April 2: The Adjustment Bureau (2011 -- George Nolfi)

★★★

Not a terrible way to spend an hour and a half, but there are probably better ways, too.  Matt Damon is quite good as David Norris, and Emily Blunt is an often-engaging Elise.  And they connect on-screen.  And there’s a little Phillip Dick sci-fi , too......meaning that the story isn’t just thrills.  Do we have free will?  If we do, what is it?  These are weighty questions, but in The Adjustment Bureau, they have more of a stoner tone than a philosophical.

 Overall, the boy wants the girl and is very determined to get her; the rest isn’t hard to figure out.  Some of the obstacles to the hero are fun, but this is a Hollywood movie, so the outcome is pre-ordained.  J

April 1: The Darjeeling Limited (2007 -- Wes Anderson)

★★★

A smarmy Christian podcast I heard likes Wes Anderson: they see him as pro-family because his films center on family dynamics and the healing in them.  While I didn’t like their “family-friendly” attitude, the podcasters hit the nail on the head with their point about family dynamics in Anderson’s films.  The subject notwithstanding, the key question in Anderson’s films for me is whether he deals with family dynamics in a real way or through some gauze of cliché, convention, quirk or other distancing mechanism.

It’s distancing mechanisms in Darjeeling Limited.  The three brothers in this film all suffer from grief at the loss of their father and the fleeting – usually absent – affection of their mother, but the movie has them doing cute, stagey actions and speaking in stiff, artificial language around their hurt.  The plot here moves mechanically in a series of set pieces, and the film is burdened with overt symbols like the baggage (guess what it means) and repeated actions (do they TRUST Francis with the passports?).  This tone risks trivializing the very real pain and loss of the characters.

But something halfway works with this approach.  For one thing, the brothers seem almost childishly cute as they pose their way through their sense of loss and the problems this sense has created in their lives, and this childishness creates some sympathy.  I also respond to their movement through healing, initiated in the village and the funeral they’re able to participate in and advanced in their meeting with their conditional-love mother.  It’s corny and stagey, but it’s satisifying to watch them drop their baggage as they get on the departing train.

There are other elements in the movie I like, too.  It has a beautiful color palette of pastels and browns, and there are some great cinematic flourishes.  For example, the crane shot of the three brothers at the market is really skillful and fun as the camera swoops in on each of the three doing his shopping individually.  My favorite cinematic point is the interruption of the story with a series of images of the cars of the train, each interior representing a moment in the brothers’ lives or in the movie itself.  This brief moment of pure cinema is the most pleasing film moment in the movie.

Other things I like about the movie are the fun cameos – Angelica Huston and Barbet Schroeder in particular – and the music, which varies from pop to pop-with-Indian-arrangement to the fun, concluding French song.  These elements all work for me.

Even with all these very fine elements, the ironic distance that characterizes the film limited(!) my response.  While I like so much of what is going on here, and I like the trajectory of the characters, I found it hard to connect to or be really touched by the movie.  Amused? Yes.  Moved? No…

March 31: Charade (1964 -- Stanley Donen)

★★★

Gee…. I wonder if the silly humor you see in so many 60s/70s mainstream movies has lost some of its ooomph when we see it from now.  I think of the painful scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with Paul Newman hamming it up on his bicycle to the tune of "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head," a scene that I was just embarrassed by the last time I saw it.

I had the same experience tonight watching Charade when Cary Grant was in the shower with his suit on.  I just can’t make the emotional or intellectual leap to go back to see that as funny.  It just looks stupid to me now, and unfortunately, that was my response to a lot of the humor in the movie.  I know the movie's supposed to be partly comedy and partly humor, but the humor part here just didn’t work for me.  I don’t think it’s the film’s fault because I think the movie falls pretty solidly into 60s convention.  It’s that I don’t find that kind of humor funny.  And for all that, I don't find poor Audrey Hepburn acting naïve or silly to be funny either.  And the timing of a lot of the humor isn’t funny today.  I could hardly even smile at the jokes about “agents” or “spies.”

Fortunately (because I WANT to like this movie), there are things here I can respond to.  The movie looks fabulous, for one!  It’s set in Paris in the 60s, and Paris looks great in film in the 60s.  Donen milks that beauty, shooting scenes in the Tuilleries and along the Seine.  And he’s working with Audrey Hepburn in Paris fashion; she’s the perfect visual complement to the city in her haute couture of the era.  She’s not great at comedy, but she knows how to wear designer clothes.  Other set design elements make the film worth looking at for me, too.  The great, empty Paris apartment that Regina returns to is pretty stunning, and the tense, closing pursuit through the theater is visual pleasure, too, as maniquins jump from shadows and chords dangle menacingly.  There is a lot to make this film worth watching.

There’s the very famous theme song, too, by Henry Mancini with Johnny Mercer lyrics.  It's a little overused in the film (for example, the version done in pipes for the carousel scene), but the musical theme is good listening and adds some cohesion to the film.

Charade works really well for me on the visual level, but I found the comedy/irony kept me from being as engaged by the thrill-plot as I might have been.  I wonder what Hitchcock could’ve done with this….

March 30: Never Let Me Go (2010 -- Mark Romanek)

★★★★

I enjoyed this movie.  The best thing about the film is the idea at its base: take an element of the human condition and highlight it by using a setting that you’d have to call sci-fi.  This isn’t sci-fi that speculates about the future, either future technology or the future society.  The aim in Never Let Me Go is to use a single sci-fi element to highlight something about our present life and examine it.  This one element aside, the world of Never let Me Go is ours.

The film is both poignant and incisive, along the lines of Solaris, Gattaca or Moon, addressing the subjects of death and love.  I’m sure the source material, a story by Kazuo Ishifuro, contributed to this theme, but Mark Romanek did a nice job with the setting and pacing of the film to bring the viewer into the drama before us.  I like how Romanek’s conception of the film uses the sci-fi element only to create the conditions that let him sharpen the terms of the film; the sci-fi element highlights the life-and-death issue, and everything else here is so quotidian that I hardly noticed the sci-fi element.   What’s more, I was struck even more strongly by the terms of the film because of the normality of the setting.  And it isn’t just Romanek’s direction that makes the film work: The three main actors do a good job, too. 

I liked this film a lot and found it very worth my time as a meditation on love and death.

March 28: Winged Migration/ Le peuple migrateur (2001 -- Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cluzaud, Michel Debats)

★★★★

This is a fabulous film to watch, but I’m sure I liked it more when it came out 10 years ago. The same things that annoyed me then annoyed me again this time, but even more. The worst thing is the syn hush music. It was just an absolutely terrible choice that actually took me out of the film with its sshh-sshh-sshh rather than engaging me in what was happening on-screen. And while I found the irrepressible French cuteness bothersome 10 years ago, it grated this time around: the poor, hurt bird getting eaten by crabs; the caged goose looking up at its free cousins; the goose abandoned by buds out west and rediscovering them; the boy helping the goose free itself at the farm and awaiting its return the next year, the goose that falls in oil in eastern Europe; the migrating birds getting shot by hunters. It’s hard to imagine a string of more obvious, cloying sentimentality.

Those considerable reservations aside, there are many, many beautiful images in this film – so many that the movie rises above its many bad directorial choices. The close-ups of birds in flight, taken with great ingenuity and effort, are simply the standard now and have forever earned Winged Migration a place in the documentary/wildlife pantheon. The Making of documentary on the blu-ray shows the effort and thought that went into these, and I was almost as moved by that supplement as I was by the feature. I won’t soon forget images like the storks over the desert, flying into an oasis that Turner might have painted if he’d gone to Libya. Then there are the geese in snow, the birds crossing the Himalayas, the birds flying through New York and through Paris, and the migration over the fall colors. And while the scenes of the birds in Monument Valley were odd (do birds even migrate through there?), I sorta liked yet another French homage to John Ford and the French fascination with the American West, even though it was oddly out of place. Ditto for the tern who looked like it was flying over a screen capture of Google maps – weird, but sorta fun.

You have to admire this film. I only wish someone with more directorial savvy had put it together after the successful filming had been done.

March 27: Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964 -- Byron Haskin)

★★★

This movie is just a goof. With its Star Trek (TV version) aesthetic and I-can-solve-any-problem plot, there’s little here that would fail to appeal to a 10-year-old boy….which I was when it came out in 1964. Yes, it’s colonialist (how does Friday feel about their rescue to earth?), sexist (why no women? Would that HAVE to move the film in a sexual direction?), and ethnocentric (Commander Kit has the techno goodies and can explain them in English), but when I was a kid, I loved imagining being in circumstances like these and solving all the problems around me at great risk to myself. And I’d be a big, handsome, muscular guy, too. And a monkey for a pet…that would have been icing on the cake. This is a fun movie that can still make me smile with its story of good people doing good things. (And I thought I heard correctly, so I checked: Friday DOES call Mars "Huehuetenango." I’ve been there! …though in Guatemala, near the border with Mexico...not Mars.)

March 26: Certified Copy/Copie conforme (2010 -- Abbas Kiarostami)

★★★★
This film is a certified, leisurely art movie that’s heavy on dialog and whose actions carry double meanings. The film is so deliberate and staged that I don’t think it’s going to be on a lot of people’s fav list, but I liked it a lot.

At the film’s core is the notion of original and copy and the question of the value of the copy. If that weren’t Derridean enough, a lot of the dialog between the two main characters, Elle and James Miller, seems suspended with uncertain significance. Is theirs is a real (original) marriage or a staged, simulated (copy) one, a game they are playing? And if theirs is only a copy, the film gets at the point that copies have value; James Miller expresses his respect for Elle's sister, who's happy with whatever she has whether it’s an original or a copy. And the wonderful scene in the Tuscan cathedral visually calls into question "original", too, with couples throughout the building happily getting married, replicating marriage in the background of our two main characters; by this point, the notion of original or copy is moot….any “original” marriage is lost and/or irreplaceable. It’s a fabulous scene as the two leads play their way through their marriage(?) among all the other replicating ones. The film eventually lands on the point that a marriage is just a marriage, original/real or copy/unreal.

Certified Copy also suggests another original/copy duality: cinema and reality. Like the other film I saw by Kiarostami recently, Close-Up, this film demands the viewer acknowledge he’s watching a simulacra of reality and not reality. As the two characters drive away from Elle’s house, the severe reflections on the windshield call attention to the fact that we’re watching a film and not a reality as Hollywood film language would express it. Later, at the restaurant, Elle looks right at the camera, right at us, and talks to us as though we were James. Ditto when she’s in the bathroom in front of the mirror later. These are two of the most uncomfortable scenes I've sat though in a movie in awhile. Added to those flourishes, the dialog of the film is generally stagey and stilted. We are clearly watching a movie and not watching reality, but the point is that what we have is good.

And we're led to accept and enjoy this or any "copy" of "reality," whether it’s a Michelangelo or any other Certified Copy.