Winter films at the Clark

WIDESCREEN WONDERS

“Widescreen Wonders” is a free series of Saturday afternoon matinees celebrating the biggest and best of popular movies, while showcasing the Clark’s HD projection capacity.  All the films in the series boast Cinemascope or other extra-widescreen formats and numerous Academy Awards, including “Best Picture.”  Experience the real scope of imperial moviemaking in this festival of the big screen.

Saturday January 12 2:00pm:  The Bridge on the River Kwai.  (1957, 160 min.)  David Lean’s saga of British POWs in Burma during World War II features a classic performance by Alec Guinness, and the visual splendor to win 7 Oscars.

Saturday January 26 2:00pm:  Ben-Hur.  (1959, 217 min.)  William Wyler’s epic of the Roman Empire in Palestine stars Charlton Heston and a cast of thousands, in a jaw-dropping spectacle that garnered 11 Oscars.

Saturday February 9 2:00pm:  Lawrence of Arabia.  (1962, 222 min.)  David Lean returns with a sweeping tale of the Middle East during World War I, featuring Peter O’Toole and vast panoramas of desert, earning 7 Oscars.

Saturday February 23 2:00pm:  The Deer Hunter.  (1978, 182 min.)  Michael Cimino follows Robert DiNiro and Christopher Walken as they depart their working class town for the quagmire of Vietnam, leaving Meryl Streep behind but returning with 5 Oscars.

Saturday March 9 2:00pm:  Gandhi.  (1982, 188 min.)  Richard Attenborough directs Ben Kingsley as the spiritual leader, along with an all-star cast in a sprawling epic of India’s independence, which came away with 8 Oscars.

Saturday March 23 2:00pm:  The Last Emperor.  (1987, 163 min.)  Bernardo Bertolucci presents the opulent captivity of the infant emperor of China as he endures abdication and humiliation at the hands of the Communists, earning 9 Oscars.

Odd couples

Of several long-term writing projects, Cinema Salon has been getting short shrift from me lately.  It’s in need of refreshment and revival – could be my New Year’s resolution.  But in the meantime I want to catch up with several months of viewing, a miscellany which oddly sorts itself into pairs of films, at least for the purpose of brief comments.  (Click on Metacritic score for more detail on film, on "NFX" for Netflix availability on DVD or streaming.)

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At the head of the class is Monsieur Lazhar (2012, MC-83, NFX), a French-Canadian film edged by A Separation for the most recent best foreign film Oscar.  Philippe Falardeau somehow adapts a one-person play into an amazingly lived-in middle school classroom, presided over by an emergency substitute after the untoward death of the popular teacher.  The sub is a courtly but mysterious Algerian émigré to Montreal, played with dignity and depth by the stand-up performer Fellag.  The two young actors who play the boy and girl most affected by their teacher’s death lead a remarkably naturalistic classroom cast.  The film has a lot of points to make -- about education, grief, truth, responsibility – but does better in its silent moments of empathetic observation than its overly-verbal conclusion.

Throwing spitballs from the back of the class is Bad Teacher (2011, MC-47, NFX), which was not as bad as you or I might imagine it to be.  As a comedy of antisocial behavior, I liked Jake Kasdan’s better than most, and give Cameron Diaz more credit than I usually would, as an utterly miscast middle school teacher who has lost her sugar daddy and needs $10k for a boob job to attract another, trying to seduce fellow teacher Justin Timberlake while fending off the attentions of gym teacher Jason Segel, and remaining totally oblivious of the students in her charge.  Stephanie Zacharek, with her usual contrarian acuity, makes the absolute best case for the film here.  But it’s not as though I’m recommending it.

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I don’t seem able to admire the unrelated Anderson boys as much as I ought.  I’ve already dissed Wes and now I have hard words for Paul Thomas and The Master (2012, MC-86, NFX).  I can’t get on the wavelength of the one’s candy-colored surreality or the other’s grim grandiosity, dark and Wagnerian.  Nor do I relate to the latter’s penchant for scenes of one man humiliating another in reciprocal annihilation, odd couples gone hateful.  P.T. Anderson is a filmmaker of visual pyrotechnics in the service of puzzling characters and open-ended storytelling, adept at spectacle suggesting substance, but for me personally, there is ultimately a failure to connect.  The most stunning scene in the Master is a prolonged close-up face-off between Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix, as the psychological shaman/showman demonstrates the skills that drew a cult around him, by getting inside the head of the volatile drifter, twisted physically and mentally, who has wandered into his aura.  Powerful, powerful scene, as are many in the movie.  (I happened to see a very similar across-the-table scene soon after, between Claire Danes and Damian Lewis on the acclaimed Showtime series Homeland, but the crucial difference was – I realize this is comparing apples and oranges – we have come to understand and care about Carrie and Brody, while we never do about the Master and his on-again, off-again disciple.)  It’s possible that if I had seen the film in its intended 70mm, I would simply have been carried along by its visual splendor, but lacking any real insight into the characters, I found the film wearying, and the over-insistent music a real annoyance.  Nonetheless the feel for the early-50s period and setting is a wonder to behold, and the performances are riveting if opaque.

I re-watched There Will Be Blood (2007, MC-92, NFX) to prime myself for its successor, but found myself with a similar response, admiring the visual and historical sweep but fundamentally ignorant of the character’s motivations, which neither Daniel Day-Lewis’s bravura performance nor Paul Dano’s double dose of nothing helps.  I stand by my earlier review.

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New to me but definitely on my radar now is the Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki.  I first stumbled upon her most recent film, Where Do We Go Now? (2012, MC-60, NFX), a crowd-pleasing hit in her native country and on the international festival circuit.  The film is a fable set in an isolated village, where Christians and Muslim live in peace, or at least in normal neighborly friction, as long as the conflicts of the surrounding world do not impinge.  While the men are inherently rivalrous, the women are friends and conspire to keep their village free from violence.  There are many good things in the film, but the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach finally wears thin.  It starts with a sequence that looks like something from Shirin Neshat, of black-robed women mourning in stylized formation on their way to tend graves in the two halves of the village cemetery, but does not hesitate at slapstick, sentimentality, and sexual humor, with another sequence that looks straight out of a Bollywood film. 

Besides writing and directing, Ms. Labaki is an effective and arrestingly beautiful actress, so I was encouraged to take a look at her more critically-supported debut, Caramel  (2008, MC-70, NFX), which could be dismissed as Steel Magnolias-in-Beirut but won me over, with it stories about a variety of women who come together in a beauty shop to share joys and sorrows.  The local color more than makes up for the familiarity of the situations.  And since Nadine Labaki gives herself more screen time, it’s the greater pleasure to watch.

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So impressed by Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (see my review here), I caught up with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s previous film, Three Monkeys (2009, MC-73, NFX), which proved watchable in a different way.  Still the leisurely, painterly compositions of Turkish landscapes, but here in service of a pulpish plot involving intersecting triangles of characters, an odious hit & run politician, his driver who takes the fall for money, the wife who comes to depend on the politician while her husband is doing time, and the drop-out son who’s getting into trouble of his own.  The well-played wife becomes the center of the film, as she is threatened and abused by each of the men in turn, and the ominous hum of potential violence against women, emotional and physical, is the engine of this grim but engrossing film.

As it is of the ironically titled House of Pleasures (2011, MC-75, NFX), about a 19^th century Parisian brothel.  I watched it not, of course, for the prurient interest of naked female bodies, but for possible showing at the Clark to tie in with a Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition, since this is very much a world in which they were immersed.  Though set in the realm of erotic fantasy, this film is hard-edged in its depiction of social and economic realities.  The gilded slavery of the women, for whom escape is to be owned by only one man, is balanced by the limited gratifications of sisterhood.  There’s no telling when the domination by men will turn violent.  The film is as languorous as the sequestered lives of the prostitutes, with a fractured time sequence and odd juxtapositions of much later music, but ultimately effective, if a bit suffocating.

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Now we turn from the cash nexus of sex to the joys and sorrows of post-adolescent passion.  Goodbye First Love (2012, MC-80, NFX) is Mia Hanson-Løve’s follow-up to Father of My Children, as impressive a start to a young woman’s directorial career as Sarah Polley’s.   Mia has no doubt been abetted by her close association with Olivier Assayas, but is clearly a talent in her own right, and this story has a very personal touch and feel.  A 15-year-old girl, played with conviction by Lola Créton, is passionately and precociously in love with a boy a few years older, who leaves her behind to go off on a South American adventure.  While she longs for him even more in his absence, his attention wanders, and she is crushed.  We jump-cut to her several years later, hair cut short, as an architecture student who eventually moves in with her teacher.  The boy returns, and she faces a choice.  Key moments tend to be elided, while other scenes linger with sensuous and emotional intensity.  The story is not so much dramatized, but presented with a directness of personal testimony that speaks to a common, if not universal, feeling.  A bright new chapter in the great French tradition of libidinal romance.

Damsels in Distress (2012, MC-67, NFX) approaches college-age romance in an entirely different way, with arch comedy.  It was one thing for Whit Stillman to look at his own generation with a preppy raised eyebrow from Metropolitan to The Last Days of Disco, but to revive those attitudes in a contemporary setting, in a cast led by Greta Gerwig, indie It-girl of the moment, yields more cognitive dissonance than wry humor.  The film tries for wacky, but winds up mostly whack.  If you’re light enough in the loafers to be tickled by the idea of tap dancing as therapy for suicidal depression, then you might like it.

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Here are two more takes on contemporary romance among the twentysomethings, both of which I liked more than I would have guessed, though not enough to urgently recommend.  The directors of Little Miss Sunshine, which I did not care for at all, return with Ruby Sparks (2012, MC-67, NFX), which is made palatable by Zoe Kazan (Elia’s granddaughter), who wrote the script and plays the lead, accompanied by her real-life boyfriend, Paul Dano.  He’s a rather implausible wunderkind writer, blocked for a decade after early success, who at the advice of his shrink (Elliott Gould) starts to write about a dream girl, who comes into real existence in a way that first confounds and then tempts him, as he tries solipsistically to enslave her to his own desires and prescriptions.  We’re in Charlie Kaufman territory here, but without the grounding in concrete reality as springboard to wild imaginative conceit. The white-on-white La-La Land bungalow in which the writer lives, as well as the manual typewriter on which he composes his girlfriend, are too outlandish to generate any baseline conviction from which the fantasy can leap.  That said, Zoe is charming and attractive in an offbeat way, and Dano mugs for all he’s worth, while some cameos click (Annette Bening as the boy’s mother) and some fizzle (Steve Coogan as a frenemy writer).  It’s a piece of light entertainment that is not insulting to one’s intelligence.

Similarly, Sleepwalk with Me (2012, MC-71, NFX) follows the efforts of a nebbish to come to terms with a dreamgirl.  Mike Birbiglia adapts his stand-up routine, about his inability to commit to his longtime girlfriend, into a surprisingly effective film, ably assisted by a loveable Lauren Ambrose, with whom our sympathies lie as this schlub proceeds systematically to lose her, in a manner as self-damaging as his habit of sleepwalking into danger.  He says he doesn’t want to get married till he’s sure nothing better is going to happen in his life, so he forsakes the best thing that ever happened to him -- unless you count this film.  A modest and generally appealing amusement.

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At least since The Son’s Room, I have admired the Italian director and actor Nanni Moretti.  His latest film is We Have a Pope (2012, MC-64, NFX), which is a comedy about what happens inside the Vatican enclave as a new Pope is chosen, seamlessly meshing with documentary exteriors of an actual papal transition.  Unfortunately the tone does not mesh seamlessly, as a crisis develops when the Pope selected changes his mind and goes on the lam.  Michel Piccoli is quite moving as the old man who quails at being chosen by God (or political maneuvering) for the awesome responsibility of the care of a billion souls.  Moretti himself is less successful as the psychiatrist brought in to convince him to accept the role, who is sequestered with the cardinals and engages them in a slapstick volleyball tournament.  The film displays both humor and pathos, as well as pungent political commentary, but adds up to less than the sum of its disparate parts.

In Quiet Chaos (2009, MC-51, NFX), Moretti writes and stars but turns over direction to Antonello Grimaldi, and I found it much better than its mediocre Metacritic score.  You never really know where the film is going, right from the beginning, when the Moretti character and his brother save two women from drowning, but then he returns home and finds his wife has died suddenly.  Stunned by this turn of events, when he takes his 10-year-old daughter back to school and she is apprehensive, he promises to wait all day in the park just opposite the school.  He proceeds to do so, and continues to do so every day, coming to know the denizens of the park, and letting his business partners, in the throes of a corporate takeover, bring their respective concerns to the park (the big boss played in a surprising cameo by Roman Polanski).  It’s really an affecting journey through the stages of grief, even though the corporate plotting is somewhat opaque, but Moretti’s performance carries the film.

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In this heyday of 3-D computer animation, it’s nice to know hand-drawn 2-D animation still flourishes.  Here are a couple of recent examples that enchant even when they do not totally satisfy.  The fluid lines of Oscar nominee Chico & Rita (2012, MC-76, NFX) dance to the Cuban music that the film celebrates, with a sexiness that makes this no cartoon for kids.  The romance of the title characters is a tad formulaic, but the sense of ambiance, both in pre-Castro Havana and bebop jazz New York, carries the film.

Another film in which the backgrounds are more compelling than the foreground characters or story is The Secret World of Arrietty (2012, MC-80, NFX), an adaptation of the children’s novel The Borrowers by Studio Ghibli (overseen but not directed by Hayao Miyazaki), whose films I always prefer to watch in the original Japanese with subtitles rather than in English with well-known celebrity voices.  Arrietty is a brave little girl, very little, maybe three inches high, but an intrepid explorer in the realm of humans, from whom her family scavenges and adapts the basics of life.  To see her run through a garden or kitchen is to be transported to a magical yet familiar world, with a new perspective on the adventure of living in the visual world. 

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My final coupling of films is definitely odd, completely different crowd-pleasers with which I was somewhat less pleased than the crowd.  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012, MC-62, NFX) rounds up a lot of usual suspects from the magnificent ranks of mature British actors and actresses, and plops them into the colorful and chaotic world of an Indian city, but doesn’t give them much to do or take them any place new.  A random group of retirees are lured by low prices and lavish promises to a ramshackle hotel inherited by Dev Patel, the young man from Slumdog Millionaire.  They have a predictable variety of reactions when they see where they have actually landed, and director John Madden does these veterans no favors in working out their respective fates.  Bill Nighy comes through best, Judi Dench and Tom Wilkinson are reliably watchable, but Maggie Smith and some of the others are reduced to self-contradictory caricatures of their usual personae.  For a much better look at the bittersweet reality of Britons in retirement, see Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (2005, MC-67, NFX), starring Joan Plowright and Rupert Friend (more recently of Homeland).

There’s no gainsaying the energy of Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike (2012, MC-72, NFX) or the appeal of Channing Tatum as he takes off his clothes and contorts his hunky body into provocative poses, to the squealing delight of fantasy-hungry female fans, who stuff dollar bills into his leather jockstrap.  This gender turnabout is humorous and revealing, and also allows Matthew McConaughey to strut his still-buff stuff in winning self-mockery as the leader of the “Cock-Rocking Kings of Tampa.”  So far, so good, in an amusing if inconsequential way, but attempts at seriousness fail to convince or enlighten.  Tatum’s aspirations beyond the fake-sex-for-money game are rather hackneyed and the saving romance is perfunctory, but if you want to get rowdy and watch rippling muscles and thrusting pelvises, then this could be the movie for you.

Coming attractions

Here’s what to expect from Cinema Salon, both as website and film club:

Here online, I'll post in the next few days a composite review covering recent films such Monsieur Lazhar and The Master; then my near-complete retrospective of Paul Newman’s career; and finally, in time for the 8^th anniversary of this blog on New Year’s Day, a tour “Around the World in Eighty Films,” which will highlight my choices for the best of world cinema over the past decade.

At the Clark, I anticipate film club screenings most Fridays through the winter, January through March.  Many will coordinate with the official Clark film series running through those months, a series of Saturday matinees called “Widescreen Wonders,” six films in high-definition extra-wide formats, each of them a Best Picture Oscar-winner, cumulatively earning 47 Academy Awards.  So for example, when I am showing The Bridge on the River Kwai on Saturday, I’ll show two other David Lean films on Friday.  On alternate weeks, I will typically be showing double features highlighting foreign directors, recent and classic, such as the Dardennes brothers, Almodovar, Wong-Kar Wai, Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, and Max Ophuls.  I haven’t yet consulted either the Clark’s calendar or my own, but will update programs as the schedule develops.

At Images Cinema, I plan to be available for post-film discussion after the 3:00 pm screening of Lincoln on Sunday, December 30.  I think the film is exceptionally good, Daniel Day-Lewis sublime, and I’ve just finished reading Team of Rivals, the Doris Kearns Goodwin book on which the film is based, as well as re-watching John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln and other cinematic portraits, so I will definitely be primed to talk about the subject.  And I’m eager to see the digital projection upgrade at Images.

Lincoln

After almost eight years, I am finding it harder to keep this blog fresh and current, but I’ve just seen a new film that urges me to break silence and make a strong recommendation.  Even though the last Steven Spielberg-Tony Kushner collaboration (Munich) was a film I abominated, and though I tend to find Daniel Day-Lewis admirable but over-mannered, Lincoln (2012, MC-86) is not just my pick for the best film of the year so far, but the most convincing and moving portrayal ever of Lincoln, or indeed of any President.  Not to mention the most truthful depiction of Congressional debate, the liveliest reenactment of historical controversy, and a riveting entertainment to boot.  My highest praise is that it did not strike me as Spielbergian at all, until a few over-emphatic wobbles near the end.  Beyond Day-Lewis and his uncanny verbal and physical impersonation of old (semi-) Honest Abe, David Strathairn is excellent as William Seward, Tommy Lee Jones a delight as Thaddeus Stevens, and Sally Field a revelation as Mary Todd Lincoln.  As a trio of shady political operators buying votes for passage of the Thirteenth Amendment (freeing the slaves for real after the wartime expedient of the Emancipation Proclamation), James Spader, John Hawkes, and Tim Blake Nelson shine in small but significant roles.  As do a host of faces familiar from excellent tv series, Gale from Breaking Bad, Lane from Mad Men (as Grant!), Boyd from Justified, Arnold Rothstein from Boardwalk Empire, even Lena Dunham’s creepy boyfriend from Girls, among other notables.  While such familiarity might have been distracting, they each look and act the part in a way that simply makes it easier to keep such a crowded canvas coherent.  I confess that I am a sucker for the Civil War as a subject (and the antebellum era even more), but that only makes me more impressed with the quality and truthfulness of historical representation in this movie.  I would have sniffed out phoniness and withheld any suspension of disbelief.  As it was, I was enraptured, transported, convinced.

Sorting 2011

Each year I make an effort to see nearly every film that appears on Film Comment’s top fifty as determined by a poll of critics.  Given the vagaries of DVD release, it takes me more than half a year to close the book on the previous tally, and sort them into my own ranking, which I divide into categories based on my level of recommendation.  So here’s my best of the year before, with critics’ composite for comparison:

Exhortations (which I urge you to see):  I’m not far from the consensus in seeing The Tree of Life (#1) and A Separation (#4) as the best films of last year.  What draws together 1950s Texas and contemporary Tehran is an intense focus on families under stress, man, woman, and child.  Both hold up on re-viewing.

Recommendations (which I advise you to see):  I’ll need a second look to move Margaret (#20) up into that first tier, but it certainly leads off the rest of my top ten, which includes new work by esteemed directors – Kiarostami’s Certified Copy (#7), Scorsese’s Hugo (#9), and Winterbottom’s The Trip (#37)—as well as surprises from Korea and Romania – Poetry (#10) and Tuesday, After Christmas (#28).  In the tradition of quality cinema, two deliver – Of Gods and Men (#34) from France, and Jane Eyre (#49) given a new lease on life by Cary Fukunaga.

Appreciations (which are worth seeing):  I pretty much follow in line with critical opinion on A Dangerous Method (#5) Mysteries of Lisbon (#6) Meek’s Cutoff ((#8) Le Havre (#12), Le Quattro volte (#14) Shame (#21), Contagion (#33), Moneyball (#38) and Rise of the Planet of the Apes (#46).  Somewhat less so with The Descendents (#15), Take Shelter (#19), Drive (#22), The Artist (#27), and Martha Marcy May Marlene (#35), all of which had good points but did not win me over to the level of their ranking.  One I’d rank higher is Incendies (#41), and one I’d add is Beginners (NR), also the tv-movie Margin Call.

Equivocations (you’re on your own):  Uncle Boonmee (#2) and Melancholia (#3) represent tastes I do not share.  Midnight in Paris (#18) did not surmount my weariness with Woody Allen, and The Skin I Live In (#31) broke a skein of Almodovar films I’ve liked.  Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (#24) was too complicated for me, and Bridesmaids (#36) too stupid.  Weekend (#30) left me cold. I found both Film Socialisme (#11) and Aurora (#29) utterly unwatchable.  A few others on the list I missed by chance or on purpose.

Documendations (docs that rock!):  Film Comment does not ghettoize documentary features, so I am pleased to agree with their inclusion of Nostalgia for the Light (#16), Cave of Forgotten Dreams (#23), The Interrupters (#26), The Arbor (#39), and Tabloid (#45).  I might sort them differently, but recommend them all, and also Project Nim.

All these films are available by DVD or streaming from Netflix.  More info and reviews can be found at Metacritic.  And my own mini-reviews can be found by using the “Search” box at the top of the page.

Drawing a bead on 2012

Working my way back into currency, I will survey a number of recent films in cursory fashion, registering my opinion more than writing a real review.  I’ll simply enumerate my expectations and reactions, what I hoped for and what I got.  As always, I link to Metacritic, so you can sample a range of critical opinion and amplify detail on the film, and to Netflix, for dvd and streaming availability.

The film I was most eager to see, Take This Waltz (2012, MC-68, NFX), fell short of my expectations, which were sky-high considering that Sarah Polley’s first directorial effort, Away From Her, was my favorite feature of 2007; that the film stars Michelle Williams who may be my favorite actress of the moment; and that the title and several songs come from Leonard Cohen, yet another favorite of mine.  Sarah and Michelle deliver nicely, although not their very best, but I think the movie needed more Leonard Cohen, a little more head to go with the heart, a little more spirituality to go with the sex, a little more grounding of romance in social reality.  This romantic triangle is too vague and too on-the-nose at the same time, without achieving a fruitful ambiguity.  It’s so much a woman’s picture, at least in the Sirkian sense, that I may be somewhat disqualified to comment.  Still, I would see it again.

Though Richard Linklater is one of my favorite filmmakers, I wasn’t expecting all that much from his latest, Bernie (2012, MC-75, NFX), assuming it was one of the indie master’s more commercial efforts.  Turns out it’s a damn fine film, with a down home feel that makes it very personal.  In his genre-busting style, Linklater mixes true crime with East Texas small town comedy, just as he mixes actors with real townspeople in a Greek chorus of gossip.  Jack Black is a revelation as a funeral home assistant with a serious people-pleasing demeanor, good at corpse presentation, eulogies and hymns, and comforting widows.  He sings exceptionally well, both at church and in his community theater performance of The Music Man, and he balances flamboyance and smarm to good effect.  He’s the most liked man in town, until he falls in with the most unliked woman, a crotchety rich old widow played by Shirley McClaine (a long way – sigh - from Irma La Douce and my adolescent fixation).  She disappears, but it’s many months before suspicion falls on Bernie, and only because showboat sheriff Matthew McConaghey (in a role for which I forgive him his “sexiest man alive” performances) scents a big score.  This film manages to be both funny and thought-provoking without bustin’ a gut over it.

I approached Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2012, MC-82, NFX) in a dutiful frame of mind, knowing it would be long and slow, but that Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of the names to conjure with in world cinema.  Despite quibbles about pace and opacity, I’d appreciated his earlier films, Distant and Climates.  This film, however, really grew on me, so much so that I may show it at the Clark.  Nominally a police procedural, literally a search for a murdered body, the film plays as a strange nighttime odyssey by three cars twisting through the desolately beautiful Anatolian steppe, as we gradually come to know the men in the cars -- suspects, police chief, prosecutor, doctor, etc.  On one level, the film is a beautiful cinematographic essay on light at night, either from the moon or headlights or lantern-flame.  But it is also a series of portraits of men under stress, and how they react to a brief vision of feminine loveliness.  The film’s title alludes to Sergio Leone, and Ceylan works that same alteration between widescreen landscapes and faces in extreme close-up.  At the same time, he takes inspiration from Chekhov in the careful, understated unfolding of the drama.  This film turns into quite a thrilling un-thriller.

My expectations for Moonrise Kingdom (2012, MC-82, NFX) were mixed.  I’ve never been a particular fan of Wes Anderson, but so many people were raving about his latest that I was willing to be surprised.  The film is certainly visually accomplished, funny in places, with its winsome heart more or less in the right place, but as usual I found it overdetermined and quirky for the sake of quirk, with caricatures rather than characters, despite actors like Ed Norton, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, and more.  The child actors, a boy who runs away from camp and a girl who runs away from home, on a New England island in the 60s, are endearing enough, and competent enough in delivering lines that no child has ever uttered.  But I was not won over.  I remain with those who find Fantastic Mr. Fox the Wes Anderson film for people who don’t like Wes Anderson films, where his cartoon characters are actually cartoons, and realer than the actors he cuts into cardboard with his overwrought style.

As a retro exercise in style, evoking the bleakness of postwar Britain, Terence Davies’ Deep Blue Sea (2012, MC-82, NFX) is effective.  As an involving drama, this adaptation of a Terence Rattigan play lacks staying power.  The always-watchable Rachel Weisz plays a woman who bursts out of a comfortable but deadening marriage to a judge and shacks up with a dashing but unreliable RAF survivor of the Battle of Britain.  It seems like a bad choice, given that the film starts with her suicide attempt, and nothing convinces me that a woman as intelligent as Ms. Weisz would have made it, and kept on making it, no matter how hot her flyboy lover was.  The two men fill their roles adequately, but this is entirely the woman’s picture, mostly alone in a room.  So the story as well as the visuals seem stuck in amber.  I suppose the message is how strong even muted and suppressed passion can be.  The upper lip is stiff to keep from quivering.  But non-Brits may find the drama less than riveting or convincing.  I’m not immune to melodrama, in the literal music-driven sense of a Douglas Sirk film, but this one did not sweep me away, left me on the outside of the woman’s dilemma.

Frankly I steer clear of most Israeli films, not wishing to probe my ambivalences about the Jewish state, but a friend assured me that Footnote (2012, MC-82, NFX) was not a political piece, but an academic comedy.  Sorry, it still wore out its welcome for me.  I found the jaunty music and satiric interpositions off-putting rather than funny.  The rivalry between father and son Talmudic scholars does touch on some sensitive spots of academic and family life, and some scenes build up to powerful realizations, but I felt flogged along through the film, rather than carried along by it.  Though one footnote can remain a scholar’s claim to fame, this one I’m inclined to skip over.

I had two reasons for watching Return (2012, MC-63, NFX).  The director is Liza Johnson, who has taught at Williams, and the star is Linda Cardellini, who was forever endeared to me by Freaks and Geeks.  The film is certainly a professional job for an independently produced effort, with a nice sense of locale, and Ms. Cardellini retains her magnetism, as an army reservist returning from deployment and falling into a near-catatonic state, despite a relatively easy tour of duty in the warzone.  Michael Shannon tones it down as the husband who doesn’t understand what’s happening to her, and John Slattery (of Mad Men) perks up the proceedings as the fellow alcoholic vet who does.  The film achieves a subdued honesty, without grabbing for any great revelation.

Once again, two of the recent films that most exceeded my expectations were documentaries.  Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present (2012, MC-75, NFX) certainly changed my mind about the artist in question, whom I would have been inclined to write off as a masochistic exhibitionist.  Certainly many of her earlier performance pieces involved self-harm, slamming and cutting her naked body, but to cap a recent retrospective at MoMA in which of troupe of performers reenacted some of the less violent of them, the artist took it upon herself to be present for the entire duration of the exhibition, sitting alone on a plain wooden chair in the vast cube of the new MoMA atrium, and inviting visitors to take turns sitting in the chair opposite her.  A simple concept -- difficult, even punishing, in execution -- that unfolded into surprising impact and meaning.  Shamanistic and sacrificial, an exercise in stillness and silence, the performance showed the power of the attentive gaze of another person to unleash emotional revelation.  The camera completes the process by allowing us to gaze into those faces as well, to experience the expressive but unexpressed power of human connection.  Really, you have to see it to believe it.

I’ve been impressed with Kevin MacDonald’s documentaries going back to One Day in September and Touching the Void, but Marley (2012, MC-82, NFX) involved me in its subject even more than I expected.  Though not a concert film, with no song performed all the way through, this biography of Bob Marley revivified my interest in his music, and lately I’ve been listening to little else.  I’d watched other films about Marley, the Wailers, and reggae music, so I was surprised to find the story told in a much fuller and richer context.  This film made Marley seem even more admirable, and his appeal more comprehensible, somehow messianic without immodesty, a global figure of spiritual light, despite the quirky aspects of Rastafarianism.  Through the testimony of himself and others, an impression of his power emerges, and what was lost by his early death from cancer.  I had been unaware of his British father, and came to understand a sort of mixed breed wisdom and appeal, which I also see in Barack Obama, bridging personal divides as well as social.

TV worth watching

Though I gave up DirecTV satellite service many months ago, I have been keeping up with some favorite shows through various providers, watching some with my daughter who still has cable with premium channels, some streaming on Netflix and some on Hulu.  It’s a truism that a sizable number of the best films being made today are television series, and they continue to make up a large portion of my viewing time and pleasure.  Looking back over the past several months, here are the standouts.

AMC continues to set the pace, with the fifth season of Mad Men (MC-88, NFX) living up to expectation, and the first half of the fifth and final season of Breaking Bad (MC-99, NFX) exceeding even high expectations.  By now you know whether you like to get into a retro groove with Mad Men, whether you buy into its premise of Sixties style, but the fifth season delivers its typical entertainment, with some highs and lows, but generally very good.  Breaking Bad, however, just keeps getting better and better, and it will be difficult to wait a year for its conclusion, which cannot help but be devastating.  Vince Gilligan has over the years delivered brilliantly on his premise of “turning Mr. Chips into Scarface,” while delivering single episodes that are imaginatively brilliant and emotionally powerful.  You ought to watch, and must watch from the beginning, not in random episodes.

HBO has definitely ceded the crown for best tv miniseries overall, but still has Game of Thrones (MC-88, NFX) on a pedestal in its second season.  Who knew sword and sorcery stuff could be so telling, faux-medieval dynastic struggle so compelling?  Balancing multiple storylines and a huge cast of characters with amplitude and intelligibility, against the mammoth backdrop of George R. R. Martin’s immense series of novels, this super soap opera delivers empathy and horror, familiarity and shock,  through topnotch acting and production values.  Again, start at the beginning and immerse yourself in a world at first strange and alien, but ultimately revealing of hidden depths.

For me, Boardwalk Empire reveals no hidden depths, and I will watch the beginning of its new season on sufferance, willing to be drawn in by Steve Buscemi and Kelly MacDonald, but likely to tune out.  As I did to The Newsroom, which had a pretty good cast and some moments that conveyed the excitement of the news business, but in which the balance of good and bad in Aaron Sorkin tipped decisively toward the bad in his depiction of women.  (Speaking of bailing out on shows that I once enjoyed, I gave up on The Big C in the middle of its third season; I still like Laura Linney, but the show lurched toward the preposterous once she went into remission.) 

I did watch two new HBO half-hour comedies through their first seasons.  I remain ambivalent about Girls (MC-87, NFX), liking Lena Dunham both as actress and defining sensibility, but finding the other three girls less than captivating and the whole Sex and the City update a little bit squirm-inducing.  I liked Veep (MC-72, NFX) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the title role, but prefer to go back to the source, Armando Ianucci’s original British series, The Thick of It (see below).

Sure to put HBO back in my good graces, the third season of David Simon’s Treme (MC-87, NFX) starts this month, though it is liable to be overshadowed by Showtime’s second season of Homeland (MC-91, NFX), which comes back with a Presidential endorsement as Obama’s favorite show.  If you have the nerves for it, you should catch up with the first season, now out on DVD, and marvel at the performances of Claire Danes as a combustible CIA agent, and Damien Lewis as an American soldier turned Islamic infiltrator.

The trail of Damien Lewis led me to the 2002 BBC adaptation of The Forsyte Saga (NFX), in which he continues to keep his emotions enigmatic and under wraps as Soames Forsyte, the man of property who wants to control all he surveys, starting with his trophy wife, played by Gina McKee.  Rupert Graves is the nicer Forsyte cousin, Corin Redgrave is his father, and Ioan Gruffudd is the dashing young architect with designs on Soames’ property.  A second season carries the saga into the next generation, but remains integral to the central story.  Well done, old chap, I must say.

Always a sucker for British heritage productions, I found it eminently worthwhile to re-watch on a good-looking dvd the ne plus ultra of Jane Austen adaptations, the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice (IMDB, NFX) with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth heading an impeccable cast.  This I think is the series that raised Masterpiece Theater to more film-like production values, and it’s really worthwhile to see it on a newer, bigger tv to appreciate the detailed depth of field.  It’s a lot more than theater on video, and truer to the book and the period than any other adaptation, with the brightest of Elizabeths and the hunkiest of Darcys pitting their pride and their prejudice against each other.

I knew just enough about the English Civil War to follow, but not enough to quibble with The Devil’s Whore (released on these primmer shores as The Devil’s Mistress, 2008, NFX), a bodice-ripper for sure but one with a rare respect for history, and really an amazing cast, with Dominic West (McNulty of The Wire) as Cromwell and Peter Capaldi (Malcolm Tucker of The Thick of It) as King Charles I, plus Michael Fassbender as a Leveller leader and Andrea Riseborough as his fictional wife, calumniated in the title.  John Simms stands out as a mercenary with a heart of gold, who turns against the men he fought with when they usurp power.

Another British tv series that belatedly became a favorite is Doc Martin (2004-to date, NFX), in which Martin Clunes plays a high-powered London surgeon who develops a phobia about blood and winds up as a GP in a beautiful seaside village in Cornwall, a brilliant and committed doctor with no people skills at all.  With hilarious consistency, he fails to notice what people are saying or feeling, while monitoring their symptoms.  There’s a comic romance, all sorts of familial complications, and a range of townsfolk to keep the proceedings sprightly through 37 episodes so far. 

Netflix temporarily lost streaming rights to Doc Martin while we were right in the middle of watching, so we had to sign up for Hulu to continue, and that turned out to be worth the eight bucks a month.  First off, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert play better on the tv than on the computer.  Then we were able catch up with the fourth season of Parks and Recreation, still one of the sweetest and sharpest of sitcoms, but moreover, Hulu has an exclusive on Armando Iannucci’s unexpurgated foul-mouthed political classic, The Thick of It (2005 to date, MC-90, Hulu).  This British political series takes cursing way beyond Shakespeare, primarily in the fearsome communications director played by Peter Capaldi.  But really the whole cast is great in this antithesis of The West Wing, where the political players talk just as fast, but instead of making coherent policy points, they break new ground in the art of insult and intimidation, much of it so breathtaking and Scots-inflected that you will need to back up and listen to it again.  Once I went through the first three seasons, I went back and re-watched the movie spin-off, In the Loop (2009, NFX), and liked it much more, now that the characters are so familiar.  A fourth season is now underway, exclusively on Hulu though linkable through IMDB, with our old Labor friends out, and the new coalition in power.

Hulu also scores point for its original programming with Up to Speed (2012, IMDB), an offbeat travel program centered around quirky tour guide Speed Levitch.  It happens to be co-produced by Richard Linklater and Alex Lipschultz, my daughter’s boyfriend, so give it a try if you have the chance (I’d start with the last episode of the first six.)  Hulu’s other great resource is movies from The Criterion Collection, including many titles not on DVD.

Last batch of 2011

I have obviously fallen way behind with my film commentary, but not with my viewing.  I need to resume to-the-moment responses, but am weighed down by a huge backlog to weigh in on.  Having finally worked my way through all but a few of the top fifty films in Film Comment’s critics poll, I will soon offer a summary of my own final rankings for 2011.  For now, a few words on a number of them.  To make up for limited detail, I link as usual to Metacritic’s compilation of reviews, and to Netflix listing for DVD or streaming availability, as well as giving the Film Comment ranking.

On the shelf for years, disappearing from theaters in a minute, late to video, Margaret (2011, MC-61, FC#20, NFX) proved well worth the wait, and well worth the two and a half hour running (or slo-mo walking) time.  In fact, I may write at greater length once I’ve seen the three hour director’s cut.  I was eager to catch up with Kenneth Lonergan’s follow-up to You Can Count on Me, one of my favorite films of this millennium, and I was not disappointed.  Anna Paquin is excellent as a Manhattan prep school girl who witnesses - and is deeply involved in – a fatal pedestrian encounter with a bus.  The likes of Alison Janney, Matt Damon, Matthew Broderick, and Mark Ruffalo make their brief appearances count.  Despite widespread dismissal, I would put this film just below A Separation among my favorites of the past year, sharing an unwillingness to settle into an opinion of a character and assume a firm handle on who’s right and who’s wrong.  The film is, as a character says, “a moral gymnasium,” and the exercise is a good workout.

I have not shared most of the cognoscenti’s enthusiasm for recent Romanian films, and could not watch two that appear on the Film Comment list (#13 Autobiography of Nicolae Ceasusescu unavailable, and #29 Aurora unwatchable), but one I found pretty terrific (in both senses of the word) was Radu Muntean’s Tuesday, After Christmas (2011, MC-81, FC#28, NFX), a romantic triangle remarkable both for its ordinariness and for its scalding honesty.  The actors who play a married couple are really married, and clearly know all about how couples fight.  The man has fallen for their young daughter’s orthodontist, and the emotional fallout is portrayed in extended scenes that offer a slow drip of reality and truth.  Sometimes amusing, sometimes lacerating, this is another film that doesn’t take sides for or against its characters, but unfolds their choices with sympathy and satire.

Aki Kaurismäki’s  Le Havre (2011, MC-82, FC#12, NFX) is a pleasant pastel fable of human solidarity with deadpan wit and political kick.  The dour but playful Finnish director travels to Normandy and pays homage to classic French film, most particularly Children of Paradise.  The female lead, though played by Kaurismäki’s favorite Finnish actress Kati Outinen, is called Arletty.  For a great inside joke, the villain of the piece -- the one member of the harbor’s working class community who does not silently conspire to protect a young African boy escaping a round-up of illegal immigrants and trying to reach his mother in London – is played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, Antoine Doinel grown up to be a malevolent snitch fifty years after The 400 Blows.  If this tickles you, -- or the Buster Keatonish impassivity of male lead André Wilms, or the terrific canine actor -- you will get a kick out of this film.  Otherwise, it’s strangeness may put you off.  There is a Bressonian severity to the way it is shot, but also a goofy once-upon-a-time quality to its old-fashioned color design.

In Shame (2011, MC-72, FC#21, NFX), Michael Fassbender -- now appearing on screen as everything from Mr. Rochester to Carl Jung, not to mention one of the X-Men -- re-teams with the director who first brought him to my attention, Steve McQueen (in Hunger), and delivers another impressive performance.  He plays a sex-addicted Manhattan yuppie, with an equally damaged sister, played by Carey Mulligan.  She’s a would-be chanteuse and her slo-mo rendition of “New York, New York” in intense prolonged close-up is one of the highlights of this stylish film.  Another is long, long tracking shots along nighttime city streets.  But everything comes down to Fassbender’s character, and he is ferocious and unsparing in his self-hate, naked in more ways than one.  Not for the weak of heart or stomach, and by no means a perfect film, Shame has an undeniable power.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011, MC-85, FC#24. NFX) I found well-made but incomprehensible.  I also wondered at the contemporary relevance of this late adaptation of John Le Carré.  It’s so difficult to follow the plots and counterplots that I just gave up on getting it, despite old familiarity with the book and the Alec Guinness tv series.  Nonetheless, Gary Oldman is excellent as Smiley in this remake by Tomas Alfredson, and the rest of the cast is made up of familiar and welcome faces such as Colin Firth and Ciaran Hinds.  The craftsmanship makes this film haunting, if not quite intelligible.  It would take another viewing to make sense of it, but I do not feel moved to give it a second chance.

I have latterly become a fan of Almodóvar but his latest, The Skin I Live In (2011, MC-70, FC#31, NFX), has already evaporated from my mind.  He’s an extremely accomplished filmmaker, can do whatever he wants, but I wonder why he wanted to do this densely-layered genre exercise, with Hitchcockian suspense, mad scientist horror, romantic melodrama, and the kitchen sink.  It sure looks good, as do leads Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya, but the mystery of the doctor and his patient-prisoner is not one that drew me in.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, MC-68, NFX) would have been empty and showy without Tilda Swinton, who is always worth watching, but the film squanders any chance it had to be illuminating about the growing up of a “bad seed” who goes on to a Columbine-like massacre.  Tilda rings a symphony of changes on the mother’s guilt and grief, and the three actors who play the sociopathic boy at different ages look spookily similar, but Lynne Ramsey’s arty, convoluted direction does not redeem the horror of this suburban monster story.

If  I list the foregoing films in declining order of my appraisal, here’s an unnoticed sleeper that I would add somewhere in the middle:  The Music Never Stopped (2011, MC-60, NFX) is a fictionalization of an Oliver Sacks case study about a brain-damaged patient who regains cognitive and affective function though connection to music.  Reliable character actor J.K. Simmons plays the father who reaches out to his estranged and amnesiac son by adopting the music the young man loved before a brain tumor erased his memory.  Lou Taylor Pucci is the Deadhead son, also enamored of Dylan and the whole pantheon of late-Sixties rock.  Julia Ormond is the music therapist (and Sacks-surrogate) who finds the key to reclaim their connection.  Jim Kohlberg’s sincere if not artful film worked for me largely because the music touched off similar sorts of timewarp memories, and the father-son relationship resonated as well.

Also on a more favorable note, I mention two documentaries that I found exceptional.  The Interrupters  (2011, MC-86, FC#26, NFX) is the latest from Steve James, best known for Hoop Dreams and here returning to similar neighborhoods of Chicago to follow several of the title characters, street-level interveners trying to contain the epidemic of urban violence.  If you love The Wire (and if you don’t, what’s wrong with you?), then you will be swept up in the stories of these sharply delineated individuals, who have gone from gangbanging to frontline conflict resolution.  The Loving Story (2011, MC-81, no NFX yet but on HBO) offers the human side of the Supreme Court’s Loving vs. Virginia decision overturning laws against miscegenation.  Richard Loving looks the part of a total redneck, but grew up in a mixed rural community not infected with racism.  Mildred Loving is a tall, lovely, and charming mix of black and Native American.  Though no sort of activists, there could have been no better couple to overturn a monstrous injustice.  It’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance, and applaud their vindication.

What with the election year and all, I’ve been watching a lot of political movies.  Somehow J. Edgar (2011, MC-59, FC#48, NFX) made it on to the Film Comment list, I suppose because Clint Eastwood is now taken to be a grand old man of cinema, though maybe not so much after his bizarre performance at the GOP convention.  It’s not a badly made period film, and Leonardo di Caprio convinces as Hoover, as he he did with Hughes in The Aviator.  But the film’s portrayal is more confused than multi-layered, as is the closeted cross-dressing character; you have to bring your own memories of the malevolent long-time FBI chief to appreciate the significance of the proceedings. 

On my side of the fence, I expected more from George Clooney in The Ides of March (2011, MC-67, NFX), both more nuanced direction and more screentime as an actor.  He’s a Presidential candidate, and Ryan Gosling is his devoted young aide.  With Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti as duelling campaign managers, Marisa Tomei as a NYT reporter, and other welcome faces filling out a competent cast, this movie would have been more successful if it were not so “shocked, shocked” at political and personal mendacity, and did not feel the need to descend to melodrama.  They talk about tv series “jumping the shark,” and for me this film went from engrossing to preposterous in one shark-jumping scene.  Not worthless, but a missed opportunity.

Meryl Streep’s Oscar-winning turn as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011, MC-54, NFX) is indeed enough of a reason to watch the film, but director Phyllida Lloyd does not have enough of a point of view to make the story compelling.  Again the viewer has to provide his or her own viewpoint to the subject.  I certainly had my own, and appreciated a review of the relevant facts, developed a sense of the character’s history but not her significance, despite the signposts of her rule.  Is she feminist heroine or political disaster?  Maybe both, but this film doesn’t sort it out.  Nonetheless, it’s an amazing impersonation by the ever-amazing Meryl.  I first saw her doing Shakespeare in the Park in the mid-70s, and she’s never let me down since.

Speaking of Shakespeare, Ralph Fiennes directs and stars in Coriolanus (2011, MC-79, NFX) as modern-dress political parable, about the conflict between aristocratic martial honor and democratic values.  Violent in execution and emotion (borrowing the DP from The Hurt Locker, shooting in Serbia), the film has plenty of power, but limited relevance.  Vanessa Redgrave is his mother and Jessica Chastain his wife, Brian Cox his senatorial advisor, so this Coriolanus has plenty of worthy support, but will never be a successful politician, too rigid, too angry to be consul.  This film of this play is a bludgeon, a military thriller, but effective within its limits.

That leaves as my favorite recent political film, the HBO movie Game Change (2012, MC-75, NFX), in which Juliane Moore gives a performance as Sarah Palin that rivals Meryl as Maggie, offering understanding without whitewash or evisceration.  Based on the bestselling chronicle of the 2008 campaign, this Jay Roach film follows Recount in turning recent politics into intelligent entertainment.  Ed Harris makes for a sympathetic and plausible John McCain and Woody Harrelson stands out as campaign manager Steve Schmidt.  As with everything else in our partisan environment, reaction to this film seems to split along political lines, so I tend to find this film as even-handed and truthful as the ludicrous Grizzly Mom deserves.  Opinions will no doubt vary. 

Going back to some old favorites, I confirmed The Candidate (1972, NFX) as the best political film I’ve ever seen, provocative, funny, and truthful.  Michael Ritchie’s film stars Robert Redford as a California governor’s radical son, who is recruited and co-opted to run for U.S. Senator.  Its jaundiced view of the Hollywoodization of politics not only holds up, but seems remarkably prescient.  Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (1998, MC-75, NFX) retains interest and amusement, but eventually wears out its welcome.  And the Watergate comedy Dick (1999, MC-65, NFX) remains broadly funny, but its greater distinction is the early pairing of Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, the two outstanding movie actresses of their generation.