Writers' revenge -- tops in TV

In this survey I’ll be commenting on the recent Emmy nominees for Outstanding Drama Series, work through some other quality television, and wind up with a strong recommendation for one series not nominated but certainly as good as any that were. 

Hollywood has a fabled history of scorn for the screenwriter, and his role in filmmaking.  (Forgive the pronoun, but gender disparity requires it.)  Not just the stories of writers like Faulkner and Fitzgerald being chewed up and spit out by the studio system, but look at the corpses of screenwriters that litter the landscape from Sunset Boulevard to The Player.  No more – that worm has turned.

The thematic thread running through my comments -- the rise to cultural prominence of the limited tv series, as a medium dominated by writers as showrunners – is derived partially from two books I’ve read recently: The Revolution Was Televised by Alan Sepinwall, and Difficult Men by Brett Martin, both of which cover the ground from The Sopranos to Breaking Bad.  Sepinwall is more reporter and critic, more comprehensive, while Martin is more writer himself, more impressionistic and given to storytelling.  Both are as readable as the series they discuss are watchable.  

I don’t object to Downton Abbey (MC-83, NFX) as a cultural phenomenon, but I don’t believe it’s a very good show, just posh Anglophilic soap opera.  I’m not very posh myself, but with an English mother I am as Anglophile as the next man, and I appreciate the appeal of soap opera as the engine that drives all the series I’m about to discuss -- coming to know characters through time, to see the changes they go through, and the changes they ring on a basic personality we know so well.  Nonetheless, this program illustrates my point -- Julian Fellowes was the screenwriter for Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, but now he runs the whole show and gets to call on all that BBC talent in heritage productions.  He’s skilled but opportunistic, without much of a coherent worldview beyond a hazy nostalgia for aristocratic living, and the series reflects that, however many people add their own skills to the production.

The BBC/PBS series I much prefer is Call the Midwife (MC-80, NFX), which derives an authentic authorial voice from the memoir on which it’s based (narration read by Vanessa Redgrave).  It’s about a group of nurses and nuns operating a childbirth clinic and outpatient services in the East End of London in the Fifties, sort of the flipside to Mike Leigh’s great film Vera Drake.  The show has an appealing cast of diverse women, and grapples with significant social and personal issues episode by episode.  It’s funny and moving by turns, and flavors its sentimentality with grit, never sacrificing believability.  The same cannot be said of another British import about a group of women at work in the same period, The Bletchley Circle (MC-73, NFX) – these women worked in codebreaking during WWII, but are now thwarted housewives and the like.  They band together to catch a serial killer of other women, and over three hour-long episodes, drag out every woman-in-jeopardy trope available, hang all plausibility.

The better recent evocation of the Downton Abbey era and setting was HBO’s adaptation of the Ford Madox Ford novel, Parade’s End (MC-73, NFX), which makes little concession to viewers’ desires or understanding, but does stand as a literary monument to the passing of a certain aristocratic style in the crucible of WWI.  Benedict Cumberbatch is an upper class civil servant who goes to the front, while his wife Rebecca Hall gallivants around, and he pines for the sweet suffragette Adelaide Clemens (a perfect cross between Michelle Williams and Carey Mulligan).  The whole seems authentic even when it remains unintelligible.  In some ways this is to Downton what The Wire was to Law & Order -- it’s work to watch.  This one lacks the ultimate payoff for sticking with it, but still, the acting and the production design make it worth looking at for its duration.

To return to the Emmy nominees, I have to say that Homeland (MC-96, NFX) is out of consideration for me, having sacrificed all believability in the course of its second season, revealing its DNA from 24 and leading me to take a rather violent turn against the show.  I still think Claire Danes and Damien Lewis are terrific, and even Mandy Patinkin, but if the writers don’t care about the integrity of their characters, why should I?  They’re just puppets being moved around a storyboard to provide dramatic beats.  I really don’t care what happens next, and that’s quite a fall for a show that riveted my attention for a season and a half.

The Netflix-produced House of Cards (MC-76, NFX) almost reached the same point, when a venal, power-greedy politician turned to hands-on murder, but somehow I weathered that blow to credibility and wound up impressed with the series overall.  If you thought Congress’s approval rating could go no lower than its current 9% or whatever, wait till you meet these denizens of the Beltway.  No heroes here, but at least the villains have multiple layers.  Kevin Spacey is denied his rightful spot in the victorious administration, so he uses his position in Congress to manipulate matters behind the scenes.  As his wife, the ever-amazing Robin Wright is just as hungry for power as the head of an environmental NGO.  It takes two great actors to give this power couple a complexity beyond mendacity.  Betokening a shift in primacy both from film to television, and from networks to new content providers -- in this case Netflix --Beau Willimon’s adaptation of a British series enlisted David Fincher to direct the first episodes.  The production was impeccable, and the instantaneous release of all 13 episodes completed the evolution of tv series that can be read in the manner of a novel.  I’d definitely watch a second season, but now we turn to three serious contenders for the title of best current series.

Though the showrunners (David Benioff and D.B. Weiss) are hardly household names, HBO’s Game of Thrones (MC-90, NFX) does celebrate the primacy of writers in its devotion to the George R. R. Martin novels on which it’s based, and they do an excellent job of balancing multiple storylines from his immense series of books.  Don’t let an aversion to sword & sorcery, dungeons & dragons, and other medieval fantasies steer you away from this show, if you are at all susceptible to the lure of soap opera, or even to opera without the soap.  Whether it’s a carefully nurtured attachment to characters, or grand and lurid spectacle, you will find here a bounty on which to feast your eyes.  You may never sort out the Lannisters and Starks, Tyrells and Targaryens, but you’ll come to recognize a colorful and absorbing swirl of characters vying for the Iron Throne.  Whether in Washington or Westeros, the lust for power never gets old, nor the power of lust.  But I have to say, this must be one of the worst series to drop into at random.  Commit to it, or pass it by.  Some episodes are better than others, but the whole is overpowering.

Mad Men (MC-87, NFX) has even greater variation between episodes that make me say “Wow!” and episodes that make me say “Huh?”   But on balance I am determined to keep watching Matthew Weiner unfold his vision of the Sixties, from the perspective of Madison Avenue and its denizens.  Again with the characters – Don, Peggy, Roger, Joan, Pete, Sally, et al. – you just want to know what they will do next.  Again with the stylish design, and evocation of another period and place.  The setting in an era I lived through, with reference points that I shared, adds to the appeal.  Matt Weiner and his Don Draper are archetypal “difficult men,” in direct descent from David Chase and his Tony Soprano -- all men impossible to deal with, but necessary to pay attention to.

The same applies to Walter White in Breaking Bad (MC-99, NFX), though apparently not to his creator, Vince Gilligan, reputed to run the happiest writers room in Hollywood.  I will have more to say after the series-concluding episodes, which begin to air August 11 on AMC.  If that date is not already marked on your calendar, you ought to go back and catch up with the 54 prior episodes, now streaming on Netflix.  I’m working my way through all of them a second time to prepare for the story’s climax, of the meek chemistry teacher turned power-mad drug overlord – Mr. Chips to Scarface, in the off-cited pitch phrase -- and finding it a surprisingly rewarding experience to watch with foreknowledge of how everything will unfold.  That really enhances one’s appreciation for what Vince and his writers bring to the table, in terms of both imagination and a deep collective understanding of the characters and their histories.  There’s potent acting across the board and a great setting in Albuquerque, rendered with thrilling visual effects, along with phenomenal, fearless, and funny storytelling.  Breaking Bad is better than good – it’s superbad.

On the topic of new platforms for original programming, the Sundance Channel aired a couple of well-regarded series this year.  In another interesting move from film to television, Jane Campion directed Top of the Lake (MC-86, NFX), a police procedural with a fantastically picturesque setting in New Zealand.  Elizabeth Moss plays the lead detective, in an interesting departure from Mad Men’s Peggy.  Peter Mullan is thrillingly intense as the patriarch of a criminal clan.  It’s all very moody and atmospheric, but didn’t repay me enough for seven hours of investigating yet more violence against young women.  I just don’t need to see any more progeny of Twin Peaks.

Rectify (MC-81, NFX), however, struck me as something quite different.  Ray McKinnon’s series, set to come back for a second season, follows a man who returns from the dead -- or at least from 19 years on death row, exonerated by DNA testing for the murder of his high school sweetheart -- and tries to fit back into his family and his small hometown in Georgia, where his guilt is still generally accepted.  Returned to a life where everything is disorienting, circumstances familiar but utterly transformed, the central character is played with stunned, unfiltered receptivity by Aden Young.  Very slow-paced but meaningfully so, with great visual acuity, and a profound appreciation of the protagonist’s viewpoint, back in a world he never expected to see again, back to his teenage self in a weird sort of time travel, transformed by two decades of reading in solitary confinement.  The show is well-populated with convincing actors, but two stand out, Abigail Spencer as the steadfast sister, and Adelaide Clemens (again) as a very sympathetic sister-in-law.   If you’ve got the patience for these six episodes, it will be repaid.

In comedy categories, Arrested Development on Netflix (MC-71, NFX) and Veep on HBO (MC-75, NFX) got some Emmy recognition, but I want to point your attention in a different direction.  I looked forward to the revival of Arrested Development for a fourth season after a decade’s delay, since I had belatedly become a fan of the first three, but I watched several episodes without getting involved at all.  Veep I like okay, but not nearly as much as the British series on which it’s based.  So I point to yet another platform for viewing, Hulu-Plus, which has exclusive US rights to The Thick of It (MC-90, Hulu).  The show has an hilarious ensemble of political types, in a British cabinet office, but becomes transcendent in the foul-mouthed director of communications played by Peter Capaldi, who takes invective and insult to levels not heard since Shakespeare.  Hulu also had an exclusive on the latest season of The Peep Show (NFX, Hulu), which certainly came up to the level of the previous seasons, which are available on Netflix.  I urge you to give it a try – you’ll quickly find it either quite annoying or just about the funniest show you’ve ever seen.

And now I kick my recommendation engine into overdrive, and bend your ear about the best show you might never have heard of.  Justified (MC-90, NFX) garnered no Emmy nominations for the FX channel, but I would rank it right at the top of the heap, alongside Breaking Bad.  Indeed, I was motivated to give BrBa another run-through because I found the experience of re-watching the first three seasons of Justified so compelling, as it has remained through the fourth.  The whole is very much of a piece, the product of a singular voice and vision, which are owed to the original source material in Elmore Leonard and to the “What would Elmore do?” showrunning of Graham Yost.  Leonard has had his books turned into any number of crime films or westerns, but this show is a perfect summation of his long career -- humorously demotic and tersely poetic, an elevation of low-lifes into figures worthy of classical comedy or tragedy.  Leading an attractive cast consistently superb in character development and timing of delivery, Timothy Olyphant plays Raylan Givens, a U.S. Marshal exiled back to his home in Harlan County for being quick and deadly on the trigger, though always with some justification.  Walton Goggins is transfixing as his nemesis and doppelganger; they came up through the coal mines together, both scions of Harlan crime families.  The whole series revolves around issues of clan and brotherhood, and Oedipal conflicts between fathers and sons.  (Or in the especially memorable second season, mother and sons, as the story centers on Margo Martindale as the legendary Mags Bennett).  In a nifty back and forth, Elmore Leonard reclaimed his characters by writing a book called Raylan, and I relished that as well as the tv series.  Besides Olyphant and a number of other actors, this show also owes a good deal in tone and complexity to David Milch’s Deadwood, a very powerful line of descent.  If you don’t enjoy Justified, then never take my word about another show.  As with Breaking Bad, if you can handle the gore, the wit will keep you coming back.

(P.S. – between writing and posting this, I got the news of Elmore Leonard’s death in Detroit at the age of 87.  What a legacy of literary wit he left!  He will be missed.  Here’s the New York Times obituary and a subsequent appreciation, of which there will be many more in coming days.)

Best Documentary?

Having finally caught up with the last of this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Feature, I am prompted to offer a slew of documentary recommendations (many available on Netflix streaming). 

While perfectly happy with sentimental favorite Searching for Sugar Man (2012, MC-79, NFX) as the Oscar winner, I have to say that two nominees seemed weightier, from either side of the wall between the Palestinians and the Israelis.  Sugar Man was certainly a delight and a marvel, but simply more calculated to please than the other nominees, feel-good rather than feel-bad.  Rather artfully constructed after the fact, the “search” nonetheless turns up an amazing find.  Rodriguez recorded a couple of records to some acclaim around 1970, and was well positioned somewhere between Bob Dylan and James Taylor, but he lacked the drive to perform and promote (would sometimes play with his back to the audience) and disappeared into odd jobs around Detroit.  Meanwhile, bootlegged copies of his album became a legendary phenomenon in South Africa, of all places.  Among the tales of the popular cult were different versions of his onstage suicide.  Swedish filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul teamed up with South African music lovers on a quest for the real story, and eventually they found the real Rodriguez, who still writes and sings while not working construction jobs, and is quite a character, sort of a mellow sage.  Sold out shows in South Africa provide a rousing climax to the film, with the Oscar for capper.  The whole story is surprising and inspiring, heartwarming in its recognition of hidden genius, but the other nominees confront issues that are chilling and cautionary.

I cultivate a deliberate ignorance about the conflict between Palestine and Israel, since I do not choose to ponder insoluble problems over which I have no control, but two films cracked my shell this year.  On the Palestinian side, 5 Broken Cameras (MC-78, NFX) documents the deterioration of relations year by year, as olive groves are burnt and the wall is built, demonstrations meeting violence from nervous young soldiers of the occupying army.  With those five cameras, filming up to the instant when they are broken by club or bullet, Emad Burnat filmed not just the demonstrations but his youngest son growing up into this climate of oppression and hate -- a home movie for those without a homeland.  Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi helped shape the footage into an intimate and revelatory passage to the other side, seeing with the other’s eyes.  Extremely powerful, extremely disturbing.

In its own way, the view from the other side of the wall is even more powerful and disturbing.  In The Gatekeepers (MC-91, NFX), Dror Moreh interviews six former directors of Israel’s domestic security service, and brilliantly recapitulates the history of the Palestinian occupation since the Six-Day War in 1967, through all the various intifadas and retaliations and all the squelched peace initiatives.  The wonder is that not one of these officials toes the official line.  All of them come by various paths to the conclusion that the occupation and the settlements are a mistake, that Israel can win every battle and still lose the war, that the only real solution, the key to security, is not military, but diplomatic; negotiation not confrontation, coexistence in two separate states.  Moreh was inspired by Errol Morris’ interrogation of Robert McNamara in The Fog of War, and has compiled an equally compelling document of second thoughts by those in a position to know.  Just the fact that it has been made and shown in Israeli is a small ground for hope.

On the home front, The Invisible War (MC-75, NFX) is a well-made and effective piece of advocacy for a public problem – sexual harassment and rape in the armed forces -- that needs the light of day, and with the aid of Kirby Dick’s film has now become a national issue for Congress and the military.  Mixed with telling statistics and other context, the film focuses intently on the Catch-22 perversities that a number of women (and the occasional man) have suffered after being subjected to sexual assault while in the service.  The personalizing of the pain makes the numbers and arguments all the more intense.  This is a worthy effort to open eyes and change minds.

Another Oscar nominee that delves into the vicissitudes of political activism and public enlightenment in a good cause, David France’s How to Survive a Plague (MC-87, NFX), has the advantage of lots of on-the-spot archival footage, in telling the story of AIDS activists trying to move the system toward effective research and treatment in the 80s and 90s.  The film’s most fascinating aspect, so inside the immediate proceedings, is in dramatizing the way movements inevitably wind up going to war with each other, whether they succeed or fail with the institution they’re trying to move.  The mix of historical scenes and contemporary retrospection by survivors tells the tale effectively, in a way that spins out from gay issues, partially past though still poignant, into questions of political activism in general.  With ACT UP as a test case, we can see what activism accomplishes and what it fails to accomplish, and at least partially, why.

Catching up with this year’s Oscar nominees, I realized I’d never seen last year’s winner, and like many of these docs under discussion, it’s available for instant viewing on Netflix.  Undefeated  (MC-71, NFX) is a perfectly serviceable sports documentary, easily pitched as Hoop Dreams meets Friday Night Lights, about a high school football team.  As the story of a white coach who lifts the spirits and competitiveness of an all-black football team at a Memphis school, it flirts dangerously with comparison to The Blind Side, but stays pretty honest as well as righteous.  I liked it, but it doesn’t bear comparison with The Interrupters by Steve James, which wasn’t even nominated that year.

Moving into candidates for next year’s Oscar, we start with two excellent films that explore the persistent racial and class discrimination built into our legal system.  The House I Live In (MC-77, NFX) makes the personal political, and vice versa, for Eugene Jarecki, who directed the outstanding Why We Fight and other worthy documentaries.  The well-to-do house he grew up in, with two brothers who also became filmmakers, was overseen by his “second mother,” Nannie Jeter, and her children were playmates of his, but they went in different directions.  Asked why, their mother has a one-word answer, “Drugs,” but from there Jarecki goes on to show that the more accurate answer is “The War on Drugs,” which registers as racial, ethnic, and class oppression for some, and as public works money for others, incarcerating vast numbers of casual users under draconian mandatory sentences.  Combining personal inquiry with wide-ranging research and telling interviews, most strikingly with David Simon, creator of The Wire, this film makes a strong case against current policing and judicial policies.

Another angle on a related problem is provided by Gideon’s Army (MC-93, NFX), part of HBO’s generally excellent summer documentary series.  Dawn Porter’s film examines similar judicial issues through the narrow but salient lens of various public defenders in the South, those assigned to shepherd the poorest of the poor through the legal system, negotiating its traps and snares in ways that are simple for those who can afford more aggressive representation.  The real-life hero of the film is a public defender who vows to have the name of any client of his who is convicted tattooed to his back.  The passion these young lawyers bring to making the system play fair is admirable, even while it seems a hopelessly Sisyphean labor.

There are documentarians who draw you by their subject, by its social or political significance, and then there are those who draw you by their empathetic insight and storytelling skill.  Lucy Walker is one of the latter.  Here last two films were deservedly Academy Award nominees, Waste Land for feature and The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom for short.  So I gave The Crash Reel (MC-82, NFX) a chance when it appeared in the HBO series, despite my extreme lack of interest in X-treme sports such as competitive snowboarding.  And I advise you to do the same if you get the chance.  You may go slack-jawed with either wonder or boredom at the stunts these guys pull, but you can’t help becoming involved with an attractive Vermont family confronting a number of crises, as the film becomes an examination of parenting and brotherhood, as well as bro’-hood and competitive rivalry, not to mention the medical facts of traumatic brain injury.  If like me, you are totally unaware of who Kevin Pearce is, I’ll let his story unfold with all the twists and turns that Lucy Walker documents so well.

Where to begin with 56 Up (MC-83, NFX)?  Well, ideally with 21 Up or even earlier in this septannual series, which documents an assortment of British boys and girls as they grow up to become parents and grandparents.  It’s much better to come back every seven years and revisit a group of old acquaintances – Neil and Bruce, Suzie and Nick, Paul and Tony, the three East End girls, et al. -- but if you are not already among those who avidly await the next installment, you could do worse than simply start with 56 Up.  Each installment recapitulates the earlier ones, so in the blink of an eye you see someone go from 7 to 14 to 21 and on, which makes up in inherent visual interest for the necessarily sketchy backstories.  But then of course you miss the more rounded play of expectation and surprise in the passage of life that the whole series conveys.  Michael Apted has continually come back to this project between making features as good as Coal Miner’s Daughter and Gorillas in the Mist.  We can only hope he keeps it up.  He knows his subjects, they know him, and we are invited to the illusion that we know them as well, their joys and sorrows, triumphs and defeats, and just plain muddling through.  Funny, touching, engrossing, with full appreciation for the ambiguities of observing -- if you’re not already hooked, find out what the fuss is all about.

It takes a pretty deft touch to present people one wouldn’t want to know, exemplars of mindless excess, in a way that can be seen as sympathetic portrait as well as scathing satire.  That’s what Lauren Greenfield achieves in Queen of Versailles (MC-80, NFX).  She began filming a couple in the process of building a monument to conspicuous consumption, the largest private home in America.  He was a billionaire timeshare magnate, she a tacky trophy wife, and they named their home after Louis XIV’s palace, without being able to pronounce it.  The real estate bubble burst, and their lifestyle crashed around their ears.  A just comeuppance in one sense, but in another it offers an exemplum of a society living beyond its means, and coming into rough contact with economic reality.

Ross McElwee presents a mordant self-portrait in Photographic Memory (MC-79, NFX), the latest installment in his series of first-person documentaries, including most notably Sherman’s March and Bright Leaves.  Trying to come to grips with the creeping estrangement of his 20ish son, whom we see growing up under his father’s camera eye, McElwee tries to revisit himself at the same age, when he was on extended stay in France working as a photographer’s assistant.  He returns to Brittany and tries to find the man he worked for and the woman he lived with.  He goes down paths familiar and unexpected.  And returns with at least a bit better understanding of his son’s stage of life.  Nothing earthshaking, but McElwee’s wry tone and honest self-inquiry make for enjoyable and thoughtful viewing. 

I’ve recently watched a number of documentaries about dance, but there are two new ones that I’m happy to recommend.  First Position (MC-72, NFX) follows a well-worn path, from Spellbound on, of young people pointing toward and eventually competing in a high-stakes contest.  In this case, Bess Kargman tracks a number of school age ballet dancers who come to New York from all over the world to compete for prizes and admission to professional ballet companies.  If the frame is familiar, the commitment and talent of the young dancers is fresh and astounding.  Never Stand Still (NFX) is a highly-watchable celebration of a Berkshire cultural landmark, the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, with historical background and a sampling of the venue’s variety of programs.  It made me want to get in the car and drive down to Becket, for the first time in ages.

I’ve always been a big advocate for the art of documentary, which has been enriched by each advance in the quality and portability of filmmaking equipment, and sustained by a long tradition of nonfiction storytelling, fulfilling in many different ways the classic Grierson definition of documentary – “the creative treatment of actuality.”  On the evidence presented here, documentaries are better than ever.

Stories We Tell

Stories We Tell (2013, MC-90, NFX) confirms Sarah Polley as one of the directors (and actresses) whose next film I am most eager to see.  Away from Her was my favorite film of 2007, and last year’s Take This Waltz well worth seeing twice.  Of films in which she acts but does not write or direct, I recommend the little-known Guinevere and The Secret Life of Words. Her latest is classified as a documentary, and certainly qualifies under Grierson’s seminal definition of the genre, “creative treatment of actuality,” but the film is thoroughly designed and not merely recorded.  Polley delves into her own family history, in a way that recalls Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies.  I won’t say much more, because the less you know going in, the greater the surprise of the film’s unfolding.  I’ll only say that it is simultaneously clever and heartfelt, and highly multivalent, with a profound understanding of our need to make meaningful stories out of our own lives, and to perform them.  Through home movies, interviews, and other means, Polley recounts the history of the mother she lost at the age of 11, and the mysteries of her own birth.  Hers is an absorbing family of performers, and they play out their stories in engrossing fashion.  Stories We Tell will certainly rank with the very best films of this year in any genre.

Before Midnight

Before Midnight (2013, MC-94, NFX) is the latest installment of Richard Linklater’s ongoing masterwork -- the “Before” series, which collectively could be titled à la Proust, “In Search of Lost Time.”   Made in close collaboration with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, as stars and co-writers, the three films to date, made at nine-year intervals, are obsessed with the passage of time, the interpenetration of past and future in the present, all the modes of time travel.  Each deals with one day in the life of a pair, American writer and French social activist, as they reflect on the past and imagine a future, as individuals and as a couple, trying to come to terms in and with the present moment. 

It doesn’t hurt that while each film is inordinately focused on just two people walking and talking, they do so in picturesque places – Vienna, Paris, and the Greek Islands.  And the two characters, whom we have watched age from their 20s to 30s to 40s, are extraordinarily appealing, in all their complexity of confrontation and evasion, showing the slippery side as well as the rough edges of each.  Permanence and mutability, connection and separation, fantasy and disenchantment, all the vicissitudes of a relationship over time are explored with wit and point. 

Though tightly scripted and rehearsed, and intimately intertwined with the characters’ prior incarnations, the endless back-and-forth seems spontaneous, even improvised.  And the three-headed creative process assures an even-handed, fully-rounded treatment of both the boy and the girl, the woman and the man.  We come to know Jesse and Celine as they come to know each other, for better and worse.  They’re funny and sharp, and they each have their reasons, and their unreasons.  There’s no denying that sparks fly, but will the fire burn itself out? 

Linklater contributes a deep sense of cinema history, setting the film in a great tradition, explicitly alluding to Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, but obviously indebted to Eric Rohmer’s delicate tales of erotic negotiation, and Truffaut’s longitudinal study of Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel over five films and twenty years, not to mention Michael Apted’s monumental 7 Up series (now at 56 Up).  This third film in the series ends Before Midnight, after what could definitely be called “A Long Day’s Journey into Night.”  The ferocity of marital argument recalls Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, and Linklater builds upon his own Tape, a no-budget exercise shot in a single motel room with Ethan Hawke and then-wife Uma Thurman. 

Following Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), with luck we will be looking at Before Noon in 2022.  I won’t recount what actually has happened so far with Jesse and Celine, but I highly, highly recommend that you catch up with their stories.

Looking for more Julie Delpy, I watched 2 Days in New York (2012, MC-62, NFX), which wasn’t as good as her 2 Days in Paris, but no chore to watch.  Chris Rock plays her husband, her crazy French family comes to visit, complications ensue, end of story.  In her own films, she plays a character who is neurotic but not as sharp-edged as Celine.

Beginning to catch up

In posting my David Lean career retrospective (see below), I was shocked to see that it had been more than two months since my previous post, and now it's longer since.  I’ve seen a lot of films over that period, so it will take a while to bring myself up to date.  I intend to follow with wrap-ups of well-rated recent films and documentaries, plus outstanding tv series, but in this catch-all I’m including a bunch of English-language classics that I’ve been re-watching, many on the big screen at the Clark.  Expect a chatty approach to some familiar movies.