Sunday, December 27, 2009
Avatar
An experience not to be missed, James Cameron’s long-awaited, super-expensive venture into 3-D is a mélange of movies you’ve seen before, presented in a way you’ve never seen. At first I was aware of the 3-D lenses themselves, with their layers perceptible like floaters in one’s eyeball, but then I was simply immersed into a swooning depth of field as an alien world was penetrated, and finally the dimensions resolved simply into a more rounded way of viewing things, aside from a few “duck! here it comes!” moments. Blending Cousteau with Costner, eye-popping (un)nature documentary with primitive parable, all-over-the-place parallels to contemporary politics with gameboy blasting away, this film has something for everybody, but ultimately too much and too little to make it the future of film. It’s cowboys and Indians, it’s interstellar space opera, it’s ecological fable and New Age spiritualism, it’s kick-ass battle scenes and cross-species love story. It’s too much, but it’s quite a ride. You’d be well advised to respond, “I see you.” (On the other hand, you wouldn’t be amiss if you left the movie when Sigourney Weaver does, unless you’re a connoisseur of explosions and mayhem.) Another technological breakthrough of this film is in the evolution of the CGI technique of “performance capture,” to the point where an actor can be slipped seamlessly into the skin of an alien being. This is not a development I would expect to be thrilled by, but is in fact pretty thrilling. It doubles down on the meaning of the word "avatar." The story of this film is that the story and the characters are sort of beside the point, but when it comes to production values, it can’t be beat. (2009, Beacon) *8-* (MC-83)
Documentaries on parade
A heterogeneous assortment of documentaries continues to pass in review before my eyes, each of which I can recommend if you’re interested, and one I urge upon you even if you think you’re not.
If, for example, you’re interested in avant-garde favorite Guy Maddin, his quasi-documentary My Winnipeg (2007, dvd, MC-84) is a good place to start. His style is in place – fragmented, fantastical, in blurry black & white – but well suited to rendering a whimsical and wistful portrait of the city he has never been able to escape, where sleepwalking is a way of life and the winter never ends. The film comprises archival footage of Manitoban history and campy dramatic recreations of Maddin’s life with an overpowering mother, along with repeated scenes of “Maddin” sleeping on a train that is supposed to be taking him out of town at last. One suspects that much of the history is made up, fact melding into fantasy, but it seems a true portrait of this on-the-frontier, north-of-the-border city where radicalism meets somnambulism. And the lament for lost landmarks of the filmmaker’s youth, whether downtown department store or hockey arena, is poignant and true. I’m a fan of first-person documentaries -- “Self-Portraits in Cinema” as I called them in a series at the Clark some years ago -- and My Winnipeg offers a novel twist, an excellent companion piece to the recent Of Time and the City by Terence Davies.
One respectfully-received self-portrait that I do not recommend is The Windmill Movie, which noted Harvard documentarian Richard P. Rogers (The Midwife’s Tale, among many others) worked on for 25 years and left unfinished (or barely started) when he died of brain cancer. At the request of his wife, the celebrated photographer Susan Meiselas, protégé Alexander Olch reviewed all the footage and put together this homage. Though I personally tend to be tolerant toward cinematic navel-gazing, this film does not, despite some striking moments, break out of the self-referential into any wider significance.
Of the widest significance is Food, Inc. (2009, dvd, MC-80), which does an excellent job of aggregating the findings of Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) into a thorough unmasking of megacorporate agriculture, which has turned farms into horrific factories, based on monocultures sustained by cheap oil, pesticides, government subsidies, and genetic copyright enforcement, disastrous in every facet of how and what they produce. This information is out there, though thoroughly obscured by corporate lobbying and advertising, but is here put together in a concise and striking manner. The film would be entertaining if it weren’t so scary, with indelible images of just what food production has become in this country. More like the lively King Corn than the meditative Our Daily Bread, Robert Kenner’s Food Inc. offers an indictment that has to be seen to be believed, in a latter day reprise of The Jungle of Upton Sinclair. It does not just diagnose the disease, but outlines the cure, through a profile of an enthusiastic and articulate sustainably organic farmer in Virginia. Warning: this film will haunt every trip to the grocery store after you see it.
I confess that I came at The Cove (2009, dvd, MC-82), a well-reviewed plea to save the dolphins, from a slant angle. Somehow I had formed the impression that it was a faux-documentary and I kept waiting for the twist that would reveal that it was all made up. I guess I’d read that it was a documentary that turns into a thriller, and that remains the problem I have with it. Director Louie Psihoyos brings an Ocean’s Eleven caper quality to his team’s effort to film the regular, but resolutely covered-up, slaughter of dolphins in a Japanese fishing village, a by-product of the capture of performers for marine parks around the world. The dolphins that don’t have the star quality to earn big bucks in aquatic entertainment are herded into a secret cove, where they are slaughtered to be sold as whale meat, in a primitive process that turns the entire cove red with blood. If the story hadn’t been told in such a self-congratulatory way, then the tragedy would have emerged in much starker terms, through the character of Richard O’Barry, who was the original trainer for the tv series Flipper and now holds himself responsible for the fate of dolphins worldwide, freeing them from captivity wherever and however he can. So admittedly I approached this film as a hoax (like a Holocaust or global warming denier), but I blame it for failing to convince me otherwise, for seeming more like a stunt than an exposé, though the truest thing in it is the haunted look on the face of Ric O’Barry.
In Ballets Russes (2005, dvd, MC-81), Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller craft a documentary with appeal well beyond its ostensible subject. Apart from the cogently presented dance history of the competing companies that vied for the mantle of Diaghilev from the Thirties through the Fifties, the hook here is the juxtaposition of supremely agile young bodies, shown vividly in archival footage, with their octogenarian incarnations, jumping off from a 2000 reunion of two groups that danced under the Ballet Russe banner. So we see Balanchine’s “Baby Ballerinas” in pre-adolescent exuberance and as white-haired old ladies, and it’s intrinsically fascinating and moving. Two troupes, mostly of émigré Russians, spread the gospel of dance through nonstop tours around the world, seeding local ballet companies across the globe, from Australia to Uruguay. Both the memories and the recorded performances are stirring.
If you think a film about origami would be cute at best, or at worst a deep snooze, then you have the same surprise in store that I did with the PBS “Independent Lens” presentation of Between the Folds (2008, now on dvd as well). Vanessa Gould’s film is intriguing and exhilarating, going way beyond the familiar craft of folded paper to jaw-dropping art and mind-blowing science. It comes at the subject from a variety of angles in profiling ten different people and their respective approaches to paper engineering, design, portraiture, even genetic modeling. I defy you to come away from this film without a newfound appreciation of origami -- it unfolds a whole new world.
If, for example, you’re interested in avant-garde favorite Guy Maddin, his quasi-documentary My Winnipeg (2007, dvd, MC-84) is a good place to start. His style is in place – fragmented, fantastical, in blurry black & white – but well suited to rendering a whimsical and wistful portrait of the city he has never been able to escape, where sleepwalking is a way of life and the winter never ends. The film comprises archival footage of Manitoban history and campy dramatic recreations of Maddin’s life with an overpowering mother, along with repeated scenes of “Maddin” sleeping on a train that is supposed to be taking him out of town at last. One suspects that much of the history is made up, fact melding into fantasy, but it seems a true portrait of this on-the-frontier, north-of-the-border city where radicalism meets somnambulism. And the lament for lost landmarks of the filmmaker’s youth, whether downtown department store or hockey arena, is poignant and true. I’m a fan of first-person documentaries -- “Self-Portraits in Cinema” as I called them in a series at the Clark some years ago -- and My Winnipeg offers a novel twist, an excellent companion piece to the recent Of Time and the City by Terence Davies.
One respectfully-received self-portrait that I do not recommend is The Windmill Movie, which noted Harvard documentarian Richard P. Rogers (The Midwife’s Tale, among many others) worked on for 25 years and left unfinished (or barely started) when he died of brain cancer. At the request of his wife, the celebrated photographer Susan Meiselas, protégé Alexander Olch reviewed all the footage and put together this homage. Though I personally tend to be tolerant toward cinematic navel-gazing, this film does not, despite some striking moments, break out of the self-referential into any wider significance.
Of the widest significance is Food, Inc. (2009, dvd, MC-80), which does an excellent job of aggregating the findings of Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) into a thorough unmasking of megacorporate agriculture, which has turned farms into horrific factories, based on monocultures sustained by cheap oil, pesticides, government subsidies, and genetic copyright enforcement, disastrous in every facet of how and what they produce. This information is out there, though thoroughly obscured by corporate lobbying and advertising, but is here put together in a concise and striking manner. The film would be entertaining if it weren’t so scary, with indelible images of just what food production has become in this country. More like the lively King Corn than the meditative Our Daily Bread, Robert Kenner’s Food Inc. offers an indictment that has to be seen to be believed, in a latter day reprise of The Jungle of Upton Sinclair. It does not just diagnose the disease, but outlines the cure, through a profile of an enthusiastic and articulate sustainably organic farmer in Virginia. Warning: this film will haunt every trip to the grocery store after you see it.
I confess that I came at The Cove (2009, dvd, MC-82), a well-reviewed plea to save the dolphins, from a slant angle. Somehow I had formed the impression that it was a faux-documentary and I kept waiting for the twist that would reveal that it was all made up. I guess I’d read that it was a documentary that turns into a thriller, and that remains the problem I have with it. Director Louie Psihoyos brings an Ocean’s Eleven caper quality to his team’s effort to film the regular, but resolutely covered-up, slaughter of dolphins in a Japanese fishing village, a by-product of the capture of performers for marine parks around the world. The dolphins that don’t have the star quality to earn big bucks in aquatic entertainment are herded into a secret cove, where they are slaughtered to be sold as whale meat, in a primitive process that turns the entire cove red with blood. If the story hadn’t been told in such a self-congratulatory way, then the tragedy would have emerged in much starker terms, through the character of Richard O’Barry, who was the original trainer for the tv series Flipper and now holds himself responsible for the fate of dolphins worldwide, freeing them from captivity wherever and however he can. So admittedly I approached this film as a hoax (like a Holocaust or global warming denier), but I blame it for failing to convince me otherwise, for seeming more like a stunt than an exposé, though the truest thing in it is the haunted look on the face of Ric O’Barry.
In Ballets Russes (2005, dvd, MC-81), Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller craft a documentary with appeal well beyond its ostensible subject. Apart from the cogently presented dance history of the competing companies that vied for the mantle of Diaghilev from the Thirties through the Fifties, the hook here is the juxtaposition of supremely agile young bodies, shown vividly in archival footage, with their octogenarian incarnations, jumping off from a 2000 reunion of two groups that danced under the Ballet Russe banner. So we see Balanchine’s “Baby Ballerinas” in pre-adolescent exuberance and as white-haired old ladies, and it’s intrinsically fascinating and moving. Two troupes, mostly of émigré Russians, spread the gospel of dance through nonstop tours around the world, seeding local ballet companies across the globe, from Australia to Uruguay. Both the memories and the recorded performances are stirring.
If you think a film about origami would be cute at best, or at worst a deep snooze, then you have the same surprise in store that I did with the PBS “Independent Lens” presentation of Between the Folds (2008, now on dvd as well). Vanessa Gould’s film is intriguing and exhilarating, going way beyond the familiar craft of folded paper to jaw-dropping art and mind-blowing science. It comes at the subject from a variety of angles in profiling ten different people and their respective approaches to paper engineering, design, portraiture, even genetic modeling. I defy you to come away from this film without a newfound appreciation of origami -- it unfolds a whole new world.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Julie & Julia
One more two-word recommendation: Meryl Streep – ’nuff said. It’s not that I have any familiarity with the real Julia Child, but Streep’s embodiment of her is pure joy in itself, deep and funny. Stanley Tucci is the perfect accompaniment, a delicious side dish as Julia’s husband. The critical consensus is correct -- one half of this dual story thoroughly outshines the other. As appealing as Amy Adams is, I found her vaguely annoying in the role of Julie, a would-be writer dying on the vine in Queens until she gets the idea of cooking her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days, and blogging about it the while. Of her husband, it is kinder to say nothing. Nora Ephron negotiates the back and forth reasonably well, but 1949 Paris comes though much more engagingly than 2002 New York. Just so, one delightful portrait of an unlikely marriage -- between a fluting giantess and her small bald husband -- renders the other completely superfluous. (2009, dvd) *7-* (MC-66)
A Christmas Tale [etc.]
This French holiday feast from Arnaud Desplechin is de trop – too much packed in, too many characters and story threads, too many stylistic hijinks, too many references and allusions. As stuffed as it is, this repast requires a second helping, just too dense and yet diffuse to take in at a single sitting. A family gathers for Christmas in the provincial city of Roubaix, where the mother is diagnosed with leukemia and requires a bone marrow transplant from a compatible donor. Is anyone in this family really compatible? The mother (Catherine Deneuve) is regal and remote, the father is troll-like but genial, and the kids are messed up, largely it seems because their elder brother died at the age of six. The elder sister (Anne Consigny) has banished one of the brothers from the family, for reasons that remain hard to fathom, though goodness knows the Mathieu Amalric character would be enough to try anyone’s patience. Melvil Poupard is the younger brother, married to Chiara Mastrioanni (in one of the many inside jokes of the film, her real mother – Deneuve – dismisses her as boring, but I loved to watch her performance and see the genes of her famous parents express themselves in the play of her face). Desplechin muse Emmanuelle Devos turns up as Amalric’s girlfriend. So the movie has real Gallic star power to go with its familiar set-up, plus all the Truffaut, Nietzsche, Shakespeare – whatever – that the auteur can cram in. But unlike Olivier Assayas’ recent and not-dissimilar SummerHours, in which I understood, despite indirection and elision, exactly what each family member was thinking and feeling, here I remained on the outside looking in, however mesmerizing the scene going on behind the window of the family home. (2008, dvd) *7* (MC-84)
Another film that was a tad too French for my taste was Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress (2008, Sundance, MC-78). Yeah sure, l’amour fou, but the crazier the love, the less I get it. In 1830s France, a lush-lipped playboy renounces his longtime mistress, a Spanish fireball played by Asia Argento, for marriage to a virginal aristocrat. But the flamenco hottie refuses to be cast aside, even though their relationship is predicated on hate as much as love, not to mention the torrid sex on a tiger-headed rug. The film certainly looks good and has its moments, but the relationships are too kinky to make sense for the likes of me, more vampire horror than comprehensible romance, however weighted with doom.
I prefer my Frenchiness diluted a bit by British qualities, so I much preferred Cheri (2009, dvd, MC-63), Stephen Frears’ adaptation of two Colette novels. A very handsome production of the Belle Epoque, it tells of a society of aging but highly successful courtesans, as they negotiate their respective retirements. My recommendation of this film comes down to two words: Michelle Pfeiffer. At 50 she is still entrancingly beautiful, but not afraid to show her age in a longtime affair with decades-younger Rupert Friend, as the son of fellow-courtesan Kathy Bates. At barely ninety minutes, this is not a film that tries to do too much, but Michelle herself is quite enough.
Another film that was a tad too French for my taste was Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress (2008, Sundance, MC-78). Yeah sure, l’amour fou, but the crazier the love, the less I get it. In 1830s France, a lush-lipped playboy renounces his longtime mistress, a Spanish fireball played by Asia Argento, for marriage to a virginal aristocrat. But the flamenco hottie refuses to be cast aside, even though their relationship is predicated on hate as much as love, not to mention the torrid sex on a tiger-headed rug. The film certainly looks good and has its moments, but the relationships are too kinky to make sense for the likes of me, more vampire horror than comprehensible romance, however weighted with doom.
I prefer my Frenchiness diluted a bit by British qualities, so I much preferred Cheri (2009, dvd, MC-63), Stephen Frears’ adaptation of two Colette novels. A very handsome production of the Belle Epoque, it tells of a society of aging but highly successful courtesans, as they negotiate their respective retirements. My recommendation of this film comes down to two words: Michelle Pfeiffer. At 50 she is still entrancingly beautiful, but not afraid to show her age in a longtime affair with decades-younger Rupert Friend, as the son of fellow-courtesan Kathy Bates. At barely ninety minutes, this is not a film that tries to do too much, but Michelle herself is quite enough.
A Serious Man
One is obliged to be of two minds about Joel and Ethan Coen. They’re funny when they’re serious, and serious when funny. I tend to like them less when slick and hugely successful (Fargo; No Country for Old Men), and more when off-beat and off-hand (The Hudsucker Proxy; O Brother, Where Art Thou?). This film feels as close to home as anything they’ve ever done. Though not Jewish myself, I grew up in a Jewish community in the suburban Midwest in the Sixties, precisely as portrayed in this film. It's the extreme accuracy of this portrait that has divided critical opinion on this film, with some Jewish writers clearly uncomfortable with how close to the bone it is. I found it hilarious and spot on. Sure, the Coen boys take a little too much glee in piling the tsuris on their main character, a college math professor played by Michael Stuhlbarg, but the sheer exuberance of their storytelling with this modern-day Job supercedes their cynical nihilism. This seriously funny film makes you think while you laugh, and think about why you’re laughing. (2009, Beacon) *7+* ((MC-79. For a while I’ve been linking to the Metacritic page for films I review, but now when there is one commentator who nails my take on a given film in a way that leaves me little to add, I will link to it directly -- in this case, A.O. Scott of the NYTimes.)
This was my first trip to the new Beacon Cinema on North Street in Pittsfield. It is an impressive facility and I wish them well. The viewing experience was among the best I’ve ever had, from comfortable seats to impeccable image and sound. Too bad there seemed to be more loitering staff than patrons the evening I attended. Some legitimate disappointment has been expressed that the Beacon will be less Triplex North than Mall South in its programming, but I am hoping for some improvement in film choices after their shakedown cruise. I’m certain there’s hunger for more serious films in Central Berkshire than their current marketing plan calls for. It’s troubling that in their first month they’ve shown only one film I considered worth going to the theater for (and which I could have seen at Images at the same time), but there’s reason to hope that the year-end critical faves will get to the Berkshires quicker now. And a 3-D venue may make Avatar a must-see.
This was my first trip to the new Beacon Cinema on North Street in Pittsfield. It is an impressive facility and I wish them well. The viewing experience was among the best I’ve ever had, from comfortable seats to impeccable image and sound. Too bad there seemed to be more loitering staff than patrons the evening I attended. Some legitimate disappointment has been expressed that the Beacon will be less Triplex North than Mall South in its programming, but I am hoping for some improvement in film choices after their shakedown cruise. I’m certain there’s hunger for more serious films in Central Berkshire than their current marketing plan calls for. It’s troubling that in their first month they’ve shown only one film I considered worth going to the theater for (and which I could have seen at Images at the same time), but there’s reason to hope that the year-end critical faves will get to the Berkshires quicker now. And a 3-D venue may make Avatar a must-see.
Il Divo
Oh, those Italians! Paolo Sorrentino bids fair to join the ranks of Scorsese and Coppola, not to mention Fellini and Visconti. This autopsy on recent Italian politics through the character of Giulio Andreotti -- three-time prime minister, with high cabinet posts in four other governments, and currently at 90 still Senator for Life as he was appointed in 1991, despite conviction and then reversal for association with Mafia murders – is both opulent spectacle and sly comedy. Much of the politics and personalities will be highly confusing to the uninitiated, but the film includes a visual clue for American audiences as a key to understanding. There is a brief glimpse of a photo of the real Andreotti sitting next to Nixon in the awkward flesh. Just as an Italian wouldn’t be able to follow every Haldeman or Liddy in some film about Watergate, an American can’t follow all the factions and conflicts in Italian governments’ deadly dance with the Church and Mafia. But the central character, embodied stiffly but evocatively by Toni Servillo, inhabits the halls of power in a convincing manner. Even if one does not comprehend the political maneuvering going on, the scenes set in the Italian parliament, for example, make for a fascinating spectacle, with all the filmmaking stops pulled out for operatic effect. The eye candy carries the day even when the intellect struggles to keep up. (2009, dvd.) *7* (MC-81)
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Ballast
This Sundance favorite involved me in its indirect approach, allowing a situation to make itself clear gradually, through inarticulate gestures rather than explanatory dialogue. What emerges from the desolate landscape of a wintry Mississippi Delta is the story of a teenage boy, whose estranged father has committed suicide. The father’s twin brother tries to kill himself as well, but survives, to take a slow and grudging interest in his nephew, even though he blames the mother for the father’s death. In a sidelong way, forgiveness and family feeling begin to emerge from emotional devastation. Understated yet eloquent, Lance Hammer’s film may look to some like nothing happening, but to me was invested with meaning and feeling, true to the marginal lives it depicts. (2008, dvd) *7* (MC-84)
Funny People
Judd Apatow should have a little less fun making movies, and give us a little more by serving up less. This film would have been better shorter -- less diffuse, less all things to all people (and therefore little to any). That said, there’s a lot of good stuff in the movie. Adam Sandler has proved himself to be an intriguingly off-putting actor, and Seth Rogen has not worn out his welcome yet. The world of stand-up comedy is intimately familiar to all involved, so there is some personal truth in the playing out of the movie, though muffled some by shtick and sentiment, however ambiguous. Sandler is -- quite a stretch -- a ridiculously successful movie comedian, who gets a death sentence from his doctor, and hires fledgling stand-up Rogen to be his flunky and fake friend. About when the story should be wrapping up, it takes a twist and goes on and on. Not that it’s all bad – we’re happy to see Mrs. Apatow (Leslie Mann) and their two kids – but the opportunity for focus and resolution is past. Maybe Judd is nostalgic for the run-on pleasures of a series -- such as the immortal Freaks and Geeks -- where he can let all his friends strut their stuff. This baby has an amusing face, and a good heart despite a potty mouth, but needs to lose a few pounds before it’s really attractive. (2009, dvd.) *6+ * (MC-60)
Random viewing
As it approaches its fifth anniversary, this blog will be undergoing a number of changes. First off is to leave behind its original impetus. With the turn of the millennium, I began a filmlog to help keep track of all the movies I was watching, with a number grade to remind me how much I liked each, and a one-line summary to jog my memory. Gradually the summations became longer, almost mini-reviews, and when I began to post them online at the start of 2005, became more like a searchable film guide, geared toward recommendations for the reader’s Netflix queue, straight from my own.
What I will be abandoning is a complete record of my viewing. Some films require only a cursory notation as watched in passing. Films of particular current or retrospective interest will continue to get their 200 words or so, sometimes accompanied by short subjects -- documentary, animation, what-have-you. Films viewed in pursuit of a theme will be addressed together in longer essays. As for the rest, they will be lumped in a potpourri such as this.
On the domestic side, what assortment could be more random than Cash McCall (1959 – somehow lodged in my 12-year-old mind, led to revisit by relation to Executive Suite and Mad Men, features charming rascal James Garner as a corporate raider who slows down enough to woo Natalie Wood (yum!), daughter of a takeover target -- not quite as humorous or pointed as I remembered), Diner (1982 – heavily copied and no longer the novelty it seemed at the time, but not a classic in retrospect, this tale of a group of superannuated juveniles in Barry Levinson’s Baltimore introduced a lot of now familiar performers, and I watched largely to compare Mickey Rourke to his latest incarnation as The Wrestler), and Tropic Thunder (2008 – Ben Stiller’s funny-enough parody of making an Apocalypse Now-like movie is a self-referential comedy in the tradition of Airplane! and all its spawn, notable for the hilarious fake trailers at the beginning, lots of celebrity cameos, and Robert Downey in blackface).
As for imports, I would single out The Return (2003, MC-82), Andrey Zvyagintsev’s subdued but intense psychological thriller, about the mysterious return of the father of two teenage boys, who were happy living with their mother, but now have to adjust to an incomprehensible authority figure they hadn’t seen in ten years. With no explanation, the father takes the boys on a fishing trip to the ends of the earth, a remote spot near the Arctic Circle. Tensions build as the elder boy is only too glad to have a dad, but the younger distrusts this demanding stranger. It all plays out with the economy of a fable, to the accompaniment of breathtaking widescreen landscapes.
I watched Nenette & Boni (1996) to fill in Claire Denis’s filmography, but you don’t have to – for a taste of this intriguingly elusive director, go straight to Beau Travail (1998) or her newly-released 35 Shots of Rum, which I notice has a Metacritic rating of 96, just about the highest ever.
As I was researching Vittorio De Sica’s career for my film club introduction, I noticed that even though Shoeshine is still unavailable on DVD, The Criterion Collection has issued an earlier film of his that I had never seen. The Children Are Watching Us (1943) is anything but neorealist, a child’s eye view of a wandering mother somewhere between Anna Karenina and a desperate housewife. The story transpires in an upper middle class milieu that gives no hint that a war is going on, but offers a well-done soap opera made something more by the brilliant “acting” of the five-year-old boy.
Speaking of the film club, I found Il Posto to be up to my exalted memory of it, The Flowers of Saint Francis to be slight but indicative of Rossellini’s genius, Umberto D to be impressive but not transcendent, La Terra Trema to be interesting but an hour too long, and La Strada to be less sentimental and more coherent than I remembered. In my other series, The White Sheik confirmed my view of Fellini’s first as one of his best, and one of the most deeply delightful comedies ever. What a comedown to the next film in the series -- I had never seen the whole of La Dolce Vita, and now I know why. Same for Fellini's Roma -- hard to see how an accomplished director can fall so far from grace.
What I will be abandoning is a complete record of my viewing. Some films require only a cursory notation as watched in passing. Films of particular current or retrospective interest will continue to get their 200 words or so, sometimes accompanied by short subjects -- documentary, animation, what-have-you. Films viewed in pursuit of a theme will be addressed together in longer essays. As for the rest, they will be lumped in a potpourri such as this.
On the domestic side, what assortment could be more random than Cash McCall (1959 – somehow lodged in my 12-year-old mind, led to revisit by relation to Executive Suite and Mad Men, features charming rascal James Garner as a corporate raider who slows down enough to woo Natalie Wood (yum!), daughter of a takeover target -- not quite as humorous or pointed as I remembered), Diner (1982 – heavily copied and no longer the novelty it seemed at the time, but not a classic in retrospect, this tale of a group of superannuated juveniles in Barry Levinson’s Baltimore introduced a lot of now familiar performers, and I watched largely to compare Mickey Rourke to his latest incarnation as The Wrestler), and Tropic Thunder (2008 – Ben Stiller’s funny-enough parody of making an Apocalypse Now-like movie is a self-referential comedy in the tradition of Airplane! and all its spawn, notable for the hilarious fake trailers at the beginning, lots of celebrity cameos, and Robert Downey in blackface).
As for imports, I would single out The Return (2003, MC-82), Andrey Zvyagintsev’s subdued but intense psychological thriller, about the mysterious return of the father of two teenage boys, who were happy living with their mother, but now have to adjust to an incomprehensible authority figure they hadn’t seen in ten years. With no explanation, the father takes the boys on a fishing trip to the ends of the earth, a remote spot near the Arctic Circle. Tensions build as the elder boy is only too glad to have a dad, but the younger distrusts this demanding stranger. It all plays out with the economy of a fable, to the accompaniment of breathtaking widescreen landscapes.
I watched Nenette & Boni (1996) to fill in Claire Denis’s filmography, but you don’t have to – for a taste of this intriguingly elusive director, go straight to Beau Travail (1998) or her newly-released 35 Shots of Rum, which I notice has a Metacritic rating of 96, just about the highest ever.
As I was researching Vittorio De Sica’s career for my film club introduction, I noticed that even though Shoeshine is still unavailable on DVD, The Criterion Collection has issued an earlier film of his that I had never seen. The Children Are Watching Us (1943) is anything but neorealist, a child’s eye view of a wandering mother somewhere between Anna Karenina and a desperate housewife. The story transpires in an upper middle class milieu that gives no hint that a war is going on, but offers a well-done soap opera made something more by the brilliant “acting” of the five-year-old boy.
Speaking of the film club, I found Il Posto to be up to my exalted memory of it, The Flowers of Saint Francis to be slight but indicative of Rossellini’s genius, Umberto D to be impressive but not transcendent, La Terra Trema to be interesting but an hour too long, and La Strada to be less sentimental and more coherent than I remembered. In my other series, The White Sheik confirmed my view of Fellini’s first as one of his best, and one of the most deeply delightful comedies ever. What a comedown to the next film in the series -- I had never seen the whole of La Dolce Vita, and now I know why. Same for Fellini's Roma -- hard to see how an accomplished director can fall so far from grace.
Still plugging
I have two more new documentaries to cite. From “Independent Lens” on PBS, I tuned in tentatively to No Subtitles Necessary: Laszlo and Vilmos (2008), and found myself more and more engaged. I certainly knew Kovacs and Zsigmond as names to conjure with, cinematographers for many of the most memorable American films from the Sixties on, but nothing more. In this film, they emerge from behind the camera as interesting characters in their own right. Though it’s impossible to keep track of who did what, if you remember the look of any movie from Easy Rider on, chances are it was shot by one of them, so this documentary works as a clips reel if nothing else. But there was a brotherhood between these two film students who escaped Hungary together in 1956, smuggling out amazing on-the-scene footage of the Uprising stomped out by the heavy foot of Russian tanks. Together they made their way to Hollywood and wormed their way into filmmaking, by working fast, cheap, and beautiful, virtually sharing a 50-year career. Based on their blithe spirits, this documentary has some of the expected platitudinous Hollywood back-patting, but something more comes through.
Another film I gave a chance and found myself watching through with a grudging fascination was Audience of One (2007) on the Sundance Channel (also on Netflix). In the tradition of films about filmmaking gone bad, Mark Jacobs has found himself a doozy of a subject in a Pentecostal preacher in whom God (that “Audience of One”) has inspired Cecil B. Demille dreams. He embarks on what he, aflame with faith, believes will be the biggest movie ever, Star Wars meets The Ten Commandments. Bringing his own special brand of craziness to the crazy business of filmmaking, he displays a flabbergasting confidence, as the project just keeps getting bigger, the more his complete incompetence is being revealed. Maybe it’s just me, but I came to see him as indicative of Bush in Iraq. Once you replace fact with faith, you believe you can do anything you want. It’s hilarious until it’s chilling. The beauty of this documentary is that the preacher could be happy with it as an honest portrait, not regret the access he gave the documentarists, while the audience is free to take it as total satire and a cautionary tale on many levels.
Another film I gave a chance and found myself watching through with a grudging fascination was Audience of One (2007) on the Sundance Channel (also on Netflix). In the tradition of films about filmmaking gone bad, Mark Jacobs has found himself a doozy of a subject in a Pentecostal preacher in whom God (that “Audience of One”) has inspired Cecil B. Demille dreams. He embarks on what he, aflame with faith, believes will be the biggest movie ever, Star Wars meets The Ten Commandments. Bringing his own special brand of craziness to the crazy business of filmmaking, he displays a flabbergasting confidence, as the project just keeps getting bigger, the more his complete incompetence is being revealed. Maybe it’s just me, but I came to see him as indicative of Bush in Iraq. Once you replace fact with faith, you believe you can do anything you want. It’s hilarious until it’s chilling. The beauty of this documentary is that the preacher could be happy with it as an honest portrait, not regret the access he gave the documentarists, while the audience is free to take it as total satire and a cautionary tale on many levels.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Docs are still rockin'
I’m still pushing documentaries and have some more to recommend, first off several from PBS, which are available on Netflix, not just on DVD but as a free download for subscribers, and also on PBS.org. Botany of Desire recapitulates Michael Pollan’s great book of the same name, in a coherent and visually impressive manner, devoting a half-hour each to the apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato, as each plant appeals to human desires – for sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control – to insure its co-evolutionary survival. Pollan’s case for diversity is judicious and entertaining, filled with “gee, I didn’t know that” facts and striking images.
I caught up with two rebroadcasts from series I just recommended, each of which seemed particularly relevant – and revelatory -- to the news of the day. An “American Experience” segment on the Civilian Conservation Corps revisited one of FDR’s great stimulus plans for recovery from the Depression, from back in the day when government was still seen as part of the solution and not the problem, a rather amazing mobilization of collective will, much more extensive than I imagined, truly the “moral equivalent of war,” until it was superceded by war itself.
Then “Frontline” repeated its survey, Sick Around the World, which gives a global survey of what works and what doesn’t in providing universal healthcare at lower cost and with better results than the American non-system achieves. This sort of comparative analysis is precisely what is missing in the current debate over healthcare reform, as Congress reinvents the wheel by committee in the dark, relying on knee-jerk positions rather than facts. So see how they do it in Britain, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and Switzerland, and conceive what is possible when healthcare is treated as a right, and not a privilege reserved to those who can afford it.
HBO is still in the game as well. By the People:The Election of Barack Obama offers behind-the-scenes access as a freshman senator embarks on an improbable journey to the White House. It’s a story that I for one was happy to relive, from the perspective of the people behind the campaign, from the candidate down to passionately committed field workers. You know whether you’d be happy to share that thrill once again.
But I have an out-of-the-blue but strong recommendation for Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak. I figured Spike Jonze’s documentary would just be a promo for his current adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, but it turned out to be an extremely well-done and intimate portrait of a prickly but fascinating character, a picture book artist who connected to children not because he knew them, but because of his connection to his own inner child, with all its passions and fears.
Another good HBO doc, which I can recommend only if you have the stomach for it, is Terror in Mumbai. Narrated by Fareed Zacharia, the film has the expected combination of news footage and eyewitness accounts by survivors, but is made riveting by the actual voices of the terrorist kids and their controllers in Pakistan through intercepted cellphone transmissions, plus video of the hospital-bed confession of the one surviving terrorist, and surveillance footage of the juvenile jihadists in deadly action. Chilling and premonitory.
I caught up with two rebroadcasts from series I just recommended, each of which seemed particularly relevant – and revelatory -- to the news of the day. An “American Experience” segment on the Civilian Conservation Corps revisited one of FDR’s great stimulus plans for recovery from the Depression, from back in the day when government was still seen as part of the solution and not the problem, a rather amazing mobilization of collective will, much more extensive than I imagined, truly the “moral equivalent of war,” until it was superceded by war itself.
Then “Frontline” repeated its survey, Sick Around the World, which gives a global survey of what works and what doesn’t in providing universal healthcare at lower cost and with better results than the American non-system achieves. This sort of comparative analysis is precisely what is missing in the current debate over healthcare reform, as Congress reinvents the wheel by committee in the dark, relying on knee-jerk positions rather than facts. So see how they do it in Britain, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and Switzerland, and conceive what is possible when healthcare is treated as a right, and not a privilege reserved to those who can afford it.
HBO is still in the game as well. By the People:The Election of Barack Obama offers behind-the-scenes access as a freshman senator embarks on an improbable journey to the White House. It’s a story that I for one was happy to relive, from the perspective of the people behind the campaign, from the candidate down to passionately committed field workers. You know whether you’d be happy to share that thrill once again.
But I have an out-of-the-blue but strong recommendation for Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak. I figured Spike Jonze’s documentary would just be a promo for his current adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, but it turned out to be an extremely well-done and intimate portrait of a prickly but fascinating character, a picture book artist who connected to children not because he knew them, but because of his connection to his own inner child, with all its passions and fears.
Another good HBO doc, which I can recommend only if you have the stomach for it, is Terror in Mumbai. Narrated by Fareed Zacharia, the film has the expected combination of news footage and eyewitness accounts by survivors, but is made riveting by the actual voices of the terrorist kids and their controllers in Pakistan through intercepted cellphone transmissions, plus video of the hospital-bed confession of the one surviving terrorist, and surveillance footage of the juvenile jihadists in deadly action. Chilling and premonitory.
Scrambled call letters
AMC has gone from a station I never looked at to the red-hot center of my television viewing pleasure. Its Sunday night has replaced HBO’s as the must-see line-up. Mad Men (MC-86) did not disappointed in its third season, nor did Breaking Bad (MC-85)in its second (with which I caught up in rerun). Both finished their seasons with a bang, and with a promise of more in 2010. If you haven’t made your way into either of these series, I strongly advise you to start at the beginning with the first season on DVD. As is the way with the televised megamovies that have become a preeminent form of popular culture, it doesn’t matter so much what they are about, as the way they have leisure to make characters and settings and communities engaging in a global and ongoing way. Were you really so interested in the business of the street corner crack trade, or of a family funeral home, going in? No, depth of engagement is the road into any of the worlds created by these high-quality series.
Mad Men has a lot going for it in the glamour of its setting and era, but all the design in the world wouldn’t attract a passionate audience without a full cast of rounded characters to live with and get to know. Highbrows can enjoy the pleasures of soap opera without guilt. On the other hand, a guilty complicity is at the heart of Breaking Bad’s appeal. Walter White is a guy just like us, a high school chemistry teacher with a perfectly ordinary middle American home and family -- in the marvelous Bryan Cranston literally a sitcom dad -- whose life is derailed by a diagnosis of cancer into unimagined depths of depravity as he schemes to turn all his technical knowledge into fast money by cooking up the best crystal meth in the world. We feel with him every step of the way, as he descends the ladder of despicability. Sometimes we laugh, sometimes we gasp in horror, sometimes both at the same time. BB’s second season certainly ended with a bang, and has us on the hook for another, but MM’s finale was the best I could imagine, not only rounding off this season but setting up the next in a way that has us panting with anticipation. How good was it? It had me comparing it to one of my top ten films of all time: The Seven Samurai.
Meanwhile, from the BBC I’ve been watching Cranford, a series that was previewed on the Little Dorrit dvds, and while it does not have the scope of the Dickens, this adaptation of several works by Elizabeth Gaskell does have an appealing cast (led by Judy Dench) and a savory Jane-Austen-ish flavor. It follows one year, from 1842 to 1843, in the life of a small village, a spinster gynocracy led by Eileen Atkins, as elder sister of Dame Judy and arbiter of all matters and manners in the neighborhood. Imelda Staunton is a good-hearted but inveterate busybody next door. A handsome young doctor comes to town and sets hearts aflutter; an estate manager crosses the lady of the manor by trying to educate and advance a poor but promising local lad; and the train threatens to reach Cranford and change its hidden-away charm forever. Of these threads and more the five-hour series is woven, increasing in complexity and significance as it goes. I’m happy to see a second series is due to be broadcast on PBS early next year.
Britain’s ITV gets in the game with Lost in Austen, which takes the premise of a modern London girl, obsessed with Pride and Prejudice, who swaps places with Elizabeth Bennett. Some amusing situations are spun out of the premise, but it does go on and on. I didn’t check the length when I popped in the Netflix-recommended DVD, and thought I was watching a film (which apparently is now in pre-production). When I started to ask myself when this thing was going to end, I checked the envelope and saw it was a series totaling almost three hours. I watched to the end with increasing disenchantment, as it strung out to a series of audience-catering, self-canceling conclusions. But the movie might be worth looking at when it comes out, once they’ve trimmed the story to reasonable feature length.
With the next seasons of the AMC duo now breathlessly awaited, the one show I look forward to every week is Friday Night Lights (MC-81), whose fourth season I am lucky to be able to preview as a DirecTV subscriber, months before it will debut on NBC. I won’t gloat by telling you how good it remains, but will simply note that in a neat passing of the baton between favorite shows, one of the corner hoppers from The Wire turns up as the replacement for ace running back Smash Williams in the new season of FNL.
Mad Men has a lot going for it in the glamour of its setting and era, but all the design in the world wouldn’t attract a passionate audience without a full cast of rounded characters to live with and get to know. Highbrows can enjoy the pleasures of soap opera without guilt. On the other hand, a guilty complicity is at the heart of Breaking Bad’s appeal. Walter White is a guy just like us, a high school chemistry teacher with a perfectly ordinary middle American home and family -- in the marvelous Bryan Cranston literally a sitcom dad -- whose life is derailed by a diagnosis of cancer into unimagined depths of depravity as he schemes to turn all his technical knowledge into fast money by cooking up the best crystal meth in the world. We feel with him every step of the way, as he descends the ladder of despicability. Sometimes we laugh, sometimes we gasp in horror, sometimes both at the same time. BB’s second season certainly ended with a bang, and has us on the hook for another, but MM’s finale was the best I could imagine, not only rounding off this season but setting up the next in a way that has us panting with anticipation. How good was it? It had me comparing it to one of my top ten films of all time: The Seven Samurai.
Meanwhile, from the BBC I’ve been watching Cranford, a series that was previewed on the Little Dorrit dvds, and while it does not have the scope of the Dickens, this adaptation of several works by Elizabeth Gaskell does have an appealing cast (led by Judy Dench) and a savory Jane-Austen-ish flavor. It follows one year, from 1842 to 1843, in the life of a small village, a spinster gynocracy led by Eileen Atkins, as elder sister of Dame Judy and arbiter of all matters and manners in the neighborhood. Imelda Staunton is a good-hearted but inveterate busybody next door. A handsome young doctor comes to town and sets hearts aflutter; an estate manager crosses the lady of the manor by trying to educate and advance a poor but promising local lad; and the train threatens to reach Cranford and change its hidden-away charm forever. Of these threads and more the five-hour series is woven, increasing in complexity and significance as it goes. I’m happy to see a second series is due to be broadcast on PBS early next year.
Britain’s ITV gets in the game with Lost in Austen, which takes the premise of a modern London girl, obsessed with Pride and Prejudice, who swaps places with Elizabeth Bennett. Some amusing situations are spun out of the premise, but it does go on and on. I didn’t check the length when I popped in the Netflix-recommended DVD, and thought I was watching a film (which apparently is now in pre-production). When I started to ask myself when this thing was going to end, I checked the envelope and saw it was a series totaling almost three hours. I watched to the end with increasing disenchantment, as it strung out to a series of audience-catering, self-canceling conclusions. But the movie might be worth looking at when it comes out, once they’ve trimmed the story to reasonable feature length.
With the next seasons of the AMC duo now breathlessly awaited, the one show I look forward to every week is Friday Night Lights (MC-81), whose fourth season I am lucky to be able to preview as a DirecTV subscriber, months before it will debut on NBC. I won’t gloat by telling you how good it remains, but will simply note that in a neat passing of the baton between favorite shows, one of the corner hoppers from The Wire turns up as the replacement for ace running back Smash Williams in the new season of FNL.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Film Club update
The final two films in the first series of screenings for the Cinema Salon Film Club at the Clark will be:
Friday, 11/6, 4:00 pm: La Terra Trema. (1947, 160 min.) Luchino Visconti’s neorealist examination of life in a Sicilian fishing village is explicitly Marxist but also lyrical, long and slow but thoroughly involving.
Friday, 11/20, 4:00 pm: La Strada. (1954, 104 min.) Federico Fellini emerges from his neorealist roots into his own personal style of sentimental fantasy, on “the road” with a waif played by his wife Giulietta Massina, who is indentured to itinerant strongman Anthony Quinn..
Thereafter, the Film Club will break for the holidays and return in February with a new series of screenings, under the heading of “What in the World is Going On?” Check back to this website for updated information.
I happened to notice this week that coincidentally Lincoln Center is just now offering a much more extensive series on Italian neorealism, and their program notes offer a concise summary of the points I've been making over the past weeks. For more detailed info, check out their program guide.
Friday, 11/6, 4:00 pm: La Terra Trema. (1947, 160 min.) Luchino Visconti’s neorealist examination of life in a Sicilian fishing village is explicitly Marxist but also lyrical, long and slow but thoroughly involving.
Friday, 11/20, 4:00 pm: La Strada. (1954, 104 min.) Federico Fellini emerges from his neorealist roots into his own personal style of sentimental fantasy, on “the road” with a waif played by his wife Giulietta Massina, who is indentured to itinerant strongman Anthony Quinn..
Thereafter, the Film Club will break for the holidays and return in February with a new series of screenings, under the heading of “What in the World is Going On?” Check back to this website for updated information.
I happened to notice this week that coincidentally Lincoln Center is just now offering a much more extensive series on Italian neorealism, and their program notes offer a concise summary of the points I've been making over the past weeks. For more detailed info, check out their program guide.
Docs around the clock
One reason I’ve been reviewing fewer fiction films lately is that I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries, and here I’m going to sort through a range of recommendations. Titles in bold are available on DVD from Netflix (or soon will be) and recommended by me. The others are worth looking for if you have a particular interest -- they may be found on the linked-to network schedules, or possibly On Demand..
First off is the recent documentary outing by feature director James Toback: Tyson (2009, MC-83). Like you, probably, I did not think I was all that interested in Mike Tyson, but I found this film almost hypnotizing in its formally inventive approach to film portraiture. Much of the film is Tyson himself speaking to the camera, in that incongruously high-pitched lisp, as if in self-reflection before an unseen therapist, but broken up into overlapping pictures and sound, which suggest the multiple facets of a divided self. He seems utterly believable in all his contradictions. There is enough footage recapitulating his career to establish that he might have been one of most powerful, if not the greatest, boxers of all time, and also to delineate his public disgrace in a rape conviction and prison term, plus the ignominious career-ending bout in which he bit the ear of his opponent. Tyson never goes quite so far as to plead, “I am not the animal you think I am,” but the film makes that case eloquently, and perhaps convincingly.
There are several stations worth monitoring for outstanding documentaries. Sundance Channel features Monday as Doc Day. I have been engrossed recently in the five-part (and perhaps continuing) series, Brick City, which portrays the city of Newark in much the same way that The Wire does Baltimore, though with more uplift and less crushing despair. In one of its aspects, this series from Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin picks up where the excellent documentary Street Fight leaves off, with the story of mayor Cory Booker, the media-savvy Obama avatar who is bringing hope to a city that is a byword for bleakness. Other threads include the story of a police commissioner brought in to lower the murder rate, and a gang girl gone good who is developing a mentoring program for other gang girls. If 90% of success is showing up, then the filmmakers are pretty much there, finding themselves in the middle of one amazing scene after another. One of the joys of documentary is deep-felt access into other people's lives, and this series has that in ... um, I want to say spades, but there are some honkies too.
“Real Sex” and “Taxicab Confessions” aside, HBO demonstrates a real commitment to quality documentaries, frequently featured on Mondays as well. From this link, you can get more information on these films, listed in order of the urgency of my recommendation. In Boy Interrupted, a filmmaking couple try to come to terms with the suicide of their teenage son, in a wrenching but not exploitive manner that is edifying to the viewer as well as cathartic for them. The Yes Men Save the World with media stunts like going on tv masquerading as a corporate spokesman to apologize and offer reparation for the health disaster of Bhopal -- they are inventive and funny and jaw-droppingly revealing of the ethos of big business. The Last Truck: The Closing of a GM Plant watches the last vehicle come off a massive assembly line in Ohio, and reveals the mixed feelings of the laid-off workers who have devoted most of their lives to the disappearing workplace. Prom Night in Mississippi is a bit of a stunt but turns out to be revealing, as Morgan Freeman offers to pay for the first integrated prom in his small hometown, which catalyzes debate over the lingering legacy of racism but also suggests the hope of a new generation free of the hatreds of the past. The Nine Lives of Marion Barry is like Tyson in going some way toward rehabilitating a black man who has become notorious for bad behavior. The Recruiter is just as much about the recruited, as we follow a variety of Texas youth into the military and through basic training, in a film that could be taken as a prequel to Stop-Loss. (Not a documentary but a spinoff from a great one, HBO's Grey Gardens, with Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange as the Bouvier daughter and mother, was not as superfluous as I imagined -- while some scenes were duplicated from the Maysles brothers' classic, the backstory is filled in and the actresses illuminate their characters -- and deserved the slew of Emmy nominations it picked up.)
PBS has long been a mainstay for documentaries, and they are a number of series I check regularly, foremost among them Independent Lens. Among the recent highlights are Herb & Dorothy, an absolutely delightful and fascinating look at the Vogels, a postal worker and librarian, who amassed an astounding collection of art from the Sixties on in their tiny Manhattan apartment, before three moving vans carted it away to the National Gallery -- I will look for the first opportunity to show this at the Clark. Butte, America mines fascinating archival footage and retrospective interviews to tell of the highly emblematic rise and fall of the "richest hill on earth," whose deposits of copper made the city boom, but whose mining companies went bust and left a legacy of environmental devastation.
Frontline is frequently worth checking out for extended treatment of important issues of the day, and Wide Angle is the same with an international perspective. Particularly notable from the latter is Time for School 3, which like the 7 Up series tracks a diverse group of children through time, ranging from an Afghan girl to a Brazilian boy, from a Romanian girl to a Kenyan boy. Initiated when an international accord promised a free education to every child in the world by 2015, this very well-done and affecting series periodically checks in on how that promise is being met or not in a variety of countries.
Two other venerable PBS series worth tuning into are American Experience and American Masters. Two episodes I've enjoyed lately are an old one of the former, A Midwife’s Tale, which uses an old diary and effectively minimal historical reenactments to offer a window on everyday life in colonial New England, and a recent broadcast on the latter, Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound, which I didn't expect to watch, but caught while channelsurfing and remained caught by through its length -- I tend to think of Baez as a pretty voice covering other people's songs, but this film makes a case for her as a social activist who used singing as her most effective tool.
I've recently watched two other documentary dvds from Netflix that I commend to your attention. Kestrel’s Eye is a delight for birdbrains, offering a genuine bird's eye view of the lives of a family of hawks living in a cranny of an old Swedish church -- a spare but astonishing nature film, without narration or music, but with incredible camera angles and uncanny intimacy with the subject.
Many years ago I saw a memorable short film called Organism, a film about New York City which uses time-lapse photography to portray the city as a huge living organism. When I started to think about doing a film series of "city symphonies" at the Clark, I went looking for it and found it on a dvd called The Films of Hilary Harris -- it was every bit as good as I remembered, and as a bonus included 9 Variations, which is as good a dance documentary as I have ever seen, utterly simple but visually stunning and extremely sensual.
There's a world of great documentaries out there, and if you're not looking for them, you're missing a great part of the art of film.
First off is the recent documentary outing by feature director James Toback: Tyson (2009, MC-83). Like you, probably, I did not think I was all that interested in Mike Tyson, but I found this film almost hypnotizing in its formally inventive approach to film portraiture. Much of the film is Tyson himself speaking to the camera, in that incongruously high-pitched lisp, as if in self-reflection before an unseen therapist, but broken up into overlapping pictures and sound, which suggest the multiple facets of a divided self. He seems utterly believable in all his contradictions. There is enough footage recapitulating his career to establish that he might have been one of most powerful, if not the greatest, boxers of all time, and also to delineate his public disgrace in a rape conviction and prison term, plus the ignominious career-ending bout in which he bit the ear of his opponent. Tyson never goes quite so far as to plead, “I am not the animal you think I am,” but the film makes that case eloquently, and perhaps convincingly.
There are several stations worth monitoring for outstanding documentaries. Sundance Channel features Monday as Doc Day. I have been engrossed recently in the five-part (and perhaps continuing) series, Brick City, which portrays the city of Newark in much the same way that The Wire does Baltimore, though with more uplift and less crushing despair. In one of its aspects, this series from Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin picks up where the excellent documentary Street Fight leaves off, with the story of mayor Cory Booker, the media-savvy Obama avatar who is bringing hope to a city that is a byword for bleakness. Other threads include the story of a police commissioner brought in to lower the murder rate, and a gang girl gone good who is developing a mentoring program for other gang girls. If 90% of success is showing up, then the filmmakers are pretty much there, finding themselves in the middle of one amazing scene after another. One of the joys of documentary is deep-felt access into other people's lives, and this series has that in ... um, I want to say spades, but there are some honkies too.
“Real Sex” and “Taxicab Confessions” aside, HBO demonstrates a real commitment to quality documentaries, frequently featured on Mondays as well. From this link, you can get more information on these films, listed in order of the urgency of my recommendation. In Boy Interrupted, a filmmaking couple try to come to terms with the suicide of their teenage son, in a wrenching but not exploitive manner that is edifying to the viewer as well as cathartic for them. The Yes Men Save the World with media stunts like going on tv masquerading as a corporate spokesman to apologize and offer reparation for the health disaster of Bhopal -- they are inventive and funny and jaw-droppingly revealing of the ethos of big business. The Last Truck: The Closing of a GM Plant watches the last vehicle come off a massive assembly line in Ohio, and reveals the mixed feelings of the laid-off workers who have devoted most of their lives to the disappearing workplace. Prom Night in Mississippi is a bit of a stunt but turns out to be revealing, as Morgan Freeman offers to pay for the first integrated prom in his small hometown, which catalyzes debate over the lingering legacy of racism but also suggests the hope of a new generation free of the hatreds of the past. The Nine Lives of Marion Barry is like Tyson in going some way toward rehabilitating a black man who has become notorious for bad behavior. The Recruiter is just as much about the recruited, as we follow a variety of Texas youth into the military and through basic training, in a film that could be taken as a prequel to Stop-Loss. (Not a documentary but a spinoff from a great one, HBO's Grey Gardens, with Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange as the Bouvier daughter and mother, was not as superfluous as I imagined -- while some scenes were duplicated from the Maysles brothers' classic, the backstory is filled in and the actresses illuminate their characters -- and deserved the slew of Emmy nominations it picked up.)
PBS has long been a mainstay for documentaries, and they are a number of series I check regularly, foremost among them Independent Lens. Among the recent highlights are Herb & Dorothy, an absolutely delightful and fascinating look at the Vogels, a postal worker and librarian, who amassed an astounding collection of art from the Sixties on in their tiny Manhattan apartment, before three moving vans carted it away to the National Gallery -- I will look for the first opportunity to show this at the Clark. Butte, America mines fascinating archival footage and retrospective interviews to tell of the highly emblematic rise and fall of the "richest hill on earth," whose deposits of copper made the city boom, but whose mining companies went bust and left a legacy of environmental devastation.
Frontline is frequently worth checking out for extended treatment of important issues of the day, and Wide Angle is the same with an international perspective. Particularly notable from the latter is Time for School 3, which like the 7 Up series tracks a diverse group of children through time, ranging from an Afghan girl to a Brazilian boy, from a Romanian girl to a Kenyan boy. Initiated when an international accord promised a free education to every child in the world by 2015, this very well-done and affecting series periodically checks in on how that promise is being met or not in a variety of countries.
Two other venerable PBS series worth tuning into are American Experience and American Masters. Two episodes I've enjoyed lately are an old one of the former, A Midwife’s Tale, which uses an old diary and effectively minimal historical reenactments to offer a window on everyday life in colonial New England, and a recent broadcast on the latter, Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound, which I didn't expect to watch, but caught while channelsurfing and remained caught by through its length -- I tend to think of Baez as a pretty voice covering other people's songs, but this film makes a case for her as a social activist who used singing as her most effective tool.
I've recently watched two other documentary dvds from Netflix that I commend to your attention. Kestrel’s Eye is a delight for birdbrains, offering a genuine bird's eye view of the lives of a family of hawks living in a cranny of an old Swedish church -- a spare but astonishing nature film, without narration or music, but with incredible camera angles and uncanny intimacy with the subject.
Many years ago I saw a memorable short film called Organism, a film about New York City which uses time-lapse photography to portray the city as a huge living organism. When I started to think about doing a film series of "city symphonies" at the Clark, I went looking for it and found it on a dvd called The Films of Hilary Harris -- it was every bit as good as I remembered, and as a bonus included 9 Variations, which is as good a dance documentary as I have ever seen, utterly simple but visually stunning and extremely sensual.
There's a world of great documentaries out there, and if you're not looking for them, you're missing a great part of the art of film.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Film Club update
The film at the Clark this Friday (10/23) at 4:00 pm is Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D. (1952, 89 min.) Again They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? aggregates useful background on the director, and the Criterion Collection includes two essays on the film with its dvd (here and here). I find that the Turner Classic Movies site frequently has good background in its reviews (here).
Remember that the film club will be deciding collectively which Visconti film to watch next. (Scroll down to be reminded of the choices.) And we will be open to suggestions on what to view after that, though Fellini's La Strada might be the default choice.
Remember that the film club will be deciding collectively which Visconti film to watch next. (Scroll down to be reminded of the choices.) And we will be open to suggestions on what to view after that, though Fellini's La Strada might be the default choice.
Bright Star
I don’t know when I’ve seen a film with a more authentic period feel than Jane Campion’s take on the Romantic entanglement of John Keats and Fanny Brawne. To me everything seems just so, not just dress and décor, but the attitudes and emotions of 1820 England. Every garment looks handsewn, each sparse interior is dimly lit by fire or candlelight or daylight slanting through a window. And a tragic unconsummated romance is believably played out in glances and delicate touches of fingertips and lips, with poetry spoken as if it were at once the language of everyday life and transcendent love. The cast is uniformly up to the task, from Kerry Fox as the widowed Mrs. Brawne, Fanny’s mother and Keats’s landlady, to Paul Schneider as his roommate and fellow poet, to Ben Whishaw as the waiflike yet willful Keats, broken by disease and poverty and critical response to his work, yet exultant in his command of Romantic feeling, for nature and the lovely, lively girl next door. That girl is Abbie Cornish, Australia’s latest gift to Anglophone film (Nicole & Cate et al. – make room!). She is the Bright Star of Campion’s film as well as Keats’ poem, a strong-willed seamstress with a thirst for fashion and passion, who ignores the liabilities of the match and attaches herself to the dying poet in spite of all the world. This chaste film burns hot with feeling. (2009, Images, n.) *8+* (MC-81.)
I happened to see Ms. Cornish in another film just two nights later. In Kimberley Pierce’s Stop-Loss, she also convinces as a Texas good old girl, fiancé to one soldier returning from Iraq (Channing Tatum) and longtime friend of his buddy (Ryan Phillippe). Coming almost ten years after Pierce’s breakthrough with Boys Don’t Cry, this film was greeted as a letdown, and flopped like every other film about Iraq. Though its approach to the subject may seem formulaic and unfocused, Stop-Loss deploys a lot of energy in laying out the familiar story of boys coming home from war, with pieces of themselves left behind, so nothing hangs together anymore. The quicksilver scenes from Iraq are vivid, and as comprehensible as the reality of the situation allows. The community back home in Texas, well-cast in every particular, is sketched in as memorably as that of Friday Night Lights, though obviously without the sustained amplitude of the latter (back for a 4th season later this month!). And the outrage at the unfair treatment of returning servicemen is well taken and important, ought to be seen and absorbed. But the film has an unresolved quality that is more frustrating than open-ended, so my recommendation is equivocal. (2007, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-61.)
I happened to see Ms. Cornish in another film just two nights later. In Kimberley Pierce’s Stop-Loss, she also convinces as a Texas good old girl, fiancé to one soldier returning from Iraq (Channing Tatum) and longtime friend of his buddy (Ryan Phillippe). Coming almost ten years after Pierce’s breakthrough with Boys Don’t Cry, this film was greeted as a letdown, and flopped like every other film about Iraq. Though its approach to the subject may seem formulaic and unfocused, Stop-Loss deploys a lot of energy in laying out the familiar story of boys coming home from war, with pieces of themselves left behind, so nothing hangs together anymore. The quicksilver scenes from Iraq are vivid, and as comprehensible as the reality of the situation allows. The community back home in Texas, well-cast in every particular, is sketched in as memorably as that of Friday Night Lights, though obviously without the sustained amplitude of the latter (back for a 4th season later this month!). And the outrage at the unfair treatment of returning servicemen is well taken and important, ought to be seen and absorbed. But the film has an unresolved quality that is more frustrating than open-ended, so my recommendation is equivocal. (2007, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-61.)
Little Dorrit times two
In the Little Dorrit sweepstakes, the 8-hour 2008 BBC production wins hands down over the 6-hour 1986 film by Christine Edzard. In fact, the former renders the latter dispensible, despite admirable performances from Derek Jacobi and Alec Guinness. So let’s focus on the latest from accomplished screen adapter Andrew Davies, who scored triumphs with Pride and Prejudice and Bleak House for the BBC. Besides their long tradition of superior acting, the BBC now provides impeccable production quality, whether the location is London or Venice, a debtors’ prison or an Italian villa. So they have the luxury of television series duration with no sacrifice of film’s visual splendor. And with Dickens they are virtually guaranteed topicality, a reliable contemporary relevance, as well as that Victorian period feel. There’s one character in Little Dorrit who might as well have been called Bernie Madoff. And so many other perennial species of human fauna and flora! And so well portrayed by this cast! In the most striking contrast with the Edzard film, here Amy Dorrit is perfectly embodied in newcomer Claire Foy, who is able to go from waiflike to radiantly beautiful, as the character must do. Highest honors must go to Tom Courtenay as Mr. Dorrit, outdoing Alec Guinness and absolutely convincing through all the character’s changes, from longtime prisoner for debt to haughty "aristo." Matthew Macfadyen is also excellent as Arthur Clennam, though younger and more eligible than the life-weary Jacobi, removing the pediphiliac impediment of the earlier film (and probably Dickens’ original). In every role the tv series effaces the film, but the most striking support comes from Eddie Marsan (the driving instructor in Happy-Go-Lucky -- “En Ra Ha!”) as Pancks, and Andy Serkis, acting more evil than Golem himself, as a French murderer who doesn’t even appear in the film, but here becomes the hinge of the story. Which is a problem, because when he reveals the secrets at the heart of the story, the reveal is impossible to follow, even when you rewind and watch it again. But that is the only flaw in a literary adaptation that I cannot recommend highly enough. (MC-82)
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Film club update
The next film for the Cinema Salon Film Club at the Clark will be Roberto Rossellini’s Flowers of Saint Francis (1950, 83 minutes, title more literally translated as Francis, Jester of God) on October 9th at 4:00 pm.
Someone requested links to material to read in advance of (or after) the screening and discussion. So here are a couple that I’ll be using myself. One of the best aggregators of information on directors is the website, They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, where you can find links to high-quality online articles about a given director. The essay accompanying the Criterion Collection edition of Flowers of Saint Francis is available here.
To facilitate interaction among members of the film club, I am turning on the comments feature of this website (splog made me turn it off), and club members can also email me directly at: ssatullo@clarkart.edu -- with questions, suggestions, feedback, and to vote on club polls.
The first decision for the club to make collectively is which Luchino Visconti film to watch on November 6th. I will announce the choices at the next meeting and the decision will be made at the October 23rd screening of Vittoria De Sica’s Umberto D. The Visconti choice is among (in my own order of preference):
A) La Terra Trema. (1947, 160 min.) Classic neorealism with a Marxist bent, set in Sicilian fishing village.
B) Ossessione. (1942, 139 min.) Ur-text of neorealism, uncredited adaptation of James Cain’s Postman Always Rings Twice.
C) Rocco and His Brothers. (1960, 180 min.) Transition from neorealism to Visconti’s later operatic style. A Sicilian family adapts to life in Milan, with Alain Delon and other well-known actors.
Let me know what you think. Let us think about film together.
Someone requested links to material to read in advance of (or after) the screening and discussion. So here are a couple that I’ll be using myself. One of the best aggregators of information on directors is the website, They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, where you can find links to high-quality online articles about a given director. The essay accompanying the Criterion Collection edition of Flowers of Saint Francis is available here.
To facilitate interaction among members of the film club, I am turning on the comments feature of this website (splog made me turn it off), and club members can also email me directly at: ssatullo@clarkart.edu -- with questions, suggestions, feedback, and to vote on club polls.
The first decision for the club to make collectively is which Luchino Visconti film to watch on November 6th. I will announce the choices at the next meeting and the decision will be made at the October 23rd screening of Vittoria De Sica’s Umberto D. The Visconti choice is among (in my own order of preference):
A) La Terra Trema. (1947, 160 min.) Classic neorealism with a Marxist bent, set in Sicilian fishing village.
B) Ossessione. (1942, 139 min.) Ur-text of neorealism, uncredited adaptation of James Cain’s Postman Always Rings Twice.
C) Rocco and His Brothers. (1960, 180 min.) Transition from neorealism to Visconti’s later operatic style. A Sicilian family adapts to life in Milan, with Alain Delon and other well-known actors.
Let me know what you think. Let us think about film together.
"Projections of Rome" at the Clark
A free film series on Saturdays at 2:00 pm in the Clark Auditorium
The “Projections of Rome” film series extends the Clark’s fall focus on representations of Rome from still photography to motion pictures. The Eternal City is a mirror onto which we tend to project ourselves, and especially so in the movies. We look first at two takes on Ancient Rome -- Shakespearian and “sword & sandal” -- then at two romantic fantasies of Rome in the Fifties, and finally two excursions by the cinematic bard of Rome, Federico Fellini.
October 17: Julius Caesar. (1953, 122 min.) Marlon Brando, John Gielgud, and James Mason lead an all-star cast in Joseph Mankiewicz’s bracing and intelligent adaptation of the classic Shakespeare play.
October 24: The Fall of the Roman Empire. (1964, 187 min.) Anthony Mann’s sweeping widescreen epic marshals a notable cast led by Alec Guinness and Sophia Loren, with a feel for historical accuracy in the dynastic conflict around Marcus Aurelius, a story later retold in Gladiator.
November 7: Roman Holiday. (1953, 118 min.) Audrey Hepburn bursts to stardom as the princess who goes AWOL in Rome, with American reporter Gregory Peck showing her around and photographer Eddie Alpert dogging their heels, under the direction of William Wyler.
November 14: Three Coins in the Fountain. (1954, 102 min.) The star here is the Oscar-winning CinemaScope photography on location in Rome -- a silly Fifties romance about three American secretaries finding the continental men of their dreams is redeemed by the scenery and a fine cast.
November 21: The White Sheik. (1951, 88 min., in Italian with subtitles.) Fellini’s first film, one of his best, follows a newly-wed couple from the provinces as they make a pilgrimage to Rome, the groom eager to visit the Pope while the bride only wants to see the third-rate Valentino of the title, played by Alberto Sordi.
November 28: La Dolce Vita. (1960, 174 min., in Italian with subtitles.) Fellini moves from outsiders to the in-crowd in this tour of the “sweet life” of show-biz Rome, in what became an international sensation, with journalist Marcello Mastrioanni covering the decadent scene as our guide to these infernal circles.
The “Projections of Rome” film series extends the Clark’s fall focus on representations of Rome from still photography to motion pictures. The Eternal City is a mirror onto which we tend to project ourselves, and especially so in the movies. We look first at two takes on Ancient Rome -- Shakespearian and “sword & sandal” -- then at two romantic fantasies of Rome in the Fifties, and finally two excursions by the cinematic bard of Rome, Federico Fellini.
October 17: Julius Caesar. (1953, 122 min.) Marlon Brando, John Gielgud, and James Mason lead an all-star cast in Joseph Mankiewicz’s bracing and intelligent adaptation of the classic Shakespeare play.
October 24: The Fall of the Roman Empire. (1964, 187 min.) Anthony Mann’s sweeping widescreen epic marshals a notable cast led by Alec Guinness and Sophia Loren, with a feel for historical accuracy in the dynastic conflict around Marcus Aurelius, a story later retold in Gladiator.
November 7: Roman Holiday. (1953, 118 min.) Audrey Hepburn bursts to stardom as the princess who goes AWOL in Rome, with American reporter Gregory Peck showing her around and photographer Eddie Alpert dogging their heels, under the direction of William Wyler.
November 14: Three Coins in the Fountain. (1954, 102 min.) The star here is the Oscar-winning CinemaScope photography on location in Rome -- a silly Fifties romance about three American secretaries finding the continental men of their dreams is redeemed by the scenery and a fine cast.
November 21: The White Sheik. (1951, 88 min., in Italian with subtitles.) Fellini’s first film, one of his best, follows a newly-wed couple from the provinces as they make a pilgrimage to Rome, the groom eager to visit the Pope while the bride only wants to see the third-rate Valentino of the title, played by Alberto Sordi.
November 28: La Dolce Vita. (1960, 174 min., in Italian with subtitles.) Fellini moves from outsiders to the in-crowd in this tour of the “sweet life” of show-biz Rome, in what became an international sensation, with journalist Marcello Mastrioanni covering the decadent scene as our guide to these infernal circles.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Pace and presence
By coincidence, last night I watched two arty foreign films, and both ended with a long slow shot looking up at the sky. One a daylight sky into which an object ascends until it disappears from sight, and the other a post-sunset sky into which a myriad of stars gradually appears. I wouldn’t say my response to either was like day and night, more like dawn versus twilight, just a different shade of light coming or going. But they will remain linked in my mind by questions of languorous pacing and the presence of the staring camera eye, which seems to be la mode du jour among knowing international film critics these days.
So I came to Heaven (2002, MC-68) by pure happenstance, browsing in the college library for a dvd to fill in a gap in my Netflix cycle. Cate Blanchett on the cover caught my eye, though I knew nothing of the title. Turns out it had a posthumous script by Krzysztof Kieslowski -- intended to be the first of a trilogy (with Hell and Purgatory) that might have rivaled his Three Colors: Red, White, and Blue -- and direction by Tom Tykwer, best known for the highly kinetic Run Lola Run. A shared obsession with synchronicity joins the ruminative fables of one and the thriller dynamics of the other, woven together through the slow and oh-so-steady movements of an aerial camera. This film is lovely to look at, whether it’s the roofs of Turin or the hills of Tuscany we pass over, and intriguing to think about, at least till the spell is broken by a series of “Hey, wait a minute, what about ...?” questions. Cate Blanchett is an English teacher in Italy, and we first see her in the process of planting a bomb in an imposing modern office building. We later learn that she is driven to righteous revenge because the police had refused to act when she told them her target was a drug kingpin, but her bomb goes horribly awry in a way she only learns when the police are interrogating her. Giovanni Ribisi is a translator for the carabineri who immediately falls for her and helps her escape. His devotion redeems her awful acts and restores her to the world through love. Or so one reading would go. I have stubborn objections to the way that’s worked out, though scene by scene I am swept along by the vivid visual presence of beauty, both Cate’s and the landscape’s.
Similarly, I eventually made my peace with the glacial pace of Silent Light (MC-79) just because it was beautiful to look at, for however long it took. Carlos Reygadas’ third film is set in a rural Mennonite community in Mexico, speaking a rare German dialect, and the first comparisons I reach for are Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur and Carl Dreyer’s Ordet. Weird, huh? You’ll have to see it for yourself, but only if you have a zen-like patience for prolonged shots in which very little is happening. You could judge by the first shot, maybe five minutes long, of the sun rising over farm fields and distant mountains. Though that will come to seem expressive next to similarly prolonged shots of two characters standing silently with their backs to the camera. Once a story finally emerges, it’s pretty racy. Though Johan has an adorable blond-haired brood of children by his loving wife Esther, he finds himself drawn magnetically to a woman in town named Marianne. Each character refers to each other as “poor such and such,” but mutual sympathy only goes so far. Tragedy is bound to ensue, but is there a redemption beyond all personal conflict? Opinions may differ. Mine is that there is something here to recompense the time put in, but I imagine few could sit still for it. Usually I only go as slow as, say, Terence Malick’s The New World, but I managed to watch this without ever hitting the fast-forward button.
So I came to Heaven (2002, MC-68) by pure happenstance, browsing in the college library for a dvd to fill in a gap in my Netflix cycle. Cate Blanchett on the cover caught my eye, though I knew nothing of the title. Turns out it had a posthumous script by Krzysztof Kieslowski -- intended to be the first of a trilogy (with Hell and Purgatory) that might have rivaled his Three Colors: Red, White, and Blue -- and direction by Tom Tykwer, best known for the highly kinetic Run Lola Run. A shared obsession with synchronicity joins the ruminative fables of one and the thriller dynamics of the other, woven together through the slow and oh-so-steady movements of an aerial camera. This film is lovely to look at, whether it’s the roofs of Turin or the hills of Tuscany we pass over, and intriguing to think about, at least till the spell is broken by a series of “Hey, wait a minute, what about ...?” questions. Cate Blanchett is an English teacher in Italy, and we first see her in the process of planting a bomb in an imposing modern office building. We later learn that she is driven to righteous revenge because the police had refused to act when she told them her target was a drug kingpin, but her bomb goes horribly awry in a way she only learns when the police are interrogating her. Giovanni Ribisi is a translator for the carabineri who immediately falls for her and helps her escape. His devotion redeems her awful acts and restores her to the world through love. Or so one reading would go. I have stubborn objections to the way that’s worked out, though scene by scene I am swept along by the vivid visual presence of beauty, both Cate’s and the landscape’s.
Similarly, I eventually made my peace with the glacial pace of Silent Light (MC-79) just because it was beautiful to look at, for however long it took. Carlos Reygadas’ third film is set in a rural Mennonite community in Mexico, speaking a rare German dialect, and the first comparisons I reach for are Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur and Carl Dreyer’s Ordet. Weird, huh? You’ll have to see it for yourself, but only if you have a zen-like patience for prolonged shots in which very little is happening. You could judge by the first shot, maybe five minutes long, of the sun rising over farm fields and distant mountains. Though that will come to seem expressive next to similarly prolonged shots of two characters standing silently with their backs to the camera. Once a story finally emerges, it’s pretty racy. Though Johan has an adorable blond-haired brood of children by his loving wife Esther, he finds himself drawn magnetically to a woman in town named Marianne. Each character refers to each other as “poor such and such,” but mutual sympathy only goes so far. Tragedy is bound to ensue, but is there a redemption beyond all personal conflict? Opinions may differ. Mine is that there is something here to recompense the time put in, but I imagine few could sit still for it. Usually I only go as slow as, say, Terence Malick’s The New World, but I managed to watch this without ever hitting the fast-forward button.
Sugar
The filmmaking team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck follow up the impressive Half Nelson with an ambitious effort to track the progress of a lanky pitcher with prospects, from his native Dominican Republic to a tryout (concentration?) camp in Arizona to a minor league stint as a stranger in the strange land of Iowa to assimilation into the Dominican neighborhoods of NYC. Each of these environments is convincingly sketched, with most of the roles filled by nonprofessional actors whose roles mimic their actual experience. Crucial, of course, was the lead they picked from a roll call of more than 500, to play Miguel, known as “Sugar” for his sweetness on the mound and with the ladies, and he fills the bill admirably. It’s the nature of this story of displacement that the film should be one inexplicable, discontinuous scene after another, and it’s right for us sometimes to be as disoriented as the protagonist we follow. The baseball scenes are unusually convincing and everything is shot with a distinctive visual style. But at one crucial turning point the story defeats one’s expectations, ultimately to good purpose, but from my perspective too abruptly. Interestingly, among the deleted scenes on the dvd was just the one that filled that gap. With that scene put back in I can give this film an unequivocal recommendation, more so if you’re a baseball fan and are curious what’s behind the growing Dominican presence in the game. (2009, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-82)
State of Play
This American remake of a brilliant British miniseries tries to cram too many plot twists into its running time. Where the 6-hour series was continuously surprising, the 2-hour film seems manipulative. That said, you are being manipulated by some mighty fine actors, from Russell Crowe as the rumpled old-school reporter to Helen Mirren as his high-powered editor trying to cope with the new corporate owners of the “Washington Globe,” with adequate support from Rachel McAdams as the online newbie with whom Crowe is oddly coupled, and Ben Affleck as his old college roommate, who is now a crusading congressman with a whole closetful of secrets. Dynamic young director Kevin Macdonald certainly knows how to keep up the pace of the original, though sometimes leaving the sense behind. Many opportunities for topicality are strewn in the story’s wake, especially the Blackwater-like mercenary army that is the subject of Affleck’s investigating committee, but more in the vein of exploitation than explanation. At the heart of the enterprise is a nostalgia for the disappearing world of print journalism, and a romantic hope for the persistence of its values into the realm of the internet. I’m inclined to recommend this film, if just for the lovely coda of the closing credit sequence, where we take a last lingering look at a newspaper being “composed” (or whatever they call it these days -- when my printer father worked wallcase or linotype he was called a compositor), rolled through the presses, collated, packed, and sent out on trucks into a new day. My brother -- who should know, having worked his entire career at newspapers, until he escaped into public broadcasting last year -- asserted the film got the newsroom atmospherics right, though much of the substance wrong. (2009, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-64)
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Film club at Clark starts 9/25
Here I'm just going to copy a press release I wrote for the start of my film club at the Clark next week. As a point of information, I reconsidered showing Rossellini's Open City when I discovered that the Criterion Collection will issue it in November, in a boxed dvd set with Paisan and Germany Year Zero, so there was no point in showing it in its unrestored condition. Criterion did Flowers of Saint Francis several years ago, so I substituted that in my series, in a demonstration of the nimbleness and open-endedness I intend for the film club. So here's the news:
Independent film scholar Steve Satullo will initiate the Cinema Salon Film Club at the Clark on Friday, September 25, at 4:00 pm in the Clark auditorium. Offered without charge and conceived on the model of book clubs that have become popular over the years, the Film Club will meet on alternate Fridays, with Satullo offering an extended introduction and moderating a discussion after screening the film.
The opening series will explore the theme of “Triumphs and Tragedies of Italian Neorealism” and begin on the 25th with a personal favorite of Satullo’s, intended to serve as a touchstone for those who might be interested in what he will be showing and talking about. The first film is Ermanno Olmi’s Il Posto (1961), about a young man leaving his village for Milan and “The Job” of the title, definitely from the lighter side of Neorealism.
On October 9 the club will return to the fathers of Neorealism with Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of Saint Francis (1950), and continue on October 23 with Vittoria De Sica’s Umberto D. (1955). Subsequent screenings will be determined by the film club collectively, with a Luchino Visconti film to be picked for November 6 and an open choice on November 20, after which the club will break for the holidays.
Satullo, formerly proprietor of Either/Or Bookstore and Video Archive on North Street in in Pittsfield, has been programming films at the Clark for a dozen years, and for the past five has been writing film commentary on his personal website, Cinema Salon, which will become interactive with the film club.
Satullo thanks the Clark for providing a venue for taking Cinema Salon live, to offer serious engagement with film art and audience, an approach he has been working toward for decades, since he was student and friend of Charles Thomas Samuels, distinguished film scholar at Williams College in the early 70s. The opening film choice is a bit of an homage to Professor Samuels, since Ermanno Olmi was the unexpected selection in his eye-opening collection of interviews, Encountering Directors.
In hosting the film club, Satullo hopes to cultivate a collective approach, with members stepping forward to suggest films to watch and discuss, and to lead future sessions. Old-fashioned cinephilia is the only prerequisite. If you approach films as art more than entertainment, and enjoy sharing observations and opinions with other engaged viewers, then Cinema Salon might be just the club for you.
For more information, contact: Steve Satullo; (413) 458-0415; ssatullo@clarkart.edu.
Independent film scholar Steve Satullo will initiate the Cinema Salon Film Club at the Clark on Friday, September 25, at 4:00 pm in the Clark auditorium. Offered without charge and conceived on the model of book clubs that have become popular over the years, the Film Club will meet on alternate Fridays, with Satullo offering an extended introduction and moderating a discussion after screening the film.
The opening series will explore the theme of “Triumphs and Tragedies of Italian Neorealism” and begin on the 25th with a personal favorite of Satullo’s, intended to serve as a touchstone for those who might be interested in what he will be showing and talking about. The first film is Ermanno Olmi’s Il Posto (1961), about a young man leaving his village for Milan and “The Job” of the title, definitely from the lighter side of Neorealism.
On October 9 the club will return to the fathers of Neorealism with Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of Saint Francis (1950), and continue on October 23 with Vittoria De Sica’s Umberto D. (1955). Subsequent screenings will be determined by the film club collectively, with a Luchino Visconti film to be picked for November 6 and an open choice on November 20, after which the club will break for the holidays.
Satullo, formerly proprietor of Either/Or Bookstore and Video Archive on North Street in in Pittsfield, has been programming films at the Clark for a dozen years, and for the past five has been writing film commentary on his personal website, Cinema Salon, which will become interactive with the film club.
Satullo thanks the Clark for providing a venue for taking Cinema Salon live, to offer serious engagement with film art and audience, an approach he has been working toward for decades, since he was student and friend of Charles Thomas Samuels, distinguished film scholar at Williams College in the early 70s. The opening film choice is a bit of an homage to Professor Samuels, since Ermanno Olmi was the unexpected selection in his eye-opening collection of interviews, Encountering Directors.
In hosting the film club, Satullo hopes to cultivate a collective approach, with members stepping forward to suggest films to watch and discuss, and to lead future sessions. Old-fashioned cinephilia is the only prerequisite. If you approach films as art more than entertainment, and enjoy sharing observations and opinions with other engaged viewers, then Cinema Salon might be just the club for you.
For more information, contact: Steve Satullo; (413) 458-0415; ssatullo@clarkart.edu.
Films to watch, then not so much
A new school year ought to be a fresh start, even for us superannuated scholastics, so I am going to wrap up an annoying backlog of pending reviews by just rambling through the list of films I’ve watched lately, dispensing with quasi-definite numerical ratings and presenting them in the order of how much I liked each. So if you’re only interested in strong recommendations, just read the first three. If you just can’t get enough of my opinions, then plow through to the bitter end.
Goodbye Solo. (2009, MC-89.) With his third film, each better than the last, 34-year-old Rahmin Bahrani confirms himself as a young director most deserving of attention. Though jumping off from the premise of Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, Bahrani is not at all derivative but has a rare purity of engagement. Set indelibly in his native Winston-Salem, and aside from the two leads populated entirely by actual residents, this film offers authenticity as well as visual acuity and emotional honesty. Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane) is a Senagalese taxi driver who picks up William (Red West) and becomes involved in his life when the weathered old man offers him big money for a one-way trip to Blowing Rock, a precipice in the Smoky Mountains. William moves out of his apartment and into a motel while he winds up his affairs. Solo, irrepressibly gregarious and hopeful, inserts himself in William’s life and tries to talk him out of his intention. He has a sweet and wise-beyond-her-years stepdaughter, who cements the fugitive bond between the two men, one who embraces the new world and one who wants out of the old. Savane is amazingly engaging, and West (high school friend and longtime bodyguard of Elvis) is evocatively silent. Irresistible force meets immovable object, and the resolution is convincingly true and surprisingly beautiful, despairing and hopeful at the same time.
Adventureland. (2009, MC-76.) Jesse Eisenberg (of The Squid and the Whale) is adorably nerdy as an 1987 Oberlin grad who is stuck with a summer job as booth attendant at a tacky amusement park in Pittsburgh, before he can go off to Columbia Journalism School. Greg Mottola’s romantic comedy of growing up weird plows familiar ground, but is sufficiently grounded in his own genuine experience to offer as many home truths as easy (or uneasy) laughs. Kristen Stewart is excellent as the more experienced, but not hardened, girl for whom our hapless hero falls. Heartthrob Ryan Reynolds is the slightly older (and married) maintenance worker who compensates for his dead-end job by cultivating the fantasies of younger women. And the always-delightful Freaks & Geeks alum Martin Starr adds his quirky support. The embarrassments and exhilarations of starting out in life are accurately and excruciatingly portrayed in this funny and touching little gem.
Summer Hours. (2008, MC-84.) I will look for the first opportunity to show this Olivier Assayas film about the disposition of a family art collection at the Clark, but in waiting weeks to write about it I have lost my chance to capture its elusive quality of family truth and domestic beauty. A matriarch brings her farflung children home to the house, and legacy of art, bequeathed by her beloved painter uncle. The oldest son is an economist who has remained in France and responsibly wants to keep the inheritance intact. The younger son is off running a sneaker factory in China, and the daughter is a designer working in Japan (this film shares ever-captivating Juliet Binoche and the Musee D’Orsay connection with last year’s Flight of the Red Balloon.) So who will maintain the integrity and identity of the French aesthetic heritage? Through sidelong and elliptical glances, this film portrays the subtle, unheard music of family relations, and raises the largest of questions without rushing to easy answers. What deserves to survive, and how? Many changes are played upon this theme in a quietly engrossing manner.
Harvard Beats Yale 29-29. (2008, MC-79.) Kevin Rafferty’s entertaining time capsule of a documentary relies more than I expected on endearingly primitive footage of the 1968 football contest indicated by the title -- so it would be hard to recommend to someone with no feel for the sport -- but there’s lot more going on here. The course of the game is broken into by the reminiscences of players from both sides. Both teams went into the game undefeated, but the similarities end there. Yale was a nationally-ranked powerhouse, led by future NFL star Calvin Hill and Brian Dowling, the former St. Ignatius High School (in Cleveland) star quarterback who hadn’t lost a game since 6th grade and became the model for the Doonesbury character B.D. They had a coach who instilled a military sense of discipline, while Harvard had a laidback coach who allowed the players to run the team almost as an anarchist commune. In the highly charged year of 1968, that made for an extremely suggestive matchup. Let’s be frank -- from a pure football perspective, this was one ugly game. And with 42 seconds to go and Yale up by 16 points, the result seemed preordained. What followed can only be described as a comedy of errors (or tragedy, if you happen to be an Eli). Unaccountably, the football gods intervened on the side of the counterculture. These guys (including Tommy Lee Jones for the Crimson) are my exact contemporaries, so I was fascinated by their retrospective observations in homespun interviews, and watched a full hour’s worth of extended footage on the dvd.
Gran Torino. (2008, MC-72.) I’ve never been a fan of Clint Eastwood, but have to be impressed by the way he has become in old age an intensely personal filmmaker, dispassionately deconstructing his own tough-guy mythology. At least from The Unforgiven on, he seems to be offering penance for the violence of his Dirty Harry/Man With No Name persona, but rarely as overtly as in this story of a crusty old racist who comes to terms with the Hmong people who have invaded his Detroit neighborhood. There is not the least suspense about where this story is going, but step by step it is well done. Clint is quite funny with his growls and epithets, which makes less cloying his inevitable warming toward the charming young Hmong brother and sister next door.
Patton. (1970) This is one of those films that lingered years on my Netflix queue until I forgot why I thought I should watch it again. George C. Scott’s performance is indeed monumental, and Franklin Schaffner’s direction of Francis Ford Coppola’s script is intriguingly poised on the cusp between old-time gung-ho war picture and the emerging anti-war sentiment of movies to come. Scott’s Patton is an outright psychopath, but a useful one in the context of a psychopathic endeavor like war. It takes a sick grandiosity to become a conquerer, and a rational, calculating soldier like Omar Bradley (Karl Malden) may require a crazy man to get the job done.
Hands Over the City. (1963) Francesco Rosi is in the second wave of Italian Neorealism and focused much of his career on the nexus between crime and politics in southern Italy. But instead of the Mafia, here he takes on municipal corruption in Naples. Rod Steiger is both a city councilor and a land developer looking to make a killing, and he maneuvers his way through a political scandal with brute force. It’s unusual to see a thriller of sorts based on shady real estate deals. Would that such a film could be made in America today.
Germany Year Zero. (1947) From the roots of Neorealism comes Rossellini’s examination of life in the rubble of postwar Berlin, following the struggle for survival of a 13-year-old boy in a disintegrating family, city, and nation. His fate is hard, but one can hardly warm to his persistent Aryan attitude. Important as a document, it’s not what you would call a movie, in terms of entertainment or emotion.
The Valet. (2006) So-so French comedy from Francis Veber, very much of a piece with The Dinner Game or My Best Friend, but not as entertaining.
Last Year at Marienbad. (1961) I have considerable esteem for Alais Resnais’ other films, so when the Criterion Collection issued a sparkling new DVD of the one I never could stand, I thought to give it another chance. Nope -- don’t care for it, never will.
Goodbye Solo. (2009, MC-89.) With his third film, each better than the last, 34-year-old Rahmin Bahrani confirms himself as a young director most deserving of attention. Though jumping off from the premise of Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, Bahrani is not at all derivative but has a rare purity of engagement. Set indelibly in his native Winston-Salem, and aside from the two leads populated entirely by actual residents, this film offers authenticity as well as visual acuity and emotional honesty. Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane) is a Senagalese taxi driver who picks up William (Red West) and becomes involved in his life when the weathered old man offers him big money for a one-way trip to Blowing Rock, a precipice in the Smoky Mountains. William moves out of his apartment and into a motel while he winds up his affairs. Solo, irrepressibly gregarious and hopeful, inserts himself in William’s life and tries to talk him out of his intention. He has a sweet and wise-beyond-her-years stepdaughter, who cements the fugitive bond between the two men, one who embraces the new world and one who wants out of the old. Savane is amazingly engaging, and West (high school friend and longtime bodyguard of Elvis) is evocatively silent. Irresistible force meets immovable object, and the resolution is convincingly true and surprisingly beautiful, despairing and hopeful at the same time.
Adventureland. (2009, MC-76.) Jesse Eisenberg (of The Squid and the Whale) is adorably nerdy as an 1987 Oberlin grad who is stuck with a summer job as booth attendant at a tacky amusement park in Pittsburgh, before he can go off to Columbia Journalism School. Greg Mottola’s romantic comedy of growing up weird plows familiar ground, but is sufficiently grounded in his own genuine experience to offer as many home truths as easy (or uneasy) laughs. Kristen Stewart is excellent as the more experienced, but not hardened, girl for whom our hapless hero falls. Heartthrob Ryan Reynolds is the slightly older (and married) maintenance worker who compensates for his dead-end job by cultivating the fantasies of younger women. And the always-delightful Freaks & Geeks alum Martin Starr adds his quirky support. The embarrassments and exhilarations of starting out in life are accurately and excruciatingly portrayed in this funny and touching little gem.
Summer Hours. (2008, MC-84.) I will look for the first opportunity to show this Olivier Assayas film about the disposition of a family art collection at the Clark, but in waiting weeks to write about it I have lost my chance to capture its elusive quality of family truth and domestic beauty. A matriarch brings her farflung children home to the house, and legacy of art, bequeathed by her beloved painter uncle. The oldest son is an economist who has remained in France and responsibly wants to keep the inheritance intact. The younger son is off running a sneaker factory in China, and the daughter is a designer working in Japan (this film shares ever-captivating Juliet Binoche and the Musee D’Orsay connection with last year’s Flight of the Red Balloon.) So who will maintain the integrity and identity of the French aesthetic heritage? Through sidelong and elliptical glances, this film portrays the subtle, unheard music of family relations, and raises the largest of questions without rushing to easy answers. What deserves to survive, and how? Many changes are played upon this theme in a quietly engrossing manner.
Harvard Beats Yale 29-29. (2008, MC-79.) Kevin Rafferty’s entertaining time capsule of a documentary relies more than I expected on endearingly primitive footage of the 1968 football contest indicated by the title -- so it would be hard to recommend to someone with no feel for the sport -- but there’s lot more going on here. The course of the game is broken into by the reminiscences of players from both sides. Both teams went into the game undefeated, but the similarities end there. Yale was a nationally-ranked powerhouse, led by future NFL star Calvin Hill and Brian Dowling, the former St. Ignatius High School (in Cleveland) star quarterback who hadn’t lost a game since 6th grade and became the model for the Doonesbury character B.D. They had a coach who instilled a military sense of discipline, while Harvard had a laidback coach who allowed the players to run the team almost as an anarchist commune. In the highly charged year of 1968, that made for an extremely suggestive matchup. Let’s be frank -- from a pure football perspective, this was one ugly game. And with 42 seconds to go and Yale up by 16 points, the result seemed preordained. What followed can only be described as a comedy of errors (or tragedy, if you happen to be an Eli). Unaccountably, the football gods intervened on the side of the counterculture. These guys (including Tommy Lee Jones for the Crimson) are my exact contemporaries, so I was fascinated by their retrospective observations in homespun interviews, and watched a full hour’s worth of extended footage on the dvd.
Gran Torino. (2008, MC-72.) I’ve never been a fan of Clint Eastwood, but have to be impressed by the way he has become in old age an intensely personal filmmaker, dispassionately deconstructing his own tough-guy mythology. At least from The Unforgiven on, he seems to be offering penance for the violence of his Dirty Harry/Man With No Name persona, but rarely as overtly as in this story of a crusty old racist who comes to terms with the Hmong people who have invaded his Detroit neighborhood. There is not the least suspense about where this story is going, but step by step it is well done. Clint is quite funny with his growls and epithets, which makes less cloying his inevitable warming toward the charming young Hmong brother and sister next door.
Patton. (1970) This is one of those films that lingered years on my Netflix queue until I forgot why I thought I should watch it again. George C. Scott’s performance is indeed monumental, and Franklin Schaffner’s direction of Francis Ford Coppola’s script is intriguingly poised on the cusp between old-time gung-ho war picture and the emerging anti-war sentiment of movies to come. Scott’s Patton is an outright psychopath, but a useful one in the context of a psychopathic endeavor like war. It takes a sick grandiosity to become a conquerer, and a rational, calculating soldier like Omar Bradley (Karl Malden) may require a crazy man to get the job done.
Hands Over the City. (1963) Francesco Rosi is in the second wave of Italian Neorealism and focused much of his career on the nexus between crime and politics in southern Italy. But instead of the Mafia, here he takes on municipal corruption in Naples. Rod Steiger is both a city councilor and a land developer looking to make a killing, and he maneuvers his way through a political scandal with brute force. It’s unusual to see a thriller of sorts based on shady real estate deals. Would that such a film could be made in America today.
Germany Year Zero. (1947) From the roots of Neorealism comes Rossellini’s examination of life in the rubble of postwar Berlin, following the struggle for survival of a 13-year-old boy in a disintegrating family, city, and nation. His fate is hard, but one can hardly warm to his persistent Aryan attitude. Important as a document, it’s not what you would call a movie, in terms of entertainment or emotion.
The Valet. (2006) So-so French comedy from Francis Veber, very much of a piece with The Dinner Game or My Best Friend, but not as entertaining.
Last Year at Marienbad. (1961) I have considerable esteem for Alais Resnais’ other films, so when the Criterion Collection issued a sparkling new DVD of the one I never could stand, I thought to give it another chance. Nope -- don’t care for it, never will.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Falling for Barbara Stanwyck
As a confirmed auteurist, I generally approach films with the notion that the controlling artist is the director, but for once I’ve been taking a fanboy approach and making my way through the collected works of Barbara Stanwyck. At one level, I can’t presume to compete with the appreciation written by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker two years ago, on the hundredth anniversary of her birth. But besides offering a film series at the Clark called “An Artist in Her Own Right: Barbara Stanwyck and the Modern American Woman,” I’ve been filling in my knowledge of her immense filmography, and I have some highlights to share.
Night Nurse. (1931) Like Baby Face, this is part of TCM’s “Forbidden Hollywood” collection, but not at all what one would expect. Yes, these nurses do seem to change out of their clothes quite frequently, but that is incidental to the way that Barbara Stanwyck both seduces and challenges the medical establishment, as she does the right thing in revealing a plot against a pair of children in her care. The mother -- in the sort of Depression-era characterization of the irresponsible rich that we are likely to be seeing more of in coming days -- is in thrall to bootleg liquor, jazz, and the evil chauffeur Clark Gable, who is scheming to get his hands on the children’s trust fund. Joan Blondell is Stanwyck’s fellow nurse, and there is a fair bit of attention to what a nurse’s career actually entails before the suspense kicks in. Besides the abundant underwear shots, the ending in which the “good” guy gets away with murder was a flagrant flouting of the production code, which is recalled in a documentary included as an extra on this dvd.
Baby Face. (1933) I had not seen this entire movie, definitely not in its pre-censorship state, so I was surprised by its sharpness and wit, and pleased by how well it was received by the Clark audience. It’s delectable to see our Barbara at work, with absolute confidence in her power over men. She’s not conventionally beautiful, despite the dialogue that reinforces that notion throughout her career, but she has no doubt about her desirability. The certainty of allure is the key to her career. I enjoyed swotting up her biography for my introduction to the film series. Ruby Stevens, born in Brooklyn in 1907, became a tough broad at an early age. Her mother died in a trolley car accident when she was very young, and her father took off, leaving four children to fend for themselves among family and foster homes. Ruby left school for good at 13 and lived with her older sister, who was a showgirl. By 15 she was in a Ziegfield chorus line herself, and before she was 20 had a hit on Broadway, under the new name of Barbara Stanwyck. Within a year, she was making films in Hollywood, and kept doing so for sixty years. Parallels to the protagonist of this film suggest themselves, as she sleeps her way up a ladder of men. Maybe it’s just acting, but there’s an unsettling conviction about it. After beginning my intro with Anthony Lane’s remark, “When I think of the glory days of American film, at its speediest and most velvety, I think of Barbara Stanwyck,” and assertion that “no actress delivered a more accomplished body of work,” I wrapped up with the conclusion from David Thomson’s essay on her, “She was honest, sharp, gutsy, and smart. Terrific.”
Annie Oakley. (1935) This films seems to signal Stanwyck taking control of her career and her image. No longer a contract player in films like Ladies of Leisure, Forbidden, The Woman in Red, she was free to move between studios and choose her own material. So in this film she is the legendary heroine, demure though dead-eye, who comes out of rural southern Ohio to become an international star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Here Barbara first displays the riding skill that will stand her in good stead for decades to come. The romance is a little saccharine, and leaves the proto-feminist comedy of the sure-shot woman behind, but George Stevens does mount some impressive Wild West spectacles, which suggest that the movies actually began fifty years before -- before film was even invented.
Stella Dallas. (1937) Apparently Sam Goldwyn had a lot of emotion as well as money invested in this remake of his 1925 hit. Barbara Stanwyck was not among his first half-dozen choices for the title role, but made it her own and earned her first Oscar nomination, as well as locking in the essential duality of her persona, the tough exterior masking an inner nobility, or at least personal resolve. Selfless mother was not her most comfortable role -- neither in film nor life -- but even her self-sacrifice is made on her own terms. King Vidor’s film is not great, but Stanwyck’s performance qualifies as iconic.
Golden Boy. (1939) Wow, William Holden seems startlingly young in his debut. Apparently Stanwyck took the young actor under her wing (she was famous for her cordial relations with co-workers on the set, part of an impeccable professionalism) and I believe he wound up handing her a “golden boy” decades later, when she finally won an honorary Oscar. As usual, she has great rapport with her fellow lead, who is electric as the shy Italian violinist who becomes the brash boxing champ. Rouben Mamoulian’s adaptation of the Clifford Odets’ play is sharp and smooth, with surprisingly good fight scenes despite the clanking plot. Barbara is caught between her boy and long-time squeeze Adolphe Menjou, his manager. Joseph Calleia is amusingly tough as the gangster who wants a piece of the boy, and Lee J. Cobb (just six years older than Holden) plays the ethnic dad. This really needs to be added to the topflight films of Hollywood’s annus mirabilis.
Remember the Night. (1940) In an obvious nod to It Happened One Night, this romantic comedy of a mismatched couple on a road trip brings together Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, in a far cry from Double Indemnity. He’s a hotshot district attorney, and she’s apprehended after shoplifting from a Fifth Avenue jewelry store. When he sees that the public defender is successfully playing on the jury, he has the case postponed till after Christmas break. Of course he is not immune to our Barbara’s charms, feels guilty that she will spend the holiday in jail and arranges bail, and when he finds out she’s from Indiana too, offers to drive her home for Christmas. I don’t need to tell you how it turns out, but a witty script from Preston Sturges and smooth direction from Mitchell Leisen, along with the chemistry of the leads, certainly make this a palatable holiday confection.
The Lady Eve. (1941) Stanwyck’s peak -- and Preston Sturges’ as well. I wanted my series to build toward it, so only later did I find out it was made earlier than Ball of Fire, which probably explains why it was the latter that earned her second Oscar nod. Certainly she plays well in that ensemble, but here she is the centerpiece, the absolute jewel in the setting, in a brilliant quasi-dual role as adventuress and aristocrat, even though they are “definitely the same dame.” As usual, she partners effectively with Henry Fonda, and Sturges at his best goes Wilde, so this remains firmly among the most delightful of all American comedies.
You Belong to Me. (1941) Stanwyck’s chemistry with Fonda was immediately capitalized upon in this misnamed follow-up, written and directed by Wesley Ruggles. Here she is a dedicated doctor on a skiing vacation, and he is a playboy who is immediately smitten when she tends to him after an accident on the slopes. He soon proposes and she declines, citing the demands of her career, but when he promises not to interfere with her practice of medicine, she accedes. The promise is easily made, but push soon comes to shove, and she is out the door at the most frustrating moments. Henry has made his bed and now must sleep in it -- alone. You will be relieved to hear that the resolution does not involve our Barbara giving up her career for her marriage, but you know it wouldn’t have been a Stanwyck movie if she had.
Ball of Fire. (1941) Just so, Sugarpuss O’Shea may have fallen for her “Pottsy” -- he-man nerd Gary Cooper, in another re-pairing from that same year (Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe) -- but there’s no doubt the showgirl will continue to wrap the professor around her little finger, or maybe her shapely ankle. Billy Wilder’s script and Howard Hawks’ accomplished screwball direction made this a big escapist hit when it came out around the time of Pearl Harbor. Amazing though these four films in the same year may be, a few years later Stanwyck’s career reached another peak when in 1944 she edged out Betty Davis as the highest-earning woman in America, apparently on the basis of films that are mostly forgotten, except for:
Double Indemnity. (1944) There’s that ankle again, this time Fred MacMurray’s undoing. It seems that working with Stanwyck only made you want to do it again. So Wilder turned to her when he turned director with a bang. It’s possible to take this film merely as a chilly exercise in style, but stylish it is, and Stanwyck, MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson invest it with recognizably human qualities.
Sorry, Wrong Number. (1948) I suppose Stanwyck got her final Oscar nomination for playing against type as the helpless, bedridden woman menaced by ominous phone calls. But this thriller continually betrays it source in a radio play, and Stanwyck is only herself in the flashbacks, which show her as a rich girl claiming Burt Lancaster as her husband. It’s no surprise that he is scheming to escape her invalid clutches. Anatole Litvak’s direction is smooth enough, but the transposition of radio to film seems slight and artificial.
East Side, West Side. (1949) But here’s one I found much more substantial than its reputation, despite the soap opera plot of will-she-or-won’t-she stay with her straying husband. James Mason as Stanwyck’s rich lawyer husband is drawn to the wilder side of town by the strikingly young and tempting Ava Gardner, while good guy Van Heflin moons over Barbara, waiting to save her from her degradation as betrayed wife. She talks over her dilemma with best friend Nancy Davis, soon to be Reagan. It’s a period piece, to be sure, but nicely put together by Mervyn LeRoy, with a genuine feel for New York City.
The Furies. (1950) Here’s how I reviewed this last winter: “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 cantankerous cattle baron, with Barbara 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.” That of course includes Stanwyck fans, and this is a foretaste of the Westerns which would predominate in her later career, jumping off from her real-life ownership of a ranch.
Clash by Night. (1952) This would have been the final film in my Stanwyck series, if the budget allowed. I would have been glad to see it again, but I will simply quote what I wrote in my filmlog shortly before I started this website: “Fritz Lang’s noirish adaptation of Clifford Odets’ play is set with some reality in a Monterey fishing and canning village. Barbara Stanwyck is effectively wised-up as the defeated wayward girl who returns home and settles for marriage to Sicilian fishing boat captain Paul Douglas. Robert Ryan is the bad man with whom sparks fly. A very young Marilyn Monroe plays the lively, expansive girl that BS might once have been. The script is literate, if filled with a lot of hooey on the battle of the sexes, and Lang’s direction is careful and shapely. Aside from the baby who is little more than a plot point, this is a believable kitchen sink drama.”
Executive Suite. (1954) Directed by Robert Wise from a script by Ernest Lehman, this is an unusually intelligent and still-relevant business drama, as five executives vie for control of a furniture company after the president dies suddenly. Each has a strategy based on their speciality, numbers man Frederic March squaring off especially against innovator William Holden, in a battle for the soul of the company and the support of disenchanted heiress Stanwyck.
Forty Guns. (1957) In an extremely gutsy role for a fifty year old woman to take on, especially for crazed director Samuel Fuller, Stanwyck keeps all forty of those guns at her disposal, whether it’s thundering across the countryside on horseback, leading the phalanx like a troop of private cavalry, or sitting in satin and frills at the head of a banquet table where they again line up in two docile rows. But forty pistols are not enough, so when Barry Sullivan wanders on the scene, she goes after another. She obviously does her own riding and stunts, including being dragged by the heel in the stirrup of a horse spooked by a twister, in this jaw-dropping take on Western mythology, dripping with sexual innuendo.
Crime of Passion. (1957) This low-budget noir offshoot is notable for completing the picture of Ms. Stanwyck as a woman who will not be kept down. She’s a Miss Lonelyhearts at a San Francisco paper, who gets a big scoop by bringing in a woman who killed her husband, in the process meeting LA homicide detective Sterling Hayden. Sparks fly, more or less believably -- Babs is still pretty well put together at 50, though clearly her character is meant to be in her 30s -- and soon she is giving up that big break at a New York paper, and going to live in an LA bungalow with her cop hubby. No bungalow is big enough to hold our gal, and the parties where the cop buddies play poker in living room while their wives talk about nothing at all in the kitchen quickly drive her insane. Soon she’s scheming to advance her husband’s career, and then she really loses her mind, just like the lost souls who used write her for advice. This decent B-movie is a waystation on Stanwyck’s path to revival of her career in television, where she won three Emmys to make up for the four Oscars she failed to take home.
Roustabout. (1964) When her career descended to B-movie status, Barbara Stanwyck did not fall as far as other classic Hollywood screen goddesses, no Baby Janes for her. No, she’s still trim and sharp, hip to the younger crowd, as the carnival owner who encourages a certain drifter to stick around and work for her. Maybe she was in fact working for Elvis (or Col. Parker), but I know who stole the show for me. In widescreen and garish color, the tough old broad holds her own against the gyrations of all those kids.
For further Stanwyck favorites, here’s a site where various people pick their own five best.
Night Nurse. (1931) Like Baby Face, this is part of TCM’s “Forbidden Hollywood” collection, but not at all what one would expect. Yes, these nurses do seem to change out of their clothes quite frequently, but that is incidental to the way that Barbara Stanwyck both seduces and challenges the medical establishment, as she does the right thing in revealing a plot against a pair of children in her care. The mother -- in the sort of Depression-era characterization of the irresponsible rich that we are likely to be seeing more of in coming days -- is in thrall to bootleg liquor, jazz, and the evil chauffeur Clark Gable, who is scheming to get his hands on the children’s trust fund. Joan Blondell is Stanwyck’s fellow nurse, and there is a fair bit of attention to what a nurse’s career actually entails before the suspense kicks in. Besides the abundant underwear shots, the ending in which the “good” guy gets away with murder was a flagrant flouting of the production code, which is recalled in a documentary included as an extra on this dvd.
Baby Face. (1933) I had not seen this entire movie, definitely not in its pre-censorship state, so I was surprised by its sharpness and wit, and pleased by how well it was received by the Clark audience. It’s delectable to see our Barbara at work, with absolute confidence in her power over men. She’s not conventionally beautiful, despite the dialogue that reinforces that notion throughout her career, but she has no doubt about her desirability. The certainty of allure is the key to her career. I enjoyed swotting up her biography for my introduction to the film series. Ruby Stevens, born in Brooklyn in 1907, became a tough broad at an early age. Her mother died in a trolley car accident when she was very young, and her father took off, leaving four children to fend for themselves among family and foster homes. Ruby left school for good at 13 and lived with her older sister, who was a showgirl. By 15 she was in a Ziegfield chorus line herself, and before she was 20 had a hit on Broadway, under the new name of Barbara Stanwyck. Within a year, she was making films in Hollywood, and kept doing so for sixty years. Parallels to the protagonist of this film suggest themselves, as she sleeps her way up a ladder of men. Maybe it’s just acting, but there’s an unsettling conviction about it. After beginning my intro with Anthony Lane’s remark, “When I think of the glory days of American film, at its speediest and most velvety, I think of Barbara Stanwyck,” and assertion that “no actress delivered a more accomplished body of work,” I wrapped up with the conclusion from David Thomson’s essay on her, “She was honest, sharp, gutsy, and smart. Terrific.”
Annie Oakley. (1935) This films seems to signal Stanwyck taking control of her career and her image. No longer a contract player in films like Ladies of Leisure, Forbidden, The Woman in Red, she was free to move between studios and choose her own material. So in this film she is the legendary heroine, demure though dead-eye, who comes out of rural southern Ohio to become an international star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Here Barbara first displays the riding skill that will stand her in good stead for decades to come. The romance is a little saccharine, and leaves the proto-feminist comedy of the sure-shot woman behind, but George Stevens does mount some impressive Wild West spectacles, which suggest that the movies actually began fifty years before -- before film was even invented.
Stella Dallas. (1937) Apparently Sam Goldwyn had a lot of emotion as well as money invested in this remake of his 1925 hit. Barbara Stanwyck was not among his first half-dozen choices for the title role, but made it her own and earned her first Oscar nomination, as well as locking in the essential duality of her persona, the tough exterior masking an inner nobility, or at least personal resolve. Selfless mother was not her most comfortable role -- neither in film nor life -- but even her self-sacrifice is made on her own terms. King Vidor’s film is not great, but Stanwyck’s performance qualifies as iconic.
Golden Boy. (1939) Wow, William Holden seems startlingly young in his debut. Apparently Stanwyck took the young actor under her wing (she was famous for her cordial relations with co-workers on the set, part of an impeccable professionalism) and I believe he wound up handing her a “golden boy” decades later, when she finally won an honorary Oscar. As usual, she has great rapport with her fellow lead, who is electric as the shy Italian violinist who becomes the brash boxing champ. Rouben Mamoulian’s adaptation of the Clifford Odets’ play is sharp and smooth, with surprisingly good fight scenes despite the clanking plot. Barbara is caught between her boy and long-time squeeze Adolphe Menjou, his manager. Joseph Calleia is amusingly tough as the gangster who wants a piece of the boy, and Lee J. Cobb (just six years older than Holden) plays the ethnic dad. This really needs to be added to the topflight films of Hollywood’s annus mirabilis.
Remember the Night. (1940) In an obvious nod to It Happened One Night, this romantic comedy of a mismatched couple on a road trip brings together Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, in a far cry from Double Indemnity. He’s a hotshot district attorney, and she’s apprehended after shoplifting from a Fifth Avenue jewelry store. When he sees that the public defender is successfully playing on the jury, he has the case postponed till after Christmas break. Of course he is not immune to our Barbara’s charms, feels guilty that she will spend the holiday in jail and arranges bail, and when he finds out she’s from Indiana too, offers to drive her home for Christmas. I don’t need to tell you how it turns out, but a witty script from Preston Sturges and smooth direction from Mitchell Leisen, along with the chemistry of the leads, certainly make this a palatable holiday confection.
The Lady Eve. (1941) Stanwyck’s peak -- and Preston Sturges’ as well. I wanted my series to build toward it, so only later did I find out it was made earlier than Ball of Fire, which probably explains why it was the latter that earned her second Oscar nod. Certainly she plays well in that ensemble, but here she is the centerpiece, the absolute jewel in the setting, in a brilliant quasi-dual role as adventuress and aristocrat, even though they are “definitely the same dame.” As usual, she partners effectively with Henry Fonda, and Sturges at his best goes Wilde, so this remains firmly among the most delightful of all American comedies.
You Belong to Me. (1941) Stanwyck’s chemistry with Fonda was immediately capitalized upon in this misnamed follow-up, written and directed by Wesley Ruggles. Here she is a dedicated doctor on a skiing vacation, and he is a playboy who is immediately smitten when she tends to him after an accident on the slopes. He soon proposes and she declines, citing the demands of her career, but when he promises not to interfere with her practice of medicine, she accedes. The promise is easily made, but push soon comes to shove, and she is out the door at the most frustrating moments. Henry has made his bed and now must sleep in it -- alone. You will be relieved to hear that the resolution does not involve our Barbara giving up her career for her marriage, but you know it wouldn’t have been a Stanwyck movie if she had.
Ball of Fire. (1941) Just so, Sugarpuss O’Shea may have fallen for her “Pottsy” -- he-man nerd Gary Cooper, in another re-pairing from that same year (Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe) -- but there’s no doubt the showgirl will continue to wrap the professor around her little finger, or maybe her shapely ankle. Billy Wilder’s script and Howard Hawks’ accomplished screwball direction made this a big escapist hit when it came out around the time of Pearl Harbor. Amazing though these four films in the same year may be, a few years later Stanwyck’s career reached another peak when in 1944 she edged out Betty Davis as the highest-earning woman in America, apparently on the basis of films that are mostly forgotten, except for:
Double Indemnity. (1944) There’s that ankle again, this time Fred MacMurray’s undoing. It seems that working with Stanwyck only made you want to do it again. So Wilder turned to her when he turned director with a bang. It’s possible to take this film merely as a chilly exercise in style, but stylish it is, and Stanwyck, MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson invest it with recognizably human qualities.
Sorry, Wrong Number. (1948) I suppose Stanwyck got her final Oscar nomination for playing against type as the helpless, bedridden woman menaced by ominous phone calls. But this thriller continually betrays it source in a radio play, and Stanwyck is only herself in the flashbacks, which show her as a rich girl claiming Burt Lancaster as her husband. It’s no surprise that he is scheming to escape her invalid clutches. Anatole Litvak’s direction is smooth enough, but the transposition of radio to film seems slight and artificial.
East Side, West Side. (1949) But here’s one I found much more substantial than its reputation, despite the soap opera plot of will-she-or-won’t-she stay with her straying husband. James Mason as Stanwyck’s rich lawyer husband is drawn to the wilder side of town by the strikingly young and tempting Ava Gardner, while good guy Van Heflin moons over Barbara, waiting to save her from her degradation as betrayed wife. She talks over her dilemma with best friend Nancy Davis, soon to be Reagan. It’s a period piece, to be sure, but nicely put together by Mervyn LeRoy, with a genuine feel for New York City.
The Furies. (1950) Here’s how I reviewed this last winter: “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 cantankerous cattle baron, with Barbara 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.” That of course includes Stanwyck fans, and this is a foretaste of the Westerns which would predominate in her later career, jumping off from her real-life ownership of a ranch.
Clash by Night. (1952) This would have been the final film in my Stanwyck series, if the budget allowed. I would have been glad to see it again, but I will simply quote what I wrote in my filmlog shortly before I started this website: “Fritz Lang’s noirish adaptation of Clifford Odets’ play is set with some reality in a Monterey fishing and canning village. Barbara Stanwyck is effectively wised-up as the defeated wayward girl who returns home and settles for marriage to Sicilian fishing boat captain Paul Douglas. Robert Ryan is the bad man with whom sparks fly. A very young Marilyn Monroe plays the lively, expansive girl that BS might once have been. The script is literate, if filled with a lot of hooey on the battle of the sexes, and Lang’s direction is careful and shapely. Aside from the baby who is little more than a plot point, this is a believable kitchen sink drama.”
Executive Suite. (1954) Directed by Robert Wise from a script by Ernest Lehman, this is an unusually intelligent and still-relevant business drama, as five executives vie for control of a furniture company after the president dies suddenly. Each has a strategy based on their speciality, numbers man Frederic March squaring off especially against innovator William Holden, in a battle for the soul of the company and the support of disenchanted heiress Stanwyck.
Forty Guns. (1957) In an extremely gutsy role for a fifty year old woman to take on, especially for crazed director Samuel Fuller, Stanwyck keeps all forty of those guns at her disposal, whether it’s thundering across the countryside on horseback, leading the phalanx like a troop of private cavalry, or sitting in satin and frills at the head of a banquet table where they again line up in two docile rows. But forty pistols are not enough, so when Barry Sullivan wanders on the scene, she goes after another. She obviously does her own riding and stunts, including being dragged by the heel in the stirrup of a horse spooked by a twister, in this jaw-dropping take on Western mythology, dripping with sexual innuendo.
Crime of Passion. (1957) This low-budget noir offshoot is notable for completing the picture of Ms. Stanwyck as a woman who will not be kept down. She’s a Miss Lonelyhearts at a San Francisco paper, who gets a big scoop by bringing in a woman who killed her husband, in the process meeting LA homicide detective Sterling Hayden. Sparks fly, more or less believably -- Babs is still pretty well put together at 50, though clearly her character is meant to be in her 30s -- and soon she is giving up that big break at a New York paper, and going to live in an LA bungalow with her cop hubby. No bungalow is big enough to hold our gal, and the parties where the cop buddies play poker in living room while their wives talk about nothing at all in the kitchen quickly drive her insane. Soon she’s scheming to advance her husband’s career, and then she really loses her mind, just like the lost souls who used write her for advice. This decent B-movie is a waystation on Stanwyck’s path to revival of her career in television, where she won three Emmys to make up for the four Oscars she failed to take home.
Roustabout. (1964) When her career descended to B-movie status, Barbara Stanwyck did not fall as far as other classic Hollywood screen goddesses, no Baby Janes for her. No, she’s still trim and sharp, hip to the younger crowd, as the carnival owner who encourages a certain drifter to stick around and work for her. Maybe she was in fact working for Elvis (or Col. Parker), but I know who stole the show for me. In widescreen and garish color, the tough old broad holds her own against the gyrations of all those kids.
For further Stanwyck favorites, here’s a site where various people pick their own five best.
Waltz with Bashir
I would have to see this film a second time to render a firm judgment. Nonetheless I am recommending it, though you may find yourself, as I did, drifting and dozing momentarily in the course of it. This may have something to do with the dream-like spell the animated documentary weaves. The conflict between Israel and Palestine is one over which I maintain a calculated ignorance, so the events of the 1982 war in Lebanon were not lodged in my memory, which would have made this film more coherent and engaging to me. But I loved the animation, found it potent even when it repeated or when I lost the thread. The film starts with a dream sequence of wild dogs running through a city, which the dreamer recounts to the film’s director, Ari Folman (or his animated avatar), leading Folman to try to recover his own suppressed memories of the experience as a 19-year-old soldier. He does this by going to interview fellow vets, also animated, and then illustrating their memories. My point of comparison would be Generation Kill, for its first person view of the chaos and horror of war. (2008, dvd, n.) *7 (or better)* (MC-91)
Two Lovers
James Gray is halfway interesting as a writer-director, and his latest film is halfway interesting too. A filmmaker’s dependence on other films can be a plus or a minus, but I found it a distraction here, like a parlor game. Yep, there’s Rear Window and there’s Vertigo. The outer borough view of Manhattan as a distant fantasyland seems lifted from Saturday Night Fever. But the whole story is virtually a remake of the Israeli film, Late Marriage, going so far as to import the actor who plays the central character’s father. Joaquin Phoenix does carry the film in what purports to be his last acting role, as a young man trying to recover from a bout of mental illness, with the good luck to be caught between two women, Gwyneth Paltrow as the amazing shiksa who appears on his doorstep in Brighton Beach and Vinessa Shaw as the plainly beautiful Jewish girl who has been arranged for him, to seal the merger of their fathers’ dry cleaning chains. All these characters seem authentic in their behavior, believably poignant and pathetic, and earnestly romantic. The supporting players definitely add flavor, with Isabella Rossellini as an improbable but convincing Jewish mother and Elias Koteas as the suave Manhattan lawyer with whom Joaquin must vie for the attentions of Gwyneth. But the sense of real people and real emotions is undermined by the quotation marks around many scenes, and the conclusion suffers from comparison to the exquisitely wrought coda to Late Marriage. Maybe I would have liked it better without the baggage of constant reference to other films, but perhaps that wouldn’t be an impediment to your enjoyment. (2008, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-74)
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