July 30: Erin Brockovich (2000 -- Steven Soderbergh)

★★★★
This film has aged very well, and watching it, I once again felt like I was in the hands of a director who was in absolute control of everything I saw on the screen.  Julia Roberts’ clothes, make-up and hair tell as much about her character as her acting and dialog do, and every detail of the mise-en-scène makes a major contribution to the sense of the place and the stakes in the film.  Soderbergh’s locations and sets always seem more important to his films than the settings of most filmmakers because his always seem to carry a lot of the important information.  In Erin Brockovich, the dingy little Jensen house tells as much about the family life there as the script does.  Details like its above-ground kids pool indicate a lower middle class family striving to provide for the kids but also show the way PG&E’s behavior is subtly undermining the efforts of the family.  Nearly every detail on a Steven Soderbergh screen carries this level of signification.  A Soderbergh mise-en-scène isn’t only appropriate; it develops the meaning in the film.

Having recently seen Magic Mike, I couldn’t help but notice the light in Erin Brockovich, too.  Whether in the run-down areas of LA or the empty desert around Hinkley, there’s often a muted yellow cast that’s warm and highlights the settings.  And at places from  Pamela Duncan’s home and Masry’s office to a local bar or the hot, cinderblock assembly room, the light is never harsh.  We can see every element of furnishing, every facial expression and every wrinkle in fabric.  The lighting works hand-in-hand with the sets.

And I like Soderbergh’s narrative economy.  There are parts a bit long and a bit too on-the nose in Erin Brockovich – when Matt communicates his acceptance of his mother’s helping the people of Hinkley by offering to get her breakfast, the scene goes on a bit too long, for example – but Soderbergh generally keeps his action moving forward quickly.  I especially like the way he uses sound bridges between scene cuts because they move me into the next scene’s action before I even see what’s happening.

Many people have noted that Soderbergh gets great performances out of his actors, and that talent is on ample display here.  Julia Roberts is far better than I remembered her in this role, playing a range of emotions (and winning an Oscar); the minor characters do equally outstanding jobs with their pain, grief and anger.  And the camera lingering on the faces of these characters in the soft light tells us even more of their backgrounds and struggles as they seem completely unaware of the cameras and mikes that were undoubtedly around them.  Soderbergh gets strong, naturalistic performances out of all these actors, both professional and non-professional actors.

And though the film isn’t even-handed about the PG&E controversy, it isn’t shrill either because the evil of the utility isn't the only focus of the film. Brockovich’s humanity informs all aspects of her life, and her dealing with the corrupt utility is just one of the arenas the film follows her into.  And we certainly see the flaws of the Brockovich’s side, too: Masry lacks backbone and wants to limit his exposure to the case, and Erin becomes obsessed with the case and ignores her family and relationships.  This isn’t a strident, anti-business propaganda piece.

Lastly, I’ve been thinking recently of a film class I took back in the 70s and of reading Andre Bazin.  I thought of Bazin’s cinema preferences a lot in respect to this and other Soderbergh works, and I think M. Cahiers would have loved this film.  Erin Brockovich is all about mise-en-scène and what you see on the screen.  The editing, though fluid and efficient, never calls attention to itself, nor does the dialog or acting.  Throughout his career, Soderbergh moves easily from one film language to another, and Erin Brockovich shows how thoroughly he can control this one.

July 29: Gray's Anatomy (1996 -- Steven Soderbergh)

★★★
The strength of this film is Spaulding Gray and his storytelling.  Gray is witty, intelligent, wry and engaging.  He’s doesn’t act terribly over-the-top the way today’s cable communicators do, but he has enough variety in his voice to keep what is basically an 80-minute monologue from getting boring.  The tale of his retina pucker here is fun because it not only leads him to outrageous corners in search of a cure – Philippine faith healer, macrobiotic doctor – but it gives a chance for his intelligence to shine, as when he mentions Oedipus,  psychology and his mother.  There’s hardly a place in the monologue where interest can flag.

Soderbergh’s contribution to the film isn’t what I might have expected.  There’s not a lot a originality in his transforming Gray’s performance into film; instead, Soderbergh avails himself of mostly cinematic elements analogous to those available to theatrical director.  We get colored gel lights, silhouettes, moving backdrops and chairs, spotlights, and backlighting.  In the sweat lodge, there’s some dry ice smoke, too.  More cinematically, Soderbergh occasionally uses focus to direct our attention and some interesting cuts.  The one element he adds to the monologue is the use of documentary interviews shot in infrared of people who’d had had accidents affecting their eyes.  Some of those stories are so affecting that he clearly doesn’t need visuals to amplify them.  There’s also some engagement of the interviewees and Gray’s story because they people reflect on some of the points in Gray’s monologue.

Overall, this is a fun, engaging film thanks to Gray’s work.  There’s not a great deal of Soderbergh cinematic insight in it.

July 28: Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012 -- Benh Zeitlin)

★★★★

I was pleasantly surprised by this Sundance fav, especially after my experience with Ballast.  Beasts of the Southern Wild is not only creative and rich in the local color we’re used to finding in indies, but it’s also engaging.  It drags in a few places like the hurricane detention center, but for the most part, we’re interested throughout in who Hushpuppy is and what is going to happen to her. 

That said, the story isn’t the focus here.  Beasts is mythopoesis, a world come to life from the imagination of its heroine and rendered in affective imagery from a life of poverty.  From its first person narration through the things we see, this film shows us the world as its six-year-old lead understands and imagines it.  Her mind puts together vicious boars with legends of prehistoric beasts to create world-destroying  aurochs, and then she embellishes the tale with fear that global warming will break the beasts from their frozen stasis and unleash them on the world again. She sees a boat made out of a pick-up truck bed and a shelter with spikes coming out the roof to protect the survivors of the inundation.  A party is a blaze of color and fireworks, and when Hushpuppy decides she has to see her mother, she swims out to sea since that’s where her father said that her mother had gone.  There’s all the magical realism of Garcia Marquez here, interpreted effectively into film.

And as in Marquez, the reality that underlies the magic is not happy.  Hushpuppy lives in intimacy with the physicality of a hard  life -- its dirt, its gore, its heartbeat.  Her father is dying, her community is being destroyed, and she’s in desperate need of her mother.  Although far too young to deal with such terrible conditions, Hushpuppy persists until she finds her mother, confirmed by the legend-fulfilling act of frying alligator, and comes to the painful realization that the woman can never fulfill the maternal role Hushpuppy has wanted for her.  With this wisdom, Hushpuppy returns to her village, faces down the vicious aurochs, gives succor to her dying father, and leads the villagers on to what is probably another promised land.  Beasts is the mythopoeic creation of a new myth, perhaps one that’s real or perhaps one that’s imagined.  That doesn’t matter to a six-year-old.

Beasts of the Southern Wild has flaws of pacing, acting and script, but it is powerful portrayal of a young girl’s imaginative mind making sense of her world and overcoming the obstacles she encounters.  That portrayal alone makes this one of the more interesting films of the year.

July 18: Ballast (2008 -- Lance Hammer)

★★
A lot of the praise for this film is completely deserved.  It really is beautiful, from the brown symmetry of rows of cotton plant stubs to the purple and grey color palate of the cheap artificial lighting.  Even dark interiors managed to provide a line of highlight so we can make out the characters’ faces.  And there’s a very strong sense of local color, too.  Good American indy film is unexcelled when it comes to burrowing into a community the filmmaker knows well and showing us the truth of that community, and here we see the struggle of life in the Mississippi Delta, the loneliness and the few resources its people have.  We’re taken to the crack house, the convenience store and the impoverished interiors people live in.  Ballast is a deep look into a community we don’t often see.  This film has a community truth that the larger indy, Winter’s Bone, tried to have, but while latter managed only to seem contrived, Ballast feels authentic.

However, the pervasive monotony of this film makes it a long, boring experience.  For all the insight the film offers, Lance Hammer’s direction offers us too little cinema to engage us.  Over the 96 minutes of the film, the vast majority of the scenes are short, 30-45 second snips.  Such short takes can be good for variety in a film, but a feature film of them feels like a very long ping pong point.  Perhaps as a function of this directorial choice, the dialog in each scene is limited, too — 2-4 lines most of the time.  The repeatedly short takes and dialog snippets don’t sink the film right away because the cinematography and atmosphere are so interesting, but I was checking to see how much more of the movie I had left by the time I got to fifty minutes.  Perhaps these directing choices were compelled by the use of nonprofessional actors who weren’t really up to the challenge.  In particular, Micheal Smith, Sr. as Lawrence couldn’t engage the camera, so perhaps Hammer chose to keep the scenes short to minimize the dramatic burden.

For all its good points, Ballast isn’t a film I’ll want to sit through again.  Its strong points included, the main insight I take away from this movie is the importance of the range of elements that moves good cinema.

July 14: Shallow Grave (1994 -- Danny Boyle)

★★★★
It’s the visuals that strike you from the very opening of Shallow Grave.  The film cuts rapidly among a series of interviews of potential housemates, and we see primary-colored walls and furnishings as MTV style cuts create the story of the interviews and establish the characters: Alex, the over-the-top extrovert; David, the very bland accountant, and Juliet, the young doctor.  And the film continues throughout with this striking editing, like the scene after Alex and Juliet have gone shopping and are celebrating in the apartment, and great images, many of which are noir-influenced like the shafts of stabbing into the attic.  Shallow Grave is a film in love with look, and it’s so creative that that aspect alone would make it worthwhile.

But it goes beyond the look into a tone that it clearly owes to the first Coen Bros feature, Blood Simple.  Coen Bros films often look evil right in the eye, see it in an everyday vocabulary, and fail to understand it.  Coen Bros evil is horrible, implacable and utterly immoral, the evil that Flannery O’Connor saw through her Catholic lens, and Danny Boyle draws from this version of evil in Shallow Grave.  We see the graphically-beautiful death by drug overdose of Hugo, the horrible violence that the two gang members visit on rivals, and the grisly dismemberments that our own accountant undertakes.  And if the link to Blood Simple isn’t clear from the tone, it’s impossible to ignore the clear parallel between the scene of Alex being pinned to the floor with a knife through his shoulder and the scene in Blood Simple when Abby nails Visser’s hand to the window sill with a knife.

But despite the clear link between Shallow Grave and Blood Simple, the two are going at different things.  While the Coens have a philosophical bent and look at the nature of good and evil, Boyle is more interested in personalities and in film noir.  After the roommates decide early in the movie to keep the money, their personalities and relationships begin to diverge.  Inhibitions gone, David becomes a violent murderer, and Juliet morphs into a femme fatale who walks away with the money after bringing down the two men.  Alex alone rolls with the punches , remaining the trickster, willing to break social mores from the beginning of the film to the end.  And like a typical trickster, he sneaks away with something a victory. This isn’t a philosophical movie but rather one about personalities.

After watching this film, I’m still not sure what to make of Danny Boyle as an auteur filmmaker.  His output is eclectic, varying from this to Sunshine to Slumdog Millionaire, but I have trouble seeing cohesion in his work the same way I sense it in Soderbergh’s, for example.  Steven Soderbergh works in a wide range of genres and budgets, but I’m always aware of an intellectual engagement with his material, an unfailing sense of film language, and an effort to reach for something a little unique.  In Danny Boyle, though, I feel like he’s doing what he’s hired for, bringing some technique and embellishment to each project but not projecting a distinct approach to his film.  It’s the same sense I get from Ridley Scott’s work, much of which I enjoy despite not seeing a particular view of the world in it.

But auteur or not, Boyles created not only a visual treat, but a fun narrative ride in this first film.

July 8: Where Do We Go Now?/Et maintenant on va où? (2011 -- Nadine Labaki)

★★★★

This film is a mix of a lot of unexpected and mostly incongruent elements.  It’s partly drama, with intense scenes of family and sectarian conflict.  There’s a lot of comedy, too, as the women sabotage the village’s news-bearing TV, import blonde prostitutes, fake religious miracles and bake drug-laced cookies in an effort to distract the men from religious conflict.  And Where Do We Go Now is also willing to occasionally break out into song and dance music numbers like those from Dancer in the Dark.

But only after all of this is blended together does the real impact of Where Do We Go Now – the profound intransigence of religious conflict and the severity of the suffering of the women caught in it.  Though they have to live together, the men and women of the village constantly dig at each other with little affronts to religion and culture, and every small dig risks escalating into civil war in the village.  And these provocations aimed at each other’s religious beliefs and dress are mean and have little humor in them.  Such conditions are certainly eye-opening to those of us who live in more pluralistic cultures where religion is generally secondary to making a living and getting along for the civil good.  Where Do We Go Now does a great job of showing what such riven environments look like from the inside.

It also shows the pain of women in such a split patriarchy.  The village cemetery is divided between Muslims and Christians, but it’s filled with the young men of both religions; the film opens with a musical number as the women head out to clean the graves of their lost husbands and sons.  Where Do We Go Now brings the accumulated pain of the cemetery into focus when one woman loses her youngest and is scared to tell the men of her own family for fear of igniting a round of recriminatory violence.  And there is a scene of a woman wounding her own son with a gun in order to prevent him from being involved in sectarian violence.  Not even romantic love can overcome the divide in this village as a trans-religious attraction falls victim to the religious strife.  As though all this suffering weren’t enough, the women finally resort to changing their faiths to the opposite religion, a move sanctioned by the religious leaders of the village, in order to prevent the men in their families from fighting with those of the other religion.  It’s heart-rending to see women who’d proudly worn or not worn scarves all their lives suddenly renounce a lifetime of religious observance.

Good world cinema takes us into a culture we have no other window into, and that’s exactly what Where Do We Go Now does.  Its mix of genres is interesting, perhaps drawing on cinema tradition I’m not familiar with.  But the real contribution here is the way the film takes us inside the minds of the religious conflict in Lebanon and throughout the Middle East.  Comedy may lighten the message a little, but the insight is real and heavy.

July 3: Safety not Guaranteed (2012 -- Colin Trevorrow)

★★★

An ironic title for a movie that takes no risks.  This is a perfectly competent romantic comedy that is composed of conventional elements that blend in a predictable way.

Outsider Darius meets outsider Kenneth, and the two hit it off.  Full-of-Himself Jeff finally eases up on the front he’s always pushing out, but when he does that (clumsily), he doesn’t get what he wants and instead learns something about love.  Uptight Indian nerd Arnau gets loosened up some as the movie progresses.  Predictable.

The most engaging part of the film is the way the time travel maguffin permits the two repressed main characters to talk about themselves to each other.  Recruitment, training, and preparation for the mission gives Kenneth and Darius a vocabulary to talk about their lives and pain.  Both had a difficult childhood--Darius confesses that she feels guilt over her mother’s death while Kenneth still burns from being rejected as a suitor.  They both deal with their problems by pushing others away but are able to talk to each other by describing their mission in going back in time.

The time travel project also works as an action-motivating plot device.  Because they are preparing, Darius ad Kenneth do things like practicing with guns, raiding an office and going camping.  And the mission creates some suspense because we’re pretty sure that Kenneth is a crackpot until it starts to look like there might be something real about it towards the end.

And these two main elements of the film are simultaneously resolved in the neat ending.  We see the outcome of the main characters' movement towards trusting another person, while the final shot also cleverly answers the time travel question in a visual metaphor.  It’s a nice ending that wraps everything up tidily.

Reflecting the two-tier movement of character arc and time-travel question, the title Safety Not Guaranteed is a double entendre.  It's risky to trust another person, and it's risky to travel in time.  And the title's tidy double meaning suggests how pat a film Safety Not Guaranteed is.  It is fun, but it isn’t really "safety not guaranteed;" in fact, the movie does everything to guarantee the viewer’s safety.

July 2: Your Sister's Sister (2012 -- Lynn Sheldon)

★★★★★

I think this little film is about as good as a nano-budget movie can be.  Maybe it’s still mumblecore, but there is a very tight plot here with clear goals in every scene.  Every character follows an arc, both an individual one and one related to the other two characters, and Your Sister’s Sister flows with the vigor, complexity and surprise of a well-done Restoration play.  And this all works because the actors involve us with their characters so much.

While a lot of the dialog here is improvised, the movie has a honed plot that engages by making us uncomfortable at times and taking several unexpected turns.  Some elements, like Iris’ attraction to Jack, aren’t hard to see coming; others, like Hannah’s interest in motherhood, come as a much bigger surprise.  As the three maneuver through a changing landscape of emotional relationships, the audience alternately squirms and laughs.  You laugh when Jack’s awakened by Iris’ unexpected arrival at the cabin, but you squirm when Iris asks Jack what he was up to the previous night and he lies.  The story takes its characters though a range of surprising, tense, warm and awkward moments.

Then credit the actors with involving us so much in this story.  Emily Blount is effervescent as Iris, creating a trusting open sister for Rosemarie DeWitt’s slightly darker Hannah.  Mark Duplass’ Jack is a troubled bumbler with good intentions.  In scene after scene, these actors inhabit their characters, speaking as the character would and fleshing the characters out with all their good and less-good qualities.  We like these characters thanks to the talent of the actors’ characters, and this is one of the reasons we stay so firmly involved in the movie’s story.

Your Sister’s Sister offers other attractions, too.  The cinematography sometimes excels, like the stationary camera that captures the pillow-talk dialog between Iris and Hannah.  As that scene opens, the sisters’ heads are on separate pillows with Iris’ as close to the edge toward Hannah as possible.  Hannah, though, feeling distant from Iris, has her head in the center of her pillow, to the right of the film frame.  As the scene continues, the bond between the two grows and the distance between their heads diminishes.  There are several instances of such creative camera work.

It’s also refreshing to see a film showing relationships between heterosexual and gay characters where sexual orientation isn’t an issue.  The fact that Hannah is a lesbian is more a source of plot turns than the focus of any of the relationship issues in the film, and Your Sister’s Sister is very much of its time in having a gay character who functions the same way as the straight characters in the film.  This quality is no more evident than at the end which stops right at the fork in the road for the rest of the characters’ lives.

This little film shows the strength of small cinema.  Without big production values and special effects, it creates characters we care about and follows them though the working out of their relationships.  I was happy to spend 90 minutes of my time with these characters.

July 1: A Cat in Paris/Une vie de chat (2010 -- Jean-Loup Felicioli & Alain Gagnol)

★★★

While some theaters this summer have shown images of an exploding TV to counter-attack against watching movies at home, a film like A Cat in Paris is a much more persuasive argument.  The rich color, smart imagery, and unique instability of frame-to-frame animation in this little movie are as strong an argument for the big screen as need be made.  

In fact, I would have almost been content with no dialog at all in this visionfest of a film.  Nearly every unique frame is interesting and engaging, whether it’s the images of characters dancing across rooftops and up gutters or fantasy scenes of a menacing octopus or a rampaging African figurine.  The animation of night, when most of the film occurs, lets the artists create contrast and shadows that give the film depth.  In fact, I almost mistook the opening for 3-D.  Many of the images have witty content, too.  There’s a clever reference to the cat and the moon, and the tour-de-force ending has an intelligent reference to King Kong as well as kung fu movies and Victor Hugo.  In the fluid freedom that directors Felicioli and Gagnol find in this animation, a long-suffering pooch experiences visually-varied ways to suffer, and character movement is more a flow than a mechanical change of position.  The film’s wit and freedom are on special display in a night scene where characters in the dark are at first invisible, then seen from the cat’s perspective as outlines, then seen as Picasso-like shapes as the outlines shift.  And throughout the film, the hand-drawn frames fail to match up exactly, giving the film a continually changing, unstable quality even as the overall gist of the action remains quite clear.  A Cat in Paris is a visual delight.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some problems here.  The tone of the film is uneven, jumping too quickly from one extreme emotion to another.  This is especially true of the mother and of Costa, the villain.  In fact, Costa is even distracting at times, stretching out his rants a bit too long and raving unimpressively.   And not only is Costa not up to par, but the film starts grinding gears when he’s on screen too long.  His pursuit of Zoe could have been another of the several intense, bravura set pieces of the film, but Costa stops the scene and dilutes its energy with a silly berating of one of his hapless flunkies.  And this gang of accomplices adds little humor or sympathy as a whole.

I also wondered if there’s a problem with the translation.  I watched the English version of the film, and some of the lines had the awkward feeling of animee translations.  And most of the English vocal talent lacks the range that might complement the visuals of the movie.  I especially wonder whether the failure of Costa for me is actually the failure of voice actor JB Blanc.

Despite these problems of tone, range and pacing, A Cat in Paris is a very worthwhile investment of time.  The visuals and the intelligence of the animation more than compensate for whatever other directorial misjudgments there are.