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Good One (2024)
The kids are alright
A daughter, about to enter college, goes on a three-day hike in the woods with her father and her father's longtime friend. It sounds like a classic coming-of-age plot: older men share their wisdom, teaching woman on the cusp of adulthood valuable life lessons. Except, as it turns out here, it's the daughter who does the wisdom-sharing, though whether either the father or his friend actually listens is another question-perhaps one answered by the final shot.
Lily Collias, who plays the daughter, has a face always in motion and seeming to reflect even the most fleeting emotions. Each of the unhappy men is unhappy in his own way, and if there are any lessons to be learned from them, it's don't pay attention to anything I say and don't do anything I'd do.
The music is very well done and the photography of Upstate New York lush.
Coup de tête (1979)
Revenge served cold
François Perrin is a talented footballer who also has a talent for not going along to get along. In the small fictional town of Trincamp, the bourgeois factory owner and the petit-bourgeois shop owners are all obsessed with the local football club's success. Irresistible force meets immovable object and conflict ensues: that's basically the plot of Coup de tête, which can mean 'header' in football or a 'headbutt' in a fight. Perrin falls out (literally) with the club's loutish star player and is framed for a rape he did not commit. After being imprisoned on the basis of false testimony, Perrin is released to save the day in a big match, which qualifies the team for the finals and sets up his getting even with the townspeople.
The examination of the group of powerful men (as they all are here) who run the town and the football club is perceptive and unusual to see in a film. The sexual politics was perhaps even in its day a bit more problematic. The assault for which Perrin is imprisoned is not shown on screen, but we are set up to believe him capable of it by a slapstick assault on his girlfriend on a scaffold. Later Perrin breaks in to the assault victim's bedroom and pretends to rape her since he's already been convicted of the crime. When he relents she is overcome by his charm and a sense of the injustice done to him to join forces with him.
Perrin has his revenge in the end, but we're also left wondering whether everyone who called him a salaud didn't also have a point.
A Storm Foretold (2023)
Rage against the machine
Don't depend on Roger Stone for your livelihood is one life lesson director Christopher Guldbransen almost learned too late. Stone withdrew his cooperation for Guldbransen's documentary midway through the project, no doubt contributing to the director's cardiac arrest, which was nearly fatal. Life lesson two: always work out next to a heart surgeon.
Guldbransen started following and filming the Nixon-fetishist and political dirty trickster Stone in 2018 and planned to continue through the 2020 elections. The aim seems to have been to see the U. S. presidential election through the eyes of someone close to Donald Trump. But what does 'close' even mean to such transactional creatures as Stone and Trump? When Stone finds that Trump has stiffed him by not inviting him to speak at the Jan. 6 rally on the Mall in Washington, D. C., he retreats to his hotel room to watch the day's events on TV. On the phone Stone admits Biden won the election, saying of Trump's campaign, 'That's why they lost: they don't know what they're doing.' Then when the insurrectionists begin their assault on the Capitol, Stone and his little entourage leave D. C. as quickly as possible for Florida, expecting all the while to be charged and arrested. As it turns out, even here Stone seems to have misjudged his centrality to the story, since he was not one of the more than 1,000 people eventually charged.
In the end, this is not the portrait of a political genius pulling strings behind the curtain, but of a sad little man, always in the middle of things in his own mind, tossing others and being tossed himself from one transactional relationship to another. Most of all, as the many verbal, facial, and manual tics attest, it is a life driven by the qualities Stone enumerates in a frothing diatribe: hate, rage, and viciousness.
My Forbidden Past (1951)
Family matters
Barbara Beureveil's grandmother was the notorious Carrie Crandall. Why was Carrie Crandall notorious? That seems to be the forbidden past, since we're never told, which seems typical of this half-baked Southern Gothic soufflé. None of the actors are committed to their characters, although Melvyn Douglas is certainly having fun as louche Cousin Paul. Even the art department can't be bothered to summon up any magic to re-create New Orleans, so the LA Arboretum stands in for Louisiana swamps and bayous and the interiors are shot in off-the-shelf 19th-century sets. But even had the actors sold their parts to the hilt and all the interiors been shot in the French Quarter, the script is so weak that the film would at best have risen to the level of high camp. Given the talented actors involved, you'd hope that this silly movie would at least be fun to watch, but sadly it ain't necessarily so. Ava Gardner as Barbara Beaurevel and Robert Mitchum as Mark Lucas are an attractive leading couple of doomed lovers, but there's about as much chemistry between them as there is in Dr Lucas's test tubes. A year after directing this film, Robert Stevenson moved to television and then to Disney live-action films.
This film is a perfect example of the studio system at work cranking out films at the right cost in the hope that someone else might want to see them, even though nobody involved with making them would.
La chimera (2023)
Following the thread
Arthur, the disheveled former archaeologist turned Etruscan tomb-finder, is a man on a quest. When we first meet him, he is dreaming on a train heading home after being released from prison. Once home, he soon falls in with his old gang of tombaroli (grave-robbers) and they're on the search for treasure in the earth. For the rest of the gang, treasure means loot from Etruscan tombs; Arthur seems to be searching for something else. We get clues to Arthur's search in recurring images of a young woman and her red thread first seen in the opening shots of the film. The woman, we soon learn, is Beniamina, the daughter of Flora and Arthur's beloved. Flora lives in a crumbling palazzo with Italia, her singing student, and a group of women who call Flora mother. Italia is being exploited as a servant by Flora, who believes she is tone-deaf, but Italia in turn is raising two children in the house unbeknownst to Flora. The film juxtaposes these two kinds of groups: the rival groups of tombaroli led by men and the communal groups led by women (Italia forms the second group in a disused railway station), which echoes the remark early in the film that Italy would be much less macho today if the Etruscans had beaten the Romans rather than the other way around.
The film is full of mythic and historical resonances. Arthur is a latter-day Orpheus searching for his Eurydice (the first musical cue is from Monteverdi's Orfeo), but without Orpheus's gift of music. The red thread recalls Ariadne and the labyrinth. Flights of birds (and ominous pigeons) follow Arthur. Italia's first language is Portuguese and her children are of many ethnicities. And so on. In the hands of a lesser director or screenwriter this hybrid creature of different parts (you might call it a chimera) could have been a mess, but here everything seems to cohere and to create a mythic world that resembles our own, but is at an angle to it. That everything clicks into place so precisely and beautifully in the final scene is a tribute to just how tightly this loose-seeming film is constructed. Rarely have the loose threads of a plot been gathered with as much skill or in a more satisfying way.
Many of the photographic tricks (different film stocks, different aspect ratios, scenes undercranked) sound gimmicky, but, except for the undercranking, most are there for people who notice and transparent to those who don't. The cast is uniformly excellent.
For all its playfulness and its conceits, this moving, elegiac film tells the story of a great love and is a great love story.
Une partie de plaisir (1975)
Cinéma vérité
This study of a violent, narcissistic, bully and his relationships would be creepy enough on its own, but the nagging feeling that the main characters are all actually playing thinly veiled versions of themselves makes the skin crawl that much more. We can start with the title: 'partie de plaisir' is an idiom for something enjoyable and easily accomplished--a piece of cake--which ranks this with Haneke's 'Funny Games' and 'Happy End' on scale of ironic titles. Paul Gégauff, also credited with the screenplay, one of many he wrote for a who's who of the nouvelle vague, plays Philippe, the protagonist. Danièle Gégauff, his ex-wife when the film was shot, plays Esther, the enigmatic woman on the receiving end of his humiliation and violence. Their daughter plays Élise, their daughter. Much like the films of Maurice Pialat (A nos amours), we're not always sure who's acting and who's just acting out. And perhaps most amazingly, as we watch in horror, most of Paul's circle of friends just laugh it all off and ask for another glass of the '61 Margaux. Like the proverbial car wreck, you can't look and you can't look away.
Le dos au mur (1958)
Stylish film noir
This stylish film noir is filled with characters double-crossing each other and then exacting their revenge for the betrayal. Set in the post-war economic boom, the film explores how the qualities that make a driven entrepreneur successful in business can also lead to his downfall--though the path there is filled with twists and turns enough to keep the audience in suspense.
Jeanne Moreau is excellent as the wife caught between lover and husband. We're never quite sure what the character is thinking: is she really charmed to meet the minister or is it just good business? As often in French films of the period, foreign autos tell us a great deal about the characters: a Buick Special from the States for the husband and a flashy MG convertible from Britain for the lover.
The photography is excellent and the film's pace never flags as the plot zigs and zags its way to the conclusion.
Certain Women (2016)
Group portrait with mountains
This film by Kelly Reichardt combines three short stories by Maile Meloy exploring the lives of four women in early 21st-century Montana. Occasionally the characters tell us what they're feeling or thinking, but for the most part the dialogue matters less than the situations and the actors' characterizations, which means that the film relies on small details for its effect. Some will admire the subtlety while others will deplore the lack of action. For those with the patience, the film offers many rewards--including humor in unexpected spots, like the teachers' questions during their school law class.
As you might expect from the cast, the acting is uniformly excellent. Even in this stellar group Lily Gladstone stands out as a calm, pure presence.
The photography by Christopher Blauvelt shows Montana in subdued winter light usually with distant mountains on the horizon. In the beautiful final shot we see the mountains framed like a work of art on the far wall of a barn.
These characters are not leading lives of quiet desperation, but you get the feeling that their lives didn't quite turn out the way they thought they would either. The incidents portrayed in the movie are important in the lives of the four protagonists, but they don't send the characters off in new directions or radically change their lives. Instead, in the hands of Reichardt and Meloy, they show us who these characters are in a deep and deeply sympathetic way.
Oppenheimer (2023)
It'a a bomb!
Watch a kinescope of Robert Oppenheimer being interviewed by Edward Murrow in the 1960s when Oppenheimer was director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton: he is charming, intelligent, and outgoing and has Murrow, known as a tough journalist, laughing along with him. Now compare that charming man with the tortured protagonist of this bloated tale of suffering genius. When you consider that Oppenheimer's most significant accomplishment was organizing and running the lab at Los Alamos, which required tact, intelligence, and organization, it's clear which of the two is the 'real' Oppenheimer. Perhaps Nolan needs to believe that geniuses are brooding, antisocial misfits, but it ain't necessarily so. In any case, the real star of this picture is the studio publicity department for the hoopla it created around the film's opening.
Chikyû Bôeigun (1957)
Toy explosion
The aliens are here and all they want is the land within a radius of three kilometers. OK, now all they want is the land within a 120-kilometer radius. OK, now all they want is all of eastern Japan and all the women. Now it's time to fight! Although the plot doesn't quite hang together, this is no low-budget film. Takashi Shimura, a member of Kurosawa's stock company and who brilliantly played the bureaucrat who thinks he's about to die in Ikiru, is the elder scientist Dr Adachi. The model work in the natural disasters at the beginning of the film is first-rate and the aliens are very stylish: there was a very high cape budget and the helmets have small antennae that seem to imitate the decorations on samurai helmets. The interior of the aliens' lair is like an explosion of 1950s Japanese toys. You may quickly forget the Very Important Lessons the film is trying to teach, but the cool visitors make an impression.
Pest in Florenz (1919)
Boys and girls just want to have fun
'Seven chapters from the Italian Renaissance as told by Fritz Lang' an opening title card tells us, thus getting one chapter up on the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt's book, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy from 1860. In the film, the youth of Florence are chafing under the yoke of Church and State power since they just want to have fun. Along comes the seductive courtesan Julia, who halts the Corpus Christi procession and whose entertainments are soon giving the young people what they've been looking for. Church and State strike back, as does the hermit Medardus, whom Julia converts to her ways. The plague begins making the rounds and Medardus, seeing the error of his ways, brings the Black Death into the city, ending his life, Julia's life, and the film. Lang's philosophy in constructing the plot seems to have been, 'If in doubt, keep it in,' so there's a bit of everything in the plot: Susannah and the elders, Masque of the Red Death, etc., and the film might have been more effective had Lang not ranged quite so widely afield. The sets and settings are especially well done and the photography very good. The acting may seem quite mannered to us, but Cesare and the Cardinal have formidable faces and Medardus, the tortured hermit, is sympathetic.
Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words (2020)
His grandfather's son
This is a remarkable film to watch in 2023. After revelations about how a circle of rich friends enabled Justice Thomas's lifestyle, this film now seems part of a multi-media effort by many of those same people to craft Thomas's public persona. The two voices we hear most in the film are Thomas and his second wife, Virginia, and the effect is to present Thomas unplugged: the man in his own words, without any artifice. But that's not really possible with someone who's written an autobiographical memoir, i.e. Someone who has polished and arranged his memories into the story he would like to tell. This Clarence Thomas is a man who rose from grinding poverty to the highest court in the US collecting injuries and slights at every turn: his advancement in the world is due to his intelligence and grit, as well as overcoming a series of injustices. The Rosebud of this story is not a sled but Thomas's maternal grandfather, Myers Anderson (Thomas's memoir is called My Grandfather's Son). Watching Thomas recount events from his childhood and young adulthood one can only marvel at the pain his inflexible grandfather is still able to cause. Still there is much in this carefully polished narrative that does not make sense: Thomas says he voted for Ronald Regan, 'Because of the promises of the Democratic Party to legislate the problems of Blacks out of existence.' That certainly fits the film's narrative--that measures intended to help Black people harm them instead--but are we really meant to think that Thomas was so repulsed by the idea that Jimmy Carter supported civil rights that he voted for a man who started his campaign with a speech on states' rights at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi?
Such remarks create suspicion that the film's narrative and reality don't quite agree; a sequence at the film's end confirms it. In remarks that have since become notorious Thomas says, 'I come from regular stock,' to explain his preference for trips in his recreational vehicle around the States rather than trips to Europe. Now we know that Thomas's RV is not like any of the ones shown in the film: it is a Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon that cost $267,230 and was paid for by a friend, since Thomas was so heavily indebted when he acquired it. We're meant to see the regular guy who just likes to hang out in his RV in Walmart parking lots, but now we know that that guy buys an RV that costs more than his annual salary ($230,000) thanks to a friend's generosity. All you really have to do is imagine how the friend came to know that Thomas was in a bind. Did the Justice let it slip when he and the billionaire were in a Walmart parking lot? In any case, just like a regular guy, he helped out.
Thomas and his wife are cultivated by billionaires who pay for a lifestyle the couple cannot afford on the salary of a supreme court justice. You have to wonder what Myers Anderson would have to say about that.
Siccità (2022)
It's all wet
The makers of this film seem to have started off with a check-list: Drought caused by climate change? Check. Diseases caused by climate change? Check. Social stress caused by climate change? Check, etc. Then, they created characters and situations to exemplify each item on the list. Unfortunately, 'make a good film' wasn't on the list. The actors are all acting their hearts out, but it's difficult to believe in, much less care about, the characters they're playing. The actors, sets, and photography seem to glow with a preternatural sheen showing that that not even a years-long drought can begin to affect bella figura.
The Problem with Apu (2017)
What's the problem?
The Problem with Apu introduces viewers to a situation that will likely be foreign to many of them: if you look like you or your family came from South Asia and live in the States, at some point in your life you'll probably be compared to the Simpson's character Apu. Comedian Hari Kondabolu is a big fan of the Simpsons, but not a big fan of being compared to Apu, so he sets out to find Abu's origins, to talk with others about being bullied with Apu, and to interview Hank Azaria, who voices Apu. The documentary is an expansion of a bit from Kondabolu's stand-up routine and although it has its moments, it doesn't really grapple with the interesting questions it raises. The attempt to talk with Azaria, for example, provides much of the structure and tension of the film--will he or won't he?--but what would such an interview really tell us? The real problem with Apu is that he's the only South-Asian character many non-South Asian people may know, so he's the go-to reference for interactions with South-Asian acquaintances that range from teasing to bullying, On the other hand, if you're of South-Asian heritage, as the film points out, Apu stands for the inability of people to see who you are. To send Apu down the memory hole wouldn't solve any of these problems because Apu is the symbol of a bigger problem, not the problem itself.
The Informer (1935)
An innocent abroad
This story of a befuddled informer is set in Dublin during the Irish War of Independence in the early 1920s. Gypo, played by Victor McLaglen, rats out his friend to the British authorities for £20 so that he and his girlfriend can emigrate to the States. Because the ratted-out friend was a member of the the IRA, the organisation is soon on the case trying to find out and eliminate the informer in their midst. Gypo quickly forgets why he wanted the money in the first place and splashes out on a series of extravagant sprees that soon draw attention to himself and his newfound wealth. As played by McLaglen, Gypo is an innocent who wants to please his companions of the moment, be they his girlfriend, the IRA men, or the crowds along for the ride--a point the final scene's Christ imagery drives home with little subtlety.
The photography is often beautiful, and the film's fog budget must have been a large one. The acting styles of most of the characters owe much to the theatre or silent films; McLaglen is by far the most naturalistic actor. The accents are a muddle. The film also seems to draw on Fritz Lang's M from 1931: the blind man who identifies the culprit and the kangaroo court of outlaws. Like Peter Lorre's character, McLaglen's can't help himself.
It's a compelling portrait of a man too innocent or foolish to understand the world he's trying to make his way through.
Night People (1954)
Cold-War Caper
This Cold-War caper can't compare with the masterpieces of the genre such as The Third Man or The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, but it still has its charms. Broderick Crawford plays a very American bull in a Berlin china shop as the father trying to ensure the return of his kidnapped son. The hard-charging and politically connected businessman has come to set everyone else straight and soon gets his comeuppance at the hands of Gregory Peck, who's devising a plan to free the captured soldier. Anita Björk plays the shady go-between who makes the deal possible.
The film is shot in Cinemascope and in color and most of the scenes are studio interiors, with few outdoor establishing shots. This combined with the relatively flat lighting mirrors the lack of shading in the characters, most of whom have very little depth or subtlety. Plus, the anamorphic Bausch and Lomb lenses tend to distort objects at the right or left edges of the frame, where the director often likes to place actors.
This is a film that tells rather than shows, but the telling is well done and the actors are in good form, so what's not to like?
Le carrosse d'or (1952)
Punch and Judy go to Peru
This tale of an Italian commedia dell'arte troupe just landed in eighteenth-century Peru is an enjoyable time spent with Renoir and his company of players. It is similar in many ways to Renoir's masterpiece, The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu) from 1939: the members of a large cast fall in and out of love with one another, with the inevitable jealousies, disappointments, and ecstasies. Renoir's sensibility also remains steadfastly eighteenth-century, as expressed in the quotation of a vaudeville song from the Marriage of Figaro in the titles before The Rules of the Game: 'Sensitive hearts, faithful hearts, who blame fickle Cupid, stop your cruel complaints. Is it a crime to change lovers? If Cupid has wings, is it not to flit about?'
Renoir's feel for music is as clear in the Golden Coach as it was in Rules. Excerpts from Vivaldi form the soundtrack, and as familiar as they may sound to us in the twenty-first century, it was surely a more daring choice in 1952, when these pieces were only entering the mainstream. And how many films have a sight-gag with a serpent (the instrument, not the snake)?
Unfortunately, comparing the two films also shows that in revisiting these themes Renoir is not as inspired the second time around. Perhaps the difference is Renoir anxiously watching his world on the precipice in 1939 and gratefully seeing that something survived in 1952. The film is beautifully shot in Technicolor by Claude Renoir (Jean's nephew, who also shot Barbarella and The Spy Who Loved Me!) and the actors are uniformly good, especially Anna Magnani. If the Golden Coach isn't a masterpiece, it's still 109 minutes of pleasure for the eye, the ear, and the spirit from a master of his craft.
The Starling Girl (2023)
The Starling girl grows up
This coming-of-age drama follows Jem Starling as she becomes an adult--or at least starts to become an adult. It explores the conflict between Jem's growing awareness of her body and its needs and the beliefs of the fundamentalist church that plays a large part in her life and her family's life. Her family is also a source of conflict: before his conversion, her father had been a musician with a steady gig at a bar in Memphis, and the temptations of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll return after the suicide of one of his former band members. What music is for her father, dance is for Jem and she contrives to lead the church's dance troupe by charming Owen, the church's youth pastor who has just returned from Puerto Rico. Eventually, Owen and Jem begin an affair that is transgressive in almost every possible way: Owen is married, he is the brother of Ben, who is officially courting Jem, and both Owen and Ben are the sons of the church's pastor. The ending is pleasantly ambiguous: we see that Jem follows her powerful need to know about the world and what her place in it ought to be, but not exactly where that takes her.
The cast is very good and Eliza Scanlen, who is in almost every scene, makes a good Jem. Wrenn Schmidt is also excellent as Heidi, Jem's mother who is trying to hold a large family together while her husband and her eldest daughter lose their minds. For many viewers, a fundamentalist church in Kentucky might seem an 'exotic' milieu, but the film doesn't treat its characters like the subjects of an ethnographic expedition. The first half of the film sets the scene at a leisurely pace, but tensions build in the second half as we wonder when the lovers will be discovered and what the consequences will be.
Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later (2007)
Just the way it is
This 2007 documentary tells the story of Little Rock and its Central High School fifty years after US Army paratroopers escorted nine black students to class there in 1957. This was one of the early enforcements of the US Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision, which ruled that separate White and Black school systems were inherently unequal. After setting up the historical context, the film first focuses on the school's academic success, following a well-off White family and its world of AP classes and Ivy League admissions. Then a Black teacher, teaching mostly Black kids, tells us 'If you are living in an AP world...you are out of reality.' Then we're off to what does seem like a different world where most kids don't engage with school and their parents are taking care of their high-school daughters' children rather than going to PTSA meetings. The school's principal ties together both worlds, touting the academic successes of some students and bemoaning the fact that others are reading at a third- or fourth-grade level.
The film ends with a powerful scene. Minnijean Brown-Trickey, one of the nine students escorted to class in 1957, visits the school to talk to a class about her experiences. While addressing the class Brown-Trickey stops suddenly and says, 'This room disturbs the hell out of me.' She invites the students to take her place at the front of the class and tell her what's so disturbing. A Black student volunteers and comes to the front and the camera pans so that we can see the back. Are there Confederate symbols? We can't see anything. Then the student says, 'I see it. Caucasians on this side Blacks on this side?' In one of the few classes we've seen with fairly even numbers of Black and White students, segregation continues. As a Black student says, 'It's just the way that it is.'
Reality Bites (1994)
Charmless
The main characters in this film have all recently graduated from college and are wondering what's next. Each of them represents a 'type'--the lost rich girl, the rebellious outsider, the yuppie, etc.--and despite the excellent cast, few of the characters end up being more than just 'types.' And there lies the great weakness of the film: we're supposed to believe that these characters have grown up in Houston together, gone to college together, and are now trying to find their feet in the world together, but the chemistry between them is so forced that it seems like they've just met. I missed the film when it first came out; it's good to find out several decades later that I didn't miss anything.
Avant la fin de l'été (2017)
A subtle marvel
Arash has decided to leave Paris and return home to Iran. His friends Hossein and Ashkan suggest that they all take a trip through France before he leaves. The film follows the three friends as they travel south from Paris by car, mostly camping at night. They tease each other, talk about France and Iran and life as an emigre, quote poetry, and try to meet women (eventually joining the musicians Charlotte and Michèle, who accompany them for awhile).
The film's laid-back, elegiac tone and the empathetic presentation of its characters are done so deftly and with such economy of means that it can be easy to overlook how beautifully they are achieved. We come to see that each of the main characters is at a crossroad in his life and none of them is quite sure whether his heart lies in Iran, in France, or somewhere between. We also see a part of France rarely presented in films: the small towns of la France profonde. One of the running jokes is that we twice hear a train whistle off-sceen and anticipate that a TGV will soon be roaring past, only to see a freight train come trundling through. It is a pleasure to be in the company of Arash, Ashkan, and Hossein as they try to figure our their lives and Life. The relationship of the three with the two musicians is again so delicately and deftly done that it is a true pleasure to watch.
This warm, humane film is a joy.
The Mayberry Effect (2021)
Mayberry of the mind
This documentary focuses on Mayberry Festivals in Mount Airy, N. C., and other small towns, as told through the experiences of those who have re-created characters from the Andy Griffith Show and attend the festivals. Two academics are brought in from time to time to remind us about the meaning of nostalgia, but their comments, however interesting, seem to be from another movie. There are also brief comments from business-owners in Mount Airy and attendees at the festivals, but for the most part, this is the story of those in the Mayberry Industrial Complex.
The appeal of the show in 2021, and the reason for the nostalgia, seems to be longing for a time where neighbors looked out after neighbors and all the quirky neighbors were accepted. Everyone wants to live in Mayberry. Except for Andy Griffith, of course, who says in an interview in the film that when he was growing up in Mount Airy all he wanted to do was get out.
The film does briefly address one group of people excluded from the series, namely Mayberry's Black citizens. Although Black actors appeared as extras in some scenes, the only Black actor with a speaking part was Rockne Tarkington, who played a football coach in one episode in 1967. The documentary explains the lack of Black actors as a nod to realism of 1960s small-town southern life. But realism is really the last thing on the Andy Griffith Show's mind, as its many fans tell us over and over. It's not realism the show is selling us but fantasy and that fantasy does not include Black people who talk or have difficulties with the way society is structured--unlike many Black people when the show was being filmed.
This film nods at interesting issues raised by nostalgia for Mayberry, but assures us that we can ignore these and settle back into the world that never existed.
Wer fürchtet sich vorm schwarzen Mann (1989)
Special delivery
This documentary follows a group of men delivering coal in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin in late 1988. Their boss is Renate Uhle, head of the Uhle Coal Company, a family business in East Berlin since 1922. The documentary's tone is pitch-perfect: it doesn't look down on its subjects and it doesn't paint them as 'noble workers'; it shows a group of men and women who have worked together for years and who treat each other with respect. We also see the connection that the business has to its customers, who stop by to order coal or to say that an elderly relative has died. There's plenty of humor as well, much of it from Renate, the soul of the business who can talk a mile a minute, and much from a standing gag of three workers trying to remove the undercarriage from a delivery trailer.
Many of the scenes could have been shot in 1888: we see the delivery men go up flight after flight of stairs carrying a Zentner of brown coal briquets (50 kg; 110 pounds), at times puffing on cigarettes; or we see them descending into cellars to dump loose lumps of coal in a heap. Anyone concerned with health and safety in the workplace would have a heart attack at some scenes, such as one in which the men split kindling using a powerful, simple, dangerous machine.
When you look at the practically vacant streets of Berlin in the film and imagine how different they are today, you see that this film captures a moment before everything was about to change. The film divides its attention pretty evenly between Renate and her family and the men and their families. Helke Misselwitz, the director, has a gift for making her subjects comfortable in front of the camera.
This is a warm, humane film.
Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (2022)
Requiem for a dream
This documentary about editor Robert Gottleib and biographer Robert Caro is directed by Mr Gottlieb's daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb. We learn about the careers of these two men as well as the subjects of Mr Caro's biographies, Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson. The film is always engaging and full of wonderful moments, such Mr Caro showing the filmmaker the cupboard across from the refrigerator where he stuffs the carbon copies of each day's typing or his description of exactly how he found out that Johnson stole his1948 election to the U. S. Senate. But the film really seems like two separate stories edited together. The device that promises to unite the film-their contentious working relationship, teased from the beginning-turns into a weakness by the time it arrives at the film's end: it is brief, shown with no sound (at the subjects' request), and looks like two people editing a typescript.
Perhaps the most telling moment in this final sequence comes as the two are settling down to work at the offices of the publisher Alfred Knopf. As we have seen throughout the film, both men work with paper: Mr Caro writes his first drafts by longhand, then revises them on the typewriter; Mr Gottleib edits with pencil on typescript or galleys. So before they get down to work, Mr Caro needs a pencil. You can see his thought process, "I'm going to a publisher's office. Why would I need to bring a pencil?" But of course nobody at Knopf has a yellow wooden pencil with eraser. Mr Caro might as well be asking for parchment and quill. When a suitable pencil is finally produced, it is unsharpened and nobody's sure whether the pencil sharpener even works (it does, saving the day). As Jordan Pavlin, Knopf's current editor-in-chief, says, when we watch these two we're watching literary history-not something of our day, but relics from a distant past, like coelacanths.
Very lively coelacanths they are, and both are still passionate about their work. But looming over the film is the specter of The Fifth Book, the final volume of Mr. Caro's LBJ books. His answer to Ms. Gottlieb can stand for all the times the question is asked or is implied: "You're really asking me, 'Do you think I'm gonna die? When you think I'm gonna die.' So I prefer not to answer that."
An interesting film could be made about either of these men, and most viewers will probably have a preference for which of those films would be the most worth seeing. This film is a long, entertaining teaser for those films: it leaves you wanting to know more.
Postscript: Mr Gottlieb died in June 2023.
Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Life on the run
Five Easy Pieces shows us an important period in the life of Robert Dupea. He has spent his life running away from his family of musicians, especially his father. Now, after the father suffers a series of strokes, communication with him may no longer be possible: is he still there listening behind the enigmatic, immobile mask? If reconciliation had ever been possible, it no longer is.
Bobby Dupea is at the centre of the film, which shows us just how terrible it must be to be Bobby Dupea or to be with him. He is filled with anger and self-loathing, constantly rejecting the way of life and people he is with and looking for the next 'auspicious beginning.' Nicholson's performance captures both the character's charm and his terror. The supporting roles are all well cast. Karen Black is outstanding as Rayette and never slips into parody. Likewise, Lois Smith as Bobby's sister Partita.
There are several memorable scenes (the diner scene, the one-way conversation with the father), but one of the most revealing is Bobby's playing for his brother's fiancée Catherine Van Oost (Susan Anspach). Cathy has been asking Bobby to play for her, which, in a family of musicians, means to reveal himself. After Bobby plays the Chopin prelude in e (one of Five Easy Pieces), Catherine says how moved she is, which elicits a smirk from Bobby, who says that he played it better when he was 8 years old. Catherine says she's responding to the feeling that Bobby put into the music. Bobby says he put no feeling into the music, turning a moment set up as a soulful revelation into the rejection and attempted seduction of his brother's fiancée and thus revealing the true Bobby.
The film, written and shot in the late-'60s, is also prescient about the sour attitude of the '70s to come. The promise of civil rights legislation and civil disobedience in the mid-'60s had given way to the assassinations of 1968 and growing disillusionment with US involvement in Vietnam, even before Watergate and the Church Committee in the '70s exposed what lay beneath the government.
The final scene, in which Bobby abandons the pregnant Rayette and heads to a place 'that gets colder than hell', is perfect.