Several critics’ polls have already declared rankings for the year. I won’t be finalizing my choices till I see a number of more recent releases, but I’ve already seen 8 out of the top 10 in the Film Comment poll, and certainly find areas of agreement [click on film title to access my review]. They have Carlos at #1 and The Social Network at #2, and I could go with that, or in reverse order as they appeared in the indieWire poll, which conforms to the Metacritic averages of 95 for the Fincher and 93 for the Assayas. So far I’ll go with indieWire’s choice at #3, Winter’s Bone (FC #6, MC-90.) Polanski’s The Ghost Writer gets just a bit more love than I give it at FC #4 and iW #7 (MC-77). I think FC has A Prophet right at #5 (MC-90). And I join the acclaim for Everyone Else with FC at #9 and iW at #5. On the indieWire list, I Am Love comes in at #9 (FC #22), and I am inclined to agree with that.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Early line on best of 2010
More documendations
Here’s another batch of documentaries that are worth a look, one that I found satisfying in every respect, and a handful of others for which the strength of my recommendation is dependent on your interest in the subject, rather than any advance in the art of documentary.
Every Little Step (2009, MC-76) works on so many levels: as presentation and enactment of a 2005 Broadway revival of the hit musical, A Chorus Line, and memorial of the original production; as real-life recapitulation of every backstage drama from 42nd Street on; as putting the viewer in the position of an American Idol-like judge to appraise just what makes for singing and dancing talent; as swift and engaging storytelling with all the winnowing-down excitement of competitive contests like Spellbound. Trust me, really -- make a point of seeing Adam Del Dio’s documentary, even if like me you are not familiar with the original show beyond a vague awareness of its long-running popularity – available from Netflix on dvd or for instant play.
The Oath (2010, MC-72), an intimate film made by Laura Poitras, probably has the broadest and most urgent interest among the rest of this list. The oath in question is of allegiance to Osama bin Laden, and the subjects are two brothers-in-law who were his former bodyguard and driver. The former is Abu Jandal, who is now a voluble cab driver in Yemen, renouncing the 9/11 attacks but still proselytizing for his own brand of jihad. The latter is Salim Hamdan -- of Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld – and Abu Jandal feels guilty for getting his unpolitical relative into Guantanamo. So Hamdan remains an absence in the film, even when the Supreme Court releases him, but Jandal’s nonstop self-contradiction, much of it as he drives his taxi around Sanaa, offers a fascinating window into the jihadi mindset. Two heroes that emerge are Hamdan’s U.S. military lawyers, who certainly put the system in the best light, despite the abuse dictated from Cheney and Bush. I saw this as part of the generally-excellent “P.O.V.” series on PBS, but it is available from Netflix both as dvd and streaming video, as is the next film, which might have been on the other good documentary series on PBS, “Independent Lens.”
In this era of WikiLeaks, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2008, MC-75) assumes more than historical interest. I started watching without particular commitment to the subject, but was never tempted to tune out. Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith take a very sympathetic look at Ellsberg, who earned the title epithet directly from Henry Kissinger, but they do a good job of recalling the Nixonian era and what seemed to be at stake at the time, and what still seems at stake today, in the continual contest between government secrecy and the public’s right to know. I don’t think Assange is anywhere near as well-motivated as Ellsberg, so I was a bit surprised to see the elder whistleblower endorse the younger on the Colbert Report. Nonetheless he’s an old-time counterculture hero who still commands respect.
Though The Promise (2010) is mainly an HBO promo for the dvd/cd release of outtakes from Bruce Springsteen’s classic album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, the documentary does offer an intriguing glimpse of the Boss in session during the mid-70s. Fans like me will not want to miss it, but if you are not into the Bard of New Jersey, you will find little here to linger over.
One of the better entries in ESPN’s intermittently excellent “30 for 30” anniversary series is The Best That Never Was (2010, no dvd yet). Jonathan Hock’s documentary about Marcus Dupree is a real-life Friday Night Lights story about the fate of perhaps the greatest high school football running back ever. The highlight is the jaw-dropping footage of him regularly ripping off 80-yard touchdown runs, with a grace and fleetness of foot that seems truly heroic. No wonder he generated such a recruiting war among major colleges, and no wonder the Philadelphia, Mississippi hero had such trouble making the transition to Oklahoma and then the NFL. From his position as a middle-aged truck driver in his old hometown, he looks back philosophically on the phenom that he was, and the stardom he was destined for and derailed from.
Gangsters galore
I liked the just-completed first season of Boardwalk Empire (MC-88) well enough, but I was not gangbusters over it. It does not muscle into that handful of ongoing series that have truly engaged me (e.g. current and final season of Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Treme), but I will keep watching. Steve Buscemi and Kelly MacDonald are always enough to keep me interested, even when other characters and storylines strain credulity. After a bit of fact-checking, I was surprised to see how the mobs in Atlantic City, New York City, and Chicago were interlocked, and how the interweaving of all the big names – Rothstein, Torrio, Capone, Luciano, Lansky – is plausibly true to life. The whole series reopens the mythology of Prohibition-era gangsters enough to make one revisit some of the classic texts of the genre.
I happened to notice The Roaring Twenties (1939) appearing on demand, and once I checked it out, I couldn’t stop watching. Raoul Walsh’s hurtling direction mixes documentary-like footage with characters who age from WWI doughboys through Prohibition kingpins to gang-war casualties. The impeccable cast includes James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, with Priscilla Lane as the canary for whom Cagney pines and Gladys George as the saloonkeeper who really understands him. This came at the end of the initial cycle of great gangster movies, but is a fluent and masterful summation
Cagney had begun etching his gangster persona on the consciousness of audiences with The Public Enemy (1931), in a performance of startling intensity. William Wellman was one of the most competent directors of the early talkies, but this film suffers from period liabilities of pacing and performance, so once you get past Cagney’s electricity and the famous grapefruit in his moll’s face, there’s not a lot here.
Another iconic, career-making performance in the genre had been offered by Edward G. Robinson as the Capone-like title character in Little Caesar (1930). This role involves yet more scenery chewing, but is effectively expressive in its snarls and spit-out lines. Mervyn LeRoy directs smoothly and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is unusually good in the sidekick-who-tries-to-go-straight role.
Howard Hawks shows why he was the master of all genres with the swift, sure storytelling of Scarface (1932). Paul Muni is excellent in a balls-out, ape-like interpretation of Al Capone, as the punk with big ideas, a Borgia with a machine gun. The almost amusingly overt incest theme of this film is matched by the startling implicit homoeroticism of the other two early gangster classics as ways of creating operatically bad characters.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Interim report
Events, including an incipient book project, have kept me from posting here lately. I’ve actually been watching a lot of films, and intend to group them into a series of mini-essays. One bunch will fall under the rubric of “Afterthoughts”; then there will be an appreciation of Eric Rohmer and a disappreciation of Nicholas Ray; a consideration of classic gangster films in the context of Boardwalk Empire; and another series of my “Documendations.” The last will include the one film I’ve watched lately for which I give a red-hot recommendation: Every Little Step, a documentary about a Broadway revival of A Chorus Line -- I’ve seen neither the original show nor the movie adaptation, but loved this backstage look at it. So don’t give up on me, keep coming back to this site, and soon I’ll once again be delivering my wide-ranging observations on the world of cinema.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Two of the best
On two successive evenings, I watched likely Oscar nominees for “Best Picture,” and I found both very much up to the hype.
Winter’s Bone. Now this is one Sundance prizewinner that I totally endorse. It deserves the acclaim of its predecessors and more. Debra Granik’s film does not have any of the deficiencies I saw in Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River or Kathryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker. For me Winter’s Bone worked on many levels, as pulse-pounding suspense, heart-leaping shock, naturalistic portrait of Ozark people and the grimly beautiful landscape they inhabit – film noir meets Southern Gothic. Adapting a novel I know nothing about, Granik took a small crew and a few professional actors to rural Missouri and recruited the rest of her cast from local folk, a strategy that works wonderfully well, mixing palpable reality with an aura of sympathy and dread. Jennifer Lawrence is outstanding in the star-making central role as a teenage girl taking care of her younger brother and sister, while looking after her spaced-out mother and tracking down her meth-cooking father, who has disappeared while out on bail, having left the family home as collateral. Talk about the weight of the world on her shoulders. But there is nothing frail or shrinking in this young beauty. Among the fearsome adults she beards in their own dens is her Uncle Teardrop, marvelously rendered by John Hawkes as a scary man with a surprising undercurrent of feeling. This film could have felt like rural slumming and backwoods exploitation, but instead elicits a classic mix of pity and terror, with respect all round. (2010, MC-90)
The Social Network. This acclaimed film stands out most rarely among contemporary American films, in that you’re likely to respond as I did at the end, “Wow, it’s over already? Those two hours went fast – and full.” In an era when even the best films seem generally 10-20 minutes too long (unless they cut loose from feature length altogether and run to 5 or 6 – or 10 to 13 -- hours), The Social Network leaves you with an appetite for more. Credit Aaron Sorkin’s patented rapidfire patter, David Fincher’s swift and sure direction, and excellent acting across the board -- funny, deep, and true characterizations that leave plenty of room for moral speculation. Jesse Eisenberg comes from two particular favorites of mine, The Squid and the Whale and Adventureland, but transcends himself with a brilliantly controlled portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook while a Harvard sophomore and subsequently the “world’s youngest billionaire.” Andrew Garfield is Eduardo Saverin, the classmate and friend who provides the initial bankroll, but gets squeezed out when the start-up goes bigtime, and sues to get back his stake in the business and co-founder status. The general assumption is that Saverin is the good guy betrayed, and Zuckerberg the arrogant selfish bastard with no social skills, who hacked his way to “Friends” across a network because he couldn’t keep them in person. I take it as evidence of the subtlety of both characters’ portrayal that I could come to see the conflict in just the opposite way, with smooth operator Saverin trying to exploit the brilliance of his obsessive friend’s monomania. I think every character in the film comes across with a piquant mix of sympathy and satire, even Justin Timberlake’s all-stops-out portrayal of Internet wunderkind Sean Parker. I was totally into this movie, from the close-up head-to-head first scene between Jesse/Mark and his down-to-earth BU girlfriend, which ends with her walking out of The Thirsty Scholar, a pub near Inman Square, just around the block from where my son lived last year. So I reveled in the familiar Cambridge vibe, despite the film’s slightly overwrought view of the scene. And I loved the contrast between the dark wood paneling and three-hundred-year-old doorknobs of Harvard, and the glassed-in funhouses and playpens of Silicon Valley. I find the widespread comparisons of this film to Citizen Kane quite plausible, and think it likely to deserve every award it wins. (2010, MC-95)
Winter’s Bone. Now this is one Sundance prizewinner that I totally endorse. It deserves the acclaim of its predecessors and more. Debra Granik’s film does not have any of the deficiencies I saw in Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River or Kathryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker. For me Winter’s Bone worked on many levels, as pulse-pounding suspense, heart-leaping shock, naturalistic portrait of Ozark people and the grimly beautiful landscape they inhabit – film noir meets Southern Gothic. Adapting a novel I know nothing about, Granik took a small crew and a few professional actors to rural Missouri and recruited the rest of her cast from local folk, a strategy that works wonderfully well, mixing palpable reality with an aura of sympathy and dread. Jennifer Lawrence is outstanding in the star-making central role as a teenage girl taking care of her younger brother and sister, while looking after her spaced-out mother and tracking down her meth-cooking father, who has disappeared while out on bail, having left the family home as collateral. Talk about the weight of the world on her shoulders. But there is nothing frail or shrinking in this young beauty. Among the fearsome adults she beards in their own dens is her Uncle Teardrop, marvelously rendered by John Hawkes as a scary man with a surprising undercurrent of feeling. This film could have felt like rural slumming and backwoods exploitation, but instead elicits a classic mix of pity and terror, with respect all round. (2010, MC-90)
The Social Network. This acclaimed film stands out most rarely among contemporary American films, in that you’re likely to respond as I did at the end, “Wow, it’s over already? Those two hours went fast – and full.” In an era when even the best films seem generally 10-20 minutes too long (unless they cut loose from feature length altogether and run to 5 or 6 – or 10 to 13 -- hours), The Social Network leaves you with an appetite for more. Credit Aaron Sorkin’s patented rapidfire patter, David Fincher’s swift and sure direction, and excellent acting across the board -- funny, deep, and true characterizations that leave plenty of room for moral speculation. Jesse Eisenberg comes from two particular favorites of mine, The Squid and the Whale and Adventureland, but transcends himself with a brilliantly controlled portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook while a Harvard sophomore and subsequently the “world’s youngest billionaire.” Andrew Garfield is Eduardo Saverin, the classmate and friend who provides the initial bankroll, but gets squeezed out when the start-up goes bigtime, and sues to get back his stake in the business and co-founder status. The general assumption is that Saverin is the good guy betrayed, and Zuckerberg the arrogant selfish bastard with no social skills, who hacked his way to “Friends” across a network because he couldn’t keep them in person. I take it as evidence of the subtlety of both characters’ portrayal that I could come to see the conflict in just the opposite way, with smooth operator Saverin trying to exploit the brilliance of his obsessive friend’s monomania. I think every character in the film comes across with a piquant mix of sympathy and satire, even Justin Timberlake’s all-stops-out portrayal of Internet wunderkind Sean Parker. I was totally into this movie, from the close-up head-to-head first scene between Jesse/Mark and his down-to-earth BU girlfriend, which ends with her walking out of The Thirsty Scholar, a pub near Inman Square, just around the block from where my son lived last year. So I reveled in the familiar Cambridge vibe, despite the film’s slightly overwrought view of the scene. And I loved the contrast between the dark wood paneling and three-hundred-year-old doorknobs of Harvard, and the glassed-in funhouses and playpens of Silicon Valley. I find the widespread comparisons of this film to Citizen Kane quite plausible, and think it likely to deserve every award it wins. (2010, MC-95)
The New Wave gets old
I have found some of Alain Resnais’ octogenarian caprices quite enjoyable (Same Old Song, Private Fears in Public Faces), but Wild Grass (2009, MC-63) strikes me not as winsome, but winceful. Count me among those who don’t get the game he was up to, with bizarre, inconsequential characters and aggressively unreal color schemes, and a general unmooring from meaning and narrative sense. Very little in this film was endearing or engaging to me, despite all the respectable people and evident craft involved.
Genre but not too generic
Splice. Vincenzo Natali’s sci-fi/horror mash-up is a knowing wink at the genre of creature feature, made notable by the presence of Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley as a couple of genetic wizards (whose names reference The Bride of Frankenstein), bankrolled by big pharma, but with their own agendas as they create life in a test tube. There is plenty of humor generated as they parent the rapidly growing half-human, half-CGI creature, as it passes through the “terrible twos” to a highly Oedipal stage of development. Then there is plenty of yuck as the tale turns bloody and kinky. This is no Gattaca when it comes to the ethics of genetic manipulation, but within its genre limits it’s shrewd enough to offer more than simple shivers of laughter and dread. (2010, MC-66)
Sunday, November 07, 2010
Carlos
Olivier Assayas is not shy about vying with The Godfather in this long-form crime saga, which spans two decades of globe-trotting mayhem by the would-be godfather of international terrorism (or political struggle, as the idealogues would have it). Carlos’s biggest hit (and biggest flop) was seizing a roomful of OPEC oil ministers at a meeting in Vienna in 1974, and commandeering a plane to take them to Libya and then Algeria, before all hostages were released, and the “revolutionary cadre” escaped to fight again. That takes up most of the middle episode of three, as made for French tv and recently shown on the Sundance Channel, close to six hours in all, with a 140-minute version in theatrical release. That central drama is surrounded by lots of assassinations and bombings, plus sex and high living, as Assayas tells the story in admittedly speculative though highly convincing fashion. We see Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a Venezuelan leftist whose brothers were named Vladimir and Lenin, assume the nom de guerre of Carlos, to which the media adds the sobriquet of “the Jackal,” making him a big name in violent circles around the world. His sponsors shift from Qaddafi to Saddam to Assad, from Moscow to Berlin to Bucharest, as he franchises terrorism around the globe. Edgar Ramirez, also Venezuelan, has the magnetism and acting chops to draw one through long stretches in the company of an odious man. In its own reflective thriller mode, Assayas’s film has more to say about the globalization of terror than almost anything I have seen or read. It’s sordid enough to make you ask why you’re sitting through all those hours of repellent behavior, but compelling enough to never drag. (2010, MC-93)
Everyone Else
I can only read this title as ironic, because “everyone else” is exactly what this intimate erotic duet excludes. Two thirtyish German professionals are vacationing together in Sardinia and testing the limits of their new relationship. Lars Eidinger is a supposedly brilliant young architect waiting for his first prize or commission, big blond and bland, with a passive-aggressive streak. Birgit Minichmayr is a brash little music publicist, who is always putting herself out there, sexually and emotionally. The director Maren Ade is a young woman who comes across as a harsher Eric Rohmer, picking apart the strands of mutual self-delusion, through conversation and sidelong glances. She throws you into close quarters with this couple, without introduction, and lets you figure out just what’s going on between them, as they bounce off each other and a limited number of others. This is romantic comedy that digs deep enough beneath the skin to hurt, and maintains a healthy respect for the mysteries of human motivation. It doesn’t assume or assert too much, but just lets us observe and understand, only up to a point, but certainly more than the characters understand themselves. (2010, MC-71)
Please Give
Nicole Holofcener extends sympathy to all her characters, however annoying they may be. In Friends With Money, that seemed way more sympathy than they deserved, but here the neurosis and affection are in better balance. As usual, Catherine Keener is right on the writer-director’s wavelength, as a guilty liberal trying to give away the money she makes with a business that seems ethically questionable to herself. She and hubby Oliver Platt own a vintage furniture store, which they stock by buying up the contents of apartments of dead old people, from their unknowing children. They’re waiting to take over the apartment of their next-door neighbor when she dies, and they become involved with the granddaughters who take care of her, deliciously played by Rebecca Hall and Amanda Peet. Ann Guilbert is hilarious as the straight-talking old lady, and Sarah Steele is also good as the acne-plagued teenage daughter of Keener and Platt. With well-judged but low-key direction, the entire ensemble is delightful and the whole nicely balances wit and warmth, with enough truth to lift the comedy beyond the situation. (2010, MC-78)
Last Holiday
For more than a decade I’d been looking for this film from 1950, which Alec Guinness made in the midst of his great series of Ealing comedies (Kind Hearts and Coronets, The White Suit, The Ladykillers), and it finally turned up on TCM. It’s worth keeping an eye out for, though here the comedy is quite subdued amidst darker themes. The story, by J.B. Priestley, follows an agricultural implement salesman who gets an imminently fatal diagnosis from his doctor and decides to spend his life savings on holiday at a posh seaside resort, where he is taken as a mystery man by an assortment of upper class types. As with Chauncey Gardner in Being There, his direct statements are taken as having great hidden meaning, so an inventor, a cabinet minister, a gambler, and others, take his word as gospel and offer him unprecedented opportunities, now that he has no time left to take advantage of them. Kay Walsh is good as the head housekeeper with whom he forms a gradually deepening relationship. The direction of Henry Cass is workmanlike at best, effectively anatomizing class types by speech and accent, and presenting topical satire on the era of austerity in Britain, but signaling the turns of the story so broadly that there is no surprise involved in how it all turns out. Nonetheless Guinness makes the film something to see.
I am Eye-talian
Luca Guadagnino aspires to the look of Visconti and the soul of Rossellini in I Am Love (2010, MC-79), a film pleasingly saturated with film history, the product of a long-term collaboration with Tilda Swinton, who plays the central role. She is the stylish matron of a wealthy Milanese family, which owns a textile factory that thrived under the Fascists and thereafter, but is about to be swallowed up by a global conglomerate. She’s a Russian who was acquired by her husband on an art buying expedition there during the Soviet era, becoming an out-of-place ice queen to fulfill the societal role assigned to her. Cracks begin to show in her opulent ice palace when the patriarch of the family bequeaths the business to her husband and son in tandem, because it will take two men to replace him. What gets through one crack is a friend of her son’s, a chef whose food, and then body, initiates her into Lawrentian ecstasy. This melodrama, luscious and fruity, is served with a sauce of John Adams music, and really indulged my taste for the likes of Sirk and Powell. It’s all absurd, but swank and powerful, with a strong undercurrent of social critique, of capitalism and Italy in the age of Berlusconi.
A much more homely look at Italian mores is offered in Gianni Di Gregorio’s Mid-August Lunch (2008, MRQE-70), about a middle-aged momma’s boy taking care of his nonagenarian mother and getting snookered into taking care of three other elderly ladies as well, and of the little community they form. In a way, this film goes beyond neorealism to home movie, with the director starring and shooting in the very apartment where he lived with his own mother until her death, but the film achieves a warmly ironic tone throughout. The four old ladies are a great aggregate of types, and in its own very domestic way the film offers as much food porn as Ms. Swinton enjoys. This lunch is light and slight, but quite tasty within its limits.
Only if ...
Here are several recent films I would commend to your attention only under special circumstances:
Letters to Juliet. Watch this utterly predictable romantic comedy only if: you’re in love with the Tuscan countryside bathed in a golden glow; or, you’re in awe of Vanessa Redgrave’s beauty, grace, and depth, and more than ready to see Guinevere reunited with Lancelot in old age, reenacting her real life reunion with Franco Nero; or, you can lose yourself in the limpid pools of Amanda Seyfreid’s saucer-sized eyes; or, you value the energy that Gael Garcia Bernal brings to any size role; or, you can forgive the formulaic writing and directing of Gary Winick to appreciate the light literary wit that pervades this otherwise ordinary entertainment. (2010, MC-50)
Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Watch this inoffensive -- try as it might – teen comedy of Jersey kids in the Big City for a long night’s journey to sunrise only if: you have been thoroughly charmed and continuously amused by Michael Cera in the sitcom series Arrested Development or movies like Juno; or, you have some idea of, or taste for, the downtown music scene herein celebrated; or, you are eager to see the fairly appealing Kat Dennings trade her sports bra for a push-up and have her first orgasm, and to see her ditsy, drunken blond girlfriend Ari Graynor make it safely back across the river to home; or, you don’t choke on the thoroughly chewed piece of gum that makes its way through sticky moments of the film; or, Peter Sollett’s direction sends you back to the master, Marty Scorsese, and After Hours. (2008, MC-64)
Friday, October 22, 2010
Red Riding Trilogy
By rights, this sordid saga of a whole culture of corruption, perversion, and violence ought to be revolting and unwatchable. Instead, it is immersive and compulsively watchable. The three films -- aired first on Channel 4 in Britain in 2009, then theatrically released in the U.S., and now on DVD (with indispensable subtitles) – cover a decade of evildoing and official malfeasance in Yorkshire. Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974 was shot on Super 16 and directed by Julian Jarrold; 1980 on 35mm by James Marsh; 1983 on hi-def video by Anand Tucker. Nonetheless they are very much of a piece, bound together in Tony Grisoni’s adaptation of David Peace’s cult-fave series of noir novels, collectively portraying a society going to hell under the toast and boast: “This is the North. Where we do what we want.” Several serial killers are on the loose, and the police are more interested in exploiting the crime sprees than solving them. People who investigate the web of corruption and fear are drawn in, chewed up, and spit out; primarily Andrew Garfield in 1974, Paddy Considine in 1980, and David Morrissey in 1983, leading effective acting ensembles in each, with peripheral characters moving to the foreground in sequence. These films are like David Fincher’s Zodiac in using the pursuit of a serial killer as the key to understanding a whole community of characters. Events always stay tantalizingly short of full comprehension, as the viewer stumbles through a universe without fixed points of truth or morality. It’s grisly to be sure, even more in scenes of police torture than in the murders and sexual abuse, but not based on gratuitous shocks. It’s confusing and meant to be, but dense with observation of personal and societal malaise. (Apparently the confusion is enhanced because the novel 1977, which fills in the story of the Yorkshire Ripper, was omitted.) The whole is a dark odyssey through a world of filth, and yet engrossing and perversely redemptive. (MC-77) If you want to get deep into the whole Red Riding cosmos, I recommend this essay by premier film historian David Thomson.
Agora
Alejandro Amenabar’s latest was a major disappointment to me. The recreation of Alexandria in the latter days of the Roman Empire, from Lighthouse to Library, is impressive and convincing, and the story of the philosopher Hypatia is treated with much more seriousness than the typical “sword & sandal” epic, but there is a failure to reanimate ancient characters in a believable way. I expected more from Rachel Weisz in the lead role, and the three students who are “hot for teacher” remain vapid and opaque, as they grow up to become, respectively -- freed slave and Christian militant, Christian bishop, and converted Roman prefect. This film has spectacle, but little intimacy or feel for the remoteness of the past. Hypatia’s anticipation of the Copernican revolution that would a millennium later overturn the Ptolemaic system may be a bit of a reach, but it’s a reach few films would attempt. And Amenabar seemed the man to do it, but alas, no. I endorse the film’s look and ambition, and its larger lessons of the perpetual conflict between religious fanatics and citadels of learning, but find the drama inert, even drowsy. (MC-55)
Casino Jack and other terrorists
Casino Jack and the United States of Money. (2010, MC-68) There’s a fine phalanx of committed documentary filmmakers working today, really making sense of vexed public issues, offering an antidote to Michael Moore. Along with two Jareckis and Charles Ferguson, Alex Gibney is one of the best. I found Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room both illuminating and infuriating, and Taxi to Dark Side definitely earned its Oscar, for its patient, thorough evisceration of Cheneyism. Now he turns his attention to the most pressing issue of current American politics, the complete takeover of the electoral landscape by the power of concentrated wealth, the insidious and pervasive influence of campaign contributions. Following the cohort of Abramoff, Rove, Reed, and Norquist from their College Republican days though their rise as idealogues of the Right to their full realization of the complete identity between their ideology and their own financial benefit. If you want some idea of how the vortex of money and power swirls in Washington, flushing our democracy down the drain, this film is an excellent place to start – informative, inventive, funny, and well-paced. I will warn you, however, that at the end of it, my first reaction was, “That movie makes me want to go out and burn something down.” The competing feature, also called Casino Jack, starring Kevin Spacey, will be out by the end of the year, and will have to go some to better this documentary.
Gibney also directs My Trip to Al-Qaeda (2010, now on HBO, dvd date as yet unknown), which he turns into much more than a simple recording of Lawrence Wright’s stage piece of the same name, based in turn on Wright’s research for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, a Pulitzer Prize winner which certainly informed my understanding of its subject more than anything else I have ever read. On stage and on film, Wright is every bit as convincing as he is in print, and the film does an excellent job of marshalling images in support of his argument.
Bastards glorious and not
Richard Linklater ranks near the top of my favorite directors now in their prime, so I was surprised by my lukewarm response to his latest film, Me and Orson Welles (2009, MC-73), which has a surprising gloss and an equally surprising lack of heart or invention. Christian McKay is definitely an impressive Orson Welles, odious but enthralling; on the other hand Zac Efron is a very bland Me, in this familiar backstage story of an ambitious teen falling in with the barely-out-of-his-teens (though you wouldn’t know it from this film) Welles, during the Mercury Theater’s inaugural with a stripped-down production of Shakespeare’s Caesar. Claire Danes graces the film with her presence, as a Vassar grad determined to get connected in show business, and Joseph Cotten, George Coulouris, and John Houseman are plausibly incarnated to recreate the Wellesian repertory on and off stage. There’s really nothing wrong with this film except for the hole at its center, and the overall sense of having seen this story before. But I expect more of Rick – this is more like his remake of Bad News Bears than breakthroughs such as Waking Life, Tape, and the sublime diptych Before Sunrise/Before Sunset.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Crime without borders
On the evidence of notable recent films from Romania, the Mideast, and France, there is a universal tension -- along with inevitable collision and collusion -- between underclass and law enforcement around the world.
Police, Adjective (2009, MC-81) is by far the lightest assessment, might even be considered a deadpan comedy in the dry Romanian style, but still is devoted to habits of mind held over from the era of a police state. A young plainclothes detective is tailing a kid -- in what feels like real and suspended time -- ratted out by a friend with whom he shares his hash. His boss just wants to run a sting on the kid, but the cop doesn’t want to entrap him for a basically innocent activity. At work he is lectured on the implications of authoritarian language, while at home his wife instructs him in the meaning of pop songs and grammar edicts from the authorities. As with most of the currently celebrated wave of cinema from Romania, Corneliu Porumboiu’s film requires patience until its implications emerge. This one didn’t click into place for me, as it did for many critics. I sort of get it, but did it have to be so slow and drab?
Slow was not the problem with the jostling Ajami (2010, MC-82). Co-written and directed by Israeli Arab Scandar Copti and Jew Yaron Shani, this film is named for an occupied neighborhood of Jaffa, adjacent to Tel Aviv, and features a bustling cast of nonprofessional actors from both sides of the great divide, each forced to cross boundaries of one sort or another. Using the currently fashionable technique of telling seemingly unrelated stories in a jumble of puzzle pieces that all connect at the end, we meet an array of characters: a young Arab man trying to negotiate himself out of a family vendetta, a hard-nosed Israeli cop whose young conscriptee brother has disappeared, a Palestinian boy trying to earn money for his sick mother back in Gaza, a Muslim hipster with a Christian girlfriend who thinks he’s free to rise above his situation. The convoluted suspense plays pretty well, and the ultimate connections do not seem forced, but the real attraction here are the dynamic, close to the bone performances by people very much like those they are playing. Sum it up as Mideast neorealism, in the storytelling vein of Crash or Babel.
Even better at the lower depths clash of civilizations is A Prophet (2010, MC-90), Jacques Audiard’s accomplished follow up to Read My Lips and The Beat My Heart Skipped. Though set in a French prison, here the clash is between Muslims and Corsicans. Tahar Rahim is outstanding as the central character, a homeless, illiterate youth, just old enough to get thrown in adult prison after an altercation with police. The great feat of this performance is to maintain our sympathy for the character as he receives a post-graduate education in crime. Niels Arestrup is electrifying as the old Corsican boss who seems to run the prison, even most of the guards. He presents the youth with a choice, kill a fellow Muslim on command or be killed himself. In a truly horrifying sequence, the boy does what has to be done and becomes the Corsicans’ Arab flunky, but thereafter forms relationships with other Muslims that allow him to operate precariously between two worlds. Stylish and intense as a thriller, this film is an anti-Scarface that excels at character development and implicit social commentary, potent and punishing.
You may have noticed that I have stopped applying numerical grades to my reviews, trusting my rating to emerge from my comments on the film. For the record, I would evaluate these three in turn as: noted with esteem but reservations; solidly recommended; and emphatically recommended (if you can take it).
Oscar upsets
The last two films to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film have both encountered widely divergent responses. On the one hand rapture, and on the other resentment and dismissal. As usual the truth of the matter lies somewhere between the extremes.
Departures earned a Metacritic average of 68, in a curious mix of 100s with 50s or less. Competent middlebrow entertainment, with an intriguing glimpse of odd foreign customs mixed with universal themes, it was a likely choice for Best Foreign Film at the 2009 Oscars, and some embraced it as such. Other critics resented the award not going to more challenging fare like Waltz with Bashir and The Class, and took that out on this inoffensive nominee from Japan. Sure, it’s too long and too obvious, but you can’t ignore the appeal of its characters and story, and the inherent fascination of Japanese mortuary rituals, every bit as stylized as tea ceremony. For cognoscenti perhaps Yojiro Takita’s film is confected too prettily out of familiar faces and themes, but for most the inherent strangeness and dignity of a different culture’s approach to death makes it seem fresh. The only face I recognized was Tsutomo Yamazaki, recycling his taciturn “noodle cowboy” from Tampopo, as the elder “encoffiner.” I found the young couple very ingratiating, though the man who plays the failed cellist and apprentice encoffiner apparently has achieved stardom in Japan in very similar roles, and while the woman may strike some as simpering to me she seemed charming and expressive. The film would definitely be better with twenty minutes of repetition and underlining deleted, but it is hypnotic in its depiction of the ritual of cleansing and dressing the body for burial, however formulaic other parts may be.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
This is a film I liked much more than the critical consensus, perhaps because of two women toward whom I’m decidedly predisposed. Rebecca Miller (Arthur’s daughter and wife of Daniel Day Lewis) caught my eye with Personal Velocity, and Robin Wright (does she still append “Penn”?) has attracted me in nearly anything she’s done. Miller’s personal quirks, as she adapts her own novel, come across to me as authenticity, and Wright never betrays her own complicated reality for easy effects. Here Robin as Pippa is married to a literary man thirty years her senior -- Alan Arkin effective in a role that obviously owes something to the writer-director’s father -- and has gone with him into a Connecticut retirement community. Unmoored, she starts to sleepwalk and also to roam in memory and flashback through various stages of her life. At the time of meeting her husband, she’s a loose-living runaway played by reasonable look-alike Blake Lively. She has grown into a controlled and dutiful wife and mother of grown children, but now is looking to re-find herself. Well-known faces turn up in peripheral roles, such as Mario Bello as Pippa’s mother in flashback, from whom she flees only to find her within herself, Keanu Reaves as the life-buffeted loser who moves in with his mother next door, and Winona Ryder as the confidante turned betrayer. Though the comedy sometimes turns cartoonish, literally, and the drama too pat, this is a fairly serious portrait of a woman coming apart at the seams, so something new can emerge from the cocoon she’s in. The story has been told before, but this comes with a literary and thespian pedigree that gives it unexpected weight. (2009, MC-49.)
Serious about series
Outside of news (including the fake news of Jon & Stephen, plus documentaries of all sorts), I don’t follow many tv programs, but these days I am among those who find the best quality series to rank in artistry and appeal with the best feature films. While eagerly awaiting the fifth and final season of Friday Night Lights, the fourth of Breaking Bad, and the second of Treme, here’s what I’ve been watching lately.
Of course, the current leader in “appointment television” is the fourth season of Mad Men (MC-92), which started with dark days indeed for our antihero Don Draper. As the arc of the season was inscribed from episode to episode, it was trending downward, but while disaster looms ever greater for Don and the rest of the gang at SCDP, all the plots that have been set spinning, and the black humor that inflects them, are rushing to a conclusion over the next few weeks, confirming the show in its classic status. I won’t presume to comment further, but if you’re into show as much as I am, here’s a place to really chew it over (check weekly recaps).
Gangsters during prohibition do not have the novelty of admen in the Sixties, but after two episodes, with instant renewal for another season, Boardwalk Empire (MC-88) promises to be worth watching at some length. Show creator Terrence Winters relies on other veterans of The Sopranos, with an assist from the master Martin Scorsese, to get the proceedings going with a bang. Led by the extremely reliable Steve Buscemi and Kelly Macdonald, the estimable cast includes “serious man” Michael Stuhlbarg, wild man Michael Shannon (here a tightly-wound G-Man) and other feature film veterans, along with big-budget production values.
With Boardwalk Empire and Treme, HBO is endeavoring to reclaim its mojo from AMC as the place for cable drama series. Sorry, I can’t sink my teeth into True Blood – I’ve had my fill of vampires. Can’t get into their half-hour comedies, either, though I did find the second season of Hung a guilty pleasure, broad and silly, but with engaging characters and acting. Meanwhile, I watched the last season of Entourage only because I’ve been watching all along, mainly for Jeremy Piven’s over-the-top antics as superagent Ari Gold.
Speaking of Ari, it was intriguing to see his nemesis Carla Gugino in a younger incarnation as one of The Buccaneers in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Edith Wharton’s last, unfinished novel, in which she looks back sixty years to the newly-rich American girls who went to England in the 1870s to land themselves titled husbands. Definitely racier than the buttoned-up society of Age of Innocence or House of Mirth, and tarted up with rape and homosexuality to go with infidelity and illegitimacy, this adaptation casts Mira Sorvino with an unlikely Brazilian accent, and two other American actresses who seem out of place in the classic British heritage settings of Masterpiece Theater, but that disconnect suits the story. If you’re into the whole dance of dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, and their stately dwellings, this (available from Netflix) will definitely meet that appetite, but it does not have the taste of the best BBC adaptations of Austen or Dickens or even Gaskell.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Film Club update
CINEMA SALON FILM CLUB AT THE CLARK RESUMES SEPT. 24TH
Film scholars may lament that “cinephilia is dead,” but for members of the Cinema Salon Film Club at the Clark, film as art is alive and well.
The movies these days seem to be all about competing in a crowded media marketplace, with the opening weekend box office gross vastly more important than any vestigial aesthetic encounter, but there was a time when cinema was widely acknowledged as “the art form of the 20th century.” That century may past, but film remains an important medium of art, at least at the margins.
The Cinema Salon Film Club looks to explore some of those margins. Seeking around the world, into the past and little-seen corners of the present, the Club screens a wide range of films worthy of discussion, for their artistry and ideas, in their simultaneous uniqueness and universality, strange yet familiar within the collective dream of cinema.
A new series of Club screenings will begin on Friday, September 24, at 3:00 pm (note earlier start time to allow for more discussion after the film) in the Clark auditorium. The theme of this series is “A Criterion of Excellence,” and the Club collectively will pick films to watch from the hundreds of dvds issued by The Criterion Collection, with its guarantee of quality both in choice of films and in meticulous digital transfer.
To kick things off on 9/24, the Club will screen the very first film in the Criterion catalogue (and one of the all-time favorites of Steve Satullo, film programmer at the Clark and presenter of Cinema Salon): Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937), the granddaddy of all POW escape films and one of the great human documents of the interwar era, starring Jean Gabin, Erich von Stroheim, Pierre Fresnay, and Marcel Dalio.
At the first meeting, the Club will select the next screening out of a varied pool of several candidates that Steve will present. At the same time, Steve will take open nominations for the next selection after that. (Votes and nominations may also be entered by email.) Check out Criterion’s list here: http://www.criterion.com/library/all
Cinema Salon is technically a private club, and not official Clark programming, but it is free and open to anyone interested enough to inquire. It’s probable that most future screenings will be at 3:00 on alternate Fridays, but that is subject to variation. The Club may be likened to the floating crap game in Guys and Dolls -- you need to be in the know to find out what’s being shown when. There are two ways to stay in the know.
Check the Cinema Salon website: www.cinemasalon.blogspot.com.
Or send Steve a request to be included in regular email updates: ssatullo@clarkart.edu.
Coming to the Clark
All about Art but the Art: The Business of Aesthetics
Free Films on Saturdays at 2:00 pm in the Clark Auditorium
Free Films on Saturdays at 2:00 pm in the Clark Auditorium
Surrounding artists and their work, many others contribute to the business of culture. This film series looks at collectors and curators, the way the art market assigns value, the responsibility of museums and other holders of our common cultural legacy. Each film, whether documentary or feature, stands on its own merits, but collectively they present an engrossing series of questions about the art world in the context of the wider economy and society.
September 25: Herb & Dorothy. (2009, 87 min.) He’s a postal clerk; she’s a librarian. Together the Vogels amass a world-class collection of contemporary art. When the collection goes to the National Gallery in Washington, it takes five moving vans to carry all the art that had been crammed into their tiny Manhattan apartment. Early on they befriended -- and collected in depth -- the starving young artists of the Minimalist and Conceptual schools, who went on to become an all-star roster of names such as Sol LeWitt, Christo, Robert Mangold, and many others. Now this charming couple, looking like outer-borough senior citizens, are the toast of the New York art crowd, in Megumi Sasaki’s delightful documentary.
October 2: My Kid Could Paint That. (2007, 83 min.) A precocious preschool girl turns out Jackson Pollock-like canvases that begin to sell for prices that escalate as her media exposure grows, until celebrity turns against her and her parents in a profile on “60 Minutes,” which questions the authenticity of her work. Questions about what makes art valuable, with commentary by Michael Kimmelman and others, blend into a familial mystery, which Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary leaves tantalizingly open.
October 16: Who Gets to Call it Art? (2006, 80 min.) One answer to the question posed by the title of Peter Rosen’s documentary is provided by his subject, Henry Geldzahler, the first curator of contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the center of the Manhattan art scene in the 60s, Geldzahler mounted his signature exhibition, “New York Painting and Sculpture 1940-1970” at the Met, and many of the participants comment on their relation to him in this lively group portrait.
November 6: The Art of the Steal. (2010, 101 min.) This documentary explores the controversy over the Barnes Foundation and the move of the celebrated collection -- unrivalled for its depth of masters such as Renoir, Cezanne, and Matisse -- from its quirky but beloved installation in a residential suburb, mandated by the founder’s will, to a new museum in downtown Philadelphia. The passionate advocacy of director Don Argott demands argument, while raising important questions of cultural patrimony.
November 20: Summer Hours. (2009, 103 min., in French with subtitles) In Olivier Assayas’ widely-acclaimed feature film, three far-flung siblings (including Juliet Binoche) gather at their mother’s country house to decide on the disposition of her uncle’s collection of art, raising in a fraught familial situation a host of issues regarding the value and ultimate purpose of an artistic legacy. The involvement of the Musée d’Orsay in this project might seem self-interested, but is certainly a favor to viewers of this quietly profound film.
Unlikely trio
Even a random sequence of films begins to reveal odd connections. Here are three I watched in succession that seem strangely related, though wildly disparate in most respects. The first two come through Turner Classic Movies by means of my TiVo “wishlist,” and the third from a new dvd of a recent foreign release.
Latterly coming to some appreciation of Olivia de Havilland as one of the great ladies of the classic Hollywood screen -- for a long time I’ve admired her in The Heiress, but recently was impressed by The Snake Pit -- I set out to see her other Oscar-winning performance in To Each His Own (1946, not on dvd). Ah yes, the Academy loves to see an actress age through make-up. But Olivia does do a creditable job, as a middle-aged businesswoman in London during the Blitz, and in flashback as a teenager in a small Upstate town during the First World War, where she falls for an aviator on a bond tour. Soon after, he dies in France, and Olivia is forced to deal with an out-of-wedlock baby in a censorious small community. Her approach is novel, not to say implausible. But it sets up the return to the train station in London where she comes face to face with that baby grown up to be an American flyboy himself (and played by the same actor). As a woman’s weepie, this does not quite rank with Stella Dallas, but Mitchell Leisen’s intelligent direction keeps it interesting.
I wish I could say the same for William Wellman in The Great Man’s Lady (1942), but the only interest here is in the performances. Barbara Stanwyck (the reason I watched, if you are aware of my recent obsession with her) outdoes Olivia by aging from Philadelphia maiden to frontier wife to centenarian teller of the hidden truth of America’s westward expansion. Joel McCrea is the great man in question, but Brian Donlevy is the more interesting character as the gambler with a heart of gold, which he gives to our girl Barbara. Again she is faced with babies of questionable parentage, though this story takes quite a different turn. In an odd way, this film prefigures Liberty Valance in its balancing of fact and legend in the development of the West, but a wartime piety about American history takes any sting out of the story.
From an entirely different era and culture comes another story of a woman abandoned with child by a supposed great man. In the case of Vincere (2010, MC-75), the “great man” in question is Mussolini, who seduces women, before he seduces the nation of Italy, with his presumptions of greatness. It turns out Marco Bellochio, bad boy of Italian cinema -- best known for his debut Fists in the Pocket (1965) but best remembered by me for China is Near (1967) -- has been making films all these years, though rarely seen in the U.S. He still pulls out all the stops, including documentary footage, animation, and other camera tricks, but this film too comes down to the riveting performance of its female lead, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, as the woman who gives all to the dashing blowhard, played with smoldering monomania by Filippo Timi, only to be abandoned when the erstwhile Socialist comes to power as a Fascist, who must clean up his past by sending his lover and then their grown son to mental asylums. To me, Mezzogiorno seemed a dead ringer for Debra Winger, but she certainly has a passion all her own.
Documendations
Under this heading I will from time to time offer brief recommendations of documentaries I have been watching that you would do well to watch, either via broadcast or on dvd. Not only am I a fan of the documentary form in all its inexhaustible variety, I am a partisan of a documentary aesthetic in all films. My one theoretical construct in cinema is that the divergent possibilities of film were there from the very beginning, with the Lumière brothers documenting, say, a train pulling into the station, and Meliès fabulating a trip to the moon, like a stage magician. Documentary and fabulation remain the poles of filmmaking, and the more a film leans toward the former, the better I like it. John Grierson coined the word “documentary” and gave it a definition that has yet to be surpassed, or contained: “creative treatment of actuality.” Sometimes it is the actuality that grips the viewer, and sometimes it is the creative treatment, and when both are powerful, nothing could be better.
And sometimes a poverty of means yields the richest result. After Forever (see “omnibus” review just below), I am into Heddy Honigmann, and the only other film of hers that Netflix had was O Amor Natural (1996), so I watched it with no advance idea of what it was about. This remains filmmaking by personal encounter; whereas in Forever Honigmann approached people in a Parisian cemetery, in O Amor Natural she accosts people on the streets of Rio and asks if they know who Carlos Drummond de Andrade was, and if they do know the famous Brazilian poet, she asks them to read aloud from his posthumous volume of that title – a book of erotic, damn near pornographic poetry. She concentrates on men and women in their 70s and 80s, and there is delicious mischief in seeing how they react to the steamy, smutty material. Probably again due to Honigmann’s choices, most respond gleefully with their own erotic memories. This film manages to be thoroughly charming and thought-provoking at the same time.
Ranking with the best films of this year or last, depending on release date, is Sweetgrass (2009, MRQE-72) by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaign-Taylor. This documentary takes an utterly different approach, in the tradition of anthropological film or Frederick Wiseman’s patient direct cinema studies of institutions – no narration or narrative frame or explicit point of view, just selective observation and juxtaposition of sound and image to weave a story out of contemplation of the reality given to the camera eye and microphone ear. Sweetgrass follows one of the last treks of a huge flock of sheep to summer grazing on public lands in the mountains of Montana. The sheep themselves are a constant source of amusement and wonder, from their sheepish antics to the breathtaking sweep of their collective passage through the Big Sky landscape. The cowboys fit the laconic stereotype and say virtually nothing intelligible, except when cooing at or cursing the flock, or their dogs and horses, or when the younger, less grizzled one whines to his mother on a cellphone how much he hates it all, while the camera does a slow pan of one of the world’s most magnificent landscapes. This film is lovely and meditative, and entertaining if you are willing to give it your time and attention.
Spike Lee’s If God is Willin and Da Creek Don’t Rise (2010, now on HBO) will definitely test your time and attention. In this follow-up to his indispensable Katrina documentary When the Levees Broke, Lee revisits many of the scenes and people, to good effect for the most part, but when the BP oil spill happened in the course of filming, he went off in search of that story and stretched the proceedings to four hours, by which time I had lost the thread of interest. Though you could say that new disaster belonged to New Orleans too, it tells a different set of stories from Katrina, so the film does seem to run on.
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