10 - Bless Me, Ultima (2013)

Based on the 1972 book by Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima deals with the coming of age story of 6 year old Antonio Juan Marez y Luna in 1944 New Mexico. Early on, Antonio watches the shooting of a WWII veteran who has appears to have post-tramatic stress. Antonio worries about the souls of the men who shoot him, who include his father. Antonio’s life changes forever with the arrival of Ultima, a curandera (folk healer) who comes to live with his family. Antonio’s sisters fear Ultima is witch, but he and she immediately bond. An owl arrives also when Ultima comes and is seen by Antonio as the spirit of Ultima.

Antonio becomes Ultima’s pupil. When his mother’s brother is bewitched by the three Trementina sisters, Ultima saves him and sets a curse onto the witches. Ultimately one of them dies and their father leads a mob to kill Ultima for the girl’s murder.  In a show-down at his parent’s house, the owl saves Ultima by attacking and blinding the father in one eye. The father’s hatred and quest for revenge fuels much of the film.

Antonio’s life is filled with questions (Why is there evil in the world? What if God were a woman? Rather than cursing someone to hell, wouldn’t she forgive them like the Virgin Mary forgave the men who killed Jesus?). His questions of faith make the other children see him as “the Priest,” and in one scene they have him confess them. One of his friends, who is orphaned and says he doesn’t believe in God is forced by the others to confess. When he refuses and says he has nothing to confess, Antonio as the priest says that his sins are forgiven anyway. The resolution of their story becomes a powerful metaphor of Antonio’s questioning.

Themes of destiny, the place of religion, and the role of family all play parts in the film. Just as Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird is told to walk around in other’s shoes, we begin to appreciate the complex roles of religion and superstition in the lives of the mid-century Mexican-Americans.

The film is filled with magic realism. As Antonio seeks answers from his family and his church, it is Ultima’s teaching him about the world around him and her ability to feel empathy for even those who hate her that teaches him the most about his world.

Luke Ganalon as Antonio becomes an appealing protagonist. He joins Alexandria of The Fall, Toto of Cinema Paradiso, and Scout of To Kill a Mockingbird as favorite child characters. Miriam Colon as Ultima offers strength and mystery, while Castulo Guerra as Tonario, the father seeking revenge, becomes the  symbol for all the world’s evil. Antonio’s parents, played by Benito Martinez and Delores Heredia, illustrate the power of family love along with the disappointment of failed dreams.

Bless Me, Ultima is definitely one of the films to see in these early months of 2013. ****

9 - Side Effects (2013)

In this highly enjoyable Hitchcockian thriller, the role of psychiatric medicine and its side effects forms the basis for the plot.

Housewife Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) is having a psychiatric meltdown. Her husband Martin Taylor (Channing Tatum) has returned from prison, having served four years for inside trading. Emily’s response to her husband’s return is to begin sleepwalking. Then she rams her car into a wall, obviously an attempt to harm herself. When the psychiatrist on duty treats her, Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), she allows her to go home on the condition that she returns to his office. She becomes his patient. Dr. Banks tries different drugs with Emily, but most seem to have unwanted side effects—she has to be stopped from throwing herself in front of a train and her sleepwalking gets worse. Martin awakens one night to find her preparing a meal for three while still asleep.

[Spoiler alert] One evening Martin returns home to find his wife preparing a meal, cutting up vegetables. With no apparent reason, she stabs him to death. She then goes to bed and only in the morning realizes her husband is dead on the floor of their apartment.

Is Emily guilty? Was the murder the product of the new medication Dr. Banks had prescribed and for which he is getting paid? Is Dr. Banks culpable? Or is, perhaps, Emily not the victim she appears? Eventually Dr. Banks learns that he is not the first psychiatrist to treat her. He traces down and consults with Dr. Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who had treated Emily when her husband first went into prison. She suggests the problem lies with him.

Is Emily the victim of her doctors? Can Dr. Banks save his career?

With numerous Hitchcockian twists, Director Stephen Soderberg (Magic Mike, Oceans 11, Traffic) plays a pretty good game with us as to what is real and what is fake. As the film progresses, we switch our sympathies from Emily to Dr. Banks, but then find he may not be the innocent either.

The four main actors, helped by a literate script, do a good job of entertaining us. Jude Law plays the "perhaps innocent" victim caught in the middle, while Channing Tatum plays the Marian Crane/Janet Leigh part with charm. Mara and Zeta-Jones seem to relish their more complex characters, offering the viewer definite surprises.

The film may not be highly memorable, but it is an enjoyable ride worth seeing.

Side Effects (2013) **** 

8 - Amour (2012)

Many years ago, my mother as she began dealing with issues related to aging began her mantra, "There are worse things than dying young." As her group of friends experienced health decline, the mantra came more and more. Later, watching my best friend's parents dealing with their issues taught me my mother was right. I remember helping my friend's mother out of a wheelchair being afraid because she felt so frail. When I got her in bed, she looked at me, smiled and said, "You didn't hurt me." Apparently some of her other caregivers hadn't been as thoughtful.

I could not help but think of my friends parents as I was watching Amour. In it Georges and Anne, an elderly active couple who are able to function in their are suddenly confronted with Anne has a stroke while sitting at breakfast. Through the film Anne has more and more strokes and goes from functioning on her own to being completely incapacitated. The film details the couple's struggles, from getting her out of a wheelchair to feeding her to trying to understand when she begins reverting to childhood memories. Near the end, she keeps repeating, "hurts, hurts," which one caregiver says is just an unconscious verbal response to which Georges should not pay attention.

Georges and Anne, portrayed beautifully and horrifyingly realistically by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuele Riva, have lived a life of quiet polite companionship. She taught piano, but now cannot play. We read Anne's decline and heartbreak in their faces. They find they cannot even talk about their fears. Georges begins having realistic dreams filled with his fears as he contemplates an end we have seen at the beginning of the film. Trintignant and Riva's performances are shatteringly real. Having enjoyed their work in their youth and seeing the film ravages of age adds another dimension to the work.

The mood of the film is set at the beginning. No sound track, black screen, titles in white. The first sound we are confronted with is firemen breaking open the apartment door. The rest, except the very end, is flashback. The silent ending was greeted by a universal exhaling of the audience.

The film feels both personal and autobiographical. For all its realism and heartfelt pathos for the two, it becomes excruciating to experience. Having watched closely people dealing with these same issues, I found it difficult to relive in closeup on the screen. By the end of the film, the elegant open French apartment became a prison from which I also wanted to escape. Although it is beautifully done and superbly acted, I had to fight not walking out many times.

Dylan Thomas was right in advising,
Do not go gentle into that dark night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Amour (2012) ****

7 - Nobody Else But You (Poupoupidou) 2011

The original title of this French mystery thriller is recognizable to any Marilyn Monroe fan. “Poupoupidou” is the last word of her Some Like It Hot rendition of “I Want to Be Loved by You.”

The film begins with a montage of Marilyn (we are to assume) doing her famous photographs with scarves near the time of her death. A woman in voice-over suggests she is going back before the womb to a previous life.

Cut to a blue-eyed scruffy mystery writer (Jean-Paul Rouve) driving in the snow in western France. He stops to listen to music beside a sign which says “Welcome to Mouthe, Candice Lecoeur’s Hometown” and a Marilyn look-alike smiling hello. David Rousseau, the writer, has come to learn of his inheritance from a distant aunt. She leaves her stuffed dog Toby which he discards. As Rousseau leaves town, he sees the blonde Candice’s body being collected by the local police. One of the patrolman is seen weeping.

Rousseau takes a room in Mouthe’s Snowflake Hotel, Room 5. We learn he is a book writer of novels like James McElroy and that Candice, who starred in cheese commercials for Belle de Jura cheese was a local celebrity.  The official story is that Candice took an overdose of sleeping pills and died in the snow in No Man’s Land at the Franco-Swiss border, so no investigate will be done.

Needing a novel plotline and intrigued by her death, Rousseau goes to the scene of her death. There he meets Bruno Leloup (Guillaume Gouix), the patrolman who was crying. Rousseau tells him he has acute hearing and shows it by hearing a rabbit struggling in a trap.

Told to leave off with his investigation, Rousseau instead goes to the local morgue and tricks his way into seeing the Candice’s body. Inspired by his No. 5 room key, he looks in No. 5 locker where he finds the girl. In a voice-over she talks about how if she’d met someone like him she might be there lying on a metal slab.

Seeing a bruise by her eye and a needle-mark on her arm, he is discovered and ends up in the Captain’s office where he is once again warned off.

Eventually Rousseau ends up in Candice’s home (a former candy factory) where he breaks in, finds all her diaries except for the most recent. Gradually he begins reading the diaries, befriends Bruno, and learns that Candice was so like Marilyn, much of her life seems to parallel—she too was married to sports figure, in love with a writer, had an affair with a local American raised president, and relied heavily on a psychiatrist who gave her drugs to handle her success. From the shrink we learn that Candice believed in reincarnation and believed she was Marilyn in a previous life.

As with any mystery, the enjoyment of the film rests with the gradual discovery of the key elements to the mystery and the people involved. The relationship between Rousseau (totally obsessed with the cheese girl) and Bruno (who seems as obsessed with Rousseau). We first assume Bruno was in love with Candice but eventually he says he wants to help Rousseau to hone his skills of detective work. The fact that Bruno is gay is only very subtly revealed during the investigation.

Director Gérald Hustache-Mathieu gives us lots of snow shots—the vast whiteness against a sound-track of a modern version of “California Dreamin,” or  white on white scenes with grey forests and occasionally Rousseau’s orange winter coat standing out. Candice refers to Mouthe as her hell where she was trapped.

Watching the film play with Marilyn and Candice’s history keeps our interest. Some things are never feel satisfactorily explained. Although we’re told the significance of the symbol 5 (it is the room where Marilyn and Kennedy met and had sex), the context makes it feel less significant than the filmmaker wants us to see. Or Candice’s voice-overs. adding her into the point of view—in my mind—just kind of muddies the film. For me, in the long run, it doesn’t matter because the mystery and the story are compelling enough as is.

There is a fascination of objects and as with any mystery we have to assign meaning to them all.

Guiox and Rouvie are generally more compelling actors than Sophie Quinton as Martine Langevin, aka Candice Lecoeur who is not given much depth to delve.

Even as we know that historical life of Marilyn, the film offers a different scenario to its basic premise.  The film is worth seeing.

Nobody Else But You (Poupoupidou). ****

on Netflix

6 - Django Unchained (2012)

There is much to like about Django Unchained. Unfortunately, some other things almost sink the film.

Django is based on a character's name from the 1966 Django (a Sergio Corbucci Italian Western) which starred Franco Nero, who makes a cameo in Tarentino's film. The Italian Django character drags a coffin into a town with two feuding groups, the KKK and a gang of Mexican Bandits. Quotes the poster about the film say, "Django is all about excess.... a thoroughly ramped up over-the-top epic" (LA Weekly). 

Well, Tarentino knows about excess quite well.

From the first moment we hear the opening music of Django Unchained, we know we are in that world of the spaghetti western from the 1960s. A title tells us we are in Texas two years before the start of the Civil War. Immediately certain expectations arise: the often-tongue-in-cheek mythic story of a heroic loner against the multitude, ending in a happy ending with good triumphing over evil. Those aspects of our expectations are fulfilled with great fun.

The film at times has the absurdity of Blazing Saddles. Take, for example, the Ku Klux Klan scene where the men can't see out of the eye holes of the masks that one of the wives made for them. One spits tobacco out of one hole while trying to see out of another. Their bickering of the group mimics scenes from Mel Brooks.

Quentin Tarentino, humor is often more pointed and nasty. He has an obsession with backlit blood mists from exploding "bullets." A single shot becomes emblematic. A bad guy rides through a field of cotton trying to escape his fate. He is shot and we see a stalks of pure white cotton suddenly spattered with bright red blood.

Tarentino carries on the tradition of 1970s Sam Peckinpah who liked to shock his audiences with violent bloodbaths. With Django Unchained, I realized that I haven't seen so many blood effects since Inglorious Bastards.

Three-fourths of the way through the film, after following and rooting for the plan to rescue Django's wife, important characters are killed. Since it is a Tarentino film I was not surprised, because he has a penchant for killing his most interesting characters in extravagantly bloody ways. 

Any character in a movie can be killed off by his creator as long as it doesn't break the contract author has with his reader. Hitchcock's killing off of Marian in the first twenty minutes of Psycho makes sense because she is not the real focus of the film, he has just led us to believe she is.

In a Tarentino film, we need to remind ourselves that any character is expendable. But I'm reminded of a lesson learned by a class of Mass Media students who watched Night of the Living Dead and Bonnie and Clyde. When Ben dies in NOLD, the entire class was incensed by the director's breaking the agreement they felt he had established with Ben's struggles. He is the only character who percerves throughout the whole film, and as dawn breaks he comes upstairs, the sole survivor from an attack of zombies. When he cautiously moves toward a window, a sharpshooter sees someone moving in the house, he quickly picks him off, and with no sense of feeling we watch Ben's body unceremoniously dragged to a bonfire and burned up. That lack of sensitivity toward Ben's death suggests a callous indifference of the director toward his characters and the attitude of many in the racial tensions of the 1960s. The students had just seen Bonnie and Clyde die in a hail-storm of bullets, but they accepted their deaths because Buck had died earlier and the director shows sympathy toward his characters.

The problem that I have with Tarentino is not his huge body count, but rather the constant blending of humor and death as if killing someone is a great joke. An example would be when Django shoots Candie's sister. When he shoots her, she flies (obviously pulled by a wire) through an archway in a comic book sweep that elicits a big laugh from the audience. Another character is shot in the arm, then the testicles... a torture that had been threatened Django but one he can now inflict on his nemesis. The audience howls with laughter. And that insensitivity toward death is my problem. Film teaches by example and the example that Tarentino teaches is that modern violent death is the fodder of a running gag and supposed to be funny. Even in the midst of The Odyssey's huge 108-man body count, Odysseus tells his maid not to joyously revel at the death of others.

In our present-day world of guns being used to randomly pick off twenty children and teachers, has not the sensibility toward that random violence become important? I find I cannot laugh at one of the bodies becoming a "shooting bag" by having the poor shots constantly hit it over and over.

In the end, as the evil has been violently expunged, Django reunites with his wife and his horse perform prancing tricks. A tribute perhaps to black horseman, Tom Bass?

Note this description of Tom Bass performing with his horse:

He and his rider pirouetted. They pranced. They racked. They pivoted and leaped.

The crowd hushed as they watched an equine performance the like of which none of them had ever seen. Tom rode Columbus as though the two of them had issued together from the same mother’s womb. They were half horse, half man, a perfect blameless centaur who had passed into perfection and left behind this world of tears.

Then Tom put to rest the legends. Columbus cantered backwards around the show ring.

The performance was so faultless even the other contestants began to applaud.

Finally Columbus stood on his rear legs, turned a full circle and then with the grace of a ballerina, came down to kneel on one leg, bowing his head in tribute to the astonished judges. (horseman)

Watching the elegant ending to the film, I found that out of all Tarento's films, I think this comes to the closest that I can praise.

Django Unchained (2012) ****