Home Box docs

While PBS continues to showcase worthwhile documentaries on the programs “Independent Lens” and “POV,” HBO has really stepped up to the plate this summer and delivered a consistently interesting series.  I refer you to their website for a complete list and descriptions, but I’ll offer brief reactions to each film in the series.  I’ve found them all worth watching, some more and some less, even on subjects I was inclined to skip.  If you don’t get HBO, most titles can be put on your Netflix queue, and if you don’t get Netflix, well then, god bless you, but why in heaven are you reading Cinema Salon?

The standout so far seems to be Hot Coffee, a classic documentary in that it takes a subject that “everyone knows” and demonstrates clearly that what everyone knows is wrong, the truth turned upside down, and moreover how and why the misconception was disseminated.  That old lady who spilled coffee on herself and sued McDonald’s for it became the butt of jokes, as well as the poster child of a huge PR campaign to mock lawsuit judgments as frivolous and costly to the public.  Susan Saladoff shows that “tort reform” is just a code word for letting corporations run roughshod over the public welfare.  It’s perfectly in line with the Citizens United decision in granting rights to corporations and denying them to individuals.  The legal fiction that the corporation is a “person” with rights (but of course no obligations) is a source of endless mischief in our system.

Another film in the series, Mann v. Ford, backs up the point, detailing the attempt of a community of Ramapo Indians to seek legal redress from Ford Motor Company for the dumping of toxic waste on their land when the huge Mahwah plant opened in the Sixties.  Now the community is dying off from cancer and a host of other diseases, and makes a good test case for imposing responsibility on corporations through the courts.  Unfortunately the film should have been an hour long rather than feature length, and is padded with much tangential material that dissipates and distracts from its argument.

Something similar might be said of the first film in the series, Bobby Fischer Against the World, which as one would expect, is engrossing as long as it recalls the days when Fischer vs. Spassky was the main bout of the day in the Cold War and chess mania swept the country, and then peters out when Fischer gives way to right-wing paranoia and free-form hate-speech.

Sex Crimes Unit sounds like a spicy spin-off of Law and Order, and thus a likely skip for me, but giving it a chance, I was impressed by the workaday reality of women working through the legal system to confront violence against women, as well as the victims who were willing to come out of the shadows and into the light.  The lack of glamour or end-of-the-hour closure is exactly what made this real-life drama satisfying.

I also resisted Alexandra Pelosi’s Citizen USA: A 50-State Road Trip, figuring it was another celebrity project enabled by her mom Nancy.  But, gosh darn it, this film of “furriners” becoming citizens all across this great land of ours was genuinely moving, even eye-opening.

Would Love Crimes of Kabul turn out to be more a Frontline-type expose, or more of the tabloid variety, detailing outrageous fundamentalist punishments for sex?  Actually, it’s more like a reality-show set in an Afghan women’s prison, not a harsh-seeming place at all, where the women freely bicker and gossip over their respective cases.  The intimate access is amazing, even though it stops at the courtroom door most of the time, and while from a Western perspective the “crimes” seem absurd, the justice dispensed is no more erratic than our own.  Some know how to play the system, and some are crushed by it.  Ultimately Tanaz Eshaghian's film is amusing, as well as titillating, as well as edifying.

I suspected “There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane” of tabloid ghoulishness as well, but then saw it was made by Liz Garbus, who has been a director I look for ever since I saw The Farm: Angola USA (and actually the Bobby Fischer film was also hers).  I can’t, however, recommend that you take this trip, digging deep into the backstory of a horrific collision that killed eight on the Taconic Parkway two years ago, since I’ve been trying to put Aunt Diane out of my mind ever since I saw the film, as her final scenes repeat in my mind like an inescapable nightmare.  I was expecting resolution of the mystery at the end, that same ultimate reversal of what “everyone knows,” but wound up with something even more disturbing, the idea that “nobody knows,” the awful truth is ultimately unknowable, and all you are left with is the strange and personal ways that people confront and cope with unimaginable events.  This is a serious film about a headline event, but after it’s over, the subject may be something you wish you knew less about, rather than more.

The next film in the series is a winning tangent off the successful Spellbound formula, following a diverse group of cute kids from their far-flung homes to a high-stakes competition.  Instead of a national spelling bee, in Greg Barker’s Koran by Heart, this contest in Cairo is for reciting the Koran from memory, and featured are three 10-year-olds, boys from Tajikstan and Senegal, a girl from the Maldive Islands.  The contest is run by a moderate Egyptian cleric and government minister, and certainly presents a less sinister side of Islam than we are accustomed to seeing these days.  It is vaguely disturbing that the children are reciting in Arabic, whether they understand the language or not, which makes for awkward interactions with the judges, but then that’s hardly different from when liturgical Latin ruled the Church.  The Tajik boy is amazingly accomplished, though not quite up to speed on the rules of Arabic vocalization, and leaves the judges in tears.  The Maldives girl is the most surprising, and there may have been some affirmative action in the response of the judges, giving extra points for the extremism of her cuteness.  The Senegalese boy strives to live up to his father, the local imam.  All three are dazzled by Cairo and camels, the mosques and the pyramids.  With good will and diversity of motive, this film revises one’s mental image of young Islamic children in madrassas mindlessly chanting the Koran.  You’ll be rooting for these kids to do it perfectly.

This fine HBO documentary series wraps up over the next two weeks, but you can catch up with these films on rerun or DVD.

What's been on

I’ve had a bit of hiatus from regular film comment, but I intend to bring the record up to date in one long go.  Lately I’ve been involved with a number of TV series that I would encourage everyone to sample, though each will not be to everyone’s taste.  Previous seasons are usually available on DVD.

I’m pretty far gone on everything David Simon does, particularly The Wire and Generation Kill, so it’s no surprise that I found the second season of Treme (MC-84) on HBO to be compelling viewing from start to finish, as a swirl of musicians and other New Orleans characters contend with the aftermath of Katrina.  On the same channel, I was resistant to Game of Thrones (MC-79) since I am no big fan of sword and sorcery and the whole panoply of medieval dynastic conflict, but trusted my daughter’s recommendation enough to give it a try, and wound up going through the first season in short order, and now look forward to more.  Being a man of a certain age, or in truth a little past it, I reveled in the bittersweet, understated humor and drama of Men of a Certain Age (MC-86), just having completed its run on TNT and yet to be picked up by some enlightened other channel, perhaps in the type of arrangement that saved two final seasons of Friday Night Lights.    

I’ve been catching up with two series on DVD.  If you jones for English heritage productions such as Cranford from BBC, a steady stash is available from Lark Rise to Candleford, which just completed a four-season run, though at the moment I am taking lingering pleasure in the first, with its range of characters and variety of stories set in a late Victorian village and town (as named in the title).  For something completely different, but equally pleasurable, I would direct your attention to Justified (MC-81), which recently completed its second season on FX.  Though I have just caught up with the first season on DVD, I urge any fans of Elmore Leonard to check out this cowboy/cop action/romance comedy/drama, based on his work and featuring Timothy Olyphant (of Deadwood fame) as a cute but deadly U.S. Marshal breaking up a meth ring in Harlan, Kentucky. 

Just underway and promising more of the same are new seasons of three series I have followed devotedly.   The Big C  (MC-64) on Showtime does not seem to have worn out its premise as a cancer comedy, and is not likely to as long as it revolves around the adorable Laura Linney.  By all accounts, Breaking Bad (MC-96) on AMC just keeps getting better and better in its fourth season, another oh-no-you-don’t crime drama/comedy centered around meth dealing, anchored by Emmy-winners Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul and driven by go-for-broke producer Vince Gilligan.  Entourage has gotten a little old for me, but I will still tune in for its short swansong season, to see where the young gang of New York guys turned Hollywood players ends up.

Turning to film, I will group my recent viewing into a few adventitious categories.   One variety might fall under the heading of economic dislocation.  I caught up with a reputed classic of Italian neorealism, a rarity that I’d never seen, when it finally made it to DVD, but Vittorio de Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) will not alter my canon.  Worth seeing but not quite up to his Bicycle Thieves or Umberto D, its supposedly harsh realism clearly reveals a soft, sentimental center, with a postwar story of good kids trapped into crime, and sent to a reformatory that gives them a graduate education in it.  Ultimately the melodrama is more like Angels with Dirty Faces than Rossellini or Visconti.

China’s recent economic growth has come at the cost of enormous dislocation as hundreds of millions have moved from countryside to cities.  Lixin Fan’s intimate documentary Last Train Home (2010, MC-86) focuses on the dispersal of one family, as the parents go to the city for work and leave their teenage daughter and younger son back in the village.  That separation is compounded by generational conflict, as the film veers close to a reality-tv invasion of one Chinese family, while retaining its seriousness of purpose and subject. 

Two much glossier films detail the dislocation of poor rich guys in the recent financial meltdown.  A great cast carries The Company Men (2011, MC-69), the first feature by television veteran John Wells, and a credible drama of the downsizing era.  Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, and Chris Cooper are all corporate high-fliers at a Boston-based shipbuilding conglomerate, until the enterprise starts to sink and they are thrown overboard.  Affleck is saved by his sensible wife Rosemary DeWitt, and her brother, salt-of-the-earth housebuilder Kevin Costner.  Perhaps the film is over-earnest and over-emphasized in the manner of a tv drama, but for the most part it seems genuine.  Or at least the actors know how to sell it.

Less credible, though moderately entertaining, is Oliver Stone’s sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010, MC-59).  After all these years, Michael Douglas has Gordon Gekko down cold, in his new post-prison incarnation.  Shia LeBeouf is better than I expected as yet another young go-getter who comes under his wing, and his squeeze is Gekko’s estranged daughter, who is made plausible simply because she is played by Carey Mulligan.  Veterans such as Frank Langella and Eli Wallach contribute flavorful walk-ons, and the film has flash, if something less than substance.  This is definitely a case where fact is stranger than fiction, so if you want to watch one feature film about banking collapse, make it HBO’s Too Big to Fail.

Another group that emerges from my recent viewing could be called “Fixated on femmes”.   Francois Truffaut’s Man Who Loved Women is generally regarded as a lightweight entry in his oeuvre, but it’s one of my favorites and the purest distillation of one of his most persistent themes:  “Are women magic?”  It’s a theme that preoccupies many French films besides Truffaut’s, and here are three that I’ve watched lately (coincidentally, all three are available for instant play on Netflix):

As a fan of actress/writer/director Agnès Jaoui’s earlier work, The Taste of Others and Look at Me, I approached Let it Rain (2010, MC-72) avidly, but left it somewhat bemused.  Here she plays a feminist writer looking to parlay her literary fame into a political career.  After her mother dies, she returns home to the south of France, where her less-favored sister still lives.  Jaoui’s frequent collaborator and sometime-husband, Jean-Pierre Bacri, plays a local who wants, for various ulterior motives, to make a documentary about her, a process that breaks down in a variety of amusing and revealing ways.  Successful as a character study, the film’s overall impact is as vague as its title, and no more illuminating in its more accurately-translated British version, Let’s Talk about the Rain.  Based on its U.S. release date, this could have been included as an “appreciation” in my rundown of 2010, but the next film earns an outright “recommendation.”

In Mademoiselle Chambon (2010, MC-83), Stéphane Brizé features two actors unknown to me, which is perfectly appropriate to the story he tells, of two ordinary people confronting something extraordinary in their everyday lives, a story told in silent stares and sidelong glances.  He’s a building contractor, shown (at length) sledge-hammering a wall for a renovation; she is his child’s teacher, a roving substitute who takes annual appointments around France, to avoid long-term attachments.  They meet at the school, and a quiet fire starts to build.  Will it break forth, or will it be tamped down?  That is the whole film, but it is more than enough, conveyed with minimal dialogue but with emotions more revealed in being unexpressed.  If you want a lot going on and feelings spelled out, this film will frustrate you no end.  If you appreciate reticence, both in the characters and in the filmmaking, it will unfold to your satisfaction.

José Luis Guerin’s In the City of Sylvia (2007, MRQE-69) is another nearly wordless exercise, as an art student stalks Strasbourgh, looking for a woman he met briefly six years before.  The film is an ogler’s delight, as he sits in a street café and sketches the women all around him, from complicated angles that the camera emulates.  The visual play is joyful, and if that’s enough for you, this film will enchant.  When the stalking of one particular woman starts to get creepy, the fact that the young man looks like a Raphaelesque angel makes it seem less sinister.  And all the visual quotations from paintings and other films keep everything at an aesthetic and enigmatic distance, which I for one found appealing.

Here’s another threesome, this time with women behind the camera.  Dorris Dörrie’s Cherry Blossoms (2009, MC-62) takes off from Ozu’s Tokyo Story, to tell the story of an aging German couple who visit their grown children in the city, only to be ignored by offspring too busy with their own lives.  So they are left only with each other’s company, and when one dies, the other takes on that identity and tries to live out the spouse’s dreams of art and travel, which had been suppressed by marriage.  The film is beautifully shot, but its emotional content is more obvious than convincing. 

Iranian-born but US-educated Shirin Neshat is that rare video artist whose installation has stopped me in my tracks while walking through a museum gallery.  So when she turned to feature films with Women Without Men (2010, MC-68), I was willing to take a look.  The transition from visual to narrative artist is not complete, but shows promise in this magic realist adaptation of a novel about the condition of women in Iran in the early Fifties, at the time of the CIA overthrown of the elected government and installation of the Shah as absolute ruler.  A woman avoids the arranged marriage her brother is forcing on her by committing suicide, but then has a second life as a radical activist.  A general’s wife leaves him to move into a garden estate in the country, which becomes a haven for other abused women.  The feminist fable sometimes astounds visually and sometimes convinces, but lacks a dramatic arc and sustained impact.  

Which a less well-made Middle Eastern documentary such as Budrus (2009, MRQE) does have, as Brazil-born but US-educated director Julia Bacha follows the Palestinian village of Budrus as it attempts nonviolent resistance to the wall Israel intends to build across its land.  There is nothing special about the filmmaking, either in live action or talking heads, but the story itself is remarkable as peaceful protest manages to break down barriers, between men and women, young and old, Fatah and Hamas, and even with Israeli and international activists.  The confrontations between the protestors and the young Israeli soldiers are chaotic and unresolved, but in the end change is achieved.  This film has its heart in the right place, even when the camera tends to wander.

Falling into no particular category, I did check out a recent animated hit, since I’ve been pleasantly surprised at several lately.  Tangled (2010, MC-71) is a retelling of the Rapunzel story, and the animation is certainly spectacular enough, but the sentiments are more Disney than Pixar, betraying the princess-obsession of the “Magic Kingdom.”  This film is definitely not the must-see for adults that Up or Toy Story 3 are, unless pink is your favorite color.

As this variegated summary indicates, in the wide world of film, some of the best viewing actually originates on TV, but there’s always something to watch for everyone, if nothing for everybody.  Don’t take my word for it -- see for yourself.

Coming to the Clark

“Toil of the Soil: Films of Peasant and Yeoman” is a free film series offered by the Clark in conjunction with the major summer exhibition, “Pissarro’s People,” and looks at the realities of rural labor that were so close to the painter’s heart and eye.

Monday August 1 2:00 pm:  Jean de Florette (1986, 121 min., in French with subtitles).  Gerard Depardieu stars as the title character of Claude Berri’s adaptation of a Marcel Pagnol novel about a man who inherits a farm in Provence and tries to make a go of scientific cultivation, while canny old villager Yves Montand schemes to drive him off the land in this harsh but lovely, sad but engrossing drama.

Monday August 8 2:00 pm:  Farrebique (1947, 85 min., in French dialect with subtitles).  George Rouquier’s beautifully staged documentary follows a year in the life of an old French farm, in timeless images that recall Pissarro’s rural themes.  The Clark is pleased to unearth and present this little-seen classic.

Monday August 15 2:00 pm:  Pelle the Conqueror (1987, 150 min., in Swedish with subtitles).  Max von Sydow is monumental and heartbreaking as the peasant hero of Bille August’s depiction of a life of hardship and toil in Sweden and Denmark around 1900, winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

Monday August 22 2:00 pm:  The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978, 185 min., in Italian dialect with subtitles).  Ermanno Olmi’s epic saga follows four peasant families who live and work on an estate in Lombardy around 1900.  Crushingly sad but transcendently beautiful, this slow and patiently observed masterpiece is among the greatest films ever made.

Monday August 29 2:00 pm:  Days of Heaven.  (1978, 95 min.)   Terrence Malick’s intense vision of farming on the Great Plains before World War I, which won an Oscar for cinematography, follows Richard Gere and Brooke Adams from the steel mills of Chicago to the wheat fields of Texas, where they labor for landowner Sam Shepard.

Dreaming of gods

Having finally wrapped up the best films from 2010, I am ready to review two that are bound to be on my list for 2011.  I’ll be back soon to post my huge backlog of comment on films and tv series, but with this I want to bring Cinema Salon back into some sort of currency.

Just out on DVD is the acclaimed French feature by Xavier Beauvois, Of Gods and Men (2011, MC-86).  I somehow remained unaware of the true story that this film retells, so for me the film had enormous suspense rather than fateful foreknowledge, and worked awfully well that way.  I will have to watch it again sometime, knowing the end of the story -- I suspect it will be equally compelling.  I’d heard enough about the film to get the idea it was worth seeing, something about a face-off between monks and soldiers, but had somehow formed the notion that it was set during WWII.  So it took me a few minutes to realize the setting was more contemporary and the bad guys were not going to be Nazis, but Islamist insurgents – same difference, from human decency that is.  Only afterwards did I learn the facts of the case, Algeria in 1995, so for me it played out as a parable of faith and duty, and wonderfully well at that.  First off, one has to say that the film is stunningly beautiful, in the setting of the Atlas Mountains and within the monastery, and then acknowledge that it is slow-moving by usual movie standards.  But I found myself perfectly in tune with its rhythms, as I was not with the recent well-regarded documentary about another Trappist monastery, Into Great Silence.  The spiritual journey of the brothers, collectively and individually, is captivating in detail and arc.  The acting is superb across the board, as is the sense of place.  And the moral quandaries of the situation make the film an exceptional philosophical experience.  In fact, it occurs to me that I will surely show this at the Clark when the Cinema Salon film club resumes in September, it’s a natural for discussion afterwards.

 

I applaud Beacon Cinema in Pittsfield for straying from their usual mainstream fare to show Werner Herzog’s new documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 3-D (2011, MC-86).  I had wanted to tie-in with a series of Herzog documentaries at the Clark, to be called “Cave/Man/Art,” but scheduling couldn’t be worked out.  Nonetheless I was delighted for the chance to see this film in 3-D, which in truth was a mixed bag, sometimes blurry and disorienting, but at other times absolutely magical, putting you right there in an otherwise inaccessible spot, truly mesmerizing and awe-inspiring.  Chauvet cave in France was just discovered in 1995, and sealed from public access, until our boy Werner wangled his way in.  It contains wall paintings believed to be twice as old as any previously discovered, begun perhaps 30,000 years ago.  The art itself is astounding, seeming as fresh as yesterday, and the whole environment of the cave equally magical, with its limestone formations and extinct animal remains.  After a century in which primitive art has been emulated by the avant-garde, these first glimmerings of the representational impulse seem instantly familiar and readable, however remote.  The combination of pictorial and physical remains in this sealed tomb of time is exquisitely poignant and thought-provoking.  Werner’s characteristically portentous and wide-ranging narration sometimes goes over the top, making claims and speculations that the already miraculous sights do not support, but there’s no doubt this film goes to the deepest levels of humanity, and is an experience not to be missed, if you have the opportunity to see it.   

Based on no more connection than “dream” in the title, and wall art as a theme, I append notice of another documentary I just watched, for possible future showing at the Clark.  In a Dream (2009, MRQE) is a very intimate look at an outsider artist in South Philly who has covered acres of walls in his neighborhood with large-scale mosaics.  Isaiah Zagar is an understandably but amazingly obsessive character, as portrayed by his filmmaking son Jeremiah and supported by his activist and gallerist wife Julia.  Psychological and family troubles impinge on the artist’s quirky but stunning work, and add a whole other dimension to the film, which is also a visual feast.  So there’s a lot going on here, perhaps a little too much, since the film seemed slightly long to me, even at less than 80 minutes.  Nonetheless, it’s a well-made and fascinating documentary.

How 2010 stacked up

With my usual half-year delay, by now I’ve seen almost every well-noticed film of 2010, going by rankings such as the top 50 in the Film Comment critics poll, and here I distill them into four categories of consumer advice.  Since almost all are out on DVD by now, you should find something here for your Netflix queue.  For fuller commentary, use the search box at the top of this page to find my personal review, which in turn will link you to the respective Metacritic page surveying other critical opinion.

Exhortations, which I urge you to see:  For sheer ambition, my choice for best film of the year is Carlos, the three-part epic by Olivier Assayas, which illuminates the international franchising of political terror from the Seventies on, and may ultimately rank with The Godfather Saga.  I share the general enthusiasm for The Social Network – let’s just say I “friend” it.  And I also share the enthusiasm of the cognescenti for Winter’s Bone, the Ozark indie thriller that’s a cross between horror film and documentary.  Into this exalted company I would admit the HBO biopic, Temple Grandin, with its transcendent performance by Claire Danes as the autistic expert on animal behavior.

Recommendations, which I advise you to see:  Here I’ll start in the mainstream and branch out into various tributaries.  I like The King’s Speech and True Grit as much as most people do, and Toy Story 3 much more than I anticipated. 

Polanski’s Ghost Writer is a very effective political thriller, and three foreign crime dramas reward the effort to watch their grisly violence – the Red Riding Trilogy (like Carlos a three-part series originally made for television) tracks the long and convoluted case of the Yorkshire Ripper; Animal Kingdom follows the decline of a Melbourne crime family ruled by an Aussie lioness of a mother; A Prophet shows in intimate gory detail how an Arab youth in a French prison comes to depend on the Corsican mob that runs the joint and much else besides.

The relationships amongst family, friends, and lovers are examined from many angles in an international array of worthy films.  The American indies Mother & Child and Please Give weave together the stories of several families -- Roderigo Garcia with an excellent cast led by Annette Bening and Naomi Watts as a mother and daughter separated at birth, and Nicole Holofcener out of a cross-section of Manhattan neurotics surrounding Catherine Keener.   From Britain, Mike Leigh does not disappoint but does not top himself with Another Year, and Never Let Me Go tells a surprisingly thought-provoking dystopian fable about some attractive young people at a boarding school that is not what it seems.  From Italy, the operatic and sensual family drama of I Am Love is anchored by Tilda Swinton.  From France, The Father of My Children meticulously examines the lead-up to and fall-out from a family tragedy.  From Germany comes the step-by-step break-up of a mismatched couple on a Mediterranean vacation in Everyone Else.

Appreciations, which I consider worth seeing:  I would cite both The Fighter and The Town for knowing portrayals of rough’n’tumble Massachusetts working-class communities.  Among the other Oscar nominees, I like The Kids Are All Right less than many do, but 127 Hours more than I expected, though neither strikes me as a legitimate contender for “Best Picture.”  The rest of this category is a mixed-bag of little-known films, each of which found some support in critics polls, except a couple I would point out as suiting my particular (peculiar?) personal taste – Neil Jordan’s selkie fable Ondine appeals to me for its local Irish flavor and the un-star-like performance of Colin Farrell, and I appreciate the relatively serious portrayal of Darwin by Paul Bettany in Creation.  Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling enact a winsome romance and lacerating break-up in Blue Valentine.  Highly-charged historical situations are depicted, again from a variety of nations -- Lebanon looks at the 1982 war from the perspective of some raw Israeli recruits confined to a tank; White Material takes in an African civil war from the perspective of French coffee plantation owner Isabelle Huppert; Vincere looks at the rise of Mussolini from the view of the woman and son he discarded on the way up the ladder; and Four Lions is an unlikely terrorist comedy about a half-assed group of British Islamicists.  Alamar is sui generis, quietly following a young mixed-race boy as he goes to spend a summer with his father in the natural paradise of the Mexican coral reefs.

Equivocations, which I leave to your discretion:  Two critical favorites that I halfway appreciated, but cannot recommend, are the Noah Baumbach-Ben Stiller acerbic comedy Greenberg and the Korean murder mystery Mother.  I have high expectations for Sofia Coppola’s films, which were severely disappointed by Somewhere.  For a while I was under the spell of Black Swan, but when the spell was broken by sheer over-the-top implausibility, I turned against the film rather violently.  I never fell under the spell of Christopher Nolan’s Inception or Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, and wound up fast-forwarding through both.  Two highly praised and highly offbeat foreign films I stubbornly refused to get were the Greek family fable Dogtooth and Alain Resnais’ weird and not-so-wonderful Wild Grass.

Documendations:  Inside Job won the Oscar for best documentary feature and came in #7 overall in the Film Comment poll, but this recapitulation of the financial collapse of 2008 was not my favorite of the year’s nonfiction films.  Among the nominees, I was more impressed with Restrepo, with its intimate you-are-there feel for a remote military outpost in Afghanistan at the furthest extension of the American empire (the co-director was subsequently killed in action in Libya); Waste Land, about a project by the international art star Vik Muniz set in the largest garbage dump in Rio; and Gasland, a D-I-Y exploration of the environmental disaster-in-waiting that is “fracking” for natural gas.  For understanding of America’s political and economic crises, I would turn to Alex Gibney, whose Casino Jack and the United States of Money was truly illuminating and enraging about the lasting toxic influence of the cadre of College Republicans led by Karl Rove, while his Client 9 detailed the rise and fall of Eliot Spitzer in a way that was virtually as informative as Inside Job in fingering the culprits of the financial meltdown.  The Oath offered surprising access to the inside of Al-Qaeda by following Osama Bin Laden’s ex-bodyguard, who is now a taxi driver in Yemen.  The Tillman Story showed how truth was one of the casualties of the Afghan war, and Last Train Home put the face of one family on the immense impact of huge internal migration in China from the countryside to the cities.  On nonpolitical themes, standouts of the year included Sweetgrass, a nearly wordless meditation on a great sheep drive to grazing in the wilds of Montana, and a late work by cinema verite pioneer D.A. Pennebaker, Kings of Pastry, about chefs vying for a French medal of honor.  One quirky outlier that has its detractors as well as advocates, Catfish, finds another proponent in me, as it takes a highly personal approach to exploring the implications of social media.  Some will tell you that Exit Through the Gift Shop was a great look at contemporary street art, but for art from an outsider perspective, I much prefer Marwencol.

So all in all, 2010 definitely goes in the book as a year of worthy films.  Take a look for yourself.

Another Year

In most years Mike Leigh is in the running for best director, but this is just Another Year, well-done and extremely watchable, though at times excruciatingly so.  Lesley Manville has been widely celebrated for her portrayal of a desperate lush, trying to fend off the sexual and existential panic of middle-age, but she is just one of the characters that circle around the cozy central couple played by Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent – she a counselor, he a geological engineer, both products of the Sixties -- who seem to maintain an open house for family and friends, while extending an open-hearted acceptance, even acquiescence, to the quirks of others -- until one of them does the unacceptable.   Leigh always creates characters who are real and rounded and whole, but your heart does not go out to any of this bunch, as it did to Vera Drake or Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky, so you are left with their foibles, be they smugly happy or desperately unhappy.   They are analyzed as specimens, all too human specimens, but the film, while even-handed, remains stubbornly unsympathetic on several levels.  Not as unsympathetic as Naked, but not among the director’s most approachable, such as Topsy-Turvy.  Nonetheless, Mike Leigh remains a must-see.  (2010, MC-80)

Somewhere

I’m sorry, for me Sofia Coppola’s latest was strictly Nowheresville.  I guess she deserves points for being strict, but she took me nowhere I wanted to go.  As much as I have liked her previous films, this one left me cold, despite glowing endorsements from critics I usually trust and agree with.  The model most frequently cited is Antonioni, and that right there might be the problem.  I’ve never really grooved on him either.  Sure, sure, the emptiness of soul that goes with hollow success.  Who cares?  Stephen Dorff is okay as the hunky if disheveled Hollywood star, too out of it to appreciate the women who throw themselves at him, whose 11-year-old daughter shows up at his suite in the Chateau Marmont.  Elle Fanning is quite charming in the role, and there is some subdued but affectionate byplay between father and daughter.  You’ll know right away if this is your cup of tea.  The first shot is prolonged as most of them are, with a fixed camera that frames two arcs of a racing oval in the desert, where a Ferrari passes through the frame in one direction then passes deeper through the frame in the other, once, twice, thrice, as the seconds tick off.  Get in a staring frame of mind, or give this film a pass.  Nothing of great human interest will pass before your eyes, though it will all be designed within an inch of its life.  (2010, MC-67)

Miracle of Michelle

Is it time to anoint Michelle Williams as the best actress of her generation?  What woman around 30 would you watch with more confidence in her ability to make any character come alive, whether it’s the waif of Wendy and Lucy or the emergency room doctor of Mammoth, not to mention her Oscar nom for Brokeback Mountain?  Here are two more I’ve just seen.

Blue Valentine.  (2010, MC-81)  I couldn’t decide whether the characters in this movie were a mess, or the movie was a mess, but the film’s value lies in the questions it leaves open, your urge to make sense of it after the fact.  Derek Cianfrance channels Cassavettes in a lacerating romantic drama, which flashes back and forth between the end and the beginning of a relationship, from love at first sight to miserable ever after.  Though he is reputed to have worked on the script for 12 years, and had the two stars attached for many years, the writer-director finally went on set and instructed Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling to surprise him.  And they do, and us, and themselves as well.  There are marvelous and revealing moments, but does it all hang together?  The characters are sufficiently complicated that our reactions to them have to be complicated, but some elements seem over-determined.  I was unhappy with the ending on several levels, but credit the film’s commitment to truths of intimate reality rather than wish fulfillment.  It’s definitely an experience, but not for everyone (NC-17 or not).

Meek’s Cutoff.  (2011, MC-85) is also an experience, excruciating in an entirely different way.  In Kelly Reichardt’s film, three covered wagons traverse a trackless sagebrush wilderness on their way to Oregon in 1845.  They’ve hired Meek to guide them and he has led them into a shortcut that goes on forever, as their water runs out and disaster looms on every side.  Though eschewing widescreen panorama, the film does capture tiny human figures lost in a vastness.  We go through most of the film with no close-up view of the characters, with scenes in darkness lit only by lantern or campfire, with mumbled dialogue less audible than the sound of the wind or creaking wagon wheels.  It takes a long time to recognize Michelle Williams hidden in her bonnet, as the woman who takes the lead, first amongst the other women, Shirley Henderson and Zoe Kazan, and eventually among the whole train, as Meek loses all credibility.  Slow moving and unresolved in a way that infuriates many, this too is a film that radiates reality while foiling audience expectation.  You will be rewarded only if you are patient enough.

Winning at failure

I highly recommend Too Big to Fail, the docudrama currently showing on HBO, and was surprised to find other critics somewhat less enthusiastic (MC-67).  Adapted from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book of the same name, and directed by Curtis Hanson, this film concisely and comprehensibly gives a day-by-day account of the financial crisis of September 2008, with an astounding cast giving spot-on portrayals of the now all-too-familiar players, starting with William Hurt as Hank Paulsen, Billy Crudup as Timothy Geithner, and Paul Giamatti as an uncanny simulacrum of Ben Bernanke.  In the array of asshole bankers are James Woods, Bill Pullman, Tony Shaloub, and other familiar faces easy to recognize and easy to associate with the real characters.  I totally believed that this is how the crisis looked from the inside – perhaps an outside perspective is required for the total picture of the economic meltdown, but as personal drama this was informative and convincing.

On a lesser scale, I found another recent HBO docudrama worthwhile.  Cinema Verité (MC-74) recreates the filming of the Seventies fly-on-the-wall documentary series on PBS, “An American Family,” which may be considered the fount of “reality tv.”  The Loud family willy-nilly became a cultural phenomenon, their lives a topic of controversy on every side.  Made by the American Splendor pair of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, this retrospect is equally adept at negotiating levels of reality, cutting from original documentary into re-creation.  Diane Lane is her reliably marvelous self as Pat Loud, and Tim Robbins is also excellent as Bill.  James Gandolfini is okay as the show’s producer, and the rest of the cast up to snuff.  It’s possible the film does not hold up without one’s own memories of the time portrayed, but the nostalgia is astringent rather than balmy.

I’d been planning to give Albert Brooks another look and Cinema Verité was the perfect lead-in to Real Life (1979), his take on the same phenomenon and startlingly prescient in many ways, despite being more a series of sketches than a real movie.  Brooks plays the obnoxious documentary producer who inserts himself as well as his crew into the lives of a “typical” American family, and is an equal opportunity satirist, mocking himself along with everyone else.  It’s all quite hilarious and biting.

Not quite so biting, and therefore not as great as it might have been is his Defending Your Life (1991).  The set-up is perfect -- Brooks is an advertising man who drives his new BMW off the lot and into an oncoming bus, and wakes up to find himself in Judgment City, an amusingly ordinary purgatory where the newly-dead are tried to see how much they have evolved above fear and whether they have to go back to earth for another crack at becoming a bigger brain.  The neurotic Brooks is not a good candidate to move on, as the key points of his life’s humiliations are reviewed, with Rip Torn not helping much as his defense attorney.  He meets a newly-dead woman whose benign calm makes her certain to move up; Meryl Streep, in an underwritten role, provides enough delight to make this sweetheart plausible.  The many funny complications in the process go mushy in an ending that must have been copped from The Graduate, but despite going soft at the end, this film about heaven is funny as hell.

Poor reviews had so far kept me from one film by Williams classmate and particular favorite of mine, writer-director John Sayles, but I finally caught up with Silver City (2004, MC-47).  The film has its moments, especially with Chris Cooper as a W. clone running for governor of Colorado, and a notable cast that includes Richard Dreyfuss as his Cheneyesque handler and Kris Kristofferson as the robber baron power behind the throne, but the story detours into a questionable murder mystery by an equally questionable investigator in Danny Huston.  Chinatown this ain’t, but I still look forward to more from Sayles.

Calling all docs!

I’m late in doing so, but I really want to call attention to the current season of “Independent Lens” on PBS, which has been presenting a lot of documentaries that I may show at the Clark sometime.  Two I’d just watched on dvd before they turned up on the program.  Waste Land I’ve already written about, and also worthy of recommendation was Marwencol (2010, MC-81).  The odd name denotes an imaginary town peopled by GI Joes and Barbies who enact the WWII scenarios of a man who had his brain damaged in a beating outside a bar.  The town, as 3-D artifact and as reproduced in photos, serves as physical and psychological therapy for Mark Hogancamp, to recreate an identity lost along with most of his personal memories.  His photos are discovered by an art magazine, leading to a New York gallery show, which challenges the creator’s identity in more ways than one.  Inspiring, almost mind-blowing, this is a film that works on many levels.

Another possibility for Clark showing is The Desert of Forbidden Art, which tells an intriguing story of a lone wolf collector of avant-garde painting banned by the Soviets, who created his own museum in unlikely Uzbekistan, in a fascinating mix of exotic themes.  Jean-Michel Basquiat: the Radiant Child was not bad, but pales next to Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat, as spectacularly embodied by Jeffrey Wright (with David Bowie as Warhol).

Off the topic of art, I definitely recommend Bhutto (2010, MC-68), also available on dvd, which focuses on Benazir as legatee of her father as leader of Pakistan, in a dynastic clan that is half-royal, half-democratic.  Twice prime minister, the first woman to lead a Muslim country, and twice deposed by the military, she was assassinated in 2007 when she returned from exile to run once again.  Educated at Harvard and Oxford, she provides an understandable window into an unknowable country, which has emerged as a crucial frenemy of the U.S.

Another PBS documentary series of consistent interest is “American Experience,” and I take particular note of two recent presentations.  Stonewall Uprising (2010, MC-74) is very effective at taking us back to the origins of gay liberation in the “riots” that took place in 1969 when the police raided that Greenwich Village bar once too often, after its Mafia owners failed to pay up, and the gay patrons took the brunt of the assault.  The jaw-dropping footage of official commentary in “educational” films and even on “60 Minutes” offers a crash course in just how far homosexuality has come out of the closet and into the mainstream of American life. 

Similarly we’ve come a long way from the situation of the Freedom Riders (2009, DVD) in Stanley Nelson’s extremely effective documentary about the 1961 bus protests against segregation on interstate transportation.  An interracial group from the Congress on Racial Equality embarked on a peaceful attempt to ride together from Washington to New Orleans, only to meet beatings and burning when they reached Alabama.  After the highly-publicized violence, other riders and the civil rights movement as a whole took up the challenge, escalating the issue until the Kennedys and the federal government were forced to intervene.  While we watch the protestors of the Arab Spring try to rise up against entrenched and illegitimate power, it is salutary to remember that fifty years ago, the situation was not that different in parts of America.

Another documentary for future showing at the Clark, just available from Netflix -- as most of these films are -- is Who Does She Think She Is? (2008), by Pamela Tanner Boll, who made the noteworthy Born into Brothels.  This film looks at a variety of women who persist in their art while raising families and facing all the obstacles to their success.  Though hardly earthshaking, it is genuinely inspiring.

Two more films to mention for completeness’ sake, both of which have their virtues but not my strong endorsement are Barbara Kopple’s latest, Gun Fight (2011) and Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman (2010, MC-81), which dealt respectively with the important issues of gun control and public education reform, but did not tell me anything particularly new or eye-opening, though I tend to support their conclusions.

Death of child or parent

Rabbit Hole.  (2010, MC-76)  The best thing I can say about John Cameron Mitchell’s adaptation of David Lindsay-Abair’s Pulitzer-winning play is that I had no sense of its being a filmed stage piece.  Carefully skirting grief-porn and restraining the wildness of his Hedwig and the Angry Inch persona, Mitchell relies on his actors to reveal emotion through indirection rather than bludgeoning, and leavens the proceedings with unexpected wit.  Aaron Eckhart and especially Nicole Kidman are excellent as a couple whose 4-year-old son was struck and killed by a car eight months before, each flailing to find the coping strategy that will work for him or her, but maybe not for them.  Diane Wiest as Kidman’s mother leads an effective supporting cast.  At a swift 92 minutes, the film does not wallow or browbeat, and while the setting lacks a tangible sense of reality (even in a grocery store aisle), the actors unfold the truth of their characters’ emotions and personalities.  Not exactly a film to lift one’s spirits, it does not punish the viewer but rewards attention.

The Father of My Children.  (2010, MC-76)  It’s no spoiler to say that at midpoint of this film, the father dies and the children grieve, three young daughters, each in her own way, and their mother in hers.  Mia Hansen-Love tells this story with such intimacy that you suspect it happened to her, and the father does turn out to be based on a well-known French film producer.  In the first half of the film his small independent operation comes under increasing pressure from all sides, as he suavely drives around while juggling two cellphones, to spend rushed but quality time with the delightful females of his family.  In the second half his family tries to pick up the pieces of his ruined life, in a film that gives equal weight to joy and sorrow, love and mortality.  It’s lively rather than deathly, and a sleeper on my best of the year list.

More classics or not?

Pardon me while I return for the nonce to my original purpose in writing this filmlog, started on 1-1-00 and put online five years later.  Namely, to keep track of what I’ve been watching and my immediate off-hand evaluation, to forestall the flaws of memory.  So lately I’ve seen or re-seen a lot of films I don’t feel moved to “review” in any meaningful sense, but merely to register my reaction.

First off, in my “Drawn to Portraits” film series at the Clark, Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) lived up to its billing as noir classic though I was struck most by its comic elements, which made me think of The Big Sleep, though Gene Tierney is no Bacall and Dana Andrews hardly a Bogart.  Portrait of Jennie (1948) delivered equally, in the vein of romantic fantasy, with sophisticated visuals and great location shooting in NYC by director William Dieterle, and well-played leads by Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones, lovingly produced by her husband, David O. Selznick.  Only Vertigo failed to meet its overblown expectations – what are you thinking of, Sight & Sound critics poll, to vote this second only to Citizen Kane as the best film of all time?  I could name a half-dozen Hitchcocks I think are better (first off – Strangers on a Train).

It was another critics poll -- this for best of past decade -- that drove me to give their #2 choice another chance, in this case David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), and I came away equally unconvinced.  I still don’t get it, though the film does showcase Naomi Watts to advantage.  Despite re-viewing, the film continues to make little sense for me, and any atmospheric impression it made quickly evaporated.

Another second look confirmed another less than enthusiastic response.  Naked (1993) remains a strong but unpleasant experience.  I am usually a big fan of Mike Leigh’s kitchen sink dramas, but though David Thewlis is powerful here as a blow-in from Yorkshire to London, where he crashes with an old girlfriend, while abusing her and her roommate and any other woman who happens by, this does not rank with my favorites.  His tirades are compelling in a bitter, bilious, spittle-spewing way, but for me the misogyny was not redeemed by any empathy-extending understanding of the character.  

Pure happenstance led me to re-viewing Wise Blood, John Huston’s 1979 adaptation of the Flannery O’Connor novel, but I recall from long ago a similar reaction of exhilaration and letdown.  Brad Dourif is perfectly squirrelly as Hazel Motes, a GI who returns to the southern town of his hellfire upbringing, and rebels against the Jesus-soaked atmosphere by preaching fanatically the “Church of Truth Without Jesus Christ.”  It’s extremely pungent, but in the end I find the story, like O’Connor herself, too extreme and arbitrary.  But there is a reek of gothic reality and wicked satire along the way.

Also caught on TCM was Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1950), Albert Lewin’s surprisingly literate romantic melodrama set in a technicolor Spanish village, where American émigré songstress Ava Gardner captivates all the men and is in turn captivated by James Mason, the mysterious sailor whose identity is given away in the title.  The movie aspires to myth in a manner that is lush but not totally laughable.

The same might be said of Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), which I watched because I was hoping to show a series of Cleopatra films at the Clark, in conjunction with an appearance by bestselling biographer Stacy Schiff, but that fell through.  This fairly lavish production of the G.B. Shaw play features Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh to good effect, but ultimately doesn’t make a whole lot of sense out of the spectacle, a problem that may be characteristic of films about the Queen of the Nile.

Mildred Pierce (1945) I watched again to compare Joan Crawford’s performance with Kate Winslet’s, also good but also lost in an unengaging story.  Michael Curtiz’s version adds a murder to spice things up, but the design and the acting, and the implicit social commentary on woman’s lot, are not enough to involve me with a bunch of not-so-interesting characters.  Compare Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas for a more compelling movie about a mother sacrificing all for an ungrateful daughter.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1987) was another film I was willing to give a second chance, and it was no hardship to watch Daniel Day Lewis and Juliet Binoche, and director Philip Kaufman’s clever insertion of them into newsreel footage of the Prague Spring uprising, but it does go on and on, the characters remain opaque to me, and I eventually fast forwarded to the end.  Lena Olin, however, caught my eye, so I went back to another film I remember liking more, Enemies, a Love Story (1989).  Paul Mazursky’s adaptation of an Isaac B. Singer novel tells of a Holocaust survivor who finds himself in a vividly-realized 1949 New York, with “wives” in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx.  One is Lena Olin, as electrifying as I remembered, and another is Anjelica Huston, wry and witty with deep submerged pain.  To me there were a few key gaps in motivation and narrative, but the acting and atmosphere carried the day, though I found it hard to forgive Ron Silver in the central role for the actor’s subsequent emergence as a right-wing apologist.

One last note on what’s classic and what’s not:  A while back I made an effort to confront the inflated reputation of Nicholas Ray, an especial favorite of my favorite director, Francois Truffaut.  They Live by Night (1948) got me interested, with Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell extremely affecting as two hardscrabble kids in love and on the run, in a film that effectively combines social realism and doomed romanticism.  So then I watched On Dangerous Ground (1951), and bought in somewhat to its reputation as a noir classic, intrigued by Robert Ryan as the rough-edged cop and Ida Lupino as the blind woman he investigates and falls for, though I still found something slipshod and unconvincing in Ray’s direction.  Then I went back to Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and found the trio of James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo iconic but their story once again unconvincing.  Johnny Guitar (1954) is indeed an eye-popping curiosity, a luridly-colored Western with a monumental Joan Crawford as the whore-turned-businesswoman, and Sterling Hayden as the gunslinging title character who wants to protect her against the raging jealousy of Mercedes Cambridge and her pack of vigilantes.  But again I do not see the mythic Freudian depths that some choose to see in Ray’s work.  And in King of Kings (1961) and 55 Days to Peking (1962), I see none of the intimate reality that Ray is purported to bring to his standard epics.  I remember being impressed by the latter as a youth, but Charlton Heston is by now another actor I cannot abide because of his off-screen activities and on-screen impassivity.  I understand that Nick Ray himself is a Bigger Than Life (1956) character in film history, but his films stubbornly do not make much of an impression on me.  Someday I’ll give the highly-esteemed In a Lonely Place (1950) another chance, and catch up with a couple of other Ray films on TCM, but I don’t imagine I’ll come over to Nick in time.

Catching up with film

Once I fall out of the habit of writing about films the day after I see them, they begin to back up, and now I’m stunned to see that I haven’t posted here in more than a month.  So I begin a process of catching up, starting with recent films, now that I have only two more must-sees due on dvd before I close the book on 2010 releases and make my official picks for best of the year.  Between now and then I will also catch up with recommended tv series, documentaries, and another round of “Classic or not?”  I will also have further word on upcoming film series at the Clark, so please keep coming back to Cinema Salon, even though I haven’t given you much to see lately.

White Material.  (2010, MC-81)  Claire Denis’ latest earned the bronze medal, voted third-best of 2010 in Film Comment poll, but strikes me as a film I would have to see again to settle on an opinion about -- but which I have no desire to see again.  As a director, Denis is a refined taste whose films I sometimes get (Beau Travail, Friday Night) and sometimes don’t (The Intruder, this film).  Here she returns to themes of her upbringing in Africa (as in Chocolat), with French settlers driven out in a civil war waged by child soldiers led by a charismatic and progressive young officer.  The ever-interesting Isabelle Huppert, whitest of the white, alien to the dark continent, has only one thought, to save her coffee plantation and its current crop, but forces are unleashed that will consume everything around her within the two days the film covers, in its own roundabout way.  The treatment is elliptical and enigmatic, but the sense of encircling menace is persuasive.  The shock ending adds to, rather than resolves, the puzzlement.

Mother.  (2010, MC-79)  Bong Joon-ho’s latest came in 11^th in that same critics poll (8^th in indieWire).  After The Host and Memories of Murder, the young South Korean is definitely one of the flavors of the month in world cinema, putting his personal stamp on various genres, following that wry creature-feature and offbeat police procedural with this “wrong man” mystery widely described as Hitchcockian, though Bong is even weirder than that chubby old pervert.  When not strange and fascinating, he can be flat-footed as well as deadpan, but this film is made by the performance of Kim Hye-ja as the mother determined to exonerate her dim-bulb grown son, who is accused of murdering a schoolgirl.  The twists of the story sometimes elicit a “Huh, what?” response, but in the end it all hangs together around that central performance.

Two favorite directors I included in my “10 Under 50” film series at the Clark some years back had recent releases that attracted almost no attention, but with which I finally caught up based on the talent involved.

Michael Winterbottom’s Summer in Genoa (known as Genova (MRQE-64) when released in Britain in 2008) is just out on US dvd, probably predicated on Colin Firth’s recent anointing as Best Actor.  He’s good here as the father to two girls, probably 16 and 10, who were with their mother when she was killed in a car accident.  Old college friend Catherine Keener gets him a teaching position in Italy and he feels that getting far away is the best way for the girls and him to cope.  Maybe yes, maybe no.  The film casts a real Don’t Look Now vibe over the narrow alleyways of the medieval city, which are penetrated by Winterbottom’s travel-light style of filmmaking.  With a compelling mix of beauty and risk, the film is flawed mainly by a conclusion that makes the whole thing seem like all wind-up and no pitch.

Similarly ominous but unresolved is Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth (2009, MC-51), which also went nowhere despite the presence of two compelling performers in Michelle Williams and Gael Garcia Bernal. They play a well-to-do New York couple who share a fabulous loft apartment with their young daughter and her Filipina nanny.  She’s an emergency room doctor on the night shift, and he’s a computer game designer off to Asia to sign a big contract, so as much as they love their daughter, the girl’s primary relationship is with the lovely nanny, who has left her own two boys back on the islands in order to earn a better life for them in this globalized but fractured world.  Each character in the film suffers in isolation from the others, despite connection by cellphone and distant affection.  Grim and moody to match the maker’s name, with lovely images and haunting music, this film has much to recommend it, but finally fails to satisfy.  The world may be a rigged game, but this film seems a bit rigged as well.

Here are two more films I found more interesting than many did, given a certain affinity going in:

Aaron Katz’s Quiet City (2007, MRQE) is a “mumblecore” enactment of twenty-somethings drifting through the Brooklyn scene.  Having once been a twenty-something drifting through Brooklyn, I was willing to expend attention on a newer version of same.  As is characteristic of this genre, the girl is attractive but not conventionally so, and the guy is a shlub.  Each shot -- some of them lovely -- is held too long, as if trying to protract the proceedings to feature length.  The film would love to be another Before Sunrise, but falls in the middle of the mumblecore pack, among whom only Andrew Bujalski so far emerges as a talent to watch. 

Marco Amenta’s The Sicilian Girl (2010, MC-48) I got into initially for its striking images of the island of my forefathers.  Then I was held by the performance of Veronica D'Agostino as the feisty teenage girl who decides to revenge the deaths of her father and brother by informing on the Mafia, and goes into ineffective witness protection in Rome.  The story follows, perhaps too faithfully, that of a real young woman about whom the director has already made a documentary, and never really goes as deep as you hope it might.    

Catching up with TV

Like Metacritic, I offer a hearty endorsement to Downton Abbey (2011, MC-92), which I did not see when it was broadcast on PBS Masterpiece Theater last winter, but caught up with on dvd (streaming video also available from Netflix).  I simply found it outrageously entertaining, mixing all the pleasures of British heritage productions with a winking wit that managed to collect a host of old clichés into a postmodern soap opera delight.  The seven episodes follow the life of the title character, a massive old pile sure to impress, from the sinking of the Titanic to the start of World War I, brilliantly sketching in the lives of a score of characters upstairs and down.  I don’t know when I have seen a better ensemble of actors, every last one making the most of his or her minutes on screen.  Julian Fellowes wrote Gosford Park and here combines that with Remains of the Day and many a BBC production, but comes up with something that seems totally fresh.  The subsequent revival of Upstairs, Downstairs seemed pallid by comparison.

I hope you are taking in the fifth and final season of Friday Night Lights (MC-82), now showing on NBC but already out on dvd, which I previously watched on DirecTV last fall.  If not, you really ought to start with the first season and watch the whole series.  It definitely ranks in my Top 10 of all time.  Yes, it’s nominally about high school football in Texas, but it offers one of the great continuing portraits of a marriage in the coach and his wife, superbly played by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, to go with a believable and involving group portrait of a community, intelligent about currents of race and sex and economic reality.  Lots of cute chicks and studs too.  Really, give it a try, it will surprise you.  Though it wandered from its core inspiration into melodrama in the second season, the show reinvented itself in subsequent seasons and ended its five-season run on a perfect series of notes.

In that, it couldn’t be more different from Big Love (MC-85 -- you've got to be kidding!), which utterly fizzled in its finale, spinning further and further into absurdity.  As with another recent HBO miniseries, Mildred Pierce (MC-69), at the end I was not just disappointed but wanted back all the time and attention I had invested to that point.  But just when I was thinking about canceling my HBO subscription, the second season of Treme (MC-84) began.  To me, David Simon can do no wrong, with The Wire my all-time favorite tv series, and Generation Kill ranking pretty high too.  This multifaceted look at the music and culture of New Orleans as it tries to come back after Katrina may lack narrative drive, but steeps the viewer in a creative gumbo of diverse characters.  Again the acting is strong across the board, carrying multiple storylines forward in a way that makes one care about each and every one (though Lucia Micarelli most of all).  And for somebody who can’t get enough of Bunk and Lester, it’s great to see Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters again.  And Kim Dickens coming over from FNL, etc. etc.

I’m a latecomer to Men of a Certain Age (MC-86) on TNT, but after my interest was piqued by one new episode, I went back and caught up with the first season on dvd, and am currently watching reruns of the second in preparation for its resumption with new episodes on June 1^st.  I was definitely not among the Everyone who Loves Raymond, so I was not alert to Ray Romano’s new show, but now I have to say that at least I like him.  And even more I like Andre Braugher and Scott Bakula as the guys with whom he hikes, eats lunch, shoots the shit, and negotiates the vicissitudes of midlife.  More affectionate and truthful satire than sitcom, this show presents believably rounded characters in characteristically believable situations of work and family.  Try it, and if you’re at all like me, you will find a pleasant surprise.

Another new show I was slow to see, but now look forward to more of, is The Big C (MC-66), Showtime’s attempt to match the success of Weeds, a show I sampled but decidedly did not get hooked on.  The new series stars Laura Linney, however, and I’ve been half in love with her since You Can Count on Me, so I was inclined to give it a try when I had the opportunity, despite not being drawn by the idea of a comedy about cancer.  And Ms. Linney is indeed a delight, but the whole show is wittier and sharper than I expected, definitely worth catching.