Early line on best of 2010

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.   

For the rest of Film Comment’s top ten, I look forward to seeing Claire Denis’ White Material (#3), and was disappointed to miss Charles Ferguson’s acclaimed documentary Inside Job (#7) when it showed at Images last month but eagerly anticipate the dvd.  Wild Grass (#8) I wish I hadn’t seen, and Greenberg (#10) I barely remember seeing.  Look for me to be filling in the rest of the top films of 2010 from various lists over the next few months, before making final pronouncement on my own choices.

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 42^nd 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.

Public Speaking  (2010, HBO, no dvd yet, MC-75) is basically Martin Scorsese’s My Dinner with Fran, and your response with be predicated on how you feel about Fran Lebowitz’s animated gestural tabletalk.  Her acerbic, self-assured New Yawker commentary on any subject that comes to mind, and her cultivated Oscar Wilde in drag persona, will determine whether you are drawn into this portrait or put off, delightedly amused or definitely not amused.  Count me among the amused.

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.

Along with these old films, I revisited Robert Warshow’s classic essay, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” (1948), and while it certainly overreaches, it does so in exciting and provocative ways, with that classic mid-century blend of Marxism and Freudianism.  He demonstrates how the gangster represents the dark side of the pursuit of happiness, the anarchic id run wild, an epitome of the modern city:  “And the gangster – though there are real gangsters – is also, and primarily, a creature of the imagination.  The real city, one might say, produces only criminals; the imaginary city produces the gangster: he is what we want to be and what we are afraid we might become.” 

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.