December 31: Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005 -- George Lucas)

★ ★★ ★ 

December 30: Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002 -- George Lucas)

December 29: Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999 -- George Lucas)

★★

December 16: In the Heart of the Sea (2015 -- Ron Howard)

★★★★

There are problems with the epic In the Heart of the Sea.  One big drawback is the way Ron Howard uses 3D.  The film is dark and hard to see, and its CGI is often so artificial that we might expect to see Smaug curled around a Nantucket church steeple.  The story also slows overly in the middle, and the script is occasionally too on-the-nose.  “I feel like a speck in the universe,” muses the depressed Owen Chase at one point, for viewers who hadn’t realized that Providence isn’t running things for the better in the world of this film.

But that’s what Moby Dick is all about, and Heart of the Sea is very much an IMAX 3D cinematic gloss on this classic.  Although Howard has ostensibly adapted a different, 2000 book for this film, his Heart of the Sea hews closely to Melville.  Like Moby Dick, it draws from a dark belief that God isn’t in charge of the universe, and an important stylistic element of Howard’s film, wonder at the material objects of the time, echoes Moby Dick’s long passages of such description.  The story in the film is from 2000’s In the Heart of the Sea, but the sensibility is Melville.

From its beginning, one of the attractions of In the Heart of the Sea is the way it lingers on the material aspects of whaling.  The camera gazes at rope and knots, while composition and lighting highlight objects like whaler-carved vignettes in bone and harpoon pins that carry prestige.  The dialog is rich in nautical specifics like types of sails and the time to use them, and there is a raw physicality to whaling as we see it here.  Not only do we experience the butchering and boiling down of a whale, but at one gruesome point, the young Thomas must climb into a whale carcass to the accompaniment of crew reactions to the smell and an evocative soundtrack.  Similarly physical, the scenes of Chase harpooning a whale communicate the whalers’ vulnerability better than most portrayals.  Beyond this, Howard dwells on the commercial side of the industry by giving the merchants’ board a lot of screen time and power, and he underscores the very real way class comes into play in the enterprise, like Melville.  Elements of the cinematography also add to the visceral physicality of the film.  The movie cuts between underwater and surface angles of the same action, and unusual angles create an almost documentary sense of realism.  For example, when the camera speeds at the ship's water line, Heart of the Sea can feels like 2012’s Leviathan with its pedigree from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab.  Howard’s focus on the materiality of whaling is a cinematic echo of Melville’s verbal emphasis.

In the Heart of the Sea is also a surprisingly philosophical film.  From the beginning, its characters express a faith in an ordered, just, moral world, but the character arc of Chase takes him to the opposite.  The merchant’s board is show to be a group of liars, and class trumps skill when Chase is appointed first mate to an unskilled but upper-class captain.  There is no justice in this situation.  And when the Essex crew confronts the great whale, Chase sees death come randomly, to the deserving and the undeserving.  The whale stalks the survivors as they struggle to make landfall, cruelly waiting until land is in sight before attacking them one final time.  This whale shows brutality at nature’s core rather than beneficence, a point pushed home even more graphically when the crew must resort to cannibalism for survival.  Yielding under the relentless pressure of these experiences, Chase’s faith in god, order and justice finally succumbs, so it’s no surprise when the merchants’ board commits yet another injustice and requires him to lie about the whale attack and the consequent events.  Through the film, Chase comes to realize that both nature and society are vicious, and he only recovers himself by falling back on virtues that permeate American cinema – individualism, as he maintains his personal honor by resisting the board’s pressure; and love, as he returns to his waiting wife.  Chase’s way of seeing the world by the end of the film is similar to that so pervasive in Moby Dick.

An annoying paradox of Heart of the Sea is the way it backs away from the very message it carries.  While Moby Dick is “nature red in tooth and claw” in the novel, Howard isn’t willing to let his whale be what the rest of the film characterizes him as.  While sometimes showing the whale as part of vicious nature, Howard also justifies the whale’s action as defending the pod against the whalers and fighting back after being attacked.  One especially saccharine moment has Chase look at the eye of the whale as though the two were communicating and decide not to throw his harpoon.   These moments are contrary to the general direction of the movie and make little sense in a film where the whale later stalks and toys with the sailors.  It's as though Heart of the Sea can’t quite embrace the darkness it unveils.

But flaws aside, In the Heart of the Sea is ambitious, deeply engaging and thought-provoking.  It lingers in the memory and makes us think about how we see the world, even here on land.

December 7: Timbuctu (2014 -- Abderrahmane Sissako)

★★★★★

December 6: The Snowtown Murders (2011 -- Justin Kurzel)

★★★

For all its punchiness, The Snowtown Murders feels derivative.  It shares the grittiness of the previous year’s Animal Kingdom, as well as that film’s setting in a poor, urban community in Australia.  There’s also a similar narrative aesthetic at work in the two films: a dramatic storyline punctuated by bursts of intense violence.  And Snowtown even has the washed-out color palette of the earlier film and its active camera.  Unsurprisingly, Adam Arkapaw is the cinematographer for both movies.

Yet Snowtown isn’t the achievement that Animal Kingdom is.  The fact that we’ve seen most of these elements, and in combination, lessens the effect of this 2011 film, though director Justin Kurzel has perhaps tried to distinguish his film from Animal Kingdom by ratcheting up the violence and mixing more sexual scandal.  However, the success of Animal Kingdom relies less on shock than on David Michôd’s giving us full characters in complex relationships and stressful situations, and Kurzel fails in that important regard.  Both films give us big, silent, passive kids, but Michôd lets us understand and sympathize far more with J than we can with Kurzel’s Jaime here.  And going beyond that, we also understand and sympathize far more with all of J’s brothers in Animal Kingdon than we can with Jaime’s.  Animal Kingdom gives us family of people we understand and engage with, but Snowtown only gives us story elements that move us from one shock to another.

Kurzel effectively appropriates and intensifies many of the elements of Animal Kingdom, but despite all the shock, Snowtown feels more like an exercise than a film with a heart.

December 4: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015 -- Francis Lawrence)

★★★

After the monotony and repetition of Part 1, it's good to see The Hunger Games pull up its pants and move ahead more vigorously to its conclusion in the second part of Mockingjay.  Although the plot here concerns the final assault on the capital by the rebels, the film manages to have some Hunger Games combat because President Snow has ordered his gamemakers to set up booby trap pods to slow the rebel advance.  With that, we get to see some of the trappings we’re used from the earlier films: video reviews of combat, heraldic music announcing combatants’ deaths, and even a short appearance by Caesar Flickerman in all his colored plumage.  It’s good to be back in the Panem war games.

Part 2 also gives us some character elements that move the story along.  One of the biggest questions here is whether Peeta is going to attack Katniss or snap out of his programming.  And on Katniss’ side, the question is whether she is going to finally choose Peeta as her mate or Gale.  This duo of suitors offers an increasingly clear contrast in the concluding episode, too.  There’s a sharp delineation here between the more domestic, artistic male and the pragmatic, harsh, warrior, and in keeping with the way the series challenges social roles, it ultimate not only endorses the milder male but punishes the more aggressive.  Julianne Moore delivers us another interesting character element in her President Coin.  The steely leader of the rebels never becomes the caricature that President Snow is, and while there’s plenty to unsettle us about her, Moore keeps her at the edge of plausibly acceptable.  Maybe that’s why Boggs has to give us such an on-the-nose warning about her.

And since this is the last film of the franchise, Lawrence takes some time to look back at the other films and to give us some time with many of the characters we love who are still around.  There’s mention of characters we’ve lost, like Cinna and Rue, and reminiscence of moments like Peeta burning bread to give it to Katniss, Gale hunting in the woods with Katniss, events in the earlier Games, and the reaping that swept up Katniss.  We also get a satisfying moment with old friends like Effie and Buttercup, making their endearing usual contribution, and we have a few longer moments with people like Joanna, Finnick and Haymitch.  The reach of Part 2 back to the series’ lore makes this part of Mockingjay far more engaging than the Part 1.

The story here, too, is more interesting than in the first part of Mockingjay.  In addition to the tension around Peeta, we wonder throughout how the final showdown between Katniss and Snow will be resolved, and the final showdown itself at the film’s climax has a logical if surprising turn.  The film has a good deal of foreshadowing, too, from the massacre of refugees towards the end to the death of Coin.  The story of Part 2 maintains its suspense nicely, even as it slows down for the team combats.

Until the film’s awkward ending.  After the bleak strife that has characterized the entire franchise, Lawrence gives us a jarring conclusion that looks and feels like nothing that has preceded it in the series.  The script gives us no transition to the brutally clichéd happy ending here, though transitions aren’t the strength of this final installment anyway.  For example, the Gale we watch throughout this episode is a significantly harsher pragmatist than we’ve seen in the previous installments.  Still, the gauzy happiness of the last scene of the film has little relation to the rest of the four-film series.

But despite awkwardness like this, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 is genuine entertainment, a final return to what has made this series one to follow for several years

November 30: The Lives of Others/Das Leben der Anderen (2006 – Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)

November 29: The Tourist (2010 – Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)

★★★

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s second film is a fun homage to a type of Hollywood that we no longer see much of.  Elise Clifton-Ward is a chic heroine who inhabits elegant locations in Paris and Venice, and von Donnersmarck’s direction dresses her elegantly, gives her witty dialog, lights her in a striking manner and moves her with a sexy swing.  She draws an innocent math teacher, Frank Tupelo, into the intrigue she inhabits, and an outlandish plot ensues as a relationship between the two develops.  It’s a film full of European exoticism, high style, romance, and maneuvering as the two negotiate the various parties interested in Elise and her criminal boyfriend.

The Tourist is simply fun.  Though it speaks more to cinema than to life, there’s pleasure to be had as it combines classic romance, suspense, humor and style from 60s American film.  While there could be more chemistry between Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, there’s no real reason for plausibility or authenticity here.  This film celebrates the pleasures of a type of movie that’s no longer made and shows us that such films can be fun even though they’re not deep.

November 27: Spectre (2015 – Sam Mendes)

★★★

In Spectre, the Bond franchise has again run out of steam after a strong reboot that began with Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. The element that has made Craig’s Bond so compelling – a humanized 007 who is strong yet vulnerable – has given in to the inertia the always seems to overtake a new James Bond.  Sam Mendes lets Spectre settle into a stereotyped James Bond who lacks character complexity or conflict, and the film is filled with franchise convention rather than reinvigorated elements.  Spectre is a competent movie with some fun parts, but having felt Craig involve us in the risks that Bond takes in other films, we’re let down to be left here with watching what we've already experienced -- stunts, a bad guy, exotic locations, beautiful women....and an Aston Martin.

November 26: La revue des revues (1927 – Joe Francis)

★★

The title pretty much summarizes this peek into part of the nightlife in 1927 Paris.  La revue des revues is a survey of big dance numbers from some of the major night clubs.  It feels a little like That’s Entertainment, but here there are performance numbers rather than clips from MGM movies.

And the dance numbers are often impressive.  Revue offers a series of lavish performance pieces with elaborate costumes and a range of dance from cancan to ballet.  One of the early numbers, Orgies, recalls the silent interest in ancient pageantry, but it also tells viewers right away that this is a pre-Code film.  It has more than a little eroticism and even goes to limits that can make a modern viewer uncomfortable.  Shortly afterwards, we’re watching bare-breasted performers changing costumes.

The outstanding tinting of the film adds to the effect of the dances, highlighting some costumes with one color and other costumes in the same number with another color.  And vaudeville backgrounds some of the performances, too, with acrobats, juggling and Cossack dance.  An unexpected pleasure, seeing Josephine Baker’s limber, rhythmic jiggles in the context of so much stiff choreography, helps explain why she was such a sensation.

Revue also provides context for Busby Berkley's best-know work, which starts some six years later.  The camera here peeps up under lines of synchronized dancers’ legs and stares down from above at patterns of the dancers’ bodies.  Drapery and parasols create flows of motion, and the stage is packed with sequins and performers.  These are all elements that Berkley tightens into some of his best work.

But for all their historical interest and range of subjects, the shows in Revue ultimately make the movie seem long for a modern viewer.  While the dance numbers may range from Babylon to Spain to 17th century France, the limited choreographic vocabulary here eventually begins to seem monotonous.  And technical restrictions of the 1927 camera limit what a director can do, though cutting the dancers’ feet out of the frame would seem a preventable technical error.  The music of the Lange restoration that I watched is another problem with this film.  Taranta-Babu’s score operates in a narrow tonal range, and the performance never seems to dedicate itself totally to the music.  One could imagine that occasions of intense strings, horn or percussion might have livened up the original music.

The frame story of the film doesn’t contribute much interest to Revue either.  It’s a story with typical elements of a silent film, melodrama like Gaby’s spending her last money on a theater ticket and the sentimentality of a contrived happy ending.  But like the music, this story lacks the intensity it needs in order to engage us.  This story is similar to the dialogues in That’s Entertainment  that stitch together the routines but it don't add to the film.

Revue des revues gives us a good, documentary-like glimpse of period musical performances.  It’s not good cinema, but it’s interesting to see this aspect of performance art at the close of the silent era.

November 23: Suffragette (2015 – Sarah Gavron)

★★

Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette is a film that’s dedicated.  It dramatizes the latter stages of the struggle of British women for the right to vote, and it portrays not only events and people but also the context of the suffrage struggle.  In this film’s 1912, most British women seem opposed to the notion of women voting, and patriarchy is brutally conservative when challenged by women seeking equal rights.  And Suffragette shows why women needed the right to vote in that historical moment.

But just as the cinematography here is desaturated and monochromatic, so are the story and characters oddly bland.  Carey Mulligan, as Maud, hits all the right notes in the film’s leading role, just as the rest of the cast does, but Gavron ultimately delivers a film that keeps us from involvement in the characters and their actions.  Even in the climax toward the film’s end, we find ourselves distanced and observing rather than feeling what is happening, perhaps because this climax involves a character we hardly know.

For all Suffragette’s dedication to its cause and effort to evoke the context of the struggle for women’s right to vote, this film succeeds more in educating us about history than in inspiring us to its cause.  As education, it’s remarkably effective, but as cinema, it doesn’t inspire.

November 5: Steve Jobs (2015 – Danny Boyle)

★★★★

November 3: A Lady of Chance (1928 – Robert Z. Leonard)

★★★

This is a charming movie that moves along on the clichéd contrast between the hardened con artists of the city and the trusting, family-oriented folk of the countryside.  The open face of the wholesome-looking John Mack Brown contributes a lot to the sentimentality that engages us in  A Lady of Chance, but it’s Norma Shearer that we most enjoy watching.  Her face expresses emotion with an uncanny precision throughout, whether sizing up a rival or leading on a mark, but it’s her moments of conflicting emotion that showcase her skill.  After Steve proposes, Dolly is left to pantomime marriage alone  in her room, and Shearer’s quicksilver face runs back and forth on a spectrum between cold happiness at landing a quarry and the joy of being sincerely loved.  We see this same flicker of emotions in a scene outside the farmhouse later in the film.  These are moments of bravura silent acting.

A Lady of Chance has other allures.  In addition to the film’s harsh set of values, its pre-code aesthetic lets a few racy moments go by, like when Steve touches Dolly’s proffered upper thigh or when he tries to remove her stocking.  But it’s the acting that engages us here and has us pulling for the couple in the melodramatic ending.  It’s a fun movie.

October 27: Crimson Peak (2015 – Guillermo del Toro)

★★★★

Viewers have to grant Crimson Peak its givens.  The film’s an anachronistic project with its heart in late 19th century gothic romance.  It’s not ironic about the genre conventions, and it doesn’t try to overly update them.  Instead, it respects the form and integrates del Toro’s unique visual talents into a sumptuous cinematic use of the style.  Vieweres have to be willing to buy into the genre and into del Toro’s vision, but Crimson Peak is a great experience for those who can.

Allerdale Hall, aka Crimson Peak, is the most obvious gothic element here.  It’s a grand, decaying mansion full of gothic arches, stairways and halls.  The ceiling has given way in the main room, so we see the rich interiors with rain or snow filtering into the frame.  Black, wispy ghosts lurch into the frame on occasion, and every available space on the screen seems to be filled with splendid, baroque fabric or Victorian exotica.  A unique del Toro contribution here is the red ooze that leeches from the house: it flows down walls and runs through pipes.  When characters walk through snow, their footprints turn red behind them the way snow turns to clear slush behind the rest of us.  The film explains that this color comes from the unique red clay that underlies the mansion.

The characters likewise come from the gothic world.  There’s a blonde, romantic heroine who wants to write about ghosts, and a disturbing brother and sister who have an unhealthy though unclear relationship.  A protective father and a rescuer boyfriend round out the cast of characters.  And the actions of these characters are appropriately melodramatic.  The father is killed when he discovers important information about the Sharpe siblings, though his gory death is a special del Toro touch.  Thomas Sharpe begins his affair with Edith to get her money, though he sincerely falls in love with her and must sacrifice himself to save her.  And the final conflict between Edith and Lucille Sharpe is high drama as Lucille runs down stairs with her dress billowing behind; here again, there are evident del Toro contributions to the gothic showdown.

As much as del Toro brings his own sensibility to the gothic in Crimson Peak, this film is still a literary-like delight.  And it’s as lean and cohesive as any 19th century novel, and a good deal moreso than many films.  Crimson Peak invites its viewers to enjoy the gothic and del Toro and to sit back and savor very rich visuals.

October 21: Bridge of Spies (2015 – Steven Spielberg)

★★★

The one pleasure that carries all the way through Bridge of Spies is its lush appropriation of espionage noir cinematography. Full foregrounds catch the eye to lead it deep into the back of the frame, and low camera angles pair with low key lighting to suggest to us what noir might have looked like in muted color.  Even sets like that of the bridge, with its oddly unnatural light and its simulated snow, have the artificial quality that noir sets embraced.  And weaving through this beauty is Spielberg’s elegant, modern camera.  And jump cuts keep us attentive to what’s on the screen by popping us between storylines and characters.  Bridge of Spies is a beautiful, engaging film to watch.

And it starts out with an equally strong narrative.  In the movie’s 1957 America, the US distinguishes itself from the Soviet Union by emphasizing the rights of individuals as guaranteed in the constitution.  However, the first half of Bridge of Spies shows patriots who want to fight the Soviets by, ironically, compromising the very constitutional rights they maintain as essential to America.  Through the court procedural that is the first half of the film, the all-American Tom Hanks, as James Donovan, pursues justice for an accused Soviet spy, Rudolf Abel, through the court system.  But Donovan’s pursuit comes in opposition to sympathetic characters, like the Judge and even Donovan’s own family, who are ironically ready to throw away Abel’s legal rights in order to oppose the Soviets.   The first half of Bridge of Spies dramatizes this complex irony – trampling on an individual’s legal rights in order to protect those very same rights -- in a deft, affective way that certainly glances at some of the personal privacy issues America is facing today.  Bridge of Spies is not the first time a Spielberg film has used to past to comment on the present – Munich looks at how an obsession with fighting terrorism can undermine the very values that the fight means to protect.  The first half of Bridge of Spies works especially well because of the way it looks as well as the way it handles this complex issue.

If the film had developed its interest in this question, it could have been a unique, important movie.  Unfortunately, it drops this subject in the middle and moves into a reboot of a Cold War thriller with a deprived Soviet bloc, oppressive Communist leaders, an oppressed Eastern population, and spies on both sides that don’t inspire trust.  There’s even a painfully obvious parallel between a grey scene of East Germans being machine-gunned as they try to scale the Berlin wall and a color scene of kids playing in New York City scaling a tall fence.  Such an obvious pairing of scenes might well be a nod to the style of the period; there are similar paired scenes when people on the NYC subway frown at Donovan when he defends Abel but later smile when he negotiates a hostage release.  But echoes of a Cold War style or not, these elements move Bridge of Spies away from the interesting ideas of the first half into one where the West is good, the East is bad, and the humanity individuals can span this gap.  The cliché at the heart of the second half of this film deflates the tension and, concurrently, our interest flags.

Bridge of Spies is half a great movie, but its visual beauty can help us overlook some of the comfortable triteness of its second half.

October 16: Black Mass (2015 – Scott Cooper)

★★★

There’s nothing really wrong with this movie – except maybe a little unmotivated IRA action – but Black Mass doesn’t bring much innovation to its genre either.  Everything is capable, from the mood through the plot to its characters, but Scott Cooper doesn’t break any new ground in intensity, suspense or surprise here.

What really works in this film is the performances.  Whitey Bulger is the best character Johnny Depp has created in years.  With his prosthetic head piece, light blue contact lenses, and thin, draped build, Depp holds the screen whenever is on it, particularly when we look into his eyes.  And we're jarred when Bulger sociopathologically oscillates between nice and murderous even though we’ve seen similar characters do the same thing in other films.  

The rest of the cast is equally effective if less riveting.  Joel Edgerton’s John Connolly is perhaps the most complex character in the film.  The script calls for him to develop as a character, and Edgerton gives us a Connolly whose posture and body language evolve in step with an increasingly sharp wardrobe. Perhaps the best-written character in the film, Connolly has complexity as he uses Bulger to promote his own law enforcement career all the while remaining loyal to his friend, to the point that his narcissism undermines his own marriage.  It's a broad but taunt performance.  Playing Connolly's spouse, Julianne Nicholson, makes surprisingly effective use of her limited time on screen as Marianne Connolly, managing to show an entire character arc in a handful of appearances and to anchor one of the creepiest scenes of the movie.  And Benedict Cumberbatch gives us a loyal and conflicted "Billy" Bulger, Whitey’s brother.  In his restricted screen time, we see the love between the brothers while recognizing the need for them to stay apart.

Black Mass delivers a very competent gangster film with interesting characters and outstanding performances.  We’ve seen this before, but the acting here makes this film worth a look.

October 15: Sicario (2015 – Denis Villeneuve)

★★★

October 14: The Martian (2015 – Ridley Scott)

★★★

One key to understanding The Martian is Mark Whatney’s potatoes.  After he’s stranded, the film imbues them with centrality and importance.  The movie can’t move on without the potatoes, and we’re as concerned about them as we are about Mark himself for one depends on the other.  despite the film's dwelling on them on imbuing them with importance, they suddenly exit after an accident, but rather than The Martian ending at this point, the loss of this vital element is hardly a speed bump; in fact, it becomes the springboard for more action.  In this film, Mark Watney’s potatoes are just a device to keep the story running, and their fate highlights that the focus of the film is action and narrative suspense; The Martian isn’t a movie of complex characters or deep insight but rather a pleasurable way to spend a few hours in the cinema.

This film’s reliance on melodrama and suspense is almost out of the silent era.  As early as the storm that strands the hero, The Martian moves from high-risk situation to high-risk situation with occasional melodramatic gestures bridging the highs.  The Chinese provide a helpful (and secret) rocket; a young, braided, African-American analyst finds a path to Mars before Mark runs out of food; the NASA crew supervisor disobeys orders and sends information about a dangerous rescue opportunity to Hermes.  Melodramatic event follows melodramatic event in keeping us plugged into the action here, and this melodrama works as well here as it does in stories like Frank Borzage silents.

A lot of good cinematic technique also keeps us in the movie.  The Martian could easily have bogged down under all the detail and plot twists, for example, but economical editing compresses the action and story so well that, despite the film’s 140-minute length, the narrative engine doesn’t falter.  And many of the visuals suggest cherry-picking of effective sci-fi gestures that have engaged us in the past.  Seen from the outside, the Hermes spaceship recalls the vessels of 2001 with its slender body and rotating rings, and inside Hermes, we watch characters pop down into compartments like they do on Kubrick’s Discovery.  Astronautic bumping around during EV activity recalls the visceral suspense that distinguishes Gravity, and Scott even applies some of his own characteristic film-making with the landscapes here.  The magnificent views of Mars with the tiny lights of Mark’s vehicle barely visible recall scenes from Prometheus and even Noah.  The editing and the visuals link up with melodrama to make this film fun.

The Martian is primarily competent.  Its story touches and moves us.  We worry at every one of Mark’s failures and feel happy with every success.  We rejoice with the world as he is finally rescued.  The film’s contrivance sometimes feels overly market driven -- for example, the multi-ethnic cast feels like it wants to include every potential audience, and there’s an especially clear gesture to the Asian market – but the suspense and melodrama of this story carry us past these.  This market orientation might explain the altogether unsatisfactory ending of the film, though the closing credits are among the wittiest and best integrated into a recent Hollywood movie.  When we part company with Mark, he's delivering truisms about his experience is a profoundly cliched setting.  Thankfully, the end credit segment gives us a more satisifying, occasionally bittersweet final experience with the rest of characters.  Simultaneously identifying the actors and showing us the characters' condition in life after thier return, this segment is one of the most original and effective in the film.  But The Martian is a fun, solid, Hollywood vehicle as it hums along and generates lots of pleasure for the audience.

August 8: Gates of Heaven (1978 – Errol Morris)

★★★★★

August 8: The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins (1968 – Les Blank)

★★★★★

The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins opens in a rural countryside with green fields, a dirt road and a broken-down wood fence.  Incongruously, a group of what looks like ramshackle farmers is playing music in the road, and just as unexpectedly, the camera that is watching them swings from one player to another, once even wandering off the harmonica soloist in obvious anticipation of a guitar solo that doesn’t come.  The camera swings back to the harmonica.  This opening sets up the rest of the short film: We see the environment that gave birth to Lightin’s blues, but we see it though a camera that is not only observant but also engaged.  We’re participating in Blank’s personal involvement with what’s before him.

Fortunately for us, Blank has a knack for putting people at ease, for picking out nuggets from conversations and for not interfering in important moments.  Early in the film, the camera is in a simple room with Lightnin’ playing guitar and another man who is singing.  At one point, the singer goes down on his knees, vocalizing a deep, raw emotion while Lightnin’ continues to play.  The singer is overcome, but it’s not clear if it’s with happiness or pain, if he’s laughing or crying.  But as he sways, it’s still music, Lightnin’ is still playing, and there on the floor of the dingy room, we see the rawness that the blues is in a way no text could describe it.  Lightin’ later tells us that the blues is a preacher preaching, which sounds like the not-uncommon formulation that the blues is a secular version of gospel music.  But Blank goes beyond such bromides and enables us to authentically hear what the blues is saying.  In one performance, Lightnin’s words are “she said…,” and then the lyrics drop out for an intense several bars on his guitar.  Lightnin’s words come back with “…that’s what she said,” an emotion that was palpably beyond words.  As we learn with Blank, that’s what the blues is.

The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins also immerses in the blues by showing us the physical environment that nourishes the music.  It’s one of rural poverty and small clapboard houses, of tiny interiors with shabby furnishings.  It’s also one of deep humanity and of the ability to experience joy.  African American cowgirls dance with their midriffs exposed and a pistol on their hip, African American cowboys stick on bucking broncos during rodeo competitions.  And when Lightnin’s plays, everyone dances, while Blank’s camera lingers on the faces of those in attendance, letting us how they experience the music.

Another strength of this small film is the way it acknowledges its own subjectivity.  People look directly at the camera throughout, and we follow Blank’s obviously subjective gaze as he sees things he’s interested in, like we did in the opening sequence.  Other moments highlight the elements of film-making.  At one point, we’re watching two men kill a snake by a railroad, and as we see this, our sound is an interview that was clearly done afterwards.  The sound has been edited in from an entirely different moment of Lightnin’s life.  Throughout, The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins isn’t an objective rendering of an objective reality; it’s a subjective construction of a subjective experience.  And the film is more honest for that.

The strength of this film lies in the way it gives Lightnin’ Hopkins’ music such authenticity.  Blank watches Hopkins and talks with Hopkins, and he observes the environment Hopkins lives in.  The film unites all Blank’s discussion and observation into a powerful understanding of what the blues is and then communicates that understanding to us.  Through this short, we get a deep appreciation for the fact that the blues in't a style but a deep, authentic cultural expression.

August 7: Grey Gardens (1975 -- Albert and David Maysles, Ellen Hovde & Muffie Meyer)

★★★★

August 6: The Man with the Movie Camera/Chelovek s kino-apparatom (1929 -- Dziga Vertov)

★★★★★

August 5: Hoop Dreams (1994 -- Steve James, Frederick Marx & Peter Gilbert)

★★★★★

August 4: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 (2012 -- Bill Condon)

★★★

At minimum, Bill Condom’s Breaking Dawn - Part 2 is a competent action thriller.  The thriller plot proceeds from the recognition of the Volturis’ threat to the assembling of a team to resist them and then culminates in the confrontation in the field.  Getting to this faceoff, we get to meet different vampires from different areas of the world and we ponder what’s happened to Alice and Jasper. 

But it’s the other things that we watch while getting to the climax that are more interesting.  Bella becomes the central female action hero as she tosses Edward and Jacob about and out arm wrestles the powerful Emmett.  She has superior self-control in resisting the urge to feed, and she develops her own super power quickly.  She even takes the lead in love. 

Such dominance is standard fare in the new genre of female-empowerment action heroes, but as the film builds to its final confrontation, we see that there is more to Bella than simply being stronger than the guys.  She is a loving mother whose primary concern to protecting her daughter, Renesmee.  She’s also a loving wife who wants to protect her husband and a loving daughter who wants to protect her father.  And Breaking Dawn, Part 2 pauses for more tenderness than the bulk of today’s action films.  Bella’s early love scene with Edward has more soft-focus and lingering than do similar scenes in other action films, and Condon brings poignancy and tenderness into his film far more than other action film directors do.  Breaking Dawn Part 2 gives us a tough action hero but also one infused with more traditional feminine characteristics.

This film has its faults.  It can be saccharine, trite, clumsy and obvious, and everyone in the cast clearly isn’t as accomplished as many of the prominent actors here are.  But an action thriller that can spend so much time on love and tenderness is a unique contribution to the genre and makes Breaking Dawn Part 2 worthwhile. 

June 27: Firefly (2002 -- Joss Whedon) & Serenity (2005 -- Joss Whedon)

★★★

Joss Whedon’s  been busy with two Marvel Avengers movies lately, and it’s easy to see why they’re a good fit for him.  The Avengers movies concern a disparate group of individuals who must learn to work as a team in order to succeed,  the same theme that Whedon’s earliest work focusses on in Firefly and its movie spin-off, Serenity.  The idea of building a community or team couldn’t be clearer in both his earliest and latest work.

In Firefly, this role of community-builder falls to Capt. Mal, who commands the Serenity.  Through all 14 TV episodes and the feature film, the one constant is the Captain’s focus on the importance of loyalty to the team and support of other team members.  The members of the crew take risks for the others, and betrayal of one another gets dire sanction. It’s not a big thematic shift from this to The Avengers having to learn to act as a single, cohesive unit despite their varied personalities and abilities.

But Firefly is a first effort, and there are drawbackss.  The acting recalls the deadpan declamation common in low-budget cable TV, and there are many problems with the script, from the too-frequently-painful dialog to the lack of character depth or arc.  A lot of the CGI and its design is good for its time, but the interiors recall those of Lost in Space or Star Trek some 40 years before.

An interesting aspect of Firefly is its overt drawing on the Western genre.  At the center of the narrative are two veterans of an interplanetary Civil War, having fought on the side that lost and then headed for the frontier.  And there are other Western characters like the dance hall girl, the tomboy, the hands and the preacher – all with a sci-fi twist here.  More obvious are many superficial references to Westerns, from the ¾-overcoat to the wood table and tin cups in the ship’s galley. The planets in Firefly are often sparse and dry, and horses and Conestoga wagons make appearances on this frontier.

It’s tempting to see these references as gratuitous, but Firefly/Serenity gets at some interesting intertextuality.  From watching Firefly, we recognize that the sheriff and his deputy isn’t far from the space captain and his sidekick, and a gruff Capt. Mal falls into a line of Western heroes that John Wayne so ably inhabits.  Evil, pretension, greed and ruthlessness drive both sci- fi adventure and the Western, and both genres can also be used as a search for knowledge and truth.  And if, like me, you like the way a Stagecoach deals with democracy and inclusion, you’ll get a pleasure out of watching how the crew of the Serenity grasp for the same despite their many differences. 

These early works by Joss Whedon have technical shortcomings, but the pleasure of watching the inter-genre play and of enjoying the theme of community in both make them worthwhile views.

June 25: Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981 -- George Miller)

TBD

June 24: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015 -- George Miller)

★★★★

I was caught off-guard by the beauty and grace of this film. The visual creativity here suggests Terry Gillam at his best, but Gilliam doesn't create the action and characters that George Miller does, and the intensity of the chaos and stakes in this film are especially compelling viewing.

The world of Fury Road is one of pessimistic existentialism.  It's a world of strength, oppression, violence, pestilence, dirt and exploitation, and the design of the film, as much as the action, creates this world for us.  Everything is rusty and dusty, and it’s a world created from scraps of the pre-holocaust civilization that have been repurposed for this brutal time.   It’s in this repurposing that Miller’s designers are at their most creative.  Vehicles have been cobbled together from a variety of forms of transport and outfitted with equipment unrelated to transportation like spikes, waving poles, a swaying guitar and flamethrowers.  Likewise, the many weapons here feature guns with repeating cartridges and spears, and masks are painted with skulls and locked closed with tines leading to the eyes.  Every surface in the film shows designers working to create a brutal, post-holocaust world.

And among all this, beauty.  An early shot that ties destruction and beauty in the film is the image of Immortan Joe’s wives standing in the desert.  Their armored tanker has broken down, and the shot of the group of women standing beside the wreck -- shapely, dressed in tailored rags, bronzed and posed like models for a summer fashion spread – juxtaposes their feminine beauty and the masculine devastation of the world.  And if any element binds together these values visually, it’s Charlize Theron’s Furiosa.  Furiosa is tanned, trim and beautiful, so it’s especially striking when we realize she’s missing part of her arm.  Onscreen, she embodies the world of Fury Road – one of intense destruction and intense beauty juxtaposed.

All the elements of the film develop this contrast.  Desperate flights have an ethereal beauty as Miller uses desaturation and color tint to create a look of splendor, and classical music sometimes makes scenes of desolation elegant.  The views of the Swampland, with its large, awkwardly-graceful devices wandering on a screen of deep azure tie beauty and desolation together with cinematography, an element Miller often uses effectively in sustaining this juxtaposition.  Even the choreography of the extended action scenes tends more to beauty than to the chaos of similar scenes in a film by Michael Bay.  Flexible poles with fighters at their ends wave during one assault, and a chilling allusion to blind justice lends a quality of beauty to another frenzied assault on the group.

And as beautiful as the film is, the characters manage to engage us despite their limited dialogue.  We feel for Furiosa as she realizes her dream is futile, and we root for Max to overcome the demons that haunt him.  We experience a sense of loss when Nux dies after we’ve followed his character arc from bad guy to good.  Fury Road doesn’t have the mythic element of the first Road Warrior, but it’s a beautiful pageant of starkly contrasting values.

June 23: Jurassic World (2015 -- Colin Trevorrow)

★★★

This is one of the more disappointing films of the summer.  Fourteen years after the last installment in the series and 22 since the original, Jurassic Park films have ossified into a formula: one especially significant dinosaur threat; intense, suspenseful action; a bit of wonder at the dinosaurs;  overbearing park leadership; threats to kids; and healed family/relationships.

This installment delivers all these in spades.  The CGI is compelling -- even if the parade of lunging, growling lizards becomes a little repetitious -- and there’s suspense as the Indominus stalks the boys and Owen, even if the tension has something of a familiar feel since it hews so closely to that in other installments.  The scene when the Indominus attacks the boys' gyrosphere certainly echoes the T-rex attack on the landrover in Part 1, and the vibe as Owen hides from the Indominus in the garage feels like that of the children hiding in the lab from the velocirapters of Part 3.  Some of the framing and action is even similar.  Likewise, the bad guys Jurassic World are arrogant and proud, as Jurassic Park bad guys always are -- Masrani, the owner, is arrogant overconfident; Hoskins, the military guy, sees the weapons potential of the  dinosaurs; and Dr. Wu actually returns as the craven researcher from Part 1.  Relationships among the principles follows the trajectory of those in other Jurassic Park films, too.  We watch the relationship of Gray and Zach build from Zach's indifference to brotherly love  to a general healing of all family relationships that culminates in the odd reconciliation of the parents and the restoration of their family.  Even Claire grows from indifference to love, mostly because she’s touched by the love around her.

The summer crowd will enjoy this competent film, but for all the sparkle and noise, Colin Trevorrow brings little originality or uniqueness to the Jurassic series with Jurassic World.  A sure sign of decline in the franchise, there’s some wit and winking at the conventions here, but Jurassic World feels much more like Moonraker than it does Dr. No. 

June 22: Things to Come (1936 -- William Cameron Menzies)

★★★

June 21: America America (1963 -- Elia Kazan)

★★★

June 20: Paris Blues (1961 -- Martin Ritt)

★★★★

June 19: Elmer Gantry (1960 -- Richard Brooks)

★★★

June 18: Run Silent Run Deep (1958 -- Robert Wise)

★★★★

June 17: Separate Tables (1958 -- Delbert Mann)

★★★★

The real star of Separate Tables isn’t Burt Lancaster or Deborah Kerr.  Director Delbert Mann and cinematographer Charles Lang show their stuff here.  Tables is beautiful to look at, and its beauty is an integral part of the action and emotion of the scene.  At one point, for example, John enters a hotel corridor with an agitated stride while the camera watches him from the opposite end.  As John hurries down the hall toward the camera, we watch him turn to the right abruptly and stop at Ann’s door, where he stands, head bowed.  The time we spend watching in this tracking shot builds our anxiety about his coming confrontation with Ann, and when Ann opens the door for him, the editing continues to increase the tension by shifting to a very long shot during which Ann talks to him while turning off several lights and John, in turn, begins to voice his anger while walking around and turning them back on.  The two long speeches during the long shot fragment when the two start a bitter argument and the editing launches into rapid shot/reverse shot pacing as the argument gets hotter and hotter.  The elegant camera work and editing here magnify their confrontation, tying their fight to the anger we’ve seen as John enters the building our dread in the long take that opens the bedroom scene, and making the intensity of their argument more gripping by quickly cutting from one face to another.  Mann’s elegant direction here intensifies our experience of the moment.

The lighting of this scene is also an example of how Mann and Lang use their rich black-and-white cinematography to focus on the content.  The scene starts with John standing by the bed, head down and the lighting making his face hard to see, a reflection of the emotional uncertainty he is experiencing.  The scene progresses with Ann turning off the lights and John sinking more and more into darkness, eventually becoming only a silhouette while her face remains clear.  After the lights are off, the couple moves to the center of the screen with him completely dark and only the outline of her face visible.  At this point, John begins to argue angrily with her, breaks away, and starts to turn the lights on. The clearer he becomes about his feelings, the more light he receives.  And the dialog in the scene even becomes a self-reflective gesture with John saying that people who don’t like light have something to hide.  It’s an outstanding sequence in the film that shows how Mann uses light to underscore the emotion and thought of the characters.

Mann also opens up the script, transforming this stage-derived screenplay into an authentic film.  Rather than the rigid, dialog-bound filming of a theatrical stage, Mann uses a set with windows that the camera can peer into and move around in.  Big windows let us look into and out of the dining room, and we look up to see Jean looking out her window on the second floor.  Mann’s editing creates rooms on the second floor, too.  The editing also creates this larger space by cutting between different conversations in different parts of the hotel so we don’t have the sense of spending the entire film in one or two rooms.  And Mann’s fluid camera makes the space of the movie feel big.

Separate Tables is not without its problems, though, and they mostly derive from the script.  The noble Miss Cooper is willing to give up John for Anne’s sake, straining our credulity with a stock character that rings hollow in a film of personal psychology in the leads.  Kerr’s Sibyl is always strung tight, but this tension becomes monotonous by the time Sibyl breaks.  Mrs. Railton-Bell is a one-dimensional stereotypical highbrow, and the professor is just as predictable and flat.  And Charles and Jean have no real role in the film at all; they retire at the beginning and reappear at the end.  It’s possible that, as the trailer suggests, Separate Tables is about various aspects of sex, in which case the liberal attitudes of Charles and Jean would have a place.  However, we’d then have to figure out why we have the professor or Lady Matheson, who don’t have much to contribute on the subject.  In all, the script of Separate Tables picks up too many characters and is therefore unable to do much with any of them.

In a related issue, Burt Lancaster’s John never seems to settle into a well-rounded character either.  Lancaster is compelling at each moment of his performance, but either he or the script is unable to create a unified, consistent character.  We see what John is doing at each moment, and there’s some consistency in it, but Separate Tables doesn’t present us with a character who is fully realized, who we can understand, predict and feel sympathy for.  The core of the character is oddly missing in this film.

Separate Tables is a fine piece of film-making that is worthwhile in many of its technical and creative achievements.  It’s a pity that the script wasn’t able to make all this endeavor more compelling.

June 16: Winter Sleep/Kis Uykusu (2014 -- Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

TBA

June 15: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia/Bir Zamanlar Anadolu'da (2011 -- Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

★★★★★

June 13: Three Monkeys/Üç Maymun (2008 -- Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

TBA

June 12: Climates/Iklimler (2006 -- Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

★★★

June 11: Distant/Uzak (2002 -- Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

★★★★

June 9: A Touch of Spice/Politiki kouzina (2003 -- Tassos Boulmetis)

★★★

June 8: Steam:The Turkish Bath/Hamam (1997 -- Ferzan Ozpetek)

★★★

June 3: Midnight Express (1978 -- Alan Parker)

★★★★

March 18: Topkapi (1964 -- Jules Dassin)

★★

The takeaway from watching this heist farce is that some cultural sensibilities change a lot over time.  Ustinov’s Arthur and Schell’s Walter still have some humor and pathos more than 50 years after Jules Dassin directed this film, but the same can’t be said for Morely’s Cedric or Hahn’s Hans <ouch!>, whose humor is tired and hammy.  But it’s Melina Mercouri’s Elizabeth who kills most of the fun for today’s audience.  Her lines are a series of tedious, obvious flirtations: Do you mind that I am a nymphomaniac? .... Don't waste it; use it!  And she drapes herself over each of the men at some point despite not having the screen charisma to make it seem like she’s being effective at teasing or manipulating them.  In scene after scene, such broad humor falls flat.

More’s the pity that Dassin didn’t drop the farce element of Topkapi and focus on the elements he’d mastered so thoroughly in Rififi because that’s where the great strengths here lie.  Like Paris was a major character in his 1955 film, Istanbul stars here.  An opening montage of the city shows us the wood houses, the street markets, the crowded bridges and boats, and the exotic architecture that makes the city so special, and Dassin even includes unique Turkish elements like the traveling carnival and a large oil wrestling tournament.    And the heist itself, with its Rififi-like silence and execution of an elaborate scheme, captures us with its suspense and its imagery.  It’s hard not to imagine that de Palma had this heist in Mission Impossible.  With de Palma, we watch Tom Cruise dangle above the temperature-sensitive floor while the director cuts between the main character and those supporting him; in Topkapi, we watch Giulio dangle above the pressure-sensitive floor while Dassin cuts between the main character and those supporting him.  The thieves in the two movies even wear similar gloves.

But for whatever reason, whenever tension begins to mount in this film, Dassin lets the steam out.  The little bird that unknowingly triggers the alarm of the Topkapi Treasury could have been an instrument of fate, but in this film, it’s the punchline for the authorities.  “A little bird told me” isn't even clever.  And we’re left with a pretty farce that isn't very gripping.