Reflecting on the Movies

As I make my way home from a weekend trip, it seems likely that I will catch the Academy Awards telecast only in part or not at all. Spring has come to the south and in moving north I am also traveling back in seasonal time. I could travel north to south repeatedly and slip into and out of spring many times before the east coast is of one mind about it. Movies can do something like that to us too, treating us to shades and nuances that we perceive as 'other', only to realize (or sometimes not realize) that we have become harmonized with them as we watch. I think our responses to movies indicate the kinds of experiences we are willing (or not willing) to have, quite apart from our likes and dislikes.

I don't know, and almost don't care who will win what. I can only say which movies took me along where they were going. Life of Pi, Rust and Bone, Silver Linings Playbook, Searching for Sugar Man, and The Master all did. Among the actors, Joaquin Phoenix, whose public persona is a bit off-putting to me, took me quite far. I loved Robert DeNiro's superstitious OCD character in Silver Linings Playbook. DeNiro has done almost everything in movies, including silliness, without losing the thread of what he's doing. He plays a mean game of chicken. Marion Cotillard is my pick for best actress - never mind that she wasn't nominated. Anne Hathaway and Quvenzhane Wallis both brought magic to their stations, turning them into constellations - which is why they're called stars. And, it's why we watch.

Photo,mine: A toddler is fascinated by the wall of live fish at the Georgia Aquarium

The Sessions, and The Master

A highly educated paralyzed man living with the help of an iron lung seeks the services of a sex therapist and a priest, the details of which are documented in The Sessions. Cheryl Cohen-Greene (played by a taut-faced Helen Hunt) is the sexual surrogate who helps Mark O'Brien (John Hawkes) have his first sexual experience. Helen Hunt approaches her role with unselfsconscious directness. Maybe because she doesn't need to act sexy, she is free to be naked without pretense. Mark's main goal is to have sex - to both receive and give pleasure, and once this is achieved, the sessions end - though neither participant escapes without some entanglement. Though both sexual surrogacy and prostitution eschew the formation of relationships, surrogacy in this case does well to break that rule albeit haltingly and in a very limited way.


In The Master - Freddie Quell, (Joaquin Phoenix) is a violent sociopath with a creative flair for alcoholic concoctions who meets an L.Ron Hubbard-ish new age guru Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his band of true believers; goes through programming designed to defuse his hair-trigger temper, his sexual repression and his creative boozing with medicine cabinet staples and paint thinner. Joaquin Phoenix is scary-good, and scary period. He lost an incredible amount of weight to play this role and he seems to disappear into it as into the folds of his baggy pants. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams are the husband and wife team. He plays it straight, and she plays it even straighter than he does, calling into question the method's ability to cure all ills - specifically Freddie's.
The movie careens from one altercation to the next, and we do not get the sense that all the programming has done any good until, in the closing scene, Freddie is finally able to be with woman - apparently in a whole and honest way.

Searching for Sugar Man, and Five Broken Cameras

  

I'm almost through the long list of movies I wanted to see before the February 24th Oscars. All that's left to be seen of the Best Picture nominations are: Les Miserables, Zero Dark Thirty and  Amour. Of the other movies I wanted to see, only The Master, Hyde Park on Hudson, and the documentaries remain, which brings me to Searching for Sugar Man. 

This South African documentary is the story of the search for an obscure sixties Detroit singer-songwriter named Sixto Rodriguez, who is credited (in the documentary) as being a catalyst for the anti-apartheid movement within the Afrikaner population. Rodriguez' voice is clear like Jose Feliciano's, melodious like John Denver's, with a vocal quality something like Bob Dylan's. The film itself employs a mix of old footage and creative camera work. It builds effectively from an air of mystery to revelation that still leaves a lot unexplained if not unexplored.
In short, it succeeded in revealing something without destroying the air of mystique surrounding this person - since he proved to be every bit as ineffable as the original myth about him had suggested.
Rodriguez was immensely popular in Apartheid South Africa, though this fact was not known outside of South Africa, not even to him. He passed his whole life after the recording of his two unsuccessful albums doing hard construction work in Detroit. Meanwhile, the South Africans had either invented or passed on the  myth of his suicide in front of a live concert audience by self-immolation in one story, by gunshot in another. That this myth survived until it was debunked by his eventual appearance on a South African stage was a testament to the complete isolation of Rodriguez from his fan base and indeed from the mainstream music scene of the day.

Five Broken Cameras is a documentary which follows the life of a Palestinian West Bank resident (Emad Burnat) and his five cameras (each of which was destroyed by gunfire and replaced by another) as he documents his community's non-violent attempts to hold on to their land in the face of increasing Israeli occupation. Beatings, arrests and even the deaths of his family members and friends are caught on camera - while he dispassionately narrates the action, albeit in voice-overs. I don't understand how he was able to remain at his station behind the camera as these things took place. Did the filming become more important than the events being captured? Or did this simply underline the desperation of the Palestinians for an unimpeachable witness? One of the most striking scenes for me was one in which the men returned to the battleground area to find that all the olive trees had been set on fire, presumably by the Israelis. The onscreen protests by one of the men about the olive trees' "innocence" was not necessary to convey the cruelty of the action, but instead raised an awkward question - didn't the Palestinians also consider themselves likewise "innocent"?  Documentaries are thought to put forward events as they happen -even if those events have elements of artifice in them. In this way artifice and truth can intersect. In one scene, Emad captures the death of his good friend as he falls into the frame after being shot at from a position presumably at Emad's side. After this,the action is followed by another cameraman who was also on the scene. Emad glances over to the live camera and then resumes his grieving over his friend's body. It is telling that even at this event, he is unable to give himself over to the moment until he has reassured himself that he will not be lost in it. Maybe this is how he survives.

Photo: Sixto Rodriguez, Searching for Sugar Man

Hold the Presses, its...The Paperboy

None of it was expected - not Zac Efron as a lovesick negro sympathizer (this was the sixties), not John Cusack as a murderous gator hunter with S&M predilections, and certainly not Matthew McConaughey as a closeted homosexual with a preference for black lovers and a poor radar for dangerous situations. Neither did I expect Nicole Kidman as a Monroe-like waif with a dark side, who bit off more than she could chew.
And finally, I did not expect Macy Gray (the singer) in any capacity, but there you have the cast of The Paperboy. A graphic, disturbing movie - complex, and ambiguous.

It sounds like a lot of sex, but most of it was insinuated. It was the inescapable subtext of the story which is actually about a murder investigation conducted by the two sons of a newspaper owner (Efron and Mc Conaughey as Jack and Ward Jensen).
All of the characters exude sensuality and there is sexual tension between Charlotte (Kidman) and almost every man except Jack (Efron), who is smitten - infatuated with her. She is, ironically enough, both too much and not enough woman for him, and his heartbreak is not only on her account, but also because of the departure of his mother after his parents'divorce. Jack also has affection bordering on the erotic for his black housekeeper (played by Macy Gray) who is something of a doting and indulgent mother figure. Set all of this in the heat of South Florida in the sixties, and its no wonder that almost everyone ends up dead - but it's great intrigue getting there.