Season 2 of Fauda build upon the excitement and tension of the first season

The first 6 (of 12) episodes of Season 2 of the Israeli series Fauda carry on with the excitement and tension from Season 1 without missing a beat or a step. It takes a while to regain our familiarity w/ the key characters and the complex events of Season 1 (a longer recap would have been helpful) and the plot lines are every bit as complex, so the first episode or two require a lot of a attention, but soon we're into the pace and the tension as Doron and a squad of Israeli counter-terrorists deal with the Hamas forces out for revenge - a quest that splinters along ideological lines: The Hamas leaders are urging a degree of caution and restraint while a young hothead is out for family revenge and is building an alliance with the more frightful ISIS. Among the strengths of the series, aside from the excellent pacing and continuous tension, are the glimpses of family life of both Israelis and Palestinians - it's not exactly a Sopranos, but we see enough of the strained father-son, husband-wife, parents-children relationships on both sides to help us understand the forces that drive the action and the lives taht are at stake. There's a lot of violence of course, some inexcusable and cowardly - on both sides (it's especially painful to watch Israeli officers beat a Palestinian prisoner, who is in fact a terrorist, while his hands are cuffed to a chair). I also tip my hat to the sound crew: the soundtrack is subtle but relentless and does a lot toward maintaining the constant sense of living on the edge of crisis.

An unconverntional and beautfiul film about the last days of colonial occupation in French-speaking Africa

Claire Denis's White Material (2009) is a tense, thoughtful, unconventional depiction of the struggles of a 40-womething woman, played by the ubiquitous Isabelle Huppert, to hang on to her family-run coffee plantation in Africa - country unnamed but the movie was shot in the French-speaking Cameroons (many beautiful scenes of the often-hostile and dangerous landscape) - during a time of political and military upheaval, as a militia of black revolutionary soldiers are in the process of seizing control of the country and in particular ownership of white-held, colonial property. Strangely, the movie begins with the plantation in ruins and Huppert confused and in despair; then we jump back in time - a few days? weeks? months? - as we see the first threats and the beginning of the uprising. The movie is often scary, as the revolutionary forces home in on the plantation and Huppert refuses to budge - even when she finds a goat's head tossed in among the harvested coffee beans, even when her power line is cut, even when a young man with a spear threans here teenage. At one point her husband abandons the cause; it wasn't clear to me, but it's possible that he actually sells the plantation or turns over the ownership anyway to a group of rebels. Huppert's doomed and valiant attempts to keep the farm running are at the heart of the narrative, and the film is unusual in building sentiment for a colonial property owner - although for the most part the rebels and other native Africans are portrayed with some sympathy and Huppert is portrayed as ice-cold and indifferent to the fate and safety or her family members and of the few employees who stay on with her during the crisis. She's brave, but she's fighting a lost cause. A key element in the film is H's relationship with her severely troubled son, a completely feckless character who, under stress, acts in an increasingly bizarre and self-destructive manner. I found the end of the film somewhat confusing, hard to make sense of a mysterious character called "the Boxer"  who dies on the plantation (we see that in the first scene). I'm curious about the reception of this film in France and in Africa, whether politically aware viewers (most people likely to see this film) were troubled by the largely sympathetic portrayal of a colonial property holder reluctant to give up her control and privilege; I'l probably watch the short documentary Denis shot about the film's premiere in the Cameroons for some insight on this.

The strange opposition of squalor and beauty in Kurosawa's Dodes'ka-Don

Akira Kurosawa's 1970 movie, Dodes'ka-Den is strange and strangely captivating in almost every respect. It's a movie about the plight and the sufferings of several people and families living in squalor in a small community - much like what today we might call a tent city - on the outskirts of a major city (presumably Tokyo) that we never see in the film. There's a lot of suffering in this movie: sexual abuse, serious alcoholism, promiscuity, mental illness. And though it's by no means a plot-driven movie, a # of the story lines come to sorrowful or tragic conclusions. That said, the movie doesn't have the ponderous and misanthropic feeling of Kurosawa's earlier "class," The Lower Depths, which I consider the most unwatchable classic film of all time. AK intentional and almost perversely contrasts the misery of the lives of the characters with settings of extreme beauty; the rice-paper walls of all the dwellings are beautifully colored, there are many scenes with striking lighting effects, the costumes are bright and witty, and even the uptempo theme music (which evokes for me each time a passage in the Dylan song I Want You) is in jarring contrast with the lives on display. Throughout, a group of women gather at what appears to be the only water source, where they scrub pots and do laundry and gossip - kind of like a Greek chorus. This was AK's first film in color, and he seems to revel in this new (for him) cinematic tool - like a blind man who can see for the first time. Whether his use of color makes any sense in this movie is an open question, but he does manage to attain some heartbreaking moments and well as scenes of riotous beauty amid lives of squalor. The major shortcoming in the film, however, is its complete indifference to the source of this poverty and despair, much less to any remedy. What brought these poor people to this slum? What can the city or the nation do to help them and others? It seems, in this film, that the poverty and squalor are just a given and it's up to the residents, or victims one might say, to make their lives better somehow. As to the odd title, as far as I can see it has no meaning but is the sound - perhaps the Japanese equivalent of "choo choo"? - that a young man, with significant mental illness, makes as he walks through the settlement pretending to be a train conductor (he imagines he's driving one of those single-car electric trains familiar to all viewers of early Japanese cinema).

Pretty hard to stop watching Evil Genius once you start

There's only one thing wrong w/ the new Netflix documentary 4-part series Evil Genius (Barbara Schroeder and Trey Borzillieri): the title. I'm not going to give anything away (i.e., no spoilers), but I can say that the 2 prime suspects in this investigation may well be evil but they are by no means geniuses except in their own minds; each repeatedly tells the investigators and the filmmakers how smart they are - but neither got anything but trouble out of their totally bizarre bank robbery gone wrong. The robbery took place in 2003 in the appropriately named city of Erie, Penn, and the series begins, after some intro material, with live footage of the bank robbery - a man with seeming to be wired with explosives robs a small strip-mall bank branch, with catastrophic results. We soon go into Bizarro World, as we learn we see the totally weird ransom note the robber was carrying, we learn of a series of mysterious deaths that are seemingly but not evidently related to this crime, we meet the two main suspects who continue to rat out each other, neither of them convincingly, we accompany investigators - there's a great deal of footage available to the filmmakers, and they had a lot of cooperation from the various police agencies (state and federal) as well as from some though not all of the suspects and participants, we enter the homes of some of the suspects where we see squalor almost beyond belief, and ultimately we see a lot footage of jailhouse visits and, less so (cameras not allowed in courts at that time) of a trial and appeals. The story is odd at times that I kept thinking that if this were fiction nobody would believe it - and yet, to what end? At bottom, it's an examination of mental illness more than a crime story; their plot was doomed to failure, though the case against the evident perpetrators was devilishly difficult to prove in court. In the end, I'm not sure that we ever get all the answers, although for a # of reasons the case is now closed if not fully resolved. Pretty hard to stop watching this doc once you're in, and at 4 episodes it seems just the right length for this story.

A beautiful and meaningful urban documentary, Stations of the Elevated

Manfred Kirchheimer's 1981 documentary, Stations of the Elevated, weighs in at only 45 minutes, which turns out to be the perfect length of time for this extended look at the NY subway system (specifically, the elevated cars and tracks of the Dyre Street line), which become a metaphor and viewpoint for a look at an entire society. Right from its witty and allusive title, with its religious connotations, the film promises to be much more than an art project - it's as meaningful and deep as any movie about contemporary urban life, even though it has no plot and no scripted dialog. The film begins with a long study of the elevated cars in their yard at the start of a day, as they slowly begin moving, like prehistoric giant beasts - with the only soundtrack the squeals of the cars emerging from the barn - strange and beautiful shots (who hasn't wondered where these cars go at night, btw?), but also hideous shots: Every car is nearly completely covered by tags from the thousands of urban graffiti artists. Are these tags art or are they desecrations of public space? Our thoughts on this go back and forth: There is a strange beauty and a lot of skill (MK makes no attempt to show the artists in action; for that go see Exit Through the Gift Shop), but you also look at these and think we're seeing a city and a civilization in ruin, where public given up all hope of maintaining clean public transportation. Over the course of the film we see scenes from some of the neighborhoods the cars pass on their route, with a particularly striking sequence in what is probably a project in the South Bronx, one which looks like a war-ravaged city, which in a sense it is. Kids play some dangerous games jumping out of a window onto an old mattress, and at one point they pause to admire the artwork on a passing car: This to them (and in a way to us) is a thing of beauty, possibly the onlyl beauty and color in their frightening lives. What chance do these kids have, we wonder? What kind of society would let families live in projects such as these? Oddly, the end of the line (South Ferry, I looked it up - the film gives us no direct markers) includes a view of the State of Liberty - MK doesn't dwell on this oddity, but just gives us a flash of an image, enough to make us wonder about art and culture and public space. Most of the sound is ambient, but there are some fine moments that include a jazz score by Mingus and, at the end of the day when the cars return to their "yard," Aretha Franklin singing a gospel song (was it Amazing Grace?) - and we sense that there is something holy and otherworldly about these passing trains, uniting a city, floating along above ground, screaming and grunting like a dying animal, an artist's composition in motion and evolving from night to night and even as we watch. 

A final iimage from Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon

Adding one note to yesterday's post on Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon: HOw could Ihave forgot to mention the final scenes in which the father and daughter prepare for her wedding ceremony and we see the father (Rya) buttoning himself into a "morning coat" - further evidence of the adoption of Western fashions especially for business and for formal occasions - and then the daughter makes her entry, in a traditional Japanese wedding dress, like someone stepping forward from the 18th century: a striking visual presentation of the clash of two cultures in postwar Japan, an attempt to hold onto traditional values and ideals against the tidal wave of Western ideas and commerce. The irony is that she is giving up the traditional role of daughter tending to aging father in order to pursue her own life as wife and mother - though of course she is doing so at the urging of her father. Her bridal attire is a way to say: See what you've sacrificed, see what you're giving up.

The power of Ozu's last movie

Ozu's final movie (1962), the enigmatically titled An Autumn Afternoon (many Ozu films are named for a season or part of a season, but this moniker seems particularly odd as the film is shot almost entirely as interiors - it hardly matters what the season might be - and takes place over several weeks or even months, although maybe the title refers to the autumnal years of the elderly central character and to the afternoon of the final scene?) touches on many of Ozu's key themes, especially father-daughter relationships and the obligations and expectations of families, especially the expectation that daughters forego or at least delay marriage in order to run the house for their father and brothers. In this movie the father - a successful business executive in some sort of vast factory in 1960s Japan, in an era when biz execs don't appear to work at a very fast pace and in which offices are run as strict hierarchies with the women in completely servile roles - wrestles with the idea that his daughter at 24 may be ready for marriage and over time comes to accept that she must begin her own life no matter what the cost to him (a similar theme in Ozu's Late Spring, with same lead actor, and a reverse on Ozu's masterpiece, Tokyo Story, in which the father, again same lead actor, and mother recognize that they are no longer central to their married daughter's life). Over the course of the movie we see a few scenes from several marriages, each exploring different aspects of or degrees of female independence: for ex., in one segment a young businessman tries to buy some expensive golf clubs and his wife forbids him to do so, an almost unheard of breech of protocol, at least of the older generation. We also see the business exec/father meet with some of his high-school buddies for evenings of serious drinking; they invite one of their former teachers - one whom they apparently did not care for - to one of their outings and get him severely intoxicated; they are a little surprised and dismayed, on helping him to get home, to see that his lives in poverty. A sub-theme is the changes in Japanese life and the self-image of the Japanese in postwar years: Not only such details as neon signs advertising "coffee" bars and the fascination w/ golf and w/ baseball but also a scene in which the business executive (Chishu Ryu, looked it up - a terrific actor) drinks with a man who served under him in the Japanese navy - a time of their lives when they were proud and hopeful; the defeat and partial destruction of Japan are never mentioned - history lives between the lines - but we sense that the younger men and women are changing to more Western, "modern" ways and the older men are ashamed of their past and drinking to blot out the bad memories and to blind themselves to the change on-going all around them.