February 25: Cleopatra (1963 – Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Rouben Mamoulian & Darryl F. Zanuck)

★★★★

This pop culture classic has a lot going for it.  Its visuals stun with their opulent grandeur.  The sets are justly praised, from the sheer-draped interiors to the justly famous pageantry of Cleopatra’s entry to Rome on a high sphinx platform surrounded by the exoticism of North Africa.  Costuming, too, creates visual pleasure, especially the series of gowns that Elizabeth Taylor wears, most inspired by Egyptian art.  They vary from pleated wraps to rich dresses in a variety fabrics and embroideries.  Her costuming in every sequence of the film is something interesting to look at.  Taylor’s makeup and hair styling also keep her as a focus for the eye, from her outlandish Egyptian eye style that can appear as blue eye-shadow or even sequins to her 60s-inflected piles of black hair.  Cleopatra always gives us something on screen worth looking at, generally around the character of the queen.

For all its problems, the script here also gives us points of narrative interest.  The film’s five-and-a-half hour run time gives us two tragedies of historic importance, the assassination of Julius Caesar and the deaths of Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, as well as two different love stories in their entirety.  And though the script’s larger structure has serious flaws, each individual scene is a jewel of language with the wit and skill that we expect from dialogue crafted largely by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.  The writer's precision of the word choice encourages us to pay close attention to shifts in mood and character relationships throughout each scene.

But it’s also true that the script is the biggest problem in Cleopatra.  After colossal delays and budget overruns, Mankiewicz ended up writing as he was directing, and that’s obvious in the uneven, first-draft feel of the script.  The two halves of the film seem like separate movies, the first half a witty romance between an established older man and a vivacious younger woman and the second half a Shakespearean tragedy of domed love.  There’s little flow of tone between the two parts, and the only tenuous plot connection is Antony’s brief encounters with Cleopatra toward the end of the Part I.  In fact, the script misses many opportunities to develop Antony in its first half when such detail would have made the second part much deeper.

The haste of writing might also explain the muddled motivations of the central character, Cleopatra.  In the first half of the film, it seems she’s mostly in love with Julius Caesar, though the occasional line makes us wonder if power isn’t a big motivation, too.  This confusion comes to the fore in the second half, when Cleopatra’s motivation varies from scene to scene.  At one point, she’s pushing Antony to ever-greater achievement and using him for her own purposes, but at the next point, she’s a lover concerned for his happiness and well-being and distraught over him to the point to suicide.  In flipping Cleopatra’s motivation haphazardly between love and power, Mankiewicz’s script gives us a hero with little cohesion at the center of the film.

Mankiewicz doesn’t excel at directing action, either.  He produces grand-scale scenes well, like the one at the beginning of the film that shows the aftermath of a battle, but his direction of action is seems desultory.  Battle and fight scenes have an almost perfunctory quality to them, and Battle of Actium, the major naval battle that resulted in Antony and Cleopatra’s final military defeat, looks painfully like models with an occasional roman candle arcing over the scene.

So Cleopatra is not without its flaws.  Effective in individual scenes, its script lacks the larger structure that would have made this film more coherent and moving, and Mankiewicz misses his opportunity for great epic action.  Still, this sprawling movie has great visuals that hold our attention and dialogue that certainly entertains.  It’s worth spending time with for just those.

February 23: Alexander (2004 – Oliver Stone)

★★★

Regardless of the edition (these comments are based on the “Ultimate Cut”), Alexander is a flawed project.  It sprawls across geography, time, and a huge cast, spending too little time with elements to let us get to know them.  A map in the scene with Aristotle tries to give us our geographic exposition, but we get that map early and in the context of discussion of values, so it’s easy to overlook it until we realize later that we need to know where places like Bactria are.  Stone could also have handled the flashbacks better.  While it’s not hard to follow them given the titles, when Alexander settles down into cutting between the hero’s childhood and his Eastern campaign, a predictability develops that becomes monotonous, especially when the links between the adult Alexander and the child don’t always seem worth the time we spend in the past.  We don’t need this many scenes of Philip’s drinking and Olympias’ snakes, for example, for us to recognize that his father was abusive and his mother strange and overprotective.

The large cast is a problem, too.  Alexander wants to identify the hero’s friends as individuals, especially the four that would later be so important to history, but it’s hard to recognize them here since they dress alike and are often in a group together.  On the other hand, the film occasionally slows down to have us focus on individuals like the Persian general or Alexander’s wife, but then those characters don’t have much to do later in the film.  And related to that problem with characters, Alexander sometimes slows down to spend time on a scene that then contributes little to the overall arc of the movie.  For example, we watch an extended scene of Darius' wife coming before Alexander, but she completely vanishes from the film afterwards.

But even with these problems, Alexander is a fun watch.  Most interesting, Stone gives us a hero here that the director himself can admire.  A dynamic, rebellious leader, Stone’s Alexander indulges his curiosity and restlessness, and he succeeds grandly in doing so.  When Alexander has conquered most of the known world, rather than doing as his generals want and returning home rich and powerful, he wants to continue into the unknown with the restiveness that Stone admires in much of his work.  Stone also gives us Alexander’s continual questioning in scenes like that when he’s trying to figure out if the monkeys in Northern India are human or not.  The hero also defies social conventions.  Alexander’s sexual interests, which range from women to feminine men to masculine men, are an obvious example, but as a leader, he also shows little interest in beating down opponents he’s defeated in battle, rather preferring to respect them and take them into his empire. And he isn’t one to accept conventional wisdom.  We see that, even as a youth, Alexander was ready to disagree with Aristotle.  And the King is a great democrat, too, seeing the human-ness in everyone.  He not only marries a non-Greek, but he also wants to bring education and development to the provinces he subdues.  His vision is to lift all humanity by incorporating the best of all the peoples he encounters, a liberal ideal that Stone endorses in several films.

Alexander also gives us a lot to look at on the screen.  In Stone’s battle sequences, we always know where everyone is in relation to each other, and the director uses editing to great effect.  His fast cuts, changing perspectives, jump cuts, and blurring of movement involve us by creating a sense of being on the field, and a few startling images from a battle -- like the trunk of an elephant being severed -- keep us watching for the next thing that will surprise us.  Stone can use color to great effect in the battles, particularly the last battle that shifts from a somewhat normal tonal range to a bright red one.  And in addition to the battles, there’s much else to engage us as viewers.  There is spectacle, rich décor and vast landscape in Alexander.  Sequences like the celebration on the Eastern frontier bring imaginative ceremony and trappings to the screen.  It’s a film that’s easy to watch.

It’s a pity that there are so many insurmountable problems with Alexander, but there’s so much to cinematic pleasure that it’s still worth the time a viewer will spend enjoying it.

February 19: La La Land (2016 – Damien Chazelle)

★★★★★

February 18: Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts (2017 -- Various)

There are several interesting projects in this year's collection of Oscar-nominated short animated films.  Of the eight shorts in this collection, it's a pity that some of these have to be out of competition because of the limited number of nominations, but there is some interesting creativity at work here.

★★ Borrowed Time  (Lou Hamou-Lhadj & Andrew Coats)
Borrowed Time has something of an underground comic vibe with the exaggerated psychological state and action of its hero.  Rather than the contemporary setting we usually see for these depictions, Hamou-Lhadj and Coats have chosen to use a Western, and their design here is admirable if not outstanding.  However, Borrowed Time doesn’t do much new with its angst, and it feels longer than its 7 minutes.

★★★★ Pearl (Patrick Osborne)
Patrick Osborne’s short is one of the more compelling of this year’s collection.  It’s a slightly-predictable story of a father and his daughter as she grows up, a refreshing take on a story that is often told of a father and son or mother and daughter.  Osborne gives us some nice period touches here, the outcome of the film is in doubt for much of its run, and the animation is interesting to look at.  In fact, it’s worth catching the VR version of this short.  But the strength of Pearl is its heart more than its technical innovation.

★★ Piper (Alan Barillaro)
This film points to where Pixar is going – increasingly wonderful technique accompanied by a loss of insight and imagination.  An incredibly cute baby sandpiper must learn how to forage and win the approval of his mother and the other sandpipers.  All the marvelous water animation in the world can’t make such a trite project interesting.

★★★★★ Blind Vaysha (Theodore Ushev)

Animated in a style that looks like wood-block etching, Blind Vaysha is a philosophical folktale.  With its voiceover narration, the short introduces us to Vaysha, who sees the future with one eye and the past with the other.  Ushev’s dramatic animation style shows how neither view is satisfying, and as Vaysha contemplates blinding one eye so she doesn’t have both views, we’re left like her, not sure if we want to live looking at the past or the future.

★★★★ Pear Cider and Cigarettes (Robert Valley)

Robert Valley’s graphic novel style informs this short.  With visual touches of noir, the film opens at the end of its story, and the narrator takes us back to tell us the story of a kid he admired in high school but who had a checkered life afterwards.  At 35 minutes, the film is too long and too flat in tone, but the compelling nature of the visuals keep us watching.

★ Asteria (Alexandre Arpentinier, Mathieu Blanchys, Lola Grand, Tristan Lamarca, Thomas Lemaille, & Jean-Charles Lusseau)

It’s not clear why the collection includes this dumb little short that features a bullying American astronaut shooting multi-eyed aliens to lay claim to a new planet.  It may be trying for whimsy, but it’s as predictable as it is stupid.

★★★★★ The Head Vanishes (Frank Dion)

This effective, touching short is a graphic portrayal of how an elderly woman with dementia experiences her trip to the seashore.  Sometimes Jacqueline is confused, and sometimes she wanders off on flights of fancy about things like fish, which she loves eating on these trips.  There’s a heavy -handed moment when she wonders who the woman is that calls her “mother,” but the rest of the film is pure fascination as we try to understand what’s actually going on by seeing what Jacqueline experiences.  The ending is deeply touching.  It’s disappointing that the Academy didn’t choose to give this excellent project a nomination.

★★★★ Once Upon a Line (Alicja Jasina)

The charm of this short lies in the cleverness of its animation.  A line runs across the screen forming shapes describing the daily life of a man.  His black-and-white life is fine until he encounters a red-haired woman who brings that color and a lot more shapes into his line.  Jasina’s simple, graphic telling is a smart joy.

February 17: Oscar Nominated Live-Action Shorts (2017 -- Various)

This year's films nominated for the live-action Academy Award come from many countries and have a wide range of quality.

★★★★★ Sing (Kristof Deák & Anna Udvardy) -- Hungary
 There’s much to recommend this small Hungarian movie about an elementary school choir.  The film has several surprises, from its shift in focus from one main character to another as the movie progresses to its surprising conclusion.  Along the way, Deák and Udvardy take us into the lives of two young girls and flesh out their friendship.  The directors accomplish all this with outstanding cinematography and editing.  The scenes in the children’s playground particularly stand out in this regard as they’re cut to the rhythms of children’s play songs.  In addition to all this achievement, Sing is clearly pointing to moral about the importance of group solidarity when confronting unjust authority.  It's is a real gem of a short film and shows what remarkable results can be achieved in this format.

★ Silent Nights (Aske Bang & Kim Magnusson) -- Denmark
Good intentions aside, Silent Nights is not a very successful short film.  Bang and Magnusson can’t shoehorn their sprawling script into this format, so while they want to explore the relationship of a woman and her mother, the difficulties of being an immigrant in Denmark and the arc of a love relationship, they produce a choppy, unbelievable film that jumps from one melodramatic scene to the next with serious continuity issues.  Addressing the plight of refugee immigrants is a worthy goal, but Silent Nights falls short of its ambitions.

★★★★★ Timecode 
(Juanjo Giménez) -- Spain
There’s a contrivance at the center of this film that approaches being overly clever, but the whimsy and joy here make you forget that.  Juanjo Giménez’s extremely short, low-budget project takes us into as dehumanizing an environment as can be imagined and shows us how art can take root and redeem it and those who work in it.   And all the while, this short plays with the medium of film and video.  Giménez manages an especially effective story shift late in Timecode, and the ending is priceless.  Although a very short movie, this is a film you’ll think about afterwards, and a warm smile will come to your face because of the humanity it shows us.

★★★★ 
Enemies Within (Sélim Azzazi) -- France
Enemies Within is another European short that deals with immigration.  Azzazi takes us into a Kafkaesque world where a menacing government official bullies a man of Algerian extraction while creating terrorist conspiracies by innuendo.  We see so much is lost in this film, not the least of which is the self-respect of the interviewee.   It’s a talkie movie, perhaps based on a one-act play, but the acting is terrific and Azzazi uses cinematography and editing to intensify the psychological abuse we’re watching.  It’s a timely warning about where the excesses of national security can take us.

★★★ La Femme et le TGV (Timo von Gunten & Giacun Caduff) -- Switzerland
Europeans excel at films that make you feel good, at films that are trite and clichéd but don’t seem like it.  La Femme et le TGV is exactly this type of movie, only in the short genre.  Jane Birkin, who is superb here, is a lonely, isolated older woman who gradually comes out of her loneliness through the film.  In showing us this process, Von Gunten and Caduff do an expert cinematic job with a tight script and visuals that engage us throughout.  You know how this film is going to end shortly after it starts, but it’s a pleasure getting there.

February 15: John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017 – Chad Stahelski)

★★★

Chapter 2 of John Wick spins in place rather than move the saga forward.  But if you liked the first one, you’ll like this one.

It has the same cool, choreographed, over-the-top violence that the first one had, and director Chad Stahelski again throws everything at the screen to keep us looking.  We get some pretty images of Italy, but it’s the sequence at a huge dance party on the edge of catacombs that’s the money moment as John fights not only through the strobes of the party but also the spotlit catacombs themselves.  The sequence echoes that at the Red Circle nightclub in the first John Wick, but the editing and action isn’t quite as crisp here.  The hall of mirrors sequence also keeps us attentive as John battles through a reflective environment that is someplace between Bruce Lee and the Lady from Shanghai.  In addition to the stylized gun-fu, some visuals are just arresting in themselves.  The office that processes bounty contracts is sepia-toned and populated by women dressed in pencil skirts and sleeveless blouses.  They're wearing their hair in a bun, and they’re tattooed. Their office is old-style operator switchboards, but vacuum tubes get paper notes from one office to the next while old computer displays distribute the messages widely.  It’s a fascinating, steampunk set.  Stahelski also keeps us attentive because we never sure who will be the next person to attack John Wick.  In keeping with the film’s exaggeration aesthetic, it begins to seem that everyone in NYC is a bounty hunter.

But there are differences here that make this John Wick slightly less compelling that the first.  While the fan service here is generally integrated well into film, writer Derek Kolstad opts for lots more exposition in the first part of this film than he did in the last.  Not only does this leave Keanu Reeves to try to hit a sweet spot of acting that explains information but maintains his artificial reticence, but this choice also diminishes the stylization that made the first outing such unique fun.  There was nothing of reality in John’s character in the first installment, but the script moves Reeves close to that at places here.  The cinematography, too, is weaker here than before.  Dan Laustsen’s  lighting is more garish and edgy than Jonathan Sela’s rich screen was, and the camera here is less fluid than in the first.

For all this, John Wick: Chapter 2 has some outrageously fun sequences, and this sequel largely avoids the sophomore slump.  Here’s hoping that the hinted-at third installment doesn’t see the series falter and ossify into a formula.

February 14: John Wick (2014 – Chad Stahelski [& David Leitch])

★★★

John Wick starts like Sunset Boulevard – a beat-up John tumbles out of a car and looks at cellphone image of his wife.  Flashback, we’re at his house. Flashback further, he’s in a hospital with her ill.  Flashback further, she admires an anniversary bracelet.  Within seconds, the film has taken us into four different times and told us where it’s going.  This fast information dump pulls us into the film and has us quickly engaged in puzzling out the links between all these facts.   The rapid opening also points to the film’s major goal, keeping the audience engaged.

It’s a smart move to use a narrative device in the opening because the film is all engagement through visuals and action from this point forward.  John Woo is much in the background, from direct references like a canted, low-angle shot looking up the barrel of Wick’s pistol to the exaggerated violence, which is excessive, stylized and choreographed until it's no longer violence but elegant performance.  The cinematography keeps our eyes busy, too.  The camera glides through long action sequences that can occur in neo-noir exteriors or in interiors filled with reflecting or opaque surfaces that distort what we see.  As dies the heavily-tinted lighting.  In one tour de force segment, Wick goes to a dance club to kill Iosef Tarasov, and the body count mounts as Wick and his enemies pirouette though the fight, shooting and hitting each other to the rhythm of the music.  It’s a bravura moment of film-making.

John Wick keeps us off-balance in several ways, too, which also holds our attention.  The violence here can be sudden and intense, like the fight that includes a puppy being killed, and we stay riven lest we miss something that might come at us suddenly.  There’s harsh, bloody one-one-violence, sudden fights, and a bit of suspense as we try to figure out Marcus’ role.  Stahelski varies the pace of the film, too, which breaks us out of the complacency of our expectations and makes us watch what’s going on.  After the several long action sequences that precede it, we expect Wick’s final attack on Iosef’s safe house to follow the same pattern.  Instead, Stahelski edits the entire sequence into a matter of seconds, and we see Wick’s quick revenge from long distance.

As is typical of this type of film, the hyper-stylization and focus on surface doesn’t allow for heart. Any psychology here is decoration, and John Wick presents its characters as figures for the action. The performances in the film create ironic distance with actors delivering their stilted lines in a deadpan manner.  In a conversation at the funeral for Wick’s wife, for example, the newly-widowed husband talks briefly with his friend Marcus in several short lines delivered in a monotone.  Even the humor, like Avi’s constantly asking his clients to speak English, is mostly ironic and distances the viewer.

John Wick is indeed all flash and no soul, but its flash is terrifically engaging.  This is a fun film to spend time with and marvel at the art and creativity behind its dazzling surface.