Movies with high demands

The cowboy life Flanders-style

"When I go to the movies, I don't want to think.  I just want to be taken out of myself," I hear.   And I think there will be many, many years to not think when you're dead.  Mindless entertainment makes me restless and bored, and too much of it physically nauseates me, especially since it's often built on lies.  Shoot me, but I like a movie or a play to actually be about something more than bringing me 100 minutes closer to my death.

Broken Circle Breakdown (2013-USA) is a tough and a tough-minded movie.  At first sight, it is exhiliaratingly free-sprited and wild, about the careless romance between a sometime phlegmatic Flemish bluegrass musician (he and his pals sing in perfect American English) and a whilring dervish of a tattoo artist, a romance interrupted by pregnancy.  That pregnancy brings joy, then heartache, all reflected through the music in a way that recalls the Irish film Once more than the structure a conventional stage musical.  Tough as that all becomes, the film then ventures into darker areas than you ever thought -- not pessimism or morbidity, but the absolute truth about the way married people can talk to each other and the stupid unthought things they can say.  And the pain that becomes more poignant as there is little or no time to take back the words.

This clip gives you some small sense of how the music plays with and against the image and just how good Belgians can be singing country music.  (Well, Flemish people anyway-- I'm prejudiced, as the Lockharts purportedly emigrated from Flanders to Scotland...)  By the way, the end of this clip is by no means the hardest part of this movie.

But if you like to be challenged, if you appreciate the echo of real life instead of the recycled BS of our commercial myth-machines, you will like this film.  Downer as it is -- and I wept through the last four minutes of the film -- I felt better for having seen it.

One side note:  the most unbelievable thing about this movie is that it has been adapted from a play by the playwright and the film's director.  I cannot see the fingerprints of theater anywhere in this movie-- not in the scenes, the language, the structure, the performances, the music, nothing.  I've never seen the whiff of the footlights so thoroughly eradicated in any other such adaptation.

So often actors think that good acting is theater acting.  Meryl Streep, formerly a fine artist, is spiralling down into a maelstrom of twitches, sniffs, shrugs and counter-intuitive line readings, trying desperately to help the poor crippled script across the street, when in fact plays like DOUBT and AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY need no such help, and in fact are marred by Streep's determined eccentricity.

Irene still remembers she loves Craig

She could take a lesson from the clear-eyed, economical and completely true performance of James Cromwell in Still Mine (2012), a film that is Canadian not only in terms of financial resources, but has the kind of unpretentiousness, directness and plain common sense one associates with Canadians.

Based on a true story, it tells of a farmer in his 80s who sees his wife sinking into dementia or worse and decides a smaller, more manageable house for them to live on, on his own property, using wood from timber he owns himself.  The "A story" as they say in television is about Craig's legal battle to build his house his own way, despite laws and regulations designed to protect the unknowing from the unscrupulous, but in this case, barring a man from living his life his own way on his own land on his own terms.  But that A-story is driven by the B-story, the fierce cleaving-together of this unsentimental, but very-much-in-love couple as she drifts away from him.  Fans of independent film might be reminded of Away From Her or the more light-hearted The Castle.  But this film has a clear-sky clarity like the New Brunswick skies it was shot under.

And at the heart of that clarity is the model performance of James Cromwell, playing his first leading role in his early 70s.  Never once do you catch him "acting."  There is no big speech, no big moment in this movie; just a lot of real true human behavior (something you could also say about Broken Circle Breakdown).

Cromwell reminds me of Spencer Tracy here, and his acting is, if anything, even more invisible.  It doesn't get fake-folksy, nor fake-eloquent, but treads that narrow in-between ground of smart but not over-educated people talking about what they truly know.  When Cromwell as Craig Morrison tells what his father, a shipwright, taught him about wood and about building --well, he never uses the word "spiritual" or "soul" but there is a profound, mystical religious quality about Craig's faith in what he has learned and what he can do that links him both to the earth and to the dozens of generations before him.  It is a master class.

There's nothing wrong with stupid movies in their place and time.  But you can't live on marshmallow, and if you'd like some good strong fibre of human life in your movie diet, check out these films.

Looking for something different to watch with the kids?

This is a time of year when parents and children are watching TV together.  If you're feeling fed up with the same animation (especially Disney), and would like to share a very quirky original with your (hopefully) quirky children, here's a 1949 British adaptation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with stop-motion animation by the Louis Bunin studio.  There is a live-action prologue, but it's not all that long, and it sets up a number of characters who re-appear in the story as in the MGM version of The Wizard of Oz. It is probably the most faithful version I've seen, both in incident, spirit and visual approach of the Lewis Carroll classic. It's the perfect family movie for weird families.  And the baby does make a very handsome pig.

Anderson in the ascendant

It will be difficult to write anything new about Moonrise Kingdom (2012).  It's the kind of film that makes people who want to write about film want to write about it.  I will try to make my own observations, but it is unlikely that they will be unique to me.

The signature Anderson shot is what I call the Dollhouse shot, in which Anderson's camera roams through divided spaces to show how they are connected (and how they are on a set, which has an anti-realistic effect).  I first noticed it in Life Aquatic, and Mr. Fox is full of them.  But Moonrise Kingdom begins with one. (The picture on the right is a set photo from this sequence.  It is really a photo, though when reproduced in a small size it really looks a Rockwell for the Saturday Evening Post.) I am reminded of how Alfred Hitchcock found it necessary to put his own cameo earlier and earlier in the film so as to get it over with and leave fans undistracted to follow the film.  In Moonrise Kingdom it may have the same function, as well as being a somewhat defiant setting of tone.  "This IS a Wes Anderson film!  You know what that means, and I'm not going to apologize for it."

It is a little appalling to see so many critics jump on Mr. Anderson for having a distinct style.  That doesn't seem to bother them with Hemingway or Faulkner or Dickens or Flannery O'Connor or Raymond Carver.  It doesn't bother them with Hitchcock or Welles or even Spielberg, who has a very particular way of using his camera.  But because Anderson uses conventions from other media, including the fine arts, illustration and the theater, the critics are all jumping up and down and turning blue!  How dare he have a distinctive voice!  All the really good directors are anonymous journeyman utterly without any element of personal expression.

There is a reason critics get excited this way.  They are all Salieris.  Third-rate uncreative nonentities, fully aware that the subject of their scribblings will far outlast those scribblings.  They are also mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging morons.

From this categorization I separate the valuable journalists and historians who deal in fact, like David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson.  These are the kind of film writers who literally count frames.  Some writer who is obsessive in just that way should tell us if Wes Anderson has ever done a push-in with his camera.  The camera always seems to move laterally, and when there is movement in depth it seems to progress in a straight line from the horizon line toward the viewer.  There are no diagonals in Andersonland, and there are no dolly movements in towards the actors.  Too emphatic, perhaps?  Or maybe the Coen Brothers used up the quota of push-ins before Mr. Anderson could get to them.

Two things Anderson gets right that few filmmakers do.  One is very early love.  There is a wonderful mix of narcissistic unawareness of one's actions and their possible consequences and self-conscious detachment in that first fine fall into passion.  At the same time a person is engaged in headlong and reckless acts to pursue the object of passion, one is also aware that First Love is a landmark in one's life and should be observed and considered.  And one can't help wondering if one is doing it right.  Anderson and his young actors get that spot on, doing insane things and analyzing them in an overly sane way.

The other thing is the 1960s.  Most filmmakers visiting the 1960s seem to believe that 1968-1973 was when the 60s took place.  Mad Men has corrected this impression to a great extent, and yet the tone is still off in many cases.  Few things evoke the 1960s so well as the battery-operated phonograph playing a 7" 33 RPM single from Europe, and the single is by a name forgotten to all but a few of us over 50, Francoise Hardy.  That is not an exercise in obscurity, but in precision.  Also, I can't help but be delighted to hear Leonard Bernstein's recording of The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra with narration read by young Henry Chapin (plus a snippet of Carnival of the Animals), a recording my son used regularly to fall asleep to during one early phase of his life.

[On the other hand, I have to admit to being embarrassed that, as a big fan of Benjamin Britten, I was unfamiliar with Noye's Fludde, the excerpts of which sounded wonderful.  Also, it looked great in the film.  Here's a picture of it on the right. I have resolved to hunt a recording of that work down.  Britten also provides the best underscoring cue in the film, a string pizzicato melody from the Simple Symphony, another piece unfamiliar to me.  Seriously, I know a lot of Britten's work very well, but he was quite prolific.]

Noyes Fludde reinforces the film's mythic and fable-like qualities.  To the critics who find this arch, I would direct them to Homer and the Bible and see if those aren't a little non-realistic as well.

Also assisting the period feeling of Moonrise, there's the color. At least in the print I saw, the film looked as though it had been shot in the 1960s on Ansco Color which had since gone a bit green.  Hard to say why, but it helped.

We didn't realize it 15 or 20 years ago, but what cinema needed was more Bob Balaban.  Glad to see Anderson doing his part to correct this problem, and made him omniscient, as is only right and proper.

Is this the first major commerical feature shot made entirely in Rhode Island?  Having summered in Maine throughout my childhood, I can't tell you how familiar and comfortable much of the film looked.  It is the cramped shabbiness preferred by members of the meritocracy.  (See also On Golden Pond.)

Here is a very nice video about Britten's opera I found at the website of Focus Films, distributor of Moonrise Kingdom.  It is quite engaging and I hope it makes up for this very dull post about a very lively movie, which you should see especially if you have ever been in love, or a child or outdoors in the rain.

My mother the bear

Don't look now, but your mother's right behind you

Brave (2012) really has the animation fan world's knickers in a twist, fiercely debating as to whether Pixar has slipped and whether they are losing their knack of inventing and telling heart-rending stories.  I suppose time will tell.  As I sat down in the movie theater, I regretted not having a kid to watch the movie with, but then had the pleasure of three young girls behind me of various ages to react to, discuss, explain and evaluate the movie.  Believe me, I didn't mind their talking through the movie, because it was such a valuable window into how the film was working on its intended core audience.

And they LOVED it.  Brave gives us the second female archer of the year (after Hunger Games), although the story doesn't turn on that skill as much as the posters and trailers might make you think.  The title and the advance publicity led me to expect a female-centered action adventure film, but what Pixar has done is invent a new fairy tale which, like so many fairy tales, turns on questions of growing up, changing family roles and coming into one's "powers."  I have to admit I didn't expect a movie with so much time spent on bears, especially when one of them sort-of resembles those dumb bears that used to help the fat park ranger clean up the park in Disney shorts of the 50's.

In a way, I don't care.  Because the reason to see an animated film is not to see more of what live-action films do -- tell stories about characters.  Everybody tries to do that.  The joy of an animated film is that absolutely everything you see is completely fabricated.  Not one thing has been taken unadorned from life in front of us.  It is an entirely designed, drawn, engineered world.  Nothing is real, and you are asked to believe in it all.  This is something only movies can do.

There is nothing inherent about the arranging of images in a sequence in time that requires three-act tales of conflict, challenge or personality development.  The technology is neutral.  It dares the creator -- "Go ahead, put some pictures in order and let's see what an audience will accept."  It's moving ink blots; what you see is a function of what your brain is willing to organize.  So the derivation of classical American cinema from the theater is merely a matter of economic expedience -- this is the cheapest way to put together a whole lot of stories using the resources we already have and understand.  But it is not the complete catalog of what somewhat might choose to put in front of a lens.

So we have Merida's incredible curly, frizzy, tangled mane which is a wonder to behold in and of itself and which would have used up half the computing power in the world 30 years ago, I should imagine.  We have the multiplicitous ways in which dozens of goofy Scottish lairds march into a hall, each of those walks created by an animator expressing his art.  Every background, prop, leaf and arrow, all created by artists, not imported from the "real world."  And to that extent, I will never stop feeling wonder at first-class animation.

If you don't believe me, see the incredible way King Fergus, voiced by the immortal Billy Connolly, impersonates his own teenage daughter as he and his queen roleplay a mother-daughter conversation.  "I don't want to get married, I want to stay single and let my hair flow in the wind as I ride through the glen firing arrows into the sunset."  It is gloriously and hilariously demented in a way that only animation, and excellent animation, can render.


I don't know whether Brave represents a slipping of Pixar's standards or if Merida is a wonderful new entry into the pantheon of Disney princesses.  But it is a superb piece of animation.  And just the way there are things that only Americans can play in jazz and only the French can do with a fish, there are things in film that only great animation can do and you should go see that, and on a big screen if possible, if only for that reason.

Kicking history when it's down

It is difficult, observing the rules I have set for this blog (and which I often traduce), to limit myself to observations regarding Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011) and not to make judgments or to make silly jokes with the title, which, in my opinion, is just ASKING for it.

Everybody has to stop taking for granted how great Spielberg is with kids.  From the evidence of this movie, it's not easy, and this is from Stephen Daldry, director of Billy Elliott.  It's not just that the child character is irritating as conceived by the writer, he's irritating in practice.  No wonder his mother lets him roam around the city without supervision.  Anything to get him out of the house.

Second, making Max von Sydow a mute character just means you're too lazy to come up with a reason why this man has a funny accent.  Von Sydow has a beautiful and expressive voice.  There are a million better non-verbal actors than he.  I guess everyone was just thrilled with the novelty of von Sydow not speaking in English or in Swedish, and thought they were some jam-dandy acting.  He's not bad, but as a student of silent film, I've seen a lot better.

Third, dressing up an empty shaggy dog story with a great national tragedy does not give it significance -- it reduces its significance.  Having the boy's father die in the Twin Towers adds utterly nothing to the story; the only thing that matters is that he is dead.  The oblique visual suggestion that he died plummeting from the building just adds a forsting of grotesquerie onto a big Bad Taste Cake.

I recognize that this is a very weak blog entry, but I literally had trouble keeping my eyes on the screen and resisting the desire to look away and do something else.  A movie that is almost successful, though not quite, can sharpen one's powers of observation.  Something this wide of the mark seems to dull the senses.  Sorry.

Steven Spielberg, film historian

Echoing "Night of the Hunter"?

Written reactions to Steven Spielberg's film version of War Horse (2011) is virtually a litmus test of each writer's film history knowledge.  Youngsters who think Titanic is a classic old-timey movie dismiss the film as sentimental slop, riddled with cliche and overstatement.  A few recognized some quotes from Gone With The Wind, usually misattributing the palette and compositions of the film to Victor Fleming, the named director.  But Fleming essentially directed the actors.  The look of the film was designed from top to bottom by William Cameron Menzies with the collaboration of cinematographers Ernst Haller and Fleming's favorite, Lee Garmes.  These would be the source of the oversaturated colors behind near-silhouetted figures as in, for instance the final shot of War Horse.

But Gone With The Wind is just the beginning.  War Horse draws from the work of David Lean (who Spielberg evoked brilliantly in Empire of the Sun) but also other epic filmmakers of the 1950s George Stevens and Fred Zinnemann.  But it also goes straight back to Lewis Milestone (specifically All Quiet On The Western Front), and silent filmmakers F.W. Murnau, Frank Borzage and especially King Vidor, director of The Big Parade and The Crowd as well as the 1956 War and Peace.  Spielberg does not do DVD commentaries (a sensible position), but I would love a commentary by really knowledgeable film scholar who could annotate the sources, whether overt or sub rosa.

Which is not to say that the film is pasted together from film references like a Brian DePalma movie.  Spielberg has thoroughly absorbed this vocabulary, like an author deliberately writing in an archaic style.  With all the fuss about last year's The Artist, I would love to see Spielberg make a substantially silent film--I think he is the director most qualified in the world to express himself in that challenging and classical form.  The exquisite no-man's-land sequence, designed by Rick Carter, would not be out of place in an epic of the mid-1920s, and the dialogue (with a German fluent in English) might have played even better on title cards than being heard.

Which is not to say that Mr. Spielberg doesn't know how to use a soundtrack.  For one thing, John Williams has written his best score in many years, although, he, like Spielberg, is creating in a borrowed idiom.  In this case it is the work of early 20th century British composers such as Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Bax, Walton, Britten and Grainger.  Again, there is no actual plagiarism, but the full immersion in a particular language.

Non-musical sound plays a part in one of the three-shots in this film that I would nominate for all-time greats in film history.  That is the moment when two young German deserters have been discovered and are being shot on the spot at late dusk or early evening.  The camera suddenly jumps from the base of the windmill in which the boys have been ensconced to high in the air, just the other side of the windmill's sails.  The boys are lined up with their backs to us.  The officer calls "Fire" and at that very instant a windmill sail obscures our view.  We hear the gunshot and the sail has passed revealing the bodies strewn on the ground.

Earlier in the movie there is a shot that would have made Eisenstein weep in recognition of a brother filmmaker.  The British are making an insane, under-manned, under-weaponed charge on a German encampment.  (The sequence begins with a brilliant shot of the officers mounting amid tall grass that obscures  the horses.)  At first, the Brits seem to be triumphant until they reach the end of the open field and the edge of the adjacent wood.  There the Germans have hidden their automatic guns, with which they proceed to demolish the British cavalry.  But we never see the falls.  We see the moment of recognition on the cavalry officers' faces that they have made a devastating miscalculation.  Then we see riderless horses leaping over and past the German guns.  Back to the mounted charge.  Back to the empty horses.  The audience puts those two shots together with that beautiful mathematics of film editing:  (Shot of mounted officers charging PLUS shot of riderless horses leaping past machine guns EQUALS officers falling dead from their horses.)

My next is a throwaway, but it simply demonstrates that Spielberg breathes the syntax of film.  It is an establishing shot of a person entering the stable in which the title character, Joey has been hidden.  We see the person first as a large, dark, convex reflection.  Then we realize it is a reflection in Joey's eye.  It is not only an inventive way to open a sequence, but it reminds us that the film is really about Joey and that we are always viewing the world through Joey's eyes.  All of this work, I have to presume, is executed with the superb collaboration of Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg's cinematographer since Schindler's List.

We knew that Spielberg is great with young actors and he has done his usual sterling work with Jeremy Irvine as Joey's faithful friend Albert and most especially with Celine Buckman as Emilie, the beautiful and tragic young protector of Joey.  But one must add to this the evocative "acting" of the horses playing Joey and Topthorn.  Be it the work of handlers and experts, Spielberg and editor Michael Kahn have put the shots together so as to simulate acting that is more convincing than many a so-called human actor.

The climactic reunion between Albert and Joey is most frequently acted as ridiculous, sentimental, implausible.  Again, this demonstrates an ignorance of this classical mode of storytelling.  It is not meant to be journalism, nor is it meant to be startling or surprising.  The mechanics of the scene were carefully put in place in the first act (my wife and I remarked to each other that the particular device would doubtless return in Act III).  The genre is closer to fable or legend than to film realism.  That is not an accident -- it is a choice.

Not only is War Horse one of the best World War I films I have ever seen, making it clear what a price nearly every person in Europe paid for that bit of insanity: I would list it as one of Spielberg's five best films, with Empire of the Sun, Jaws, Munich and Duel.  Yes, it's a perverse list, but hey, this is my blog.  Make your own list on your own blog.

Death, beneath all

Private tragedy forced, painfully, into the public arena

The highest compliment I can pay to Life, Above All (2010) is that I was startled to learn that the film is based on a book, on a book by a man, on a book by a Canadian man.  It feels so authentic, so personal, so finely observed that it feels as if there is no distance between the finished film, its characters and the events of their lives.

And yet, for me, the film kept recalling that most formalized and schematic of modern dramas, The Crucible by Arthur Miller, because of the respective society's attempt to use shame to crush non-conformity or dissent.  What Life's protagonist, Chanda, has to navigate through is burden enough, especially for a 12-year-old, but its taking place under public scrutiny increases the pain exponentially.  The social stigma of and ignorance about AIDS proves more debilitating than the disease itself.

The story is built on incident virtually without plot.  The net effect is that neither Chanda nor the audience know what to look forward to, which means we share her feelings of frustration and even hopelessness.  The film does end on a note of reconciliation, but it comes without preparation, and feels a bit tacked on, although, personally I'm a sucker for Zulu harmony singing, so it got to me.

My only other observation is that cinematographer Bernhard Jasper has taken the trouble to work out how to photograph dark-skinned people in dark rooms.  They are vibrant and present and far more visible than in many more celebrated films.  Cinematographers need to study this one as an example of how to shoot black skin--in fact, it might even have made some very sick characters look too beautiful!

Death hovers just below the surface of We Bought A Zoo (2011), which is probably not mentioned very prominently in the marketing materials.  But that may be what gives the film a peculiar gray emotional undertone, and gives the rather chaotic and sloppily assembled screenplay some unity and resonance.  Without the presence of death, this could be filed next to those made-for-Saturday-matinee movies they turned out in my childhood, like Clarence the Cross Eyed-Lion and Hello Down There.

It seems truly perverse that an intended family entertainment is so death-ridden, beginning with the death of Matt Damon's wife (before the story begins) which is the inciting incident for him to buy a zoo, and continuing through the acceptance of the death of old tiger as a healing mechanism for Damon to accept his own loss.  That may be kind of weird, but it is one of the things that unquestionably works in a script riddled with red herrings, cul de sacs, extra characters, scenes and situations.  It has the marks of a three-hour script having been cut down to two, and not all that comfortably.

One note in its favor -- the film literally features lions and tigers and bears and doesn't cute them up.  The only monkey is a fleetingly viewed capuchin, and most of the other animals seem hazardous or just not people-friendly -- exotic porcupines, snakes and camels.  The "awwww" factor has been reserved almost entirely for Maggie Elizabeth Jones, as Damon's 7-year-old daughter.  Jones is ridiculously cute without ever being cloying, although she is made to say the title of the film too many times.  (Under my son's secret rules, when you say the name of the film, the film must end.  Clearly this rule was promulgated under the influence of The Importance of Being Earnest.)  But there are some impressively scary shots of big scary teeth in POV shots which omit the principal actors, but had to pose some hazard for the photography crew, at least.

Ultimately, it doesn't make any sense.  It's never really clear why owning a very marginal zoo (are there such things in the US--privately owned for-profit zoos?  The real story took place in England) is such a happy resolution.  It just seems like buying more trouble.  Perhaps sensing this, co-writer-director Cameron Crowe cooks up a finale with the departed wife rejoining her now-happy family in the cafe where husband and wife first met.  Given that we have only seen Mom in still pictures or fleeting glimpses until now, the whole scene has an odd overhang, like a cantilevered canopy that threatens to fall on the people underneath.  The movie ends with scads of happy people in the happy zoo and Matt Damon having been kissed by Scarlett Johannson (the little hussy), and it feels fun, but it never ever really feels right.

Oh, and speaking of Miss Scarlett, in this film she takes on the new role (for her) of Workboots Girl.  Workboots Girl is the inverse of Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but she performs the same plot function.  Where MPDG unleashes the protagonist's inner desire for freedom and creativity, Workboots Girl teaches the dreamer How To Do Practical Stuff.  She is a bit like the Hawks Woman, but the Hawks Woman does not need the man, nor does the man need her.  Workboots Girl, on the other hand must solve the protagonist's problem, or she will not be.  In this Syd-Field-Robert-McKee, we must never have a character who is just enjoyable to be with--they all must have A Function in the Story Arc.  ("Arc! Arc!" The cry of the Hollywood development executive...)
One last thing--few directors or producers seem to realize how damaging it is to film to be deliberately unclear about where it is taking place.  There seems to be a fear that if a story is grounded in a particular geography, no one who lives anywhere else will relate.  This is too obviously ridiculous as to spend any time refuting -- all identification is rooted in specificity.  The events of We Bought A Zoo took place in England, but evidently Cameron Crowe would have been uncomfortable with that, or Matt Damon signed on early, but for whatever reason, the zoo got moved into some strange landscape that bears no resemblance to any urban-suburban-exurban environment in the United States.  There are no landmarks, no local characters, no sports teams, no TV stations, nothing to ground it anywhere.  The "charming cafe" where Damon met is wife is so generic that it can literally be in any town in the world.  So when you read that the factual basis of the movie has been completely twisted and distorted, you're not surprised-- this story really feels like it never happened, and it really never happened no place.

Cave-dwellers of New York



Tentative steps toward chaos in Carnage

 The very fine professional job that Roman Polanski and his excellent cast do in transcribing Yasmin Reza's play as the film Carnage (2011) is a good measure of the limitations of such inter-media transfers.

Perhaps I lack imagination, but I cannot fault what the filmmakers and actors have done.  I didn't see the play, but from all available evidence, this is an accurate, if culturally translated, representation of Ms. Reza's play, originally written in French for a Swiss theater director.  The setting feels completely accurate, the gradual setting of the sun (reminiscent of Hitchcock's Rope) evocative, the actors fully embody their characters (Kate Winslet now sounds almost more credible as an American than in her native accent, which sounds put on to please the folks back home), the staging and framing the usual meticulous Polanski job.  It is beyond cliche to point out Polanski as the poet of confined space, given Repulsion, Cul de Sac, and his previous play adaptation, Death and the Maiden.  But this confined space works in an odd way. At first, care is taken to keep it realistic.  In fact, the Kate Winslet and Christolph Walz characters are at pains to leave the space.

But then, after some intestinal and emotional vomiting, the liquor breaks out.  This is the great 20th-century theatrical deus-ex-machina, designed to get characters to say and do things they would not logically say or do, and also stay in place within the confines of the stage.  Let's say it straight out-- in 2012, using alcohol in a play is a crutch.  It was OK for O'Neill and Inge and Maugham and even Albee, but its time has passed and its mechanics are threadbare.

What happens at that point in Carnage is that what had been a meticulously detailed and realistic New York apartment became converted to a purely metaphoric and metaphysical space, a Huis Clos for the modern era.  But the problem is that the film remained tethered to the conventions of representational realism.  The play Carnage could have been used as the first half of a film, which developed and extended the ideas of The Exterminating Angel, about a class frozen in time and space, locked in a repellant embrace, continuing to decay

But Reza and Polanski make their living as entertainers.  A bit acidic, a bit cynical, but never truly disturbing to their middlebrow audiences of people like me.  So its characters begin their descent into primordial archetypes, to the very beginnings of human society, savage and needy, then the film abruptly stops before anyone's feelings get hurt, before cynicism converts to nihilism.  A shame, because I couldn't help feeling that a better ending could have been borrowed from that of  Fight Club, demolishing whole cities at a time.

Just to have seen Jodie Foster's face as she blows up a whole East Side luxury tower...that would have been a movie.

Bravo pour le maitre

Georges Lopez and his youngest charges

The initial impulse of cinema verite as it was first defined in the sixties was to capture the world as it is, without artifice, virtually without a point of view.  Frederick Wiseman is the filmmaker most often cited as coming closest to that ideal, but while Wiseman doesn't narrate his films or state a thesis or deliver a canned conclusion, but he frequently lets his subjects go on at such length as to expose themselves as foolish, vain, misinformed or incompetent.  Wiseman seems to feel as though the purpose of documentary is to let the subject hang himself with his own words and acts.

Etre et avoir (2002) is not having any.  [The title was translated as, literally, "To Be and To Have" but that means nothing in English, whereas the words are the basic building-block irregular verbs of French.]  Interestingly, the film evidently began as a pedagogical exercise to document successful teaching techniques for the use of fellow professionals.  But filmmaker Nicholas Philibert found that his first subject, Georges Lopez, teaching in a one-room school in rural agricultural France was not only a maitre (the common French idiom for teacher) but a master.

What are his brilliant techniques?  What is the terminology for his instructional approach?  I have no idea.   We don't see any specific methods employed, other than the tried and true.  There is nothing for what teachers call a Professional Learning Community to chew over here.  The secret ingredient that makes Georges Lopez a great teacher?

Love.

This man loves his students like we're supposed to and often not permitted to.  He pays deep attention to each one, knows their foibles and strengths, praises them and chastises them, a true in loco parentis.  He is more than a master, he is a father, the father of our imaginations, almost endlessly patient, kind and firm.  He settles disputes, makes students keep promises, checks their work, reviews their assessments, and lets them play, imagine, draw and dream.

Lopez and the film that contains him is so serene, poised, balanced and beautiful that it should be prescribed for any emotional upset or disturbance.  A few minutes with M. Lopez, and no one could be distressed-- all is tranquility and peace.

The neutrality of the camera is a thing to behold.  There is a beautiful stillness to the empty classroom, but even with the kids in action, the camera holds back, never intruding, letting them be themselves.  There is a priceless bit of slapstick with two 6-year-olds trying to operate a large photocopy machine, as they go on and on trying to get the book set correctly on the glass, struggling to push the right button, keep the cover down, to little avail as they keep producing bungled copies, soldiering on nonetheless.

Philibert builds in no false drama.  The children will move up to the next grade, the next school in the usual way.  There are no confrontations with angry parents, no meetings with Lopez's superiors (spiritually, there are none), no extraordinary crisis.  (One child is counseled as his father goes through a terrible illness, but still part of the ordinary fabric of life, a context into which Lopez attempts to put these events for his distraught student.)

Following its own quiet ways, the film's climax comes at the end of the film, the end of the school year.  He and the children say their goodbyes, some for the summer holidays, some forever.  He is all reassurance and warmth.  And as the last one clears the threshold, Lopez suppresses the tiniest choking tear.  It's more moving than all the agony of the throbbing orchestral tones of Titanic.

Etre et avoir is a reminder of just how powerfully less can be more, in life and on film.

As time goes by

Facial hair can indicate clinical depression

Forget five years -- 124 minutes!  There's a reason that romantic comedies, which The Five-Year Engagement (2012) is not, uniformly last 90 to 100 minutes.  The ground has been covered, no matter what it is, and once the audience has sussed out your new twist or gimmick, it's your obligation to get off the stage as quickly and entertainingly possible.

But, as previously asserted, TFYE is not a romantic comedy.  At times it is only a comedy the way Uncle Vanya is a comedy, which is one reason I regret it was directed by the crass Nicholas Stoller, whose last credit, Get Him To The Greek , was dedicated to the proposition that there is nothing funnier than Jonah Hill's butt crack.  Moreover, Mr. Stoller and Mr. Segal seemed to be so busy acting and directing that they did not notice the fairly easy cut they could have made which would have lopped off 20-25 minutes to this film and substantially improved it.

(The cut I mean is to go from Jason Segal's character learning that his fiancee has kissed her boss straight to Segal returning to San Francisco.  That would have omitted the disgusting attempted adultery-with-condiments scene and the disgusting frostbitten toe.  The Apatow crowd seems to be stuck in the pubescent phase of confusing bodily fluids and food plus a fascination with bodily mutilation.)

On the other hand, Segal and Stoller have to be applauded for trying to make something different and better, even if they didn't succeed.  The idea is that relationships are hard and don't match ideals, that we fail and fall short and we still love each other.  Not new, but needs to be repeated for each generation.

Because TFYE is really, at heart, an example of what art historian Stanley Cavell termed the "comedy of remarriage" of which Noel Coward's Private Lives is the modern progenitor. (Cavell finds its roots in Shakespearean comedy.)  In TFYE, the break-up and reunion happen in the context of an engagement, rather than requiring divorce and remarriage, but that is merely a function of changing social customs and movie censorship.  The principal is the same.  Unblemished happiness cannot survive, will not survive.  The characters must be tempered, must be chastened, punished perhaps (maybe that's why the frostbite) so that they may learn.  It might even be considered a comedy of lessons.

What makes TFYE disconcerting is that whereas Coward masks his character's pain in badinage with only the briefest of lapses revealing the truth, the characters in Segal & Stoller's script talk the way real couples having real trouble really talk.  Which is fine, except for the sort of style problems raised when such material is in juxtaposition with the Apatow brand of not just fall-on-your-prat humor, but fall-on-your-prat-in-poo-three-times-over humor.

That said, I laughed not infrequently and there is one Hall of Fame scene between Emily Blunt and Alison Brie.  They are arguing about the long engagement and marriage in front of a young child, and have therefore adopted (rather poor) imitations of Elmo and Cookie Monster, respectively to conduct the argument, which concludes, "'C' is for condom!"

One other odd element -- the cinematography of Javier Aguirresarobe, who not only has never shot a comedy before, but is responsible for some very dark horror films and thrillers (The Road, The Others, some of the Twilight films).  TFYE looked very dark, with many rollicking comedy scenes in half-shadow and the comic violence invoked real terror and pain.  Now the fact is, I saw the film in my neighborhood theater, which is a little old and shabby, and it just may have been that the projector bulb was dim and that the film is very bright and cuddly and cheerful.  But honestly, when a comedy film's characters get depressed, should you be just as depressed as well?  I sure was.

Two flavors of popcorn

X Men: First Class and Super 8 both aspire to little more than a couple of hours of summer's entertainment, directed primarily at young people interested in comic books, science fiction, horror, monsters, action and other young people. But the two films approach this task with instructively divergent toolkits.

First Class runs 132 minutes, which is the length of a typical James Bond film. That doesn't seem accidental. Like Bond films, there is a super-villain, a glamorous villainess (portrayed by January Jones, who has evidently decided to give up even trying to act), numerous locations usually built in a sleek and sterile style that looked modernistic back in the 1960s (there is a Pentagon set which is a straight lift from Dr. Strangelove), random transitions to far-flung locations and an overall sterility and lack of suspense as to whether the hero will survive. This is partly the inherent handicap of a prequel -- all the important characters must needs survive, and newly-minted characters have about a 50% chance of being Red Shirts. Even worse, the X powers tend toward the really weird and difficult to visualize on film (though not in comics). Poor James McEvoy as Xavier keeps having to put two fingers to his temples and squint like a turbo-charged Kreskin, and Michael Fassbender as Magneto has been compelled, in order to demonstrate he is practicing his magnetic powers, to make bizarre and comical hand and finger gestures which would embarrass a casino lounge magician.

The sterility of the visual vocabulary extends to the entire low-stakes story, emphasized by the pounding, emphatic and pointlessly bombastic music sore by Henry Jackman, who seems determined at this early point in his career that he can write music just as terrible as that written by the likes of James Horner, Alan Silvestri and other musical sausage-grinders.

Still, it's a pleasant time-passer, and you have to like any film that begins with a sleek silver-haired Nazi Kevin Bacon speaking what sounds like impeccable German and shooting the hero's mother in front of him. Christolph Walz would be proud. Sadly, the film never tops that sequence.

Super 8 is no less engineered and calculated, but the template it uses had more authenticity when it was created in the 1980s. As everyone down to your uncle who talks too loud at holiday dinners as noted, Super 8 is Spielberg once removed, with a group of plucky kids from 1979 stumbling into a big adult adventure and fumbling through some coming-of-age moments. Also, there's absent and distracted parents and a location away from the coastal media centers that dominate American storytelling.

It's grittier, less obviously designed (although just as carefully--getting all those late 70s toys must have been quite a job), more based on human foibles and relationships -- parents, friends, budding romance, the desire for adventure. It is, as movie executives like to say, more "relateable." It's the Spielberg spin on Rockwell America, flawed, but allowing love and perseverance to triumph at last.

A closer examination shows that the film has an almost equal debt to the hapless M. Night Shyamalan in its use of phony suspense, red herrings and narrative cul-de-sacs, an overuse of the Val Lewton "bus" (a cheap shock created by a needlessly blunt cut or loud sound cue), a disappointing denouement and more importantly, the central gimmick of the story having no real bearing on the story's meaning.

How many movie monsters have NOT been disappointments when finally seen? The Monster played by Boris Karloff, the Alien in the films of that title and...can't think what else. (I don't even think much of King Kong, who looks like any child's toy gorilla.) And giving a CGI monster a close-up is a sure-fire fail. But more importantly, the title and the first half-hour of the film set up the gimmick that the kids' super 8mm filmmaking will have an important bearing on the film, and as the second act begins we see that the camera will catch some important information which will be revealed at the right time.

Except that it doesn't. It doesn't reveal much, and what it does is found out by a lot of other characters in some other way. So at no time is the super 8 film indispensable -- not to the characters in the film and not to the audience watching the film. It literally has no bearing on the way the story develops. It's as if the filmmakers had never seen a Hitchcock film. If you've got a McGuffin, even if it's not important to the audience, it's important to the people in the movie. In Super 8, the super 8 doesn't even matter.

There's one thing for sure. Elle Fanning is a full-on, flat-out movie star. Even more than Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, this actress barely out of her own childhood has the potential to be one of the most powerful and charismatic film stars of an emerging generation. She does whatever she is asked to do in this film supremely well (and give the film credit for never trying to make her look stupid or silly). But what makes her a star is that she is fascinating doing nothing. Just looking off at the horizon until the director calls "cut." She is much more of a phenomenon than the Big Scary Thing the Air Force is trying to hide.

Madame Tussaud School of Film

A film like Nowhere Boy (2010), the John Lennon portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man film requires the viewer to bring a picture of the artist to the film with them: the filmmakers haven't time for that. But the question is never resolved, and barely even raised as to what the crisis depicted in the film means to the artist and his body of work, which in turn raises the question of the purpose of the film.

In essence, Nowhere Boy is a lower-middle-class kitchen sink family drama of the type Britain started producing in the era of Lennon's young adulthood, the late 50s and early 60s. It is the battle between two sisters about how to live one's life, how to raise a child and how to show love. John's mother Julia is what might euphemistically be called a "free spirit" who was not committed to parenting when he was born. It has fallen to her older, conventional, "responsible" older sister Mimi to raise the boy. Then, in a scene reminiscent of the opening of Kazan's East of Eden, John is invited to walk a few blocks to meet his mother.

The rest of the film settles into a sort-of triangle with John's devotion to rock and roll pushed into the spiritual background. And that is the tug-of-war that pulls this film apart, both from itself and from the audience. Because we want the Beatles. To want to see a film about John Lennon is to want to spend a little more time with the Beatles. But neither the screenwriters have figured how to integrate the development of the Quarrymen with John's choices between freedom and safety as represented by his mother and his aunt, even though such a conflict would seem to be easily extended. In time Paul and George would become as formidable rivals to Mimi as Julia had been, but Nowhere Boy never goes down that road, and the Beatles remain a sideshow in a story which should have pointed to them inevitably.

Curiously, the film does not even attempt to limn the spirit-crushing grey dullness of the rations-and-rubble world of post-war England, as contrasted with, say An Education, in which the heroine's bad choices are driven as much by the constrictions of the greater world of England as by her own family's misplaced priorities. Thus, we miss what a big thing it is for John to attend a private school, to receive a guitar, and then a better one, given the general tightness of money and resources. (His fellow Beatles always scoffed at John's pretensions to working class status, albeit this film demonstrates that the middle class is just as proficient at forging broken families.)

Given that he never has to portray the well-known public John Lennon, Aaron Johnson is free to just be a conflicted and troubled teenager. Anna Mouglalis and Mads Mikkelsen have no such flexibility as the respective title characters of Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2010), a film no more imaginative than its generic title. Despite a promising opening depicting the famous riot at the premiere of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," Stravinsky and Chanel are quickly covered in wax by the filmmakers, and we not only don't get a sense of their personalities, it becomes dubious that they even have personalities. Chanel seems to be "about" being cool and unflappable. Stravinsky seems to have acquired a wife and many many children without his knowledge and participation, and has no relationship with them whatsoever. Chanel and Stravinsky are naked at the same time and appear to be having sex although they do not seem to have a relationship other than hostess and houseguest. It is as if the film was made by off-world aliens who observed that humans enjoy proximity but had not bothered to observe why. It is true that Chanel and Stravinsky are known to history as fairly cold characters, but this entire film is an iceberg itself, concealing whatever potential drama there might have been under a ton of costumes, locations and production design. I can't imagine who the intended audience is for Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky; perhaps robots taking an art appreciation course.

I suppose I should offer some observations or analysis of the technique of the film, or perhaps some interesting moment in it, but at this moment, a few days after seeing the film I can remember literally nothing about it to observe. So let's move on, shall we?

Hysterical hysteria

It's a good thing for Pixar that A Town Called Panic opened in 2009, because while Toy Story 3 is a very good movie, Panic is an explosion of lunatic creativity like I haven't seen in a long time. If any movie deserved the appellation "LOL," Panic does.

This is not just a smart movie based on a TV show with limited animation, like Rocky and Bullwinkle. The limitations of the animation, using the sort of figurines that children play with (based on real figurines bought at flea markets and garage sales) is an inherent part of the style. Smoother, more "realistic" animation would spoil the jokes.*

Once you've absorbed the silliness of the animation, the next thing that hits you is the speed and density of the events and the gags, and the way they link to each other with a child-like explosion of imaginative leaps. Some commentators say the story follows its own logic or carry ideas out to their logical conclusion. But that is an inadequate explanation of how the heroes fall through a trap door to the center of the earth (where they answer their cell phones), find a door that connects directly to an Arctic tundra where they encounter a giant robot penguin flinging giant snowballs to other parts of the earth. Later, we discover that the creatures stealing the walls belonging to Cowboy, Indian and Horse look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon and live far, far below the pond in the neighboring farm. This is nothing like any kind of logic--it just follows, the way a child makes up a story as he plays.

The whole film feels like a long session with a hyper-creative child. There is very little snarky adult satire in the film--only the double vision of a child's adaptation of the world to their own understanding and the adult's unfortunate knowledge of how things really are. Why shouldn't they make pianos that horses could play (not to mention toothpaste dispensers)? Why can't a little police booth expand into a local jail (like an earth-bound Tardis)? Why can't an angry farmer attack you with parachuting cows? (see the clip.)

Happily, Zeitgeist Films has chosen not to produce an English track, because the over-excited voices are an integral part of the whole thing. (Indian is constantly hysterical, Horse sounds like an American comic doing Charles Boyer, neighbor Steven is apoplectic non-stop.) And they add to the sense of speed, which makes The Simpsons seem stately and majestic by comparison. That contributes the child-like nature of the film, since healthy children at play think, talk and act at the speed of light. It's amazing to learn the script took years to develop and refine--the film seems like a mad improvisation, like a playtime locomotive bearing down on you at top speed.

And one of the best things about this film is it dispels the notion that only 3D CGI characters are compelling enough to entertain nowadays. Now I just got to find a crazy kid to watch this literally hysterical film with.
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* Panic originated as a Belgian TV series. Belgium is France's answer to Canada; a neighboring country which doesn't take itself as seriously and has an extra language (or two) to contend with.

The kids are not the problem

What writer-director Lisa Cholodenko has done in The Kids Are All Right (2010) is one of the oldest story-telling tricks, notwithstanding how nimbly it has been done. Howard Hawks pulled it off in His Girl Friday and cop shows like The Closer have been doing it for years: take an oft-told story and change the gender of one pivotal character.

Look, here's an idea for a movie: an adopted child reaching 18 wants to meet her natural father. The adoptive parents resist it, but finally give in. The natural father begins to integrate into the family, and finds a supportive, positive role for himself. The adoptive mother feeling bored and neglected, drifts into a relationship with the adoptive father. This almost wrenches the family apart, but the outsider is barred and the rest muddle through.

You've seen that movie, right? Or if not that one exactly, close enough to be bored by the idea. So let's make the couple lesbians, and make the natural father a sperm donor. Now we're interested. Why is that? Is it the sex? Certainly the implication that all a tired neglected lesbian needs is a quick hop into bed with a man is questionable and uncomfortable. Actually, awkward is the keynote of the film. The first meeting between Mark Ruffalo and his sperm-donor-kids was an essay in awkward worthy of The Office. And so, making the parents a lesbian couple just amps up the awkward. But just to make sure that the folks buy tickets to the movie, one casts heterosexual actresses. (The movie even makes an intramural joke about it as Jules disdains lesbian porn, "They use straight actresses and the lack of authenticity...")

These types of films tend to be all script and acting, that is, the technique is fine but unremarkable, because the director is much more focused on content than expression. However, I do want to point out a couple of remarkable moments. First, in the scene when Ruffalo and Moore have their first sexual encounter, it appears that the director uses shorter and shorter lenses as the scene progresses. The effect, especially in over-the-shoulder shots is to (apparently) shove the characters closer and closer to each other until they cannot help but fall into each other's arms. Odd how, while I did not anticipate that story turn at the outset, it seemed inevitable once Moore and Ruffalo were alone together. (Wishful thinking from someone who sees too many indie films?)

The other is the moment after Nic (Bening) has discovered her partner's infidelity, but must return to a family meal and preserve the niceties. Now the lens is very wide, very close, but the conversation becomes aurally distant, echo-y with a steady ringing, until Nic pulls herself together and returns to the room. I have had precisely that sensory experience upon receiving news I had difficulty accepting. That distance and ringing was perfect.

The scene in which a character receives life-shattering news--most commonly that of betrayal such as infidelity--that might be an interesting blog post in and of itself.

Speaking of blog posts, Kristen Taylor and David Bordwell, the best analytical thinkers about film around has been really captivated by Inception and have written about it brilliantly here. Read it, and if you don't regularly check their blog (the link is in my list on the right-hand column), you should.

A story before naptime

Captain Abu Raed (2008) is reportedly an attempt to make a Jordanian Charlie Chaplin movie. Making a Chaplin movie without Chaplin is always a bad idea. Chaplin was the greatest actor in the movies, a brilliant multi-faceted performer. He did not craft great stories or invent original situations. His stories are poorly constructed and grotesquely sentimental at the core, which is some of the problem with Captain Abu Raed.

The first 30 minutes of the film are completely enchanting and will make you love the city of Amman and the Jordanian people and impress you with the compositional talents of the film's writer-director, Amin Matalqa. After that, the inability to spin a compelling story does in both the charm of the leading actor, Nadim Sawalha and the fine cinematography of Reinhart Peschke.

Abu Raed is an airport janitor who wears a discarded captain's hat home. When the children in his impoverished neighborhood spot him, he adopts the identity of a airline captain and spins marvelous tales for the children, creating an oasis of fantasy and imagination from their harsh urban life. So far, we have Danny Kaye in Hans Christian Andersen (both characters are practically sexless). Then Abu Raed tries to rescue a boy from beatings administered by his drunken father. But the plan backfires. He rats out the father, the cops come, everything is covered up, Abu freaks, but THEN...nothing happens. This bad-guy father never visits any reprisals on the son. You can't have your bad guy refuse to do bad stuff--that's just bad story telling.

Then Abu makes a plan for the mother and children to escape from the father. But...they successfully escape!! Yes--no complications, no difficulties, no story twists. A man makes a plan and then executes it. That's a story?

There's a tentative relationship with a young woman who is an airline pilot, but I have no idea what it means, since there are huge differences in age and class between her and Abu--he simply is an unimaginable suitor in this society.

How would this be different if Chaplin were in it? Well, first of all there would have been some slapstick complications in the rescue and much comedy of embarrassment in the scenes with the young woman. There would have been a powerful bond between man and boy, as seen in Chaplin's The Kid and a profound sense of longing for missed opportunities, as in the dazzling final shot of The Circus.

Look--if you're going to make a Chaplin movie, you better damn well have a Chaplin at the center of it. Otherwise, you've just got goo.

Incidentally, here's Chaplin in The Kid with what appear to be, appropriately, Arabic titles below the English titles:

Floating to the surface

Of the Miyazaki films I've seen, Ponyo (2008) is the first I can imagine an American child enjoying, even without an adult telling them why they should like it.

It feels lighter, more weightless, more improvisational and less death-0bsessed than film such as Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke or Howl's Moving Castle.

Perhaps that is because the characters are floating much of the time, either because they began life underwater, or because the water is overtaking the land for much of the story. But there are none of the ominous older magic-oriented characters often found in Miyazaki who bring cruelty and destruction. Even the wizard in this story is essentially benign and brings resolution and reconciliation to the story.

And the strange inexplicable elements in the story--the fact that Ponyo never really does look like any kind of fish, Ponyo's marvelous pursuit of her little friend on land by running on giant fish that look like waves (illustrated) or even the whole world's lack of concern or upset that the whole landscape has been flooded--all have a plausible dream logic to them. These things would literally happen in dreams; not the artificial "dream" designation that Disney uses for materialistic fantasies, but real bits of confusion that your brain brings together in a weird narrative that makes perfect sense until you wake up.

Moreover, the film is as brightly colored as a preschool classroom; in fact, it has much more of a preschool feel than his other works, and thus perhaps the optimism, gaiety and the simple faith in friendship that small children bring with them. And for us grownups, perhaps the most delightful part of this fairy tale is that it doesn't make sense, it's not consistent, and it hasn't been organized so as to teach a moral or a lesson--it's a joyful hodgepodge to be enjoyed as an experience. Because Miyazaki is an artist, not a schoolteacher. And school is out.

Love story

Hachi (2009) is one of those movies "they" don't make anymore. When I was a kid we had Old Yeller and Greyfriars Bobby and the Incredible Journey animals (the stark black-and-white original, not the goofy remake with movie star voiceovers). For a G-rated film like this, about loyalty and persistence, and greater values in life than the acquisition of money and status (the humans in the film are artists and teachers), it had to be a passion project.

And Lasse Hallstrom, still most famous for the immortal My Life As A Dog, was the perfect director. That film was not about a dog, but about a boy who longed to be one, or indeed to be anything than what he was, a little boy whose mother was dying. Both that film and Hachi have the knack of showing the point of view of ordinarily neglected figures--a little boy, a lost dog--who do not or cannot express themselves verbally. In Hachi, that point of view is expressed in dog-level POV shots with desaturated color (to represent a dog's color blindness, presumably). Curiously, as the film progresses, and we get to the heart of the story, the dog waiting faithfully for 9 years for a master who will never return, we lose the point-of-view shots, as if in recognition that the story's impact relies on a human perspective. After all, we don't expect humans to be loyal and persistent. It is the contrast between the dog's behavior and our expectations (and knowledge) of each other that makes the dog heroic in contrast.

Like the classic European directors we fell in love with in the 50s and 60s, Hallstrom doesn't need much story to make an engaging film. It does feel thin around the one-hour mark, but finishes strongly, walking that fine line of honest, decent sentiment without sentimentality. And yet, although I liked the film, it felt weightless. There is nothing to the relationship between man and dog but their relationship. There are no special circumstances binding them together, whether shared hazards or service or even attachment to some third party, human or otherwise.

Curiously, one of the most touching moments belongs to Joan Allen, playing Richard Gere's widow, who happens upon the dog many years into his vigil waiting for his never-to-return master. Allen's character never seems to have bonded closely with the animal, and she approaches it, perhaps hoping for some connection due to their shared loss. The animal looks at her uncomprehendingly, but does not move or shy away. Allen says, "I'll just sit with you until the next train comes, if that's alright." The dog gives its tacit permission, never veering off its focus on the door through which its master may yet arrive. There is a silent acknowledgment that, as much as it is healthy for us to move on, those who cannot may be admirable in their own way. (Take that, Lovely Bones!)

Wasted on the young

I don't know if you've noticed, but children are not idiots. Not all of them, anyway. And you can speak to them as if they're going to be adults someday and be rewarded for the effort. The makers of I Capture The Castle (2003) have done so, and while they haven't been showered with Shrek-type riches, I suspect their work will be looked at respect and affection for a long time.

This would follow suit for the book Castle is based on, which is evidently a Young Adult favorite in Britain. It's a blend of coming-of-age story with eccentric-family story. And there is an interesting dichotomy between the beauty of the film's images and the messiness of the relationships in it. Nothing quite works out as you expect and that is quite admirable.

The story is told by the aptly-named Cassandra, a very smart 17-year-old girl bubbling at the frontier of love and longing, but still able to view her disintegrating family with an unbiased eye. Father is both genius and failure, stepmother both muse and betrayer, sister both princess and harlot. The charming Americans who turn up as neighbors and landlords are both saviors and destroyers.

Children's literature (and the films based on it) isn't supposed to be like that. We should be able to tell good from bad, fair from foul. The castle is charming and magnificent on the outside and completely barren and crumbling inside, like the family itself, like the promises of the adult world. Leave it to a British film to make muddling-through into a virtue--but muddling without compromising yourself. Write for passion, marry for love, work for life.

One cannot pass on this film without noting the high proportion of young actors whose careers continued to blossom after this film. Cassandra is played by Romola Garai, from New Moon and Emma on Masterpiece Classics; her sister is played by Rose Byrne of Damages; Henry Cavill, seen in Whatever Works; Marc Blucas, previously known from the TV version of Buffy, and who is even busier today. One suspects that director Tim Fywell, who was in his mid-50s when he made the film, was in touch with his inner teen.

Off-road trip

As horrendous as many aspects of the story told in
Rabbit Proof Fence (2002) are, it is comforting, as an American of Anglo-European origins, to be reminded that we are not the only people to senselessly abuse their indigenous populations.

When I was a kid there was a show on Saturday at noon, when most of the network cartoon shows had ended called CBS Children's Film Festival. It showed films like The Red Balloon showing children's adventures from all over the world. Once you got over the strangeness of these other cultures--which is always hard for us parochial Americans, especially as children--it was fun and interesting to see our commonality as kid-type humans.

Rabbit Proof Fence (which is rated PG) would be an ideal candidate for such a festival. It is a child's adventure from the child's point of view--the difference is the terrible stakes involved, namely, the integrity of the family versus social concepts of race. A government obsessed with marginalizing people of mixed race and encouraging breeding that will lead children to be identified as wholly aboriginal or wholly white adopts the policy of kidnapping mixed-race children from their families and training them for domestic service to white families. Our principal characters, three plucky sisters, escape from their school and follow the rabbit-proof fence across the near-lunar landscape of the outback to find home and their mother. As one might expect, it is based on a true story, punctuated by footage of the actual people depicted in the story (with much the same startling effect as in The Blind Side, discussed below). Children, especially American children would benefit much from seeing this story.

The filmmaking is mostly self-effacing, other than some canted angles in the scenes with the administrator of the program, played in an appropriately bloodless manner by Kenneth Branagh. Director Phillip Noyce has an interesting trick of moving the camera in a lateral or oblique fashion in ordinary dialogues scenes as if something strange or terrifying was about to be revealed, although no such thing is. It lends an air of restlessness to a film which is almost entirely on the run.

Mumblecore for kids?

Where The Wild Things Are (2009) offers a new approach to a problem that has been developing recently in large-scale studio films for kids. More and more films are being based on what essentially are picture books, with narratives that can be summarized--or even read in their entirety--in less than a minute. The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, The Cat In The Hat, The Polar Express, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, Jumanji are all examples of brief diversions meant to help pre-schoolers to fall asleep being expanded into full-scale works. There have been many explanations for this, but I believe that the reasons studios finance these movies is that these are the only books that film production executives have actually read. Or actually can read.

So what to do with 90 to 120 minutes to fill up and a one-minute story to fill it with? Some films, such as Cat In The Hat fill it up with production expense and annoying noise. Some tell their simple little story real-l-l-l-l s-s-s-l-l-o-o-o-o-w-w-w. Spike Jonze has come up with a new idea for Wild Things, a book that is only 10 sentences long. Make a mumblecore movie for kids. Mumblecore is the perfect genre for filmmakers with actors, a setting and no story. It was created by young filmmakers with little or no resources--a digital camera, friends for actors, their own apartments for sets, and little life experience to write about, except their own embarkation into the world of adult relationships. So it is dialogue-driven and relationship-oriented. And its worst, it is draggy, self-indulgent and pointless. At its best, it reaches a hyper- or even meta-realism about young adult life.

Surprisingly, this works really well for Wild Things. (The screenplay is co-written by novelist and memoirist, Dave Eggers, who is having a heck of a year, given that his first film, Away We Go was completely brilliant. ) The book told children, it's OK to be angry, it's OK to let the wild things out and let them romp awhile, as long as you learn to let them go back into hiding when it's time. The film expands on that idea. Max's Wild Things have gone out of control and he leaves his home completely to go live with them for a while. But the Wild Things don't know how to live with each other any better than the other people in Max's life. They have some wonderful simple joys--sleeping in a big, warm furry pile (yes, the pile is scary at first, but then it is OK, because you're with your friends). And there is a terrific dirt clod fight and a really cool fort with underground tunnels and a fantastic tower on top and you don't have to let in anybody you don't like--and this voice I am imitating in my primitive way is the voice of the film. The entire film lives inside the head of a kid the way none of the expensive entertainments by Disney or Pixar or their imitators could ever do.

The child entertainers want to make everything all right, to soothe us, to homogenize experience into the formulas of narrative we find so comforting. But even as kids we know life to be formless, erratic, ebbing and flowing without pattern or, it seems, reason. Friends are really close and then they hurt us or leave us and they come back and they want everything to be all right again and we don't ever get to understand it--we just learn to accept it. And all this is stuff is hard, but we gotta learn to do it. So this is not an easy film for kids. But they will get it. And judging from the kids all around us at a matinee show, they will enjoy it.

I confess, I may not be the best possible judge for this film. My son, who grew up entirely in the age of digital animation was not completely convinced by the eyes and lips of the characters, which were evidently digitally grafted onto the actors romping in big furry character suits. For my own part, I was delighted by the low-key, almost improvisational acting style adopted by the voices of the Wild Things, so far from the over-emphatic voice acting that plagues so much animation, as if children could not understand anything that wasn't shouted at them. This movie knows that if kids are good hearing anything, they're good at hearing the stuff that wasn't meant for them. Wild Things is meant for them...and it isn't.