March 31: Charade (1964 -- Stanley Donen)

★★★

Gee…. I wonder if the silly humor you see in so many 60s/70s mainstream movies has lost some of its ooomph when we see it from now.  I think of the painful scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with Paul Newman hamming it up on his bicycle to the tune of "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head," a scene that I was just embarrassed by the last time I saw it.

I had the same experience tonight watching Charade when Cary Grant was in the shower with his suit on.  I just can’t make the emotional or intellectual leap to go back to see that as funny.  It just looks stupid to me now, and unfortunately, that was my response to a lot of the humor in the movie.  I know the movie's supposed to be partly comedy and partly humor, but the humor part here just didn’t work for me.  I don’t think it’s the film’s fault because I think the movie falls pretty solidly into 60s convention.  It’s that I don’t find that kind of humor funny.  And for all that, I don't find poor Audrey Hepburn acting naïve or silly to be funny either.  And the timing of a lot of the humor isn’t funny today.  I could hardly even smile at the jokes about “agents” or “spies.”

Fortunately (because I WANT to like this movie), there are things here I can respond to.  The movie looks fabulous, for one!  It’s set in Paris in the 60s, and Paris looks great in film in the 60s.  Donen milks that beauty, shooting scenes in the Tuilleries and along the Seine.  And he’s working with Audrey Hepburn in Paris fashion; she’s the perfect visual complement to the city in her haute couture of the era.  She’s not great at comedy, but she knows how to wear designer clothes.  Other set design elements make the film worth looking at for me, too.  The great, empty Paris apartment that Regina returns to is pretty stunning, and the tense, closing pursuit through the theater is visual pleasure, too, as maniquins jump from shadows and chords dangle menacingly.  There is a lot to make this film worth watching.

There’s the very famous theme song, too, by Henry Mancini with Johnny Mercer lyrics.  It's a little overused in the film (for example, the version done in pipes for the carousel scene), but the musical theme is good listening and adds some cohesion to the film.

Charade works really well for me on the visual level, but I found the comedy/irony kept me from being as engaged by the thrill-plot as I might have been.  I wonder what Hitchcock could’ve done with this….

March 30: Never Let Me Go (2010 -- Mark Romanek)

★★★★

I enjoyed this movie.  The best thing about the film is the idea at its base: take an element of the human condition and highlight it by using a setting that you’d have to call sci-fi.  This isn’t sci-fi that speculates about the future, either future technology or the future society.  The aim in Never Let Me Go is to use a single sci-fi element to highlight something about our present life and examine it.  This one element aside, the world of Never let Me Go is ours.

The film is both poignant and incisive, along the lines of Solaris, Gattaca or Moon, addressing the subjects of death and love.  I’m sure the source material, a story by Kazuo Ishifuro, contributed to this theme, but Mark Romanek did a nice job with the setting and pacing of the film to bring the viewer into the drama before us.  I like how Romanek’s conception of the film uses the sci-fi element only to create the conditions that let him sharpen the terms of the film; the sci-fi element highlights the life-and-death issue, and everything else here is so quotidian that I hardly noticed the sci-fi element.   What’s more, I was struck even more strongly by the terms of the film because of the normality of the setting.  And it isn’t just Romanek’s direction that makes the film work: The three main actors do a good job, too. 

I liked this film a lot and found it very worth my time as a meditation on love and death.

March 28: Winged Migration/ Le peuple migrateur (2001 -- Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cluzaud, Michel Debats)

★★★★

This is a fabulous film to watch, but I’m sure I liked it more when it came out 10 years ago. The same things that annoyed me then annoyed me again this time, but even more. The worst thing is the syn hush music. It was just an absolutely terrible choice that actually took me out of the film with its sshh-sshh-sshh rather than engaging me in what was happening on-screen. And while I found the irrepressible French cuteness bothersome 10 years ago, it grated this time around: the poor, hurt bird getting eaten by crabs; the caged goose looking up at its free cousins; the goose abandoned by buds out west and rediscovering them; the boy helping the goose free itself at the farm and awaiting its return the next year, the goose that falls in oil in eastern Europe; the migrating birds getting shot by hunters. It’s hard to imagine a string of more obvious, cloying sentimentality.

Those considerable reservations aside, there are many, many beautiful images in this film – so many that the movie rises above its many bad directorial choices. The close-ups of birds in flight, taken with great ingenuity and effort, are simply the standard now and have forever earned Winged Migration a place in the documentary/wildlife pantheon. The Making of documentary on the blu-ray shows the effort and thought that went into these, and I was almost as moved by that supplement as I was by the feature. I won’t soon forget images like the storks over the desert, flying into an oasis that Turner might have painted if he’d gone to Libya. Then there are the geese in snow, the birds crossing the Himalayas, the birds flying through New York and through Paris, and the migration over the fall colors. And while the scenes of the birds in Monument Valley were odd (do birds even migrate through there?), I sorta liked yet another French homage to John Ford and the French fascination with the American West, even though it was oddly out of place. Ditto for the tern who looked like it was flying over a screen capture of Google maps – weird, but sorta fun.

You have to admire this film. I only wish someone with more directorial savvy had put it together after the successful filming had been done.

March 27: Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964 -- Byron Haskin)

★★★

This movie is just a goof. With its Star Trek (TV version) aesthetic and I-can-solve-any-problem plot, there’s little here that would fail to appeal to a 10-year-old boy….which I was when it came out in 1964. Yes, it’s colonialist (how does Friday feel about their rescue to earth?), sexist (why no women? Would that HAVE to move the film in a sexual direction?), and ethnocentric (Commander Kit has the techno goodies and can explain them in English), but when I was a kid, I loved imagining being in circumstances like these and solving all the problems around me at great risk to myself. And I’d be a big, handsome, muscular guy, too. And a monkey for a pet…that would have been icing on the cake. This is a fun movie that can still make me smile with its story of good people doing good things. (And I thought I heard correctly, so I checked: Friday DOES call Mars "Huehuetenango." I’ve been there! …though in Guatemala, near the border with Mexico...not Mars.)

March 26: Certified Copy/Copie conforme (2010 -- Abbas Kiarostami)

★★★★
This film is a certified, leisurely art movie that’s heavy on dialog and whose actions carry double meanings. The film is so deliberate and staged that I don’t think it’s going to be on a lot of people’s fav list, but I liked it a lot.

At the film’s core is the notion of original and copy and the question of the value of the copy. If that weren’t Derridean enough, a lot of the dialog between the two main characters, Elle and James Miller, seems suspended with uncertain significance. Is theirs is a real (original) marriage or a staged, simulated (copy) one, a game they are playing? And if theirs is only a copy, the film gets at the point that copies have value; James Miller expresses his respect for Elle's sister, who's happy with whatever she has whether it’s an original or a copy. And the wonderful scene in the Tuscan cathedral visually calls into question "original", too, with couples throughout the building happily getting married, replicating marriage in the background of our two main characters; by this point, the notion of original or copy is moot….any “original” marriage is lost and/or irreplaceable. It’s a fabulous scene as the two leads play their way through their marriage(?) among all the other replicating ones. The film eventually lands on the point that a marriage is just a marriage, original/real or copy/unreal.

Certified Copy also suggests another original/copy duality: cinema and reality. Like the other film I saw by Kiarostami recently, Close-Up, this film demands the viewer acknowledge he’s watching a simulacra of reality and not reality. As the two characters drive away from Elle’s house, the severe reflections on the windshield call attention to the fact that we’re watching a film and not a reality as Hollywood film language would express it. Later, at the restaurant, Elle looks right at the camera, right at us, and talks to us as though we were James. Ditto when she’s in the bathroom in front of the mirror later. These are two of the most uncomfortable scenes I've sat though in a movie in awhile. Added to those flourishes, the dialog of the film is generally stagey and stilted. We are clearly watching a movie and not watching reality, but the point is that what we have is good.

And we're led to accept and enjoy this or any "copy" of "reality," whether it’s a Michelangelo or any other Certified Copy.

March 25: The Tillman Story (2010 -- Amir Bar-Lev)

★★

I think this is an especially great time for documentaries, so The Pat Tillman Story comes out at a time of strong work in the field. But I didn’t find this one strong or wonderful. It’s competent, but no more.

If you need another reason to hate Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush (which I don’t), this film will give it to you. But The Pat Tillman Story states the obvious in the Tillman case, finally just presenting the very story the military tells—not a riveting conclusion or documentary investigation. In fact, the military can hardly have been upset at the way the movie stays in the boundaries that the military cover-up finally established. With nothing new to say about Tillman’s death or about the decision to use it for war propaganda, the only thing the movie can do is give vent to the anger of the family, which it does at some length. Another way to approach the subject might have been to try to offer us more of Tillman’s personality so we might be offended at the military’s exploitation of him or see more readily the military’s duplicity or irony. But Bar-Lev either chooses not to do that explanation…or else he can’t.

A few minutes of stonewalling by those of high rank at a House hearing give a little whiff of something rotten, with respect to the cover-up of how Tillman died, but the movie lets the witnesses – and congressmen – off with little examination. I wish we’d seen Tillman’s father, an attorney, tell us the questions he’d have asked, but the movie instead meanders off in disappointment.

For all the competence of the film, it doesn’t offer much insight. The sad moral here is that a good cover-up works and might not even inspire sharp, investigative, documentary outrage.

March 24: Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973 -- Peter Yates)

★★★★

This movie is a great little discovery for me.

I think I heard Friends of Danny Coyle mentioned in connection with the crime movies I’ve been watching lately, and I finally sat down to watch it one evening after a long day at school. I’d expected another crime movie, but I found a surprisingly sympathetic, compelling character study of a middle-aged guy who’s losing his game a bit but still trying to play. The idea isn’t unheard of in crime movies, but with the powerful Robert Mitchum at the center of this movie, Danny Coyle sets the standard for this kind of movie as far as I’m concerned.

Mitchum’s face is about all you’d really need for the film – rugged and masculine with some echo of his younger good looks still visible in the sags that a life of struggle, cigarettes and booze has led to. Coyle is in his 50s and has been beaten up in life, physically and workwise. Sensing his middle years slipping away, he wants to have his remaining life with his kids and with the wife he clearly loves. He’s surrounded by younger, aggressive, risk-taking hoods (the gun dealer and the robbers) that indicate what Coyle might have been in the past, but Coyle has suffered as a result of his earlier risk taking and, in the wisdom of maturity, doesn’t want to take so many risks and have to face the consequences. His buddy Dillon remains in the life, continually struggling to balance the shifting demands of crime and the police, but Coyle seems to have lost this ability. Though he tries to maneuver between the police and crime, he ends up being used by both the police and his criminal friends as he tries to avoid a prison term that would take him away from his wife and children.

Mitchum’s character is a fantastic, memorable, unique crime figure, but his truth goes beyond the crime genre – he’s a middle-aged guy whose talents are slipping but who still needs to function in his corner of society so he can spend his waning years with the people he loves. Mitchum’s good-looks-over-the-hill and his nuanced, sensitive performance create this memorable, sympathetic character.

Director Peter Yates died just last January. If his passing prompts any re-evaluation of his career achievements (which include Bullit, Breaking Away and – ugh! – Krull), I’m sure this film is set for a serious re-evaluation.

March 21: A Single Man (2009 -- Tom Ford)

★★★

This is a beautiful movie, as you’d expect from a designer with a strong visual sense. More than one scene has a still photography sense, but the two that I remember clearest are the scene when George and Jim are talking on the rocks (which looked like it was lifted from a photography book) and the scene with the oversized billboard and George talking with Carlos, the Spanish hustler. I enjoyed both of these scenes, the former because of the composition, texture and stark light and the latter because of its GQ fashion sense and quote of Arimondi. Other great visuals are the architectural mid-century house George and Jim lived in and the home and style of Charley.

Moore’s character points to some of Ford’s limitations, though. Aside from her being in the book that served as the source of the film, I don’t see her function here. Were all of Moore’s footage cut, we’d have the same understanding of George’s character, and Charley doesn’t have an important plot function either. She’s a good excuse for bringing in some more visuals, but she doesn’t move the story or psychology forward very much. In fact, a general problem here is that the story doesn’t move forward much at all. While it can be fine to have a meditative film or a film whose visuals move in a direction, Single Man feels more like a series of pretty tableaux than a linear progression of a story. Single Man suggested Vivre sa Vie to me with its nice visuals and its episodic plot structure, but the French film, even with its choppy inter-titles, has much more narrative flow than does Single Man. Colin Firth does an admirable job of trying to bring continuity to his character, but the movie needs that attention at the larger film level.

Even with its problems, though, Single Man has a lot heart. Its live-every-day-like-it’s-your-last theme is warm and worthy, and it’s a film with love at its core. We see the tenderness and affection between George and Jim in parts of the film, and George’s profound mourning indicates the depth of their love. But the film prefers love over loss, and Firth’s character eventually discovers that he can still find tenderness in the sweet, insistent affection of Kenny and the evident attraction of Carlos. Loopy as she is, even Charley brings some love and humanity into George’s life. And the redemptive power of love goes a long way in making this film the worthwhile project it is.

March 11: Animal Kingdom (2010--David Michôd)

 ★★★★★

Animal Kingdom is one of the darkest and most compelling crime movies I’ve seen in a long time.  A very long time.

The atmosphere here is absolutely brutal.  The police are as ruthless as the criminals, whether they are ambushing and executing suspects or blackmailing the 17-year-old Joshua.  They give Animal Kingdom a big part of its suspense as you never know what the police might do next.  There is no ethical limitation on them, and they are capable of the most uninhibited violence.

Joshua’s family is no better.  After the police frame and execute one of the family, the family ambushes and brutally kills some young policemen.  One uncle regularly gets hyped on drugs, another lusts after Joshua’s girlfriend and has no inhibitions about killing at all.  And Joshua’s aunt, who he moved in with after his own mother OD-ed, will kill or destroy anyone that threatens the family.  Like the police, this group has no morality or limits either.

And the tension is further heightened when Joshua – young, soft-spoken, shy, immature and inexperienced – gets caught between these two violent, raging forces.  He’s used and manipulated by the police and used and manipulated by his family.  And both seem intent on destroying him for their own purposes.  James Frecheville plays Joshua with a good ear and eye to teenage reticence among adults, and he nails the open, deer-in-the-headlights look of a teen who is earnestly trying to learn.  And Joshua needs to learn fast.  Animal Kingdom gets much of its power from our watching this innocent among such raging evil.


There’s no elegance here to relieve the brutality either; in fact, the painfully lower middle class setting adds to the tone in its detail. The family lives in a characterless suburban ranch, and much of the action takes place in strip malls and small business franchises.  It’s a harsh life in a prefab environment.

Michôd moves the plot along quickly with many sudden turns, constantly surprising the viewer with unexpected actions and sudden outbursts of violent strength.  This is what Lou and I call a two-martini movie: one during the movie for pleasure and one after to relax.

March 8: Inside Job (2010--Charles Ferguson)

★★★★★