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
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
I was going to see Tower Heist this weekend, but I got a chance to see an old epic on the big screen and opted for that instead. It was Spartacus (1960), one of Stanley Kubrick’s better films–good on the small screen, a gem on the big. Therein, Kirk Douglas plays the gladiator Spartacus, who is determined to fight historical dehumanization by leading a slave rebellion against ancient Rome. Douglas has star power but greatness too: he’s never without forcefulness and personality. Other great ones are Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov and Charles Laughton; every time they’re on the screen we like it. Jean Simmons, enacting Spartacus’ wife, fills the bill.
I love epic movies; good ones offer cakes-and-ale, as this one does. They don’t get monotonous. Kubrick directed carefully and wisely. Outstanding is the battle scene where the rebels use against the Roman soldiers rollers of burning straw, and the long shot of Simmons and Ustinov riding away on a stretched-out road lined with crucified slaves, Spartacus among them, before the picture ends. The last epic film I saw in a theatre hitherto (they aren’t plentiful) was Mongol, which was enjoyable but somewhat less so than this one, just as Spartacus is not as great as The Ten Commandments, Lawrence of Arabia and Lord of the Rings.
(Spartacus is showing in Tulsa, Oklahoma until Thursday, Nov. 10, 2011.)
Cover of Spartacus
The 2006 German film, The Lives of Others, successfully does what today’s movie critics declined to mention in their reviews: it condemns Communism. Too, it exposes a government, East German in 1984, that is slowly getting weary of Communism, whether the death throes are there or not. A Stasi member called Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) realizes just how spiritually draining the GDR is. Although the change which comes over him is insufficiently believable, Wiesler seems to be humanized by three things: music, some poetry by Brecht, and–the lives of others, viz. the people he is spying on. One of them is the victim of a Commie’s sexual harassment.
Directed and written by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others is absorbing and nicely plotted. It’s rated R because actress Martina Gedeck has her breast squeezed (by a man) and then exposed. But it isn’t gratuitous.
(The film is in German with English subtitles.)
Cover of The Lives of Others
The Merchant Ivory film, Before the Rains (2007), is a wonderland of rich scenery. Set in India, it was photographed by its director, Santosh Sivan. Too bad a second-rate story, with the character of a British colonialist in 1937 given short shrift, wrecks the enterprise. In fact, a whole lotta hogwash is here.
Linus Roache supplies a little too much on-the-surface acting as the colonialist, but is passable. Rahul Bose is largely uninteresting as an Indian right-hand man. The women, Nandita Das and Jennifer Ehle, however, have their hearts in it and never make a false move. Put another way, no surface stuff. If you’re drawn at all to this film, see it for these two performances.
Image via Wikipedia
Image via Wikipedia
In the non-naturalistic The Leftovers (2011), Tom Perrotta’s new novel, millions of people have disappeared from the earth in a Rapture-like phenomenon, and a great many were not Christians. It was a “random harvest” and most of Perrotta’s attention is fixed on what has ensued in the U.S. suburbs now that this inexplicable tragedy has occurred. At bottom the Sudden Departure, as it is called, is simply the next bad thing to happen after such events as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Japanese tsunami, etc.; the novel subtly presents it as such.
A spellbinding fact is that sundry religious cults have arisen, winning such converts as the wife (Laurie) and son (Tom) of Kevin Garvey, the mayor of a town called Mapleton. The cult that has lured in Laurie is the Guilty Remnant, a bizarre religion whose adherents wear white, almost never speak, and routinely smoke cigarettes. Perrotta’s point here may well be this: To slightly alter something G.K. Chesterton said, when people stop believing in the traditional God, they start believing in anything. False gods are ubiquitous, notwithstanding there is in the book a ruined minister, Max Jamison, who does not even turn to a false god. He fails to accept that a non-traditional event like the random (but was it random?) Sudden Departure could have come from the true Deity.
One might suspect The Leftovers of being depressing, but it isn’t. It’s merely serious as well as lively, wry and humane. Though it’s been called satirical, for the most part that isn’t true.
The photo is of Tom Perrotta.
