November/December 2012

ZERO DARK THIRTY  (2012)

     It seemed unlikely that the filmmaking team of director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal could top their Oscar-winning snapshot of fearless soldiers defusing bombs in Iraq, but taking on the search for Osama bin Laden was a good start. And while the slow, agonizing detective work that led to his death—as seen through one very determined CIA operative—is fascinating, it never reaches the minute-by-minute intensity of “The Hurt Locker” or offers enough dramatics to turn the investigation into compelling cinema.

      As satisfying as it is to see the behind-the-scenes maneuverings and, finally, the assault on his Pakistani compound at ground level, I had a hard time sharing the characters’ frustrations when I knew the end results from the opening frame. This is a superbly made and acted chronicle of one of the landmark events of recent history and shouldn’t be missed, but it requires patience; like so many films released at this time of the year, it easily could have been trimmed by 30 minutes. 

     Attempting to hold it all together is Jessica Chastain’s Maya, a young, inexperienced agent who goes from being shocked by water boarding at a Black Op site to a hard-hearted zealot who throws herself completely into the pursuit of OBL (as they refer to the elusive terrorist). Chastain, who emerged as a top actress last year with “The Tree of Life” and “The Help,” is handcuffed in her portrayal of Maya because the screenplay offers barely a hint at her personal life. Even with all her screen time, the lack of depth makes her seem like a supporting player much of the film.

      The extensive length of the movie is, in part, necessary to show the interminable 10 years it took to piece the intel all together, but the filmmakers trade away energy and intensity with the leisurely pace. The film also takes a long time to find a compelling counterweight to steely Maya. The always superb Mark Strong has some nice moments as her direct supervisor who is slowly convinced of her evidence, but it takes the arrival of James Gandolfini as the CIA director to bring out the feistiness in Maya. He nearly steals the picture with just two or three scenes.

      The brilliant recreation of the raid, shot as if seen through night goggles, will probably and understandably earn the picture a boatload of Oscar nominations. It reminded me of the nail-biting scenes that filled “The Hurt Locker,” except here we know how it ends and that, even in the face of danger, the Navy SEALs will leave unscathed.

      The closest comparison to “Zero Dark Thirty” is “United 93,” Paul Greengrass’ re-creation of what went on behind the scenes on Sept. 11, 2001. The details of that day are vastly more familiar than this new film’s decade-long saga, yet the filmmaker made you feel the almost unbearable reality of the moment and created a great film about a terrible event. Under similar circumstances, Bigelow and Boal fail to draw the audience (at least this one) into the minutia of the story, greatly reducing the impact of the picture. I’m not sure what kind of film they would have had if bin Laden had not been found and killed—they started the project before the May 2011 raid—but without the mesmerizing final 30 minutes all you’d have is Maya flying around the globe to verify another sliver of intel that might move the investigation one step closer to him; interesting history, but not exactly cinematic.

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK  (2012)

     The last time David O. Russell dipped into the quirky dynamics of fragile family life, he came up with “Flirting with Disaster,” one of the funniest and most insightful comedies of the 1990s, a screwball worthy of the classics that chronicles contemporary America’s obsession with finding roots.

     Sixteen years later, “Silver Linings Playbook” is just as smart and hilarious, jam packed with memorable characters and featuring, at its center, a pair of unstable souls looking for a chance to start anew.

      Like his 2010 film, “The Fighter,” this is the year’s best acted movie, with no less than six superb performances. But, acting wise, the big surprise of the picture is Bradley Cooper, best known from the “Hangover” films, playing a former substitute teacher with anger management issues. After flipping out when he catches his wife in the shower with another man, he ends up in a mental facility.

     When the bipolar Pat comes back to his parent’s Philadelphia home it quickly becomes clear why he has so many issues. Pat Sr., (Robert De Niro, in a return to glory) who has recently taken up book making in hopes of earning a down payment on a restaurant, is an obsessive, superstitious fan of the Eagles football team and clearly hasn’t tried very hard to understand his son. Pat’s sympathetic mother (Jacki Weaver) does her best to keep a calm lid on the household, but his father inevitably sets him off and, luckily, he finds someone to turn to. His refuge turns out to be an equally troubled, recently widowed young woman named Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence, brilliantly portraying the stoic sarcasm that defines so many in her generation), who enlists him as a dance partner.

   There’s no good way to explain how exhilarating this movie is as it explores Pat’s mental state, his misguided mission to reunite with his wife, the swirling chaos of his family, and the growing attachment to the blunt but vulnerable Tiffany.

     The film culminates in one of the funniest set pieces I’ve seen in years; in the family living room after a bruising Eagle loss, Tiffany faces off with Pat Sr. on football jinxes, a bet for all the marbles and the right course for Pat. Brilliant writing (Russell from a novel by Matthew Quick) and perfect comic timing (young Lawrence matching the great De Niro line for line) make the scene unforgettable.

       Other performances worth noting include John Ortiz as Pat’s best friend, who is having his own marital struggles, Anupam Kher as Pat’s offbeat therapist and the wild-eyed Chris Tucker, who I hadn’t seen in years, playing a fellow mental patient who keeps popping up just to further demonstrate that there’s a very thin line between crazy and just being human.

     “Silver Linings Playbook” may be the year’s best film, a biting, fresh and daring comedy worthy of the best of Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges or Woody Allen. 

LINCOLN (2012)

      There is plenty in this remarkable re-creation of the final days of the Civil War to admire, but towering above it all is Daniel Day-Lewis’ flawless, commanding, hypnotic portrayal of the country’s most important president.

       This 55-year-old, two-time Oscar winning British actor creates the definitive Lincoln, not an icon or a revered martyred, but a flawed, occasionally unsure leader carrying the burden of a bloody war and the fate of 4 million slaves, along with difficult family issues. That he maintains his calm exterior and ability to tell a witty story in the midst of this turmoil seems nearly inhuman, but Day-Lewis helps us understand, turning this legend into flesh-and-blood while confirming his greatness.

     The smartest decision Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner made in “Lincoln” was to narrow the time period covered to when the president maneuvered the 13^th Amendment through Congress while winding down the Civil War. It allows the actor to present a Lincoln at his most serious, avoiding the usual bio-pick clichés of romance, day-to-day life and artificially jumping from one state of life to another.

    I wouldn’t call “Lincoln” a great film; it’s burdened with too many obvious stereotypes, corny sentimentalism (the opening scene in which Lincoln talks to black and white soldiers may be the worst of the picture) and overall conventional filmmaking. Yet it’s a remarkable record of the country’s rebirth and a film everyone needs to see. 

      Even in the shadow of the magnificent Day-Lewis, other performers shine. Tommy Lee Jones is an unsmiling standard bearer of full equality for blacks, Thaddeus Stevens, the most influential member of the House who endures a decisive tongue lashing from the First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Field giving one of her most powerful performances of her long career). Both give Oscar-worthy performances as does James Spader as a roguish, foul-mouthed early version of a hard-nosed lobbyist who does the president’s dirty work. A dozen others have memorable moments, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the president’s son who wants to enlist, the always reliable David Strathairn as Secretary of State Seward, and Jared Harris as an insightful Gen. Grant.

         “Lincoln” is a motion picture that seems to arrive—not unlike the director’s “War Horse”—from another era, yet could only have been constructed by this master storyteller. But equally important are the contributions of Kushner, whose script doesn’t shy away from complex political discussions and legislative maneuvering that are not always easy to follow but infinitely compelling, and director of photography Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg’s secret weapon for nearly 20 years, who recreates the gas light look of the 19^th Century, burnishing the god-like profile of Lincoln and visually expressing with every frame the undeniable truth that no man has ever been so essential to this nation.

WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH HELEN? (1971) and

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO AUNT ALICE? (1969)
     Tell me this isn’t the perfect drive-in double feature, circa 1971? These insanely titled clunkers—attempting to cash in on the popularity of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”—feature battling star actresses and a title question that’s not worth answering.

     In “Helen,” Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters play a pair of small-town mothers thrown together when their sons are convicted of murder. Reynolds’s Adelle, a dance teacher with big dreams, decides they’ll start a new life in Hollywood. Winter’s Helen, a dreamy, unstable woman, goes along reluctantly.

      Adelle’s dance studio, exploiting tots and their parents longing to become Shirley Temple clones (the film is set in the 1930s), seems to be a success and she hooks up with a rich Texan (Dennis Weaver) who is the father of one of her students.

     But Helen is constantly worried that someone from their past is stalking them and soon there’s a dead body in the parlor. The manner in which it leaps from a seemingly conventional drama into weirdly benign slasher flick, as directed by Curtis Harrington, is both clumsy and startlingly clumsy.  (The next year, the director conned Winters into a follow-up question movie, “Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?”)

    Reynolds and Winters can’t match neither the star power nor the venom that filled those earlier gothic exercises, “Baby Jane” and “Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte.” And even though the pair seemed long past their primes they were only 41 (Reynolds) and 51 (Winters). The leap from 1950s Hollywood to the late ‘60s and early ‘70s turned most 40-plus stars into relics. (Though Winters scored a huge hit the next year with “The Poseidon Adventure.”)

    There an amusingly dark ending to the film but by then it had become such a parody of itself that it’s hard to care. 

       More serious, but much less fun, is “Aunt Alice,” in which Geraldine Page chews up the scenery as a widow left with nothing who moves to New Mexico and starts killing off housekeepers. The film, produced by Robert Aldrich, who directed “Baby Jane” and “Sweet Charlotte,” has huge gaps in the plot; my guess is that it was chopped down from a longer running time. The scheme has Page’s Mrs. Marrable tricking the domestics into investing their life savings with her money manager, killing them and then burying them in the garden.

      Ruth Gordon plays Alice, a friend of one of the “missing” housekeepers who gets herself hired to investigate. The script would have been more compelling if the actresses had just made it up as they went along. But Page does manage to give a compelling performance, even as her motivations and machinations seem ridiculous.

     The real question about both of these films is: Why did I waste my time watching them? I don’t have an answer for that one either.

DJANGO UNCHAINED  (2012)

     After providing Jews a taste of better-late-than-never revenge in “Inglorious Basterds,” master blood-letter Quentin Tarantino offers African-Americans a fictional shot to exact a price for 250 years of slavery.

     Utilizing the laconic pacing and threat of sudden violence of spaghetti Westerns with the spit-in-their-face attitude of blaxploitation, Tarantino holds nothing back (as if he ever does) in this tall tale of a well-spoken, German-born bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz, Oscar winner for his Nazi in “Basterds”) who frees a slave (Jamie Foxx) to make him his partner in the killing business.

     The writer-director, boldly practicing his pitch black humor and willingness to show the most gruesome of deaths, doesn’t succeed as well as he did in “Basterds,” in large part because he stretches out scenes to such length (Waltz’s Schultz is the most verbose horse-riding man in history) that they are too often drained of their inherent dramatic energy. At two hours, “Django” might have been a great film—the extra 45 minutes just deflates it. And maybe, just maybe, the death toll could have been reduced by 20 or 30 percent, making those surviving killings more meaningful.

       The story is pretty simple: After the pair team up to kill the Brittle brothers, handily dispatched at a vast plantation run by Big Daddy (Don Johnson), Schultz promises to help Django find and free his wife after they spend the winter collecting bounties.

      They locate Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) at Candyland, the property of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), who specializes in “Mandingo fighting,” a especially despicable sideline of slavery in which the fittest slaves viciously fight one another, usually to the death.

     What makes “Django” valuable—though I will resist suggesting it for a double feature with “Lincoln”—is its focus on what slavery really meant for blacks. Forgot about the lack of freedom or back-breaking work; what Tarantino hammers home is the constant  threat of torture or death and the hateful degradation by the white population; the daily crushing of the human spirit by being treating like livestock. I can’t think of another director who would be willing to take on this delicate subject (not even Spike Lee)—showing the hideous beatings, the oppressive use of the n-word—and actually get the film made. Yes, the script could have been sharper and the editing tighter, but you have to give Tarantino credit for throwing it out there, for better or worse.

ARBITRAGE  (2012)

     Robert Miller, like most Wall Street players, wants it all. And, for a moment, he achieves that goal—the indulgent, supportive wife; loving, successful children; the exotic, Euro-artiste mistress; cooperative friends and accountants propping up his cash-poor investment firm; and a rich, willing, if coy, investor prepared to pay him millions for the company.

     It all seems to be, if not under control, within his grasp. Then, on a romantic whim (the best and worst kind), he heads off with the mistress for a weekend getaway. His 60^th birthday ends badly as he dozes off while at the wheel, crashing the car and leaving the girl dead.

      This finely detailed character study of an extremely resourceful man trying to escape the irresponsible actions of the privileged class serves as a brilliant analogy for the broken, frankly gamed, system that the American economy has evolved into. Fueling this autopsy is a surprisingly blunt script by writer-director Nicholas Jarecki (making his feature directing debut) and a spot-on performance by Richard Geer, an actor who has rarely received his due as one of the finest of his generation. Not only has he given iconic performances in some of the most influential romantic/sexual movies “American Gigolo,” “An Officer and a Gentleman” and “Pretty Woman,” but he’s delivered under-the-radar exceptional work in less popular fare, including “Beyond the Limit,” “Internal Affairs,” “Primal Fear” and “The Hoax,” for decades.

      The role of the generically named Miller, an unruffled, quick thinking, still attractive money manager, plays to Gere’s strengths and it’d be a shame if Oscar voters didn’t reward him with a best actor nomination; it’s among his best performances.

     The film is an American tragedy turned on its head—a lesson in “deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” Not to get politically righteous, but, as “Arbitrage” pointedly demonstrates, Americans have accept the country we have; be it a massacre of innocents in a school room or million dollar winks in the boardroom. It’s all the same corruption that has no master except the bottom line.

     Great acting abounds in this film, including the ageless Susan Sarandon as Miller’s long-suffering wife; Tim Roth as the detective who is determined to nail him; Stuart Margolin, a veteran of 50 years of television, playing Miller’s clever, cautious lawyer; and Brit Marling as his loyal daughter, a partner in the business, who is shaken to her core when she discovers the financial reality of her father’s business. She plays “us,” the fools who have invested our futures, our retirement, everything we’ve spent a lifetime working for in the slim hope that we can get a little piece of the pie that others are feasting on.

LUCKY BREAK  (2001)

     Just as rewarding as seeing a great film for the first time is discovering a gem you’ve never heard of. The title of this thoroughly entertaining and thoughtful British comedy says it all.

    The only reason I recorded it was because the film’s lead actress is Olivia Williams, one of Britain’s most appealing actresses (she was priceless as the object of desire in “Rushmore”). In “Lucky Break,” she’s simply enchanting as Annabel, a prison therapist who, in spite of her better judgment, falls for one of the convicts. She reminds me of early Diane Keaton as she tries to remain professional, sensible, as she fights off her growing affection for this charismatic, self-assured bank robber Jimmy Hand (English TV veteran James Nesbit).

      But I’m getting ahead of myself. The film opens with long-time crime partners Jimmy and Rud (Lennie James) botching a bank robbery, which earns them 15-year prison terms. I had no idea where the movie was headed as it introduces various prisoners, mostly as they work out their anger in Annabel’s group counseling sessions. But director Peter Cattaneo, who I had completely lost track of since he was nominated for an Oscar for “The Full Monty,” brings a working-class sensibility to the prison culture that makes it easy to simply enjoy the film’s collection of characters. 

      It’s when Jimmy first encounters Warden Mortimer (another quirky, late-career turn by Christopher Plummer) and identifies the song he’s quietly singing from “South Pacific.” Soon, Jimmy is cast as the lead in the warden’s own musical based on the life of Admiral Nelson. And, of course, being the only female in the place, Annabel is forced to take on the role of Nelson’s love, Lady Hamilton.

     Yet, for Jimmy and Rud, the play is just a cover for a planned prison break.

      The off-handed realism that Nesbit brings to Jimmy, encouraged by the romantic neediness of Annabel, is the center of this engaging picture, while the supporting cast brings out the reality that not all convicts are scary thugs.

     James, in a nicely understated performance, makes Rud’s growing interest in his role in the musical as Nelson’s sidekick amusing and touching, while Timothy Spall’s Cliff, a gentle, brow-beaten prisoner, becomes the heart of the picture; he’s way too naïve for this world of bad guys. Bill Nighy’s Rog is another repressed character, constantly apologizes for no reason, who knows he’ll be fine if he can return to his beloved Amy (a feisty Celia Imrie). And then there’s Ron Cook’s snarling, vindictive guard who lords over these easily bullied prisoners.

      Attracting Nighy, Spall and Cook, among the Empire’s finest character actors, along with the legendary Plummer says more about the quality of Ronan Bennett’s script (based on a novel by actor Stephen Fry) than any adjective I can type.

    I’m not a big romantic comedy fan, at least not the ones that Hollywood makes these days, but “Lucky Break” restores my faith in the genre, and in the hope that love, even when it seems impossible, can make everything right.

SKYFALL  (2012)

    Though too often the franchise has felt weighted down by its long history and jerry-rigged plots, I remain a devoted fan of the granddaddy of spy thrillers, the Bond movie.

    Since I was a kid (my father took me to see “Thunderball,” maybe the first “adult” film I’d ever attended), I have made it an obligation to see them all, even the cartoonish crap fronted by Roger Moore and, as rigor mortis set in, the painful Timothy Dalton years.

     For me, the underrated Pierce Brosnan, in the Bond saddle for four pictures, the best being “Tomorrow Never Dies” (1997) featuring Michelle Yeoh as his wing girl, revived the series’ dignity, restoring a semblance of relevance to the ageless, martini-swilling MI6 killer.

     Then the franchise got lucky: the market for complex action heroes sprinting across the globe exploded on the heels of the success of “Bourne.” With a more ferocious, less playful, leading man in Daniel Craig, the series moved into a higher gear. Resetting the character with “Casino Royal” (2006), Ian Fleming’s original novel, the film gave hope that Craig and company could improve upon what Brosnan had done. Then the producers took a step back with 2008’s “Quantum of Solace.” Happily, for us devotees, “Skyfall” is first-class Bond, maybe the most engaging film since the Sean Connery era and certainly the best acted in the 50 year history of the series.

    I’m not sure what kind of arm twisting went on to secure Sam Mendes, the first Oscar-winning filmmaker to direct a Bond (his debut, “American Beauty,” also won best picture), but the unlikely choice turns out well. He stages the always-spectacular opening set piece, aboard and on top of an Eastern Europe train, with the flawless skill of an action veteran, while putting greater emphasis on what’s going on inside these characters’ heads and their complex relationships.

     The plot, not worth lingering over, involves the stealing of a list of agents (why do agencies’ even make such a list?) and a vow by the twisted bad guy to expose them one by one. Predictable stuff if it wasn’t for Javier Bardem’s Silva, an ex-MI6 agent who feels betrayed by M (Judi Dench in one of her finest screen performances) and wants revenge. Silva also may be the first out-of-the-closet gay villain, his sexuality played not for laughs or shock, but as another aspect of this bad guy’s life.  

     “Skyfall” puts the focus on M like never before, exploring the bond between her and James and her metal as she’s threatened both by Silva and by her new bureaucratic boss (Ralph Fiennes). And if Dench, Fiennes and Bardem don’t offer enough acting history, near the end of the film, Albert Finney shows up in a choice role as caretaker of Bond’s family estate in Scotland—there’s 16 Oscar nominations among those four.

     The script by John Lange, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade keeps the action moving at a breakneck pace (or it wouldn’t be a Bond), yet finds space for real characters exploring the results of their actions, creating a spy thriller that isn’t just a live-action video game. Now we just need someone to convince Craig he’s needed for a fourth film.

THE MASTER  (2012)

     Paul Thomas Anderson crafts motion pictures like few ever have. Combining unfiltered reality, larger-than-life performances and surreal, unexplainable sequences, staged and filmed with the precious of a diamond cutter, the 42-year-old writer-director is utilizing the language of filmmaking with a cool perfection and sudden brazenness that makes his films simultaneously confounding and stunning.

      Yet, since his brilliantly audacious 1997 debut, “Boogie Nights,” he hasn’t made a satisfying film. I could show you clips from any of his last four films, “Magnolia,” “Punch-Drunk Love,” “There Will Be Love” and “The Master,” that would convince you that each was a masterwork. His command of the mise-en-scène (the French phrase for what a director brings to an individual sequence) is unmatched in contemporary cinema—he makes Martin Scorsese look messy. But I’ll take messy every day if it adds up to an intellectually and emotionally truthful story, a film with meaning and clarity.

      In “The Master,” we meet the damaged outsider who has been the centerpiece of all of Anderson’s films; this time it’s shell-shocked World War II soldier Freddie Quell (a effectively bizarre Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in with a group of philosophical cultists surrounding the man they call “The Master,” Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in an unfocused performance). He’s a bit of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, a bit of Rush Limbaugh, but also not unlike the pseudo heroes that made Frank Capra films so appealing. But, from my point of view, he’s not as interesting as any of those characters and certainly not as defined. I never really understood much about his theories or what drew all these sycophants to him like moths to light.

       Quell is a lost soul looking for a reason to live and he finds it in Dodd. Why the all-powerful, but strangely nervous Dodd embraces Quell is never addressed, beyond the fact that the not-very-bright ex-soldier makes potent bootleg liquor.

      There are a half dozen scenes in “The Master” that left me totally confused—was it real or someone’s dream and what exactly does Anderson wants us to make of it. Dodd’s wife, played by Amy Adams, gives some hints that this cult is really about sexual freedom, but Anderson never tips his hand; in some ways, this film hides more than it reveals. Filmgoers are left with Quell’s view of Dodd’s world, a naïve, muddled understanding—not exactly why I watch a movie.

 

September/October 2012

ARGO  (2012)

    I distinctly remember the outrage—there’s no other word for it—during the Iranian hostage crisis when the Canadians were able to free six of their diplomats while 52 Americans remained prisoners of student revolutionaries.

     Canada? You’ve got to be kidding. Their success was America’s embarrassment and another dagger in the doomed Jimmy Carter Administration.

      But don’t always believe what your government tells you. When the operation was declassified in the 1990s, the truth turned out to be quite different, if a bit late for Carter. The six were American diplomats who escaped the country by way of a daring CIA plot (with the support of the Canadians).

      Actor-director Ben Affleck has fashioned this stranger-than-fiction secret slice of history into a terrific movie, alternating between outrageous humor and breathless suspense, lampooning Hollywood, the intelligence community and the White House while telling a truly heroic saga.

     Affleck plays Tony Mendez, the CIA expert in hostage extraction, who just barely convinces Secretary of State Cyrus Vance that his bizarre plan is worth undertaking. His boss, played with biting cynicism by Bryan Cranston, tells Vance: “This is the best bad idea we have.”  Mendez proposes, to the blank stares of his superiors, to mount a fake Hollywood movie production and then enter Iran under the premise of scouting for locations. When he leaves, his crew—the six embassy employees now hiding in the Canadian ambassador’s home—will fly out with him.

       Mendez knows that to fool the American educated Iranian security forces, this bogus project needs to look like the real thing. He first turns to an old ally, John Chambers (played by an enthusiastic John Goodman), a legendary Hollywood makeup artist—in real life he won an Oscar for his work on “Planet of the Apes” and created Spock’s ears—who guides Mendez to veteran producer Lester Siegel (a composite character). Alan Arkin plays Siegel as the ultimate done-it-all, seen-it-all Hollywood insider who makes it clear from the start that he’s taking his role seriously, demanding they go all out. “If I’m going to make a fake movie, it’s going to be a fake hit,” he says with a straight face.

    Reportedly, screenwriter Chris Terrio, working from a Wired magazine piece by Joshuah Bearman, doesn’t always adhere to the facts of the operation, but, more importantly, turns it into a smart, witty, suspenseful and thoughtful film.

      The scenes with Goodman, Arkin and Affleck as they search for a script (ending up with a “Star Wars” rip off called “Argo”), “develop” the project and even hold an outlandish press event and script reading are not only hilariously staged but filled with perfectly aimed zingers at an industry where exaggerations and cons are accepted as standard operating procedure.

     Affleck smoothly segues from this B-movie goofiness to gripping intensity when Mendez arrives in Iran and makes contact with the fearful Americans.

      As he did so well in “Gone Baby Gone” (2008) and “The Town” (2010), the director places genuinely ordinary people in believably extraordinary situations—even in the way he portrays Mendez makes this CIA operative seem like just a sincere, dedicated Everyman.

      Maybe the best work of his short, but impressive career is the opening sequence in which the director cuts adroitly between the angry mob storming the U.S. embassy and the panicked Americans inside. Since the film is focused on the six who avoid being taken hostage, it would have been easy to downplay the actual takeover, but he tackles the challenge like a veteran action director.

     Not only does he capture the chaotic insanity of the situation in Iran and the buffoonery of Hollywood, but also the division the crisis caused in the Carter Administration and the less than decisive way decisions are often made at even the highest levels. Not a bad accomplishment for an actor whose career just a few years ago seemed to be headed for the straight-to-DVD dustbin.

 

MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA  (1929)
      Every 10 years, the British magazine Sight & Sound, among the most respected film journals in the world, polls hundreds of critics and filmmakers to determine the most admired movies ever made.

     The big news of this year’s list is the end of the half century reign of “Citizen Kane” as the undisputed champ of the world, displaced by Alfred Hitchcock’s chilly tale of obsession, “Vertigo.” In the 1952 poll, Orson Welles’ “Kane” failed to make the Top 10, then a decade later, was No. 1.  “Vertigo” didn’t made its first appearance in the Top 10 until 1982 (24 years after its 1958 release), but since has gradually closed in on “Kane,” coming within five votes of the No. 1 spot in 2002.

      This year’s poll, with a much larger voting pool (over 800), gave “Vertigo” a decisive, 45-vote win. I’m not sure what it all means, but, for comparison, the No. 1 film in 1952, Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist classic, “Bicycle Thieves,” finished 33^rd in this year’s rankings. Two films from the 1952 Top 10, Luchino Visconti’s “La terra trema” and Sergei Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible,” have fallen out of the Top 100.  

      While most of the top films are the usual suspects of unquestionable world masterpieces (see the list below), one title caught me by surprise, “Man with a Movie Camera,” a Russian documentary I’d never heard of. If this was 20 years ago, I would have spent the next two years trying to seek out the video or hoping that it’d show up at some moldy revival theater on a day I was free. Instead, three days later, via Netflix, I was watching this obscure film.

       In the opening credits, the director describes his intentions:

      “This film represents an experiment in the cinematic communication of visible events without the aid of inter-titles; without the aid of a scenario; without the aid of theater (sets, actors, etc.). This experimental work aims at creating a truly international absolute language of the cinema based on its total separation from the language of theater and literature.”

      You’ve got to love a film that announces its importance before the opening image. Depicting a typical day, from dawn to sunset, in the still hopeful Communist Soviet Union, this silent is framed with the making of the film you’re watching. Opening in a theater screening the film and often showing the film’s primary cameraman in action, “Man with a Movie Camera” offers a textbook example of the incredible cinematic beauty that was in vogue during the late silent era and a behind-the-scenes peek at how such images are captured.

      Director Denis Kaufman (who used the pseudonym Dziga Vertov—meaning “spinning top”) was the leading propaganda filmmaker in the early years of Soviet Russia, spending most of his career editing and directing newsreels. His theories on the use of the camera and capturing realistic images were revolutionary at the time and influential beyond his time; Vertov is often heralded as the father of cinema vérité.

      But the real star of “Man with a Movie Camera” is Vertov’s brother, Mikhail Kaufman, the cameraman who captures these seemingly random, but powerful images of everyday life and serves as the film’s linking presence. (Their younger brother, Boris Kaufman, shot such classics as “On the Waterfront” and “The Pawnbroker.”)

      And don’t think that just because this is Communist propaganda that there isn’t plenty of spice—the glory of the human form holds equal weight to the light and shadows of quaint Russian streets. The Kaufman brothers film a young woman awaking from a night’s sleep and putting on her clothes, preparing for work and then, later, find a spot for shots of topless women at a mud-bath spa. Near the end of the film, the camera lingers, using slow motion, over both male and female athletes as they exercise and perform track-and-field events.

      For the academics and high-minded critics who dominate the voters in the Sight & Sound poll, this documentary delivers on two favorite criteria for greatness: films about filmmaking and pictures stripped of all commercial conventions. For my taste, I love the common conventions—at least the ones that produced the unending string of great American films from the 1930s through the 1970s. As one loyal reader of this post commented after seeing the Sight & Sound list, “I'm suspicious of any movie list without “The Maltese Falcon” or “Dr. Strangelove.” As you can see from the Top 10 that I would have endorsed, I couldn’t agree more with those sentiments.

     I’m glad the list made me aware of this clearly important and influential Russian documentary, but to place it on any list of the best films ever made feels disingenuous, a one-and-done that will disappear from the list in 2022. 

     Here’s the Sight & Sound Top 10:

     1  Vertigo  (1958, Hitchcock)
     2  Citizen Kane  (1941, Welles)
     3  Tokyo Story  (1953, Ozu)
     4  Rules of the Game  (1939, Renoir)
     5  Sunrise  (1927, Murnau)
     6  2001: A Space Odyssey  (1968, Kubrick)
     7  The Searchers  (1956, Ford)
     8  Man with a Movie Camera  (1929, Vertov)
     9  The Passion of Joan of Arc  (1927, Dreyer)
    10  8 ½  (1963, Fellini)

    And mine, if I had a vote:

    1  Citizen Kane  (1941, Welles)
    2  The Third Man  (1950, Reed)
    3  Vertigo  (1958, Hitchcock)
    4  The Godfather Part II  (1974, Coppola)
    5  The Seventh Seal  (1956, Bergman)
    6  Casablanca  (1943, Curtiz)
    7  Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop
        Worrying and Love the Bomb  (1964, Kubrick)
    8  8 ½  (1963, Fellini)
    9  The Maltese Falcon  (1941, Huston)
  10  Seven Samurai  (1954, Kurosawa)

THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS (1972)

     Amid all the articles commemorating the 40^th anniversary of the release of “The Godfather”—which, incidentally, finished 21^st in the Sight & Sound poll, but 7^th in the directors-only poll—another intelligent, brilliantly realized film from 1972 has yet to received its due.

      Director Bob Rafelson, fresh from the groundbreaking “Five Easy Pieces,” fashioned another classic American tragedy, with screenwriter Jacob Brackman, by placing Eugene O’Neill-style dramatics amidst the beachfront squalor of Atlantic City.

      The ironically titled “The King of Marvin Gardens” (a reference to the Monopoly streets of the New Jersey city) centers on two very different brothers, played by longtime friends and alumni from the Roger Corman bike movie entourage Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern.

      A moody, cerebral radio commentator, David Staebler (Nicholson) offers ruminations on life as he narrators his stories to late-night listeners. The character is based on the legendary radio broadcaster Jean Shepherd.

      Jason, his very different brother played with cartoonish, almost childlike energy by Bruce Dern, wants David to join him in an Atlantic City property scam, bringing them together for a weekend.

       This is Atlantic City long before the Trump and other casinos brought it back to life. A shadow of its 1940s glamour as a vacation destination, the city had become a rundown haven for swindlers and the hopeless. (See Louis Malle’s excellent “Atlantic City” for a decade-later update on the seaside resort.)

     In the middle of these bickering brothers, an odd pair of women adds to the tension. Ellen Burstyn, in the midst of a string of raw, moving performances, plays Sally, Jason’s on-again, off-again mistress and also the stepmother of the much younger Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson), who is also sleeping with Jason. As this arrangement turns as soar as the real estate deal, David can only watch Jason’s world spiral out of control.

    Rafelson, who never matched these back-to-back masterpieces of American disillusionment (he’s made one barely released film in the past 15 years), is at his best when bringing out the deep-seated, uncensored emotions of these characters while distilling the story down to its basic tenant: the American dream is dead, so roll up your carpet and hunker down for a long winter.

      Nicholson, Dern and Burstyn are all at their best, creating an uncomfortable reality that’s as hard to watch as it is impossible to turn away from. The performance is one of Nicholson’s least appreciated; a quiet, interior study of a man whose neuroses are compounded by his intellect.

     Masterful cinematographer László Kovács, as he did in “Five Easy Pieces,” knows exactly how to bring out the dreary, worn-out mood of these spiritless characters and their cold, inhospitable environs. 

THE LOCKET (2002)

     Don’t ask me to explain, but my wife is a fan of the romantic melodramas that dominate the schedules of Lifetime and the Hallmark channels. Because of that, I half-watch a ton of ridiculously bad TV films, enduring dozens of stories about successful but unfulfilled women (more often than not played by Teri Polo or Melissa Gilbert) who return to their rural roots to find love and the real meaning of life. Yet even amidst a junk pile, something first rate occasionally emerges.

      “The Locket” stars a distressingly unexpressive Chad Willett as a medical student who takes a job at a nursing home and ends up on trial for murdering a patient. Beyond the ridiculous script and farfetched plotline, the movie is poorly editing and directed, exasperated by mostly tedious acting.

       Yet two mesmerizing performances elevate the production. The enduring Vanessa Redgrave plays Esther, a patient who wants little to do with anyone until the new attendant makes her his special project. As she emerges from her depressed state and reveals her heartbreaking life story, which should have been the focus of the script, the movie comes alive.

     While it’s hardly a surprise that Redgrave, among the great film performers of the past 40 years, gives a memorable performance even in a forgettable TV film, the intense turn by Terry O’Quinn, as the young man’s alcoholic father, was an eye-opener. This mainstay of a half dozen major TV series, including “Alias,” “The West Wing” and “Lost,” who has worked relentlessly since the early 1980s, is both touching and irascible, offering an achingly real portrayal of a man forever damaged by the loss of his wife. It’s the kind of turn that delivered in a major motion picture would have scored O’Quinn an Oscar nomination.

      That’s the great thing about art; even in trash, you sometimes find a sliver or two of brilliance.

LILY IN LOVE (1984)

     It’s easy to forget as contemporary Hollywood spews out terrible films week after week, that a rather high percentage of American movies have always been pretty awful.

     Many of the most forgettable pictures of the past 30 years can be seen every day on the oddball cable chancel THiS. But even knowing the channel’s track record for showing bombs, inevitably I’m drawn by an interesting plot description or unusual cast. And, just as inevitably, I’m disappointed.

     Few films I’ve seen in recent years are as idiotic as “Lily in Love,” especially considering the picture pairs two of the great actors of our time, Maggie Smith and Christopher Plummer. Not only does it feature two acting legends, but its plot, about the making of a movie, is hard to resist. Smith plays a successful screenwriter married to a pompous Broadway star (Plummer) who secretly pines for a shot at big-screen stardom.

     Lily and Fitzroy have a typical showbiz marriage in that they often leave social gatherings separately—her with long suffering agent Jerry (played by veteran screenwriter Adolph Green), he with an admiring starlet.

      But when Fitzroy reads Lily’s latest script he’s suddenly very attentive to his wife, determined to play the romantic lead role despite her insistence that he’s wrong for the part.  

      At that point the film could have gone in dozens of directions, but director Karoly Makk and screenwriter Frank Cucci picked the least believable, most ludicrous plotline. First, the audience is asked to buy the fact that Lily, the screenwriter, not only makes casting choices but is basically in charge of every important aspect of the production. If there is anything you can count on from Hollywood, it’s that screenwriters have the smallest share of power in any film production.

      Suspending belief beyond all reason, Jack disguises himself as an Italian actor—with an accent and a bit of putty—fooling his wife and scoring an audition. She’s so impressed with “Roberto,” this “wonderful actor” who she’s never heard of, that she cast him in the role and they all head to Budapest to shoot the film. (Coincidentally, director Makk is Hungarian).

     It’s ironic, I guess, that the film they are shooting looks and sounds even worse than “Lily in Love,” featuring the production values of a grade school play. And Plummer’s acting is beyond bad, chewing scenery as if he’s dying of hunger.  Maybe that’s all meant to be funny, but the results are just insufferable. It’s never made clear when Lily actually figures out that Roberto is her husband as Smith plays her as eternally sunny even in the worst of circumstances. It is just another hole in a preposterous script.

      For Smith, this was just an unpleasant bump in her long and distinguished career; the next year she earned an Oscar nomination for “A Room with a View.” Most recently, she’s shined in the British TV series “Downton Abbey” and the film “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” (see below).

     As for Plummer, it was yet another failed attempt to regain the movie fame he had after the success of “The Sound of Music” (1965). It wouldn’t be until his impressive 1999 performance as Mike Wallace in “The Insider” that Plummer became an in-demand Hollywood actor. Now, he’s seems to be in every other major film, culminating last year with his Oscar-winning performance as a late-blooming gay man in “Beginners.”

     For a week after watching “Lily in Love,” I swore off all “THiS” movies, but then there was this film about Vegas in the ‘60s……I’ll write about that next month.

ROBOT & FRANK (2012)

      This deceptively sweet futuristic tale of a house burglar dealing with dementia offers the kind of insight into aging and friendship that rarely shows up in American films.

     Frank Langella has long been an admired stage actor, but has only occasionally had success on screen. Best known for his dashing turn as Count Dracula in the 1979 remake, Langella has had a recent run of first-rate film roles, including as CBS chairman William Paley in “Good Night, and Good Luck” (2005), as a veteran novelist in “Starting Out in the Evening” (2007) and, simply stunning, as a feisty Richard Nixon in “Frost/Nixon” (2008).

     At 74, his late career spurt continues with his most complex and emotionally rich performance playing Frank Weld, who, because of his memory problems, is forced by his son to accept a robot companion. Now common in society, robots can hold conversations and handle most domestic chores. After rebelling against the idea for awhile, this career thief starts to rely on the mechanical friend and even involves him in his latest crime operation.

          As voiced by Peter Sarsgaard, this unnamed, generic robot may be the most interesting mechanical device since the soft-spoken Hal from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Equally laid back, Susan Sarandon’s lonely librarian confides in the flirty Frank that new owners plan to make the library totally digital, spurring him into action. Without making much of it, the film offers a warning about losing the tradition of the printed word in the name of new technology.

     At numerous points in the film, Frank is simply not very nice, a man not worthy of our sympathy. It’s a tribute to Langella’s nuanced acting that he keeps winning you back to his side, as he creates an authentic, complicated, very uncertain senior you won’t soon forget.     

     Among the strengths of “Robot & Frank”—an impressive debut for director Jake Schreier and screenwriter Christopher D. Ford—is the manner in which it depicts the indignities of aging, both the minor and the life-altering changes that keep piling on as the end approaches. The film glows with a quiet intelligence.    

THE ROCKING HORSE WINNER (1949)

    There are few things better than when a film you’ve never heard of turns out to be something special. That was the case with this low-keyed, surprisingly serious British film about a boy’s fascination with horse racing.

     “Rocking Horse Winner,” based on a D.H. Lawrence story, starts out like so my genteel English movies, with an inquisitive young boy (an engaging John Howard Davies, best known for playing the title character in David Lean’s “Oliver Twist”) befriending the household’s new hire, handyman Bassett (John Mills, who also served as producer).

     Gradually it becomes clear that young Paul’s parents (played by Hugh Sinclair and Valerie Hobson) are facing financial problems even as the wife refuses to accept the reality of it. While the adults, the parents and Uncle Oscar (Ronald Squire), who  serves as the voice of reason, bicker over the cost of their lifestyle and the father’s card game loses, Bassett and Paul are placing horse racing bets and collecting quite a sum.

    Turns out the boy believes that a wooden, rocking horse can tell him the winner of each week’s derby. The film naturally evolves from a boyhood adventure into a powerful psychological cautionary tale of greed and misguided priorities.

      Davies gives a very impressive performance—equal to his Oliver Twist—making his breakdown very believable and affecting. After his short juvenile acting career (he appeared in just two more features), he became a television producer, a longtime BBC mainstay whose credits include the classic comedy shows “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and “Fawlty Towers.”

     Mills, one of the great character actors in film history, won an Oscar two decades later for his mute, mentally disabled Irishman in “Ryan’s Daughter,” but is equally masterful in this quieter, less showy role. He appeared in over 100 films before his death in 2005 at 97.

      Writer-director Anthony Pelissier, whose handful of features include adaptations of works by H.G. Welles, Noel Coward and Somerset Maugham, turns what could have been a middling domestic drama into a memorable gem by subtly alternating perspectives between the parents and the boy and bringing out the emotional darkness just below the surface of this seemingly model post-war family.

THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL (2012)

     I was convinced by the trailers that this English comedy about a diverse collection of retirees who travel to a struggling Indian resort was the last summer movie I wanted to see.

     Despite the presence of consistently superb actors Tom Wilkinson and Bill Nighy and a pair of Dames, Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, the picture seemed destined to be yet another litany of predictable old-people jokes leading to a heartwarming ending.

     Either I’m getting soft in my old age or “Exotic” is a step above the usual “Grand Hotel” offspring, but I enjoyed it in spite of its formulaic structure.

      What these Brits find in Jaipur is not quite what was on the website (oldies duped yet again); instead Sonny (Dev Patel of “Slumdog Millionaire”) is an inexperienced youngster who is determined to turn his inheritance into the resort of his father’s dreams.

     Quickly the roles are defined: Dame Maggie, there for hip replacement surgery is the dismissive accidental tourist; Dench plays the recent widow who wants to escape her dull life; Wilkinson is an unfulfilled judge who is returning to his boyhood home to find a long-lost friend; Nighy plays a quirky, gentle soul in an unpleasant marriage; Ron Pickup plays a randy senior looking for one last fling; and Celia Imrie is his female counterpart seeking a soul mate.

      Director John Madden (“Shakespeare in Love,” “The Debt”) and screenwriter Ol Parker (working from Deborah Moggach’s novel) waste too much screen time on the rather plodding romantic woes of Sonny, but when the camera turns to Dench, Nighy and Wilkinson this picture comes alive.

     Each of those veterans makes the most of these well-drawn characters, each searching for the life they deserve. These characters feel very real and alive, even as they exist in a script bloated with clichés.  

      And then there’s Smith, who, though playing a stereotype, never ceases to entertaining as the cranky, snobbish Brit (not much different from her “Downton Abbey” role), delivering sarcasm in proper English like nobody else.

GEORGE HARRISON: LIVING IN A MATERIAL WORLD (2011)

    You’d think that at nearly four hours a documentary on a man who was a household name since he was a teenager would cover every important aspect of his life. Yet this Martin Scorsese-directed compilation of rarely seen clips and new and archival interviews gives short shrift to the music career of George Harrison.

     Certainly, the guitarist and songwriter was not your typical rock star; his glittery start as a member of the most famous band in the world—he was “the quiet one”—contrasted with his later spirituality, diverse interests and rather disappointing solo career. Yet so much screen time is spent on his Beatle years and the relationship between him and his three band mates, along with his later connection to Ravi Shankar, Indiana music and spirituality that everything else gets squeeze out.

      His saint-like loyalty and philanthropy is testified to over and over in new interviews with his widow Olivia (also executive producer), son Dhani, Eric Clapton, Shankar, race car driver Jackie Stewart, Phil Spector, Eric Idle, Klaus Voormann and, of course, Paul and Ringo. And I have no reason to doubt it.

     But what did he think of the Lennon-McCartney songs that defined the Beatles and kept his compositions, for the most part, off the albums? And why, after spilling out a masterful three-record set “All Things Must Pass,” was his subsequent work mostly forgettable? I wanted a objective voice, maybe a respected music critic or Beatle expert, to definite his contributions to this monumental group and weigh in on his later music.

     Also ignored is one of the most prominent events of his post-Beatle career: when Harrison was forced to defend himself against plagiarism changes. A jury ultimately decided that he had unintentionally swiped the melody from the 1963 Chiffon’s hit “He’s So Fine” when writing “My Sweet Lord,” Harrison’s most popular song and a No. 1 hit in 1970. Unquestionably, it had a detrimental effect on his songwriting from that point on.

   Overall, the film lacks a strong focus. It’s a surprising complaint to make about a Scorsese picture, especially since the director did such a superb job profiling Bob Dylan in “No Direction Home.” Yet too much of this documentary plays like those strung together, theme-less biographies once popular on cable television. I’m far from being a Beatle fanatic, yet I learned very little about Harrison from “Living in the Material World;” I was left with more questions than answers.