many specials e.g. BBC’s David Attenborough and even PBS’s Ken Burns  as star performer Diane Morgan tours the world to give us the supposed history of civilization in 5 easy pieces of acerbic and comic excellence. No sense in giving away any of the great gags, scenes, and lines - except that I missed some of the gags because I was laughing. Thx, Netflix. 

One of the Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky’s last films (2nd to last actually) Nostalghia [cq] (1983) is the perfect film (please don’t extract this fragment for use in publication [joke]) if you like extremely long close-ups, panning shots, and tracking shots, so slow and statioc that you may give your flatscreen a rap to ensure that it hasn’t fallen asleep. It hasn’t; you might. But to be fair: I watched the whole 90 or so minutes with great interest. In short, as w/ most of his Soviet films, it’s by no means plot driven and never crystal clear about the actual plot but, let’s face it, each shot is gorgeous (Italian countryside, ruined castles and courts, a decrepit mineral water, an awkward and ill-lit hotel… ) and two subtle, provocative lead actors (Oleg Yankovsky, an emotionally drained Soviet writer in Italy to gather info for a book he’s writing on an exiled Russian author who’d taken solace in these mineral waters and his “tour guide” for his time in Italy, Erland Josephson). There’s lots of sexual innuendo - Oleg is attracted to his beautiful guide yet yearning to return to his wife in Russia, Erland, in a hysterical outburst accuses him (unjustly, it seems) of coming on to her. It’s hard to determine - intentionally - precisely what might or might not have happened among these characters - but the movie has great clarity and insight about its topography and archeology - so many beautiful long shots of the building and the rock grounds, the remnants of the super baths. Nota film for everyone and without doubt not the best entree into Tarkovsky’s work (see other entries on this blog) but an unusual and sometimes disturbing (one of the main secondary characters apparently feared the world’s end and thus imprisoned his wife and son in their apartment for 7 years!) work of art-filmish art. 

Nate Bargatze's Hello, World comedy special is hilarious - a completely “clean” act (a note brought home when his 10 or so age daughter introduces him and we see her and comic’s wife backstage at opening of show - that finds humor in themes unlikely places, e.g., digging a hole to build a fish pond, tribulations of the first-born, a sliding door entry into a house … on the other hand Marc Maron’s well-meaning From Bleak to Dark touches all the right/expected places and is much aligned with us and the riotous NY audience re politics and culture and yet, the fact of the matter is, nothing in the first half (all we saw) of his routine was funny - we did not laugh once, so go figure. 

Hard Labour (1973) is an early work, made the earliest work, by Mike Leigh, one of a series of TV dramas at the start of his career. It may also be the darkest work of Leigh’s career, as his characters, strange and eccentric as they may be, tend to come across as “rounded” and quite often as really funny (usually unintentionally). This film is light on humor to put it mildly; we follow a middle-aged working-class woman who helps support her family via working as a maid - where’ she is constantly mistreated and humiliated by the stone-cold, well-off woman for whom she works, constantly wiping surfaces or so it seems. Her husband, with whom she hardly communicates, works a night shift and is grumpy toward everyone. Her daughter, late teens?, makes some effort to confide with her mom, but the taciturn mother offers no comfort or solace. Toward the end, the mother  - Liz Smith as Mrs. Thornley - seeks comfort in confession,  but the priest hardly seems to be listening to her, quite an indictment of the Church. It’s not a joyous film, obviously, but it’s smart and credible, a great contribution to 60s/70s British films about the troubled working class. 

(Jean-Luc) Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) was (once) ground-breaking and imaginative and a showcase for every photographic and cinematic device Godard could devise or reconstruct, from VO narrative to unscripted rants, to lecture and response on various leftist tracts and treatises and thinkers, to sounding music clips and strange typographical observations about film itself unfolding - deeply influencing world cinema in its day, at least temperamentally if not politically, a film that today looks more antiquated than a Soviet/Maoist treatise, which in part in is. The plot such as I can isolate and explain let alone understand any of it covers 4 (I think - I only watched 3 for about half the film length) movements as we watch the 20-something radicals living and breathing in a Paris commune and plotting, however feckless it may be, some kind of attack, crisis, war on the bourgeoisie - all of which unfurls for us, to a degree at least, as the director (unseen) questions several of the youth about their background, politics, thoughts - I’m glad to have watched it for an hour but that was long enough as the film eventually seems flaccid and self-indulgent, lacking in some of the aspects I, and most viewers of film, like the most, that is plot, emotion, insight, beauty, fright, laughs, exotica, reflection, and character.

Aside from one highly troubling sequence (a performance at a music hall by a small orchestra in Blackface), Alfred Hitchcock’s really early film, one of his first “Talkies,” Young and Innocent (1937) is a funny, even charming - really unusual for the acidic AH - tale and one of the first to establish a key element in all of AH’s work, “the wrong man.” In brief a handsome, well-educated young man spies a body supine on a beach and runs off to fine aid (somewhat improbable, but, OK); witnesses find him running from the scene and ID him as the killer. At first he’s blasé, sure that his class statue will get him out of this mess, but he soon sees that his lawyer is a dolt and he’s probably going to be convicted - but he manages to escape from the courtroom and thus begins a chase, when a lovely young woman - who happens to be the police chief’s daughter, picks him up, takes pity, and the two of them make a run for it, in part in search of a belt that was the killing device. So we’ve to a “wrong man” story, police incompetence, guy and girl on the run, a Maguffin (the belt), and a budding romance all in motion - and it’s a lot of fun with plenty of laughs and narrow escapes that anyone will enjoy, except, dammit, for the blackface scene, so, why? AH was so busy setting a huge crown and crane shot that he didn’t see what was right before his eyes, not that he would have cared, troubled guy that he was in his own life. 

The Kiss of Death (1977) is another early work from Mike Leigh, this one part of anthology series from British TV, far from Leigh’s best work, this obscure movie with the quixotic title (this is not a vampire film!) is worth a look for David Threlfall’s debut as an Trevor, extremely shy and gawky youth in the British midlands (Birmingham?) where he works as an assistant to a funeral director and awkwardly tries to build a relationship with a young woman of his age. The scene toward the end in which Kay Adshead (Linda) guides Trevor toward his first kiss is justly renowned; for me the most powerful and disturbing scene, so underplayed and tense, involves the death of an infant. Overall, though, it’s a low-key film without a dramatic denouement - life just goes on for these poor “blokes,” although Trevor seems to have gained a bit of self-confidence. The main drawback, however, is that the film iOS too low-key - as the Midlands accent is nearly impenetrable to American viewers; give it a look, butI can assure you that you’ll miss a good half of the dialog. 

I can assure you that Jerzy Skolimowski’s 2022 film Eo. (Oi in Polish, if you’re counting) will not win the Academy Award for best International film but it’s worth a look; I though I was clever in noting that the film is very closely aligned with the Bresson’s famous Au Hasard Balhazar, from about 50 years ago so who’s counting now?, but I see that the credits recognize Au Hazard, as well they should: Both chronicle the sad life and demise of a circus donkey removed from the ring (by animal-rights protesters) and goes on to lead a peripatetic life of loneliness and abuse - a sad story for which parents should certainly be alert. Still, it’s quite an achievement to have donkey as the prime mover of a mover, aside from animal-dudded tearjerkers such as Homeward Bound, which I found terribly moving long ago. So the lead/title character has nothing to say, or nothing in language to say, but there are some powerful sequences as well as some artistic touches such as flashing red lighting during dream/thought sequences. The scene most will remember concert some “football” hooligans who take out their wrath on you knows who - and the last scene, although it’s thankfully palliated by the assurance that no animals were hurt, etc. 

The 3-part doc Murdaugh Murders (a title? a sentence?) from Netflix is groundbreaking in that the documentary is being aired just as the trial of the eponymous Alex gets under way, so we can get all the background and then watch it play out in a murder trial live as it happens. Thedocumentary itself breaks no new ground in regard to format, style, and conventions and the doc team faced a huge task in that there are so many people and possible crimes involves - plus of course the raw wounds that the trial has opened - but they did an admirable job in presenting the key moments of this years’-long drama, clearing away some of the underbrush and giving us a good idea about life in this small SC township and about the inter-relationships among the main players - some of whom seem to have started as spoiled teens w/ terrible judgement and odious behavior who, several years later, feel still sorrowful and wounded but, one hopes, matured and wisened by experience. 

Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976) is a nearly unique genre film, a story of two hoodlum gangster buddies (John Cassavetes and a young Peter Falk) who interact, squabble, fight, and engage in various low-life encounters over the course of done day - a rough-edged, fearless film - a film not generally associated with female directors and writers then or today - and totally engrossing it is. The plot in brief begins as JC calls his pal PF and asks him for help, he’s a dead man; Falk then guides Cass. out of his rented crappy hotel room and through a series of encounters = and we can see the strong tradition of improv at work, as these are 2 pro actors with strong backgrounds in live theater - culminating in a fight between the two guys and a tumultuous scene at the apartment of Cass’s girlfriend (one of the weirdest sex scenes ever) and a final visit to his long-suffering wife. Almost stealing the show is the dour hitman (Ned Beatty) who just can’t seem to catch a break - or a kill. We’re both repulsed by these guys and their dark milieu and we feel sad for them, smart guys who’ve wasted their lives, whose time is (almost) up - among the most personal and character-driven films of its time.  

January 2023: Hitchcock, Mie Leigh, 2022 Oscar Nominees, Ferrante, Madonna Street, Tick ... Boom,

Hitchcock, Mike Leigh, 2022 Oscar Nominees, Ferrante, Madonna Street, Tick...Boom

The already famous Slow Horses, based on the extremely well-reviewed spy novels from Mick Herron, continues on to Season 2 (2022) with the sameverve and with the anti-hero premise based on the premise of a series about the British MI5 but as far removed from James Bond and Smiley’s People as possible - a team of outcasts and malcontents whom the bureau could not risk firing but instead send the to Slough House, aka Slow Horses, to be under the cantankerous leadership of Jack Lamb played to the disgusting hilt by Gary Oldham - think him what you will but he makes this series fly. In Season 2 the focus is not on the plight of one hapless soul who falls into the clutches of a right-wing clique; rather, it’s about what appears to be an attack engineered by Russian agents on London itself, a reprise of 9/11. The plot gets complicated - in fact I’d recommend watching in in daily sequence rather than week by week as released - but the details of the crackpot attack aren’t so important, as we watch the characters develop a set of inter-relations and played with a core of indifference and toughness, which they don’t really have. There are deaths, including among at least one major character - another’s a sense that we are privy to an insider’s view of the MI5. At least, it’s as different from but as credible as LeCarre’s - so which one is real(istic)? Both, probably. 

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film Flowers of Shanghai (1998), based on the 1892 novel by Han Bangqing is a beautiful and sensuous movie with a plot that barely exists and doesn’t really matter. The film is set entirely in a Shanghai brothel of the 19th century, and we see the young women as completely exploited, just property, or worse - and the men who consort with them (and the Madam who runs the show) as cruel and heartless. The thin plot involves one of the somewhat older prostitutes trying to negotiate the terms of her release from bondage. Over the course of the film we don’t really get to know any of the characters as individual - they’re all just part of a process: the women taken into captivity when they were young girls, children really, and they work their way “up” to be consorts on beck and call - the madam keeps track of who’s bringing in the dough and who’s past her prime. So what makes the film memorable and worthwhile is beautiful creation and rendering of a particular practice and scene: the brothel itself richly decorated with Asian pottery and statuary, the curling of the opium smoke, the mournful and beautiful background music (Yoshihero Hanno), the elaborate costumier of the women and their clientele as well, and a few incredibly powerful scenes of range and wonton destruction and of the menfolk - surrounded by weary sex workers - engaged in loud and boisterous gambling and monumental drinking. This film is not a great joy to watch, but it’s a seemingly accurate portrayal of a practice that’s maybe not so long gone, even in the U.S. 

Mario Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) must rank among the greatest Italian films and film comedies of all time - a hilarious account of the most discombobulated, cockamamie robbery schemes ever imagined. A group of Italian men of middle age, who more or less met one another in prison - they were all part of a (failed) scheme in which one of the guys would pose as another and serve his time for petty theft in order to get a payback - never really works of course - and this quintet of small-time crooks go after a big prize, knocking off a pawn shop. As none of the men is master criminal, everything goes wrong, as we can foresee. Plus the guys are always yelling at one another and one of the guys is a hopeless skirt-chaser which in several instances almost details the theft - all sorts of minor plot scams, all of the funny - I particularly liked the “clinic” in safe-cracking run by an old-timer who provides the knowledge and the tools but stays far away from the crime. And we know everything will go wrong, which of course it does, and in hilarious fashion. There have been many comical crime-scheme since, many of them funny, but Big Deal has be at or near the top of them on any list. (And I almost forget the excellent jazz score by Piero Umilliani.

Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light (2022) consists of strands of various sorts: First strand: A weepy story about a woman who finds happiness or at least inner peace by standing up for herself in the face of (second strand) workplace sexual harassment/rape as well as through (3rd strand) recovery from severe mental illness giving us a scary picture of the indifferent medical care provided to the  mentally ill though she does recover thanks to a few good providers and especially  (4th strand) through building a relationship - at first carnal, later as supportive friends - with a Black co-worker (5th strand) about half her age in this star vehicle (6th strand) for the always great - can any actor today do more with facial expression than she? - Olivia Coleman and along the way (7th strand) there are race riots - with violent skinhead (this is England, 1981) roaming the streets and bating up Black residents whom they see as invaders and tying it all together (8th strand), as the setting for the film is a movie theater in the last days of glorious cinema and reel to reel projection (9th strand) and, hey, I’m losing count, but there are numerous literary references - snatches of Auden, of Larkin, and some heavy-handed imagery - the Black co-worker tenderly nursing an injured pigeon to health and watching it fly away free - could any symbol be more obvious? - all in a film-good film that doesn’t quite make its case: Can we truly believe in her recovery?, Is she as doomed as the theater in which she works?, Is her relationship with the young co-worker believable in the least? - but at least the film held my interest, clocked in at less than 2 hours - a miracle! - provided us a soundtrack that includes It’s Alright, Ma, among the greatest songs of all time. 

High Hopes (1988) is an early and archetypical serious comedy from the unappreciated though successful Mike Leigh - a domestic drama of sorts, a family crisis and eruption, and an exploration of class and culture into contemporary English life. The film starts with the entry of a young man lost on the streets of (North?) London, and is helped out by a gentle, friendly bike messenger and his partner - girlfriend, as we learn later - who put him up for the night; this generosity contrasted with the societal mistreatment of the bike-man’s elderly mother, who is locked out of her apartment and given reluctant shelter for the next-door neighbors, a hilarious portrayal of snobbery and self-importance. The film for a time feels harsh and weighty, after a few outbursts and the riotous events of an 70th b-day party for the mom - but in its final segments the film, and the characters, soften and we close on a sweet discussion of potential marriage and children - heart-warming to be sure. As always, Leigh gets tremendous performances from his cast, and one gets the sense that there was a lot of improv encouraged the actors develop and round out their characters. Laughter and tears - it might have been called - and as always with Leigh a film to catch. 

Lighter and less complex (really just 5 characters) than most of his work, Mike Leigh’s 1976 comedy Nuts in May presents a couple on their way to a weeklong “holiday” to be spent at an understaffed campground - the guy is almost unbearably effusive, know-it-all, mansplainer as we might say today and his wife whiny, spineless, and submissive - though with at least more than a humane touch than her husband. Over the course of a few days camping, the guy upbraids a nearby camper for playing his radio too loud. Offended, the guy refuses (as is his right), which leads to hostility, somewhat alleviated by wife’s attempts to make amends. Things continue to get worse, spoiling their holiday - esp as another couple enters the fray, leading to some knockabout of the guy - well deserved! These two seem to have stepped out of a Monty Python episode of the era - they probably did! ML as is his wont lets the characters develop much of their dialog, much of it hilarious - though at the end there’s not quite anything for viewers to hang on and remember - it’s not, as is ML’s best work, a look at love, hate, and social ills; it’s just darkly funny. 

As part of my personal Leigh-quest we watched his television film (remember those?) Four Days in July (1984), set and filmed in Belfast during the heart of “the struggles” and the deadly rivalries between Cath and Prod and overall animosity of the Irish toward the English occupying Army. A lot of the nuances will no doubt be confusing to most American viewers, especially nearly 40 years down the road, but the heart of the film - at times hilarious - will be easy for most to grasp; in essence the story line follows the lives of two families, one from each side of course, in which both wives are pregnant (and deliver, on the last of the 4 days) and through the process we see the great overlap in sympathies and style as well as the huge gulf that separates the two couples/factions/forces. The humor often involves long conversations about mundane matters - repairing a toilet, e.g. - that go off on various tangents - and with a lot of mockery, drinking, and smoking (tobacco). The film is also an examination of poverty, of the mistreatment of the native Protestants (shabby housing, little economic opportunity), the problem of excessive drinking, and a pervasive chauvinism which shows the women serving the hapless men even hours before delivery. It’s not an easy film to get into, at least at first (the first scene, at a police checkpoint - without any further development except that it introduces one of the protagonists, the British soldier on alien turf). But as we become somewhat accustomed to the dialects, the film builds intensity and insight, right up to the conclusion that finds the two wives from different cultures find themselves in adjacent beds in the delivery room - a beautiful closing image. 

The Netflix series The Lying Life of Adults (2023), from Edoardo De Angelis, based on Elena Ferrante’s novel, has a lot to stand up against and will inevitably not match its source material, much less and outstanding series based on Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, but it still ranks as a good series with strong characterization, esp. by the Giordana Marengo as the troubled, highly intelligent, but underachieving Neapolitan teen, whom, over the course of six episodes we see her establishing her independence from her family, standing up to her difficult and eccentric aunt, learning about her sexuality, and for the first time making wise and thoughtful decisions. Of course the series gets a lot of its ignition from Biagio Forestieri  as her egocentric, selfish father - as the story revolves around the family breakup, the result of his serial infidelities. Ferrante’s fiction seems a vein that has hardly been tapped, and any attempt to embody her novels is probably for the better - I liked both this and Brilliant Friend more on screen than in print (it was excerpted in the NYTimes), a rarity. 

The biopic Tick, Tick … Boom! (2021) from genius playwright/actor/director (here, “only” the director) Lin-Manuel Miranda portrays the pre-Rent artistic struggles, and genius in his own right, Jonathan Larson, one of the many who died prematurely. LMM focuses on Larson’s early musical which had a lot of intriguing songs - very much in the tradition of or the precursor of testimonial Broadway musicals of the 90s. The music is still beautiful and the evocation of life in NY in particular among gay men in the age of AIDS is presented with great personal insight and sensitivity. (Note: Larson in this film and in his life was not homosexual and died not of AIDS but of some sort of heart aneurism). The music is really fine and we can see that he’s on a pathway that will bring him to cult phenomenon Rent - although the pathway, as w/ most artists and geniuses esp because they break the rules and the conventions - is difficult and demoralizing - until he gets advice from his tough-as-nails agent: Write what you know (advice given in most writing courses of any sort). Jonathan Garfield as the energetic Larson deserves special praise for a long, challenging performance; LMM shows here that he’s great with musical numbers, obviously, though his frantic cuts and edits make the going too difficult for most viewers (same with his later In the Heights film), but who am I to give any advice? All told an exciting but ultimately sad film about a moment in tine. 

For any who think of Alfred Hitchcock as primarily a director of thrillers I’d recommend a look at (the original) The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), one of the great films from his British period. Yes, it’s in a way a thriller - I mean in involves a man and woman Leslie Banks and Edna Best), on vacation in the Alps, who via miscommunication come to learn of a terrorist plan destined for an assassination in England (plan to shoot an ambassador during a performance at the Albert Hall) and which leads to a kidnapping of their child and ends in an endless shootout outside of a church - and despite all the tension of the plot the film is at many points laugh-out-loud just plain funny - a great example of AH’s sense of humor and his highly inventive storytelling and image-making: the gang of terrorists is led by an extremely unctuous Peter Lorre in his first English-language film, and he himself provides enough laugh lines - but then you’ve got a terrorist group meeting in one of funniest ever church services (the “minister” is hypnotist who puts Best into a trance and we watch him in various cuts sleeping through a gunfight; the London cops arrive to take on the terrorists but they have no weaponry and have to contact a local “gunsmith” to provide them w/ rifles, lots of other moments - but all culminating with a scary sequence in which the kidnapped child stands at the edge of a 3rd-story rooftop as the bullets fly all around here - overall, a a film with much but not too much excitement and with lots of laughs, sight gags, and surprising imagery that seem to put the whole crime/thriller aspect of the story in “ ”. 

Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) was preceded by a 1930 silent (?) v from Germany in turn based on the 1929 German-language novel by Enrich Maria Remarque who was forced to flee from Germany as the anti-war message of his novel didn’t exactly jibe with the rise of Hitler (see Elliot’s Reading for my take on Remarque’s novel). I first saw the film when I was in high school, and it was foundation and incarnation of my pacifist views and opposition to the Vietnam war.  So here we have another take, a century later, again from Germany and again at a time when nations opposed each other in a pointless and horrible war - and I don’t think pacifism can stop this one. Given the huge advanced in cinema technique and skill since 1930, this film is so much more powerful and chilling than its predecessor and it ranks well w/ any war (or anti-war) film ever - as it’s entirely focused on trench warfare, which has to be the most ghastly, brutal,   and terrifying form of armed combat. And in this film we’re right in the trenches; the focus is, loosely, on 5 young German lads, entering the fray w/ visions of glory and of patriotism, visions that are immediately abolished. For the next 2 hours we suffer w/the terrors these young men face, paid and gruesome death, mostly, with no clear objective - especially under the delusional leadership of the top generals who are completely unconcerned about suffering and death - just glory and the fatherland. To my memory, the book and the1930 film ended with a return home and a confrontation w/ the cocksure professor who inspired by boys to go off tonight for the homeland; the film also had a beautiful closing image of a soldier reaching out from a trench, or at least so I remember. This film is even more bleak and dark, and the soldiers go on one final suicidal mission, just because their commanding officer feels betrayed by the incident peace treaty. This film’s a much - scary, sad, brutal - although there’s little hope offered at the end, much like the present time. 

Another stop on my Mike Leigh journey, this one the first to appear after his perhaps most famous low-budget piece (Secrets & Lies) to which not doesn’t entirely measure up but it’s still worth watching and appreciating, Career Girls (1997) about two women in their 20s, roommates via bulletin-board posting in college (unnamed) in London ca 1995, of quite different temperaments, who get together for a weekend of catching up (they hadn’t seen each other for 6 years) and we see through a beautiful matching alternation of narrative from the present - 2 career girls, single, trying to get a start oink life, each in her own way, and 2 college kids w/out much focus or direction and involved in a series of dank relationships with unsuitable guys, some of whom cost their paths via extremely odd coincidence during their reunion visit - especially notable was the man who now seems to be homeless, addicted, and suffering from some kind of derangement. As w/ so many of Leigh’s films, there are moments of darkness and despair and light-hearted comedy, alterations between the sorrows and insecurity of youth and the fear, post-college, that the world is slipping by too fast.

Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2022) is no doubt the least-qualified film to make a nomination for an Oscar for Best Picture. Really? Nothing better out there? Throw a dart at the board and you’ll get a better nomination, which must have been fueled by admiration for his earlier work. From the start - a completely pointless 20-minute digression to look at shirtless male models - we move to a luxury cruise on which the passengers all seem to be despicable - wait! haven’t we seen this before? like, White Lotus??? - without any of them being sweet and redeeming. Lots of allusion to the disparity between the wealthy buzzards and the hard-working crew (the captain excepted - a drug and lout Woody Harrelson); the cruise turns into a vomitation - absolutely disgusting and repulsive and pointless - talk about easy targets. Anyway, Bunuel did something like this 50 years ago, ditto Godard’s weekend - great for their day but pointless now. The final segment as some of the rescued passengers on a seemingly deserted island waiting for rescue - again, completely preposterous and terribly dated - think, Lord of the Flies for adults? - that leads to a conclusion that I won’t disclose except to say that Ostend has just given up. Me, too. 

There’s been a lot of noise about Michale Morris’s film To Leslie (2022), which many think should have been an Oscar vehicle esp for the leading actress, Andrea Riseborough, who no doubt did a terrific job portraying a troubled middle-aged mom who won a big lottery prize then blew all the $ in a few years as she dived ever deeper into alcoholism and poverty and more or less abandoned her young - not 20-year-old son. Is it a great movie? No, it is not great exactly - it feels as if the story of an alcoholic in distress is pretty familiar movie territory and this movie, for all its strengths, overplays its hand on both ends: the alcoholism seems overdone (most do a much better job of concealing the addictions), the scorn of the townspeople seems not quite credible (wouldn’t some be sympathetic?), and the ending strains belief. All that said, it has its strengths - notably it’s nicely low-budget, just a straight-forward story without much diversion or spx, and, as noted, AR’s performance is excellent. Much of the Oscar push came about because of the web of connections that MM brings to the fore; it doesn’t feel truly like a deserving underdog but more of a good not great movie. There must be dozens of others. 

The Richard Peete/Robert Yapkowitz documentary Karen Dalton: In My Own Time (2020) resurrects that obscure Greenwich Village folk/blues singer who played coffee houses and the like in the 1960s, brushing sleeves w/ the most famous denizen of that den, Dylan, who extolled her in his own autobiography in words that left even close aficionados of that era wondering: Who was she? She was a then-young white woman from OK who sang like a strung-out Black blues singer from the 40s, most notably like Billy Holiday. She had a lot of vocal and guitar-picking style that could have led to more acclaim, however the virtually never composted or sang any originals and she had a stubborn resolute personality, refusing in any way to build a bonding or rapport with her audiences. Other singers revered her, but she never caught on commercially despite many leads, opportunities, and supporters. Ultimately, she descended ever deeply into hard drugs, contracted AIDS, died young and largely unrecognized, barely known even to her children and granddaughter, and it’s her posthumous good fortune that this documentary team came to her doorstep as, while film was in production, her entire home and studio with all of her mementos, writings, and recordings was destroyed by fire (this documentary had saved many of these materials and records). Though I can’t imagine her in any successful singing career, this account of her demise is powerful and thoughtful and at times unbearably sad. 

Santiago Mitre’s documentary drama (that is, all acted and scripted but as accurate as possible in re-creating historical events) Argentina, 1985 (2022) is one of the Oscar nominees for best international film; it probably won’t win as the technique of the film is never groundbreaking or unusual and the streaming version, at least as far as I could figure, gives you subtitles above a dubbed English version, very unpleasant to watch in that regard. N.the.less the film tells an international audience the to most of us an unknown series of events in which a team of brave prosecutors - with the lead being a dedicated, fearless, but emotionally drained Ricardo Darin playing Julio Cesar Strassera with a cast of supporting young brave eager lawyers and law students who pushed the historic case against all odds of the leading military figures - in the US that would be the Joint Chiefs - who oversaw the capture, torture, imprisonment, and murder of thousands of citizens, some of who bravely testified in this case that seemed doomed - the highlight of the film, I would say. Greatly informative, worth watching, hope you can get this in a more viewer-friendly format.  

The Top Ten Films (I Watched) in 2022

 The Top Ten films (I Watched) in 2022:

The terrific Romanian 2007 film 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days from Cristian Mungiu - isa film everyone in an abortion-banning state should be forced to watch over the 2 hours or so, through a series of mostly long stills, and sometimes long tracking shots in which Mungiu conveys the struggle over a few days of two college roommates in Romania, with its ridiculously strict anti-abortion laws (couldn’t happen here, could it?). 

Wim Wenders’s music-documentary Buena Vista Social Club (1999) is a totally enjoyable start to finish look at Cuban music - a project that began when the great American guitarist Ry Cooder, who’s been for many years a proponent of world music, travels to Cuba to try to connect with the great stars of traditional Cuban dance music, much of which had been performed by members of the eponymous club. 

What a nice surprise to come across the under-the-radar Best Pic nominee Coda (2022), which shocked everyone with its Best Picture Oscar: a terrific film that’s heart-warming, never soporific or gratuitous, about a teenager 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 members all have complete deafness. 

In the Soviet WWII film Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985), one of best war, or anti-war, films I’ve ever seen, we follow a young man’s induction into and armed combat and takes us through astonishing sequences of cruelty and brutality that never feel gratuitous, just horrifying. 

The Billy Wilder classic Double Indemnity (1944) is one of the best ever among American films noirs - from the look of LA ca. 1938 (the setting for the plot), the fantastic hard-boiled dialog (screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, based on a novel by JM Cain, so how could you go wrong?), great acting by the 3 leads, each cast against type (McMurry, Stanwyck, E.G. Robinson), and a fun plot that will have you thinking all the way through,

Dino Risi’s Italian road movie, Il Sorpasso (1962), is totally watchable and fun and sad and touching. “Road Movie” doesn’t to it justice; it’s a comedy with much pathos, with two guys, strangers essentially, taking a weekend drive away from Rome and along the Coast - with Vittorio Gassman as the extrovert, risk-taking, domineering personality and the recently gone Jean-Louis Trintagnant as the timid, cautious, nerdy guy.

Jerrod Carmichael: Rothaniel (2022) - the title will become evident a few bits into this 60-minute program, directed by Bo Burnham - is an absolutely unique (and excellent) piece of cinema, something like an hour-long comedy sketch, sure, but also like a 60-minute one-man play and like an hour-long discussion unrehearsed and like an hour-long therapy session.

Radu Jude’s 2016 film, Scarred Hearts (the title is awkward, at least in English) is a beautiful if painful medical odyssey, as we follow a young man (early 20s) in 1935 Romania as he enters a TB asylum; the care he receives may have been adequate in its day but from our vantage looks brutal and ineffective: essentially the well-meaning doctor punctures the patient’s stomach to siphon off infectious pus - extremely painful - the puts the patient in a body cast, essentially making him immobile for months - with obvious physical (and mental) deterioration. 

John Ford’s 1939 classic, Stagecoach, is still a pleasure to watch if you can get by the racism and stereotypes that mar some of the scenes and just recognize these - the Apache warriors, the comical Hispanic-American English pronunciations - as relics from a (nearly) bygone era. In essence, the film is a version of the Canterbury Tales meets Sartre’s No Exit, as a group of 10 or so travelers, each with his/her own mission, share a coach for transport across dangerous open lands to the next fortification.

Martin Bell’s documentary Streetwise (1984) is a stunning and extraordinary film on the (mostly) teenagers living on the streets of Seattle, then, ironically, known as the “most livable city in America.” This scene is the polar opposite of the Microsoft/Starbucks Seattle culture that we know (of). Bell’s camera follows these children, all of them from broken homes or other terrible and threatening and loveless lives.

Top Ten Miniseries (I watched) in 2022

The Top Ten Miniseries (I watched) in 2022:

You won’t find a more hateful character on screen than Jean Paul (JP) Williams (played by Claes Bang) in the Irish black-comedy thriller (yes, lots of genre crossings) Bad Sisters (2022).

Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back (2021) is a monumental work of documentary and film editing - Ja 6-hour series built from hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours of film and recoding of the foursome in studio (and, ultimately, on rooftop) as they spent a month developing what would be their final album, Let It Be.

Dennis Lehane’s Black Bird miniseries (2022, Apple) is one of the most successful dramatizations “based on a true story”- a terrific and harrowing look at the life of a 20-something straight-arrow seeming guy (Taron Egerton as James Keene), nabbed as an Rx dealer and sentenced to 6 years - but the FBI makes him an offer: They will have his sentence commuted if he’ll go undercover into the prison for the “criminally insane” to get info and and wrench a information from a scary guy (Paul Walter Hauser as Larry Hall) who’s in jail for the murder of a young woman.

Hostages, an HBO documentary series (2022, 4 episodes, from a team of 5 directors), is a detailed look at the Iranian revolution of the ’70s, the American complicity based on years of support for the brutal Shah, and ultimately the collapse of all social order, a vacuum filled by the charismatic Ayatollah who turns a blind eye on the mob attack of the U.S. embassy, leading to 444 days of imprisonment of embassy staff, a few Marines (or just one?), and other Americans working with the embassy.

The HBO 8-part series Julia (2022) with Sarah Lancashire predominant as the eponymous French Chef Julia Child, is a pleasant, enjoyable, approachable series that has lots of laughs, smiles of recognition from those who recall the original TV series, and its moments of darkness and struggle as well: much talk about women being pushed aside in the male-dominated world of public (and I would guess commercial) TV, some sharp debate about whether Julia’s role was supportive of or harmful to progressive women of her era (the ‘60s), and a few glimpses of a some of the hidden truths in Julia’s life.

Nanfu Wang’s terrific 6-part documentary series, Mind Over Murder (2022, HBO) tells of the conviction of a six people known as the Beatrice Six. This gives nothing away, as you will learn in the first 60 seconds or so of the first episode that the 6 were later exonerated and released from prison after some 20 years after their conviction. How and why? 

In Season 3 of My Brilliant Friend “Lenu” rises to some fame through her publications as, thanks to her spoiled intolerable husband, her marriage cracks at the seams. This series remains one of the best on-going series of the 2020s - better and more accessible, I believe, than Ferrante’s source novels. 

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 how 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 HBO series Slow Horses Season 1 (2022, James Hawes, director; based on Mark Herron novel) is a complex and emotionally draining work about a team of British agents assigned to Slough House aka Slow Horses because of their various screw-ups and misdeeds - as they try to redeem their reputations through their efforts to thwart the kidnapping of a young Muslim comedian taken by a group of right-wing extremists who plan to execute the young man.

The 2nd season of Mike White’s HBO smash The White Lotus (2022), similar to the first in its luxury hotel setting for the rich and uber-rich, this time in Sicily, despite recent quibbles about its celebration of conspicuous consumption and display and the free ride that the most obnoxious characters get at the end (no spoilers), was a lot of fun to watch from the outset, and if we hate some of the characters, which we’re supposed to and expected to, well, that’s part of the fun as well. 

 

Some key films of '22, including Tar, Till, Elvis, Banshees of Inisherin, The Fabelmans, White Noise + The White Lotus Season 2

 Elliot's Watching - December 2022

Can anyone write a great whodunnit? Aren’t all the plots already taken? I have to say we were enjoying the BBC series Magpie Murders, which had enough originality within the threadbare conventions to keep our interest: A great popular author of detective fiction dies by falling off a rooftop bannister on his rural England mansion, one of several suspicious deaths in the region that may or may not be connected - although the connections are far from obvious - and at his death he left the eponymous mystery novel though absent any trace of the final chapter. His editor goes off in search of same, aided by her visions of the writer’s main character, Detective Pund, who comes to us from the past and guides his protege - and the editor to a degree - in the search to solve the murder mystery. All good, and surprisingly creative, with it’s multiple time levels and veering backend forth between past illusion and present real time. Interested? Stop right here, then, and though I will not give anything away let’s just say that, as w/ so many mysteries, the “solution” scene is a mess - all sorts of coincidences and improbabilities and encrypted messages and great leaps of faith so that everything’s explained except that the solution makes no logical sense. Oh, well. Back to classic movies and literary fiction. 

Among the vast wasteland of mediocre movies streaming in Netflix there stands at least one that was completely engrossing and dramatic, clearly low-budget/indie but not in need of a huge cast or special effects: John Patton Ford’s debut Emily the Criminal (2022). We were drawn to it because of the excellent performance in White Lotus from Aubrey Plaza, who stars as Emily in this intriguing crime drama: Emily in crisis has huge student debt and is unable it seems to get a professional job, result of several arrests in her youth; nearly  by chance she takes a flyer working as a “shopping dummy,” for a small syndicate that hires workers on a cash-only basis to buy major electronics using fake credit cards then selling the stolen produce at a deep discount; obviously, she’s in way over her head and faces a # of crisis points, but proves herself tough as nails - and all within the realm of probability and credibility: no superpowers here, no likely sequel at all - but an entertaining (and informative) 90 or so minutes - and hopes that it opens a gateway for director and star performer. 

Baz Luhrmann’s biopic Elvis (2022) is informative about Presley’s life for those few who don’t know that song already - emphasizing how, under guidance of his less-than-supportive manager, “Col.” Parker, Elvis melded the Memphis Blues sound of “Black” R&B that he’d heard from his youth with the more broadly popular “White” C&W Nashville sound and - by covering numerous songs from the Black musical tradition Elvis changed the nature of rock/popular music and re-established what it was to be a bigger than life star, comparable in universal popularity of his era with only the Beatles. There’s a good story within these parameters, and Austin Butler’s energetic performance is excellent, but BL can’t leave well enough alone, as this was about the most frenetic movie (aside from the occasional explosive crime or war or space movie) I’ve ever seen; for the hell of it I began measuring each “take” and I believe none was more the 3 seconds! Dizzying! Plus, 2.75 hours is far too long - what ever happened to the 90-minute show? A highlight, for better or worse, was an actual clip of Elvis in late career performing in Vegas - he still had it, in some ways, but he looked horrible and he seemed to be struggling with voice, weight, and life itself. Wish I could give this film a stronger recommendation, but the directing and self-indulgence did me in before the last bell. 

It’s disconcerting, troubling, sometimes frightening, sometimes grotesque but a tremendous and powerful true-life film about the infamous Emmitt Till case of 1955; Till (2022) tells the story of a 14-year-old Chicago child (Emmitt) whose mother, Danielle Deadwyler in the sure-bet Oscar nominee role as Emmitt’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who following her son’s murder became a social activist in racial and voting-rights issues. At the outset, she makes an unwise decision to send Emmitt alone on a visit to family in Mississippi, with numerous warnings about how race relationships are different in every way in the segregated Deep South; Emmitt, soulfully portrayed by Jalyn Hall, clearly has some learning disabilities and it’s evident to us that he cannot fully comprehend the warnings from his mom; sure3 enough, Emmit breaks the social code (whistles at a White woman!) and pays for it w/ his life - a brutal, sadistic lynching. The miracle is that two of the perpetrators are arrested and charged; much of the film from that point concerns the national movement for justice, which Mamie has pursued, and the horrors of the Deep South so-called jury trial. Director Chinonye Chukwu does a great job keeping up the pace of the film, never letting the film descend to melodrama or rise to preachiness, keeping the narrative tight and compelling, even though most viewers will know the history and the outcome from the start. 

The 2nd season of Mike White’s HBO smash The White Lotus (2022), similar to the first in its luxury hotel setting for the rich and uber-rich, this time in Sicily, despite recent quibbles about its celebration of conspicuous consumption and display and the free ride that the most obnoxious characters get at the end (no spoilers), was a lot of fun to watch from the outset, and if we hate some of the characters, which we’re supposed to and expected to, well, that’s part of the fun as well. As in Season 1, the series opens with a corpse, this time an afloat corpse, and part of the fun trying to figure out who died and who killed. Few will succeed at that. The Lotus team does a great job defining each character while avoiding the most obvious stereotypes, and at keeping several plot lines moving along and clearly defined. It’s no great expose or analysis of society, but it’s honest within its scope and a kick to watch, especially if you don’t expert more than HBO planned to deliver. I actually think Season 2 was better than Season 1 - a rare occurrence - in that the characters across the board were less hateful and less naive. 

It’s easy to see how and why Vera Chytilova’s film Daisies (1966) was a significant cinematic event when released as this strange romp - two young women each named Marie with little or no back story (who are they how did they meet what is up w/ their lives???) go about their days (and nights) seemingly surviving by hooking up w/ various elderly men who take them out for dinner (and drinks!) at various dinner/dancing clubs - none of which feels likely or accurate - which is part of the point. The 2 Maries are spirits rather than characters, and their role in life is to poke fun and and puncture the autocratic, Soviet-dominated culture of Czechoslovakia in that era. What today looks self-conscious and ludicrous - souped up by many quick cuts and weird camera tricks, very avant guard even in the US in the ‘60s and now quaint and distracting - was at the time a brave political statement: upend the bourgeoisie! The film, though, still has its pleasures; the 2 Maries are spirited and funny, and the concluding segment, a huge table set up for a banquet (nobody seems to be arriving), accessible only through a scary freight elevator, in which the 2 Maries indulge in the word’s biggest food fight - a great scene and not hard to see its ideology: secret riches kept hidden from the public, vast expenditures, vulnerable to direct attack. And that soon ended. 

Tar Fields’s drama Tar (2022) gives us a tour de force portrayal of that chameleonic actor Cate Blanchett - if she could portray to a T Bob Dylan why not the most successful (strictly fictional) female conductor in the world, the eponymous Lydia Tar? She’s tremendous, sympathetic, credible actor in every scene over the course of the nearly 2.5-hour film, and a primary reason for watching - and why it will never be a box-office smash - is the information we get about the behind the scenes workings of a symphony orchestra, both the artistic direction of one such as Tar (although I don’t think any conductor was ever as histrionic as she) and the back-stage politics of who’s staying, going, performing, or not. Personally, I was fascinated by this aspect of the film - can’t think of many other works that touch on this aside from Thomas Mann’s and Yehoshuah’s The Extra. That said, there’s also a deeply troubling side to this film: Why is it that the greatest female conductor etc. uses her prominence to gain sexual favors and to even scores, and why is she so nasty to underlings? To the extent this is true at all, why single out the only woman ever to play this role. Yes, there’s a brief acknowledgement to negative equality - reference to “Jimmy” being chased out of the closet and some lament about Von Karajan without really holding him accountable for his capitulation to Hitler and his all-Aryan orchestra - the setting for Tar btw is the Berlin Symphony - nothing like it in the world, as they note - but why the soft-pedaling re the men and the skewering of the gal? OK, despite all this I was  fascinated throughout the film - some of which is tough to understand because of plot complexity and bad sound design on the many one-on-one scenes in which we can discern what Blanchett is saying but not so for her counterparts. Worth watching never the less, and Blanchett definitely earns an Oscar nod. 

The multi-talented Sarah Polley directed the film Women Talking (2022), and quite a challenge that must have been as the film consists largely of the eponymous women, who are living in a present-day dystopian settlement in which the women and men are separated at birth and live only among their same-sex brothers, sisters, etc., w/ the women playing subservient roles (e.g., they are never taught to read), engaged in an ongoing discussion about the future of their community, in which the women were on a recent night/day attacked and raped by a group of the men: Should the women stay? Go? Fight Back? Do nothing? Polley gives us nearly 2 hours of their debate - 10 or so women, all dressed in dark clothing, in a single darkened room in the rafters of a hay loft. How could this be interesting? Yet - it will hold anyone start to finish. Polley does a great job keeping the camera alive but never rushing the shots, letting each of the women to speak powerfully of their experience and ideas. Particular honors go to Claire Foy - who knew the Queen got rant in American? The community itself, which seems so improbable, is apparently based in part on such a segregated community in Bolivia - but that aside, there are obvious parallels to various communities that are illegal, cruel, or otherwise: think Hasidic Jews, the Amish, outlaw LDS communities, the Waco project, and this could go on, so, yes, the nearly incredible may be not impossible. Spacial kudos on this project much to novelist Miriam Toews, on whose same-name novel this film is based; as most of the film entails “talking,” the source novel, we can be sure, provided Polley with much of the language (as well as the whole dystopian-present-day high concept) for her screenplay and treatment. 

We’re definitely in the midst of a Chantel Akerman revival thanks to the surprising announcement from Sight and Sound that her Jeanne Dielman (1975) was the top-ranked film (i.e., appeared on the most total 10-pick ballots) ever made; I have to think that’s a little overstated - Rules of the Game, Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story anyone? - but a welcome recognition of the work of female and avant-garde filmmakers, and accompanying that surprising (to me) recognition another one of her early films, the “documentary” News from Home (1977). This film consists entirely a series of photos of NYC - where she’d moved - from back in the day, with some voiceover narration from CS’s mother, reading her correspondence with far-from-home daughter; the letters, despite the title of the film, are mostly un-newsy: There are a few updates about her father’s health and accounts of meetings with other relatives and neighbors, but never any detail; the correspondence mostly consists of statements about how much she misses her daughter/CA and pleading with her to come home and to write more regularly, in other words, typical correspondence from that day between parent and away-at-college kin. Watching this film reminds us of how great a distance separated the U.S. from Europe in those days before email, before computers, way way before cell phones and free “long distance” calls. But that’s just the choral background; the brilliance of the film comes from the photographic structure: a series of shots of scenes of NY life, at a time when the city was at its worst, with graffiti and garbage and pretty crime and even prostitution was out there, everywhere. With the possible exception of the final shot, none of the photos show NYC at its best; this is the opposite of, say, Woody Allen’s veneration of NY in Manhattan; CA’s camera focuses on the dirt and the grit - such as long takes about a moving, jostling subway line - the walls scorched with graffiti, the crowd tired and indifferent (hardly ever does anyone notice her camera). After many such still, toward the end CA takes films from a moving car/van (up 10th Ave.) and then downtown via elevated tracks. Her steady camera doing street photography it looks to viewers as though she was taking still photos and the photos are, just a little bit, coming to life - as the occasion car wooshes by, for ex. The film is by no means gripping or dramatic - but it set forth a style largely imitated in the 45 years since by hundreds, maybe thousands of aspiring filmmakers who today are working w/far more advanced and efficient equipment. But Ackerman was there first. 

Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) is about as a definitive marker of excellence for dark comedy - a film with some horrific scenes of abuse and self abuse and a sorrowful tale of angst and loneliness in a small Irish coastal island; the film owes a debt to the great William Trevor in its notes of Irish melancholy and fierce loyalty, its strange juxtaposition or high drama and sly wit. To summarize would be beside the point: to tell of the brutality would be to lose the the fellowship. But in brief, the film lifts off with an elderly man tell his long-time best friend to get lost - he never wants to speak to his friend again, and will not quite say why that’s so. Improbable, yes - but there’s so much wit and drama drawn from this standpoint: you’ll laugh but won’t exactly know why, as this story is so dire and cruel; you’ll back off, but you won’t exactly know why, as this village seems on the surface to be such a peaceable community - with daily conviviality at the pub, with family loyalty, with the love for animals large and small - a brilliant, sly movie that will stay with you for some time. 

Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s film Neptune Frost (2021) is one of those rare films that you have to give yourself up to it and enjoy what you can - especially of the really cool African music and the startlingly vivid costume display and other visuals - while you can because I think most viewers, me certainly, will find the film extremely difficult to comprehend. But does that matter really? Roughly speaking, the film is “about” a young man working in the gold mines of central Africa (Burundi, I think) who strikes (kills?) a team boss and thus goes on the lam to try to save his life and to avenge the killing; he adopts the name Magnanimous Goldmine (or something like that), as well as the title name - as does his sister, in a yin and yang relationship. Neptune (male, though nonbinary) joins up with a cultish group living “off the grid” and hoping to attack the government in some unclear manner. Hmm. Yes, difficult to follow the details and not really necessary if you can just give yourself up to the energy and unusual (to Westerners) Central African setting. To those who prefer or who demand a coherent, accessible narrative with a beginning, middle, and end - this is not your film. 

The Steven Spielberg/Tony Kushner The Fabelmans (2022) is a star-dappled work of cinematic auto fiction, re-creating the childhood and adolescence of SS with particular attention, obviously, to his lifelong passion for films/cinematography. I wasn’t at first warm to the film - it seem to reek a bit of idolatry as we see SS at age figuring out how to stage and photography train crashes - story a prodigy, in other words, and I was afraid the film would drown in solipsism - but, no - the narrative takes off in the second “movement” of the film as we see more about the fissures in the Fabelman/Spielberg family dynamics, putting young SS, aka Sammy F., in conflict with his mother, his father, and his beloved “uncle,” as we feel deeply for this child and recognize that film is his life and his salvation - which comes an even greater part of the narrative in the 3rd “movement,” his h.s. years, notably in a wealthy suburban Cal. community in which he is the only Jew and suffers deeply from antisemitism and bullying - and of course his skills as a filmmaker becomes his salvation, but at a cost. Strangely, the movie feels cut short in the superficial treatment of SS’s dropping out of college and seeking to get work in the industry; we could have used more of this - though the film checks in at well above 2 hours, so maybe it could have been done as a series? Or just leave well enough alone. Particularly moving are the sequences of the h.s. bullying - though this has long been a staple of films about adolescence, and the wrenching portrayal (Michelle Williams) as “Sammy’s” troubled mother, a frustrated artist herself - and a true disrupter, who serves, at least initially, as an inspiration for the young Sammy and later as the agent of destruction in this divided family. 

Noah Baumbach’s film adaptation (2022) of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985, also approx setting of the novel) is in essence a three-act story, the best of which by far is the middle story - An Airborne Toxic Event - in which a dark cloud of lethal chemicals released ion a truck crash swirls above the mid-Ohio mid-sized city, leading to a mass evacuation of all the inhabitants - all this beautifully conveyed, the tension and conflicting information, the reckless behavior - by NB, a very difficult event to capture I would think. The first part of the story, as in DD’s novel, focuses on the “college on the hill” (in the novel, I’d thought of the setting as Saratoga, Skidmore, though that’s never id’d) and some serio-comic “deconstruction of academic nonsense, as the main character, Jack (Adam Driver) takes pride for his creation of a Hitler Studies program (rivaled by a fledgling program of Elvis Studies) - the satire on academia is kinda funny but let’s face it, these are easy targets (Driver’s lecture on Hitler, which mesmerizes his students in a Hitler-like performance - if this episode is in the novel I don’t remember it, but it’s powerful in this movie, the highlight of Act I). The story line, however, when it moves on to Act III in which Driver’s wife (played by Greta Gerwig, NB’s wife) become addicted to some sort of experimental mood-altering Rx, which sends Driver off to find her Jones - and the film just unravels in this improbable episode: The first half of the film was credible and therefore scary abut the ending seemed to me just a mess (I don’t have a clear recollection of how the novel ended - hey, it’s been nearly 40 years!) - floundering about and way too long a that point, though the highly animated closing credits make it worthwhile to stick around till the end. 

Nope? Nope. And it’s such a shame after a few powerful films from Jordan Peele, most notably Get Out, already on the Sight & Sounds list of the best films of all time. And rightly so - it was a perfect demonstration of how to make a great horror film: It has to begin slowly w/only a vague intimation of what’s to occur and why, and there has to be a clear demarcation between reality, fantasy, terror - as well as a divide between those who recognize the danger (and act on that recognition) the doubters and dissemblers. Nope (2022) has none of these - instead, a hard-to-fathom some kind of possession affecting animals on a ranch for a company that provides trained animals for use in films; there are flying saucers, of course, and attacks on the grid, but why? What’s this all about aside from a display of special effects? So let’s just leave it at that: There oughta be a “feels like” scale as with the weather forecast (45 degrees but feels like 20…: How about 2 hours 10 minutes but feels like 4 hours and 40 minutes? 

 

November 2022: Werner Herzog, Godard, Truffaut, Pasolini, Van Sant, plus Hud, The Crown 5, Blue Dahlia, and The Earth Is Blue...

 Elliot’s Watching - November 2022

Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampire (1979) is a loose adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel (and apparently of Murnau’s silent) and it fully lives up to the standard its forbears set: Dark, creepy, ugly, disturbing, even for those who’ve read the original (I found it terribly dated) or seen any of the many adaptations. Set in a German village, Herzog’s version of the legend begins with a young man with a lovely young wife (Isabelle Adjani) is sent by his boss (they seem to be in the real estate business), a weird guy in his own right, giggling and full of ticks, on a business assignment: Go see this man who wants to buy a major property in town - Count Dracula. Wait as second, who would go on such a mission?! We want to say: Stop! Hold it right there! Go home! But, no, he’s young and ambitious and heads off on his own - a journey of 4 days, mostly on foot, as nobody he meets wants to take him to Dracula’s castle (this part of the plot veers from Stoker’s). When he arrives, he meets his nemesis - played by Klaus Kinski, Herzog’s fave villain/weirdo - who has weird long fingernails like claws, a ghastly bald dome, dark clothes, dark everything - and as he feeds the young many (Harker) a substantial dinner Drac. hovers over everything: He notes that he cannot conduct business during the daylight hours, listens to howling “creatures of the night,” and so on. In short, months, in seems, later Harker returns to his home a completely damaged and ruined man (again, quite differing from the sources), carried by a carriage that contains dirt-filled soil from Dracula’s estate - and the shipment also caries many rats, who disembark and multiply into vast swarms - the plague! Watch it for the extraordinary sense of dread and gloom, esp when Drac clamps onto peoples’ necks to draw his life-sustaining blood. Though it’s not entirely the conventional Dracula narrative, it’s a great intro to this material for those who can stomach it. 

Pier Paolo Passolni’s (short) film (30+minutes) film La Ricotta (as in the choose - 1962) which ran as part of those ominous features popular in intalian art films in the ‘60s is a sometimes hilarious bit of sisal criticism and hypocrisy and a glimpse of the prices of the art and skill or lack thereof of filming, esp crowd scenes shot en pleine aire. This shows PPP’s nihilistic and blasphemous treatment of organize (Catholic) religion, and as elements for offend just about everyone, or at least every disbeliever and skeptic. A ragtag grojp of about 5 actors, dancers, musicians are set to shoot a scene of the death of Jesus o the cross; they’re in one of those outlands, cold and muddy, with lots of new cheap high rises sprouting in the distance, an image of the rising yet still inchoate landscape of postwar industrial Rome - a setting familiar to those who’ve sene Fellini’s early works. The kicker is that as the production crew - led Orson Welles playin a type of himself, an enigmatic and querulous director who has no truck with the Italian journalist on hand to interview the great director - struggle and stumbles to get the actors to tat heron these appropriately costumed and ready at the least with their lines - as he prepares for the grand finale the Crucifixion - essentially arranging his actors into tables of great Renaissance paintings, Everything goes wrong, and in the foothills of this carefully constructed scene the troupe of actors indifferent to the artistic vision engage unjust about all of the 7 deadly sins and more, notably infidelity, gluttony, jealousy, avarice, lust, greed, sloth, wrath, coveting, et al. - all I’m high-energy scenes of hilarity played out at the foot of the Crucifixion re-enactment - with some tragic consequences. No wonder that PPP was banned by the Church of Rome - not something he feared, evidently - and the film holds up today (though what does the title mean?) and makes its point through riotous hilarity (think Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale) rather than dismal pronunciation from on high (think Chaucer’s Priest’s Tale).

Stanley Kwan’s Hong Kong set film Rouge (1987) is not the kind of film I would ordinarily care for - a rom-com/melodrama ghost story - but Kwan tells this love story with such panache and humor that it’s hard not to smile and enjoy this fantasy romp. In essence, it’s about a young woman, Fleur,  indentured from childhood to serve as a “courtesan” - i.e., prostitute - in a high-end Hong Kong brothel that caters to the wealthy young (and older) men. She and one of her clients (Chan)  fall in love; they arrange a meeting with his mother - and Fleur (Anita Mui) is obviously charming, intelligent, poised, lovely 0 but Mom will have nothing to do w/ her because of her sullied past. So - the two drink poison on OD on opium in a joint suicide pact (see R&J, Aida, et al.). Tragic - but - we pick up the story some 50 or so years later in Honk Kong with an unchanged Fleur wanders into a newspaper office planning to place a personal ad to find the whereabouts of her lost love, if he is still alive. Two reporters take up the challenge w/ her, leading to a # of complications but most important - the pursuit leads to two reporters, 2 misfits, to fall for each other (he, Alex Man, is particularly gawky and ill at ease with women) - and their sweet love story evolves out of the star-crossed lovers of the frame story. Kwan manages to find much humor and joy in what could have been a mawkish romp, and the lighting, costumery, and interior and exterior sets throughout - particularly night-time scenes in the rain on the streets of HK - are in themselves enough to hold anyone’s attention in this under-the-radar success. The score will not be to all tastes, but the passages of Chinese opera are integrated very well into the story line (Chan is a wealthy young man who somehow aspires a career as an opera singer - isn’t there a similar film concept in an early Japanese movie that I can’t quite remember?)

Does (Jean-Luc) Godard’s film Weekend (1967) stand up after so many years? Pretty well, I think, in that it’s just as odd, at times hilarious, at times boring and off-putting, but for whatever reason, good or bad, my reaction today is much like my reaction 50 years ago. It’s worth watching if only for the great “traffic jam” sequences, an incredibly long set of 4 (I’m told) shots of cars and truck stuck on a freeway, in which everyone’s blasting away as if that will do any good. Then we get to some really gory sequences, many bodies strewn along the roadside - and what does it mean? You have to be totally “square” or out-of-it even to ask: It just is. We (loosely) follow our protagonist couple on their weekend adventure, during which they make several encounters during which the conversation explores: Are we real people? Or actors in a movie? A very 60s kind of question and dilemma - seems quite antiquated as well. And then two migrant laborers talk at great length direct into the camera about their revolutionary aspirations - again, very ‘60s in the days of idolatry of Marx and Mao. And they film wraps with a Western-movie shootout at a pastoral retreat of some the characters we’ve met en route. And it all amounts to? A critique of society? Not really, but maybe a glimpse of what it would be like 50 years hence, i.e., today, with our over-dependence on gasoline-powered cars and with the remnants of colonialism still hovering over the African nations. Godard was no seer, but he broke the rules of narrative and made viewers think and react, if not with any of the Marxist fervor that he would have liked or anticipated.  

Traces Series 2 (we missed the 1st season but each season stands alone successfully. In this series, set in beautiful Dundee, Scotland (the Scots are really showing their stuff via crime series of late), the main strand of the plot involves the search for a serial bomber who threatens to create more havoc. What’s good is that the pursuit is intense and along the way we learn a lot about forensics and crime investigations, thanks largely to the clear accounts of the ongoing pursuit Laura Fraser (Professor Sarah). What disappoints a little is that - as in far too many crime thrillers - there are about a thousand things that could have gone wrong in the investigation, arrest, and interrogation but - miracle of miracles! - ever guess pans out and everything works. Put aside any skepticism and enjoy, I guess. A more troubling aspect is the absolute and complete mystery of the attraction between Sarah and the lead investigator - possibly the most off-putting and incomprehensible office romance ever filmed, not that I’ve seen them all. 

I had never seen Hud and had consigned it in my mind to a typical American Western, centered on a larger-than-life tough guy (cf Liberty Valence, High Noon, for some better examples). But, prompted by reading a review of  PN’ auto bio, I thought I’d take a look at Hud on Criterion before it was too late (it will drop from Criterion library next month). Wow, was I surprised: Martin Ritt’s Hud (1963) is a really great American film, right from the first frame, when we know this will not be another dull, drab Western exterior. The film, shot by JamesWong Howe extreme Panavision (ie the vantage is always wider and narrower than convention letter-box framing), a great way to feel from the first immersed in aTexas landscape. Plus, filming in b/w - an homage those who shot thousands of oaters - but here the b/w gives the film the look of classic - just beautiful. We see life in a hardscrabble farm house where Newman lives and runs the farm with his grandfather and with his late brother’s teenage son - 3 generations of guys in the one meeting - + plus the girl, Patricia Neale. What a set-up: we could be heading toward Tennessee Williams, or other films of ne’er do well bros and struggling farm fams, see e.g. East of Eden. And in the desolation of the nearby town, where there doesn’t seem much to aside from drinking and fighting; the landscape will remind many of Last Picture Show and maybe the novel Lonesome Dove, both by Larry McMurtry, a genius, and the author the excellent screenplay for Hud. Hud as played by Newman is a vile, sexist, angry, and dangerous man; his smoldering temper - which leads to a brutal assault on Neale and much peril for Hud’s nephew, who worships Hud - and follows him down a path could lead to much self-destruction. One thing curious about the plot, however, is that Hud’s nephew seems to have no friends - a sad side-note that the film never quite recognizes or resolves. As with so many great dramatists - compare Pinter, Strindberg, O’Neill - everyone suffers. 

Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), aside from its great title, did little for me and I quit on it about 40 minutes in. I found the whole production to be in some ways self-conscious and cute and imaginative but to no good cause; in other ways, the characters are repulsive and dangerous and I just felt the whole movie, or the half of it, was an unpleasant place to be. If you’re interested in the community of dropouts, drifters, drug addict of there Pacific NW, a far better film is Streetwise, which is much more realistic (it’s a documentary) and much more sympathetic to the lives of its participants. It’s note exactly a feel-good movie, but it’s straight=forward and honest and not filled with visual pyrotechnics and other distractions. 

George Marshall’s noir LA film The Blue Dahlia (1946) is best known and appreciated today, to the extend that it is known and appreciated, for the Raymond Chandler screenplay - which I think is one of his few writing credits for original work rather than adapted from one of his novels or stories. The film isn’t great - a far too complex, head-scratching who-dunnit  - but any Chandler project will have some great dialog and this one also  has some fine moments such as the Alan Ladd Veronica Lake drive up the dark coast to and past Malibu, or the opening scuffle in a downtown LA diner, where we get the first sense that one of the characters, William Bendix as Buzz - shows himself to be mentally disturbed - specifically, by a wartime head injury that leaves him with serious PTSD, though the term came into use only later; credit here to Chandler and Marshall for a film that recognizes the price of war on civilian life, even after the armistice, and without a mawkish or melodramatic tone. 

Filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk was traveling/working in Ukraine ca 2020 when she met a family (a single mom and her 4 kids) that was making a film about their life during the war - mostly directed by the teenage daughter who, with some friends, aspires to become a filmmaker herself; IT decided to make a documentary film, The Earth Is Blue as an Orange, about the film - which seems as if it would be a precious, ironic venture - but, no: by filming the fledgling efforts of these teens and their mom and younger sibs and neighbors, we get an intimate portrait of what the family is living through, coping with, and in a real sense triumphing over during the war - which had been ongoing for five years at the time depicted. We see both the spirit and energy of the young filmmakers - for ex., gaining cooperation from some Ukraine tank soldiers for a short staged sequence - and some harrowing accounts of how the family copes with the constant night-time bombings: they hide in a cell in the basement, for the most part. In one interview with children talk about how they’ve learned to distinguish incoming from outgoing missiles. Many winter exterior shots show us the grim, post-Soviet, ugly cityscape - and then there will be a patch of beauty - bridge, a neighborhood along a greenway; and then, worst of all, bombed out apartment buildings, charred beyond repair. The movie is uplifting in the end - but of course that’s not the end, and we have to wonder: What has become of this family, and so many others, since 2020? A scary thought. 

I had to watch it, just because - so into it after 4 seasons, so how can you not watch Season 5 of The Crown, especially as we know what lies just over the horizon: the specter of Diana, pursued by the media and the public, dead on a speedway in Paris. But not yet - that’s for season 6. And Season 5? Just not quite as good, engaging, varied, and lavish as the first 4. What went wrong? top of the list would be the casting of Domenic West as the most un-Charles-like Charles as possible; could not in any way fathom Charles as a handsome, cocky, ladies man, no way. And the conflicts in most of the season were muted and peripheral, unlike the first 4 seasons that really developed a character over time (Eliz. seems the same as in season 4, and not too different from the Queen we all know in her final years, decades. What’s good about Season 5?: the 8th episode that traced the manipulations by the BBC in getting Diana to tell her story via one of its news programs - great look at the Diana phenomenon and at the workings and working-overs of the media; and episode 9, in which Charles and Diana seem to reconcile into a friendship post divorce - but not for long. The last episode seemed a stasis, with the Queen lamenting the retirement of the royal yacht about which who cares? Are 5 castles or whatever enough? Boo hoo.  

Francois Truffaut’s best-known film, Jules and Jim (1962), based closely on the 1953 novel by Henri-Pierre Roche, is the classic love triangle - J&J being the two best buddies who fall for the same girl, Catherine (Jeanne Moreau). Over the course of some years or so - beginning with the protagonists as easy-going young men living the vie Boheme in Paris before the Great War - their friendship interrupted by the war (Jules is German, and served on the Russian front; Jim is a journalist who is assigned to write about post-War France) - until, after a gap of some time, Jim visits the now-married Jules & Catherine in rural France. Thus begins Catherine’s on-again, off-again relations with each of the two men, plus at least one outside fling - none of which, at least at first, provokes the jealousy and vitriol that one would expect. But this triangulated marriage/friendship cannot endure forever, as we see in the last third of the film, in which it becomes every more obvious thatCatherine is more than just a flirt but also a seriously deranged and dangerous woman. The great success of this film is that it hovers between romantic idle - esp with Truffaut’s beautiful wide-angle b/w film and topography - and tragic cruelty; try as we might, we can’t truly identify with or aspire to this kind of relationship, so cruel to those so close. If J&J were to be re-made today, of course, the erotic attraction between the two men would be explicit rather than implied or suggested (a recent streaming series from Mexico, Everything Will Br Fine, touched on similar themes).