Two winter westerns on a frigid night

What better way to spend a cold night than to watch two films set in bitterly cold environs back to back at Tuesday’s cheap night at the theatre. First up was Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015) starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy. Next was Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. Both are set in the frontier west, the first in the 1820s, the second about 50 years later. Both take place in winter in the stark North American wilderness…..The Revenant is the better film,

by far. It’s actually one of the most eerily breathtaking films I’ve seen, set in an environment that while stunningly beautiful is seemingly malevolent. Almost everything about this movie is impeccably done – the hundreds of virgin sets in the snowy wilds (how did the film crew not make tracks! and Iñárritu said he didn’t want computer-generated imagery), the gorgeous cinematography, the astounding score, and the acting, especially that of DiCaprio (Golden Globe winner as was the film for drama). The next time you think that acting can’t be all that hard just take a look at DiCaprio’s performance here. The plot, based in part on a novel, is about a crew of trappers employed by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and one in particular, Hugh Glass (DiCaprio), an actual historical figure. The movie opens with a group of trappers tanning and gathering hides but are soon set upon by Arikara Indians. Many of the trappers are killed and the rest escape to a raft but must eventually abandon it for fear of being tracked. Heading overland they camp one night and Glass, separated, is attacked twice by a grizzly bear, which severely mauls him. (Don’t put faith in reports that he was “raped.”) He’s left for dead by his crew, led by a selfish John Fitzgerald (Hardy). Glass manages to survive and slowly, through numerous travails in the bitterly cold frontier, make his way back to the fur company's fort-like outpost, to Fitzgerald’s shock.....The Hateful Eight has the Tarantino stamp right from the start, with 1960's movie fonts (Tarantino, if nothing else, loves the glory days of 1960's and 70's imagery), playfully ominously titled story chapters, and a humorous undertone to almost ever scene. But essentially and disappointingly this is a stage play. And even some of the acting seems stilted, particularly the halting conversations in the first chapter. Most of the story takes place in a large log cabin/store (Minnie's Haberdashery), located en route to the town of Red Rock, where the stage coach travelers seek refuge from a Wyoming blizzard. The plot, almost like in an Agatha Christie mystery, unfolds accordingly. At first, some of this seems plodding and besides the point. But eventually the storylines pick up, more tension ensues, culminating in Tarantino’s other trademark, buckets-of-blood killings. Samuel L. Jackson is very good in the film. And Tim Roth as British dandy Oswaldo Mobray is a delight. Jennifer Jason Leigh as Daisy Domergue, the character around whom the story turns, has the perfect pitch as an outlaw queen, at least early in the film. And Walton Goggins’s Sheriff Chris Mannix is a prissy boisterous delight. But at two hours and 37 minutes Tarantino is a little too full of himself to command such screen time for a rather not so remarkable story.

Highbrow soap opera, pure and simple

Downton Abbey phenom: I never got particularly into the series, airing on PBS, which launched its final season Sunday night, though I watched most of last year’s episodes and have wondered, from time to time, why this Edwardian-era soap is so popular. The New Yorker magazine this week has an interview with Jim Carter (Mr. Carson) and Phyllis Logan (Mrs. Hughes) (photo left), downstairs head servants and late blooming paramours. Carter muses that DA was designed in large part to show the passage of history and the fall of the aristocratic class structure. But the audience got so caught up in the personal stories of the ensemble cast that the producers had to prolong the downfall. “… we realized the success was due to the relationships rather than the social milieu, so we slowed down the march of history and concentrated more on the relationships.” That’s the experience with the people I know – the drama is all about who’s marrying, why did so and so die, dastardly personal conduct and redemption, and can this character make a new start? Pure soap opera, in other words, and the elegant costumes and filigree of a century ago doesn’t hurt either.

I returned to cheap night at Cineplex cinemas last night and took in David O. Russell’s Joy starring Jennifer Lawrence. I walked out on Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook (2012) (I know, I’m the only one who hated it) and found the same faults with this. The film’s first third is basically a symphony of the gestalt of the dysfunctional lower middle class family, same as in Silver Linings. You’re almost half way into the film before Russell gets to the guts – the trials and tribulations of Long Island housewife Joy (Lawrence) inventing a miracle mop and getting it on the market, based on the true story of Joy Mangano. And you know what? In close-ups Lawrence looks like a thinner Renée Zellweger.

The Windsor International Film Festival (WIFF) has no plans to restart its monthly film series at the downtown Capitol Theatre. “It is not something we have planned for 2016, though we might revisit it in the future,” director Vincent Georgie said. The increasingly and widely popular festival had been organizing monthly screenings to keep the film fest flame alive throughout the year and also as a prop for downtown redevelopment but ended them about a year or so ago.

Life's last delusions

Director Paolo Sorrentino is only 45 years old yet he seems obsessed with age, the aging process, personal legacy, even death. Is he an old soul or old before his time? In his The Great Beauty, which won the 2014 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), an aging aristocrat of the beautiful people persuasion, ruminates on his life amongst the seeming boredom of the elite world around him. In Youth (at the Landmark Main), two aging artists - composer Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) and film director Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel) – lifelong friends, are vacationing at a Swiss spa. They seem depleted, indeed vanquished, of energy. Especially Ballinger, who adamantly maintains he has retired from composing, and seemingly synonymously, life. Boyle isn’t so defeated and in fact is among a group of young writers working on a screenplay for a new movie roughly titled Testament, as in his own. The film’s context makes it seem these men are actually older than they are, but they're only in their 70s. Hell, those are the ages of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Ballinger and Boyle walk around the spa’s grounds talking about the joys of having a good piss. The plot rambles from topic to topic and scene to scene and the juxtapositions, rather than repel, tend to absorb. Maybe it’s me. I like films that are talkies in the sense of philosophical meanderings on the world, life, and the point of it all. Films like My Dinner with Andre (Louis Malle, 1981) and the first two of the Ethan Hawke-Julie Delpy Before trilogy (Richard Linklater) can make me go gaga, as much as an action movie freak likes Schwarzenegger films. Deep thoughts, or at least pseudo deep, but I’ll taken them. Boyle to Ballinger, “You say that emotions are overrated. But that's bullshit. Emotions are all we've got.” And Ballinger, “You were right. Music is all I understand” after his daughter Lena (Rachel Weisz) verbally lacerates him for having neglected her mother and her. The movie seems to say that the trivial is important. Like the joy of being able to piss even a few drops, the rules of attraction are about the basest and minutest details. Ballinger’s daughter is unceremoniously dumped by husband Julian (Ed Stoppard) for blond pop star Paloma Faith. Why? She’s better in bed. And the film seems to say that contradictions abound despite out loftiest ideals. Ballinger finally capitulates in every way on a matter of high principle. Like Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty the film moves slowly and meditatively but anything but boringly. And it’s hardly all frowns. Youth, described as a comedy-drama, has plenty of guffaws, such as Ballinger and Boyle constantly betting on whether a svelte bourgeois couple will ever talk. And the two repeatedly laugh at and harangue each other often about their own personal absurdities. The film’s dreamy quality, it’s chattering ruminations offset by some funny sight gags (such as Swiss cows engaged in a chorus) make for more than two hours of engrossing movie-watching, the best newly-released big screen film I’ve seen in months.

May the farce be with you!

I have to laugh at all the incredible excitement and hype about the latest Star Wars movie – what’s it called again? I am so entirely not into this. True, I was excited when the first Star Wars movie (George Lucas) came out in 1977, the same year as Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. It was a phenom at the time and I got caught up in it. I also saw the second and perhaps third editions. But after that my interest waned to the point where its now below nadir. I simply don’t get Star Wars, or at least the popularity. Nor did I get the geeky TV show Star Trek. So screw the tough-to-get-into lines, you couldn’t pay me to go. Ok, offer me $100 and I’ll sleep through it. A great spoof on the original Star Wars, also made in 1977, was a short Hardware Wars (Ernie Fosselius) (photo above), with the memorable line, “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll kiss three bucks goodbye.” (Movies were cheaper then.) As we used to say, “May the farce be with you!”

I saw Brooklyn (John Crowley) on the weekend (at the Maple). The film is well directed, has very good acting by lead Saoirse (SEAR-sha) Ronan, is sentimental, and is very Irish. You’d think Brooklyn in the early 1950s was nothing but Irish.

Last Tuesday at cheap night at Devonshire Cineplex I caught Legend (Brian Helgeland) about Britain’s infamous 1960s Kray twins. Tom Hardy of course was brilliant in portraying both Ronnie and Reggie Kray, sometimes in the same scene. But there are problems with the film. It concentrates too much on rock’em sock’em violence. It could have provided a wider context about 1960s Britain in which the Krays flourished. And as a period piece it succumbs to the usual tropes of a soundtrack playing music of the era, even though often well performed in nightclub scenes.

On Netflix the other night I caught The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles (Cécile Telerman, 2014) starring Julie Depardieu as Joséphine Cortes and Emmanuelle Béart as Iris Dupin. The story follows the travails of Joséphine, a poorly paid but brilliant translator who is finagled by her sister, Iris, a failing novelist, to write her next book. The story is a best-selling sensation and Iris, a megalomaniac, takes all the credit. Based on the Katherine Pancol novel, it’s a bit far-fetched but Depardieu and Béart’s performances are good.

And on TCM recently I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 Suspicion. If you ever want to see Cary Grant (Johnnie Aysgarth) out of character as a debonair charmer this is the movie. Here he’s diabolical or at least comes across that way. Hence the title.

I hadn’t watched a film at Cineplex in awhile and was pleased that there are now pre-movie warnings to the audience not to do obnoxious like kicking the backs of seats. It’s been a long time coming and Canadian theatres have trailed American ones in this regard. The Maple Theater has a great pre-movie short featuring George Lucas, talking about his frustrations with other moviegoers, which turn out to be, sure enough, the same as ours. But what is with all the Cineplex commercials? There were perhaps as many as 20 coming at you staccato-like prior to the feature attraction.

Not seeing any movies

It’s fall film season heading into Christmas – the prime time of the year to catch films slated for Oscar buzz, and what have I been doing? Not going to see them. There are several reasons. One is the timing. I was travelling a lot this fall and in Europe and in a country where English is not the first language. So after Spectre (Sam Mendes) premiered in London Oct. 26 and there was perhaps a chance to catch it in the language of the country I was in, no problem, since who really needs translation for a Bond film? But alas, the movie’s almost over the top hype turned me off, and the charms of medieval Europe allowed little time for the nearest multiplex…..The Danish Girl (Tom Hooper) might have been a film I’d have seen in another time and place. But earlier this fall I saw a movie with the same theme, The New Girlfriend (François Ozon, 2014 – see Sept. 25 post). And with the Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner story all over the news the theme of transgenderism just seemed a bit exhausted. …. The same, I might say, for Trumbo (Jay Roach). No offence to Bryan Cranston (as famed novelist Dalton Trumbo and Hollywood Blacklist victim) and Helen Mirren. And although Dalton Trumbo was a great writer (just read his Johnny Got His Gun) the theme of Hollywood blacklisting has been done time and again…. How about Carol (Todd Haynes)? You can’t pick up a newspaper or digital magazine these days without reading a story about Cate Blanchett (whom the media seems determined to make into the starriest of current actresses) in the leading role of Carol, based on the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt. I’m a fan of Highsmith and the story, especially set in early 1950s New York, seems intriguing from the perspective of the then taboo attraction of one woman for another. But, again, the subject has been done before……Brooklyn (John Crowley), also set in generally the same era, depicts the Irish immigrant experience to the U.S. Nothing against the theme, I just can’t get too worked up about seeing it…. Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg) is a film I’d normally be interested in seeing, at least in terms of the topic – the height of the Cold War, and West and East Berlin the fulcrum of then Soviet – US tension.  But I’m not a particular fan of Spielberg. There is a certain patina to his films that I want to call Disneyesque only they’re Spielbergesque.……Do I want to see The Big Short (Adam McKay) and depressingly return to recent history when the financial bottom was falling out of our economy? I’ve read umpteen explanations of the housing crash so do I want to see it explained on screen, albeit dramatically portrayed with a stellar cast?..... Ditto Spotlight (Thomas McCarthy). The Catholic Church abuse scandal was horrific and I've read copious amounts about it. Do I want to revisit it in a film?.....So Stang, what do you want to see? Well, there’s Legend (Brian Helgeland). I’m a huge fan of Tom Hardy, who masterfully plays the dual roles of Britain’s infamous Kray brothers (twins) criminal gang in London’s Swinging Sixties. What’s not to like? And there’s Youth (Paolo Sorrentino). This film seems a lot like Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013), a meditation on life and its multifaceted charms and illusions, and starring two of my favourite actors, Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel. 

No one, not even a cop, deserves this day

A Hard Day, South Korean director Kim Seong-hun’s second film, which screened last weekend at the Detroit Film Theatre, is a cop corruption drama that provides a sufficient amount of thrills and spills and competed in the Directors’ Fortnight at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Seong-hun came up with what I’m sure he thought was an imaginative premise. Have a cop - or it really could have been anyone - go through the trials and tribulations of one particularly god awful day. The cop is Detective Ko Gun-su (Lee Sun-kyun). You see, all he’s trying to do is get to his mother’s funeral, which is bad enough. But he ends up hitting a body on a deserted road, freaks, and decides to dump the dead man in his car trunk. I’m not sure why he didn’t just come clean as it was an honest mistake but I’ll leave that up to the filmmaker. The funny part comes when he has to get rid of the body. Guess what? His mom’s casket makes the perfect place to hide the evidence. “I’ll make it up to you, mom,” he pleas. There’s one problem. Someone of course has seen him. It’s another cop on the force, a guy who really is corrupt, as in trafficking in narcotics and other underworld activities corrupt, Lt. Park Chang-min (Cho Jin-woong). He decides to blackmail our hero, and the film proceeds in a kind of Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968) style chase as Gun-su seeks to discover and eliminate his adversary. The roller coaster ride, often imbued with humour, will be sure to get your adrenaline churning. South Korean films tend to be good at delivering high octane drama and I’ve seen better than this. Park Chan-wook’s 2003 Old Boy or Boon Joon-ho’s 2006 The Host come to mind. And while movies about police corruption are genre standards Seong-hun implicitly paints the entire police force in this movie, set in Seoul, as corrupt, right down to the guys taking the breathalyzer tests. I’m getting a little tired of movies that, almost in knee-jerk fashion, paint everyone, especially cops, with one stroke. Maybe it’s the times but I’m waiting for a film that makes heroics, flaws and all, of the police. Any takers?

Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) artistic director Cameron Bailey will make a rare Windsor appearance this Thursday at the Art Gallery of Windsor. He’ll be taking part in a discussion on a future cultural strategy for Ontario, sponsored by the provincial government. The event gets underway at 7 pm. 

Two at the DFT

This weekend I caught Gueros (2014, Alonso Ruiz Palacios) as well as this year’s Taxi (Jafar Panahi), the two films on tap at the Detroit Film Theatre (DFT), with Taxi also playing next weekend……Gueros intrigued me because it was a take on youthful alienation and something of a nod to the French New Wave. And Taxi, because it’s Iranian and made by perhaps that country’s leading filmmaker and which has generated a lot of publicity during its screenings at numerous art houses this fall……First, Gueros. What you notice first is that this film is in 4:3 aspect ratio so it appears on the screen more like a square than a rectangle, and the fact it’s shot in black and white. No biggie there, it was the subject matter that interested me. The film has been hailed by the critics and yes it certainly does have enough references to the kind of meandering story lines of the New Wave. But I thought the subject matter was barely interesting. The central character Tomas (Sebastian Aguirre) gets kicked out of his home to live with his older university-going brother Sombra (Tenoch Huerta) in Mexico City. Everywhere he goes people remark on his light skin, hence the movie’s name, showing that racism exists, even unintentionally, in every society. Sombra is on strike, against a strike, by fellow university students, who have laid in for a long occupation of their presumably liberal arts campus. I thought this was an interesting aspect of the movie but the director brings no edge to it. Is Sombra politically against the strike or simply indifferent? More the latter. The two characters plus a roommate and a student leader, Ana (Ilse Salas) decide to leave the university’s fractious atmosphere and go on a drive in search of a legendary Mexican pop star, whose voice “once made Bob Dylan cry.” They find him but don’t get the reception they wanted. So what’s the film about? If anything ennui, that politics doesn’t matter, and that life is for filling in any haphazard way you want. It’s these very aspects that induced a bit of ennui in me…..Now to Taxi. The film by the celebrated and persecuted (by the Iranian authorities) Panahi is a rather light slice of life. Panahi plays a taxi driver (picture above) picking up fares around Tehran, with virtually everything filmed from a dashboard camera. The characters are disparate, from a man and woman arguing over the death penalty, to two older women carrying a fish bowl, to a cyclist bleeding from an accident, to a young filmmaker played by the filmmaker’s niece, Hana, who harangues the good-natured Panahi as she goes about making her own school project film. One wonders what all this is supposed to add up to. There’s a reference to the Iranian theocracy’s oppression, as Hana reads the strict guidelines about who should be the good guys and bad guys according to official state policy. It’s not until the end of the movie that we come face to face with the real wall of oppression on a sunlit Tehran day. Altogether, Taxi is a series of whimsical character studies, ending with a surprising and not so pleasant kick in the teeth.