December 28: Twelve Years a Slave (2013 -- Steve McQueen)

★★★

It takes some hutzpah for a director with a fine art bent like Steve McQueen to undertake a movie about slavery, and Twelve Years a Slave has a lot of good ideas.  One of McQueen’s best decisions is to show how the institution affected everyone involved with it rather than simply focus on the plight of the slave.   Of course, we repeatedly see how horrible it was to live as a slave; it was a horrible institution.  Love and family are disrupted as we see not only in Solomon’s situation after his enslavement but also in the situation of Eliza, who is stripped of her children in a New Orleans slave sale after having been her previous master’s favorite. We see the horrible beatings that slaves receive when Solomon, and later Patsey, are whipped, and there is even torture when Solomon is left hanging from a tree with his toes barely touching the ground.  Epps’ drunken dragging in of his slaves to dance for a midnight “party” is another form of abuse.

The film's handling of Solomon’s hanging points to another aspect of slavery – its effect inside the slave community.  While Solomon is hanging, struggling to stay alive by dancing on tiptoe, other slaves continue their lives only catching furtive glances of him from the corners of their eyes, and kids play outdoors in plain sight of the torture.  Only one woman risks punishment by bringing Solomon some water.  The level of horrific violence that Solomon experiences is not only familiar to the slave community, but the community knows that resisting it will only bring added pain.  Solomon is told this very clearly on the boat to New Orleans, and he even repeats it in trying to console Eliza after the woman’s separation from her children.

But the breadth of McQueen’s portrayal of the institution of slavery extends beyond those enslaved
to include the enslavers, and what we see is not a monolith of racism.  Solomon’s first master, Ford, tries to buy Eliza’s children when he buys her in order to keep the family together, but he can’t afford them all.  At his estate, Ford shows some respect for Solomon’s opinion over that of a racist craftsman, Tibeats.  And we see that even masters have limits when Ford has to sell Solomon to Epps in order to protect his slave from the anger of Tibeats.  Ford warns Solomon that he can’t protect him alone.

But the most compelling portrayal of a slaveholder is Michael Fassbender’s Epps.  In fact, this character is the fullest, most complex character in the film.  Epps is a powerful man, rigidly beating underperforming slaves and subjecting his slaves to humiliating behavior like rousing them to dance for him when he is drunk late one night.  This dancing scene also shows other aspects of the complex Epps, though.  He drags his slaves in to dance because he lacks friends and companionship on his isolated plantation.  His wife not only hates him, but she berates him and insults his honor in front of the slaves here, showing his own weakness, insecurity and hesitancy in this episode.  And the cause of her behavior is that, although Epps feels that slaves are inferior, he searches for consolation by sexually assaulting Patsey, seeking a  complex solace that involves both power and attraction. The extremes of Epps’ moods and behaviors make him the most complicated and compelling element of Twelve Years a Slave.

Which is the central problem with this film.  The main character, Solomon, lacks complexity and emotional resonance with the audience.  Often, he’s merely a vehicle for showing us what slavery is all about, but even when he’s involved in the action, we don’t see the complexity of motivation in him that we see in Fassbender’s Epps or, for that matter, in Lupita Nyong'o's Patsey, who ranges from despair and submission to defiance.  Twelve Years a Slave initially gives us a formal Solomon who doesn't engage us, and he become even more distant from us when he’s a slave.  You have to think that McQueen has directed Chiwetel Ejiofor to make Solomon reticent; in scenes like Solomon’s pleading his innocence about writing a letter or his resistance to whipping Patsey, we see that Ejiofor can indeed connect with the audience.  But though most of Twelve Years a Slave, the reticence of the main character keeps us from being fully engaged in the film.  Epps is a fully-formed character, Patsy is complex and conflicted, but Solomon is just a means for the movie to make a statement.  The formal disconnect between the cardboard main character and these two dynamically realized ones prevents Twelve Years a Slave from being aesthetically satisfying.

There is a lot in this movie to recommend it.  There are moments of beauty when McQueen is willing to let his camera linger and take in what’s around him.  Images like the swamp sunset with silhouettes of cypresses and moss show the beauty that coexists with the horrible institution of slavery.  Solomon’s letter (and hope) burns slowly, turns into red glow, diminishes and then goes out.  Such measured moments pace the film and offer touches of beauty amid the grimness.  But the decision to prevent us from empathizing with Solomon, coupled with the masterful creation of the complicated, conflicted, insecure, tyrant Epps and his equally complex slave Patsey, creates a weakness at the center of this ambitious work.

December 18: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013 -- Francis Lawrence)

★★★

The Hunger Games is back, and there are compelling elements in Shooting Fire that go beyond taking care of the franchise.  I was a fan of the first Hunger Games, but Francis Lawrence here ups the ante from assembling the now-familiar costumes, characters and decent story to include continuous dramatic tension and very high stakes.  The big achievement here is Katniss because we sympathize with her dilemma, respect her integrity and recognize the difficulty of her decisions.  She grows before our eyes as she works to protect her family, Peeta, and Gale while increasingly wanting to support the rising resistance to the Capital.  And focused tightly on Katniss’ arc, Shooting Fire addresses several ideas.

Of course, the film has an anti-authoritarian element to it.  Donald Sutherland’s cold-blooded, manipulative Shooting Fire goes beyond Snow to make its anti-authoritarianism by sending in Peacekeepers who look like the Storm Troopers of Star Wars to rough up audiences during Katniss’ tour, whip Gale in public and beat Cinna in front of Katniss as she ascends to the Games.  Authority comes off badly in this film.
President Snow could create this idea on his own as he threatens everyone Katniss’ loves and tries to have her killed by changing the rules of the Third Quarter Quell.  But

There’s also a continuation of the media parody from the first film.  And here it’s the same elements.  There are ridiculous public appearances by Katniss and Peeta that are stiff and staged as their erstwhile media manager Effie determinedly ignores reality in favor of her scripts and broadcast times, and Stanley Tucci again chews into the role of host Caesar Flickerman, bringing a perfectly pitched exaggeration of a show host to the screen.  In Catching Fire, however, those opposed to authority and the media that enables it subvert their media appearances and take control long enough to send a message to the rising rebellion.  In a pageant in the Capitol, the clothes of Katniss and Peeta ignite in a fire connoting rebellion, and when Katniss later appears on a broadcast in her wedding dress at the command of Snow, the dress transforms into a Mockingjay, her symbol for the rebellion.  In the 74th Game that ended the first Hunger Games, the grist for the media mill in subverted the media and used it to fight with when Katniss forced the game master to spare both her and Peeta.  That same subversion occurs again at the end of the Third Quarter Quell here when Katniss destroys the game area and is airlifted out of the arena.  The media isn't able to exploit its subjects in the either of these Games.

Catching Fire is a great time spent at the movies.  It has an interesting story with several unexpected turns, it has sustained drama that keeps interest high, and it has visuals that are fun to look at.  Some of Effie’s costumes have so much plumage that they almost look soft focus, and even throwaways like the technologically-advanced train racing too fast through a verdant forest make you look.  Add to this the likeable characters, and Catching Fire is a fine film pleasure.

December 13: Frozen (2013 -- Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee)

★★★

Just in time for the holidays, Disney has kicked out a fun film to escape to the theaters for.  If, like me, you enjoy Disney, Frozen is sure to please.  It’s a story of magic and threat, love and yearning, goofy characters and villains.  And it’s a musical with songs that sound like they were recorded on Broadway.  And, more innovative for Disney, it’s got lots of visual interest.

Everything the film is about is wrapped up in the two sisters, Elsa and Anna.  The older Elsa is gifted with dangerous ice magic, and she shuts everyone out, including Anna, in an effort to hide and control it.  Anna, meanwhile, wants to be social and loving, and she longs for company and for the childhood relationship she had with her older sister before Elsa chose to go into isolation.  Anna must get through Elsa’s distrust and distance to save Arendell, and Elsa ultimately learns that the solution to her problems (and the kingdom’s) isn’t withdrawal into solitude but accepting and trusting her sister.  The story is a worthwhile take on the Disney princess tale since it’s girl-rescuing-girl (and kingdom) while the heroines are growing up at the same time.  And in the focus on women, Frozen has a distinct echo of Brave, though the two films look at different aspects of girls’ development.

Even with the focus on women, the guys don’t come off irrelevant or bad here.  Social Anna falls in love with Hans the day of Elsa’s coronation, and the couple has a fun musical number, “Love Is an Open Door,” with in-your-face, over-the-top fantasy and cinema cliché.  And then there’s the sudden dramatic reversal centered around Hans that becomes important at the end of the film.   The amiable, rougher Kristoff has an important role, too, as a capable assistant who also contributes comic relief; plot-wise, he becomes an unexpected red herring as the story reaches its climax.  Although Frozen is about the girls, the boys have a lot to do here.

In addition to the way the film plays with expectations, Frozen is the first Disney animation in a while that has so solidly embraced its music.  The lyrically-edited opening song, “Frozen Heart,” sets the tone, mood and theme of the whole movie, and Else’s “Let It Go” endorses individuality in such moving terms that you feel she’s made the right decision in building her ice castle in the mountains.  There are awfully funny songs, too.  The naïve snowman’s ode “In Summer” gets a lot of laughs from the central paradox that the poor man would melt while enjoying his beach.  Likewise, the witty lyrics and onscreen antics by the trolls make “Fixer Upper” funny.  More than most recent Disney films, Frozen exploits its song to add to the pleasure of the film.

And the visuals make the film involving.  Frozen uses a range of palettes that keep the screen changing from white to brown to blue to orange, and the images certainly engage.  Else’s castle is striking to look at, and landscapes of ice-bejeweled willow branches or windblown snow in howling winds add to the visual interest.  But a lot of the pleasure in the visuals concern movement and editing.  Wolves chase the sleigh of Anna and Kristoff, a snow monster runs them away from Elsa’s castle, and things freeze up and change color.  Editing, too, makes the film fun to watch.  Song montages follow choreographed movement or sequences of images associated with the lyrics.  In Frozen, there is almost always something interesting to look at.

In fact, it’s the strong visuals that carry the film because the story has a few problems.  Perhaps it’s not fair to ask for too much story in a Disney Christmas movie, but all the dilatory moments -- whether fast-paced action, musical interludes or just dialog -- aren't a substitute for dramatic engagement, and Frozen has an episodic quality that at times leaves you feeling like it’s not going anywhere.  For example, there’s a lot of thematic and plot buildup to Anna's visit to Else's ice castle, but then nothing comes of the encounter between the two.  Also, although the characters are generally winning and sympathetic, they lack the complexity of characters like Carl in Up, Merida in Brave or even Remy in Ratatouille.  Frozen’s characters are mostly mono-dimensional, embodying a certain quality or idea but lacking personality.  This shallowness is most obvious when Hans makes a radical shift from one quality to another with no motivation or groundwork laid for the transformation.

But these reservations aside, Frozen is still fun for what it is -- a couple of hours of classic Disney.

December 4: Abraham Lincoln (1930 -- D.W. Griffith)

★★

There is some fun flair in Abraham Lincoln, but there isn't enough to redeem the film from its terrible script and the stilted acting.  From the love scenes through the public oratory and presidential decision-making, the language is poetic and the delivery, declamatory.  As Lou said, this film is a silent movie with sound.

It features Griffith using techniques that were innovative fifteen years earlier but old hat by this time.  There’s cross-cutting, which Birth of a Nation skillfully exploited in 1915; here, Griffith uses the same technique and for the same purpose, to contrast the North and the South and to show simultaneous action.  Lincoln also shows us extras-packed war scenes reminiscent of both Birth and Intolerance, and dissolves between scenes here suggest that the content of one shot lingers into the next.  For example, Lincoln’s distress at the death of Ann Rutledge dissolves into his virtual breakdown afterwards.  There’s also the technique of using a repeated image to convey a poetic meaning.  Intolerance repeatedly returns to the rocking cradle; here, we keep seeing a tracking shot of a landscape model, an image the film offers as symbolic.  And close-ups here lend intimacy and urgency, just as they did in Birth, Intolerance and Way Down East.  Whether it’s Lincoln’s seduction of Ann or the facial intensity of rebels plotting the assassination, close-ups of the actors’ faces bring us into the emotion of the scene.

Griffith adds at least one new element to some close-ups Lincoln that shows his direction hasn't completely ossified.  In a very contemporary and unexpected way, Griffith sometimes has his actors, in close-up, look directly at the camera and at us.  Our introduction to John Wilkes Booth has one such moment in it, which drives home to us the radical he is; likewise, Lincoln tells us at one point, eye to eye, that the Union will not be dissolved.  Such breaking the fourth wall shows a director at least modestly looking to vary his cinematic language.

Griffith also integrates camera movement especially well with the rhythm of a scene in this film.  At one point, the camera moves in on wedge Lincoln is using to split wood and then draws back to show us Ann watching Abe as he splits logs.  Then the camera moves in for their intimate dialog before it ultimately cuts to dialog with Abe’s employer.  This is a much more fluid camera than we see in early Griffith.  The scene of Abe’s proposal to Ann is even more lyrical and fluid.  As the scene opens, the camera follows a singing shepherdess walking a cow out through the pasture.  The camera then swings back across the field to close in on Abe’s proposal.  After Ann accepts, the camera swings back to the shepherd girl, who is just closing the gate and coming to the end of her song.  It’s a beautifully-edited sequence, a culmination of techniques Griffith used earlier.

There’s even a moment of German Expressionism in Abraham Lincoln.  Late in the film, a backlit Lincoln wearing a tall top hat descends narrow stairs toward the viewer with a child at each hand, a shot which carries an eeriness that doesn't appear in other Griffith work.  Here, the director is clearly trying out alternative ways of telling stories.

Unfortunately, for all the innovations big and small, Abraham Lincoln doesn’t engage an audience because its dialog is so literary and its acting so stiff and stagy.  It can have striking moments of historical accuracy, like the scene that shows the horse and buggy dirtied up with mud, but in cinema, Griffith had clearly done better work previously.

December 3: Way Down East (1920 -- D.W. Griffith)

★★★★★

The first whiff of sentimentality or melodrama can take me out of a movie fast; I moaned aloud at the big reveal in Gravity, which broke the spell of even those effects.  But when Lillian Gish learns she isn't actually married in Way Down East, I’m hurt and angry.  And when she’s wandering homeless and sees the happy Bartlett family in their home, I long for her to join them just like she does.  Gish’s performance in this film is a master class in silent acting, in understanding and collaborating with the camera in a way that sucks a viewer in.  Her posture, her timing, her facial expressions, her gestures – all these are hugely emotive.  For an audience that can suspend current cinematic values enough to allow the silent’s, Way Down East is a remarkably affective film.

An easy way for a modern audience to engage Way Down East is through the character of Gish’s Anna.  She’s a little simpler and far more innocent than we can believe today, but her wisdom and power grow dramatically in the film.  After learning she’s been deceived about her marriage, she vows to marshal on as a single mother, and when her newborn is ill and she fears for the unbaptized child’s eternal soul, Anna usurps clerical prerogative and baptizes her child herself, an act that would bring a good deal of condemnation even in today’s cinema.  Not long afterwards, Anna defies class conventions and refuses to leave her home with the Bartletts despite being ordered to do so by the upper-class Sanderson.  And she takes a feminist stance when she complains that an unwed mother is ostracized but the father of the child is embraced.  Way Down East may be approaching the century mark, but Anna is a common-sense feminist that can inspire us today.

Several Griffith film techniques are on clear display here, too.  Early in the film, we’re already seeing sentimental symbolism as we watch the young Bartlett longing for love while surrounded by baby birds and blossoms.  As Bartlett later courts Anna, Griffith sets the couple in the lower left of a pastoral scene.  The scene of Bartlett’s longing also points to another technique that Griffith uses often, the close-up.  Griffith mastered the art of filling the frame with actors’ faces to bring viewers into the action and into the personal struggles of the characters.  In this scene, Richard Barthelmess overplays Bartlett’s longing, but Griffith’s use of close-up for effect remains a good decision.  The director also uses the tracking shot on Way Down East that he’d found so worthwhile in his two previous features.  At one point, for example, his camera tracks Martha as she rushes back to the Bartlett’s bringing news of Anna’s deceit.

While all of these elements are familiar, the tried-and-true Griffith technique that gets the most attention here is cross-cutting.  Like in his other films, Griffith uses this technique to build suspense.  Much of the suspense in the famous ice floe scene come from the film alternating between showing us the rescuer and cutting to the heroine.  More suspense is created as Martha is rushing home to denounce Anna and Griffith cuts back and forth between Martha and Bartlett’s effort to propose.  As this scene also implies, Griffith’s cross-cutting can elicit irony.  While Bartlett is at home longing for a mate, the film cuts back and forth from him to the false marriage that Sanderson has set up.  Way Down East shows Griffith refining the number of things he can do with cross-cutting.

Like many silents, Way Down East also uses the vocabulary of melodrama.  Anna trials are textbook examples of the extreme situations and heightened emotions that govern this style.  Anna is deceived by the evil Sanderson and bears an illegitimate child.  Her mother dies, and the new mother is cast out penniless.  The child then dies.  And just when Anna is beginning to recover, her secret past is revealed, and she finds herself cast out yet again.  The film’s story uses such heightened exaggeration to engage its audience.  And in addition to the melodrama, Way Down East relies on stereotypical characters like the spinster gossip and the comic, plain-faced country people.  Elements such as these are no better or worse that those found in other films of the era, though Gish’s ability to play to the camera hooks us into this melodrama.

Of course, the ending of the film is rightly famous.  Attention is generally focused on the ice floe rescue during which actor Richard Barthelmess actually leaps from ice sheet to ice sheet to get to Lilian Gish, herself floating down the river towards a waterfall on a piece of ice.  However, the prior scenes of Anna running through the winter storm in anguish at this final reversal in her life are equally gripping.  During this segment, we see images of bare branches that are intercut with Anna’s bent, clutching hands and arms in the air, and the film then cuts to a ghoulish image of the devastated woman’s face, eyelashes tinged with frost.  And all of these on film stock tinted purple.  It’s as creepy a sequence as anything Murnau would create.

In Way Down East, Griffith tells a straightforward melodramatic story using the cinematic language he had played such a key role in developing.  His collaboration with Lillian Gish gives this film the lift that puts it at the top of silent drama.

December 1: Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916 -- D.W. Griffith)

★★★★★

The word to describe Intolerance is “scale.”  Nothing here is modest or subtle.  Rather than one story, this one has four, and they’re not only spread over thousands of years but they’re weighty subjects like the fall of Babylon to the Persians, the massacre of the Huguenots by Catherine de Medici’s Catholics, and the life of Jesus Christ.  It’s hard not to admire Griffith’s ability to even imagine such a project, not to mention actually setting out to accomplish it.

Griffith’s ambition here doesn't stop at his choice of subject matter; what he puts on screen is every bit as impressive to look at.  His contemporary tale of the poor who are oppressed by capitalism and by self-righteous Reformers still manages to open with an opulent ball and elaborate costumes.  Likewise, the depiction of Charles IX’s France has some lavish royal sets and decoration as well as scenes filled with running crowds and soldiers surging from one side of the screen to the other.  The crowds appear, too, as Jesus struggles to Golgotha with the cross.  But it’s in the Babylonian story that Griffith goes all out for spectacle in Intolerance.  Thousands of extras dance on an elevated courtyard surrounded by undulating pillars that rise several stories from carved bases and end in large elephants.  In the interiors, Babylonians wear elaborate costumes, jewelry and make-up, and the battle scenes are replete with siege towers, basins of burning oil, and hundreds of soldiers scaling walls and being repulsed.  At one point, the camera itself takes wing, perhaps mounted in on early dolly, as it photographs a Babylonian performance.  The whole movie is visual extravaganza.

Griffith, too, ups the editing ante in Intolerance.  The previous year’s Birth of a Nation had clearly shown the power of cross-cutting to create suspense, and Griffith was quick to apply that lesson in Intolerance.  In the contemporary story, he cross-cuts scenes of the execution with scenes of the rush to get exculpatory evidence to the prison, for good measure tossing in a racing scene and a few impediments to the car carrying the evidence.  There is similar use of this editing technique in the Babylonian and the French stories as characters rush to warn others of the imminent threat bearing down on their respective beloveds.  But Griffith amplifies this technique of building suspense by cross-cutting beyond what he accomplished in Birth of a Nation because he cuts between the stories as he cross-cuts within each story.  Thus, the story of the Mountain Girl rushing to warn Belshazzar is cross-cut with the story of Prosper Latour rushing to warn Brown Eyes.  And this intercutting of stories builds suspense in a way impossible in the one story of Birth of a Nation because both the Mountain Girl and Prosper fail to save the object of their affection, suggesting that The Dear One might, too, fail to save The Boy.  With four storylines to play with, Griffith ramps up the suspense in Intolerance exponentially over that in Birth of a Nation.

All of which is not to say there are no problems with this early spectacle.  One of the biggest drawbacks is the muddled point of all the excess and suspense.  Only three of the stories in fact deal with intolerance – the Modern, the French, and Jesus’ – while intolerance doesn't seem to be an issue in the Babylonian.  And if we consider the subtitle, “Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages,” we only cover the Modern, the French and the Babylonian because we don’t find love as an element of the Jesus story.  And the film's odd ending of the peaceful soldiers, the angels and the divine light hardly seems appropriate to the stories we've seen either, especially given their tenuous thematic links.   Likewise, the woman rocking the cradle, the image idée fixe of the film, doesn't have a clear significance.  With the large time span of the stories, there’s no real reason to affirm the universality of Intolerance’s themes, as some maintain the image does.

Intolerance also suffers from expressing some of Griffith’s own intolerance.  The meddling do-gooders in the modern story come in for special scorn with their hypocrisy and their coldness.  With their holier-than-thou attitude, they take away The Dear One’s baby to turn over to irresponsible handlers; in fact, it’s the do-gooders’ need for more money that motivates the factory owner to squeeze his workers until they all strike and end up unemployed in the city.  Elements of the other four storylines imply criticism of these same women.  Jesus criticizes the public piety of the Pharisees, forgives a prostitute, and even makes wine; all these actions fly in the face of the values and practices of the modern do-gooders.  In the French story, religion is primarily a weapon, another indictment of religious people, and the sympathetic couple of the Babylon story are hedonistic lovers who aren't married.  If there is any unity among the four stories, it’s a shared critique of do-gooders and their manifestations in various ages.

Intolerance is a sprawling film of great excess, and it’s hard not to get caught up in its technical achievement and thematic grasp.  The film is far from perfect, but it is one of cinema’s great pleasures.

November 30: Birth of a Nation (1915 -- D.W. Griffith)

★★★★

When a film can have you rooting for the Ku Klux Klan to rescue a group of white folks from a black military unit, you have to pay attention to what’s been happening on the screen. And when that film is from 1915, there’s even more cause.  The paradox of the repugnant racism which informs Birth of a Nation and the aesthetic beauty and technical achievement of the film puts it on a very short list of movies that make me uncomfortable to watch.  In a bad way.  Like the anti-gay bigotry of Rome, Open City and the aesthetic idealization of fascism in Triumph of the Will, the pervasive racism in Birth of a Nation makes watching the film today an ambivalent experience for me at best.

Birth of a Nation isn’t overtly hostile to its black characters, but it sees them from a condescending, paternalist perspective.  The black population in the film dances barefoot, plays music, laughs and eats chicken and watermelon, but the people themselves aren't portrayed as inherently anti-white.  Much of the black/white tension in the film results from Northern whites manipulating the simple-minded blacks, though there is some resentment of whites in characters such as Stoneman’s housekeeper.  Another element of the bigotry here is that some black men, like Silas and Gus, are unable to control their passion for white women, which leads to conflict.  There aren't any workable interracial love interests here.  And though Birth of a Nation includes some positive positive black figures, these characters embody the paternalistic attitude of the film in their own way -- Mammy and Jake are contented servants willing to give their all for their white owners/employers.  Because of the paternalism in Birth of a Nation, the black characters don’t hate whites and don’t especially want to dominate them; instead, the African Americans here aren’t able to think for themselves and mostly take their cues from white ideologues who are bent on using them to upend social convention.

A striking thing about Griffith’s paternalistic racism is that it doesn't imply that blacks need to be repressed.  Birth of a Nation lauds Abraham Lincoln and approves of his leadership in the Civil War and his freeing of the slaves in the South.  It goes on to show Lincoln as trying to ease the reintegration of the South into the Union against hardcore ideologues like Stoneman and opportunistic carpetbaggers.  It’s these latter parties, who manipulate the black population to their own advantage, that are the real villains in this film.  African Americans are too simple to be responsible.

But aside from the racism that informs Birth of a Nation, the film is clearly a giant step in film narration. 

E.W. Porter may have pioneered basic elements of modern film like simultaneous story lines and continuity editing, but it’s Griffith – here – who turns these elements into what feels much like the language of cinema as we still know it today.  

Early in Birth of a Nation, editing lays out simultaneous stories as we visit the Stoneman family of Pennsylvania and the Camerons of the Piedmont.  The simultaneity here contrasts life in the North and the South.  After the war begins, Birth of a Nation also cuts between battlefield and home front, showing us what’s happening in those two spheres.  But the real conceptual leap in this film is its suspenseful conclusion as we see the Klan rallying, Lynch trying to force Elsie into marriage, and the Camerons being surrounded by a menacing black militia.  All simultaneously.  And Griffith doesn’t grant the audience narrative relief until all three narratives are resolved.  We worry as the Klan gathers, wondering if the riders will be in time to rescue Elsie, but then while the rescue of Elsie is underway, we worry whether Ben will get the Klan to the countryside cottage to rescue the Camerons.  It’s this headlong narrative drive that so engages viewers today that causes us to end up rooting for, of all things, the Ku Klux Klan; this section of Birth of a Nation is a real testimony to the power of the film language that Griffith masters here.

Modern viewers also recognize other cinema elements in the film that are familiar to us.  For example, Griffith uses editing to portray a psychological state of mind.  At one point, Margaret rejects a suitor as she thinks back on her brother, and the director cuts from a shot of Margaret thinking to one of her brother dying.  This edit evokes not only the brother’s death but Margaret’s pain over losing him and establishes her state of mind.  And Griffith uses many now-standard cinema gestures to create the scale and kinetic energy of a battlefield.  A shot of a woman with her children morphs into the introduction of a huge battle as the camera pans from a medium close-up of the family unit on a hill and to a very long shot that reveals a massive military assembly in the valley below.  Later, a matte insert combines scenes of Atlanta burning with frenetic battlefield movement in the foreground to create an onscreen battle that not only forecasts the same one in Gone with the Wind but also the large-scale SFX work in movies like the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Birth of a Nation uses such cinematic elements to put scale on the screen, but within such large-scale views, individual vignettes give us the human element of war.  The young Cameron and Stoneman die together in battle, a scene anticipating the melodrama that silent film would embrace so firmly, and there’s even a tracking shot of the Little Colonel leading a charge that is shot from the open bed of a truck ahead of the action. 

The 1915, Birth of a Nation also anticipates other features that would become cinematic stock-in-trade. 

There is the engaging humor in the way the guard at the hospital pines for Nurse Elsie.  His cute if futile gestures prefigure the Little Tramp as well as Buster Keaton.  And we have a full blown action hero in the sexy, shirtless blacksmith who fights off everyone in saloon.  It’s moving take on the action hero because, unlike today’s massive strongman hero, this one is ultimately shot in the back and killed, adding to our anger at the bad guys.  It’s hard to imagine a similar end to a Bruce Willis or Jason Statham character.  And Griffith even anticipates John Ford and David Lean in this film.  The brief shot of a silhouette of horsemen on a hill could have been shot in Monument Valley or Wadi Rum decades later. 

And I’m no expert, but I found the use of intertitles in the film to be inconsistent and, for that reason, interesting.  Some of them summarize and comment on the action we've seen, and others give dialogue.  Among the most interesting are the ones aimed to shore up the verisimilitude of the film.  Some explain that the way we see Ford’s Theater is the way it really was or that the tableau we see of the surrender at Appomattox is an honest rendition of the historical fact, complete with footnotes and references to sources.  Beyond the intertitles, Griffith also aims at being “realistic” by basing some scenes on Civil War photographs.  The image of the rider on the black horse with a wagon in the background echoes an image of Mathew Brady as do the images of battlefield causalities.  

All of which takes a viewer back to the uncomfortable paradox of this film -- the combination of its terrible racism with its breakthough discovery of powerful film language.  Birth of a Nation is certainly one of the most difficult films films for a viewer to know how to respond to.

November 27: Inception (2010 -- Christopher Nolan)

★★★

The central problem with Inception is that it's too complicated to be a movie, even a 2-1/2 hour movie.  That’s why we have the constant exposition of rules and amendments to them.  If we all knew we’d wake up if we were killed in a dream, that wouldn’t need explaining.  And we wouldn’t need to find out later that if we were dreaming under sedation and were killed in a dream that we’d wash up on the shores of our unconscious and our consciousness would be a mush.  But we don’t know that, so someone has to explain it.  And they have to explain what a “kick” is, why we shouldn’t use memories in a dream and whose projections hate whom and why.  And then there are the corporate and family connections that figure in the film.  And the technique for incepting an idea.  There is just way too much explaining in this movie.

There is also too little heart.  The most complex character, Cobb, is a string of adjectives – lovelorn, hurt, guilty, manipulative – but despite DiCaprio’s best efforts, there’s not enough time amid all the exposition to connect these parts into a cohesive personality.  And the other characters are mono-dimensional.  Adding to character weakness, Ellen Page, with one of the main roles in the film, is completely unable to commit to Ariadne and delivers her lines in precisely the same way regardless of the dramatic circumstances.  With so much exposition and so little sympathetic engagement, Inception doesn’t have a lot of options for audience appeal.

But it uses the remaining options very effectively.  For one, what Nolan can’t do with characters he does well with plot.  Like in Following and Memento, the plot of Inception is broken into parts and reassembled with a cleverness that draws us in.  To perform the inception, Cobb designs an intricate, three-level operation with the actions on one level being important to the actions on the others; time in all the levels is related.  And we even get a bonus level at one point.  Inception has something of a geek appeal in the way all the levels cohere, but they cohere with a satisfying consistency.

 There are fun visuals in the film, too.  Action sequences are effective and logical.  Chases like the one on foot though Mombasa and the one with cars and a train have lots of dynamism and surprise, and the James Bond-ish snow fight is particularly easy to follow.  Nolan complements these with great special effects.  Arthur’s fight in the free-fall hotel corridor is the central action sequence of the film as the fight occurs on floor, walls and ceiling, but the slow-motion plummet of the truck, too, has fun visuals.  Likewise the scene of Ariadne learning what she can do in a dream by folding Paris up and creating bridges and mirrors at will.  And all these aside, there are fun images like the bullet train speeding across a marsh or the elaborate décor of the Japanese palace that opens the film.  Nolan is at his most effective at technical feats like these.

Like much of Nolan’s work, Inception excels at the mechanics of an action movie.  Its plot is like a well-oiled machine, and technical elements like special effects and action hum.  There’s even the clever use of “Je ne regrette rien,” a cute nod to Marion Cotillard’s role here.  But someone should have reined in Nolan’s elaborate world and the complicated, unfamiliar rules that needed so much exposition.  And added a bit of heart.  Inception is fun, but it could have been much more.

November 24: Following (1998 -- Christopher Nolan)

★★★★

This is a surprisingly fun little film, enjoyable in its own right and and a pleasure to see from our vantage point now much further into Nolan’s career. The director’s first outing, Following is a film shot in black-and-white and complete with a dark mood, pervasive corruption, high-key lighting and a femme fatale in the person of the Blonde.  It also borrows the trope of starting with a cop interrogating our main character, and as is often the case in this genre, the hero doesn't fare well in the film.  It’s easy to see Following’s film noir roots.

None of this is very far from The Dark Knight Rises.  Not completely black-and-white, the later film is nonetheless often monochrome, and there’s clearly the same oppressive dark mood in both, even heightened in Following.  There’s also a fair amount of darkness and contrast lighting in Dark Knight Rises, and it has both a penitent and a full-blown femme fatale in Catwoman and Miranda Tate, respectively.  The correspondences are uncanny; without seeing Following, I wouldn't have picked up on the film noir elements in The Dark Knight Rises.

Yet watching Following is more fun than watching Nolan’s latest Batman.  Following is taunt and its elements, purposeful; in fact, in the reversal at the end of the film, the viewer even reinterprets all that has come before.  Something as insignificant as signing a credit card turns out to have been important to the story, unlike the rambling in Dark Knight Rises that can dwell on elements that don’t resonate later.  Why did Bruce Wayne spend all that time in an underground prison?  There is no such sprawl in Following.  This film is economical rather than sprawling and fat; every detail, item and even gesture has purpose.

This movie also has narrative engagement and suspense, two things lacking in The Dark Knight Rises.  Nolan’s fractures the plot of Following into four periods and intercuts them for the story, but there are always clear markers to cue the viewer into the respective parts of the plot.  We find ourselves watching the film as something of a puzzle, but this story structure also engages us with questions about how these parts are connected.  Why did the Young Man get cleaned up?  How did he end up with the bruises?  This type of narrative is somewhat contrived, and though Nolan uses it just as effectively in the later Memento, it’s not technique that would bear frequent repetition.  Here, though, it pulls us into the story.

And Following has lots of squirm-inducing suspense.  The film’s basic concept of following a stranger for fun is creepy and raises fear in the audience of the consequences; the tense scene when Cobb confronts the Young Man gets its suspense from this setup.  There’s also an extremely suspenseful scene when the two break into an apartment and Cobb casually goes through the residents’ personal items, even having a glass of wine in their kitchen.  That suspense peaks when one of the residents returns home unexpectedly.  And in yet another scene, the Young Man has to tape cash to his body while in constant fear of being caught.  That scene is has an intensity lacking at any individual point in The Dark Knight Rises.

Following has originality, creativity, engagement and suspense.  Darkness pervades this little movie, but it’s a sharp, cutting darkness rather than the continuing thud of a club.  This debut makes us hope that Nolan is eventually able to make contact again with the deftness and precision of this early work.

November 17: The Dark Knight Rises (2013 -- Christopher Nolan)

★★

If Dostoyevsky worked for Stan Lee, we’d get something like The Dark Night Rises.  An aging, battered Bruce Wayne opens the film in seclusion, licking his wounds.  Gotham crime rebounds, and Wayne goes through mental angst to decide if he should don the cape anew.  One he decides, and with the aid of a remarkable brace, he recovers his physical agility.  However, he is soon betrayed by the woman he loves (twice), loses his entire fortune, and gets badly beaten yet again by Bane, who exiles him to an underground prison in China (or someplace similar).  By comparison, Raskolnikov didn’t have much to deal with.  And into this unrelenting stream of pain, is added the infirmity of Commissioner Gordon and the fall of Gotham City into a sort of Reign of Terror with its own Robespierre. 

Then Batman defeats the bad guys and goes to Florence for coffee with his repentant girlfriend.  I kid you not.

The Dark Night Rises is a sprawl of cinema that veers from one mood to another and from one plot point to another.  First, Batman is crushed, but comes back to win the second round.  He’s imprisoned with little explanation, and he gets back to Gotham with little explanation.  To a degree, this aesthetic is true to the Marvel source, but on the screen, it becomes long and even annoying.  And Nolan isn’t inclined to pare his story down to a more fundamental narrative focus with consistent characters and values.  When we discover that Bane isn’t the real bad guy but that Talia is, this reveal nearly takes the wind out of the story; we lose Bane’s plot energy, but Talia doesn’t have the story interest to replace him. In the first 90% of the film, Batman undergoes so much pain and loss that we might be forgiven if we eventually wish he would indeed give up the cowl so his relentless pain would ease.

But for all these unsatisfying elements of The Dark Knight Rises, there are aspects of the film that warrant note.  One of the most interesting is that Batman is a past-his-prime male who has to try to find his place in the world outside the role he’s held for so long. Dark Knight Rises gives us a superhero that isn’t as super as he used to be, who is physically vulnerable and who can be tricked.  He’s a superhero we don’t see often.  Dark Knight Rises also makes a political nod in the direction of today’s situation of a shrinking middle class and an underclass with no upward mobility.  Catwoman resents the rich in an almost Robin Hood way, and Bane’s takeover of Gotham appeals to resentment against the 10%.  But if Dark Knight Rises has a political message, it’s difficult to read it clearly.  There’s a position here against Tea Party anarchy, but there’s also a feeling that Bruce Wayne and the moneyed class manage to keep order much better than the mob rule Bane incit and manipulates.  The ideology here isn’t clear, or it’s one that many of us might not want to think about.

As with the other two installments of Batman -- and many of his other films – Nolan goes for gut moments at the expense of the overall film.  Dark Knight Rises isn’t nearly as rambling and fractured as its immediate predecessor, but it’s not a very satisfying either.

November 16: Looper (2013--Rian Johnson)

★★★

Looper is the little sci-fi movie I’ve been wanting to see all year.  It doesn’t have grandiose ambition but instead takes a single conceit and works it into a clever, engaging two-hour cinema experience that teaseses the sci-fi-minded to daydream what-ifs. 

The strength here is Rian Johnson’s screenplay, as artful and precise as a music box.  In the future, if a criminal guy does't like someone, they send that person back in time, where execution awaits at the hands of a Looper, a killer who gone back in time to do this work.  However, Loopers must eventually kill their older selves, and sometimes this rule causes problems.  When Young Seth refuses to kill Old Seth, gang members capture the younger boy and carve an address into his arm which then shows up as a scar on the arm of the Old Seth, summoning the older man to his death.  It’s a grim scene as Old Seth experiences broken bones and missing appendages as he tries to get to the address, but it’s perfectly part of the time travel logic of Johnson’s music box.  The present affects the future, so when Old Joe starts to lose a clear idea of his (future) wife, an astute viewer will pick that up as foreshadowing about something that will happen in the future.

In addition to the time travel conceit that Johnson manages so adroitly, Looper putters right along with suspense from several sources.  What’s the gang going to do to the two Joes?  Will Old Joe be able to save his wife….and the same question: Will he kill the Rainmaker before the latter becomes a crime monster of the future?  And since we’ve already seen that the present affects the future, what will the future look like after Young and Old Joe have had their climatic encounter?  All these narrative questions keep you plugged into this fun, smart sci-fi movie.

Looper isn’t deep, intellectual sci-fi, but it’s smart and well-crafted.  And it even manages character development and passing cinematography along the way.  This is a worthwhile film to catch on a day when you feel like a ration of cinematic precision.

November 15: Oblivion (2013 -- Joseph Kosinski)

★★★

Bad notices aside, I enjoyed this film.  Visuals count, and there’s a lot of pleasure to be had from soaking up what’s on the screen.  From the clean look of the sky home where Jack and Vika live to NYC ruins like the public library and the Empire State Building, there’s most always something worth looking at in Oblivion.  Desolate scenes are empty, and panoramas have expanse, even when there’s a monster of a mechanism looming far away.  The movie also has an engaging tone of Romantic nostalgia for a lost civilization, similar to that in WALL-E, with Jack Harper as the last man on earth, left to maintain a few machines, sift through damaged artifacts of the lost culture, and engage his fantasies of what life must have been like.  All this makes for a good sci-fi movie, and if there’s the occasional Star Wars-inspired chase through a narrow canyon or struggle with a sophisticated version of Hal, so much the better.

There’s even enough suspense to hold our attention as we go through a series of surprises.  We discover, for example, that our Moon-inspired maintenance man has an little refuge in an area of rich greenery, and soon afterwards, we face the mystery of why the Scavs want to capture Jack rather than eliminate him in the library scene.  And before we linger on that point too long, a signal mysteriously comes from the Empire State ruins, a ship with a human crew lands, drones attack the crew, and Jack and a new character, Julia, end up with the Scavs.  The story continues to move quickly all the way through the big clone reveal, another salute to Moon, and on to the counter-attack against the Tet.  I enjoyed the ongoing narrative springs through the film.

Oblivion even gives us something of a sci-fi thematic question in the second part of the film: What does identity consist of?  In all the film’s loss and nostalgia, we discover that Jack 49 looks exactly like his clone, Jack 52, so 52 would logically have the same memories as 49;  however, memory scrub aside, it’s by no means clear that they share the dreams of their wife, Julia, or that both have their wilderness homestead.  With this same-but-different twist, the plot gets a little unstable.  And what’s more, Oblivion goes on to propose that Jack 49 can die while destroying the Tet – thus widowing his wife – but that Jack 52 can then replace 49 as the husband back on earth.  It’s a classic sci-fi conundrum to ponder if a bit creaky.

Oblivion offers some sci-fi satisfaction to fans of the genre, and there are good images and some narrative energy.  It’s not a bad way to spend a couple of hours in front of the screen.

November 14: Ender's game (2013 -- Gavin Hood)

★★★

I might have enjoyed Ender's Game more if it had had less money.  This is a film that feels like it should be smaller because of in the way it focuses on its simple ideas.  Ender's brother has failed at military college because he is too prone to violence, and his sister has likewise been bounced out because she is too empathetic.  Ender himself succeeds there, though, because he has a good balance of the two.  Ender's Game tells us that one should have martial prowess, but it’s important to understand the enemy first to be sure of the threat before attacking.  And in fact, when the militarist Colonel Graff finally gains the upper hand over the empathetic Major Anderson and uses Ender to achieve his battle aims, the teenage commander is appalled at Colonel’s manipulation and, gaining an insight into the Formics, sets about saving the species he was trained to destroy.  It’s this the kind of neatness of idea that makes Ender's Game have the feel of Gattica or Moon while simultaneously looking like a mega-EFX,  large cast star-vehicle.  It could have pulled off the thinness of its ideas if it had been less inflated.

Unfortunately, this is a big movie, and its scale magnifies problems we might’ve forgiven in a smaller film.  In Ender's Game fails to engage the sympathies of the audience.  The kids are oddly off-putting as they shout Marine chants, stand at attention and march together; adolescents going through adult motions don’t convince us that the kids have depth.  And nor does the script.  The film's contrived tableaus of school bullying and bf/gf play lack emotional depth and leave us as observers noting information.  It’s hard to engage the world of Ender’s Game sympathetically because the characters are as simple as the ideas.
addition to its neat polarities and the simple outcome of its story,

Ender’s Game ultimately provides us dedicated sci-fi fans with what we enjoy: some accessible ideas and lots of special effects.  It’s fun on screen.  However, you leave this film more dazzled by its look than moved by its characters and insight.

November 12: Captain Phillips (2013 -- Paul Greengrass)

★★★

Greengrass has created a perfectly good action thriller with Captain Phillips, a based-on-fact flic that’s not unlike a Jason Bourne movie.  There’s suspense galore as the crew hides in the mess locker and the engine room, as the pirates confront the everyman Captain on the bridge, and as the hijackers, Phillips in tow, face off against the United States Navy from their lifeboat. The performances by the pirate actors add to the intensity with the desperation in the characters’ backgrounds and their frustratingly limited language ability.  Hanks, too, contributes to the suspense when his even-keeled Captain finally starts to crack towards the end of the film.

And Greengrass’ signature wobbly camera gives a sense of immediacy to the action unfolding in front of us. 
Whether bouncing in the pirates’ boat or glancing around the bridge frantically, the view through the camera communicates at least a bit of a sense of participating in the drama.  The stakes also inexorably build from the small-scale, casual intimacy in the car as Andrea Phillips accompanies her husband to the airport, to the huge freighter that Phillips captains, and then to the image of the small lifeboat dwarfed by two warships and an aircraft carrier.  Importance increasingly bears down on the characters visually as the suspense builds in the film.

But for all the directing chops and acting technique in Captain Phillips, the movie doesn't quite make it past being a fleeting, cinematic thrill.  There is creaky exposition as the mate shows a map and explains that the Maersk Alabama will be quite close to the Somali coast; likewise, the SEAL leader has to articulate that he needs three simultaneously clear shots to end the standoff.  There is also an effort to elevate Captain Phillips from being a typical action film to being one with something to say about the First World/Third World struggle of today, but the mentions of the subject feel tacked on to the film’s main interest in suspense.  We see the desperate situation of Muse in his Somali village, and we hear his protestations that he has no options but to continue the hijacking.  There’s the concern that the First World Captain evinces for the Third World teenaged hijacker, who is approximate the same age as his own First World son in Vermont.  But none of these elements manage to inform the overall effect of Captain Phillips, perhaps because Greengrass is so good at action that such thematic gestures fall short. 

At the end of Captain Phillips, we’re more left more wanting to take a deep breath of relief than think about the collisions of economic disparity in today’s global economy.  And there’s certainly a place for such cinematic fun at the movies.  It's just that, having seen what Greengrass can do, I found myself wishing he had hit closer to his achievement in United 93 than his work in The Green Zone.

November 9: FILMS FOR OLD MEN

This is an interesting film theme that doesn't get lots of attention.  However, when a director tackles this topic seriously, some surprisingly good films result.  Here's my list so far.

1. Friends of Eddie Coyle
2. The Leopard
3. The Music Room
4. Wild Strawberries
5. The Misfits
6. Rififi
7. The Cowboys

My next question: I know the issues that men face as they age, and these movies all address them to some extent.  But what are some of the issues facing women as they age?  And what films address those?  Input welcome.

November 4: Greek Pete (2009 -- Andrew Haigh)

★

I was interested in this first feature by Andrew Haigh, and I wasn’t disappointed to see some of his Weekend style already under development here.  There’s the intimacy in Haigh’s style that I liked so much in Weekend, and after watching Greek Pete, I was surprised I hadn’t recognized the documentary roots of that approach in the later fictional film.  And the specificity I liked so much in Weekend is amply on display here, too.  Life in Greek Pete is a series of apartments inhabited by guys in the early 20s with the furnishings and decor you’d expect in an apartment block….just as in Weekend.  And like in Weekend, the cinematography consists of frequent, intimate close-ups and a soundtrack of voices talking over each other or speaking in the background while we’re watching another face.  There are even forays into local, specific social locations.

However, in contrast to Weekend, Greek Pete fails as a film, and that largely because of its main character.  Pete is simply not an interesting documentary subject.  We get to know him well through the camera, but Pete is just an immature, somewhat shallow 24-year-old who has a big cock and isn’t inhibited.  He may talk about missing his family during holidays and about saving money so he can buy his own house, but such statements have the heft of something a teenager might say.  There’s not much wisdom or investment in these pro forma musings.  Likewise, his relationship with his boyfriend doesn’t show much depth.  They have sex, they play at staged bathtub scenes, but we see little intimacy through this documentary camera, either physical or emotional.  And at this point in time, drug use and kinky sex scenes are almost to be expected in a film about a male rent boy, so those scenes aren't insightful or original either.

Greek Pete is a surprisingly uninteresting film by the maker of later, excellent film.  The contrast of the two is a good lesson in how hard it is to make a good documentary, even for directors who are talented at fictional films.

November 3: Weekend (2011 -- Andrew Haigh)

★★★★★

This is a wonderful little movie that brings the specificity and honesty that small film seems to be able to muster more easily than our summer blockbusters.  It’s billed as a romance and has a little the feel of Brief Encounter or Before Sunrise, but Weekend’s romance is mostly the catalyst for change that the two well-wrought characters experience.  It’s a unique, touching and truthful portrayal.

The center of the film is the characters, and Haigh develops them with a compelling specificity.  Russell is out but not open about himself with those around him, and he compartmentalizes his various experiences and feelings as a way of fitting in.  He’s uncomfortable with public expressions of male affection since that could result in social rejection, and he always hides the details of his gay experience from his straight best friend who, we find out, actually wants his friend to be more honest with him.  Haigh expresses Russell’s longing to connect in other details, too.  Russell furnishes his apartment with pre-owned items, making up stories about the connection people might’ve had to his tea cup, and the only space Russell is completely honest is when he’s writing alone on his laptop.  When we learn the details of Russell’s background, we can better understand his desire for connection and difficulty in connecting—Russell grew up as a state ward.

The garrulous Glen, on the other hand, maintains his distance from people by throwing up a big, extroverted wall of talk and posturing.  Right after his first night with Russell, he begins to externalize the experience by recording Russell’s impressions of the night for an art project.  Glen’s angry, in-your-face activism lets him politicize and abstract the pain we later learn he feels; details like his shouting into a courtyard fourteen stories below him show the intensity of his feeling if not the real object.  At his going away party, Glen is loud with his friends but not warm, and Russell learns they don’t feel they know Glen well.  Weekend develops both characters with an exceptional amount of real, specific detail.

The film uses the love story between the two men to motivate their respective character changes, and it’s the specific details here, too, that mark their changing relationship.  Russell is open with Glen from the beginning, but as Glen leaves Saturday morning, Russell thinks the encounter is just another entry on his laptop.  However, Russell has been feeling increasingly isolated – which we see in details like the opening scene with his friends and in the lunch scene with his friends – and after a day of life-guarding and watching life at the pool from the outside, he texts Glen.  Glen shows up, a significant gesture for the closed character, and the two spend a day together.  As Glen leaves later, he makes an move outside himself and invites Russell to his going away party; Glen sliding a hoodie over his head is an external expression of how vulnerable the invitation is making him feel.  As Weekend progresses, the more they talk with each other, the more the two men reveal and the more their love develops.  By the end of the film, Russell has opened enough to trust his straight friend Jamie with the details of what’s been going on in his life, and Russell opens up enough to try to catch Glen at the station.  For his part, Glen has opened up enough to break down in tears at Russell’s gesture, and Russell is open enough to kiss him in public.  As a last detail to mark Glen’s change, he gives Russell the tape he made on the first morning they awoke, honoring their relationship by not having played it for anyone and not keeping it.  It’s a touching detail.

And for all the engagement with the characters that Weekend creates, the film’s visuals are also a big part of
what draws us into the movie and keeps us there.  The local specifics make this film real.  There are trips on public transportation, a trip to a fair, and visits to locations like the pool and apartment complex that give the film so much of its authenticity.  While real, these same locations become cinematic expressions in the camera of Ula Pontikos.  The natatorium is dressed out in cinematic primary colors, and the buildings of Russell’s apartment block have a gray uniformity that echoes the lives of Russell and Glen.  As their love grows, an external building shot shows a light in Russell’s apartment alone, a metaphor for their spot of life in the complex of gray buildings.  Pontikos also uses artificial light to good effect in exteriors, especially in the fun, garish shots of the fair and an Edward Hopper-esque gas station.

The cinematography and editing also create great intimacy.  Pontikos is comfortable in extreme close-ups of the two leads, and we respond to the actors as real people, complete with pimples and messy hair.  Narrow depth of field, too, adds to the sense of intimacy and engages our eye in the film as our gaze moves from the strip of face that is in focus to the rest of the image that isn’t.  And Pontikos indulges our cinematic voyeurism as we scan the bodies of the actors, coming to know them as only their most intimate acquaintances would.  Haigh has said that he wanted a gay male or a female as a cinematographer so the camera might be more intimate with the male actors.  And while the cinematography is breaching the distance between us and the characters, encouraging us to connect with them, the direction is providing great, long takes that have the span of real conversation.  The cinematic here lends even more authenticity to the characters and their movement.

Weekend even has a little of the meta- in it.  Early on, Glen says that gay art will never be popular because the majority straight world isn’t interested in gay life or, especially, gay love.  It’s not hard to imagine Haigh behind that script line, wittily commenting on the barriers to a wide reception his Weekend will face.

And more’s the pity that Haigh was right.  Too few people heard about Weekend and even fewer saw it.  But with its specificity of characters, specificity of locale and even specificity of gayness, Weekend is a universal portrayal of two people trying to overcoming their social isolation through love.  It’s a story the movies have been telling for a long time if with a different vocabulary.