Recount
The film takes a look behind the scenes of how Gore and Bush fought out their electoral battle for five weeks after the election. Even for someone who read the newspaper every day during this period, the writer and director manage put on a gripping drama. Clearly, the movie is written from the Democratic (loosing) perspective. But with the exception of how James Baker and Warren Christopher are portrayed (the come across differently when they are on TV), the film is splendid.
The Proposal
The Proposal is a lot better than I had expected after seeing the trailer for it. The short preview made it look like a silly film with a lame plot and stale humor. The heroine (Sandra Bullock) starts out a bitch. She is the chief editor of a distinguished book publisher in New York City. Showing how far women have come, she successfully harasses our hero (Ryan Reynolds). In an effort to avoid deportation from the U.S. because of a visa violation, she forces him to agree to marry her. Our hero goes along with her proposal not simply because he is weak but because he able to get something in return: The heroine agrees in return to promote our hero from her mere assistant to an independent editor at her publishing house. If you are up do date on immigration law enforcement, you will know that the IRS does not like it when you marry someone just to help them stay in the country.
Cloud 9 (Wolke 9)
The idea of making a film about sexual desires of seniors is brilliant. Such a film was overdue. But Andreas Dresen, the 46-year-old director of Cloud 9 constructed a film about his own desires rather than exploring how seniors cope with society’s predilection to see them as sexless creatures. Dresen’s drama is not about the psychological challenges of growing old: losing your partner, falling in love again, wanting physical intimacy with someone who perhaps no longer cares for it. Dresen wants to demonstrate how we can be spooked by breaking many taboos of contemporary sensibilities. Hollywood staffs sex scenes with young women; he opens the film with a long sex scene with a woman in her late sixties and a seventy-six year old man. Even more shockingly, he gives the lead female character Inge (very well-played by Ursula Werner) the psychology of a sixteen-year-old girl who is naive, emotional, reckless, and irrational.
The Times of Harvey Milk
This documentary about the life of Harvey Milk starts at the moment of his election to the city council of San Francisco. Compared the recent motion picture Milk, the film begins a bit slow but then becomes a wonderful depiction of what made Milk a great politician. It is quite remarkable to see him organize the gay community into a political force. All in all, the documentary is more gratifying than the motion picture because Milk playing Milk is a lot more convincing then Sean Penn playing Milk. Towards the end, the director devotes considerable time trying to figure out what motivated Dan White to shoot the major of San Francisco and Harvey Milk. No good answers emerge from White’s biography. The film cannot uncover any evidence of psychological instability or sublimated aggression that periodically would have erupted. I suspect that if White hadn’t had a gun readily available at home the day of the crime, he would have calmed down
Gran Torino
Clint Eastwood is now 78 years old. He has directed 29 movies. Some of them are very good (e.g. Letters from Iwo Jima) some of the very bad (e.g. Bridges of Madison County). He works quickly. Yet in contrast to Woody Allen who also makes one film a year, Eastwood is not repeating himself. The reason for this is simple: unlike Allen he does not write his own scripts. When Eastwood secures a good script as in the case of Gran Torino he makes great films. Gran Torino is takes place in a decaying working class neighborhood in Michigan. Whites are moving out and relatively poor immigrants move in. Putting it mildly, Walt Kowalski (played by Clint Eastwood) is not happy about this development. But after his wife dies, his anti-foreigner sentiments are challenged by the charms of the two teenage kids of the Vietnamese family that has moved in next door to him. Now you are treated to a wonderful story. I don’t want to give it away. Go see the film.
Rebel Without A Cause
Drama about family relations. Deep insight into the human psyche. Great film. Great emotions. Great acting by James Dean. Tribute to troubled children. Love. Nathalie Wood.
Briefly Noted: 17 Again, Bride Wars & Hildegard
Zack Efron is beautiful and fun to watch. Matthew Perry is a letdown. But 17 Again has a few good lines. Bride Wars is a real chick flick. Men will not understand what the whole thing is about. Hildegard, a film about the first part of the career of post-WW II actress and singer Hildegard Knef, is not nearly is good as La Vie en Rose, the film about the life of Edid Piaff that I reviewed in an earlier entry.
Milk
Sean Penn is perhaps my favorite living male actor. I see films merely because he is in them. Milk, the interesting real life story of the first openly gay public official in the United States proved that even the most talented actor cannot portray every character. Despite all of his amazing talents, the task of playing a gay man lies beyond Penn’s skills. This is crystal clear at the end of film when we see a snipped of the real Harvey Milk for a mere 30 seconds: Here it becomes painfully apparent that Penn comes no where close to capturing the real Harvey Milk. Penn’s failure is a stark reminder that we all may misjudge the range of our abilities. While the film does a good job in telling the basic facts about the life of Milk, it does not illuminate at all the motive that led, Dan White, a fellow member of the city council kill Milk and the Major Moscone. The ending credits refer to a documentary called the “Life and Times of Harvey Milk.”
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is Hollywood at its best. The film lifts a simple idea from a short story of F. Scott Fitzgerald and turns it into first-class entertainment that touches on deep emotions of the human condition: being in love, getting older, and dying. Hollywood works its magic by hiring great writers (Eric Roth and Robin Swicord) who take Fitzgerald’s plot line of a baby boy who is born old and gets younger and put together a narrative that is much grander than the original short story. Add to this a competent director (David Fincher), two of today’s biggest stars in the leading roles (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett), and a team of splendid set and make-up designers. Voila, you have all the elements of a great movie. The only weakness in this production is the editor: The film could have been half an hour shorter. But the production is so good that you can even forgive this weakness.
The Baader Meinhoff Complex
In 1997, Heinrich Breloer made a spectacular docudrama (a documentary interspersed with acted drama) about the abduction of Hans Martin Schleyer, the head of the West German employer’s union, by the Red Army Fraction, a home-grown terrorist group, formed by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhoff. The Baader Meinhoff Complex goes all the way to the beginning of the group in the late 1960s and tells the story of the group largely from the imagined perspective of the terrorists. Breloer’s Todesspiel (Death Game) was compelling because he helped you understand why the terrorist acted the way they did and why the state reacted the way it did. Breloer interviewed the families of the terrorists and victims, as well as the politicians who tried to defend the state against the terrorist group that tried to bring the state to its knees and overthrow capitalist institutions in the name preventing another social injustice on the scale of Nazi Germany.
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