A Hijacking (***)

This is the Somali pirate version of a police procedural. The particulars of the story are fictional, but everything is realistic enough that it seems otherwise. The story does not offer twists and turns, or any action —even the hijacking itself takes place off camera, experienced from the point of view of the Danish CEO being notified — but the slow buildup of tension on the part of both the captives and their families back home. The ransom negotiations are the main focus, a fascinating exercise in game theory. The CEO (Søren Malling), certainly the most memorable, and intense, character, heeds the advice of the negotiator he hires and lowballs the Somali negotiator (who denies that he himself is a pirate). But as time passes, and the captives suffer further deprivations, he must decide on his own course.

IMDb link

viewed 6/20/13 7:30 at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and posted 11/2/13

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

Compliance (***1/2)

Just because something really happened doesn’t mean people will believe it, and that’s the only problem with this movie, which, nonetheless, a lot of people might benefit from seeing. It begins with a giant “based on real events,” which as often as not signals a story that heavily departs from reality, but, based on a little post-movie reading about the case, and ABC News footage from a 20/20 investigation, it would appear that this sticks pretty close to what happened in a McDonald’s restaurant—here styled a “Chick-wich”—in a Kentucky town. The film is done in a quasi-documentary style, and even the first few minutes of it give off the familiar vibe of what it’s like working in a low-wage retail establishment.

It is better not to give too much of the story away, but it begins with the manager of the restaurant (Ann Dowd), an ordinary-seeming middle-aged woman, getting a call. The caller states that he is a police officer, and that a patron has accused the young cashier there of stealing. This leads to an increasingly unpleasant experience for the young woman (Dreama Walker). Without giving more away, it’s worth noting that nothing than happens to her is worse than what happens to victims of violence in many a popular thriller, and yet I suspect that most people will feel as I did, much more squeamish watching this.

I saw the movie at a screening the other night. I was near the front and didn’t see, but the person leading a Q&A afterward said there were a few walkouts. I heard a few cries of “she is so stupid” and such even during the movie. The discussion was polite, though. I made a comment about the Milgram experiments as well as the tricks “psychics” use to elicit information from their marks and then feed the same information back to them to gain trust. The caller does that in the movie. I also disagree that the restaurant manager in the 20/20 piece is necessarily lying. She may be, but people’s memories have a funny way of reconstructing things in a way that makes sense to them. Her doing something so awful doesn’t make sense to her. 
 
But someone wants to know why anyone wants to see this. I would say, why does anyone want to see a movie like Saw III, in which we are somewhat made to identify with the torturer? Here we identify with the victim, and it makes us (me, at least) incredibly squeamish. Yet what happens to the girl is no worse than what happens to victims of violence in many a thriller. Why do we not feel so awful in these kinds of movies? Is it that they don’t seem real, that we are desensitized to that kind of violence, or that those movies attribute most or all of the bad behavior to outright villains, whereas this movie has seemingly ordinary people doing the ordinary things. 
 
I think it would be great if a lot of people saw Compliance, which reminds us that movies can present idealized models of human behavior, and reality is a lot more complex. 
 
By the way, the epilogue to the film [spoiler, sort of] tells us there have been many such incidents.

IMDb link

viewed 8/15/12 7:30 at Ritz Bourse

Bernie (***)

In the stranger-than-fiction category comes this small-town tale. Jack Black plays the title character, an assistant funeral director beloved in his adopted hometown of Jasper, Texas. Shirley MacLaine plays the wealthy widow, beloved by no one except Bernie, who is nonetheless driven to a desperate act. With the help of Skip Hollandsworth, whose Texas Monthly article inspired the movie and who gets co-screenwriting credit, Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Tape, Fast Food Nation) has fashioned Bernie’s story into something like a docudrama. A few dozen actual townspeople appear in the movie in interview segments. (Wait for the ending credits for a glimpse of the real Bernie talking to Jack Black.) It would have been easy to make this into a straight comedy, or give the narrative an air of condescension, but Linklater simply presents the story as it happened, with commentary. It’s a pretty good yarn.

IMDb link

viewed 6/14/12 7:35 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/14/12

The Class (***3/4)

This is, and isn’t, another movie about an idealistic young teacher trying to lift up a bunch of high school kids in a tough neighborhood. Mr. Marin won’t remind you of Michelle Pfieffer in Dangerous Minds, Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver, Hillary Swank in Freedom Writers, and so on. Movies like that suggest that with a little tough love and a tough-but compassionate teacher, even poor kids in rough neighborhoods can all succeed. Even if we accept this as true, it’s also the case that there aren’t enough of these superhero teachers to go around. The Class, the story of a non-superhero, is based on a book by François Bégaudeau, a teacher who more or less plays himself in this drama directed by Laurent Cantet (Time Out, Human Resources).

Mr. Marin will probably seem more familiar than the superheroes, even if you didn’t go to school in a poor, multi-ethnic, Paris suburb. He’s the sort of teacher you might’ve thought was a good guy when you had him, then mostly forgotten about after that. He’s a well-meaning liberal who tries harder than most of his colleagues to engage the students, but still gets tripped up from time to time, reminded by the students that no matter how hip he tries to be that he is not one of them. The students are a mixture of types and ethnicities, including Arab and African immigrants and one awkward Chinese kid. It’s a small picture of a racial and social dynamic that’s a little bit different than in the United States, but like Mr. Marin we only get part of the story. Everything that happens is entirely within the school walls, so what we see is nothing more than the teacher does. (Nor do we learn anything about the teacher’s personal life.)

Cantet takes a somewhat detached approach to his characters—the film is like a documentary—but that works well here because it highlights the process as much as the characters. That is, we see the way the teacher is fighting a thousand tiny battles to hold the attention and respect of these students, who sometimes see through his strategies, and sometimes are too busy arguing with one another to notice what he’s doing. There are no great moments of uplift, or great defeat either (although the end has the suggestion of both). Heavy plotting there is not. But this cast of amateurs still had me amused, angry at them, feeling sorry for them, identifying with their boredom, and generally riveted.

IMDB link

viewed 2/14/09 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 4/16/09

Waltz with Bashir (**3/4)

This movie that its creator, Ari Folman, calls an animated documentary, is nominated for an Academy Award, but not in the animation or documentary categories, but as foreign-language film. Folman is an Israeli who, spurred by a conversation with a friend, realizes that he’s almost completely forgotten the details of his service in the military during the country’s 1982 war with Lebanon. Interviews with men he knew on the battlefield are the basis for the film.

Animation frees Folman to use “footage” and “camera angles” that would not otherwise be available. (The animation, partly based on live footage, utilizes a realistic, but simplified, style). Flashbacks, dream sequences, and the creative use of music, too, make this seem more like a narrative film, although it’s organized around interview segments (mostly using the actual voices of Folman’s old comrades). Folman provides few details about his life before or after the war, and no geopolitical details about the war. It is possible to see the movie as anti-Israel, I suppose, in that Israelis are shown killing civilians. However, the clear point is that such atrocities are the natural by-product of war and the fear and confusion that it produces. The director is Everyman.

Even while realizing that Folman’s choices were deliberate, for me they made the film a little too abstract. Some sequences are quite striking, like the one in which a solider is separated from his unit and has to swim to avoid running into his enemy. But it if a movie is not going to provide a storyline in terms of why the war was being fought, then it should have given a more significant one in terms of its central character.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/1/09

United 93 (****)

Simulating a real-time documentary, writer-director Paul Greengrass portrays the morning of 9/11. The accumulation of detail and a melodrama-free focus on events, not any one individual, gives the story its power.

I was curious about how I’d react to this movie. Having seen director Paul Greengrass’s earlier docudrama Bloody Sunday, I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t veer into sappiness or cheap jingoism. But seeing the 9/11 events on TV now seems almost like watching atomic bomb footage, and I wondered if seeing this would bring back some of the emotions of when it occurred. The best thing I can say about United 93, which shortly followed a TV movie called Flight 93, is that it did. Greengrass’s approach is simply to show the events in real time. John Powell’s subtle score certainly adds to the mood, but in many ways the movie is something like what a real documentary might have been like, had people been there to film it. There are no stars, either in the sense of well-known actors or in the sense that any particular person’s role was emphasized, although Ben Sliney makes an impression as the FAA national commander who was on duty the morning of 9/11. (Like many of the ground crew, Sliney plays himself.)

Watching Bloody Sunday I thought I’d have liked a stronger character to identify with, but I didn’t miss that here, perhaps because the real-time approach was so powerful, perhaps because the event was more familiar. I’d also wondered if the movie might be dull due to this familiarity, but in fact the dramatization showed the events in a new light, as well as some things I hadn’t known or remembered. For example, a simple flight delay was probably a large reason why 93 didn’t hit the hijackers’ target. As the hijackers headed toward their target, the passengers were aware of the World Trade Center being hit, and so would have realized that, unlike other hijackers, the ones here were not intending to land. For their part, the ground personnel were slow to realize what was happening, both because the event was unique and because the air-traffic control system conveys incomplete information unless the pilots cooperate. At a certain point, the film switches focus from the ground to the air, an implicit acknowledgment that, by then, the people on the ground had become irrelevant. Obviously, the action aboard the plane is a reconstruction based on the black box recording (presumably) and the calls made aboard the flight. There are no flashbacks, so we know little about the passengers, but this is an asset because the range of their actions and reactions seems universal.

I’m sure some people who see this movie will find their political views reinforced, but I don’t think this was intended as a political film. Could the military response been swifter? Could the hijackings have been prevented? These aren’t questions that this film tries to answer. From the standpoint of the people portrayed, 9/11 was an ordinary day that became something else. Depicting this reality through an accumulation of small details is what gives the movie its power.

IMDb link

posted 8/20/13