Youtube stream, over 3 hrs

Another excellent choice when you are sick with the flu. Excellent casting for this Hardy novel; stock high quality BBC production. The Hardy plot typically dips into the questions of social constraints vs. subjective passions, but has added sophistication in the characters – flaws and errors in our heroine – that provide just the kind of depth that the theatrical BBC presentation can exploit over the length of the production. Very high quality.

Eglington Theatre, with mom and the nephews

Spielberg

I showed the boys ‘The adventures of Tintin at Shark Lake’ from 1972 – a lower quality production in low-quality download format. They watched it twice! It involves a mystery which the boy and his dog have to track down. The next week we went to the new Spielberg 3d Tintin, which I thought was much worse. There were two basic problems: the camera work and the plot compression. Likely these are related. The camerawork is done in constant simulated steadycam, of course untethered from physical constraints. This results in all the basic mechanics of cinematography (establishing a scene, establishing a point of view) being lost in what amounts to a single ‘extreeme action’ shot style. Hypothetically one could say this ‘exploits the tremendous potential of synthetic cinematography’ except it’s a one hit wonder – like getting your first zoom handicam and making a nauseous pan-and-zoom home movie. It’s pure amateur (sorry SS). The New York Times praised the way each shot flows continuously into the next. This is exactly what I thought was so terrible.

The second problem is that the script was made by combining 3 Tintin books. This is a terrible idea. The story in the 1972 production – as I mentioned, a fairly low-quality production – is what had the boys interested.  I’ve heard that this is a common problem in story adaptation for film or TV. Jeremy Brett, lead actor in the 1980’s BBC Sherlock Holmes productions, said that he had a constant fight from season one to try and not have the television writers change the plots in the Arthur Conan Doyle stories. He said that the actual Detective stories had never been filmed as written, and yet he was the only one fighting for fidelity on the (than) new productions. Tintin 3D has this same affliction – they took a lovely children’s story and turned it into a poorly shot paper thin action thriller. It’s too bad. The good news is it made me look it up on IMDB, and I see there’s a whole TV series from 1991 that I can download – in good ‘ol 2D.

One other thing. It actually didn’t look right. Tintin was too old looking. Somehow, they just had no instinct for what they were doing.

Stream from youtube

Dir. David Wheatley

St. Siobhan Flynn

A good BBC period production.  A part of some popular novel series (which shines through in the trite ending). The quality of production and acting in these BBC miniseries is so high it seems that all is required is a good storyline to make hours of very high quality drama. Mid 19thC; girl struggles with her own passions versus her circumstance and the social and economic norms of the period.  It’s great if you have the winter flu (which I have).

2010 UK (BBC)

dir. Michael Winterbottom

st. Steve Coogan and Rob Braydon

Varsity Theatre, July 2010 w/ MK

I went into this film with all the wrong ideas. I understood it was to be some sort of late-coming derivation of Sideways, but it turned out to be much better. Even when I saw the film I didn’t realize that it is based on a British television series, and I didn’t know the two main characters are playing caricatures of themselves in real life. But it does not matter if you know these things; it’s just a good entertaining guy buddy road trip film. It’s a post-40’s guy road trip, and the gentlemen exploit the quirks of their middle-age to the maximum.

Yes the endless impersonations grind on and on and grate on you, the viewer – just as Dustin Hoffman’s made-up songs in the desert in Ishtar (yes, the dreaded and panned Ishtar) were truly awful to watch. But the awfulness of it is also somehow the point. You are the third buddy on this tour, and like your old friends – who are often friends as much of circumstance as they are of temperament – you find your familiarity with their annoying habits inseparable from their more likeable qualities.

It is no wonder the gentlemen are in a sense playing themselves. They are all too good at it. Enjoy this 1.5 hour British road trip Seinfeld.

George Clooney, Sydney Pollack, Tilda Swinton

Dir. & Writ. Tom Gilroy

Download, jan 2012

This is another good ‘stock’ film centered on George Clooney. It is a character driven set-piece. The plot is a simple corporate intrigue serving as a revolving stage for George’s middle-age soul searching. He is (not for the first or last time) using his blue-collar grit to cut against the current of a finely tuned starched white professional landscape. As expected, the landscape is starched white to hide the dirt. It’s really well done. When I mean in describing it as ‘stock’ is that the script, actors, cinematography and sound do not intrude or take over the production; they are all integrated into a whole. Because of this we end up with an hour and a half of ‘stock’ footage – it has that great normalizing and natural appearance of gritty film quality of the 1970’s. So by stock I mean ‘professionally generic’. Key to this kind of production is a script that is not over ambitious, a cinematographer who knows what they are doing, accurate casting and near invisible direction. It’s got to be as if the film made itself. The film-makers chose the easy route: Pollack as the father figure, Clooney as the independent bachelor with a veneer of success and internal troubles, and Swinton as terribly high-strung – an upstanding reed in a strong wind. Nobody tries to fool you (the bane of the poor Hollywood thriller); there is a story to tell, and they tell is as artfully, directly and with as little apparent effort as possible. You type-cast your actors to make sure it does not appear that they are ‘playing’ their roles. It’s the difference between Meryl Streep doing drama and comedy.

The only real fault in the film is also a ‘stock’ fault. They elected to follow a plot technique that appears indistinguishable from marketing. The opening 15 minutes of the film are a snippet from the end of the plot. So it’s an ‘opening cliffhanger’, after which we are transported back 4 days (text on screen: “Four days earlier”) to spend the next hour or so sorting out how we end up at the opening predicament. A simple trip to the editing room could move this footage back to the end where it belongs and I think it would be a better film. More plain to be sure; less pizazz and more texture. For me it is the plainness of the filmmaking and the Clayton character that is the foundation of the elegance of the production. For this reason I would prefer they did not use their inexpensive Hollywood trick.

There are two aspects of the film I would like to highlight. The first is the success of the casting of Swinton and Clooney. She’s even thinner, stronger and more frail than usual. Her white suit is stunning, like Nicole Kidman in The Peacemaker or Claire Danes (if you can believe it) in Terminator 3. Would it be half as good a film with different actors? One is left with the impression that this could not be the case. The quality of the production is so evenly distributed that one would expect that an error in casting would not really be an option here. Pollack is also excellent, but does not stand out like the other two. Swinton is the perfect offset for Clooney; although it seems the beauty of Clooney is the ability to offset him on screen with a contrasting female counterpart. The voluptuous Italian in The American, Meryl Streep in Mr. Fox, Vera Farmiga in Up in the Air, and Swinton here. He’s Hollywood’s great contemporary set-up man. It’s no wonder the tabloids enjoy tracking his dating life.

The second striking element of the film is the above-mentioned consistency. Apart from their one plot slicing-and-dicing error, everything else is executed with a high level of professionalism, competence, and an invisible naturalness. It’s like ‘The Empire Strikes Back’: the least remarkable of the original three Star Wars films but the one that is often praised most highly by fan critics because the film seemed to flow through the story instead of the story appearing to exist for the film. The short scene in Clayton at the house of the hit-and-run driver demonstrates this quality. Functionally it is incidental. The casting in it maintains the high standard of the rest of the film – including the forlorn and emotionally damaged wife whose moment on screen consists in turning her head and not saying a word. She really nails it. One feels the very grain of the film in that scene, as if the digital age had never arrived at all. It is a side moment but somehow offsets and prepares us for the main plot, in the same way that a mise-en-scene camera shot establishes the minute action to follow. The care taken by the filmmakers in the scenes that are not central to the main plotline demonstrates a degree of professional competence of a high standard.

I will regard this film as if it did not have the 15-minute set-up at the beginning; we will imagine it as it would be after some home digital editing restored the plot to its logical order.

2010

dir. Bertrand Travernier

based on book by Madame de La Fayette

st. Melanie Thierry, Lambert Wilson, Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet

A 7 in IMDB. A 7! I’m not sure what flaws elicted so many deductions. Not the story, nor the casting, nor the delivery. The script is good. The cinematography would be considered excellent by virtually anyone. If one is superficial, there is an extreemly beautiful girl to look at. If one is not, she’s there all the same. So IMDB fails us, to our advantage.
It is a period drama set, so the write-up says, in 16th century France. It has a political and historical (and religious) backdrop, but what sets the film apart is its rendering of psychological portraits in the main characters. They are all almost type cast – the rugged, almost villaous male love interest; the jelous and sensitive husband; the civalrous aide-de-camp and the heart-breaking hot-blooded blond who ensnares the first with her temperment, the second with her beauty, and the third with her intellect. A trite story! But not quite. In fact not at all. The characters, with this basic cast of types, manage to show subtlety and ingeuity. We are not quite sure what drives this beautiful girl. She keeps here feelings hidden well, and than exposes them atrociously. The husband we like, perhaps admire, and than are disappointed in. But they keep us guessing – we can’t tell who will gain favour either with each other or with the audience. It seemed like a clever and original layer of complexity added onto what appeared to be stock characters. It caught me off guard and held my attention through the film.
The film-work is marvelous. Depth of field, portarit (isometric) shots, and wonderfully simple battle senes. If you want to see people dying by the sword, there could be no better choreography. The scene where two men fight back to back, to be joined by a third in a triangle formation – is marvellous. It’s pretty much all either the killing or the beautiful blonde. There’s always something to watch.
A very nice few hours, in the Bell Lightbox, June 2011.

The company is set in Chicago, but I understand it is actually based on Campbell’s time with the National Ballet company of Canada.   It’s a much better film then the IMDB 6.3 suggests. It does not have a plot as such that many film goers might expect – it ends by surprise, without anything much to show for it. That many would regard as a weakness, but I think it is a strength in this case. It’s a charming film. McDowell is great. Campbell at first I thought was providing a television worthy performance – not bad, but noticeably not quite cinematic. I was thinking they should have got a dancer to act (like Baryshnikov in the Tipping Point) rather than an actor to dance. I changed my mind a little while later. Campbell is elegant and her character requires a kind of quiet sincerity that she delivers.
The cross over between ballet scenes and personal life is remarkably well done in part because they do not try and artistically link the two.  There is no great parallel between personal triumphs and stage ones. In that way it all seems real: she is a real person in a real production company, and life is life and work – however beautiful and interesting – is work. So Altman gets full marks. It’s no wonder he is so well regarded and has such a niche in terms of style. Sure, it cost the studio. The film might have cost 15 million, and brought in something over 2. People I’m sure found it absolutely unremarkable, amid so many films that were so much more entertaining.
If the film had added whatever would be required to make it commercially successful – at least 15 million dollars successful – it would have lost the very quality that makes it a pleasure to see.  It’s not as magnificent as the Tipping Point, to be sure – it’s more a personal drama and deals more with ballet production than ballet proper. But it’s very good. Great casting and direction, and surprisingly subtle.

The assemblage of footage is effective. The one let-down is the ‘dramatic’ pan and zoom in on text (typewritten on paper) describing Bobby, zooming in finally on a single word (such as eccentric).  These artistic escapades are the few moments where the film-maker has made their art the subject of the film and not Bobby, and the documentary becomes for a moment and amateur film without subject. However these moments are few and far between. In contrast, the interviews with chess experts are done in interesting industrial locations with rich depth-of0field photography, providing brilliant relief from the grainy 1970’s footage with it’s attendant awful sound. This contrast in quality of film production produces a real feeling of transport between he subjects in the 1970’s and 1980’s and the people today. We see Bobby as a memory of past things, but these narrators – mostly older than Bobby, who watched him grow up after them and surpass him – are more real to us now today in 2011 than they are in the past footage. An effective documentary of a very interesting topic.

Dir Luca Guadadnino

St. Tilda Swinton

As all the reviews attest, a very beautiful film to look at. “This is Love” is a period piece – a contemporary one – that has story, sound and direction integrated into a strong aesthetic. Regardless of the plot, it is worthwhile. However the plot has a lot going for it; it is complex and full of intriguing questions. The beautiful veneer drapes over a framework that is unresolved. The characters, like the plot, are always seen only in parts, and one is never quite sure where they will end up. The high aesthetic makes the film into something ratified and refined, and the fragmented view we get of the inner lives (and the inner story) turn this precise atmosphere into something emotionally charged. So the film aims to make all of the most delicate sensibilities high-strung. It succeeds admirably.

If we are going to follow in the footsteps of others and consider the comparison with Visconti – for example my personal favorite, the Leopard – than we will also find a clear difference. The Leopard has a moral (or super-moral) tone. The old is transforming into the new, and Lancaster chooses to forgo his time-honored principles in favour of new, untested ones, against all his convictions, because he sees it is a case of riding the tides or dying out all together. Therefore, as he says, everything must change in order for all to stay the same. That’s the moral. I Am Love does not appear to carry such a heavy handed plot discipline. It is less intellectual and more emotional. The characters are not resolved as types but instead are examples of types shown with all the cracks and fissures that break the ‘type’ mold. Therefore, they are more individuals against type. Thgis carries through all the characters, making them in style similar to one another – so the type as a restriction of character is broken open, the cost being that all types are shown as weaker and more alike. The individual gains against the type, but loses ground in their distinctiveness compared to the other individuals. It is difficult to say if this quality increases or decreases the value of the film. It can easily be said however that this tack, one taken, is executed with thoroughness and precision.

It is the story of a wealthy family. The father is the binding success story, but aloof. The daughter is splintered off to a degree – an artist searching for her identity away from the family. The elder son is following the path of the father. The younger son is the great hope, having the strength of individual character of the father and the creative aestheticism of the mother. The mother is the key character (Swinton). She is absorbed in her internal world, and functions as a connecting line between the father, the daughter, the younger son and some external quality that brings an added richness to an established group. This is represented through her strong connection to her unseen Russian heritage – she has married into this great Italian industrialist’s family. Her genetics provide the wild card, both enriching and enlivening the established family brand, but also casting it into danger, as change is wont to do.

The plot therefore is the unraveling of these different elements, like a card game being played. It takes place in a beautiful setting, with sophisticated, elegant persons. But like any card game in a dirty basement, people take chances. For the father and elder son, this means in regard to business; for the younger son, it is with regards to both business, family and person life, which for him are all bound together. For the daughter and especially for the mother, it is with regards to their personal lives, and how this crosses over into family. Many of the hidden tensions are made apparent by the end. This does not mean – as in The Leopard – that they are resolved. On the contrary. It is more of a play of forces that we see shifting and changing with circumstance. The family – not the father or elder son, but the others – have buried volcanic pressures that erupt and explode depending on when circumstance changes the pressures of their lives. Therefore it is a film not so much about a character’s internal development, but about how character development happens externally, like a series of potentials that are pushed, pulled, developed and repressed according to the winds of change which are beyond their control.

One final note. Netflix (being used in Canadian streaming mode) is functioning like internet downloads, or as streaming should. It suggests films to watch and gives a browsing library that has you hitting on films you may never have heard of before, like this one. The parade of new acquisitions and the very effective rating/suggestion system makes it a far more valuable service than regualr cable or satellite feed, at least for a viewer such as myself.

St. Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren

USA 1975

Night Moves is a very well put together film with a weak plot. The acting is first rate, and the casting. Hackman is as we expect: gritty and authentic. Jennifer Warren is as beautiful, coy and quixotic as she was in Slapshot, and Melanie Griffith is the same underage playgirl we saw so briefly in the Drowning pool – also 1975.

It’s a detective story. The direction is excellent, in that it is almost invisible, like in “The Empire Strikes back”. You never see it, as if there were no director. The shots lay out the scene, follow the progression, identify the characters, and let the story show itself. The characters appear vivid and rich without being cameoed. The casting as well is effortlessly professional, with James Woods as a young mechanic and a host of well defined character actor positions. The settings are beatiful and gritty, like the characters themselves; it’s all just what you want from a 1975 P.I. intrigue.

Except they fall in that old Hollywood scriptwriting trap. There’s one or two too many clever twists in the who-done-it. Those iffy characters – I knew it was one of them. Ah ha! But  what – that one was involved too? And that one. Was that a coincidence, or am I starting to have trouble following the plot? And then to try and surprise us ‘once more’ they throw in yet another improbable culprit. It’s like the horror film where the villain comes back from the dead over and over again. It may still look scary – and they do perhaps here catch us a bit off guard – but once we see it’s just a formula a fair bit of the fun seeps away.

Now this doesn’t mean it’s a bad film. It’s a good film. 80% is very good. It is a film that one feels was put together by an enormously competent team. Beautiful to watch, with the water scenes and Harry’s swap between the city and the water’s edge.

Saw it at the TIFF building, March 2011. Good short dinner in the Canteen afterwards. Excellent espresso.