Lots of stars given out this week. What can I say? I tend to see movies that people I trust say are very good, and people I trust have gained that trust by being right a decent percentage of the time. I'll try to get grouchier next time.
Mary Poppins (1964, Robert Stevenson) **** (A)
I think it's probably become
diminished from the over-familiarity of some of the songs and scenes,
but this comes close to being the best movie for families ever produced.
It manages to be age-appropriate and engaging down to the very young
(my kids loved it starting at age three) without losing charm or relevance for
adults. It doesn't hurt that almost every song is a classic, lyrically
and musically. Hard to miss how retrograde the gender politics are,
given that the mother is essentially a witless dingbat, though even
including a major suffragette story — with shout-out to Mrs. Pankhurst —
in the background probably counts as a victory for Mad Men era Disney.
Van Dyke's accent is laughable, which is sort of the point for a
character(s) clearly meant as comic relief, but he's also impossible not
to watch, all rubber limbs and daffy grin. The children manage to seem
headstrong and real without crossing into unforgivably bratty, and
Andrews deftly manages to keep just enough of the title character's
prickliness without ever making her less than charming. What sticks with
me these days, though, are the visual flourishes, many of them sad or
eerie: nannies like black handkerchiefs blown down the street. silhouette
of chimney sweeps against the sky disappearing down the pipes (this is
perhaps my earliest movie memory), Mr. Banks taking his slow walk to be
sacked in a board room out of German expressionism; the classic shot of
Mary's descent-upon-umbrella; and all those beautiful outdoor sets.
I
also think there is evidence in the "text" of the movie that Mary
Poppins is an ageless being who was once Burt's nanny, and probably his
Uncle Albert's before him. But that's a story for another day (and
probably for Neil Gaiman to tell).
Taxi Driver (1976, Martin Scorsese) **** (A)
Scorsese's dark poem of loneliness and alienation and menace still
reverberates, even after the ubersleaze Manhattan of "Taxi Driver"
received a "real rain" of sorts (courtesy not of an angry God, but of
Rudy Giuliani — same diff?) . Watching this again after perhaps a 15 year absence,
I'm struck by (1) how gorgeously it's shot; I'd remembered it as a grainy
sort of color-drained Dogma 95 template, not Michael Chapman's flood of
night-reflections and vivid color; and (2) the potential surrealism, which
may not be precisely the right term, but given that our narrator is
decidedly untrustworthy even to himself, I found myself wondering
if/when we might be seeing the action filtered through the unhinged
perceptions of our main character. Is the 'hero montage' following the
shootout real? How real? Unsure if the final "chance" encounter with
Shepherd isn't a return to obsessive stalking, though it played
ambiguously to me. Not usually a fan of voice-over, though really how
else can you get into the head of Travis Bickle? Is he talkin' to us?
Is he talkin' to us?
Starman (1984, John Carpenter) *1/2 (D)
Man, was this weak sauce. Everything about this screams "80s TV movie"
except for one scene in the opening minutes in where the alien incorporates
as human, passing through some truly Carpenter-worthy stages of body
horror before coming out the other end as Jeff Bridges with feathered
hair. After that, they may as well have had one of the 2nd string directors on season 3 of "Simon & Simon" at the helm, with boring
pacing, camerawork, and...I don't know, boring everything. The love story that
develops is creepy in the extreme, given that it doesn't effectively
deal with the fact that the Starman is posing as the husband of Karen
Allen's grieving widow, and thus is playing on emotions that neither of
them is really processing. I don't think that Bridges' sometimes-lauded,
Oscar-nominated turn has held up that well, perhaps because it's become
the template for every other Gentle Alien Too Good For Our Violent
Species over the years. I suppose he should get credit for being the
least annoying example of the annoying archetype he sort of created
here, and he does do some subtle work, but I'm still going to blame him for co-starring in K-PAX (in the
non-alien role) and taking Kevin Spacey right down the tubes for 12
years (and counting) now. As for the special effects, suffice to say, I
envision BACK TO THE FUTURE snapping at STARMAN, Mark Wahlberg-style:
"I'm the guy from your era that still looks cool today. You must be the
other guy."
Melancholia (2011, Lars von Trier) ***1/2 (A-)
Lars von Trier's most recent
flawed-but-brilliant movie opens with one of the most astonishing
collection of images I've seen in film, each a high-definition diorama
unspooling in ultra slow motion, each containing the vivid specificity,
vague symbolism, and inchoate menace of a dream that's on the cusp of
nightmare. It isn't a spoiler to tell you that the final image in this
seqence shows an immense planet colliding with Earth, first dwarfing and
finally annihilating it, because while some of these images come to
pass, others don't, or else occur, but only on a symbolic level. Will
the planet Melancholia really connect, or will it just be a signifier of
some deeper emotional truth?
I don't know if it's a demerit
against MELANCHOLIA that it never manages to live up to the promise of
its opening — I'm not sure a narrative is up to the task (and part of me
just wishes that the whole movie was just a series of similar beautiful
intangible wonder).
In brief, the film is divided very formally
into two parts. In the first, a just-married couple arrives for their
reception at a palatial home belonging to the sister and brother-in-law
of bride Justine (Kirsten Dunst), only to see the party destroyed in
excruciating increments by the bride's crippling depression. In the
second, Dunst returns to the mansion to recuperate, as the titular
planet does whatever it's going to do: either making its slingshot orbit
safely around Earth or else enacting the complete destruction we saw in
the opening moments.
The wedding is barely discussed in the
second part, while the planet is not mentioned at all in the first (the
timing isn't clear, but it's possible that the characters are not yet
aware of it), yet we are clearly encouraged to conflate Dunst's
depression with the potentially all-destroying dark orbit of the planet.
That this sort of gonzo metaphor is usually successful probably speaks
to von Trier's skills as a formalist, but the broad application of it
also unfortunately has the effect of divorcing us most of the time from
emotional empathy with the characters, which might be a flaw in a movie
that's about the destruction of all known life in the universe. It's enough of a misstep to make this a really good movie instead of a great one. Justine in particular seems more
like an idea than a person, though Durst plays the hell out of that idea (it turns out she's capable of an alien glare that's chilling enough to
suggest a life-snuffing planet.) She manages to put very old eyes into a
young face. But she never quite works as a person.
Similarly, Justine's interesting proposition – that mass destruction might not even be so
tragic given how awful people can be – doesn't connect with the impact it
should, because the people at the wedding party are, while occasionally and to greater and lesser degrees awful, they seem to be abstractions, not real people who have the alleged real relationships with one
another they purportedly have. They're all planets on disconnected
orbits.
Synecdoche, New York (2008, Charlie Kaufman) ***** (A+)
Astonishing. I'm actually going to wait until I've had a chance to take
it in again (soon, hopefully), before writing extensively about this.
Suffice it to say that it's on my short list for the greatest movie of
the decade, an aching, surreal, confusing, heartbreaking, funny,
beautiful rumination on the state of the human condition and identity
and the nature of reality itself. I say this as somebody who hasn't been
skeptical of many of the other big Charlie Kaufman films, but I can't
recommend this highly enough. It's the film version of some miraculous union
of Pynchon and Dostoyevsky and Kafka.
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