petrelet Reviews (79)

I, Robot (2004)

As an action film, it's not great. As Asimovian sci-fi, it's terrible.

[4/10 · 23 March 2024]

Considered just as an action picture with three protagonists braving a horde of CGI zombies and trying to save the world, this movie is no better than average and is full of implausible plot elements.

Movies in which one person successfully out-punches and out-shoots an entire army of killers attacking from all directions are sadly common. It's even worse when the killers are all robots with the ability to coordinate with each other at the speed of light, heedless of their own safety, and whose literally lightning-swift reflexes ought to make them pretty much unbeatable by mere humans - let alone a single mere human, and yet he makes them seem slow, clumsy, and inept. (It's true that Will Smith as the human in question has an edge that we don't find out about until late in the film, but it really shouldn't be enough to make him as unbeatable as he is.) This is only one aspect of the strange inability of the force of killer robots, with eyes and ears and brains everywhere on the battlefield, to surveil and defend its own headquarters or even see what is going on under their noses, including the ongoing insubordination of one of their own.

So this movie doesn't compare well to the John Wicks of the world. But the filmmakers wanted this movie to be seen as more than an action picture. Why is this movie named after Isaac Asimov's collection of robot-themed stories? Why does it open with a recitation of Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics, which a generation of readers of science fiction from the classic age know by heart? Clearly, because they wanted to steal the valor of Asimov, a great thinker and writer who was deceased at the time of the movie's production and hence unable to defend himself. They wanted this movie to be seen as a serious and thoughtful work. But it isn't. It cheats throughout.

Asimov's works are works full of ideas. His robots became more than the boring, obedient, harmless drones one might expect from reading only the Three Laws, but this was because Asimov was aware of the logical pitfalls underlying his own attempt to codify robot behavior. No robot may harm a human being, but who counts as a human being? And suppose the robot discovers that everything in life is a trolley problem, where you are always at risk of harming one person or another? A robot must obey the apparently harmless orders of a human being, but does this include children, pranksters, and criminals? On what information, or misinformation, will the robot rely in concluding whether some action or inaction is harmful?

We learn early on how little of Asimov the writers of this film had absorbed, when Will Smith, a cop with anti-robot prejudices, sees a robot running with a purse and concludes that the robot has stolen the purse. His captain asks him how many times a robot has committed any crime, and Smith admits that the number is zero. We should know right then that they are all missing the point, because in fact nothing in the Three Laws guarantees that robots will obey all human laws, and it's obvious that any number of creative people, in 2035 Chicago anyway, will think of ways to order robots to "bring me that purse" or something more lucrative. (If you wonder how the laws worked in Asimov's books, I'll just say that they were set far in the future in very different societies.)

These scenarios come up in Asimov's own writings and they are much more interesting than anything in this movie. Instead, within minutes after being told that no robot can harm a human and that all robots must obey humans, we see a robot fight with a human and disobey him, and it turns out that, oops, at least one non-Asimovian robot has gotten into circulation. Actually it turns out that there are a lot more. But this means that the Three Laws, which in Asimov's works were basic and enduring properties of robots' mental DNA, in this movie are just lying marketing promises that have been swapped out in the new model like iPhone features.

You may think that their misuse of Asimov is just something that only an obsessive nerd would care about, to which, possibly a fair point - but they started it! If Asimov's name and title and three laws weren't important, than why hijack them?

I don't think that the cast did a bad job. I think the computer-generated robots, robot delivery vans, superhighways, and other stuff clash oddly with the live-action elements, but maybe I would feel differently if I liked them better. The dialogue is not so bad and is sometimes funny, like when a killer robot attacks Will Smith's car while screaming "You are experiencing an auto accident!" That's funny even if it doesn't withstand a moment's scrutiny on the "why would it do that" level. (On which note, why do all the robots have scary red lights that turn on when they are in killer mode? Who came up with that design feature (eyeroll emoji)) It's also both humorous and thought-provoking (for me anyway) to watch the movie's depiction of 2035 - 30-odd years in their future, and only 11 years off in ours - and see what they got right and wrong, and, of course, everything is wrong. For example, in the first shots you see scads of robots trotting around through the streets delivering packages, but it turns out, of course, that humans working for Amazon are much cheaper than robots. It would be a nice little project to examine the patterns of how sci-fi tends to get it wrong.

But none of that turns this into a good movie.

The Forgiven (2017)

Challenging, engaging, and underrated

[8/10 · 22 March 2024]

A lot of critics and a lot of users apparently disliked this movie. They found it boring and trite, or tasteless and disgusting. They hated the fictional Eric Bana character because he was too racist and vile, and they hated the historical Desmond Tutu character because he was too preachy and unrealistically good. I find both these last points particularly unconvincing, because if you were a vicious and murderous enough racist to have gotten locked up for it in South Africa during the 1990's you must have been pretty racist and murderous and vile indeed; and then Desmond Tutu was an actual archbishop, so it's not fair to fault him for quoting the Bible, and he was a Nobel Peace Prize winner, so maybe he really was a more virtuous man than the general run.

As for me, I (white, US, privileged, and someone who did some anti-apartheid stuff back in the day) found it engaging, challenging, and at least authentic-appearing. It is true that the movie should come with several content warnings, and that the Piet Blomfeld character can be really hard to watch. But on the other hand I don't think he's overdone in the least. When he was smirking and boasting of his murders and being as racist and disgusting as possible, I thought, "yes, this is how this guy would actually act. This is how these guys actually act today."

I should point out that all the versions of the plot summary which talk about the Blomfeld character as "seeking redemption" are just completely wrong. When Blomfeld summons Tutu to visit him in his cell, he has no sense whatever that he needs redemption. He summons Tutu there because he wants to humiliate and mentally weaken his enemy. He is trolling him. He believes this will be a successful psyop for the white supremacist cause. Archbishop Tutu at this time is a person with great respect and soft power both in South Africa and internationally, and Blomfeld believes that he can, through the force of his unconquerable racist will, take away Tutu's assurance and equanimity, anger him, waste his time, and, in current internet parlance, "own" him. I think it is reasonable to approach a movie which platforms this kind of character with initial skepticism, but on the other hand such people existed then and exist now, and if they have the delusion that they are better and stronger than someone like Desmond Tutu, I think it's reasonable to have a movie where they test this assumption. Spoiler alert: I don't think Blomfeld succeeds in what he initially intends.

Personally I am not a Christian nor particularly into forgiving monstrous racists. But on the other hand it is one thing when we are asked to forgive and appease and look for common ground with monstrous racists while they still have power, guns, and the ability to do great harm, and a different thing if, by some miracle, the people do what it seems like they can never do and actually manage to win a victory over them as - let's not forget this, please - they did in South Africa, within the living memory of some of us, and then have the privilege and quandary of trying to figure out how to create society on a new basis. Tutu in this movie makes clear more than once that this idea of reconciliation comes from a position of strength - not from a desire to cover up crimes and make nicey-nicey, but from an intention of digging up the bodies and exposing the murderers, and then choosing what to do with them.

Really the main flaw that I see with this movie is that (spoiler alert) it kind of cheats when it tries to answer the question of how monstrous racists get that way. In Blomfeld's case, we are told, it comes out of childhood trauma and a psychological drive to make sense of his own personal losses. This gives the movie-Tutu some ammunition that one can never count on having. I don't believe very many monstrous racists have this kind of origin story. They're mostly much more banal and they don't have magic keys to unlock the buried child inside. I think that's a weakness of the story, and it would be better without it.

But I still think it's pretty good. One doesn't have to share all of Tutu's belief system in order to appreciate that people with this kind of belief system do a lot of things in this world which have notable consequences. I thought that the depiction of how Tutu got stuff done (by the way, I read that Tutu approved of this movie and I hope this is true) is worth people's attention. We need hope in these days, and I think it can be a source of hope to remember that sixty years ago South African apartheid looked eternal and had friends around the world, notably including the United States; but then thirty years ago, former convict Nelson Mandela was the country's president and they were doing Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. There can be change. There can be victory. Maybe there can even be reconciliation.

Descendant (2022)

So many truths are brought up and exposed in this celebratory masterpiece

[10/10 · 23 December 2023]

This is a film which unflinchingly exposes truths, not only of enslavement, but of the cover-up of enslavement and of how the enslavers have held on to their profits to the present day. But those aren't the only truths shown here. There are inspiring truths, triumphant truths, about a community of descendants of survivors - and survivors in their own right - who are inspired by their ancestors on a daily basis, who are hopeful and undefeated, and who are making their ancestors' voices and their own voices heard today.

So, this film is not like an episode of "Secrets of the Dead" (which I love, btw) where the focus is on archaeology. The discovery of the remains of the "Clotilda", which was used to smuggle 110 human beings into Alabama in 1860 so that they could be sold into servitude, is the least of it. There is so much else that is brought to light here, so many rediscoveries of which the unearthing of the "Clotilda" crime scene is a symbol and metaphor:

There is the silent film footage of the last survivor of the "Clotilda", shot in 1928 by the young African-American filmmaker, Zora Neale Hurston (No, I hadn't known she did that!), who wrote down his testimony in his own words and dialect as the book "Barracoon" which did not see the light of day until it was published in 2018! (No, I hadn't known about that either!)

There is the Africatown community, a village that exists today nearly within walking distance of the site of the scuttled ship - despite the polluting and carcinogenic industries which encroach upon it from every direction, having even taken a piece of its graveyard, and the busy highway where cars and trucks whiz by where homes and stores used to be.

There are the whites who appear in the story, filling out a spectrum from sincere allyship through white saviorism to political opportunism. The flawed specimens are generally not called out in words. They are on film. You can see it.

There are the whites who "refused repeated requests" to appear in the film: the descendants of the man who chartered the kidnap ship and successfully sold the African survivors. You do not see them in the film, but you see their names on the stone property markers that border Africatown. They prosper today on the proceeds of that sale and the aforementioned industries that hem the village in. When the discourse about reparations turns to whites saying "but it wasn't me, it wasn't my family", these are the ones you will never hear.

But the great revelation of this film is the descendants themselves. They are bold. They can celebrate. Their voice is the voice of the film. They are the reason why you can watch a film occasioned by horrible crimes extending into the present day and still come away, not depressed, but uplifted. The film is not centered on the criminals, or the historians, and certainly not on the filmmakers themselves - you barely hear their voices at all except in the occasional pithy explanatory text card. The community of descendants has been put in the center of the film and the filmmakers are letting them talk, in their diversity, in good moods and bad. So, on top of everything else, this film is a teaching model for aspiring documentarists. My own viewpoint is from a limited northern-US white perspective, but, such as I am, I see no flaws in this work, and I am very glad to have seen it.

Pat and Mike (1952)

This film is weirder than you might suspect

[6/10 · 25 November 2023]

I saw (some of) this film several decades ago, but I apparently absorbed very little of it - to the extent that when I saw it again a few days ago, I was just astounded by some of the plot elements. I know that 1950's romantic comedies are going to show their age somehow, but I'm talking about something more than that. I have questions. Like for example:

(1) Is it true that in 1952 the bookies were handling such a high volume of bets on women's professional golf and tennis that it was worthwhile for mobsters to try to get women athletes to throw their matches? And that most women on the tour accepted this as normal (as we are informed)?

(2) How often does it happen that a woman in mid-life will suddenly bloom into championship-level success in a sport, having never faced professional competition in it before and maybe never played until a year ago? How often does she do it in two sports at once, like a female Jim Thorpe coming into her own?

(3) Is there such a thing as "natural generalized coaching ability" such that a person can start successfully coaching a professional golfer or tennis player, having learned one's craft by managing a boxer (who takes dives a lot) and a race horse?

(4) Also, has the "left-handed English" used by Tracy's character ever been spoken by anyone in the real world?

In order to enjoy "Pat and Mike" at all, one has to ignore the real-world answers to these questions, and treat the movie as if it took place in a weird parallel world, sort of like a supernatural K-Drama or anime series. Once you have committed to treating Hepburn's Pat Pemberton as a sort of superbeing sort of like Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, and Tracy's Mike Conovan like a fatherly coach out of Speed Racer, and accepted the mobsters as the sort of mobsters that are always appearing in works like that, then you can at least get past the weird version of women's sports and get into the tougher asks, like making sense of the romance part.

So, to begin with, I have no problem with the idea that somehow Pat has gotten engaged to a guy who is just wrong for her (and William Ching did a great job, in my opinion, of getting us to cringe without hamming the part up very far beyond what is believable).

But the next part is getting us to believe that PatMike makes sense as an item. And here I have a hard time. It's not what Mike says about him being just a boxing gym lout and her being an "upper-cruster". But when a guy (spoiler, but it's early into the film) literally meets you by busting into your hotel room, along with his henchman, and hiding in your bathroom, and then popping out when you go in there half-naked to take your shower, and then immediately starts talking about the money to be made throwing a golf match, I would say that it would take some "crucial conversations" to get from here to the negotiations about life partnership.

And here's the thing (another spoiler): those conversations never take place! Somehow at a certain point some special effects inform us that Pat and Mike are thinking romantically of each other. (These special effects involve the face of the other appearing like a hallucinated image - for Pat, over the photo of Ching's Collier Weld, and for Mike, over the face of his horse. These aren't the only special effects hallucinations in the movie either. Cukor really thinks these hallucinations are nifty, you can tell.) Then, at a later point, still with hardly anything in the way of talking about things having intervened, only some hijinks, all of a sudden it is the end of the movie and, zap!, a couple is born.

Now, there are some interesting things about the movie other than the main on-screen plot - for example, the appearance of real women athletes in the film, and the fact that apparently Hepburn really was quite athletic and fit nicely into the role, and of course the whole Hepburn / Tracy thing. You might find that all this adds significantly to the enjoyability of the film. For me - I didn't hate it. I liked it some. And I thought it was weird.

The Good Time Girls (1960)

A well-crafted, very bleak picture of women's lives

[8/10 · 19 November 2023]

This is a grim film. It is certainly not a comedy, and calling it a drama is wrong, as it is not overly concerned with the narratives of its characters' lives. (Calling it a horror movie would be closer to the truth.) It is more like a crafted illustration of the condition of working-class women in Paris at a certain time. And this condition, as depicted here, is bad.

This film was released in the US as "The Good Time Girls", but there is not much of a good time to be had, and watching the film does not offer a good time either.

Four young women work in a small appliance store in Paris. From 9 am to 7 pm, with a couple hours off for lunch, they are together in each other's company, along with the older cashier, amiable enough but not part of their circle. The store never has any customers, so they are stuck looking at each other except when their boss summons them into his office for brief spells of ludicrous flirting and dominance games.

They are shown visiting the zoo on their lunch hour; this is an old-style affair with no attempt to produce a semblance of a natural environment for the monkeys and baboons and tigers - just cells with bars. The metaphor is too obvious to dwell upon. The women mock and tease the animals, in a reflection of the way they themselves are mocked and teased by the men who surround them and form the bars of their own social cells.

The four use their midday and evening hours to try to improve their situation by seeking, cultivating, or hoping for relationships with men, which, of course, is exactly the principle of a thousand novels since Regency times and before: woman's way to happiness and a comfortable life is into the arms of a man. But it's sad (though perhaps healthy, in a cold-water-in-the face way) that a film released in 1960 offers so bleak a vision in comparison with products of earlier decades and centuries. At least some of the men in Austen were tolerable. With two exceptions I can think of, every man in the film is a leering jerk, or worse. Allies are shown to be ... let's say, highly unreliable.

So, this movie is not in my estimation a feminist (or pro-feminist) movie. And that is entirely separate (or is it? That's a discussion) from its having been written and directed by men. Feminism offers answers. It offers courses of action. This movie shows that women are subject to suffering and restriction and violence and captivity, but, for all its characters know or have ever heard, this is the inevitable and permanent state of female life. Perhaps the audience of the film will be moved to read some of the things that its characters will never read. Perhaps this is the idea. Of course, there is always the danger that the audience will just feel more depressed afterward.

On the plus side, the plotting is good. And there is plenty to talk about afterwards. (Like that lucky blessing handkerchief!) So, yes, I think it's worth seeing. Just don't let it ruin your day.

Dressed to Kill (1980)

Yes, but leaving the gay/trans controversy aside ... this is still not a good movie

[3/10 · 4 November 2023]

(Yes, this review discusses who the murderer is, but doesn't everyone know that by now?)

It is not really true that the world is divided into two groups: people who love and respect "Dressed to Kill", and people whose only reason for disliking it is that they see it as anti/LGBTQ propaganda. It's certainly not my only reason for disliking it.

There are people who try to make out that de Palma's approach to gender ID and sexual orientation is not particularly bad ... for its time ... maybe, and it's true that they do have a clip of a news interview with a trans woman that supports the idea that de Palma doesn't think that ALL trans woman are deranged murderers. And I suppose you could go on and say that this is really pointing the finger not at LGBTQ people in general, but only at those LGBTQ people who are affected by dissociative identity disorder (DID), and really only at the subset of that intersection one of whose alters is very angry with another one and liable to act out murderously. (Although that seems rather ableist too. Even if it was Hitchcock's idea originally.)

But, even pretending we can ignore this whole aspect, I still don't think it's a good movie.

First: it goes beyond mere "hommage" to "Psycho", and goes over into the line into something more like an eye-winking parody, with scenes and characters and plot elements self-consciously popping up all the time. This could work as a comedy, but it really interferes with DtK's pretensions at being a thriller.

Second, there are numerous plot holes, like, for example, how does Michael Caine actually get to the murder scene? Has he really been following his victim all over NYC all day? I think that's a weakness in the plot.

Third, are there really supposed to be relationship vibes between the sex worker and the high school student? Can I say "eww" here? This is either not explored enough, or else way too much.

Fourth, the score is loud and intrusive, and doesn't have the range of Herrmann's score in "Psycho" over moods ranging from the lyrical to the ominous to the suspenseful to the terrified.

Under "miscellaneous", I was particularly annoyed by the interminable pre-credits dream sequence, an idea which worked a million times better in "Deliverance" partly because it was newer and much briefer.

So, if you are covertly sad because you feel you have been depriving yourself of the chance to see a great movie out of principled allyship, I have good news for you!

Water (I) (2005)

Shows us what hope in a hopeless world looks like

[10/10 · 3 September 2023]

This movie ends on a note of hope. Of a sort. But not the kind of hope that comes with assurance and plans and happy endings coming into being and people walking into the rays of light from the rising sun.

It's more like taking everything meaningful in your world, bleeding and despoiled as it is, and hurling it desperately toward someone else's hands, like a forlorn and precious gem, and watching it disappear, knowing that you will never know what happened to it. But you hope.

Director Deepa Mehta must have needed this kind of hope in 2000 when her production in India was shut down as blasphemous and her sets in Varanasi were thrown in the Ganges, and she had to imagine the possibility that she might ultimately yet convey this story, which - years later - she was able to recast and restage in Sri Lanka.

The film is set in 1938, a time when widowed women and girls in India faced isolation, exploitation, and abuse, under the guise of tradition taking the name of faith that they were expected to internalize themselves and use to police each other. CONTENT WARNING: we are shown very bleak and horrible things. This is not a "Pollyanna" film where an innocent girl melts everyone's heart and brings salvation to everyone. No such luck. We are shown that a man can enjoy a reputation as liberal and forward-thinking, and yet be a beast without ever sensing the contradiction.

In this story, hope is given a name: Gandhi. But we are reminded throughout the film that the response to Gandhi's message in India was various; we are shown people who respect his call to conscience, and we are shown those who are convinced that his critique of caste and marginalization will "sink India". (Should I assume that everyone reading this is aware of the circumstances of Gandhi's assassination in 1948? Probably not.)

Mehta assured us at the end of the film that the marginalization of widows had not yet disappeared in 2005 in India, 67 years after the action of the story. I suspect it hasn't yet.

But, lest anyone miss the obvious point, similar atrocities against women can be found just about anywhere today, using any faith as a cover, and are not clearly on the road to disappearance in the United States or anyplace else. So I hope my admiration for this film is not only an expression of imperialist white male saviorism. We all need examples of hope and should endure whatever we have to to seek them out. In the words of Mariame Kaba, "Hope is a discipline."

With a Song in My Heart (1952)

I was kind of disappointed - don't @ me

[4/10 · 3 June 2023]

A lot of reviewers have loved this movie, and a lot of award-givers back in the 1950's loved it too, particularly the performances by Susan Hayward and Thelma Ritter. I don't have any beef with Hayward and Ritter, or with Froman's dubbed-over singing in all those show tunes (I'm no music pro but it seemed seamless to me), but to me it seemed kind of unfocused, overstuffed with tunes, and a bit dubious as a biopic.

This movie is trying to do four dramatic things on top of being a showcase for the songs that went into the record album that came out of the movie. (To be fair it was a very successful album, apparently.) I didn't time it, but I'll bet that this two-hour movie is about 50% musical performances by Hayward/Froman. Just to make an important distinction, this movie is not a "musical" like, say, "Singing in the Rain", in which the songs are written for the production and advance the plot. It's more like a musical revue, in which you are paying to watch an onstage performance by a singer and accompanists.

That leaves the movie about an hour to try to do four dramatic things, and I don't think it really can:

(a) It's a patriotic movie about supporting the troops, which was made in 1952, that is, in wartime. The first minute of the opening titles make it clear that the producers were very clear about this, as you see that every title card is "sponsored" by the logo or "seal" of one or another U. S. military service or subservice or NATO power.

(b) It's supposed to be a biopic, but there's not enough time left to do it right, and it's very much an "authorized" biopic in which the subject not only had input but was intimately involved in the production. But then it's not presented as Froman's own account, but as a story about Froman's great courage narrated by her ex-husband (Ross, divorced 1948), her current husband (Burn, married 1948), and the Thelma Ritter character (Clancy, ??), who has most of the best lines but, was she based on anyone real? Who is paying her to be Froman's personal nurse/aide during the second half of the film? Was that real? I have no idea.

There are a bunch of glitches in the timeline too if you look at it from the point of view of accuracy, like for example Ross trying to talk Froman into marrying him because "weddings are popular what with the war fever", but in fact Ross and Froman were married in 1933. A lot of Froman's life has to just be compressed in order to get from her apprentice days in the late 1920's up to the plane crash in 1943 in a hurry.

(c) It's supposed to be a dramatic story about the triangle between Froman, Ross, and Burn, but it doesn't have enough time to really develop the relationships, particularly the one with Burn. He just shows up as a guy as handsome as Rory Calhoun who is like "I love you" and she is like "sorry, I can't, I'm married" and he is like "I still love you and will chase you everywhere". Froman doesn't seem to have a lot of agency here as Ross and Burn are having summit meetings about who gets her. Also, the screenplay would like to resolve the RossBurn issue as soon as the 1945 USO tour ends, but here too life seems to have been different. This is a case where you watch the biopic and then you are frustrated and want to go and find a biography to find out the real story. (Well, speaking for myself, anyway.)

(d) Finally, it wants to be an inspirational story about Froman's courage in recovering from her injuries and singing to the troops in Europe in 1945. But we don't really see a lot of the courageous parts. We see her being moved around on hospital carts and we see doctors and we hear that her leg might get amputated, but we don't see long periods of rehabilition or pain or the actual work of dealing with disabilities. And then she has a moment of despair, and Thelma Ritter yells at her and shames her out of it, which we are given to understand is the best thing to do because god forbid a person with disability or chronic pain should feel down at all. Anyway the emphasis on "getting back to being a normal woman again" (that is, walking, on two original-equipment legs) may strike a discordant note for people who are in, or listening to, the disabled community these days.

Actually I would like to see a good honest biopic, or miniseries, about Froman's life presenting a detailed picture of her relationships and her experiences with trauma and disability and her career and service. This isn't it, in my opinion. Sorry for having impossible standards, I guess ...

Come to Daddy (2019)

This has shocks! Twists! And .. is that it?

[6/10 · 25 October 2022]

I am not really going to dump all the spoilers into this review, because it would just be an exhausting list, but here's one: this movie is in my opinion a lot like a Twitch run-through of a single-player stealth RPG, or, maybe even more so, of an old-school text adventure, where the lead character is "You" and you are basically trying to survive to the end of the maze, faced with choice points like:

You hear a loud metallic grinding sound below you!

(look down)

You see nothing but the carpet.

So you are watching a befuddled Elijah Wood try to navigate this thing, and there are plenty of plot twists, shocks, "ewwww!" moments, and so on. I sort of stumbled on this thing randomly and my spouse and I watched it, and we killed a couple of hours and talked afterwards about how weird it was, and we could have done worse for the evening.

So how high do I rate this?

A lot of people think this is just exactly the sort of movie they love. I can't argue with that. I'll just say that it falls short of what I think a great movie is, and even a little short of a good one, and that some of the claims that I see being made here and there seem to me to be cases of seeing what one wants to see.

Is this "tightly plotted"? No. You race through the movie at a speed that's fast enough that it's hard at the time to look at the seams and holes in the plot, and maybe it's enough to power the roller coaster ride in the moment. But you, or at least I, get a night's sleep and then I start to get lots of thoughts like "But wait, why didn't this person do that?" "Why didn't this person have X in their possession?" "What were these people doing in all the time leading up to this?" That sort of thing.

Does Elijah Wood do a magnificent job of acting? No. I mean, I don't think he's called upon to. His job is just to run around like a game avatar and look scared or angry at the appropriate points. But as to trying to get across the poignancy of his estrangement from his dad, or whatever is supposed to be "heartfelt" about this, I think the plot doesn't give him enough time or breath to even attempt it. Of course some of the other cast give us some real scenery-chewing which is entertaining enough at times.

So, I found it good enough that I don't regret having seen it, but not nearly good enough that I want to see it again or promote it. There, that's my hot take written with my smelly pen...

Café Lumière (2003)

A fascinating reflection on art and artists (for those who are fascinated by such things)(and trains)

[10/10 · 22 October 2022]

There are works of art that are about artists who are making art about artists, and which turn into intricate exercises in reflective self-reference, like Escher prints. Not everyone likes such things or sees them as fun. Some people are looking for works of art that are just about, you know, things happening, people who arrive at new destinations, narrative, story, that sort of thing. Some people find that these meditative exercises on the creative process bore them, which is okay, and then conclude, mistakenly, that they are intrinsically boring. That's going too far, say I. I loved Café Lumiere and am still thinking about it, but I recognize that not everyone will.

Still, it should help if you like trains. About half an hour into it, I said, maybe out loud, "This would be a great starting point for anyone who wants to get into Japanese trainspotting - there are all these different rail lines, all these different car designs!" But then, as if he had heard me, one of the characters in the film reveals his own fascination with trains and train-based art and then goes on a mission to record train noises all over the Tokyo area. Trains are a really central metaphor for this film, it turns out - its closing shot includes at least three, maybe four different trains on a tangle of lines, in momentary proximity yet going with determination down their own tracks.

This is a film by a Taiwanese artist, made in homage to the Japanese filmmaker Ozu Yasujiro, concerning a Japanese creative who is researching a project - one reviewer said she was writing an article, but I get the impression it might be a documentary film - about the Taiwanese composer Jiang Wenye, in the course of which she interviews the composer's wife and daughter, played by themselves. Composer Jiang, we are told, when he was in Tokyo, hung out in a bookstore and also in a café; Inoue Yoko, our creative, tries to track down these locations, while also hanging out in a bookstore and working in a café. She has a dream apparently referencing Maurice Sendak's picture book "Outside Over There". The heroine of this book plays a "wonder horn" and is apparently an artist in her own right.

Also, Yoko is three months pregnant and plans to raise the child herself. Some viewers apparently don't trust her story about her Taiwanese boyfriend, but I don't know why I shouldn't. Her parents are apprehensive about how this is going to work out, but she is just going on with her life. Like a train. By the way, Jiang's café was not called "Café Lumiere". The movie's title is generally reported to be a shout-out to the Lumiere brothers who made a pioneering early film featuring a train and exhibited it in 1895, reportedly in a café.

Well, I have now spoiled just about all the "events" of this film, but this film is not really about events - it consists largely of meditative sequences in which we get to think about things. Have I now told you everything I think is interesting about this movie? No, I have not! Could I have written something more extensive by doing more research myself, possibly while working in a café? Sure! Had I better watch Ozu's "Tokyo Story" which this movie reflects? You bet. But I think I've told you enough to help you decide if you might like it or might prefer something else.

Cruella (2021)

Sadly, not what I'd hoped .. issues of tone and story weigh it down

[5/10 · 27 August 2022]

I had really hoped I would like this movie a lot.

I don't find any fault with the cast - either the Emma tier or the supporting ensemble. But somehow it wasn't right. It's taken me a few hours to figure out exactly what wasn't.

First, the film starts off with a basic structural problem: Cruella De Vil is its protagonist, its heroine and point of view character. But Cruella De Vil as we know her from 101 Dalmatians is horrible. She wants to make coats out of doggies! COATS! DOGGIES! Who wants to see a movie where somebody like that is the protagonist?

Well, the movie cheats. I see why they felt the need to. But they have to make "Cruella's" Cruella the sort of person you want to root for, so they are necessarily required to make her NOT as evil as 101D-Cruella, and, explicitly, someone who does NOT want to make coats out of doggies. Her hard life makes her vengeful, deceitful, reckless, and scornful of laws and conventions, but when it's all done and the loose ends in the film are tied up, she is still not the 101-D Cruella and there's nothing obvious that's going to happen that is going to turn her from what she is into a maker of canine-based outerwear.

There are at least rumors of there being a second sequel (prequel? Midquel?) that would solve that, but that's still cheating, and it would have to have grimmer plot elements than "Cruella" does, which would be an achievement. (It would also be a cheat if they are really intending to retcon 101D entirely so that we have been misunderstanding 101D-Cruella this whole time, although it might be an interesting cheat.)

This brings me to the second main problem I have with this movie: it is like a mashup of two movies. On the one hand it has the kids'-movie capers-and-hijinks style of "Home Alone" or maybe a "Beethoven" film. On the other hand, it has a lot of distinctly PG plot elements that are really grim and disturbing, and that's from my own POV, much less that of some eight-year-old who winds up in the audience. I mean, ten minutes in, a child is attacked by ravening murderous dogs! That's heavy material, and it doesn't soften up. Disney movies are of course known for their Bambi issues, but, trust me - by the end of the movie you WISH that this movie only had a Bambi issue.

I'm not averse to the idea of a movie about CDV having grim elements, but I find it jarring to have them share the same scenes with cartoon-type cops-and-robbers hilarity, so that you are called upon to dismiss the cops and guards as non-threatening cartoon characters and then treat the Baroness, say, with the seriousness that the plot demands from you.

So, that's my take, feel free to slice it up -

The Red Turtle (2016)

A contrarian view: Ghibli style and quality don't mesh with the underlying horror story

[4/10 · 13 August 2022]

We expect good things from Studio Ghibli. It's reasonable for us to do so. But that shouldn't lead us to project those expectations onto a work which has the Ghibli production quality and style, but whose story has come from someone without much of a track record.

Critics tended to like "The Red Turtle", but the problem is that the things they said about the story just don't add up. It was called an allegory of the natural world - which it isn't - and a story about the circle of life - also not right - and is said to be about a guy finding his "soulmate" - a very dubious assertion. My take is that the critics were "herding" - that is, matching their good ratings to the good ratings of other critics - and were straining to find some interpretation that would make "Turtle" a meaningful film.

"The Red Turtle" kind of looks like a folktale, but it's not based on one. Folktales are products of cultures and tell you something about the practices and values of those cultures. (See for example "Ten Canoes". I mean literally find a way to see it! It's very good.) But "The Red Turtle" does not have its source in a culture. You would have to ask auteur Michael Dudok de Wit what he had in mind, I suppose.

So let's talk about what really happens in this movie (spoilers abound from this point on, of course). A man is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. Undaunted, he builds a raft to escape. But a monster keeps him a prisoner there. The monster will not even let him kill himself. It uses its power over him to reproduce using his seed. The monster's offspring swims away. When the man, after years of captivity, dies of old age, the monster swims away too.

So, yes, this is really a horror story. At least from the human point of view. Or, if you prefer, maybe it's a pleasant slice-of-life narrative made for an audience of supernatural turtle monsters. But from the human point of view it's clearly a horror story, or would be if not for the fact that the monster sometimes takes the physical form of a naked woman. That really shouldn't distract anyone, but maybe it has?

"Oh, you cynic, how can you not recognize the purity of the love story between the man and the Turtle Woman?" Well, is it really love when one party starts off by imprisoning the other party? When there is so far as we know no communication between the two over a period apparently of decades? When the imprisoning party has the option of turning back into a turtle at any time and going off and living in turtle society? I mean, really.

The fact that it's a horror story doesn't automatically mean that it's bad, but I think it's a problem that on the one hand it's a very bleak and hopeless horror story and on the other hand it doesn't face up to its own horrible aspects and hides its real nature behind pleasant ambient music. Also, I think that it's subject to a very misogynistic interpretation, as a fable about how men are trying to gallantly explore the world and brave the elements and then women seduce and trap them so they can have babies. I'm not saying this was really on Dudok de Wit's mind, but I don't know what was.

Anyway, it's not an allegory of the natural world when most of the characters are supernatural, and it's not about the circle of life if most of the characters are quite possibly immortal and only one unfortunate prisoner dies. So there.

Picnic (1955)

Worthwhile, though obscured by spectacle

[8/10 · 23 July 2022]

Picnic is a movie from another time and place, the work of people from other times and places. I don't mean that it's bad or worthless; I mean that it's like a historical document, or rather like a palimpsest, a document which has been written over and erased and edited by different people with different interests - really a historical and biographical puzzle. Somewhere under there is the reality of "small-town Kansas," as selected and interpreted by playwright William Inge based on his own life in the 1920's and 1930's, and then staged on Broadway by Joshua Logan, and then filmed largely on location in Kansas in the 1950's and turned into a Hollywood production, also directed by Logan with an adapted screenplay by Daniel Taradash. All the people involved in this including Inge are somewhat unreliable narrators, and it's reasonable to ask if watching this film is worth the trouble today. I like puzzles, so I'm glad to have seen it on DVD and I'm obviously still thinking about it. Your results may vary though.

First, let me unpack the scare quotes in the previous paragraph. Let's not get confused into thinking that "small-town Kansas" is or was a real thing that is depicted in Inge's play or Logan's movie. Inge was born in Independence, KS, whose population was close to 13,000 in 1930. The movie was largely filmed in Hutchinson, KS, which had a population over 30,000 at the time and which, I promise you, would have been described as "the big city" by residents of the outlying villages of Reno County. But in any case, Inge's play doesn't present us with a town, it presents us with two houses, in which six women (three in one household) live, and with three men who become linked in some way with these women. So it's not a sociological study of "small-town life" any more than a Sartre play like "No Exit" is. Inge meant his characters to be elements in a composition, not actors in a narrative. But without reading or watching the original play itself (which would be the scholarly thing to do, of course) I don't want to attempt to go much further into what Inge intended and will at least try to settle for saying what the movie winds up seeming to intend.

It seems that in the transition to moviehood there was a desire to make "Picnic" more "spectacular" rather than just being people interacting on two back porches. The Inge play, I should mention, does not show a picnic! The leading characters don't attend it! The movie, by contrast, provides a huge picnic pretty much comparable to a county fair, with truckloads of food, community singing, and a swan boat on the Saline River. (This detail sticks with me: at one point it is announced that little kids are going to get the chance to dig through a pile of hay in search of quarters and other change totaling *one hundred twenty-five dollars*. WHAT? In the 1950's?? That has to be like over fifteen hundred dollars today! Those kids are going to kill each other fighting for that loot!) There are also location shots of freight trains, grain elevators, and a police chase. These scenes which are not original to the play are pretty recognizable and don't really add to the narrative (or composition). (By the way, I don't recall a single Extra of Color in the whole picnic crowd. Hutchinson was pretty white in those days, but not ALL white. Just saying.)

So what is "Picnic" really about? Really - this insight has come to me just this minute - it's a lot like a Jane Austen novel - that is, it's about the decisions women have to make to get a good life for themselves and their daughters, which largely involve matters of marriage. (That is NOT meant as disrespect to Austen, whom I love.) This is slightly obscured by the fact that we begin the movie by following Hal Carter, the point-of-view character, played by a 37-year-old William Holden (really too old for this), who hops off a freight, washes himself up in the river, and wanders by chance into the aforementioned two-house all-female neighborhood. He first meets the Kind and Wise Old Lady (Mrs. Potts) who gives him pie and offers him a room. But then he meets the rest of the ensemble: the Calculating Deserted Mother (Flo Owens), the Pretty Daughter (Madge), the Scholarly Tomboy Daughter (Millie), and the Prudish Old Maid Schoolteacher (Rosemary Sydney). If we are the Mother, we are very concerned with marrying off the Pretty Daughter to the Grain Elevator Heir (Alan Benson) right away before her beauty fades like a withering blossom. The Pretty Daughter is not as excited about him as the Mother, though. Honestly - this is a big spoiler - this is a lot like Pride and Prejudice (with some crossover characters from other novels), only if Darcy were not so great and Wickham were maybe a diamond in the rough. There is also a side plot about whether POMS will get her perennial date, the Hapless Shop Owner, to marry her.

But Inge has a lot of concerns of his own relating to this whole process, which, by the way, also turn up throughout the culture of the 1950's. Sexual repression and prudery, for one. Sons who don't live up to their fathers' expectations of "manliness". (If this sounds to you like Tennessee Williams, I agree with you, and btw Williams was an early mentor to Inge.) Young men who don't immediately fit in and "fail" early and do itinerant labor and struggle to climb back up onto the ladder of class, fighting against social stigma and their own feelings of shame. Alcohol. A lot of what rescues this movie from mediocrity and really gives it some greatness is that you can sense the extent to which the real Inge cares about these critical matters (look it up if you like) and has transmitted his concern to us through all these layers.

Watching this film leaves me unsatisfied in several ways. I want to get into the fictional neighborhood and interview some of the characters and flesh out the novel and find out more details of their lives and this town. I want to argue with some of them about whether their choices are really as limited as they think and really have to be made before the 24 hours of action of the film expire. I want to find out more about Inge's "Summer Brave", staged only after Inge's death but which was the original version of "Picnic" and the version Inge said he preferred. I take all of these feelings of mine as evidence that watching this movie was a good idea. For me, anyway.

Three Times (2005)

Technically brilliant. Is love what it used to be?

[10/10 · 17 July 2022]

This film was widely recognized as one of the best films of 2006, and seeing it now I believe its reputation is well deserved, both on account of the confident technical brilliance of director Hou Hsiao-Hsien and because of the very economical way he presents some interesting insights, some explicit, some not so much.

We are given three 40-minute vignettes about love and love-adjacent behaviors, set in Taiwan in the years 1966, 1911, and 2005 (in that order). In each, there is a man played by Chang Chen and a woman played by Shu Qi. Hou gives each episode its own visual style; the earliest, very deliberate, with carefully placed cameras peering through doorways to focus on a character, and silent-film style sepia title cards in lieu of audio dialogue; the latest, very fast-paced with action shots and close-up work. Throughout, Hou exemplifies the practice of showing the audience, rather than telling the audience in expository dialogue.

The 1966 episode ("A Time for Love") is apparently very simple: a man doing his compulsory military service meets a woman working in a pool hall while home on furlough. They apparently exchange a letter or two. He comes home again, and she has moved elsewhere. So he goes and finds her. They share some noodles and hold hands in the bus station. They smile a lot and apparently have something going despite the fact that they have maybe 100 words of dialogue in this whole segment. That's it, and it seems like enough. It's nice! It's cute! (We'll revisit this.)

The 1911 episode (rather ironically titled "A Time for Freedom") is set in a much grimmer and more oppressive reality. And I'm not just talking about the state of China under the Qing dynasty, which had moreover ceded Taiwan to Japanese occupation 16 years previous. The segment is set in a brothel, which is to say in a center of unfreedom for women. The Shu Qi character doesn't even have a name in this segment - she is just "Courtesan". Chang Chen plays a well-off revolutionary-minded intellectual who is involved in the covert struggle against occupation and feudalism - at least in the traveling and networking and appreciating revolutionary poetry parts. (This is not to dismiss these activities.) He is at least in principle an ally of women, but that's not his central focus and we see in practice what it comes to. At one point a title card announces "The Wuchang Uprising", an actual important historical event, but on the screen we are seeing only the day-to-day unending routine of the brothel. The "sorrowful waves" of the final poem are not just talking about Japanese imperialism.

Now we skip ahead to love, or lustfulness anyway, in the present day ("A Time for Youth"). Shu Qi's Jing is singing in a club. Performing her own songs which she composes using Garageband software. She takes the initiative in an affair with motorcycle-riding photographer Zhen. They have a lot more choices than their historical counterparts. They have been and are involved with other people. What strikes me, though, is that they do not smile much and really don't seem very happy. Jing's music is pretty downbeat in tone. We have no real sense at the end of them having any kind of future - there is a final shot of Jing riding with Zhen on his motorcycle, but is that a real new sequence, or a memory, or Jing's fantasy? I really don't know. Is this what "youth" are facing these days? Will they maybe be happier when they are "Mature"?

So does this mean that 1966 marked the golden pinnacle of love in Taiwan, poised between a past of no choices and a present of too many unsatisfying choices? I don't know about that. Is it a golden age if women have to wait for the right guy to ride buses all over Taiwan to find them? We don't really know what would have happened to May and Chen after that day in 1966. Being happy together for a day or two is one thing, and can be managed without conversations about life plans, but maybe actually living together might require more? I think Hou is perfectly happy for us to think about these things after the picture is over.

The Aura (2005)

I've never seen a better heist film

[10/10 · 12 February 2022]

When I was done watching this, I asked myself, "Why do I not know about all the other wonderful films that writer/director Fabian Belinsky must have produced since 2005?" Of course the answer is that he died of a heart attack in 2006, at the age of 47. A catastrophe.

This film is worth going to the trouble and expense that you will have to go to in order to see it, given that nobody is streaming it. Ricardo Darin plays the point of view character with simple and unassuming genius. A taxidermist whose hobby is to work out in his imagination how successful heists could be carried out, he goes on a hunting trip in the course of which chance events place an actual heist situation in his hands. How will this actually work out in the face of chance and with the involvement of actual crooks?

The rest of the ensemble is also great. Including the dog. The musical score, the locations, the camera work - it's all brilliant.

"The Aura", we are told, refers to the moments when an epileptic suddenly knows that a seizure is inevitable. We have the same feeling of inevitability several times in this film, brought about by one realization or another. It gripped my attention throughout. I won't spoil it by going into the details. Really. See it.

The Time Machine (1960)

Brilliant screenplay - better than Wells' novella!

[9/10 · 22 January 2022]

I honestly don't think the late David Duncan ever got enough credit for this screenplay. Yes, the special effects deserved the acclaim they got. But to really understand the magnitude of Duncan's achievement you have to go back and read Wells' novella. It's not anywhere near as good a story - not as tightly plotted, not as satisfying to the viewer - as the one Duncan gave us.

Wells' "Time Machine" is not at all as good as "War of the Worlds" or "The Invisible Man", and it would have posed a lot of challenges to anyone trying to adapt it. Thankfully, Duncan had the courage to invent a lot of new story elements which we now think of as canon. The sequence of wars - the Morlocks' sirens - the three books the traveler takes with him on his final trip - these are all Duncan's work, not Wells'. In the novella, the traveler takes no books and has not even any interest in reviving human society! He is only interested in bringing back "proofs" and then just never comes back. And don't get me started talking about matches and camphor and the forest fire which Duncan wisely cut out!!

Yes, it's silly that the Eloi speak English in the movie, but Wells' tedious account of the traveler and the Eloi stuck in mutual incomprehension is so dull that I refuse to judge Duncan harshly for moving the story along as he did.

The Nest (I) (2020)

Some people can make any manor into a house of ghosts

[9/10 · 27 December 2021]

Between the blurbs, the critics, and the user reviews, there seems to be a lot of disagreement about what this movie is trying to do. This surprises me. It seems to me very clear that this movie is trying to do one thing, and does it quite well and quite logically.

But that one thing is not about cursed houses, or the Thatcher era, or even "money" per se. This movie is about a narcissist - a narcissist of a type perhaps much more familiar to us in the late 2010s than in the 1980s. A narcissist who lies all the time, who insists on controlling everything, especially the things he doesn't know how to manage. A narcissist of whom it can be said that "everything he touches, dies." This movie is about how he ruins everything and everyone around him, crashing to a rock bottom from where he can't even con anyone into giving him cab fare.

A narcissist often likes to have a spouse on hand as a fashion accessory and semi-witting accomplice, and Rory has Allison. When, in the first ten minutes of the movie, Rory tells Allison that he has decided that they are all packing up and moving from the US to London because he says so, we know where the movie is going. When Allison's mother tells her that this is entirely reasonable and she should let her man make all the decisions, we know where the movie is going. When she does not immediately seek out a divorce lawyer, we know where the movie is going. When they get to London and Rory drags Allison to a business dinner where it becomes immediately clear that Rory's story to Allison about how he was going to have his own company was a pack of lies, we know where the movie is going. When Allison tells her kids that they have to be honest with each other, and then lies to them in the same breath telling them that they have nothing to worry about, we see that the movie is getting there right on schedule.

It is, or ought to be, completely clear very early on that Rory is headed for a crash, because all he knows how to do is (to use a "Good Place" term) bullswish about great deals and then expect everyone to give him a bottomless credit line. It does not depend on the vagaries of the stock market, or bad luck, much less on the particulars of his rented manor house. He would be able to go bust under any circumstances.

You might make a case, I suppose, that Rory is a man ahead of his time, his time being the present age of Internet swindlers. But honestly I don't think he has the determination to pull off a decent scheme. Although maybe one of the reasons I like this movie is Rory does crash instead of perpetually and invulnerably floating in a balloon of his own hot air. These days, that kind of passes for a romantic ending from a simpler time.

The Robber Bride (2007 TV Movie)

You won't believe what this guy does next (no, really)

[3/10 · 26 December 2021]

I haven't yet read the Margaret Atwood novel that loosely inspired this CBC movie, so it doesn't terribly bother me that it's been somehow been converted into a detective thriller. But did they have to make the detective -that- guy?

(Spoilers start here, although they won't spoil things very much if you know anything about this movie at all)

So, seriously, we learn early on that the apparently-murdered Zenia was a sociopathic liar and predator. And the modern viewer will only be put on their guard by the line that "she must absolutely be dead, we found three pints of blood!" (This dodge has been used more than once since 2007, in culture and also in real life.)

What will surprise you is that this detective, a former cop, mind you, who already has a good picture of Zenia's lying manipulativeness, pretty much immediately upon having the opportunity allows himself to get seduced by said lies and manipulations, temporarily abandoning in murderer's jail the supposed friend who brought him into the case. I know guys are stupid in real life and even stupider in movies, but this is just painful to watch.

(Yes, I noticed that they threw in a little bit about "well, he got thrown off the force for covering up for a drug-using woman partner, so it's in character, he's just that kind of guy." Sorry, that doesn't impress me.)

That's why I'm spoiling this so much. I really don't want to you go to the trouble of finding this movie and then suffering. There are plenty of other women sociopaths in the movies and on TV these days. You don't need to settle for this.

Also, the movie then gets a little self-conscious about abandoning its literary-fiction roots and finishes up with a kind of Rashomon ending where you don't know what really happened and don't really care. That's about it. The acting and production are decent, but nobody can build on the marshy foundation of this screenplay.

Come Early Morning (2006)

Not a rom-com or a tragedy, but a good movie about life

[8/10 · 26 December 2021]

First, a couple cautionary notes: this is a very white and cis/het movie, shot in North Little Rock, in which the biggest cultural divide is between "old country" and "new country" and in which going to an evangelical church with Christian rock on Sunday is a positive thing in people's lives. I understand that this may not have good associations for everyone.

I don't go out looking for movies as culturally vanilla as this as a rule, but it doesn't strike me that this movie goes out of its way to beat you over the head with the Bible. It's actually a pretty realistic movie about a period in the life of a woman who has a productive working life during the day and then tries to fill the void at night with alcohol and whatever she gets from the guys she picks up in the local bar. She hasn't had great relationship models in her life, apparently, and the movie catches her at a time when she is trying to, well, get better.

This setup could easily lead either to a tragic ending or a rom-com ending wrapped up with a Hallmark/GAC movie Christmas bow. SPOILER: it doesn't do either one. Some of the things that might be going somewhere "nice" turn out to leave only memories. On the other hand her arc does bend upward and left me feeling glad that I searched this movie out.

Brand Upon the Brain! (2006)

A success on its own terms (and: notes to potential viewers)

[10/10 · 10 October 2021]

(Content warning: abuse of children; parental sexual molestation)

The conventional blurb about a man going back to his childhood home leaves out a lot. A more descriptive one would be "feelings about a psychologically abusive childhood processed into the language of a surrealistic 1920's-era silent-melodrama with title cards, music, and a narrative track, rather than spoken dialogue, and full of genderqueer libido". Then of course one might get into the particulars - about the lighthouse with an orphanage in the basement and the steampunk mad scientist father who harvests adrenochrome (well, "nectar") and the "Lightbulb Kids", 1920's-era YA novel teen detectives at least one of whom arrives on the scene - but there, I'm spoiling too much.

My point is that if you just stumble over this DVD and slide it in without any buildup about what writer-director Guy Maddin is trying to do here, you might just weirded out real fast and quit halfway in. I almost did. After I finished, though, I watched the 50-minute "Making Of" documentary that was also on the DVD (I hardly ever do this sort of thing) and I think I have some insights that will pave the way for other viewers. Perhaps.

Maddin confidently claims that this film (whose protagonist is also named "Guy Maddin") is 97% biographically true, by which he does not mean surface elements like the lighthouse (really it functions more like a guard tower) but refers to the emotional truth of his childhood. This is also disturbing. One reason I watched the interview, to be honest, was that at the end I kind of wanted to see that Maddin was really still okay. He seemed to be (in2009 anyway), and described basically using his films as therapy (he doesn't use that word) for processing the emotional experiences of his own childhood and the misleading models of reality one develops as a child and builds over like a modern house built on a flawed foundation.

Maddin knows a lot about film history and is consciously influenced in this by directors like Luis Bunuel and Erich von Stroheim and also the Kuchar brothers. He says that this had to be a silent film because the tight production schedule didn't give him any time to write dialogue. At the same time he clearly enjoyed the opportunity. The melodramatic language of expressions ("Melodrama is the naturalism of dreams," Maddin says) and characters whose eyeballs seem to fill the screen recalls to me at least what Eisenstein did in "Ivan the Terrible".

The action is deliberately presented using an editing style that Maddin says he and his editor came up with serendipitously, in which we can see numerous microclips and frozen frames hopping forward in time, then backward, then maybe centering on the desired moment. Maddin says this replicates the way childhood memories are recalled and savored. (This makes the viewing experience unusual but not unwatchable, in my opinion.) I felt that the following piece of information actually put this film in a new perspective for me: if you see this streamed or on DVD, this is not at all the way this movie was meant to be experienced. When it was released, it would be presented in your city in a theatre, not just projected on the screen, but accompanied by a troupe of live performers, including a narrator, a singer, 11 musicians, and a three-person sound effects team producing footsteps, bangs, splashes, chews and slurps in full view of the audience. Somehow this idea of a public ensemble performance seems like it would distance the viewer more from the film and make it less narrative and more symbolic and evocative (if that makes any sense) than just watching it on the DVR as if it were a TV program.

Anyway it seems to me that Maddin and the talented cast and crew produced pretty much exactly what they wanted to. I'm glad I saw it, and I didn't see anything that I would call a "flaw". I think what I've said above should give the reader enough information to decide if it's just what they would rather avoid, or just what they might be interested in looking up and seeing!

The Many Saints of Newark (2021)

Too much for a movie, not enough for a prequel

[6/10 · 2 October 2021]

Whether you look at "Many Saints" as a stand-alone movie, or as a prequel to "The Sopranos", it doesn't quite work.

To give it its due, it has great acting and production values, and numerous worthy storylines.

But it never gets over the (I think) insurmountable job of being both a good movie and also a prequel to the complex 86-hour saga which was one of the best series in the history of prestige television.

If one wants to do a prequel to a show like "The Sopranos", and one doesn't want to do what Vince Gilligan did for "Breaking Bad" by making a whole new prequel series that has the time to explore in depth the backstories of many characters, then I don't know what to tell you. I don't think you can really do what you want in a two-hour film. (And, by the way, "Better Call Saul" has been restrained enough not to even touch yet on Walter's backstory.)

And if you want to make an engaging film about racist Italian gangsters in Newark in the 1960's committing various crimes against their own family members and also facing rebellions both from the Black community and their former Black subordinates - that can be done! Although even that's pretty ambitious for two hours, you might want three!

But in that case if you want to make it ALSO a series prequel you are only going to end up cluttering it up with distractions involving the self-imposed necessity of showing the 1960's versions of 15 or 20 people (I didn't count) who later on become characters in a TV show set much later, starting with a Sunset Boulevard style narration to the present-day audience from within his grave complaining about the child Tony Soprano who later murders him, from the cadaverous lips of Christopher Moltesanti who, mind you, is either unborn or *an infant* throughout the action of "Many Saints".

I mean, you have all this other action going on, and meanwhile you have dead adult Christopher's voice reminding you that all that stuff isn't the real point, "the real point is to show how that kid Tony gets turned into the kind of jerk who would murder sweet little baby me."

I mean, that's distracting.

The History Boys (2006)

A period piece from a different period

[6/10 · 26 September 2021]

This highly acclaimed 2006 film based on a highly acclaimed 2004 play set in the 1980's ... really doesn't do well today. Perhaps this was in fact really trenchant, "history-making" social criticism back in the day. But in the post-#MeToo era, in an era when the ancient mechanisms of equality are perhaps not seen as legitimate as they used to be seen, the things that are uncriticized scream out more loudly than the criticisms of the things that are. For me, much of this film was like watching some interesting events take place onstage in a theatre where, however, there are continuously irritating sound and lighting effects which the cast never notices or mentions.

The film is set in a boys-only private school where the protagonist of creative teaching is an "amiable pederast" (the Guardian theatre reviewer's words, not mine) who can't refrain from fondling the students - "assaulting" is another word one might use. It is taken for granted that no harm is done by this and that it is a regrettable mischance when he is caught in the act. The boys indeed are shown to be in charge of these situations. Mrs. Lintott, the female teacher who is to some degree the social conscience of the production, does shoot down most of the rationalizations - "Groping is groping" - but somehow misses the rationalization about how the boys are really all grown up and really hold the reins of the power imbalance. The fully heterosexual and anti-gay headmaster gropes his female assistant as well, a woman who had a non-speaking part in the play. The Bechdel test is not passed.

This is not supposed to be a movie about sexual harassment, though, but rather an exploration of the nature of teaching and what pedagogy is and of the intellectual-exploration approach of Mr. Hector vs. The "it's all a game, say the thing that will get you into Oxford" hot takes of Mr. Irwin. Some interesting things are said about all this, but what is really being exposed - and is never discussed - is what an utter sham the system of private schools and exams and elite universities is from the point of view of determining which young men are going to be admitted to the ruling class of England.

Mrs. Lintott attempts to tell these young men something about how women are left out of the subject matter of history, but she does so from the point of view of "these are modern times, one of the Oxford dons might actually be a woman and you have to be prepared to say something she would appreciate." Meanwhile the current generation of girls who are out there somewhere in some other school are unmentioned and unconsidered.

I will grant that this film might actually provoke productive discussions, like for example "So what does one really say about the Holocaust - obviously neither of the approaches presented in the film will do at all, so what is the better one that none of the characters actually present us with?" Or "Why does everyone think that it's important to get into Oxford, since actually (as we find out) most of the successful boys don't actually become government ministers but only get into the petit-bourgeoisie?" Or "Are teachers and administrators acting differently now to the way they are portrayed in this film, and how long a way is there to go?" But this is just to say that one can have interesting discussions about relics from a bad period.

The Ghost of Peter Sellers (2018)

Entertaining management case study

[7/10 · 10 June 2021]

Back in 1973, hot young director Peter Medak was given the chance to direct Peter Sellers in a pirate movie, to be shot in Cyprus in a two-month window. It went ... badly. According to Medak, his career suffered badly in the aftermath. Forty-five years later, he planned out and directed this documentary as a sort of inquest into the catastrophe (well, spoiler alert, nobody actually died), filming on location and interviewing as many of the survivors as he could find.

It's a very interesting tale, full of pretty unbelievable incidents which seem to have actually happened. I would also suggest that it be watched in business schools, so well does it dramatize what happens if the criteria for success of a project are not determined in advance, if the organizational chart is not clearly filled out, if some of the key players (Sellers, e.g.) have no clear incentive to complete the project and if their nominal supervisors have no real power to induce them to.

The only real problem with this movie is that Medak is not a neutral party - he has clearly been stewing all this time about how he was treated by Sellers and by financier John Heyman, and he is ready to expose it all to us. I'm not saying that I don't trust Medak's account - I rather do. And it's still a good movie. But I think it would have been a better one if someone else with a little distance had had editorial control. For one thing, I don't think Medak bears it in mind enough that we, the viewers, don't know up front who the crew and management all were, and that we might have a hard time following the organizational chart. For another, there are a few questions that could be posed to Medak himself that he doesn't think of - like, "Did you, with like two pictures on your resume, worry enough in advance about how you were going to run a project where Sellers was the person whose fame would impress everyone and was likely to walk all over you?" Some movies can't be made, and some job offers shouldn't be accepted.

Ivanhoe (1952)

A movie ravaged by the decades

[2/10 · 22 May 2021]

Hark we back to the days of yesteryear, when culture was different and people judged not as we do today - no, I don't mean 1192, when Richard I was imprisoned by Duke Leopold of Austria, or 1820, when Sir Walter Scott finished his influential historical novel "Ivanhoe". I mean the year 1953, when this MGM film was nominated for a "Best Picture" Oscar. It's been a long 68 years since then, and we discover that time can destroy a motion picture in other ways than by fire and decay. Creeping irrelevance is enough to do the job.

If someone wants to tell me that this was a great movie "for its time and place" I won't necessarily argue, but is it a great movie now? To particularize that a bit, how well do I think I was repaid for my time watching this film today? My answer has to be: not a lot.

This was, I suppose, a cutting-edge liberal film for it's time - after all, it featured the screenwriting services of Marguerite Roberts, who was then blacklisted for her pains. It tells us that, despite what you may have heard, Jews are as good people as Christians are - yes, they are rich traders and moneylenders, but they can do good things with that money, and look, there is a magical thing called a letter of credit! Yes, I'm well aware that there are a lot of people around today who could stand to hear this. At the same time, it's dated in substance and tone. King Richard's message of monarch-induced national unity - "you kneel down as Normans, Saxons, and Jews, but you rise up as English!!" - was perhaps just what it was thought America needed to hear in the year of Brown v. Board of Education, but nobody today thinks it's as easy as that.

I will pass over all the historical and geographical issues in silence (despite all temptations). I didn't find the story elements believable or interesting. I found the characters to be pretty simple caricatures. As for the fight scenes, I think it's better if mass archery assaults on castles are conducted by people who actually know how to fire arrows so that they maintain their orientation in flight instead of just arriving like a disorganized handful of jackstraws thrown through the air.

To sum up, there are a lot of movies from 1952 - or 1942 or 1932 - which I still find very engaging and worth watching. And then there are movies like this. I will give the critics of 1952 the benefit of the doubt as upholding the standards of their time, but I have to say how it looks today, not how my hypothetical grandfather would have seen it. If you are studying the history of films and criticism, or if you are a Marguerite Roberts completist (maybe a worthwhile pursuit, come to think of it), those are arguments for seeing it, but otherwise there are probably a lot of better choices.

Martin Eden (2019)

Very successful, by London's philosophical standards

[9/10 · 22 May 2021]

I haven't yet read London's "Martin Eden" (often called "semi-autobiographical" but see below). When I was done watched this movie I said to myself, "This is really a cautionary tale about how young proletarian intellectuals should avoid bourgeois philosophers like Herbert Spencer." But then I did some digging and I found (yes, this is a boast) - that is -exactly- how Jack London intended it to be read! So let's start off by saying that the team get high marks for discerning and staying true to London's main point - and (from what I've picked up) to other parts of the novel as well.

Let's dispose of a couple other things too - yes, the movie takes London's tale of the working class on the west coast of the US in the first decade of the twentieth century and plops it down in Napoli in the 1950's or so. You can lose yourselves in questions like "Why does anyone remember Herbert Spencer at all? Why does nobody mention Mussolini? Shouldn't the Communists be running election campaigns? What is the war coming up - is that World War I or what?" The movie's answer to this is basically, "Look, the working class and the capitalists are what they are. Just deal with it." And for me, I've decided that it works well enough.

So: we have a young worker, brilliant but uneducated, who by a stroke of fortune (as in a Horatio Alger story, I might say) gets introduced to a ruling-class family, and, fatally, to Elena Orsini (Jessica Cressy), the beautiful daughter of the house. She becomes his inspiration to begin a life of self-education and writing - pretty much regardless of anything she says or does, just in her role as the passive focus of his adoration and his readiness to project anything on her.

Martin is skeptical of socialist indoctrination, and values only individual freedom. He resists Elena's obvious attempts to turn him into a standard-issue businessman, but he doesn't see the less obvious and more pervasive "indoctrination" that have taught him what kind of culture to value, what kind of books to read, what kind of individualism to profess.

At the same time he values his working-class associates who are kind to him and support him. His individualist skepticism - reinforced by Herbert Spencer's doctrines of unstoppable evolution and the survival of the fittest - leaves him completely unprepared for what happens when, in a very abrupt turn, he suddenly succeeds. Now what does he do? Is he the "blond beast" himself now (yes, sadly, he has also picked up some Nietzsche as well now - a quite logical development, really)?

In addition to valuable ideas, this film has great acting and production values - it is enjoyable to watch. I was put off a bit by the physical transformation wrought upon Luca Marinelli by the dissipation of success, but maybe the filmmakers meant to make it clear that he just isn't the person he was.

Anyway, this is a very good movie, worth the rewatching, but it's important to bear in mind that it's not just about depression or alcohol or the perils of success or (god forbid) some kind of nihilistic outlook mistakenly projected on London himself. London is problematic in many, many ways, but nihilism wasn't one of them at this time. London, if alive, would, I think, be very happy to have young people get together and argue about what insights would have allowed Martin to avoid his sad denouement, starting, perhaps, with "Listen to women and take them seriously" and "Love has to be more interactive than just adoring a face."