.
This month we got us some history, some biography, some animation, some film noir- old and new, some rock ’n’ roll, new chapters in both the Planet of the Apes series and the Jason Bourne franchise, some great finds and one big disappointment. All in all, these films constitute the usual suspects: cinema in all its multifaceted variation from cultures around the world… Groove!
(All ratings are on a 5 star scale. Note that a classic only becomes a classic after a decade or more.)
(Titles in purple have been expanded for Flix Pix columns.)
> This month I review the following 19 films:
GET OUT (2017)***
CHASING CORAL (2017)****
LOVING (2016)***+
LET THERE BE LIGHT (1946)*****
WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (2017)***+
CAPTAIN FANTASTIC (2017)***+
JASON BOURNE (2016)****
JACKIE (2016)**+
LAND OF MINE (2015)****
IN A LONELY PLACE (1950)***+
SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR(2014)***
IN LIKE FLINT (1967)***
CHICKEN LITTLE (2005)***
NATIONAL BIRD (2016)****+
FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS (2016)***+
CAMERAPERSON (2016)****+
EAT THAT QUESTION:
Frank Zappa in His Own Words (2016)****
49th PARALLEL (1941)****
A COFFEE IN BERLIN (2012)***+
– – – – – – – – – – – – –
GET OUT (2017) ***
> Big buzz on this one, the directorial debut of sketch comic Jordan Peele was reputed to shed some light on racial tensions in America… it does not.
. It merely uses racism to frame an otherwise standard horror flick.
. Even with a good performance from Daniel Kaluuya at the center of it, the film does not live up to its hype. The problem here might be me. I am hopelessly white. Perhaps I just don’t get it. But let me be clear: I don’t get it. Though entertaining, GET OUT just didn’t work for me.
. A black man is romantically involved with a comely white lass who seems to hail from a life of privilege. His black friend warns him that he is courting disaster by walking into this family dynamic when her parents are totally unaware of his ethnicity. But he is a modern man. He is willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. BAD IDEA, as it turns out. “Liberal” parents Bradley Whitford and Katherine Keener are more than patronizing snowflakes. They are monsters of sorts. (Without giving it away, I will say that it is not a terribly original concept. In fact, in my 20’s I shot a gothic horror satire called “Nightmare at Boomer’s Castle” that had exactly the same central plotline.) Here is where the clumsy racial allegory comes in, I guess.
– Entertaining, but horror flicks are not my cup of meat- unless they are a whole lot more original than this was.
CHASING CORAL (2017) ****
> After chronicling the accelerated melting of polar ice with the Emmy winning documentary CHASING ICE, Jeff Orlowski turned his attention to global climate change, focusing on the world’s swiftly disappearing coral reefs.
. Again, Orlowski uses breathtaking time-lapse photography to show the insidious effects of human activity on our natural world. It’s pretty hard to turn a blind eye to the wanton destruction of an entire ecosystem when we see coral bleaching unfold in truncated time before our very eyes. To someone like me, who has wanted to dive Australia’s Great Barrier Reef since viewing 3-D scenes of it on my Viewmaster as a small child, this mass coral die-off is a tragedy of the highest order. It seems pretty inevitable that they will be history before I am. As a result, millions will suffer. People will die. And one of the most indescribably beautiful natural landscapes will be gone, perhaps forever.
. There are so many absolutely stunning shots of this magical realm here it is a veritable feast for the eyes. The colors dazzle and delight. But it only takes a small amount of warming to bleach and sterilize these vivid coral colonies. Too late! We were busy dithering, practicing denial and accommodating the interests of Big Business to worry about a little thing like sustainable survival on the planet.
– As our (former) moron-in-chief would say: “sad!”
LOVING (2016) ***+
> We live in a racist country. Always have.
. In some states, for many decades it was illegal to love someone with a dark complexion unless you were similarly pigmented. How absurdly surreal is that?
. This film tells the true story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple in the late ‘50’s who travelled from Virginia where anti-miscegenation laws kept them apart, to Washington D.C, where they could legally wed under federal laws that racist states like Virginia simply chose to ignore. The problem arose when the couple returned home to an intolerant community, where they where summarily dragged from the marriage bed into jail. It was a long, frustrating battle, eventually championed before the Supreme Court by lawyers hired by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
. We never really get a feel for Ruth, as played by winsome actress Ruth Negga, but Joel Edgerton gives another intense, compelling performance playing a simple, inward man who does not see what all the fuss is about and just wants to be left in peace to live his life. When asked by his lawyer what message he has for the Supreme Court justices, he says: “Tell them I love my wife.” As a man with the simple good sense to love, this is all that really matters.
– No kidding!
LET THERE BE LIGHT (1946) *****
> I learned about this intense short film from the Netflix doc FIVE CAME BACK, which tells the story of five Hollywood directors who enlisted in the armed services during WWII to help with the allies propaganda effort.
. One of those five was iconic movieman John Huston (MOBY DICK, THE AFRICAN QUEEN), who made this searing, unblinking film about the severe injuries of war we cannot see- the sometimes permanent mental trauma that used to be called “shell shock”, but we now know as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.
. It is calculated to create the impression of success. We watch as a new group of emotionally wounded soldiers are inducted into a mental health program, monitor their treatment, and witness their release at the end, supposedly “cured”. And presumably, these men are not acting. They are G.I.’s, still on active duty. They are not asked for permission to film them going through post-traumatic hell, it’s more of an order: “Ignore these men filming you.” So when some of them go home without the overt trembling or noticeable stuttering they came in with, these must be small victories.
. But PTSD is like an iceberg. What lies below the surface, unseen, dwarfs what we see above. It feels fake, forced. The rosy picture it paints does not match the reality we have come to know.
. In the interim, we watch fascinating scenes of therapeutic treatments that are both heartbreaking and inspiring. From time to time, we perceive small incremental successes that give us heart. All the while, the military doctors smoke, smoke, smoke- cigarette after cigarette after cigarette. You would think it was a commercial for Lucky Strikes. These damaged men are normal and authentic in a way trained actors can rarely be. They are the real deal, in all its horror. In these intimate interviews, the history of each man’s personal trauma is written all over his face. It is lodged in his body. It permeates every syllable he struggles to utter.
. Holy shit- it is one powerful testament to the ongoing carnage of war and the human price of warfare! Not surprisingly, the military brass did not like the film Huston submitted- not in the least. They suppressed it, refused to show it and reassigned him to another story, burying this amazing footage for many years in the dark recesses of their vaults. To release it would to have publicly acknowledged the terrible truth of that iceberg of trauma and depressed recruitment efforts. It would have exposed the utter devastation of warfare on the human psyche, and thus, the ultimate depravity of what warmakers do. This gem lay hidden in those archives until they were persuaded to release it almost 40 years later, largely due to the advocacy of Jack Valenti, who was president of the Motion Picture Association of America. The army went so far as to confiscate a copy Huston was about to screen for friends at the Museum of Modern Art, claiming it infringed on the privacy of the soldiers- whose release forms mysteriously “disappeared”.
. In 2010, the film was selected by the Library of Congress for restoration by the U.S. National Film Registry, as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. Now, it is in the public domain, and available to the masses on Netflix, and I strongly encourage Americans to see it.
– The cost of war has not decreased. The carnage has.
WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (2017) ***+
> This third film in the second reboot of the series (after Tim Burton’s failed 2001 PLANET OF THE APES), and aside from the original 1968 sci-fi classic, these films are much better than the original five films that just got more and more dreadful as the series progressed.
. Rupert Wyatt directed the first reimagining (RISE OF THE POTA), and Matt Reeves took over for the first sequel (DAWN OF THE POTA), and this chapter, where full-blown war breaks out between what is left of the decimated human race and the suddenly enlightened ”lesser” primates. Where the first installments had the occasional sympathetic human, this film has all of one such character- a little mute girl Caesar and his dwindling crew pick up along the way. Woody Harrelson is here, chewing up the scenery as a ruthless extra-legal military renegade with an axe to grind. All very Col. Kurtz. But this is not a human-centric story. The world of this film transpires almost entirely in the ape’s universe. Andy Serkis is back, and his performance makes another strong argument that “motion-capture artists” deserve to be recognized with Oscar nominations. He deserved a nomination for Gollum, perhaps King Kong, certainly for this. He is simply terrific at showing us the intrinsic “humanity” in chimpanzee leader Caesar, using only body language and the nuance of digitized facial expression. Like Giancarlo Giannini in Lina Wertmüller’s best Italian films, Serkis doesn’t need anything more than his eyes to convey conflict and deep emotion. Simply: Andy Serkis is one of the greatest living screen actors. It is time for him to get the recognition he deserves!
. It’s all pretty riveting stuff- a great achievement technically, of course. The score and cinematography are excellent. The story trajectory is fairly predictable but one never knows the route it will take to get to the requisite confrontation between Woody’s monstrous human and Andy’s human monster. It’s all pretty satisfying spectacle… but it’s long. It needed some trimming. It must have, because I was sitting in a comfortable theater, immersed in the experience of the film- and yet I kept noticing how long it was taking to get to that crucial climax. One should never notice the length of a film while one is watching it- especially under ideal conditions.
. Will there be a fourth POTA film in this franchise? They burned some major bridges here- but look at the names of the younger characters: “Cornelius”… “Nova”… Sound familiar? If there is a next chapter it will have to be a bit of a reboot itself.
– One can only hope it’s as entertaining as the three that came before it, helmed by equally self-assured directors and actors. If not, they picked the right place to end the story.
CAPTAIN FANTASTIC (2017) ***+
> Reviews for this family drama were mostly good. Many noted the “unfortunate” title, because it misleads in some way. I get their point. (I kept thinking it had something to do with Elton John…) But as Shakespeare said: “a rose by any other name smells the same”. And this one smells sweet as a fresh spring morning… until the last twenty minutes, which lost me completely.
. The mighty Viggo Mortenstern is the oddly named “captain” of the title, the patriarch of a singularly and singularly extraordinary brood. Like THE ROYAL TENNEBAUMS, this film shows how the parent shapes the family. Viggo’s dad is a sharp cookie. A self-taught Renaissance man with strident lefty political views and a cynical skepticism of the modern world that leads he and his wife to raise their brood “off the grid”- no phone, no TV, no Internet. No electricity or even running water. They hunt for meat, read their assigned books around the campfire and make music together to pass the time. He relentlessly indoctrinates them to his point of view, celebrating Noam Chomsky Day. And the kids receive daily “training” that brings to mind Marine Corps boot camp!
. Mom is in hospital, struggling with a serious illness- a backstory that gradually unfolds. So dad is left to do it on his own. And he is a driven, and single-minded parent, demanding the highest imaginable standards from all six of his kids, from the youngest- about 5 years old, to the eldest teen who undergoes a ritual of manhood at the start of the film. When they have to go to town, they all pile into a big renovated school bus for the trip. When they are pulled over by a Highway Patrolman, the entire family conspires to throw him off track in a very funny scene. There is a lot of great humor in this film. As when the youngest asks: “What’s sexual intercourse?” His reply is priceless- exactly what we would expect from this character and the way adults often wish they could answer such a direct question- directly.
. But this is the problem: Dad seems to have no concept of age appropriate expectations. He treats them all like little adults, routinely putting their lives in danger to “toughen them up” for the world. (We even get a breathtaking mountain climbing sequence- and the amazing thing: apparently all these kids did everything we see them doing here- including scaling the face of an imposing cliff! These are not CG FX or very small stuntmen doing these extraordinary things- it’s the child actors themselves, which is very impressive indeed. To acknowledge this, they got equal billing with the big stars in the closing credits- a classy gesture.)
. But family members like his wife’s father (Frank Langella, very good, as always), wonder if perhaps, dad is preparing them for everything except the real world. When flirting with a cute girl for the first time in his life, knowing how to track a deer or navigate by starlight is of little help to the eldest boy. A family crisis forces Viggo’s fiercely iconoclastic father to consider the unthinkable- releasing control and allowing their grandparents to raise them. And here’s where the film goes awry. At the end, Viggo goes along with an extreme choice that feels at odds with everything that came before it. While it made perfect sense as far as the interior logic of the film, it was just not remotely believable to me, and left a bummer spin on an otherwise delightful film.
– Don’t let that deter you. The journey is more important than the destination.
JASON BOURNE (2016) ****
> Great cinematic raftsman Paul Greengrass does it again, with this fifth installment of the renegade spy series.
. Matt Damon is back, after a brief hiatus where Jeremy Renner took the mantle under a different director. The results were not bad- but Damon, Greengrass and Bourne are a match made in heaven. Throughout the film, I absolutely marveled at the deft mechanics that this accomplished filmmaker employed to keep viewers on the edge of their seats. (More hand-held camera- thankfully not as shaky as usual. More rapid fire editing. More layered storytelling rife with mystery and suspense. More tight shots that beg the question of what exactly is happening just out of frame. All- extremely effective!)
. The same mainspring drives the plot: Damon as Bourne has been turned into a weaponized super soldier through a top secret government program headed by his own father. He’s been egregiously manipulated, leaving frustrating gaps in his memory that cast his identity adrift. He is on a relentless mission to discover his own past, with government agents (a serviceable Alicia Vikander here), dogging his every step and trying to thwart and defeat him at every turn. He is pressured on all sides. But Bourne has his allies, in handsome Julia Styles and eventually, from inside the operation.
. This chapter of the franchise is a high-tech, thrilling, nail-biting ride, packed with great action sequences and exciting locales. These films are really so much better than most Bond films have been for many years, SKYFALL notwithstanding. Maybe Greengrass should direct the next (and final) Daniel Craig James Bond thriller.
– This man has powerful tools in his cinematic toolbox!
JACKIE (2016) **+
Critics loved this, giving it an 8.0 rating… I was bored, bored, bored. This petulant portrait of a sniveling Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath of her husband’s assassination did not seem to have any reason to exist. Even a typically good performance by a well-cast Natalie Portman as the tragic First Lady could not rescue this flat dud of a biopic. No, we did not need to see a graphic reenactment of Kennedy’s head blowing apart. Simply gratuitous. Skip it. Do your laundry instead. It will be just as entertaining…
LAND OF MINE (2015) ****
> When World War II ended, it did not end for everyone.
. German forces mined the hell out of Danish beaches, under the presumption the coming allied invasion would come ashore there. They were wrong, and eventually got the asskicking they so richly deserved through Normandy Beach in France. But after the cessation of hostilities, there were still 2000 German soldiers left in Denmark. When they lost the war, these young Nazi pawns wanted nothing more than to go home and rebuild their crushed homeland. But many thousands of mines remained- some with maps to mark the precise locations, some without. And the Danes had no intention of letting these green recruits return home to the Fatherland until they undid the damage they had done. They were forcibly requisitioned by the Danish government to clear the beaches of the mines they had placed there.
. Finding and defusing these mines was intensely dangerous work. A huge percentage of the soldiers forced to do it where killed or horribly disfigured. This suitably intense film tells the story of one small squadron of these exhausted and traumatized German men, under the bitter thumb of a seemingly heartless and vindictive Danish commander. Sergeant Carl is so furious at the invasion of his country that he seems to see his POW’s as something less than human. His treatment of them boarders on the sadistic, until one heartless choice has terrible consequences, and he begins to slowly feel some common human empathy for his conscripts. It’s a fierce performance from actor Roland Møller (also excellent in A HIJACKING), in a film that certainly deserved its Oscar nomination.
. No question- it’s hard to watch sometimes knowing that, in a film like this, somebody has got to be blown to smithereens at some point. (In this way, it shares some of the same seat-gripping intensity of ZERO DARK THIRTY.) But the acting, production values and storytelling is so good, it’s worth the anxiety. This is certainly a side of World War II we have not seen before, and a growingly compelling film to view.
– So many great Danish films lately, one wonders if the filmmaking center of Europe is drifting northward from Paris…
IN A LONELY PLACE (1950) ***+
> In this highly respected film noir, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE director Nicholas Ray casts an impossibly craggy Humphrey Bogart as a tough, cynical screenwriter with a volatile temper.
. At his core, there’s something wrong with this guy. The question is: how wrong?
. A woman comes to Bogie’s apartment to help him with a book he has been hired to adapt for the screen- and he is the last person known to see her alive. Not good. His new paramour, (the professional noir femme fatale Gloria Grahame), is his alibi, but as the police press harder on her man, Grahame becomes less and less certain he is not, in fact, the killer they seek. The viewer feels the same way. It’s unnerving.
. Bogie is so opaque and inscrutable here, he is impossible to read. He sends flowers to the dead woman, but we can’t tell if it’s an act of common human decency or a ploy to cover his tracks. He grows increasingly erratic, gets tough with people who have been his lifelong allies, then reenacts his analysis of the murder for the cops with obvious relish and glee that raises every eyebrow in the room.
. No, this guy is not right in the head. But is he a murderer or just a world-weary curmudgeon who is genuinely clueless of the impression he leaves?
– Ultimately, IN A LONELY PLACE is a real heartbreaker. Life can be a bitch.
SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR (2014) ***
> The first installment of this stark, high-contrast graphic novel of a film was all style, and less than met the eye. But the eye-candy was unparalleled.
. I, for one, was dazzled by the saturated high-contrast technique that made SIN CITY look quite unlike any other film I have ever watched. All the negative buzz on this second chapter had not escaped me, but found its lure irresistible when I saw the cast:
– Mickey Roarke, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Roasrio Dawson, Bruce Willis, Powers Boothe, Dennis Haysbert, Ray Liotta, Christopher Lloyd, and Stacy Keach (!!!).
. And even though A DAME TO KILL FOR is a real mess of a movie- a muddled prequel/sequel that revels in the most graphic and cravenly gratuitous stylized violence, I loved watching these actors unwind past the point of absurdity.
. I got a kick out of the stilted, calculated noirish dialogue, and thrilled to the mostly black-and-white cinematography, pocked with pools of color that shimmered and glowed by comparison. The characters were outlandish, but pleasantly so. (One could hardly recognize Stacy Keach under a flabby prosthetic that made his head twice-normal size!) Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a carbon copy of the character he played in the truly awful BRICK, but it somehow works here. Mickey Roarke and Josh Brolin are tougher than nails. Powers Booth is as evil and sadistic as bad guys get. Jessica Alba and Rosario Dawson are impossibly sexy while at the same time, dangerously lethal.
– The movie stinks. It’s bad cinema. But its fun! Definitely a guilty pleasure.
IN LIKE FLINT (1967) ***
> As a Bond-mad kid, I was predisposed to dig Derek Flint- James Coburn’s suave, sexy auteur secret agent, who knew everything and could do anything, effortlessly.
. I dug the original OUR MAN FLINT, when I saw it in the theaters during its original run when I was a sophisticated 11-years old, and was too naive and green to even recognize it as a parody of the Bond spy flicks. After all, the conclusion to DR. NO in that manmade volcano was not no less ludicrous than anything I saw in the Flint universe. (I should have been tipped off by Flint’s superhuman ability to slow his heartbeat dramatically when he slept, his physiology reawakened by a device on his super-cool watch that protruded and poked him back to life.) Flint was admired as a man’s man- both intellectual and athlete, and of course, adored by the ladies who swarmed around him in doting adoration. Flint was a gentleman-playboy, and exactly who I wanted to be when I grew up.
. This sequel had pacing problems. Poor box office killed the franchise. But it’s a vivid kitsch reflection of the swinging sixties, in a story about the women leaders of the world plotting to overthrow the men in power, who have so bolloxed everything. I can dig that.
– Stupid, simple, retro… fun!
CHICKEN LITTLE (2005) ***
> Disney’s 46th full-length animated feature was a hit or miss affair, but it was not the bomb it was reputed to be.
. I decided to move this title to the top of my queue when I heard Disney was withdrawing all its content from Netflix. (Boo! Hiss!) Though certainly not entranced by most of it, this “boy who cried wolf” derivative had its charms- mostly in the vocal talents of Zach Branff, Steve Zahn, Amy Sedaris, Don Knotts (!!!), Patrick Stewart, horribly miscast as a sheep. (It absolutely did not appear that sonorous voice was coming from that fruffy character), and especially from director and occasional actor Garry Marshall, who turns out to have a truly great character voice, but also for the bright color and sheer lunacy of bringing aliens into the fable.
. Turns out that piece of the sky that fell on Chicken Little’s head was of extraterrestrial origin, and it’s a bit fresh to see this society of humanly personified animals interact with ET’s. Old headless Walt himself would not have grooved much on it, I don’t think, and probably would have hated the gratuitous pee jokes.
– While certainly not Disney’s finest hour, not every animated feature can be DUMBO or PINOCCHIO, and I was entertained.
NATIONAL BIRD (2016) ****+
> No matter how you feel about the shadowy U.S. drone program, it’s hard to deny that technology like this is a two-edged sword.
. Executive producers Wim Wenders and Errol Morris bring us this sobering documentary looks at three courageous whistleblowers who bear the psychological scars of having participated in a program that kills people by remote control, like Ah-nold Schwarzenegger‘s Terminator but without the artificial intelligence. Identified by first name only, Lisa, Heather and Daniel, (the only one still serving when the cameras began to roll), all served in highly classified government service.
. Having these eyes in the sky to surveil a potential hostile territory is one thing. Gathering intelligence is a rudimentary function of national security apparatus. But coupling that remotely-controlled aircraft with deadly weaponry, introduces a whole magnitude of new complexities. These national birds become not only spying eyes, but deadly enforcers of instant justice- or in some cases, detached murderers of innocent people- guests at a wedding party, for instance, caravans of families with mothers and babies at their breasts, mistaken for “enemy combatants” on the basis of very scant evidence, shaky judgment calls, and sometimes, sheer bloodlust. It’s such a clean, convenient way to kill your perceived enemy. The slaughter does not need to be up close and personal. The soldier who dispenses death with a joystick has the luxury of an illusory detachment. The technology between the trigger and the carnage lends the conscience a false respite from guilt.
. So when these soldiers suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorders, the government gets to pretend they are fakers and traitors, and deny them the help they need because they were not technically physically present on the battlefield. How could they possibly have PTSD? All they did was play a perverse kind of lethal videogame. These three individuals share heartbreaking stories. The damage their time as remote-control snipers inflicted on them is evident for all to see. This is some powerful shit.
(A personal aside: I have been a lifelong Democrat- but I left the party over this issue for a while. It’s a fact of life now- weaponized drones are here to stay. The genie is out of the bottle. Pandora’s Box has been opened and the monster has been released. Now, isn’t it just a matter of time before the same technology begins to be used against us by the enemies we are manufacturing daily with these terrors from the sky?)
. I truly believe, most Americans don’t even want to know the awful things that are being done in their name daily. If they knew, they would feel the moral obligation to do about it. Avoiding these ugly truths provides us plausible deniability.
– Shame on us!
FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS (2016) ***+
> Good news: this film is just as charming as the trailer suggests. Based on a true story about a high society patron of the arts in New York in the late 1940’s, who somehow got it into her head that she was an opera singer, without being encumbered by any discernible talent whatsoever.
. With the behind-the-scenes help of her doting thespian husband, the imaginary singer’s recitals were packed with handpicked sympathizers and paid enthusiasts and specifically devoid of critics. At the age of 76 Florence Foster Jenkins booked Carnegie Hall for her first and only real public performance. It was sold out weeks in advance and thousands were turned away at the door. She sounded like shit. She was a hit!
. Popular tunesmith Cole Porter and virtuoso conductor Arturo Toscanini were fans, perhaps because they recognized her true and sincere love and devotion to music. It is unclear whether Jenkins herself was in on the joke, or if she really believed she was supremely talented. But when the papers lambasted her performance the following day, it sent her into a tailspin from which she never recovered, passing away only a month later from a heart attack, complicated by a lifetime of untreated syphilis.
. It’s been a while since I have seen a Meryl Streep movie, and she was a predictable delight in the role. Even better, was Hugh Grant as her loving but philandering husband and fierce protector. Grant seems to rise above his mannered limitations here, and give a truly heartfelt performance that helps anchor the film in emotional reality, even when the truth seems so far-fetched. Also delightful to watch is Simon Helberg who gives a quirky comic turn as her conflicted young accompanist Cosme McMoon, a budding composer who certainly wants to play Carnegie Hall, but does not want his career tarnished by accompanying a talentless singer.
. The sets, costumes, and vision of the New York City of 1944 are sumptuous and richly detailed. Hey! No wonder this was a good film: Stephen Frears directed it. Good fun, with a genuine emotional center and real people we can root for and care about.
– Sweet!
CAMERAPERSON (2016) ****+
> Accomplished documentarian Kirsten Johnson assembled this unique film and presented it as a kind of alternative memoir of her life and career.
. It is culled from footage shot for many different documentary films in countries and conflicts around the world over several decades- most of which did not end up in the final films they were originally shot for. But they were images that somehow resonated and stuck with Johnson, despite being relegated to the cutting room floor. The result is a kind of collage film that wanders all over the map. It’s an unusual form- Laurie Anderson’s stunning HEART OF A DOG is a good example of it. And it’s a genre I’m familiar with, because after making a dozen short super-8 films as a young teen, I did the exact same thing with my reams of outtakes- reassembling them into something I called CELLULOID SUICIDE. The big difference between my film and this, of course, is that one of her unused shots is a thousand times better than any single shot I was ever able to capture. I was a kid with a camera, Kirsten Johnson is a cameraperson.
. Her work is uniformly stunning. My flick came from scripted films, making it all about rhythm through repetition, featuring slightly different takes of the same scene. Here, Johnson takes us all across the globe covering a wide variety of topics from the repercussions of Bosnian war crimes to family footage of her young children burying a dead bird in the yard. We watch a woman’s hands fidget endlessly, as she recounts the guilt over having a second abortion because she could not possibly raise a child at this point in her life. We talk to prosecutors trying a hate crimes case, and a midwife in Africa delivering babies in a rural clinic. But we keep circling back to footage of the filmmaker’s aging mother, struggling with the ravages of Alzheimer’s Disease, and the scattershot approach of this brilliantly edited film approximates the fragmentation of her world without context.
. CAMERAPERSON is a fantasia, a kaleidoscope of places and people and conflict and human suffering that reminds us that life is made of moments only- one moment following on another, in billions of lives scattered across the planet.
– Moments are all we have, and the moments assembled here are stunning!
EAT THAT QUESTION: Frank Zappa in His Own Words (2016) ****
I find this a very difficult documentary to review, because I just want to quote every damn word that came out of Mr. Zappa’s mouth. It features great musical interludes that left one wanting more, but it is the irreverent iconoclast’s brilliant satiric wit, unjaded worldview and unflinching artistic vision that are the stars of this film. Frank was an Everyman philosopher. The man was just a world treasure. I am still pissed off at him for dying. It seems the world needs his unique ability to see clearly through heavy bullshit more than ever right now!
49th PARALLEL (1941) ****+
> British propaganda über alles, this love letter to the heroes of WW II honors their allies north of the 49th parallel, the Canadians, and attempts to draw a scary picture that would draw the U.S. into the escalating war by focusing on the bad guys.
. Pulling a novel switcheroo, a group of six Nazis on the lam across Canada are the protagonists, anti-heroes that we root against as they try to escape from their sunken submarine in Chesapeake Bay to a Vancouver docked freighter bound for Germany’s ally Japan. Along the way the desperate men encounter everyday Canadians who welcome them warmly… until they find out who their unexpected guests are. Then they rise up heroically to oppose them, sometimes at great personal cost. Glynis Johns is one, Raymond Massey, Laurence Oliver and Leslie Howard are three more- and they all give really good performances. (Oliver’s Swedish accent was spectacularly realistic to the untrained ear. What a well trained actor he was.)
. Sure, it’s occasionally corny, gets off to a clunky start, but as the undercover Nazis gradually get closer to escape, the tension in the storytelling ratchets up considerably.
– It’s not one of the great films, but it is full of great scenes, and for what is pretty nakedly a pro-war propaganda piece, it’s a near-classic.
A COFFEE IN BERLIN (2012) ***+
> Ah, this is a sweet one!
. Well… bittersweet really- for what is the sweet without the tart? Just candy. This film is like nutritious candy.
. In his debut feature, German Jan-Ole Gerster follows an aimless young man named ‘Niko’ over the course of one long day and night, as he roams the streets of Berlin searching (unsuccessfully) for a cuppa joe, while the bottom drops out of his world.
. This beautifully rendered black-and-white, sometimes very dark human comedy was called “OH BOY” in its German release, and oh boy was it fun! It’s one of those films about personalities butting against each other in an infinite world of chance encounter. I would say it was clearly influenced by the films of Jim Jarmusch.
. A COFFEE IN BERLIN has a few moments of unexpected pathos where the interactions with other people remind us of what it is to be human. Things never go the way Niko expects, but when dawn breaks, he can finally find that cup of coffee he’s been seeking for so long.
– A great beginning for Jan-Ole Gerster! Hope there are more delights to come.
*
That’ll do nicely, Thankee. Let’s rendezvous here again next month around this time, shall we? Until then:
VIVE Cine, arts lovers!
* * *
© Kevin Paul Keelan and lastcre8iveiconoclast, 2021. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kevin Paul Keelan and lastcre8iveiconoclast with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
KPKworld 