Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (Dean Fleishcer-Camp, 2022): 4/5

I accidentally watched this one with Jack. I was (quietly) crying almost immediately at how beautiful, sweet and poignant it was, but the kid was sobbing inconsolably and at length by the end. So, yeah, emotional experience.  

Where the Crawdads Sing (Olivia Newman, 2022): 1.5/5

I read the book recently and really liked it. It’s written by a murderous naturalist, and it’s really about the same. The protagonist grows up alone in (and of) a marsh and gets to know it intimately, and the narrative pauses often to describe the landscape with great feeling, knowledge and eloquence. In the movie, though, she’s just another mumbly princess. She’s not even friggin’ tan!!

 

Neptune Frost (Saul Williams, Anisia Uzeyman, 2022): 3.5/5

When I thought this Afrofuturist head trip was made by an African filmmaker, I was genuinely excited by its rejection of Western editing rhythms and unmotivated songs—a weird, poetic, visionary, spooky spiritual journal full of arcana, myth, philosophy, and mysticism a la Jodorowsky. Then half-way through, I found out that it’s actually a (mere) art object/long-form video from American rapper Saul Williams (collaborating with Rwandan-born artist). Why is one better, I ask myself. 

 

Emily the Criminal (John Patton Ford, 2022): 2/5

Confess, Fletch (Greg Mottola, 2022): 2.5/5

This is how “movies” are being ruined by prestige TV, with its cardboard-y, sit-commy mise-en-scène and a pedestrian emphasis on dialogue and plot. Emily is sub-Ozark nice-person-gets-involved-in-crime. Confess is mildly amusing but crammed with sweaty exposition to explain an over complicated plot. Both movies would have made fine first episodes of Apple TV shows that I wouldn’t feel the need to watch any more episodes of. 

 

Pinocchio (Robert Zemeckis, 2022): 1.5/5

Fails to improve on a single aspect of the original (which I’m no fan of anyway), and fails to justify its existence with any level of (re)interpretation. Jack was utterly terrified by it (although the original is arguably even darker). 

 

Funny Papers (Owen Kline, 2022): 3.5/5

The darkly comic tale of a young cartoonist in Trenton, NJ, surrounded by sweaty, anti-social weirdos and scumbags. You know…good people. Produced by the Safdies. 

 

Accident (Joseph Losey, 1967): 3/5

At a certain age, this is exactly what I thought adults were like: blasé zombies being mysteriously moved by deep, tragic feelings of passion they don’t half understand. 

 

Panique (Julien Duvivier, 1946): 3.5/5

A glittering, beautifully dark noir involving a doomed romance (or two) and Fury-like scapegoating. The protagonist is a voyeur who is an all-knowing outsider—until he meets his femme fatale, dreams of integrating and is punished.  

 

Au Hasard Balthazar, rw (Robert Bresson, 1966): 5/5

“You must forgive. Everyone. Much will be forgiven you. You have suffered.” Encounters with the uncanny, full of mystery and deep thoughts about chance and suffering. Drama reduced to its essence, almost wordless and full of silence—just a series of hands doing stuff. Balthazar is compared to a stone but also called a genius and a saint. He’s all of it without even being the protagonist of his own story, “doomed to spend all [his] days watching the same fools pass by.”

 

Stavisky (Alain Resnais, 1974): 2/5

The anxious, manic ennui of a rich Jewish businessman in France of the 1930s. The movie sums up Belmondo’s character like this: “He was a man who wanted the world to talk about him. Au contraire, he should have wanted it to forget him.”

 

A Room with a View, rw (James Ivory, 1985): 5/5

A refutation of the traditional wisdom that a great book makes a lousy movie. I just read the book and I loved it. Then was delighted by how the screenwriter selected and crafted the dialogue and Ivory made it glow. Funny, romantic and beautiful. 

 

Unrelated (Joanna Hogg, 2007): 3/5

Another incisive portrait of a sad, passive outsider from Hogg. Hiddleston is very young and terrific.

 

The Outskirts (Boris Barnet, 1933): 4/5

It’s 1914, and WWI comes to a sleepy Russian town to give its striking factory workers something new to think about. A complicated relationship between a German POW and a girl in the town ensues. When the film jumps to 1917, things get even crazier. A witty, free and almost improvisational mix of tones keeps every scene lively. Expressive use of sound, and great dogs. 

 

By the Bluest Sea (Boris Barnet, 1936): 4/5

A tale of adventure and a romantic triangle on the Caspian Sea, with a surprisingly light tone for a Soviet film of the 30s—a semi musical, even. A most expressive use of the (titular) sea in all its moods—and many innovative/amateurish film techniques, including an interior boat set that pivots and rocks in a most nauseating way. At 68 minutes, it’s a great length for a dreamy bauble such as this.

 

 

Nazis Film Fest

These movies ask over and over: “What can yesterday’s Nazis be convicted of, considering that pretty much every German can be seen as guilty on some level, even some of the Jews—and you can’t hang everyone (can you?).” I note that almost all of these are extraordinarily long. I suppose the subject justifies it.

 

Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer, 1961): 4/5

Superb acting in scenes addressing issues of the highest importance. Spencer Tracy expresses the deepest wells of thoughtfulness and empathy. And with Tracy, Monty Cliff, Richard Widmark and Judy Garland on set, there must have been some fun parties. The key strategic move the movie pulls is to put the true damning denunciation of the German people into a German character’s mouth (Burt Lancaster, stiff and hollow-eyed). Like Hotel Terminus, it dramatizes how quickly, once the Nazis were defeated, Communists became the enemies and Nazis the valuable assets against Russia.

 

Mephisto (István Szabó, 1981): 3.5/5

Here’s a familiar character: someone who avails themselves of the opportunity to align with a stupid but powerful regime to feed their vanity and gain opportunities—and soon find themselves on TV mouthing whatever destructive invective is required. After all, it’s too late to turn back now—you can’t unsell a soul. “Freedom? What for?”

 

Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (Marcel Ophüls, 1988): 3/5

What begins as a portrait of the sadist head of the Gestapo in Lyon quickly spirals out to indict French resistance infiltrators and stoolies, “the majority of Germans citizens,” and especially the Americans who used Barbie to fight the Communists after the war—and let him escape to South America. Unfocused, but a picture of the paranoia and moral ambiguities of war that cause so much invisible damage. 

 

Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004): 3.5/5

Schadenfreude, The Movie. Also, Suicide! The Movie. Amazing acting and intensity. A Masque of Red Death. 

 

The Last of the Unjust (Claude Lanzmann, 2013): 3/5

The story of Theresienstadt, “Eichmann’s favorite ghetto,” could have been told more fully with a third-person documentary, but that’s not Lanzmann’s way. Instead, the last of the Jewish administrators of Theresienstadt tells his story his way, and his personality brings idiosyncratic humanity to the history. 

 

Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015): 3.5/5

1944 Auschwitz. Saul is one of the prisoners forced to help newcomers into the showers and clean their bodies up afterwards. But the camera stays riveted closely on Saul’s face and the horrors are in the corners, in the background, out of focus. In the midst of devastation and, having given up all hope, Saul fixes monomaniacally on a dead boy he feels he must give a proper burial. Is such a gesture morality or madness?

 

A Hidden Life (Terrence Malick, 2019): 2.5/5

There’s much to like here, including a great many beautiful images, a preference for silence and image over dialogue, and a meaningful moral inquiry into ultimate issues. But it gets repetitive fast and stays that way for three hours. In Judgement at Nuremberg, we sneer at the evil of anyone who would sign the loyalty oath in ‘39. Although “everyone did,” say all the accused and even one of the accusers. In contrast, this movie depicts the stupid, saintlike and unnecessary suffering of everyone involved with someone who refuses—the ironic monstrosity of doing the right thing.

 

 

One Thousand and One Nights Film Fest

I admit to having no particular attraction to the Arabian Nights stories or about “stories about stories." Still, it’s interesting to see how many filmmakers want to take them on, usually to their own ends entirely.

 

The Thief of Bagdad (Michael Powell, Ludwig Berger, Tim Whelan, 1940): 4/5

This was released the year after The Wizard of Oz and is its equal in terms of immersion in a colorful fantasy world. A boy’s adventure with state-of-the-art set work and matte painting. Nice use of scale—the genie is huge. Extra full star because I immediately re-watched the film with commentary by Coppola and Scorsese, gushing about one of their favorite films (which I can understand if one saw it as a child). Thanks Criterion Channel!

 

Arabian Nights (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1974): 3/5

“Truth isn’t found only in one dream, but in many.” Pasolini openly reveling in pornography, rape and slave fantasies, “innocent” and free in tone, with stories (and penises) breaking out everywhere. At one point, Franco Citti (the charismatic protagonist of Accattone, antagonist of Mamma Roma, and bit-player in the Sicily portion of The Godfather) shows up as an orange-haired (and worse for wear) demon and brutally cuts the hands, feet, and head off of a princess. But, big picture, Pasolini is perhaps saying: hey, this isn’t my transgression, it’s that of a revered text.

 

Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One (Miguel Gomes, 2015): 1.5/5

The film that fits this theme most loosely. Although Scheherazade does wander around the (gorgeous) Iberian Peninsula for a while at the beginning, this is mostly a documentary about finch trappers. It’s really just all finches, finches, finches! On-scene narration lets us know that what we are watching is a tale Scheherazade is telling King Shahryar. 

 

Three Thousand Years of Longing (George Miller, 2022): 3/5

This is in many ways the most traditional of the Arabian Nights movies here, although this time it is the genie who tells the stories, mostly. It’s also akin an End-of-the-West Western, in that it addresses the fact that storytelling like this is becoming more and more driven away by the static in the air.