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.

November 5: Steve Jobs (2015 – Danny Boyle)

★★★★

November 3: A Lady of Chance (1928 – Robert Z. Leonard)

★★★

This is a charming movie that moves along on the clichéd contrast between the hardened con artists of the city and the trusting, family-oriented folk of the countryside.  The open face of the wholesome-looking John Mack Brown contributes a lot to the sentimentality that engages us in  A Lady of Chance, but it’s Norma Shearer that we most enjoy watching.  Her face expresses emotion with an uncanny precision throughout, whether sizing up a rival or leading on a mark, but it’s her moments of conflicting emotion that showcase her skill.  After Steve proposes, Dolly is left to pantomime marriage alone  in her room, and Shearer’s quicksilver face runs back and forth on a spectrum between cold happiness at landing a quarry and the joy of being sincerely loved.  We see this same flicker of emotions in a scene outside the farmhouse later in the film.  These are moments of bravura silent acting.

A Lady of Chance has other allures.  In addition to the film’s harsh set of values, its pre-code aesthetic lets a few racy moments go by, like when Steve touches Dolly’s proffered upper thigh or when he tries to remove her stocking.  But it’s the acting that engages us here and has us pulling for the couple in the melodramatic ending.  It’s a fun movie.

October 27: Crimson Peak (2015 – Guillermo del Toro)

★★★★

Viewers have to grant Crimson Peak its givens.  The film’s an anachronistic project with its heart in late 19th century gothic romance.  It’s not ironic about the genre conventions, and it doesn’t try to overly update them.  Instead, it respects the form and integrates del Toro’s unique visual talents into a sumptuous cinematic use of the style.  Vieweres have to be willing to buy into the genre and into del Toro’s vision, but Crimson Peak is a great experience for those who can.

Allerdale Hall, aka Crimson Peak, is the most obvious gothic element here.  It’s a grand, decaying mansion full of gothic arches, stairways and halls.  The ceiling has given way in the main room, so we see the rich interiors with rain or snow filtering into the frame.  Black, wispy ghosts lurch into the frame on occasion, and every available space on the screen seems to be filled with splendid, baroque fabric or Victorian exotica.  A unique del Toro contribution here is the red ooze that leeches from the house: it flows down walls and runs through pipes.  When characters walk through snow, their footprints turn red behind them the way snow turns to clear slush behind the rest of us.  The film explains that this color comes from the unique red clay that underlies the mansion.

The characters likewise come from the gothic world.  There’s a blonde, romantic heroine who wants to write about ghosts, and a disturbing brother and sister who have an unhealthy though unclear relationship.  A protective father and a rescuer boyfriend round out the cast of characters.  And the actions of these characters are appropriately melodramatic.  The father is killed when he discovers important information about the Sharpe siblings, though his gory death is a special del Toro touch.  Thomas Sharpe begins his affair with Edith to get her money, though he sincerely falls in love with her and must sacrifice himself to save her.  And the final conflict between Edith and Lucille Sharpe is high drama as Lucille runs down stairs with her dress billowing behind; here again, there are evident del Toro contributions to the gothic showdown.

As much as del Toro brings his own sensibility to the gothic in Crimson Peak, this film is still a literary-like delight.  And it’s as lean and cohesive as any 19th century novel, and a good deal moreso than many films.  Crimson Peak invites its viewers to enjoy the gothic and del Toro and to sit back and savor very rich visuals.

October 21: Bridge of Spies (2015 – Steven Spielberg)

★★★

The one pleasure that carries all the way through Bridge of Spies is its lush appropriation of espionage noir cinematography. Full foregrounds catch the eye to lead it deep into the back of the frame, and low camera angles pair with low key lighting to suggest to us what noir might have looked like in muted color.  Even sets like that of the bridge, with its oddly unnatural light and its simulated snow, have the artificial quality that noir sets embraced.  And weaving through this beauty is Spielberg’s elegant, modern camera.  And jump cuts keep us attentive to what’s on the screen by popping us between storylines and characters.  Bridge of Spies is a beautiful, engaging film to watch.

And it starts out with an equally strong narrative.  In the movie’s 1957 America, the US distinguishes itself from the Soviet Union by emphasizing the rights of individuals as guaranteed in the constitution.  However, the first half of Bridge of Spies shows patriots who want to fight the Soviets by, ironically, compromising the very constitutional rights they maintain as essential to America.  Through the court procedural that is the first half of the film, the all-American Tom Hanks, as James Donovan, pursues justice for an accused Soviet spy, Rudolf Abel, through the court system.  But Donovan’s pursuit comes in opposition to sympathetic characters, like the Judge and even Donovan’s own family, who are ironically ready to throw away Abel’s legal rights in order to oppose the Soviets.   The first half of Bridge of Spies dramatizes this complex irony – trampling on an individual’s legal rights in order to protect those very same rights -- in a deft, affective way that certainly glances at some of the personal privacy issues America is facing today.  Bridge of Spies is not the first time a Spielberg film has used to past to comment on the present – Munich looks at how an obsession with fighting terrorism can undermine the very values that the fight means to protect.  The first half of Bridge of Spies works especially well because of the way it looks as well as the way it handles this complex issue.

If the film had developed its interest in this question, it could have been a unique, important movie.  Unfortunately, it drops this subject in the middle and moves into a reboot of a Cold War thriller with a deprived Soviet bloc, oppressive Communist leaders, an oppressed Eastern population, and spies on both sides that don’t inspire trust.  There’s even a painfully obvious parallel between a grey scene of East Germans being machine-gunned as they try to scale the Berlin wall and a color scene of kids playing in New York City scaling a tall fence.  Such an obvious pairing of scenes might well be a nod to the style of the period; there are similar paired scenes when people on the NYC subway frown at Donovan when he defends Abel but later smile when he negotiates a hostage release.  But echoes of a Cold War style or not, these elements move Bridge of Spies away from the interesting ideas of the first half into one where the West is good, the East is bad, and the humanity individuals can span this gap.  The cliché at the heart of the second half of this film deflates the tension and, concurrently, our interest flags.

Bridge of Spies is half a great movie, but its visual beauty can help us overlook some of the comfortable triteness of its second half.