Day 50/52 - Sleepwalk With Me (2012)

[Note: Last week, I listened to a really revealing interview that Terry Gross (Fresh Air) did with Mike Birbiglia and Ira Glass (This American Life). It really inspired me to see their film when it opened at The Music Box in Chicago today. Before reading about the film, you might enjoy this short film that Mike and Terry did spoofing that interview. As a fan of Mike, Terry and Ira, it seems a great lead-in to the movie.]

For me, great movies often center around a journey of self discovery. It might be a physical journey, but more often it is about a main character learning something about themselves and their world. As a fan of Ira Glass’ This American Life for many years, I knew Mike Birbiglia’s story because he told it on the show. I knew he was the guy who sleepwalked and ended up jumping out a window. That story has become a great Indie film--a sleeper if you will--called Sleepwalk With Me.

Matt Pandamiglio (Birbiglia) tells his story in flashbacks as we see him in present day driving around New York. The film story is a little different than Mike's real life story because in writing this journey film, the writers tightened up and reorganized the story to make it more dramatically satisfying. The purpose of art could be said to make life better than it was.

In his film world, Matt’s story begins with he and Abby, his girlfriend of several years, renting an apartment together. Even though Matt is obviously not ready for the commitment, he doesn’t want to hurt Abby’s feelings. Later they go to his sister’s engagement party and he begins the first of several episodes of physically walking in his sleep. (In reality, Mike had sleepwalked as a kid.)

Matt is a struggling stand-up comic who has less than 10 minutes of weak material. His father harps on his need for commitment and success, so Matt begins working with an agent who gets him some of the worst gigs possible--forcing him to drive long distances for little money.  As the film progresses, we see Mike begin to realize there is comic material in his real life and see him grow as a comedian. The more successful he is, the further apart he finds himself from his girl friend Abby (Lauren Ambrose). 

In one beautifully edited scene, he returns home, feeling guilty for having sex on the road, and asks Abby to marry him, even though he knows they should break up. Rather than give us the whole lengthy speeches, the editor does jump cuts and nails for us the feelings of the two characters. When he finally asks Abby to marry him, we know he can’t believe he’s saying it. 

As pressures build, Matt’s sleepwalking increases; until the final real life moment that he literally jumps through a second story window of a La Quinta Inn.

Mike Birbiglia is charming as Matt. He reminds me of Jules Feiffer’s Bernard Mergendeiler.  Not a strikingly handsome leading man type, Mike is instead someone like a Seth Rogan that you immediately want to protect and comfort and with whom you want to share a few beers and some laughs. Birbiglia is surrounded by wonderfully strong supporting actors, especially, Lauren Ambrose, Carol Kane (as his mother), James Rebhorn (his father), and Sondra James (his agent).

I loved the film and so did the audience at the Music Box. Great script with comedy and pathos, engaging actors, beautifully filmed and cut, this is a film I highly recommend. SEE THIS FILM. If it’s not at a theatre near you, ask the local manager why not.

Sleepwalk with Me (2012) *****

100 Great Foreign Films

If you like foreign films, check out this page.

Day 49/51 - A Heavenly Vintage (The Vintner's Luck, 2009)

One side of my family came from Lorraine, France, so I have often found myself drawn to French themed works. In 1998, I read New Zealander Elizabeth Knox’s book, The Vintner’s Luck, a book in diary form about a French vintner named Sobran Jodeau, who in 1808 Burgandy gets drunk and encounters an angel Xas (Yes, a real angel), and begins a life-time relationship with him. They meet each year, as the vintner learns to make outstanding wine and develop a love-hate relationship. The book centers on  the two and also Sobran’s relationships with two women, his wife Céleste and his business  partner, Aurora de Valday, the Baroness.  

I was enchanted with the book’s discussions on philosophy and theology. [Xas, we learn part of the way through, doesn’t live in Heaven but in Hell and the why of that was a significant discovery of the book.] In 2009 New Zealand director/writer Niki Caro adapted Knox’s book into what was later called, A Heavenly Vintage.

The film is visually beautiful, having been filmed in New Zealand, France, and Belgium. The costumes by Mark Bennett and Elaine Grainger, while set in the early 19^th century, have a 17^th and 18^th century feel to them, appropriate for Burgandy, France.

Jérémie Reier makes an attractive Sobran. Keisha Castle-Hughes, superb as the child-lead in Whale Rider and as Mary in The Nativity Story, is a stunningly beautiful Céleste. It was an interesting directoral decision to keep her looking the same age as Sobran ages. Vera Farmiga plays Aurora and also is fascinating to watch. Gaspard Ulliel is not called Xas in the film, but listed as The Vintner’s Luck. Of the main characters, he may the weakest, but the writers have chosen not to give him much of the interesting philosophy from the book. 

Nonetheless, I was definitely drawn into the story. At one point the Baroness has suffered a 19^th century mastectomy and Xas suffers a similar loss, each character in their own way dealing with the loss of part of themselves.

The film is on Netflix streaming and was worth the viewing. The film is R rated for nudity and sexual situations. 

A Heavenly Vintage (2009) ****

Day 47/50 - Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

Mexican director/writer Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth is a film which merges fantastic images of a mythological world “underworld” with the realistic story of a young girl who must learn to accept her mother’s new evil husband, a leader of the Fascist Franco army. The year is 1944 in Spain after the Civil War. Resistance fighters are still hiding in the mountains.

As the film opens we see a young girl dying and the narrator tells us:

A long time ago, in the underground realm, where there are no lies or pain, there lived a Princess who dreamed of the human world. She dreamed of blue skies, soft breeze, and sunshine. One day, eluding her keepers, the Princess escaped. Once outside, the brightness blinded her and erased every trace of the past from her memory. She forgot who she was and where she came from. Her body suffered cold, sickness, and pain. Eventually, she died. However, her father, the King, always knew that the Princess' soul would return, perhaps in another body, in another place, at another time. And he would wait for her, until he drew his last breath, until the world stopped turning...

We have two plots in this film: one dealing with myth; the other dealing with reality.

Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) reads books about fairies. As she and her pregnant mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) are driven to join the mother’s new husband, Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), the mother becomes sick and they have to stop. Ofelia wanders off and finds an old runic stone with a face carved on it. Nearby is a missing stone with an eye. When she puts it in place, a stick insect flies out of the stone’s mouth. Ofelia believes she has found a fairy.

Later in the story, Carmen is restless and asks Ofelia to tell her unborn baby brother a  story. She tells him:

Many, many years ago in a sad, faraway land, there was an enormous mountain made of rough, black stone. At sunset, on top of that mountain, a magic rose blossomed every night that made whoever plucked it immortal. But no one dared go near it because its thorns were full of poison. Men talked amongst themselves about their fear of death, and pain, but never about the promise of eternal life. And every day, the rose wilted, unable to bequeath its gift to anyone... forgotten and lost at the top of that cold, dark mountain, forever alone, until the end of time.

When she finishes her story, she tells him she will always protect him.

In the real world, Vidal is the embodiment of sadistic evil and all things bad on earth. Early on he questions a man and his father who he believes are resistance fighters. The old man maintains he was only in the woods at night trying to get rabbits for food. The young man argues with the Captain who takes a wine bottle and smashes in the young man’s face, killing him. When the old man protests, the Vidal shoots him. Later, going through the old man’s bag, Vidal finds a rabbit. The danger of illogical violence becomes ever-present in the film.

Throughout the Captain’s story in reality, he threatens everyone around him, terrorizes his new wife and daughter, fights resistance fighters allowing no mercy, shows his brutality toward everyone, is finally punished himself by one of the female servants who he has bullied constantly, gets routed by the fighters, and eventually gets his “just rewards.”

In the myth story, the insect does turn into a fairy who leads Ofelia through Pan’s Labyrinth to the underground world. Pan (Doug Jones) who says he is the faun greets Ofelia as the princess that will bring life back to the underworld. He tells her she must be tested and do three things in order to return as a princess. The first is to find a key which has been swallowed by a huge toad. (This she does.) 

Next she is to find a knife kept by the Pale Man (also played by Doug Jones), a terrifying human-like monster with shark-like teeth, long sharp nails, and eyes he inserts in the palms of his hand. She has been instructed not to eat anything in his realm, but she eats two grapes before leaving and is chased and almost eaten by the monster. Pan rejects her at this point because she has disobeyed him.

Evil appears in the world of myth where monsters like the Pale Man can exist and where the Faun can turn from being kind to threatening in a moment.

[Spoilers] Eventually Ofelia’s mother dies in childbirth and Ofelia is instructed to take her baby brother to give to Pan. When she realizes that Pan plans to shed the boy’s blood to open the portals, she refuses to allow it. Blood must be shed, and in the real world, she is shot by the Captain. 

[Spoilers] Shedding her blood allows Ofelia/Princess to “return” to the land in the Underworld where her father and mother await her. According to director Del Toro, the film is about Soren Kierkegaard’s quote which says “the tyrant’s reign ends with his death, but the martyr’s reign starts with his death. I think that is the essence of the movie; it’s about living forever by choosing how you die.”

The film is one of the most haunting films I have seen. The special effects are unforgettable. The violence in the film is sometimes hard to take, but the lyrical beauty of the film often transcends it. There is danger in the world, but Ofelia learns that protecting another weaker than herself is worth all risks.

I smiled when I learned that at the Cannes Film Festival, the film received 22 minutes of applause.

Pan's Labyrinth (2006) *****

Day 46/49 - Little Women (1994)

Is there any film more joyfully Americana than Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women?

In 1933, “women’s director” George Cukor directed a black and white version with Katharine Hepburn (Jo), Joan Bennett (Amy),  Jean Parker (Beth), Frances Dee (Meg), Spring Byington (Marmee), and Douglass Montgomery (Laurie). Costumes were by Walter Plunkett, who later designed the award-winning Gone with the Wind and Singing in the Rain.

In 1946 David O. Selznick began a production to star Jennifer Jones (Jo), Diana Lynn (Amy), Bambi Linn (Beth), Rhonda Fleming (Meg), Anne Revere (Marmee) and John Dall (Laurie), but because of the ordeal of filming Duel in the Sun, the property and script were sold and the film was scrapped.

 In 1949, Mervyn LeRoy directed an MGM color version with June Allyson (Jo), Janet Leigh (Meg), Margaret O’Brien (Beth), Elizabeth Taylor (Amy), Mary Astor (Marmee), and Peter Lawford (Laurie).  Again costumes were designed by Walter Plunkett in lush but often anachronistic 1860-1870s costumes. (In one of the scenes, a zipper closure can be seen in the back of Marmee’s dress). The script changes the birth order so that young Margaret O’Brien can do the Beth death scene. The film is in the broad MGM classic style. In many ways, the early scenes of the film are the most memorable, especially the Christmas scenes which look like early Currier & Ives prints. [Note how the same musical theme has been reused from the 1933 film.]

Today, I rewatched one of the latest incarnations of the book, directed by Gillian Armstrong in 1994, and starring Susan Sarandon (Marmie), Winona Ryder (Jo), Trini Alvarado (Meg), Kirsten Dunst & Samantha Mathis (Amy), Claire Danes (Beth), and Christian Bale (Laurie). Sarandon makes a strong Marmee and although Ryder seems a little weak in her role, the ensemble acting works. Danes gives a touching death scene.

The last version of the film expands on the book and becomes truly a woman’s perspective of the Civil War Period. Women throughout the film are seen naturally doing women’s activities: folding clothes, baking and cooking, sewing, living with and loving cats and little dogs, gardening, arranging flowers, admiring fabrics, tending children, painting china and later oil painting, writing, entertaining themselves. The film is filled with period quilts, dolls, historically faithful clothing, glorious attics and parlors, and Concord, Massachusetts, environments. The set interiors of the house are patterned after Louisa May Alcott’s family home, Orchard House.

According to the IMDB article on the film regarding Colleen Atwood's costumes:
Costumes are handed down from older sister to younger, to underline both the family's poverty and the connections between sisters. Jo's red plaid dress worn to the ball where she meets Laurie is worn the following Christmas by Beth when she comes down the stairs after being ill; Jo and Beth are close to each other, as Meg and Amy are close to each other. Meg's blue striped dress that she doesn't end up wearing to Belle Gardiner's debut ball is worn years later by Amy in the scene where she announces she's going to Europe with Aunt March. 

I have seen this version at least five times, and find I continue to enjoy it more each time I see it.

Little Women (1994) *****

Day 46/48 - The Bourne Legacy (2012)

Jason Bourne of the Robert Ludlum novels is loose, but AWOL in this new thriller. Built to function as an adrenaline pump, I found the film a riveting two-plus hours. 

The covert operations of all the Bourne-like programs are being shut down, and one by one the operatives (called outcomes) are dropping dead from the yellow pills they have so trustingly taken. As in the X-Files universe, the operative catch-phrase is “Trust No One.”

Jeremy Renner as Outcome No. 5, Aaron Cross, is one amazing superhero.  We first see him rise from sub-zero water (a nod to 007?), climb sheer mountain ranges, leap crevices and evade and eventually outsmart wolves.  A new chemically altered spy, with super hearing, he can hear a drone strike in a snow storm just in time to save himself. 

Back at the labs where all the outcomes’ meds are distributed, one of the scientists begins shooting all the lab doctors, but kills himself before he gets head Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz). Later, when additional operatives arrive at her hideaway home to wipe her out, she is saved by Cross who has come to get more of his meds, since he believes he will die without them.  

How the two escape and how “they,” led by Edward Norton (Retired Co. Eric Byer) and Stacy Keach (Retired Adm. Mark Turso) try to capture them makes up the remainder of the film.

Tony Gilroy is credited with directing, story and co-author of the screenplay. It takes awhile, as is true with most Bourne films, for us as the audience to figure out exactly what’s going on, but once the sides are clearly drawn and the fights and chases begin, this is a truly satisfying adrenaline rush. The motorcycle chase at the climax is like riding a roller coaster. 

We get enough back-story and character development for us to root for Renner and Weisz.

Reading some of the reviews, I didn’t expect to enjoy the film as much as I did. For me, it was worth the ride.

The Bourne Legacy (2012) ****

Film term 101: Save the Cat

Listening today to NPR's Fresh Air Sunday edition, Terry Gross interviews Ira Glass and comedian Mike Birbiglia. They bring up a film term I hadn't come across: "Save the cat." According to the discussion when filmmakers want to get an audience to identify and bond with a character, they throw in a scene that is merely there to show what a character is like. You want the audience to feel the hero is a nice guy, have him "save the cat." In Glass and Birbiglia's new film, Sleepwalk with Me, in order for the audience to feel Birbiglia and his girlfriend had a strong relationship, they added a short scene where they merely bond. The purpose of the scene was merely to "save the cat."

[Update: I bought Blake Snyder's Save the Cat on Amazon. Billed as the ultimate insider's guide which "reveals the secrets that noone dare admit, told by a show biz veteran who's proven you can sell your script if you can save the cat!"]

Day 45/47 - Pretty Poison (1968)

Dennis Pitt: Boy. What a week. I met you on Monday, fell in love with you on Tuesday, Wednesday I was unfaithful, Thursday we killed a guy together. How about that for a crazy week, Sue Ann? 
Sue Ann Stepanek: "Unfaithful Wednesday?" 
Dennis Pitt: I was just joking, Sue Ann. That was in another country. Forget it. I do. . . .
Sue Ann Stepanek: Marry me.

The Music Box in Chicago has been running films in the Film Noir tradition. One of their offerings today was Pretty Poison.

By 1968, thirty-six year old Anthony Perkins had become so identified with his 1960 Norman Bates role that it seems only natural that his character, Dennis Pitt, is just getting out of an institution for having burned up his aunt in a house fire when he was 15. Dennis, given to outlandish lies, may or may not believe all the stories he tells. When he meets Sue Ann Stepanek, a flag carrier for her high school band, he appears quirky enough to get her interest. Eventually he convinces her he works for the CIA and that she must help him. He believes the chemical plant he works for is poisoning the water  with their colorful red discharge and he plans on sabotaging the plant by bringing down the metal discharge ducts. Sue Ann gets carried away and as they set about in their plan, she kills a night watchman by drowning him between her legs, holding him under water. This is definitely not the innocent Dennis thought she was. 

Later that same night, the two are picked up by the police who assume that Dennis is trying to rape her at the local make-out area in the woods. Her mother tells the police to forget it and then tells Sue Ann she can never see him again. And the resulting actions show that the "Pretty Poison" of the title is not referring to the chemicals found in the lake.

Perkins gives us a sustained role without reprising the quirkiness of Norman Bates. Twenty-five year old Tuesday Weld is fairly convincing as a 18 year old who seems more dangerous than her paroled boyfriend. At times, the film feels like it had made for TV, including some of the musical bridges used. The plot remains interesting enough to keep our interest. 

I found it interesting how a film that is 44 years old could show clearly one of the changes in today's culture. The clothing and houses could be today, but pay phones have disappeared from the side of the road. Today, Sue Ann would probably not be able to spend 10 minutes without texting Dennis.

I enjoyed the film as much for seeing the film noir aspects as the performances of two capable and underused actors.

Pretty Poison (1968) ***

Day 44/46 - Cosmopolis (2012)

It’s not a good sign when you give your ticket to the ticket-taker at the movie and hear his boss say to him, “Cosmopolis is a really crappy movie.” I guess I was prepared for the worst and that’s what director David Cronenberg gave us.

Landmark Century Centre Cinema’s newsletter explains the plot this way:

Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), a 28-year-old finance golden boy dreaming of living in a civilization ahead of this one, watches a dark shadow cast over Wall Street. As he is chauffeured across midtown Manhattan to get a haircut, his anxious eyes are glued to the yuan's exchange rate: it is mounting against all expectations, destroying Eric's bet against it. Meanwhile, an eruption of wild activity unfolds in the city's streets. As the threats of the real world infringe upon his cloud of virtual convictions, Packer's paranoia intensifies as he pieces together clues that lead him to a most terrifying secret: his imminent assassination.

That is certainly a much more coherent idea than what we as an audience were given.

The film reminded me of what I know of  Dadaism, a post-World War I movement that stressed the absurdity of art and ideas by using nonsense words in mock didactic speeches and collages of discarded materials. André Breton defined it as, “Dada is a state of mind… Dada is artistic free thinking… Dada gives itself to nothing.” A piece of film I saw once of a Dada performance was of a man banging on an upright piano while three women dressed in white gown performed nonsense movements and said words that made no sense. I think a cuckoo clock was singing at the same time.

I bring these up because that’s what I felt the film was doing. There were big pompous speeches about the economics of the world and how rats might become currency, but everyone seemed to be reading a teleprompter. Pattinson, who I know can act—check out Water for Elephants or Little Ashes but avoid the Twilight series—seemed in catatonic state where he registered virtually no emotion until one moment at the end. His character has sex a couple of times, gets a prostate exam which talking about sex with someone who works for him, shoots a character with no motivation apparent, loses his tie and then his coat, gets a pie thrown in his face, keeps meeting his wife at various stops, and gets the worst possible haircut from the family barber. I'm sure we are supposed to see the disintegration of the person, but we as an audience should care. I found myself wanting to talk back to the film.

I think one of the clues to the film is this bit of dialogue between Pattison and Paul Giamatti:

Packer:  My prostate is asymmetrical. Do you think that means anything?
Levin: No.

I thought the same thing of the film.

Cosmopolis (2012) 0 stars

[Note: I liked last year's A Dangerous Method, directed by Cronenberg, a lot.]

Day 43/45 - Following (1998)

If you are a person who has trouble following a movie when things are told out of chronological order, this isn't the film for you. But if you like Christopher Nolan's work (The Dark Knight Rises, Momento, Inception), you'll want to see this film.

I was blown away with Momento (written and directed by Christopher Nolan), where a man has no memory of what has happened before so that he has to write down immediately what has happened so he can remember it. The film becomes layers of onions peeled away to an ultimate core.

But in 1998, the year before Momento was released, Christopher Nolan wrote, directed and filmed Following, where he experimented with the same technique. Nolan’s film makes for really cerebral filmgoing, ultimately exciting and satisfying.

Start as a viewer with the premise that the images you see are reflections of various times and moments in the main character’s life, but jumbled as in working a jigsaw puzzle. Nolan does give us all the answers we need, but ultimately we have to put all the pieces together.

The film follows “The Young Man”—who may or may not be named Billy (Jeremy Theobald)—who tells us that he likes to follow people. Eventually he follows Cobb, a handsome guy in a suit and tie (Alex Haw) who confesses to being a day burgler.  He takes Billy with him on some robberies. Eventually, the two even rob Billy’s own apartment (which Billy doesn't tell Cobb because he wants Cobb evaluate him by what he owns). Billy does follow others. Drawn to The Blonde (Lucy Russell), ex-mistress of a sadistic and dangerous nightclub owner. She has been robbed and Billy becomes obsessed with her.

Filmed in a “neo-noir style” [the rich black and white look of the 1940s film noir], the film reminds me visually of Laurence Harvey’s Room at the Top. The clothes even all look sixties. As classic film noir, we know that the main character is being played and the woman he is involved with can’t be trusted. But the hows and whys are what we have to wait for.

One of the ideas of the film is an obsession of investigating the victim’s psyche by studying the clutter of their lives. In Billy’s case, a large portrait of Marilyn Monroe hangs on his wall and could easily be the Blonde he falls in love with. At the end she is coiffed and costumed like the 1960s Marilyn in one her famous later portraits, upswept hair and black turtleneck. Astute viewers might also smile when they see also that Billy’s door has a Batman logo on it, a nod to Nolan’s future as The Dark Knight’s director?

This is film definitely worth seeing. I loved the experience.

Following (1998) *****  (on Netflix streaming)

Day 42/44 - Identity (2003) - extended cut

The film begins with a patient quoting on tape a poem he says he made up as a child, “Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish he’d go away.” [This first part of a longer poem by Hughes Mearns.] In a well paced opening montage, the director gives us the background on a major character of the film, mass murderer Malcolm Rivers (Pruitt Taylor Vince), who the psychiatrist Alfred Molina is trying to save in a last minute appeal to the Nevada state commission.

The set up appears to be an homage to Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians formula (which is referenced in the film): in a blinding thunderstorm which has washed out all roads, ten people end up in a isolated Nevada motel. There is no escape to anywhere else. The motel is wonderfully creepy and suspenseful, filled with 10 connected rooms, an Indian burial ground, a deserted restaurant, and other outbuildings. As people begin to die—murdered by an unknown person--the surviving characters begin to ask why these specific ten have been brought together? One of the ten is a prisoner brought in by a cop. Is he the murderer or is someone more “innocent” guilty? Is it significant that they are all the same astrological sign? [I kept hearing Laymont Cranstan, "What evil lurks in the hearts of men?"]

While we try to make connections with the clues we are given, we begin to assume the person they are waiting for at the murderer's hearing is someone at the motel. The psychiatrist says he wants to prove that his client’s body might have committed murders, but that his mind didn’t do it.

The best thing about this thriller is the way the plot twists. I thought I had it figured out and then the writer Michael Cooney just kept taking me somewhere else.

As each of the ten in the motel dies, we begin seeing that each has a secret that makes him or her guilty, and we begin rooting for which will survive. About two-thirds of the way in the film though, writer Cooney pulls the rug out from under us (think the kind of thing Hitchcock did to viewers with Psycho) and what we think is happening suddenly may not be. For example, after the first five die, bodies begin to disappear along with any evidence of mayhem . What’s going on here? Well, the director James Mangold keeps us along for the ride and gives a satisfying and surprise ending.

I always like the work of John Cusack and Ray Liotta and they give their usual strong performances. Amanda Peet as a hooker who just wants to buy an orange grove in Florida and John Hawkes’ Larry who runs the motel are also memorable. If you like thrillers, you will like the ride and the exercise of just figuring out exactly what’s happening.

[Note: I’m assuming the extended cut, no pun intended, is just more violent and bloody than the original release.]

Identity (2003) ****

Day 41/43 - The Happening (2008)

M. Night Shyamalan wants to give you nightmares. The Happening comes pretty close as he plays with the survivor genre in the tradition of Night of the Living Dead. Remember in NOTLD how we begin with a brother and sister in a cemetery complaining about being at the cemetery and the brother laughs saying, "They're coming to get you..." when without any warning a zombie attacks her? Scary beginning. 

Shyamalan plays a similar trick on us. Two blonde women sit reading in Central Park. One hears someone scream and she looks up to see a few people walking backward. She turns and a larger group of people have all stopped and slowly a few of them begin walking backward. Her friend appears catatonic, takes a metal needle from her hair and sticks it in her neck. We recognize the genre but the film is definitely going to be an "R" ride.

The first attack is believed to be from terrorists, but as the movie progresses we're given lots to mull over. Bees have begun to disappear. Attacks are first in larger cities, but gradually move to less urban area. Everyone affected has the desire to kill themselves in pretty gruesome ways--running into trees, shooting themselves, throwing themselves off buildings, hanging themselves from trees, allowing mowing machines or wild animals to maul them, slamming heads into glass. And the body count gets pretty massive during the film. 

Never do the scientists in the film find an answer to why it happened: Have the plants and trees suddenly become our enemies? Is it a result of global warming somehow? Is it our government attacking us? Whatever caused it (like Hitchcock's bird attacks) happens without warning and can start and stop suddenly. 

In order for the survivor gimmick to work, we have care about the people trying to survive. Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo and Betty Buckley all keep our sympathies. As they learn on their journey what is important about relationships and caring, we hoping they'll make it, even though we know not everyone will survive. (For awhile it does look like no one will make it.)

Shyamalan doesn't deviate very much from the standard formula of the survivor film, but that's what we expect. If you don't mind violence and disturbing images, the film is a pretty good ride told by an interesting storyteller.

The Happening (2008) ****

Day 40/42 - The Lady Vanishes (1938)

The Lady Vanishes shows its low budget from the beginning when a camera begins a surprisingly jerky pan of a miniature "Bandrika" train station, a fictional foreign country pre-World War II. The beginning section is slow as it establishes the characters with 1930s "witty repartee." A group of English travelers are trapped in this border hotel while the train is dug out from an avalanche.

Our initial focus seems to be on two English gentlemen who are trying to get to England in time for a major cricket match. There is Iris (Margaret Lockwood), a rich bored young woman who is heading back to England to marry her boring fiancé. She meets a sweet old English governess, Miss Froy (Dame  May Whitty), who is heading home after six years. Miss Froy listens to a folk singer who is serenading below her window. The moment is disturbed by noise coming from above Iris' room.  Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), a cheeky young musicologist in the Noel Coward-vein is collecting folk songs from the region and is having three of the staff dance and sing while he records their music. When Iris gets him thrown out, he joins her in her room until she agrees to have him reinstated. The governess continues to listen to the folk singer, but he is mysteriously strangled, unbeknownst to her.

The next morning people begin boarding the train. Just as the Iris helps Miss Froy, someone knocks down a planter which hits Iris on the head. Dazed, she is taken by Miss Froy to a compartment. Also in their compartment is a traveling magician, his wife and child, a Baroness, all foreign. 

The plot begins after Iris and Miss Froy share tea. Iris sleeps, and when she awakens Miss Froy is gone and no one admits to having seen her. Eventually Iris enlists the help of Gilbert and a Dr. Hartz to find Miss Froy and a search of the train begins. Has Iris hallucinated the whole thing or is something much more sinister at hand?

[For a much more psychologically disturbing use of the disappearance theme, find The Vanishing, a 1988 Dutch film based on The Golden Egg, about a man whose wife disappears from a gas station.]

The rest of the film involves spies, coded songs, a clue written on a window, a fight in a baggage compartment, a fake nun, and Englishmen trapped on a train with foreign military men shooting at them.

Hitchcock memorably used trains in several of his films: Strangers on a Train, Shadow of a Doubt, North by Northwest, The 39 Steps.

Among some of Hitchcock’s early signatures are the ordinary individual as hero, the double, (people who are not who they seem to be), the seemly benign villain, close-ups of sinister objects, the surprises hidden in the luggage compartment, a MacGuffin never fully explained, and a resolution with a happy ending where the bad dream is banished away.

Hitchcock in interviews talked about the importance of building suspense by showing the audience something a character doesn’t know and then playing with that idea. Here we have drugged drinks that we know have been doctored but of which the characters are unaware.

Even though there are obvious cheap film techniques—the miniature sets are laughably and the rear projections clearly artificial—Hitchcock’s strength is always his storytelling so that one tends to ignore the falseness.

This was the last of Hitchcock’s London films, made to fulfill his contract with producer Edward Black. The growing threat of the English by the Germans can be felt particularly near the end of the film. While the film takes place in a fictional country, it is pretty obviously German in culture. The small group of English trying to reach London become separated from a main train and will be executed if caught--a seemly obvious symbol. One of the characters who claims he is a pacifist tries to surrender and is shot. Another obvious symbol.

While this is not one of Hitchcock’s masterpieces, it certainly shows the artist growing into the man who would create Vertigo, Psycho, and Rear Window (my favorites).

The Lady Vanishes (1938) *** The entire film can be streamed on The Internet Archive or Hula Plus. 

Day 39/41 The Last Metro (1980)

François Truffaut's The Last Metro is a lush romance built around the story of a theatre owner who must hide her Jewish husband in occupied Paris. Catherine Deneuve (as a famous actress/manager) is at her most radiant beauty, paired with passionate Gérard Depardieu (as her lover) and cerebral Heinz Bennent (as her husband). Will Deneuve and Depardieu fall in love? That question becomes one of the viewers questions. If the film plays a little too close to the feel of Casablanca, so what?

Truffaut films his movie on obvious sound stages where the look reminds me of the early Technicolor of the MGM films. For a film about theatre, the style seems appropriate. 

About half-way through, as the passion between Deneuve and Depardieu heats up, I became aware that every frame used a bright vermilion for accent or was bathed in monochromatic schemes of the same. The seats and walls of the theatre are vermilion. Deneuve in the play-within-a-film wears a Victorian red dress against an unadorned set of pastel variations of the same color. The color stunningly off-sets Deneuve's blonde hair and luminous skin tone. Often the vermillion was paired with a rich earth/chocolate color. Strikingly, when Deneuve must venture into the Gestapo's headquarters a large Nazi flag with red background is featured prominently. Later in the film, Deneuve's costume colors move to a dark red, and later, black and beige. 

The film becomes much more newsreelish near the end, with narrator resolving the action. A particularly nice touch at the end which blends reality with theatricality, reminding us that all we have seen is just a theatrical presentation of real life.

I have always found Deneuve a fascinating actress to watch and she works well with Depardieu. The film is an enjoyable look at a very serious side of French life during World War II.

The Last Metro (1980) ****

Day 38/40 - La jetée (1962) / Leave Me (2009)

La jetée is a fascinating science fiction movie made by Chris Marker, composed almost entirely of still photographs. The short film (27 minutes) deals with time travel after the destruction of Paris in World War III. The narrator tells us we are concentrating on a man who has a very vivid memory of his youth, standing on a jetty or pier watching planes land. He sees a woman, a man falling from somewhere and that is all.

The man with the memory is picked as a subject for experiments dealing with time travel, trying to see if he can go backwards in time and actually exist in it. After many painful attempts, the man does go back and falls in the love with the woman he had remembered from his childhood. She calls him her phantom and they don't discuss how he got there. They have one perfect day and his experimenters decide that he should go into the future. What he finds and how the film resolves itself makes it memorable.

It is rather fascinating to study a montage of still pictures telling a story. We don't view it same way we view moving images, where we tend to concentrate more on the motion than on the composition. In this film each moment is held long enough for us to really study the composition, lighting, context and we put them together like a comic book frame by frame. 

The film reminds me of another short film I found a couple of years ago called "Leave Me," directed by Dustin Ballard, one of the most touching short films I know. 

La jetée (1962) ****
Leave Me (2009) *****

Day 37/39 - Hope Springs (2012)

Once again, Meryl Streep proves what a true chameleon she is.  She can play any character, from awkward Julia Child to a dottering Margaret Thatcher, strict and plain Sister Aloysius Beauvier in Doubt to glamorous Miranda Priestly in Devil Wears Prada to Donna in Mama Mia. Each character she plays shows rich depth and is fully realized. Kay in Hope Springs is another character Streep owns.

Kay has been married for 31 years and finds herself desperate for a change from the monotonous Omaha life into which she and Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones) have settled.  She books them a one week intensive marriage encounter in Maine with Dr. Feld (Steve Carell). Their coming to terms with each other and the lives they have accepted make for pure entertainment for the audience—funny, poignant, heart-wrenching, satisfying.  Whether you are married or not, the film says a great deal about the limits that all of us put on ourselves and the need to grow.

Steve Carell is at his most subdued and personable. Tommy Lee Jones is always fascinating to watch and shows a lot of depth to his character, but whenever Meryl Streep is on the screen, she teaches what true acting is. When I directed high school plays, I used to drill into my kids’ heads that “Acting is Reacting… Acting is Reacting.” Just watch Streep closely and you won’t find one false note to her character. She has the most expressive face of almost any American actress.  The audience responds to her totally in this film and I heard over and over how wonderful they thought the film and the actors.

All the characters really seem to listen to each other and enrich our lives by their insights. The writing is strong and we end up rooting for the couple.

This is a must see film for the summer.

Hope Springs (2012) *****

Day 36/38 - A Murder of Crows (1998)

A Murder of Crows (1998) feels like a fairly standard made-for-tv film—not a lot of depth, nor surprises, great locations (New Orleans and Key West), a few chase scenes, and acting that is not required to go very deep.

The film begins with ex-lawyer Lawson Russell (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) being transferred into a New Orleans prison. Once that is established, Lawson’s character begins voice-over narration for the whole story.  He takes us back to Mardi Gras where his character is being stalked (unknowingly) by a character in a devil costume. Lawson is defending rich client Thurman Parks III (Eric Stoltz in a pretty unmemorable role). Parks is guilty and when Lawson tries to give him up to the jurors, he ends up being disbarred.

After moving to Key West to run a fishing boat and write the novel he had been working on, he meets an elderly teacher named Christopher Marlowe (a very obvious age makeup job) who says he has a book he’s written about the murders of five lawyers, which he calls A Murder of Crows. Lawson reads it and returns to find the old man, only to learn from a police detective that Marlowe has died of a heart attack. 

Lawson keeps the manuscript, rewrites it as his own and has it published. After the book comes out and is a great success, a NOLA policeman, Clifford Dubose (Tom Berenger) reads the book and realizes that the five murders described are based on real cases and contain information only the police and murderer would know. Dubose begins to hunt Lawson who now has to find the murderer to clear himself.

There are a few plot twists that are memorable, maybe one real surprise, but on the whole the acting was uninspired. I usually like Gooding, Berenger and Stoltz as actors, but in the hands of a poor director, they often seem to be reading lines, ready to move on to the next scene.

A murder of crows (the collective name for a group of crows) is mentioned by Shakespeare in Macbeth.  There are some literary names that are important clues here, including the name of murderer.

A Murder of Crows works as an evening’s light entertainment. ***

Day 35/37 - After Image (2001)

You may not have heard of this film... and there's a reason for that. It's pretty hard to sit through, not because as a thriller it is scary, but because the whole thing seems a bit of a muddle where logic has to be forgotten from the beginning.

Singer John Mellencamp plays a tormented crime photographer obsessed with the pictures he takes of murder victims. [Mellencamp registers only one facial reaction throughout the film, so we have to infer what he is feeling by his vocal range.]

From the beginning we know he is being stalked by a guy in a red baseball cap. Why we don't know until about mid-way through the film. The stalker is creepy, but unfortunately looks like a sibling of Will Ferrell.

Mellencamp befriends a female deaf mute [Terrylene], a friend of his aunt. She lives in a church rectory and acts as sacristan. Since she cannot speak, she speaks only in sign language. Some you can figure out, much means little to those who don't sign language. Mellencamp communicates with her using sign language and some dialog. Needless to say, their scenes together don't always help the viewer. Terrylene's character is also clairvoyant and sees murders and the murderer. She is called on several times to do nude scenes which don't seem to have much purpose other than show her body.

Louise Fletcher plays Mellencamp's aunt, a minor, rather thankless role. There's a side story about Mellencamp's emotionally damaged brother, but it doesn't add a lot of depth to the story except to have a second creepy character as a foil to the baseball-cap guy.

Suspense should be the focus of this kind of film, but there are few surprises and little to recommend it.

After Image (2001) * (To paraphrase a friend, "This is 92 minutes of my life I'll never get back.") The film is on Hulu Plus or Amazon instant.

Trailer here

Day 34/36 - Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005)

The theme of today's film has similarities to yesterday's: World War II and the theatre, although in Mrs. Henderson Presents, we are in London from 1937 to about 1941. Based on real events and people, widow Mrs. Henderson (Judi Dench) needs something to occupy her time, so she buys The Windmill Theatre, a deserted theatre in the West End of London. She is outspoken, rude, totally privileged and strong willed. She's the type of woman who on a whim can hire a plane to take her to France. She is late to her meeting with Mr. Vivian Van Damm (Bob Hoskins) who wants nothing to do with her project. She immediately offers him a job, attracted by his willingness to stand up to her. He agrees only if she gives him absolute authority in all matters. They butt heads as we expect them to, and at Van Damm's suggestion begin presenting five shows a day.

When other theatres adopt the same policy and begin cutting into their receipts, Mrs. Henderson proposes they get rid of costumes. "Men like looking at breasts," she says. Nude performers were pretty shocking in London at the time, and the prudish Lord Chamberlain had to license all performances. Mrs. Henderson, a friend of his, convinces him that if the girls don't move, it would be more like a trip to an art museum. (Tableaux of similar kinds were done during the Victorian Period, although the women of that period wore skin-tight costumes.) The Gillian Anderson character in The House of Mirth, reviewed earlier, performs in one of these tableaux.

The Windmill's productions become popular with the troops and as London suffers bombardment, the productions become more and more patriotic. When the Lord Chamberlain wants to close down the theatre, popular demand and a moving speech from Mrs. Henderson keeps it open.

Someone referred to Dame Judi Dench as one of England's National Treasures. I agree. She is always enjoyable. Here she and Hoskins are a delight to watch. Dench gives great depth and believability to her character. Hoskins is more subdued than I usually think of him and more charming. A side-story about one of the performers played by Kelly Reilly gives depth to our understanding of the women's views. You might recognize Reilly in the recent Sherlock Holmes films, but she has a long list of credits.

The many production numbers are fun and entertaining, with all attempts at capturing the 1930-1940 styles of dancing, production, costume, and makeup. I'd put it on your queue to see.

The film features nudity, but there is nothing prurient about it. This not Russ Meyer sexploitation from the 1960s; nor were the shows of The Windmill Theatre.

Mrs. Henderson Presents (DVD, 2005) ****

Day 33/35 - To Be or Not To Be (1942)

While I have seen the film To Be or Not to Be from Mel Brooks' 1983 adaptation of the 1942 film, I had never seen the Benny/Lombard production.

The persona of television star Jack Benny that I grew up with during the 1950s is not much evident in Ernest Lubitsch's 1942 satire To Be or Not to Be. Benny plays a great Polish actor that none of the Nazi characters have heard of. "What he did to Shakespeare," says one character, "is what we are doing to Poland." The film jokes stretch from theatre/Shakespeare jokes and evolve into anti-Nazi content. Some of the Benny's classic comic bits which should have illicited laughs seem forced. He comes, for example, into his apartment and finds Robert Stack in his bed. He does a double take, then a triple take, and a quaduple take, but none of them shows the timing he perfected on television.

Benny's co-star Carole Lombard fairs much better, and I found her character much more likeable than other roles I've seen her in. (Last year, I was shocked to see My Man Godfrey on the large screen, where I found her performance grating, shrill and highly forced. I found myself wishing for scenes where she didn't appear.) Lombard always seemed a fairly lightweight commedianne without the depth of other 1940s stars. Lombard died in a plane crash two months before the picture was released and her performance here for the first time made me wonder what she might have done had she lived.

The dark focus of the satire is that of a theatre company trapped in Warsaw as Hilter's troops invade the country. Among the troop is at least one Jewish actor, but although the concentration camps are mentioned, the Jews are not. One actor wants to play Shylock and quotes "Hath not a Jew eyes" three times without the word "Jew" ever mentioned. He says of another actor, "What you are, I wouldn't eat." "Are  you calling me a ham?" responds the other actor. Certainly in dark tones are the sense of destruction and occupation of the city. It seems pretty amazing for a 1942 film to take on the subject.

Interestingly for me was a running gag about the Nazi commandant Col. Ehrhardt's adjutant, Capt. Schultz, who is constantly blamed for getting Ehrhardt in trouble. I kept thinking of Sgt. Schultz who was a running joke, being blamed by Col. Klink of Hogan's Heroes.

I found the opening image of cameo portraits of Benny and Lombard funny as they are posed in the famous John Barrymore "Hamlet" pose.

Near the end of the film, Hitler visits the company's theatre with a large group of guards. It reminded me of a similar setup in Inglorious Bastards.

Although I found the comedy of the satire rather weak, I did find Lomard and the Warsaw backstory interesting.

To Be or Not to Be (1942), part of the Criterion Collection on Hulu Plus,***

Day 32/34 - Grey Gardens (1976)

By 1975, when Albert and David Maysles were filming “Big Edie” Ewing Bouvier Beales and her daughter “Little Edie” Bouvier Beales for their documentary, the women had become recluses, living among crumpled newspapers, discarded packages, dirt, and cats and fleas. The two women were by then inhabiting only a few rooms of the East Hampton 28-room grey hulk of a mansion (named for “the color of the dunes, the cement gardenwalls, and the sea mist”) which gave great irony to its name, Grey Gardens. From 1971 to 1972, their living conditions had been so deplorable and infamous, that a series of “raids” from the Suffolk County Health Department almost led to their eviction and the razing of the house. In 1972, former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill (Big Edie’s nieces) stepped in and had provided enough funds to keep them in the home, which was repaired barely enough to meet village codes.

The Maysles film, Grey Gardens, begins with Big Edie’s discovery of a hole in one wall where a cat may have disappeared. A raccoon has taken up residence in the attic. Little Edie later feeds it loaves of bread and boxes of cat food, and it in turn tears down a whole section of the wall. That sense of invasion of the Beales’ world runs throughout the film.

It is easy to feel that the Maysles brothers have taken us to a Tennessee Williams world of loss and decay. Our views of the two women, who are obviously flattered by the male attention, seems to prompt intimate and highly personal insight into their lives. It seems immediately ironic that the opening remark from David Mayles is that they are “Gentlemen Callers.” The two women are always aware of the team and perform together and separately for them. Each woman reveals more and more of insights into their lives, past and present, while bickering, chatting, and speaking in Williamseque monologues that the other cannot always hear because she is speaking her own monologue.

Mother Big Edie sings “Tea for Two” while propped up in bed with wearing a large floppy beach hat, her thick glasses, a filmy nightgown and blue open smock. She declares with satisfaction that she still has her voice. Daughter Little Edie sings and dances, finally performing a flag march routine in a bathing suit, top, and scarf.

It would be easy to mock the two women, but the longer I shared time with them, the less I was inclined to do that. 
Little Edie blames her mother for her not being married or having had a career. “She wanted the people she wanted to live here,” she says. Then she finishes her thought with, “I had animals, but after awhile the raccoon and the cats become boring.” Both women have powerful regrets about lives not lived.

Still attractive at 50, Little Edie’s eccentric fashion sense at first shocks us. She appears in a tight brown sweater, navy sweater gathered on her head like a loose  turban with huge gold brooch to pin it on, clearly visible panty hose under a shortened and pinned brown skirt “which you can always take off and use as a cape,” and high heels. The ubiquitious scarf or sweater turban on her head hides the loss of hair she experienced in her 30s from alopecia universalis.

Later, as Little Edie goes through pictures of the beautiful women they once were, using her magnifying glass to counter the effects of her cataracts, we get a sense of who the two once were.

One of the ironic moments deals with a beautiful large oil portrait of Big Edie in the 1920s propped on the floor beside her bed. One of the cats stands behind it and pees on. This has obviously happened before, and no one considers hanging the portrait out of harm’s way.

At one point, Edie performs a dance routine to a patriotic march, wearing a white high heels, a black bathing suit, over a black sweater, with a navy and red scarf turban, carrying an American flag. She dances coquettishly for her “caller.” At the end, Little Edie again dances for the Mayles brothers while wearing a black lace dress hiked up into a short skirt. The cameraman stands up the stairs cut-off and she seems lost in her own world. At that moment, she becomes Williams’ Amanda Wingfield.  I feel great sadness knowing that her mother would be die within a year and that Little Edie would go on to become an unsuccessful cabaret singer before her own death in 2002.

This is a powerful film and by the end, I found myself under their spell. Hope Lange and Drew Barrymore portrayed the two for an HBO Grey Gardens docudrama, but the two powerful actresses reach none of the personal charm and eccentricities of the real women.

Grey Gardens, part of the Criterion Collection on Hulu Plus, is a definite must see. *****