Change Your Image
michaelj108
Reviews
Another Earth (2011)
A diamond in the rough
Recommended for adults. This is a diamond in the rough. It glitters with the intensity of the narrative and of the two lead players: The crippled man and the guilt-ridden girl, he nearly psychotic and she certainly neurotic, each with good reason.
What's to like?
liked the living Jupiter in the opening sequence. liked the video boxing scene. liked the essay about the losers people who go first. liked the other earth hanging in the sky ever an invitation to think twice. liked the chance meeting with a one-time high school class mate at the convenience store and his incomprehension that she is a janitor and her directness in saying so. liked the working class side of New Haven in the fall and winter as a setting. Barren, foggy, hard, bleak.... Yet the spring will come. liked the saw concert for one. liked that there was no resolution at the end just more questions and I really liked the very end but cannot talk about it without spoiling it. It was quite unexpected and yet dead obvious, both at once.
Cryptic and enigmatic at times, but it assumes an audience of adults who will not implode if everything isn't rammed home with shouting, primary colors, and capital letters, an audience of adults who might think about what is going on. The air of mystery that hangs over the film adds to its forlorn appeal. For example, the elderly janitor? His suicide attempt makes no sense and does not relate to either the major theme (the other Earth that is within us all) or the minor theme (the relationship of the wounded man and broken girl).
Rough edges shows in some of the photography and camera work. Please use a tripod in the future.
Sleep Dealer (2008)
Arresting and unpredictable.
Based on the premise of labor without laborers. The usual Mexican preoccupations with El Norte are there, but nicely balanced and understated. No preaching.
It depicts a future only a few minutes away from today. Mexicans work in Mexico controlling via the internet robots in the USA that do everything from construction to nannies. They use Waldo's plugged into their nervous system. But there is no surfeit of tech-speak. A peon from the arid interior comes to Tijuana at the now completely closed USA border to work in one of the implant factories. He meets a writer who sells stories, memories. The drone operator who killed the peon's father seeks him out through the writer.
Understated and visually dark, but arresting and unpredictable.
Ilektra (1962)
Stark, spare, and powerful.
Euripides pared to the essentials. Not one word, not one gesture is wasted. Nor is there ever an iota more than necessary.
A stark, spare study of despair in a sun blasted landscape that seems to watch over the pathetic efforts of humans with equal measures of timeless indifference and utter contempt. The characters in the story, the actors on the screen, and we in audience know what will happen next; but we are all powerless to prevent it. It is so intense that it makes Shakespeare's 'King Lear' seem almost frivolous.
It takes five minutes for the first two words to be spoken. 'Strike him!' Everything flows from that line. Another ten minutes of near silence passes before Electra appears. Her back to the camera, she turns to look over her shoulder - electricity is discharged. The audience gasps. Nothing is said but the implacable will is communicated. Nothing good is going to happen next.
It is almost a silent movie. They certainly have faces, to quote Gloria Graham from 'Sunset Boulevard.' By looks, by camera angles, by gestures, by the tensing of shoulders, the widening of eyes, make-up, fine photography, tight cutting, and very few words the tragedy unfolds.
It is always about Electra, to be sure, and Irene Pappas is a force of nature on the screen. She says little but each move, gesture, look, and word is supercharged.
Recommended for adults.
Moneyball (2011)
Too much Pitt, too little baseball
I will comment first on the movie as a movie and then on sabermetrics.
The movie is a typical Hollywood ego picture for Brad Pitt, who is an Adonis to be sure, now if he could just change his smug expression once a while, when not looking into a mirror. Fortunately, the screenplay does not ask much of him. Fat Boy does the nerd-lifting, leaving Pitt free to spit, grin, punch telephones (which work faster if punched), pump iron, drive a gas guzzler, and other macho pursuits, though strangely no women. Fat Boy stares at the video, enters the data, runs the algorithms, produces the spread-sheets, and spouts the numbers. Evidently a Hollywood leading man cannot be seen reading data or studying a problem.
The screenplay sets up tensions that are painfully obvious and contrived and then abandoned, first with the scouts and then the manager. Neither of these is resolved, they simply drop out. A careful viewer will conclude some of the scouts resigned or were dismissed. But it is just guesswork. Likewise the manager, who looked painfully bored by the whole thing, is an obstacle and fades away.
Endowing Pitt's Beane with a double back-story is another Hollywood standard to keep the focus on the lead. The first back-story is Beane's own baseball career. The second is the ex-wife and daughter. Neither contributed to the storyline and both were poorly done, but they gratified the need to make Pitt into some kind of sympathetic hero, since his acting is not going to engage us. Sabermetrics got into baseball without need of these stale conventions.
In fact, Sabermetircs has been around a long time and there have been others in baseball who have taken an interest in it, including Beane's predecessor in Oakland. So Pitt's Beane was not the singular voice of reason presented here. Moreover, Sabermetics does not produce a single number as Fat Boy is made to say. It produces many, maybe too many, for most purposes. Specifically, On Base Percentage (OBP) is certainly important, but the film presents it as the absolute. As anyone of those scouts who are deprecated in the film would say, a team can put two runners on base every inning and never score. A few, clipped scenes where Beane and Fat Boy talk to players about specifics is good but not enough to balance the matter.
Sabermetrics has the most to offer strategically. It makes sense for a general manager to consider that kind of data. The essential difference between sabermetics and the orthodox baseball data is that the former factors in games won, whereas the latter are always isolated absolutes. A batting average, an RBI total are taken alone and out of context. There are batters with impressive averages and big RBI totals whose hits and runs batted in come in 11-0 routes, and never in 2-2 ties. At the end of the season they have big numbers.
Neither OBP nor RBI total are absolutes. As to OBP, since it is the focus of this movie to the extent it has focus apart from Adonis, tactically, to win a game it takes more than a high OBP or RBI total. In the bottom of the ninth, with one out and the tying run at third, a batter who gets a walk does not win the game. But maybe a batter who can hit a high, long fly ball for a sacrifice or maybe a batter who knows how to bunt, they can win the game. The skill set does come into the equation to produce those numbers and a naif watching the movie would never know that.
I will certainly concede that baseball has long been the most hidebound and inward looking of the professional sports. Professional basketball and football have been much more open to social and technological change than baseball since the year dot. Moreover, baseball has always been replete with numerical data which has been subjected to only the most primitive analysis, e.g., batting average, or earned run average. Making more use of the data available does make sense. But the movie hardly indicates how that is done. There was just too little baseball.
Sherlock (2010)
An exciting re-invigoration of the franchise.
A wonderful adaption and up-date of Sherlock Holmes. Brisk, coherent, and contemporary. It seems effortless. He is Sherlock Homes and this is Dr Watson. The references to the stories are like coded messages to those of us who have read them, but they do not obscure the fun for those new to the franchise. I watched them one-after-another, I was so hooked, while traveling. I ordered the DVDs while still on the road and when I got home I watched them again with the family. A hit with all concerned. I am now giving the DVDs as Christmas presents this year. The first one, 'A Study in Pink' was made twice, first as a pilot and then again for broadcast. That is a luxury but the results show. 'A Study in Pink' is brilliant. London is a character that determines some events. The streets, the rooftops channel action. The addition of Mycroft in the broadcast version is priceless.
I have read the stories, some more than once, and seen all of the Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett films more than once. I have also seen just about every other Holmes film in English. Once 'A Study in Pink' started I did not think about any of them.
I rather liked the restaurant scene in the pilot more than in the broadcast version of 'A Study in Pink.' Compare the two on DVD and make up your own mind.
I marveled at the use of IT and the effort to project Holmes's thinking. Never seen anything like it before. It also offers by implication an explanation of why the perfectly normal John Watson puts up with the condescending, irritating, self-centered twit that is Sherlock Holmes.
I also found the introduction of Moriarty's name powerful.
I am left wondering about Holmes and Watson will get out of the cliff-hangers they were left in at the end of 'The Great Game.' I definitely want a lot more of 'Sherlock!'
I clicked the Spoiler box just to be safe.
Pars vite et reviens tard (2007)
A very special film: Slow and methodical.
The story is taken from a novel in a series by Fred Vargas. Inspector Adamsberg figures in most, but not all of those novels, each of which has an odd plot. I felt that I knew Adamsberg from the several novels, six in all. José Garcia is perfect. Adamsberg is vague, lonely, uncommunicative, and – at times – brilliant. He would be an irritating fellow to work with or for. Only his lieutenant Adrien Danglard has the patience and persistence to put up with his eccentricities, one of which is an inability to remember people's names, including his subordinates and colleagues. Perhaps the author intends this feature to indicate his unwillingness to commit to others. Adamsberg is at least as remote and annoying as Sherlock Holmes, but in different ways.
The film makes the local community a character in the story. The Bar Viking, the plaza, the boarding house, the regulars all add to the texture of the story, and to some degree determine events. There are chases for those who must see movement and color on the screen to stay tuned, one over rooftops and another on roller skates. There is a shoot out for those who must have noise, though it seemed to add nothing to either plot or character.
But the center of the film is Adamsberg, brooding and intense without saying a word very often. It is an unusual approach these days to rely on acting, rather than shouting, guns, or special effects, but it works. Garcia is compassionate and dedicated, but he is also guarded and vulnerable. He makes mistakes, but presses on. He does not defy authority, but occasionally asserts it slowly and steadily.
When Adamsberg's famed intuition does occur, he is as confused by it, as the viewer is, but he works through it, as do we along with him.
I hope the film leads to more the Vargas books being filmed and that José Garcia plays Adamsberg again, and again. This film was the last credit for the great Michel Serrault. He gave us much to think about over the years and a great deal of pleasure, too.
The Sandbaggers (1978)
If you want James Bond, go to the library
The best line in all the episodes is in the first one, titled "First Principles."
The odious Neil Burnside flies to Oslo only to rebuke his Norwegian colleague face-to-face with a short, sharp lecture delivered at the boarding gate of the airplane, brusk and aggressive as Burnside nearly always is, on what it takes to succeed in the Cold War. Burnside says the Norwegians must learn more about how intelligence works and that takestime. His Norwegian counterpart protests that there was no time and action was necessary. Action was taken and it ended disastrously.
"If you want James Bond, go to the library," Burnside replies. Hasty action gets good agents killed as it did in this case. If you want success then do the hard, boring, endless, tedious, and detailed work of preparation. Read maps, study weather patterns, train and train again, learn languages, stockpile equipment that may never be used, argue over budgets to do these tasks, guard against cost-cutting pressures, consider every possible and few impossible alternatives, and then start over. Most of all jealously preserve the capacity to take action from the most insidious and constant threat against the capacity to act and that is the office politics of any large organization, the competition for resources, for recognition, for promotion, for one's ideas, and so on.
That brief dialogue sets the theme for most of the rest of the Sandbaggers where the focus is first on securing the Sandbaggers in the dangerous and ruthless world of Whitehall. In Whitehall it makes sense to send assassins economy class on long international flights and expect them to do the killing efficiently and secretly and return economy class. That is far cheaper.
One of Burnside's recurrent fights is over budget for exactly such needs as first class travel for the Sandbaggers who do the killing. (There is no point in hiding behind metaphors like "dirty work" or "heavy lifting" because mostly the Sandbaggers kill. If anything less than murder was required, someone else could do it.) Anyone working in an organization knows all of this to be true, and "The Sandbaggers" is on this score one of the most realistic television programs ever made. It is all about budget most of the time.
Seven Days in May (1964)
A meditation of democracy's strengthens and weaknesses
I focus on one long scene: the confrontation between President Jordan Lyman and General James Mattoon Scott.
It is a compelling dialog about democracy. The general is full of himself, and realized effortlessly as only Burt Lancaster could do, an under-rated actor by all but Luchino Visconti. The beleaguered president, played with enormous conviction and depth by Frederich March, still has one thing the general does not have, an electoral mandate.
While the film seems far fetched, a coup d'état in the United States, as others have noted, the underlying tension is real. There are times when the elected government may well have lost the confidence of the electorate, but it clings on because the constitution permits or indeed requires it to do so. The election occurred in the past, by definition, and events may have wrought great changes, or the government, in this case embodied in one man, the president, may have changed course for one reason or another. That electoral mandate is then a thing of the past, or so it may seem.
There are many examples, an Australian prime minster was removed from office in mid-term as recently as 1975, Israeli governments have stumbled as changing coalitions have produced policies from pure air, the threat of coup d'état against Charles DeGaulle over Algerian independence was very real. More mundane examples likewise abound.
An elected government confronts the reality of the responsibility of office and has to change its rhetoric form the carefree days of opposition to the hard edges of government. Its supporters feel betrayed and the opposition beats the drum for a change of government. In such a situation why wait for constitutional niceties? Throw the rascals out, now! Indeed, why not? Because in the longer run this kind of mob rule and demagoguery destroys order, stability, and continuity. The voice of the mob is not the voice of the people. Why not? Read on to find out why not.
What is the worth of that dated mandate? President Lyman then makes an argument that the process that produced the mandate stands above all else, and it guarantees the continued worth of the mandate, dated or not. Process? The democratic election that yield President Lyman, that process.
General Scott claims to represent the will of the people, and just maybe he does in the film. That is the tension. He may be as much right as wrong. He may be right about the will of the people. But he certainly wrong about the voice of the people.
The voice of the people is not heard on talk-back radio, in studio audiences of public affairs television, newspaper letter pages, bars, and lobbies. The voice of the people is heard in the ballot box. That is Lyman's argument.
If he has exceeded his mandate, if the will of the people has truly changed as Scott believes, then the voice of the people will be heard at the next scheduled election. To make that happen all Scott needs to do is declare his candidacy and run for election. He can do that at any time.
Scott argues that time does not permit the luxury of democracy. The threat is real, material, and immediate. He might be right. Yes, also, this is ever the usurpers argument. It convinced Brutus to strike at Caesar. It led many well meaning people to support Adolf Hitler. Even if right, Scott is also wrong in a much more important way than he is right.
That is the great constraint of democracy. It fixes the occasions of election in one way or another in any political system. The rhythm of elections may not match the rhythm of events. But to breach democracy in accord with the rhythm of events may be itself be more destructive than anything else because it destroys the process. That is Lyman's reply.
After all, if the Soviets see a military seizure of power in the United States that alone will be sufficient to cause them to attack right now. The very thing to be avoided will be provoked by the effort to prevent it. But that kind of second guessing is just that, speculative second guessing.
The note that Lyman strikes repeatedly is that democracy is the open and endless opportunity for anyone to take to the soapbox and rally the voice of the people, and that is the one thing General Scott has conspicuously failed to do. He speaks only to those who already agree with him. One of the hallmarks of democracy is that it requires those who seek office to meet those who do not yet agree with them. Though there is a lot of nonsense in electoral campaigns that essential requirement remains. To win any candidate has to get votes from that vast bulk of voters who are not ideologues.
Rather than face the auditorium with it noisy but vigorous disorder, his meetings have been in closed offices, underground car parks, back rooms, and the like, all this to save democracy from
itself.
Edge of Darkness (1985)
Changing policy is easy, changing people is impossible
One of the central political points of the story is that policies come and go, but people stay. When one policy is set in motion, it rolls on, even if back at headquarters the policy has changed. Darius Jedburgh explains the changes of policies in Washington to Ron Craven, with a shrug. The policy changed but the people who worked for the previous policy went on. Policies can be turned on and off, in this case, by executive orders, but people cannot. When Jedburgh set up GAIA he recruited believers who would do some serious work, and when Washington policy changed, they just kept going as best they could. There is an important message here that few people in the policy business never get. Once something is started, it may take on a life of it own. The lesson to draw then is to be careful about what is started, a lesson few learn.
Il generale Della Rovere (1959)
A measured story of spiritual growth
An understated masterpiece, this film charts the moral growth in nearly the worst of times of Victorio Grimaldi played by Vittorio De Sica. Other comments set out the main lines of the plot and note the excellence of de Sica as the not-good, but not all-bad, Grimaldi who is just trying to survive, like everyone else. But it evolves in a story of one man trying to live up to the expectations of others, who have had it even harder than he has. Planted in the prison to impersonate the heroic General della Rovere, Grimaldi slowly begins to act like the leader that Rovere was. In one touching scene, while under a terrifying bombardment, he cowers in his cell only to stiffen himself to shout out encouragement to the others, before collapsing in prayer and mortal dread. In this two or three minute episode we learn more about courage than from a score of action movies and thrillers. And of course Grimaldi learns something about himself, too, in a way, and also something about General della Rovere. Toward the end Grimaldi takes on the role of the now dead general so completely that he writes a letter to the general's wife encouraging her to persevere, while he willingly faces execution by the Germans to set an example to other Italians to resist. It is a powerful story of growth, self-realization, and redemption in terrible conditions, though there is also a hint of Italian patriotism, too. The film is hard to get but I managed it a few years ago on VHS, so seekers, persist! It is worth the effort.
The War That Never Ends (1991)
It is available on DVD and VHS.
This film is available on DVD and VHS. A reference librarian found it for me on educational audio-visual web site and I ordered it from there. I cannot remember details now, but don't give up without trying to find it. Not everything out there pops up on a google search or on the IMDb shop at the top right of the screen.
The film takes liberties with the text, of course, to trim the story to seventy minutes. The major debates are there, and also the infamous dialogue at Melos. For some reason part of an ersatz Platonic dialogue, the Hippias, is inserted in the middle, concerning the education of warriors, I guess is the justification. Bob Peck is superb as the doomed Nicias at Syracuse. I have screened in a class a few times with students, for some of whom it is an eye-opener about how powerful the words are without the slam bang of special effects.
Deutschlandspiel (2000)
The politics of German unification
The film is a documentary about the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of East Germany, and German re-unification. It is essential viewing for those interested in national and international politics. It combines film footage of the time with subsequent interviews and re-enactments. The result is dazzling panorama with three layers. First we see archival footage of Helmut Kohl, West German chancellor bumbling through a media conference in 1988 and then in a re-enactment we see him in private negotiating the purchase of Germans from the East and finally an interview with him for the film in 2000. (Yes, he bought Germans from the East German regime.) In addition there are interviews with most of the other major players in this great game, Mikhail Gorbachev, George Bush senior, and Margaret Thatcher. It is a brilliant investigation into one of the most extraordinary events of Twentieth Century politics. In a 1979 article that respected magazine the National Geographic opined that East Germany was the one place where communism worked. A 1961 film with Jimmy Cagney, "One, Two, Three" had a more realistic judgment of East Germany – a good place to leave - than the august National Geographic. Within ten years of publishing that article East Germans voted with their feet and left. The film charts the spontaneous exodus that started by a mistake, but once started it could not be stopped. Those who marveled at the strange and small micro world of divided Berlin in The Promise (Das Versprechen) (1995) may find the macro perspective of "The German Game" provides a context. Kohl emerges as something of a hero. He was pressured by all of his allies, starting with the closest and more important one, France, not to interfere in tottering East Germany, least it upset the balance of power and draw a reaction from the Soviet Union. To Mitterrand's voice President Bush senior and British Prime Minister Thatcher both added theirs, insisting that West Germany remain passive. Kohl has been described, even today, by journalists who should know better as "not a bright man" (Jean LeCouture) and a "wooden Titan" (Neil Ashendon), but he seems to have known one thing, that this was Germany's chance and he took it without hesitation. He pressed ahead despite the demands of his allies, and they were demands, especially from Thatcher, invoking fears of World War II and making it clear she did not want a united Germany, and Mitterrand, much more subtly (he was called Le Chinoise because of his famed inscrutability), equally preferred a divided Germany dependent on its closest and most important ally, France. But the real heroes of this story are the individual East Germans, who after forty years of ruthless oppression and murderous hegemonic rule, made their own decisions and drove those Trabants (an automobile built in East Germany and famed for its unreliability, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant) on the circuitous route west at far greater risk than Chancellor Kohl faced. I saw it but once on television with subtitles but I have been able to find a subtitled DVD. It is available from Amazon Germany (despite the blank link to the right above for Amazon Deustchland)but only in German with German subtitles (for the English, American, French, and Russian speakers). My comments are based on a single viewing a few years ago.
A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004)
A few points
The film is dominated by the dead Lorraine and the atmosphere of NOLA. Within that context the three central characters come to terms with each other, and through that experience each finds some solace if not redemption. As others say, it is uneven in a number of ways. Those distracted by the trivia of slippers, accents, and guitar picks will be distracted. It is a daring choice both by the director and the actor to cast a vigorous 51 year-old John Travolta as a ruined hulk who still has a twinkle is his eye. The film is a self-conscious entry to the list of Southern Gothic works from Shirley Ann Grau's The Keepers of the House, to Calder Willingham's End as Man, and William Stryon, Lie down in Darkness, only one of which has been filmed: End as a Man, under another title. A few literary references seem appropriate for Professor Long.