Quick Reviews

A couple new movies, and a very rare old one....

Ten Items of Less - bit of a slow week for regular new releases - this is the only one that seemed al that appealing. And it lived up to it. A neat little two hander between Morgan Freeman and Paz Vega (of Sex and Lucia fame - one of those unjustly neglected gems: Julio Medem is an unjustly neglected gem). Freeman plays an actor who is damned near himself - he is in a slump, or something and researching a role for his sort of comeback in an indie film. He gets dropped off by a stupid PA at a barren supermarket, and starts wandering around, and soon takes notice of the smart angry girl in the 10 items or less lane. His ride doesn't come back, so when she goes off duty he goes with her, but she has a job interview in the afternoon, but not before fighting with Bobby Cannavale, cornering the market on asshole roles. They take her gremlin and go shopping at Target, get Arby's and go to a car wash. All that is in the trailer, and it's the plot, but there you go? It's modest, but it nails it - the filmmaking is clear and simple, unshowy without being invisible... And the leads are superb. Freeman is able to be as charming and funny and wonderful as he is capable of - and he is capable of a lot of it. HIs character is a bit out of it, counting on his ability to charm his way through anything, but also endlessly curious and generous... Vega's character is young and pretty and smart and wants to get along in life on her own power. They play well together. It's shocking to see something like this from Brad Silberling, maker of the atrocious City of Angels. This is another Capra riff, by the way - but a good one, more in tune to the early, lighter ones, complete with jokey out of tune songs... (Speaking of which - I notice I didn't mention seeing Platinum Blonde and Bombshell last week. This isn't Platinum Blonde by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not far from a stripped down Broadway Bill.)

Piano Tuner of Earthquakes - new from the Quay brothers. A gothic nighmare of a film about a singer kidnapped by a mad doctor Droz who brings in a piano tuner to tune his automata. There is also a housekeeper and the girl's jilted lover, also played by the actor who plays the piano tuner. Things go roughly as expected. Handsome and strange, with some moments of great animations, but generally rather tedious. Plays like a sedated and slightly out of sorts Guy Maddin film.

Enthusiasm - 1931 Dziga Vertov film, made in industrial Ukraine (the Donbasse region) to celebrate/advertise the first five year plan. In fact, a sensory battering - images, sounds coming at you with great force... (The woman introducing it told a story - at the London premiere , Vertov himself took over the sound controls, and turned up the volume to "ear=splitting" levels, despite the shouts and pleas of the audience.) Vertov hauled a monstrous sound camera to the Ukraine to make the film - he was after Truth, and considered himself part of the five year plans - he considered making films as valuable a kind of work as any other... No lack of actual physical labor involved... The film is about work: most of it set in coal mines and factories, showing the workers doing their jobs - it's about technology, machines - including the camera. The mill images get this the best - startinmg with abstract images of mills, lots of camera tricks, editing tricks and so on, then moving to the workers - he shows their actions actions fragmented, taken out of context - no sign of where things were coming from or going, what men were doing - a series of images of men working, at strange, repetitive tasks - prodding fires - throwing coal into a furnace (that made sense at least), a man grabbing a long thin piece of molten metal and twisting it around him. All this shown from various angles, including some radical overhead shots - accompanied mostly by natural sounds. Culminates in an almost ecstatic shot of molten metal lines twisting around on the screen, forming genuinely abstract patterns - very beautiful, very strange. It has an odd effect - he cuts up the actions, shows it from all angles, though never quite as a whole. It's interesting that a lot of the shots are perfectly natural - showing us what the workers see - they are absorbed into their specific tasks, and that is what we see. No one sees the steel coming together, no one sees the process whole... He does that - breaking up the overall process into its pieces, only tentatively bringing them all together at the end. It really is a spectacular, exhilerating film. Makes you want to go exceed a quota!