Dogs Bark

A Glimmer Of Hope - - Gravity (2013, USA) - - 26 January 2014

Recommended. I am a big fan of Gravity writer/director Alfonso Cuarón. He has helped to define a new Mexican renaissance in filmmaking. I hope he can still make the smaller pictures like Amores Perros that defined the latest Mexican renaissance.  Gravity, however, gives me pause. Although the special effects and camera work are totally dazzling - - the action, brutally tense - - there’s no human gravity to a potentially much deeper story. George Clooney shows none of the quiet depth he has used in other roles, reduced here to a wisenheimer.  Sandra Bullock’s limits are greater, a purportedly trained astronaut squealing and weeping through space. I found the bad characterization, bad dialogue and physical implausibility of Gravity very distracting; however, the spectacle of the movie is good enough to just squeak past these major flaws. Bullock’s character says, “I love the quiet of space;” It’s a lovable movie . . . if you don’t speak English.

An Unkind Stranger - - Blue Jasmine (2013, USA) - - 24 January 2014

Not recommended. I can’t imagine what Woody Allen intended in his re-write of Tennessee Williams, aka, Blue Jasmine. He seems ethically off-the-page. If it’s a serious film, it’s mean to the mentally ill.  If it’s a black comedy, he’s just being mean spirited. Cate Blanchet (Elizabeth: The Golden Age), who played Ms. DuBois on Broadway and the title character here, does a talented job translating the affectations of a Southern rara avis into Madame Ponzi. But Blanche’s great tender heart never steps off this streetcar. We are given little reason to care about Jasmine and her bathetic fate.  The other characters randomly abuse her and each other without consequences. Only Brando stand-in Andrew Dice Clay (The Adventures of Ford Fairlane) shows any humanity. Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky) is very good as the randy sister but again, the part is empty.  And Woody, no one moves to San Francisco when they’re broke!

Universal Solders - - Rebelle [War Witch] (2012, Canada) - - 21 January 2014

Recommended. Viet/Canadian, writer/director Kim Nguyen has been quietly making a name for himself in the four feature films he’s completed since The Marsh in 2002. With War Witch, he scored two Genies and Canada’s submission for last year’s Foreign Language (French) Oscar. Amour won but this is its better. For one thing, the agony of the story is more socially important. Komona is an African girl who is taken by rebel forces and forced to shoot her parents. She escapes, is retaken and impregnated by the rebel commander. Again she escapes, pregnant and terrified that her baby will be cursed unless her dead parents are buried. Rachel Mwanza, as Komona, also won a Canadian Oscar and several festival awards for her unaffected performance. She aptly conveys, without condescension, the stubborn spirit burning below her numbed surface. The original tale is actually Burmese, sadly illustrating the global scatter of this atrocity.

Reckoned Dead - - All Is Lost (2013, USA) - - 18 January 2014

Recommended.  I dislike it when cancer survivors - - or any survivors for that matter - - are called ‘winners.’ I’m all for encouragement but what about the people that don’t live? Are they losers? At game end, nobody wins. And we suspect that Robert Redford’s hero in All Is Lost won’t win his attempt to cross the Indian Ocean in a crippled Cal 39 sailboat. His despair is suggested in the first five minutes and the remainder of this one-man show is a flashback of Silent Bob trying to jump each of the many incremental sharks. Director J.C. Chandor (Margin Call) uses Redford’s expressively under-keyed acting skills to keep us guessing about the final leg of the journey.  The open-water pictures are spectacular, as you’d expect, and the score won a Golden Globe; however, I can’t buy a guy this obviously smart not cracking the celestial navigation textbook before the radio conks out.  

In Service To History - - Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013, USA) - - 14 January 2014

Recommended.  When The Butler first hit the theatres, I cast a dubious eye. Looks like broccoli to me. I missed the fact that it was my broccoli. I’m not African-American but the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers were central to my political upbringing. In 1973 I lived near the White House and may have passed Forest Whitaker’s (The Last King Of Scotland) character, Cecil Gaines, on K Street. Actually Gaines is only based on the actual butler, Eugene Allen. I don’t know about their accuracy but Whitaker, and particularly Oprah Winfrey (Beloved), splendidly recreate a middle-class, DC Black couple, attempting to overcome a ghastly childhood in the depression South. I have also never seen a more sexy Oprah. There's still a lot of ‘eat your vegetables’ here and the sound is strangely muddy. But when Gaines meets the story’s last President . . . you get past that.

Robata Inamorata - - Her (2013, USA) - - 11 January 2013

Strongly recommended. One of the common failings of crap movies is a good idea that never gets past the first act. The trailers of this dreck are all you need. And then there is Spike (Being John Malkovitch) . . . whose stories just keep going and going and going. Her begins as a funny mediation on the horror that is love in the 21^st century.  I’ve been on that blind date with Olivia Wilde (shudder). Leaving the SNL skits behind, Her goes cute with Samantha the Operating System (Scarlett Johansson), then veers again with a twist that riffs on the nature of consciousness. Yeah, that nature.  I can’t give up much more plot without spoiling things but the movie ends exactly where and when it should. Arcade Fire provides a great score and Amy Adams is at her most charmingly frumpy. Also, watch the credits for an amusing voice-cameo.

A Splash Quite Unnoticed - - Museum Hours (2012, Austria/USA) - - 8 January 2013

Recommended.  Here’s the plot of Museum Hours. An older, Canadian woman, Anne (Mary Margaret O'Hara) comes to Vienna to sit with her cousin who is in a coma. She befriends a gay, older guard, Johann (Bobby Sommer) at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and they spend her time away from the hospital touring the museum and city, discussing life (in English) and occasionally ordering food from waiters. The cousin eventually dies. Indy director Jem Cohen makes Antonioni look like Verhoeven and if you don’t want to think about a movie . . . this ain’t gonna be pleasant. If cool, weird movies do rock your world, this is an amazing one. The camera keeps cycling back to peer at the great Bruegels and Rembrandt paintings that hang in the Kunsthistorisches.  Museum Hours is almost a documentary on the way artists manipulate your gaze, and how we sometimes rebel. What’s it about? Just that question.

No Dirty Names - - Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, USA) - - 1 January 2014

Strongly recommended. I found Dave Van Ronk four long years after “Inside Dave Van Ronk.” By then, Van Ronk covered a more  bluesy repertoire and introduced me to such as Mississippi John Hurt, Mose Allison and Reverend Gary Davis. Suffice to say, I owe him much and I, like Joel and Ethan Coen, never felt that we thanked him for his strange and tender beauty; I’m pleased to report that the brothers have delightfully paid that debt, intelligently capturing the verisimilitude of Van Ronk and the early 60’s Village scene. This is also their most sentimental movie to date, despite the cruelties they rain upon their Job. The music is lovingly assembled by T Bone Burnett (True Grit), and nicely performed by Oscar Issac, accompanied intermittently by Justin Timberlake and Cary Mulligan. John Goodman conjures up another unforgettable loon. One more lovely little gem in a long line of them.

https://myspace.com/davevanronk/music/song/gaslight-rag-81549567-95389864

Once Upon A Time In London - - The Deep Blue Sea (2011, USA/UK) - - 31 December 2013

Not recommended. This film was touted last year as a triumph for lead actress Rachel Weisz, an admirable artist who needs no introduction after the silly but popular Mummy franchise. Lest we forget, she already has a greatly deserved Oscar for The Constant Gardener. In The Deep Blue Sea, based upon Terence Rattigan’s (The Prince and the Showgirl) highly praised play, Weisz fashions a married, post-WWII Englishwoman driven to attempt suicide after adultery with a younger, RAF pilot. I’ve never seen the play but I wonder if the power of the story has simply receded into the past. The sixty-year distance perhaps pushed director/adaptor Terence Davies (The House Of Mirth) to emphasize the timeless agony of Ms.Weisz’s abandoned character but I felt little connective chemistry from her neurasthenic noble. A previous attempt from Vivian Leigh occured in 1955, when the audience may have had some actual memories of the war.