Reviews

When I saw this movie in the mid-1960s I enjoyed it-but in 2023 it seems flat, woodenly acted, neither funny nor thrilling, and way too long. Compared to the great classic noirs, neo-noir like Chinatown, and contemporary crime stories like Better Call Saul, it fails to capture our imagination, to grab our fears, fantasies, and fatalism. Why? This question takes us to the heart of the matter-how does our taste change in tandem with the style of the times, causing and reflecting each other? Harper's sunshiny scenes, bright colors, unconvincing cool jazz references on the soundtrack, and flat TV-type acting are part of the answer. Misogyny (and racial stereotyping) is a constant in the crime genre, but in Harper it has an irritatingly adolescent tone-appealing to the Boomers in their teens-that is quite different from the femme fatale imagery of classic noir and the strange transgressive/redemptive Tristan-Isolde companionship of Kim and Jim in Better Call Saul. See Harper if this kind of film history question interests you.

Paul Dedalus, an anthropologist returning from Tajikistan to Paris, remembers his mother (a short, intense scene), his high school "travel abroad" trip to Minsk, USSR (an odd destination for a school trip, but very exciting), and then alas, his interminable teen romance with Esther. Unfortunately the boring third segment is very long and Esther was not a character that I "cared about."

This movie about a 40-ish Korean fellow on the lam in Paris is not for everyone. Some will find it slow and rambling. The protagonist meets a lot of Koreans in Paris, including romantic encounters, as he ambles around Paris, taking it one day at a time. He is an artist who specializes in cloud-scapes, perhaps symbolic of his hazy aspirations, unreliable pronouncements , and lack of solid grounding. It is reminiscent of episodic French new wave films (some of Godard's work) as well as Rohmer. We broke up the viewing into three evenings--a good way of moving through it. I am not sure we fully understood it relying on the subtitles--there was stuff we did not "get" that other viewers who can follow the Korean dialog might appreciate.

Ken Loach is in top form with this heart-breaking movie about a man whose "self-employment" and "entrepreneurship" are revealed to be a total sham. He is mercilessly exploited in his delivery job, while his wife struggles with a 0-hours contract as a home-care provider. Loach hammers home the lies and greed of neo-liberal capitalism and the terrible insecurity it generates, using a documentary style that makes the story very real. Even if you aren't a socialist, this movie will make you think..

This movie is based on the true story of an Austrian farmer who refused military service for the Nazi state in World War II. His resistance emerged from his deep Christian faith, which Malick brilliantly contextualizes in the breathtaking natural environment, the dignity of human labor, and a loving family. This is a very long movie, with many landscapes and images of village homes, the church, farm-work, and prisons. These images show us the whole life-world within which Franz made his choice. It is not for all viewers; but even if you are neither a Christian nor a pacifist, this movie can touch you deeply.

This is not one of Scorsese's better movies and it does little that is fresh and new--just mining the usual Mob vein with lots of talk among the wise guys, punctuated by periodic murders. De Niro's aging was clumsy and unconvincing. Though De Niro and Pesci give good performances, the movie drags interminably. I left for the middle hour and did not miss much. Al Pacino is badly miscast as Jimmy Hoffa--completely wrong in face, voice, and overall persona.

I saw the 60 minute version aired on PBS on October 27, not the 80 minute version. First the macro-rubbish: Rufo shows us scenes of industrial wastelands and he mentions automation but says nothing about globalization and financialization (ascendancy of finance capital). De-industrialization and job loss are results of capital's fixation on short-term shareholder value, and Rufo needs to address that rather than blame the victims. Rufo intermittently engages in silly rants against bureaucrats. The problem in the United States is not bureaucracy, but the lack of public policies that other high-income countries use to mitigate job loss and displacement. Public policy disasters in the US include- --Lack of universal health care, whether single-payer or German-style regulated insurance. --Reagan-era policies that promoted globalization, accelerated de-industrialization, and cut social services; --The pathetic patchwork of state policies that sometimes deprive people of even meager support such as Medicare expansion; --The dismantling of public housing after years of neglect and deferred maintenance, with no effective affordable housing programs to take its place; --The lack of a progressive income tax in many states, leading to state fiscal crises; -- Property-taxes as a major source of school funding, leaving the poorest districts with the least resources to prepare students for the global economy; --Republican cost-cutting measures at both state and federal levels, most recently displayed in the disgraceful scuttling of covid-19 relief; --Mass incarceration and militarized policing in place of social services; --Lack of an industrial policy with private-public partnerships for job training and apprenticeships. Rufo's willful silence on these issues is the reason I cannot rate this movie higher than a 7. At a micro-level, the movie offers sympathetic and vivid portraits of individuals and families-- and raises issues that the Left sidesteps-fragile families, lack of community solidarity, and unrealistic thinking. Family cohesion, two-parent households, and community solidarity cannot undo capital flight, but maybe they can contribute to effective responses. Solidarity, trust, family unity, discipline, coalition building, and realistic thinking are foundations for civic engagement and activism, as well as for individual mobility. The Left and Neo-cons like Rufo could have a productive dialog about building stronger families and communities as well as a meaningful public policy agenda to address economic woes. I don't think that conversation is likely to happen. In the meantime, I recommend political scientist Robert Putnam's Our Kids (2015) (or his New York Times article about Port Clinton, OH, August 3, 2013) for a more coherent take on mending the social fabric while developing the public policies we need.

The story is touching and will grab your heart, and the acting is terrific. I was hooked on reading when my 2nd grade teacher gave me The Boxcar Children, and this movie is a modern Japanese version--about people who protect their humanity by living below the radar. Japanese film has a "lower depths" tradition, but this one is much warmer and more engaging than any previous movie about "outsiders." I remain puzzled by Aki's story--I missed something there--but it did not detract from the beauty of the movie as a whole. Just about perfect.

This movie is a screen adaptation of East German writer Anna Seghers' novel about German refugees trying to get out of Marseilles in 1940. They are engaged in a life and death struggle to obtain required documents--visas, boat tickets, and transits. The action is intense but not overtly physical or violent; it is entirely driven by the desperate focus on documents. From what I learned from my own family and my reading, this is very accurate--and of course it is also a central theme in Casablanca. What makes this film version politically brilliant is that the 1940 plot and dialog are visually set in 2018 --in France today--as you will realize in the first five minutes of the movie when you see the cars, police uniforms, and restaurants of contemporary France. With this disjuncture of the audio (1940) and the visual (2018), the director makes us think about refugees and undocumented people today--it works in a way that is not at all preachy or heavy-handed, but very effective. A must see!

Director Jan Troell filmed an autobiographical story by Eyvind Johnson about a boy coming of age in Sweden in the first decades of the twentieth century; the result is both empathetic and objective-we are touched by the kid's hardships and triumphs, but at the same time it shows the conditions of his life clearly and even dispassionately. The movie focuses on his working life, as he finds gigs as a logger, brickyard worker, film projectionist, and sawmill helper, most of them very dangerous; on the happier side, he meets girls and becomes an avid reader. This is a beautiful movie, but not for everyone-it moves slowly, it's in black and white, and some people might not be able to relate to the harsh life it portrays.

I am a complete sucker for any story about mountains, and this is a true story of an attempt to understand what happened to George Mallory and Andrew Irvine when they tried to summit Everest in 1924. Mallory's body was found near the summit, leading to speculation that the men may have succeeded in reaching the summit and died on the way down. Conrad Anker and Leo Houlding recreate the historic climb which started in Tibet and required difficult rock climbing in the final stretch. (The modern route, pioneered by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary in 1953, required approval from the government of Nepal which Mallory did not obtain.) I won't spoil it for you by revealing what Anker and Houlding learned. It is amazing to see the primitive type of clothing, shoes, and equipment that Mallory and Irvine used! The mountain vistas are thrilling. I usually don't like "The Making of---" movies, but in this instance, I would very much like to know more about how The Wildest Dream was filmed.

In 1970 Barbara Loden made a move about a woman drifter; she wrote, directed and starred in it, and the results are surprising and some would say brilliant. Definitely not Hollywood. Wanda is passive, indifferent, promiscuous, and lazy; she seems stupid and completely lacking in agency. Is her incompetence just incompetence or should we see it as some critics did, as "resistance of the weak"-a total refusal to meet society's narrow expectations for a working-class wife, mother, and woman? The filmmaker leaves that up to the viewer. Wanda's corner of the U.S. is certainly not "great." Everything is dirty, dilapidated, and ugly, from her miserable home near a coal dump to motels in which she spends nights with random men, garish churches, malls in which she buys hideous clothes, city centers with boarded-up businesses, and bars--including the one where she has an unusual first encounter with Mr. Dennis. Mr. Dennis, brilliantly acted by Michael Higgins, gives a definite new direction to her life. This movie will not please everyone. Some viewers will not find Wanda very "relatable" or engaging; and the pace of the movie is slow and episodic until she meets Mr. Dennis, but even then, it moves at an odd rhythm. The role of chance recalls Detour, a phenomenal low-budget film noir, and Wanda's abjectly-aimless rebellion may remind some viewers of Agnes Varda's Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond), though with a less terrible ending. But this movie is unique and sui generis.

I loved this movie "based on the true story" of a dumpy, caustic, hard-drinking has-been writer who figures out an ...innovative way of using her talents to keep herself afloat when her books no longer sell. Melissa McCarthy's acting is perfect, and Richard Grant as her side-kick Jack Hock is wonderful and will make you laugh and cry. The New York bookstore scene and literary crowd of the 1990s are brought back to life with humor. Nice to see a movie that featured physically-ugly characters. Anybody who likes reading, writing and books is likely to enjoy this movie!

Loathing Cheney and loving American Hustle, I really looked forward to Vice-- and was disappointed. The short-comings of The Big Short were amplified here and the result felt dumbed-down. Vice gives no insight into what makes Cheney tick as a person nor does it provide any analysis of the Cheneys as representatives of a class and of neo-con ideology. Instead it offers a series of vignettes and sketches, played for laughs, but unfortunately neither as short nor as funny as SNL skits. Although Christian Bale does a good job of physically impersonating Cheney, the character is so poorly written that he comes across as a cardboard cut-out. Amy Adams is sorely underutilized in the role of Mrs. Cheney. Symptomatic of the low regard the writers have for their audience, the "unitary executive theory" (a key feature of the Kavanaugh confirmation before it got swamped by beer and the Devil's Triangle) is inaccurately and simplistically described.

Garrone's magical movie opens with bows to two great scenes of Italian cinema: the ornate wedding carriage recalls the child's funeral procession from The Gold of Naples, and the helicopter-borne star of a reality show replays the helicopter ride of Jesus in La Dolce Vita. These images evoke Italy as the longest-running "society of the spectacle": Roman games; Renaissance princes and popes who conned everyone, as Machiavelli says; the splendors of the Counter-Reformation Church; and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi with the sun in his pocket-"il sole in tasca." Luciano--fish monger, petty con artist, and pater familias--longs to be cast in a reality show called Big Brother. His quest becomes increasingly obsessive and fantasmagoric, and his extended family shifts from humorous support to escalating concern. Will his dream come true? Aniello Arena in the part of Luciano is terrific and will capture your heart; he has a surprising and poignant story of his own, which you can check online for yourselves. Garrone is a master of production design, creating exuberant post-modern sets in which decaying Neapolitan palazzi mingle with malls and water slides. This movie is perhaps not for everyone-only for those prepared to enter a world that is theatrical, flamboyant, sentimental, and ironic--one that calls for a sense of humor and a big heart.

The plot of this movie is as fresh as today's news about refugees, asylum seekers, detentions and deportations, sensationalized images of immigrants, and the question of who gets to come to the US. Peter Kaban, a displaced person seeking to enter the US (Vittorio Gassman in a touching performance), escapes from detention and begins a desperate search through nighttime New York for the jazz musician who can corroborate his claims to having saved the life of an American soldier. The story has potential as a remake (sub Syria or Honduras for Hungary, etc)!

The America the writer-director (Maxwell Shane) portrays is not the wholesome suburbia many folks associate with the 1950s, but a tough tawdry urban jungle of sexual harassment, single moms surviving as strippers (Robin Raymond in a sympathetic turn), shabby single-room occupancy buildings,exploited factory workers, kids who have to dance in the street for coins, homeless people sleeping in subways, and desperate people eating food left behind in restaurants...brilliant imagery with a Noir atmosphere.

I did not fully understand Peter's story as a displaced person. He says clearly enough that the Nazis murdered his family and that he had been in Auschwitz, but he does not fill in much between WW II and 1953 --and so in 2018, it is difficult for us to understand exactly who he is and what happened to him in that period. 7-11 million people were wandering through Europe at the end of the war as "displaced persons": Jewish survivors of the Holocaust; Poles, Germans who had lived in Eastern Europe, and Ukrainians; refugees from the Baltic countries that were incorporated into the Soviet Union; and some Nazi collaborators fleeing the Soviets. The US passed strict and rather controversial legislation as to who could come to the US (e.g., only people who were already in displaced person camps by 1945 as well as many other rules), and Peter evidently did not match the approved profile. Maybe viewers in 1953 understood the context more clearly than the average viewer does now.

Maybe if John Garfield had been cast instead of Charlton Heston (who looks and moves like Frankinstein's monster here); and if the producers (writers? director?) had not backed away from the mine safety, health, and company criminal negligence theme that packs a punch in the first ten minutes of the movie.