Reviews

The movie (like the play) is about a boy who blinded some horses. Richard Burton plays a psychiatrist who figures out why, speechifies, and chews the scenery. The answer has something to do with the fact that a girl liked the boy but the boy liked and/or loved and/or idealized horses. I imagine that if you were to commission Salvador Dali and Bruno Bettelheim to concoct an inexplicable shocking incident and then a Freudian-adjacent explanation for it, you might get Equus. Thinking that the scenario is plausible is real life is beyond my powers of imagination. It's hilarious that this was once taken seriously. For all that, listening to Burton's mellifluous deep-sounding tirades is very enjoyable.

This kind of story is only really interesting if it is true to life. I don't know what the day to day texture of life tends to be like for Turks in Germany -- I don't even know if the characters are ethnic Turks or Kurds -- so I have to trust the movie. But I don't know whether I should. Yes, the outlines of the plot come from a true story. I can forgive the movie for ignoring that Germany and Turkey have both signed the Hague Abduction Convention, which would allow the father to get his son back. Yes, many parts of the Muslim world share the sense that honor is tied to being able to control one's women, and honor killings happen. Yes, some children in a family may acculturate differently than others. And, yes, it was nuanced. But that does not necessarily mean that the nuances are there in life rather than only in the director's head. Ingmar Bergman comes to mind, and Amos Gitai (some of whose movies I somehow forced myself to watch all the way through). My suspicions were also raised by When We Leave's contemplative quiet, which is common in this kind of art movie but not in real life. But, let me re-emphasize, I don't really know that the picture is a fantasy, I only suspect.

My review is based on two seasons, which is all that has been produced at the time of writing. I have not seen Homeland.

Two Israeli soldiers and a body are returned home after 17 years of captivity by a terrorist group in Syria. The details of the capture, imprisonment, and reactions in Israel draw on actual abductions, for example, Ron Arad, Gilad Shalit, Guy Hever (arguably), and others. The closest real-life Israeli parallel I can think of is the (mildly obscure) case of Massad Abu Toameh, who was kidnapped in Greece and secretly held in Syria for 14 years. There have been somewhat similar cases in the Arab world (not involving Israel) such as in Morocco, Syria, and Iraq. I wish I knew more about those, so I could better compare fiction to reality.

Season 1 follows the returnees and their families as they try to re- adapt to ordinary life, while gradually filling us in on what happened in captivity, some of which involved moral compromises and does not come into the light easily. It's gripping, and, as far as I can tell, fully plausible. Season 2 is more of a thriller, which I won't reveal the reason for. The second season contains significant implausibilities. Drew me in anyway.

The cover of the DVD I rented gave away too much of the plot. I'll try to avoid doing this. The characters in "Early Spring" talk explicitly about jobs and families, so I'll take that as a cue to do the same.

"Early Spring" feels rough -- mostly drab scenery, stark conflicts, and direct behavior. The movie begins with a long stretch of static scene-setting, and then abruptly becomes event-rich. I won't detail the plot, but will say that it and the characters and their actions are completely believable. Nothing is exaggerated or simplified to artificially enhance the drama or make a point.

Many of the characters are recent arrivals to the middle class, thanks to jobs on lower rungs of corporate offices. Business and personal lives are realistically interconnected, which is rare in movies. (Exceptions that come to mind are "The Sopranos," "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz," and movies by the Dardenne brothers.) Even when there is a collegial work atmosphere, the jobs can be punishing. The people don't fail to appreciate the benefits, and memories of poverty are fresh enough to keep them from romanticizing the alternatives. Orwell wrote that Dickens pointed to problems of capitalism, but offered no systematic program to fix them, and that the latter may be depth rather than shallowness. You could say the same about Ozu. "Early Spring" ends, not unlike Chekhov's "The Duel" and "Uncle Vanya," with resignation to circumstances, but also rebuilding and a sense of the redemptive value of work.

Amidst the morass of irrationality, antinomianism, and sanctimony that is The Sixties (celebrated, for example, in "Hair" and "A Hard Day's Night"), "Don't Look Back" is refreshingly, almost cathartically, lucid and morally serious. There isn't a conversation that isn't intelligent on at least one side. Dylan's discussions with and about musicians and poets sparkle with a thirst for poetic and musical expression. The music is passionate, serious, and enjoyable.

About the competitive and business aspects of music, Dylan is game and reasonable. His manager, without screaming or hostility, tries to hold the BBC to, apparently, previously implied promises they are backing away from on the grounds of a contrary general policy. There are no implausible pretenses to asceticism.

Dylan never attacks anyone weak or who does not deserve it. Members of Dylan's entourage who do things that are dangerous or wantonly destructive, such as throwing a glass out the window, are sought out for reprimand. A hanger-on who tries to coopt Dylan to the idea that the two of them are superior for, well, I'm not sure for what, is well flustered by Dylan's Socratic questioning of that superiority. Young fans are put at ease, treated gently, and, in a way that obviates their awe, probed for reactions to his music.

Two instances reflect badly on Dylan. He is suddenly hostile to a Time magazine reporter, and insists that he should not be called a folk singer. The reporter is taken aback and exasperated (notwithstanding that the claim is accurate for sufficiently narrow definitions of "folk"). He doesn't argue, but behind the eyes you can see a quick mental retrenchment. The reporter gingerly tries a new tack, and salvages interesting and perceptive impressions. Talk about a bravura performance. More troubling is a member of the Animals going uncriticized for opening a bottle with a hotel piano. Does Dylan let pass from a star what he would justly rebuke in an ordinary person? It happened behind Dylan's back. Maybe he was unaware of it.

Although I like theater, I'd never see any Strindberg before "Miss Julie," and almost all I knew was that he was one of Otto Weininger's biggest fans. As you'd expect from this, Strindberg is indeed whack, especially about women. Notwithstanding class and other constraints in 19th century Sweden, "Miss Julie" is compelling not because of any social realism but for its searing claustrophobia and barely suppressed hysteria. Saffron Burrows is stunningly, inhumanly beautiful.

Eric Rohmer's characters are mostly intellectuals, and mostly not so bright. On one hand, this is to Rohmer's credit, since it's realistic; on the other hand, the rarer characters with more penetrating intelligence (as in, especially, "My Night at Maude's") are nicer to listen to. Rohmer's characters love to yak on about ideas, art, and their feelings. The talk, on the most literal level, is generally unpersuasive, but relationships are formed through enjoyment of conversation, and character (not limited to vanity) is revealed via defensiveness and posturing.

"A Summer's Tale" follows twenty-something Gaspard during his summer vacation at a seaside resort town in Brittany. The people in the movie have fewer blind spots than most Rohmer characters, but not fewer difficulties. For a theme song, I'd suggest Weird Al Yankovic's "Good Enough For Now." The girl Gaspard had planned to meet alternately blows him off and strings him along. Another girl he meets, with whom there is palpable chemistry, has a distant boyfriend she doesn't seem very attached to. He vacillates on a third he is not crazy about but who bluntly conveys that she would take him. Gaspard is turned down twice for a romantic relationship (though not told to get lost entirely), and does the turning down once.

The interactions exhibit a believable mixture of genuine affection, indecision, and awkwardness. Rough edges are not glossed over as they might be by romanticism or in recollection. These might have been ingredients for a dull virtuous accuracy. But "A Summer's Tale" moves at a good pace, turns in the story feel natural and mostly not inevitable, and the whole is affecting and memorable.

This comment almost began with the question "Why have Israeli movies been such garbage?" I changed it because the problems are obvious (except to a large minority with ideological blinders). There's been great improvement recently, and with "Late Marriage" and "My First Sony," even brilliance.

"My First Sony" tells of a family in Tel Aviv, the father, an unsuccessful playwright; mother, an architect; and their three children. The middle son, a young teen-ager, showing signs of a future writer, videotapes everything -- hence the title. The older son has the most difficult relationship with the father. The youngest daughter, not yet a teenager, simply adores him.

The plot revolves, in wide rather than tight circles, around the father's compulsive and destructive juggling of lovers, seen especially through the eyes of the middle son. "My First Sony" gets the ups and downs from the father's perspective as well as most of I.B. Singer's books, and, like Singer, captures something of the inscrutability of human desire. The family's reactions are restrained by their awareness that they are bound together, and take a path between ultimatums and persuasion.

The characters are realistically responsive to the ideas in the air generally and among their middle-class and bookish crowd. For example, there is the pony-tailed, vaguely Rudolf Steiner-ish marriage counselor. At first I laughed at this, but then appreciated the subtle mix of trendiness and reasonableness. I laughed for longer at the art teacher in "Ghost World." On further reflection, this is not because one is a better parody or a truer-to-life non-parody, but because a high school teacher has a younger and captive audience and can get away with more.

"My First Sony" is consistently good on a range of central and passing concerns, never descending into false extremes or cliche: The observantness of children (as in "The 400 Blows," "The Sopranos," "La Promesse"). Risks and capriciousness of life (cf. "The Son's Room," "A Map of the World"). Work and money. "My First Sony" integrates all into full lives, tied together with light echoes of some unobtrusive and eloquent commentary.

There's a very rare honesty and charm to "Tokyo Pop." Although I never knew the music scene in Japan, so much in the movie is immediately recognizable from life: The naivete on many sides. The fun of being exotic for a while and the uses made of it. The value for Westerners of being in Japan for a while; the sterility of living there long-term (generally speaking). The harmless chintziness of much in Japan. A degree of gentleness. The story is believable and the characters endearing. In tune with the lightness of the movie, there are few of the crudest sorts of stupidity one is likely to run up against: Westerners who set themselves up as experts on everything under the sun. The Japanese love of grandiose abstractions; verbal bombast about uniqueness and subtlety. The extreme moral and intellectual obtuseness involved in occasionally hammering down nails that stick up. Or that if you are inclined to pithiness, then you too may be unsuited for life in Japan.

Most war movies are peopled by overgrown children, or technicians, or cartoon heroes and villains. "The Battle of Algiers" is nearly alone in its fully believable depiction of adults at a particular time and place being molded by wartime experience. Only "Band of Brothers," in my opinion and to my knowledge, is worthy of comparison. In the other direction, the formulaic leftism and phony pretensions to knowingness in Pontecorvo's "Queimada" result, I guess, from its subservience to the director's thoughts rather than close contact with real events.

"Algiers" is a more complete film than "Brothers," showing the battle, if not the entire war, from inception to results, from the perspectives of the all the main combatants and bystanders. This is possible because the historical conflict was more circumscribed, and, despite its documentary feel, because "Algiers" has more fictionalization, such as combining several real people into one character and inventing others. Nevertheless, and with the provisos that there are honest debates and I am no expert, fundamental strategy and character have not been essentially falsified.

The movie opens near the end of the battle, with a chillingly unexaggerated torture of a FLN rebel by the French army, and then proceeds to the beginning. "Algiers" shows a city that is largely either French and bourgeois, or Moslem and proletarian. Not comfortably so. The French have a professional army, but are in a demographically precarious position. Among the Moslems, socialism and secularism are in the air a bit. Most people fear being caught on the losing side, and try to wait and see. Consequentially, small numbers can tip the balance of power. Terrorism and threat of later reprisal are used to force people off or onto the fence. The rationale for the French strategy of policing and torture is also carefully laid out.

"Algiers" has a neither sentimentalized nor over-cynical understanding of human nature, and is very good at bringing alive the vagaries of charisma and public moods. At stake are lives, and ideology, and religion. The characters have thought hard about what is achievable, and what they are willing to sacrifice to win or survive. Appalling as are torture and random slaughter of innocents, by the end we have seen enough through the eyes of both sides to grasp how they came about.

In the closing scene, the FLN's loss of the battle is juxtaposed with its later winning of the war in a way that suggests that France's loss was the logical result of France's brutality. But the intervening period is not depicted, and, to the movie's credit, causation is not clearer than in life. With hindsight, which includes the knowledge that the FLN's current extremely brutal war against an Islamist rebellion has worked, we can see that effectiveness of tactics depends on many details. Even though we know the history, the movie's tension is genuine because the outcome was not preordained.

In most of Yasujiro Ozu's movies, and in all of the ones seen by me, the people are, more or less, middle class. In "Late Spring," that description holds just barely, as the characters belong to the extreme academic elite. (I did a postdoc in Japan, but didn't move in circles anywhere near that rarefied.)

"Late Spring" tells the story of a widowed father and his single daughter. The father, a professor of considerable status, is very much an iconoclast, with a familiarity with foreign cultures that is deep and broad. The daughter, at ease among her father's colleagues, casually eats bread and bakes cakes herself. In many circumstances, these behaviors surely precipitate hails of abuse faster than you can say Masao Miyamoto. Yet the father has not hardened into a simplistic contrarian or provocateur, but shows a broad-minded appreciation of the variety of things wanted from life, and a far-sighted sense of the effort needed to attain them.

Although the daughter is growing a bit old for marriage, she and her father have a comfortable and interesting relationship, and they could easily go on for some time as they are. Marriage would be an unpleasant disruption, as the father is otherwise alone, and the daughter, not in love with anyone, cannot expect to find a match as sophisticated and companionable. But there is no future for her in remaining single.

Like, and in contrast to, Spielberg's "A.I.," with its negative illustration that love entails a concern for the other's future, "Late Spring" has a strong positive illustration of this -- the father's love for the daughter is especially palpable. The movie follows father and daughter feeling out things during the course of work, at home, and among friends. While the plot is in one sense pedestrian, in another sense, this is a critical point in their lives, and it is extremely dramatic, not despite but because of the absence of false melodrama. And it is a pleasure to spend two hours observing these thoughtful and fully human characters.

By most descriptions, the father merely pretends to toy with the idea of remarrying so his daughter will let go, and in fact plans to live out his days alone. But I don't see the father as having completely closed off the possibility. A marriage is arranged for the daughter, one that strikes me as realistic and nice. What does come poignantly to an end with the daughter's wedding is the life shared with her father.

Sometimes I think George Bernard Shaw got it backwards when he said that sex could have no place in serious theater, since, if one is not a participant, it looks too ridiculous. Rather, sex is serious and watchable, but the sight of two other people in love is unbearably cutesy and inane. "Hiroshima mon amour" is hard to take on both counts. On top of that, even more inanely, the characters are prone to dubiously coherent philosophizing and posturing.

All this does exist in life. But the movie wallows unskeptically in the lovers' proclaimed profundities. The picture is unremittingly dingy. Nothing in it is enlightening. Ugh.

After hearing raves about Ali G for a year or so, "Indahouse" is the first I've seen of him other than Madonna's video. This affectionate parody of gangster chic and latent homosexuality resembles, and does not much improve on, Chris Elliott's characters on David Letterman. This is what the fuss is about?

Especially in the absence of many lively or engrossing movies from Chekhov's works -- "An Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano" and "Country Life" are exceptions -- Yasujiro Ozu strikes me as an excellent representative of many of Chekhov's sensibilities.

Dramas are on human scales: about love, relationships, work, day to day travail and pleasure, and desires to accomplish something in life. Concerned for and affectionate towards his characters, Ozu is mercilessly illusionless. People are creatures of their social and economic and educational backgrounds, but not mechanically or simplisticly so. Emotions are pitch-perfect and lucid -- to the audience, if not always to the characters. Conflicts and passions are tempered by characters' realistic self-perceptions and their practicality, with consequently no implausible hysterics.

Ozu's dramatic best, such as "Floating Weeds" or "Late Spring," compares quite well with the best of Chekhov's plays and stories. In moralizing mode, "Tokyo Story," Ozu descends to melodrama, with good characters being very, very sensitive and altruistic, and bad characters crudely selfish (cf. Chekhov's "The Darling," which is even worse, Tolstoy's idiosyncratic enthusiasm notwithstanding). Although this would be uninteresting in isolation, such types do exist in life, and in the context of Ozu's other movies, it is a worthwhile sample of human variety.

Which brings us to "Ohayo." Reasonably categorized as a comedy, it also resembles Chekhov's comedies, with similar strengths and weaknesses. The movie meanders around a couple plots -- children's conniving to get their parents to buy a television, and a suspected case of embezzling. Though the latter is potentially extremely serious, Ozu follows these conflicts and misunderstandings, and detours into his characters' other doings, with a light, unforced, sometimes quizzical amusement and compassion. This is the great value of the movie, and may, in fact, be its intended point. "Ohayo" is at bottom a comedy and not a deeply serious drama.

"Anna" is the movie with perhaps the greatest disparity between my opinion and everyone else's, so seems appropriate for my first comment on IMDb.

Anna (Sally Kirkland) was a legendary actress in Czechoslovakia, and in New York suffers a career in shabby productions with avant garde or artistic pretensions. Krystyna (Paulina Porizkova), an immigrant from Czechoslovakia with acting aspirations, spends her first days on the streets of New York searching for Anna, fainting from hunger virtually on her doorstep. Anna takes her in, and they become intimate friends.

Porizkova's Krystyna is as compellingly ambitious and wily as any of Werner Herzog's roles -- and this in an area calling for a subtler social sense. Krystyna seems not to be Anna's daughter, given up for adoption at a young age. But the malleability of memory -- Krystyna's in an obvious way, though perhaps also Anna's -- is treated more interestingly than in some of Agnieszka Holland's better known movies, such as "Olivier, Olivier" or "Europa, Europa." Almost as interesting as some real life cases: The erstwhile mental illness "fugue" comes to mind (see, for example, the Times Literary Supplement, 16 July 1999; as this is a movie database, I'll also point to "Paris, Texas" for a portrayal of the phenomenon). So does the case of Benjamin Wilkomirski. I could but won't extend this list.

On the negative side, the description of Jewish life in New York is a mixture of inappropriately projected Christian norms and condescension (maybe due to unfamiliarity, or laziness of imagination).