Shakespeare our contemporary? Not quite, in Hopkins's King Lear

Last night I watched the first half hour - into Act 2 I think (the expulsion from Goneril's estate) of the Anthony Hopkins King Lear (on Prime); I doubt I'll watch any further. Not that it's a terrible production or anything - it has many strengths - but there's also something about it that's entirely wrong. They set the play in contemporary London - with the opening sequence showing the bright lights of the financial-district towers at night - slowly moving us toward a government building, an appropriate locale for the first act, the king's division of the country among his daughters. But soon I recognized that the contemporary setting just feels ridiculous - at least without major modifications to the text. It's OK I guess to have an aged king of England dividing up the realm but it's totally weird when he says things like "By Appollo!" And gradually, the realistic-contemporary setting seems more and more absurd: A king sitting in a darkened room with just his three daughters and some of the upper nobility dividing the kingdom into sections on a hand-drawn map? How could this be? And the visit to Goneril, with the crowd of soldiers in camo acting like a bunch of louts? And the king has a jester, too? No, it makes no sense at all. There have been other updates of Lear - Jane Smiley's Thousand Acres; Kurosawa's Ran - that work well (at least Kurasowa's does) because they just use the dynamics of the plot, rebuilding as necessary (Shakespeare would approve of course, that greatest of adapters). But to take the play literally and stage it in contemporary setting is ludicrous; it's a medieval play and should look and feel that way - ghostly, dark, brutal, sparsely populated. That said, the English are always great at certain aspects of Shakespeare: The look of the setting is visually fine, even if it makes no sense, and the cast, especially Hopkins and Emma Thompson (Goneril) are great at line readings. It won't do you any harm to watch the whole movie - though I would definitely say it is totally unsuitable for a first-time viewer/reader of King Lear. I'd start with the Peter Brook 1971 film if possible and work down from there.

Perhaps the best and most credible h.s. drama since FNL: Elite

The 8-part Netflix series Elite (2018) has gotten little attention so far - perhaps because it's in Spanish and easily confused w/ a Telanovela - but in my view it's a series well worth watching for a # of reasons: Excellent narrative line w/ many strands that intersect intelligently and surprisingly, fine acting by a young cast (all of the principals are student in an "elite" high school in, I think, Madrid), a mystery and a murder investigation revealed in the first scene and carried through till the conclusion but that never dominates the plot, which is really about the students and their complex inter-relations; a high-school drama that is both sympathetic and highly credible (the only comparable piece I can recall would be the great Friday Night Lights). Yes, maybe there's a touch of melodrama and yes it's a litle hard in the first few episodes to keep the many characters and their back stories straight and yes the cross-cultural crushes and relationships are not always totally believable - a fact that the characters recognize themselves and joke about, calling these cross-class relationship "Disney" - but there's a lot of veracity throughout and it will hold your interest and attention top to bottom. In brief, the story line is that 3 kids from an impoverished public h.s. win scholarships to attend the elite school and their doing so and their falling in love with kids already in the school creates waves of social pressure and reaction.Among issues touched upon include homosexuality, Muslim fundamentalism, political corruption, grade-grubbing, and more, all done without didacticism and as part of character development. All told, though Madrono and Montero have come up with a really good series w/ a lot of insight into many social issues - in all cultures today - and it seems definitely headed to a Season 2 (and who knows?, an English-language remake, that would probably ruin the whole thing?).

The Dawn Wall has plenty of thrills for those who love heights and those who fear them

The Lowell-Mortimer 2018 film, The Dawn Wall, has plenty of jaw-dropping moments of awe and is a thrill for those who love heights and for those who fear them, though it doesn't break any ground in documentary cinema - pretty standard techniques throughout with too much emphasis on talking heads - in what has become a mini-genre, the mountain-climber movie (the recent Meru was one of the best). That said: Aren't these movies always pretty good and worth watching (one of my household members says an emphatic: Yes!). And I have to say that the saga of Timmy Caldwell is one of the best: He's a kid who grew up w/ learning difficulties and w/ a loving dad but one who pushed him to extremes from the earliest age and, fortunately, instead of growing up in rebellion fell in love with rock climbing and by teenage years totally excelled (and dad never became too pushy of too invested in his son's life). Timmy became obsessed with completing unique climb up the wall of El Cap (Yosemite), and the film centers on that climb - and gives us a great sense of the extraordinary difficulty of some of the 32 "pitches" en route to the summit. We get a really intimate view of the struggles of Caldwell and his much less experienced climbing partner (Kevin Jorgeson) as somehow the filmmakers followed them closely throughout the challenge (there's no info on how they shot this film - which is good; the film isn't about itself). Moreover, Caldwell has a fascinating back story, involving an ill-fated climb with his then-girlfriend and a climbing partner, in Krygyzstan, during which they were assaulted and captured by a team of rebel soldiers. So there's plenty of great material in this film, and it's especially worth watching for those who like documentary films that take us for 2 hours to places we'd never go in a million years.

An quirky search-for-the-truth documentary about a missing film: Shirkers

Sandi Tan's 2018 documentary, Shirkers, gets off to a bumpy start but by the end catches us up in its pathos and humor. Tan narrates the story of her life as a filmmaker, centered on the creation and then the mysterious loss of a film she and some friends produced when they were college students, the eponymous Shirkers. ST, now about 40 years old, grew up in Singapore, where she and 2 girlfriends were into punk, alternative rock, world cinema, and all forms of creative expression; there are and were kids like them in every single school in the U.S., but in Singapore they were complete outliers. Pursuing their mutual interest in film, they took a course in what looks to be some kind of community school, a class led by a 30ish man, Georges Cardona, who turns out to be strange to say the least. The 2 young women leave Singapore for first year of college - 2 to the US and Tan to England - and continue communications w/ Cardona (he primarily sends odd tape recordings of his brief messages to them rather than calls, cards, letters); he encourages the 3 to return to Singapore for the summer to make a movie. Tan writes a screenplay that everyone raves about; at this point her film looks to be incredibly disorganized and amateurish, but they get enough money to spend the whole summer shooting. They all return to school in the fall, leaving the film - about 70 "cans" - with Cardona to edit. And that's the last they see of the film - Cardona disappears along w/ all the video and audio. I won't provide any spoilers; however, I'll say that up to this point in the film - a bit more than halfway in - I was disappointed: Cardona is such an obvious phony and pathological liar, perhaps even a predator, that it was hard to believe these young women were so trusting in him. And the film they were working on looked to be a disaster - perhaps it was best that they just move on. The 2nd half of Shirkers, however, really picked up my interest, as Tan in particular tries to sleuth out what happened to Cardona and to the film. Without divulging anything, I'll say only that it's nice at the end to see where the 3 filmmakers are today and how much - or how little - they've changed over the years. This documentary will recall in some way other search-for-the-truth dox such as Searching for Sugar Man; I don't see this film as a likely commercial success - a little too quirky for that - but it's worth a look.

Why to watch Orson Welles's final film - and why not to

We shoujld be grateful to Nettflix for bringing us the finished version of Orson Welles's final movie, The Other Side of the Wind, which remained incomplete when he died in 1985 - leaving behind about 100 hours of footage, shot in various formats (some full screen 35mm, some square forma - maybe Super8?, some b/w, some color) - with a few edited segments, many notes, but far from coherent. He never was able to get full backing that would have enabled him to complete the film within a set time-frame and budget - typical of his late films, which were always hanging on by a threat and filmed over a too-long span of time - and the footage sat in various vaults and warehouses in Europe until a few years ago. The job of putting this together was heroic, with many obstacles - including transfer from celluloid to digital - but the team has at least created a reasonably coherent 2-hour film. But is it any good? I would say it's a curiosity worth watching because of what it shows us about Welles, but conceptually the film is a huge ego trip that's willfully disorienting and deliberately obscure. In brief, the movie tells the story of an aging director celebrating his 70th bd with a crowd of acolytes, hangers-on, and a host of media invited into the house director (played by John Huston, clearly meant to be a stand-in for OW) to document the celebration and to screen a cut of his latest film project - a film within the film. The evening comes to a tragic end - which we learn of at the outset; much as we might (or might not) love OW, there's nothing lovable about the overbearing, gruff character at the center of this film, much less about his swarm of parasites and acolytes and exes. That said, on the plus side this film is like an anthology of OW's innovative and groundbreaking directorial style or styles: The unusual shooting angles, many from the ground up, that we know from Citizen Kane, the strange effect of bright illumination in dark rooms and spaces that we've seen in Chimes at Midnight, the quick cuts in the editing - assuming the editors of this final version emulated OW's technique in the scenes he'd completed - so that the camera never lingers on any one character or moment, which recalls the above-mentioned films and also Mr. Arkadin. This directorial abundance is worth watching, even studying, as least for a while, though eventually most will agree that all this technique is in service to no good end. The "film within a film" is dreadful (maybe it's supposed to be?), a near-pornographic film that looks like a bad music video from the 90s (so maybe OW was ahead of his time once again, but it's a time well forgotten); the screenplay at times impenetrable. It's no wonder he could get no financial backing for this film as it had flop written all over it - which makes us wonder about the director's blathering about the decline of taste and the ever-lower standards of the movie biz. So, yeah, it's worth seeing for technique alone and for historical value, but I doubt anyone will want to rank this among other Welles classics. Sometimes, an artist's days are done.

Homecoming will hold your interest despite some of its flaws

The Blooomberg/Horowitz/Esmail 10-part series Homecoming, on Amazon Prime is a mixed bag, w/ some strong points in its favor and some deep flaws as well. The story, briefly, involves a social worker/therapist, Julia Roberts, working in a DOD-financed program to help returning war vets overcome PTSD and transition into society. OK, but we see right away that this project is deeply flawed and completely sinister, in ways that we don't comprehend fully until the conclusion of the series. Her supervisor, running the program from afar - all by cell phone while he engages in various sybaritic activities - is played by a hilarious Bobby Cannevale, who brings a lot to the show. On the plus side, the creators to a fine job w/ the plot strands, doling out information in pieces and letting the picture in stages come into focus; this works bcz JR herself is unclear about the program and its true intent. The show is done half in the "present" - a few years after the program was shut down, and w/  JR working in a crappy job in a diner - and half in the he past, when JR was a well-groomed, devoted social worker involved in a good cause, with particular focus on one returning vet and their completely inappropriate flirtation (the use of different frame dimensions - portrait-frame for the present and wide-screen landscape for the past, was visually distracting and not even used consistently). JR once again shows she's a fine and resourceful actor, able to show a range of emotion. It's obvious why they cast her in the role - star power mega! and prestige for streaming and TV - but she is perhaps 20 years too old from the role (to everyone's credit, they do not make her "glam"). No spoilers here, but the ending had a nice twist that surprised at least me; that said, toward the end there's a lot of schmaltz and improbability re the relation between JR and her patient. I personally do not see how they can use this material for a second season; it would be nice if they quite while they're (mostly) ahead. I will also endorse the comments of a NYT TV critic who gave thumbs-up for a drama series using 30-minute episodes - a rarity, and a welcomed change for pace.

A 1940s melodrama that rises above the level of the genre to examine issue of unwanted pregnancy

Ida Lupino's 1949 melodrama, Not Wanted (she isn't credited on all sources as director because she took up the reins when the original director became ill), is a deceptively powerful work that in some ways goes beyond the conventions of its time and of its genre. The film shows us the plight of a 19-year-old woman (Sally) who has a difficult home life with an overbearing mother, she starts to date a jazz/classical pianist who wants to break out of his life playing in local saloons and clubs; they have a brief (one-night?) relationship and he leaves for "Capital City." Completely misreading his supposed affection, Sally follows and is immediately rebuffed: He wants to get on w/ his career and has no use for her. Meanwhile she meets another guy, a sweet and very dull injured war vet, who pursues her avidly - but as these things happen, she's not that into him. (In a twist that makes us squirm today, he gives her a job in his gas station, then pressures her to go out w/ him. Good thing he's such as "square," as they used to say.) To this point, the movie's a straightforward melodrama, with a ridiculous, swelling soundtrack and with many stagey and stilted one-on-one scenes. The movie takes twist, however (is this where Lupino took over?) as Sally discovers she's pregnant - a pretty cool scene of her passing out at a small amusement park leads to their calling a doctor - and from this point forward the movie has almost a documentary feeling, exploring the issue of "unwanted" pregnancy (the title is a clever double-entendre) and the unfairness of the woman's plight. More fortunate than some, Sally gets taken in by a have for expectant single mothers, a very caring environment, but she's faced with the terrifying decision as to whether to keep and raise her child. The birth scene at the hospital is terrific - all filmed from the mother's semi-conscious point of view - and then the scenes of Sally post partum, working a menial job, living in a tough neighborhood, drawn to all the children that she sees playing on the sidwalks and "stoops," is really powerful, culminating in her snatching up a baby from an untended carriage. As a brief note in current New Yorker pointed out, the film concludes w/ some fine scenes of 1940s LA (Angel Steps, I think) as Sally races away, pursued by would-be "square" suitor; I don't know why the film didn't acknowledge the LA setting, would have made it more real rather than faux-universal (Capital City??); the ending, which some might see as "happy," has enough ambiguity and uncertainty to balance out the occasional schmaltz that seems inevitable for a melodrama from the 1940s. (Note to Amazon Prime: for some reason the left-side stereo channel dies in the final "reel" of the film.)