Departures – A Review

July 5, 2009 ~ bythefirelight

Departures is a movie for crying if the tears streaming down the faces of several women in the audience is any indication. While the movie is about undertakers, it is really about family and the search for the healing when a family falls apart. The film follows Daigo a cellist who is laid off from his job and takes a new job in his village of birth as an undertaker. For western audiences undertaker here means someone who washes, dresses, and makes up the body as the family watches. It is very ritualized and as they do the washing the film suggests there is not so much a closure but a briefest healing for the families. At first Daigo is the reluctant novice, but he soon learns he has a talent for the job and begins to like the ritual of it. As he begins to understand the job more and how important it is for the families to see him clean the body, his family and friends distance themselves from him. Yet he perseveres and when those same families and friends see him wash the bodies of their loved ones they understand how important he is to the process of taking care of the dead. In addition to the families who watch him work, Daigo is also trying to come to terms with his father who abandoned him when he was just a boy. It was so long ago he can not even remember him.

The power in the film is located in continual sense of healing, of the families who have been arguing about the death, suddenly seeing the loved one as they were or as the family wants to remember the loved one. The grief is naturally hard on the families but the under takers, but the ritual is calming not only in the sense that the family sees a new the loved one, but the grief becomes part of the ritual which in turn becomes part of the ritual of life. From the sense of healing Daigo and the other undertakers become part of life cycle of the town they live in and as much as the film is about the dead it is about the rituals about the every day. It is not by chance that Diago has to leave Tokyo to find the calmer rhythms of a Japan from the past. Ultimately, when Diago resolves the issues with his father not only is there the same healing for him that he has seen with the families, but the course of life has made its natural progression. To compare Departures to a Japanese tea ceromony or the care taken in flower arangements might be over stating it, but the movie leaves one with that sense of tranquility and suggest while that ritural and tranquilty may not end grief it helps.

Karl Malden – RIP

July 2, 2009 ~ bythefirelight

I don’t normally post about actors, but Karl Malden (NYT obit) always seemed to be real, normal, all those adjectives that seem unactor-like. Perhaps because it was the Streets of San Francisco (A Quinn Martin Production) was my first experience with his work. I was only 13 or 14 when I saw the shows in rerun a few years after the show had ended. Malden’s character always seems reasoned and impassioned, but not the kind of over the top stress ball that is in vogue these days. He seemed fatherly for a time when the sitcom father had long since passed into unreality.

His role in Patton, too, is remarkable. Again he makes the General Bradley seem the every man, which was his reputation. More importantly, though, it has always made me think, it isn’t the prima donas that run the world, but the every man who can control them. Of course, this isn’t quite true, but the way he plays the role makes it seem that way.

The General (El General) – A Review

June 17, 2009June 14, 2009 ~ bythefirelight

The General is a documentary about Plutarco Elías Calles, the former President and revolutionary general. But in watching it you will not learn much about the man. Instead, what you learn is fleeting, brief, like the memories of his daughter whose voice describe what he and Mexico were like after the Revolution. The daughter’s memories and the bits of history that fill out his story are fragments of a larger story: the failure of the Revolution to live up to its promises.

The General is Calles’ great grand daughter’s attempt to discover who Calles was and what his legacy was. She looks not only at the historical sources, newspapers, her grandmother’s recorded memoirs, but the lives of the Mexicans in Mexico City. Did the brutality of his regime change anything? Did the Revolution itself change anything? The verdict is no. With 500,000 street vendors in Mexico City 80 years after his presidency, it is obvious what ever he left Mexico it didn’t work. The interviews with the people of Mexico City all come to one conclusion: nothing has changed and the rich still get away with everything while the poor still suffer.

The General is a must for anyone who is interested in Mexico. Although it isn’t a traditional history of Calles, the interweaving of history, memory and documentary makes for a good film.

Lovely Loneliness (Amorosa Soledad) – A Review

June 16, 2009June 14, 2009 ~ bythefirelight

Lovely Loneliness is a sweet film of broken romance and the loneliness that follows. Following the Soledad (Inés Efron) as she slowly gets over her boy friend who dumped her, the movie isn’t concerned with plot, but the interior life of Soledad. Soledad isn’t morose, though. Far from it. She goes about her life with a certain style that lets her survive. She is also a little strange. She is probably a hypochondriac. There are many scenes of her going to the doctor’s office or checking her blood pressure with her home blood pressure machine. Between the scenes of her loneliness in her apartment and those of her medical preoccupations, Soledad is a captivating mix of the lost and the eccentric. Efron’s portrayal is excellent and she is quite captivating. The film is funny, too, but jokes are not the point. Instead, it is the slight melancholy that seems to be just off screen as if Soledad was just barely surviving, that makes the movie enjoyable. For a first film, it is a solid movie and one worth watching.

Kanchivaram – A Review

June 15, 2009June 14, 2009 ~ bythefirelight

Kanchivaram (A Communist Confession) is a beautiful and sad film, but not an oppressive film of endless sorrow. And despite the foreshadowing of doom that the frame story creates there is humor and a resolution, that dark, is in the end hopeful.

The SIFF guide describes the film quite well:

Every Indian bride dreams of wearing a delicate Kanchivaram sari on her wedding day, no matter her caste. On the day of his daughter’s “first feeding,” Vengadam (Prakash Raj) promises her one of the same expensive saris that he weaves daily for the highest caste in India. Despite resistance from the village community and fears that an unfulfilled promise will lead to a curse, Vengadam risks his livelihood to steal individual vivid silk threads from his workplace. Every night, he secretly and patiently weaves his daughter’s sari. As his daughter’s wedding day approaches, a communist activist initiates strikes against the mill owners, preventing Vengadam from completing the sari and from keeping his promise.

Ultimately, Vengadam, who is the leader of the strikers, ends the strike so he can finish the sari before his daughter’s wedding day. In doing so he breaks the bond between the two families and when the father of the groom attacks him for his cowardice in ending the strike, the mill owners discover he is stealing thread. He is sent to prison and only release for two days to see his daughter who has fallen down a well and is paralyzed. Seeing she has no future in a land that neither respects the poor, nor women, he poisons her. Although, he could not provide her the sari on her wedding day, he can provide it for her funeral. The last we see Vengadam he has sunk into madness and is pulling the silk sari that is to short to cover her whole body from her head to her feet over and over, unable to realize he came close to giving her a silk silk.

What makes the film intriguing besides its will written story is the politics of the film. Although they live in misery and poverty, Vengadam has a bicycle and they make enough to eat. They do not live in the starkest of poverty, yet they do earn much from their highly skilled labor. While the organizer is a communist and has pictures of Lenin the workers only are interested in forming a union or a cooperative. The workers suffer for months during the strike, some even die. Yet they are all committed to the strike. Vengadam suffers the least because he had a little money saved up. In a film with such political leanings, the locus of the film is in the personal and for Vengadam the personal is where one suffers. At the end of the film after Vengadam has gone mad, the film makers note that just a few years latter after independence, the state voted communists in and the workers formed cooperatives that exist today and pay the workers well.

Kanchivaram is part history and part political work. It borders on the misery of the poor, yet it is a film that is also of those who should not be poor, those have skills. So in this sense the film is tragic and hopeful at the same time. Sad for one family, but hopeful for the weavers as a whole. This mix distances the viewer some what from the brutality that comes from poverty and makes the film seem lighter than it should. Adding to this is the framing narrative of the bus ride which adds comedy. So after watching it you don’t have so much a sense of injustice exists, but it is too bad for that one family. That shift in focus makes the politics more subtle and ultimately the film more interesting.

The SIFF guide describes the film quite well:

Every Indian bride dreams of wearing a delicate Kanchivaram sari on her wedding day, no matter her caste. On the day of his daughter’s “first feeding,” Vengadam (Prakash Raj) promises her one of the same expensive saris that he weaves daily for the highest caste in India. Despite resistance from the village community and fears that an unfulfilled promise will lead to a curse, Vengadam risks his livelihood to steal individual vivid silk threads from his workplace. Every night, he secretly and patiently weaves his daughter’s sari. As his daughter’s wedding day approaches, a communist activist initiates strikes against the mill owners, preventing Vengadam from completing the sari and from keeping his promise.

Stunning colors punctuate this strong Tamil-language narrative, where the setting acts as another character in the well-woven script. Though history contextualizes Kanchivaram it’s Vengadam’s strong desire that drives the film’s mystical tone and sensitive approach to the social realities of India’s caste structure.

Four Chapters – A Review

June 14, 2009 ~ bythefirelight

Four Chapters is one of those films where you have the feeling that you might have gotten just a bit more if you were from the country of origin. While meditative, well shot, and having a slow beauty, the spiritual search seems distant and troubled, as if something is missing. And perhaps that is the point—spiritual journeys are never easy.

Based on Rabindranath Tagore’s Four Chapters, Sachish is a young man who breaks with his father’s Hindu religious beliefs to follow his reformist uncle who is willing to feed poor Muslims, which scandalizes the family. When his brother’s young mistress becomes pregnant and is abandoned by him, Sachish offers to marry her to save her from the street. Again, it creates a scandal and the mistress kills herself before the wedding can occur. His uncle then begings a hospital, but soon sucumbs to a fever and dies, leaving Sachish grief stricken. He joins an ashram where he has given up all worldly attachment and follows a guru. Sachish’s friend comes to the ashram seeking to convince Sachish that the guru is a fraud, but, instead, he stays with Sachish to see if faith could be better than the skepticism of his uncle. While they are with the guru they meet Damini who is a widow and a ward of the guru. She sees Sachish and wants to break him free from his allegence to the guru and marry her. Although she tries, he is unwilling. Eventually, they leave the guru so Sachish can find an even deeper faith. Damini who has no other options marries Sachish’s friend who has grown attached to her. Damini and her husband return to the world of work while the last we see of Sachish he is staring at the sea watching singing Sufis walk by.

Four Chapters is even handed in the way it looks at faith. At first it seems as if the guru is going to be a corrupt man, more interested in the physical world than the spiritual. He does need money to run his ashram, but he doesn’t seem to spend it on himself. He is a patriarchal man who thinks women need to be taken care of and supervised. Instead, the criticism is aimed more at the rich families who invite in the gurus, pay them for personal advice, then continue their profligate lives. The gurus are just answering a call. This is why Sachish has to leave the ashram and find something even more spiritual, something that leaves the work of the guru behind. At the beginning of the movie it is Sachish’s father who is spiritual but also doesn’t want to have anything to do with poor Muslims. Sachish who first takes on the asceticism of social reform is natural upset by this and distances himself from his family. It this initial conflict that frames the search for spiritual meaning against the use of spiritualism as something to make you feel better about yourself.

Four Chapters is also interested in looking at how women are treated. Damini has no freedom. As a widow she is dependent of the guru who received her husbands estate, an estate which Damini’s father gave her. She becomes a prisoner in her own estate. To find freedom she must marry again. This is why she trys to attach herself to Sachish. Damini is in a similar position to the woman that Sachish was going to marry at the beginning of the film. She, too, didn’t have any options for life without a man.

Four Chapters is a good film that blends the search for spiritual faith with that of social criticism. It is interested in the subtleties of hypocrisy rather than out and out castigation. That stance makes it a subtle and, at times, slow. Nevertheless, it is worth seeing.

Inland – A Review

June 8, 2009June 7, 2009 ~ bythefirelight

The mistake I made in selecting this film was not paying attention to the last line of the review which said the film ” compared to Antonioni.” Oh, the tedium for this loose (which is kind) and boring film. When you read the description below you might think it has potential but only when you get one hour into it do you even know why Malek is in the country side. But what was worse were all the long scenes of almost nothing, just the country side going by. Perhaps there was 20 minutes of dialog in over 130 minutes. Definitely not worth seeing. The only saving grace was the five minute Raï party, which gave you some idea how a traditional party might go. Otherwise not worth the time. If only someone had written a better movie to go along with the synopsis.

Malek is a reclusive topographer who accepts a commission to survey a remote part of western Algeria in order to extend the electrical grid. He arrives to find the area has been decimated by religious fundamentalists who have only recently cleared out. Malek meets the local police, the shepherds who are beginning to return, and villagers who invite him to a makeshift party. In the middle of the night, he is awakened by the sound of explosions. Not to worry, explains a local man. When the cicadas land in the sand, it’s enough to trigger off the buried booby-traps. But as Malek soon realizes, it isn’t cicadas setting off the mines, but refugees trying to reach the coast and a boat for Spain. The next day he finds a young woman, exhausted and terrified, hiding in a corner of his shack. Malek decides to drive her to the border, and together they set out toward some indeterminate vanishing point on the horizon. These present-day realities are interspersed with flashbacks to the idealistic political debates of his youth, and set against a soundtrack that mixes alternative rock, Nigerian Afrobeat, and Algerian Rai. With his minimalist approach to plot and dialogue, and mesmerizing cinematography, director Tariq Teguia has been compared to Antonioni. (from the SIFF site)

The Maid – A Review

June 5, 2009June 4, 2009 ~ bythefirelight

The Maid is one of those claustrophobic movies that seldom roams into varied locations and keeps to one character almost all the time, yet feels open and finds in the littlest of actions an expansive interior world. The interior world for the viewer, though, is a mystery, because it is unverbalized. The Maid is a visual movie, almost seeming like a narratorless documentary. It is in the subtle scenes and excellent acting of the actor who plays Raquel that makes the anything but dry.

As the movie opens that employs Raquel is trying to celebrate her 40th birthday. She is unwilling to celebrate it with them, though. Is she shy, or afraid? It is not clear. What is obvious is she is a quiet, pensive character. She goes about her work quickly and efficiently, but also disturbs the older daughter while sleeping in a fit of vindictiveness. She protests to the mother of the family about bringing in another maid to helper, saying she has always taken care of the family for 20 years. When a maid is brought in anyway, she locks her out of the house. When another maid is brought in she locks her out of the house too. Through all this strange behavior, though, the family keeps her. Finally, though, what ever was bothering her leads to her collapse and she ends up in the hospital driven in a panic by the family as if she was their own child. While she is in the hospital the family brings in a new maid, Lucy. Lucy is unlike the other maids and when Raquel returns to work and tries to lock her out of the house instead of trying to get back in the house, begins to nude sunbathe. It breaks the ice between them and they soon become friends and Raquel goes with her to her family’s farm for Christmas, something it is implied she hadn’t done since she’d lived with the family. When Lucy leaves, Raquel is disappointed, but instead of retreating into her old shell, takes up one of Lucy’s hobbies, jogging. As the movie ends Raquel is running down a street in listening to music and dressed just like Lucy when she went jogging.

Raquel is a mystery. What is bothering her and why is she taking it out on the family? What is apparent is her need for a wider experience, not so much in adventures in the world, but among friends. She has lived with a very paternal family that appreciates her, but does constrain her. She has lived with them for 20 years and has known almost nothing else. She is cut off from her family for a reason that is never explained but obviously bothers her. She is part child that has never grown moving into the family at 20 and a perfectionist who can no longer stand the exactitude. When she goes to Lucy’s she goes to bed with Lucy’s uncle but is unable to consummate the night probably because it is outside her experience. Moreover, the family she lives with is very religious with crucifixes in every room and prayers every night. Between her youth, her inexperience and the family she lives with, she is struggling to grow up. When Lucy comes, she presents a new avenue, not just another maid just like her. The final scene of the film is of Raquel taking on not only the persona of Lucy, but a new persona that is free of the house and her past.

The even handedness of the film as it finds Raquel and Raquel finds herself is what makes the film so good. It is a search without the conventions of search; a movie of self discovery without the clichés of self discovery. It is a movie where the questions you are left with will begin the search and extend the film beyond the theater—the mark of a good film.

Apron Strings – A Review

June 3, 2009May 31, 2009 ~ bythefirelight

Apron Strings is a family and identity drama from New Zealand that tells the story of two families, one of British origin and the other Indian. Mixing food and the questions of identity, Apron Strings is a nice, if some what light, film that explores broader topics of identity through the familiar.

The British family has worked in the same neighborhood for years and watched it change and become more multi-ethnic. The proprietor of the shop, a woman of 62 years, is frustrated by the changes, particularly the garlic that comes from the shop next door. The proprietor’s son is a gambling addict who is in hock to the owner of a Vietnamese bakery who wants to buy his mother’s shop. At the same time, her daughter has just become a single mother, giving birth to a black baby, which does not please her. Eventually, the mother realizes that her son has to be kicked out of the house because he is only taking advantage of her. Despite the problems with her son she is able to reconcile with her daughter.

The Indian family is composed of two sisters, one who has a curry shop and is part of the Sikh community, but still single at 40, and the other who is a famous TV chef who has not seen her sister in 20 years. The son of the TV chef takes a job in the curry shop without telling his aunt who he is. The son begins to learn about his past and begins to turn against his mother some. When his aunt, though, finds out he is gay, she shuns him. His mother comes to see her sister and they reconcile and she convinces her sister to accept her son.

The strength of the movie is its even handedness. There are no monsters, just the little slights that life has: TV producers that want to make the chef into the sterotype of an Indian goddess; the familly that shuns the gay son; the mother unable at first to accept a mixed race grandson. In this sense the film veres away from long arguments and fights about identity and chooses a quieter, more meditative path. There are a few moments of violence and shouting, but in all the film tries to show identity affects the family. Every family member brings a different identity and each family member must deal with those as best they can.

In Apron Strings, though, the strength becomes a bit of a weakness in that all the problems within the families are resolved at the end of the movie. The resolution lightens the questions it did have, because in resolving an issue in a film, the audience is left with nothing to take away: resolution leads to niceness. Nothing ever resolves that easily.

Apron Strings spends quite a bit of time contrasting of food cultures: the curry shop, the macrobiotic diet of the daughter, the proprietor’s great cakes and bland British style cooking. I wish this had been a little bit more in the forefront. It might have made the movie just a bit more memorable.

Apron Strings is a good film with a nice story and worth watching if it ever comes your way.

Star Trek – A Review

June 2, 2009May 31, 2009 ~ bythefirelight

You have a few options when thinking about a movie like Star Trek. You can either lambaste it for the silliness of the action genre, or try to think about it on its own terms, within its own genre. Certainly the former can only lead to disappointment, because this is a pure action movie filled with explosions and malevolent characters that create a black and white element. As an action movie, Star Trek is typical: characters without depth, or are action standards such as the troubled hot head. Granted Star Trek relies on a back story with forty years of history that fills in the gaps, but take that away and the movie is easily summed up: bad guys come to town, brave hot head saves everyone.

Thinking about the movie in its own terms as sci-fi or part of the Star Trek family the movie does improve, but not really that much. Sure, a fan of Star Trek has to see it to know what is being done with the story, but it doesn’t have much more to offer. What made it weak wasn’t so much the rewriting of the Star Trek time line, but the silliness of it. How can a bunch of cadets become captains, etc. so quickly? For good or bad, Star Trek had the logic of a different world where there were rules that lead one to where they are. In this movie, to get Kirk to be the captain, the film makers had to jump him from cadet to captain in five minutes. It seems like a quibble, but it was the kind of shortcut that is typical of an action movie: a nobody saves the day.

I will skip tiresome introductions and pet phrases of the supporting cast, something that seemed to be required, but was usually tedious and seemed to be more about pleasing the old Trek fans, than creating a more plausible story. I suppose Wrath of Khan was probably the best of the films, most likely because they were able to balance the characters so much better. Besides possibly the Borg Queen, is there a memorable villain from another Star Trek movie?

The movie is two hours of time spent, nothing more, even if you are a fan of Star Trek.

Chef’s Special – A Review

May 30, 2009 ~ bythefirelight

Big Night meets the Bird Cage might be the best way to describe this gay cooking comedy. It was funny in the way that slapstick and exaggerated characters can be: fun for a while, but not good for a repeat viewing. It was an at times funny movie filled with stereotypes that were played well: the flamboyant gay man, the ex-punk, the desperately lonely woman, the parents who are unable to understand the gay son and either make constant jokes or are constantly praying to God for his salvation. Mix all those together and you’re bound to get some laughs. At times, though, the movie seemed a little slow, in part because it is more than just comedy. The chef also has two children with whom he has a bad relationship. In particular, the relationship with the son is troubled and the film is much more serious. In these scenes the film slows down and could have been treated a little better in serious film. The real problems between the two are somewhat distracting and would be better served in a less comedic way where the topic is respected more.

The description from the SIFF guide describes the part of the film quite well: “Maxi is a master chef who wants a Michelin star so badly he can taste it. After years of toiling in his chic Madrid restaurant, he feels he’s on the brink of culinary superstardom—that is, until Maxi’s two estranged children show up on his doorstep. Not only are the children grieving over the recent death of their mother, they must now come to terms with their father’s openly gay lifestyle. To complicate matters further, Horacio, a sexy Argentine ex-soccer star, moves in next door, diverting the attentions of both Maxi and Alex, the restaurant’s unstable maître d’.” The soccer player, though, is in the closet becuase he is afraid of the homophobic sports world.

In all it is a light romantic/family/food comedy that has its moments.

The Anarchist’s Wife – A Review

May 28, 2009 ~ bythefirelight

Every war once it begins to be committed to film has its own cliches. The Anarchist’s Wife from film makers Marie Noelle and Peter Sehr is full of those from the Spanish Civil War as it attempts to tell the sweeping love story of a young wife who stands valiantly by her husband’s side. Really it is always the risk with a war film because if it is not out and out propaganda, then it is easy to fall into the passion trap. The passion trap is where the passions of the war filter into construction of the story and infect the story with either heart wrenching shouting or overly emotive writing.

Unfortunately, The Anarchist’s Wife piles on the cliches and the shouting and the crying so that by the end of the movie you wonder did they leave anything out? Probably the most glaring cliche, or, to be kind, simplistic device, is the complicated political alliances of the family members. The wife’s brother is a Republican, her husband a Republican, and his brother and his wife a Fascist. To make it hear wrenching the sister-in-law is summarily executed by a Republican and the the young brother is executed by the Fascists. While all of this could have happened, it seems the film makers had to make sure they explained each side had its savage moments and that if someone dies on each side the emotion can be greater.

Eventually, the anarchist has to flee the fall of the government and goes into exile in France where he is put in a concentration camp.The wife waits for him and suffers the privations of the losers in the war. The wife is a fighter, but she comes off as a spoiled brat more annoying than anything else, wearing her old mink coat from when she was a rich anarchist, and unable to understand times had changed. Ultimately, though, she is allowed to go to France to reunite with her husband. At first it is happy, but then a mystery seems to swirl around him. Why is he so secretive? What is the relation with the French-German woman? Oh, they are plotting to bomb Franco from a small plane, that’s all. This is when the movie really lost its focus and really began to take on the cliches. Naturally they fail, but at least the wife and husband are together. Perhaps if the film had been about just this or without the assassination plot it would have been better.

Finally, the ending of the film was terrible. The last minute of the movie is closed by the narration of the daughter who says when Franco died Spain moved into democracy without out any problems, which isn’t true. Then she goes on to say everyone who knows a survivor must talk to them. A laudable goal, but a difficult one too. More importantly, though, it makes the film too self important. After sitting through the assassination plot that weakens what every power there was in the film, the ham handed command to talk to the survivors is just silly.

War films, easily to overloaded with passions and plot, are best left simple and shouldn’t try to encompass every last detail as The Anarchist’s Wife did.

The Watchmen – A Review

March 22, 2009March 21, 2009 ~ bythefirelight

The Watchmen is, perhaps, the best comic book movie ever made. It is a large qualification and one that does the movie a disservice, but despite the reworking of the typical comic book themes and an ending that avoids the superhero defeats super villain formula, some elements still cannot escape the genre and make the film a little awkward at times.

Based on the 1986 graphic novel, The Watchmen tells the story of a group of super heroes that were anything but the clean cut exemplars of American culture that Superman represents. Instead, in an excellent title sequence you learn how some were killed in scandalous ways, one ended up in a mental hospital, and others resorted to drink. It is a foretelling of the scandals, immoral behavior and the self righteous crusading. One of the great strengths of the film is to see superheroes as something other than heroic. When The Comedian shoots and murders his pregnant lover in Vietnam because he doesn’t want to have anything to do with her, it is a moment that undoes the whole facade of the heroic and makes the comic fantasies that have come before seem silly. What is worse is the all powerful Dr. Manhattan doesn’t do anything. Superman with his perfect sense of right and wrong has been replaced by a hero who is too unconcerned with the problems of everyday people.

The movie, too, avoids the usual convention where the super villain fights the super hero in a battle that goes on for five to ten minutes and millions of dollars of special effects. For the all the complexity that the super heroes might exhibit, the film in the end comes down to the grand battle, which is really a let down because it seldom has anything to do with the characters the heroes have. The Watchmen, on the other hand, avoids the problem because the conclusion of the film is based in a moral ambiguity: can one kill millions to save billions. Sure there is a fight between the heroes but it comes to nothing and only proves they dislike each other. It is a relief to see the lack of a grand show down, because it makes the movie about decisions, not power. If everything is about one’s powers then it doesn’t matter how complex the character is (or how mopey they are, which seems to be the case usually), it is the luck of the one’s powers, which naturally always tilts towards the good, that defines the movie and the characters.

The Watchmen is an excellent representative of a narrative imagination that was common in the 80’s where the extremes of right leads one to see concentration camps coming any day now. In The Watchmen there is a sense that the government would be completely happy to start building the camps to deal with the restless people. Both the Comedian and Rorschach are quite the right leaning vigilantes who see nothing good in the scum of the world as it has descended in to a cesspool of criminality. It is the same fear that shows up in various American punk bands of the time such as the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and the Suicidal Tendencies. In each there is a preoccupation with government power that turns fascistic.

The Watchmen, though, has its flaws. Its length is not necessarily one, although some may suggest 3 hours is excessive. The biggest problem is it can’t escape its comic book past. For all the cleverness in rewriting the genre it still uses conventions of the genre. So, at times the narration is weak, a cross between Raymond Chandler and a teenage kid when Rorschach is narrating, and boring when Dr. Manhattan is narrating. Moreover, Rorschach’s insights into human nature are quite tedious, as are some of the flashbacks that describe the various back stories. Silk Spectre II and Night Owl are a little light in the characterization department, and rewriting the way women are portrayed in comic books is certainly not the focus of The Watchmen, which is obvious from Silk Spectre’s costume. Having a lesbian character, Silhouette, only servers to underscore the male fantasy that is at work in the characterizations (granted, she is also the victim of a hate crime). Finally, Silk Spectre I could be quite a complex character, but loving one’s abuser is simplified so much that it suggests if you try to rape someone you may still have chance to have her fall in love with you. If one is going to embrace that theme, you really should dig deeper.

The best comic movie is probably a turn off to those who don’t care about the genre, either in film or the comic books themselves. Yet it is worth seeing if only to understand how far comics have and have not come over the years. Despite the seeming silliness of costumed heroes they are one of the great American inventions.

Vickie Christina Barcelona – A Review

March 21, 2009March 19, 2009 ~ bythefirelight ~ 2 Comments

Vickie Christina Barcelona should probably have been called Vickie Christina New York, since Barcelona has little to do with the film and New York, the alter ego of Woody Allen, is really where the movie should have been set. The film is filled with his usual preoccupations: failed relationships and the quixotic quest for happiness in a relationship. While Crimes and Misdemeanors and Deconstructing Harry weren’t necessarily funny, they were more they were more than just the light exotic fantasy that Vickie Christina Barcelona is.

Perhaps if the movie wasn’t so full of clichés it might have been a better movie. The first and most egregious was Penélope Cruz’s dark haired bundle of fire. The feisty, dark haired Spanish woman who is only interested in fighting but who can channel her passions to become the most intense lover, is an old cliché. Perhaps Allen had just seen Carmen when he wrote the movie? Then there is Bardem, the Spanish man, in other words, the Spanish lover who chases anything with a skirt, a cliché that only lets Allen explore his real interest, Vickie and Cristina. He is not interested in Spain, but a stereotype of Spain that lets him play with his real interests.

Unfortunately, the clichés are really the only Spanish elements in the film. Except for the occasional Spanish guitar music (which was often out of place: Catalan music in Oviedo, Spanish in Barcelona), the film might as well have been shot in New York. Yet had the film been shot in New York it would have had its own clichés that still would make the film one of his lesser efforts.

What makes the film weakest is Vickie and Christina are obscured by Bardem and Cruz and never really have a chance to be more than Americans on a lark. One has an affair the other a menage a trois, and both escape from their ordinary lives. The escapes, however, tell you little and though confusing for them, they are meant to be liberating as the women find themselves in the midst of new adventures. The escapes are contrasted against Judy, another American, who doesn’t love her husband. She is the antipathy of Christina—she wants adventure but is afraid to be free. Yet she is the more real character. The other two are on vacation and just as Bardem is something exotic, the freedom they have in Barcelona is the idealized freedom one feels in a city where one neither has to work nor to try to really belong.

In the hands of a lesser director the film would have been terrible, but Allen is able to make the film seem interesting despite the narration that instead of being cleaver, seems banal. Ultimately though, cliché and fantasy sinks the film.

Gomorrah – A Review

March 15, 2009March 14, 2009 ~ bythefirelight ~ 2 Comments

Gomorrah is not glamorous; it is the opposite of almost everything that one has come to expect from a gangster film. Gomorrah has one goal: point out that the mafia is anything but good, glamorous or culturally redeeming. And it does succeed quite well. Yet the opposite of glamor—poverty, the mundane, fear—are harder to make compelling and whereas the flashy crime life that is so common in films—Scar Face, Good Fellas, The Godfather—though ending in violence so often, have an allure that is hard to beat. What makes Gomorrah a good antidote to those films, is also what makes it less thrilling to watch. Simply said, problems aren’t as fun to watch as unrestrained luxury.

Gomorrah follows six characters whose lives are affected by the Naples mafia: a tailor who works for a mafia financed dress manufacturer; a man who delivers weekly money to the families of the mafia who have a family member in prison; a young boy who is just coming of age and wants to join the mafia; two boys who want to start their own mafia; a young man who has joined up with a Don who buys toxic waste and dumps it illegally. It is not obvious at first what is happening. The film is a series of interwoven stories and it cuts between each of the protagonists. For half the film the film is a series of snippets from the lives each and if you don’t know exactly what is happening, it is clear that the life they lead is not a good one. If the men are not dead or in jail they hang around the huge tenement on the outskirts of Naples that functions like a mafia housing complex. The tenement is not beautiful (although the architecture is so strange it worth it to see the movie just so you can see the building) and looks more like an Eastern Block apartment complex.

As the movie progresses the stories of the protagonists begin to take shape and if the confusion and seediness of the early part of the film served to undercut in glamor, the lives the protagonists actually live undercut any glamor one might find. It is obvious that those who join the mafia are destined to live at the edge of violence and the wealth they seek may exists for some, but it can disappear so quickly and isn’t that much anyways—€10,000 to kill someone, won’t last more than a week. Swirling through the film is an ever present war. It is not clear who is waring against who, and that, again, undercuts the glamor. All one knows is that someone could get killed at any time and the reasons are completely unknown. For the viewer there isn’t any one or group to bond to. Instead the arbitrariness makes the threat real and anxiety producing. The film is not about the audience bonding with characters, but pushing them away.

Some of the protagonists will survive, others will be killed; some will leave the mafia, some will become even more entrenched within it. Each, though, will find that they will loose something precious. Yet what they loose is in so many ways nothing worth having. One of the characters, Maria, when her husband joins the other side, refuses to leave the apartment the mafia has been paying for. She gets to keep it, but looses all her friends and lives in perpetual fear, and what does she have? An apartment in a decaying tenement that is surrounded by mafia lookouts where gunfire can start at a moments notice.

Gomorrah, as the end credits makes clear, wants to be everything a gangster film isn’t: cold, depressing, sad, fear inducing. It succeeds, yet that success comes at the price of a pleasing narrative, one that pulls you along in narrative bliss. Instead, it is more of a documentary full of uncertainties and the grim realities. While Gomorrah may be the best gangster film ever as our ticket taker said, it is not the most exhilarating one. That is the way it should be, but in a world where Tony Montana is someone to idolize, as the two boys do in the film, Gomorrah may only collect dust. I would hope, as the author seems to, that writing the book and making the movie helps deflate more of those mafia myths that continue to exist.

100% Arabica – A Review

March 14, 2009 ~ bythefirelight

If you want an insightful film that will explain the problems of Algerian immigrants in France, this is not the film. Yet it does have its moments and is a Raï fan’s attack on those problems, which gives it a certain weight. At the same time the film is a was a young persons film, one of those films that celebrates youth culture and asks why the adult world is so afraid of what the kids are doing these days.

The film follows a Raï band as they try to break out of their ghetto and make a living from their music. They are all former criminals and the temptation to steal is strong, especially since there are not too many opportunities in the ghetto. French discrimination of immigrants is quite well known and the film does not shy away from suggesting there isn’t much beyond the ghetto. While the band and the inhabits of the neighborhood try to live in peace, the local imam tries to get rich by imposing a fundamentalist form of Islam on the neighborhood. The imam is completely corrupt and is only interested in getting more people to support him. He works with the mayor, who is only interested in getting reelected and doesn’t care about what happens in the neighborhood, and takes his money to try and convince the neighborhood it should follow him.

The members of the band, fronted by Khaled, fight against all of these problems. They struggle to get money for a show, struggle against the imam who says music is forbidden, struggle with their parents who think they are bums. As in all musicals, though, the music is all powerful and everyone except the imam love the music. In the end, despite the machinations of the imam, the band celebrates with a triumphal show in the neighborhood and and the imam is driven from the neighborhood in a pork delivery truck. Music defeats intolerance.

The film is supposed to be a comedy and in a way it is, but it is seldom funny. Instead it comes off as a problem film with music. It is much better than Blackboard Jungle which is another problem film with young people’s music, because the musicians made the film. It shows the real preoccupations and problems the Algerian youth in France have. Every element, lack of jobs, corrupt officials, fundamentalist Imams, all have their bases in reality, and in this sense the movie is interesting. However, the narrative thread is week and so many characters come and go throughout the film that no character can develop very much. Everything in the film is for the insiders who can fill in the gaps, who know what it is like to live there. If you are an insider it makes for a pleasing film, if not, it makes for a film that is uneven.

The music, however, makes the film worth watching. There are several good performances by Khaled and Cheb Mami of some of their well known songs. The versions are not the album versions. Khaled has several good scenes where they show him working out a song and he is working with just one keyboard player and no mic. The performance is very intimate and well worth a watch.

In all, 100% Arabica is not one of the best movies but it if you have even a passing interest in Raï it is worth it.

Two Lovers – A Review

March 6, 2009March 5, 2009 ~ bythefirelight

Two Lovers is the latest retelling of Dostoevsky’s White Nights and although Visconti’s Le notti bianche so beautifully retold the story, Two Lovers is a welcome reworking of the subject. Where as Le notti bianche had the claustrophobic feel of post war Italy, with its impoverished inhabitants seemingly unable to even populate their own towns, but still feeling as if the narrow streets and years of tradition were constraining the oppressing the people, Two Lovers has the claustrophobic feel of a Jewish family with its community and traditions. In both films it is the tension between the main character’s desire to escape the constraints through an idealized love and the pressure to be part of some sort of ordinariness that drives the narrative.

As the film opens Leonard (Joaquin Pheonix) is crossing a dock and suddenly jumps into the water. It is a suicide attempt, but he is unwilling to go through it. He is unsure of suicide even though life hasn’t been what he wanted. His parents, concerned by his earlier mental health problems, introduce him to the daughter of his dad’s soon to be business partner. The business partner is Jewish like his family and also live in Brighton Beach, and though they are welcoming they offer a world he already has: middle class, but not exciting. He likes the daughter yet she is more of the same.

Shortly after Leonard meets Elizabeth who lives the life he has always wanted: full of night clubs and excitement, unattached to family, to questions of who she is. Yet the rootlessness comes at a cost. Elizabeth is a former addict and lives in an apartment that her married lover pays for, but she has to wait for her lover to make time away from his wife before he will see her.

Ultimately, it is not so much the choice between the two women, but how he makes the choice that shapes the tenor of the movie. Leonard is a romantic and neurotic and uncertain. He knows how to take a chance and when Elizabeth leaves her lover because he was not at her side when she miscarried, Leonard makes his move. Leonard and Elizabeth after a tearful and intense sex of the rooftop of their apartment building, plan to move to San Fransisco together. It is an impulsive move indicative of Elizabeth’s troubles and Leonard’s dreaming. Leonard, though, is alive—he is finally escaping the family. As a true romantic he buys a ring for Elizabeth. It is obvious that Elizabeth who has just broken up with her lover is not ready for this, she just wants to escape, but Leonard is too obtuse, a dreamer caught in his own world of romance and escape.

Elizabeth changes her mind at the last moment and goes back to her boyfriend. Leonard, devastated, considers suicide again and returning to that first attempt at the beginning of the movie, he walks down to the seashore and looks as if he is going to walk into the water. He turns, though, back to the claustrophobia of his family, of their friends and realizes their is more stability with his girlfriend. It is not a music swelling moment, nor is it pessimistic, it is realistic, as if his dreams have not so much disappeared, but receded into the distance. The bitterness of the moment, a mix of anguish and the promise that although now it all seems so terrible now and will always be a melancholic part of his persona he still will be able to look back with just enough joy that the moment will become the melancholic hope that so typifies Italian Neorealism.

The conclusion is not surprising, perhaps, but it is fitting. Leonard is too unbalanced to live a wild rootless life. The clausterphobia of the film, so artly filmed, is not only what pushes Leonard away, but what shapes him and holds him together. He may not want to be the son-in-law of a dry cleaner, but he at some level feels safe in that world, and if he left the opposition that defines him would abate and he would be lost. It is not a romantic ending, but an ending that may actually bring him so sort of peace. A copule made of two troubled couples will only end in more trouble.

Alias Nick Beal – A Review

February 22, 2009February 21, 2009 ~ bythefirelight

Alias Nick Beal (1949) is a rare film noir that until recently was thought lost. Universal, though, has found the negative and a new print of this Faustian noir was show at Siff’s recent film noir festival. It is an excellent film that mixes mysterious cinematography, great acting and a good story to produce an atmospheric morality play with plenty of dark edges.

The film features Ray Milland as Nick Beal, the devil, who upon hearing a crusading DA say he’d give his soul to convict a big time criminal begins to tempt the DA. The DA is a good man only concerned with eradicating crime and helping kids with his foundation, but little by little Nick ingratiates himself in the DA’s life. First, he gives the DA the evidence he needs to convict the man even though he has to steal it. The theft is only the first step to loosing is soul. Along the way Nick arranges it so that the DA becomes Governor and has an affair with Audrey Totter. Totter’s character is a good woman who is seduced by the glamor Nick showers her with and the threat that Nick will tell the cops her where abouts, which scares her because she is wanted for something she didn’t do. Eventually, the DA, now the Governor, signs away his soul—not that he knows it. He only thinks he will go to the Isla de Almas Perdidas if he doesn’t keep Nick in the role of the Keeper of the State Seal. When Nick tries to collect on the bargin, the DA’s friend, a minister, accidently drops his bible on the contract. Nick, of course, can’t pick up the contract and so he cannot collect. The DA just barely escapes.

Ray Milland makes the movie work. His Nick is a malevelant man, always ready with an answer or money, cold, short tempered, and demanding. He doesn’t take no for an answer and seems to know everything. He almost seems to have the power to make one change their mind and what is worse, knows exactly what one is going to say. There is a particullarly brilliant scene where Nick tells Trotter how to convince the DA he should leave his wife. She is unconvinced it will work, but later he says exactly what Nick said he would. What makes the scene brilliant is the elment of commentary, as if the film makers were saying, this what they do in every film, of course it is going to work. Milland also gives Nick an unblinking stare and an expression that says he is ready to kill at a moment’s notice.When ever he enters a scene it becomes dark.

In true noir form, the DA battles between good and evil. His battle through most of the movie is one of little steps to damination. It isn’t so much the devil that makes him do it, but little compromises with his ideals. The DA, unfortunately, is a little too good, and his slide into darkness is a little too much. What makes it worse, though, is his sudden reversal. It is not his action, but divine intervention: the bible falls on the contract. Does this mean that to redemtion is a heavinly lottery that saves people from time to time? If the slide from good to bad was a little heavy handed, the sudden reversal undoes any responsibility one has to take. The DA had recanted the mistakes he had made, but he should have had to do more. The film, though, is more concernd with spiritual redemption and defeating the devil can only be done with the God’s help.

Despite the heavy handed morality play the film is solid. Every scene Milland is in is excellent and when he comes out of the havy fog that seems to permiate half the scenes he is the embodiment of evil. The cinemotography alone is worth watching. It is too bad the film isn’t available on DVD.

Night Editor – A Review

February 21, 2009February 21, 2009 ~ bythefirelight

The more obscure the noir film, the more it adheres to the genre’s conventions and Night Editor is as obscure and as B as they get. As film noir it has the classic femme fatal and the good man gone wrong who must choose between keeping a secret that will ruin him and doing the right thing. A cop (William Gargan) and his married socialite lover (blond Janis Carter) witness a brutal murder while making out by the ocean. He tries to apprehend the murderer but is afraid he will ruin his marriage and career both of which he has been putting in jeopardy to have the affair. She doesn’t want him to tell the truth because it will ruin her too. Naturally, such inaction is never rewarded and the cops soon arrest another man and accuse him with the murder, eventually sentencing him to the chair. Gargan’s character is wracked with guilt and tries to figure out how to do the right thing while keeping out of trouble. Of course that is impossible because the basic premise of a noir is the conflict between doing the right thing and saving yourself. What makes his problem worse is his lover, now ex-lover, doesn’t want to go to the police. Instead, she has taken up with the killer and is now protecting him, partly as revenge because he left her and partly because she is intoxicated by the murder, and partly because she thinks the victim deserved it. Although she turns fatal quite quickly, she is the true fatal: cold, ruthless, selfish, and sexy. The cop gets more and more irritable until his partner, a wise and kindly German, gets him to tell him the truth. The cop realizes he has evidence that will corroborate his story so they go to his ex-lover’s home to confront her. He finds her alone in the kitchen and after he has told her she has no way out she stabs him with an ice pick.

Night Editor, though, is not an existential fable of the best noir, but a morality play and though Carter’s character gives the movie a trashy joy, it suffers from its earnestness. First, the cop’s family is in such stark opposition to the jaded and glamorous world his lover comes from, it is obvious that the cop has made a mistake. How could one leave such an ideal world? Moreover, the film is more concerned with the rightness or wrongness of the affair, not what led to it, which would make room for moral ambiguity.

However, what makes the film completely awkward is the frame story that surrounds the movie. The film takes the name Night Editor because the framing device is a news room where editors talk about old stories. As the film opens a young reporter walks into the news room and passes out at his desk. The wise old editor decides to tell the story of a cop who had a good family and went astray. At the end of the movie when the editor has told the story, the young report sees the light and renounces the parting he has been doing. He goes to the restroom to buy cigarettes and there he meets the cop who now works as a mens room attendant. The reporter is so overcome by this example of where a bad decision can lead he heads right home to apologize.

Night Editor is one of those noir films that show just how common place the conventions of noir were and just how the basic elements were used as a template for the most B films. In many ways, its as if a certain number of films need love scenes and a certain number needed to have vicious blonds. What does it say about an era that needed to use women as mirrors for men’s consciouses.