Recent Theatrical Viewings

Two weekends since the last post - sad, sad.... At least I have seen a good number of films in that stretch, more than I have in a long while - enough to break them into two posts, one for the theater, one for DVD...

Start with an old one - Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (13/15) - A very fine thriller, starring James Mason as an IRA man who leads a robbery, but is left behind after an exchange of gunfire, leading to a manhunt by cops and crooks alike. A lovely film, in the oddly off-kilter European noir style you see around that time - canted angles and rain slicked old streets surrounded by ancient buildings, with plenty of empty spaces, ruined houses - it's interesting that its Belfast looks like the Vienna of The Third Man or Berlin in A Foreign Affair, at least around the edges - the stoneworks where Mason is abandoned by a cabby, or the ruined tenement where he is taken by the three squatters... a very post-war feel. It is, anyway, a fantastic film, with Mason at his most pathetic most of the way, though given opportunity to cut loose there at the end - the rest of the cast is just as good - it is a treasure.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (9/15) - this is one of those films that I think I should like, it has everything I should like in a film, and I find that though, okay, yes, I suppose I like it, enjoy it, well enough, I am oddly unmoved. Okay, saw it, whatever man... it's about - Toronto slackers in a bad band, one of whom (ae 22) has a 17 year old girlfriend, an arrangement he seems to quickly come to regret - then he meets Ramona, from New York, girl of his dreams, and he hits it off and soon they are something - except he is still dating the 17 year old... Then he battles Ramona's 7 evil exes, video game style - etc. I can't quite articulate why this is so pointless - it is all well put together, clever and inventive all the way through, the visuals and editing and video game jokes and general air of provisional casual seriousness ought to be right up my alley, but it's not. It's the right idea, but comes off flat. Maybe it's just me, but I doubt it - I think it's probably that there's not much of a story there, young people falling in and out of love isn't all that important, and the stylistic overkill is just showing off. Maybe. 9 is still a pretty good rating - this is mostly a reaction to what I'd hoped for.

Soul Kitchen (9/15) - Fatih Akin's latest turns out to be almost the same deal as Scott Pilgrim - a film that should have been a lot better than it was. This story is about a Greek guy who owns a trashy roadhouse - things start coming apart for him - his girlfriend heads to China, he hurts his back, his brother is using him to get out of jail, the tax office is harassing him and then the health inspectors start too - when he tries to hire a volatile gourmet chef, the regulars storm out, mad that they can't get their usual hamburgers and pizza. But then a band starts practicing in the place, and their hipster friends love the food - success! Except - you know, complications... All this is really quite entertaining - Akin is the real deal, after all - the cast is outstanding, the script witty, the story clever enough. The problem is, there's not a second of it that doesn't feel like it's in quotes. It's Tampopo, more or less - the mysterious genius chef, the modest restaurant, the gangsters and lowlifes - but... It also seems to suffer a bit from an awkward fit of sensibilities - there are times, you get the impression Akin had to fight off the temptation to kill off half the cast... Still - it has all the makings of a really good film, but just doesn't make it. The best thing about it is the cast - Birol Unel, lean and craggy, or Adam Bousdoukos, a pudgy Jim Morrison, or the shockingly beautiful Dorka Gryllus as a therapist or Anna Bedarke as a hipster - I find I want to hang around these people, find out what they are up to. Everything else tends to fade.

This was a documentary weekend: first, Two in the Wave (10/15) - a nice, if minimal, documentary doc about Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, and their friendship, from the birth (and roots) of the Nouvelle Vague through their break, in the 70s, after 1968... It's sympathetic to both, through the end, quoting them at length on the break, in a way that makes them both seem right - Godard saying there is more to art than art (great riff on a metaphor from Day for Night - cinema as a train - but what kind of train? where is it going? who is on it, who owns it? he's right - all those things we take for granted when we make simple, poetic analogies)... But Truffaut also eloquent, and right, speaking about Matisse, living through three wars, and ignoring them to keep making his art, and his art is what matters. The film tells its story in clips and quotes - film, stills, texts, and so on, which keeps the film from becoming too static... It's fairly strong on the origins of the new wave, doing a good job of tracing its influences and values - though it tends to state its values, its influences, more than analyze them. We don't really get much on what actual cinematic changes were brought about - some hints about working methods, lots of talk about breaking rules. If you know what you are looking for, you can see it in the clips - but this film leaves too much undeveloped. It also gets weaker with the later material - it rushes through the 60s, and ignores everything after their break - it slights the rest of the new wave, other than naming a few of them when they appear in pictures with Godard or Truffaut. Still - it's interesting enough. One more thing - it could have been called "Three in the Wave" - since a lot of it is organized around the relationship between the two directors and Jean-Pierre Leaud. It begins and ends with him, the last shot of The 400 Blows - and makes much of how he moved between them, to establish and maintain his own identity, and how he became a kind of point of contention in the end. (Though he went back to Godard in the 80s, and never stopped working for Truffaut.) Though this too might be more interesting if it spent more time with his work with others, Rivette or Eustache, say... There's always more to the story, and it tends not to be in this film. (Leaud raises an interesting point, too, in how he worked with Truffaut and Godard. He was Truffaut's alter ego, and his star - the center of his films; with Godard, he was always part of an ensemble. He started working for Godard after Godard started moving away from stars (Anna Karina, Belmondo, etc.) - so he's always part of the group...)

The Tillman Story - 12/15 - a well named documentary, as it is not just about Pat Tillman, the football player turned soldier, but about his family - and about The Tillman Story - the myth surrounding him, the use made of him by the military and government to justify its two ill-advised wars... Basically - the myth - the football star who left to join the rangers after 9/11 (actually the next spring); who served in Iraq, then went to Afghanistan, where he was killed (4/22/04), by friendly fire. The army immediately covered up the friendly fire (in the field, it seems) - and made this worse by drumming up a heroic story about his death that was a complete fabrication - and did this knowing that he was killed by friendly fire. Things leaked out, as they usually will - the family found out a few months later and were understandably furious - and made a stink, pursuing the truth with great tenacity - investigations were held, that mostly came down to "mistakes were made" - the family kept pushing - more investigations, and a few scapegoats - more information, including a memo to and from some of the highest levels of the military and defense department - leading to congressional hearings, which prove to be the climax of the film. Or anti-climax, in a way - a row of 4 star generals pretending to congress that they didn't recall anything about the Pat Tillman memo - a particularly grotesque spectacle at the end, when one after another interrupts the congressional speaker to point out that they didn't actually recall any specific dates... It is not a moment to give you faith in our military leadership. Or political leadership either. [One might be tempted to note that congress is more wiling to pursue Roger Clemens for lying to congress about cheating in a baseball game than it is to pursue Stanley McChrystal or Donald Rumsfeld for lying about covering up the facts about a soldier's death, in order to use that soldier's death as a rallying point for support for their war. This will not bring happy thoughts.] It's an incredibly depressing film.

Though there is this - that one comes away with the sense that Pat Tillman himself was an infinitely more interesting, compelling, and probably heroic figure than the official, militaristic myth would show. There are times the film feels like a different kind of hagiography - of someone better than anyone around him at everything he did - capable of anything.... But it's easier to believe this Tillman is real, partly because we have the example of the rest of his family - who themselves embody most of the virtues they say he had. There's something in his story - there is something in his end - the likelier story, of being pinned down by friendly fire, and trying to get himself and his buddy out alive - that is as impressive as the invented ones. In a pointless and stupid way. The sense of heroism, strength, honor and all the things the military embodies, and usually embodies really, not just in words - being pissed away on useless posturing in the desert... That's always been there with Iraq, and has long since become equally true in Afghanistan, and that pointless squandering of American power is all too well represented by the Tillman story...