Ida (***1/4)

A lot of filmmakers, after making a splash with an independent or small-budget hit, will move on to blockbuster fare, but Pawel Pawlikowski has done the opposite. Best known for the English romance My Summer of Love, Pawlikowski has returned to his native Poland and made a black-and-white drama about a young woman (Agata Trzebuchowska) on the verge of taking her vows as a Catholic nun. Having grown up in the convent, she is only now being told she has a living relative, an aunt (Agata Kulesza). The aunt she never knew tells her about the parents she never knew, who were Jews who died, or were killed, during World War II.

In the course of this concisely told tale, these very different women together try to find out what happened. The contrast of personalities is about the only thing Ida has in common with My Summer of Love. Asked if she’s ever had impure thoughts, Ida says yes, but not carnal ones. Too bad, the aunt says, because it’s not much of a sacrifice if you don’t know what you’re giving up. The sheltered girl and the hard-edged, hard-drinking aunt make a sort of good-cop, bad-cop pairing, though Pawlikowski does not use this to humorous effect, as another filmmaker might have.

Instead, the style is composed and steady; the unbeautiful views of rural and small-town Poland of the 1960s create a visual impression as strong as My Summer. The ending seems possibly headed for melodrama, but Pawlikowski reins it in, concluding the story in a way that may or may not be what the viewer will want to happen, but that seemed to make sense.

IMDb link

viewed 6/11/14 7:35 pm and posted 6/11/14

The Wind Rises (***1/4)

It is perhaps fitting that the final feature by Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki looks back in time. Departing from the fantasy films that make up the bulk of his work, he tells the story of Jiro Horikoshi, whose real-life counterpart designed Japanese aircraft used in World War II. Jiro literally dreams of flying long before the war. The charming sequences in which he converses with the dream-conjured Italian aeronautics pioneer Giovanni Caproni have a touch of the whimsy that characterizes Miyazaki’s other work.

A key element of the story captures the 1923 earthquake that nearly destroyed Tokyo, but most of the film takes place later, when Jiro has begun working for an aircraft-design firm. Looking at the more advanced work being done in Europe and America, he burns with an ambition born of what the film suggests was a national inferiority complex. Arguably, this complex translated into an ugly nationalism, but in Jiro it merely translates into a desire to build better airplanes. The contradiction between Jiro’s pure desire for engineering perfection and the military uses to which his designs will be put is a subtle theme of the film, and the understatement enhances rather than detracts from the bittersweet conclusion.

I don’t think this film is quite the masterpiece that Miyazaki was perhaps going for, given the historical sweep and dramatic themes. In the English-dubbed version, anyway, some the dialogue and its overly bright delivery gives the proceedings the feel of a old-fashioned “family” film. The love story is unusual in its particulars, but conventional in its telling, close to Nicholas Sparks territory. However, if this is the director’s last feature, as he has said it will be, it is not unworthy, and a good choice for those who will enjoy the lovely hand-drawn images but are wary of the spirits and demons that populate many of Miyazaki’s earlier films.

IMDb link

viewed 3/16/14 3:45 at Ritz Bourse and posted 3/16/14

The Monuments Men (**3/4)

I’ve usually enjoyed George Clooney’s acting roles, but his directorial projects (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck., Leatherheads) have mostly seemed more admirable than winsome. So it is with this one, which takes a solid subject, art treasures looted by the Nazis, and renders it more drily than I’d have hoped.

Not surprisingly, the cast is full of big names: Clooney himself plays the leader of a middle-aged band of art experts who don uniforms in order to keep the treasures out of German hands, or get them back before they’re destroyed. His recruits include Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Hugh Bonneville, Jean Dujardin, and Bob Balaban. But the best role is Cate Blanchett’s, an employee of the Nazis in occupied Paris who is happy to betray them, but also suspicious of the motives of the American (Damon) sent to enlist her assistance. Hers is by far the most complex character. Clooney has the biggest role, but his most significant function is to make a few speeches saying that art, the cornerstone of civilization, is what everyone was fighting for, so the mission is worth it. How more meaningful, I thought, it would have been to include a glimpse of the art before the war, rather than first encounter it in warehouses and similar settings, in bulk.

In terms of plot, this is a true-story version of National Treasure. In form, though, it’s mostly an old-fashioned adventure film. Put a bunch of colorful characters together, have them troupe around Europe, let fun ensue. But the tone seemed to me downbeat, yet without being especially emotional. Even when the monuments men come upon a cache of gold teeth removed from people sent to concentration camps, the moment seems perfunctory. Also present are multiple scenes in which the art men confront the enemy, or those who are potentially the enemy. I thought of Inglorious Basterds, in which similar moments crackle with tension. Of course, Clooney is a thoughtful man who is unlikely to make a truly awful movie, or an unintelligent one. Here he works with his longtime writing and producing partner, Grant Heslov, and everything is executed with competence. But little pizzazz.

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viewed 2/12/14 7:30 at Roxy; posted 2/12/14

Lore (***)

Everywhere in the world, people tend to adopt the attitudes and belief systems of their parents, and this is no less true when those attitudes are repugnant. Lore (short for Hannelore) is the daughter of Nazis; as the film begins, the family is fleeing in the face of the German defeat. Barely into her teens, she winds up leading her four younger siblings on a trek across a land divided among the Allies. But her longer journey involves re-evaluationg her acceptance of her parents’ ideology.

Director Cate Shortland brings the same poetic approach to her filmmaking as in her film Somersault (set her native Australia). This means lots of gauzy close-ups and quiet passages. This is not dull, but in this case I found it emotionally distancing.

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viewed  3/20/13 7:10 pm at Ritz Bourse

The Well-Digger’s Daughter (***1/4)

This World War II melodrama comes by its old-fashioned quality in part because it’s a remake of a 1940 Marcel Pagnol film. Getting the period look isn’t so hard, but the movie’s strength is to remind us that it is values and culture, more than style and technology, that truly separates us from the past. The title character (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) is turning 18 as the story begins. She is “as kind as she is pretty” as her widower father and his younger friend agree. But, though she has spent time in Paris, unlike her four younger sisters, she is rather innocent. Her father (Daniel Auteuil) has only lived in the rural south and is rather traditional.

The story, which involves the debonair son of a prosperous shopkeeper, is not wildly original, but  the characters make a a strong impression. The showiest role is the well-digger himself, whose sudden changes of heart bring a measure of humor even as tragedy threatens. A lovely score by Alexandre Desplat captures the overall bittersweet tone. Auteuil, whose breakout role was as the star of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, adaptations of a Pagnol novel, here makes a strong directorial debut. With lush color missing from the original film, he brings out the bucolic qualities of the setting. Moreover, he allows the characters to emerge, especially in the crucial early scenes. Much of the tale hinges on the meaningfulness of two brief meetings of the girl and her young man. In lesser hands, this might seem corny. Mostly, it doesn’t.

IMDb link

viewed 8/5/12 4:15 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/9/12

In Darkness (***1/4)

This is yet another true, moving Holocaust story that you probably haven’t heard (though adapted from a book by Robert Marshall). It would be absurd to call the abundance of such stories a silver lining. But a tiny one might be that even as the extremeness of the Nazi movement allowed mistrust, venality, and hatred to flourish, it allowed some ordinary individuals, like Anne Frank savior Miep Gies, to achieve a measure of heroism.

The story of Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), a petty thief, bears some parallels to that of Gies, except that Socha’s motives were, at least at the start, entirely mercenary, and the Jews he hid were people with whom he had no prior relationship and felt no particular affection. However, as the resident expert on the sewer system in Lvov, a Ukrainian city mostly populated by ethnic Poles, he and his (literal) partner in crime were in a position to help (or turn in) a small group who fled underground when the Nazis removed the city’s Jewish population. The film shows just enough Nazi brutality to set up the plot. Otherwise, it concentrates on Socha and the desperate people he and his partner agree, for a price, to assist, although none of them in particular.

This is a return to form for director Agnieszka Holland, who made the great, Holocaust-themed Europa, Europa two decades ago but most recently had made the lightweight (English-language) Copying Beethoven. (Nominated for a foreign-language-film Oscar, In Darkness lost to the brilliant A Separation.) The most noteworthy story elements, even more than the threat of discovery, are the senses of squalor and deprivation in the pipes, where the rats are so numerous that children and adults alike brush them off calmly. Additionally, the necessity of living in cramped quarters made privacy nearly impossible. (Even Leopold and his wife have sex just feet from their sleeping daughter.) Tragedy reaches underground, too, yet this desperate life was a preferable fate to that of most of the Jews in Lvov, who did not survive the war.

IMDb link

viewed 3/21/2012 5:30 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/21/2012

Nuremberg: Its Lessons for Today (***1/4)

This documentary was compiled in 1948 but qualifies as new based on the addition of narration by Liev Schreiber. (The text is by the late writer Budd Schulberg and his brother, Stuart.) The subtitle is misleading*, as the film simply summarizes the celebrated 1946 trial of 19 accused Nazi war criminals. Footage of the proceedings is intercut with documentary evidence of the case being made. The first half mainly shows how the Nazi conquests were planned well ahead of time, and systematically accomplished. On screen we see, for example, letters signed by Adolf Hitler in 1939 stating Germany's peaceful intentions toward nations such as Denmark, or Switzerland. Then we see footage of the invasions, Poland first, then much of Europe by the end of 1940. Those on trial are referred to as “Defendant Goebbels,” “Defendant Goering,” and so on. Collectively they are simply “the conspirators.”

The second half of the film concentrates on the war crimes and the idea “total war” that allowed no sympathy for the enemy, whether that was Soviet POWs, resistant villagers, or, above all, the Jews. Any educated person has seen images of emaciated Jews, dead and alive, from the concentration camps. (Indeed, even in the ghettos there were starvation conditions.) In 1948 undoubtedly they would have been altogether startling to most people, and even upon repetition seeing such disregard for human life does not lose the power to shock.

The film ends by drily reciting the verdicts. Indeed, it is a dry presentation of facts, which is actually its strength. Such truths need no dramatic staging. In clips of several of the final statements, the defendants apologize, or state their ignorance of most of what happened, or blame Hitler for betraying Germany and themselves. Of the four prosecutors, the American, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, perhaps most effectively summarizes the collective case against them by essentially ridiculing the idea that, despite holding high positions of authority, each had virtually no knowledge of the horrible things the others were doing. Despite this, the focus is not the individual guilt of each defendant, but the actions of the Nazi regime collectively. I can only guess how I would have reacted had I been learning about these things for the first time.

* Though it’s correctly spelled with no apostrophe, which is nice to see.

IMDB link

viewed 5/18/11 at Roxy and reviewed 5/19/11

Garbo the Spy (***)

First, this is nothing to do with the famous actress Greta Garbo, who once played the spy Mata Hari, but an even more mysterious figure. As it turns out, the Barcelona-born double agent code-named Garbo began his career just as the Swedish-born movie star was completing her on-screen career. After fighting on both sides of the Spanish Civil War, he worked for both sides in World War II. “Spy” might not be the correct word for this work. Without real contacts, he simply made them up. Ironically, his ability to convincingly fabricate information—and have the Germans believe it—made him immensely valuable to the English, to whom he offered his services. This made all the difference in the success of the D-Day invasion, when Garbo and his made-up informants convinced the Germans that the Allies were planning a larger landing elsewhere.

Unlike Garbo the movie star, the man born Joan Pujol didn’t leave behind period footage of him in action, and perhaps for this reason is not well remmbered. Edmon Roach fills the gap with stock footage, talking heads like that of his English biographer, Nigel West, and stylish clips from Hollywood war movies, including Mata Hari. Visually, it’s inessential, but the story is fascinating enough, and it turns out to not quite end with the Nazi defeat. As a personality, Pujol remains enigmatic, but this chapter of history is wealth worth knowing.

IMDB link

viewed at Prince Music Theater [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/22/10

Inglorious Basterds (***1/2)

Only an eccentric like Quentin Tarantino would rewrite the history of World War II to suit his cinematic ends. Tarantino, steeped in cinema history, has a way of wearing his influences on his sleeve yet making them seem more like other Tarantino films that those original sources. Thus this entertaining thriller (with touches of humor) feels both fresh and familiar.

Here, instead of an original score he uses pieces of other scores, the western scores of Ennio Morricone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) in particular. The title, excepting the odd spelling, comes from the American release of a 1978 Italian film whose tag line was “Whatever the Dirty Dozen did they do it dirtier.” The main plot, about a ramshackle bunch of Nazi-slaying Jewish soldiers, is right out of The Dirty Dozen and probably a dozen other movies. But the way Tarantino uses dialogue and works quirky things like forgotten bar games into his plots, and the use of violence as catharsis, are quintessentially his own. Another trademark is the use of distinct “chapters” to separate major sequences. With varied settings and styles, they almost function as mini-movies.

For my taste, the way the soldiers’ lieutenant (Brad Pitt) relishes sadism was somewhat distasteful, leaving me in the uncomfortable position of feeling sorry for Nazis (or GNAT-zees, in Pitt’s odd, Southern accent), but the clever plotting, colorful characters (on both sides of the Nazi fence), and sheer cinematic flourish of the climax more than made up for that. The significantly violent parts are actually less than in other Tarantino films. Chistopher Waltz as the Nazi “Jew hunter” is a great villain whether speaking German, English, or French. And that climax is set at a French movie palace; the heroine (Mélanie Laurent) is a projectionist. Thus, Inglorious Basterds is as much a tribute to its director’s love of cinema as to war movies.

IMDB link

viewed on DVD in early March 2010 and reviewed 3/9–23/10

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (**3/4)

Curious is Benjamin (Brad Pitt) because Benjamin ages backward. Screenwriter Eric Roth (Munich, The Good Shepherd, Ali) and director David Fincher (Zodiac, Panic Room, Fight Club) borrow this idea—and almost nothing else—from the identically titled F. Scott Fitzgerald story. Whereas Fitzgerald’s “Curious” is just that, a curious trifle, the film tries to be two things: a philosophical work, told in flashback excerpts of an old woman’s diary, and a love story of longing and separation.

Benjamin is born in New Orleans at the end of the Great War. In a concession to physical reality, he is baby-size and unlearned, but with the face, and arthritis, of an old man. Taken in by a black caregiver (Taraji P. Henson) at a nursing home, he grows larger, but not, seemingly, older. (Despite this setting and time period, racial themes are not prominent.) Time marches on, but Benjamin only grows more vigorous. Partly isolated from others by his condition, he forms mostly brief relationships. Only with his (adoptive) mother and the granddaughter of one of the nursing home residents is there a longer-lasting bond. (Fincher manages to depict the friendship of the “old man” and the little girl without it seeming creepy.) Eventually, Benjamin leaves New Orleans on a tugboat.

Except for some sexual frankness, the movie feels old-fashioned and timeless, which may be appealing. It’s beautifully shot and scored (by Alexandre Desplat). The make-up effects combine with Pitt’s elegant performance to make you forget he’s a movie star, or that the plot is outlandish. (However, I never quite understood why Benjamin assumes that he’ll regress into childishness and lose his adult memories to match his appearance. Given the way he starts out, couldn’t he as easily just look childish? I suppose the answer is that that outcome would seem more comic than poignant, as indeed the reverse situation is in the beginning, but it bothered me just the same.)

Having noticed that screenwriter Roth also wrote Forrest Gump, I realize that the two movies have a lot in common, structurally. Although comedy was more prominent in Gump, both movies feature the life stories of their central characters, and romances in which the strangeness of the hero creates a challenge. Despite this, I liked Gump a lot better. For all of the loveliness of this one, I felt unconnected to the story, and two reasons suggest themselves. The first is that, notwithstanding Pitt’s performance, Benjamin is not that memorable a character. Gump annoyed some people, true, but Button won’t annoy anyone because his only major characteristics are a certain reserved politeness, and his love for the girl, played as an adult by Cate Blanchett. Which brings up the other reason I didn’t love the movie. Blanchett is another fine performer, and her role has more personality to it, but when we first see her, I could not connect this hard-edged ballet dancer to the sweet child first encountered. There is too much separation in time and in character. And so I remained unconvinced, or maybe just unmoved, by the placid man’s reawakened ardor. I actually found Benjamin’s other romance, with an unhappily married Englishwoman (Tilda Swinton), a more compelling storyline, but it’s a much smaller part of the movie.

I’m not saying there was no poignancy at all in the way these two people can love but not grow old together, or in the way that the movie reminds us of how our connections with other people make us human. But I preferred the warmer tone of Gump, where the female lead is in some way like Blanchett’s—hard, but in a way that makes it easier to see the tenderness within. In fact, a more recent movie, Slumdog Millionaire, tells a very similar romantic tale, wherein the hero tries to reconnect with his childhood friend, now a toughened-up young woman. There too, I rooted harder for the couple than here. This is clearly a well-crafted movie, and so I know some people are going to like it a lot. But in my case, it just seems like an overlong curiosity.

IMDB link

viewed 12/1/08 (screening at Ritz Bourse); reviewed 1/25/09

Valkyrie (***)

It is 1943, and Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise), a Nazi colonel severely wounded in the North Africa campaign, takes charge of a plot to kill Hitler. A dozen such plots have failed before, but they didn’t have Tom Cruise—sorry, Stauffenberg—in charge.

Cruise brings his usual cockiness to the role. He seems too modern, and too American, but as the role is written, it suits his usual mien. The colonel rarely even bothers with the “Heil Hitler” greeting, which makes you wonder why the fuhrer’s loyalists weren’t onto him. He is, in fact, a fairly one-dimensional character. This dovetails with the general lack of moral ambiguity in the story. The conspirators who urge caution are made to seem as foolish as the colonel is heroic, so that I was slightly worried the filmmakers would change history and have the plot succeed. There are several other characters, played by good actors like Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, and Tom Wilkinson, but they didn’t stick in my memory. (Cruise’s wife, incidentally, is played by Carice van Houten, who got to show off far more range in another Nazi-era thriller, the superior Black Book.)

Still, the thriller thrills. Director Bryan Singer uses sound cues like the hum of teletype machines to convey a sense of urgency. The script, co-written by Christopher McQuarrie, who collaborated with Singer on The Usual Suspects, precisely reveals the way the plotters planned to turn an existing Nazi emergency plan—Project Valkyrie—against the regime itself. The climax, in which it becomes unclear whether the Führer is dead or alive, is a reminder that information and belief are—as much as weapons—the tools of power. Yes, this is a fairly well-crafted thriller, but not more.

Perhaps it was felt that we needed no reminder of Nazi horrors, but without knowing that history you could actually watch Valkyrie and wonder what the plotters hated about Hitler and the Nazis, except perhaps a growing feeling that they has already lost the war. Valkyrie does remind us that not all Germans supported the Nazis, although you could forget that with the mixture of English and American (Cruise’s) accent. (Using a clever device I remember from The Hunt for Red October, Cruise begins speaking German and then segues into English.) What could have made the movie more compelling, though, is a look into why these men—even Stauffenberg himself—came to oppose the Reich. Other than the setting, and the ending—no, history is not altered—little distinguishes the movie from a good, but generic, Hollywood suspense drama.

IMDB link

viewed 12/9/08 (screening at Ritz 5); reviewed 12/9/08 and 1/26/09

Australia (**1/4)

They just don’t come any bigger than this continent-size epic from director Baz Luhrmann, best known for Moulin Rouge. Set in the early part of World War II, the film offers two leads who exude old Hollywood star quality, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. The clear antecedent for Kidman would seem to be Kate Hepburn in The African Queen; she is, in this case, a posh Englishwoman, Lady Ashley, alarmed by the rough-and-tumble Aussie town of Darwin, which offers up every cliché of old westerns (fightin’, cussin’, drinkin’, etc.) in the first ten minutes. Luhrmann, a master of style, makes it all look smashing (sometimes literally). Later on, he fills the screen with expensive-looking aerial shots as the lady predictably learns to embrace the Outback. She is plucky, it seems. Jackman’s character is a cattle drover; helpfully, he is called Mr. Drover. He helps Lady Ashley round up the cattle she’s trying to sell. They bicker like Hepburn and Humprey Bogart in African Queen; much more quickly, they follow the cinematic law requiring that the two most attractive-seeming characters must eventually stop bickering and hook up.

However, this does not purport to be what the movie is about. Nor is it about Australia’s role in World War II, though as it happens Darwin was bombed by the Japanese, the attack faithfully re-created in the second half of the feature. But the story the movie claims to tell is that of Australia’s “stolen generations” of mixed-race children subjected to a kind of forced assimilation that only ended in 1973. The narrator is a small boy (Brandon Walters) who, as the son of a white man and an aborigine, is subject to being captured and sent to be re-educated by missionaries. The boy’s grandfather, steeped in the old ways, is a recurring “magical black man.”

Luhrman, though an Aussie, tells this story in the way Hollywood always tells this kind of story, by framing it in the glow of a grand love affair between forward-thinking white folks. It’s not apparent that either Drover or Lady Ashley has ever entertained a racist thought. More interesting might be seeing a character overcome racism, but this is not that sort of a movie, obvious racism being, in this context, a proxy to identify the villain, who wants to acquire Lady Ashley’s land for a fraction of cost.

Superficially, one can level a similar criticism at most any movie with rich/noble white main characters and poor/discriminated-against natives. The similarly epic (and continentally titled) Out of Africa comes to mind. But that romantic drama is, simply put, much better. It’s a movie for grown-ups, with characters exceeding the minimum requirements for complexity and shades of subtlety in the plotting. The music score is better, too. Here, on the other hand, is mere spectacle. The dialogue is typically spouted out as if the script is written in ALL CAPS, though memorable lines are in short supply. Jackman is a perfect combination of Bogart and Robert Redford—a ruffian who cleans up extremely well. (Kidman makes less of an impression, and the chemistry between the two is lacking.) The cattle stampede in the first half can’t help but sweep you up in the excitement. There is action, there is romance, there is drama, there is—crikey!—a dash of comedy. But any real depth of feeling is missing. Australia borrows its sentiment overtly, from The Wizard of Oz. The brief Judy Garland clip is more touching than any of the new footage. (The characters watch the movie in 1939, though as it happens the film did not open Down Under until the next year.) The climactic, presumably cathartic, moment, after two and a half hours, begat titters of laughter from the audience I saw this with, such is the magnitude of the cliché.

I might yet recommend Australia but for this: It is a nearly three-hour movie in which not one truly surprising thing happens. The closest might be when a crocodile bite becomes a major plot point, which is hardly a recommendation. In the end, whether you like this one depends on what you look for in a movie. To me, whereas a film such as Moulin Rouge could succeed on little more than panache, set design, and catchy tunes, the epic requires more substance. Australia recalls great adventure movies of the past, like the ones mentioned above (even the credits font is like that of Casablanca), but the comparison does not flatter. The film to which it truly invites comparison is the formulaic Pearl Harbor, although, blessedly, that film’s corpulent third act is without analogue here. At the very least, this movie doesn’t seem any longer than it is.

There is, as it happens, a movie that more directly tackles the subject of “stolen generations,” and that is Rabbit-Proof Fence. It’s far superior to this exercise in schmaltz.

IMDB link

viewed 11/24/08 (screening at Ritz East) and reviewed 11/25/08

I Served the King of England (***)

Here’s something I haven’t seen before. It’s the tale of a middle-aged man and a young man, separated by 30 years. The flashback structure is the most typical thing. Stronger on visual flair than plot, it begins with the young man in a faux silent-movie segment as a small-time, small-0f-stature huckster in Prague who works his way up to a big-time waiter by absorbing the lessons of a series of mentors. The man learns well, seeming to float above everything, including a series of women who wander in and out of the story. Like other characters besides the lead, some make an impression, but most go away soon. The tone is whimsical, slightly reminding me of Amélie, but with less romantic appeal. Still, even a blowjob (implied, not seen) from a hooker seems nearly cute as light classical piano plays in the background.

The server, who dreams of money, women, and little else, is a silent witness to the decadency of the prewar era, rendered with tapestries of banknotes, vivid color, and more exotic dishes than an Iron Chef marathon. What separates the young man from his older self, besides 15 years in prison and drab surroundings, is of course the war. Typically, this would be the part in which he wises up and realizes what’s really important, but not here; he sees only that the Nazis are being treated badly by the Czechs, and sympathizes with them. This is only one of the unusual things in the movie. Probably two hours is a bit long to tell the story, and only toward the end did I lose my own mild feeling of detachment. But the choreographed, slightly unreal way the story is told and the look of the film give it an originality than may make it worthwhile for the adventurous.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 9/8/08

Epitaph (**1/4)

A World War II hospital is the setting for this South Korean psychological horror film. The story confusingly shifts from a squeamish young morgue intern to another doctor trying to aid a young girl whose parents died in a car accident, and then to another doctor who suspects his wife of being a ghost. Some of the confusion is deliberate; we are meant to wonder who is a ghost and who is alive. By the end, I understood some of what happened. But, despite some creepy imagery and sounds, and a few genuine scares, I found the film too incoherent to enjoy.

IMDB link

viewed 4/10/08; reviewed 4/11/08; screened at Philadelphia Film Festival

The Counterfeiters (***1/2)

I hadn’t seen this when I made my Oscar predictions, but correctly picked it for foreign-language film by observing the “Holocaust rule”—i.e., the Holocaust-themed movie always wins. Still, upon seeing it, it’s not a bad choice. It’s a much less sweeping story than Schindler’s List or The Pianist, and less horrific, simply because the main character, Salomon Sorowitsch, managed to avoid the magnitude of suffering of other Jews. In all tales of great evil, it’s easy to forget that both the heroic and the unsavory are victims. Sorowitsch was exactly what the Nazis accused him of being, a master forger, but it was their need for his skills that kept him fed. He is well aware that his ability to reproduce the British pound will help fund Hitler’s war effort, but is in no mood to sacrifice himself by trying to sabotage the effort. His nemesis, a communist, is more idealistic, but the decisions they make as individuals may also determine the fate of the men they work with.

IMDB link

viewed 3/21/08; reviewed 3/27/08

Nanking (***1/4)

If you know anything about the Chinese city of Nanking, you probably mentally precede its name with “rape of.” In 1937, the Japanese army invaded China, and by November its army had overrun Shanghai and began marching toward the then Chinese capital city, 150 miles away. Already the thriving city had been heavily bombed, but when the soldiers arrived, the real devastation began. This American-made documentary uses the recollections of elderly survivors as well as actors reading letters and testimony from the post-World War II war crimes trial. Surprisingly, there are several former Japanese soldiers on camera, at least one of whom seems rather nonchalant as he explains how married women made better rape victims. They tended to resist less, and the experience wasn’t much good unless there were two participants, he says. A Chinese man, on the other hand, weeps 70 years after the fact as he recounts watching his mother and baby brother get bayoneted and die slowly. There’s a good deal of period footage evidencing the cruelty inflicted, although most of it is in short clips. The bright side of the story, if one can say that, is the efforts of the few remaining westerners, most prominently American nurse Minnie Vautrin (Mariel Hemingway), to protect the poor people who had not been able to flee the city prior to the occupation. Nanking doesn’t try to explain why the Japanese decided to invade China, or what made the Japanese commanders encourage such inhumanity, but it provides an easy-to-follow summary of one of the several great horrors of the 20th century.

IMDB link

viewed and reviewed 1/31/08

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (***)

This family film spins the Loch Ness monster myth into a gentle family film about a Scottish boy (Alex Etel, of Millions) and his secret pet. Besides that, the story revolves around a British naval company whose commander seems to think a small village might become a major front in the second World War, the boy’s recently widowed mother (Emily Watson), and a mysterious handyman who helps out both mother and child. Despite all that, and the beast given life via 21st-century effects, the movie is at heart an old-fashioned tale of a time and place where a summer, even during wartime, would allow a young boy time to while away freely.


IMDB link

reviewed 1/11/08

Atonement (***1/2)

Ian McEwan’s novel becomes a passionate tearjerker in this adaptation from Pride & Prejudice director Joe Wright and Quiet American writer Christopher Hampton. Or, at least, the first half does. Pride star Keira Knightly is the heroine, a wealthy girl whose mysterious relationship with the educated son (James McAvoy) of the family housekeeper piques the interest of her younger sister Briony (Oscar-nominated Saoirse Ronan). What follows, which is best not given away, is one of those old English-y sort of love stories where the passion is pent up, like in Pride & Prejudice, but even more like in The English Patient.

It’s 1935 when the story begins, and the setting is one of those impossibly large estates that are now, frequently, tourist attractions. Cecilia (Knightly) has returned from college, where she encounters Robbie (McAvoy), whom she’s not seen in some time. Also present are some cousins, a brother, a friend of the brother’s, and Briony, whose powers of imagination will drive the plot in unexpected ways. Wright’s direction is crisp, moving to a musical motif that cleverly incorporates a clicking typewriter. No scene feels wasted, and indeed, when the plot moves devastatingly forward I was sorry to leave the manor and the minor characters behind.

The war is what comes next, and the love story becomes, also, a story of tragedy and redemption. I’m being deliberately vague here about how that happens, but the themes the movie’s title points to are about how we judge ourselves and come to grips with mistakes that cannot be undone. The hallucinatory mid-section of the movie might seem to be about something else, and to lose momentum, but is rescued by the ending. The plot is very faithful to McEwan, but not in a way that makes it feel like something is missing. Besides, what is added is a series of picture-postcard images that makes the movie visually as well as narratively stunning. McAvoy, the faun in The Chronicles of Narnia, the callow doctor in The Last King of Scotland, is a surprisingly convincing romantic lead. Actual displays of passion are limited, but the one unmistakable love scene smolders.

If you thought English Patient was dull and overlong, you might still like Atonement, which comes in under two hours and is less talky. But if understatement doesn’t appeal to you, if The Notebook is the sort of romance you’re searching for, this ain’t it.


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reviewed 12/27/07

Letters from Iwo Jima (***)

? Clint Eastwood’s companion film to his Flags of Our Fathers tells the story of the Battle of Iwo Jima from the view of the Japanese, in particular the commander Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) and a private played by singer-actor Kazunari Ninomiya.

+ Eastwood’s mostly subtitled film (with a script by newcomer Iris Yamashita in collaboration with Flags scribe Paul Haggis) is most fascinating for its unique perspective. Watching the huge American naval contingent arrive provides quite a different sense from the same scene’s counterpart in Flags. Brief flashbacks and the interactions of the soldiers provide a military and cultural context for the willingness of the Japanese to sacrifice themselves, resulting in a stunning casualty rate exceeding 95%. Yet the movie shows them as brave but not fearless, not the automatons that the Americans suspected. Kuribayashi, the commander, had spent time in America, and his character merges the Japanese and Western sensibilities. Cinematically, Letters gives a more vivid portrait of the geography of the island and the elaborate tunnel system that the Japanese had created in anticipation of the battle. Both Watanabe, who’s played similarly powerful men in The Last Samurai, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Batman Begins, and Ninomiya give appealing performances. The 60-years-ago flashback device is more effectively used than in Flags.

- Although powerful, the movie feels overlong at 142 minutes. Additionally, the more historic movies I see, the more I’m convinced of the merits of on-screen titles, which in this case would have better conveyed the passage of time. It’s hard to tell that the battle took over a month, and the war preparations over half a year.

= *** Unlike Flags of Our Fathers, which primarily depicts the aftermath of the battle, this is all-war, all the time. Depicting combat at its most desperate and horrific, it’s a better film than Flags, but it may seem tedious to some.

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Pan’s Labyrinth (***3/4)

? Guillermo del Toro is a Mexican director who’s alternated between dark Hollywood fare like Hellboy and Blade II and more individualistic Spanish-language movies such as The Devil’s Backbone, a mixture of social tragedy and fantasy set during the Spanish Civil War. This follow-up of sorts mixes similar elements. It is 1944. Even as the fascists are losing ground in the rest of Europe, dictator Francisco Franco is consolidating his power in Spain. An army captain (Sergi López) commands a small outpost that is trying to rid the area of a small band of rebels that stubbornly remains. Meanwhile, a girl (Ivana Baquero) unhappily arrives with her widowed mother, who has married (and become pregnant by) the captain. As the horror of her surroundings become apparent, the girl is led by a fairy to a strange world in which she learns she is the reincarnation of a princess.

+ Del Toro brilliantly sets a brutally realistic historical drama against a grotesque netherworld where a girl can become a heroine and control her own destiny. The historical part is fairly straightforward but suspenseful all the same, and López is a fine villain. The fantasy element is more appealing than the one in Devil’s Backbone. It’s weird and fun and gruesome and whimsical. Pan’s Labyrinth is like The Fountain if it hadn’t been incoherent and pretentious, or Lady in the Water if it hadn’t been dreadful. Del Toro visually contrasts the literal and the fantastic to great effect, and has a real find in the twelve-year-old Baquero.

- More literal-minded people might wonder why the netherworld creatures look the way they do, and I’m usually that sort of person, but mostly I just accepted it all.

= ***3/4 In a holiday season full of terrific movies, this one stands as among the best and most original, a modern Grimm fairy tale that takes you somewhere that only fiction can.

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