Very entertaining Stranger Things - as long as you can willingly suspend your disbelief

Half-way through the first season of The Duffer Brothers' Netflix drama, Stranger Things, and finding it surprisingly entertaining. Yes, it requires and enormous suspension of disbelief - as the story involves some kind of conspiracy centering on the U.S. Department of Energy facility in Indiana, with scientists using a young girl ( the daughter of the lead scientist) as a subject for mind-control experiments that someone get way out of control and produce a blob-alien all-devouring monster that is attacking children in the small Indiana town, got it? You really don't have to, as I find the sci-fi-conspiracy elements uninteresting in and of themselves - but they're a vehicle for the Duffers to get at the personalities of the town, in particular the children in the schools whose friends are abducted and who pledge to find them. Also, Winona Ryder is very good as the mom of the first abducted child and who believes he is communicating with her via electric currents. As in so many scifi movies, everyone thinks she is delusional, suffering from a serious breakdown, while of course her only problem is that she's in a movie about the paranormal - we get it, and we feel for her in her misery. The Duffers do a nice job w/ the 1980s period setting - the topical details and the style all seem right, and give the series a little bit of a creepy flavor - a la Blue Velvet, perhaps. The greatest influence, though, is the huge debt to ET (as M pointed out): the adult scientists cruel and lacking in understanding, the sensitive lost alien (in this case the girl who's been the subject of the experiments), the contrast between the dramatic and unusual plot and the mundane domestic life of the town and of the time - kids riding around on bikes in a seemingly safe community, w/ the unknown lurking around the bend.

A great start to My Golden Days, and then what happened?

Arnaud Desplechin's My Golden Days got off to a great start - but then what happened?! A great beginning as Paul Dedalus (yes, we catch the allusion), a middle-aged anthropologist (as we later learn) leaves a central Asian republic heading home for France (where he had not lived for many years) and says farewell to a woman who works in the embassy and w/ whom he's been in love, or at least having an affair. All OK until he's stopped in a French (I think) airport and told there's a problem w/ his passport. That leads to an interrogation - French officials think he's been a Soviet spy - and flashback to his youth in southern (?) France and an adventure in Russia (I won't give it away), and a great story seems to be building: Apparently there's another Stephan Dedalus elsewhere in the world, same name, dob, place of birth. Now the spoilers: After the matter is explained, and we think we're building toward a crisis, the pin gets pulled and we learn the other Paul has been dead for 3 years, so what's the point? Then Paul has other youth memories, in particular, of his first huge college crush - and for the next hour we are faced with the tedious, predictable, terribly familiar romance story: his pursuit of "unobtainable" girl, he wins her heart, he goes off to college, they write to each other (dutifully captured in voice-over, a device that Truffaud used well and more or less retired). Completely uninteresting stuff, made worse by the fact that there are interesting characters on the periophery whom Desplechins (had to look up his name) leaves unexamined: the odd mother who dies when Paul is 11, the brute of a father who for no apparent reason later in life turns out to be a kind and friendly dad, the younger brother who's drawn to guns and violence, the attractive sister who believes she's "laide" ie ugly - why can't we learn more about these people? Why start a really good story and let it spin away into thin air? I couldn't finish watching - just didn't care after 1+ hour. Rather be reading.

A German domestic drama that's honest but neither cold nor hot

Maren Ade's (had to look that up) German domestic drama Everyone Else (more accurate translation of title would be All of the Others) is really about one couple, Chris and Gitta, unmarried, not living together, maybe early 30s, on a vacation staying, as we gradually learn, in Chris's mother's vacation home on Sardinia (beautiful!, and mostly unspoiled, it seems) and about their troubled relationship, their alternating variously between verbal abuse, humiliations, worries about careers (his, mostly), physical abuse (self-abuse, mostly - Gitta jumps out of a window for example) and some playfulness (at times), sex (several times, and the only time he actually says he loves her) - in other words about a week in a very rocky and difficult relationship that seems to be heading toward dissolution; they contrast with another far more successful (and conventional) couple they run into on the island - a couple who's professional success and generally peaceful relationship with and commitment to each other (she's pregnant) brings out the worst, most passive-aggressive and then aggressive behavior in Chris and Gitta's relationship. I have to admire the movie for its honesty and its emotional scope - a whole range of emotions and attitudes in its two-hour span - but also have to say that I kept waiting for something actually to happen, something other than the relentless bickering and posing: something dramatic, some revelation, something that would move their relationship toward a conclusion or dissolution if need be. This is not Albee's Virginia Woolf nor is it a Bergman domestic drama; it's much more low-key and even civil  (it's closer maybe to a contemporary take on Antonioni). It seems to me that for a film like this to work we have to empathize with the main characters and their troubles or loathe them, and in this case it's neither, we're left like the Laodiceans - neither cold nor hot, which is maybe worst of all, for a drama anyway.

Is the future really theirs?: Riots in the Paris suburbs circa 1995 - La Haine

Watched the 1990s French film La Haine (Hate), (dir M Kassovitz, looked it up) which seems especially on point today - about the street demonstrations and the thug life in the Paris banlieux (sp?), the suburbs that, in the reverse of the American topography, house the poor, the immigrants, the outcast. Film begins with terrific documentary footage of the street riots and clashes w/ police outside Paris and then breaks into a narrative, beginning on the morning after the riots w/ one of the rioters in critical condition in a local hospital. We follow 3 guys - late teens, early 20s, affiliates through a loose gang association w/ the guy in the hospital - and we follow the 3 over the next 24 hours as they get in various scrapes, commit a # of crimes, beginning with the petty and building in gravity and intensity; a lot revolves around a gun that one of the gendarmes lost during the riots and that one of the 3 guys has found - this seems so odd to us in American, where half the people on the streets probably own guns legally - and, as all movie and theater-goers know, if you show us a gun in the first act, someone will have to shoot it in the 3rd. It's a really dark movie about these three estranged and somewhat dangerous guys, representative of an entire culture; though one is Arab (the others are black and Jewish), this movie predated the age of terrorism and the culture clash with the vast Muslim community in and around Paris - it's nonideological and a little dated in that sense. There's some humor, at times, but dark and vulgar and sexist humor - at times it reminded me of the young toughs in Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, but it doesn't really build in us much sympathy for these characters (the black guy maybe an exception - he's been trying to rise above his circumstances) and we know little - intentionally - about their families, education, aspirations. They scrawl on walls the slogan "The Future is Ours" - but it's just a slogan. They seem to have no thoughts beyond the present moment.

Veep season 2 builds toward its inevitable conclusion

Season 2 of the Julia Louis-Dreyfus vehicle, Veep, builds inevitably toward her decision to split with POTUS (the president is never named, nor seen) and run for president herself. The last episode is a terrific back-and-forth as she struggles with her decision, sending each of her staff members into a frenzy, each reacting differently but each one immediately looking out for self - loyalty to a boss in politics can evaporate in 2 seconds. A particularly strong episode in season 2: the TV crew visit to Veep in her home, a seemingly puff-piece feature interview that turns at various times extremely nasty when the interviewer (Allison Janney) drops a few provocative questions. Entire episode filmed in one location, all interior, and very smartly cut from interview footage the the various prep actions of both the news crew and the Veep staff. Consistently, this series gets the personalities and the predicaments right - exaggerated for comic effect, of course. JLD carries the show, w/ her malicious smile and her wilful blunders, but the supporting cast, each a type: the steely and dead-serious scheduler, the affable and rumpled media guy, the smooth and ambitious top aide, the equally ambitious but maybe just slightly yearning for a life of her own chief of staff, the idolatrous personal aide - all will be instantly recognized to anyone who's been around elected officials and their entourage.

Exxcllent South American film about 2 ethnographers exploring the rain forest - 30 years apart

The Embrace of the Serpent looks like the kind of film that Werner Herzog might have made (he didn't; it's by a team from Colombia), an ethnographic drama that follows two anthropologist/explorers in South America (undefined rain-forest area, could be Columbia or Brazil), two stories told in tandem: the first is of a German man interested in learning about and preserving the native cultures, brought by a native Indian who is slightly westernized (wearing the same type of tropical khakis as the German) to an Indian shaman and healer who seems to be living alone in the jungle - angry and resentful about the way white settlers have taken over tribal land and corrupted (or killed) native people. The native man agrees to a river journey to find healing medicines for the German. In the parallel story, set about 30 years later (the 1940s) an American, having read the posthumous journals of the German ethnographer, locates the same native healer and asks him to help him find a tree of great value - he agrees, and the go on a river journey the recapitulates the earlier journey 3 decades later and we see some of the increasing devastation and native people are enslaved and oppressed. There are some very beautiful scenes (movie shot in b/w widescreen, except for 1 sequence) and some harrowing moments, particularly the 2 visits to a Catholic school for boys - later corrupted into a Jim Jones-type settlement. Late in the movie we learn that what the American is seeking isn't some powerful hallucinogen but a rare form of rubber tree - something desperately needed - and highly valuable - at the start of WW2. A totally engaging and often weird movie, and we learn at the end - but good to know at the outset - that it's based on the actual journals and papers of the two white explorer/ethnographers/exploiters.

Why Campion's Janet Frame biopic misses the mark

Jane Campion's film about the life of the New Zealand author Janet Frame - originally a 3-part TV series, later distributed as a 2.5 hour movie in 3 parts, An Angel at my Table - based on Frames three-volume memoir (the title is the title of Frame's 2nd vol.) - has many of Campion's strengths as a director, and some serious weaknesses, unfortunately (I watched only the first two parts). Campion is great at establishing a historic period and giving us a vivid, almost tactile sense of the hardship of life for a large, working-class family struggling to get by in a remote NZ town in the 1940s: the cramped bungalow, with 4 girls sharing a mattress, the dismal outhouse, beautiful mountain scenery all around but the living conditions bordering on squalor. Also she gives us a good sense of Frame as a young misfit, strangely homely, awkward with others, withdrawn, lacking in social graces and boundaries (in one powerful scene completely misreading a whole situation and letting the family know at dinner that she saw her older sister "fuck" the boy next door). So the first section is pretty good, especially in that we know we're seeing a portrait of the artist as a young girl. The second section or chapter really misfires, however: in this section Frame goes off to college (in Christchurch, I think) to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. At one point in despair she tries to kill herself w/ an aspirin OD; a well-meaning but feckless teacher suggests she go to a hospital, which apparently leads to a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia and 8 years in an institution under-going hundreds of electroshock treatments. I say "apparently" because none of this is dramatized, Campion skirts over that entire section of Frame's life (she may have done the same in her memoir), and the next we know she's out, living in a rural spot with a fellow writer (a mentor, not a partner) and writing - and lo and behold her first book is accepted on first try! But what does she write about? We really have no idea (and from the little I've read about Frame I think she was published pretty widely before her hospitalization - the movie seems to distort her chronology for dramatic effect). Too much left unexamined and unsaid her, and Frame in part 2 is just a blank canvas. I really want to know more about Frame, but will have to go to her books for that to happen (maybe that's as it should be).