Thursday, September 28, 2006
Half Nelson
Ryan Gosling proves that his strong performance in The Believer was no fluke (and bids to become the next Ed Norton) in this exemplary indie from Ryan Fleck in partnership with Anna Boden. Gosling is a dedicated middle school history teacher and basketball coach, who happens to be a crackhead. He’s the sort of teacher who throws out the textbook and instructs his charges in Gowanus, Brooklyn (the title of the short film that paved the way for this feature) in the recent history of protest and the age-old process of dialectic. The film similarly instructs on the yin-yang interpenetration of good and bad in any character or situation. Danny Dunne (is the name of the character an homage to the children’s book hero of my youth? he of the anti-gravity paint, etc.?) meets his match in the 13-year-old student played flawlessly by Shareeka Epps, who is prematurely knowing in the drug trade, with her brother already in jail and herself being recruited as a replacement by his boss, played with appealing complication by Anthony Mackie. Will she become a “hopper,” in the lingo of The Wire (and indeed some of the kid actors from that magnificent HBO series appear here as well)? The in-tight, hand-held camerawork, no doubt dictated by the budget of this labor of love and youthful energy, conveys a sense of claustrophobic discomfort perfectly representative of the story. And the refusal to opt for easy resolution of scene or story betokens a realism of spirit as well as style. On IMDB there’s a picture of director Fleck, looking much like an earnest middle school teacher himself, on stage at Sundance in a t-shirt that reads simply in lower-case, “evildoer” -- which suggests the basic but complex sensibility of his film. In the face of the ruling mendacity of the film business, it’s easy to go overboard in praise of authenticity, but this is a film to see and wish for more of its ilk. (2006, Images, n.) *7* (MC-85.)
French Cancan
Hitherto hard to find, this film is now part of the Criterion Collection set, “Stage and Spectacle: Three Films by Jean Renoir,” and kicks off my personal mini-retrospective of Renoir films. This oh-so-Impressionist rendering of the Moulin Rouge story is something I’ll have to show at the Clark someday. Widely considered one of the great backstage musicals, it features Jean Gabin as the impresario and ladies man, who puts together stage shows to appeal to Belle Epoque French society across the bounds of class and propriety, making his way from bellydancing to a revival of the high-kicking tease of the title, leading to a big finale which defines the word “rollicking.” (1955, dvd, n.) *7*
Wheel of Time
Yet another recent documentary from the prolific Werner Herzog, this film feels like a timebomb for the brain. I’ll be honest -- watching it nearly put me to sleep and yet the next day I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The film follows thousands upon thousands of Buddhists on pilgrimage to a ritual at the site of the Bodhi tree under which Buddha found enlightenment. Some come across trackless wastes in trucks stacked high and tight with people and gear; some come on treks of unimaginable length, prostrating themselves at every step -- one took three years to come more than a thousand miles, an unhealable sore on his forehead from touching the ground a million times. The ceremonies also include the creation of a sand mandala representing the Wheel of Time, of which we do not get to see enough. One assumes Herzog has staked out a skeptical position in opposition to all forms of piety, and yet this film is not overtly critical of some rather extreme manifestations of Buddhist faith. Werner refrains from commentary, except for cracking wise with the Dalai Lama during an interview. It’s hard not to judge some of the behavior on view as crazy, and yet Herzog lets it speak for itself, and still ends the film with images of majestic, magical beauty -- if not nirvana, then at least a landscape transfigured. (2003, dvd, n.) *6*
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
New to DVD
Lately I’ve been catching up with 2006 films that have already been issued on dvd, but I’m still strangely reluctant to assign ratings. Certainly United 93 was the best of the group; in fact, according to www.metacritic.com it is the best reviewed film of the year so far (MC-90.) I watched it because I have been following the career of Paul Greengrass since his Bloody Sunday, even watching The Bourne Supremacy, a Robert Ludlum/Matt Damon thriller franchise that I normally wouldn’t notice at all. United 93 was certainly riveting and impeccably made -- not entertainment certainly, and not exploitive, but I don’t really know what I think or how I feel about it. It certainly gives a you-are-there feel to the events of 9/11, but does one really want to be there? The on-board drama of the hijacked airliner is not hyped up, but doesn’t add all that much to one’s imagination of the event. To me the most interesting scenes were in the various air traffic controller sites, as they tried to make sense of an incomprehensible situation, with many of the real folks reenacting their actual responses. Greengrass is a master of the quasi-documentary style, and certainly one of the best directors working today. If you really want to know what it feels like to be going down in a doomed airplane, then this is the movie for you.
Nicole Holofcener is another youngish writer-director who has earned attention with two previous films, Walking and Talking and Lovely and Amazing. Her new film, Friends with Money, brings back Catherine Keener, along with Frances McDormand and Joan Cusack as “successful” SoCal women, plus Jennifer Aniston in her indie mode, as their old friend, a dropout teacher working as a maid. It’s a wonder how a group of appealing talents such as this could combine for such a wan production (MC-68.) There are good moments of dialogue, and pointed bits of business, but overall we’re not given much reason to care about the problems of these privileged women confronting middle age, nor about their financially and romantically deprived friend. It’s indicative that one gets no idea how these women became friends in the first place. Presumably “real” and fitfully funny, these are not friends I am eager to spend time with. My enthusiasm is effectively curbed.
And my enthusiasm is more than muted for Spike Lee’s latest (and financially most successful) feature, Inside Man. I mean, how bad could it be, with Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster, Clive Owen and a distinguished supporting cast; with Spike’s real feel for New York City locations and people; with a great model in Dog Day Afternoon? The answer is pretty bad, despite the Metacritic score of 77. The film has one of those scripts with so many clever twists they begin to seem pointless, and I began to tune out the puzzle rather than try to solve it. It almost seemed as if Spike did the same, throwing away the maguffin (oh those Nazis -- will they ever wear out as a lazy signature for evil?). There are some good things in this film about a hostage/heist at a Wall Street bank, it’s not an out-and-out disaster like She Hate Me, but my patience continues to wear thin with Lee’s lack of judgment. He’s too fond of his own trips, tricks, and tics -- he doesn’t know when to murder his darlings. Here’s a tip, Spike, if you want to be a great filmmaker, stick with the documentary form -- you need the discipline of fact. And as you of all people should know, shorter is sometimes better.
Nicole Holofcener is another youngish writer-director who has earned attention with two previous films, Walking and Talking and Lovely and Amazing. Her new film, Friends with Money, brings back Catherine Keener, along with Frances McDormand and Joan Cusack as “successful” SoCal women, plus Jennifer Aniston in her indie mode, as their old friend, a dropout teacher working as a maid. It’s a wonder how a group of appealing talents such as this could combine for such a wan production (MC-68.) There are good moments of dialogue, and pointed bits of business, but overall we’re not given much reason to care about the problems of these privileged women confronting middle age, nor about their financially and romantically deprived friend. It’s indicative that one gets no idea how these women became friends in the first place. Presumably “real” and fitfully funny, these are not friends I am eager to spend time with. My enthusiasm is effectively curbed.
And my enthusiasm is more than muted for Spike Lee’s latest (and financially most successful) feature, Inside Man. I mean, how bad could it be, with Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster, Clive Owen and a distinguished supporting cast; with Spike’s real feel for New York City locations and people; with a great model in Dog Day Afternoon? The answer is pretty bad, despite the Metacritic score of 77. The film has one of those scripts with so many clever twists they begin to seem pointless, and I began to tune out the puzzle rather than try to solve it. It almost seemed as if Spike did the same, throwing away the maguffin (oh those Nazis -- will they ever wear out as a lazy signature for evil?). There are some good things in this film about a hostage/heist at a Wall Street bank, it’s not an out-and-out disaster like She Hate Me, but my patience continues to wear thin with Lee’s lack of judgment. He’s too fond of his own trips, tricks, and tics -- he doesn’t know when to murder his darlings. Here’s a tip, Spike, if you want to be a great filmmaker, stick with the documentary form -- you need the discipline of fact. And as you of all people should know, shorter is sometimes better.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Diary redux
At the moment I’m not into offering objective assessments and assigning numerical ratings, so I’m just going to tell you what I’ve been watching and what I’ve thought about it.
Starting with the best and working my way down, I have to say I was well-pleased with my screening of The Best of Youth at the Clark, both the turnout and the response, but moreover the film itself, which moves up in my estimation, maybe into my Top 25 of all time (though if I were actually to tabulate the list, there might be 50 or more films on it.) The first time through, you are swept along on the surging flood of event and emotion, but upon re-viewing you can see how perfectly constructed the film is. You can, for example, see the seed of the brother’s subsequent history in an early and seemingly casual scene at a dance, where their characters are sketched in quick, sure strokes.
And on second look, it dawns on me that the Caratis, the family whose saga this is, are a close anagram of caritas, and constitute a typology of human caring. Nicola is the sympathetic psychiatrist of course, but “mad... mad... Matteo” (as Giorgia calls him), though feigning indifference and the impassivity of soldier/policeman, has the problem of caring too much, so his only recourse is to blow up or turn away. Older sister Giovanna cares on a social level, first as a crusading public interest advocate and then as a mafia-defying judge, and younger sister Francesca cares on a domestic level -- when first seen she wants to marry both her brothers and winds up doing the next best thing by wedding their friend Carlo, and eventually taking over as matriarch of the family. And of course the mother and father care in their own ways, as schoolteacher and modest entrepreneur.
The Best of Youth is transformative, endlessly involving, like life itself, so sad and yet everything is beautiful. You are put through an emotional wringer, as the hours and years go by, and yet you love it and come out wiser at the end, just as we wish with life itself.
I also happened to re-watch my pick as the best film of the previous year, Vera Drake, and confirmed its power, both in Mike Leigh’s close observation of another family dynamic and its collision with the outside world, and in Imelda Staunton’s supreme performance as Vera, from the smiling bustle of the busy bee, ever helpful, to devastated defendant, to contrite convict, beaten down and stripped of her life for trying to aid others, in unmindful defiance of the law.
Also had a second look at last year’s Grizzly Man, and had a different though still favorable reaction, which suits the protean nature of Werner Herzog’s documentaries. This time Timothy Treadwell’s personality was more in the foreground, from the babytalk he’d use with the bears, to the childhood teddy bear he slept with in his tent in the Alaskan wilds. At first glance I took everyone in the film as a poseur, at second I saw Timmy as the damaged child he was.
A much longer interval, decades in fact, intervened before my second, long-awaited chance to see two early films of Peter Watkins, finally released on dvd. He made Culloden and War Game for the BBC in the mid-60s. I saw them soon after that, in the era of Vietnam, and they have lingered in my mind ever since. (Culloden intertwined in my memory with the similarly unrecoverable Chimes at Midnight of Orson Welles, as having the most effectively anti-war battle scenes I’ve ever seen.) In the footsteps of You Are There, the Walter Cronkite series that first presented historical events in a tv-news format, Watkins essentially invented the docudrama form, and his innovations retain their power, if not their utter surprise. The Battle of Culloden Moor in 1746 was the final defeat of “Bonnie” Prince Charlie and his pretensions to the English throne, and the subsequent Hanoverian “ethnic cleansing” of the Highland clans that had supported him was the most decisive turning point in Scottish history. And yet the military, political, and social fiasco was almost farcical in its haplessness, which the film captures in face-to-face interviews with participants on the battlefield. The narration is spare but absolutely devastating.
It’s a little more insistent in War Game, which lays out the implications of a nuclear strike against Britain in a way that seems quaint from the perspective of the 21st century. Which makes sense since it was made much closer to the Blitz of WWII than to the threats of today. Implicitly it is a piece of “Ban the Bomb” agitprop, which deconstructs the official prognostications of a “clean” nuclear exchange. At the time it was inflammatory enough to be banned from broadcast, though it now seems tame and self-evident despite its low-tech-SFX horrors. I was less impressed by its argument this time, than by its clear debt to the great WWII documentary by Humphrey Jennings, Fires Were Started.
Two recent genre exercises round out my recent miscellaneous viewing. Shaun of the Dead (2004) is an up-to-date British parody/homage to the tradition of zombie films in the wake of Night of the Living Dead. Title actor Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright collaborated on the script, which they describe as a “rom-zom-com.” The joke is that Shaun and his mate are blokes so out of it that it takes them half the film to realize that their neighborhood of North London is being taken over by the walking dead. Like Adaptation, it treds a fine line by becoming what it parodies, but retains its modest amusement to the end.
Debut writer-director Rian Johnson deserves encouragement if not all the praise he has received for Brick (2006), which transplants hardboiled Hammett/Chandler patter and noir plot twists into a sunny California high school today, San Clemente in fact. That may strike you as revelatory of the hidden dark side of teenage life, or it may just strike you as odd. The trick works up to a point, with effective actors like Joseph Gordon-Levitt (of Mysterious Skin) as the nerd/gumshoe hero, and Lukas Haas (long ago the Amish boy in Witness) as the drug kingpin who operates out of his parents’ panelled basement. But for both these films, unless you are a devotee of the genre being taken off, they are not invested with enough reality to sustain your interest thoughout their running times.
Starting with the best and working my way down, I have to say I was well-pleased with my screening of The Best of Youth at the Clark, both the turnout and the response, but moreover the film itself, which moves up in my estimation, maybe into my Top 25 of all time (though if I were actually to tabulate the list, there might be 50 or more films on it.) The first time through, you are swept along on the surging flood of event and emotion, but upon re-viewing you can see how perfectly constructed the film is. You can, for example, see the seed of the brother’s subsequent history in an early and seemingly casual scene at a dance, where their characters are sketched in quick, sure strokes.
And on second look, it dawns on me that the Caratis, the family whose saga this is, are a close anagram of caritas, and constitute a typology of human caring. Nicola is the sympathetic psychiatrist of course, but “mad... mad... Matteo” (as Giorgia calls him), though feigning indifference and the impassivity of soldier/policeman, has the problem of caring too much, so his only recourse is to blow up or turn away. Older sister Giovanna cares on a social level, first as a crusading public interest advocate and then as a mafia-defying judge, and younger sister Francesca cares on a domestic level -- when first seen she wants to marry both her brothers and winds up doing the next best thing by wedding their friend Carlo, and eventually taking over as matriarch of the family. And of course the mother and father care in their own ways, as schoolteacher and modest entrepreneur.
The Best of Youth is transformative, endlessly involving, like life itself, so sad and yet everything is beautiful. You are put through an emotional wringer, as the hours and years go by, and yet you love it and come out wiser at the end, just as we wish with life itself.
I also happened to re-watch my pick as the best film of the previous year, Vera Drake, and confirmed its power, both in Mike Leigh’s close observation of another family dynamic and its collision with the outside world, and in Imelda Staunton’s supreme performance as Vera, from the smiling bustle of the busy bee, ever helpful, to devastated defendant, to contrite convict, beaten down and stripped of her life for trying to aid others, in unmindful defiance of the law.
Also had a second look at last year’s Grizzly Man, and had a different though still favorable reaction, which suits the protean nature of Werner Herzog’s documentaries. This time Timothy Treadwell’s personality was more in the foreground, from the babytalk he’d use with the bears, to the childhood teddy bear he slept with in his tent in the Alaskan wilds. At first glance I took everyone in the film as a poseur, at second I saw Timmy as the damaged child he was.
A much longer interval, decades in fact, intervened before my second, long-awaited chance to see two early films of Peter Watkins, finally released on dvd. He made Culloden and War Game for the BBC in the mid-60s. I saw them soon after that, in the era of Vietnam, and they have lingered in my mind ever since. (Culloden intertwined in my memory with the similarly unrecoverable Chimes at Midnight of Orson Welles, as having the most effectively anti-war battle scenes I’ve ever seen.) In the footsteps of You Are There, the Walter Cronkite series that first presented historical events in a tv-news format, Watkins essentially invented the docudrama form, and his innovations retain their power, if not their utter surprise. The Battle of Culloden Moor in 1746 was the final defeat of “Bonnie” Prince Charlie and his pretensions to the English throne, and the subsequent Hanoverian “ethnic cleansing” of the Highland clans that had supported him was the most decisive turning point in Scottish history. And yet the military, political, and social fiasco was almost farcical in its haplessness, which the film captures in face-to-face interviews with participants on the battlefield. The narration is spare but absolutely devastating.
It’s a little more insistent in War Game, which lays out the implications of a nuclear strike against Britain in a way that seems quaint from the perspective of the 21st century. Which makes sense since it was made much closer to the Blitz of WWII than to the threats of today. Implicitly it is a piece of “Ban the Bomb” agitprop, which deconstructs the official prognostications of a “clean” nuclear exchange. At the time it was inflammatory enough to be banned from broadcast, though it now seems tame and self-evident despite its low-tech-SFX horrors. I was less impressed by its argument this time, than by its clear debt to the great WWII documentary by Humphrey Jennings, Fires Were Started.
Two recent genre exercises round out my recent miscellaneous viewing. Shaun of the Dead (2004) is an up-to-date British parody/homage to the tradition of zombie films in the wake of Night of the Living Dead. Title actor Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright collaborated on the script, which they describe as a “rom-zom-com.” The joke is that Shaun and his mate are blokes so out of it that it takes them half the film to realize that their neighborhood of North London is being taken over by the walking dead. Like Adaptation, it treds a fine line by becoming what it parodies, but retains its modest amusement to the end.
Debut writer-director Rian Johnson deserves encouragement if not all the praise he has received for Brick (2006), which transplants hardboiled Hammett/Chandler patter and noir plot twists into a sunny California high school today, San Clemente in fact. That may strike you as revelatory of the hidden dark side of teenage life, or it may just strike you as odd. The trick works up to a point, with effective actors like Joseph Gordon-Levitt (of Mysterious Skin) as the nerd/gumshoe hero, and Lukas Haas (long ago the Amish boy in Witness) as the drug kingpin who operates out of his parents’ panelled basement. But for both these films, unless you are a devotee of the genre being taken off, they are not invested with enough reality to sustain your interest thoughout their running times.
When the Levees Broke
I am generally a fan of Spike Lee, if frequently critical of his excesses and lack of discipline (and this film could have been shaved by a few minutes to come in at four hours even), but When the Levees Broke follows 4 Little Girls to suggest that he might do his best work in the documentary genre (of his features, only the epic Malcolm X rivals their impact.) This requiem for New Orleans, before and after Katrina, is masterfully composed and amazingly self-effacing (no narration, and just twice did I catch Spike's off-camera voice asking a question.) And I would call it noninflammatory despite a fair amount of Bush-bashing (wholly justified to call the anti-spade an anti-spade.) With a judicious mix of news footage and sustained engagement with a group of talking heads who become genuine characters, Lee makes palpable the human devastation of Katrina. Multifaceted if less than comprehensive, the film is particularly astute in its music, from the opening strains of Louis Armstrong singing “Do You Miss New Orleans?” to Fats Domino’s “Walking to New Orleans” at the end. It shows what was lost not just in terms of infrastructure but of a special brand of creole culture. Tragic but engrossing, this documentary calls citizens to hold their government accountable, to take a genuine interest in “homeland security” as a collective concern, and not in bungling, boondoggling, ideological military adventures abroad. (2006, HBO/T, n.) *8-* (MC-88.)
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