Catching up

I haven’t been on vacation, but on hiatus I guess. Watching a lot of different stuff, but not feeling moved to commentary. The most significant part of my recent viewing has been the third seasons of two outstanding HBO series, The Wire and Deadwood. I will write about them soon at some length, but will first catch up with what I’ve been watching, which has been oddly divided into double features and then films that it took me several nights to get through.

Two of the double features were part of my “Brother to Brother” film series at the Clark, which disappointed me in terms of attendance, but not at all in the quality of the films, all of which would have earned at least a *7+* rating from me on re-viewing. Under the rubric “Brothers at Work” I showed Big Night (1995) and Adaptation (2002), and for “Brothers Documented” I showed Brother’s Keeper (1992)and Capturing the Friedmans (2003). If you haven’t seen all of these, you should. And like all films shown at the Clark, you can borrow the dvds from the Milne Public Library in Williamstown afterwards. Or queue them up on Netflix.

One night I watched a pair of films controversial for their sexual content, but actually fairly tame. Atom Egoyan’s latest, Where the Truth Lies (2005), was bad enough to call the whole auteur theory into question. Egoyan was one of my “10 Under 50” list of young directors to watch, but this film was pretty much unwatchable. Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth were okay as a Martin-&-Lewis-type duo, big in the Fifties, who split up in the wake of a hushed-up sex-murder scandal, but Alison Lohman is woefully inadequate as the young reporter trying to dig up the story in the Seventies. You get traces of Egoyan’s obsession with young women in sexual jeopardy, but none of the strength and depth of Mia Kirshner in Exotica or Sarah Polley in The Sweet Hereafter. Let’s just write this off as Egoyan’s misguided bid for commercial success, and hope he goes back to the highly-personal and thought-provoking films he’s made heretofore.

By no means an abject failure, Friday Night (2003) is definitely slighter than Claire Denis’s earlier films, especially the modern classic Beau Travail, but bears the trademark of her highly sensual filmmaking -- languorously executed and exquisitely physical. This is the story of an unexpected one-night stand between a thirtyish woman about to move out of her apartment and in with a boyfriend, and the slightly older man to whom she gives a ride when a transit strike brings Paris traffic to a halt. Almost without dialogue, and without much overt sex either, this is a melodic tone poem on desire and release.

Another evening saw an adventitious double feature of documentaries. First I went to Images to see Sketches of Frank Gehry (2006), Sydney Pollack’s intimate and ingratiatingly modest portrait of his architect friend. I must say it was fun to see my friend, Tom Krens, in wide-screen close-up, his face twenty feet across, commenting on his partner in the construction of the world-renowned Guggenheim Bilbao. A standard mix of talking heads and glamour shots of fabulous buildings, this is nothing special as a documentary, but is as interesting as its subject. Good to see in a theater, it will also appear soon on the PBS series, American Masters.

I came back from Images to watch the dvd of Sunset Story (2003), Laura Gabbert’s portrait of two women in an L.A. retirement home for old radicals. Lucille is an acerbic ex-social worker in her nineties, and Irja is a sunny-minded ex-teacher in her eighties, the best of friends despite their different outlooks on life, one with a cane, the other with a wheelchair, but still mobile when they’re connected, still attending protest rallies together. Their adventures are circumscribed but their personalities are expansive. Hard to imagine spending time in a nursing home as entertainment, but this film has a spirit worth seeing.

Then there was a succession of films I watched over several nights, by happenstance all with the same initial, sort of an intermittent Four C’s. The Corner (2000) was an Emmy-winning HBO series of six one-hour episodes, a precursor to The Wire in writer, subject, and many of the actors, so I’ll discuss both series together later. It was natural for that to take several evenings, but the subsequent films each had a different reason why I couldn’t make it through in just one go.

Coffee & Cigarettes (2003), from indie icon Jim Jarmusch, is also episodic, composed over a number of years from assorted coffee shop vignettes of mismatched pairs: Steven Wright & Robert Benigni, Iggy Pop & Tom Waits, Cate Blanchett & herself, Steve Coogan & Alfred Molina, etc. etc. Low-key and hipper-than-thou, the dialogues do have their moments of wit, insight, or feeling, but in total it’s rather dry and repetitive.

Crack-Up (1946) intrigued me as a noir set in a museum, with an art historian as gumshoe, as it were -- I thought it might be a goof to show at the Clark some time, but it was neither wacky nor involving enough, a curiosity but not a gripper. The story of forged paintings (Gainsborough and Durer) and cover-up murder has its genre convolutions and stylistic elements, but doesn’t make much sense or have much drive. Pat O’Brien is more believable as Knute Rockne than as an art lecturer, even one with populist tastes. I’ve never heard of director Irving Reis, and there’s probably a reason for that.

I’ve most definitely heard of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, however -- I have yet to see a film from “The Archers” that I did not like and/or admire. The list is long and varied, but always strange and surprising; among my favorites are I Know Where I’m Going, Stairway to Heaven, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes. Just before that amazing sequence fits A Canterbury Tale (1944), in a sparklingly-restored, lavishly-extra’ed two-disk dvd from the Criterion Collection. You never really know where this story is going, and only at the end does it fall into place as the gentlest, sweetest bit of war propaganda ever. After a prologue that jumps off from Chaucer, we follow an American soldier on leave (played by real-life army sergeant John Sweet), who gets off his Canterbury-bound train a stop too early, and falls in with “Land Girl” Sheila Sim, down from the city to help out on a farm. A phantom figure in the night pours glue in her hair, as he has done serially to a number of girls, and the pair pursue the mystery to its source, the highly-ambiguous figure of Eric Portman, a landowner and magistrate with a magical connection to the Kentish landscape. Eventually all the characters follow the Pilgrim Road into Canterbury Cathredal for a lovely and satisfying, if still enigmatic, conclusion. I think it’s safe to say you’ve never seen anything like this, unless you’ve seen other productions from The Archers. My mood wasn’t right at first approach, but then I went back and watched it through with mounting enthusiasm, and finished with a big smile. Not the first Powell-directed movie to watch, this will surely reward the adventurous viewer.