Watchlist

With the Clark auditorium dark during the current phase of construction in the Manton building, I have no idea whether or when I will resume film programming there.  I’m particularly dubious about future Cinema Salon screenings, but do intend to keep my film blog going, even if the film club is no more. 

There certainly has been no abatement in my own film viewing, and I am once again dozens of films behind in my commentary.  My intention is to make another big push to catch up, and then to take a two-pronged approach to future films -- keeping a daily diary of immediate reactions to what I’m watching, back to my original intent of a decade ago; but for films and filmmakers about which I have something more extensive to say, or strong recommendations to make, posting longer essays on occasion.

First off, I have two films to recommend that were shown during the fall at Images Cinema, and for which I led an After Images discussion.  In advance I prepared career summaries of two of my favorite active directors, Richard Linklater and Michael Winterbottom, which I’ve posted here as “Pages.”

Linklater’s latest, Boyhood (MC-100(!!!), NFX), has been so widely acclaimed that adding my own praise would be carrying coals to Newcastle.  As a cinematic stunt -- filming intermittently over a dozen years to literally enact a child’s growing up -- it’s amazing, but even better for its substance.   As much as this film seems to be life caught on the fly, in fact every line is scripted and rehearsed, repeating the process for as long as it takes to seem spontaneous.  Its realism inheres in the practice of basing every scene on something that actually happened to Linklater or one of his actors or acquaintances.  The film is naturalistic, but not improvised, and definitely not documentary.  It’s a lived-in film, and a pleasure to live through.  I doubt it will be supplanted as my choice for best of the year.

I like the nakedness of remaking that Michael Winterbottom, Steve Coogan, and Rob Bryden bring to The Trip to Italy (MC-75, NFX).  That was fun, let’s do it again, in Italy instead of Yorkshire.  Flip the script in few ways, then let’s go.  If the material is thin, we lay on the layers – person, persona, impersonation; food, scenery, cinematic and literary allusions.  We’re a group of guys who are getting older, and mortality is much on our minds, so everything revolves around that theme.  Just do it, then do it again, until we can’t do it anymore.  See what happens.

Reviewing the films that Winterbottom and Coogan have made together, I saw that there was one I had missed.  The Look of Love (MC-57, NFX) was not up to the standard of 24 Hour Party People, but did profile another major figure in British popular culture.  Paul Raymond leveraged strip clubs and titty mags into massive holdings of Soho real estate, and one of the greatest fortunes in the UK.  Citizen Kane this is not, though it tells a parallel tale of the emotional emptiness of public success.

Considering myself a big fan of Steve Coogan, I felt it was time to make the acquaintance of his alter ego – he certainly has more than enough ego for two – and the film Alan Partridge (MC-66, NFX) was a good place to start, though it finds Partridge on the downside of his career, fallen from national TV host to provincial radio DJ.  This film stands on its own as a humorous character study, but I have to say that a sampling of the TV shows that made Partridge a figure in British pop culture did not travel very well, especially with annoying laugh tracks. 

Another of the directors from whom I expect great things, Lukas Moodysson, returned to form with one of my favorite films of the year, the aptly-named We Are the Best! (MC-87, NFX), about a trio of 13-year-old girls who form a punk rock band in 1980s Stockholm.  Only one of them is the least bit musical, but they don’t let that stop them, and their anarchic energy is utterly endearing, as their friendship allows them to negotiate a world of parents and schoolmates that seems to have no space for them, until they carve out their own personal niche.  It’s all utterly specific, yet remarkably universal.

That set me off on a rewarding cycle of films about (pre-)adolescent girls.  Sundays & Cybèle (1962, NFX, CC) was a film of which I had fond memories, so when the Criterion Collection re-issued it, I leapt at the chance to see whether fifty years had changed my impression of Serge Bourguignon’s Oscar winner for best foreign film.  Certainly, modern sensitivities about pedophilia cast a different light on the proceedings, but the adult/child romance between a shell-shocked veteran and a preternaturally grown-up little girl retains its power, largely because of the enchanting performance of 12-year-old Patricia Gozzi.  Hardy Kruger is the damaged manchild who meets her halfway.  Though dismissed for sentimentality by New Wave critics at the time, now it seems very much of that era, with delicious widescreen black & white cinematography by Henri Decae and music by Maurice Jarre.  While one can see why Bourguignon’s career went nowhere from here, I’m still a sucker for his first effort.

A more sensual and much scarier approach to a 14-year-old girl’s awakening sexuality is offered by It Felt Like Love (MC-76, NFX), a first feature from Eliza Hittman, starring a magnetic Gina Piersanti.  On the summer streets and beaches of working-class Brooklyn, she is taunted by an older friend, who is sexually active, into pursuing a wildly-inappropriate older boy.  She has no idea what she is getting into, but we do, and hope she manages to elude the manifest danger, and retain her childish illusions for a little while longer, in this effective mood piece.

  

In Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy (MC-74, NFX), the girl is only ten, and when her French family moves to a suburban housing complex, she is able to introduce herself to the neighboring group of children as a boy.  Through a summer of soccer games and swimming she is able to maintain her masculine identity as Mikael, even while at home Laure has good relations with her parents and adorably girly 6-year-old sister.  The imposture can’t go on forever, but you root for her to keep her gender freedom for all long as possible.  Nothing especially dramatic happens, but the quality of observation and empathy is delicious.

Moving to an age when teenage romance is more appropriate, Shailene Woodley is utterly charming in the cancer kids weepie, The Fault in Our Stars (MC-69, NFX), Josh Boone’s adaptation of John Green’s YA blockbuster.  It could be all too much, but only steps over the line a couple of times, as Shailene and her costar Ansel Elgort keep it realistically based in genuine teenage emotions, which don’t really need the overemphatic underlining by pop songs on the soundtrack.

Felicity Jones is another appealing young actress, and helps make Drake Doremus’s Breathe In (MC-60, NFX) watchable, if not memorable.  She’s a British exchange student living with a family in upstate New York, a shy musical prodigy.  Her host father, Guy Pearce, is the high school music teacher, frustrated in his professional career.  You know where this is going.  The two leads are the only thing that keeps the proceedings somewhat interesting.

I’m partial to British historical costume dramas, so it’s no surprise that I rate Belle (MC-64, NFX) somewhat higher than the critical consensus.  We’re in Jane Austen territory here, but with an interesting twist, since the title character is the daughter of a slave and a sea captain, who is brought up in his aristocratic family.  The story is based on an enigmatic double portrait of a Georgian beauty and her mulatto companion, but is freely fictionalized, to good effect, and handsomely directed in Merchant-Ivory style by Amma Asante, a British woman of Ghanian descent, who gives the gimmick a substantial foundation in class and racial history.  Gugu Mbatha-Raw is both dazzling and believable as Dido Belle, and the film successfully balances romance and social reality, to a history lesson finish that is not quite fully realized.  But if you like this sort of thing, the film is well worth seeing.  Tom Wilkinson and Emily Watson play Lord and Lady Mansfield, so you know it’s a quality production.  Unfortunately, the double portrait in the film is not nearly as mysterious as the real one, which is shown all too briefly at the very end.

There is also much to recommend in a rather different historical drama, The Immigrant (MC-77, NFX).  In James Gray’s dark-amber-hued melodrama, Marion Cotillard is a Polish refugee from the First World War, who comes through Ellis Island and is taken under the protection of an ambiguous impresario played by Joaquin Phoenix, strange and intense as always.  Jeremy Renner is a magician and rival, but it’s definitely the two leads that carry the film and lend mystery to this earnest evocation of a particular past.

Certainly worth seeing for Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s final performance, I found A Most Wanted Man (MC-73, NFX) more comprehensible and rewarding than the last well-received John le Carré adaptation, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and an effective update of his Cold War concerns and tone, to a world of jihad and unleashed antiterrorism.  I was taken by the sleek and seedy look of Hamburg in Anton Corbijn’s film, and by an extremely effective cast that included Robin Wright, Willem Dafoe, and Nina Hoss.  As much a mood piece as a spy thriller, this seemed to divide critical response as radically as the foregoing film, and again I tended to fall on the favorable side.

[click through for more quick reviews of recent and older films, mostly on the less favorable side, but with some outright recommendations]

What's up docs

Now I’ve got the prompt I need to write up another long composite post -- a jumping-up-and-down recommendation for a recent documentary.  I loved Finding Vivian Maier (MC-75, NFX), but perhaps I over-identified with the subject, by reason of class status, artistic endeavor, and lifelong obscurity.  Vivien Maier was a nanny and caregiver who was also an obsessive photographer, taking hundreds and hundreds of rolls of film, and never showing her pictures to anyone.  She was also a hoarder, and a crank verging on mental illness, but she certainly belongs in a pantheon of street photographers that includes Helen Levitt, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Weegee, as well as Joel Meyerowitz and Mary Ellen Mark, who comment intimately on her work.  John Maloof is the young man who happened to buy at auction a random box of negatives and discovered the work of an unseen artist, just about at the time of her death, which allowed him to corner the market on Maier’s photographs.  He co-directs this movie in both celebration and exploitation of this cache of unsung work.  The question of whether this benefits or betrays the intention of the artist is one of many interesting themes this film touches upon.  You could take it as a slick piece of self-promotion, cashing in on someone who was the antithesis of self-promoter, or you could revel in the revelation of a powerful but unknown body of work.  The film follows the successful template of Searching for Sugar Man to tell a crowd-pleasing but troubling story of a lost artist redeemed, in this case posthumously and with many attendant questions of ethics, aesthetics, and value, as well as mysteries of personality and fate.  Plus, the photographs are truly great.  Find Vivian Maier! – that’s as close as I’ll ever come to an order.  Check out some of her work here, then see the movie, and then decide whether you agree it constitutes a genuine discovery.

First Cousin Once Removed (MC-94, NFX) is another great find.  I recommend all of Alan Berliner’s films but his latest is not a bad way to start.  Instead of focusing on himself or his immediate family, this film follows the progressive dementia of the eponymous relative.  That Edwin Honig had been a distinguished poet and translator makes the gradual extinguishing of his light even more poignant.  Filmmaking does not get more intimate and thoughtful than this.  As sad as the poor man’s decline may be, the film remains respectful, clever, and even witty, a Berliner trademark.

I’ve been planning this round-up of the best recent documentaries since the time of the Oscars, so I’ll start with what was named Best Documentary Feature, 20 Feet from Stardom (MC-83, NFX), which I really enjoyed, as the most ingratiating of the nominees, again following last year’s winner, Sugar Man.  This time the artists being rediscovered, celebrated, and given their due, were a number of female back-up singers, mostly from the Motown era.  Darlene Love, Merry Clayton, Lisa Fischer, and the others were (and are) powerful artists in their own right, but had the special knack of backing up some of the defining acts of the time.  Most of these ladies came out of gospel and put the soul in Soul music, but there was only room for one Aretha in the business, so for most of their careers they labored at the distance suggested by the title.  Morgan Neville’s film shines the limelight on them, and they more than fill the stage.  Might be enraging, if it weren’t so entertaining.

[click through to read commentary on a score of recent recommendable documentaries]