Author: Chris

Directed by Julie Gavras (daughter of Costa-Gavras), this tells the story of a young, nine year-old girl in early 1970s Paris. Born of a well-to-do family, and used to bourgeois comforts, she reacts angrily when her parents become radicalized by events in Franco’s Spain and Allende’s Chile, and by the women’s liberation movement. The movie watches and evaluates the parents through the eyes of the girl, Anna (played by an impressive Nina Kervel-Bey). Not a great film, primarily because the parents’ are never believable, either as radicals or parents, and because the trajectory of the film is too obvious, as Anna softens to the revolution, questions her catholic nun teachers, and comes to like the “beatnik-hippy” friends that her parents make in their solidarity work. It lacks the hard edge of Costa-Gavras’s films, exploring the human reaction to great events rather than the events themselves. Still, it is an affecting film, if only because these were genuinely momentous events going on, and to live through them was to be transformed. As soon as I finished watching I found good versions of ‘Ay Carmela’, ‘Hasta Siempre’ and ‘Bella Ciao’ to download and listen to. It could almost have been the 1970s again.

I’m interested in what you all think of this, not least because there is probably some experience of student films produced on a tiny budget on this blog. The only reference I can find to it here was a comment from Michael earlier this year about the problems getting the movie released because the songs used on the soundtrack had not been licensed. In any case, this was made by Charles Burnett (of To Sleep With Anger and Glass Shield) for $10K in 1977. It has only just been released on DVD and it is a revelation. Done in documentary style, in black and white, the camera just captures life in South Central LA, presumably contemporaneously, though there is a 1940s almost rural feel to many of the scenes. It is unlike any depiction of urban African American life I have seen (and of course The Wire is much on my mind right now). There is a joyousness on the part of the characters, especially the children who are playing in and on vacant lots, railyards, rooftops and so on, and Burnett shows a deep affection for his characters. It is just poor people working away on their lives (one of the best lines has a character actor explain that he is not poor because he gives stuff away to the Salvation Army). The explosion of films in the 1990s about South Central gang warfare seems a million miles away. The DVD comes with a commentary track and three other Burnett shorts, all worth watching. The first, dating from 1969 looks like a study for Killer of Sheep. Oh, and the soundtrack is incredibly good.

But my real question is: how can a film maker this good have made so few films of note? Apart from Killer and the two I mentioned above, it is a very thin resume including a fair amount of forgettable TV.

The title refers to Frank Lucas, who controlled a big chunk of the New York heroin trade for the first half of the 1970s. The movie follows two parallel tracks: first the rise of Lucas, played by Denzel Washington; second, the efforts of Ritchie Roberts, played by Russell Crowe, to catch him. This is enjoyable, and the first half is compelling, but somehow it didn’t quite cohere for me. Continue reading American Gangster

This is a classic martial arts movie from 1978, though I had never seen it. A remastered version with some good extras was just released by the Weinstein brothers’ Dragon Dynasty label and Netflix has it, though there was a long wait. Starring Gordon Liu in his prime, and opening with the ShawScope logo, you can see why Tarantino wanted to recreate some of its feel in Kill Bill.

In any case, it is very good. The plot line has a young rebel going to a Shaolin temple to learn kung fu in order to fight off the tartar hordes who have invaded China. 35 chambers teach elements of the art of kung fu, each more advanced than the one before (again, the scene in which the Bride is trained — by Godon Liu — in KB vol 2 explicitly harks back to this part of the movie). The 36th chamber involves a dispute over whether Buddhist monks should be training the masses to fight the invaders. Good, old-fashioned martial arts scenes with no wires and remarkably little cutting. Recommended.

There are plenty of worthy movies out there, and there are plenty that fit comfortably in the “enjoyable crap” category. But more and more, I find myself appreciating movies that fail — often in a big way — but have something important going for them. These are not truly great movies, with a minor flaw in them. They are fundamentally flawed, but somewhere within them there is a germ of a good idea, or just one fine scene, one performance, one moment that rescues it from obscurity and makes it compelling. There was an earlier thread of movies we are ashamed we had not watched or had not enjoyed. Here is a category of movie to be ashamed that one liked, but to still see something worthwhile in the whole enterprise.

So my first candidate is Falling Down, with Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, Tuesday Weld, and Frederic Forrest. It’s a crude vigilante movie that asks us to applaud a domestic terrorist, that tugs shamelessly at our heartstrings, that gives us explosions as well as a child’s tears, that caricatures the people “D-Fens” kills (or causes to die). Worthless. Exploitative. And yet… I just watched it again on HBO and it captures something about middle class alienation that we rarely see. There are a handful of scenes that, for me, rescue the movie. The Douglas character sitting in traffic at the beginning (the heat and insect buzzing remind me of the train station scene in Once Upon A Time in America), the black character holding up the handwritten sign saying he is “not economically viable”, Douglas watching home movies of his ex-wife and child and seeing his own anger and the fear in their faces, Duvall’s early tender scenes on the phone with Weld. There are too many wrong decisions to make it a decent movie, but enough good ones to make it memorable.

This one doesn’t need a lot of interpretation. It is exactly what you expect: a well executed action thriller that hits every button a Hollywood movie with pretensions to semi-seriousness has to hit. We have: lots of children, often conducting themselves bravely after the loss of a parent; plenty of bonding across religious and national lines; expert American investigators able to solve crimes with just a few fibers and access to the Internet; the requisite cowardly top American officials, more interested in politics than solving crimes and saving lives. Continue reading The Kingdom

Interesting, enjoyable, with some wonderful moments, but something of a letdown after ‘History of Violence.’ Whereas HoV is full of quiet menace, here the menace is right in your face, on the surface of the film. Cronenberg revels in the blood, from an opening assassination, through a bloody birth, to a remarkable scene in a public steambath which features a naked, tattooed Viggo Mortensen sliding in pools of blood. Whereas the transformation of the Mortensen character in HoV takes us by surprise, here he glowers and exudes power from the first moment we see him.

Some nice performances, especially Armin Mueller-Stahl, Naomi Watts, and Mortensen, when he lets his face crease and his hair flop a little. But I couldn’t help feeling that Cronenberg bought into the allure of the Russian mob a little too much. Oddly enough, this made me think fondly of a much earlier Mortensen film, ‘American Yakuza’: a true B-movie, but one that played with betrayal and honors in a mafia setting in ways that I found more satisfying than ‘Eastern Promises.’ [SPOILER] Continue reading Eastern Promises

This is a haunting, deeply affecting film, directed by Ki-duk Kim (of 3-Iron and Spring Summer Autumn Winter). I’m not sure how to review it without spoilers, so be alerted. A teenage schoolgirl raises money to go to Europe for her and her friend by prostituting herself; the friend helps to set up the encounters with men and stands guard despite being disgusted by what they are doing. When the first girl dies, her friend sleeps with all the men who had sex with the dead girl, and returns the money to them. It is a sort of homage to her dead friend, and she achieves a kind of peace as she crosses off the names of former johns, and overcomes her earlier disgust. Meanwhile, her father discovers what his daughter has been doing, is distraught and wreaks a measure of retribution on the men. He then sets off on a trip with his daughter to visit the grave of his wife, her mother. Continue reading Samaritan Girl (Samaria 2004)

For my money, easily, effortlessly, the best thriller/action movie of the summer, the year, probably the decade. It is a little flabbier than the first installment but it is trying to do a lot more, so that can perhaps be forgiven. A few lines uttered by David Strathairn are clunkers, but very few. And the feel-good ending spoils the introspective, dark feel of the movie. But apart for that, I can’t think of a thing this movie does wrong.

The cinematography conveys a sense of place as we move from Turin to Paris to Tangiers to Madrid and then to New York. There are nice moments of tranquility within the mayhem, beautifully captured by a shot of a finger idly stroking a coffee cup, or Bourne alone in his thoughts, nursing bruised and bloodied fists. There is a great juxtaposition of flashbacks as Bourne recalls being waterboarded, immediately followed by an underwater scene from early in the second installment. Two scenes from the second installment of the trilogy are reinserted into this movie seamlessly. Paul Greengrass cuts it all together superbly.

The action sequences are simply unmatched. The word ‘taut’ is overused, but here it applies in spades. A long scene near the beginning in London’s Waterloo station sets a new standard for action choreography (and is another illustration of Gio’s observation that the cellphone has become the one indispensable item in a thriller). But there are at least three other fine action sequences that had me chewing on my fingernails.

In Joan Allen, David Strathairn, Albert Finney, Julia Stiles and, above all, Matt Damon, the movie has real professionals, adding a level of seriousness and self-consciousness to all the performances. And, to the extent that this trilogy has a message, it is about the cost of violence, and the remorse and pain that Bourne feels — and Damon conveys this mostly silently, through facial expression — for the damage he has done. I’m gushing, but if you like action movies, this one is in a class of its own.

Not bad, just disappointing. Granted this movie is based on the weakest of the books: the overall plot of the series was not advanced at all, Rowling’s efforts to portray her hero’s stormy psychological development into adolescence consisted entirely of long passages rendered in block capitals, and story rests on acts of incredible stupidity on the part of adults. So, there was not much to start with. But even so, this is a mess. It is so badly edited (from what must have been a much longer movie) that whole scenes make no sense because earlier events which are referenced later never actually made it off the cutting room floor (Cho’s betrayal, Luna’s possessions, Dumbledore on love). My kids spent the entire trip back from the movie counting the mistakes. The movie is very dark – all night sweats and moments of claustrophic panic – unleavened by any sense of wonderment. There is a single scene, when the older Weasley twins create chaos in the examination room and chase Umbridge, that reminds viewers of the excitement of magic and the pleasures of being a student at Hogwarts. Otherwise it is a conventional teen thriller. A word about the adult British cast. As always, it is a who’s who of talented British actors, with the addition this time of Helena Bonham Carter and Imelda Staunton. But, with the usual exception of Alan Rickman’s Snape, they are all wasted. They are either asked to ham it up (Staunton is completely over the top as a very smug Dolores Umbridge, and Bonham Carter just cackles like a maniac), or given lines of such banality that it must be strain to have to utter them (Gary Oldham is tortured with dialogue that cannot be said with a straight face; I suspect he administered the Avada Kedavra curse on himself to get it over with). Why do these actors do it? Is it some conceit about bringing their craft to a wider audience?