Cinema Salon at the Clark

For the month of March, Cinema Salon will be “Toujours Truffaut!”  We’ll be seeing 14 films by my all-time favorite director, Francois Truffaut, in a series of seven themed double features on Friday and Saturday afternoons, starting with his autobiographical “Adventures of Antoine Doinel.”  All are in French with subtitles, except for Fahrenheit 451 in English.

Friday March 2: Doinel begins

1:00  The 400 Blows (1959,  99 min.)

2:45  Antoine and Colette (1962, 30 min.)

3:15  Stolen Kisses (1968, 90 min.)

Saturday March 3: Doinel concludes

1:00  Bed and Board (1970, 100 min.)

3:00  Love on the Run (1979, 94 min.)

Friday March 9: Crimes of love

1:00  Shoot the Piano Player (1960, 92 min.) 

3:00  Mississippi Mermaid (1969, 110 min.)

Saturday March 10:  Children on the loose

1:00  The Wild Child (1969, 85 min.)

3:00  Small Change (1976, 104 min.)

Friday March 16:  Hysterical romance

1:00  The Story of Adele H (1975, 97 min.)

3:00  Two English Girls (1971, 130 min.)

Friday March 23:  Steve’s sleepers

1:00  Fahrenheit 451 (1966, 110 min.)

3:00  The Man Who Loved Women (1977, 119 min.)

Saturday March 24:  Truffaut as himself

1:00  The Green Room (1978, 95 min.)

3:00  Day for Night (1973, 116 min.)

Since the film club has watched Jules and Jim and The Last Metro within the past year, we will have covered all of Truffaut’s oeuvre currently available on DVD.  For links to more info on individual films, check out this list: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000076/filmorate#director

Hugo

At first glance it seems a real departure for Martin Scorsese to adapt an award-winning children’s book in 3-D, a long way from Taxi Driver or Goodfellas.  But from the very first shot, Hugo (2011, MC-83, NFX) establishes itself in the intimate line of the master’s work – it’s Scorsese all over.  We plummet from an aerial view of Paris around 1930 into the Montparnasse train station, zip along the crowded platform between trains, and then sweep up to a large clock and through it, to an extreme close-up of the eyes of a boy looking out.  Then we race with him through the walls and towers of the old building, as he goes about his job of winding all the clocks, spies on the denizens of the station, steals food and other necessaries, and avoids the clutches of the station inspector.  It’s all enormously exhilarating, especially in 3-D.  Then we settle into the story, which even as an adaptation has all the hallmarks of Scorsese’s personal history and obsessions – the young boy on the inside looking out, the love for film history and film preservation, the mechanical magic of movies.  The boy is an orphan whose one relic of his clockmaker father is an automaton found in a museum attic, and his quest is restoring it to working order in order to receive a message from his dead father.  To do so, he steals parts from a toy store in the station, run by a grumpy old man, who turns out to be none other than film pioneer Georges Méliès.  The plot neatly dovetails with his genuine biography, while remaining an effective children’s adventure story.  Asa Butterfield is good as Hugo, but I was less thrilled by Ben Kingsley as Méliès, and by his granddaughter who teams up with Hugo, somehow the 3-D just accentuated the obviousness of their performances.  Sacha Baron Cohen as the station inspector and Helen McGrory as Mrs. Méliès lead a solid supporting cast.  But the film as a whole is a kinetic wonder, which retains a heart of true feeling. 

Getting the trick of Malick

Vats of ink (or pixels) have been spilled in pontificating, pro and con, on maverick filmmaker Terrence Malick’s latest opus, The Tree of Life (2011, MC-85, NFX).  Though most critic polls rank it #1 for the year, there have been some vociferous naysayers, and moviegoers demanding their money back.  My expectations -- based on previous Malick films,all of which I’ve re-watched in the past few months, and widespread critical raptures -- were so high that I was primed for disappointment if I came out of the first viewing anything less than transfigured. 

It turned out pretty close, partly because I was so enraptured with the Clark’s newfound projection and sound capacity, installed for live opera in HD and now available for my screenings, which Tree of Life exploited to maximum advantage.  Now that I’ve watched the film again on a smaller screen, I feel ready to have my own say on the subject.

I am among those who are thrilled by Malick’s inscriptions on the cave wall, his philosophical essays in the language of cinema.  I am happy to read his thoughts through his images, forsaking conventional narrative but ransacking nature, personal experience, and film history for beauty and meaning.  His interrogative -- or slantwise -- voiceover narrations (or overheard voices) are an annoyance to some, but a provocative polyphony to me.  I find him highly intelligible and expressive of deep personal feelings, sensations, and memories.  Others may find his puzzles cold and merely pretty, but to me they are profoundly moving pictures.

Nobody thinks that Malick’s films are just okay.  Either you are entranced, or you consider his work, whatever its merits, an affront against cinematic storytelling.  But even among those who are susceptible to his magic, argument persists over whether this film or that film is a masterpiece, a flawed masterpiece, or just a piece of crap.

Nearly everyone is on board with Badlands (1973, NFX), partly because the storyline is so familiar from other films and TV -- a couple of killer kids on the run -- that you can overlook how strange the approach to that story is.  And then there are Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek at the beginning of stellar careers, just exuding a fresh camera-capturing allure.  That Sheen is a dead ringer for James Dean is no small part of his character Kit, as he tries to make himself a celebrity by shooting his way across the desolate West, with teenage doll Sissy providing the drugstore-magazine narration.  Her lack of meaningful affect, and the eye-popping expanse of Western landscapes, situate the true-crime violence in art-house territory, so everybody gets what they are looking for.  An impressive debut, but not my favorite of Malick’s films.

Days of Heaven (1978, NFX), however, is close.  I’ve found three different occasions to show it in Clark film series.  I think it’s a monumental achievement in a mere 94 minutes.  Though it again relies on a familiar story -- of two lovers conspiring against her husband -- some people find the plot thin, but I find it elemental, just one of the agents in a dense compound.  Some find the actors (Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard) expressionless, but I find their archetypal masks expressive portraits in a wider landscape.  Some find the young girl’s narration tacked on, but I find it a form of demotic philosophy (“There never were a perfect person.”), which is another strong element making the whole combust.  But the visuals, oh my god, the visuals – with the grandeur of the West Texas grasslands caught at magic hour, just glowing with transcendence, and with the up-close details of indifferent but exquisite nature!  Nestor Almendros, cameraman for Truffaut and Rohmer, won the Oscar for cinematography.  I love the sheer sweep of the story, set in 1917, from Chicago ironworks, to amber waves of grain on the prairie, to the river of no escape, and finally the troop trains departing for World War I.  Appropriate to the era, it is almost a silent movie.  When I showed it at the Clark last summer, there was a problem with the speaker set-up and it took me ten minutes to realize that the dialogue track was missing.

Returning after two decades of reclusive disappearance, Malick adapted a James Jones novel about the Battle of Guadalcanal, The Thin Red Line (1998, NFX).  Despite his characteristically aestheticized approach, this turns out to be a highly visceral war movie, with about as clear a picture of a military operation as I’ve ever seen on film.  The approach to battle of each character is individuated, as are the reactions of the captured Japanese at the end of the action.  But the narration is totally de-inviduated, it’s never really clear who is speaking, and the voice frequently does not match the character in the picture.  Like a patchwork quilt of sound, it is meant to express the collective voice of men in combat, but it’s too dense and undifferentiated.  Nonetheless the action sequences are amazingly effective, even when they focus on the tall waving grasses into which the soldiers plunge, just as the three brothers in Tree of Life do, and other signature shots of sublime nature indifferent to man’s scurrying about.  The cast is a lengthy who’s who of acting talent, but none gets to stand out in the ensemble.  Malick is hard on his actors in a variety of ways -- delivering on the morning of the shoot not written dialogue but questions for the character to address, and then in the end leaving most of the performance on the cutting room floor, and even cutting voice free from image -- but they still flock to work with him.  In the end, however, this is the Malick film that might be too much of a good thing.

The one I can’t get enough of is The New World (2005, NFX).  That was one of the first Blu-Ray discs I got to project in full high-def at the Clark, and it had an extended cut of almost three hours, which for me did not drag a minute too long.  I simply love this movie, and if I were still assigning numerical grades to films, this would be a rare *10*.  The sense of discovery, of being transported from one world into another, the strangeness, the disorientation, the wonder – all are made palpable in this historical vision of the clash of civilizations in the wilderness.  The Pocahantas story is familiar, but never so compelling as here, in the enchanting performance of Q’Orianka Kilcher.  Colin Farrell neatly demythologizes Capt. John Smith.  The rest of the acting (much of which is close to dance) is solid, and the set design meticulously real, but the most artful of artisans is cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who also shot Tree of Life.  Much of the narration is meant to be fleetingly intelligible, since a key theme of the film is the difficulty of translation, through words or through the body, English to Indian, Indian to England.  So for me this remains the most rapturously perfect, the transcendent Malick film.

The Tree of Life might be my choice for best film of 2011, but is only middle of the pack among Malick’s films as far as I’m concerned.  Perhaps illogically, a comparison stuck in my mind.  Like a Jackson Pollack painting, this celestial Tree is simultaneously cosmic and deeply, deeply personal.  I was not swept away by the scenes of Sean Penn as the adult Jack O’Brien, an architect among the glassy spires of a modern city (I assume Houston), mourning the long-ago death of his brother and the childhood they shared in 1950s Waco.  But situating a single family’s life in the whole span of existence from the big bang to the big get-together on the further shore, I buy into.  And the sensuous portrayal of a 50s boyhood is so close to the bone, so profoundly memorious, that I watched the film in ecstasies of retrospective reverie.  The three brothers are all convincingly depicted, while Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain are superlative as the parents.  Even people who have no patience at all for Malick’s more portentous fusions of evolution and spiritual teleology, acknowledge the touching immediacy of the growing-up scenes.  I was more tolerant than some of the metaphoric conclusion, when all the characters are milling around on the beach, because I saw it less as an obviously religious consolation and more as an aesthetic one, a cinematic mash-up of Bergman’s Persona and Fellini’s 8½, a pleasant evocation of two of the very best films ever.  Overall, I find

The Tree of Life luminous and numinous, offering a sensory apprehension of cosmic connection.

I note that this long-growing Tree seems to have resolved and released something in Malick, so that after finishing five films in forty years, he has almost that many now in various stages of production.  I salute him for making his own thoughts and feelings so watchable, and look forward avidly to watching more.

Go see a doc

To me documentary is the essence of film art.  Even with feature films, I appreciate as they aspire to the condition of documentary, and depreciate as they depart into fabulation, as I call the polar opposite -- Lumière vs. Méliès, actuality vs. theater, from the very beginning of film to this day.  Here are some recent documentaries that support my case for aesthetic merit.

It’s safe to assert that you have never seen anything like The Arbor (2011, MC-88, NFX).  Don’t be fooled by the pastoral title, this is tough stuff.  The Arbor is a street in a council estate (public housing project) in the rough Yorkshire city of Bradford.  Clio Barnard’s artful documentary follows the lives of Andrea Dunbar -- who won a playwriting contest at 15, had several plays produced in London, one adapted into a movie, and died in a pub restroom at the age of 29 – and her three children, by three different fathers, who each have a different response to a childhood of abuse and neglect.  With levels of artifice and reality in constant flux, the film combines oddly effective lip-synching to actual audio recordings of the subjects by actors in stage-like environments, along with playing out scenes from Dunbar’s play, The Arbor, literally on the eponymous street, and even with footage from a 1989 television documentary about her.  If like me you have no familiarity with Dunbar, it will take you a while to figure out what the story is about, until it settles on Dunbar’s grown-up half-Paki daughter, mesmerizingly portrayed by Manjinder Virk, who recapitulates her mother’s descent in a frightening collusion of flawed nature and nurture, familial substance abuse and hardscrabble environment.  While highly aestheticized, this unflinching documentary is an eye-opener about the culture of poverty, to slot with Ken Loach or Mike Leigh at their grimmest.

Project Nim (2011, MC-83, NFX) investigates the strange habits of higher primates, especially the subspecies of academics and hippies.  And oh yes, there’s a chimpanzee involved too.  Like a slicker Errol Morris or Werner Herzog, director James Marsh (Oscar winner for Man on Wire) veers from his ostensible subject into the psyches of the strange characters who people his films.  The film tells the life story of Nim Chimpsky, who was kidnapped from his mother back in the 70s and raised by an assortment of variously-motivated humans to learn sign language, and whose life takes on the ups and downs, twists and turns, changes of fortune of a Dickensian hero.  The film plays as a human comedy but a simian tragedy, so each viewer will have his or her own particular mix of amusement and outrage.  Re-enactments and insistent musical cues keep the story moving along, with an illuminating back and forth between archival footage and retrospective interviews, for a rich stew of a story.

Patricio Guzmán makes films that strive obsessively to combat Chile’s amnesia about its recent history, the American-sponsored 1973 coup against Allende that led to Pinochet’s military dictatorship.  In Nostalgia for the Light (2011, MC-85, NFX), he goes to the Atacama Desert, the highest and driest place on earth, perfect for astronomical observatories, as well as preservation of corpses.  Passages of this film are beautifully reminiscent of the cosmic raptures of Tree of Life, though it wasn’t clear to me which were genuine telescopic images and which were enhanced special effects.  Astronomers and archaeologists wax philosophical on the meaning of time, of the signs of the past in the present.  Then Guzmán pivots to the women who still search the desert for the bodies of their “disappeared” loved ones, since the Atacama was also the site of a Pinochet concentration camp.  His narration is awfully insistent upon the parallels, but this is still an eye-opening film.  The DVD includes a number of other short films that amplify and contextualize his impassioned argument about historical memory.

Among the few things I miss since canceling satellite tv service a few months ago are the documentaries on PBS and HBO, but I still manage to catch up with the important films one way or another.  Two that I just checked off my watch list, but do not necessarily urge you to watch are Eames: The Architect and the Painter (2011, MC-63, NFX) and Paradise Lost 3 (2012, MC-85, NFX). 

The former is a moderately interesting but gossipy look at the marriage and creative partnership between Charles and Ray Eames, which is emblematic of a number of aesthetic and gender issues, and crucial to the whole story of postwar American design, but you’d be better off watching their own films, such as Powers of Ten and The World of Franklin and Jefferson, preferably while sitting in one of their chairs. 

The latter completes the story of the “West Memphis 3.” In two previous films, accomplished documentarians Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky detailed the process by which three heavy-metal Goth teens were convicted of the “satanic” murders of three young boys.  Partly due to the exposure of questionable evidence and legal procedures in the first two films, the three were recently released after nearly two decades in prison, by the judicial face-saving bargain of pleading guilty (while still protesting their innocence) and being released after time served.  If you’ve seen the first two films, then you’ll appreciate the closure.  If you haven’t, and you can stand the grisly details of both the crime and the punishment, the trilogy is worth looking into.

New directors of 2011

Margin Call  (2011, MC-76, NFX) was quite good, especially as a showcase for actors, but I guess I was expecting too much from it, so J.C. Chandor’s debut film left me with a slight sense of disappointment.  As an inside view of the financial meltdown of 2008, this film does not supersede either Too Big to Fail or Inside Job, in their quite different fashions.  The neat thing, however, is that Chandor’s father worked for Lehmann Brothers right till the end, so the characterizations are based on long personal experience.  And actors like Kevin Spacey, Stanley Tucci, and Jeremy Irons can make the most of that.  Nonetheless, I’m not sure I wound up understanding any of these characters better than I did going in.  The film unfolds over a single long night, which begins with downsized senior risk analyst Tucci being marched out of the office by a security guard, and passing a memory key to a young protégé, with the advice, “Be careful.”  The former rocket scientist quant looks over the data after hours, while others in the office are out partying.  We look from the perspective of the computer monitor as the horror of the numbers begins to dawn in his face.  Thereafter one superior after another is called in, till CEO Irons helicopters in and ruthlessly decides on a strategy for survival that undermines trust in the whole financial sector, which the underlings then have to execute, whatever their personal feelings and fates.  While very watchable, in a Mamet-like manner, this drama of the financially high and mighty falls short of Shakespearian.

Circumstance (2011, MC-65, NFX) is the story of two Iranian teenage girls who can’t keep their hands off each another.  And who can blame them?  They are spectacularly beautiful, and well-acted to boot.  To all intents and purposes this is an Iranian film, though it couldn’t be made or shown there, shot in Lebanon with Iranian ex-pats in the cast, but writer/director Maryam Keshawaraz is a NYU film grad nurtured at Sundance, where this film won the Audience Award last year.  There are a lot of things to like about this film, including the softcore girl-on-girl action, but especially a glance at a vibrant underground of modern society in Iran.  One girl is from a wealthy family, her parents professionals educated in America who returned during the revolution of 1979 out of idealism, and managed to do well for themselves without succumbing to Islamic fundamentalism.  The other girl’s parents were dissident intellectuals who were erased somehow, and now she lives with an uncle and grandmother who are trying to marry her off.  The rich party girl leads her friend into an illicit realm of sex, drugs, music, and banned movies from the West.  Meanwhile her drug addict brother “reforms” into a militant tool of the mullahs, and also has eyes on the girlfriend.  The resolution of this triangle does not quite satisfy, not to the level of Persepolis for example, but there is a lot of worthwhile observation in this promising debut.

The quick and dirty take on Submarine (2011, MC-76, NFX) would be “Rushmore in Swansea, Wales.”  High school misfit tells his story of romance, and of being a hero in his own mind, in self-absorbed but possibly endearing fashion.  Richard Ayoade is a first-time director who is apparently a sitcom star in Britain, and doesn’t do badly, though some of his offbeat stylistic tricks are simply off-beat.  The boy and girl actors are fairly fresh, and so is the setting.  And adult support is offered by Sally Hawkins, Noah Taylor, and Paddy Considine, all of whom I like a lot and who acquit themselves well here.  So if you haven’t had your fill of quirky adolescent romance, you might submerse yourself in this, but otherwise it’s nothing you need dive into.

What to watch from 2011

Year-end polls of critics are out all over the place, including two in particular I will use to guide my own viewing over the next few months, from Film Comment and indieWire, along with old standby Metacritic.  So if you want my definitive last word on the best films with U.S. release in 2011, check back in five or six months. 

Here I offer reactions rather than reviews, with links to more detailed info on the film and a wide range of critical and viewer response, to put my own in context.  As readers of this blog, or followers of Cinema Salon screenings at the Clark, you probably have a notion of where I’m coming from and therefore my opinion may help to organize the range of opinion and give you ideas on what films to seek out.  But above all, my aim is to share my enthusiasm for film as a vital, diverse, and profound medium of art.  So this batch of recent films is listed in order of my intensity of recommendation, from strong to “meh.”

I’m not sure whether it makes the best introduction to Abbas Kiarostami, but if he’s ever got you on his wavelength, then you will love the departure and return of Certified Copy (2011, MC-82, NFX).  Most critics did, placing it #6 and #7 on the polls referenced above.  Sounds about right to me.  The amazing Iranian New Wave has not entirely broken and receded -- as witness The Separation, which has just opened to universal acclaim -- but Jafar Panahi is in jail and Kiarostami in exile apparently, with this film set in Tuscany and starring Juliet Binoche.  The film speaks in a variety of tongues, voicing its themes of translation and reproduction, artifice and creation of self.  An English writer comes to Florence to promote the translation of his book of aesthetic theory, which argues essentially to forget the original and embrace the copy. The ever-enthralling Juliet is an antiques dealer with an interest in his theories, and as it develops, a more personal interest as well.  She takes him on a daytrip to museums and monasteries, and their relationship unfolds in ways that are increasingly mysterious.  If you’ve seen Close-Up or Taste of Cherry (and if you haven’t, you should), you will know that Kiarostami can wring endless convolutions of meaning out of the simplest means, with an aura of intellectual mystery, if not mystification.  Though the tight framing does not flaunt the beauty of the Tuscan countryside, it does make a stark contrast to the desert-like terrain of Teheran and outlying villages familiar from Kiarostami’s earlier films.  Ultimately the film is attractive and confounding at the same time, both firmly-situated and unsettling.

For me, Moneyball (2011, MC-87, NFX) suffered from excess expectation.  I loved Michael Lewis’s book, and the line-up of talent in this film seemed surefire.  And the film did hit most of its targets, but like its subject, GM Billy Beane of the Oakland As, it failed to win the final game of the season, at least in my estimation.  Brad Pitt is indeed excellent as Beane (with this and Tree of Life, he should have a Best Actor Oscar sewn up), and Jonah Hill is an effective foil as the Yale econ major who upends the conventional wisdom of baseball with his nerdy formulae for success.  Director Bennett Miller does a good job of mixing archival footage and reenactment with a believable mix of actors and players.  But after the story pivots from down-market adversity to record-breaking success, the story drifts to a conclusion that left me less than convinced.  Somehow the screenwriting talent of Aaron Sorkin and Steve Zallian did not deliver the decisive home run I was waiting for.  But most of the way, I felt like I was rooting for a winner.

 I have to give Vera Farmiga credit for directing as well as starring in Higher Ground (2011, MC-74, NFX), and extra credit for doing it while she was five months pregnant.  She makes some rookie mistakes, such as a few cartoonish subjective shots, but delivers a rare thing, a film about American evangelical religion that does not prejudge the subject.  The film follows the vicissitudes of faith though one woman’s life, from a tentative childhood response to the call to Jesus, through a teen marriage to a rock musician and a miraculous escape from family tragedy that drives them both into the arms of the Lord, and into adult motherhood and an increasingly unsatisfied relationship with God and the patriarchal church in which she is immersed (or immured).  As a teen, the character is played by Taissa Farmiga, Vera’s younger sister, who is not only very good in her own right, but has the family resemblance to make for a particularly convincing passage of a character through time.  Original and daring as well as alluring, Farmiga makes a serious debut as a filmmaker of note, which puts me in mind of Robert Duvall in Tender Mercies and The Apostle.

Another film that looks at mid-American values with amused skepticism but fundamental sympathy is Cedar Rapids (2011, MC-70, NFX).  Ed Helms sheds his Daily Show/Hangover shtick and delivers a genuine performance as a rural Wisconsin insurance agent, for whom Cedar Rapids is the exotic big city into which he is thrust unexpectedly, to attend an insurance convention for his firm.  In the enclosed world of the convention hotel, he rooms with John C. Reilly, in his well-worn boorish but endearing persona, and Isiah Whitlock, as perhaps the first African-American he has ever met, who has good fun referencing his role in The Wire.  Liberated from his usual restraints (“What happens in Cedar Rapids, stays in Cedar Rapids”), the Helms character dallies with fellow agent Anne Heche, on leave from family life, and Alia Shawkat (of Arrested Development) as the hotel prostitute who strikes him as just an exceptionally friendly young lady.   Miguel Arteta directs an effective, affectionate satire about real people in a situation that is realer than it seems.

I have seen The Future (2011, MC-67, NFX), and while mopey and strange, it does work in its own peculiar fashion.  Miranda July adapts a solo performance piece she developed after the relative success of her debut feature You and Me and Everyone We Know, and while it retains the preciosity of the stage (the scratchy-voiced narration by the ailing cat Paw Paw is a dealbreaker for many, as was the subtitled dog in Beginners, made by her husband Mike Mills), this film manages to open out into some sympathetic understanding of its perplexing and annoying characters.  July herself is matched with Hamish Linklater, as a dithery couple in their thirties whose life is overturned by their commitment to adopt the sick cat.  In the month till that epochal change in their settled life, she quits her job teaching dance to children and vows to make thirty dances in thirty days, for posting on YouTube.  He disconnects from his computer and part-time job in tech support, to solicit money for tree plantings to combat global warming.  Neither gets anywhere near these goals, but their lives are transformed anyway.  Or are they?  One hardly knows in this quirky slacker comedy.

Many took Midnight in Paris (2011, MC-81, NFX) as a return to form for Woody Allen, but I found it disappointingly more of the same.  This fanciful return to the artsy world of Paris in the Twenties – Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein et al. – for me suffers in comparison to Alan Rudolph’s The Moderns (1988, NFX), which I would urge you to watch instead.  I didn’t hate Woody’s latest, but I can’t imagine why it became his biggest box office hit ever.  Though I felt that I had had my fill of his work, I happened to start watching the recent presentation of a documentary about him on the PBS program “American Masters,” and once I started, made it through all four hours of compilation and character study with interest.  Allen certainly made the case for his compulsion to turn out a film every year, as the extension of a nonstop career that began when he became Woody Allen, writing jokes for comedians in Manhattan while still attending high school in Brooklyn as Allan Konigsberg.  That compulsion to work is his stay against chaos and death, and I don’t begrudge him his efforts, but I no longer feel compelled to watch, since I’ve seen it all before.

New stuff

One more random compilation and I will be caught up with my film reviewing, and then proceed in a more systematic manner.

Among some recent American indies, the standout was Beginners (2011, MC-81, NFX), in which Mike Mills makes an autobiographical film about discovering his father and himself.  Ewan McGregor plays the lead, a graphic artist whose profession yields animated sequences, flashbacks and forwards, and all sorts of goofy but endearing interpositions.  Christopher Plummer plays the father, a museum curator who comes out after his wife dies, and delightedly embraces a gay lifestyle for a few years before his death from cancer (the movie starts there, so that’s no spoiler).  In watching his father come out of the closet, the lonely 38-year-old tentatively starts to come out of his own, a reluctance to open up to the women of his serial relationships.  He meets a new woman, Melanie Laurent, who is equally winsome and withdrawn.  They cavort with the adorable terrier Ewan has inherited from his father, but will they embrace the joy of being together or retreat to comfortable solitude?  This romantic folderol is almost as charming as it intends to be, with enough genuine detail to give the story some weight.

Turns out girls can do mumblecore as well as boys.  In Tiny Furniture (2010, MC-71, NFX), Lena Dunham, a year out of Oberlin, makes a home movie that is worth watching, about a recent college grad coming home to the elegant white-on-white Tribeca studio loft of her artist mother.  She plays the lead, her mother plays her mother, and her sister plays her sister, mostly in their own space.  Her character is certainly more hapless than the go-getter who got this film made, and if the intimacy can be a bit icky, that is certainly the point of this highly self-aware exercise.  Ms. Dunham turns herself into a poster girl for “smart women, foolish choices,” right down to probably the least erotic sex scene ever filmed.  Her mother comes across as stiff and remote, but it’s hard to know whether that is characterization or poor acting.  Her younger sister, however, hogs the scene just as the character should.  The two boys she dallies with on the rebound from her end-of-college breakup are effectively vacuous.  Self-revealing yet highly-mediated, with a sharper and steadier camera than is the rule for such D-I-Y efforts, this is a funny and pointed debut that promises much.

Win Win (2011, MC-75, NFX) was not as winning to me as Tom McCarthy’s previous film, The Visitor.  But there was much to like in this story of a small town New Jersey lawyer, who cuts a corner or two to get by, but is still a good guy, volunteering to coach the high school wrestling team.  That is Paul Giamatti in a familiar mode, but Amy Ryan as his wife stands out, totally Jersey but not a caricature in the least.  The decidedly unglamorous sport of wrestling allows for some amusing takes on classic sports movies clichés, and McCarthy’s decidedly unglamorous hometown of New Providence keeps the story similarly grounded.  Though reactions differ, I thought it was an excellent idea to cast a real high school state champion wrestler as the homeless boy the couple takes in -- with highly mixed motives -- and to rely on him to behave naturally on camera, rather than “acting.”  I think that works to sustain an air of gritty reality, while the obligatory heart-tugging goes on.

In Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011, MC-65, NFX), the accent is on the middle word.  Despite decent performances and a few winning moments, this was not to my taste.  I know nothing about codirectors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, but I would be surprised if they were not a gay couple – not that there’s anything wrong with that.  It’s just that the gay sensibility in disguise adds an element of falsity to the proceedings.  Come out of the closet, guys.  This is the story of an entertaining “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” makeover, which goes all mush-headed with talk of “soulmates” and “your one true love.”  The women just get in the way, with Juliane Moore and Emma Stone wasted.  (One of these days Ms. Stone will be in a decent movie, and she will be amazing.)  Steve Carell is his usual endearing everyman self, as a 40-year old dumpee rather than virgin, but Ryan Gosling brings his usual surprise, showing an aptitude for humor and humanity in the uncharacteristic role of a preening peacock.  “No -- seriously?  It’s like you’re Photoshopped.”

Appropriate Adult (2011, MC-77, Sundance) is plenty serious.  I don’t know whether the Brits have a particular thing with serial killers, or whether I’m just more willing to watch a crime drama with a British accent, but I’ve been seeing a lot of them lately (Red Riding Trilogy, Luther, Longford), and this one was authentically creepy without a bit of gore.  Dominic West (McNutty again!) plays the real weirdo Fred West, and Emily Watson is the title character, someone who accompanies through interrogation a defendant whose mental competency is in question.  West insinuates himself with Watson, and a dance of calculated revelations, attractions and repulsions, follows.  Julian Jarrold, who directed one of the Red Ridings, provides a disturbing but absorbing experience, with more thought-provoking ambiguity than shock value.

There are multiple reasons for me to have a soft spot for Made in Dagenham (2010, MC-65, NFX), which is basically just Norma Rae in England.  First off is Sally Hawkins, who was forever endeared to me by Happy-Go-Lucky.  She’s the normal working class mum who takes control of a strike by women at a Ford plant outside London in 1968 (and thereby puts me in mind of my own mum, a working class war bride from Slough).  The soft-focus direction by Nigel Cole is in the vein of his Saving Grace and Calendar Girls, with the ladies going about a bit of fetching naughtiness, with “you go, girl” uplift.  The film could well have done with a good deal more documentary flavor, but the subject is catnip to me, having grown up in a union household.  In fact at just about that time, I was working with the American counterparts of these very women.  At a GM plant in Cleveland, I had a summer job as a “trim key checker,” basically keeping up with the women who operated the piecework machines to sew or glue vinyl interior parts.  So the UAW was the only union I ever joined, and despite what unions have become, I am always susceptible to the call of solidarity.  Back in the 70s, one of my very favorite films was about a similar labor action by women, Coup pour Coup, now nearly forgotten and in fact not well know at the time – when I went to see it a second time at Film Forum in Manhattan, I was the only person in the audience.  All this is to say that I quite liked Made in Dagenham, but you may not. 

Days and Clouds (2008, MC-69, NFX) is another tale of economic hardship, in another time, class, and country.  Silvio Soldini’s story of an upper middle class marriage under stress from fiscal setback is timely, as the impact of financial panic persists and Italy becomes the case in point.  But it is timeless as well, and well served by the unfamiliarity of the actors, however well known they may be in Italy.  Margherite Buy in particular convinces as the wife who went back to school as an art restorer after her grown daughter left home, but then is compelled to take call center and secretarial jobs, after her husband is forced out of his shipbuilding concern in Genoa, then keeps his dismissal a secret for several months, and fails to find any new work for himself, even as their well-heeled lifestyle evaporates.  The couple literally winds up flat on their backs, in this tough but not despairing film.

Two recent newspaper documentaries deserve note.  My father was a printer at the Cleveland Press, and a leader in the local and International Typographical Union.  My brother and I grew up with printer’s ink in our veins; Chris was longtime editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and though he has deserted that sinking ship for public broadcasting in Philly, remains every inch a journalist.  So I watched Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times (2011, MC-68, NFX) with keen interest.  By no means a definitive panorama, Andrew Rossi’s film offers a peek behind the doors of the embattled media giant.  The access is limited but still involving, with the newly formed media desk the focus, and the fate of newspapers in a digital world the main news story.  Reporter David Carr becomes the star of the show, with a hard-boiled attitude and a gravelly voice, as an ex-crack-addict who can’t believe his luck in winding up at the Times.

No question who’s the star of Errol Morris’s Tabloid (2011, MC-74, NFX).  The only question is whether Joyce McKinney is “barking mad,” or a canny fabulator of her own life.  Back in the 70s she became a tabloid sensation in Britain as the American beauty queen (Miss Wyoming) who kidnapped her Mormon ex-boyfriend in London and took him to a cozy B&B in Devon, manacled him to the bed, and proceeded to “rape” him for three days (Joyce rightfully asks, how do you put a marshmallow in a parking meter?).  As usual, Morris’s documentary method seems straightforward, mostly head-on interview, but strangely destabilizing (compare, at a totally different level of seriousness, his portrait of Robert McNamara’s second thoughts on Vietnam in Fog of War).  You will definitely laugh at or with Joyce, but you will have a hard time knowing what to believe about her.  And the current hacking scandal at a British tabloid puts this film in the context of a larger question of sensationalized journalism.

Grab bag

I plan to resume regular reviewing, and give this blog a bit of a makeover by the first of the year, but I have to catch up with a backlog of random viewing, with only a few real recommendations among them. 

Thankfully, the world of cinema is wide and deep, because most popular American movies seem to come out of a shallow, narrow pool.  Good films do get made, and I will be covering the best of them in upcoming months, but most fail to rise above their formula.

As a journalistic convenience, many young American filmmakers in their twenties have been grouped under the rubric, “mumblecore.”  Having made their first films with minimal means, about lives much like their own, self-absorbed young people struggling to find work and romance, some are trying to go mainstream.  The Duplass brothers, for example, deliver a quirky comedy with Cyrus (2010, MC-74, NFX), and can’t go too far wrong with performers like John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, and unlikely man of the moment Jonah Hill.  A hapless divorced man gets lucky with a beautiful babe, but then has to contend with the jealousy of her adult son still living at home.  There’s never a moment’s doubt where this is headed, though there are some amusing moments, and some not so, along the way.

In Cold Weather (2011, MC-64, NFX), Aaron Katz tries to meld a mystery dynamic into the mumblecore formula of aimless conversation, but it’s all red herring or shaggy dog or some such indirection.  Chilled out, anyway, in this story of four young people drifting through their twenties in Portland, OR.  Katz brings a bit of visual flair, and also some real world observation, to the familiar world of hip anomie.  Not a chore to watch, this effort left me flat in the end, but it’s not without wit and style.

Among popular comedies formula reigns supreme, “high concept” in the lingo, but really geared to the latest lowest common denominator.  Take Bridesmaids (2011, MC-75, NFX) for instance -- all you have to tell the marketing department is “The Hangover for chicks.”  I haven’t lost all respect for Judd Apatow as he extends his brand of loose and shambling comedy, producing this mess with director Paul Feig (co-creator of the short-lived but seminal tv series Freaks and Geeks).  It is true, however, that there is more acting talent than writing ability on display in Hollywood today, even when, as with Kristen Wiig here, the actor is the writer.  There are some mildly amusing sketches, and fellow SNL alum Maya Rudolph makes a winning foil, but truth of character or action is in short supply.

That is doubly true of Due Date (2010, MC-51, NFX), in which Robert Downey Jr. kept me watching long past the point where this odd couple buddy comedy flew off the bridge.  I’m no fan of Zach Galifianakis, but he is capable of more characterization than this flimsy writing and haphazard direction allow (from Todd Phillips, between the two parts of The Hangover).  The question remains whether formula is the starting point or the endpoint of the project.  Throw two antagonistic guys together on a roadrip, and you can end up artfully with The Trip, or you can end up with this carwreck of a movie.

Where festivals like Sundance used to offer an alternative to Hollywood, now they are more like a feeder stream.  I caught up with one former Sundance Audience Award winner, because of the presence of Kelly Macdonald.  Two Family House (2000, MC-79, NFX) is slight but honest, and writer-director Raymond De Felitta does a good job of convincingly recreating Staten Island in the Fifties on a minimal budget.  Buddy, as played by Michael Rispoli (whom you may recognize from The Sopranos, and also Katharine Narducci as his nagging wife), was once noticed by Arthur Godfrey for his singing and imagines he could have been Julius LaRosa, but drifts through failed schemes until he comes up with the idea of buying the house of the title and turning the downstairs into a bar where he would be the entertainment.  Unfortunately he has to evict a very pregnant Kelly and her drunken older husband, but forms a connection with her that endures.  This is an ethnic comedy-romance (the cover image begs comparison with Moonstruck) that gives indies a good name.

Another little-noticed film, which I caught up with on a friend’s recommendation, was Mao’s Last Dancer (2010, MC-55, NFX).  This had escaped my attention even though directed by Bruce Beresford, who clicked with me on Tender Mercies and several other films in a long and checkered career.  This one is well-made and fact-based, as it follows a young boy from a village in China, who is plucked out to attend ballet school in Beijing, and winds up defecting to perform for the Houston Ballet.  All three actors who portray the progression of Li Cunxin (based on his memoir) are convincing, as are the depictions of three different worlds, but the film has its flaws, including an inadequate actress as first love interest, an ending of forced uplift, and an unfortunate habit of going to slow-motion during dance performances.  Nonetheless I found it well worth watching.

Though I have persisted through two seasons, I still wonder whether Boardwalk Empire was worth watching on HBO, but I have no such qualms about Homeland (2011, MC-91) on Showtime, which is almost certainly the best series now running on television.  Claire Danes plays an intriguingly flawed CIA counterterrorism agent, in pursuit of a similarly nuanced Damian Lewis, as a marine who may have been turned during eight years as a POW in Iraq.  This thriller effectively ratchets up the suspense without betraying plausibility of character or event, and keeps on twisting.  Catch up with it if you can.

I followed one episode by turning to another story of a beautiful blond CIA agent in Fair Game (2010, MC-69, NFX), this one for real.  Naomi Watts plays Valerie Plame and Sean Pean plays Joe Wilson in Doug Liman’s authorized version of their two memoirs of being collateral damage to the Bush administration’s headlong and headstrong rush to war in Iraq.  The political context is rather thin in this story of a marriage under stress, but convincing performances carry the day.  Not a must-see, Fair Game is fair as far as it goes.

One of the alternative areas to look for new films of unexpected strength is Korea.  Two impressive films by Chang-Dong Lee have reached the U.S. in the past year, each centered on a strong female lead.  In Secret Sunshine (2010, MC-84, NFX), Do-Yeon Jeon is a young widow who goes to live in her dead husband’s hometown (its name translates to the title), creating a new home for her boy and setting up as a piano teacher, finding her way uncertainly into the community.  Something bad happens, and she has to cope, sometimes with the help and sometimes with the hindrance of a semi-comic unwanted suitor.  To say more would be to betray the experience of the film, in which ordinary life seems to unfold patiently, till the abyss opens and a desperate struggle for sanity and survival ensues. 

In Lee’s Poetry (2011, MC-89, NFX), Jung-Hee Yun is a grandmother, just diagnosed with incipient Alzheimer’s, who is taking care of a sullen teenage grandson and getting by on a pension and as part-time maid for a rich old man.  Despite the marginality of her existence, she still likes to make a nice appearance, with scarves and colorful clothes. For mental exercise, she enters an adult education class on poetry.  Something bad happens, and she has to cope.  Again, this is a film to be experienced at its own leisurely, observant pace.  Ms. Yun apparently was a big star in Korea when younger, but this role is a comeback after nearly two decades of retirement; she commands the camera while seeming to do very little, again hypnotically ordinary, as she solves the enigma of her existence.

Another alternative to run of the mill feature films lies with documentaries.  One that makes its point and does not overstay its welcome is Morgan Spurlock’s Greatest Movie Ever Sold (2011, MC-66, NFX), or rather, POM Wonderful Presents: The…  As with Super Size Me, Spurlock puts himself front and center, and he’s an amusing, adventurous guy to hang out with.  This is a film by and about financing through product placement, and its funhouse self-reflection is quite effective, as the camera follows Morgan into a host of pitch meetings and promotional stunts.  Is he selling out, or buying in?  Or debunking the whole business of “hidden persuasion”?  At any rate, my product awareness of pomegranate juice, in little snowman-shaped bottles, has gone up 100%.

Among other recent documentaries that I have liked are two about sports from HBO.  Gemma Atwell’s Marathon Boy was of more general interest, for the story of an uncannily accomplished young runner in India, who completes 48 marathons by the time he is four years old, and then further endurance stunts.  His coach and promoter runs an orphanage where the boy lives, until the state steps in.  This is a fascinating and quirky window into Indian society, and an open-ended moral quandary.  Marc Levin’s Prayer for a Perfect Season follows a basketball rivalry between Catholic prep schools in New Jersey, vying for #1 in the nation.  I’m a sucker for any teammate of Hoop Dreams, one of the best documentaries ever, which towers over the court, but this film is a scrappy youngster who deserves a call from the bench.

Just a word on films I’ve recently watched again with Cinema Salon.  Altman’s Player and Scorsese’s Aviator emerged slightly lower in my estimation of the works of a favorite director, but Visconti’s  Leopard rose even higher.  Of the films just mentioned here, Poetry is a candidate for showing to the film club, since it’s definitely a “film worth talking about.”

Getting to better of 2011

Outposted here in the boondocks, I never complete my round-up of the best films of one year till the middle of the next, when they’ve all reached DVD, but lately I have been watching some films that are sure to figure in the conversation.   Please note that I am now including a direct link for each film not only to Metacritic, for more description and a wider range of opinion, but also to Netflix, for immediate availability by DVD, or by streaming (as with the top three below).   

Buck (2011, MC-76, NFX) will certainly count among the best documentaries of the year. Cindy Meehl’s profile of “Horse Whisperer” Buck Brannaman is unusually nuanced and surprisingly moving.  Turns out that to know equines is to know humans, and Buck makes for an unlikely adept, a soft-voiced sage.  Part of a brother duo of child performers with the lariat, he was abused by his father and eventually taken away into foster care after his mother died.  Somehow that experience gave him empathy with other abused creatures and how to reach them.  Now he is on the road for 300 days a year, giving clinics to horse owners, occasionally joined by his loving wife and teenage daughter.  The one gaping omission in the film is what happened to his brother, but a revealing comparison of fates is supplanted by a dramatic confrontation with an unruly horse that even Buck finds hard to understand into docility.  Interesting interviews and gorgeous Western scenery surround the inspiring encounters between man and horse. 

The Trip (2011, MC-82, NFX), a collaboration between the prolific, protean, and provocative director Michael Winterbottom and comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Bryden, will follow its predecessor, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, onto my best of the year list.  Coogan and Bryden, friendly rivals or rivalrous friends, are thrown together on a commissioned tour of the lovely stone-fenced lanes of the Yorkshire Dales to review upscale restaurants, which serve art on a plate rather than anything recognizable as food.  Their competitive impersonations of Michael Caine (and many others) or ABBA duets, over meals or in the car, are the peaks of a continuous back and forth improvised from their own established characters.  As boiled down from a six-part BBC series, this Trip is one to take, both hilarious and touching in its ongoing clash of personae.  Beside the comedy of antithetical personalities thrown into intimate contact, and the risible food, there are suggestive parallels developed in their visits to Coleridge and Wordsworth heritage sites.  The film has as much to say, in its own Brit way, about “men of a certain age” as the American tv series of that name, or the movie Sideways.  It’s enough to make you think while you laugh.

Bertrand Tavernier has had a long and generally interesting career, so good notices drew me to his latest, Princess of Montpensier (2011, MC-78, NFX).  I warmed up immediately when I realized it was set in the era of Montaigne, subject of my favorite book of last year or many more, Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live.  In fact, Lambert Wilson (who was head monk in Of Gods and Men) plays an intellectual nobleman much like Montaigne, in the age of the endless French wars of religion and succession in the late 16^th century.  He is one of four men attracted to the princess of the title, played by Melanie Thierry, including her husband (by arranged marriage), her persistent former lover (one of the Guise), and Duc d’Anjou (destined to be king).  Bodices are ripped, to be sure, in this adaptation of a novel by Madame de Lafayette, and knaves are run through by galloping horsemen or deft swordsman, but much more is going on.  It helps to have the excellent background offered by Bakewell on the power players of the age, to pick up for example on the brief cameo by Catherine de Médici.  This period piece is intelligent and beautifully made in every detail.

You’d be well within your rights to wonder whether the world needs another movie adaptation of Jane Eyre (2011, MC-76, NFX), but the surprising answer is yes, because young actresses will rise to the challenge of one of the great literary heroines.  Up to now Charlotte Gainsbourg had been my favorite (in Zefferelli’s otherwise unmemorable 1995 version), but Mia Wasikowska manages to come across as “small and plain, poor and obscure” as the best of them (what acting for such a beauty!).  Michael Fassbender is not as threatening but every bit as imposing as Rochesters like Orson Welles of George C. Scott.  Judi Dench fills in as Mrs. Fairfax, so you know you’re in a quality adaptation.  Cary Fukunaga, a young American with only Sin Nombre to his credit, was a surprising choice to direct but does so more than credibly.  All the sets and costumes, and the cinematography in endless shades of gray and blue, evoke the atmosphere of the Bronte classic.  And for once the deleted scenes tell of a film that might have been and was wisely avoided, with most of the supernatural gothic elements left on the cutting room floor.

Two films that were released in the U.S. only after they were nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at last winter’s Academy Awards are now available on DVD.  The Oscar went to the Danish film In a Better World (2011, MC-65, NFX).  I’ve consistently liked director Susanne Bier’s films, and there was plenty to admire here, especially in the performances of the two ten-year-old boys at the center of the film.  One is grieving the cancer death of his mother, and blaming his father for not saving her, and acting out his anger and despair in increasingly alarming ways.  At a new school he makes friends with a sweet, dorkish boy, whose father really is working for a better world, though separating from his mother.  We see the father working as a doctor in a clinic in the African desert, where he faces the moral conflict of treating the violent local warlord.  Back in Denmark, he literally turns the other cheek to a bully, which the boys cannot abide, till their own scheme of revenge goes awry.  It all turns out a little too predictably, but there is a lot of suspense, much of it genuinely ethical, along the way.

In a better world, the French Canadian entry Incendies (2011, MC-82, NFX) would have taken home the Oscar.  Denis Villeneuve’s film follows thirtyish twins from Quebec, when their mother’s will sends them on dual quests back to her native country of Lebanon (or something like), and into the civil wars of its past, and her hitherto undisclosed role in them.  The girl takes on her quest determinedly, while the boy dismisses his mother and her desires in every way.  Most of the film flashes back and forth between two outstanding actresses who play the daughter and mother, with Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin traveling deeper into Lebanon and the past, while Lubna Azabal enacts the events being revealed.  The film is almost unbearably tense and sad, as it unfolds the horrors of religious conflict, as much in the 20^th century as the 16^th, but is marred in the end by a theatrical development that reveals the story’s source in a play, in spite of the harsh reality so vividly depicted.