Notes on "Breach"

The movie, Breach, is based on the Robert Hanssen spy case. Robert Hanssen was a top FBI agent. In the early years of this millennium he was uncovered as a Soviet spy. The story is told from the point of view of an aspiring FBI agent who was a planted as his assistant and played a significant role in breaking the case. The film spends a good deal of time on Hanssen's attempts to convert the assistant to Opus Dei (the real Hanssen was an Opus Dei member along with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and, according to rumor, FBI head of the time, Louis Freeh.) Curiously, it only mentions the cult by name one time late in the film. The film is structured as a thriller, but the plot is so understated that it comes across as more a psychological character drama.

- J

Notes on "Mississippi Masala"

In the seventies, Idi Amin expelled from Uganda people of Indian descent. Many had been in Uganda for generations. Mississippi Masala is the story of one such expelled family who ended up in Mississippi. The daughter falls in love with a black man. It is a story about race and racism, but not the traditional story. It is about how suspicions and mistrust can grow between two oppressed minorities. It is a very interesting movie, but a little emotionally flat.

- J

Notes on "Romance and Cigarettes"

The movie Romance and Cigarettes, directed by John Turturro, is about a working class couple in Jersey with marital problems. Done as a musical. James Gandolfini is kicked out of his home for infidelities. He begins to sing. Pretty soon he is dancing in the street with the garbage men. Depressing topic. Fun movie.

- J

Notes on "The Kite Runner"

The movie, The Kite Runner, is true to the book upon which it is based. Plot details are followed in sequence, more so than in most movies. It is perhaps too true. Cinematically, it feels a little flat, at least by modern expectations. On the other hand, the story has a lot of authenticity. I think this is what attracted people to the book. It would be difficult to make the story more cinematic without losing the authenticity.

- J

Notes on "Very Annie Mary"

The film Very Annie Mary is a wonderful movie. It heartwarming piece of surrealism starring Rachel Griffiths. It takes place in a rural valley in Wales and is about a woman's efforts to find her way out from under her father's all consuming shadow. It borrows from the surreal Australian films of Griffiths's earlier career and the English underdog from the midland's makes good. Every plot twist is contrary to the conventions of modern films, yet entirely predictable and consistent with the characters involved. Rent it.

- J

Notes on "Sweeney Todd"

The recent movie Sweeney Todd, starring Johnny Depp, is more theatrical than cinematic. The interest is more in the grace and flair the actors demonstrate in their roles than in the characters in their world. Special effects are used a great deal to conceal this, but mainly it is talented actors hamming it up. In this it is not unlike The Pirates of the Caribbean series, in which Johnny Depp also stars.

- J

Notes on "Pan's Labyrinth"

The Spanish movie Pan's Labyrinth takes place in Spain in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. It concerns a bookish and imaginative girl who's mother, a widow, has married a cruel captain in the Franco's army. He is engaged in mopping up remaining republicans in a small village. There are two stories that run in parallel: the story of the small band of rebels and their struggles with the cruel captain, and the story of the girl's inner life of fantasy. As the barbaric world comes closer to the girl, so the inner fantasies become more intense and dangerous.

For me, the "real world" story was not very real. It was as much a product of the CGI shop as the fantasy story, only with an element of sado-masochism. The "real world" story was as much a fantasy.

The movie felt to me a lot like the Matrix series. For all their mythologizing, it felt like there were no humans involved in the filmmaking.

- J

Notes on "The Cooler"

The Cooler is a movie starring William H. Macy about a man with such bad luck that he is employed in a Las Vegas casino to "cool" the luck of gamblers. He falls in love, his luck changes, and hilarity ensues. Well, hilarity and a good deal of extreme violence.

- J

Notes on "Letters from Iwo Jima"

The Clint Eastwood film, Letters from Iwo Jima, is a companion to his earlier film, Flags of our Fathers. This one is about the Battle of Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective. Like many later Eastwood films, this one centers around violence, but neither romanticizes nor moralizes it. Not to say that it avoids mythologizing. Eastwood is all about the mythic. In this case, it is about the honor system of Japan and the cult of suicide. The narrative makes a distinction between the uses of the honor system to promote authoritarianism and conformity and the truely honorable death.

- J

Notes on "June Bug"

The movie, June Bug, is a very American movie, but had the feel of a French film. It was quiet and static with an ambiguous ending.

This is a city mouse/country mouse story. A sophisticated art dealer from the city is trying to sign a primitivist painter from the deep south. Since this is near her new husband's family home he comes along. The art dealer bumbles along, not understanding her newly acquired family's country ways. Her husband is divided between the two worlds.

The protagonist is clearly the art dealer. Her husband is out of focus for most of the movie. But in the end, it is he that is changed by the experience.

A strange, fastinating, out-of-place, out-of-time piece of filmmaking.

- J

Notes on "Charlie Wilson's War"

The film Charlie Wilson's War is about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the role of Congressman Charlie Wilson in providing funding for the resistance. It stars Tom Hanks, Julie Roberts and Phillip Seymore Hoffman, was written by Aaron Sorkin of West Wing, and directed by Mike Nichols. These are such very competent people and we are so used to seeing their work that we are swept along. It is an entertaining couple of hours. Only afterwards did I stop and realize that there was so little there. This is a political procedural, like a TV cop show or hospital drama. Things happen that appear to have great moral weight but no one changes fundamentally.

The story is based on real world events. Just as in the real world Charlie Wilson had a reputation as a rake, became obsessed with Afghanistan, coerced a reluctant CIA to become involved in the effort to resist the Soviets. Some people have said that the defeat of the Soviet Army there brought down the Soviet Union, though it is of course a bit more complicated than that. But the movie is not very interested in the war in Afghanistan. This is depicted in a couple of montages, the movie is not very interested in the politics, not interested in the refugees. It seems mostly interested in the irony of the assertion that it was a libertine Democrat, and
not the moralistic Reagan that brought the Soviets to their knees.

- J

Notes on "Atonement"

The 2007 movie Atonement felt emotionally false to me. Very nice cinematography and competent acting, but to what end?

- J

Notes on "Fellini's 8 1/2"

I remember being enthralled seeing 8½ in the seventies. Seeing it recently, I felt less involved. Some individual scenes are quite memorable: a coming of age memory on the beach where the village outcast dances for the young Fellini and his school mates, a scene taking the water at a health spa, and a scene on an aborted movie set. Unusually for an Italian movie, there is no whorehouse, but there is a fantasy harem sequence. It amounts to about the same thing I suppose.

- J

Notes on "La Vie en Rose"

La Vie en Rose is a biopic about Édith Piaff. It is told as a sequence of montages unrelated in time. Unlike many films that use this technique, there is no wrapping narrative that explains the jumps. This is not a sequence of interconnected memories. Rather, it appears, the filmmaker made a standard biopic in standard narrative order: star as a child has traumatic experience, star gets foot in the door by chance, star struggles to adjust to changing tastes, star has problems with drug abuse, star abandons those who love star, star collapses on stage, star has comeback concert, star dies. I think they realized that they had done this, so decided to randomize the chronology to so that it would not be so apparent.

- J

Notes on "Savages"

I heard from several source that The Savages was a movie about disfunctional siblings caring for an emotionally distant parent with dementia, but funny! I can confirm all but the last clause. It was a well acted movie and emotionally honest, but it was not funny, at least not for me.

- J

Notes on "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind"

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is a film based on the Chuck Barris autobiography of the same name. Chuck Barris was a creator of trashy game shows for television -- The Dating Game, The Newlywed Show, The Gong Show. In his autobiography he claims to have led a double life as a CIA assassin. The movie plays it straight, except that the actor playing Barris plays his role rather broadly. The movie was a project of George Clooney, who directs and acts. It was a well paced movie, never boring, but unsatisfying. The movie seemed to be making some important point about Hollywood, but I didn't get it. Maybe it would make sense to people in the business.

- J

Notes on "Once"

Once is an Irish film in which a street singer and a struggling immigrant woman from the Czech Republic meet and rescue one another through music. The film is mostly told through the music, although it is not a musical in the normal sense. The immigrant woman is strong in a way that immigrants are often forced to be, and this one fact causes the film to have a rhythm and trajectory that is counter to that of most films.

- J

Notes on "There Will Be Blood"

There Will Be Blood is a 2007 Paul Thomas Anderson film about the early days of the oil business in California. It is loosely based on an Upton Sinclair novel, Oil. It felt like an Upton Sinclair novel. It has a plot arc of the naturalistic fiction of Frank Norris and Emile Zola or of the Italian films of the '50s. That is to say, the plot arc steadily in relentlessly downhill.

This is a geek film. Most films about the oil business would show a derrick and gray men working around it, but here we see the evolution of the technology from a man with a pick and shovel at the bottom of a hole to men with buckets slopping oil out, to primitive pumps. We see primitive braces and pulleys turning into 80 foot derricks. We see barrels rolled onto trains evolve into pipelines. It is fascinating to witness. Often, the details of the mechanics are exposed as a setup to some dramatic catastrophe. One becomes conscious that, if the camera spends time showing the course of a belt, then soon that belt will break and someone will be harmed. We do not see the mechanics simply for the interest of the mechanics, but that's okay.

A theme this movie has in common with Paul Thomas Anderson's earlier Boogie Nights is family, specifically rejection of family. Both, Daniel Plainview, the protagonist of this film, and the subject of Boogie Nights have turned away from family, and spend much of their respective films trying to reconstruct a version of it. In Boogie Nights, the family is the porn movie production company. Both lose their bearings when their pseudo-families fall apart.

- J

Notes on "Boogie Nights"

Boogie Nights is a 1999 film by Paul Thomas Anderson. Nashville in the San Fernando Valley.

- J

Notes on "The Tale of Sweeney Todd"

The Tale of Sweeney Todd is a 1998 version of the London horror tale, not the Stephen Sondheim/Tim Burton/Johnny Depp musical currently contending for an Oscar. It turns out that the Fleet Street barber's story has been rendered to film quite often, going back to 1926. The version we saw was a made for TV movie, but it the title character was played by Ben Kingsley and the remaining cast was quite respectable. In this version the homicidal haircare specialist has a blood lust that grew from war experiences in Africa. There is, of course a vendor of meat pies. An American agent inquiring after jewels in the care of one of Sweeney's victims accidentally uncovers the whole nasty enterprise. London is portrayed as a grim, dark, damp, muddy place filled with nasty brutish crude louts with bad teeth and frayed whigs. All except the principals, who have good teeth and their own hair. Having gone to the expense of hiring first rate actors, decorating and peopling a dispiriting early nineteenth century world, that the movie would hinge on a melodramatic plot device out of Sergeant Preston and the Mounted Police or a Bond movie. What was the point of getting everybody mucked up for a deus ex machina?

- J