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.
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