Movies

Coming up on TV: The great Erroll Morris and Gates of Heaven

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On May 1, Turner Classic Movies is showing Gates of Heaven (1978), the first masterpiece by documentarian Erroll Morris.  It’s overtly about a Bay Area pet cemetery, but as Morris interviews the cemetery owners and the pet owners (as well as the guy at the rendering plant), the subjects expose their passions, aspirations and vulnerabilities.  And it’s hilarious.

This is an excellent introduction to America’s best documentarian, whose other films include The Thin Blue Line (which freed a wrongly convicted man from Texas’ Death Row) and Standard Operating Procedure (which exposed what was behind the abuses at Abu Ghraib).

Morris’ newest film, Tabloid, will be released on July 15.

In a Better World: an ambitious contemplation on violence

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How do we respond to violence without perpetuating a cycle of violence?  What and how do we tell our kids?  Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier (Brothers/Brodre, After the Wedding, Things We Lost in the Fire) takes on these questions through the stories of two 12-year-old boys and their well-meaning but troubled parents.

A schoolboy bully is handled through shock and awe, but the responses to other incidents of violence are far messier.  A parent’s teachable moment about pacifism doesn’t seem effective, and the boys fashion their own disproportionate solution.  One of the fathers, a do-gooder doctor who puts in time at a hell hole of an African refugee camp, must face pure evil in the form of a local warlord.  It’s an often tense drama.

In a Better World benefits from outstanding performances, especially by the boy actors, William Jøhnk Juels Nielsen and Markus Rygaard.

In a Better World won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture.  I didn’t like In a Better World as much as Brothers and After the Wedding, but it’s still an ambitious and successful film.

Poetry: Learning to see what you’d rather overlook

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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.

Coming Up on TV: The two best Civil War films

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Jeff Daniels (center) in Gettysburg

The Civil War began 150 years ago this month, and TCM is broadcasting the two best Civil War movies on April 25.

Ron Maxwell’s 1994 Gettysburg is the gold standard of Civil War films.  It follows Michael Shaara’s superb historical novel The Killer Angels and depicts the decisive three day battle.  It was filmed on the actual battlefield with re-enactors.  Maxwell took great care in maintaining historical accuracy.  Civil War buffs will recognize many lines of dialogue as historical, as well as shots that recall famous photographs.  In addition, Gettysburg is especially well-acted, especially by Jeff Daniels, Tom Berenger, Stephen Lang, Sam Elliott and Brian Mallon.

The other very best Civil War movie is the 1989 Glory, which tells the real-life story of an all-black unit in the Union Army.  Glory has tremendous performances by Denzel Washington, Andre Braugher, Morgan Freeman and Jihmi Kennedy.

DVD of the Week: Rabbit Hole

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Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhardt play a couple that lost their four-year-old son eight months ago, and are grieving in different ways and at different paces.  David Lindsay-Abaire’s screenplay is based on his Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play, and it’s as brilliant an exploration of the grieving process as I’ve ever seen.  There is just enough suspense and humor to make the film eminently watchable despite the grim subject.  Kidman, Eckhardt, Sandra Oh, Dianne Wiest and newcomer Miles Teller lead an excellent cast.

This is an exquisite film and is high on my list of Best Movies of 2010.

Hanna: girl power to the max

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Here is a paranoid thrill ride starring Saoirse Ronan as a 16-year-old raised in the Arctic Circle to be a master assassin by her rogue secret agent father (Eric Bana), and then released upon the CIA.  She is matched up against special ops wiz Cate Blanchett.

The story relies on two novelties. First, a teenage girl is raised to speak 20 languages fluently and kill people with her hands.  Second,  the same teenage girl is raised to have no familiarity with electricity, music and other teens.  Because Ronan is perfect and the pacing flies along, sthe story works. Hanna is ably directed by Joe Wright (Atonement, The Soloist).

Source Code: a gripping thriller with a heart

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I admired both this gripping thriller’s intelligence and its heart.  The key is a breakthrough screenplay by Ben Ripley.  The scifi premise is that supersoldier Jake Gyllenhaal can inhabit the brain of a terrorism victim for the same 8 minutes – over and over again.  Each time, he has 8 minutes to seek more clues. Can he build the clues into a solution and prevent the terrorist atrocity?  Gyllenhaal is excellent.  So is Vera Farmiga as his handler and Michelle Monaghan as a girl you could fall in love with in 8 minutes.  Jeffrey Wright chews the scenery with his homage to Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove.  Director Duncan Jones solidly brings Ripley’s screenplay home.

Carancho: seamy and steamy

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Well, they have ambulance chasers in Argentina, too, and that seamy world is the setting for this dark and violent noirish thriller.  Ricardo Darin (The Secrets of Their Eyes, Nine Queens) stars as a suspended lawyer running insurance scams.    (I think of Darin as the Argentine Joe Mantegna.)  Set in the gloom of urban nighttime emergency rooms and funeral homes, it’s a love story between the lawyer and an equally troubled doctor (Martina Gusman), nestled into a crime thriller.

The story is as cynical and dark as it comes.  The handheld camera keeps it out of the noir category, but the story is as hard-bitten as Kiss Me Deadly or any of the really nasty noirs. The violence is realistic, and there’s lots of it – I had never seen anyone beaten to death with a file drawer before.  If you like dark and edgy (and I do), this is the film for you.

DVD of the Week: Le Cercle Rouge

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Can a French 1970 color film that stars cool guys like Alain Delon and Yves Montand qualify as film noir?  You bet, especially when written and directed by a master of noir like Jean-Pierre Melville (Bob le Flambeur, Le Doulos, Le Samourai).

A thief gets out of prison, immediately robs his former crime boss and goes on the run.  An escaped murderer stows away in the trunk of his car.  Now they are both on the run from a very cynical and driven cop – as well as from the  gangsters.    They hire a dissolute former cop and try to pull off a heist.  The honest cop who is chasing them squeezes a shady nightclub owner to betray them.

There’s a chase and shootings and a heist that takes up the final 30 minutes, but Le Cercle Rouge is not about the action.  It’s about the nature of these characters, guys who live by their own codes.  They know what they’re gonna do, and they don’t need to think about why.  There’s minimal dialogue, and they look and act really cool for all 140 minutes.

Criterion has just released Le Cercle Rouge on DVD.  Take a look.  Here’s the trailer in French.

DVD of the Week: Black Swan

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Natalie Portman won the Best Actress Oscar for playing a ballet dancer who competes for the role of a lifetime.  Her obsession with perfection  is at once the key to her potential triumph and her potential ruin.  Barbara Hershey brilliantly plays what we first see as another smothering stage mother, but soon learn to be something even more disturbing.  Vincent Cassell (Mesrine) captures the charisma of the swaggering dance master who pushes the ballerina mercilessly.  Portman’s dancer has the fragility of a porcelain teacup, and, as she slathers herself with more and more stress, we wonder just when, not if, she’ll break.  The tension crescendos, and the climactic performance of Swan Lake is thrilling.

Fresh from The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is another directing triumph.  In fact, parts of Black Swan are as trippy as Aronofsky’s brilliant Requiem for a Dream.

Black Swan is also on my list of Best Movies of 2010.