Cinema Salon

Cinema Salon at the Clark

2012-01-25T15:41:00.001-05:00

Next up are two recent and highly-acclaimed Cannes prize winners from the periphery of Asia, countries not well known for vital national cinemas. Both will be shown in full high-definition on the Clark’s upgraded projection and sound system.

On Friday 1/27 at 3 pm, we’ll be watching Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry (2010, 139 min.) from South Korea. It ranked #10 on the Film Comment critical survey of films released in the U.S. last year, and received a Metacritic rating of 89.

On Friday 2/10 at 3pm, we’ll be watching Apitchatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2011, 114 min.), from Thailand. It came in #2 in the Film Comment poll, and got an 87 rating from Metacritic.

Looking ahead, my current plan is to show David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) next, probably 2/24, and then get into my long-promised Truffaut retrospective. Check here for updates, or request direct email notification from: ssatullo@clarkart.edu.

What to watch from 2011

2012-01-25T15:30:00.000-05:00

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.

Coming to the Clark

2011-12-29T17:26:00.000-05:00

“Escapist Entertainment” is a free film series offered in the comfort of the Clark auditorium on selected Sunday afternoons at 2:00 p.m. in January and February. In the midst of a Williamstown winter, everybody craves a bit of escape, and this series caters to that widespread desire. Let the Clark transport you from realms of snow and ice to islands of sun and sand, from the Pacific to the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. Warning: an island paradise is not always what you expect. The epigraph of one of these films covers the whole series: “In times like these, escape is the only way to stay alive and keep dreaming.”

Sunday January 8 2:00 pm: Cast Away. (2000, 143 min.) Escape to a desolate island in the South Pacific with Tom Hanks, in the story of a go-go FedEx fixer whose plane goes down and forces him to survive alone and to develop an entirely different relationship to time. Robert Zemeckis directs this crowd-pleasing update on Robinson Crusoe, with a famous supporting role by the volleyball “Wilson.”

Sunday January 15 2:00 pm: The Talented Mr. Ripley. (1999, 139 min.) Escape to the Neapolitan coast, and then to Rome and Venice, with Matt Damon as the title character of Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s psychological thriller. Damon is a chameleon who wishes to take on the colors of rich American ex-pat Jude Law, to live his privileged life with girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow. Obstacles present themselves but he overcomes them with increasing ruthlessness. Cate Blanchett and Philip Seymour Hoffman round out the superb cast.

Sunday January 23 2:00 pm: Dr. No. (1962, 105 min.) Escape to Jamaica (and from the clutches of the title villain) with James Bond, played by Sean Connery in the very first film adaptation of the popular hero, still going strong a half-century later as the most successful movie franchise in history. Director Terence Young establishes the blockbuster formula to come, and Ursula Andress supplies one of the most indelible movie entrances, as she emerges nearly-naked from crystalline waters onto golden beach. Racial and sexual attitudes have altered markedly in the last 50 years, but Connery remains the quintessential Secret Agent 007.

Sunday February 5 2:00 pm: Mediterraneo. (1991, 90 min., Italian with subtitles) Escape to an isolated Greek island with a small band of Italian soldiers, who are stranded there during World War II and reach a separate peace, finding beauty and romance in the pastoral Attic setting with voluptuous shepherdesses, and whores with – you guessed it – hearts of gold. Gabriele Salvatores’ charming comedy won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

Sunday February 19 2:00 pm: Heading South. (2005, 105 min., French with subtitles) Escape to a beachside resort in 1970s Haiti, where women of a certain age are free to sample the favors of native young men. Charlotte Rampling stars as the queen bee of the group, along with Karen Young, in expert director Laurent Cantet’s sophisticated film about sex and colonialism, both sensuous and politically astute.

New stuff

2011-12-29T17:19:00.001-05:00

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

2011-12-17T17:13:00.001-05:00

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

2011-12-08T16:18:00.001-05:00

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 (2001, 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.

Sisterhood is powerful

2011-12-08T16:12:00.001-05:00

Sometimes unrelated films watched in succession suddenly reveal a common thread. I certainly didn’t set out to watch films about sisters, but this diverse -- indeed globe-spanning -- group proved to have that hidden connection, as well as a level of quality in common, worth firm but not urgent recommendation.

In Kon Ichikawa’s The Makioka Sisters (1983, NFX) there are four, and we follow their lives through four seasons, from cherry blossom season to its return a year later, under the shadow of coming World War II. Reminiscent of Ozu in its focus on domestic interiors, both physical and psychological, this film has a visual lushness all its own. The kimonos dazzle as much as the cherry blossoms. In this well-to-do family the two elder sisters are well-married and seeking a similar match for the demure third sister, who is in no rush, which puts pressure on the wilder and more modern fourth sister, who is in no mind to hold off on her own attachments till her elder gets hitched. The setting may be exotic, but the intrafamiliar tensions are readily identifiable.

I assumed Treeless Mountain (2009, MC-75, NFX) was a Korean film till I found out after the fact that director So Yong Kim is an American living in Brooklyn. In tight close-up and intimate empathy she follows two young sisters, perhaps seven and four, who are dumped by their emotionally distracted mother with a drunken aunt, before finding refuge in the country with a more welcoming grandmother. The kids are in the dark about what the adults are up to, and so are we, as we share their limited perspective on events. Apparently the director’s mother emigrated to

America

before she came over herself at the age of 12, and she clearly draws on her own feelings of abandonment and misunderstanding to elicit remarkable performances from the two little girls. The film is slightly derivative (cf. Nobody Knows), but well done by a promising filmmaker.

Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen (2010, MC-68, NFX) deals with a different sort of sister, as it explores the life and relationships of a 12^th-century nun. Veteran director Margarethe von Trotta features frequent collaborator Barbara Sukowa as Hildegard, the highly-accomplished mysti, and leader of a convent, whick breaks away from the rule of monks to establish an independent sacred community of women. The nuns do not leave behind jealousy, envy, and other untoward emotions, but the religious life is portrayed in a spare and even-handed manner. Not a film to sweep you up in its story, but involving in a low-key way.

Cliente, the original title of French Gigolo. (2008, NFX), keeps the focus where it belongs, on Nathalie Baye, as a professional divorcee who solves the problem of sex by buying it when she feels the urge. Josiane Balasko, who also directed, plays her sister, roommate, and business partner, taking a decidedly more romantic approach. Eric Caravaca is endearing as the gigolo who may turn out to be something more. Ah, French sex comedy, so much more sophisticated than the American variety! And ahhh, Nathalie Baye, no less seductive as a woman of a certain age than she was as a scriptgirl in Truffaut’s Day for Night and so many other notable films in between! One is supposed to fall in love with film stars, and Nathalie is a longtime flame of mine, never less than appealing.

Mopping up

2011-12-08T15:56:00.001-05:00

I certainly seem to be out of the (non)business of writing regular film reviews, but I still want to reflect on what I’ve been viewing. Lately a lot of what I’ve watched had to do with present and future film series at the Clark. First I nailed down the line-up for my midwinter series “Escapist Entertainment” – the three movies that made the cut, to fit between the bookends of Cast Away and Heading South, were The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999, MC-76), Dr. No (1962), and Mediterraneo (1991). Matt Damon was better than I remembered as Ripley, but the supporting cast made the film, and the Italian locations made a perfect fit for my series. Sean Connery remains the quintessential James Bond, the

Jamaica

locations fit the bill, and I found it a real goof to look back on the start of the franchise from the perspective of fifty years later. And the Italian film not only features a pastoral idyll on a Greek island, but starts with an epigraph about the importance of “escape.”

A near runner-up for the series was Emanuele Crialese’s Respiro (2002, MRQE-63, NFX), which was set on an island south of Sicily and featured the compelling Valeria Golino as a woman under the influence of a wild freedom, which disrupts the settled ways of the fishing village where she lives, in a lovely and believable mix of neorealism and mythic fantasy. A similar mix may be found in another folkloric take on an isolated Sicilian community in the Taviani brothers’ Kaos (1984), which I found interesting to watch but too long and unresolved for my taste. Robinson Crusoe (1952) seemed like a good fit with Cast Away, and when I saw that despite Dan O’Herlihy in the title role, this was not a Walt Disney production, but directed by surrealist provocateur Luis Bunuel, I made a point of watching, but found it too quaint and outright racist to show, probably true to Defoe in that. I even checked out Endless Summer (1966) as an escapist candidate, but found the narration of the seminal surfing documentary just too arch and bubble-headed to endure.

Then I was canvassing other candidates for my subsequent “Artists Now” film series at the Clark in March and April. Gary Tarn’s Black Sun (2005, NFX) was certainly an interesting departure, but only for a certain sophisticated audience. The narration -- or rather, rumination – is by Hugues de Montalembert, an artist who went blind after a street beating in Manhattan. He has interesting things to say about the psychology of sight and many other subjects, delivered haltingly and hypnotically, while the imagery ranges free, sometimes in synch with the narration (e.g. walking down the street and seeing extremely blurry faces coming at the camera) but more often in counterpoint, sometimes lovely, sometimes yawn-inducing.

Rothko’s Rooms (2008, NFX) is quite an interesting documentary about the painter and the environments he sought to create for viewing his abstract expressionist masterpieces, but for now I’m only showing films about living artists, so file this away for future reference. Hockney at the Tate (1988, NFX), however, while no great shakes as a film -- just Hockney and a curator walking through a retrospective exhibition and talking about his paintings -- provides backstory and a perfect complement to the later and more process-oriented David Hockney: A Bigger Picture.

In the current series of Cinema Salon screenings at the Clark, under the rubric of “Steve’s Screening Room,” I have watched Jules and Jim, The New World, and Of Gods and Men, and upon re-viewing, each rose even higher in my estimation. Someday I’ll get around to writing an appreciation of Truffaut’s entire career, and I’ll talk more about Terrence Malick when I review Tree of Life sometime in the next month, after Netflix gets the Blu-Ray DVD. For the third film, I stand by my recent review.

Frankly, like many people these days, I have been watching fewer feature films, and more long-form television series. I’ve already recommended Breaking Bad and Lark Rise to Candleford, and I am holding off finishing the fourth season of each till my daughter returns and I can share them with her. My enjoyment of Laura Linney in The Big C was undiminished in its second season, and I’m glad to hear it’s been renewed for a third.

I’ve just started checking out some programs on BBC America. The cast and setting of The Hour (2011, NFX) appealed to me, but the story didn’t really click. Dominic West (“McNutty” of The Wire!), Romola Garai, and Ben Whishaw are developing the new format of a weekly hour of news and opinion for BBC TV in the midst of the Suez Crisis in 1956. The characters and scene did not wear out their welcome in six episodes, so if it comes back again, I’d probably watch more. This series was presented under the umbrella of “Dramaville,” with each program introduced by Idris Elba (Stringer Bell of The Wire!). The next series featured him as Luther (2010-11, MC-82, NFX), a troubled London detective working the serial killer beat. The first season is available on Netflix streaming, and the second just aired, six and four episodes respectively. I don’t usually have much patience for detective shows, with a different killer every week and frequent gore, but the London setting and the well-acted, complicated characters kept me engaged with this one. Frankly, close captioning is a big help to enjoying both these shows, since the argot and accents are hard to follow, especially when the dialogue is delivered casually on the go.

So now I’m into new seasons of several HBO series. I like but still do not love the second season of Boardwalk Empire (MC-81). For reasons I can’t quite pin down, I enjoy the shameless silliness of Hung (NFX) in its third season, I suppose for the post-adolescent humor of its take on sexuality, and its engagingly awful characters. I’m giving the new Laura Dern show, Enlightened (MC-75) a chance to win me over on the same terms. One new show that does seem to have won me over is Showtime’s Homeland (MC-91), largely on the strength of Claire Danes’ lead performance as a CIA agent trying to crack a terrorist plot, which seems to revolve around a freed American POW who may have been turned during eight years of captivity in

Iraq

. It’s a topical thriller that does not go as far over the top as 24, which I did not care for at all.

As I continue to catch up with my recent viewing, you can expect forthcoming mini-essays on the films of Humphrey Bogart and of Elia Kazan, as well as Terrence Malick. Also, reviews of new films emerging from the so-called “mumblecore” movement of young American filmmakers, and from a variety of Asian cinema. If you are an adventurous film-viewer, I hope to make it worth your while to keep coming back to Cinema Salon for new discoveries.

Film programs at the Clark

2011-09-05T16:55:00.000-04:00

Lately I’ve been preoccupied with Clark film programs, past present & future. I was tremendously pleased with the “Toil of the Soil” series that ran through August in conjunction with the “Pissarro’s People” exhibition. It was a rare combination of films perfectly matched to the themes of the exhibition and all of superior quality.

Besides Cinema Salon screenings starting this month, I am planning two series for winter and spring. In January I will present a series called “Escapist Entertainment,” offering the Berkshire audience an escape from ice and snow into sun and sand, but with a catch, paradise not always turning out to be what it looks like. I’ll kick it off with Cast Away, featuring Tom Hanks and Blu-Ray projection, but get more serious with Eric Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach and Laurent Cantet’s Heading South. F. W. Murnau’s silent era black & white semi-documentary Tabu seemed too big a reach for the average audience, despite location footage in Tahiti.

Also alienating to some of the audience would be Lina Wertmuller’s Swept Away (1975), but I was glad for the occasion to re-watch this mid-Seventies artifact. It’s definitely cartoonish in style and substance, with the rich blond bitch Mariangela Melato and the swarthy bearded Sicilian Giancarlo Giannini as the deckhand on her yacht, but the battering of women by men now seems even less acceptable than it seemed at the time, even allowing for cultural and temporal differences. Nonetheless this feminist flashpoint retains some amusement, and the Mediterranean island setting would make it perfect for my series, if the film were not so shallow and objectionable.

I also checked out Rene Clement’s Purple Noon (1959), but it lacked the tropical beach scenes I was looking for and registered on me no more than The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), a subsequent adaptation of the same Patricia Highsmith novel. You can see how it made of star of Alain Delon, however. Stay tuned to find out how I fill the last two spots in the series.

In March I will start a series called “Artists Now: Documenting Creative Process.” Waste Land is a definite candidate, and Marwencol likely, as is In a Dream, but I am in the process of seeing every documentary of a living artist at work that I can lay my hands on.

Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter (1992) is not in the running, since the artist is long dead, and Marion Cajori’s film is notable mainly for the access she had to the crotchety reclusive artist in old age. She’s a character all right, but what really makes the film is simple head-on, full-frame recording of her amazingly beautiful and evocative paintings, which certainly deserve mention alongside Pollock, DeKooning, and the other macho giants of Abstract Expressionism. I would definitely take a trip to see a retrospective exhibition of her work.

Before her early death, however, Marion Cajori made the feature-length Chuck Close (2007), and that is a must for my series. The film follows a two-month process of Chuck Close painting one of his mammoth self-portraits, interspersed with interviews not just with Close himself but with all the fellow-artists who are the typical subjects of his giant photo-based portraits, which started out seeming figurative and hyper-realist, but have now revealed themselves as gloriously abstract, which in truth they have been since the beginning. So it all adds up to a collective portrait of a community of artists.

Another definite candidate for my series is David Hockney: A Bigger Picture (2009), which shows Hockney late in life returning from Southern California to his native Yorkshire, and reverting to plein air landscapes. We get to see the subject of his gaze, and then the painting as it takes shape, in a very instructive manner. Bruno Wollheim’s film is only an hour, so I will pair it with an earlier film of Hockney at work.

Guest of Cindy Sherman (2009, MC-64) does not fit into my series, being more about the art scene than artists at work, and frankly it’s a mess of mixed motives, but I certainly enjoyed watching it. Subject of the title and co-director of the film is Paul H-O, who as a struggling artist in the late Eighties turned to video interventions, and ran a flaky program called Gallery Beat on public access tv in NYC. We see some amusing footage from that program, of him accosting art folk at gallery openings, but when the generally very private Cindy Sherman opens up to him, they hit it off and become a couple, a relationship doomed by her art stardom and his hanger-on status, unnamed on banquet placecards except as indicated in the title. Despite being a post-break-up dissection, the film is good-spirited and Sherman comes across quite well, though the artworld as a whole is skewered.

Again, stay tuned for further reports on documentaries of contemporary artists at work.

Worthwhile distractions

2011-09-05T16:35:00.000-04:00

Again my film-viewing has been preempted by extremely involving tv series. The current fourth season of Breaking Bad on AMC and second season of The Big C on Showtime have captured -- and rewarded -- my attention. And retrospectively, I am now into the third season of Lark Rise to Candleford from BBC. The three series have absolutely nothing in common, but each is worth sampling from the beginning if you are interested -- either in outrageous domestic meth-crime drama/comedy, or in outrageous cancer situation comedy (revolving around Laura Linney!), or in gently satirical and mildly romantical comedy of Victorian village manners. Now I’m giving The Hour from BBC a chance, but am not yet prepared to recommend (or dismiss) that broadcast news drama from the era of the Suez Crisis.

I have watched several films that I do recommend, in descending order of intensity: My Dog Tulip (2011, MC-80) is a marvelous animated version of J.R. Ackerley’s well-loved memoir of the romance between a cranky British “bachelor” and a German Shepherd bitch. Paul and Sandra Fierlinger’s animation is hand-drawn but computer-aided, and Christopher Plummer provides the appropriately plummy narration. Both writing and visualization are charming and delightful, while remaining candid and unblinking about inter-species relationships and the messy realities of animal life.

Queen to Play (2011, MC-70) I watched for the performance of the reliably-riveting Sandrine Bonnaire, who plays a woman trapped on the island of Corsica by an unsatisfying marriage to an unsuccessful man, obliged to work as a maid in a local tourist hotel and in the home of a retired American academic played by Kevin Kline. Both places prompt her into fascination with the magic of chess, one arena where the woman is the most powerful player. The game gives her life a purpose it had lacked, and she induces Kline to give her lessons and competition. Caroline Bottaro’s first film is perhaps a little formulaic in its tale of female empowerment but wonderfully observed, satisfying without schmaltz.

Somersault (2006, MC-73), likewise, I watched for the early performance of Abbie Cornish, who caught my attention when I happened to watch Bright Star and Stop-Loss back to back. Here she plays a teenage Aussie girl who is trying to come to terms with her longings, while making a string of alarmingly bad decisions. When flirtation with her mother’s boyfriend goes too far, and is found out, she leaves home with nothing but the clothes on her back, which will not remain there long, as she depends utterly on men attracted to her jailbait allure. Winding up at an off-season ski-resort, she meets a more suitable mate in Sam Worthington, who is not really worth her either. Australia is still turning out movie stars, with Worthington a matinee idol in the aftermath of Avatar, but Abbie Cornish is definitely one to watch. Cate Shortland may be a young director to watch as well.

Home Box docs

2011-08-07T16:20:00.000-04:00

While PBS continues to showcase worthwhile documentaries on the programs “Independent Lens” and “POV,” HBO has really stepped up to the plate this summer and delivered a consistently interesting series. I refer you to their website for a complete list and descriptions, but I’ll offer brief reactions to each film in the series. I’ve found them all worth watching, some more and some less, even on subjects I was inclined to skip. If you don’t get HBO, most titles can be put on your Netflix queue, and if you don’t get Netflix, well then, god bless you, but why in heaven are you reading Cinema Salon?

The standout so far seems to be Hot Coffee, a classic documentary in that it takes a subject that “everyone knows” and demonstrates clearly that what everyone knows is wrong, the truth turned upside down, and moreover how and why the misconception was disseminated. That old lady who spilled coffee on herself and sued McDonald’s for it became the butt of jokes, as well as the poster child of a huge PR campaign to mock lawsuit judgments as frivolous and costly to the public. Susan Saladoff shows that “tort reform” is just a code word for letting corporations run roughshod over the public welfare. It’s perfectly in line with the Citizens United decision in granting rights to corporations and denying them to individuals. The legal fiction that the corporation is a “person” with rights (but of course no obligations) is a source of endless mischief in our system.

Another film in the series, Mann v. Ford, backs up the point, detailing the attempt of a community of Ramapo Indians to seek legal redress from Ford Motor Company for the dumping of toxic waste on their land when the huge Mahwah plant opened in the Sixties. Now the community is dying off from cancer and a host of other diseases, and makes a good test case for imposing responsibility on corporations through the courts. Unfortunately the film should have been an hour long rather than feature length, and is padded with much tangential material that dissipates and distracts from its argument.

Something similar might be said of the first film in the series, Bobby Fischer Against the World, which as one would expect, is engrossing as long as it recalls the days when Fischer vs. Spassky was the main bout of the day in the Cold War and chess mania swept the country, and then peters out when Fischer gives way to right-wing paranoia and free-form hate-speech.

Sex Crimes Unit sounds like a spicy spin-off of Law and Order, and thus a likely skip for me, but giving it a chance, I was impressed by the workaday reality of women working through the legal system to confront violence against women, as well as the victims who were willing to come out of the shadows and into the light. The lack of glamour or end-of-the-hour closure is exactly what made this real-life drama satisfying.

I also resisted Alexandra Pelosi’s Citizen USA: A 50-State Road Trip, figuring it was another celebrity project enabled by her mom Nancy. But, gosh darn it, this film of “furriners” becoming citizens all across this great land of ours was genuinely moving, even eye-opening.

Would Love Crimes of Kabul turn out to be more a Frontline-type expose, or more of the tabloid variety, detailing outrageous fundamentalist punishments for sex? Actually, it’s more like a reality-show set in an Afghan women’s prison, not a harsh-seeming place at all, where the women freely bicker and gossip over their respective cases. The intimate access is amazing, even though it stops at the courtroom door most of the time, and while from a Western perspective the “crimes” seem absurd, the justice dispensed is no more erratic than our own. Some know how to play the system, and some are crushed by it. Ultimately Tanaz Eshaghian's film is amusing, as well as titillating, as well as edifying.

I suspected “There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane” of tabloid ghoulishness as well, but then saw it was made by Liz Garbus, who has been a director I look for ever since I saw The Farm: Angola USA (and actually the Bobby Fischer film was also hers). I can’t, however, recommend that you take this trip, digging deep into the backstory of a horrific collision that killed eight on the Taconic Parkway two years ago, since I’ve been trying to put Aunt Diane out of my mind ever since I saw the film, as her final scenes repeat in my mind like an inescapable nightmare. I was expecting resolution of the mystery at the end, that same ultimate reversal of what “everyone knows,” but wound up with something even more disturbing, the idea that “nobody knows,” the awful truth is ultimately unknowable, and all you are left with is the strange and personal ways that people confront and cope with unimaginable events. This is a serious film about a headline event, but after it’s over, the subject may be something you wish you knew less about, rather than more.

The next film in the series is a winning tangent off the successful Spellbound formula, following a diverse group of cute kids from their far-flung homes to a high-stakes competition. Instead of a national spelling bee, in Greg Barker’s Koran by Heart, this contest in Cairo is for reciting the Koran from memory, and featured are three 10-year-olds, boys from Tajikstan and Senegal, a girl from the Maldive Islands. The contest is run by a moderate Egyptian cleric and government minister, and certainly presents a less sinister side of Islam than we are accustomed to seeing these days. It is vaguely disturbing that the children are reciting in Arabic, whether they understand the language or not, which makes for awkward interactions with the judges, but then that’s hardly different from when liturgical Latin ruled the Church. The Tajik boy is amazingly accomplished, though not quite up to speed on the rules of Arabic vocalization, and leaves the judges in tears. The Maldives girl is the most surprising, and there may have been some affirmative action in the response of the judges, giving extra points for the extremism of her cuteness. The Senegalese boy strives to live up to his father, the local imam. All three are dazzled by Cairo and camels, the mosques and the pyramids. With good will and diversity of motive, this film revises one’s mental image of young Islamic children in madrassas mindlessly chanting the Koran. You’ll be rooting for these kids to do it perfectly.

This fine HBO documentary series wraps up over the next two weeks, but you can catch up with these films on rerun or DVD.

What's been on

2011-08-07T16:12:00.000-04:00

I’ve had a bit of hiatus from regular film comment, but I intend to bring the record up to date in one long go. Lately I’ve been involved with a number of TV series that I would encourage everyone to sample, though each will not be to everyone’s taste. Previous seasons are usually available on DVD.

I’m pretty far gone on everything David Simon does, particularly The Wire and Generation Kill, so it’s no surprise that I found the second season of Treme (MC-84) on HBO to be compelling viewing from start to finish, as a swirl of musicians and other New Orleans characters contend with the aftermath of Katrina. On the same channel, I was resistant to Game of Thrones (MC-79) since I am no big fan of sword and sorcery and the whole panoply of medieval dynastic conflict, but trusted my daughter’s recommendation enough to give it a try, and wound up going through the first season in short order, and now look forward to more. Being a man of a certain age, or in truth a little past it, I reveled in the bittersweet, understated humor and drama of Men of a Certain Age (MC-86), just having completed its run on TNT and yet to be picked up by some enlightened other channel, perhaps in the type of arrangement that saved two final seasons of Friday Night Lights.

I’ve been catching up with two series on DVD. If you jones for English heritage productions such as Cranford from BBC, a steady stash is available from Lark Rise to Candleford, which just completed a four-season run, though at the moment I am taking lingering pleasure in the first, with its range of characters and variety of stories set in a late Victorian village and town (as named in the title). For something completely different, but equally pleasurable, I would direct your attention to Justified (MC-81), which recently completed its second season on FX. Though I have just caught up with the first season on DVD, I urge any fans of Elmore Leonard to check out this cowboy/cop action/romance comedy/drama, based on his work and featuring Timothy Olyphant (of Deadwood fame) as a cute but deadly U.S. Marshal breaking up a meth ring in Harlan, Kentucky.

Just underway and promising more of the same are new seasons of three series I have followed devotedly. The Big C (MC-64) on Showtime does not seem to have worn out its premise as a cancer comedy, and is not likely to as long as it revolves around the adorable Laura Linney. By all accounts, Breaking Bad (MC-96) on AMC just keeps getting better and better in its fourth season, another oh-no-you-don’t crime drama/comedy centered around meth dealing, anchored by Emmy-winners Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul and driven by go-for-broke producer Vince Gilligan. Entourage has gotten a little old for me, but I will still tune in for its short swansong season, to see where the young gang of New York guys turned Hollywood players ends up.

Turning to film, I will group my recent viewing into a few adventitious categories. One variety might fall under the heading of economic dislocation. I caught up with a reputed classic of Italian neorealism, a rarity that I’d never seen, when it finally made it to DVD, but Vittorio de Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) will not alter my canon. Worth seeing but not quite up to his Bicycle Thieves or Umberto D, its supposedly harsh realism clearly reveals a soft, sentimental center, with a postwar story of good kids trapped into crime, and sent to a reformatory that gives them a graduate education in it. Ultimately the melodrama is more like Angels with Dirty Faces than Rossellini or Visconti.

China’s recent economic growth has come at the cost of enormous dislocation as hundreds of millions have moved from countryside to cities. Lixin Fan’s intimate documentary Last Train Home (2010, MC-86) focuses on the dispersal of one family, as the parents go to the city for work and leave their teenage daughter and younger son back in the village. That separation is compounded by generational conflict, as the film veers close to a reality-tv invasion of one Chinese family, while retaining its seriousness of purpose and subject.

Two much glossier films detail the dislocation of poor rich guys in the recent financial meltdown. A great cast carries The Company Men (2011, MC-69), the first feature by television veteran John Wells, and a credible drama of the downsizing era. Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, and Chris Cooper are all corporate high-fliers at a Boston-based shipbuilding conglomerate, until the enterprise starts to sink and they are thrown overboard. Affleck is saved by his sensible wife Rosemary DeWitt, and her brother, salt-of-the-earth housebuilder Kevin Costner. Perhaps the film is over-earnest and over-emphasized in the manner of a tv drama, but for the most part it seems genuine. Or at least the actors know how to sell it.

Less credible, though moderately entertaining, is Oliver Stone’s sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010, MC-59). After all these years, Michael Douglas has Gordon Gekko down cold, in his new post-prison incarnation. Shia LeBeouf is better than I expected as yet another young go-getter who comes under his wing, and his squeeze is Gekko’s estranged daughter, who is made plausible simply because she is played by Carey Mulligan. Veterans such as Frank Langella and Eli Wallach contribute flavorful walk-ons, and the film has flash, if something less than substance. This is definitely a case where fact is stranger than fiction, so if you want to watch one feature film about banking collapse, make it HBO’s Too Big to Fail.

Another group that emerges from my recent viewing could be called “Fixated on femmes”. Francois Truffaut’s Man Who Loved Women is generally regarded as a lightweight entry in his oeuvre, but it’s one of my favorites and the purest distillation of one of his most persistent themes: “Are women magic?” It’s a theme that preoccupies many French films besides Truffaut’s, and here are three that I’ve watched lately (coincidentally, all three are available for instant play on Netflix):

As a fan of actress/writer/director Agnès Jaoui’s earlier work, The Taste of Others and Look at Me, I approached Let it Rain (2010, MC-72) avidly, but left it somewhat bemused. Here she plays a feminist writer looking to parlay her literary fame into a political career. After her mother dies, she returns home to the south of France, where her less-favored sister still lives. Jaoui’s frequent collaborator and sometime-husband, Jean-Pierre Bacri, plays a local who wants, for various ulterior motives, to make a documentary about her, a process that breaks down in a variety of amusing and revealing ways. Successful as a character study, the film’s overall impact is as vague as its title, and no more illuminating in its more accurately-translated British version, Let’s Talk about the Rain. Based on its U.S. release date, this could have been included as an “appreciation” in my rundown of 2010, but the next film earns an outright “recommendation.”

In Mademoiselle Chambon (2010, MC-83), Stéphane Brizé features two actors unknown to me, which is perfectly appropriate to the story he tells, of two ordinary people confronting something extraordinary in their everyday lives, a story told in silent stares and sidelong glances. He’s a building contractor, shown (at length) sledge-hammering a wall for a renovation; she is his child’s teacher, a roving substitute who takes annual appointments around France, to avoid long-term attachments. They meet at the school, and a quiet fire starts to build. Will it break forth, or will it be tamped down? That is the whole film, but it is more than enough, conveyed with minimal dialogue but with emotions more revealed in being unexpressed. If you want a lot going on and feelings spelled out, this film will frustrate you no end. If you appreciate reticence, both in the characters and in the filmmaking, it will unfold to your satisfaction.

José Luis Guerin’s In the City of Sylvia (2007, MRQE-69) is another nearly wordless exercise, as an art student stalks Strasbourgh, looking for a woman he met briefly six years before. The film is an ogler’s delight, as he sits in a street café and sketches the women all around him, from complicated angles that the camera emulates. The visual play is joyful, and if that’s enough for you, this film will enchant. When the stalking of one particular woman starts to get creepy, the fact that the young man looks like a Raphaelesque angel makes it seem less sinister. And all the visual quotations from paintings and other films keep everything at an aesthetic and enigmatic distance, which I for one found appealing.

Here’s another threesome, this time with women behind the camera. Dorris Dörrie’s Cherry Blossoms (2009, MC-62) takes off from Ozu’s Tokyo Story, to tell the story of an aging German couple who visit their grown children in the city, only to be ignored by offspring too busy with their own lives. So they are left only with each other’s company, and when one dies, the other takes on that identity and tries to live out the spouse’s dreams of art and travel, which had been suppressed by marriage. The film is beautifully shot, but its emotional content is more obvious than convincing.

Iranian-born but US-educated Shirin Neshat is that rare video artist whose installation has stopped me in my tracks while walking through a museum gallery. So when she turned to feature films with Women Without Men (2010, MC-68), I was willing to take a look. The transition from visual to narrative artist is not complete, but shows promise in this magic realist adaptation of a novel about the condition of women in Iran in the early Fifties, at the time of the CIA overthrown of the elected government and installation of the Shah as absolute ruler. A woman avoids the arranged marriage her brother is forcing on her by committing suicide, but then has a second life as a radical activist. A general’s wife leaves him to move into a garden estate in the country, which becomes a haven for other abused women. The feminist fable sometimes astounds visually and sometimes convinces, but lacks a dramatic arc and sustained impact.

Which a less well-made Middle Eastern documentary such as Budrus (2009, MRQE) does have, as Brazil-born but US-educated director Julia Bacha follows the Palestinian village of Budrus as it attempts nonviolent resistance to the wall Israel intends to build across its land. There is nothing special about the filmmaking, either in live action or talking heads, but the story itself is remarkable as peaceful protest manages to break down barriers, between men and women, young and old, Fatah and Hamas, and even with Israeli and international activists. The confrontations between the protestors and the young Israeli soldiers are chaotic and unresolved, but in the end change is achieved. This film has its heart in the right place, even when the camera tends to wander.

Falling into no particular category, I did check out a recent animated hit, since I’ve been pleasantly surprised at several lately. Tangled (2010, MC-71) is a retelling of the Rapunzel story, and the animation is certainly spectacular enough, but the sentiments are more Disney than Pixar, betraying the princess-obsession of the “Magic Kingdom.” This film is definitely not the must-see for adults that Up or Toy Story 3 are, unless pink is your favorite color.

As this variegated summary indicates, in the wide world of film, some of the best viewing actually originates on TV, but there’s always something to watch for everyone, if nothing for everybody. Don’t take my word for it -- see for yourself.

Coming to the Clark

2011-07-26T16:13:00.000-04:00

“Toil of the Soil: Films of Peasant and Yeoman” is a free film series offered by the Clark in conjunction with the major summer exhibition, “Pissarro’s People,” and looks at the realities of rural labor that were so close to the painter’s heart and eye.

Monday August 1 2:00 pm: Jean de Florette (1986, 121 min., in French with subtitles). Gerard Depardieu stars as the title character of Claude Berri’s adaptation of a Marcel Pagnol novel about a man who inherits a farm in Provence and tries to make a go of scientific cultivation, while canny old villager Yves Montand schemes to drive him off the land in this harsh but lovely, sad but engrossing drama.

Monday August 8 2:00 pm: Farrebique (1947, 85 min., in French dialect with subtitles). George Rouquier’s beautifully staged documentary follows a year in the life of an old French farm, in timeless images that recall Pissarro’s rural themes. The Clark is pleased to unearth and present this little-seen classic.

Monday August 15 2:00 pm: Pelle the Conqueror (1987, 150 min., in Swedish with subtitles). Max von Sydow is monumental and heartbreaking as the peasant hero of Bille August’s depiction of a life of hardship and toil in Sweden and Denmark around 1900, winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

Monday August 22 2:00 pm: The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978, 185 min., in Italian dialect with subtitles). Ermanno Olmi’s epic saga follows four peasant families who live and work on an estate in Lombardy around 1900. Crushingly sad but transcendently beautiful, this slow and patiently observed masterpiece is among the greatest films ever made.

Monday August 29 2:00 pm: Days of Heaven. (1978, 95 min.) Terrence Malick’s intense vision of farming on the Great Plains before World War I, which won an Oscar for cinematography, follows Richard Gere and Brooke Adams from the steel mills of Chicago to the wheat fields of Texas, where they labor for landowner Sam Shepard.

Dreaming of gods

2011-07-26T16:10:00.000-04:00

Having finally wrapped up the best films from 2010, I am ready to review two that are bound to be on my list for 2011. I’ll be back soon to post my huge backlog of comment on films and tv series, but with this I want to bring Cinema Salon back into some sort of currency.

Just out on DVD is the acclaimed French feature by Xavier Beauvois, Of Gods and Men (2011, MC-86). I somehow remained unaware of the true story that this film retells, so for me the film had enormous suspense rather than fateful foreknowledge, and worked awfully well that way. I will have to watch it again sometime, knowing the end of the story -- I suspect it will be equally compelling. I’d heard enough about the film to get the idea it was worth seeing, something about a face-off between monks and soldiers, but had somehow formed the notion that it was set during WWII. So it took me a few minutes to realize the setting was more contemporary and the bad guys were not going to be Nazis, but Islamist insurgents – same difference, from human decency that is. Only afterwards did I learn the facts of the case, Algeria in 1995, so for me it played out as a parable of faith and duty, and wonderfully well at that. First off, one has to say that the film is stunningly beautiful, in the setting of the Atlas Mountains and within the monastery, and then acknowledge that it is slow-moving by usual movie standards. But I found myself perfectly in tune with its rhythms, as I was not with the recent well-regarded documentary about another Trappist monastery, Into Great Silence. The spiritual journey of the brothers, collectively and individually, is captivating in detail and arc. The acting is superb across the board, as is the sense of place. And the moral quandaries of the situation make the film an exceptional philosophical experience. In fact, it occurs to me that I will surely show this at the Clark when the Cinema Salon film club resumes in September, it’s a natural for discussion afterwards.

I applaud Beacon Cinema in Pittsfield for straying from their usual mainstream fare to show Werner Herzog’s new documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 3-D (2011, MC-86). I had wanted to tie-in with a series of Herzog documentaries at the Clark, to be called “Cave/Man/Art,” but scheduling couldn’t be worked out. Nonetheless I was delighted for the chance to see this film in 3-D, which in truth was a mixed bag, sometimes blurry and disorienting, but at other times absolutely magical, putting you right there in an otherwise inaccessible spot, truly mesmerizing and awe-inspiring. Chauvet cave in France was just discovered in 1995, and sealed from public access, until our boy Werner wangled his way in. It contains wall paintings believed to be twice as old as any previously discovered, begun perhaps 30,000 years ago. The art itself is astounding, seeming as fresh as yesterday, and the whole environment of the cave equally magical, with its limestone formations and extinct animal remains. After a century in which primitive art has been emulated by the avant-garde, these first glimmerings of the representational impulse seem instantly familiar and readable, however remote. The combination of pictorial and physical remains in this sealed tomb of time is exquisitely poignant and thought-provoking. Werner’s characteristically portentous and wide-ranging narration sometimes goes over the top, making claims and speculations that the already miraculous sights do not support, but there’s no doubt this film goes to the deepest levels of humanity, and is an experience not to be missed, if you have the opportunity to see it.

Based on no more connection than “dream” in the title, and wall art as a theme, I append notice of another documentary I just watched, for possible future showing at the Clark. In a Dream (2009, MRQE) is a very intimate look at an outsider artist in South Philly who has covered acres of walls in his neighborhood with large-scale mosaics. Isaiah Zagar is an understandably but amazingly obsessive character, as portrayed by his filmmaking son Jeremiah and supported by his activist and gallerist wife Julia. Psychological and family troubles impinge on the artist’s quirky but stunning work, and add a whole other dimension to the film, which is also a visual feast. So there’s a lot going on here, perhaps a little too much, since the film seemed slightly long to me, even at less than 80 minutes. Nonetheless, it’s a well-made and fascinating documentary.

How 2010 stacked up

2011-07-26T16:04:00.000-04:00

With my usual half-year delay, by now I’ve seen almost every well-noticed film of 2010, going by rankings such as the top 50 in the Film Comment critics poll, and here I distill them into four categories of consumer advice. Since almost all are out on DVD by now, you should find something here for your Netflix queue. For fuller commentary, use the search box at the top of this page to find my personal review, which in turn will link you to the respective Metacritic page surveying other critical opinion.

Exhortations, which I urge you to see: For sheer ambition, my choice for best film of the year is Carlos, the three-part epic by Olivier Assayas, which illuminates the international franchising of political terror from the Seventies on, and may ultimately rank with The Godfather Saga. I share the general enthusiasm for The Social Network – let’s just say I “friend” it. And I also share the enthusiasm of the cognescenti for Winter’s Bone, the Ozark indie thriller that’s a cross between horror film and documentary. Into this exalted company I would admit the HBO biopic, Temple Grandin, with its transcendent performance by Claire Danes as the autistic expert on animal behavior.

Recommendations, which I advise you to see: Here I’ll start in the mainstream and branch out into various tributaries. I like The King’s Speech and True Grit as much as most people do, and Toy Story 3 much more than I anticipated.

Polanski’s Ghost Writer is a very effective political thriller, and three foreign crime dramas reward the effort to watch their grisly violence – the Red Riding Trilogy (like Carlos a three-part series originally made for television) tracks the long and convoluted case of the Yorkshire Ripper; Animal Kingdom follows the decline of a Melbourne crime family ruled by an Aussie lioness of a mother; A Prophet shows in intimate gory detail how an Arab youth in a French prison comes to depend on the Corsican mob that runs the joint and much else besides.

The relationships amongst family, friends, and lovers are examined from many angles in an international array of worthy films. The American indies Mother & Child and Please Give weave together the stories of several families -- Roderigo Garcia with an excellent cast led by Annette Bening and Naomi Watts as a mother and daughter separated at birth, and Nicole Holofcener out of a cross-section of Manhattan neurotics surrounding Catherine Keener. From Britain, Mike Leigh does not disappoint but does not top himself with Another Year, and Never Let Me Go tells a surprisingly thought-provoking dystopian fable about some attractive young people at a boarding school that is not what it seems. From Italy, the operatic and sensual family drama of I Am Love is anchored by Tilda Swinton. From France, The Father of My Children meticulously examines the lead-up to and fall-out from a family tragedy. From Germany comes the step-by-step break-up of a mismatched couple on a Mediterranean vacation in Everyone Else.

Appreciations, which I consider worth seeing: I would cite both The Fighter and The Town for knowing portrayals of rough’n’tumble Massachusetts working-class communities. Among the other Oscar nominees, I like The Kids Are All Right less than many do, but 127 Hours more than I expected, though neither strikes me as a legitimate contender for “Best Picture.” The rest of this category is a mixed-bag of little-known films, each of which found some support in critics polls, except a couple I would point out as suiting my particular (peculiar?) personal taste – Neil Jordan’s selkie fable Ondine appeals to me for its local Irish flavor and the un-star-like performance of Colin Farrell, and I appreciate the relatively serious portrayal of Darwin by Paul Bettany in Creation. Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling enact a winsome romance and lacerating break-up in Blue Valentine. Highly-charged historical situations are depicted, again from a variety of nations -- Lebanon looks at the 1982 war from the perspective of some raw Israeli recruits confined to a tank; White Material takes in an African civil war from the perspective of French coffee plantation owner Isabelle Huppert; Vincere looks at the rise of Mussolini from the view of the woman and son he discarded on the way up the ladder; and Four Lions is an unlikely terrorist comedy about a half-assed group of British Islamicists. Alamar is sui generis, quietly following a young mixed-race boy as he goes to spend a summer with his father in the natural paradise of the Mexican coral reefs.

Equivocations, which I leave to your discretion: Two critical favorites that I halfway appreciated, but cannot recommend, are the Noah Baumbach-Ben Stiller acerbic comedy Greenberg and the Korean murder mystery Mother. I have high expectations for Sofia Coppola’s films, which were severely disappointed by Somewhere. For a while I was under the spell of Black Swan, but when the spell was broken by sheer over-the-top implausibility, I turned against the film rather violently. I never fell under the spell of Christopher Nolan’s Inception or Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, and wound up fast-forwarding through both. Two highly praised and highly offbeat foreign films I stubbornly refused to get were the Greek family fable Dogtooth and Alain Resnais’ weird and not-so-wonderful Wild Grass.

Documendations: Inside Job won the Oscar for best documentary feature and came in #7 overall in the Film Comment poll, but this recapitulation of the financial collapse of 2008 was not my favorite of the year’s nonfiction films. Among the nominees, I was more impressed with Restrepo, with its intimate you-are-there feel for a remote military outpost in Afghanistan at the furthest extension of the American empire (the co-director was subsequently killed in action in Libya); Waste Land, about a project by the international art star Vik Muniz set in the largest garbage dump in Rio; and Gasland, a D-I-Y exploration of the environmental disaster-in-waiting that is “fracking” for natural gas. For understanding of America’s political and economic crises, I would turn to Alex Gibney, whose Casino Jack and the United States of Money was truly illuminating and enraging about the lasting toxic influence of the cadre of College Republicans led by Karl Rove, while his Client 9 detailed the rise and fall of Eliot Spitzer in a way that was virtually as informative as Inside Job in fingering the culprits of the financial meltdown. The Oath offered surprising access to the inside of Al-Qaeda by following Osama Bin Laden’s ex-bodyguard, who is now a taxi driver in Yemen. The Tillman Story showed how truth was one of the casualties of the Afghan war, and Last Train Home put the face of one family on the immense impact of huge internal migration in China from the countryside to the cities. On nonpolitical themes, standouts of the year included Sweetgrass, a nearly wordless meditation on a great sheep drive to grazing in the wilds of Montana, and a late work by cinema verite pioneer D.A. Pennebaker, Kings of Pastry, about chefs vying for a French medal of honor. One quirky outlier that has its detractors as well as advocates, Catfish, finds another proponent in me, as it takes a highly personal approach to exploring the implications of social media. Some will tell you that Exit Through the Gift Shop was a great look at contemporary street art, but for art from an outsider perspective, I much prefer Marwencol.

So all in all, 2010 definitely goes in the book as a year of worthy films. Take a look for yourself.

Another Year

2011-07-26T16:02:00.003-04:00

In most years Mike Leigh is in the running for best director, but this is just Another Year, well-done and extremely watchable, though at times excruciatingly so. Lesley Manville has been widely celebrated for her portrayal of a desperate lush, trying to fend off the sexual and existential panic of middle-age, but she is just one of the characters that circle around the cozy central couple played by Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent – she a counselor, he a geological engineer, both products of the Sixties -- who seem to maintain an open house for family and friends, while extending an open-hearted acceptance, even acquiescence, to the quirks of others -- until one of them does the unacceptable. Leigh always creates characters who are real and rounded and whole, but your heart does not go out to any of this bunch, as it did to Vera Drake or Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky, so you are left with their foibles, be they smugly happy or desperately unhappy. They are analyzed as specimens, all too human specimens, but the film, while even-handed, remains stubbornly unsympathetic on several levels. Not as unsympathetic as Naked, but not among the director’s most approachable, such as Topsy-Turvy. Nonetheless, Mike Leigh remains a must-see. (2010, MC-80)

Somewhere

2011-06-05T17:41:00.002-04:00

I’m sorry, for me Sofia Coppola’s latest was strictly Nowheresville. I guess she deserves points for being strict, but she took me nowhere I wanted to go. As much as I have liked her previous films, this one left me cold, despite glowing endorsements from critics I usually trust and agree with. The model most frequently cited is Antonioni, and that right there might be the problem. I’ve never really grooved on him either. Sure, sure, the emptiness of soul that goes with hollow success. Who cares? Stephen Dorff is okay as the hunky if disheveled Hollywood star, too out of it to appreciate the women who throw themselves at him, whose 11-year-old daughter shows up at his suite in the Chateau Marmont. Elle Fanning is quite charming in the role, and there is some subdued but affectionate byplay between father and daughter. You’ll know right away if this is your cup of tea. The first shot is prolonged as most of them are, with a fixed camera that frames two arcs of a racing oval in the desert, where a Ferrari passes through the frame in one direction then passes deeper through the frame in the other, once, twice, thrice, as the seconds tick off. Get in a staring frame of mind, or give this film a pass. Nothing of great human interest will pass before your eyes, though it will all be designed within an inch of its life. (2010, MC-67)

Miracle of Michelle

2011-06-05T17:38:00.003-04:00

Is it time to anoint Michelle Williams as the best actress of her generation? What woman around 30 would you watch with more confidence in her ability to make any character come alive, whether it’s the waif of Wendy and Lucy or the emergency room doctor of Mammoth, not to mention her Oscar nom for Brokeback Mountain? Here are two more I’ve just seen.

Blue Valentine. (2010, MC-81) I couldn’t decide whether the characters in this movie were a mess, or the movie was a mess, but the film’s value lies in the questions it leaves open, your urge to make sense of it after the fact. Derek Cianfrance channels Cassavettes in a lacerating romantic drama, which flashes back and forth between the end and the beginning of a relationship, from love at first sight to miserable ever after. Though he is reputed to have worked on the script for 12 years, and had the two stars attached for many years, the writer-director finally went on set and instructed Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling to surprise him. And they do, and us, and themselves as well. There are marvelous and revealing moments, but does it all hang together? The characters are sufficiently complicated that our reactions to them have to be complicated, but some elements seem over-determined. I was unhappy with the ending on several levels, but credit the film’s commitment to truths of intimate reality rather than wish fulfillment. It’s definitely an experience, but not for everyone (NC-17 or not).

Meek’s Cutoff. (2011, MC-85) is also an experience, excruciating in an entirely different way. In Kelly Reichardt’s film, three covered wagons traverse a trackless sagebrush wilderness on their way to Oregon in 1845. They’ve hired Meek to guide them and he has led them into a shortcut that goes on forever, as their water runs out and disaster looms on every side. Though eschewing widescreen panorama, the film does capture tiny human figures lost in a vastness. We go through most of the film with no close-up view of the characters, with scenes in darkness lit only by lantern or campfire, with mumbled dialogue less audible than the sound of the wind or creaking wagon wheels. It takes a long time to recognize Michelle Williams hidden in her bonnet, as the woman who takes the lead, first amongst the other women, Shirley Henderson and Zoe Kazan, and eventually among the whole train, as Meek loses all credibility. Slow moving and unresolved in a way that infuriates many, this too is a film that radiates reality while foiling audience expectation. You will be rewarded only if you are patient enough.

Winning at failure

2011-06-05T17:36:00.000-04:00

I highly recommend Too Big to Fail, the docudrama currently showing on HBO, and was surprised to find other critics somewhat less enthusiastic (MC-67). Adapted from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book of the same name, and directed by Curtis Hanson, this film concisely and comprehensibly gives a day-by-day account of the financial crisis of September 2008, with an astounding cast giving spot-on portrayals of the now all-too-familiar players, starting with William Hurt as Hank Paulsen, Billy Crudup as Timothy Geithner, and Paul Giamatti as an uncanny simulacrum of Ben Bernanke. In the array of asshole bankers are James Woods, Bill Pullman, Tony Shaloub, and other familiar faces easy to recognize and easy to associate with the real characters. I totally believed that this is how the crisis looked from the inside – perhaps an outside perspective is required for the total picture of the economic meltdown, but as personal drama this was informative and convincing.

On a lesser scale, I found another recent HBO docudrama worthwhile. Cinema Verité (MC-74) recreates the filming of the Seventies fly-on-the-wall documentary series on PBS, “An American Family,” which may be considered the fount of “reality tv.” The Loud family willy-nilly became a cultural phenomenon, their lives a topic of controversy on every side. Made by the American Splendor pair of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, this retrospect is equally adept at negotiating levels of reality, cutting from original documentary into re-creation. Diane Lane is her reliably marvelous self as Pat Loud, and Tim Robbins is also excellent as Bill. James Gandolfini is okay as the show’s producer, and the rest of the cast up to snuff. It’s possible the film does not hold up without one’s own memories of the time portrayed, but the nostalgia is astringent rather than balmy.

I’d been planning to give Albert Brooks another look and Cinema Verité was the perfect lead-in to Real Life (1979), his take on the same phenomenon and startlingly prescient in many ways, despite being more a series of sketches than a real movie. Brooks plays the obnoxious documentary producer who inserts himself as well as his crew into the lives of a “typical” American family, and is an equal opportunity satirist, mocking himself along with everyone else. It’s all quite hilarious and biting.

Not quite so biting, and therefore not as great as it might have been is his Defending Your Life (1991). The set-up is perfect -- Brooks is an advertising man who drives his new BMW off the lot and into an oncoming bus, and wakes up to find himself in Judgment City, an amusingly ordinary purgatory where the newly-dead are tried to see how much they have evolved above fear and whether they have to go back to earth for another crack at becoming a bigger brain. The neurotic Brooks is not a good candidate to move on, as the key points of his life’s humiliations are reviewed, with Rip Torn not helping much as his defense attorney. He meets a newly-dead woman whose benign calm makes her certain to move up; Meryl Streep, in an underwritten role, provides enough delight to make this sweetheart plausible. The many funny complications in the process go mushy in an ending that must have been copped from The Graduate, but despite going soft at the end, this film about heaven is funny as hell.

Poor reviews had so far kept me from one film by Williams classmate and particular favorite of mine, writer-director John Sayles, but I finally caught up with Silver City (2004, MC-47). The film has its moments, especially with Chris Cooper as a W. clone running for governor of Colorado, and a notable cast that includes Richard Dreyfuss as his Cheneyesque handler and Kris Kristofferson as the robber baron power behind the throne, but the story detours into a questionable murder mystery by an equally questionable investigator in Danny Huston. Chinatown this ain’t, but I still look forward to more from Sayles.

Calling all docs!

2011-06-05T17:32:00.000-04:00

I’m late in doing so, but I really want to call attention to the current season of “Independent Lens” on PBS, which has been presenting a lot of documentaries that I may show at the Clark sometime. Two I’d just watched on dvd before they turned up on the program. Waste Land I’ve already written about, and also worthy of recommendation was Marwencol (2010, MC-81). The odd name denotes an imaginary town peopled by GI Joes and Barbies who enact the WWII scenarios of a man who had his brain damaged in a beating outside a bar. The town, as 3-D artifact and as reproduced in photos, serves as physical and psychological therapy for Mark Hogancamp, to recreate an identity lost along with most of his personal memories. His photos are discovered by an art magazine, leading to a New York gallery show, which challenges the creator’s identity in more ways than one. Inspiring, almost mind-blowing, this is a film that works on many levels.

Another possibility for Clark showing is The Desert of Forbidden Art, which tells an intriguing story of a lone wolf collector of avant-garde painting banned by the Soviets, who created his own museum in unlikely Uzbekistan, in a fascinating mix of exotic themes. Jean-Michel Basquiat: the Radiant Child was not bad, but pales next to Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat, as spectacularly embodied by Jeffrey Wright (with David Bowie as Warhol).

Off the topic of art, I definitely recommend Bhutto (2010, MC-68), also available on dvd, which focuses on Benazir as legatee of her father as leader of Pakistan, in a dynastic clan that is half-royal, half-democratic. Twice prime minister, the first woman to lead a Muslim country, and twice deposed by the military, she was assassinated in 2007 when she returned from exile to run once again. Educated at Harvard and Oxford, she provides an understandable window into an unknowable country, which has emerged as a crucial frenemy of the U.S.

Another PBS documentary series of consistent interest is “American Experience,” and I take particular note of two recent presentations. Stonewall Uprising (2010, MC-74) is very effective at taking us back to the origins of gay liberation in the “riots” that took place in 1969 when the police raided that Greenwich Village bar once too often, after its Mafia owners failed to pay up, and the gay patrons took the brunt of the assault. The jaw-dropping footage of official commentary in “educational” films and even on “60 Minutes” offers a crash course in just how far homosexuality has come out of the closet and into the mainstream of American life.

Similarly we’ve come a long way from the situation of the Freedom Riders (2009, DVD) in Stanley Nelson’s extremely effective documentary about the 1961 bus protests against segregation on interstate transportation. An interracial group from the Congress on Racial Equality embarked on a peaceful attempt to ride together from Washington to New Orleans, only to meet beatings and burning when they reached Alabama. After the highly-publicized violence, other riders and the civil rights movement as a whole took up the challenge, escalating the issue until the Kennedys and the federal government were forced to intervene. While we watch the protestors of the Arab Spring try to rise up against entrenched and illegitimate power, it is salutary to remember that fifty years ago, the situation was not that different in parts of America.

Another documentary for future showing at the Clark, just available from Netflix -- as most of these films are -- is Who Does She Think She Is? (2008), by Pamela Tanner Boll, who made the noteworthy Born into Brothels. This film looks at a variety of women who persist in their art while raising families and facing all the obstacles to their success. Though hardly earthshaking, it is genuinely inspiring.

Two more films to mention for completeness’ sake, both of which have their virtues but not my strong endorsement are Barbara Kopple’s latest, Gun Fight (2011) and Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman (2010, MC-81), which dealt respectively with the important issues of gun control and public education reform, but did not tell me anything particularly new or eye-opening, though I tend to support their conclusions.

Death of child or parent

2011-05-23T16:05:00.000-04:00

Rabbit Hole. (2010, MC-76) The best thing I can say about John Cameron Mitchell’s adaptation of David Lindsay-Abair’s Pulitzer-winning play is that I had no sense of its being a filmed stage piece. Carefully skirting grief-porn and restraining the wildness of his Hedwig and the Angry Inch persona, Mitchell relies on his actors to reveal emotion through indirection rather than bludgeoning, and leavens the proceedings with unexpected wit. Aaron Eckhart and especially Nicole Kidman are excellent as a couple whose 4-year-old son was struck and killed by a car eight months before, each flailing to find the coping strategy that will work for him or her, but maybe not for them. Diane Wiest as Kidman’s mother leads an effective supporting cast. At a swift 92 minutes, the film does not wallow or browbeat, and while the setting lacks a tangible sense of reality (even in a grocery store aisle), the actors unfold the truth of their characters’ emotions and personalities. Not exactly a film to lift one’s spirits, it does not punish the viewer but rewards attention.

The Father of My Children. (2010, MC-76) It’s no spoiler to say that at midpoint of this film, the father dies and the children grieve, three young daughters, each in her own way, and their mother in hers. Mia Hansen-Love tells this story with such intimacy that you suspect it happened to her, and the father does turn out to be based on a well-known French film producer. In the first half of the film his small independent operation comes under increasing pressure from all sides, as he suavely drives around while juggling two cellphones, to spend rushed but quality time with the delightful females of his family. In the second half his family tries to pick up the pieces of his ruined life, in a film that gives equal weight to joy and sorrow, love and mortality. It’s lively rather than deathly, and a sleeper on my best of the year list.

More classics or not?

2011-05-23T16:00:00.000-04:00

Pardon me while I return for the nonce to my original purpose in writing this filmlog, started on 1-1-00 and put online five years later. Namely, to keep track of what I’ve been watching and my immediate off-hand evaluation, to forestall the flaws of memory. So lately I’ve seen or re-seen a lot of films I don’t feel moved to “review” in any meaningful sense, but merely to register my reaction.

First off, in my “Drawn to Portraits” film series at the Clark, Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) lived up to its billing as noir classic though I was struck most by its comic elements, which made me think of The Big Sleep, though Gene Tierney is no Bacall and Dana Andrews hardly a Bogart. Portrait of Jennie (1948) delivered equally, in the vein of romantic fantasy, with sophisticated visuals and great location shooting in NYC by director William Dieterle, and well-played leads by Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones, lovingly produced by her husband, David O. Selznick. Only Vertigo failed to meet its overblown expectations – what are you thinking of, Sight & Sound critics poll, to vote this second only to Citizen Kane as the best film of all time? I could name a half-dozen Hitchcocks I think are better (first off – Strangers on a Train).

It was another critics poll -- this for best of past decade -- that drove me to give their #2 choice another chance, in this case David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), and I came away equally unconvinced. I still don’t get it, though the film does showcase Naomi Watts to advantage. Despite re-viewing, the film continues to make little sense for me, and any atmospheric impression it made quickly evaporated.

Another second look confirmed another less than enthusiastic response. Naked (1993) remains a strong but unpleasant experience. I am usually a big fan of Mike Leigh’s kitchen sink dramas, but though David Thewlis is powerful here as a blow-in from Yorkshire to London, where he crashes with an old girlfriend, while abusing her and her roommate and any other woman who happens by, this does not rank with my favorites. His tirades are compelling in a bitter, bilious, spittle-spewing way, but for me the misogyny was not redeemed by any empathy-extending understanding of the character.

Pure happenstance led me to re-viewing Wise Blood, John Huston’s 1979 adaptation of the Flannery O’Connor novel, but I recall from long ago a similar reaction of exhilaration and letdown. Brad Dourif is perfectly squirrelly as Hazel Motes, a GI who returns to the southern town of his hellfire upbringing, and rebels against the Jesus-soaked atmosphere by preaching fanatically the “Church of Truth Without Jesus Christ.” It’s extremely pungent, but in the end I find the story, like O’Connor herself, too extreme and arbitrary. But there is a reek of gothic reality and wicked satire along the way.

Also caught on TCM was Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1950), Albert Lewin’s surprisingly literate romantic melodrama set in a technicolor Spanish village, where American émigré songstress Ava Gardner captivates all the men and is in turn captivated by James Mason, the mysterious sailor whose identity is given away in the title. The movie aspires to myth in a manner that is lush but not totally laughable.

The same might be said of Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), which I watched because I was hoping to show a series of Cleopatra films at the Clark, in conjunction with an appearance by bestselling biographer Stacy Schiff, but that fell through. This fairly lavish production of the G.B. Shaw play features Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh to good effect, but ultimately doesn’t make a whole lot of sense out of the spectacle, a problem that may be characteristic of films about the Queen of the Nile.

Mildred Pierce (1945) I watched again to compare Joan Crawford’s performance with Kate Winslet’s, also good but also lost in an unengaging story. Michael Curtiz’s version adds a murder to spice things up, but the design and the acting, and the implicit social commentary on woman’s lot, are not enough to involve me with a bunch of not-so-interesting characters. Compare Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas for a more compelling movie about a mother sacrificing all for an ungrateful daughter.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1987) was another film I was willing to give a second chance, and it was no hardship to watch Daniel Day Lewis and Juliet Binoche, and director Philip Kaufman’s clever insertion of them into newsreel footage of the Prague Spring uprising, but it does go on and on, the characters remain opaque to me, and I eventually fast forwarded to the end. Lena Olin, however, caught my eye, so I went back to another film I remember liking more, Enemies, a Love Story (1989). Paul Mazursky’s adaptation of an Isaac B. Singer novel tells of a Holocaust survivor who finds himself in a vividly-realized 1949 New York, with “wives” in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx. One is Lena Olin, as electrifying as I remembered, and another is Anjelica Huston, wry and witty with deep submerged pain. To me there were a few key gaps in motivation and narrative, but the acting and atmosphere carried the day, though I found it hard to forgive Ron Silver in the central role for the actor’s subsequent emergence as a right-wing apologist.

One last note on what’s classic and what’s not: A while back I made an effort to confront the inflated reputation of Nicholas Ray, an especial favorite of my favorite director, Francois Truffaut. They Live by Night (1948) got me interested, with Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell extremely affecting as two hardscrabble kids in love and on the run, in a film that effectively combines social realism and doomed romanticism. So then I watched On Dangerous Ground (1951), and bought in somewhat to its reputation as a noir classic, intrigued by Robert Ryan as the rough-edged cop and Ida Lupino as the blind woman he investigates and falls for, though I still found something slipshod and unconvincing in Ray’s direction. Then I went back to Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and found the trio of James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo iconic but their story once again unconvincing. Johnny Guitar (1954) is indeed an eye-popping curiosity, a luridly-colored Western with a monumental Joan Crawford as the whore-turned-businesswoman, and Sterling Hayden as the gunslinging title character who wants to protect her against the raging jealousy of Mercedes Cambridge and her pack of vigilantes. But again I do not see the mythic Freudian depths that some choose to see in Ray’s work. And in King of Kings (1961) and 55 Days to Peking (1962), I see none of the intimate reality that Ray is purported to bring to his standard epics. I remember being impressed by the latter as a youth, but Charlton Heston is by now another actor I cannot abide because of his off-screen activities and on-screen impassivity. I understand that Nick Ray himself is a Bigger Than Life (1956) character in film history, but his films stubbornly do not make much of an impression on me. Someday I’ll give the highly-esteemed In a Lonely Place (1950) another chance, and catch up with a couple of other Ray films on TCM, but I don’t imagine I’ll come over to Nick in time.

Catching up with film

2011-05-03T15:04:00.001-04:00

Once I fall out of the habit of writing about films the day after I see them, they begin to back up, and now I’m stunned to see that I haven’t posted here in more than a month. So I begin a process of catching up, starting with recent films, now that I have only two more must-sees due on dvd before I close the book on 2010 releases and make my official picks for best of the year. Between now and then I will also catch up with recommended tv series, documentaries, and another round of “Classic or not?” I will also have further word on upcoming film series at the Clark, so please keep coming back to Cinema Salon, even though I haven’t given you much to see lately.

White Material. (2010, MC-81) Claire Denis’ latest earned the bronze medal, voted third-best of 2010 in Film Comment poll, but strikes me as a film I would have to see again to settle on an opinion about -- but which I have no desire to see again. As a director, Denis is a refined taste whose films I sometimes get (Beau Travail, Friday Night) and sometimes don’t (The Intruder, this film). Here she returns to themes of her upbringing in Africa (as in Chocolat), with French settlers driven out in a civil war waged by child soldiers led by a charismatic and progressive young officer. The ever-interesting Isabelle Huppert, whitest of the white, alien to the dark continent, has only one thought, to save her coffee plantation and its current crop, but forces are unleashed that will consume everything around her within the two days the film covers, in its own roundabout way. The treatment is elliptical and enigmatic, but the sense of encircling menace is persuasive. The shock ending adds to, rather than resolves, the puzzlement.

Mother. (2010, MC-79) Bong Joon-ho’s latest came in 11^th in that same critics poll (8^th in indieWire). After The Host and Memories of Murder, the young South Korean is definitely one of the flavors of the month in world cinema, putting his personal stamp on various genres, following that wry creature-feature and offbeat police procedural with this “wrong man” mystery widely described as Hitchcockian, though Bong is even weirder than that chubby old pervert. When not strange and fascinating, he can be flat-footed as well as deadpan, but this film is made by the performance of Kim Hye-ja as the mother determined to exonerate her dim-bulb grown son, who is accused of murdering a schoolgirl. The twists of the story sometimes elicit a “Huh, what?” response, but in the end it all hangs together around that central performance.

Two favorite directors I included in my “10 Under 50” film series at the Clark some years back had recent releases that attracted almost no attention, but with which I finally caught up based on the talent involved.

Michael Winterbottom’s Summer in Genoa (known as Genova (MRQE-64) when released in Britain in 2008) is just out on US dvd, probably predicated on Colin Firth’s recent anointing as Best Actor. He’s good here as the father to two girls, probably 16 and 10, who were with their mother when she was killed in a car accident. Old college friend Catherine Keener gets him a teaching position in Italy and he feels that getting far away is the best way for the girls and him to cope. Maybe yes, maybe no. The film casts a real Don’t Look Now vibe over the narrow alleyways of the medieval city, which are penetrated by Winterbottom’s travel-light style of filmmaking. With a compelling mix of beauty and risk, the film is flawed mainly by a conclusion that makes the whole thing seem like all wind-up and no pitch.

Similarly ominous but unresolved is Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth (2009, MC-51), which also went nowhere despite the presence of two compelling performers in Michelle Williams and Gael Garcia Bernal. They play a well-to-do New York couple who share a fabulous loft apartment with their young daughter and her Filipina nanny. She’s an emergency room doctor on the night shift, and he’s a computer game designer off to Asia to sign a big contract, so as much as they love their daughter, the girl’s primary relationship is with the lovely nanny, who has left her own two boys back on the islands in order to earn a better life for them in this globalized but fractured world. Each character in the film suffers in isolation from the others, despite connection by cellphone and distant affection. Grim and moody to match the maker’s name, with lovely images and haunting music, this film has much to recommend it, but finally fails to satisfy. The world may be a rigged game, but this film seems a bit rigged as well.

Here are two more films I found more interesting than many did, given a certain affinity going in:

Aaron Katz’s Quiet City (2007, MRQE) is a “mumblecore” enactment of twenty-somethings drifting through the Brooklyn scene. Having once been a twenty-something drifting through Brooklyn, I was willing to expend attention on a newer version of same. As is characteristic of this genre, the girl is attractive but not conventionally so, and the guy is a shlub. Each shot -- some of them lovely -- is held too long, as if trying to protract the proceedings to feature length. The film would love to be another Before Sunrise, but falls in the middle of the mumblecore pack, among whom only Andrew Bujalski so far emerges as a talent to watch.

Marco Amenta’s The Sicilian Girl (2010, MC-48) I got into initially for its striking images of the island of my forefathers. Then I was held by the performance of Veronica D'Agostino as the feisty teenage girl who decides to revenge the deaths of her father and brother by informing on the Mafia, and goes into ineffective witness protection in Rome. The story follows, perhaps too faithfully, that of a real young woman about whom the director has already made a documentary, and never really goes as deep as you hope it might.

Catching up with TV

2011-05-03T14:54:00.000-04:00

Like Metacritic, I offer a hearty endorsement to Downton Abbey (2011, MC-92), which I did not see when it was broadcast on PBS Masterpiece Theater last winter, but caught up with on dvd (streaming video also available from Netflix). I simply found it outrageously entertaining, mixing all the pleasures of British heritage productions with a winking wit that managed to collect a host of old clichés into a postmodern soap opera delight. The seven episodes follow the life of the title character, a massive old pile sure to impress, from the sinking of the Titanic to the start of World War I, brilliantly sketching in the lives of a score of characters upstairs and down. I don’t know when I have seen a better ensemble of actors, every last one making the most of his or her minutes on screen. Julian Fellowes wrote Gosford Park and here combines that with Remains of the Day and many a BBC production, but comes up with something that seems totally fresh. The subsequent revival of Upstairs, Downstairs seemed pallid by comparison.

I hope you are taking in the fifth and final season of Friday Night Lights (MC-82), now showing on NBC but already out on dvd, which I previously watched on DirecTV last fall. If not, you really ought to start with the first season and watch the whole series. It definitely ranks in my Top 10 of all time. Yes, it’s nominally about high school football in Texas, but it offers one of the great continuing portraits of a marriage in the coach and his wife, superbly played by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, to go with a believable and involving group portrait of a community, intelligent about currents of race and sex and economic reality. Lots of cute chicks and studs too. Really, give it a try, it will surprise you. Though it wandered from its core inspiration into melodrama in the second season, the show reinvented itself in subsequent seasons and ended its five-season run on a perfect series of notes.

In that, it couldn’t be more different from Big Love (MC-85 -- you've got to be kidding!), which utterly fizzled in its finale, spinning further and further into absurdity. As with another recent HBO miniseries, Mildred Pierce (MC-69), at the end I was not just disappointed but wanted back all the time and attention I had invested to that point. But just when I was thinking about canceling my HBO subscription, the second season of Treme (MC-84) began. To me, David Simon can do no wrong, with The Wire my all-time favorite tv series, and Generation Kill ranking pretty high too. This multifaceted look at the music and culture of New Orleans as it tries to come back after Katrina may lack narrative drive, but steeps the viewer in a creative gumbo of diverse characters. Again the acting is strong across the board, carrying multiple storylines forward in a way that makes one care about each and every one (though Lucia Micarelli most of all). And for somebody who can’t get enough of Bunk and Lester, it’s great to see Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters again. And Kim Dickens coming over from FNL, etc. etc.

I’m a latecomer to Men of a Certain Age (MC-86) on TNT, but after my interest was piqued by one new episode, I went back and caught up with the first season on dvd, and am currently watching reruns of the second in preparation for its resumption with new episodes on June 1^st. I was definitely not among the Everyone who Loves Raymond, so I was not alert to Ray Romano’s new show, but now I have to say that at least I like him. And even more I like Andre Braugher and Scott Bakula as the guys with whom he hikes, eats lunch, shoots the shit, and negotiates the vicissitudes of midlife. More affectionate and truthful satire than sitcom, this show presents believably rounded characters in characteristically believable situations of work and family. Try it, and if you’re at all like me, you will find a pleasant surprise.

Another new show I was slow to see, but now look forward to more of, is The Big C (MC-66), Showtime’s attempt to match the success of Weeds, a show I sampled but decidedly did not get hooked on. The new series stars Laura Linney, however, and I’ve been half in love with her since You Can Count on Me, so I was inclined to give it a try when I had the opportunity, despite not being drawn by the idea of a comedy about cancer. And Ms. Linney is indeed a delight, but the whole show is wittier and sharper than I expected, definitely worth catching.

Documentary round-up

2011-03-27T16:49:00.000-04:00

Inside Job (2010, MC-88) suffered for me from the high expectations I brought to it, having found Charles Ferguson’s first film, No End in Sight, the most enlightening documentary I’d seen about the Iraq War. So I figured he’d really unpack the banking meltdown of 2008, and very likely I’d join the critics of the Film Comment poll and rank Inside Job among the top handful of films from last year. Not quite. The film offers a clear enough picture of the financial skullduggery behind the crisis, and I agree that some people should have gone to jail for it, but I didn’t find its argument as informative and convincing as I expected. So I can’t quite agree with its Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Another nominee that I found more surprising and satisfying was Waste Land (2010, MC-78), which I will certainly schedule for the Clark at first opportunity. Vik Muniz is an artist well-known for his re-photographed portraits in chocolate, sugar, or dust, and a pair of matching Madonnas, one in peanut butter and one in jelly. Lucy Walker’s film follows Muniz when he returns to Brazil, having achieved success in the global art world, in an effort to give something back to the community from which he arose. He chooses as his focus the largest landfill in the world, where most of the waste in the Rio area goes, and as subject for his portraits the catadores, or pickers, who recycle a modest living out of the piles of garbage. He takes photos of them, and then enlists their aid in recreating the portraits by arranging refuse on the floor of a warehouse and then re-photographing the construction from above. He then takes the portrait subjects to a London gallery show and auction of the finished works, returning the money raised to the pickers’ association for mutual aid. There are many ways this film could have turned icky, but it maintains its humor and intelligence throughout, and winds up quite moving as well.

At first I assumed the HBO documentary Reagan (2011) would be an anodyne celebration of the Gipper’s hundredth birthday, another amnesiac hagiography of the patron saint of all Republicans. But then I saw that it was directed by Eugene Jarecki, who in Why We Fight went back to Eisenhower’s farewell speech and lucidly showed just how the “military-industrial complex” has taken over in the fifty years since the old soldier’s warning. This film manages to debunk without anger, and still to celebrate what there was to celebrate in Reagan’s leadership. It works as a reality check both ways, more a serious work of history than a partisan argument.

Another documentary I approached dubiously on PBS "Independent Lens" series, For Once in My Life (2010), turned out to be well worth seeing. I suspected this story of a band of variously-disabled performers from a Goodwill facility in Miami getting ready for a big public performance would be a source of saccharine uplift, but the film by James Bigham and Mark Moormann included as much eye-opening insight as special pleading, on the path to its rousing and heartening conclusion.

I also didn’t expect a competition among pastry chefs for the French honor of “master craftsman” to make for a riveting film either, but I certainly had enough respect for giant of direct cinema D.A. Pennebaker and his partner Chris Hegedus, to give a look to Kings of Pastry (2010, MC-69). The film baked up more amazement and emotion, not to mention humor and suspense, out of sculptures in sugar than one could have easily imagined going in, with a small subject that revealed unsuspected depths of implication.

A much weightier subject is addressed in Pray the Devil Back to Hell (2010, MC-78). Gini Reticker’s film follows a peace movement among Christian and Muslim mothers, led by Leymah Gbowee, which managed to bring an end to Liberia’s civil war with the overthrow and exile of corrupt strongman Charles Taylor. This film makes an excellent prequel to The Iron Ladies of Liberia, another good documentary which covers the subsequent election of Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson as the first woman president in Africa, and the initial efforts at reconstruction by her largely female administration.

Also worthy of note is the second season of the Sundance Channel series, Brick City (2011), a high-toned reality show that follows Newark mayor Cory Booker as he deals with budget apocalypse and a re-election campaign. Booker is an admirable and engaging character, a Rhodes scholar who takes on the mission of saving New Jersey’s beleaguered largest city against formidable obstacles, while maintaining some sense of mystery about his private life, if any, and his deepest motivations. His story is intertwined with that of the police chief and various reforming gang members, as well as the entrenched opposition of native Newark or would-be radical forces. In the current days of municipal meltdown and threatened default, these stories are important to see, and the comparison to The Wire as a portrait of a city in multiple crises is well-deserved. Booker’s story is fascinating to follow, from the excellent stand-alone documentary Street Fight, which detailed his first, unsuccessful run for mayor, through the first season of Brick City, in which he wins and takes office for the first time. I’m eager to see whatever’s next.

As an addendum to the Cinema Salon film club’s first series on “The Art of Documentary,” let me re-recommend F for Fake, Orson Welles’ elegantly braided exploration of art and lying; The Gleaners & I, Agnes Varda’s amusing and thoughtful exploration of the margins of economic system, and an obvious inspiration for Waste Land; and most especially, Heddy Honigmann’s Forever, which seemed even better to me on second viewing, in its exploration of death and immortality, art and memory, through the window of Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Displaced persons

2011-03-27T16:30:00.000-04:00

The central character of Amreeka (2009, MC-73) is as much placeless as displaced. As she has to inform airport security, she has no country, she is Palestinian and comes from occupied territory. Her 15-minute commute to work takes two hours because she has to go around the Wall and through checkpoints where she and her son are routinely hassled. Her husband has left her for a younger, slimmer woman, and her son urges that since the old man’s done what he wanted, they ought to do what they want, which is move to America when their papers come through. They go to stay with her sister in suburban Illinois, her husband a doctor whose successful practice is suddenly shunned after 9/11. Despite two degrees and ten years experience in banking, our heroine has to take a job at White Castle, while pretending to her family that she is working in the bank next door. Cherien Dabis knows whereof she makes her film, and while it may run through a checklist of predictable plot points, it does so with grace, charm, and wit.

Nearly witless yet sharply satiric, Four Lions (2010, MC-68) portrays a group of Muslim young men living in England but not at home there, longing for jihad, with pratfalls at every step. This film can only be categorized as terrorist slapstick, so be prepared to laugh as one dunderhead after another blows himself up, and if you can’t imagine laughing at such things, then pass this film by. In one respect, Chris Morris’s film is very much like The Hangover (which I just happened to catch in passing on HBO, but did not find special in any way), in which a group of wild and crazy guys find nothing but misadventure on their path to paradise, whether it be Las Vegas or scented gardens with 77 virgins. Given the exploits of the underwear bomber and the clown who left a carful of fertilizer in Times Square, this film may give a truer than expected portrait of the losers who turn to terrorism, but it still winds up a mixed bag, which may or may not be yours.

In Alamar (2010, MC-77), a young boy is transported to something like paradise, above the coral reefs of Mexico. He is the product of a brief union between an Italian mother and a Mexican guide, and is going to spend time with his father, living in a house on stilts above the water and spending his days baking in the sun on fishing boats, falling into the rhythms of an extremely elemental life, while tacitly absorbing paternal lessons in communion with nature. Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio’s film is half documentary, half rhapsody, slow and stately, intimate and sensual, quiet but ultimately powerful.

I guess I was the person displaced from Around a Small Mountain (2010, MC-63) – I just didn’t get it. Jacques Rivette’s latest falls under my category of “The New Wave gets old,” and as with Resnais’ Wild Grass, I am disinclined to follow. Only my man Rohmer was strong till the very end. Rivette as usual looks at the lives of performers, in this case a traveling circus in the south of France, but unusually and mercifully this film is quite short. I’m interested enough in Jane Birkin to watch for 80 minutes to try to figure out why she left the circus 15 years ago and why she’s back now, and whether she will fall for the Italian charmer stalking her. But I didn’t figure it out, and I didn’t really care.

I’ll squeeze one more recent film under this heading: It’s Kind of a Funny Story (2010, MC-63). This unmemorable title suits this kind of okay movie, about a teenager who is displaced by checking himself into a mental hospital, when suicidal feelings get the better of him. It’s a plush place where he learns some not-very-hard life lessons and meets a cute girl with just a few cosmetic scars on her wrists and face. The whole thing is less “Boy, Interrupted” than “Boy Goes to Overnight Camp.” Still, I watched it because I’d been impressed with the earlier films of the directorial team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Half Nelson and Sugar. They should forget catering to a wider audience, and go back to making their own stories, instead of adapting popular young adult novels. Keir Gilchrist is ingratiating enough as the central character, Zach Galifianakis is good as the fellow crazy from whom he learns the ropes, and the rest of the cast is inoffensive in this “cuckoo’s nest lite.” So the film won’t bore you silly or altogether betray your sense of plausibility, but you won’t remember it or its title for very long.

Never Let Me Go

2011-03-16T17:53:00.000-04:00

Don’t let this one go by. Mark Romanek’s adaptation of a Kazuo Ishiguro novel received some lukewarm reviews, but I’m with those who see its virtues. Foremost among them is Carey Mulligan -- I believe I could watch the subtle movements of her kewpie-doll face for the duration and be content. The suddenly ubiquitous Andrew Garfield also seems to be inherently interesting. And here Keira Knightley has something within her range. They are residents of a not quite right British boarding school some decades ago, in this strangely-retro speculative fiction of cloning to harvest organs. There, I’ve given it away. And will do so more by comparing this film to Gattaca in its thoughtful addressing of questions of genetic ethics. The three characters are earlier played by a younger trio who mirror them nicely. The film is prettily shot by and I found Rachel Portman’s music to be appropriately lugubrious and meditative. Aside from the set-up, I leave the mystery and romance to unfold for you step by quiet step – it won’t make you happy but it will hold your attention, and give you plenty to think over afterward. (2010, MC-69)

Lovers discourse

2011-03-16T17:50:00.003-04:00

Showing Eric Rohmer’s La Collectioneuse (1967) to the Cinema Salon film club was one of the most agonized viewing experiences I've ever had, with its provocative aggravations hardly giving most of my audience an inviting introduction to one of my favorite directors. Yet I could have as easily made a case for it as apologized for it, and I was glad when some of the audience spoke up in favor. Later the same day, I watched two other of Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales” and confirmed that he is indeed engaging as well as persistently interesting, and now I’ve been on a binge of watching or re-watching every Rohmer film I could get my hands on.

The most excruciating scene of La Collectioneuse was certainly when the annoyingly pretentious artist Daniel persisted in mindlessly stamping his feet on the living room floor. The character was played by a real artist named Daniel and he no doubt considered his rudeness a conceptual performance piece, as painfully prolonged as many such are. While the discomfort of the scene might have seemed too mimetic, still one could see Rohmer doing interesting things within it, in the reactions of the other two characters, the man who smirks admiringly at this friend’s effrontery even while his own leg falls into the other’s rhythm, and the girl who determinedly moves to her own rhythm and gives a sensible if exasperated response. The whole film is there in miniature, if you can bear to watch.

But the thing is, Rohmer is usually easy on the eyes -- like Haydée in this film -- and if you pick up his rhythm, get on his wavelength, he is endlessly and seamlessly entertaining, yet continually thought-provoking. Like Ozu, he is a master who basically made one lifelong film, comprised of interlocking (and almost interchangeable) chapters. So here’s my brief take on a number of those chapters.

The “Moral Tales” I watched to get the taste of La Collectioneuse out of my mouth were Ma Nuit Chez Maud (1969) and Love in the Afternoon (1972). Both were every bit as good as I remembered them to be, well establishing the Rohmer formula – a few attractive people in an attractive place, ruminating endlessly on the ambiguities of attraction. One person is pursuing another, but is distracted from pursuit by a third. Much rationalization -- and comic delusion of self and other – follows. The characters are specimens we observe with sympathetic amusement.

In My Night at Maud’s, the black & white setting is Clermont-Ferrand at Christmastime. That’s Pascal’s hometown, and the film revolves around the question of Pascal’s Wager, as Jean-Louis Trintignant pursues his “innocent” blond dreamgirl Marie-Christine Barrault, despite his attraction to dark-haired, worldly-wise divorcee Francoise Fabian. In Chloe in the Afternoon (as it was first released in the U.S. to avoid confusion with the Audrey Hepburn film), a stuffy Parisian businessman threatens his comfortably bourgeois marriage by taking up with an old bohemian flame. In Claire’s Knee (1970), which I’ve seen often enough not to need my memory refreshed, the setting is summer at a Swiss lake, where an engaged diplomat forms a fixation on a blond teenager’s lovely gam.

Beatrice Romand plays another teenager, a dark frizzy-haired foil to Claire, but grows up to return as the main character in Le Beau Marriage (1981), in Rohmer’s next series, “Comedies and Proverbs” (and will return again, as is Rohmer’s habit with actresses, as the delightfully difficult middle-aged seeker for love in An Autumn Tale in 1998). Here she’s a young woman who’s never had trouble attracting men, commuting between art studies in Paris and family home and job in the old section of Le Mans, when she decides arbitrarily to get married and suddenly encounters disappointment in her pursuit of a mate.

We return to a seaside summer in Pauline at the Beach (1983), with our first glimpse of the delightful Amanda Langlet as the 15-year-old title character, who follows the erotic escapades of her va-va-voom older cousin and begins to form her own attachments. As usual, Rohmer manages to find humor, pathos, and complication in his bikini-clad characters. Summer (Le Rayon Vert) (1986) features another difficult babe and Rohmer favorite, Marie Riviere, as she restlessly seeks a place to vacation and some sort of romantic companionship. Boyfriends and Girlfriends (L’Ami de mon amie) (1988) concludes the “Comedies and Proverbs” cycle, back in a fancy new suburb of Paris, where young professional women try to find a mate and sort out their love lives, as usual charmingly complicated and fondly satirical.

Then Rohmer turned to his “Tales of Four Seasons,” beginning with A Tale of Springtime (Conte de printemps) (1989), which follows a young Parisian philosophy teacher as she falls in with a younger girl and eventually her father, in another rondelay of hidden motive and sexual scheming. Amanda Langlet returns in A Summer’s Tale (Conte d’été) (1996), again wise beyond her years as she waits for a young man to make up his mind, while he vacations on the Brittany seacoast waiting for his tardy girlfriend and encountering a hot chick, emulating the choice of Paris in selecting the fairest of the three. Scandalously unavailable in any video format, I remember An Autumn Tale (1998) most fondly of the tetralogy, for its winning reunion of Beatrice Romand and Marie Riviere, the former as a winemaker ripe for love amongst her beautiful vineyards. I don’t remember much about A Winter’s Tale (1991), except that it delivered the reliable, though ineffable, pleasures of any Rohmer film.

I recently reviewed Rohmer’s last film, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2006), and then at last, I caught up with his penultimate film, Triple Agent (2004), which as a World War II spy saga seemed like an outlier in his oeuvre, but turned out to be quintessential Rohmer in its depiction of intimate deception of one’s self and the other. Based on a real case, the film examines a White Russian general living in France, who may be collaborating with the Nazis or the Russians, but is certainly deceiving his stay-at-home Greek painter wife, in Rohmer’s usual round of conversations filled with themes of loyalty and betrayal, trust and suspicion. Amanda Langlet reappears as the upstairs neighbor in this very interior drama.

These last two films complete another implicit cycle of Rohmer's work, which might be categorized to as historical stylizations. However different in setting and style, each essentially recapitulates all his obsessions, of romantic complications among attractive people, usually young. The Marquise of O (1976) adapts a Kleist novel into a beautifully chaste though passionate vision of domestic life during the Napoleonic wars. Perceval (1978) emulates a medieval pageant, on minimally unreal sets, to retell a tale of chivalry and knighthood amongst a group of lovely modern young people, especially notable for introducing Fabrice Luchini as the title character, humorously balanced between naiveté and nobility. The Lady and the Duke (2001) plays out an affecting story of the French Revolution from the perspective of the nobility, against green-screened period paintings of interiors and exteriors, an effective innovation in historical recreation that surprisingly has not been much emulated.

So there in capsule form is the career of one of the greatest of all filmmakers. Dip in at any point, and enjoy!

Recent viewing

2011-03-03T14:41:00.001-05:00

Reviews are mixed, by myself or the critics, on these assorted films from 2010 that I combine here simply because I’ve watched them in the past few weeks.

The biggest surprise to me was Animal Kingdom (2010, MC-83), which I put in the category of Red Riding Trilogy as films that ought to be loathsome in their violence and corruption, but actually approach the pity and terror that is the point of such drama. David Michôd’s debut crime thriller follows the disintegration of a Melbourne family of not-so-goodfellas, with their pride -- preying and preyed upon -- led by a dowdy old lioness, a seductive and deceptively sweet grandma named Smurf (believably embodied by Oscar nominee Jacki Weaver with a bleach-blond mane). She takes in her 17-year-old grandson when her estranged daughter ODs on heroin. He comes under the wing of his uncles, for whom armed robbery (as in The Town) is the family trade, though threatened by cops more eager for the kill than the collar. This grimy, unglamorous revenge tragedy plays out in a sunny suburban landscape of gas stations and supermarkets, yet remains hypnotically absorbing through its twists and turns, feints and blows. Character, even when creepy, is more important than action. The acting is good across the board, though only Guy Pearce, as an unusually honest cop, is a familiar face.

Also worthy of note is Lebanon (2010, MC-85). Written and directed by Samuel Maoz, this film -- like Waltz With Bashir – is a personal reminiscence of being a very raw Israeli conscript in the 1982 war in Lebanon. The particular novelty here is that the entire film is shot from a viewpoint inside an armored vehicle, so it does for tanks what Das Boot did for submarines, evoking a claustrophobic atmosphere so dense you can smell and taste it. In some ways the film is as formulaic as a play, as one character after another drops through the porthole for a scene or two with the four typically assorted crew members, but the gunner’s-scope view of chaotic battles and civilian devastation seems particularly potent and powerfully evokes the director’s personal experience. Not a must-see, but worth a look if the subject interests you.

Creation (2010, MC-51) is one film I endorse more warmly than the Metacritic average. I found Paul Bettany quite convincing as Darwin and Jon Amiel’s direction good at evoking wonderment in the face of nature and portraying a plausible struggle to write. Bettany’s wife, Jennifer Connolly, serves as Darwin’s pious and severe wife, who dreads publication of his ideas. Marsha West (daughter of “McNutty” on The Wire) is engaging as the deceased child whose ghost haunts and inspires Darwin. I wouldn’t say this rises far above a good BBC television production, but it certainly held my interest and more, intellectually convincing despite some sentimental contrivance.

I part company with the critical consensus in the opposite direction on Dogtooth (2010, MC-73), a prizewinner at Cannes and nominee from Greece for Best Foreign Film. I confess I was slow to get the point of this fable of horrific parenting by Giorgos Lanthimos, but by the time I got over its sheer weirdness, I was put off by several scenes of shocking violence, gratuitous or not (less so by the graphic sex). So be forewarned about this story of three post-adolescent children who are kept sequestered in a gated compound, and whose isolation is enforced down to being taught nonsense meanings to words that might suggest a world outside. You could take this as a very bleak black comedy, or you could just leave it.

For You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010, MC-51), my “meh” response pretty much matched the critical average. I’m not sure why I keep watching Woody Allen, as he obsessively recycles his material year after year. There’s always an intriguing cast, and a smoothly delivered veneer, but never anything new being said. Naomi Watts made this one tolerable to watch, though Anthony Hopkins could do nothing with the hackneyed role of the old guy besotted with a young hottie, and several other familiar faces are wasted. We follow a group of loosely-related characters for an hour and a half, and then the narrator throws up his hands and closes the proceedings abruptly. I couldn’t believe that was it, that these desultory sketches were supposed to add up to a feature film.

Oscar contenders

2011-02-08T15:15:00.001-05:00

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been catching up with all the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture, and while none would be my pick over The Social Network or Winter’s Bone, most were worthy in their own right (and better than The Kids Are All Right in my book).

My friend suffers from a family affliction, a half-ironic obsession with the Royal Family, so she was eager to see The King’s Speech (2010, MC-88) as soon as it came out, even before its large haul of Oscar nominations. And why not? With Colin Firth as Bertie, destined to be George VI, and Helena Bonham Carter as the future Queen Mother, and Geoffrey Rush as the idiosyncratic speech therapist who helped the king-to-be to assume his duties as head of state, all directed by Tom Hooper, whom I’d noted for last year’s Damn United – what could go wrong? Not much did, and I liked the film more and more as it went on, as it got past the jokey byplay featured in previews, and really deepened into a study of an unlikely friendship. I wasn’t blown away, but was thoroughly entertained, and as moved as an anarchist can be by the personal travails of royalty. I liked the little girl who played Elizabeth too, and thought about her growing up to become Helen Mirren in The Queen.

I’m not sure what surprised me more about True Grit (2010, MC-80) – how purely entertaining this old-fashioned Western proved to be, or how little of the Coen brothers’ quirky personalities came through? Nonetheless it was immaculately made, with superb performances from Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn, Matt Damon as “LeBeef”, and Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie, the stalwart young girl who recruits the other two to track down her father’s killer. But the true star of the film was the dialogue lifted directly from the Charles Portis novel, in an archaic diction that achieved the same unlikely self-contained believability that the harsher dialect of Deadwood did. (I caught up with the John Wayne version on AMC, and while the Duke had his iconic portrait readymade, plastic smoothie Glenn Campbell and the Disneyesque Kim Darby are not a patch on the remake’s other pair. How did the Coens follow the original so closely and yet make it so much hipper?)

An even bigger surprise was Toy Story 3 (2010, MC-92), which more than overcomes the stigma of a sequel. Like Up, this Pixar animation is fit to play with the big boys, and definitely deserves consideration as one of the best films of the year. Andy is going away to college, and has to decide what to do with Woody, Buzz, and the rest of his long-disused toys. The film is both hilarious and effectively tearjerking, as the toys experience a variety of possible fates -- including a garbage truck and a preschool that is not the utopia it seems at first glance -- before finding a safe haven. The standout among the new characters is a Ken doll, who has as much surprising personality as the dog in Up, though a sinister huggy bear and a discarded baby doll also make a deep impression. Despite being a cartoon and a sequel, this is certainly among the most powerful cinematic experiences of the year. It made me go back and check out Toy Story 2, which I had skipped in a prejudice against films with a number at the end of the title, and found it almost equally charming and eye-popping.

Last and certainly least of Best Picture nominees (aside from Inception) is Black Swan (2010, MC-79). Darren Aronofsky’s intense direction kept me involved till the Grand Guignol turned silly, and Natalie Portman’s performance, both as ballet dancer and crazy person, was better than I expected, but in the end I found this an empty-headed horror film, relying on shrieking chords and shock cuts instead of meaningful characterizations. A puppet show rather than a genuine backstage drama, this film’s pretension to follow in the steps of The Red Shoes or All About Eve is totally overblown, a traducing of cinema history.

And the final nominees are...

2011-02-08T15:09:00.000-05:00

I dutifully took in two final multiple-Oscar nominees in a self-made double feature at Beacon Cinema, both highly competent translations to the big screen of interesting real-life stories, both including in the final credits footage of the real characters behind the stories, but neither of which is likely to make my Best of 2010 list.

You have give credit to an exuberant director like Danny Boyle for taking on the challenge of such a constricted subject as 127 Hours (MC-82). The title refers to the time Aron Ralston spent alone in a canyon crevice with his arm caught under a huge boulder, until he did what he had to do to escape with his life. The first major hurdle is to find an actor with whom we would want to spend extended time up-close and very personal, and one could hardly do better than James Franco. As it happened, I went to this film immediately after catching a few minutes of him as dropout Daniel in the short-lived but immortal tv-series Freaks & Geeks – that crooked smile charming even in 1999 as a high school student (and now a graduate student at Yale and RISD, not to mention co-host of this year’s Oscar ceremony). Boyle gets things going with a burst of kinetic exhilaration, multiple images to a pounding beat, as Aron escapes the big city on a Friday night and heads for the canyon wilderness of Utah, for a weekend of biking and hiking, and penetrating the landscape. Until he falls down the rabbit hole. Boyle has the opportunity to interject hallucinatory imagery, but from then on, it’s just us and Mr. Franco in very close quarters. There’s some gore, of course, more horrific than a horror picture, but the essence of this film is still its intimacy and its ratiocination, as Aron confronts his dilemma with the limited tools at hand.

Then I watched a few minutes of the Super Bowl on the big screen -- the Beacon showing it for free -- and went back to another screening room to watch The Fighter (MC-79). The boxing film is firmly delineated as a genre, a tight box all its own, and it’s surprising to see a director as wacked out as David O. Russell work within the small lighted ring, so indelibly inscribed by a whole range of films, out of which Raging Bull stands as the peak. Of course, he’s got Christian Bale to go all crackhead crazy for him, as the coulda-been-a-contender, who punched his one-way ticket to palookaville with drugs, but now fitfully tries to guide his younger half-brother to the success he never reached. Mark Wahlberg effectively plays Micky Ward, and this project is his homage to a hometown hero, the Pride of Lowell. Unfamiliar with boxing, I wouldn’t know that for three straight years after 2000, Ward’s bouts were hailed as the fight of the year, but this film deals with the decade before, when the craziness of his family – not just his brother, but his manager mother, the formidable Melissa Leo, and a Greek chorus of seven furious sisters – drove him out of the game. It takes the equally tough and adorably foul-mouthed barmaid Amy Adams to return him to his dream. All involved acquit themselves well, but in the end cannot escape the boxing movie formula, however true to life it may be. While I wouldn’t say that The Town was a better film, Affleck’s Charlestown exceeded my expectations by about as much as Wahlberg’s Lowell fell short of what I expect from director Russell, a personal favorite.

Two new documentaries

2011-02-08T15:02:00.001-05:00

The Tillman Story. (2010, MC-86) The title of Amir Bar-Lev’s accomplished documentary (following My Kid Could Paint That) refers to at least three different stories: Pat Tillman’s personal story, the story the military made up for propaganda purposes, and the story of the Tillman family’s attempt to get at the truth, and restore the integrity of their son’s life and purpose. One strength of this film is that it doesn’t force an argument at you, but offers a many-sided portrait that holds together more and more as you think about it. It would be easy to solicit rage around this subject, and maybe rage is an appropriate object, but even-handed contemplation offers more manifold truth. Pat Tillman became, unwillingly, a patriotic icon when he turned his back on a multimillion-dollar NFL contract to enlist in the Army Rangers after 9/11. When the army literally killed him in Afghanistan, they had to make up a story of an All-American hero’s death -- as always in war, “truth is the first casualty.” His family – mother, father, two brothers, wife – insist upon the real story of his death, as forthright and thoughtful as he had been in life. We follow as these strands spool out and interweave, free to take sides but not forced to do so. The final story takes shape in our minds after viewing. Call it “fratricide” or “friendly fire,” this is a tale with powerful overtones of tragic irony.

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer. (2010, MC-68) Alex Gibney is among the best of polemical documentarians working today, but his latest does not come up to the standard of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room; Taxi to the Dark Side; or even Casino Jack and the United States of Money, which he must have been working on at the same time as this film, which shares themes of big money and the corruption of politics. Not that Spitzer isn’t a character of some interest, but this film is too long and diffuse, goes off in too many directions, suggesting but not proving a number of conspiratorial connections. No doubt Spitzer made some powerful enemies, and Hank Greenburg of AIG and others parade their satisfaction at his downfall on screen. The politicization of the Justice Department in the Bush years is well known, but if the whole case amounted to a sting, and a hit job, well then, Spitzer himself was no innocent party. He manfully if not candidly admits to as much in interview, while also elevating himself with talk of Greek myth – hubris, Icarus, all that. One might also suggest that there was some ironic, if not causal, connection between Spitzer’s takedown and the financial meltdown of 2008. But then you add an inside look at the world of high-end escort services, introducing an intriguing array of characters, including one who didn’t want to appear in person so her words are replicated by an actress, and you’ve got a serious distraction. Overall, Gibney has developed a jazzed-up, argumentative documentary style as identifiable and influential as Ken Burns in his sedate PBS manner, but this film does not get deep enough into the character of Spitzer to invest him with the weight assigned to him.

Catfish and other fry

2011-02-08T14:54:00.000-05:00

Your reaction to a documentary has a lot to do with the expectation of truth that you bring to it. For me that yielded a response to Catfish (2010, MC-65) that was just the opposite of my reaction to The Cove, each documentary arriving with some question in the air about its relation between fact and artifice. With The Cove, that skepticism was amply confirmed by the “mission impossible” vibe, so I wound up thinking the whole thing was a hoax, which maybe it wasn’t. With Catfish, however, the approach was so modest and D-I-Y, that I granted some trust to its reality, and I did not find myself disappointed. Perhaps some reviewers were put off by the way the film was being pitched, as a real-life thriller, and refused to be had. But I found the whole operation sincere, if conscious of effect and aimed to a purpose. But that purpose was not to unmask a Web imposter, but to get to the real person under the mask, and in the process make multiple points about social media, NYC vs. the Heartland, as well as art in the construction of identity and personality. Ariel Schulman, with Henry Joost, set out to make a film about his brother Nev’s internet romance with not just a young woman but her whole family out in Upper Michigan, and his eventual quest to meet them in person. To my mind, the DVD extra with the three of them sitting together and answering questions about the film more than confirms their genuine geniality, and the essential honesty and good will of the project. See for yourself, but for me this is the real deal.

Not so real but fun just the same was I Love You, Man (2009, MC-70), which one reviewer accurately described as the best Judd Apatow film that Judd Apatow had nothing to do with. Apatow regulars Paul Rudd and Jason Segel are, however, at the heart of this bromance, and writer-director John Hamburg does mix in a good measure of psychological truth along with the gross-out humor, so this tickles the funny bone without insulting the brain.

In an odd coupling, even odder than Paul and Jason, I have to mention another film about the bond between men. Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (Novocento) (1976) follows the lives of two boys born on the same day in 1900, who grow up to be Robert DeNiro as the padrone, and Gerard Depardieu as the peasant communist, whose lifelong friendship and antagonism comes to a head on Liberation Day in 1945, with the overthrow of evil Fascist Donald Sutherland, whose leering performance typifies this film’s cartoonish approach to the politics of the first half of the 20^th century. Even after I decided against showing this film in a peasant-themed series I am doing at the Clark next summer, as tie-in to a Pissarro exhibition, I persisted through its original 5 ½ hour length, for the operatic elements that overcame a lot of awkwardness. I watched it dubbed in English to get the real voice of DeNiro and the other American actors, but perhaps the Italian would have seemed less stilted. Burt Lancaster wanders in from Visconti’s Leopard, along with many other borrowings from that master, but this film’s ambition of depicting brotherhood with historical sweep would eventually be achieved much more fully in a later Italian epic, The Best of Youth.

Mother and Child

2011-01-19T17:42:00.001-05:00

This is another comparable film that I preferred to widely-acclaimed The Kids Are All Right. The main point of comparison is in superlative performances by Annette Bening, but while in the other she retains her glamour in a lifestyle magazine setting, here in Rodrigo Garcia’s film, she strips away vanity in a truly lived-in LA environment. As with Nine Lives, the son of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and buddy of the three amigos (Cuarón, Del Toro, Inárritu) recruits exceptional actresses and actors to live out his interlocked stories of something like real life. (Garcia is also responsible for the HBO series In Treatment, which I will have to find my way into at some point.) There is an element of contrivance in the way different story lines finally connect, but the coincidences are more grounded than in Babel and its many modish epigones. The narrative leaps over major developments to focus on crucial moments of truth and feeling. Bening plays a difficult, disappointed woman, a physical therapist who yearns for the child she gave up when she got pregnant as a 14-year-old, while she cares for the aging mother who has instructed her in the disenchantments of life. In parallel, Naomi Watts (in a highly plausible pairing) plays her unknown daughter, who has sealed off the anger of her abandonment in determined independence and devotion to getting ahead as a high-powered lawyer. They pair off with Jimmy Smits and Samuel L. Jackson respectively, as a kindly fellow therapist and the head of a fancy legal firm. A third strand of the film is anchored by Kerry Washington, as an infertile bakery shop proprietor who is trying to adopt a child while ignoring the ambivalence of her husband. There are several other representations of the relationship highlighted in the title, which add up to a convincing group portrait, despite some gaps in plausibility. If you are a mother or were formerly a child, this adoption drama is worth seeing. (2010, MC-64)

Other side of town

2011-01-19T17:40:00.000-05:00

By happenstance, I watched in succession a group of recent films whose Metacritic ratings all fell in the mid- to high-70s, but of which I had decidedly different opinions, here listed from most favorable to least.

From The Town (2010, MC-74), I get the feeling that Ben Affleck looked at the efforts of elders Eastwood, Scorsese, Lumet, and others -- to penetrate the seamy side of his native Boston -- and said, “Hey, I’ll show you what we’re all about.” Of course he’d already done that in his first directorial effort, Gone Baby Gone, but I was surprised to find myself won over by this expression of the Beantown crime formula. I don’t usually go for car chases, but I found one such through the narrow streets of the North End to be hilarious. Likewise with extended shootouts between cops and robbers, but it’s kind of cute to see one such set in Fenway Park. The town of the title is Charlestown, a square mile that has in fact produced an amazing number of bank and armored car robbers, and while my knowledge of Boston’s ethnic enclaves is not comprehensive, I found the flavor of this relatively authentic, within its genre limits. Affleck himself is the leader of one gang, with childhood friend Jeremy Renner as his triggerman. In the course of one bank heist, they take manager Rebecca Hall hostage, but then release her blindfolded, only to find out she’s a “toonie” – as opposed to “townie” – in their own neighborhood. Ben tries to check out whether she could have recognized the masked robbers, and soon is falling for her (not a stretch of the imagination with the lovely Ms. Hall). Don Draper, aka Jon Hamm, leads the FBI investigation, while other welcome faces turn up, such as Chris Cooper for a scene or two as Affleck’s imprisoned father. Not a cinematic gem, this proved to be an entertaining genre exercise with strong local flavor.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010, MC-79) was reviewed as a documentary to see even if you have no appreciation of the subject. I don’t, and I did -- but I don’t necessarily advice you to do the same, even if Anne Sundberg and Ricki Stern do look beyond showbiz cliché in their portrait of a driven performer’s drive to perform, even well past her sell-by date. Though I was never able to see behind Rivers’ absurdly nipped-tucked-&-botoxed face to a more sympathetic character behind the mask, one does derive some sense of a will, a way, and a world. But if you want to spend time in the company of a tough New York Jewish comedienne and provocateur, you’d be better off with Fran Lebovits and Public Speaking.

Soul Kitchen (2010, MC-76) offers just what you expect from Germany – frothy romantic comedy and food porn. Now I do indeed have great expectations of director Fatih Akin, but this would-be jeu d’esprit is a far cry from Head-On and Edge of Heaven. I’m inclined to let him have his fun, but I certainly did not join in, and wound up fast-forwarding through the second half. This film takes his usual inside look at his hometown of Hamburg but does not balance it off with trips to his ancestral Turkey, as his other films do so memorably. This caper follows a hapless restaurateur trying to appeal to a hip young crowd in a converted factory, while dealing with his journalist girlfriend going off to Shanghai and his ne’er-do-well brother getting out of jail and depending on him for work, along with a madman chef and a yuppie old classmate scheming to buy him out. This film certainly expresses youthful energy, but for me the romance was vacant and the comedy landed with a dull thud.

On the other hand, I knew I was not going to have much use for Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010, MC-74), but dutifully took a look at what some consider among the best films of the past year. Very much like another of the same -- Scorsese’s Shutter Island -- I just did not care that much about what is going on inside Leonardo DiCaprio’s head, and wound up fast-forwarding after the first hour of oh-wow dreamscapes. It’s not so much that I couldn’t figure out what was going on, as I didn’t give a damn about any of it, despite a lot of appealing performers, from Ellen Page to Michael Caine, and some spectacular -- if not special -- effects.

Classic or not?

2011-01-19T17:38:00.000-05:00

In the past month or so, I have watched (or re-watched) a lot of films that someone or other has called a classic, and while I don’t have it in me to review each in much detail, I will take the opportunity to pop off on my opinion of whether each film is indeed classic.

We’ll start with an easy one, a film that practically defines the meaning of the word “classic,” and lives up to its billing every time. Casablanca (1942) is the fruit of the Hollywood studio system at the end of its golden age, plucked at its peak of ripeness. It seems almost too familiar, without having been seen in ages, and hovered deep in my Netflix queue for a decade. But one night I happened to flip on TCM just as the opening credits began to roll -- I couldn’t resist, and was transported all over again. It was indeed an amazing moment of movie perfection, with every element conspiring as Michael Curtiz rushed the film to completion to take advantage of the marketing bonanza of FDR’s Casablanca conference. As a star of magnetic magnitude, Ingrid Bergman in gauzy close-up is all that, but what startled me was the subtlety and range of Humphrey Bogart’s role-playing, and of course Claude Rains gives one of the great supporting performances, amid a string of pleasingly evocative faces. It’s a little magic box of a movie.

White Heat (1949) explosively completes the cycle of gangster films at just the point where it blends with film noir. Cagney returns to complete his classic trilogy of energetically crazy bad guys with family issues, here an Oedipal relationship gone wild, with Ma the only real person in his life. Raoul Walsh returns with his hurtling direction. The story mingles the old and the new, the high and the low, characters from Greek tragedy and a big robbery based on the Trojan horse, newfangled police technology like tracking by radio transmitter, and a big ending that is totally metaphoric in a realistic modern setting. And yet the film is like the last big blow-up of a genre, baroque to the point of unbelievability. Well done in every particular, it still seems essentially divorced from reality into artifice. It would take The Godfather to revive the form and infuse it with a convincing new reality.

The Big Clock (1947) is not a classic in my book, but an interesting variant on film noir. Ray Milland is editor of a true crime magazine in the publishing empire of Charles Laughton, obviously premised on Henry Luce and Time-Life. Laughton offers an amusingly mannered portrait of a business tyrant, who drives Milland out of his job and into association with the tycoon’s disenchanted mistress. Skullduggery ensues. The title references the signature element of the company’s highly stylized building, and indeed set design is one of the strengths of the film. So is the acting in its own overwrought way, but John Farrow’s direction is nothing special and the story is full of holes. Perhaps toddler Mia was on the set with her father and her mother Maureen O’Sullivan, who plays Milland’s wife. Anyway, this film is child’s play, however dark.

Susan Slept Here (1954) is child’s play of a different candy-colored sort, with director Frank Tashlin on his way from cartoons to Jerry Lewis. This would not have caught my attention if not for a recent boxed feature in the New Yorker film listings, but when it turned up on TCM I recorded it. I rather enjoyed revisiting the Technicolor world of Fifties romantic comedy, but classic this is not, though it is a stylish take on the “bachelor and bobbysoxer” theme, which has a lot of fun with sexual innuendo between a middle-aged man and a teenage girl, in this case Dick Powell closing out his career and Debbie Reynolds near the start of hers.

For two slots in a film series that I’ll offer at the Clark next summer, called “PraiseSong: African-American Music in the Movies,” I watched and decided between two pairs of would-be classics. Cabin in the Sky (1943) was the first all-black musical on screen, brought from the stage by Vincente Minnelli in his first film directing job. Stereotypes abound, starting with “Rochester” as the male lead, but some authentic spirit is maintained, with Ethel Waters as the devoted wife for whom “Happiness is a Thing Called Joe,” and Lena Horne as the sultry songstress who leads Joe astray with “Honey in the Honeycomb,” while emissaries from heaven and hell strive for his soul. There are also walk-ons by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, so the film certainly represents its period. Carmen Jones (1954) I ruled out, despite its widescreen Technicolor direction by Otto Preminger, and a magnetic performance by Dorothy Dandridge, because it was too much an operatic construct by Oscar Hammerstein. The transposition of Bizet’s opera to the African-American South works well enough, but why star Dandridge and Harry Belafonte and not let them sing in their own voices, as Pearl Bailey does get to do?

It was a much closer call between Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight (1986) and Clint Eastwood’s Bird (1988), each of which does justice to the bebop jazz saxophonist at its center, centered on exceptional performances by Dexter Gordon as a fictional amalgam of Lester Young and Bud Powell, and Forest Whittaker as Charlie Parker. Both films totally respect the music and deserve to be considered classic, if not without flaw. Bird was darker, both psychologically and visually, and very long, but more homegrown, without the Parisian setting that is a bit of a distraction from my theme.

After watching Five Easy Pieces with the film club, I had the inclination to watch another bit of vintage Jack Nicholson, in The Last Detail (1973), which proved less satisfying. Hal Ashby’s direction is slipshod in my estimation, but Jack as petty officer “Bad Ass” Buddusky, and Randy Quaid as the young railroaded sailor being escorted from Newport to prison in New Hampshire, carry the film through its stops along the road, in Washington, New York and Boston, whether in Aquarian enclave or whorehouse. There’s some sense of the period, but little of timeless significance.

Getting down to the bottom of the barrel, I’ve always confused Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981) with Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant – which really is a classic -- as Aussie war films, but it turns out I’d never seen this one, which left me rather cold, though it was startling to see Mel Gibson so young. This seemed too obvious an attempt to follow in the footsteps of Chariots of Fire, and wandered to its preordained battlefield conclusion, which ought to have been horrific but seemed aestheticized.

Another early Jack Nicholson, Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) was, however, the absolute pits. I might have thought that it was merely my inattentiveness that made it seem so bad, but my two viewing companions shared my befuddled exasperation with this portentous nonsense. So later, for laughs, I had to read them the proclamation by David Thomson (whom I generally find illuminating) that this is “one of the greatest films ever made.” Not by me, it isn’t. I’ve never been an Antonioni acolyte, and even less as the years go by, so this one was completely lost on me.

The Kids Are All Right

2011-01-09T14:49:00.000-05:00

It would be easy to imagine Lisa Chodolenko’s latest film as intolerable with another cast, but with Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, and Mia Waskowska, it’s a pleasure to watch. Compared to another recent film with a number of similarities -- Nicole Holocener’s Please Give -- I buck the critical consensus and much prefer NYC over LA in the skewering of liberal pretension and self-delusion. Nor did I find this as surprisingly good as Chodolenko’s previous SoCal effort, Laurel Canyon. Still, Annette is astounding and Julianne game as a lesbian couple, whose teenage children seek out their sperm donor father, in the hunky, easy-going person of Ruffalo. While the actors take the family sitcom beyond its normal limits into realms of truth, the film remains unrealistically insular, too much a design spread in a lifestyle magazine. If you damp down your expectations, though, this film delivers a fair measure of satisfaction. (2010, MC-86)

Restrepo and other docs

2011-01-09T14:47:00.000-05:00

Among the hardest to watch but most essential films of the past year was the you-are-there Afghan war documentary Restrepo (2010, MC-85). Sebastian Junger (who also wrote the companion book, War) and Tim Hetherington accompany a small band of soldiers on a 14-month deployment on a remote mountain top in Afghanistan, the furthest tip of the spear of American power. The troops build Outpost Restrepo, named for the devil-may-care medic who was among the first casualties of their unit, and then go out into the surrounding valleys, ancient and alien, to win hearts and minds, while being continuously shot at by rarely-seen attackers. The viewer shares the hard duty intimately, and puts a human face on the abstraction of boots on the ground. You participate in the boredom of prolonged isolation, mixed with the insane adrenaline rush of being under fire and letting loose with 900 rounds from your M-50. The small cameras go into battle alongside the soldiers, and also show the daily life of young men together, in a way that verges on the homoerotic and recalls Claire Denis’ Beau Travail. The film doesn’t tell you how to think about the American presence in Afghanistan, but gives you plenty of grist for the mill of your own thinking. And the deleted scenes and extended interviews on the DVD supply plenty more, and should not be missed.

I expected more than I got from Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010, MC-85), the “prankumentary” by and/or about the famous British street artist Banksy. Frankly I didn’t get the joke. The collateral presence of Shepard Fairey makes for an obvious comparison with Beautiful Losers, another film about the graffiti aesthetic, which I found more satisfying. Controversy still rages over whether this Banksy film is a doc or a con, a setup or a brilliantly witty reversal, in which the filmmaker becomes the subject and vice versa. To me it’s all much ado about nothing.

On the other hand, I had no expectations for Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (2010, MC-73) and did not bother to record its “American Masters” presentation on PBS, but I happened to turn on the TV in the middle of its broadcast and was soon engrossed, so I recorded a rerun and watched it from the beginning. Peter Raymond and Michele Hozer’s documentary takes a more traditional approach to the piano prodigy than 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (which I will now have to watch again), but with plenty of archival footage and subsequent interviews, it offers a compelling portrait of a strange but engaging genius.

So pleased with Every Little Step, I was moved to watch other terpsichorean documentaries. The Last Dance (2002, MC-66) is about a collaboration between Pilobolus Dance Theater and Maurice Sendak, an unlikely combination that follows a fascinating joint process of creation. Sendak is of course a compelling character in his own right (see Tell Them Anything You Want – no, I mean it, you really should see the documentary portrait made by Spike Jonze at the same time he directed the feature adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are), and Pilobolus is an eye-opening improvisational dance group that lasted for more than thirty years as the original dancers became directors and recruited a new troupe of exceptionally lithe and inventive dancers. Sometime tense, sometimes ecstatic, the collaboration is enthralling to watch, though the concluding passages from the finished piece seemed draggy by comparison. Sendak is determined to make a piece about the experience of children in the Holocaust, while at least one of the Pilobolus directors wants to make the dance simply about movement. But through the raw material of the astounding flexibility of the dancers’ bodies, they reach some sort of accord in Mirra Bank’s effective film.

Afterthoughts

2011-01-09T14:41:00.000-05:00

Neil Jordan’s Ondine (2010, MC-65) was an afterthought with critics and audiences, but I found it among the better, if not the best, films of the year. The selkie-based story is reminiscent of John Sayles’ Secret of Roan Inish, though it takes off in a different direction. The beauty of the Irish seacoast as filmed by Christopher Doyle is almost a sufficient recommendation, but Colin Farrell is excellent in his own right as the fisherman who happens to pull up in his nets a mysterious young woman. She’s played by Alicja Bachleda, Farrell’s squeeze at the time, and the chemistry between them is palpable. He’s trying to cope with a history of alcoholism and a young daughter in a motorized wheelchair; she’s on the run from – what? A nice edge of mystery is maintained, but the thriller denouement seems somewhat misplaced in what is actually an effective character study of a few people and a place.

After referencing it in a review of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, I decided to take another look at Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) and confirmed the delights of its passage through downtown in the dead of night. It was really Griffin Dunne’s project, and he is charming as the horny uptown computer specialist, who is lured downtown by the enticements of Rosanna Arquette, only to run through a nightmarish maze of crazy women, on a long night’s journey back to day. As Marty relates in an interview on the DVD, his beloved long-term project, The Last Temptation of Christ, had fallen through, and out of that disappointment this quick and dirty production reawakened his appetite for making films. Its edgy off-kilter humor recalls but does not quite come up to The King of Comedy.

After being so impressed with Winter’s Bone, I looked into Debra Granik’s first feature, Down to the Bone (2005, MC-76), and it proved promising but less than fully satisfying. Vera Farmiga performs well in the central role, of a recovering junkie trying to normalize her life as single mom supermarket checkout clerk in upstate New York. Apparently the film grew out of a longtime documentary project, and the milieu is well described (how many films are set in a Price Chopper?), but the story seems familiar and unsurprising, with a whiff of nostalgia for the mud. You get a sense of slumming that you don’t in Winter’s Bone, or for another example, Wendy and Lucy.

Cedric Klapisch strikes me as a middling sort of director, hardly an auteur, but when I saw his Paris (2009, MC-68) showing on Sundance and noticed Juliette Binoche and Fabrice Luchini starring, I decided to record it, and eventually got around to watching in bits and pieces over several nights, not the ideal way to take in a film but not inappropriate for the fragmented style of this Altmanesque ensemble of intersecting types. Juliette and Fabrice were indeed the best things in the film, she a single mother of three caring for a sick brother, and he a distinguished history professor turned tv-documentary host, who falls for one of his students. A swirl of characters surrounds them in ways that did not really connect for me, though I never minded watching.

Early line on best of 2010

2010-12-28T18:02:00.000-05:00

Several critics’ polls have already declared rankings for the year. I won’t be finalizing my choices till I see a number of more recent releases, but I’ve already seen 8 out of the top 10 in the Film Comment poll, and certainly find areas of agreement [click on film title to access my review]. They have Carlos at #1 and The Social Network at #2, and I could go with that, or in reverse order as they appeared in the indieWire poll, which conforms to the Metacritic averages of 95 for the Fincher and 93 for the Assayas. So far I’ll go with indieWire’s choice at #3, Winter’s Bone (FC #6, MC-90.) Polanski’s The Ghost Writer gets just a bit more love than I give it at FC #4 and iW #7 (MC-77). I think FC has A Prophet right at #5 (MC-90). And I join the acclaim for Everyone Else with FC at #9 and iW at #5. On the indieWire list, I Am Love comes in at #9 (FC #22), and I am inclined to agree with that.

For the rest of Film Comment’s top ten, I look forward to seeing Claire Denis’ White Material (#3), and was disappointed to miss Charles Ferguson’s acclaimed documentary Inside Job (#7) when it showed at Images last month but eagerly anticipate the dvd. Wild Grass (#8) I wish I hadn’t seen, and Greenberg (#10) I barely remember seeing. Look for me to be filling in the rest of the top films of 2010 from various lists over the next few months, before making final pronouncement on my own choices.

More documendations

2010-12-28T17:46:00.000-05:00

Here’s another batch of documentaries that are worth a look, one that I found satisfying in every respect, and a handful of others for which the strength of my recommendation is dependent on your interest in the subject, rather than any advance in the art of documentary.

Every Little Step (2009, MC-76) works on so many levels: as presentation and enactment of a 2005 Broadway revival of the hit musical, A Chorus Line, and memorial of the original production; as real-life recapitulation of every backstage drama from 42^nd Street on; as putting the viewer in the position of an American Idol-like judge to appraise just what makes for singing and dancing talent; as swift and engaging storytelling with all the winnowing-down excitement of competitive contests like Spellbound. Trust me, really -- make a point of seeing Adam Del Dio’s documentary, even if like me you are not familiar with the original show beyond a vague awareness of its long-running popularity – available from Netflix on dvd or for instant play.

The Oath (2010, MC-72), an intimate film made by Laura Poitras, probably has the broadest and most urgent interest among the rest of this list. The oath in question is of allegiance to Osama bin Laden, and the subjects are two brothers-in-law who were his former bodyguard and driver. The former is Abu Jandal, who is now a voluble cab driver in Yemen, renouncing the 9/11 attacks but still proselytizing for his own brand of jihad. The latter is Salim Hamdan -- of Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld – and Abu Jandal feels guilty for getting his unpolitical relative into Guantanamo. So Hamdan remains an absence in the film, even when the Supreme Court releases him, but Jandal’s nonstop self-contradiction, much of it as he drives his taxi around Sanaa, offers a fascinating window into the jihadi mindset. Two heroes that emerge are Hamdan’s U.S. military lawyers, who certainly put the system in the best light, despite the abuse dictated from Cheney and Bush. I saw this as part of the generally-excellent “P.O.V.” series on PBS, but it is available from Netflix both as dvd and streaming video, as is the next film, which might have been on the other good documentary series on PBS, “Independent Lens.”

In this era of WikiLeaks, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2008, MC-75) assumes more than historical interest. I started watching without particular commitment to the subject, but was never tempted to tune out. Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith take a very sympathetic look at Ellsberg, who earned the title epithet directly from Henry Kissinger, but they do a good job of recalling the Nixonian era and what seemed to be at stake at the time, and what still seems at stake today, in the continual contest between government secrecy and the public’s right to know. I don’t think Assange is anywhere near as well-motivated as Ellsberg, so I was a bit surprised to see the elder whistleblower endorse the younger on the Colbert Report. Nonetheless he’s an old-time counterculture hero who still commands respect.

Though The Promise (2010) is mainly an HBO promo for the dvd/cd release of outtakes from Bruce Springsteen’s classic album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, the documentary does offer an intriguing glimpse of the Boss in session during the mid-70s. Fans like me will not want to miss it, but if you are not into the Bard of New Jersey, you will find little here to linger over.

One of the better entries in ESPN’s intermittently excellent “30 for 30” anniversary series is The Best That Never Was (2010, no dvd yet). Jonathan Hock’s documentary about Marcus Dupree is a real-life Friday Night Lights story about the fate of perhaps the greatest high school football running back ever. The highlight is the jaw-dropping footage of him regularly ripping off 80-yard touchdown runs, with a grace and fleetness of foot that seems truly heroic. No wonder he generated such a recruiting war among major colleges, and no wonder the Philadelphia, Mississippi hero had such trouble making the transition to Oklahoma and then the NFL. From his position as a middle-aged truck driver in his old hometown, he looks back philosophically on the phenom that he was, and the stardom he was destined for and derailed from.

Public Speaking (2010, HBO, no dvd yet, MC-75) is basically Martin Scorsese’s My Dinner with Fran, and your response with be predicated on how you feel about Fran Lebowitz’s animated gestural tabletalk. Her acerbic, self-assured New Yawker commentary on any subject that comes to mind, and her cultivated Oscar Wilde in drag persona, will determine whether you are drawn into this portrait or put off, delightedly amused or definitely not amused. Count me among the amused.

Gangsters galore

2010-12-28T17:42:00.001-05:00

I liked the just-completed first season of Boardwalk Empire (MC-88) well enough, but I was not gangbusters over it. It does not muscle into that handful of ongoing series that have truly engaged me (e.g. current and final season of Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Treme), but I will keep watching. Steve Buscemi and Kelly MacDonald are always enough to keep me interested, even when other characters and storylines strain credulity. After a bit of fact-checking, I was surprised to see how the mobs in Atlantic City, New York City, and Chicago were interlocked, and how the interweaving of all the big names – Rothstein, Torrio, Capone, Luciano, Lansky – is plausibly true to life. The whole series reopens the mythology of Prohibition-era gangsters enough to make one revisit some of the classic texts of the genre.

I happened to notice The Roaring Twenties (1939) appearing on demand, and once I checked it out, I couldn’t stop watching. Raoul Walsh’s hurtling direction mixes documentary-like footage with characters who age from WWI doughboys through Prohibition kingpins to gang-war casualties. The impeccable cast includes James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, with Priscilla Lane as the canary for whom Cagney pines and Gladys George as the saloonkeeper who really understands him. This came at the end of the initial cycle of great gangster movies, but is a fluent and masterful summation

Cagney had begun etching his gangster persona on the consciousness of audiences with The Public Enemy (1931), in a performance of startling intensity. William Wellman was one of the most competent directors of the early talkies, but this film suffers from period liabilities of pacing and performance, so once you get past Cagney’s electricity and the famous grapefruit in his moll’s face, there’s not a lot here.

Another iconic, career-making performance in the genre had been offered by Edward G. Robinson as the Capone-like title character in Little Caesar (1930). This role involves yet more scenery chewing, but is effectively expressive in its snarls and spit-out lines. Mervyn LeRoy directs smoothly and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is unusually good in the sidekick-who-tries-to-go-straight role.

Howard Hawks shows why he was the master of all genres with the swift, sure storytelling of Scarface (1932). Paul Muni is excellent in a balls-out, ape-like interpretation of Al Capone, as the punk with big ideas, a Borgia with a machine gun. The almost amusingly overt incest theme of this film is matched by the startling implicit homoeroticism of the other two early gangster classics as ways of creating operatically bad characters.

Along with these old films, I revisited Robert Warshow’s classic essay, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” (1948), and while it certainly overreaches, it does so in exciting and provocative ways, with that classic mid-century blend of Marxism and Freudianism. He demonstrates how the gangster represents the dark side of the pursuit of happiness, the anarchic id run wild, an epitome of the modern city: “And the gangster – though there are real gangsters – is also, and primarily, a creature of the imagination. The real city, one might say, produces only criminals; the imaginary city produces the gangster: he is what we want to be and what we are afraid we might become.”

Interim report

2010-12-15T18:34:00.000-05:00

Events, including an incipient book project, have kept me from posting here lately. I’ve actually been watching a lot of films, and intend to group them into a series of mini-essays. One bunch will fall under the rubric of “Afterthoughts”; then there will be an appreciation of Eric Rohmer and a disappreciation of Nicholas Ray; a consideration of classic gangster films in the context of Boardwalk Empire; and another series of my “Documendations.” The last will include the one film I’ve watched lately for which I give a red-hot recommendation: Every Little Step, a documentary about a Broadway revival of A Chorus Line -- I’ve seen neither the original show nor the movie adaptation, but loved this backstage look at it. So don’t give up on me, keep coming back to this site, and soon I’ll once again be delivering my wide-ranging observations on the world of cinema.

Two of the best

2010-11-16T17:48:00.003-05:00

On two successive evenings, I watched likely Oscar nominees for “Best Picture,” and I found both very much up to the hype.

Winter’s Bone. Now this is one Sundance prizewinner that I totally endorse. It deserves the acclaim of its predecessors and more. Debra Granik’s film does not have any of the deficiencies I saw in Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River or Kathryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker. For me Winter’s Bone worked on many levels, as pulse-pounding suspense, heart-leaping shock, naturalistic portrait of Ozark people and the grimly beautiful landscape they inhabit – film noir meets Southern Gothic. Adapting a novel I know nothing about, Granik took a small crew and a few professional actors to rural Missouri and recruited the rest of her cast from local folk, a strategy that works wonderfully well, mixing palpable reality with an aura of sympathy and dread. Jennifer Lawrence is outstanding in the star-making central role as a teenage girl taking care of her younger brother and sister, while looking after her spaced-out mother and tracking down her meth-cooking father, who has disappeared while out on bail, having left the family home as collateral. Talk about the weight of the world on her shoulders. But there is nothing frail or shrinking in this young beauty. Among the fearsome adults she beards in their own dens is her Uncle Teardrop, marvelously rendered by John Hawkes as a scary man with a surprising undercurrent of feeling. This film could have felt like rural slumming and backwoods exploitation, but instead elicits a classic mix of pity and terror, with respect all round. (2010, MC-90)

The Social Network. This acclaimed film stands out most rarely among contemporary American films, in that you’re likely to respond as I did at the end, “Wow, it’s over already? Those two hours went fast – and full.” In an era when even the best films seem generally 10-20 minutes too long (unless they cut loose from feature length altogether and run to 5 or 6 – or 10 to 13 -- hours), The Social Network leaves you with an appetite for more. Credit Aaron Sorkin’s patented rapidfire patter, David Fincher’s swift and sure direction, and excellent acting across the board -- funny, deep, and true characterizations that leave plenty of room for moral speculation. Jesse Eisenberg comes from two particular favorites of mine, The Squid and the Whale and Adventureland, but transcends himself with a brilliantly controlled portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook while a Harvard sophomore and subsequently the “world’s youngest billionaire.” Andrew Garfield is Eduardo Saverin, the classmate and friend who provides the initial bankroll, but gets squeezed out when the start-up goes bigtime, and sues to get back his stake in the business and co-founder status. The general assumption is that Saverin is the good guy betrayed, and Zuckerberg the arrogant selfish bastard with no social skills, who hacked his way to “Friends” across a network because he couldn’t keep them in person. I take it as evidence of the subtlety of both characters’ portrayal that I could come to see the conflict in just the opposite way, with smooth operator Saverin trying to exploit the brilliance of his obsessive friend’s monomania. I think every character in the film comes across with a piquant mix of sympathy and satire, even Justin Timberlake’s all-stops-out portrayal of Internet wunderkind Sean Parker. I was totally into this movie, from the close-up head-to-head first scene between Jesse/Mark and his down-to-earth BU girlfriend, which ends with her walking out of The Thirsty Scholar, a pub near Inman Square, just around the block from where my son lived last year. So I reveled in the familiar Cambridge vibe, despite the film’s slightly overwrought view of the scene. And I loved the contrast between the dark wood paneling and three-hundred-year-old doorknobs of Harvard, and the glassed-in funhouses and playpens of Silicon Valley. I find the widespread comparisons of this film to Citizen Kane quite plausible, and think it likely to deserve every award it wins. (2010, MC-95)

The New Wave gets old

2010-11-16T17:42:00.001-05:00

I have found some of Alain Resnais’ octogenarian caprices quite enjoyable (Same Old Song, Private Fears in Public Faces), but Wild Grass (2009, MC-63) strikes me not as winsome, but winceful. Count me among those who don’t get the game he was up to, with bizarre, inconsequential characters and aggressively unreal color schemes, and a general unmooring from meaning and narrative sense. Very little in this film was endearing or engaging to me, despite all the respectable people and evident craft involved.

On the other hand, some might find Eric Rohmer’s swansong, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007, MRQE-63) an equally off-putting exercise in geriatric stylization, but I had the opposite reaction. With Rohmer I appreciated the amorous obsessions of the old codger and the absolute artificiality of his presentation, more archetypal than merely arch. Here he twines together two strands of his work – archaic pageants and the erotic complexities of modern romance – into an adaptation of a 17^th century novel’s view of a 5^th century pastoral of shepherds and nymphs, played by very contemporary youths in a bucolic country setting, winding up with a hot twist on Shakespearian-type gender bending. Rohmer truly animates the ancient conventions of courtly love and brings them into 21^st century relevance, leaving me with a slow smile spreading across my face.

Genre but not too generic

2010-11-16T17:36:00.000-05:00

Splice. Vincenzo Natali’s sci-fi/horror mash-up is a knowing wink at the genre of creature feature, made notable by the presence of Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley as a couple of genetic wizards (whose names reference The Bride of Frankenstein), bankrolled by big pharma, but with their own agendas as they create life in a test tube. There is plenty of humor generated as they parent the rapidly growing half-human, half-CGI creature, as it passes through the “terrible twos” to a highly Oedipal stage of development. Then there is plenty of yuck as the tale turns bloody and kinky. This is no Gattaca when it comes to the ethics of genetic manipulation, but within its genre limits it’s shrewd enough to offer more than simple shivers of laughter and dread. (2010, MC-66)

Whip It. I will not take the invitation of its title and lash out at this pleasant piece of fluff. Drew Barrymore’s first directorial effort looks at the revival of women’s roller derby in the hip enclave of Austin TX, whipping grrrl-power, teen yearnings for romance and escape, and sports movie tropes into a familiar yet appealing froth. Ellen Page has no difficulty in turning on the adorable, and is surrounded by an array of equally familiar but appealing characters. Her mother (Marcia Gay Harden) wants her to win teen beauty pageants as a way out of their backwater town, but our girl Bliss has her eyes set on a different breakout. She joins with the likes of Maggie Mayhem and Eva Destruction to become Babe Ruthless, the rookie star of the roller derby circuit. If you can do without depth or surprise, this is perfectly fun little film to watch. (2009, MC-68)

Carlos

2010-11-07T17:44:00.000-05:00

Olivier Assayas is not shy about vying with The Godfather in this long-form crime saga, which spans two decades of globe-trotting mayhem by the would-be godfather of international terrorism (or political struggle, as the idealogues would have it). Carlos’s biggest hit (and biggest flop) was seizing a roomful of OPEC oil ministers at a meeting in Vienna in 1974, and commandeering a plane to take them to Libya and then Algeria, before all hostages were released, and the “revolutionary cadre” escaped to fight again. That takes up most of the middle episode of three, as made for French tv and recently shown on the Sundance Channel, close to six hours in all, with a 140-minute version in theatrical release. That central drama is surrounded by lots of assassinations and bombings, plus sex and high living, as Assayas tells the story in admittedly speculative though highly convincing fashion. We see Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a Venezuelan leftist whose brothers were named Vladimir and Lenin, assume the nom de guerre of Carlos, to which the media adds the sobriquet of “the Jackal,” making him a big name in violent circles around the world. His sponsors shift from Qaddafi to Saddam to Assad, from Moscow to Berlin to Bucharest, as he franchises terrorism around the globe. Edgar Ramirez, also Venezuelan, has the magnetism and acting chops to draw one through long stretches in the company of an odious man. In its own reflective thriller mode, Assayas’s film has more to say about the globalization of terror than almost anything I have seen or read. It’s sordid enough to make you ask why you’re sitting through all those hours of repellent behavior, but compelling enough to never drag. (2010, MC-93)

Everyone Else

2010-11-07T17:40:00.000-05:00

I can only read this title as ironic, because “everyone else” is exactly what this intimate erotic duet excludes. Two thirtyish German professionals are vacationing together in Sardinia and testing the limits of their new relationship. Lars Eidinger is a supposedly brilliant young architect waiting for his first prize or commission, big blond and bland, with a passive-aggressive streak. Birgit Minichmayr is a brash little music publicist, who is always putting herself out there, sexually and emotionally. The director Maren Ade is a young woman who comes across as a harsher Eric Rohmer, picking apart the strands of mutual self-delusion, through conversation and sidelong glances. She throws you into close quarters with this couple, without introduction, and lets you figure out just what’s going on between them, as they bounce off each other and a limited number of others. This is romantic comedy that digs deep enough beneath the skin to hurt, and maintains a healthy respect for the mysteries of human motivation. It doesn’t assume or assert too much, but just lets us observe and understand, only up to a point, but certainly more than the characters understand themselves. (2010, MC-71)

Please Give

2010-11-07T17:38:00.002-05:00

Nicole Holofcener extends sympathy to all her characters, however annoying they may be. In Friends With Money, that seemed way more sympathy than they deserved, but here the neurosis and affection are in better balance. As usual, Catherine Keener is right on the writer-director’s wavelength, as a guilty liberal trying to give away the money she makes with a business that seems ethically questionable to herself. She and hubby Oliver Platt own a vintage furniture store, which they stock by buying up the contents of apartments of dead old people, from their unknowing children. They’re waiting to take over the apartment of their next-door neighbor when she dies, and they become involved with the granddaughters who take care of her, deliciously played by Rebecca Hall and Amanda Peet. Ann Guilbert is hilarious as the straight-talking old lady, and Sarah Steele is also good as the acne-plagued teenage daughter of Keener and Platt. With well-judged but low-key direction, the entire ensemble is delightful and the whole nicely balances wit and warmth, with enough truth to lift the comedy beyond the situation. (2010, MC-78)

Last Holiday

2010-11-07T17:37:00.002-05:00

For more than a decade I’d been looking for this film from 1950, which Alec Guinness made in the midst of his great series of Ealing comedies (Kind Hearts and Coronets, The White Suit, The Ladykillers), and it finally turned up on TCM. It’s worth keeping an eye out for, though here the comedy is quite subdued amidst darker themes. The story, by J.B. Priestley, follows an agricultural implement salesman who gets an imminently fatal diagnosis from his doctor and decides to spend his life savings on holiday at a posh seaside resort, where he is taken as a mystery man by an assortment of upper class types. As with Chauncey Gardner in Being There, his direct statements are taken as having great hidden meaning, so an inventor, a cabinet minister, a gambler, and others, take his word as gospel and offer him unprecedented opportunities, now that he has no time left to take advantage of them. Kay Walsh is good as the head housekeeper with whom he forms a gradually deepening relationship. The direction of Henry Cass is workmanlike at best, effectively anatomizing class types by speech and accent, and presenting topical satire on the era of austerity in Britain, but signaling the turns of the story so broadly that there is no surprise involved in how it all turns out. Nonetheless Guinness makes the film something to see.

I am Eye-talian

2010-11-07T17:36:00.000-05:00

Luca Guadagnino aspires to the look of Visconti and the soul of Rossellini in I Am Love (2010, MC-79), a film pleasingly saturated with film history, the product of a long-term collaboration with Tilda Swinton, who plays the central role. She is the stylish matron of a wealthy Milanese family, which owns a textile factory that thrived under the Fascists and thereafter, but is about to be swallowed up by a global conglomerate. She’s a Russian who was acquired by her husband on an art buying expedition there during the Soviet era, becoming an out-of-place ice queen to fulfill the societal role assigned to her. Cracks begin to show in her opulent ice palace when the patriarch of the family bequeaths the business to her husband and son in tandem, because it will take two men to replace him. What gets through one crack is a friend of her son’s, a chef whose food, and then body, initiates her into Lawrentian ecstasy. This melodrama, luscious and fruity, is served with a sauce of John Adams music, and really indulged my taste for the likes of Sirk and Powell. It’s all absurd, but swank and powerful, with a strong undercurrent of social critique, of capitalism and Italy in the age of Berlusconi.

A much more homely look at Italian mores is offered in Gianni Di Gregorio’s Mid-August Lunch (2008, MRQE-70), about a middle-aged momma’s boy taking care of his nonagenarian mother and getting snookered into taking care of three other elderly ladies as well, and of the little community they form. In a way, this film goes beyond neorealism to home movie, with the director starring and shooting in the very apartment where he lived with his own mother until her death, but the film achieves a warmly ironic tone throughout. The four old ladies are a great aggregate of types, and in its own very domestic way the film offers as much food porn as Ms. Swinton enjoys. This lunch is light and slight, but quite tasty within its limits.

Only if ...

2010-11-07T17:32:00.000-05:00

Here are several recent films I would commend to your attention only under special circumstances:

Letters to Juliet. Watch this utterly predictable romantic comedy only if: you’re in love with the Tuscan countryside bathed in a golden glow; or, you’re in awe of Vanessa Redgrave’s beauty, grace, and depth, and more than ready to see Guinevere reunited with Lancelot in old age, reenacting her real life reunion with Franco Nero; or, you can lose yourself in the limpid pools of Amanda Seyfreid’s saucer-sized eyes; or, you value the energy that Gael Garcia Bernal brings to any size role; or, you can forgive the formulaic writing and directing of Gary Winick to appreciate the light literary wit that pervades this otherwise ordinary entertainment. (2010, MC-50)

Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Watch this inoffensive -- try as it might – teen comedy of Jersey kids in the Big City for a long night’s journey to sunrise only if: you have been thoroughly charmed and continuously amused by Michael Cera in the sitcom series Arrested Development or movies like Juno; or, you have some idea of, or taste for, the downtown music scene herein celebrated; or, you are eager to see the fairly appealing Kat Dennings trade her sports bra for a push-up and have her first orgasm, and to see her ditsy, drunken blond girlfriend Ari Graynor make it safely back across the river to home; or, you don’t choke on the thoroughly chewed piece of gum that makes its way through sticky moments of the film; or, Peter Sollett’s direction sends you back to the master, Marty Scorsese, and After Hours. (2008, MC-64)

Blind Side. Watch this surprisingly bad -- and surprisingly successful -- family soap opera with would-be wit and heart only if: you have never watched an episode of Friday Night Lights to realize just how truthful and involving a story one can weave around high school football in the South; or, you are like Stephen Colbert and “don’t see color” and thus won’t mind the sanitized portrayal of race relations in this film; or, you’re not worried about having your esteem for source writer Michael Lewis called into question; or, you can believe that Sandra Bullock was named “Best Actress” for this adequately charming performance in a role without a lot of nuance; or, you are just in love with the whole Red State fantasy of “mama grizzlies.” (2009, MC-53)

Red Riding Trilogy

2010-10-22T18:04:00.000-04:00

By rights, this sordid saga of a whole culture of corruption, perversion, and violence ought to be revolting and unwatchable. Instead, it is immersive and compulsively watchable. The three films -- aired first on Channel 4 in Britain in 2009, then theatrically released in the U.S., and now on DVD (with indispensable subtitles) – cover a decade of evildoing and official malfeasance in Yorkshire. Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974 was shot on Super 16 and directed by Julian Jarrold; 1980 on 35mm by James Marsh; 1983 on hi-def video by Anand Tucker. Nonetheless they are very much of a piece, bound together in Tony Grisoni’s adaptation of David Peace’s cult-fave series of noir novels, collectively portraying a society going to hell under the toast and boast: “This is the North. Where we do what we want.” Several serial killers are on the loose, and the police are more interested in exploiting the crime sprees than solving them. People who investigate the web of corruption and fear are drawn in, chewed up, and spit out; primarily Andrew Garfield in 1974, Paddy Considine in 1980, and David Morrissey in 1983, leading effective acting ensembles in each, with peripheral characters moving to the foreground in sequence. These films are like David Fincher’s Zodiac in using the pursuit of a serial killer as the key to understanding a whole community of characters. Events always stay tantalizingly short of full comprehension, as the viewer stumbles through a universe without fixed points of truth or morality. It’s grisly to be sure, even more in scenes of police torture than in the murders and sexual abuse, but not based on gratuitous shocks. It’s confusing and meant to be, but dense with observation of personal and societal malaise. (Apparently the confusion is enhanced because the novel 1977, which fills in the story of the Yorkshire Ripper, was omitted.) The whole is a dark odyssey through a world of filth, and yet engrossing and perversely redemptive. (MC-77) If you want to get deep into the whole Red Riding cosmos, I recommend this essay by premier film historian David Thomson.

Agora

2010-10-22T18:00:00.000-04:00

Alejandro Amenabar’s latest was a major disappointment to me. The recreation of Alexandria in the latter days of the Roman Empire, from Lighthouse to Library, is impressive and convincing, and the story of the philosopher Hypatia is treated with much more seriousness than the typical “sword & sandal” epic, but there is a failure to reanimate ancient characters in a believable way. I expected more from Rachel Weisz in the lead role, and the three students who are “hot for teacher” remain vapid and opaque, as they grow up to become, respectively -- freed slave and Christian militant, Christian bishop, and converted Roman prefect. This film has spectacle, but little intimacy or feel for the remoteness of the past. Hypatia’s anticipation of the Copernican revolution that would a millennium later overturn the Ptolemaic system may be a bit of a reach, but it’s a reach few films would attempt. And Amenabar seemed the man to do it, but alas, no. I endorse the film’s look and ambition, and its larger lessons of the perpetual conflict between religious fanatics and citadels of learning, but find the drama inert, even drowsy. (MC-55)

Casino Jack and other terrorists

2010-10-22T17:59:00.000-04:00

Casino Jack and the United States of Money. (2010, MC-68) There’s a fine phalanx of committed documentary filmmakers working today, really making sense of vexed public issues, offering an antidote to Michael Moore. Along with two Jareckis and Charles Ferguson, Alex Gibney is one of the best. I found Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room both illuminating and infuriating, and Taxi to Dark Side definitely earned its Oscar, for its patient, thorough evisceration of Cheneyism. Now he turns his attention to the most pressing issue of current American politics, the complete takeover of the electoral landscape by the power of concentrated wealth, the insidious and pervasive influence of campaign contributions. Following the cohort of Abramoff, Rove, Reed, and Norquist from their College Republican days though their rise as idealogues of the Right to their full realization of the complete identity between their ideology and their own financial benefit. If you want some idea of how the vortex of money and power swirls in Washington, flushing our democracy down the drain, this film is an excellent place to start – informative, inventive, funny, and well-paced. I will warn you, however, that at the end of it, my first reaction was, “That movie makes me want to go out and burn something down.” The competing feature, also called Casino Jack, starring Kevin Spacey, will be out by the end of the year, and will have to go some to better this documentary.

Gibney also directs My Trip to Al-Qaeda (2010, now on HBO, dvd date as yet unknown), which he turns into much more than a simple recording of Lawrence Wright’s stage piece of the same name, based in turn on Wright’s research for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, a Pulitzer Prize winner which certainly informed my understanding of its subject more than anything else I have ever read. On stage and on film, Wright is every bit as convincing as he is in print, and the film does an excellent job of marshalling images in support of his argument.

Bastards glorious and not

2010-10-22T17:52:00.000-04:00

Richard Linklater ranks near the top of my favorite directors now in their prime, so I was surprised by my lukewarm response to his latest film, Me and Orson Welles (2009, MC-73), which has a surprising gloss and an equally surprising lack of heart or invention. Christian McKay is definitely an impressive Orson Welles, odious but enthralling; on the other hand Zac Efron is a very bland Me, in this familiar backstage story of an ambitious teen falling in with the barely-out-of-his-teens (though you wouldn’t know it from this film) Welles, during the Mercury Theater’s inaugural with a stripped-down production of Shakespeare’s Caesar. Claire Danes graces the film with her presence, as a Vassar grad determined to get connected in show business, and Joseph Cotten, George Coulouris, and John Houseman are plausibly incarnated to recreate the Wellesian repertory on and off stage. There’s really nothing wrong with this film except for the hole at its center, and the overall sense of having seen this story before. But I expect more of Rick – this is more like his remake of Bad News Bears than breakthroughs such as Waking Life, Tape, and the sublime diptych Before Sunrise/Before Sunset.

Can a moral midget make a film of worth? I doubt it. Knowing the sensibility at work, I surmounted my aversion and watched Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds with a grudging willingness to see past my preemptive dismissal of what some consider one of the best films of 2009 (MC-69). There was indeed some smooth moviemaking on view (and an Oscar-worthy performance by Christoph Waltz), with many nudges in the ribs of cinephiles, but the extreme ugliness of Tarantino’s temperament kept popping through, and surged in crescendo at the climax, reveling in revenge and essentially endorsing terrorism and torture. So I got through it, but felt unclean afterwards -- say no more about it. I will probably run the same experiment with Antichrist, by the equally loathsome Lars von Trier, when it comes out on dvd next month, so I can say I’ve seen all the so-called best films of last year as tabulated on various critics’ polls.

Crime without borders

2010-09-30T19:22:00.000-04:00

On the evidence of notable recent films from Romania, the Mideast, and France, there is a universal tension -- along with inevitable collision and collusion -- between underclass and law enforcement around the world.

Police, Adjective (2009, MC-81) is by far the lightest assessment, might even be considered a deadpan comedy in the dry Romanian style, but still is devoted to habits of mind held over from the era of a police state. A young plainclothes detective is tailing a kid -- in what feels like real and suspended time -- ratted out by a friend with whom he shares his hash. His boss just wants to run a sting on the kid, but the cop doesn’t want to entrap him for a basically innocent activity. At work he is lectured on the implications of authoritarian language, while at home his wife instructs him in the meaning of pop songs and grammar edicts from the authorities. As with most of the currently celebrated wave of cinema from Romania, Corneliu Porumboiu’s film requires patience until its implications emerge. This one didn’t click into place for me, as it did for many critics. I sort of get it, but did it have to be so slow and drab?

Slow was not the problem with the jostling Ajami (2010, MC-82). Co-written and directed by Israeli Arab Scandar Copti and Jew Yaron Shani, this film is named for an occupied neighborhood of Jaffa, adjacent to Tel Aviv, and features a bustling cast of nonprofessional actors from both sides of the great divide, each forced to cross boundaries of one sort or another. Using the currently fashionable technique of telling seemingly unrelated stories in a jumble of puzzle pieces that all connect at the end, we meet an array of characters: a young Arab man trying to negotiate himself out of a family vendetta, a hard-nosed Israeli cop whose young conscriptee brother has disappeared, a Palestinian boy trying to earn money for his sick mother back in Gaza, a Muslim hipster with a Christian girlfriend who thinks he’s free to rise above his situation. The convoluted suspense plays pretty well, and the ultimate connections do not seem forced, but the real attraction here are the dynamic, close to the bone performances by people very much like those they are playing. Sum it up as Mideast neorealism, in the storytelling vein of Crash or Babel.

Even better at the lower depths clash of civilizations is A Prophet (2010, MC-90), Jacques Audiard’s accomplished follow up to Read My Lips and The Beat My Heart Skipped. Though set in a French prison, here the clash is between Muslims and Corsicans. Tahar Rahim is outstanding as the central character, a homeless, illiterate youth, just old enough to get thrown in adult prison after an altercation with police. The great feat of this performance is to maintain our sympathy for the character as he receives a post-graduate education in crime. Niels Arestrup is electrifying as the old Corsican boss who seems to run the prison, even most of the guards. He presents the youth with a choice, kill a fellow Muslim on command or be killed himself. In a truly horrifying sequence, the boy does what has to be done and becomes the Corsicans’ Arab flunky, but thereafter forms relationships with other Muslims that allow him to operate precariously between two worlds. Stylish and intense as a thriller, this film is an anti-Scarface that excels at character development and implicit social commentary, potent and punishing.

You may have noticed that I have stopped applying numerical grades to my reviews, trusting my rating to emerge from my comments on the film. For the record, I would evaluate these three in turn as: noted with esteem but reservations; solidly recommended; and emphatically recommended (if you can take it).

Oscar upsets

2010-09-30T19:17:00.001-04:00

The last two films to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film have both encountered widely divergent responses. On the one hand rapture, and on the other resentment and dismissal. As usual the truth of the matter lies somewhere between the extremes.

Departures earned a Metacritic average of 68, in a curious mix of 100s with 50s or less. Competent middlebrow entertainment, with an intriguing glimpse of odd foreign customs mixed with universal themes, it was a likely choice for Best Foreign Film at the 2009 Oscars, and some embraced it as such. Other critics resented the award not going to more challenging fare like Waltz with Bashir and The Class, and took that out on this inoffensive nominee from Japan. Sure, it’s too long and too obvious, but you can’t ignore the appeal of its characters and story, and the inherent fascination of Japanese mortuary rituals, every bit as stylized as tea ceremony. For cognoscenti perhaps Yojiro Takita’s film is confected too prettily out of familiar faces and themes, but for most the inherent strangeness and dignity of a different culture’s approach to death makes it seem fresh. The only face I recognized was Tsutomo Yamazaki, recycling his taciturn “noodle cowboy” from Tampopo, as the elder “encoffiner.” I found the young couple very ingratiating, though the man who plays the failed cellist and apprentice encoffiner apparently has achieved stardom in Japan in very similar roles, and while the woman may strike some as simpering to me she seemed charming and expressive. The film would definitely be better with twenty minutes of repetition and underlining deleted, but it is hypnotic in its depiction of the ritual of cleansing and dressing the body for burial, however formulaic other parts may be.

The Secret in Their Eyes won the 2010 Oscar, and encountered similar disparagement at the hands of a few critics who felt the award should have gone to The White Ribbon, A Prophet, or Ajami – and once again I find myself in the middle. The Argentinian Juan José Campanello apparently has directed episodes of Law & Order -- the ubiquitous tv series that I have somehow managed to avoid – so is adept at the mechanics of a legal thriller. He reaches for more here, and grasps a fair portion. For an Argentine audience, the shuttling of the story between 1974 and 1999 seems particularly evocative of the Isabel Peron era, but Americans are left free of their own memories to notice the rather unconvincing cosmetic aging of the characters and other artificialities. But the melding of police procedural with thwarted love story comes off quite well, owing to the appeal and skill of the two leads, Ricardo Darin and Soledad Villamel. He’s a court inspector, and she’s an upper class, Ivy-educated lawyer who comes in as his boss, and as his lifelong object of yearning. When he’s retired and she’s become a judge, he brings her a novel he is writing about a 25-year-old rape/murder case. The story flashes back and forth between the two eras, with bravura scenes like one pursuit set in a soccer stadium and various kinds of hugger-mugger. The film certainly sustains interest, if not total belief. It will engage your interest but not change your life, well-done entertainment but not quite art, which those other three nominees decidedly are. So my opinion again falls somewhere in the vicinity of the Metacritic mean of 81.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

2010-09-30T19:09:00.000-04:00

This is a film I liked much more than the critical consensus, perhaps because of two women toward whom I’m decidedly predisposed. Rebecca Miller (Arthur’s daughter and wife of Daniel Day Lewis) caught my eye with Personal Velocity, and Robin Wright (does she still append “Penn”?) has attracted me in nearly anything she’s done. Miller’s personal quirks, as she adapts her own novel, come across to me as authenticity, and Wright never betrays her own complicated reality for easy effects. Here Robin as Pippa is married to a literary man thirty years her senior -- Alan Arkin effective in a role that obviously owes something to the writer-director’s father -- and has gone with him into a Connecticut retirement community. Unmoored, she starts to sleepwalk and also to roam in memory and flashback through various stages of her life. At the time of meeting her husband, she’s a loose-living runaway played by reasonable look-alike Blake Lively. She has grown into a controlled and dutiful wife and mother of grown children, but now is looking to re-find herself. Well-known faces turn up in peripheral roles, such as Mario Bello as Pippa’s mother in flashback, from whom she flees only to find her within herself, Keanu Reaves as the life-buffeted loser who moves in with his mother next door, and Winona Ryder as the confidante turned betrayer. Though the comedy sometimes turns cartoonish, literally, and the drama too pat, this is a fairly serious portrait of a woman coming apart at the seams, so something new can emerge from the cocoon she’s in. The story has been told before, but this comes with a literary and thespian pedigree that gives it unexpected weight. (2009, MC-49.)