Movie Roundup, Continued
Note: I’ve been assuming in these notes that you’re assuming that these movies are basically for adults, and haven’t noted contraindications for children. Most of these are more or less unsuitable for children, but it doesn’t matter because they wouldn’t be interested anyway. Some have nudity or, as they say in the ratings, "sexual situations," that go a bit beyond suggestion, fairly mild by today’s non-standards, but if in doubt consult ratings, and feel free to email me for specifics.
Dead Man Walking: Like more than half of the movies on this list, this was my wife’s pick, and I would probably never have seen it on my own initiative. I assumed it would be a fairly heavy-handed piece of anti-death-penalty propaganda. But it isn’t, at all. It’s really quite well done and, taken as a study of the moral questions surrounding capital punishment, very even-handed. Sean Penn doesn’t do an entirely convincing Louisiana accent but apart from that he’s extremely good, as is most of the cast. I would recommend it, no matter what your views on the death penalty are, but if you haven’t seen it, be warned that much of it is pretty painful viewing, especially the crime committed by Penn’s character. (This one, by the way, is absolutely not for children.)
Broken Flowers: Bill Murray playing what has become his standard depressed and vaguely hostile character, visiting a string of ex-girlfriends to discover which of them sent him a note claiming that he has a 19-year-old son. The plot becomes a capsule version of “life’s a bitch and then you die.” There are some great moments but as a whole it leaves one in a sort of Bill-Murray-character frame of mind, morose expectations confirmed and feeling that nothing in particular has changed, no lessons learned.
The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Italian L'Albero degli zoccoli): This 1978 film has been recommended to me more than once as a Catholic classic, and by people whose opinions I respect, so I feel a bit guilty saying that I was disappointed in it. I should give it another try some time: watching a slow-moving three-hour movie on Friday night was a mistake, as in my house we are always short on sleep by the end of the work week, and I found it difficult to stay interested in this portrait of Italian peasants ca. 1900. It’s beautifully done, and the picture of the way the Faith is embedded in the lives of the people makes you say, “That’s the way it ought to be.” Don’t let me discourage you.
The Dress (Dutch De Jurk): Story of a dress and the people through whose hands it passes, an idea that has more potential than it delivers. Much of the story involves a creep who has a weird erotic attachment to the dress. The English-speaking viewer inevitably attaches the Dutch title to him. It doesn’t add up to anything much.
Beyond Silence (German Jenseits der Stille): Another family drama that I wouldn’t have picked, but which turned out to be very much worthwhile. About a girl whose deaf parents expect more from her in the way of assistance with everyday life than she is, as she gets older, prepared to give. The situation is complicated by the father’s sister, who encourages the girl’s musical abilities, which prove to be substantial: absolutely the worst art she could have chosen, of course. It’s all worked out very believably and touchingly, with no cheap follow-your-bliss stuff. Excellent and recommended.
Nowhere in Africa (German Nirgendwo in Afrika): Still another family drama that I wouldn’t have picked; moreover, still another drama about Jews attempting to escape the Nazis, a subject which one would think is pretty well exhausted. But it’s marvelous. The family’s escape is to Africa, and the film is much less about what’s happening in Europe than about the reactions and adaptations of mother, father, and daughter to Africa. Far too much here to be summarized briefly, but suffice to say it’s very much worth seeing; the visual portrait of the African landscape and people alone would make it so. The final image haunts me. Based—as I began to suspect within the first half-hour or so—on an autobiographical novel by Stephanie Zweig which I think I’d like to read.
The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl: It’s three hours long, so you may want to watch it in two installments, but fascinating. Riefenstahl, as you probably know, produced films, some brilliant, for the Nazis. She herself appears here, sometimes attempting to explain and sometimes appearing to evade the facts of her complicity. Had she not stuck with the Nazis she would have seemed to us another glamorous female adventurer of the between-wars period, and there’s a bit of there-but-for-fortune in seeing how easy it might be to follow a regime into deep evil if one is respected, admired, and rewarded within it.
The Battle of Algiers (Italian La Battaglia di Algeri): I wanted to see this because I’d heard it bears a lot of relevance to the Iraq war. It does. It’s also a very fine work apart from that.
Faust: F. W. Murnau’s 1926 silent version. Like The General, which I’ve already written about here, I wanted to see this for more or less educational reasons, because it’s considered a classic, not necessarily expecting to enjoy it. But I did. If you can adapt to the conventions of the silent and to the filmmaking technology of the 1920s, you may find this far more enjoyable than you might have expected. I did.
Kolya (Czech): Hmm, yet another abandoned-child story. This one is also a life-under-Communism story: Kolya is a politically out-of-favor cellist who participates in a phony but legal marriage (an immigration dodge) which leaves him in custody of a child, the last thing he wanted to bring into his womanizing routine. Fairly slight but very good.
La Notte (The Night, Italian): The second in what is generally considered an Antonioni trilogy beginning with L’Avventura and ending with L’Eclisse. I didn’t like this one as well as L’Avventura, though I do want to see it again. Here’s an interesting comment from an anonymous Netflix customer: “The ending is (like many other films of this era) what we would today call borderline—unable to feel or act without a painful and ultimately destructive push and pull of emotion…demanding drama in your life can work in film. Films of this era created a whole generation of people who tried to actually live that way, and looking back at these films is instructive as to how we have gotten where we are—needing constant external input.” Don’t know that the cause-and-effect (very few Americans saw this film in its day, and probably not all that many Europeans did), but that does perhaps describe a real action-reaction in the culture.
The Firemen’s Ball(Czech Horí, má panenko): I was on my way to thinking that this 1967 Milos Forman film was a near-complete waste of time, shortly after my nineteen-year-old daughter bailed out on it, when I began to realize that there was a statement about life in Communist Czechoslovakia going on. That made it a bit more interesting. Still, it’s a kind of shabby and not extremely interesting story. I may be speaking partly out of prejudice against Milos Forman, whose later Hollywood career seems to have produced some films for which I don’t have a lot of respect, e.g. Amadeus and The People vs. Larry Flynt. (I have not seen the latter, but since everyone, admirers and detractors alike, seems to agree that it makes something of a hero of Larry Flynt while glossing over the disgusting truth about him, I feel justified in my opinion).
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