Hitchcock and Argo

These two movies were films within films, begging the question whether any film could ever be true fiction or artifice, intersecting as it does with the real lives of real people - the actors who bring characters to life.  Hitchcock tells the story of Alfred Hitchcock's life during the filming of the movie 'Psycho', and is particularly interesting for what it reveals about the lives of  Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh and Vera Miles, who played the main roles in that 1960 movie. Argo details the successful use of a fake movie production to rescue six American Embassy employees during the Iran hostage crisis.

Both movies were suspenseful - Hitchcock, because the thrill and terror of his movie 'Psycho' was revealed to be a reflection from some dark recess of Hitchcock's own psyche. Argo, because the scenes of Middle Eastern social unrest and Anti-American sentiment are still very much current today, even though the eye-wear, hairstyles and clothing of the movie date these events as belonging solidly in the late seventies.

In both movies, the general outcomes are already known, so these are not stories of what, but stories of how. I wonder, for instance how Hitchcock's wife is able to come to his rescue and help complete 'Psycho' after he falls ill, when he has jealously hounded her and all but accused her of having an affair. It is also not clear whether she is privy to her husband's dark fantasy involving her own murder which seems to have been granted a kind of proxy via the making of the movie. If we are to take these representations as truth, then it does seem that she saves both herself and her husband (not to mention his reputation and career) by taking the helm of this runaway train and bringing it safely into the station.

The tension in Argo was marvelously thick throughout. Therefore, one almost couldn't believe that together, the nimble-fingered Iranian children laboring to piece together the shredded photographs, and the menacing airport security detail were not able to identify the Americans in time to stop the plane from taking off and carrying them to safety. Funny, in life as in art -- suffering is infinitely explorable, whereas happiness resists exploration and is in fact often reduced to a cliche.

Silver Linings Playbook and Django Unchained

I didn't plan on seeing Django Unchained but there it was, actually a nominee for best picture, so in the interest of balanced reporting I had to suck it up. Django (Jamie Foxx) is a slave emancipated at gunpoint by  German bounty hunter Dr. Schultz, (Christoph Waltz) who seeks his assistance in capturing a few notorious heads, (those on the shoulders of the three Brittle Brothers) for which endeavor Django would be the 'spotter'. For his trouble, Dr Schultz promises to help Django free his wife from her owner,Calvin Candie and his plantation named Candyland. Like most Tarantino films, Django was violent in a way that dulled one's senses, subverting natural aversion into numbness.The busiest man on set must have been the blood splatter master - no matter how far away the target was in the scene, we were treated to explosive blood-works which were curious in their excess. Alongside this almost cartoonish physical violence was the considerable and palpable emotional violence, of which as it turns out, Dr Schultz is a victim. Django, for his part, manages to hold himself together despite his anger, revulsion and fear, aided by his unswerving resolve to find his wife and keep his cover intact. The unexpected reversal was interesting. Dr Schultz is used to killing people for a reward, but discovers that he has no stomach for the brutality of slavery. I loved the cinematography - part Marlboro Man, part Attack of the Zombies and the soundtrack - part seventies pop, part nineties gangsta rap. This movie is a study in opposites that manages to synthesize something noteworthy in the middle and I suspect that's why it's staring down the barrel of a best picture nomination.

Silver Linings Playbook was my second great favorite of this Awards season (watched it twice). It's the portrait of a dysfunctional family, an OCD father Patricio (Robert De Niro), an insecure competitive brother, and a hand-wringing mother (Jackie Weaver). The crown jewel is the bipolar Patricio Junior (Bradley Cooper) who, as the movie opens is serving time in a mental institution for the assault on his wife's lover which occurred in Pat's own bathroom shower.
Pat gets out of the mental institution and tries to make a fresh start and rescue his marriage from the restraining order put on him since the assault He is deliriously optimistic, we might say pathologically so. He sees silver linings everywhere, even in the disingenuous platitudes of those who have written him off. 'Silver developments' abound and where they obviously do not (as in the ending of the novel 'A Farewell to Arms') he becomes enraged. Bradley Cooper stretches here - and I like to see actors stretch.
The cast (DeNiro,Weaver and Jennifer Lawrence with an entertaining appearance by Chris Tucker) congeals nicely around this character - everyone bringing something to the table. The only flaw I found in this movie was some sloppy editing, forgivable because of the engaging story, cast and acting.

Hope Springs, and Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

The thing about movies staffed with actors in their golden years is that the subtext of age invades every aspect of the movie -which almost forces the movie to be about that age in a way that movies cast with youth are not.

I didn't plan to see Hope Springs, but there I was watching an impossibly wrinkled Tommy Lee Jones and a visibly older Meryl Streep going through the motions of marriage counseling with a much effaced Steve Carrell as their therapist. (I didn't plan on seeing Django Unchained either, but more on that in another post). I was hoping that Meryl would keep her hands away from her face - there is this thing she does in almost every movie - a gesture of false modesty that I dearly hoped she would spare us. About three times in the movie, she didn't (spare us). See publicity shot.That's not acting, that's a Meryl thing. Kay and Arnold had been married for thirty years - the last five of which were sexless. Kay is ready to break out or break away, and Arnold is in some sort of denial. In desperation she books them both for a week with a celebrity therapist in the town of Hope Springs, Maine. At the beginning, our sympathies lie with Kay ( her attempts at intimacy are bluntly rebuffed by her husband) until the third or so therapy session when it becomes clear that Arnold is the one who sustained the emotional blow years earlier. We can see the shades go up behind Steve Carrell's eyes as he realizes that all is not as Kay has painted it. The couple awkwardly goes through a series of exercises aimed at restoring intimacy, and they eventually arrive at something , though I don't know what. However at awkwardness, they were good.


The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is an Indian oasis where British golden oldies come to live (almost) free or die. Part medical tourism mecca, part halfway house - these Brits are all strapped for cash and averse to curry. The hotel is run by a young man trying to hold up his candle to his older bothers' lanterns. His mother is barely humoring him, and her threats to close the hotel and ostracize his love interest make up the sub-plot of the movie. Best Exotic showcases a range of responses to aging: awkward attempts at hooking up, eleventh hour gold-digging, siren calls, swan songs, fatalism and reinvention. Judi Dench plays a woman with nothing left in England who finds fulfillment using her knowledge of consumer psychology to help Indian phone bank workers. In this she finds new purpose for her life. Judi Dench is no freer of Judi in her acting than Ms Streep is of Meryl,except that she approaches her roles from the opposite direction. Through her default mode of stoicism ,she lets the emotion break through believably, and we take her in whole. Ms Dench seems to use emotion for traction whereas Ms. Streep tries to use it as an engine. One performance has movement and the other is just so much wheel spinning.

Life of Pi , and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

It's probably telling that I've already triple dipped into the Life of Pi. From the very first scene -those strutting pink flamingos against the backdrop of a sepia painted wall with the gauzy overlay of the sublime voice of Bombay Jayashri - I knew this would be a special movie. It was beautiful to watch - expanses of sky and water in a breathtaking array of colors and textures. People were almost superfluous to this movie, and in truth, no one competed with Ang Lee's scenery. This was a tale about survival on many fronts - physical, spiritual and emotional - and a testament to the idea that survival sometimes depends on the stories we tell ourselves.(actually, when does it not?) This is destined to be a classic - a movie that will be loved and watched over and over again. I've already seen it three times - not counting the six times I've watched the opening sequence just to hear "Pi's Lullaby".

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was a simple (and somewhat simplistic) love story built around the grand idea of bringing a sustainable salmon population to Yemen to feed a rich (yet honorable) man's appetite for fly fishing. British scientist in a professional marriage meets (British) attache to the Yemeni sheik in question. The project was green-lighted as a counterfoil to some bad press surrounding British-Yemeni relations. A stretch of a story (except for the part about the bad press). Nothing was fleshed out - there was no real explanation of the challenges beyond those implied by an aerial shot of a desert gorge littered with heavy machinery. There was no real tension, only insinuations of conflict and danger.We were asked to believe that this vague project (half-heartedly sabotaged by an unspecified fringe element ) and the fruition of this unlikely endeavour so lightly treated in the film could be the stuff of a great love story. I love Ewan McGregor, but I couldn't.

Rust and Bone, and Beasts of the Southern Wild

Things are looking up - I hit upon not one, but two good movies.

I watched Rust and Bone in French without the benefit of subtitles - and it's a testament to the acting that I didn't need them. In fact, I found myself wishing that the music soundtrack was in French as well. Marion Cotillard is enthralling. She seems to come away clean from every role she plays, and goes into each new performance bare and believable. This time she's an aquarium performer who loses both legs in a horrible accident involving a killer whale. A chance meeting at a nightclub (a boxer moonlighting as a bouncer, before the accident) is the slim thread upon which she hangs her future because there was nothing and no-one else. After the accident, she fell out of her circle of aquarium friends as into a black hole and her former boyfriend was nowhere in evidence. The bouncer saves her from suicidal despair, and helps her navigate her recovery even as he gets bruised and bloodied for money in illegal fight clubs, and continues to seek random outlets for his almost angry sexual energy. When he comes to her physically he is considerably broken in, and when he comes to her emotionally in the wake of his son's near drowning, he's just plain broken... and finally open.

Beasts of the Southern Wild was gritty, gory, and in the end, glorious. A father and his six year old daughter (Wink and Hushpuppy) barely eke out an existence in the squalor of the Louisiana 'Bathtub' district. She is a sassy yet sensitive child terrorized by her father's mercurial moonshine moods, and his mysterious illness. A storm puts the Bathtub under water, but the Bayou people refuse to evacuate. Knowing that her father is near death, Hushpuppy searches for her mother who left shortly after giving birth to her. She cremates Wink when he passes away from his illness, and soldiers on with her adoptive community. The young actress who plays Hushpuppy (then 6- and now 9-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis) manages a miraculous transformation within about three seconds of screen time - her face takes on resolve and wisdom seemingly without any physical tricks (jaw-setting or teeth gritting). Those few seconds were magical. Hers were some of the most memorable line in the movies so far: "When it all goes quiet behind my eyes, I see everything that made me. I'm a little piece of a big big universe and that makes things right."

It seems that unknown actors have the greatest power and potential to stun us with their performances.
Increasingly, movies are created as vehicles for big name actors, leaving big movie performances in the domain of the relatively unknown actors. Of course there are exceptions, so I'm hopeful that I'll find a few more Marion Cotillards before this year's Oscar odyssey is over.

Skyfall and Moonrise Kingdom

No other Bond but this one (Daniel Craig's) could have traced his path forward into the world from an ancestral home like Skyfall. It was a bit of a stretch even for him, but no other Bond was dark enough to pull off such a grim origin, and frankly none of them left enough of the character on the screen to warrant that close of a look. The past three Bond movies have a continuity that the others lacked, and prompt a different level of investment (if one is a fan, as I am). In this movie - the wall between M and Bond is utterly demolished. There could be no going back from it, hence M's demise. Daniel Craig appears gaunt and a little haggard - did he lose weight for the movie,or just sleep? Or, was that look deliberately cultivated with makeup? I couldn't tell, and I found that more unsettling than Javier Bardem's scene-stealing Vader move - taking apart his own face as he confronts Judy Dench's M with the devastating effects of a not-quite-fatal cyanide pill. In case anyone is still wondering, M stands for Mother - or it should.

Moonrise Kingdom was an unusual little movie set on the fictional island of New Penzance ( actually, Rhode Island) - Gilligan's Island meets The Wonder Years meets Hogan's Heroes... or maybe something a little darker, like MASH.
Two misfit twelve year olds find each other (and love) and try to blow a bubble around themselves.He's a bespectacled 'coonskin capped cub scout, she's a reading runaway with a hair trigger temper.This was a comedy, and I bought it all the way up to the moment that the girl knifed one of the other cub scouts. Yes, he was a bully, but he was a kid and this was a comedy, dammit!. The wound wasn't serious, and neither was anything that followed.There was a storm, a Harold Lloyd-like run in with a clock tower, lightning, a flood, and perfectly respectable actors like Frances Mc Dormand, Ed Norton and Tilda Swinton ( et tu, Tilda? ) caught in the matrix of this movie with Bill Murray and Bruce Willis. I loved the 'New England nautical' look of the movie, and the soundtrack - but not much else.

Showtime!

Here we are again, another new year, and I am getting ready to run my annual movie marathon.In the meantime, I discovered two BBC Masterpiece Series ( Downton Abbey and Sherlock) which have helped make my 90 minute commute (each way) more bearable.

As usual, the awards movie 'short list' is pretty long - twenty-six at last count - many of which I will not see, however it is with a sense of relish that I read the list and the synopses, trying to figure out which ones to watch - the way one surveys a banquet table and selects something to eat.

Already there are some that I intend to pass on - Zero Dark Thirty and Django Unchained (too violent), Flight (I'm no expert, but I find Denzel Washington's acting range to be a bit narrow - exception:Training Day), and Hope Springs (again I'm no expert, and though she is probably deserving of high acclaim, I find that Meryl Streep's portrayals are quite similar.)

So (in alphabetical order) here's the list:

Amour
Anna Karenina
Argo
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Django Unchained
Flight
Hitchcock
Hope Springs
Hyde Park on Hudson
Les Miserables
Life of Pi
Lincoln
Moonrise Kingdom
Promised Land
Rust and Bone
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Silver Linings Playbook
Skyfall
The Deep Blue Sea
The Hobbit
The Impossible
The Master
The Paperboy
The Sessions
Zero Dark Thirty

(Here's) to the movies, and... To The Movies!