After quite a few months of ignoring films, we got the bug recently and saw eight or nine of them. We streamed some and actually went to the theater several times. Here are brief descriptions of a few of the best.
Licorice Pizza
The pace is steady, the setting is interesting, the characters are unusual, and so are the social dynamics in this romance/adventure/coming-of-age story. Sean Penn, Tom Waits, and Bradley Cooper show up in bit parts, but the two leads, both of them relative unknowns, hold the screen quite well on their own. Gary is a chubby, self-confident go-getter who seems to be starting a new business every five minutes, though he's only fifteen. He takes a fancy to Alana, a testy twenty-five-year-old working on the staff of the company taking pictures for Gary's high school annual. Her life is going nowhere, which may explain why she starts spending time with Gary, though she repeatedly makes it very clear that she is NOT his girl friend. Lots of unexpected developments, odd situations, and adventures ensue. Director Paul Thomas Anderson knows how to make things look "cool," even if it's a 1970s San Fernando Valley cool. And the soundtrack has got a good vibe, too.
Parallel Mothers
In recent years I had lost track of, or maybe lost interest in Pedro Almodóvar's films, so I'm in no position to call Parallel Mothers a return to form, but it's a nice piece of work, putting his singularly bright sense of color and soap opera-ish mise-en-scène to the service of a complex narrative, superbly acted by Penelope Cruz and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, who play unwed mothers-to-be, a generation apart in age, who meet in the maternity ward of a Madrid hospital and through a strange set of circumstances, eventually become friends. Almodóvar's youthful zaniness is entirely absent from the work, but a heightened political consciousness fills the gap, and the personal drama is riddled with subtle turns that the actors convey in numerous conversational close-ups. I especially liked the scene in which Cruz explains to the much younger Sánchez-Gijón how to make a tortilla—that is to say, the kind of potato-egg pie you see standing unrefrigerated on the counter in every working class bar in Madrid. Sánchez-Gijón comes from a well-off conservative family, and she's never seen it done.
Like last year's Hollywood dud Mank, this film is intricate and ambitious, but in the end, it doesn't quite satisfy. Javier Bardem doesn't look like Desi Arnez, and he doesn't seem to have Desi's good-humored and shallow flashiness. (He was better cast as the killer in No Country for Old Men.) Nicole Kidman fares better as Lucille Ball, but in the end, viewers may long for the on-stage Lucy rather than the talented and competent but somewhat humorless woman who played the part. Still, it's free on Netflix and it's a high-quality production.
The Hand of God
Also free on Netflix, and perhaps the BEST movie I saw in recent months, this Neapolitan coming-of-age tale was directed by Paolo Sorrentino, whose film La Grande Bellezza won the Foreign Film Oscar a few years ago. I saw that film, which was set in Rome, and it struck me as dazzling in parts, but too long, and too decadent. Reviews had it that Sorrentino's subsequent effort, a sprawling work based on the life of notorious Italian prime minister Berlusconi, was worse. But The Hand of God has the dazzling, shimmering beauty of the Bay of Naples and the personal rootedness and feeling of an autobiographical tale. (Some of the best parts of La Grande Bellezza were the flashbacks to childhood.)
The story includes high-speed boat chases, practical jokes, family picnics and feuds, film sets and theater stages, mistresses and monks and soccer, filling the screen with color and life. But the thread holding it all together is the young son Fabietto, who has no idea what he's going to do with his life. His chief interests seem to be his gorgeous but mentally unstable aunt, and the fact the famous Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona has signed a contract to play for Naples.
At one point Fabietto's mother asks him what he plans to study at university. He answers, somewhat tentatively, "philosophy."
She looks down for a few seconds, then says cautiously, "What is that?"
After a pause, he replies, "I don't know."
There are quite a few odd characters in the film, and viewers may be reminded here and there of Fellini's nostalgic film Amarcord, but Sorrentino's work veers far less often into caricature and the grotesque. He emphasizes richness rather than crassness, and sustains a depth of feeling reminiscent not of Fellini but of such Italian directors as Francesco Rosi and Ettore Scola.
The Last Duel
Maybe they should have called it "The Last Gruel." Director Ridley Scott, whose well-known films run the gamut from Thelma and Louise and Bladerunner to Alien and Gladiator, here tried his hand at a medieval morality tale, but without the morality, or the moral. The tone is rough and wisps of pageantry are few and far between. The battle scenes steer clear of gratuitous gore, but this may simply be because everyone wears so much armor that the blood rarely leaks out.
We might describe the plot as a love triangle, except that there isn't much love in it. Early on in the action the paths of Jean de Carrouges and his friend Jacques Le Gris diverge as Carrouges "wins" the hand of Marguerite, the daughter of a nobleman who "backed the wrong horse" by defecting to the English side in recent conflict. Meanwhile, Le Gris makes use of his monastery education to be of service to the local nobleman who controls the fate of Carrouge's family estate. Carrouges isn't a bad man, but his strengths lie along the lines of combat and loyalty, rather than gentility and grace, and Matt Damon struggles to breathe life and interest into the character. The ladies at court, including Marguerite, find the supple tongue and dashing figure cut by Adam Driver as Le Gris more attractive. And when Ben Afleck, as the local lord, Pierre d'Alençon, transfers the Carrouge estate from the dour heir apparent, whom he dislikes, to the bon vivant Le Gris, with whom he shares some illicit tastes, the entire situation begins to go south.
Scott employs the "Rashoman" device of telling the tale three times over, each time from a new perspective, and this livens the film at several points. But there's really no one to root for here, and we may leave the theater mouthing the remark of Aristotle—or was it St. Augustine?—"There is no justice in this world."
The Disciple
This quiet film follows the career of one Sharad Nerulka, who has devoted his life to studying classical Hindustani music under an obscure but semi-legendary vocalist while making ends meet by working for a friend who digitalizes LPs and tapes. His guru is elderly and frail, and Sharad has also taken on a few of the man's domestic responsibilities. The film develops placidly, almost blandly, with a few performances by the "master," some lessons, and conversations among friends who are following a similar path, including a young woman that Sharad has taken a liking to. (She doesn't return the interest.)
Sharad also draws inspiration from a set of tapes that he listens to while riding his motorcycle at night, on which an obscure (but evidently legendary) female vocalist from a previous era dispenses esoteric advice about dedication, selflessness, long years of sacrifice, and other quasi-Zenlike motivational notions. Sharad tries to absorb these teachings and put them to good use, but he finds it hard to shake the feeling that he's not very good, and isn't getting much better. The hollow, gloomy, countenance of first-time actor Aditya Modak in the title role tells the same story: selfless dedication isn't enough if you haven't got the talent. (Sharad's father wasn't much good at it, either.)
Writer-director Chaitanya Tamhane, who worked with Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón on Roma, has lined up a diverse set of episodes to keep the story afloat. The film is shot in long takes with a static and often low-angle camera, in the manner of Ozu. The singing itself is a sort of melismatic improvisation, with plenty of quarter-tones involved, accompanied by some tapping on a bongo-like tabla and a sitar drone. The guru is pretty good at it. At the start of the film, I found it incomprehensible, if not exactly irritating; two hours later, I was wishing I could hear a little more.
What Do We See When We Look at the Sky
"Whimsical" is a term often used to mask mediocrity, but this film from Georgia (the country, not the state) begins with a fable-like premise and then settles down, through a long string of plausible and occasionally enchanting episodes, to examine the consequences. It's a tale of star-crossed lovers at a bar in Tbilisi, and what we witness is what happens between people when that initial period of infatuation is removed from the equation. In fact, we soon lose sight of the initial issue as a series of new challenges present themselves. To call the film "low-key" would be an understatement. But it's also unpredictable, humorous, and touching.
Don't Look Up
Leonardo diCaprio plays an astronomer, Jennifer Lawrence plays a grad student, Meryl Streep plays the president, Cate Blanchett plays a FoxNews host, and Ariana Grande plays a pop star. A meteor is about to strike Earth. What did you expect? It's a lot of fun, though it isn't as good as The Big Short. And it won't end the climate catastrophe. Then again, neither did Al Gore.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment