Cinema Classics: Double Indemnity

The best movie showing in town right now is 70 years old and sharper, fresher and nastier than anything out there. Double Indemnity, the fantastic film noir based on a novel by James M. Cain, with a screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler (just mull this over for a moment), is a jewel: a kind of mashup of classic hardboiled noir sprinkled with Billy Wilder's jaundiced sense of humor.
This movie is a delicious, bitter joy.
Fred MacMurray, a lug, but whom Wilder used well (see The Apartment), plays Walter Neff, an insurance salesman that gets ensnared by femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson, the magnificent Barbara Stanwyck, a very alluring anklet-wearing dame. Poor Phyllis is trapped in an unhappy marriage. Feigning innocence, she suggests taking out an accident policy for her husband. Like any insurance agent worth his salt, Neff can smell a rat, but the twist here is that he knowingly bites. It's not that he doesn't know trouble when he sees it, is that he sees trouble and he joins it. He makes it worse. Nobody is innocent.
Chandler and Wilder are interested in ambiguity and grey areas. Phyllis (not the sexiest name for a femme fatale) tells a tale of marital woe. She claims she is married to a horrid man who stifles her and humiliates her. She may be lying, we think, to butter Neff up. But later we see the husband in action, and indeed, he reeks. She was telling the truth. Like all good sociopaths, she bends and arranges the truth to suit her purposes.
Best thing in the movie, in my view, is Edward G. Robinson as Barton Keyes, an insurance claims adjuster who distrusts everything and everybody. Robinson is one of those actors in old movies who seems to be more natural, more modern than everyone else (Spencer Tracy was another one). He completely inhabits this fastidious, suspicious man with a moral certitude and a verve that no one around has. It is a beautifully written character and Robinson fills him in. He is given one of the funniest monologues ever written. It's about death. Absolute greatness.
One of the heartbreaking ironies of the film is that Keyes leaves no stone unturned in his quest for human corruption, but he is naive about his colleague Neff, whom he never suspects. This seems like a trifle, but it is killer stuff. Do we really know people? When even the most punctilious skeptic about human nature can be fooled, we are all in trouble.
The movie is beautifully shot with hard angles and shadows. La Stanwyck glows from the inside out, but the most sparkling gems are the words that flow out of the characters like diamonds, a mile a minute.

Frances Ha

I have never enjoyed the films of Noah Baumbach. Although they are well written and well directed, I find them mean spirited. From The Squid and The Whale's withering portrait of a couple of monstrous, self-absorbed parents, to the depressive sibling dysfunction of Margot at The Wedding and the bitter nihilism of Greenberg, their sour humor is rarely tempered by compassion. Their main characters are really hard to take, and at times it feels like Baumbach is too unforgiving with them. Not this time around.
In this luminous collaboration with actress, co-writer, and main squeeze Greta Gerwig, Baumbach has finally loosened up and delivered a truly lovely, funny, sad film that's an homage to a lot of many splendored things. It's an homage to the early films of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, with echoes of Jules Et Jim and A Band Apart, and reminiscent in spirit of Woody Allen's Manhattan; beautifully shot in black and white by Sam Levy. It uses the gorgeous music of Georges Delerue to great effect (together with an extremely well considered soundtrack). It is a tone poem to the difficulty of making it in New York if you are an artist, a bittersweet love letter to female friendship, and a very enjoyable film. Most remarkably, it is an homage to Gerwig's charm, and somehow through her, to all the female movie stars who light up the movie screen with their ineffable loveliness. There is barely a frame without Gerwig in it, and the camera basks on her beautiful, expressive face at all times.
Gerwig plays Frances, a 27 year-old eternal aspiring dancer. She lives with her best friend from college, Sophie, (Mickey Sumner, daughter of Sting, and very good) and refuses to grow up. Frances is a world class ditz, but she is sweet and loopy and fun. Life gets in the way, the way life does, particularly in New York. Better apartments are found, jobs are lost, friendships strained, and through it all Francis soldiers on, where someone with less moxie would have taken to shrinks and antidepressants. What she does instead is lie. She lies to her friends and family and to herself, trying to hold on to a way of life that is slipping away from her.
It's a strange occurrence when the middle of a movie is actually the most satisfying part of it. The second act introduces some real pain into Frances' life. Gerwig and Baumbach leave Frances' twee antics behind and delve into the painful crush of reality. Everything seems to go wrong for Frances. She can't pay the rent, her best friend is having a life without her, and Frances refuses to give up her dignity, as well as her messiness, for a shot at financial stability. The movie is arranged by chapters on her diminishing fortunes. She moves from neighborhood to neighborhood, the harsh economics of living in New York laid bare, until she's practically homeless, and a fellow dancer takes her in. Still fun, but now faced with serious problems, we really feel for Frances, even as she makes whimsical, unsound choices. She's not a violent rebel, but a sweet fuck up, and it takes rock bottom to make her come through to the other side, older and wiser. At certain points, I thought Gerwig was on the verge of falling into shtick, but she is such a charmer that she gets away with it. I just hope she doesn't play lovely, loopy women forever. She is an intelligent, vibrant actress and it would be great to see her stretch her range.
There are a couple of plot contrivances that gently strain credulity. Potential love affairs never get off the ground, because Frances is more of a sport than a seducer. She doesn't take herself seriously, so no one else does either. A refrain runs through the movie that Frances is undatable, which I found hard to believe. What man in his right mind wouldn't like to spend a couple of hours in her presence? And in the third act things come together way too neatly. The movie really makes you root for her happy ending, but I wish the ending was not so perfect. A little more of Frances' own messiness, of the bittersweet sting of successful compromise would have been nicer, but these are nitpicks. Frances Ha is Baumbach's best movie to date.

Oscars: They're Like Bad Sex

The first Oscar Ceremony, 1929.

People get ready. Our Superbowl is near. I've come to the conclusion that the Oscars (which I think I have missed only twice since 1973), are like bad sex. There is a lot of anticipation, months of foreplay, lots of teasing, getting to a fever pitch... all leading up to mostly a huge anticlimax. The ceremony itself takes forever and then, if you are lucky, you can't really remember anything.
True, there are a couple of thrilling moments here and there, but by the end of the long, agonizing evening one feels dazed and exhausted, wondering if no sex at all is better than bad sex.
Of course, the answer to this question, as far as the Oscars are concerned, is always: no.
We can't wait to be disappointed.

Check out my musings on this year's nominations here.

Caesar Must Die!

This extraordinary film from Paolo and Vittorio Taviani may be the greatest screen adaptation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and is one of the most magnificent films of their storied career.
There are no marquee names in this movie, no elaborate sets or costumes. The actors happen to be inmates of a maximum security prison in Italy. Some of them are members of organized crime, others are murderers, drug pushers, hardened criminals. The prison has a drama program and the Tavianis use the opportunity to tell a complex and movingly human story about pariahs who are considered inhumane. But Caesar Must Die is not a documentary. It is about the overpowering truth of art intersecting with the overpowering truth of reality. It is about truthfulness in fiction, and the freeing, humanizing power of art; it is about the genius of Shakespeare too, who has understood human nature through the ages like no one else. One keeps peeling layer after layer of meaning long after watching the film.
At the beginning, we see the end of the live performance of the play, the audience's applause, the elation of the actors after the performance. Then the Tavianis go back and introduce the players, their jail sentences written on the screen. At the casting call, Fabio Cavalli, the director of the play (who cowrote the script with the Tavianis) asks the inmates to state their names, the name of their father and where they are from, in two different ways. One, as if saying goodbye to their wives, and the other, angrily. He's trying to find out who has natural acting chops (surprisingly, at least among hardened criminals, many do).
Some of the aspiring actors are immediately transfixing, naturally at home with performing. Some are enormous hams, bursting with pizzazz. Just having to utter their names, where they are from and who their father is, puts these men in a highly emotional state. One inmate, reminded of these essential facts of life, cries so hard he can't even say his name. The director casts his Julius Caesar, his Brutus, his Cassius and other characters. Then the inmates go back to their cells. The opportunity to do the play has given these men a sense of freedom and possibility, but then they are reminded that they are not in imperial Rome and they are still locked up.
So far it looks like a documentary. But once the camera is allowed into the men's cells, we realize that this is much more staged than we thought. The directors use crisp black and white to show the rehearsals and their own staging of the play as a movie, whose backdrop is this jail. But they use color to record the live performance of the play.
Teasing our sense of reality, they also stage scenes with the actors that are not part of the play. The man who plays Brutus, a gifted thespian, is consumed with learning his lines correctly. He asks his cellmate to help him play a scene. This is evidently staged, as are other scenes where the men marvel at Shakespeare's ability to know their hearts intimately. These scenes are slightly jarring, for when the inmates are asked to play themselves, they seem much more self-conscious than when they are performing Shakespeare. There are scenes where the play reminds the men of the terrible deeds they have done, and they can't handle it. In some scenes, the cell doors are left open, further inviting the question of freedom into our minds. The choice of Julius Caesar is inspired: it takes place in ancient Italy, which the men can relate to, and it is about the capo di tutti capi, about a man abusing his extraordinary power. Murder, loyalty and revenge are topics that these men know too well. They are understandably blown away by Shakespeare, and they feel his words as their own.
In terms of filmmaking, the film is just magnificent. The cinematography is crisp and sharp and uses the prison as an epic, existential backdrop. The editing is masterful. The actors are extremely well directed and though the actual play is shortened and adapted, the Tavianis get to the marrow of the play. The inmates are more alive and compelling (in particular Brutus and Julius Caesar) than some professionals who can do Shakespeare in their sleep. It is their story. It's almost as if they don't need to pretend.
There is yet another fascinating layer to this movie, which is the social reality of the inmates. This transformational program is emotionally tough for the men, but it gives them something to excel at and it gives them dignity. A friend of mine was saying that this movie should be used to teach the play to high school students, which is the best idea ever. But I wonder if the drama program itself is something that could be applied in jails all over the world. It might seem to the merciless like it coddles criminals with artsy pieties, but in fact this role playing challenges the men emotionally and psychologically to face their own demons, while giving them back a sliver of humanity. It is profoundly healing, as evidenced by a postscript that lists the fates of the inmates and their progress after participating.
But it is the unwavering empathy, the profound wisdom of the Taviani brothers that makes this film a masterpiece. These two gentlemen, making such a brilliant gem at this stage in their lives, give me hope that as long as somebody uses the art of cinema to make films like this, movies will not have been been totally debased, and will be around to move us and change us forever.

NYFF 2012: Amour

Do not be fooled by the romantic-sounding title of the latest Michael Haneke film.
Amour, a masterpiece, is as tough and devastating as any of his other films, and then some. It is an intimate look at the end of life, the ugliness of illness and death, and the devotion of love.
An epic movie that takes place mainly in one apartment, with just a handful of characters, Amour is a film from which it is very hard to recover. Haneke has a streak of the stern educator, who insists on showing the darkest aspects of human nature, as clearly, ruthlessly and devastatingly as possible, in the service of opening our eyes. So Amour, which is about love, may sound like Haneke has softened his stance, or allowed his gimlet eye to cloud. Never fear. He pulls no punches in telling this most universal of stories, the one narrative thread that comes for us all.
Amour's depiction of the bonds of love is beyond touching, it is emotionally devastating.
There is not one scene in this movie that seeks to make it easier for the characters, much less the audience, to deal with the terrifying prospect of decay and death. This is above all, a movie about human dignity. After all, isn't dignity the end result of love? This is borne by the clarity, intelligence, and the profound sympathy with which Haneke depicts the difficult rite of passage of his characters towards death. Yet he refuses to sentimentalize, cheapen, ingratiate, mythify, or gloss over the subject. I'm offended by movies in which people with terminal illnesses decide to have the time of their lives while they wait for death to come. I find them preposterous, deceitful and naive. There may be a lucky few who die in their sleep with a dreamy expression on their faces; most people are painfully conscious of their illness as a terrible burden for their loved ones. Most people are too sick to decide anything, to frail to be in peace. The loss of their capacities, their impotence against their own demise, is a source, not of expectant bliss, but of anger, depression and shame. Amour is a cleansing experience. It redresses the cinematic fallacies of death in the movies, and it ennobles us through the heroic determination of its  characters to cling to their human dignity. It is also, probably, the best anti-Hollywood film of all time in the sense that it subverts the cheapened definition of heroism in movies. You want heroes? You can find them here -- far more heroic and larger than life than any guy in tights -- in two impossibly elegant, beautiful octogenarians, transcendently played by Emanuelle Riva and Jean Louis Trintignant.
The astonishing opening scene shows firemen forcing open the door of an elegant apartment where a death has taken place. Doors and windows have been sealed with masking tape. It's been days, so everyone covers their faces from the stench. An elderly woman's body is found, blue and withered, her pillow strewn with flowers. Next comes a long take of an audience at a concert hall, mirroring us. What we are about to see is a reflection of our own life. Among this audience sits an elegant couple, alert, waiting for the music to begin. They come home bantering courteously. After all these years, he still finds a bon mot to tell her. Georges and Anne are a refined Parisian couple. They have devoted their life to teach music. They live surrounded by civilization: books, art, Paris. They are warm but quaintly formal towards each other, and they quietly enjoy their long lived company.
But Anne has a stroke. The first movement (in this movie the acts feel like movements in a sonata), takes place at the beginning of her illness. At this point, Anne is still lucid, yet paralyzed on one side. It's a scary nuisance, but she is fiercely independent and refuses to be condescended to. She has been to the hospital and makes Georges promise he won't send her back. The movie is about how he keeps this promise.
In the second movement, Anne deteriorates, losing her ability to speak and do things for herself. However, her mind is still painfully intact, and Anne, the most elegant and dignified of women, cannot stand her dependency and the loss of her physical integrity. She is depressed and angry. Throughout, Georges soldiers on, taking care of her by never losing sight of the woman she has always been. He is an intelligent, articulate man, dry and loving at the same time, who honors his promise without complaint, without self-pity or aggrandizement, and without expecting applause, yet with great tact and delicacy towards his wife. No words suffice to sing Riva's and Trintignant's praises. Haneke is not one to spare his actors the discomfort of portraying the most unvarnished truth. Riva and Trintignant rise to the occasion with extraordinary intelligence and generosity, without a trace of pandering sentiment or manipulative emotion. At their age, to portray these characters with such commitment, artistry and dignity is simply epic.
There is a daughter (Isabelle Huppert), who waltzes in from time to time, cries and expresses concern, but is no help at all. Georges hires a nurse who, like many nurses, is equipped with miraculous kindness. But as Anne deteriorates, he needs to hire a second nurse. This nurse is not kind. She combs Anne's hair like a child abusing a doll. She then forces Anne to look at herself in the mirror, patronizing her like a child, falsely insisting that she is beautiful. This incident is appalling: an intelligent, independent woman, trapped in an unresponsive body, at the mercy of an ignorant, indifferent and slightly sadistic nurse. It is a banal kind of sadism, and therefore all the more cruel, since it pretends to pass as care. Georges fires the nurse, and she accuses him of meanness, which is the height of injustice after what he has done for his wife. She also squeezes him for more money. It is revolting, and an example of the kind of harsh emotional violence that Haneke likes to inflict on the audience. But in Amour cruelty is tempered by the grace and thoughtfulness of George's care, by the defiant dignity of Anne, and by the equally unflinching look at the bond between Anne and George.
In the end, Anne's suffering becomes unbearable for both of them. A shocking, violent act of mercy is delivered both by Georges and the director bluntly, but with deliberate care. It is both brutal and civilized, harsh and tender; a beautiful, terrible scene. And so, throughout Amour (as in life, perhaps) we cling to the small yet enormous moments of grace that float like buoys amid the unforgiving waves of suffering. In his last two films, Haneke has allowed mercy and tenderness to take root among his usual explorations of depraved indifference. It started in The White Ribbon, and has fully bloomed in Amour. He happens to be as masterful and unflinching an observer of love as he is of cruelty. Amour is a transcendent film.

Tony Scott

Tony Scott was among the best practitioners of the action genre and he left behind a number of iconic movies, from the small cult movie The Hunger to Top Gun. His death is enormously tragic, yet as many obits confirm, his movies, although immensely popular, were not usually liked by  critics (in contrast to the work of his brother and collaborator Ridley Scott, responsible for movies like Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator, all popular and critical successes).
Tony Scott's movies were, for the most part, preposterous blockbusters; adored by the masses, derided by reviewers. The success of his big movies like Top Gun, The Last Boy Scout, and Days of Thunder paved the way for increasingly over the top studio extravaganzas, which turned out to be much less watchable, and far more stupid than the worst Tony Scott movie. Compared to the Roland Emmerich or Michael Bay school of cinematic destruction, Scott's films are a marvel of restraint. There is always an interesting character worth following. He always got solid performances out of his actors, which is more than you can say for many action films. And the action sequences are top notch (although sometimes his movies feel like there never was a cut he didn't like). Still, they are no masterpieces. Many times, they verge on the cheesy. Top Gun and Thunder Days are perfect examples of Tony Scott's brand of impeccably executed mindlessness.
In any case, here are my favorite Tony Scott movies:
First one out of the gate, and his first movie, is The Hunger, a mesmerizing vampire clunker that has achieved cult status because of a notorious lesbian scene between Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve. We should be forever grateful to Tony Scott just for orchestrating such an event. The movie is artsy cheese. Lots of fog, fans and venetian blinds. Very 80s, campy fun. With David Bowie, as what else? A vampire.
I actually liked Revenge, starring Kevin Costner, Madeleine Stowe and a scene-stealing Anthony Quinn. It's a little noir set in Mexico, in which Costner has the hots for Stowe, who is married to Quinn, who is sheer evil. Dark and very satisfying.
True Romance, with a script by Quentin Tarantino, happens to be one of my favorite Tarantino films. It is exhilarating fun and has one of the greatest supporting casts ever. A scene between Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken is worth the price of admission. Brad Pitt is very funny as a clueless pothead. Scott directed with great verve, making Tarantino's chutzpah shine through.
Crimson Tide is a pretty taut submarine thriller that pits the great Denzel Washington against the great Gene Hackman in a battle of wills, which is like sinking your teeth into a most delicious acting sandwich. Apparently, an uncredited Tarantino spiffed up the dialogue, making it more fun than any submarine movie has any right to be.
Scott made several collaborations with Denzel Washington, who has made a career of delivering plausible, unshakable, dignified action heroes. Washington has a smart gravitas that other action stars don't. He always sounds like a human being and not a sound bite. Even in the most ridiculous action films he makes you care and keeps you following him, which is what happens in the mess that is Man on Fire.
I didn't see Scott's remake of The Taking of the Pelham 1-2-3, but I did catch Unstoppable on TV and enjoyed the well manufactured tension of a train hurtling towards destruction without brakes. I also enjoyed watching a lox like Chris Pine come up to bat against Denzel and become a better actor for it.
I hope the Scott family is consoled by the love of millions of people for the films of Tony Scott.

The 50 Greatest Films of All Time

Sight and Sound Magazine just released its list of 50 greatest films of all time. The big surprise is that Hitchcock's Vertigo dethroned Citizen Kane for the first time in 50 years. Now, is Vertigo the greatest film of all time? It is a great film, but the greatest of all time? Will it be able to last 50 years on top like Kane did? That is the problem with best film lists. They are by definition myopic.
Every time someone asks me to name my favorite film of all time, or even my 10 best, I groan. I find it impossible to say. I can tell you 25, 50, but to narrow it down to less than 25 is a futile exercise.
The Sight and Sound list is a venerable canon, a solid, sensible list. It's a great primer on the history of cinema. It includes films that changed other films forever. I'm thrilled it puts Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in 6th place. I'm relieved it does not include Star Wars. It does not overtly celebrate greatly influential movies, for better or for worse, like Spielberg's Jaws, nor does it celebrate insufferable pains in the ass like R.W. Fassbinder. It is an august list. It includes most of the usual suspects (Dreyer, Godard, Tarkovksy, Ozu, Kurosawa). A great many movies in the list hail from the distant past. We need that much hindsight to select great films, that we can't think of anything newer than David Lynch's Mullholland Drive and Wong War Kai's In The Mood For Love, which are more than 10 years old.
But then half the fun of these canonic lists is you get to quibble with them.  This one includes a few essential comedies, Keaton, Chaplin, Wilder, Singing in The Rain, but in general it skews towards the solemn. It includes some stuff that I find unbearably pretentious, even if it might be essential viewing. I loathe mid and late Godard, and so while I agree with the inclusion of Breathless, and have no choice but grump at the inclusion of Contempt, I can't abide Pierrot Le Fou, which is like watching a French brat throw a tantrum for two interminable hours. I sat through eight hours of Bela Tarr's long, mesmerizing and sometimes soporific Satantango. It is a great work of art, but is it one of the 50 best films of all time? If sheer arty length is a criterion, then I think The Clock by Christian Marclay should be a worthy contender, even if he did not shoot one foot of film himself. Do we really need three Tarkovsky movies in the mix? (Not in my book. I find him very tough going). Why not three Billy Wilder's? Or Chaplin? Polanski's Knife in The Water? Why not The Shining? Fargo? Dog Day Afternoon? Still, if you want to explore the essentials of world cinema, this list is a great place to start arguing.

The Clock

Now showing as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, this impressive art installation is well worth braving the endless lines to get in. (It's free). I breezed in last Saturday at 8:30 am but when I came back at 11 pm, I had to wait almost 2 hours to get in. And I intend to go back this week. It's addictive.
Artist Christian Marclay has created a unique timepiece. It's a real-time clock made of movie clips that have to do with time. If you walk in at 8 am, it is 8 am in the clips. A minute later, it is 8:01. It's a movie that lasts 24 hours. What is astonishing is that Marclay found clips that feature either clocks, watches or characters mentioning the time of almost every minute in the day. That's a lot of clips. The Clock is not just a collection of random clips but a flawlessly edited movie that is absolutely spellbinding in many levels.
First level, if you are a movie junkie, you are in heaven, as you recognize faces, favorite stars, scenes from films, even clips from movies you haven't seen, or wonder about actors whose faces elude you, try to place a movie name to a scene. Even if you don't know a movie star from Adam, you will still be hypnotized by Marclay's canny creation of sequences. He plays around with editing, intercutting scenes from different films to underscore the amazing trickery of the film cut. A character opens a door, he cuts to a different character entering a different room. A character from ancient history asks for the time; cut to the close up of a digital wristwatch. He makes us realize how used we are to this language of cuts that compress time and storytelling. Cinema as shorthand for time.
The sound editing is magnificent. Sound and music foreshadow scenes or leave the trail of a scene behind. For instance, a clip of the final scene of Truffaut's The 400 Blows, shows Antoine Doinel greeting the sea for the first time, but the clip is shown with the music from Jane Campion's The Piano, and then, in a lovely lyrical echo, it cuts to little Anna Paquin doing cartwheels on the beach.
Yet luckily for us, Marclay is not a movie buff. He is not making value judgements on the films he loves, or bragging about his film knowledge. He picks from good movies and bad, but he has a great eye and great timing and rhythm, and picks visually arresting scenes. The clips flow seamlessly, and work exactly like the narrative in a movie, creating emotional landscapes, humor and suspense, a compressed history of human beings in one day. You will find yourself deciding that you are leaving, say at 11, only to find yourself staying to see what is going to happen minutes later. It's about the human need to know what happens next.
There are sequences about death, sex, eating, working, playing, dreaming. So many people fumble in bed trying to turn off the alarm clock, so many people are always jumping out of bed, late for something important they are about to miss. You can clearly grasp the difference between the stillness of bonafide movie stars and actors of a lesser caliber. The Clock makes you conscious, if you are of this persuasion, of every single aspect of the artifice of film: light and shadows (particularly in black and white), the symmetry of the human face, framing, camera movement. You see the artistry of great masters like Polanski in a morning scene where Mia Farrow, in Rosemary's Baby, wakes up to reveal horrible scratches on her back; a marvel of elegance, irony, horror and revelation, in contrast to shoddy pans and careless camera work by lesser craftspeople.
The Clock can be deliciously overwhelming, almost disorientating, for movie obsessives.
On another level, The Clock is a visceral, subconscious experience. After I saw it, I had fabulous dreams about making movies with a cast of thousands. At some point you kind of forget about the movies and you focus on the actions, on the almost hypnotic, mantric quality of the footage with its spirals and repetitions and its relentless flow. You are transported by the sudden realization that you are extremely conscious of the time (you don't need to look at your watch, the movie tells you exactly what time it is), how long has it been since you've been transfixed by the illusion of time in the movies, in which one minute can be an eternity or it can go in a blink. You become extremely aware of time flowing or seeming to stop. Sometimes it is amazing that not even a minute has elapsed, and it seems to be 9 am forever, while sometimes you are caught in the reverie of this flowing continuum, and you realize you've been sitting there for three hours.
It is also a bizarre window into the human experience. A massive, delicious, extended dream sequence enacted by people who look much better than us, because they are the stuff of our deepest dreams.

Magic Mike

I have a newfound respect for Channing Tatum, hero, producer and inspiration of this uneven film by Steven Soderbergh. He is a charming, confident actor and he can bust a move (who knew?). The story goes that he used to be a male stripper and this film is based on his experiences. Good for him.
He is chiseled to perfection and gorgeous to look at: All-American Beefcake Extraordinaire. He could be the offspring of Tommy Lee Jones. He reminds one of actors like John Wayne, or even Gary Cooper. A real guy. A man's man. Not a hipster wallflower, this one. In my fantasies, I see him as a Marine, or an officer in the Yankee Army, who comes in uniform to sweep me (Scarlett O'Hara with glasses and no Tara) off my feet. American movies today need intelligent, sensitive, sensible beefcake like him. We've had a shortage of his kind for years. He is eminently likable, he has personality, unlike some of the other beefcakes Hollywood tries to foist up on us, such as Taylor Lautner or Taylor Kitsch, good examples of pumped up human nothingness.
Magic Mike belongs to a hallowed category of American working class stiff movies like Urban Cowboy, Saturday Night Fever, and An Officer And A Gentleman. It is no coincidence that Soderbergh uses the Warner Brothers logo from 1972 to 1984, the period when some of the aforementioned movies were made. Like these films, Magic Mike is about what American people have to do to make a decent living. Except in this case, the working class heroes are male strippers in Tampa, Florida. This, of course, is a big exception.
Those expecting something darker, a jaundiced view of American entrepreneurship along the lines of Boogie Nights (working stiffs, no pun intended, in the American porn industry), will find Magic Mike a much more conventional film, a straight-laced morality tale, not about sex, but about work ethic. I'm not sure if it intends to be radical by delivering so conventional a story (feebly written by Reid Carolin), but Magic Mike somehow misses the opportunity to make a stronger statement about a number of interesting themes.
It makes much of the guys' need for money. These are people who earn each and every dollar bill they make. Money comes to them in fistfuls, a dollar or five bucks at a time, depending on pelvic thrust. They happen to live in Florida, world capital of financial hubris. For all the hard work Mike does, (he has more than one job and builds furniture), he lives in a pretty nice house steps away from the beach. Still, he can't get a loan to start the business he is passionate about, which has nothing to do with stripping. His is the story of achievement through honesty and hard work, not easy money and deception.
The other salient topic is the selling of sex, in this case, male to female. There is one scene where the love interest (played by nonentity Cody Horn) watches Mike's routine at the club. Like all of us in the audience (comprised mostly, the night I saw it, of excited young females), she is spellbound by his physical glory, his sexiness and his talent as a stripper (these men work hard to put on a show). There is sexual longing in her gaze, but there is also disgust. How can these guys stoop so low?
We are used to seeing women perform in strip clubs in real life, films, and cable TV, and nobody finds this uncomfortable, even though the female version of stripping is by now almost completely devoid of romance, fantasy or narrative, and it has become mostly hardcore smut. But show dudes pleasing women's libidos by stripping and undulating, and a frisson of discomfort, embarrassment and thoughts of homoeroticism rise to the surface. In real life, how many male stripper clubs exist today in comparison to "gentlemen's clubs"? Must be one in thousands. This is a disparity that goes right to the core of the profound inequality between the sexes. The movie only hints at it by training the camera mostly at the male bodies.
The first scenes of the strippers, both in their dressing room and in their choreographed routines are bracing, exciting, and fun. It is shocking to watch men unabashedly bump and grind at women. The club, as these clubs are, is a safe place for women to let out some steam. It's perfect for bachelorette parties, girls celebrating their passage into legal drinking age, girls' nights out, etc. The stripping dance routines are fueled by fantasy (firemen, detectives, policemen, construction workers, soldiers, doctors, etc), and there is something fun and lighthearted, almost innocent, about the whole scene. Soderbergh spends a lot of time on those male bodies and shows little of the club's clientele's reactions, to the point that the women become just blurry backdrop. I wish there was more of their titillation, their elation and their desire. More of the female gaze.
The movie has no time to dwell on this fascinating topic, preferring to focus on melodrama; the trials and tribulations of Mike, a decent, hardworking, talented guy who likes to make furniture from discarded debris and is wary of relationships. He helps Adam, (Alex Pettyfer), a dropout and slightly shady 19 year-old he meets at the construction site where he works by day, by introducing him to the world of male stripping. They are polar opposites. Mike is hardworking, has principle and straight ambitions, even if he loves threesomes (always with two women: all the strippers in this movie seem to be militantly heterosexual). Adam is blinded by the easy money and the easy sex. Adam's sister, Brooke (Cody Horn) is the ornery love interest who chafes at the thought of her brother and Mike belonging to this crazy circle of strippers. Matthew McConaughey, finally remembering he has always been a solid comic character actor, chews the scenery as Dallas, the flamboyant, fickle owner of the club. Their story is interrupted many times by dance routines at the club. After three or four dance scenes, the routines get boring. They stall the story. At the same time, the earnest, shoddily written story stalls the fun. The result is a movie that feels both long and undercooked, a fact that is not aided by mostly asinine, unimaginative dialogue that seems to have been lifted directly from Mumblecore. Some scenes feel like hack work, others are very effective. A particularly fun scene is when Adam undresses in front of the audience for the first time. The embarrassment, the mettle, and the churlishness he displays by being totally artless are what makes his stripping sexy. And there are a couple of funny moments delivered by good comic timing in editing, particularly involving McConaughey. But I have a feeling that Soderbergh's heart is elsewhere. There is a fuzziness, a lack of focus that feels distant and uncommitted, particularly compared to other, much more polished work from him. Some of the story doesn't make sense, as when Adam clearly betrays Mike and in the next scene they are hanging out as if nothing happened. I also don't believe Mike forgives and helps Adam for love of his sister Brooke. Mike slowly comes to regard Brooke as relationship material, but Cody Horn is so uncharismatic that her presence actually zaps the movie of life. This is the kind of creative decision that turns a decent movie into hack work. Brooke is a big, juicy part that should have gone to a better actress. But Horn happens to be the daughter of Alan Horn, the ex-Warner Brothers studio chief. Maybe she came with the financing. Ah, the things one has to do to make an honest living in America...

Foreign Policy and The Oscars

Few categories are more infuriating than the Best Foreign Film category in the Oscars. The films are submitted by their countries (a bureaucratic choice), so many times there are ridiculous omissions in the category. Sometimes great movies happen to make it to the list, only to be voted down by either feel-good movies, foreign movies that are Hollywood wannabes, or Holocaust movies.
The Holocaust movie/documentary winner has become like a bad recurring joke. I've no doubt that some of them are worthy films, but I think this is a case in which the good intentions of an insular industry end up creating animosity. Most people just roll their eyes every time yet another documentary or foreign film on the subject wins, particularly when the competing subjects are other equally egregious human injustices, whose loss seems guaranteed at the mere inclusion of a Holocaust themed competitor. There is Holocaust fatigue. And worse, the very disturbing fact that among some non-Jews this is seen as some sort of irrational, obnoxious Jewish obsession with the topic. 
This year, there is a true contender in the Foreign Film category that is almost the sure bet to win the statuette. Iran's official entry, A Separation, is, in my view, the best movie of the year. But it cannot compete in that category, so it has been nominated, not only for foreign film but surprisingly for best original screenplay as well. Truly deserved on both counts.
Its win could be a fait accompli if it weren't for two movies that may prove tough contenders. Poland's In Darkness, about, guess what, the Holocaust, and an Israeli movie called Footnote, which won best screenplay at Cannes last year.
Indeed, Footnote boasts a great screenplay, but its execution is deeply flawed. In Darkness is a good, but uneven movie. And it's about the Holocaust. About the other contenders I know little and I don't expect the members of the Academy to know much more (a movie from Belgium, and a movie from Canada). The only one that truly made a splash internationally, and with good reason, is A Separation.
The problem is that it is from Iran, a country that seems to be our current foreign policy bogeyman. This may put the voters in a conundrum. Do they want to reward a movie sent by a regime they probably hate? If they are smart, I think they should. The right thing is to award it the prize on its outstanding artistic merit. At the same time, this would also be a very meaningful symbolic statement. It would extend a hand to the people of Iran, who are brilliantly, humanely represented in the movie, amidst the worrisome cacophony of bellicose intentions among certain hawks in the US and Israel. And this could perhaps even elegantly flip the anti-American and anti-Semitic propaganda of Iran. But if instead of giving the award to A Separation, it goes to In Darkness (massive roll of the eyes) or to Footnote, Iran and all the Jew haters can go back to saying that the Jews run everything anyway, etc. If Belgium or Canada win, it's a cop out and nobody cares.
This is the most important prize of the evening, people. The smart thing to do is to vote for A Separation. It is, after all the much superior film.
On the surface, A Separation does not seem like an overtly political film. But it is a very shrewd film which depicts a society that is deeply divided along class lines (The educated, more secular middle class, and the poor and pious), who, thanks to their particular kind of regime, are incapable of coming to terms with one another. The movie shows how a simple decision by an unhappy wife who wants to leave the country and a husband who cannot, snowballs into a drama that involves almost all segments of Iranian society. It is not a particularly rosy picture of life in Tehran, but it feels true.

I remember my shock when The Secret In Their Eyes, a Hollywoodish Argentinian potboiler took the prize from the magnificent French film A Prophet, in a year where both were competing against Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon. The winner was a perfectly entertaining movie, but A Prophet and The White Ribbon are masterpieces, too gloomy and realistic for the feel good schmaltz of the Academy.
A Separation is a masterpiece. Vote smart.

Hugo

Wrong man for the job. Had this movie been directed by Steven Spielberg, it would have been much more fun, mischievous and magical. As directed by Martin Scorsese, even though its intentions are lovely, Hugo is a drag. It certainly does not deserve to be a contender for best film of the year. The Artist, which is a similar homage to the dawn of film, is a much superior movie in every respect. Martin Scorsese is out of his element telling a story for children, and no amount of camera pyrotechnics can add lightness and grace to this leaden affair. There are a lot of swooping computer graphics-enhanced camera moves, but they add no real excitement. Everything looks fake. The cinematography by Robert Richardson is garish. The music by Howard Shore is predictable and cliched. The story of Hugo Cabret, an orphan who winds the clocks of the Gare Montparnasse and discovers the forgotten film genius Georges Mélies (Ben Kingsley, excellent) is very dark, but neither Scorsese or screenwriter John Logan seem to know how to deal with an audience of children. Either Logan thinks children are dim and need to be hit over the head with basic, repetitive dialogue and endlessly telegraphed plot points that surprise nobody, or he was phoning it in. The kids (Asa Butterfield as Hugo, and Chloe Grace Moretz as his friend Isabelle) work very hard to act but they are not charming, through no fault of their own. 3D does not contribute anything of value, except perhaps remind us that it shares the Mélies spirit for experimentation.
In a movie that lasts more than two hours, there were only two instances where I was not bored to tears, my heart sinking with disappointment. Any time that Sacha Baron Cohen appears as the evil station inspector who likes to send kids to the orphanage, simply because he is fun to watch. And once Scorsese gets around to tell the story of George Mélies, which is when the movie finally blossoms. Scorsese's love of movies is heartfelt and evident in his moving homage to this great artist, a former magician who after being a prolific filmmaker and the first inventor of visual effects in silent film, ended up tragically impoverished and forgotten. Scorsese shares his love of movies by including footage of two of the first movies ever made, the Lumiere brothers' Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory and Train Arriving at a Station (1895), of one of the first fictional narrative movies made in the US, The Great Train Robbery (1903), and of Mélies' magnificent A Trip to The Moon (1902). There is a bit with Harold Lloyd famously hanging from a clock, just like Hugo does in the movie, some snippets of Chaplin and Buster Keaton. These old movies are still as potent and beautiful and modern and timely as the day they were printed. The story of Meliés is a good reason to see this movie, the only time it truly comes alive with a lovely, elegiac sense of awe. Scorsese is right to to share his passion with audiences that simply do not appreciate enough the astonishing wonder that is film. I suggest you get the DVD and skip to those parts, which are truly beautiful and moving.

For Your Halloween Consideration

Don't want to dress up as Michelle Bachmann or an OWS camper this Halloween? Watch a movie instead!

Here's a list of spooky movies for your viewing pleasures. And some new additions below.  I'm in the camp that humans are far scarier than zombies, ghosts, vampires or ghouls, so much of what you will find below qualifies as horror in my book. 

Now Playing:

Martha Marcy May Marlene. I think this is a horror film. Period. And a good one too.

On DVD:

Requiem. A German movie about an exorcism, based on a real story. No turning heads or day-glo vomit, but creepy and disturbing nonetheless.

Eyes Without a Face. A beautiful French horror classic. Almodóvar's new film borrows liberally from this one. And this one is much better.

La Ceremonie. Evil unleashed in the form of a maid (Sandrine Bonnaire) and her nasty girlfriend (Isabelle Huppert). Pretty much anything with Isabelle Huppert will make your blood curdle, so consider watching The Piano Teacher as well. 

The Butcher. Another disturbing little film from Claude Chabrol, a master of social horror. 

The White Ribbon. The budding seeds of Nazism in a small, creepy German town. Gorgeous and frightening.

Dogtooth. This Greek movie will weird you out. I promise.

Black Swan. Relive the anorexic nightmare. I actually saw it a second time on a plane, and it held up. 

Taxi Driver. Saw it again recently. Pretty horrible in the best way possible.

The Room should be required viewing every Halloween. You get to see the mind of a deranged person who thinks he has made a movie. Really scary.

NYFF 2011: The Descendants

I'm a big fan of Alexander Payne, a smart, independent-minded American filmmaker, in my view, an heir to great satirists like Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges.
His movies are about regular Americans and the messes they get into: Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, and the most heartbreaking segment in Paris Je T'aime. If Citizen Ruth and Election were more broadly satirical, Payne has been moving into more Chekhovian territory with his last three films. Even though his humor at the expense of his characters may be mordant, he is never mean-spirited or contemptuous of them, like, for instance, Todd Solondz or Noah Baumbach. His movies have great empathy for regular Americans who try to live their complicated emotional lives as best they can.  
Payne doesn't have a flamboyant cinematic style, his movies about plain people look rather plain, but he does have an inimitable tone: the language of his characters is precise, hilarious, and peppered with regionalisms, and some of them, always deeply flawed, like Tracy Flick in Election and Miles and his friend Jack in Sideways, are unforgettable, not to mention total Oscar bait. His stories are full of comedy and heartbreak. That perfect balance between pain and humor is not easy to get right, and Payne has it down better than any other American filmmaker working today. He is a humorist and a humanist. 
If Sideways explored the way in which grown men can behave like children, The Descendants is about a man who has to be mature enough to raise his kids by himself. George Clooney plays Matt King, a Hawaiian lawyer whose wife is in a coma after a boating accident and now he has to take care of two daughters, one aged ten (Amara Miller) and a rebellious teenager (Shailene Woodley). He is in the middle of finalizing the sale of some pristine Hawaiian land to developers and has no clue on how to raise his kids. This could be the premise for a stale TV show, but on top of everything, King learns some damning truths about his wife that send him reeling in pain. This is a bittersweet, funny, poignant film about marriage, love, death, infidelity and, especially, about family. Family can be a pain in the ass, but you better hang on to it, because it's the most important thing you have. (Lots of arty movies with a "family is all you've got" motif this year, including The Tree of Life, Melancholia, Martha Marcy May Marlene, and Shame).
The casting of Clooney as a clueless dad is as unconventional as the casting of Jack Nicholson as the most timid and conformist of Mid-westerners in About Schmidt. Clooney, sporting a bad haircut and Hawaiian shirts galore, is solid and believable as a Hawaiian lawyer, clueless dad and a man who takes some unexpected emotional punches. As in Syriana and Michael Clayton, Clooney does competence in pain well, and here he delivers a deadpan, relaxed and very natural performance.
The entire cast is pitch perfect, including a scene-stealing turn by Robert Forster as Clooney's hardass father-in-law. Some of the movie borders on cliche, like the surfer dude teenage boyfriend (a very sweet and funny Nick Krause) who tags along with the Kings on their adventure, but Payne and his co-writers Nat Faxon and Jim Rash  dive head on into apparent cliche, and subvert it. There are no easy pieties and pat sentiments in this movie. Death brings chaos, anger, and pain, and yet humans are still funny. It's no wonder that Payne says he loves the Italian neorealists: he has a similar temperament.
What I loved most about this movie, besides the fact that Payne found an all-Hawaiian music soundtrack that doesn't drive the audience crazy, is that the movie does not shy away from what death looks and feels like to those who remain. People may have their rituals and say their goodbyes and talk to a comatose woman who may not be listening, but her death is presented without adornment or syrupy euphemism, and so are their feelings, in all their misery, frustration and grace.

NYFF 2011: The Artist

I had no faith in this movie. I was afraid it was going to be a gimmicky, twee affair along the likes of Amelie (a movie I loathe), but The Artist, by writer director Michel Hazanavicius, is a disarming, inventive and charming love letter to the art of filmmaking, and it is a wonderful treat. It is technically breathtaking, flawlessly executed and it restores our wonder in the magic of cinema by showing us how it's been done since the beginning.  
The Artist has the cheekiness of being a new silent film in black and white. What's more, it makes it a new and thrilling experience. In this age of shrinking screens, 3D, digital cameras and special effects (which it itself uses, subtly and brilliantly), it reminds us that cinema, the most modern form of art, has always been about technological advancement. From the very beginning people were inventing ways with which to better tell stories, whether with sound or with color, with the invention of the dolly or the cut, or better special effects. The art form has never stopped moving forward and hopefully, as long as it has affecting stories to tell, it never will. The first movies were shown on zoetropes or movieolas, little personal machines that you cranked up to see a spool of film achieve movement. Now that we can watch films in our phones, and that commercial movie screens have shrunk while TV screens have mushroomed, we are back to square one. This is not necessarily a good thing, but The Artist both asks us to restore our sense of wonder in the movies and admire the craft that goes into making a film, as well as to let go of our fears and embrace whatever is coming, for as long as a story is told that reaches our hearts, the art form will not die.  
The Artist is also an elegy to an age where cinema was simple but grandiose. The stories were basic, the technology primitive, but oh, those sumptuous movie palaces with giant screens and live music! Now the movies have become enormous, expensive spectacles, most of them still telling some very basic stories, while the communal experience of moviegoing keeps shrinking; a tragedy, if you ask me. You could watch The Artist in Netflix, or even in your iPhone, but as every other movie except the bad ones, you need a big screen to fully feel the impact of the expressiveness of the human face, the gorgeousness of its images and the thrill of its lovely tale.
The story is simple: George Valentin (the excellent Jean Dujardin, who won the best actor award at Cannes) is a silent film idol, a dashing cross between Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino. He is a huge movie star, with a ravenous ego. He swashbuckles and rescues damsels in distress for a living. He lives in a mansion with his unhappy wife (Penelope Ann Miller, excellent) and his loyal dog (Uggy, very excellent), who also appears in his movies, and whom he dotes on much more than on his wife. The opening scene is a film within a film. We are watching people watching a silent movie. It is the premiere, and the actors and producers wait behind the screen to hear the audience's reaction, which we can't hear, but which we see in the triumphant expression of their faces as we gather that the audience loved it. Then it cuts to a silent shot of the audience applauding wildly. The music score by Ludovic Bource (deserves an Oscar nomination) is a pitch-perfect homage to movie music and it complements, enhances and underscores the movie gorgeously, focusing the audience's attention on what a great music score can do in a movie; basically, drive you to tears, fear, excitement and joy. The exquisite black and white cinematography by Guillaume Schiffman is also worthy of top awards.
Valentin basks in the adoration of the public, and on the street, while posing for photographers, he meets a pretty girl by accident (Berenice Bejo, wonderful). From there, it's boy meets girl, boy loses girl and, of course, boy meets girl again. She is a wannabe starlet who looks for work as an extra in a big Hollywood studio, and the movie chronicles her rising fortunes as Valentin's star ebbs (in a beautiful sequence where we see how her name appears in the credits of movies, from the very bottom and with spelling mistakes, to top billing as "Peppy Miller"). Valentin is getting on in years, and his producer (John Goodman, excellent), shows him the future: a sound test for the "talkies", which of course, we can't hear. Valentine laughs it off, as many did in its day, as a fad and a failure. Soon, he's out of work, because then, as today, Hollywood is always hungry for the new. The hero's tribulations and his love story are deeply affecting, aided by Dujardin's charming and wonderfully calibrated performance.
There are many ingenious moments in this fun, delightful film, which is so well done, and it has so many layers of creative ingenuity to it, in the use of the movie grammar -- sound, music, shots -- that I bet it could serve as a master class in early filmmaking techniques. It lovingly recreates every old movie cliche, both technical and dramatic; from emotional mugging in close ups, to a thrilling car sequence, to an Astaire and Rogers number, to a dog to the rescue scene. It also reminds us that film language tells a story mainly visually, and that it can make us experience all kinds of feelings with few words, if any. 
The Artist, a great commercial work of art (by Hazanavicius, a guy who is mainly known for his French James Bond spoofs), works at several levels. Film fanatics like me are going to have a ball with all the fun meta movie stuff, which is prodigious, but the average moviegoer will not be immune to its charms, for it is funny, poignant and delightful. Its entire premise is to show that a silent film in black and white can still win people's hearts. And that the essence of movies, this magnificent, collaborative art form, is here to stay. It is sheer joy.

NYFF 2011: 2 Small Films

Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet, a small film about romantic disillusionment, takes place in the wilderness of Georgia, Russia, and follows two young travelers, Nica, (Israeli actress Hani Furstenberg) and Alex (Gael García Bernal) as they go hiking in the mountains. There is very little incident. The opening scene shows her naked and shivering, waiting for him to bring her hot water for her bath. They are roughing it, and the camera takes an intimate look at what seems their budding relationship. There's lots of sex, silent walks in remote places, trying to figure out how to communicate with the locals. Some scenes suggest the possibility of peril (like dancing with drunk locals at a crummy little bar), but nothing ever happens. Alex is relaxed and good-natured and for a Mexican male, extremely confident in his woman. She has beautiful red hair and seems to be fit and a game traveler. We don't know anything about them except they seem to be having a nice time. Both actors are gorgeous to look at in a completely natural way. Loktev is great at capturing unspoken nuance, tiny shifts of emotion, which her actors handle beautifully. Furstenberg is a very charismatic presence, absolutely stunning in some scenes, and coarse looking in others; she has personality to fill the screen and then some. The camera adores García Bernal and he is particularly good at being inarticulate. He is a great silent actor. 
As they traverse the landscape with a local guide (Bidzina Guiabidze), nothing much happens until a small but loaded gesture, a threatening situation, provokes a reaction in Alex that completely alters Nica's understanding of him and changes their dynamic irrevocably. If before they weren't talking because they were happy in each others' company, now they are not talking because they can't bear to be near each other.
The movie aims to be naturalistic, but Loktev's stylistic choices seem pretentious. She cuts abruptly in scenes between them and the locals, but then the camera rambles endlessly in open shots of them walking through the spectacular landscape. She avoids the feeling of travelogue, but at the same time it is frustrating that we don't quite get to see what they are seeing. It feels deliberately claustrophobic. The sparse music score is one of those ugly abstract compositions that call attention to how arty the filmmakers are but add little to the images.

But even though the subtle psychological dynamics of the couple cast a certain spell, since the characters seem to be abstract figures rather than real people with past lives and present quirks, it is hard to be invested in their journey or their conflict.
The movie tries the viewers' patience with long aimless scenes and a disjointed rhythm. Once things get worse, the film gets better. The rift in the couple makes the guide, a man that is between benign and taciturn, potentially menacing, sense an opportunity. The ending is a wash out. Loktev goes for a very stripped-down world and, mostly through the excellent performances of her actors, who do a lot with very little, it does have a certain emotional power, but the self-conscious style gets in the way of raw emotion.

In my view, the same thing happens with Aki Kaurismaki's Le Havre, although this is a far more complex work, with a lot of cinematic references. The Finnish filmmaker is known for his stylized, quirky deadpan. Shot in beautiful compositions with harsh light and primary colors against flat backgrounds, Le Havre is quite remarkable to look at but at the same time its style is starting to feel a bit old. It is the kind of thing that directors in advertising try to imitate when they want to give ironic edge to their commercials, except they rarely know how to pull it off as beautifully. Le Havre is a sweet, subversive little fable about racism and immigration. It takes the opposite route of weepy, truculent movies like Biutiful or Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things, which approach the topic with indignant moral outrage.
In Le Havre, a dreamlike world that pays homage to old French films with its deliberately fake sets of a quaint France, the old boulangerie, the old corner bar, the little cottage where the protagonists live, in contrast to the realistic, ugly modern port, some old folks band together to help a group of African illegal immigrants that are trapped in a ship container. The protagonists, an old couple that go by the names of Marcel and Arletty Marx, no doubt a nod to old French cinema stars but also to Groucho and Karl, are poor but happy. He is a debonair gent who shines shoes and can't pay the bills and she stays at home and cooks. His friends patiently allow him to freeload. They seem to stem from a distant age of dignity and courtesy, but in complete opposition to the world today, they have great empathy for the plight of the illegals and organize to save one of them, a young boy named Idrissa, who escapes from the clutch of the police. The actors are deliberately wooden and speak clunky, mildly funny dialogue. The characters seem to belong to the world of film, including a police inspector dressed at all times in a black trench coat and a black fedora, perhaps an homage to Jean Pierre Melville's tough resistance fighters. The gang of friends may have been resistance members themselves, with their instinctive antipathy to the police and an organic tendency to altruism. The meanie who blows the whistle on the kid's whereabouts is Jean Pierre Leaud, Truffaut's alter ego in many films, looking ghastly and mugging for the camera. Kaurismaki has composed a little love song to his favorite French films, the ones full of esprit de corps and humanity, the Marcel Carne's, Jean Renoir's, Truffaut's, rather than the brainy Godard, Bresson or Resnais.
The film is gently funny and offbeat and it convinces once we realize that Kaurismaki is not being naive, but quite the contrary, he is being a contrarian. He asks what if instead of rejection, racism and intolerance, Europe would be warm and welcoming to those seeking a better life. He has enough studied quirkiness to make the liberal pieties less preachy, but my problem with this film is that the high style creates distance, it screams look at me, instead of bringing the audience closer to the characters. Even though I really like the idea and appreciate the execution, I find it difficult to feel passion or enthusiasm for this film.
When you see deeply humane films like Miracle in Milan, which Le Havre resembles in spirit, those films are steeped in human warmth and they open your heart. Le Havre might bring a smile to your face, but it does not reach your soul. 

Jane Eyre

For modern audiences this Victorian tale of romantic woe may be a little frustrating. So the guy is married to a crazy bitch? So what, Jane Eyre? Worst things have happened. Haven't you heard about the pursuit of happiness? Get a life!
In the age of Snooki and the Kardashians, we are very far from the oppressive condition of women in Charlotte Bronte's time, (just as the concept of concealed and repressed sexuality is alien to our age*), but what is eternally appealing about her fantastic yarn are the deeply archetypal, intricate layers to the story of deceptively plain Jane.

Jane Eyre's greatest tragedy is that she is an intelligent, talented woman (an artist!) trapped in a world that doesn't allow women the capacity to think. An orphan, a woman and poor, she is nobody, even if her greatest asset is her mind. In Victorian England, the social hierarchy was almost fetishistic (and a great source of wonderful literature). Love between members of different social classes was taboo (and it still is to an extent. To this day, the rich only marry the rich). Jane is a lowly servant, no matter how refined or educated. Even Mr. Rochester, her employer, has been shackled to misery by the conventions of marriage by money. So there's no chance in hell of love blooming. Taboo is of course, very sexy, so this is a very powerful hook.
Jane Eyre also is an impassioned protest against the established cruelties of the day. The everyday cruelty towards women, but also the cruelty born of the meanspirited "charity" of the clergy and the rich, both oozing contempt for the needy and the weak. 
Both Jane and Rochester are complex and difficult characters, with too much feeling and backstory underneath the straitjackets they need to bear. They are soulmates: endlessly frustrated by society's constraints, and each sporting their own horrid tale of woe. They both have fiery passions underneath which are not the solely the passions of the flesh, but more dangerously, of the spirit. And then there is the whole spooky, Gothic, haunted woman in the attic thread, which hints at the Victorian obsession with repressing the strongest instincts of the soul. What is a more obvious metaphor than madness dwelling in a hidden room in a dreary mansion? We are all vulnerable to madness. And if we lived in the Victorian era with its crazy-making rules, it could be hard to escape its clutches.

Jane Eyre is eternally hypnotic: it's a great, romantic story of love and cruelty and a passionate proto-feminist manifesto. This latest film incarnation alas, feels strangely airless. Many things are right. The mood is dark and gloomy, the costumes and decor feel authentic without calling too much attention to themselves. The music by Dario Marianelli is duly ravishing. The cinematography by Adriano Goldman is lovely. The rich and sparkling dialogues seem very faithful to the source. Everything is careful and correct. But, and I say this with great heaviness of heart, there is a lack of passion, a lack of madness, a lack of fire. Which is to say that, among other things, there is no chemistry between Jane (Mia Wasilowska) and Rochester (Michael Fassbender). Their individual characters feel too constrained, as if director Cary Fukunaga was afraid to let loose and risk going over the top.

A diabolical idea just crossed my mind. Imagine Alejandro González Iñárritu's version of Jane Eyre. He would surely err on the side of mega melodrama, and we could run the risk of getting a campy telenovela with billowing skirts, but it wouldn't lack emotion. The filmmakers of the present version seem to approach the characters and their Victorian environment as if they were looking at a rare and fragile specimen behind glass in the British Museum.
I adore this intelligent story of romantic upheaval so my heart did flutter in places and I enjoyed the movie, but I expected to be ravished. There is too much control for that in this film. Wasilowska is a perfectly good actress. Her eyes betray intelligence and feeling, but she seems too muted. After enduring a horrible childhood, she seems to bear not a hint of a subconscious grudge. Amelia Clarkson, the wondrous young actress who plays Jane as a child is far more alive and fiery. Wasilowska is very good in the scenes when she falls in love for the first time. You can almost feel her heart beating out of her corset, yet she retains her smarts (which is more than one can say about anybody in the throes of a major crush), but she is too obedient.
Rochester is not an easy role either. He is both an alpha male and deeply sensitive, imperious, and like most males, clueless about the female heart. Michael Fassbender seems a bit tentative. He's not doing anything wrong but there is something unconvincing. We all imagine our Janes and Rochesters through the prism of our own experiences. To me his Rochester lacks a tad of bitterness, of cynicism and of turmoil. And a whole lot of mystery. The rest of the cast seems to have been instructed to be as discreet as possible. And some scenes that would benefit from great dramatic flair are blunted either by good taste or lack of daring. For instance, when the existence of Bertha Mason is discovered, the camera focuses first on Jane's reaction. It would have been far more powerful for us to discover Bertha as Jane does, from her point of view.
Can't wait for the next version.

*This movie made me pine for the days when showing as much as a wrist would be considered foreplay. I'm not a prude, or maybe I am, but I do believe that what is suggested, forbidden and concealed is so much sexier than the literal and the explicit. And we live in a revoltingly explicit, vulgar age).

Review of A Movie I Haven't Seen: Jane Eyre

Readers, the time has come.
I am swooning already. 
In fact, half of me swoons and the other half frets.
The new version of Jane Eyre opens tomorrow and my heart flutters with excitement. I swoon for our new, improved, dark and stormy Mr. Rochester, played by Michael Fassbender (aka Sexiest Man on Earth as per my friend Andy, seconded by moi).
I swoon because the previews look aptly windswept, gloomy and Gothic.
I swoon because fabulous actors like Simon McBurney, Judi Dench, Jamie Bell and Sally Hawkins are in it. And because Jane (Mia Wasikowska) looks duly and convincingly plain.
(And if Rochester can fall in love with her, then he can fall in love with me).
I fret, alas, because of opening weekend agita. Usually I wait. I wait until Monday and go to a screening before 6 pm with little old ladies who have trouble hearing and their  film buddies who snore. But for this film I cannot possibly do that.
I myself am surprised at my girlish enthusiasm. I surmise it's because this film fills an enormous void: that of the truly romantic, repressed erotic film. In other words, an intelligent, high quality chick flick. Not manipulative, vulgar trash like Eat Pray Love and what passes for movies for women these days. True forbidden love. True feeling. And one of the greatest stories ever written. Again.

Now, wouldn't Fassbender be a glorious Heathcliff? 

...Swoon....

Cinema Quote of the Week

"Hedy Lamarr, the actress habitually regarded as “that most beautiful woman in Hollywood,” was a rocket scientist on the side, inventing and patenting a torpedo guidance technique she called “frequency hopping,” which thwarted efforts to jam the signals that kept the missiles on track".

From an article in the New York times about actors who actually are rocket scientists, Natalie Portman included. 

On DVD: Two Creepy French Films

A poetic French horror movie by Georges Franju, Eyes Without a Face (1959) is one classic film that no lover of horror should miss. You are not going to jump 13 times out of your seat. You are not going to see lots of gore and torn limbs. This movie burrows under your skin, a deeply disturbing fantasy on the destructive power of love and guilt. I don't like cheap scares like obvious music cues and gratuitous jumps. Gore bores and disgusts me. Eyes Without A Face has little of these, but it is the stuff of nightmares, and a masterpiece of atmosphere. A famous plastic surgeon (the wonderful, bone dry Pierre Brasseur) is trying to create the first successful face transplant. His daughter has lost her face in a car accident and now he wants to replace it. For that he needs another fresh, young human face. And it can't be from someone dead. So we're off to a good start. Behind all great horror movies there is a personal, human story that transcends the scares. The Shining is not about twin ghosts or rivers of blood coming from an elevator. It's about a man who hates his family. Rosemary's Baby is about the subconscious fear of having children, not about a satanic cult of adorable old geezers. Great horror stories go to the deepest recesses of our subconscious and deal with primal, heavy stuff. So here, Dr. Genessier, a tyrannical control freak who apparently provoked the accident with his arrogant driving, wants to make it up to his poor daughter Christiane, who now doesn't have a face. For that purpose, he is able to forgo his human sympathy for anybody else. He enlists, as a willing accomplice, a woman (Alida Valli) who is beholden to him because he once restored her face. She will do anything for him, including murder. And the kicker is, they are doing horrible things for love!
Franju trusts that our imagination can provide the gory details. We never really see her disfigurement (had it been made today, we'd have endless close ups of severed arteries and live nerves). Christiane has a mask, and you know how effective masks are at creeping the bejesus out of anyone. Her mask is like a mannequin's face through which we only see her big, sad eyes. It is creepy and beautiful at the same time. Still, I'm pretty sure this must have been the first time someone showed quite graphically, although thankfully in black and white, a scalpel cutting through a human face and then lifting it off. This reminded me of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a truly frightening movie. The villain in that movie did not have the luck to have Dr. Genessier as his plastic surgeon. Dr. Genessier is one of the most accurate portrayals of a doctor I've ever seen on film. He has the self-importance of someone who saves lives, is coldly professional and quite arrogant (a pre-condition for sociopathy). He looks at everyone as if they were amoebas under his microscope, but in one scene, he visits a little boy in the hospital and he is tender and caring. For some reason that I can't comprehend, his warmth in this scene makes him all the more creepy. 

The Butcher (1969) is one of Claude Chabrol's many elegant incursions into evil. In his movies, evil blooms in broad daylight, among the commonplace. Here it dwells in the bucolic French countryside, where the principal of a school, the great Stephane Audran, meets a war veteran from the French adventures in Algeria and Indochina, who is the town's butcher (Jean Yanne). The movie starts with a long wedding banquet scene that has one wondering why Chabrol is not in any rush to get his story going. You get tickets for a thriller and you are stuck in a pastorale. But soon murdered women start appearing in the woods. We kind of expect the butcher to be the killer. He has been in the war, and seems embittered and alienated, though he also could be an inoffensive schmo (albeit with a butcher knife). He's the guy that instead of bringing flowers to the schoolteacher, brings her a leg of lamb.
But you have to pay attention to the details. He talks about his father with too much contempt, and in an amazing bit of dialogue, to the townspeople in his shop that are traumatized by the murder of one girl, he counters, calmly, that he was in two wars and saw many men blown to pieces, as if one measly girl wasn't such a big deal.
There are 2 amazing set pieces in this movie. One involves a schoolgirl innocently eating a sandwich and thinking it's raining in a sunny, cloudless day, and the other one is Audran, a master at sangfroid, suddenly becoming afraid in her own house. One flick of a switch and Chabrol has you trembling with fear. 
These are the thrills I love best. Smart, rooted in reality and wicked. There is nothing scarier than human nature.

Cahiers Du Cinema Ideal Cinematheque

These kinds of lists are meant to be discussed passionately. I agree with many of the 100 movies and disagree with more. For instance, under no circumstances would Godard's insufferable Pierrot Le Fou make the list, and I would add more Billy Wilder to the canon, among others, but this is a good a compendium to brush up on your classic cinema. Please disregard the stupidest, most unimaginative yet pretentious use of music ever.


La cinémathèque idéal selon Les Cahiers du cinéma
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