In the Land of Movies

This month, my movie-going daughter, Jane, and I spent two weeks in the L.A. area, the land of movies and many wonderful cinemas, staying with her aunt, uncle, and grandmother in Pacific Palisades.

I was hoping for a showing of Lawrence of Arabia or Ben-Hur at the Egyptian, but no such luck. Gone With the Wind was playing at the Aero, but I’m not a fan.


Anyway, Jane had dibs on first viewing, so we took in Katy Perry: Part of Me at the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. I expected merely to tolerate this life-story/concert pic, but I rather enjoyed it. I had no idea Perry was the daughter of Evangelical Christian parents, both of them ministers. My favorite part comes when Perry’s parents are hanging out in the dressing room before the big performance, and Katy asks her mother which of her songs is her favorite. “’I Kissed a Girl’”? she teases. “Not that one,” her mother says sweetly, refusing to sound shocked. Katy Perry’s stage fashions are beyond bizarre, but she’s a good performer, and I liked the little added drama involving her side trips overseas to spend breaks with her hubbie, Russell Brand, how this wears her down to the point of collapse, and how their breakup threatens the show. Will she go on stage or give up? We know she’ll get out there and belt out “Firework.” As for Russell, he’s a creep. I think his accent's a put on.

I was at least hoping that The Amazing Spider-Man would be playing at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, one of the best movie-viewing venues in the world. But that magnificent screen bordered by those opulent curtains was still showing Tyler Perry’s: Medea’s Witness Protection. Go figure! At least we took time to look at the footprints of the Harry Potter and Twilight casts, along with other famous footprints.

Don’t you want somebody to love/ Don’t you need somebody to love/ Wouldn’t you love somebody to love - Jefferson Airplane

Out there right now are three enjoyable films that explore that persistent human endeavor to find somebody love. All three films offer laughs, fine performances, and moments for poignant self-examination. In each of the three films, quirky circumstances throw together a man and woman in unexpected partnerships that might seem unlikely on the surface. But, as the individuals involved realize, what you feel under the surface is more important. In addition, each film ends with the encouraging suggestion that, no matter your personal troubles, there is someone out there for everyone.

In Your Sister’s Sister, directed by Lynn Shelton, Jack (Mark Duplass) and Iris (Emily Blunt) have been best friends for many years. That’s why Iris sends Jack, who is grieving the loss of his brother, to her family’s island vacation home for a much-needed getaway. When Jack finds that Iris’s sister, Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), is also there for a getaway after breaking up with her female partner, Jack and Hannah complicate things for Iris, who also turns up at the cabin and is secretly in love with Jack.


While presenting sticky situations that provide some clever humor, the film doesn’t draw out the comedy of errors to a silly extent. Characters are quickly forthcoming, as seen in some touching, sensitively performed moments. Evoking a sharp sense of place – a summer island that makes you feel like you’ve been there – and offering some brilliantly genuine acting, especially on the part of Emily Blunt, the film’s strengths are in its lucid moments in which believable characters express their hopes and desires in believable ways.

Alien Evolution: Ridley Scott's Prometheus

After a stunning opening scene in which an “Engineer” from another world plunges down a waterfall and contributes a genetic stew that starts human evolution, and a wonderful sequence in which an android named David (Michael Fassbender) occupies himself on a two-year voyage riding a bicycle, learning alien languages, shooting baskets, and watching Lawrence of Arabia, Ridley Scott’s prequel to Alien rushes its pacing and jumps too quickly into sci-fi shock and schlock. But the film is a visual feast throughout, and I enjoyed its use of allusive tropes to set the scene for Alien.

Ridley Scott goes for a grand, epic introduction to the Alien saga. Visually and conceptually, he succeeds, but too many of the film’s parts don’t work as well as they could have. He strains too hard to start the action instead of spending time slowly building tension as he did in Alien. Disregarding how effective Alien and Cameron’s Aliens are because they don’t reveal the creatures too soon, Scott rushes to ram a creature down someone’s throat, and when it happens it becomes the film’s worst moment. A scientist, previously petrified and eager to get back to the protection of the ship, thinks a cobra-like serpent is cute and puts his face right up to it. A trillion-dollar mission, and they hire the dumbest scientist in the world! Meanwhile, the top-notch scientists picked for this mission are responsible for a whole hell of a lot of scientific ineptitude. They touch everything; they work too quickly on the Engineer’s head and blow it up; and they take off their helmets at the risk of contagion.


Visually, however, the film is worth seeing more than once. I loved the Engineer at the waterfall; the Prometheus entering the planet’s atmosphere; the Engineers’ “installation;” the bust of the über-Engineer; and the holographic schematic of the universe. My favorite image is the shot of David watching Lawrence of Arabia. In 3-D, this image has incredible depth. For the most part, however, 3-D doesn’t do much for the film, and I enjoyed it just as much in 2-D.

Boom!

Boom, indeed! There is a lot of action in Hasbro’s movie, Battleship, but you have to sit through a painful thirty minutes before the action gets started and the fun begins.

When it comes to alien invasion and “the war of the worlds,” Wells and Spielberg knew that it’s crucial to get the aliens down to Earth and get the party started.

The big failing of Battleship is that it wastes time with unnecessary nonsense and terrible writing before the aliens are introduced. First, we get the year’s worst opening scene in which Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch of John Carter) tries to pick up a gorgeous blonde bombshell (Brooklyn Decker), dressed in tight white top, who inexplicably walks into a scuzzy bar and orders a chicken burrito. “I’m hungry,” she explains. No McDonald’s open? The ridiculous extremes to which Hopper goes to acquire said chicken burrito constitute the year’s worst scene.

This is followed by disgusting propaganda that turns physical therapy sessions for amputees in a VA hospital into a music video designed to advertise all the great things technology is doing for the American servicemen who have lost limbs in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Then, suddenly, the film leaps forward what must be years during which Alex Hopper’s upstanding Navy commander of a brother (Alexander Skarsgard) forces Alex to join the Navy in order get his act together. The next thing we know Alex is a lieutenant in charge of weapons firing aboard a Navy destroyer. From burrito thief to naval officer in a matter of seconds!

Unforgivable nonsense over, the alien ships splash down, Hong Kong gets pulverized by a crash-landing communications ship, and what follows is one of the best of the many alien invasion action movies released in the past few years. Unlike in the very boring The Avengers, the action is not a dizzying blur of motion. Instead of focusing on a wild confusion of flying things, we get simple duels between Navy destroyers and alien monster-craft. It’s always clear what’s going on; it’s never too fast to follow.

Visual Passion: Elvira Madigan and Other Films

Like Terrence Malick’s lovers on the lam in Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1977), Elvira Madigan (Pia Degermark) and Sixten Sparre (Thommy Berggren) in director Bo Widerberg’s hauntingly beautiful Elvira Madigan (1967) pass through an indifferent world of pastoral beauty and come to a bad end. Did shots of Elvira and Sixten gathering food while they lounge in nature, oblivious to the conventions and responsibilities that make their affair hopeless, inspire Malick’s similar depictions of Bill and Abby and Kit and Holly camping and fishing by a river while the law closes in on them? Did Widerberg’s film also influence the sensual shots of sexually frustrated girls picnicking in the rugged beauty of Australia in Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)? Widerberg’s attention to the sensuous and sensual effect of shots of raspberries in thick cream; red currants devoured right off the bush by the hungry Elvira; red wine soaking a white cloth; white lace curtains in a sun-filled room – set to classical music (Mozart’s Piano Concerto #21 and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons) - seems to be a characteristic of the kind of lyrical cinema made by auteurs of the 1970s. Whether or not the Swedish film Elvira Madigan influenced Malick or Weir in any way, it is clear that nature is often a key element in stories depicting the intensity of the enigmatic biological and psychological processes that cause people to fall in love passionately.

Whatever influence it has had on later decades, Elvira Madigan is very much a child of the 60s. It is about a man and a woman who turn their backs on convention, forsaking everything for love, spending their days together literally rolling in the hay and living like Mother Nature’s children. Hedvig Jensen, a tightrope walker whose stage name is Elvira Madigan, turns her back on fame. Sixten, a nobleman and a cavalry officer, deserts the army and leaves wife and children for his lover. When a fellow officer tries to make Sixten see that he is focusing on a single blade of grass and not seeing the whole world around him, Sixten sounds like a hippie poet when he responds by saying that “one blade of grass can be the entire world.” Sixten goes on to say that “words have lost their meaning.” Also very fittingly for a 60s film, Sixten makes it clear that he is leaving the army because of all that it means, and he proceeds to present a graphic description of the many layers of tissue and muscle pierced by a bayonet before it reaches the gut.

Elvira Madigan is an engaging portrait of mutual passion, memorable for how it reflects inner passion in shots of exterior natural beauty. In contrast, The Deep Blue Sea (2012) takes place mostly in interiors: darkly lit pubs and a drab flat in a building not far from rubble still remaining from the Blitz. In The Deep Blue Sea, directed by Terence Davies, Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz), wife of a judge, falls in love with Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston), a handsome golfer and hero of the Battle of Britain, but the passion soon becomes one-sided, leaving Hester suicidal. Unlike Elvira and Sixten, Hester and Freddie are not wired the same way. Freddie does not feel the same way about Hester, and it is impossible for him to understand how this drives Hester to such despair. Only Hester knows completely how she feels, and I totally sympathize with how she is left “between the devil and the deep blue sea,” unable to change how she feels. She can’t help the way she is wired for passion, and this leads to her despair. The joy in the ultimately tragic Elvira Madigan is that the two lovers are totally on the same wavelength from beginning to end. If they can’t be together, then it’s goodbye world.

There are no golden fields, shady woods, or sunny beaches in The Deep Blue Sea, but the passionate love affair of Elvira Madigan and Sixten Sparre is almost entirely set in exquisitely beautiful and sunny exteriors. Elvira and Sixten try to enjoy their days of heaven together in an idyllic pastoral world as they run from convention, run out of money, and run out of options. Leaving each other and going back to their responsibilities is definitely not an option, and actress Pia Degermark's pure face and entrancing eyes make it very clear why a young man would not want to leave this woman. Nature provides the setting for lovemaking, picnics, an exquisite tightrope walking scene, and beachcombing at sunset. It also provides food, virtually turning them into foraging animals. Sixten and Elvira graze on mushrooms; they catch a fish; they stuff themselves with berries. In one scene, Elvira hungrily plucks clover from the ground, eating it until she vomits. Other than that scene, nature is always benevolent, providing food and sunny days and never a drop of rain. In keeping with the weather, Elvira and Sixten only quarrel once, and they make up very easily when Sixten writes “Forgive me” on a slip of paper and floats it down a creek to Elvira.

"From man to dragon": Coriolanus (2011)

Shakespeare assumed we’d come to the theater ready to use our imaginations. His speeches, as delivered by the performers, provide the drama, but trappings such as weather and the terrain of the setting, as described in the speeches, are up to us to imagine. Similarly, as the texts come to us today, a Shakespeare play is a bare template open to an imaginative director’s visualization. Shakespeare doesn’t seem to have been big on stage directions. In the famous duel scene in Hamlet, the spare stage direction They play has invited countless interpretations for the choreography of this dramatic episode. But Hamlet is the kind of Shakespeare play that doesn’t need a lot of effort from actors or set designers to enhance its language. The language alone is engrossing.

Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, however, is one of those utilitarian Shakespeare plays whose functional speeches require a little more effort from a director, and Coriolanus, as directed by Ralph Fiennes, gets its drama pumped up by the director’s imaginative approach. Here, Fiennes takes the tragedy of Caius Marcius Coriolanus, the kind of problem general like Patton or Custer (before the Little Bighorn) who gets an A in War but an F in Diplomacy, and establishes a 1990s Bosnia/Serbia mise-en-scène replete with villages in rocky places, garbage-cluttered streets, and unsavory stray dogs. Employing newsreel footage, news channel feeds, and scenes set in the streets and governmental chambers of a place called Rome, Fiennes really fits the language into the setting in a way that works very smoothly so that when CNN-style pundits exchange commentary in Elizabethan diction, it doesn’t seem strange at all.

In this world of a discontented populace protesting the economy and Kevlar-clad soldiers engaged in fierce firefights with insurgents toting AK-47s, Caius Marcius, as played by Ralph Fiennes, sacrifices his blood for his country by fighting Rome’s chief enemy, Tullus Aufidius. As Aufidius, Gerard Butler is superb, enhancing the drama of lines that often lack the memorable imagery of Shakespeare’s better plays. The acting is excellent throughout the film, with Jessica Chastain as Virgilia, Corolanus’s wife, and the especially engaging Vanessa Redgrave as Volumnia, his mother. Though Redgrave loses us in some of Shakespeare’s more convoluted syntax that cries out desperately for a full stop, her lines are earnestly and believably delivered, and she steals the show when she begs her vengeful, banished son, who joins forces with Aufidius, to spare Rome from invasion.