Weekly Viewing

I am unduly proud of myself - I have gotten the interval for these review posts down to a week! It will be a miracle if I can keep on this schedule, but I have to hope...

Broken Embraces: 9/15 - another Almodovar film, that I'm afraid starts to blend in with all the other Almodovar films. It takes a long while to get going, and traverses some very well worn ground - a film director, flashbacks, embedded narratives, Penelope Cruz, secrets and lies, dramatic revelations, car accidents and handicaps, vengeance and forgiveness, in jokes, movie quotes, bright colors, etc. - by the end, I have to admit, it's become quite involving - but it takes too long to get there, and you never get anywhere you haven't been before with Almodovar. Still - he's a masterful filmmaker - after suffering through last week's slithering camera, it was a huge relief to see a filmmaker who knew what to do with the camera - when to move it, when to leave it alone, how to stage action for the camera without jacking it up with artificial motion... The Last Station set my teeth on edge - this, even if the story seems like secondary Almodovar, is a joy to look at. Though not as much as the film he produced, that I also saw last week... we'll get to that.

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers: 10/15 - Story of Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers - marine, Rand corp thinker, hawk, turned disillusioned, turned dove - who, seeing no other hope, copied the pentagon papers - a 7000 page report about US involvement in Vietnam (begun as a study commissioned by McNamara to demonstrate how we got sucked into this mess) - and the aftermath... It's a gripping story - Ellsberg (who narrates, and appears in interviews) is a compelling hero - and there are some neat sidenotes, the heroism of Mike Gravel, who had the papers read into the Senate record, things like that... It's also depressing - to think how useless it is. It helped get us out of Vietnam, and Nixon's overreaction helped ruin him - but 30 years later, have we learned anything? In the run up to Iraq, the secrets and lies were on open display - it was widely known and understood that Iraq had no WMDs - but this was somehow forgotten, marginalized, ignored, ommitted, despite the fact that it was on public display. The gutlessness of the papers and the news, and congress in this decade is agonizing.... This film, as a film, has a good story to tell and tells it efficiently, though I suppose it's nothing particularly innovative as a film. Though there's no need for it to try to be fancy - the material and people involved carry the film.

The Headless Woman: 13/15 - I saw this back in '08, at the Harvard Film Archive, with Lucrecia Martel in town, talking about it... I didn't write about it then - but I thought when I saw it it was the film of the year... It played again last week at the Brattle, the day it was supposed to snow - seeing it again - I'm sure it's a masterpiece. The story is - a woman driving home alone from some kind of family gathering, looks down to answer her phone and hits something - she sits for a moment or two, then drives off, without looking back. (The camera looks back, something - a dog? - out of focus on the road...) It starts to rain - she ends up at a hospital, having her head checked, then goes to hotel, when she meets a man, who takes her home... She is in shock, if not amnesiac - she doesn't react to people, she may not even recognize them - she goes through the motions for a day or so, and slowly seems to emerge from this confusion. But then, she thinks she remembers, hitting a child, not a dog - her husband and other men check around, don't find any evidence of a kid getting hurt - and then they do hear about a kid falling in the canal, drowning. Did she do it? Her husband, brother, etc. erase all records of her accident - does she start to doubt her memory? The film end as she walks into a room, with her family and friends, and she disappears into the crowd... It's an intense, riveting film - Martel keeps us very close to Vero (the headless woman) - tight closeups and fuzzy backgrounds at the beginning, backing off as the film continues and she returns to herself, but still tracking her, as she seems to be absorbed into the world around her. The focus remains on her, but other characters give us tantalzing glimpses of their worlds - a strange young woman with hepatitis; the odd relationship with her lover (who seems to be either her cousin or her brother in law, I'm not sure what.) The extended families that play a larger part in Martel's other films are still present in this one, though the film follows Vero more closely - but Martel can sketch in the suggestion of expansive worlds with the barest details. One of the best films of the past couple years, and Martel one of the best directors working today. It's been something of a slow start to this year - I've seen a couple pretty good films, but nothing that really nails it - seeing this again, one of the decade's best - was a joy.

Finally - my home viewing this week was mostly given over to The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin - a show I'd watched now and then in the past, though only isolated episodes, never quite getting into the flow of it. Watching it end to end this weekend was a revelation - it's a marvel.