This is a continuation of the previous post. I recommend you read them all in order. Here's a link to the first part.
Wednesday came and we had to return most of our videos, seen and unseen, to the library, but we walked away with three more big piles of DVDs. The Festival continues.
Starring Jean duJardin and Bérénice Bejo
Directed by Michel Hazanavicius
Released: 2011
This is a remarkable film. Jean duJardin plays silent film star George Valentin, a sort of Douglas Fairbanks type. When talkies come along he scoffs at the notion that they will ever be popular.
Meanwhile, he runs into wanna-be starlet Peppy Miller, played by Bérénice Bujo, literally by accident, and he literally leaves his mark on her. It apparently is just what she needs to get ahead in Hollywood, and her star rises as his sets. When Valentin is hospitalized after a fire in his home, Miller takes him in and does all she can for him. His pride becomes an issue, an obstacle to be overcome.
The story in this film is more about friendship than romance, and it's refreshing to see a Hollywood tale that doesn't depend on backstabbing and betrayal to be told. (You should know that the film is entirely in black-and-white, and is almost completely silent other than two brief scenes, and the almost relentless music. Do yourself a favour and watch it without closed captions.)
.png)
Starring Himesh Patel and Lily James
Directed by Danny Boyle
Released: 2019
On a warm evening before the Pandemic, something happened. All the power in the world went off for about twelve seconds. It was right about the time that failed singer/songwriter Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) was hit by a bus and lost two teeth. Everyone else in the world lost certain memories.
Once Jack recovers, his friends celebrate with a little get-together, at which they give him a new guitar, to replace the one destroyed in the crash. He uses it to play Yesterday, the beautiful ballad written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Except that none of his friends know the song. Turns out they have never heard of The Beatles. In fact, no one in the world seems to have ever heard of them. Only Jack. (He's also the only person who's ever heard of Coca Cola, but that doesn't figure in the story.)
When I was a kid I wanted to be John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Not one or the other, but both of them, because I found McCartney's songs too skippy-bubbly happy and Lennon's too dreary and (as we would now call it) woke; but together they worked magic, writing songs that are as fresh now as when they were new. I will hardly ever listen to Instant Karma or Silly Love Songs all the way through, but if Got to Get You Into My Life comes on the radio, I'm tuned to that station for the duration. Jack Malik got to live my dream some fifty years later.
Jack suddenly becomes the world's most famous musician, on the strength of such songs as She Loves You, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and Let It Be. He meets real celebrities, particularly Ed Sheeran (played by himself), and gets an agent and a record deal before realizing what the cost is. Wealth and fame turn out to be a double-edged sword, and Jack has to decide how he is going to deal with it.
I saw this film in the theater when it was new, and was frustrated by the little snippets of great music it dropped in throughout the two hours of film. But such earworms! The only complete rendition of any Beatles song in the film is over the closing credits, when we get to hear the entire (real) version of Hey, Jude. It's worth the wait if not the teasing.
16. The Good German
Starring George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Tobey McGuire
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Released: 2006
Nineteen-forty-five: war rages on in the Pacific, but Germany has surrendered in Europe. The allies have divvied up the capital city for occupation and are preparing to hold the Potsdam Conference to see who gets what. George Clooney plays Jake Geismer, a war correspondent posted to Berlin to cover the conference. There he runs into his old girlfriend Lena, who is now the girlfriend of Corporal Patrick Tully, the soldier assigned to be Jake's driver. It's not a coincidence.
Things in Berlin are a mess, made messier when Corporal Tully washes up dead in Potsdam with big bucks on his body. Jake wants to investigate it but is waved away by the US Military Governor. He gets involved anyway, and it rapidly gets complicated. Too complicated for me, in fact: while I eventually figured out what was going on and why people did what they did, I don't feel like I was helped at all by the storytelling in this downbeat black-and-white film. Instead, I get the feeling that too much of real interest was left on the cutting room floor. Aspects of character are introduced that look like they're important, or are going to figure in the resolution, but they just lie there like so many gefilte fish. It's as though they started off to make a film comment on one facet of society, but then swerved to a commentary on something else, and forgot to update all the roadsigns.
By the end I didn't much care anyway. That may be the worst thing you can say about a suspense film: the audience doesn't care. Besides, I've never been much of a fan of film noir: its movie-industry practitioners seem too willing to sacrifice content for mood. This gritty movie does nothing to disabuse me of that prejudice.
Starring Drew Barrymore, Justin Long, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis and Christina Applegate
Directed by Nanette Burstein
Released: 2010
This is what I want in a rom-com: a reasonably realistic relationship portrayed with reasonably realistic characters and reasonably realistic dialogue, one that actually makes me laugh out loud more than once while my heartstrings are tugged. Barrymore and Long deliver the first part; Day, Sudeikis and Applegate deliver the second and third, and everybody, including supporting actor Jim Gaffigan, contribute to the last part. This is, as a result, a fun little movie; not great art, but fun. And don't miss the deleted scenes if you're renting the DVD. I have a feeling they were ad-libs and they are funny.
The premise is simple: she is an intern at a New York newspaper; he works in the music business. They meet shortly before she returns to school on the west coast, and fall in love. The rest of the movie chronicles their efforts to keep the relationship, which is important to both of them, going despite the distance. I had a long-distance relationship myself once, and this story rings true to me, though mine was less intense and nobody followed either of us around with a film crew. I also didn't have such an enjoyable cadre of supporters as these two people have. I need better writers in my life, I guess, though my own personal sequel did much better than the original.
Starring Anthony Hopkins
Directed by Roger Donaldson
Released: 2005
Anthony Hopkins, one of the world's great actors, plays an eccentric old Kiwi Burt Munro, who for years has dreamed of taking his ancient Indian motorcycle to the Bonneville salt flats and setting a world speed record. The film is based on a real person, who actually sort-of did the motorcycle-related things shown in the film, though a number of details, according to Wikipedia, are fabricated or altered, including the outcome of his trip to Bonneville.
The World's Fastest Indian is essentially a one-man road movie. Scenes set at Munro's house in New Zealand establish his idiosyncracies, including his skill in manufacturing parts for his bike and his capacity for aggravating his neighbours, who nonetheless remain friendly toward him. (That may be the difference between "eccentric" and "crazy".) He then loads the bike onto a ship and sails to Los Angeles, where he encounters a sometimes-confusing American culture. He buys an old car, builds a trailer, and drives his motorcycle across the desert to Bonneville, leaving a trail of well-wishers in his wake. It's a heart-warming tale, even if it's not strictly true in detail.
On another note ... I was intrigued by the cover quote on the library's copy of this movie: "One of the year's best films," said by Jeffrey Lyons, a respectable film critic. I thought that was a stretch too far; it was a nice movie, a pleasant movie, but one of the year's best? I didn't think that could be true outside of MAGA-land; but this film came out long before there were Jewish space lasers "they" use to control the weather and make hurricanes. So I looked online to see what great movies came out in 2005 (when this film was released in New Zealand) and 2006 (when it opened in the United States).
Turns out Lyons' opinion is arguably true. There were no really good movies released in either year. It was a time dominated by franchise films like Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith; Batman Begins; and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Just about the only film of those years that I've seen and could call "great" is Joe Wright's film Pride and Prejudice with Keira Knightly ... and I'm biassed by being a huge fan of both Jane Austen and Keira Knightly. So anyway, Lyons' tribute quote is arguably true by default. Good on him.
Starring too many big names to list
Directed by Robert Altman
Released: 2001
Downton Abbey meets Clue. The cover of the DVD (and the movie poster shown) lists sixteen names as stars in this film; having watched it, I think a lot of people got left out of the list
If
you can't bring yourself to let this silly story just wash over you as
you admire the words spoken and the pictures shown -- if you need some drama
with your comedy -- you will likely be disappointed by this movie.
You're not watching a period murder mystery, you're watching a
vaudeville revue. None of the characters develop in any way, though
certain things are revealed about some of the understairs staff.
A mean old tightwad invites an uncurated group of selfish people to his country house during the Great Depression. He gets murdered eventually, and the police are called in. Don't get too hung up on the plot: it's just a coat hanger for the many amusing performances in this loose talent show. (My favourite is Stephen Fry as the most clueless police inspector in film.) By the end of the movie we know who done it and why, and we've gotten some laughs and we've admired the gaudy late-Edwardian décor and hair and clothing, and we've studied the glimpses of several nice old cars (particularly the 1924 Rolls Royce that drives Maggie Smith away at the end). Let that be enough, and just be glad you only borrowed or rented the DVD, or bought it out of the bargain bin at Wal-Mart. It's worth that.
Starring Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie and Robert DeNiro
Directed by Robert DeNiro
Released: 2006
There was a time when this great nation left organized spying to our friends in Britain and their European frenemies. About the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, we had cottoned onto the need for spies of our own, and after a few jolly ploys in imitation of Brit ways, we got our act together and set up a group of self-righteous snobs to keep tabs on our Cold-War opponents and allies. We told ourselves they were all honourable men (see Julius Caesar III.2) and left them to do their dirty work in our collective name.
This film traces the career of one particular honourable man, played by a completely mirthless Matt Damon as he goes from Yale schoolboy to CIA bigwig. It is a study in the contrast between his success as a spy and his failure as a husband and father. The story is convoluted and complex, and centers on the Bay of Pigs Invasion in the early 1960s, historically a sort of turning-point in that it marked the end (hopefully) of the uncontrolled Wild West Cowboy style of spycraft that had prevailed since the start of World War II, in favour of a more cerebral and technologically sophisticated spying that (we hope) serves us better as a nation in a complex world full of suspect friends and smiling enemies. Sort of like the student body at Yale.
It's a good movie, full of good performances, and not too much of it was shot in the dark, so you can actually see what's going on most of the time. Angelina Jolie's character is, to my mind, unstable, but maybe it's meant to be that way. Seems to me, though, that she was unhinged from the start and just looking for someone to blame. The relationship between her and Damon's character -- wife and husband -- plays such an episodic part in the story that it seems like most of that aspect of the tale got cut out after the fact, leaving it a little confusing. If the point of it was to explicate the final resolution of the film, involving their son (played by Eddie Redmayne), it kind of misses. Still, a good movie.
Starring Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée
Released: 2009
Everybody wants to know: what was Julian Fellowes doing with himself before Downton Abbey? Turns out he was writing luxuriant period pieces about titled rich people who live in big, fancy houses. Things like this film, the story of King George III's great-niece, last of the Hanovers, first of the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, ancestor of the Windsors.
Victoria had the good fortune to reign for a long time while her nation was at its political and economic peak. Everything in the world is named for her, and as a result people think she is important in the great scheme of things. Well, certainly she was more important outside her own circle than I am outside of mine, but that's not saying much. Whether she was more important than my ancestors is a closer question, and I come down on the side of my ancestors, without whom I would be in no position to argue about anything.
But I digress.
In the 21st Century we like to see Victoria as an expression of feminist virtues, whatever they may be. Like every other set of virtues, they fluctuate with the sensibilities of the viewer. In this film, she is a very rich young woman in love with a less-rich but equally well-connected young man, and the two of them are making their way, either without guidance or with too much guidance, toward a balance between her public position, his public position, and their respective private wants and needs. We know from history that they largely succeeded. The world went on around them, and because of their public positions, especially hers, their lives are extraordinarily well documented, so anybody wishing to make a point about anything that comes after Victoria can point to something she did, or something he did, or something one of them didn't do. Truth is in the eye of the beholder.
Either way, it's a beautifully made movie, and you get a frisson of pleasure at seeing her gradually assert herself in the face of pressure from politicians and, especially, family. One wonders that the Germans are so much more attuned to things than the English.
