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)

★★★★