Filmlog
A Proto-Puritan Robin
A review of Robin Hood; produced and distributed by Universal Pictures; directed by Ridley Scott; screenplay by Brian Helgeland.
Since his earliest appearances in folk ballads of the 13th century, Robin Hood has been a slippery fox of a hero. He’s a man who thumbs his nose at the powerful while going his merry way aiding the powerless. To this day, the King Johns and Nottingham sheriffs the world over fume at his impudent exploits and hurl interdictions at his spritely, elusive form. But to no avail. The outlaw of Sherwood Forest can no more be captured than can a will-o’-the-wisp.
Regional Cinema
(A review of The Last Confederate; produced by Strongbow Pictures; directed by A. Blaine Miller and Julian Adams; written by Julian Adams and Weston Adams; and Firetrail; produced by Forbesfilm; written and directed by Christopher Forbes.)
Like it or not, movies are the main art form of our time, the storytelling medium that reaches the largest audience and captures the attention of us all, high and low, wise and foolish. It is also arguable that movies, like literature and architecture, reflect something of the soul of the particular nation that produces them. If so, we indeed need to be concerned about the American soul.
Winning Is Everything, Isn’t It?
A review of Vincere, written and directed by Marco Bellocchio; produced by Offside and Celluloid Dreams; distributed in America by IFC Films.
Feminists began proclaiming that the personal is the political during those dreamy 70’s of the last century. This, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is a proposition that every sane person must resist. Those who accept it invariably contaminate their relationships—especially intimate ones—with a lethal dose of powermongering. Of course, this obvious consequence of turning individuals into political operatives didn’t deter the truly ideological feminists.
Back in the Locker
As I write, it’s already been three weeks since the Academy Awards broadcast on March 7, and I’m still surprised that the judges for Hollywood’s annual ceremony of self-love named The Hurt Locker Best Picture of 2009, awarding it six Oscars in all. The pooh-bahs of mediocrity voted for art rather than commerce, and so the enormously profitable spectacle Avatar had to bow to a low-budget independent production. Adding spice to the outcome, Locker’s Oscar-anointed director, Kathryn Bigelow, is the former wife of Avatar’s director, James Cameron.
The Disgrace of Disgrace
This film has won a major prize and is being given the big hype by all the trendy thinkers as a profound look at the “new South Africa.” That it may be, though not in the way they mean. Disgrace is one of the vilest movies ever produced for normal viewing, and I cannot recommend it for anyone. Even though I fast-forwarded through much of it, I admit it haunts me like a bad dream—a hellish tour of Western decadence.
Filmlog: Laila’s Birthday and The Lemon Tree
I hold with Washington and Jefferson—it is dangerous folly for our government to get involved in conflicts among different bunches of foreigners. But that wisdom was long ago trashed by our rulers, who imagine themselves Masters of the Universe of Global Democracy, and their court intellectuals, who imagine themselves to be prophets when they are only second-string and rather comic soothsayers.
A Mortal Blivet
A review of The Edge of Darkness (produced by GK Films, Icon Productions, and BBC Films; directed by Martin Campbell; screenplay by William Monahan and Andrew Bovell from the original television script by Troy Kennedy Martin; distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures).
In The Edge of Darkness, director Martin Campbell has tried to compress the six hour-long episodes of the television drama he made for the BBC in 1985 into a two-hour film. The result is a blivet: ten pounds of baloney in a five-pound casing.
Reporting and Deciding
A review of The Hurt Locker (produced by First Light Production and Kingsgate Films; directed by Kathryn Bigelow; screenplay by Mark Boal; distributed by Summit Entertainment).
At last we have a movie that makes us feel the full obscenity of the Iraq war. Other films have been well intentioned but have either given in to the temptation to preach (Lions for Lambs) or taken aim at the wrong targets (In the Valley of Elah and Redacted). The Hurt Locker takes an entirely different tack.
In Flight
A review of Up in the Air (produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures; directed by Jason Reitman; screenplay by Sheldon Turner, adapting Walter Kirn’s novel) and The Road (produced and distributed by Dimension Films; directed by John Hillcoat; screenplay by Joe Penhall, adapting Cormac McCarthy’s novel).
George Clooney, well-groomed and exceedingly fit at 49, seems perfect as Ryan Bingham, the conscienceless protagonist of Up in the Air. He’s a man who disposes of people for both profit and recreation. By day he is a frequent-flying hatchet man or, to use the preferred term in America’s ever-expanding dictionary of euphemisms, “transition counselor.” He flies wherever needed 320 days a year to fire people whose bosses would rather not swing the ax themselves.
Faust
German movies of the 1920’s receive a remarkably poor press in conservative circles. Some critics regard them as little more than obvious reflections of Weimar decadence, as some of the lesser films doubtless are. Sometimes even the ubiquitous use of expressionist technique is presented as definitive proof that the mental derangement of souls in pain means that the art itself is deranged—a genuinely confusing subject with object. German expressionism in film is often merely the best kind of indigenous romanticism (the tradition of Novalis or Hoffmann) reacting to the psychological breakdown of its own culture.
