New stuff

One more random compilation and I will be caught up with my film reviewing, and then proceed in a more systematic manner.

Among some recent American indies, the standout was Beginners (2011, MC-81, NFX), in which Mike Mills makes an autobiographical film about discovering his father and himself.  Ewan McGregor plays the lead, a graphic artist whose profession yields animated sequences, flashbacks and forwards, and all sorts of goofy but endearing interpositions.  Christopher Plummer plays the father, a museum curator who comes out after his wife dies, and delightedly embraces a gay lifestyle for a few years before his death from cancer (the movie starts there, so that’s no spoiler).  In watching his father come out of the closet, the lonely 38-year-old tentatively starts to come out of his own, a reluctance to open up to the women of his serial relationships.  He meets a new woman, Melanie Laurent, who is equally winsome and withdrawn.  They cavort with the adorable terrier Ewan has inherited from his father, but will they embrace the joy of being together or retreat to comfortable solitude?  This romantic folderol is almost as charming as it intends to be, with enough genuine detail to give the story some weight.

Turns out girls can do mumblecore as well as boys.  In Tiny Furniture (2010, MC-71, NFX), Lena Dunham, a year out of Oberlin, makes a home movie that is worth watching, about a recent college grad coming home to the elegant white-on-white Tribeca studio loft of her artist mother.  She plays the lead, her mother plays her mother, and her sister plays her sister, mostly in their own space.  Her character is certainly more hapless than the go-getter who got this film made, and if the intimacy can be a bit icky, that is certainly the point of this highly self-aware exercise.  Ms. Dunham turns herself into a poster girl for “smart women, foolish choices,” right down to probably the least erotic sex scene ever filmed.  Her mother comes across as stiff and remote, but it’s hard to know whether that is characterization or poor acting.  Her younger sister, however, hogs the scene just as the character should.  The two boys she dallies with on the rebound from her end-of-college breakup are effectively vacuous.  Self-revealing yet highly-mediated, with a sharper and steadier camera than is the rule for such D-I-Y efforts, this is a funny and pointed debut that promises much.

Win Win (2011, MC-75, NFX) was not as winning to me as Tom McCarthy’s previous film, The Visitor.  But there was much to like in this story of a small town New Jersey lawyer, who cuts a corner or two to get by, but is still a good guy, volunteering to coach the high school wrestling team.  That is Paul Giamatti in a familiar mode, but Amy Ryan as his wife stands out, totally Jersey but not a caricature in the least.  The decidedly unglamorous sport of wrestling allows for some amusing takes on classic sports movies clichés, and McCarthy’s decidedly unglamorous hometown of New Providence keeps the story similarly grounded.  Though reactions differ, I thought it was an excellent idea to cast a real high school state champion wrestler as the homeless boy the couple takes in -- with highly mixed motives -- and to rely on him to behave naturally on camera, rather than “acting.”  I think that works to sustain an air of gritty reality, while the obligatory heart-tugging goes on.

In Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011, MC-65, NFX), the accent is on the middle word.  Despite decent performances and a few winning moments, this was not to my taste.  I know nothing about codirectors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, but I would be surprised if they were not a gay couple – not that there’s anything wrong with that.  It’s just that the gay sensibility in disguise adds an element of falsity to the proceedings.  Come out of the closet, guys.  This is the story of an entertaining “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” makeover, which goes all mush-headed with talk of “soulmates” and “your one true love.”  The women just get in the way, with Juliane Moore and Emma Stone wasted.  (One of these days Ms. Stone will be in a decent movie, and she will be amazing.)  Steve Carell is his usual endearing everyman self, as a 40-year old dumpee rather than virgin, but Ryan Gosling brings his usual surprise, showing an aptitude for humor and humanity in the uncharacteristic role of a preening peacock.  “No -- seriously?  It’s like you’re Photoshopped.”

Appropriate Adult (2011, MC-77, Sundance) is plenty serious.  I don’t know whether the Brits have a particular thing with serial killers, or whether I’m just more willing to watch a crime drama with a British accent, but I’ve been seeing a lot of them lately (Red Riding Trilogy, Luther, Longford), and this one was authentically creepy without a bit of gore.  Dominic West (McNutty again!) plays the real weirdo Fred West, and Emily Watson is the title character, someone who accompanies through interrogation a defendant whose mental competency is in question.  West insinuates himself with Watson, and a dance of calculated revelations, attractions and repulsions, follows.  Julian Jarrold, who directed one of the Red Ridings, provides a disturbing but absorbing experience, with more thought-provoking ambiguity than shock value.

There are multiple reasons for me to have a soft spot for Made in Dagenham (2010, MC-65, NFX), which is basically just Norma Rae in England.  First off is Sally Hawkins, who was forever endeared to me by Happy-Go-Lucky.  She’s the normal working class mum who takes control of a strike by women at a Ford plant outside London in 1968 (and thereby puts me in mind of my own mum, a working class war bride from Slough).  The soft-focus direction by Nigel Cole is in the vein of his Saving Grace and Calendar Girls, with the ladies going about a bit of fetching naughtiness, with “you go, girl” uplift.  The film could well have done with a good deal more documentary flavor, but the subject is catnip to me, having grown up in a union household.  In fact at just about that time, I was working with the American counterparts of these very women.  At a GM plant in Cleveland, I had a summer job as a “trim key checker,” basically keeping up with the women who operated the piecework machines to sew or glue vinyl interior parts.  So the UAW was the only union I ever joined, and despite what unions have become, I am always susceptible to the call of solidarity.  Back in the 70s, one of my very favorite films was about a similar labor action by women, Coup pour Coup, now nearly forgotten and in fact not well know at the time – when I went to see it a second time at Film Forum in Manhattan, I was the only person in the audience.  All this is to say that I quite liked Made in Dagenham, but you may not. 

Days and Clouds (2008, MC-69, NFX) is another tale of economic hardship, in another time, class, and country.  Silvio Soldini’s story of an upper middle class marriage under stress from fiscal setback is timely, as the impact of financial panic persists and Italy becomes the case in point.  But it is timeless as well, and well served by the unfamiliarity of the actors, however well known they may be in Italy.  Margherite Buy in particular convinces as the wife who went back to school as an art restorer after her grown daughter left home, but then is compelled to take call center and secretarial jobs, after her husband is forced out of his shipbuilding concern in Genoa, then keeps his dismissal a secret for several months, and fails to find any new work for himself, even as their well-heeled lifestyle evaporates.  The couple literally winds up flat on their backs, in this tough but not despairing film.

Two recent newspaper documentaries deserve note.  My father was a printer at the Cleveland Press, and a leader in the local and International Typographical Union.  My brother and I grew up with printer’s ink in our veins; Chris was longtime editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and though he has deserted that sinking ship for public broadcasting in Philly, remains every inch a journalist.  So I watched Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times (2011, MC-68, NFX) with keen interest.  By no means a definitive panorama, Andrew Rossi’s film offers a peek behind the doors of the embattled media giant.  The access is limited but still involving, with the newly formed media desk the focus, and the fate of newspapers in a digital world the main news story.  Reporter David Carr becomes the star of the show, with a hard-boiled attitude and a gravelly voice, as an ex-crack-addict who can’t believe his luck in winding up at the Times.

No question who’s the star of Errol Morris’s Tabloid (2011, MC-74, NFX).  The only question is whether Joyce McKinney is “barking mad,” or a canny fabulator of her own life.  Back in the 70s she became a tabloid sensation in Britain as the American beauty queen (Miss Wyoming) who kidnapped her Mormon ex-boyfriend in London and took him to a cozy B&B in Devon, manacled him to the bed, and proceeded to “rape” him for three days (Joyce rightfully asks, how do you put a marshmallow in a parking meter?).  As usual, Morris’s documentary method seems straightforward, mostly head-on interview, but strangely destabilizing (compare, at a totally different level of seriousness, his portrait of Robert McNamara’s second thoughts on Vietnam in Fog of War).  You will definitely laugh at or with Joyce, but you will have a hard time knowing what to believe about her.  And the current hacking scandal at a British tabloid puts this film in the context of a larger question of sensationalized journalism.

Grab bag

I plan to resume regular reviewing, and give this blog a bit of a makeover by the first of the year, but I have to catch up with a backlog of random viewing, with only a few real recommendations among them. 

Thankfully, the world of cinema is wide and deep, because most popular American movies seem to come out of a shallow, narrow pool.  Good films do get made, and I will be covering the best of them in upcoming months, but most fail to rise above their formula.

As a journalistic convenience, many young American filmmakers in their twenties have been grouped under the rubric, “mumblecore.”  Having made their first films with minimal means, about lives much like their own, self-absorbed young people struggling to find work and romance, some are trying to go mainstream.  The Duplass brothers, for example, deliver a quirky comedy with Cyrus (2010, MC-74, NFX), and can’t go too far wrong with performers like John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, and unlikely man of the moment Jonah Hill.  A hapless divorced man gets lucky with a beautiful babe, but then has to contend with the jealousy of her adult son still living at home.  There’s never a moment’s doubt where this is headed, though there are some amusing moments, and some not so, along the way.

In Cold Weather (2011, MC-64, NFX), Aaron Katz tries to meld a mystery dynamic into the mumblecore formula of aimless conversation, but it’s all red herring or shaggy dog or some such indirection.  Chilled out, anyway, in this story of four young people drifting through their twenties in Portland, OR.  Katz brings a bit of visual flair, and also some real world observation, to the familiar world of hip anomie.  Not a chore to watch, this effort left me flat in the end, but it’s not without wit and style.

Among popular comedies formula reigns supreme, “high concept” in the lingo, but really geared to the latest lowest common denominator.  Take Bridesmaids (2011, MC-75, NFX) for instance -- all you have to tell the marketing department is “The Hangover for chicks.”  I haven’t lost all respect for Judd Apatow as he extends his brand of loose and shambling comedy, producing this mess with director Paul Feig (co-creator of the short-lived but seminal tv series Freaks and Geeks).  It is true, however, that there is more acting talent than writing ability on display in Hollywood today, even when, as with Kristen Wiig here, the actor is the writer.  There are some mildly amusing sketches, and fellow SNL alum Maya Rudolph makes a winning foil, but truth of character or action is in short supply.

That is doubly true of Due Date (2010, MC-51, NFX), in which Robert Downey Jr. kept me watching long past the point where this odd couple buddy comedy flew off the bridge.  I’m no fan of Zach Galifianakis, but he is capable of more characterization than this flimsy writing and haphazard direction allow (from Todd Phillips, between the two parts of The Hangover).  The question remains whether formula is the starting point or the endpoint of the project.  Throw two antagonistic guys together on a roadrip, and you can end up artfully with The Trip, or you can end up with this carwreck of a movie.

Where festivals like Sundance used to offer an alternative to Hollywood, now they are more like a feeder stream.  I caught up with one former Sundance Audience Award winner, because of the presence of Kelly Macdonald.  Two Family House (2000, MC-79, NFX) is slight but honest, and writer-director Raymond De Felitta does a good job of convincingly recreating Staten Island in the Fifties on a minimal budget.  Buddy, as played by Michael Rispoli (whom you may recognize from The Sopranos, and also Katharine Narducci as his nagging wife), was once noticed by Arthur Godfrey for his singing and imagines he could have been Julius LaRosa, but drifts through failed schemes until he comes up with the idea of buying the house of the title and turning the downstairs into a bar where he would be the entertainment.  Unfortunately he has to evict a very pregnant Kelly and her drunken older husband, but forms a connection with her that endures.  This is an ethnic comedy-romance (the cover image begs comparison with Moonstruck) that gives indies a good name.

Another little-noticed film, which I caught up with on a friend’s recommendation, was Mao’s Last Dancer (2010, MC-55, NFX).  This had escaped my attention even though directed by Bruce Beresford, who clicked with me on Tender Mercies and several other films in a long and checkered career.  This one is well-made and fact-based, as it follows a young boy from a village in China, who is plucked out to attend ballet school in Beijing, and winds up defecting to perform for the Houston Ballet.  All three actors who portray the progression of Li Cunxin (based on his memoir) are convincing, as are the depictions of three different worlds, but the film has its flaws, including an inadequate actress as first love interest, an ending of forced uplift, and an unfortunate habit of going to slow-motion during dance performances.  Nonetheless I found it well worth watching.

Though I have persisted through two seasons, I still wonder whether Boardwalk Empire was worth watching on HBO, but I have no such qualms about Homeland (2011, MC-91) on Showtime, which is almost certainly the best series now running on television.  Claire Danes plays an intriguingly flawed CIA counterterrorism agent, in pursuit of a similarly nuanced Damian Lewis, as a marine who may have been turned during eight years as a POW in Iraq.  This thriller effectively ratchets up the suspense without betraying plausibility of character or event, and keeps on twisting.  Catch up with it if you can.

I followed one episode by turning to another story of a beautiful blond CIA agent in Fair Game (2010, MC-69, NFX), this one for real.  Naomi Watts plays Valerie Plame and Sean Pean plays Joe Wilson in Doug Liman’s authorized version of their two memoirs of being collateral damage to the Bush administration’s headlong and headstrong rush to war in Iraq.  The political context is rather thin in this story of a marriage under stress, but convincing performances carry the day.  Not a must-see, Fair Game is fair as far as it goes.

One of the alternative areas to look for new films of unexpected strength is Korea.  Two impressive films by Chang-Dong Lee have reached the U.S. in the past year, each centered on a strong female lead.  In Secret Sunshine (2010, MC-84, NFX), Do-Yeon Jeon is a young widow who goes to live in her dead husband’s hometown (its name translates to the title), creating a new home for her boy and setting up as a piano teacher, finding her way uncertainly into the community.  Something bad happens, and she has to cope, sometimes with the help and sometimes with the hindrance of a semi-comic unwanted suitor.  To say more would be to betray the experience of the film, in which ordinary life seems to unfold patiently, till the abyss opens and a desperate struggle for sanity and survival ensues. 

In Lee’s Poetry (2011, MC-89, NFX), Jung-Hee Yun is a grandmother, just diagnosed with incipient Alzheimer’s, who is taking care of a sullen teenage grandson and getting by on a pension and as part-time maid for a rich old man.  Despite the marginality of her existence, she still likes to make a nice appearance, with scarves and colorful clothes. For mental exercise, she enters an adult education class on poetry.  Something bad happens, and she has to cope.  Again, this is a film to be experienced at its own leisurely, observant pace.  Ms. Yun apparently was a big star in Korea when younger, but this role is a comeback after nearly two decades of retirement; she commands the camera while seeming to do very little, again hypnotically ordinary, as she solves the enigma of her existence.

Another alternative to run of the mill feature films lies with documentaries.  One that makes its point and does not overstay its welcome is Morgan Spurlock’s Greatest Movie Ever Sold (2011, MC-66, NFX), or rather, POM Wonderful Presents: The…  As with Super Size Me, Spurlock puts himself front and center, and he’s an amusing, adventurous guy to hang out with.  This is a film by and about financing through product placement, and its funhouse self-reflection is quite effective, as the camera follows Morgan into a host of pitch meetings and promotional stunts.  Is he selling out, or buying in?  Or debunking the whole business of “hidden persuasion”?  At any rate, my product awareness of pomegranate juice, in little snowman-shaped bottles, has gone up 100%.

Among other recent documentaries that I have liked are two about sports from HBO.  Gemma Atwell’s Marathon Boy was of more general interest, for the story of an uncannily accomplished young runner in India, who completes 48 marathons by the time he is four years old, and then further endurance stunts.  His coach and promoter runs an orphanage where the boy lives, until the state steps in.  This is a fascinating and quirky window into Indian society, and an open-ended moral quandary.  Marc Levin’s Prayer for a Perfect Season follows a basketball rivalry between Catholic prep schools in New Jersey, vying for #1 in the nation.  I’m a sucker for any teammate of Hoop Dreams, one of the best documentaries ever, which towers over the court, but this film is a scrappy youngster who deserves a call from the bench.

Just a word on films I’ve recently watched again with Cinema Salon.  Altman’s Player and Scorsese’s Aviator emerged slightly lower in my estimation of the works of a favorite director, but Visconti’s  Leopard rose even higher.  Of the films just mentioned here, Poetry is a candidate for showing to the film club, since it’s definitely a “film worth talking about.”

Getting to better of 2011

Outposted here in the boondocks, I never complete my round-up of the best films of one year till the middle of the next, when they’ve all reached DVD, but lately I have been watching some films that are sure to figure in the conversation.   Please note that I am now including a direct link for each film not only to Metacritic, for more description and a wider range of opinion, but also to Netflix, for immediate availability by DVD, or by streaming (as with the top three below).   

Buck (2011, MC-76, NFX) will certainly count among the best documentaries of the year. Cindy Meehl’s profile of “Horse Whisperer” Buck Brannaman is unusually nuanced and surprisingly moving.  Turns out that to know equines is to know humans, and Buck makes for an unlikely adept, a soft-voiced sage.  Part of a brother duo of child performers with the lariat, he was abused by his father and eventually taken away into foster care after his mother died.  Somehow that experience gave him empathy with other abused creatures and how to reach them.  Now he is on the road for 300 days a year, giving clinics to horse owners, occasionally joined by his loving wife and teenage daughter.  The one gaping omission in the film is what happened to his brother, but a revealing comparison of fates is supplanted by a dramatic confrontation with an unruly horse that even Buck finds hard to understand into docility.  Interesting interviews and gorgeous Western scenery surround the inspiring encounters between man and horse. 

The Trip (2011, MC-82, NFX), a collaboration between the prolific, protean, and provocative director Michael Winterbottom and comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Bryden, will follow its predecessor, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, onto my best of the year list.  Coogan and Bryden, friendly rivals or rivalrous friends, are thrown together on a commissioned tour of the lovely stone-fenced lanes of the Yorkshire Dales to review upscale restaurants, which serve art on a plate rather than anything recognizable as food.  Their competitive impersonations of Michael Caine (and many others) or ABBA duets, over meals or in the car, are the peaks of a continuous back and forth improvised from their own established characters.  As boiled down from a six-part BBC series, this Trip is one to take, both hilarious and touching in its ongoing clash of personae.  Beside the comedy of antithetical personalities thrown into intimate contact, and the risible food, there are suggestive parallels developed in their visits to Coleridge and Wordsworth heritage sites.  The film has as much to say, in its own Brit way, about “men of a certain age” as the American tv series of that name, or the movie Sideways.  It’s enough to make you think while you laugh.

Bertrand Tavernier has had a long and generally interesting career, so good notices drew me to his latest, Princess of Montpensier (2011, MC-78, NFX).  I warmed up immediately when I realized it was set in the era of Montaigne, subject of my favorite book of last year or many more, Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live.  In fact, Lambert Wilson (who was head monk in Of Gods and Men) plays an intellectual nobleman much like Montaigne, in the age of the endless French wars of religion and succession in the late 16^th century.  He is one of four men attracted to the princess of the title, played by Melanie Thierry, including her husband (by arranged marriage), her persistent former lover (one of the Guise), and Duc d’Anjou (destined to be king).  Bodices are ripped, to be sure, in this adaptation of a novel by Madame de Lafayette, and knaves are run through by galloping horsemen or deft swordsman, but much more is going on.  It helps to have the excellent background offered by Bakewell on the power players of the age, to pick up for example on the brief cameo by Catherine de Médici.  This period piece is intelligent and beautifully made in every detail.

You’d be well within your rights to wonder whether the world needs another movie adaptation of Jane Eyre (2011, MC-76, NFX), but the surprising answer is yes, because young actresses will rise to the challenge of one of the great literary heroines.  Up to now Charlotte Gainsbourg had been my favorite (in Zefferelli’s otherwise unmemorable 1995 version), but Mia Wasikowska manages to come across as “small and plain, poor and obscure” as the best of them (what acting for such a beauty!).  Michael Fassbender is not as threatening but every bit as imposing as Rochesters like Orson Welles of George C. Scott.  Judi Dench fills in as Mrs. Fairfax, so you know you’re in a quality adaptation.  Cary Fukunaga, a young American with only Sin Nombre to his credit, was a surprising choice to direct but does so more than credibly.  All the sets and costumes, and the cinematography in endless shades of gray and blue, evoke the atmosphere of the Bronte classic.  And for once the deleted scenes tell of a film that might have been and was wisely avoided, with most of the supernatural gothic elements left on the cutting room floor.

Two films that were released in the U.S. only after they were nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at last winter’s Academy Awards are now available on DVD.  The Oscar went to the Danish film In a Better World (2011, MC-65, NFX).  I’ve consistently liked director Susanne Bier’s films, and there was plenty to admire here, especially in the performances of the two ten-year-old boys at the center of the film.  One is grieving the cancer death of his mother, and blaming his father for not saving her, and acting out his anger and despair in increasingly alarming ways.  At a new school he makes friends with a sweet, dorkish boy, whose father really is working for a better world, though separating from his mother.  We see the father working as a doctor in a clinic in the African desert, where he faces the moral conflict of treating the violent local warlord.  Back in Denmark, he literally turns the other cheek to a bully, which the boys cannot abide, till their own scheme of revenge goes awry.  It all turns out a little too predictably, but there is a lot of suspense, much of it genuinely ethical, along the way.

In a better world, the French Canadian entry Incendies (2011, MC-82, NFX) would have taken home the Oscar.  Denis Villeneuve’s film follows thirtyish twins from Quebec, when their mother’s will sends them on dual quests back to her native country of Lebanon (or something like), and into the civil wars of its past, and her hitherto undisclosed role in them.  The girl takes on her quest determinedly, while the boy dismisses his mother and her desires in every way.  Most of the film flashes back and forth between two outstanding actresses who play the daughter and mother, with Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin traveling deeper into Lebanon and the past, while Lubna Azabal enacts the events being revealed.  The film is almost unbearably tense and sad, as it unfolds the horrors of religious conflict, as much in the 20^th century as the 16^th, but is marred in the end by a theatrical development that reveals the story’s source in a play, in spite of the harsh reality so vividly depicted.

Sisterhood is powerful

Sometimes unrelated films watched in succession suddenly reveal a common thread.  I certainly didn’t set out to watch films about sisters, but this diverse -- indeed globe-spanning -- group proved to have that hidden connection, as well as a level of quality in common, worth firm but not urgent recommendation.

In Kon Ichikawa’s The Makioka Sisters (1983, NFX) there are four, and we follow their lives through four seasons, from cherry blossom season to its return a year later, under the shadow of coming World War II.  Reminiscent of Ozu in its focus on domestic interiors, both physical and psychological, this film has a visual lushness all its own.  The kimonos dazzle as much as the cherry blossoms.  In this well-to-do family the two elder sisters are well-married and seeking a similar match for the demure third sister, who is in no rush, which puts pressure on the wilder and more modern fourth sister, who is in no mind to hold off on her own attachments till her elder gets hitched.  The setting may be exotic, but the intrafamiliar tensions are readily identifiable.

I assumed Treeless Mountain (2009, MC-75, NFX) was a Korean film till I found out after the fact that director So Yong Kim is an American living in Brooklyn.  In tight close-up and intimate empathy she follows two young sisters, perhaps seven and four, who are dumped by their emotionally distracted mother with a drunken aunt, before finding refuge in the country with a more welcoming grandmother.  The kids are in the dark about what the adults are up to, and so are we, as we share their limited perspective on events.  Apparently the director’s mother emigrated to America before she came over herself at the age of 12, and she clearly draws on her own feelings of abandonment and misunderstanding to elicit remarkable performances from the two little girls.  The film is slightly derivative (cf. Nobody Knows), but well done by a promising filmmaker.

Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen (2010, MC-68, NFX) deals with a different sort of sister, as it explores the life and relationships of a 12^th-century nun.  Veteran director Margarethe von Trotta features frequent collaborator Barbara Sukowa as Hildegard, the highly-accomplished mysti, and leader of a convent, whick breaks away from the rule of monks to establish an independent sacred community of women.  The nuns do not leave behind jealousy, envy, and other untoward emotions, but the religious life is portrayed in a spare and even-handed manner.  Not a film to sweep you up in its story, but involving in a low-key way.   

Cliente, the original title of French Gigolo.  (2008, NFX), keeps the focus where it belongs, on Nathalie Baye, as a professional divorcee who solves the problem of sex by buying it when she feels the urge.  Josiane Balasko, who also directed, plays her sister, roommate, and business partner, taking a decidedly more romantic approach.  Eric Caravaca is endearing as the gigolo who may turn out to be something more.  Ah, French sex comedy, so much more sophisticated than the American variety!  And ahhh, Nathalie Baye, no less seductive as a woman of a certain age than she was as a scriptgirl in Truffaut’s Day for Night and so many other notable films in between!  One is supposed to fall in love with film stars, and Nathalie is a longtime flame of mine, never less than appealing.

Mopping up

I certainly seem to be out of the (non)business of writing regular film reviews, but I still want to reflect on what I’ve been viewing.  Lately a lot of what I’ve watched had to do with present and future film series at the Clark.  First I nailed down the line-up for my midwinter series “Escapist Entertainment” – the three movies that made the cut, to fit between the bookends of Cast Away and Heading South, were The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999, MC-76), Dr. No (1962), and Mediterraneo (1991).  Matt Damon was better than I remembered as Ripley, but the supporting cast made the film, and the Italian locations made a perfect fit for my series.  Sean Connery remains the quintessential James Bond, the Jamaica locations fit the bill, and I found it a real goof to look back on the start of the franchise from the perspective of fifty years later.  And the Italian film not only features a pastoral idyll on a Greek island, but starts with an epigraph about the importance of “escape.”   

A near runner-up for the series was Emanuele Crialese’s Respiro (2002, MRQE-63, NFX), which was set on an island south of Sicily and featured the compelling Valeria Golino as a woman under the influence of a wild freedom, which disrupts the settled ways of the fishing village where she lives, in a lovely and believable mix of neorealism and mythic fantasy.  A similar mix may be found in another folkloric take on an isolated Sicilian community in the Taviani brothers’ Kaos (1984), which I found interesting to watch but too long and unresolved for my taste.  Robinson Crusoe (1952) seemed like a good fit with Cast Away, and when I saw that despite Dan O’Herlihy in the title role, this was not a Walt Disney production, but directed by surrealist provocateur Luis Bunuel, I made a point of watching, but found it too quaint and outright racist to show, probably true to Defoe in that.  I even checked out Endless Summer (1966) as an escapist candidate, but found the narration of the seminal surfing documentary just too arch and bubble-headed to endure.

Then I was canvassing other candidates for my subsequent “Artists Now” film series at the Clark in March and April.  Gary Tarn’s Black Sun (2005, NFX) was certainly an interesting departure, but only for a certain sophisticated audience.  The narration -- or rather, rumination – is by Hugues de Montalembert, an artist who went blind after a street beating in Manhattan.  He has interesting things to say about the psychology of sight and many other subjects, delivered haltingly and hypnotically, while the imagery ranges free, sometimes in synch with the narration (e.g. walking down the street and seeing extremely blurry faces coming at the camera) but more often in counterpoint, sometimes lovely, sometimes yawn-inducing.

Rothko’s Rooms (2008, NFX) is quite an interesting documentary about the painter and the environments he sought to create for viewing his abstract expressionist masterpieces, but for now I’m only showing films about living artists, so file this away for future reference.  Hockney at the Tate (1988, NFX), however, while no great shakes as a film -- just Hockney and a curator walking through a retrospective exhibition and talking about his paintings -- provides backstory and a perfect complement to the later and more process-oriented David Hockney: A Bigger Picture.

In the current series of Cinema Salon screenings at the Clark, under the rubric of “Steve’s Screening Room,” I have watched Jules and Jim, The New World, and Of Gods and Men, and upon re-viewing, each rose even higher in my estimation.  Someday I’ll get around to writing an appreciation of Truffaut’s entire career, and I’ll talk more about Terrence Malick when I review Tree of Life sometime in the next month, after Netflix gets the Blu-Ray DVD.  For the third film, I stand by my recent review.

Frankly, like many people these days, I have been watching fewer feature films, and more long-form television series.  I’ve already recommended Breaking Bad and Lark Rise to Candleford, and I am holding off finishing the fourth season of each till my daughter returns and I can share them with her.  My enjoyment of Laura Linney in The Big C was undiminished in its second season, and I’m glad to hear it’s been renewed for a third.

I’ve just started checking out some programs on BBC America.  The cast and setting of The Hour (2011, NFX) appealed to me, but the story didn’t really click.  Dominic West (“McNutty” of The Wire!), Romola Garai, and Ben Whishaw are developing the new format of a weekly hour of news and opinion for BBC TV in the midst of the Suez Crisis in 1956.  The characters and scene did not wear out their welcome in six episodes, so if it comes back again, I’d probably watch more.  This series was presented under the umbrella of “Dramaville,” with each program introduced by Idris Elba (Stringer Bell of The Wire!).  The next series featured him as Luther (2010-11, MC-82, NFX), a troubled London detective working the serial killer beat.  The first season is available on Netflix streaming, and the second just aired, six and four episodes respectively.  I don’t usually have much patience for detective shows, with a different killer every week and frequent gore, but the London setting and the well-acted, complicated characters kept me engaged with this one.  Frankly, close captioning is a big help to enjoying both these shows, since the argot and accents are hard to follow, especially when the dialogue is delivered casually on the go.

So now I’m into new seasons of several HBO series.  I like but still do not love the second season of Boardwalk Empire (MC-81).  For reasons I can’t quite pin down, I enjoy the shameless silliness of Hung (NFX) in its third season, I suppose for the post-adolescent humor of its take on sexuality, and its engagingly awful characters.  I’m giving the new Laura Dern show, Enlightened (MC-75) a chance to win me over on the same terms.  One new show that does seem to have won me over is Showtime’s Homeland (MC-91), largely on the strength of Claire Danes’ lead performance as a CIA agent trying to crack a terrorist plot, which seems to revolve around a freed American POW who may have been turned during eight years of captivity in Iraq.  It’s a topical thriller that does not go as far over the top as 24, which I did not care for at all.

As I continue to catch up with my recent viewing, you can expect forthcoming mini-essays on the films of Humphrey Bogart and of Elia Kazan, as well as Terrence Malick.  Also, reviews of new films emerging from the so-called “mumblecore” movement of young American filmmakers, and from a variety of Asian cinema.  If you are an adventurous film-viewer, I hope to make it worth your while to keep coming back to Cinema Salon for new discoveries.