Cinema

David Denby didn’t like “Sicko” very much. In the New Yorker, he writes:

“Hauling off seriously ill people to a military base where they won’t receive treatment is a dumb prank.”

Okay – I’m not the biggest Michael Moore fan in the world, and I can see how this might rub some people the wrong way.

“Why not tell us what really happened on the trip – for instance, what part Cuban officials played in receiving the American patients?”

Actually, that might not be a bad idea.

“Moore winds up treating the audience the same way that, he says, powerful people treat the weak in America – as dopes easily satisfied with fairy tales and bland reassurances.”

Seems harsh – this is clearly supposed to be a piece of entertaining propaganda – but, again, I can see the point.

“A shift to the left, or, at least, to the center, has overtaken Michael Moore, yielding an irony more striking than any he turns up: the changes in political consciousness that Moore himself has helped produce have rendered his latest film almost superfluous.”

Er, how’s that again? In polls, a majority are in favor of universal health care, so there’s no need to build grass-roots pressure anymore? Same for getting out of Iraq, I suppose.

Over the next five days, the Guardian is publishing their list of the top 1000 films ever , in alphabetical order. Naturally, being the Guardian, they manage to screw up before getting past “A” through the shocking omission of All About Eve , without which no such list can be taken seriously. I’m sure our commenters will spot other similar outrages as the week unfolds.

The Hollywood Reporter, uh, reports:

Haitian auteur Raoul Peck will direct “Karl Marx,” tracing the young adventures of the German philosopher and revolutionary, producer Jacques Bidou said Thursday.

The picture will cover the period 1830-1848, including Marx’s time in Paris before being expelled to Brussels and culminating with the publication of the Communist Manifesto. “Marx was considered a young genius at the time, but it was also a period marked by the birth of a great movement in thinking,” Bidou said.

The story also will encompass Marx’s love for his aristocratic wife Jenny von Westphalen, and his friendship with Friedrich Engels, with whom he co-authored the Manifesto.

No cast is yet attached, but Bidou said the principal characters will necessarily be young….

Well, yes, that is probably true, given that Marx was 12 years old in 1830.
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Went to see Shane Meadows’s much-hyped-by-the-critics This is England last night. What a piss-poor film it is. Poorly acted, poorly scripted, and hardly redeemed by some really clunking cinematography. The film would be kind of ok as a drama offering on BBC2 (or BBC4) but insightful socio-historical document it isn’t. The action all takes place on a bog-standard depressing-concrete housing estate with the standard row of depressing-concrete shops (plus free-standing Pakistani newsagents) and—for those who don’t know—gravitates around the tensions within early-80s skinhead culture between two-tone ska fans and racist knuckleheads. Young boy with father-killed-in-the-Falklands (Shaun) gravitates to the cool(ish) multiracial ska crowd but then becomes seduced by boastful-but-insecure racist psychopath Combo, the movie then plods along to its predictable violent “climax”. Thatcher and the Falklands lurk predictably in the background. Redeeming features? The National Front meeting in the pub isn’t badly observed, but, in truth, it can’t have been all that hard to set up a little cameo involving dopey skinheads, tatooed bikers and fat Nazis in bad suits. TiE goes a long way to showing that, just so long as you make a film with a certain kind of subject matter, critics will give you a good write-up. Sit at home and watch old episodes of Shameless or rent a copy of La Haine : both are better acted and both offer more insight into their subject-matters than This is England.

There’s been just about nothing in the Anglophone media about the controversy surrounding Volker Schlöndorff’s new film Strajk: die Heldin von Danzig which deals with the birth of Poland’s Solidarity movement and is loosely based on the role of Anna Walentynowicz in the union. Walentynowicz is outraged at Schlöndorff’s movie which portrays her as illiterate and the shipyard workers as, among other things, hard drinkers. She’s threatening legal action. There’s some coverage here , here and here . I’d be interested to read comments from Polish or German readers about how the row is being reported in those countries.

A bemused follow-up to my Frankenstein post. Here’s what you get tangled in, trying to edit this stuff into shape (plus YouTube goodies!). [click to continue…]

Last night Belle and I watched a classic war flick – 12 O’Clock High [wikipedia], with Gregory Peck as the stoical General Savage. It contains extensive and rather impressive real combat footage: formations of flying fortresses vs. German fighters with lots of planes going down in smoke and flames and frantic little stick figures trying to bail out safely, with apparently mixed results. Then dropping of bombs and large explosions. It suddenly struck me that it’s sort of weird to use real war footage in Hollywood entertainments.

I flew into Prague a couple of days ago; before boarding my flight, I spent a little time in the Dulles Borders browsing. I was a bit surprised to see a big display in the impulse buy area beside the cash register for “Snakes on a Plane.” Seems like a fairly odd marketing strategy to me – I don’t imagine that it’s likely to be the kind of movie that many people would want to watch on a plane, or even buy on the spur of the moment just before getting on a plane. The fun of watching people trying to deal with poisonous snakes in a confined space would pall quite quickly, I imagine, if you were in that confined space while watching it. I asked the asst. manager at the register how many he’d sold; he said none so far, but it was the first day it was on display. Not that I have any great wisdom to impart on this or anything, but just thought it was a little odd.

I’ve just finished watching Das Leben der Anderen, which I was given on DVD for Christmas. It was a bit of a struggle, linguistically, and I missed a fair bit of dialogue, but it is a very powerful film which I strongly recommend. The setting is East Berlin in 1984 and the plot concerns the Stasi surveillance of a playwright and his lover. I won’t post more in the way of spoilers but I’ll just say that the movie gives a very strong impression of what it must be like to live in a police state and of the corrupting effects of dictatorship on watchers and those they watch. I had a bit of a disagreement with Tyler Cowen recently about the former GDR, when he took issue with me for saying:

the real problem with East Germany was not its comparative level of economic development or the level of health care its citizens could receive (rather good, actually). It was the fact that it was a police state where people were denied the basic liberties.

I have to say that’s an opinion that has been reinforced by the film: a (far) worse choice of fruit and vegetables is as nothing to the corrosive effects on the soul of a political tyranny. The film also constitutes a very concrete rebuttal of Volokh guest blogger Fernando Tesón’s strange polemic against political art . Art can contribute to political understanding by making vivid to people what a state of affairs is like in a way that no mere enumeration of facts can. The level of surveillance that citizens of the GDR were subject to is shocking, but it takes art to depict the effect of such a system on their inner lives.

Shopping with a 5-year old on one arm, 2-year old on the other, saw a sale VCD of “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas”, snagged it (don’t ask with what appendage). When we got home I was surprised to discover it was a minimal 1992 production, with Walter Matthau narrating. Walter Matthau as Cindy Lou Who is a hoot. Animation-wise, it’s just barely. Mostly just shots of the original Seuss illustrations with eyes that roll and horns that toot and a cut-out grinch who creeps along to a snow-crunching sound. (But done tastefully and appreciatively, as cut-out grinches go.) It comes packaged with a similarly minimal “If I Ran The Zoo” narrated by some kid who does sound as though he gets Gerald McGrew’s motivation. I sort of like this style. Camera-crawls over a kid’s book, with good voice-over. There’s a lot to love in the plain old Seuss drawings. Of course, it’s a bit hard to keep Karloff out of the back of your head. But I think my scaredy 5-year old and 2-year old might not be quite ready for the classic 1966 version – superior though it unquestionably is. Walter Matthau completists can get this strange version from Amazon. (I mean if you are that sort of person, you’ve already watched A New Leaf to death and are ready to turn over a new leaf. If they’d gotten Elaine May to be Cindy, that would have been funny.)

A few months ago I praised Kim Deitch – as well I should. I didn’t mention at the time that his dad, Gene Deitch, is no slouch either. (I guess that must be why they gave him an Oscar, so maybe my help here is not needed.) And not just that: on Gene Deitch’s website you can listen to the original John Lee Hooker recordings he made long, long ago.

I mention Deitch because I notice that Amazon just put a bunch of Scholastic DVD’s for kids on sale (we parents watch out for such things). And the pick of the litter is Where the Wild Things Are; a bunch of Sendak stories, directed and produced by Deitch. And you get Peter “PDQ Bach” Schickele providing some music and narration. And Carole King singing songs we remember: “Pierre”, “One Was Johnny”, “Alligators All Around”, “The Ballad of Chicken Soup”. (You can watch them all on YouTube.) Best of all is “In the Night Kitchen”. It tripped out my 2-year old. And, of course, “Where The Wild Things Are”.