Because of the many new movie screenings I’ve seen lately, I’m starting a special Oscar category. Here are some of the films I’ve seen.

• Slumdog Millionaire

   

            I must be the last person in town to see this film which I avoided for, perhaps a snobby reason, that I never watched the game show and, a squeamish one, that I can’t watch torture scenes.

            One day, my 90-year-old girlfriend, an actress who gets screeners, wanted to watch it and I agreed, feeling it would be easier to escape the bad parts in a corner of her living room than a theatre lobby. 

  The torture was brief and mild, by movie standards.  The game show was used to drive the plot, an incredibly far-fetched concept which was overcome by the brilliant cinematography and Danny Boyle’s direction.

   Jamal (Dev Patel), who survived the slums, gets on a Millionaire quiz show because he knows the love of his life, Latika (Frieda Pinto) will be watching.  By an absurd coincidence, all the questions summon childhood memories which provide him with the right answers.  But dramatically this works and the story of his life, told with dazzling speed by Boyle from Simn Beaufoy’s screen adaptation of Vikas Swaraf’s novel “Q & A” sweeps us along.  Despite the violence and squalor which are a very real part of Boyle’s story, the film brims with the color and excitement of boys who are too young to find life anything less than amazing and of India itself.  I spent a few weeks with a film company in India some years ago and, though it was in a very different milieu, I’ve never forgotten the vivid exoticism of that huge sprawling country.

            My first introduction to India came from a book given to me by my godfather as a Christmas present.  It was Richard Haliburton’s “Book of Marvels” and I thought the Taj Mahal was the most beautiful building I ever saw.  It plays a pivotal role in this film and its dedication to the love of a man for a woman is a symbol and theme of the movie.

            I’m glad I saw it but what makes me happiest is the way the mainstream American public has embraced a foreign film, something they too rarely do.

   

   

Waltz with Bashir

January 5, 2009

The satirical title of “Waltz with Bashir” is reflected in the form of this unique and stunning animated feature from Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman. The documentary is based on his own repressed memories of his role as a 19-year-old soldier in the attack on Lebanon in the early 1980s. After the assassination of Lebanese president-elect, dynamic young Bashir Gemayal, retaliatory massacres occurred at the Palestine refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, spearheaded by a group called the Phalangists supported by the Israeli Army.
The film begins with vicious dogs of war charging head-on almost off the screen straight at the audience. They’re the recurring dream of a former Israeli soldier who remembers being compelled to shoot dogs whose barking would alert the enemy. As he tells this story to the filmmaker, the man realizes he can’t remember his part in the Lebanese invasion and goes on a pilgrimage of self-discovery, interviewing fellow soldiers who were there. Their stories, climaxing in the massacre which the filmmaker witnessed, are drawn in brilliantly innovative ways, combining fantasy, guilt and the painful unearthing of the past.
Annimation proves to be the perfect form for this story, allowing us to see the surreal side of investigative journalism. The characters are drawn with expressive realism and the imagery is beautiful. This brave film by an Israeli filmmaker with the support of the Israel Film Board climaxes with archival footage of sobbing Palestinian women fleeing the camps, mourning their losses.

Last Chance Harvey

Whatever’s happening around him, Dustin Hoffman creates a fully-rounded character. In “Last Chance Harvey”, he plays the title character, an uptight businessman who is compelled to answer his cell phone even in the middle of his daughter’s wedding rehearsal dinner to deal with trifles that eventually have no significance. His daughter has asked her stepfather to give her away and, upon losing his job, this is the worst day of Harvey’s life. So he tells Kate (Emma Thompson), a woman who has become so low key that her natural charm and empathy is drenched. They meet at a Heathrow airport restaurant and, although she’s had a hell day of her own, including being rejected by a blind date and riddled with phone calls from her lonely mother, Kate agrees that he wins the misery stakes.
Predictably, Harvey and Kate wind up spending the day together. He admits he feels his wife and daughter look better with the more sophisticated stepdad, played by James Brolin, and that his workaholic obsessiveness manufactured to overcome his insecurity has destroyed his family life. Kate’s part is more thinly written. She feels guilty about an early abortion but, apart from that, it’s Thompson’s charm that carries her through.
Writer/director Joel Hopkins has molded this predictable vehicle around his stars and Hoffman and Thompson are a pleasure to watch. They are so sharp, perceptive and humane in their characterizations that it’s an inspired lesson.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Scott Fitzgerald’s short story takes 10 minutes to read on the internet. The same topic of reverse aging is the subject of an excellent full-length novel “And Again?” by noted Irish writer Sean O’Faolain.
Brad Pitt plays Fitzgerald’s title character who ages backwards. He meets Daisy, played by Cate Blanchett, the love of his amazing life when he is an old man physically, though a 10-year-old chronologically, and she is a child. They journey down the years together on separate aging tracks and come together for a brief joyous time when they are both physically and psychologically the same age. Their reunion brings a daughter, played in adulthood by Julia Ormond.
Set in New Orleans which, over the decades, reverberates like another character, this version, directed by David Fincher and written by Eric Roth, is no more than inspired by Fitzgerald’s whimsical plot line. The performances are exemplary, the New Orleans setting which begins in 1918 gives an initial flavor of Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age world and the question of where you go when locked in an irreversible tragedy with the love of your life is one which resonates, no matter what the situation.

The Reader Kate Winslet gives the best performance I’ve ever seen from anybody as Hanna, an illiterate 35-year-old woman who has an affair with teen-age Michael (David Kross). Later, as a law student attending Nazi trials, he discovers that she was a concentration camp guard and complicit in an even worse tragedy revealing a deep moral illiteracy, in the words of director Stephen Daldry who did a Q&A after the screening I saw at the Directors Guild. I told him the last time I’d seen him at a Q&A was after “The Hours” (another film he directed about a woman) and I was just as blown away by this one. Winslet’s character ranges from the 35-year-old erotic tutor of young Michael to a woman on trial to an old prisoner. David Hare, who also adapted “The Hours”, adapted this screenplay from Bernhard Schlink’s novel, a best-seller in Germany. The story uses books and reading as a deepening medium, expanding the story beyond the lives of one woman and one man. Bruno Ganz, the superb German actor who starred in “Wings of Desire”, plays Michael’s professor and interlocuter. Ralph Fiennes gives a subtle portrayal of Michael as an adult who, 20 years after Hanna’s conviction, still, like many Germans, wrestles with questions of national guilt and how long the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the next generation. The film’s questions about the borders of love and values make this one of the best in a year of great movies.

Gran Torino Clint Eastwood who produced, directed and stars could qualify for the award of Grand Old Man of American Movies. In this story by first-time screenwriter Nick Schenk, Eastwood unabashedly plays his age as grim retired factory worker Walt Kowalski whose wife has just died. He resists all efforts of young Father Janovich (Christopher Carley) to be his friend and bring him back to the church, as his beloved wife wished. He resents the Vietnamese families moving into his neighborhood and they don’t understand why he doesn’t leave with the other white homeowners. His teen-age neighbor Thao (Bee Vang) is instigated to steal Walt’s treasured 1972 Gran Torino as his initiation into his cousin’s gun-toting gang. When Walt catches him, Thao’s humiliated family begs him to let Thao work for him as penance. Alienated from his boring, greedy children and grandchildren, Walt finds himself drawn into the life-affirming neighbors (and their wonderful cooking). Funniest is Grandma (Chee Thrao) who bests Walt in a spitting contest. The two try to outstare each other before becoming friends. The neighborhood is becoming a fighting ground for gangs, including one who tries to jump Thao’s pert Americanized sister Sue (Ahney Her) and her hunky boyfriend Trey (Scott Eastwood). Walt intervenes but later the spunky Sue is beaten and raped by her cousin’s gang who resent her independence.
Walt sees only one way to protect the two young people he has come to love. Those who expect an Eastwood shoot-out may think they see one coming.
Eastwood, who calls this his last movie as an actor, expands his tough-guy repertoire with wonderful tight-lipped snarls and the portrait of an American veteran who is set in his ways and scarred by memories of the Korean war in which he had to kill kids Thao’s age. The script is a portrait of a specifically American man and his time. Probably no one but Eastwood could have gotten it made and he does it justice, delving deep as an actor and carving the movie with his customary chiseled and astute directoral style.

Synecdoche, New York

Synecdoche, says the dictionary, means that a part stands for the whole or vice versa. For example, “suits” means movie executives. Charlie Kaufman’s new film, his first as a director, follows one man, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) a theatre director in upstate New York, who receives a genius grant. Caden is so obsessed with staging an immense work of art that will reflect his own life that he fails to see the world falling apart around him. Buildings disintegrate, streets decay, cities are abandoned. Their synecdoche reflects Caden’s self-obsession that leaves him with an empty and deteriorating world.
One thing Kaufman’s new film has in common with writer/director Woody Allen’s work is an abundance of beautiful women in the hero’s life. Caden’s wife Adele (Catherine Keener), a painter, goes off to Germany where she is declared a genius, too. Caden re-marries an actress (Michelle Williams), has an intriguing relationship with his receptionist (Samantha Morton) and plunges into his mamouth creation staged in a warehouse. He builds various spaces, hires many actors, rehearses countless scenes from his own life.
How often do we think, if only we could live our life over and do things differently, what would it be like? While the real world falls apart into deserted streets and shabby buildings, he worries at his personal past, casting and re-casting characters from his life. There’s no resolution, no happiness. If Aristotle declared “The unexamined life is not worth living”, one of Kaufman’s points seems to be the uselessness of nothing but self-examination. Kaufman often uses his own world of theatre or screen-writing as a metaphor for trying to solve the riddle of the universe by acting it out. Here he seems to be trying to show us the futility of enlarging the world by subtraction. The more he ignores the world in favor of his personal explorations, the more it dies.
Anything Kaufman does is worth seeing: “Being John Malkovich”, “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and, a personal favorite, “Adaptation” starring Nicholas Cage. This film has the pleasures of Hoffman’s work and the rigorous, if elongated, trail hewn by the author.

Rachel Getting Married

Jonathan Demme, Oscar-winning director of “The Silence of the Lambs”, is back with another woman in jeopardy in an entirely different genre. This one takes place at a wedding. The theme of family relationships and long-buried tensions enriches the story of this bi-racial family, by first-time screenwriter Jenny Lumet, daughter of director Sidney Lumet and granddaughter of singing legend Lena Horne.
The story follows the character of Kym (Anne Hathaway), Rachel’s sister, who has a week-end pass from a rehab facility for the wedding. Kym has been on drugs since she was a teen-ager and the death of her little brother is a subject that has never until now been thoroughly aired between Kym and her mother, played by Debra Winger. Winger retains her ability to hold the screen with anybody, projecting dignity and sensuality.
Hathaway shows a range she hasn’t had the chance to display before, boding well for a long and rich career. Demme gives this the feel of a home movie by using a hand-held camera to cover the rehearsal dinner. That feeling is augmented by having the speeches go on a tad too long, just as they do in real life.
Many treasures in this one. It’s going to take its place in movie archives.

Let The Right One In (Sweden)

This Swedish thriller is a very special vampire story. 12-year-old Oscar (Kare Hedebrant), a lonely only child of divorced parents, is bullied by classmates and never fights back. He thinks he’s found a friend when a pale 12-year-old girl, Eli (Lina Leandersson) and her father move into the next apartment. But when a rash of bloody killings sweep their town, he realizes she’s a vampire. This film doesn’t shrink from Eli’s necessity to feed on people but she’s just what Oscar needs. She encourages him to stand up to the bullies and he does, damaging the ear of the instigator.
After a particularly gruesome disaster involving Eli’s father, she knows she has to move on. A lonely Oscar is attacked in a swimming pool by the brother of the boy he has wounded, leading to an enthralling climax.
The combination of vampire lore, suspense, violence and the pure deep love between Oscar and Eli, he on the cusp of adolescence, she frozen in time forever, is unique. Set in winter in a soulless Swedish apartment block which emphasizes today’s alienation, the bloodlust of the little vampire stands out in vivid relief. Hedebrant, whose fair hair and white skin make him look like a medieval angel, is completely credible as an average kid who lives a reserved and withdrawn life. Leandersson projects the mystery and sadness of a little vampire who is trapped for eternity in a lifestyle that leaves scant room for the precious happiness that she knows exists. Directed by Tomas Alfredson from John Ajvide Lindquist’s script based on his novel, it swept European film festivals and is enjoying a long run here at the Laemmle theatres.

Doubt: The Movie

John Patrick Shanley’s play swept the awards boards in 2005, garnering Tonys and a Pulitzer, but transferring to the screen with equal success was problematic. Many movie-goers don’t read or care about theatre reviews. The story of a priest and a nun debating over the priest’s possibly predatory attitude towards a boy in his charge has made headlines repeatedly, so the theme is not exactly surprising. And that brilliant funny playwright John Patrick Shanley’s foray as a director of his own film script “Joe vs. The Volcano” didn’t save it’s wry whimsy from confusing both audience and critics.
So thank whatever gods may be that this movie and its writer/director got the green light to go together where they ought to go. Shanley chose a completely different cast from the Broadway production and, no slight intended to the Tony-winning Broadway cast, it’s fascinating to see new people interpret these roles.
Set in 1964 in the kind of Catholic school the playwright attended, it centers on the conflict between flinty principal Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) and charismatic young Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman). The sister suspects the father of preying on boys, particularly the vulnerable Donald Muller, first Negro child to be admitted to the school.
Streep as Sister Aloyisius is a traditional authoritarian who believes in her instincts almost more than in her God, with an asperity leavened by surprising flashes of dry humor. Hoffman is brotherly and charming as the charismatic Father Flynn. Viola Davis, in the unforgettable character of Mrs. Muller, is apprehensive but quivering with determination to do whatever she must for her child. It’s one of the most powerful scenes Shanley has written and Davis does it full justice. Amy Adams peels away the innocence of Sister James, the young idealistic teacher whose values are shredded by the play’s end.
There’s no trace here of the heightened language Shanley has used to such dazzling effect. This is the pared-down speech of every day but the playwright’s imagination inspires Father Flynn’s sermons and his humanity glows through Sister Aloysius’s wit. Shanley brings out the humor in the characters and, through his emphasis, new nuances in Father Flynn’s sermons. Doubt is already in play in Father Flynn’s mind, as he makes that subject the focus of his initial appearance in the pulpit. Shanley keeps the story as tightly in the confines of the school as it is on stage, with only one break-out scene where Sister Aloyisius walks Mrs. Muller back to her job along a cold grey November street. The walk heightens the sense of urgency because of the tightness of Mrs. Muller’s lunch hour and her conflicted desire to run away from what she has to say. The director also brilliantly contrasts the priests’ dinner table with its dim lights, laughter and wine to the nuns’ brightly-lit austere dinner table where only milk is served.
The film further expands by using visualization in Father Flynn’s pillow sermon in which the gossiping woman is actually depicted watching the feathers from her pillow fly irretrievably across the city. The director further his scope by including glimpses of the young students in this school.
Although Sister Aloysius believes she has the proof she needs, her final words summarize the theme of the play: “Oh, Sister James, I have such doubts, such doubts! “. She’s not referring to Father Flynn necessarily or even to Mrs. Muller’s revelations. She’s referring to the whole cusp of the world, as it lurches from the prim dogmatic 1950s into the fragmented openness of the 1960s. Not that she would ever go there but the fact that the crack in that door is opened by her is a testament to the nun’s character. The playwright will never give you a reading on what the play means but he doesn’t need to.
It’s all beautifully there with the questions, the passions, the conflicts and the spirituality of real life.
When I e-mailed my reaction to Shanley, whom I’ve known since the National Playwrights Conference in 1983, he replied, “It’s been a journey!”

Frost/Nixon (The Movie)

Peter Morgan’s dramatization of the famous interviews between British talk show host David Frost and former American president Richard Nixon began as a play, with video monitors augmenting the experience.
However, the big screen is where this really belongs and where it’s at it’s best. The screen is the medium where both Frost and Nixon made their mark.
Director Ron Howard is a child of television and has an innate sensitivity for the use both Frost and Nixon make of the media. He intercuts brilliantly, making a fascinating suspense story out of raw material.
Though a little drawn-out, the story of how Frost overcomes his talk show host persona to take down the more experienced Tricky Dick is the an intricate one. The final close-ups, in which Nixon finally admits he let the American people down, are powerfully expressive. But the telling line that we’ll all remember is when Nixon, driven to the wall, hisses arrogantly: “It’s not illegal when the President does it.”
Frank Langella and Michael Sheen repeat their Broadway roles. Although neither man resembles the person, both express the essence of their personalities. Langella lends Nixon a modicum of warmth that lurked in his feelings for his children and animals. No one is totally one-dimensional and Langella is too fine an actor not to find some sympathy in his character. Sheen plays Frost with sprightly sleaziness, but brings out the determination of a man who’s willing to risk his own fortune on interviews nobody else will back.
Rebecca Hall lends dry humor and off-hand sensuality to the role of Sheen’s girlfriend, Caroline Cushing. Sam Rockwell plays a fiercely determined James Reston, Junior, out to get Nixon and Oliver Platt adds heft and character to Bob Zelnick. Kevin Bacon fully inhabits Nixon’s militaristic aide, Jack Brennan, with a redeeming loyalty to his boss. Michael McFadyen is attractive and honorable in the thankless role of Jack Brit, Frost’s producer, a part with as little range for his talents as the real Brit.
Pat Nixon is played with ladylike resignation by Patty McCormick, who debuted on Broadway as a child murderess in “The Bad Seed”. Who would have thought she’d grow up to be Pat Nixon?

Milk offers a glowing performance by Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, the first homosexual city councilman in San Francisco, who was murdered by colleague Dan Black, another fine characterization by Josh Brolin. It seems over-long and sometimes repetitious but Gus Van Sant’s film, with a screenplay by Dustin Lance Black, brings out the tragic oppression experienced by homosexuals. Episcopal Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori said, “They’re the latest group but they won’t be the last.”