Films Seen Recently

Last weekend I began, tentatively, to return to the wide world, after a couple weeks devoted to moving. Managed to see a couple new films, after not seeing anything the previous week - a rather drastic layoff for me...

Greenberg: 11/15 - Ben Stiller plays Roger Greenberg, a depressive ex-musician, turning 41, house sitting for his rich brother in LA. He lurks about the house, not quite able to go outside and talk to people - stalking around LA in his NY regalia, sometimes annoying his old friends... He meets his brother's PA, Florence, played by Greta Gerwig (actually, we meet her first, driving around running errands for the brother - Roger is introduced slowly and off camera), and after some rather awkward attempts at conversation, he seduces her. In a somewhat loose sense of the word "seduce". It is a character study, mostly of Greenberg, though Florence - and indeed several other characters - are neatly limned at the edges of his world - he's a miserable son of a bitch, lonely, passive, paralyzed with a kind of agoraphobia that he hides, partly by joking about it. (A paralysis that always seems about to become literal - and has, in the past... he seems to have had a stint in a mental hospital when his legs stopped working...) He's odd - he seems to know these things, knows what affect he has on people, but can't quite stop himself - he's selfish but too self aware not to hate himself for it - he draws people in then rejects them, almost as if he were trying to save them from getting involved with him. All this is very nicely shot and put together - Stiller is superb, and is surrounded by an ace cast, especially Gerwig, though also Rhys Ifans and Jennifer Jason Leigh in smaller, but sharp, roles. It slots into the current state of cinema in some odd ways - picking up some of the looseness and mannerisms of "mumblecore" (as well as Gerwig) - and at times, resembling the story and characters you might find in one of Arnaud Desplechins' films. Stiller comes off as the passive version of the manic madmen Matthieu Amalric has been playing for Desplechins - the relationship between Greenberg and Florence is a bit like the one between Amalric and "La Chinoise" in Kings and Queens. It's a much more modest film than Desplechins' multi-generational, multi-character, stylistically extravagant 21st century monsters, but works well in its way.

The Secret of the Kells: 10/15 - it's Ireland in the dark ages, the Vikings are raising hell, and Abbott Cellach at Kells is building a great wall that he thinks might keep them out. His nephew Brendan, though, is more interested in the books the monks are illuminating, and more curious about the outside world, which he has been forbidden to enter. Then another monk, Brother Aidan, a master illuminator, arrives from Iona, the only survivor of the Vikings raid - carrying a magnificent book, that he continues working on, with Brendan's help. Conflict ensues! as the abbott lays down the law, and Aiden warns that the Vikings will destroy all etc... Brendan has adventures in the forest with the help of a fairy, and things go more or less as expected. The Vikings arrive, with predictable results... But the book is completed (not exactly a spoiler, since this is a story about the Book of Kells)... All told, I suppose it's pretty typical children's film fare - you can see the plot coming a mile away - but it is ravishing to look at, drawn in a style derived from the book of Kells, as well as, maybe, woodcuts and such - all angles and curves and light ands dark. (Reminded me at times of Virginia Lee Burton - all swirls and angles and lines, strongly two-dimensional, very stylized - especially Calico the Wonder Horse, a perfectly gorgeous book, one of the foundational texts for this humble correspondent...) The style alone, avoiding the current vogue for digitized animation and three-dimensionality, makes it a joy to watch...

I did manage to catch a couple other films over the last month - goes back some... saw The Red Shoes (13/15) - Powell and Pressberger, filmmakers I have not seen near enough of (I think this might be the first of their collaborations in color I have seen) - another ravishing film, with an interesting vision of art and collaboration, that raises some intriguing questions about art and gender as well... I have to admit, though, that I saw it in the middle of the first of the 2-3 Biblical Tempests we've recently suffered here in Beantown, and half drowned myself getting to the theater, and spent the film shivering and wishing I could be in Monte Carlo...

The Ghost Writer: 10/15 - I guess I managed to see this since my last post too. Polanski's latest - a fine little thriller, though probably a total fantasy (one of the architects of the Iraq war brought up on war crimes charges? heavens...) Ewan McGregor as a ghost writer hired to replace another writer who fell off a ferry boat in the rain - this new ghost soon finds plenty of information to indicate foul play, and acts on it, generating suspense and folly... It's virtually a Hitchcock cover, North By Northwest specifically, and done with aplomb. Nonsense or no, it's a gripping experience. It helps to have a juicy cast, and it does - Pierce Brosnan as a disgraced ex-PM, Olivia Williams as his wife (both character and actress being maybe the high point fo the film - why is she in so few films?), and McGregor managing a wormy innocence at the center of it all. Fine film.

And finally - on DVD - Byron, the BBC show with Jonny Lee Miller as England's greatest sinner.... I might as well admit to my rating - 6/15 - not good... It has its moments - Byron's life and misbehavior would seem well suited to potboiling film or TV... and there's scandal aplenty... it follows the Lord from Greece to Greece - first he saves a girl from being drowned by the Turks, then heads home to England to mope and write and then become famous and proceed to tup half of London, including Caroline Lamb, a madwoman with a weird haircut that no one seems to notice. Scandal! he leaves London, bangs his sister, then marries a prim schoolgirl who adores him. But he treats her bad and Caroline puts word around that he sodomized his wife and screwed his sister and off to Italy he goes, where he chases whores and talks to Shelley and then goes to Greece and is bled to death. It's all handsome enough, and hard to imagine, really, how you can make all that into dull repetitive cliches, but they somehow pull it off. Most of it plays as a rather standard, if elliptical, biopic, that falls into very dull patterns after a while. The dialogue is particularly annoying, as it seems to consist of the cast taking turns coming on to recite a set of standard lines - Shelly declaims about revolution and hope; the wife mews about god, sin, and mathematics; the sister is earthy and sweet, Caroline Lamb is crazy, etc. etc. - this is particularly notable in the second half - the first half at least has Byron romancing a variety of women, with some stakes in the various relationships. The second half starts with the end of the marriage and never bothers to treat what came after as worthy on its own. Some halfway decent performances are squandered, and a whole host of great writers aren't quoted very often, and given whiny repetitive lines to read. Too bad!