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.