The other morive about a hijacking on the high seas

I'm sure Captain Phillips is a great movie and I'll probably see it and be impressed like everyone else but it's hard to imagine a better movie on the theme of at-sea kidnapping by Somali pirates (why are there suddenly two of these movies within the span of a year?) than the Danish A Kidnapping. Told with incredible efficiency and understatement, this film puts us right in the midst of the captured ship, and we suffer along with the crew, in particular the cook, whom we see in the first sequences talking to his wife and daughter home in Denmark and about whom we soon learn, to his later chagrin, that he is competent in English - he later becomes the captors link to his fellow crew members and to the owners back in Denmark - which brings us to what's even more remarkable about this fine movie: it's not just about the tension on board the captured ship, great a story as that may be, but also about the tension, guilt, and duplicity going on back in Denmark among the ownership - in fact the real star of the movie is not necessarily the ship's cook but the company CEO, Peter: in an early scene we see him as the tough negotiator and steely boss cutting a deal w/ a Chinese team for the sale of a few ships. After the hijacking, he hires an outside expert to consult on the negotiating process but defies advice and insists on doing the negotiating himself - admirable, in that he's taking ownership of the situation but also, perhaps, foolishly cocky in thinking he can handle any situation when in fact he's in uncharted territory. There are many moments of moral ambiguity, as he tries to work out a deal with the pirates without jeopardizing the men, but also with a sharp eye on the company bottom line. The expert he hires is very self-confident - his main advice is don't give in to their initial demands because they'll see you're weak and demand more - but every moment of delay means more suffering for the captured crew, and perhaps more danger. It's really tough to know what to do, who's right who's wrong - and eventually we learn, particularly through one surprising and explosive scene, the toll this is taking on the CEO as well. A really fine and understated movie, and I wish it could find one twentieth of the audience that Captain Phillips has found.

No happy endings - in Blancanieves, a reworked "fairy tale"

The Spanish film Blancanieves (i.e., Snow White) is unusual in so many ways and there are so many ways it could have gone wrong but I think it's a good movie and would appeal to a very wide range of viewers, including children, if people have the patience for a movie that: a., is in black and white, b., has no dialogue (though it does have to title frames a la a silent movie), c., is set in the 1930s or so, d., is Spanish-language based, and e., is pretty dark and scary at times. The film is a loose adaptation of the Snow White story - most of us know only the Disney version with the cute dwarfs in the forest - in this case SW is the daughter of a bullfighter who gets seriously gored and paralyzed in a major fight; she grows up mistreated by a wicked stepmother - a staple of so many fairy tales and films - think of the fabulous Pan's Labyrinth as one example - and gradually learns who her father is/was and, with the aid of the dwarfs whom she meets in a forest after escaping an assassin - they are "repurposed" as a dwarf bullfighting troupe - she gets into the ring to avenge and emulate her father. The ending, which I won't give away, is powerful and creepy. Some very beautiful, dark sequences, a truly engaging plot that's very simple and elegant, like most fables, and easy to follow cinematically. The whole spectacle of bullfighting is strange and very powerful on screen - not sure that it's ever been shown as such a dangerous sport - the scene near the opening with the matador waits in the ring for the initial charge of the bull is very powerful. Too bad wicked stepmothers have become such a cliche, which this movie fully endorses. This movie posits that there's incredible evil in this world - which of course there is - and that the good does not always win out in the end - a very dark message, especially for those who look to myth and fable and fairy tales for uplifting, happy endings. You won't find that here.

Ending Bad

Inevitably, the ending of Breaking Bad turns out to be disappointing, in part because we have set unreasonable expectations for any great series and in particular for this one, which literally seemed to improve and mature with almost every episode. These conclusions are also disappointing because we don't want to let the characters go, and wish they could live on - but the writers and creators know, as a convention, that they lead has to die - otherwise, there's always that slight possibility of another season. But the conclusion to BB was also disappointing because, thought Vince Gilligan wrapped up all of the strands of the series pretty effectively, he did so by granting Walter White almost superhuman powers - or luck. Did anyone else wonder how in hell he managed to sneak into the house of the wealthy couple? Or how they would manage to distribute millions in cash to Walt's children? And how did he manage to build that weird contraption in the Cadillac trunk that mowed down the whole rival gang? Even the assassination of the Chicken King in the nursing home seemed more possible, if not more credible. In other words, in this last episode Walt stepped out of the boundaries of ordinariness that made his character, and the show, so intriguing. I didn't buy into it, and thought an accidental or unexpected death would be a more likely and more satisfying conclusion. (BTW, I always thought it was a mistake to kill Tony in the final episode, and that he should have been left as the last one standing, with his family and his crew all gone.) Despite these quibbles about the final episode, Breaking Bad takes a deserved place among the great American TV dramatic series, maybe just a notch below The Wire and The Sopranos, but certainly on a level with Mad Men, Friday Night Lights, Homeland, and even the surprising Battlestar Gallactica - each different in style and genre but each just a great contribution and a high point in American culture and to popular, commercial entertainment.

Breaking Bad: The End is Near

I've noted a # of times that no show has consistently become better episode by episode than Breaking Bad. This week's episode - is it the penultimate? - carries that observation forward, still intact, as it's one of the finest and most dramatically intense episode every seen on TV, IMHO. From the very strange opening sequence - a flashback to a time when Walt and Jesse were first cooking meth in a trailer, and W. is trying to maintain a bizarre facade of normalcy with the then-pregnant Skyler - long cell phone conversation suggesting they take a drive up to Taos over the weekend, enjoy some family time - while he's cooking meth in the background! - to the very tense confrontation with the new meth gang when they discover that the now-captive Hank is a DEA agent, Walt's desperate attempts to negotiate for Hank's release, Hank's trenchant remark that W. is so smart and so stupid - he doesn't see that Hank's a dead man either way - the capture of Jesse and his abduction, the final face-ff between Skyler and Marie, the revelation at long last to "Junior," the violent confrontation at home between the bossy and now totally insane Walt and Skyler (and Junior), and finally Walter's revenge and this very strange phone call back to S., when he must know police are listening. What's his motive for that call? To pose as the only bad guy and take the heat of Skyler? Or something else more devious. The end is near.

Who made your blue jeans?: An incredible documentary, Last Train Home

Last Train Home (2009) is Lixin Fan's excellent documentary about migrant workers in China - after a great opening shot of a vast crowd of workers pressing against a set of gates waiting to board trains - and we know there's no way that anyone can handle a crowd - Fan gives us a surtext stating that 130 million Chinese migrant workers go home for the New Year, the largest population migration on the planet. Amazingly, he finds one family to focus on to tell this sorrowful story, and he does a great job; in the style of many contemporary documentaries he stays completely out of the picture, we never hear his voice or anyone's doing interviews and after the opening segment we never get a bit of info from the filmmaker, it's all what we see, carefully edited to have the feeling of an epic drama. Events take place over 3 years - we see a husband and wife living in terrible poverty in a large sitting, making clothes for the U.S. market. Their children are in the Szechuan village, being raised by the grandmothers. We see some very painful calls home, in which it's clear the parents barely know the children; they go home - incredibly difficult and expensive to get tickets - for the New Year, and we meet the children. The daughter, about 16, says no one her age is left in the village, either they've gone to the city to work or they're elderly. Parents awkwardly pressure the children to study hard - it's the only road out for the children of peasants, they note - but the daughter, Qin, wants to go to the city with them. She does so, lives with a girlfriend and others and has a crappy job, but makes a little money, starting to feel independent. Over the net two years, she gradually breaks away from the family, finally coming to head in a tremendous fight that Fan captures. It's the only moment when the frame breaks for a second, so to speak, as Qin turns to him and says: You wanted to film the real me? this is the real me! (Earlier, she and her brother had been very awkward, obviously looking at the camera when being filmed.) At the end, the mother decides she has to go back to live in the village, and the husband, by this time in ill health, is alone in the city, knowing the family is completely dependent on his pathetic wages - and as we also all know, the family is just a concept, they barely know one another. Goddamn, makes you think you should never wear another pair of $200 jeans, basically made in China by slave labor.

Down the drain: Spiral

With disappointment, I watched the first episode of the much-talked-of French series Spiral - and found it to be not by any degree better than a routine American police procedural or crime series - though quite a bit more gruesome than just about any American TV - the discovery of the faceless corpse in the first scene and the ghastly autopsy early are challenging for the viewer, and even for the characters (and perhaps the actors). Gruesome is not something I really look for on TV, however. Gruesome aside, the interest for American viewers will be primarily a look at the French criminal-justice system, apparently strikingly different from that in America: for example, parents with a complaint about the behavior of a public-school teacher go right to the public prosecutor, who hears them out, interviews the teacher and her colleagues, and brings the matter to resolution - without, apparently police involvement, much less education officials, unions, et al. If true, that's very surprising. Other than that, Spiral has the flaw of so many crime or mystery series, in that the clues just keep falling into place so that the crime can be solved in the requisite 47 minutes. It reminds me a little of the excellent US police series The Shield, in that there's one ongoing series narrative and a side story (0r even 2) per episode. I could forgive the crappy side story if the main narrative were more unusual and interesting, but there's nothing special or vivid about any of the characters, the ridiculous run of luck gathering clues and evidence over course of the hour is preposterous, and at the end, or at the beginning rather, we've got yet another story about a brutalized woman - can you say Dragon Tattoo? Compare this story, at least at its outset, with the much greater The Killing, that worked so effectively (in seasons 1 and 2 at least) because of vivid and likable characters and a great deal of attention to the family of the victim. The Spiral, at least in episode 1, does neither - just a rush to conclusion; in fact, one of its more effective devices is occasional use of fast-forward as we transition between main story and episodic subplot. Quel dommage.

The worst living director?

I don't want to be mean or anything but is it possible that Hang Sang-soo is the worst living director? I mean, we tried to get through his pretentious and tedious 2011 film, The Day He Arrives, and, not leaving bad enough alone, tried again last night to watch his 2012 In Another Country. Well, did watch it - though 3 out of 4 adults watching film fell asleep (new rating system potential here). Sang-soo gets a lot of mileage out his strange narrations in which conversations are weird and improbable and very stagey - and sometimes have the feeling of uncomfortable actors trying to improvise a scene - and in which scenes are played out again and again, with slight variations. These are tedious and even painful to watch, and in fact these are films designed not for an audience but for a graduate seminar - you could spend a lot of time talking about what the films "mean," but in the end do they mean anything at all or are they just a conceit? In Another Country seems to recognize that Sang-soo's stories are puerile and ridiculous, so this film begins with a young girl and her mom talking about some kind of family distress; then the young girl (maybe about 20?) goes off to a desk where she decides to write three short screenplays (as in Day Arrives, these are movies about moviemakers and, in particular, about grad students) - and then we watch the three versions of a story she creates. The fact that each one is odd and preposterous and stilted without being, in my view, striking or moving or imaginative in any way, is shielded from critical complaint because, hey, these are a fledgling's attempts at a screenplay and not "real" moviemaking. Nice try. In addition, most of the movie is in English, not Korean, in that the 3 plots are about a French director (Huppert) visiting this small seaside resort town, where she stays with a Korean filmmaker and his pregnant wife, and engages with one or two people in the town, notably lifeguard (some symbolism here? pretty heavy-handed) - so the very fact that the conversations seem artificial and broken can be attributed to everyone's speaking a non-native tongue. But can Sang-soon write a good scene in Korean? I see no evidence of that. These movies about movies w/ multiple versions of reality are by no means radical innovations - this is ground filmmakers explored pretty thoroughly in, say, the 1950s (Hiroshima, Rashoman, many others) and then moved on. Sang-soo ought to as well.