Filmfatale

The Iron Lady: Thatcher Devoid of Thatcherism

2012-02-07T02:09:00.000-08:00

Guest Post By Leonard Quart

Biopics are rarely the best way of getting a handle on the social or political world. They are too focused on the career or character of their central figure. Everything else, including other people, is only superficially sketched, subsumed by the actions, thoughts, and feelings of the film’s protagonist. Phyllida Lloyd’s The Iron Lady, one of the better recent works in the genre, is a perfect example of the biopic’s limits and strengths.

It opens with a frail old woman on the cusp of dementia, Baroness Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep), tottering around her monochromatic and shadowy but comfortable apartment, living with fractured memories of her triumphant past. She is sustained by these memories, including the ghost of her gin-drinking, golf-playing husband, Dennis (Jim Broadbent), who offers her reminiscences of good times and total devotion. When her concerned daughter Carol (Olivia Colman) visits, Thatcher responds without much affection or respect—as if Carol is merely a professional caregiver. Her feeling of rejection in these scenes is subtly projected, without a false note.

The scenes of an aged Thatcher are deeply affecting, but there is a bit too much of her relationship with Dennis, which though somewhat humorous feels sentimentalized. His ghost seems to have been inserted to soften her characteristic harshness, to grant her more humanity. But watching Streep’s elderly Thatcher—a shell of her formerly commanding and abrasive self—reminded me of Shelley’s Ozymandias:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Despite Thatcher’s callous economic and social policies and overbearing personality, one can’t help but feel compassion for a woman facing the decay of her mind and body. It’s something that ultimately confronts us all, both the rulers and the ruled—the inescapable tragedy of the life cycle. The film poignantly captures it.

Streep, embodying both the senile and the formidable Thatcher, is the film’s greatest asset. She encapsulates Thatcher’s distinctive voice, intonation, posture, and motions (and her matronly hairstyle is done with utter precision), but she goes beyond that, to Thatcher’s essence. That’s no small feat: it’s hard to capture the soul of a woman so severe and strident that she could declare, “Feelings do not interest me, thoughts and ideas are what matter the most. What we think is what we become.” Thatcher acted out of a sense of moral rectitude, without doubt, self-awareness, or a capacity for self-criticism.

Alexandra Roach plays the young Thatcher, who is a touch more vulnerable but no less ambitious than Streep’s character. She adores her father, a small-town, conservative grocer. Thatcher is spurred on by his words, “Never go with the crowd.” After attending Oxford, she wins a seat in parliament in 1959 at the age of thirty-three. By then she had already taken measure of the condescending upper class “old boys’” milieu that dominated the Conservative Party, preparing her leadership takeover in 1975 and eventual three terms as prime minister, from 1979 to 1990.

When the young Thatcher meets Dennis, she informs him that she will not be the traditional domestic wife but plans to leave a mark on the world. He responds that he loves her, because she isn’t going to be that woman—making the seemingly conventional Dennis an unusual man for that era. Indeed, Thatcher aggressively asserts her independence as a woman and has the capacity to dominate the men in her cabinet. But she has no link to other political women or any interest in feminism. The film gives no sign of female confidantes or of a strong connection to her mother; Thatcher goes as far as to say that she prefers the company of men to women.

But from the evidence of the film, Thatcher was emotionally insulated and really didn’t need many other people at all. Besides her husband and father, only Airey Neave (Nicholas Farrell) plays a role in her private life. Neave was Thatcher’s campaign manager when she was elected Conservative Party leader, and was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. But an Irish terrorist group assassinated him before he could take office in 1979, moving Thatcher to genuinely grieve over his death.

Thatcher changed the nature of the Conservative Party by undermining its paternalistic and totally male elite, an upper-class aristocracy committed to preserving the welfare state and a consensual politics dedicated to the idea of “one nation.” Thatcher rejected compromise and began to dismantle the welfare state. Her politics appealed to a rising lower-middle class and the skilled working class. She promoted an entrepreneurial culture where the acquisition of wealth and the consumption of goods became the prime goals. She believed social good came not from unity but from conflict between interest groups, was utterly unconcerned with what happened to the poor, and treated the unions as her prime enemy.

But watching the film, one would never know that though she professed commitment to a meritocracy where class status would never be an obstacle, she opposed all redistributive programs. That she made Britain less equal by easing the capital gains tax and reducing the top rate. The Iron Lady offers nothing more than the most superficial exploration of Thatcher’s politics. We get Thatcher, but not much Thatcherism.

Massive chunks of her career in office are awkwardly evoked and compressed through a montage of high points (or low points, depending on one’s perspective). We see her taking an uncompromising and jingoistic stand on the Falklands War, a victorious military campaign that helped her win the 1983 election in a landslide. We also get a look at the miners’ strike of 1983 and, in grainy archival footage, the mid-1980s financial sector boom and the poll tax riots of 1990. Only one scene, where angry protesters slap on the window of Thatcher’s limo to tell her she’s “a monster,” gives us a sense how hated she was by a portion of the population. And the only moment of parliamentary opposition comes in a glimpse of a tirade by Labour leader Michael Foot in the House of Commons. (Of the effects of Thatcherism on the Labour Party, there’s not even a glimpse.) The Iron Lady may convey a clear sense of Thatcher’s character flaws, but it mostly passes over how divisive a politician she was.

Political films like Ken Loach’s 1995 Spanish Civil War drama Land and Freedom feature scenes of intellectually exhilarating ideological debate, but The Iron Lady desires a large audience and doesn’t pretend to be intellectually sophisticated. When we finally see a scene with Thatcher’s cabinet, close to the end of her time in office and as her popularity is waning, it exists only to show Thatcher cruelly dress down her ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer and ex-Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe (Anthony Head), as if he was a failing, slow-witted pupil. There’s also no mention of the intellectual force behind Thatcherism, the anti-Keynesian Keith Joseph, who famously declared, “We are over-governed, over-spent, over-taxed, over-borrowed, and over-manned.”

In The Iron Lady, political and social institutions can’t withstand Thatcher’s steely will. It’s a distortion of history, and leaves us wanting to know why her final term in office turned into a disaster—a fact that can’t merely be explained by her behavior toward fellow cabinet members. Contrary to this film, the personal is never the whole political story.

Still, if The Iron Lady fails to give us a critical handle on the policies of this political and public woman, it brings to life, through Streep’s brilliance, Margaret Thatcher the person. She was over-certain and insensitive but also talented and intelligent. She permanently changed the parameters of political debate in Britain, but she was also human, unable to resist our common mortal fate.

Leonard Quart is a contributing editor at Cineaste and the coauthor of American Film and Society Since 1945

Winslet Wasted: Contagion/Carnage

2011-12-03T09:35:00.000-08:00

A few years back, I endured a particularly bad bout of flu, which I suspect might have been of the swine variety. Since then I have washed my hands obsessively, not quite OCD, but every time I come in from outside, every time I accept a delivery, every time I pick up the mail. If I'm out and about, I slather my hands with that sanitizing gel as often as I can remember to. After washing my hands in a public bathroom, I use a tissue to open the door to get out. I whole-heartedly agree with those epidemiologists who insist that a world-wide flu pandemic is not a matter of if, but when. Furthermore, I adore disaster films. My favorites from when I was a kid were King Kong, Godzilla (and all the sequels), The Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno, The Andromeda Strain--and I've seen The Day After Tomorrow three times (I'm a sucker for those scenes in the New York Public Libary). As anyone who has come to dinner at my house knows conspiracy theories are staples in my verbal diet. (Favorites: Chinatown, The Conversation, Three Days of the Condor, Enemy of the State, the Bourne films...) So there was no way I wasn't running to see Contagion--and with that director and cast--just as soon as I could.

Can you believe I almost fell asleep?

You've got to hand it to Steven Soderbergh that he could make a movie called Contagion seem as if it were shot in slow motion. It was as if the guy had no idea how to tell a story. Strands began that went no where. Characters introduced then forgotten. The whole film was a veritable school of red herrings. And all that "talent" gone to waste. Gwenyth Paltrow is almost immediately killed off, Marion Cotillard is introduced than disappears for most of the movie, Lawrence Fishburne and Elliot Gould reduced to talking head doctors, Jude Law had potential but his aussie conspiracy babble eventually went nowhere. We're left with Matt Damon to hold down the fort! I mean it felt like a cruel inside joke, as if Soderbergh were taking his directorial revenge on movie stars--the movie should have been titled "Revenge." The biggest waste of all was Kate Winslet. In the first half of the film, we kept watching for her--she was going to save the world from disaster as well as this disasterous film--and then Soderbergh KILLS HER OFF. A red nose, a stretcher in a make-shift hospital, body bag, gone. Soon after her demise I was seriously nodding off. Visually, the film had some extraordinary shots--almost worth seeing for this. Otherwise a dud.

(Sorry for all the spoilers but it's my belief that no one should read a film review unless you have already seen the film or have no intention of seeing it. If the review then changes your mind one way or the other, how delightful!)

I didn't fall asleep in Carnage but I couldn't wait for it to be over. A film written and directed by the smug about the smug is just going to be flat no matter how many zippy speeches and drawing-room histrionics. The problem with this movie, besides the complete implausibility--and one dimensionality--of the script, was the casting. Jodie Foster is not a natural screecher, John C. Reilly kept struggling to give his hounded-husband-ready-to-explode routine more depth, Christoph Waltz was actually perfect because he understood the banality of his character and entertainingly stuck to type. But oh, Kate Winslet, what a waste! What was she doing in that room, with those people, with that husband, in that movie? She was too beautiful, too sophisticated, too intelligent for the part, her character so badly conceived as somewhere between trophy wife and kick-ass executive. Poor Winslet was totally at sea, doing the best she could as a dinghy in one scene and an ocean liner in another.

The Grim Reaper Comes to the London Film Festival: 50/50, Into the Abyss, The Descendants

2011-10-30T03:49:00.000-07:00

A boy buddy movie about cancer? What was I thinking? Truth is with Joseph Gordon Levitt's million dollar smile really anything is possible. Based on the writer Will Reiser's actual experiences, Adam (Joseph Gordon Levitt), a radio journalist, is diagnosed with a rare cancer in his late 20s and learns from the internet that he has a 50/50 chance of survival. The movie is the unfolding of his life, loves, and friendships post-diagnosis. Levitt's charming ability to make chemo-stry (sorry) happen with just about anyone is what makes this film. Even Seth Rogin becomes somewhat endearing while basking in Levitt's radiant glow. (Okay, I'll stop.) I laughed. I cried. A lot. I still don't know why I, of all people, a paranoid hypochondriac extraordinaire, chose to see this. Was it because of Anjelica Huston (totally great as the cancer stricken boy's suffocating mother)? Was it for Anna Kendrick (just ok as grief-therapist-in-training who falls in love with her patient)? It was probably because at the film festival I try to see things I would never otherwise see. It really is a cute, whacky, perfectly acceptable small film that does succeeds in making cancer funny. Does the world need such a thing? Quite possibly.

Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life is the documentary by Werner Herzog about a boy, Michael Perry, on death row in Texas. Again, what was I thinking? It seems I was in pursuit of the grim this year and grim this film certainly is. It's really a horror film in the guise of a documentary. Herzog (whose voice we hear, but who we see only in vague reflection in the glass dividing him from the prisoners) interviews a whole cast of characters somehow involved in Perry's fate--from his partner in crime Jason Burkett, to Burkett's father, to the prison chaplin, to the ex-executioner (my favorite of them all), to Jason Burkett's miraculously pregnant mail-bride who provided the audience with some comic relief through her charming penchant for self-deception. Each of them, as we all are, is trapped inside his or her own terrifying reality. A worthy film I am not unhappy to have seen but it falls short of great documentary in the manner of, say, Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line or anything by Chris Marker. At the screening, the producer who introduced the film compared it to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which is not a stretch (the crime is similar) but Herzog is more interested here in sociology than psyche, which helps him cope with the intensity and insanity of his subject, but makes our experience more voyeuristic than empathetic.

Elizabeth King is in a coma after a boating accident and unlikely to live. Matt King, her husband, discovers from his teenage daughter that Elizabeth was having an affair. They hatch a plan to confront her lover, bringing father and daughter into a new intimacy. In the meantime, King and his cousins are about to decide what to do with a huge chunk of pristine land his family owns in Hawaii, handed down through generations from their royal Hawaiian ancestors. Hence the film's title: The Descendants. The whole state is waiting to see what these descendants will do with their legacy while the audience is waiting to see how King will help his children deal with their mother's impending death. Would I run to see that film? No. But it's the film festival AND the director is Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways) AND it stars George Clooney. I go because Alexander Payne's celluloid rendering of quirky Americana is always surprising, and not only is Clooney Clooney, he has an inclination these days for trying to stretch himself as an actor. Payne's script hovers between sitcom and surreal, nothing which isn't done extraordinarily well on tv, but Payne includes in the mix extended pathos--something few can pull off convincingly in our age of irony and cynicsm. Dying mother in a hospital bed is a very tricky proposition both despite and because of delivering insta-sadness. Payne's project in this film is to redeem the sentimental to its original favorable sense: "Characterized by or exhibiting refined and elevated feeling"--as opposed to its current sense: "Addicted to indulgence in superficial emotion; apt to be swayed by sentiment." (OED) George Clooney, as Payne's chief means to this end, is a joy to watch even if a lot of the time what we are witnessing is a cinema icon struggling not to bury his very ordinary, flawed and vulnerable character under the weight of his own real life megastardom. This quasi-post modern distraction actually worked in a particulary Paynian way to further the film's mundane message i.e. we're all humans who suffer and love and laugh despite our own particular legacy. In the end, Payne and Clooney manage to pull off this strangely heartfelt movie, but not without a lot of help from the pitch-perfect performances from the supporting cast.

Moving from grim reaper to hyperactive stork, the most innovative and engaging film I saw at the festival was 17 Girls,

from French sororal (great word!) writing and directing team Delphine and Muriel Coulin. Beautifully shot in a small French port city in decline, the story is about 17 high school girls who decide to empower themselves by becoming pregnant. Based on the true incident in Massachusetts in 2008, the Coulin sisters imagine the girls' motivations in an intriguing twist on the tropes of teenage pregnancy. Unfortunately, the end was pat and predictable, deflating what was otherwise a mind-bendingly gorgeous and stunningly acted film.

The worst film I saw was Carnage (will post about this anon).

The most purely enjoyable was Nouka Dubi (Boat Wreck)

from Bengali director Rituparno Ghosh. Great plot, astonishing cinematography, stupendous singing, magic melodrama. Bollywood meets Tagore--need I say more?

Silent Films Redux: Underground, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Light of Asia...

2011-10-06T01:19:00.000-07:00

For a while now, the silent film accompanied by live music has been making a come back in London and beyond. It is an extraordinary way to spend an evening: watching cinematic history in the making while listening to composers' and musicians' interpretations of the visual. Here are the three I have seen recently:

UNDERGROUND (1928) directed by Anthony Asquith, score by Neil Brand, with Timothy Brock conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra

A stunning romance-comedy-noir-thriller starring above all else the London underground of the late 1920s, this is some extraordinary filmmaking. Light and shadow, German expressionism, Russian montage, Hitchcockian suspense, Chaplinesque humor, and it has one of the best chase sequences ever filmed. So much more entertaining than most films made today. The score was perfection, full of fabulous themes and wonderful surprises, the timing and flexibility of the orchestra conducted by the amazing Timothy Brock quite simply unbelievable. The film, beautifully restored by the BFI, was dismissed by reviewers when first released. If the packed and enthusiastic audience at the Barbican has anything to say about it, this print and score will surely set the record straight.

The screening at the Barbican was followed by a riveting Q&A with Brock, Brand, Robin Baker (Head Curator, BFI National Archive), Matthew Sweet (Writer, Historian and Broadcaster), and chaired by Francine Stock (TV/Radio presenter and novelist.) Wonderful stuff was revealed like how the harmonica sequence had to be played by a melodeon, how Asquith introduced the helicopter shot before the helicopter, and how David Thomson, according to Sweet, very wrongfully dismisses Asquith in his Biographical Dictionary of Film. (I subsequently read the entry--Underground isn't mentioned--and he does seem unreasonably nasty about Asquith, but we love David Thomson precisely because he can be so viciously wrong.) But what I appreciated most was the sheer love of film and music eminating off the Barbican stage from all of the speakers, most especially Neil Brand. I missed his score for Hitchcock's Blackmail which I understand was another triumph. Now in October in New York he will be conducting the New York Philharmonic in his restored score of The Gold Rush. If you happen to be in the big apple then go, go, go.

In the meantime, here's almost two minutes of that chase scene I mentioned from Underground. This is from the rooftop of the Lot's Road Power Station which is still there in romantic semi-ruins right down the road from where I live in London.

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1920) starring John Barrymore, directed by John Robertson, screenplay by Clara Beranger, live score written and performed by Blue Roses

It was raining, we were late, we were riding Boris bikes across Hyde Park and couldn't find anywhere to return them. We finally arrived at the Electric Cinema in Notting Hill to see Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, myself resembling in look and mood the latter. But settling into the plush red leather seats with a glass of red wine to warm us up, we were fast restored by this wild evening to our better selves. The very creepy, scary, weird film in which John Barrymore very impressively becomes a hideous, hairy, distorted version of himself, was accompanied by an equally macabre and intriguing score played and orchestrated by Blue Roses. There have been too-many-to-count film versions of this Robert Louis Stevenson story about our dark double-nature, but this one is the original and fascinating to watch. It was written by Clara Beranger, who would go on to have a very successful Hollywood career scripting over 70 movies.

This screening of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was part of the wonderful BIRD'S EYE VIEW FILM FESTIVAL's Sound & Silents strand which presents classic silent films by pioneering women filmmakers alongside specially commissioned scores by cutting-edge contemporary female musicians.

Upcoming from Bird's Eye View Sound & Silents: British Composer Mira Calix rescores early animation The Adventures of Prince Ahmed at the Aubin Cinema, Shoreditch, on Sunday 23 October. (www.birds-eye-view.co.uk)

THE LIGHT OF ASIA (1925) directed by Franz Osten & Himansu Rai, written by Niranjan Pal with New Live Score By Pandit Vishwa Prakash

I had seen Franz Osten's amazing A Throw of the Dice at a screening in Trafalgar Square about a year ago so when I heard the BFI was showing The Light of Asia I quickly bought tickets. After an overlong introduction to the film (the occasion was actually a celebration of the filmmaker Niranjan Pal who went on to found with Osten and Rai the movie studio The Bombay Talkies Limited) the movie was finally screened. The film recounts the saga of Prince Siddhartha, who rejects his privileged life to search for Truth and becomes Buddha, or the Enlightened One. The story was just not as compelling as A Throw of the Dice based on the episode from "The Mahabharata" chronicling a harrowing love triangle. Still, they both shared the incredible Rajasthan settings, the erotic and exotic costumes, the jungles and palaces, elephants, camels, and tigers. Orientalism abounds but so does breathtaking beauty and astonishing filmmaking. The meticulous attention to lighting and patterning of Weimar cinema here meets the fantastical tradition of Indian storytelling. And the Prakash score was sublime.

A THROW OF THE DICE (1929) directed by Franz Osten

I know of two more silent film events upcoming in London which I will sadly have to miss but they promise to be great, great evenings.

THE FIRST BORN directed by Miles Mander with a live performance of Stephen Horne's new score at Southbank's Queen Elizabeth Hall on Thursday, Oct 20 at 19:30. (bfi.org.uk/lff)

THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC directed by Carl Dreyer (and one of the all time great silent films) with music from the London Symphony Orchestra on November 6 at 19:30. (Iso.co.uk)

If Only God Were A Woman: The Tree of Life and Bridesmaids

2011-07-17T10:03:00.000-07:00

I thought I would hate Bridesmaids--I tend to loath films that pander to women and end up digging them even deeper into the demeaning morass where they are forced to wallow by the prevailing misogynist culture. Instead, I liked it quite a lot--an excellent send up of the cliched wedding story, even if the satire wasn't as razor sharp as it could have been. But I laughed so much more than I thought I would--and much more by a long shot than I did watching The Hangover. The women were just plain consistently funny. I also appreciated that, though the men in the film were by no means front and center, at least two of them got some very strong, even hilarious, lines--a big difference from the male buddy movies in which the women are usually throw aways. And so Bridesmaids managed to be a good bad girl buddy film, full of stark and raunchy truths about us, while maintaining our moral superiority. Perhaps, Margaret, there is a God and she's got a helluva sense of humor. In truth, there was still quite a bit of pander in Bridesmaids (the premise itself, the cupcake business, the iheart moments), but there was quite a bit of surprising writing and acting with refreshingly little concern for the male gaze. I am convinced that contrary to what they preach in Hollywood, and the numbers back me up on this one, that men find the woman's perspective refreshing too (and erotic, and challenging, and intriguing). A little less fear from the powers that be and that green light is going to be getting a whole lot of action for women-centric films. (Don't worry, I'm not holding my breath. That's what everyone said after Thelma and Louise--how many years ago now?) In any case, a film that has a scene of a bride in a white gown taking a shit in the middle of a busy street deserves an Oscar (I know, in some other universe, maybe that one in which God is a woman).

As for The Tree of Life, I thought I was going to love it. I've never loved Malick to the degree others have (the way he's always so obviously reaching for profundity makes me cringe--boy was I in for it), but I have always admired his grand ambition and immense filmmaking skills. When I heard people were walking out of The Tree of Life saying the film was nonsense, my pretentious, antipopulist self decided I would love it. I actually found the film very funny, with all those exploding stars, primoridial muck, dinosaurs, Brad Pitt (of the rainbow brood) with the infant's foot and that final scene which made me yearn for more films like Last Year at Marienbad. But it's never really all that fun to be laughing when you're not supposed to be. And I found so much of it tedious--Malick pretending to be Spielberg trying to be Tarkovsky--brought to mind once again the lyrics from that great "Hair" song: And I'm a genius genius/I believe in God/And I believe that God/Believes in Terence/That's me that's me. Though I would tell no one it was a film that had to be seen (Bridesmaids on the other hand I would just), I never really wanted to walk out as it was on the whole nice to look at, the boys were wonderful, the music so very heavy duty Christian but still great to hear. Best comments from the blogosphere: "This film was complete and utter self-absorbed masturbation. American faux-angst, faux-reflection, emotionally-thin bullshit … The sighs of boredom, fidgeting and deflated expectation culminated in cinemagoers at the Curzon Soho today leaving with barely the will to live." -Socialsurgeon; "I think in his desperate search to make the perfect transcendental film, Malick is using a bigger and bigger canvas and taking longer and longer to say less and less. There is nothing in this film that isn't intimated with greater subtlety, sadness, and a truer sense of the sublime in his first three films." -Jeromenewton. As a female viewer, I felt almost entirely excluded, women really having no place at all in this film except as a male fantasy of the perfect mother. Always irritating. I did have a great thought though as I was leaving the cinema: If only God were a woman Malick might have made the epic he was hoping for.

Other films I've seen recentlyish:

Source Code: What a great old-fashioned yet au courant sci-fi thriller that made perfect sense in the end and didn't rely on too much schmalz. Concept brilliant--three cheers for the multiverse theory (did you know that William James coined the term?)--acting by Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan adorable. Good chemistry. This was everything that other film with Leonardo di Crappio should have been but wasn't (Inception). Loved Vera Farmiga though the trailer for her new film Higher Ground in which she stars and directs has me worried she wants to be Terence Malick. What's with the God theme these days? Please someone make a film in which it's discovered that God is a lesbian.

Hanna: Opening sequence excellent. All down hill after that though the young actress playing Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) was mega watchable. Action scenes went on too long and blended into each other. First time I've seen Cate Blanchett not totally at the top of her game. Tom Hollander great as evil guy.

Pirates of the Carribean: I love Johnny Depp but even with the excellent decision to get rid of the fey Keira Knightly and bring on my heartthrob Penelope Cruz, this was still so very tired even Jack Sparrow seemed to have trouble keeping his eyes open.

Le Quattro Volte: An Italian version of The Tree of Life. An overdose of pretention. I actually should have walked out of this one it was so unbearable, though the detail of the shepherd ingesting the dust off the church floor to help cure his chronic cough was a nice touch.

Make Way For Tomorrow

2011-04-03T12:44:00.000-07:00

I'd never heard of Make Way For Tomorrow, but Leo McCarey had also directed one of my favorite films, The Awful Truth (made the same year, 1937), and I had been meaning to go for some time to one of The National Gallery's Saturday afternoon screenings of classic films. Their flyer billed Make Way For Tomorrow as "one of the great unsung Hollywood masterpieces, an enormously moving Depression-era depiction of the frustrations of family, ageing, and the generation gap." It sounded promising enough, though not a subject I would usually leap at. I had no idea what I was in for.

The story centers on an elderly couple who haven't planned for retirement. He is fired from his job and can't get another. The bank forecloses on the house and the couple finally tell their five adult children what has happened. There is no obvious solution as none of the children is particularly well off so the couple is split up, the mother going to live in New York City with a son, the father to a small country town where he sleeps on his daughter's sofa. The movie plays out the dreadful humiliation of what the aged must endure when entirely dependent on their children, and the heartlessness, frustration, pity, and guilt the children experience when faced with the "burden" of their parents. It is a shockingly real portrait of middle class family life across three generations and more than relevant to today's audiences. It is also an acute and beautiful portrait of a long term marriage.

With magnificent subtlety and artistry, this movie, perhaps more than any other I have ever seen, gets right at the awful truth of the human condition. It is certainly one the most honest and loving portrayals of basic human cruelty ever created. And some of the best acting--with Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi giving extraordinary performances as the old couple--ever captured on screen. The writing was pitch perfect, the screenplay by Viña Delmar, who also wrote the screenplay for The Awful Truth. (She was the author of a series of best-selling novels with titles such as Bad Girl, Kept Woman, and Loose Ladies about the real issues facing the modern woman.)

The film was, of course, a failure at the box office as the subject is simply not one most people want to face, myself included. But it is a subject that we actually do confront every hour of every day and the brutal truth of the film is our own: Ageing and death is the deepest, darkest of sins not only in our society at large but within our very families. Not only do we resent and despise those close to us for committing the sin of getting old, we know our turn is at hand and loathe ourselves for it. The last thing we are prepared to do for ourselves or for others in any meaningful way is to Make Way For Tomorrow. Though the very end of the film is relentlessly bleak, in the stunning denouement when the couple tour New York City during their last hours together before being split up again, this time surely permanently, McCarey gives us a deeply moving vision of old age in the fullness of its elegance and integrity.

Orson Welles said that the movie "would make a stone cry" but this film is not sentimental. Nor is it a cold-eyed view of man's inhumanity to man. Its devestating power to make us weep is found in how generous and understanding McCarey is to each of his characters, all of whom, even those most apparantly selfish, display the whole gamut of emotions from sheer loving kindness to begruding niceity, to petty meanness, to heartlessness, to sadistic pleasure. No one is innocent, and we're all guilty.

Make Way For Tomorrow was an inspiration for Ozu's Tokyo Story, a fact I find at once surprising and obvious. I always thought that slow, subtle, penetrating depth of vision into family dynamics so uniquely Ozu's, but McCarey's influence on Ozu is indeed perfect.

McCarey claimed Make Way For Tomorrow was the best film he ever made and in 1938 when he won the Oscar for The Awful Truth he held up the golden statue and told the audience, "This is for the other one."

Four More Films I've Seen Recently in Brief:

Silken Skin--directed by François Truffaut, his fourth film, made in 1964, this is a gorgeous movie about a married French intellectual's passionate love affair with a stewardess, exquisitely played by Françoise Dorléac, Catherine Deneuve's older sister who would die tragically in a car accident soon after the making of this film. Wonderfully detailed, delicate and engaging, that is right up until the last scene of the film which is just silly and reminds me of how hard finding the right ending can be.

The Hereafter--directed by Clint Eastwood, entertaining enough but mostly plodding and never soars, except in a very early scene in which Cécile De France is nearly killed by a tsunami. Very beautiful and very eery on many levels. Matt Damon was adequate but Bryce Dallas Howard's brief cameo stole whatever of the movie there was to steal.

Blue Valentine--another portrait of a marriage, though this one was so one-dimensional as to be confusing, causing this viewer to repeatedly wonder: am I missing something here? The script was flat and cliched but Michelle Williams outstanding performace saved the movie from being a complete waste of time. Ryan Gosling also acquitted himself well. Still, I don't understand how this film got made.

Morning Glory--entirely forgettable romcom with Diane Keaton, Harrison Ford, and Rachel McAdams. If only Viña Delmar were still around...

End of Year Roundup--Somewhere, Forbidden, Inception, The King's Speech, The Wrestler, The Shining, Invasion of the Body Snatchers...

2011-01-09T11:47:00.000-08:00

SOMEWHERE
I actually saw "Somewhere" long ago at the London Film Festival but disliked it so much I couldn't bring myself to write about it at length. Apparently, neither could Anthony Lane, who gave me the idea for a roundup, and whose assessment of the film very nearly matches my own--"In one prolonged shot, Johnny circles his car fast around a track, but the futility of a noodling movie star is hardly a revelation of the absurdity of the human condition, or whatever this movie is supposed to be about." Indeed, Stephen Dorff's Johnny Marco is the flattest imitiation of a Mastroianni-esque character one could devise. "Somewhere" was as bad as "Nine" in its complete misunderstanding and degradation of Italian cinema, not to mention women. (The only viable female is Johnny's eleven-year-old daughter played by Elle Fanning and an obvious stand-in for Coppola's younger self.) I was a fan of "Lost in Translation" despite my big problems with its gross condescension towards the Japanese. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson were just so incredibly watchable, whereas "Marie Antionette" was entirely unwatchable. "Somewhere" has some nice shots of the Hotel Marmont and Sunset Boulevard but was mostly just plain boring and horribly misguided. But this is blissfully a roundup so I won't go on. Let's just say the highest compliment I can pay this film is that it made me think of the lyric from "Hair":
Claude Hooper Bukowski/Finds that it's groovy/To hide in a movie/Pretends he's Fellini/And Antonioni/And also his countryman Roman Polanski/All rolled into one/One Claud Hooper Bukowski.
If only Sofia Coppola had a tad more of Claud Hooper Bukowski's ambition.

FORBIDDEN
"Forbidden," seen at a Frank Capra retrospective at the National Film Theatre/British Film Institute (one of the great perks of London), was a surprise. Not your usual Capra or Stanwyck fare--the film is about a librarian who has a passionate affair with a married man--an ambitious but very likeable politician (only Capra could pull any of this off)--while on holiday and subsequently gives up everything--including their child--for him. The power of Stanwyck's performance allows the film to investigate love's complexity with a rare depth and maturity. I actually came away from the film empathasizing with her choices. Nevertheless, Capra himself loathed the film calling it "two hours of soggy, 99.44% pure soap opera." During the filming, Stanwyck fell off her horse, injured her back, and had to spend every night of the rest of the filming in the hospital in traction. Capra would blame the film and the equestrian accident for Stanwyck's definitive refusal to marry him.

INCEPTION
Glad I saw this on a plane and very post hype. But still I was bored. Doesn't even come close to the genius of "Memento" or even "The Matrix." Saw everything coming way before it did and the love story was plain stupid.

THE KING'S SPEECH
Oops, wrong King. So what if it's historically inaccurate. So what if it's a feel good story that lacks any subtlety whatsoever. It's entertainment at its best in the sense that it doesn't have any ambition to be anything more than it is so fulfills its promise from start to finish. Besides, I saw it with my mother who loved it because she remembered as a kid listening to the stuttering King on the radio and being embarrassed for him. If Colin Firth doesn't get an Oscar for this I'll eat my hat. And Geoffrey Rush deserves a nod. Without them this film would have been nothing at all.

THE WRESTLER
I saw this with my mother too and she repeated throughout the entire film: "Why would anybody ever want to watch this?" I thought Mickey Rourke's performance eerily too good. The film comes nowhere near the brilliance of "Raging Bull" but does have moments of sublime intensity. The love story with Marisa Tomei (always wonderful) and the daughter thread very banal. I was actually relieved at the lack of redemption, but could have been spared the Christ image during the denouement. Finally, I have to agree with my mother here.

THE SHINING
Quite simply one of the best films ever made. This should be required viewing for any student of film, really anyone interested in the creative process. It is a veritable primer in perspective. A multi-layered work of genius, my favorite scene, of course, is when the amazing Shelley Duvall peers down at the typewriter Jack has been writing his magnum opus on, while the camera takes precise aim up at her, the typewriter smack in the center of the frame. As she reads the by now infamous line, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," she--and we--are struck dumb by the great and horrifying truth that creation and destruction are one. The film is the enactment of T.S. Eliot's line, "There will be time to murder and create," via the inimitable horror/humor of Stephen King as envisioned by Stanley Kubrick. Unbelievable. I so identified with Jack it was disturbing.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS
By far the best of the three versions is the one starring Donald Sutherland and Jeff Goldblum. My mother's verdict: "This should be required watching for all citizens of the United States every six months to ensure we all don't become Republicans."

THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE
One of the most deeply feminine and feminist films I have ever seen, albeit made by a man.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK
I saw this on the plane home from LA. I had avoided seeing it because I just didn't think I could take one more film telling me how irrelevant women are. But on a plane I can take anything and yes women are entirely irrelevant here but I did enjoy the epic battle between Jew and Gentiles. Ah those Winklevoss twins really got what was coming to them (a 60 million dollar settlement). And what a hero for our times that Zuckerberg, a veritable saviour. He's given us Facebook, a monument for all time, a wonder of the world, a human cultural legacy up there with the pyramids, The Divine Comedy, Star Wars. Where would we be without him?

Howl

2010-11-26T05:06:00.000-08:00

Howl is a howl, of laughter or pain take your pick. Poetry made accessible to the masses is a nice idea (for more and frankly more interesting see: www.motionpoems.com) but the literalization of Ginsberg's poetry through less-than-inspiring animation by Eric Drooker was just too much for me. The film is a primer on how to take a great work of literature and banalize it beyond recognition. James Franco's performance was exceptional and he'll probably win an Academy Award or something for it but to me it felt like a lot of strutting and fretting for his 90 minutes upon the stage, full of sound and fury but, contrary to Ginsberg's poem, trying to Signify Something. (In the new year I will go see Derek Jacoby play King Lear at the Donmar and with any luck--and so far all signs positive--his performance of "howl, howl, howl" will redeem all.) The obscenity trial was a pretty flat courtroom dramitization. And even though the cameos were fantastic--Mary Louise Parker and Alessandro Nivola in particular--they could do just so much. My present infatuation (I have a feeling I'm not alone), Jon Hamm, sadly couldn't muster any kind of enthusiasm for his role. I thought perhaps the casting was wrong and that Hamm should have played the prosecution lawyer (David Straithairn did the best he possibly could) instead of the defense lawyer but I doubt that would have helped. The film will undoubtedly increase sales of Ginsberg's "Howl" so I suppose, then, "Howl: The Film" won't have been a total loss.

The Kids Are All Right

2010-11-21T03:48:00.001-08:00

I laughed, I cried (not really), I was thoroughly entertained. This is a solid comedy and about lesbians no less! Wow, did I ever think I'd see the day when a film about lesbians would make it into the (albeit arthouse) mainstream? I am a fan of Lisa Cholodenko's other films High Art and Laurel Canyon. But whereas Cholodenko's other movies are interested in the relationship between the surface of things and the twilight zone below, this movie stays rigorously above the water line. Don't get me wrong, I like the film in a superior made-for-tv-movie kind of way but wish I had seen it on an airplane instead of at the London Film Festival. Whenever I bring my objections to the film up among friends and acquaintances (of the left-leaning kind, the right-leaning kind having not even consciously registered the existence of the movie), I am almost immediately asked if I have any gay friends. So let me just state once and for all Filmfatale's Gay Credentials: Some of my best friends are gay! So here is my greatest objection to the movie: THE SEX. Though there are many sex scenes, some rather hot, there is not one viable sex scene between the two lesbians. The couple--excellently played by straight women extraordinaires Annette Bening and Julianne Moore--like to launch their foreplay with gay male porn, a hilarious scene, full of oily male torsos, but then Annette and Julianne disappear under the blankets and that's it! Mark Ruffalo (also excellent, as are the kids) has great, steamy, and graphic sex with his hot African-American goddess of an employee and then with adorable-femme Julianne Moore fulfilling two standard white male fantasies. But what about the lesbian audiences or the straight women even??? We're probably 99% of the audience! But when did that ever matter. Once again our gaze is irrelevant, especially if the movie wants to make it into the big leagues. Aargh. Other objections: It's totally unrealistic that the family had no lesbian friends. They seem to live in complete isolation from the gay community, and so very fearful (though humorously so) that their son might be gay. The only friends we do see are a very heterosexual couple. Which brings me to my next niggle. Did Annette and Julianne's relationship have to be such a straightforward copy of the typical upper-middle-class heterosexual couple? Couldn't the writers/director have given us just a bit more complexity? Yes, of course, we all strive towards normalizing ourselves to middle class values, even lesbians, but it's never as easy or as plain as all that. Lisa Cholodenko's fine comedy opted for mainstreaming over plumbing the depths.

Never Let Me Go

2010-11-01T10:32:00.000-07:00

Kazuo Ishiguru is one of my favorite living authors but I will not here compare book to movie because, well, though it sits on my shelf I haven't read the book, but I also admire how Ishiguru himself said that once he signed over the film rights, as far as he was concerned whatever was created was something he could lay no claim to, he was simply eager to see what would happen.
The film describes a world, very near to our own (end-of-the-20th-century Britian), in which clones are created as living organ farms in order to increase the life-span of non-clones (presumably for those who can afford such a thing as there seem to be far fewer clones than non-clones and the clones are very well taken care of). The film had the potential to be great. The script was solid enough, though lacked a layer or two of finesse, the production gorgeous, if a little too gorgeous in that Merchant & Ivory way, which might have added something wonderfully creepy but the cinematography and production design seemed more intent on looking good than on providing contrast to the content. My biggest objection, however, was the casting. The three stars--Keira Knightly, Carey Mulligan, and Andrew Garfield--were excellent but the trio (and Keira Knightly most glaringly) had too much of the Movie Star aura about them to let this film deepen and mull as it needed to. Three unknown actors would have made a huge difference in allowing the material to truly disturb. Instead the audience is constantly distracted from the claustrophobic and horrific sadness of the story by the cult of the glam personality. (Same goes for Charlotte Rampling.) The result, I fear, is that most people will come away from this very prescient, not-so-science-fictional tale with the idea that it is a metaphor for and musing on our own mortality, when it could have been a very subtle and sophisticated damnation of our capitalist society and the rigid class system that prevails despite all attempts (albeit feeble) to do away with it under some guise of social justice. Of course, the film's greatest strength is also it's greatest flaw. It works hard to convey the idea that in this world cloning for organs seems so utterly reasonable that no one, neither the clones themselves nor the society at large, seriously objects to the practice. It's just accepted as another of life's necessary evils. We're all going to die some day anyway, the organ-donating clones just somewhat before their time and after two or three gruesome operations. This speaks to so much of what occurs every day in our here and now--organ farming actually does happen, but also horrific pracitices such as clitoridectomy or slavery or gross disparity of wealth, one country has an obesity problem while another starves. We all, more or less, accept these things, relying on the truism that this is just how it is, there's really not much we can do about it. It's a utilitarian world, after all. But the film never really leads us here. With all its high production qualities and fancy cast, implausibility reigns and the audience is sure cloning for organ farming could never, ever, happen, especially in England, or America, where there is a strong tradition of humanism and individualism and especially of fighting the enemy without (while entirely ignoring the enemy within). I was not unhappy I saw this film but it was most certainly was a missed opportunity.

The Town

2010-10-09T03:28:00.000-07:00

As I sat through Ben Affleck's ridiculously puerile, utterly derivative The Town, I marvelled at how kind reviewers can be. What I soaked up from pretty much all and sundry was that this film was a fine entertainment, with a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Implausible from the getgo, Ben Affleck managed to make bank robbery boring. As the four heisters geared up for yet another job, all I could think was oh no not again (though the series of masks worn by the theives was the best thing about the film, referencing the long thespian tradition and allowing for some true spectacle to occur.) The film begins by making much of the fact that this was going to be a portrait (yet another) of a particularly sorry Irish neighborhood in Boston (the helicopter shots of the city were appealing but had no real purpose other than announcing the film had a budget big enough to include them). But despite the evident strain to do so, "Charlestown" never becomes a character in the film in any way.
The script was beyond bad with so many laughably unbelievable lines that I felt embarrassed for the actors--well, mostly for Rebecca Hall whose part as a toney bank manager who falls in love with her abducter (Ben Affleck) was plain preposterous. I guess she did the best she could with the role but it was not a showcase for her talents by any means. Ben Affleck is nice to look at and the camera likes him but his acting has a tendency to be very flat and though he comes frustratingly close, he can't quite project *Movie Star,* placing him in the Keanu Reeves category.
I was thrilled when Don Draper (the wonderfully named Jon Hamm) appeared on screen, and I spent most of the film studying his performance since I love him so much on Mad Men. Again, like Rebecca Hall, he did what he could with the material but that wasn't much. I have high hopes for him but so far he isn't pulling a George Clooney and making the transition from tv to film with ease and aplomb. Making it as a movie star surely rests in part on being able to recognize a dud script, or at least having people who can do that for you.
Two actors who did manage to acquit themselves impressively were Jeremy Renner and Blake Lively. Renner (The Hurt Locker) played supreme badass (typecast in the making?) adoptive brother to Affleck and gave the film any life it had. Though Lively's part was so cliched as lowlife whorish girlfriend I felt nauseated for her, she succeeded in dominating the screen whenever, albeit briefly, she was on it. Cameos by old-timers Chris Cooper and Peter Posthelwaite were welcome, lending a sense of irony to otherwise excruciating dullness, but what were they doing in this movie? All this to confirm: never believe anything you read.

Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors

2010-09-12T03:55:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine (@gsuh) familiar with Hong Sangsoo's work, told me that I had probably chosen to see his "slowest and least enjoyable" film as my first and so far only introduction to this much-lauded Korean filmmaker. But it was the only one playing at the BFI (British Film Institute), where they are having a festival of his films this month, on a night I happened to be free, so I jumped at the chance. At last year's London Film Festival, I had been awed by a film called "Mother" by another Korean filmmaker, Bong Joon-Ho, and was hoping to experience something similar. Plotwise, "Virgin Stripped Bare..." is a Korean arthouse version of "Sliding Doors" in which we are given first the male perspective on how Sujeong (played by the stunning Lee Eunju) comes to lose her virginity to Jaehoon, the wealthy owner of Growrich Art Gallery, and then Sujeong's own perspective on the matter. (The BFI program calls the film "a cubist romcom inspired by Marcel Duchamp"--a claim this film certainly doesn't live up to but also a claim I can't imagine any film wanting to live up to.) The film is beautifully shot in black and white and this is its saving grace, but, alas, the exquisite visuals didn't provide quite enough redemption for this viewer. By the time the second version of the story rolled around, I was so bored I didn't care to learn about the nuances of Sujeong's perspective--which in any case didn't seem to me to be very nuanced. Hong Sangsoo is known for his "wry and witty unravellings of tangled sexual relationships" but in this film the "wry and witty" were sadly absent and we were left with just an endless unravelling. My friend Grace says that her Korean national women friends all adore Sangsoo because he gets the female perspective so spot on. It may be a cultural thing but I didn't get that at all. I felt the film made fun of men and condescended to women and avoided any "truth" about the sexes by sticking to cliched vignettes of their predictably unpredictable interactions. (My friend Grace doesn't get Hong Sangsoo either but more graciously says, "I guess the whole relationship between the sexes in Korea is way more complicated than I can understand.")
Nevertheless, Lee Eunju is amazing to watch, her acting subtle and powerful. And though I have yet to understand all the hype about Hong Sangsoo and his apparantly fresh, funny, and surprising depiction of the male/female conundrum, there were enough inklings here of an alternative vision to make me want to do my best to see more of his films before the festival is over.

Toy Story 3 and the Male Gaze

2010-08-05T05:02:00.000-07:00

It may be because I saw this in New York City, where I almost always feel on some level ecstatic, but Toy Story 3 was for me nothing short of a revelation. I had heard from all and sundry that the film was exceptional. I had read how it had hoards of grown men leaving cinemas in floods of tears. I hadn't seen a film in a movie theater in three months. I was full of anticipation. But I could never have predicted what I was in for. On a superficial level, the film did everything right. It looked fabulous: the 3D was fun and elegant, never annoying or flashy. The plot twists were many and always surprising. Every character was so well drawn as to be uniquely him or herself, including the overtroped Barbie and Ken. As my six-year-old nephew summed it up: "That was funny, smart, and sad." But here's the thing: as I sat watching I couldn't help but think that this film was a very literal enactment of film theorist Laura Mulvey's famous-among-film-geeks phrase "the male gaze." Bear with me. The male gaze is for me as important an idea as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, or Freud's Oedipus Complex (ok, I'm exaggerating, but just a little). In a nutshell, the "gaze" is a Lacanian term for a person's projection of identity onto exterior objects; the "Male Gaze" is Mulvey's idea that Lacan's statement "woman is a symptom of man" is reproduced in the cinema where the viewer is assumed to be male, femininity a male social construct, the female his object of desire, and therefore she constitutes his chronic sense of deprivation ("the male lack"), and simultaneously becomes the location of his positive identity.
Toy Story 3 is a primer for the "male gaze." The narrative presents that extraordinary engagement a boy has with his toys and how those toys all become aspects of himself. Superhero, cowboy, potato head, teddy bear, but also, and this is where the film becomes brave and brilliant, Mrs. Potato Head, the cowgirl, Barbie. The male gaze also projects its identity onto female objects, absorbing the feminine back into himself. The same goes for Ken: the quasi gay, metrosexual doll with a fashion fetish. The sequence in which Ken tries on all his different outfits for Barbie must be one of the funniest in film history. But the subtext is that all men have a part of themselves that wants to dress up and parade around. Toy Story 3 embraces all these "other" selves-a crazed baby doll, an embittered teddy bear, the cowgirl, Barbie, Ken, Mrs. Potato Head--and incorportates them into the uberself Andy. And each of the feminine representations here are in no way static symbols but rich in character. Why grown men are crying, in my view, is because they are mourning for all those lost selves that, as they grow up, become too taboo to include consciously as part of the self. His gaze is reduced to projecting only the "acceptable" male selves, and to projection onto only the limited female symbols of sex object or untouchable icon. I'd be crying too.
But I wasn't crying and neither was my neice. The screenwriters tried hard at the end to include us in the gaze by having Andy--on his way to college where his definition of self will no doubt become radically restricted--pass on his toys to a little girl. But no one was fooled. In fact, another nephew said that for him, this was the saddest part of the film: the toys would now be played with by a girl who wouldn't "do it right." I understood him completely. The female gaze, whatever that may be, will be very different from the male. To assume equality is a mistake and Andy's toys will know it.
Instead, it was entirely refreshing to me to see the male psyche portrayed on screen in such a varied and undefended manner. All of the toys, as projections of the male self, revealed aspects of masculinity that I reveled in. Despite theories that have emerged, since Lacan and Mulvey, arguing for the existence of a female gaze or a "Matrixial Gaze," it is my belief that we still have no concept of what the "female gaze" might look like. There are many women filmmakers, writers, artists, but the implied audience remains male--even if more women go to the movies, read books etc. Toy Story 3 takes a very big step towards owning and exploring the male gaze and all that signifies for both sexes, most intriguingly the sense of inclusion of female parts in the male self. It makes me think that the expression of the female gaze--the female projection of her identity onto exterior objects, including her construction of the male and masculinity--is perhaps not so far off and will be a further revelation to us all.

I Am Love

2010-04-12T06:23:00.000-07:00

I really wanted to love this film. I bought tickets to the preview at the NFT with a discussion afterwards with Tilda Swinton and the director Luca Guadagnino. From what I had read, and from the film stills, it had all the promise of a Visconti epic coupled with the more Protestant sensibility of a Douglas Sirk melodrama. Precisely my fantasy of the perfect film (add Bunuel to this formula and you've got Almodovar?). The first half hour of the movie keeps the promise--all the exquisite details of the daily life of a wealthy Milanese industrialist's lavish lifestyle (Tilda Swinton plays his Russian wife) are lushly recreated. Apparently members of the Visconti family helped the set designers get everything just right and taught the actors which fork to hold and to ladle away--a certain Russian soup having a starring role in the film. But when for no discernible reason, Tilda falls for her son's friend, a budding chef, the film soon dissolves into an unappetizing gastro-drama, and the messy storytelling that follows is unconscionable. Non-enlightenment from post-film Q&A: Why is the wife Russian? In the original script, she was an American from the South but that presented too many logistical problems. What do all the flashbacks to her past add up to? Why do we never see any spark between her character and her young lover? Why does her daughter suddenly become a lesbian, cut off her hair, and move to London? Swinton explained that the choice to make the daughter gay was random, the hair-cutting a symbol of freedom--Tilda's lover will cut off her hair as foreplay--and only meant to show love's possibilities. All of these myriad script problems are set against a "throbbing"--Stephen Holden's term and he loved the film--musical score by John Adams, and framed within some fancy Hitchcockian camera angles, but the problems abide. The rest of the film was some kind of tasteless short-order job continuously using as ingredients pinches from the great classic Italian film directors: Visconti, Antonioni, Rossellini, Pasolini. And then came the most hilarious/excruciating sex scene in which a very graphic intermingling of bodies in several different sex acts is filmed in tandem with close ups of mating insects. This goes on for an inordinate amount of time just in case we don't immediately get the metaphor. But most nauseating of all is the banal moral message of the film: Carnal Sin, especially on the part of a woman, will inevitably lead to Punishment and Tragedy. Now, according to what was said in the conversation after the film, Tilda and Luca saw theirs as a film depicting the liberation of an oppressed housewife rather than a Catholic Church-inspired morality tale locating the source of all evil once again in female sexuality, but I'm afraid given the absurd event at the end of the film, there is really no other way to spin it. The daughter has become a lesbian, the mother has had extramarital sex, the family must suffer armageddon. I don't know why exactly but I expected way more of Tilda Swinton as a filmmaker. This project was almost ten years in the making suggesting an admirable perserverance. I'm not sure how it went so wrong, and from the reviews I am one of the few for whom it did so there's that. And I wonder at Swinton's urge to pull a Meryl Streep and learn Italian and Russian for the film. Therein, perhaps, lies the trouble. In the film, and in the discussion afterwards, the director and the producer/leading actor were inexplicably earnest, any underlying threads of irony, humor, playfulness strangely absent as they were from the film--something even the German Sirk knew how to make ample use of.

Invictus

2010-03-29T09:18:00.000-07:00

Clint Eastwood knows how to make a solid film and this one is solid and inspiring and was thoroughly enjoyed by my rugby-playing family as well as my non-rugby playing self. I have always believed in sport as metaphor, and if not always a unifier or entirely beneficial to one's mental and physical health, often so. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 which effectively required equal funding for girls and boys sports in schools is probably the single piece of legislation since the 19th Amendment in 1920 to significantly change the lives of girls and women in the United States. All this to say that the premise of Invictus--Nelson Mandela as new President of South Africa does all he can to make sure the Springboks beat New Zealand's All Blacks in the 1995 World Cup in order to bring about something of a truce between South Africa's apartheid-riddled white and black citizens--is really great, and gave me a reason to mention Title IX, something I love to do any chance I get, and especially since women in this film are not exactly irrelevant but negligible. Was this a great film? No, but watchable and worthy. And by comparison it made District 9, also set in Johannesburg, look like a work of sheer genius (totally different genre but I have never been shy of criss-crossing genres--I don't even believe in genres actually). I now need to mention the excellent book this movie is based on: John Carlin's "Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Changed a Nation." Full disclosure: the author is represented by my neighbor and soulmate Anne Edelstein. (You get old enough and everything is connected.) So Clint pulled another decent enough effort out of his infinite bag of tricks (he makes Tim Geitner look positively lazy) and gives good message to boot. While watching the movie I, of course, barely focused on the rugby matches--which my boys tell me, and which I could never have told you since I don't even go to watch their matches, were well staged, but obviously staged. And I also couldn't tell you if Matt Damon's accent was any good, but it sounded good to me and he was all around convincing as a white South African professional rugby player--as was Morgan Freeman as Mandela. Instead, I focused on the film's title which is the title of a poem we learn Mandela recited to himself during his many years in prison in order to keep himself alive and which he then writes down for Matt Damon, the Springboks team captain, for inspiration before the fateful match. But I kept wanting to know who wrote the poem. Was it Stevenson, Tennyson, Browning? I never found out during the film since his name is never mentioned because he was no one famous. In fact, he was a Victorian poet called William Ernest Henley who went to his grave, like so many, believing he had failed in his artistic efforts. I assume the story of Mandela and the poem is true, but even if it isn't, I salute William Henley.

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

Up in the Air

2010-03-13T02:14:00.000-08:00

I really wish I had seen this on a plane. And not simply for the obvious thematic reasons. I am so much more forgiving of movies I see while on a plane. I'm so much more forgiving of everything--myself, my family, the food--while I'm on a plane. I think I might have even liked Juno and Thank You For Smoking a little better if I'd seen them on a plane. I was, in fact, avoiding seeing Up in the Air until I was on a plane, but then it was a Friday night and the kids were watching tv and the movie was playing as part of a Clooney double-feature with Good Night, and Good Luck (had already seen that one and loved it, and love George--he's my idea of a movie star, a combo of Clark Gable and Cary Grant, something his aunt Rosemary no doubt taught him) at our local independent cultural center which I like to support and, well, off I went. The film did begin magnificently. The opening credits were fantastic. The initial patter between George and Vera (a revelation!) was (almost) worthy of any '40s fast-talking-dame romcom. Anna Kendrick as the eager, fresh-faced professional without a clue, so spot on. This film was 100% perfectly cast and a perfect example of how casting is of dire importance. Without this very particular cast, the film should have gone straight to video. (Full disclosure: the fact that I have been to Sicily and shoe shopping with Mindy Marin, the casting director, has nothing to do with this opinion.) And then pretty soon it all began to head down hill, the amusing details of airmile aspirations and trenchant soliloquies by the laid-off keeping things aloft, but the impending nosedive was palpable. By the sister's wedding, the tour around the high school, the cold-feet pep talk, the plane, the movie, had crashed. (On second thought, maybe it's better I didn't see this on a plane.) The script was smouldering in Hallmark schlock, the edgy social commentary had morphed into a propaganda tool for the status quo, blandly repeating the Walmart-coated sentiments of love and commitment and pursuing your dreams--while the Corporatation makes off with the suckers', ahem, employees, hard earned loot. It made me want to puke. Why is it that someone as obviously talented as Jason Reitman cynically decides to make a career out of choosing charged "social issues"--smoking, teen pregnancy, unemployment--and pretends to have something to say about them but really is just using them to sell his films? For me, it's like throwing a kid with a terminal illness into a film simply in order to make your audience cry. Devoid of integrity, or worse. For the record, the book was better than the movie, and I spotted the author Walter Kirn, another acquaintance (such friends in high places!), in two scenes--looking a little bemused by the whole thing.

Avatar

2010-01-26T00:43:00.000-08:00

I wasn't going to see this film. The trailer looked terrible, I hated Titanic, I was disgusted by the disgusting amount of money that was proudly being swirled about its creation and promotion. I was told again and again by friends and reviewers: "terrible story but the special effects are great!" and, finally, my best film buddy said convincingly, "we're not going for the content, we're going for the form." So, okay, I didn't entirely hate it while I was watching it. I kept thinking as the glowing jelly-fish things floated across the screen: What if Cameron had the genius of Victor Fleming and had given us the technologically innovative film masterpiece for our times? A short-lived fantasy. Almost any film by Hayao Miyazaki, and certainly Princess Mononoke, to which this film is clearly indebted, is far superior to this piece of, well yes, trash. I won't go much into the 3D thing because it makes me sick (I suffer from every form of vertigo known to humankind and then some), but somehow even with the glasses over my own graduated-lenses (I'm nearly blind), the effect was for the most part pleasantly surprising, more like snorkeling than freefalling. The script was indeed terrible and there was not one good performance--though it was interesting to watch Giovanni Ribisi and Sigourney Weaver giving self-consciously B-performances in an effort to salvage the idiocy of their task. Actually, the film itself, which I saw now over a week ago, I have mostly forgotten--and probably was in the process of mostly forgetting while watching. As is my wont, I paid special attention to the female gestalt and Cameron aquits himself better on that front than a lot of contemporary directors, but ultimately only insofar as it serves his PC agenda i.e. PC sells because it actually promotes the opposite of its MESSAGE (more on this anon). On the other hand, Hurt Locker, made by Cameron's ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow, (a far better film but will lose all the awards to Cameron, a fact that is explained by the MESSAGE of Avatar--but more anon) chooses to leave women out of her film, a viable response by the director to the perceived role of women in our society. I'm kind of on the fence about art as corrective. I think finally it's better for women that Kathryn Bigelow is making a film at all than that James Cameron is making a film that has an apparantly kick-ass female protagonist--who in any case is, let's face it, second fiddle to the male lead (can't remember either the character or the actor's name) who saves the day. So here's what I mean by PC sells and how Cameron has exploited the concept: the profound problem with films like this one which is ostensibly about good vs. evil, where the "good" values of respect for nature and your fellow creature are threatened and then restored, where the "victims" triumph (and here I'm paraphrasing my hero Muriel Spark), is that what this kind of "art" offers is the worst, most pernicious kind of surrogate absolution. We rise from our viewing chastened, but all the more determined ourselves to be an oppressor rather than a victim. Films like these actively encourage "the cult of the victim" which then necessitates an obliging cult of twenty equivalent victimizers. Avatar, then, is in some ways a criminal act, a criminally bad script that ultimately promotes criminal behavior in the guise of empathy for the downtrodden. It's today's equivalent to the very popular medieval church practice of selling indulgences to forgive our sins and encouraging us to go out and sin again. Exquisite hypocrisy that ensures Cameron and the like will fry in the sixth ditch of the eighth circle of Dante's hell--the only one, by the way, that I believe in. In the end, my film buddy, who in general is far more forgiving a critic than I, found the film even more insufferable than I did, and my two boys who were initially indifferent to seeing the film, felt soundly entertained, but remained indifferent. So much for form without content.
For a far better, far more comprehensive, informed, and entertaining review of Avatar check out Steven Santos' review: http://thefinecut.blogspot.com/2010/01/i-dont-see-you-james-camerons-avatar.html

Nine

2009-12-22T13:32:00.000-08:00

Everyone told me not to go see this but the stars, so to speak, aligned and I went. After all, Italian cinema is my thing--so it seemed right that I should witness what a mostly American remake of one of the greatest films of all time might offer. While I sat watching the film in the splendiferous Ziegfeld cinema on 54th Street in Manhattan, (this did help matters slightly), at any given moment I couldn't decide if I should laugh or cry or leave. This film was so bad it almost became good by the sheer force of how perfectly bad it was. But ultimately it was just an excercise in butchery. In a nutshell, the film is a remake of a broadway musical (luckily I missed this) remake of Fellini's "8 1/2" about a movie director's creative crisis while trying to make his ninth film. Now the hubris and ambition of such a cockamamie idea is impressive, but how is it possible to make a movie about Italians, and about the heyday of Italian filmmaking, and do it without a modicum of irony and with a smothering of earnestness? What were they thinking? The levels of irony in Italian culture and the Italian national character are so deep, chronic and labyrinthine that perhaps we'd do better just to leave that aspect out? Let's not go there? And casting Daniel Day Lewis in the role of Marcello Mastroianni is tantamount to casting casting Arnold Schwarzenegger as Casanova, Jim Carey as Einstein. Daniel Day Lewis may be a Great Actor but self-doubt is just not in his repertoire and nor is the boyish charm of a rogue women adore to indulge. And just about everything else was wrong: the script, the set, the direction, the editing, the costumes, the musical numbers (even Fergie was a travesty! And I love her!). Nevertheless, it was diverting to watch so much extraordinary female talent and beauty make what it could out of such dreadful material. And each diva, though painful to watch, acquitted herself well, with Marion Cotillard (playing Giulietta Masina) taking the lead since her role was in many ways the easiest (wronged but stoic wife--who doesn't sympathize with that?). Oh and Judy Dench kept trying to save the day until she was utterly thwarted by her number about the Folies Bergere (and we know just how much the Italians love the French so if anyone had any questions as to the appropriateness of this song choice stop asking them now.) Other more pertinent questions I kept asking myself: Whose face was tighter Sophia Loren's or Nicole Kidman's? Did Penelope Cruz actually sing? (I think not.) How many unmemorable songs can fit into one musical? Could it be that Kate Hudson actually outshone all that Diva power? Wonders never cease. Need I mention that the film was blatently sexist and racist? Oh, I forgot, we're in a post-caring-about-those-things society.

The White Ribbon

2009-12-09T12:01:00.000-08:00

This film by one of international cinema's most interesting filmmakers Michael Haneke, (Hidden, Code Unknown), is above all else absolutely stunning to look at. It takes place in a rural German village just before World War I and fulfills all my (facile but workable) beliefs about the creepy, evil nature of small town life, as well as confirms my philosophy that nothing ever changes, you reap what you sew, and truth is a matter of perspective. Unfortunately, his film (intentionally?) also fed into to my pre-conceived ideas about Germany and Germans, (even though I know this story could have taken place in any small village anywhere in the world), which I wish had been challenged not upheld. Luckily, Haneke's filmmaking is so delicate that the potentially worn-out ideas which permeate his film do not weary the experience but essentially become the movie. Filmed in an utterly gorgeous pellucid monochrome (got that from the BFI's film notes, who in turn got it from Peter Bradshaw's review in The Guardian), the film contains a shot that lasts for maybe three minutes that is an artwork unto itself: a peasant woman dies when she falls through the rotted floor of one of the Baron's farm buildings during the harvest. Her body is brought back to her humble dwelling and laid on her wooden bed which occupies most of a small room. The shot, which occupied perhaps 3 or 4 minutes of the film is made with a steady camera positioned just outside the door to the bedroom. All we can see is the wall on the far side of the room which is a mural of faded and chipped paint, and the lower quarter of the bed with the dead woman's feet which are being washed by another peasant woman. The husband abruptly comes into the frame, obviously seeing his dead wife for the first time, brusquely tells the foot-washing woman to get out, then stares for some time off-screen in the direction of his wife's face. If for nothing else, the film should be seen for this bit of footage alone which, in turn, should be put on a loop, framed, and hung in a museum. It is a trandscendent moment of superior filmmaking where the form reveals itself as capable of the greatest art.
There is a lot to say about this film but I suppose the issue I had with it is really my own--surpise, surprise. Inevitably a film made about creepy, evil German children and their even more creepy, evil elders set pre World War I will link ahead to the Nazis, Nazi youth, the Holocaust. I was not happy about this link--whether Haneke intended it or not--because it is entirely too facile an idea. If he's trying to present some sort of archeology of Nazism then his film, for me fails, on the conceptual level. Evil, perversion, the sins of the fathers (because here it is the men who are predominantly evil, the women complicit only by their passivity which, despite my positive female prejudices, hardly rings true) manifesting themselves even more hideously in the sons and daughters are things not unique to Germany. In the film, Haneke also sets up an opposition between the oppressive German and the more romantic, fun-loving Italian, a spurious and again, facile juxtaposition, (again upholding instead of challenging our preconceived notions of national identity) especially if you remember that Italy's relationship to fascism is long and enduring. I guess what I'm trying to get at is that the film felt very masochistic to me, and not in a good truthful way but more as a defense against truth--which is indeed Haneke's point, since the film is told in retrospect from the point of view of the school teacher. The how and why of the Holocaust will eternally evade us, but this film like so much art made about the subject, continues to evade the evasion, even perhaps in its attempt not to do so. Nevertheless, this is certainly one of the best films of the year.

Glorious 39

2009-11-14T10:10:00.000-08:00

Romola, Romola, Romola! (Garai) You must get yourself a good film, something to launch you into that international stardom you deserve! This vehicle just isn't going to get you there. You are the best thing about this dreadful doesn't-know-what-it-wants-to-be, entirely-derivative-in-a-bad-way (Hitchcock, Polanski, Merchant & Ivory--what a cocktail!) piece of selloutuloid. Besides you, your clothes are the next most watchable thing about the movie but certainly not anywhere near on a par with, say, those in Broken Embraces or Bright Star. Bill Nighy and David Tennant exhibit the pitiful acting they are capable of but I blame the writer/director Stephen Poliakoff who should stick to tv. (I am not dissing tv. I actually think the best writing is happening for tv in this moment in time. His stuff for tv just works better.) A cameo by Julie Christie threw me for a bit as it took me a while to recognize her (still beautiful but this ageing thing is just too weird and awful) and her perfomance was as good as it possibly could be.
I saw this at the BFI (British Film Institute) with a question and answer session afterwards which couldn't save the evening but made it a little less of a total loss. Romola was articulate and adorable and falsely humble in that wonderfully British way. Poliakoff was terribly inarticulate going on and on about how the UK was a hair's breadth away from being a Nazi state in 1939 due to a strong push by the aristocracy towards appeasement (an excellent point/idea/subject here tragically thrown away to bad art), and Bill Nighy was the sophisticated ham we expect him to be.

Giulia Doesn't Date at Night

2009-10-28T05:11:00.000-07:00

This movie, made by Giuseppe Piccioni, an affable guy (he made some remarks before and after the film as part of the film festival perks), had many elements that were almost superb--depiction of awkward early teen love, spoof of what it takes to become a famous writer (the protagonist is a fiction writer whose books are constantly praised yet no one seems to be able to finish one), characters from the writer's stories that vie for primacy by entering "reality," gorgeous underwater shots of swimmers in a swimming pool, multiple direct and indirect references to some of my favorite films and filmmakers--Umbrellas of Cherbourg, A Special Day, Bunuel, and a significant nod to Mimmo Calopresti's excellent film The Second Time. Though it was easy to watch, and I appreciated all these details, the film, alas, did not add up to very much. Characters were never truly developed and too many themes and plot lines were left dangling without it feeling intentional. And about half way into the film, what promised to be a quirky (hate that word but it's apt) story with a honed European film sensibility, became a predictable melodrama.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

2009-10-26T01:58:00.000-07:00

I very much wanted to love this film and there was so much to love. The foxy foxes, George Clooney's voice, the far out animation, and all of the very thoughtful details, especially the train that every so often shoots through the scenery. But I didn't love this film, I couldn't love this film, because yet again, practically the one female who has any role at all, Mrs. Fox, is not only a passive, risk-adverse, naysayer, but the reason Mr. Fox has spent a lifetime living contrary to his wild animal nature. (Is she not a wiley fox, too?) Roald Dahl was certainly a misogynist but even he didn't blame Mrs. Fox for the animals' predicament. There is another female fox, a friend of the Fox's son Ash, whose only role is to humiliate the boy (who is teased because he wears a cape???), by shifting her affections to his cousin the super metrostud Kristofferson. When Mr. Fox is giving his evolutionary biology/men's movement speech towards the end of the film, asking each creature to tap into his wild inner nature, he identifies only the male members of each species--mole, badger, rabbit, squirrel, weasel etc., the females presumably irrelevant except as offspring reproducers and burrow cleaners. One might defend Anderson and say that he was remaining faithful to the original story, but he didn't remain exclusively faithful to the original story so he could have done any number of things to include a viable, active, female in his story. Why didn't he make the cousin a girl? How interesting would that have been? It astounds me that Wes Anderson didn't make even the slightest attempt to appeal to girls in his film. No girl seeing this film can directly identify with any character in it, and any boy seeing this film gets fed once again the message that girls are not protagonists and if they are their function is to thwart the male. It makes me sick and sad to see someone as talented as Wes Anderson fall into this age-old trap out of laziness or expediency. What's even more frightening is that no one seems to be paying attention, much less thinking seriously about how we represent the female in our stories any more at all.

Mother

2009-10-24T10:55:00.000-07:00

Easily the best film I've seen at the London Film Festival 2009, and certainly one of the best films I've seen this year, if not the best. Bong Joon-Ho's filmmaking is some kind of strangely wonderful mix of Almodovar and Hitchcock, with a bit of Cassavetes, Rossellini, Goddard and Melville thrown in, and Satyajit Ray is in there too. Bong Joon-Ho knows his film history and it shows gloriously throughout his movie. The opening credits alone are genius, and later ingeniously figure back into the narrative. The story is simple: a mother tries to prove her mentally-damaged son innocent of the muder he has been accused of. She is fiftyish, attractive but not beautiful, smart but not educated, worn out by life and worries. She is in just about every frame of the film and thoroughly commands our interest in each one. She is a true diva (played by the very popular veteran Korean actress Kim Hye-Ja). The theme of a mother's iron-strong, complicated, perverse bond to her child is an old one, but such is the filmmaker and the actress's talent that the trope becomes new and compelling all over again. But Bong Joon-Ho is interested in more than Greek tragedy and soon echoes of Medea, the Bacchae, Phaedre reverberate through The Wrong Man to Dirty Harry as the mother becomes a ruthless, lawless, justice-seeker. And only then do the real twists and turns begin. Humor, of course, is ever present, lurking, absent, or causing belly laughs. The rich storytelling is in exquisite dialectic with equally lavish and intense images, and with a sublime sound track. For me the height of filmmaking is when image, word, and sound are each of similar mass and brightness, a constant yet constantly shifting constellation. Antonioni and Almodovar are the masters. Bong Joon-Ho's ambition to join their ranks is a joy.

Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl

2009-10-22T05:12:00.000-07:00

In some ways this film should be required viewing for any young filmmaker or short story writer. Made by the now very old Portuguese director, Manoel de Oliveira, it is a primer in basic narrative taken from a worn but still sturdy carpet bag full of tools: image, gesture, word. The film begins on a train with one stranger (handsome young man) telling another stranger (attractive older woman) the "terrible" story of what has happened to him. This scene alone could take a dissertation to dissect, but what it perfectly establishes is a backdrop of irony against which the rest of the film will play out. The story, which of course turns out to be a rather banal love story involving the blonde of the title, then proceeds in cuts back and forth from the train to flashbacks. We are compelled to pay attention to details, juxtapositions, and influences imitated and cited. This last element is perhaps the most significant, and certainly for this filmmaker. His movie is based on a story by a well known Portuguese writer, Eca de Queiroz, to whom the film is also dedicated and within the film there is further homage paid in a formal description of his accomplishments and a shot of a marble bust made in his image. And at the center of the film, a poem by the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa is read in full at a salon. Oliveira's film is also an homage to old world cinema, and to that great, decandent European city, Lisbon. The movie unfolds with a loving slowness and joyful simplicity that we are no longer used to, that we no longer really even know how to respond to.

An Education

2009-10-22T03:58:00.000-07:00

The first film I've seen at the London Film Festival to get a solid round of applause when the credits rolled. Now what does that say exactly? That Nick Hornby has the golden touch (this is surely more his film than the director's), that he knows deep in his gut what it means to entertain, that his script is solid and sharp, that his ambition is no greater than his talent, and though that may sound like a slur, I see it as a great gift. The story is a good one (true, but that matters I think only in terms of helping to publicize the film), linear and uncomplicated. I was always engaged, never irritated (which means a lot for me), and I laughed out loud at many lines, especially "it's better to know a famous author than to be one." I didn't think Peter Sarsgaard was at the top of his game. I understand the hype about Carey Mulligan but I think it's cruel that the press is comparing her to Audrey Hepburn. Rosamund Pike did very well with the one-dimensional character she had to work with. And the same was true for Alfred Molina. Both actors had perfect timing and wrung all the laughs and then some from the good material they were given. In terms of sheer cinematic presence and the ability to fully mine any character, Emma Thompson stole the show. Visually, the movie was fun to look at, the period detail convincing (incomparable to Bright Star but perhaps that's an unfair comparison since Campion's film was in many ways about period detail.) The opening credits were the most visually interesting part of the film, but that is often true of many a fine film. I'm all for the applause. Needless to say, although I was most assuredly entertained, I didn't clap, but I'm filmfatale.

Bright Star

2009-10-21T01:54:00.000-07:00

Doesn't come anywhere near The Piano in terms of its ability to surprise, amaze, transform. Still, it's the best film I've seen at the London Film Festival 2009 so far. [Aside: the Festival trailer of pasty British faces staring awestruck into flickering projection light accompanied by an abominable sound track is even worse than last year's. It's a disgrace and insult to both the filmmakers and the audience.] Bright Star is beautiful to look at (though one too many scenes with flower picking for me), perfectly cast and exquisitely directed. But what saved it from being a superior BBC-type creation were two things: on a minor scale, the glorification of Fanny's incredible skill at sewing, raising consciousness about "women's work" being its own kind of poetry. This reclaiming and empowering of the denigrated pastimes of women is very much in the zeitgeist, as periodically occurs, but just for how long this time we'll see. Indeed, the clothes designer deserves an Oscar. More significantly, but somehow connected to the artistry of the practice of sewing, was how Campion managed to show the commonplace nature of Fanny Brawne and John Keats' youthful love, even against the backdrop of the creation of some of the greatest poetry in the English language. The film, through its meticulous attention to detail and daily routine, lent to the whole idea of "greatness" a random, even trivial element that is usually absent from any biopic. A remarkable feat. I did regret, however, at the very end of the film when the postscript appears describing what became of Fanny, Campion chose to leave her wandering mournfully about Hampstead Heath instead of telling us that she went on to marry someone else and have a very full and interesting life. This omission in my opinion was a serious mistake and served to undermine the great strength of her film: the wondrous banality of true love and how it actually resists Romantic convention.

The Limits of Control

2009-10-20T02:39:00.000-07:00

2nd film of the London Film Festival 2009. So far so bad. I always suspected that Jim Jarmusch was a wannabe--is it David Lynch with hidden Antonioni aspirations or is that giving him too much credit? There were also a few Almodovarian touches or was that just Spain? (Why is everyone making films in Spain these days? Tax breaks I guess.) I was not bored, like I was watching The Single Man, I just kept waiting for the movie to stop being pseudo, to actually make me laugh or feel clever or sad but it never did. By the end of the movie, whatever was initially at all intriguing had long ago become wrung hopelessly dry with the endless repetitions of phrases, symbols, and images which were then parched some more but never enough to become crushing or, gasp, meaningful. Anyway, Jarmusch knows how to choose his actors, I'll give him that. Isaac de Bankole was fabulous to watch as was Tilda Swinton et al so the film wasn't a total loss, although Bill Murray as some kind of Dick Cheney was completely thrown away.

A Single Man

2009-10-20T02:10:00.000-07:00

My first film of the 2009 London Film Festival. Ugh. A very, very long photo shoot for GQ. I was so incredibly bored by this film. As anyone who truly knows me knows, I should have been a gay man, so with respect to the film's ingredients this should have been a film for me: extreme color palettes, lots of retro kitch, multiple references to classic film, camera lingering extensively on gorgeous male bodies and faces. And yet I loathed it. The film was quintessentially trite as in "all style and no substance" but with the most embarrassingly strained attempt at Substance. Poor Christopher Isherwood (the script is based on his excellent novel) must be rolling in his grave. Colin Firth tried very hard to be an actor, as is his wont, but every dragged out close up of his face was simply a painful struggle for subtlety which he could not achieve. Julianne Moore couldn't do the posh British accent--mostly she just slurred and on her face all that could be read was "Am I drunk or am I British?" (Not entirely fair as the one almost decent scene in the movie was hers when she and Firth dance after dinner.) Poor Nicholas Hoult was entirely miscast. He couldn't pull off the seductive ingenue in the least and he wasn't even that great to look at. And doesn't Tom Ford know that the de rigeur sitting-on-the-toilet scene has by now become a mark of the amateur? As for technical issues, trying to create profundity with sudden whooshes of color, slow motion sequences, and fragemented shots, please, not even worthy of a student film, and especially not a gay student film.

UP

2009-10-19T03:06:00.000-07:00

Wow. What's not to like? Good old fashioned story-telling and nice to look at too with all those colorful balloons and a gorgeous South American waterfall. And a story about an old person! Who gets a second chance! You're wrong F.Scott, there are second acts in an American life. I kept thinking about The Wizard of Oz and the flying house, the anthropomorphized animals, and the disgraced old wizard (in UP it's a self-exiled explorer who has been wrongfully shamed which makes him turn evil). Reconfigure a few of these cherished concepts and they stimulate all the right memes in the parents' brains. Now for the choice of the Asian-ish boy. I wish I'd been at the meeting (not really). "And the kid will be fat, slanty-eyed, and let's see, he'll have an absent father! Any other banalities we can use?" Well, of course there are! But by now it's not a banality but a given: the poor long-suffering selfless wife who never gets to live her dream (when does she give it up? around thirteen perhaps?) trading it in to play help meet to her husband for her whole life. And of course she can't have children (ever hear of adoption?) and then she dies and her husband gets to live her dream. Now how sorry is that? Yet again the straight white men, albeit old (does this say something about Pixar's executives), still have all the power and most of the fun. Does anybody really want to identify with the fatherless fat kid or the dead wife? After all, there are no second acts but just the same old act. Oh well.

Broken Embraces

2009-10-02T03:41:00.000-07:00

Pedro Almodovar is my favorite living filmmaker. This is not his best film. Each frame is fabulous to look at but as a whole not on a par with All About My Mother or Talk to Her or even Volver. I adore his mixture of noir and melodrama, his combining of Raymond Chandler and Douglas Sirk. But there were too many plot problems and unworthy implausibilities to keep me entirely in Almodovar's thrall, which is where I want to be. Almodovar is all about making the implausible plausible only to finally reach some ecstatic and transcendent level of implausiblity that is ART, but here he gets stuck too often in the first level of implausibility. Furthermore, by the end of the film there are too many plot twists tied up or not tied up in unsatisfactory ways. Film quoted was Rossellini's Voyage in Italy. Like Hitchcock's signature walk-ons, in nearly every Almodovar film a classic movie plays briefly on a television. Voyage in Italy is an odd film with Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders about a marriage falling apart. I think Broken Embraces firmly establishes Penelope Cruz as our only living Diva. (It was also clear in Woody Allen's Vicky Christina Barcelona, a dreadful film saved by Cruz's performance alone.) Does any other actress out there even come close to her Diva status? I can think of plenty of great actresses but none of them true divas. Despite my disappointment, I have little doubt this will be by far the best film I see this fall.

Fish Tank

2009-10-02T03:24:00.000-07:00

More poverty porn? The lead actress--"discovered" in a mall yelling at her boyfriend--was sublime but I didn't like feeling the constant sense of blatent voyeurism I had the entire time I was watching the film. All art is voyeurism but all voyeurism is not art. It was unpleasantly distracting. The filmmaking was certainly very adequate but I couldn't help wondering why I was watching life on a housing estate. What exactly was I supposed to take away from this film other than the usual mothers are to blame for everything under the sun and thank god I don't live on a housing estate. My big question is who exactly is the audience for this film? Certainly not the housing estate dwellers. I fear it is people like me--white, liberal, upper middle class intellectuals who by watching this film and feeling empathy for how badly people live somehow feel exonerated from participation in a society that perpetuates such gross unfairness. Many beautiful images here but many condescending ones too (shots of toys, animals, fluffy cliches). Michael Fassbender was fantastic to watch but he was probably miscast. His inexplicable Canadian accent confused me as well.

(500) Days of Summer

2009-10-02T03:00:00.000-07:00

I nearly left this film after the first twenty minutes the script was so terrible, but it did improve. There was a very funny, edgy romcom dying to get out of what was not quite a total disaster of a film. There were a few truly funny lines and the bollywood/disney song and dance sequence in the middle of the film to express the male lead's euphoria at sexual conquest was pretty great. Zooey Deschanel is wonderful to look at but her range seems terribly limited and I don't think the script can be blamed entirely, though as I said that was a huge problem. (She was equally flat in Gigantic, another dull film, but somehow I thought her flatness in that film was acting. I guess not.) A lot of it the film was astoundingly dull and predictable, but then every so often the characters or action would verge towards the surreal and the whole story would become momentarily interesting. The film's structure--jumping back and forth in time--was simply annoying and oh my god it's been done to death. Ever since that genius of a film Memento, filmmakers have been trying to play with structure mostly to disastrous effect. I'm afraid I can't think of much more to say about this film because I've already forgotten it even though I saw it three days ago.

The Hurt Locker

2009-10-02T02:29:00.000-07:00

The Hurt Locker Katheryn Bigelow has more testasterone than most men. I had to keep my eyes closed through a lot of this but that's a compliment. Of course, anyone who makes a film about a bomb squad and isn't able to muster megadoses of tension would be truly deficient. Some have objected to her using the Iraq war as just another roller coaster ride for moviegoers but I have no such complaint. I have also read that the film is entirely implausible but implausible is a feature filmmaker's business. It just needs to feel plausible enough to us within the rules of the world Bigelow has created. Her message is that war, violence in general, is an adrenaline addiction for men. Nothing new or earth shattering. She leaves women out of the equation, which we're awfully used to. (I did enjoy a glimpse of the actress from Lost.) The whole idea of the film is a big cliche, but cliches dramatised well make for satisfying movie watching. The subplot of the wimpy doctor was a shame. I knew he was a gonner the moment he came on screen and watching his fate play itself out was unpleasant in that his character was totally unsympathetic, his liberal condescension towards everyone too easy. The more I watch and think about movies, the more I have come to understand that they all have some level of porn, and this is war porn, artfully enough done. The acting was excellent, except for the doctor, but then again his part was poorly written. What I think I liked the best were the spots in which Sergio Leone and Ennio Moricone were referenced. This film will never be on a par with The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, but you've got to like a girl who has such ambition.