The THC Son and I recently watched I Like Me, the documentary on the life of John Candy. A funny and poignant reflection on a man who died at such a young age - 43. Full of commentary by his fellow comedians and actors, Steve Martin, Eugene Levy, Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Tom Hanks, Martin Short, Mel Brooks among them. McCauley Caulkin, who was in Uncle Buck with Candy, speaks very perceptively about Candy and Hollywood. Also featured is Catherine O'Hara, whose wonderful eulogy at Candy's funeral is shown. We watched I Like Me a couple of hours after hearing of O'Hara's passing.
I'd not been aware of Candy's father passing of a heart attack at the age of 35, nor of the crippling anxiety he experienced in the three years before his death in 1994. Interviews with his wife, son, and daughter explore that side of his life.
Watching the comedy and film clips reminds the viewer of not just how fine a comedian Candy was but how good he could be as a dramatic actor. The film's title is taken from one of his greatest dramatic scenes in Trains, Planes, and Automobiles.
Exhilarating was THC's reaction. THC hadn't planned to see A Complete Unknown when he first heard about it but was persuaded to take a chance after reading some reviews by people he respected. Glad he did so and is certain to see it again at some point.
Never saw Timothee Chalamet before. The kid is spot-on playing Dylan in all his mumbling, passive-aggressive glory and is very good performing the music. In fact, the staging of all the music scenes is done very well, including those of Joan Baez, played by the talented and charismatic Monica Barbaro, another actor new to THC.(1) Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, a version of Dylan's early 60s girlfriend Suze Rutolo, is also outstanding.
All of the casting hits the mark. Edward Norton is a pitch-perfect Mr Rogers as folk singer Pete Seeger(2), Boyd Holbrook is hilarious as Johnny Cash, while Dan Fogler's Albert Grossman, and Scoot McNairy as the dying Woody Guthrie are also well done.
The movie recounts the beginning of Dylan's career, covering the period from 1961, when he arrives in New York City, becomes the star of the folk music revival period, and then goes electric in 1965, climaxing with his appearance at the Newport Folk Festival that year. THC recently wrote about the significance of the turn in Dylan's music in Dylan 15.
The film captures the marvel of Dylan's musical creative process (though the essence remains unknown) and stage presence, both acoustic and electric. The quality and quantity of his output is staggering. Dylan 15 focused on three albums from 1965 and 1966, but A Complete Unknown reminds one the avalanche of memorable original compositions on his three albums from 1963 and 1964. Here's a partial list (songs heard, at least in part, in A Complete Unknown, indicated with asterisk):
From his two 1965 albums we also hear Like A Rolling Stone, Maggie's Farm, Subterranean Homesick Blues, It's All Over Now Baby Blue, It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), It Takes A Lot To Laugh It Takes a Train To Cry, Highway 61 Revisited.
While conveying Dylan's musical genius the film is not a hagiography. At various times, Dylan is portrayed as snide, remote, elusive, egocentric, infuriating, and a fabulist. During the course of the movie, Baez calls Dylan an asshole and a jerk, both of which are accurate descriptions (though who knew that singing Blowin' In the Wind and Masters of War would serve as a chick magnet, at least where Baez was concerned!). He's also very funny. At the personal level all you see is Dylan's surface; what's inside remains enigmatic, as he has deliberately done throughout his life. Dylan's autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, is the finest of any musician from the 60s and 70s, but a reader is often left wondering how much is invented by Dylan. He's been a careful curator of his myth for decades, while rejecting any attempt by others to define or control him, a characteristic accurately portrayed in the movie. This is not a traditional biopic where the main character's personality transforms over the course of the movie and he triumphs over all obstacles. Dylan's music changes, but his personality does not in A Complete Unknown.
The heart of the film is around what was seen by the leaders of the new folk revival of the late 50s and early 60s as Dylan's betrayal. He was seen as the figure who could transcend the mere folkie label and his move to electric was bitterly resented by some and indeed turned out to be a death blow to the folk revival. That theme puts a different spin on some of his folkie songs just before his transition to electric. In the context of the movie, these lyrics from The Times They Are A Changin' struck THC as a warning to those folkies who were resisting the oncoming wave of rock, though his audience heard them much differently at the time:
Come mothers and fathers Throughout the land And don't criticize What you can't understand Your sons and your daughters Are beyond your command Your old road is rapidly agin' Please get out of the new one If you can't lend your hand For the times they are a-changin'
As did this lyric from It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, which Dylan plays to close his '65 Newport Folk Festival set:
Well, strike another match Yeah, go start new, go start new 'Cause it's all over now, baby blue
Like all movies, A Complete Unknown plays around with facts and chronology. The sequence of the composition of Dylan's acoustic songs is rearranged, his relationship with Sylvie was over by the time of the '65 Newport Folk Festival, some other events portrayed didn't happen or, at least, didn't happen that way, and the fierceness of the resistance to Dylan's Newport performance is over-dramatized. The relationships with Baez and Sylvie play a significant part, but by early 1965 Dylan was involved with Sara Lownds who he was to marry that November. I assume Lownds is not in the movie because since their divorce in 1978, Lownds, with whom Dylan had four children, has remained silent on their marriage and Dylan, who commented on and approved the script, probably wanted to keep her out it.
Go see the film; like Dylan's autobiography it is a well-done and enjoyable mix of fact and myth.
Another towering figure, Bill James, gives some insight into Dylan here.
(1) Baez had a beautiful voice but I never cared for her singing because its lack of dynamics and declarative stridency made it sound like she was delivering a lecture.
(2) Imagine Mr Rogers, and, indeed, Seeger had a very sunny personality, as also being a Stalinist (as Seeger also was in real life).
The story of Desmond Doss during WW2 is something I'd been unaware of until a few years ago, did not see Hacksaw Ridge when it was released in 2016, but the THC Son suggested we watch it when he was visiting last week. It is a very powerful movie. Like any film portraying real events there is a good deal of fictionalizing, but the core of the tale is faithful to the essence of Desmond Doss. And faith is the core of the story, as Doss was the first conscientious objector in our nation's history to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. If anything, the movie understates his exploits and heroism.
The power of Desmond's religious conviction is conveyed honestly and I think director Mel Gibson's ability to convey intense faith, as demonstrated in his previous directorial efforts, is a perfect match for the subject matter. The movie was filmed in Australia with mostly Aussie actors except for Doss (Andrew Garfield) and his sergeant (Vince Vaughn).
The power of the movie is enhanced at the end by brief excerpts of late in life interviews with Doss, and his company commander, who initially tried to get Doss removed from his command. Doss passed in 2006 at the age of 87.
The events portrayed at Hacksaw Ridge on Okinawa in late April and May of 1945 actually took place over a three week period. Omitted from the movie is Desmond's service as a combat medic in the 1944 assaults on Guam and Leyte, for which he received two Bronze Stars for his bravery.
After the war, Doss spent 5 1/2 years being treated for tuberculosis, contracted on Leyte, during which he had a lung and five ribs removed before being discharged in 1951 on a 90% disability.
Below is the full text of his Medal of Honor citation.
He was a company aidman when the 1st Battalion assaulted a jagged
escarpment 400 feet high. As our troops gained the summit, a heavy
concentration of artillery, mortar, and machine-gun fire crashed into
them, inflicting approximately 75 casualties and driving the others
back. Pfc. Doss refused to seek cover and remained in the fire-swept
area with the many stricken, carrying them one by one to the edge of the
escarpment and there lowering them on a rope-supported litter down the
face of a cliff to friendly hands.
On 2 May, he exposed himself to heavy
rifle and mortar fire in rescuing a wounded man 200 yards forward of
the lines on the same escarpment; and two days later he treated four men
who had been cut down while assaulting a strongly defended cave,
advancing through a shower of grenades to within eight yards of enemy
forces in a cave's mouth, where he dressed his comrades' wounds before
making four separate trips under fire to evacuate them to safety.
On 5
May, he unhesitatingly braved enemy shelling and small-arms fire to
assist an artillery officer. He applied bandages, moved his patient to a
spot that offered protection from small-arms fire, and, while artillery
and mortar shells fell close by, painstakingly administered plasma.
Later that day, when an American was severely wounded by fire from a
cave, Pfc. Doss crawled to him where he had fallen 25 feet from the
enemy position, rendered aid, and carried him 100 yards to safety while
continually exposed to enemy fire.
On 21 May, in a night attack on high
ground near Shuri, he remained in exposed territory while the rest of
his company took cover, fearlessly risking the chance that he would be
mistaken for an infiltrating Japanese and giving aid to the injured
until he was himself seriously wounded in the legs by the explosion of a
grenade. Rather than call another aidman from cover, he cared for his
own injuries and waited five hours before litter bearers reached him and
started carrying him to cover. The trio was caught in an enemy tank
attack and Pfc. Doss, seeing a more critically wounded man nearby,
crawled off the litter and directed the bearers to give their first
attention to the other man. Awaiting the litter bearers' return, he was
again struck, this time suffering a compound fracture of one arm. With
magnificent fortitude he bound a rifle stock to his shattered arm as a
splint and then crawled 300 yards over rough terrain to the aid station.
Through his outstanding bravery and unflinching determination in the
face of desperately dangerous conditions Pfc. Doss saved the lives of
many soldiers. His name became a symbol throughout the 77th Infantry
Division for outstanding gallantry far above and beyond the call of
duty.
Reading Quentin Tarantino's book, Cinema Speculation, made me want to watch two 70s flicks, The Outfit and Rolling Thunder, finally getting around to viewing both over the past week. Both are lower-budget films with high-powered casts and are quite good, quite gritty, and quite violent, with a distinctively 70s look. Both directed by John Flynn.
The Outfit (1973) is one of eight films based on the Parker character, a hard-boiled criminal, in a series of novels written under by Donald Westlake under a pseudonym. Others include Point Blank with Lee Marvin as the Parker character (1967), The Split with Jim Brown (1968), Slayground with Peter Coyote (1983), Payback with Mel Gibson (1999), and Parker with Jason Statham (2013).
Flynn's version stars Robert Duvall as Earl Macklin (Parker) and Joe Don Baker as Earl's partner Cody. Both are terrific. Karen Black plays The Girl (there's always The Girl in a Parker film). Macklin, recently released from prison seeks revenge against his brother's killers. The problem is the killers were sent by The Outfit, the powerful Mob organization. The great Robert Ryan, in one of his last roles, players Mailer, head of The Outfit.
The Outfit is better than the two other Parker movies I've seen, Point Blank and Payback and is far superior as a genre film to the much more praised Michael Mann film Thief (1981)(1), which I viewed last year.
Flynn's next film was Rolling Thunder (1977), one of the early returning Vietnam vet films, which became a trend later in the 70s. The title is taken from the code name for the American bombing campaign in North Vietnam. Major Charles Rane has just returned to Texas from seven years as a POW in a North Vietnamese prison where he was tortured. Accompanying him is Rane's companion from that prison, Master Sergeant Johnny Vohden. Both are psychologically damaged from their experience, both have difficulty adjusting to civilian life, and both seem placid on the outside. After a calm beginning, this becomes a revenge film as Rane tracks down the murderers of his wife and son.
As Rane, William Devane, in his first lead role, plays the troubled character to perfection. In one of his first roles, Tommy Lee Jones as Vohden is good in his more limited screen time, and has the best line in the film. Linda Haynes plays The Girl and she is very good, better than Black in The Outfit.
I doubt whether, if these movies were remade today, they would have the same endings.
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(1) Mann's highly overrated 1995 film, Heat, with Pacino and De Niro, also has elements of the Parker character and stylized storyline.
Released in 1943, THC finally got around to viewing Colonel Blimp this week. A splendid film!
It's also deceptive as the first, fast-paced, scene leaves one a bit befuddled about what the film is about. And then it looks like it's going to be a satire about the British military and the last days of imperialism. But it ends up as something more deep and profound. It does satirize the military, but also conveys the sense of duty and responsibility of soldiers. It is about friendship, love, and patriotism and how people respond when under strain.
The movie was filmed in Britain in 1942 and early 1943, in the midst of the world war. For various reasons the British military and Winston Churchill preferred it not be made but the filmmakers, director Michael Powell and screenplay writer Emeric Pressburger (who also made The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus) forged ahead.
The movie stars Roger Livesey (as the British soldier Clive Wynn-Candy who eventually rises to Major General), Anton Walbrook as German officer Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, and Deborah Kerr in one of her first lead roles playing three different characters. All are indeed splendid.
The story begins in 1902 when then Lt. Livesey fights a duel in Berlin with Kretschmar-Schuldorff, leaving them both wounded and hospitalized and where they meet Kerr's first character. We then see both soldiers during World War One and its immediate aftermath. Finally, they are reunited in wartime England after Theo has fled Germany.
Two scenes from near the end:
Theo, a refuge in England in 1939, is being questioned by British security which needs to decide his status. This is the latter part of a nine-minute scene. Walbrook is so good, doing so little, but conveying so much. You've never heard anyone say "Heil Hitler" like he does.
In this scene, General Candy was to have delivered a talk on the BBC in the aftermath of Dunkirk, but it is cancelled at the last minute. He arrives home to find he has also been discharged from the military. Kerr is now playing Candy's driver. Theo speaks to him of the changed world and the need to fight differently. Theo's message was one of the aspects of the film that gave the British military and Churchill pause. It is also a message that resonates today - the eternal question.
The restored version of Colonel Blimp you can know see was made under the direction of Martin Scorsese, a huge fan of the film since he was a teenager.
A unanimous thumbs-up from THC, the THC Son, and the THC SIL, who watched the movie earlier this week. Far superior to Napoleon, the last movie THC viewed.
This is a complete reboot of the Godzilla series. It goes back to recreate Godzilla's origin story so there is a titanic monster and a lot of destruction but what elevates the movie is that it is also a story of the people of Japan coming to grips with losing a disastrous war and deciding upon their future. It is the human element that makes this a resoundingly good film.
The story starts just before the end of the war when a kamikaze pilot lands his plane on an isolated Japanese-held island in the Pacific. He has decided not to go ahead with his mission and the small group of mechanics at the airfield soon recognize it. That evening a modest-size Godzilla attacks, wiping out all but one of the mechanics and the pilot, who freezes at a chance to kill the monster.
The pilot returns to Tokyo at the end of the war as a broken man, to find his neighborhood reduced to rubble by American air raids in which his parents have been killed. His next door neighbor, who has lost her husband and children in the raids berates him for failing to complete his kamikaze mission. He then encounters a young woman with a baby and he provides them shelter in his damaged small home. The woman has lost her parents in a raid and the baby is not hers, she took the child at the imploring of a dying mother she came across in the chaos of the bombing.
We then see the beginning of the rebuilding of Tokyo and the struggle of those surviving and their adjustment to a new world, as well as the guilt that consumes the pilot and others. It makes for a riveting and, at times, moving, experience. And Godzilla returns to threaten Tokyo, a monster supercharged and enlarged by the American A-bomb tests at Bikini Atoll.
The cinematography and visuals are very well done but it is the story and the actors that make this film. Ryunosuke Kamiki and Minami Hamabe are outstanding as the pilot and the woman he encounters. Secondary characters are also well done, particularly Hidetaka Yoshioki as a brainy naval engineer and Kuranosuke Sasaki as the world-weary captain of a decrepit wooden minesweeper.
Enjoy a couple of trailers. These emphasize the Godzilla aspects and not the quieter scenes which make up much more of the film:
Well, it certainly isn't Alien, Blade Runner, or Gladiator, three of Ridley Scott's best films. Glad I saw it, but very strange. I can't figure out what Scott was thinking, other than he really doesn't like Napoleon. Some interesting and well-shot scenes but definitely not an actors movie. The only outstanding performance is by Vanessa Kirby, as Josephine, Napoleon's love obsession.
The film has several historical whoppers - Napoleon didn't destroy the tops of the pyramids with cannon fire and didn't lead cavalry charges, but I can live with that. The big problem is Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon. He's terrible. Whether he was miscast, told to play it that way by Scott, or just hampered by the weak script, it's just a weird performance.
I could get past the age factor; Phoenix is 48 while much of the action in the film occurs when Napoleon was in his twenties or early 30s, and six years younger than the more sophisticated Josephine. Napoleon Bonaparte was dynamic, tireless, charismatic, charming, highly intelligent, and a good conversationalist. The Duke of Wellington said his presence on the battlefield was worth 40,000 men. And his interests were not limited to war, his reforms of France's administrative, legal, and educational systems remaining largely intact in the 21st century. A complex character with a controversial legacy. None of that comes through in Phoenix's performance. His Napoleon is a taciturn dullard. We are left wondering why anyone would follow him; why he ascended so quickly to power.
After Waterloo, Napoleon sought refuge on the British ship HMS Bellerophon. The British turned down Napoleon's request to be allowed to settle in their country, one of their concerns being that his ability to charm would make him widely popular with the public, as demonstrated by how, within a few days, he charmed the crew of Bellerophon, including the young midshipmen. In the movie we see one of Wellington's subordinates warning him that Napoleon is enchanting the midshipmen, but the scene doesn't really show him doing it. Exposition carries the day, when it would have been much more effective to see Napoleon's personality at work.
Last month I wrote about intending to rewatch William Friedkin's 1977 film Sorcerer. I thought it was great at the time but hadn't seen it since, and some movies just don't wear well (Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid for instance, which I rewatched last year), but finally watched it recently and Sorcerer remains a great film. Gritty, tense, thrilling, existential. Four fugitives scraping out a bare existence in a jungle shanty town of an unnamed Latin American country. Desperate to get enough money to obtain exit visas they accept a job driving two trucks loaded with cases of nitroglycerin more than 200 miles through brutal jungle and mountain terrain to be used to put out an oilfield fire.
The movie actually looks better than I remembered. Not a lot of dialogue and some of the most nerve-wracking scenes on film. It must have been a nightmare to make the movie, which went way over budget and was a flop when released.
Christopher Nolan makes long, beautifully produced, and convoluted movies. Oppenheimer is no exception. Sometimes that works better (The Dark Knight, Dunkirk) than other times (Inception, The Dark Knight Rises) and, sometimes, well and not so well at the same time (Interstellar). Oppenheimer falls in the last category, though it is still worth seeing.
The acting is uniformly excellent, particularly Cillian Murphy as the title character, and Robert Downey Jr as Lewis Strauss. The cinematography and imagining, both visually and in the screenplay, is outstanding. Many of the set piece scenes are incredibly well done - I found myself very tense in the lead up to the Trinity test, even though I knew how it turned out. Nolan does a fine job portraying the complexities of Oppenheimer's character and the perplexity of his behavior. But the movie is just too long and the tacked on story of Lewis Strauss' revenge and destruction of Oppenheimer's career in the 1950s makes the movie drag at the end.(1) It's a bridge too far. Because it is all jammed into one movie, the last part also does a disservice to Strauss, a difficult, but interesting, figure in his own right and who, like Oppenheimer, served his country well. It appears the studio recognized this problem, as the film's trailer pays no attention to what is a significant element in the movie.
Some specific comments:
I enjoyed the movie's portrayal of General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) and his relationship with Oppenheimer. Most film depictions, as well as book and documentaries, have provided a negative picture of Groves, portraying him as a block headed, manipulative, military martinet. Oppenheimer shows him as tough, but also perceptive, sympathetic, and with the sense to know when to not blindly follow the rule book. It also depicts him defending Oppenheimer during the secret 1954 Atomic Energy Commission hearing that resulted in the scientist's security clearance being revoked. In fact, Nolan could have cut the film in such as way as to create a two hour, 80s style odd-couple buddy movie about the pair.
The movie is a reminder of the remarkable job that Groves and Oppenheimer did for this country. Although much of the work of the Manhattan Project went on at other sites, like Hanford and Oak Ridge, the work of designing and assembling the bomb was at Los Alamos. There was very little in Oppenheimer's pre-war work and personality indicating his suitability for the task of project manager, coordinating and corralling physicists and other scientists unused to operating in such an environment, yet Groves recognized his potential and working together they succeeded.
Nolan does a terrific job showing Oppenheimer's desire for fame and recognition and how it intertwined and conflicted with his desire to also portray himself as a morally driven person with all his agonizing over the development of the bomb and later opposition to the development of thermonuclear weapons. There is a memorable scene during the 1954 security clearance hearing where he is forced to confront the inconsistencies in his policy views and actions, as well as how his own careless actions damaged his position in those hearings. (2)
The contradictions are also seen in the scientist's only meeting with President Truman (played by Gary Oldman, whom I didn't recognize until the credits), who becomes exasperated with Oppenheimer's indulgent moral martyrdom (declaring he has blood on his hands), declaring that it was he, not the scientist, who had to make the decision whether to use the bomb. The film accurately shows Truman's direction to an aide after the meeting that he never wanted to have another meeting with Oppenheimer.
The movie shows the Los Alamos scientists debating whether, in the wake of Germany's surrender and what they believed was the imminent surrender of Japan, if they should petition against the use of the bomb. Oppenheimer opposes this, stating that it is only if the bomb is used and people see its destructive power, will future use be deterred. If created, but not used, it would not have the same deterrent factor. With the conclusion of the Cold War and now 32 years further one without the use of nuclear weapons, might Oppenheimer have been correct in his analysis?
Oppenheimer would be a good choice of a movie to screen in an academic course because of the discussions it would prompt. That is, if we are still allowed to have such discussions in academia.
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(1) And the third and final section of the movie leaves the impression that the Senate's 1959 rejection of Strauss' nomination to become Secretary of State was due to his treatment of Oppenheimer though, in reality, it was only a secondary reason for the Senate action. The real reason is that Strauss alienated a lot of people in his AEC role and withheld information from Congress.
(2) For a more complete analysis of the background to the security clearance hearing read this piece by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes. I'm very familiar with the work of Klehr and Haynes, who are the leading authorities regarding Soviet espionage in the United States during the 1930s and 40s. They've done groundbreaking work on this topic, illuminating our knowledge while eloquently opposing the more extreme theories in which FDR and Harry Hopkins were supposedly Soviet agents. Their conclusion:
Knowing what we know now, America’s public interest would have been
best served if Oppenheimer had been able to continue in his role as a
consultant to the government on various atomic projects. The evidence by
the mid-1940s was that he had left his earlier Communist allegiance
behind and was anything but a party sympathizer. But one of the major
contributing factors to his loss of security access was his own
unwillingness to provide a candid and honest account of his earlier
Communist ties and why he had put them aside. If he continued to lie
about such matters, how could he now be trusted?
None
of this detracts from the greatest achievement of Oppenheimer’s life
and one of the great scientific and engineering achievements in human
history. It does, however, complicate the morality-play version of his
life. Unquestionably, the hearing that denied the renewal of his
security clearance (and that is portrayed so powerfully throughout the
movie) was stacked against him. His archnemesis, Lewis Strauss (played
by Robert Downey Jr.), orchestrated a dishonest and biased attack,
deprived Oppenheimer and his lawyer the opportunity to see key evidence,
and distorted some of his views and behavior. But Oppenheimer’s lack of
candor made him a contributor to his own destruction. That truly makes
the story of his life a Greek tragedy. As good a movie as it is, Oppenheimer would have been richer still if it had plumbed these deep waters.
Went to a movie theater today for the first time since early 2020 and saw The Banshees of Inisherin. Very good and very dark, in some ways even darker than In Bruges. The film looks lovely, shot on two islands off the west coast of Ireland, which is good because the story deals with some dark emotions, though often injected with humor. Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell, Kerry Condon, and Barry Keoghan are splendid.
The movie is set in April 1923 and there are occasional references to the ongoing Irish Civil War, at least twice we can hear gunfire and explosions across the passage separating the island from the Irish mainland. I realized that at least one of the themes of the movie was as commentary on that Civil War, which occurred between June 1922 and May 1923, and left bitter scars on Irish society that took decades to erase.
The Civil War occurred because of an oath. From shortly after the end of WW1 until the summer of 1922, the Irish rebels had fought a non-conventional war in order to end several hundred years of English occupation. Britain eventually agreed to negotiate and after months of talks in London an agreement was reached (Winston Churchill was one of the British negotiators). While it was short of full independence for the entire island (leaving six northern counties in Britain) and created what was to be called a Irish Free State, within the British Empire and, most importantly, requiring an oath of allegiance to King George V, as the King in Ireland, not King of the United Kingdom. It was this oath that led to a split within the Irish revolutionaries, the Free Staters supporting it, however reluctantly, and seeing the Free State as the first step towards inevitable independence, while the Irish Republican Army saw the oath as a repudiation of all its principles.
War broke out between the factions in late June. It was brutal, devolving into murders and executions. The Banshees starts with a seeming inconsequential conflict over not much of anything and escalates from there, despite the wishes of the principals, as they are carried along by sticking by their principles. Prior to the Civil War, two rebels, Michael Collins and Harry Boland, were very close friends but Collins was Chairman of the Irish Provisional Government of the Free State and supported the oath, while Boland opposed the treaty with England. On July 31, 1922 Boland was shot by Free State soldiers attempting to arrest him and died the next day. Collins attended his funeral. Three weeks later, Collins was dead, killed in an ambush. All over an oath. An oath that ended friendships, that led to friends killing friends, that led to decades of bitterness, and delayed economic development. An oath that meant nothing in the longer-term. Under the 1931 Statute of Westminster all British dominions, including the Irish Free State, became effectively independent and the oath of allegiance was dropped by the Free State shortly thereafter, without reaction from Britain. In 1937 a new constitution was adopted, in which the Irish Free State disappeared to be replaced by the nation of Ireland, a constitutional Republic. By its setting in the midst of the Civil War, I think writer and director Martin McDonagh, also considered Ireland's leading playwright, meant to make that statement.
But there are other themes also running through the film, and the interview with Gleeson and Farrell below explores one of them, as does this movie review. Worth seeing. Just be ready for it.
NOTE: It turns out the downside of being back in a movie theater is having to watch so many awful trailers, all played at top volume, and varying in quality from boring, to "seen it before", to repellent.
We've been on a bit of a binge lately watching older movies, some we've already seen, some unknown to us until recently (like Army of Shadows). Among the ones we'd already seen were a couple of Paul Newman films; Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, which seemed kind of flat - I've no desire to see it again, and The Verdict (which we'd not seen since it was released in the early 80s), which was outstanding, much better than I remembered. Others in the never seen before category were The Day of the Jackal, a terrific thriller, and the film we watched last night, The Long Good Friday, released in 1981.
This was the film that made Bob Hoskins a star and it also features Helen Mirren, which is always a good thing. Until I did a little research after viewing, I hadn't realized the love the critics had for it at the time. Here's an excerpt from Roger Ebert's review, after he'd called it a "masterful and very tough piece of filmmaking":
And I have rarely seen a movie character so completely alive. Shand
is an evil, cruel, sadistic man. But he's a mass of contradictions, and
there are times when we understand him so completely we almost feel
affectionate. He's such a character, such an overcompensating Cockney,
sensitive to the slightest affront, able to strike fear in the hearts of
killers, but a pushover when his mistress raises her voice to him. Shand is played by a compact, muscular actor named Bob Hoskins, in the most-praised film performance of the year from England. Hoskins has the energy and the freshness of a younger Michael Caine, if not the good looks, of course.
This movie is one amazing piece of work, not only for the Hoskins
performance but also for the energy of the filmmaking, the power of the
music, and, oddly enough, for the engaging quality of its sometimes very
violent sense of humor.
Hoskins plays a mobster who controls much of the London underworld and is attempting to go legit with a large property development in the dockyards of East London. He's hosting a senior Mafia guy from the U.S. who can provide the key financing, but things start to go awry with bombings and murders.
A fascinating aspect for me was the conflict between "traditional" gangsters like Shand and political gangsters like the IRA about which the film revolves.
And, in his first film role, an incredibly youthful looking Pierce Brosnan appears briefly in two scenes that you won't forget, and the last scene will stay with you for a long time.
Gritty, brutal, and unsparing in its depiction of the costs of resistance to the Nazis, Army of Shadows is quite a film. It tells the tale of a French Resistance cell from the fall of 1942 into the spring of 1943, at a time when the Nazis dominated Europe and liberation remained only a dream. The cell members struggle not only against the Germans but against informers in their own ranks, and are faced with making choices among options most of us would never want to encounter.
The movie, released in 1969, stars Lino Ventura and Simone Signoret. It is methodical and understated, tense and dramatic. The cell leader is referred to as "The Boss" but his name is Luc Jardie, a philosophy professor before the war. In one scene his deputy looks at five books; we see each title and Jardie shown as the author. The Jardie character is based on Jean Cavailles, a professor of philosophy, who joined the Resistance, headed one of its sabotage networks, and was eventually arrested and executed by the Gestapo. The five books shown in the film were authored by Cavailles.
I'd not heard of the film until a couple of weeks ago. A little research discovered why. Army of Shadows, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, was released in September 1969, a year after the 1968 student riots and five months after the resignation of President Charles de Gaulle, the leading French Resistance figure of WW2. Most film critics, who opposed de Gaulle, saw the film as glorifying his role and the Resistance figures associated with de Gaulle, heavily criticizing the film, a criticism echoed in Cahiers du Cinema, the prestigious film magazine, and one relied upon by foreign distributors. The film was a box-office failure in France and did not even receive distribution at art cinemas in the U.S.
In the 1990s, Cahiers du Cinema published a reappraisal of the movie, and after restoration it was finally released in the United States in 2006 to acclaim from film critics, many of whom placed it on their Top 10 lists for the year, including the New York Times, whose critic called it the best film of the year. Roger Ebert wrote, "This restored 35mm print, now in art theaters around the country, may be
37 years old, but it is the best foreign film of the year".
It's refreshing to watch a movie that could have easily been cliche-ridden, predictable, and/or a parody of well-worn themes, instead be a unique and enjoyable experience. At the recommendation of the THC Son we watched The Vast Of Night (2019), the first feature film, and a very-low budget one, by Andrew Patterson.
Set in the fictional town of Cayuga, New Mexico (from its description meant to be a stand-in for Roswell) in the late 1950s, it takes place in the course of a couple of hours one night while Cayuga is hosting a basketball game in which its high school team is facing the squad from neighboring Hobbs, and most of the town's population is attending. Mysterious events; sightings of lights in the sky, odd sounds on radio frequencies, begin to be noticed by the few not attending the game, which include our two main characters, teenagers Everett (Jake Horowitz), a fast-talking DJ on the low-wattage local radio station, and Fay (Sierra McCormick), who operates the town's telephone switchboard.
It's how the story is told, rather than the specifics of the plot, which is familiar in its outline to many other sci-fi movies, that makes this movie special. It's done in a straightforward way; irony need not apply. The camera work is remarkable in establishing a mood and look, featuring an extraordinary tracking shot that takes us through the entire town. The young actors do a terrific job, particularly in the extended scene when Fay, alone at the switchboard, begins to understand that something odd is going on.
Highly recommended. The trailer below shows the long tracking shot but gives away none of the plot, unlike most trailers, including the other ones for this film!
Dear Comrades!, a 2020 film by Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky, is about the events of early June 1962 in the Soviet city of Novocherkassk. A Moscow directive raising the price of meat and milk, combined with a reduction of pay in a city factory, led to worker protests, which were suppressed when KGB snipers fired on unarmed demonstrators in a city square. Accurate information on the events was also suppressed until the last years of the Soviet Union. The bodies of those killed were buried secretly in unmarked graves at undisclosed locations. It was only in 1994 that relatives were notified of the location of the burials.
The Novocherkassk massacre also serves as the climax of one of the finest books I've read, and written about twice - Red Plenty andKhrushchev Reflects- a book which should be required reading in college.
The movie is focused on Lyudmila (Julia Vysotskaya, Konchalovsky's wife), a member of the Communist Party City Committee, an absolute believer in the Party who stridently expresses her views and support of the party line. When her daughter becomes a participant in the protests and then can't be found in the aftermath of the shootings in the city square, Lyudmila begins a frantic search to find if she is dead or alive, during which she learns how the Party is literally covering up the extent of the carnage.
Filmed in striking black and white, Dear Comrades! is a movie made in outrage and anger, but it also shows the psychological confusion induced in Soviet citizens, and particularly among Party members when, after a lifetime of immersion in Communist education and sloganeering, they are faced with its brutal reality. If all their beliefs and sacrifices meant nothing in the end, what is left? They had no other context, no other reference points, having been so isolated from the rest of the world, and any counter viewpoints within their country silenced - for Lyudmila it is either Stalin or Khrushchev; the striking workers carry posters portraying Lenin. At one point, Lyudmila, thinking her daughter is dead, laments that if only Stalin were still alive this would not be happening, an echo of those who, in the midst of the Great Terror in the 1930s would say, "if only Stalin knew!" when hearing of yet another random arrest and somehow disassociating the Great Leader from the act, believing he would intervene to stop it, though the truth was Stalin knew very well and, indeed, was its director.
Mrs THC and I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once a couple of evenings ago. Despite the presence of the wonderful Michelle Yeoh and 93 year old James Hong, who has over 650 movie and TV credits including 92 film and 205 TV appearances and voice overs since turning 60, it was disappointing.
The film certainly looks good but once you get the basic multiverse concept, it drags on for far too long, and for all its attempted unpredictability, it became pretty predictable how it would end. It's a 140 minute film that would have been better served at 105 minutes.
Stephanie Hsu is saddled with playing a very dreary character as Yeoh's daughter (her girlfriend is much more interestingly written but we don't see much of her). Ke Huy Quan, as Yeoh's husband, looks unnervingly like Jackie Chan at times due to lighting and camera angles. Jamie Lee Curtis is quite good and quite unrecognizable as an IRS agent.
This mostly black & white film is worth watching for the cinematography alone though that is not its only positive attribute. Set in 1969-70, at the beginning of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, it is the story of a Protestant family living in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood in Belfast as told through the eyes of the youngest son.
Belfast is directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also wrote the screenplay. Branagh, born in Belfast, was eight years old when The Troubles began. His Protestant family lived in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood and his father, just like the dad in the film, was a plumber and joiner who traveled to England to find work to support the family.
The film swings between the idyllic parts of childhood and frightening outbreaks of violence, and it is very frightening when it starts on the screen. Branagh has sympathy for all those caught up in the situation, and nothing but disdain for those who promoted sectarian hatred. Because it is told through the perceptions of a boy too young to understand what is going on around him, some scenes are exaggerated and there are a couple that are clearly fantasies of how the child would like to remember those days and his parents. Very moving and very disturbing at times.
As a young man, Branagh directed and starred in the finest Shakespeare ever put on film,Henry V. If you haven't seen it, do so. And watch it with a copy of the play with you to appreciate the brilliance of Branagh's adaptation.
Sometimes you finally get around to watching what you've heard is a great film and end up disappointed. This happened to us last year viewing The Rules of the Game (1939) by Jean Renoir, a movie on many Top Ten greatest film lists. It was boring, pretentious, and way too obvious in its themes.
And then there is The Night of the Hunter, which we viewed last night and one of the finest films I've ever seen. Released in 1955 and the only movie directed by actor Charles Laughton, The Night of the Hunter stars Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish, the great silent film star, in one of her few sound picture appearances.
Set in West Virginia during the Depression, Mitchum plays an itinerant preacher who has devised his own religion, based on a twisted interpretation of Christianity, while marrying widows, killing them and stealing their money. With L-O-V-E tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand and H-A-T-E on the left he charms small town folk and mesmerizes his intended victims. In this case, he plans to shake loose the secret location of a hidden $10,000 from the two young children of his newest wife (played by Shelly Winters with much more restraint than usual). After murdering the woman he sets off to track down the children who have fled. Lillian Gish plays the children's protector, a deeply religious woman who represents love in the struggle against hate.
This is an eerie and terrifying movie. As AO Scott remarks in the video below, "While you're watching this movie you are like a child in the grip of a nightmare". Mitchum is frightening whether charming, threatening, or both at the same time. The film is shot using techniques from German expressionist films of the silent era, giving it a dreamlike quality. The scenes and images from this film will stay with you for a long time.
A unique and unforgettable film, it was a commercial failure at the time and Laughton never directed another movie. You can watch the cast and crew talk about the making of the film here.
Director Guy Ritchie returns to the form he exhibited in his first films, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch (with a hilariously unintelligible Brad Pitt). That's a good thing. Like those movies, The Gentlemen mixes violence, comedy, and an incredibly twisted plot where you can't tell who is running what scam on who until the end. And it is incredibly offensive by Woke standards, thanks goodness.
The Gentlemen takes awhile to get going, at least by Ritchie standards, but it's worth waiting for it to get rolling. In the lead roles Matthew McConaughey and Charlie Hunnam are quite good but supporting actors Colin Farrell and an amazingly smarmy Hugh Grant steal the show. And the elegant Michelle Dockery from Downton Abbey is a hoot as McConaughey's elegant but steely tough wife. To say more would be to give too much away.
What a waste of 3+ hours. I've enjoyed most of Martin Scorcese's films over the years but The Irishman was quite a disappointment. Flaccid and dreary. It looks like it was shot on video - the
cinematography is terrible. The screenplay just kind of sits there and the movie is way too long. Because the film takes place over a 50 year period and the actors, particularly Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci appear throughout, a "de-aging" process was employed on them - the result is weird and off putting, particularly for DeNiro who, even when his face looks younger, walks and moves like a guy in his late 70s.
This is DeNiro's movie, told completely from his character's perspective, that of Frank Sheeran, a mob hit man and supposed confidante of Jimmy Hoffa, but his performance failed to capture my interest. The only decent performances were by Al Pacino who portrays the
mercurial and charismatic
Hoffa quite well, without falling into Pacinian overacting, and Pesci who
plays the subdued, controlled, but merciless mob boss Russell
Buffalino. The rest of the cast seems to include every actor who's played a mobster in a movie during the last four decades doing their mob thing. One touch I appreciated is that Hoffa's wife Jo is played by the actress who was the annoying babysitter and drug bagman in the climatic scenes of Goodfellas thirty years ago.
I
am not one who is much concerned with factual accuracy in a film as
long as it captures some overall truth or insight into the events but
when factual inaccuracy is matched with inexcusable and irrelevant incursions into the movie
it becomes ridiculous. Suddenly, in the middle of the film, we switch without explanation to the story of the murder of mobster Crazy Joey Gallo at Umberto's Clam House in Little Italy, which has nothing to do
with anything else in the story and, most certainly, was not done by
Frank Sheeran (nor, for that matter, did he kill Hoffa). What was that
all about?
As far as historical accuracy is concerned the best part of The Irishman is its portrayal of Hoffa, down to his personal tics - did not drink alcohol, loved ice cream, was a stickler for punctuality - and the bigger context of his battles with Bobby Kennedy, his dealings with the mob when Teamster president, the mob's outright takeover of the Teamsters when he was imprisoned and his murder by the mob, prompted by seeking reelection as union president while denouncing the gangsters. The worst part as far as accuracy is everything else in the film.
If you are interested in more of the history of the Teamsters, the life of Hoffa and his disappearance read Jack Goldsmith's recent book, In The Shadow Of Hoffa, which I wrote about here.
