A Separation (****)

Iran boasts a fairly robust film industry, but its only filmmakers whose movies have been widely seen outside the country are Jafar Panahi, whose politically laced work led to his arrest and a ban on further filmmaking, and Abbas Kiarostami, who makes minimalist, arty films like A Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us. This drama by Asghar Farhadi (whose previous work has been shown at US film festivals) is neither political or arty in an obvious way. It is both accessible enough to have been a hit in its native country and complex enough to garner a passel of awards.

The main characters in this story (Leila Hatami, Peyman Maadi) are a married, middle-class couple, but the wife is seeking a divorce. On what grounds an unseen clerk asks. Does he mistreat you? No, he is a good man, she explains, but will not emigrate with her. He does not wish to leave his elderly father, who has dementia. Neither party will budge. And so, instead of divorce, the couple separate, necessitating hiring a housekeeper who can also look after the old man. There is also a choice for the couple’s eleven-year-old, who elects, for now, to stay with her father.

The rest of the story is all complications that lead to an unfortunate incident and an accusation against the husband. What’s brilliant about the movie is the way it brings several elements together in a completely natural way. It has much to say about the push-pull of relationships, but it’s not a self-consciously psychological film. It depicts an unfamiliar (to Americans) legal system, but is not a legal thriller. It has certain cultural particulars—humorously, the housekeeper consults a sort of dial-a-cleric to see whether it’s okay for her to help undress the old man—but its broad themes are universal.


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viewed 2/11/12 12:45 pm at Ritz 5

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.

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viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 7/18/11

Freakonomics (***)

For those unfamiliar with the title, it’s the name of a 2005 non-fiction book subtitled A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. The economist was Steven Levitt, whose teddy-bear voice graces linking segments in this multi-part documentary. Also on hand is journalist and coauthor Stephen Dubner, who does a podcast that was an outgrowth of the book’s success. (There’s also a blog.) In the film’s four segments, prominent documentary filmmakers tackle subjects also explored in the book.

  

Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock’s opening segment about baby names is typically (for Spurlock) whimsical, with lots of random man-on-the street interviews, “cute” illustrations and editing. It pretty much sticks with the data in the book, which has to do with differences how in race and class affect what people name their kids. While on the one hand it suggests that names matter much less than other factors in predicting success, it also shows that résumés with typically black names (Tyrone, eg) were less likely to get a callback than identical ones with a "white” name. However, it's unclear whether this effect is entirely due to the perceived race of the applicant or if some is due to the name itself. In fact, the segment never really pins down whether names have no impact on the way others perceive you, or a small but real impact. Still, it’s fun to watch.

Alex Gibney’s segment about cheating among sumo wrestlers is predictably more serious. His interviews and information go beyond the book to explore the role sumo in Kapanese culture and to draw a parallel between corruption in the sport and recent chicanery in financial markets, which he has also explored in Enron: The Smartest Guy in the Room and other films. The way the cheating was detected is also ingenious. (That part was in the book.)

Eugene Jarecki’s (Why We Fight) brief segment, called “It’s Not Always a Wonderful Life,” has more jazzy graphics plus an ironic juxtaposition of scenes from It’s a Wonderful Life in a segment that presents Levitt’s conclusions about legal abortion leading to less crime.

Finally, Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing (Jesus Camp) present “Can a 9th Grader Be Bribed to Succeed?” Of the four parts, this one is the lightest on actual data (and fancy graphics) but is also the only to feature conventional storytelling, specifically about two of the students. It’s not the best (Gibney’s is), but it may be the one that most appeals to non-documentary fans.

From an informational standpoint, only Gibney’s adds to the information found in the book, though Grady’s segment adds emotional content. So it’s not a must-see for those who’ve read the book. For those unsure whether the hidden sides of things are worth exploring, this movie’s a mostly entertaining introduction.

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viewed 8/25/13 on iPad [DVD transfer from Philadelphia Free Library] and posted 9/8/13

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.

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viewed 8/29/10 at Ritz 5

City of Men (***1/4)

A follow-up of sorts to the acclaimed City of God, a gritty drama set in the slums of Rio, this tells the story of two best friends turning 18. Growing up without a father in a favela called Dead End Hill, one searches for his while the other already has his own toddler of his own to contend with. Unlike most slums, the Hill, adjacent to a popular beach, looks beautiful from afar; only up close do the ramshackle buildings become clear. The place, already featured in a television series created by the directors of City of God, is almost as much a part of the story as the characters. The two friends spent much of the series steering clear of criminals, but here cannot avoid the crossfire as rival gangsters fight to be king of the Hill.

Despite that plot and the similar setting, this has a gentler feel than City of God. Though it realistically depicts the criminality and poverty that affects slums around the world, it’s not nearly as downbeat (or violent) overall. I don’t think people will be blown away by this movie the way many were by City of God, but they’ll leave the theater feeling more hopeful. The overall story arc is a familiar one, yet there was a surprise or two.

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viewed 2/26/08; reviewed 2/29/08

No Country for Old Men (***1/2)

Joel and Ethan Coen harken back to their first film, Blood Simple, with their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Texas murder tale. Josh Brolin, who played a different sort of greedily reckless character in American Gangster, is great as a hunter who finds a couple of million in cocaine money. But it’s Javier Bardem, as a sociopoathic killer-for-hire who dispatches his victims with a bolt gun, who you won’t forget. Bardem’s creepy demeanor and deep voice practically had me quaking in my seat. The two men play cat and dog across south Texas. It’s like a western with cars instead of horses (there’s a couple of those too, though), or like a film noir with a couple of less hard-boiled characters (Tommy Lee Jones’s as a sheriff and Kelly McDonald’s as the wife of Brolin’s character). The Coen brothers effectively use light and shadow, and a minimum of dialogue, to maintain the tension for at least 90 minutes. The last act is more philosophical, and may be a letdown for those expecting an explosive finale.

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reviewed 11/13/07

16 Blocks (***)

Bruce Willis is a booze-addled cop trying to protect a witness (Mos Def) in this fairly intelligent thriller set in Manhattan.

Bruce Willis is a booze-addled, sleep-deprived cop who gets a chance to redeem himself when someone tries to kill a witness he’s escorting to the courthouse. Mos Def, as the witness, adopts what must be the most irritating voice since Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Truman Capote, but, like Hoffman, he’s interesting. The witness needs to testify by ten, so the usual formula would be that at 9:59, Bruce, having blown up half of Manhattan in the chase, shoots the bad guy, who has idiotically whipped out a rifle instead of surrendering to police, and whisks Mos (Mr. Def?) into the room with one second to spare. I suppose some people will be disappointed not to see that. Director Richard Donner gives the proceedings some of the qualities of his Lethal Weapon--a mismatched black-white duo (Mos Def is the optimistic one), a mix of suspense, action, and character-driven humor, though less of that. Willis gives a nice, low-key performance, and David Morse is good as his former partner, even if his character’s pretty standard issue. This one probably won’t win any awards, but as 2006’s first decent Hollywood thriller, it’s worth a look.

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posted 9/9/13