Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

FILM NOTE – The Intouchables starring Francois Cluzet and Omar Sy, directed by Olivier Nakache and Erik Toledano (in French with English titles)

                                                    … opposites attract …

This movie is a delight.  The Intouchables is about a hugely rich French man who became paraplegic in an accident and hires against the odds a big Black man originally from Senegal to be his caregiving man -- his arms and legs essentially and to take care of him in every way -- and the liberation they each bring to each other in their different ways.  It's a comedy, with lots of joyous laughs and continually interesting characters.  The photography is stunning, with the contrast between the totally gorgeous rich house, and the child-crammed chaotic apartment in the housing projects of the Paris suburbs where the Black man's family lives powerfully well described.

The contrasts between the two men are fully drawn:  Philippe, in late middle age, is a lover of classical music and literature and an art collector.  He’s The Establishment, living in his luxurious, serene mansion filled with a sense of hereditary and current imnportance -- but he’s physically helpless.  Far from The Establishment, Diss is a petty thief, Black and poor, with a brutal rupture in his past:  as a boy, he was sent by his parents from his home in Senegal to Paris to live with an Aunt and, as the movie begins, Diss’s Aunt, having given up on him, throws the big, muscular, unruly guy out of her apartment. 

He only interviews for the position of Philippe's caregiver because he needs a signature to verify he’s looked for work in order to qualify for his government “benefit”.  But in the face of the more apparently qualified candidates who line up for the job, Philippe hires him.  Improbable, yet all the more wonderful because we know that this film is based on a true story.  Philippe recognizes Diss's  outstanding vitality:  not only his exceptional physical strength -- the very opposite of his own limp limbs and useless back -- but also his originality and emotional daring, a dynamism that was once his own but is now largely sapped by his incapacity.

They have a lot to offer each other.  Rambunctious Diss pulls Philippe out of himself, caring for him in the bodily sense, but also driving him to new adventures which Philippe can enjoy with the wonderfully strong surrogate arms and legs of Diss always there to protect him -- except for occasional distractions.  Philippe has a few adventures to show Diss, too.  And Diss, though stricken by an evening of 4 hours ahead of German opera, absorbs a great deal not only about art and literature but about a mode of being in which one can work toward what one wants, and control a measure of ones existence.

And eventually Diss engineers a romantic interest for Philippe -- and for the housekeepr Yvonne.  In fact, great, big, unangelic Diss is a sort of Cupid in this movie. 

Francois Cluzet as Philippe is elegant, sophisticated, and -- seeking a way beyond his incapacity -- is ready to seize the day: his subtely allows us to understand the suffering his paralysis causes him, and there’s also great appeal in his readiness to enjoy -- and all that money has a charisma of its own, which helps him get the girl.  Omar Sy is so big, his physical power, his know-how, his fast learning curve, and fundamental ethical quality inspire so much confidence, that you have to love him just as Philippe does.   This down and out ex-con is a man who, it turns out, is truly one who takes good care … of Philippe and others.  It’s a funny, unexpected and inspiring character beautifully acted by Sy.

The Intouchables is very much like the movie The King’s Speech.  In both, a funcctional incapacity in someone at the top, Philippe’s paralysis, the King of England’s stutter, catalyzes a meeting with an aide far down the social and economic scale -- Diss;  George VI’s  speech therapist.  The unlikely connection, loaded with incongruities ripe for laughter and touching moments, develops into a deep friendship.  And all the better in this type of film, neither of these is fiction:  both of these profound relationship are based on real life, and, in fact, lasted beyond the time frame of the movie, for the rest of all the characters’ lives.  In this way, both films project a gratifying sense of some fundamental unity of our society, and the resolution of class conflicts -- of racial conflict as well in The Intouchables.  Both films leave us feeling that we’re all in it together and that our common humanity transcends class, economic disparities, and contrasts in opportunity.  It’s a spurious sense of unity -- and one of the reasons we go to the movies.  You’re filled with a happy glow while applauding the film with every one else in the audience, while leaving the theater, and beyond.  No wonder these are both, as The Intouchables describes itself, “crowd pleasers.”  And. yes, I still feel the glow.

Yvonne Korshak 

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FILM REVIEW – The Iron Lady, with Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, Jim Broadbent as Denis Thatcher, Alexandra Roach as the young Margaret and Harry Lloyd as the young Denis

There's one reason to see this film: Meryl Streep. The Iron Lady follows Britain’s Margaret Thatcher from aspiring politician to political powerhouse, from loving wife to grieving widow.  Streep brings to this range of life experience her power to move one with the slightest tilt of her head, to convey inner experience with the minuscule shift of the direction of her eyes.  By the end of the film, one feels one has been enlarged and touched by the depth with which one has shared the full life of another human being from the inside.  We feel we know what it felt like. That makes the movie a great pleasure to experience.

The story's told through Thatcher’s mental world in old age as it flows between past and present, and between what’s actually happening in her life and what’s illusory -- particularly the hallucinatory and “alive” presence and companionship of her beloved husband, Denis Thatcher, who often settles in with her for a chat across the dining room table, on the sofa, and in bed, but who -- as she at the same time knows well -- had died a few years earlier.  It's a compelling, and genuinely interesting coda to a moving love story.      

Thatcher's against-all-odds climb to the pinnacle of power as Prime Minister of England is Horatio Alger-like (though her father did own two grocery stores).  The film sees a relationship between her arch conservatism, especially her focus on individuals as responsible agents, and disdain for government solutions for people’s problems, to her own relatively humble beginnings and tough uphill battle.  She remembers herself as a girl working in her father’s grocery store, through her early grasps at political office and her marriage with the wealthy businessman, Denis, to her rise as a national political figure.  Along the way she has to overcome, and often overlook, sexism and snobbery (the grocer’s daughter in Parliament -- you can imagine!). 

In its treatment of her long tenure as Prime Minister, the film gives glimpses of positive and negative aspects of the tough-minded and at times brutally enforced conservative policy of the "Iron Lady", and takes us through to her eventual defeat as head of the Conservative Party. 

But for all of Thatcher’s central, and continuing, political significance, these are background to what the film focuses on and does well: the inner life of this strong and independent-minded woman, now diminished in strength, and with her independence challenged in even the smallest everyday matters -- like going out on her own to buy a carton of milk.  This is an imagined telling of her toughest battles:  lost love and old age.

It’s not possible to know how much the subjectively presented film reflects that “real” Margaret Thatcher.  Are these really her thoughts?  Streep sounds like and looks very like Thatcher but, in the scenes of Thatcher's mid-years, a little softer and prettier, with Streep’s characteristic girlish underlay (she managed to avoid this, however, in her astonishingly convincing portrayal of Julia Child in Julia and Julia).  But never mind physical vanity:   in the showdown -- old age -- Streep gives all to expressiveness.  During one scene in which she’s still really good looking, it takes a long time to sew on a bodice button, with Streep’s impressive décolleté spotlighted all the while.  I thought, she likes to allure, but she likes even more to be a great actor.  There’s nothing’s left of handsome -- or glamorous or graceful -- in the old, red eyed, bulky, wispy haired, and often frightened Mrs. Thatcher.

But personality persists.  This Margaret Thatcher maintains her full self in the face of the frailties of age, grief and hallucinatory confusion.  We know about these, since the movie let’s us see her at her weakest, but the rest of the world doesn’t have to know!  Interacting with others -- with a doctor, or at a dinner party -- she drifts off.  But she realizes it.  And will not tolerate condescension.  How shall she retrieve her dignity?  Characteristically, of course, by a rousing political statement, on the spot, articulate and vigorous.  She rouses herself with a jolt, I'm still Margaret Thatcher.  These are some of my favorites scenes in the movie. 

Alexandra Roach is charming, feisty, looks the part, and in all ways creates an affect consistent with the mature Margaret portrayed by Streep, and Harry Loyd brings an erotic chemistry to their romance that effectively warms the movie.  Olivia Colman as their daughter Carol portrays the conflicted but loving relationship with her extraordinary mother. 

But how did the grocer’s daughter become Prime Minister of England anyhow?  We get glimpses of what she did but no insight into how.  Surely Thatcher didn’t climb the slippery slope just by being a peppery young woman.  She couldn’t have maintained power and forced through her policies without manipulations, accommodations, negotiations and alliances within alliances, but these are barely hinted at, and the film leaves one wondering about the mechanisms of her success.  There’s another movie to be made about Margaret Thatcher.  But this one is compelling in human terms, a most public woman in her private life, a most powerful woman struggling with the weaknesses of old age, illumined by a remarkable actress.

Yvonne Korshak

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FILM NOTE -- The Artist, written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius, starring Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, and that wonderful dog ...

This is as good a movie as I’ve ever seen or ever hope to see.  And it’s such a surprise.

It’s filmed in black and white and as a silent film, about a silent film star, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), whose name suggests Valentino and who looks enough like Douglas Fairbanks to pass as Zorro -- the first Zorro -- in a film clip.  It’s not totally silent, though, and the occasional break-throughs to sound are so clever and witty you could squeeze them tight with happy gratitude.   And then there's the brilliant use here and there of silent film captions like the one where ... well, you'll have to see it to believe it.

In 1927, Valentin, at the cusp of his fame in silent films but at the brink of the talkies meets a young actress/dancer Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), a nobody who -- even as they fall in love, though in keeping with the theme it's never said aloud -- parlays their fortuitous meeting into stardom -- in the new talkies.  Valentin, rich, confident, used to the power of his stardom, refuses to make the bridge to the talkies.

Thus Peppy’s arc rises and his falls.  She soars to the top while he, uncompromising in his artistic pride, refuses to talk for the movies.   With the kind of marvelous play on words this “silent” movie abounds in, when his wife, on the brink of leaving him, comes up with the familiar “We have to talk,” he refuses, blows her off.  So she blows him off ...  and keeps the mansion, the jewelry, the objets d'art ... 

He descends, he pawns his tuxedo, he drinks, he let’s his loyal, unpaid butler go, giving him the car which is all he has left, and he hits bottom.   Well, he has one other thing left, his totally marvelous dog (if there were no other reason to see the movie, the dog would be enough). 

The titles of the movies these two stars make echo where they are in their personal story.  Leaving the studio, he loses huge sums of money in his self-funded silent film fiasco in which we see him drowning in quicksand at “The End.”  The rest of his money goes in the 1929 crash.  While Peppy, in her new stardom, makes Guardian Angel, and she is his guardian angel, or tries to be, but he resists all help because of pride.  Valentin has another guardian angel, though, the dog -- like him a genius at wordless communication.

How to find a way around Valentin’s pride -- without making him talk in the movies?  There is a way, and … you will leave this movie smiling broadly, deeply, warmly.   

Dujardin is marvelous as the silent film star with his dark good looks and that smoothed back hair. The scene in which he -- for several film retakes -- winds his face up into the inhibited smile/sneer of a German officer is funny and fascinating for the sheer artistry .  In the quietest moments of introspection his face reflects the parade of thoughts, memories and emotions that cross the mind in his fall from greatness.  And he’s an outstanding, charismatic dancer.

Bejo, with her large dark eyes and mobile face, is entrancing as the dynamic talent, out for herself but -- here’s the strength of her  character -- not only for herself.   In a world of glitter and make believe, she truly loves him and she proves it;  the more obvious ways she tries are touching for the film goer but leave him unmoved, so she strains to find a way, in harmony with his artistic pride, not to restore him -- her first thought -- but to enable him to restore himself.

Everything about this movie is in fact intelligent, witty and great -- including the musical score, which, along with the screen play and the film as a whole is Academy Award worthy.   It couldn’t be more vibrant, compelling, funny, touching or memorable.

Yvonne Korshak 

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Contracorriente / Undertow, a Peruvian film by Javier Fuentes-Leon, starring Cristian Mercado, Tatiana Astengo and Manolo Cardona, in Spanish with English subtitles

Reviewed by guest author John Buscarello 

... against the current ...

Undertow, a wonderful simple film, focuses on a modest town where a modern perspective starts to crack open a closed village society.  I came across this film, knowing nothing about it, on HBO’s On Demand, and found myself swept up in its direct beauty.

Charmingly photographed in a tiny Northern Peruvian coastal town, Cabo Blanco, Undertow draws one in, as surely as the ocean’s tide.  As the movie begins we watch a seaside burial.  It’s a fishing village and traditions run deep.  According to custom, the spirit of the newly deceased must be buried properly at sea.  Miguel (Cristian Mercado) has the magical touch that will allow the deceased’s spirit to be free from the bondage of our world, and thus we follow Miguel out to sea where the body is cast off into the ocean.

Back in town life goes on -- simple lives, fishermen, their wives or girl friends, tavern owners, a local market... a close-knit town for sure, obviously there for decades.  Yet, oddly the town has been invaded by a photographer, Santiago (Manolo Cardona);  he drifts about, always an onlooker, documenting the town with his camera, clearly an outsider and different in his ways.  The movie intercuts between the town’s people and Santiago and, as we discover in time, Santiago and Miguel are lovers.  The director gives us hints that ghosts may inhabit the town and all may not be as rosy as we think, through the abandoned buildings where the lovers meet.

Miguel’s problem is he’s married and his wife is about 7 months pregnant.  Santiago adores Miguel who, to him, is as beautiful and tranquil as the town.  Santiago is an artist -- a painter as well as photographer -- and he’s truly come to town because of Miguel.  Ah but Miguel, in spite of his enjoyment of his erotic time with Santiago, believes that he’s truly a man in the conventional sense the village would understand, and he loves his wife too.

Alas after one of their erotic encounters, Santiago has an accident.  He slips on his boat and is drowned.  Not being buried properly as tradition dictates -- his body is at the bottom of the ocean -- his spirit is trapped at the seaside town.  Magical happening abound between Miguel and Santiago to both men’s delight and fears.  Thus, reality and the supernatural intermix in this beguiling story, as the town is dragged into the fray.  Miguel is confronted with his true self and must come to terms with it, as difficult as it will be for himself and his family.  Will these simple seaside villagers be able to accept gay men in their midst?

I was surprised by the film’s unpretentious charms, yet deep devotion to explore majestic themes.  The photography made one long for a mythical seaside existence where life seemed simpler.

As the riveting story takes a number of twists and turns, each complicating matters (I will not reveal its secrets.), we see that the human spirit can soar and adjust to life’s most difficult challenges.  The film builds ever more surely to a beautiful, teary-eyed ending.  I loved the film.

John Buscarello

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Silver Screen Silver Prints, Hollywood Glamour Portraits from the Robert Dance Collection, curated by Ann H. Hoy, The Grolier Club, NYC

... star struck ...

 

This exhibition brings together 90 publicity photographs, made by the big studios, of major Hollywood stars:  the earliest is of Theda Bara as Cleopatra of 1917, and the latest of Elizabeth Taylor -- not as Cleopatra (that would have been fun) -- but as Barbara in Ash Wednesday (a woman driven to plastic surgery to keep hold of her husband), dated 1974.

Theda Bara as Cleopatra, by Albert Witzel, 1917, gelatin silver print, 10 x 8".  Photo: Grolier Club

 

These are ultra large format gelatin silver prints and required great effort and expense to produce but evidently the studios thought they were worth it -- I learned at an introductory Discussion that at one point MGM employed 500 people just to turn out the prints, and hundred of thousands of prints were made at "astounding" cost. These went to magazines, newspapers and elsewhere and, reduced in size and autographed before printing were sent to fans who wrote in requesting them. 

But why are most of the photos of female stars?  That excellent question was asked by someone in the audience during that Discussion presented by Ann H. Hoy, Robert Dance and film director Paul Morrissey, and the response was that "day-long photo sessions" lie behind these photos and the male stars didn't have the patience or interest in posing to do them.  Yet the star power and popularity of the male stars -- without such a stream of publicity photos -- equaled that of the female stars, which leaves open some questions well worth pursuing:  just what was the --evidently great -- impact of the studio publicity photos?  and on whom?  And why were they so valuable to the studios?   Any ideas?     

Ramon Novarro and May McAvoy, for Ben Hur attributed to Warren Lynch, 1925, geltin silver print, 13 x 10".  Photo: Grolier Club     

A valuable aspect of the exhibition is that while highlighting movie stars, it also brings out the specific talents of the photographers whose names, perhaps with the exception of Edward Steichen, even film buffs aren't likely to know.  The photographers didn't sign the photos but, through their work played a part in creating that sense of linked personality and image -- that persona that helped to emblazon the stars in the popular imagination.  Thus there are photographs Ruth Harriet Louise made of Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford with Robert Montgomery, and others grouped so as to give a sense of the photographer's presence and individuality.  Photographer Clarence Sinclair Bull photographed Lillian Gish in 1917, Greta Garbo in 1931 and Hedy Lamarr around 1942.  You can read in the informative catalog essay how photographer George Hurrell enabled Norma Shearer to become a star.

Norma Shearer by George Hurrell, 1930, gelatin silver print, 13 x 10".  Photo: Grolier Club

The photographs are beautifully printed, often with the fine resolution and subtle chiaroscuro large format makes possible.  A few show the effects of time and the instability of the gelatin silver process, while remaining effective. 

I find, though, that for all the skill, there's a thinness in the glamour posturing and patent manufacture of personality.  It's a playing with surface -- lots of chiaroscuro but not much depth.  And how much more vital and communicative it is to see these actors in dramatic contexts, hard at work in their films, creating for us not mere image but characterizations! 

But publicity photos are significant and omnipresent in our culture and, thanks to Robert Dance making them available, Silver Screen Silver Prints lets you see original prints of some rare images that strike chords of resonant cultural memories. 

The illustrated Catalog is by the Curator Ann H. Hoy, Art Historian and author of The Book of Photography, published by National Geographic in 2005.  Silver Screen Silver Prints, free and open to the public, will be on view at the Grolier Club through November 11.  For further information, click on live link of exhibition title.

Yvonne Korshak 

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FILM NOTE – Brighton Rock, with Sam Riley, Andrea Riseborough, Helen Mirren, and Andy Serkis, directed by Rowan Joffe, based on the novel by Graham Greene

... the hesitation ...

I went to Brighton Rock (not usually going to gangster films) because   Graham Greene writes great stories and I hoped this one would survive the movie.  It does:  the story is terrific and the film is well done, and well worth seeing.

And at heart an absolute classic on how to build a character and a story on ... hesitation.

Set in Brighton, England in the 1960’s, the film tells the story of Pinkie (Sam Riley), a small-time, ruthless gangster trying to be a bigger one.  Killings lead to killings and as Pinkie’s group tries to take over from a rival, powerful gang, Pinkie commits a revenge killing.  On the sunny Brighton boardwalk filled with strollers and “every day” people, Rose (Andrea Riseborough), a waitress in a café, innocently taking the air and reading, accidentally comes into possession of evidence linking Pinkie to the crime, and thus is drawn into his murderous life -- it helps that he’s handsome, though awfully grim.

To purloin the evidence, and then to keep her quiet, Pinkie takes her out for an evening on the town.  She falls for him -- ignoring all danger signals including the fresh knife cut across his cheek (doesn't she recognize that mark of Cain?  maybe, but she never hesitates), and the attempts to protect her by the café owner, Ida (Helen Mirren).  And he, somewhere in his rotten soul, is touched by her trust and falls in love with her -- or maybe he falls in love with her.  Or what is love anyway?  And can it coincide with hate?  We never know:  the emotional ambiguity of this movie is brilliant. 

Whatever he feels for her, it’s powerful and sets up a conflict in him, because clearly the easiest thing to do about her, now that she knows too much, is to murder her:  but he hesitates.  He can’t quite bring himself to do it, he makes excuses to his friends, and, not a man for honor among thieves, he knocks off his closest associates as they get in his way about her and about challenging the gang run by powerful, rich Colleoni (Andy Serkis);  Pinkie does everything conceivable to keep her quiet except kill her.  Even at the end, well, I can’t tell you the end but it is absolutely superb.  

The violence in this film is necessary -- nothing gratuitous about it (a refreshing change) -- because it’s part and parcel of the hot conflict within Pinkie:  seeing how totally brutal he is, his hesitation becomes all the more powerful, and thought-provoking.  Inner conflict in this brute?  Yes.  Which is exactly Graham Greene’s point.  We all have a soul, and somewhere in all of us is the possibility of love.  Maybe.  It’s a human message as well as, in this film and in Greene’s work, a Catholic vision.  Maybe.   

You have to see the story through to the end to understand its powerful embedded ambiguities about a really bad man.  Pinkie tells Rose early on, “I’m bad, you’re good.  We’re alike.”   What was that supposed to mean?  By the end, I knew.

The film is set against the background of violent conflicts between motorcyclists (“Rockers”) and scooter drivers (“Mods”) that disrupted the pleasant resort of Brighton, near the White Cliffs of Dover, during the 1960’s.  The Rockers-Mods' hectic speed, noisy collisions and dangerous hatreds spill over onto the mild pleasure seekers on the boardwalk, providing cover for the dark chases and murders beneath it.  While the novel (1938) and the first film made of it (1947), are set in the 1930’s, I think that bringing it up to the time of the Rockers v. Mods is a creative act:  this way the film shows violence as not something below the surface, sequestered among men who make their livings as gangsters and so, if you're lucky, potentially avoidable:  violence is surround-sound.   

Yvonne Korshak

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FILM NOTE -- Sarah's Key, directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Melusine Mayance, Niels Arestrup, Frederic Pierrot

                                    ... history ...

Sarah's Key contains some of the most powerful, heart-wrenching scenes ever filmed -- and this is not sensationalism, but truth.  This film is important for making everyone aware of a particularly horrific episode in France during World War II and -- if you didn’t know -- what human beings are capable of, for ill as well as for good.

Based on the novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, Elle s’appelait Sarah, “her name was Sarah,” this is an unsparing account of the Vel’ d’Hiv' Roundup in which tens of thousands of Jews were literally pulled from their homes to be sent to their deaths in concentration camps.  The Starzynski family is being dragged away but Sarah, 10 years old (Melusine Mayance), manages to hide her younger brother in a wardrobe, taking the key with her as she, her mother and father are brutally transported to the Velodrome d’Hiver stadium -- hence the name Vel' d'Hiv'.  With the unflinching realism of a great documentary, we see the thousands of people of all ages held there for days without access to food, water or toilets.  Here is  Hell on Earth.

Surely it can’t get any worse but it does as the men are violently separated from their wives and children and then -- can it get worse than that? -- the children under 12, Sarah, feverishly ill, among them -- are literally torn from the arms of their mothers.  These police are not Nazis but French functionaries of the wartime Vichy government that cooperated with the Nazis, which makes no difference in their level of brutality.

Through it all, separated from her brother, her father, and her mother, Sarah, ill, alone in a children's concentration camp, is totally focused on getting back to her brotherl and unlock the closet.  With astonishingly daring, she escapes with another girl from the barbed wire compound, helped by a kindly guard who lifts the entangling wire.  Once they're out, the guard is left with the bloody imprint of the jagged wire on his palm, like the stigmata of Christ.  It's his second kindness to the little Jewish girl.  One worries about what will happen to him, too.

Some of the French say they weren’t aware of the Roundup (though living across the street from the stinking stadium), some admit to a vague awareness but “What could you do?”  But some are courageous in their opposition to inhumanity.  Sarah and her co-escapee find their way to the rural home of a couple with grandchildren Sarah's age, the Dufaures, who at first try to “avoid trouble” but then take them in and bravely brazen it out with the police in order to call in a physician to attend the other little girl who is, however, beyond saving.  And -- since Sarah is unstoppable in her attempt to get back to her little brother -- the Dufaures accompany her to Paris, risking their own arrest, in a great train scene in which the police share their compartment and the conductor comes looking for everybody’s transit papers.  And what happens when Sarah gets back to the old apartment and the locked wardrobe … ?

The film blands down as it turns to the aftermath of Sarah's return to Paris.  Two stories run parallel, Sarah’s and, to bring it to the present, that of Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas), an American journalist who, in our own time, is writing an investigative story about the Vel’ d’Hiv' Roundup.  In the course of her research, she uncovers Sarah's story and learns that she, unlike her mother and father, did not die in the concentration camps.  Julia sets about finding out what happened to her, and learning more and more about the brave and agonized little girl, takes Sarah deep into her heart.  Meanwhile Julia and her French husband are about to move in to an apartment that had been in her husband’s family for 50 years -- until Julia, through her research, comes upon the nauseating fact that her in-laws apartment, that she's about to move in to, had become vacant 50 years ago because the  Starzynskis had been ripped out of it.

Confronted by Julia, her husband’s father recounts what happened when he was a boy during the war and Sarah returned to the apartment with the key to free her brother.  His memories provide a breakthrough in Julia’s search for Sarah: as she uncovers the full complexity and tragedy of Sarah’s existence, Julia frees herself from a careless, overbearing husband who wants her to abort her unexpected late-life pregnancy but -- having learned of the deaths of so many children, she cannot go through with the abortion.  Eventually, Julia shares her knowledge of Sarah's background and fate with Sarah’s now adult son who gains a deeper understanding of his mother and himself.

The story about the present -- Julia, her pregnancy, her distracted, ambitious, cell-phone addicted husband, and that of Sarah’s son -- is superficial compared with the story of the past.  We see Julia in the U.S. with her little girl -- but what about her twelve-year old daughter left in France?  And the French father who, even if he opposed the birth, might now welcome his new little daughter?  Julia says she's planning to go back to Paris so she, the younger child, her older daughter and the father can be "near".  Near.  What would the Dufaures, who so lovingly took in Sarah, have thought ofthat?  Julia in fact abandons her older daughter, her husband, too, in favor of the new child which dissipates the impact of what she has come to feel as the gem-like value of each child.  At the end Julia and Sarah's son embrace powerfully.  With understanding?  Maybe.  But it has the movie look of "they all lived happily ever after".  I don't think so. .   

This “present” story dominates the later part of the film so, on leaving, one has to think back to connect again with the true power of Sarah’s Key.  Without that thinning out, it could have been one of the great films but it remains compelling, gripping, important.  

It's interesting to think about Sarah's Key in comparison with another recent film with a similar theme, Inglourious Basterds (reviewed here below):.  In that film, too, one little Jewish girl escapes the massacre, by the Nazis, of her entire family and, growing the maturity in Paris, must deal with her survival in the face of total family loss.  Inglourious Basterds is a more thrilling, artful film, brilliant, with a driving dramatic arc and a climactic finale one can wish were true -- but, plain and simple, is counter to history.   In contrast, Sarah’s Key, though with a "present" story that saps some of its strength, remains more faithful to the truths of history, which  gives it an equivalent weight and lasting impact. 

I'm glad for both of them.

                                                                                         Yvonne Korshak

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FILM NOTE - Cave of Forgotten Dreams, written and directed by Werner Herzog

In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, you follow Werner Herzog and his 3-D camera into one of the rarest and least accessible spots on earth -- Chauvet Cave in Southern France.  Here, on its bumpy walls, approximately 32,000 years ago our human forbears painted hundreds of astonishingly lifelike wild animals -- horses, cattle, reindeer, rhinoceri, lions, panthers, bears, antelopes -- 13 or more species.  What a lot of game -- and predators -- there were  back then!  These are among the earliest paintings ever found.  Many are overlaid by the rougly parallel scratch marks of cave bears, now extinct.  The 3-D filming brings the region, the river valley, the rock face and the interior of the cave to vivid life, and gives a context for the paintings beyond photographs or conventional film.

Herzog was given exclusive permission to film inside the cave but in order to protect the paintings, discovered in 1994, and because of the toxic atmosphere, access was extremely limited, so Herzog and his crew had four hours a day for six days inside for filming.  What they achieved is dazzling.  How could it not be?  The artists are great.  The paintings are magnificent, and on top of that, are so distant in time, they seem filled with mystery, raising questions.  If they are speaking to any one, it’s to people of their own time -- not to us -- and they don’t come with a commentary.

Two rhinoceri, their low slung, massive bodies seen from the side, lock horns in battle, 32,000 years ago.  A bison is done largely in outline as are most of the paintings, but its face is naturalistically shadowed, giving it that man-like look people often notice in bison today -- just go see them at Yellowstone.  A male and a female lion are partially superposed as an eternal pair -- the male is without a mane:  the artist has answered the question of whether or not European male lions had manes like African lions.  But in general these paintings raise more questions than they answer. 

And those horses!  One magnificent, large painting of a solo horse seems given a special place inside a natural niche.  The edge of niche is painted with smaller animals, the way Symbolist painters around 1900 often painted the frames around their main subjects.  But beware!  Resemblances like this can be amusing, even intriguing, but misleading.  The visual resemblance doesn’t mean the meanings or purposes are in any way similar.  We don’t know what these humans were thinking when they made these paintings.

The tradition of cave painting was very long lived and remarkably constant.  Some contrasts and developments can be seen in comparing the paintings of Chauvet Cave with those of, say, Lascaux Cave, 15,000 years later, but a remarkable constant that animals are by far the major subject of cave paintings, with only a very small number of human representations.  One intriguing image is not fully visible from the walkway since it partly bleeds around the stalactite it's painted on, and so was photographed with the use of a camera held up on a stick (didn’t anybody have a mirror?): it appears to show the lower part of a woman with an emphasized pubic triangle, and the upper part of a bison.  One has to wonder if this (if that’s really what it is) is a hybrid of imagination or a representation of a masked figure.  Arguing backward in time proves nothing but moving from the known to the unknown in thought can be useful.  Humans wearing animal masks are almost ubiquitous in tribal cultures, as part of Shamanism, and in rituals.  In this, and the stick-like figure of a bird-headed man from Lascaux cave, are we glimpsing a tradition that stretches from the Palaeoloithic to our own time?       

So this film is a wonder to see, mainly because the material is a wonder, not the filming.

The choices made in writing and editing are disappointing.  Access, as we know, was limited, but we see the same figures again and again.  With 24 hours  of filming time, they could have shown us more of the hundreds of animals and 13 or so species represented in Chauvet Cave.  The related archaeology and information about the region, while interesting, should have taken up less of this 95 minute film and more given over to what's truly unique and inaccessible, the cave.   

Also, the film is more interested in “mystery” and “dreams” than in the paintings themselves.  Even the title is irksome -- why “forgotten dreams?”  That title is just misleading mood music -- there’s no reason at all to think the artists thought they were depicting dreams.  Much has been suggested, and virtually nothing known for sure, about the purposes of the cave paintings, these or others, but the suggestions themselves are stimulating and should have been included in the film.   Shamanism?  Totemism?  Hunting magic?  Whatever the paintings purpose or purposes, they were very likely practical, at least in the views of those who made them.

Too much romance is thrown around in “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,”  too many shadows cross the camera image just when you’re trying to get a good look.   

More should have been said about the materials the painters used and their techniques.  We’re shown remarkable right hand prints in red ochre and told these are “positive” prints but without explanation that there a many examples in cave paintings and rock paintings around the world of “negative” hand prints made by spray-painting -- blowing pigment around a hand pressed to a wall as in a stencil.       

But then, you're looking at the palm prints of someone who lived 30,000 years ago, prints with poignant individuality in a detail:  a distinctively bent pinkie finger.  Who was there to purposefully dip the palm of a right hand in red ochre and press it to the wall?  Was the bent pinkie casual or was he or she chosen to leave prints because of the odd finger?  Or take it upon himself or herself ... perhaps fascinated by the "different" finger.  Given the context, are they a kind of painter's signature?  And of course:  what would this individual of 32,000 years ago think if he or she could know we were puzzling over those palm prints today?   

It's hard to think about the missed opportunities in the making of this film.  The rights should have gone to a film maker less centered on himself, and more focused on fulfilling the material.  But then, this is the film we have.  The paintings are so beautiful and the sights so rare, these are reasons in themselves to see it.  Not seeing it is to miss a unique and important glimpse into our human past. 

Yvonne Korshak     

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FILM NOTE – Midnight in Paris, written and directed by Woody Allen, starring Owen Wilson

… It was the best of times …

Midnight in Paris is as much a pleasure to watch as Woody Allen’s best films even though it’s not as good -- the fantasy is so powerful.  This time travel film takes us, and its main character, Gil (Owen Wilson), a successful screen writer, back to the Paris of the 1920’s where we meet the artists and literati who made the city the brilliant center that we all go to Paris looking for -- even those too young or unworldly to realize it. 

Gil is ensconced in a fancy hotel with his beautiful fiancee, Inez -- of course that’s part of the fantasy, too, that and the French food.  She and her rich, conventional right wing parents are dutifully intent on seeing the sights -- Versailles and all that -- guided by a know-it-all smart guy and his adoring girlfriend, but Gil -- vaguely discontent, and yearning to be a serious novelist, has another agenda.  He withdraws from family fun to search out his own Paris -- the Paris of his imagination -- and wonder of wonders at the stroke of midnight, finds it.

Swept off mysteriously in a chauffeured car, he’s delivered to the intellectual and artistic soirees of 1920’s Paris, where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald rub shoulders with Hemingway and Picasso while Cole Porter plays the piano [partial list of famous people], and eventually everybody who is anybody ends up at Gertrude Stein’s for intellectual discussions, artistic critiques, gossip and lovemaking.

Oh how marvelous to encounter Hemingway (Corey Stoll), young, darkly handsome, intense, having just published his first novel speaking in the dead-pan of his writing style about courage under fire  (“I’ve read all you work,” Gil tells him though at this point Hemingway's only published one book).  How delicious to see Zelda dive too deep into the absinthe with the Princeton-elegant Scott guiding her to the next party.  And joy of joys, how wonderful that our very American Gil with Wilson’s farm-boy drawl, patent simplicity and naïve aura (though he is a successful screenwriter, Woody Allen has his cake and eats it to on that one) not only meets but draws to himself Picasso’s mistress, played by Marion Cotillard looking like the dancer Olga Khokhlova whom Picasso loved at the time.  (So much for prissy, materialistic Inez, in any time zone.)

And. here's something really valuable, Gil gets a focused critique on the pages of his novel by none other than Gertrude Stein – it’s going to serve him in good stead back in his own time.  To see Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein sitting under Picasso’s famous, groundbreaking portrait of Gertrude and looking exactly like her is a high point of the movie and feels, for the moment, a high point of life (they really don’t have the same facial structure but Bates and Woody’s camera pull it off). 

Gil’s travel back to the 20’s in the chauffeured car is smooth but some of the other time travels lurch and are less believable, and are accompanied by preaching about the value of being of one’s own time that sounds like forced virtue.

And Allen seems so in love with the idea of this movie that he hurries through characters, settling on caricatures for his artists and writers from the past rather than on real people, let alone the creators they were, engaged in hot struggles to develop their modes of expression.  For all the fun it is to engage with Hemingway, his clipped, cliché-ridden courage talk is so obvious it's camp, and while Adrien Brody does a great look-alike caricature bit of Salvador Dali, it’s a bit, not a person.  So if you have another way of being in Paris at its beautiful best (appealing photography) and chatting with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Matisse and Picasso, by all means do it. 

If not, see this movie.  It’s a treat:  once again we have to thank Woody Allen for giving us great pleasure, the most fun, and a fantasy fulfilled. 

Yvonne Korshak

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FILM NOTE -- Meek's Cutoff starring Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Rod Rondeaux, directed by Kelly Reichardt

... existentialism among the pioneers ...

Which way to turn?  Whom can we trust?

It's 1845 and three couples, one wife pregnant, one couple with a little boy, journeying west in covered wagons, are lost in Oregon territory.  Low on food and lower on water, they've been led into a trackless wilderness by their arrogant guide, Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), who thought he knew a better way.  Fighting fear, everyone refrains from complaining but in time the men admit among themselves, "We should have followed the main trunk."

We're used to Westerns that show us the appeal of the vast, mountainous, natural terrain but this is a dry, desolate stretch of Oregon that would likely appeal only to those who after seeing the photos want to trek across Mars, pulled by oxen in a wagon and without a map, GPS or support system. 

At every juncture, choices have to be made with no useful evidence and life and death stakes.  With water low in the wooden barrels ("We should have taken on more water at the river"), Meek returns from a scouting trip with a good report: there's a lake ahead!  They arrive at its shores to find that the water's too alkaline for drinking (think sulphur springs).  And the lake's so broad and presumably deep -- much more of an obstacle than the fast rushing river they've crossed -- that it stops them dead in their progress westward.  Furthermore, the lake extends too far North-South to see either end.  They'll have to go around it, with no knowledge of its full extent.   

But should they go via the North or the South?  No way to know.  The women hear the men whispering, "north", "south".  Meek is for going North;  they've learned the hard way his knowledge and judgment can't be trusted -- but that's still not an answer to the question, is it?   

Meek, with a history as an Indian killer, fans the fear of Indians who may be in the region.  A new crisis occurs when an Indian (Ron Rondeaux) appears on the crest of a hill on horseback.  Two of the men go out after him and capture him and -- they don't have much but they have guns -- bring him back to the night's camp tied up and without his horse.  He's in their power.  What should they do with him?  Should they let him live or kill him?  Meek's for killing him on the spot.  The men argue, uncertain.  The Indian listens to the men debate his fate, not knowing the language but knowing exactly what they're talking about. 

The Indian lives, at least for now, and here the leadership subtly shifts.  The women have hovered in the background as the men made the decisions that would affect their living or dying, but now the young, calm, competent wife, Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams), makes some decisions of her own, first to bring food to the tethered Indian.  Meek's enraged.  So, at first, is the proud, angry Indian.  But when, later, she brings him water, he accepts it:  the Indian's made some decisions, too.  Perhaps there's a humanitarian feeling in Emily but her explanation for protecting the Indian is purely pragmatic:  "I want him to owe me."

Dogged by whether they should trust the Indian but in need of food and water, they decide to follow him instead of killing him, Meek tight behind him with his rifle, as the conflict between Emily and Meek intensifies to a thrilling climax.  

As if you were voyaging along with them, you get to know all your fellow travelers over time and really well.  The three wives and three husbands differ distinctly from one another in strengths, weaknesses and idiosyncracies -- no mix-up about who's who but there are some interesting surprises about who responds how to the grueling voyage. 

The emotional intimacy of husbands and wives -- persisting even when their only times alone together are in the bare interior of a covered wagon at the end of a day's dusty trek -- is engaging.  The volatile conflict between Emily and Meek forms a gripping dramatic focus. 

And as often happens in Westerns, the Indian is the most charismatic character:  he's not sentimentalized, nor overly handsome, but there's great charm in the way he takes in the ways of this alien group from behind a largely stoic mask, registering how they're like him and what he knows, and how they're not. 

Which way to turn?  Whom can we trust?   The highest stakes and not a clue as to how to chose.  But a choice has to be made.   

This is a brilliant movie, intimately human and profoundly philosophical -- and what an ending!

Yvonne Korshak

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FILM NOTE -- Barney's Version, with Paul Giamatti, Dustin Hoffman, Rosamund Pike, Minnie Driver, Rachelle Lefevre, directed by Richard J. Lewis

... mixed ...

With flashbacks and fast forwards, Barney's Version follows Barney Panofsky through the saga of his three wives.  First, as a sort of straight-man in Rome among his more footloose and artsy buddies, he marries the gorgeous and flaky Clara (Lefevre) because he believes he's fathered her unborn child (don't count on it).

A strength of the film is the naturalism of Giamatti's portrayal of Barney, and the complex conception of his character: smart, successful (he's a tv producer), loving, loyal -- and selfish and opportunistic.  Too many scenes, though, are hyped for farce.  Take this first wedding:  with the baby's birth imminent, Clara staggers on stiletto heels, ignored by the men, toward the church where she and Barney will be married, ungainly and off-balance from the weight of the bulbous pregnancy, her beautiful long legs silhouetted and forced apart by the size of it.  I think I may have laughed but then, this movie gets you to laugh at things that aren't really funny.

Barmey's second wife, played by Minnie Driver, is described in publicity as a "Jewish American Princess" (although we're in Canada) but really, what do we see of her?  (She isn't even dignified with a name in the film.)  She's the daughter of well-to-do Canadians who are Jewish -- as if that's enough to make her a joke.   And she truly and sincerely falls for Barney -- one wonders why since he's not particularly attractive and his charm is not overwhelming, but she does.  Their wedding is satirical farce, a Goodbye, Columbus catered affair complete with a lavish "Viennese Table" that older women who don't need another pastry dive into.  And since in the course of the wedding dinner, Barney separates himself emotionally from his bride and her family, we, too, get the feeling that they're gross and this is a gross event.  Hey wait a minute -- Barney's actions are really gross:  he flirts with another woman, Miriam, at his own wedding, falls instantly in love with her and, drunk, disheveled and abandoning his bride, chases Miriam to a departing train.  One tends to root for the course of true love but -- this is a stretch.

Barney continues to court the elegant Miriam long-distance after the wedding, leaving his wife high and dry.  She tries to maintain their marriage and their sex life, he's lost interest in all of it, but eventually, at their isolated lake house she succumbs to Boogie, Barney's handsome writer friend from the old days in Rome.  Arriving unexpected and finding them at sex, Barney seizes upon the situation as an easy way out of this marriage so he can go on to marry Miriam.  But first he has a drunken fight with Boogie who falls into the water and disappears, leading a detective to hound Barney for decades as a murderer.

Barney succeeds in winning his true love, Miriam, but eventually goofs up their idyllic marriage.  Not even perfect Miriam is perfect:  turns out she's unforgiving.  Sadness ensues.  And eventually deepening of character, and learning, and everything else that happens if you live long enough.

Barney's is a complicated life, well acted by Giamatti who grows old subtly as we watch.  Too bad the film makers didn't find in that enough of a story and hyped it by resorting to farce and by reducing some characters to caricature.  One actor in the film is even more natural, more completely believable and more humorous than Giamatti:  Dustin Hoffman, playing Barney's father, Detective Izzy Panofsky, who protects his son from the ruthless detective who haunts him.  The complete naturalness with which Hoffman speaks even the simplest lines is startling, even in a face-off with the excellent Giamatti.

All in all, a well acted, well photographed, mean spirited movie.

... nixed ...

Yvonne Korshak

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FILM NOTE - Inside Job, documentary film by Charles Ferguson with contributions and narration by Matt Damon

Mark P. Haggard writes from England ...

... disturbing questions ...

Many people had their say on the Wall Street fraud (it would be indulgent to merely call it a crisis or crash, when a bank is mis-selling mortgages which it knows are trash and will fail, but is also insuring itself against such failure).  This documentary says a lot, very clearly and comprehensively (see for example the New York Times review:  http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/movies/08inside.html).  So what is there to add 5 months after the film's debut and 29 months after the collapse?  And what is there to say from a country not included in the critique to the extent it might justifiably have been by virtue of its considerable financial muscle and its own spectacular bank failures?

Sometimes the most pivotal or revealing aspects take time to see.  Fiction can often communicate more freely and effectively than fact, unfettered by detail and reservation.  But fact is stranger than fiction, and for an issue that needs to be nailed, facts are ultimately more convincing.  In the audience with which I saw this film, the gasps at the enormity of the revelations and the derision of the outrageous posturing by the interviewed apologists for the fraud far outstripped any I have ever heard occurring in response to movie car-crashes or virtual tsunamis.

I went to the film knowing pretty much that it would be an expose of greed and the folly of deregulation and Wall Street, but was not prepared for how deep and substantiated a critique it would be of the conspiracy to subvert and to corrupt academia and Washington (both all too corruptible, it seems);  or for the scandal of how little has changed and how few have been held to account.  Shameful though I feel to admit this, the City of London and the last Government of the UK should have received more of a broadside than they did, for failings entirely parallel to those in the U.S. and in the colorful little hot spot of Iceland.  

The closing moments of the film show a fly-by shot of the Statue of Liberty and succinctly and unsentimentally pose the question of values that our societies represent, and project the hope that some of those values can be re-found and promoted.  As I write we see protests from millions in the Arab world wishing to cast off oppressive and inefficient governments.  What can we offer Arab countries that is better than what they have had?  Let us cling to what we can;  we still have good models for Citizens' Advice Bureaux (remain vigilant, there!), and we are not being tortured for exercising the right of free speech.  Ferguson was allowed to make, and to a limited extent to distribute this film, although, as with Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, the people who really need to see it probably will not.

As is well known from economic history, one main cause of the French Revolution was the inefficiency of concentration of great wealth in the hands of a very small aristocracy arbitrarily selected not by merit but by accident of birth, coupled with the restriction of economic spin-off to a few producers of luxury goods and vice supplying them.  The sharp steepening of the socioeconomic gradients of income and capital in western countries in the last 30 years is efficient only in the eyes of the top few percent who define efficiency in terms of their own growth of capital income.

Of course there are problems with excessively flat income distributions, with excessively large public sectors and with perverse incentives in welfare programmes but these are mostly departed extremes of a fairly remote past.  Our populations have been sold an opiate of the people, about deregulated markets as the efficient alternative.  If the people who commandeer such a high proportion of national wealth are smart (and many are quite smart), then it is not impossible that their efforts may be on driver of efficiency.  But we rightly call fraud a crime and, pointing at mafia-ridden societies we say, rightly, that crime is not efficient.  It is an arbitrary qualification for the aristocracy.

Enough people in the finance industry were smart that their defense (no-one saw the crisis coming) does not stand up.  The bankers threatened the regulators with the spectre of a crisis if they were regulated, so when it inevitably came, it was bigger than the blip it might have been.  There was enough quantitative obfuscation (by academics whom we can now see as possibly corrupt), that a few in the finance industry and many ordinary politicians might honestly claim they really thought that complex derivatives could spread risk, although these people will now look a little foolish.  Spreading is not the same as reducing risk.  A good deal has at least two parties to it for whom it is advantageous and even efficient to do business by making the deal.  We see in the many foreclosures and in the unemployment statistics just how widely the risk was spread. 

The questions raised by Inside Job roll on, and many of them are much more profound than technical issues about complex derivatives:

Who competent and non-corrupt can be recruited to do government finance and regulation jobs?  And will taxpayers foot the small bill to have enough of them to avoid the stock- and mortgage-holder and taxpayer from being defrauded again?  Will Europe succeed in implementing some form of appropriate regulation and will the lower risk lead to an inflow of funds and financial business?  Will Harvard and Columbia take any steps to regain academic credibility or just bluff it out?  Has the self-seeking fashion-obsessed society produced an inability to say or to hear that the Emperor has no clothes?  Is there any way to reverse the social pathology of this great distraction from the real issues of industrial decline, geopolitics and global warming?  Can any large-scale citizen lobby energized by this film turn pressure on elected representatives to take some action?  Watch this space, but shudder as you remember how slow and modest were the effects of the critical documentaries by Michael Moore and Al Gore.

Mark P. Haggard

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FILM NOTE - True Grit, starring Jeff Bridges, directed by Ethan and Joel Coen, 2010, and comparison with True Grit, starring John Wayne, directed by Henry Hathaway, 1969

... true grits ...

True Grit, filmed by the Coen brothers in 2010, is a western with a true twist, a young girl's quest for revenge and her determination to stick by the sides of the two pistol slingers in a manhunt through rough western country.

Mattie Ross, a composed and purposeful fourteen-year old girl, hires the grittiest Deputy Marshall she can find, scraggy, old, one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, to track down and bring back alive her father's killer, Tom Chaney.  Rooster teams up with a Texas ranger who's after Chaney for his own reason and, since she's paying -- this girl knows money, she was her father's bookkeeper -- she insists on going along.  The two pros try to shake her but she's courageous, resourceful and unshakable.  She's also refined and educated and part of the film's charm is the playoff between Mattie's serious, formal way of speaking and the rough and ready crudity of the Western tough guys.  The little girl knows what she wants and pushes these two big men around to get it -- although they aren't always pushable.

Maddie also knows the law, as it applies to her case, and her references to it set against the law-in-his-own hands Cogburn carries an essential and significant theme of the story:  the insinuation of law and order into Wild West eye-for-an-eye anarchy; the weaking of that Western tradition in the face of "gentrification".

The manhunt leads to dangerous situations and brutal killings and Mattie shows that as far as true grit goes, she's every bit the match for Cogburn.  She never yields to panic in terrifying incidents when, I think, most of us would, and she emerges unscathed until, finally, and as a result of her own bravery, it looks like all is lost.  But each man, in his own, unspoken way, has come to love Mattie, the young Texas hot-head with a tenderness faintly suggesting romance, and Cogburn with a protective fatherliness.  We don't know this fully until the chips are down and we see the lengths each man will go to save her.  There's an epilogue in which Mattie, grown up and a successful business woman, almost manages to re-encounter the elusive Cogburn.  The Texas Ranger has faded from the picture.

The acting, with the exception of Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie, isn't as brilliant as the story.  Jeff Bridges is visually convincing as the worn, lonely bounty hunter, but his voice is monotonous -- he falls back on his growl to convey complex experiences and emotions.  Matt Damon has no particular hold on the role of the dare-devil Texas Ranger and seems to just walk -- or ride -- through the part.  Still, don't miss this movie -- the story's just too good and it's told well enough.

Are we arriving at maturity too late, these days?  Are there fourteen-year old girls around today like Mattie Ross?  I hope so!

... from light to dark ...

There have been two major Hollywood productions of True Grit, one starring John Wayne as the sharp shooter Rooster Cogburn in 1969, and the current one with Jeff Bridges as Cogburn.  Each tells its truly great story well, based on the novel by Charles Portis.  Here are a few thoughts on differences between the 2010 True Grit and the 1969 version.

Wayne won the Academy Award for his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn but I think they must have given it to him more as a career award than for this role.  He's quite wooden as Rooster, with a few facial expressions and a few tones of voice that he cycles through.  It's easier to believe that Bridges could soften inside than Wayne, who's all on the surface.  As the Texas Ranger, Glen Campbell is more exciting and individualized than Matt Damon, which sets up a tense, dynamic contrast between Cogburn and the ranger.  In the 2010 film, bland Damon seems like just a hanger-on.  As for Mattie, well -- how can you choose between Kim Darbie in the 1969 movie and Hailee Steinfeld in the current one -- both, in different ways, are marvelous!  Darbie is round-faced and conveys a sunny disposition behind her seriousness of purpose;  Steinfeld seems more intense.  Neither is just "cute" -- thank heavens!  

In some ways, the 2010 movie is like a translation of the 1969 from light into dark.  Darbie is fair and light haired, Steinfeld deeply brunette.  The earlier movie is filmed in daylight with direct camera shots, and the fast-action scenes make sense.  In 2010 the same scenes are shot at night, with oblique camera angles and surrounded by an aura of mystery, with some confusion thrown in.  Generally, the 1969 movie tells its story in a straightforward manner, like prose read in a good light.  The 2010 film is more startling and filled with forboding.  In it, Maddie spends her first night in town in an undertaker's coffin;  in 1969, she goes straight to the boarding house.  The Texas Ranger encounters Mattie across the boarding house dinner table in the 1969 film;  in 2010, as she's in bed and gradually waking up, she finds the man watching her.  In 1969, Maddie's crossing the river on horseback is filmed from a distance;  in 2010, we're right there with the struggling, splashing horse.  The 2010 film is more shadowed with scenes constructed to heighten suspense.  

A strong positive of the 1969 movie is that it presents the precipitating situation and the critical action that generates the plot, which helps us to understand the characters better than in the 2010 movie where this is only referred to.  On the other hand, by giving plenty of space to the early courtroom scene of Cogburn toying with the lawyer, the story's important theme of anarchy in the old West versus the enroachments of law and order is more fully developed in 2910, which gives the later movie more depth.

Starting earlier in the plot, the 1969 movie also ends earlier, and upbeat, pretty much "happily every after".  The 2010 film, following the novel, let's you see how things wind up years later down the line.  Maddie, now a business woman, is strong as ever but, poignantly, just misses her last chance to re-encounter Cogburn.  He, the old bounty hunter, had wound down to a Wild West sideshow, resolving that essential theme.  The lower arm Maddie lost from the snake bite has become part of her silhouette.  Not a "happily ever after" ending here, but not exactly a bitter one either: it carries a strong sense of truth. 

Yvonne Korshak

Comments very welcome ... please scroll down, click on "comments", write in box and click on "post."  Thank you.

FILM NOTE -- Black Swan starring Natalie Portman, with Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey and Winona Ryder, directed by Darren Aronofsky

... alter egos ...

In the ballet Swan Lake, the White Swan princess, Odette, good and truly loving, is opposed by Odile, the Black Swan, wild and destructive, both ideally played by the same dancer.  What a role for a ballerina!  And now, in this film, the Artistic Director of the New York City Ballet is looking to cast a new dancer for his new version of Swan Lake.  Which soloist in the company will rise to star in this most coveted role?  Nina (Portman) is in the running:  the charismatic European impresario (Cassel) finds her dancing technically brilliant, great for the role of the White Swan, but lets her know she must loosen herself emotionally and sexually to fullfill the White Swan's fascinating alter ego, the Black Swan. 

How does a young woman, strung tight as a bow, loosen up emotionally and sexually -- and when the stakes are so high?  And when every other soloist in the company is after the part, too?  And when the former star hates her for honing in on the part?  And when a jealous rival smears the word "whore" in crude red lipstick letters across the mirror of the ladies' room because the Artistic Director is attracted to her?

High stakes -- and plenty of jitters even for a woman with a rock solid psychology -- but Nina, we see, is pathologically tense and has a strong streak of self-destruction.  What looks like a raw rash on her back is the result of compulsive scratching, particularly frightening on the highly scrutinized body of a dancer, with the premium on perfect beauty.  She's also prone to hallucinations, terrifying in themselves and something else that must be kept hidden, increasing her tension.  How much her mother (Hershey) heightens her tension and how much she assuages it is never clear.

And, wonder of wonders, the Director chooses her for the role!  This triumph of her life (and her mother never even made it out of the corps de ballet, hah!) intensifies the jealousy that surrounds Nina, as well as her own inner fears.  Genuine rivalries blend into paranoia.  The on and off sexual attentions of the Artistic Director excite her and confuse her.

Through it all there are gorgeous glimpses of ballet and Tchaikovsky's passionate ballet music ... AND glimpses of the battered toes of a dancer on points, and daily discipline of classes.  Black Swan and White Swan:  two sides of ballet, two sides of Odette, two sides of Nina.

Will she make it to towering stardom on opening night?  Or will her hallucinatory terrors overwhelm?  For how long can she hide her sore back?  The questions burn as one watches the film.  Their resolution is brilliant, though not totally believable.  Portman is superb portraying, side by side, the magnificence of dance and psychological deterioration, in this Academy Award worthy performance.

The film would be greater if we understsood more about the Artistic Director.  What's important about his "new version" of Swan Lake.  What drives him?  And -- an intrusive question as you're watching -- why does he choose Nina when he has reservations about her dancing for the Black Swan? -- he's not that in love with her.  We have to take his creativity on faith so he comes across as a suave, European version of "just another pretty face", too simple a foil for Nina's complexities.

Mila Kunis is terrific as the solo dancer with a tough, humorous personality opposite in all ways to Nina, another alter ego, as are all the women.  Barbara Hershey, looking just like an older Portman, is convincing as Nina's loving, over-protective mother (but given Nina's self-destructive tendencies, is she too protective?).  Winona Ryder is powerful as the enraged prima donna pushed aside for the new "little princess".  In keeping with the theme of alter egos set by the ballet, New York City plays a double role of its own, from expansive views of glamorous Lincoln Center to scenes of lonely, grafitti'd subway tunnels.

Black Swan is a compelling portrait of a woman caught between her demons and her potential for great achievement.     

Yvonne Korshak

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FILM NOTE -- The King's Speech starring Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, and Helena Bonham Carter, directed by Tom Hooper, perspectives from two writers, Yvonne Korshak and Mark P. Haggard

Let's Talk off-Broadway is very grateful to have received, 2/16/11, from Mark P. Haggard, Guest Blogger, comments onThe King's Speech, written from his humanistic as well as specifically British point of view:  his comments have been added following Yvonne Korshak's of 12/13/10 ...

... We're all in it together -- sometimes ...

Don't miss The King's Speech.  It's a wonderful, and through-and-through enjoyable movie.

Albert, the second son of George V of England, has a severe stutter, which clips his wings as a royal prince and causes him immense embarrassment in carrying out his public duties.  In an acutely painful early scene, Albert, in front of a large crowd, struggles to utter his encouraging words at the opening of a new factory -- he simply can't get the words out.  With his earnest desire to do good, his pain at failure, and his good looks we're totally on his side.

With the help of his loving wife, he reluctantly sets to work with a speech therapist, Lionel Logue, to cure his stutter -- hard to say which is more problematic about the rough and ready Logue, his unorthodox techniques or that he's Australian.  But they struggle through Albert's aristocratic resistance and oh so human need, on again off again, with breathing exercises, rolling on the floor and some off-hand psychoanalysis (we're in the mid-1930's) and make progress.  The friendship between the aristocrat and the commoner that develops in Logue's run-down consulting room is part of the movie's appeal.  Even Albert's wife takes tea at the Logue's simple table.

Meanwhile, crises are developing on two fronts that make everything that happens more important:  Hitler and his plans for world domination loom large.  And Albert's father, the elderly King George V grows ill and is facing death.

Prince Edward, Albert's older brother, as George's oldest son stands eady to succeed George as King -- only, we have to worry, is he really ready?  He's a self-centered spendthrift in an impolitic affair with a divorced American woman, Wallis Simpson.  King George V is said to have a higher opinion of Edward, who already has two children, than the feckless, and still unmarried and childless Albert, i.e., without an heir to the throne, but that's not how the succession game is played.  At George V's death, Edward becomes King willy-nilly ... but we're seeing some handwriting on the wall, so the success of Albert's conquest of his stutter grows even more important.  Edward, rejecting tactful solutions for keeping a mistress, insists he must marry Mrs. Simpson, a marriage opposed on several grounds including that Edward, as King, heads the Church of England which does not allow a divorced person with a living, former spouse to remarry within the Church (Henry VIII had his marriages annulled). 

Another consideration:  Edward and Mrs. Simpson were thought to be German sympathizers, a charge that had always dogged this dynasty of German origin, and to drive the point home, Germany's Foreign Minister was currently sending Mrs. Simpson flowers on a daily basis;  the British government may well have shoved Edward out of the Kingship, which put Albert into it, although the movie doesn't take this up.  The upshot is, at any rate, that Edward abdicates the throne to marry "the woman he loves," Wallis Simpson and they become the Duke and Duchess of Windsor ever after.  

Albert, reluctantly, uncertainly, becomes King, taking on the name of George VI for the stabilizing sake of continuity.  At the moment he becomes King, the older of those two cute little daughter's he's been playing with in the course of the movie, Elizabeth, becomes first in line for the throne. 

The crisis of war with Germany follows fast on the heels of the averted constitutional crisis.  How does Albert handle his kingship, and his communication disorder, in the face of war?  It's enough to say here that he and Logue have worked hard, persistently, and courageously.  They are ready. 

Colin Firth gives an Academy Award worthy performance as the tender, humorous, intelligent, but not intrinsically remarkable man who is thrust into a position of tremendous symbolic influence with the arrival of a national and world crisis.  His rendering of the speech problem, with its frustrations, and waxing and waning, is masterly.  People are raving about Ann Hathaway's performance as a girl with Parkinson's disease in Love and Other Drugs  but all she does is wiggle a finger or two now then and cry a lot.  In contrast, Firth makes the speech impediment a deep and sustained part of himself. 

Geoffrey Rush is charismatic as the rambunctious, compassionate, determined therapist.  One of the underlying strengths of the film is the way Logue's determination and self-confidence in the absence of "credentials" play off against the tentativeness and insecurities of the man with so many titles to his name.  What a deep sense there is in that of common humanity -- and what brilliant movie-making!  There's lots of laughter in this film, and much of it comes from the timing and antics of the great comic actor, Geoffrey Rush.

Helena Bonham Carter is entrancing as Albert's loving, down-to-earth -- and gorgeously dressed, furred and jeweled -- wife.  She positively spells privilege in its most charming allure.  You can all but smell her French perfume.

The movie favors accuracy:  my knowledgeable companion tells me that the techniques of speech therapy are those of the period;  like Logue, a small-time actor, many speech therapists emerged from among actors and other professional speakers who responded ad hoc to the desperate speech needs of many soldiers injured in World War I.  The movie brings to life England in the 1930's;  it let's you dwell in the royal world of castles, of lavish decor and food, and of servants who conscientiously hold trays steady while seeming unable to hear scandals unrolling before their ears.  And it let's you discover, along with Albert, the world of common people struggling to make do, fulfill their aspirations and raise their children.  A keen pleasure of the film is the friendly interactions that occur between these two worlds, all the better that it happens to be true -- this time.

Yvonne Korshak

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The King's Speech, by Guest Blogger Mark Haggard (received 2/16/11)

The delightfully fitting ambiguity in the two meanings of "speech" in English captures the multi-level appeal of this film.  I write as a late recruit to its audience, having seen it on the night it picked up several BAFTA awards, which endorse its tipping for several Oscars.  The core script is simple:  despite initial resistance and ambivalence of A, B helps him to overcome baggage from his previous life as so to rise to current challenges.  This core formula could work in many different settings, professional and otherwise, and could underpin many differing films of varying degrees of success.  We know the ending, at least in round terms, so the what-happens-next? motive for the audience is not as strong as with other screen plays.  Why, when does this film work so well?  There are many answers, I suspect different for different people.  Leave aside the obvious brilliant acting and some very successful location staging (how did they do it for under $15m?), accomplishments of which all readers must already have heard.  Beyond these, the question becomes interesting.

Foremost must be the momentousness of the events of the mid-20th Century.  Britain fought the Nazis alone for 27 months, or 13 depending on whom you choose to include as effective co-combatants.  After the double shock in 1936 of the abdication of Edward VIII and the German re-militarisation of the Rhineland, the severity with which the Nation and the Monarchy would be tested became evident.  The Duke of York became King George VI, and so became hugely important in the maintenance of morale and the belief that victory was possible, as the nation bled its resources to that end.  The Monarchy became very popular again through its dedication in the years to follow, but the film wisely stops at the successful delivery of the stirring broadcast to the Nation and Empire in September 1939, emblematic of ensuing events.

The King's Speech helps me understand more deeply than the many books or documentaries had done why, 59 years ago, on the morning of February 6th 1952 a teacher from another class came running into the classroom I was in, tears streaming from her eyes, to announce the death of the King.  The fact that a curious and vulnerable professional relationship between the Duke/King and an out-of-work actor Lionel Logue was so important underlines again, and chillingly, what a close-run thing it all was.  This transfixed me with atavistic emotion for the entire second half of the film.  It is not necessary to be a royalist to experience total suspension of disbelief as this piece of history unfolds.  The identification is not of course with either main character (except perhaps if you happen to be a king or an unqualified speech therapist).  With what then?  That is hard to answer except by saying that, barring the more private scenes of family and therapy which are touching but also funny, the film has an impact similar to that of a re-shot period newsreel, only in wide screen colour and with more time to savour detail.

There are many other bases of excellence that will be more important than an identification with a past cause, to those who do not have reasons of age and nationality to be so sensitive to the historical backdrop.  The period detail is superbly judged and executed, only slightly edged with caricature, as must be necessary to evoke comprehension and recognition by a wide audience of personalities and of differences of in customs or the social order across three quarters of a century.  The genuine difficulties with monarchy as an institution, not just in the superbly captured self-indulgent personality of Edward, are clearly stated for those with an eye to see them, without being thrown in our face.  The diffidence and mistakes of both the unconventional speech therapist and of King George are artfully managed through several on/off fluctuations of the professional relationship to create strong dramatic tensions, released periodically by the humour.  The cinematography uses indoor perspective in palace and abbey, and snow and mist outdoors to impressive effect, without becoming over-mannered.  Choosing Beethoven's 7th as the incidental music to the climax when the broadcast is delivered was supremely apt;  its grandeur might make it over-obvious for some, but it worked for me as a way of underlining the Olympian moment where all normal realities had to be suspended, as all but the sublime requirement fell away from th focus.  But such long lists become boring.  Well done, chaps!

Mark P. Haggard

Comments as always very welcome!  Please scroll down, click on "comments," write in comment box and click on "post."  Thank you!

FILM NOTE - VISION starring Barbara Sukowa, by Margarethe Von Trotta, drawn from the life of Hildegard Von Bingen

... a woman of vision ...

Hildegard Von Bingen was a remarkable woman of the 12th Century, administrator, author, artist, physician, musician and composer, and councilor to leaders of state.  The film stresses two personality traits -- her determination and emotional volatility -- at the expense of her strong, thoughtful intellect.  It also seems odd that, as visual art, the film makes no use of her vibrant manuscript paintings.

We see the blinding light that often strikes her inner field of sight (it's thought she had migraine) that partly forms her visions.  These visions -- personal and untestable -- along with her stubborn rebelliousness, create conflict with many in the Church hierarchy, in particular the nasty Abbot of her first convent.  She often seems quixotic in taking on -- even egging on -- the powerful, particularly remarkable in that she bears the inferior status of a medieval woman.  Yet, while she confronts near impossible odds in support of her visions -- or just what she wants -- she wins some big battles. 

Her portraits as a visionary have come down to us in painted manuscripts.  For example, by clicking on this link to her portrait in the Liber Scivias,  you can see Hildegard receiving a fiery vision and writing about it, with her scribe in attendance, ca. 1145.  You can notice in this picture that Hildegard and her male scribe share an intellectual world -- their heads are in the same space -- but their bodies are carefully kept in clearly demarcated separate spaces.  The clarity with which he is shown listening but not writing indicates the illustration may have sought to counter rumors that the scribe, not Hildegard, was responsible for her books.

The movie gives some clues to her success but falls short of conveying how it all could happen.  It's best at showing her stubbornness and passionate emotionality, but considering the obstacles, how was that enough to get her what she wanted?  When the Magistra of her first convent dies, the Abbot appoints her the new Magistra.  Why on earth -- when he's perennially distrustful of her rebelliousness?  True to form, she immediately counters him by insisting the nuns elect their next Magistra.  Then, when she wins their vote, the nuns encircle her with joyous, loving hugs.  What did she do to earn their love or confidence?  We don't know.  As for her influence at the state level, once she visits the grandee of the day but the advice she gives is homily, and nothing really happens.

The film over spends its energy on "romance."  Hildegard severed her nuns from her monastery-convent to found a new one solely for women, Rupertburg:  instead of conveying a prescient and productive act (born out by history), the film motivates this vastly difficult task by a love affair between a monk and a nun.  Even more important, too much of the film is devoted to Hildegard's passionate, physically unfulfilled love for Richardis, the daughter of an aristocratic family who comes to Rupertsburg as a teenager and then, for the sake of her family's ambition, leaves to become an Abbess elsewhere.  Barbara Sukowa is magnificent in conveying the love-sick, desperate Hildegard but this tacit love affair with its anguish of separation goes on for too long and dissipates the arc of Hildegard's success.

VISION brings the medieval world to life physically and spiritually -- that's a good reason for seeing it.  The sense of authenticity is very satisfying.  The Romanesque monasteries and convents with their hand-wrought stone columns and arches, horrific but fascinating paintings and lush gardens hold great appeal.  Narrow minded ideas, hatreds and vengeance cohabit with spiritual passion;  religious enterprises are fueled by politics and ambition.  VISION is beautifully produced and gives us some insight into Hildegard von Bingen but one is left wishing it went further to illuminate the source in her personality of her prodigious accomplishments and their impact on Europe of the 12th Century.  Hildegard's influence continues:  below is a detail of an illustration from an artist's book by a contemporary artist that takes its inspiration from Hildegard von Bingen.

 

Claire Van Vliet, Sanctae Hildegardis Circulus Sapientiae, detail of artist's book, with Hildegard's songs, inspired by Hildegard Von Bingen, 2001.  Photo courtesy of Robert and Yvonne Ruben.

                                                                                            Yvonne Korshak      

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FILM NOTE - You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, written and directed by Woody Allen

... another wonderful Woody Allen movie ...

What is it about the camera angles, the light and the naturalness of the actors that immediately let you know you're at a Woody Allen film and you're in good hands?

We're in London, and in the midst of troubled relationships in two parallel couples, one old, one young.  Pairs and parallels count a lot in this movie.

In the wake of despair because her husband of a lifetime, Alfie, has left her, Helena, and older woman in pink and a touch of ruffles, has found her way to a fortune teller who she thinks is both more useful and cheaper than the psychiatrists she saw after a near-successful suicide attempt.  It turns out she's right.  Alfie, meanwhile, a wealthy businessman, bitter because his marriage never produced a boy, only a girl, has made the break for that one last fling, whitening his teeth, getting a suntan, going to the gym and purchasing a convertible, plus viagra.

Sally, Helena and Alfie's daughter, is filled with resentment toward her husband, Roy, the one American in the bunch:  they're living off her earnings because Roy, though he published his first novel, hasn't been able to sell one since.  Also, she wants to get pregnant and he doesn't want a child.  Roy, at the moment, is on tenterhooks waiting to hear if the publisher will accept his latest novel submission, his irritable anxiety heightened by Helena's tactcless intrusions into their apartment -- since she's paying their rent, she feels she's entitled to unannounced visits and, further angering Roy, Sally doesn't seem to disagree.

In a hyper-fulfillment of the fortune teller's optimistic prophecy that Helena will meet a new love,everyone meets a new love.  Feeling listless from waiting for news of his book, and attracted by the girl across the way he sees through a window, Roy hooks up with her, Dia, a dark beauty from a well-to-do Indian family who's about to be married to a very regular seeming young Englishman;  the engagement is broken and one just knows this is a bad decision on Dia's part.  Sally becomes infatuated with Greg, the handsome, wealthy owner of the high end art gallery where she's working.  Alfie buys himself a call girl, Germaine, whom he goes so far as to marry and set up in a glamorous apartment with glamorous furs and ... oh oh, a charge card.  And Helena encounters Jonathan who's not tall, dark, nor handsome, not wealthy either, but who's warm and charming:  they share a belief in the occult, of having lived before and in the possibility of reincarnation.

How the plot works out is truly a surprise.  It's not  telegraphed.  It's awful.  It's wonderful!  And leaves one smiling and talking and talking and smiling.

The relationships are fun to watch for the sense of recognition and sheer laughter -- this is, after all, Woody Allen.  But what does Allen convey through them?  The affairs feel meaningful and imperative to those involved but what really is this thing we call "love"?  Lust goes by the name of love and while it grabs hold of love's high and individualized status, it's mechanically a sure thing and -- let's face it -- lovers are interchangeable.  Roy lusts for Dia in her bikini underwear as he watches her through the window of the apartment he shares with Sally, and later he lusts for Sally in her bikini underwear as he watches from Dia's window.  In the film, two separate sexual relationships are initiated in exactly the same way -- by a guy massaging a girl's injured leg.  That's all it takes.  Sally's choice:  Roy and Greg coarsely resemble each other. Roy's choice:  Sally has studied art and Art History, Dia studies music and music history.  What's the difference, really?

A view of mechanistic drives, and a downgraded significance of higher human faculties goes beyond the question of love in this film to the very heart of existence, and interestingly, again through parallels.  At two critical points, the plot turns on rudimentary signals, the knock on a medium's table, the eye blink of a brain-injured man.  Language, definitions, subtlety, nuance become irrelevant -- but only momentarily.  That's one direction.  There is another.

Allen doesn't leave us with the mechanical working out of love and life.  For one couple, there's a genuine meeting of the minds;  they have much to share spiritually (intended pun, Woody's not mine), as well as physically.  Surrounded by everyone else's disappointments and failures, they emerge to remind us that while tragedies end in death, by the end of a comedy there has to be at least one -- life affirming -- marriage.  Woody Allen, for all his burdened awareness of the true identity of "the tall dark stranger we all meet," is a great comedic creator.

I particularly loved Gemma Jones as the anguished, then frazzled, but fundamentally strong Helena, Lucy Punch as the realistic business person Germaine, and Roger Ashton-Griffiths as the sophisticated and tender-hearted Jonathan but the cast is all excellent.  Anthony Hopkins is convincing as the vulnerable but crude Alfie (I don't agree at all with critics who found him uncomfortable with the part).  It's fascinating to watch Naomi Watts' range of emotion and purpose as Sally.  Josh Brolin is an earthy Roy (I would have liked to see the writer writing something or at least have had a look at his computer), and as as for Anthony Banderas as Greg, the suave, successful gallery owner, what could possibly go wrong there?  Remembering the witty, wonderful cast in their parts brings back the delightful hour and 45 minutes in Woody Allen's created world.  I can hardly wait for the next one. 

Yvonne Korshak  

Comments very welcome.  Please scroll down, write in comment box and click on "post."  Thank you. 

FILM NOTE -- A reader writes in about "Mao's Last Dancer" ...

 

"DO NOT MISS "MAO'S LAST DANCER"  FANTASTIC!   At the  Paris.   Oh, boy, oh boy!  

          and P.S.  Very few people there last night--it needs some good publicity!"

                                                                                Irma B. Jaffe  08/28/10

 

Here's a comment on this post that came in -- you can read it in the comment section (scroll down) but am including it here since it gives more information about the film:   

 

"I saw it! You can't believe how a film about a male ballet dancer can grip you! The background is the Chinese Communist Revoution and what a view you get about the repression in China during those years under Mao! I hope the dancer that played the role of the fabulous Li Cunxin will be taken up by the American Baller theater! I would love to see him dance on the stage!  I  really hope the ABT will get that dancer Chi Cao to dance with them in NY"

 

n.b. The Paris, located in NYC in midtown Manhattan at 58th Street near Fifth Avenue (4 W. 58th St) is the longest continually operating art film theater in the United States.  Some of the great all-time films have opened there.  They play one film at a time -- kind of a relief!

FILM NOTE -- The Kids Are All Right, directed by Lisa Cholodenko, with Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Mia Wasikowska, Josh Hutcherson

... politically correct ... but unkind ...

This is a pleasant movie to watch but sentimental, and very unfair to men.  It's a well acted comedy with canny observation of recognizable "types" engaged amusingly in an odd ball "modern family" situation -- in a southern California environment of sunny decks and patios, lush foliage and organic food.  There are problems, sure, but then how bad can anything be with great kitchens with granite counter tops and warm wood shelving and everybody cooking really well?  It's in the genre of It's Complicated.

Two lesbians, Nic (Benning), an M.D. (OB-GYN) who supports the family and Jules (Moore), somewhat feckless in the job area but now engaged in a start-up landscaping business, have been together in what for them is in all ways a true marriage -- wherever California may be on the legal status of gay marriage at the moment -- for many years.  Rounding out the family are their two teen-agers whom they each had via the same anonymous sperm donor.  Laser (Hutcherson) is Jules' biological 15-year old son and Joni (Wasikowska) is Nic's biological daughter, 18 and about to start college.  The kids are doing fine having two moms.

Laser, though, yearning to know something about his biological father, urges Joni to find out about him because she's old enough to make the inquiry.  Thus Paul (Ruffalo), the donor from all those years back, enters their lives, and he's charming, a little raffish but still, a guy who makes a good living -- he runs a successful restaurant.  He takes to spending time with the kids in a loving and responsible way -- though Nic, antagonistic from the start, argues about "responsible."  The kids, though cautious, fall for him, and so does Jules who has "issues" with the domineering Nic, and anyhow Jules has a common interest with Paul in growing things and organics.

So, while Jules is working on landscaping Paul's place, she and Paul have what looks on all counts like a passionate, joyous affair.  If you came into the movie at this point, you'd never guess Jules was gay, believe me.

But then everybody gets angry at them.  Nic, frantic over Jules' betrayal, fearful of the loss of her love, turns sarcastic and ugly, and the kids, too, are furious, seeing it as a personal and family betrayal.  Jules ends up sleeping on the couch (turnaround on an old joke).  But Paul --

Paul is thrust from the family circle.  Out in the cold.  Persona non grata.  Expelled from the clan.  Jules, back in the fold, seems (implausibly) not to care a jot.  And Paul has to hear his biological daughter say to him, searching for the right words though she's a very smart girl, "I wish you'd been ... better."  Whamo.  While everybody rushes to get back to loving Jules, who's off the sofa and back in the cozy marital bed fast.

Yet Jules and Paul were both drawn to the affair and shared responsibility for it -- in fact Jules initiated the first kiss, Paul up to that point having been, as they say, a "gentleman."  And as Paul's dream takes hold of him, of loving Jules and gaining a family in the bargain -- not reaching 50 as a drifter "like some of those guys" -- he gives up his gorgeous, younger, Black sometime girlfriend (who manages to dump on him, too).  Paul loses the whole caboodle, and Nic -- I guess this is called "growth" -- lets Jules take over the wheel of the family car. 

Talk about a double standard.

I feel really sorry for Paul. 

Yvonne Korshak 

Comments very welcome ... please scroll down, click on little gray word "comments," write in the comment box that opens up, and click on "post."  Thank you!

FILM NOTE -- Inception with Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, written and directed by Christopher Nolan

... Special Defects ...

Never mind the hoopla, this is a really bad movie.

In case you have somehow escaped knowing this, Dom Cobb (DiCaprio) is hired by a Japanese businessman to help break up a rival business conglomerate by going beyond even his extraordinary capacity to share the dreams of others.  His new task:  to instill a new idea, the break-up of a business, into the dream of the heir to the other guy's conglomerate.  "Inception" refers to instilling a new idea into somebody else's had through a dream.

To enroll the dream-endowed DiCaprio to his cause, the Japanese businessman (Watanabe) uses as leverage that DiCaprio is believed to have murdered his wife back in California and so can't get out of this shady business and back to his kids.  I'm using their names as actors because you never forget for one moment whom you're watching -- the characters have no lives independent of these famous faces.  The deal is that DiCaprio will do what Watanabe wants and once he's successful, Watanabe will do something (pull strings?) to get DiCaprio off the hook and back into a normal happy life.

From here follow many adventures in many cities, from Kyoto to Mombasa, all involving a great deal of violence, and cars colliding, exploding, rolling down embankments and off bridges.  It turns out there are several levels of dream worlds and so multiple surreal but related chases and disasters that take place at the same time but in different locales and time frames.  What takes a minute here might take 10 minutes somewhere else and 50 years somewhere else, all on different dream levels.  This means that while things are careening toward disaster here, within the logic of one dream world or another there's time to avoid disaster because elsewhere a different but linked downward spin is taking more time, giving the here a breather. 

This sounds more interesting than it is because, what's particularly annoying about Inception is that the rules of this SciFi world are not clear, and the sense is they're not consistent.  Maybe if you pinned Christopher Nolan to the wall he could persuade you that, within his artistic framework, things are consistent but nobody sitting anywhere near me could make it out -- I was not alone.   If you sacrifice consistency you can do anything and thus things float, time passes at different rates, things happen arbitrarily for some special effect of another and you can have all the disasters and violence you want by the snap of your fingers.

The downside of a game without consistent rules is it's boring.  I was glad when Inception was over and DiCaprio was (no surprise here) freed from his wife and his guilt and back with the kids (of course we don't get a clue as to how Watanabe pulls that off).  A number of teenagers just upped and left though the adults tended to stick it out -- if they were looking for a point to it all they didn't find it. 

Yvonne Korshak

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FILM NOTE: Agora Starring Rachel Weisz, Max Minghella, Oscar Issac, Directed by Alejandro Amenábar

... twilight of the gods ...

Agora is as powerful a movie about sectarian violence as I think has ever been made. That it takes place long ago intensifies its power because it’s so much like what’s happening in the world today.
 
The film is set in 4th Century Egypt, when the Pagans run the great city of Alexandria while the Christians, recently legitimized in the Roman empire, have become increasingly numerous. Beleaguered by the Christians, the Pagans attack the Christians and then the Christians attack the pagans – all attacks cruelly vicious. As the Christians amass power, they take on the third Great Religion present in Alexandria, the Jews, who retaliate, the Christians then seizing the opportunity to drive them out of Alexandria -- a new Exodus. It's now clear that the Christians will stop at nothing in their will to “purify” Alexandria by making it fully Christian. Convert or else.
 
The story's dramatized through the life of Hypatia – an actual person – a brilliant woman who wrote and lectured in Alexandria on Mathematics, Philosophy and Astronomy and had influence in matters of state. In the romanticized film, she's loved secretly by Davus, who's both a student at her lectures and her slave. Here in a nutshell is one of the great tensions of the classical world – it’s liberality and willingness to search and explore ideas and its dependence on slavery. Davus the slave is right there in Hypatia's class along with the rich and high born Orestes, who also loves Hypatia.  She, however, spurns all lovers in order to remain free of even loving male domination to carry out fully her life of teaching and inquiry.

Much of the action takes place in and around the famous library of Alexandria which housed the wisdom of the ancient world and the imminent threat to the books by those who hate their teachings is one of the great dramatic themes of the film.   
 
Loving Hypatia but detesting his position as a slave, Davus joins the Christians with an implied possibility of being freed from slavery (though it’s actually Hypatia who releases the locked slave's collar from around his neck). Orestes converts to Christianity though we're led to believe he is one of those who say the words without truly converting within, and becomes Prefect, the top position in Alexandria, where he continues to love Hypatia -- platonically -- though he cannot follow some of her more brilliant astronomical perceptions, which really are brilliant!

One of the things I love about this movie is it's great to see her thinking!  Although Hypatia’s writings haven't survived, her use of deduction in the film to come close to understanding essentials of modern science, including the rotation of the round earth, is well within the framework of the ancient philosophers.  

How does this intelligent woman who refuses to accept a subordinate "woman's role" fare in the increasinglly intolerant Alexandria?  It didn't work out well for her in history.  I'll leave it to you to see what happens to her in the movie, but this isn't a film that pulls its punches.   

Rachel Weisz is a little sweet-voiced for Hypatia but lovely to watch.  Max Minghella is not a natural actor but he works hard and does the job as Davus.  Oscar Isaac as the ironic but deep feeling Orestes has real star power. The dialog in Agora is not its strong point, but the film more than makes up for it by the dramatic and fundamentally honest telling of its tragic and compelling story.  Agora is a gripping and important film about the end of the ancient world and origins of the new era.

Yvonne Korshak

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The Habit of Art by Alan Bennett, directed by Nicholas Hytner, starring Richard Griffiths and Elex Jennings, simulcast of the play presented by the National Theatre, London

reviewed by guest writer Mark Haggard

 

I saw The Habit of Art “live” in a cinema well outside London, as did thousands across North America, though not on Broadway, under the new NTLive initiative, using high-definition satellite relay. This is a new technological compromise between live theatre and cinema (long-focus lenses and ingeniously unobtrusive camera technique ensure a better view than from the stalls). It’s worth a debate in its own right (does one clap and laugh aloud ?) However, the play’s the thing.

The Habit of Art is lashed with literary allusions and interlaced levels of realty. The title itself starts us into the play’s complexity, referring, as later revealed, primarily to the inability of
the artist to do other than he must do, the compulsion to be creative. But a habit is also a garment, and in the vernacular, the default reading of the term is that of a bad habit. And so we’re launched into ambiguity linking the levels of discourse.

 

Poet W.H Auden and composer Benjamin Britten collaborated in the late 1930s and early 40s (in New York), but then split with some lasting bitterness. The core of the inner play-within-a-play is an imagined meeting and reconciliation between them in Oxford in the early 1970s, not long before their respective deaths. The Actors periodically hold the Author to account for some aspects of this inner play (upper case here denotes the Characters in the outer play, which is about the rehearsal of the inner one). A pragmatic Stage Manager runs the rehearsal in the absence of the Director which enables the Actors to interrupt the inner play’s dialogue with a wider range of comments than would otherwise occur, and a range of layered humour. Switching from Britten-cum-Auden to within-rehearsal comments and back again is quickly established as something to be expected. When Author is asked whether Auden would actually have said certain of the part’s words, he smoothly provides research-based facts which support the realism, though counterfactual, of the inner play. Ahah, insights into the playwright’s art.

 

Two of the Actors are otherwise engaged, so their parts are talked through (and hammed up) by Stage Manager and Assistant, these burlesques serving like Shakespearian light-relief scenes. The Commentator in the inner play is a journalist, Carpenter, interviewing Auden in the first act. He has two levels of edit mode above the portrayal of a quasi-historical Carpenter (done with considerable dramatic license): these are as commentator (think ancient Greek chorus) within the inner play to provide grandiose historical/biographical comment, and as disgruntled Actor, the most querulous and most identified with his part of all. There’s irony in his complaint to the Author that his part is “just a device”. This makes it an existential threat to the Actor playing Carpenter, leading to the funniest lines in the play; he wants it to be something more but can’t quite express what, a neat summary of the human condition. The similarities and contrasts between parts and Actors’ real personalities (sexuality, incipient senile dementia, reserve vs. assertiveness, personal foibles) regularly intrude through banter and back-chat, offering solid fare of out-jokes for those who don’t get all the cultural, theatrical and university in-jokes.

 

The complexity is comprehensive and deeply structured. The real Auden and Britten had been going to collaborate on an opera of Death in Venice, and in the inner play Britten has been

proceeding slowly and with ambivalence on several counts. In a discussion that feeds the theme of the craft of art, they talk over reviving this project. Despite the detachment encouraged by rapid switches between layers of reality, Auden’s exhortation to Britten that he must never give up on the creative impulse, even if his music has now gone out of fashion, is deeply moving. 

 

The erudite discussion, chiefly by Auden, of the content of Death in Venice concentrates on
age-boundaries and the division of responsibility in seduction, openly articulating the theme of homosexuality. Thomas Mann, his main character Eschenbach, the real Auden and Britten were all in their ways gay, with a preference for the under-age. It is not entirely clear whether in 2010 this is an essential or incidental detail, such that the ideas and structure of the play might equally have been supported by heterosexual fascination with people almost two generations

younger, some under-age, and remained acceptable.

Self-reference in art is writ large in The Habit of Art; for the repressed Britten, self-revelation is a major fear. This sexual theme is set up early with the appearance of the rent boy, a mixture of ingenuousness, worldly-wise competence and low humour, though only developed toward the end. In Author’s play, this character is to represent the exploited (not just sexually) and the
unacknowledged, at whose expense art flourishes — the play within a play accordingly entitled Caliban’s Day, Caliban as the exploited savage. But by this point the action has become thematically crowded and Bennett doesn't create enough space for this interesting idea, although it’s ingenious that the rent boy, whilst not being highly educated, has already without artificiality been shown to have emotional and cultural insight. The ending is retrieved by orderly exits and realistic everyday winding-down conversations, then a beautifully theatrical turning out of the lights by the Stage Manager.

Mark Haggard

 

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FILM NOTE: The Last Station starring Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren, directed by Michael Hoffman

The Last Station is about the last phase in the long life of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, when writing novels has faded in importance for him, and what matters most is the utopian movement that had his name -- Tolstoyan.  Count Tolstoy has come to detest privilege, hence his support of his movement with its focus on social justice.  The movie gives us views of his endlessly vast lands and of his serfs engaged in back breaking labor, reminding us that this is a reasonable development in the the thinking of an intelligent and compassionate author.  In line with his ideals, he's about to sign a will that will leave all future royalties on his books to the Russian people.

Altering the will, however, frightens and enrages his wife, Sonya, who sees it as a betrayal.  She and Tolstoy have enjoyed a long and joyous marriage, she's aided him in writing his novels both through insightful discussion and as a Secretary -- "I copied War and Peace six times" -- and has borne him 13 children (of which 8 survived);  she feels she's earned his loyalty and is due those royalties by tradition, for herself and her children.  We can see her point, too.

Sonya's on a collision course not only with Tolstoy but with Chertkov, Tolstoy's kindred spirit and Tolstoyan administrator, who's as determined to obtain those royalties for the larger, idealistic good as she is to keep them in the family.  He sends a young believer, Valentin, to the Tolstoy chateau to be the author's Secretary and to spy on Sonya.  Valentin sees all, as the creators of this film want the viewer to see all;  he's torn between his idealist belief in the movement and his new understanding of love and loyalty, gained through close contact with Sonya and Tolstoy and his own budding romance.  Yet, at a critical moment he has to choose:  he sides with Tolstoy and Chertkov.  Sonya is the loser.  But when love and ideals collide there is no winner.

Eventually, and following history, Tolstoy leaves his chateau in the middle of winter, partly fleeing the frantic and histrionic Sonya and partly drawn toward some unclear ascetic vision.  But not before Tolstoy and Sonya engage in one of the most astonishing and totally unexpected love scenes in all film.

This is a wonderful movie about real people -- not just historically real, though the film is true to the circumstances at the end of Tolstoy's life, but vivid, richly developed characters.  Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as Sonya are superb as the loving and warring pair.  Paul Giamatti is both humorous and tenacious as the single-minded Chertkov.  Kerry Condon with her wry and knowing smile is entrancing as Valentin's lover.  James McAvoy as Valentin manages the job among these great performances.  All the characters have excellent reasons to want what they want and feel the way they do.  How do all these valid and conflicting wants become reconciled?  In the only way possible. 

Yvonne Korshak

  

FILM NOTE: The Road starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee, directed by John Hillcoat

The current issue of Scientific American (Jan 2010) has an article called "Local Nuclear War, Global Suffering".  The authors, Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon, calculate that the effects of a nuclear war between, for example, India and Pakistan could be enough to blot out the sun, the ultimate source of all our food:  we'd shiver and starve as we and most of the rest of life on earth wound down.  A major nuclear war between the U. S. and Russia isn't needed -- a smallish one could do the job.

This, or a comparable impact like a large asteroid hit, is the situation in The Road.  Starting some time after the apocalyptic disaster, when it's gotten good and cold, the movie focuses on one family, clinging to their home while reduced to eating insects.  But the mother can't take it anymore.  As a last loving act, she devises a way to commit suicide so as not to waste on herself the two last bullets in their gun:  her husband will need them.  Father and son head south, hoping the blessed sun may have a greater hold there, and that it will be brighter and warmer.  (don't count on it.)

The depiction of the barren, de-energized earth is relentless and the film offers no sentimental comforts.  The landscape now resembles the lunar vision of the Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy but this isn't surreal -- it's real.  The same sense of "that's just how it would play out" carries through to the all-out brutality in the frightful encounters between the scarce human survivors along the road.  Food is the issue, cannibalism is the solution, along with opportunistic theft and sexual predation.  Survivalism an sadism join hands.  And given what humans do to one another on the earth when the sun shines and crops grow, how would it be otherwise in a struggle to survive at the edge of nothing?  

This movie should have been better than it is.  Viggo Mortensen was outstanding as the protective father in History of Violence, in my view among the finest movies (and that didn't get its fair due).  Good reason for him to be cast here as the father determined to enable his son's survival.  But the screenplay, after Cormac McCarthy's novel, in spite of the gruesome material, is uninventive.  The threats father and son face, grotesque as they are, manage to seem repetitive.  Again we may be eaten -- better get a move on.  Sometimes challenges are unfulfilled:  when the father starts to swim out to the boat for supplies, does he reach the boat?  The dialogue is flat, except for one poignant line when they reach a southern beach that I'll leave you to discover. Possibilities for an intriguing plot are missed.  The grim salvation at the end could have been a thread drawn from the fabric of earlier incidents:  the characters who make this possible are there, but instead the ending is tacked on with no lead-up.

But the movie stays in the mind because of the truth with which it plays out a devastating, and not-impossible, scenario.   

Yvonne Korshak

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BRIEF FILM NOTE: Invictus, Clint Eastwood's film starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon

Excellent ... pulls you through the whole gamut of emotions AND gives great sense of history.  One of the greatest movies of all time?  No, because the characters are a little too simple and also there's a self-conscious quality to the great "bits" involving two races getting together, but still ... tremendous! 

Mandela's references to the poem, Invictus, by William Ernest Henley, written in 1875, are intensely moving.  In the context of being held in prison unjustly over a period of many years, those are two mighty last lines.  (Sometimes the poem is printed with the words in the first stanza "...my conquerable soul."  I can't imagine why.)  Henley wrote the poem in response to the amputation of his foot as a result of tuberculosis.  I'm including it below just to make it easy to get to and read. 

YK

INVICTUS

William Ernest Henly

Out of the night that covers me, 
Black as the Pit from pole to pole, 
I thank whatever gods may be 
For my unconquerable soul. 

In the fell clutch of circumstance 
I have not winched nor cried aloud 
Under the bludgeoning of chance 
My head is bloody, but unbowed. 

Beyond the place of wrath and tears 
Looms but the horror of the shade 
And yet the menace of the years 
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. 

It matters not how straight the gate, 
How charged with punishment the scroll, 
I am the master of my fate; 
I am the captain of my soul. 

FILM NOTE: A Serious Man with Michael Stuhlbarg, written, produced and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

... Job in the Midwest ...

Billed as a dark comedy, A Serious Man is a modern version of the story of Job.  Larry Gopnik, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, is a likeable, responsible Jewish man, a Physics professor in a Midwestern university who's terrific covering the blackboard with Heinsenberg's uncertainty principle equations, his intensity indicating true passion for his subject.  Piece by piece, though, everything goes wrong.  His wife leaves him for another man who sends Larry off to stay at the local motel with his brother with the disgusting, suppurating sebaceous cyst.  His daughter's a narcissist, his son's just this side of delinquent, his neighbor impinges on his property, etc... etc...  The rabbis of his congregation can't provide meaningful guidance and the lawyers don't do any better, while running up big bills.  Even when things pick up -- againsts the odds, it seems, his son makes it through his Bar Mitzvah -- they quickly sour.

That may sound interesting in outline -- it works well in the Bible -- but it's not a good movie.  For one thing, the characters just do whatever the film makers want them to in order to make life hard for Larry -- nobody's bothered to make them consistent.  Why does his wife leave him?  And then why does she warm up to him at the Bar Mitzvah?  The writers give us no clue -- maybe we're supposed to fall back on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle but that's not good enough for the plot.  Two days before the committee is to meet to consider Larry's application for tenure at the University, the Chair drops by to mention it would be useful for Larry to let the tenure committee know of anything he's published in his field.  "I've done nothing," Larry says, like it's a new idea.  Nonsense, he would know the score.  And anyhow that's not how the process works -- why didn't the Coen brothers bother to get things straight?

Although Larry is the main character, visually and otherwise the movie feels as if it's told from a child's point of view.  There are many close-ups of older people's hairy ears, droopy noses and overlarge, wet mouths, uniformly yucky.  In one scene, Larry's son actually does face a rabbi who seems terrifying but turns out a humbug, like the Wizard of Oz.  Most important for the character of the movie, though, Larry's helplessness is like that of a child in an adult world, his struggle lacks Job's metaphysical strength. 

This seems like a grudge movie -- an ugly tone of old resentments.  Let's get back at the fathers, mothers, teachers, rabbis -- all those hypocrites, weaklings and moral cop-outs who call themselves adults.   Didn't the Coen brothers take well to the guidance, religious and otherwise, they received as boys?  Who knows?  The worst thing the rabbis do in the film is fail to explicate the meaning of life, nor do they solve the problem of evil.  It's hard to hold those failures against anybody, even Heisenberg.

Yvonne Korshak

FILM NOTE Inglourious Basterds, with Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Melanie Laurent, directed by Quentin Tarantino

... "Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France ... "

-- INGLOuRIOUS BASTARDS

  Three driven personalities and three suspenseful story lines, all in collision course toward a hellish and thrilling climax. 

Out in the countryside during WWII, early in the German occupation of France, a Jewish girl, Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) is the survivor of a targeted Nazi massacre that wipes out her entire family.  Near the end of the war, she seizes the opportunity to carry out a vengeful plot.

Lieutenant Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt), under military orders, heads up a crew of Jewish soldiers organized to terrify Nazi's with brutal vengeance murders.  Raines is the right man for the job:  we don't know the source of his particularly passionate determination to kill Nazis but there are a couple of hints:  an ear to ear scar on his neck -- somebody taught him some brutal lessons with a knife -- and his reference to being part American Indian.

The Nazi Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz in a performance of Academy Award caliber) matches Raines in his own compelling passion -- to round up and murder Jews.  We think we know him well from his first scene in which he directs the massacre of Shosanna's family.  Still, while the others run true to form, he surprises us.  The anomalies, the things he does off-path are intriguing.  Why, for instance, does he let Shosanna go free -- twice?  The subtle emergence of Landa's personality, specifically of his perverse sexuality and sadism, is one of the features that brings the film to near greatness.

All three of these major characters perpetrate grizzly acts of violence but only one is evil -- Colonel Landa.  The exploration of the problem of pure evil, and of complicity in evil, is another of the film's strengths.

Actions in this movie are not only dramatic and compelling but resonate symbolically.  Shosanna up on a ladder, doing her job, dusts off one by one the letters on the marquee of her film theater -- a purge is in sight.

A close-up focuses on a French pastry as Landa stabs and then, with a deliberate, circular motion, snuffs out his lit cigarette in the whipped cream.  How x-rated!  How perverse.

Or, in a new take on that age-old sexual symbols (think Cinderella), Landa slips a lost shoe onto the foot of a German actress who's spying for the British and terrified of being found out;  the shoe's perfect, click into place fit incriminates her, whereupon Landa proceeds to -- well, I have to leave out the next part but if you see the movie, you'll see the relationship to the French pastry.  Tarantino uses visual images and symbolic repetitions -- and his camera -- to great effect.

What, then, keeps Inglourious Basterds from reaching the realm of the great all-time movies?  I think it's too mythic for a film about such recent and well known history.  People may be vague about some details of World War II but everybody knows Hitler died in a bunker -- not as here.  Nor would anybody believe that, with the Americans having invaded France and moving toward Paris, and the end of the war at hand, the entire German High Command would have handed themselves over to the trap this movie sets for them.  It didn't happen like that and it never could have and the movie, even for its own fictional space of time, just can't overcome that knowledge.

Never mind -- it's the best movie I've seen in a long time.  The way the war ends in Inglourious Basterds departs from history but grimly, perversely, humorously, it satisfies ones sense of justice restored, barely and at great cost.  That's real.

 Yvonne Korshak

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FILM NOTE: Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep

                                                           ... Mickey Mouse ...

This movie weaves between two stories, one from the past and one current.  The good part lets us in on Julia Child's early years in Paris, her ecstatic discoveries of French food, the pleasures of the good life she shared with her husband, and how she became a chef and author.  Julia, her husband, played with touching warmth by Anthony Tucci, Paris, the food all look wonderful.  Meryl Streep captures Julia's flighty, deep, tony voice, her bulky occupation of space that goes hand in hand with her alarming and amusing clumsiness, and her perseverance.  Julia Child lives before our eyes in that fascinating fluctuation of yes it's her but after all it can't be like watching Philip Seymour Hoffman as Capote or David Strathaim as Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck. 

What an annoyance that the contemporary story of feckless Julie keeps rudely interrupting the genuine Julia!  Julie, played by Amy Adams, living with her husband in "Astoria" (spoken as if the word "Astoria", in Queens, NY is some kind of exile, which it isn't) lacks a sense of purpose, so she sets about cooking through all the recipes in Julia Child's book written with two other chefs, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in one year and, at her husband's suggestion, records it all in a blog.  Her blog becomes a success and she wins a book contract.

In the movie, outside of being able to follow the directions in a cookbook, Julie has nothing special to offer.  Her too-cuteness and bemusement over boning a duck don't compensate for her boring self-involvement.  Under a strain to be interesting, the Julie scenes unwind into slapstick.  Julia Child took no interest in Julie's project.  How right she was.  It all but spoils her movie.  And Meryl Streep all but saves it, so in the upshot, it's worth seeing if you're drawn to Julia Child.

The relationship between Julia and Julie reminds me of what Stephen Jay Gould showed happened to Mickey Mouse -- at first he was a feisty, self-assured mouse with a good long, sharp mouse's nose but over time softened up, turning into today's baby faced spinoff of the original Mickey, with a so cute little nose.   

                                                                                        Yvonne Korshak

On a culinary note:  Since I've made Julia Child's boef bourguinon which features prominently in the movie, I feel I should say it doesn't come out looking with that web of sticky-looking carrots on top.

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Film Note -- The Hurt Locker, with Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow

                                             ... strong material, weak film ...

In a way everyone should see The Hurt Locker:  it's not a good film but it makes clear what it's like for our soldiers in Iraq to carry out their duties while relentlessly under the eyes of armed enemy insurgents out to kill them.

The movie does have suspense -- these are, after all, our boys moving into treacherous, hostile situations time and time again, acting heroically and escaping by the skin of their teeth.  One thing's for sure:  when traveling on a desolate road in this country, don't get a flat tire.

No soldiers place themselves more in danger than the three-person Bravo squad whose task is to locate and disarm -- locate the detonater and cut the live wires -- of car bombs, roadside bombs, and bombs which, if not padlocked to their chests, are surgically implanted into the guts of suicide bombers.  Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) is the best bomb disarmer and biggest risk taker of them all, and even his tough squad members, Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Jackie) and the young Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) are angered because he thrusts them into danger unnecessarily, risking not just his life but theirs, bypassing military protocol in his passion for disarming bombs -- he's done over 800 of them.

"Do you know why I do this?" James asks Sanborn (who looks like Ralph Lauren's famous Black male model, and has a similar range of emotional expression).  Sanborn doesn't, and unfortunately the audience hasn't a clue either.  We watch him take his irresponsible risks but he's so thinly characterized we don't feel his genuine drive, though we do feel some admiration for his ability.  That in itself might have been developed as a reason:  Sanborn describes hm as "a trailer park red-neck" so finding something he can do well could have helped explain James' passion and determination to keep doing it (he smiles with happy anticipation when, leaving behind a beautiful wife and adorable child who looks just like him, he lands in Iraq for another tour of disarming bombs) but there's no follow-through on that idea.

Often things are said and done that one just doesn't believe.  An army psychiatrist portrayed as an ectomorphic ivy league nerd-weakling joins on a bomb-search mission because he's bored around his office -- I don't think so.  Why doesn't James speak when he calls his wife and son from Iraq on his cell phone?  Why did Sanborn leave his Intelligence unit to volunteer for the bomb squad?  Why doesn't Sanborn want a child?  Why doesn't the army commander recognize a renegade when he sees one? 

"War is a drug" is the movie's answer to James compulsion but we never feel that wild high, though we're told of it, so James just seems, well, odd.  Stephen Crane got the intoxication of battle right in his Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage -- this film team doesn't.  Leaving the theater, some people thought the problem was poor acting.  I thought it was more a problem with the scripting -- too many "weighty" thoughts tossed in but never picked up by the plot -- like unused props on a stage -- and none of the characters have any back story that helps us understand them.

                                                                                Yvonne Korshak

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Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, directed by Michael Mann

                                                          Loving the bad guys ...

John Dillinger was very smart and courageous in his exploits, totally loyal to his friends, took on the giants, and won again and again, against great odds!  Oh, yes, and he was "gentlemanly," throwing a coat over the shoulders of his female hostages.  To all that Johnny Depp adds his star power charm and a boyish cowlick.  What's not to love?  Outside of the fact that he's a gangster.

He preferred not to kill -- a point made in a couple of philosophical pauses in the movie by this otherwise unintrospective character -- but if your time is spent robbing banks and evading the law with blasts of machine guns and other fast violence, it's bound to happen often.  He was called "The American Robin Hood" but he didn't rob the rich to give to the poor -- he robbed for money.  Yet, law abiding citizen that I am, I found myself rooting for him as was most of the audience, just as many rooted for him back in the early '30's.  Sepia tones bring us back to that earlier period, and the photography is often angled close-ups of large machinery that hook us into the large and grinding emotions.

We also root for Dillinger because his ultimate opponent, the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover, is so easy to hate, a mean spirited martinet driven by selfish ambition.  But Melvin Purvis, Dillinger's one-on-one opponent whom Hoover puts in direct charge of the case is admirable -- he has a high minded view of law enforcement which lends a larger meaning to his manhunt, he doesn't like to kill either, and Christian Bale who plays Purvis is handsome and charming in his own tight, disciplined way with 1930's slicked back hair (read:  opposite of anarchic cowlick).  Still, you root for Dillinger -- after all, you don't know anything about how much Purvis loves his girlfriend -- and the movie builds wonderful suspense as it moves from Dillinger springing his friends from prison at great danger to himself, to daring robberies, to unbelievable escapes to robberies to escapes until ...

... Dillinger's girlfriend, Billy Ferchette, played by Marion Cotillard is brutally beaten by law enforcement authorities to induce her to rat on him -- she doesn't -- and for all the invincibility Dillinger's shown, we're pretty sure by this point that he won't be able to spring her, and so what if he did?  look what he's already let her in for.  There's no way he could possibly pay for that.  So by the time the inevitable betrayal happens that leaves him dead on a Chicago sidewalk, we're ready to give him up too.  Public Enemies considerately resolves the ethical issue of the anti-hero and lets the audience off the hook -- this is a true Hollywood movie in the old sense, part of its nostalgic appeal. 

It would be a better, even more engaging movie if we understood the backstories of the characters.  The little said about Dillinger is too thin to help us see him as fully three-dimensional, as is true for the others.  It reminds me of the old Dick Tracy detective comic strips -- characters outlined, fast movement from frame to frame, and you do stay with it.

                                                                                      Yvonne Korshak

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Film -- Whatever Works, written and directed by Woody Allen ...

                                                   (  ... but he doesn't act in it ...)

Whatever Works is about a brilliant man with a totally morbid view of people and existence -- a real Woody Allen stand-in.  Most of us manage to block out this fundamentally realistic view of existence most of the time, but Boris Yelnikov sees it and feels it every moment -- no wonder he's given to panic attacks.

Once a Physicist at Columbia University "almost nominated for the Nobel Prize" -- echoes of Brando, "I could have been a contender" -- Boris is now a professorial dropout who pays rent on his dingy, wonderfully textured Greenwich Village apartment by teaching chess to children, and berating them for their stupidity.  For Boris, everyone is stupid except himself, and he believes this with good reason:  he had hold of a unique understanding of the full tragedy of existence.

The scruffy, balding Boris, gimpy from a failed suicide attempt, meets up with Meloody, an under-21 beauty pageant winner from the deep South who is, he thinks, stupider even than the other "worms" and "cretins" around him -- this is as hilarious looking a September-May romance as has ever been filmed.  Melody, played by Evan Rachel Wood, has the youthful comfortable in her underwear charm that's characterized Allen's leading ladies since Annie Hall.  Allen has a wonderful time -- so does the lucky audience -- with their collision of sophistication and naivete, of his burdened, wary pessimism and her dreamy optimism and joie de vivre.

Melody's small town Alabama conservative church-going Mother appears -- herself a runaway from the disasters that, yes, even the most mainstream middle class Americans risk, and in no time she's fully into the New York swing, showing her photographic collages of rearranged body parts of naked men and women at a tony art gallery.  Uptight Dad -- sort of a Governor Mark Sanford type -- comes soon and it doesn't take long for him to get liberated either, as it all spins off into an impressive series of mix-and-match loves (like Mom's polymorphic body collages).  And these loves are ... well, "Whatever Works."

New York City is lovingly filmed -- the movie starts reassuringly, though somewhat slowly, in a Greenwich Village cafe, and gathers steam with the arrival of the finest actor in the cast, Patricia Clarkson as the Southern Mom.  It's a very funny movie but ... if only Woody Allen were delivering the irony and pessimism himself.  Larry David as Boris comes recognizably close, and at times even manages to look like Woody -- or Woody's camera manages to make that happen -- which makes you realize whom you really want to see playing Boris.

Woody Allen cuts deeper and deeper to the bone of existence, which has always been his subject.  As the movie moves along, he hands over his ultimate pessimism to love.  That's part of his genius:  he never forgets who he is as an artist -- a comedian -- and by the end he lets you off the hook so you can leave with a happy smile -- thank you, Woody.

                                                                                         Yvonne Korshak

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Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward, the 1947 film with Rex Harrison, Kay Hammond ...

                                                                ... always ...

Since Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit is currently on Broadway, it seems like a good time to look at the 1947 film, directed by David Lean.

With an evanescent greenish cast and semi-transparent, a beautiful ghost returns to stir things up with her novelist husband in the midst of his new life with a new wife.

People talking to the ghost in one direction when she's really on the other side of the room ... flowers carried from the table to the mantelpiece with no one carrying them ... a seductive ghost ... a suave and youthful Rex Harrison .. a terrific "great performance" medium played as an English eccentric by Margaret Rutherford ... a common sense Constance Cummings as the second wife puzzling through inexplicably opening and closing doors ... that's a lot.

A broad percentage of the film's appeal comes from the sheer allure of Kay Hammond as the ghostly first wife, with her throaty voice, ironic gaze, and the cast given by greenish overtones to her red lips.  Lounging gracefully over the back of the sofa, she's completely at home -- so amusing. 

The title comes from Shelley's poem "To a Skylark" ... "HAIL to thee, blithe spirit!  Bird thou never wert -- "  The film has a musical theme, "I'll be loving you, always, with a love that's true, always ... "  Right, "always."  The plot is thin -- but the fantasy is powerful!

                                                                                               Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Film Note: Duplicity with Julia Roberts and Clive Owen

                                             ... James Bond on a leash ...

James Bond tamed -- that's Duplicity.  Bond-style music, master spies, international glossy views and fantasy luxury gorgeously photographed, and Clive Owen's looks almost fall in line with the Sean Connery successors though there's a touch of the spaniel about him.  But the intrigue, which anyhow lacks the scope and wild imagination of a Bond film, plays second fiddle to the saccharine and unbelievable love story whose sex scenes and dialogue are platitudes:  Roberts to Owen:  "I know what you are and I love you anyway."  Owen to Roberts:  "I've been faithful."  James Bond domesticated.  

                                                                         Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button -- Faust With No Choice

A man is born and grows young:  this brilliant reversal, from a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, shines a new light on all the commonplaces of life.  They say that when people have cataracts removed they see everything with a new brightness and intensity of color, even if they didn't realize they were missing anything before.  In Benjamin Button, everything -- birth, growth, death, love, separation, joy, pain -- is recognizable but seen afresh, and with poignant intensity.

All that, and the Faustian allure of growing young again and finding a beautiful love.

The film begins with routines carried out inside a New Orleans hospital while the first winds and water of hurricane Katrina slash at the windows, a framing metaphor for the treachery of existence and the combination of ignorance and nobility that keeps human beings moving in the face of it.  Benjamin Button's story -- and her own -- emerge from the memento filled suitacase of a dying old woman.  A clock is built to run backwards, and the movie pulls out all the stops in turning an old man into a young one.

Queenie, a Black maid in an old people's home, determines to keep the grotesque-looking White baby abandoned on her doorstep, rejecting the cautions of a reasonable, kind doctor that some are not born for existence.  The full, worthy life Benjamin goes on the live, albeit backwards, validates her decision.  The movie was made to prove Queenie right about individual worth.

In the "brief encounter" love story, the transience of the affair is bound not by train schedules or prior loyalties but by the lovers' trajectories criss-crossed in time:  growing old meets growing young.  Still they find a way to make their love permanent as life itself -- life, that is, with Katrina at the windows.

From his wizened babyhood, Benjamin adapts to his odd position by being careful not to cause trouble, and by watching others for clues about how to act.  A problem with the film is that he maintains his defensive passivity as he grows young.  Even as a hale and hearty man in mid-life, he continues to react rather than initiate, which thins the character and narrows what's asked of Brad Pitt in terms of emotional range.  Still, Pitt's right for the part:  for those lacking Queenie's saintly character, it takes the exceptional charm and tousled-haired good looks of a Brad Pitt to offset unease about a freak of nature, and to make him seem enough of a regular guy that we -- and his lover -- can warm up to him.

While Benjamin grows young, Cate Blanchett as the volatile Daisy grows older in a subtly developed personal evolution.  Taraji P. Henson as Queenie touches the heart with her lightest smile.  In this movie of richly developed -- richly loved -- characters, there are in a sense no small parts.  Jared Harris as the tugboat Captain who gives Benjamin a vocation, cluing him in at the local brothel about why a man needs money in his pocket, is particularly vivid.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, directed by David Fincher, is ambitious in taking on existence as its subject, and it's as engaging, humorous, tragic, sensuous, suspenseful, serious and moving as life itself. 

                                                                             Yvonne Korshak

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