Birdland: The Central Park Effect

All birders and in fact all nature-lovers will enjoy watching The Central Park Effect, which takes us swiftly through 4 seasons of bird-watching in Central Park New York - much of the film focused on the birds themselves and a small cadre of devoted bird-watchers who roam the park, often led by a stalwart guide, Star Sapphire, a true New York character, smart, obsessed with her little niche of life, strong, independent, and surprisingly open about the cancer she suffers from. There's some background information as filmmaker J. Kimball talks to a few experts, from Cornell and elsewhere, about migration patterns and why CP is a major stopover from migrating birds. All that said, I don't think nonbirders will care much for this film as it's not a great narrative documentary by any stretch. Kimball gives the film a shape by demarcating the 4 seasons - we go from spring to spring, actually, for an upbeat ending as the songbirds return - but there's no narrative tension or conflict and no sharp focus on any one character or small set of characters, elements that life documentaries like this above the level of nature special and into real storytelling. There's also, I found, too much time spent interviewing various birders (notably, J. Franzen) about their passion for birds - point made, and made again - and too much use of a musical soundtrack, while what most of us would want is the simple sound of birds and of the soft conversations of the birders. So, not a film for everyone, but for those of us who do care about birds it was a pleasure to watch and it succeeds in the way Kimball probably wants - made me want to get outdoors.

The streets of Rome are paved with rubble: Shoeshine

Few movies are more painful to watch that V. DeSica's 1946 Shoeshine, a great and disturbing highlight of Italian postwar neo-Realism. All done in gritty, grainy black and white (of course) probably on location on the streets of postwar Rome, still suffering from tremendous poverty and destruction, filmed with I would guess mostly amateur actors, the story has both the simple and elemental qualities of a tale and the grand emotions of a lyric opera, especially at the tragic conclusion. Story is of two shoeshine boys who, improbably, are trying to save money to buy a horse (the equivalent at the time of teenagers yearning for a sports car - flash and freedom); through the lead of the older teenage brother of one of the boys, they get involved in selling some stolen goods (American blankets - movie is set during the war) and inevitably the get caught (partly because they stupidly use the windfall to buy a horse and then prance around the city). They get sent to juvenile prison, with all of the horrors, or most of them, that you can imagine - brutality, indifference, overcrowding, unsanitary, etc. Police squeeze the boys to give up info on the older sibling, which of course breaks a huge social taboo and leaves the two boys at odds, estranged from family, and even more vulnerable. It's a very dark movie, so not for everyone, and much of it is an expose of the horrible social conditions in Italy at its time (and no doubt still the case, with some modifications, in many cities in the U.S. and the world today) - thousands of kids working the streets of Rome with no chance of ever receiving an education, families living impoverished and crowded conditions, social services that are just warehouses for kids who have nowhere else to go, everyone taking advantage of them, treating them like dirt - notably, the American GI who gets his shoes shined and dismissively refuses to pay, mumbling as he leaves the stand: "Tomorrow." As with so many movies of this period - Rome Open City, Bicycle Thieves, to name two - the street scenes of Rome are incredibly interesting to look at, and nothing like the tourist mecca we expect: yes, we see some squares with fountains, but decidedly not the Trevi of Fellini - these are ugly, dark streets with broken stones and facades. The waterfront (along the Tiber presumably) is cindered and industrial - Rome looks like a place you'd want to escape from - but how can you do it? Where would you go? The boys' hopes of buying a horse, though briefly realized, are absurd and doomed. One child in the prison talks longingly of Florence - and you get the sense that they understand that anything would be better than where they are now. Part of the wonder of watching this and other post-War Italian films is thinking about how much that culture has changed in the past 70 years - from a dank ruin to a gleaming metropolis. It's like watching a film not just from another era but from another world.

Unusual Suspects: Everyone in The Killing is a potential perp

In a rare disagreement, I am surprised that friend AW completely dismisses The Killing, which M and I continue to find very engaging on almost every level - sure, it's over the top at times and highly manipulative, adding new clues and information episode by episode though we would expect that the cops would have uncovered a lot of these leads in the first few days of investigation, and, more disturbing, many of the leads are there just to tease us along and keep the series moving. Still - the series does keep moving. Enos/Linden remains a strong if somewhat opaque lead character, her partner, Holder, a very funny and sympathetic sidekick as a unconventional undercover cop with a troubled past and a hip-hop attitude. At end of episode 8 of Season 2: the story obviously now focusing on the Indian casino as the scene of the crime, but it's less clear by the day (each episode = one day) what Rosie was doing at the casino - as we hear now that she may have been a maid (not a juvie hooker). How her family would not have known this is mysterious; and why the cops top brass would go to such lengths to cover up this murder is also mysterious, and my never be satisfactorily answered. Some issues that need clarification at this point in the series: why is Richmond, paralyzed from a shooting and running for mayor, still key to the story? I suspect that he will again become a suspect - there's something suspicious in his refusal to say where he was on the night of the killing. What will Stan Larssen uncover through his posting of a reward for info (the scene when the woman tries to convince him she knew Rosie was excellent)? What about Stan's wife, Mitch, who's basically fled from the family and from the marriage - M has always been suspicious of her, her lack of concern about Rosie's initial disappearance? I think some of the early-on suspects, particularly father of Rosie's boyfriend, will circle back into the story - even Holder, we suspected him at one time - but I don't expect a rapid or clean conclusion, as apparently there is a Season 3 en route. Who dunnit? Coulda been anyone.

Why Zero Dark Thirty is watchable - and why it won few awards

If you missed Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty on screen it's definitely still worth watching on DVD, maybe better on DVD. I was daunted by two things: the length (2.5+ hours!,) and the torture. Watching at home, with short break for T, the length was not an issue - we were totally captivated by the fast-paced, focused, dramatic narrative - kudos to M. Boal (?) for fine screenplay. The torture, which all occurs near the beginning of the film, is difficult to watch, as it's meant to be, but important, essential for the context of the whole movie - not at all gratuitous or overdone. All of us have seen various forms of torture on film by now, so it's no longer terribly shocking to see torture presented graphically (sometimes it's revolting, however). What's really different about the torture in ZD30 is that it's perhaps the only time where your sympathies are in doubt: other torture scenes (coming to mind quickly: Reservoir Dogs, the McCain biopic, Deer Hunter, to cite three very different ones) we are completely in sympathy with the victim. Here, we know the victim is a cold-hearted terrorist partly responsible for thousands of deaths, and the torturer (Jason Clarke) is working to save American (and other) lives. All true. And yet - what he's doing to the man is so against our national principles and values that we are aghast and hate him for it. Our feelings are shared by the new CIA agent on scene, Jessica Chastain (Maya) - she is our entree into the narrative. She too is appalled -but she's part of it, it's her job. Gradually, she figures out how to extract info without direct violence (though the threat of violence is always there - part of the equation); then the film moves on to its second phase, which is using the evidence to track down OBL or UBL as they call him, and finally to persuading the reluctant bureaucracy to move on the evidence. Chastain, in her single-mindedness and passion, is like an avatar of C. Danes in Homeland - in fact, that probably didn't help ZD30's chances at major awards - it felt a little like we've already spent 13 episodes with this character. Alos, ZD30, which won only a single Oscar I think, was hurt by the obvious comparisons with the similar but more likable Argo, which was tighter in construction, more unusual in topic, and had great sense of comedy as well as danger. ZD30 apparently based on real accounts of those who caught and killed OBL, and Maya apparently a composite of several people. Really engaging movie to watch, but it does lose a bit of its edge toward the end - the attack on the compound - because we are so certain of and familiar with these events and the results.

The Killing - or, The Red Herrings

Watching now Season 2 of The Killing and despite the fact that it's an obviously manipulative show - honestly, it should probably be called The Red Herrings because we soon see that the pattern of the show is to introduce one likely suspect after another, only to exonerate in one manner or another and leave them in the rear view mirror, to the point where, by Episode 4 of Season 2, we're thinking not could this guy be Rosie's killer but why is he innocent? And how? - and you do get the dreaded feeling that the show will never conclude, at least not in a satisfying way - and yet - it's still very compelling episode by episode, especially because of the two leads, Mareille Enos as Linden and her partner, Holder (sorry I don't have actor's name), who's like what Eminem would be if he were a cop. The plot twists do keep me thinking, and I do have my theory - from way back early in Season 2 - that (possible spoiler) it's the angry dad of Rosie's rich boyfriend who did the killing; we'll see. Maybe. Love the look of rainy Seattle, even though I know it was filmed in Vancouver. But it does convey the feeling of a small and somewhat out of the way city with its own hip counterculture, and culture.

My True Story: Memoir, Documentary, and The Flat

Personal documentary films are the analogue to literary memoirs: they're interesting and successful because of the material they convey and not necessarily because of any great artfulness or style or originality; in fact, style may be a disadvantage in both personal documentary and memoir: we want the text of the film to be essentially transparent so that we can peer right through it to the essential facts about the life of the author or director. Memoirs have been a ridiculously popular literary form; they demand less of the writer, in my opinion, and they at times create a false expectation: very few writers have more than one memoir "in them," but the success of one pushes writers to return again and again to the same well, until it runs dry. There are many different types of documentary film, some in which the life of the filmmaker plays no role at all - but there have been a # of these memoir films in the past few years (one about a Long Island family in which filmmaker's dad turns out to be a pedophile; one about another LI, I think, family in which the mother had led a long and secret fantasy life about her therapist - to recall two), and last night we saw an Israeli film, The Flat, which is a really good film and a good example of this subgenre: the filmmaker, Aron Goldfinger, begins to document the family's task of stripping down the apartment left by the death of his 98-year-old grandmother. It's not clear why he thought that would make an interesting film; probably he's one of those guys that film everything, hoping to find nuggets? Or maybe he suspected what they would find: a stack of virulent Nazi newsletters from the 1930s, and following strands he learns that his cultured, peaceful, German-Jewish grandparents who'd been in Israel since about 1940 were close friends with a high-ranking Nazi official, whom they'd actually accompanied on a tour of then-Palestine (oddly, Nazis and Zionists in the 30s share a hope that Jews would resettle there) - this friendship continuing for years after the war. What's amazing in the film is the extent of the denial: nobody in Goldfinger's family wants to accept this fact, they all "knew nothing" about the grandparents/parents; G. finds the daughter of the Nazi, von Mildenstein, and meets with her in Germany where she, too, denies everything: her father was never a Nazi, he was defamed, etc. It's amazing and appalling that these people could carry on what they considered a friendship, and it's even harder to fathom how a man like von Mildenstein, who after the war worked for Coca-Cola!, could reconcile the horrors of his life with his supposed friendship with these people - self-hating Jews, no doubt, and collaborators, whether they knew it or not.

The best director of all time in the open air

It's clear to me that no one - with possible exception of John Ford? - directed in the open air better than Jean Renoir. We all remember his great en plein air scenes in Grand Illusion and even more so in Rules of the Game (the hunt especially) and last night I saw for the first time one of his lesser-known, undeservedly, American films, The Southerner (1945) - a truly terrific film of its type. The Southerner is beset by a few handicaps, not only it dumb title and its lack of marquee stars and its timing - did Americans really want to watch a movie about farmers trying to make it in the cotton fields as the war was ending? I think they wanted either escapism or war dramas - and it looked old-fashioned even in its day, in grainy black-and-white and narrow-screen format. Yes, the film is kind of a campy melodrama, but told with such passion, humor, and visual imagery that it rises well above all of its limitations. The story is of a small family that leases a field in hopes of getting out of the life of sharecropping and migrant labor, and they suffer all the privations you can imagine during their first year of life on the homestead, flood, illness, poverty, well runs dry, nasty neighbors, and so on. the reasonably happy ending seems tacked on - perhaps a sop to the need of the day for some kind of moral uplift. But such great scenes throughout the movie!: opening in the cotton fields when Uncle Pete falls over and dies, his last words: Plant your own seeds; grandmother stuffing her face with fox grapes, and her fear of snakes as she walks through the rows of cotton (sets us up for ominous dangers everywhere); the flood washing away the farm and the cattle - I actually have no idea how Renoir was able to film this; the knife fight beside the well, one of the more credible film fights ever, much more so that, for example, the balletic knife fighting in West Side Story; the square dance, with the grandma starting to sing hymns; the wedding party (one of the few indoor scenes); the family gathering around the stove for a meal of stewed possum (and hot coffee) - scene by scene, few films can match this one for imagery, oddity, and beauty.