August 12: The New World (2005 -- Terrence Malick)

★★★★★

August 7: Another Earth (2011 -- Mike Cahill)

★★★

August 6: Even the Rain (2010 -- Icíar Bollaín)

★★★★

Based on what I’d heard about this movie, I was ready for something tedious, self-reflexive, academic and slow.  It wasn’t….at all.  I was engaged all the way through, both with the action/characters and with the way the two main storylines of the movie reflected off each other.  It’s been awhile since I’ve seen a movie that was engaging on an entertainment level as well as on an intellectual.

The action level in itself has plenty going on.  A crew is making a movie about Columbus’ initial landing in the New World and brutal subjugation of the indigenous people that followed, but as the film crew is working on their movie, a full-scale rebellion breaks out in the city with some members of the film’s cast being involved.  Lots of risk, action and conflict there; it’s a rich story.

As Even the Rain continues, though, some wonderful parallels emerge.  First, it becomes obvious that he water company’s forcing the locals to pay for well water is a parallel to the exploitation of the colonists who forced indigenes to pan for gold.  Parallels are clear between the colonial military forcing the mining and the modern Bolivian army enforcing water payment; there's even a parallel scene concerning dogs.  And there are great scenes in Even the Rain with some of the local workers listening to actors delivering the lines like those of the 16^th century anti-exploitation monk Bartolomé de las Casas; these 500-year-old exhortations are as pertinent in 21^st century Bolivia as they were in the colonial period.  Capitalism has replaced colonialism, but the indigenes suffer all the same.

Suspended between these two areas of meaning is the filmmaking.  The filmmakers partly participate in the exploitation, having come to Bolivia to save money and pay a pittance for wages.  But parallels to the colonial era exist in the film company, too; the exploiting producer comes to sympathize with the oppressed locals, reflecting one reading of the trajectory of Columbus himself, and the lead actor has an instant sympathy with the local people like Bartolomé.  Thrown in for good measure is the director, torn between totally loyalty to his film and a strong moral sympathy to the exploited locals.  His situation is summed up well when he confronts the mayor about the poverty of the local population that works for as little as $2/day and the mayor responds that the film company was paying that itself.   

These several levels of parallel and signification make Even the Rain a hugely pleasing film experience.  I sometimes wished it were a little less hammer-to-the-head, but it so smart and often so beautiful that I was willing to look past that.

August 5: Horrible Bosses (2011 -- Seth Gordon)

★★★
I know it’s just conventional, summer pablum, but this movie had me laughing in many, many places.

Part of the appeal is the story, which is quite tight, and another part is the obvious chemistry between the leads.  As you learn from the outtakes in the credits, a lot of the dialog was improv, and these guys are very good at picking up on each other when they are all in character.  I was already familiar with Jason Bateman before the film, but here he mostly played the straight man to Charlie Day’s and Jason Sudeikis’ characters.  Day was simply hilarious, into his character and playing him with abandon.  Of scenes I remember, the little guy Day was hysterical playing the little guy who accidentally ended up on coke even though a scene like this is close to cliché.  No surprises in this film but very competent.  Just the thing for a summer afternoon.

I went with a group of former students who were leaving the country, and they all thought it was funny, too.  My question: How did they ever learn that vocabulary?

August 4: Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1984 (2009 -- James Marsh)

★★★

Red Riding 1984 is the weakest of the trilogy, and watching it showed me what I liked in the others by the absence of it in this one.  The biggest lack her is the atmosphere of the first two.  In those films, the police are utterly, utterly ruthless and omnipresent. There’s an atmosphere of pervasive oppression there that informs every one of the banal, ordinary settings, and it’s almost work to get a breath in the films.  In addition, the camera work in the first two -- jerky, wandering, stream-of-conscious – disquiets a viewer, but the camera here is stable, the lighting more even, the editing smoother. The loss of the atmosphere and the unconventional cinema techniques of the first two films make 1984 far less involving than its predecessor.

Perhaps the lack of menace is related to what seems to be the main idea here – to explain all the mysteries to date and to tie all the loose ends up.  And it does so, if a pretty straightforward manner.  We find out who the killer is, what motives lie behind the non-serial-killer violence, and what happens to the important characters.  The film adds a little more story here, but the main thrust seems to be to wrap up things up.  Reminds of the last Harry Potter film.

I enjoyed the Red Riding Trilogy well enough.  It’s suspenseful and occasionally surprising, and it's solidly in the new European crime genre of hard crime film.  And the trilogy is effective to some point.  Before the film, I thought of the British police as some incorruptible institution,  but with this trilogy complementing the Murdock police scandal in the news daily, you almost have to wonder if there’s a generic truth behind it.  

August 3: Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980 (2009 -- James Marsh)

★★★
Six years later, and the outside inspector who was called in to investigate the Karachi Club violence in 1974 is back in Yorkshire to try to figure out why the police investigation into a serial killer isn’t going well.  Inspector Peter Hunter lifts the wrong stone, and he discovers a lot of things about the Yorkshire Police.

There’s a similar atmosphere here with the overwhelming, irresistible corruption of the police in an obscure, dark setting.  Perhaps thinking of the previous movie, I had the feeling that Inspector Hunter was facing a big, uphill battle against the police, so there was a situational oppression for me as well as the dark, wet, nighttime settings and the darkness in so many people’s personal relationships.  The overarching darkness in 1980  echoes that of 1974.

Another tonal success, 1980 isn’t as structurally adventurous or engaging as 1974.  This film was shot in 35 mm while the earlier one was in 16 mm, so perhaps the more fluid camera movement of 1974 was partly a result of the smaller, more nimble camera.  Whatever the cause, 1980 is more static and has a more straightforward narrative style than 1974 does.  This film isn’t far from a typical, smaller-budget crime/corruption movie, and I found myself relating the visuals back to those in Fincher’s 7.

So 1980 is certainly a worthwhile effort.  And there are so many loose ends and characters left over, I have to think I’ll seen them again in 1983.

August 2: Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974 (2009 -- Julian Jarrold)

★★★

This movie was a lot better than I expected.  There’s a tone I often see in British crime cinema, a gritty, bone-chilling ruthlessness that heightens tension because the bad guys really will do anything.  And there’s nothing elegant about them either – they’re middle class or lower middle class folk with bad taste, puffy faces and a stubborn lack of interest in anything not material.  This grittiness, which informs not only the characters but the dialog, setting and action, drains any larger concerns from the film.

Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974 is firmly in this line of British crime movies as the slightly vulnerable/slightly incompetent young Eddie Dunford discovers and walks into the grinder that the Yorkshire police operate.  It’s a land of smoky, tacky interiors with cheap furnishings and lighting that is sharp and unflattering.  There’s no beauty in the sets of the film, and there are no limits to what the bad guys are capable of.  The atmosphere is relentless, and it’s one of the strong points of the film.

I liked the way it was filmed, too.  The first of a trilogy made for British TV, Red Riding 1974 has a fluid camera that gives the impression of actually being with the action.  It might move from the face to the collar of the actor’s shirt or linger in a room after a character has walked out.  With the desaturated images and the meandering camera, you get a sense of almost participating in the action (if not occasionally of watching TV).

The acting is uniformly good, too.  In fact, I spent the first few minutes of the film thinking of Dog Day Afternoon and wondering if the film had actually been made in 1974.  The actor playing Eddie looked familiar and it wasn’t until I recognized him as Andrew Garfield from The Social Network that I got that this was a recent movie.  It was certainly looking very prescient…..

Red Riding 1974 is an excellent, smart, hard movie, suggesting Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in tone but not relying on Nazis.  Film noir is alive here.  I’m hooked and want to see the second installment of the trilogy to see how that director uses the actors and the setting.