May 22: The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957 -- David Lean)

★★★★★

May 21: Doctor Zhivago (1965 -- David Lean)

★★

May 8: Kes (1969 -- Ken Loach)

★★★★

May 2: Chico & Rita (2010 -- Tono Errando, Javier Marisca and Fernando Truebal)

★★★★

I like this movie more than a lot of people.  The biggest complaint I’ve heard is that the characters aren’t real and that you can’t feel or identify with them, and I think that's fair.  This is no Pixar production, and though there is a complex story and an arc for the two characters, the titular leads lack passion and verve.  Chico and Rita has a graphic novel quality and, though it lacks that genre's exaggerated angst, graphic novels rarely have engaging characters.

What works great here is atmosphere, and if you like Caribbean Latin, you’ll quickly recognize that quality and respond to it.  The early scenes of characters riding a motorcycle around post-WW II Havana evoke that time and feeling like a documentary.  Commercial signage adorns the broad boulevards of 18th and 19th century architecture.  In an interview, director Fernando Trueba said that he’d found an archive of street photos of the era, and he was right when he said they were of central importance to the film.  With Cuban Latin jazz as background, these scenes of Chico and his pal wheeling around the city with two female American tourists in hand set the context for the birth of the music.

Chico and Rita takes us into more depth about the birth of the music, and I found myself thinking of Buena Vista Social Club many times while watching the film.  There's a range of contexts for the music: local bodegas, ritzy nightclubs, outdoor markets, NY jazz bars, Hollywood movies and Parisian concert spaces.  The film—and, by extension, the music—starts with the blending of American and Cuban cultures in pre-revolutionary Cuba, but the film’s many settings emphasize the many cosmopolitan elements that feed into Latin jazz.  And throughout, whether in a swank or shabby setting, sensuality permeates.  Rita is sexy, and Chico feels it.  As the couple move from Havana to New York, Las Vegas and Paris, Chico and Rita portrays their sensuality as part of the music.  Latin Jazz is infused with passion, and the film nails that aspect of the music especially well.

There are many other joys in this film in addition to its reading of the music.  The animation itself is wonderful to watch.  Chico’s dream about America is a show-stopping piece of bravura work, and settings like the large, colonnade bar/restaurant have a strong feeling of reality.  It’s also fun to see familiar jazz artists like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong animated on the screen.  The attention to color, light, detail and point-of-view throughout make these visuals engaging as the music plays in the background, and the subject matter isn’t what we often see in film, much less in animation, with the visits to boarding houses, jazz cellars, and late night breakfast places.  Chico and Rita is a delight to watch, a graphic novel brought to the screen in motion.

It isn’t important that the characters here don’t touch the heart of the viewer because Chico and Rita isn’t about a pair of lovers.  With its graphic novel tone, it’s about Latin Jazz and the social moment the music grew out of.  And the film is hugely successful in portraying that.

May 1:The Kid with a Bike/Le gamin au vélo (2011 -- Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

★★★★

April 27: The Raid: Redemption/Serbuan maut (2012 -- Gareth Evans)

★
I tried to embrace this film since it seems like so many other people do, but I just don't care for it.  I will give it one thing: A lot of the fight sequences are compelling.  I got very involved in a couple of them and felt myself exhale and relax after a long fight had me tensed up.

But that was as involved as I got with anything in The Raid.  The flat characters and meager plot reminded me mostly of a porn film where you get the littlest string of a story to tie together the action scenes, and for all the vitality in the fights, even they eventually began to have a certain monotony.  I’m not a connoisseur of the martial arts film, but do the bad guys usually wait in line so they can come at the hero to get beat up one-by-one?

I thought of two other film references in trying to figure out what missed the mark for me here.  One was Quentin Tarantino, a director whose work I respect for flourish but that usually fails to move me because of its emphasis on action and citation.  I don’t share the public’s affection for Tarantino either since I find his work more like manipulation of genre elements or reference to film history than looking into the heart, one of the things I most enjoy in cinema. 

I also thought of Oldboy...in fact, of Park Chan Woo’s whole Vengeance Trilogy.  There is certainly heightened, stylized fighting and violence in these films, the scene outside the elevator in Oldboy coming to mind right away.  But Park’s films have characters who suffer, win, lose and grow.  These films are far superior to The Raid.

I was disappointed in this film, but that's likely  because the genre doesn’t speak to me.  I can spend a great deal of time watching story-impoverished fantasy and science fiction as long as there are good visuals or at least a good idea to engage me, but I can’t do the same for martial arts films.  It’s just a question of taste, and I haven't acquired a taste for these.

April 23: Psycho (1960 -- Alfred Hitchcock)