On Labor Day, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting all seven parts of its series Moguls And Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood. Most histories of cinema emphasize the technical and creative evolutions of film. Instead, Moguls traces the business story – how mostly Jewish immigrants started with the early peep shows in old Eastern cities and wound up building monopolistic empires in the sun and glamor of Hollywood. It’s a great story, and this series tells it very well.
TCM originally broadcast the series in fall 2009. The DVD set is now available for purchase for about $28. Here’s the original TCM promo.
My top choice this week is still the Irish dark comedy The Guard, 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.
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.
If any new face has broken through in 2011, it’s the actress Jessica Chastain. First, she delivered a fine performance as an enabling 1950s mom in the most coherent part of The Tree of Life. This week, she followed that with an excellent performance as a 1960s Mossad agent (the younger version of Helen Mirren’s character) in the thriller The Debt. She won critical praise for the trashy but aspiring housewife in a film I haven’t seen – The Help. So we already know that Chastain is versatile enough to play soft and tough, brittle and sexy, action and romance.
Later this fall, she will have three more films in release. In Take Shelter, she plays the wife of the mentally disintegrating Michael Shannon. She’s a tough cop in The Texas Killing Fields. And then she’s in Ralph Fiennes’ adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.
This week, Sarah’s Key and The Debt explore aspects of the Holocaust. Sarah’s Key is the story of the French round-up of French Jews in 1942, and of how a present day investigation shakes up several lives. The Debt is about a team of three Mossad agents charged with kidnapping a Nazi war criminal out of 1964’s East Berlin – and how they must revisit the mission 30 years later. I recommend both movies.
One of them is the 2002 documentary Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary. One of the central questions of the Holocaust is how could ordinary humans tolerate and even enable such monstrous acts? Blind Spot is the story of Traudl Junge who, as a rural, naive 22-year-old, happened on a job in Hitler’s secretarial pool. After the war, she lived in obscurity for decades. Wracked with guilt, she was interviewed for 90 minutes shortly before her death by a filmmaker who lost his parents in the Holocaust. This 90 minute interview is the core of Blind Spot.
Last week, three men were released from prison in Arkansas – one of them from death row. This wouldn’t have happened without two HBO documentaries, the 1996 Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and its sequel Paradise Lost 2: Revelations. HBO is rebroadcasting them on Monday, August 29th (the first one) and Tuesday, August 30th (the sequel).
The men had served over eighteen years each for a horrific crime that they apparently had nothing to do with. Three second grade Cub Scouts were brutally raped, murdered and their bodies mutilated. The authorities, under understandable pressure to solve the crime, arrested three Metallica-loving teenagers and railroaded them for a supposed Satanic ritual killing. Although no physical evidence tied them to the crime, one teen with an IQ of 76 was browbeaten into a confession that he later recanted.
The HBO films spawned media interest and public and celebrity support for the convicted men, who became known as the West Memphis Three.
Recently-processed DNA evidence was inconsistent with any of the defendants. Facing the specter of a futile new trial, the prosecutor accepted a plea bargain that freed the men without their having to acknowledge guilt. Interestingly, the father of one of the victims has gone from the villain of the second HBO film to a supporter of the recently freed men. Here’s the New York Times coverage.
A team of three Mossad agents are charged with kidnapping a Nazi war criminal out of 1964’s East Berlin. One aspect of the mission remains incomplete, and the three must address it 30 years later. It’s a ripping yarn with some serious comments on the costs of both truth and untruth. Helen Mirren is brilliant as one of the team, as is Jessica Chastain, playing her younger self. Directed by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love).
My top choice this week is still the Irish dark comedy The Guard, 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.
Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are excellent in the romcom Crazy Stupid Love. Turkey Bowl is a delightful indie comedy available from iTunes. Despite Rachel Weisz’s performance, The Whistleblower is a misfire – a potentially riveting story clumsily told.
The master writer-director John Sayles delivers a first-class historical drama with Amigo, set in 1900 amid the US occupation of the Phillipines. One of Sayles’ specialties is intertwining the stories of a large ensemble cast while keeping each character recognizable, distinct and textured. As in City of Joy and Lone Star, the audience sees events unfold from the perspective of various characters, none of whom know enough to fully understand the others.
Veteran Filipino actor Joel Torre (over 200 acting credits) plays the village headman, who recognizes that he is doomed to disappoint the contradictory expectations of the Filipino rebels and the US occupiers. Garret Dillahunt plays the well-meaning American lieutenant who is charged to both protect and fight a people that he is not equipped to understand. Oscar-winner Chris Cooper, DJ Qualls, Dane DeHaan, Spanky Manikan and Ronnie Lazaro also excel among the fine cast.
Early in his film, Korean writer-director Chang-dong Lee tells us his theme. Holding an apple, the teacher tells his students that, to write poetry, you must first see, really see the world around you. Mija is a 66-year-old pensioner in his class who works part-time as a caregiver for a stroke victim and is raising her sullen slob of a teenage grandson. She struggles with the poetry, but she does begin to see the people in her world with clarity – and it’s not a pretty picture. What she learns to see is human behavior ranging from the venal to the inhumane.
The key to the film’s success is the performance of Jeong-hie Yun as Mija, a protagonist who spends the entire movie observing. Her doctor tells her that her failing memory is the start of something far worse. Sometimes she doesn’t see what we see because she is distracted. But sometimes she doesn’t act like she sees because of denial or avoidance. Sometimes she is disoriented. But she has moments of piercing lucidity, and those moments are unsparing.
This unhurried film is troubling, uncomfortable and very, very good. It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2011 – So Far.
Kristin Scott Thomas stars in another French film, this time as a journalist tracking the story of a girl during the WWII roundup of Jews in France. Her probe of events almost sixty years in the past becomes more and more personal, and profoundly entangles more and more people. It’s a compelling story, and no actor can portray intensity and doggedness better than Scott Thomas. Co-stars Niels Arestrup (A Prophet) and Aidan Quinn.
