”In the Loop” is a broad and harsh satire in which the feckless and self-serving behavior of political operatives in Britain and the United States threaten to lead inexorably to a completely needless war. To all appearances, the war is not waged for any logical reason, but only to further the personal agendas of a few ego-addled politicos. Farfetched, isn’t it?
Directed by acclaimed British TV comedy veteran Armando Iannucci (”I’m Alan Partridge”), “In the Loop” is largely an extension of the 2005 miniseries, “In the Thick of It,” with its Oscar-nominated screenplay penned by Iannucci and a quartet of writers from the series. And so, “In the Loop” borders stylistically on mock-documentary. However, if it were an actual documentary, it would be in the category of, “I could send you a screener, but then I’d have to kill you.” It’s a real worm’s-eye view of the rush to a war of (poor) choice.
And here’s one more. Sorry about the double subtitles, but this is a clip of the great opening sequence of Rohmer’s “Love in the Afternoon” (sometimes called “Chloe in the Afternoon” to avoid confusion with the Billy Wilder romantic comedy). It starts out like classic Rohmer and ends with a bit of sci-fi.
The breathtaking cinematography here is by the late Nestor Almendros. Whatever you do, when you see this one, get the Criterion version.
In 1934’s “Manhattan Melodrama,” Clark Gable’s virtuous gangster literally goes to the gallows for the sake of his friendship with William Powell’s honest but sincerely conflicted politician, now the governor of the state. As Gable nobly refuses Powell’s offer of a reprieve – he deserves his fate – and prepares to meet his end, they shake hands, a bit dewy-eyed. Thirty-four years later, Oscar (Walter Matthau) and Felix (Jack Lemmon) in “The Odd Couple” are pretty clearly in the throes of one hilariously complex love/hate relationship but, when their friendship is healed by the end of the film, even the briefest of hugs is not in the cards for the poker buddies.
Now, of course, we live in a very different male-bonding world. Yet, even as the hug becomes the new handshake for many, the question remains: what is the new hug? No wonder so many of us seem caught between a junior high school level fear of being thought gay and artsy post collegiate embarrassment that we’re not cool enough to actually be, you know, a little bit gay. It’s life in the post-Kinsey, post-ambisexual/glam David Bowie, post “Seinfeld” “not that there’s anything wrong with that” world where, as proven by “Superbad,” the spectacle of straight males being physically affectionate is somehow funnier than ever.
Also, If you’ve haven’t seen them, you may also want to check out my interviews with Humpday’s two stars, Mark Duplass (of the filmmaking Duplass brothers) and actor-filmmaker Joshua Leonard (”The Blair Witch Project.”)
A once influential theatrical artist with a flair for surreal provocation and a madcap sense of humor makes some questionable decisions and winds up in a world where, at least for the moment, no one much cares for his stories. Doe this remind us of anyone we know?
Well, ex-Monty Python animator and trouble-plagued big budget cult movie director Terry Gilliam has made no secret of the autobiographical nature of “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.” Between that, the tragic death of Heath Ledger midway through filming, and the numerous references to the grim reaper that fill this dark and occasionally comic fantasy, it’s kind of impossible not to think about the grim real world conditions of its making; not only did the production lose its star in the most painful way possible partway through filming, but producer William Vince also passed on from cancer during post-production, while Gilliam himself suffered serious injuries after being hit by a car. The writer-director emphasizes that the screenplay for “Parnassus” was not significantly rewritten after Ledger’s death, but in view of this strangely disjointed film, that brings up a lot more questions than it answers.
A film about Greece, made by an expatriate Greek director, but featuring an all-star French-speaking cast, “Z” is, alongside John Frankenheimer’s “The Manchurian Candidate” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend,” one of the most important political films of all time. Even if, artistically and in terms of sheer entertainment, it’s not quite on the same level as either of those masterpieces, it had an immediacy those films lacked. Unlike Godard and Frankenheimer, director Costa-Gavris wasn’t only working out of political conviction, he was trying to free his homeland.
Shot and financed in the former French colony of Algeria, “Z” is based on a thinly fictionalized novel by Vasilis Vasilikos detailing the 1963 murder of pacifist leader Gregoris Lambrakis and the investigation that followed. Presaging the John F. Kennedy assassination by several months, the killing helped set the stage for a full-scale fascist military takeover of Greece, which lasted from 1967 to 1974. That, in turn, set the stage for Costa-Gavris, a promising young director hot off the success of his first film, “The Sleeping Car Murders,” to recruit a cast of mostly French stars to participate in a film designed specifically to raise a worldwide alarm. With the tacit acceptance of the U.S. and Western Europe, the world’s cradle of democracy was harboring a totalitarian regime that regularly tortured and murdered dissidents and had banned everything from the Beatles and long hair, to Mark Twain, Dostoyevsky, and a certain letter of the alphabet. With “Z,” Costa-Gavris made sure the world knew that.
“Your reality is already half video hallucination. If you’re not careful, it will become total hallucination. You’ll have to learn to live in a very strange new world.” – Media philosopher Brian O’Blivion in David Cronenberg’s “Videodrome” (1983)
So far, the bulk of gifted documentarian Ondi Timoner’s work has dealt with the forces that persuade human beings to give up some par of themselves, whether it be in pursuit of creative growth, God, or fame. Her latest film, takes that as far as it can possibly go. Unlike her remarkable “DiG!,” about the cultish neo-psychedelic rock band, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, or “Join Us,” about an actual religious cult, this time the cult is not just a few fanatics, it’s you and me.
I first praised the Sundance Grand Jury prize-winning “We Live in Public,” opening Friday at L.A.’s Nuart Theater (with special Q&As Friday and Saturday nights), back in June when I saw it at the Los Angeles Film Festival. The screening was capped off with the then somewhat surprising appearance by the documentary’s antihero, Internet entrepreneur and self-styled conceptual artist Josh Harris. Having returned from an idyll in Ethiopia, he said that his next project was something he called “the Wired City” and that, in his view, a typical human’s life in the future is going to be something like the present day existence of “a Purdue chicken.” He also said he hadn’t seen the movie and wasn’t sure when he would.
David Mamet’s third film starts out exactly like the Mamet cop movie you think you want to see – a detailed, literate, and darkly funny police procedural. But what begins like a sort of dry run for the classic ‘90s TV series, “Homicide: Life on the Street,” right down to its Baltimore locations, becomes a somber examination of the meaning of being Jewish in modern America and, more broadly, the dangers of excessive identity politics. Indeed, the warning the film delivers about the dangerous side of ethnic identity is so stark that it’s easy to wonder whether the Mamet of today – a stridently outspoken observant Jew and a self-outed conservative – wouldn’t have written a different story entirely.
“Homicide” stars the man I still consider the ultimate Mamet actor, Joe Mantegna, as Bobby Gold, a homicide detective who specializes in negotiating with suspects. We later learn, however, that the specialty might not have been entirely by choice because Officer Gold has something to prove. Being Jewish, he’s had to deal with an assumption that he is a soft and unphysical nebbish, so proving his toughness by being “first in the door” is a must and being assumed to have the gift of gab is almost a plus. (Almost everyone in a Mamet production has that gift, in any case.) Moreover, perhaps because he’s had to deal with a fair amount of abuse his whole life because of his identity, he seems to have internalized the bigotry and become a real-life version of a frequent mythological figure in intra-Jewish political battles – the “self-hating Jew.”
Even as someone who has a soft spot for offbeat indie comedies, I would nevertheless seriously consider instituting a perpetual moratorium on the use of the word “quirky” to describe that kind of movie. The only problem is then we’d have no other word to use in reference to something like “Gigantic.”
This is the story of the emotional life of Brian (Paul Dano of “There Will Be Blood” and “Little Miss Sunshine”), a low-key salesman of very expensive beds whose only real ambition is to adopt a Chinese baby. It’s a laudable but unusual goal for a young man, and he’d seem like a pretty stable guy were it not for the occasional apparently random violent attacks waged by an angry homeless man (the suddenly omnipresent Zach Galifianakis). It’s tempting to think that the encounters are imaginary, but the injuries seem real enough.
Classroom dramas are a venerable subgenre, populated by troubled students, charismatic and dedicated teachers, lots of entertaining dramatic contrivance, comic relief and heavy-duty sentiment. Often, there is a pop music soundtrack and we are usually treated to a big finish of some sort. “The Class,” which won the Palm D’or at Cannes in 2008 and was France’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar last year, has the troubled students and the hardworking teacher, but its approach is a million miles from any tale of educational triumph and tragedy you’ve ever seen.
Drawn from an autobiographical novel by punk rock singer turned highly successful writer François Bégaudeau, “The Class” is in a subgenre all its own: an educational procedural. Like many a good police procedural, the events are entirely on the job and the film takes a hard-edged, facts-only approach. Directed with a disciplined, unyielding eye-level view by Laurent Cantet (“Time Out”), we learn little of the students’ home life, except by way of rumor, and the only personal detail we learn about the teacher is that he admits to being heterosexual. And, while this in an urban, multi-ethnic school in today’s Paris, we’re a long way from some of the overcrowded human dumping grounds that sometimes pass for American inner-city schools. This is a good, if flawed, educational environment with mostly well intentioned and hardworking teachers and students. We get the impression everyone is both trying to make the best of things and simply get through the day and the school year. The tension is so great that the film often feels like one of those work-related dreams from which you wake up tired.
[Today’s entry at Premium Hollywood had some FtY suitable material, so here it is again.]
Filthy lucre is today’s theme in movieland. Really, it’s every day’s theme, but it’s on my mind today.
* Nikki Finke, who actually makes money blogging, notes a pay cut for William Morris assistants, who already work ridiculously hard for the hope of decent money some day, and are expected to work a minimum of fifty hours a week. Presumably they get some overtime (though one wonders if they’re not working actually quite a bit more — Hollywood and Walmart have been known to have a few things in common in the past). They’d better because their boss’s brother is the White House chief of staff. Could get messy, otherwise.
Finke also has an interesting — inasmuch as I can follow it — look at some silver linings amidst the major studio’s fiscals clouds.
* A noted casting change in the third “Twilight” will probably not affect grosses perceptibly, but there’s no stopping those wagging tongues.
* And with all the fuss at Comic-Con, the appearance of anime genius Hiyao Miyazaki got all but ignored by the media, as far as I can tell. “Princess Mononoke” beat “Titanic” in Japan. If it had done so here, it’s fair to say he wouldn’t have been a relative afterthought.
* What of “District 9″? Given one of a few strong early reviews by Justin Chang, will politically trenchant, if thoughtfully violent/icky, Sci-Fi set in South Africa find a big enough American audience? (H/t Jeffrey Wells.)
* For those of you who live outside of California, it might be interesting to note that while mass chaos seems far away here, the state’s fiscal crisis really is effecting everything and everyone to varying degrees. People I know who work in the public sector out are personally experiencing furloughs and pay cuts to go with them, classroom sizes are ballooning absurdly and on it goes to some pretty scary and sad places.
It may not be directly related, but the Los Angeles Times report that the L.A. County Museum of Art is ending its weekend programming hits me where I live. As Anne Thompson points out, some of that may be due to some very canny competition from the terrific Los Angeles Cinematheque, a relatively very young organization that has actually come to the fore during the DVD era with two theaters at opposite ends of town offering some pretty great programming.
The Times‘ John Horn strikes a perhaps overly drastic or even borderline intellectually snobbish note on that point, though it’s true that this is not a golden age for art movies. LACMA was more prone than any other venue to offer works by such cinephile-only filmmakers as Bela Tarr, whose best known movie is the 7.5 hour “Satantango,” and will be closing out with the far-from-Frank Capra Alain Resnais.
Nevertheless, the museum’s Bing Theater was certainly not above offering crowd-pleasing fare from time to time and, indeed, not doing so would be to ignore a huge part of film history. Still, a cannier mix might not have hurt so much. Since they are talking of tie-ins with museum shows, programs similar to (or identical to) New York’s MOMA collaboration with Tim Burton might be in order. If regular film programming ever does return to MOCA, a little more Charlie Chaplin and a little less Maoist-period Godard might not be the end of the world, either.
Forward to Yesterday is dedicated to all that is valuable yet deemed—rightly or wrongly—to be dead or dying in movies and popular (and unpopular) culture, politics included.
