April 9: Nice Guy Johnny (2010 -- Edward Burns)

★★★

This is an impressive movie for what went into it.  It was shot with a digital camera and a tiny budget of $25,000; I think I read the actors did their own clothes, hair and make-up, too.  Director Edward Burns even played one of the main roles, and you have to think that might’ve been yet another budget decision.  And Burns is distributing the movie thru i-tunes and VOD since he doesn’t have studio backing.  It’s an independent, independent movie.

And lots of it is good.  I like the strong sense of place in the film, almost like seeing through a camera wandering around the Hamptons with a not-long-out-of-college kid who is trying to make decisions about his future.  And the story is on, too, dealing with that decision and with young adults deciding how to move into adulthood.  Script isn’t bad either.

My only strong reservation here is the acting.  Knowing that the set and staff was small, I was still constantly taken out of the film by the declamatory delivery of lines.  And though many would disagree, the delivery of Burns himself was one of the weakest elements.  The near shouting and limited tonal range of the actors’ voices would probably work alright on a stage, but it didn’t work at all in this intimate filmof a big decision point in a life. 

Nice Guy Johnny has lots going for it, especially given its indie context…..I really wish it had had better performances.

April 4: Pan's Labyrinth (2006 -- Guillermo del Toro)

★★★★★
 

What a step from Cronos to Pan’s Labyrinth!  This film does so much more, is so much more compelling, and holds its unusual tone so much better than Cronos does.  This is one of those rare films that’s actually better than I remembered.

Of course, there’s the fantasy element here with the amazing Faun and Pale Man; they’re the stuff of creep shows.  But it’s not just chills and thrills here.  The film has two realms (the fantasy world and the real world), and both have a dark feeling about them where awful things can (and do) happen.  Part of the tension in the movie is that we learn quickly that Labyrinth isn’t timid about horrid violence, and knowing that creates a lot of suspense in various scenes.  The evil father is capable of the terrible violence with a distinct sado-masochistic element, and the Faun always seems like he could as easily kill Ofelia as crown her princess.  Resistance leaders get shot at point blank range, and fairies get their heads bitten off.  Menace and violence dominate both realms.

And there’s a connection of some kind between these two worlds.  Both, for example, have keys, and both have prohibitions and other rules.  Actions in one world can affect the other, too.  For example, the mandrake root comes from the fantasy world but works (or not) in the real. 

Which leads to the most pleasing aspect of the movie for me, its ambiguity.  You can’t really nail down the connection between reality and fantasy here because the echoes and links between the two aren’t sharp.  I had the overwhelming temptation to see the fantasy world as the way Ofelia dealt with the horror she experienced in her life, but there was no way to connect events like the attack to what was happening Ophelia’s world.  In fact, I even got to the point where I couldn’t be sure that the fantasy world was fantasy, at least in terms of the movie.  I’m still not sure if I think the fantasy world was Ophelia’s hallucination or if it was real and that she was the only one who could see it.  There is a lot of eye imagery in the film, after all, in both the real and fantasy realms.

There are many other engaging elements of the film like repeated images, parallel plot actions, and meticulous color schemes, but the important thing is that they’re all tied together organically by the hand of a most capable director.  And this adult can still enjoy a good story told right…and enjoy it even more on the second go-round.

April 3: Cronos (1998 -- Guillermo del Toro)

★★★

I remember seeing this when it first came out…it was at the High Museum’s Latin American Film festival.  At that time, I didn’t know quite what to make of it.  It was oddly evocative, but it was hard to put my finger on why.

This time around…knowing del Toro’s work so much better…I had no such problem.  Cronos is a del Toro fantasy tale, plain and simple, and that’s what makes the film so compelling.  First, there’s the dark morality issue.  The grandfather, Jesus, makes a bad choice and is punished for that error.  As that story element is worked out, del Toro uses elements that are bizarre or baroque, a tool kit he frequently uses.  Scenes such as those with the cronos machine digging in suggest things I’d see later in Hell Boy and Blade II, as does the extreme make-up we see in Jesus.  I saw another del Toro interest as I watched the preternatural granddaughter Aurora, who prefigures characters in The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Laybrinth.  And then there’s the vaguely once-upon-a-time feeling here.  That’s certainly something we see in later del Toro, too.

My hang up first time around was that I kept wanting to see what the story was getting at beyond what I was watching.  This time around, I watched Cronos as a fantasy that had no real significance beyond being an engaging story with fantastic elements.  For a good movie, that’s plenty. 

April 2: The Adjustment Bureau (2011 -- George Nolfi)

★★★

Not a terrible way to spend an hour and a half, but there are probably better ways, too.  Matt Damon is quite good as David Norris, and Emily Blunt is an often-engaging Elise.  And they connect on-screen.  And there’s a little Phillip Dick sci-fi , too......meaning that the story isn’t just thrills.  Do we have free will?  If we do, what is it?  These are weighty questions, but in The Adjustment Bureau, they have more of a stoner tone than a philosophical.

 Overall, the boy wants the girl and is very determined to get her; the rest isn’t hard to figure out.  Some of the obstacles to the hero are fun, but this is a Hollywood movie, so the outcome is pre-ordained.  J

April 1: The Darjeeling Limited (2007 -- Wes Anderson)

★★★

A smarmy Christian podcast I heard likes Wes Anderson: they see him as pro-family because his films center on family dynamics and the healing in them.  While I didn’t like their “family-friendly” attitude, the podcasters hit the nail on the head with their point about family dynamics in Anderson’s films.  The subject notwithstanding, the key question in Anderson’s films for me is whether he deals with family dynamics in a real way or through some gauze of cliché, convention, quirk or other distancing mechanism.

It’s distancing mechanisms in Darjeeling Limited.  The three brothers in this film all suffer from grief at the loss of their father and the fleeting – usually absent – affection of their mother, but the movie has them doing cute, stagey actions and speaking in stiff, artificial language around their hurt.  The plot here moves mechanically in a series of set pieces, and the film is burdened with overt symbols like the baggage (guess what it means) and repeated actions (do they TRUST Francis with the passports?).  This tone risks trivializing the very real pain and loss of the characters.

But something halfway works with this approach.  For one thing, the brothers seem almost childishly cute as they pose their way through their sense of loss and the problems this sense has created in their lives, and this childishness creates some sympathy.  I also respond to their movement through healing, initiated in the village and the funeral they’re able to participate in and advanced in their meeting with their conditional-love mother.  It’s corny and stagey, but it’s satisifying to watch them drop their baggage as they get on the departing train.

There are other elements in the movie I like, too.  It has a beautiful color palette of pastels and browns, and there are some great cinematic flourishes.  For example, the crane shot of the three brothers at the market is really skillful and fun as the camera swoops in on each of the three doing his shopping individually.  My favorite cinematic point is the interruption of the story with a series of images of the cars of the train, each interior representing a moment in the brothers’ lives or in the movie itself.  This brief moment of pure cinema is the most pleasing film moment in the movie.

Other things I like about the movie are the fun cameos – Angelica Huston and Barbet Schroeder in particular – and the music, which varies from pop to pop-with-Indian-arrangement to the fun, concluding French song.  These elements all work for me.

Even with all these very fine elements, the ironic distance that characterizes the film limited(!) my response.  While I like so much of what is going on here, and I like the trajectory of the characters, I found it hard to connect to or be really touched by the movie.  Amused? Yes.  Moved? No…

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.