Catching up

I seem to have taken a short holiday from film reviewing, but it won’t take me long to catch up with what I’ve been watching. And it’s easy to single out one film as a recommendation. Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009, dvd, MC-83) is irresistibly charming in its faux-primitive stop-motion animation, with the ingratiating vocal performances of George Clooney, Meryl Streep, et al. I wouldn’t call this free-form adaptation of the Roald Dahl children’s story a must-see but it certainly is fun to see, and does not insult the intelligence of six or sixty year old.

Among other recent releases by well-established directors, Tony Gilroy’s well-made but frustrating Duplicity (2009, dvd, MC-69) does not come close to duplicating his superb Michael Clayton, and Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! (2009, dvd, MC-66) displays a mixed bag, as so much of his career does. Clive Owen and Julia Roberts entertain as the two competing spies in Duplicity – first MI-6 and CIA, then corporate -- who fall for each other and all the deceptions they each spin, but the viewer eventually loses patience with all the doubling back and gives up trying to figure it all out, not believing (or caring about) any of it. The Informant! could easily have had the same title (or The Insider, if that weren’t already taken), and would have been better off called something like Whistleblowing, since that exclamation point is a giveaway to its flaws, the attempt to goose an interesting story with too much goofy first-person narration and slapstick music. Matt Damon is quite good as a duplicitous executive at the agricultural conglomerate ADM, who turned FBI informant at the same time he was embezzling from the company and faking test results. The true story has enough substance and amusing twists that it would have been better told without the honking bells and whistles.

Of course I’ve been in a heavy cycle of screenings at the Clark, which I tend not to review after the fact, since the recommendation is implicit in my programming of them, and I say what I have to say about the films at the event. Last weekend, however, stands out. The Friday screening for the film club, The Edge of Heaven, confirmed Fatih Akin as one of the more interesting young directors out there today, and I added two earlier films by him to my Netflix queue. The “Portraits of Society” film on Saturday equally confirmed that Max Ophuls’ gliding, glittering rondelay, The Earrings of Madame de…, is one of the precious gems of cinema history, with performances from Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer, and Vittorio De Sica that are absolute jewels. Sunday’s Roberto Rossellini double feature was overpowering: Rome Open City coming through with enhanced force in its Criterion Collection restoration, and Paisan pounding home its vast ambition in a way that made even its flaws impressive – I don’t know if I’d call it a good film per se, but it is certainly important and thought-provoking, to the history of war as well as cinema.