March 21: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1 (2011 -- Bill Condon)

★
About half way through this film, I hit the timeline button on my PS 3 to see how much longer it was going to be.  Breaking Dawn Pt. 1 is that bad.

At least the first half is.  It’s a long wedding and honeymoon fantasy that was so long and so bad that I was sure throughout that something was about to happen.  But it didn’t, and I was about to quit on the film when a story finally started.  Newlyweds Bella and Edward return from their honeymoon with Bella carrying a miscegenetic, vampire/human child with all the attendant problems that crossing racial boundaries has.  The Werewolves soon head out to fight the Vampires because of the situation.

This part of the film has its heart in the right place, dwelling on the theme of harmony among people, er, beings.  I was struck with how similar this theme is to that in The Host, in which same author, Stephanie Meyers, deals with the same issue through a war between humans and Souls.  And she resolves that war by the merging of the two groups in flesh.  Here in Twilight, the tension is between Vampires and Werewolves, and Jacob’s imprinting on the child points to some reconciliation there.  If I watch Part 2, I’ll be interested to see how that goes.

But I got very tired of another point in this film--its persistent, smack-in-the-face, anti-abortion message.  It reminds me of the abstention message of Eclipse, and it strikes me as a pity that both films make such strident and irresponsible points to the target audience of young girls.

 I hope that Part 2 manages to be more of a film than a wedding fantasy followed by preaching.

March 19: The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010 -- David Slade)

★★★
There’s no reason to be snarky about this film.  It’s has some painfully bad elements, among them a very predictable plot and some  terrible acting, especially on the part of part of Taylor Lautner, the werewolf whose smooth, ripped, mostly shirtless body obviates the need for acting chops.  …but that’s being snarky.

It’s interesting to watch a film like this one, which I can’t connect with but which teens clearly can.  There’s a lot of confusion and talk about feelings, and I’m struck that the pivot of the whole film is Bella, a girl; it’s significant that, for once, the female is at the center and the two male protagonists are mostly functions of her.  And the two main males are object lessons for teen boys: selfish jocks don’t get the girl, and the successful boyfriend listens to the object of his affection.  Girls get their lesson, too: family is important and don’t have sex before you’re married.  That latter lesson was so over-the-head that…..but I’m being snarky.

It’s not a terrible film, and with no ads and good special effects, it’s better than TV.  (darn, there goes that snarky thing again…..)

March 17: 12 Angry Men (1957 -- Sidney Lumet)

March 16: Network (1976 -- Sidney Lumet)

★★★★★

Network is such a prescient film that it’s almost eerie to watch it today, and it’s been prophetic throughout the 35 years since it was made.  These decades have seen the decline of news departments, the growth of conglomerates that swallow and then squeeze networks, and an increase in “personality” news. More striking still from today’s perspective is the rise of media that thrives on stoking anger—you have only to think of Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity—and the blossoming of reality TV.  Paddy Chayefsky’s script couldn’t anticipate the way media has changed because of technological innovation that opened the door for cable and the internet, but in 1976, Network already saw that that the media was going to become all entertainment all the time. With anger as it's main attraction.

Beyond its vision for the media itself, Network also talks about what will happen to media consumers.  Max is old school –married with friends, family, integrity and a long career.  In Network, he’s having problems in life, but he deals with them directly by having his winter/spring romance with Diana and negotiating the terms of his marriage with his wife.  His is a real life.  The new media person, the character of Diana, is one who doesn’t experience life directly but instead lives through the media she loves.  Diana has several former marriages, she doesn’t connect on a personal level, she lacks integrity, and she’s abrupt in sex.  All these characteristics show how she has trouble with real people and real emotions.  In fact, although Network seems a little on-the-nose in describing her as trying to turn her life into a series of TV program plots, that is how she lives.  Throughout her brief sex scene, she talks about ratings, and to talk with her about their relationship, Max has to talk about possible plot lines.  Perhaps because Network is so heavy-handed and affected with this observation, it rings somewhat hollow today, but as we watched Newt Gingrich in the 2012 Iowa Republican primary go from first to last as a result of negative campaign advertising on TV, a movie like this one does make you pause and wonder how much we’re inscribed by the media around us.


Network is unquestionably of its time, as New Hollywood as any movie you’ll see.  It’s earnest, advocative, and critical.  Lumet goes beyond the ideas, though, by getting strong performances, especially from William Holden and Peter Finch.  Robert Duvall, though sometimes too over-the-top, still brings a cinematic intensity to his role engages.  The weak acting in this film is, unfortunately, at the center—Faye Dunaway as Diana.  A lot of the dialog here is stagy and theatrical, and even Holden and Duvall sometimes have to work to keep the language from taking us out of the movie.  Dunaway doesn’t have the chops to do that though, and scenes like the one where she bustles into her office giving orders are more painful than anything else.


That reservation aside, this is an eye-opening movie.  It transcends its 70s topicality and manages to pull off social satire while making a surprisingly accurate critique of public media.  I remember rewatching Brazil ten years ago and being surprised at how it anticipated the Bush administration’s creating the Department of Homeland Security and increasing governmental powers in order to "combat terrorism"; rewatching Network today, when anger is entertainment, I had the same feeling of eerie amazement.

March 15: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007 -- Sidney Lumet)

★★★★★

After watching Clooney’s The Ides of March, I decided to go back to Sidney Lumet, who I kept thinking of as I was watching the Clooney film.  Now I’m not sure how I made that connection.  Maybe because I went back to Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and remembered Philip Seymour Hoffman in both.

That was about the only connection.  Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is a masterful film with great acting, pitch-perfect direction, a rich script and stakes.  Major stakes.  And heart.  It’s thriller about a heist, but it’s also a deep family-relationship film and a wide-cast character study.  This film is a wonderful cinema experience.

There’s a dark taint in the heart of the main character, Andy, though we only see the symptoms of the darkness for the first two-thirds of the film.  Andy manipulates his younger brother Hank, playing him like a puppet, and he patronizes a high-end drug dealer who provides him heroin and a place to use it, a Manhattan version of a Chinese opium den.  Andy also steals from his company, fails as a husband, and plans the robbery of his parents’ small jewelry store that triggers the downward spiral of the film.  And we come to realize that his relationship problems and fixer personality have roots in his past as the responsible older brother.  Before the Devil Knows has a deep, complex script that balances all these elements of this one character, and Hoffman delivers an intense portrait of the man who is holding all these pressures under control, barely managing to keep them in check, while the movie plot slowly intensifies the pressure from each one.  And as the pressure increases, we feel its intensification each time Hoffman inhales a deep breath or shifts his large frame awkwardly.  His is a great performance in an able script.

Andy’s younger brother, Hank, has almost as much complexity.  Played by Ethan Hawke, Hank is the failure of the family-- nervous, unreliable, weak and unable assume responsibility.  He has married a strong woman who’s divorced him, and even his daughter pushes him around.  Always seeking security, Hank is having an affair with Andy’s wife because she makes him feel good, and his fear of doing the jewelry store robbery leads him to count on Bobby, who bungles it.  The rich depth of the script here, too, even shows us how this the family history of Andy and Hank have led them to who they are in the film.  If older brother Andy’s calm but increasingly desperate attempts at fixing the situation create some of the tension here, the spoiled Hank’s frazzle as he copes with every new turn creates complementary stress.  The audience can only watch with bated breath as the stakes get ever higher for these two brothers who are still acting though their childhood roles.

I like Albert Finney as the father in this film, too, and I find his character adds even more depth to the portrait of the family and suspense to the story.  Lumet was already an old man himself when he directed this last film, and the detail to Finney shows the insight of an older director.  The settings that Finney works in, whether suburban dining room or Towncar, feel dead-on for an elderly man, and Lumet gives Finney the freedom to create Charles as a hurting, angry, inarticulate widower who feels like he might have been a failure as a father.  With his pants hiked up too high and his shirt tail tucked firmly in, Charles brings as much tension to the screen as his sons do, tension that continues to ramp up as the plot reveals more and more details of the taint within the family and the way it’s produced the evolving situation of the characters.

As Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead builds to a crescendo and past, you sit watching masterful performances masterfully woven into a thriller that’s also the psychological portrait of a family.  With so much skill, judgment and artistry at work, this is a mature film that sets a very high standard.

March 14: The Ides of March (2011 -- George Clooney)

★★★

I kept thinking of Sidney Lumet while I was watching The Ides of March.  I think the combination of political commitment, institutional corruption, firm handling of film mechanics and a willingness to look at a character or situation hard to see a taint, all these conjure Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Network and, more recently, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.  But Ides of March isn’t in a league with these films; their echoes only sound here.

This film’s visual language is standard issue.  There are a lot of capable images and some capable camera movement with nothing bravura or new, which is fine for a film that looks more at content and character than at story-telling itself.  Clooney is very capable indeed at this.

But such a movie needs strong acting and a strong story if it’s to be a message film, and I didn’t find either here.  I continue to be unimpressed with Ryan Gosling performances, and his portrayal of the campaign aide is the weak link at the center of the film.  For Ides of March to work, we need to identify with that character, feel his commitment to an ideal at the beginning and sense his slide into disillusionment until we understand the shell he becomes at the end.  But Gosling isn’t able to connect with us or take us on that trip.  Instead, his character’s arc feel s like a series of stages with time connections but without emotional links: Now-I’m-Idealistic, Now-I’m-Frustrated, Now-I’m-Cynical.  It feels like Gosling is striking a series of poses as Ides of March proceeds rather than showing us the glide path as Stephen develops from optimist to cynic.   I don’t know enough about film-making to be able to say whether that’s a failing of Clooney as director or Gosling as actor, but given what Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti are able to do with their much smaller roles, I think Gosling has to bear a lot of the responsibility.

This story, too, has so much contrivance that you’re eventually taken out of the film and you lose interest in its concerns.  And it’s not only melodramatic moments like the one when we discover Molly has had a thing with the Governor; the script has to add abortion to the mix.  And even that has to be one-upped by the suicide.  Midway though, Stephen asks Ida for help, saying they’re friends, only to be rebuffed; by the end, Ida needs him and uses the same line.  These types of contrivance don’t make this film engaging or effective but take us out of it and diminish our interest.

Despite all these reservations, I find Ides of March sincere, and I like work that at least tries to get at current issues through art.  The movie is the personal voyage of a character whose idealism is ruined, but it's also a politically-committed film, and I’m glad to see someone looking at this important aspect of our political system dramatically.  I wish Sidney Lumet were still with us to be able to handle the issue with more aplomb, but at least someone is trying.

March 11: Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011 -- Rupert Wyatt)

★★★

I don’t get all the fuss about this film.  Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a good, by-the-numbers, sci-fi/action movie that is all plot-driven.  Characters are stereotypes, and the action goes exactly where you expect it to go.  The acting is wooden (as you would expect),  and the filmmaking itself mostly unexciting but for a  few images of things like those of apes jumping though plate glass windows from the inside out or them surrounding the evil business manager in an amphitheater-shaped atrium.  

There was some talk about Andy Serkis’ performance in the motion-capture generated imagery, but I didn’t find his acting compelling either, perhaps because nothing else in the film is.  He definitely doesn’t carry it the way, say, Dustin Hoffman does Elephant Man, a performance I've heard Serkis' compared to. In fact, I found Serkis’ performance to be closer to pantomime than acting.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is good, fun, well-done escapism with many sentimental tones.  And that’s enough to warrant watching it without laying on unjustified acclaim.