Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting Battle Circus (1955) on October 7. It’s not a great movie, but Baby Boomers will recognize many similarities to 1970’s MASH. Battle Circus stars Humphrey Bogart as a doctor in a US Army mobile hospital unit in the Korean War. As in MASH, there’s plenty of casualty-laden helicopters, smart ass humor, partying and nurse-chasing.
Of course, Battle Circus‘ story came directly out of the then-contemporary Korean War. MASH was adapted from the 1968 novel by Richard Hooker, who had served in such a unit 15 years before. And, of course, Robert Altman framed MASH so that, although it was set in the Korean War, it was really about the Vietnam War.
(By the way, the novel and the 1970 movie were titled MASH, and the epic TV series was titled M*A*S*H*. )
Buck is a documentary about real-life horse whisperer Buck Brannaman, an exceedingly grounded and gentle man who knows everything about horse behavior. But the movie is more about human behavior, about the disturbing crucible that formed Buck, and about what we can learn about people from their handling of horses.
Fortunately, Director Cindy Meehl realized that she had a great story and got out of the way. The understated guitar-based score never becomes melodramatic. And Meehl never lets the admiring talking heads elevate Buck to more than what he is, which is remarkable enough. This movie could have easily been painfully corny or pretentious and is neither. I’d happily view it again today.
Buck’s own background is so nasty that it would totally unremarkable for him to have emerged mean or emotionally crippled – and he is the farthest from either. With some help from loving people, Buck has chosen to become something different from his apparent fate. In this way, Buck could be a companion piece to Mike Leigh’s Another Year.
The Criterion Collection has released its DVD of Carlos, Olivier Assayas’ 5 1/2 hour miniseries on the 70s/80s terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Carlos had played in three-parts on the Sundance Channel – and it’s really good!
Carlos begins as a playboy who thinks it would be cool to fight for the Palestinians. It turns out that he is way smarter and more nervy than the other dippy wannabe terrorists, so he rises to lead his own crew. At first he prudently tries to remain clandestine, but he inadvertently gains some celebrity and LOVES IT. After his first exposure in the media, he self-consciously dons a Che Guevara beret for his next adventure. Soon he is a legend in his own mind. Finally, he learns what happens when he becomes too hot for anyone to shield.
The action sweeps between atrocities in Paris and Vienna, a terrorist training camp in Aden, secret bases in Berlin and Budapest. Along the way, we meet European goofball radical posers and smarmy Syrian, Iraqi and Libyan intelligence officers. We see dynamite action scenes as Carlos must pull off escapes and attacks in compressed time.
Carlos is a star making performance by the Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez who plays Carlos and has to carry almost every scene. Ramirez perfectly captures Carlos’ bravado, audacity, vanity, sexiness, delusion and dissolution. Ramirez plays a few scenes in the nude, with Carlos at first admiring his own beefy body and later lolling about with a pot belly.
Carlos is a French film, but is mostly in English; there are subtitled scenes with French, Spanish and Arabic dialogue.
Dagmara Dominczyk and Vera Farmiga in HIGHER GROUND
In the theaters, I still strongly recommend, The Guard the Irish dark comedy starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle. Sarah’s Key is an excellent drama starring Kristin Scott Thomas as a journalist investigating very personal aspects of a French episode in the Holocaust. The Debt, with Helen Mirren, is a multigenerational thriller that addresses the costs of both truth and untruth. Higher Ground is Vera Farmiga’s provocative take on persons of faith.
Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are excellent in the romcom Crazy Stupid Love.
I haven’t yet seen the recently released Drive or Love Crime, or this week’s Moneyball. You can see trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
My top recommendation this week is the year’s best film and my DVD of the Week: Incendies. Rent it and see it now!
In the theaters, I still strongly recommend, The Guard the Irish dark comedy starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle. Sarah’s Key is an excellent drama starring Kristin Scott Thomas as a journalist investigating very personal aspects of a French episode in the Holocaust. The historical drama Amigo benefits from writer-director John Sayles’ typically excellent juggling of interconnected characters and from a fine cast. The Debt, with Helen Mirren, is a multigenerational thriller that addresses the costs of both truth and untruth. Higher Ground is Vera Farmiga’s provocative take on persons of faith.
Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are excellent in the romcom Crazy Stupid Love. Despite Rachel Weisz’s performance, The Whistleblower is a misfire – a potentially riveting story clumsily told.
I haven’t yet seen Love Crime or Drive, opening this weekend. You can see trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
This searing drama is the year’s best film so far. Upon their mother’s death, a young man and woman learn for the first time of their father and their brother and journey from Quebec to the Middle East to uncover family secrets. As they bumble around Lebanon, we see the mother’s experience in flashbacks. We learn before they do that their lives were created – literally – by the violence of the Lebanese civil war.
Because the film is anything but stagey, you can’t tell that Canadian director Denis Villaneuve adapted the screenplay from a play. Lubna Azabal, a Belgian actress of Moroccan and Spanish heritage, is brilliant as the mother.
It’s a tough film to watch, with graphic violence against women and children. But the violence is neither gratuitous nor exploitative – it is a civil war, after all, and the theme of the film is the cycle of retribution.
Incendies was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, but lost out to a much inferior film on the same subject of violence, In a Better Life.
Roger Ebert just tweeted that today is the 20th birthday of Sony Pictures Classics. I normally don’t weigh in on distributors, but I note that Sony Pictures Classic has already released three of the films on my Best Movies of 2011 – So Far – Incendies, The Guard and Midnight in Paris.
In 2009-20, their released four films that made my annual top ten lists: Another Year, The Secrets in Their Eyes and A Prophet. And, in 2008, Sony Pictures Classics released both my #1 film, I’ve Loved You So Long, and my #2, Rachel Getting Married. Not bad.
The fine actress Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air, Source Code, The Departed) directs and stars in this drama about a woman in a tightly communal church and how her faith supports and fails her. Farmiga’s character is not a naturally spiritual person, but lives within an intensely spiritual community. It’s rare that a film examines the question of religion so personally. It’s a thoughtful and provocative film that takes a position, albeit a respectful one.
Higher Ground, adapted from a novel, would have benefited from less sexism from the male characters and more contemporary clothing for the female characters; both distract from the central question of the usefulness of faith. As a director, Farmiga is not afraid of using some magic realism, which generally works.
The performances are especially strong. Vera’s little sister Taissa Farmiga, aided by a strong physical resemblance, is eerily perfect as the younger version of the protagonist. Also especially excellent are Dagmara Dominczyk as an especially vibrant church member, Michael Chernus as her sincere and dutiful husband and Norbert Leo Butz as the pastor. The always reliable Bill Irwin (Rachel Getting Married) and John Hawkes (Deadwood, Winter’s Bone) are good, too.
I went to see The Guard for a second time and it was well worth it. The Irish dark comedy stars Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle. Sarah’s Key is an excellent drama starring Kristin Scott Thomas as a journalist investigating very personal aspects of a French episode in the Holocaust. The historical drama Amigo benefits from writer-director John Sayles’ typically excellent juggling of interconnected characters and from a fine cast. The Debt, with Helen Mirren, is a multigenerational thriller that addresses the costs of both truth and untruth. Higher Ground (I’ll comment tomorrow) is Vera Farmiga’s provocative take on persons of faith.
Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are excellent in the romcom Crazy Stupid Love. Despite Rachel Weisz’s performance, The Whistleblower is a misfire – a potentially riveting story clumsily told.
Road to Nowhere could be subtitled Monte Hellman’s Jigsaw Puzzle. It’s the first film in twenty years from 79-year-old cult director Hellman, and he has delivered a multi-layered riddle that challenges the audience. There is the story of a crime as it was originally understood, the story of what really happened and the story of a film being made about the crime. The same actors play the characters in all three stories. One of the actors in the movie may actually be one of the participants in the original crime.
It’s not a film for everyone. You must be willing to accept that the story is not going to make sense for a while, and some issues are never going to be resolved. If you can engage in the puzzle, there’s enough of a payoff.
My guilty pleasures include Hellman’s 1974 Cockfighter with Warrren Oates and his 1971 Two-Lane Blacktop with Oates and James Taylor (yes, the singer-songwriter James Taylor). Road to Nowhere is far more stylish and ambitious than those films, but far more baffling.
In Road to Nowhere, the director of the film within the film discovers and becomes besotted, even obsessed, with his leading lady – and things do not turn out happily. I had to think of the female lead in Two Lane Blacktop, Laurie Bird; Hellman had a relationship with Bird, who later became Art Garfunkle’s companion and committed suicide in Garfunkle’s apartment.
