JimBell

Under discussion:

Outsourced  (2007)

Outsourced (2006) takes the very serious topic of outsourcing, treats it with a light touch, and presents an alternative view of it. Todd (Josh Hamilton) sees his entire phone-order department outsourced to India, and he saves his bacon by reluctantly agreeing to go to India to train his replacement and the Indian workers who are replacing the operators in Seattle.

Although things do not go well at first, quiet comedy abounds. Refreshingly, Outsourced does not try for laughs by making the characters quirky. In fact, Todd is relentlessly ordinary. This leads to one of the most deft touches of this intercultural movie: When Todd runs into a culture he doesn’t understand, and when nearly everything is going wrong, he does not become louder and more ridiculous, he becomes quieter. Although this could lead to a long dull stretch in the movie, it allows the Indian culture to come to the fore. The comedy arises not from individual quirkiness but from the environment. When Todd gives an insistent neighbourhood boy a rupee, the boy gives him a hug—and steals his cell phone. He later returns it. Todd allows him to choose a pencil for art work, and the kid grabs the whole bunch and runs off. Todd has a lot to learn. But the movie does not try to teach us about India. Rather it shows India in action and lets us learn what we are ready for.

It is a great compliment to a movie when you like it enough to start searching for small things it could have done better. Outsourced occasionally feels a little bit amateurish or low budget. But for every tiny amateurish shot there are many wonderful touches. For example, when Todd and his new Assistant Manager, Asha (Ayesha Dharker), are forced to check into a hotel, the only room available, the manager claims, is the Kamasutra Room—and the camera shows a close up of the name and rate on the board. This is clunky. In support of this shot, you could argue that it was taken from Todd’s subjective point of view, but all other shots in the movie were from an exterior point of view, showing Todd finding his way in a strange land. But after this clunker shot comes, a minute later, a first tentative kiss, with no dramatic close-up, no atmospheric panorama, but rather a standard two-head shot which allows us to see, after the kiss, Todd’s almost imperceptible nod. Excellent.

Another example. When filming the change-of-seasons festival where the Indians throw coloured dyes at each other, there is an impressionistic shot of a mob of people at the bottom of the screen and an impenetrable cloud of red dust at the top. This shot does not fit with the rest of the cinematography which is very matter of fact. It is also probably not accurate, because when you mix red dust, blue dust, and some other colours, you get an unphotogenic grey. This shot is out of place because the movie has been emphasizing an almost-documentary style. Yet, in the same sequence, Todd drops his inhibitions and, covered with red and blue pigment, he grabs some bombs and fires back. But here’s the little detail I love—he throws hard! He was a pitcher in college, and he hits both guys square on the head. This detail lets observant viewers know that while Todd has “stopped resisting” Indian society, he’s not completely happy about it and he’s not going to give up on his own culture.

This fish-out-of-water comedy has two serious, underlying issues. In spite of vast differences between cultures, genuine human contact is possible. People can connect and care for each other across considerable divides. This message is refreshing in light of the many Hollywood movies which posit the opposite. The other issue is outsourcing, and here I don’t think the film plays fair with the issue. It tries to get us to see that there are more important things in life than your job, for example, your parents and getting married. However, the film stacks the deck. All the laid-off Indian workers have learned so much English and so many skills that they can all get jobs elsewhere. Only the laid-off manager will have great difficulty, and Todd steps in and saves the day. But stacking the deck in the argument glosses over the problem of profit above all else, the problem of multinational corporations that have no concern for the community, and the problem that today in the USA there are about 16,000,000 able-bodied people unable to find work.

I really enjoyed Outsourced as far as it went. I can see why it picked up audience awards and best picture awards at smaller festivals—Seattle, Palm Springs, San Jose, Bend, and Tipton, Iowa. We empathize with Todd and root for him to make the best of a tough situation. He and Asha have excellent, natural chemistry, and we hope against hope that their romance will flourish. And it s such a treat to watch an upbeat movie.

Under discussion:

The Brothers Bloom  (2009)

Whether you like The Brothers Bloom (2008) will largely depend on your sense of humour and your tolerance for being fooled. Film maker Rian Johnson assumes you are “full of beans” like he is, and that you’ll follow the twists and turns of the caper with interest. It worked for me, but a sense of humour and a tolerance for ambiguity are highly individual.

I liked the sly sense of humour. For example, when the con artists Bloom (Adrian Brody) and his brother Stephen (Mark Raffelo) select a lonely American heiress as their last target, they get Penelope (Rachael Weicz) who “collects hobbies”—we see a montage of her playing a variety of musical instruments, spinning discs, leaping into the air for karate kicks, and so on, ending with a piece of origami that looks a bit sad. The karate and the fancy paper appear later in the movie, which to my mind makes the montage of hobbies not gratuitous but which to some people seems merely smug.

There is an intelligent “conceit” or extended metaphor that runs throughout the film: writing a life. Stephen plans his masterful cons like a Russian writer planning a sprawling novel, but Bloom is getting tired of always playing a part and wants to live an unwritten life. This raises the question of whether you can lead an unwritten life. The film does not explore this deeply because it is a fast-paced caper, but it provides a serious idea to anchor the shenanigans. It also sets up Penelope to reinterpret the metaphor in the climactic scene—what matters is who does the writing. If Bloom no longer has his brother writing roles for him, he can try to write his own life, the best story he can create. I thought the handling of the metaphor was deft, but others might see it as too smart for its own good.

The actors were so good I could relax and trust they’d pull off any scene, funny or serious or ambiguous. I enjoyed a movie that assumed I was smart enough to remember a sentence about blood made early in the movie to interpret a key scene late in the film.

The only noteworthy weakness is thatm try as I might, I cannot figure out Stephen’s motivation for his behaviour in the climax of the movie. I can guess, but the film does not give us much to go on. Still I found the entire movie a fun and entertaining romp.

Under discussion:

Duplicity  (2009)

Duplicity (2009) is forgettable. You’d expect it to make an impression because with Tony Gilroy at the helm (Jason Bourne movies; Michael Clayton) and a fleet of top-notch actors . . . But even if we grant that it is a romantic caper film and not supposed to be substantial, it is still not a particularly good romantic caper film. Why?

Take the romantic part. Even though Clare (Julia Roberts) and Ray (Clive Owens) have some on-screen chemistry, what is the basis of their attraction? We don’t know. They are both professionals who lie for a living and work in the unsavoury field of corporate espionage. Should we care about them?

Take the caper part. We don’t know until well into the movie that there is a caper. At first it seems like industrial espionage; then, through a series of flash backs, we see that Clare and Ray are trying to pull a fast one. When the caper comes to a conclusion, it’s not what you expected. But this surprise ending is a cheat: You were given no hints, no chance to figure it out yourself. It was simply sprung on you, making it all that much more forgettable.

Under discussion:

Amongst White Clouds  (2005)

Amongst White Clouds (2005; documentary)—I don’t have much to say about this fine documentary except it is for a limited audience and I really liked it. This young guy (Edward Burger) is reading about Buddhism when he realizes that there are people out there living the life now that he is only reading about. So he learns Mandarin (yes), tracks down the hermits living in some mountains in China, and moves in amongst them—for years. I admire the dedication. With camera in hand, he interviews the different Buddhist monks living a mile or so apart in the mountains. I found their different versions of Buddhism intriguing. It is not that they are confused or uncertain or misinformed or eccentric, but, as the Buddha said, you have to find your own path, and they have, each one emphasizing a different aspect of the teachings. I also really liked the seclusion. Actually, not the seclusion but rather the way the monks handled the seclusion. It was an inspiration.

Under discussion:

Bringing Up Baby  (1938)

It’s difficult to judge a screwball comedy such as Bringing Up Baby (1938) because it is screwball. The term comes from a baseball pitch popularized by Carl Hubble in 1934 where the ball travels in an unpredictable path. So you cannot insist on plot coherence. What is paleontologist Dr. David Huxley (Cary Grant) doing taking a leopard to New Jersey on the day he is supposed to marry his icy research assistant? You cannot demand realistic characterization. Why does Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), a beautiful, ditzy socialite, suddenly pick David off a golf course to be her future husband?  You cannot even hold the movie to the genre standards of a “screwball comedy,” because the term has no agreed-upon definition. It is generally applied to certain films made from 1934 to the early 1940s. Mistaken identities often add to the chaos, but not in Bringing Up Baby. Because of the Great Depression, class is often an issue, but not in Bringing Up Baby. Rather this film features the classic screwball romance—a mismatch in temperament and wealth between man and woman, with the woman planning the marriage from the get-go. The film also features farce, placing the characters in ridiculous situations. For example, as the two leads exit the party, she steps on his tux tails and rips his suit, and he tells her to leave him alone. When she turns to go back into the party, he is standing on the hem of her dress and rips the back panel out of it. She, however, is in no mood to listen to a word he says and walks back into the party unaware that her undergarments are exposed. When she finally figures it out, he’s there to help her make a Chaplinesque exit.

In 1938, New York Times film critic Frank Nugent slammed the movie because it had no original jokes. But, again, who says the jokes in a screwball comedy have to be fresh? The bottom line is the movie has to make you laugh or smile or, at least, be quietly amused, and a lot of that humour has to come from farcical situations. Bringing Up Baby worked for me! Why?

The plot of a scatterbrained woman getting an good-looking nerdy professor to marry her avoids a couple of obvious pitfalls. She could be too scheming to be likeable, but Susan is so chaotic that she doesn’t really have a master plan of how to get her man. Katharine Hepburn was wonderful. I never realized how good-looking she was—and the outfits she wore made her look more attractive. She had a girlish charm that made it difficult to dislike her. As for her victim, he could have become nasty about how she was screwing up his orderly life, but Dr. Huxley soldiers on, never getting vicious, always holding onto the hope that things will work out reasonably. Just as I never realized how attractive Hepburn was, I never knew what a solid actor Cary Grant was. I had assumed he was another handsome face. I didn’t know he’d run away from home to learn his vaudeville chops with a touring acrobatic company, or that at 18 he’d left the company in New York to pursue a gruelling life of stage plays and third-rate movies before he finally hitting his stride in films such as Bringing Up Baby.

The comedy is not just monodimensional farce. There’s slapstick—she drops an olive, he steps on it and falls on his top hat. There’s madcap chaos—three people talk at once and the dog, George, starts barking. There’s sly jokes—Dr. Huxley is introduced at dinner as a big game hunter, and he quietly spends the meal getting up to look for a dog. As another example, Dr. Huxley and Susan have to calm the ubiquitous pet leopard by signing, “I can’t give you anything but love, baby,” when the leopards’ name is, of course, Baby, and the two singers who don’t get along are falling love. There’s situational jokes—just when Dr. Huxley and Susan lose Baby, a traveling circus loses its dangerous leopard. And there’s the abstract conceptual joke—a dignified, systematic man of science is reduced to a humbled, confused man in love. I enjoyed the whole thing from start to finish.

Under discussion:

The Dhamma Brothers  (2008)

Dhamma Brothers: East Meets West in the Deep South (2008) achieves its purpose wonderfully, but I wish it had had a different purpose.

Director Jenny Phillips is a psychotherapist with a PhD in cultural anthropology who wanted to do something like the Peace Corps work she’d done in her youth. She got involved with the prison down the street from her practice, and she soon heard that a penitentiary in the deep south was going to try serious meditation with some of the hard-core inmates. Her purpose in making the film, I’d say, was to show that even the most violent offenders should not be warehoused but rather treated as human beings who happen to have been convicted of murder.

The documentary achieves its purpose by focusing on a small number of inmates such as OB and Grady. OB was part of a group young guys who wantonly shot at and killed people driving by. Although OB did not pull the trigger, he tried to protect his friends who did. When the offer of Goenka-style Vipassana meditation came to the prison, he says, “I was at a crossroads.” He was questioning lots of things, and after going through the 10 days of intensive meditation, he says he “slowed down” thus giving himself time to think before acting. Brief clips of his family reinforce the message that this is a decent human being who has paid 17 years for youthful stupidity but is now a guy who could make it on the outside.

Grady, who was drunk out of his gourd and driving the get-away car in a robbery where his two buddies stabbed a guy to death, knows he will never get out, so he wants his prison/home to be a better place to live. This, he comes to realize, starts with himself. He seems to truly incorporate the meditation practice into his daily living. Ingraining the deceptively simple concept that everything changes, Grady repeatedly says to himself, “It’ll be all right in a minute.” This stops so many negative reactions. Imagine if you said this and believed it. As a proponent of the meditation program, Grady says that, after 150 guys have been through the Goenka program, he can tell in the exercise yard whether an inmate has taken the course “by the way he carries himself.”

So we do get to know some of the guys and realize there is a big difference between “he is a murderer” and “he is a person who was involved in a murder.” Personally, however, I wish the film had explained the meditation program much more thoroughly. It is nice to know that these guys have changed for the better, but what exactly facilitated this change? The film does not explain where the Goenka method came from, creates the false impression that it is the same as Vipassana meditation (it is a small branch), and fails to explain what the guys do sitting on their cushions for 10 days. Worse, a glimpse of some of the charts taped on the wall of the retreat area have strange words and give the impression that there was a lot more in-depth stuff going on—but we never learn what it is.

It’s a film I won’t forget. As Jenny Phillips said on Oprah’s Soul Series, these guys are “human beings in great misery looking for solutions.” Ironically, their motivation for enlightenment is generally more fierce than yours or mine. I just wish the film had paid a lot more attention to the method that facilitated their transformation.

Under discussion:

Film Name  Production Year

Wendy and Lucy  (2008)

I really liked this movie--barely--but I would not expect a lot of other people to like it. Wendy and Lucy (2008), the story of a young woman and her dog, is unlikely to have much of an impact on your average movie goer. The plot provides little excitement: As one blogger cried, who wants to spend an hour and half watching some girl look for her bleepin’ dog!? Rather strangely, the central character does not provide much excitement either. We do not know who she is, what she has done, why she left Indiana or Illinois—we know zilch about her background aside from a depressing phone call she makes to her dismissive sister and brother-in-law. Nor does Wendy grow in any way that traditionally interests viewers.

Yet for some people--including me--this slow-paced picture about not much can pack a powerful punch. Unlike the many films which pander to their audience, this film does not reach out to you--you have to reach out to it. You have to find some way to identify with the lost young woman. Have you been alone and poor? I remember arriving in Adelaide at 6:00 in the morning with 20 cents to my name and wondering if I should steal a morning paper to find out what was going on in town. Have you been a vulnerable young female accosted? No, but I remember riding an old train where a young punk came into my compartment so many times I thought it best to pull out my switchblade to cut my cheese and bread.

For this movie, it also helps if you love dogs. It would help if you had one who dearly loved to fetch a stick. For the ending to have its full power, I think you have to appreciate ahead of time the powerful bond that can exist between person and dog. But also, as your heart is breaking, you have to figure out quickly what the film was all about. I was left asking, “What was the purpose of that film?” Five minutes later as I searched the web, it hit me. Without giving away the story, I’d say the film is about poverty and the fine line between being a member of society with an address and money and being down and out and off the grid. Director Kelly Reichardt said in an interview with Spout that the movie did not have a point but certainly had a question: “Are we related and do we owe each other anything? . . . Are we supposed to do anything for each other, or is it every man for himself?”

But even if you do figure out the purpose of the film, you may not have sympathy for the young woman. Why’d she shoplift when she had enough money to buy dog food? That’s were all the trouble started. Similarly, you might make short shrift of the director’s question. Of course we are supposed to do things for each other, and this girl probably had lots of help in the past and she got a reasonable amount of help in the present. What more can you expect? But a small number of people, including me, feel terrible for the young woman and would love to help.

My Fav Films

In the following list, the films I repeatedly rank among my favourites are in bold. I have separated out documentaries.

If I have any unique interests in film, they would be film noir and Shakespeare, so I have listed my favourites in each of these. (I know they seem almost opposites, but there you go!)

Films

Accidental Tourist, The

As Good as It Gets

Blood Diamond

Bourne Identity, The

Casablanca

Conspiracy Theory

Diamond Men

Iris—Richard Eyre, 2001

L. A. Confidential

Melvin and Howard—Jonathan Demme, 1980

Much Ado About Nothing—Kenneth Branaugh, 1993

Muriel’s Wedding

Nobody’s Fool—Robert Benton, 1994

Out of the Past—Jacques Tourneur, 1947

Painted Veil, The—John L. Curran, 2006

Shawshank Redemption, The

Spygame

Station Agent, The, 2003

Firm, The —Sydney Pollack, 1993

Princess Bride, The

You Can Count On Me—Kenneth Lonergan, 2000

12th Monkey

Aliens, I, II, III

Arlington Road

Black Book

China Moon

Chocolat

Conversation, The

Cool Hand Luke

Crying Game, The

Decline and Fall of the American Empire

Dirty Pretty Things

Dr. Zhivago

Enemy at the Gates

English Patient, The

Exotica

Field of Dreams

Finding Nemo

Foyle’s War (series)

Fugitive, The

Ghandhi

Good Will Hunting

Groundhog Day

Hotel Rwanda

House of Mirth

Jagged Edge--Richard Marguard

Liberty Heights

Lost in Translation

Madness of King George, The

Matchstick Men

McCabe and Mrs. Miller

Memento

Midnight Cowboy

Mildred Pierce

Perfect World

Pianist, The—Roman Polonski

Pledge, The

Prestige, The—Christopher Nolan

Rob Roy

Romeo + Juliet

Romeo and Juliet

Ryan’s Daughter

Scandal

Scarlet Street—Fritz Lang, 1945

Schindler’s List

Shakespeare in Love

Shine—Scott Hicks, 1997

Sixth Sense, The

Snapper, The

Strictly Ballroom

Sunshine State, The

The Commitments

The French Lieutenant’s Woman

The Girl with the Pearl Earring

The Great Escape

The Killers

The Story of the Weeping Camel

The Usual Suspects

To Kill a Mockingbird

Tootsie--Sydney Pollack

True Lies

Two Family House

Ulee’s Gold

Up Series

Unstrung Heroes

Vanishing Point

Washington Square

Year of Living Dangerously, The

Zodiac

Documentaries

51 Birch Street

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room—Alex Gibney, 2005

Hoop Dreams

MicroCosmos, 1996

Sharkwater—Rob Stewart, 2007

The Take—Avi Lewis, 2004

Thin Blue Line, The

Who Killed the Electric Car?

An Inconvenient Truth

Anytown, USA

Devil Plays Hardball, 2008

The Story of the Weeping Camel (semi-documentary)

The Weather Underground

Wordplay, 2006

Shakespeare

Much Ado About Nothing—Kenneth Branaugh, 1993 (my fav Shakespeare)

Love’s Labours Lost,--Kenneth Branaugh, 2000

Merchant of Venice, The—Michael Radford, 2004

Othello, 1995

Richard III, 1995

Under discussion:

How to Cook Your Life  (2007)

How to Cook Your Life (2007) has not won much praise from viewers, but I liked it. The documentary focuses on the American Zen Buddhist teacher Edward Espe Brown and the relationship between cooking and life. To get much out of this low-key film, you have to be ready. So I’ll explain one of three things I got out of it, and if it resonates with you, you might well like the film.

As a young trainee and cook at Zen training centres in California, Brown thought the offering of food to Buddha was stupid: Gautama Buddha has been dead for more than 2,000 years, so he won’t be appreciating the cooking—“especially loved the crepes!” mocks Brown. But two decades later, Brown suddenly realized what a powerful practice it was: You do your best, offer it, and turn around and walk away. Yes, Buddha never says thanks for the food. So as a cook, where are you going to get your satisfaction? Good question for life as well as cooking.

Tonight, a few days after watching the film, I had a good chance to implement Brown’s teaching. I made a huge Greek-style salad based on a Vegetarian Epicure II recipe and took it to an extended family gathering. No one said they enjoyed it, and no one said how wonderful it was that in all the chaos they didn’t have to make a salad to go with the spaghetti and tomato sauce. Irrelevant. I was delighted with the wild diversity of flavours in the atypical salad—green olives from California, thinly sliced fennel, slivers of red pepper with creamy feta—and how it was a refreshing contrast to the familiar spaghetti sauce. And I was excited to discover a combination that I really liked. As Brown said, he initially tried to cook to please everyone, but he soon learned that that way lies certain suffering.

Elegy (2008) is very good, and for a limited audience. In telling the story of a womanizing, old  professor who has an affair with a graduate student, the movie has some serious challenges to overcome. For one, we have to care enough about the encrusted old fart to care what happens to him and his relationships. Elegy attempts to create empathy by emphasizing not his talents or his erudition but rather his old age—we’ll all be there. If you cannot identify with that, you will have trouble caring about David (Ben Kingsley).

For another, we have to believe that this affair could happen and that it could have some substance. David’s growing obsession with Consuela Castilla (Penelope Cruz) is understandable in the sense that she is amazingly beautiful—plus, she has a complex personality we get glimpses of. She sometimes has the mystique of a person from another culture, and indeed the movie makes quite a deal of her being from Cuba.

But Elegy is about more than their 18-month affair. It is about David’s so-called “independence” and all of his relationships. Thus when the focus on Consuela ends, Elegy keeps the plot moving along with an encounter between David and his resentful son (Peter Sarsgaard), then the sudden illness and death of David’s best friend (Dennis Hopper), and then a conflict with David’s long-time lover (Patricia Clarkson). Slowly and painfully we see David become less self-centered, less selfish, and more accepting of his mortality.

While Elegy successfully meets numerous artistic challenges, it does not equal the sum of its parts. It is difficult to put your finger on why the well-made movie lacks punch. One problem is what Yvor Winters calls the fallacy of imitative form. That is, we have cerebral, closed, and subtle central characters who create a cerebral, closed, and subtle movie. It need not be that way. But I imagine Phillip Roth, who wrote the novel, would say that it is true to his upper-middle class academic characters.

Under discussion:

Cadillac Records  (2008)

Although Cadillac Records (2008) has some excellent acting and some of my favourite music, it has no juice. It never comes alive. I never really cared about the characters. Part of the problem is the editing jumping here, there, and everywhere. But deeper than that the movie doesn’t seem to have a compelling story. Len Chess, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, is struggling and maybe discriminated against, and he starts a club featuring black blues musicians and goes on to build a recording studio, the famous Chess Records. But I didn’t feel the struggle, and I didn’t understand why he turned to Delta bluesmen. The drama is Chess’s changing relationship with the musicians on his label. Muddy Waters and Little Walter like the approach which some nowadays would call paternalistic, but Howlin’ Wolf insists on being his own man, not friends with the white businessman. Chess explains that when he started, a black man could not have started a record business, but by the late 1960s things had changed so much that Chess reluctantly sold the business. The voice-over narration provided by the Willie Dixon character does not make it any easier to get deeply involved with these characters and their struggles.

Under discussion:

Frozen River  (2008)

Frozen River (2008) is such a good movie because of Courtney Hunt, its writer and director. Although Courtney was born and raised in Tennessee, she can relate to the characters of up-state New York. She was raised by a single-mom from age 3 on, and this no doubt gives her empathy with the two main characters and moms in Frozen River. The principal, Ray (Melissa Leo), is a poverty-stricken mom of two boys, whose husband runs off with the money to go gambling. Through a circuitous route, Ray teams up with a young Mohawk single mom, Lila (Misty Upham), to smuggle illegal immigrants across the Canada-US border, the frozen St. Lawrence River.

Courtney Hunt also spent 10 years getting to know the people she was writing about. No, not ten days. Thus, if you know anything about North American reserve cultures, you’ll appreciate the realistic tid-bits such as the band won’t allow Lila to buy a big car because they know she wants to use it to smuggle. The word has come down, and the young used car salesman on the Mohawk reserve has to point her to the compacts which would never make it across the frozen river.

Courtney Hunt brings a serious, academic brain to movie making. I love to read a script or see a movie by someone who thinks like a good novelist. While it may be trendy to have the latest pyrotechnics from rock videos, it only means that you can make a movie that looks good, but is probably full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. While it may be commendable to learn your craft on day-time television, it can easily mean that you learn how to make the puerile more palatable but still unsatisfying. Ms Hunt has a B. A., Sarah Lawrence College, a law degree from Northeastern University, and then an MFA from Columbia.

Courtney Hunt also has a good movie pedigree. Her favourites are movies from the mid-70s to the early 80s. Her favourites include Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, Paper Moon, and The 400 Blows, and let’s throw in one from a few years earlier, Dr. Zhivago.. She likes directors such as Bogdanovich, Scorcese, Paul Schrader, and Sidney Polllack. These guys are not on the current trendy list, and they are great directors.

Courtney Hunt is smart, confident, and tactful. If you want to see all of these traits at work, read her interview with a woman at the intellectual The Huffington Review:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melissa-silverstein/interview-with-courtney-h_b_116411.html

Hunt absolutely refuses to bite at the simplistic feminist line thrown out time and time again. Sure, she wrote and directed a movie about two women with feminist issues involved, but that does not mean that she is not well beyond knee-jerk feminism. I particularly welcomed her comments as to why men like the movie: “If suspense keeps me viable then that's good. The next generation of men are totally comfortable seeing a woman protagonist as long as she's doing something. These relationship movies won't appeal to them . . .  Everything doesn't have to be va va voom in order to keep the male viewer watching. A woman engaged in fascinating action is just as interesting as a guy, in fact more so since we've seen guys pretty much do everything.“

The suspense works because we care about Ray and her kids. One of the most moving scenes for me was when her 15 year old son ( a captivating performance by Charlie McDermott) has to look after things on Christmas eve. He doesn’t know where his mother really is—she says she’s working late. As usual he’s taking care of his little 5-year old brother, the water pipes under the trailer freeze, there are no presents under the Christmas tree, and he tries to shoulder the burden. What if the ubiquitous cops catch Ray and Lila?

Courtney Hunt knows exactly what the themes of her movie are (how refreshing!): Doing the right thing even though you are disadvantaged, and moving beyond your racial biases. Right on! This doesn’t mean the movie is perfect. There are a few awkward scenes. And at the crucial turning point in the movie, I was not sure why Ray made the decision she did—until I thought about it for a day. This might be a bit too subtle for the average viewer, and one sentence of dialogue such as “It was my idea” would solve the issue.

The film was shot in 24 days in mid-winter around Plattsburgh, NY, for under 1 million dollars. Hunt is not afraid of the cold, and her husband, the executive produceer, showed major support by rtaising money from every fellow lawyer, every business person, every donor he could find, even while the shooting was going on. The entire crew and cast should be proud of the product. The movie is certinaly worth seeing!

Under discussion:

One Water  (2007)

One Water (2008) is a documentary that sneaked up on me. At first I acknowledged the poetry in the approach to the issue of clean water for people on earth, but the movie seemed a bit slow. Ah, but just slow enough to get me to settle down into the rhythm of life as lived by many peoples in the 14 countries visited. At first I liked the original sound track played by the Russian National Orchestra, but then I realized the wonderful role the music played in supporting scenes where there was almost no speaking or narration. At first I wondered why we jumped from people bathing in the Ganges River in India to a fellow chipping ice on a mountain in Ecuador and then to . . ., but I soon realized that I was seeing the roles water played in the lives of ordinary people in different countries.

For me the film packed a punch near the end when it intercut the birth of a baby in Africa with icebergs floating in the ocean. At this point, no narration or editorializing was needed. I wondered how many kilometres the mother would have to walk for water each day. I wondered if she’d have to give her child contaminated water because no other was available. More broadly, we are leaving the planet in a mess—short of water, too much contaminated water, dangerous inequity in the distribution of water, conflict over whether water is a right or a commodity. As I drove home, I thought that in Shakespeare’s time (1590s), they did not understand how the plague was transmitted, so it killed thousands and thousands; but in the modern world we know exactly what we are doing, yet keep on abusing the resource that comprises 70% of our bodies and our planet.

Oddly, this commendable, creative, and important film is the product of a university. The University of Miami provided everyone from director to cinematographer to composer to the narrator (the President of the University). The producers supplemented grants from the Provost and the Dean with numerous private foundation donations. They got the cooperation of some big names for commentary: the 14^th Dalai Lama, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, Vandana Shiva, and Maude Barlow. Working over 5 years on a budget of just under a million dollars, the professors did what universities should do: They raised an important issue—Is clean water a right or a privilege?—in a responsible and interesting manner.

For more information, visit www.onewaterthemovie.org

Under discussion:

Thief  (1981)

Thief (1981) is a familiar story well told: A thief wants to go straight after he pulls one more job, and then things go awry. Going back a quarter century to Michael Mann’s first wide-release film reveals a good film-maker at work. Mann was inspired to go into film-making when he saw Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. That film, he said, told an entire generation that it was possible to say something of artistic worth and simultaneously be commercially successful. In Thief, screenwriter and director Mann says: Meet this guy; it’ll shake up your stereotypical image of a thief because this guy has some great traits and great dreams as well as some tragic flaws.

            The cinematography is top-notch. The opening heist sequence shows various close-ups of breaking into the safe, melding the artistry and the mechanics of the operation. Nearly every scene thereafter is shot with a color palette in mind: the icy blue fluorescent glare of the used car lot, the warm, smoky atmosphere of the bar and eatery, the rich orange glow of cutting through a safe with a torch—excellent work.

            The sound track by Tangerine Dream is cranked up. Some people will hate both the volume and the music. I thought it really worked. Although the 70s electronic band was too loud at times, it provided music appropriate to the film, it added some appropriate distortion, grit, and pulsating beat, and it emphasized the silence of dramatic scenes when it stopped. Incidentally, there is one short scene with a blues band playing, and the end credits give a special thanks to blues greats Mighty Joe Young and Willie Dixon.

            For me, the complexity of the thief came to the fore when I had to turn the DVD off with less than half an hour to go. What would Frank (James Caan) do to get out of the corner the Mafia had trapped him in? Going into hiding with his wife and kid was congruent with his character. But so was some tricky scheme where he got the cops who were trying to get a cut of his action to somehow turn on Leo (Robert Prosky) and the mob. Although Frank does neither of these things, what he actually does still makes perfect sense for his character.

Under discussion:

Gran Torino  (2008)

When Gran Torino (2008) ended, I knew I’d seen one of the best films of the year, and I soon began wondering why more people didn’t agree. Gradually, I realized that older folks liked it but younger folks were more critical. Gran Torino would have had a wider following if it had provided younger viewers with the background information older viewers possessed.

Let’s try. Over the last half century, what year were Americans in general most happy? (Yes, we have university professors who actually study this.) There is a great temptation to pick a recent year because as believers in progress we know that things are getting better and better—the new Blackberry is just out! But Americans were most happy in 1957, prime time for the protagonist Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood). This does not mean that everything was great, for, as Walt said, he’d had to go to Korea and kill. There was racism, particularly of whites against blacks, but people were hopeful it would end. When Little Rock, Arkansas, schools denied blacks entrance to schools, Republican President Eisenhower called in the army to enforce the desegregation law. There was a cold war with the Russians, but Americans knew beyond a doubt that theirs was the best way of life on the planet. The Russians launched Sputnik and caused America to question the quality of its school system, but Americans were confident they knew how to make the system better, and “structure of the discipline” courses started taking over the curriculum. In 1957, Betty Freidan surveyed other women who had graduated from Smith and found that if the wives and mothers had outside interests they were generally happy but if they focused relentlessly on being wives and mothers, they were disgruntled. Although Walt Kowalski’s prime was not an idyllic time, many people say it’s the best we’ve had, and we have to know something about it to appreciate its attraction and understand Walt.

Walt’s transformation from angry racist pig to dedicated friend of the Hmong neighbours is quite believable for a host of reasons. One: Walt is basically a fine man. This comes out when he bares his soul in confession, and the priest says, “Is that all!?” Two: While Walt is a racist, he is not as bad as he seems. It’s his way of talking. When Walt goes for a haircut, he and barber sling outrageous insults at each other because they are sort of buddies. In our era of political correctness, we can hardly imagine such a way of speaking. Three: the death of Walt’s wife opens Walt to the possibility of big changes. It reminds me of the university professor who went to India to confer with the Dalai Lama on scientific topics. An interviewer for a Buddhist journal asked the scientist what it was about the Dalai Lama that had such a big impact on him. He replied, not much. If you take someone who has recently retired from his life’s work and whose spouse has just died (or divorced), it doesn’t take very much influence to affect a huge change, such as going in with no interest in religion and coming out a Buddhist.

Four: Walt is lonely--wife dead, both son’s estranged, friends from the Ford plant long gone, and the old neighbourhood full of immigrants—so, if given half a chance, he is going to do something besides sit on the porch and drink Pabst Blue Label. Five: The opportunity presents itself when the charming teenager, Sue, from next door stands up to Walt and welcomes him, at the same time the Hmong in the neighbourhood shower Walt with gifts of flowers and food for his stand against the Hmong gang. Six: Walt slowly and reluctantly decides to mentor the Hmong boy from next door, Thao (Bee Vang). Although not a popular topic of conversation, research shows that a lot of men at or near the end of their career want to mentor someone up and coming. Walt has additional motivation because he wants badly to resurrect the old way of life. So he helps the kid get a construction job and develops the kid’s interest in mechanic’s tools—when we all know what is happening with the housing market and with the auto makers today. Seven: Because Walt’s biggest regret is the huge distance between him and his two sons, he wants to have another try at raising a young man. Walt still is not great at it, but good enough. Eight: Walt is coughing blood, needs every medical test under the sun, and is staring death in the face, so he wants to get serious, do something worthwhile, and not worry too much about the physical consequences.

For me, that is enough to understand where Walt is coming from and why he changes the way he does. Gran Torino is a good movie that packs a powerful punch.

Under discussion:

Man on Wire  (2008)

Man on Wire (2008) is probably the most highly regarded documentary of 2008. So you do not need me to tell you that it is good. So, while you watch Phillipe Petit prepare to walk between the World Trade Center towers on August 7, 1974, you might want to consider a few questions:

What is the most powerful moment in the movie? (I’d say: It’s not when he is on the wire; it’s when his friend and right-hand man says something “snapped” in their friendship.)

What do you think of the way Phillipe treats his girl friend? (I’d say: Shabby. As with so many driven people, Phillipe leaves people strewn in his wake.)

Could anyone else but the French have done this? (I’d say: I still call those little potato sticks French fries, not Liberty fries.)

Could a similar stunt have been pulled today? (I’d say: It was a kinder and gentler time, and it is good to be kinder, really, and it is good to gentler, really. I see—how many?—fighter planes strafing him off the wire in the name of—what is it?—national security.)

Would this documentary be as popular if it were not about the World Trade Center? (Nope.)

Is the theme of the movie right for you—the theme being that we must always dream big, follow that dream, and live on the edge to achieve it? (Not for me—but that doesn’t stop me appreciating an excellent story well told.)

Under discussion:

Vicky Cristina Barcelona  (2008)

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) is such a poor movie that it demands we consider or reconsider whether a voice-over narration can ruin a movie. It pains me to have to say it—but obviously someone as knowledgeable as Woody Allen does not remember it—but whereas novels largely tell, movies largely show. It is the unique power of movies that they are not black squiggles on white paper but rather seemingly real characters speaking and moving, very much like real life. If writers and directors such as Allen want to destroy this crucial feature of film, they should have  good reason. There are a couple of  good reasons, but they don’t apply to Vicky Cristina Barcelona. One of the best reasons for a narrator is that film has difficulty showing us the internal thoughts of a character, and a narrator can supply them. For example, in a P. D. James detective mystery I watched last week, Inspector Dalgleish’s thoughts were sometimes voiced over the action, and this, albeit startling, helped me keep track of a very complex plot. But in VCB, the narration simply tells the story from what fiction theorists call an omniscient point of view.

Another reason to have a voice-over narration is for commentary on the action, whether that is satirical, critical, or whatever. This can manifest the director’s or writer’s opinion when the action is ambiguous. But in VCB, the narrator is simply a crutch to move the action along.

If film makers insist on going against commonsense and employing a voice to narrate the story, the narration should at least not duplicate the action. But in VCB, the narration is sometimes superfluous. When Cristina goes into Juan Antonio’s charming artist’s house with its paintings everywhere, the narrator tells us that Juan Antonio’s house was charming and that Cristina thrilled to the wild colours on all the canvases. You might say this gives us a glimpse into Cristina, but by this time in the movie we know she loves art of all kinds, motion pictures, photographs, even architecture. Again, when Juan Antonio gets a late night call from his suicidal wife, he rushes out of the house and into his car, and the narrator tells us “Juan Antonio hurried out in the dead of night.” What do normally intelligent, sensitive viewers feel confronted with this superfluous narration? Maybe they are insulted to be told a guy is hurrying out in the night when they see a guy hurrying out in the night. Maybe they are distanced from the emotion of the supposedly serious situation. Just when they should be sensing Juan Antonio’s panic and worrying about his relationship with Cristina whom he left behind in bed, a voice booms from above to tell us that Juan is rushing and that all the black we see on screen is night.

The narrator’s tone of voice further distances us from the movie. The tone is difficult to describe. It is patronizing, trying to make the story interesting for us. It is also disrespectful of the characters, sounding remote and untouched by any pain and confusion they are suffering.

Although this heavy-handed narration pretty much destroys the movie, there are a few good points if you can make it through the film. Penelope Cruz, as the unstable ex-wife, is excellent. Not coincidentally, she is one of the few characters who does not sound like Woody Allen. When Patricia Clarkson, for example, talks about her longing to break out of her respectable marriage, she sounds like we’ve heard Woody so many times before, but when Penelope Cruz loses her temper, she sounds like the character she is. To her credit, Rebecca Hall, one of my favourite actresses (Starters for 10; The Prestige), handles with aplomb the sort-of intellectual lines that Woody might normally deliver. That said, the characters in the movie are not particularly unique or interesting—except maybe Cristina: She did not know what she wanted, only what she did not want. This is a fascinating insight for me, and a cautionary note that there are immature people like her out there screwing up lives, including their own. Trying valiantly to pull this movie along is a peppy and interesting sound track, the highlight of the movie.