Skyfall

(dir. Sam Mendes)

Before hitting shores in America, the word on the 23rd James Bond film, Skyfall, was out: it was very good. In fact, good enough for Roger Ebert to call it the best Bond flick in years and make him finally believe Daniel Craig was James Bond. I may be reacting to a new hyper media hellbent on over-pronouncing every little criticism, but the latest Bond flicks seem too interested in reassigning the identity of James Bond in some fashion. After the Pierce Brosnan entries ended in boring generics, the new order is to continue to find different ways to imagine who James Bond is and what he stands for. Daniel Craig is lucky enough to be our cinematic guinea pig. Like most fans of Bond, a number of changes I am a fan of, some I think are unnecessary, and others are over hyped. Still, word should be assigned the interest in commenting on Bond.

After 20-plus films of following the same chronology along the lines of serials, it wasn’t hard to accept the producers might be interested in restarting the series. Certainly enough time passed. The difference is that the series being re-done now means it is no longer going to be the serial story the way the other Bond films were. After the first two Craig entries, it was difficult to see how that was going to play out. Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace were continuation pieces on Bond’s early years that was roughly broken into two parts. Revolving around the influence of Vesper Lynd, her relationship to Bond, and their romantic fallout, James Bond went from rough special agent to fully formed super agent. Now we have Skyfall and the training wheels for Bond have to be taken off and asked to proceed without the full assistance of the first two stories. Bond has grown up since then, but the question Skyfall asks, is how?

The first bit of disappointing news is that in Skyfall, Bond has already graduated to elder statesman as an agent and the film has a litany of “past your prime” themes to remind him he has seen better days. It’s the complete opposite of what the first two Bond films were doing. What’s annoying is that documenting themes around the beginning and end of a story seem to be a lot easier. Dramatic implications don’t need to be developed as much. With the idea of a Bond remodeling, I was more interested to see how his middle years would develop, meaning his relationship with Felix Lighter, the new Spectre-type organization in Quantum, and whether Bond ever comes near a real romantic relationship with another woman. The last could happen since in the early films, it wasn’t until the 6th film that Bond fell in love and lost everything. As a gentleman spy, he may not be above finding love again. Implication in Casino Royale is that when he lost Vesper, he lost his soul and ability to care.

Of course, the last bit isn’t so simple. Continuing with Solace, Bond’s relationship with M (Judi Dench) goes more into focus. Still burdened by a hard dedication to his job and seeking it out til the bloody end, Bond seemingly finds a mother-son relationship with M and she with him when she ditches government protocol at late stages in the film and says her alliance (when Bond’s motives are questioned) is with her agent. They have a tempestuous, caring relationship while she seems to be all he has for immediate relations. Skyfall does take advantage of a more natural development of the previous entry by putting M into peril and again having Bond being challenged with potentially losing someone he loves.

As spoilers go, the whole story of Skyfall is a lead up to M dying.  In the film, Bond only gets a whiff of life after her. Essentially, it’s cliffhanger drama. The question being what awaits Bond after. Another peg in the development of Craig’s version of Bond is another attachment to his human being cut off. But, even though I said the film is dealing with an aging Bond, the film also re-introduces common characters like Q, Moneypenny, a new M, and a familiar office. All of this is stylistic throwback to how the series used to feel. Some twists happen in that Moneypenny and the new M are former agents and can handle themselves. Bond even has mission history with Moneypenny (detailed in Skyfall) so there is opening for detailed development there. Still, to move forward, it seems the film took a long road back to Connery origins in basic story makeup.

The most interesting thing about the new film is how the story recycles so many elements of Bond’s past in the literal story and film past (well before Casino Royale) and takes some pretty easy license with things. One tidbit in Casino Royale is that a back story is explained to how Bond got his famous BMW car (it’s done through a card game) so instead of remembering Connery’s famous 60s vehicle, the audience could have a new BMW to idolize. In Skyfall, there is a scene where Bond goes through his storage and takes out the very same 1960s car Connery used. M then makes a reference to the time period no longer being the 1960s for him or her. Instead of continue with a new history from previous two efforts, the film is recycling old things from the past 50 years of Bond history and meshing it with new things.

Super hero movies like to play too deep with the genre license and replace lucid storytelling with references which will appease the fan base. For me, it just hogs up time in a story and instead of trying to better develop a story, a film will attempt to be both relevant dramatically and filled with enough quotes to satisfy an audience. One can argue since Skyfall spends a lot of time with using old references to find a way back to the beginning of the series where Bond can finally deal with familiar things like Moneypenny, Q, a similar office space for work, so the film is using the reference points to make them more dramatically in-sync than just continuously providing anecdotal information which mostly helps nothing. There is a point to that, and thankfully, Skyfall isn’t full of dumb 1960s references when there shouldn’t be any.

I always come into any Bond flick as a genre fan. I don’t doubt even the best movies in the series are born out cliches which could not hold up in any sophisticated story. With that, I announce my unlikely and somewhat subjective position I favor Quantum of Solace over Skyfall even if the former doesn’t hold up to much respect with others. It is now easily dismissed for the condition in which it was made. The film was going into production during the writer’s strike and the director had to do some serious pre-production work with no script in hand. Daniel Craig even said he was contributing lines of dialogue during shooting to help out. For a visualist like Marc Forster, it allowed him chance to be more inventive with camera technique while hammering away at a story that was pretty generic. There is artistry in that filmmaking which hasn’t been present in any Bond ever. Sam Mendes is the noted director in Skyfall and why he manages to instill European flavored shots into the sequence, he bows down to more stale action techniques and standard filmmaking. Luc Besson (in his 80s and 90s work) had a better idea how to form technique with story approach and merge the two together. In Bond, Mendes has to have extravagant action sequences and somehow go to over-dramatized scenes just moments later. Just following rules of the series now. Mixing in a well lit shot that focuses on the silhouette of Bond or a bad guy in beautiful coloring is just Mendes poking his head up to remind the audience he is still a director with some independent touch.

Skyfall is middle of the Bond pack for me. It definitely graduates from previous Bond efforts in looking stylish in every modern sense of the word. Previous Bond works tried too hard to look stylish for their respective periods and suffered the fate of staleness. Not sure whether Mendes’s small attempts to go against the grain and make certain shots look cooler or more intriguing will pay off down the road.  Bernard Shaw once said a good piece of political or social art should only have a shelf life of 100 years before becoming irrelevant. Bond films looking cool and cutting edge seems to only last 10 years at best. Of course this dig is the least important because it doesn’t matter. Problem is that delving deeper into character doesn’t matter to. We get with Bond films what we get. The surface details are the discussion.

Dead Man Down

20 years ago, this film would have seemed more ordinary than its already ordinary nature. The simple contrast to our movie world is that it’s an action film which deposits more of its time to building up a story, characters, and a relationship instead of just blitzing the audience with detailed effects and then dabbling in moments of drama. Just like Swat from 2003 and also starring Colin Farrell, the film’s nice quality is its own simplicity and ability to tell a story.

In the story, Farrell is a man who is on the inside of a gang that killed his wife and child. They believing he is also dead, he is able to reinvent his identity and become a member so he can fulfill revenge methodically. There is an element of terrorism to systematically killing member after member, sending packages to taunt, and even holding one as hostage. The wrinkle in the story comes when he meets his neighbor, a facially disfigured woman, (played by Noomi Rapace) who also has vengeance on her mind. Plot conveniently enough, she witnessed Farrell kill a man from her window and recorded it on her phone. She wants him to kill the man who caused her car accident because he was negligently under the influence at the time. Farrell is reluctant to become anyone’s gun-for-hire.

The meat of the story is how the two come together and combat each others thirst for vengeance. She starts to like him and find moments of happiness in her life but knows Farrell has it in his mind the only way to kill everyone is a grand suicide form of killing. He believes she should be above vengeance and try to find better moments in life. At late stages in the story, both try to foil the others plan for the sake of the others livelihood.

The good thing about the film is that while the trailer has a lot of action sequences, the film does not. It’s methodical and only focuses on a few elements personal relations between the character. The film is too plot ridiculous and could have found ways to reign it in, but after all said and done, the film feels like it holds back than other effect efforts. By the end, there are a few legitimate tender moments that are earned. Definitely fails in feeling withdrawn compared to smart dramas or better handled thrillers.

I mentioned the terrorism element to the story. It’s interesting to me since a number of Hollywood movies pit “good” guys against bad guys and the manner in which the characters operate has a lot of terrorist identification. It isn’t a serious Battle of Algiers debate on whether terrorism seriously can ever be ethical, but more of a comment on our cultures attraction to violence and how if we can sympathize with the ends in a fight, we don’t quibble too much about the means a character will go about settling a score or fighting something heinous. The Matrix is still the king of this genre. No comment necessary about Dead Man Down since it’s just a personal vendetta and smells like suicide bomber means by the end. For me, just always interesting to watch a movie and add it to a very unlikely club.

Zero Dark Thirty

(dir. Kathryn Bigelow)

Kathryn Bigelow certainly knows how to take the bull by the horn. After years of being a successful filmmaker of action stories (most noticeably, Point Break), she has had her own Sam Peckinpah transformation and found a way to dramatize the dangerous elements of life without fully neutering the explosive details in the story. A few years ago, The Hurt Locker was a detailed and excellent staging of a soldier losing himself while in combat and seeking the thrill of danger. Now Bigelow stays in battlefield and gives the film world its first major budgeted account of the search for Usama Bin Laden. Due to the incredible press coverage and notoriety already, for better or worse, it’s going to stand as our cinematic landmark of what the search for Bin Laden entailed and what the costs of it were worth. In simple terms, a film which feels to be an unabashed interpretation that not only was torture (enhanced interrogations, for the defenders) used in the hunt for Bin Laden, but it was essential in the process.

For me and the torture issue, the reprehensible thing is that the film paints torture to be a considerable share of what it took to make the gain in developing intelligence over the course of the years. An excellent conservative magazine, Commentary, made the point the film is ambiguous with torture because what really got the crucial evidence in the end was the chief interrogator being nice and humane to a prisoner. Misses most of the point. If you took the film as some totality to what the investigation was for years, you would see torture taking up a much greater piece of the pie than probably true. The first ten minutes of the film is a tone establishment to what torture meant for “breaking a person.” After years of torturing a prisoner, the final straw was broken when they showed compassion to someone. He didn’t talk because of compassion. He talked since the effects of sleep deprivation got him to think he already talked. The investigators made him believe a terrorist plot was foiled when it wasn’t but their knowing the details meant he revealed confided information.

If a film was pro torture and false historically, I could still support it if the quality was good. The film isn’t horrible, but it’s the kid brother to The Hurt Locker in a lot of unfortunate ways. Both films are about characters driven to a soulless existence because they encompass their lives with one passion and lock out meaningful human contact. Bigelow is good enough to know if you dialogue out this theme, it’s meaningless, but the method of approaching the theme here is to stretch out an investigation story and watch a simple character bend herself over to its cause. If the main character’s identity gets lost in the process of a bigger story, a single shot can propel a hundred emotions. It can dig at those feelings of  Bigelow wants that moment when Chastain is alone on the aircraft carrier and is exhausted she has seen the single purpose of her entire CIA career come to an end.

The approach is nothing new. Problem for me is the investigation story has to skip over a lot of details and branches of the investigation. It wants to encompass a bigger story it’s not going to do justice for and also be about the personal story of someone as well. We see Jessica Chastain’s character go from naive to torture to its major facilitator. On the way, she develops friendships with characters around. Tragically, and coincidentally, they die in various battlefield situations surrounding the search for Bin Laden. Instead of see the deaths as warning she is getting close to the brink, she sees her continued existence as a calling she is meant to see things through until the end. It’s a prophetic vision to make the capture or killing of Bin Laden the only thing worth doing. Better films about an individual losing themselves in a case begin to realize the who did what or didn’t or how it all comes about doesn’t really matter too much. Circumstances are different here. The filmmakers were blessed with intelligence access and while making the film, granted the actual news Bin Laden was killed. They had to report what they found to everyone. I doubt I would have minded the last 20 minute sequence which was a detailed look at how the Bin Laden kill went down if I felt the previous scenes were more detailed and a better umbrella.

There are other structural details. In The Hurt Locker, Bigelow isn’t pitting a big story against her personal characterization interest. It’s just about the life of a soldier and his dangerous business. The film can make smaller moments feel bigger and explore the environment of the story more. Of course, I thought the character depiction was better. In Zero Dark Thirty, there is an attempt at more roundness of character development. The beginning of a cause is shown for a CIA agent and in the film, the details of the investigation get her to round out her toughness and demeanor at every step of the invesigation. By the end, she’s barking at her superiors and disobeying rules of politeness to strangers. Her defection to just supporting the cause is the end game of her lost in the details. At the beginning of the film, she was happy to play secondary to other agents and follow their commands. True, she probably felt the long torture scene at the beginning of the film was more productive and fell in line with her every belief later. The film could have been unveiling an already placed mentality one step at a time for dramatic sake of the audience. For me, the attempt at roundness lacked the characterization specifics of what was in The Hurt Locker. The film did fine at pinpointing Chastain’s drive, but not at getting the smaller points of her demeanor across. A less plot objective film like The Hurt Locker had more freedom to explore those things.

Of course, at the end, one still has to wonder how relevant her character was. A Navy Seal involved in the very mission that led to Bin Laden’s murder confirms the real life character shown in the film was “bad ass”. I know Zero Dark Thirty is based on an actual person and I don’t know the circumstances of her story. She may really have been the only cog in the engine searching for Bin Laden. It feels like if that was true, she was doing this more toward the end of the investigation when it needed political push to take a huge risk and that was hard to come by. Her story definitely does not speak for all the earlier years when many organizations were looking into Bin Laden. In fact, Robert Baer (former head of CIA’s arm to the Middle East) says the film has little accuracy. When speaking to Anderson Cooper last December, Baer said he could find no evidence torture is what helped the investigation come full circle. Still, she is connected to that early history of the investigation. I just can’t believe she was instrumental in almost every major development the way the film says. But because the film is obviously detailing someone in the agency who is for torture (I hear it’s evenly split), it’s taking one story and making it feel like it encompasses much more. Maybe too much.

The Dark Knight Rises

(dir. Christopher Nolan)

The Hollywood wonder kid has finished his Batman trilogy. Giving a blueprint ideal for all other super hero movies, Christopher Nolan has emphatically stated it’s better for comic book lore to move away from adventure stories and dig deeper into trying to make myth and sociology working components to take unbelievable  plot scenarios and construct full dramatic themes around them. Now that America has over 80 years plus of chronicled super hero history behind it plus a full 15 years of over zealous filmic history to reinforce comic book’s history cultural importance, the benchmark has been set for stories that may have been felt to be ridiculous forty years ago to be implicitly dramatic and important today. The cultural importance of Godzilla to Japan turned into a foreign hit in the United States, but the films never became a series of American blockbusters. In Japan, there are numerous movies devoted the frightening lizard. In America today, we dedicate film after film and many kinds of interpretations to the same super heroes. Their legacy either to Marvel or DC comics is all the American public needs to suspend belief and welcome a hero.

Never mind many super heroes were created in the 1930s under serial conditions and could have an imaginative update. Never mind characters like the Green Lantern and his world should just be dismissed and used to create not only something new, but a little interesting. It was a considerable chore to watch the recent interpretation of the character. Yet because it was established in DC comics, the outdated character got a full fledged movie. I’m told I should amend some of my complaints since the hero was recently turned into the first gay super hero to be affiliated with a major comic brand. I really don’t think his heterosexuality was the problem in the film. Just the film was a last straw in super hero movies for me.

I’m tired of the melodrama that super hero movies inherently carry with them. Because super heroes have farfetched ideas, the films have to continuously invent new ways for the characters and situations to be believable. Characters have to take time to constantly tell other characters how so-and-s0 could come from a gap in the universe they never heard of and how it conveniently led to a problem which can also be explained. When the initial situations develops into new problems and situations for other characters, the story seems to naturally invent new amendments to the original set up. Doesn’t matter it happens all the time and is a dramatic get out of jail free card for any storyteller afraid to contain stories to characters, situations, and what logically could happen. The more amendments, the deeper the drama is because it can go into more history and myth of the surrounding world. Audiences have to generally deal with so much back-history coming from all angles that they begin to care about all the details and work them into running theories which can have a life of their own.

My high school English teacher bashed the book, The Lovely Bones, because he thought it was dumb to have a character tell the story after they were dead. Apparently he was concerned with the limitations of first person narrative, but I think now if Shakespeare had written a sizable play around the experiences of a dead person, there wouldn’t have been this second guess. One could say I am arguing against something due to there being no tradition. I disagree. I imagine if Shakespeare ever dedicated a play to a communicating dead person (not just as a minor character), he would have still followed logical methods of drama and what is really believable for a story. Akira Kurosawa had little problem creating adequate drama involving the testimony of a ghost as if they were another character. Super hero movies seem to be doing more than breaking traditional structure norms. They lack commitment to go beyond talking about set ups and new circumstances. Instead of really showing the drama, all they do is talk around it. Melodrama is rooted in talking around situations and creating drama out of the bubbles of what actually happens to characters and how it afflicts them.

The running storyline in Dark Knight Rises is how the emergence of an underworld figure known as Bane forces Bruce Wayne’s hand and make him come out of retirement to be Batman once again. Attacks of Jim Gordon and word from Alfred that Bane is a former League of Shadows member convince Wayne this is something worthy of Batman. May be a dumb question, but how does Alfred know about Bane’s origins? Even more peculiar is Alfred’s quick identification of Bane in action (courtesy of security camera footage) is how Bane represents something beyond what Wayne himself is even capable of. The dialogue foreshadows the fall of Batman and his human failings. Instead of wait until Batman gets his bat broken by Bane in their first encounter, the film has a fatalistic resolve to downcast the mood of Batman. Doubt the ethos of Greek tragedy is working here. The film feels too critic conscious like it wants everyone to know what the themes are in case they can’t read into any subtext within a fairly simple story. Nolan isn’t trying to rework the boundaries of Hollywood entertainment with his take on a theatrical approach to cinema. The film wants all the standard cues and payoffs you see in other dramas and action films.

The problem isn’t just that the film tries to combine action heroics with the full mood of a serious drama. The problem is that it does neither very well. As Roger Ebert said in his review, theatrics of Batman in action doesn’t really happen a lot. Dramatically, the “talk instead of show” mentality is doubled by some far fetched twists at the end of the story. For me, since I already knew the legend of Ra’s al Ghul (the main villain in Batman Begins and former leader of the League of Shadows), I know from comics he has a daughter. Interpretation of her has varied over time and since Nolan selects what kind of elements he wants to draw from in the comics to show in his movies, I thought the idea of her reappearing somehow could happen. Dramatically, the third film was angling the story back to the League of Shadows by making  Bane a former member. However, that’s as far as the lineage goes. Bane should have stayed more as a standalone villain in the Joker sense. The attempt to bring the dead Ra’s al Ghul back to dramatic life is a little more than desperate. It’s really silly.

An insertion into the third Batman film is a character named Miranda Tate. The head of a firm that sees potential in Wayne Corp’s manufacturing of a machine which can create sustainable power, she continues to meet Wayne in hope he will allow her to get closer for the firm to utilize what it can do. Wayne fears it could be used as a nuclear weapon so shelves the project. When financial push comes to shove, Wayne trusts her with the machine and his emotions. The relationship seems to be nothing more than a fling, but the heads of Wayne Enterprise trust her business reputation. There is no dimension to Miranda Tate other than that she is at the cross hairs of a pivotal plot moment. Then the turn happens. As the climax between Bane and Batman begins to heat up and he is immersed into obsessing over Bane’s history with the League of Shadows, Miranda Tate unceremoniously announces her real name is Talia and the daughter of Wayne’s former mentor, Ra’s.

The table is a complete turn of the plot arrangement. Instead of Bane be the one who was born in hell and made a miracle jump out a prison which could only be escaped by an impossible climb, turns it was Talia who did all those things. Bane was just someone in the prison who helped her stay alive when she was a child. He has no history before the prison. The already murky history of someone growing up in a prison is doubled by the revelation it was Ra’s wife who was thrown into the prison and she gave birth to a daughter. The connection back to the first film is lifted in a flashback scene when Ra’s tells Bruce he once had a wife and she was taken from him. Seems a lot more happened. The simple piece of dialogue from Batman Begins is enough for a left field version of the story to complete the whole story. Lets say I wasn’t convinced by this.

The only precedent to attempt this switch around is the fact Talia is classically established as Ra’s daughters in the comics. Audiences can immediately believe she would yield her hand at some point in the story. Otherwise, there is no reason to build up layers of back story, even if sloppily, only just turn everything on its head. The rationale is Talia pretended to be someone else for years so she could get closer to Wayne and he would desperately fall for her trust at the last second. The same dramatic rationale could be used for Lucius Fox. He also had to incognito for years to gain Wayne’s trust and so he could get into a position within the corporation to be able to use his genius to build machines which could finally destroy Gotham City. If there was a comic bad guy who came close to fitting Lucius Fox’s personality build, the legitimacy would be there, too.

Nolan allows the world of comic book lore in America to cloud his better judgment of how far he can extend the situations in the story. While he is clever with small anecdotes like how Catwoman can get payback in case a deal with a local gangster goes south, Nolan always seems to dribble with the arbitrary when he asks his plot to function for exploration of character or themes. In Inception, a haunting world worthy of Andrei Tarkovsky could have been created, but the film is drowned in an ever continuous number of rules for what happens in his version of “dreams”. The twists and turns eventually are paid off by more action sequences than personal insights into the protagonist. The depth of Bruce Wayne and other themes are understood early. The rest of the film is more showmanship in trying desperately to mix action with drama and thinking any rules can established thanks to comic book enfranchisement.

I’m not the most keen spectator of comic books on film. The more they are rolled out, the more I wonder how much time can be devoted to a mass market which seems to be just repeating itself at a boring pace. One key divergence is the success of Nolan’s Batman is getting every up-and-coming auteur of other super hero films to say they want to create similar dramatic myth around their works. It’s interesting since as super hero movies go more dramatic, another serial creation like Indiana Jones eventually went the opposite way. Both are throwbacks to 1930 adventure structures. Steven Speilberg and George Lucas imagined pretty basic adventure-type interpretations in the 1980s. When reworking the series just last decade, the vision more sillier than the originals. Both sides should have been seeking compromise somewhere in the middle.

Letter Never Sent

( dir. Mikhail Kalatozov)

Proving the past can always be felt anew, a few months ago Criterion released Mikhail Kalatozov’s little seen adventure film, Letter Never Sent. While known for work in the 1960s (I Am Cuba, specifically), little has been streamlined to America from Kalatozov’s earlier efforts. Considering his last film came a mere five years after Cuba, it always seemed to this outsider his past was well worth reconsidering. Especially since it’s difficult to even find original reviews of his other films from critics during their heyday. Sometimes the old takes more than a few years to reach our shores. Letter Never Sent is just one film  and only joins The Cranes are Flying as his topical Soviet work to get major release (both by Criterion). On the surface, both seem typical affair for Soviet released entries. Letter Never Sent is a geological exploration story about scientists battling Siberia climate in search of undiscovered diamonds. In the hands of many other filmmakers, the expectation bar would be lowered. With Kalatozov, the finished product  is commendable.

A way of introducing Kalatozov is he shares an unlikely bond with Ingmar Bergman in that both filmmakers distinctly know how to make the 90-minute film feel epic. Bergman digs at specifics of the personal in harrowing ways. Kalatozov underscores dramatic stories with modern action tricks which both extend out characterization and stressful circumstances. Routinely setting his films in either wartime settings or dire personal situations, Kalatozov takes tricks that today would be used for action effect and uses them to dig deeper at themes in his films. While one of many directors at the time taking the camera and using it for more than just shooting scenes, Kalatozov’s films feel a little more modern than the likes of Ophuls and Fuller. Modern filmmakers have no problem praising and referencing their work, but I always found Kalatozov more interesting.

Ophuls and Fuller never had gymnastic routines with their fillmmaking. They relied on different dance glides around the action. The operative function of a camera “dancing” around the scene is that it keeps the characters and action within full visual distance. As far as visualizing the scene, there is no real abstraction of what is happening. However, Kalatozov makes sure the filmmaking is the textural identity of the story. No complimenting. No sugar coating to enhance style or bring closer to any genre. He wants each scene to radiate at different pulses of storytelling. Whether it be the camera running with characters at full speed and losing the specifics of their movements in the foggy dizziness of speed or the camera highlighting fire in the background and swallowing up the full scene. Just a continuous array of varying camera tricks that highlighted his previous films to lesser degrees and seems more prevalent here. Many scenes start out standard and just foreground the scene. The end interest in the film is to long distance the effects and make them inhabit the structure of the story.

Compare Letter Never Sent to another timely explosion of style at the time, Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. After spending the first 15 years of his career defining many style norms to come in cinema, Welles may have saw an opportunity for a second renaissance when he adopted new guerrilla techniques of independent cinema and dedicated an entire film to seeing how how many camera tricks he could implant into one genre story. Seems like Welles was less concerned with degree of style in juxtapose to genre and more interested in seeing how story could exist within an ever continuing wheel of  filmmaking ingenuity. The film does not exist for evenness or Hitchcock precision of story-to-style. The film is an unmitigated explosion. The uniqueness is that the filmmaking does not temper the story. As a noir piece of crime-telling, the cliches remain intact. It’s relevant movie-making since swarms of filmmaking movements would be defined by how untypical modes of production could alter the general feel of typical works. Letter Never Sent seems to go the extra mile to ensue the filmmaking fully transforms how the story plays out. If just concerned with theme relation to story and execution, Letter Never Sent always felt more complete. Just lacked historical reputation on the same level of something Orson Welles has done.

As far as making the personal epic goes, Kalatozov has the luxury of exuberant location with Siberia to play with. Unlike other travelogue films, there is less interest here in allowing the scenery change from good to bad be the major sun dial in the dramatic exposition of the characters. Things for the characters get worse and the climate gets too frosty to handle. Peter Weir’s recent work, The Way Back is a roll out of gradual scenery change positioned very keenly the characters triumph over mother nature. If weather has an interest in Letter Never Sent, the tonal change is black and white and how desperate the characters become when engulfed with chilling snow. Just the major dramatic anchor for this is the method of the swooping camera tricks blending with the action of the characters so much you lose sense of who they are and how they really feel. Loss of their sense parlays with the lack of their own resolve to continue on. Unlike The Way Back, there is no real optimism for protagonist. No beacon of filmmaking light which allows the audience to see a way through the madness of impossible terrain and believe, somehow, they will find a way. Kalatozov has to find a way to make intrigue out of a hopeless situation that does more than the story only getting dimmer as it goes along. For all his filmmaker skill, there has to be an exuberance to film the voyage into nothingness.

Considering there is little technical story after the characters introduce themselves, the situation, and the conflict, the template of the film has a little of an open book feel to it. For a visual artist, the chance to fill in the dramatic detail with visual keys to extend out the simple nature of the story must be attractive. Modern filmmaker Tarsem Singh recently said in his exploration for new projects he has rejected scripts that were too well written since they left little visual room for him. He spoke about how he enjoyed the chance to take stories which seem half complete and make them his own. I don’t know the biographical details about Letter Never Sent. The production situation may have been more sketched out than Tarsem’s own feelings. I kind of doubt it. The film is too impressionistic and reflexive with letting loose on visualization marks and inklings it is likely Kalatozov found himself making a film where work in the editing room started early and continued on during the filmmaking since the film thrives at a uniquely rhythmic pulse. Even if the guess isn’t the historical case, it’s the easy imaginative answer for a filmmaker very much home to one of the Soviet Union’s best filmmakers.

My Week with Marilyn

(dir. Simon Curtis)

Arguably no film star has as much fame and aura surrounding her than Marilyn Monroe. She had defining physical characteristics matched with an unforgettable charm and magnetism. And this is talking about is the fame portion of her life. Buried beneath this is a woman full of troubling deficiencies and a personality complex too deep to even consider reining in with simple explanation. In My Week With Marilyn, a matter of fact biography about Monroe at her height, Laurence Olivier tries to sum up the quintessential emptiness which many could (and still cannot) define. The words (not copied here) relay to her lack of self and lack of ability to really love herself. It alludes to all the emptiness that comes when talent cannot find any measure of happiness within. Fine. Thankfully, the film has a lot more detail than this.

The film opened last year to fanfare for Michelle Williams and notes over her performance of Marilyn Monroe. When it came to award season, comment about the performance swept anything. The slanted commentary isn’t without purpose.  Unknown to me, this is the first film to take serious interest in just trying to gain a full semblance of personality. Before, movies tended to focus on the caricature features Monroe made famous with strong hints at deeper troubles. The film also is better for not having a sweeping story which goes from beginning til end of her life. For me, the bigger biographical problem is the full story biographies tend to rely on plot too much and go beyond their means. The shortness of film tends to be better for composed looks at specific detail nuances. My Week with Marilyn achieves this since the headline plot is that a 20-some year old youth spends a week with the movie star, Marilyn Monroe, and falls in love. The easiness of the plot is a deceptive invention into really learning about Monroe.

Relaying the story from a hopelessly well doing and naive young man, the idea is that an impartial viewer of Marilyn is someone who can really see beyond the false headlines. This measure is true in how the film proposes she had too many handlers pushing her in every direction for their own sensibilities. Marilyn’s own sensitive ego allows for the stringing along, but she is also keenly aware of her position and able to comment on it with insightful precision. The failing point is inability to really stand up for herself. In this young man, at least for a little while, she has an ally in someone who only wants her to be herself. Our young protagonist is only an assistant on a movie to Laurence Olivier and he is pushed into her care because Olivier needs Monroe to be less volatile on set. Olivier also hopes him to be a spy so he can figure out the method to win her favor because he intends to bed her. The running dynamic in the film is the politics of what happens on a film set.

Based on a true story and documented in diary that was eventually published in the 1990s, My Week with Marilyn is a travelogue through the events of a timeless week between a simple movie staffer and a famous actress. Simon Curtis grounds the story enough to keep it to the smaller details of what happened. The only thing bordering on movie injected plot is a sideline potential romance that happens with another staffer (played generally enough by Emma Watson), the potential romance is only there so it can be dismissed and show how much our young protagonist is taken by Monroe’s vibrancy. No idea if the this story is true. Question isn’t a concern since it stands the outer levels. The film quickly directs itself to the back and forth game Marilyn plays with herself in showboating the famous person people know and the one who continually struggles in the darkened corners of her life.

The psychological interest is commendable. However, given the structure of pivoting the story from the fascination of a young fan, the film is pivoting a lot of the film on the effect of memory and intrigue into how well Williams plays Monroe. In essence, the story is a fan living out a dream week with his favorite actress and basking in her beauty along with her problems. The enchantment she holds over him does not get him to fall out of love during any troubling point. The audience, most removed from remembering the actress during her day, are supposed to marvel at an uncanny portrayal of Monroe and the effect she had on people. Unlike Frank Langella’s dubious portrayal of Richard Nixon as a domineering figure in Frost/Nixon, Williams understands her subject’s character defects a lot more. Misgiving is in asking for the impossible in being as physically alluring as Monroe was. She just does not have it. The filmmakers help themselves a little by portraying a lot of Monroe’s downcast personal problems, but the film wants the audience to coincide those feelings with enthrallment over her beauty and magnetic charm.

My Week with Marilyn is what I would like to a single ingredient film. The work depends on whether it gets the unique nuances of Marilyn Monroe. For the most part, the film is fine. Williams has been successful in films before but now is trying to occupy an entire story. In our age, Robert Duvall is the actor best suited to minimalist films where his performance could be everything. It’s a tall order to expect here. And because the film is about an iconic figure, the role has more documented information than the standard fiction one. Allows the actor both more detail to help the performance but more expectation to live up to. Val Kilmer lived up my best imagination of what an actor could do to be Jim Morrison. Confused Oliver Stone enough that during audio recordings of songs by the Doors, the director could not differentiate if the singer or the actor were singing. Michelle Williams does about half the job and not the other half. It’s a good film. I just wonder if when the next ambitious Marilyn Monroe biography is made, I wonder how much I will be compelled to remember My Week with Marilyn and whether or not this nameless future film lived up to its better ideals. Could be this forgettable.

Jane Eyre

(dir. Cary Fukunaga)

The least exciting idea is another adaptation of Jane Eyre would be forthcoming. Not only is the history of classical novels on film worn most sense of use, but Jane Eyre has already bypassed Hollywood romanticizing and saw its norm become hallmarked by PBS production of what a small budget can entail when the look of the film screams “made for television movie.” All qualities aside (mainly due to some actors), the films aim to just project a straight interpretation of the novel in condensed fashion. The principle belief is that the novel should be enshrined and any corresponding film should be just a support to lift up whatever the interpreter believes is the best qualities of the original work. Since the novels are best as just being novels, the hope does not merit much and compelling cinema is typically lost. A bevy of films from a number of talented filmmaker have tried to curb stale expectations. Not new to the party is a fascinating interpretation of Jane Eyre by relative newcomer, filmmaker Cary Fukunaga.

The principle evolution in the film is the structure of the story. Instead of slot the story into a chronological coming-of-age story (typical for classical novels of the period), the film immediately breaks up the story by varying the order of what scenes are shown. No random order, the realignment is aimed to better project the emotional states in the story. The film begins with Jane Eyre in desperate measure when she is wandering through an endless series of meadows. Drenched down by rain, her body begins to give out. A passing by carriage spots her and the people inside come to assist. As they take her home and supply her with food, things become apparent she is not typically poor. A curious story must be the reason why she ended up in the straits they found her. With use of various first person perspectives, the film begins to take on a multi-layered drive to lay credence to an emotional history for young Jane.

During the hysterics of Jane’s physical rebuilding, the film allows her to remember childhood moments of estrangement from an overbearing aunt and heartbreak at an orphanage when a fellow classmate died in her arms. The friendly strangers are asking her about where she came from and all her emotions can circumference is blips of painful memories. Instead of extend out these early scenes, they are capsized in searing emotional moments. The first dramatic tone the film establishes is not to doll the emotions but find ways to make the darker themes more subjective. In classical films, implied emotions in characters exist around the exterior of a tone in the story that is more focused on exhibiting realism of day-to-day life during the time period. By choosing not get cozy with a standard realism code, Jane Eyre establishes its filmmaking as more workable for some intrinsic themes in the novel.

I have always believed too many historical films relied on historical filmmaking methods to align emotions with a dumb sense of what history would have felt like. When Francois Truffaut imagined how a film about Jesus Christ would look like, he famously opined how it would be need to be black-and-white film since that is what color a film back then would have been made of. Other filmmakers have followed in similar assumption by steadying all camera work and keeping certain realism methods flow throughout the films. Jane Eyre continuously changes the emotional juxtaposition of the scenes by switching from handheld cameras to hybrid dolly shots that speed up the pace of the action but feel like a character in a hallucinatory state. Instead of try to just be experimental all around, the approach is more economical. The better result is a film that borders more on an Ingmar Bergman intensity instead of a Jane Austen comfortable.

But abandoning a linear narrative also keeps the story from general heroic angles. A trend of literature in England at this time was to write books that were critical of certain social patterns but also equip the story with plot requirements of a romance and coming-of-age mentality. From Dickens to Austen, tracking a character through evolutions and seeing their point of personal completion made for more translatable narrative. By breaking up the story into sections and most notably diminishing Jane Eyre’s early years, the film wants the viewer to see story as less heroic and more of a meddling into a psychological condition. Every stage of her life is broken into moments of scars. The depth of character comes from how the film depicts the moments and sequesters the emotions to darker corners. Even though the original novel played against romantic archetypes than what Jane Austen ever dared to, the final scene of Eyre returning to a disfigured Mr. Rochester has a horrific aspect to it in this film.

In the film, the relationship between Eyre and Rochester is a memory. Eyre is still lingering with the kind people who have taken her in and she is trying to convince them she has found peace in her new setting, but time and isolation allows the memories of what happened to come roaring back. The film digs a trail to her past by showing how coming to work for Mr. Rochester as a tutor after experience with her aunt and the orphanage was almost a godsend. At first Eyre is hesitant to open herself up to Mr. Rochester. He’s smitten by her unique gift for gab, but the audience understands her history has to make her shy about trusting anyone. The portrayal of Mr. Rochester leans on his intimidating presence and failure to be fully welcoming or clear in his personal intentions to Eyre. Unexpected warmth endears Eyre to Rochester when she saves him from a fire. Still, they share tumultuous conflicts and betrayals of trust when past secrets come roaring back. The relationship is antagonistic to the cogs of film romance.

The principle development for Eyre during this tempestuous engagement is that she develops a sense of independence and becoming of herself. The courtship between the two is very short on screen, but Eyre imagines a future with Rochester and holds firm to the idea of being with him. Saving his life and being a tutor/role model to the children of the house feels like things she has accomplished and will continue to do. An unruly lie drives her to leave Rochester and flee a dream. The development of a new menial life seems to be a nice change of pace. Eyre tries to convince her relations she is at full peace in her surroundings. Still, her memories of Rochester continue to haunt. Days look lazy and even a new teaching job for local children isn’t enough. When someone tries to propel a romantic relationship with Eyre, the feeling drives her to search out Rochester again. Memories have clouded the peace.

Using modes of editing that are essential to cinema, Jane Eyre structures a feeling of loss and emptiness around blips of memories. The new narrative bend to this story allows it to be perfectly housed in a new environment. Film has to methods to curtail the depths of detail and length in novels. An excellent example is the experimental Passages From Finnegan’s Wake (1966). Adapting James Joyce’s impossible last novel, the film curtails scope issues by structuring the film to be about some elements of the novel. At the same time, a film adaptation was made for Ulysses. Seemingly an easier adaptation possibility (at least for a Joyce work), the film tried unsuccessfully to portray the entire story. All it did was take an excellently deft novel and make it into a simple moral work. Even the implied morality from the film hardly feels existent in the novel. A full fabrication.

The revolution around the themes of the film is found in the back-and-forth moments in the story. Certain relations and character developments are given traditional measure to be drawn out. Left out conclusions and implications of tense scenarios do not find realization until the history is enlightened upon. Instead of make missing details any real bigger clue, the film seems to leave out details just so it can get to a few transcendent scenes at the end when all the emotions of the film come to a head. After Eyre is left soulfully lost and returns to Rochester, she learns his brutal fate in a fire. Still alive, Rochester suffers from burning and disfigurement of vision. Our emotional conclusion is when she finds him and simply caresses his face, hands and motions her body next to him. He understands who she is calls out her name. The film has reached climax.

Even complimented by a structure that understands how to compact a bigger story, the film does need other reasons to instill belief in the characters and story. The main benefit of the wonderful sub settings of the film is the two lead actors, Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender. Playing Eyre and Mr. Rochester respectively, the two combine to paint a thorough depiction of torn love erupting from sequestered surroundings. With the aid of close camera proximity, the performance of Wasikowska focuses on her intent focus and diligence. Part of her coming to independence is her social opening up and the muscles in her face beginning to blossom in some variation. Fassbender is allowed to do more generics because he moves from stern overseer to smitten gentleman and adds his dose of nuance by going into a performance of regret. Nothing is wrong the performance, but the camera only really knows Wasikowska’s Eyre. She is the actor who goes through every stage and ends her performance in the poetically unexplainable when we wonder what her character must be feeling when she is reunited with Rochester under regrettable circumstances.

It’s hard to make more out of this film. Mia Wasikowska is a talent on the rise and while she has star potential, she isn’t giving herself up to cheap roles to make a brand name yet. The director, Cary Fukunaga, had little reel history before and there is little way to forecast his future. Michael Fassbender is making his acting name in better performances and will continue to be spotlighted when he isn’t detouring for summer blockbuster movies. However, if more movies continue to take fragmented approaches to classic novels like this Jane Eyre does, a healthy tradition could be in the making. This isn’t the first film to do it, but it was a spotlight work in American release this year. A trend can find almost any tide to cast itself from. Here’s me more hoping adaptations get this thoughtful and adventurous with their endeavors.

Miral

(dir. Julian Schnabel)

A level of expectation went into what Julian Schnabel would do when he announced his intentions to make a film about the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Past efforts and his incline of ratcheting up the filmmaking decibel to interrogate truth of difficult subject matter seemed to indicate personality and controversy may come to a head if Schnabel sight-lined a tenuous issue (like the strained Middle East dilemma) with the right amount of fervor. Time progressed after the announcement and when it came for Miral to finally debut, the film tracked up enough production mud to get delayed a few times and stunt momentum for any headlining world cinema controversy. The film also did something more off putting and disenchanting by skirting most controversial issues and going more down the social middle of the road with its story.

The good news is that there is much merit in what Schnabel does. Miral, an adaption of a novel by the same name from Rula Jebreal, is a fictional story about a historical situation of philanthropist Hindi Hussein and the results of her efforts in trying to create a school haven that would allow Palestinian girls to grow up in Israel without feeling any second class citizenry that came with the creation of Israel and disjointing of land around Jerusalem from locals nationalities already living there, namely the Palestinians. Because Hindi was a successful politician in swaying Israeli political interest, she maintained peace at her school for years. The story is history of characters involved with the school and how things came to a breaking point when Palestinian protests pushed for independence and a girl from Hindi’s school put both her family’s interest and the school’s by joining in on the political crusade.

The narrative of the story has a novel feeling of backtracking the history of the school and the main figure of Miral from the respective history of different characters and how their dramas shaped the events that revolve around later portions of the film. At the beginning Hindi Hussein finds herself accidentally helping out orphaned children. Subsequently, her housing means allows for a floodgate of more orphaned children. The accident turns into a cause. Years later, the narrative gets to know Miral’s mother and her unlikely chance of meeting her father while in prison. The story bends even more by telling how Miral got her namesake (named after a common flower on the side of the road) and how she grew to adapt Hindi as a second mother after her biological mother ended her life. The suicide does not have an immediate plot necessity to helping understand Miral herself, but it underpins many social dwellings. Many facts in the story have a sweeping curiosity that have no easy plot peg to fit into.

The eventual moral discussion is framed around the struggle for independence and acceptance of compromise by protesting Palestinians. For many Palestinians, it is not enough. The film registers their complaints on the faintest level. It directs the focus through Miral and the school and their safer desire to find peace. There is insuniation that Hindi wants peace but she also wants her school to be protected. When the agreement means that only 22% of the disputed land will be recovered, Hindi seems happy to go to her grave with that achievement. The dismal reality (supplied in a footnote) is that Israelis still have not given Palestinians even that, but the belief it will happen will be lasting solace for Hindi’s efforts. The nice notion of a contained independence being given a level of credence is controversial because it bow ties an enormous and ongoing argument with deep history into a smaller struggle. If I was going to rate Miral’s political deft, the film would flunk. However, I believe the film has an interesting level of apolitical morality and finds some interesting (and relevant) emotional strands by trying to be something else.

There is no reason to think Julian Schnabel short changes the novel. The slim work gets consistent criticism for being light on political issues, but what this story has going for it is an air of authenticity into a sidebar historical issue. As a biography of Miral until her early adulthood, the film is a tracking of how she was able to get the means to leave Israel and study with a full scholarship in Italy. The thanks is to Hindi Hussein and her school, but since both had unique ways of both coming into existence and finding each other, the narrative relies on anecdotal quirks to detail how both could evolve in the same universe. Unlike Slumdog Millionaire (2008), the quirky facts are not friendly for a clever plot construction. They just exist and conclusion does not find most stories or characters in the film. The only story in Miral with solid beginning and end is Hindi Hussein herself. Whatever size her school has in the region’s bigger political picture, the validation of doing what she did is still a rational dramatic stronghold. The result is the creation of a memorial work in the midst of a controversy.

An intimidating road to travel is to successfully navigate a difficult subject that has too many ends to cover. Topics and subjects have intimidated artists in various fields before. It does not even have to be an unresolved situation. Stanley Kubrick abandoned Aryan Papers and his dream of ever making a Holocaust picture when he realized no work was going to speak for the millions who died. The fear is trying to avoid short sighted moralizing that does not register with people who have experience with the event. The history of Hollywood and commercial art relying on fictional narratives has almost expunged film from getting any benefit of a doubt. Exceptions exist, and Miral gets a plus because Rula Jebreal based the character of Miral on her own life. Hindi Hussein was her real mentor and the path they took together grew into a mother-daughter relationship. Since Jebreal wrote the screenplay, the film is kept biographical.

There are some unique prisms to Miral. Rula Jebreal is acting on Hindi Hussein’s account to include the entire history of the school in her own biographical work, but she is also acting on author-subject accord to make the relationship between the writer and the subject feel interconnected in ways that cannot be rationed down to a formula. The simulation is metaphysical because the reader/viewer is thinking about processes in-and-out of the work, but specifically, the story shows an ongoing history of semi-political works that understand the inability to address full topics so compress their focus to facts more interpersonal to characters in history. The greatest biography of the 20th century was also one of the most compelling accounts of the Spanish Civil War, The Forging of a Rebel. Its author, Arturo Barea, was mainly re-telling his life but his identity to have a life became forged in the war. The creation of an identity is what became the main focus of the enormous book. Instead of self experiences, Miral road maps a theoretical history around the protagonist’s parameters of life to show how her school and other people in her life were a lead in to finding her identity through the Israeli/Palestinian situation.

Perceived political deft of a subject is based on a version of hindsight intelligence. Since the abject commentator has every published account to go on, they have the resources to say how a work is limited in its vision. The clemency for a work like Miral is that it makes a shrine for Hindi Hussein and allocates ideas of her beliefs and hopes. She is a historical figure who lived a full life within the struggle. Her dying hopes may come off as naive in greater schemes, but the film pays higher debt to her cause by hunkering down with her basic hopes and dreams when she was still alive. As much as the second guesser wants to point out limitations in her beliefs, they cannot put themselves in her day-to-day reality of what she felt was attainable and important progress between Palestinians and Israelis. Her entire life is moderating on give-and-take between both sides so the idea she could feel positive thoughts over a conservative settlement isn’t too surprising.  Since political notions are created by outside forces and make up imaginary narratives about a situation, the film’s measured political commentary goes back to its biographical focus.

Last but not least, the director needs to be regarded. Julian Schnabel is continuing on a path with few doubts. So far in his career, he is trademarking his approach with veracity over style engagement. Isn’t to say he can’t delve into styles, but he isn’t genre conscious like other filmmakers. Whatever moods and tempos Schnabel warms to, they seem to exist on an individual basis of what he thinks what will just help the emotions in a scene. Other structures and considerations seem to be damned. In Miral, a consistent production technique is to over saturate the light. The locale is Middle East so brighter scenes inhabit the visual senses even more. A moderate cliche is that light is abundant in happier scenes while light is dimmer in tenser scenes. It’s an easy mood swing. Difference with Schnabel is he distils so much light radiation onto the film in many ways that the lighting feels like a veneer on the surface of something larger. In the “film is most like painting” argument, Schnabel’s predisposition to lighting seems to make it qualify here.

The other overwhelming technical stroke is the precision of the compositional storytelling. For a film that travels over 30 years of story, the running time is under two hours. Instead of laboring through a methodical tone, Schnabel minimizes the amount of scenes and scenery the audience gets to see. After a while, it becomes evident the film wants locations and people to stand out in the audience’s mind. No physical alteration to adjust their reality and the school is the only place consistently shown throughout the film, but Schnabel tries to make visual cues the focal point. For a travelogue story, it reduces the identity of Miral’s mother to a broken person who has little technical characterization and existed for the specifically traumatic moments in her life. The thematic link harkens back to Miral’s third and first-person narrative of her life. For moments she cannot specify, Rula Jebreal just elaborates on the telling parts for the story. Schnabel assists by making the scenes emotionally traumatic and fitting the disjointed narrative into an almost seamless memory.

Julian Schnabel is continuing to separate himself. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) felt like a full mind meld of Schnabel’s realism potential from before. Some filmmakers sees decibel levels to push their filmmaking up to and call every new notch progression. Schnabel fully pulls back in his long awaited follow up. The result is not only fascinating history, but it is also a success in revamping my expectation levels. I saw visions of images to come after Diving Bell and now I see the same for Miral. Before one tries to catch up to Schnabel and play Nostradamus, all I hope is that his willing audience gets to see his next effort sooner instead of later.