The Painting

The Painting  2011  119 minutes   I regret that I haven’t had time to watch or comment on many movies lately, but this is just too good to pass up.  An artist left a painting unfinished, and the people in the painting who weren’t finished want the artist to come back and complete the job.  There’s conflict between the arrogant and privileged figures who were finished and those who were only sketched in or at least need some degree of touching up.  The film is animated in beautiful colors.  Some of the characters are right out of Saturday morning cartoons, but some seem to have come off of Modigliani’s sketch pad.  The artist doesn’t come back -- he's old and only paints landscapes now -- but the incomplete figures discover a way to make themselves whole.  Did I mention the colors?  August 2015

Absolute Wilson; Cloud Atlas; Forty Seven Ronin; Lilyhammer; Marco Polo; Sneakers; Two Lives; and Zelig

Absolute Wilson   2006  105 minutes   This is a documentary about Robert Wilson, an avant garde director and producer.  He is based in New York, of course, but he has produced works all over the world.  He seems to know and be known by everyone.  He has collaborated with Phillip Glass and singer Jessye Norman and was close to Susan Sontag, all of whom appear in the film.  He is called a fearless artists and a creative genius.  Among his works are “Deaf Man’s Glance,”  “Einstein on the Beach,” and  “The Civil Wars.”  One review calls him “the most controversial, rule-breaking and downright mysterious artist of our era.”

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Cloud Atlas   2012   172 minutes   Several stories are presented in bits and pieces over many centuries and actions in one era may affect events in another.  The fun is in the actors, each of whom plays multiple roles.  Tom Hanks is recognizable most of the time and you can’t miss Halle Berry but Hugh Grant can be tough and so can Jim Broadbent.  As a film, it was o.k.

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Forty Seven Ronin  2013  127 minutes   I’m sorry, but this title is totally misleading.  There was a real incident in Japan where 47 leaderless samurai commited seppuku, and it has been told in film more than once as “Forty Seven Ronin” or “Chushingura.”  This film is a fantasy that tells some other story, and it’s a lousy one at that.  The costumes and sets look Chinese and the film has all the quality of a 1950s Hong Kong production.   I hated it.

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Lilyhammer   I pretty much binged watched through season 3 of this Netflix original series.  If you haven’t watched seasons 1 and 2, you won’t understand anything.  Each of the ten episodes consists of bits and pieces of earlier story lines.  It’s a big waste of time, and I loved it.

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ugh Grant can H

Marco Polo   I binged watched the first season of this made-for-Netflix epic.  Marco Polo’s father leaves him in China with Kublai Khan as a sort of hostage.  Marco soon becomes a favorite of the Khan, but that doesn’t mean life is without risk, because he is resented by some of the courtiers and not all of the strategies he recommends work.  It’s interesting overall, especially the Khan who is likely to put people to death for the slightest offense.  Not only is he cruel, but he’s is obese and ugly as sin.  Nevertheless I found myself liking him.  There’s lots of nudity and torture for those who are into that.  One problem is that the whole production is kind of dark.  I don’t mean content; there’s just not enough light to see what’s going on.

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Sneakers   1998   128 minutes   Robert Redford runs a company that tests the security systems of businesses like banks that need such systems.  He’s actually a fugitive from the law, but he has a new identity and has collected a team of hackers and electronic wizards, including one blind guy.  He’s approached by two agents from NSA and asked to steal a black box developed by a university math professor that will break any code.  They offer a lot of money, $175K, and also to clear his record.  Redford does get the box.  It turns out the two agents aren't really from NSA.  They get the box, so then Redford has to steal it back from them to pass it to the real NSA.  It’s pretty exciting stuff.

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Two Lives (Zwei Leben)   2012  99 minutes   At the end of WW II, many of the children born to Norwegian women and German soldiers were taken to Germany.  Some were adopted by German families; others were raised in orphanages. Both societies shunned the Lebensborn children and their mothers after the war; in Norway, women known to have had relationships with Germans during the Occupation were sometimes incarcerated in work camps. In East Germany, some German orphans were recruited by the Stasi as agents and given false identities, so that they could "escape" to Norway to be reunited with their birth mothers, claiming places of war children and serving as spies. Reportedly there are still such Lebensborn agents in Norway who have not been discovered.  In the film we follow one such agent, who found her “birth mother,” married, had children and now has a new granddaughter.  She is totally assimilated.  Then the wall comes down and efforts are made to identify the children who were taken to East Germany and offer them repatriation to Norway and financial compensation.  As the lawyers begin to examine her case, her cover starts to unravel, and she knows she is in danger from former Stasi agents who have settled in Norway and want to live out their lives there.  It’s a fascinating story of people under extreme stress as they watch their lives unravel.  Juliane Kohler  plays the Stasi agent.  She was new to me; I hope I see her again.

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Zelig   1983   79 minutes   This is Woody Allen innovating.  He creates a character who is so eager for acceptance that he even begins to look and act like the people he is with -- fat, thin, any color, any profession.  Mia Farrow is a shrink in the New York Hospital where he ends up.  She can’t figure it out, but she falls for him.  He disappears and then turns up with Hitler at a rally in Munich.  She brings him back and eventually his symptoms fade away.  What’s interesting about the film is Allen’s use of newsreel footage to recreate New York in the 1920s and 1930s.

Atlantic City; Barney’s Version; Captain America: The Winter Soldier; Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport; and Pan Tadeusz

Atlantic City   1980   104 minutes   I got this oldie because I wanted to see what Susan Sarandon looked like back then,  I’m always interested in seeing Burt Lancaster, and I wanted to know more about director Louis Malle.  Lancaster is an aging low level mobster, who seems to be supporting himself running numbers.  Sarandon is a wannabe trying to move up from food service to being a blackjack dealer.  Lancaster window peeps and falls for Sarandon.  Her estranged up husband Dave turns up with some cocaine he found in a phone booth in Philadelphia.  He plans to sell it to pay for the baby his pregnant girlfriend is carrying.  The hoods who were supposed to have picked up the drugs show up looking for Dave and eventually kill him, but Lancaster has the drugs.  It’s a long story, but Lancaster ends up with Sarandon, and then she takes the drug money and takes off.  See Wiki for a detailed plot summary.  The film was nominated for all sorts of Oscars.

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Barney’s Version   2011  134 minutes   I don’t much like Paul Giamatti, and I liked him even less as Barney Panofsky, who produced a Canadian soap for 30 years.  At his wedding he takes off in pursuit of a woman, whom he sees across the room.  He finds her but she won’t have anything to do with him.  Some years later after his divorce she accepts him and marries him.  She’s happy and he’s happy, but there are conflicts about her career in radio.  While she’s away he’s unfaithful to her in a one-night stand, and she leaves and doesn’t come back.  Some years later when he’s drifting off into dementia, she comes back into his life as a friend.  The headliner in this film should be Rosamund Pike, who plays the woman he saw at his first wedding and later married.

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Captain America: The Winter Soldier   2014   136 minutes  It’s all very confusing and is the last Marvel film I will see.

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Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport   2000   117 minutes   Mainly through interviews with the survivors, the film tells the story of how 10,000 Jewish children were rescued from the Nazis just before WW II.  Jewish parents sent their children to live with families in England.  Judi Dench narrates, but the real story is told by the children, now grown up and grown old.

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Pan Tadeusz   1999   150 minutes   This is Andrzej Wajda’s retelling of Adam  Mickiewicz’s novel.  I’m not sure I like the way Wajda tells the story, but the film is beautiful to look at and, of course, Wajda is effective in representing the Poles devotion to their country during the 19^th century when they were partitioned among Russia, Prussia and Austria.  Poland lived on in their minds and hearts.  It involves a multi-decade dispute between two families, the Horeszkos, who had a long history as nobles, and the Soplicas, who were on the rise from the upper middle class.

Death to Smoochy; Divergent; Double Jeopardy; Draft Day; Killing Kennedy; Kingdom of War: Part I and II; and The Secret life of Walter Mitty

Death to Smoochy   2002   109 minutes   Robin Williams is a tired and cynical host of a popular network show for kids.  He gets fired for taking a bribe from a father, who wants his kid featured on the show.  Smoochy played by Edward Norton in a purple rhinoceros suit is the idealistic young entertainer who replaces  Robin.  Smoochy is a real goody two shoes and so naïve that he starts taking advice from an unscrupulous agent played by Danny Devito.  He also manages to replace Robin in the affections of Nora, a hard-boiled network programming executive played by Catherine Keener – we need to see more of her.  By accident Smoochy befriends a punch drunk ex-boxer, and the boxer’s Irish crime family is so grateful that they protect Smoochy from the bad guys who want to exploit him, and the show goes on – idealistically.

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Divergent   2014  139 minutes   Sometime in the future when, as usual in the film future, the world has been devastated, society in a city that looks a lot like the ruins of Chicago is divided into five factions, Abnegation, for the selfless; Amity, for the peaceful; Candor, for the honest; Dauntless, for the brave; and Erudite, for the intellectual.  Once a year at a coming of age ceremony called Choosing Day, 16 year olds must choose a faction, and the decision is irrevocable.  They usually choose the faction in which they grew up, but they may choose another.  Beforehand they are given an aptitude test.  Beatrice grew up in the Abnegation faction, but she doesn’t feel like she is a selfless person.  When her test results are inconclusive, the tester tells her never to share these results because it makes her a divergent .  Divergents are troublesome to this totally organized society and are killed or cast out to live in the streets without the support of a faction.  She chooses Dauntless and thus begins the path toward overthrow of the factional organization of society.  It’s based on a first novel, and while it may not be George Orwell, it’s pretty good.

Double Jeopardy   1999   105 minutes   Ashley Judd plays Libby, a happily married woman with a son about 5.  Her husband is a wheeler dealer who is about to go broke, so he fakes his own murder and makes it clear that Libby did him in.  There’s a payout from a million dollar life insurance policy, which Libby turns over to her son’s nanny and asks her to raise him, while she’s in prison.  While still in prison Libby figures out that her husband is still alive and that she was framed, tried and convicted for a murder that never happened.  When Libby is paroled to a halfway house in San Francisco run by Tommy Lee Jones, she tries to get in touch with the Nanny.  She’s disappeared with the boy and the husband.  Libby starts to search and soon figures out that her husband has murdered the nanny and changed his identity again.  In her search, she violates the conditions of her parole and becomes a fugitive with Jones in pursuit.  He catches up with her in New Orleans just as she has located her husband.  She threatens to shoot the husband if he doesn’t give her her son.  She can do this without repercussions because she has already been convicted of killing him.  He concedes, but as she turns to leave, he pulls a gun.  Jones shoots him.  (It was a clear case of self defense, but I was left wondering if it were otherwise, could Jones have been tried for shooting a dead man?)

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Draft Day   2014   110 minutes   This is Kevin Costner at his best in a part he clearly loves.  He plays Sonny Weaver, the Cleveland Brown’s general manager, on draft day.  It’s the smartest wheeling and dealing you are ever going to see as he parlays the number 6 first pick into the number 1 pick plus two other first round picks.  He gets the defensive end and the running back he wants and passes on the quarterback who was supposed to go first.  Sonny had a good quarterback and he figured out that the new guy, despite his college record, wasn’t going to make it big in the NFL.  Among other things, he learned that none of the quarterback’s teammates came to his heavily publicized 21^st birthday party. 

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Killing Kennedy   2013   90 minutes   I haven’t read Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s book, so I can’t blame them for this turkey.  It was shot for the National Geographic Channel in 18 days and looks it.  We all know the story, and I think it rates something better than a low budget film, so maybe this should have just stayed on TV.  Rob Lowe as Kennedy looks great, better than the original, but nothing else works.    I did learn a few things about Oswald.  No wonder the Soviets didn’t want him.

Kingdom of War: Part I   166 minutes and Part II  165 minutes   This was a lot to sit through but so strange it was almost worth it.  In production terms it looked a lot like epic films 50 or 60 years ago.  The scene is 16^th C Burma where a young Siamese prince, Naresuan, spends his youth as a hostage learning the art of war.  He learns his lessons well and in Part II King Naresuan the Great leads the Siamese people in a revolt to free their country from Burmese control.

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The Secret life of Walter Mitty   2013  114 minutes   Danny Kaye was great in the original and Ben Stiller is at least his equal in this remake, but very, very different.  Life Magazine is preparing its final weekly issue some 40 years after it actually shutdown in 1972, and the contractor who will fire most of the staff is already on site.  Stiller is a photo editor and for years has been the backup for a famous but reclusive life photographer played by Sean Penn, although he has never met him.  Penn has sent a message to management that no. 25 on the last role he sent in is his masterpiece which should go on the final cover.  Stiller can’t find it and sets off to find Penn.  Kristen Wiig, looking gorgeous and somewhat flaky, after all it’s Kristen Wiig, helps him figure out where to go to find Penn:  Greenland, Iceland, Afghanistan and Tibet.  It’s a great trip involving a helicopter flight with a drunken pilot, a dip in the North Atlantic not far from an iceberg, Stiller showing his mastery of the skateboard, an escape from an erupting volcano, a telephoto shot of a snow leopard and a pickup game of soccer with some sherpas.  In Life’s offices in the movie, one sees framed blowups of Life covers.  They’re fakes.  And the real last weekly cover had no picture.  In large type it said “The Year in Pictures 1972.”  Instead it should have been something like the last picture in this movie.

20 Feet from Stardom; Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq; Art Is… The Permanent Revolution; At Berkeley; La Danse – Le Ballet de l’Opera de Paris; Dumbstruck; Frankie & Alice; The Grand Budapest Hotel; Hateship Loveship; How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?; The Lego Movie; Monkey Business; Never Stand Still: Dancing at Jacob’s Pillow; Noah; The Railway Man; Traffic; Transcendence; and We Cause Scenes: The Rise of Improv Everywhere

20 Feet from Stardom   2013   90 minutes   I was just finishing college when rock and roll was taking off and then I went to sea for three years.  Somehow I never bought into it and I don’t think I appreciated it at all until I saw this film.  The film is about backup singers, virtually all African American and graduates of years of gospel singing in their churches.  I still have no interest in listening to songs being shouted at me in words that are unintelligible, but I was fascinated at the richness and inventiveness of the sounds created by the women who stood behind the stars.  Some eventually made it on their own, but those who didn’t can look back on years of making beautiful music that enriched what was happening in front of them but was unappreciated on its own.

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Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq   2013  91 minutes    This was originally shown on the American Masters series on PBS.  It’s a documentary of the rise of Tanaquil Le Clercq to being a principal dancer for the New York City Ballet until she was struck down by polio while on tour in Germany.  She never danced again but she lived a full life until she died at 71 in 2000.  She was married to George Balanchine from 1952 to 1969.  It’s not a pleasant film, but it is an interesting part of the history of ballet in the 20thC.  You can see the whole film or shorts of LeClercq at: 

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http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/tanaquil-le-clercq/biography-and-photos-of-tanaquil-le-clercq/3048/

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Art  Is… The Permanent Revolution   2012   Three contemporary graphic artists, Sigmund Abeles, a painter and etcher; Ann Chernow, a painter and lithographer; and Paul Marcus, a wood block cutter,  reveal how art has been used to promulgate social progress throughout history and its role in such change today. Between discussions of Goya, Picasso, Rembrandt and other painters, the trio creates three new works, which are then printed by master printer James Reed.  Their themes are pretty grim: torture, suicide bombers and a cemetery.  Among other things, one can learn a little about printing processes.

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At Berkeley   2013   244 minutes    My vote is to require all college administrators to watch the whole thing.  It’s a documentary that exposes tensions over rising tuition and slashed budgets.  My own take is that faculty and students should recapture universities from the administrative staff and turn them back into educational institutions.

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La Danse – Le Ballet de l’Opera de Paris   2009   158 minutes    This is long and a bit tedious, but it does give an amazing behind the scenes view of the dedication and hard work it takes to create the magic of ballet on stage.  One sees the behind-the-scenes view of rehearsals, performances and ephemeral moments of the dancers, choreographers and others that make up the creative troupe inside the Palais Garnier.  I was particularly interested in the rather manipulative management style of Brigitte Lefevre, Director of Dance, and the opportunity in the film to see the Chagall ceiling at the Opera Bastille.  The film contains brief scenes from the following ballets:  Genus, Casse Noisette, Le Songe de Medee, Paquita, Romeo & Juliette, La Maison de Bernada, and Orphee et Eurydice

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Dumbstruck   2010  85 minutes   Here in Washington we’re accustomed to hearing the very rich speak to us through our (their) politicians, but this film is about old fashioned stage ventriloquism.  Ventriloquists from all over the country get together once a year in Kentucky to perform for each other and swap stories and information about possibilities for performing.  It looks like a fun party, but it has its sad side because so few performers can make a living doing what they love to do.  The film is a documentary that follows five performers: a truly gorgeous young woman who just wants to make it big enough to hit the cruise ship circuit; a young guy age 13 who hopes for a career; a crabby old New England lady who performs for people who really need cheering up – she’s amazingly inventive – but neglects her own finances; a guy in his 40s who made it to the cruise ship circuit and spent so much time away from home that his wife divorced him; and Terry Fator who made it BIG.    Fator’s story is the happy one.  When he first went on stage at American Idol, you could see the faces of the judges all looking like they were prepared to be bored.  Then his puppet started to sing, and he blew them away.  He won the contest and then got a gig in Las Vegas that was so successful that he was signed to a $100 million five year contract and was given his own personal stage set.  The guy can really sing.  I wonder if someday he’ll just forget about the puppet.

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Frankie & Alice   2014   101 minutes   I had a little trouble following this so I cribbed this quote from Wiki almost verbatim: “ Frankie (Halle Berry) is a black woman with dissociative identity disorder, caused by a traumatic incident from her childhood, which she has repressed.  She has two alternate personalities: Genius, a seven-year-old child; and Alice, a Southern white racist woman, whom Frankie struggles to overcome.  With the help of Dr. Oz,her psychiatrist (Stellan Skarsgard), Frankie strives to live a life close to normal.”  Her I.Q.  sometimes measured 151 and sometime much lower.  It’s based on a true story.   I don’t claim any credentials as a critic, but Halle Berry blew me away as she moved among her personalities. 

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The Grand Budapest Hotel   2014  100 minutes   From the previews I had expected to see Bill Murray on screen for more than 30 seconds, or was it a minute and 30 seconds?  Gustave H (Ralph Fiennes) is the concierge at a prestigious European hotel and the occasional lover of many of the rich women who stay there from time to time.  One of the women leaves him a valuable painting when she dies, but the family will not acknowledge the bequest, so with the help of his protégé, a lobby boy named Zero, he steals the painting.  Inside the cover on the back of the painting is a new will that leaves everything to Gustave.  All hell breaks loose.  Along the way we learn that the concierges of the great hotels all know each other and form a network that can do almost anything.  It’s all great fun, but the producers chose to shoot the movie in a really ugly hotel.

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Hateship Loveship   2013   102 minutes    I was curious to see if Kristen Wiig, one of my favorite comedians, could act in a drama.  She can.  She plays a dowdy caretaker who is hired to look after an elderly lawyer (Nick Nolte looking really old) and his granddaughter.  Wiig is attracted to the girl’s father, an ex-con and junkie, who has just bought a rundown motel in Chicago.  He’s not even allowed to stay overnight in his father’s house.  He’s the one who hired Wiig, and she  writes him a note to thank him.  The daughter’s friend Edith offers to mail it but instead writes an answer herself and suggests they correspond further on the internet.  A romance blossoms but only in the mind of Wiig.  She leaves her job and goes to the motel in Chicago.  The first thing she learns is that the father has never been on the internet.  This is a movie so you can imagine how it turns out.

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How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?   2010  79 minutes   I thought I knew a bit of art history, but I had never hear of Norman Foster.  The question in the title came from his friend, Buckminster Fuller.  Foster developed a huge practice with over 3000 employees and built innovative buildings all over the world.  Google him.  The pictures of his work will blow your mind.

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The Lego Movie   2014   101 minutes   First you have a computer animated movie about a young guy trying to stop his evil mayor from ruining the city, and then you are suddenly in a tract house basement with a huge Lego city.  The father, Will Ferrell, is about to glue everything together to make it permanent.  His son persuades him not to on grounds that that would stifle creativity.  If they took the city apart, they could make all sorts of other interesting things.  It’s a good point, I guess, but another good point is that you might not want to see every Will Ferrell movie.  Ferrell does speak English throughout.

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Monkey Business   1952  96 minutes   It doesn’t hurt once in a while to go back 60 years if it’s to see Cary Grant.  He’s a wacky professor who may have invented a youth serum.  It’s fun except for Ginger Rogers who seems to have been carved out of wood.

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Never Stand Still: Dancing at Jacob’s Pillow   2011  Jacob's Pillow is a dance center, school and performance space founded by Ted Shawn and located in Becket Massachusetts.  It is known for the oldest internationally acclaimed summer dance festival in the United States.  In the film there are clips of Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Suzanne Farrell, Mark Morris, Judith Jamison and Bill Irwin talking about and sometimes demonstrating their work.  A film to see if you are interested in dance.

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Noah   2014   137 minutes   It just couldn’t have been any worse.  What a waste of Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly!

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The Railway Man   2014   118 minutes   This film is based on the story of Eric Lomax, who was captured in Singapore by the Japanese at the beginning of WW II and taken north to work on the railroad the Japanese were building across Thailand.  It’s the one that crosses the River Kwai.  His horrible tortures in captivity by the Kempetai included water boarding.  He recovered physically but never escaped the nightmares.  On a train he meets Patti, a recent divorcee played by Nicole Kidman, and soon they become a couple and marry.  Lomax met periodically with other survivors of the RR and at one meeting he sees a newspaper article that shows one of his torturers, Takashi Nagase, in Thailand giving tours of the Kempetai compound and the RR.  Patti encourages Eric to go to Thailand and find Nagase.  Unlike the horrible incident in Unbroken, where the guard who tortured Louis Zamperini and other Allied prisoners refused to acknowledge any regret, Nagase finally admits his role and expresses his regrets.  Nagase and Lomax reconciled and became lifelong friends.

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Traffic  2000   147 minutes  This centers around a newly appointed federal drug czar, who finds out his own teenage daughter is an addict.  It won four Oscars, was nominated for best picture and the cast includes Don Cheadle, Benecio del Toro (Oscar for best supporting actor), Michael Douglas as the czar, Luis Guzman, Dennis Quaid and Catherine Zeta-Jones.  It’s all a little too predictable and kind a drags through too many minutes.

Transcendence  2014   119 minutes   Up until now I would have said that I would see any film that had either Johnny Depp or Morgan Freeman.  From now on I’ll be more careful.  Depp and his wife are computer scientists working to advance artificial intelligence.  They are opposed by an anti-technology organization, R.I.F.T. that is trying to prevent them from creating a world where computers can transcend the abilities of the human brain.  The anti-tech people shoot Depp and as he lies dying his wife uploads his brain into a computer.  From there he continues to run his lab and continue his research.  He begins to reach too far and the powers that be create a virus that will stop him and also shut down the internet and the whole technological world.  For the rest, read Wiki.

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We Cause Scenes:  The Rise of Improv Everywhere   2013  85 minutes   Who knew that New York City, until recently the stop and frisk capital of the world, could be such a tolerant place.  Yesterday I read in the Washington Post that buskers here in Washington are not allowed to play within 15 feet of Metro property and even if they are outside 15 feet they may not accept tips.  In New York the authorities pretty much leave them alone if they don’t play in places where their music will interfere with people’s ability to hear loudspeaker announcements.  I guess that permissive attitude is why Improv Everywhere was able to thrive in the City.  Charlie Todd, Improv’s creator, narrates this film.  He started with an action on the subway.  He and a number of his friends got on the train one by one without acknowledging each other.  They took off their pants and just stood or sat there as if nothing unusual had happened and surreptitiously filmed the whole thing.  There was an attractive girl sitting there who kind of got the idea of what was going on.  (She and Charlie are now married).  They spent a lot of time figuring out what else they could do and the group got a lot larger.  One of their best was a hypnotism prank that totally took in the crowd that had gathered to watch in Washington Square.  When You-Tube came along and social media started to metastasize, the group grew to over 3000 and was imitated worldwide.  A lot of what they did was in the category of flash mobs, but some of their actions were more complex.  One of the networks picked them up to do a TV series, but it never got beyond the pilot stage.  You can see the network footage on You-Tube.  It’s just a great story of someone having fun and making a career out of mocking our uptight society.