Ayneh (The Mirror)

This is going to be tough.  I really don’t want to spoil the movie, but it’s hard to talk about without doing so.  But I’ll give it a shot.  It starts with an incredibly basic premise… a little girl waiting for her mother to pick her up from school decides to try to make it home on her own.  About halfway through the film, something happens that might be the most unexpected twist I’ve ever seen.  It’s beautifully, magically meta.  Like Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf, Panahi is doing bold, refreshing things with the medium.  Both halves are compelling despite (or because of) their simplicity, and the parallels between them add extra dimensions.  And Mina Mohammad Khani (who looks so familiar because her older sister had previously starred in The White Balloon) gives a great performance for such a young child.  Where the film falters a bit is in the transparency of its central device… it works amazingly well at first, but here and there the cracks show.  This doesn’t have too much of a detrimental effect, though, it’s still a wonderful, thought-provoking work about the world through a child’s eyes, the line between cinema and reality, Iranian society, and a number of little observations about humanity.  Great stuff.  Rating: 9

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Varieté

Dupont (as aided by Karl Freund) has a flair for fantastic cinematography, with a number of dazzling images.  There’s a lot of creativity in the shots, particularly in use of the subjective camera.  Some of the trapeze scenes are really wonderful.  Although not as shallow in its original form as it would be in the American release (which excises the first act to make Emil Jannings a more sympathetic character) the story is a rather simplistic and predictable morality play… Still, it’s worth watching for the great photography and the very fine performance by Jannings, some of his more nuanced work.  Rating: 7

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Bienvenido Mister Marshall!

Yet another wonderful comedy by Berlanga.  In a plot reminiscent of Waiting for Guffman, a tiny Spanish village prepares for the arrival of Americans representing the Marshall Plan, hoping to receive a piece of that reconstruction money.  At a brisk 75 minutes and loaded with gags, the film moves like gangbusters, with plenty of great moments.  In the opening scene, the narrator (the great Fernando Rey) introduces a whirlwind of memorable characters, “pausing” the action at times to make a point… and even apologizing to one fellow who was caught in the middle of lifting something heavy.  Most notable is the series of dream sequences towards the end, including a Western parody (complete with “fake English” as silly as saying “ching chang chong” to imitate the Chinese) and one that manages to lampoon the KKK, film noir and HUAC in less than two minutes.  It’s all a terrific satire of Americans, Spanish, and their perceptions of each other.  This was the last Berlanga on the TSPDT list, but I’m definitely going to explore further on my own.  Rating: 8

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V lyuyakh (My Apprenticeship)

Aleksei Lyarsky returns for the second in Donskoy’s Maxim Gorky trilogy.  My reaction is pretty much as the same as Childhood… some nice shots, and certain individual moments are compelling, but it doesn’t add up to anything that great.  All of the “villains” are really exaggerated, and Gorky is always such a stand-up guy.  It feels like a mediocre Soviet adaptation of a lesser Dickens novel.  I mean, it’s fairly enjoyable, but a little more nuance would have helped.  Rating: 6

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La commune (Paris, 1871)

This month has been loaded with movies that are much better than I thought they’d be.  Maybe I’m getting soft, or maybe my expectations are too low.  As this very lengthy film about the Communards (who, before now, were simply a Jimmy Sommerville band to me) started I thought, “This is going to be a nightmare of boredom.”  It wasn’t long before I was hooked.  Watkins recreates the events with an anachronistic twist: a television crew is recording the events, and provides commentary on how the media of both the past and the present manipulates the truth.  The trick is simple but effective.  The actors were apparently given a lot of free rein, and except for a couple of subpar performances (I kept noticing one hammy young lady in particular who always seemed to be vying for camera time) they’re very good.  In another interesting twist, they often debate the current political climate in out-of-character discussions, and sometimes even drop in and out of character in the middle of a scene.  All in all, this is pretty interesting stuff, and thankfully is closer to The War Game than Punishment Park.  But let’s not get carried away.  Although Watkins makes some attempt to reveal the failings of the Commune, it’s entirely clear where his sympathies lie.  This is not an unbiased presentation, but one with a definite agenda.  Furthermore, having people spouting doctrine at you for a large part of 6 hours can get really tedious.  Most of the time, it’s surprisingly engaging, but some of it is very repetitive or long-winded… the lack of a reasonable voice for the counterpoint means you’re going to hear the same shit over and over and over again.  Still, I was far more engaged that I anticipated.  Rating: 7

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The Hawks and the Sparrows

This light comedy from Pasolini has its charms and its flaws.  A Morricone score is always appreciated, and this one has the added bonus of the opening credits cleverly being done in song.  Toto and Davoli have a funny kind of chemistry together, and most of the episodes offer at least a smile or two.  I also liked the film’s slightly surreal aspects.  However, a lot of the humor is pretty stupid and/or slapsticky, and the movie is rather unfocused, taking allegorical potshots at too many targets.  I started to lose interest by the end, and I think a tighter structure might have helped.  But maybe I was just tired.  Perhaps I’ll give it a second chance someday, I did mostly enjoy it.  Rating: 7

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The Black Cat

Although it has absolutely nothing at all to do with the Poe story it claims to be based on, this is a terrific creepy classic.  The atmosphere is high Gothic, thanks to a combination of Ulmer’s expressionist direction, the moody music (almost every second is scored, but it rarely becomes intrusive) and the one-two punch of Lugosi & Karloff.  Rarely does the film get corny, as the humor is kept to a bare minimum.  A surprisingly intense climax, with Satanic rituals and vengeful torture.  Seems like some aspects could have been more fleshed out… on the other hand, I appreciate short and sweet.  Rating: 8

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Kick-Ass

Not as terrible as I’d feared.  As in Stardust, Matthew Vaughn applies a tongue-in-cheek approach to a genre, with mixed results.  The all-too-obvious cultural references got tiresome fast, as if Vaughn (or the original comic, I dunno) was trying to be Tarantino but didn’t have as deep a well to draw from.  It’s often too tongue-in-cheek… although I do prefer my superhero movies not to take themselves so damn seriously, this one is a little high on the “nudge nudge wink wink” meter.  However, I had more fun with it than I expected to, and there is something compellingly disturbing about a little girl exacting homicidal carnage on a room full of bad guys.  The movie needs to figure out what it’s trying to say, but on a purely entertainment level it’s not bad.  Rating: 7

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Inside Job

I ought to know more about the financial crisis.  The company I work for is actually featured (well, mentioned for two seconds) in this movie.  But I’m IT, so I don’t actually need to know the financial part that much.  This movie does a pretty good job of presenting the basics in a nutshell.  Ferguson does not seem to particularly favor either political party (although his very sane response is the need for more regulation) and has plenty of blame to spread around among greedy, corrupt, spineless and inept people of all stripes.  It’s hard to keep track of everything at times, and perhaps the subject is really too complex for a 2 hour film.  I also found the music occasionally distracting.  Still, it’s an informative overview.  Rating: 7

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The Prowler

I might have gotten my hopes up too high for this one.  TSPDT give it “Highly Recommended” status, and there’s glowing quotes on the DVD case.  For me, it didn’t live up to these accolades.  Van Heflin and Evelyn Keyes are both fine, although I’m still not terribly impressed with either.  The story does have a subversive edge to it, but it’s really not that edgy.  Miller is not a noir cinematographer, and only a few shots are interesting.  But the main issue is that it’s kinda slow.  Not painfully so, but it definitely is a bit sluggish.  I did like how the film went in a couple of different directions that I didn’t expect, and overall my complaints are fairly minor.  I always find movies about abuse of power fairly interesting.  But it isn’t the “masterpiece” I was led to believe it is.  Rating: 7

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