Feb 27: Out of Africa (1985--Sydney Pollack)

★★★★★
Met David and Andy at Emory’s Theater Trois to watch this last night -- it’s just the big image/big sound movie to see there. Settled into one of Emory’s comfy leather chairs with a big bourbon and an orange, put my feet up, and went back to the clean-and-kind, early colonial days in Kenya. For all the faults of big budget Hollywood productions, when the system gets it right, it’s hard to beat. And Out of Africa is as fabulous as I remember it. In fact, better.
The first time I saw this movie, I responded exactly like Denys did to East Africa: there was so much great, open space and so much wildlife, I just had to get there to experience it first-hand. I should be embarrassed to say that this, but I think Out of Africa was a big part of the reason I went to East Africa the first time. What’s not to love in the images of the rift valley, the mixed herds of wildlife and the exotic acacia silhouettes?

But first time around, I think I missed what was going on in the movie because it’s not really a romantic praise of nature and its beauty. It goes lots further and, though set in East Africa, develops the very American theme of the loss of the frontier. Denys reminds me of Daniel Boone as Robert Morgan describes him in Boone. Morgan’s Boone as a frontiersman who loves being on the leading edge of the frontier, hunting independently or with a bud, making some money by his hunting or by using the knowledge he has gained from his leading-edge position. But he mostly likes being out there because he is more comfortable there than with his family or the society that he left behind. And that’s Denys in Out of Africa. He even admits to Karen that he sometimes goes out into the bush just because he likes it.

And the American frontier at the end of the 18th century was losing its wildlife and pristine character in Boone as fast as Kenya was in the early 20th century in Out of Africa. Daniel Boone saw farms and settlements and declines in beaver and buffalo; Denys saw litter along the railroad track and car tracks in game lands. By the end of the movie, in fact, the land no longer belongs to the native Kykuyu and Masai. It’s the king’s and ready to be surveyed and sold, the indigenous populations being pushed to the side. Just like in Kentucky. I completely missed this deep, American theme the first time I saw the movie, probably because the setting was so exotic.

Out of Africa ties the loss of the frontier theme to another American theme – working out the relationship between a man and his society. This theme got a poignant treatment recently in Into the Wild. The boy in that movie, Chris, takes his Tolstoy and goes on a road trip to Alaska where he hopes to experience connectedness. He reads Tolstoy as emphasizing a natural connection, so he ignores the opportunities for human, social connection he has along the way, opportunities with buddy Vince, girlfriend Kristen and surrogate dad Hal. But the nature connection doesn’t work out for Chris, and even his understanding of Tolstoy shifts from an emphasis on the link between an individual and nature to an emphasis on human connectedness. This insight comes late for Chris, though.

Denys goes on the same trip as Chris, though Out of Africa is a romance and not a road movie. Denys is a strong individual, too, and he generally prefers his connections to be with nature rather than with people. He’s disdainful of society, having only one real friend, and prefers his time in the bush to being in the city. Like Chris, though, Denys comes to see the importance of being connected with people. He’s clearly surprised when he discovers his friend, Berkeley, has an African mistress; Berkeley hadn’t told Denys about the woman because he didn’t think they knew each other well enough, and that insight makes Denys aware of is lack of connection. However, Denys is attracted by independence, and he’s attracted to Karen because he thinks he sees his own independence in her. However, as their relationship grows, it turns out that she’s more connected to people and society than he is despite her refusal to play a conventional role in her society. In their arguments, Denys comes to see the give-and-take and place of responsibility in a relationship, and he even acknowledges how he’s been wrong about things. But though Denys and Karen have some happiness (more than Chris in Into the Wild), it’s ultimately cut short by the fire on Karen’s estate and Denys’ accident. Denys is a little too slow to understand the importance of others in a life.

Works that deal with human connections always resonate with me, but there are a lot of other things in the film I connect with, too. I think the movie has some of the greatest music ever, and that’s not hyperbole. The grandeur and the minor key of the theme, along with its orchestration, create a sense of lift but also of nostalgia for something lost. It’s easy for me to dial it up from memory at about any time. And I like the spacious, inclusive framing of so many images. And the low angle exterior lighting and the soft interior. Also, the 1910s through 30s setting of the film is one of my favorite design periods, so I like the clothes and décor as much as the nature scenes.

I also connect with many of the locations and with the expat-in-Africa elements. I’ve been on that train from Nairobi to Mombassa twice, and the first trip (the 80s) reminded me of the movie. I slept on the train that time and went for breakfast as we were passing through Tsavo. Eating on silver and china, I sat in the dining car and watched antelope and giraffe as we headed to the coast. A great memory. Also, I’ve been to the Karen Blixen house a couple of times, and I remember the gardens and the period furnishings well. And the scene of the Africans watching for the cuckoo clock to chime reminded me of living in the bush in Mali when our house was the main source of amusement for the village lids, who would come to the house and look in the windows just to see what weird things the tubobs were doing when they had free time.

And how could anyone not like the romance in the movie? The appeal here is the earnest quest for love that both Karen and Denys are undertaking in their respective ways. Karen is independent, determined but warm; Denys has an almost childlike need for love despite the wisdom he’s developed in the bush. There’s no question of the spark between them. And that’s helped by their acting skills. The script is generally good, but both Streep and Redford have some godawful lines to deliver though they both do it so convincingly that I only realized the lines were bad in retrospect.

I could go on and on about the things I like in this movie. Not sure what the extended scenes are here, but perhaps the scene at the beach would be in that number….and perhaps some scenes were added to the trip Denys invites Karen on. I also liked the Karen character as having a quality I associate with Scandinavians and Germans: direct, very warm, lacking sweetness. Karen is all of that. Lastly, I guess I forgot the discussion of STDs in the film: Karen getting infected with syphilis, having to discuss it with Bror and then with Denys.….in Out of Africa? I totally blanked that in my first viewing of the film. Fairly progressive mainstream cinema for today, not to mention 1985.

I think this film is an extraordinary classic. How wonderful.

Feb 26: Winter's Bone (2010--Debra Granik)

★★★

This is a good little movie: tight acting, interesting story, good art direction, compelling suspense and lots of local color. I was more engaged by the art direction and cinematography than most else here. It’s winter in the Ozarks -- a poor part of the Ozarks—and everything from the sky to the interiors is dirty gray. The people here look as beat up as their houses and trucks, and the society we see is run by fierce families where men take care of men-things and women with long hair take care of women-things. The heroine, 17-year-old Ree, faces a forced move from poverty to abject poverty, and in trying to avoid this, she pushes her extended family until they react and take care of her problem.

Winter’s Bone is a grim, hard, suspense movie that finds its dark tension in a slice of America we don’t see on screen often: a poor, rural area beset by a drug problem. Becase it's so strongly rooted in its locale, the film can give us villians we're not used to and threatening situations we're not familiar with. This recasting of cliche elements alone could make the film worthwhile, but director Debra Granik makes almost no missteps creating her tight, engaging thrill. If not the stuff of classics, this film is definitely worth an evening.

Feb 25: Andre Techine: My Ideas on His Cinema

Watched the last of my Andre Techine movies a month ago, but they’re staying with me, so I thought I’d jot down a few things I saw repeated in them. I guess it was Still Walking that took me back to Techine; there seemed like a number of echoes in the Kore-eda film of what I saw in Techine.

The main thing I responded to in Techine was the frankness and honesty in his films. None of the sentimentality that so much contemporary American film has and that reduces characters to familiar types, and none of the irony or comedy that distances us from the characters and reduces them. Instead, there are a lot of complicated relationships in Techine that show people interacting with each other in ways outside movie conventionality. Adding to this complication, Techine’s films often move a wide range of characters through the narrative instead of focusing on two or three. I enjoy this breadth, this excess of life in Techine’s films. In particular, I respond to way gay characters interact with each other and with straight people. I know of no other director who is comfortable enough with this interface to use it as a part of their cinema without focusing on it or trivializing it. Homosexuality is just a part of the life in Techine's movies.

Loss, too, is a major element of Techine stories. Nearly every movie I watched had a character who’d lost a loved one, and a big part of the film was for the character to deal with that loss, often sharing the loss with other people who were also dealing with it. Like the lingering effects of the loss of the son in Still Walking. And the loss in Techine is often an unexpected element of an unconventional story line. Les temoins set this pattern for me when we follow Manu for half the movie before he suddenly drops out. Conventional films don’t drop a major, sympathetic character half-way though; that’s a big disruption of typical cinema convention.

There are other elements that recur in Techine. I’ve had so much experience watching French films set in Paris that I was surprised not to see much of Paris in Techine. Instead, Techine films are often set in the south of the country. And perhaps because of that, North Africa and North Africans play a particularly large role in his films. Techine’s vision of France isn’t of a Caucasian country but rather of one that has significant racial, even cultural, diversity. While this vision may not be unique now, it seems remarkably prescient to me in retrospect. But understandable given Techine’s inclusive vision of humanity.

I was also struck at how frequently mothers are found at the center of Techine films, and these women are not the mothers of typical cinema lore. Of course, some are loving nurturers, but most are self-actualized women who are dealing with their children at the same time they are dealing with their own personal issues like career, parents, loss, ambition, or aging. Another Techine mother is the woman who organizes the world, who sets the parameters for the kids’ understanding and who, in some cases, the kids must rebel against to become individuals. An older gay male is sometimes the mother for a young kid, too. As for fathers, you have to look hard to find them; they’re usually in a corner somewhere, grumping.

Lastly, there’s often a moment of cinematic flourish in a Techine film, and I can’t decide if he always stumbles on a serendipitous moment or if this flourish has some actual role in Techine film language. Whether it’s a Kurasawa tracking shot with a busy middle between the camera and the characters; some wild, circling camera movement; or some showy editing, there usually seems to be a moment of cinematic intensity someplace in a Techine film, a moment of cinema excess that is just cinematic joy. They are great moments.

What a pleasure to watch these movies. Not only enjoyed seeing how the films differed but proceeded out of the same cinematic vision, but the films are by-and-large good. What a great, worthwhile experience. I’ll be first in line when the next Techine opens in Atlanta.

Feb 22: Still Walking (2008--Hirokazu Kore-eda)

★★★★★

What a beautiful film. This was another Jenny movie, part of a series we’ve been watching of films by Hirokazu Kore-eda. Jenny picked these movies since Kore-eda returns regularly to the same theme -- suicide or loss. The first, Mabaroso, follows a woman whose boy friend might have killed himself, and Hana is the story of a samurai who has to deal with the death of his brother. And we’d both seen Nobody Knows, the story of a group of children who have lost their mother, before we even knew Kore-eda was the director.

But I love this film. It’s a completely engaging portrayal of a family that has gathered to honor the memory of a lost son though there is practically no story in it. Instead, the various members of the family interact and talk, and through their interaction, we come to know and understand each of them. All have a mix of good and bad, all act justifiably and unjustifiably, all excite our affection and criticism. And while this doesn’t sound like a compelling film, Still Walking is fascinating through all 115 minutes of its run, and I came out of the movie feeling as if all the members of the family were people I knew well. It reminded me a little of the family portraits in Assayas’ Summer Hours, Desplechin’s Christmas Story and even Techine’s My Favorite Season, but there is even less story here than in those French films, each of which seems to have a least a modicum of plot and climax. Still Walking has no character conflicts that rise to a resolution; it’s a gradual revelation of some people who have a lot of history and who love each other in their own way. This insight is keen, revealing and yet warm. And there is none of the irony or comic distance that seems so necessary to films today. We simply see the characters in a direct way.

And there is a lot to be said about the production, too. Much of the frame had an off-center composition like you see in Japanese prints, and there was noticeably little camera movement. I loved it when the camera framed a composition, and then the actors (or a red train!) moved into and around the frame, putting all the visual emphasis on the moving object in the frame rather than calling attention to the camera with movement. Voyeuristic, yes….but that technique brings the viewer into the intimacy of the family. There’s one scene that stands out in my mind – the one of the boy lying on a mat. At first, the boy is cramped in the bottom of the frame, in fact, only half in it. During the dialog, the boy turns over on his back, rolling into the frame and into engagement with his step-father. That simple little gesture was incredibly aesthetic to me. In rolling, the boy realized the potential of the original image, and he could just as easily roll back out. The beauty in that realized frame is under constant threat of destruction by something as simple as the boy moving out of the frame again. There’s something richly Japanese about it…and about the many similar shots.

The lighting is marvelous, too. It looks like it’s all done with reflective umbrellas that illuminate all the actors and interiors softly evenly. There are no sharp lines on the actors or the sets, but the viewer can see everything. It’s a visual analog to our access to the characters’ actions and words, and the light also creates a sense of calm, refinement and beauty. I could enjoy this movie with no sound at all just by watching the visuals. However, that would be a loss because the sound plays such an important role here. Kore-eda repeatedly creates off-screen space with the sound, so while you’re looking at one thing, you’re hearing another. And the sonic and visual spaces might not even be interacting; they’re just co-existing. In one elegant moment, there’s a conversation in the bedroom, and while the conversation continues, the film cuts to a small vase on a table with the crape myrtle sprig one of the kids has brought in, the shot composed, of course, with an off-center aesthetic. The shot has lingering memory and beauty.

I love moments like this in Still Walking.

Feb 20: Splice (2009--Vincenzo Natali)

★★

Utterly predictable. Sarah Polley can't act, and Adrian Brody doesn't have much to work with.

I know, I know....what did I expect?

Feb 14: Lola Montes (1955--Max Ophuls)

★★

Ok…I’ll lose my lover-of-French-cinema card, but I didn’t like this movie.

I understand what the New Wavers liked about it. There’s the constant defamiliarization of cinema convention with the story fragmented into separate performances and presented in nonchronological order. There’s a ringmaster who talks to the audience (us?) about Lola's story and even appears as a character in it. There are multiple layers of self-conscious reality jumping among the circus frame and the bio episodes. There’s even defamiliarization of the circus, which has masks related to Lola’s story and bizarre characters like the faceless children. There’s soundtrack play with reverb in some dialogue to conjure the circus performance while the movie is running in a more conventional narrative vein, again highlighting the mechanics of the movie. Things like the sweeping crane shots that end focused on a chandelier and the over-the-top theatricality won't let us relax into a mimetic viewing mode.

And in all this self-consciousness, there’s a good story. Lola vogues with Franz Liszt, escapes exploitation by her mother, exits a terrible marriage, seduces a teenager, has a romantic affair with a King, escapes a revolution and lands in a circus. That’s an interesting story.

But as good as all this sounds, I was bored to tears by the movie. I disliked the circus that was the central vehicle for the story; in fact, I disliked it so much that I’m almost afraid to revisit the extravagant Fellini films from the 60s that I remember with such fondness. What if they’re as tedious and academic as the circus looks here? I got very tired of Peter Ustinov yelling at me in his limited, circus-barker, ladies-and-GENTlemen voice, and the stilted acting of Martine Carol (Lola) didn’t engage me in the least. I know she was faulted for her acting at the time, but given how self-conscious and idea-driven the film is, I’d point my finger at Ophuls, if not for the acting itself then for the casting. The only part of the film that engaged me at all was the segment with Anton Walbrook as Ludwig I of Bavaria, and having seen Walbrook in Red Shoes and Colonel Blimp recently, I suspect that this segment is good because he could play opposite a floating log and make the scene compelling.

Too much idea here and too little cinema. Count me among the Bavarian peasants when it comes to Lola.

Feb 11: Happy Together (1997--Wong Kar-Wai)

★★★★★

Second time watching this movie. Really liked it the first time around but thought it was depressing; this time, I just thought it was fantastic and feel like I missed a lot the first time. It’s not depressing at all, actually, though it’s not Hollywood happy. It has a frank, analytical view of psychology and relationships like I’ve been seeing in a lot of films, thinking especially of Techine.

So many things I liked about it. Its technique reminded me of the earlier Chungking Express and Fallen Angels: jump editing; music video cuts, lighting and camera movement; shifting film stock (grainy, normal daylight, b/w). Those two earlier films were mostly style, though, and didn’t seem to have a lot of heart beyond some quirkiness and, ultimately, cuteness.

Happy Together, though, knocked me down with the intensity and truth of Lai Yiu-fai and Ho Po-wing and their relationship. The responsible Lai Yiu-fai is the provider type who nurtures but wants control in exchange; the cute boy Ho Po-wing is an insecure, spoiled kid who needs nurture, in fact demands it, but can’t stand not being the constant center of attention. Both are insecure, and both become jealous of the other because of it. It’s a dysfunctional relationship that causes pain for both of them, and Happy Together documents the dysfunction as if it were Greek tragedy, complete with hubris and the fall. The intense inevitability of what happens to the two men is as riveting as it is painful…and true. This is the type of relationship I saw in good Techine.

That relationship would have been enough for me, but the movie offers so much more. First there’s the way that no setting is left to chance. Buenos Aires is an intensely-realized city seen from the POV of a foreigner who doesn’t have much money and is scraping to get by. The metropolis is a collection of garish clubs, restaurant kitchens and tourist bars with a decrepit boarding house (with its shared facilities) and a slaughter house thrown in. Interesting in itself, the hardscrabble setting also reflects the strife-filled inner life of the two protagonists. No accident that the two men can’t make it to the vast openness of Iguazu Falls; that dynamic, strong, bright setting would not have been the right analog to their relationship even though they constantly long for it while looking at their Iguazu motion lamp.

With setting reflecting inner workings, it’s to be expected that, when Chang takes Lai Yiu-fai’s love to release it at the southern lighthouse, that setting is bright, open and naturally lit, and when he finally breaks free, Lai Yiu-fai is able to make the trip to Iguazu alone (though, he says, still feeling that Ho Po-wing should be there). We last see Lai Yiu-fai in the clear, sunny, clean daylight of Taipei, carrying a photo of Chang an free of the darkness of his relationship with Ho Po-wing; we last see Ho Po-wing alone in Lai Yiu-fai’s old apartment, crying and trying to arrange cigarette packages as reminders of Lai Yiu-fai’s affection. Bittersweet, even heart-rending, stuff.

And there are other cinematic flourishes that I love in this movie. We see Lai Yiu-fai from interiors a couple of times, shots that, along with frequent lens flair, reminded me of the camera and of that shot of Clyde from inside the bank after the first robbery he does with Bonnie. All those scenes take me back to French New Wave and remind me how truly revolutionary that movement was. I wonder if Happy Together could even have been imagined without the editing and self-conscious camera of those films. And then there’s the surfeit in this movie. There’s one whole section that consists of close-ups of Lai Yiu-fai sitting on the back of an open boat as the boat shifts around the industrial docks outside the hotel. Nothing happens, and this segment doesn’t advance the story one iota. It’s a brief moment of impressionist filmmaking that is there simply for mood and inner psychology. Eliot: objective correlative. Like the settings. Like the shots of Iguazu, both the ariel nature shots and the close-up lamp shots.

I remember being impressed with The Kids are All Right and wondering where else a film like that could have been made, a film that talks about the difficulty of families and relationships but uses a gay vocabulary. Here’s an answer: Hong Kong. Happy Together, too, puts a universal truth about human relationships into a gay language, but the real focus here is on the intensity and difficulty of love. Cruising and acting straight are merely gay-specific embellishment on the central concern of this film: the dynamics of a hard relationship and how to deal with them. This film is both beautiful and true.

Feb 8: Bonnie and Clyde (1967--Arthur Penn)

★★★★★

Feb 06: The Tudors: Season 4

★★★★★

When I don't have time (or energy) to watch a whole film, I like to squeeze in a TV episode or two. That's how I've been watching my way though this last season of the Showtime series, The Tudors.

One of my biggest pleasures here is the way it lets me touch base with the European history classes I did as an undergrad and grad student. I remember a lot of the history, but some of the details are always vague, so I like half-anticipating what is happening. The part around the abolition of the monasteries was pretty clear; the Pilgrimage of Grace was almost new.

I’d have to say that the series has at least partly changed the way I think of European history, too: it’d never occurred to me that many of the monarchs were young, spoiled brats and that many must have grown up under terrible pressure and experienced terrible tragedy. Rys-Meyers plays such a character to the hilt with his Henry VIII, and his portrayal has a logic that makes sense to me; early Henry is self-absorbed and spoiled, while later Henry is resisting aging, trying to recapture his youth. As the series has gone along, it’s seemed the Henry character has lurched from one point to another sometimes, but the initial season certainly pushed me to think of how their childhood – and, later, youth – could have accounted for the ridiculous waste that monarchs inflicted on so much of Europe. I wouldn’t discount the impact of politics, religion and power as factors in the wars, but the personalities of the monarchs would certainly have had a major impact.

I refer to The Tutors as “Baywatch in the Renaissance” because of its emphasis on soft core sex, and I think some of the characters, unfortunately, get the depth of treatment that a character in Baywatch would get, too. Tamzin Merchant’s Katherine Howard, for example, would be best popped into a bikini and put on a beach in California; her flighty-young-thing act is annoying, not to mention her painfully anachronistic language and gestures. Suffolk (Henry Cavill) moves from playboy to brooder to lover with relatively little graduation in between. On the other hand, Natilie Dormer manages some depth and growth to Anne Boleyn. There’s a range of depth here, partly due to the acting and partly due to the scope that the series is trying to encompass.

I loved the set décor here, though, an engaging mix of Tutor with some contemporary taste for luxury. I want the sheers with embroidery that appear around the bed in several places; what a great idea for a mosquito net! Ditto for the costumes, which manage to be sexy on the handsome actors.

So this is a fun series, and the graphic nature of characters’ interactions, costuming and environments have left me with an image of some of these characters I’m apt to carry with me for awhile: Henry, Anne Boleyn, Anne of Cleves, Sir Thomas More, Catherine of Aragon, Cardinal Wolsey, Mary and Cromwell. I not only enjoyed the television, but I’m also glad for the sense of the time I got that I can carry around and modify as I learn more. And since this is the last season, I have to add that I’m going to miss seeing Mary and Elizabeth grow up (yeah, I know the HISTORY….would be interesting to see how the producers handle them, though).

Feb 01: Vivre sa vie (1962--Jean-Luc Godard)