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]

Bong Jung-ho is a taste I have not acquired, without enough seasoning to compensate for ingredients I don’t really care for.  Snowpiercer (MC-84, NFX) has gotten a lot of favorable notice, but whatever wit or style others may savor is lost on me, in my indifference to sci-fi action-thriller formulae.  Before the halfway point, I had to fast-forward to the end.

Some people found Chef (MC-68, NFX) quite tasty, but I found Jon Favreau’s would-be heart-tugging father-and-son story, with road-trip flavoring and food-porn overtones, to be bland and warmed-over; not nasty going down, but not very nutritious. 

There were some ingredients in Begin Again (MC-62, NFX) that I would have expected to savor, but John Carney fell far short of duplicating the delights of Once.  As a musical couple, Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo have much less appeal than the unknowns of the previous film.  Their relationship lacks poignancy, and the film is more like a less-witty remake of The Commitments.  As “sexiest man alive,” Adam Levine is just a joke, but Hailee Steinfeld is definitely a young actress to watch.

Not to get into a rut of negativity, let me mention Liberal Arts (MC-55, NFX), which I liked much more than the critical consensus.  As a former English major in close proximity to his alma mater, I quite enjoyed Josh Radnor’s love letter to Kenyon College.  Previously unknown to me, he won me over both as director and actor.  And he showed excellent taste in casting Richard Jenkins and Allison Janney as his former professors.  When he returns to college to visit them, he falls in with the charmingly sophomoric Elizabeth Olsen, and yearns to re-enter the womb of academe, in a romance that is less formulaic than it seems at first.

I’d say the same of Drinking Buddies (MC-72, NFX), which I liked more than any other Joe Swanberg film I’ve seen.  It might have been Olivia Wilde in the lead role, or the setting in a Chicago microbrewery, but this story of tentative romances among co-workers steeped in beer, both on and off the job, worked for me.  Two sort-of couples go on vacation together, and flirt with re-sorting themselves, and the story plays out with a nicely-blended mix of expectation and randomness.  Anna Kendrick is another asset to the film, but not enough to redeem Swanberg’s follow-up Happy Christmas (MC-70, NFX), which succumbs to the “mumblecore” flaws of aimlessness and visual blandness.

Another American indie worth singling out is Land Ho! (MC-68, NFX), which might have been called The Trip to Iceland, one more odd-couple road-trip between men of a certain age.  In this film directed by Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens, the bickering buddies are played by Australian actor Paul Eenhoorn and nonprofessional uncle Earl Lynn Nelson, who seems to be just the aggravating yet endearing character that he plays.  Again the scenery forms an engaging backdrop to the by-play of two older guys, reuniting decades after they were married to two sisters, subsequently deceased and divorced.  I identified with the characters and enjoyed being along for the ride, but I think there’s enough wit and insight to keep different sorts of viewers engaged.

I almost recommend Hateship Loveship (MC-59, NFX), the latest film directed by Williams College professor Liza Johnson.  Based on an Alice Munro story, it stars Kristen Wiig in a subdued role as a spinster caretaker and housekeeper, who forms a fantasy attachment to the ne’er-do-well father (Guy Pearce) of a girl she’s looking after for a rich grandfather (Nick Nolte), and through sheer blind determination makes her dream come true.  The acting is fine and the material is rich; in fact, the film’s best result was to send me to the Munro book of stories from which it was derived, also the source of the marvelous film Away from Her.

The Lunchbox (MC-76, NFX) was another good enough variation in the genre of romantic comedies, predicated on a remarkable phenomenon of social organization, the decentralized lunch delivery system in Mumbai.  A clerk nearing retirement (played by Irrfan Khan), and a woman feeling neglected by her distracted husband, form an epistolary relationship, when the lunches she cooks in an attempt to seduce her husband get misdirected to the curmudgeonly widower instead.  Whether or not they ever will meet, something in the connection revivifies both of them, in Ritesh Batra’s delicate, understated debut.

Presented as something of a suspense thriller, Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves (MC-75, NFX) works best as a deconstruction of the lead character, an organic farmer in Oregon turned eco-terrorist.  If you thought Jesse Eisenberg was chillingly opaque as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, check out his reptilian turn here, as he draws Dakota Fanning into a conspiracy masterminded by Peter Sarsgaard.  More a tense slow-burn procedural than an exploration of psychology or sociology, it shares the subtly subversive intent of Reichardt’s other films.

Paul Giamatti seems to be ubiquitous these days, generally a welcome presence but hardly able to elevate questionable material.  He was enough to make me watch Barney’s Version (MC-67, NFX), Richard J. Lewis’s adaptation of a Mordicai Richler novel, but not enough to make me recommend it.  Barney is a rat with women, such as Minnie Driver and Rosamund Pike, funny at times and echt Montreal, but not someone I cared to spend time with. 

As Abe Zapruder, Giamatti is one of many under-utilized familiar actors in Parkland (MC-51,NFX) a 50^th anniversary retelling of JFK’s assassination, from the perspectives of a host of peripheral characters.  The film delivers some documentary verisimilitude, but not a whole lot of point.  Giamatti also figures in The Congress (MC-63, NFX), Ari Folman’s follow-up to Waltzing with Bashir, which held me for a while with Robin Wright playing a version of herself, who is offered a once-for-all contract to have herself digitally sampled for future use by a sleazy studio called Miramount.  Once the film went to animation with a sci-fi plot, however, it totally lost me.

For the sake of completeness, and the highlighting of the occasional gem, I am going to run through a bunch of older films that I have recently re-watched or caught up with for the first time.  At a recent wedding, I was discussing films with an old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time, and she recommended two actor-directed films that I had missed.  John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo (MC-58, NFX) turned out to be the most enjoyable Woody Allen film I’ve seen in a while, though that is not much of a reach.  It’s an absurd tale of Allen pimping for Turturro, to great success and ultimately to romance with a Hasidic widow played by Vanessa Paradis.  As a whole, the film does not convince, but it does amuse and charm in parts.

I was more on board with Helen Hunt’s Then She Found Me (2008, MC-56, NFX), particularly taken with a relatively subdued performance by Bette Midler, who appears on the scene claiming to be the birth mother of Hunt, who plays a newly-pregnant and newly-abandoned elementary school teacher.  She falls for the single dad of one of her students, and why not, since he’s played by Colin Firth.  Adapted from a comic novel by Elinor Lipman, this film remains more tart than saccharine, and grounded in a recognizable reality.

Moving into older films, I start with my re-viewings of old favorites.  Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990, NFX) remains every bit as good as I remembered and certainly worthy of its ranking among the best movies of all time.  Enjoying a flashback to mid-80s romantic comedies, I relished Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks in Broadcast News (1987, NFX), directed by James L. Brooks; and Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson in Heartburn (1986, NFX), the Mike Nichols adaptation of Nora Ephron.  They’re both well worth seeing again, and must-see if you haven’t already.

One old film I was surprised that I had never seen, and now heartily recommend, is Pajama Game (1957, NFX).  Maybe I was too young to see it when first released, but in a few years I would become quite a fan of Doris Day, in her rom-com confections with Rock Hudson and others, manufactured to be tartly sweet and mildly spicy, and appropriate to the tastes of a teenage baby boomer.  This musical, surprisingly, has a bit more substance, as our Doris foments a strike amongst workers in a pajama factory.  Though compromised by duets with management, in the person of John Raitt, definitely more singer than actor, our Doris leads an effective labor action (not much of that in the past 50 years!), marvelously choreographed by Bob Fosse.  This is good fun, and a bit more.  See it – really!

A New Yorker squib induced me to watch The Uninvited (1944, NFX), directed by Lewis Allen and starring Ray Milland, a gothic haunted house story effective enough to send me back to its obvious precursor, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Rebecca (1940, NFX), which in turn held up well enough to lead me to a few more Hitchcocks that I had somehow missed over the years. 

David Thomson’s citation of Under Capricorn (1949, NFX) as a “lost treasure” led me to that little-seen and distinctly uncharacteristic Hitchcock film, shot in color and set in 1830s Australia, with Joseph Cotton as a transported convict turned wealthy landowner, and Ingrid Bergman as his delicate and distrait upper-class wife.  More reliant on a gliding camera that Hitchcock’s usual associative cutting, but another obvious descendant of Rebecca, this film is more interesting than compelling, but deserves consideration in his canon.  

Somewhat less of a discovery was The Wrong Man (1956, NFX), with Henry Fonda struggling to prove his innocence when misidentified as an armed robber. The film has an unusual documentary quality for Hitchcock, shot on location in New York, and based on a true story that constrains some his flights of imagination and wit.  Though it has elements of Kafka, the story settles around Vera Miles (one of Hitch’s obsessive blondes) as the accused man’s wife, who cracks under the strain.  I Confess (1953, NFX) with Montgomery Clift as a priest boxed in by a murderer’s confession, has Hitchcock’s usual themes of guilt and deception, but ranks with his lesser efforts.

As I get to the bottom of this list, I append a comment on a double disk that rose to the top of my Netflix queue only by dint of long duration, with two early Gary Cooper films on it.  Cooper hardly seems a fit for Noel Coward’s play Design for Living (1933, NFX), and neither does screenwriter Ben Hecht, so one has to accept the Ernst Lubitsch movie as something quite different, but still the triangle with Frederic March and Miriam Hopkins has its moments of humor and interest, if not of champagne wit.  Peter Ibbetson (1935, NFX) may have be the reason I queued up this disk in the first place, when looking at films about architects for a possible series at the Clark some time back.  So Cooper is an architect as the title character in Henry Hathaway’s film, though this is no Fountainhead, but a strangely literal romance that transpires in dreams stronger than death.  It’s a curiosity, but not really a find.

Okay, so now I’ve finally caught up with most of the films I’ve seen this year -- though I do have another round-up of recent and all-time TV series in the works -- so I’m set to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Cinema Salon blog -- as of New Year’s Day -- with a renewed commitment to timely and relevant film commentary.  Please keep coming back to this portal for a wealth of cinematic information and opinion.