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Ray & Liz (2018)
Powerful and Disturbing
I've seen many films about the lives of the British working class, ranging from "A Taste Honey" to "Vera Drake." They generally show people with hard lives, who are nevertheless making the best of things and trying to do what's right.
This isn't one of those films. The family here is totally dysfunctional and the parents seen to have no interest in their children at all. There's no money to put in the electric meter but plenty of money for a large stash of booze. There are some funny moments, such as when the two boys (about 8 and 14) play a trick on their stupified father one morning. But a more typical example of daily life is when the older boy is leaving the house one day. His mother has no interest in what he's doing or where he's going, but just wants to know if he's coming home that night.
The crisis in the plot happens on Guy Fawkes Night, November 5th, when the younger boy goes to a bonfire with his friend (again with no apparent knowledge or interest in his activities by his parents), then decides to sleeps outdoors in a shed and nearly dies from the cold. He's rescued by his friend's mother, and when his parents see him playing in the park with the friend the next day, their only comment is, "The coppers are looking for you."
Ultimately his parents are found unfit and the younger boy is placed in a foster home. The father's main concern is that, with one child gone, they lose 25 quid from their housing allowance. When the teenager is told about his brother's placement, his only question to the officers is if he can go to a foster home too. This film is semi-autobiographical, and that teenager was the filmmaker himself.
The plot of Ray & Liz is a string of incidents rather than a highly structured whole. It starts with the father, elderly and alone, living in a single room, spending his pension on booze and all his time drinking. The rest of the story is a flashback from there, except at the very end when the mother comes to visit him -- to borrow money.
This is a powerful story, but don't watch it expecting a happy ending.
Capharnaüm (2018)
Deserves More Oscar Nominations
As many reviewers have said, this film is a masterpiece. I saw it in January at the Film Forum in NYC, and at the end, nobody clapped -- I think we were too numbed by the power and rawness of the story to applaud it as if it were "entertainment."
Some have criticized the structure as somewhat "canned." The plot begins as a courtroom drama with most of the events in flashbacks (perhaps to assure the viewer at the outset that everyone did survive). Also, everything turns out well at the end for the three major characters. But I think some kind of positive outcome was mandatory after such an overwhelming and realistic story.
This film is nominated for Best Foreign Film, but it should also have been nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Director. Awhile back I saw Roma and until now considered it the best film of the year. Not anymore.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
A collection of short stories, many very good, but most of them tragic
As several people have mentioned, this is an anthology of short stories about the old West, with no character or plot continuity among them. Some of them are strikingly good, but the great majority, particularly the second-to-the-last one about a wagon train, also have sad or tragic endings. Only the one about panning for gold, with Tom Waits as the main character, can truly be said to end happily. I realize a happy ending is a cliche and not necessarily required in a movie, but an anthology of stories, almost all of them tragic, left me feeling impressed, but rather bleak.
Babylon Berlin (2017)
Easy to Get Rid of the Dubbing if You Prefer That
Babylon Berlin is perhaps the best thriller I have ever seen, and there's no need to duplicate all the rapturous praise everyone else has given. But the worst CRITICISM I see of the series here is that the German dialogue is dubbed into English rather than subtitled. Some people have given it low ratings just because of that.
But that's completely silly. Europeans often prefer dubbing, because people can listen faster than they can read, so dubbing can give you a more accurate picture of what's being said. Subtitles inevitably show you only a sampling of the actual words being said.
But if you prefer subtitles, it's easy to change the dubbing. Click on the little gear at the bottom of the screen, turn on the English subtitles, and turn the dialogue from dubbed English back to the original German. Problem solved.
The Place Beyond the Pines (2012)
Wonderful and Strange
I liked this movie a lot (and unlike some here, didn't think it was too long). But I'm surprised no one else has pointed out what I thought was the most startling thing in the plot: Derek Cianfrance kills off his star partway through then makes the killer the new hero, exactly the way Alfred Hitchcock did in Psycho.
As I realized this watching the movie last night, I wondered if I was the first person to notice it. Then I looked up the reviews in the New York Times and saw that Ryan Gosling had hinted at it himself ("Myth Making on Motorcycles" 3/22/13):
"I never felt more like Janet Leigh in my life," Ryan Gosling said with his best straight face.
The filmmaker Derek Cianfrance, who has known Mr. Gosling for seven years and directed him in two films, chimed in, "You have a nice figure, like she does."
Mr. Gosling replied: "The hair. That's why I went platinum."
The Kid (1921)
I've always hated Chaplin
I'm a Keaton fan. To me, Charlie Chaplin has always meant the forced, artificial sentimentality of City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator, or the unfunny (and borderline disturbing) Monsieur Verdoux.
But I never saw any of Chaplin's earlier films, so I decided to give him another chance at the week-long showing of The Circus at New York's Film Forum, and I was surprised that I liked it. I was impressed that he made it through a movie without pouring on the corn syrup, so I decided to give The Kid a try (partly because I'd never seen a performance by Jackie Coogan -- Uncle Fester in the Addams Family doesn't count).
And I was blown away. This film is a masterpiece, showing that the early Chaplin could combine slapstick comedy, drama, and an appropriate level of sentimentality to devastating effect. And Coogan was astonishing -- not the typical child-actor, but at least an equal partner with Chaplin in the picture, despite his age.
It's a pity Chaplin later degenerated into sentimental crap, but if the treacle of his later films makes you gag, give this one a try. I can't believe I almost didn't.
How Green Was My Valley (1941)
Don't bother with this movie if you've read the book
I'm sure this is a very fine movie for people coming to the story for the first time, but those of us who have read and enjoyed How Green Was My Valley in book form will find the movie so superficial that it's hardly worth it. As lewis-51 points out in his review, the movie skims the various aspects of the plot, leaving many of them a mystery. As a single example, the movie reveals that Huw Morgan decided to join his father in the coal mine rather than becoming a solicitor, but there's no obvious reason for that, and the sight of what looks like an eight-year-old Roddy McDowell going off to work with grown men is absurd-looking.
The book explains that, by this point, Huw has grown to his mid-teens, had become a VERY good boxer, and had beaten up the sadistic teacher who tormented Welsh children at his school. The school authorities pardoned him for that, but he was later expelled from school when he saw the same teacher tormenting another Welsh child and beat him up again -- so savagely that he nearly killed him. Thus, Huw's decision to join his father in the coal mine was partly because continuing at school was no longer an option for him, and when he did so, he was old enough to do such work.
The book gives the same comprehensive detail for many of the other areas barely skimmed in the movie, including union/management issues in the mines, the lives and fates of the various brothers, Huw's love for his brother's widow, Dai Bando's blindness, and many other areas. Using Roddy McDowell as the only actor playing Huw meant that other parts of the book had to be excluded entirely, such as Huw's own romantic adventures in his teens (including his near-lynching after an affair on the mountain with a local girl).
Nowadays, a book as complicated as How Green Was My Valley might have been made into a series of films, the way Peter Jackson did with The Lord of the Rings. Ford did not have that option, but he could have treated a small part of the book in detail, the way Kazan did with East of Eden. Instead, he decided to skim the highlights of this enormously complicated story, and the public apparently liked it. Maybe they never read the book either, but if you loved this movie, you should.
Metropolis (1927)
You've Never Seen Metropolis Before
If you've seen Metropolis before, you only thought you saw it. The newly restored "Complete" Metropolis is, for today's viewers, entirely new and a masterpiece. It's not just the 30 minutes of lost footage discovered in Argentina (although this includes wonderful scenes -- mad inventor Rotwang's shrine to Hel, the woman he loved, the harrowing details of how Freder and Josaphat rescue the children of the workers from the flood, how the angry crowd chases the real Maria and winds up catching the false one, and many, many more).
But perhaps more important is that the discovery of an unbutchered print of Metropolis enabled the restorers to reorganize the existing footage and fill in formerly incomprehensible gaps in the plot, so for the first time we have the film with scenes and titles in their original order. The special effects of Metropolis were always dazzling, but the plot never entirely made sense. Now it does, and the imagery is more spectacular than ever.
The missing reels of Greed may never be found, the original ending of The Magnificent Ambersons may be lost forever, but -- against unbelievable odds -- we now have back the Metropolis that the first audiences saw in 1927 and no one ever saw again. Until now.
Boy A (2007)
Extraordinarily Powerful
This movie is astounding. I was mesmerized throughout, and the performances are so rich that I'll have to see it again to fully appreciate it.
Only the last scene between Jack and his former girlfriend seemed somewhat forced, and perhaps it was added lest the bleakness of the ending be unbearable. But when Jack goes to his favorite Brighton pier to commit suicide after he's been exposed as a child murderer and his new life has disintegrated, it's extremely improbable that on the same pier he'd encounter the girlfriend who dropped him after that exposure, and even more improbable that he'd go ahead and commit suicide after he learned that she still had feelings for him and seemed to be reconsidering their relationship. But I can find no other flaws in this remarkable film, probably the best I've seen this year.
Rafter Romance (1933)
Breezy Romantic Comedy Shows what the Hayes Code Lost
This delightful romantic comedy, unseen since 1959, shows how fresh and funny movies could be in 1933, the last year before the Hayes Production Code clamped down on the film industry and enforced mandatory wholesomeness -- banning anything that might "lower the moral standards of those who see it," including almost any reference to sex.
Many pre-Code films look antiquated and creaky today, as the characters earnestly discuss sex, adultery, divorce, and other Serious Adult Topics. This one plays it all for a farce, with Ginger Rogers and Norman Foster forced by economics to share the same attic apartment in 12-hour shifts, him by day and her by night. They never meet and communicate only through increasingly nasty notes and pranks, coming to despise one another as roommates even as they're unknowingly flirting and falling in love in the outside world.
At the same time, Rogers is trying to fend off the amorous advances of her boss (Robert Benchley), who sees a man entering her room as she's leaving with him and apparently assumes she's turning tricks on the side, while Foster is trying to discourage an elderly millionaire (Laura Hope Crews) who wants to take him away from his sordid life and bring him home with her as her boy-toy. In the final denouement, they're explaining to everyone that they're "not married, just living together," while trying to decide whether they actually love each other or hate each other. (Love, as you might suspect, wins out).