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.

July 31: Summer Palace/Yihe yuan (2006 – Ye Lou)

★★★

I thoroughly enjoyed this film despite its flaws.  My experience in watching it was like that of reading a long, difficult but good book: there’s a reward at the end and I’m glad to have read it, though I’m not sure I’d read it again.

I liked many aspects of the film.  Summer Palace mostly follows the life of Yu Hong, a student from the country who goes to Beijing for university study. Her emotional complexity is the center of most of the action of the movie and, unfortunately, one of the aspects of the film that I found tedious as she whips repeatedly from love to anger to frustration to dissatisfaction and back. 

But as she becomes more intense and expressive emotionally, so does the political expression of students in the Chinese capital intensify, and the parts of the film that create this parallel are amazing achievements.  You see the parallel when several scenes of her tempestuous emotional life are followed by scenes of the liberty and excitement of the students’ burgeoning activism.  Ye Lou eventually intercuts between these areas of the story more and more frequently, orchestrating all of this tumult to the penultimate conflict in Tiananmen Square.  And as if that weren’t impressive enough, the Tiananmen conflict itself is a study of effective editing and staging that even Eisenstein would appreciate.  This is one of the great parts of the movie.

The conflict over, Ye Lou segues into yet another powerful set of edited sequences showing the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the surging of freedom in Europe, contrasting that with the Chinese assertion of authority in Hong Kong.  And these scenes parallel the emotion range of the characters in the movie, too: freedom and expressiveness in Berlin with curbed passion in China.  It is these combined elements that I like so much in Summer Palace – the parallels between political freedom and emotional life that are not causal in the least but still echo each other.  The fluidity of the editing throughout this film is marvelous, and the parallel freedoms are engaging.

My major qualm here is the character of Yu Hong and the way Ye Lou presents her.  We don’t see any side of her except her moodiness, anger and pouting, so we don’t know where that comes from or how these characteristics affect her outside her relationship with her boyfriends.  As we see her, in fact, she’s not very likeable.  And Ye Lou bears a lot of that responsibility since he did the screenplay as well as directed the movie.  Worse still, in his direction, we spend long periods as Yu Hong argues, has sex, and pouts, a repetition that slows the film while adding little content.  Perhaps this repetitive emotional tumult has something to do with Chinese culture or film context (melodrama?), but it was the weakest side of the film for me, and I wish we’d lost about a half hour of it.

Summer Palace follows Ye Lou’s other film, Suzhou River, and confirms him as an art movie director.  In this film, he casts a broad net.  There’s the great parallel between political and emotional freedom, the social history of a generation that came of age in Tiananmen and the economic opening that followed, the uniformly great editing and the story of several individuals.  If the film fails on the latter, its success in its other aspects make it a very worthwhile experience.

July 30: Cowboys and Aliens (2011 -- Jon Favreau)

★

This is easily the worst movie I’ve seen all summer.  The film has all the elements of the western – Indians, canyons, the loner, the landowner, the bad guys – and uses them to no effect.   You don’t really like or dislike anyone because they’re all just ciphers, nor are you surprised by their typical western actions.  Speed ahead to the aliens, and there are no surprises there either.  Think of the beasts in War of the Worlds.  This movie is more a show-and-tell than an engaging film.  It’s like everyone in the movie is modeling their characters instead of inhabiting them, but that’s because the characters are shallow clichés rather than characters.

The sci-fi/western mash-up is a fine idea, but Favreau misses here what J.J. Abrams gets right in Super 8.  Like Favreau, Abrams quotes extensively from a list of pre-existing elements (Spielberg’s cinema vocabulary), but Abrams does more than quote: he uses the elements to create a film with freshness, life and engagement.  Fabreau, instead, just marches out a type like the loner and marches him off as if to show him but not to use him to engage the audience.

I like the idea of mixing different period and genres, even mixing alternate versions of historical periods.  That can work in films like the recent Sherlock Holmes, and the upcoming Three Musketeers looks to have potential.  But a film like that has have more than show-and-tell going for it, or it will turn into a list of predictable characters doing predictable things, like Cowboys and Aliens. 

July 23: Super 8 (2011 – J.J. Abrams)

★★★

This movie is just a delight --  my second wonderful summer film bauble after Midnight in Paris.  It’s not aiming to give great insight or to move or to thrill.  Super 8 is just a fun, smart homage to Steven Spielberg’s film-making without cynicism or irony.

And that's its value and attraction.  I’ve tried on my own to sit down and make a list of the components of Spielberg’s film style, and I’ve pretty much always failed to find a uniqueness that would distinguish him from others.  I’ve always sensed it and felt I could recognize a Spielberg film, but I couldn’t tell someone what I was responding to.

 

Abrams, though, nails it.  His lens flairs, the long train wreck, his focus on children and (especially) their relationship to their fathers, the pure kid and the flawed adult, the strong foregrounding, the misunderstood alien, the mysterious government……yeah, ALL these are Spielberg.  This film is the best description of a Spielberg style that I’ve seen, and while I totally enjoyed the film, I also came away with a vision of Spielberg’s work that I hadn’t had before I saw it.

So Super 8 is a pretty good way to spend a couple of summer hours.  It foregrounds Spielberg's style while making it work on the viewer.  What a pleasure.....now back to Close Encounters.

July 22: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt. 2 (2011 -- David Yates)

★★★★

I read that Yates has done the last four Harry Potters, and I think he’s got the knack.  Though Deathly Hallows, Pt. 1 dragged a bit, this one did not disappoint.  At all.  I enjoyed the story a lot and, for once, I felt invested in Harry.  I went into the film with a vague foreboding, not having read the book and not having heard how it ended -- just all the usual chatter about “appropriate” and “mature.”  With that in mind, I wasn’t a half hour into the film before I felt the weight of doom on Harry, and I had an awful dread going all the way through.  It was the first time, in any of the films, that I was pulling for the boy and worried about what would happen to him.

Add that engagement to the impressive cinematography, and you have a worthwhile summer movie, and a kids movie to boot.  From the menace to Harry and his buds to the impressive action sequences like the attack on the shield over Hogwarts and the magicians’ battles, I felt altogether in the hands of a good story teller.  I was engaged; I felt threatened.  And I enjoyed the experience...in IMAX 3D.   I think the magician’s battles even break some new ground in fantasy film since they were so impressive despite the relatively restrained acting called for. 

The film isn’t perfect.  I got some answers to questions from Pt. 1 -- like who helped the kids escape from the department of magic – but I found some of the dramatic reversals to be  distracting.  I’m sure a lot of that had to happen because fans would want to know the ultimate fates of the characters, and this being the last in a series, I think Yates can be forgiven for packing in some info that might not be integral to what happens in this particular movie.  In any case, these digressions hardly take away from the pleasure of watching the culmination of the series and the vague bittersweet of the ending, which reminded me of how I always feel at the end of Peter Pan, with its continuing faith but also its sense of loss.


So I join the crowd in expressing my appreciation for this series-ending film.

July 18: In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger (2004 -- Jessica Yu)

★★★★

A worthwhile movie, both for the style of the documentary as well as for the subject matter.  Henry Darger was a fascinating guy – introvert, anti-social, hurt and inspired in the way a Howard Finster was.  I kept thinking of Finster as I watched this film.  Darger grew up achingly poor in the early 20^th century and experienced institutional life as well as military service in that era.  Probably due to his experience with Catholic charity, his Catholicism was important to him, too.


What makes Darger worth a documentary is the way he transformed his life into original, engaging art.  For his 15,000-page Realms of the Unreal, he created a universe in which the Vivian Girls are trying to free the enslaved children of the Glandeco empire.  The documentary suggests Darger draws in a lot of his personal experience as the Glandeco and Angelinian empires clash; characters have names of people he knew and experiences he had.  And he seems to identify with the girls (who had penises!) as much as with characters like General Darger.

Yu points out correspondences in Darger’s life and art by juxtaposing readings from his autobiography with excerpts from his epic.  This technique works to great effect because neither source is completely reliable, and we’re left to listen to the information and weigh it as we will.  We don’t get Darger presented to us; we understand him, each according to our individual resonances in his words.  This is a very effective way to present the man and his work.  The eyewitnesses who knew Darger contribute nothing determinate to our understanding of him because, to a person, they say they didn’t know him.  His identity emerges from our encounter with his work in this film.

Darger’s paintings seem to glow and shimmer with action with the Vivian Girls sometimes triumphant and sometimes not, often protected by chimeral  fantasy beasts.  Yu has chosen to give a stiff animation to some of Darger’s work, an animation that doesn’t go far beyond what the artist himself put on paper.  It’s an odd choice, not one that was especially necessary from my perspective.  But it doesn’t detract, and this documentary leaves you thinking about its unique subject and the way he created art for days afterwards.