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El ciudadano ilustre (2016)
Keeps you guessing
This is a perplexing story from Argentina about fame and the fact that as Thomas Wolfe advised, you can never go home again. A pampered writer, in fact, a Nobel prize winner, impulsively decides to return to his native village which he left half a century ago without ever returning. He longs to revisit where it all began and our sympathy is with him because who hasn't longed to retrace the paths of life to see what might have been? The provincials in his home town pull out all the stops to curry favor with the man, lectures are scheduled, there's a parade,, he asked to judge the local art contest and they erect a hastily improvised statue of him. But instead of understanding their jealousy of his fame mingled with their genuine pride in his accomplishments, he pompously mocks their country ways and their longing to escape from the monotony of provincial life. Suddenly the tables are turned; we see the the bumpkins as honest and fallible human beings even if they lack the will and talent to escape, and the writer is revealed to be the pompous ass he probably has always been. This transformation is very skillfully done in a film that is at once funny and sad. Highly recommended.
The Legend of Ben Hall (2017)
A wasted effort
Having just seen the vastly superior Australian film,'Sweet Country' about men in the outback and remembering the equally compelling movie about Ned Kelly of a few years ago, this film about a 'legendary' bushranger outlaw is a lame effort by comparison.
I am sure the historical Ben Hall was an interesting character, but you wouldn't know it from this inept script. First of all he spends much of the movie pining after an old love and his son. If he really wanted to be with his son all he had to do is put down his gun and pick up a plough. Was this longing for a family really the heart of Ben Hall's story? It doesn't seem likely or believable or even very interesting.
Also his insistence of never killing anyone is ludicrous when you consider in the 'action' parts, Hall and his pursuers fire volley after volley - in real life, these scenes would be followed by the sight of many corpses littering the ground. But like the Saturday matinee westerns of my youth, they never hit anybody and they never stop to reload. Everything is predictable, the script, the acting and the music which gets in the way. The director apparently spent seven years researching Hall's history but apparently all he absorbed was how to make the locations, the costumes, and the weapons appropriate to the period. Somewhere along the line, the real Ben Hall escaped, as he so often did in real life.
Lazzaro felice (2018)
Neorealism meets Magic realism.
Neorealism meets magic realism. The first half of this marvelous Italian film is a neorealist pean to those close to the earth who are unfortunate enough to be under the heel of a decaying aristocrat, the Marquise de Luna. Scene after scene drifts by, delineated with compassion and subtlety in a way that recalls the glory days of Vittorio de Sica and Visconti. There is special emphasis on the character of Lazzaro, an orphan with the head of a seraphim and the body of a laborer who is simple and innocent in the way of many a saint and mystic.
But suddenly and shockingly, he falls off a cliff and like Rip van Winkle awakes thirty or more years later. Move aside Umberto D. and make room for Fellini or Guillermo del Toro. All has changed, the farm is deserted, the Maquise has been imprisoned for oppressing her laborers, and eventually the still youthful Lazarro encounters his family, now aged and poverty stricken as ever, as they scrabble for survival amid the confusing tangle of modern city life.
I could go on but suffice it to say the two halves of the film are in perfect counterpoint; like a reflection in a pond we wonder which is more real, the reflection or that which it reflects?
An extraordinary accomplishment by director Alice Rorhwacher. Her haunting film returns Italian cinema to the bravura days of Fellini and the Cinecittà studios.
Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)
A cop out
This film could have made some interesting points about the art world Instead it opted for a routine horror show which failed to horrify. A waste of good acting and cinematography.
The Trial: A Murder in the Family (2017)
Hokum obscures the real drama
This was a disappointing series because it used the contrivances of bad drama to obscure an important subject: the human nature of the justice system. I have been on two juries ( none a murder case) and deciding evidence is 'beyond a reasonable doubt' is dramatic enough without all the histrionics employed by this team of filmmakers. The inveterate use of close-ups is usually a good indication of bad directing; in a real trial trial there are no close-ups, just the tense space of uncomfortable people in a room together because of distressing circumstances.
Then there was the constant use of dramatic recreations. In a real trial you would have barren recreations of time and space sketched out in a video or on a whiteboard instead of these filmed dramas which could have never been used as evidence in a courtroom. Also, the timing was excruciatingly slow; there was about two episodes of material there stretched out to five overly long hours.
The drama in a real trial is the studied absence of drama and even the occasional flamboyance of a famous lawyer is looked up with distaste. Speaking of that, the defense lawyer with his organ-tone drawl was very irritating. he might as well have been selling snake oil. If he had been my lawyer, QC or not, the moment he opened his mouth he'd be out the door.
The way to due a series like this would have been to make it as realistic a trial as possible, not by hyping the drama but by revealing the boredom, the slowness of time, and the moments of real drama involving human beings and their lives. I have seen similar programs do this very effectively; one, done a few years ago, featured John Turturro as a shambolic detective. "The Night of...". That series made prison life come alive for me. "A Murder in the Family" just reminded me of a lot of bad movies.
Escape at Dannemora (2018)
more on Dannemora
To add to my original review now that I've seen all 7 episodes. My enthusiasm if anything is even higher for this remarkable show. I am simply astounded by the layers of meaning that Patricia Arquette finds in the character of Tilly. And as the series went on, the brilliance of Paul Dano's acting comes to the fore. Talk about the deck being stacked against you. Dano shows us the agony of man who knows that life is cruel and unfair and there's nothing he can do about it. A great tragedy for our time. My one complaint is the music, it gets in the way.
Pine Gap (2018)
Entertaining and frightening too
I am not usually a fan of plot-driven series but this one is solidly directed with a good cast. The result, thanks to some good scriptwriting, is also entertaining primarily because it also manages to be character driven. The characters seem like real people for the most part, caught up in the ugly political maelstroms of the time.
Pine Gap is frightening because the show actually emphasizes that no one's hands are clean, that America, China and Australia are all players in a drama that will likely see the decline of the US and Europe, and the emergence of China as a world power. But one wrong move could easily make all our previous conflagrations look like minor skirmishes.
Mona Lisa (1986)
All comes together
What a pleasure it is when all the elements of a movie fall into place. And how rare for the writing, the direction, the cinematography and the acting to work so seamlessly at such a high level of excellence. A great script, and direction that doesn't get in the way but just enhances the narrative and gives these supoerb actors room to express themselves. Which they do beatifully. Bob Hoskins is muscular, enegertic and funny and about as natural as an actor can be. As usual you can't take your eyes off of Michael Caine, maybe the last great novie star left. The subtext is the empty world of prostitution and the seedy London of the 80s. Movies gain a whole new dimension when the locale they faithfu;lly present changes and is no more. In that sense Mona Lisa is also a great documentary. and that makes the recent HBO The Deuce, which not a document but a recreation of Times Square paralleling the time of Mona Lisa, seem forced by comparison.
Curb Your Enthusiasm: Foisted! (2017)
a Very funny man who's been on the stage one time too many
I have to agree with reviewer Leonardhaid. Rveryone is older and everyone is in denial and the shtick is getting old. I'm wondering why beyond the obvious reasons of age and staying on the stage too long and a couple of things occur to me. I remember when Seinfeld began to get surreal with episodes that strained credulity and weren't as funny. Too much imagination. The beauty of Seinfeld and Curb is that as wacky as those narratives are, at their best they are believable while being totally improbable, that's why they are so funny. The more surreal episodes lost that connection with reality and the same has happened to Curb in Season nine. We can't really believe Larry would wrestle the star of Hamilton to the ground while at the same time begging him to star in his show. In earlier seasons this episode would have been done in a way that one could believe it might possibly have happened that way. Then I've noticed Larry now has a co-writer for some if not all the episodes of season 9. My impressions was that in earlier seasons he did all the writing himself. I wonder if that might have anything to do with the decline ,Whatever, there's no arguing the fact that LD with Seinfeld and Curb has been a brilliant funny man for a very long time. So I give season nine a 4 but a nine for all the previous seasons.