December 6: The Snowtown Murders (2011 -- Justin Kurzel)

★★★

For all its punchiness, The Snowtown Murders feels derivative.  It shares the grittiness of the previous year’s Animal Kingdom, as well as that film’s setting in a poor, urban community in Australia.  There’s also a similar narrative aesthetic at work in the two films: a dramatic storyline punctuated by bursts of intense violence.  And Snowtown even has the washed-out color palette of the earlier film and its active camera.  Unsurprisingly, Adam Arkapaw is the cinematographer for both movies.

Yet Snowtown isn’t the achievement that Animal Kingdom is.  The fact that we’ve seen most of these elements, and in combination, lessens the effect of this 2011 film, though director Justin Kurzel has perhaps tried to distinguish his film from Animal Kingdom by ratcheting up the violence and mixing more sexual scandal.  However, the success of Animal Kingdom relies less on shock than on David Michôd’s giving us full characters in complex relationships and stressful situations, and Kurzel fails in that important regard.  Both films give us big, silent, passive kids, but Michôd lets us understand and sympathize far more with J than we can with Kurzel’s Jaime here.  And going beyond that, we also understand and sympathize far more with all of J’s brothers in Animal Kingdon than we can with Jaime’s.  Animal Kingdom gives us family of people we understand and engage with, but Snowtown only gives us story elements that move us from one shock to another.

Kurzel effectively appropriates and intensifies many of the elements of Animal Kingdom, but despite all the shock, Snowtown feels more like an exercise than a film with a heart.

December 4: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015 -- Francis Lawrence)

★★★

After the monotony and repetition of Part 1, it's good to see The Hunger Games pull up its pants and move ahead more vigorously to its conclusion in the second part of Mockingjay.  Although the plot here concerns the final assault on the capital by the rebels, the film manages to have some Hunger Games combat because President Snow has ordered his gamemakers to set up booby trap pods to slow the rebel advance.  With that, we get to see some of the trappings we’re used from the earlier films: video reviews of combat, heraldic music announcing combatants’ deaths, and even a short appearance by Caesar Flickerman in all his colored plumage.  It’s good to be back in the Panem war games.

Part 2 also gives us some character elements that move the story along.  One of the biggest questions here is whether Peeta is going to attack Katniss or snap out of his programming.  And on Katniss’ side, the question is whether she is going to finally choose Peeta as her mate or Gale.  This duo of suitors offers an increasingly clear contrast in the concluding episode, too.  There’s a sharp delineation here between the more domestic, artistic male and the pragmatic, harsh, warrior, and in keeping with the way the series challenges social roles, it ultimate not only endorses the milder male but punishes the more aggressive.  Julianne Moore delivers us another interesting character element in her President Coin.  The steely leader of the rebels never becomes the caricature that President Snow is, and while there’s plenty to unsettle us about her, Moore keeps her at the edge of plausibly acceptable.  Maybe that’s why Boggs has to give us such an on-the-nose warning about her.

And since this is the last film of the franchise, Lawrence takes some time to look back at the other films and to give us some time with many of the characters we love who are still around.  There’s mention of characters we’ve lost, like Cinna and Rue, and reminiscence of moments like Peeta burning bread to give it to Katniss, Gale hunting in the woods with Katniss, events in the earlier Games, and the reaping that swept up Katniss.  We also get a satisfying moment with old friends like Effie and Buttercup, making their endearing usual contribution, and we have a few longer moments with people like Joanna, Finnick and Haymitch.  The reach of Part 2 back to the series’ lore makes this part of Mockingjay far more engaging than the Part 1.

The story here, too, is more interesting than in the first part of Mockingjay.  In addition to the tension around Peeta, we wonder throughout how the final showdown between Katniss and Snow will be resolved, and the final showdown itself at the film’s climax has a logical if surprising turn.  The film has a good deal of foreshadowing, too, from the massacre of refugees towards the end to the death of Coin.  The story of Part 2 maintains its suspense nicely, even as it slows down for the team combats.

Until the film’s awkward ending.  After the bleak strife that has characterized the entire franchise, Lawrence gives us a jarring conclusion that looks and feels like nothing that has preceded it in the series.  The script gives us no transition to the brutally clichéd happy ending here, though transitions aren’t the strength of this final installment anyway.  For example, the Gale we watch throughout this episode is a significantly harsher pragmatist than we’ve seen in the previous installments.  Still, the gauzy happiness of the last scene of the film has little relation to the rest of the four-film series.

But despite awkwardness like this, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 is genuine entertainment, a final return to what has made this series one to follow for several years

November 30: The Lives of Others/Das Leben der Anderen (2006 – Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)

November 29: The Tourist (2010 – Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)

★★★

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s second film is a fun homage to a type of Hollywood that we no longer see much of.  Elise Clifton-Ward is a chic heroine who inhabits elegant locations in Paris and Venice, and von Donnersmarck’s direction dresses her elegantly, gives her witty dialog, lights her in a striking manner and moves her with a sexy swing.  She draws an innocent math teacher, Frank Tupelo, into the intrigue she inhabits, and an outlandish plot ensues as a relationship between the two develops.  It’s a film full of European exoticism, high style, romance, and maneuvering as the two negotiate the various parties interested in Elise and her criminal boyfriend.

The Tourist is simply fun.  Though it speaks more to cinema than to life, there’s pleasure to be had as it combines classic romance, suspense, humor and style from 60s American film.  While there could be more chemistry between Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, there’s no real reason for plausibility or authenticity here.  This film celebrates the pleasures of a type of movie that’s no longer made and shows us that such films can be fun even though they’re not deep.

November 27: Spectre (2015 – Sam Mendes)

★★★

In Spectre, the Bond franchise has again run out of steam after a strong reboot that began with Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. The element that has made Craig’s Bond so compelling – a humanized 007 who is strong yet vulnerable – has given in to the inertia the always seems to overtake a new James Bond.  Sam Mendes lets Spectre settle into a stereotyped James Bond who lacks character complexity or conflict, and the film is filled with franchise convention rather than reinvigorated elements.  Spectre is a competent movie with some fun parts, but having felt Craig involve us in the risks that Bond takes in other films, we’re let down to be left here with watching what we've already experienced -- stunts, a bad guy, exotic locations, beautiful women....and an Aston Martin.

November 26: La revue des revues (1927 – Joe Francis)

★★

The title pretty much summarizes this peek into part of the nightlife in 1927 Paris.  La revue des revues is a survey of big dance numbers from some of the major night clubs.  It feels a little like That’s Entertainment, but here there are performance numbers rather than clips from MGM movies.

And the dance numbers are often impressive.  Revue offers a series of lavish performance pieces with elaborate costumes and a range of dance from cancan to ballet.  One of the early numbers, Orgies, recalls the silent interest in ancient pageantry, but it also tells viewers right away that this is a pre-Code film.  It has more than a little eroticism and even goes to limits that can make a modern viewer uncomfortable.  Shortly afterwards, we’re watching bare-breasted performers changing costumes.

The outstanding tinting of the film adds to the effect of the dances, highlighting some costumes with one color and other costumes in the same number with another color.  And vaudeville backgrounds some of the performances, too, with acrobats, juggling and Cossack dance.  An unexpected pleasure, seeing Josephine Baker’s limber, rhythmic jiggles in the context of so much stiff choreography, helps explain why she was such a sensation.

Revue also provides context for Busby Berkley's best-know work, which starts some six years later.  The camera here peeps up under lines of synchronized dancers’ legs and stares down from above at patterns of the dancers’ bodies.  Drapery and parasols create flows of motion, and the stage is packed with sequins and performers.  These are all elements that Berkley tightens into some of his best work.

But for all their historical interest and range of subjects, the shows in Revue ultimately make the movie seem long for a modern viewer.  While the dance numbers may range from Babylon to Spain to 17th century France, the limited choreographic vocabulary here eventually begins to seem monotonous.  And technical restrictions of the 1927 camera limit what a director can do, though cutting the dancers’ feet out of the frame would seem a preventable technical error.  The music of the Lange restoration that I watched is another problem with this film.  Taranta-Babu’s score operates in a narrow tonal range, and the performance never seems to dedicate itself totally to the music.  One could imagine that occasions of intense strings, horn or percussion might have livened up the original music.

The frame story of the film doesn’t contribute much interest to Revue either.  It’s a story with typical elements of a silent film, melodrama like Gaby’s spending her last money on a theater ticket and the sentimentality of a contrived happy ending.  But like the music, this story lacks the intensity it needs in order to engage us.  This story is similar to the dialogues in That’s Entertainment  that stitch together the routines but it don't add to the film.

Revue des revues gives us a good, documentary-like glimpse of period musical performances.  It’s not good cinema, but it’s interesting to see this aspect of performance art at the close of the silent era.

November 23: Suffragette (2015 – Sarah Gavron)

★★

Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette is a film that’s dedicated.  It dramatizes the latter stages of the struggle of British women for the right to vote, and it portrays not only events and people but also the context of the suffrage struggle.  In this film’s 1912, most British women seem opposed to the notion of women voting, and patriarchy is brutally conservative when challenged by women seeking equal rights.  And Suffragette shows why women needed the right to vote in that historical moment.

But just as the cinematography here is desaturated and monochromatic, so are the story and characters oddly bland.  Carey Mulligan, as Maud, hits all the right notes in the film’s leading role, just as the rest of the cast does, but Gavron ultimately delivers a film that keeps us from involvement in the characters and their actions.  Even in the climax toward the film’s end, we find ourselves distanced and observing rather than feeling what is happening, perhaps because this climax involves a character we hardly know.

For all Suffragette’s dedication to its cause and effort to evoke the context of the struggle for women’s right to vote, this film succeeds more in educating us about history than in inspiring us to its cause.  As education, it’s remarkably effective, but as cinema, it doesn’t inspire.