The Missing Picture (***)

No documentary has ever been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, but awards for 2013 saw this movie receiving only the second such nomination in the foreign-language category. The other one was the animated Waltz with Bashir; it’s perhaps not entirely a coincidence that both films use non-traditional techniques to tell personal stories of war. Both films can be seen as visual memoirs, but Cambodian-born Rithy Panh’s story is less linear and more impressionistic. The narration (read by Christophe Bataille in French) is like a long, poetic essay about the longing for a lost childhood.

According to the film, Panh last saw his home on April 17, 1975, the day before his eleventh birthday and the day Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces overran the capital of Pnom Penh. The film well decribes the effects of the relocation, forced labor, agrarian “reform” and other policies inspired by the Chinese communists, but with the focus on the personal rather than the historical forces at work. To supplement the mostly black-and-white footage that exists from the period, and to tell the more personal aspects of the story, Panh uses clay figures and small-scale re-creations of many historical scenes. This is more effective than I might have thought.

For me, The Killing Fields remains the most indelible film about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime. My taste would have preferred either a more historical film or a more detailed personal one, perhaps telling us of how Panh escaped to Thailand and became a filmmaker. It’s not a long movie, but perhaps is a bit long for the sort of gauzy remembrance it is. Where it did impact me was in importing the power of ideology. Greed and lust for power are enormous forces, but ideology was the motivating force that created the most murderous movements of the 20th century, from the totalitarian communism to the Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide.

IMDb link

viewed 4/10/14 7:15 at Ritz Bourse and posted 4/10/14

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (**1/2)

This everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sequel comes nine years after its predecessor, so the most impressive thing about it might be that it got made with the cast members (and director Adam McKay) intact. It’s the tail end of the disco era, and the dawn of the 24-news era. Thus, rather than parodying local news and the introduction of women into the newsroom, it features Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy working for an upstart operation called GNN (Global News Network). Ron thinks 24-hour news is “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” but a paycheck’s a paycheck. Also on board are his pals: the playboy Brian (Paul Rudd), the racist/sexist Champ (David Koechner), and the simple-minded Brick (Steve Carrell). Ron’s nemesis turned spouse (Christina Applegate) is not on board, but is in the movie. They have a son.

McKay and Ferrell’s schtick is to let the jokes fly and see what sticks, with the force of the delivery sometimes compensating for half-funny lines, sometimes merely emphasizing the lame ones. “Who the hell is Julius Caesar?…I don’t follow the NBA,” is the kind of exchange that half the audience will be amused at, and half will groan at. I’m sure the people who like the movie will disagree about which lines worked and which fell flat. One thing I found incredibly tedious was an entire subplot involving Ron’s new boss, who is, somewhat implausibly, a 30ish black woman (Meagan Good). Besides creating another female role, the character seems mostly to exist to provide an excuse for lame jokes about race. Time was when plain old racist jokes were acceptable; the modern substitute is to make jokes about racists. This itself became tiresome years ago. Maybe because the movie takes place in the early 1980s (the hits-laden soundtrack keeps reminding us) it seemed somehow fresh to have a scene with Burgundy, invited by the boss to dinner, trotting out “jive talk” in an effort to seem “hip” and “down with it,” but in fact it was as painful to look at as all the quoted phrases I just used.

The original Anchorman lacked a real satirical bite but was pretty funny. This sequel, with a better satirical target, since the 24-hour news culture is still very much with us, still mostly lacks satirical bite. Burgundy is the Inspector Clouseau of the news world, spontaneously or accidentally coming up with most of the dubious innovations of the post-cable TV news world — traffic chases on camera, Fox-News-style superpatriotism, focus on celebrities, etc. But beyond that the movie doesn’t have anything to say about those developments. It is simply a silly movie.

Now, being silly is okay. Interrupting the story with the odd fantasy sequence can be fun. And if the main characters are caricatures of womanizers, jerks, and idiots, I’m okay with that, too. But then, don’t show me that for 90 minutes and then follow up with a soppy, sentimental conclusion that asks me to have a big soft spot for these people, one that has them suddenly, and unconvincingly, developing a conscience (and/or a brain). And don’t have a big climax, an overblown successor to the West-Side Story style gang fight in the original, that is much more impressive for its guest-star roster than its humor quotient.

McKay and Ferrell are not going through the motions here. Instead, it seems like they may have tried too hard. If you’re into the kind of humor in the first Anchorman, you’ll probably laugh at something or other here. I’d bet there are more punch lines per minute than in almost any other comedy in recent memory (except maybe toward the end). But I’d also bet that, for most people, a lower percentage of them land.

IMDB link

viewed 12/4/13 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and posted 12/18/13 (revised 12/26/13)

Let the Fire Burn (***3/4)

Anyone who lived in the Philadelphia area in the mid-1980s will remember the police confrontation with the radical group MOVE on May 13, 1985, that resulted in the deaths of eleven group members, including children, and an out-of-control fire that destroyed multiple city blocks in the West Philly neighborhood. Those who don’t remember may find even more bewildering the sequence of events that resulted in such a calamity. This documentary tells the story extremely well using, exclusively, period footage, primarily local news coverage, film of the hearings held by the city in the months after the confrontation, and the videotaped deposition of thirteen-year-old Michael Moses Ward, who had been living in MOVE house with his mother and survived the conflagration.

Told sequentially, the film provides some of the history of MOVE (not an acronym), which formed in the early 1970s. Under the guidance of spiritual leader John Africa (whose followers adopted the same last name), the group espoused an anti-authority, pro-self sufficiency philosophy and rejected most modern technology, though not autos. To many people, they just seemed dirty and odd. To their neighbors, they were a nuisance. To the police, they represented a threat, and a 1978 confrontation with the group left one officer dead, one MOVE member beaten on camera, and the MOVE “compound” destroyed.

After that, the group relocated to a row house where the 1985 confrontation took place. The last two thirds of the film recount that fateful event, interspersing the news footage with the later testimony in a way that seems as clear as possible and fair to all sides. Today, the MOVE fiasco is a symbol of a decade when the city had reached a low point. It’s still possible to argue about the extent MOVE was to blame and how the city should have handled the group and the plan to evict it from the West Philly row house. It’s unclear what lessons are to be drawn from it. Still, watching it occur is like watching a suspense thriller, albeit a depressing one.

A sad footnote that occurred after the film was complete was the death of Ward, also known as Birdie Africa, in September 2013.

IMDb link

viewed 11/7/13 7:30 pm at Ritz Bourse and posted 11/7/13

Rush (***1/2)

This Ron Howard-directed auto-racing drama shares its title with a movie about drug use, and the meaning is parallel. Racing a car at 170 mph, trying to maneuver past other cars, provides (I suppose) a similar high, a similar level of danger, with an added element of fear. In Cinderella Man, Howard elevated a conventional sports story by infusing the film with a sense of time (the Depression) and place. In this case, the settings are multiple and interchangeable, Formula One race tracks on four continents, so competition is the glue that holds the film together. British James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Austrian Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) began their careers around the same time (the early 1970s) and shared posh backgrounds that they had rebelled against. Hunt was an impulsive playboy, whereas Lauda was a shrewdly calculating loner whose appearance earned him the nickname “rat.” But they shared an ambition that made them natural rivals.

In reality, the two were friendly off the track and roomed together at one point. Here, their relationship ranges between antipathy and grudging admiration. Nonetheless, Howard uses a mutual antagonism effectively to bring out these divergent personalities. Hemsworth’s Hunt seems to be less complicated; if you imagine “English playboy race-car driver/badboy” you can conjure up most of the character. The Austrian is more difficult. Peter Morgan’s screenplay uses narration by the Lauda character as a framing device, suggesting a future in which Lauda has gained perspective, but I’m not sure what it is. (Morgan previously collaborated with Howard on Frost/Nixon, a film that artfully depicted a different kind of competition between a playboy and a dour antagonist.) Alexandra Maria Lara plays Lauda’s first wife; we can tell more about what she feels for him than the reverse. None of that is Brühl’s fault, though. He’s excellent, completely different than in the German-language roles in which I’ve seen him before. And Morgan’s dialogue is smart.

The movie concentrates most on the 1976 F1 season, which contained enough drama that here is where one might suspect some screenwriting embellishment. But in this area it turns out to be quite accurate. The racing scenes do a great job of providing a sense of danger —curiously, with few if any shots from the driver’s point of view — and less of a job of emphasizing the nature of the skills of the performers. Unlike in boxing, it’s hard to tell the competitors apart. But if Rush is not quite as moving a sports film as Cinderella Man, that’s no disgrace. Even if you don’t see the appeal of auto racing as a sport, and I don’t, this is a winner.

IMDb link

viewed 9/19/13 7:30 at Ritz 5; posted 9/26/13

       

Jobs (***)

The late Steve Jobs was a classic rags-to-riches success story, an avatar of the tech revolution, and a peculiar, particular individual. This helped make Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography a fascinating read and a runaway bestseller, and it makes him a good film character. This biopic begins with a graying Jobs (Ashton Kutcher) introducing the product, the iPod, that assured that Apple Computer would remain an important company in the new century. However, the rest of the film is set earlier, with Jobs as the scrappy underdog. Director Joshua Michael Stern skips over his childhood and how Jobs’s father’s inspired his interest in technology (and the epiphany he had at age 12 when he realized he was smarter than his old man), or how he met Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. Instead, it begins in 1974. The 1960s were over, but Jobs turned on, tuned in (to Dylan, especially), and dropped out of Reed College while continuing to audit courses he liked, such as one in typography that helped inspired his love of good design.

In nearly every respect, Jobs is a biopic that Jobs would find quite flattering. Even his tantrums seem in service of creating a better product, and ditto his early attempts to deny the paternity of his out-of-wedlock daughter. You can almost hear him saying How can I change the future of personal computing if I have to deal with a kid? And you’ll sort of agree. Likewise, it’s impossible to see Jobs’s foes at Apple — primarily Board Chairman Arthur Rock (J. K. Simmons) and 1980s CEO John Scully (Mathew Modine) — as anything but folks who just don’t get it. Jobs’s later success makes it difficult not to agree with that view, but Isaacson suggests that Jobs’s immaturity had some role in his eventual fallout with the board and makes it at least possible to question his choices. The financial success of Microsoft makes it clear that, as a business model, there was another path rather than the high-control, perfectionist model Jobs espoused. However, the film does bring across that financial success, while important, was not what drove him.

As a longtime Mac user, I may be biased, but despite the somewhat two-dimensional portrait of its subject, the Apple story is a good story. (Other aspects of Job’s life, like his role in starting Pixar Animation Studios, are not mentioned, or de-emphasized.) The film has the chronology about right, Kutcher is made to look uncannily like Jobs and, though I have not seen Jobs on film that much, he seemed to have his mannerisms down pat. (Josh Gad seemed well case as Wozniak.) Kutcher has a cockiness about him that works in the part. Aaron Sorkin is reportedly working on a film adaptation of Isaacson’s book, and there’s an obvious parallel between the forceful personalities of Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, subject of the Sorkin-penned The Social Network. I expect Sorkin’s version of the story to better highlight Job’s difficult side, or present his story with more complexity. I expect it to have quicker pacing and more snappy dialogue; this one’s most memorable line for me came when Jobs threatens Bill Gates on the phone after learning that Microsoft planned to release an operating system — Windows — that imitated many features of the Mac interface. Like the products Jobs created, Jobs has most of the rough edges smoothed out, but is handsome to look at.

IMDb link

viewed 8/14/13 at AMC Cherry Hill [PFS screening] and posted 8/17/13

Twenty Feet from Stardom (***)

Something like a companion piece to Standing in the Shadows of Motown, a documentary about the unheralded musicians who backed up 1960s hits by the Supremes, the Four Tops, the Miracles, the Temptations, and other stars, this shines a spotlight on the backup singers of American popular music, mostly the rock and R&B of the 1960s–'80s. With DIY home-recording equipment, Auto-Tune, and cash-strapped record companies, these are tougher times for backups, but some can still make careers of it.

Movies like this can sometimes be on the dull side because they don’t get beyond testimonies to the wonderfulness of their subjects. The first half has some of that, with Bruce Springsteen (who married his back-up singer), Stevie Wonder, Mick Jagger, and Sheryl Crow (a former back-up singer) among those testifying. Sting does too, but we actually get to see him working in the studio with Lisa Fischer, too. Fischer is one of the stars of the second half of the film, which is built around featurettes about a few of the women, but particularly in terms of their efforts at building solo careers. Among the most successful has been Darlene Love, still singing into her 70s and inducted, as a solo artist, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Then there is Merry Clayton, the powerhouse female voice in the Rolling Stones hit “Gimme Shelter,” whose solo efforts in the 1970s met with only modest success. There is the relatively young Judith Hill, a songwriter who worries that too many backup gigs will derail her efforts to be seen as a solo artist. And there is Fischer, who had a moment of Grammy-winning stardom in the 1980s but professes to be happier as, most prominently, the Rolling Stones’ favorite backup singer on tour.

The film is not as revelatory as Standing in the Shadows; a couple of the women (and, with a few exceptions, the subjects are women) speak of their discomfort at being seen, on stage, as sex objects more than performers, but not that much behind-the-scenes dirt gets dished. (That Ike Turner saw himself as a pimp and his backup dancers as “hos” hardly counts as dirt at this late date.) Nor is there a ton of technical information about how back-ups are utilized in the recording process. But, for those with an interest in pop music, especially pre-1990 rock, the movie should be entertaining. I was especially taken with old clips of an impossibly young David Bowie, of George Harrison at the Concert for Bangladesh, and of Ray Charles exuberantly singing on television with the Raylettes, who included Clayton.

IMDb link

viewed 7/3/13 7:25 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 7/3/13

The Company You Keep (***)

Today, “liberal” is used as a slur by conservatives, but 40 years ago it was just as likely to be uttered derisively by those who favored more radical methods of change. Such people would have perhaps been sympathetic to the Weathermen, a radical spinoff of the Vietnam antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society. The Weathermen became the Weather Underground, who after a series of bombings in the 1970s mostly disappeared. Some got caught, some went straight, and some stayed underground for a long time. (One who went straight, Bill Ayers, became a controversial figure in the 2008 presidential election.) There’s a very good 2002 documentary (called The Weather Underground) about the group.

Here Robert Redford, also the director, plays an Albany lawyer and, improbably, a single father of a pre-teen girl who’s drawn into the past when an old friend (Susan Sarandon), a Weather Underground member wanted for her role in in a botched bank robbery (resulting in a guard’s death), decides to turn herself in after living under a false identity for decades. For reasons best left unstated here, he winds up on the run trying to hunt down other members. A local journalist (Shia La Beauf) is trying to figure out what’s going on. And both of them wind up traveling around, giving Redford the opportunity to include a variety of locations.

While conservatives may object to the sympathetic portrait of former radicals, it should also be noted that, whereas the actual Weather Underground took care, after a fatal bombing in its early “Weathermen” years, to avoid harming individuals, this film centers around a bank robbery that results in a fatality, an incident that never took place. The script, from a novel by Neil Gordon, is by Lem Dobbs, who has written suspense films like The Limey, The Score, and Haywire rather than morally complex ones. Dobbs and Redford substitute some speechifying by the characters for a more ambiguous exploration of how far it is reasonable to go in service of a cause. The film, never really places you back in the past, when stopping the war seemed like a moral imperative (though the bank robbery is supposed to have taken place later). Instead, the story positions Redford’s character as a liberal exemplar, mounting a defense of liberalism against, not conservatism, but radicalism. La Beauf (an actual investigative newspaper reporter) makes the case for old-fashioned journalistic virtues. This is all subtext and can be easily ignored. As such, Redford has made a good dramatic thriller with an interesting structure and a bunch of famous faces — Chris Cooper, Nick Nolte, Julie Christie, Anna Kendrick, Stanley Tucci, Brendan Gleeson, etc. — in supporting roles.

IMDb link

viewed 5/22/13 7:05 pm at Ritz 5

Argo (***1/2)

I always enjoy it when movies do more than one thing well. Ben Affleck’s third directorial effort (after Gone Baby Gone and The Town) is a three-for-one. In the first, shortest sequence, it is a docudrama (incorporating news footage) showing, in 1979, Iranian revolutionaries taking over the American embassy. The mass hostage-taking that followed was the year’s top foreign-policy story and, perhaps, the thing that lost Jimmy Carter re-election.

The flight, in secret, of a handful of embassy employees to the nearby Canadian embassy is a lesser-known story that makes perfect fodder for an elliptical thriller, with a rescue plan that was literally straight out of Hollywood. The satirical midsection would not be ought of place in Get Shorty. John Goodman and Alan Arkin play the colorful movie folks who helped produce the operation, the details of which are too amusing to recount.

But then Affleck, who plays the CIA operative who arranges the whole plan and sells it to his agency superiors, deftly pivots again and shows the operation in action in a most suspenseful way. He pays attention to the individual hostages, who included a married couple and one man who is heavily skeptical of the plan, which requires them to play, among other things, Canadians.

The script, while not perfectly fidelitous to history, particularly in the third act, gets some points for casting, as can be seen in the photographs of the actual hostages, looking remarkably like the actors who portray them (as does the John Goodman character). The story is based on a book by Tony Mendez, Affleck’s character, with a screenplay by Chris Terrio. It’s a fine blend of Hollywood thrills and nervous tension, with a touch of comedy.

IMDb link

viewed 11/4/2012 2:05 pm at Ritz 16 NJ; review posted 2/21/2013

Searching for Sugar Man (***1/4)

I’ve always been impressed by the ability of foreigners to appropriate America’s culture and make it their own. (It happens less the other way around.) We sometimes make a joke of it, as with David Hasselhoff’s popularity in Germany, or Jerry Lewis’s in France. But, on the evidence presented here, and it’s pretty good evidence, Sixto Rodriguez is bigger that Hasselhoff, or Lewis…in South Africa.

That the Detroit native made only two albums in the early 1970s and remained completely unknown everywhere else, including Detroit, makes the story unlikely. Even more unlikely, and impossible in today’s digitally connected world, is that Rodriguez heard nothing of his overseas following. Nor did the South Africans know anything about the man who was a household name there. (At least among the white population. Although Rodriguez is said to have been an inspiration to whites who opposed apartheid, his fan base does not appear to be multiracial.) Fans pored over lyrics for clues about the artist. There were rumors — he was said to have committed suicide before a hostile audience — but that’s all.

So this documentary — by a Swede, Malik Bendjelloul — is a kind of detective story as much as anything else. Bendjelloul also managed to interview the producers of the two albums, who attest to his genius, but that’s not the interesting part. What turns out to have happened to Rodriguez, including his missed opportunity for 1970s stardom, is both unusual and mundane. And the movie itself has provided its own touching ending to the story, with its soundtrack and Rodriguez’s re-released 1970 debut finally granting him the chart placings that eluded him 40 years ago. The music itself, incidentally, fits into the emerging singer-songwriter sensibility of the time, but with generally grittier lyrics and a haunting musical quality somewhat reminiscent of another 1970s artist who has re-emerged, Nick Drake, with some Bob Dylan influences. There’s plenty of it heard in the movie, which cannot explain its enduring qualities nor the vagaries of circumstance and coincidence that can affect what becomes popular.


IMDb link


viewed 10/17/12 7:45 pm at Ritz Five and reviewed 10/17/12

The Iron Lady (***)

This is perhaps two thirds of a very good biopic about the life of Margaret Thatcher, British counterpart to Ronald Reagan, yet his temperamental opposite. Unfortunately, the employment of a mostly useless framing device — Thatcher (Meryl Streep) spends half a dozen segments in the near-present day as she struggles with dementia and has conversations with her late husband (Jim Broadbent)—mars it. Not only does it rob the narrative of some momentum with a storyline that emphasizes the artificial nature of the medium—how could screenwriter Abi Morgan (Shame), or anyone, know that Ms. Thatcher is turning on her radio and other noisy appliances to drown out the sound of the imagined husband she’s bickering with?—but it also uses up time that would have better spent, say, showing us how a grocer’s daughter came to such firm conservative beliefs that, even today, she is a controversial figure in her hometown in the English Midlands. Or how young Margaret Roberts became so determined to break into the nearly uniformly male field of electoral politics in the 1950s. (Director Phyllida Lloyd depicts some of the sexism that greeted her efforts, but wisely doesn’t make it the main focus; the visual statement of the pearl-necklace-wearing Thatcher among a sea of grey suits makes its own statement.)

Other than Thatcher’s landmark achievements as 1980s prime minister—the taming of the trade unions and the victory in the Falklands War—the film elides over her specific political policies, not to mention her four years as opposition leader, in favor of emphasizing her forcefulness and disinclination to yield. (The vehement opposition to her is also depicted without the film seeming to take any position on whether it was justified.) Indeed, American Tea Party sympathizers will find her an appealing heroine, and even firm liberals may fantasize about a President Obama who’s as unwilling to compromise.

Streep, of course, is entirely convincing; another actress, Alexandra Roach, plays Roberts/Thatcher as a college student, newlywed, and 1950s candidate for a seat in parliament. At least the makeup artistry that makes Streep look 80 can be admired. Broadbent is a fine actor, but not one who can be made to look young. So we see Denis Thatcher in the earliest scenes played by another actor; then he seems to age about 40 years to Thatcher’s 20. Oddly, Broadbent appears more as a ghost than in the scenes when Denis is alive. Although Denis was ten years the senior of Margaret and an archconservative, his possible role in shaping her political views is not explored.

For some reason, too many biographies of current or recent figures (e.g., J. Edgar) seem to insist on some sort of flashback structure so that the story is told from a present-day perspective. Yet less frequently is this done for those who died long ago. A Dangerous Method, for example, is perfectly content to dispense with the last 40 years of Carl Jung’s life in a brief epilogue. This would have done just fine to sum up the post-office life of Lady Thatcher. As it is, depicting the Iron Lady in her doddering dotage, possibly lamenting neglecting her husband and children, and the grandchildren off in South Africa, would seem to sentimentalize a woman for whom sentimentality would seem wholly inappropriate.

IMDb link

viewed 1/26/12 7:35 pm at Ritz Five and reviewed 1/30/12

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life (**1/2)

There are ordinary biopics, careful to identify places and persons and dates, often with on-screen titles. They’ll advance the story by showing the subject mentioned in newspaper headlines, or seen on a talk show, or performing. They’ll start with formative childhood incidents and end with the character’s death, or with an epilogue telling us in a conclusory paragraph. Sometimes, they win Oscars for the leads, as with Jamie Foxx in Ray or Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. This impressionistic take on another French icon is another sort of biopic, something like the take on Bob Dylan in I’m Not There.

Serge Gainsbourg (Eric Elmosnino) is a little like Dylan in embracing a number of musical identities, and maybe, as this film would suggest, being hard to sum up. Outside of France he is best known for the steamy 1969 duet “Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus,” written for his paramour Brigitte Bardot but a hit in much of the world (save the United States) as sung with English actress Jane Birkin, who’s portrayed here by Lucy Gordon. We first meet Gainsbourg (né Lucien Ginsburg) a bright, cocky twelve-year-old (Kacey Mottet Klein) Jewish boy in a Nazi-occupied Paris whose mix of repression and licentiousness would  inform his future work as aspiring painter and, later, composer and singer. He’s already smoking the cigarettes that will shorten his life and exhibiting his lifelong fascination with the adult female. This early segment is the most conventional, but also the most satisfyingly cohesive. Perhaps the very first scene, in which a girl refuses his kiss because he’s “too ugly” is meant to clue us in to the insecurity around women that mysteriously shows up later.

Fast forward about ten years and the soon-to-be-renamed Ginsburg meets the first in a succession of wives and paramours. Things get more impressionistic at this point.  Writer-director Joann Sfar doesn’t do any of the flitting back and forth in time like that Dylan biopic, which, coincidentally featured Charlotte Gainsbourg, the singer’s daughter with Birkin. However, it features an annoying plot device of having a costumed, giant-nosed (even larger than Gainsbourg’s nose) alter ego goad him into his boldest actions, which usually involved seduction. Perhaps this device worked better in Sfar’s graphic novel, from which she adapted the film. Her movie version skips about with time passage little noted and characters barely identified. Gainsbourg first wife, a by-product of his art-school education, disappears with only the impression that Gainsbourg had tired of her. The second wife is there to object to his philandering. Bardot, a torrid, famous fling, gets a lengthy interlude, and Birkin, with whom he spent the 1970s, gets more.

The movie spends about ten minutes exploring Gainsbourg’s life as a public figure, mostly by showing the controversy around his recording a reggae version of the French national anthem. Here are some other things about him that are not in this movie: he acted in several films, and directed a few; he released a classic album, Histoire de Melody Nelson, in 1971 (the film alludes to the title); he played the accordion and harmonica as well as guitar and piano; he wrote a novel; he appeared shirtless on a bed with a sensually arrayed, 13-year-old Charlotte in the music video for a 1984 duet entitled “Lemon Incest”; he recorded two albums in New Jersey in the 1980s; he died in 1991. In general, the movie is shallow about his musical life and only fleetingly suggests his place in French pop music history. The music is there mostly as a pathway to the personal, and, without the music, the personal suggests aimlessness.

As for the personal, if you come away with any image of Gainsbourg, it’s that he was attracted to many women. Whether you come away with much else is an open question.

IMDB link

viewed 11/15/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/16/11 (revised 11/20/11)

Project Nim (***1/2)

I had heard the story of the chimpanzee Nim Chimsky. Born in 1973, he was the subject of an experiment whose ostensible purpose was to see if a chimp raised like a human child would develop basic language skills. As fascinating as that question is, the story of what happened to Nim as an individual is equally so, and certainly both stranger and, at times, disturbing. The decision to place Nim in a New York City apartment with a caretaker— a former student of the researcher living with half a dozen kids—who knew nothing about chimps and little about sign language is only the first of the odd events. She was, however, willing to treat him so like one of her own young children that she breast fed him. And yet, he would be taken from her.

There are several more stops on Nim’s odyssey, and while the jury is still out on how much language apes can acquire—a question explored more in Elizabeth Hess’s book than in this adaptation—it’s hard to come away from this movie with good feelings toward primate experimentation. Yet the tone director James Marsh takes is as even as that in his previous documentary, Man on Wire. He has the benefit of having nearly every person important to the story participating in his film, though most of the story is at a 30 year remove. This includes Herb Terrace, the researcher who oversaw Project Nim, as well as the humans who bonded with Nim. Since Nim was the subject of the scientific research, Marsh also has period footage of Nim, whose signing is helpfully translated on screen.

In the end, Nim shows himself to share many human qualities, but the film also shows that to be not entirely a flattering comparison.


IMDB link


viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 7/31/11

Tabloid (***1/2)

It happens that I saw this when, aside from the economy, the month’s two biggest news stories have been a young woman’s acquittal on charges of murdering her daughter and a British newspaper’s alleged phone hacking. The stranger-than-fiction story that unfolds here is a reminder that stories of young women, especially attractive white ones, have long captured public attention, and that British newspapers have never been shy about pursuing their own version of the truth.

The events that took Joyce McKinney from Wyoming beauty pageant contestant to English headline-war fodder took place in 1977. Her looks have faded, but she seems to be the same person whose magnificent obsession with her Mormon boyfriend (or fiancé, maybe) inadvertently turned her into a celebrity across the ocean. And Errol Morris, who has made biographical documentaries about serious things (The Fog of War) and entertaining things (Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control), provides just the right approach to telling her story. While relying heavily on his own interviews, he splashes his screen with old Hollywood footage and splashes pull quotes from his subjects across the screen in giant, old-fashioned letters. Even the background music is melodrama worthy. This approach can seem heavy-handed in a serious documentary (see Michael Moore’s work for examples, or even some of Morris’s), but underscores the humor. And, for certain, there’s more humor here than in most Hollywood comedies.

McKinney might be a tragic figure but seems to see herself more as a survivor. She certainly has a way with a phrase; she compares the unlikelihood of the accusation against her to “putting a marshmallow into a parking meter.” And she has already denounced Morris’s film as a “celluloid catastrophe,” though gently mocking is about the worst that can be said of the director’s presentation. I felt there was a sincerity to her even when I wasn’t sure I believed her version of events.

The one thing thing that hampers Morris’s storytelling is the lack of participation of key principals, either because of death or unwillingness to participate. (The only documentary I can compare this to would be Crazy Love, which tells a more complete story.) McKinney tells the bulk of the tale, and she appears to be an unreliable narrator. And yet the ambiguity that remains is also part of the appeal; the element of mystery is that which nearly all of the greatest tabloid stories have. Morris may not have resorted to illegality, and he is, McKinney’s objections notwithstanding, presumably more scrupulous than The Daily Mail about fairly portraying his subjects (his 1988 film The Thin Blue Line helped free a falsely accused prisoner), but he clearly understands the attraction of what the tabloids are selling.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 7/18/11

Incendies (***3/4)

Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which I saw the night before this, includes William Faulkner’s famous quote, “The past is never dead; it isn’t even past.” Probably that’s why it came to mind while watching this harrowing mystery, which proves the point. It also proves that it’s not only science-fiction films and action-thrillers that deliver mind-blowing conclusions. (Yes, the one here involves a big coincidence, but it’s a coincidence that mostly explains subsequent events rather than too-conveniently wrapping up a messy plot.) What starts out as a slow-paced drama about French Canadian twins asked to carry out their late mother’s last wish—find their lost father and brother—becomes increasingly compelling. For me the point at which I started becoming involved was when, in flashback, the mother (the very fine Lubna Azabal) finds herself facing a Christian death squad in Lebanon’s civil war of the 1970s. Thinking quickly, she not only shows them her cross to prove she’s not a Muslim, but also tells them that a young Muslim girl is her daughter, hoping to save the child.

Alternating with the mother’s story, her daughter (but not her twin brother, less inclined to carry out the will of a mother he somewhat resents) travels from Montréal to Lebanon and slowly uncovers her mother’s unfortunate past. Director Denis Villeneuve, who’s adapted the play by Lebanese Canadian Wajdi Mouawad, keeps the actual violence off-screen while showing its effects. The flashbacks and the modern scenes move toward the same conclusion, but the contrast couldn’t be greater. It’s not only that the twins live in a world of cell phones and air-conditioned vehicles, but that they live in a world where they have the luxury of being able to forget the past.

This was nominated for the foreign-language Oscar. It’s nearly a toss-up whether this or the winner, In a Better World, is better. But the twist at the end of this one, and Villeneuve’s natural-seeming presentation of a tricky structure, gives this the edge.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 6/23/11

Potiche (***1/4)

“Trophy housewife” is how the title gets translated in the English subtitles of this breezy French import. Catherine Deneuve, who’s won some trophies of her own, plays the title role. As the wife of a 1970s umbrella magnate, she’s learned to live with being ignored, condescended to, and probably cheated on by her wealthy spouse (Fabrice Luchini). Unfortunately for him, while she tolerates his ill treatment, his factory employees won’t, and their threats to strike will have unexpected repercussions on his family, which includes a left-leaning son who sympathizes the workers and a right-leaning daughter who doesn’t. Turns out, the housewife is the only one who can step in and make peace.

This of course would be a creaky storyline today, but director and screenwriter François Ozon has kept the setting of the play he’s adapted, and he’s also filmed it in a style that will remind viewers of a time long ago, when feminism still seemed new, young women had Farrah Fawcett haircuts, and communist mayors of small French cities were, presumably, common. He’s co-opted the bright look of 1970s television, utilizing a groovy font for the credits, a period-sounding score (reminding me of Marvin Hamlisch’s in The Informant!), and even touches like a split-screen scene.

Ozon’s movie occupies the territory between homage and parody, not unlike his 8 Women, which also featured Deneuve. Thus, while well-plotted and relatively realistic, it’s also whimsical and comic in its retro stylings and acting. The communist mayor, by the way, is played by Gerard Dépardieu, the onetime leading man who’s made a Brandoesque transformation, weight wise. The potiche turns out to have a past. Deneuve fell for Dépardieu 30 years ago in The Last Metro, but here, she turns him down. Complications ensue, all in good fun.

IMDB link

viewed 4/23/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 4/24/11

Night Catches Us (***)

Ang Lee’s brilliant film The Ice Storm eyed the osmotic flow of counterculture values into suburban America, and Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty followed 1960s radicals still on the run almost 20 years later. Tanya Hamilton’s film, set in 1976, revolves around former Black Panther Marcus (Anthony Mackie), who returns to his former home in West Philadelphia when his father dies. There he finds varying reactions—a brother resenting his disappearance, a fellow Panther calling him “snitch,” and a friend and lawyer (Kerry Washington) offering to assist. Washington’s character, who defends Panthers but seems no longer to have her heart in the movement, is a widow who deflects her daughter’s questions about the past.

The best thing about the film is its portrayal of the era, although clearly the low budget prevented better known songs from being used. (The Roots contribute a score, however.) The Panther movement as portrayed has devolved into a vestige of itself, its leaders imprisoned, as Marcus was, or mellowed out, as he is, its remaining followers without an agenda other than nihilism. Mostly white cops patrol the middle-class neighborhood with little attempt to integrate themselves into its fabric. It is an era of decline in old cities like Philadelphia.

Hamilton paces the film deliberately, holding back on revealing the circumstances by which Marcus wound up in prison, and how his former colleague was killed. Meanwhile, the presence of Marcus forces the young mother into her own kind of self-examination. I might have wished for there to be more about the Panther movement and what it meant to these characters and what it meant to the United States. Nonetheless, I appreciated the movie’s lack of an agenda in depicting this fading bit of history.

IMDB link

viewed 12/24/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 12/27/10

Secretariat (***)

Even with a great pedigree, no one can predict with certainly that a horse will be great, and so Secretariat’s owner got him after losing a coin toss. (The winner took another horse that seemed more promising.) Still, he was not a true underdog, like Seabiscuit. He did not meet a mysterious and tragic end, like the title character in Phar Lap, another great drama about a racehorse. So some obvious dramatic angles are missing here. Instead, this is is a straight inspirational drama with a mild but definite feminist angle. The horse’s owner, Penny Tweedy (née Chenery) (Diane Lane), was a housewife and mother of four who learned the business in her 40s, made some smart decisions, and got a bit lucky. Taking over her father’s Virginia horse farm in the late 1960s, she defied her husband’s preference that she stop spending so much time away from their home in Denver. Pointedly, the film does not apologize for her having done so.

The screenplay is by Mike Rich, who has penned other inspirational sports films, notably The Rookie. Rich plays up Chenery’s feistiness and simplifies or sentimentalizes some events, but sticks to the facts when it comes to the horse racing. (The corniest moment is probably when her father’s assistant brings Penny coffee. Asked how she knew Penny wanted two sugars and cream, she replies, “That’s how your Daddy liked it.”) Director Randall Wallace (We Were Soldiers) does a fine job filming the races. Seen close up, with dust kicking in the air, it seems almost a violent sport, in contrast to how elegant it looks from afar. And even if you know the outcome, Secretariat’s performance in the 1973 Belmont Stakes is still pretty astonishing. A nice one to watch with the kids.

IMDB link

viewed 9/2/10 at Rave UPenn [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/2–10/7/10

Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 (***1/4)

Picking up about where Mesrine: Killer Instinct left off, this is nonetheless a different film than its predecessor. You don’t particularly need to have seen part one to make sense of part two, and in fact there is hardly any character overlap, save Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel) himself. Here Mesrine is no longer the angry young man. He is older and has settled into a career, albeit as a bank robber only dabbling in other crimes. He is still capable of violence but it seems more measured. He reserves most of his hatred for the police and those running France’s maximum-security prisons. He believes himself to have a credo, to be a man of his word even as he publishes an exaggerated memoir aimed at increasing his fame and notoriety.

Lacking some of the vitality of Killer Instinct, this installment is nearly a character study, though its prison-escape sequence bests the one in the first film, and there are multiple shootouts. Here his penchant for disguises is more prominent. Like the first film, this one starts off with his death in 1979. Since it begins in 1973, it doesn’t skip ahead in time as much. It’s still episodic, but less so. Unlike the first film, this ends where it begins, with the police killing Mesrine. We now see this, for the first time, from the viewpoint of the police, a clever reminder that, to them, this was no master criminal, no gentleman bandit, but a thug they were determined to take down.

IMDB link

viewed 9/8/10 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 9/8–9/10

Mesrine: Killer Instinct (***1/4)

The gangster film had already been around awhile when the early classics The Public Enemy and Little Caesar were released in 1931. These formed the template for countless films that followed the rise and, usually, fall of a would-be mob boss. Arguably, this formula reached its zenith with the Godfather saga, which also incorporated the trope of family conflict that is nearly as frequent an ingredient in these stories. But filmmakers still try their hand at making something original of the genre. Just a few months ago there was A Prophet, another French film that is superior to this, probably, though this does have a certain visceral energy to it.

These films vary in location, time period, criminal proclivities of the antihero, and so on, but the primary characters generally fall into two types. One is the type who under other circumstances might have done something else with his life, but learn the ruthlessness that underlies criminality. Michael Corleone in The Godfather and Henry Hill in Goodfellas are such characters. So is the hero of The Prophet, who starts off as a scared prisoner. This suspense drama, a true story, is of the other type. If Jacques Mesrine ( Vincent Cassel) was once an ordinary young man, it was at a young age. In an early scene the young Jacques, just back from fighting in Algeria, berates his father for cooperating with the Germans during World War II. "Do balls skip a generation in this family?" he asks. And that's about as much of an explanation as we get for the remarkable criminal résumé that Mesrine would amass, on two continents, in the 1960s and ’70s. It's a record so extensive as to have been compiled in two parts, of which this is the first. (Even with that, the film skips ahead and omits several of Mesrine's documented adventures.)

What most gangster films have in common is the man who disregards all rules, and our fascination with that is why they keep making them. Attracting comely women and escaping from prison were among Mesrine’s talents, but it is sheer cockiness that propels him. Cassel is quite charismatic in the leading role. In terms of story, there is not much order to all that happens. Mesrine seems to have been an improviser, which is perhaps why he got caught and ultimately killed. No spoiler this, since it’s shown at the start of the film. The movie never returns to it, though. Instead, it stops in the middle, the story to be picked up in Mesrine: Public Enemy #1, whose title is an homage to one of its classic forebears.

IMDB link

viewed 8/29/10 at Ritz 5

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (***1/4)

It was a war begun under a false pretense that lasted way longer, was more deadly, and proved much more costly than predicted. The outcome was not as planned, and that severely impacted the political fortunes of the president who had poured hundreds of thousands of troops into a faraway country. That was Vietnam. People under 45 or 50 won’t remember Daniel Ellsberg, and yet his actions indirectly may have led to the downfall of a president and to one of the most important First Amendment verdicts by the United States Supreme Court.

Ellsberg’s goal was to end the Vietnam War, though. Through his job as a United States foreign policy analyst at the Rand Corporation, he had access to a top-secret report about the history of US involvement in Vietnam. Notably, it was top secret not because it would aid the enemy, but because it would demonstrate the deception of American presidents and the unreality of upbeat assessments about the likelihood of success. After handing the report to The New York Times and other newspapers, Ellsberg earned both a federal indictment and, from President Richard Nixon, the epithet that gives this film its title.

This can be seen as a companion piece to The Fog of War, the Errol Morris documentary that featured Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. McNamara and Ellsberg were both originally supporters of the war (though Ellsberg with more reservations), and both realized that the US was not, as President Lyndon Johnson had told the public, winning the war. But whereas McNamara felt, until decades later, that his duty was to be loyal to his boss, the president, Ellberg came sooner to feel otherwise. Directors Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith allow Ellsberg to narrate his own story, incorporating recent interviews of him and others. Stylistically, the movie is not noteworthy. There is no Philip Glass score a la Morris’s work to lend a sense of urgency, and no fancy graphics. Minor re-enactments of certain scenes are included, and period footage, but mostly the movie is a typical “talking heads” documentary. Almost all of the voices, though, are of those directly involved in leaking the document, in Ellsberg’s life, or in related matters. One academic, people’s historian Howard Zinn, appears, but as one who knew Ellsberg in the 1970s. Nixon is heard on tape, wondering in one excerpt whether dropping a nuclear bomb on Vietnam might not be a good idea.

While little new information is revealed, this is a very well organized look at a piece of history that any American ought to know.

IMDB link

viewed 4/14/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/15/10