Varda by Agnes, Lesotho film, Black Bird, Buena Vista Social Club, Belfast, 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, Thirteen Lives Las Year at Marienbad

 Elliot’s Watching - August 2022

All fans of the work of Agnes Varda - which should mean anyone really interested in European cinema of the past 70 years - should take the time to watch her final film, Varda by Agnes (2019). It’s a tour of (most of) her best films with live narration from Varda herself, addressing various groups of students and filmmakers. She concentrates on her works from late career, with hardly a mention of her earlier, somewhat more conventional films such as her real-time drama Cleo from 5 to 7 or her landmark feminist work One Sings, the Other doesn’t, nor does she dwell on any collaborations with her late husband, Jacques Demy. Rather, these late-career works are more like experiments in participatory, public art - one that describes her work style and her innovation (use of found objects to mark time and space) The Gleaners and I or her harrowing film about the life of an outsider (Vagabond) or the particularly imaginative film Faces, Places, in which she collaborates with an artist, JR, to visit various sites in France to shoot and display a photograph that captures the essence of the community, for example a shot of an enormous baguette sandwich that the villagers eat side by side (if I remember correctly). Her outreach to her subject is touching and inspiring, as is her focus on the marginal and the marginalized. Varda by Agnes should function as an open door to her other films rather than has a summary of her life’s work. A final note: Those lucky enough to watch the film on the Criterion Channel should check some of the commentary, notably the memories of Varda shared at the Telluride Festival, with panelists including her two adult children and her fan and friend Martin Scorsese.  

Lesotho (South Africa) is the setting for the unusual and entirely captivating film from the Lesotho filmmaker Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, This Is not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019). The film merits at least one revisit, as much of it is obscure on the literal level on a first viewing, at least my first viewing, but any obscurities or ambiguities are outweighed by the mysterious beauty of the setting and the community. The plot such as it is, in essence, centers on an octogenarian woman, Mantoa, played by Mary Twala Mhlongo, a well-known Lesotho actor (who died shortly after this film was completed) who anticipates a visit from her son working the SA gold mines, but instead receives word that he has died (we learn nothing more about his death), the latest in a long line or tragedies and losses she has suffered in her small, remote village. Over the course of the film she prepares herself and other villagers for her death - and for her burial in the small family or community cemetery - with this catch: the SA government plans to flood the entire village (and relocate the villagers) as part of a massive dam project; of course Mantoa organizes resistance to the project, with devastating results. What keeps the film alive is the sense of place and setting, the unusual cinematography, and terrific music both from the villagers and from highly dissonant score from Y Miyashita - it’s pretty much unlike any other film you’re likely to see. 

The American miniseries developed by David E. Kelley and Melissa James Gibson - which strangely is set in London and seems entirely British, who knew? - Anatomy of a Scandal (2022; based on a Sarah Vaughan novel) is worth seeing just to watch the courtroom drama, as the completely despicable MP James Whitehouse (our RI Senator oughta sue!), played by Rupert Friend, endures days in the dock after he’s accused of raping a much younger aide. It’s a he said/she said, which, unfortunately for James requires that he fess up to a 5-month consensual affair, and his lovely wife, played by Sienna Miller, endures the whole ordeal - and gives hubby some much-deserved grief after each court session. The series is engrossing, up to a point - as we watch the smarmy, self-satisfied James get skewered, but unfortunately the writers were stuck with a crappy plot that runs out of gas by about the half-way point and, if you keep watching (which we did) you’ll see one of the most ridiculous and preposterous resolutions (no spoilers) I’ve ever seen in an otherwise reasonably good crime/courtroom drama. Caveat emptor. 

Dennis Lehane’s Black Bird miniseries (2022, Apple) is one of the most successful dramatizations “based on a true story”- terrific and harrowing look at the life of a 20-something straight-arrow seeming guy (Taron Egerton as James Keene), nabbed as an Rx dealer and sentenced to 6 years - but the FBI makes him an offer: They will have his sentence commuted if he’ll go undercover into the prison for the “criminally insane” to get info and and wrench a information from a scary guy (Paul Walter Hauser as Larry Hall) who’s in jail for the murder of a young woman - and he’s suspected of killing about 20 other young women, whose bodies had never been found, leaving their families in grief. The series gives a brutal and uncompromising account of life in that Midwest prison, including various gangs inside the prison and a corrupt guard and the fear that at any moment Keene will be identified as an FBI plan (and the son of a retired police officer (Ray Liotta, in his final film). The series is tense all the way through - right to the final credits. 

Wim Wenders’s music-documentary Buena Vista Social Club (1999) is a totally enjoyable start to finish look at Cuban music - a project that began when the great American guitarist Ry Cooder, who’s been for many years a proponent of world music, travels to Cuba to try to connect with the great stars of traditional Cuban dance music, much of which had been performed by members of the eponymous club. Cooder soon learns that the club itself has long since passed away, but he and his team assiduously track down many of the great Cuban performers - men and women who at that time, inter 70s or older, had largely given up performing. Cooder et al brought these performers into an impromptu studio, recorded their work, and released a hugely successful compilation disk in the late ‘90s. Wenders joined the project and did on-camera interviews w/most of the singers - plus many fascinating location shots in Havana: worth seeing for the old American cars and the weathered grand boulevards and back by-ways - as well as the musicians themselves. The project culminated in a great concert in Amsterdam and then a find, triumphant performance before an enthusiastic crowd at Carnegie Hall. Totally fun for the great music and the strong, quirky personalities of the many artists. 

Stanley Donen’s spy-caper film Arabesque (1966, based on a novel by Gordon Cotlar) ) broke no new ground - familiar femme fatale plot with lots of twists - low-income Uni prof Gregory Peck, American England is called upon for his expertise in ancient languages to translate a small piece of parchment that for some reason has become of great interest to the PM of an Arab nation and a weird crime syndicate - don’t even try to follow the plot because who cares anyway?, it’s all about the exciting and imaginative chases (through Regents Park zoo, and aquarium, chases on horseback, pursued by a chopper, at the Ascot races, buildings blown up and demolished, Peck drugged and stumbling at night through English traffic, and more! - plus Sophia Loren in a sexy/comic/secret-agent role. Lot’s of fun - filmgoers in the 60s got the money’s worth even if, in the end, it amounts to not much but a Hitcirhcock homage: right down to the scene in which Peck and Loren are pursed by a harvester in a field of grain (North by Northwest anyone?) and, in Hitchcock fashion, the bit of cypher turns out to be a bit of nothing - just the “maguffin”that sets this madcap romp romping. Lots of fun; zero depth. 

Kenneth Branagh’s film Belfast (2021) is a portrait of the then-troubled city in the 1960s (with some framing shots of a Belfast as a peaceable, bustling city today) as experienced by a young boy - obviously a depiction of Branagh in his childhood - in a Protestant family living in the midst of the struggles; the film opens w/ a frightening street riot aimed at driving newly arrived Catholic families from the neighborhood. Some of the film is idyllic, as the young protagonist enjoys a life of close family ties - esp to the older generation - w/ lots of Irish humor, and much of the adolescent struggle (a crush on a classmate, whom we later learn is from a Catholic family) plus pressures on the family itself, of which the young boy is beginning to get a glimpse and a dawning appreciation, brought on by the father’s gambling habits and need for a more stable, unthreatened life - notably a move to London, which of course upsets the young boy deeply. There’s a lot of humor, much pathos, lots of street fighting and thuggish bullying of those - including the boy’s father - who refuse to take up arms - plus a good musical track with some fine selections from Van Morrison. Though the film ends with some sanctimonious moments, it’s overall a fine work that depicts a difficult childhood predictive of a culturally rich career in the arts - cf 400 Blows or Cinema Paradiso; will there be a sequel? 

But not for me … two completely different series about workplace culture: Industry, about a cohort of new temporary hires at a highly aggressive financial-services company, all vying to be retained come RIF (reduction in force) day, but (most of) the cohort are dislikable or amoral or both and there’s way too much totally gratuitous sex, drinking, smoking - without the counterweight of strong characters, interesting relationships, crises and resolutions. Ditto the much-praised surreal and enigmatic workplace of Severance, which for me was just far too creepy and arbitrary and I probably didn’t give it enough of a chance (2 episodes) but why would I want to visit by evening the fears of my nights? 

Catching up on recent watching of two productions, first the Skye Borgman’s 2022 3-part series, I Just Killed My Dad, is a good program (Netflix) for those like me who are true-crime buffs, and this has a twist in that it opens with the confession that you can see in the title - a young man calling the police to report on his own actions - and it seems the young man gets terrible treatment as ;aw enforcement assume thesis a murder or at least manslaughter face that they have to pin on the kid - but over the course of the drama we see how horrendously he was treated by his father and the misery of his life of near torture and of course we recognize before the cops and the DA’s team do that this kid is guilty of nothing. No spoilers. Second, I re-watched the terrific Romanian 2007 film 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days from Cristian Mungiu - and it’s a film everyone in an abortion-banning state should be forced to watch’ over the 2 hours or so, through a series of mostly long stills, and sometimes long tracking shots in which Mungiu conveys the struggle over few days of two college roommates in Romania, w/ its ridiculously strict anti-abortion laws (couldn’t happen here, could it?), and compromise, the suffering, the expense, the humiliation, the fear these 2 women brave together because of their friendship and commitment to women’s rights. The writing is wise and insightful, and the star s Anamaria Marinca as the fearless loyal friend. Topical, I’m sad to say, and enduring drama. 

Prolific, polished professional Ron Howard, who’s done about a movie a year, almost all of them big-budget and highly successful, since 1982, despite some wavering reviews comes through once more with the dramatic and technically challenging Thirteen Lives (2022), based (closely) on the rescue of 12 Thai kids and their soccer coach from a flooded dave in mountainous Thailand. Though most viewers will be familiar with the rescue, which received much international daily coverage, it still takes your breath to watch the rescue team in action against all odds and expectations. It had to be a huge technical challenge to do this film - many complex crowd scenes, re-creation of the terrifying mountain cave, re-enactment of the treacherous rescue process - you’ve with them all the way what seems an impossible task. If there’s a flaw to the movie it would be that no central character emerges - though that would be the “Hollywood” way the group effort with no individual hero is in keeping w/ the facts so, so be it. Also unfortunate - the Thai Seal rescue team and other local experts seem shunted aside and dependent on the expertise of a few British amateurs - a patronizing structure and not in keeping with current screen mores - but that’s the way it played out, and I think Howard and his team would have been lambasted had they restructured to story include a Thai hero, so more credit to them for staying with the facts of the docudrama. 

Yes, it’s pretentious; yes, it’s enigmatic; yes, it’s preposterous; yes, it’s French - but Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961), screenplay by the equally pretentious/French Alain Robbe-Grillet - and yet, it’s still worth watching for pure weirdness. YOLO. The film - in which to my knowledge none of the characters have names - takes place in what looks to be one of the great chateaus now a grand hotel at the eponymous resort/recovery clinic; the characters wander through the innumerable long hallways and ballrooms, sometimes engaging in small gambling, at one point seeming to watch a play about the movie in which they’re participating, who knows? The story line such as it is involves a man who seems a woman whom he recognizes reminds her of their affair (her hawkish husband plays some kind of gambling or card trick on many of the guests) that began a year ago at this very hotel - and the woman insists that no, it never happened, she has no such recollection. So who’s right in this? What kind of sense does it all make? To me, not much - still fun to wander through these over-the-top decor - 2nd empire style? - and to walk in the garden that is done in extreme French style with all the greenery cut into rigid geometric patterns that look nothing like nature, guided throughout by dissonant organ music (I think that for a few moments some stringed instruments join in?). Obviously a lot of commentary exists on this sometimes incomprehensible film and maybe some of it will clarify Resnais’s intention, aside from bafflement, but many films that were startling and evocative in their time today look like curiosities - Godard and Truffault drove a stake into the heart this type of moody, languorous film with their new-wave cinema built upon by psychology, memoir, character, engagement, history, style, and commitment. 

Two films about boxin including the great Raging Bull, a great road movie from France, and a great documentary series on a small-town murder

 Elliot's Watching - July 2022

Chloe, Il Sorpasso, Raging Bull, Cobra, Mind Over Murder, The Harder They Fall 

I guess the Amazon Prime film Chloe (2022) is worth watching, in that it kept us interested enough to watch it to the end (8 episodes, I think), thanks largely to the portrayal by Erin Doherty, but really how stupid are the characters in this drama? Anyhow likely are its events. Zero and zero - stranger comes to town (a good narrative trope at the outset) and immediately assimilates into a crowd of Bristol (England) artists and politicians. We know, and they don’t, that part of her raison d’etre is to get at the truth about the apparent suicidal death of a friend from her youth - but the cover story is so flimsy, the recklessness of the guy she begins to live with (on the rebound recovering from the death of his wife, running for office … - come on, he’s too smart to fall from this erratic and peculiar woman from out of nowhere). So, no, I didn’t believe it for a second, but it was act least fun to watch the plot unfold and to try to figure out what drives this woman, is she evil or dangerous or unbalanced or a loyal friend on a mission?, that it kept us going. Can’t say it was a great series by any measure tho.

On the other hand, Dino Risi’s Italian road movie, Il Sorpasso (1962), is totally watchable and fun and sad and touching. “Road Movie” doesn’t to it justice; it’s a comedy w/ much pathos, w/ two guys, strangers essentially, taking a weekend drive away from Rome and along the Coast - with Vittorio Gassman as the extrovert, risk-taking, domineering personality and the recently gone Jean-Louis Trintagnant as the timid, cautious, nerdy guy. So many funny scenes and incidents throughout, but it’s not Animal House or Easy Rider - everything that occurs along this jaunt develops the characters and examines their unexpected friendship: many laughs, perhaps some tears as well. 

Clark (2022)? No, sorry, after a clever and jaunty intro to the life of a Swedish bank robber and ne’er do well, the series devolved into much material about how cute and charming the eponymous Clark with his seductions and unlikely escapes - hared to believe in the reality and hard to care about such a dislikable characters - couldn’t carry me through 2 episodes let alone or 10 or whatever. 

Martin Scorsese’s decidedly non-adulatory biopic Raging Bull (1980) stands even a half-century) later as a great film in its own right and as a seminal work of American noir, a passageway that extends from the Cagney gangster films of the 30s/40s through the Godfather then on to Scorcese’s own work e.g., Mean Streets and Goodfellas, and then all the way toward the Sopranos and beyond. (Some claim this film is not “noir” but I disagree.) The heart of the film is De Niro’s portrayal of middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta (a sad forewarning that there’s no glory in the life of a fighter post-career) based on his autobio/memoir in which he must hold nothing back. The film moves from balletic beauty to frightening ferocity, esp in the boxing sequences - but the greatest agony for viewers are the tense family sessions, marked by silence, seething, and fury. Some of the dialog is incredibly revealing (as I suspected and later learned was the case, much of the dialog was improvised over the course of many long takes) even with or maybe especially with the awkward brute language of Jake, his bro. (Joe Pesci), his “moll” - the guys are not Rhodes Scholars, but they make their point. The nightclub fight is probably more tense and seething than any of the fight scenes - ditto De Niro’s trashing of his apartment or bashing his fists and forehead into a wall upon his imprisonment. Greatest sorrow is probably his pathetic attempt in a parking garage to reconcile w/ his brother, Joey. And then there’s the demise - Jake’s painful attempt to do a routine in one of his nightclubs - let’s just say he’s not a natural jokester - (and De Niro must have tortured himself to put on all that weight!), scenes that reveal all about the afterlife of a man once a star. An incredible movie that definitely does not glamorize brutality, infidelity, or organized crime. 

The somewhat under-the-radar British series Cobra (season 2) gives a good and frightening account of a country under siege and held hostage by cyber warfare - disrupting all financial transactions, threatening the water supply, and others. The series feels plausible and realistic, for the most part - although I had to wonder why the Brits were taking this attack completely on their own (there were some snide portrayals of ugly Americans - not likely, I hope, at least in current admin.); at times the series reminded me of Borgen, with lots of insider dope about the by-elections, but, this being a British show, all or most all came together at the outcome. The acerbic conservative MP played David Haig steals the show. A mostly good, watchable series - too bad there are some cheesy elements such as the breakdown of the PM’s wife and the revelation that the PM had a long-time crush on his Chief of Staff - those being avenues I wouldn’t want to pursue any further in a 3rd season. 

Nanfu Wang’s terrific 6-part documentary series, Mind Over Murder (2022, HBO) tells of the conviction of a six people known as the Beatrice Six. This gives nothing away as you will learn in the first 60 seconds of so of the first episode that the 6 were later exonerated and released from prison after some 20 years after their conviction. The series shows us the brutality of the crime, a rape and killing of an elderly woman who lived alone in an apartment building in downtown Beatrice, Nebraska - a town so typical of rural life in the Midwest, or so it would seem. We see the efforts to determine who committed the crime, the questionable police tactics, the inability of most of the 6 to make any sort of defense - it appears that some of the accused suffered from some developmental disabilities; others had poor counsel or none - the efforts of some lawyers to reverse the verdict and, more important, to follow ignored clues to reveal a more likely criminal, the sanguine and self-confident police officer who pushed most of the 6 into false confessions, and most of all the effect in the small community  of the crime, the trial, the imprisonment, and eventual release six people - who knew one another only slightly if at all. Capping all this, and holding the series together, was the enterprise of the local community theater to tell the story in a one-act play in which the dialog consisted only of on-the-record statements from the police, the accused, and others involved in the case and the trial - and the effect that this drama had on the community and in particular on the descendants of the murder victim - a truly engrossing and perhaps unique documentary (itself comprised entirely of interviews). 

Mark Robson’s 1956 film The Harder They Fall (other films have also used this title), based on a Budd Schulberg novel, stars Humphrey Bogart in his last film - and though Bogart performa well as an out-of-work boxing writer who’s recruited by a sketchy syndicate to run a massive publicity campaign for their newly discovered boxing phenom, the S. American “champ” Toro Moreno, a gigantic man who can’t fight a lick. Strangely, Bogart was cast against a woman who played the part of his long-suffering wife - who looks about a third his age, which makes the whole domestic angle look absurd or even perverse. The film is funnier that the other boxing film I watched recently, Raging Bull, in that the lead boxer is a comic misfit; it’s meant to be in part an indictment of the boxing industry, in particular that every lead-up fight toward the championship bout was thrown - and the boxers just seem to go along with this fraudulence - whereas in RB the lead was tormented and wracked with pain being forced to hit the floor - it called his whole being into question, whereas here it’s all part of the night’s work. In that regard, the film is less credible than it ought to be - although it goes give us a glimpse into the world of pro boxing in its heyday - the negotiation of crooked contracts, the sense that boxers were just chattel rather than skilled athletes, the machinations of fight promotion, the incompetence of the working sports press. Worth a look, esp for Bogarts’s last gasp, but not a profound study in the boxing mentality. 

June 2022: Rothaniel, Barry, TheAscent, Borgen, Tehran, BlackMother and Double Indemnity

 Elliot’s Watching - June 2022: Double Indemnity, The Ascent, plus Borgen, Barry, Rothaniel, any others 

Jerrod Carmichael: Rothaniel (2022) - the title will become evident a few bits into this 60-minute program, directed by Bo Burnham - is an absolutely unique (and excellent) piece of cinema. It’s something like an hour-long comedy sketch, sure, but also like a 60-minute one-man play and like an hour-long discussion unrehearsed and like an hour-long therapy session - all of these elements, and I would add only that it can never be staged more than once (without significant changes in the material) - it’s bold, brash, funny, and moving, and even a little scary, as JC opines on race, queerness, family, friends, and on the audience itself (I’ve read it was performed at the Blue Note, not sure if it was by invite). JC is a totally likable stage persona, completely open - well, almost completely - about his life and his struggles with family and w/ relationships; impossible to watch this film without thinking you could be friends w/ this guy. But could you? Or is he all an act? Definitely worth watching. 

I should have better discipline when watching a series from HBOmax or Apple+ but I can’t help it; they do us no favor by their stretching out the premier one episode per week. And that works just fine for a traditional comic series, esp of 30 minutes, such as Curb Your Enthusiasm, for ex., or Veep - episodes connected in spirit but only loosely bound by plot and it would be, and is, very funny even with long time gaps or mixed order for that matter. But for a comedy such as the weirdly entangled series Barry - that’s when I wish I had the patience to wait till all episodes are releases and then watch in consecutive nights. The plot of Barry, hilarious as it is, is just too byzantine to expect that we remember all of the necessary details - at least, I can’t do so. That said, this Bill Hader and Sarah Goldberg (who increasingly takes on the star role with her terrific outbursts and her what feels like an authentic look at the idiocy of much of the TV/media entertainment industry from the POV of a groundling) is fully of laughs and surprises and delightfully off-center characters from Hader’s struggle between his role as violent hit man and his yearning for an acing career, or Anthony Carrigan’s portrayal of a homosexual Chechen assassin or Henry Winkler as an acting savant. Watch it, but watch out - it gets really complicated (maybe that doesn’t matter?). The final episode of the season (2?) is somewhat more straightforward, with each of the 3 main plot strands culminating in great violence and potential for further explication in an on-coming season, one assumes. 

Larisa Shepitko’s Russian-language film The Ascent (1977), adapted from a (little known?) novel by Basil Bykau, tells a harrowing tale of two Soviet “partisan” soldiers during WWII who depart from the unit, in the midst of terrible blizzard conditions, to find food from any source, a journey that ultimately leads them into the hand of Nazi soldiers who horribly abuse their captives, leaving each of the two to decide his fate - one of whom becomes a martyr and the other who betrays his fellow prisoners: the religious allegory here is really evident. The film is shot in stunning b/w with many extremely long takes, and the suffering endured by the Russians, soldiers and others, is nearly unbearable to watch - a beautiful but harrowing film whose stark images - the mother calling to her children as she’s abducted by the Germans, the torture devices in the German camp, the 5 dangling nooses, to cite just a few - will stay w/ any viewer for a long time. 

This series is for adults only. It has no sex, no violence, no swearing, no smoking (I think) - but it’s adults only because it’s about politics and media and ecology and economics - all set in Copenhagen and, for this season, in Greenland. Borgen: Power & Glory (2022 Netflix) has an unusual history: 3 years to the original series, ending about 10 years ago, and now the characters are back for not a 4th season but a “new” series, which picks up 10 years after the predecessor bid adieu as Brigitta, the Danish PM, bids adieu. Now we have most of the same characters and all of them are portrayed by the original cast members, to it has a feeling of verisimilitude unlike most other reprises. This series centered on a discovery of a massive oil field in Greenland, enough potential revenue to lift the colony into prosperity and trend dependence on grants from Denmark; but - is it OK for the super-liberal Danes to support an oil terminal on their territory? The discover draws into the fray not on the US but also China and Russia, with all sorts of complications, which unfold with novel-like precision. That said, it’s almost amusing for an American viewer to see how seriously the Danes take their politics (if this is accurate) - the media focused on every facet of domestic policy in a way we never see with the crime/mayhem-obsessed American media (TV mostly). And the moral standards in Denmark compared w/ US are laughably high; for one example, the main character, Birgitta Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen), is once again terrific in her ministerial role, gets chewed out for responding “no comment” to media - this is evidently not the expected behavior of a Danish cabinet member. Ditto for her equivocations about comments she made at a Cabinet meeting - which in the US would be a big who-cares. Any, it’s a serious, thoughtful, entertaining, non-exploitative drama, one of the few (sadly). 

Kenji Mizoguchi had many great films to his credit, notably Ugrestsu and Sansho the Bailiff, but as for his monumental 47 Ronin (1941), come on, today it’s mostly unwatchable (I stood with it for an hour, passed on watching the next 3 hours): slow, static, almost completely unfathomable to non-initiates - how some obscure breaking of protocol led to years of civil war - none of which was dramatized or depicted in the first long hour. The film is based on historical events and has been mined by other directors since ’41 but today it’s at best a historical curiosity. 

Tehran Season Two doesn’t have quite the suspense of the first season, in which time was compressed and life was on the line every moment and the Israel and Iran were on the verge of all-out war but it’s still a good adventure, with plenty of tension and surprising twists. Niv Sultan is a great lead, playing an Israeli agent under cover in Tehran and assigned to a dangerous mission before the Israelis pull her out safely - if they do. OK, there are many highly unlikely twists of fate and some preposterous hair-raising escapes, but it’s still pretty good entertainment without too much violence and without vulgarity or exploitative sex. The characters are largely believable - with the exception of badly miscast Glenn Close who seems lost in her roll as an undercover agent in Tehran. Definitely  leaves the plot open for a likely 3rd season. 

There is no way I’m going to watch beyond the first episode of the HBO series Irma Vep, about an American actress who goes to France to star in a remake of a famous French vampire film from the silent era. Nothing about this show appealed to me, nor was it really meant to - you’d have to ID with the lead (admittedly, a charming actress) and her sexual trials and tribulations and to care in the least about her director, who suffers from some kind of mood disorder. I didn’t. If you wanna see a better film about the making of a movie try Day for Night (Trufault) or, for a more personal and idiosyncratic version try Fellini’s classic 8 1/2. 

Khalik Allah’s documentary Black Mother (2018) provides us with a rate and painfully honest look at urban black street life in Jamaica, mostly in or around Kingston, I think, much of which, I think, must have been footage of KA’s family (he is American, his mother is Jamaican), particularly his elderly grandfather. There are some beautiful passages, many of which involve music and prayer, some philosophizing among the elderly, and, most striking, straightforward footage of the street prostitutes at work. Nothing in the film glamorizes life on the streets - life is tough and sometimes scary, housing and living conditions are terrible, education of the young seems to be sporadic. We see nothing about prosperity in Jamaica, nor anything at all about tourism or the wealth of Jamaica in the colonial era. Few filmmakers would have access to the material that KA uses. He frames the film with a check-in on a woman (part of his family?) who is pregnant, and at the end we see the birth in close-up - like every other birth, it seems a miracle! There’s no obvious proselytism here - just an unflinching look at the reality of life in this community.  

The Billy Wilder classic Double Indemnity (1944) is one of the best ever among American films noirs - from the look of LA ca 1938 (the setting for the plot), the fantastic hard-boiled dialog (screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, based on a novel by JM Cain, so how could you go wrong?), great acting by the 3 leads, each cast against type (McMurry, Stanwyck, EG Robinson), and a fun plot that will have you thinking all the way through - it’s about McM and Stanw concocting a scheme to collect $100k (a fortune, back then) on an insurance claim that they believe is the perfect crime, but we know from the outset it isn’t, as the first scene is the beginning of McM’s confessional, but if so then what went wrong? Can we figure out what they screwed up in their ingenious planning? Lines such as  he’d wring life insurance on a guy who goes to be w/ 4 live rattlesnakes, or, when adding a shot of rum to his iced T: That’s put legs on it!, and many others. Stanw is a particularly intriguing character: naive? smart? dumb? loyal? duplicitous? Figure it out as the story moves along. I remember watching it decades ago, and loving it, and it hasn’t aged a bit (though I have). 

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,