Boy A (2007)

Media: Film
Title: Boy A
Director: John Crowley

Boy A is highly recommended, small British film. It is mostly an impressive character study that displays with great empathy the reemergence of a child locked away since he was 14? for allegedly assisting in the murder of a classmate. Now at 21? Jack must try to start a new life while concealing his past from his colleagues, friends and his girlfriend. The most moving part of the film is watching Jack tentatively put a life together while still being tormented emotionally by his past. Now, while Boy A is mostly an intimate character study, it is also a thriller. Quietly, in the background, there is an angry mob stalking Jack believing he was not punished sufficiently and are out for vigilante justice. There is a tension sustained throughout the film that Jack’s past is about to jump out of the shadows and ruin the life he has pieced back together. If you go see Boy A you will be as enthralled as I was to see if it does.

Belle De Jour

Media: Film
Title: Belle De Jour (1967)
Director: Luis Bunuel

Belle De Jour is the second masterpiece of French cinema I have seen this year. (Rules of the Game being the other.) Looking as beautiful as any one you have ever seen on film, Catherine Deneuve plays Severine, an emotionless, young, upper class wife suffering through the most intense case of ennui. In a way she is similar to Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate (also 1967). She seemingly has everything (wealth, beautiful doctor husband, ski vacations) and her whole life before her, but she is paralyzed with a feeling of emptiness; and like Hoffman’s Benjamin, she turns to illicit sex to feel something, anything in her barren life. This movie also contains one of the greatest screen thugs in all film. The thug is Severine inversed. He too is young, disillusioned and disconnected from society. But where Severine is inert the thug is perpetually on the knife’s edge of violence. Despite being different in every societal aspect they share at their core a feeling of estrangement from the world, and this draws them to each other.

Belle De Jour deserves multiple viewings and much conversation to fully explore all the themes and ideas saturating this work of art.

The Year in Film

Media: Film
Title: The Year in Film

Updated 2/20

My Best Film of the Year: The Great New Wonderful

Sadly I do not think this subtle, beautiful and significant film was screened outside of New York. I almost avoided it myself given the subject matter: exploring the emotional impact of September 11th on a disparate group of characters through five separate New York storylines. But no, the actual events of September 11th are never seen or spoken of explicitly; rather we explore the inner struggle of each character as they quietly ask themselves: how do I live now that I see and feel everything differently? One character expresses the inner disequilibrium at the film’s core when she confides in Maggie Gyllenhaal. They both make cakes which sell for many thousands of dollars. Distraught she asks, how can we go on doing this frivolous work “after what happened”? The other characters have been denying this acknowledgement of change in their selves, and the film intelligently and powerfully explores their moments of acceptance. It is all so quiet, so well performed, and so significant. (jerromano.blogspot.com under August 2006 for more)

The Most Fun I Had: Little Miss Sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine was the one film of the year where I could have walked right back into the theater and watched it again as soon as it ended. (Last year it was Napoleon Dynamite.) In fact Napoleon Dynamite is an apt comparison. Little Miss Sunshine’s delight is equal to your love of the quirky characters, the ridiculous story-lines (though stealing the body went a bit far) and the stomach-aching laughter from the final dance sequence. I’m sitting her smiling just thinking about it. Not to mention that Olive and her grandfather portrayed the sweetest relationship of any in film this year. And Olive herself is my film hero for 2006.

The Second-Most Fun I Had: Dreamgirls

To quote The Stranger’s review: This is not a good film. That said, if you approach Dreamgirls as a dollop of superficial, spectacular fluff there is an abundance to enjoy. For instance, I enjoyed watching Eddie Murphy more than I have in 25 years. Don’t expect character development, don’t expect real emotion, don’t imagine that there is anything beneath the shiny surface. The best musicals are sweet frosting slathered over an empty hat box, and that’s what you get from Dreamgirls.

Most Visually Beautiful Film: Marie Antoinette

With Marie Antoinette Sofia Coppola made my “Directors Whose Films I Will Not Miss” list. (Woody Allen, Francois Ozon and Robert Altman, who sadly will have nothing more to show us, are also on that list.) Now Marie Antoinette is not a great movie. It goes nowhere and the ending simply lies down and dies. Antoinette, as played by Kirsten Dunst, undergoes no growth, no catharsis – rather she spends the film finding new and different ways to relieve her boredom – first opulence, then sex and then seclusion at a pastoral retreat. Lucky we in the audience are not similarly bored even as we are unsatisfied. It is the stunning beauty captured by Coppola's camera that is worth the price of admission. I will even go as far as to compare Coppola's visual art with Kar Wai Wong’s (In the Mood for Love, 2046). At just about any point you can stop the projector, pull out the frame and be brought to breathlessness by the image’s composition.

Most Intelligent Film of the Year: The History Boys

The History Boys was one of those films that I did not appreciate fully until I started to write about it. Then all the complexity and thoughtfulness that went into the story started to spill out. The plot: this ensemble of lower and middle class prep-school Britons study for their A-Level tests to gain admittance to Oxford. But the heart of the film is a mediation on the purpose and meaning of education. Do we use education to listen for the magnificent voices of the poets and artists whose eloquence describes an understanding of existence parallel to our own? Do we challenge our own artistic gifts to strengthen to their potential? Or do we work to beat the test, reap the reward and stock pile the treasure? It is a rare film where you should turn the questions right around and ask yourself: what have I chosen?

The Long List of Disappoints

These the films either I anticipated would be great based on the directors’ past work (Science of Sleep, The Departed, Little Children) or films that are on the hyped critically acclaimed list (The Departed, Babel, Pan’s Labyrinth, Little Children, Notes on a Scandal, The Queen, Letters from Iwo Jima) but which ultimately disappointed. To not prolong the dissatisfaction, I will be brief with each.

Letters from Iwo Jima: I just don't like war films and this one certainly didn't change my mine.

The Queen: Very fine acting, but I was not interested in the subject matter.

Science of Sleep: Director Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless was near or at the top of my 2004 film list so I hoped for great things from Science of Sleep. Admittedly Science of Sleep offers truly marvelous, even breathtaking visual experiences as the director captures moments of pure imagination on film. Yet ultimately Gondry had the same shortcoming as the film’s main character, he cannot generate the necessary emotional connection to make his playful experiment a satisfying experience.

The Departed: I liken The Departed to The Aviator. Scorsese is able to keep you utterly captivated for over two hours without a moment of let-down. Yet, like The Aviator, once you awaken from the world of the film you realize there is not much there beyond the perfect execution of a riveting plot, which hardly sounds like criticism, but we know Scorsese is capable of providing something more significant.
Beyond that backhanded criticism, there are number of moments when the film feels like a caricature of a Scorsese film rather than the real thing – for example, Nicholson coming out from an ‘interrogation’ all covered in blood, and the trite concluding symbol of the rat on the deck. Come-on Marty!

Babel: OK, after Crash last year and Babel this year I must scream: There is nothing innovative about a film exploring a theme through a number of seemingly unconnected stories and various points of view! D.W. Griffith created this structure in 1916 with Intolerance, and he did it better! So cut it out, Crash and Babel are mediocre and good respectively. Now Babel does has many masterful elements. In particular the editing which often cross-cuts from one story to the next allowing a necessary exhale at moments of unbearable tension. Also, Iñárritu has superbly captured distinct visual signatures for each of the various settings.

Pan’s Labrinth : Pan’s Labyrinth is half fairy tale and half military movie. I loved the fairy tale, told in the pre-Disney understanding that fairy tales are about a child’s psyche confronting death, parental abandonment and impending sexuality. I did not care for the film’s reality, a military story set in fascist Spain. Here del Toro uses his abundant visual talents to makes us squirm anticipating torture and looking at gore (from which I chose to look away). As you may imagine, loving only half a film is ultimately unsatisfying.

Little Children: At about the half way point I thought to myself, yes, this is the best movie of the year. I wasn’t surprised because Todd Field’s In the Bedroom was one of the best films of 2001. Little Children, a film about suburban alienation, depicts the supremely unsatisfying lives of Sarah and Brad. Each was married in their early 20s and they suddenly awaken, with 30 approaching, to the suffocating reality of their suburban lives. The title, Little Children, refers to the suburban ideal that life should center around children, but neither Sarah nor Brad can find meaning taking their children to the park and the pool, so they try an affair imagining love. Little Children is also overflowing with smart literary and film references, the best of which is the homage to Jaws in the ‘child-molester goes for a swim’ scene. So what’s the problem? The ending is so unsatisfying that it taints the brilliance and insightfulness of all that came before it. It is not just that we are left with unresolved storylines, the unforgivable sin is that the final choices Sarah and Brad make are entirely out of character; and the change in tone from drama to horror film is both idiotic and ineffective.
Yes, another disappointment but probably the best disappointment of the bunch.

Notes on a Scandal: I loved the first 20 minutes of Notes on a Scandal. You hear Judi Dench, as the omniscient narrator, providing dry, intellectually superior, hilarious commentary about the students and teachers in the school where she is a history teacher. Soon all the comedy and eventually all the empathy is squeezed from the film. When you have a pedophile on the one hand and a deranged human vampire on the other it is difficult to care what happens to either, and easy to tune out emotionally. Plus- like Cate Blanchett is really going to live with Judi Dench after she has just viciously tried to blackmail her – give me a break!

Best Foreign Film: Time to Leave

This did not surprise me. Director Francois Ozon is on my short list of directors whose film I will not miss. After last year’s awful 5X2 Ozon has created a quiet, contemplative film on death and the psychological role children play in one’s idea of living beyond one’s death. It has one rare, transcendent moment – a quick 5 second close up of a crying baby beginning to nurse. I cannot explain it, but the image was so unexpected, so pure and sweet I actually shed a tear. It was the most perfect moment in film this year.

Asphalt

Media: Film
Title: Asphalt

The reason lovers of film and film history should see Asphalt (1929) is to discover one of the first film noirs. If you were to throw this film up at SAM during the Film Noir Series this autumn it would be accepted as noir with little argument, though many may be unhappy with its silence. So once again Silent Movie Mondays has not only provided another fantastic film with perfect musical accompaniment via Dennis James, it has shown me yet again that most film innovations occurred in the silent era. The talkies merely added, well, talk.

What about Asphalt is prescient of film noir? First the look, Asphalt is set in a teaming city mostly shot at night. The city is large beyond a single human’s comprehension. It is active, loud and uncontrollable. And no one is to be trusted, especially not the gorgeous woman in furs who flirts and then robs you blind. Bringing us to the femme fatal, looking beautiful and played beautifully by Colleen Moore imitator Betty Amann. She tempts the innocent young man (still living with his parents) to accept sex instead of bringing her to jail. He accepts, after a quite well performed inner battle with his sense of duty, and becomes sexually obsessed with and sexually possessed by Amann. This fall into the urban underworld from a position in honest society is yet another noir theme. As the film begins we see the young man directing traffic (in the daylight), naively believing he is in control of the uncontrollable city. By the end he has murdered for Amann, the ultimate sign of love for the femme in the twisted moral code of the noirs. Finally, you will see echoes of much of the cinematography in later noirs. There are the shadows and darkness (perhaps most notably in the scene where the criminals are tunneling into the bank, and for a good 30 seconds the frame is almost entirely black), and the use of camera angles and shots up crooked stairways to convey inner turmoil.

This is a film that calls for multiples viewings because of all that is packed into it, or, perhaps more importantly, once you realize all that has been unpacked from it in film history.

Babel

Media: Film
Title: Babel

Oh no, another of this year’s critically acclaimed films turns out to be a disappointment.
OK, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu lost me when Gael Garcia Bernal’s character runs from the boarder patrol officers and drops his aunt and the children out in the desert in the middle of the night. There was nothing in Santiago’s character development to justify these drastic, insane actions. Plus, as the children now wander near death in a desert their mother, who has been accidentally shot from a mountain top, is near dieing in Morocco. Talk about a bad day for a family! It is enough to make you roll your eyes and say “come on!” and “give me a break!” Which I did, and no drama can fully recover from the eye roll.

Despite this terrible, disappointing turn in the storytelling, in all other film making aspects Babel may be the best made movie I’ve seen this year. The stories wove beautifully together to create a complex mediation comparing the ever closer interconnectedness of our globe with people's growing alienation and inability to form meaningful relationships. Also, the editing masterfully allowed for an exhale by cutting from one story to the next just when you could not bare the dramatic tension any longer; and Inarritu skillfully captured the distinct mise-en-scene of each distinct setting. You walk away thinking, that was fantastic film-making.

Ahh, too bad for that eye roll. I could have loved this film.

Pan's Labyrinth

Media: Film
Title: Pan’s Labyrinth

Pan’s Labyrinth is half fairy tale and half military movie. I loved the fairy tale, told in the pre-Disney understanding that fairy tales are about a child’s psyche confronting death, parental abandonment and impending sexuality. Guillermo del Toro’s visual effects creating the fairy tale world are fascinating, spectacular and a compelling reason in themselves to see this film. This imagined world was so wonderful I kept hoping to get back to it each time our little girl heroine had to step back into the film’s reality. I did not care for the film’s reality, a military story set in fascist Spain. Here del Toro uses his abundant visual talents to makes us squirm anticipating torture and looking at gore (from which I chose to look away).
If del Toro had decide to make the fairy tale alone I may have loved this film. But sadly, it is yet another disappointment in this year of disappointing films. As you may imagine, loving only half a film is ultimately unsatisfying.

Charlie Chaplin

Media: Lecture
Title: The Fool in the Frame: Film Comedy and 20th Century America

Professor Bean is teaching this 5 session course and she began this week with a quick history of the beginning of film and then focused on its first big star Charlie Chaplin. I’ve done a good deal of my own reading on the subject but this class is helping cement my understanding of early film. A few facts I enjoyed:
The first exhibition of film for an audience was in France 1895. (Edison had motion picture machines first but they were one person arcades.)
The first fictionalized film was slap stick comedy (most early documented real events like a train arriving). Its subject, a kid tricking a man to look into a hose and getting a face filled with water.
Chaplin entered film via Max Sennett at Keystone studios, the gold standard of early film comedy, just as film was about to explode in popularity. Chaplin rode atop that explosion for a good 15 years becoming the first international film star, and the richest. There is no real comparison for his fame until Mickey Mouse.
Chaplin started with Sennett 1914-15, worked with Mutual 1916-17, worked with First National 1918, and started United Artists in 1919 which he was involved with until his death.

I'm anxious to get to the next class, I wish I didn't have to wait two weeks.

Silent Movie Mondays

Media: Film
Title: Diary of a Lost Girl

Yesterday was a Silent Movie Monday at the Paramount theater, perhaps my favorite on-going Seattle film event. Now, Diary of a Lost Girl was one of my least favorite of the many silent films I have seen. The story was tedious melodrama, and it seemed to end three different times and each time you wished it would. Nevertheless the experience is wonderful. Silent Movie Mondays are time travel. You enter a fully restored silent movie palace (The Paramount’s original function); you listen to archival music played on the theater's original organ; and you watch film prints restored to look as good as they would have 80 years ago. Give all the men hats, put all the women in skirts and you have the 1920s. I urge everyone who will listen, when given the opportunity to experience the magic of time travel it is always worth taking it, even when the film is as lackluster as Diary of a Lost Girl. (By the way, Lousie Brooks is adorable.)

The Immigrant (1917)

Media: VHS tape
Title: The Immigrant

I am taking a film study class which starts in two days and one of my preparatory assignments is to watch a number of Charlie Chaplin shorts. The Immigrant is the one that most struck me (even as One O’clock was probably the laugh-out-loud funniest.) I guess I passively knew that Chaplin mixed social commentary with his pratfalls, and in The Immigrant I finally experienced this mixture first hand. The scene that best encapsulates Chaplin’s commentary in this film occurs in a startling juxtaposition of two images. Image one, immigrants aboard ship see the Statue of Liberty in the harbor. Chaplin captures the initial moment of pure hope and pride in the immigrants’ faces. Image two, cut to the immigration workers literally cutting off the immigrants from their dream with a rope, roughly herding them like cattle. (In 2007 we also bring to the film the knowledge of the dehumanizing inspections to come.) The paradox for us to consider is powerfully set in these images. Hopes of liberty, wealthy and freedom juxtaposed with the immigrants’ current reality of poverty, bigotry and cold indifference. Throughout this short Chaplin plays with the twin reality of opportunity and hardship in America, which you may or may not want to ponder in-between the laughs.

Dreamgirls (2006)

Media: Film
Title: Dreamgirls

To quote The Stranger, this is not a good film. That said, if you approach Dreamgirls as a dollop of superficial, spectacular fluff there is an abundance to enjoy. In enjoyed watching Eddie Murphy, for instance, more than I have in 25 years. Murphy gives a terrifically exciting performance in his half Little Richard, half James Brown persona. He may even be a little too good, making Beyonce’s and Jamie Fox’s uninspiring acting feel even more flat. But they, along with everyone else, is surrounded by so much noise and color, so much fashion and hair flux that you hardly care. Actual acting is negligible to the overall effect of the spectacular. So what it’s hollow; Dreamgirls is the most fun I’ve had in the theater since Little Miss Sunshine. Don’t expect character development, don’t expect real emotion, don’t imagine that there is anything beneath the shiny surface. The best musicals are sweet frosting slathered over an empty hat box, and that’s what you get from Dreamgirls.