Bill's Movie News and Reviews

"Red Tails": how did a segregated military ever achieve "unit cohesion" at higher levels?

2012-02-01T06:48:00.000-08:00

There is a point in Anthony Hemingway’s film for LucasFilm and Fox, “Red Tails”, where Col Bullard (Terrence Howard, from “Hustle and Flow”) tries to argue with his superiors for equal rights for his men, in 1944 Italy. He is told that equality and rights don’t mean anything until we win the war. Bullard goes along. That’s one of the relatively few philosophical moments in a film dedicated mostly to action for its own sake. So the controversy in Hollywood over funding because of the cast seems moot.

That reminds me of the parameters of the debate over gays in the military when Bill Clinton took office, and the constant comparisons (somewhat misplaced) to the integration of the military by President Truman in 1948 (as demonstrated in the HBO film “Truman” [with Gary Sinese] in 1996). In fact, given the modern notion (as it has evolved since 1993) of “unit cohesion”, it is rather shocking that we once had a totally segregated military.

In fact, the 332^nd Fighter Group, graduated from the Tuskegee training program, remains amazingly cohesive, particularly during the scenes where fighters are shot in the air and have to be talked to crash landings, sometimes successfully. But there’s a tendency to go wild and go off on one’s own, as in an early scene where the Red Tails attack a train about to enter a tunnel in Italy. That wreck is especially well done, reminding one of the wreck scene from “The Fugitive”.

Here’s the official site.

This film is a 2012 release, not a straggler for the awards. (That’s interesting; I wonder if the producers thought it wouldn’t quite get in anyway. It wouldn’t.) I wonder if 3-D was seriously considered.

There is a 1995 HBO film “The Tuskegee Airmen”, directed by Robert Markowitz, also starring Cuba Gooding Jr. (who appears in this newer film). In that film, there was more emphasis on the idea that the Red Tails provided a cover for the white mockingbird-like “dive bombers”, and John Lithgow had been chilling as the bigoted Senator Conyers. I rented it from Netflix but saw it sold at a Smithsonian gift shop.

“Beyond the Trailer” offers this YouTube preview of the current film:

Hallmark's "A Smile as Big as the Moon": a teacher's passion gets his special education kids to Space Camp

2012-01-29T21:20:00.000-08:00

Hallmark’s “A Smile as Big as the Moon”, directed by James Steven Sadwith, certainly might have been a hit movie as a theater release. And it certain illustrates the maxim of screenwriting, to create maximum urgency and rooting interest.

John Corbett plays a Mike Kersjes, special education teacher (and football coach) in Grand Rapids, MI, with a driving passion to make his kids prove to themselves that they can make it. His technique: expect from them the same thing you expect from everyone. The film tells the (partly) true story of his drive around 1989 to get his students to Space Camp in Huntsville, AL. His technique is to get them to focus on teamwork, during which they rapidly catch up in social skills.

The kids have varying appearance and demeanor. Some seem to have Asperger’s syndrome and are actually very good with a narrow range of tasks (like one boy who builds models). The teacher has the kids invent a board-game (that looks a bit like the old Mr. Wiggley Game, but with space destinations) to raise money, but eventually he turns to a local fast food business owner who employs some of the kids after school. Some kids actually do quite well in structured employment. Most of the kids in the film appear to have issues that are medically treatable and appear to be capable of catching up with the demands of the outside world. The story of JMac, which may be a film soon, comes to mind (Book reviews, March 18, 2008).

I actually visited the Space Camp as a tourist in 1989, and saw the water tank, where participants have to assemble apparatus while swimming underwater. As a kid, I did not swim, and would have had extreme difficulty with some of this myself. I was afraid to go on these things in the middle school years. Some of the other training, such as zero gravity, appears physically challenging. The phrase "The Right Stuff" (also a 1983 WB film) figures into the climax.

I worked as a substitute teacher from 2004-2007 in northern VA and sometimes had special education classes. Some of the classes were for the very severely challenged (much more so than in the film) who could not have handled this.

The film aired on ABC Jan. 29.

The official site is here.

Here is a typical Space Camp scholarship site.

"Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance" airs simultaneously in many indie theaters today with Q&A by Internet, Twitter

2012-01-28T17:54:00.000-08:00

Saturday, January 28, 2012, the West End Cinema in Washington presented a showing of the documentary by Bob Hercules, “Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance”, from Lakeview Films, narrated by Mandy Patinkin.

The 84-minute film was followed by a Q&A by Skype from New York (since the Internet broadcast appeared simultaneously in about 30 cities), with some questions submitted by Twitter. There is another show at 11 AM Sunday Jan. 29 at this theater. The theater is small (almost sold out today), and the digital sound and projection were much better than with some films shown there.

The ensemble originally was formed by Robert Joffrey (1930-1988) and Gerald Arpino (1923-2008) in New York in 1956. They were life partners for a long time, and their social setup managed to remain acceptable for the times, and even avoid McCarthyism. Joffrey was actually born to an Afghan father and Italian mother and the film shows historical footage of work in Afghanistan long before the current troubled history of the country. For a time, the group was sponsored in large part by Rebekah Harkness, but had to start over after falling out.

The group lost members to the Vietnam era draft (and combat) and would later produce its version of the anti-war (based on the aftermath of WWI) ballet “The Green Table”. Another major accomplishment from the group was the futuristic “Astarte”.

Joffrey would die of AIDS in 1988, but Arpino would remain relatively healthy until shortly before his passing at 85. The present day head is Ashley C. Wheater, who helped lead the Twitter forum.

One interesting aspect of the film was the physical appearance of the dancers, which for men is nearly always extremely athletic and virile. One member talked about being 6 feet 6 inches and fitting in. Members of the ballet had to master both classical and modern dance, which before Joffrey had not been commonly expected.

Today the ballet company is located in the Joffrey Tower in Chicago.

The official site is here.

Wikipedia attribution link for picture of Joffrey Tower in Chicago.

"Albert Nobbs": women living as men to survive in 19th century Ireland

2012-01-28T07:45:00.000-08:00

“Albert Nobbs” , directed by Rodrigo Garcia, comes across as clever in concept, perhaps. Shouldn’t 21^st century audiences learn about the way women had to masquerade as men in the 19^th century, at least in the British Isles, in order to survive? After all, female authors took manly names.

Glenn Close (who helped write the screenplay) does have some awards for playing the role of a man as she ekes out a living in a small Irish hotel. If you look closely, even when she’s clothed fully (all the time, almost), she doesn’t look as “masculine” as others, such as Joe (Aaron Johnson), who, after fired at the demand of a customer from another job, gets a chance to redeem himself by fixing the boiler at the hotel. Joe befriends and eventually impregnates Helen (Mia Wasikowska) and Albert is only too happy to take over raising the child since that will suit his purposes as he plans to start a new business, a tobacco shop.

Albert’s ruse is challenged when he is asked to share his lumpy bed with a visiting painter Hubert (Janet McTeer) who also has to masquerade as a man, and fortunately is “sympathetic”. It’s interesting how there was so little physical privacy in this society. But that was normal.

In this world, these women sometimes lived with other women as publicly heterosexual couples, and even got to raise OPC (other people’s children). Nobody thought about this as lesbianism, although in many cases these couples would have liked to be able to live openly as female partners. Neither Albert nor Hubert want to live as men, although their sexualities seem fluid.

In fact, there is some conventional male homosexuality at the hotel, with the Viscount (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers).

The film is distributed by Roadside Attractions and Liddell Entertainment. Will Lionsgate handle the DVD? Once again, a film that got into the awards season by Dec. 31 was not available to the public until the end of January. I saw this at the AMC Shirlington in Arlington, in a smaller auditorium but good full widescreen projection, before a moderate crowd, first show Friday night opening day.

The official site is here.

Glenn Close gives an interview here (YouTube video by StarkInsider) where she says “Independent Film almost doesn’t get made".

"Oka!" takes a musicologist from the sickbed into the wild

2012-01-26T19:12:00.000-08:00

The film “Oka! Amerikee”, directed by Lavinia Currier and written in part by real-life ethno-musicologist Louis Sarno, comes across as creating a sub-genre. That is, science fiction or fantasy, placing the protagonist and moviegoer in another world, almost that of another planet, while needing nothing supernatural (with a caveat about the ending, and maybe about his reception of a "message" in his sickbed, below). The film is part “Avatar”, part “Lost”, part “Terra Nova”, and part “Lord of the Flies”, with a touch of “Into the Wild” and “Cast Away”, maybe even “Dances with Wolves”.

The word means “listen” in Akka (or Aka), the basis of the language of the Bayaka Pygmies, of Central Africa. Most of this film was shot on location in the Central African Republic, north of the Congo. There are some references to the Bantu and the serious tribal problems covered in other films.

The film invents a fictional character, Larry Whitman, played by Kris Marshall (“Love Actually”). As the film starts, his doctor warns him he needs a liver transplant and should not travel. He also has tinnitus and fears danger of going deaf (like Beethoven), ruining his life as a musician. He wants to document one more musical idiom in Central Africa, that of the Bayaka. He goes anyway. Having plenty of energy and ability to live in the wild while lugging high-tech gear, he doesn’t really have many obvious medical problems (until almost the end), and he looks pretty good physically (just not perfect). The film does make him look like a giant compared to the natives (as if out of “Gulliver’s Travels”). He’s able to make the native people like him and communicate with them in their language and value set. He (probably knowing this before he left home) runs into the political aspirations of the “mayor” (Isaach de Bankole) and a logging developer (Will Yun Lee), prepared to deforest the area to do business with the Chinese. The mayor has a political front, to stop the pygmies from hunting and eating elephants, which we know are very intelligent animals deserving of respect. (At this point, I should also refer to the CBS “60 Minutes Presents”, reviewed on the TV blog Jan. 23, which had a segment [also called “Into the Wild”] on elephants as well as wildlife migrations in this general area.)

The mayor demands that Larry bring in his equipment for bureaucratic approval (“we are now a modern country” – laugh) and claims that Larry needs copyright approval to record wildlife and native music. That’s an ironic point, given the current political battles in the US now over copyright infringement (like SOPA and Protect-IP), but this takes copyright to absurdity.

As the movie unfolds, the music works its way into the story. The music tends to comprise chants, and two-or-three note motives played on primitive woodwinds or percussion, often counterpointed and danced to. As the people chant and dance, they come alive spiritually. This is not music that emphasizes development or personalization of emotion the way European classical music (since Bach, or at least since Mozart or Beethoven) does. Instead, it is more like a ritual experience, like hymn singing (the same verses over and over) among Evangelical Christians. As the film progress toward a penultimate climax with the elephant hunt, another crude and very large woodwind is introduced (“The Bayaka”) and the sound has a mesmerizing effect. The music has taken over and driven the plot.

At the end, a medicine man has to tend to Larry. There is an “Inception-like” sequence that the viewer must interpret for himself. I don’t know whether Sarno really did have these medical issues in real fact. (If a viewer does, please comment.) I like the possible interpretation that local medicine healed him (just as I once witnessed a healing at MCC Dallas in 1979 and maybe another one at an AOG in Florida in 1998). If so, I can think of small directorial changes (or images) that could have made that point stronger.

Interesting also is the “living off the land” – the quick building of tree-component huts as if they were tents, covered by huge leaves. How many of us could build these things with our own hands?

The film was edited and processed in the US; I would have expected France (as the film is mostly in French and in Akka with subtitles). The production companies are James Bruce and Roland, and the distributor is a small, obscure one, Dada. I don’t see that it was in the festival circuit; it should have been, where it might have gotten a major corporate distributor and been in the running for Oscars or Golden Globes. This is a film that could have used Imax and 3-D, although it’s hard to imagine attracting the necessary investor money for such a big project on this obscure but (morally) important story.

The movie site is here.

I saw the film at the West End Cinema in Washington DC late Thursday afternoon in front of a fair crowd given weekday time slot.

I did rent “Lord of the Flies” around 2004, and was left with the impression that Getty’s character was hardly much of a leader, just too young. As a substitute teacher, I ran into this novel a lot .

I saw “Dances with Wolves” in 1990 when it came out, and remember the trials of Kevin Costner’s character. I saw “Cast Away” in 2000, and remember Tom Hanks and the volleyball playmate Wilson.

Wikipedia attribution link for map of Pygmy peoples in Africa.

"Bad Actress": what does a has-been soap star do to get back into the limelight?

2012-01-25T19:05:00.000-08:00

Well, ready for a cynical black comedy about Tinseltown and the B-grade actors? Well, you’ll enjoy Strand’s upcoming “Bad Actress”, directed by Robert Lee King.

Beth Broderick plays Alyssa Rampart-Pillage, who got knocked off the fame stage of soap opera in the 90s as she outgrew “HMO Nurse”. (Funny, “Days of our Lives” has been reincarnating the characters and rehiring the actors it had axed.) She’s had to work in the real world, just doing commercials for her husband’s air conditioning business. That’s Bernie (Chris Mulkey). When her talented daughter Topanga stages an Earth Day demonstration at the opening of a new store, tragedies ensue and a body count mounts. The notoriety will give Alyssa her new chance for another "career". We may learn what Alyssa and cousin Morris (Vincent Vintresca, and he is not a cat) are capable of, with the complicity of virile gigolo boyfriend George (Andrew Levitas), who is all to willing not to stay out of jail. Alyssa’s other two kids, fraternal twins Rebecca (Whitney Able) and Russell (Ryan Hansen) are the only two solid people in the movie. Besides environmentalism and police work, the movie has some interesting explorations into wills and the “dead hand” issue – all because Bernie, after seeing Topanga’s ghost, gets religion and starts believing in sacrifice and charity.

The movie even takes a poke at the Oscars at its “climax”.

The official Facebook is here. The “official site” doesn’t seem to be built yet.

The DVD is available Feb. 21, 2012 and the pre-book is Jan. 24, 2012.

The film played in international film festivals in New York, Miami and Cleveland.

This may be a good play to mention a 2002 film for comparison, Brent Huff’s “100 Mile Rule”, where some Michigan businessmen decide they can “play” because they are more than 100 miles away from their wives when at a sales conference in LA. The film really hits hard the nature of “sales culture”, that is, “always be closing.” I saw this at an international festival in Minneapolis in 2002.

Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams"; the short "Ode to the Dawn of Man" shows baby play, literally

2012-01-23T21:01:00.000-08:00

Werner Herzog, with very gentle “sotto voce” narrates his stunning documentary “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”, examining the implications of pictographs and artwork found in caves (the Chauvet Cave) in the Provence Region, in an area of rolling plateaus, steep cliffs and river banks, in southern France.

The cave had been sealed off accidentally by rock slides, and was discovered in 1994. The artwork appears to date back about 32000 years, and contains probably the earliest artwork and even musical instruments (including a pentatonic flute) ever found. The people used the caves only for ceremonial purposes. At one point, the explorers follow thumbprints back into the cave to follow the movements of a typical hunter. These were true “homo sapiens”, not Neanderthals, who lived in the area and who might have been able to interbreed.

The photography has very muted colors, necessary inside the cave (where access is so strictly controlled and not open to the public), but the technique continued outside, giving the French countryside a rather extraterrestrial look.

The film, produced by Creative Differences and the History Channel, has DVD distribution by IFC. It also showed at the Toronto Film Festival (2010).

The official site is here. The theatrical release was available in 3-D.

The DVD has an expansive 38-minute short “Ode to the Dawn of Man”, which demonstrates the rehearsals for the music of the film, composed by Ernst Reijseger. The music, with a chamber group including keyboards, chamber orchestra, and wordless chorus, tends to emphasize ground bass (in 2/4 time) with many variations. The composer’s wife often rehearses with the baby in her lap, and in a sense at the end of the film, the baby plays some notes on the piano, one at a time, while Mom plays an atonal, 12-tone theme (rather odd effect). That is an interesting concept in teaching a 1-year-old music.

Can babies learn to play instruments this young? Does anyone know?

Another interesting sidelight is the keyboard artist, youthful-looking Dutch artist Harmen Fraanje (link), who sometimes conducts, but usually plays both the upright piano (keys exposed) and tracker Wurlitzer organ, arranged in a perpendicular manner so he can play one with each hand simultaneously.

Wikipedia attribution link for Chauvet Cave picture. Other pictures, mine, from northern MN.

Update: Jan. 24

Oscar nominees for 2012 ceremony are here. There are nine nominees for Best Picture.

"Clapham Junction": powerful British gay drama structured like a Robert Altman film

2012-01-22T18:20:00.000-08:00

“Clapham Junction” is an interesting British gay drama, directed by Adrian Shergold, that plays like a Robert Altman film, or even like the film “5 Lines” about the DC Metro. Over a period of about 36 hours, it traces the lives and interplay among several characters in south London, with a central event being a horrific slaying of a gay man in a London park.

The film was originally produced as British made-for-TV and ran 2 hours, and was condensed to about 100 minutes for DVD release on E-1 and Regent. It may have played in some LGBT festivals. The concept is quite intriguing and some of the characters are quite compelling, but not all of them. The film seems uneven, but that may be because of the cuts. (Why not release the entire original?)

The opening of the film is interesting to me, as one of the characters is walking through a featureless tunnel, almost a metaphor for passing on. That character, who is African American, does feel taunted, but he is more of a foreshadow for the main course of drama to follow. The tunnel metaphor appears again a few time.

The main story begins with a gay wedding, or civil union (this is 2006 in Britain). It’s lavish, almost to the level of “Melancholia”, and even offers some music from the finale of Saint-Saens’s Organ Symphony (competition, it seems, for William and Catherine picking the music of Hubert Parry right before they tie the knot.) The partners are Will (Richard Lintern) and Gavin (Stuart Bunce). But Will gets distracted soon by a sudden fad for a handsome waiter Alfie (David Leon). (“Alfie” was a famous British comedy in 1996, remade in 2004.) Alfie, unfortunately, will stumble into tragedy later.

Other subplots meander, however. The most important concerns a teen, Theo (Luke Treadway, 22 when the film was made, and definitely too “mature” now on imdb for the role), who takes a liking to thrity-something Tim (Joseph Mawle), making eye contact and later watching him from an apartment window. Trying to get away from his overprotective grandmother, he eventually visits Tim and begs for some personal attention, manipulating the older man quite cleverly. It is definitely possible for adults to get into trouble with minors this way because the minor is “mature for his age” (as Theo is) and can manipulate him. It’s also a difficult topic for film, as in the 2003 movie “Student Seduction” (reviewed here May 4, 2010), but it puts a different spin on the “Dateline Problem”. This situation propels the film toward a big climax to supplement the tragedy that has already happened.

There is a dinner scene near the end where the grandmother asks why gays think they have a problem, “they” got their rights now, right? Why can’t they just keep their ideas to themselves and leave “normal people” alone (so “normal people” can function without having to think about themselves)? There’s another great line to the effect, “I don’t have kids because I’m gay”.

The music score uses Bach’s unaccompanied cello music a lot.

The film is quite explicit in a few places, and would probably get an NC-17 if shown in US theaters. But I think we need films with real substance intended just for adults. In this case, the explicit scenes are necessary to convey the entire meaning. I wonder if the full length version covers the questions about hate crimes against gays; it appears in this film that the perpetrators don’t get caught. One could otherwise compare this movie to films about Matthew Shepard (“Anatomy of a Hate Crime”, and “The Laramie Project” (plays blog, Dec. 17, 2010). This film should have become better known than it is.

The actual location in London has a site here. The area was apparently affect by flash mobs during the looting crisis in 2011.

"Bonus:"

This might be a place to mention another Strand film, "Frisk", from 1995, directed by Todd Verow, based on a novel by Dennis Cooper where the novel author apparently admits to horrific deeds or inclinations in a letter early in the film, which leads to a first-person rendition of the deeds in the film, which are quite graphic. A potential legal oddity.

"A Separation" (from Iran) presents divorce, eldercare, and "bribery" in a complex moral drama

2012-01-21T14:06:00.000-08:00

The film “A Separation” (“Jodaeiye Nader az Simin”), from Iran (director Asghar Farhadi), certainly provides a roadmap for how we construct and resolve moral dilemmas. The story provides a good case for the “collective good” aim of moral principles common in most religious scriptures (whether the Koran, the Bible, the Book of Mormon), and yet at its conclusion makes personal honor an absolute. That is to say, the “hero”, dutiful husband Nader (Peyman Moadi, who makes himself energetic and likeable), finally has to decide an issue on the basis of whether he really did anything wrong, rather than on what resolves the needs for two families. All religions have to deal with these kinds of situations. And so do all reputable legal systems.

Simini, Nader’s wife (Leila Hatami) wants to leave Iran to give a better life for her blossoming daughter Tehmeh (Tarina Farhadi). Nader, however, cannot leave his father, deteriorating rapidly with Alzheimer’s disease, alone. As the movie opens, they want a pragmatic, no-fault divorce which the religious cleric (under Shiite law) cannot allow. She goes away briefly, while Nader tries to hire a caregiver, who, a female, at first wonders if she can even provide the physical care that the aging father needs. After some mishaps, Nader tries to fire her, and as she leaves the apartment, she falls and soon miscarries. There follows a complex battle in which Nader is accused of causing the death of the unborn child, but even that does not account for all of the moral complexity.

The film takes place mostly in door, with a lot of rapid, heated dialogue; the technical quality of the film isn’t quite up to contemporary standards, and the top and bottom were cropped slightly to fit into 1.85:1.

The practical difficulties of caring for the father, who no longer recognizes his son, are well demonstrated.

The official site is here. It had played in the New York, Telluride, and Toronto film festivals and won the Golden Globe for best foreign language picture.

"Space Tourists" (from Sundance library) shows civilians who will pay millions to pay to be trained as astronauts

2012-01-20T19:45:00.000-08:00

Sundance is offering a 2009 documentary by Christian Frei, “Space Tourists”, which documents the experience of several civilians around the world who have paid up to $20 million to fly on Russian or European space shuttles.

The documentary is in segments, including an effort in Kazakhstan with a young adult Iranian woman as a tourist (more or less taking the first hour), and then another project in Romania (from the viewpoint of a young engineer), and then a presentation of Russia’s Star City, where Charles Simonyi, architect of Microsoft Word and Excel, is trained, in a variety of situations (centrifuge, zero gravity, wilderness survival). Imagine paying millions of your own money to do this? Will Mark Zuckerberg try it (having the advantage of youth)? Simonyi comments that this is like military life. (For survival training, they are given weapons with one round.) The young woman says she is willing not to come back from space.

There is also a section where ragtag engineers camp out on the steppes to recover components of the Soyuz as it falls.

Much of the early part is photographed by young Norwegian Jonas Bendiksen, who explains the physics of a lot of the shuttle work.

Toward the end, there is an effective animation of a lunar landing echoing the mood of Kubrick’s “2001”.

This film (as well as Thursday’s here) comes from a list of “New discoveries from Sundance film festival”. I could not find these in the 2012 alphabetized list (here ).

Here is the official site for this film.

There is a review today of “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” on my “films on threats to freedom” blog (see Profile, look for “cf”).

"Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel" traces Corman's record career with B-movies, indie film, and actually some real art film; he is "an artist"

2012-01-20T06:37:00.000-08:00

Alex Stapelton’s “Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel” documents the career of director/producer Roger Corman who produced and/or directed more movies (almost 400) than any other person. Perhaps he invented both the B-movie and the independent film. Now 85, he sounds as sharp as ever. He has the focused mind of a Jimmy Carter. (Imdb credits him with producing 398 movies and directing 56.)

Corman made an early alliance with the infamous American International Pictures, known for motorcycle movies (“The Wild Angels”), and then, after a falling out, founded New World Pictures.

The documentary shows a huge library of excerpts, which show how effective low budget carnage can be. There interviews with many other Hollywood stars, including Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson (who looks fat), and Eli Roth (“Hostel”), who looks cute.

Corman tried making some “quality” film with social statements, as in 1962 with “The Intruder” where a man (William Shatner) tries to stir up reform in the segregated south – a precursor to the horrible disaster in Mississippi in 1964 with the three voting activists. No one (including AIP) wanted this film at the time.

Corman also started importing foreign film, especially Ingmar Bergman, through his New World Pictures (for example, “Cries and Whispers”), because he had developed a way to market independent film with the business models of the day.

I saw this film at the West End Cinema.

The official site (Anchor Bay) is here.

Sundance offers "Advise & Dissent", examining the process of selecting Supreme Court justices

2012-01-19T15:11:00.000-08:00

Sundance is offering some of the films from the current festival for online viewing, from this link.

I watched “Advise & Dissent” (or “Advise and Dissent”), 2009, from David Van Taylor and Lumiere Films. This documentary looks at the process of picking justices for the Supreme Court, through the eyes of the “Third Branch Conference” as well as political pressure groups on both sides, ranging from People for the American Way to the Family Research Council. The Cato Institute is mentioned in the credits.

Much of the film covers confirmation hearings of President Bush’s appointments of Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, along with the failed appointment of Harriet Miers. Roberts was non-committal in his answers (he had to be pressed to name his favorite movies – “Dr. Zhivago” and “North by Northwest” but not “Casablanca”). Alito was challenged heavily as to his record as an appeals court judge but at the end he received an apology for the grilling.

The early part of the film makes a big point of the tendency of the religious right to manipulative language of freedom for its own reactionary mindset. The 1987 hearings of Judge Bork (“Slouching Toward Gomorrah”) are excerpted, and at one point Bork is grilled as to his views of the right to privacy. Bork fires back “privacy to do what?” Later the right wing complains about the “minions on the Left” and that includes George Soros! (In my own DADT book, I had coined the phrase “nightbreed minions”, referring to a Clive Barker film.) It’s clear that the Right wants to retain the “freedom” to barge into the personal lives of people it considers dependent or morally less worthy. The film does mention many of the decisions eventually rooted in large part on privacy, ranging from Griswold v. Connecticut (contraception, even within marriage, 1962) to Lawrence v. Texas (2003). Of course Roe v. Wade (1973) is mentioned, and it has always seemed that the abortion issue is a proxy for a larger issue of willingness to commit to protecting the vulnerable.

The official site is here.

I chose the YouTube option to watch the film, for $2.99 (48 hour rental, convenient automatic charge for those with Google accounts). Low-cost YouTube licensed rental of new independent films sounds like a constructive answer to Hollywood’s complaints about piracy, giving some more money, however modest, back to filmmakers.

But it concerns me that it took a film that is this important two years to get into the festival circuit and become available for watching even with paid rental. (See review Friday -- this is in Sundance library but I couldn't find in 2012 list.)

The Sundance Film Festival runs in Utah Jan 19-Jan 29.

"Paranormal Activity 2" no longer has much punch

2012-01-18T07:07:00.000-08:00

I got around to seeing “Paranormal Activity 2” finally, and found what seemed to be the same family carrying on its handheld, Dogme-style documentation of haunting, a year later.

After an apparent burglarly, the family sets up more security camera equipment and record everything on a DVR. They also hire a nanny, who soon informs them of more problems. The film progresses much as the first one did, with many black-and-white clips of “activity” caused by unseen entities in the middle of the night, and then even during the day.

This time, the demons make Biblical or Passover-style rules, threatening family members based on their position in the family (putting the first-born male up as collateral). The film gets speed toward the end, leading to sudden and abrupt violence. In a different kind of film, we’d call it tragedy.

It’s interesting how old fashioned “family values” make everyone vulnerable.

Katie Featherstone and Michah Sloat star as “themselves”, although Micah’s “future” may now be with the undead.

This sort of film was so effective when new (like “The Blair Witch Project”). Sequels tend to get stale, and you need to see it in a theater with other people to feel scared.

Paramount has found this little franchise a real cash cow. (It really should be branded as “Paramount Vantage”.) This second film (2010) cost just $3 million. It’s directed by Tod Williams, whose 2004 film “The Door in the Floor” gave us Jon Foster as Eddie O’Hare, the young man hired by a Long Island family in disarray, maybe a mini version of “Revenge”.

I do hear sounds in my own house at night. The plumbing? Squirrels on the roof?

Picture: I know that is based on "V for Vendetta".

Angelina Jolie's "In the Land of Blood and Honey" is brutal

2012-01-17T06:07:00.000-08:00

“In the Land of Blood and Honey” is indeed a hard and brutal film to watch. New director Angelina Jolie pulls no punches in conveying to us the horror of the violence in Bosnia in the early 1990s, and provides us with some explanation. After the Communists left and Yugoslavia broke apart, the ethnic factions and jealousies exploded. The atrocities in the film are comparable to those of the Nazis.

The story is a “love story” of sorts, across factions (like Crosby’s 1970s novel “An Affair of Strangers”). Danijel, a Serbian cop and soldier (Goran Kostic) sees Ajla (Zana Marjanovic), a Muslim. The relationship will indeed be challenged by the circumstances, and to say too much more would spoil things. But the conflict within Danijel is of an existential nature.

Life is indeed cheap as atrocities are carried out against civilians, especially women. Among the men, loyalties are tested in simple ways, with sudden horrific consequences for slipups.

This is, after all, a story about tribalism. In the film, the Serbs say they resent subservience to the interest of Muslims. I recall a Time Magazine cover in 1993 titled "Bosnia", at a time when, with public attention on gays in the military and Waco (the early days of Clinton), very few people understood what was going on.

Much of the film was shot on location in Sarajevo, which still looks ragged. Much of it is in winter, and there seems to be plenty of snow.

I saw this Monday night in the Landmark E Street in Washington DC and it was well attended.

The link is here.

The film was produced by GK films (a major British producer that often works with Paramount) and distributed by Film District (“Drive”). Jolie is also listed as a producer.

In 2001, there was a similarly titled film "Milk and Honey" produced by Joe Maggio, about a NYC man deteriorating in a series of relationships.

"The Iron Lady": Meryl Streep becomes Margaret Thatcher (the conservatism is softly pedaled)

2012-01-16T07:06:00.000-08:00

“The Iron Lady” (directed by Phyllida Lloyd) is a somewhat extravagant biography of Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925), the “conservative” British politician, serving in Parliament from 1959-1970, Education Secretary until 1974, leader of the Conservative Party until 1979, and then Prime Minister until 1990.

The film is told through fluid flashbacks, generated naturally as Thatcher cleans out her husband’s belongings after he passes. The film starts with her buying a pint of milk.

Meryl Streep really is amazing as Thatcher, and totally Brit. Nothing of the eclecticism of her many past roles (as in “Sophie’s Choice) comes through. (I have imagined Streep as right for the part of “high school principal” in my own “Do Ask Do Tell” screenplay.) The makeup must have been amazing. James Broadbent (whom I remember most from HBO’s 2006 film “Longford” from Tom Hooper, depicting the Lord’s work with prisoners). Streep won the Golden Globe for best performance by an actress in a drama (story).

Thatcher herself is slowing down in present day, and life is getting a bit tedious. She would be 86 now. That’s really not that old.

The film does not explain her philosophy in a lot of detail, but she says her beliefs are based on saving Britain. There is a scene where she talks with her husband about the difference between “feelings” and “thoughts”. People need to pay more attention to “thoughts”.

Nevertheless, the anger and indignation of some of the public comes through, in the demonstrations and sometimes (IRA-related) violence. Her defense cuts help tempt the rebels in Argentina into the Falklands war, with tragic loss of life to families of British sailors.

As a biography, and with a somewhat artificial narrative construct, the film doesn't have the tension of some other historical dramas (compare to "The King's Speech" in Dec. 2010).

The film is distributed in the US by the Weinstein Company, but has large corporate support in Britain, including Film Four, Pathe and 20th Century Fox.

I believe I spotted one person I know personally as an uncredited extra.

The official site is here.

I saw it late Sunday afternoon at the AMC Shirlington in Arlington VA in the largest auditorium, about three-fourths full. It is shot in full 2.35:1 aspect.

Wikipedia attribution link for picture of Thatcher with Reagans.

"Bridesmaids" set to frolic at the Golden Globes; it doesn't help "straight" marriage

2012-01-15T07:02:00.000-08:00

Even before “Melancholia”, Hollywood seemed to like botched or compromised weddings, especially in the year that William and Catherine tied the knot. In the spring, a rather long and bloated comedy, “Bridesmaids”, from Universal and Relativity, and directed by Paul Feig, became all the rage, and is getting a lot of attention at the Golden Globes.

Annie (Kirsten Wiig) is invited to become the maid of honor for the wedding of “best” friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph). In the situation comedy to follow, a lot of jealousies grow, especially from Helen (Rose Byrne). In the scramble that follows, Annie develops a “relationship” with a cop (Chris O’Dowd) who stops her for a broken tail light; a salmonella vomit-fest occurs (anticipating Polanski’s “Carnage”), and Annie, refusing to let her rival buy her a first class airline ticket, goes bonkers and gets kicked off a plane, which has to land in Wyoming. (Something like this really happened in 2001, shortly before 9/11.) Then she gets kicked out of the bridal shower itself.

At least there’s no Brown Dwarf approaching and threatening to swallow up the earth anyway. And there’s no music by Wagner, but a great lilt in the 20 or so songs that play (“Rip her to shreds”, “Hold out for one more day”.

Sister Brynn is played by Rebel Wilson, who looks like a younger Kathy Bates.

This movie will do the institution of heterosexual marriage as much good as did “Melancholia”. Maybe we should watch MGM’s 1954 frolic “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”

By the way, Annie is supposed to live in Wisconsin (like angels Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in "Dogma"), and to its credit, some of the film was shot there.

Official site is here.You can rent the movie from YouTube online for $3.99.

Roman Polanski puts "God of Carnage" on screen -- and takes himself so seriously

2012-01-14T08:22:00.000-08:00

The film “Carnage”, directed by Roman Polanski, rather reminded me of my experience in 1967 or so seeing “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf”, that in black and white, at the huge Granada theater in downtown Lawrence, Kansas when I was in grad school. I still remember the sniping in Mike Nichols’s film based on Edward Albee’s play.

This new little film mostly takes place in a Brooklyn apartment, overlooking the East River, not so far from my favorite “Bargemusic”. It’s shot in full 2.35:1 to mimic the effect of a stage, where the four “grown up” characters can snipe at each other, and worse (that in a moment). I wondered in the credits why it took film companies in four countries and a horde of carpenters to make a movie that could have worked Dogme style with ordinary video in a typical larger NYC apartment. (This is my second "Brooklyn" film in a week; "Pariah" was filmed nearby.)

The movie is based on the play by Yasmina Reza, “God of Carnage”, and was on Broadway. And the movie pretty much is a play.

In the quick prologue, one boy punches another with a stick on a NYC park. Then, Alan and Nancy (Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet), whose son was the alleged bully, are visiting Michael and Penelope (John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster), parents of the victim, to make amends. They keep trying to leave the apartment on amicable terms, and stuff happens. First, the “home team” offers peach cobbler (a mistake, it turns out) and espresso; then Alan keeps getting Blackberry calls about a case.

The vocational information is interesting. Penelope is a writer (“I wrote a book”) and had a book on art history co-published through the establishment, and is working on a project involving Darfur. Her husband is a handyman salesman. That seems odd. But Jodie Foster acts appropriate but. But Nancy is an investment banker and Alan some sort of liability lawyer. Alan keeps on talking about corporate press releases and blogs when he takes the phone calls, so the theme of “credibility” in media seems important.

But things go downhill. The constant “false starts” on “leaving” and not making it on to the elevator take their toll. Nancy suddenly doesn’t feel well, says she is nauseated, and becomes much more argumentative. Suddenly, she vomits all over the hosts’ art history books. It seems like, her lunch, let alone the cobbler, didn't "digest".

The small audience at the AMC Shirlington in Arlington was giggling a lot now. The slide continues, and it turns into women vs. men. Nancy, despite her total loss of control, starts drinking heavily and behaves even worse. The limits of technology will be tested deliberately.

In the end, I wondered, what is the point? My Army buddies would have said, there is no point in this 80-minute exercise (but the play must have fared well enough -- it's considered a "comedy"). It simply turns into black comedy. Oh, yes, there is some argument about marriage, and men saying that having kids (through wives) has just become too dangerous for them, and that women are too much trouble. Is the point, then, to document the slide of “marriage” as a civilizing institution? Maggie Gallagher would then love this movie. It’s their kids who “pay”. At least, there’s no rogue planet approaching Earth in the last scene.

Official site from Sony Pictures Classics is here ; Sony apparently was in on this film from the beginning. The film was an Opening Night attraction for the New York Film Festival in 2011.

What would Woody Allen do with this material?

"Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows": great entertainment, and a pre-history of what caused World War I (and everything since)

2012-01-13T08:11:00.000-08:00

Movies are supposed to take you into a different world, and the “sequel” (number II), “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” does just that, demonstrating with presto-moving images the opportunities provided by technology of the 1890s in England and France. It garners effectiveness from Hans Zimmer’s orchestral score, somewhat reminiscent of “Inception”; here, he treats us to a pacing 2/4 march (almost like the “Tom Thumb March” from the John Thompson piano course), working in some Richard Strauss, and in one embedded opera scene, the climax of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which comes out as so brutally effective (see April 9, 2011 here for a review of the film of the opera).

The plot is politically important, too. Warmongering “Professor” James Moriarty (Jared Harris) makes his fortune setting up a military-industrial complex, then setting off incidents so that the great powers will go to war and buy his munitions. (His quote, “people have an innate desire for conflict.”) This is terrorism for profit, as a business. He’s even trying to set up a major assassination at a summit in Switzerland. We all know that about 25 years later, he would get his wish, and World War I would ignite. Sherlock (Robert Downey Jr.) is his enemy, and he has targeted a gypsy Sim (Noomi Rapace) because her brother had worked with Holmes.

Early in the film, Dr. Watson (Jude Law) marries Mary (Kelly Reilly), in a bucolic countrified scene that comprises somewhat less than the royal treatment offered William and Catherine. The relationship of affection between Sherlock and Watson continues, however; and in the chase scenes – especially on the train – there is some “accidental” (in one place, quite graphic) intimacy . Watson has made himself into the “marrying kind” with an eye to occasional initiation.

Technically, the film runs non-stop with well-imagined events and quick shots. At the summit, Watson plays a chess game with Moriarty, who opens as White with “1 P-QB4” (the English Opening). Pretty soon, they are calling out moves to each other; Holmes, as Black (playing a reversed Sicilian, maybe) plays a queen sacrifice and pulls off a tricky brilliancy for a checkmate, the game ending on a discovered check. (Remember the chess game in the first Harry Potter movie?)

I saw this on a free pass in a smaller auditorium at the Regal in Arlington VA, but the technical problems had been fixed: the surround sound was working right again, and the projection was perfect. If you can find it in a big auditorium with digital projection, see it there. Regal, by the way, has an ad to encourage in-theater experiences: “Go Big or Go Home” with an image of a miniaturized flatscreen TV.

Hollywood threw its corporate biggest to make this film: Warner Brothers, Village Roadshow (actually an Australian company) and Legendary, directed by Guy Ritchie. I didn't see a budget on IMDB, must have been at least $150 million. Filming was done in the UK, France and Switzerland, and postprocessing in the UK.

Is it time for another visit to England?

The official site is here.

"Swimming in Auschwitz": documentary by six survivors re-airs on some PBS stations

2012-01-12T07:11:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday, Howard University Television aired a slightly condensed version of the documentary by Jon Kean, “Swimming in Auschwitz: Six Stories of Survival”, from Bala Cynwyd Productions.

Six Jewish women who survived the notorious concentration camp in the Holocaust tell their stories. The narrative is spliced with many black-and-white film clips and photos of life in to-be-occupied Europe before World War II.

The women include Renee Firestone, Erika Jacoby and Lili Majzner.

In most cases, the women report a relatively rewarding middle-class life being taken from them by outside invading enemies.

One woman from Czechoslovakia said that she had been told her country was a Republic modeled after the United States. Nevertheless, it was easily overrun. She described a life of outings and theater that was replaced by curfews, and eventual deportations. Eventually she would have a taste of the old life, pretended, in the Paradise Ghetto Theresienstadt, before a three day train trip to the camps. (The same sequence is followed in Herman Wouk’s epic “War and Remembrance”.) Another was told that the Germans were a well-educated people, and such people aren’t aggressors. One woman from the Netherlands described a strict upbringing in foster care and not noticing the loss of freedom.

The women described the harrowing process of arrival at Birkenau, with the segregation of women, and their shoring which they specifically say included the humiliation of removal of all body hair as well. (There is a scene like that involving gale male prisoners in the 1996 film “Bent”, based on the play by Martin Sherman.) The film shows the notorious “Arbeit macht frei” sign several times, and the women say that when they first arrived, after the three days in the box cars, they were curiously “relieved”; it didn’t “look bad” at first, for about the first hour there.

During the last months, before liberation, some of the women were removed from the camps and sent to German factories as slave labor. The Nazis wanted to eliminate evidence of what they had done (and eliminate witnesses).

Erika Jacoby is introduced at a performance of the film in this YouTube welcome by Dr. Spiegel.

There is a very short YouTube vidoe by Jarke Mensfelt showing the actual "swimming pool".

Visitors might be gently “warned” that YouTube has a nearby nine-minute video by “Nokikov” that presents, rather flippantly, the Holocaust denial argument mentioning the pools and other "luxuries" (it carries a user-generated warning).

Wikipedia attribution link for picture of Birkenau gate. I visited on May 25, 1999, by hired taxi, after arriving in Cracow that morning on a night train from Berlin.

The most harrowing moment in all of the movies about the place is the flashback scene in Alan J. Pakula’s film “Sophie’s Choice” (1982, based on the book by Wiliam Styron) where Sophie (a younger Meryl Streep) has to choose between two children as she arrives at the camp. I remember seeing this at Northpark in Dallas that year.

LDS visitor's center: "Joseph Smith" and "The Testaments"

2012-01-11T07:14:00.000-08:00

I journeyed to the Mormon Temple Visitor’s Center in Kensington, MD yesterday to see the two largest films offered.

In the main auditorium I saw “Joseph Smith: The Prophet of the Restoration” (61 min), on a big screen that appeared to be Imax, the aspect cropped to almost 2.35:1. The photography of early 19^th Century America is crisp and stunning (almost like 3-D without the need for glasses), with a tendency to add reddish hue to some scenes, giving some of the foliage an almost extraterrestrial look at times. The LDS church is very capable of making professional-quality film.

The 15-year-old Joseph Smith comes across as the world’s nicest teen, who has taught himself to read well enough to decipher the golden plates he discovers. The religious family and community around him discourages his new ideas, but in time he perseveres. In the early part of the film, it almost seems as though a whole new religious movement gets started by the charisma of a prescient teenage boy. (No, I don’t think that Justin Bieber could start a church.) But the actor who plays the young man looks different, but more like the usual pictures of Smith. Out of very little substance Smith seems to win converts to his idea that the real apostles are to be “restored”. The film also focuses on the idea that restoration offers salvation to everyone, even those who have already passed away. (The film presents a link between the passing of his own older brother and then the latter practice of being baptized for the “dead”. The film doesn’t go into deals about the theology of the pre-existing soul or the stages of afterlife.) The rest of the film traces the persecution of the Mormons in various places in the Midwest until Brigham Young takes them to Utah. The angel is shown as a “person” only once. It’s ironic that a religious group that was so persecuted would favor a society that is even more socially conservative and nuclear-family-oriented. The film does stress the importance of gender and family roles and does mention the concept of “eternal marriage”.

I was the only person in the auditorium for the 12:30 show, which seemed to be "just for me". Two young women entered and told me that the story was “true” and started to proselytize a little.

The church staff said the film was shot in 2005 and also has a slightly longer 69-minute version (which may explain more theology).

Many films, mostly about the LDS Church and its leaders in more detail, are available to be seen in request in the smaller auditoriums. But I saw the other better known film, “The Testaments: One Fold and One Shepherd” (64 min), also in full Cinemascope. The film traces the history of an artisan and his son in a Mayan community in parallel to the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ. After the Resurrection, and a catastrophe at the Mayan temple settlement, Christ appears and restores sight to the artisan. One item of accuracy: most of the Mayan areas were in relatively flat country, without the green mountains shown (and probably inserted with CGI) in the film.

As far as anthropological evidence (or lack of) for Mormon progeny in the New World among Native Americans, see footnote 104 on this Wikipedia reference, link.

I did see these films the same day that Mitt Romney was winning the New Hampshire 2012 primary – and that’s a convenient coincidence.

The Mayan history that we know well (when the Mayan cities were well established) would take place about 1000 years later, before the Maya would fail. Mel Gibson has made the two “Hollywood” films that seem most relevant: "Apocalypto", for Touchstone Pictures, in 2006; and “The Passion of the Christ” for New Market Films, the last film I would see with my mother in 2004.

In 2007, Christopher Cain directed a frontier film “September Dawn” about offshoot sect from Mormonism and a confrontation with pioneers on September 11, 1857. “God’s Army” (2000), by Richard Dutcher), shows the life of Mormon missionaries in California: the young men pay for their own missions. And “Latter Days”, by Jay Cox, tells the story of a missionary who discovers that he is gay.

When I was in the Army (1969), one soldier was doing genealogy and was considering asking for a recommend in the Mormon Church.

Mormonism certainly strikes me, at least, as having a “works-based” concept of salvation. Are people called to "live with God" or to "become Gods"?

Actually, cosmological physics (especially the Second Law of Thermodynamics) and mathematics would have a lot to say about the potential of immortality. One might be able to prove mathematically that only a finite number of souls could enjoy immortality, it seems to me. The concept of entropy would explain why reproduction (procreation) is necessary.

The Washington Post has a major story on Mormon social values (by Michelle Boorstein) Jan. 12, here. A larger percentage of Mormons than of the general population believe that being a successful parent is the most important thing one can do and believe that having a good marriage is mandatory. Note that the moral belief centers on the idea that a person is required to perform a pre-existing obligation (getting and staying married and raising children as an oblication), rather than follow through on a choice already made (having sexual intercourse that happens to result in children), the latter of which has become the "libertarian" idea of personal responsibility.

The Pew Research Center has a report Jan. 12, 2012, "Mormons in America: Certain in Their Beliefs, Uncertain of Their Place in Society", here.

"Exam": a "closed room experiment" leads to articulation of a curious proposal about longevity

2012-01-10T06:45:00.000-08:00

Okay, high school kids (or maybe college students), here’s a movie for you, “Exam”, from Stuart Hazeldine based on a story by Simon Garrity. Or I could say, here’s a tight thriller for job applicants.

Actually, the situation, of putting some people (or just one person) into a mysterious enclosure and letting him (them) solve a puzzle has been tried before, as with “Fermat’s Room” (reviewed April 19, 2009), or “The Interview” (1999), an Aussie film from Craig Monahan, a big hit at a Twin Cities film festival).

Eight job applicants report to a windowless room for the final “test” for a selection process for a mystery British company. Supposedly they will sit for a written exam, and they’re told that they can’t leave the room, “soil” their own paper, or talk to the guard. The invigilator (that is, proctor) does talk up the life-changing benefits of joining such a superior “organization”. Pretty soon they all notice there are no questions on the exam. They’re not told they can’t work together. Remember how in high school that students felt more comfortable doing projects “in groups”.

The characters have nicknames like those in a board game: Black, White (from chess), Brown, Dark, Blonde, Brunette. One imagines Clue tokens. They try some experiments that causes the lighting in the room to darken to ultraviolet and then infrared, giving this film, shot in 2.35:1, a contradictory closeted, minimalist look. It seems to want to be a stage play. The film had opened identifying each character and showing some mundane details of interview preparation.

In time, some possibilities come out of the woodwork. Some of the contestants might already be with the company. And one of the contestants, the most articulate and aggressive (White, played by Luke Mably),, is infected with a deadly virus and requires an antidote. The company, which we learn is a pharmaceutical, not only manufactures the antiviral drug but has patented a way to extract from the virus (or antibodies related to it) gene therapy drugs (maybe augmented by nanotechnology, as per Michio Kaku and his “Physics of the Future”, books reviews, May 23, 2011) to maintain the fountain of youth, maybe for everyone. (The applicants, in their 20s, have been told they would work for 80 years.) The company is on the verge of enormous profits.

I wondered at first if the virus was based on HIV, but it doesn’t sound like it. There’s no virus I know of that fits the profile in the fictitious movie. Nevertheless, the irony, that a deadly virus could form the pharmaceutical basis of developing a potion that prolongs life almost indefinitely, is a fascinating one. True, since the film was made, the mere act of experimenting with deadly viruses has drawn public criticism, as with the recent stories about an artificial H5N1 and the controversy over publishing the details. It is true that infection by an innocuous virus can be therapeutic. For example, asthma patients sometimes find their symptoms lessen when they have a common cold, because the rhinovirus gives their immune cells something else to do.

The film lists IFC as the distributor, and has not had a theatrical release in the US. I don’t know why it hasn’t. Maybe the West End in Washington DC would look into it. This film definitely should be offered in arthouse theaters.

I watched it in instant replay from Netflix on a reasonable sound system, and the schmaltzy score by Stephen Barton was impressive. I had accidentally mailed in the DVD (the wrong one) and was lucky it was available on replay, so I watched it immediately yesterday. (I don't have a quarrel with Netflix's recent "restructuring"; DVD's are starting to arrive damaged with scratches, and instant broadband playback is becoming the norm; you still pay for it, average of about $3 a movie.) It was a fortunate “mistake” because the “idea” (about the longevity cure) applies to my own novel.

IFC official site is here.

Second picture: from a freshman physics lab notebook. Hardly trials for an anti-HIV drug.

"Release" is another curious UK film from Flaxstone, is all over the map with prison, the Catholic church, and the "priest problem"

2012-01-09T05:54:00.000-08:00

Another gritty British drama from Darren Flaxstone and Christian Martin poses a “what if” question as a troubled priest approaches his day of release from a roughshod prison in Bristol England. The film is titled, simply enough, "Release", a name which alone doesn't mean much.

Jack Gillie (Daniel Brocklebank) has a clandestine in-cell relationship with another guard Martin (Garry Summers) and has adjusted to the violence well enough to try to defend younger cell mate Rook (Wayne Virgo) from assaults by the other prisoners, who assume Jack’s imprisonment has to do with the recent priest scandals in the Catholic Church. Jack is presented as lean, rather virile and in his own way attractive.

Jack relives his story in flashbacks, and in the middle of the film we see the peculiar tragedy (involving a boy he thought he could aid) that led to his imprisonment. As his release approaches, another elder of the Church (Dan Jones) scolds him not for his acts but simply for acting out on his homosexuality. The cardinal makes a lot of the idea that the Church requires everyone to accept his own personal cross, which for some men will be difficulties with women. Then just as the “Release” to the Outside world occurs, another tragedy strikes, literally from a cross. We even get a glimpse of what a man experiences at death.

Catholicism in England is perhaps locally controversial; Andrew Sullivan has written about it a lot.

The official site (TLA Releasing) is here. The film can be rented on YouTube for $3.99 and is available on DVD (but not streaming) from Netflix.

“Secret of the Rosary” Films offers two short films on YouTube, the “Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons”. They're not pleasant to listen to.

The notorious 1986 "objective disorder" phrase is "explained" and later "idolatry" is mentioned in textual analysis. Bluntly speaking, the theology gets into (feminine) "self indulgence", denial of complementarity and the refusal to "give of oneself" and show willingness to create and bring up new life (children). The Church imagines that God has mapped out everyone's purpose even if allowing Free Will. Toward the end (the video has no change in visual image and the speaker talks in monotone), the material hints at the dangers of HIV.

Canadian director Cronenberg does a microscopic history of psychoanalysis in "A Dangerous Method" (remember "Spider"?)

2012-01-08T15:30:00.000-08:00

It’s appropriate for me, in reviewing David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method,” to first recap some of my own experience with psychotherapy and “analysis” of sorts.

The “diagnostic interview” started with an “emergency” visit at 6 PM to a psychiatrist in NW Washington Nov. 30, 1961, two days after my William and Mary expulsion. Then was a period of visits to a therapist on Glebe Road in Arlington, in a second floor office of a high rise apartment. He would suggest the inpatient experiment at NIH, which started in July 1962.

Each patient had individual therapy three times a week. There was group therapy, family therapy, family art therapy, unit government, and group activities. And I was the only patient who went to college nights.

The individual therapy sessions went around in circles, as I looked for the grand revelation, that magical fix.

The therapist seemed to want to prod into my fantasies, and face what purpose the fantasies served.

The female patients tended to be less intact than the males, because of how they had been selected. I can only guess what their individual therapy might have been like, but an early scene in the film gives a hint.

A somewhat violent femalel Sabina (Keira Knightley) is brought into a Swiss mental hospital in 1904. Although there are some shock scenes (cold bath), the main therapy is the “talking cure”. Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) proposes to “just talk” a couple hours a day, sitting behind her so she can’t see him. At the beginning, she is hard to control. She is what I called (in my NIH days) a “g.d. MP”.

He uses the methods of psychoanalysis he has learned from Sigmund Freud. He gets her out of herself, and into expressing the at first unbelievable goal she has of becoming a doctor herself. Then he travels to Vienna to meet Freud (Viggo Mortensen) himself. Their potential disagreement begins to develop, as Freud has a surprising aversion to too much escapist fantasy. Jung begins to fall in love with his patient, while still acting dutiful to his wife (Emma Sarah Gadon).

The film is sketchy on the substance of most of Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis, but provides an alternative with Sabina’s ideas, once she is well enough to be ready for real life and school. Sabina says that sex necessarily requires that one put his ego at risk for loss, or at least for a person’s sense of change into something else. That sounds like a theory of marriage, where the man and woman are transformed into new sense of self with permanent love, while abandoning earlier modes of fantasy that had been used to build the ego. (That point seemed to come out in my own experience at NIH in 1962).

In the 1970s, I was connected to a group in New York City called the Ninth Street Center, founded by Paul Rosenfels, whose best known book is “Homosexuality: The Psychology of the Creative Process” (1972), reviewed in Books blog April 12, 2006. Sabina’s ideas sound predictive of Paul’s theory of “polarities”, where personality specializations are independent of biological gender. (The group is known today as The Paul Rosenfels Community, link here ) Paul had authored several other books in his days of working as a psychiatrist, such as “Love and Power”. I do have at home a DVD with BW footage from the talk groups in the 1980s.

The film is distributed in the US by Sony Pictures Classics, but by Lionsgate in Britain and Universal in some countries. It was produced by resources in Canada, Germany and the UK. The official Sony site is here.

The music score, adapted by Howard Shore, uses a lot of the music from Wagner’s Siegfried, including a piano rendition of the “Siegfried Iydll”. There is a scene where the “Ride of the Valkyries” is played on an old victrola dating to just before World War I (the main part of the movie runs through 1913).

I saw the film late Saturday night at the AMC Shirlington in Arlington in front of a moderate crowd.

In early 2003, I attended a screening of Cronenberg’s “Spider” at the Landmark Lagoon Theater in Minneapolis, with Cronenberg present for a Q&A. That film followed mentally ill man released to a halfway house in Canada. I remember the menace of the simple quilt images.

"The Wedding Weekend" aka "Shut Up and Sing" fought more than one battle around 2006

2012-01-07T17:38:00.000-08:00

There is a film “The Wedding Weekend”, a comedy directed by Bruce Leddy, distributed in 2007 by Strand Releasing and First Run, that “Creative America” says was harmed by piracy attempts just before release (see my Dec. 7 posting for “Stolen Jobs”). The film is also known (overseas) as “Shut Up and Sing”, which is the name of the production company and a key line in the script, but that brings up another point, to be covered below.

Six guys who had formed an a cappella group in college reunite fifteen years later for a friend’s (Mark Feuerstein) wedding in the Hamptons on Long Island. The guys have varying success in life and look pretty good (particularly Spooner [Chris Bowers], but are concerned about their lack of commitment and wayward lives. They worry that their lives will soon go downhill as they approach life’s midpoints (they say it’s 11:30 AM on a 24 hour day.) One of them (David Harbour) worries about a receding hairline, which really isn’t noticeable. They get in trouble, all right, with a police sting for prostitution, and don’t “stay out of jail”. One of the guys has gotten fired for cause, tries to shoot himself, and his girlfriend (some of the old girl friends are there) dumps him.

The script is appropriately flippant. When the future groom announced “Fellows, I’m getting married”, the guys ask “when’s the baby”, and later express their own resignation to the necessity of marriage. (I think of “My Fair Lady”: “Why can’t a woman by more like a man”.)

The film has many songs but comes across as situation-to-romantic comedy, not a musical. (It’s really not like “The Artist”; maybe it’s just a touch of “Jersey Boys”.) The wicked song during the end credits speaks of obligations to society when you grow up, like being able to go to war.

As to the title change, the producers/distributors got into a legal battle with The Weinstein Company which had released the documentary “Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing” (or "Shut Up & Sing"), directed by Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Park. This somewhat crude documentary (technically) traces the history of the group after singer Natalie Maines publicly criticized the Bush Administration – the trio having come from Red State territory. The film made a powerful argument about free speech "in practice".

Normally it’s not a problem for two films to have the same name unless one of them is part of a franchise or TV series (like “Terminator”, Mission Impossible”). Maybe the short time span between the two films (I saw the Dixie film at Landmark in 2006) created a trademark argument. Maybe the controversy then attracted the “pirates”.

“The Wedding Weekend” should not be confused with “Wedding Crashers”(Davis Dobkin’s big comedy with Owen Wilson and Christopher Walken about traveling wedding busters, for New Line, which I saw in 2005). There are other comparisons: “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” (2002, Joel Zwick, not my favorite), and “The Wedding Singer” (1998, with Adam Sandler).

And while I’m at it, I’ll mention Melody Gilbert’s one hour documentary “Married at the Mall”, referring to the Mall of America, which I watched in a class in Minneapolis in 2002.

The official site for the ("Wedding Weekend") film is here.

Picture: from my parents' wedding, May 15, 1940, Washington DC.

"Pariah" is an eclectic hit on opening night in more general release

2012-01-06T19:57:00.000-08:00

“Pariah” was offered as the closing night film at Reel Affirmations 20. I missed it because of a trip to Williamsburg VA for William and Mary GALA. I saw it on opening day in an exclusive engagement at Landmark E Street in downtown Washington. The film, directed by Dee Rees, produced by MBK and several other companies, and has a major corporate distributor, Focus Features (belonging to NBC Universal), as well as major release support from Sundance.

The film takes place in the fort Greene area of Brooklyn. I appears to be shot in HD video with heavy use of close-ups in Dogme style. Most of the film takes place indoors in very “ordinary” and somewhat constricted-looking household settings, such as what might be common in the community.

Alike (Adepero Oduye), at 17, is a good student and has a definite talent for writing, including poetry. (The film presents her description of a butterlfy’s life.) She is coming to terms with her feelings for other women, and has had an openly lesbian friend Laura (Pernell Walker). Her parents Arthur (a cop) and Audrey (Charles Parnell and Kim Wayans) are experiencing strain in their marriage which may be related to unease about their daughter’s “social” direction. (In an early scene, mother chides Alike for staying out a little late after a movie). The idea that the gay children could impact parents’ marriage is not often discussed but very important (it may have been significant in my own life a half-century ago). Mother tries to get her to socialize with Bina (Aasha Davis) with surprising results.

The cast is all African-American. The audience was largely so (and mostly female), and often enjoyed the subtle humor of the script, which tended to be very community specific and might not be funny to “wider” audiences (even white gay male audiences). A smaller auditorium at Landmark was nearly sold out for the early Friday evening show.

The official site is here. It’s interesting that the first definition of the word is “a person without status”.

"Denied" presents a "bisexual" man, but in a rather monotonous setting

2012-01-04T19:13:00.000-08:00

Once again, I found another little film about a gay man falling for an ambiguous “straight” man. This movie is “Denied” (2004), written and directed by David Scott.

Troy (Lee Rumohr), having graduated from high school and looking forward to blue collar life in small town Ontario, invites his straight best friend Merrick (Matt Austin) to move in. Over the course of the film, Merrick’s own identity becomes pliable, after asserting himself, in a confrontation, that everyone is immutable in this regard (using some rather specific language).

But unlike “Old Joy”, which takes us on an outdoor ("Brokeback-like") journey, “Denied” stays indoors mostly, avoiding the Canadian climate, and jogs in place. The film is rather amateurish technically, with the substandard lighting badly undermining some of the nighttime scenes.

I had a couple of “crushes” on “straight men” before my “Second Coming” in the 1970s. I can remember a few encounters where more could have happened, including one particular spring evening in a northern Virginia townhouse in 1972 when the wife was away.

I think both men need to move to Vancouver (and make more movies), not just Toronto.

The film is distributed by Ariztical.

Insiders Health video on “Bisexual men do exist”:

"Singin' in the Rain" (1952, MGM) is a wonderful musical about movie-making, silent to sound

2012-01-02T19:52:00.000-08:00

“Singin’ in the Rain” is indeed the cultural parent of “The Artist” (Dec. 23). The MGM film (but now belonging to WB) is quite garish in its Technicolor, but old aspect (4:3) ratio, about a year before Cinemascope was premiered.

Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Lina (Jean Hagen) are real life partners as well as actors bound to a studio (under the old system), so far just in silent film When (in 1927) “Monumental Pictures” faces competition from a rival studio (which was actually Warner Brothers) for making “The Jazz Singer” as sound, it decides that it will need to make the silent “The Dueling Cavalier” into a sound musical (as “The Dancing Cavalier”). Lina’s pipsqueak voice is an issue for a “sound film”. But Kathy (Debbie Reynolds) has already established her reputation for sound and would make a replacement for the voice part. Yes that leads to real life romantic complications. But Lina (and others) take voice lessons that anticipate “My Fair Lady” (1965). The experiments with sound get humorous, picking up hearbeats, and a sample early BW “talking picture” about chivalry gets hilarious. The film gets into the technical difficulties of showing early sound pictures “in synch”. Another issue is how you take a regular drama and make it into a musical (who composes it, what is the musical style and technique, etc.) There’s some pretty silly stuff about how the French Revolution fits in (not really that funny as history). There’s a scene where “Cavalier” is being filmed and it dissolves from color back to black-and-white, an interesting technical effect.

Toward the end, the film becomes increasingly complex as it integrates the subordinate “Cavalier” musical with its own story (especially the song and dance), finally leading to a confrontation on stage where Lina threatens litigation and then has to demonstrate to an audience that she can sing. They try a ruse backstage. If they get the key wrong, then “Singin’ in the Rain” will get to use some polytonality.

The film is really quite remarkable in the way it can weave political and legal issues with layered storytelling, and song. And this is “only” 1952, in a “G” movie, but there’s plenty of thought material for adults.

There’s an early embedded BW excerpt from a 1921 “Vitaphone Phonofilm”.

There’s a scene where Don’s jacket gets torn – and inspiration for the “coat” scene in “Artist”.

No doubt, though, this 1952 classic is much “lighter” in touch than TWC’s essay on the subject, which rather inverts the plot. I wonder if the re-invented MGM and Sony-Columbia will try a remake.

I don't find any actual films "Dueling Cavalier" or "Dancing Cavailier" in imdb.

I did see the 1980 version of “The Jazz Singer” (by Richard Fleischer) in Dallas, not in a good theater as I recall. (I think it was that old Northtown Mall – now a Dart rail yard.)

New Year’s Day (it’s New Year’s Monday, Jan. 2, actually) has typically been a movie day. On Jan. 1, 1955 (a Saturday), I recall that “the family” went to see Billy Wilder’s BW “Sabrina” New Year’s Night. I never found a reason to see the remake.

Picture: Niagara Falls, 1941, my parents' trip.

"We Bought a Zoo" (no, I didn't)

2012-01-01T14:36:00.000-08:00

When I was working in I.T. for three decades, when things got flaky we’d say “what a zoo” about our workplace.

So I chuckled a bit at the title of Cameron Crowe’s Christmas film for Fox, “We Bought a Zoo”. Indeed, the seven-year old girl Rosie Mee (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) screams that out at least twice.

The plot sounds a bit simplistic, and adds to opportunities to screenwriting urgencies. But it’s supposed to be based on a true story based on Benjamin Mee’s non-fiction book.

Benjamin is played by Matt Damon, whose face now betrays an age of forty even if his body doesn’t.

Recently, he’s lost his wife, probably to cancer. His teen son Dylan (Colin Ford) has gotten expelled from school and is obsessed with drawing dark images of horror. Fortunately, Ben was left well off by his wife’s life insurance and other assets. He can afford to quit his job as a reporter. He says that a journalist “observes and watches” but he wants a “real adventure”.

He buys an old house and estate in the southern California canyon country, somewhere around San Bernadino, (The real life Dartmoor zoo is in England, link here ). The realtor advises him almost in passing that there is a closed zoo and complete staff that comes with it. Benjamin takes up the challenge and seems to have infinite resources from the estate.

Scarlet Johnasson plays the staff zookeeper Kelly, and it’s not hard to predict other opportunities she could give Ben to resume his life and family later. But the PG film remains quite restrained on that point.

The reason to see this film, for my money, is the animals themselves. A friendship with an elderly tiger redeems the teenage son. Benjamin is sincere about wanting to give the animals much more freedom and living room. The film says that lions and tigers are different – but genetically they’re almost the same, and can actually mate. Big cats (and big bears) can be a lot like us.

The film is shot in a “mere” standard 1.81:1; I think it could have used the wider screen (especially coming from the studio that invented CinemaScope).

The official site from 20^th Century Fox is here.

The “Celebrity Baby Blog” describes Matt Damon’s own experience with fatherhood, marrying into it, here.

Damon has been active in some international environmental work, especially about clean water in developing countries. One can see that this film appealed to him more now than it might have in the past.

Fox preceded the feature with a two-minute cartoon short, “Scrat Continental Crack-Up”, yup, indirectly about global warming.

Pictures: From the Washington DC zoo, March, 2007.

"Romeos" (Germany) examines personal life issues for F-M transsexual

2011-12-31T12:41:00.000-08:00

“Romeos” (or “Romeo’s different than you think” or “Romoes anders als du denkst”) is a new film from Sabine Bernadi from Boogiefilm (Germany), Kino, and Strand Releasing (Jan. 17).

Lukas (Rick Okon) opens the film telling us by Skype that he is going female-to-male, and giving himself injections. Then he moves into a female dormitory during a period of civilian service, in Cologne. (Germany required military service for men until 2010, but civilian service could be substituted; this point about potentially unequal treatment of gender in a liberal modern state hits home immediately – in the film, it seems that both genders do at least civilian service, though.) He soon meets Fabio (Maximillian Befort). Pretty soon the film is exploring the idea that gender identity and sexual orientation are totally separate concepts.

Very early, we see Lukas exercising and doing measurements, and inspecting his darkening leg hair. Only later do we see visually that none of the surgery has been done yet. I don’t know how the film accomplished this, whether the actor is transsexual, or some sort of CGI was used – but it so, it is very effective “technically”. Gradually, the film develops Fabio, and a couple other characters from men’s dorm, especially the attractive Sven (Felix Brocke). At the end, the “obvious” issue with a relationship – and the “discovery process” – must be dealt with. One of Fabio’s shirts had a particularly convenient cut for the near-final scene.

There's a bit of irony. Lukas is ready to fall in love with a man when he is one himself -- biologically, as much as possible -- and would refused earlier, when there would have been a possibility of children. In scenes of Lukas, the female aspect is indeed made to seem grotesque. This indeed is portrayal of "upward affiliation".

When I was a patient at NIH (1962), one of the female patients said she wanted to be a man, hardly acceptable in 1962. My own father would say, after visits, “Poor (name), she’s not very feminine”. In 1993, one of the guest on Scott Peck’s radio program in Washington was a sailor who had gone male-to-female transgender, forced out of uniform, but still in civilian intelligence service, and a lesbian.

The film says that Germany’s health care system pays for Lukas’s change. When I grew up in the 1950s, performance according to biological gender was viewed in “moral” terms only, as if (as the Vatican claims) it was only one special challenge among many that almost everyone must face while meeting obligations to others. No question, the status quo was about preserving power structures.

Official site from Media Luna in Germany is here.

MGM and Fincher offer "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", almost the same film, in English; but typical Fincher moods

2011-12-31T07:24:00.000-08:00

I wasn’t going to “bother” to re-see “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, so soon after the trio (no pun with a musical scherzo) of thrillers from Sweden in 2010. But with David Fincher as the director, I was just too curious, and too in need of a “guilty pleasure” last night. And I was curious that the big film may help mark a rebirth of the grand old MGM studio (with the help of Sony and Columbia). My review of the Swedish version of this film occurs Aug. 14, 2010 under the label “Millennium Trilogy” base don Stieg Larsson’s novels.

The remake in English seems to be very similar to the first film, in plot and even style. What that says is that the entire trio is somewhat typical Fincher raw material. There is a sequence where Lisbeth (Rooney Mara, who invokes Lisbeth’s no-nonsense manner of talk well) shows that a sequences of European murders in the 50s and 60s follows verses in Leviticus – a typical Fincher concept (remember the movie “Se7en” or “Seven” (1995), where the pattern is based on the Seven Deadly Sins, for Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman to unravel, even shaving to wear wires!) It's not always snowing (the way it rained in "Seven"), but Sweden is either dark or in twilight much of the film.

Daniel Craig is a bit too cookie-cutter-like as the tainted journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Christopher Plummer is effective as the suspicious family patriarch. The whole plot seems a bit like a dream. When Blomkvist travels north by train from Stockholm, the film shows the train going through mountains. That doesn’t happen in Sweden until you go north of the Arctic Circle, toward Kiruna, and iron-mining town that I actually visited in August, 1972. The estate, of course, is on an island, with the bridge and geography driving much of the plot.

The sentient house cat (big, almost like a bobcat) who lives in the guest cottage turns out to be a major character, almost human, constantly seeking attention and bossing around Mikhael as a guest. As in “The Future”, you wish the cat could have a happy end. But cats can be trained to perform in the movies.

I guess the plot is a warning about the risks professional journalists run – so what about amateurs? It’s also a warning about what determined hackers can do, especially at the end.

In retrospect, “The Social Network” seems a bit outside the box for Fincher. In that film, all of the young male characters (not just Mark Zuckerberg as played by Eisenberg) have moral flaws, but you like them, and covet their world, want to belong to it. In “Tattoo”, there is a sense of unrealness, and corruption everywhere. You admire Lisbeth’s fearlessness, but you don’t really want her in your own life. Fincher offers us a couple of scenes where men undergo some physical mayhem in sensitive ways, yet for the most part, Fincher offers a more heterosexually-inclined Lisbeth in order to play before large mainstream audiences. Lisbeth is no female Zuckerberg. Bold as she is (even dangerous to bank accounts), she is not capable of ruling the world.

The early scenes in the film (which interlope Lisbeth and Mikhael before their future connection is developed) present Lisbeth as institutionalized because of her lack of "sociability", which sounds improbable in liberal Sweden -- but you have your exploits beneath the surface.

The new music score (with the “whistle theme”), by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is spooky in “Se7en” style.

How would Fincher handle my "Do Ask Do Tell" screenplay? I guess when the "Character" (Me) realizes he may have passed on but might have to go back, he would convey the appropriate sense of menace.

I saw the "Tattoo" remake in a small auditorium at Regal in Arlington VA, not knowing in advance which shows were in the larger auditoriums. It was almost full late last night. The auditorium did not have Surround speakers, although there was conventional two-track stereo up front only.

The new film has this link from MGM. I thought Oprah was going to rescue MGM financially.

"The Power of Forgiveness" from Journey Films

2011-12-29T18:54:00.000-08:00

“The Power of Forgiveness”, from Journey Films, directed by Martin Doblmeier, quickly draws a distinction between tolerance and forgiveness. It requires compassion and mercy, not justice. It requires being “tough minded by tender hearted”. It was shown on some, but not all, PBS stations in 2008.

It then first examines the issues surrounding the conflicts in Northern Ireland, and a program of forgiveness education.

It then examines forgiveness in the Amish community, after the Nickel Mines (PA) tragedy (Oct. 2, 2006). The community is strong enough as a society that the people don’t need to bear the burden individually.

The notion that “all people have worth because they are members of the human family” and not because of personal accomplishments or merit, is presented. A person is more than what he/she has done. A course in both seeking and offering forgiveness is presented in Ireland.

The film moves to the Holocaust, and Elie Weisel (“Night”, often read in high school) discusses the PBS Masterpiece play “God on Trial” (TV blog, June 20, 2010, by Frank Cottrell Boyce).

There is a discussion of the biology of justice, which the brain craves, and forgiveness. People were hooked up to electrocardiographic monitoring to study physiological reactions in detail. Men were seen as more like to forgive in a critical moment than women.

The issue of forgiveness in connection with 9/11 is presented. One woman looks for her son in a dump in the meadowlands. She says “understanding” and “doing” are different things.

The project for the Garden of Forgiveness in NY (link) is discussed by a priest from St. Paul’s Church, and that project is based on a similar one in Beirut, which is shown. The National Council of Churches has a link on the Garden project.

Toward the end there are personal testimonials of forgiveness from crime victims that is hard to watch.

The link for the film is here.

Robert Enright International Forgiveness Institute (link) appears.

What is hardest, I think, is that loss, because of the wrongs of another, is real for the victim. It makes the victim accept for dependence on others. But, “forgiveness is something you do for yourself.” I have the idea that, if one does not forgive, one must personally keep paying for part of the wrongdoer's deeds. The law of karma makes us share some responsibility for the deeds of others anyway.

Russian film "The Return" -- a road movie, a morality play, a father-sons struggle, with an existential twist

2011-12-28T19:37:00.000-08:00

Back in 2002, a passage in an online copy of my second book, where I was discussing the possibility of nuclear terrorism, was hacked. Some of the jibberish that got overlaid onto a particularly sensitive passage appeared to point to some lakes around the border between Russia and Finland. It never happened again. It was weird.

Well, Eastern European films can definitely have sharp edges to them on deep moral problems. So I was curious when I saw “The Return” (“Vozvrashchenie” or "Возвращение"), a 2003 film in Russian by Andrei Zvyagintsev, and noted in the Netflix summary that it’s about a father’s forcing a “rite of passage” on his sons, I was curious.

The film opens with two brothers, Andrey, about 16 (Vladimir Garin) and Ivan, about 12 (Ivan Dobronrarov) “playing” with other kids on a jump tower near a cold seacoast. Ivan is afraid to jump and dive, and his “single” mother (Natalya Vodvina) rescues him and protects him from the bullies, but the boy will be called a “coward” and “pig” by his playmates anyway. They go back to their Spartan home, and suddenly the father (Konstantin Lavronenko) has returned after twelve years of mysterious absence.

The father takes the boys on a road trip, past the cafes and into the wilderness. (At one point, the father dispatches a thief who tries to steal from Ivan, as if the world were one with no real morality or sense of law and order.) The boys fish in canals, tar the bottom of a boat and then make a trip with father to a “mysterious island” where they will be challenged and initiated. The film develops the complex relationship between the boys and with their father and plays on the idea that in their culture, boys must prove their competitiveness and “machismo” (ability to protect women and children) before they can go anywhere else in life.

Toward the end, the father digs up a chest in a remote shed, and a heavy tin box inside it. We’re never shown what’s in the box (you think of [“The Box” and “Darko”] Virginia-rasied director Richard Kelly), but imagination is a good thing here. One could presume that he will leave his sons an “inheritance” if they pass their tests. All you get to see is a watch.

A little test does happen, and then there is tragedy, which is enigmatic. Before the closing credits, the boys review some pictures (maybe from the box) that give some clues as to what may have happened to their father. One can imagine that the box could contain gold – but not that much, really – or something very heavy and very dangerous. The father was obviously “on the lam” and had hidden something away, perhaps with shady business dealings in post-Communist Russia, or maybe even with booty from the Cold War.

The film was shot around the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga, more or less near areas in the hack, and the film was made about the same time as the hack. For me, it’s all rather curious. Early in my novel manuscript, “Brothers”, the protagonist (a part-time CIA agent who publicly is just a history teacher) journeys to the Gulf of Finland area to pick up a mysterious “heavy” object disguised in an old Radio Shack computer, with clues toward a turning of our whole civilization. The scenery is pretty much as I had imagined -- very flat, with lots of waterways and bridges. It reminds me a bit of northern Minnesota (like around the Burnside Lodge, near Ely, where I stayed one weekend in 1999).

The English translation of the title matches the name Beethoven gave to the last movement of his "Les Adieux" Piano Sonata. That's curious. A little music from Mozart's Requiem appears in this movie.

Kino’s official site is here.

There is a “feature length” documentary about the making of this film from RenFilm on YouTube, the first part here:

Wikipedia attribution link for map of Ladoga area.

"My Reincarnation" follows a Tibetan master and his western son's growing awareness of a past life

2011-12-27T20:10:00.000-08:00

I went into town (the West End Cinema) to see the small film by Jennifer Fox, “My Reincarnation,” expecting it to be important to see now. It was.

Tibetan master Chogyal Namkhai Norbu moved to Italy to escape persecution by Communist Chinese, had and raised his family, particularly a son Yeshi Silvano Namhkai, whom he, at his son’s birth, believed to be a reincarnation of his lost uncle, whom he also believed may have died at the hands of the Chinese.

Yeshi, however, grew up as a western person, and worked for IBM for a couple decades as a systems analyst and project manager. He would have his own family and daughter. In time, particularly after his father’s bout with cancer (lymphoma), he began to feel drawn more to his father’s world. His father recovers. But In dreams, Yeshi became connected to his great uncle, even to the point that he believed he had experienced the uncle’s death in a Chinese prison, leading to a bridge to the continuity of his own life. As a child, he experienced prescient dreams of a monument in Tibet that was not actually built until around 2005.

Yeshi “looks” western, more Caucasian than his father (the acne was distracting), perhaps a little bit plump – he actually looked better (probably because of losing weight) after he increased his spiritual practice. At the close of the film he is in his mid 40s and still looks youthful.

Chogyal is called “Rinpoche” in Tibetan, meaning guru or teacher. He is a wise man somewhat in the sense that Paul Rosenfels (discussed elsewhere in my blogs) was.

What do we make of the “reincarnation”? It seems that with time Yeshi gradually incorporates the progressive memories of his great uncle’s life as if they were his own, but with many details missing. But none of us remembers all the details of our own lives anyway. That name on the tip of the tongue that escapes us – it doesn’t defeat the integrity of our identity. (Today, I struggled to remember the name of a famous 1981 film, discussed on The View – finally it clicked, “On Golden Pond”.)

The film has an initiation ritual, which reminds me a little of a Rosicrucian "Feast".

Mathematically, there are not enough people alive on the planet today for everyone to have been reincarnated. But maybe that just argues for the sure existence of other habitable planets for us to go to and work out our karmas – at various stages of development, some “terra nova’s” 40 or 50 light years away. Maybe some day we will really find Clive Barker’s “Imajica”.

When you dream, you don't know how you got there, nor do you care, unless you're having a nightmare. When you wake up from general anesthesia, you can remember being wheeled into surgery, and nothing more, but all of your life up to that point seems intact, as if you were a computer having just been rebooted. With reincarnation, it sounds as though the experience of a past life might come back in snippets through meditation, but in time, you would have to take responsibility for what had happened (even on another planet) and would develop a sense of continuity with some of that life. What if you had children? What if you had been of a different gender? (and sexual orientation?) Could a dream of an encounter with someone today really be a recall of a relationship in a past life (with that other person being a matched reincarnation)? The film "Judas Kiss" (June 4) even posed the idea of a relationship with a past self.

Here is the official site. The production and distribution company is “Long Shot Factory”.

There is a new review of “The Darkest Hour” on my blog “Films on Major Challenges to Freedom”.

"War Horse": Spielberg starts slowly, builds to a shattering climax in the WWI trenches

2011-12-25T20:21:00.000-08:00

Steven Spielberg’s latest film, “War House” (Touchstone and Dreamworks) is a period epic, leading to World War I, the “Great War”. It starts modestly in rural England but, with an episodic narrative (the film runs 2-1/2 hours) works up to one of the most gripping and horrific war scene climaxes ever filmed. It certainly leads us to wonder why “The War to End All Wars” was not such.

Well, one reason is that young men – as well as horses – were drafted and left to die in the trenches, under chemical warfare attacks, fighting for nationalist agenda imposed by others.

But adaptive life is not easy even in the tense pre-war peace. Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine) is a strong-willed 16 year old who takes up the challenge left by his father (Peter Mullen) when the elder overpays for a questionable horse. The wife (Emily Watson) reminds them all that they have to raise enough crops to pay the rent. I didn’t realize that average Brits rented their land in those days from the Tories.

Albert takes up the challenge, bonds to “Joey” and in a couple weeks has him tilling the soil. But when WWI comes, the father sells the horse. The movie becomes episodic, tracing the history of Joey as he gets “captured” by German soldiers. One interesting observation is that it is hard to tell the two sides apart.

Eventually Albert is old enough to be drafted (he wanted to go with Joey), and winds up in the trenches. It’s not too much of a spoiler to suggest that Joey will find him the way loyal animals do. But the way he does is truly harrowing. They truly save one another’s lives. There is even a “negotiation” between two corporals which puts the War to shame.

The movie has a schmaltzy score by John Williams. Some music from Britten’s “War Requiem” would have fit.

I saw this in a smaller auditorium at a Regal in Arlington (opening Christmas Day to large crowds), and the projection has some problems in the middle of the cropped screen. See this on a big screen and with digital projection if possible.

Here is the official site (Enable scripts and plug ins.)

ABC's interview follows:

ABC has a similar interview on YouTube (no embed) here.

"Young Adult" (as performed by Charlize Theron) brings back memories of my own "good old" days in Minneapolis

2011-12-24T13:14:00.000-08:00

I was “attracted” to see “Young Adult” (dir. Jason Reitman) in part because of the Minnesota location. In fact, in the opening sequence, downtown Minneapolis is shown, and there are a couple of high rise balcony shots that appear to be taken of the Churchill Apartments (link), downtown, near the Post Office, two blocks from the Mississippi River. I lived in the Churchill for six years, from 1997-2003, on the PO side, the last two years in an end corner unit on the NE side.

Charlize Theron plays fiction writer Mavis Gray. She’s not monster this time, but she is manipulative. She journeys to “Mercury MN” (I couldn’t find the town, but there is a company by that name in Faribault, 50 miles south of the Twin Cities on I-35) to hook up with a previous boy friend Buddy (Patrick Wilson, who had starred in “Little Children”), when Buddy’s wife unwisely invites her to a baby shower. It seems that there is love lost, and a tragedy behind it. The confrontation at the "party" gets quite ugly. I wouldn't get into anything like this myself.

She also consorts with a portly high school chum Matt (Patton Oswalt), who very early in the film tells the story of his being “gay-bashed” when he wasn’t gay – but left badly crippled “down south”. His legs have surgical scars as a result. That’s a little bit timely because a school district north of Minneapolis, normally seen as a “blue state” area, is having controversy over not doing enough about anti-gay bullying.

The script makes an interesting story of her career as a writer or, as she says at least twice, “author”. Her teen-oriented series is not selling so well now. I guess she suffers from the “midlist author” syndrome, much dreaded in old-fashioned trade book publishing. She has a confrontation with a young bookstore clerk (Brian McElhaney) when she wants to autograph all the books – and he says they are about to be sent back “to the publisher”. In fact, a couple copies of my “Do Ask Do Tell” book were at the Barnes and Noble store in downtown Minneapolis for most of 1999 in the LGBT section.

There's a scene at a bar called "Cedar Saloon" (as I remember); actually, "The Saloon" is the most popular gay dance bar in Minneapolis (more popular than the Gay 90s in my experience; nevertheless, the 90s could have made for a good backdrop).

I saw this at the AMC Shirlington Theater in Arlington, with a prefix for “AMC Independent”. Nevertheless, Paramount lists itself (rather than “Paramount Vantage”) as the US theatrical “distributor”. (It seems that Paramount now brands films with Vantage only when foreign-sourced.) This is very much in the style of a small film (although the $12 million budget is substantial, probably because of Theron and Wilson in the cast – the movie hardly works without a lead like Charlize). The production company, Mandate, has usually made smaller domestic films. I didn’t see any credits for IFPMSP, but I did see the Minnesota Film Commission. Some of the small town scenes were actually shot in Orange County, New York, however. There is one scene that appears to be shot at an outdoor strip-mall in Roseville, MN on Highway 36 that I often visited. As for the references to writers, Minneapolis has a very strong National Writers Union group, and a screenwriting group, and a Mayberry award for local film.

Here is the movie site.

First two pictures: from East balcony Apt 711 in the Churchill, winter 2003, where I lived. I believe that motion picture companies often rented upper floor apts in the building. Third picture, from the East Bank, my visit, June 2011; the Churchill is the first building behind the bridge.

Go see TWC's "The Artist" and learn something about film

2011-12-23T20:47:00.000-08:00

The Weinstein Company’s and French director Michel Hazanavicius’s holiday social experiment, “The Artist” is indeed presented as a black-and-white silent film, in the original 1.33:1 ratio that used to be standard. There is spoken dialogue only in a couple of places, as when George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) dreams that he is in talking pictures, and at the end, when he goes for “all that jazz”.

The movie also embeds some silent films, opening with an orchestra playing in a theater in 1927, the way these films were presented. And George gets to do some kinky stuff, like drown in quicksand.

But by now the word is around, the story is about the actor’s inability to move from silent to talking, while a female idol Peppy Miller (Berenice Belo) stars in them – or perhaps the studio’s unwillingness to let him try and prove he can learn.

So when the 1929 crash comes, he is cast off, and sinks into poverty. But in a tantrum, he burns his own celluloid, almost perishing in the fire, and only is sentient human dog saves him. The logical question is why she doesn’t help him sooner.

The film has a dazzling classical sound track, with some rather impressionistic original orchestral music by Louis Borce, some Ginastera, some jazz, and a climactic sequence using some of Bernard Herrmann’s 1958 score from the climatic sequence in “Vertigo”, where in this movie the plot takes on a curious contraposition. The sound track also quoted the 1981 hit "Pennies from Heaven", which I did see in Dallas then (not my favorite).

There are some other curious effects, as when Peppy “makes love to a suit”, pretending she is being embraced by the sleeves. In a late scene where a "talking" movie is being filmed, there are separate chairs for director and "screenwriter", as if the writer had to be present for the filming. Is this what happens now?

This is, in the end, a near-tragedy about the life of a somewhat self-indulgent artist and "problem child", who may not be able to adjust to a “new world” with new modes of expression.

This film is also, like “Hugo” and “Marilyn” (also from TWC), about the movies as they were years ago, even in very early times.

I saw this at Landmark’s E Street in downtown Washington (apparently its debut outside NY and LA) on this Friday night (two days before Christmas) in the large auditorium, and it did not sell out – I had thought it surely would. It’s unusual for a screen designed to show full 2.35:1 without vertical cropping drawn in to the old aspect ratios of the 1930s.

Here is the official site.

CNN and TWC have been offering a sweepstakes contest for consumers with a prize of a stay in LA, details here.

Other critics have compared this film to "Singin' in the Rain" (1952), which I have never seen. I've just added it to my Netflix queue (DVD only, there's no instant play, which would be a good thing given the interest).

Another comparison is "A Star Is Born" (1954, George Cukor, Warner Brothers), in the original Cinemascope, where Norman Maine (James Mason) helps Esther (Judy Garland) grow as an actress despite his own alcoholism. I saw this in Dallas at Fair Park at a special benefit in 1984.

Second picture: My father's, from southern CA, in the 1920s, about the time of the film.

"Two Weeks Notice": Hugh Grant in conventional romantic comedy; he made made a curious comedy about "geography" back in Wales; AMC history

2011-12-22T19:47:00.000-08:00

Well, I go back in time, to a 2002 mainstream romantic comedy that I missed, “Two Weeks Notice”, from Warner Brothers, Castle Rock, Village Roadshow, and Fortis, the last of which listened to my passionate pitch for ‘Titanium” at a 2006 screenwriting class in DC. This genre is not my element, and seems formulaic. The director was Marc Lawrence.

Smooth-skinned Hugh Grant plays a rich real estate lawyer (George Wade) who hires “Lucy”, a sassy Sandra Bullock, who soon resents his treating her like a nanny. But when she tries to give him two-weeks notice to quit, he blackballs her and browbeats her with non-compete clauses.

Grant is caught in a bind: he has her, when hiring her, promised to build a Coney Island community center and “give back” to the community (he says his life is like Monopoly), and his own boss insists on short-term profits only in the post-9/11 world. He can say the platitudes (real estate makes “strangers into neighbors”) but can he live as a real human being? He’s a bit like the Rich Young Ruler.

There’s a scene where Grant is playing chess, and the analogy to chess pieces (predictable) and women is made. (Is Grant playing the Shevshnikov?)

He also asks Lucy a curious post-interview question, about picking out environmentally friendly stationery (and this is 2002). On the web, employment consultants often discuss whether to ask a candidate whether he/she can start immediately and ditch a current employer.

As for Coney Island (and the terminus of the D and F trains) I remember the Seaside Courts and the paddleball games along the Boardwalk on Coney Island from a visit around 1989. Is it still there? Or did a real Community Center and Condo complex get built there?

There's also a scene at Shea Stadium where George as a fan interferes with a foul pop fly. The ballplayer says, go root for the Yankees. Citi Field is a much more interesting place than Shea was. The fans boo. (I was actually an extra for one second in a film scene for Morgan Creek's "Major League 3", with a live scene filmed at the Minneapolis Metrodome in November 1997. They bought us din-din.)

There are lots of familiar pop songs, like “Ain’t no paradise” and “The Way”.

Hugh Grant played in a curious little British comedy in 1994, by Christopher Monger, as cartographer Reginald Anson in “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came down a Mountain” (Miramax), in Wales. The issue was whether the hill was over 1000 feet high, deserving the name “mountain” and the color orange-yellow in a World Book Encyclopedia 1950 relief map. Rising sea levels could bring it down to “hill” status. I remember seeing this in an old AMC property at the Skyline Mall at Bailey’s Crossroads VA.

There was a curious incident at that old complex (now long demolished and replaced). Late on a Saturday afternoon in September 1992, when I went to see Clive Barker's silly "Candyman"; I had previously thought that his movie was “School Ties” (Paramount, Robert Mandel), a woman walked into the small auditorium before the show started and warned people about talking during the movie. This has never happened any other time. The "school" film, by the way, concerned a Jewish boy (Brendan Fraser) hiding his religion from an anti-Semite (Matt Damon) at a prep school. (During that time, and for a number of years, AMC operated a theater complex at Union Station in Washington DC and advertised a “no talking” policy at that complex only in the newspapers; bizarre.)

"Trunk" reduces horror to two people and a very confined space

2011-12-21T19:18:00.000-08:00

I suppose that Straw Weisman’s proof-of-concept film “Trunk” shows what you can do with just two characters in a movie taking place in a very confined space. I don’t know that this is too helpful, except that it might give a novice filmmaker an idea “where to start”.

Jennifer Day plays Megan, and I suppose it can be dangerous for a young woman to walk alone to her car in a commercial city (probably Toronto) garage at the end of the work day. David Blanchard plays George, her captor. That’s about it. You can imagine she’s in the worst possible trouble – again, urgency and dire straits are what they teach in screenwriting. (She tries cell phone 911 calls, but not the escape hatch idea.) And he invokes an almost Alfred Hitchcock response – he has no MO, no motive.

The film, from Maverick, (site) mercifully runs less than 90 minutes. If you rent it, you’ll want to be doing something else while it plays (like solve computer programming problems if you’re self-employed).

We’ve seen with “Old Joy” or “My Dinner with Andre” (or, for that matter, “Brokeback Mountain”) how films with (almost) only two characters can be fascinating; with this one, we see how it can become boring classwork.

Maverick offers the whole film on YouTube here.

I notice that "Saratoga Trunk", a classic, is not listed on Netflix but is "manufactured on demand" when ordered from Amazon. Haven't seen this situation before. I've never seen this noir 1945 film. I wonder if Netflix rental and video won't be adequate to get everything. (I did find two versions of the full movie on Youtube "free"; I don't know if they're "legal".) A subscription model that works for all films is an important strategy in preventing piracy in the long run.

There is a much "better" movie that shows what can go wrong in a parking garage, "Family in Hiding" (2006, Timothy Bond) from Lifetime, where a woman (an executive played by Brenda Strong) witnesses a hit on a DA in a garage and her family is put in witness protection in Seattle, which is very hard on her and the kids, and very hard to watch.

"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy": they lived in their own world, far from the ideology

2011-12-20T17:37:00.000-08:00

For a “semester” exam in VA and US Government in twelfth grade, in January 1961, just as a blizzard started, we had to write an essay in class comparing Communism to Democracy.

Nowadays, the emergence of a spy thriller set in the Cold War seems like a big event. And the British spy thriller (based on John La Carre’s famous novel of the same name) “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”, directed by Thomas Alfredson makes one singular impression from all the labyrinthine complexities of the plot: spies live in their own world, separate from the normal of us, and really don’t care about ideology. They probably couldn’t have written that semester essay exam that I took. But, oh yes, this movie really has a plot! Literary agents (and purchasing agents for studios looking a screenplays) love that.

The movie (like “Mission Impossible IV”) opens in Budapest, with a shocking hit in a café, leaving a mother dead with a nursing baby, as well as the intended target Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong). Soon British Intelligence (aka “The Circus”, more or less) is calling back Control (John Hurt) and Smiley (Gary Oldman) into service to root out a mole. The movie builds on its dusty look as long as it lives in London; everybody smokes, and the equipment – Amdek tape deck recorders, teletype machines, Turing decoders, and various microphones and cameras, looks all too macro and physical for audiences used to computers. (When you go into a reading room, you aren't even allowed to take in pens.) The story takes place in 1973-1974, not only the height of the Cold War (really past it – the worst was the Cuban Missile Crisis), but about the time of the Arab Oil Embargo and also of Watergate, neither of which is mentioned.

The middle section of the film, happening in Istanbul, is the brightest, with a “Rear Window” like episode. Younger spies played by Simon McBurney and Tom Hardy (who look at little too alike) invigorate the story. Physically, the men don’t look the worst for wear despite their lifestyles. But the older cadre does. Toby Jones is meaner than usual as intelligence boss Percy Alleline. He’s a far cry here from Capote.

The "Tinker Tailor Soldier" are compared to chess pieces, but more could have been done with the analogy (maybe show a real game in a controversial opening).

The film was produced by Studio Canal (France) and Working Title (Britain), and is distributed in the US by Focus (NBC Universal). The novel had been the topic of a TV series with Alec Guiness in 1979. Had the film been made sooner, like in the 80s, it would have been branded as a major studio film.

A Tuesday afternoon performance in Washington DC at Landmark, on a day when the Metro had serious problems, was well attended. Maybe the lawyers downtown like to take their clients to see this film, or maybe the FBI agents across E Street enjoy it.

Here is the official site.

This film could be compared to Martin Ritt's 1965 film "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" (Paramount), with Richard Burton, in black-and-white, also based on a Le Carre novel.

"King of Devil's Island" (quite far from "Shutter Island") hits a current topic hard

2011-12-19T15:18:00.000-08:00

The Norwegian film “King of Devil’s Island” (“Kongen av Bastoy”), directed my Marius Holst, is, on a certain level of storytelling, a bit like “Shutter Island” (Feb. 21, 2010). But the purpose and emotional effect of the film is even more shocking.

The movie is based on a story by Lars Saabye Christensen, and reflects what could have happened around 1915, at an island prison for supposedly delinquent boys. Today the institution is said to be a model facility.

A new prisoner, 17 year old Ehrling (Benjamin Helstad) arrives, to be shocked at the total regimentation of life here. No personal possessions are allowed, everything is watched, and prisoners are used for slave labor. The boys are told that their past histories do not matter, and the outside world does not exist for them (World War I had started, but it is never mentioned). One other boy, Olaf (Trond Nilssen) may be nearing “graduation”. The island is run by a governor (Stellan Skarsgard) and a creepy assistant (Kristoffer Joner), the later of whom is not afraid to take advantage of some of the boys, whereas the governor looks the other way.

In the film's "middle", there is a tragedy. A particular boy, a victim of the assistant's exploitation, drowns himself with a rock (the sequence reminds one of Benjamin Britten's operas like "Peter Grimes" and "Billy Budd"). The governor characterizes him as a "weak" boy, and "not fit to live with other people". That particular sequence reflects the pre-Nazi values (even though this is not Germany) in films like "The White Ribbon" (Feb. 13, 2010).

Now, the film hits the streets right after the Penn State scandal broke loose, and that is perhaps a fortuitous coincidence.

As for the film, in its dingy, wintry environment, the storytelling picks up as the hope of rebellion and escape builds up. There is an accelerating climax, where the assistant nearly gets what he deserves. The final escape sequence on a frozen lake, with the ice unstable, is riveting, and partially tragic, and ironic. (It’s even more dangerous to do a fireman’s carry on ice because of the combined weight.) This is one of those films where not many of the characters have a good outcome.

I saw the film at the West End in Washington, and the projection was done from a BluRay DVD. As a result, the screen image was cropped both vertically and horizontally for the 2.35:1 format, which would have fit the theater screen from a normal print.

The distributor is Film Movement, which concentrates on European films (other than France and Germany) exploring moral issues. (I’m a little surprised that Sony missed this one.)

The official site is here. No question, this is a major contender for best foreign language lfilm in 2011.This is a major European film, big in production and very professionally made.

I suspect that in time there will be a documentary film about the problems with “scandals” in sports programs and school systems. It’s a little early to editorialize on how Penn State (and Syracuse) will turn out yet. The culture of “looking the other way” is a huge social problem, as we know from the Catholic church (which has generated some documentary film). A few years ago, there was controversial series on NBC Dateline (with Chris Hansen – see my Books blog, March 17, 2007) about men, mostly with no criminal records, caught in Internet stings trying to contact minors. In these cases, actual abuse did not occur. That would also make for a good documentary examination, such as the really disturbing story of Rabbi David Kaye, convicted in 2006. I would even be interesting in participating in making such a documentary film.

When I was a substitute teacher a few years ago, there were assignments involving special education students where the possibility of having to have questionable physical contact with a student could come up. I turned down these assignments, but I was ambushed by a couple of them. Again, this is a topic worthy of news reporting and maybe documentary film.

Michael Dowse brings Terry and Dean back for a second satire on manhood; I was looking for a different film, involved in the piracy fight

2011-12-18T15:31:00.000-08:00

Today, I thought I could make another contribution to the debate on movie piracy, and found out almost at the end I had watched the “wrong” film. So, we will have a debate on energy policy (oil shale), the welfare mentality, and “what it means to be a man.”

I had never watched the earlier Fubar comedy from 2002, so when I watched Michael Dowse’s 2010 sequel to his own satire of the heterosexual world, this time called “Fubar: Balls to the Wall”, or “Fubar II”, I thought I was watching a comedy whose release had been endangered by piracy. More about that later. “Terry and Dean are back.”

In fact, the movie at hand seems like a conservative-launched satire that would probably please Rush Limbaugh. The term “Fubar” is an acronym for something (look it up). In this comedy, Terry (David Lawrence) and Dean (Paul Spence) get evicted after chainsawing and torching their Montreal apartment during a wild party. They head for Fort McMurray, Alberta, to get rich as oil field workers, in the tar sands. The film shows the “gas chamber” training and drug testing, and their rubber stamping. They really need workers. But the money isn’t quite that good and Dean can’t keep up, so he injures himself to get workers comp. His medical examination shows advanced testicular cancer, in this case meaning the loss of “both” (which almost never happens in real practice). Dean (the film makes a lot of his bodily hairlessness) is to lose it all and not be a man any more. Hence, the title of the film.

There’s more comedy about paternity and being able to have a lineage, and Terry gets married, having a kid that looks too much like Dean (that won’t be a good thing). Dean, his voice having become more high pitched (that would incite mockery from my old Army buddies at Fort Eustis) becomes the wedding singer.

The on-location scenery around the old fields and of life on the northeastern Alberta tundra is quite breathtaking. There is also a sequence at the Mall of Canada – that is, the West Edmonton Mall, which I visited myself in 1983. Edmonton itself has a pyramid building resembling that in Memphis.

The film is released by Screen Media and Alliance Pictures, with FU2 Productions and Cardinal Films as production companies. The official site is here.

As to my intention, it was to see the 2011 comedy by Penepole Spheeris, called simply “Balls to the Wall”, which is not yet on Netflix. The use of the title seems to be a coincidence. With the latter movie, the Los Angeles Times has reported that pirated copies showed up from Europe, jeopardizing US release. (See posting on “BillBoushka” blog Dec. 7, 2011, about “Creative America”, as well as post here the same day about the short “Stolen Jobs”. IMDB shows the Spheeris film as having US distribution from Midwest Movies. I will have to follow up on this. I suspect it will turn up on Netflix soon. But the only DVD I could find on Amazon right now with the title was the Dowse film. I really tried to do this right!

Wikipedia attribution link for area picture from Athabasca.

"Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol": see it in Imax to do a virtual visit to the Burj in Dubai

2011-12-16T15:51:00.000-08:00

Okay, sometimes we tap top dollar for genre thrillers in Imax, if we get to see Dubai from the top of the Burj in Imax. The film is "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol" (sorry, no 3D), in which Tom Cruise was one of the producers, directed by Brad Bird. (This is "Mission Impossible IV" if I count right.)

The IMF (not the International Monetary Fund) maybe put down for good after it’s “blamed” for a gas explosion that destroys the Kremlin. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise Mapother) has just escaped from a Russian prison, no coincidence.

I suppose the idea that the Russians could come back with a nuke is plausible, or that a plot could be envisioned to trick the modern Russians into an attack. In fact, there was a near crisis when a Russian test launch was misinterpreted in 1995.

The movie, like a Bond film, has an excuse for a jetsetting world trip, but this time the other locations are limited to Budapest, Prague, Mubai, and the main course of Dubai, which looks rather like a child’s toy city from the Burj. A haboob approaches, and Cruise clings to the skyscraper like Spider Man. I can’t see any ropes holding him. Nobody asks whether the Palms – the artificial fan-like communities built into the sea – would survive sea level rise.

Tom Cruise (his own official site ). He’s 49 now. His faces is starting to weather, finally (as do those of the other male characters). When he’s climbing the Burj Khalifa, his trouser legs are rolled up – and we have more visual evidence that he doesn’t look as young as he did when dancing in skivvies in Paul Brickman’s “Risky Business” back in 1983.

Bad Robot (“Cloverfield”) and Skydance are the production companies, and Paramount is again the distributor, and now Paramount has a great, bombastic corporate musical trademark to play as the mountain comes up. It’s in good company with Fox, Columbia, Universal, and even Lionsgate now.

I saw this in the AMC Tysons Corner Imax auditorium. The scenes originally shot in Imax are projected at the full screen size, with is 1.85:1 or sometimes slightly cropped to 2.0:1. This is true particularly of the outdoor Dubai scenes. Other scenes, especially the indoor ones (mostly shot actually in Vancouver or the Czech Republic) are cropped vertically to mimic 2.35:1.

The afternoon ticket price was $15, but I think this time moviegoers can say, it would cost a lot more to fly to Dubai and ride the elevator of the Burj yourself. (The film may make some viewers dizzy.) This time the hefty premium price may be worth it for what you see. The film makes stunning use of actual locations. You cannot experience what the artists intend you to see without paying the price to see it in a properly equipped modern theater. That is how it should be.

Here’s Paramount’s official site.

Wikipedia attribution link for Dubai skyline picture.

Below: Real progress in NYC:

"Kinyarwanda" is a good followup to "Hotel Rwanda" and presents Islam at its best

2011-12-15T17:59:00.000-08:00

“Kinyarwanda”, directed by Alrcik Brown, makes a successor to “Hotel Rwanda”. In 1994, a the grand Mosque in Kigali becomes a refuge for victims of the civil war after the Mufti issues a fatwa forbidding Muslims to participate in the genocide of the Tutsi. Many of the refuges are peasants who could not afford the “hotel”. The title of the film refers to a dialect of a Central African language spoken in Rwanda. A Wikipedia article would make the language difficult to learn.

The film tells the story of the war in docudrama style from the viewpoint of several characters, whose lives intersect. There is a female preacher who lectures the Hutus on forgiveness – on how to accept forgiveness and repent – and on how forgiveness is sometimes more painful than the initial loss. A tagline for the film is "forgiveness is freedom".

Later in the film there is a rendering of the Lord’s Prayer in the mosque with Christians and Muslims present together. The film does have discussion of Islam as a religion of peace. There is a scene early where a girl's copy of the Koran has been desecrated, but the book itself is not shown. The film has horrific verbal descriptions of atrocities ("chopping"), but little physical depiction.

The film was shot on location, in full 2.35:1, and puts the moviegoer right there. The music score by James Jennings Boyd is postromantic and effective, has a lot of Maherian juxtapositions of major-minor chords.

The film comes from AFFRM, the “African American Film Festival Releasing Movement”, which should not be confused with Sony TriStar’s Affirm films, although the later company could have well considered picking this film up since Affirm specializes in religious films.

Here is the official site.

When I substitute taught a ninth grade English class, the teacher had the class watching “Hotel Rwanda” and filling out detailed video worksheets on the movie. The history of that war is quite intricate.

Wikipedia attribution link for aerial view of Kigali.

I saw the new film at the West End Cinema in Washington DC in a late Thursday afternoon performance, with a fair crowd.

"Like Crazy" seems like a screenwriting class exercise (to me, at least)

2011-12-14T19:21:00.000-08:00

A maxim of conventional screenwriting is that the protagonist(s) just have to overcome his/her/their problems, or the sky falls. No matter if the problems are of their own making, or if they are just manipulating others. Oh, and they have to solve these problems in novel ways, reaching into the character for something extra.

In the film from Drake Doremus, “Like Crazy”, these problems do seem a bit invented. Anna (Felcitiy Jones), a college student in LA from the UK, has been conveniently careless enough to overstay her visa (from the UK, it’s really that big a deal?) when she falls for Jacob (Anton Yelchin) or gets him (like a Charlie Bartlett) to fall for her. Jacob majors in “furniture design”, which sounds a bit dippy.

Well, you know the solution: get married. I guess if a movie wanted to make fun of the way heterosexuals can abuse it, this is it. The movie (89 minutes) starts to run a unbelievable speed – Jacob must have Clark Kent’s speed to cross the Pond so often – as the inevitable temptations to both follow, inasmuch as the marriage doesn’t solve the legal problems so easily after all.

Paramount Vantage distributes the film, and it’s good to see Viacom/Paramount use the brand openly again.

The official site is here. The film seems to be shot in digital video. It is said to have budget of a mere $250,000 – so see what you can do for that amount of money. At least, that part is interesting.

I suppose that, as an exercise, you could make this plot work in the gay genre – if California finally defeats Prop 8. (If they threw in babies, it would get testier.)

I can’t imagine getting myself into something like this. I don’t have it in me.

Successful gay architect risks all when he falls for a drifter in film "Lucky Bastard"

2011-12-13T18:37:00.000-08:00

In the previous review, I talked about going “upward” for love, but here is a film from Everett Lewis (and Breaking Glass Pictures) about being dragged down by one’s own temptations and lusts, only to be surprised by what one does find. Yes, I see a lot of films with “bad behavior”, but in “Lucky Bastard” (2009), all the main characters find some redemption.

Rusty (a handsome Patrick Tatten) is a successful closeted architect about 30, with a straight business partner Garret (Timothy Ryan Cole). After a couple of LA and Hawaii real estate projects fall through and the two have a falling out, Rusty is overwhelmed when a drifter Denny (Dale Dymkoski) comes on to him in an LA convenience store. The reserved Rusty is unable to resist the attention and warmth, as Denny’s desire to use him as a sugar daddy to feed his drug habit puts him at real risk. Gradually, the characters start coming to understand each other’s backgrounds. Denny thinks Rusty “has it made” (and is "lucky") and Rusty says he never considered doing anything else other than succeeding. Denny got out of the ghetto with a football scholarship and then threw it away for gay life.

There’s a scene in a disco dive halfway into the film, where Denny says that when people “fool around” on the dance floor, it doesn’t mean anything. In my own experience of observation of discos, that doesn’t sound true.

Here is the official site.

"Holding Trevor": gay romantic drama examines the "logic" of upward affiliation

2011-12-12T19:27:00.000-08:00

Pennsylvania native Brent Gorski wrote his own screenplay and protagonist’s part for “Holding Trevor” (2007, Regent, Here!, KGB Films, Stray Films), but a film like this might have seemed stronger if not set in a gay ghetto like West Hollywood. Be that as it may, the movie seems determined to affirm the right to independence, self-ownership, and all such things part of the “modern” gay world. Already, I notice a slight cultural backstep in movies made before Prop 8 and gay marriage really went onto front burner. This movie is about "gay life" as it has been for a long time.

Trevor is troubled by his boyfriend’s (Darrell, Christopher Wyllie’s) sad descent into substance addiction. A visit to a hospital gives him a chance to meet a new “better half”, the good hospital resident, Ephram (Eli Kranski) and also explores lightly the visitation rights (or lack thereof) for non-married partners. In time, Trevor (who is very appealing himself) kicks out Darrell as a loser ("I'm not responsible for you") and goes with a winner. Why not have a high achiever in your life as a partner rather than a loser? Sounds logical, right? But that’s not very easy in our real world of inequalities, with other side characters around the house. Social conservatives like George Gilder ("Men and Marriage") call this process "upward affiliation". I'm reminded of a recent sermon I heard, "Compassion is the hidden resource."

The film tells part of the story of the new relationship in short-term flashback, and tends to dissipate the tension in the relationship too quickly. And there are some cosmetic inconsistencies in the photography of Trevor.

The use of Ephram (a Biblical name) as a character name is interesting; "Ephram" was the name of the piano prodigy played by Gregory Smith in the series "Everwood".

The official site is here.

"Blood to Wine" presents Arizona wine industry; producers say it was harmed by piracy attempts

2011-12-10T14:44:00.000-08:00

“Blood into Wine” has been mentioned by the AFTRA group “Creative America” as a small film severely injured by piracy when it introduced its DVD. The film, written and directed by Ryan Page and Christopher Pomerenke (from Semi-Rebellious Films and Twinkle Cash Company) documents the growing domestic wine industry in northern Arizona, and then spreads out and surveys other locations, including California and makes a sojourn to Texas.

The film starts in low-key fashion with a television interview show “Focus on Interesting Things”, the sort of presentation that my own father would have liked. Pretty soon we’re around Jerome, AZ, slightly west of I-17 linking Phoenix to Flagstaff, and just above the Mogollon Rim (where UFO’s swarm, but that’s another discussion). It’s at about 5000 feet elevation and not too far from Sedona. We enter the Stronghold Vineyards (link ).

That presents an issue: it can get very frigid and snow a lot in the winter, and the northern Arizona industry has to deal with cold weather issues not found in California.

The star of the film is Maynard James Keenan, who, for all his solitary devotion to manual labor (again, my father would have admired him) regarded himself as an artist. The handsome blond man who does a lot of the grape squashing (with modern methods, not the way Lucille Ball did it) is I believe his son Mike.

The business experiences complex regulatory issues, and the film gets into libertarian territory. One of the characters wears a shirt called “Green Piece” with a pistol, arguing for Second Amendment rights, a big deal in Arizona.

The official site is here. In the YouTube below, I believe the picture shown is actually Mike.

Wikipedia attribution link for picture of Jerome area. My last visit to the area occurred in May 2000.

Miller's film "I'm Glad My Mother Is Still Alive": what happens when an adopted teen finds his original mother

2011-12-08T18:50:00.000-08:00

The 2009 film “I’m Glad My Mother Is Still Alive” (“Je suis heureux que ma mere soit vivante”), directed by Claude and Nathan Miller (and produced by Metropolitan Films in France), will be available in DVD from Strand Releasing Jan. 3. I got a review copy supplied. The film is based on a “true story” by Emmanuel Carrere.

A clue to the meaning of the title is in the use of subjunctive mood in the original French title. At least, it suggests ambivalence. The premise is certainly natural and compelling, and must happen often. A teenager, feeling alienated by adoptive parents as they threaten to put him into boarding school, goes searching for his birth mother who, unprepared for the responsibility, gave him up, which equals abandoning him, in his mind. The results can be unpredictable, maybe tragic.

Even at 12, the kid Thomas (Maxime Renard) is perceptive of how things are. He accuses his unattractive adoptive father (Yves Verhoeven) of being unable to procreate himself. Later, at around 20, and not looking much older (now played by Vincent Rottiers), he tracks down his ragtag single mom Julie Martino (Sophie Cattani), having a younger kid Frederic, and working as a maid in a hospital. Her manner is a bit careless and distant. Thomas is dizzied by a world where grownups can’t follow through on anything they promise, particularly when they make babies, or even take them on. Curiously, for a while, his real mom actually expects him to babysit and help raise his half-brother.

The movie heads toward an uneven climax that is perhaps out of control, and unpleasant. I’ll leave it at that.

The film does have a lot of scenes showing the delicacies of childhood, the vulnerability of children when given up. That contrasts with the opulent scenery of the opening, along the Riviera, which will soon be replaced with lower middle class highrise life.

The official site in France is here. I couldn’t find Strand’s site yet.

"Stolen Jobs", a short film from "Creative America" (AFTRA) states its side on the Internet movie piracy debate

2011-12-07T07:22:00.000-08:00

The American Federation of Radio and Television Artists (AFTRA) has a lobbying group called Creative America (link) which is says it formed to press for laws to combat piracy and content theft, both online and in the physical world. It has been running a TV ad in conjunction with bills called SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and Protect-IP, now before Congress. I have traced the progress and controversy about these bills on my main “BillBoushka” blog (get to it through Blogger Profile).

Creative America has a 12-minute documentary called “Stolen Jobs” (also subtitled "Content Theft: The Big Picture"), which seems to have been made just before these two bills were introduced. The film is available on Vimeo, for blogger embed, below. One immediate irony is that Electronic Frontier Foundation has written that Vimeo is one of the sites particularly endangered by SOPA (aforementioned blog, Nov. 15).

Content Theft: The Big Picture from Creative America on Vimeo.

The film makes the not surprising point that the entertainment industry is a major source of jobs (hint: we’re in severe recession) and that most union workers aren’t rich like “Marilyn”, making about $55000 a year. And it says film production is down 30% over the past few years, largely because of theft – although recession itself obviously matters.

One particular point, of some surprise to me, is that theft affects independent film. The documentary tells the story of two particular films, “The Wedding Weekend” (also known as “Shut Up and Sing”) (2006), and “Blood into Wine” (2010). The film says that in both cases streaming video was available of pirated copies of the films through P2P sites and pirated DVD’s were available as soon as or before the films’ release or even pre-book dates. Investors are discouraged from investment in independent film because of the threat of piracy. DVD sales (which always seem pricy to me, $24.99 or so), help investors make back what they put in. I have put both of these films in my Netflix queue (Instant and DVD) and will try to see them both (very legally) before the markup of SOPA in the House Dec. 15. According to the LA Times, "Balls to the Wall" also met this fate, to the point that US release was jeopardized (see my main blog today).

Previously, I've written about the mass litigation against pirated films brought by the "US Copyright Group", films including "The Steam Experiment" (see this blog April 8, 2010), "Call of the Wild", and even eventually "The Hurt Locker". But many of these were smaller, less well-known films.

Besides movies, episodes of television series are also pirated, it says. I have not encountered this myself as an Internet user; but, then again, I aggressively delete spam before ever looking at it; I probably do get offers for pirated material that I never open.

For me, that raises a question. If I get my sci-fi scenario for “Do Ask Do Tell” made, is piracy a threat to me as a potential filmmaker? If the film is sellable enough for people to want it, the reasoning is, the pirates (and not Pittsburgh’s baseball team from “Abduction”) will go after it. So it could keep me from getting investor money, prospectively. Or here’s another question. Are “specialty” documentaries at risk? Would a film like HBO’s “The Strange History of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” (Oct. 13) or even Marc Wolf’s film based on his play (Sept. 19) be put at risk?

The documentary makes the point that existing laws don’t allow US law enforcement or civil suits to turn off foreign IP addresses. It also seems to imply that most Internet piracy occurs through the P2P mechanisms, which have already attracted mass lawsuits (as from the RIAA) against users. (Remember, copyright trolls like Righthaven go after conventional sites, not P2P.) It also says, toward the end, that the free and open Internet should coexist with reasonable law enforcement, just as the physical world has to (they says we use locks on our doors – Medeco locks). But SOPA and Protect-IP, as written, apply to both foreign and domestic servers, probably because it is very difficult to segregate them all the time. (The film makes this look easy, by pointing out a few notorious foreign sites like Pirate Bay.) In fact, the main objection to these bills is that they, through overbroad language, seem to place service providers and ISP’s in the position of having to monitor all user’s postings, which would make it impossible to keep the Internet open as usual for “amateur self-publication” and free entry (sites like YouTube, Blogger, and Wordpress – although how it would affect social networking sites like Facebook is also a complicated topic). AFTRA will deny this, but some of us are not sure that Congress cares now.

Unions, of course, always favor policies that protect the jobs and livelihoods of its members – that’s why they exist. And unfortunately they have a natural inclination to deny entry to new competition.

"My Week with Marilyn": a young man comes of age, in the front row of the 50s movie business

2011-12-06T19:07:00.000-08:00

I certainly remember the heterosexual hype about Marilyn Moore (Norma Jeane Mortensen or Norma Jeane Baker) as I grew up and was introduced to the movies. When I first heard about The Weinstein Company’s new comedy “My Week with Marilyn” (directed by Simon Curtis) based on the memoir by Colin Clark, I thought the concept to be a bit superficial. When I saw the film, I found it was a real coming of age for Colin (Eddie Redmayne) and gave us a look at the old Hollywood-London model for movies as it was then (a follow-up on “Hugo”).

Colin does what job coaches like Tory Johnson say we must do to get good jobs today: he persists, and talks around the union red-tape, and does things for free until he is hired under-the-table as third assistant director for “The Secret Prince” which became “The Prince and the Showgirl” (I never saw that – it’s in my Netflix queue with a very long wait).

It’s not much of a secret now that Colin, with his focused people skills (he was the youngest in a large family) got Marilyn (a very compliant Michelle Williams) out of herself and able to perform in the movie. There’s a critical point where, as he begins to get caught in the middle, he tells her “you’re a film star who wants to be an actress”, and Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) is a director and “actor who wants to be a film star.” That's the justifiable perception: Marilyn couldn’t remember – or even get the point of – her lines, without very personal help. Of course, Colin (who is quite attractive – but please lose the cigarettes, even if this is the 50s) will incite suspicion and jealousy, particularly from Marilyn’s somewhat inattentive husband, writer Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott). Colin wants to become a “writer” himself in the days when the term meant something, but he comforts Marilyn by saying that writers are always scribbling down insults.

The film was produced by BBC, Lipsync and “Trademark Films” (which displays its tm). Here is the official site.

This might be a good place to mention a famous similarly titled indie drama, Louis Malle's conversation piece "My Dinner with Andre" (1982), which I did see twice (see posting Nov. 19).

Almodovar: "The Skin I Live In": yes, the mad scientist did the worst possible thing to his "subject"

2011-12-05T19:59:00.000-08:00

Pedro Almodovar has given us another shocker (with lots of helix-twists and layers in the plot) with “The Skin I Live In” (“La piel que habito”, based on the novel “Tarantula” by Thiery Jonquet. The film is set in Toledo, Spain, but it not “outdoors” all that much, giving is the garish long-wavelength colors of Spain in its sets, and the dazzling chamber music score of Alberto Iglesias.

Before discussing the rather shocking premises of the story, it’s well to rehearse other movies that make a good comparison. Back in 2004, I had seen Almodovar’s “Bad Education” (“La mala educacion”. In that film, a filmmaker’s former boarding school companion presents him a script of a film to be made, and as the movie goes into the script layer, shocking scandals related to the problems with the Catholic priesthood come out, and affect the making of the film.

Then, it’s well to mention a couple of other films that anticipate Almodovar’s concept here. That is, for example, “Boxing Helena” (1993, Jennifer Chambers Lynch (story by Philippe Caland) in which an obsessed surgeon amputates the limbs of his lover, holding her captive as a freak. It was a sensation at the time, or even William Wyler’s “The Collector” (1965) where a London man kidnaps a woman with choloroform and holds her, to see if she can tempt and outsmart him. Another film to mention here is (with a curious name similarity) Greg Araki's "Mysterious Skin" (2005).

In comparison with these, the totality of Almodovar’s precept here is pretty complex. A Spanish surgeon (and mad scientist, perhaps) Robert, played by Antonio Banderas, has developed a synthetic skin that may become a universal cure for all burn and even skin cancer patients. He keeps a woman, Vera (Elena Anaya), who has had the skin transplant, which has taken so well that she looks like and function as a modern young woman. She has bonded to him ("Stockholm Syndrome") and he can "protect" her. We learn that he was inspired to invent the surgery because of a tragic accident that took his wife.

The film is more or less bifurcated, with the second half taking place six years earlier, to “explain” how this all “really” came about. (Godard’s New Wave film “In Praise of Love” (2001) has the same kind of backward bifurcation.) In the first half (today), Vera is attacked by a visiting rogue Zeca (Roberto Alamo) in a Spanish tiger costume for a pageant. We’re introduced to the scheming boy’s mother Marilia (Marisa Parades), who is also Robert’s employee.

Then the film takes us back into history, to explain how “Vera” came about. Well, some people will say this is a spoiler, but the gig is probably out anyway. Robert’s lesbian daughter had been assaulted by Vincente (Jan Cornet) – that scene is ambiguous enough to almost be consensual, if unfortunate. In the aftermath of psychiatric treatment, the daughter kills herself, and Robert seeks revenge against Vincente. He kidnaps Vincente off a motorcycle in the woods, drugs him, and brings him back for rendition and, well, you can guess what kind of operation. I suspect that when the DVD comes out there will be deleted scenes that play up the “shame” element (as in the film Saturday here) that Vincente will deal with in his transformation to Vera. Almodovar shows some restraint in the R-rated theatrical version. One of the worst fears for a “man” is being made to “feel feminine” himself.

The film also hints that Robert is getting other subjects for his experiments from less than legitimate sources. Auto “accidents”, maybe?

The film is shot in conventional 1:85:1, which tends to emphasize close-ups and give the film a Hitchcock-like feel.

Here is the official site from Sony Pictures Classics.

"Old Joy": a touch of "Brokeback" and even "Bugcrush", but so much gentler; men need their rites of passage

2011-12-04T20:27:00.000-08:00

“Old Joy”, a little film directed by Kelly Reichardt from Kino, combines elements of both “Jerome’s Razor” and “Bugcrush”, and even “Brokeback Mountain”, in a road movie that stays in “kinder and gentler” and simpler territory. (A more distant relative is Gus van Sant's "Gerry"; van Sant certainly could have made this particular film and impart a similar feel.)

Mark, an attractive ("cute", frankly) and slender late 20s-something young man, is settling into married life somewhere around Portland OR. (If I read it right, his wife is only recently pregnant.) One day he gets a call from an old buddy, a scruffy and balding quasi-drifter Kurt (Will Oldham), who wants to get together for old times and go on a (summer) hike with him in the Cascades, and take him to a particular hideaway he has built with his carpentry skills. Mark, curious, agrees, and his wife even reassures him he doesn’t need to feel tethered. She suspects he has an old yearning to satisfy, before they get on with a “real” family.

The film spends about an hour taking us into the woods, giving little clues. Kurt says he’s amazed that Mark will make the commitment of having a kid. They pitch camp in a generous two-man tent, and Kurt notes that the dog is a girl. But by now we’ve noticed that the dog, while Mark’s, seems even more bonded to Kurt already, and seems to view Kurt as a more important companion to Mark than his own wife. (Animals – at least carnivores as pets – understand all of these things.) Mark also reassures Kurt that now everything is "fine" (so something had "happened" or "almost happened" before). They eventually find the river and wind up at a “resort” Kurt has built (that is, he has helped build, with a lot of other people -- at best) with his own hands, including two Jacuzzis fed by natural hot springs. It's odd that he has trouble finding it.

It’s not hard to guess what can happen. But the actual climax (at exactly 1 hour in a 76 minute film) is quite subtle and understated. It is more touching – even erotic – to show very little – and probably to do very little. In what amounts to (just) a shoulder and (upper?) chest rub, Mark resists mildly (“what’s happening?”) and then relaxes. That’s about it, and that’s all either man needs. Unlike yesterday’s movie, we stay well within the PG-13 world. This is more about longing, and the satisfaction of a need, the completion of a step in life necessary to move on to something more. Of course, though, at the end, someone in my community would say to Kurt, "Mark went straight on you." I've heard of this (it was a common expression when I lived in Dallas in the 80s).

Right before the "encounter" Kurt tells a story in which he had a dream in which a person appears that then appeared the next day in real life in a sensitive situation. I think that has happened to me -- prescient dreams. When someone else appears in one's dream, does the other person know?

The dialogue of both men tends to be curt and “man talk” (like Mark's “dry toast” – something almost out of Twin Peaks – oh, that was “warm milk” wasn’t it -- then what is Kurt's "wet toast"? Oleo, anyone? From appearances, beanpole Mark probably doesn't have to "worry" about cholesterol, but Kurt does.).

I have to express the idea that film brings back memories of early periods in my adulthood, "relationships" or sorts with "straight" men, not going as far as even this film (although one of them was perhaps close).

Here is the official site.

Wikipedia attribution link for Crater Lake, OR picture I visited it in May, 1978. I understand it has been one of the remotest areas from wireless service in the US; don’t know if that is still true.

British filmmakers make "Shame" in NYC, with a little taste of "Eyes Wide Shut"; concept of film is not what it might have been

2011-12-03T15:11:00.000-08:00

There is a conversation two-thirds the way through the new NC-17 film “Shame” where NYC yuppie Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender) tells his uninvited sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) that she didn’t come from him and that he shouldn’t have to be responsible for her. She retorts that they are family, and family members watch each other’s backs. That, to my consciousness, is one of the most pressing and unsettling questions in modern western life, and maybe the only really important conversation in the new film from Steve McQueen (not the same person as the well known American actor, but I ask anyway, remember “The Blob”?)

In fact, that may what parents, in a marriage, believe they get out of their commitment. They have both the right and responsibility to socialize their kids to live in a community, and not just for their own karma. There are some lines earlier in the script about this sort of thing: what is having a “relationship” for anyway? Brandon doesn’t know, or believe; but neither do any of the other characters very much, except for the parasite Sissy. (When I was a patient at NIH in 1962 – covered elsewhere in the blogs – there was a female patient like Sissy, who kept on asking “why can’t we love everybody?” From each according to his/her ability, to each according to his/her needs.)

Oh, Brandon’s boss David Fisher (James Badge Dale) is a family man, who talks to his son from work by Skype, in front of Brandon, after calling Brandon in to his office to pass the hint, politely, that they found too much porn on Brandon’s virus-infected workplace computer. Oh, no, he doesn’t get fired. That’s not the culture. But, then, there’s a good reason (involving David’s own conduct) for him not to get axed – it closes the circle of the “plot”.

Of course, everybody knows that this movie is about sex addiction, and it is; and it does “show everything” for the curious, or easily titillated, but that’s about it. There’s not that much that’s really new. You can enjoy the spectacular views of the Hudson from Brandon’s apartment --- yes, he is “responsible” enough to earn his own living and pay for his own apartment in New York (not too easy these days). But he’s apt, after the expected heterosexual trysts, to visit the Trucks, too. He even gets bounced from gay or bi places.

To me, the title of the film suggests a history of past humiliation in a certain kind of adolescent competition, and then “enjoyment” of the abasement or even total desecration accompanying its recreation. This may sound too much like what conservative author George Gilder wrote in the 70s and 80s in “Sexual Suicide” and then “Men and Marriage”. But there’s underground gay literature around that depicts this concept of "deep shame". Some of this lit was in my car trunk, and when I was subbing, I had to toss it out to protect myself. Anyway, that’s not what the film says; that’s what I wanted it to get into. Google's definition of the word is "A painful feeling of distress or humiliation cause by consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior", although in practice the concept has been used against people for status-like things they cannot choose or do anything about.

I do suppose that what happens with Sissy is a major source of the substance of the “title”. There are reports of some audience members being sickened by the scene, which is not more graphic than many other films. (Somehow, I was expecting something like “American Psycho” but that didn’t quite happen, either.)

The film, shot economically (though in 2.35:1) in New York City (using the IRT line 28^th St station a lot) was produced with British resources (Film 4, Hanway, the UK Lottery, and Momentum Films). A little of it reminded me of “Eyes Wide Shut,” ("R") where Stanley Kubrick recreated the mood of New York City while actually shooting in London. (Others will compare this film to the earlier "X" films "Last Tango in Paris" and even "Midnight Cowboy".)

The original orchestral music score by Harry Escott is a bit Wagnerian (as if Van Trier's use of Wagner could almost work). The music score also uses Bach, especially the Goldberg Variations, most effectively.

I saw this on a Saturday afternoon at Landmark E Street in Washington DC, to an almost full house, mostly college-age men -- and the audience did not seem to be impressed that it had seen anything very original. I don't feel or experience the protagonist's urges myself, so my experience of the movie was a little bit motivated by curiosity ("voyeurism"?)

Fox Searchlight’s official site is here. I suppose we could applaud Fox for letting the MPAA actually give the film its "rating" and make the case (sometimes stated by Roger Ebert) that grown-ups need real movies where "persons under 17 will not be admitted". But I can't say that this particular movie makes that case. But, true, the Hollywood bean counters ought to be less sensitive to the social connotations of official ratings.

"Game of your Life": a kid in a video-game summer camp finds a real "conflict of interest"

2011-12-02T19:21:00.000-08:00

Tonight NBC presented a “Walmart PG Family Movie” from writer/director John Kent Harrison, Rosemont Pictures (and “IamRogue?”), “Game of your Life”. Titus Makin, Jr. plays a college freshman Zach who gets an internship in a summer camp to work in dorm-live-in teams with other students to design video games. His widower father (with whom he plays a game of checkers (not chess) in an early scene) is in financial trouble over a subprime mortgage and unemployment. The summer camp requires that kids not accept any outside employment as part of a “conflict-of-interest” clause. When a shady investor (Marcus Bentton) approaches Zach about a lucrative gaming contract, a conflict develops, and for a while, Zach gives into temptation.

The gaming environment was to be a mixture of Second Life and Facebook, with avatars building circles or preferred lists of friends, and a variety of shadow-motion games. (I once subbed in a technology class where some kids were playing shadow tennis, and others were writing java code for it.)

Was the “conflict of interest” real? I once had such a workplace conflict that I have sometimes discussed on these blogs – it wasn’t real to everyone, but it created a serious crisis in 1999. And mine was more related to a specific political issue.

Curiously, I can’t find this film on imdb yet. Other kids' parts are play by Nathan Kress, Adam Kagley, and Dana De La Garza. In the film, as on many campuses, the "kids" have a place in enforcing the honor code and conflict of interest rules.

Here is the site for the film.

First picture: robotics display at the Yotel, 10th Ave. and 42nd St, NYC.

"The Revenge of the Electric Car": Chris Paine's indie sequel to a "Kill"

2011-11-30T15:40:00.000-08:00

In 2006, Sony Pictures Classics had distributed the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” by Chris Paine, in which it was related that an electric car had existed in the 1920s, and that a conspiracy led to its destruction (literally) in the 90s. In 2011, Paine has a sequel, a digital video from a much smaller distributor (Area23a), “The Revenge of the Electric Car”.

The film starts with an area shot of a California cloverlead, and then Wall Street reporter Dan Neil is telling us that he is sold on going all electric. Soon Tim Robbins takes over the narrative, which traces the resurgence of the electric car particularly at the restructured GM, at Tesla Motors (under the charismatic entrepreneur Elon Musk), and Reverend Gadget, who has to recover from being burned out of a facility and then working in another garage filled with toxins.

There are many side stories in the film, such as Musk’s earlier venture with Paypal, the ascendance of Carlos Ghson at Nissan (with impressive footage of Tokyo), and the career of Bob Lutz. There is a lot of footage shot in Detroit and suburban Michigan, and coverage of the foreclosure blight as it spreads past the milepost roads in the burbs.

There is not much attention given to the hybrid, and a lot is said to praise totally electric cars with a range of 100 miles. We need about a 400 mile range for total electric to be really usable.

The official site is here.

Wikipedia attribution link for picture of NASA Lithium ion polymer battery.

"Role/Play": LGBT drama explores openness for public figures, integrity for political activists

2011-11-29T19:10:00.000-08:00

The little drama “Role/Play” by Rob Williams (Guest House Films, 2010, about 85 minutes), taking place almost entirely within a small resort, the Alexander, in Palm Springs CA, manages to cover a lot of contemporary territory about both personal integrity (double lives are no longer “in”) and freedom of expression – even if the film focuses on a particular gay-related political problem (the Proposition 8 fight in California), the moral principles generalize readily for everyone.

The film is “framed” as an interview, a perhaps redundant narrative device, except we can rightly wonder what “happens” to actor Graham Windsor (Steve Callahan), and what the “incident” was.

Graham checks into the gay resort run by a senior-approaching Alex (David Pevsner), and doesn’t enjoy talking to his agent. He’s been summarily fired from the cast of a soap opera after a sex tape made by a former partner Parker (Matthew Stephen Herrick, the most obviously attractive character for those who want to see “masculinity”, even if his screen time is short) surfaced in the tabloids (and on the web). It was violation of a “morals clause” that got him axed, not his “sexual orientation”.

Then “gay marriage” activist Trey Reed (Matthew Montgomery) checks in, with the innkeeper Alex having set up a “marriage” suite with a cake, but Trey has already broken up.

Graham and Trey develop a “relationship”, in which each character starts to shift his position on openness and expression. Trey has been the “professional West Hollywood gay” who got married during the “donut hole” period before Proposition 8 kicked in, to prove a point. He didn’t do it for love. He has all these interesting theories as to why gay bookstores and gay media are failing (that could be a reference to the failure of Windows Media, but the constituent papers, like the Washington Blade, have bounced back strong on their own, thank you.) Graham wants to live a double life, a private life. That is hardly possible anymore with Facebook’s “real identity” policy (I call it the “do ask do tell policy”). As the drama progresses (and the film really starts to become like an off-Broadway play), we learn that Graham’s motives were already changing and he longed for a unified public life. The film dialogue does explore the different standard of “privacy” allowed in the law for “public figures” (as a price for “right of publicity”) but leads us to believe there is not a good ethical reason for a different standard any more. The tagline “Who are you pretending to be?” applies well.

The film makes interesting points about soap opera – and we all know that some of soaps are getting cancelled, and the film certainly gives us an idea why. It’s true that soaps tend to pander to an old-fashioned idea about the patriarchal family: that a man must succeed at it before doing anything else, lest his life be laid out for him by others. Soaps have nerd-like characters (like Nick, played by Blake Berris in “Days of our Lives”) set up in situations demanding them to respond to women whether they want to or not. The treatment of gay issues on soap opera has been at best patronizing and superficial in many cases.

As physically portrayed, Graham is already 40-something, and his smoothness looks artificial (he rather reminds me of “Brady” on “Days of our Lives”, in a future time-lapse). Trey is more like a 30-something, not perfect, but at least appealing.

The film makes some interesting references to other movies and celebrities. Honorable mention is given to “Whatever happened to Baby Jane?” (the classic from Bette Davis and Joan Crawford) and “My Dinner with Andre” (always a favorite of Roger Ebert and the late Gene Siskel). And a couple of times the possibility of a crush on Anderson Cooper is mentioned. (You wonder whether Brian Boitano, mentioned in SouthPark, is next.)

Here is the official site. The film can be rented on YouTube for $3.99 or rented from Netlfix with subscription.

The DVD has a 15-minute short subject about the screenwriting of the film (really, almost about writing movies in general), “Getting into Character”, narrated, produced and directed by Anthony Palato.

The PBS film “Smothered: The Censorship Struggles of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour”, which deals with censorship of speech by public figures at least tangentially, was reviewed on my TV blog yesterday.

Wikipedia attribution link for Palm Springs picture. I visited the area last in February, 2002.

Norway's "Troll Hunter" is both a "monster movie" and a take-off on "Blair Witch" and "Last Broadcast"

2011-11-28T19:36:00.000-08:00

The Norwegian horror spoof “TrollHunter” (“Trolljegeren”), dir. Andre Overdal, seems on one level to be an ambitious takeoff on amateur road haunts like “Blair Witch Project” and “The Last Broadcast” (the later of these is about the Pine Barrens Jersey Devil). "Troll Hunter" is also a monster movie (maybe even "The Monster Movie" (replacing "An American Werewolf in London" for the honorable title), one in which the “monster(s)” appears about a third the way through, but there’s a lot of politicking about what it all means. There was a Swedish “chiller” from the 50s, “Invasion of the Animal People”, that comes to mind.

Some college students go into the wild to investigate a supposed bear poacher Hans (Otto Jespersen), but pretty soon he gives up his classified secret and reveals that he is a clandestine troll hunter for the Norwegian government. There’s the usual cover-up, and denials, more or less as if trolls were extraterrestrial aliens or sasquatches. In fact, they’re made into fascinating monsters, crude, living for thousands of years, reproducing slowly, vulnerable to sunlight, prone to explode or turn to stone, which actually incites some religious tests.

The movie plot is framed by a claim that the students disappeared, and that a friend received a DVD documenting their whole experience. Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud) is the most conspicuous of the kids and often narrates, but his own demise could come. There are subtle clues early that this project of voyeurism (earning academic credit in college film school) comes with its bodily costs: the kids are told to scrub the hairier parts of their bodies to remove any human odor, and then cover themselves with smelly troll goo to smell like the beasts, to attract them. It works.

Here’s the official site. The film can be rented from YouTube for $3.99 (or from Netflix with subscription). The US distributor is Magnolia Pictures (Magnet), and in the UK it's Momentum.

Technically, the film is impressive (though just 1.85:1), with good night photography, and stunning Norwegian scenery. I visited Norway in 1972, taking the train from Oslo to Bergen, then flying to Trondheim, and then taking another train and bus to Narvik.

The idea that a secret conspiracy or hidden natural threat is passed around on media or among characters in a “treasure hunt” is often used in “science fiction”, particularly in stores that challenge our perception of everyday reality and presents the possibility of massive plots and coverups. In my novel manuscript “Brothers”, the CIA brings back an ex-military person (now teaching history) as an agent when it learns of a bizarre “Andromeda strain” of sorts from a precious college student, who contacts the agent, who brings the evidence back from Europe, to have it passed to other “targets” in a covert right wing group known to a friend of the college student. The strain “infects” the agent, and other people, with bizarre plot twists (some of them political) eventually leading to the realization that the number of souls in the world is reaching a limit and will contract.

In another screenplay, “Titanium”, a journalist receives a bizarre beta hi-fi tape that has to have been made in the 1980s, leading him to connect some characters at a private academy to supernatural things.

In David Lynch’s “Lost Highway”, the arrival of mystery tapes at the saxophonist’s home drives the early part of the plot, eventually involving dopplegangers and identity-change.

Wikipedia attribution link for picture of Narvik.

The title of this film is ironic for me, inasmuch as I have blogged about the "copyright trolls" (like Righthaven).

Hallmark's "Mitch Albom's 'Have a Little Faith'" premiers first on ABC

2011-11-27T20:24:00.000-08:00

ABC, on Thanksgiving Sunday, presented Hallmark’s “Mitch Albom’s ‘Have a Little Faith’”, based on the Detroit sportswriter’s book of the same name. Compared to some other faith-based films, it seems a little bit didactic (after all the action in “Courageous”, Nov. 10). It's directed by Jon Avnet ("Righteous Kill", "Fried Green Tomatoes").

Mitch (Bradley Whitford) is asked by an aging rabbi Albert Lewis (Martin Landau) to write his memoir or eulogy – and it’s a bit deal for a writer to be so “commissioned”. The rabbi is aging and says he is approaching his earthly end, but is still active and sharp mentally. Along his journey, Mitch meets a man from a Detroit homeless shelter. After Mitch spends a night there (it’s much more crowded than Army barracks), he meets the ex-con pastor Henry Covington (Laurence Fishburne) who runs it, as well as an new congregation (the “I am my brother’s keeper Church”) in an old downtown Presbyterian Church building with huge holes in the roof. The writer’s journey into real faith starts. The early part of the film tells Covington’s back story of crime in NYC. But the connection to Albom is not made clear until the film's middle, which to me seems like a structural flaw in the screenwriting.

The movie makes a lot of simple plays on words: the difference between “books” and “action”; later it depicts Covington as having been told by his father to “take what he wants.” Lewis notes that babies are born with their fists clenched, as if to “take”, but a person’s hands open as life progresses.

Mitch will say he is not “better” than the people in Convington’s world, or even smarter, just luckier. Knowledge itself is not the goal, but the process of searching for it is what matters. He starts out and stays within the perspective of his own Judaism, while embracing Christianity at the same time, particularly at the end as the church is repaired.

Here is Hallmark’s site.

"The Green": important drama about a falsely accused gay male teacher

2011-11-26T14:15:00.000-08:00

Wolfe released its new controversial drama “The Green” about the perils of a gay male teacher on Nov. 22. I’m sure that the distributor and film production staff, when scheduling the release of the film, had no inkling of what would suddenly unfold at Penn State. But as I watched the film, and the accumulation of hysteria around a falsely accused (fictitious) teacher, I felt a definite chill and sense of panic myself.

The title of the film is an understatement. Forty-somethings Michael Gavin (Jason Butler Harner) and Daniel (Cheyenne Jackson) have left New York for a “green” life in suburban Connecticut. Despite the recent legal changes, they’re not quite ready for formal gay marriage. Michael is having contractors fix up an old house. Michael teaches (high school) English and drama at a private Yardley Academy, which in the inner halls isn’t so different from a typical suburban public school. My own father, back in the 50s, used to ask “Why would a man want to teach English?” – a prejudiced question, as my 10^th grade English teacher (a football star) was actually one of the best I had. It seems that Yardley has its own share of troubled kids, and one of them, Jason (Chris Bert) is attracting attention by skipping class and failing classes while still focusing on his own world. We don’t know for a little while how desperate his family situation is. His redneck father is suspicious of everyone, including Michael. One day, some other kids try to bully Jason, and Michael breaks it up, with due assertiveness. That’s the right thing to do, we say. But Jason says he is picked on because Michael pays attention to him, and pretty soon Michael is called into the principal’s office and then arrested on phony charges of an “inappropriate relationship” with Jason.

Enter the hotshot lawyer, a British woman (Mary McCann). She minces no words, concluding that this is a shakedown by Jason’s family for money. She says, “you’re a gay may teacher, and a student has made an accusation, and that’s all that matters. The best I can do is prevent a conviction”. Michael is out on bail (not shown), put pretty quickly the prejudice and anger from the townspeople (with no facts, only rumor) is manifest. His contractor quits, leaving his open roof open to an approaching hurricane. His lover Daniel starts to fight and is about to leave him. A minor gay character from the local pub Glenn (Michael Godere, who looks ten years younger than his imdb age, probably always) sometimes tries to smooth things over. The police confiscate his lover’s computer. And so on.

In any good screenplay, the protagonist has to draw on some hidden character resource to solve his problems and provide the film a climax. In this movie, the solution will come from a series of coincidences involving the storm, forcing Michael to confront Jason’s father. The film bypasses what could have been a complicated and interesting courtroom drama – that would have made another movie.

The film could be compared to Lionsgate’s “Student Seduction” (2003), discussed here May 4, 2010, in which a female chemistry is accosted by a male student and then accused. In that film, the prosecutors and court system plays much more into the story.

Then there is my own screenplay short, “The Sub”, which I have worked in a “layer” of a bigger screenplay for my “Do Ask Do Tell” film. In that film, an older gay male teacher, call him “Protagonist”, has a cardiac arrest at school and a precious music student saves him with a defibrillator. Protagonist is an amateur composer himself, and this leads the student to invite the teacher home. The teacher, after recovery, goes (unwise). Soon the student has tricked him into helping him make a fake ID to get into a gay bar. By “happenstance” the student appears at the same time on a weekend night as Protagonist, and they dance. Soon Protagonist is arrested at school. His own lawyer is also blunt and not too sympathetic (just as in this film). The district attorney wants to offer him a “deal” of no jail if he will register (as a “sex offender”). But then Protagonist dies of another heart attack, but the student performs his music.

Here’s the official site. This effort, directed by Steven Williford and written with Paul Marcarelli, is important viewing (for adults), but perhaps a bit painful to watch. I have to admit that I didn’t “like” the characters as much as I did in some other LGBT films. I hope Wolfe Video and Table Ten Films can get it into theaters (like Landmark or AMC Independent; I simply purchased it from Amazon). It is shot in full 2.35:1.

It's important to note that the film is almost pure drama (it seems like a stage play at times), probably in the PG-13 area. There is almost nothing explicitly shown in the film.