by Dean | Jan 11, 2012 | General
The French director Robert Bresson, whose 13 films are currently being shown in a New York City retrospective, was a Christian artist without being a Christian man, i.e. a bona fide Christian believer. His cinematic style usually leaves me cold, although not in two great pictures he released during the 1950s: Diary of a Country Priest (from the Bernanos novel) and A Man Escaped. Here, the man who was raised a Catholic presents protagonists who receive significant mercy from God, in films as spiritual as they are austere. After that, however, works appear in which some spirituality arises, but mostly there is wan despair over the world’s violation of innocence–expressed through a flat, eccentric style. Even the very interesting and compelling Au hasard Balthazar (1966) is not quite what it ought to be. The “automatic, affectless performances” (Nick Pinterton, The Village Voice) Bresson demanded of his cast do the film no favors.
All the same, the two masterpieces I mentioned above–and 1945’s The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne–prove the level of brilliance in Bresson before he took what I believe to be a regrettable turn for a Christian artist.
(The photo is of Robert Bresson.)
Image via Wikipedia
by Dean | Jan 9, 2012 | General
On Little Children (2007):
Kate Winslet is commanding but never hammy. All the anxiety, ambivalence, femininity, and intelligence of the character of Sarah in this Todd Field movie Winslet supplies. She’s the best thing in it. An adaptation of a Tom Perrotta novel (which I’ve never read), Little Children doesn’t make the grade, though. Winslet’s suburban wife becomes an adulterer in this almost dated tale of unhappy suburban sinners, and what ensues, I’m sorry to say, is a forced, uneasy denouement in addition to an uneven tone. The film is inferior to the same director’s flawed but worthwhile In the Bedroom (2001). I disagree with critic Dana Stevens that Perrotta, who co-wrote the screenplay, “is a natural match” for Field.
Field has an artistic eye, after all–he uses depth of field as though he invented it–and his scene creation is better than the script. No doubt LC was not the novel he should have filmed.
Cover of Little Children
by Dean | Jan 2, 2012 | General
Hollywood is woefully indifferent to the scripts it puts together for its action flicks (those scoundrels!), and so the one created for Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011) doesn’t exactly tell a high-quality story. But it’s such a wonderfully rich B-feature I was delighted to have laid eyes on it.
Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his International Monetary Fund team–scratch that! that’s not what IMF stands for here–go after a mad scientist with a remake-the-world scheme. There are plenty of tight, technically savvy action scenes (Ethan’s vertical car ride to the bottom of a confined area, his effort to climb a stunning skyscraper, Jane Carter’s heated battle with a female assassin). Also, the film sort of channels pictures of the past: 2001: A Space Odyssey gadgets and “zero gravity” floating emerge.* And in Mumbai, where the story finally ends up, Tom Cruise becomes an everyman James Bond and Paula Patton, who plays Agent Jane Carter, becomes an exemplary Bond movie beauty-cum-heroine.
Irresistible stuff.
Directed by Brad Bird.
*It’s not really zero gravity, which I why I used the term in quotation marks.
Image via Wikipedia
by Dean | Dec 27, 2011 | General
The Undefeated, Stephen K. Bannon’s 2011 documentary about Sarah Palin, begins with footage of familiar people speaking about Palin in words ranging from insulting to disgusting.
Sarah Palin is not Hitler; she is not a monster. The loutish haters treat her as though she were. Bannon’s film is wholly in favor of her, using for voiceover parts of the Going Rogue audiobook and featuring people who used to work with Palin as they talk about her accomplishments. It’s also a film about Alaska and the oil industry, which became the esteemed governor’s opponent. (It’s not so much about the John McCain presidential campaign.)
The Undefeated is propaganda, though. It should have been more intelligently searching. Bannon still could have shown he was on Palin’s side had he focused on any sensible questions that have been raised about her decisions, her governance, etc. For example, was her governance in Alaska always conservative—probably not–and if not, why? Such a thing hardly would have hurt her standing as a right-winger. Palin’s respect for conservative values has long been evident.
Bannon’s film is technically well-made, but a more incisive pro-Sarah doc would have been a stronger doc.
Image via Wikipedia
by Dean | Dec 20, 2011 | General
I never saw the original Footloose movie from 1984, but the story told in Footloose the Remake (2011) is pure rubbish. It rattles along indecorously and, in spite of everything, it’s dated. Yet filmmaker Craig Brewer concentrates on it as carefully as he does the dancing. Big mistake.
Even so, at least the dancing doesn’t get shortchanged. The music does. Both “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” and a forceful White Stripes song get lost in the narrative balderdash. Footloose should have been more of a musical and less of a drama.
The movie stars Kenny Wormald (Ren) and Julianne Hough (Ariel). Ren is a teenaged know-it-all, Ariel knows nothing except how to have fun. I wish to have no truck with either of them.
by Dean | Dec 16, 2011 | General
In The House of Mirth (2001), a Terrence Davies film, Gillian Anderson offers no real surprises as Lily Bart. But she does offer skill, having an almost childlike quality and the capacity to move us. Eric Stoltz, as Laurence Seldon, does nothing either particularly right or particularly wrong, but Laura Linney, as Bertha Dorset, is true and wonderfully self-confident. She and Anderson are the best actors here. Add to this the spot-on costumes and production design and you have . . . well, not quite the Edith Wharton novel from which this commendable movie was adapted. It makes me ambivalent in a way the great novel never could.
This is the one about the woman who, without being shallow, wants to marry a man with money, but does not do so. Instead she suffers and ultimately dies, doing so as a tragic heroine more than as a victim–something Terrence Davies fails to understand. Thus he has Lily Bart not so much living as simply going downhill. Moreover, the Lily of the novel rightly appreciates the finer things in life, certainly including material things, but the film never points this up. It knows Miss Bart isn’t shallow but that’s about it. She might as well be a thoroughgoing stock heroine.
Yes, Anderson tries to rescue Lily but she can’t–can’t rescue her from what Davies has done. Though the film has its virtues, it does not understand the novel’s virtues.
Cover of The House of Mirth
by Dean | Dec 7, 2011 | General
China’s Zhang Yimou is a great film director, but House of Flying Daggers (2004) is no Ju Dou or To Live or Not One Less. These films are gripping successes, whereas the ’04 effort is a mildly serious entertainment with the absurd action of the cheap 1980s Hong Kong fare.
It’s ingeniously made, visually spellbinding, but Zhang should not have gone the Crouching Tiger route. Purveyed is a sagging story about the female member of a rebel group, the House of Flying Daggers, and the guardian captain who is in fact a government agent. A flatly superficial period piece, it belongs to a genre which isn’t big enough for Zhang. Lovely women, particularly Ziyi Zhang, are too Amazon-like, as physically superhuman as the men, and we wonder how it can be that both men and women here are even destructible. Their martial arts are god-like, you see. The climax is as nicely, darkly tragic as the climaxes of many other Zhang films, but it hardly prevents Daggers from being a bold nonentity.
House of Flying Daggers (Shi mian mai fu) (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)
by Dean | Dec 1, 2011 | General
In addition to being very foul-mouthed, Jake Kasdan’s The TV Set (1997) is an obvious, not always credible, and eminently unfunny satire on the squalid thinking we’ve witnessed for years in the television industry. In many ways it’s the poor man’s–no, the loser’s–Idiocracy.
Cover of The TV Set
by Dean | Nov 21, 2011 | Movies, Music
Cover of 8 Mile (Widescreen Edition)
Eminem, in 8 Mile, plays a Detroit post-teenager who dreams of becoming a rap singer, who both has black friends and receives hostility from blacks who don’t like his career intentions. For all its hokiness it’s a good movie, chiefly because of its depiction of working-class life in an American city. Scott Silver’s script is fragile, but Curtis Hanson directs it with flair and know-how. Eminem’s acting is hollow but the other performers shine. E.g., Mekhi Phifer is urban tough but nonthreatening as one of Eminem’s friends, he who asserts he intends to square things with the Lord but never gets around to it. Kim Basinger gives a nicely complex performance as the white rapper’s mother, and the late Brittany Murphy effectively plays, er, an affable slut. It’s not much of a role. It is not even clear that Silver is aware she is a slut.
Another problem: the obligatory embarrassing sex scene. And another: rap music. The one Eminem rap song I have heard in its entirety struck me as trivial and unfunny, and the tripe spewed out in 8 Mile is no better. One wishes we had Duke Ellington and Scott Joplin around to teach this white kid a lesson.
by Dean | Nov 13, 2011 | General
Not long after Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) begins, the eponymous main character (Elizabeth Olsen) runs away from the young people’s commune she’s been living in for two years and begins to live with her sister and her sister’s husband in Connecticut–and, boy, does erratic behavior come about! Martha left the commune because she found it to be a wicked place, but her own psyche is now crashing and burning.
Is Martha attracted to communal living because she has an unhinged mind? Or does communal living associated with evil create within her an unhinged mind? Such questions arise while viewing this artistic thriller of sorts written and directed by Sean Durkin. All in all, however, not much thought is required of us re the film. For a portrait of ugly realities, it is wholly unprofound. But it’s certainly watchable: as “carefully constructed” (J. Hoberman) as it is unusual. After Martha’s craziness almost wrecks one of her relatives’ parties, she falls back exhausted on her bed before the longest fade-to–black I’ve ever seen ends the sequence. Earlier, Durkin gives us a fine sequence in which Martha’s sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson), in a long shot, jumps out of her lawn chair over the sight of Martha skinny dipping in a nearby lake.
When the acting isn’t good, it is extraordinary, as in Olsen’s case. One of the Olsen twins, Elizabeth still has the marvelous eyes she had as a child as well as a perfect understanding of the character she is playing. Even when she gets emotional, her Martha is never very far from the psychotically subdued person she has perhaps always been.
(The photo is of Elizabeth Olsen and Sean Durkin.)
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
