August 16: Sunset Song (2015 -- Terence Davies)

★★★★★

In another summer of superheroes, Sunset Song reminds us of other things that cinema can do.  Terence Davies brings as much big and showy to the screen as Zack Snyder, but he uses it to entirely different effect.  Sunset Song is a rich two hours that moves at the easy pace of reading with all the complexity that a novel can maintain.

Cinematic beauty fills the screen.  The actors are as handsome as fashion models and quaffed to perfection.  When we see Ewan Tavendale framed in a doorway with beads of mist condensing on his hair, we could be looking at an image from Vanity Fair.  Rich, wide landscapes punctuate the outdoors scenes, and interior shots are sparsely furnished and naturally lit, often as though from a soft single source.  And Davies softens the light with gauzy filters and uses backlighting that blends his subdued color palette even further.

Sunset Song’s camera also creates onscreen beauty.  In one shot, the camera starts with a closeup on the back of Chris Guthrie’s head as she washes her face from the edge of a small pond dock.  With the pond symmetrically laid out in the frame’s background, there’s a real beauty in this image.  But the camera begins to draw back to include more of the background and creates a different beauty as the composition changes before our eyes.  Chris becomes smaller and smaller, and the shot becomes one of a landscape.  Not only does the camera movement emphasize the theme of Chris’ oneness with the land, but there is a cinematic pleasure in watching such beauty unfold on the screen.   Davies’ camera moves in such purposeful ways throughout the film.  And in addition to camera movement, the angle of shots gives us imagery to appreciate.  One low shot fills the screen with tilled earth as a horse-drawn plow approaches from the top of the frame, and one high angle shot turns the locals into small figures on a large landscape.  Davies’ camera fully exploits the strength of the visual in cinema.

Beyond their beauty, such images contribute to the complexity of theme and character that informs Sunset Song.  Through the story of Chris Guthrie, the movie shows us the challenges facing a woman at the turn of the century.  Chris is bullied by her father and forced to do the demanding work of the farm, yet she lacks the opportunity her brother has of leaving the farm to try to live better elsewhere.  Her mother warns her of the limited choices she can expect as a woman before killing herself to avoid more bullying by her husband, and Chris raises eyebrows in her village by deciding to run the farm she inherits rather than marry.  The scenes of Chris in the landscape develop a second theme of the film – the way a connection to the land helps her stay strong in the face of all the trials she faces.  She emerges from the earth early in an early shot in the film and becomes one with it as Davies’ camera moves around her outdoors.  And the voiceover refers to her connection to the land many times, a connection that gives her not only strength but also transcendence, as though the land will give her knowledge and immortality rather than social institutions like government or religion.  The link between the visuals and the narration makes this theme especially strong.

And Sunset Song takes the time to create complex characters with subtlety.  Chris’ father is a terrible man, yet the movie gives us moments of sympathy for him as when we see him worry about providing for the family or when he is dying.  Chris’s brother loves his sister deeply yet leaves her to pursue his own goals.  And her eventual husband, Ewan Tavendale, starts as a loving husband and father but returns from WW I as an abusive spouse; his arc ends in a deeply poignant inversion when Ewan is executed by the state for desertion, an act that simultaneously affirms Chris’s reliance on the land as foundation of life and her skepticism of national institutions.  The film ends with a shot that pans the detritus of a grey battlefield from above in the same way we’ve previously seen the film pan a field of russet hay from above.  The contrast of the shots both expresses the film’s theme of the importance of an attachment to the land and shows us what has happened to Ewan as government has reached all to way to members of small farming communities.

The tight control and complexity of Sunset Song make watching this film a deeply pleasurable aesthetic experience.  It weaves its cinematic beauty and its themes into a unified whole in a way that other films of our action hero summer don’t.  Or, for that matter, than most films can.

August 10: Ex Machina (2015 -- Alex Garland)

★★★★

Very conversant with sci-fi, Alex Garland picks up some of its familiar memes here, modifies them and then blends them into a thought-provoking film.

Ava, for example, would fit into Blade Runner as yet another replicant who has developed consciousness.  In Ex Machina, she learns and she schemes in order to survive, though by the end of the film she has neither the aesthetic sensibility of a Roy nor the emotional range of a Rachel.  In Garland’s conception, Ava hasn’t arrived at human-like consciousness yet; instead, she’s an AI creation and intelligent thinker but functions mostly on the level of her survival instinct.  Garland’s shift in the conception of the android sets up the brutal climax of the film, though the very end suggests the possible future growth of a more human identity.

In addition to Blade Runner, Ex Machina draws from a line of movies that stretches from Island of Lost Souls through blockbusters like Jurassic Park.  As early as the Erle Kenton 1932 classic, a naïve outsider finds himself in an isolated environment with a threatening scientist as host.  Dr. Moreau and Nathan both manipulate this outsider in order to test their respective female creations, and the two scientists share the same ambition of rivaling god in their creations, an ambition they also share with relatives like Jurassic Park’s CEO and researcher, Dr. Hammond.  In terms of its general pattern, Ex Machina is very much a classic Hollywood horror story.

Garland’s achievement here is in taking this familiar story and these familiar characters and making something uniquely contemporary of them.  Nathan is a narcissistic, overbearing technology magnate.  He’s young but fabulously rich, and he’s doughy but pounds a punching bag for strength.  He eats healthy food and drinks choice alcohol amid his minimalist decor.  Verbally, he’s abrasive, pushy and arrogant, warping one of Caleb’s comments into a reference to his own godliness.  Sociopathic as he is, Nathan is only sympathetic when it enables him to manipulate Caleb.

Ex Machina provides this sociopath with contemporary tools for creating his android, and the film uses these elements to look at big ontological questions.  After a time at Nathan’s, Caleb begins to suspect that the scientist has created Ava using his own web searches and internet preferences, but Caleb also realizes that he’s responding to Ava even though he recognizes this artificiality and manipulation.  Though this dynamic, Ex Machina asks if identity itself is only a pattern of behavior and thus programmable and capable of manipulation.  This idea finds visual expression in the opening scene of the film when digital imagery is projected onto Caleb’s face, imagery that the film repeats when Caleb realizes that even Kyoko is an android.  As Caleb begins to lose his sense of what constitutes human identity, he eventually resorts to viciously cutting his own arm to reveal the blood and tissue inside it, an evident contrast to the clear plastic arms of Ava.  But after establishing his own human-ness in this way, Caleb nevertheless decides to help rescue Ava from her upcoming decommissioning.  Even though Caleb recognizes how Nathan has manipulated his own responses – and we later find out that Ava is doing the same -- Caleb decides to respond to the collection of his preferences that Ava is.  Though Caleb, Ex Machina proposes a vision of human identity as a pattern of behaviors and even implies that the major difference between the android and the human is flesh vs. synthetics.

In the film’s concluding scenes, we find that Ava has begun developing a more human identity but she has not yet completed the process.  Ava has enough awareness to want to survive, and we discover that she has been using Caleb’s inclinations in order to manipulate him into helping her escape.  But she has not developed sensibilities like altruism, and she leaves him to die in a concrete room after she has killed Nathan.  Before she leaves the house, she puts synthetic skin on her arms, an echo of Caleb’s earlier slashing, as a way to disguise her difference from the humanity she is about to join.  The very ending of the film suggests that Ava is prepared to continue the growth of her identity.  She decides to visit a complicated intersection she has earlier talked about with Caleb because she wants to experience the cacophony of sensory stimulation that humans deal with routinely.  The film, however, leaves her moral development unexplored.

Garland uses old sci-fi memes in Ex Machina, but he updates them to consider some of the same questions of being that that a lot of sci-fi addresses.  What is identity?  What is human?  Ex Machina is an incisive look at these questions, and it’s also a compelling story with interesting characters and engaging visuals.  It’s a worthy addition to the subgenre of conceptual science fiction.

August 8: What We Do in the Shadows (2014 -- Jemaine Clement & Taika Waititi)

★★★★

This very funny mockumentary by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi gets its humor from satire at several levels.  One of the funniest is the way What We Do in the Shadows consistently pokes fun at familiar formal aspects of Direct Cinema documentary style.  A movie about vampire housemates in New Zealand, the film opens with Viago directly addressing the camera as he guides us around the rooms of house.  It’s almost like Little Edie taking us around Grey Gardens.  As the film progresses from this opening, we make eye contact with the subjects throughout.  And like the Maysles, Clement and Waititi foreground the filmmaking process.  At one point, Viago creates a loud mic noise as he tucks in a handkerchief, and at a later emotional moment, Vladislav lunges at the camera to cover the lens.  But not content to merely use these conventions in a satirical setting, Shadows goes on to satirize the very presence of the camera and crew.  The camera crew becomes the focus of a confrontation when they follow the vampires to the Unholy Masquerade Ball, and they’re even attacked by werewolves later in the film, an act that truly shows the involvement of the documentarians with their subject.   The writing and direction throughout Shadows, in its mockery of Direct Cinema conventions, satirizes how seriously the style takes itself.

The directors also get a lot of humor from the traditional comic trope of using an outsider viewpoint of the everyday.  The vampires here have to deal with a roommate who hasn’t done dishes…in five years…and the film cuts to a kitchen shot with stacks of blood-stained china.  When roommate tempers flare, these housemates shape shift and fly into the air.  They also have problems in their love lives, though these problems are unique: the object of Viago’s affection is a very old woman now because his servant sent his coffin to the wrong international destination, and Vladislav has lost some of his power because he’s still unsettled by his conflict with The Beast, who we later learn is a previous girlfriend.  We also watch them learn to use the internet, text, navigate the rivalries that arise in their friendships, and find ways to dig at each other.  Nick, for example, makes Jackie into a vampire to get at Deacon by taking away his familiar.

Clement and Waititi also get humor from vampire lore.  The silver locket his love has unwittingly chosen for him burns Viago when he puts it on, but he does so anyway as a testimony to their love.  When Peyter is exposed to sunlight and burns, there are several gags about a barbeque smell.  One witty sequence describes the problems of dressing for going out when you don’t have a reflection, and once you’re out, you can’t go into a club unless you’re invited in.  And there are more than a few references to Nosferatu.

What We Do in the Shadows is a very funny movie.  The humor doesn’t always aspire to grand statements or observation, but its incisive wit is a delight.  And the sponsorship of The New Zealand Documentary Board suggests there is even a worthwhile genre critique at the base of the film.

July 30: Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016 -- Mandie Fletcher)

★

What a disappointment.  There’s a lot of attention to set design and costume here, but this AbFab bumps from one hammy cliché to the next, sprinkling in way too many jokes about ageing.  A few scenes capture the pop of the old TV series, like the snappiness of most of the airplane scene, but Fletcher’s tongue is way too far in her cheek here and even her satire lacks pop.  The film makes you want to go back to review the TV series.  What’s different this time?  Have the times changed, or has Fletcher shifted the TV series’ tone?  Whatever is out of sync, Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie just isn’t fun.

July 24: Syncopation (1942 -- William Dieterle)

★★★

Syncopation works along two lines.  On the one hand, there’s the love story between Kit and Johnny, which is a mess as it surges from first one thing then another.  Starting with the childhood friendship between Kit and Reggie, we suddenly realize that Reggie is gone from the story and find Kit married to Paul.  Soon after that, she’s getting along famously with Johnny.  While the story is bumping along these changes, there's also a shift in focus.  Kit emerges early on as the musical center of the film, climaxing with the courtroom scene, but she is then relegated to a role as cheerleader for Johnny for the rest of the movie.  And among all these surges and shifts, odd moments interrupt the story.  Ella, for example, breaks into song in court, Kit and Johnny fall in love in seconds while reading Walt Whitman, and Ella dies melodramatically as her son Reggie arrives in Chicago on a parade float.  None of these events is central to the story.   And continuity elements plague the narrative line, too.   At the end of the film, Kit’s father suddenly turns up in the audience in New York to celebrate Johnny’s successful appearance at a club there, though we haven’t seen or heard from him for a long time in the film.  The Kit/Johnny story line is a turbulent muddle.

But the other main thrust of the film, the story of jazz, works much better.  From the earliest scenes in Africa, Dieterle shows us feet moving in a syncopated rhythm, the film’s idée fixe definition of jazz.  After Africa, we see the same shot of feet moving to this rhythm in a New Orleans church, then in the Chicago courtroom, and finally in the film’s concluding club scene.  The jazz through-line also interprets the meaning of the genre.  The suffering of the enslaved incubates the music, and when Reggie tries to blow the star down for the recently-widowed Kit, we see the significance of jazz has expanded to express individual suffering.  As the music morphs into the Swing 40s, it’s a music that simply expresses something real and primal.  Syncopation shows us that jazz always retains a connection to the essential heart.  The movie makes an additional point as we watch Reggie’s failure to master Bach and Johnny’s throwing off the confines of orchestral jazz -- jazz is an individual expression that occurs at an inspired moment, an analog to the restless American poetry of Walt Whitman, and not a performance of notes on paper.  The film also anchors the birth of jazz in the African-American community and dramatizes the music’s crossover into the white community when Reggie teaches Johnny how to swing his trumpet.  As messy as the love story is, the movie’s treatment of jazz makes many important observations.  And it has a fun conclusion of several important early-40s musicians edited together as a performance.

Syncopation is a worthwhile interpretation of jazz as a quintessential American expression with a focus on the individual.  Unfortunately, Dieterle is unable to merge this line of thought with a coherent narrative, and the film suffers for it.  It’s worth watching Syncopation for the musical thought, but it’s mostly a failure as cinema.

July 23: White God/Fehér isten (2014 -- Kornél Mundruczó)

★★★

There are a lot of interesting things going on in White God.  It’s the coming of age story of a young girl in Budapest who has to work out her changing relationships with her estranged father and her friends.  It’s the story of a dog that is separated from his owner and goes on an Oliver Twist odyssey.  It’s a parable of the immigrant/native strife that is becoming so apparent in Europe.  It’s a revenge tale, and it’s a horror story.  And it has some tremendous shots of packs of dogs running amok in the Hapsburg streets of the city. 

What director Kornél Mundruczó doesn’t bring here is a fleshed-out unity among all these elements.  Hagan, the dog, is the most well-rounded character of the film.  He goes from a happy pet to a vengeful terrorist leader via a terrible arc that includes betrayal, abuse and drugs.  What an outstanding work this film would have been if Mundruczó had been able to bend the arc of Lili so the two characters intersected and complemented each other.  However, the director is willing to let Zsófia Psotta give us a one-dimensional Lili who strikes a similar note whether she is looking for her dog, playing in the orchestra or going to nightclub.  Lili is a surface that lacks interior, and we can hardly accept the changes she walks through because her on-screen impenetrability tells us nothing of her internal processes.  Because of this weakness in the central character, it’s hard to see the ending of White God, when music tames the savage beast, as much beyond a strikingly beautiful cop out.

There are great moments of cinema here.  The dogs running through the boulevards and interiors of the city are exciting, evoking a feeling like that in parts of Hitchcock’s The Birds, when everyday, innocent animals suddenly become a menace.  The civilized but visceral opening of the film sets a tone that prepares us for much of the violence to follow. too.  And the concluding scene is an image of beauty and reconciliation.  However, the uneven work that precedes this conclusion undercuts the effect here, so although the concluding trumpet performance seems inevitable, it lacks significance.  It’s a pity that so much buildup and beauty comes to so little at the end.

May 22: Sherlock Holmes (1922 -- Albert Parker)

★★★

Six years after Sherlock Holmes’ screen debut, Albert Parker revisits the detective, even using the same William Gillette play as his source material.  At a minimum, it makes for an interesting comparison with the 1916 serial.

It’s hard to say that Parker improves on Arthur Berthelet’s earlier version.  As in the earlier film, there are cohesion problems here with, for example, big gaps that make the Sherlock Holmes/Alice Faulkner romance hard to accept.  And while Parker brings a little more fluidity to his 1922 editing than Berthelet managed, this later film lets the character of Holmes sprawl from college youth to middle-aged crime solver, introducing us to a surprisingly simple kid as our embryonic detective but not giving us enough insight to understand or believe his later transformation.  And if that range isn’t enough, Parker adds Sherlock-as-loving-husband to the mix.  The ’22 Sherlock Holmes lacks the tight character focus of the ’16.

But Parker’s film has its strong points.  He cuts back the role of the Larrabees and foregrounds Moriarty, shaping him into a singularly vicious villain.  The film is also effective with some filmic elements.  At one point, Holmes leaves a dark foreground and is suddenly lit in the mid-ground as he crosses a street, an effective use of light that certainly attracts the eye.  The opening aerial shot is likewise compelling.  And actors like John Barrymore and William Powell know how to hold scene.  Even Hedda Hopper is effective in her very small role.

It’s hard to know why Goldwyn Pictures would have wanted to return to the same character and the same source material that a film had used only six years previously.  While this Sherlock Holmes warrants some comfortable appreciation as early cinema, it’s not a great step forward for the character, the theatrical script or for film.