Ideoblog

DIDVD: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)

One of my favorite comedies, directed by Madonna’s husband, with a suitably great soundtrack, and a nice little supporting performance by Sting .

I reflected on why I liked this movie so much. Perhaps because I prefer British over American-style humor. Of course we know that British-style is “dry.” What that means is that it doesn’t always announce itself as such. It is often inherent in the situations. Comedic dialog is likely to be wordplay or allusive. American film humor is often of the ta-dah sort, where you expect a little drum roll to announce that you’re supposed to laugh.

The script is very intelligent without seeming so. It’s got game theory, criminal law, business and a lot of other stuff buried in it (e.g., the scene in which one of the “gang” members compares the threat value of knives and guns). The plot is tight as a drum, with the whole Rube Goldberg contraption coalescing on the heist, and then a brilliant denouement in the ending freeze-frame (a little like the last line of my favorite American comedy, “Some Like it Hot”).

And the plot device inherent in the title (I won’t give away more) is classic.

DIDVD: Hoop Dreams (1994)

This film is about two kids (William Gates and Arthur Agee) growing up playing basketball in Chicago.  It's got high drama, great sports action (it may be one of the best sports films ever made as well as one of the best documentaries) and social commentary.  It's a short three hours.

Many of the characters here are unforgettable -- the mothers, Arthur's struggling father, William's doomed brother, the coaches -- presented in Trollopian depth. 

The filmmakers' art rises to transparency. The viewer is enriched without being manipulated. Michael Moore should be chained to a seat and forced to watch this film until he repents. 

After you watch, read the follow-up story in last summer's WaPo.

DIDVD: Thief

As past readers know, I have an obsession with movies which manifests itself here in two ways. First, in the film archive there are posts on how business is portrayed in film, discussed in my working paper now called Wall Street and Vine.

Second, there's my more recent series of "desert island DVDs" -- lesser known films on all themes that I am instructing you to like. A film that combines both threads is Michael Mann's Thief (IMDB,  Amazon.) Here the Miami Vice man shows his small, independent side, in a gritty little movie set in Chicago -- great acting (including in addition to others named here, James Belushi and Willy Nelson), tight script, jazzy music by Tangerine Dream. But then there's also the anti-capital bias you see in so many films and that I've traced in my work.

Frank (Caan) a professional safecracker not long out of 11 years in prison just wants to ply his craft as an independent businessman.  (Like Charlie Varrick, he's the "last of the independents.") At the beginning of the movie you see him carefully breaking into a safe -- he might as well be a welder or any other workman.  The payoff for this job goes bad and he meets Leo (Robert Prosky in a great performance), a big time hood.  Leo convinces a reluctant Frank to work for him.  For Frank it will be one big payoff so he can settle down with Jessie (Tuesday Weld) and have an ordinary middle class life

But Leo has other plans for Frank.  He wants Frank as his long time employee.  He won't pay off in cash -- he puts Frank into shopping malls as a limited partner with the general as a subchapter S corporation, presumably run by Leo. 

The point is that the capitalists suck you in, and then they own you.  They hook you by making you care about material things.  Here Leo even gets an adopted kid for Frank and Jessie.

Frank doesn't want this.  He says Leo doesn't own his labor -- like the filmmakers, he wants to live in a worker's paradise. But Frank can free himself from the capitalists only by sending his wife and kid away and blowing up all of his possessions.  Then he can kill Leo and his henchman. That takes care of the capitalists.

Like so many other films, notably including The Godfather movies, the filmmaker makes no distinction between criminals and legitimate business people.  Frank is like the Corleone family -- he wants to be "legitimate," even though the film makes clear that "legitimacy" is even worse than crime.

Someday maybe someone will make a gritty little movie about a capitalist trying to make it but getting stymied by government.  Until then, we got to take the filmmakers' great work salted with their particular point of view.

DIDVD: 42 up

42 up is about as close to life as you're going to get on the screen.  Director Michael Apted follows several Brits from childhood into middle age, beginning as an experimental television project at age 7.  The films have been released at seven year intervals beginning with 28.  The hypothesis is that the kids' lives will be determined by their social class, and these effects will be observable by age 7.  Each film includes snippets from past films.  This one has the feel of the final one in the series, with overall observations.  Note that the kids were born in 1956, so 49 up, if it  is to exist, will be in 2005.

You might think that 2 + hours about very ordinary lives, selected randomly, would be boring.  You would be wrong. In fact, you would probably be wrong even if you watched all three films together (I've seen them all, but at wide intervals).

You can get a lot of details from IMDB or the DVD commentary.  A few idiosyncratic observations:

--This is the film that taught me that life is inherently sad -- even the "happy" successful lives are happy at the cost of squeezing out the complexity and doubt.  A wealthy solicitor looks blandly at the camera and says he never wanted to be or do anything else.  If, as Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living, this life at the same time had the most potential and was the most wasted.  Not that the examined life is necessarily a happy one.  One person tastes glory as a jockey, then realizes that being a cabbie is as far as he's going to get.  He might have been better off if he had switched places with the solicitor.

--As if to illustrate the above point about the sadness of even the "happiest" lives, two of the seemingly most successful people refused to participate in 42 up.  One of them was quoted from an earlier episode as saying that confronting the filming  each time made him feel like he was swallowing poison. The other was a documentary filmmaker -- did he know best of all what he would look like as a subject?

--Part of the sadness is what you see in the lives as the episodes unfold, and relate to your own life. The 7-year-olds are most happy, seemingly with endless possibilities ahead.  But the possibilities are shown as constrained not only by class, but also by personality.  One of the kids is quoted as saying he wasn't sure if he wanted to get married, because what if he didn't want to eat cabbage and greens (or some such thing) but his wife wanted him to eat cabbage and greens?  The look on his face is haunting, and stays there through balding and facial hair.

--The film demonstrates the difference between art and reality by exploring the borderland.  The project is as close to reality as you can get in a work of art.  Yet the art is apparent, not only in the obvious editing and narration, but in the participants' self-editing and examination, which they're frank about at the end. Call it the uncertainty principle, applied to film.

--With respect to the film's hypothesis -- yes, class mattered to material success -- but not to happiness. 

DIDVD: Shakespeare-Wallah

Shakespeare-Wallah (IMDB, Amazon) is a very early, and the first widely distributed, Merchant-Ivory production.  It's a film about criss-crossing cultures.  A British Shakespeare troupe, including a mother, father and daughter, have been traveling around India since colonial times. They are slowly losing their once-enthusiastic audiences, replaced by film (the beginnings of Bollywood) and sport. The daughter is romanced by an upper-class playboy whose own culture is also disappearing. 

The misty photography, atmospheric sets, music (by famed director Satyajit Ray), near-perfect script (by Ivory and Jahbvala) capture this passing of the glorious old and entering of the tacky new.  In particular -- a scene in the former wine cellar of a decaying club, with hundreds of empty holes where the wine used to be; the decaying theatres, dressing rooms and dusty roads where the troupe spend their lives.

Why does it seem to be so hard for modern filmmakers to film stories that have a natural dramatic arc, whose events suit the characters and ideas?   

No, you don't see many films like this anymore.  I spent my youth seeing sad British movies of the 60's -- Girl with the Green Eyes, Taste of Honey, Seance on a Wet Afternoon.  They didn't end happily.  Of course, reality doesn't end happily -- we die.  Not that a film -- even a documentary -- can be "real."  But it can tell us useful things about reality. Film companies today must assume that we need always to escape from these things. But why should they?  Rare films like Lost in Translation (which Shakespeare-Wallah reminded me of, with star-crossed lovers lost in a foreign culture) still sell tickets.