Closer

Swank and stupid, this is as bad as a film directed by Mike Nichols and starring Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Jude Law, and Clive Owen could be. Meant to be blisteringly truthful about love and sex, it is more lurid and wearisome than revelatory. Yet again, dialogue taken for shocking and meaningful on the stage is revealed as shallow and stagey by the steady gaze of the camera. Still, there’s a lot of eye candy here, star power and sleek London settings, and some craft as well. Too bad all these talented people were not better employed. Carnal Knowledge, this ain't. (2005, dvd, n.) *5+* (MC-65, RT-68.)

Pride & Prejudice

I had a contrary reaction to this, compared to Walk the Line. Here I was the true fan, stringently judging how well the movie came up to the source material. And here I was ready for the film to end well before it finally did. Keira Knightley was certainly an appealing heroine, though hardly Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett, the whatshisname Darcy was okay, as were some of the other players, but the best thing by far about this film were the realistic production values and the Constable-like views of the English countryside. But pictorial authenticity did not extend to a true sense of historical period and social mindset. Austen’s subtle nuance and insidious humor are Brontefied and Hollywoodized. Everything is overt and heightened, instead of gently unmasked. I was much more tolerant of the appropriations of Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice. (2005, Images, n.) *7-* (MC-83, RT-86.)

Lilya 4-Ever

What makes this film watchable, as well as heartbreaking, is the luminous spirit of the title character, played by Oksana Akinshina. Lilya is a teenaged girl, abandoned by her mother in a ravaged post-Soviet landscape when she escapes to America with her thuggish boyfriend. Then Lilya is shunted aside by a wicked aunt who appropriates the mother’s apartment and sends her off to a dismal flat in which an old man has just died. Her downward spiral follows with all the inexorability of a Zola or Dreiser heroine. Betrayed by a friend who drags her to a disco where Russian new capitalists troll for young girls, Lilya’s each painful step into degradation is carefully delineated, mitigated only by the affection between her and a younger boy, cast out by a brutal father, with whom she forms her only remaining bond. When a handsome, gentle man offers to engineer her escape to Sweden, the boy is rightfully suspicious, and devastated when she grasps the one glimmer of hope afforded her. There is some parallel both in radiant beauty (light against dark) and in plight to the girl in Maria Full of Grace, but Lukas Moodyson, despite the gentleness so well expressed in Show Me Love and Together, is much more relentless in his depiction of her helpless descent. Snatched from the plane in Stockholm, Lilya is imprisoned in a featureless high-rise apartment and taken out only to be sold to a sickening succession of men, her only respite in relation to the remembered boy who is now a half-fledged angel, but unfortunately no guardian. Their whimsical reunion in some rooftop heaven is the only palliative to her dismal fate. Though the story of one indelible character, this film suggests a world of pain over the betrayal and exploitation of children. (2003, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-82, RT-85.)

Walk the Line

Charged by the magnetic performances of Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon as Johnny Cash and June Carter, this film’s energy is well channeled by director James Mangold. Like Taylor Hackford of last year’s Ray, he is an underappreciated craftsman, and could have pushed his way on to my “10 Under 50” list of best young directors if I’d already seen this film, coming after Heavy, Cop Land, and Girl, Interrupted. (He is the son of painter Robert Mangold and grew up over in the Hudson valley.) But -- all props to the man behind the camera -- this film belongs to its stars, both the original performers and the actors embodying them, and ranks with Coal Miner’s Daughter at the head of a talented class of country music biopics. There are the traditional tropes of the genre: the hardscrabble childhood, the ravages of life on the road, the sex and drugs, the struggle to find one’s voice and then to sell it, on stage and in the recording studio, the importance of finding a nice house in the country at the end of the road. And there’s also an engaging love story. So it’s all very familiar, but very particular as well. True fans may complain that the film only captures a slice of Johnny Cash’s talent and stature, but for such as myself it was an admirable opening up of some unexplored peaks of the musical landscape. And I would gladly have spent more time in the engaging, exuberant company of Johnny/Joaquin and June/Reese. (2005, AMC Theater in PA, n.) *8* (MC-72, RT-82.)

Again with the diary

Here’s what I’ve been watching lately, none of which rates a strong recommendation. Though each is okay or better, I do not feel driven to apply a number rating or a full-fledged review. (Admittedly it’s an open question how mature the plumage is on even my reviews of widest span.) So on with it:

Two Days in October appeared on the PBS program “American Experience” and marks Robert Kenner as a documentarian to watch. It pairs up two events in 1967 that really paint a portrait of the era -- a Marine detachment is ambushed and massacred in the jungles of Vietnam, which the generals try to pass off as a victory, while back on the homefront at the U of Wisconsin, students sit in to protest Dow recruiters on campus and are violently routed by Madison city police, which radicalizes the entire campus. The mix of archival footage and talking head retrospect is extremely well put together and evocative.

Tarnished Angels is a Douglas Sirk from 1958, not on DVD but broadcast on Turner Classic Movies, in Cinemascope but surprisingly B&W after he had made a string of amazingly expressionistic color films. Adapted from the novel Pylon, this was declared the best film made from Faulkner by the author himself. The leads from Written on the Wind are re-teamed: Rock Hudson, Dorothy Malone, Robert Stack. The first two have some fresh moments, but the last is just his steel-jawed self. Hudson is a maverick reporter for the New Orlean Times-Picayune who becomes fascinated with the flying gypsies of a traveling airshow. Stack is a WWI flying hero now barnstorming in his biplane, with Malone his parachute-jumping wife. Complications ensue, with a good deal of wild chariot-racing low over the water and around the pylons. In some ways a preposterous period piece, in others the film bears the mark of Sirkian sophistication.

De-lovely is almost de-lightful. The Cole Porter songs certainly are, as is Kevin Kline in the lead role. Ashley Judd is appropriately swanky as his wife of convenience and a good deal more. This biopic is infinitely franker about Porter’s homosexuality than Night and Day starring Cary Grant, which is referenced in this film. The problem is that much is referenced but little is developed. There’s a half-heartedly meta- framing device, but the through-line is weak. The music and the performances are worth watching, however, and it’s a kick to hear Ashley tell Kevin that she is engineering his escape from Hollywood debauchery by purchasing a house in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Reefer Madness: The Musical is jaunty and irreverent, a Sundance fave apparently. For two-thirds of its length, the energy of the singing and dancing definitely carry the story along; the final third spins out of control in a manner that failed to entertain me. I guess you could say the buzz wears off. Kristin Bell (tv’s Veronica Mars) is extremely effective as the ingenue; her death signals the film’s. Alan Cumming is snappy in a variety of roles. Neve Campbell pitches in a nifty dance piece, in support of her brother who plays the lead. Good dirty fun, for the most part, but when it goes over the top I am as reluctant to follow as a smart WWI soldier in a trench.

Hail Caesar! Hail HBO!

Last evening I brought myself up to date with two praiseworthy HBO original series. Oddly, I find I can’t write about tv the way I write about film. When you stop to think about it, they are different aesthetic experiences. A film seems a self-contained object, which can be judged objectively, with whatever subjective shading. A tv series on the other hand is more like a transaction between sender and receiver, a developing relationship which grows closer, uncritically, or fades away to pointlessness. I certainly formed a bond with Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus of the series Rome, watching riveted to the final shots of their first season. And also with Julius Caesar, as embodied nobly by Ciaran Hinds, memorable as Captain Wentworth in the superb film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. It won’t be giving anything away to reveal that he dies at the end, a bloody corpse on the Senate floor. It’s good news that the rest of the characters we’ve come to know -- maternal monsters, mealy-mouthed polticos and martial heavyweights, would-be emperors and their families -- have been renewed for a second season. It really does bring ancient history alive, in a variety of ways. On a different scale from my film ratings, I would give Rome an A- as a tv series, ranking just behind The Wire and The Sopranos.

Incidentally, HBO will soon start rebroadcast of the first three seasons of The Wire, leading up to the premiere of season four, which may yet overtake Buffy the Vampire Slayer as my favorite tv series of all time. I for one will have my TiVo revved up to catch season three, not yet available on DVD. And while I’m at it, I may give the first season of Deadwood a try, now that it is on DVD.

In a different vein, HBO also produces the Paradise Lost documentaries of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. I’d heard good reports on the original, but it wasn’t available on DVD till very recently; the sequel was, but I avoided it till I could see the first. A third is now in the works, and it is not hard to see how the story compels an ongoing fascination. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Woods (1996) details the grisly case of three mutilated young boys found in a drainage ditch in West Memphis, AK, and the trials of three teenaged boys charged with killing them in a satanic ritual. The original documentary is credited with unblinking objectivity, but certainly seems to make the case for the railroading of the charged youths, seemingly more for their taste in clothes and music than for any actual evidence. You begin to assume that this film, like Errol Morris’s Thin Blue Line, will get an unjustly condemned man off death row. But no. Ten years later Damien Echols is still on death row, and his two friends in prison for life without parole. Reasonable doubt? There’s plenty. After the original documentary an internet-spawned group grew up to “free the West Memphis Three,” and they become the focus of Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (1999), along with the deeply scary stepfather of one of the victims, a drug-fueled camera-hound redneck behemoth who makes himself the best candidate for the actual murderer -- all he lacks is a leather mask and a chain saw. The amazing access, to families and suspects and lawyers and the court proceedings themselves, that drives the original, is shut off in the sequel and many key moments are covered by text on a black screen that explains they were forbidden to film. The film, however, compels one to the website -- www.wm3.org -- where one discovers the legal battle is ongoing, with the U.S. Court of Appeals just last month granting a plea of habeas corpus to Damien, who has also published poetry and a memoir written from solitary confinement. Not a word is said about the death penalty itself, but the whole case suggests the capriciousness with which it is sometimes dispensed. This is certainly a real-life courtroom drama to trump any fiction on the tube. As a tv series, it’s a definite A; as films, I would give the first a *7+* and the second a *7*, both essential representatives of the power of the documentary form.

Salvatore Giuliano

I didn’t really get this film when I saw it at MoMA thirty-odd years ago, and I still don’t. Francesco Rosi’s neo-neorealist reconstruction of the death and deeds of a Sicilian bandit leader in the years just after WWII is meticulous but incomprehensible. Shot in operatic black & white, on the actual sites of the events, with actual townpeople in all but two of the roles, the film uses time-fractured editing to depict a complicated tale of conspiracy and double-cross in postwar chaos, among the bandits, separatist politicians, and the Mafia. It’s like watching JFK if you had no antecedent knowledge of the facts of the case, though Rosi is an unturned Stone when it comes to wild speculation. Still, there’s something there about controlling insurgencies in the Mediterranean world, from Algiers to Baghdad, that comes through in this beautifully-presented Criterion Collection dvd. (1961, dvd, n.) *5+*

The Son (Le Fils)

This film is so un-American, but perhaps that’s just what a Belgian film should be. Critical darlings Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne follow La Promesse and Rosetta with another penetrating look at proletarian life. The brothers remain true to their documentary roots, and to the environment in which they grew up. The long takes seem captured on the fly, though in reality carefully rehearsed. We see more of the protagonist’s neck than of his face, viewing most of the action from over his shoulder. Also un-Hollywood is the refusal to explain -- you have to watch intently and figure it out as you go -- plus the inversion of the typical revenge fantasy (or even atypical ones like In the Bedroom.) The brothers built the film around their favorite actor, Olivier Gourmet, but allowed it to grow from its initial inspiration into something quite strange and surprising, a gripping suspense story without any of the usual tropes of cinematic suspense. Olivier (the character) is a carpentry instructor in a trade school for delinquent boys, who takes an unsettling interest in one of his students, for deep but only gradually revealed reasons. But be forewarned, if you do not approach this film as a quest for understanding, it will frustrate and irritate you. (2002, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-86, RT-89.)

In the proletarian vein, if you wish to dig a little deeper into the recent news from France, then I strenuously recommend that you watch La Haine, a 1995 film by Mathieu Kassovitz, a Parisian Mean Streets set in precisely the milieu that is now aflame.

Good Night, and Good Luck

George Clooney honors his news anchor father with this well-made tribute to Edward R. Murrow, superbly embodied by David Strathairn. With evident documentary intent, he lets Senator Joseph McCarthy play himself in old newsreels of his communist witch hunt days. The old tv footage blends seamlessly with the deep, rich black & white cinematography, which calls up the Fifties without ever stepping out of doors -- from smoke-filled studios where a crew of bespectacled go-getters use primitive technology to seat-of-the-pants the tv news, to the smoke-filled bar where they swirl bourbon in the glass and strategize the stuggle of a free press in a troubled time. A time, the estimable Mr. Clooney does not even need to imply, that bears some similarity to our own. He also evokes the spirit of the Fifties by effective use of a female blues singer as a sort of Greek chorus. The story is a bit thinly painted, though the canvas is large and looming -- it begins and ends with a lecture, with a civics lesson in between -- but this is honest work of high degree. As drama it lacks some elemental pull, but as dramatized documentary it is a mesmerizing swirl of smoke, infinitely preferable to anything Michael Moore might concoct. George Clooney, to me, is one American hero commenting on another, who inspired him in speaking truth to power. And David Strathairn is an absolute must for a Best Actor nomination, way beyond mimicry of Murrow to a deep channeling. It’s not a great film, but has many elements of greatness. (2005, Images, n.) *7+* (MC-80, RT-94.)

No Direction Home

Two American masters meet, Bob Dylan and Marty Scorsese, with appropriately epic results. This 3 1/2 hour documentary takes the generational icon up to his motorcycle accident in 1966, at age 25. What would it take to cover the subsequent forty years? I’d be eager to find out. I have friends who expressed impatience with the pace of this piece, but pace them, I happily took the whole ride, down memory lane and into the man of that moment -- a cocky kid and musical sponge with an amazing verbal facility, who bemusedly became the voice of a generation. There’s so much going on here -- the music, the history, the American fable of celebrity -- it seems more inexhaustible than exhaustive or exhausting. (2005, dvd, n.) *7+*

Hana-Bi (Fireworks)

There’s an undeniable charm to this fragmented but sentimental yakuza flick written, directed, acted, and painted by Takeshi Kitano, but this is another critical bandwagon I just can’t get on board. I leave it to the Tarantinos of this world. “Beat Takeshi” may be the Buster Keaton of Japan, but I find him as off-putting as ingratiating. His tangram storytelling, mixing pieces into various shapes, engages but does not convince. As the central character, a police officer who holds himself responsible for his partner getting shot and another officer killed, he turns to bank robbery to pay off loans from the mob, and to take his terminally ill wife on a final tour of Mt. Fuji, the ocean, and other Japanese sights. This film is sweet, funny, and (implicitly) violent, as assured as it is idiosyncratic, but it does not hold together for me, makes me watch but not follow. (1997, dvd, n.) *6*

Search function

You may have noticed that Blogger has added a beta version of a local search engine to its service. While far from comprehensive yet, if you fill in a movie, director, or actor's name at the top of this page and click the "Search this blog" button, you may come up with review listings from my archives.

King Creole

With this I wrap up my choices for a “Remembering New Orleans” film series, which may or may not run soon at the Clark. I expected this to be goofy fun, but what is universally proclaimed Elvis Presley’s best film is in fact a good film, from when he was plausibly being positioned as a singing James Dean. Accomplished veteran director Michael Curtiz, of Casablanca fame, mixes extensive location shooting with story-justified singing numbers as Elvis goes from busboy to headliner on Bourbon Street. In well-shot black & white with noirish tone, the story (from a Harold Robbins novel) echoes Rebel Without a Cause. Walter Matthau, of all people, is the villain of the piece, and Carolyn Jones, who would become tv’s Morticia Addams, makes a fine hooker with heart. And oh my, that “Pelvis” is something! (1958,dvd, n.) *7*

Down by Law

Jim Jarmusch’s deadpan comedy starts with a long sequence of tracking shots of just the New Orleans neighborhoods that Katrina probably washed away, before focusing in on Tom Waits as a much-fired deejay being thrown out by girlfriend Ellen Barkan, and small-time pimp John Lurie ignoring a lecture from his naked but philosophically acute Black whore. They wind up railroaded into the same Orleans Parish jail cell, into which comes the irrepressible Roberto Benigni (back in the day when he was still sufferable, and a nice contrast to Jarmusch’s seeming lassitude), who utters the movie’s tagline: “Ees a sad and beautiful world.” Roberto (big fan of Walt Whitman and “Bob” Frost in Italian translation) foments a prison break, and they wind up slogging through the bayou, bickering and bonding, to a fanciful but apt ending. The laughs sneak up on you, and while the film is much too hip to wear its heart on its sleeve, it definitely beats within. (1986, dvd, n.) *7+*

In the Mood for Love

Even with a second viewing, I just cannot get with the program on Wong Kar-Wai’s much-praised opus. Does it effectively establish a mood? Yes. Is it lovely to look at? Definitely. Is it cleverly elliptical and swooningly stylized? You bet. But did it move me or mean something to me? Sorry, no. Some may see it beautifully exploring the border between restraint and abandon in love, but not being quite that nice (in the classic Jane Austen-ish sense), I tend to see it just as a frustrated and frustrating affair. It’s certainly possible to enjoy the entire movie just for the succession of sheath dresses clinging to the exquisite form of Maggie Cheung, all cut the same way with a high, tight neck but in an astonishing array of fabric, color, and design; she must wear 40 different dresses in 98 languorous minutes. She and Tony Leung are accomplished actors as well as impossibly beautiful stars to watch. Nat King Cole and the rest of the soundtrack is very pleasant to listen to. I’m sure there’s an entire Asian frame of reference that I am oblivious to. But still, this to me was a film that went nowhere, way too slowly. And why did it end up at Angkor Wat, besides an excuse for an unpeopled coda of slow tracking shots? I read le mot juste on this film in the Time Out Film Guide (which is, incidentally, the indispensible reference for the film fan), calling it “scored as a valse triste.” You may like that sort of thing, apparently many knowledgeable people do, but I have other preferences in film. In fact, even here, one of the things I liked best was the documentary aspect of conveying the tight, dark density of living conditions in 1962 Hong Kong. The slow-mo and other stylistic tricks I could do without. (2000, dvd/cai, r.) *7-* (MC-85, RT-87.)

Comments

Hello again. I'm back from a trip, to resume posting, but regretfully the first thing I have to do is turn off the comments feature of Cinema Salon. I had imagined the possibility of a serious ongoing conversation about films, but it didn't quite work that way. Only one person was genuinely responsive (thanks, la.dauphine, whoever you may be) and now I am overrun by what I just learned from the news today is called "splog." I would still welcome comments at ssatullo@clarkart.edu but won't allow these spam blog posts to appear.