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. *****