director Steven Soderbergh
viewed: 02/18/2012

I have been pretty keen on seeing Contagion.  I guess you’d have to say “how keen?” as I neither managed to see it in the theater and was also patient enough to wait for Netflix to finally release the film (after their embargo on new content expired).  It had a lot of good buzz and it looked to me to be quite the thing to see.  But I guess that I was able to be patient enough to wait for it to come to me.

A disease thriller, this is only science fiction in that it is fiction.  The plot adheres as closely to a believable reality of a modern epidemic.  Think H1N1, but this time, people die by the thousands.  You get a runny nose, you feel like crap, three days later you’re in seizures and then you die.  It doesn’t matter if you’re Gwyneth Paltrow (actually, being a big star probably increases your chances of failing to make it through the film alive).

The film starts off running, with its pantheon of stars, several sets of mini-narratives, cross-cutting one another, attempt to tell this global story at a pace and immediacy of the now.  Much is made of the “fomites,” the many objects or touches that can swiftly pass a pathogen on from one human to the next or the many.  Director Steven Soderbergh lets the camera linger just long enough on the peanut bowl at the bar, the handles on a bus, the number of times a person touches their face and then touches a public object.  It’s a germophobe’s nightmare deluxe.

And for that matter, it’s an incredibly timely nightmare for the world.  In our increasingly global universe, the right contagion could sweep the human populace like the Black Death, taking down immense numbers of people, a significant percentage of the human race.   Some say it’s just a matter of time.  Perhaps the movie is perfectly prescient.

The movie is really quite good through the first hour or so.  The zeitgeist thriller really taps into something and moves with alacrity and with some deadly power.  The only thing is that the last half hour or so, the film loses some of its potency.  It’s hard to put my finger on it exactly, what happened, but it sort of sputters to the finish line.  I found the Jude Law character the weakest of the bunch and the kidnapping of Marion Cotillard seemed to veer off from whatever track had the film moving so well.  This hardly ruins the film, just diminishes what starts out as a top rate flick.  A popcorn movie that will keep you from sharing your popcorn.

director Hiromasa Yonebayashi
viewed: 02/18/2012 at AMC Loews Metreon 16, SF, CA

It’s a sad fact that one day, we will live in a world without Hayao Miyazaki actively making movies.  We may already be living in a world where Miyazaki is no longer directing films.  There has been speculation, based on his own words, that Ponyo (2008) may prove to be the last feature film for which he will have a directorial credit.  We have been so lucky to live in world in which a master film-maker created at the top of his craft such films as My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Spirited Away (2001), Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) and so many others.

What we have in The Secret World of Arrietty is perhaps the next best thing to a film directed by Miyazaki.  It’s a film written by Miyazaki and to some extent “planned” by him.  I’m not sure if this includes storyboards or to what extent his hand remained in, but Arrietty does bear more of his mark than other films from Studio Ghibli.  It is directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi who worked as an animator on a number of Miyazaki’s films, and I’d be hard pressed (or merely speculating) to suppose where the word started and stopped.  The most important thing is that while Arrietty may not be entirely a Miyazaki film, it bears a great deal of the charm and beauty of his work.  It’s a fine film.

Based on the novel, The Borrowers by Mary Norton, the story is about a little family of little people who live in a house in the Japanese countryside.  They “borrow” what they need from the bigger humans, hiding their existence entirely from them.  But when Sean, a boy with a heart condition, is brought to the house to convalesce, he discovers the teenage borrower Arrietty and tries to make friends with her.  Ultimately, when the family realizes that they have been discovered, they have to leave and rebuild their home somewhere else, but the friendship between Sean and Arrietty brings about hopeful changes for both.

It’s a sweet film.  Like Ponyo, it’s rated G (a rare enough thing these days in children’s film), with a strict limit to drama, danger, and violence.  While there is no out-and-out magic at play here (a common Miyazaki theme), this family of little people are in  a sense the magic of the world, a hidden, endangered, beautiful element sadly threatened increasingly by change.  The family aren’t sure if they are or not the last of their species.

Arrietty is yet another of Miyazaki’s strong young female protagonists, spirited and innocent, breaking into the world in new ways.

Both Felix and Clara liked it a lot, though Felix, typically was less enthusiastic after a while.  I thought it was quite enjoyable myself.

We are lucky to live in a world in which Hayao Miyazaki is still creating cinema, and we can hope that he will continue to do so.

director Michael Curtiz
viewed: 02/17/2012

For all the films, genres, stars, experiences that I handpick to show to my kids, intending to expose them to the breadth of cinema, there are a number of those that I, myself, have no first-hand experience.  Take Errol Flynn for instance.  Before we watched The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) last year, I couldn’t claim that I’d really seen any of his films.  The more and more that we watch together, and the broader and broader of the material to which they are open, we will doubtlessly continue to forge into territory that is new not just for them, but for me.

Actually, I hadn’t realized that it had already been a year since we saw our first Errol Flynn film.  I’d had Captain Blood in my queue, waiting for its week for film night.

Captain Blood is actually a title that I recall getting heavy play on television as a kid and actually still on TCM.  For whatever reason, I’d never seen it.  Based on a popular novel of the early 20th Century, it tells the tale of a doctor turned pirate in the topsy-turvy world of 17th Century Britain.  The evil (or at least very unlikable) King James has a group of rebels sent off as slaves to Jamaica to serve a brutal Lord there on his plantation.  Dr. Blood (Flynn) had been an adventurer, but had settled as a doctor, only pulled into the courts when captured healing a rebel.  When opportunity finally shows itself, he leads an escape of the unjustly imprisoned men, taking a pirate ship and then turning buccaneers themselves, becoming the scourge of the Caribbean.

For all its swashbuckling, the film actually takes quite a while to get to its first battle and it’s quite deep into the story before a sword fight breaks out.  By contrast, action got happening much more quickly and regularly in the later The Adventures of Robin Hood.  Oddly enough, the kids were both invested in the film early on, not being plaintive for more action.

Again, I thought that Felix would be more into it than Clara.  He was more into it than he was in the prior week’s Astaire/Rogers film Swing Time (1936), but Clara was in some ways equally as excited about it as the other.  As for me, I enjoyed it a great deal, too, though I did find it a bit slower than ye olde Robin Hood.

The finale is by far the best, as Blood leads his crew in an attack on two French ships engaged in besieging the port.  Finding out that James has been chased from the throne, usurped by King William, the English take the pirates back and the enemy has now sided with the French.  The battle sequence is enthralling.  While Felix noted the fakery of the skies in the background on some shots, it’s a testament to the battle sequence that one isn’t drawn to figuring out what shots are models, which shots are sound stage, trying to decipher the artifice.  It’s just a good old adventure with the high-flying Flynn, still exciting and fun.

director Alma Har’el
viewed: 02/16/2012

Bombay Beach is a small community on California’s the Salton Sea.   Though I never saw the movie The Salton Sea (2002), a neo-noir set in this milieu, I have been intrigued by it.  Apparently, the current “sea” was formed in the early part of the 20th century when the Colorado River flooded, bursting dams and other man-made attempts to harness it, and water poured into this low-lying area, which had been connecting lakes, rivers, waterways back through the ages.  Apparently, briefly, it became a tourist destination, an inland sea for partying on.

Now for some time, the area around much of this isolated sea has become a home for various people who have removed themselves from society, generally through poverty or intentional isolation.  As for the Val Kilmer film, I think it focused on the methamphetamine communities and other more criminal elements.  Whatever it is or isn’t, I’ve been curious about it.

Bombay Beach is a sort of “artistic” documentary by Israeli-born director Alma Har’el, who focuses on a few key people and families in the Bombay Beach community, following them throughout their lives and travails for a period of time.  I say “artistic” documentary because while it is a documentary, is attempting to capture and document these people, this place, Har’el also takes some liberties with the reality, staging scenes and instances with some poetic license.  While some of these are more clearly fictional or contrived, others are more subtle and confusing.

There is a surreal nature to this.  There is perhaps a surreality to the world itself, untouched by anything other than the camera eye.  It reckons of David Lynch or Diane Arbus, a weirdness of the world that just is.  The landscape, with dead fish on the ground, desolate, decaying structures, damaged, withered people, it speaks a lot.

The core of the story is living with these people, the elderly racist fellow who makes his living selling cigarettes, the young African American boy who relocated from the rough parts of LA after a cousin was killed in gang violence, the young boy on insane medication with behavioral issues.  The ultimate portrait of the people is less exploitative than might seem at first.  Har’el follows them through their aspirations and life changes, and while initially reveling somewhat in their outre-ness, the story is more sympathetic than many.

Still, I feel the “artistic” license employed degrades the possibilities of the documentary.  While documentary is never truly objective and perhaps belies itself in projecting that ideal, Har’el’s surreal moments of dance and dialogue, perhaps meant to suggest the characters’ inner worlds seem contrived and false to me.  It seems like the protagonists participated cheerfully and willingly in these sequences, and while it pushes beyond their natural language and behavior, it grated on me.  Perhaps as more and more documentaries are made as production costs drop, the variety and challenge of the form will come under further and further expansion and testing, such discordances as this will feel more part of the language of these forms.  I don’t know.  I recognize it’s a personal response on my part.

director Cindy Meehl
viewed: 02/12/2012

My step-sister had recommended this film to me, and others since, and now I am recommending it to a lot of people because I can think of so many people who would appreciate it.

Buck Brannaman is not “the horse whisperer”, though he did inspire the character of Nicholas Evans’ novel and  consult with Robert Redford on the 1998 film.  In a lot of ways, he’s “the horse therapist”.  In reality, he espouses a practice known as “natural horsemanship” which is kinder, gentler and far more “humane” than traditional practices of “bustin’ broncos”.  He’s noted for his amazing way to approach a new horse and within minutes having it follow him where he goes.  He does this without violence of any kind, only patience and empathy.

The film follows the low-key cowboy from one training session to another and recounts his own troubled childhood in which he withstood immense physical abuse at the hands of his father.  A truly inspiring story of coping with trauma, he has gone on to deal with horses with the same steady conscientiousness and good will that most any person would find a valued attribute in another.

The most dramatic sequence of the film occurs when a truly wild, damaged animal, noted to be one of the most dangerous that one of his collaborators had ever seen, attacks another horseman who is trying to use the gentle practices and tears a gash in his head, and perhaps easily could have killed him.  The horse’s owner realizes that the animal will have to be put down, but Buck comes in and with only his steady patience and flag, manages to coax the animal back into its traveling compartment.  Buck tells the woman, one of his great truisms, that animals often reflect their owners’ issues and problems, that it’s best to deal with oneself first than try to work with a creature beyond oneself.

It’s an impressive portrait of humanity, a portrait of humanity in a very idealized state, a state of patience, tolerance, and kindness that most anyone can appreciate and perhaps admire.

director George Stevens
viewed: 02/11/2012

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers at the height of their collaboration, directed very effectively by George Stevens, and featuring music by the fantastic Jerome Kern.  What’s not to like?  The blackface, perhaps?

After watching Top Hat (1935) a couple of years ago, I wondered about watching films like this with kids.  This time, I did.  The magic was lost a bit on Felix, perhaps due more to tiredness (he fell asleep during the film) than due to real reaction, but Clara, who is soon to be 8, totally loved it, as did I.

As good as the Irving Berlin songs were in Top Hat, the Kern songs in Swing Time are even more impeccable.  ”Pick Yourself Up”, “A Fine Romance”, “The Way You Look Tonight”.  Fantastic.

The dance sequences, namely the first, set to “Pick Yourself Up” in which Astaire vies to prove that Rogers has just taught him how to dance in the studio is magic.   The “Bojangles of Harlem” sequence is perhaps the most cinematic, highlighting a big tribute to Bill “Bojangles” Robinson with a striking sequence in which Astaire dances in front of a screen of three giant syncopated silhouettes of himself, projected behind him.  This sequence, though, is the site of the blackface that Astaire dons.  It’s the sad thing about blackface that it’s so rightly stigmatized that even in a sequence like this, which is done in tribute, and perhaps far less is lampoon, it’s still shameful.  I, personally, try not to get too hung up on these elements, as there is no simple, clear way to feel.  It’s of its time, it’s shameful, it’s there.  It’s still arguably one of the film’s best moments, tainted as it is.

Not being a particularly “dancey” person myself, I still found myself wanting to glide around the room a-la Astaire, and Clara did very much too.  It’s almost impossible not to get caught up in it.  We both thoroughly enjoyed it.  Felix slept through the ending, so maybe next time for him.

director Joel Schumacher
viewed: 02/04/2012

“And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us” – Matthew 6:12

We can probably forgive Joel Schumacher, Nicolas Cage, Nicole Kidman and co. for this Trespass.  It’s bad but only on the down slope from mediocre.  It’s not an embarrassment.  For Schumacher, that would be Batman & Robin (1997).  For Cage, it would be any number of movies that he’s made in the last 10-15 years.  For Kidman, …her marriage to Tom Cruise?

The plot of Trespass is sort of like someone who saw Michael Haneke’s deconstrcted thriller Funny Games (1997) (or its American re-make of 2008) and thought, “Wow, if it wasn’t deconstructed, this would make a great thriller!  We just need to Hollywood it up a bit more!  Or maybe a lot!”

Rich family in an isolated mansion get held prisoner, not by two young prep school thugs, but by a group of thieves.  Supposedly, Cage’s character, the family patriarch, has been squirreling away money while their financial world is falling around them, unbeknownst to the family, but the kidnappers have been eyeing him and know he’s got diamonds and money.  With guns to their heads, Cage still won’t let the villains have the combination to the safe.  He tries to make a deal.  And then there is the subplot of the younger brother of the gang who scoped the house and has the hots for Kidman (and did he or didn’t he have an affair with her at the same time?)  And the crack-smoking girlfriend. And the thug from the mob.  And of course, people are going to die.

The thing is that it never really makes sense what Cage’s motivation is.  By the end, it really doesn’t seem to make exact sense.  But it’s not really worth quibbling about.

The film isn’t successful at capturing potential zeitgeist either.  Theoretically, this family, while not necessarily “part of the 1%” that the Occupy movement has defined, is certainly richer than the average upper middle class family.  They are the haves.  Or are they just living on the razor’s edge as well, is their life a facade?  There is class implied that the criminals are certainly not of that same ilk, but rather want what the rich guys have.  And at the end, when it all goes up in flames, and the family unit, tested and tried, hangs together in the face of crime and torture, what exactly is the message?

Well, the only reason I watched this is because of my Nicolas Cage thing.  It’s not as campy as his more entertaining bad movies.  It’s a shabby attempt at a more mainstream, adult thriller.  But it is a shabby attempt.

directors Jim Henson, Frank Oz
viewed: 02/04/2012 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

Playing at the Castro Theatre as part of its 30th Anniversary, The Dark Crystal is yet another journey into the heart of 1980′s wonderful analog effects, puppeteering, and visual design.  Great as all of that is, it’s a little hard for me to consider it a “classic” as some do, certainly a number of the people in the crowd last Saturday.

I recall seeing it when it first came out, something I noted to my kids, which would have made me 13 at the time.  I remember not being particularly impressed by the film, and finding the “gelflings” the heroes of the film, bland and unexpressive.

Directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz as the first of their more “adult” or “realistic” styled puppets (as opposed to The Muppets with whom they had risen to fame), it’s a very different style of narrative, a more traditional fantasy genre story, set in a mystical world that has three suns.  When the dark crystal became damaged in time long ago, it broke these creatures into two races, the evil, vulture-like Skeksis and the mellow, old hippy-like Mystics.  When the old ones start dying out, the leader of the Mystics tells one of the last living gelflings, Jen, to go find the missing shard of the crystal and to make things whole again.  It’s all associated with a prophecy.  The Skeksis don’t want this to happen, they just want to rule cruelly for all eternity.

The story isn’t all that strong.  I mean, an old hag had the shard in a box of crystals all along.  Outside of dodging the giant pill-bug-cum-crab creatures called Garthim, the Skeksis’ henchmen, there really isn’t a whole lot to the “quest” as it were.  And the direction of the main story arc is kind of clumsy and plodding.  So, I guess I kind of agree with my 13-year old self on this one.

Differently, though, I think I appreciate the puppet designs and performances a bit more, though.  The gelflings are still kind of lame, but the Garthim and the Skeksis are cool, as is the old hag, and lots of the little details, the strange plant life and odd creatures that make up the landscapes (and don’t necessarily get a lot of screen time) are some of the most fun and interesting.

Typically, Clara enjoyed it more than Felix, something of a theme of late in our viewings.  He’s developing a cynical sensibility toward a lot of stuff, perhaps some would say, much like his old man.  That’s too bad.  It’s more fun to find reasons to enjoy things than to find reasons not to.  Note to self.

director Terry Gilliam
viewed: 02/03/2012

The only time that I had seen Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was on VHS in 1990.  At that time, I wasn’t terribly familiar with it, though I had been very familiar with his 1985 film Brazil which was probably one of the first “art films” that I got into.  At the time, though there was a lot to like about Munchausen, I, like my friends, was inclined to consider it sort of mediocre, which given the circumstances of seeing it, makes some sense.

It was, however, in considering potentially entertaining fantasy adventure films for my kids, especially having just watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974) at their behest, that I came to reconsider Gilliam’s great adventure film.  The kids had no idea what to expect, and I, over 20 years out from having seen it before, was due for some surprises, too.

More than anything, I was surprised by how charming and fun most of the film was.  If anything, it brought to mind such classic adventure fare as The Thief of Bagdad (1940), a solid, while quite whimsical romp, with some truly outstanding design elements and good fun.  The film is a long one, over 2 hours, and some of the sequences have less verve and fun as some others, it could doubtlessly use a nip or tuck here and there to tighten it up.  Still, it’s a very sound and good fantasy adventure, which Clara liked very much and Felix liked to some extent.

Set in some time in the 18th Century in a “town” besieged by the Turks, a small theater troupe is performing the adventures of the baron Munchausen, a popular series of stories based on the tall tales told and attributed to an actual Baron.  They are performing amidst an onslaught, when suddenly an elderly fellow, claiming to be the real Baron steps forth and begins spinning his tales, with really only the young daughter of the troupe leader (a nine-year-old Sarah Polley) who takes him for real.

But then he is “real”.  The film’s main thrust, outside of weaving a rollicking yarn, is the aspect of fantasy in the realm of “reason”.  As the intertitles tells us, the story takes place in “The Age of Reason” in which people continue to bomb the hell out of one another and when the film comes to its grand finale, the difference between the “real” and the “fantasy” is sort of clumsily (though perhaps intentionally) kept fuzzy.

Eric Idle appears as Berthold, one of the Baron’s sidekicks with variant superpowers (his is superspeed).  Another has great hearing and the ability to blow tremendously powerful wind with his breath.  Another is a sharpshooter and another is a strongman.  Maybe one of the downsides is that these characters spend most of the time as semi-useless, with only the briefest of moments of highlighting their hidden strengths.  The Baron himself is played by John Neville with a particular flair and charm truly befitting the character.  We’ve also got a young and beautiful Uma Thurman as the goddess Venus (an apt role indeed).

The adventures take them to the moon, into the depths of Mt. Vesuvius, and swallowed by a giant sea serpent/fish, all while the aging Baron is pursued by the shrouded and skeletal image of “Death”, ever-waiting to snatch his essence away.

The film is far from flawless but indeed is perhaps as good as anything that Terry Gilliam has directed.  I’m sure that there are those who would vaunt Time Bandits (1981) or the aforementioned Brazil as his masterpieces, but it’s clear to me that he is certainly a director who is worth considering among the most interesting and original living American directors (though it’s sometimes hard not to consider him English, what with his Monty Python affiliation).  And really, I did enjoy it more than I imagined I would (even with the tiresome Robin Williams as King of the Moon sequence).  I was tired of that 20 years ago.  Still am.

director Lucky McKee
viewed: 02/01/2012

Little tales of misogyny.  Actually, this is a big tale of big misogyny.  Thus its sordid reputation at film festivals.

I’d only seen one of director Lucky McKee’s films, his 2002 movie, May, which wound up surprising me positively.  When I read about his latest, edgy, controversial film, I was curious.  So much contemporary horror films are intensely uninspired, that something that shocks and appalls piques one’s interest (thus The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009), right?)

The story about a small town nuclear family, who lives isolated on a pretty private lot, who take in a feral woman that the father captures in the nearby woods, chains in the storm shelter, and ostensibly tries to “socialize”.  This, however, is no The Wild Child (1970), no real sense of humanity trying to better a feral human.  No, this is all hypocrisy, barely veiled paternalism, misogyny, and ultimately rape and more violence.  It’s not going to end well.

The film is about the father’s point of view, the iron-fist of the family law, smacking down the women, cowing them into shame and quietude, suggesting further violence, both physical and psychological.  And the creepy breeding of the teenage son into a sexual manipulator in his father’s image.  When the woman is finally cut loose, her vengeance is not just personal, it’s meant to be societal, a female rage that eviscerates the oppressors.

There are shots, moments, when this titillating material looks strong.  But those are shots and moments.  Between those shots and moments is the rest of the film, which feels sloppy or rushed, not as strong or sophisticated as it would need to be to pull off its intellectual goals.  Either that or just not plain visceral enough.

Frankly, the idea, the concept, is creepy and stark.  Could be interesting.  I still think so, even after having watched The Woman and feeling less than impressed with its take on its material.

And where lies the misogyny? Is it in the text or the subtext, in the eye of the producer or the beholder?  That’s probably an openly debatable question.