Breach 2007 110 minutes
It’s weird that the Netflix summary for this film tell us that an FBI
employee, Eric O’Neill, is asked to spy on his boss, who is suspected of
selling secrets to the Soviets, without mentioning that the boss’s name is
Robert Hanssen. Once I got over the
shock of that omission, I enjoyed the film.
The story is well told, there’s plenty of suspense, and they get Hanssen
in the end, just like it was in the newspapers.
Chris Cooper is fabulous as Hanssen.
He gives you half a dozen reasons to hate him long before it’s proved
that he is a spy. If you get the disk,
you get a chance to see the real Eric O”Neill.
The real Hanssen is in the slammer and doesn’t appear.
Creation 2009
108 minutes If you want excitement,
watch something else. This is a BBC
biopic about Charles Darwin as he writes the Origin of the Species while grieving over the loss of his favorite
daughter, Annie. The film got good
reviews, but I can’t decide if I liked it or not. Jennifer Connelly as Darwin’s wife Emma
objects to what he is writing on religious grounds but nevertheless seems to be
the glue that holds him and his household together.
The Devil’s Mistress (The Devil’s Whore) 2008 A
Miniseries It centers on the adventures
of the fictional Angelica Fanshawe and the historical Leveller soldier Edward Sexby and spans the years 1638 to
1660. Once you file the fact that
Fanshawe is fictional, the film is an interesting tour through Cromwell’s
Puritan revolt, the execution of Charles I, and the various political movements
of the time – like the Levellers who objected to great and growing gap between
rich and poor.
Everlasting Moments 2008
131 minutes The Swedes just keep
on making great films. This one is based
on the life of Maria Larsson, an early 20th C photographer. She married the charming but coarse Sigfrid
and they had many children, but he drank and had trouble holding a job and
became increasingly brutal. Eventually
he wound up in prison. Maria was
befriended by a photographer, who loaned back to her the camera that she had
won in a lottery and had sold to him to get money for food. He recognized from the beginning that she
had a gift for seeing a picture and shooting it, encouraged her to keep
shooting and taught her how to develop film.
She developed a little photography business of her own, which Sigfrid
didn’t like, but it did bring in some money.
Eventually the photographer asked Maria to leave her husband and marry
him, but she chose to stay with Sigfrid.
When Sigfrid got out of jail he started a haulage business, and, much to
everyone’s surprise, made a success of it.
It’s a good story well told, but even better is the realistic portrayal
of life among the poor and near poor in early 20th C Sweden.
Farewell 2009
117 minutes A senior KGB
official, Sergei Grigoriev, tries to
hand over hard evidence of his agency’s deep penetration of US
intelligence. He tries to use an
American businessman with no previous intelligence experience to pass on his
information, because he knows all of the American professionals are constantly
monitored. It works for a while, but the
information seems too good to be true.
When the CIA tries to check it out with their mole in Moscow, it’s
curtains for Sergei. The businessman and
his family escape to Finland by car with only seconds to spare.
Hollywoodland 2006
127 minutes When Superman,
George Reeves played by Ben Afleck, dies of a gunshot wound in the head, the
police rule it a suicide. Louis Simo
played by Adrien Brody is a sort of shabby private eye. He thinks Reeves’s death was murder and sets
out to prove it. What makes this film
interesting is that it runs on two tracks and the director keeps cutting from
one to the other. The first is Reeves
life in Hollywood up until his death, featuring especially his kept man status
as the lover of the wife of a powerful and unscrupulous studio exec.. The other, the Simo track, is fictional,
although Simo is loosely based on a composite of real people. Apparently Reeves really wanted to be an
actor and finally shot himself when it became clear that he would never get a
part better than Superman. As for the
fictional Simo, his experience trying to prove murder eventually ends up with
him getting his life together. Almost
any story of Hollywood in the 1950s is likely to be fun to watch, and this one
is no exception, especially because you get to see Diane Lane as Reeves’s
mistress.
K-19: The Widowmaker 132 minutes 2002
When Liam Neeson has to play second fiddle, because the first violinist
is Harrison Ford, you know you have a movie.
This one is based on a true and long classified story of a Russian
nuclear submarine, which developed a fatal flaw during its maiden voyage that
could have ended with a thermonuclear explosion in close proximity to a US
naval base. Ford, perhaps the Soviets’
most experienced sub commander, was given command of the boat just before it
sailed, and Neeson, the captain, had to step down to serve as executive
officer, i.e., second in command. Things
don’t go well. Ford drives the crew hard
and creates resentment. When the nuclear
accident happens, his decision to try to repair the damage leads to radiation poisoning
for several crew members and eventually to mutiny. The mutineers want to escape their nuclear
deathtrap by surrendering to an American destroyer which is monitoring
them. Neeson quells the mutiny, and
eventually another Soviet sub arrives to rescue them. The interest here is the interaction among
Ford, Neeson and the crew. Maybe Ford
plays Ford, but it is a performance I won’t forget. He must have been a Russian submarine
commander in another life.
The Last King
(Charles II: The Power & the Passion)
A Miniseries 188 minutes It’s a shame Angelica Fanshawe (The Devil’s
Mistress) couldn’t hang around to be one of Charles II’s mistresses. He found plenty of others, including
especially the manipulative Catherine Villier.
I happened to find a user review of this series that is so good that I
would be wasting my time trying to do one of my own. Here’s the url:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364800/
The Last Train (Der
Letzte Zug) 2006 125 minutes
The last 688 Jews in Berlin are forced into cattle cars for transport to
Auschwitz. The journey is a horror. Many die, some are murdered b y the SS for
protesting, there is no water to drink.
Two of the men try to arrange an escape from the train. Just before arrival at the death camp they finish
a hole in the floor of their car large enough for a child or a slender woman to
escape. A girl and a young woman manage
to get out and are rescued by Polish partisans.
The rest arrive at Auschwitz and get down from the train. Their fate is already clear. This is about as powerful a film as one could
make about the atrocity of the transport of Jews to the death camps.
Max 2002
108 minutes This is a fictional
account of a relationship between Max Rothman, a Jewish art dealer and teacher
and Adolf Hitler in the first years after WW I when he was studying art. The film shows Hitler evolving into the
demagogue he became. I didn’t find it
convincing and sort of wondered why the film had been made at all.
Mrs. Palfrey at the
Claremont 2006 107 minutes
The Claremont Hotel is really an old folks home, where the residents
await the inevitable. Joan Plowright
plays Mrs. Palfrey, who takes up residence at the Claremont as the film opens. This doesn’t promise to be an exciting film,
and it isn’t, but it is a beautiful story of how an old women and a very young
man can become true friends and give meaning to each other’s lives.
O Brother, Where Art
Thou? 2000 106 minutes
Sometimes the Coen brothers get it right – maybe because they based the film on the
Odyssey. It’s 1937 in Mississippi and
George Clooney needs to escape from prison, because his wife has divorced him
and plans to marry someone else. While
working on a chain gang, he persuades the two convicts chained to him to escape
by promising them a share of the loot from the armored car robbery that got him
locked up. Actually he was in prison for
practicing law without a license. Most
of the movie is simply the chase as the authorities try to round up the
escapees. Along the way Clooney and company
meet the sirens and the Cyclops (John Goodman), unwittingly become a popular
singing group and get pardoned by the governor (Charles Durning) for saving his
campaign. It’s billed as their least
violent film, and it’s laugh out loud funny all the way.
Stalingrad 2003
156 minutes This is a three part
documentary on the battle for Stalingrad.
It includes some 8mm film shot by soldiers and the reading of some
soldiers’ letters. It got very good
reviews.
Stalingrad 1993
150 minutes The film opens on squad of German soldiers recuperating in sunny Italy after service in North Africa. Soon they re on a train bound for Stalingrad,
defeat and death. The soldiers must
contend with a determined enemy, amoral officers and winter. One by one they are killed. The last two survivors freeze to death in a
blizzard as they try to walk west. The
2003 documentary was good, but this film made more of an impression on me of
the horrors of the siege and of the motivations of the German leadership.
Super 2011
96 minutes Here’s one I should
have skipped. When Frank’s wife takes
up with a drug dealer, He decides to be a super hero and fight crime. He becomes the Crimson Bolt and hangs out
behind a dumpster watching for bad guys.
His power is in his monkey wrench, with which he does considerable
damage, all or most of it unjustified.
Ellen Page, the reason I saw the film, plays a comic-book store clerk
who becomes the Bolt’s sidekick. Near the
end we get to see her with half her head blown off. Have fun.
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada 2005
121 minutes Tommy Lee Jones
directs and plays a rancher with a place near the Mexican border. He becomes close friends with one of his
illegals, Melquiades Estrada. A new and
overzealous border patrol officer named Mike shoots Estrada and then buries the
body in an unmarked grave to hide his mistake.
Jones had promised Estrada that if anything ever happened to him, he
would take his body back to Mexico to his wife and child for burial. I guess Jones wanted to say something about
friendship. He finds the body, captures
Mike and sets off for Estrada’s village to see that he gets a proper burial. No one in Estrada’s village had ever heard of
him, including the woman in the picture that Estrada had always carried. Jones finds an alternative site, has Mike dig
the grave and then sets Mike free. By
this time Mike seems to have come to understand Jones and perhaps something
about humanity. There are a lot of Tommy
Lee Jones movies that I like better, but this was OK.
You Will Meet a Tall
Dark Stranger 2010 98 minutes
This is not Woody Allen’s best effort as writer and director. There’s all kinds of star power, and it’s
amusing all the way through, but nothing gets resolved. Everyone makes bad choices, but we never find
out what happened to them except for the flaky mother who finds a soul mate in
a widower who also believes in reincarnation.
For everyone else, it’s like Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. (In that
novel the nice guy ends up a prisoner in a South American jungle doomed to
spend the rest of his life reading Dickens to his deranged captor).
No comments:
Post a Comment