May 2022:Julia, Winning Time, My Brilliant Friend, Pachinko, Chan Is Missing, Very British Scandal, Merrily We Go to Hell, Carlin, Ivan's Childhood

 Elliot’s Watching - May 2022 

The HBO 8-part series Julia, with Sarah Lancashire predominant as the eponymous French Chef Julia Child, is a pleasant, enjoyable, approachable series that has lots of laughs, smiles of recognition from those who recall the original TV series, and its moments of darkness and struggle as well: mush talk about women being pushed aside in the male-dominated world of public (and I would guess commercial) TV, some sharp debate about whether Julia’s role was supportive of or harmful to progressive women of her era (the ‘60s), a few glimpses of a some of the hidden truths in Julia’s life (perhaps some repressed Lesbian sexuality?, the mystery of her husband, Paul/David Hyde Pierce, and his severance from the foreign service) - but mostly it’s a light-hearted nostalgia romp thru most of the 8 episodes before more or less sputtering and running out of gas in episode 8 as the writer, Daniel Goldfarb, casts his net wide with many possibilities for a pick-up in a 2nd season: Julia and co-author Simca in France, the book publisher’s ensuing blindness, Alice’s (BrittanyBradford)  new romance, plus other strands sent aloft to see if they might fly.  

Ditto for Ozark - though I was fully satisfied at the wrap-up of the 5-season series, which concluded all of the plot lines without feeling rushed, bored, or out of gas - in fact, one of the best wrap-ups of any long-running series (think of Sopranos or Mad Men, oh what a falling off was there!), emphasizing the importance family for the Byrdes - it seems almost any other series of this nature and length would somehow involve infidelity of the lead male - though 2 quibbles: what the hell was the purpose of the car crash in the final episode?; and, well, a strand of the plot was still dangling as we wonder whether there will be a series focusing on a different lead character from the next generation, and I’ll say no more on that. The 3 leads - Jason Bateman as Marty, Laura Line as Wendy, and, especially Julia Garner as Ruth - really carried the show: You can’t stop watching, and rooting for, Ruth, and thanks to Wendy I will never again hear a donor pitch from public radio in the same way. All told the series was lively, intelligently written, broad in score, and engaging: You had to think to yourself “I’m so glad that I’m not doing business with a cartel.” 

Franco Russo’s film Babylon (1980) is somewhat difficult to follow as the English language will seem to American viewers doubly removed: a Jamaican v. of British English; the subtitles will help. But for the most part we don’t need to follow the nuances and details of plot; the film is about a culture little-known then and now to most Americans and probably most white Brits: the Jamaican culture of reggae music, Rastafarian religion, and a great deal of “herbs.” So imagine you’re watching not a fictive narrative but a 90 minute documentary, and the film will go down just fine: some terrific scenes of ear-blasting music at various clubs, a great confrontation between as some of the performers try to buy from a questionable producer the rights to use a couple of songs, a long visit to a Rasta religious rite, and lots of street-life in South London, probably not too different today from 40+ years ago. Beneath all the frenzy of the music and club scene is a great deal of racial hatred and intolerance; to his credit, Russo isn’t doctrinaire in his account of the racism. We feel great loathing (and fear) of the British toughs who confront the Jamaican guys, the name-calling, the taunting, and ultimately the physical violence and destruction; on the other hand, though we hate the white racists, they do have a point: the Jamaican lads are blasting away with their music at all hours, almost as if they’re seeking validation through confrontation. We’re headed for an inevitable collision of intractable forces. All parties need some counseling, it seems - but that’s not gonna happen, all of which makes for a sad portrait of social misfits with little chance for prosperity or integration, the news wave of immigrants, confined to the bottom rung of the ladder (housing, pay, tolerance, respect) - unless, and until, other ethnic groups arrive, which of course has happened. 

The HBO series Winning Time (2022) has a strong cast w/ John C.Reilly as Lakers owner ca 1980 Jerry Buss and Quincy Isaiah as Magic Johnson in his rookie year and I could sum this in one sentence, which would be that you don’t have to be interested in basketball or even in sports to enjoy and appreciate this series; in the mode of Friday Nigh Lights or Last Chance U it uses spots as a vehicle through which to drive personal and family drama and build a great narrative arc as the troubled and under-rated team goes for a championship. Lots of good story lines developed, based closely on fact though it’s more free-wheeling w/ fact than the typical docudrama, at least from what I’ve heard (I had little interest in pro b-ball) - an eccentric, intellectual coach, nearly killed mid-season in a bike accident, the improbable and irascible owner, the likable Magic and the admirable and mysterious Kareem, the ex-coach West fuming in the background, and so on - the only narrative threads that wore a little thin concerned Bus and his family, in particular his relationship w/ the still-beautiful mother Sally Field. Already picked up for season 2.

And a very quick note on a series that we actually didn’t know we’d watched to the end (of season 3), the outstanding series My Brilliant Friend,  which, as I may have noted in previous posts, is actually in my view better than the source novels, which were a little to flat and plot-driven, for me, rather than literary and evocative and interior, and were hard to follow as too many characters and families were just name and hard to distinguish - problems all but eliminated in the series, as we can easily keep the characters straight once we visualize them and the miniseries form is in itself more plot driven and interior - in this one “Lenu” rises to some fame through her publications and thanks to her spoiled and intolerable husband her marriage cracks at the seams - relatively little, sadly, in this season about her brilliant friend. 

Yesterday’s avant garde looks befuddled and confused 30 years down the road. Yvonne Rainer’s 1990 film, Privilege, in its time must have been groundbreaking in subject matter (the film begins as a conventional documentary in which several women discuss their menopause - daring and original then but complacent now - then the narration shifts entirely into what looks like a play rehearsal for an experimental movie in which the topic is female sexuality and the presentation is confusing and pretentious - long quotes from Eldridge Cleaver for some reason) - Honestly couldn’t watch till the end of this movie, for which clearly I am not the target audience; though there’s a wide acceptance and even a commercial appeal for a film in which the protagonists discuss and debate their sexual histories, this film from today’s viewpoint can’t seem to get out of its way, as if YR was never quite sure what kind of film she wanted to make. We see the evolution of a work of art, from idea to actualization, but wouldn’t it have been better had the team stopped everything once the theme and style emerged and start again with a more clear goal and style in mind? Or maybe it’s just me. 

About a year ago I posted on Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel, Pachinko, noting that it wasn’t exactly my type of book - long, multigenerational, multicultural family saga spanning century - but suggested that it might make a really good miniseries, which it does (2022). Koganada and Justin Chon make the most of the material in the novel - diverging from the novel in many significant ways, or so I’m told - but giving us overall a great portrayal of the clash of 3 cultures: Korean, Japanese, and - for segments filmed in the present or near present  the U.S. financial industries. The film looks great, and the many transitions among the several - 8 or so? - plot strands and segments are handled deftly. But there are many, many transitions - each of the 8 episodes will have pieces of several of the narrative paths - dire poverty in Korea, exile to Japan and facing deep racial prejudice, contemporaries dealing with development and overdevelopment, plus more. Those who haven’t yet seen this series now have an advantage, as it will be much easier to follow the many lines of narration through binging or watching on 8 consecutive nights. Yes, it’s still melodramatic, and, yes, there are some rough edges not really explained or worked out (note: 2nd season to come), but overall a series of high quality and high ambition, both textually and thematically and worth watching. 

Wayne Wang's unusual, maybe unique, film Chan is Missing (1982) is a blend of noir detective drama and minimalist documentary as we follow a taxi driver and his nephew around and about San Francisco Chinatown, in b/w and mostly handheld camerawork so that the whole movie has a sense of immediacy and authenticity. The two guys are in search of the missing Chan who seems to have vanished after a minor car accident that he did not wish to report - and the 2 follow a series of leads to try to track down their friend and erstwhile business partner who may have in fact absconded with some shared $ and taken off for his homeland in China. Along the way we meet a # of unusual characters, notably a fast-order chef in a C-town restaurant and a # of dancing couples in a senior center for the Filipino community, police officers and detectives, an the searchers’ ebullient sister/aunt (I think) - all of which - well, I won’t disclose anything about the ending except to say that it comes about rather abruptly and the film, with all its beauty, could have used a little more plot discipline. Definitely, memorable for the look at a vista that I think today has all but succumbed to the ever-rising real-estate values in downtown SF - though maybe a stray restaurant or 2 has survived and still serves the tourists and visitors, if not the long-time residents. 

I used to find W.C. Fields’s films, notably The Bank Dick (1940), to be funny thanks to his irascible character, but coming back to the film after the passing of some decades I found it, at least the 30 minutes I watched, tiresome and at times extremely disturbing (notably for its completely inexcusable portrayal of a Black man. Okay, WCF is good for a few sight-gag laughs, in particular his “smoke-blowing” tricks to amuse some kids - but the gags about his smoking and especially his drinking make for a good 4-minute sketch but not for an entire tiresome movie. Every WCF film has a few good laugh moments, but they’re stretched pretty thin in this picture, perhaps because WCF could play only himself: He had no room to grow or to change. It’s a bit of film history, but watching it today is painful. 

The TV series A Very British Scandal (Season 2 - 2022) continues on the pattern of the 1st season - each a three-episode drama about a scandal that disgraced a public figure, each based (not sure how loosely but obviously including tons of dialog generated or posited for the series) on “true events,” widely published in the British press at the time. This season about a contentious divorce proceeding pitting the Duke v Duchess of Argyle, made particularly salacious by the tidbit that the Duchess kept voluminous records, including photographs, of her sexual encounters. Claire Foy takes the lead, and she’s always great with her clipped British accent - but here so different in character from her famous role of the young QE in The Crown. Yes, this short series held my interest over its duration, though I’m not proud or pleased to say so. The lead characters are to a man, or woman, repulsive and disreputable and seem very much to deserve  one another. Equally guilty: the sensationalist British press and, most of all, the British public as a whole, so interested in this seamy tale that would have no interest whatsoever were it not that the husband  (Ian) was a “Duke” and a “Lord” - and the title itself is at the basis of the dispute - and Foy’s “Duchess Margaret” is equally banal and evil - how or why the Brits have not for centuries risen against the monarchy and the whole system of royalty, as if these people deserve in any way our interest or attention. I cringe every time one or the other is addressed as “your Grace.” Not mine - yours. 

The 1932 film Merrily We Go to Hell is a rarity, one of the few studio films of the era directed by a woman, Dorothy Arzner. Whether a man would have created a film with a different nuance, who knows? Either way, the film starts off as a conventional romance - only child of a wealthy industrialist falls for a guy older, funnier, more brash, a newspaper columnist no less!, not welcomed by the father, but Dad gives in as there’s no sense fighting true love - looks like we’re headed toward light-hearted young couple overcomes obstacles and wins the hearts of doubters - and then the film take a sharp U-turn and it becomes a film about how alcoholism wrecks marriages and lives (the less than credible ending feels tacked on to please the studio). The star of the film clearly is Sylvia Sidney as the daughter of wealth, Joan; the film also includes a bling-and-you’ve missed-it appearance by the then-unknown Cary Grant as friend of Joan’s Charlie Baxter (doubly funny to me as that’s the name of one of my friends). Obviously the film feels dated in many ways but it’s still quite straightforward and watchable if not groundbreaking and heartbreaking. 

I have renewed respect for George Carlin, whom I’d mostly written off as a star who got huge laughs based on his reputation rather than on his material, having watching George Carlin’s American Dream (2022), an excellent though too-long (especially in the 2nd of 2 episodes, filled with talking heads) look at his lifetime work. We see him in his early days as a conventional night-club comic and the big shift as he decided to be himself and began his counterculture period, probably the first to talk so openly about Rx and radical politics in large venues. First of all, he delivery of material was outstanding - enough to get huge laughs from often mediocre insights - but he worked hard and matured his talent to the point where he could rightly consider himself a writer - and his routines were almost dramatic readings of pieces that could be public on their own as comedic essays. His late work, taking on all aspects of of consumer culture - with special targets being God, War, Rx, and Ecology (about this last he was way wrong, which he probably would’ve later recognized. The film also tells a lot about his troubled childhood and difficult family life - as well as by his extreme work ethic and willingness to talk openly about his various struggles. The highlights are clips of him working, esp in late career. A great talent. 

It must have been huge fun to be present at Jocelyn Bioh’s Merry Wives, her adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, in Central Park in 2021, though the same cannot be said, unfortuntely, for the PBS broadcast in Great Performances. The play - word has it that S. wrote it on orders from Queen E.., in any event, the tale of cuckoldry and come-uppance, with the portly Falstaff getting his just desserts, stands as one of S’s worst, though Verdi did make a great opera of it, go figure. The fun is that this MW takes place in Harlem and the whole show has a bright and lively appearances throughout with lots of great West African music (percussion, esp.), and the characters all retain heavy West African accents and the script at times veers far from the Elizabethan. All good - and I’m a huge fan of S adaptations and re-imaginings - but watching the show on screen places it at a great remove whereas the original staging included the audience and setting as part of the milieu. I felt as if I were watching a screening of someone else’s party. For entirely there reasons, the filmed version, on HBO, of Dear Evan Hansen (2021) falls short on many counts (I have not seen the play, but assume it was better than the film), notably how odd it seemed for the characters to burst from the visual/textual realism of the setting into sudden eruptions of song and dance; sure, it works sometimes, e.g., West Side Story (the original), but here I just felt alienated and puzzled by the movie rather than drawn in - though I must say I’m always brought near tears by any depiction of lonely, picked-on, teased high-school kids. But overall, this Stephen Chbosky production just seemed dead wrong - what we should have, I think, would be a film of the staged shows, as w/, for ex., Hamilton. If you haven’t seen the play this film does not seem like the way to do so, and if you saw the play and loved it you’d be wise to poss on this version. 

Andrei Tarkovsky’s first film, Ivan’s Childhood (1962) is a tight, smart, scary account, filmed in beautiful b/w giving the film a look at times of a documentary, recounts a period in the life of the eponymous Ivan, a Russian maybe 12 years old or so who, it seems, has lost his family in an attack from the Germans in midst of WWII and takes on the role of a spy for the Soviet forces, perhaps eluding detection, for a time, because he’s so young. We go with Ivan and two soldiers on a behind-the-lines scouting patrol, and the outcome isn’t great. This film is a prelude for some the great films that Tarkovsky will produce in later years (e.g Andrei Rublev, Solaris), but we can in this early episode the attention to photographic detail, the choice of setting, and the frightening struggle of the heroic individual against forces much larger than he can perceive or combat. 

Severeal films by Black directors, 2 American classics,a David Lynch film, and one by Olmi

 Elliot’s Watching April 2022

A New Yorker blurb led me to watching Chantal Akerman’s 1986 musical feature, Golden Eighties, which could hardly differ more from her landmark work, Jeanne Dielman: This a mostly light-hearted film told mostly in musical #s, and in the spirit of Umbrellas of Cherbourg, though without the emotion and the pathos. Akerman’s characters are foolish and not in the least credible nor are they meant to be - this film is meant primarily to dazzle us with color (it’s filmed in a small shopping mall below street level in the Paris (?) Metro system) as we bounce around among three settings: a beauty salon, a coffee bar, and a clothing store, and with the buoyancy of a # of tunes, none of which is memorable though it’s uplifting to watch the beauty-shop employees do the dance #s. But who are these people? What’s the story? Not much, other than the characters take any form of social commitment, even marriage, as just a traffic advisory; when one young man, for ex., ditches his fiancée on the day before their to-be marriage, the adults console the young woman by telling her, hey, you’ll soon find another guy and you can be unfaithful to him. The heart of the story, such as it is, involves an American visiting France who purely by chance runs into a woman he’s lived w/ after the war and has pined for ever since. Nothing credible about this, except - the New Yorker writer (Richard Brody?) notes that this film is played out against a landscape of war and the Holocaust. Really? Blink and you’ll miss it! There’s a single mention when the woman says she was so skinny after they left the camps and that’s why she and the American lived together without sex. Hm, well, that hardly makes this into Shoah 2. Anyway, fun for the dancing and the overall design, but as a drama it makes no sense and seeing this will remind you that there has never been a French song or band to make it big anywhere. 

Quick note on a few shows sampled and abandoned: Star Struck Season 2 seems like a rehash of Season 1 and got us nowhere; The Outlaws, written by the Office team from England, is not nearly as funny in fact not funny at all. 

Horace Jenkins’s 1982 film, Cane River, long lost and forgotten but recently restored, is a landmark in cinema history as one of the first films written, directed, produced by an all-Black team (some minor parts in the movie played by whites, who are tour guides in a former plantation house) and filmed on location in Louisiana. I wish it were a better film, though it does have its strengths; the leads are very appealing couple start to finish - Peter (Richard Romain) a recent college grad returned to his home town, and Maria Tommye Myrick), set to begin her college life at the end of the summer (though she’s supposed to be 22 so what happened in her life? We get little back-story.) Their love is a bit R&G or WSS, as they seem to be from different but adjacent but rival Black communities; at the outset, that seems to be a big deal, as M’s brother in particular strongly oppose their relationship - though nothing comes of his opposition. That in a sense is the major weakness of the story; there’s not much dramatic tension until near the end when M’s mother, in a long scene probably mostly improvised, gives her hell for spending time w/ Pete. A good, dramatic scene in itself, but what’s up with this narrative? Both P and M are in their 20s, but the story line presents them as if they were kids, teens, just graduating from h.s. It’s almost comical to see the mother freaking out about her daughter’s behavior at age 22! Pete himself is enigmatic; he was a college football star who has just returned home after refusing pro opportunities; he doesn’t want to play football, he wants to be a poet. Yes, that’s possible - but we really need to see more of his “poetic” side - he seems incredibly naive for a 26-year-old (!) college grad in the 1980s - does he ever read, recite, memorize, think about poetry? Does he know how to begin to start a career as a writer? Anyway, we can bang away on this movie, but the subtext is it’s incredibly sad that Jenkins didn’t live to see it completed and didn’t get the chance to expand and improve his artistry. 

Kathleen Collins’s film Losing Ground (1982) is recognized as one of the first films by a Black director and featuring a nearly all-Black/Hispanic cast, has some excellent moments but its willful ambiguity seems very 1980s (or 60s?) and probably leaves most viewers with the sense of wanting more (not a bad thing, better too little than too much) although wanting more clarity isn’t necessarily good. I really liked the two main characters from the start - a married couple, she about 30 he at least a decade older, she (Seret Scott as Sara) a well-liked and charismatic college prof (Philosophy?) and he (Bill Gunn as Victor) a self-employed artist who’s just learned that a museum is buying one or some of his key works. They decide - he decides, actually - to rent a place upstate (it looks like a town on the Hudson such as Nyack?) for the summer. At first, Victor seems affable and joviaL - Gunn has a terrific laugh - but we gradually realize that he’s a big mansplainer and, worse, a troublesome flirt. Their relationship sours and darkens over the course of the summer, has he makes little effort to hide his dalliances (with a much younger Hispanic woman) and she sets aside her scholarly research to take part in an amateur or student film project, in which she dances w/ a handsome and mysterious black actor. It seems we’re meant to parse the differences between their two behaviors: she flirts because it’s in the script, it’s a role, whereas he does so because it’s in his character. I don’t want to give away too much by the ending - which is possibly violent - as we are, I think, meant to discern the moral and physical distance between what two people might do in pursuit of art - did the gun really go off or was it just a play? - and in life, particularly sex life. I don’t know anything about other work by Collins but I like to believe she had other opportunities in film and that later films were less random and withholding regarding key plot elements, that is, re life and death. 

Gordon Parks Jr.’s Thomasine & Bushrod (1974), written by Max Julien (who plays the male lead, alongside Vonetta McGee as Thomasine) has some strengths and innovations that make it worth a look - notably, an exciting gunfight filmed by a handheld camera that gives a vital sense of reality and danger, plus an imaginative montage of stills that trace the from obscurity to fame, or notoriety if you prefer, of the two Bonnie & Clyde- like gangsters - with the catch that they’re both law-abiding black citizens in 1911 Texas, facing a great deal of racism and racial hostility, at first with some equanimity but eventually with violence of their own. Unfortunately, the plot is thin as tissue paper, with far too little attention to the bounty hunter pursuing the two outlaws, so we never experience their danger nor do they ever do much to conceal their identity or whereabouts - in fact, it seems that the T&B would have been easy, natural targets as they go on a rampage of auto theft and shooting (apparently never fatal shooting); there are nice scenes that show the outlaws distributing their bounty (in the form of loads of bread, so we do get the symbolism) to impoverished people of color, Native people I assume, and the 2 leads throughout are pleasant and likable - we can’t help but root for them despite their sometimes too easy resort to violence and theft. This film comes about 6 years after its obvious model, B&C, and I just wish it had taken more of an original course of action and development, instead of coming off too much as a “Black version” of the antecedent. Also have to note that the film boasts perhaps the worst theme song ever attached to a movie (doesn’t help that the names of the lead characters are so odd). 

Ermanno Olmi’s third feature, i Fidanzati/The Fiances (1963) follows up on his great feature Il Posto as a great look at working-class life in post-war Italy. In this instance the story line follows a young man, Carlo Cabrini as Giovanni (too old for the part it seems) who leaves his home - and leaves his girlfriend (not clear except from the title that they’re engaged) Lilianna behind on the mainland as he heads off to Sicily where he’s been recruited for what seems to be a mid-level professional position in engineering at a gigantic power plant. He imagines this job will be a great economic opportunity - if I don’t take it, 10 other guys will, he says - that may help him and L. financially; times are tough all over despite some postwar prosperity. He learns on arrival that the job isn’t quite what he’d expected: horrible and unsafe working conditions, exploitation of the manual laborers (mostly Algerian), terrible and over-priced housing, and little to no guidance or recognition. We see quite clearly that any prosperity in the region takes advantage of the workers and disrupts all life in the region; the factories and the plant itself are ghastly monstrosities. Olmi’s great strength lies in filming this like a documentary, like an expose of the lives of the workers and to some degree the life of the Sicilian community - the 3-day festival includes some remarkable footage, for ex. Unfortunately, the narrative runs out of gas toward the end, as we see/hear an interchange of letters and messages between the G and L, as we get the sense -never specified as far as I could see - that he will return home to her asap. (The dance-hall scene at the opening of the film - where L. sulks in sorrow and declines to dance, is quitebeautiful.) Note: I saw this film a few years ago and blogged on it, but haven’t re-read the blog; I’ll do so later to see how much my views have changed or my memory has faded. 

One of the lesser-known (today) works by the Eric Pressburger and Michael Powell team is the delightful I Know Where I’m Going (1945), a pit of whimsy and romance near the end of the war in which the war casts a shadow over the story line but the story itself offers some comic relief, so called: A young man (Wendy Hiller) heads off from London to the Hebrides where she is to meet up with her wealthy industrialist (hard not to think of war profiteers) fiancé, whom apparently she hardly knows but is wowed by his stature, at his family castle in the Hebrides for a very quick wedding. En route she meets another young man from the islands - who also has a family castle/estate, as it’s obvious to all of us that they will end up together, just a matter of how and when (about 90 minutes). A series of storms and gales keep the woman from getting onto her finances island, and during that interval she learns of his cruel and self-centered character and becomes ever more warmly attached to guy #2. There’s lots of light island humor throughout (the movie was mostly shot on location - quite unusual then) and some great scenes including a singing, dancing, and speechifying during a long night’s celebration and in particular the foolish final attempt to motor through the gales and reach the remote island - this part obviously shot in studio using a projected film background but done so effectively that no doubt susceptible viewers have felt sea sick. Not one of the great movies of all time, but a great movie of its time and a pleasure to watch some 75+ years later. 

RaMell Ross’s documentary film Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) is moving and absorbing in many ways - it’s a portrait filmed over several years of life among the (mostly) Black community in this small rural county in Alabama. The highlights include some inventive and quite beautiful camera work - high-speed photography, unusual light filters, and most striking are two brief but powerful sequences on life (birth) and death (of a child). We seem to follow over the course of time several members of a family, in particular the older son who is enrolled in a small college in nearby Selma where his focus seems to be on basketball - throughout the entire project there is little to no talk about schooling, about preparation for college, about careers. The flaw in the series, however, is that we don’t get sufficient introduction to the central characters so it’s quite difficult to follow a narrative arc - and by the end the film seems to be a collage of mostly inventive passages and sequences. Ross deserves some credit for eschewing the more conventional form of documentary narrative, but a little more spine to the story, a little more sense that we are following the course of the lives of several people in this rural community. There is little reference to the “outside” world - a brief comment about a celebration of the Selma protesters, but that’s about it - and, again, Ross avoids the conventions of documentary filming: as best I can recall we never hear him ask a question or probe - the story such as it is unfolds, slowly, over time. 

Martin Scorcese’s The Age of Innocence (1993), based closely (I think) on the novel from 1920 - both set decades back, in the 1870s - is notable for its break-the-band extravagance of the period details of the lives of the uber-rich in the elite Manhattan social circles, so if that’s what turns you on for it - and also watch The Crown, which was similarly adorned, with one difference: the Crown told a great historical-generational story whereas Scorcese’s indulgent piece smothers a great novel. Viewers will not readily pass from the slumbering giant of a movie to Wharton’s elegant narrative. In fact one problem with the movie - which I could not watch in its self-indulgent entirety - is that MS relies far too heavily voice-over narrative, without the narrator’s having any personality of her own. What’s cool about it? OK, the camera work in long ballroom dance scene is a technical marvel, an obvious tribute to Welles’s Magnificent Ambersons - and maybe as well a reprise of his own justifiably famous Copa scene - and the opera (I guessed correctly that it was Gounaud’s Faust) at the opening is beautiful (it oughta be) and he does manage to get gorgeous megastars into his movie but what he never gets - or at least 40 of so minutes in fails to get - anything moving or heartfelt about the story, which just seems a lot of gossip and protocol from the denizens of a social world that has ceased to exist and good riddance. Read the novel. 

For several years I was one of the judges for a statewide short-story contest, and inevitably each year several entries read something like this: Terrible noise, storm, lightning, I sought shelter in an abandoned house, creaking noises, a hand at my throat, what could I do?, and then I woke up! These were particularly frustrating when the set-up was better and more original, but we can see what happens: writer can compose a good, even great, scene but has no idea how to tell a story. Same would be true for David Lynch’s frustrating Muholland Dr. (aka Mulholland Drive, 2001). There are good, even great scenes throughout the film, start to finish, most notably Naomi Watts’s “audition” for a film that will obviously never happen, the Cowboy scene, the figure behind the Dumpster, the lip-synch theater art, the intense woman-to-woman sex scene, the jewelry destruction - just for starters. But about halfway through the film, after Lynch has set up two or three plot lines that highlight the vanity and hypocrisy and even the corruption of the Hollywood film industry, it appear he has no idea how explain and bring to gather these pieces of narrative nor does he have any interest in doing so. Yeah, maybe you can devise, as I’m sure many have, an explanation that would account for all the elements, but it wouldn’t really make sense of this chaos, so the best way to watch it is to enjoy the show as it moves along and don’t worry about explanations. Lynch doesn’t. 

John Ford’s 1939 classic, Stagecoach, is still a pleasure to watch if you can get by the racism and stereotypes that mar some of the scenes and just recognize these - the Apache warriors, the comical Hispanic-American English pronunciations - as relics from a (nearly) bygone era. In essence, the film is a version of Canterbury Tales meets Sartre’s No Exit, as a group of 10 or so travelers, each with his/her own mission, share a coach for transport across dangerous open lands to the next fortification. We see the drunken doctor, the “bad girl” pushed out of town by the intolerant matriarchs, the card shark/gambler, the blowhard banker, the timid salesman, the jocular coach driver, the intrepid sheriff, the brave and loyal wife (pregnant) who’s traveled from Va. to reunite w/ her soldier husband, et al. - the key figure being the outlaw whom they allow to join the ride because he’s a fighting expert - played by a young John Wayne in a career move. Viewers today will get a charge out of the excellent studio re-creations of a frontier town and at the magnificent Monument Valley landscape, used in many subsequent films so as to establish the iconic visual recognition of the frontier and still worth a visit today. The film is full of humor, pathos, and schmaltz, a lot of fun, not exactly realistic but same could be said and has been said of most movies, not just Westerns. 

The HBO series Slow Horses (James Hawes, director; based on Mark Herron novel) is a complex and emotionally draining work about a team of British agents assigned to Slough House aka Slow Horses because of their various screw-ups and misdeeds - trying to redeem their reputations through their efforts to thwart the kidnapping of a young Muslim comedian taken by a group of right-wing extremists who plan to execute the young man - highly dramatic plot, with lots of twists - hard to follow at times, at least for this American viewer, if we get to season 2 I will probably try untitles though I hate to admit that. Gary Oldman, as the supervising agent in charge of the team of misfits, is a grumpy, spiteful, hateful man - apparently Oldman playing himself, which may be enough to put some viewers off. That said, it’s an intelligent script, well plotted, full of high drama, esp. in the final episode. 

March 2022: A great anti-war movie, Murakami in film, Roumanian film, Karel Reisz, Fassbinder, Jarmusch, Lincoln, and Will Smith

March 2022

The 40-part AppleTV series Lincoln’s Dilemma is engrossing and informative on so many levels; while fully acknowledging the pain many Black Americans today feel in the presence of statuary or landmarks that claim Lincoln as the great emancipator - arguing vehemently and correctly that Blacks earned their own emancipation, through their years of suffering and their uprisings during the Civil War and their valiant service in the still-biased Union army - the series recognizes the great accomplishment of Lincoln and, most important, his evolution over time, over the course of his presidency - initially only pledging to restore the union w/out any particular view on slavery or emancipation, gradually, in part through his own suffering and loss, feeling bold enough to use emancipation in order to move the war toward its conclusion and hold the union of states - and up to the time of his death by which point he recognized the importance of emancipation regardless of political or military expedience. Told with excellent use of period photographs and documents, with lots of voice-over readings of key statements by Lincoln, those who knew him, those who suffered in the war and in the confederacy, and in particular Douglass, who spurred Lincoln on like a living conscience, though they met face to face only three times. The series is narrated by a collection of Lincoln schools, historians, and journalists, all of them on point and clear, giving me faith that there must be many great young historians at work today and teaching their craft and knowledge to today’s generation of college students - a really impressive group effort. Jacqueline Olive and Barak Goodman direct, based on the book Abe by David S. Reynolds.

Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) has to be the best war, or actually anti-war, film I’ve ever seen - why it’s so far under the radar is a bit mysterious and must have something to do w/ its being one of the few great films come of the post-Stalin era Soviet Union (another being the much more recent Beanpole). Come and See (yes, bad title) is in the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front (the first anti-war film I ever saw) as we follow a young man’s induction into military life and armed combat. The setting both geographical and temporal is a little muddy at first, at least to this American viewer, but I see by the end that it was set during World War II and involves an small Soviet military unit taking up arms against the invading Nazi army - always a morally confusing moment, as it seems strange to be on the side of the Soviets, but an enemy of my enemy is a friend. Apparently it’s set in Belarus, and the film goes through what feel like several “acts”: initially the young man is essentially impressed into the Soviet Army to the horror of his parents who need him on the small family farm. He is taken in by an Army unit on the march, and all seems well and jovial for a time - it’s like a camp!- and on a mission he encounters a young woman whom he seems to fall for (the film, like many Soviet films, is quite chaste); suddenly they’re under aerial attack - vivid, realist, scary. He later makes his way back to his family farm, which in now deserted - everyone’s been killed by the Germans. On he goes - the next “movement” being the appropriation from a farmer of a dairy cow - an incredible sequence that ends in despair. And then the most amazing part - a segment of may 20 minutes, maybe longer, of the German overthrow of and occupation of a small town - just an astonishing sequence of cruelty and brutality, that never feels gratuitous - just horrifying; I know of no other sequence like this. (The young woman reappears, somewhat changed.) So the film is 2+ hours and it’s without any redeeming humor or sentiment; insofar as it’s a justification of Soviet brutality (to its own), to hell with it, but insofar as it’s a filmmakers view of the horrors of war, it’s must-see. 

The quirkiness and oddity of Haruki Murakami’s fiction has at last become evident to contemporary filmmakers (years ago I tried to persuade friend director AW to adapt Wild Sheep Chase to an American setting), with the latest venture being Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021); should it be 3 hours long? Probably not (we watched in the 3 one-hour segments, making it much like a miniseries) but in any format it’s an excellent film about a theater director coping with the death of his wife and with several realizations about his wife’s infidelity, all of which lead to surprising outcomes and developments across the span of this epic; much of the film has do w/ the director’s taking on a multi-language production of Uncle Vanya (another fave among filmmakers, for obvious reasons), which at first looks as if it will become one of worst productions ever staged but surprisingly it becomes a beautiful project that touches on various aspects of the lives of the actors (and others). The highlight-reel segment is the long car ride in which the lead actor in the play gives the director (Hidetoshi Nishijima) a spill of info about his late wife, most of which surprises us, some of which surprises him, all of which may or may not be a lie.  Definitely an intelligent film; the slow pacing and lack of high melodrama will mean it’s not for all viewers, but patience pays off - the film becomes better as the plot moves along and we become accustomed to its pace, so to speak. I’d like to read or re-read the source story. 

Radu Jude’s 2016 film from Romania, Scarred Hearts (the title is awkward, at least in English) is a beautiful if painful medical odyssey, as we follow a young man (early 20s) in 1935 Romania as he enters a TB asylum; the care he receives may have been adequate in its day but from our vantage looks brutal and ineffective: essentially the well-meaning doctor punctures the patient’s stomach to siphon off infectious pus - extremely painful - the puts the patient in a body cast, essentially making him immobile for months - with obvious physical (and mental) deterioration. The actor portrays a well-known (in Romania) poet and novelist of the 30s, Max Bletcher, whose words open each segment of the film; it’s obvious to all viewers that Bletcher (played as “Emmanuel” Lucian Teodor Rus) is dying - but over the course of his demise he falls in love w/ a young former patient who spends time at the facility. Obviously this film evokes Magic Mountain, but this is hardly in the same social (or intellectual, or medical) orbit - as the life of the patients is painful and difficult, there are several riotous episodes, lots of carousing, much open, even encouraged, often painful sex, some anti-Semitism directed at Emmanuel - it’s by no means a resort or a place anyone would ever choose to stay for a minute. His well-off Jewish family members do the best they can for “Manu,” but there’s only so much that medical science of the day can do; his awkward journey at the end to Hungary for more extensive supposedly helpful surgery is horrifying and sorrowful to watch. The whole film is photographed beautifully as a series of long takes from a still (or slowly approaching) camera; I don’t think there’s a single close-up in the whole film - especially strange in that most of the dialog is spoken by actors immobilized and on their backs facing the ceiling. In short, a unique, troubling, yet powerful film. 

Don’t ask me to tell you the plot of Harry and Jack Williams’s series, The Tourist (2022, HBO) as it is almost impossible to recount let alone relate all of the twists and turns, many surprising, most of which make sense - I mean, yes, you could log off saying “that could never happen,” but throw yourself into the unlikelihood and go for the ride, which is a lot of fun, often laugh-out-loud funny, and engrossing - right through to the conclusion which leans hopefully forward to a 2nd season. Roughly, this (poorly named) series follow a man driving in the Outback who is pursued he knows not why and, following a brutal crash, has lost all of his memory; over the course of the 6 episodes we learn that the is being pursued by gangsters - or maybe he is a gangster? - and aided by a beautiful woman whom he may (or may not?) have known her in his previous life and pursued by the Australian cops - incompetent? just inexperienced? or in on the scheme? You get the picture, or maybe you don’t, but it’s fun and engaging all the way. 

Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) still stands as one of the great films of its era, capturing the look and mood of post-war (I think the story was set sa 1948?) London - shot in industrial Nottingham, every moment - from the first moment of men like automatons in some sort of factory to the close overlooking a once-pastoral hillside now scarred by housing developments - dark and oppressive; as with the other Angry Young Man films, this one focuses on an angry Arthur, played well by Albert Finney, fun-loving but ultimately destructive, cruel, self-centered, dreaming of a better life but doing nothing bring that about, full of hate toward all authority figures, belligerent and unfaithful to women and to his “pals” - yet, somehow, we feel, what choice does he have? At least he’s full of life and not shut off from life his fellow oppressed workers. The film is based on a novel by Alan Sillitoe - who also wrote the screenplay - and it will of course remind most viewers of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, based on a Sillitoe story - probably a better film because of a more rounded central character and its beautiful, sorrowful ending - whereas SN&SM ends abruptly and ironically in a way that doesn’t do justice to much of the rich material. 

Many takes on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s vast and diverse collection of works, some great some just eccentric, and one of the latter would be Chinese Roulette (1976). It starts as a surprisingly “French” drawing-room comedy as a husband and wife each set out for a weekend tryst w/ mistress or lover (the lead character was supposedly heading for a meeting in Osloa) when both couples converge at the same getaway, a “mansion” that one of the couples owns. These are 4 sophisticates so rather than blow up in anger they accept the switch of couples and engage in smirch civilized if repressed chatter and recreations, such as an on-going chess match. The movie never becomes what we viewers were led to believe: it’s not Cosi nor Midsummer Night’s Dream - it’s just - I don’t even know what; the 4 adults (and one of their kids who’s the most malevolent of all) begin to engage in some weird party games including the eponymous roulette but for me it was impossible to follow the rules of significance of that game nor of any of the other distractions. By the end I was just puzzled: Who are these weirdos, including the household staff, one of whom is writing some sort of Nietzsche-like profundities and absurdities, so who is he and who cares? WMF seems to have lost interest in the film aside from its being an opportunity for shots from many odd angles and perspectives; otherwise, it was probably a quick one-off for this highly productive filmmaker but one that would fall at or near the bottom of his list, and mine.

Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984) is great to watch today, a time capsule of roadside life - America looked so different then, in some ways much more industrial and grimy and in other respects vacant, untouched - and of life in a dingy apartment in Brooklyn, now probably renting or a condo in the millions. The story - classic motif, a stranger comes to town - involves the unexpected arrival in a young man whose 16-year-old cousin suddenly appears at his doorstep, a new arrival fro Hungary. As we watch her hang around with cousin Will and his pal Eddie it becomes obvious that they’re going nowhere - petty grifters, aimless - and that she’ll do all right in America: she’s attractive, animated, and she picks everything up fast. The plot, thin as it may be )(which is ok in the totally non-=commercial film0, involves a road trip to Cleveland and an extended trip to Florida, where they boys blow their $ at the track; the end is deliberately open and inconclusive, much like a Joyce story. The cinematography, b/w, a series of scenes in which the camera is nearly still and we are allowed to absorb the scene in detail (I think these are called master shots - what’s unusual is that this film is composed solely of such shots). All of these shots help us understand the context of the time and place of these characters - so distant today! - and some are beautiful in their own right and hilarious, as for example the long shot - 2 minutes? - of the threesome with one picked-up friend (interested in the girl) as we watch them watch what seems to be a Kung Fu movie. And almost forgot to mention the terrific, highly dissonant, score for a string quartet (I think), mostly in the 2nd and 3rd acts of the film, plus the added bonus of clips from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s Got a Spell on You, terrific performer froth 50s little known today (nice touch making the Hungarian teen her champion). Really nice debut (?) film from JJ, who’s gone on to a great career in non-Hollywood cinema, about as far from the studio system as one can get. 

King Richard (Reynaldo Marcus Green, 2021) gets it about right, as far as I can tell from following the Williams sisters and their rise to stardom over the year. We’re left with a suitably ambivalent feeling about their father/coach, Richard Williams, in Will Smith’s (deserved) Oscar role: yes, RW deserves praise for his raising his 5 daughters in a wholesome and loving manner, and esp for doing so in the challenging environment of Compton/LA, where he is threatened and beaten by thugs who harass his daughters Venus and Serena. His faith in their abilities and his intelligent coaching and managing their careers - despite so many potential pitfalls and such hostile and racist reception by so many in and on the circuit. That said, it’s not hard to sympathize with the neighbor who suspects him of child abuse, as he is extremely hard on his daughters and a martinet on certain aspects of family discipline (his wife, Aunjanue Ellis,  is a good counterweight, and I loved the scenes where she told him off - the only person who could possibly do so). RA knew that his daughters would become stars - but we also have to recognize that the world is full of parents who overestimate the brilliance of their kids - and to an outsider he would seem like one of those, at least at first. The film culminates in the ultimate success of the girls, Venus in particular - and does not even touch on the issues of what about the other girls in the family? If memory serves, at least one did not come to a good end. I would not say the film is “scrubbed clean,” as we definitely see some of the flaws in RW’s system and his confrontational behavior, but it was obviously made w/ the cooperation of the W family so it was definitely not going to cross any lines. All told, worth watching, esp for tennis fans and for those curious about what spurred Smith on to such hostility at the awards ceremony: he’d been primed for anger, 

Elliot's Watching February 2022: Some I'd recommend (Scenes from a Marriage, As We See It, Coda, Crit Camp); others, not

 Elliot’s Watching Feb 2022

West Side Story - barely watchable. Spielberg and Co. decided to expand and narrative aspect of the story, which is by far the worst part - if anything it should be trimmed and just get us to the music and even to the dancing. Overall, the two gangs looked like a ballet corp (or corpse for that matter) and it was hard not to laugh when the gangs get tough, so-called, with each other. Ditto when the do flying leaps, jete’s, pirouettes, whatever on the mean streets of NYC. The 1960s v wasn’t great and probably has not aged well (not as well as Rita Moreno) but it was far, far, better than this mess of a film. 

Somebody, Somewhere - speaking of musicals - didn’t do much for me in the first 2 episodes, despite its good hear and good intentions. Just not funny (or sad) enough. As We See It, about a group home for adults on the “spectrum” was much more moving and credible for me, though my viewing partners were not in agreement so I probably won’t see much more of this one, either.

On the other hand…there’s Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, which I first saw around its release date (1982) and I think I was too young to understand or appreciate this work. Or maybe it’s that I saw the movie version and have just finished watching, for the first time, the “theatrical” v., at 5 hours or saw and 5 episodes. I suspect that the film version included all of the emotional highlights, most notably the horrendous interrogations that the evil bishop/stepfather inflicts on the intelligent and sensitive Alexander (young Bergman) - in other words, the movie version was almost unrelenting horror whereas the theatrical presents a broader social canvas - esp in the amazing first episode that intro’s us to the Ekdahl (Bergman) family, which at first seems fun-loving the boisterous in their lavish xmas celebration - and we recognize, over the course of the episode, one night, we see that the family is deeply flawed by infidelity and failure. In any event, the series is breathtaking, and the Bishop has to be about the most noxious and hateful character in any dramatic film of the century. 

Other shows I will not finish include: The After Party, juvenile and preposterous; Red Notice (feature film) thinks it’s another James Bond except the characters are bits of fluff and the plot is absurd without being funny, charming, or devious; South Side, yes I did laugh a few times at this series about the Black community and its denizens in Southside Chicago - but not funny enough to hold my attention over a full season; Gilded Age, paper thin and completely unengaging in first episode, not even close to the standards that the BBC has - can anyone not see where this is headed? - so why not just adapt one of the great novels or stories?of the era rather than try to write something anew? And adding more to this list: What went wrong for Julia Garner/Shonda Rhymes on the interminable series Inventing Anna, which seemed phony and strange and just plain uninteresting from the outset, despite the all-star lineup. Do they have any idea how a newspaper/magazine office manages? Do they have any sense of how to create dramatic tension as reporter tries to convince her editors that this story, of a woman who faked her way into the upper crust of NY society, would be interesting or tense in the least? No, no, and no. Sorry

However, what a nice surprise to come across the under-the-radar Best Pic nominee Coda; it won’t win the Oscar, for obvious reasons (sorry, Apple TV), but it sure could attract a wider audience - a terrific, heart-warming, never soporific or gratuitous, of a teenager girl who works on her family fishing boat out of Gloucester while a full-time h.s. student with dreams of becoming a pro singer, with the catch that her family member all have complete deafness. The film gives us unusual insight into the world of those without hearing and is full of surprises and twists of fate as the young woman breaks free, to a degree, from her family - but finds a way to bridge the gap between her aspirations, which her parents and bro can obviously only partially appreciate if that, and the need and desire to be close to those who love her no matter what. 

Hagai Levi’s re-take on Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage doesn’t quite measure up against the original, but it’s still a powerful and sometimes frightening intense, close look at a youngish (30+) Boston-area couple and who they deal directly and painfully with issues that arise over the course of their endangered marriage: pregnancy and medical abortion, infidelity, separation, sexual longing, and, in the episode closest the Bergman original, heart-felt reparation. The series reads like 5 intense two-person plays, and the leads, Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac give it their all. Probably not a show for everyone, but in an age of too much streaming drivel and lackluster comedy, this series wins props for intensity and credibility.

Then there’s Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959); in my admittedly fading memory the 1934 v was more powerful and moving, but the Sirk remake (both based oh Fannie Hurst’s novel) is far the more lush and operatic - too much so, by today’s standards, which tend to favor minimalism and subtlety rather than over-the-top melodrama. So much depends on the score! As you watch it try to imagine it w/out the scare and it would be laughable. The story, groundbreaking in its day for its honesty about race relations, today looks too condescending at best and puzzling in ways that really aren’t so great: It’s a “passing” story, with the young girl, a light-skinned Black child who identifies even from an early age as “white” and as she gets older she rejects her Black mother and is embarrassed any time her mother is on the scene. Despite its strengths as a mother-daughter drama, the film doesn’t really give voice to the Black girl’s struggle: She’s right, in a way; to ID as black in the 1950s was to cut oneself off from most opportunities for success. The overacting, the schmalz, make the film laughable at ties, but it’s best to accept it as a product of its era and ponder: How would a director/writer take on this theme today? 

The much anticipated season 4 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, at least based on the first episode, is a crashing bore with almost no good laugh lines and some long passages that are painful to watch, notably the long ride on the ferris wheel; yes, Rachel Brosnahan can still bring it - and Susie Myerson commands the screen at times, but something’s missing here and I think it’s comedy. I can’t be the only on who thinks Tony Shaloub is just plain not funny. But what about Brosnahan? In this season so far, which is as far as I’ll get, she just seems angry and deranged. Anger is not necessarily humor. This show has drifted far from its roots. And btw the same holds true for Ali Wong, whose 3rd Netflix comedy special is, based on the first half-hour, just a rant - provocative, sure, but not really funny, just gross and indecourous. Loved her previous special - which has real insight into relationships, class, ethnicity - but this one just was going nowhere good, despite the hilarity from the audience (much good-will laughing and cheering, as with so many comedy audiences - handpicked?).

First noting that we have returned to As We See It, a moving and provocative series about a group home for 3 young adults with severe autism and their medical aide, a terrific series that gives us insight into a world and a malady about which most of us know little, plus it’s comic without being condescending and dramatic without being melodramatic or, for that matter, predictable.

Over past couple of days have watching Max Ophuls’s late (last?) film, The Earrings of Madame de… (1953), which unlike above series (in every way) is melodramatic and romantic and an evocation of a long-gone era - Gilded Age Paris - with a distinct focus on the world of the aristocratic and privileged, though not without several snide remarks and actions throughout that, if we absorb these moments, show us privilege, cruelty, and obduracy of the aristocracy on its last breath. The main reason to watch the film is a technical one: the astonishing camera work of Ophuls, the camera moving so much as it follows the characters through and across various settings, most of them interiors of a belle-epoch mansion somehow brought to life and re-created by MO’s design team. The camera work - esp in the ballroom-dancing sequences - is literally dizzying. And how can you get enough of the performances of the 3 leads, Charles Boyer, Danie;le Darrieux, and especially famous director Vittorio DeSica? The plot - based on a then-current novel set ca 1900 - is almost incidental; the eponymous earrings figure in several white lies and social upheavals and by the end I couldn’t keep the earring-story clear in my muddled head - but there’s no need for that, just watch what’s before you and it’s amazing and unlike that of any filmmaker since (and few previous, Welles being one). BTW we never learn Madame’s name - every time its uttered some intrusion - the noise of a passing carriage, for example - blurs it out. 

I had it completely wrong about the Netflix doc Crit Camp, for some reason expecting this doc to be a heart-warming visit to a camp for children with disabilities, much like Paul Newman’s much-touted camp, but it happens that Crit Camp is so much more and so different from my expectations. It begins as a focus on a camp called Jen Ed, but always by the participants called Crip Camp, using much documentary, low-quality video footage from the 70s or so (not sure of precise dates) of a left-wing, counterculture camp for these admirable and brave young people; the spirit of the camp led to the formation of an advocacy group by some of the campers, who over the years built a national, even an international, recognition of the rights of those w/ disabilities and fought some valiant battles against authority, many of whom - even in the Carter administration - were reluctant to sponsor legislation guaranteeing most basic right: access, transportation, housing, schooling that was not “separate but equal” - a tremendous example of the power of advocacy and peaceful demonstration. The world has changed radically, thanks in this regard to the brave souls who found their voices in youth in this “special” camp - a powerful documentary that will bring you near tears and make you proud of what can be and has been accomplished. 

I’m no big fan of ballet - in fact I don’t understand it at all and I skip any story in the arts section that’s about dance - but the 1948 weepy The Red Shoes (Powell and Pressburger) is a good entertainment in so many ways: start w/ the highly stylized Red Shoes dance full of illusion magic, something not able to re-create in a live performance but that lifts the performance to another level in film; also, Red Shoes gets as well as any other film I’ve seen at the real tensions and emotions of the cast - stars, extras, business interests - all the love and jealousy and camaraderie and exploitation and irascibility, all there and seeming to this viewer on the money, nothing romanticized. The end of the show is operatic and over the top, but it’s earned the right to that - stepping out of the real world of dance/the arts and all of the attendant struggles for success and balancing stage life with personal life; a beautiful film just to watch, right up the the conclusion which is a cornball. Reminded me altogether of Children of Paradise - which was made at roughly the same time, but Red Shoes feels much more contemporary (of course it was a present-day setting, unlike CofP) and also of Day for Night. Fun to watch, and, as the Criterion Channel notes, beautiful use of technicolor. 

 

January 2022: Lost Daughter, Beau Travail, Ozark, Magnificent Ambersons, Spirit of the Beehive, and others

January 2022: Being the Ricardos, The Lost Daughter, Beau Travail, Ozark, Magnificent Ambersons, Spirit of the Beehive, Fanny and Alexander, and some series I abandoned 

The Prime feature Being the Ricardos by writer/director Aaron Sorkin and starring Nicole Kidman as Lucy (w/ a NYC accent that I don’t think Lucy shared) and Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz (and J.K. Simmons in a show-stealing role as the actor who portrayed the Ricardos’ neighbor, Fred) is a lot of fun to watch at least up to a point; in particular I liked its dissection of how a 22+-minute comedy broadcast is put together over the course of a week, with close focus on the writing team and on nuanced directorial decisions, many or most of them developed by Lucille Ball (not sure if that’s true at all but I makes for a good story); would have liked to see more of the actual show, but so be it. Some of the scenes - notably Lucy w. Simmons in a neighborhood bar and lucy meeting with the woman only woman in the writers’ room - are of the kind of excellence we’ve come to expect from Sorkin w. the only quibble being that: Everyone sounds like Sorkin! Can’t have everything. Not sure how close any of these events come to the real lives of the characters - as they struggle through a # of crises, notably accusations that Lucy was a Communist - but, though it’s about 20 minutes too long, it’s still a good show that helps us understand (as the Dick Van Dyke show did some years after Lucille Ball) how difficult it is to write, direct, produce, and perform a weekly comedy show. 

Whether it’s the fault of the author of the based-upon novel (Elena Ferrante) of of the screenwriter (Maggie Gyllenhaal) or of the Director (ditto) the much-anticipated Netflix feature The Lost Daughter is a mess. Fast it, anything with the suddenly omnipresent Olivia Colman is worth watching - for her facial expressions alone! - and the cast is good overall, but does this movie make any sense on any level? Does any woman in her right mind behave the way Leda (Colman) acts throughout? What explains her decision to keep in her possession a baby doll los by a little girl on the beach, as the child spends a week (unlikely) mourning the disappearance of her toy? Especially in that we get many broad hints that the child’s family are bunch of ruffians, often threatening and malicious? This behavior is not in any serious way accounted for by mistakes Leda made in her youth (young Leda played well by Jessie Buckley, a convincing young Leda/Colman); OK, so Leda was a bad mother who for a time abandoned her children rather than manage the pressures of young motherhood. But why the pointless cruelty some 25 years later? She’s an enigma, a mystery without a suitable clue. 

The Claire Denis film Beau Travail (1999) is at once a social documentary - tremendous footage of a French Foreign Legion company going through intense training and deprivation - this looks and feels like documentary, though I’m not sure if that’s true - set against the extreme poverty and barren landscape of Djibouti, where the company is deployed; it would have been enough just to do a documentary or if need be a docudrama about life in the legion, but CD takes the film to another level in that this film is a re-imagination of Melville’s Billy Budd (actually, it’s closer to a re-imagination of Britten’s BB opera, which emerges from a few of the scenes). Spoiler alert here: The film diverges, however, from the source in some key ways, most notably that the BB character, who punches out the cruel mid-rank officer, similar to the book, is not sentenced to die by the code of conduct - so, unlike the short novel and the opera, the captain remains largely guiltless, and the BB character survives. I think I like the original better, but this is a really daring and thought-provoking film; although it’s an adaptation, there’s really no other film quite like to my knowledge. (and would add on further reflection that Melville/Britten are wise to stay closer to the original as it makes both BB’s death and the Captain’s lifelong struggle w/ this execution far more poignant and searching)

Series I’ve started that are clearly not meant for me: Love Life and Starstruck, both appealing rom coms (the sex/love/romance life of a young woman single in NYC, ditto in London) but clearly for a much younger viewer and Stay Close, a Harlon Coben genre pic about a beautiful woman on the cusp of marriage with a mysterious past - so preposterous, cliched, and predictable as to be literally unwatchable. What’s with Coben, a highly respected writer? Sometimes what works on the page is exposed as vapid on a screen, not sure why. Truth is unmasked by the reality of the camera? 

Watched all of Season 4 Part 1 of Ozark, which continues to be an exciting and plot-driven series, w/ plenty of violence, tension, and dark humor. The lead performers have all grown into their roles - Jason Bateman, Laura Linney, Julia Garner in particular - the series has lots of surprises and overall makes you extremely grateful that you’re not part of an international drug cartel; all the chimes are run, so to speak, including a take-down of the sanctimonious Rx manufacturer who pushes her additive product on the world as recklessly as do the pushers of heroin - no difference, morally - just legally.

Watched for 2nd time Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, a great though fatally flawed film: I love films that give us the portrait of an entire community, an extended family, a time and a place, which this one does - along with some incredibly powerful dramatic passages, notably with Agnes Moorehead, and extremely complex cinematically episodes such as the first evening ball and the sleigh-ride through the snow. Yet the film marred by extensive post-production cuts and re-shoots, including a ridiculous ending, and also by the relentlessly obnoxious George Minafer (Tim Holt), a character with huge mama-problems and an irredeemable personality. (Read some of the novel to make more sense of the story, but found it sadly dated and unreadable.)

Saw Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive (1973), a little dated now with its interest intentional ambiguity and obscurity, but still worth watching for the visual imagery if nothing else: terrific moments as we follow over the course of a few days the lives of two young (8 at the most) sisters who play mind games w/ each other and who get glimpses of an adult life - e.g., discovery of a fugitive soldier - film sent in the 40s post Spanish Civil War - hiding in an abandoned farm shed - that they can neither understand nor explain. Nor can we, exactly: Is this soldier in fact the former lover to the girls’ mother. Is he trying to get back to her? Or is he just a random presence fleeing the authorities? Many of the scenes and events in this film cannot be definitively explained - very 1970s - but the accumulated moments - including a weird sequence incorporating footage from the silent v. of Frankenstein - spliced in to boot. 

Will also note that I’ve started watching Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, television version, and found the first episode to be fantastic - a portrait of a bourgeois Swedish family in the early 20th century celebrating xmas with what at first seems to be a grand, lavish entertainment - but over the course of the evening (and of this first episode) we see the fault lines, the misery, the lies, the infidelity (as well as, to be fair, the creativity) that lurk just beneath the glamour surface - this brilliant celebration is a facade, beneath which lies ruined and failed lives and class exploitation. 

Finally, saw Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (how nervy is Coen to take credit for re-writing this play, “adapted” from Shakespeare. It’s no more adapted than, say, 98 percent of productions - in essence, he introduces one - needless - character and makes some cuts esp among the witches’ chants). On the plus side, there are some visually striking moments - in particular the movement of Biornam Wood - but the film suffers from, for some reason, imagining a Scotland inhabited by about 10 people, for the weird choice of a setting in a castle that’s all weird angles and tall staircases - as if right out of Calgary rather than the Scottish moors - and especially because of the poor performances of Denzel Washington, star though he may be he is terrible at delivery of MB’s lines, which is kind of essential to any production, and a surprisingly tepid and understated performance from Frances McDormand sharing the lede. 

Elliot's Watching December 2021 - Sunset Boulevard, Eclipse, Hand of God, Children of Paradise, Succession, Landscapes, et al.

 Elliot’s Watching - December 2021

The Billy Wilder classic Sunset Boulevard (1950) holds up really well after all these years - the retro look that, say, 30 years ago looked quaint and out of date now adds to the beauty of this film, a hard-boiled narrative with not a surprise ending but a surprise beginning of all things. It’s a lot of fun watching William Holden get caught in the web of “Norma Desmond” (Gloria Swanson), a star from the silent era now pushed aside by the completely different skills and demands of the “talkies.” Her over the top performance is great - we’re repulsed by her bossiness and sense of privilege, we’re astonished by her lack of insight (and charm), yet we feel sorrow for her and her pathetic attempts to revive her career. Cecil B Demille, playing himself, does a brilliant turn as a kindly director who feels sorrow and pity for the diminished Swanson; there are other Hollywood cameos of the era (or earlier), including a surprise appearance by Buster Keaton (and Swanson herself does a good Chaplin impersonation. Holden is cruel and manipulative, but we feel sorrow for him as well, used onto the margins of Hollywood because of his own real but limited talent as a would-be screenwriter. All told, the film moves right along, and we go along, too - right to the gruesome and weird conclusion, where we all pause to look at the wreckage. 

The Torquil Jones documentary (on Netflix), 14 Peaks (2021) is worth watching if you’re into films about (mostly) guys who take incredible risks involving surfing, diving, hiking, free climbing, or as in this case scaling huge mountain peaks. There are moments of incredibly frightening footage involving injuries and white-outs as we follow Nepalese climber Nurmal Punjab leading an all-Nepalese/Sherpa team in a quest to scale the 14 +2,000-meter peaks in  months. (I always remember the Mad Mag spoof that suggested the Nat Geo photogs who take the pictures deserve all the accolades.) The quest itself is egocentric and in some ways cruel; I’m just not into these stunts that put not only the leader but the whole support team at great risk. Nurms’s quest is in some ways political - the first all-Sherpa team giving credit where its due - but for all that we learn little about anyone else on the climbs other than Nurms. Moreover, he/they never seem to appreciate the beauty of the mountains - they’re just objects to “conquer.” Still, you can chalk this up alongside 100-foot Wave if this type of adventure rings your bell.

Chris Marker’s 1982 film, Sans Soleil (Sunless), is built on 90 or  so minutes of Marker’s fantastic photograph, an incredibly visually interesting and complex visual study of street life and iconography most in Japan though some in Africa; scenes as diverse as street theater, department stores, pinball arcades, zoos, long train rides with most passengers asleep, all of which work together and give a portrait of developing and developed countries far from Europe (not sure the dates of the actual footage, though suspect some of it from well before 1982). Unfortunately, though, by about an hour into this 90+-minute film I felt I’d had enough; there’s no narrative line of shape to encompass these phots and film clips, and the voiceover narration - recited by a woman who supposedly received these images along with messages from CM - seem to go nowhere and by 60 minutes just feel obtrusive, and I bailed out. Got the picture. 

Going against the consensus here but I found Jane Campion’s “Western,” The Power of the Dog, (filmed in NZ?) to be largely unwatchable: The characters are drawn with such a heavy hand that nothing they say or do makes any sense.We’ve got here a cross between East of Eden and Brokeback Mountain, and the basic arc of the story is a preposterous tragic relationship between two of the men in the film. Jesse Plemons does his best to bring off is stupid and enigmatic character, owner of a cattle ranch and newly wed to a seemingly naive woman, Kristen Dunst, who biomes increasingly addicted to alcohol and bizarre in performance as the movie edges along. Benedict Cumberbunch show that the can do a decent American/Western accent, but who can believe his repressed homosexual character for even a minute? And then there’s the over-the-top effeminate Kodi Smith-McPhee. Who are these people? What drives them? What do they hope and think, why are they so mean to one another, does the death at the end of the movie make any sense at all? Is it a murder? Who knows or cares at that point? 

Jean Renoir’s 1937 classic, Grand Illusion, loses nothing even after 80+ years and multiple viewings, a totally engrossing narrative whose basic underlying image is that social class is more of a bond among men at war than patriotism - at least up to a point! Story is of a group of French POWs held in a German camp near the end of the first WW - and it’s a camp for “officers,” so they’re treated quite well compared w/ POW camps for the ordinary grunts, which we never see. The head of one of the camps (Von Stroheim again!) thinks he has a special bond of understanding with his fellow aristocrats, and French play along - but all the while concoct an escape plan. The German officers are astonished at such effrontery - esp. in that some of the Fr. officers come from bourgeois backgrounds - one of key players is a Jew! Ultimately, class and country don’t matter, as we see in the touching concluding episodes when 2 of the escapees are taken in and protected by a German war widow; the last scene, which I won’t divulge, with the escapees struggling to cross a field of snowbanks, is famous and rightly so. Sadly, this film, with its sympathy for most of the German soldiers, could not have been made a few years later or at any time since; the Jewish POW would have been doomed, and the other French POWs could not possibly have felt a shared ethos with those serving under Hitler. 

Everything you’ve heard about Succession is true; at end of Season 3 (no spoilers) the characters are just as loathsome, intelligent, driven, and clearly defined as established in Season 1, and this series - of course it will be picked up as a Season 4 - seems likely to be one of the few that builds an arc from opening to conclusion and that satisfies viewers to the end, that is, doesn’t tail off as every aspect of the series runs out of steam and the final episode is on fumes. No, these characters and their milieu (I hate myself for envying how they travel in luxury around the world and around NYC) are so fascinating and well delineated that to start watching is to stay hooked.  don’t think this series does any form of justice or benevolence, but it lets us into what appears to be the inner workings of a right-wing media giant (read, Fox news) and satisfied us by showing that these people are so mean-spirited and self-centered in every aspect of their lives: Nobody to root for; just watch the carnage. Huge props to writers/creator Jess Armstrong, as to the cast too many to mention; no misfits or lightness among them. 

Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1962 film, L’eclisse (The Eclipse) will knock you over if you like cryptic, enigmatic features - because that’s all you’ll get here, no plot to speak of, the characters are strangely abstract, the pace is glacial (for the most part). But it’s a film that accomplishes its ends, so props on that. Essentially the story is about  beautiful 30ish woman in Rome (I think), Monical Vitti as Vittoria, who breaks up w/ her fiancé for no clear or distinct reason, and after much meandering has a fling with a handsome ne’er do well young stock broker, Alain Delon, and that just plain ends leaving her alone on an empty street. What works well in this film, however, are the vast empty spaces on the streets of Rome; I know that by in the ‘60s we didn’t see the street-choking traffic of Rome today (that’s part of the fun in watching European films from this era) but MA engineered these streets for his movie so that they’re vast empty spaces, kind of like a Magritte painting - unsettling in their emptiness, an emptiness that is matched by Viti’s insecurity, inability to know herself or to connect with anyone else. MA balances these empty street-scapes against 2 long scenes on the trading floor of the Rome stock market, where buyers and sellers literally scream at one another constantly, a furious babble of noise that no outsider can comprehend; it turns out to be a terrible day for the market, and we see in some of the characters the aftermath of a big paper loss. The stock-market scenes seem almost like documentaries, and maybe they are, with the key actors emerging gradually from the crowd. Overall, the film won’t answer any of your questions, but will leave you with a weird unsettlement, such as after reading a troubling poem or hearing dissonant chamber music. 

Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013) stands as one of the greatest European films of the century, and he continues that reign of excellence with his 2021 film, The Hand of God, marking him really as the living heir to the style of Fellini, the obvious avatar for TGB which was PS’s homage to La Dolce Vita - and HofG continues that reverence: The complex family and public gatherings and celebrations, with so much explosive passion and anger and a fascination with eccentric characters and body types; in HofG the celebrations range from the purely familial (often over dinner, of course - with one spectacular family outdoor gathering), outbursts of passionate anger and sorrow (in HoG in particular a tremendous scene of the adult children reacting to a family tragedy), and flirtation & fascination with the criminal underworld. The main divergence of these two masterpieces is that TGB was about a man in late-life crisis, feeling that despite profuse outbursts of admiration and respect from all of his many acquaintances realization that he is close to none of them and that he has wasted his life in not completing his 2nd novel; in HoG we have a more conventional “coming of age” narrative, centered on a young man, Fabietta (a diminutive), whose aim in life is to be a filmmaker - so we obviously suspect that there are deep autobiographical elements in this film, which, like many Italian films of 20th century that encompass a relocation from the provincial towns and cities toward success in Rome. Fabietta’s seduction is one of the greatest of sex sequences; his obsession with his beautiful and deeply disturbed aunt is one of the great depictions of hopeless young love and “sentimental education.” Not sure how I feel about the film director (based on Fellini? didn’t seem like it) who makes a late appearance and gives F hell for not pursuing his dream - seemed a bit crude and too much “on the nose.” But F emerges from that tongue lashing, as we see him recognize the vapidity of his earlier passion - pro soccer, which, as he recognizes, is a stand-in for and an obstacle to his pursuit of filmmaking. All told, an excellent film that almost demands another viewing, as you can only absorb so much of this beautiful film - including the art direction and the excellent dissonant score. 

If you can’t get enough of the one-man (or -woman) conquering incredible odds and surviving in a challenge against topography and against all reason - mountain climbing, endurance running, surfing in 100-foot waves, etc. - you should add The River Runner to your viewing list, as it’s probably the best ever of films about kayaking the world’s most dangerous rapids - and it has a pretty good back story as well about personal hazards and obstacles that the greatest kayaker faced and survived. Maybe too many talking heads in this Netflix (2021) film, but the kayaking passages make it worth at least a good look. 

A better man-against-nature and facing incredible risks is The Alpinist, which follows the endeavors of possibly the world greatest free climbs - enormous peaks in Canada and Argentina that he climbs without ropes, only equipment he can carry by hand and in a small pack, unsupported, climbing solo with no backup crew, truly incredible, though we see it with our own eyes thanks largely I guess to drone cameras. Heart in mouth the whole way.

Marcel Carne’s masterwork, Children of Paradise (1945) feels today, obviously, somewhat dated - in particular because it’s set in Paris in the mid-19th century and is completely old-fashioned in its narrative, a beautiful (supposedly, something I’ve failed to see) woman (Arletty) adored by 4 men: a criminal, a wealthy aristocrat, a young aspiring actor, and a great mime (Jean-Louis Barrault), in a particularly sensitive role. So, yea, it’s kind of corny - when I first saw it in youth I was moved by the sentiments of love lost, love regained, and despair, later viewings have taken the polish off - but it’s grand in its way, too, much like a Balzac or even, though not quite as beautiful, like a Flaubert or Stendahl. Well those are high peaks to summit, and CofP definitely accomplishes its goals of a throw-back romance and a re-creation of the world of theater from long ago - the crowded street scenes, the behind-the-scenes chaos, and the rowdy audience crowds are extraordinary, even today. Part of anyone’s dismay, however, in watching this film today comes from knowing that Arletty was later convicted of treason for her ongoing relationship w/ German officer. The film was meant to be, weirdly, an escape from the war and the Occupation, but of course there had to be many compromises that allowed for the film to be made; certain topics and plot elements, which we can only imagine, must have been “streng verboten.” 

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza is about as appealing as the afore-mentioned snack. This preposterous account of a 15-year-old h.s. senior in a  Central California town who falls at first sight for a 25-year-old woman in a dead-end job just makes no sense from the first moment: We don’t believe the male character is possible or likely or even likable and the woman, though more sympathetic, is so out-of-character in falling for a guy about half her age - well, it makes no sense at all. So it could still be fun or funny if these two were powerful and eccentric characters, if their pursuit of wealth and of one another and weirdly of a career in acting led to some wit, humor, or even development and maturation of 2 of the misguided, but there’s nothing her I could believe in or care about even for a moment - well, there was one moment (no spoiler but, here: when the guy is arrested by 2 tough cops who rough him up) though that promising episode ends w/ a puff: Sorry, wrong guy.  PTA has a lot of stature in Hollywood, but who really likes or liked this movie. It’s a holy, wholly, mess. 

Another under-the-radar series you’ve probably never heard of is Ed Sinclair and Will Sharpe British true-crime miniseries (4 episodes), Landscapers (2021). Based on a true crime about which there’s no mystery - the first episode begins with the VO that the couple was convicted of murder some 20 (?) years back and still proclaim their innocence - this series follows a strange, middle-age couple, Susan (Olivia Colman) and Christopher (David Thewlis) charged with killing Susan’s abusive parents and burying the bodies in the back yard. It’s not so much the details of the case and the trial that make this series work: It’s the suffering and sorrow of the couple, our empathy for them mixed with disgust even revulsion, and some highly unusual narration that at times breaks the 4th wall and that delves into dreamwork and fantasy - and most of all for star turns by the two principals: Colman’s face can express every known emotion, in a flash, and Thewlis is unmatched in various roles as the British misfit and intellectual weirdo. This series deserves more recognition. 

Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm hardly needs a boost from me but I’ll just say that Season 11 loses nothing in the hilarity department. How many series can say that? I’ve only watched a scattered few of the episodes in past years but, new to HBO, we enjoyed watching a full season of the show and I was particularly impressed at how well individual episodes stand up - thanks to the continued wrangling about the smallest aspects of the protocols of life, e.g., tucking sweaters in our not, how men should and shouldn’t embrace, et al, while maintaining a narrative arc of equal hilarity across the 10 episodes of the season: in this case LD’s attempt to repeal the local ordnance requiring a “five-foot fence” around a swimming pool - all because a burglar drowned in LD’s unfenced pool and he finds himself threatened by a relative of the deceased with a huge lawsuit for negligence - but there’s an out, case will be dropped if LD casts guy’s daughter in his latest sitcom, which is OK but she’s terrible and so forth. All funny and at times poignant. 

Carol Reed’s 1949 thriller, The Third Man, is fun and beautiful to watch, all filmed in eerie b/w on streets of the near-deserted postwar Vienna as the protagonist, Holly played Joseph Cotton, seeks his vanished friend Harry Lyme, played brilliantly by Orson Welles, in fact many people probably think OW directed this or starred in it - in fact he has only one speaking scene before the long, complex chase at the end through the underground sewer system of Vienna, a symbol, obviously of the sinuous and rotting system of postwar management - and perhaps of European prewar life as well. The plot doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense - script by Graham Greene in the all-star production - but that doesn’t matter as the acidic, disillusioned dialog, the great manhunt at the end, and the weird ride on the Ferris wheel all are fun to watch. As to listening, I am definitely not a fan of the zither music that scores the entire film - totally annoying and not especially appropriate for the setting, either. 

The rogue McKay-Sirota comet heads toward Earth and global extinction, Don’t Look Up, turns out to be not a conventional world-on-the-brink thriller at all but a serio-comic, ironic, message-bearing, fun if too much on the nose and too easy to gloat about look at how a corrupt administration hand-in-hand with high-tech heavy donor trillionaires creat global confusion as half the world (or at least the country) fails to recognize the global threat and mocks those who do - does this sound familiar? DiCaprio as scientist though hardly world-renowned is part of team that discovers the comet gives a career performance in stepping out of character, Jennifer Lawrence good as always, Timothee Chalamet shows some range, Mark Rylance as a Steve Jobs-type is great, too - lots of fun in this sometimes message-heavy production that, like the comet, feels at times too close for comfort.