The Briefest of Reviews from 1972

The main title for this film is Neil Simon's The Heartbreak Kid. I didn't really realize that this was a thing, where the writer got billing like this. (I know this happens on Paddy Chayefsky's Network, but that still seems quite unusual to me.) Neil Simon did not write the novel on which The Heartbreak Kid is based, and Elaine May directed the film. The Heartbreak Kid is a really funny farcical piece, and I quite enjoyed myself. Eddie Albert is hilarious, but I think what I don't really get is Charles Grodin. I've just never understood Charles Grodin. Maybe it's from seeing Beethoven as a kid and hating him, but he is young and cute in this... and still looks as one-note and uncomfortable as ever. I will say, though, that The Heartbreak Kid is a kind of comedic version of the 1970s lonely man à la The Conversation or Save the Tiger. The ending, funny though it is, is a beautiful portrait of this emptiness. I thought this was pretty great.

Catching up on More 2014 Films

Like Father, Like Son (そして父になる) is Hirokuza Kore-eda's exploration of childhood, genetics, parenthood, and the big nature/culture discussion that we always have. Like Father, Like Son poses the question: What do you do if you find that your six-year-old son, whom you love more than anything, was switched at birth with another boy? If the other family agrees, do you switch them back so that you can begin raising the son that is genetically yours? What if – and this is where Hirokuza's film gets really brilliant – you have always wished that your son could be braver, stronger, smarter, and now you feel like this is an explanation for your son's failings?

Hirokuza's film is a Japanese movie, so it isn't filled with histrionic scenes and yelling and fistfights between the two fathers. And the dynamics of raising in children in Japan and raising children in the U.S. are (obviously) slightly different, as well, but Like Father, Like Son gets at the real heart of the matter. Hirokuza slowly complicates things until they are as difficult as you can imagine them being. (Rather like a Asghar Farhadi film, without the tragedy.) By the time we reached the third act, I cared for these people so much that I was emotional about any decision they might have made. This is a superb film, with excellent performances, especially from the lead actor, Masaharu Fukuyama. The performances of the children are also beautiful, their wide-eyed confusion works as a mirror for the alleged knowledge that the experts, the parents, and the audience are supposed to possess. Be sure to see Like Father, Like Son before you see whatever USAmerican remake that (you can be sure) they are cooking up.

I hated Calvary, John Michael McDonagh's (alleged) comedy about an Irish priest who is threatened with death during confession and then given a week to get his affairs in order. The film stars a bevy of excellent actors, including Brendan Gleeson, Isaach de Bankolé, M. Emmet Walsh, Aiden Gillen, Domhnall Gleeson, Chris O'Dowd, and Kelly Reilly. (Killian Scott gave my favorite performance in the film, for the record.) I've been told, too, that the film makes more sense if I've seen JMMcD's earlier film The Guard and perhaps a television show or short film of his? Whatever they are, I missed them, and apparently missed the point of this film as well.

Films about religion have never been very interesting to me, in truth, and Calvary is about the way that the Catholic church, once so important to Irish nationhood and Irish daily life, has faded in importance, rejected by the people it was intended to serve. The church, too, has been guilty of horrible crimes, not just over the centuries, but in our own century, and so the film is about parishoners and their complicated relationship with their local priest. The thing is, the film is not funny, and is not intended to be. Amusing or quirky scenes between the priest and the parishoners are broken up by gratuitous helicopter shots of Irish hills and these are overlaid with slow, operatic (or more specifically) sacred music. This slows the film down considerably, and gives it a ponderous mood.

Even more vexed is Calvary's use of violence. John Michael McDonagh is the brother to the writer/director Martin McDonagh, who has written hyperviolent plays such as The Lieutenant of Inishmore and A Behanding in Spokane. His films include In Bruges. Now, I will admit to never truly understanding McDonagh's approach to violence. Why is this supposed to be funny? Do you enjoy the violence? Are you interested in pain? Are you making a statement about it? His work always makes me ask these questions, not least because violence is treated in a cavalier way. To give just one example, in In Bruges, a body falls from a high tower and lands with a crunch and a splash on the cobblestones of Belgium. The effect is decidedly comic. Why? With McDonagh, his fascination with the flesh-ness of the human body, its fragility, always seems to be what he's exploring – an intriguing exploration, to be sure – but his point of view about this always seems to be silly. Isn't it funny that we're just, after all, meat – with bones that go crunch when you smack 'em? I'm mostly alone here, of course: McDonagh's work is very popular.

But his brother John Michael McDonagh takes even more pleasure in the violence he shows us. His camera positively enjoys watching suffering, and he asks us to enjoy it, too. He slows down one particular sequence so that we can, Tarantino-like, watch a bullet rip through a man's head in slow-motion and spatter blood across a beach. Why? The effect is cruel and grotesque, and this clashes markedly with the emotional valence the scene appears to be trying to achieve. Calvary is, honestly, a total mess, and I had begun to hate it long before the slow-motion bullet.

...And then there's Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer (설국열차). We're on a train. In the future. We need to fight the bad guys. And we need to get to the front of the train. The whole thing is as simple as that – at least to begin with. Now this is a violent movie that has no pretentions about how its violence works. This is an action film about meat, about bodies crunching against metal, about weakness and fear and real pain. But these are Bong's acknowledged subjects. That is, Snowpiercer is a movie about who gets to live and who gets to die, and the different types of violence that attend decisions about who lives and who dies. And this exploration all takes place on a train that is speeding through a frozen wasteland.

Snowpiercer stars Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Song Kang-ho, Jamie Bell, and Octavia Spencer. And it is fun (at least it was for me) from start to finish. In fact, I think the movie is worth seeing simply for the art direction – the train cars are crafted beautifully, and they are so different from one another, and so cleverly arranged, that the simple walk from the back of the train to the front, through the world of the cars, is fascinating. And Tilda! Tilda is ridiculous and so much fun. (Hilarious that she and John Hurt were also both in the ponderously boring Only Lovers Left Alive in such a different style.) I do wish Chris Evans were a better actor. His range strikes me as fairly limited. I think he's a really fun performer, but there's an act three monologue in the film that (aside from interrupting the action-packed thrust of the film) really doesn't achieve what it ought to because Evans can't really connect emotionally with what he's saying. A more actor-focused director may be able to solve this problem for him, eventually. I will hope so, because I like him.

I should note that I thought that Snowpiercer was totally incoherent, and the presence of the writer was so palpable that by the end I felt that literally anything could've happened and then been explained away by some trick. The film's ending didn't make one bit of sense to me. (There's an explosion and there's a polar bear: I have no idea.) And I didn't care about any of that. This is a brutal, violent, fun ride, filled with the awesome fight sequences and suspense we have come to expect from the new wave of Korean directors. I really, really liked it. But don't spend too much time thinking about it.

Three with Goldie Hawn

I don't know what's been happening, but I've recently been catching a movie with an actor and then, without really intending to, watching a second (or third) movie with that actor.

Butterflies Are Free is mostly a silly little drama, and is obviously adapted (and not very much) from a play by the same name. There isn't much to say about this film except that Goldie Hawn is a delightful little nymph in it, the main actor (Edward Albert) is very attractive, and Eileen Heckart is pretty well near brilliant as the young man's mother. I should note, too, that the main character is blind, but that this disability is mainly understood through the (typical and tiresome) lens of metaphor. His blindness is a way of talking about living in the world on our own, without the supervision of parents, lovers, etc. Can you make it on your own? Yes. Yes, you can. As long as you don't freak out too much, and as long as you find a very cute white girl to love you. I am being dismissive. But it is easy to be dismissive about something so slight. In any case, if there is a reason to watch Butterflies Are Free, Eileen Heckart is that reason. Her performance is beautifully nuanced. She is initially a kind of stuffy, Helen Mirren type, who Heckart humanizes into a fascinatingly strong, compassionate character. It's enchanting to watch.

Best Friends is a rom-com with Hawn and Burt Reynolds that is completely and totally enjoyable. This comedy was written by Barry Levinson & Valerie Curtin and directed by Norman Jewison. I basically loved it, and in the processed remembered how much I love both of these actors. Reynolds gets a lot of flack for his off-screen behavior – frankly, I am taking him to task for a couple of things in my book manuscript – but as a performer, I just love him. He is so much fun, and plays the frustrated, exasperated straight man figure just perfectly, with a careful eye on how silly he knows he looks. He's delightful. This comedy, too, is really funny. A couple of Hollywood screenwriters, who have a great relationship, decide to get married and then to visit each of their parents' families in turn. Both interactions are hilarious, and as you can imagine, the relationship is tested by this return home to the nonsense from which each of them originally came. This is a complete farce, with a few sentimental messages about marriage and commitment thrown in, but it's never preachy, and even the girlfriend-with-the-baby character (who usually preaches wisdom and freaks the heroine out in these kinds of movies) gets drunk in the afternoon with Hawn's character and gives wise counsel rather than inciting terror.

And then there's Swing Shift, which is a Kurt Russell / Goldie Hawn feature about the Rosie-the-Riveter types who went to work during the Second World War. The film is a nostalgic piece of fluff for the most part, presenting the past in a kind of Barry Levinson-esque candied haze. But this film, too, has things to recommend it. Aside from the obvious hotness of Russell (as well as the sexy Ed Harris), this is a movie about cheating on your husband that doesn't spend a lot of time moralizing about how awful the cheating wife is. The cheating wife in this case (Hawn) figures out who she is by herself while her husband is away, and the film is much more interested in this discovery of subjectivity itself than it is in punishing or scolding the woman for her discoveries. Swing Shift was directed by Jonathan Demme, and it also possesses the particular brand of quirkiness that Demme was working on in the 1980s. I'm thinking of films like Married to the Mob and Melvin and Howard, that take a humorous perspective on human nature, while also understanding the difficulties and violences that daily life entails. Swing Shift is one of these 1980s Demme films that makes fun of its characters in a gentle, empathetic way, while also spending just a little more time than it knows it should focusing on how silly everything is. His films from this time period focus almost guiltily on the pleasure everyone is experiencing, even though they are well aware that we are talking about serious things. This makes the director's movies into the quirky, seemingly disjointed narratives that they are. But his movies are not disjointed at all. His films are of a piece, in fact. This quirky, nostalgic style runs through all of Demme's movies in the 1980s.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1970

I actually don't understand how this was nominated for Best Foreign Language Picture. Wikipedia and IMDb both say that First Love is a German-language film. But that is definitely not true of the English-language print I watched. With the actors John Moulder-Brown (British), Maximilian Schell (Austrian), and Valentina Cortese (Italian), English rather than German seems a more common language here, as well. In any case, First Love is a beautiful picture, and this is mostly due to its exquisite direction (also by Schell). It is Chekhovian and wise and visually interesting. The film is marred by a 1970s musical soundtrack that now seems dated and silly, but otherwise this is gorgeous stuff.

Short Conversations about A Clash of Kings (Book 2)

SPOILERS FOR BOOK TWO OF A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE BELOW. 

Me: Why does GRRM insist on describing meals and outfits constantly? These are the two things I don't understand. And all the meals are the same anyway: pork roasted with leeks and herbs, wine sweetened with honey, black bread, and honey cakes.
Catie: Um, have you seen the size of him?
Me: Oh my god. Excellent point. But he needs to hire a chef to help him change up the menus a little bit.
Catie: He dresses like he lives in Game of Thrones. He loves being Robert Baratheon.
Me: They only ever eat winter vegetables. But it has been summer for like twenty years!
Catie: So true!
Me: Like, no one has seen a zucchini.
Catie: Or a nice avocado.
Me: Exactly. No one grows tomatoes. Though it is perma-summer.
Catie: And they dress like it's winter, as well.
Me: Well they are all naked a lot.
Catie: I'm wondering if his last book and last sentence will say Winter has come and that's it. We've just been leading up to snow.
Me: The Starks will have been right all along.
Catie: Hahahaha. Fuckin' Starks.
Me: Ugh. May they all perish.
Catie: Except Arya???
Me: Right. I like Arya. Although she just did something asinine. She got captured by the Mountain because she trusted this idiot Hotpie.
Catie: Hotpie. I forgot about him!
Me: Easy to do. I assume I will too. He will be killed in the next chapter.

Tom: Where are you in Westeros now?
Me: I am wishing I could move faster. The audiobook isn't very fast when I'm only going to and from the grocery.
Tom: You know, you could, like… read it...

Me: Lady Catelyn has gone as an envoy to King Renly. I am glad. Even if I have to put up with Catelyn's constant boo-hooing, it is worth it to hang out with Renly for a while. I've never hoped we'd go back to Catelyn before but like what is happening with Renly.
Catie: Does he make you miss the Starks?
Me: No. Fuck a Stark. But, like, GRRM only cares about Arya and Tyrion and fucking Daenerys (and who the fuck cares about her right now?) and I want to know what Renly is doing!

Me: Renly??! No. I can't. I am so sad/mad/upset!!
Catie: I've been waiting for this text. I knowwwww.
Me: I hate everything. There are two motherfucking gay characters and he has to go and kill one.
Catie: Best reaction. Shall we go into mourning?
Me: Seriously. So mad. I had been looking forward to hanging out with him for the whole fucking book. And GRRM cuts his throat with a fucking fake shadow dark magic sword from his racist version of a mysterious orientalist east.
Catie: Hahahahahaha. Oh my god. That's it.
Me: Maybe next the evil red bitch Melisandre can put some five spice powder in her stir fry. Almond eyes. Fuck. Can he think of any other way to describe Asian people. I am so mad. There better be another gay character soon or I'm out.
Catie: Melisandre annoys the shit out of me. That fucking birthing a weird ghost Stannis baby. I can't imagine.
Me: But then the rest of these assholes. Catelyn is like, you know what we ought to do? Pray. Yep. That'll help. Only Tyrion is like: Hmmm. I think I'm going to hatch a fucking plan. Catelyn is like Plans? Why do we need plans? We have honor! Just like her husband. Someone oughtta cut her throat too. I'm going to bed. I'm going to cry and pray that GRRM can think of another character with cool outfits like Renly's. You know he loves to describe an outfit. (And a meal.)
Catie: Catelyn is just straight dumb. Worst representation.
Me: Literally everything she says I just think cheer up!
Catie: She invented Debbie Downer. And she doesn't shut up.
Me: I can see why people get onto Team Lannister. Go fucking do something.
Catie: I just want Tyrion and Varys to take over everything.

Me: Sometimes I actually think I'm only reading this book for the gods. For an atheist, I sort of love the idea of deities.
Tom: Haha. They mostly bore me
Me: Gods bore me in real life. But if they actually have magic powers, I'm in. Like the Greek ones.
Tom: I like R'hllor
Me: I have no idea what you just said, but it looks abominable.
Tom: The lord of light. That's how you spell his name
Me: It is spelled like that? That's horrific. Yet another instance of GRRM racism? Is he supposed to be from the East? The mysterious oriental east?
Tom: Hahaha. I don't think he's given a geographic origin.
Me: Bullshit. That Melisandre woman was chanting in the language of Asshai.
Tom: Oh right, she is from the east
Me: Nailed it. This shit is so racist.

Me: I'm on Theon II. He's flirting with the wife of the man who built his ship.
Tom: Ok.
Me: No idea what's happened in Pyke since I was there last though. GRRM hasn't gotten around to that. He's busy talking about Theon's "iron" "mast".
Tom: Well it is his defining characteristic
Me: I like him. I like sons who don't get on with their fathers.

Me: The reason the Bran storyline is so fucking stupid is that he only sees future scenarios that we already know about.
Catie: He's just a recap.
Me: Boring ass Starks.

Me: The mother of dragons needs to give birth again. This time to a plot twist. I'm 60% through this book and she can't do anything except roast a bit of meat to feed the little guys.
Catie: She's so slow in that. Actually most of her stuff is slow and redundant except for a few boom moments. I mean, come to Westeros already.

Me: I hate Catelyn so much. I liked her for five minutes at the Twins when she talked to Lord Fray. But now. Fuck her.
Dayne: This is when a judging emoticon would be useful.
Me: In the books, though: she is such a whiner. She just cries and there's no plot advancement. Boo hoo hoo hoo, bitch. This woman has not enjoyed a single day of her time in the entirety of this series. I can't wait for her to die.
Jeanne: How are we friends? Stark-hater.
Tom: Would you enjoy her life? If it makes you feel better, pretty much everyone hates Cat. Which makes me sad because I love her.
Me: You two go ahead and love her. And I will hate away. 

Me: Melisandre gave birth to Stannis's shadow baby and it was great.
Catie: False. It was fucking random.
Me: I loved it.
Catie: I had to reread it. I was like whaaat? And then got turned on. She is badass but if she says "Lord of Light" one more time I will light her on fire.
Me: True. But she is fucking pure evil. And that is interesting.
Catie: Especially when you have the Starks prancing around.
Me: What did you say? I fell asleep for a second.
Catie: Hahaha. I said HOOOODOOOOR.
Me: Twice today I sighed deeply and said "oh dear" and then much louder I said "HOOODOOR."

Me: There is so much magic in Book 2. I like it. Dany just escaped from the house of the undying.
Tom: I was literally about to ask if you'd been to the house of the undying yet.
Me: It was so cool! I feel like that is the chapter you need to revisit. He probably hid lots of secrets in there. But also Jaqen H'ghar!
Tom: I just reread House yesterday I think. And of Jaqen, you're just at his intro now, right?
Me: Oh no. He has already disappeared like the wind. After being amazing and killing people
Tom: Ahhhh. Valar morghulis
Me: Whatever that shit means.
Tom: It will be translated for you
Me: Aside from the fact that it obviously means something having to do with magic and death.
Tom: Yes. I can tell you what it means. It's not a huge shocker.
Me: Haha. Yes. Do.
Tom: "All men must die."
Me: But see. Here's the thing. What is dead may never die, as the Greyjoys remind us.
Catie: The drowned god! Yes.

Me: Jaqen H'ghar is my shit.
Catie: He is awesome. And hot.
Me: Phrase most often written in this book: "Blah blah blah, said Catelyn gravely."
Catie: Gravely. Hahahaha. Every. Thing. Is. So. Dire.
Me: Seriously. Catelyn is always weeping. When she was alone with Ned's bones I thought I was going to explode with rage.
Catie: Someone would give her a million dollars and she would just be so sad about it.
Me: She was wealthy beyond measure, but she couldn't help her thoughts turning to the sadness in her heart. Gold and jewels only appeared cold and unfeeling to her. They wouldn't bring her Ned back. And they wouldn't bring her closer to her children.
Catie: Zzzzzzzzzzzzz. Maybe if you had a better attitude all your children wouldn't be so fucked up and living a million miles away from you.
Me: Exactly. Also, you never should've left Winterfell. And never have let Tyrion get away.
Catie: I'd go to war to get away from her.
Me: Hopefully she'll die soon.
Catie: Fingers crossed.
Me: I'll pray to the seven about it.

Me: I really like Sansa in this book. Almost finished with Number 2.
Jeanne: Wow! You're killing it! She's definitely better in the books. ... I do think it's funny you like the one Stark who I don't like. It took me forever to get through the first half of that book.
Me: The first half of that book nothing happens. It is awful. Nothing is still happening, frankly, but I have hopes for the last fifth.
Jeanne: Hang in there. It gets awesome.

Tom: You're heading to the big climax.
Me: Yes of course. Cliffhangers and whatnot. Fucking Stannis is going to attack King's Landing. But what gets me is that the books are totally ignoring Robb Stark - or have been for ages. Not that I care about Robb. He is boring. But, like, Tywin and Robb are fighting and fighting the whole book and there are no eyes on them.
Tom: Yeah but it's the war of five kings. With five kings, you lose track of one or two for a while.
Me: I counted 7. Kings, I mean.
Tom: Well, 6 and a queen.
Me: Yeah.
Tom: Joffrey, Stannis, Renly, Robb, Balon, Mance, Dany.
Me: Can't leave out the king beyond the wall.

Me: So after the battle of Blackwater. The guy reading my audiobook goes: “Daenerys”. And I yelled curses at the CD player for the next five minutes straight.
Tom: Haha.
Me: I don't wanna hear about her. I wanna know what happened.
Tom: Hahahahahaha.
Me: Loras was wearing Renly's armor I take it. Romantic. And stolen wholesale from the Iliad. I am so close to being done with this book.
Tom: And then onto Book 3! My favorite of them all.
Me: …And hopefully some new characters. But right now GRRM is literally introducing us to a million Frays who are hanging out at Harrenhal with whatshisname with the leeches. Like: hello! Wrap it up! I'm meeting new characters?? That fucking sadist.
Tom: Setting up Book 3.
Me: Right.
Tom: Blackwater is the climax, time to have falling action
Me: And I suppose the book will end with Bran telling us where the fuck he's hiding himself. HOOOOODOOOOOR.

Me: Poor Theon. Everybody hates that motherfucker.
Dayne: Bahaha. I'm part of that club as well. 
Catie: Not a damn friend in the world. I want Varys to employ him.
Me: It makes me like him. Haha.
Dayne: Of course.

Dayne: You finished book 2!
Me: I did. Cliffhanger city.
Dayne: I'll have to call and hear about it.
Me: You've heard all there is to hear. But I will say one thing. Jon Snow is no Stark. He abandoned his honor for the good of the realm. What a good guy.
Dayne: Doing what?
Me: Going over to the wildlings.
Dayne: Ah.
Me: Lord Eddard could never have done that. Ever.
Dayne: Daenerys' boring stuff is finally over. 
Me: Thank the lord. Maybe Bran can become interesting finally too. And maybe Catelyn will die soon. Plus: new point of view characters!! I am hoping for Jaime this time. Or Loras. And I hope Davos is still alive.
Dayne: Book 3 is good.
Me: Good! I am excited for it

Two from Ingmar Bergman

The Virgin Spring is a gorgeous little film. It's early Bergman (1960), and it is in the Criterion Collection, so it is available in a sparkling print. I don't think I have much to say about the movie itself. though. The plot is a very straightforward narrative of violence, loss, revenge, and religion based on a medieval tale from the thirteenth century.

It has an infamous rape scene, but the film's violence is presented in a painful, anguished way. This is not done through sound information (the way Stephen Prince suggests that pain is best communicated on film), in fact the film has hardly any sound in it at all. Instead, the camera seems to feel with the characters, and the violence itself is almost always obstructed from view in some way.

The narrative on which the film is based is inherently religious, yet Bergman manages to make a film that – despite the obvious existence of god – questions the god's choices. Birgitta Valberg and Max Von Sydow as the young girl's parents are really quite excellent.

Bergman is a bleak filmmaker – not totally joyless, but definitely bleak. And his film from 1976, Face to Face (Ansikte mot Ansikte) is no exception to this. But Face to Face boasts an unbelievably amazing performance from Liv Ullman. Unlike The Virgin Spring, which is easy to get ahold of, it's pretty hard to find a copy of Face to Face. I've been trying for years. But now I'm at Dartmouth and they have everything, so I watched it two weeks ago.

Face to Faceis about a psychiatrist who has her shit together. As her daughter is off at camp and her husband in New York for work, she goes to stay with her grandparents for a month while some work is being done on her house. This return home opens up all sorts of things for the woman and she confronts her long-repressed fears and anxieties.

This is a hard film. First of all, it is dated by its interest in psychiatry and repressed memories, but the film itself is also a true challenge. The main character is truly fucking sad, and there doesn't seem to be much of a way out of the misery that she feels blanketing her put-together life. So this is hard to watch. Honestly, though, I spent a good portion of the film with my jaw dropped, disbelieving that Liv Ullman was as good as she is. Ullman is extraordinary in Face to Face. She tears into the role and is unrelenting. We get every confused, difficult moment of this woman's existential anguish. It is a performance that is so exquisitely crafted and so specific, that the audience is left as confused as the character about what is really wrong with the woman.

The trouble with the film itself, though, is that it doesn't have much of a solution to this anxiety, and frankly doesn't have much of a reason for displaying it all to us in cinematic form. Face to Face is enjoyable only for Ullman's virtuosity. The film itself is unrelentingly miserable.

The Dardennes Do It Again

The final film that I was able to see from the Dartmouth version of Telluride was the Dardenne Brothers' Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit). The film is the kind of tense, emotional ride typical of the Dardennes' work, and I loved it.

The film is about a woman who works in a manufacturing plant. She has been on sick leave, but is recovered and has returned to work. At the plant (which has 16 workers plus her), the boss has decided that he can't afford to rehire her. He gives the other 16 employees the option to vote. Her coworkers must choose between getting a bonus or hiring the woman back.

She spends the titular two days and one night visiting each of her coworkers in turn to try to keep her job. The bonus is rather a lot of money, so this is an uphill battle and a very emotional one. The Dardennes always have the ability to raise the stakes on any plot. Their work is similar to the work of Asghar Farhadi in this way, except that the intensity of Farhadi's stories revolves around unfolding plot events. The Dardennes's stories just seem to unspool, to follow naturally from the initial event they've scripted.

Two Days, One Night is also very, very smart. It is an intelligent analysis and emotional representation of how capitalism works to divide people up, to teach us to see ourselves as individuals and understand the world as one where the choice is between our benefit and someone else's benefit. Two Days, One Night makes this crystal clear, and the journey of it is almost agonizing.

More than anything, though, this is a movie about very high stakes, about asking for assistance from the people in our lives and hoping that they will be willing to help us. In other words, it's about community, about nation, about working together at something in order to make the world better. Each time the film's main character has to ask for help, though, this prospect is absolutely terrifying. Two Days, One Night makes clear just how difficult community actually is.

***

Two Days, One Night is Belgium's official selection for the Foreign Language Picture Oscar. But the Dardennes have not been appreciated by the Academy, and Belgium has done better with Felix Van Groeningen and (surprisingly) Michaël R. Roskam. The last time Belgium submitted a Dardennes movie was in 2005 with L'Enfant. In the same year, Argentina submitted the last Fabián Belinsky film, El Aura, Canada submitted current Oscar darling Jean-Marc Vallée's excellent C.R.A.Z.Y., Hungary went with Lajos Koltai's gorgeous Fateless, and Romania selected Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. The Academy's nominations weren't all terrible: Sophie Scholl: the Final Days and Gavin Hood's Tsotsi made the cut. But the category was filled with mostly bad films: Paradise Now, Don't Tell, and the truly terrible Joyeux Noël. I'm crossing my fingers for the Dardennes this year.

The J.M.W. Turner Movie

Watching movies with all of the geriatrics of Hanover who have squeezed into the enormous Spaulding Theatre to see these Telluride movies has really started to mess with my head. First everyone loved The Imitation Game, then most people were grossed out or bored by Wild, and two nights ago the audience was openly hostile to Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh's film about the British painter J.M.W. Turner. But I was loving it.

I don't want to recommend Mr. Turner to folks, though. It's a tough film. Aren't all of Mike Leigh's films tough? Mr. Turner is tough in a different way than Another Year or Secrets & Lies or Vera Drake, though. Mr. Turner begins by being tough to understand. Like, what are those people actually saying? Turner's father speaks in an intensely thick dialect, and Turner himself (played by Harry Potter's über-creepy villain Timothy Spall) spends the majority of the film literally grunting. It becomes his way of speaking as he gets older, too, so that by film's end he responds to almost anything addressed to him with a pig-like grunt. At the end of the film this is quite amusing, but at the beginning it is frustrating and confusing. Thirty minutes into the movie, though, it all becomes fine, and one hasn't missed anything anyway.

The film is not a standard biopic, beginning when Turner is a young man and following him until his death. Instead, Leigh addresses Turner during his decline. He is an older man, set in his ways, stubborn, messy, disgruntled, hardened by years of neglect by the art establishment. For me this was a fascinating study. The film does not spend time flashing back to when he was young and beautiful and full of life or any such thing. Nor does the film locate the source of Turner's rebellious and outrageous behavior in some childhood trauma (à la Ray, The Imitation Game, Walk the Line). There is no explaining Turner. There is only dealing with him. 

But Mr. Turner is really funny. Leigh moves deftly between social satire that is uproariously funny and then very serious scenes in Turner's private life. Nearly every sequence in the art world is both a beautiful re-enactment of petty nineteenth-century artists' squabbles and a hilarious send-up of the same. There is an absolutely brilliant sequence in which art critic John Ruskin starts a discussion of how to paint the sea. Turner sits in the corner, grunts responses, and then asks the most important artistic question that can be asked: Do you prefer lamb and kidney pie or veal and ham pie?

And there are two genius scenes regarding the future of art. Turner sits in front of a daguerrotype machine and has his picture taken. It's a fascinating sequence about ways of behaving as one is confronted by new technologies. And then there is the future of painting. Turner observes the work of those who would come after him with curiosity, confusion, and (of course) disdain. But Mr. Turner doesn't weep for Turner, and it doesn't treat him as a saint. In many ways he is a grotesquerie, a ridiculous imp in the art world, a disgusting misogynist at home, a tender lover with his partner, a stubborn, difficult artist with his patrons, and a confused, awkward guest at parties.

Leigh's movie intercuts these sequences of private life and the social world of nineteenth-century England with the beautiful sunsets and sunrises Turner is known for painting, as well as images of trains, landscapes, and, of course, the roiling sea. Here, only, do we truly see the world from Turner's point of view. Leigh only allows us access to the artist in this oblique way, by showing us the paintings themselves in a new way. In many ways he gives us brief, cinematic versions of the paintings. Turner sees the world as fast, beautiful, and enormous, and his own position in that world is our position as we look at his paintings: we are so tiny. And the world itself majestically, terrifyingly, bustles right on by us.

I loved this movie.

Wild

Wild is the story of a woman who has a lot of problems, and who – in order to find something out about herself, about the world, about who she wishes to be – hikes the Pacific Coast trail beginning in the California desert and ending way up north in Oregon. The movie is based on a memoir. It stars Reese Witherspoon, and it is really good.

I was totally skeptical of Wild. Mostly because I am skeptical of Reese Witherspoon and skeptical of Jean-Marc Vallée, who directed the awesome C.R.A.Z.Y. but also directed the Dallas Buyers Club and The Young Victoria. These two most recent films are straightforward narratives, and I didn't care for either of them, but Vallée's newest film is about memory, longing, and desire in the way that C.R.A.Z.Y. was, and this is what the director does really, really well. Reese hikes the trail, but she flashes back to events in her past, some of which we get only in the briefest of glimpses. The character confronts her memories piece by piece, as her hike is a way to deal with the things she has done, to come to terms with her grief and her own outrageous behavior.

The film is, by turns, quite funny, really intense, and even suspenseful at times. But this is not a movie about hiking or the inspirational possibilities of nature or anything like that. This is a movie about a woman dealing with herself and her situation in life. The director of the film society here referred to it as a more realistic Eat, Pray, Love, and maybe the comparison is a good one. Unlike EPL, though, this is a story about pushing one's self to the limits of one's own abilities in order to see if one can handle both the past and the future.

I want to be sure to note, though, that what's on show here is really excellent storytelling, most importantly accomplished through editing and direction. Memories come at the main character quickly, and then they are quickly pushed back if she doesn't want to deal with them. We get inside the character's head, and this learning about her doesn't work to explain her behavior as much as it works to help us process these things along with the character. As the things in the past happen, they feel less like revelations or ways of understanding why this character has done what she has done, and more like things we begin to shoulder with her. There is no third-act aha! moment that makes it all clear and helps us understand her. Instead, slowly but surely, we confront her past the way she confronts her past.

I have to say one more thing about Wild. Laura Dern plays Reese Witherspoon's mother in this, and she is amazing. It is a beautiful, beautiful performance. Even if Wild weren't as good as it is, it would totally be worth checking out just for her. As it is, Wild is worth it all around.

***

The Bunch

Can we also note that there are a million movies with Wild in the title? I mention this because I recently (finally) saw Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and it is as awesome as everyone working on violence in cinema has been saying forever. (I would call it downright inspirational. It is just a genius film from start to finish.) But there's also Into the Wild, Wild Things, The Call of the Wild, The River Wild, as well as another famous movie starring Laura Dern: Wild at Heart. And I haven't even mentioned Wilde yet. There're a lot of Wilds, that's all I'm saying, and calling a movie simply Wild doesn't help things much; I'm also (to be honest) not sure what it has to do with the movie.

The Imitation Game - A Beautiful Mind Lite

Morten Tyldum's The Imitation Game is a real crowd-pleaser. It recently won the audience award at the Toronto Film festival, and both shows here at Dartmouth sold out quickly and easily – I know probably a dozen people who tried to get tickets and couldn't. I had to buy mine two weeks in advance in order to make sure I got one. The line was literally out the door. As I say, it's an intense crowd-pleaser, and the audience I was with just loved it; laughing at all the jokes; gasping at all the right moments; pretending to be surprised when something predictable happened; and clucking in a knowing and self-congratulatory way when the final title cards came up to tell us what happened after the events of the movie were over.

Ms. Knightley

But The Imitation Game is cheap, cynical Oscar bait through and through. It has a beautiful score by Alexandre Desplat, a charming supporting performance by Keira Knightley, and a tic-filled teary-eyed central performance by everyone's favorite problem-solver Benedict Cumberbatch, but this is a movie that repeats to us a series of things that we already know so that we can feel good about knowing them. And the clichés! The one of these that stands out the most is the phrase It's the one no one imagines can do anything who can do the thing no one imagines or something like that. It is repeated no less than three times throughout the film, so often that I'm surprised the Weinstein Company isn't using the phrase in its marketing.

The film follows famed Enigma code-breaker Alan Turing, and it alternates between three time periods – the early 1940s, the early 1950s (after the war), and the 1920s when Turing is a young man. This is yet another film that intends to explain a character's interesting or seemingly inexplicable behavior through recourse to a past that is unfolded to the audience slowly. In Turing's case, he was in love as a very young man and this boyhood love somehow – well, the film doesn't really say, but it had a profound effect on him, and if The Imitation Game is not really clear about any concrete effects this young man had on Turing, the film makes us think that it has unlocked something deep about Turing and his (allegedly) mysterious life.

The sequences with Turing's fellow code-breakers are fun. And every scene with Keira Knightley is delightful, but the rest of the film is just one more narrative about a single-minded genius whom no one believed but who did his thing anyway, dammit, and turned out to be right, suckas. The film is ostensibly also about the persecution of homosexuality in the 1940s and '50s, but this is more an afterthought for the film than it is anything else. We never see Turing really as a homosexual. That is, he doesn't actually have sex with anyone in the film. He keeps saying he's a homosexual, and he's told that he needs to keep that a secret and all of that, but... legally, one isn't really a homosexual if one never has sex with anyone. I mean, how would anyone go about trying to prove it? The film's version of what a homosexual is is a person who knows a secret thing about himself – not a person who, you know, has sex with other men or even fantasizes about them.

And The Imitation Game goes further: everyone keeps secrets during the war. There are spies for the Soviets and secrets kept from the military and encoded messages from the Nazis. Being gay is just one more secret in a whole series of them – a comparison the film makes explicitly in a scene late in the film. In other words, the film doesn't explore the life of Alan Turing at all. Instead it explores what might have happened if a homosexual worked for MI6 during the Second World War. Everything in this film is approached generically.

Oh, but don't listen to me. I'm just a curmudgeon. The film comes out in late November, and most everyone will probably like it. Expect Oscar nominations for the writer, the composer, and the two main actors. That seems about right. It's a crowd-pleaser. It's about World War II. And it feels very important.

Two with Marlon Brando

I loved Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata! with Marlon Brando. Now, I know that Brando plays the Mexican hero Emiliano Zapata, and that, therefore, it is (yet another) instance of Hollywood casting a mostly white actor to play a person of color, but the film is still great. And it also boasts an awesome performance by Mexican-American actor Anthony Quinn.

For me the greatest thing about Viva Zapata! was its cinematography. Everything in the film is sun-bleached, and the desert in this film is a stunning white. In fact, the way the film is shot, everything looks white. It's rather an extraordinary achievement of black-and-white photography to my mind (although, perhaps I don't really know what I am talking about).

Thematically, the film is sort of a reactionary, disillusioned, anti-revolutionary thing. The revolution, we find out, must continue purge those who wish to stop the revolution. The revolution eats its head off. The revolution is co-opted by those who wish only for the deaths of others and do not really care about others. All of this is true, of course, but for me that does not mean we ought to give up on the idea of revolution; Kazan, apparently, had given up.

But this is a very good film with some excellent performances and gorgeous photography. And now it is available on blu-ray, so that cinematography is on full display.


Bernhard Wicki's Morituri is also really good. It's much more of a melodramatic action-suspense film, with Brando as its disaffected center. I found it gripping and truly enjoyable. Wicki's film Die Brücke is one of the most pitiless of anti-Nazi films ever to be made. This one, too, is absolutely clear about the crimes the Nazis committed. At no point does this film – as so many do – allow Nazi Germany simply to become a backdrop for an action film. The atrocities of the twentieth century are always there for us to see. That Morituri can also be a tensely crafted suspense film is a testament to how good of a filmmaker Wicki was.

Two Lives

We meet the main character of Georg Maas's Two Lives while she is doing a whole bunch of stuff we don't understand. I like spy games, and since the movie starts off as a spy game, I was very interested. But Two Lives is also an exploration of a historical event that I knew nothing about.


Apparently, during the occupation of Norway in the Second World War, children of Norwegian mothers and German soldiers were considered good Aryan stock, taken from their mothers, and transported to orphanages in Germany where they could be raised by Germans. After the war, the GDR decided it didn't want these children. Many of them were killed.

Two Lives is a tension-filled melodrama that is also somewhat of a thriller, but set in front of this historical background, Georg Maas's movie becomes richer than that. The story becomes devastating, an uncomfortable portrait of one of the forgotten stories of the war in Europe, and one that makes it clear that the War is still not over.

Jude Law is Dom Hemingway and You're Not

In a lot of ways, Dom Hemingway, a film written and directed by Richard Shepard (who, as far as I can tell, was known before this only for a single episode of 30 Rock and the Pierce Brosnan film The Matador), is strikingly similar to a film I watched recently called Filth, by writer-director Jon S. Baird.

Both films are about reprehensible main characters who are almost completely unhinged. They are both crime films, filled with cocaine and prostitutes and lots and lots of drinking. Both films are also about traditional masculinity (this isn't just my read on them: they both want to be about masculinity) and its attendant components: heterosexuality, violence, futurity, impenetrability. I think, for the record, that I tend to dislike films that take traditional masculinity as a kind of uninterrogable given. Liam Neeson's revenge films (and before him: Mel Gibson's revenge films) tend to do this, for example. But I tend to be fascinated by films that specifically address masculinity, attempting to explore how it works emotionally, relationally, etc.

This poster is genius. Obviously. That ape!

So: if I liked Filth for its surrealism and its strangely shifting, drug-addled perspective, I loved Dom Hemingway. The reasons are several, but they have everything to do with Shepard's point of view about his main character. The film opens with Jude Law getting a blowjob from an unseen character, and Dom Hemingway talking about how amazing his penis is. He goes on and on in the opening monologue: it is a ridiculous, hilarious almost endless list of how his penis should win the Nobel Peace prize and can do laudable feats like rescue dying children and cure cancer. The absurdity of this is immediately clear, and that the person with whom Dom Hemingway is having sex with is a fellow inmate already signals that this film is an interrogation into traditional masculinity and not a simple celebration of its attributes.

Where Filth allowed its protagonist to talk to us directly, asking us to buy into his delusions of grandeur, Dom Hemingway always keeps a slight distance from its protagonist, treating him like the delusional relic of traditional masculinity that he is. Other men do not cower before Dom Hemingway; they are amused by him, but they think he's an asshole and no one in the film wishes he were Dom Hemingway.

Jordan A. Nash & Jude Law

The film is filled with Dom's angry, completely ludicrous outbursts and his outrageous, violent behavior. But the film never asks us to agree with Dom, to think him clever; one never really feels as though Dom is making the right decision. We get to enjoy his antics, to be sure, but he is never a model for behavior. And after the three opening sequences, the film shifts perspective from Dom himself. We see him from the perspective of his friend, from the perspective of his boss, from the perspective of his daughter, from the perspective of his son-in-law, and from the perspective of his grandson. Dom Hemingway says that masculinity is funny, sexy, even awesome, but then... one has to interact with other people, and the failings of traditional masculinity become all too clear when actual other humans are involved. Further, Dom himself understands his own limitations – he totally grasps his own problems with anger, and he even knows that he is usually the least intelligent person in the room. All of this manages to be, well, endearing, and keeps the exploration of masculinity a sincere one rather than Filth's ironic, half-hearted pseudo-exploration of the same thing. This is a rich, very funny film, with a fierce central performance from Jude Law. Great stuff.

The Woman in Red

Have you seen Gene Wilder's The Woman in Red? If not, you're doing fine, although I will say that I found lots of it really funny. It's funny in that awkward kind of way where you just feel uncomfortable most of the time and then that super-awkward feeling is punctuated by laughs every once in a while.

There's also a rather fascinating gay thing. (The movie is from 1982.) Everyone in the group of friends in the movie is cheating. Gene Wilder is trying to cheat on his wife with the eponymous woman in red, Joseph Bologna cheats on his wife constantly, Michael Huddleston is sleeping with a colleague's wife, and Charles Grodin... well it turns out that Charles Grodin cheats on his boyfriend at one point during the film with a cute young blond boy named Erik (Thom Mathews, who would go on to act in The Return of the Living Dead, Return of the Living Dead II and Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI.)

Anyway, the film makes a big show of accepting Charles Grodin for being gay and Gene Wilder drives him home and gives him a hug but doesn't say anything – and then later they stay friends and nothing is strange.

Overall, the movie is one of these comedies-with-a-lesson-type movies that are more interested in sentimentality than in making their audiences laugh.

I should say that the woman in red herself is not just an object in the film, even if she obviously is on the poster. As it turns out, she is clever and fascinating, and way more interesting than any of the other characters in the film.

Two Musical Biographies

My favorite thing about Igor Talankin's Tchaikovsky (Чайковский) was the stunning costume design by Lyudmila Kusakova. Otherwise, it is standard, late-1960s biographical fare – it was released in the U.S. in 1972. It also omits all mention of homosexual affairs, if there were any. (Were there any? Inquiring minds want to know.) I recently also watched a biographical film about Frédéric Chopin called A Song to Remember from 1945 that is a more poorly made film than Tchaikovsky. In a lot of ways, though, Charles Vidor's A Song to Remember is a more interesting film than Tchaikovsky because it is such blatant nationalist propaganda for World War II.

Both Chopin and Tchaikovsky had guarded, mysterious personal lives, and neither of them felt the need to share whatever demons they possessed with the rest of the world. But Tchaikovsky treats those secret demons as a mystery, presenting the things we don't know simply and without comment – without attempting to understand them, really: Here they are. Pyotr Ilyich had night terrors. He was tormented. He couldn't figure out how to be happy. And this is how it must be to be a genius. And in its way, this mode of treating the mysterious emptiness at the center of this man whom the film does not understand is simply a way of giving up. It reminds me a bit of the way that Clint Eastwood so boringly treated the life of J. Edgar Hoover (surely a fascinating man, in fact). Tchaikovsky is sumptuously filmed – the costumes, I am telling you, are phenomenal (unfortunately, Google Images is being decidedly unhelpful as I try to search for examples) – but the film has nothing to say about the mysteries at the heart of this man.

This isn't to say that I think all biographies ought to be along the lines of Ray or Walk the Line, films that purport to explain an entire man's life through access to some particularly traumatic or marking incident in the man's childhood. But a perspective of some kind is welcome. A Song to Remember, while being totally silly and '40s and (therefore) part of the big studio propaganda machine, still makes some propositions about Chopin's life and work and his mysteries. To be sure, it explains Chopin's life as one torn between Polish nationalism and the love of an (ahem) evil, pants-wearing woman – Merle Oberon at her iciest – but it is at least some kind of explanation or perspective. It is at least a theory. I think I will always prefer those kind of risky explanations to the "just the facts ma'am" way that so many people think biography ought to be done these days.