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

The Reader (***1/4)

Three movies in one: a teen boy’s affair with an older woman (Kate Winslet), a young man’s learning about her past, and a grown man’s trying to reprocess the experience years later. The first part is interesting enough, but sort of perfunctory. If you’ve seen one movie about a virgin getting to act out his masturbatory fantasies, you’ve seen them all, and it doesn’t much matter that this takes place in postwar West Germany. The only novelty is that, besides the obvious, the boy reads to her. Perhaps teen lust is clouding his brain, for he seems not to realize, as we do rather quickly, that she is illiterate. This of course becomes a plot point later.

This early part of the movie was least compelling, but functions as setup to the rest. The plot details are best left unrevealed here, but given the setting, the nature of the revelations is easily guessed. What fascinates more is the question of how, having found out this information, one squares it with the kind lover of the first part. Director Stephen Daldry and screenwriter David Hare, as in their previous collaboration, The Hours, use the passage of time to make us reevaluate the characters. Winslet not only gets to age but also to play a character who seems sophisticated to the boy, but simple to the adult. Some have criticized the movie for making her character seem too sympathetic. Yet surely the whole point is that the viewer (or the reader, in the case of the Bernard Schlink novel from which this was adapted) get to decide whether she is sympathetic or not. This is the position in which the man finds himself; The Reader spends its last half as he wrestles to assess his relationship to the kind lover who could also be so thoughtlessly cruel.

IMDB link

viewed 12/16/09 at Ritz Five (screening) and reviewed 4/18/09

Lucky You (***)

? A professional poker player (Eric Bana) keeps pushing his luck until he meets a woman (Drew Barrymore) who’s willing to push back. Robert Duvall plays the one man he can’t seem to beat, and who also happens to be his father. The film was directed by Curtis Hanson (In Her Shoes, 8 Mile, L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys).
+ Above all, this movie seems to accurately portray the world of the professional player and the nature of the game. It does this even better than Rounders, a poker film from 1998, and certainly more than in Two for the Money, 2005’s sports-betting allegory that suggested that gambling success was merely about getting in a good groove. Hanson and writing collaborator Eric Roth (Munich, The Good Shepherd) emphasize that it’s all about the odds. I expect they actually spent some time in Las Vegas (where the movie’s set) learning about the kind of people who frequent poker tables, and about the game itself. As anyone who’s watched TV poker knows (and contrary to what’s suggested in the otherwise excellent Casino Royale, etc.), straight flushes are extremely rare and a pair of threes might sometimes win a big pot. Barrymore’s character is the sort of nice, honest girl she usually plays, but the father-son relationship at the heart of the film is less conventional.
- The story is only partly predictable, but in terms of the path taken by its main character, it was much what I expected. I enjoyed the movie, but it’s a small one that I think won’t stick with me.
= *** Hanson’s film has fewer commercial elements than his other movies (i.e., it doesn’t glamorize the world of the gambler, or feature a lot of sex and violence), but it’s a good option for those not looking for Vegas flash.

IMDB link

reviewed 5/11/07

Lucky You (***)

? A professional poker player (Eric Bana) keeps pushing his luck until he meets a woman (Drew Barrymore) who’s willing to push back. Robert Duvall plays the one man he can’t seem to beat, and who also happens to be his father. The film was directed by Curtis Hanson (In Her Shoes, 8 Mile, L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys).

+ Above all, this movie seems to accurately portray the world of the professional player and the nature of the game. It does this even better than Rounders, a poker film from 1998, and certainly more than in Two for the Money, 2005’s sports-betting allegory that pushes the idea that gambling success is about getting in a good groove. Hanson and writing collaborator Eric Roth (Munich, The Good Shepherd) emphasize that it’s all about the odds. I expect they actually spent some time in Las Vegas (where the movie’s set) learning about the kind of people who frequent poker tables, and about the game itself. As anyone who’s watched TV poker knows (and contrary to what’s suggested in the otherwise excellent Casino Royale, etc.), straight flushes are extremely rare and a pair of threes might sometimes win a big pot. Barrymore’s character is the sort of nice, honest girl she usually plays, but the father-son relationship at the heart of the film is less conventional.

- The story is only partly predictable, but in terms of the path taken by its main character, it was much what I expected. I enjoyed the movie, but it’s a small one that I think won’t stick with me.

= *** Hanson’s film has fewer commercial elements than his other movies (i.e., it doesn’t glamorize the world of the gambler, or feature a lot of sex and violence), but it’s a good option for those not looking for Vegas flash.

IMDb link

circulated via email 5/10/07

Fracture (***1/2)

? Anthony Hopkins has apparently killed his cheating wife and confessed, making a seemingly easy final case for prosecutor Ryan Gosling, who’s resigned to take a job at a ritzy law firm.
+ The mystery here, a missing bit of evidence, is a canny invention that by itself practically makes the movie worth watching. But what really makes things interesting while that unravels is the prosecutor, whose desire for justice is conflated with a desire to display his competence, and whose pride and sense of ethics conflict with his ambition. Between the sharp screenplay (by Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers) and Gosling’s nuanced portrayal, what could have been a corny potboiler about a lawyer choosing between money and public service is rendered with subtlety. The villain is a simpler character; Hopkins differentiates him from his Hannibal Lecter by playing him as deceptively mild-mannered.
- The movie telegraphs its surprise ending a few minutes earlier than necessary. It’s a pretty good twist, but probably one that the characters should have figured out before they apparently do.
= ***1/2 Smart and suspenseful; recommended.

IMDB link

reviewed 4/27/07

After the Wedding (***1/2)

? An orphanage manager (Mads Mikkelsen) reluctantly leaves Bombay to return to his native Denmark to make a funding pitch to a wealthy businessman. An offhand invitation to the wedding of the businessman’s daughter leads to an unexpected reunion with consequences both men, as well as for the businessman’s wife and children. Directed by Susanne Bier (Brothers, Open Hearts).
+ The well-crafted screenplay has two significant surprises that have stunning consequences. In the businessman we see both how wealth is used for power and the limits of that power. His actions create an unexpected moral dilemma for the other man. Mikkelsen, who played the villain Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, shows his versatility, and the rest of the cast is equally strong. I especially liked Rolf Lassgård as the rich man whose actions leave the most room for different interpretations, and whom we see as imperious CEO, doting father, angry drunk, and more.
- I think I’d have liked there to be another scene in the movie where I found out more about what the other characters think about the aforementioned moral dilemma. Bier’s frequent use of extreme close-ups is occasionally distracting.
= ***1/2 Whether you like good plot twists, morality plays, or just good character dramas, this is a winner that deserved its nomination for Best Foreign Language film.

IMDB link

reviewed 5/11/07

This Film Is Not Yet Rated (***1/4)

 ? Ever wonder about how movies get rated? This documentary looks at the process from start to finish. Filmmaker Kirby Dick submitted his own film and even hired a private detective to learn about the somewhat secret process employed by the Motion Picture Association of America. In addition to decrying this secrecy, Dick makes several specific criticisms of the MPAA ratings. He argues that, when deciding between an R rating and the box-office-poison NC-17 (or an R and a PG-13), independent films are treated more harshly than studio films, gay sex more harshly than straight sex, female sexuality more harshly than male sexuality, and sexual content more harshly than violence. Film clips and interviews help make these points. The interviewees include directors such as John Waters, Kimberly Pierce (Boys Don’t Cry), and Trey Parker (South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut).

+ The movie pretty easily proves its points. Parker, for example, notes that the MPAA refused to tell him how to cut his independent film Orgazmo to avoid an NC-17 rating, but was willing to do so for the studio-made South Park. Even more interesting is the look at sexuality on film. Implicitly, the subject is not only the ratings system, but morality. Why are more films rated NC-17 for sexual content than violence? Even as American movies have become more violent over the last few decades, serious depictions of sexuality have probably decreased (even as comic portrayals, such as in the American Pie movies, proliferate).

- The significant portion of the movie devoted to the detective and her attempts to learn the identity of the MPAA ratings board members is not uninteresting, yet adds little to the arguments made in the rest of the movie. Some of that time might be better spent looking at the one element it somewhat neglects: the audience. For all I sympathized with Dick and the filmmakers he interviewed, I couldn’t help but continue to think that, for the most part, the rating system does reflect the values and beliefs of a majority of the public. The point is implicitly acknowledged a couple of times in the movie. It’s never made sense to me that parents would worry more about nudity and sexuality than violence, but it seems that they do. And is anyone surprised that gay sex would be seen as more objectionable than straight sex?

= ***1/4 Recommended not only for anyone interested cinema as art, or in censorship issues, but for people interested in the ways society projects its values.

IMDB link

viewed at PFS screening

The Notorious Bettie Page (***)

Covering Page’s rise and subsequent career as the nation’s premier pin-up queen, this alluring biopic is easy to watch, thanks in part to Gretchen Mol’s lively performance, but left me wanting a bit more.

Nashville-reared Bettie Page was a 1950s pin-up queen. If she was not the first, she was probably the first whose fame came solely as a result of the thousands of racy pictures she posed for. As Page, Gretchen Mol is, in both senses, a knockout. In the many modeling scenes, she retains an air of innocence even as she indulges in mock bondage scenarios and the occasional nude shot. (Given the legal restrictions, the nudes were almost all for private collectors who paid to take photographs.) Mol as Page oozes allure, but not an overt sexuality. She seems intelligent, and poised, but callow. Asked how she reconciles her work with her abiding faith, she admits some uncertainty but simply explains that it seems to make people happy. If her interior life went much beyond that (and Richard Foster’s biography suggests that it did), it’s not frequently apparent here. There’s an early sequence in which Page’s naiveté gets her in trouble. Maybe director Mary Harron simply figured it was too important to exclude, but if anything the movie suggests that it didn’t really affect her friendly, trusting nature. Along with movies such as Kinsey, Harron’s film provides an useful glimpse into a relatively repressed, mysterious era of American sexuality. (Harron and her co-writer, Guinevere Turner, previously collaborated on the film version of American Psycho.) It’s largely in black and white, with much of the look and feel of an older movie. When the color scenes begin, they are deliberately blurred to look like an old post card. This movie is a bit like a picture post card. It’s lovely to look at, but provides only a glimpse of what it represents.

IMDb link

posted 8/23/13