MaryDan's 2009 Movie List

MaryDan's 2009 Movie List

B indicates Bob saw it too; Bob's comments are in {curly brackets}

Documentaries

** Highly Recommended **

The Dryden. The story of the famous 1972 plane crash is told 30 years later by the 16 survivors. The director is a childhood friend of many of the survivors. After 13 days, the air search had been called off, and when the survivors learned this by radio, it was a terrible blow. {Radio: You never know who is listening.} Years ago, I read Piers Paul Reid’s Alive!, which was a memorable account of this ordeal. This film is a great companion piece.

Tagline: We're running out and we don't have a plan.

One person who reviewed this film on imdb said that he woke up scared in the middle of the night after watching it: “Never before have I been afraid that I am too young, and might live to experience the crisis outlined in this film.” This is available on DVD. The filmmakers are Swiss.

Premiered on PBS’s American Masters, but I saw it at Rochester’s High Falls Int’l Film Festival (HFIFF). Not a great film, but I liked this look into how Garrison works, and liked seeing his 11-yr-old daughter at home, and hearing some of his philosophy.

HFIFF. I’m so glad someone captured this Julius Shulman on film before he died. He was still alive when I saw the film in May, but he died in July, 2009, age 98. What a lively nonagenarian he was! This movie is a short course on the modernist architects of the 20^th century and how Julius learned—from them—the art of photographing their architecture. In 2005, at age 94, he finally decided it was time to find a home for his archive. The lucky recipient was the Getty. They acquired more than a quarter-million prints, negatives and transparencies. That process was one of the many interesting events documented in the film.

{Bob has about 250,000.}

** Also Worth Seeing **

Library DVD. "Let's destroy this young demagogue before he becomes another Ralph Nader." White House tapes recorded Colson saying this about John Kerry. The White House went to the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace, an organization that was just starting up, and found one John O’Neill, who believed that VVAW was “murdering the reputations of 2.5 million service members by accusing them of war crimes.” They got O’Neill and Kerry to debate on the Dick Cavett Show. That’s just one incident documented in this film, whose subtitle is: The Long War of John Kerry. One interviewee admired Kerry's courage in 1969 in becoming a leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. “For anyone with political aspirations, I would have advised, ‘Anti-war, or a career in politics. Pick one.’” There were clips from the Winter Soldier hearings, and a long segment on the VVAW March on Washington. Especially poignant was their throwing of their medals over the fence.

HFIFF. By the director of The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg.

Gertrude Berg sold the idea for her show to NBC radio in 1929, and it started as a weekly show. In 1936, it moved to a 15-minute daily radio show on CBS, and ran until 1946. Berg wrote, supervised, and starred in all the radio episodes, and continued this when the series moved to TV. The story of it all is interesting, including Philip Loeb’s story. He played Molly Goldberg’s husband in the TV version. In 1950, he was blacklisted. Berg refused to fire him, but he soon resigned. He was disconsolate after the blacklisting, and committed suicide in 1955. It was said that he “died of a sickness commonly called the blacklist.” Loeb’s suicide was reflected in the character Hecky Brown in The Front, a 1976 film examining the Hollywood blacklist.

Tagline: Everyone deserves a shot.

Courtney Bent tried making her own pictures at a Boston cerebral palsy day center, but she found her images to be “shallow, cliched, and unjust,” and thought they did not capture the outsized personalities she was coming to know. She decided to get adaptive cameras into their hands. The project—and the show that followed— was embraced with great interest by these handicapped individuals.

Made for HBO for the 62^nd anniversary of the first atomic bombing. We got this from the library after Eric B. recommended it. It is good that the world has this archival footage of the survivors, as children, several months after the blast. We cannot afford to forget what happened on those two days in 1945. And yet… we have. The film makes a statement by asking a question, “What historical event occurred on Aug 6, 1945?” The filmmakers pose this question to young people walking the streets of Hiroshima. Teenager after teenager didn’t have a CLUE.

** Could Have Skipped **

The Dryden. This documentary about Katrina and its aftermath was shown at Sundance. People who had no options for leaving town were waiting to see what would happen. There was footage as the family huddled in their attic in the 9^th ward, looking out the window at that raging flood. Then there was footage of the refugees in the stadium. I didn’t really learn anything from this film, and I truly wonder why it was nominated for an Academy Award!

This was a benefit that was shown around the country on International Women’s Day. It profiled three interesting and inspiring women from Africa and Vietnam. However, it wasn’t that memorable.

HFIFF. The filmmaker is the daughter of the legendary trial lawyer, Martin Garbus. She previously directed The Farm: Angola, USA (1998), which I liked. However, this film was marred by bad editing or lack of concept. Many cases were brought up—the Poway School case (2004) against the anti-gay T-shirt, for instance. By the end, you couldn’t remember what cases had been discussed, or what the outcomes had been, or what point, exactly, the filmmaker was trying to make. Her father was interviewed extensively. I think a personal film about him, including some interesting stories from his career, would have been more interesting.

Dryden Theatre. What this film is about, according to Agnès: “One little person's creative life across half a century that saw the Cuban Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Black Panthers, the evolution of birth control—major social changes. And also the growth of popular theater and of the nouvelle vague. It's my trajectory through public events, either by chance, by affection, by political conviction.” I find Agnès Varda to be interesting, and thought I would like this film, but something about its structure, its reenactments, and so on, didn’t appeal to me. Director Chris Marker is of an age with Agnès (both in their 80s). They have been friends since their Left Bank days, when he encouraged her to make her first film. It was made on a shoestring budget when she was 25, in 1954, and put her, to her surprise, in the vanguard of The New Wave. She said that she was neither a critic nor even much of a film buff, having seen only a handful of movies when she decided to make her own. “I thought that pictures plus words, that was cinema. It was only later that I discovered it was something else.”

The New York Times says that Agnès Varda has “a liberating willingness to find inspiration and even beauty in what might conventionally be dismissed as rough, ugly or commonplace.” Varda on documentary: “The word documentary has been spoilt. You say documentary and people say ‘what a bore.’ We should have middle words.” {She doesn’t get around to saying what documentary is or what cinema is.}

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Feature Films

** Highly Recommended **

Tagline: “Passion. Ambition. Butter. Do You Have What It Takes?” Loved this! Meryl Streep did a fantastic job channeling Julia Child. Also, I loved Stanley Tucci as Paul, and Jane Lynch did a marvelous job with the few short scenes where she played Julia’s sister Dort. I was so glad I had finally gotten around to reading My Life in France earlier in the year, as it was fun seeing how the screenplay managed to capture the essence of that story and the 1950s.

Jewish Film Festival. Set in 1947 Palestine, when it was occupied by British forces. 11-year-old Proffy Liebowitz (played by Ido Port; I hope to see more of him!) and his friends are subject to a curfew. Based on Amos Oz’s Panther in the Basement, which is semi-autobiographical. I agree with a review that said, “This film can be enjoyed by families together, and will teach about history, hope, and humanity.”

Dryden Theatre. I brought Shweta Jain, TCS colleague from India, who had been in Rochester for a year. She is a huge Audrey Hepburn fan. She loved The Dryden (brocade curtain, balcony), which is nothing like the mall theatres. This movie came out the same year Aquinas put on their (excellent and memorable) production. The movie was all-around excellent: play, screenplay, songs, acting, sets. Herman owns this on DVD, and he used it as his demo when we were helping him set up his projector, over Thanksgiving. So, I got to watch it twice in one year! Ezra watched it with us—his first time to see it.

"No one makes movies like Gran Torino any more, and more's the pity. This one, with Clint Eastwood as director and star, is concerned with honor and atonement, with rough justice and the family of man. It raises irascibility to the level of folk art, takes unapologetic time-outs for unfashionable moral debates, revives acting conventions that haven't been in fashion for half a century and keeps you watching every frame as Mr. Eastwood snarls, glowers, mutters, growls and grins his way through the performance of a lifetime."

- Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal

{Made Bob’s 100-life list.}

** Also Worth Seeing **

Dryden Theatre. My first time seeing this film; Bob had seen it once on video. It’s a classic, and I’m very glad I had this chance to see it on the big screen.

The Dryden. Set in late 18^th-century France. Based on the true story of a physician who takes in a child of about twelve who was found (appar-ently abandoned at an early age) in the forest near Averyon. He is first put in a school for deaf mutes, but the doctor recognizes that he is not deaf, and takes the boy to live with himself and his housekeeper.

Jewish Film Festival entry from Australia. The lead, Danielle Catanzariti, is charming. I look forward to seeing more from her. Her friend, Sunni, is played by Keisha Castle-Hughes, and it’s fun to see her again, after Whale Rider.

Author's Note, at beginning of movie: “The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Especially you Jenny Beckman. Bitch.”

Dryden Theater. This was the first movie to “sweep” the Oscars. And it (unexpectedly) turned Columbia Pictures from a “poverty” studio to a real player in the industry. With Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable. It was fun to see. {Bob saw this on video while subbing for a film-history professor.}

Somers Town, dir by Shane Meadows, 2008

Dryden Theatre. Teenage friendship between Marek (who lives in a high-rise with his father) and Tomo, a street kid.

Stars Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard. Set in the early ‘60s in Twickenham, a London suburb. Jenny is sixteen, a good student, and headed (her father hopes) for Oxford. But her life changes after she meets David Goldman, a man twice her age. Based on the memoir by Lynn Barber, which was turned into a screenplay by Nick Hornby.

“For his keenly observant narrative feature debut, documentary filmmaker Chris Smith and writer Randy Russell have deftly transposed Russell's short story The Pool from Iowa to the Indian state of Goa, in the small city of Panjim.”

- Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

I debated whether to put this under “I Might Have Skipped.” I guess it was worth seeing, but it was not a favorite of mine. We saw this New Year’s Eve 2009, or New Year’s Day 2010, I forget which, with Ani Dhole, and his new wife, Shital. He had just returned from India with her. She had only slight spoken English. I’m not sure how much English she understood. If I had known how violent this was going to be, I don’t think I would have thought to invite them. But, I think they were glad to see it. {One of Bob’s themes: The man who has found his mission.}

Description, and then comment, from imdb: Teacher and novelist François Bégaudeau plays a version of himself as he negotiates a year with his racially mixed students from a tough Parisian neighborhood.

This is no feel-good To Sir With Love movie. But what's positive about it is the vibrancy of the social dynamic and the fact that communication really does happen, with challenge and response ceaselessly on both sides. It's fascinating how the kids catch up the teacher and how he (for the most part) successfully parries their thrusts and perhaps even convinces them, to some degree, of the value of standard French in a mulitcultural France. {Best movie about school I’ve seen.}

Dyden Theatre. 145 min. Comment on IMDB: "The original 1948 Joan of Arc at 145 min is magnificent. The 100-min version that's been foisted off on the U.S. buying public is below mediocre." I have to say, though, that I found the clips in A Touch of Greatness, of Albert Cullum’s 4th grade students doing their version of Joan of Arc, more enjoyable/memorable. (See my movie list from several years ago.)

* I Might Have Skipped These *

Set in Bloomington, MN, 1967. I agree with the commenter who says about the directors: “They break every story paradigm there is, as if to suggest that they are now so great they can present a piece that has no development, no conclusion, a prologue that seems to have no relevance to the main body of the work, and no redemptive quality to extract from any of the characters. A bit like real life I suppose. But who wants to see that on a forty foot screen?” {Not like real life.}

Loveleen Tandan was the co-director for India. I just didn’t enjoy this movie. (Bob liked it, though.) The kids were awfully cute, and I’m glad for them that it won the Best Picture Oscar.

Family of nomads live in the desert tending a flock of sheep. The family has three darling children, and the wife’s brother lives with them. He wants his own flock, but the owner says you have to be married—have to have someone to wash and cook for you—to do the job.

The faces of the women are memorable. Only two were professional actors. The basic theme is the circle of restrictions on women in Iran.

Summary from the DVD: "Their world is one of constant surveillance, bureaucracy and age-old inequalities. But this stifling world cannot extinguish the spirit, strength and courage of the circle of women." Great theme, but that doesn’t mean I liked the movie. In Farsi with English subtitles.

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Movie Quotes

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Gran Torino was full of great quotes

Walt Kowalski: Would it kill you to buy American?

Thug: How old are you anyway?

Sue Lor: Mentally, I'm way too old for you.

Sue Lor: The Lutherans brought us over.

Walt Kowalski: Everybody blames the Lutherans.

Walt Kowalski: Take these three items, some WD-40, a vice grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone.

[walking over to some black thugs]

Walt Kowalski: What are you spooks up to?

Walt Kowalski: I confess that I have no desire to confess.

Walt Kowalski: [to Father Janovich] The thing that haunts a guy is the stuff he wasn't ordered to do.

Thao Vang Lor: It's Thao.

Walt Kowalski: What?

Thao Vang Lor: It's not Toad, my name is Thao.

Walt Kowalski: Yeah, well, you were blowing it with that girl who was there. Not that I give two shits about a toad like you.

Thao Vang Lor: You don't know what you're talking about.

Walt Kowalski: You're wrong, eggroll, I know exactly what I'm talking about. I may not be the most pleasant person to be around, but I got the best woman who was ever on this planet to marry me. I worked at it, it was the best thing ever happened to me. Hands down. But you, you know, you're letting Click-Clack, Ding-Dong and Charlie Chan, just walk out with Miss What's-her-face. She likes you, you know? Though I don't know why!

Thao Vang Lor: Who?

Walt Kowalski: Yum Yum. You know, the girl in the purple sweater. She's been looking at you all day, stupid!

Thao Vang Lor: You mean Youa?

Walt Kowalski: Yeah... Yum Yum... yeah... nice girl... nice girl, very charming girl... I talked with her... yeah. But you, you just let her walk right out with the Three Stooges. And you know why? 'Cause you're a big fat pussy. Well, I gotta go. Good day, pussycake.

Walt Kowalski: I once fixed a door that wasn't even broken yet.

Father Janovich: Why didn't you call the police?

Walt Kowalski: Well you know, I prayed for them to come but nobody answered.

Casablanca

"Here's looking at you, kid",

- Voted #1 of "The 100 Greatest Movie Lines" by Premiere (2007). Humphrey Bogart improvised the line in the Parisian scenes and it worked so well that it was used later on again in the film.

"Round up the usual suspects."

- Voted #32 movie quote by the American Film Institute.

"I stick my neck out for nobody."

- Voted #42 of "The 100 Greatest Movie Lines" by Premiere (2007).

"We'll always have Paris."

- Voted #43 movie quote by the American Film Institute.

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

- Voted #67 movie quote by the American Film Institute.

"Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

- Voted #65 of "The 100 Greatest Movie Lines" by Premiere in 2007.IMDB claims it is one of the most misquoted lines in all of film history. It has been quoted as, "This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship" or "I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship."

Trivia: This last line of the movie was a last-minute addition, thought up by producer Hal B. Wallis and dubbed in by Humphrey Bogart after filming was completed. {So, we don’t see him say it. Montage.}

An Education

Headmistress, detailing Jenny's career opportunities (remember, this was the 1960s): It doesn't have to be teaching. There's always the Civil Service.

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Movie Miscellany

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Casablanca

The script was based on the unproduced play "Everybody Comes to Rick's" by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. Warner Brothers purchased the play for $20,000, the most anyone had ever paid for an unproduced work. The letters of transit that motivate so many characters in the film did not exist in Vichy-controlled France—they are purely a plot device invented by the screenwriters. Playwright Joan Alison always expected somebody to challenge her about the letters, but nobody ever did.

{Everyone knew it was a metaphor—shorthand—for the difficulty of getting out of Europe/N. Africa after war began.}

It is unclear where the line, "Here's looking at you, kid," originated, but it definitely predated both Casablanca (1942) and earlier stage work by Bogart. On March 9, 1932—10 years before Casablanca—Eddie Cantor signed his name in cement at Grauman's Chinese Theater and wrote, "Here's looking at you, Sid" (referring to Sid Grauman, owner of the theater).

In 2007, both the American Film Institute and Entertainment Weekly ranked this as the #3 Greatest Movie of All Time. {Why?}

The screenplay (written by Philip and Julius Epstein) was named as best of all time by the Writers Guild of America (2006).

The film cost approximately $950,000, some $100,000 over budget.

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Shulman's 1960 photograph of Koenig's Case Study House No. 22—a glass-walled, cantilevered structure hovering above the lights of Los Angeles—became one of the most famous architectural pictures ever taken in the United States. It was, as architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in the New York Times, "one of those singular images that sum up an entire city at a moment in time." {A definition of Art.}

- from Julius Shulman’s obit in the LA Times

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Godard nailed it once and for all: at the cinema, you raise your eyes to the screen; in front of the television, you lower them. … But having said that, let's be honest. I've just watched the ballet from An American in Paris on the screen of my iBook, and I very nearly rediscovered the lightness that we felt in London in 1952, when I was there with [Alain] Resnais and [Ghislain] Cloquet during the filming of Statues Also Die, when we started every day by seeing the 10 a.m. show of An American in Paris at a theater in Leicester Square. I thought I'd lost that lightness forever. … I've said for a long time that films should be seen first in theaters, and that television and video are only there to refresh your memory. Now that I no longer have any time at all to go to the cinema, I've started seeing films by lowering my eyes, with an ever increasing sense of sinfulness.

- Chris Marker (dir of The Beaches of Agnès) in 1983, at age 81

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Movie Reviews

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A Crude Awakening

A five-alarm documentary that explores the shocking realities of the impending oil crisis. An international cast of maverick energy experts and thinkers debunk the conventional wisdom that oil production will continue to climb. A must-see.

Joan of Arc

From the Dryden summary: “Director Fleming’s final film features Ingrid Bergman in one of her most memorable performances as the divinely inspired Maid of Orleans. The gorgeous costumes and Technicolor™ cinematography, both of which won Oscars®, are displayed in this beautifully restored print of the complete, uncut version from the UCLA Film & Television Archives.”

The Wild Child (L’Enfant Sauvage)

Provocative, engaging, and moving, this movie is an absolute wonder— elegant, artful, with breathtaking use of Vivaldi's music, with amazing performance from Jeanne-Pierre Cargol as the Wild Child of the title. Based on the book of the physician Itard (played by Francois Truffaut) who took the boy in and tried to teach him how to live among humans. The contrast between the narrator's (Itard's) passionless voice and his growing emotional attachment to the boy is heartbreaking.

-From a review on imdb

Truffaut tells [the story] simply and movingly. It becomes his most thoughtful statement on his favorite subject: The way young people grow up, explore themselves, and attempt to function creatively in the world...Truffaut places his personal touch on every frame of the film. He wrote it, directed it, and plays the doctor himself. It is an understated, compassionate performance, a perfect counterpoint to Jean-Pierre Cargol's ferocity and fear...So often movies keep our attention by flashy tricks and cheap melodrama; it is an intellectually cleansing experience to watch this intelligent and hopeful film.

- Film critic Roger Ebert

(500) Days of Summer

Tom, the boy, still believes, even in this cynical modern world, in the notion of a transforming, cosmically destined, lightning-strikes-once kind of love. Summer, the girl, doesn't. Not at all. But that doesn't stop Tom from going after her, again and again, like a modern Don Quixote, with all his might and courage. Suddenly, Tom is in love not just with a lovely, witty, intelligent woman—not that he minds any of that—but with the very idea of Summer, the very idea of a love that still has the power to shock the heart and stop the world.

– from the blurb

Somers Town

In a tour de force, 16-year-old Thomas Turgoose (child star of director Meadows's excellent This is England) plays Tomo, a tough-but-sweet homeless kid who finds refuge and friendship with Marek, a shy Polish émigré. In a charming story that stylistically recalls the realistic British dramas of the early 1960s, Tomo and Marek scheme for money, fight off bullies, and become rivals for the affections of a young French waitress. Turgoose won the best actor prize at the Tribeca Film Festival.

- from the blurb