Rachel and Richard are both getting older--she's 41-- and desperate to have children, any children, any child. They have applied for adoption but haven't given up yet on the possibility of natural birth-- with all the assistance modern medicine can muster, at whatever the cost (and "Private Life", to its' credit, does not pretend there is no cost). Their marriage is stressed as each takes turns being the driver for the next phase of their quest. At one point, they enter a serio-comic discussion about whether Feminism is responsible for their predicament, because Rachel waited to have a baby, and wanted to have a career first, and always believe it was possible to have it all. At the right moment, a niece, Sadie, enters their lives. She appears to be an ideal candidate to donate an egg, and she is enthusiastic about the idea-- to the consternation of her mom-- but she is something of a narcissist and raises a few alarms along the way. But "Private Life" is mainly about the stress on Richard and Rachel's relationship. For more than a year, all of their energies and attention have been focused on the jaded rituals of doctors' visits, injections, tests, extractions, and whatnot, at the expense of their emotional lives as marital partners. This extraordinary film exposes not only the cost of their pursuit, but, with some caustic relish, the selfish interests and cluelessness of the people around them. Sadie's mother almost implodes with fury when she announces that she has consented to provide eggs for Rachel. Richard complains that they haven't had sex more than once in 11 months. Rachel screams her rage at the clinicians who don't care or care for the wrong aspects of their lives as they consider adoption. A young girl in the South courts them as potential adoptive parents but doesn't show up to their first face-to-face meeting and disappears from the web: she was probably never pregnant. She just wanted the attention. Which is what everybody in "Private Life" wants. The film ends on an enigmatic note, and a gesture of optimism. All the tension between Rachel and Richard arises at least partly because they still care deeply about each other and what each other thinks.
The astounding series continues: every seven years, Michael Apted re-interviews a select group of 13 individuals, having started in 1963 when they were all seven years old. The implied argument was that class determines future; and even as one of the boys insistently denies it-- arguing that his mother, widowed, was poor-- he mentions his scholarship to Cambridge or Oxford, as if, of course that was possible for anyone. Many of the individuals have become somewhat ambivalent about the program, having become celebrities in Britain, and had their privacies invaded. One of them openly admits he rejoined the program to get publicity for his band (The Good Intentions). And one of them, Neil, whose strange life was often the most compelling story-line in the series, insists that people think they know him from the series, but they don't, really. Well-- we know we don't really know them in the full dimension of their lives and personalities, but who thought we did? I don't think the series has been unfair to them, as long as you understand, as every informed viewer should, that this is not the totality of their lives. What matters is how, stepping back, you get a sense of the full dimension of a life span, of people who went from adorable child to wary retiree before your eyes.
Preposterous sci-fi drama with mystic pretentions from the pen of Jeff Vandermeer. A weird "shimmer zone" extends from a lighthouse that appears to have been struck by a meteor. It is luminescent, iridescent and expanding, and all of the men sent in to investigate it have disappeared except for Kane, who weirdly just appears at his house out of nowhere (while his wife has been having an affair with a professor). Then a group of ladies with no apparent authority, organization, or mandate, decide to investigate it. Kane's wife volunteers to go with-- sure, she can come. She eventually returns and is interrogated by someone with no particular reason for existence other than to give the impression of authority inquiring into a mystery by asking stupid questions and behaving like a lunch room monitor. (There is some time shifting going on.) The ladies dress like they are military and they are commanded by -- well, nobody. There is no evidence of anyone being "in command", or of someone deciding that they would just workshop the whole experience. There is Dr. Ventress, but she never issues orders-- just suggestions. And at one point she just goes off by herself. The others just go, and frequently go their own way. The entity at the center of this disturbance appears to be an echo of the body snatchers of that particular invasion , but they seem to be vanquishable. The bigger question is, what's the point? What is the message here? What is the story, other than a list of sequences that look cool in computer graphics? Why did nobody give much thought to how procedures might actually work in such a circumstance? Why did they think their radios might work when nobody else's did? Why didn't they send in a larger group into a limited area at first in order to establish a secure corridor to the lighthouse? We offered discussions that sound like sophomoric pseudo-scientific explanations: the entity is "refracting" the DNA of the living things it encounters. So we have an alligator with shark teeth. Portman does her method-mumble. Jennifer Jason Leigh does her best but is mostly wasted. There are overt nods to "Blade Runner", and Star Trek and numerous other efforts, almost all of which were more plausible or interesting than this turkey.
Preposterous sci-fi drama with mystic pretentions from the pen of Jeff Vandermeer. A weird "shimmer zone" extends from a lighthouse that appears to have been struck by a meteor. It is luminescent, iridescent and expanding, and all of the men sent in to investigate it have disappeared except for Kane, who weirdly just appears at his house out of nowhere (while his wife has been having an affair with a professor). Then a group of ladies with no apparent authority, organization, or mandate, decide to investigate it. Kane's wife volunteers to go with-- sure, she can come. She eventually returns and is interrogated by someone with no particular reason for existence other than to give the impression of authority inquiring into a mystery by asking stupid questions and behaving like a lunch room monitor. (There is some time shifting going on.) The ladies dress like they are military and they are commanded by -- well, nobody. There is no evidence of anyone being "in command", or of someone deciding that they would just workshop the whole experience. There is Dr. Ventress, but she never issues orders-- just suggestions. And at one point she just goes off by herself. The others just go, and frequently go their own way. The entity at the center of this disturbance appears to be an echo of the body snatchers of that particular invasion , but they seem to be vanquishable. The bigger question is, what's the point? What is the message here? What is the story, other than a list of sequences that look cool in computer graphics? Why did nobody give much thought to how procedures might actually work in such a circumstance? Why did they think their radios might work when nobody else's did? Why didn't they send in a larger group into a limited area at first in order to establish a secure corridor to the lighthouse? We offered discussions that sound like sophomoric pseudo-scientific explanations: the entity is "refracting" the DNA of the living things it encounters. So we have an alligator with shark teeth. Portman does her method-mumble. Jennifer Jason Leigh does her best but is mostly wasted. There are overt nods to "Blade Runner", and Star Trek and numerous other efforts, almost all of which were more plausible or interesting than this turkey.
Based on a P. K. Dick story-- very, very loosely, one must assume. Futuristic dystopian cliche-ridden earth. Douglas Quaid decides to utilize the services of "Rekall", which can provide him with someone else's adventure through a memory implant. As the process begins, he is identified as a spy and all hell breaks loose. We are then treated to long, long, tedious chase scenes, and the police, firing thousands of rounds, can't seem to hit their target. Is his wife, Lori, in on the plot? How about the lovely Melina who just happens to drive by in the middle of Quaid's escape? Could have been intriguing-- and should have been-- but the layers of reality involved are not explored in any kind of intriguing way. Is it all a hallucination, or someone else's memory, or real? It would have made more sense to be someone else's memory, but the movie leans the other way. Farrell is wooden and whiny and I couldn't even really identify which woman was which after a while. And there are lots of scenes of capture and escape, capture and escape, and nobody seems to have the good sense to just kill the man. Instead, we get loads of clumsy, ridiculous, completely unnecessary exposition, as in, now that I've captured you-- for real this time-- not like the twenty times you've already escaped identical situations -- let me explain in detail what is going on, and then I think I'l leave so we can repeat the whole cycle of escape, capture, confrontation. Borrows heavily from "The Matrix" but most obviously from the look and style of "Blade Runner", including the moisture and the dark, wretched buildings.
Immensely enjoyable six-pack of stories that are more like parodies of traditional westerns than they are westerns themselves. A singing gunslinger, an armless rhetorician, a young pioneer whose brother dies on the trek to Oregon, a gold-miner. All told beautifully, with wit and imagination, and the sharp edges the Coen brothers are known for. We meet a ridiculously confident singing cowboy, and gold-miner who faces an attempted robbery after a determined effort to find the motherlode in a remote valley, a man who travels the west with a man with no arms or legs who recites poetry and famous speeches, and a tragic young woman headed to Oregon and potential marriage to a stranger. There is an unlucky bank robber, and a pair of suave bounty hunters. And there are the hauntingly beautiful landscapes of the west, lovingly filmed, miraculously dramatic and rich with lore. A beautiful, delightful film.
Delicate, thoughtful, expressive film about the lives of a well-off family of a doctor and their two maids in Mexico in 1970-- (confusing me because of references to the Olympics which were held in 1968). Director Cuaron has stated that almost everything from the film is directly from his own memories and the film is dedicated to the family maid, Libo, whom he grew up with, and set in the neighborhood, Roma, in Mexico near the city center. The doctor, Antonio, sets off to a conference in Quebec but does not seem to be returning. A maid, Adela has troubles of her own: she's pregnant and her boyfriend disappears. The city has problems: there are wild demonstrations in reaction to the corruption around the Olympics, the seizure of property, and police brutality. But the film stays focused on Sofia's family and the maids. There are several utterly remarkable sequences, including childbirth, and a swim at the beach in Tuxpan-- long, continuous shots of remarkable drama and beauty. In fact, some of them were "stitched together" seamlessly from different takes. Like Ozu, Cuaron here is concerned with the intimacies of daily life, or relationships, of care. Cleo, the maid who gets pregnant, is a loving, compassionate presence in the family. And the mother, Sofia appreciates her value to the family and takes her with on vacation. The children respect her and look to her for guidance, especially after Antonio has abandoned them.
Delicate, thoughtful, expressive film about the lives of a well-off family of a doctor and their two maids in Mexico in 1970-- (confusing me because of references to the Olympics which were held in 1968). Director Cuaron has stated that almost everything from the film is directly from his own memories and the film is dedicated to the family maid, Libo, whom he grew up with, and set in the neighborhood, Roma, in Mexico near the city center. The doctor, Antonio, sets off to a conference in Quebec but does not seem to be returning. A maid, Adela has troubles of her own: she's pregnant and her boyfriend disappears. The city has problems: there are wild demonstrations in reaction to the corruption around the Olympics, the seizure of property, and police brutality. But the film stays focused on Sofia's family and the maids. There are several utterly remarkable sequences, including childbirth, and a swim at the beach in Tuxpan-- long, continuous shots of remarkable drama and beauty. In fact, some of them were "stitched together" seamlessly from different takes. Like Ozu, Cuaron here is concerned with the intimacies of daily life, or relationships, of care. Cleo, the maid who gets pregnant, is a loving, compassionate presence in the family. And the mother, Sofia appreciates her value to the family and takes her with on vacation. The children respect her and look to her for guidance, especially after Antonio has abandoned them.
Occasionally witty and interesting, this Americanized "Love Actually" undermines its own efforts with a steady determination to extract charm from repulsive characters and characterizations. Charlotte and Sam are getting a divorce and Charlotte insists on one last perfect family Christmas, even though Hank has lost his job, grandpa Bucky has the hots for a 20-year-old waitress, sister Emma is a shoplifter, and Angie has no reason for being in the story at all. The trouble is, Charlotte and Sam don't behave in the least like a couple that has exhausted most if not all remedies: they banter and joke and laugh at each other's witticisms like newlyweds and, in the worst scene in the film, they argue in the kitchen like Dr. Oz taking on Oprah: you haven't been you. You haven't been me. I haven't been me or you. We lost each other. Let's try to find each other. Blah blah blah. When grandpa ends up in the hospital after a minor stroke, Emma and Charlotte scream at each other over his bed in a scene that I think is supposed to have been funny. Timothee Chalamet, as a unconvincing heterosexual, chases a girl who french-kisses like a lapdog-- and that isn't half bad. The most redeeming story line features Eleanor and Joe. Eleanor, trying to overcome years of disappointing her parents, recruits soldier Joe at the airport to act like a boyfriend for the duration of the family party. She is flying in from somewhere-- so where are they going to sleep? The issue, disappointingly, isn't even raised. But he is a conservative republican who believes evolution if false because if we evolved from apes, why are apes still here? Their dialogue is often witty and clever, their relationship inevitable and as unconvincing as Sam and Charlotte's divorce (which, predictably, is nullified by Christmas treacle). The whole film could have been lifted if one of the cooks in the cafe kitchen had shouted "no" when Bucky asked for privacy so he could continue his argument with Ruby. He is angry because she didn't tell him she is leaving. It would have been compelling if he had been sad instead, but the script was looking for conflict. Okay-- but it gets even more outrageously shameless: they all dance in the hospital waiting room to celebrate their reconciliations, including a gutless suggestion that Ruby will find true love with Hank instead of Bucky. Like "Love Actually", it's a movie with some quirk and some fun, but, unlike "Love Actually", it didn't have the guts to let some tragedy leaven the schmaltz.
Rachel Weisz called this a "funnier, sex-driven 'All About Eve'", which sounds right. Lady Sarah is Queen Anne's confidant, adviser, and first minister of sorts, her indispensable aide, because Anne is unhealthy, incompetent, and clueless. Abigail is a former Lady who has been cast out through unfortunate circumstances. She is accepted, generously, by Lady Sarah as a servant, but devises various stratagems through which she begins to win the attention and support of Anne. By the time Lady Sarah recognizes the threat, she has been placed in a vulnerable position. The two women are cynical, calculating, and ruthless in their work, which oddly imbues the shrewd men around them with the impression of virtue and honesty. Very well-acted and beautifully filmed in Hatfield House, Hertfordshire and Hampton Court Palace-- the palaces are truly amazing to behold. In a revealing bit of trivia, Emma Stone states that it was her idea to show her breasts in the scene in which Sarah discovers her in bed with Anne: it's a middle finger to Sarah.
Documentary about a veteran who was severely beaten one night at a bar. He lost most of his memories, including of his wife, and had to relearn to walk, eat, speak, and so on. On the way, he began to retreat into a world of G.I. Joe and Barbie dolls, that he build in his back yard and then photographed. This became a form of therapy for him, discovered by an editor for an exotica magazine, and eventually a New York gallery. Odd, sometimes amateurish-- which works in its favor. We meet many of his friends who hold the dolls that represent them in front of themselves to lead into the interviews. Some surprising developments, pertaining to women's shoes. Hogancamp is free of artifice and coyness and quite talented artistically. His photos became a bit of a sensation (thought not for all), and the documentary led to a feature movie in 2018 starring Steve Carrell. But we are left the ambivalence Mark feels towards his fame, and his expressed desire to continue to live in his fantasy, doll world.
Poorly directed biopic about Lee Israel, a woman who discovered that people will pay a lot of money for letters from favour writers. So she decided to make a little industry of it and produced up to 400 fake letters, selling them to collectors and dealers, before being caught by the FBI. Lee was a writer herself whose books were sometimes noted but did not sell well, and were regularly dissed by critics. "Can You Ever Forgive Me" is distinctly self-serving, giving the impression that Israel was a better writer than most critics believe, and that she honorably owned up to her misdeeds at the right time, but generally it's accurate, and downbeat, and gritty at times.
Well-intentioned study of the poor underbelly of Manila, seen through the eyes of an earnest young fisherman, Julio, who leaves his provincial town in search of his girlfriend, Ligaya, who was lured to the city by a procuress promising good jobs and an education. Julio is quickly disabused of his naivete by robbers and cheating foremen, of course, and driven to the point of desperation by his frustrated search for Ligaya. We are told this is a combination of flashbacks and narration. His desperation, however, is somewhat undercut by the cheerful support of his compatriots, the other exploited workers, who are quick to offer a place to stay or money to Julio when he needs it. It's a message of solidarity with the working, exploited classes, and it is striking how often this film expands narrative time to explain relationships and tricks that are clearly the result of research and documentation. As such, it's a worthwhile look at an important aspect of life in the large, developing cities, even if the drama is sometimes clumsy, poorly acted and edited, and a bit rote.
John Keats was part of a flurry of Romantic poets in the early 19th century (he died in 1821, at 25), along with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley. We meet him living with Charles Brown, a Libertarian, who enjoys tormenting neighbor Fanny Brawne for her triviality and obsession with fashion. John is drawn to Fanny and she to him, almost instantly, but we are never allowed to forget for a moment the harsh strictures of 19th century social life, the fact that he is in debt and has no prospects, and the requirements of public virtue in all concerned. They talk and fence verbally and she begins to acquire a taste for poetry-- or so, she badly wants Keats (and Brown) to believe. She is often accompanied by her brother but she and Keats do find time alone, but there will be no bodice- ripping in "Bright Star". (Though, in his letters, Keats made it clear that he at least wished for a consummation). Campion has an exquisite sense of the right visual touch, the timely edit, and pace, that gives this film a slowing sense of delicacy and joy and inquisitiveness. We see how others watch Fanny and John, what they pay attention too, what their interests are. This introduces an almost unbearable tension for we know that the gestures in this relationship are fundamentally consequential and potentially tragic. Campion's film echoes "A Quiet Passion", the challenging film on Emily Dickinson, that also handled well the task of making a poet's life interesting. Though, let's not forget, he was a romantic poet, which means he was responsible for much of the silliest verse ever foisted upon a high school class: Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: and: "For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells." Alas, alas, 'tis silly and trite And only a modern English teacher Treacly and blathering, could bite.
Decent dramatization of the book by Nick Vallelonga about his father's relationship with black classical pianist, Dr. Don Shirley, who hires him as a driver for a concert tour of the Southern U.S. during the early 1960's. Guilty of the "white savior complex" without a doubt-- Tony Lip is the real hero of the story, especially when he tutors Shirley on "real" black culture, thereby completely undermining what should have been the central point of the film. The real message of this film is that the elitism represented by Shirley's elegant and talented trio, the culmination of years of dedication and devotion to their craft, is junk, and boogie bar blues and fried chicken and hoagies are the real thing. This is betrayed when Tony identifies what Shirley does as being like Liberace. For god's sake!
Powerful docu-drama (it is a drama that looks very much, at times, like a documentary, with handheld cameras and improvised scenes, though the sound quality is a giveaway) about a group of AIDS activists in Paris in the early 1990's. They meet and argue and discuss strategies and the moral and ethical principles they must apply, and there are personality clashes, and the desperation of individuals who see their lives at stake in the outcome. They sneak into pharmaceutical company offices and disrupt their business and splatter fake blood on their doors and windows. They confront executives and government officials and sometimes expel them even when they appear to be offering dialogue and shared concerns. Eventually, we focus on Sean and Nathan and their love affair as Sean shows symptoms of AIDS and he moves back in with his mother for care. Almost uncomfortably intimate at times, and does not shy away from the sex, unlike most Hollywood movies about AIDS (director Campillo recruited only gay actors for the major roles). Really, a terrific film.
And what a deal!
(Joel Edgerton actually wrote the screenplay). Searing, emotional drama about a young man raised in a fundamentalist Christian family who is outed as gay by the college friend who raped him (to forestall an accusation of rape). His parents book him into a conversation therapy program (at some cost) that claims to be able to convert him to a heterosexual. "Boy Erased", to it's credit, avoids the obvious pitfalls: caricature and exaggeration. It is moving because the program, delineated with precision and tact, has real life to it, and the unhappy participants stand out as individuals with stories, not stereotypes. Jared's father is hardcore on the issue (to this day, he rejects homosexuality), but his mother gradually comes to accept Jared as he is, and pulls him out of the program. Sensitively filmed and acted, this is a remarkable, moving story.
Stunning script about a American, Charlie Madison, in charge of wrangling supplies and other benefits for the brass, in England, on the eve of the D-Day invasion. Madison is unashamedly a coward who will do anything to avoid being drawn into an actual battle, and he has a taste for good food, wine, and woman. He meets his match in Emily, a British driver, who finds his hedonism offensive, but is attracted by the fact that he is far less likely than her first husband, brother, and father, to be killed in the war. What is so stunningly refreshing is that there is no redemptive moment really, or twist, in which we learn that courage and the willingness to die for a cause really is better. It's a direct challenge to the culture of militarism, the fetishist worship of death. Madison loves life. He loves women and he loves good food and he has no intention of putting his life at the disposal of some general or admiral who may very well be a lunatic-- as his own boss, Admiral Jessup proves to be. In a dissociative moment, Jessup plans an absurd strategy to make a film about the first navy man on the beach, to promote the cause of keeping the navy a distinctive service to Congress. Madison is dragged into with apparently tragic results. Caustic and provocative. Not particularly artistic in presentation (this is Arthur Hiller, after all) but tasteful and down to earth.
Maverick is, well, a maverick. He's reckless and arrogant and, of course, a great pilot, just the kind of man America needs to defend itself from foreign predators. In fact, he sounds like the kind of guy who bombed those Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan by mistake. Charlie is an instructor who, without the slightest care, begins an affair with her student, Maverick. The "tough but fair" instructors understand that we need assholes to fight our wars and tolerate Maverick's behavior. Desperate to impart some kind of seriousness to the story, a rather unlikely attack by Russian planes at the end heightens the suspense, which is a low bar in this film. Poorly acted, poorly directed, and really pretty tiresome. There is a real school for Top Guns and they impose a $5 fine to any student quoting the movie. Many actors turned down roles in the film because of it's pro-war message, and because it glorified militarism; Bryan Adams also refused to allow the use of one of his songs. The music is mostly awful synthesizer crap. According to IMDB, this appears to be one of the most inaccurate films ever made. No attempt appears to have been expended to give accurate detail about the military hardware, uniforms, procedures, dogfight strategies-- you name it.
When Veronica's husband, Harry, is killed, along with his com-padres, in a botched robbery attempt, she discovers that he owed millions of dollars to a vicious gangster, who expects to be paid. Desperate, she recruits the wives of the other gang members to follow up on a heist planned in Harry's notebooks, that looks rich and simple. Turns out the gangster is a black politician running for ward counselor in Chicago. What starts out as over-exploited heist concept turns into a dark exploration of politics, race, poverty and class. And then ends not uncomfortably with a more conventional heist outcome. At one point, it seems to turn into an empowerment trope, but the story is more complex than that. The women don't become surrogate men, or learn to excel at masculinity: they are determined and clever, without obviating their gender. Jack Mulligan, who first appears to be the white, racist demagogue, turns into a more complex character, with some distaste for the corrupt politics of his father, and his opponent, Jamal Manning, is not what he first appears to be either. All is handled deftly by McQueen, adding nuance to characters and situations, and exploring the personal circumstances of the women at some length. In particular, Alice grows pleasingly as a character, believably, from a naive, helpless debutante, into a determined, enthusiastic conspirator. The ending has echoes of "12 Angry Men", in which two of the key protagonists finally feel free to acknowledge each other's humanity in a subtle, brief encounter. Actress Elizabeth Debicki, incidentally, looks a lot like Mira Sorvino. Neither Viola Davis, who is over-rated in my opinion, nor Liam Neeson distinguish themselves here, but the rest of the cast, including Colin Farrell and Robert Duvall do.
The Mirando Corporation has, through genetic engineering (a process they deceive the public about), developed a new very lavishly endowed pig, which they distribute to numerous farmers around the world in some kind of contest. All we know is that the pig better "taste fucking good" because after 10 years, the animals are to be slaughtered for meat. Young Mija, who treats her pig, Okja, like a pet dog, doesn't know that. She is the very young grand-daughter of one of the farmers and her grandfather has led her to believe that he purchased the pig from Mirando, and it is now Mija's pet. He tricks her into visiting her parents' graves when the Mirando Corporation comes to take the pig. Grandfather offers Mija a golden pig as a bribe, informing Mija that she is growing up and should consider boyfriends. Mija, furious, sets out to rescue Okja. An animal rights group, coincidentally, wants to use Okja to get film of the real Mirando laboratories to show the public that Okja is actually GMO. At least, so I gathered from this elaborate, confused plot. There's a lot of humour and satire in the story, not all of which is funny or compelling. The corporation is dominated by fanatical liars and the animal rights group is dominated by fanatical liars who hilariously keep telling people that they are none violent and don't mean to hurt them and sorry about the destruction. Johnny Wilcox arrives (Jake Gyllenhaal doing a blatant Jim Carey impression-- and not very well; Paul Dano does much better in his parody of a polite animal rights fanatic) to judge the pig and promote himself-- just another wildcard tossed into the mix. The first hour is strong, amusing, and sometimes magical. But the film gets all messed up in the second half-- too many targets and too little payoff. The idea of the contest never really takes life
Mark Lewis is a photographer and focus puller who never leaves his apartment without his camera. Because his mind has been contaminated in a rather schematically Freudian manner, he feels a need to film fear and then watch the results over and over again. Can his super- nice neighbor Helen save him from himself and his scoptophilia? (Voyeurism). Can the police track him down before he kills again? Unusually well-written and relatively sophisticated for such a pot- boiler plot and ultimately ridiculous, and so scandalous it destroyed the career of a respected director, Michael Powell. Yet regarded by some as a classic in the suspense genre, and a worthy rival to "Psycho"-- which has it's own cheesiness to contend with.
(I did see this much earlier but didn't review it at the time.) "The Candidate" is a stunning film. It shares with "Bullworth" the conceit that the only way a real man of integrity could enter politics is on the assumption and acceptance of the fact that he will lose, (or has nothing to lose), and his primary virtue is the willingness to tell unpopular truths to voters. Redford, who also produced, is Bill McKay, a rather pure (except for a mistress) community organizer and lawyer, and son a former governor. When Marvin Lucas, a political campaign manager without a candidate, offers to manage a campaign for the Senate-- which he will surely lose-- he agrees on condition that he can stay true to his values. But he immediately begins to accept the small compromises asked of him-- cutting his hair, moderating his positions-- and as his campaign begins to catch momentum, he succumbs to more and more pressure to mainstream his positions and style. His father, the ex-governor, appears reluctant to support him, and he tells an important labour leader that he "has shit in common" with him, causing aides to stare in stunning silence until one, then all of them, start laughing. He gets the endorsement. We given full view of the awkward and shabby parts of the campaign: his wife posing for pictures for parade magazine, an aide trying to hustle his way into a conversation with Natalie Wood (as herself), voters that appear to be clueless about the race or his policy positions, a campaign speech to an empty room. At one point, he begins to mouth inane parodies of his own speech in the back of a car. He gets 15 minutes free air time from a radio station but arrives late and can't stop giggling. It's a bravura performance by Redford, and brilliant direction and writing. It is full of those random, unpredictable moments you encounter in real life but rarely in film. It is by far the most realistic campaign movie I know of.
I would have guessed this film was made much earlier, like 1962, instead of 1969. Jean-Louis is a devout Catholic, invited by a friend to join Maud at her apartment for an evening, for dinner, and drinks. Maud is divorced, with a young daughter, and very progressive in terms of personal values. She invites Jean-Louis to literally sleep with her, though this later transitions into more. Jean-Louis, responding to her proximity, makes a move, which she rejects: because he doesn't know his own mind (he had rejected her offer earlier). Jean-Louis knows who he wants: a blonde girl on a motorized bicycle he spots on the street, and, later, at mass. She fits his ideal more perfectly: devout and blonde. But he discovers that she is not all he imagines either. He and his friend Vidal discuss philosophy, Pascal, math, and religion with Maud, and they all sound like college sophomores more interested in making an impression than searching for truth. Sophomoric, in the familiar sense. The type of movie that National Lampoon mocked for pretentiousness. The trouble is not that they discuss important, substantive, philosophical issues: it's that to do so self-consciously, and awkwardly, without that obtuseness becoming part of the aesthetic. It's just clumsy and abstract, especially when Jean-Louis tells Maud that he must be very shocking to her. No, you're not. Well-acted and crisply filmed, outdoors in the snow at times, and a beach, and Maud's striking apartment, and highly regarded by critics because of the same intellectualisms that, today, make it sound pretentious.
I would have guessed this film was made much earlier, like 1962, instead of 1969. Jean-Louis is a devout Catholic, invited by a friend to join Maud at her apartment for an evening, for dinner, and drinks. Maud is divorced, with a young daughter, and very progressive in terms of personal values. She invites Jean-Louis to literally sleep with her, though this later transitions into more. Jean-Louis, responding to her proximity, makes a move, which she rejects: because he doesn't know his own mind (he had rejected her offer earlier). Jean-Louis knows who he wants: a blonde girl on a motorized bicycle he spots on the street, and, later, at mass. She fits his ideal more perfectly: devout and blonde. But he discovers that she is not all he imagines either. He and his friend Vidal discuss philosophy, Pascal, math, and religion with Maud, and they all sound like college sophomores more interested in making an impression than searching for truth. Sophomoric, in the familiar sense. The type of movie that National Lampoon mocked for pretentiousness. The trouble is not that they discuss important, substantive, philosophical issues: it's that to do so self-consciously, and awkwardly, without that obtuseness becoming part of the aesthetic. It's just clumsy and abstract, especially when Jean-Louis tells Maud that he must be very shocking to her. No, you're not. Well-acted and crisply filmed, outdoors in the snow at times, and a beach, and Maud's striking apartment, and highly regarded by critics because of the same intellectualisms that, today, make it sound pretentious.
I would have guessed this film was made much earlier, like 1962, instead of 1969. Jean-Louis is a devout Catholic, invited by a friend to join Maud at her apartment for an evening, for dinner, and drinks. Maud is divorced, with a young daughter, and very progressive in terms of personal values. She invites Jean-Louis to literally sleep with her, though this later transitions into more. Jean-Louis, responding to her proximity, makes a move, which she rejects: because he doesn't know his own mind (he had rejected her offer earlier). Jean-Louis knows who he wants: a blonde girl on a motorized bicycle he spots on the street, and, later, at mass. She fits his ideal more perfectly: devout and blonde. But he discovers that she is not all he imagines either. He and his friend Vidal discuss philosophy, Pascal, math, and religion with Maud, and they all sound like college sophomores more interested in making an impression than searching for truth. Sophomoric, in the familiar sense. The type of movie that National Lampoon mocked for pretentiousness. The trouble is not that they discuss important, substantive, philosophical issues: it's that to do so self-consciously, and awkwardly, without that obtuseness becoming part of the aesthetic. It's just clumsy and abstract, especially when Jean-Louis tells Maud that he must be very shocking to her. No, you're not. Well-acted and crisply filmed, outdoors in the snow at times, and a beach, and Maud's striking apartment, and highly regarded by critics because of the same intellectualisms that, today, make it sound pretentious.
I would have guessed this film was made much earlier, like 1962, instead of 1969. Jean-Louis is a devout Catholic, invited by a friend to join Maud at her apartment for an evening, for dinner, and drinks. Maud is divorced, with a young daughter, and very progressive in terms of personal values. She invites Jean-Louis to literally sleep with her, though this later transitions into more. Jean-Louis, responding to her proximity, makes a move, which she rejects: because he doesn't know his own mind (he had rejected her offer earlier). Jean-Louis knows who he wants: a blonde girl on a motorized bicycle he spots on the street, and, later, at mass. She fits his ideal more perfectly: devout and blonde. But he discovers that she is not all he imagines either. He and his friend Vidal discuss philosophy, Pascal, math, and religion with Maud, and they all sound like college sophomores more interested in making an impression than searching for truth. Sophomoric, in the familiar sense. The type of movie that National Lampoon mocked for pretentiousness. The trouble is not that they discuss important, substantive, philosophical issues: it's that to do so self-consciously, and awkwardly, without that obtuseness becoming part of the aesthetic. It's just clumsy and abstract, especially when Jean-Louis tells Maud that he must be very shocking to her. No, you're not. Well-acted and crisply filmed, outdoors in the snow at times, and a beach, and Maud's striking apartment, and highly regarded by critics because of the same intellectualisms that, today, make it sound pretentious.
A melancholy, stately story about a couple, Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow, who, with their spouses, occupy rooms in a boarding house in Hong Kong in 1962. Mr. Chan travels a lot, to Japan and elsewhere, and so Mrs. Chan is often home alone. Mr. Chow's wife works late and one night he discovers that, actually, she hasn't been working late: she's been somewhere else. And his friend, Mr. Ping, has seen her walking with another man. Gradually, the two, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan, discover-- through clever detail-- that their spouses are having an affair. It's 1962, remember? They don't even want to reveal the scandal to anyone, so they suffer loneliness and neglect in silence. But they discover each other and very slowly develop a level of intimacy that we wrongly expect will lead to consummation at some point. But they have decided that to sleep together would make them like their unfaithful partners. There are clear indications that both want to fulfill their relationship, but not at the same moment. There is a world of detail in their relationship, their meetings, their small gestures, their intimate looks, and we focus on that because there are no explosions, no melodrama, no rage. In some ways, "In the Mood for Love" is all the more explosive for the way it constrains the two of them, magnifying each smaller moment. There is one magnificently chilling moment: Mrs. Chan decides to finally confront her husband about his affair. So she looks at him and asks if he has a mistress. At first, we think it is her husband, but then we discover it is Mr. Chow. She wants to rehearse it first, with her trusted lover. But, knowing that he wants to sleep with her but she does not agree, the question takes on a double meaning, and when she repeats it, without the firm demeanor of the first attempt, it's as if she is staring into the soul of Mr. Chow, wondering how he could stand to go so long without any physical affection: do you have a mistress? Music is used beautifully throughout, with characters almost posing in tableaus that dramatize the state of their lives. In the end, we are left with the tragedy of emotionally constrictive social conventions that deny two intelligent, sensitive persons the opportunity to live well, to fully experience love and companionship. Nat King Cole's "Aquellos Ojos Verdes" is prominent, as is Bryan Ferry's "I'm in the Mood for Love", of course.
Set in Belarus during WW II, 1943, Florya wants to join the partisans resisting the German invasion. His mother, heart-rendingly, begs him to stay home and look after his younger siblings. But he finds a rifle and sets out on a journey or horrors. Strange, magical movie at times-- his encounter with a stunningly beautiful girl, Glasha-- seems surreal, the story stays anchored to realism just enough to keep the tragic horror of war from becoming rote. Still, Florya is in constant shock and astonishment, which diminishes the effect of some of the later atrocities. In real life, the Germans destroyed and burned 628 Belarusian villages and, yes, herded civilians into barns and set them on fire, as dramatized effectively in "Come and See". Strange film, unevenly paced, sometimes very opaque, but ultimately powerful and disturbing.
Dramatization of the events of July 22, 2011 in Norway on the island of Utoya, filmed Norway and Iceland. Gives large voice to Anders Behring Breivik, and contrasts him with victim Viljar Hanssen who was seriously wounded and spent months recovering the ability to walk and function, peaking with Hanssen's testimony at the trial, which, we are given to believe, shamed Breivik, though I don't know if there is any objective evidence of that. Greengrass is fascinated with evil and the motivations of those who commit atrocities and it shows: Breivik is given lots of air time. (The cast, by the way, speaks English with a slight nordic accent--a strange choice really, but that might be partly because the entire cast is Norwegian, but the film, of course, had to be in English.) Hanssen (played by Michael J. Fox lookalike Jonas Gravli) consistently looks startled and hungry and becomes somewhat tiresome after a while. The problem is that he is presented as a relatively faultless character, bland and correct. Bleak and colourless, and poorly acted and edited (too much ridiculous hand-held), but its virtue lies, ironically, in giving us a fairly extensive picture of Breivik. You would naturally wonder, what would bring a nobody like Breivik to commit such an act. He answers: because he is a nobody. He really believed, like Manson, that his act would electrify the opposition to Norway's liberal, progressive governments, stop immigration, and begin the process of building a future of racial homogeneity, in which he, presumably, might actually get the girl.
Based on book by James Hansen. Extraordinary account of Neil Armstrong's career culminating in the moon landing in July 1969. One must be grateful that the filmmakers inexplicably chose not to commit the foulest errors most space films make, like putting tiny lights inside the helmets to show the astronaut's faces, or making sounds in space. "First Man" has an eye for the shabby, darker side of space exploration. Indeed, some scenes of the astronauts being prepared for the launch suggest hamsters being put into test buckets-- no romanticized, pseudo heroic pretense here. Most fascinating as a study of Neil Armstrong, a self-effacing, diligent man, who held his emotions in check (his sons collaborated on this film) and didn't try to exploit his privileged career for personal gain (he only very reluctantly agreed to James Hansen's biography, and insisted on accuracy). The music is particularly good, featuring Armstrong's own favorite, the theramin, on a lot of tracks. Excellent special effects, particularly the dramatization of the near disaster of Gemini 8.
The usual Michael Moore, which, if understood correctly as polemic rather than documentary, is actually pretty good. A bit rambling and disjointed as it covers Trump's election, betrayals of the Democratic Party, the horror of Flint's water contamination and Governor Snyder's bungled response (he immediately restored clean water to the General Motors Plant), and the way Bernie Sanders got cheated out of delegates in the 2018 Democratic primaries. Moore is often eloquent, and his arguments are not unsound. He has a knack for presentation but he also includes at least one regrettable segment in all of his films (chasing Charlton Heston around his house, suggesting that Trump has unnatural lusts for Ivanka, ignoring Cuba's human rights abuses). But it is a polemic and if you find his working class perspective congenial, "Fahrenheit 11/9" is worth your time.
Haunting documentary about Linda Bishop, a woman who abandoned her adolescent daughter and wandered the streets under delusions and paranoia, until apprehended for several minor offences, and institutionalized for three years at the New Hampshire Hospital. In the end, the state is no longer able to hold her (it's not really clear if they couldn't or wouldn't) and she is released without notification to her sister or any other relative. She finds an abandoned farmhouse and lives out the winter there until she eventually runs out of food and starves to death. The film-makers advocate for more rights for the state and guardians to forcibly institutionalize cases like Linda, or force them to take medications, but her stay in an institution was not anodyne: she didn't like the lack of freedom, the lack of privacy, the interactions with the other people there. Nor do the interviewee's acknowledge that part of her delusion was that God would take care of her. Or is it a "delusion"? Or is it a religious belief?
Unusual, rambunctious film about a struggling man, Cassius Green, who takes a job at a call center and who, with the advice of a co-worker, develops a "white voice" that helps him become a success. He is rapidly promoted and continues to succeed until he gets to meet the head of the company. The company, it turns out, has a relationship with another company that offers slavery to people in exchange for which they received guaranteed food and housing for their lifetime. But this company is busy developing genetic hybrids-- a kind of weird centaur-- to do even more work for even less compensation. (The viewer might be surprised they're not investing in robots.) Yes, it is weird. Meanders over into science fiction for a time, and then into social commentary, with a labour union signing up the other workers at the call center. At that point, I no longer knew or cared deeply about what the director wanted to show us.
On the day of Jerry Black's retirement from the police department, the body of a seven-year-old girl, Ginny, is found, raped and brutally murdered, on a snowy hillside. A native man was seen fleeing the scene by a young snow-mobiler. Jerry decides to look in on the case even though he is official retired. He goes to the crime scene and when other detectives are reluctant to inform the parents, he decides to do it. Ginny's mother demands that he promise he will find the killer. Instead of promising to do his best, Jerry promises that he will-- upon pain of his salvation-- find the culprit. Religion intrudes on the movie in several instance, usually as a dark, frightening force, as when the mother forces him to make this pledge. Stan Krolak, a detective, interrogates the suspect and persuades him to confess, but Jerry, aware of the man's history and his borderline developmentally delayed condition, suspects that the confession is false. When the suspect kills himself, the rest of the department considers the case closed, but not Jerry. He researches other unsolved slayings and concludes that a serial killer is operating in the area, and he sets out to trap him. But here the movie departs from the usual Hollywood scheme and focuses on Jerry's retirement, his fishing, his purchase of a gas station, and his relationship to a single mother, Lori, with a young daughter, Chrissy, whom he relates to as a devoted father figure, but also, we realize, as potential bait. Jerry is obsessed and Penn is interested in how the obsession with "justice" twists and bends personality, to the point where Jerry may be doing more harm than good. This is not a faultless film: you should be astonished that the police assist Jerry when uses a child, Chrissy as bait. And the odds against the real killer being be drawn to Chrissy is astronomical. And Jerry too quickly suspects the native man is innocent, even when there is some evidence that he might be the murderer. But the ending is courageous and unusual and Penn's direction is robust and clever. And the excellent performances by Nicholson and others-- a stellar cast-- lift "The Pledge" and prove compelling viewing.
Seven-year-old Ana and her older sister, Isabel, live in a small town somewhere in rural Spain, with two parents who immediately seem to us to be distant, remote, and disconnected. Father is a beekeeper and writer; mother bicycles into the city to send love letters to a man living in a town faraway. Ana and Isabel go to a movie one night, "Frankenstein", and Ana is very affected by the monster, particularly after he appears to have killed the little girl. She demands an explanation from Isabel but Isabel breaks her promise to give her one and Ana accuses her of not really knowing the truth. But Isabel does tell her the monster lives nearby and can be found; it is a ghost and has a body but doesn't have a body and talks to her but can't talk. And when a soldier who appears to be a deserter shows up at an abandoned building, Ana seems to connect him to the Frankenstein monster and is strangely attached to him, and brings him food, and touches his wounded leg. It's as if she wants to befriend him. In resistance to the harsh emotional landscape around her, Ana develops her own powerful inner feelings about the stranger. She gives him her father's coat and there are consequences for that. In her imagination, Frankenstein's monster visits her near a river. Village Voice suggests that "Spirit of the Beehive" expresses Erice's implicit view that childhood is the "process" by which understand the lies of life. Isabel lies to Ana. Their parent's relationship is obviously superficial. The soldier is murdered by the police. Exquisitely filmed by Luis Cuadrado, who was going blind at the time and committed suicide in 1980.
Allegedly, Bradley Cooper can direct, and write. Allegedly the music was filmed "live"; allegedly, this one is not as bad as the horrible Kris Kristofferson - Barbara Streisand vanity project from 1976, produced by Jon Peters who, lo and behold, also produced this turkey. I don't think I've recently felt as deceived by the reviews of a film as I did over this one. "A Star is Born" is essentially a princess film: Ally can never appear to be so crass as to desire fame and attention-- she must dragged onto the stage, promoted by others who think she's brilliant even if the actual songs she does in the film are pedestrian, and, finally, she must be the center of attention at a great ball-- the last scene in the film where she is supposed most interested in paying tribute to her husband, Jack. Her manager, the bad guy, has the obligatory foreign accent. Nobody brings up tacky details about contracts, royalties, song-writer credits, and such. I didn't believe Lady Gaga's performances in "A Star is Born" were really "live", as insistently claimed by Bradley Cooper. Turns out, they were not: they used a kind of hybrid technique in which the live audience did not hear the songs, which is kind of doing a studio recording on an outdoor set. They claimed that they did this because they didn't want the audience recording the songs in advance of the film's release and leaking them onto Youtube. I think they also wanted to keep her mouth visible to the camera at all times. Too bad. It was the main reason I wanted to see the film. I would also have liked to see the scene in which Ally realizes her share of Spotify plays is going to be about $0.006. Another problem: Jack, an established star, drags Ally onstage and promotes her career. It has the distasteful flavor of Linda McCartney's ill-fated tour with Wings, and Neil Young putting his wife Pegi in a backup band with Emmy-Lou Harris, and even Yoko Ono. Ally pays no dues, and it is just plain ignorant of the film to not at least acknowledge that it will be an issue with critics and fans. Her first performance materializes out of nowhere with the backup band already knowing the song, apparently, that she wrote, and never played before. Secondly, a great voice is not that unique: Jack could have put any of a dozen unknown singers out there in that situation and they would have been a hit. Thirdly, audiences don't know an artist is supposed to be great and deserving of wild acclaim until they have received the ritual promotion of various media outlets, talk shows, reviews, podcasts, and so on. She's working on an album almost immediately after her debut, signed by the heavy with the accent, who also starts changing her look and style, even while she feebly insists she wants to remain authentic. She's also pop-- and he's country-rock. Fourth: not a single song on the soundtrack is even remotely as good as, say, "When Your Mind's Made" up from "Once".
Tim, who is part of a fully functional, likable family, is informed by his father that all the males in the family have the ability to time-travel. Happy birthday. He uses this new found power to manipulate a girl he meets at a dating night at a restaurant that is held completely in the dark. After he blunders a few times and goes back in time to have another go at it, he succeeds in winning Mary over. The catch? We are told that if he goes back and changes things there might be peripheral damage--as when he finds out a beloved child is never born: a different sperm fertilizes Mary's egg. But in this film, it's best not to try to work out the complications in too much detail-- there are too many holes in the conception. And this is a Curtis film so all's fair in love, including the fundamental deceptions Tim works on his love, and his friends, and even his family. (He wants to rescue his sister from a live of dissolution by steering her away from a bad influence.) The first half is unforgivably sloppy and thoughtless, every interaction so schematic that it dies. Mary immediately offers him her rapt attention is never less than attentive and affectionate. Even when he stalks her as a complete stranger in a museum, she is immediately open to a date with this man who would, in most accounts, be perceived as creepy. Tim's dad is perfectly charming and loving-- sort of a less acerbic Bill Murray character. His sister is predictably quirky. He rescues a play by his landlord and the landlord is immediately acclaimed a genius, even though the actor is reading his lines from Tim's scribbled cardboard sheets on the side of the stage-- we were asked to believe that if an actor completely forgot his lines on stage, no one would be able to step in and feed him his lines or cover the gap. But the story begins to have some emotional weight as it focuses on Tim's realization that every moment of life should be lived with joy and sensitivity-- though we are never offered any moments of particular poignancy or charm to revel in.
Repressive father figure: check. Tolerant and kind mother: check. Repressive authorities with hilarious accents: check. Colorful sidekicks, also with hilarious accents: check. Recycled pop tunes: check. Hero rejected by society because of personality trait: check. Hero suggests a condition analogous to homosexuality or gender dysphoria: check. Large dangerous creatures who often appear behind sympathetic characters without them knowing he is there-- hilarious-- check. Superb graphics and 3D animation-- yeah, there is that too. And a story too pedestrian and predictable to credit. And the lonely hero returns to his community to alert them to his success and everyone stops everything to listen to him and he is challenged but then events transpire at just the right moment to prove him right and make him a hero: check. So he doesn't get the girl-- well, his character really is a gay anyway, voiced by Elijah Wood, and possessing, as a heroic virtue, the ability to--wait for it-- tap dance. What possessed them to base a character with no apparent links to Marilyn Monroe the name Norma Jean, and Monroe's voice? None. It means nothing except as a gimmick. And ask yourself how appealing this movie would have been if it didn't hijack its appeal from popular music? It is a pity that the heavy-handed ecological message was imposed so clumsily onto the film in the last half-hour. Otherwise, it would have been a relatively depressing ending for animated film. Instead, the crisis of the film is resolved with magic and tricks, instead through the ingenuity and determination of the hero. But the larger point is that the "crisis" was manufactured for the purpose of hanging a few chase scenes and dance numbers on it, so resolving it shouldn't have been the issue. What is so wrong with just ending the story without a big bang?
Actually written by the usual Disney committee of mediocre pollsters: Moana is NOT a princess-- so they. No, no, no-- she is daughter of a Polynesian chief. Not a princess. But she is spunky and loud and obnoxious and the only one who can see what has to be done to save her people. Her mean old dad has no sense at all, I guess, and tells her not to sail beyond the reef. But she just has to, to remove a curse put upon her people, with the helpful, magical, random help of the ocean, which though apparently powerful, can't do anything about the curse. Moana is the least amusing thing in this animation, even though she's voiced by Auli'i Cravalho rather than a celebrity. Dwayne Johnson inadequately voices Maui. Maui doesn't want to help Moana's people, of course. Characters are predictable and tediously schematic: the spunky girl, the stern father, the hilarious side- kick, lovable naughty grandma, the male demigod who you are supposed to think is knocked out of the story until he comes roaring back at just the right instant. They battle Tomatoa the Giant Crab, who sings a song in knowing impersonation of David Bowie as voiced by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who must have really wanted the Disney money. (No-- he didn't. He signed on before the success of "Hamilton", and is said to a big fan of "The Little Mermaid".) Most of the other music, including the obligatory theme, sound utterly derivative and are not voiced by the actor. Exceptional technical animation, though what's the point when you steal ideas from other animations, including Disney's own? What is the goal? To make the characters lifelike, but with bigger eyes? And the plot relies on random magical interventions not tied to character or intellect that feel more like convenient artifacts rather than developed story. The lead actors did not even meet until after recording was complete and it shows: the dialogue it static and lifeless.
In one of the most engaging sequences of alluring conversation between two leads in a romantic/not-romantic film, Elle and James meet at a book signing, go to her antique store, and drive out to a museum, while arguing over whether an exact copy of an artwork-- or marriage, perhaps-- is just as good and serves to create just as much pleasure as the real thing. It is only after an hour or more that we realize that this couple might already be married-- or not. Maybe they are role-playing the marriage; maybe they are role-playing two strangers who meet and (re)discover what they like about each other. There is no definitive answer but all the pleasure is in the journey they take us on, very reminiscent of "Before Sunset", in which they taunt, ridicule, flatter, and fight each other, and consider an elderly couple leaving a church, after considering a very young couple getting married who insistently ask them to pose with them in their wedding pictures (for luck). James ridicules the young couple: they have no idea what will hit them with children and responsibilities and age. Elle rather suggests that the copy of love, the appearance of loyalty and commitment, are just as good as the real thing-- something James claims to have proven in his book. They tell each other stories, that might be true, about each other, about a woman who falls asleep while driving with a child in the back seat, or man who almost abandons his family and forgets to even acknowledge a child's birthday, who is "cold" on his wedding day. We never get the definitive goods on them: are they really talking about each other? Kiarostami has a history of portraying impostors and fakes, and this one is a marvel of opacity. The two leads are obsessively watchable here, and Kiarostami uses long, continuous takes that never drag.
We meet Brady Blackburn as he removes the bandage from a severe head wound and covers it with plastic wrap so he can take a shower. He is a rodeo rider whose career is endangered by the injury, but he doesn't have much else to fall back on, not even high school. His relationship with his father is rocky-- he gambles and drinks-- but his developmentally-delayed sister is close to him. He is also a good horse trainer and we get to see his remarkable skills with an untrained horse, patiently filmed and explored. We understand why his temporary job in a local store leaves him feeling robbed of his identity. Chloe Zhao met Brady (the actor) when he taught her how to ride a horse and when the real person suffered the real injury, she built this remarkable film around him. What a find! Brady is a compelling, subtle, convincing screen presence. Most of the other actors are clearly real people who probably play themselves for the most part, but it all works beautifully because of Zhao's austere, sparse style, the exquisite photography, and the riveting sequences with the horses and with a friend, Lane, who has suffered a grievous accident and is now paralyzed. Not a cheap shot or trick in the film and when we arrive at the tragedy unresolved at the conclusion, it arrives with the full weight of believable characters.
Disappointing story about a genius high school student in the Inglewood area of Oakland who wants to get into Harvard, and the various misadventures that follow his stumbling association with a drug dealer named Dom. It all quickly turns into a caper film with a lot of thoughtless sequences of women randomly coming on to our hero, Malcolm-- of course, we couldn't see him coming on to them first, could we?-- not in this universe. So Malcolm and Jib and Diggy, a lesbian, subject to her parents determined conversion therapies, (who are also a punk band), need to return a large cache of Dom's MDMA (mollty) to someone before they get killed. For unclear reasons, they decide they better sell it online, using BitCoin, and for even more mysterious reasons, they are able to make extensive use of the school's computer and science labs to process the material. (As it turns out, AJ, the destined dealer, doesn't want to deal with the drug after the botched transfer, but wants Malcolm to take care of selling it and return the money to him). Meanwhile... Malcolm meets an older girl named Nakia who just adores Malcolm's niceness-- not my experience in high school, while Dom's sister, Lily who offers to take his virginity. And is there any point to this all? Yet Malcolm offers a righteous little diatribe at the end about white viewers expecting a black kid like him to be a drug dealer rather than a Harvard student. Yes. "Dope" is poorly acted, poorly written, and poorly directed. Yet it got a lot of kind notices. Why?
The director and writer shared both duties, and star in the film, but the film was largely improvised anyway. And the character of Stu, in real life, is pretty well exactly what he appears to be: a computer analyst hired from a Wellington company, LanWorx, to do technical work on the computers. He may well be the best thing in the film. Four vampires share a flat in Wellington, New Zealand, but behave like frat boys, arguing over whose turn it is to do the dishes and whether one should put newspaper on the couch before fanging a new victim. Viago, who reminds one of Andy Kaufman and Peewee Herman, wakes to an alarm clock every night at sundown and rouses the other vampires, though Petyr, the oldest and creepiest-looking, might just stay in his vault and ignore the house meeting. Like "The Office", there is a documentary crew following them around and interacting, at times, with the characters (they eventually get caught up in a scrape with some werewolves). They also have magical powers to get people to not see things (like the body of a vampire hunter in the basement), and some limited powers to mesmerize victims, though they seem rusty in that area. So it's really about friendship and aging (they are out of touch with modern technology and clubbing rules) and of course the endless tension between having a human friend or just eating him. Really, pretty amusing and generally fresh and funny, and sometimes violent.
Lovely, contemplative film about life on a farm called "Paridier" in wartime France (WW I) from the point of view of the women who have to do most of the work while the men are away fighting, and the social conflicts that arise due to the absence of the men. Hortense is the owner and dominant force on the form, hiring and firing, and managing affairs. Solange's husband is off fighting and is eventually taken prisoner by the Germans. They need more help and get it from Francine, who is sent by a bank. Francine is an orphan and glad to have a place, and is a dedicated, self-less worker. "Guardians" patiently lets us watch farm life for them, milking cows, plowing, seeding, chopping wood, making some weird dish with bread and wine, so that we become accustomed to the rhythms and textures of their lives-- before they are disrupted by Solange's actions and their consequences, and George's interest in Francine (when the family expected him to become engaged to Marguerite, a family ward, instead). There is more disruption from the Americans who haven't entered the fighting yet but buy food from the farm, annoying Georges, who thinks they should be off fighting. This is a wonderful recreation of a time and place, sensitive, and revealing.
Searing documentary about a program at Folsom Prison to get the men to face their deepest anxieties and grievances about their past, their absent fathers, brothers who betrayed them, and so on, in a kind of large psycho-therapy session moderated by social workers and joined by volunteers from the community, and largely led by the inmates themselves. Filmed in 2009 but not released until 2017. Frighteningly raw at times-- and not to everyone's taste. You can see some of the volunteers hang back, then get drawn into the confessional style confrontations. Then one of them recounts how his father was disappointed in him for fetching the wrong tool several times, and then sent him into the house. This is transformed by some of the inmates into some kind of traumatic thing that contaminated the volunteer's relationship with father, though it seems more likely it was and remained trivial. It was a strange sequence. Other sequences are more intense, in which a person howls and thrashes his outrage while embraced tightly by the other men. One volunteer, Brian, says something really aggravates an inmate, and then another one who lunges at him-- leaving questions about just how suitable he was for the experience. At times, searingly compelling. It is claimed that none of 40 men who went through the program returned to prison. I remain skeptical. I see some of this kind of programming as similar to faith healing and charismatic church services, speaking in tongues, and so on. It's all very dramatic and full of lingo, but is there any real evidence that, 1) all of the experiences related by the participants are real or true, and, 2) that any of it is really therapeutic, at least, in the way the convenors think it is. It is not difficult to imagine that the love and acceptance these men express towards each other doesn't make them less dangerous to anyone outside of their artificially created circle of trust. Implicit in all of this is the suggestion that these men committed crimes primarily as a consequence of a deprived or abused childhood. If you are in this circle, you seem obligated to come up with something and to cry and to thrash and scream, and it would not be hard to imagine a deprived participant making something up, or exaggerating, in order to fit in.
Two billionaire brothers arguing over nature vs. nurture decide on an experiment. They will destroy a rich young broker's career, take away his credit, alienate his colleagues, and take a poor, black, beggar from the street and make him rich and privileged. One brother, Randolph, argues that the young broker will become corrupt because of his environment, and the young beggar will become clever and sophisticated and will behave ethically. Mortimer argues they will behave the same way regardless of economic circumstance. I give credit to "Trading Places" for making substantive efforts towards making this story line at least moderately credible, and extraordinary efforts to dramatize the scam the two subjects of the experiment pull on the two brothers in the end. There is an extraordinary scene of stock brokers trading futures on the floor of the Stock Market, with a short, lucid explanation of what they are doing (Louis and Billy Ray are betting against high futures for orange juice-- yes, that is a real market-- and selling short). Eddie Murphy creates here the character that became Donkey in Shrek, with very little alteration, and Ackroyd is credible at Louis, who finds his path blocked at every turn-- credit denied, bank accounts frozen because his framed as a drug dealer, friends alienated). Okay, it's a bit of a stretch, but it's not a lazy comedy and the spastic sequences at the end are almost worth the clumsy set up of the attempts to swipe the briefcase with the mcguffin in it. This is "Prince and the Pauper" of course.
"Based on the true story"-- loosely. Very loosely. Ron Stallworth was a black cop in Colorado Springs in late 1970's (the movie moves the dates back to the early 1970's) and, after seeing an ad in the paper, decided to become a member of the KKK so he could infiltrate it. He had to send a white partner to actually attend the meetings. This is all good for some laughs, and gives Lee free reign to dramatize a lot of racist culture, but the "enhancements" the story sap the movie of some strength. There was no girlfriend, no actual attacks, no bomb, no climatic phone call to Duke. But the Stokey Carmichael segment is compelling, as are the dance scenes afterwards. Unfortunately, this is Lee going Hollywood to some extent, and not happily. Adam Driver and Robert John Burke and Laura Harrier and Corey Hawkins are all very good, and Lee always composes and edits forcefully. Just not as satisfying as "Bamboozled" or "Do the Right Thing". Yet, "BlacKkKlansman" won the Grand Prix at Cannes and garnered a six-minutes standing ovation for Lee.
Enjoyable fantasy about the bear and his friendships and his charm-- he turns the prison he is sent too (a miscarriage of justice, of course) into a lovely "home sweet home" that becomes a long, relatively imaginative and enjoyable chase sequence. I find Paddington himself to be a bit of a bland, proper character (voiced by Ben Whishaw, unremarkably)and his relationships antiseptic, but it's all fun and amusement.
Elaborate production of the famous Lope De Aguirre story, one of the cruelest, harshest testaments of human avarice and ruthlessness ever documented. Lope De Aguirre is a captain for a Spanish expedition down the Maranon River in Peru, a source of the Amazon that stretches from the mountains in Peru to the Atlantic, in search of the mythical El Dorado, the city of Gold. In reality, the Spanish crown wanted to divert some restless, belligerence conquistadors after the conquest of the Incas but putting them altogether on a consuming task. The expedition is a disaster right from the start and the command rebels and assassinates the Governor of Peru, Pedro Ursua. This, of course, opens the door and more murders follow as the captains and commanders jockey for power, eventually leaving Aguirre in charge. He has taken his beautiful daughter with, as Ursua took his beautiful wife. The film's producers (a combined Costa Rican-Spanish production) for lots of extras and sets and it looks expensively filmed but the editing is clumsy and sometimes confusing, as it seems to jump from a crisis to post-resolution(at one point, some of the ships disappear, and then reappear without explanation). It's an engrossing film because the story itself is so compelling and it was filmed on location in Costa Rica. Aguirre is said to be an inspiration for Coppola's Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.
Thatcher's Britain. Mark and Colin are sons of Mavis and Frank. Only Mavis works while the others collect pogey and complain when dinner isn't prepared on time. By Mavis, of course. Colin is borderline retarded while Mark is borderline punk. Mavis' sister, Barbara, and her husband John are comparatively well-off, and when Barbara tries to do a favor for Colin, the delicate wretched balance is shaken and resentments spring forth. On the periphery, both Mark and Coxy, a skinhead friend, are interested in Hayley but she seems sharply aware of the dead-end they seem to offer. In the penultimate scene, we learn more than we could have imagined about the state of Colin's and Mark's relationships with their family, their aunt, and themselves. Mark sabotages Colin's job with Barbara for fear of Colin achieving more than him, the smart one, and not being as dependent on him as he would like. The job is really not all that generous and Mark is defending the proletariat here, and retaliating for the perceived insult of Barbara's condescension. There is a kind of reconciliation in the end-- blood, perhaps, is thicker than water, but Leigh never lets his audiences escape with cheap grace, and that is the difference between a brilliant film-maker like Leigh and Hollywood.
Bleak and depressing at times, but also hilarious and biting, Mike Leigh's take on Thatcherism is never dull, never stagnant. Cyril and Shirley live in a small apartment nursing their disillusionment with hashish and touching affection for each other. Shirley wants a baby but Cyril feels the world is too cold and harsh to bring another life into it. Cyril's sister Valerie, is an incredible piece of work-- over-the-top, perhaps-- as a shrill, giggly poseur whose husband has nothing but contempt for her (at one point he even pushes her hard into the couch) and doesn't treat his mistresses much better. Cyril's mother, Mrs. Bender, is the depressing element: old, ill, and depressed, when she loses her purse one day a neighbor, Laetitia, reluctantly lets her in while Laetitia phones for help. Laetitia and Rupert are nouveau riche and have upgraded a council apartment next to Mrs. Bender's. They are exhilarated by wealth and its accoutrements (they are headed for the opera when Mrs. Bender asks them for help), and they are put off by Valerie's pushiness in trying to see what the apartment looks like when she comes for her mother. All of the family tensions come boiling over at a party Valerie throws for Mrs. Bender's birthday, into a screaming match, mainly between Valerie and Martin, as Valerie tries to shove cake into Mrs. Bender's mouth and make everyone drink champagne. At times while watching a Mike Leigh film, even I wonder if too much reality can be too much to take. He is determined to reveal the lives of real people as they are really lived. Characters are physically flawed, the homes are dreary and lived in, and Mrs. Bender clearly doesn't feel she has much to live for. But that makes his movies all the powerful and often moving, as when Shirley and Cyril discuss having a baby. You can tell that they aren't just reading a script: she is thinking about how his words correspond or not with what he's feeling, and how far can she push, and how really, really badly she wants a child. It is art being art, authentic and revealing and often powerful.
Corrosive, dark comedy about neighbors who squabble over a tree (it casts shade on the deck where Eybjorg, the young second wife of Konrad, likes to work on her tan). Inga, the older wife of Baldvin, resents the young woman, partly because she's beautiful and young, and partly because she seems to represent the loss of one of her sons who has gone missing and may have committed suicide. When Inga's cat disappears, she assumes Eybjorg is responsible and sequence of events begins that lead to a macabre denouement. In the background, we watch Atli and Agnes's marriage fall apart when Agnes catches him watching porn-- which turns out to be Atli himself and a former girlfriend. She considers this an infidelity and regards Atli now as a threat to their young daughter, Asa. But Atli later on turns out to be sane one in this assemblage. Not the most polished film, and the cinematography seemed cold and lifeless at times, but some scenes of wonderful black comedy, and a strong performance by Edda Bjorgvinsdottir bring it to life. She steams all through the film, furious at her attractive neighbor whom she calls the "cycling bitch", at her husband for being a wimp, and her son for cheating on his wife. A compelling portrait of hateful, unhappy soul. Reminded me of Norman Mclaren's famous brilliant animated short, "Neighbors".
Collin has three days to go before his probation period is over and he is free to move out of the half-way home and travel where-ever he pleases. And he is determined to make it, but his life-long buddy Miles is reckless and impulsive. He buys a gun from an Uber driver while Collin is in the car, which could, technically, send him back to prison. Later, he leaves his gun exposed so his young child finds it, leading to an terrifying moment and the wrath of Ashley, his girlfriend. Collin and Miles work for a moving company where Collin's former girl-friend, Val, is the dispatcher. The drama is, will Collin make it through these last three days without blowing his probation? The irony is that Miles behaves more like the stereo-type of the black hood in Oakland than Collin does, though the movie undermines that idea near the end. I had trouble with that ending: Collin behaves as if he is a better man than the white police officer who killed a fleeing black man, but it's almost as if the movie forgot why Collin was in prison in the first place. Some reviewers thought that last, climatic scene was breathtaking. I thought it was self-serving and pious, and a classic example of an actor risking the artistic tone of a movie in order to show off, to give that sensational moment that might get attention but undermines the integrity of the narrative: Collin doesn't deserve that moment. "Blindspotting" is well-acted and generally well-written, and intense, but not particularly well-filmed. And the extended rap sequence near the end just didn't sell it to me.
Yes, that's 197 minutes. And it's great. It has an odd, cumulative effect, in which you become enamored of all these people, customers, users, guest speakers, hosts, managers, directors, of the massive New York Public Library. As always, Wiseman eschews narrative and formal interviews, and just films what he sees, and edits into a lingering love letter to the institution.
Seriously miscalculated movie about a man who is killed in a car accident only to return as a ghost-- in a ridiculous sheet with two eye-holes-- to "haunt" his former house. There is undeniably a kind of elegance to very static compositions and background music and the weirdness of the concept, but, ultimately, there isn't enough story or substance to survive the ridiculousness of the concept. Even the accident itself is embarrassingly cheaply shot, and gives us the dreary image of the driver leaning into the steering wheel. Ebert's web reviewer insists that "A Ghost Story" gets us questioning the idea of a "singular, linear experience" of life and death. If he experienced that, it's because it came out of his own mind, not from any specific imagery or narrative development in the film. Personally, I think some reviewers were swept up by the static images and the heavy-handed music, which was dreamy and slushy but not particularly moving. If this film worked, there would be at least once scene that would be almost as good as any of ten scenes in "Wings of Desire", and I'm sure Lowery believes the pie-eating scene was that; it wasn't. It was drearily sophomoric and lame. Some reviewers called that scene "daring" and challenged viewers to enjoy the "experimentation". I love experimentation, and I love scenes that really are daring. But this one was so schematic and obvious and boring that it was a drag on the whole sequence of M coming to grips with C's death. The one big speech, by a character called "the prognosticator" (Will Oldham), who predicts the doom of mankind, gets Beethoven wrong-- specifically, the 9th Symphony, by attributing his inspiration to a belief in God, when the 9th Symphony was specifically about a belief in the greatness of man. Even worse, whatever point the movie is trying to make by having a ghost wander his old residence, is undermined by the idea that great artists seek immortality in their art. So why did so many reviewers rave about it? I believe the musical score, undistinguished but constantly washing over the static scenes, convince some people that they were seeing more than they were. What exactly, I ask, is the point of this story, other than that people who lose loved ones are sad? There isn't any. Are we to believe in ghosts? Does the ghost represent M's sadness? Then why is it angry when she brings someone new home? Why does it travel through time, but then, only back to when Caucasians entered the geography. What is the point of the ghost wandering through new buildings that rise over the site of the old house? Does the ghost want to get back into the living world? Then, what the heck, the ghost can touch M? It can go through a wall, but can't read a note in the wall? Why the smashing dishes and other objects? What is the point of that?
At the penultimate moment of this film, Sylvia, a lonely young woman caring for her sister with a mental disability, persuades Peter, who had taken her out for dinner to a shabby restaurant with a rude waiter, to come in for a coffee and then offers him sherry and, when he says he doesn't want any because he hasn't finished his coffee yet, fills his glass to the very brim and says, "what are you going to do about it". Alas, Peter is a timid little proper little Brit and the answer is inevitable. But there is a better scene: Norman plays the guitar and sings, weakly, but not altogether badly. Well, the point is the effect of his singing becomes, after a while, kind of mesmerizing, and we shared Sylvia's comfortable repose next to her sister (who adores the music) on the couch as he plays. It fills the sound and washes away the need for clumsy conversation, that Peter can only wish for. We also catch a glimpese of a co-worker with a near-hysterical passion to get Sylvia's sister, Hilda, to a church, and her mother, a kind of bed-ridden monster. Really poor sound quality (they talk even over a typewriter, with the sound recorded on location), but beautifully acted, especially by Raitt. And tender and kind and compassionate and rich. My points for the film are generous, in consideration for the earnestness of Mike Leigh's vision here.
Puzzling drama inspired by Ozu about a Korean man, Jin, who travels to Columbus to attend to his distant, unloved father who has had a severe heart attack and lies in the hospital in a coma. Through credible circumstances he comes into contact with Casey, a young librarian whose mother has is former meth addict, and whose is played with self-effacing grace and wit by Haley Lu Richardson. Casey thinks about going to college, and has received some external encouragement, but hesitates to leave her mother. Ozu famously decried the decline of the family unit in post-war Japan, so these issues resonate with films like "Tokyo Story" and "Late Spring". Even more directly connected to Ozu is the cinematography, carefully composed, stately shots of Columbus' distinctive architecture, by famed architects like Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, and Harry Weese, with the two main characters ruminating on their effects on the humans who encounter them. Most fun to watch though is the sometimes prickly exchanges between Casey and Jin, and other characters: they not easily impressed or sentimental about each other. There is a subtle romantic charge between the two leads, but we're not going to get dragged into melodrama here. Truly worthy of Ozu, "Columbus" is an exquisite film, pretty and beautiful, sad and moving.
Another director dispenses with a writer and provides his own script. And it shows. And a movie of which some of the actors discuss their body shapes interminably: how fit they are, how much work they did, how much exercise and training... all to provide this tiresome, repetitive installment-- how dare they call it a sequel!-- to one of the most boring franchise in Hollywood (and the competition is fierce). Let's see: some bad guys (fanatics, terrorists) want some plutonium so they can build a bomb that will destabilize the world leading to a renaissance of wholesome democratic values. The terrorists are nicely apolitical here: it was hard to figure out what exactly Lark was against other than oppression and authority. And Ethan Hunt is a rather incompetent hero-- and gutless. Seriously, he can be persuaded to give up the plutonium, which could cause millions of deaths, because he didn't want his buddy Luther to get hurt? I mean, it's admirable, but any general or secretary would never assign a person like this-- and they know he is like this-- to a task with such high stakes. Add to that the conversations he likes to have with casualties in the middle of very tense confrontations with the baddies-- it's ridiculous.
There is some hope for the world: there are a lot of movies about adolescence and the coming of age of adorable, beautiful girls and boys. Finally, one that has a realistic heroine (she's chubby and has acne) and, mostly, realistic interactions with her peers. I won't apply that to her father who, in the biggest flaw in this otherwise intriguing film, is absurdly ineffectual and utterly characterless. Was that a point? That for adolescents in today's world, parents might as well be as useless and clueless as Mark Day? One wonders if maybe we should go back to the cliches. In any case, Elsie, whose mother abandoned her when she was baby, is about to graduate Grade 8. She is essentially friendless until she is matched up with a senior high school student as part of a program to help grade 8 graduates prepare for high school. She circulates her school hallways and an acquaintances' party (funniest line in the film is the acquaintance's invitation to her birthday party) without having much of an impact on anyone. She does have the hots for a boy named Aiden and tries to interest him in explicit pictures of herself that she doesn't have. He asks for a blow job-- in the movies frankest scene-- and she researches the subject. In a scene that is seriously misjudged, her father catches her with a banana, and flogs the point that she just told him she doesn't like bananas only a week ago. She does connect with Gabe, who is a stereotypical geek, and shows some initiative in the relationship. And that's about it. No big crisis, or disaster, or triumph. One must admire the intentions of the producers here, to make a relatively honorable, honest, believable film about teenagers dealing with smart-phones and peers and snobs in today's society.
Entrancing, compelling documentary about identical triplets who were unknowingly the subject of "scientific" experiments by an American psychiatrist (Viennese) who wanted to know something about nature vs. nurture. It began with Robert arriving at Sullivan County Community College only to find himself being greeted with great familiarity by numerous upperclassmen. Puzzled, he quickly discovered that everyone thought he was Eddie, who had left the college. He contacted Eddie, and they realized they were both adopted and both had been born on the same day. Their story went viral-- newspapers and television at the time-- and a third brother saw the pictures and realized that he was their identical sibling too. But this is the first layer of this onion of a story: their parents were furious that they had been separated and investigated, and Lawrence Wright, an investigative journalist joined the search. They gradually uncovered a more complex story and we discover that their childhoods were not idyllic. They opened a restaurant together and tensions arose from differences in their approach to business and work. While everyone at first was stunned by the similarities in the three-- they all smoked the same brand of cigarettes and wrestled in high school-- it gradually became clear that differences in upbringing (one father was effusively affectionate, another was tough and largely absent) had a profound effect on them. Unfortunately, this not a documentary in the class of Frontline or Michael Moore: the producers obviously had difficulties or inadequate financing to fully investigate the backgrounds of the psychiatrists and organizations involved, and at times seemed to miss the point of crucial developments. Still, a very, very interesting story.
Titled after a Nick Cave song meaning "night vision", this is an odd dissection of group of young people in Paris who decide to conduct a terrorist attack. Meticulously planned, but not perfectly executed, they throw Paris into chaos and then go hide out in a shopping mall cleared through a fake bomb threat. The mall, conveniently, has no exterior windows, and they dispose of the security guards, and they wander through the displays of expensive jewelry, clothing, toys, electronics, and manikins. Bonello presents us with complex, richly developed characters who never fall into cliches or stereo-types, and who each have their path of indifference to culture and politics. There are some intimations of political motives here, including at least one Islamic radical who thinks he will go to paradise for his actions, but mostly they suffer from ennui and despair. It's almost as if Bonello has taken a group of average millenial French youth and simply added the violent incidents in order to see what it looked like. There could be a message here-- it reminds me of Warhol's acerbic "Bad" about a housewife who runs a murder for hire operation in her spare time. No blazing performances but competence; well-filmed but not showy. I was confused the sequence of police invading the mall-- I don't think it was meant to be realistic in a conventional sense but I'm not sure it worked as fable or metaphor either.
Based on novel by Antonio Di Benedetto. Don Diego de Zama is an absurd creature in an absurd universe and the purpose of "Zama" is to reveal this to him and to us. In what appears to be the 18th century, Zama, disgraced in some way, has been relegated to a colonial outpost by the Spanish government, as a minor magistrate. He longs to be restored to a position in a city, and influence and prestige, but has a ridiculously difficult time even getting the local governor to write a letter on his behalf. In the meantime, he encounters indigenous tribesmen and other minor functionaries and ravishingly scenic vistas on the river and the hills and forests nearby. He also has a few social visits with Luciana, played by the very charismatic Lola Duenas. She highlights the tantalizing lure of the social life Zama is missing out on, even as we discover that he has had a child with a local Indian, who, in one scene, refuses to even give him a shirt ("Who am I? Your wife?). His downfall begins in earnest when a local outlaw, Vicuno Porto, who is blamed for every crime, it seems, within 500 miles, comes to believe that Zama knows the location of the "coconuts", which he believes hold precious gems. Zama tells Porto that he is going to do something for him that nobody has ever been honest enough to do for him: shatter all your dreams right away instead of lying. There are no valuable coconuts. You and your men will never get rich. For this, he is labelled a traitor and punished appropriately. This is a slow-moving, sometimes bewildering film, but if you just wait for it to reveal the details necessary to understand what is happening, it is reward, and exquisitely beautiful.
Oddly, you know, Kennedy may not have even been in the car at the moment it went off the bridge. Some investigators have concluded that the only reasonable explanation for Kennedy's actions after the accident is that he didn't know it happened until the next day. He may have driven down the road to evade the police deputy, then left the car so he wouldn't be found with the young girl in a compromising situation, leaving the inebriated Mary Jo to drive off by herself. He seemed perfectly calm and cool the next morning, chatting with neighbors in his hotel, until Joe Gargan and Paul Markham arrived and took him aside. Then he was suddenly a wreck. That said, as a movie "Chappaquiddick" works. It's stylish and well-acted and directed, using music to accentuate the dreamy, confused state of affairs. It focuses on Kennedy's issues with his family, his expectations, and the machinery that tries to minimize the impact on his career. It moves effortlessly between past and present actions without confusing the narrative. It perhaps gives too much credit to Gargan-- the scenes of him desperately drying to get Kennedy to own up to his responsibility come up as self-righteous rather than righteous (and are not based on real recollections). What it does get right is the loyalty of Kennedy's entourage, and their ability to see past the immediate tragedy to the greater aspirations of their political activities. They react like they should: the tragedy matters not just because a young, talented, admirable woman lost her life, but because a political ideal that mattered to them is threatened. Kopechne, for the record, would not have been unlikely to assent to a relationship with Kennedy, and she was drunk at the time.
Poorly written and poorly acted drama about a music producer, Jane, in Los Angeles and her cultural conflict with her uptight son, Sam, who comes to stay for a while with his naive fiance, Alex. He has a job in psyche ward at a local hospital-- the scenes there are hardly credible-- while his fiance is working on her dissertation. The house is full of rock musicians including one, Ian, who is having a fling with Jane, but has an eye on Alex. Alex begins to dig the druggy, pleasure-seeking atmosphere, leading to tension with Sam, who is himself tempted by Sara, a fellow psychiatric resident. It all goes nowhere clumsily leading to scene of pitched cringeworthyness that proves more ridiculous than shocking. I suppose it's all supposed to be somewhat revelatory about art and music and culture and hippydom, but it's all so fey it's hard to care. Conversations between Jane and her publisher are sophomoric, as are Sam's attempts to provide therapeutic care to a young drug addict. And if you are going to have original music in a movie about an artist, it had better be good enough to convince the audience that the characters in the film are not showing an absurd degree of enthusiasm when they nod and smile, but Ian's ballad-- inspired, we are led to believe, by Jane-- is utterly lame. McDormand's performance as Jane is generally praised but I didn't buy in, but that is partly because she is hamstrung by a trite script and the lack of detailed awareness of how a music producer would talk. She's supposed to be sexy and liberated but it seems so forced that I couldn't buy it, just as I couldn't buy her scenes with the band recording in the studio.
Paul Schrader seems to have never gotten over his bad relationship with the church: this film is another attempt to expiate some guilt he still seems to feel over not living up to the august pieties of his upbringing. In a perverse way, he seeks to first diminish, then redeem, then explode the experience. Reverend Ernst Toller is pastor of a historic church, by the grace of an enthusiastic modern church nearby. There are virtually no members-- just a handful who show up for his sermons and the Eucharist-- and the organ is broken, and Toller's wife has left him after his son was killed in Iraq. He has ended a relationship with the choir director at the big church though she keeps after him: what good is self-pity if you don't have someone to nurse it for you? A young woman named-- wait for it-- "Mary"-- enters his life. Her husband-- wait for it-- Michael-- is an eco- terrorist, fresh out of jail. Toller embraces his cause, even after a disaster, and plans to make his own mark as a statement against the abuse of creation by greedy corporations, represented by Edward Balq as a straw man who amazingly can't come up with an argument for why his profitable company is a benefit to the community (how about jobs, prosperity, health care, pensions, useful products). It's muddled here: I had thought the movie was going to be about Toller's spiritual struggle, and it is, but his radical embrace of environmental issues diverts us at times, mainly because Hawke is so busy being miserable that the idea that he is part of cause seems absurd. Schrader is on the record as stating that he thinks this film is more like Bergman, Bresson, and Tarkovsky, than his own earlier work. I would not have invited that comparison if I was him: his dialogue is lame, schematic, and delivered by Hawke with a flat disposition. Bergman and Bresson and Tarkovsky would never have left scenes like Toller's visit to the doctor so under-developed and sophomoric: it reads as if Schrader was too lazy to write credible dialogue. Schrader was also surprised, while editing, to notice that he had cribbed his own script for "Taxi Driver": the similarities are quite obvious.
Donald Sutherland is a pleasure to watch in almost anything. Helen Mirren does less well with a wandering South Carolina accent. "The Leisure Seeker" wobbles along as well, veering towards the sentimental and predictable and occasionally correcting course with a moment of clarity of intuition. The problem is emblematic in a scene where a pretty former student recognizes former professor John Spencer and calls his name: she's already acting as if she knows he's losing it before she could possible know it. She is delicate and tentative, expecting the vulnerability. Surprise: he does remember her. But that's the way this movie moves along, setting you up for those schematic illustrations of the characters' condition. John Spencer and his wife Ella-- who has terminal cancer-- set out for a last excursion in their old Winnebago, and their son is outraged: don't they know someone has to be outraged in order to provide some tension to the plot? Their daughter Jane is more sanguine about it, which is refreshing. On the way, John hurts Ella's feelings by revealing that he had an affair with their neighbor, though we are right to be surprised that Ella accepts this information at face value even though John has dementia. Either way, it's a cheap plot point.
Maury Dann, loosely based on Hank Williams, is a country singer on the downside of his career. He drinks too much, uses drugs, and people. His entourage have become adept at protecting him from the consequences of his actions, but Payday makes no apologies for him. There is no romanticized vision of the put-upon artist whose sufferings yield masterpieces and "justify" his sins. Maury-- refreshingly, actually-- is just plain mean and selfish, and never concedes an inch to those who judge him. Rip Torn, unfortunately, can't really sing convincingly, so it was wise to minimize his exposure in that respect. But he can act; he can snarl and he possesses a wonderful smirk. And he's good at conveying the shrewd manners Maury uses to talk himself out of trouble, or charm a disk jockey-- without giving too much. But some of the drama is amateurish and stiff and some scenes look like they should have been re-shot.
I'm not sure what Sayles was up to here-- and not sure he knew what he was up to either. The first part is a kind of folky backwater romance between Joe, a former fisherman with a dark chapter in his past, and Donna, a decent singer stuck in a backwater because of the boyfriend she is leaving. Her daughter is depressed and cuts herself, and Joe's brother is involved in a drug deal with dangerous people. The second half is a survival story that doesn't quite invest totally in the concept. The action sequences are unconvincing, especially when they escape the boat without being noticed by the men who have boarded it, and the hardships of life on the island are not dramatically convincing. It is a jarring contrast to the first half and doesn't successfully hold the same tone. We end up with some sense of redemption and self-discovery, but even those themes don't seem fully realized. There are ideas but it might have worked better as two movies. At least, it's all shot on location in Alaska. Lesser John Sayles. Incidentally, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio can sing-- probably far better than her character would have been likely to sing.
Cookie Orcutt depends on Willis Richland for most things. He's the handyman and her comfort and support. Her family-- not all of whom are apparent to us-- are a mixed bag, but niece Camille, who directs a church play, "Salome" of all things, is not in her good books. There is a murder and lots of mysteries about who is related to who, and a relatively satisfying comeuppance, but the pleasure of watching "Cookie's Fortune" is mostly in the entertaining performances, the clever script, and Altman's technique. It's lesser Altman but still Altman, as the camera finds interesting objects to express tension, and motions that add to the drama. The characters are relatively fresh, and at the same time, a bit stereotyped. Obvious issues of race are ignored and everything is a little too Andy Griffith for my liking but I would rate it a superior diversion.
The opening scene of "Tuesday After Christmas", a Romanian film largely made in Bucharest, is strikingly intimate, confident, and bracing. Paul and Raluca in bed, nude, in her apartment, cuddling, teasing, playfully touching, mocking, and laughing. It lets you in on what Paul sees in his affair with this young, beautiful (but not unrealistically so) dentist, and why he might consider leaving his wife of ten years for her. The nudity is not filmed in the traditional coy manner, with sheets covering the sensitive parts, or even waist-up only shots: they are stark naked and the camera remains stationary, unblinking, as they move around. Adriana, Paul's wife, the woman he is cheating on, is neither shrill nor unattractive-- more like average-looking. And director Muntean doesn't want to let you off the hook: "Tuesday After Christmas" is, above all else, an affront to the Hollywood style of presenting ridiculously schematic treatments of serious issues. TAC is gentle, sensitive, insightful, patient, and evocative. You are bombarded with relentless detail of the normal average lives of its subject, including the heartbreaking moments in which one realizes that one's life has changed forever, and not necessarily for the better. Paul is a not a monster, but he's no saint either: he can be rude and mean at times, but he is very sweet to Raluca. Raluca isn't innocent or naive and one can see how she might just be nothing more to Paul than a younger version of Adriana, after all, Is this new affair going to end differently? And we don't get to escape the practical consequences, the daughter, the ski trips cancelled or changed, the legalities. I watched a good chunk of the film a second time; it did not lose an ounce of energy. Another foreign (Romanian) film: "Tuesday After Christmas", that, in it's simple respect for the rich complexities and nuances of marital infidelity, in which no one is a caricature or villain, makes most Hollywood films seem childish. I think we've been trained from childhood to want to see someone get smacked at the end of every story.
Roger Ebert-- ridiculously-- called this the best movie of 1998. Better than "Saving Private Ryan", "The Big Lebowski", "American History X", "Happiness", and even Terence Malick's "The Thin Red Line". It is a brave, incoherent, visionary film, but the execution-- especially of the dramatic interactions between characters-- is pedestrian. And it is definitely the step-daddy of "The Matrix" which came out a year afterwards and even borrowed some of the sets, and the step-child of "Metropolis". In short, John Murdoch wakes up in a bathtub one day to discover that he apparently has murdered several prostitutes. But something is wrong. His memories are missing. He gets a phone call telling him to flee his apartment because some people are coming for him. He sets out to discover his own identify and finds that he lives in a strange world with no sun, where buildings change over-night, and everything freezes at midnight. He doesn't even remember ever meeting a woman who is identified as a his wife. Meanwhile, a sympathetic detective who also suspects that something funny is going on, is looking for him as well. Eventually, they find out that the world is not what they think it is. There are lot of problems with the plot (for example, the aliens appear able to put anyone to sleep whenever they please--including John-- but don't use that power when it would most obviously be useful). But it moves along briskly and suggests a moderately intriguing premise.
"Songwriter" lost out to "Purple Rain" in the Oscar category of "Best Original Music". It should not have been close. Yes, it looked like Kristofferson (48) and Nelson (51) had lots of fun filming the awful concert footage and snuggling with the young actresses (well, okay: Lesley Ann Warren was 38, Melinda Dillon was 45), but the movie isn't as enjoyable as they think it is. Nelson is a famous country star, Doc Jenkins, who also writes; Kristofferson is country hunk Blackie Buck. You know they are great because the script tells you they are great-- they don't demonstrate anything remarkable in the film itself, aside from a few moments of Nelson solo. Kristofferson bizarrely grins incessantly behind a mic he plainly ducks at times. Doc Jenkins gets cheated out of his song royalties by Rodeo Rocky and comes up with a scheme to get his earnings back by assigning song-writing credit for a batch of "great" new songs to another singer. This part of the film rings with some authenticity and is clearly based on experience (Tom Petty, Counting Crows, and so many others). But the idea that Leslie Ann Warren as Gilda would be a top country star based on the songs in this film is an insult to country music. Over the top, mildly funny (Rip Torn is the best thing in the show), and a bit tasteless (the singing is manifestly flat, everyone drinks and carouses, and we're supposed to admire them for it), and nothing redemptive in any of it-- except for a nice scene where we find out that Gilda is switching to gospel.
Usually, we meet the star as he begins his career, follow his early set-backs, wallow in his success and excess, and then watch as he is corrupted and falls and then is redeemed by his second wife, or a child, or father. "Tender Mercies" starts at the bottom, with Mac Sledge broke and drunk and his girlfriend driving off leaving him stuck with the motel bill. Fortunately, for him, it's the right motel: redemption awaits in the form of Rosa Lee, a widow, with a photogenic young boy, who hires him to do some maintenance work and then is sensibly receptive to his offer of marriage. Sledge was a great country singer but he is perceived as washed up. Still, a local band looks him up and he gets back into writing. His daughter looks him up too. Sledge gradually finds order and purpose to his life and that's really the heart of this well-written, well-acted movie. Duvall did his own singing for the part and is almost credible as a country singer. The movie smartly doesn't over-play it's hand. Foote (the writer) has said that the whole film is encapsulated in an exchange he heard about between a real country artist and a fan: "Were you really..." "Yes ma'am, I guess I was." But his most acute writing touch is demonstrated in Rosa Lee's response when Sonny asks how his father died. She tells him she doesn't know. They just found him dead. He'd been dead for days. It might have been a sniper or a battle. Her dialogue in this scene in haunting and compellingly real. So are the scenes at church, an important part of life for a large portion of the population that is almost never acknowledged for render authentically in film. Unfortunately, Universal, the distributor, had no faith in the movie and refused to promote it. Duvall thought they were clueless about middle America and he has a point. When Willie Nelson offered to promote it, they were like "Willie who?"
Ishaan Awasthi is not doing well at school. He is failing all of his subjects and he misbehaves, even skipping out. His stern father decides to send him to a boarding school, where the teachers, living out the cliche, are stern and unsympathetic. When a substitute teacher-- also living the cliche-- arrives and actually cares about the depressed boy, things change for the better and daddy learns his lesson. The performance of Darsheel Safary as Ishaan saves the movie-- almost. He manages to make even rather schematic scenes (boy is happy, boy is sad, boy is anxious) seem somewhat lively and almost convincing. Everyone else is stock, and the teacher's self- righteous pieties are actually rather offensive, especially when he lectures the father (a successful businessman who would not be likely to take that kind of lecture with his tail between his legs). Ishaan is too showy about his despair, making a large point of being unhappy, rather than showing the absence of happiness. Would it really take school officials that long to figure out what the problem was? Was the problem really that simple? This is a movie with a mission: to tell the world to treat students with learning difficulties better. But the film undermines that message with the character of teacher Ram Shankar Nikumbh (who evokes a pale imitation of Robin Williams). How many schools would ever be able to provide someone of his character and talents?
Written by Robert Penn Warren and based on the life of Huey Long of Louisiana, I expected a more interesting script, and a little less melodrama. Chronicles the rise of a populist Southern governor, Willie Stark, who makes his reputation as "the only honest politician" only to succumb to corruption as he learns how to win. Tries to chart fairly complex political concepts-- Stark is recruited, at first, as a spoiler, by the current governor, and adds some speechifying about how using evil to produce good (Stark builds roads and hospitals) inevitably leads to the triumph of evil.
Written by Robert Penn Warren and based on the life of Huey Long of Louisiana, I expected a more interesting script, and a little less melodrama. Chronicles the rise of a populist Southern governor, Willie Stark, who makes his reputation as "the only honest politician" only to succumb to corruption as he learns how to win. Tries to chart fairly complex political concepts-- Stark is recruited, at first, as a spoiler, by the current governor, and adds some speechifying about how using evil to produce good (Stark builds roads and hospitals) inevitably leads to the triumph of evil.
Lucy and Barkley are an elderly couple living together in their lovely home, as they have been for most of their 50-year marriage. Their children are all grown up, married, some with children. One day they are all summoned to the house to hear the bad news: Barkley, having lost his job, is unable to keep up the payments on the house. They are being evicted. Could anyone take them in? And thus is slowly laid bare the real characters of their children. All of them claim to be well-meaning, and assert their generosity towards their parents, but it all becomes rather inconvenient for them. The first thing they do is split them up. Then Lucy becomes annoying for George and his wife Anita and daughter, Rhoda, talking to guests, sitting in her squeaky rocking chair during bridge lessons, offering unwanted advice. Cora and her husband take in Barkley but look for any excuse to send him off to Addie, his daughter who lives in California, but who has never, over the years, even sent a grapefruit. In the end, the children's wishes prevail and Barkley and Lucy get to spend a few hours together before Barkley gets on the train. This experience provides a poignant contrast to the children, as they walk to a park and then downtown. A stranger persuades them to let him drive them around thinking he might sell them a car; when they make it clear they misunderstood, far from being chagrined, he is charmed by the couple and tells them it was his pleasure to drive them to the hotel. The hotel, likewise, is pleased to entertain guests who are celebrating the 50th anniversary of their honeymoon at the same hotel. When they dance, the orchestra switches to "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" to acknowledge them. A truly heartbreaking ending precisely because the Coopers, Barkley and Lucy, are flawed humans, quirky, annoying at times, even whiny, and yet they win our sympathy. Their children are not monsters-- just selfish and insensitive and, really, rather believable as we too would find the circumstances they are put in difficult. McCarey fought the studio to preserve the ending and he was right. It would have lost its punch if he had changed it to something "uplifting". A really remarkable, satisfying film, in spite of the anachronistic dramatic style, the staginess at times, and the acting.
Amusing, fresh documentary of Agnes Varda and JR travelling around France together taking pictures and putting giant prints on walls and water towers and shipping containers, of local people they have met and engaged on their tour. The fun is in the interaction with locals who generally react very positively to the giant images-- "it's art, isn't it?". And JR and Varda seem to really enjoy meeting working class people and discovering details about their lives that affect the photos they create. We meet a waitress, a goat (cheese) farmer, dock workers and their wives (in the most striking exercise). Most of all we watch the bemused relationship between a 90-year-old woman film-maker, and icon of the French new wave, and the young photographer, JR. They joke around and ridicule each other at times, but also express great affection for each other.
We have a pretty good idea now of what is going to happen after the ending of "The Holy Girl", as the two teenagers swim in the hotel pool, one of them with knowledge of an impending disaster that she withholds, and the other clearly intent on preventing that disaster but unable to because she doesn't know it is imminent. Neither of them leave the pool and we hear them swimming and murmuring as the credits role. Amalia is 16 and lives with her mother, Helena, in a busy hotel that is hosting a medical congress of sorts. While watching a musician perform on a theremin in a store window, a man creeps up behind her and, aroused, presses against her. She turns suddenly and sees him slink away quickly. The man is Dr. Janos, a married man with children, who is attending the congress and who also arouses the interest of Amalia's mother, who finds him compelling and sad, and flirts with him. Amalia is confused, interested, disingenuous. She tells her friend, Josefina, what happened but swears her to secrecy. They both attend catholic school and we see them at some kind of religious class comically discussing vocations and missions and sacrifice with Ines, who tries to steer them to more serious consideration of the issues. One reviewer said, "their teen imaginations conflate the erotic, the religious, and the lurid". I would add that Martel simply refuses to expunge the ambiguities at the heart of the #metoo issues raised in the story and it is very striking that this female director gets so much of how these teens interact with each other, push each other's imaginations, how they mock the rigid Inez and accuse her of hypocrisy because Josefina has seen her with her boyfriend. In fact, this film brought back vivid memories of girls I knew at that age whose behavior was strikingly similar-- behavior so rich with mixed motives, dramatics, masochism, provocation, and incongruity that it almost impossible to figure out what they really wanted or intended out of it all. Indeed, Josefina, striving to remain pure outside of marriage, nevertheless invites her boyfriend to use the backdoor, appears to have a sexual attraction for Amalia, and makes a terrible decision, a betrayal, when her mother catches her and her boyfriend in bed. This is an echo of "The Crucible" and "The Children's Hour". Is this suggested dynamic really anachronistic, today, or more true than we would like to admit? Is Amalia really a saint, or is she complicit in a culture that allows men to escape accountability for offensive behavior?
Over-rated sometimes accidentally comical story about a couple, Katherine and Alexander, on vacation in Italy, struggling in their marriage. He is British upper class dignified, fatuous, and witty, while she is dissatisfied, bored, and frustrated. He goes off to Capri to flirt and party, while she tours museums. Together, in an interesting segment, they tour the ruins of Pompey where they witness the filling of a human form encased in volcanic ash with plaster. They get caught in a parade. She considers the idea of a baby. Throughout, they flirt with the idea of getting a divorce, and you kind of feel like encouraging them. The shots of Italy are interesting, and the music charming at times, but Sanders is an icy lead who looks too old for the part, and Bergman seems bored with herself during those stretches at the museum, and you wish she'd share your own reverence for the beauty of the statues and the architecture.
Katherine marries Alexander, a wealthy landowner much older than her, whose only request, on their wedding night, is that she undress. Later he adds a detail: face the wall. Then he apparently masturbates. He leaves soon after and Katherine, unsatisfied, has a rude encounter with a farm-hand named Sebastian, who understands what she wants and gives to her. In this 19th century community, this creates a deadly dynamic, especially since secrets are not kept in this household. Like the movie's namesake, Katherine is no victim, no shrinking violet: she is "thick-skinned" she says, and she proves it as her desires lead to increasing complications and disasters. Through it all, Pugh, as Katherine, is riveting-- you can't take your eyes off her. Her performance is austere and never showing, yet it builds in intensity and conviction as Katherine continues to surprise us. It twits our sympathies: after all, she is clearly an oppressed victim of a brutally patriarchal society, but we are never given an out to excuse her choices and as she refuses to compromise with her own desire. Based on the Russian novel, "Lady MacBeth of the Mtsenk District", which, of course, is inspired by the play. An extraordinary if harsh film.
Antiseptic, homogenized vision of two extremely attractive 80-year- olds basically playing themselves: the glamorous Jane Fonda and the handsome, winsome Robert Redford. Brokeback Mountain for seniors, complete with melancholy acoustic guitars-- yes, even the melody from "Brokeback Mountain" is evoked. And yet they ridiculously scandalized by their own non-affair affair. Addie strolls over to the house of an acquaintance, Louis Waters, and asks him, with all the poise of an adolescent, if he'd like to sleep over. Just for comfort-- no sex, at least at first. Louis thinks about it and then strolls over a few evenings later with his pajamas in a paper bag, going in the back door to avoid people talking. Neither of them appear to have much mileage on their lives. When, later, Dorlan comments on all the energy Louis must have, he is so embarrassed he leaves the restaurant and stalks off without a reply. Neither of the majors have any personality at all, but it's hard to see where the poor acting begins and the lack of development ends. Everyone's just waiting for their lines to come with no backstory or depth. At one point, for no obvious reason, Louis says, "so this is our last night"? He has no reason to think it's a last night-- he has no idea of when Addie's going to leave. It's just a careless line in a careless script meant to evoke some feeling before it evokes any reality. How does a relationship develop at that age? Well, according to "Our Souls at Night", with a hot date to the Cow Palace in Denver, dancing to romantic music, and, oh my gosh, they couldn't resist the cliche of the camera circling the handsome couple, leading to Fonda in bed, eager as college freshman. "Have you forgotten how?", with an ingratiating smile that reminds you of how tiresome ingratiating can be. The dialogue at the bowling alley between Louis, Addie, and Holly is not merely lame; it is stunningly facile, contrived, and vacuous and just radiates the fact that none of these characters have any existence outside of their lines in the script. And yet more shameless manipulation when we learn why Addie's son, Gene, is so unhappy and drinks too much-- of course, of course, of course. It is never going to be because he just has a weak character. There has to be a trauma of some kind.
The much esteemed novel "Ragtime" brought to film by esteemed director Milos Forman, who, justifiably condensed the sprawling story down to a few major characters. Even so, the film seems episodic at times, and slightly disjointed, but not to my annoyance. The centerpiece of the story is true: a man named Henry Thaw, aware of a past sexual relationship between his wife, Evelyn Nesbit and a famous, wealthy, influential architect Stanford White (who designed the Washington Square Arch, among other achievements), strode into a New York club one night and shot and killed White. His trial was a tabloid sensation, with lurid accounts of White's numerous affairs, and the claim that Thaw had been temporarily insane at the time of the murder. But the more important characters are peripheral to this story. Younger Brother falls in love with Nesbit and has an affair with her. A negro baby is found in the garden of Father's house and Mother takes in the baby and it's mother to protect them from incarceration. The father of baby arrives, self-sufficient in his owned Ford Model "T" and declares that he is the father of the baby and intends to marry the mother. He is later humiliated by a group of racist volunteer firemen and the latter half of the story centers of his unyielding passion for justice, and here the story rides somewhat improbably into melodrama. Yet the characters are so well-drawn, and well-acted, that the power of the film is not diminished. If that isn't enough, we have a stellar James Cagney in his very last role, and Donald O'Conner as a dance instructor (apparently, he was having financial troubles at the time and Forman gave him a break, at the request of Cagney). We have the iconic Pat O'Brien playing-- very well-- a slippery but competent lawyer for Thaw. And an uninhibited Elizabeth McGovern frolicking naked for a good five minutes while negotiating with the lawyers. Jeff Daniels makes and appearance, as does Debbie Allen, and several other actors in their first significant roles.
A man washes up on a lonely beach somewhere, a shipwreck, alone, exhausted. But wait, he rises quickly and begins scurrying around his new environment. It's one of many, many disjointed moments in this otherwise beautiful animation, largely bereft of any dialogue. Okay-- it's a magical story, a fairy tale, in some respects. But it would have been more charming and magical if there was something more affecting about the details. And would it have taken much work to explain where he found the rope that he uses for the raft he tries to build? Or how a turtle-- even a large one-- can shatter the same raft? Or how he knew the deep interior pool had an opening on the ocean side? Or what he ate other than coconut? So it's more of a sequence of very pretty, muted water-colours, movement, and striking images, and the passage of time, the mystery of the turtle itself, of why someone appears and then someone else disappears. It's pretty, but I found it strangely unmoving. Is the island itself a stand-in for life, love, family? And why so antiseptic? No one relieves himself or herself. Not a flash of animation-nudity. Why the preciousness, the delicacy? Because Disney is associated with the production? And a Japanese studio? After a while, it's sadly kind of boring.
Soulful story about Courgette, a young boy whose father has abandoned him and whose mother is an abusive alcoholic. When tragedy strikes, he is shipped off to an orphanage, driven by a kindly police officer, Raymond. His developing relationships with the other children and with Raymond are traced, along with a "romantic" interest, Camille. What is truly extraordinary about "Courgette" is the way adult-sized problems are treated with respect and telescoped in a child's sensibility without sanitizing or homogenizing the drama. The children talk to each other about murder, drugs, abuse, and so on, as children. The delicacy and sensitivity with which their relationships are explored and revealed is a marvel. A beautiful, sad, but ultimately hopeful film, and antidote to every Disney Princess out there.
Soulful story about Courgette, a young boy whose father has abandoned him and whose mother is an abusive alcoholic. When tragedy strikes, he is shipped off to an orphanage, driven by a kindly police officer, Raymond. His developing relationships with the other children and with Raymond are traced, along with a "romantic" interest, Camille. What is truly extraordinary about "Courgette" is the way adult-sized problems are treated with respect and telescoped in a child's sensibility without sanitizing or homogenizing the drama. The children talk to each other about murder, drugs, abuse, and so on, as children. The delicacy and sensitivity with which their relationships are explored and revealed is a marvel. A beautiful, sad, but ultimately hopeful film, and antidote to every Disney Princess out there.
An actor, Hendrik Hofgen, must navigate the changing politics and culture of Germany, first in Hamburg, then Berlin, from a Communist Workers' Theatrical company to the patronage of a Nazi Minister-- modelled on Hermann Goring-- who loves theatre but pressures him to work on behalf of the party and purge the theatrical community of Jews and malcontents. Klaus Maria Brandauer is brilliant as Hofgren, a brilliant actor and a volatile personality. The film is a study of his willingness to compromise to further his career, and just how much he will tolerate in exchange for the privileges award him by his Nazi keepers. The theatrical performances are expertly staged, the acting superb, and panorama of incidental characters to the history of the war is breath-taking. Author Klaus Mann, grandson of Thomas, is said to have been clearly inspired by his brother-in-law, Gustaf Grundgens (married to Klaus' sister Erika Mann). Grungen's son Peter Gorski succeeded in getting the book banned in Germany for years after the war. He remains controversial: a number of other actors insist that he protected them and saved lives during the war.
Epic telling of the misfortunes of the Sonnenschein family, Jews living in Hungary, from the late 19th to mid 20th century. Ignatz and Valerie are cousins who were raised together because Valerie's father died. Gustave is the younger brother. Ignatz is ambitious and convinces his siblings to join in changing their name to the more "Hungarian" Sors. This might be the original sin in this story: we are shown over and over again that compromises with identity can't obviate your real status in the eyes of the elites who rule Hungary, through the monarchy, the communists, the Nazis, and the communists again. Even though Ignatz is a champion fencer who wins Hungary a gold medal at the Olympics, he is not protected from the roundups and eventual deportation. The biggest problem is Ralph Fienne's narcissistic decision to play three roles, the father, son, and grandson, all unconvincingly. But then the direction is weak-- almost all dramatic conversations are flat and under-developed and reactions to dramatic events is telegraphed and predictable. Even worse, the lesson we are supposed to learn from all of this, expressed by Valerie and her camera, appears out of nowhere. We never really latch on to the passion she feels for photography, we are only given incidental glimpses of her work, and the most significant photo was taken by Gustave, not her. The sex between Carole and Adam is nearly comical.
Can you buy it? A family is living on a farm in some post apocalyptic circumstance. There are creatures-- aliens probably-- who are blind but have no other weaknesses. They do have one amazing strength: they can hear the slightest sound. So this family, Evelyn, Lee, Regan, and Noah, must be perfectly quiet at all times. Any sound attracts the horrible creatures. The flaw, of course, is that the world is full of sounds and their ability to distinguish and track down a hurricane lamp falling, for example, is a bit specious and hard to buy into. Add to this the fact that Evelyn is pregnant: how to keep the baby silent? They have a plan but it's hard to believe the complications would not overwhelm them, or, if not, then why they can't apply similar solutions to their other crises. To divert us, the film gives us Regan's guilt about inadvertently exposing the youngest, Beau, to the creatures by giving him a battery powered toy space shuttle. Does daddy still love me? It is not a tribute to Krasinski's directorial skills that this angle doesn't work particularly well. We don't get any scenes in which this guilt is really explored or expanded on: it's just there, like the furnishings, the nail in the floor, the hurricane lamp. It doesn't do anything. And it's hard to care about the family's fate when their interactions with their environment doesn't invoke the film's contrivance: they have pictures hanging on the wall, loads of stuff sitting all over the place, but, apparently, no safe room to retreat to. I kept wondering why they wouldn't have built one, given all the other activities they engage in. Worse, there is a climatic scene that can't overcome it's predictability and the convenient way it seems to resolve the family issues-- while leaving a glaring deficit in their future.
Okay-- you got the smart nerd misfit, the virtuous, nice girl, the jock, and the mean girl. Cliche-city, right? Not in David Seltzer's affectionate and authentic treatment of adolescent angst in "Lucas". Lucas meets 16-year-old Maggie at a tennis court, entranced by her tennis skirt, and charmed by her friendly demeanor: she's new to the high school, her dad has left her mom for a 19-year-old, and, well, she is simply a peach of a person. They hit it off but Lucas clearly would like a romance. The trouble is, Maggie is entranced by jock Cappie, who, in defiance of the canon of teen-movies, is a nice guy, who actually likes Lucas and protects him from the other jocks. This leads to complications that are not neatly resolved: Maggie needs Lucas to understand that she only wants friendship with him, but he doesn't give up. There are wonderful, elegant moments in the film: a drive in the country where cicadas crash into the windshield of the car, band rehearsals, choir rehearsals, and a few realistically awkward teenage conversations. The acting is superb throughout, especially Kerri Green as Maggie, but even Sheen gives a sensitive, thoughtful rendering as the jock (echoing his performance in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"-- two years later!). In one scene, his girlfriend (at the moment) gives a long, assessing look at Maggie that is a triumph of subtlety and understatement. A marvel of a film, rare, and special. When the big football came arrives, you anticipate the worst, but Seltzer manages to come up with a splashy ending that dodges the cliche's and somehow remains believable. The surprise at the end is ringingly sensible the minute it happens.
Let's be clear: this really is a giant, quavering turkey of a movie. So consider a big chunk of it's 7/10 credit for the incredible spectacle of thousands of extras in costume and monumental sets and perfunctory respect for the historical record. Rex Harrison is horribly glib as Ceasar, and Burton is terrible as Antony, but Elizabeth Taylor is reasonably entertaining as Cleopatra. I give her bonus points just for the way she approached Caesar after finding out that the library in Alexandria was on fire thanks to the Romans burning enemy ships in the harbour: "do you smell smoke?". Taylor has said she went home and vomited after seeing the "final" cut, which is missing at least 2 hours of film that even the studio couldn't stomach. But the spectacle is amazing, compared to modern CGI products: real crowds, real costumes, real massive sets. It's incomparable at that level. The real story is fascinating but you'd never know it from this cheesie rendering: these are Hollywood stars doing their star stuff, posing and strutting in mini-skirts (the men) or a record number of costume changes (Taylor). It's really a mess.
Everyone in Dunham's autobiographical film here, playing themselves mostly, understands the requirements of the art: they play authentic, sometimes unpleasant versions of themselves, and the results are quite good. Aura has just graduated from college in Ohio and has moved back into her mother's lavish apartment in New York. Mother is a photographer/artist who uses tiny replica furniture in her work. Aura has broken up with her boyfriend and interacts with two men who are prospects, and with friends, and that's about it. Oh-- and she is fat. She is not even Janeane Garofalo cute. She is also completely unremarkable. Yet she posts a video of herself in a bikini on Youtube: it's her only claim to fame. She gets a job, quits the job, goes to a party, fights with her unpleasant sister, Nadine (still in high school, and slim and attractive and smart), and that's about it. Why did this movie generate such enthusiasm in some quarters? The authenticity of the characters, the relevance and realism of their issues, and the very contemporary tone of the dialogue and situations. Vanity Fair called it "unnervingly honest". It was made for $65K, and the cameras are static. The music is interesting and fresh, probably because Dunham could never have afforded a real composer and musicians. No, she's not a female Woody Allen-- not even close-- but it's a good film and deserves high marks for honesty and relevance. That said, it is unsurprising that Dunham has not made any other feature films, or that her book, "Not That Kind of Girl" was panned in many quarters as "narcissistic" and "glibly nattering".
Maude Lewis was born to misfortune, suffering from juvenile arthritis, an unrequited love affair that resulted in a baby born out of wedlock, and the sale of her beloved parents' home after her death when she was 32 by her brother, forcing her to move in with an unsympathetic aunt. But she loved to paint, using primary colours, creating simple, folkish tableaus of rural life in Nova Scotia. Her friends and neighbors regarded her art as amateurish (my child could do that) but some New York vacationers like enough to start buying it up at $5 a pop. She insinuated herself into the employment of one fishmonger, Everett Lewis, who eventually married her, and eventually took over the housework as her paintings began to make them money. Sally Hawkins is brilliant as Lewis-- not a false or showy moment in the entire movie, and Hawke is actually excellent as Everett, an unsympathetic, complex character. Canadian actress Kari Matchett is also charming as Sandra, the New Yorker who "discovers" Maude. "Maudie" traces her life from her departure from her Aunt's home to success as a painter and death at 67 in 1970. Filmed largely in a recreation of her unique tiny house (now on display in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax) and in Newfoundland (Nova Scotia denied the film-makers tax credits), includes some harrowing winter scenes and convincing if low-cost recreations of 1950's and 1960's streetscapes. Charming, likeable, engaging film. Admirably refrains from anachronistic notions about gender relations: Maude, in this film, is no pushover, but she and Everett, in spite of the outward harshness of their relationship at times (he says he'd rather have a dog), clearly fulfilled each others' needs in a particular way.
Andy Serkis' business partner, Jonathan Cavendish, had an interesting and remarkable personal story to tell about his parents, Robin and Diana Cavendish, and here it is. Robin Cavendish and Diana married in 1957 and had a son-- Jonathan, of course-- almost immediately. In 1958, Robin contracted polio, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down and unable to breath without a ventilator. Initially, he wanted to die. The traditional narrative is that he felt Diana, at 25, still had a chance for a rich life with a healthy man after after he was gone. But Diana fought this impulse and they remained together until he was into his 60's. The film acknowledges a point at which he encouraged her to consider an affair, and she refused. They raised their son and embarked on numerous travels and adventures. He became an advocate for the disabled and helped a friend, Teddy Hall, design and build a chair with a built-in ventilator to give him mobility. Gradually, they were able to obtain funding from the government and other sources to build more of them, for himself and others. (The ventilator is a choice: the iron lung, of course, inhibits mobility severely, though it apparently provides a more "natural" breathing system). "Breathe" is a good movie, not great, and most of the credit belongs to Claire Foy whose self-effacing approach to roles allows her to merge more convincingly with the characters and story than even some actresses who might have more talent, and more ego. She is charming and smart and tasteful. McCarthy is okay in this role, though he never surprises you with a gesture that isn't telegraphed by expectation. One suspects that Robin's life was somewhat glamorized-- he has charming, devoted friends who never tire of him or get distracted or diverted.
Hilarious romp through the last days of dictator Joseph Stalin by the director of "In the Loop". Feisty, provocative, and yet fairly close to the facts. Stalin falls over in his study from a stroke but his guards are too terrified to open the door to see what happened. He lies there in a puddle of his own urine for hours until a maid comes to bring his morning tea. Then all hell breaks loose as Beria, Malenkov, Molotov, Khrushchev, and others circle the dying man trying to position themselves for the inevitable power-struggle, while acknowledging the need for reforms-- most specifically, to stop the incessant murder of suspected political opponents that reached a state of madness as Stalin's paranoia grew and grew. Beautifully acted and filmed; riveting. And a huge blessing: they speak English, in normal accents. No ridiculous Russian accents at all. It's wonderful, if not quite as good as Russian with subtitles.
Very long and contrived story, inspired by true events, of an Indian man, Mahavir Singh Phogat, who trains his daughters, Geeta and Babita, to wrestle, in the face of public disapproval and resistance, and his daughters' resentful submission. A different movie might be about a driven, cruel father, who forced his unwilling daughters to live out his dreams of wrestling success, but, instead, we are given to understand the daughters, in the end, were grateful and happy to learn so much about self-sacrifice and hard work. The drama in "Dangal" is invariably rather lifeless and rote, and the characterizations are not-subtle, nor accurate (there was no villainous head coach in real life). And Mahavir forcing the girls into double-training while they were in the national training program was not admirable. The final contest for the gold medal is pure hokum-- in real life-- spoiler alert! -- Geeta won easily, in front of a half-empty building. That said, the wrestling scenes are reasonably convincing. And that's about it. The mother is a phantom of no importance whatsoever in this story (in real life, she is the one who bemoaned daughters instead of sons). The father is a rather grim, unemotional character and the film wants you to feel glad when he finally tells Geeta he is proud of her-- we are given to understand-- for the first time.
Maureen is a "personal shopper": someone who buys things, including clothing, for Kyra, a well-known actress or model who doesn't have the time for trivialities, or doesn't want to deal with fans seeking autographs and selfies. She hates her job, and hates her employer, who is repulsed by the idea of Maureen ever trying on any of the shoes or dresses she purchases. A strength of "Personal Shopper" is just how convincing those scenes are: Kristen Stewart is quietly building up a repertoire of serious, interesting roles-- Jennifer Lawrence might want to take a page or two from her playbook. There are semi-nude scenes-- I think they were wonderful in their casual, nonchalance. No need for a shocking announcement: just part of her character in the film, a personality that seems invisible to itself, and not sure if she's really visible to the rest of the world. Maureen is also in Paris waiting for something: contact from her deceased twin brother, who had a heart defect that she also has. She tries the house he lived in, and seems to have a some kind of contact with a spirit-- but not her brother. She stays with his former wife, who has a new lover, just 90 days after her brother died. But Maureen is very tolerant and understanding. Later, she finds herself being digitally stalked by an unknown person who texts her mysterious messages, and invites her to a hotel room he has reserved, in cash, in her name. Very impressive performance by the entire cast, utterly convincing and casually believable interactions with dialogue that never sounds contrived or forced. A bit of a mystery at the end-- what does it all mean? That what she takes as experiences of an alternative reality is just projection, that dovetails with her own unconscious manipulation of people? Or that there really is some spiritual interactions here? A. O. Scott describes Assayas' characters as often "dissolved by perpetual displacement". Incidentally, Stewart rides a motor-scooter in some shots, which are clearly not faked. Nice.
It's a film with heart, if there is not much else going for it. Ricky is an incorrigible abandoned child, about 10, who is sent to live with Bell and Heck as a last resort, before sending him to "juvy"-- juvenile detention. Bella is warm and wise and welcoming while Hec, who openly admits he didn't want Ricky, is cold and distant and rude. Of course the two, Ricky and Hec, end up on a journey together where they work out their hostilities and come to adore each other. Of course. In the meantime, through a clumsy series of interactions, Hec becomes a wanted man and Ricky is believed to be his prisoner. There follows a lot of scenery and a preposterous chase-- intentionally over-the-top, one supposes-- and resolution. Along the way, one pleasant diversion is Ricky's meeting with Kahu, a smart-ass girl on horseback, who makes things up. Enjoyable for the scenery if not much else, and Julian Dennison gives a charming performance as Ricky, but it's hard to get past the clumsy, low-grade effects and action sequences. Why is Leonard Cohen's "The Partisan" (by Hy Zaret) in this movie? A bit weighty given the lightweight, farcical plot. And the over-the-top chase scene doesn't work because there is no real point to Paula's obsessive pursuit of the pair to be satirized. IMDB entry points out that there are considerable similarities to the plot of "Up".
Once again, reviewers have fallen over themselves praising "Black Panther", which looks like a big-budget Hollywood CGI extravaganza with the usual emphasis on special effects, computer graphics, and cliche-ridden motifs, and identified it as "different", deeper, and more important. No, it isn't. It really is the same old, same old, with weak acting (thanks to the incessant green screen shots) and a boring, trite plot lifted right out of the "The Lion King". If there is a virtue in this production it would be in the refreshing incorporation of racial oppression in the narrative, linking the mystical kingdom with a young boy growing up in Oakland, and the impulse for justice as rooted in the histories of racism and exploitation. All led by a King, who holds power through the privilege of being the son of the previous King. In one bizarre scene, we are given that a challenger can invoke a tradition that requires the King to defend his legitimacy in single combat with the challenger. Nobody questions the validity of this tradition until their preferred combatant loses, and then, suddenly, his loyal followers decide that the tradition is only legitimate if they want it to be so. It's a shallow idea that is validated by attributed virtues of those who challenge it, and immediately raises questions about what other values and traditions would be cast aside whenever convenient. But then again, this is a King, not an elected leader.
Disappointingly narcissistic portrait of a transgender woman whose older partner dies after a year-long relationship. She is a singer, and has lived with him in his apartment sharing his life, and his dog, until he has a heart-attack one night and dies. She must then cope with a family and an ex-wife that is largely hostile to her and the police who are suspicious about a bruise on Orlando's body, which we know was caused by a fall down a stairs. It serves the contrived drama of the move for Marina to inexplicably keep this information from everybody, at first. Just so she can appear to be a victim of a mean police investigator? A different police detective suspects that Marina may have been abused-- or suspects her of murdering Orlando-- it's not always clear which it is. Either way, we are subjected to an increasingly self-pitying portrait of Marina as a victim of prejudice and hostility, even though the family, given what they know about the relationship, is not entirely unjustified in suspecting that she is at least an opportunist. Too smart to wallow in it, "A Fantastic Woman" is moderately fresh and moderately unpretentious, ending with a low-key recognition of Marina's persistence, performing in a night club (of course), and moving on with her life.
There's no suspense about Zhenya and Boris's marriage at the start of "Loveless". It's on the rocks. And no, they will not be friends. Zhenya in particular is absolutely scabrous in her condemnation of poor Boris. They shout and scream at each other because neither of them wants to take 12-year-old Alyosha who, unbeknownst to them, is listening from the bathroom (in a scathing scene, Zhenya relieves herself in the bathroom and as she closes the door behind her, we spy Alyosha, unseen by Zhenya, hysterically but silently crying in the darkness.) When Zhenya returns from a late date, while Boris is on his own date, and rises late in the morning, Alyosha has disappeared. "Loveless" carefully depicts the contrast between Zhenya and Boris's callousness and the determination and commitment of the volunteers who search for the boy. This is Zvyagintsez acidic comment on Russian society. Everyone is totally absorbed by their smartphones and their own image in the mirrors they pass, but they barely noticed the missing son. They are both, in the end, left with what they wanted, and the flat, resigned expressions on their bodies tell us the cost. This is what "The Guardian" calls "a spiritual catastrophe".
Extraordinary film that doesn't feel like almost 2 and a half hours. Christian, the curator of a prestigious Stockholm museum, is trying to arrange publicity for a new show, about a square in the square, in which participants are invited to feel a sense of brotherhood and peace with the world. From within the square, you can ask a passerby for anything, and the passerby, in theory at least, is obligated to give what you ask for. A consulting firm is working on the publicity for this project, when Christian loses his wallet, cellphone, and cuff links downtown. On the advice of an assistant, he puts a letter in the mailbox of every apartment in a complex in the vicinity of where he has detected his stolen phone. The letter says, "I know you stole my phone and wallet-- return it now". Unfortunately, the parents of one child assume he is guilty and punish him, and the boy seeks out Christian for justice. Christian also has a one night stand with Anne, who later demands to know what it meant to him-- a #metoo moment in the film. But the most remarkable sequence is a dinner held for patrons of the museum at which an artist, Oleg, pretending to be some kind of primitive chimp-like beast, enters the hall. The guests have been instructed to not move, and not run away, for the "beast" will give chase and devour you. It's an art "happening" and, at first, everyone, intrigued, plays along. But Oleg becomes increasingly threatening and one guest flees, and another woman can't stay still. It's a incredibly tense scene because no one even knows if the two respondents were part of the event, or innocent guests. Christian's two daughters view these events with interest and ambivalence and, in the end, we are left with their gaze, and the questions that must be raised in their minds about how "good" their father his, how altruistic, in comparison with the ideals represented by "The Square". From Ostlund (the Director) "It's about the bystander effect. The reason we don't have the ability to take responsibility in situations like that is because we are herd animals and we get scared, and when we get scared we get paralyzed. And we're thinking, don't take me, don't take me, take someone else."
Eka and Natia are two teen-aged girls living in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1992. There is a war going on which vaguely intrudes on the story at times. But there are also feuds and eventually someone has to pay for a grievance against Natia's family. We see things mostly through the eyes of Eka, who observes all that is going on around her and doesn't like the role she is expected to assume, and the relationships that some are forced into. This is an insider movie: much of the cultural values and historical traditions that shape the lives of these people are not explained or rationalized-- they exist as the canvas upon which Eka and Natia try to illustrate themselves. Nothing is ever cheaply rendered, or contrived in this story, which makes the fates of these characters all the more heart-rending. Superbly filmed and acted, like the later "My Happy Family" (which, in some ways, is a more fully-realized version of Ekvtimishvili's vision). A beautiful, touching story.
J. Paul Getty is the richest man in the world. His son, John, is a heavy drinker, a n'er-do-well, married to Gail, and father of indolent John Paul Getty III, who, at 16, is kidnapped one day in Rome. Getty Sr. has no interest in paying a ransom, and, besides, he thinks it's all a plot by Paul Getty III to get some cash-- $17 million. And soon unfolds one of the strangest criminal plots involving a rich celebrity ever. Christopher Plummer famously relieved Kevin Spacey in the role of Getty Sr., and is very good, as is Michelle Williams as Gail. Generally well-filmed and well written, though Scott couldn't resist insert an escape sequence that never happened, and placing Gail where she never was. Nor were the kidnappers arrested at the exchange site-- it was months before any arrests were made. One also suspects that the role of Fletcher Chase (Mark Wahlberg, barely adequate) is somewhat exaggerated-- was he the primary source? The Gettys have been publicity shy about the whole story so one suspects it was Chase who provided the flattering details, as when Gail looks at him earnestly and thanks him, and when he tells off Getty for his ham-fisted refusal to help. (When he did finally offer some ransom money, he reasoned that he could deduct some of it from his taxes). It's a great story, aside from the fudging, but I don't see much more than a vivid portrait of ruthless greed and ambition on the part of Getty Sr. Getty III doesn't really have much presence-- he's 16, anyway, and rather passive. The escape sequence was added to juice up the story, but it's out of character from what we do know about him.
Mesmerizing and hypnotic at times: Alma is a waitress at a small restaurant in the country. Reynolds Woodcock is a premiere fashion designer from the city, out for some respite from his incredibly busy life. He is also something of a psycho-- constantly passive aggressive and bullying. When he asks Alma out for dinner, she offers a wonderfully unambiguous but considered "yes", in a throaty, compliant voice. They begin a complex relationship disturbed, almost immediately, by Reynolds' sister, Cyril, who regards Alma as just another way-station to be measured and packaged and discarded in the end. Let the games begin: Alma is not the passive, obedient type, and a strange game begins between the three of them. Vicky Krieps as Alma is brilliant, needy and independent; understanding but demanding at times. She resists and he resists her resistance and at times, "Phantom Thread" suggests that this is what love is: secret damage, manipulation, and manipulation of the manipulated.
Seriously, IMDB? 8.1 out of 10? This horrible little production invites the viewer to enjoy how wonderful it is to share the patronizing attitudes of the characters towards poor little Auggie, who has a terrible facial disfigurement (but not too terrible, lest the audience feel genuine distaste) and has to go to school, where the student body parts like the Red Sea as he strolls the sidewalk, contrary to any natural behavior by any group of people anywhere, except ancient Israel. Then we are invited to feel sorry for him as, remarkably, every single student in the school shuns him at lunch time. We are tossed a few bones-- one friend, arranged by the principal, betrays him once, but changes his mind, which leads to Auggie unjustly rejecting him. But in the end, the bullies, the mean kid, the teachers, and the entire school gather together to give him a standing ovation as he receives an award for being the most adorable misfit in the school. Really pretty shameless, and does no one any favors by rigging the plot to render this honor to Auggie-- one last act of patronizing pity for a character that deserves better. And why oh why is it so predictable that, as in "Mask" (a teacher), a key, compassionate figure will be black? Because they too have been oppressed? And we should respond with condescension?
In Tbilisi, Georgia, middle-aged Manana lives with her husband, daughter and husband and son and girlfriend, and parents, in a small apartment. Her mother does most of the cooking. Manana teaches. Nothing big or shocking happens in this movie except life: Manana wants a change and she goes looking for an apartment. Her family is convinced that someone has deeply offended or hurt her and they are determined to find out who it is, but she insists she just wants a space of her own. Her husband, Soso, is mysteriously demur about the issue, but her children and parents are shocked. We follow her encounters with her family, her students, her brother, and friends as she un-tethers herself and enjoys sweet moments of solitude and reflection. A former classmate runs into her and invites her to a reunion where the only really surprising revelation occurs, in a clever, circumspect manner. Does it change anything? "My Happy Family" is a study of ordinary people coping with life, trying (and mostly failing) to understand each other. Filmed in gorgeous, long continuous takes of ensembles moving and interacting with conviction, the steadicam shots never annoy-- they entrance and suck you in and you seem barely aware of the art of the director: it just feels like you are in the apartment with the family, and your instinct is to duck or move out of the way.
In 1967, as Detroit was convulsed with riots, a group of (white) policemen heard shots coming from a building and entered the building to find the "sniper". What they found was a group of black men and two white women who were having a party and hanging out. Astonishingly, the police rounded them all up and began beating and terrifying them. At the end of the night, three of the blacks were dead, and the rest of them, and the two women, traumatized. Bigelow goes for a lot of handheld camera-- which I'm not fond of-- but it allowed her to push the ensemble cast to a high level of intensity and conviction: not a moment goes by that is unconvincing or slack. Almost all of the performances are exceptional, and the constricted environment conveys the tension and unease of the victims of this violent episode. The outside scenes of rioting and looting and police and National Guard stratagems is very impressive, as blended with news reports, black and white photographs, and close-ups of the actors. Really a very remarkable film that should be in the running for best picture Oscar, best director, and best actor (for Will Poulter and Algee Smith). Even John Krasinksi turns in a creditable out-of-persona performance as a lawyer for the police-- ruthless, but not really bad.
A promising movie that is partly derailed by Sorkin's sniveling reverence for psychology and psychologists: when Molly's dad comes to New York to cheer her up during her trial and accuses her of running her poker nights, not for the money or lifestyle, but to lord it over powerful men-- stand-ins for me, daddy! When Bloom rises to leave this harangue, he shouts at her-- orders her-- to sit down. And she obeys, in perhaps the most repulsive scene in a biographical film this year. This sequence of cheap, dime-store psychology was so disheartening to see-- and cringy-- that it knocked a full .5 off the movie's score. Rehearsals with Chastain and Elba were minimal, often by remote connection, and it shows: both give sub-par performances, though Chastain is still impressive. Sorkin didn't care too much about detailed accuracy: the skiing accident as described didn't happen-- Bloom quit skiing after winning a Bronze in U.S. competition to pursue other interests. And nobody decides to add a "rake" in the middle of a poker game: it must be agreed upon before the game even starts. Bloom's attorney is almost completely fabricated, as are the judge's comments at the end. More significantly, one cannot be naive about the source of the story-- Bloom's memoir-- in which she insists there never any sex or drugs involved in the poker matches, and that she urged chronic losers to quit the game. We have only her word for it. Interesting and entertaining movie with a glimpse into organized crime in New York, the Russian mob connections, and this weird diversion, the poker match, involving rich, stupid men. Sorkin has said that this is a movie "about decency", which tells you that this is a facile movie about a hustler's self-described virtues.
A promising movie that is partly derailed by Sorkin's sniveling reverence for psychology and psychologists: when Molly's dad comes to New York to cheer her up during her trial and accuses her of running her poker nights, not for the money or lifestyle, but to lord it over powerful men-- stand-ins for me, daddy! When Bloom rises to leave this harangue, he shouts at her-- orders her-- to sit down. And she obeys, in perhaps the most repulsive scene in a biographical film this year. This sequence of cheap, dime-store psychology was so disheartening to see-- and cringy-- that it knocked a full .5 off the movie's score. Rehearsals with Chastain and Elba were minimal, often by remote connection, and it shows: both give sub-par performances, though Chastain is still impressive. Sorkin didn't care too much about detailed accuracy: the skiing accident as described didn't happen-- Bloom quit skiing after winning a Bronze in U.S. competition to pursue other interests. And nobody decides to add a "rake" in the middle of a poker game: it must be agreed upon before the game even starts. Bloom's attorney is almost completely fabricated, as are the judge's comments at the end. More significantly, one cannot be naive about the source of the story-- Bloom's memoir-- in which she insists there never any sex or drugs involved in the poker matches, and that she urged chronic losers to quit the game. We have only her word for it. Interesting and entertaining movie with a glimpse into organized crime in New York, the Russian mob connections, and this weird diversion, the poker match, involving rich, stupid men. Sorkin has said that this is a movie "about decency", which tells you that this is a facile movie about a hustler's self-described virtues.
Was Tonya Harding misrepresented by the media? "I, Tonya" wants it both ways: we see her side of the story, her struggles growing up, her disadvantaged childhood, and her view of the infamous knee-bashing incident with Nancy Kerrigan, but we never miss the obvious white-trash spin on the story, or the condescension (her mother denies that they were "trailer-trash" because they lived in a nice, new trailer). Harding was a remarkable skater, with impressive lift, and, of course, the triple axle. Her boyfriend, Jeff Gilhooly, beat her up, and her mother was savage, but somehow she managed to win a U.S. championship and place fourth at the Olympics. Filmed with panache and perhaps a bit too much irreverence: her story is really a tragedy driven by the perverse expectations of society for female skaters to conform with "princess" model of elegance and grace. Don't gesticulate after landing a jump-- you make it look like it was hard work. In the most telling incident in the film, a judge tells Harding that it was never about the skating-- it was all always about image. That's why she didn't get the marks.
Below average take on the infamous Riggs-King "Battle of the Sexes" tennis match in 1973, which the 55-year-old has-been Riggs, overweight, unprepared, and over-confident, lost, to the top female tennis player on the circuit. (ESPN's Don Van Natta thinks Riggs may have bet against himself and lost the match deliberately-- only three months earlier, well-prepared, he had crushed Margaret Court, the #1 female player at the time). Poorly acted and written, sloppy, sentimental, and facile. Dwells on King's relationship with Marilyn Barnett (who soon after outed King when she sued her for palimony) but cheerfully acknowledges her marvelous husband, Larry, who not only turned King on to feminism, but generally tolerated her lesbian relationship with Barnett. King was bright and articulate, but yes, as Cosell observed, she walked in a "manly" fashion. Riggs was a vulgar hustler and gambler and, if Van Natta is right, this was a classic gambling scam: the Court disaster set up Riggs as heavy favorite against King. A lot of money stood to be made by the huge amount gambled on the outcome. Not a single notable performance in the film. It felt at times as if everyone was merely waiting for their next good role in a real film.
I cannot help but connect this film to our trip to see the Viet Nam Veterans memorial in Washington D.C. a few years ago, in 2009. There was the long black scar in the landscape, and every name, in random order, a wound on the nation. The Pentagon Papers showed that the government of the U.S. knew, by 1965, that the war was not winnable, yet it continued to send thousands of young men to be wounded and killed in a vain effort. All because Johnson and Nixon did not want to admit the truth. Because they couldn't bear the political cost of being the administration that "lost" Viet Nam to the Communists. "The Post" tells us how Daniel Ellsberg, a Pentagon analyst who worked with the Rand Corporation compiling a history of the war, after hearing Robert McNamara continue to insist that the war was going well, decided to leak the report to the media, Parts went to the New York Times, which was immediately served with an injunction to cease publication, and a reporter, Ben Bagdikian, at the Post, who knew Ellsberg personally, acquired huge sections of it. The problem was that the court order from New York appeared to apply to any Newspaper publishing information from the same source. Kay Graham, publisher of the Post, was really not very familiar with the journalistic side of the paper, and was confronted with the real possibility of jail time if she supported Ben Bradlee and published the report. Spielberg's talent for suspenseful but sometimes schematic sequences works well here, to explain a complex but dramatic series of conflicts, between editors and reporters, reporters and lawyers, the government and the press, and the courts and the press. Surprisingly powerful dramatic build as the players head for a major showdown with the Supreme Court, and the conflict between Graham's financial interests (the Post was about to go public) and her respect for the journalistic side of the business (which she inherited after her husband, Phil Graham, a close friend of John Kennedy's, committed suicide). Streep nicely underplays her role, which makes her co-stars more effective in theirs.
Unusual and generally ineffective parody of celebrity culture: Tina Menzhal, a beautiful hockey player, is "discovered" and channelled into superstardom by a series of exploitive and incompetent photographers, boyfriends, producers, and celebrities. Along the way, she seems to bring chaos and destruction, while gliding through the disasters herself, untouched, if also, unheard (everyone seems to cut her off whenever she speaks). Aside from the exquisite Jessica Pare, and a boisterous Dan Ackroyd and slithery Frank Lagella, there is not much worth watching here, but the swift editing and lively transitions make it somewhat bearable.
Lesser Allen, but still Woody Allen: Mickey is a lifeguard on Coney Island who falls for a fading married woman, Ginny, whose husband, Humpty, is brutish, a drunk on the wagon, and whose son is a pyromaniac. Enter Carolina, Humpty's stray daughter, who is wanted by the mob for finking to the FBI. Mickey meets Carolina and-- the heart knows no logic-- falls in love with her. As Ginny realizes what is happening she becomes increasingly desperate, leading her to an unspeakable act. The real-life parallels are obvious: Woody, Mia Farrow, and Soon Li. If that parallel stands, "Wonder Wheel" is a cruel portrait of a ruthless woman, and a flattering self-portrait of Woody as the sensitive artist, aware of beauty and transcendence, and offering something better than most people can appreciate, and, of course, something appealing to the ingenue, Carolina, who begins to worship him. The trouble with "Wonder Wheel" is that Allen doesn't even seem to be trying hard anymore. Given the time period and the setting, Ginny and Mickey wandering around Coney Island without even checking around to see who might see them-- Humpty has fisherman friends around, after all-- seems hard to credit. The actors seem under-rehearsed at times, especially Winslet and Timberlake. And some scenes are just too rote, too predictable, sophomoric. But the portrait of a fading, disillusioned married woman at the end of her string, committing foolish, desperate acts remains strangely compelling. Juno Temple is up to the role of Carolina. Belushi is very good. And, given the current political climate, Allen's take on the dynamic between the Mickey and Carolina and Ginny is a welcome perspective. And this is at least the second film ("Crimes and Misdemeanors") by Allen that features a character who feels no remorse: Jude is surprised. He thought his upbringing and culture would overcome his corrupt desire and is entranced by the fact that it didn't. Ginny just doesn't feel it. What she wants and needs is enough to justify her actions.
In the dark days of 1940, "the fate of the world rests in the hands of newly appointed British Prime Minister Winston Churchill". Right. No it didn't, and this take on Britain's darkest hour doesn't even try for historical accuracy. Other than the fact that Churchill, indeed, was prime minister at the time. That said, it gives us a surprisingly dimensioned view of Churchill in the first half: self-doubting, alternately arrogant and humiliated, uncertain of his course of action. But conservatives have wet dreams every time they contemplate the infamous Chamberlain, who failed to seize the opportunity to make war and thus brought Nazism upon all of us! Chamberlain might have been right, at the wrong time, but the only reason we think Churchill was right is because he was prime minister at the time the U.S. entered the war with their massive production capabilities and delivered the goods. Odd then, that Oldman takes great pains to look and sound like Churchill, but the director cares so little historical accuracy elsewhere, as when he has Churchill leave his limo and take a ride in the tube. Of course he did. And when he asks the "common people" in the tube whether England should fight on, they all-- every last one of them, down to a child-- enthusiastically back their lovable pooh-bear of a pm. This scene includes that weird slime of common people acting extremely grateful that a leader-- usually a president or prime-minister-- should condescend to hang out with mere mortals. They act like it is some special virtue and they are entitled to, after all, not hang around with "common" people, so you better wet your pants if they do. Just as Churchill is supposed to go moist when an aide comes and tells him he has a visitor. "Really? Who?" "The King". "The King? Oh my God! Here? To see me? Oh my God! What will I wear..." And the King confides in him that he has every confidence in him.
Not worth the 132 minutes of worship: Armie Hammer plays well as a a research assistant named Oliver spending 6 weeks in Italy as the guest of a celebrated professor researching artifacts in the Mediterranean. The professor's son, Elio, becomes sexually attracted to Oliver. And the film plays like Oliver's self-serving vision of how a relationship like that, between a 17-year-old and a 24-year-old, should be viewed. At times, clumsily. We have, for example, Elio's father consoling him at one point by telling him that his relationship with the 24-year-old was to be envied, that he'll always remember it as beautiful and true, and he should consider himself fortunate to have experienced it. Perhaps he should also let some of the women Oliver (and Elio) had affairs with know the same thing: don't be heart-broken. Don't feel cheated or tricked. Consider yourself lucky. Need we note that it was absolutely crucial that Elio is shown having the initiative in this relationship. Sure, that does happen. But it's not very likely. And Oliver's token resistance, in which he does seem to acknowledge a slight problem, does nothing to ameliorate the potential hypocrisy of people who endorse this film while objecting to sexual relations between teachers and high school seniors. All of that said... it's just not that great of a film. It's not bad, especially for the first half, in which Oliver and Elio establish a convincing rapport-- but the last 1/3 is very tedious. It this were not a gay love story, would anyone care about the first half? Let's get to the cinematography: I have seen many films in which the scenery and backgrounds are beautiful because they were beautifully filmed. Rarely, the background is beautiful just because it is beautiful. But in "Call me by Your Name", the backgrounds look like they should be beautiful, but they are not. As they roam around on their bicycles, you expect wonderful shots of bucolic, rural landscapes in Northern Italy. Instead, the backgrounds look static and dull and de-saturated. Not sure why. Nor does the camera often move interestingly. Nor is "call me by your name" the romantic or meaningful gesture it is, I think, supposed to be. Their relationship, as expressed on the screen, just never rose to that level of intensity.
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