My February movie-watching (NOT a 10-best list) Mar 01 '06 (Updated Jun 14 '08)    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Movies Under the Tuscan Sun From $9 Casablanca From $3 The Bottom Line Hotel Rwanda, The Bravados, Man in the Moon were the best of this lot. Still at it—though I watched no movies during half of the shortest month (having had no time while in Panamà and then suffering food poisoning in Miami). As usual, jottings of more than a paragraph about a movie are set off by dashes, and movies are listed chronologically by their year of release. (A before the entry indicates it is a movie I had seen before.) Joan of Paris (1941, directed by Richard Stevenson, 3.3 stars) has a fairly tedious set-up, but a more interesting final half hour with a darkly comic chase, a showdown in a steam room, and, best of all, Michèlle Morgan in high-heels leading Nazi troops through the sewers. Her best roles were already behind her. The best ones for Paul Henried (Casablanca, Now Voyager) and Alan Ladd (The Glass Key, This Gun for Hire) were just a year in the future, and the celebration and overestimation of the French Resistance already underway (with one of those stirring renditions of "Le Marseilles"). The Nazis are not demonized nor represented as idiots. The fastidious ununiformed Gestapo chief (Laird Cregar, The Lodger, This Gun for Hire) is sinister in his urbanity (like Ernst J�nger in occupied Paris? in a far larger size...). He was only 28!? In Which We Serve (1942, codirected by Noël Coward and David Lean, 4.2 stars) is very hard to get into, but has some masterful work, including Ronald Neame's cinematography, David Lean's montages and action sequences, and Coward is superb as Captain D, particularly in his penultimate scene. "In Which We Serve" was propaganda for the classes working together in the Royal Navy. Sahara (1943, directed by Zoltán Korda, 3.6 stars) is an Anglo-American piece of propaganda for unity in fighting the Nazis on the ground, including, notably, a heroic African soldier played by Rex Ingram. Rudolf Maté's cinematography is outstanding and the rest of the cast, headed by Humphrey Bogart, is good (if a little too motley in Hollywood come-together fashion). * The Bravados (1958, directed by Henry King, 4.4 stars) has Gregory Peck in one of those implacable, obsessed roles like those James Stewart played in Anthony Mann westerns during the 1950s (and John Wayne's role in John Ford's "The Searchers"). It also has Joan Collins as a sweet Latina widow who invites Peck to church (in a d�collet� red dress with black mantilla). The movie provides action and scenery, but what really matters is conveyed in the eyes of Gregory Peck. King and Peck inaugurated the psychological western earlier in "The Gunfighter." (They also collaborated on "Twelve o'clock High.") * The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965, directed by Martin Ritt [Hud], from the novel by John Le Carr�, 4.1 stars) was not as good as I remember. Indeed, it was hard to get into until Alec Leamas (Richard Burton), posing as a defector, returns to Germany and feeds ambitious Stasi agent Fiedler (Oskar Werner) material that interprets as showing that his superior, Mundt (Peter Van Eyck, who starred in Fritz Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse), is a traitor. The plot could sound convoluted, but in retrospect is very clear to Leamas. Burton has a big speech on the banality of spies and plentiful occasions for displaying self-loathing (something of which he was a grand master, warming up for playing George in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" a year later). The movie is well served by the black-and-white cinematography of Oswald Morris (The Hill, Fiddler on the Roof) and a spare, bluesy musical score by Sol Kaplan (Niagara, The Victors). --- * Arabesque, Stanley Donen's (1966) followup of "Charade" was intended for Cary Grant (who stopped making movies in 1964) and seems to me to draw heavily on "North by Northwest." It is another (far inferior to NxNW) chase picture with a non-spy (Gregory Peck), a lovely lady (Sophia Loren) whose loyalties are uncertain, and uncertainty about how many sides there are to be on as well as whose side the seemingly helpful lady is on. It has an exquisite villain Alan Badel, and superb cinematography by Christopher Challis, but the characters and plot make no sense. Gregory Peck's comic timing was not as sharp as Grant's. Loren's comic timing was quite adequate, but her part and the plot (the uncopied Hittite inscription in particular) are impossible. Loren looked great and there are some excellent set pieces, including a wrecking ball, a chase through zoo and aquarium, and the final dash on horseback and foot while being menaced by helicopter. And there are lots of arty reflection shots, but I lost interest in trying to understand what was going on before the stylish racetrack scene (midway). If I thought about the plot, I could reel off plot holes, but why should I take the plot seriously when the film-makers did not? 2.3 stars --- * Adapted from Chester Himes's novel and directed by Ossie Davis, Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970, 3.7 stars) is a surprisingly genial early blaxploitation movie about a very handsome preacher/swindler (Calvin Lockhart) and the choleric black policemen, Gravedigger (Godfrey Cambridge) and Coffin Ed (Raymond St. Jacques) who try to protect the credulous and smite the gangsters. They tell the connected reverend: "When you steal from white folks, that’s your business when you steal from black folks, that’s our business."(The two returned in an adaptation of Himes's The Heat's On two years later. In 1991 A Rage in Harlem was filmed with different players.) Cambridge has the best lines and the best weary "I've seen it all before" looks at the follies of the NYPD, the black community, and his hot-headed partner. Andrzej Wajda's first movie made outside Poland, Danton (1983, 3.6 stars) is remarkably lacking in point of view or striking visual compositions. Gérard Dépardieu, in the title role returning in 1794 to try to quell the reign of terror, and Wojciech Pszoniak, as Robespierre, go through their motions of rallying The People, and the Terror is ongoing at the end I don't know why Wajda (fresh from the struggles of Solidarity that underlie his "Man of Iron") wanted to make a movie about the French Revolution's Stalin triumphing over its Trotsky (with Saint Just, chillingly played by Boguslaw Linda, as its Beria). Much of the dialogue is very stilted (plus the dubbing into French of many Polish actors' line) and the street scenes are low-budget studio shots. Though very long (138 minutes), those unfamiliar with the history of "la Revolution" in power will find the context confusing and certainly not laid out in the movie. Footloose (1984, directed by Herbert Ross, 2.5 stars) It was entertaining to see the young(er) Kevin Bacon (26), Sarah Jessica Parker (19), and the late Chris Penn (19) as high-school students in a town where rock music and dancing have been banned (at the behest of a minister played by John Lithgow). Gotta dance! Gotta dance with the preacher's daughter (of course). Haveta fight, too. And in a motel with the reading lights inoperative, it passed the time. --- The Man in the Moon (1991, directed by Robert Mulligan, 4.3 stars) is a quiet masterpiece. In her screen debut, Reese Witherspoon made a big impact as Dani, a 14-year-old in rural Louisiana suffering her first love and first heartbreak. The object of her infatuation is the 17-year-old Court Foster (Jason London), whose family moves back into the long vacant Foster place next door that includes the swimming hole Dani had come to consider her own preserve. Dani's mostly sympathetic parents were played by Sam Waterston and Tess Harper, Dani's older sister Marie by Emily Warfield. Plus Gail Strickland plays the widowed mother of Court and his two younger brothers. I can't find anything to fault in any of the performances, and Mulligan seems to have a special gift for portraying young love (Summer of '42) and girls growing up (Mockingbird, Clara's Heart, Inside Daisy Clover). The movie may seem slow (bucolic?) and uneventful to some: a tear-jerker "chick flick," I guess. Some things do happen, but the focus is on characters and relationships raveling and unraveling. --- Quentin Tarrantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992, 3.8 stars) is pretty boring, particularly its first hour. It is also disjointed, blood-soaked, more than a little sadistic, extremely talky (I mean Mamet-grade artificial and nasty, mostly in long shots in an empty warehouse), though occasionally funny in grim and macabre ways. I think that Stanley Kubrick (whom I also think critically overrated) did the heist gone wrong much better in "The Killing" (before Kubrick had the control to bury substance in dark style). "The Taking of Pelham 123" is also superior in a similarly gritty way (without the pup culture chatter and in linear fashion). Still, it has compelling performances all around, including the resurrection of Lawrence Tierney (and an outstanding performance by the late Chris Penn, and more). --- Nearly everything (except the irritation of the phone ringing) in Oleanna struck me as false: the stilted Mametspeak for starters, and the requirement for Mamet "drama" that someone (Carol, played by Debra Eisenstadt) who goes to the professor (William H. Macy) in whose course she is failing because she does not understand his big words within a few weeks is crafting speech as polysyllabic as his. Or that the professor would continue to have closed-door tete-a-tetes after the first act's meeting becomes the basis for official complaints (or so prolong that first one). Or the palatial office for an untenured faculty member, Etc. Characters, situation, setting, all were false. The movie is the epitome of "stagey" in the sense of artificiality of situation, characters, and dialogue as well as in being confined almost entirely to one set and with two performers.. Eisenstadt and Macy were very good at being annoying, pretentious, and in failing to connect (all of which are what the script mandated). The 1994 movie was directed by David Mamet from his play, 2 stars. --- A 1995 BBC recording of Jan�cek's widely beloved ballet/opera, The Cunning Little Vixen, as staged by Nicholas Hynter (Madness of King George) with Charles Mackerras conducting the Orchestre de Paris shows the even beyond opera being an acquired taste, Jan�cek operas are. Unlike "Jen�fa" or "Makropulous Case," there is no drama in "The Cunning Little Vixen." There is not much comedy beyond the outlandish costumes Bob Crowley designed. Lopping off opening credits and final bows, the music takes only 89 minutes. There are no real arias, and not much dialog (lame in translation and, I suspect, lame in the original Czech, too). The music for whimsical animal dances is serviceable (as are the singers and dancers), but not especially inspired. The camera is often too close to the dancers to show dancing, alas. (And no DVD extras. 2.6 stars) --- Although it's a remake of a 1942 Italian movie (scripted by Cesare Zavattini before his illustrious collaborative partnership with Vittorio de Sica began), there is something very 1940s Hollywood about A Walk in the Clouds (1995), directed by Alfonso Arau with the same heavily filtered visuals and stereotypical characters that brought him success three years earlier in "Like Water for Chocolate." As in many 1940s movies, pretending to be married leads inevitably to love and real marriage. Returned veteran Paul Sutton (an awkward, well-meaning Keanu Reeves) pretends to be married to the beautiful/pregnant/abandoned Victoria (Aitana Sánchez-Giján, Sin Dejar Huella) for the sake of her stereotypical vinter family that includes grandfather Anthony Quinn, father Giancarlo Giannini, and brother Freddy Rodriguez. What's not to love about the beautiful, tremulous Victoria? The main problem is that Paul married before going off to war (self-absorbed Debra Messing with an attractive absent husband already in 1995!). The plot is preposterous, the characters stereotyped, and (Alfonso Cuarón's cinematographer) Emmanuel Lubezki's photography is so grandiloquently, cloyingly artificial that the northern California locales might as well have been painted sets. "Hak gam" means "Black Gold," an idiom for corruption, particularly in contracting. The movie was released in English as Island of Greed (1997, directed by Johnny Mak, 2.6 stars) Based on the story of a gangster elected to office (with official immunity) in Taiwan during the Kuomintang era, this movie has some impressive action sequences. Tony (Ka-Fei) Leung ("the other Tony Leung") plays a very suave gangster. Andy Lau's policeman (a captain on the front lines) matches him in tailoring and is at least as cool as Steve McQueen ever was. Leung gets the kinky sex(ual simulation) scenes, and more of a character to play, however malevolent it is (and it is very malevolent!). Lau has the tentative, proper (if offbeat) courtship. Both women are forceful out of bed. The narrative is difficult to follow (especially at the start) and the mix of languages (mostly Cantonese with Beijinghua [Mandarin] and Hoklo [Taiwanese] mixed in) is perplexing. There is some very visceral action, especially a plantation escape, a marketplace shoot-out, and a riot of taxi drivers. As in the US, religion is in the mix of government corruption in this Hong Kongized Taiwan. You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (2004, directed by Deb Ellis & Denis Mueller, 4 stars) combines archival footage with talking heads well and shows something of Howard Zinn's thought, amiability, and commitment to a more just and open society, but I thought would have been better if it had included some contrary perspectives, not just adulating ones (though I have been an admirer of Zinn's work since the late-1960s). He may very well be a saint, and we hear enough from Rupert Murdoch's pundits, but surely there are some differences of opinion among those working on the topics of dissent in American history. some historians of social movements who think there are some things he has not gotten right. With more than a million sales Zinn's People's History of the United States has reached a large audience, but if I were making a film about him, I'd ask him to assess how well he thinks he has reached his target audience, and what he thinks of the postwar Vietnamese government's democratic openness to dissent. As he says, "To be neutral and to be passive is to collaborate with whatever is going on." But there is no consideration of what kinds of actions make things worse or what dissidents do when they take power. Eros (2004) combines a mildly entertaining black-and-white short by Steven Soderberg involving Robert Downey, Jr., as a troubled 1950s New York advertising executive with a recurrent dream about a woman in a bathtub and Alan Arkin as a psychoanalyst more interested in whoever is across the street than in his patient, a vapid nudity-heavy sketch by Michelangelo Antonioni of an estranged couple (Regina Nemni and Christopher Buchholz) on the Italian Riviera, and, in the most substantial part, "The Hand," Wong Kar-Wai shows an aim-inhibited dressmaker (Chen Chang, the Mongol leader "Dark Cloud: from Crouching Tiger) devoted to a high-priced prostitute (Gong Li) who loses her grip on clients, but keeps the loyalty of her dressmaker. (Though not as wet as In the Mood for Love, "The Hand" has more than a little of that film's sexual repression.) All three movies have considerably more style than substance. "The Hand" has the only eroticism in the movie, and also a simulation of a sexual act (this is not its erotic moment, but a dominance-and-submission humiliation of the sexually inexperienced man. The DVD also includes a wordless 17-minute record of Antonioni looking at and touching the work of the more famous Michelangelo in San Pietro di Vicolo particularly the statue of Moses. With music by Pergolesi and Palestrina, I like this bonus feature considerably more than Antonioni's chapter in the tripartite film. 4 stars for Wong's part, 3 for Soderbergh's, and less than 2 for Antonioni's (and 3.5 for the trip to Vicolo). --- Hotel Rwanda (2004, co-written and directed by Terry George, 4.5 stars). I guess the Hollywood ending is true, as the Hutu butchery of Tutsi, and the bravery and resourcefulness of Hutu hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina (played by Don Cheadle) who sheltered and managed to save more than twelve hundred Tutsi is. Obviously, the African "Schindler's List" and Cheadle is phenomenal playing a phenomenal man. (His performance and the magnitude of the violence do not need to be amped up with music in the Max Steiner tradition in my opinion.) The film is extremely good at showing ordinary folk leaping into barbarism. Initially, Rusesabagina resists trying to protect anyone other than family members and employees, while his neighbors kill each other. He is unable to sustain amoral familialism and takes on a mass of dependents while (heroically) aspiring not to be a hero. Rusesabagina's Tutsi wife is also extraordinarily realized on screen by Sophie Okonedo. Each entirely loses it once, and even in a film with so many corpses, the most harrowing scene may be one in which he makes her promise to leap off the hotel roof with their children if the Hutu militia/mob breaks into the hotel. Whew! --- The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005, directed by Bill Paxton, 4 stars) is a sort of reverse "Chariots of Fire," with the British champions a threat to the Americans. It manages to make a US Open (the 1913 one) interesting, in part by showing the British champion Harry Vardon (Stephen Dillane) as being as unelite as the young American, Francis Ouimet (Shia Shaide LaBeouf, "Even Stevens", "Holes:), who will force the two into a playoff round that any viewer of other underdog sport movies knows the caddy-turned champion will win (with a pint-sized but very wise truant (with a brash know-it-all attitude) as his caddy, played for all its worth plus some by Josh Flitter). There is a perfunctory romance ((Peyton List is the girl) and acute family tension between the hard-driving youth and his father (Elias Koteas, "Thin Red Line") who tries to keep him in his (subordinate) place to keep his heart from being broken. (The movie is very different from Paxton's first film, "Frailty," except in examining father-son bonds.) BTW, in reality Oiumet won the playoff round by 5 strokes, not one putt. The master list of all the movies I watched in 2005 is at http://www.epinions.com/content_4624588932 and notes on my January 2006 movie-watching is at http://www.epinions.com/content_4656111748..

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