Ballets Russes; The Brothers Bloom; The Edge (Krai); Giallo; Iron Jawed Angels; Renoir; Splendor in the Grass; and World War Z

Ballets Russes   2005   118 minutes   The company was formed in the first decade of the 20^th C by Diaghilev, who wanted to showcase the avant garde in Russian art, something he couldn’t do in Russia.  Most of the original dancers were drawn from the Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg and later from the Russian émigré community.  Diaghilev brought together not only the avant garde in dance but also in music and painting. He died in 1929 but a successor company carried on in the 1930s and 1940s and then ran out of steam in the 1950s. The list of dancers, composers and artists who contributed their talents to the success of the company reads like a roll call of early 20^th C artists.

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The Brothers Bloom  2008   113   Mark Ruffalo plays the older brother who writes the scripts for their elaborate cons, and Adrien Brody is the younger brother who leads on the mark.  Brody wants out but Ruffalo persuades him to do one last job.  Their target is a rich young woman of 33 played by Rachel Weisz.  She is friendless and lives alone in a giant mansion in New Jersey.  They draw Weisz into an elaborate con and lead her to think she is one of the players.  Weisz and Brody fall in love.  Ruffalo keeps saying this shouldn’t happen, but in the end it seems his greatest con is to give Brody the real life that he wanted when he was trying to quit his life as a con man.

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The Edge (Krai)   2010   118 minutes   This is a Russian film about a post WW II labor camp in Siberia where Russians who had been POWs in the West were interned, because they were seen as somehow corrupted by their exposure to the Germans.  They’re not behind wire; the taiga and their lack of papers is their prison.  When Ignats, a decorated sergeant who had fought all the way to Berlin, arrives to be part of camp administration, his unorthodox behavior shakes up the community.  He’s an expert on train engines and in the forest he finds an abandoned engine on an abandoned spur.  More surprisingly, he finds that a young German woman who had escaped from Russian custody had been living in the cab of the engine and surviving alone in the taiga for four years.  He gets the engine running and brings it to town and eventually partners with the German girl.

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Giallo   2009   92 minutes   Adrien Brody stars as Inspector Enzo Avolvi who trails a sadistic serial killer in Milan.  The film is based on an Italian TV series from the 1970s.  I usually stay away from horror films, but this one was interesting.  Avolvi has a back story which explains why he operates the way he does.  Interesting, but a little too creepy for my taste.

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Iron Jawed Angels   2004   124 minutes  This HBO film chronicles the efforts from 1912 to 1920 of Alice Paul (Hilary Swank) and Lucy Burns (Frances O’Connor) to force adoption of a Constitutional amendment that would guarantee women the right to vote.  218 suffragettes, including the wife of a US Senator, had to let themselves be arrested and dismally imprisoned before President Wilson and the other powers that be could be persuaded to allow women to vote.  This is as good as it gets in films recreating real events.

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Renoir   2012   111 minutes   This film chronicles the last years of Renoir’s career and also the beginnings of his son Jean’s career as a film director.  Towards the end of his long life Renoir was badly crippled with arthritis and had to have his brushes tied to his hands with strips of cloth, but he continued to paint.  The film puts a lot of emphasis on the influence of a teenage girl, Andree, who comes to model for Renoir and becomes a part of the community of women who cared for him in his last years.  I don’t know how accurate that is, but her performance (Christa Theret) and that of Michael Bouquet as Renoir along with a beautiful rural setting in the south of France make this a film well worth seeing.

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Splendor in the Grass   1961   124 minutes   I think I recorded this off of TCM just to check in on Warren Beatty.  It was his first film role, and after seeing it I have no questions about why he became a megastar and why he was able to sleep with most of the women in Hollywood.  And Natalie Woods’ eyes -- there’s nothing like them.  The screenplay is a real dog and I found myself fast forwarding ahead.  Maybe it was just dated and maybe I was turned off by the music, which always seems awful in old films.  Most painful of all were Natalie’s scenes with her mother, which seemed to embody everything that was wrong with conservative, white America of, in this case, 1928.

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World War Z   2013   116 minutes   The UN calls Brad Pitt out of retirement, when a virus that turns people into zombies goes viral.  He and his family have to be extracted by helicopter off of a rooftop in Philadelphia to save them from hordes of hungry zombies. Pitt flits from a carrier off of the East Coast to South Korea to Jerusalem to Cardiff, Wales in search of the source of the virus and a way to stop it.  He saves the world, of course.  He’s Brad Pitt.  It was O.K., but I’ve seen many films that were better, even the ancient Invasion of the Body Snatchers.