Quintet

Bibi Andersson and Paul Newman

Robert Altman's Quintet has a rather dire reputation. Certainly upon its release in 1979 its critical defenders were few. Variety summed up the prevailing opinion of the day by describing the film as "an impenetrable exercise in self-indulgence." I do not neccesarily disagree with these words, but, then as now, I prefer auteurist self-indulgence to soulless corporate projects. I think it is Altman's best and most personal film during his long fallow period between 3 Women and Vincent & Theo. It is a hard film to follow or penetrate, but I think it fully expresses the depths of Altman's misanthropy.

The film is set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian world in which humanity struggles to survive amidst a new ice age. Whether this is the result of a nuclear war is unremarked upon. Indeed, obfuscation is the hallmark of the film. Nearly every shot in the film, with one significant exception, is cloudy around the edges (see above) as if cinematographer Jean Boffety (Thieves Like Us, The Lacemaker) used gauze or Vaseline on his lens. This mirrors the plight of the protagonist, Essex (Paul Newman), who wanders around in the film as if in a fog. We first meet him and his pregnant girlfriend Vivia, (life, baby) played by a luminous Brigitte Fossey, as they make their way to a city to stay with Essex's brother, Francha. They are warmly, if guardedly met and Vivia's pregnancy is greeted with great joy and surprise, as infertility seems to be the post-apocalyptic norm. However, this respite is brief as Vivia and Francha are murdered in a seemingly pointless bombing. To prevent Vivia's corpse from being eaten by dogs, Essex carries her body to the river in the film's most affecting scene.

Essex is bent on revenge, but first must figure out why the killings occurred. The actual murderer, Redstone, is himself dispatched by the mysterious St. Christopher (Vittorio Gassman), a Savonarola type preacher. Essex assumes Redstone's identity, a further obfuscation, and becomes involved in the local pastime, a dice game that resembles the I Ching called Quintet. The game is merely a pretext for a test of survival among its participants. This is a dog eat dog world in which no one can be trusted: not the proprietress of the hotel where Essex stays (Altman regular Nina van Pallandt), not the amoral judge of the contest (Fernando Rey, droll as ever), or the comely Ambrosia (Bibi Andersson). The array of different accents on hand was criticized at the time, but I think it works in the film's favor. The world of Quintet is truly a post-Babel world in which people are at cross purposes and all attempts at mutual understanding have been abandoned.

A monochromatic world

Quintet is certainly monochromatic and, at times, monotonous. Right from the start, Altman shows us a shot of wild dogs feasting on a human corpse to show us how rotten the state of things is. This he repeats six or seven times to increasingly diminishing effect. I also found Tom Pierson's musical score to be tiresomely overwrought. I liked Leon Ericksen's ramshackle production design, but found that Scott Bushnell's costumes, which give a medieval slant to the proceedings, didn't look lived in enough. One thing I did like about the film was Paul Newman's performance which, to me, barely held together the whole enterprise. It may have been the results of a Coors hangover, but Newman perfectly captures the cluelessness of his character. We are told that Essex is a seal hunter, but the character is somewhat at sea when man is both the hunter and the game. Newman was usually cast as smart alecks (Hud, Harper, Cool Hand Luke), but was equally adept at playing dumb lugs, as in this film and Sometimes a Great Notion. I also really liked the performance of David Langton (Upstairs Downstairs' Mr. Bellamy) who beautifully capture the craven desperation of his character, the doomed Goldstar.

One aspect of the film that has aged well and seems to have anticipated the internet is the town's information center that Essex consults to hunt down people. The info center is really a series of silk-screened glass panels that Altman delights in overlaying over each other. The message is that though this information center provides knowledge, it also functions as a hall of mirrors that people can get lost in. A moral that applies to both the internet and Quintet itself. Quintet is a defiantly odd, pipe-dream of a movie whose ultimate obfuscation may be that Altman lacked the final cut. It ain't the masterpiece the similarly cloudy McCabe and Mrs. Miller is, but Quintet proves that even the failures of cinematic masters may ultimately prove more interesting the successes of lesser filmmakers.
                                                                     

The Brutalist

Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce

Brady Corbet's The Brutalist is his strongest and most accomplished film. The script, written by Corbet and his partner Mona Fastvold, is sturdily constructed and provides opportunities for the film's accomplished players. Thus far, Corbet's main attribute has been his laissez faire handling of his players. He gives them space in an exact, but not rigorous mise en scene. The Brutalist works, in part, because it is so well cast. Adrien Brody gets to show off his mastery of his mother's tongue and dig into his default role, a masochist. When a whore tells Brody's character, an architect name Laszlo Toth who emigrates to the US after World War 2, that he has ugly face, we know Brody was the man for the job. Similarly, Guy Pearce, as sociopathic tycoon named Harrison van Buren, is a cinch for the role. However, Pearce, though capable of entitled bombast, lacks the manic and Satanic glee that lurks below the performances of such cinematic tycoons as Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) and Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis).

The reason I bring up Citizen Kane and There Will Be Blood is that, as with those films, the creator of The Brutalist is swinging for the cinematic fences. The Brutalist is shot in VistaVision, a high resolution 35mm process that was created at Paramount Pictures in 1954 and utilized in such disparate films as White Christmas, The Searchers, and Vertigo. The Brutalist is structured like a Roadshow film from that era with an overture and, mercifully for the audience, an intermission. The Brutalist is a grandiose throwback for both good and ill. The main problem with the film is that it's theme can be boiled to a very simple premise, to paraphrase Manny Farber's review of The Chase, Amerika stinks. A message Corbet underlines with his already famous shot of an upside down Statue of Liberty. I don't neccesarily have a problem with this message per se, just the unsurprising way Corbet delivers it. As soon as Toth meets Harrison van Buren (the names of three Presidents), we know that the artist will be screwed over by the capitalist and, in this case, it is too literal.

Now the message of The Brutalist is not all that different from Citizen Kane or There Will Be Blood, but it is a much less exciting stylistically than either of them. Also, the script of The Brutalist tends, at times, to wallow in cliches. This is especially true of the character of Toth's wife, Erzsebet, who shows up after the intermission in a wheelchair. Felicia Jones does her best, but the character is not provided a second or third dimension. She simply serves to amplify Toth's suffering and trauma. Toth's avant-garde props are that he shoots up and listens to be-bop. Zzzz. However, The Brutalist is a technical triumph, particularly the way it is able to mimic the sweep of an epic on a small budget. Daniel Blumberg, formerly of the band Yuck, offers a discordant and challenging score that is always listenable, but never overwhelms the picture. The production design entertainingly conveys the Brutalist style even if the construction scenes border on fantasy. Corbet's skill and respect for actor remains. I particularly enjoyed the efforts of Raffey Cassidy, Emma Laird, Stacy Martin, Alessandro Nivola, and Michael Epp. Still, someone with a more disinterested view should have taken a cleaver to this occasionally interesting movie which runs well over three hours. 

Where Is the Friend's House?

Babak Ahmadpour

Abbas Kiarostami's Where is the Friend's House, from 1987, was his eighth feature and the first to attract widespread acclaim in the West. This was the first of three of his films set in the village of Koker which is located in northern Iran near the Caspian Sea. It follows the travails of a small boy, Ahmad (Babak Ahmadpour) struggling to return a lost note book to a classmate, Reza, in a neighboring village. That classmate has been berated in class for previously misplacing his notebook and is facing expulsion. The teacher's browbeating and humiliation of Reza in class motivates Ahmad to support his hapless chum with a single minded devotion along his circuitous route.

The picture, at times, bogs down. There are a few too many shots of Ahmad racing through the hinterlands. In addition, any time his non-professional grownups share their harumphs, the effect is soporific. However, Kiarostami's camera placement, often displaying four grounds of view, never wavers and tells us more about Iran and its flora and fauna than his adult characters ever could. A striking and heartfelt film that unspools in 83 minutes. 

Book Review: Waiting on the Moon by Peter Wolf

Peter Wolf as I remember him

As the full title attests, Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses, Peter Wolf's memoir is less about his career than it is about the famous and interesting people he has encountered along the way. It is a tribute to Wolf 's generosity of spirit that this is one of the warmest and most self-deprecating memoirs that I have ever read. Wolf renders loved ones as indelibly as he does show biz icons. I was a fan of the J. Geils Band back in the 1970s. Their records were uneven, but onstage they were one of the best bands of the era. Wolf only addresses one slim chapter to his time with the band. He is still haunted by the band's ouster of him after the success of the Freeze-Frame album and its single, Centerfold. This proved to an extremely ill-advised mood for all concerned, right up there with the sacking of Mick Jones by the Clash. Wolf prefers to offer fond reminisces of his musical heroes: ranging from Muddy Waters to Merle Haggard.

He also encounters an astonishing array of cultural figures, but I would not be reviewing this book on this blog if Wolf did not have numerous brushes with the film world. Wolf had the pleasure of being married to a humdinger of a film star, for better and worse, in Faye Dunaway. Wolf survived hurricane Faye, but barely. They were divorced in 1979 and the subsequent J. Geils album was entitled Love Stinks. Along the way, Wolf meets a fascinating array of film folk: from Nicholson to Hitchcock to George Cukor, Marilyn Monroe, and David Lynch. The book is a rich feast and the best rock memoir since Dylan's Chronicles.    

                                           

Peter Wolf and Faye Dunaway on their wedding day in 1974

             

Hell Bent

Harry Carey

Hell Bent is one of twenty five or so Western features John Ford and Harry Carey churned out for Universal Pictures between 1917 and 1921. A prologue indicates that the two compadres wanted to vary the formula that they had established. An author opens a letter from his publisher criticizing the one dimensional nature of his literary hero and daring him to write a book with a more ambivalent protagonist. The action of the film springs from this dare. The author gazes at Frederic Remington's painting The Misdeal which changes into Ford's recreation of the painting and signals the start of the actual film. The picture then follows the adventures of Carey's usual hero, Cheyenne Harry. This time Harry is a reprobate who is soused for nearly half of the film. However, Harry is emboldened on the path to virtue when he has to rescue his beloved, Bess (Neva Gerber).

Frederic Remington's The Misdeal

Ford was a longtime admirer of Remington's work and admitted to Peter Bogdanovich that he copied the painter when he made She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, so it is especially heartening to see this film once thought lost displaying Ford tipping his cap to the Western artist. The film, found in a Czech archive six years ago, is a slight and truncated affair, only running 50 or so minutes. The story may be pat, but the picture is visually exciting. Ford's vivid use of landscapes, chiaroscuro, and emotionally evocative close-ups are all in evidence. Hell Bend also contains more depth of characterization than most films double its length. We even get to see Harry Carey do his charachteristic arm rub that John Wayne mimics, in tribute, at the end of The Searchers.

Hell Bent is so frisky and loose-limbed that if it had been released in 1968, it would have been considered an anti-Western. The images on the Kino Lorber DVD are startingly clear for a century old film. The disc also contains a video essay by the great Tag Gallagher whose 1986 biography of Ford is still the best book on the subject. Gallagher notes how the Universal films were filled with the players that formed Ford's first stock company and how many of those players would reappear in Ford films in the sound era. Hell Bent is not only an important part of film history, but an enjoyable film on its own. I'm all revved up to watch the newly found Ford-Carey collaboration, The Scarlet Drop.

Becoming Led Zeppelin

                       
Bernard MacMahon's Becoming Led Zeppelin displays the pitfalls of authorized music bios. Cozy familiarity is gained at the cost of shilling for the band. The only taking heads included are the band themselves with deceased member John Bonham contributing in an old audio interview. Thus, we get a rose colored glasses appraisal that amounts to hagiography of a band that found commercial gold in the hard rock residue of psychedelia. There are token stabs at objectivity, the band admit to being stung by the critical brickbats aimed at their first album, but they are few and far between. When Jimmy Page mentions that Zep's version of "Dazed and Confused" was inspired by Jake Holmes, you just know that he is covering his tracks after a consultation with his solicitors. No other examples of Zep's propensity for plagiarism are mentioned. The only females name checked are wives and mothers. So, there are no mentions of Miss Pamela Des Barres, Eva von Zeppelin, or Jackie DeShannon. The absence of the latter is a particular pity since she was Page's closest musical collaborator before he joined The Yardbirds.

Still, there is enough exciting live footage to satisfy fans of the band. The documentary limits itself to the band's first two albums, material that suffers from a cartoonish and overwrought blooze approach. I enjoyed "Whole Lotta Love" the first five hundred or so times I heard it, but I don't need to hear it again. I may be prejudiced against this film because I believe the band didn't really gel musically until its third album, but, perhaps, a sequel awaits. The studio session careers of Page and John Paul Jones before the formation of the band, fascinating topics in themselves, are only superficially touched upon. Becoming Led Zeppelin suffers from an oafish use of stock 1960s footage. "I Can't Quit You" is contrasted with shots of the Apollo 11 moon voyage among the many such ho hum and puzzling moments. Footage of an iron foundry is shown as Robert Plant sings about Golem during "Ramble On". The film opens in hoary fashion as the band, ripping through "Good Times, Bad Times", is juxtaposed with stock footage of the Hindenburg. Ultimately, this is a more satisfying portrait of the band than The Song Remains the Same, but it is still only a two hour infomercial for Led Zeppelin Inc. The flick is a PG-13 band approved boilerplate that is currently streaming on Netflix.

The Room Next Door

Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore

Few recent films have engendered such a divided response in me as Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door. This adaptation of Sigrid Nunez's novel What Are You Going Through is a tale of decades long friendship that is rekindled when one of the protagonists must face her mortality. Martha (Tilda Swinton), a writer and war correspondent, has received a terminal cancer diagnosis in New York city. Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a successful writer who has not kept up with her friend, hears of Martha's plight from a mutual confidante at a book signing and endeavors to make up for lost time by providing Martha with support. However, she gets more than she bargained for when Martha enlists her as her companion on an upstate retreat where Martha intends to commit suicide.

This dolorous narrative is broken up by flashbacks that show the fate of Martha's Vietnam era love, Fred (Alex Høgh Andersen). Fred is the father of Martha's estranged daughter, Michelle, but was too broken by his experiences in the war to be a true father. The flashback sequences, like the rest of the film, look great even when offering the hoariest of cliches. Fred gets a Viking funeral when he plunges into a burning building and does not return. He hears terrified cries from the burning edifice, which is empty, because of his wartime trauma; he is still in Saigon as Charlie Daniels sang. An overwrought episode that is further bungled by Almodóvar who can only direct action as farce. Victoria Luengo's slip that allows Fred to go unimpeded to his doom has to be one of the most feeble stunts of recent memory. Something a streaming police show hack could dash off. 

There is also a brief flashback of Martha's memories of a wartime posting that is more up Pedro's alley. Ingrid is given little back story, in contrast. The pity is that Moore gives the better performance. Swinton is well cast as Martha, she has always looked half dead to me, but can't quite muster the swagger of a writer who has heretofore dodged death. John Turturro is adequate as former lover of both women. However, the characters are under nourished culture vultures. The film is replete with the name dropping hip New Yorker's have been prone to since the days of Horace Greeley: Dora Carrington, Edward Hopper, Martha Gelhorn, etc. The milieu is similar to that of Woody Allen film, for good and ill.  

However, as a play of light, color, and shade, The Room Next Door succeeds. Even as the plot devolves into an Afternoon School Special trumpeting euthanasia as the bee's knees, the director unleashes a host of gorgeous images that urge us to seize the day, stop and smell the roses, and breathe. The reflection on Martha's picture windows, be they downtown or upstate, become Almodóvar's principle means of picturing an affirmation of human and natural beauty. The labor expended so that Martha's balcony, a fifties style diorama, can conjure the right pink tone of sunset tells one where Almodóvar's artistic affinities lie. Comparable to David Hockney, Almodóvar fills the screen with light and eschews chiaroscuro. Even Swinton's death head is kissed by the sun. This aesthetic effect causes The Room Next Door to feel a little too chi-chi at times. Swinton's hospital suite is truly to die for, but it is proof that Pedro Almodóvar is still kicking.

                 

Mickey 17

Robert Pattinson

I thought the underwhelming commercial and critical reception to Bong Joon Ho's Mickey 17 was an appropriate response to the film's modest charms. The film is, fatally, both overlong and slight, a commercial project aligned with its director's anti-elitist leanings that attempts to reach a larger audience than his usual art house fare, much like Bong's earlier Snowpiercer and Okja. Like those two films, Mickey 17 is set in a dystopian future. Robert Pattinson stars as Mickey Barnes, a shy loser who is in desperate straits after the failure of his macaroon business. Barnes agrees to sign on to a space colonization mission helmed by Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a bloviating ex-politician with delusions of grandeur. Mickey becomes a sort of canary in the coal mine for the mission. When he dies after experiencing whatever toxic events can be experienced on a possible host planet, a new iteration of him is reborn after he is spat out by a human printing machine. Thus, the central premise of the film is the eternal recurrence found in such popular favorites as Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow. 

The variation on this theme, derived from Edward Ashton's source novel, is that a Mickey 18 is manufactured when Mickey 17 is mistakenly thought dead, so that our hero must deal with his doppelganger. The double is met with delight by Mickey's girlfriend Nasha (Naomi Ackie) who is eager to have another playmate. However, Mickey 17 views the new iteration with trepidation. Mickey 18 has a completely different moral compass than #17 and is soon plotting to eliminate the craven Marshall. Mickey 17 bonds with the creatures on the possible host planet, monikered "creepers", and a finale is concocted after lengthy digressions and feigned peril that upholds virtue and repudiates genetic engineering.

Bong's visual style is consistent with the film's flip tone. The production values are exemplary. The space ship in this film looks more lived in than most of the gleaming monstrosities found in this genre. I found Jung Jae-il's score to be spritely and appropriate. However, I also found the whole enterprise to be a trifle compared to the director's best efforts: Memories of Murder, Mother, and Parasite. As in Snowpiercer and Okja, the comic book tone of the proceedings eventually proves wearisome. Nowhere is this more true than in regarding Mickey 17's one dimensional villains. Ruffalo's melding of Trump and Wayne Newton ultimately proves as tiresome as Tilda Swinton's imitation of Mrs. Thatcher in Snowpiercer and Jake Gyllenhaal's hysterical mugging in Okja. Toni Collette, as Ruffalo's missus, has little to except extend her talons. 

That said, I did like most of Mickey 17's supporting performances from Ms. Ackie, Steven Yeun, Anamaria Vartolomei, Holliday Grainger, and, especially, Patsy Ferran. The main reason to see the flick is to witness Mr. Pattinson doing double duty. As he has proven in the last decade, Mr. Pattinson is one of the cinema's finest and most versatile leading men. His performance as the guileless Mickey 17 is the heart of the film, giving it most of its goofy appeal. Overall, though, this is one of the talented Mr. Bong's lesser efforts: better than Okja, but not as memorable as Snowpiercer.              

Megalopolis

Adam Driver

Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis was certainly the cinematic farrago of 2024. An allegory of creeping American fascism set in a near future dystopian world that, stylistically, is a cross between ancient Rome and Gotham City, the film runs roughshod over any semblance of artistic coherence and understatement. That said, I find it fascinating both for its visual energy and its attempt to carve a personal statement out of its overlarge canvas. The film is dedicated to Coppola's late wife Eleanor and I find Coppola's sincerity touching despite the film's numerous lapses in taste and judgement. The film's central romance between master builder Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) and Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel) is Coppola's tribute to the grounding and emotional support his wife provided for decades as Coppola chased his artistic rainbows. Now one can dismiss this as yet another example of Coppola's egotism run amuck, Cesar is essentially Coppola's version of Howard Roark, but I find the film to be a moving mea culpa that lays bare the sacrifices made by those who emotionally buttress a work driven visionary.

I do admit that there is as much to be appalled by in Megalopolis as there is to be admired. This is certainly true of the performances. I feel that Coppola was so wrapped up in the intricacies of his mammoth production that he left most of the performers to their own devices. Thus, such seasoned actors as Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight give some of the worst performances of their careers, indulgent efforts that reek of ham. Aubrey Plaza and Shia LaBeouf also offer outsized and garish turns, but at least seem to recognize where they fit into Coppola's outlandish scenario: LaBeouf is in drag for a large portion of the film and Plaza plays a tabloid reporter named Wow Platinum. Driver and Emmanuel's understated performances offer the viewer some relief amidst the film's garish and manic convulsions. I do think someone should have told Coppola to jettison the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet that Driver has to intone with a straight face at one point. 

As to the allegory of Trumpian fascism the film provides, I was non-plussed. It seemed like shooting fish in a barrel to moi. What I did grok was the batshit energy of the array of images that Coppola throws at the viewer. Not since Bram Stoker's Dracula, has Coppola unleashed such a frenzy of expressionistic imagery poised on the brink of madness and or psychedelia. I am reminded of Andrew Sarris prescient remarks on Coppola over fifty years ago in The American Cinema. Sarris noted that Coppola was willing to borrow from bad movies just as much as he did from good ones. That gamut of low and highbrow references is just as much in evidence in Megalopolis as it was in Dementia 13: in his latest flick Coppola borrows from both the WWF and Caravaggio's The Martyrdom of St. Ursula. Despite its numerous shortcomings, Megalopolis is Coppola's least boring film in some time and I look forward to seeing it again. 

Black Bag

Michael Fassbender and Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh's Black Bag is the most accomplished and entertaining film of 2025, thus far, and Soderbergh's most successful venture since The Knick. David Koepp's screenplay is a canny mixture of espionage and mystery tropes chiefly set in London. Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett play MI6 agents in a long term relationship. A colleague of Fassbender's, who will soon turn up dead, informs him that a workmate is involved in treasonous activity and that one of the suspects is his missus. So, Fassbender must work like Smiley to uncover the rat. No actor working today has as imperturbable a surface and Fassbender, with gleeful malice, replays the robot from the Alien films. This works fine because Blanchett is on hand to give the film its romantic dash and regal mystery. The two have a brittle and biting chemistry that recalls the romantic leads of Dorothy Sayers and Dashiell Hammett mysteries.

The other trope Koepp borrows from mystery writers is having all the suspects assembled, twice yet, around a table. Add a dash of truth serum to the tikka masala, and Koepp and Soderbergh are able to generate some twists and genuine humor from some old recipes. The script regurgitates the usual saw that intelligence agents are amoral backbiters, constantly vying to be the alpha dog. Nothing new, but Soderbergh has upped the ante in the elitist lifestyle of his players. Blanchett dresses like the starlet she is and Fassbender looks slick in his bespoke Dunhill suits. The supporting players are all superb, especially the up and coming Marisa Abela who is all tightened sphincter and sulphur. Rarely has mendacious duplicity been this entertaining.

From the film's first shot, a winding descent into the basement of a club, Soderbergh, who served as his own camera operator on the picture, displays more of an emotional involvement than is usual from this very cerebral filmmaker. Since his debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Soderbergh has dealt ambivalently with modern life, championing glimmers of humanity amidst an increasingly dehumanized environment. The surveillance state of Black Bag fits well within his dour worldview. He views the pampered denizens of the intelligence community with a gimlet eye, distaste mixed with fascination. David Holmes, a longtime collaborator of the director, offers a nervy score that adds to the film's palpable air. A brisk and enthralling 94 minutes. 

           

The Order

Nicholas Hoult

Justin Kurzel's The Order is a decent, if not particularly interesting crime drama. Jude Law plays an FBI agent investigating a series of major crimes in the Pacific Northwest during the early 1980s. In the course of his investigation, the agent discovers the perpetrators are white supremacists, the titular order, who have splintered off the Aryan Nation. The order is led by the charismatic Bob Matthews, brilliantly portrayed by Nicholas Hoult in a so good he's quite scary performance. Law's character enlists a Coeur d'Alene deputy (Tye Sheridan) to help flush out the evildoers while putting up with the usual barbs from his superior (an underused Jurnee Smollett). Though this is compelling, mostly true to life tale, Kurzel's lack of intensity as a director causes this film to rarely rise above the routine.

Matthews was a real life character, but the identities of almost all of the law enforcement officers have been changed. Some people may have heard of this case because, among his many felonies, Matthews masterminded the murder of Denver talk show host Alan Berg (a perfectly cast Marc Maron); a crime which was the basis of Oliver Stone's Talk Radio. Zach Baylin's screenplay, adapted from the non-fiction The Silent Brotherhood by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, offers a firm foundation for a film. Events and their repercussions are clearly and logically laid out. I appreciated how Baylin presents a contrast, or lack thereof, between the families of Matthews and the deputy; both seemingly idyllic and well-adjusted. Sheridan's character is married to a Native American woman (an underused Morgan Holmstrom) who fears her his husband is being led to his doom by the reckless Law; and if you've ever seen a movie, like the one with Bambi and Thumper, you know this will prove true.

Matthews seems to have his wife firmly under his thumb, but she (the underused Alison Oliver) is beginning to have misgivings when Bob starts giving their son lessons in automatic weaponry and, especially, when he impregnates another woman. The big contrast is actually between the two family men and the bereft Law whose wife has dumped him and stopped returning his calls. Law's character is supposed to be an adrenaline junkie whose rash nature jeopardizes those around him, like Al Pacino's character in Heat. Law's performance is adequate, but he never captures his character's fury. The only miscasting in the film, but it's a fatal one. Likewise, Kurzel's direction is merely serviceable. Some of his duds seem preordained, especially Assassin's Creed, but even when gifted with promising material, here and with Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, he has yet to deliver a satisfying film.            

La Otra

Agustín Irusta and Delores del Río

Roberto Gavaldón's La Otra (The Other) is a pretty good melodrama from 1946 that features Dolores del Río in a dual role. Gavaldón and his collaborators repurposed a Warners Brothers script written by Rian James that had been meant to star Bette Davis. Interestingly, Davis did star in a later redo of the script, 1964's Dead Ringers which was directed by Paul Henreid. Ms. del Rio plays twins Maria and Magdalena Méndez who we meet at the funeral of Magdalena's wealthy husband. Maria is a downtrodden and bespectacled manicurist who toils at a barber shop. She ekes out a living from this while fending off the unwanted advances of her clients. She has a virtuous boyfriend, Roberto (Agustin Irusta), who is such a model of rectitude that he doesn't even take off his trench coat when bussing Maria. 

In contrast to Maria, Magdalena is a bitch on wheels who lives in palatial splendor. Ms. del Río is introduced in a mirror shot as Magdalena, emphasizing her vanity, and has great fun wallowing in her character's wickedness. Maria has numerous issues with her sister, not least of which was landing that rich husband, and plots to rub her out and take her place. She lures Magdalena to her humble flat, shoots her, plants a suicide note, changes clothes and goes to Magdalena's mansion disguised as her. Of course, the transition into her sister's life does not go altogether smoothly. Magdalena's pet mastiff knows Maria is an imposter from the get go. Maria also has problems functioning without her glasses. More problematic is the sudden appearance of Magdalena's sleazy lover Fernando (Victor Junco in the Zachary Scott role) whose machinations seal Maria's doom.

Gavaldón shoots the film in a lurid expressionistic style, with the aid of cinematographer Alex Phillips, in a manner appropriate to the material. He uses mirrors not only to indicate Magdalena's vanity, but also to signal Maria's loss of actual identity amidst a multiplicity of identities. The chessboard pattern in the foyer of Magdalena's mansion is doubled by the same pattern at Maria's workplace, contrasting starkly the lifestyles of the two. The murder takes place at Christmas time and Gavaldón contrasts the Yuletide joy of children with Maria's perfidy. As in his later film Macario, Gavaldón's affection for the folk rituals and pageantry of Mexican life is evident. Composer Raul Lavista use of the theremin in the score adds a spooky note to the proceedings. 

The final third of La Otra does bog down in overwrought speeches and needless contrivances. Maria's decision to brand one of her hands with a hot poker seems a bit of an overreaction given the circumstances. However, from the first shot of a coffin being lowered into the earth to a final shot of iron bars obscuring del Río's face, Gavaldón's masterly control of the medium is in evidence. The print I saw was pretty dire, but even in a crappy print the director's vision shines like a beacon.      

Gladiator 2

Paul Mescal

What a dull film Ridley Scott's Gladiator 2 is despite its many bloody fracases, Roman decadence, wicked twin Emperors, and an entertainingly grandstanding Denzel Washington. The aura of Scott's gift for spectacle dims because the film feels like a retread instead of a reinvention. Everything about the new film is a pale facsimile of the first one starting with leading man Paul Mescal. Russell Crowe is a bloated and self-parodying shadow of his former self these days having become drunk on his own grunts, but during the era of Gladiator he was one of our finest film actors. Mescal is a pretty good pick for a sensitive sort, but lacks the machismo of  a Crowe. Even in a bulked up form, Mescal looks like he would last thirty seconds with the MMA and WWF rejects Scott has assembled as his gladiators.

The battles royales of Gladiator 2 seem less vivid and imaginative this time. I thought the feral CGI monkeys looked particularly fake. I remember seeing the trailer for the first film, mostly shots of a tiger assaulting Mr. Crowe as a Kid Rock song blared, and thinking that it was brilliant marketing. At last, a sword and sandal epic was jettisoning the Victorian conventions employed by Hollywood and exemplified by Cecil B. DeMille. The film was a hit because it pandered to a young male audience's thirst for violence, not because it had an interesting plot or clever dialogue. I thought it was OK. Master thespians like Crowe, Richard Harris, Joaquin Phoenix, and Oliver Reed helped paper over the plot holes. Because of the high body count of the first film, the only actors we have left for 2 are Derek Jacobi and Connie Nielsen, and, unfortunately, only one of these people can act.

Nielsen is married in the film to Pedro Pascal, who plays a General involved in a conspiracy against the evil twin Emperors. I cared not a whit. Like most of Ridley Scott's films, Gladiator 2 is lovely to look at, but ridiculous in its predictability. Scott once again draws parallels between imperial Rome and modern fascism, but to what end if one is inclined nod off at the ninety minute mark. Scott has had a long career of hits and misses. For every Alien or Thelma and Louise there is a Legend or a Robin Hood. Of all the films in his oeuvre, Gladiator 2 most reminds me of Kingdom of Heaven, a similarly empty epic with one very good supporting performance: Edward Norton as a leprous King. Denzel Washington's performance is similarly skilled, but can't mitigate the overall tedium of Gladiator 2. 

Don't Play Us Cheap

Rhetta Hughes and Joe Keyes Jr.

Melvin Van Peebles' Don't Play Us Cheap, from 1973 , is his most overlooked and underrated flick. Part of this is due to the film's unusual origins and part due to its release or lack thereof. Peebles originally published the story as a French language novel entitled La fête à Harlem. The project, in each of its iterations, centers on a Harlem apartment where Miss Maybell (Esther Rolle) is hosting a Saturday night bring a bottle party with dancing, appetizers, and a grand feast. The guests sing and raise a rumpus, rejoicing in each other's company. Two interlopers are welcomed, but they turn out to be imps, ordered by Satan to disrupt the festivities. However, the sheer good-heartedness of the partygoers upend their plans.

Peebles had adapted the novel into a stage musical which briefly played San Francisco in 1970. Peebles filmed the production soon after, but was unable to find a distributor. He next mounted the play on Broadway, with largely the same cast that is in the film, where it had a fairly successful run. The film had a token, if you will excuse the expression, release and then languished in obscurity for decades. The ramshackle nature of the film and its weirdness probably scared off the major film studios, but it is Peebles' funky nerve that makes it resound today. Peebles doesn't open up the material, but turns it inside out. We view the apartment not just from a proscenium view, but from multiple points of view, including that of the denizens of the underworld. Numerous cinematic and theatrical techniques are used to reinforce the mood of bonhomie: a black and white segment, theatrical tableaux, shots through window frames, everything including the kitchen sink. I do think Peebles does indulge his love of superimpositions too much, but Peebles is trying to conjure the antic hilarity of his characters and I feel he largely succeeds.

Part of the reason is Peebles was able to attract a talented ensemble who were all impressive vocalists. Rhetta Hughes had been a backup vocalist with such luminaries as "Bobby Blue" Bland and Bob Dylan. Avon Long, who gives the film's most outstanding performance, had sung at the Cotton Club and played Sportin' Life in a Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess. Since, as you can probably tell from my description, the plot is slight, the film functions more as a musical revue with roots, fully exposed, in vaudeville and minstrelsy. Peebles' songs draw as much from show tunes as they do from soul. What is fully modern is the extremely funky costumes which remind me of the illustrations Pedro Bell provided for Funkadelic albums of this period. Don't Play Us Cheap  is as much a product of post-Sly Afro-American street culture as Miles Davis' On the Corner and as much a stylistic ragamuffin as that album.      

Giants and Toys

Hitomi Nozoe

Yasuzô Masumura's Giants and Toys is a 1958 Japanese satire of consumer capitalism. The film's plot machinations are centered around three generations of men who work as flacks for the publicity department of a Tokyo based sweets company. Their company, World Confectionary, has hit a sales slump and the P.R. whizzes must concoct a new It girl to center their next campaign around. They happen upon Kyōko (Hitomi Nozoe), an innocent gamin from a poverty stricken family. Kyōko has the raffish charm of a tomboy, we even see her playing stick ball at one point, that translates well through the lens of a beatnik photographer played by the marvelous Yûnosuke Itô. Kyōko becomes a media sensation, but loses her innocent charm in the process. The advertising men who engineered her rise all suffer from their devotion to their career at the expense of their personal lives.

Jonathan Rosenbaum has noted that Giants and Toys is evocative of Frank Tashlin's work which is an understatement, if anything. Masumura's color, wide-screen compositions resemble the cartoonish elasticity of Tashlin's work. Furthermore, the screenplay for Giants and Toys intersects with those of The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? on so many themes that one can't help but think that this is a case of imitation standing in for flattery: the films all share critiques of the modern capitalistic work ethic, satirize advertising and modern media (especially television), and utilize pop music. Giants and Toys even steals a bit of milk jug japery that Tashlin employed to draw attention to the bust size of Jayne Mansfield. The shadow of American culture is acknowledged by the characters in Giants and Toys. The lack of nationalist self-esteem is striking from a culture that bristled with chauvinism before its defeat in World War 2. "America is Japan," one character remarks ruefully.

Giants and Toys also shares the major flaw of Tashlin's work: its cartoonish visual dexterity is stressed to the detriment of the dimensionality of his characters. Very few of the characters in Giants and Toys exist beyond their one dimensional functioning within the plot. I cared very little for those caught up in corporate espionage and subterfuge in the film. Still, the visuals are occasionally dazzling. Giants and Toys is currently streaming on Kanopy.

Ziegfeld Follies

Lucille Ball and feline friends

Producer Arthur Freed wanted Ziegfeld Follies to reflect the wide-ranging revue that impresario Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. brought to Broadway in the early years of the 20th century. He succeeded in that the film is as scattershot as the original Follies undoubtably were. The film is a portent of the variety shows that were a staple of the early days of television. Comedy sketches alternate with lavish musical numbers with no attempt to craft a narrative. William Powell, who starred in MGM's The Great Ziegfeld, a Best Picture Oscar winner and huge hit for the studio, impersonates the showman again in a brief prologue. The producer has earned his reward in heaven and gives his benediction to the MGM players who he lauds for invoking the spirit of the old burlesque days. This translates to MGM using the film to plug their rising and established stars. The only true Ziegfeld performer in this film is Fanny Brice, who appears in a skit directed by Roy del Ruth that features Hume Cronyn and William Frawley. It is middling Brice, but I'm very glad it exists. 

The majority of the film was directed by Vincente Minelli with assists from Charles Walters, Robert Lewis, Lemuel Ayers, George Sidney and whoever was free on the MGM lot. The Minelli numbers are the film's highlights, especially the sequences with Fred Astaire and a boffo number with Judy Garland which originally was going to feature Greer Garson; but disaster was averted on that one. Minelli was in between Yolanda and the Thief and The Pirate and shoots here with full confidence, the former department store dresser (like Warhol) indulging his love of expressive color and bricolage. The pas de deux between Astaire and Gene Kelly gets most of the ink, but I think the standout number is the "dramatic pantomime" Limehouse Blues which features Astaire and Lucille Bremer. The casting of the two as Chinese emigres in London's Chinatown may cause one pause, as do a number of racist and sexist emanations from the film, but the result is sublimity, up there with the finest moments in Meet Me in St. Louis or Some Came Running.

The rest, while not quite dross, is decidedly a mixed bag. I've never found Red Skelton funny and his skit did not convert me. Keenan Wynn fares a little better. There is a number from La Traviata that's OK, if a little incongruous. MGM would hit paydirt a bit later by signing Mario Lanza. I always like seeing and hearing Lena Horne. In comparison, Kathryn Grayson seems anodyne. I like then new faces Bremer and Virginia O'Brien, but they both would soon get the axe from the studio. The appeal of Esther Williams continues to escape me, but Cyd Charisse has a nice dance cameo. Ziegfeld Follies grossed well, but could not meet its exorbitant production costs. Many snafus dogged the production, including a malfunctioning bubble machine.

The Tree of Wooden Clogs

Tales and Songs

Ermanno Olmi's The Tree of Wooden Clogs deservedly won the Palme d'Or at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival over such disparate films as The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Coming Home, Empire of Passion, Midnight Express, Pretty Baby, The Shout, An Unmarried Woman, Violette Nozière, and Who'll Stop the Rain. I am not overly enamored with neorealism, so a three hour film about Lombardy peasants working for a landowner in 1898 would seemingly not float my boat. However, Olmi's unobtrusive craft and compelling story had me glued to the screen for the entire film. Olmi synchs his film with the naturalistic and Catholic rhythms of life that feudal peasants lived for centuries. The tragic ending of the film augurs the modern era and the death of that way of life.

Olmi seems to have been inspired by the mystical Christian neorealism of Roberto Rossellini. As in the work of Rossellini and fellow nutty Christian Robert Bresson, Olmi use non-professional actors for verisimilitude. The adherence to the numerous rituals of Catholicism both bonds the peasantry and provides spiritual comfort. This is also true when the peasant families congregate in a barn to swap songs and tales before bed. Running parallel to these rites are those of nature. Indeed, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is a veritable fertility rite in of itself. We get birth, death, austere courtship, the sowing of seeds, and harvest. Olmi uses repeated shots of people looking out through windows, but all they see is time passing. The lack of heat in their abodes is stressed. They huddle around a flame to warm their bones. A flame of humanity that, like this film, sheds heat and light even in the dark, cold future.

Short Term 12

Kaitlyn Dever and Brie Larson in Short Term 12

Destin Daniel Cretton's Short Term 12 is a better than average drama that suffers from a fatal case of the cutes. It is an indie flick about a short-term residential treatment facility where the lines become blurred between staff members and patients. The bonding scenes are not as icky as they could be thanks to Cretton's restraint and the talents of Brie Larson, LaKeith Stanfield, and Kaitlyn Dever. However, Cretton frames his everyday tragedies as if this were a M*A*S*H* like ensemble comedy. The effect is jarring. There is much more than a spoonful of sugar making the medicine go down when the film ends with an adolescent charge running out of detention with a Superman cape on. (11/25/16)

Hagazussa: A Heathen's Curse

                     
Lukas Feigelfeld's Hagazussa is a decidedly creepy horror film set in the Alps during the15th Century. The 2018 film is a fairly impressive debut feature debut from the Austrian writer and director. Hagazussa is visually stunning, but dramatically a little sluggish. The film shows, in four parts, vignettes from the life of a simple goat herder who lives on the fringes of society in a remote cabin. Albrun is an outcast from Christian society and is derided by her neighbors, as her mother was before her, as a witch. When Albrun is raped by a local, she takes her revenge in a fiendishly clever manner. What follows is even more horrifying and the film climaxes in fiery fashion with one of the most striking long shots of recent vintage.

Feigelfeld conjures a past that is both strange and sinister, sometimes at the cost of narrative coherence. What he is able to picture, which should be at the heart of any period horror film set in this period, is the conflict between paganism and Christianity. Interestingly, the parish priest is quite tolerant of the pagan leanings of both Albrun and her mother. He realizes that prescence of an outcast like Albrun only increases the religious fervor of his own flock. Albrun is presented, none too subtly, as a scapegoat for the community at large. Feigelfeld also invests his film with traces of the Lorelei myth, though the analogy is a little murky. As Albrun, Alexsandra Cwen offers a bold and forceful performance in a film with very little dialogue. Hagazussa works better as a visual tone poem than as a straightforward story, but there are enough powerful moments to make me look forward to Feigelfeld's next effort.

The Careless Years

 

Dean Stockwell and Natalie Trundy

Arthur Hiller's The Careless Years is a dreary and conformist teen romance from 1957. Jerry (Dean Stockwell) and Emily (Natalie Trundy) become sweethearts while attending Santa Monica High School. They come from differing social backgrounds with Jerry's Dad working in a garage. Emily's parents are more upper crust and expect Emily to attend college after graduating from high school. Jerry, frustrated because Emily draws the line at heavy petting, broaches the subject of an elopement. Both of their parents object to this idea and, eventually, Emily knuckles under and agrees to go away to college. She pledges to write to Jerry, but bourgeoise conformity triumphs over romance at the end of The Careless Years.

Emily's mother is played by Barbara Billingsley who ended up playing another model of traditional feminine conformity as Theodore Cleaver's mother on Leave It to Beaver. Billingsley's character mouths the ethos of the screenwriters, decrying such totems of modernity as psychology and sleeping pills. What is one to make of the scene in which Emily and her mother both try on the same dress at a department sore? Mom tries on the dress second and pronounces that it suits herself better. From the film's viewpoint, I suppose, mother knows best, but I found it creepy. John Larch, another familiar face for those who owned a television in the 20th century. offers a solid performance. Ms. Trundy, not so much. She had a slim film and television career, but appeared in four Planet of the Apes movies because the second of her five husbands was Arthur P. Jacobs, producer of the simian epics.

The main reason to watch the picture is Dean Stockwell's brooding performance. Stockwell was just beginning to emerge out of his child star period. The role, sort of a neutered James Dean, is not a perfect fit. Stockwell never possessed the sexual magnetism of a Dean, but found his niche as a supporting player. However, whatever energy that emerges from this very dull film is almost solely to the restless poetry of Stockwell's work. Something that certainly can not be said of Hiller's efforts, which are lifeless. Even at seventy minutes, the film is turgid with little drama or snap to the proceedings. The Canadian director would stay afloat in Hollywood for almost fifty years, directing more commercial disasters (Penelope, Man of La Mancha, WC Fields and Me) than hits (Love Story, Silver Streak). The good films that bear his credit (The Hospital, The In-Laws) seemed to have succeeded despite him. Tellingly, Hiller did not direct another feature film for six years after The Careless Years failed to make an impact commercially or critically.

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat

Patrice Lumumba

Johan Grimonprez's Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat is a documentary that focuses on the machinations that led to the overthrow and death of the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961. Grimonprez places this story within the context of the rise of the non-aligned nations of that era which were struggling to free themselves from the shackles of colonialism. The "soundtrack" part of the film features, mostly, American jazz musicians unleashing titanic performances. The keynote piece is Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, released in 1960 and an attempt is made to link the Afro-American struggle for civil rights with emerging African nations attempts to free themselves from the yoke of European rule. Less successful, is Grimonprez's attempts to show how overseas tours by US jazz performers, funded by CIA front groups, distracted those abroad from the Western intelligence community's international chicanery. People abroad were not so easily hornswoggled, even in that far off time.

I did like the lack of narration in the documentary. Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat paints too broad a canvas for Grimonprez to lump his disparate threads into one monolithic narrative. He takes care to list his sources, though I think his cherry picking of said sources displays his bias. The manifold sins of the CIA are fully explored while the KGB rates nary a mention. Grimonprez unquestioningly displays speeches by Khrushchev and Castro supporting the non-aligned nations with little to no context. Now Grimonprez has previously explored the paranoia of the Cold War era in his documentary Double Take, so he may not have wanted to repeat himself. However, he paints a false binary view of the US: we see a lying Eisenhower and a truth telling Malcolm X. King and Kennedy never appear. I also think Grimonprez downplays Belgian culpability in the death of Lumumba and the severe cruelty of the Belgian rule of the Congo before 1960. Grimonprez does indeed hail from Belgium and the film provides a cursory looks at Belgian culture, such as it is. Much as I adore the film's footage of US jazz giants, I would have preferred to hear more from the African artists like Franco and OK Jazz that are featured far too briefly.

Despite my little Bichon Frisé reservations, Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat is an enjoyable film with a vivid gallery of talking heads that fly by swiftly, despite the film's length, because Grimonprez marshals an enormous amount of sound and imagery into a fairly digestible package.  I swam willingly in the stream of its powerful, if somewhat one-dimensional screed. Sometimes the effect verges on overload, I didn't see the point of juxtaposing Khrushchev speaking at the UN with shots of children enjoying a puppet show except for the most obvious point. I did appreciate the segments featuring Andrée Blouin and In Koli Jean Bofane, the author of the searing Congo Inc. It is the rich mineral deposits of the southern Congo, as Bofane points out, that have caught the focus of the world's great powers. A day after China's cessation of rare mineral exports to the US, Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat looks even more pertinent.

Les chambres rouges

Juliette Gariépy

Pascal Plante's Les chambres rouges (Red Rooms) is one of the more compelling and technically interesting films of the past few years. Set in Montreal, the picture commences with the criminal trial of a serial killer named Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) who is accused of torturing and killing three young women. The film's main character, Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), is in attendance and it becomes obvious that she is obsessed with the case. Kelly-Ann lives a hermit-like existence in a sleek high-rise, making a very good living modeling and playing online poker. She befriends a fellow trial groupie named Clementine (Laurie Babin) who thinks Chevalier has been framed. Clementine is a drifter from the sticks who gladly accepts Kelly-Anne promise of shelter. However, Kelly-Anne, who is a techno wiz, reveals to Clementine that she has copies of the videos of two of the murders, acquired with her hacking skills on the dark web on what are referred to as red rooms.

These videos were shown at the trial, but only in camera with the exclusion of spectators. Naturally, Clementine wants to see what is forbidden, but it upends her. She finally grasps Chevalier's perfidy and disassociates herself from the trial and Kelly-Anne. Kelly-Anne's attendance at the trial does not go unnoticed and her modeling career suffers. She loses herself to her obsession, even dressing up as one of the victims. She is sucked into a media vortex and reacts in a, somewhat justifiably, paranoid fashion much like the protagonist in this film's main influence, David Cronenberg's Videodrome. The themes of surveillance and loss of identity that underpinned that film are very much in evidence in Les chambres rouges. Plante shares with Cronenberg a clinical and very Canadian rationalism that is contrasted with more unconscious forces in their scenarios. In Les chambres rouges, the blinding white light of the courtroom, where truth and justice are sought, is contrasted with Kelly-Anne's dark lair where she consorts with the pitch black elements of the world wide web.

The gaze of Pascal's camera is largely an objective one. Sleek camera movements eye the participants in this drama in all their three dimensionality, even when they are playing a "role" in court, but also neutrally. The exception occurs when Kelly-Anne shows up in court dressed as one of the victims and is promptly ejected. As the bailiffs manhandle her out of court, the camera point of view shifts to her perspective. She sees Chevalier acknowledge both her and her complicity, like Manson to one of his chicks. As with Clementine's moment of realization, this changes Kelly-Anne's perspective, but, unlike Clementine, not her obsession with the case. She devotes herself, in her own twisted fashion, to bring justice to Chevalier. 

The Lady of Shallot by Elizabeth Siddal

One aspect of Les chambres rouges that intrigued me was the use of motifs and references from Arthurian legend. In the film, Guinevere is an AI computer assistant to Kelly-Anne. Kelly-Anne's internet moniker is "Lady of Shallot" who, if I remember my Tennyson, also spends a lot of time cooped up in a tower. Chivalric crests come into (cos)play and the murderer is, of course, named for the French word for knight. A very errant knight, I suppose. The dark web is rendered as modern necromancy in which all shapes, including the shape of truth, can be hacked and fracked into fractals. The rituals and romance of Arthurian legend are debased in Les chambres rouges. Pascal seems to intimate that truth is as illusory in the modern world as the Grail. All we are left with are the hollow rituals of streaming news and talk shows, mere phantasms of truth and bodyguards to lies.

The Edge of the World

Belle Chrysall and Eric Berry

Michael Powell's The Edge of the World, from 1937, is the first of his films to bear a personal stamp. Set on the island of Foula just west of the Shetland archipelago, the film is concerned thematically with the depopulation of the outer islands of Scotland. Two clans react differently to their dying way of life in which the island folk subsist on fishing, sheep herding, and crofting. The split in the community on whether to continue their seemingly doomed way of life leads to tragedy, particularly for Powell's young lovers Ruth (Belle Chrysall) and Andrew (Niall Macginnis). Throughout the picture, Powell's reverence for the traditional rural life of Great Britain emanates from the screen. 

That reverence is balanced with a frank depiction of the hardships brought by living on the island. Powell employs a documentary approach that verges on neo-realism. Indeed, a majority of the film's players were non-professional. The toil of those he depicts is stressed whether they are islanders laboriously extracting peat, shepherds climbing down steep rock to rescue their flock or coal stokers plying their trade on fishing trawlers. Powell regards them objectively, but with compassion and that makes all the difference. The expressionism of his later work makes only fleeting appearances, particularly when a superimposition of waves crashing on the island's rocky shore is layered over the face of Ruth as she contemplates suicide.

The plot of The Edge of the World is laden with melodramatic elements: two falls to doom from a rocky cliff, stern patriarchs, an unplanned pregnancy, an emergency tracheotomy, and, of course, a storm tossed sea. All of this crammed into 80 minutes! Powell contrasts this with moments of repose and reflection amidst the flora and fauna. Parishioners and their dogs wait patiently during an interminable sermon. A dance celebrates the birth of a child. Mankind resides with both sheep and hawks, life and death in a beauteous and terrifying setting. An essential film.

A Complete Unknown

Timothée Chalamet

James Mangold's A Complete Unknown is a satisfying film, worthy of the plaudits it has received. The script by Mangold and Jay Cocks, based on Elijah Ward's Dylan Goes Electric, wisely restricts its purview to the four years between Dylan's move to New York City and his plugged in performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The focus is on the embrace of Dylan by the folk music community and Dylan's eventual estrangement from the orthodoxies of that movement. Even with the film's narrow focus, there is a lot left out: no Ramblin' Jack Elliott, no Paul Clayton, no Mavis Staples, no Suze Rotolo abortion, no Tom Paine Award speech, no Beatles, and no drugs. Naturally, you can't include everything in a two hour film, though I kinda feel the absence of Bob's copious consumption of reefer and speed in this period was the price Mangold had to pay for Dylan's cooperation. Nevertheless, Dylan's pallor and nocturnal habits in the second half of the film provide enough of a clue to what was going on with Bobby after he hit it big.

Even with the director of Walk the Line at the helm, I honestly thought that this project was going to be the usual biopic debacle. Surely Chalamet was too tall and too lightweight of a performer to portray the Nobel laureate. I stand corrected. Chalamet fully inhabits his role and is especially convincing as a musical performer. Even Dylan detractors like Leonard Maltin can grok the songs now that the nasal whine of the Bobster is lessened. As good as Chalamet is, for me the outstanding performance of the film is Edward Norton's uncanny impersonation of Pete Seeger. Norton's rendering of Seeger's basic decency and timbre is completely dead on. Indeed, A Complete Unknown is a feast of supporting performances that conjure the historical figures without resorting to impersonation: including Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, Dan Fogler as Albert Grossman, Will Harrison as Bob Neuwirth, and Norman Leo Butz as Alan Lomax. The only actor I was not satisfied with was Elle Fanning as the Suze Rotolo stand-in called here by the name of Sylvie Russo. This is not entirely Fanning's fault. Rotolo was an Italian-American red diaper baby and Fanning just seems too much of a WASP for the role. If I have a slight criticism of the film is that its heavy use of recreated musical performances tends to ameliorate the drive of the narrative. When the script shows real life events intersecting with the legend of Bob Deity, like the sequence of Dylan regarding his neighbors watching President Kennedy address on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mangold's subtle touch reaps dividends. I'm a big Dylan fan, so the more poetic musings of a Martin Scorsese or a Todd Haynes to me better capture the complexities and profundity of the subject. However, if someone who was ignorant of the life and work of the bard from Hibbing wanted to watch a film to learn about the man and his music, I'd unhesitatingly recommend A Complete Unknown.