March 31: The Four Feathers (1939 -- Zoltán Korda)

★★

I guess it’s obvious that a film's content affects the way we enjoy it, and though I try to look through aspects I find personally objectionable, sometimes I just can’t.  I’ll never like Birth of a Nation, its technical breakthroughs notwithstanding, and I can’t embrace Rome, Open City because of the way Rossellini conflates homosexuality with fascism and sexual perversion.  And I don’t respond to The Four Feathers the way I want to either because I so dislike the imperialist ideology at the center of this 1939 British film.

Some argue that Four Feathers is mostly about honor and duty, but in 19th century England, that was another way of saying imperialism.  Whether fighting the Turks in the Crimea or the Sudanese in Africa, a man of honor would prove himself on the field of conquest somewhere in the Empire and, duty done, he would reap the social rewards in British society.  This is the lesson of the child who likes poetry in Four Feathers as he learns to embrace the Empire and outdo his doubting comrades by braving the natives and their harsh climate.  In fact, everyone is brave, and everyone acts honorably in Four Feathers.  Among the colonialists, at least.  I doubt the dialog given to the targets of British imperialism here would fill two pages of script because we never see them do anything except menace the Brits and serve as the agency for the white man to prove his courage and honor.  The locals, apparently, have nothing that the audience might sympathize with.

The one part of this film I can have affection for, though, is the visuals.  There's more than a little taste of David Roberts' orientalism in the cinematography here, and I also enjoy the path I can imagine between Four Feathers and Lawrence of Arabia.  Less than a quarter of a century after Omdurman, David Lean’s desert adventurer has become complex, conflicted and flawed; the local people have identities and personal concerns; and 1.37:1 has become 2.20:1.  Korda clearly sees the open beauty of the desert, but Lean’s aspect ratio and F.A. Young’s cinematography are able to turn this desert in vast expanses of color and motion that Korda tries to capture but can’t.  Both also use a camera on a truck to track battle lines hurtling toward each other, though Lean’s later film takes advantage of 25 years of developing that technique and has smoother, more successful shots.  Both films have bone breaking treks without water and the hot visuals to intensify the risk.  As an outsized fan of Lawrence of Arabia, I enjoyed seeing a desert epic that predates that film by nearly a quarter century.  Four Feathers is a measure of the refinement of cinematic technique and sensibility that Lawrence represents.

My takeaway from Four Feathers is that content can matter.  This film has beautiful Technicolor and lavish sets, but that feels like attractive make-up on something very ugly.  Powell and Pressberger’s 1943 Life and Death of Colonel Blimp manage to address many of the same issues as Korda does here, but their story manages to avoid the overt, grating imperialist assumptions that inform Four Feathers.

March 23: The Hunger Games (2012 -- Gary Ross)

★★★

I hadn’t read any of the books before I went to see The Hunger Games and, in fact, hardly knew anything about the series.  So I was pleasantly surprised to find myself at a movie that I’d group with Gattaca, Never Let Me Go and Moon as futuristic sci-fi with an intellectual bent.

That said, Another Earth also falls into that category, and it isn’t a good film at all.  And while The Hunger Games isn’t nearly as weak as Another Earth, it’s not as good as my favorites in the category either.  On the positive side, I respond tothe parody of reality TV in Hunger Games--maybe I’m still basking in the aura of Network—and it’s hard not to be drawn by the class/power structure so clearly at the center of the film.  And I like the look of the movie a lot with its costumes, make-up and design that are as over-the-top as that of Fifth Element.  I saw Hunger Games in IMAX, and the colors filled the screen.  The acting wasn’t bad either.  I’d have to say that I wasn’t compelled by the performances, but no one appeared to be merely reciting lines.

My only reservation about the film is that it seems to be too much in thrall to a book rather than being a film.  I don’t, for example, understand why the Woody Harrelson character and the Lenny Kravitz  character couldn’t have been combined; they both advise the Tributes, but neither character has enough time or depth to warrant being singular with the result that neither has much presence beyond being a plot device.  The game itself was a bit over-sized, too, and we didn’t develop much attachment to or understanding of most of the characters.  I recognize this plot as resembling that of films like Murder on the Orient Express (another nod to Sidney Lumet), disaster movies like Towering Inferno or most slasher films: characters get bumped off sequentially.  But the list of victims in Hunger Games is too long and we can lose interest in its unfolding even with the scoreboard in the sky.  …unless , of course, we’re already book fans and want to see how the things we loved in the book develop in the movie.  And I gather that the fans of the book are legion, so it makes some commercial sense to orient the film toward them.

All of that aside, I came out of The Hunger Games curious about the second book, which means I connected with the film in some way.  I plan to pick up that second book and see how things go for Katniss, Peeta and Gale.  Perhaps by the time the sequel comes out, I’ll be joining the segment of the audience wearing a Mocking Jay t-shirt.

March 21: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1 (2011 -- Bill Condon)

★
About half way through this film, I hit the timeline button on my PS 3 to see how much longer it was going to be.  Breaking Dawn Pt. 1 is that bad.

At least the first half is.  It’s a long wedding and honeymoon fantasy that was so long and so bad that I was sure throughout that something was about to happen.  But it didn’t, and I was about to quit on the film when a story finally started.  Newlyweds Bella and Edward return from their honeymoon with Bella carrying a miscegenetic, vampire/human child with all the attendant problems that crossing racial boundaries has.  The Werewolves soon head out to fight the Vampires because of the situation.

This part of the film has its heart in the right place, dwelling on the theme of harmony among people, er, beings.  I was struck with how similar this theme is to that in The Host, in which same author, Stephanie Meyers, deals with the same issue through a war between humans and Souls.  And she resolves that war by the merging of the two groups in flesh.  Here in Twilight, the tension is between Vampires and Werewolves, and Jacob’s imprinting on the child points to some reconciliation there.  If I watch Part 2, I’ll be interested to see how that goes.

But I got very tired of another point in this film--its persistent, smack-in-the-face, anti-abortion message.  It reminds me of the abstention message of Eclipse, and it strikes me as a pity that both films make such strident and irresponsible points to the target audience of young girls.

 I hope that Part 2 manages to be more of a film than a wedding fantasy followed by preaching.

March 19: The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010 -- David Slade)

★★★
There’s no reason to be snarky about this film.  It’s has some painfully bad elements, among them a very predictable plot and some  terrible acting, especially on the part of part of Taylor Lautner, the werewolf whose smooth, ripped, mostly shirtless body obviates the need for acting chops.  …but that’s being snarky.

It’s interesting to watch a film like this one, which I can’t connect with but which teens clearly can.  There’s a lot of confusion and talk about feelings, and I’m struck that the pivot of the whole film is Bella, a girl; it’s significant that, for once, the female is at the center and the two male protagonists are mostly functions of her.  And the two main males are object lessons for teen boys: selfish jocks don’t get the girl, and the successful boyfriend listens to the object of his affection.  Girls get their lesson, too: family is important and don’t have sex before you’re married.  That latter lesson was so over-the-head that…..but I’m being snarky.

It’s not a terrible film, and with no ads and good special effects, it’s better than TV.  (darn, there goes that snarky thing again…..)

March 17: 12 Angry Men (1957 -- Sidney Lumet)

March 16: Network (1976 -- Sidney Lumet)

★★★★★

Network is such a prescient film that it’s almost eerie to watch it today, and it’s been prophetic throughout the 35 years since it was made.  These decades have seen the decline of news departments, the growth of conglomerates that swallow and then squeeze networks, and an increase in “personality” news. More striking still from today’s perspective is the rise of media that thrives on stoking anger—you have only to think of Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity—and the blossoming of reality TV.  Paddy Chayefsky’s script couldn’t anticipate the way media has changed because of technological innovation that opened the door for cable and the internet, but in 1976, Network already saw that that the media was going to become all entertainment all the time. With anger as it's main attraction.

Beyond its vision for the media itself, Network also talks about what will happen to media consumers.  Max is old school –married with friends, family, integrity and a long career.  In Network, he’s having problems in life, but he deals with them directly by having his winter/spring romance with Diana and negotiating the terms of his marriage with his wife.  His is a real life.  The new media person, the character of Diana, is one who doesn’t experience life directly but instead lives through the media she loves.  Diana has several former marriages, she doesn’t connect on a personal level, she lacks integrity, and she’s abrupt in sex.  All these characteristics show how she has trouble with real people and real emotions.  In fact, although Network seems a little on-the-nose in describing her as trying to turn her life into a series of TV program plots, that is how she lives.  Throughout her brief sex scene, she talks about ratings, and to talk with her about their relationship, Max has to talk about possible plot lines.  Perhaps because Network is so heavy-handed and affected with this observation, it rings somewhat hollow today, but as we watched Newt Gingrich in the 2012 Iowa Republican primary go from first to last as a result of negative campaign advertising on TV, a movie like this one does make you pause and wonder how much we’re inscribed by the media around us.


Network is unquestionably of its time, as New Hollywood as any movie you’ll see.  It’s earnest, advocative, and critical.  Lumet goes beyond the ideas, though, by getting strong performances, especially from William Holden and Peter Finch.  Robert Duvall, though sometimes too over-the-top, still brings a cinematic intensity to his role engages.  The weak acting in this film is, unfortunately, at the center—Faye Dunaway as Diana.  A lot of the dialog here is stagy and theatrical, and even Holden and Duvall sometimes have to work to keep the language from taking us out of the movie.  Dunaway doesn’t have the chops to do that though, and scenes like the one where she bustles into her office giving orders are more painful than anything else.


That reservation aside, this is an eye-opening movie.  It transcends its 70s topicality and manages to pull off social satire while making a surprisingly accurate critique of public media.  I remember rewatching Brazil ten years ago and being surprised at how it anticipated the Bush administration’s creating the Department of Homeland Security and increasing governmental powers in order to "combat terrorism"; rewatching Network today, when anger is entertainment, I had the same feeling of eerie amazement.

March 15: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007 -- Sidney Lumet)

★★★★★

After watching Clooney’s The Ides of March, I decided to go back to Sidney Lumet, who I kept thinking of as I was watching the Clooney film.  Now I’m not sure how I made that connection.  Maybe because I went back to Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and remembered Philip Seymour Hoffman in both.

That was about the only connection.  Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is a masterful film with great acting, pitch-perfect direction, a rich script and stakes.  Major stakes.  And heart.  It’s thriller about a heist, but it’s also a deep family-relationship film and a wide-cast character study.  This film is a wonderful cinema experience.

There’s a dark taint in the heart of the main character, Andy, though we only see the symptoms of the darkness for the first two-thirds of the film.  Andy manipulates his younger brother Hank, playing him like a puppet, and he patronizes a high-end drug dealer who provides him heroin and a place to use it, a Manhattan version of a Chinese opium den.  Andy also steals from his company, fails as a husband, and plans the robbery of his parents’ small jewelry store that triggers the downward spiral of the film.  And we come to realize that his relationship problems and fixer personality have roots in his past as the responsible older brother.  Before the Devil Knows has a deep, complex script that balances all these elements of this one character, and Hoffman delivers an intense portrait of the man who is holding all these pressures under control, barely managing to keep them in check, while the movie plot slowly intensifies the pressure from each one.  And as the pressure increases, we feel its intensification each time Hoffman inhales a deep breath or shifts his large frame awkwardly.  His is a great performance in an able script.

Andy’s younger brother, Hank, has almost as much complexity.  Played by Ethan Hawke, Hank is the failure of the family-- nervous, unreliable, weak and unable assume responsibility.  He has married a strong woman who’s divorced him, and even his daughter pushes him around.  Always seeking security, Hank is having an affair with Andy’s wife because she makes him feel good, and his fear of doing the jewelry store robbery leads him to count on Bobby, who bungles it.  The rich depth of the script here, too, even shows us how this the family history of Andy and Hank have led them to who they are in the film.  If older brother Andy’s calm but increasingly desperate attempts at fixing the situation create some of the tension here, the spoiled Hank’s frazzle as he copes with every new turn creates complementary stress.  The audience can only watch with bated breath as the stakes get ever higher for these two brothers who are still acting though their childhood roles.

I like Albert Finney as the father in this film, too, and I find his character adds even more depth to the portrait of the family and suspense to the story.  Lumet was already an old man himself when he directed this last film, and the detail to Finney shows the insight of an older director.  The settings that Finney works in, whether suburban dining room or Towncar, feel dead-on for an elderly man, and Lumet gives Finney the freedom to create Charles as a hurting, angry, inarticulate widower who feels like he might have been a failure as a father.  With his pants hiked up too high and his shirt tail tucked firmly in, Charles brings as much tension to the screen as his sons do, tension that continues to ramp up as the plot reveals more and more details of the taint within the family and the way it’s produced the evolving situation of the characters.

As Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead builds to a crescendo and past, you sit watching masterful performances masterfully woven into a thriller that’s also the psychological portrait of a family.  With so much skill, judgment and artistry at work, this is a mature film that sets a very high standard.

March 14: The Ides of March (2011 -- George Clooney)

★★★

I kept thinking of Sidney Lumet while I was watching The Ides of March.  I think the combination of political commitment, institutional corruption, firm handling of film mechanics and a willingness to look at a character or situation hard to see a taint, all these conjure Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Network and, more recently, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.  But Ides of March isn’t in a league with these films; their echoes only sound here.

This film’s visual language is standard issue.  There are a lot of capable images and some capable camera movement with nothing bravura or new, which is fine for a film that looks more at content and character than at story-telling itself.  Clooney is very capable indeed at this.

But such a movie needs strong acting and a strong story if it’s to be a message film, and I didn’t find either here.  I continue to be unimpressed with Ryan Gosling performances, and his portrayal of the campaign aide is the weak link at the center of the film.  For Ides of March to work, we need to identify with that character, feel his commitment to an ideal at the beginning and sense his slide into disillusionment until we understand the shell he becomes at the end.  But Gosling isn’t able to connect with us or take us on that trip.  Instead, his character’s arc feel s like a series of stages with time connections but without emotional links: Now-I’m-Idealistic, Now-I’m-Frustrated, Now-I’m-Cynical.  It feels like Gosling is striking a series of poses as Ides of March proceeds rather than showing us the glide path as Stephen develops from optimist to cynic.   I don’t know enough about film-making to be able to say whether that’s a failing of Clooney as director or Gosling as actor, but given what Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti are able to do with their much smaller roles, I think Gosling has to bear a lot of the responsibility.

This story, too, has so much contrivance that you’re eventually taken out of the film and you lose interest in its concerns.  And it’s not only melodramatic moments like the one when we discover Molly has had a thing with the Governor; the script has to add abortion to the mix.  And even that has to be one-upped by the suicide.  Midway though, Stephen asks Ida for help, saying they’re friends, only to be rebuffed; by the end, Ida needs him and uses the same line.  These types of contrivance don’t make this film engaging or effective but take us out of it and diminish our interest.

Despite all these reservations, I find Ides of March sincere, and I like work that at least tries to get at current issues through art.  The movie is the personal voyage of a character whose idealism is ruined, but it's also a politically-committed film, and I’m glad to see someone looking at this important aspect of our political system dramatically.  I wish Sidney Lumet were still with us to be able to handle the issue with more aplomb, but at least someone is trying.

March 11: Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011 -- Rupert Wyatt)

★★★

I don’t get all the fuss about this film.  Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a good, by-the-numbers, sci-fi/action movie that is all plot-driven.  Characters are stereotypes, and the action goes exactly where you expect it to go.  The acting is wooden (as you would expect),  and the filmmaking itself mostly unexciting but for a  few images of things like those of apes jumping though plate glass windows from the inside out or them surrounding the evil business manager in an amphitheater-shaped atrium.  

There was some talk about Andy Serkis’ performance in the motion-capture generated imagery, but I didn’t find his acting compelling either, perhaps because nothing else in the film is.  He definitely doesn’t carry it the way, say, Dustin Hoffman does Elephant Man, a performance I've heard Serkis' compared to. In fact, I found Serkis’ performance to be closer to pantomime than acting.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is good, fun, well-done escapism with many sentimental tones.  And that’s enough to warrant watching it without laying on unjustified acclaim.

March 9: Army of Shadows/L'armée des ombres (1969 -- Jean Pierre Melville)

March 4: The Fall (2006 -- Tarsem Singh)

★★★

I was in in a city northeast of Mumbai 15 years ago.  The city was hot and crowded, but on top of a hill, I wandered into a palace cemetery with the usual collection of ruined mausoleums.  There were few people there in the relative cool, and the quiet was soothed further by a man playing a stringed instrument.  Sitting beside a small mausoleum, the musician told me that the deceased had left a bequest that would pay for a musician to play at this tomb……forever.  I was touched by what must have been the deceased’s love for art, that he would devote the proceeds of a lifetime’s work to something as ephemeral as music, and that his love of art had reached out beyond his own death to give me that little pleasure on that afternoon.

I remembered this experience after I watched Tarsem Singh’s The Fall.  There’s the obvious Indian connection, but this film is also one man’s passion for art – cinema, in this case --  that is so great he put a big part of his own fortune into this single work.   And you can tell The Fall is the singular vision of an individual: There is little of Hollywood film language here, and the images simply overpower the narrative.  These images are ravishing, from Pacific atolls to Himalayan lakes and  Indian Palaces with  Balinese kecak performance.  The glory of the film is its images, and The Fall celebrates them throughout.  It reminds me of the 1937 Snow White, a movie that is so driven by the love of the images that its animation can produce that the narrative becomes a thin excuse to go from one wonderful set of visuals to another.  The same is true here.

That’s not to say that The Fall lacks typical characters or that the characters lack a narrative arc.  Roy deals with his depression throughout the narrative frame of the hospital, and he and  Alexandria build a relationship that is important to both of them in that context, too.  And the film has some thematic content as it plays with the relationship between the narrative frame and the events in Roy’s story – actors have different roles in the frame and the story, like the actors do in The Wizard of Oz, and characters and events in the frame affect the narrative of the story.  In fact, the characters and actions of the story become the language that Roy and Alexandria eventually use to talk to each other.  And the characters here are also moving.  You especially feel sympathy for Alexandria, through whose perspective we see the events of the movie.  She experiences drama that is more intense than most children experience, and her life is anything but simple.  Language is a barrier for her, her migrant-worker parents face discrimination, and she herself will return to work in the orchards where she’s previously fallen and broken her arm.  Cinema, story-telling, will provide her with much of the little pleasure she will have.

Yet despite these compelling cinematic elements, The Fall keeps returning to its colorful, striking images.  A spectacular red tent on wheels is dragged through an alpine desert by hundreds of slaves; a giant square of white fabric with a large red blotch stands out against a bright background, creating an image like a Rothko on a wall; and a captive runs through a cinematic maze constructed out of shots from an ancient observatory.  These are the parts of The Fall that resonate after the film ends.

It’s easy to see how someone could think of this film as a vanity project.  Singh is a wealthy man, and he comes from a music video background that makes him more skilled at visuals than at directing actors or creating compelling stories.  But The Fall is an instance of beauty created out of one man’s love of art. It comes from the same impulse as the music that is still being played in that Indian cemetery thanks to the bequest of an art lover.

March 3: Léon Morin, Priest (1961 -- Jean Pierre Melville)

★★★★