Chinatown
While the dialogues in Chinatown are well crafted, the drama of this detective story falls a bit flat after 30 years. Roman Polanski has a penchant for psychological stories, but his art is at a much higher level in The Pianist and Death and the Maiden. If you want a little history lesson of LA without too much history, the film captures well the city’s precarious habitat: it is built in a semi-desert and requires imported water for its sustenance. Water politics are central to this history of the city to this day. Watching the film, I could never shake the feeling that I already knew the mood of the film. With the help of the web learned that The Two Jakes was a sequel to Chinatown. Both films don’t make it my must-see list.
Fitzcarraldo
Growing older has its pleasures. I was bit nervous about renting Fitzcarraldo (1982) with Klaus Kinski in the lead role. I remember seeing Kinski as a teenager in a film depicting a strange riverboat trip. At the time I thought the film was boring and Kinski crazy. In my memory the action took place on the Nile, but after searching for any evidence of the film on the Internet this morning, I am forced to conclude: It was Fitzcarraldo that the teenage me rejected as boring and crazy. The adult me, by contrast, enjoyed every single one of the 158 minutes in which a lovable crazy Fitzcarraldo (Klaus Kinski) tries to bring opera to the backwaters of Peru. This film, set at the turn of the 20th century, is not for everyone, especially not teenagers who will find the pace too slow. If you like opera, nature, and people who are a bit crazy in their quest to experience life in its fullest, you will not be disappointed.
King Kong
Good writing goes a long way. I have seen the famous picture of King Kong on the Empire State Building in New York many times. “Isn’t that silly. Such an ape would never climb on top of the New York skyline,” was my reaction every single time. I was never much interested in seeing the original (1933) film, let alone the recent remake. But King Kong held me hostage on the airplane. The film is too long (you can skip the first 40 minutes until the film crew arrives on the island) but from then on Peter Jackson unleashes incredible special effects and the storyline of King Kong is excellent (much better than Jurassic Park), taking you along for a splendid ride. For me, the most amazing feature of the film was how Jackson got the animated animal to display emotions. Jack Black and Adrian Brody were miscast. The only Hollywood star that gives a good performance is Naomi Watts. Now I know where the expression “Beauty and the Beast” comes from.
Go for Zucker
Go for Zucker is a delightful German comedy written and directed by Dani Levy. With a Midas touch, he navigates around highly sensitive topics for the German national psyche and creates the first post World War II German comedy about a Jewish family. Jacky Zucker (nee Jakob Zuckermann) was born to a Jewish mother in East Germany. She is on a trip to Frankfurt with her other son Samuel when the Wall dividing the country comes up, and she decides to stay in West Germany. Fourteen-year-old Jack determines to stay in the East German sports high schools he loves. For the next 30 years, the two brothers who hated each others’ guts as teenagers lead separate lives. The film opens just as the gambler Jacky is thrown out by his wife and about to go to jail for not paying his debts. His unsuspecting wife receives a telegram from Samuel, who in the meantime has taken up Orthodox Judaism, that their mother has died and that he is coming to Berlin lay her to rest in Jewish cemetery. The mother specified in her will that Jacky and Samuel will only get her money if they make up and spend one week together or morning her as prescribed by Jewish rituals. When Samuel first arrives in Berlin with the coffin of the dead mother, the schism between the brothers seems insurmountable were it not for the fact that both would have a good use for a big injection of cash. Go see Zucker!
March of the Penguins
In high school biology classes I watched many films about animal and plant life. The one I recall most vividly is Konrad Lorenz tricking little geese into believing that he was their parent during a particular phase in their young life. These films were produced on relatively modest budgets. In the hearts and minds of teenagers they could not compete with the Hollywood pictures that we went to see over the weekend. Once in a while I would doze off during my biology films because the classroom was darkened, tricking my body into thinking is was night and time to go to bed. Hollywood films on the weekend could never play this trick on me. March of the Penguins just as its eye-popping predecessor Winged Migration beautifully marries Hollywood style film-making with the genre of high school biology films. Invented was this potent genre in France where Hollywood films are taxed to subsidize domestic film production.
Capote
As a biography of a major writer of the 20th century America Capote is an artistic failure. The film covers only a short period in Capote’s life when he researched and wrote In Cold Blood. The script utterly lacked a central requirement of a good biography: make us understand the person better. All we learn about Capote is that he was almost as cold-blooded as the murderers he interviewed in his pursuit of a story that could make him a famous writer. I suspect many critics have sung high praises for this mediocre film because they identify with the fellow writers. This is made easier because the best scenes in the film are when Capote entertains fellow writers in New York salons. Capote leaves no doubt that making a film about a world-class writer is a nearly impossible task. The most electrifying moment of the entire film occurs when Capote reads a few passages from his book In Cold Blood. You immediately think: What amazing language! How did he think of stringing these words together! The film itself never comes close to the quality embodied in these passages from the book. I am looking forward to reading In Cold Blood. The script utterly lacked a central requirement of a good biography: make us understand the person better.
Walk the Line
If I had grown up in Nashville listening to country music, it would have been easier to appreciate Walk the Line, a chronicle of the first 30 something years of Johnny Cash’s career. Raised on Rock, Pop and Soul and Classical Music, I could not connect very well with Cash’s music, except for the occasional tune whose lyrics stood out. But even the die-hard country fans were not given the same treat as we fan of Ray Charles could experience last year with the stunningly good Ray. Walk the Line lacked the craftsmanship of Ray that would have given us deeper understanding of artistry behind the music. Whereas Ray was fundamentally about music, Walk the Line is about the amazing love story of Johnny Cash and June Carter that outshines his music. Reese Witherspoon deservedly won the Oscar her performance as June Carter.
In her Shoes
Two sisters, Maggie (Cameron Diaz) and Rose (Toni Collette), could not be more different. Maggie gets any man she wants but is not able to hold a steady job and support herself financially. Rose has no success with men and is climbing up the corporate ladder in a high prestige law firm. When Rose finally manages to get a man to spend a night with her, her state of romantic bliss comes quickly to an end. Having been kicked out her father’s house, Maggie is staying at Rose’s apartment while trying to find a job. When Rose boyfriend rings the doorbell one afternoon, Maggie jumps into bed with him only to be caught in flagrant by her sister. Rose is so hurt that she kicks Maggie out and the sisters lose all contact and go their own novel ways. But despite all their differences, the two ladies are bound together deeply by their experience of having lost their mentally ill mother at a very young age. The film traces the psychological difficulty of being cut off from someone who is tightly connected to one’s identity. The movie is watchable on an airplane (I saw it on my recent trip to Los Angeles) but is not particularly profound. There are a few good jokes, primarily delivered by Jewish ladies in a Florida retirement community.
Syriana
It is customary at many opera productions to hand out notes to the audience about what is happening in the different acts of the musical work, often because the opera is sung in a foreign language. Most critics and moviegoers have remarked the plot of Syriana is jumping to so many places and to so many individuals that one needs the equivalent of opera notes to stay abreast of what is happening. Alas, if this were the only problem of the film, my weekly evening at the movies would have been splendid. When I form a judgment about a film I asked myself. Given the subject matter, how well was the film been designed and executed. In the case of Syrania, the answer is: poorly. The voracious increase in demand for oil from rapidly growing China and India and the dwindling reserves around the world is posing an enormous economics and political challenge during the next couple of decades.
Match Point
I buried Woody Allen tonight. The first 90 minutes of Match Point were entirely repetitive of his previous films, with the exception the location: the film takes place in London and not Manhattan. I wished I had stayed home and not wasted time on such a trivial movie. Allen’s final mission in life seems to be to prove right Freud’s theory that human beings are entirely controlled by their desires for sex. Allen has devolved into a puppeteer, incapable of creating human characters. But as an artist he has become sterile. His creative impotence is painful to watch. The last thirty minutes of the film relieve the pain only because Allen let’s a murder take place and you want to know whether the murderer gets away with the crime. If a young film student had made this movie, the critics would have buried the person’s career before it ever started. It obviously pays to have a large loyal audience, but I am no longer part of it.
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