Worth re-watching at any length

I’ve been spending a lot of time watching films I’ve seen before, and they each seem worth the time, from the short and sweet to the very long and overpowering. It was fun to revisit Porpoise Spit, on the north coast of Australia, for P.J. Harvey’s Muriel’s Wedding (1994), and to see a young and blimped-up Toni Collette hook up with a young and slender Rachel Griffiths to do a karaoke duet of “Waterloo.” Together they make this slight but sly slice of life eminently re-watchable. And of course, the ABBA music is infectious -- I may have to take an antibiotic to get “Dancing Queen” out of my head -- and better integrated to the story here than in Mamma Mia!

For complete antithesis, I re-watched Woman in the Dunes (1964) as a longshot candidate for a Japanese film series at the Clark. It doesn’t really fit there, but I was very glad to see it again. My hazy impression had been that I don’t generally care for allegory or fable in film, but this film came as a shock in its intensely real specificity. It’s the story of a Tokyo science teacher on a specimen-seeking trip to the seaside, who gets tricked into joining a woman who is trapped in a house at the bottom of a huge hole and needs to ceaselessly (and Sisyphus-ly) shovel sand to keep from being buried. The sand itself is the third character in the drama, and it's photographed expressively in high-contrast black and white. Director Hiroshi Teshigahara renders the simple elements in the film -- sand, skin, wood, water -- with remarkable sensuous detail. He breaks down each of the man’s attempts to flee as diagramatically as Robert Bresson -- this could be called “The Man Who Didn’t Escape.” The distinctive electronic music and the acting of the two principals make this a complete package, and deserving of more thanks to the Criterion Collection, though the restored twenty minutes were perhaps unnecessary.

It wasn’t that long ago that I watched and reviewed Peter Bogdanovich’s documentary, Tom Petty: Runnin’ Down a Dream, but in the interim I have become a big Tom Petty fan and now know the songs, so when I saw it come around again on Sundance Channel, I tuned in to watch some concert performances, but stayed to watch the whole four hours all over again. The music is classic, and so is the film. Hear it, see it.

It was a long time ago that I watched The World at War. When it first appeared on tv way back in 1974, I tuned in obsessively. And recently noting its appearance on dvd, I have been making my way through all 26 hours all over again. Masterful. The archival footage from all sides of WWII, the interviews from the 70s (now scarily further removed in time than the War was then), the narration by Laurence Olivier, the haunting music -- all retain their power. And from the perspective of today’s crises, it’s reassuring to imagine that if the world could recover from such total devastation, then it can probably recover from its current grim outlook.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

This handsomely mounted production from David Fincher is ponderous and long-winded, and owes too much to Forrest Gump, also written by Eric Roth, but the scope is large and many of the scenes are impressively staged. It jumps off from a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, about a baby who is born old and gets progressively younger. With seamless CGI wizardry, the title character played by Brad Pitt ages from wizened small boy to his fortyish self and on to his youthful beauty, along the path to infancy and death. Meanwhile Cate Blanchett is growing from a young girl to a celebrated dancer to a fortyish mother and finally to a very old woman on her deathbed. Over the course of the decades, their relationship reverses, but they meet in the middle for a romantic mating. The historical background is rendered perfunctorily, but New Orleans comes through as a developing character in its own right, though the framing story, set in the run-up to Katrina, is rather otiose, and the narration a bit overbearing. Many elements are moving if not really convincing, but the picaresque whole does not come together and does not sustain the nearly three hour running time. Among the subsidiary characters, Tilda Swinton stands out as the wife of a British diplomat in WWII Russia, who initiates the young-old Brad/Benjamin into the mysteries of love. So it’s all quite overblown, but still impressive, not least in the performances of the two leads. (2008, Images, n.) *6+* (MC-69.)

Heights

If you feel the world of artsy, neurotic New Yorkers has not been sufficiently explored by Woody Allen, then you may want to see this film. Or if you like urban romantic rondelays like London’s Love, Actually or the Parisian Same Old Song. Chris Terrio’s debut feature adapts a play by Amy Fox, but opens it up nicely to Big Apple locales. Glenn Close plays a fearsome theatrical celebrity who is playing Lady Macbeth on Broadway. Pittsfield native Elizabeth Banks is her daughter, caught between a nascent career as a photographer and a prospective marriage to a guy who is secretly gay. George Segal and Isabella Rossellini are among the familiar faces that turn up in peripheral roles, as a large cast deceives each other, and especially themselves. Too familiar by half, and only half-smart, this still is not a chore to watch. (2004, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-59.)

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

Virtually unknown in this country, Mikio Naruse is the fourth great director of the generation of Ozu, Mizoguchi, and the somewhat younger Kurosawa. (And thus completes my proposed film series for next summer at the Clark, “Four Seasons in Japan: A Cycle of Film Classics.”) The woman in question is Hideko Takamine, new to me but apparently an actress to put beside Setsuko Hara for beauty and sublime expressiveness. She made 17 films with Naruse, and many others as well -- I will be looking for them. The stairs ascend (or descend) to the second-floor bar where she works as an all-round female companion and manager of same, in a Ginza niche between geisha and prostitute. She’s a young widow who has made a name for herself in her world, namely “mama,” but still leads an economically precarious life, and is reaching the age when her options come down to marrying some client or opening her own bar. Scene by scene those options are closed down. In style, Naruse comes across as a pessimistic Ozu. Ozu’s world is sad enough, to be sure, but Naruse’s is bleak, but somehow exhilaratingly so in his quality of precise attention. I was reminded of another favorite film of mine, from the very same year and in the same widescreen intimacy. In The Apartment, Shirley MacLaine is a girl similarly trying to negotiate her assets in a world of businessmen, but here “mama” has no mensch like Jack Lemmon to rescue her. Now that I’ve seen one Naruse, I want to see many more, but this is the only one available on dvd. Here’s hoping the the Criterion Collection gets such a response to this that they come out with an Eclipse boxed set, as they have for Ozu and Mizoguchi. (1960, dvd, n.) *8*

Flight of the Red Balloon

I just can’t get with the program on Hou Hsaio-Hsien. Though the Taiwanese Hou is frequently anointed by critics as the cinematic heir of Ozu, my enthusiasm for the one has never extended to the other. For me, it’s the difference between nothing happens and nothing happens. But in Hou’s latest, Juliet Binoche happens, and she makes a big difference. The going is slow and the story almost nonexistent, but Juliet comes through expressively, as the chaotic mother of a young boy, trying to balance running a boho household with a career leading a puppet troupe. She’s got tousled, bleached hair, and a distracted air. She hires a Chinese film student to mind her son, but loves him despite her distraction. The interrelations within the house emerge obliquely, in the course of long takes that combine seeming randomness with precise visual design. And then of course there’s the whole “symbolic” level of the red balloon, which follows the boy through the streets of Paris and hovers outside various windows, in overt homage to the 1956 Albert Lamorrisse children’s film classic. I acknowledge there’s a lot going on for the filmmaker, but for this film viewer, not so much. I suspect it would help to watch this on the big screen, where you could use your leisure to explore the depth and breadth of the frame, or in an audience of adoring film festival fans who could sweep you up in their admiration. I don’t resent the time spent at Hou’s pace and angle, but it doesn’t fly for me. (2008, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-86.)

If you like that sort of thing...

I’m not going to tell you that Mamma Mia! (2008, dvd, MC-51) is a good movie, but I rather enjoyed it and you may too. The stage show might be even more engaging, but I was won over by the film’s exuberant silliness. I’ve never really listened to ABBA, but one absorbs such popular music by osmosis. The story, such as it is, is a flimsy armature on which to string the songs, but for the first time I could make sense of the words, not that there’s a whole lot of sense to be made. Set on a picturesque Greek island (and some unconvincing stage sets), the film features Meryl Streep as the single mother of a 20-year-old bride-to-be, played by Amanda Seyfried (of Big Love), who invites to her wedding each of the three men who might be her father. Both women are highly appealing and decent singers, with Meryl having a lot of unabashed fun dancing and emoting her way through the songs. The prospective fathers are Colin Firth, Stellan Saarsgaard, and Pierce Brosnan, the last of whom is ridiculous but touching as he tries to croak out “S.O.S” and other songs, braver than James Bond ever had to be. Meryl, as the ungracefully aging but still beautiful hippie, has two old girl group pals in Julie Waters and Christine Baranski, and their antics are fun to watch as they fool around. Some may feel left out of the fun, but as part of the same age cohort, I was into them. Now that I have a better grasp of ABBA’s songlist, I want to go back and watch Muriel’s Wedding again, re-catch Toni Collette and Rachel Griffiths at the start of their careers.

As Happy-Go-Lucky settles into my memory as the best film of 2008, I happened to notice that a PBS Masterpiece Theater presentation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion that I TiVo’d long ago also starred Sally Hawkins, now destined for a Oscar nom but then unknown. I hadn’t felt moved to watch at first because the 1995 Roger Michell version remains my favorite Austen adaptation of all. But Poppy does Jane was irresistible. She made a truthful and endearing Anne Elliott, but could not supplant Amanda Root in my affection. And the Wentworth had nowhere near the Caesarian strength of Ciaran Hinds (though Rome’s Brutus does turn up as Anne’s scheming cousin, and Buffy’s Giles as her father.) I found the roughness of the semi-documentary style of filming to convey a better sense of place and period than glossier attempts to package the Divine Jane for present-day consumption, though at 90 minutes the adaptation was rather abrupt and overt.

In the interests of completeness, I should mention a worthwhile documentary called The Spirit of the Marathon, which follows six runners at different levels as they train for and run in the 2005 Chicago Marathon. It’s quite well done, and enters the lists as an elite sports doc, but you may have to have some connection to a marathon runner to really enjoy it. My son ran London last year and is now training for Boston, so it was a bonding experience to watch this film with him.

And for complete completeness, there are two more films I should mention, depending on whether you have a taste for serial killer comedies and musicals, even though I definitely do not. For each, you can go by Metacritic or you can go by my definite non-recommendation. Memories of Murder (2005, MC-82.) had been on my DVR for more than a year till I broke down and watched it. Made by the Korean director Joon-ho Bong, who also made the well-received creature feature The Host, which I didn't care for either, mixes humor with the truth-based story of a sensational sex murderer in Korea, a mix that did not take for me despite some understanding of what others saw in it. I also watched Sweeney Todd (2007, MC-83.) in the interests of playlist maintenance, and liked it no better than I expected to, despite the "Universal Acclaim" Metacritic assigns to it. If you go down their listing to my two favorite reviewers, Anthony Lane of The New Yorker and Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com, you will find my opinion expressed. Neither Johnny Depp nor director Tim Burton convinced me that this film should have been made, nor did the stripped down Stephen Sondheim music.