Mother and Child

This is another comparable film that I preferred to widely-acclaimed The Kids Are All Right.  The main point of comparison is in superlative performances by Annette Bening, but while in the other she retains her glamour in a lifestyle magazine setting, here in Rodrigo Garcia’s film, she strips away vanity in a truly lived-in LA environment.  As with Nine Lives, the son of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and buddy of the three amigos (Cuarón, Del Toro, Inárritu) recruits exceptional actresses and actors to live out his interlocked stories of something like real life.  (Garcia is also responsible for the HBO series In Treatment, which I will have to find my way into at some point.) There is an element of contrivance in the way different story lines finally connect, but the coincidences are more grounded than in Babel and its many modish epigones.  The narrative leaps over major developments to focus on crucial moments of truth and feeling.  Bening plays a difficult, disappointed woman, a physical therapist who yearns for the child she gave up when she got pregnant as a 14-year-old, while she cares for the aging mother who has instructed her in the disenchantments of life.  In parallel, Naomi Watts (in a highly plausible pairing) plays her unknown daughter, who has sealed off the anger of her abandonment in determined independence and devotion to getting ahead as a high-powered lawyer.  They pair off with Jimmy Smits and Samuel L. Jackson respectively, as a kindly fellow therapist and the head of a fancy legal firm.  A third strand of the film is anchored by Kerry Washington, as an infertile bakery shop proprietor who is trying to adopt a child while ignoring the ambivalence of her husband.  There are several other representations of the relationship highlighted in the title, which add up to a convincing group portrait, despite some gaps in plausibility.  If you are a mother or were formerly a child, this adoption drama is worth seeing. (2010, MC-64) 

Other side of town

By happenstance, I watched in succession a group of recent films whose Metacritic ratings all fell in the mid- to high-70s, but of which I had decidedly different opinions, here listed from most favorable to least.

From The Town (2010, MC-74), I get the feeling that Ben Affleck looked at the efforts of elders Eastwood, Scorsese, Lumet, and others -- to penetrate the seamy side of his native Boston -- and said, “Hey, I’ll show you what we’re all about.”  Of course he’d already done that in his first directorial effort, Gone Baby Gone, but I was surprised to find myself won over by this expression of the Beantown crime formula.  I don’t usually go for car chases, but I found one such through the narrow streets of the North End to be hilarious.  Likewise with extended shootouts between cops and robbers, but it’s kind of cute to see one such set in Fenway Park.  The town of the title is Charlestown, a square mile that has in fact produced an amazing number of bank and armored car robbers, and while my knowledge of Boston’s ethnic enclaves is not comprehensive, I found the flavor of this relatively authentic, within its genre limits.  Affleck himself is the leader of one gang, with childhood friend Jeremy Renner as his triggerman.  In the course of one bank heist, they take manager Rebecca Hall hostage, but then release her blindfolded, only to find out she’s a “toonie” – as opposed to “townie” – in their own neighborhood.  Ben tries to check out whether she could have recognized the masked robbers, and soon is falling for her (not a stretch of the imagination with the lovely Ms. Hall).  Don Draper, aka Jon Hamm, leads the FBI investigation, while other welcome faces turn up, such as Chris Cooper for a scene or two as Affleck’s imprisoned father.  Not a cinematic gem, this proved to be an entertaining genre exercise with strong local flavor.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010, MC-79) was reviewed as a documentary to see even if you have no appreciation of the subject.  I don’t, and I did -- but I don’t necessarily advice you to do the same, even if Anne Sundberg and Ricki Stern do look beyond showbiz cliché in their portrait of a driven performer’s drive to perform, even well past her sell-by date.  Though I was never able to see behind Rivers’ absurdly nipped-tucked-&-botoxed face to a more sympathetic character behind the mask, one does derive some sense of a will, a way, and a world.  But if you want to spend time in the company of a tough New York Jewish comedienne and provocateur, you’d be better off with Fran Lebovits and Public Speaking.

Soul Kitchen (2010, MC-76) offers just what you expect from Germany – frothy romantic comedy and food porn.  Now I do indeed have great expectations of director Fatih Akin, but this would-be jeu d’esprit is a far cry from Head-On and Edge of Heaven.  I’m inclined to let him have his fun, but I certainly did not join in, and wound up fast-forwarding through the second half.  This film takes his usual inside look at his hometown of Hamburg but does not balance it off with trips to his ancestral Turkey, as his other films do so memorably.  This caper follows a hapless restaurateur trying to appeal to a hip young crowd in a converted factory, while dealing with his journalist girlfriend going off to Shanghai and his ne’er-do-well brother getting out of jail and depending on him for work, along with a madman chef and a yuppie old classmate scheming to buy him out.  This film certainly expresses youthful energy, but for me the romance was vacant and the comedy landed with a dull thud.

On the other hand, I knew I was not going to have much use for Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010, MC-74), but dutifully took a look at what some consider among the best films of the past year.  Very much like another of the same -- Scorsese’s Shutter Island -- I just did not care that much about what is going on inside Leonardo DiCaprio’s head, and wound up fast-forwarding after the first hour of oh-wow dreamscapes.  It’s not so much that I couldn’t figure out what was going on, as I didn’t give a damn about any of it, despite a lot of appealing performers, from Ellen Page to Michael Caine, and some spectacular -- if not special -- effects.

Classic or not?

In the past month or so, I have watched (or re-watched) a lot of films that someone or other has called a classic, and while I don’t have it in me to review each in much detail, I will take the opportunity to pop off on my opinion of whether each film is indeed classic.

We’ll start with an easy one, a film that practically defines the meaning of the word “classic,” and lives up to its billing every time.  Casablanca (1942) is the fruit of the Hollywood studio system at the end of its golden age, plucked at its peak of ripeness.  It seems almost too familiar, without having been seen in ages, and hovered deep in my Netflix queue for a decade.  But one night I happened to flip on TCM just as the opening credits began to roll -- I couldn’t resist, and was transported all over again.  It was indeed an amazing moment of movie perfection, with every element conspiring as Michael Curtiz rushed the film to completion to take advantage of the marketing bonanza of FDR’s Casablanca conference.  As a star of magnetic magnitude, Ingrid Bergman in gauzy close-up is all that, but what startled me was the subtlety and range of Humphrey Bogart’s role-playing, and of course Claude Rains gives one of the great supporting performances, amid a string of pleasingly evocative faces.  It’s a little magic box of a movie.

White Heat (1949) explosively completes the cycle of gangster films at just the point where it blends with film noir.  Cagney returns to complete his classic trilogy of energetically crazy bad guys with family issues, here an Oedipal relationship gone wild, with Ma the only real person in his life.  Raoul Walsh returns with his hurtling direction.  The story mingles the old and the new, the high and the low, characters from Greek tragedy and a big robbery based on the Trojan horse, newfangled police technology like tracking by radio transmitter, and a big ending that is totally metaphoric in a realistic modern setting.  And yet the film is like the last big blow-up of a genre, baroque to the point of unbelievability.  Well done in every particular, it still seems essentially divorced from reality into artifice.  It would take The Godfather to revive the form and infuse it with a convincing new reality.

The Big Clock (1947) is not a classic in my book, but an interesting variant on film noir.  Ray Milland is editor of a true crime magazine in the publishing empire of Charles Laughton, obviously premised on Henry Luce and Time-Life.  Laughton offers an amusingly mannered portrait of a business tyrant, who drives Milland out of his job and into association with the tycoon’s disenchanted mistress.  Skullduggery ensues.  The title references the signature element of the company’s highly stylized building, and indeed set design is one of the strengths of the film.  So is the acting in its own overwrought way, but John Farrow’s direction is nothing special and the story is full of holes.  Perhaps toddler Mia was on the set with her father and her mother Maureen O’Sullivan, who plays Milland’s wife.  Anyway, this film is child’s play, however dark.

Susan Slept Here (1954) is child’s play of a different candy-colored sort, with director Frank Tashlin on his way from cartoons to Jerry Lewis.  This would not have caught my attention if not for a recent boxed feature in the New Yorker film listings, but when it turned up on TCM I recorded it.  I rather enjoyed revisiting the Technicolor world of Fifties romantic comedy, but classic this is not, though it is a stylish take on the “bachelor and bobbysoxer” theme, which has a lot of fun with sexual innuendo between a middle-aged man and a teenage girl, in this case Dick Powell closing out his career and Debbie Reynolds near the start of hers.

For two slots in a film series that I’ll offer at the Clark next summer, called “PraiseSong: African-American Music in the Movies,” I watched and decided between two pairs of would-be classics.  Cabin in the Sky (1943) was the first all-black musical on screen, brought from the stage by Vincente Minnelli in his first film directing job.  Stereotypes abound, starting with “Rochester” as the male lead, but some authentic spirit is maintained, with Ethel Waters as the devoted wife for whom “Happiness is a Thing Called Joe,” and Lena Horne as the sultry songstress who leads Joe astray with “Honey in the Honeycomb,” while emissaries from heaven and hell strive for his soul.  There are also walk-ons by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, so the film certainly represents its period.  Carmen Jones (1954) I ruled out, despite its widescreen Technicolor direction by Otto Preminger, and a magnetic performance by Dorothy Dandridge, because it was too much an operatic construct by Oscar Hammerstein.  The transposition of Bizet’s opera to the African-American South works well enough, but why star Dandridge and Harry Belafonte and not let them sing in their own voices, as Pearl Bailey does get to do?

It was a much closer call between Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight (1986) and Clint Eastwood’s Bird (1988), each of which does justice to the bebop jazz saxophonist at its center, centered on exceptional performances by Dexter Gordon as a fictional amalgam of Lester Young and Bud Powell, and Forest Whittaker as Charlie Parker.  Both films totally respect the music and deserve to be considered classic, if not without flaw.  Bird was darker, both psychologically and visually, and very long, but more homegrown, without the Parisian setting that is a bit of a distraction from my theme.

After watching Five Easy Pieces with the film club, I had the inclination to watch another bit of vintage Jack Nicholson, in The Last Detail (1973), which proved less satisfying.  Hal Ashby’s direction is slipshod in my estimation, but Jack as petty officer “Bad Ass” Buddusky, and Randy Quaid as the young railroaded sailor being escorted from Newport to prison in New Hampshire, carry the film through its stops along the road, in Washington, New York and Boston, whether in Aquarian enclave or whorehouse.  There’s some sense of the period, but little of timeless significance.

Getting down to the bottom of the barrel, I’ve always confused Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981) with Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant – which really is a classic -- as Aussie war films, but it turns out I’d never seen this one, which left me rather cold, though it was startling to see Mel Gibson so young.  This seemed too obvious an attempt to follow in the footsteps of Chariots of Fire, and wandered to its preordained battlefield conclusion, which ought to have been horrific but seemed aestheticized.

Another early Jack Nicholson, Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) was, however, the absolute pits.  I might have thought that it was merely my inattentiveness that made it seem so bad, but my two viewing companions shared my befuddled exasperation with this portentous nonsense.  So later, for laughs, I had to read them the proclamation by David Thomson (whom I generally find illuminating) that this is “one of the greatest films ever made.”  Not by me, it isn’t.  I’ve never been an Antonioni acolyte, and even less as the years go by, so this one was completely lost on me.

The Kids Are All Right

It would be easy to imagine Lisa Chodolenko’s latest film as intolerable with another cast, but with Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, and Mia Waskowska, it’s a pleasure to watch.  Compared to another recent film with a number of similarities -- Nicole Holocener’s Please Give -- I buck the critical consensus and much prefer NYC over LA in the skewering of liberal pretension and self-delusion.  Nor did I find this as surprisingly good as Chodolenko’s previous SoCal effort, Laurel Canyon.  Still, Annette is astounding and Julianne game as a lesbian couple, whose teenage children seek out their sperm donor father, in the hunky, easy-going person of Ruffalo.  While the actors take the family sitcom beyond its normal limits into realms of truth, the film remains unrealistically insular, too much a design spread in a lifestyle magazine.  If you damp down your expectations, though, this film delivers a fair measure of satisfaction.  (2010, MC-86)  

Restrepo and other docs

Among the hardest to watch but most essential films of the past year was the you-are-there Afghan war documentary Restrepo (2010, MC-85).  Sebastian Junger (who also wrote the companion book, War) and Tim Hetherington accompany a small band of soldiers on a 14-month deployment on a remote mountain top in Afghanistan, the furthest tip of the spear of American power.  The troops build Outpost Restrepo, named for the devil-may-care medic who was among the first casualties of their unit, and then go out into the surrounding valleys, ancient and alien, to win hearts and minds, while being continuously shot at by rarely-seen attackers.  The viewer shares the hard duty intimately, and puts a human face on the abstraction of boots on the ground.  You participate in the boredom of prolonged isolation, mixed with the insane adrenaline rush of being under fire and letting loose with 900 rounds from your M-50.  The small cameras go into battle alongside the soldiers, and also show the daily life of young men together, in a way that verges on the homoerotic and recalls Claire Denis’ Beau Travail.  The film doesn’t tell you how to think about the American presence in Afghanistan, but gives you plenty of grist for the mill of your own thinking.  And the deleted scenes and extended interviews on the DVD supply plenty more, and should not be missed.

I expected more than I got from Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010, MC-85), the “prankumentary” by and/or about the famous British street artist Banksy.  Frankly I didn’t get the joke.  The collateral presence of Shepard Fairey makes for an obvious comparison with Beautiful Losers, another film about the graffiti aesthetic, which I found more satisfying.  Controversy still rages over whether this Banksy film is a doc or a con, a setup or a brilliantly witty reversal, in which the filmmaker becomes the subject and vice versa.  To me it’s all much ado about nothing.

On the other hand, I had no expectations for Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (2010, MC-73) and did not bother to record its “American Masters” presentation on PBS, but I happened to turn on the TV in the middle of its broadcast and was soon engrossed, so I recorded a rerun and watched it from the beginning.  Peter Raymond and Michele Hozer’s documentary takes a more traditional approach to the piano prodigy than 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (which I will now have to watch again), but with plenty of archival footage and subsequent interviews, it offers a compelling portrait of a strange but engaging genius.

So pleased with Every Little Step, I was moved to watch other terpsichorean documentaries.  The Last Dance (2002, MC-66) is about a collaboration between Pilobolus Dance Theater and Maurice Sendak, an unlikely combination that follows a fascinating joint process of creation.  Sendak is of course a compelling character in his own right (see Tell Them Anything You Want – no, I mean it, you really should see the documentary portrait made by Spike Jonze at the same time he directed the feature adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are), and Pilobolus is an eye-opening improvisational dance group that lasted for more than thirty years as the original dancers became directors and recruited a new troupe of exceptionally lithe and inventive dancers.  Sometime tense, sometimes ecstatic, the collaboration is enthralling to watch, though the concluding passages from the finished piece seemed draggy by comparison.  Sendak is determined to make a piece about the experience of children in the Holocaust, while at least one of the Pilobolus directors wants to make the dance simply about movement.  But through the raw material of the astounding flexibility of the dancers’ bodies, they reach some sort of accord in Mirra Bank’s effective film.

Afterthoughts

Neil Jordan’s Ondine (2010, MC-65) was an afterthought with critics and audiences, but I found it among the better, if not the best, films of the year.  The selkie-based story is reminiscent of John Sayles’ Secret of Roan Inish, though it takes off in a different direction.  The beauty of the Irish seacoast as filmed by Christopher Doyle is almost a sufficient recommendation, but Colin Farrell is excellent in his own right as the fisherman who happens to pull up in his nets a mysterious young woman.  She’s played by Alicja Bachleda, Farrell’s squeeze at the time, and the chemistry between them is palpable.  He’s trying to cope with a history of alcoholism and a young daughter in a motorized wheelchair; she’s on the run from – what?  A nice edge of mystery is maintained, but the thriller denouement seems somewhat misplaced in what is actually an effective character study of a few people and a place.

After referencing it in a review of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, I decided to take another look at Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) and confirmed the delights of its passage through downtown in the dead of night.  It was really Griffin Dunne’s project, and he is charming as the horny uptown computer specialist, who is lured downtown by the enticements of Rosanna Arquette, only to run through a nightmarish maze of crazy women, on a long night’s journey back to day.  As Marty relates in an interview on the DVD, his beloved long-term project, The Last Temptation of Christ, had fallen through, and out of that disappointment this quick and dirty production reawakened his appetite for making films.  Its edgy off-kilter humor recalls but does not quite come up to The King of Comedy.

After being so impressed with Winter’s Bone, I looked into Debra Granik’s first feature, Down to the Bone (2005, MC-76), and it proved promising but less than fully satisfying.  Vera Farmiga performs well in the central role, of a recovering junkie trying to normalize her life as single mom supermarket checkout clerk in upstate New York.  Apparently the film grew out of a longtime documentary project, and the milieu is well described (how many films are set in a Price Chopper?), but the story seems familiar and unsurprising, with a whiff of nostalgia for the mud.  You get a sense of slumming that you don’t in Winter’s Bone, or for another example, Wendy and Lucy.

Cedric Klapisch strikes me as a middling sort of director, hardly an auteur, but when I saw his Paris (2009, MC-68) showing on Sundance and noticed Juliette Binoche and Fabrice Luchini starring, I decided to record it, and eventually got around to watching in bits and pieces over several nights, not the ideal way to take in a film but not inappropriate for the fragmented style of this Altmanesque ensemble of intersecting types.  Juliette and Fabrice were indeed the best things in the film, she a single mother of three caring for a sick brother, and he a distinguished history professor turned tv-documentary host, who falls for one of his students.  A swirl of characters surrounds them in ways that did not really connect for me, though I never minded watching.

Early line on best of 2010

Several critics’ polls have already declared rankings for the year.  I won’t be finalizing my choices till I see a number of more recent releases, but I’ve already seen 8 out of the top 10 in the Film Comment poll, and certainly find areas of agreement [click on film title to access my review].  They have Carlos at #1 and The Social Network at #2, and I could go with that, or in reverse order as they appeared in the indieWire poll, which conforms to the Metacritic averages of 95 for the Fincher and 93 for the Assayas.  So far I’ll go with indieWire’s choice at #3, Winter’s Bone (FC #6, MC-90.)  Polanski’s The Ghost Writer gets just a bit more love than I give it at FC #4 and iW #7 (MC-77).  I think FC has A Prophet right at #5 (MC-90).  And I join the acclaim for Everyone Else with FC at #9 and iW at #5. On the indieWire list, I Am Love comes in at #9 (FC #22), and I am inclined to agree with that.   

For the rest of Film Comment’s top ten, I look forward to seeing Claire Denis’ White Material (#3), and was disappointed to miss Charles Ferguson’s acclaimed documentary Inside Job (#7) when it showed at Images last month but eagerly anticipate the dvd.  Wild Grass (#8) I wish I hadn’t seen, and Greenberg (#10) I barely remember seeing.  Look for me to be filling in the rest of the top films of 2010 from various lists over the next few months, before making final pronouncement on my own choices.

More documendations

Here’s another batch of documentaries that are worth a look, one that I found satisfying in every respect, and a handful of others for which the strength of my recommendation is dependent on your interest in the subject, rather than any advance in the art of documentary. 

Every Little Step (2009, MC-76) works on so many levels: as presentation and enactment of a 2005 Broadway revival of the hit musical, A Chorus Line, and memorial of the original production; as real-life recapitulation of every backstage drama from 42^nd Street on; as putting the viewer in the position of an American Idol-like judge to appraise just what makes for singing and dancing talent; as swift and engaging storytelling with all the winnowing-down excitement of competitive contests like Spellbound.  Trust me, really -- make a point of seeing Adam Del Dio’s documentary, even if like me you are not familiar with the original show beyond a vague awareness of its long-running popularity – available from Netflix on dvd or for instant play.

The Oath (2010, MC-72), an intimate film made by Laura Poitras, probably has the broadest and most urgent interest among the rest of this list.  The oath in question is of allegiance to Osama bin Laden, and the subjects are two brothers-in-law who were his former bodyguard and driver.  The former is Abu Jandal, who is now a voluble cab driver in Yemen, renouncing the 9/11 attacks but still proselytizing for his own brand of jihad.  The latter is Salim Hamdan -- of Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld – and Abu Jandal feels guilty for getting his unpolitical relative into Guantanamo.  So Hamdan remains an absence in the film, even when the Supreme Court releases him, but Jandal’s nonstop self-contradiction, much of it as he drives his taxi around Sanaa, offers a fascinating window into the jihadi mindset.  Two heroes that emerge are Hamdan’s U.S. military lawyers, who certainly put the system in the best light, despite the abuse dictated from Cheney and Bush.  I saw this as part of the generally-excellent “P.O.V.” series on PBS, but it is available from Netflix both as dvd and streaming video, as is the next film, which might have been on the other good documentary series on PBS, “Independent Lens.”

In this era of WikiLeaks, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2008, MC-75) assumes more than historical interest.  I started watching without particular commitment to the subject, but was never tempted to tune out.  Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith take a very sympathetic look at Ellsberg, who earned the title epithet directly from Henry Kissinger, but they do a good job of recalling the Nixonian era and what seemed to be at stake at the time, and what still seems at stake today, in the continual contest between government secrecy and the public’s right to know.  I don’t think Assange is anywhere near as well-motivated as Ellsberg, so I was a bit surprised to see the elder whistleblower endorse the younger on the Colbert Report.  Nonetheless he’s an old-time counterculture hero who still commands respect.

Though The Promise (2010) is mainly an HBO promo for the dvd/cd release of outtakes from Bruce Springsteen’s classic album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, the documentary does offer an intriguing glimpse of the Boss in session during the mid-70s.  Fans like me will not want to miss it, but if you are not into the Bard of New Jersey, you will find little here to linger over.

One of the better entries in ESPN’s intermittently excellent “30 for 30” anniversary series is The Best That Never Was (2010, no dvd yet).   Jonathan Hock’s documentary about Marcus Dupree is a real-life Friday Night Lights story about the fate of perhaps the greatest high school football running back ever.  The highlight is the jaw-dropping footage of him regularly ripping off 80-yard touchdown runs, with a grace and fleetness of foot that seems truly heroic.  No wonder he generated such a recruiting war among major colleges, and no wonder the Philadelphia, Mississippi hero had such trouble making the transition to Oklahoma and then the NFL.  From his position as a middle-aged truck driver in his old hometown, he looks back philosophically on the phenom that he was, and the stardom he was destined for and derailed from.

Public Speaking  (2010, HBO, no dvd yet, MC-75) is basically Martin Scorsese’s My Dinner with Fran, and your response with be predicated on how you feel about Fran Lebowitz’s animated gestural tabletalk.  Her acerbic, self-assured New Yawker commentary on any subject that comes to mind, and her cultivated Oscar Wilde in drag persona, will determine whether you are drawn into this portrait or put off, delightedly amused or definitely not amused.  Count me among the amused.

Gangsters galore

I liked the just-completed first season of Boardwalk Empire (MC-88) well enough, but I was not gangbusters over it.  It does not muscle into that handful of ongoing series that have truly engaged me (e.g. current and final season of Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Treme), but I will keep watching.   Steve Buscemi and Kelly MacDonald are always enough to keep me interested, even when other characters and storylines strain credulity.  After a bit of fact-checking, I was surprised to see how the mobs in Atlantic City, New York City, and Chicago were interlocked, and how the interweaving of all the big names – Rothstein, Torrio, Capone, Luciano, Lansky – is plausibly true to life.  The whole series reopens the mythology of Prohibition-era gangsters enough to make one revisit some of the classic texts of the genre. 

I happened to notice The Roaring Twenties (1939) appearing on demand, and once I checked it out, I couldn’t stop watching.  Raoul Walsh’s hurtling direction mixes documentary-like footage with characters who age from WWI doughboys through Prohibition kingpins to gang-war casualties.  The impeccable cast includes James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, with Priscilla Lane as the canary for whom Cagney pines and Gladys George as the saloonkeeper who really understands him.  This came at the end of the initial cycle of great gangster movies, but is a fluent and masterful summation

Cagney had begun etching his gangster persona on the consciousness of audiences with The Public Enemy (1931), in a performance of startling intensity.  William Wellman was one of the most competent directors of the early talkies, but this film suffers from period liabilities of pacing and performance, so once you get past Cagney’s electricity and the famous grapefruit in his moll’s face, there’s not a lot here.

Another iconic, career-making performance in the genre had been offered by Edward G. Robinson as the Capone-like title character in Little Caesar (1930).  This role involves yet more scenery chewing, but is effectively expressive in its snarls and spit-out lines.  Mervyn LeRoy directs smoothly and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is unusually good in the sidekick-who-tries-to-go-straight role.

Howard Hawks shows why he was the master of all genres with the swift, sure storytelling of Scarface (1932).  Paul Muni is excellent in a balls-out, ape-like interpretation of Al Capone, as the punk with big ideas, a Borgia with a machine gun.  The almost amusingly overt incest theme of this film is matched by the startling implicit homoeroticism of the other two early gangster classics as ways of creating operatically bad characters.

Along with these old films, I revisited Robert Warshow’s classic essay, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” (1948), and while it certainly overreaches, it does so in exciting and provocative ways, with that classic mid-century blend of Marxism and Freudianism.  He demonstrates how the gangster represents the dark side of the pursuit of happiness, the anarchic id run wild, an epitome of the modern city:  “And the gangster – though there are real gangsters – is also, and primarily, a creature of the imagination.  The real city, one might say, produces only criminals; the imaginary city produces the gangster: he is what we want to be and what we are afraid we might become.” 

Interim report

Events, including an incipient book project, have kept me from posting here lately.  I’ve actually been watching a lot of films, and intend to group them into a series of mini-essays.  One bunch will fall under the rubric of “Afterthoughts”; then there will be an appreciation of Eric Rohmer and a disappreciation of Nicholas Ray; a consideration of classic gangster films in the context of Boardwalk Empire; and another series of my “Documendations.”  The last will include the one film I’ve watched lately for which I give a red-hot recommendation:  Every Little Step, a documentary about a Broadway revival of A Chorus Line -- I’ve seen neither the original show nor the movie adaptation, but loved this backstage look at it.  So don’t give up on me, keep coming back to this site, and soon I’ll once again be delivering my wide-ranging observations on the world of cinema.

Two of the best

On two successive evenings, I watched likely Oscar nominees for “Best Picture,” and I found both very much up to the hype.


Winter’s Bone.  Now this is one Sundance prizewinner that I totally endorse.  It deserves the acclaim of its predecessors and more.  Debra Granik’s film does not have any of the deficiencies I saw in Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River or Kathryn Bigelow’s Hurt Locker.  For me Winter’s Bone worked on many levels, as pulse-pounding suspense, heart-leaping shock, naturalistic portrait of Ozark people and the grimly beautiful landscape they inhabit – film noir meets Southern Gothic.  Adapting a novel I know nothing about, Granik took a small crew and a few professional actors to rural Missouri and recruited the rest of her cast from local folk, a strategy that works wonderfully well, mixing palpable reality with an aura of sympathy and dread.  Jennifer Lawrence is outstanding in the star-making central role as a teenage girl taking care of her younger brother and sister, while looking after her spaced-out mother and tracking down her meth-cooking father, who has disappeared while out on bail, having left the family home as collateral.  Talk about the weight of the world on her shoulders.  But there is nothing frail or shrinking in this young beauty.  Among the fearsome adults she beards in their own dens is her Uncle Teardrop, marvelously rendered by John Hawkes as a scary man with a surprising undercurrent of feeling.  This film could have felt like rural slumming and backwoods exploitation, but instead elicits a classic mix of pity and terror, with respect all round.   (2010, MC-90)


The Social Network.  This acclaimed film stands out most rarely among contemporary American films, in that you’re likely to respond as I did at the end, “Wow, it’s over already?  Those two hours went fast – and full.”  In an era when even the best films seem generally 10-20 minutes too long (unless they cut loose from feature length altogether and run to 5 or 6 – or 10 to 13 -- hours), The Social Network leaves you with an appetite for more.  Credit Aaron Sorkin’s patented rapidfire patter, David Fincher’s swift and sure direction, and excellent acting across the board -- funny, deep, and true characterizations that leave plenty of room for moral speculation.  Jesse Eisenberg comes from two particular favorites of mine, The Squid and the Whale and Adventureland, but transcends himself with a brilliantly controlled portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook while a Harvard sophomore and subsequently the “world’s youngest billionaire.”  Andrew Garfield is Eduardo Saverin, the classmate and friend who provides the initial bankroll, but gets squeezed out when the start-up goes bigtime, and sues to get back his stake in the business and co-founder status.  The general assumption is that Saverin is the good guy betrayed, and Zuckerberg the arrogant selfish bastard with no social skills, who hacked his way to “Friends” across a network because he couldn’t keep them in person.  I take it as evidence of the subtlety of both characters’ portrayal that I could come to see the conflict in just the opposite way, with smooth operator Saverin trying to exploit the brilliance of his obsessive friend’s monomania.  I think every character in the film comes across with a piquant mix of sympathy and satire, even Justin Timberlake’s all-stops-out portrayal of Internet wunderkind Sean Parker.  I was totally into this movie, from the close-up head-to-head first scene between Jesse/Mark and his down-to-earth BU girlfriend, which ends with her walking out of The Thirsty Scholar, a pub near Inman Square, just around the block from where my son lived last year.  So I reveled in the familiar Cambridge vibe, despite the film’s slightly overwrought view of the scene.  And I loved the contrast between the dark wood paneling and three-hundred-year-old doorknobs of Harvard, and the glassed-in funhouses and playpens of Silicon Valley.  I find the widespread comparisons of this film to Citizen Kane quite plausible, and think it likely to deserve every award it wins.  (2010, MC-95)

The New Wave gets old

I have found some of Alain Resnais’ octogenarian caprices quite enjoyable (Same Old Song, Private Fears in Public Faces), but Wild Grass (2009, MC-63) strikes me not as winsome, but winceful.  Count me among those who don’t get the game he was up to, with bizarre, inconsequential characters and aggressively unreal color schemes, and a general unmooring from meaning and narrative sense.  Very little in this film was endearing or engaging to me, despite all the respectable people and evident craft involved.

On the other hand, some might find Eric Rohmer’s swansong, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007, MRQE-63) an equally off-putting exercise in geriatric stylization, but I had the opposite reaction.  With Rohmer I appreciated the amorous obsessions of the old codger and the absolute artificiality of his presentation, more archetypal than merely arch.  Here he twines together two strands of his work – archaic pageants and the erotic complexities of modern romance – into an adaptation of a 17^th century novel’s view of a 5^th century pastoral of shepherds and nymphs, played by very contemporary youths in a bucolic country setting, winding up with a hot twist on Shakespearian-type gender bending.  Rohmer truly animates the ancient conventions of courtly love and brings them into 21^st century relevance, leaving me with a slow smile spreading across my face.

Genre but not too generic

Splice.  Vincenzo Natali’s sci-fi/horror mash-up is a knowing wink at the genre of creature feature, made notable by the presence of Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley as a couple of genetic wizards (whose names reference The Bride of Frankenstein), bankrolled by big pharma, but with their own agendas as they create life in a test tube.  There is plenty of humor generated as they parent the rapidly growing half-human, half-CGI creature, as it passes through the “terrible twos” to a highly Oedipal stage of development.  Then there is plenty of yuck as the tale turns bloody and kinky.  This is no Gattaca when it comes to the ethics of genetic manipulation, but within its genre limits it’s shrewd enough to offer more than simple shivers of laughter and dread.  (2010, MC-66)

Whip It.  I will not take the invitation of its title and lash out at this pleasant piece of fluff.  Drew Barrymore’s first directorial effort looks at the revival of women’s roller derby in the hip enclave of Austin TX, whipping grrrl-power, teen yearnings for romance and escape, and sports movie tropes into a familiar yet appealing froth.  Ellen Page has no difficulty in turning on the adorable, and is surrounded by an array of equally familiar but appealing characters.  Her mother (Marcia Gay Harden) wants her to win teen beauty pageants as a way out of their backwater town, but our girl Bliss has her eyes set on a different breakout.  She joins with the likes of Maggie Mayhem and Eva Destruction to become Babe Ruthless, the rookie star of the roller derby circuit.  If you can do without depth or surprise, this is perfectly fun little film to watch.  (2009, MC-68)

Carlos

Olivier Assayas is not shy about vying with The Godfather in this long-form crime saga, which spans two decades of globe-trotting mayhem by the would-be godfather of international terrorism (or political struggle, as the idealogues would have it).  Carlos’s biggest hit (and biggest flop) was seizing a roomful of OPEC oil ministers at a meeting in Vienna in 1974, and commandeering a plane to take them to Libya and then Algeria, before all hostages were released, and the “revolutionary cadre” escaped to fight again.  That takes up most of the middle episode of three, as made for French tv and recently shown on the Sundance Channel, close to six hours in all, with a 140-minute version in theatrical release.  That central drama is surrounded by lots of assassinations and bombings, plus sex and high living, as Assayas tells the story in admittedly speculative though highly convincing fashion.   We see Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a Venezuelan leftist whose brothers were named Vladimir and Lenin, assume the nom de guerre of Carlos, to which the media adds the sobriquet of “the Jackal,” making him a big name in violent circles around the world.  His sponsors shift from Qaddafi to Saddam to Assad, from Moscow to Berlin to Bucharest, as he franchises terrorism around the globe.  Edgar Ramirez, also Venezuelan, has the magnetism and acting chops to draw one through long stretches in the company of an odious man.  In its own reflective thriller mode, Assayas’s film has more to say about the globalization of terror than almost anything I have seen or read.  It’s sordid enough to make you ask why you’re sitting through all those hours of repellent behavior, but compelling enough to never drag.  (2010, MC-93)

Everyone Else

I can only read this title as ironic, because “everyone else” is exactly what this intimate erotic duet excludes.  Two thirtyish German professionals are vacationing together in Sardinia and testing the limits of their new relationship.   Lars Eidinger is a supposedly brilliant young architect waiting for his first prize or commission, big blond and bland, with a passive-aggressive streak.  Birgit Minichmayr is a brash little music publicist, who is always putting herself out there, sexually and emotionally.  The director Maren Ade is a young woman who comes across as a harsher Eric Rohmer, picking apart the strands of mutual self-delusion, through conversation and sidelong glances.  She throws you into close quarters with this couple, without introduction, and lets you figure out just what’s going on between them, as they bounce off each other and a limited number of others.  This is romantic comedy that digs deep enough beneath the skin to hurt, and maintains a healthy respect for the mysteries of human motivation.  It doesn’t assume or assert too much, but just lets us observe and understand, only up to a point, but certainly more than the characters understand themselves.  (2010, MC-71)

Please Give

Nicole Holofcener extends sympathy to all her characters, however annoying they may be.  In Friends With Money, that seemed way more sympathy than they deserved, but here the neurosis and affection are in better balance.  As usual, Catherine Keener is right on the writer-director’s wavelength, as a guilty liberal trying to give away the money she makes with a business that seems ethically questionable to herself.  She and hubby Oliver Platt own a vintage furniture store, which they stock by buying up the contents of apartments of dead old people, from their unknowing children.  They’re waiting to take over the apartment of their next-door neighbor when she dies, and they become involved with the granddaughters who take care of her, deliciously played by Rebecca Hall and Amanda Peet.  Ann Guilbert is hilarious as the straight-talking old lady, and Sarah Steele is also good as the acne-plagued teenage daughter of Keener and Platt.  With well-judged but low-key direction, the entire ensemble is delightful and the whole nicely balances wit and warmth, with enough truth to lift the comedy beyond the situation.  (2010, MC-78)

Last Holiday

For more than a decade I’d been looking for this film from 1950, which Alec Guinness made in the midst of his great series of Ealing comedies (Kind Hearts and Coronets, The White Suit, The Ladykillers), and it finally turned up on TCM.  It’s worth keeping an eye out for, though here the comedy is quite subdued amidst darker themes.  The story, by J.B. Priestley, follows an agricultural implement salesman who gets an imminently fatal diagnosis from his doctor and decides to spend his life savings on holiday at a posh seaside resort, where he is taken as a mystery man by an assortment of upper class types.  As with Chauncey Gardner in Being There, his direct statements are taken as having great hidden meaning, so an inventor, a cabinet minister, a gambler, and others, take his word as gospel and offer him unprecedented opportunities, now that he has no time left to take advantage of them. Kay Walsh is good as the head housekeeper with whom he forms a gradually deepening relationship.  The direction of Henry Cass is workmanlike at best, effectively anatomizing class types by speech and accent, and presenting topical satire on the era of austerity in Britain, but signaling the turns of the story so broadly that there is no surprise involved in how it all turns out.  Nonetheless Guinness makes the film something to see.

I am Eye-talian

Luca Guadagnino aspires to the look of Visconti and the soul of Rossellini in I Am Love (2010, MC-79), a film pleasingly saturated with film history, the product of a long-term collaboration with Tilda Swinton, who plays the central role.  She is the stylish matron of a wealthy Milanese family, which owns a textile factory that thrived under the Fascists and thereafter, but is about to be swallowed up by a global conglomerate.  She’s a Russian who was acquired by her husband on an art buying expedition there during the Soviet era, becoming an out-of-place ice queen to fulfill the societal role assigned to her.  Cracks begin to show in her opulent ice palace when the patriarch of the family bequeaths the business to her husband and son in tandem, because it will take two men to replace him.  What gets through one crack is a friend of her son’s, a chef whose food, and then body, initiates her into Lawrentian ecstasy.  This melodrama, luscious and fruity, is served with a sauce of John Adams music, and really indulged my taste for the likes of Sirk and Powell.  It’s all absurd, but swank and powerful, with a strong undercurrent of social critique, of capitalism and Italy in the age of Berlusconi.

A much more homely look at Italian mores is offered in Gianni Di Gregorio’s Mid-August Lunch (2008, MRQE-70), about a middle-aged momma’s boy taking care of his nonagenarian mother and getting snookered into taking care of three other elderly ladies as well, and of the little community they form.  In a way, this film goes beyond neorealism to home movie, with the director starring and shooting in the very apartment where he lived with his own mother until her death, but the film achieves a warmly ironic tone throughout.  The four old ladies are a great aggregate of types, and in its own very domestic way the film offers as much food porn as Ms. Swinton enjoys.  This lunch is light and slight, but quite tasty within its limits.   

Only if ...

Here are several recent films I would commend to your attention only under special circumstances:

Letters to Juliet.  Watch this utterly predictable romantic comedy only if:  you’re in love with the Tuscan countryside bathed in a golden glow; or, you’re in awe of Vanessa Redgrave’s beauty, grace, and depth, and more than ready to see Guinevere reunited with Lancelot in old age, reenacting her real life reunion with Franco Nero; or, you can lose yourself in the limpid pools of Amanda Seyfreid’s saucer-sized eyes; or, you value the energy that Gael Garcia Bernal brings to any size role; or, you can forgive the formulaic writing and directing of Gary Winick to appreciate the light literary wit that pervades this otherwise ordinary entertainment.  (2010, MC-50)

Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist.  Watch this inoffensive -- try as it might – teen comedy of Jersey kids in the Big City for a long night’s journey to sunrise only if:  you have been thoroughly charmed and continuously amused by Michael Cera in the sitcom series Arrested Development or movies like Juno; or, you have some idea of, or taste for, the downtown music scene herein celebrated; or, you are eager to see the fairly appealing Kat Dennings trade her sports bra for a push-up and have her first orgasm, and to see her ditsy, drunken blond girlfriend Ari Graynor make it safely back across the river to home; or, you don’t choke on the thoroughly chewed piece of gum that makes its way through sticky moments of the film; or, Peter Sollett’s direction sends you back to the master, Marty Scorsese, and After Hours.  (2008, MC-64)

Blind Side.  Watch this surprisingly bad -- and surprisingly successful -- family soap opera with would-be wit and heart only if:  you have never watched an episode of Friday Night Lights to realize just how truthful and involving a story one can weave around high school football in the South; or, you are like Stephen Colbert and “don’t see color” and thus won’t mind the sanitized portrayal of race relations in this film; or, you’re not worried about having your esteem for source writer Michael Lewis called into question; or, you can believe that Sandra Bullock was named “Best Actress” for this adequately charming performance in a role without a lot of nuance; or, you are just in love with the whole Red State fantasy of “mama grizzlies.”  (2009, MC-53)

Red Riding Trilogy

By rights, this sordid saga of a whole culture of corruption, perversion, and violence ought to be revolting and unwatchable.  Instead, it is immersive and compulsively watchable.  The three films -- aired first on Channel 4 in Britain in 2009, then theatrically released in the U.S., and now on DVD (with indispensable subtitles) – cover a decade of evildoing and official malfeasance in Yorkshire.  Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974 was shot on Super 16 and directed by Julian Jarrold; 1980 on 35mm by James Marsh; 1983 on hi-def video by Anand Tucker.  Nonetheless they are very much of a piece, bound together in Tony Grisoni’s adaptation of David Peace’s cult-fave series of noir novels, collectively portraying a society going to hell under the toast and boast:  “This is the North.  Where we do what we want.”  Several serial killers are on the loose, and the police are more interested in exploiting the crime sprees than solving them.  People who investigate the web of corruption and fear are drawn in, chewed up, and spit out; primarily Andrew Garfield in 1974, Paddy Considine in 1980, and David Morrissey in 1983, leading effective acting ensembles in each, with peripheral characters moving to the foreground in sequence.  These films are like David Fincher’s Zodiac in using the pursuit of a serial killer as the key to understanding a whole community of characters.  Events always stay tantalizingly short of full comprehension, as the viewer stumbles through a universe without fixed points of truth or morality.  It’s grisly to be sure, even more in scenes of police torture than in the murders and sexual abuse, but not based on gratuitous shocks.  It’s confusing and meant to be, but dense with observation of personal and societal malaise.  (Apparently the confusion is enhanced because the novel 1977, which fills in the story of the Yorkshire Ripper, was omitted.)  The whole is a dark odyssey through a world of filth, and yet engrossing and perversely redemptive.  (MC-77)  If you want to get deep into the whole Red Riding cosmos, I recommend this essay by premier film historian David Thomson.