August 7: Grey Gardens (1975 -- Albert and David Maysles, Ellen Hovde & Muffie Meyer)

★★★★

August 6: The Man with the Movie Camera/Chelovek s kino-apparatom (1929 -- Dziga Vertov)

★★★★★

August 5: Hoop Dreams (1994 -- Steve James, Frederick Marx & Peter Gilbert)

★★★★★

August 4: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 (2012 -- Bill Condon)

★★★

At minimum, Bill Condom’s Breaking Dawn - Part 2 is a competent action thriller.  The thriller plot proceeds from the recognition of the Volturis’ threat to the assembling of a team to resist them and then culminates in the confrontation in the field.  Getting to this faceoff, we get to meet different vampires from different areas of the world and we ponder what’s happened to Alice and Jasper. 

But it’s the other things that we watch while getting to the climax that are more interesting.  Bella becomes the central female action hero as she tosses Edward and Jacob about and out arm wrestles the powerful Emmett.  She has superior self-control in resisting the urge to feed, and she develops her own super power quickly.  She even takes the lead in love. 

Such dominance is standard fare in the new genre of female-empowerment action heroes, but as the film builds to its final confrontation, we see that there is more to Bella than simply being stronger than the guys.  She is a loving mother whose primary concern to protecting her daughter, Renesmee.  She’s also a loving wife who wants to protect her husband and a loving daughter who wants to protect her father.  And Breaking Dawn, Part 2 pauses for more tenderness than the bulk of today’s action films.  Bella’s early love scene with Edward has more soft-focus and lingering than do similar scenes in other action films, and Condon brings poignancy and tenderness into his film far more than other action film directors do.  Breaking Dawn Part 2 gives us a tough action hero but also one infused with more traditional feminine characteristics.

This film has its faults.  It can be saccharine, trite, clumsy and obvious, and everyone in the cast clearly isn’t as accomplished as many of the prominent actors here are.  But an action thriller that can spend so much time on love and tenderness is a unique contribution to the genre and makes Breaking Dawn Part 2 worthwhile. 

June 27: Firefly (2002 -- Joss Whedon) & Serenity (2005 -- Joss Whedon)

★★★

Joss Whedon’s  been busy with two Marvel Avengers movies lately, and it’s easy to see why they’re a good fit for him.  The Avengers movies concern a disparate group of individuals who must learn to work as a team in order to succeed,  the same theme that Whedon’s earliest work focusses on in Firefly and its movie spin-off, Serenity.  The idea of building a community or team couldn’t be clearer in both his earliest and latest work.

In Firefly, this role of community-builder falls to Capt. Mal, who commands the Serenity.  Through all 14 TV episodes and the feature film, the one constant is the Captain’s focus on the importance of loyalty to the team and support of other team members.  The members of the crew take risks for the others, and betrayal of one another gets dire sanction. It’s not a big thematic shift from this to The Avengers having to learn to act as a single, cohesive unit despite their varied personalities and abilities.

But Firefly is a first effort, and there are drawbackss.  The acting recalls the deadpan declamation common in low-budget cable TV, and there are many problems with the script, from the too-frequently-painful dialog to the lack of character depth or arc.  A lot of the CGI and its design is good for its time, but the interiors recall those of Lost in Space or Star Trek some 40 years before.

An interesting aspect of Firefly is its overt drawing on the Western genre.  At the center of the narrative are two veterans of an interplanetary Civil War, having fought on the side that lost and then headed for the frontier.  And there are other Western characters like the dance hall girl, the tomboy, the hands and the preacher – all with a sci-fi twist here.  More obvious are many superficial references to Westerns, from the ¾-overcoat to the wood table and tin cups in the ship’s galley. The planets in Firefly are often sparse and dry, and horses and Conestoga wagons make appearances on this frontier.

It’s tempting to see these references as gratuitous, but Firefly/Serenity gets at some interesting intertextuality.  From watching Firefly, we recognize that the sheriff and his deputy isn’t far from the space captain and his sidekick, and a gruff Capt. Mal falls into a line of Western heroes that John Wayne so ably inhabits.  Evil, pretension, greed and ruthlessness drive both sci- fi adventure and the Western, and both genres can also be used as a search for knowledge and truth.  And if, like me, you like the way a Stagecoach deals with democracy and inclusion, you’ll get a pleasure out of watching how the crew of the Serenity grasp for the same despite their many differences. 

These early works by Joss Whedon have technical shortcomings, but the pleasure of watching the inter-genre play and of enjoying the theme of community in both make them worthwhile views.

June 25: Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981 -- George Miller)

TBD

June 24: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015 -- George Miller)

★★★★

I was caught off-guard by the beauty and grace of this film. The visual creativity here suggests Terry Gillam at his best, but Gilliam doesn't create the action and characters that George Miller does, and the intensity of the chaos and stakes in this film are especially compelling viewing.

The world of Fury Road is one of pessimistic existentialism.  It's a world of strength, oppression, violence, pestilence, dirt and exploitation, and the design of the film, as much as the action, creates this world for us.  Everything is rusty and dusty, and it’s a world created from scraps of the pre-holocaust civilization that have been repurposed for this brutal time.   It’s in this repurposing that Miller’s designers are at their most creative.  Vehicles have been cobbled together from a variety of forms of transport and outfitted with equipment unrelated to transportation like spikes, waving poles, a swaying guitar and flamethrowers.  Likewise, the many weapons here feature guns with repeating cartridges and spears, and masks are painted with skulls and locked closed with tines leading to the eyes.  Every surface in the film shows designers working to create a brutal, post-holocaust world.

And among all this, beauty.  An early shot that ties destruction and beauty in the film is the image of Immortan Joe’s wives standing in the desert.  Their armored tanker has broken down, and the shot of the group of women standing beside the wreck -- shapely, dressed in tailored rags, bronzed and posed like models for a summer fashion spread – juxtaposes their feminine beauty and the masculine devastation of the world.  And if any element binds together these values visually, it’s Charlize Theron’s Furiosa.  Furiosa is tanned, trim and beautiful, so it’s especially striking when we realize she’s missing part of her arm.  Onscreen, she embodies the world of Fury Road – one of intense destruction and intense beauty juxtaposed.

All the elements of the film develop this contrast.  Desperate flights have an ethereal beauty as Miller uses desaturation and color tint to create a look of splendor, and classical music sometimes makes scenes of desolation elegant.  The views of the Swampland, with its large, awkwardly-graceful devices wandering on a screen of deep azure tie beauty and desolation together with cinematography, an element Miller often uses effectively in sustaining this juxtaposition.  Even the choreography of the extended action scenes tends more to beauty than to the chaos of similar scenes in a film by Michael Bay.  Flexible poles with fighters at their ends wave during one assault, and a chilling allusion to blind justice lends a quality of beauty to another frenzied assault on the group.

And as beautiful as the film is, the characters manage to engage us despite their limited dialogue.  We feel for Furiosa as she realizes her dream is futile, and we root for Max to overcome the demons that haunt him.  We experience a sense of loss when Nux dies after we’ve followed his character arc from bad guy to good.  Fury Road doesn’t have the mythic element of the first Road Warrior, but it’s a beautiful pageant of starkly contrasting values.