More gaps to fill

My viewing remains more random than usual. While generally diverse, now it’s hard to find any thread at all. Let’s see if we can tease one out. I really need to weed through and reorganize my Netflix queue, get it down from 200 to 100, and probably should economize by cutting back from five to three discs at a time. When I first subscribed to Netflix eight years ago, they only had one shipping point, in LaJolla CA, but now a two day turnaround in the mail is typical, so even if I watched one every day, the three-disc deal would be sufficient. And that was before I had TiVo, where I probably have twenty more films “Now Playing.” So these were the latest disks to show up in my mailbox:

There’s a strong presumption than any new Criterion Collection release is likely to be worth watching, and Barbara Stanwyck is an actress I look for, so that’s how The Furies (1950) got to the top of my queue. I’m not really up to speed with Anthony Mann’s Freudian Westerns, aside from one or two of the Jimmy Stewarts, but this transposition of King Lear to the New Mexico desert reeks of incestuous passion. Walter Huston, in his last film, is a cantakerous cattle baron, with Stanwyck as his spirited daughter, a mare who will not be broken. In noirish black and white, with more night scenes and interiors than wide open spaces, the film is a little much, but not enough, if you know what I mean. The leads are magnetic but much that surrounds them is laughable. Only for aficionados of one sort or another.

I was looking for another Therese adapted from a French novel, recommended by an emeritus professor who frequently comes to my screenings at the Clark, but wound up with Therese Raquin (1953), a Marcel Carne film from after his classic period (which was capped by all-time great Children of Paradise). Despite a tendency to turn Zola into potboiler, this story of a fatal triangle is carried by a luminous young Simone Signoret and a rugged Raf Vallone. Nearly unknown, it is not something you need to seek out, but not without interest

It must have been sheer randomness that brought Death and the Maiden (1994) to the top of my queue. I may have put in on after I had a chance to meet Sigourney Weaver briefly at a Williamstown Film Festival event, or maybe I was filling in my Roman Polanski life list. At any rate, it was years ago and the reason has been forgotten. My viewing was slightly discombulated by a dirty disk, but even allowing for the disruption, I don’t think this adaptation of an Ariel Dorfman play about torture, guilt, revenge, and forgiveness, set in an unnamed country reminiscent of Chile after Pinochet, would have worked for me, starting with the artificiality of the English-speaking cast. Sigourney is strong but not quite right as the torture victim who gets an unlikely chance to get back at one of her tormentors, played with requisite ambiguity but not much resonance by Ben Kingsley. Stagey as the set-up may be, Polanski brings a personal intensity to the volatile proceedings, which makes the film hard to dismiss despite evident flaws.

At some point when I was on a noir kick, it occurred to me that I had never seen the Jack Nicholson-Jessica Lange remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). Now I have, and while it offers more than the 1946 version with John Garfield and Lana Turner, it also offers less. More of the book, but less sense. More sex, but less heat. More real, but less feel. It’s fascinating to watch Jack and Jessica in their prime, as they go down and dirty, if rather tastefully so. This is pulp gone classic, with script by David Mamet, direction by Bob Rafelson, and cinematography by Sven Nykvist (!). It’s a rare case in which a single reviewer -- Vincent Canby -- says everything I would say and more. Yeah, what he said.

Not as bad as one may have heard but not as good as one might have hoped, Art School Confidential (2006) is the follow-up by director Terry Zwigoff and writer/artist Daniel Clowes to their zingy, zesty Ghost World. As an art museum film programmer, I felt obliged to watch a film with “Art” in the title (plus, Zwigoff’s Crumb is a doc I’ve shown twice at the Clark already). So I kept my eyes and mind open, despite the critical pummeling this film took upon release. I found it half-good, with an effective skewering of art school pretension (like Claire’s experiences in Six Feet Under), but then some undernourished mystery about a serial killer develops and the satire goes from stinging to distasteful and disproportionate. Some familiar faces, some not so, appear in the film, but no acting worthy of a name. So now it’s on my list, but I wouldn’t recommend it for yours. (MC-54.)

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints

This vanity project projects sufficient humility to be watchable, if not a must-see. First-time writer-director Dito Montiel adapts his own memoir of growing up in Astoria, Queens in the 1980s, a prescription for self-importance, but enlists Robert Downey Jr. and Shia LeBeouf to play his older and younger selves, and Dianne Wiest and Chazz Palminteri for his parents, with Martin Compson (of Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen) as one of a variety of believable street boys and girls, another of whom grows up very believably and rivetingly to be Rosario Dawson. So across the board the acting trumps the ego involved, and with big assists from cinematographer and editor, plus Sundance workshopping, this film is able for its duration to make you forget its descent from Mean Streets and all its progeny, and lose yourself in a time and a place and a group of people hanging out and hooking up, getting by and coming to grief. (2006, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-67.)

Filling in the gaps

Lately I’ve been re-viewing a lot of films without being moved to review them, so I will just mention some of them in passing. Zhang Yimou’s staging of the Beijing Olympics led me back to To Live (1994), which some time ago was a revelation to me (Gong Li!) and set me off on a binge of Chinese movies, including all of his. Lately he has relied too much on sheer spectacle, in historical martial arts epics, but formerly alternated relatively intimate films of contemporary peasant life. To Live contains both elements, in a decades-long family saga within an historical pageant (for which I tend to be a sucker -- e.g. The Best of Youth), following China from World War II through the Cultural Revolution. This time the filmmaking seemed a bit stodgy, but the history lesson remained vital.

I was happy to relive the bejeweled music box perfections of two French classics of aristocratic adultery, but feel disinclined to look too much inside the works, to examine the delight-producing mechanisms. In my intermittent retrospective of Jean Renoir (in which La Bete Humaine filled a gap and Elena and Her Men stuck me as his worst effort, chaos without control), I had the Criterion Collection disk of Rules of the Game (1939) around for months, while I spent way too many evenings watching election coverage of one sort or another. But once Barack was safely elected, I was free to revisit the chateau where Renoir’s figures high and low go through their clockwork dance. What a perfect construction -- delightfully complicated, exquisitely sad, lightly profound! Though I will always prefer La Grande Illusion personally, I cannot quibble with the consensus view that La Regle du Jeu is one of the very best films of all time.

Meanwhile another new Criterion Collection disk finally arrived after a “very long wait” on my Netflix queue. Max Ophuls’ Earrings of Madame de ... (1953) displays similar clockwork charm, though his mechanism is a moving camera rather than Renoir’s deep focus. Through the contrivance of the eponymous jewelry, which passes back and forth like the clap in La Ronde, Ophuls tells a story of passion that breaks through the mirrored facades of fin-de-siecle France. Danielle Darrieux and Vittorio De Sica are sublime as the lofty lovers, while Charles Boyer maintains his dignity as the cuckolded general. One marvels at the construction, but catches a breath of passion as well -- it’s all artificial but moving nonetheless.

Peter Watkins must be one of the most unwatched and unwatchable of great filmmakers. Gradually more of his work is becoming available. It was decades before I got another chance to see an old favorite, Battle of Culloden (1964), but when I caught up with Punishment Park (1971) on IFC recently I couldn’t bear the old counter-cultural hysteria. Privilege (1967), however, retained its interest despite seeming amateurish and implausible. There was some incisive social analysis in the story of pop star Paul Jones being exploited to subvert dissent into semi-fascist conformity. Jean Shrimpton is blankly effective as the bird of the moment, and the broad caricatures of British business and religious leaders are sometimes spot-on, if you can see past the lameness of the overall enterprise.

The Coen brothers, on the other hand, are sometimes undermined by their own facility, which can border on slickness. While recently underwhelmed by No Country for Old Men -- at least relative to its Best Picture Oscar -- I retain appreciation of a number of their films. Having read several references to the growing cult status of The Big Lebowski (1998), I decided to give it another look. Sure enough, it’s very funny in places, and its central conceit of plopping aging stoner Jeff Bridges in the midst of a Raymond Chandler-like plot gives free rein to a number of reliable performers, such as John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, and others. It’s not a great film, but it does fit neatly in the Coen career project of genre deconstruction. I think most would agree, “The Dude abides.”

Charles Burnett seems to me to have been given the benefit of critical affirmative action, with many willing to overlook the low-budget flaws of his slice-of-ghetto-life stories. While Killer of Sheep was sustained by the soundtrack -- whose clearances kept it from being released for decades -- My Brother’s Wedding (1983) proves less worthy of resurrection. There are some flavorful characters, but it is less the amateur actors than the flat-footed script that undermines the authenticity of Burnett’s picture of Black life in L.A.

Having passed the midpoint of my “Anime for Grown-Ups” film series, I am inclined to pat myself on the back for my selections from Studio Ghibli. Grave of the Fireflies is truly one of the great anti-war films of all time, Whisper of the Heart a delightful and poignant story of a young girl growing up and finding her purpose in life, and Porco Rosso an accomplished pastiche of cinematic adventure and romance seen through personal perspective of Hayao Miyazaki. I tried to pick animation that would appeal to filmlovers who don’t typically watch animation, and these films certainly fill the bill.

Standard Operating Procedure

Errol Morris’s latest documentary examines the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs -- who took them and why? what they show and what they don’t show? It’s definitely a meta-exercise and not “just the facts, ma’am,” as the jazzy graphics and stagings seem to betray. While it is interesting to see some of the convicted soldiers (Lynddie England et al.) tell their side of the story, and there is point to the Susan Sontag-like concern with the inherent meaning of photography as a medium, this is a pivotal story told askance, and suffers badly in comparison with Taxi to the Dark Side in telling the truth about America’s descent into torture. The film does help you get inside the heads of the “bad apples” who were held accountable, but does not follow the trail to the bad apples in the White House who were truly responsible, as Alex Gibney’s film does so well. So ultimately it says more about Errol Morris’s standing operating procedure (showy but generally effective) than about the S.O.P of military interrogation, and fits more usefully into his own oeuvre than into the essential but suppressed debate over whether the U.S.A. is a torture state. (2008, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-70.)

Happy-Go-Lucky

I was happy to view Mike Leigh’s latest with little advance knowledge, so the film could unfold for me like life itself, never knowing just what’s next, with first reactions misleading and final feelings mixed. That is the essence of Leigh’s process, the six months he spends with the cast, working through the characters from the outside in and the inside out, and letting the story emerge from the personalities and interactions that develop. It works so well, one wonders why more directors don’t work the same way. After Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake, and more, Leigh definitely ranks with the best directors in the world. At first glance, Happy-Go-Lucky may look like a departure, more light-hearted and uncomplicated, but it becomes progressively deeper and more complex, even days after viewing. I confess to having borrowed a bootleg copy of this new release, but will see it again if it ever arrives at a theater near me, and it’s sure to seem different with hindsight, the randomness illuminated by the canny construction, the artful raising and subverting of expectation. I won’t spoil any surprises for you, but just describe the opening scene. Through the credits, we see Poppy riding her bike through the streets of London, smiling broadly and waving at strangers. She stops and goes into a bookstore, annoying the taciturn clerk (and some of the audience) with a stream of laughing patter while she browses. As embodied indelibly by Sally Hawkins, she’s an attractive but psychotically cheerful 30-year-old, turned out in a rainbow of flounces and furbelows. Too much to take, it seems, but beneath her antic aspect, we gradually discern finer qualities. She comes out of the bookstore to find her bike stolen, but her only regret is that she didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to it. In subsequent scenes we see her partying with her female mates, and learn that she has found her niche as a primary school teacher. And we find out that her good cheer is not a natural mania, but a chosen way of being in the world. We follow her through several weeks of small (mis)adventures, and find out just what it means to view the world through Poppy-colored glasses. Sally Hawkins seems destined for a totally-deserved Oscar nomination (like Imelda Staunton as Vera Drake), and however you wind up feeling about her character, you have to love her performance. Equally potent is Eddie Marsan (memorable as Vera’s son) as the tightly-wound driving instructor, whose weekly sessions with Poppy frame the story. The rest of the cast live in their roles, revealing much in small and sidelong ways. This is a film to see with an open mind and an open heart, as well as open eyes. (2008, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-84.)

Late Marriage

I went into this film not knowing what to expect, and it kept taking turns I didn’t anticipate. Dover Koshashvili sets his film within the Georgian emigre community in Israel, and indeed casts his mother as the mother of his protagonist, so this comes across a bit like a home movie -- and what a strange home it is. Lior Ashkenazi plays a superannuated student still living off his parents while he completes a doctorate in philosophy. The actor looks disconcertingly like Steve Carrell, so I was tempted to look at this film like “The 31-Year-Old Non-Virgin.” His parents are eager to arrange a marriage for him, and the film starts with one in a long string of matchmaking meetings, this with a hot but sullen teenager. Later in the evening we find out why Zaza showed so little interest -- he goes to visit his lover, a 34-year-old Moroccan divorcee, played with unabashed sexuality by Ronit Elkabetz. I wasn’t expecting an extended sex scene in an Israeli movie, and this one is startling in its naturalness, quite unlike any film sex I’ve ever seen. But Zaza’s family finds out about the affair and takes collective action, which is just as startling. This insular community is rigid in its ways, and will accept no deviations from its norms. What will Zaza do? Whatever you expect, you will be surprised, and probably not satisfied. It’s a strange world, and you’ll likely remain on the outside looking in. Is this a deadpan comedy, a scathing satire, or a scarring familial drama? You decide. (2002, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-82.)