June 30: Moonrise Kingdom (2012 -- Wes Anderson)

★★★★★

June 23: I Wish/Kiseki (2011 -- Hirokazu Kore-eda)

★★★★★

June 20: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012 -- John Madden)

★★★

Susan K. and I, a neo- and proto-retiree, decided to check out the The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for a weekday afternoon show, and we found the theater fairly crowded.  With similar moviegoers.  That’s the demographic for this fun film, and it punched all our buttons.

Not far into the film, I realized I’d seen it before.  Marigold Hotel is that movie that is set in a college dorm or among a group of college friends who are discovering themselves and having new life experiences, films like Cédric Klapisch’s L'auberge espagnole.  In Marigold Hotel, though, the characters are late middle-aged, and instead of transitioning into adulthood, they’re moving into late adulthood.  The key to this film is that its characters are going through the same process as those in the 20-somethings’ films, but these older people have a different context for their discoveries about life.  Some here have lost spouses and find themselves alone for the first time, making their own way in the larger world alone.  Some have to learn how to meet others and start relationships, while others have to come to the recognition that the relationship they have isn’t functional.  They cope with money problems, and since they’re in India, they have to learn how to deal with the large, unfamiliar world.  There’s even a gay character coping with coming out to his peers while also dealing with some unresolved issues from his past.  Change the age of the characters, and the film has the familiar feel of a group of young adults discovering the world.

A big part of the pleasure here is the way the maturity and life experience of the Marigold Hotel residents affects how they cope with their life discoveries.  Each of the characters has his own arc and each brings along the wisdom of a life lived, so although characters find surprises as they grow, they all have a lot of knowledge to use and to share.  They help the young hotel owner with his own transition into adulthood, and they apply the skills they’ve learned in their lives to improve the situations they find themselves in.  Marigold Hotel’s wisdom is in this point: The characters accept the challenge of a new environment and thus experience growth, but they have the wisdom of a lifetime to use, a tool not available to younger characters in films about young adults.  Of course, those young adults don’t have death quite as near or present, either.

This is a fun movie.  The TV background of director John Madden shows in many elements of the film: The story is conventional, and there aren’t a whole lot of surprises.  But Marigold Hotel is a film about personal growth and having life-changing experiences, and it refreshing to see that opportunity offered to older characters.

June 17: The Avengers (2012 -- Joss Whedon)

★★★

The Avengers is exactly what it needs to be—a summer movie with great special effects, a story that moves along clearly and quickly, a collection of mono-dimensional characters whose speech varies from witty repartee to patriotic platitudes.   There are clever variations on old-time technology, like the flying aircraft carrier, as well as amazing alien technology, like the Chitauri creature-machines who come to earth to destroy it.  The story engages as it splits into multiple scenes of recruitment, defeat and victory with director Joss Whedon all the while managing to keep the various story strands coherent, clear and related.  With a cast and story this big, that’s an achievement.  And the distinctive dialog and mannerism of each Avenger lends itself to a certain predictable but pleasant set of interactions.  Iron Man’s smart assness grates on Captain America, and Thor’s Shakespeare contrasts mightily to The Hulk’s inarticulateness.

All these formulaic elements come together surely in The Avengers, and the movie is as pleasing as a ride at Six Flags.  You don’t take much away from it when the ride ends, but it’s fun while you’re there.

June 10: A Night to Remember (1958 -- Roy Ward Baker)

★★★  

June 9: Prometheus (2012 -- Ridley Scott)

★★★

Prometheus is a very different movie from Alien.  A lot of fans are complaining that Prometheus takes on so much explanatory detail that it is confusing and ultimately doesn’t make sense. And that all the detail dilutes the thrills.  I wouldn’t totally disagree with that opinion, but if you just look at the broad brushstrokes, this is still a fun summer movie with outstanding special effects.

The visuals are very well thought out and wonderful to watch in 3D.  Prometheus has the same vast scale of Alien, the same claustrophobia, and the same stark lighting.  Dusty scenes that are cut through with searchlights and flashlights create depth and scale and give the visuals a plausible feel. There are quotes and echoes of Alien throughout. The angular bulkheads of the first movie look familiar here, and so do the helmeted spacesuits with their camera feeds and interior lights.  

On the other hand, transparent circuit boards seem to have replaced the tubes and wires of the older film, and this small difference in design points to the large difference in the two movies: Alien is a simple horror flic that uses its sets to add to the viewers’ tension, while Prometheus has moved away from horror in pursuit of larger sci-fi themes.  Unfortunately, it’s this move toward greater sci-fi that complicates and ultimately undercuts the film.

Seen in a large perspective, Prometheus starts with a slow development and gets more and more intense as the stakes and the violence rise.  A lot like Alien.  But Prometheus also becomes more dilute as it adds layers of complication like the subplot of Weyland appearing on the Prometheus and the seemingly gratuitous references to Lawrence of Arabia (and why was Charlise Theron’s character even in the movie?).  But the more the dilution increases, the more the film loses energy and coherence.  If you eventually begin to question the motivation for some of the actions in the film, Prometheus loses the amiable unity you’re willing to grant it in pursuit of your cinematic thrills, and you have to resort to thinking that you liked it despite it's finer incoherence, which is my conclusion.

Prometheus might be on the path to becoming the poster movie for those postmodern film theorists who say films don’t need to be coherent to be good.  Michael Bay regularly puts together incoherent action scenes to create chases and fights, but Prometheus does this on a larger scale by putting characters and events together without the tight logic of a traditional story.  But whether postmodern or just badly scripted, with its great visuals and larger story structure, Prometheus is still a fun way to spend a couple of summer hours.  

June 8: Alien (1979 -- Ridley Scott)

★★★★

With Prometheus looming in the very near future, Carlos suggested revisiting Ridley Scott’s original Alien, so I watched that film for the first time since 1979.  It still has impact, though thankfully I wasn’t as jittery after this viewing as I was after my first.  And I hadn't realized how influential this film has been; I recognized many elements in it that I see regularly in today’s thrillers.

This time through, I realized that the movie is more a thriller with an outer space setting than a hard-core sci-fi flic.  Scott combines the two genres by using the vastness of space, contrasty lighting, and claustrophobic quarters stuffed with lots of cables/hoses/wires/technogear to create the tension and dread in the mind of the viewers that we expect from thrillers.  It's a smart, original use of the sci-fi setting we expect.  The story of Alien starts slowly, introducing us to the tight, dark Nostromo and its squabbling, human crew, and when the close-ups and tight quarters have us breathing a little hard for air, we visit an alien ship that’s disturbingly organic (gold star for HR Giger’s design) and thus get introduced to a yet another element of tension.  Of course, shortly after the tension jacks up with the visit, the alien gets loose on the Nostromo, the pace picks up, and the movie never looks back.

I've seen a lot about the economy of this film, and Scott does indeed focus on his storytelling and on our thrills while watching it.  Alien has practically no exposition: We don’t know anyone’s background or the reasons for their behavior, and we don’t know much about the ship, its stated mission or the ulterior motives of the company.  We don’t know anything about the alien and how it mutates either.  And we don’t need to.  Alien is a scary movie, and all we need to know is that the characters are in real danger from a very bad enemy.  The movie works in a pure cinema space of frame, light, set design, sound, story and acting, and it’s this pure cinema that Scott masters to scare the pants off us.

June 2: Thunderball (1965 -- Terence Young)

June 1: Goldfinger (1964 -- Guy Hamilton)