November 12: Captain Phillips (2013 -- Paul Greengrass)

★★★

Greengrass has created a perfectly good action thriller with Captain Phillips, a based-on-fact flic that’s not unlike a Jason Bourne movie.  There’s suspense galore as the crew hides in the mess locker and the engine room, as the pirates confront the everyman Captain on the bridge, and as the hijackers, Phillips in tow, face off against the United States Navy from their lifeboat. The performances by the pirate actors add to the intensity with the desperation in the characters’ backgrounds and their frustratingly limited language ability.  Hanks, too, contributes to the suspense when his even-keeled Captain finally starts to crack towards the end of the film.

And Greengrass’ signature wobbly camera gives a sense of immediacy to the action unfolding in front of us. 
Whether bouncing in the pirates’ boat or glancing around the bridge frantically, the view through the camera communicates at least a bit of a sense of participating in the drama.  The stakes also inexorably build from the small-scale, casual intimacy in the car as Andrea Phillips accompanies her husband to the airport, to the huge freighter that Phillips captains, and then to the image of the small lifeboat dwarfed by two warships and an aircraft carrier.  Importance increasingly bears down on the characters visually as the suspense builds in the film.

But for all the directing chops and acting technique in Captain Phillips, the movie doesn't quite make it past being a fleeting, cinematic thrill.  There is creaky exposition as the mate shows a map and explains that the Maersk Alabama will be quite close to the Somali coast; likewise, the SEAL leader has to articulate that he needs three simultaneously clear shots to end the standoff.  There is also an effort to elevate Captain Phillips from being a typical action film to being one with something to say about the First World/Third World struggle of today, but the mentions of the subject feel tacked on to the film’s main interest in suspense.  We see the desperate situation of Muse in his Somali village, and we hear his protestations that he has no options but to continue the hijacking.  There’s the concern that the First World Captain evinces for the Third World teenaged hijacker, who is approximate the same age as his own First World son in Vermont.  But none of these elements manage to inform the overall effect of Captain Phillips, perhaps because Greengrass is so good at action that such thematic gestures fall short. 

At the end of Captain Phillips, we’re more left more wanting to take a deep breath of relief than think about the collisions of economic disparity in today’s global economy.  And there’s certainly a place for such cinematic fun at the movies.  It's just that, having seen what Greengrass can do, I found myself wishing he had hit closer to his achievement in United 93 than his work in The Green Zone.

November 9: FILMS FOR OLD MEN

This is an interesting film theme that doesn't get lots of attention.  However, when a director tackles this topic seriously, some surprisingly good films result.  Here's my list so far.

1. Friends of Eddie Coyle
2. The Leopard
3. The Music Room
4. Wild Strawberries
5. The Misfits
6. Rififi
7. The Cowboys

My next question: I know the issues that men face as they age, and these movies all address them to some extent.  But what are some of the issues facing women as they age?  And what films address those?  Input welcome.

November 4: Greek Pete (2009 -- Andrew Haigh)

★

I was interested in this first feature by Andrew Haigh, and I wasn’t disappointed to see some of his Weekend style already under development here.  There’s the intimacy in Haigh’s style that I liked so much in Weekend, and after watching Greek Pete, I was surprised I hadn’t recognized the documentary roots of that approach in the later fictional film.  And the specificity I liked so much in Weekend is amply on display here, too.  Life in Greek Pete is a series of apartments inhabited by guys in the early 20s with the furnishings and decor you’d expect in an apartment block….just as in Weekend.  And like in Weekend, the cinematography consists of frequent, intimate close-ups and a soundtrack of voices talking over each other or speaking in the background while we’re watching another face.  There are even forays into local, specific social locations.

However, in contrast to Weekend, Greek Pete fails as a film, and that largely because of its main character.  Pete is simply not an interesting documentary subject.  We get to know him well through the camera, but Pete is just an immature, somewhat shallow 24-year-old who has a big cock and isn’t inhibited.  He may talk about missing his family during holidays and about saving money so he can buy his own house, but such statements have the heft of something a teenager might say.  There’s not much wisdom or investment in these pro forma musings.  Likewise, his relationship with his boyfriend doesn’t show much depth.  They have sex, they play at staged bathtub scenes, but we see little intimacy through this documentary camera, either physical or emotional.  And at this point in time, drug use and kinky sex scenes are almost to be expected in a film about a male rent boy, so those scenes aren't insightful or original either.

Greek Pete is a surprisingly uninteresting film by the maker of later, excellent film.  The contrast of the two is a good lesson in how hard it is to make a good documentary, even for directors who are talented at fictional films.

November 3: Weekend (2011 -- Andrew Haigh)

★★★★★

This is a wonderful little movie that brings the specificity and honesty that small film seems to be able to muster more easily than our summer blockbusters.  It’s billed as a romance and has a little the feel of Brief Encounter or Before Sunrise, but Weekend’s romance is mostly the catalyst for change that the two well-wrought characters experience.  It’s a unique, touching and truthful portrayal.

The center of the film is the characters, and Haigh develops them with a compelling specificity.  Russell is out but not open about himself with those around him, and he compartmentalizes his various experiences and feelings as a way of fitting in.  He’s uncomfortable with public expressions of male affection since that could result in social rejection, and he always hides the details of his gay experience from his straight best friend who, we find out, actually wants his friend to be more honest with him.  Haigh expresses Russell’s longing to connect in other details, too.  Russell furnishes his apartment with pre-owned items, making up stories about the connection people might’ve had to his tea cup, and the only space Russell is completely honest is when he’s writing alone on his laptop.  When we learn the details of Russell’s background, we can better understand his desire for connection and difficulty in connecting—Russell grew up as a state ward.

The garrulous Glen, on the other hand, maintains his distance from people by throwing up a big, extroverted wall of talk and posturing.  Right after his first night with Russell, he begins to externalize the experience by recording Russell’s impressions of the night for an art project.  Glen’s angry, in-your-face activism lets him politicize and abstract the pain we later learn he feels; details like his shouting into a courtyard fourteen stories below him show the intensity of his feeling if not the real object.  At his going away party, Glen is loud with his friends but not warm, and Russell learns they don’t feel they know Glen well.  Weekend develops both characters with an exceptional amount of real, specific detail.

The film uses the love story between the two men to motivate their respective character changes, and it’s the specific details here, too, that mark their changing relationship.  Russell is open with Glen from the beginning, but as Glen leaves Saturday morning, Russell thinks the encounter is just another entry on his laptop.  However, Russell has been feeling increasingly isolated – which we see in details like the opening scene with his friends and in the lunch scene with his friends – and after a day of life-guarding and watching life at the pool from the outside, he texts Glen.  Glen shows up, a significant gesture for the closed character, and the two spend a day together.  As Glen leaves later, he makes an move outside himself and invites Russell to his going away party; Glen sliding a hoodie over his head is an external expression of how vulnerable the invitation is making him feel.  As Weekend progresses, the more they talk with each other, the more the two men reveal and the more their love develops.  By the end of the film, Russell has opened enough to trust his straight friend Jamie with the details of what’s been going on in his life, and Russell opens up enough to try to catch Glen at the station.  For his part, Glen has opened up enough to break down in tears at Russell’s gesture, and Russell is open enough to kiss him in public.  As a last detail to mark Glen’s change, he gives Russell the tape he made on the first morning they awoke, honoring their relationship by not having played it for anyone and not keeping it.  It’s a touching detail.

And for all the engagement with the characters that Weekend creates, the film’s visuals are also a big part of
what draws us into the movie and keeps us there.  The local specifics make this film real.  There are trips on public transportation, a trip to a fair, and visits to locations like the pool and apartment complex that give the film so much of its authenticity.  While real, these same locations become cinematic expressions in the camera of Ula Pontikos.  The natatorium is dressed out in cinematic primary colors, and the buildings of Russell’s apartment block have a gray uniformity that echoes the lives of Russell and Glen.  As their love grows, an external building shot shows a light in Russell’s apartment alone, a metaphor for their spot of life in the complex of gray buildings.  Pontikos also uses artificial light to good effect in exteriors, especially in the fun, garish shots of the fair and an Edward Hopper-esque gas station.

The cinematography and editing also create great intimacy.  Pontikos is comfortable in extreme close-ups of the two leads, and we respond to the actors as real people, complete with pimples and messy hair.  Narrow depth of field, too, adds to the sense of intimacy and engages our eye in the film as our gaze moves from the strip of face that is in focus to the rest of the image that isn’t.  And Pontikos indulges our cinematic voyeurism as we scan the bodies of the actors, coming to know them as only their most intimate acquaintances would.  Haigh has said that he wanted a gay male or a female as a cinematographer so the camera might be more intimate with the male actors.  And while the cinematography is breaching the distance between us and the characters, encouraging us to connect with them, the direction is providing great, long takes that have the span of real conversation.  The cinematic here lends even more authenticity to the characters and their movement.

Weekend even has a little of the meta- in it.  Early on, Glen says that gay art will never be popular because the majority straight world isn’t interested in gay life or, especially, gay love.  It’s not hard to imagine Haigh behind that script line, wittily commenting on the barriers to a wide reception his Weekend will face.

And more’s the pity that Haigh was right.  Too few people heard about Weekend and even fewer saw it.  But with its specificity of characters, specificity of locale and even specificity of gayness, Weekend is a universal portrayal of two people trying to overcoming their social isolation through love.  It’s a story the movies have been telling for a long time if with a different vocabulary.

October 24: Europa Report (2013 -- Sebastián Cordero)

★★

Europa Report is not the low-budget, concept, sci-fi film of the summer in the tradition of Gattaca, Moon or Never Let Me Go.  Instead, it’s a predictable procession through the sequential demise of the members of the crew of a spaceship heading to Jupiter’s moon, Europa.  It’s an old formula, I think most recently used successfully in 1979 by Ridley Scott in Alien.

Director Sebastián Cordero spices the formula with some jittery camera and lots of partial views of the threat, but even this variation mostly owes its predecessor, Cloverfield.  All the fuzzy transmissions, soundtrack static, flashbacks, flashforwards, and unsteady cameras ultimately annoy more than engage. 

Not among my anticipated films of the summer, Europa Report still disappoints.  It should fit in well with the fare on Syfy when it finally lands there.

October 23: Le ciel est à vous/The Woman Who Dared (1944 -- Jean Grémillon)

★★★★
The third of Jean Grémillon’s wartime films, Le Ciel est à vous is markedly different in tone from either of its predecessors.  It’s not a pessimistic religio-political statement like the Poetic Realist Remorques, and it’s not an over-the-top melodrama like Lumière d'été.  Le Ciel simply tells the inspirational story of a couple who sacrifice to achieve their dream against considerable odds, but as in all three of the films, moments of sheer cinematic beauty pop out unexpectedly and delight the viewer.

The visual is important in all Grémillon, and Le Ciel is no exception.  Some parts of the film are tour-de-force cinematography, like the visually startling opening.  In the first image of Le Ciel, we see a triangle of walking sheep heading into the frame from bottom right.  The camera starts to rise, and as our perspective widens, we see a shepherd leading the flock at a short distance.  The camera doesn’t stop at that point, though; it continues to rise until the flock is a small element in frame and we see black circles rotating in an open field.  We move in that direction to find children in black uniforms dancing in big circles, and the camera ultimate descends past them to a sign pointing to an orphanage.  It’s a delightful crane opening fraught with significance we’re prepared to see realized further into the film.

The first arrival of the aviatrix Lucienne Ivry  is another opportunity for bravura filmmaking.  We first hear the plane approach and begin to land as we are watching Pierre in a conversation elsewhere.  As he perks up and heads out, the camera rises and Pierre becomes part of a crowd surging toward the plane.  From above, the camera sweeps along with Pierre as he rushes to the plane as part of the crowd, and as the Lucienne exits the plane and starts towards the banquet hall, the camera, maintaining its height, stops its forward rush just as the crowd does and reverses direction with them to return to the hall with Lucienne.  Grémillon is known for tracking shots, and this one is one of his more remarkable.

But Grémillon’s visuals go beyond merely making his films interesting.   Maybe because of his silent film Grapes of Wrath, but shortly afterwards, Pierre has a tow truck and Thérèse is driving a sporty roadster.  Their furnishings transition from the simple, rural items of the opening to the embroidered fussiness of a bourgeois household, and the simple piano they could barely afford early in the film is replaced by a big, shiny new one.  Le Ciel also makes a point of commenting on Pierre’s new neon sign, a symbol of their increased affluence. And when Pierre becomes obsessed with aviation and Thérèse gets a job in the big city, the messiness of the house and the shop indicate the lack of familial attention.  Later in the film, the image of the disappointed couple peering through the café window at the celebration in honor of Lucienne’s forthcoming conquest of the women’s distance record says as much about the situation of the couple at that point in the film as any amount of exposition would.  Throughout Le Ciel, Grémillon shows us information rather than telling us with tedious explanations.
background, Grémillon’s images tell us important information.  For example, he tells us of the changes in the Gauthier family fortune by the way the family’s circumstances look.  When they leave their rural garage, the Gauthiers travel in a rickety truck that would have been at home in 1940’s

But for all that, one of the most intense pleasures of Grémillon’s imagery is the occasion eruption of a completely irreducible symbol, an image that is packed with meaning that we can’t articulate in simple terms.  The recurring appearance of the orphans is one such element.  The film opens with a strong emphasis on circles of dancing orphans, and we see the orphans two other times in the film as well.  The opening suggests a parallel between the sheep/shepherd and the orphans/priests, both sets of images carrying religious overtones.  However, Le Ciel, whose title itself is a pun on sky/heaven, doesn’t have an overtly religious theme.  The orphans may carry a visual suggestion of Pierre’s opinion that obsession doesn’t lead to anything good, implying that some control of impulses is desirable; in fact, the next time we see the orphans, this need is even more urgent as Thérèse and Pierre are risking the family’s finances and even Thérèse’s life.  In this and their last appearance, the orphans carry a multifaceted significance, one that is vaguely foreboding, and perhaps moral, yet there is no explicit meaning to draw from the recurrent image.

The sinking beacon at the Nice airfield is another image that has multiple layers of significance.  Disappointed that their home-built airplane will never outdistance Lucienne Ivry’s well-financed technologically-advanced plane, Thérèse and Pierre leave the Nice airfield on a foggy evening to return to their hotel.  As they start to head out, the tall beacon that they have been standing beside begins to recede into its silo.  As the two leave the frame, the camera stays on the beacon, drawing attention to it as an image that captures so much of what is happening at that moment.  This high-tech machine is part of the same aviation technology that has wrecked the Gauthier’s dreams, and in it we see technology unrelentingly performing its task, oblivious to whatever tragedy that has just occurred.  Not only is the technology unrelenting, but it is also a little point of light that is going out in an already dark night.  Grémillon ties together several aspects of Le Ciel in this one unexpected image.

There is also a complexity to the relationship at the center of Le Ciel because we watch two well-rounded characters working out the parameters of their relationship.  Charles Vanel creates a compelling Pierre, deeply sympathetic and likable.  Pierre has renounced his love of aviation for his wife but finds himself drawn back into it.  After an flying accident, he recognizes the dangers of flying and again renounces it.  But when his wife, Thérèse, develops her interest, he reverses himself yet again, and the two of them intensify their love by pursuing flight for Thérèse rather than for Pierre.  Such back-and-forth makes the story of Le Ciel somewhat turgid, but it’s a pleasant complexity.  And though Pierre has plenty of complexity, his pales in comparison to Thérèse’s.  She evolves from a rural housewife to a successful , urban saleswoman to an bossy, intolerant wife and mother.  Soon, though, she’s obsessed with flight and willing to lose the entire family fortune to set a flight record.  With both of these central characters so variable, the relationship at the film’s center occasionally becomes confusing.

Even 70 years later, we don’t see many female characters like Thérèse.  She is brave and self-determined, and it’s her husband who makes compromises in order for her to further her career rather than vice versa.  In fact, were it not for the empathy that Vanel generates onscreen, Pierre would mostly be a reflection of the heroine of Le Ciel.  The film is also unique in having two women, Thérèse and Lucienne, competing for fame instead of a two-man rivalry or two women competing for a man.  This element is another of the unique pleasures here.

Le Ciel is not without some problems and unevenness.  The story is too choppy, and the reversals of the individuals at the center are too frequent.  The film also leaves unanswered some important questions like what, for instance, is going to happen with Jacqueline’s piano and the rather brutal way her parents took it from her.  In fact, the character of Jacqueline gives rise to several unaddressed concerns, too, as her determination to continue playing piano seems to echo her mother’s determination, yet Jacqueline’s story remains undeveloped. 

Such reservations aside, Le Ciel is a real cinematic pleasure, both for its imagery and its characters.  We have only to embrace its excess and irreducibility to have a unique and wonderful filmic experience in Grémillon’s world here.

September 29: (1943 -- Jean Grémillon)