REVIEWS IN BRIEF: AUGUST, 2015

I mentioned some while back that going forward, there were going to be a lot of shorter reviews popping up, and going forward, I hope to make these posts happen weekly - biweekly for sure. But it's been a bad month for watching things, so this first capsule review round-up is going to stand instead as the collection of all the things I watched in the month of August that I thought I wanted to talk about in some capacity. Bonus: this means, now and in the future, that I'm going to review classic movies that happen to cross my transom that would otherwise never make it to the blog.

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A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Contemplating Existence (Andersson, 2014)

Just like that other Anderson from the United States, there's not point in denying that Roy Andersson tends to make films that resemble each other, and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, his Leone d'Oro winner from the 2014 Venice Film Festival, does pretty much exactly the same things as 2000's Songs from the Second Floor and 2006's You, the Living, and it it does them in pretty much exactly the same way. Long takes of barely-moving scenes, sudden eruptions of po-faced absurdism, and the whole thing would be suicidally depressing if it the comic timing weren't flawless. Third verse, same as the first.

Or is it? Whether I'm just starting to feel diminishing returns, or whether Andersson is slowly running out of inspiration, the one clear difference between Pigeon and its two forerunners in his trilogy of modern life is that it's not as good as they are. Which is a very different thing than saying it's not good, period, and I laughed heartily, many times, throughout the film, and was then cut off cold, many times, by the mordant shifts in perspective and tone. It's virtually impossible to imagine anyone who responded to the other films not liking this one at all, or even liking this one a whole lot. But comparatively, it lacks the passionate fire they possessed in such quantity; there are many handfuls individual shots and gags I could recite in loving detail from the first two movies, but the scene from Pigeon that lives strongest in my memory does not do so because I admire it the most (though a repeating motif involving 18th Century King Karl XII of Sweden, played by Viktor Gyllenberg, imposing upon the confused patrons of a rundown portside bar in the 2010s does give me enormous pleasure as I roll it around in my head).

Still, if we free it from the tyranny of having to live up to the standards of two of the most brilliant, idiosyncratic comedies of the 2000s, Pigeon is a fine piece of work on its own merits. The crawling pace of the static long shots - which are frequently exteriors or otherwise not beholden to the "this is a shadowbox in a room" staging of the earlier films, and that gives things a nice sense of sprawl - is absolutely perfect in establishing the film's erratic humor, and telling us how to appreciate it: first you're confused, then you're repulsed, and eventually the stiff stillness becomes hilarious. Or it doesn't. This is, beyond doubt, the kind of material that appeals to a very particular audience, and I think Songs from the Second Floor is absolutely more immediately winning, but there's no doubt that this is a thoroughly enjoyable experience for folks as what like morbid humor based in the pasty-faced frigidity of both people and their actions.

8/10

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A Star Is Born (Pierson, 1976)

Two terrific versions of the highly melodramatic story A Star Is Born - three if you count the original 1932 What Price Hollywood? (as you absolutely should), the same material in all but name - was perhaps already pushing it, but least the 1976 incarnation of the story tries to freshen the material by changing the setting from the movie industry to pop music. That doesn't entirely work out in practice, owing to the differences in image management between classical Hollywood and the '70s music industry, and it's only the least of the problems that brings the movie down to its knees.

One can have heard rumors and mutterings for years, as I had, that the '76 Star Is Born is nothing but a colossal ego trip for star-producer Barbra Streisand (who won the film's only Oscar, for the gooey love ballad "Evergreen", co-written by Paul Williams), but it's impossible to be prepared for how all-encompassingly dreadful a movie it is. It's not simply that the screenplay, assembled by too many cooks who clearly didn't work in the same kitchen, sacrifices its dramatic integrity in favor of giving Streisand one moment after another to show off. Though it's not possible to have enough favorable feelings for the star nor her vehicle to excuse the grotesqueness of extending the sodden 139-minute film's ending by a good quarter of an hour beyond its natural stopping point just to facilitate a showstopping solo number at the end.

But really, everything about the movie, save perhaps for its nifty grit-soaked concert-doc cinematography (by Robert Surtees, Oscar-nominated), is just embarrassing hackwork. Kris Kristofferson, cast as the third wheel in the love story between Streisand and herself, ambles in like a guy who figures that you'll buy him a beer if he has a relaxing enough smile, while the rest of the cast shuffle around in the background; the luckier ones get to furrow their brows and look sad at the thought of Kristofferson's drinking. Occasionally, a pair of African-American backup singers materialise to give the film a jolt of incongruous lazy racism. As a work of craft, the film begins and ends with Surtees; the '70s fashions are charmingly dated, but still more campy than anything, and the less said about the raw editing in some of the singing scenes, the better.

No, the film lives and dies on Streisand's talent, which is of course considerable, but sabotaging the drama to get us there is hardly worthy of anybody's time or energy, hers least of all. I would at this point name some of the films to better show off her iconic vocal powers, her loopy screen presence and comic timing, or her gift for turning woundedness into lashing anger, but it would take too long: all of Streisand's films are better showcases than this, even the most overt vanity projects. And yes, I have seen The Mirror Has Two Faces.

3/10

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Fantastic Voyage (Fleischer, 1966)

One of the last big sci-fi pictures before 2001: A Space Odyssey came along and fundamentally changed the possibilities of the genre, 1966's Fantastic Voyage is the platonic ideal of a movie that gets praised, sincerely, for its visual effects, by someone whose tone of voice and inability to maintain eye contact make it clear that they hope you don't ask about anything else. Because it feels bad to attack the movie: the visual effects are really good, even if they were supplanted and then lapped within a few years of its release. And how much nicer to have those kind of top-drawer visual effects in a movie about interesting concepts and adult characters, and not one that involves giant robots walloping the shit out of each other.

Still, you can't get too far into the film before you have to admit that for all its achievements, and the very real charm of mid-'60s sci-fi (notwithstanding the vast budget gap, the film more than slightly resembles TV's Star Trek, from the same year), Fantastic Voyage is a fucking slog. It shouldn't be: the hook is terrific. Both the U.S. and the USSR have developed miniaturisation technology, but only the Americans have a scientist who knows how to make the process last for more than an hour. And he's been almost fatally shot, and sent into a coma that can only be cured by shrinking down brain surgeon Dr. Duval (Arthur Kennedy), his assistant Cora Peterson (Raquel Welch), Dr. Michaels (Donald Pleasance), and sub captain Bill Owens (William Redfield), and injecting them and their microscopic submarine right into the scientist's body, with government agent Grant (Stephen Boyd), along for manly protagonist duties, trying to catch Duval in the act of being a Commie spy.

That certainly ought to be a fantastic voyage, and if you've encountered the story in Isaac Asimov's novelisation, you even know that it kind of can be (Asimov demanded permission to re-work the story to make it less idiotic). But Henry Kleiner's screenplay and Richard Fleischer's direction show off all the seams and plot holes while pushing the plot along as slowly as a nominal adventure movie could possibly support. The sub voyage takes place in something longer than real time, during which the plot plonks along through a repetitive cycle of theoretically tense moments flattened by lifeless direction. Every actor who isn't Pleasance stands around being vastly too serious, and sometimes we are given blessed relief in the form of the production designers' florid, psychedelia-tinged vision of the inside of the human body.

It looks great - there will be those who carp about how dated it is (and, sure, it is), but really is quite a special visual experience. Tragically, behind those visuals, it's bloated B-movie nonsense built around false characters, expanded and perpetrated by people who didn't know how to capture the proper spunk and speed of a good piece of junk sci-fi.

5/10

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The End of the Tour (Ponsoldt, 2015)

Far be it from me to tell the nearest and dearest friends and survivors of David Foster Wallace, a great many of whom have said some pretty withering things about the beatifying biopic-in-miniature The End of the Tour, that they're wrong. There's something squishy and off-putting about the film just in relationship to itself, and the way it treats its version of Wallace (Jason Segel) as a soul too gentle for this cynical, cold world - literally, the film is set in the Midwestern winter - while constantly foreshadowing his suicide 12 years later. There's a distinct, appalling thread of "come laugh at the homey wisdom of Your Literary Idol®, and then cry to remember that he's dead" that runs through the whole thing.

And yet I find myself not only not-hating the film, but even admiring bits and pieces of it, though probably not the bits that the filmmakers wanted. Frankly, I found Segel's Wallace to be all mimicry (good mimicry) with limited willingness to let us inside - and this is, to be fair, much more a function of Donald Margulies's script, which presents the author as an enigma and a concept in the first hour, than it's a sign of Segel's limits as an actor - with not nearly enough thought behind his eyes. The movie depicts Wallace, but it's terrified as hell at grappling with him.

Instead, the real protagonist and by far the deeper, more thoughtfully played character, is minor novelist David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), assigned by Rolling Stone to interview Wallace near the end of the promotional tour for the author's 1996 novel Infinite Jest. Eisenberg performance isn't as "revelatory" as Segel's, I guess - the doubt-ridden, antagonistic urban Jewish figure he plays here is securely in his wheelhouse - but it's far more expansive and tricky, full of threads that aren't quite in the script, allowing his version of Lipsky (whose story was never finished and ultimately turned into the 2010 book, Although of Course You End Up Meeting Yourself, that this film is adapted from) to be sufficiently resentful under the starry-eyed nervousness and awe that the film's lurch towards an interpersonal conflict as it goes along feels like a natural outgrowth rather than an imposition. It ends being, Amadeus-style, better as the story of an average man admiring and fearing a genius, than as the story of that genius itself, and it's easily Eisenberg's best work since The Social Network.

Stylistically, it's wholly undistinguished American indie filmmaking of a sort that has been unchanged in all particulars since sometime in the 1990s; director James Ponsoldt is clearly more interested in presenting his characters than in doing anything to frame them cinematically. A literary approach certainly fits the material, but the lack of aesthetic challenge is exactly the problem: all the film wants to do is gawk at Wallace/Segel, not engage with him, and the result is often more trivial than penetrating.

6/10

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TO BECOME IMMORTAL AND THEN DIE

A review requested by Ryan J, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 debut feature and declaration of war Breathless* is a curious case. In hindsight, everything that is most daring about it would be repeated to stronger effect in more interesting movies overall by the same director - most directly in Band of Outsiders and Pierrot le fou, though almost everything he made throughout the 1960s reworks some element of his debut - which makes it frankly a wee bit harder to regard it with the same esteem that besotted critics and cinephiles did when it was brand new.And yet, this is The One. The single movie that you need to see and grapple with if you're going to have a reckoning with Godard's first phase, and arguably with the entirety of French cinema in that decade (arguably with any of the European New Waves of the 1960s and 1970s, of which the French New Wave that Breathless co-created with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows was the wellspring). It's indisputably on the shortlist (the top ten, let's say) of Movies You Need To See if you're going to have a proper conception of cinema history and the potential of cinematic form. So even while my heart says that we should care more about Band of Outsiders or Contempt or Masculin féminin, my head says not to be fucking daft.

The place: Paris in the '60s. The time: America during Prohibition. Here we meet self-identified bastard Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a young man who has certainly built most of his personality from a steady diet of B-grade Hollywood crime pictures, not unlike the writer-director who created him. He's apparently some kind of a real criminal, though you could be forgiven for supposing it's all an overbaked fantasy in his noir-soaked head, and he's also a loudmouth given to braggadocio and toxic sexism. Who's to say if we're supposed to admire him or find him absurdly hateful: the camera insinuates us right along side him, Belmondo's prickly acting and the relentlessly, self-consciously disagreeable things he keeps saying repel us, and the editing by Cécile Decugis, famously, doesn't much intend that we regard him as a real character at all: he's a dude in a movie with the misfortune to somewhat suspect that's the case, which leads him to act far too much like a movie character. And this is partially to blame for why he shoots a cop during a drive in the country.

I hope it says more about the film than my inattentiveness when I declare that, having seen Breathless God knows how many times now (I went to film school, and I'm a self-professed Godard fan - that's good for at least six viewings right there), and remembering with great fondness that it's the first of Godard's gangster movie riffs, I am infallibly surprised to remember that the entire plot hinges on Michel's murder of a cop. It's just not that kind of movie, except that of course it very much is - the rest of the film down to the last scene all revolves around the detectives hunting Michel down and ultimately getting their hooks into visiting American student Patricia (Jean Seberg), possibly the most important of his current paramours; she's the co-lead of the film, but at the same time they don't really seem to like each other very much, the evidence of the signature bedroom scene notwithstanding. But I'm going all out of order.

It is so deeply tempting and dangerously easy to lock in and adore Breathless for all its little flair: the popular introduction of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous technique of the jump cut, which I think we typically remember as showing up during a car ride that gets propelled ahead in an attempt to make it seem artificially exciting and tense, with the full aid and comfort of Martial Solal's pounding jazz-influenced score. But that's at least the third major scene involving jump cutting, and the other two are both conversations, one between Michel and another one of his girlfriends (it just so happens to be right after Michel mentions his recent work at famed movie studio Cinécitta), one between Patricia and the editor nudging her journalism career forward, both relatively banal. I wouldn't suggest anything so trite as to say that the jump cutting is the film's attempt to hurry us through the dully quotidian scenes that shouldn't even be in a nervy gangster thriller in the first place, but I wouldn't tell you not to make that claim for them.

Or there's the brilliant way that the killing of the cop is shot, with close-ups of the gun and the unsynchronised sound of an gunshot, immediately followed by a scene moments later - the jarring image editing and discontinuous sound standing in as surrogates for the act of violence instead of that act being depicted (both times a human being is murdered with a gun in Breathless, the sound of the gunshot does not match the onscreen imagery. Just a fun thing to be aware of). Which would easily lead us to the film's bravura use of sound editing, which for my money is the far bolder aspect of Breathless's aesthetic developments, though the film editing was more quickly, more widely copied. And then I would talk about the floating, ghostly voices in the scene with a great, famous author (played by New Wave progenitor Jean-Pierre Melville) being peppered with high-minded but insipid philosophical questions leading to purposefully shitty answers ("Rilke was a great poet, so undoubtedly right" is his considered response to some journalist's "look how I did my research!" moment), and maybe the way that the score keeps jolting its way into the movie, mostly but not always motivated by the onscreen action.

The mistake I have personally had in the past with doing that is to lose the forest for the trees: Breathless is not just the sum of Godard's aesthetic. And it is here, I think, that something on the order of Masculin féminin argues for itself as an improvement over Godard's debut, since that film more clearly demonstrates the reason for its aesthetic rather than simply wandering, as Breathless occasionally does, into "look at me, I can be formally outrageous for the sake of it!" territory.

So let's not indulge that limited reading, huh? Step back from the jump cutting and the sound, from Seberg's stiff French and Belmondo's posing for the camera, from the litany of Hollywood genre film references and in-jokes, and Breathless does in fact take on quite a distinctive shape. It's not just Godard's riff on gangster movies of both the American and French tradition, and not even just his riff on the kind of young people so infatuated with pop culture that they'd fall into the trap of defining their identity in terms of the movies they enjoy most. Though that's getting us closer.

It's really nothing else but the first in a chain of films where Godard is interested in youth itself, the issue of how young, or at least young-ish individuals manage to find their way around a quickly globalising world whose values are evolving at a startling rate. For Michel, this means retrenching to an archly conservative, performance-based notion of masculinity, and the whole movie bends itself around him - though by no means does it do so uncritically - and eschewing the real world in favor of the fantastic one he thinks of in movies.

Reality, in the form of aesthetic realism, insists on pushing its way through; I return us to that bedroom scene, in which a film constructed out of three- and four-minute blasts of narrative propulsion jams on the brakes for 23 minutes as Michel surprises Patricia in her hotel, they have sex, they discuss art insofar as his dickish, petulant refusal to take her questions seriously permits. The editing slows down, the lighting (from cinematographer Raoul Coutard) turns ragged and rough, the setting becomes almost sublimely unexceptional and devoid of storytelling momentum. It's like the "other" New Wave, the one by Truffaut (who co-wrote this film) and Rohmer, based in languid humanistic moments of unadorned conversation pushes its way into Godard's more manic, formalist New Wave for the duration of a whole act. But for the most part, the film permits Michel his fantasy, even though it requires him to be betrayed by a woman who seems a little perplexed herself why she's been obliged to be a femme fatale in the film's glorious final shot, a deeply ambivalent close-up on Seberg's face that ends with her turning her back on us.

The jarring and groundbreaking post-modernism of the filmmaking - Breathless is not the first movie that is aware that it's a movie and which acts to make sure we're aware that it's a movie (that's not even an invention of the sound era), but it's the film that kickstarted that as a tradition that has never since gone fully into hibernation - isn't, then, simply a radical response to the hidebound aesthetics of the bulk of post-war French cinema. Of course it's partly that. To assert otherwise would be to deny the volumes of Godard's own writing at this time, when he was still a critic at the legendary Cahiers du cinéma. But the aesthetic violence of the film is also an attempt to encapsulate the rage of its characters, whose youthful energy is given no functional outlet, and so must explode somehow. Within the world of the film, that means destroying the traditional structures of cinema. In the real world, that meant the increasing unrest of the '60s that resulted in the May 1968 protests across Europe - and while I'll not be such a Godardian as to claim that he could predict those protests were coming, any quick glance at his films in '67 - Week End, La chinoise - and their continued development of the self-destruction begun with Breathless suggests that the nascent youthful resentment of this film had continued festering and growing ever bolder, more radical, and more intense. As much as they're any one thing, Godard's films are deliberate diagnoses of the era in which he made them, and Breathless is as precise an identification of the culture of the '60s-to-come as I have seen in the movies.

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A FILM THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY

A review requested by Pat King, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Recommended musical accompaniment to this review.

Obviously, if we're talk about pure, rancid anti-cinematic imbecility, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is Michael Bay's worst movie and will almost certainly remain that way, for it's difficult to imagine a worse film that doesn't reach out and murder the post-production team before they have a chance to complete it. But if you asked me which one I hated the most, which one I would least want to have to see twice - as I now have, thanks to this damn fundraiser and the cruelty of those who would claim to be my friends - I wouldn't take a moment to answer: Pearl Harbor. Revenge of the Fallen is at least about giant robots from space. Pearl Harbor is a reprehensible mangling of history, which isn't inherently a bad thing - many a good film has looked at the annals of historical fact and decided "meh, fuckit", from the earliest days of narrative cinema - though instead of mangling history in the service of some insightful work of dramatic art and character study, it slathers its ahistorical twaddle onto a tepid, wannabe-Titanic love story, under the stewardship of a man whose career has ranged from the emotional depth of an 11-year-old boy all the way up to a 13-year-old boy.

The film is about two best friends from a version of Tennessee that couldn't be any more shamelessly, heart-tuggingly Rockwellian. Maybe if they threw a jumping, slobbery puppy in there, or something. Even before we meet a single human being, we've already heard Hans Zimmer's deeply earnest score, dripping with melancholic evocations of Classic Americana and warm, easy patriotism; we've already seen John Schwartzman's lusciously Malickian sunset photography in all the shades of nostalgia. And no insult meant to either Zimmer or Schwartzman, whose work throughout the film is of the highest caliber; it is hard to imagine anyone improving upon their work, which is plainly no less than what they had asked of them. The problem is not with the cinematography or the music per se, but with the underlying conception driving not just those elements but the whole ethos of the movie.

Simply put, this is what happens when Michael Bay does patriotism, and like everything else in his career, it's awful. Even more awful than when he tries to do smart sci-fi or satire, because Pearl Harbor requires a particularly delicate touch: it's a period film, which is already a minefield that requires either a keen awareness of how people moved and talked 60 years before the film's release, or a particular stylistic intention that justifies modern attitudes and deliberate anachronism, and neither of those apply here. It hardly requires mentioning that the guiding hand of the bombastic crapshow Armageddon wouldn't even be able to daydream about handling World War II with anything but the most stupidly gung-ho adoration for military doodads. And this isn't by any means a scenario that could benefit from Bay's characteristic enthusiasm giant metal cocks with the U.S. flag painted on them: Randall Wallace's screenplay is far more interested on the romantic triangle between good Tennessee boys in the U.S. Army Air Corps (later the Army Air Forces, a change that occurs in the time frame of the movie, though it's not mentioned), Capt. Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Capt. Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett), who both fall in love with nurse Lt. Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale), Rafe when he meets her in New York in January 1941, Danny at the U.S. Navy base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, after Rafe has left for Europe to fly with the RAF, and has been incorrectly reported dead. He re-enters their lives on 6 December, 1941, just so that the blow-up between them all can mirror in the most shockingly inappropriate way that whole attack thingy that shows up the next morning late afternoon. And things do not repair themselves for months, until Rafe and Danny both sign on for Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle's (Alec Baldwin) famed attack on the Japanese archipelago in April, 1942, when one of the men must make the ultimate sacrificcccccccccccccccccccc sorry, fell asleep on my keyboard.

The miracle of Pearl Harbor lies in the number of different ways that it's totally unacceptable as a work of cinema and a dramatic story. There's the obvious shortcomings the film as an enormous misrepresentation of living history (an apparent specialty of Wallace's - he also wrote Braveheart), ranging from the innocuous (Bay had the colors of the Mitsubishi Zeroes flown by the Japanese changed so they'd look cooler) to the reprehensible (the re-ordering of chronology to change what the military brass knew and when) to the fucking nuts. Fucking nuts isn't enough. This is a film in which President Roosevelt (Jon Voight), in order to make a point about America's determination, stands up out of his goddamn wheelchair.

It's also simply a wreck of storytelling, with its grotesque structural lurches from the love story to a historical wide view, without any rhyme or reason to how it attempts to combine those elements. Hell, the fact that FDR is in the movie at all is as deeply questionable of a choice as then having him turn into some kind of polio-defying superman: Pearl Harbor is a story about a lot of things, and it's muddled about all of them, but the machinations of Washington politics are absolutely not on the list of things that fit comfortably into the rest. It's frankly only just barely a film in which the attack on Pearl Harbor fits: the story climaxes with Rafe and Danny flying in the Doolittle Raid, while in the scheme of things, the attack is more of an inconvenience that redirects the characters' attention without actually changing the stakes at all. And the poor writing isn't limited to form: the film's dialogue is justly infamous for its mixture of tortured verbiage in a weak attempt to ape '40s speech, and its ludicrous, artless bluntness: "I think World War II just started", delivered with forced determination by Hartnett, is right up there with "Come on, Hitler, I'll buy you a glass of lemonade" from 2002's Max in the annals of lines from historical fiction that make the entire medium of cinema a little bit shabbier.

The characters and acting are atrocious: Affleck, Hartnett, and Beckinsale are an unholy trinity of blandness and low-charisma, and while there are a few flashes in the supporting cast of anything resembling humanity - Baldwin makes a good Doolittle, and Mako has the requisite solemnity as Admiral Yamamoto - the great majority of the supporting cast is distinctive more for being curiously terrible than fading into vanilla obscurity like the leads. The way William Fichtner lurches into the movie like a drunk asshole in the 1923 prologue sets a poor standard that the rest of the movie keeps folllowing: when even as magnetic a presence as Michael Shannon comes off like a flailing moron, you know that things are going deeply wrong.

And of course, Bay conducts all of this with maximum bombast and no worries about how much, if any, sense it all makes. His customary beer commercial aesthetic not being suited for a story of people living and dreaming in 1941, he instead goes for the romantic drama version of the same, which is why we get so many eye-searing sunsets and shots of trees and water - cut by the four-man editing team, amusingly enough, with the same whiz-bang madness of the average car chase or gun battle in a Bay picture. It's even more why we get Evelyn and Danny making love in the most overwrought, aggressive scene of impressionistic gentleness ever put to film, with soft focus and gentle lighting and sheets blowing in the wind that are exactly the Bay version of soap opera sex scenes, trite imagery blown up to 11 and screaming at us. There are flourishes that are the worst thing in the whole world: a newsreel photographer gets shot, so the camera falls to the ground and records him dying and we see it in cocked black-and-white, a scene that recalls Saving Private Ryan as filtered through unapologetic assholery.

It is impossible to catalogue all the ways in which Pearl Harbor is tasteless, overblown, or boring; it's not even good as mindless war action, with the 7 December attack itself a messy collage of disconnected scenes that finds Bay's mayhem skills at a low ebb. If there's a single positive element to this movie, I am certain that I cannot name it; it is overstuffed bullshit that enthusiastically mocks real history and the real sacrifices of human beings who lived long enough to respond to the film with acidic dismissal. There's more incompetent filmmaking out there - but not by a terribly huge margin - but there aren't many films that I find more genuinely vile.

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PLEASE SHARE MY UMBRELLA

A review requested by Fedor Illitchev, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. My thanks as well for the historical background he was able to provide for this film, about which virtually no information is readily available in English.

During the most censorious periods in the history of Soviet cinema - which is to say, everything from the start of the Second World War until the early 1980s, with the exception of the Krushchev Thaw between roughly 1956 and 1965 - there were, broadly speaking, two reasons that a film might trigger the official objection of the government. One, obviously, was because it contained subversive narrative elements that could be interpreted as critical of Soviet policy, or Communism generally. The other reason is a little stranger: basically, a movie could be stamped down on account of being too stylish. The charge was "formalism", meaning that the film was driven more by aesthetics and filmmaking technique than presenting a clear story with a plain message, and was perhaps so confusing and obscure in its challenging application of those aesthetics that the people in charge couldn't even tell if it was subversive or not.

It was wicked formalism, rather that touchy political content, that mostly explains the aborted career of Mikhäil Kobakhidzé a filmmaker from what's now Georgia. At the dawn of the '60s, in his early 20s, Kobakhidzé attended the state-run Gerasimov film school, until his graduation in '65. Between 1961 and 1969, he completed five short films, three at school and two subsequently; the last, Musicians, finally pushed the censors too hard, and his next completed project wouldn't come until years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when he was invited to make En chemin in 2003 as part of a French series of short films.

If Musicians killed off his career, it was his fourth film, 1967's Umbrella, that first triggered the warning signs. To your eyes or mine the wordless 18-minute film - available in its entirety on YouTube - is naught but a poetic fable about human connections starting to blur and pull apart, carried on the back of an uninterpreted image of an umbrella floating along the Georgian countryside of its own accord. But we lack the finely-honed paranoia of a Soviet official. There's one way into which it's at least possible to read troubling politics into the film: the umbrella is associated with distinctively French-sounding music cues that I can't place 100% (though one motif is instantly recognisable from Gershwin's An American in Paris), while the clean-cut youths the umbrella entrances and confuses are linked, in the umbrella's absence, to a passage from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. The potential for a politicised meaning to this Western vs. Russian war on the soundtrack was dangerous enough to bring unwanted attention Kobakhidzé's way, if not, itself, enough to shut him down.

As for the film itself, it's probably easiest if we start out by just working through the plot. A young man (Gia Avalishvili) works in some not-entirely clear capacity by an isolated stretch of railroad tracks, and in his downtime entertains his girlfriend (Jana Petraitite) by putting on cute little shows, with a curtain and everything, in which he plays Tchaikovsky on a recorder. A white umbrella floats by, and they're compelled to give chase through the countryside and into town, and it taunts them, staying just out of reach. They give up for a bit and dance inside the man's house, while the umbrella lingers outside the window. It follows them and they're finally able to grab it, and all seems happy and free till another man (Ramaz Giorgobiani) comes by, and the umbrella flies over to him. The woman follows him and they start to walk off; she slows and changes her mind handing the umbrella over to the second man and walking back, though the framing of this final shot - nothing but her quiet, ambiguous smile - make it deliberately impossible to be sure what's on her mind in that moment.

If there's a political reading that seems to me to fit the evidence, it's one that would actually tend to support the Soviet Union: the allure of Western culture, embodied by the umbrella, drags the young couple away from their work and their lives, embarrasses them in front of their neighbors, and generally bothers and distracts them. In the end, they both abjure the umbrella, she by deliberate choice and he by learning that its charms are all just a big come-on, in the end - this true regardless of what the umbrella represents, or if it represents anything at all. So it is, if I have any idea what the hell I'm talking about, a fable about the triumph of Soviet youths (calling them good Georgian youths would be one of those subversive narrative elements I mentioned) over the siren call of Western art.

But then, what Umbrella is actually about is rather more abstract and emotive than breaking down its plot beats into editorial cartoon symbols. The bulk of the film is about pure experience, the young man and the young woman and the umbrella moving in stark black and white against the mottled grey dirt of the Georgian hills. They run and skip in a highly exaggerated series of angular movements of, transformed by the camera and the music (which dominates the minimalist, plastered-on sound design) into playful dancing. Just about the only thing it's possible to confidently declare about Kobakhidzé's critical reputation in the West is that people like to compare him to Jacques Tati, and that's absolutely fair: the fascination with how bodies and limbs can move in graceful sweeps and sharp jabbing gestures, and how the angle the filmmaker takes on those bodies changes our perception of what they're doing, readily evokes that French genius that Kobakhidzé had never seen. But the movie that Kobakhidzé had never seen that I kept thinking of was Richard Lester and Peter Seller's masterful exercise in manic slapstick, The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film from 1959, which similarly finds itself deeply fascinated with the geometry of the human form.

What both of those comparisons miss - for both of them attend only to Umbrella's broadly comic aspects - is the gauziness of the movie, the sensibility that positions it within a widely-defined Eastern European artistic tradition instead of the widely-defined Western European/American tradition. As much as the film is charming, it's even more hushed and haunting, with the umbrella's fluid gliding through the landscape and the camera's graceful pursuit of it adding an ethereal feeling. Kobakhidzé and cinematographer Nikoloz Sukhishvili's images can have a very hazy and ghostly quality, owing in no small part to the stark whiteness of the umbrella serving to so thoroughly strip any and all naturalism from the film. But also owing to the way that the images all seem to be made of curves and irregular shapes, in everything from the rolling hills to the floppiness of laundry in the wind - the man's little square house is a striking bulwark against this, a concrete manifestation of stability that emphasises the weirdness around it (the shots of an out-of-focus umbrella through the house's windows are absolutely striking, as instantly unforgettable as anything I've seen).

The film's brevity and its frankly opaque "meaning" more or less require that it function more as a mood piece and an expression of emotions. It's not quite an experimental film in the way I like to use that term - it tells a definite story and that story has resonances - but it's fair to call it experimental in the way that it generates those moods and emotions purely through movement, editing, and gradations of greyscale. It's deeply mesmerising and yes, it's absolutely formalist - that the Soviets would get a little nervous watching it makes perfect sense even if the film itself has little that anyone could object to within it. It's joyful cinema, cut with just the right amount of bittersweet, and the way that it builds that joy within its craftsmanship is far more affecting than a blunter treatment could have been; it's a sorry accident of history that it's for exactly that reason that the film was shunted to the memory hole that makes it so deeply obscure now.

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IT'S BEEN BUILDING UP INSIDE OF ME FOR OH, I DON'T KNOW HOW LONG

Biopics are bad enough, but biopics about genius artists tend to be the worst, and biopics of genius artists who are particular icons to the Baby Boomer generation? You might as well try to survive a nuclear strike. So the simple fact that Love & Mercy, the story of Beach Boys songwriter, producer, and artistic guide Brian Wilson, is pretty damn good - not great, but pretty damn good - is beyond miraculous. And I haven't even mentioned yet that it drags two remarkable-unto-sublime performances out of Paul Dano and John Cusack, a pair of actors whose recent career choices would leave me unwilling to trust them with doing voiceover work for a McDonald's ad, let alone bringing to life one of the defining artists of 20th Century pop music.

Aye, they both play Brian; that's sort of the gimmick, you see. Love & Mercy splits itself into two parts that interweave, each covering a short, important window in Wilson's life. There's the period in the 1960s (the Dano half) during which he conceived and created Pet Sounds, the "Good Vibrations" single, and the increasingly deranged recording sessions for the unrealised Smile, at which time he transformed from "guy who has auditory hallucinations that he funnels into his daringly unconventional production of rock & pop music" into "guy who has auditory hallucinations that leave him unable to function at the most basic human level". And then, there is the period in the 1980s (the Cusack half), which finds him overmedicated and easily manipulated by the overreaching Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), and befriended by Cadillac salesperson Melinda Ledbettr (Elizabeth Banks), who figures out reasonably quickly that he's being horribly mistreated, but has no idea what to do to help him.

The most critical thing that Love & Mercy gets right, and it's apparently all on director Bill Pohlad (who is, by habit, a producer) that it got that way, is that it's not a story of how Brian Wilson was a genius who used his emotional torments to feed his genius and thus created the genius works that have made all our lives better for a half-century. Now, I happen to believe that Pet Sounds is one of the handful of perfect musical objects of the last 70 years, and that "Good Vibrations" puts in an enormously strong case for being the finest pop single ever recorded. And because I believe that, there are some in-jokes and one-off references in Love & Mercy that I get to enjoy more than other people. But in virtually every way that it effects the story or the treatment of the characters, the film doesn't reward me for having good taste. It matters, within the film's frame of reference, that Pet Sounds is generally regarded as a masterpiece with songs on it that a random person, e.g. a Cadillac salesperson, would immediately recognise, and have automatic enthusiasm for meeting the man who wrote them. It does not, however, matter what we think.

Given the crushing volume of biopics, and musical biopics especially, whose solitary hook is "because this person achieved great things and you love him/her for it, come bask in hero worship for two hours", the existence of a movie that takes an unbelievably famous man and prefers to place him in a character study that feels the need to make the case in reference to itself that he deserves to be studied is great enough. But then Love & Mercy goes even farther in the direction of the angels by focusing, rigidly, on just one aspect of its subject's personality and building its narrative around relatively concise stretches of his life that directly relate to that one aspect. This merciless focus serves the movie well as cinema, far better indeed than the macroscopic "childhood to the grave look of virtually every other biopic of recent vintage. Praise be to Pohlad for having the good sense to make those choices, and praise be to screenwriter Oren Moverman (who also co-wrote one of the only other mainstream biopics of the 21st Century that's worth keeping, the experimental Bob Dylan fantasia I'm Not There) for executing it so successfully. Even without recourse to its terrific cast and its occasional unconventional technique, the structure and narrowed scope would be enough by themselves to put in a play for this as the most original and insightful film biography in many, many years.

In the form of Dano and Cusack, it boasts two absolutely vital performances that are not any kind of mimicry - Cusack does not physically resemble Wilson at any stage of his life - and aren't interested in digging into the creative process. They are performing a man with a profound mental imbalance, in both cases putting more emphasis on his personhood than his disease. And, forbidden by Pohlad from meeting to build the character together, the actors approach that goal with sufficiently different strategies that the break in personality is shocking and even scary, hammering home the idea that the years between Smile and Lebdetter's arrival represented a profound, irrecoverable rupture in Wilson's life more eloquently than any piece of writing could. It's career-redefining work for both men; Cusack hasn't played so hard against his stock tricks and refrained from indulging in his standard persona in years and years, and it's the most daunting, accomplished performance that Dano has ever given in a movie.

And even given that, I'm not sure if I'd hand either of those men Best in Show honors over Banks, who emerges as the actual protagonist of the 1980s scenes, in a role that demands different things of her than I can recall having ever seen. There's little to no comedy in the movie, which hamstrings her from using her best-honed tools; but the quick-witted reaction times and disappearance into the needs of the individual moment that mark good improvisation translates remarkably well to the needs of a sober character drama.

Stylistically, Love & Mercy is a bit subtler; Pohlad and cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman aren't hellbent on putting together particularly striking images, and while the movie is unmistakably well-shot, it's in a very humble manner that only goes for broke in a couple sequences that try to mimic '60s film stock. Otherwise, it's all so many California afternoons with thinnish yellow and blue skies, well-used but hardly imaginative. Where Love & Mercy casually sidles into genius is in its sound design, led by Eugene Gearty, as befits a movie about a man driven towards crafting innovative overlays and harmonies in pop songs because it captured the world as he knew it, with its shifting, non-real sounds. The movie calls attention to audio first and foremost: it's opening is a black screen on top of which a formless sound montage rolls around over our heads and behind our ears and back and forth through our skulls. And this continues, if frequently in less aggressive forms, throughout the movie, sometimes for better (young Brian's fit in a swimming in a pool), sometimes not quite as much (a busy, noisy dinner that feels a little bit too "yes, we get the point, thank you"). It shades invisibly into Atticus Ross's astounding, perfect score, a sound collage using fragments of Beach Boys hits and incomplete session tracks that have been reassembled and tweaked so much as to sound like the movie having an auditory hallucination of its very own, one from which snatches of music can be pulled out only if we're paying attention constantly. It's a marriage of form and content of an unexpected sort, but it works perfectly to match our perception to the distressed leads'.

The question that at last presents itself: does all this add up to an actually great piece of cinema? Or am I simply bowled over by a semi-biopic that breaks every last one of the conventions that makes that my least favorite genre, and find myself anxious to overrate it? For all that I'm thoroughly impressed by Love & Mercy and have had it rolling around in my head much more stickily than I'd have ever assumed might happen, I can't quite bring myself to actually recommend it. Still, it's better than it has any right to be in virtually every capacity, and far be it from me to undersell that kind of achievement.

7+/10

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ANDROIDS DO DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP

A second review requested by Michael R, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The credit for the production company glides into the movie so subtly you barely even notice:

A VIRGIN PICTURES PRODUCTION
hello
HELLO
is this a story?
YES
what type?
FAIRYTALE FOR COMPUTERS
name?
ELECTRIC DREAMS

It's a feisty, lighthearted start for a movie that continues to always and primarily be those two adjectives above all others, though there's at least one other that puts in a good case for itself: pacey. But we'll get there in a moment. The first thing that an honest person writing in the second decade of the 21st Century has to concede is that, for a movie from 1984, Electric Dreams has aged in a particularly miraculous way. By which I mean that you could spend weeks hunting without finding a movie that's so enormously dated in every way. But this is the very fact that redeems the movie. Put it another way: if I were writing this review in '84, I think I would find it preposterous junk elevated by Giorgio Moroder's score and Bud Cort's vocal performance as an A.I. But I am writing in 2015, and from this point in time, Electric Dreams is such a preposterously exciting time capsule from the dawn of the personal computer age that I can't stand it. We'll get there in a moment, too.

For now, just the plot. Miles Harding (Lenny Von Dohlen) is a brilliant architect but a disaster of a human, perpetually incapable of being where he needs to be on time or with all of his ideas collected. With his job hanging in the balance, he reluctantly decides to buy one of those brand new pocket computers that keeps track of dates and notes. Like a personal assistant, but one that's digital. The perky saleswoman (Wendy Miller) manages to upsell him a whole home computer set-up, along with all the widgets and doo-dads that will allow his computer to monitor all of his home appliances and basically run his whole physical life, if you can imagine something so implausible and silly.* Besides, what could an architect possible us a computer for? Modeling his highly experimental earthquake-resistant bricks in simulated three-dimensional space, or some fantasyland bullshit like that?

Exactly that, in fact, and it's the mind-blowing realisation of what a computer can do to his workflow that finally gets Miles onboard - or make that "Moles", since he is such a complete failure at life and computers are soooooo hard that he misspells his name during set-up, and can't go back to fix it later, ho-ho. So he decides to download everything he possibly can related to his work and design, and this so taxes the 1984 internet that his computer starts to overheat. In a feverish panic, Miles pours a glass of champagne all over the keyboard, and this somehow manages to slosh all the way into the machine's hard drive where it crystallises and grants the computer sentience. As will happen.

While this has been happening, Miles has been listening to his new neighbor Madeline Robistat (Virginia Madsen) practicing cello. So, it turns out, has his computer: its first act as a self-aware being is to improvise variations on the piece she's playing and play them through its voice synthesizer. And from this point on, the story goes to relatively predictable places: the A.I., calling itself Edgar (at which point it is voiced by Cort) and Miles both fall in love with Madeline, and she falls in love with Miles on account of the beautiful electronic music he's been playing for her through the walls. And, you know, that's charming and all, if necessarily limited. It's pretty obvious that the romantic triangle is the box for the filmmakers, led by early music video director Steve Barron and writer Rusty Lemorande, to pour all their ideas into, rather than the driving force of the movie itself. Indeed, it seems entirely possible that such a generic, played-out concept as a Cyrano de Bergerac-esque romantic triangle was picked specifically so that it wouldn't get in the way of the film's fascinated portrayal of the brave new worlds of computing and synthetic music.

The none-too-exciting result of this is that Electric Dreams has absolutely no narrative urgency, particularly in its first 40 minutes (the point where Edgar gains the rudimentary power of speech). It is, not to be inelegant about it, slow as balls. And when the entire narrative justification for a film is that it's genial without being actively funny and cute without being emotionally deep, there really isn't any upside to it also being pokey about moving through its plot. And this is where that special exemption kicks in: Electric Dreams benefits to an immense degree from being an in-depth look at a very specific moment in the development of the Information Age. Watching a movie from, say, 1930, the differences between then and now seem incidental and organic - sure, the attitudes, behavior, and technology are all essentially alien, but the process by which Point A turned into Point B is clear enough that it feels like a real part of history; one we no longer inhabit, but one we evolved from. In contrast, Electric Dreams is, in so many ways, exactly like our world, such that as recently as two years ago, the film Her could speak directly to our contemporary cultural moment while telling only a slight variation on the same plot elements. Hell, Electric Dreams even opens with a sequence ironically poking fun at people so captivated by the little blinking screens in their hands that they ignore the rest of humankind, a piece of visual commentary that could be plugged into a modern movie without having to change anything but the costumes.

Despite that, there is not a single moment in Electric Dreams that feels remotely compatible with the world as it exists today - the difference between "people were just starting to figure out computers" and "people use computers several hundred times every day" turns out to be much more severe than the difference between the latter and "people have never even heard of computers, because they are top-secret codebreaking machines used to hunt Nazis". Perhaps it's because the world resembles our own so much, that the fact that everything is just slightly wrong seems intensely magnified. Perhaps it's because computers are no longer mystical, and the things that the movie tries to sell as "what the hell, who knows how these damn things work, anyway?" do not seem plausible in any way. Perhaps it's seeing people doing what we do, only they have '80s clothes and '80s hair. Whatever the hell is doing it, it means that Electric Dreams is like reading a transcript of an opium dream - you can see real life underpinning it, but the effect is otherworldly and uncanny, and it's the most amazing damn thing.

Which is exactly why I feel like I'd have ignored if not hated this movie when it was new: all of the things that seem dazzlingly weird about it now were just the world outside in 1984. Or at least, the world as practiced by tech geeks, far away on the outskirts of polite society. All that leaves is the story, which really isn't all that interesting: Von Dohlen and Madsen make for pleasant but largely bland and shallow human leads, leaving no real focal point of personality until Cort finally comes to the rescue with his tartly mechanical line readings, as if HAL 9000 grew up listening to the Clash.

But even taken on its own terms, this isn't really about its story. Barron's music director instincts drive the film more than his narrative instincts. That means that most of the images where are interesting tend to exist in a vacuum: the example that leaps to mind is the profile shot of Miles in the computer story, his face appearing on a CCTV monitor that's blocking his upper body. Pretty much any shot of Edgar's abstract color-and-line interface is coming from the same place, more interesting graphically and perhaps because of what it says about computer culture, than because of what it says about this computer in this scenario.

Even more than that, though, Barron's intentions for the movie lead him to gift the entire thing to Moroder and company ("and company" meaning New Wave groups Culture Club and Heaven 17); this isn't a long-form music video to quite the same extreme that, say, TRON: Legacy is, but that's still probably the level on which it's most successful. And why not? Moroder was the guru of making music through electronics; it's right on a very nearly moral level that he'd be called in to provide the audio background for a story about what computers feel and how they express those feelings through song. It sounds perfect: nothing about the film makes Edgar so real as the music that essentially places us inside his head at the expense of Miles and Madeline, but since Edgar is more interesting than they are, it's no real loss. The film sounds every bit as quintessentially of the early-middle '80s as it looks and acts like it, and this completes its flawlessness as a time capsule; and the music, at least can be enjoyed unironically. Or as unironically as we enjoy any of Moroder's work, anyway. The end result of all this isn't great cinema, or even particularly good cinema; but it's sure as hell attention-grabbing.

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BUT AH, PARIS!

A review requested by Teo Bugbee, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

As both a production company and a shorthand for describing a certain flavor of self-consciously middlebrow literate cinema, Merchant Ivory takes its name and identity from professional and life partners James Ivory, who directed, and Ismail Merchant, who produced. But there is a third figure who had just as important a voice in the team's best-known and best collaborations: screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. I mention her now on the occasion of turning to one of her most singular achievements under the Merchant Ivory banner, their 1981 adaptation of the Jean Rhys novel Quartet, which has absolutely none of the cachet and prominence of the team's later blockbusting E.M. Forster adaptations. And to be fair, it's not nearly as satisfying as those movies, either as a work of art or a piece of costume and set porn, so I'm not going to go for bat that it's a movie you desperately need to see.

It is, however, one of the Merchant Ivory films in my acquaintance that is most heavily dependent upon its screenplay more than the rest of its production, even more than its rock-solid cast. Ivory's direction, which is never particularly noisy or aggressively present, recedes almost into invisibility: he and cinematographer Pierre Lhomme favor still shots at a respectable distance from the actors, using close-ups almost exclusively in conversation scenes, and the pace of the editing (the film was cut by Humphrey Dixon) is resolutely calm and deliberate. The production design by Jean-Jacques Caziot, and costumes by Judy Moorcroft, meanwhile, are as succulent as in any Merchant Ivory production (and in this case, the hairstyles, overseen by Jean-Pierre Berroyer, are particularly present as well), but the film's setting is relatively conventional enough that it doesn't "pop" like a 19th Century costume drama. So the story and the dialogue are weighted unusually heavily here.

The marvelous irony is that Jhabvala didn't even want to adapt Quartet, which she viewed as being unnecessarily bleak and crippled by a complete lack of sympathetic characters. And that's what I find so impressive about what she did here: not that her script is required to do so much of the film's work, but it that it does that work on top of being something of a chore for the writer to grind through. You cannot tell; Quartet is a feverishly tight piece of writing, with a quick-moving scene structure and precisely worked-out character beats that let it make sharp, swift observations about the behavior of blunt, self-centered people in an environment that happily encouraged selfishness, and does it in a relatively compact 101-minute frame. How much of this is an inheritance from the novel, I cannot begin to say. But Jhabvala's concision and focus in putting the script together is admirable (and possibly aided by her detachment from the source material - she could afford to be merciless), and while there are ways in which Quartet can tend to be a bit less interesting than the big-time Merchant Ivory productions, the writing's not one of them.

As the title suggests, this is a tale of four humans getting muddled up sexually and romantically. In the frivolous Bohemian world of 1920s Paris, Marya Zelli (Isabelle Adjani) charms an older British couple, H.J. Heidler (Alan Bates) and his wife Lois (Maggie Smith). When her husband Stephan (Anthony Higgins), a Polish art dealer with ties to the black market, is imprisoned for selling stolen artwork, Marya finds herself in an economic crisis, unable to make any kind of living due to her immigrant status. The Heidlers take her in - for kindly reasons, they imply, but the reality turns out to be much darker than that. In keeping with the sexual freedom of that time and place, they're actually bringing Marya into their home to be H.J.'s newest sexual plaything, with Lois's benefit being some obscurely-defined hope that if her husband can get his ya-yas out, it will save their marriage. Certainly, neither of them give a damn about Marya as a human being, and her own thready marriage to a selfish asshole and criminal, whom she dutifully visits weekly despite the Heidlers' objection and Stephan's loutishness, begins to fray in its own right.

Quartet's biggest strenght and its biggest weakness are the same thing: the acting. And we can draw the dividing line strictly by gender. Bates (whom I have greatly admired in other films) and Higgins (whom I have not) are appallingly bland and at best functional in their roles; Higgins also has to cope with a Polish accent that he's not great at, and a character literally hemmed in by the prison set and the snug shots with which he and it are filmed, but he's certainly the fourth-most important member of the quartet, and his insubstantial performance doesn't do much harm. Higgins, though, has quite a meaty part indeed, full of unstated tensions and dark undercurrents, and it hurts the film a great deal that he's not terribly memorable or imposing.

The flipside is that the leading women are both utterly terrific. Smith is a real surprise, words I'd never assume I'd have cause to type out: it's the least-characteristic role I've ever seen her play, wounded but cruel, strained with nerves, pinched in by the period clothes and hairdos that she wields like a sword and shield. Every line reading is underplayed and crackling with self-hatred, self-satisfaction, self-righteous rage; it's like watching the world's quietest thunderstorm flashing out of Smith's big, intense eyes. I realised in watching Quartet how guilty I've been of taking Smith for granted: she's so good so much of the time, but frequently relaxes into a certain kind of role (tart-tongued, authoritative, preternaturally old) that makes it easy to think she's just "pulling a Maggie". And to see her stepping outside of that so forcefully and effectively is stunning. It's a great performance, tightly-wound, wholly natural, desperately serious.

In the film's sort-of more-or-less lead, Adjani isn't quite as striking as Smith - it's the same sort of "porcelain doll on the outside with a deeply conflicted interior" role that she she got stuck with in a lot of her early English-language roles - but it's hard to imagine a better choice, in 1981, for the role of a young woman who doesn't belong in the environment she finds herself occupying, and who doesn't mean to exude the intoxicating sexuality she possesses. It's certainly a good enough performance to confidently sell the crux of the human drama even in the face of the men being a bit tepid.

With the bitter scenario and potent female leads taking up the most of the oxygen in the film, there's less space left over than I'd have expected for Merchant Ivory's stock in trade: skillfully bringing past eras to life. '20s Paris is a particularly stylish, brazen era that a company of costume drama specialists were undoubtedly eager to attack (it's the only film they made in that era and place), and it looks perfect, with Ivory favoring shots that present the action in stiff tableaux that focus rather on the stagy brittleness of the culture than the luxurious fashion and licentious joy. Given that script, it couldn't be any other way - Quartet is every bit the harsh tale look that Jhabvala didn't want to be involved with, cynically considering the ideal of an accepting, indulgent society as just another thing that can be exploited by the cruel to take advantage of the innocent. It's nasty-hearted in a way we don't tend to think of Merchant Ivory films as being, but that's one of its strengths; there's something different going on here than the usual stuff of bringing an epoch to life with a humanist tale to tell, and while I won't claim that it's one of my favorite efforts from that team, it leaves more to chew on than many of them.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: MALE STRIPPERS

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Magic Mike XXL continues its predecessor's look at the lives of men who dance dirty for a living. Not the commonest subject in a male gaze-dominated medium, but nor is it the first time this milieu has been plumbed.

A Night in Heaven is a romantic drama about a community college professor stuck in a dying marriage who has an affair with one of her students after discovering he's a dancer at the local strip club. So obviously it starts off with golden hour shots of Kennedy Space Center. What possible other opening gambit could there be?

So it's a disastrous film, anyway. The splendidly inappropriate opening isn't the reason for that (though it absolutely doesn't help). What it is, though, is perfectly symptomatic of the film's deeply broken sense of self. It's easy to joke, "what kind of movie about strippers opens with several minutes of Cape Canaveral location footage?", but the fact that A Night in Heaven is the answer to that question is telling of how unclear its goals are, as well as its execution of those goals. It is a film divided between the impulse towards smut and towards socially-minded character drama; it is exactly what you get when the Oscar-winning director of Rocky, John G. Avildsen, and the writer of the core material of Nashville, Joan Tewkesbury, find themselves in the business of making a star vehicle for Christopher Atkins, primarily known then and now as the male half of the teen soft-core drama The Blue Lagoon. It's possible to tell, if you hold the film at the right angle, that Avildsen and Tewkesbury had in mind a steady-handed narrative of marital stresses, female desire, and the hard cost of making ethical choices instead of economic ones, and found themselves obliged to readjust everything in the wake of a lead actor whose primary skill was his ability to not wear a shirt. I will say on behalf of the film's novelty that it is maybe the only thing ever filmed that derives virtually all of its dramatic value from the level, complex presence of Lesley Ann Warren.

She plays Faye Hanlon, a skittish-looking teacher of public speaking at a Florida community college and the wife of a bored, boring NASA engineer, Whitney (Robert Logan). For his part, he's facing down an industry in decline, and the company he specifically works for is hunting down Defense Department contracts to make ends meet. This sits poorly with Whitney, who chooses to be laid off rather than work towards what he considers immoral ends, a fact he massages when relating it to his wife. There is surely a deep and interesting subplot involving Whitney to be explored, but A Night in Heaven is resolutely disinterested in it; at 83 minutes long, it could probably afford a little more meat on its bones, but the film is hellbent on getting to the steamy stuff as fast as possible and staying there as long as it dares, and Whitney's existence comes to feel more like an imposition levied on the the film than a possibility for dramatic expansion early in the proceedings.

Faye has a particular student, Rick Monroe (Atkins), who's one of those quintessential movie youths, a brilliant kid with all the potential in the world and no drive to exploit it. So she is compelled to flunk him, on the very day that her sister Patsy (Deborah Rush) is coming to town for a few days of girl bonding, including drinking and a night at Heaven, the local strip club that she found on her last trip. The most popular and lusted-after of all the dancers there is one Ricky the Rocket, and you get zero points for guessing ahead of time that he's the exact same student that Faye just bawled out. She's both mortified and transfixed by his tremendously overt sexual energy, his fearlessness in grinding against patrons and passionately kissing them, and his inappropriately perfect abs. He can tell she's transfixed, and comes along to give her his special treatment; this turns into an intense mutual infatuation that leads her to (gasp!) lie to her husband and (shock and horror!) go back to the strip club to continue ogling. And eventually, it leads to them making tender love. But this was the '80s, and social standards must be maintained, and that means a very abrupt series of plot developments that feel more like the notes for a third act than actual third act. The upshot being that Rick turns out to be a callous little shit.

There are no ways around it: the story is a dog, collecting musty clichés and not even pretending to freshen them up. Avildsen is not without an eye for capturing the sweaty fatigue of environments, and that trick serves him well at multiple points throughout this movie, but it's mostly just spackling a respectable gloss on a tawdry scenario in a tawdry milieu. Which is not, in and of itself, a problem, except that none of the filmmakers seem tremendously interested in making a tawdry movie and that's just not really an applicable strategy here. When the action switches to Heaven, and there's no choice but to make it a tasteless cartoon, it's palpable how weirdly the energy rotates: suddenly the lighting and framing become very self-conscious, like we'll hopefully be so aware of the abstract qualities of the shots that we'll ignore the gyrating men who are, by and large, given curiously unerotic dance moves - witness the Dance of the Kitchen Stools!), or the fever dream hectoring of the Heaven M.C. (Spatz Donovan). His dialogue is the one element of the film that's so incomprehensible that it turns out to be funny - "They'll steam the crease right out of your polyester, ladies!" he leers at one point. "Do you wanna see Ricky take his clooooooothes off?" he later asks, in the kind of hyper-literal statement that suggests children play-acting at strip club management. For unclear reasons, he has been costumed to look like a disco version of the Mad Hatter, but that's just part and parcel of the uncompromising hideousness of the wardrobes. Anna Hill Johnstone, the costume and production design, had an apparent vendetta against the cast, burying Warren especially in costumes so over-the-top in their '80s signifiers that it feels like an Expressionist nightmare about the decade. "You look like a hibiscus in bloom!" coos Patsy to Faye before their first night of debauchery, and that is a thoroughly accurate statement, which certainly would appear to be meant as a compliment.

The strip club sequence is at least appropriately erotic (less so the couple's sexual encounter, which is rushed through like Avildsen - editing as well as directing - just wanted to get it over with), and it's here that Warren really shines. In a lengthy scene that relies entirely on her reaction shots, the actor is able to evoke longing and an immediate wash of guilt at feeling that longing; a desire to stare but also conspicuously trying to make sure that nobody notices her staring; and, uncomplicated by any libidinous urge, a very real sense of confused horror that her professional life and her off-hours gallivanting with Patsy have been blended. It's remarkable acting, and it builds up an aura of goodwill towards the actress attempts to redeem the insufficiently probing remains of Tewkesbury's compromised script, which largely involves adding lots of complicated self-doubt and fear to the surface-level horniness. It's the most human, interesting material in the film, and it's largely wasted, but Warren deserves a lot of credit for the effort.

Nothing was going to actually humanise this material, not with Atkins sucking all the energy out of the room. He's pretty as hell, undoubtedly, but limited to one vapid expression of innocuous self-regard, and prone to making terrible decisions like rolling his eyes so hard during class that it resembles an epileptic fit more than an expression of annoyance, or wearing a nominally flirtatious grin that has virtually no sex in it, just the distant smile of somebody who just remembered the leftover pizza at home. Given his prominence in the story, and the prominence of his body in the film's visual scheme, his callowness, static expressions, and inability to build a solid character are limitations that A Night in Heaven was certainly never going to survive. Warren fights as hard as she can to buck this odds; Avildsen nervously tries to ignore it with needless shots of rockets and a blazingly fast pace; most everybody else just gives up and tries to slap some crap up there onscreen. It's not much of a tribute to the male body or the female libido, and it's an outright joke to pretend that we can cobble together the dog-ends of ignored subplots into a treatise on economic tension in the early years of the Reagan presidency. It's not sordid enough to be decent junk, but the filmmakers gave up on it before had stopped being any kind of junk at all, and other than offering the unusual sight of male objectification in a Hollywood studio picture, there's nothing about it that justifies so much as a sidelong glance.

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HAVANA GOOD TIME

A review requested by a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

No film shamelessly advertised with the tagline "Part Heaven... Part Hell... Pure Havana" can possibly be all good. To be fair to 1979's Cuba, though, it's nobody's fault but the marketing department's that they heard "Sean Connery plays a British government agent..." and immediately tired to figure out how to sell this cool and slow-moving anti-romantic anti-thriller as a distaff James Bond picture. But it's unlikely that it would have been possible to sell it as the thing it actually was. Not because Cuba is uninteresting - exactly the opposite. But its interest is in part because of how thoroughly unusual it is, to the point that it sometimes breaks the movie. It is none of the things that it seems like it should be, and while that's great for its personality, it's a bit thorny for it as a movie for people to watch.

The setting is Cuba, in the weeks and days immediately preceding the revolution on 1 January, 1959 (the film has the misfortune to commit its most profound error as its first narrative gesture after the opening credit sequence: onscreen text sets the action in 1959, when virtually all of it happens in December, 1958. It's a shockingly obvious mistake that makes it hard to take anything that follows entirely seriously). Connery's distinctly non-Bondian character is Robert Dapes, a miltary officer turned mercenary, who arrives in the politically tense Havana on the invitation of Batista's government in the form of General Bello (Martin Balsam), to offer advice and support in suppressing the Communist rebellion of Fidel Castro. While there, he encounters Alexandra Lopez de Pulido (Brooke Adams), an ex-lover who has returned home to marry a wealthy plantation owner, Juan (Chris Sarandon). While in the country, Robert finds that the exploitative business classes picking at Cuba's bones are cruel enough that it's not worth using his time to help prop the old regime up, while the Communist guerrillas are too indiscriminate in their radical violence to support them. Which leaves only "stay alive long enough to get the hell out and take Alexandra with" as far as plans go.

That is, mind you, the summary version of the script by Charles Wood. The actual film has far less direction, spending a good half of its running time looking around pre-revolutionary Cuba, frequently not even using the fig leaf of Robert's presence. At times, it's barely a narrative at all, and when it is, it's a deliberately unsatisfying one, subverting the expectations of both of its main plotlines: the politically shiftless mercenary who discovers the human element of the system he's cynically inhabiting, and the open Casablanca riffing (like, really, really open) inherent to ex-lovers reuniting against a politically-charged backdrop. It's an unconventional approach to what could easily be yet another in the endless line of movies about doomed love during historical flashpoints - the approach taken in this very same setting by 1990's Havana - and the film deserves plenty of credit for its bravery.

The question, then, is whether it deserves points for its execution, and on this point I am quite undecided. It's not exactly right to say that the film's "problem" is that it was directed by Richard Lester - in fact, Lester originated the project, so the alternative to a Lester Cuba is no Cuba at all. There's no way around it, though: he's a weird fit for the material. All of the director's best-known and most significant projects - the Beatles vehicle A Hard Day's Night, Palme d'Or winner The Knack... and How to Get It, the Salkind-produced megaproduction of The Three Musketeers - are united by a goofy, kinetic sensibility, one that oozes an unspoken "holy crap you guys we're making a mooooooveeeeeee" glee, entirely about having a whole lot of broad fun even when the films in question aren't comedies (though he tends to blur "comedy" and "not-comedy" - this is the man who was assigned the scraps of Richard Donner's Superman II and figured out how to turn them into the first superhero farce). The only one of his films besides Cuba that I've seen without any meaningfully protracted comic energy is Robin and Marian from 1976, his other collaboration with Connery, and that is, when all is said and done, a Robin Hood movie.

The skill set that Lester had developed over his years as a filmmaker were, then, not by any means a natural fit for a serious drama about a real-life political event whose ramifications were still piping hot twenty years after the fact. I do not say this to beat up on Cuba, merely to point out what a peculiar beast it is, combining gorgeous Spanish locations, impressively sober and dirty cinematography by David Watkin, and meandering incidents that are more interested in the day-to-day lifestyle of the characters than the historical moment about to overwhelm them, all under the stewardship of a director who has to constantly fight his instincts. Eventually, he loses: one of the most unpredictable elements of this surprisingly unpredictable movie is that the final act turns, rather abruptly, into an action-heavy tank battle. It's staggeringly unacceptable at the level of both plot and tone; imagine Casablanca tossing in Saving Private Ryan's finale before it returned to the airport finale, and you have approximately the cinematic aneurysm that Cuba transforms into. But it's still not played for laughs.

Conceding all of that, the lumpy, internally confused Cuba that we have is rather more aggressively magnetic and compelling than a more streamlined Cuba by a more superficially appropriate director. I mean, we have Havana right there, and Havana is dullness on toast. Before its diversion to the tank finale, Wood's script is strong at the level of thoughtful observation, laterally comparing several elements of Cuban government and culture to try and paint a full picture of everything good and bad about both the pro-Batista and pro-Castro elements of life on that island in 1958. That it fails to plug these ingredients into a clean narrative structure isn't beside the point: it is the point, much as the repeated failure of Connery to ignite as the daring, competent man of action we expect him to be (until, again, that damn tank) is the point. It is a film about how the smart outside observer, virile and capable, is sometimes exactly the wrong solution to a problem, whether that problem is with the fate of nations or the life of a woman trapped in a hurtful marriage of economic convenience. With a stronger actress in Adams's place (ideally one who was actually of Latin American descent), the film could have presented quite a strong anti-romantic thread to go along with its anti-Bondian portrait of the British warrior as hapless victim of historical undercurrents.

As it is, it's more theoretically interesting than actually interesting, but it's still bracing to see something puncture its genre so fearlessly, especially one whose aesthetic is, generally speaking, so in line with conventional crowd-pleasing instincts. It's about worthy of the re-evaluation called for by Steven Soderbergh (a longtime devotee of Lester and director of his very own picture about the Cuban revolution): as a deeply flawed movie whose historical inquiry and willingness to complicate the genre it appears to inhabit make it much more valuable than its original reception was willing to admit.

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A TALE OF TWO SISTERS

A review requested by Rachel P, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The broadly-defined genre of Prestige Picture Adaptations of Unassailable Literary Classics is terrifically old and terrifically durable, though it has had specific high and low points over the years. The most recent high, in the English-speaking world, covered most of the 1990s, when the successes of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V in 1989 and Merchant-Ivory's Howards End in 1992 (itself a delayed capitalisation on the same team's A Room with a View, released in 1986) proved enough to trigger a mania for well-heeled adaptations and variations of the things you read in high school, or a least in a freshman year college English class. As with any movie fad, some of the individual efforts were strong and some were clinkers (the hit-to-miss ratio of major Shakespeare adaptations over the decade is fairly dire), but all in all, I'd be inclined to say that it remains my own favorite period of Literary Classics movies ever. And the best film of the bunch is probably the 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, directed by Ang Lee from a script by Emma Thompson.

By all means, putting a talent like Lee in place already gave the film a huge leg up: the director's fist wholly English-language film was superficially an enormous shift from his contemporary-set studies of Taiwanese family life, but his brilliance was in figuring out how the story was basically just an extension in different clothing of the same kind of interpersonal dynamics he'd already made his specialty (and would continue to do going forward, ultimately resulting in the scandal of making a pensive family drama out of Hulk). What separates the great costume drama literary adaptations from the drearily mediocre ones is, in most cases, their emotional accessibility: the films that clearly demonstrate how people alive decades or centuries ago were feeling, fleshy people like ourselves are brilliant, whereas the ones that are arch fashion shows set in authentic but sterile re-creations of old locations tend to be the most boring, stultifying movies on God's green earth. Lee was uniquely well-suited to make a film on the right side of that gap.

But while Lee's contribution to the film's success is impossible to diminish, it's hard not to think of this as Emma Thompson's achievement overall. As an actress, she's the best part, or the only genuinely good part, or surely one of the highlights, of virtually every film she was involved in throughout the half-decade preceding this movie, but that's not the real tell. The real tell is that the four movies she acted in under Branagh's direction during their marriage are generally terrific or at least fascinating in their miscalculations, and they are best in some of the same ways that Sense and Sensibility is at its best. He hasn't made anything nearly as good since their divorce, which just so happens to have been finalised about two months before Sense and Sensibility came out. Am I saying that Emma Thompson was the secret genius behind Branagh's best work? No, that's scurrilous gossip-mongering. I am heavily implying it. The really sad thing is that after doing whatever wonderful magical voodoo she did to make this such a great work - in the process, becoming the only person to win both a writing and acting Oscar (she had the latter from Howards End) - Thompson's career basically swan-dived into oblivion.* For this, I feel sad on Thompson's behalf, but even sadder on behalf of myself and everyone else who'd like to know what she might have had up her sleeve next.

The plot of Austen's 1811 isn't as ubiquitous as her 1813 follow-up, Pride and Prejudice, but I pray it's not that unfamiliar (especially since I prefer the earlier book). The ingredients, anyway, are pretty basic: the second wife (Gemma Jones) of the late Mr. Dashwood (Tom Wilkinson), and her three daughters Miss Elinor Dashwood (Thompson), Marianne (Kate Winslet), and Margaret (Emilie François) are horrified to learn that Dashwood's son by a first marriage, John (James Fleet), has been persuaded by his harpyish wife Fanny (Harriet Walter) to ignore the dying man's request and leave the second family penniless. They are able find temporary housing with one of Mrs. Dashwood's cousins, and set themselves to the task of surviving, which for a family of women in the late 18th Century can only mean making suitable marriages. For Elinor, who is stiffly pragmatic ("Sense"), this does not mean the handsomely awkward Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant), Fanny Dashwood's brother, for though they strike up a warm relationship, the threat of his disinheritance hangs over his every action. For Marianne, who is ready to burst with passionate, intense emotions ("Sensibility"), this does not mean the boring Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman), no matter how smart a match he'd make; she's much more interested in the charming, obviously roguish John Willoughby (Greg Wise). Things play out with Sense and Sensibility becoming more like each other, to the hard-won benefit of virtually all.

As a work of adaptation, Sense and Sensibility is mostly a matter of streamlining Austen's original, giving Ferrars and Brandon a bit more to do, and finding a way to indicate to moderns what the hell all of this is about without it feeling pandering. That goes beyond the simple matter of contextualising a vastly different set of cultural norms about gender roles: Sense and Sensibility is a very financially-obsessed story, even more interested in the economic role of women in Georgian England than with their social roles. And the first triumph of the film is in the way it lays all of this out in neat little moments that feel organically woven into the story, occurring naturally rather than feeling like the movie has to come to a stop to lecture us. For one thing Sense and Sensibility never feels like, is a lecture. In fact, given its basic seriousness, a not-insignificant 131-minute running time, and overwhelming costume and production design (the former by Jenny Beavan and John Bright, the latter by Luciana Arrighi), one of the more impressive things about the movie is that it's quite a lot of fun to watch.

Credit due there to Thompson, to Lee, to damn near everybody. This is as lively as costume dramas get, thanks in large part to an exceptional cast: only Grant feels like a let-down of the major characters, and that's more because his "I'm so hapless and awkward, but unbearably cute" shtick was already wearing thin by the time this movie came out, rather than because it's a bad fit for the character. In fact, he's perfectly fine in the role. But "perfectly fine" doesn't help one to stand-out in this crowd. The best of the lot are unmistakably and necessarily Thompson and Winslet (though I am also much partial to Imelda Staunton in a modestly-sized role), whose huge age gap helps to fuel the gulf of understanding between two sisters who love each other very much and still can't fathom how the other lives. Winslet impresses me more, mostly because of context unavailable at the time (this was only her third movie role): she's a great actress but not an infallible one, and her future career tends to show that her biggest liability is when she's playing period roles. She tends to choke off her natural prickly energy and tendency to dart in unexpected directions in favor of playing dully literal notions of old-fashioned attitudes. That's exactly what she's not doing her: her Marianne is a tricky, mercurial person, not a prop for dresses, not a desperate attempt to hide a modern way of building character underneath a one-note stiffness (two shortcomings obviously present in her Titanic performance). Not that Thompson is a slouch; she's just not a revelation. Still, her emotional striptease in allowing us to see with exquisite slowness and deliberation what Sense has cost her character is impressive and important, and if the film's narrative works largely because of her smart excisions and clarifications, its emotional arc depends to a great degree on her gradations of feeling.

The aesthetic framework for these characters is crisp and unshowy: in terms of visuals, Lee and cinematographer Michael Coulter are mostly interested in drawing us into the film's reality by treating it with invisible naturalism, and for a film of such plush design, it's surprisingly casual in its style. The most dramatic thing that happens is the subtle way that the two sisters are framed: Elinor appears within boxes and against straight lines, while Marianne is likely to show up in open frames with more lighting and messiness in the set decoration. That's lovely as a grace note, but it's not something the film actively insists we notice; part of Lee's mechanism of bringing the material to life in a highly accessible way is to avoid putting any kind of spin on it - the contrast between this and his later period film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with its painterly images and self-conscious grandeur, to match its bold-strokes emotions and stylised narrative, is immediately obvious. Sense and Sensibility is much more about fine details, and the quiet style Lee brings to it is exactly what's needed for those details to catch our attention in their own time and not because the film wants to assault us. Though it is ultimately a tribute to Sensibility, it's a movie made with much good Sense, and that's exactly why it's so much more effective than almost all of the other films of its type and of its time.

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