Anthony Mackie in “The Hurt Locker.”
1) The Hurt Locker
I admit … that for the first 15 minutes, I believed the movie to be a documentary. I was astounded beyond words to finally grasp that this was a scripted movie, and as such, far and away the finest full length feature on the Iraq war. Spectacularly directed by Kathryn Bigelow, it homes in on three soldiers of Delta Company, whose raw-nerved, adrenaline-rush responsibility is to detonate I.E.D.’s. They are Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) fear-racked and vulnerable, Sgt. J. T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) who adheres to the book and army protocol, and the irrepressible Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), who skillfully defuses a bomb with the dispassion of a virtuoso timpanist. Renner and Mackie play off each other with grudging admiration and tough love. It ranks with Paths of Glory and Platoon as searingly great war movies. The influential NY Film Critics Circle which recently named it Best Film, have sounded the drumbeat of critics' prizes leading up to the Academy Awards on March 7.
In the casting process for The White Ribbon, more than 7,000 children were screened for 18 parts as the schoolchildren . © Films du Losange, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
Tenant farmers threshing on the Baron’s Estate.
Fion Mutert as Sigmund (The Baron’s son).
2) The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band)
I had the privilege of viewing The White Ribbon several months ago and now that it’s released in the U.S. I’ve been chafing at the bit to talk about it to you. Its Austrian director/writer Michael Haneke who was born in 1942, has shaped a masterpiece that could belong in the canon of Ingmar Bergman. Photographed in stunning monochrome by Christian Berger, his poetic use of light is akin to that of cinematographer Sven Nykvist who illuminated many of Bergman’s greatest films. Haneke has spun a mysterious parable about a series of untoward events. The action takes place in a rural, feudal village in Protestant Northern Germany, projecting a timeless quality, with its absence of motor cars, gas and electricity and its reliance on horse-drawn transport and bicycles. The period is 1913-14, just prior to World War I. It is a story of the children and teenagers of a choir run by the village schoolteacher, and their families, the steward, the pastor, the doctor, the midwife, the tenant farmers and a repressive fiefdom dominated by a baron who metes out injustice and corporal punishment. A precursor to a fuehrer and a fascist state, you may well ask? To this point Haneke states: “German fascism is the best-known example of ideological delusion. The grownups of 1933 and 1945 were children in the years prior to World War I. What in people’s upbringing makes them willing to surrender their responsibilities … and makes them hate?” At the top of the pecking order is the Baron (Ulrich Tukur), owner of the land and principal employer. Attached to his estate is a craven Steward (Josef Bierbuchler), his daughter Erna (Janina Fautz) and his sons Georg and Ferdinand (Enno and Theo Trebs).The primary figures in the village are the stern Lutheran Pastor (Burghart Klaussner), the Midwife (Susanne Lothar), her son Karli (Eddy Grahl), the Doctor (Rainer Bock), his daughter Anna (Roxane Duran) and most tellingly, the insecure 31-year-old Schoolteacher (Christian Griedel), who interweaves two narrative threads. One is that he has fallen in love with the shy new nanny Eva (Leonie Benesch) now caring for the Baron's three children. The other thread is a series of mystifying conspiratorial actions, beginning with the Doctor being seriously injured when his horse is tripped by a wire strung between two trees near his house. It continues with a farmer's wife falling to her death through rotten floorboards at a sawmill owned by the Baron. There are two brutal abductions, and a barn –burning. The Baron tyrannizes his young Italian wife Marie-Louise (Ursina Lardi) as if it were his inalienable right. In the name of his narrow religion, the Pastor thrashes and humiliates his children, forcing the two older ones to wear the eponymous white ribbons of purity to keep them aware of their sinfulness (the girl's pride, the boy's masturbation). The Steward, brutalizes his sons, while The Doctor's transgressive conduct involves both the Midwife and his daughter. German with English subtitles.
Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela.
3) Invictus
Trust Clint Eastwood to give us a humanizing perspective of Nelson Mandela by virtue of a metaphorical device that in less capable hands would be simply another genre inspirational sports movie; at its best Hoosiers, at its worst, Knute Rockne All American and Jim Thorpe – All American. Invictus is the polar opposite of getting even. In his wisdom, Nelson Mandela in the mid-1990s, as the country’s first black president, eschews payback for decades of incarceration and the subjugation of South African blacks under apartheid, by being enormously pragmatic. He challenges the country’s defining symbol of Afrikaner repression, the almost all-white Springboks national rugby team, with the green and gold team colors that are anathema to the black populous, to do the improbable - to win one for the country that hosts the championship – the entire country, to wit the 1995 World Cup. Let’s see, it’s 22 years since I was first charmed by Morgan Freeman, as Dana Ivey’s chauffeur in Driving Miss Daisy in its Off-Broadway incarnation. That warm dignity and understated intelligence has never been in greater evidence than in a role worthy of a second Oscar. Matt Damon as the captain of the Springboks, François Pienaar, grows in versatility with each succeeding movie. His and Freeman’s authentic accents are a tribute to Katy Wood, supervising dialogue editor for the picture. I leave you with the closing lines of William Ernest Henley’s Invictus, which I learned in the sixth grade: I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. The action of the Rugby match against heavily favored New Zealand, was about 10 minutes more than I thought necessary. The rugby match in This Sporting Life with Richard Harris in 1963 had it about right. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, here in a nutshell are how points are scored.
Try: Like a touchdown in American football, 5 points are awarded to a team for touching the ball down in the other team's in-goal area.
Conversion: Like an extra point in American Football, following a try, 2 points are awarded for a successful kick through the goal posts.
Penalty Kick: Following a major violation, the kicking team, if in range, has the option to "kick for points." 3 points are awarded for a successful penalty kick. The kick must be from the point of the foul or anywhere on a line straight behind that point. The ball can be played if the kick fails.
Matt Damon as Mark Whitaker. © Warner Bros. Pictures
4) The Informant!
Under Steve Soderbergh’s riveting direction, a plumped-up Matt Damon demonstrates his flair for fussy, minimalist comedy as the whistle-blower biochemist/executive Mark Whitacre who provided the FBI with scores of tape that implicated his firm Archer Daniels Midland in a global price-fixing scheme.
Julia Child was photographed by Sing-Si Schwartz at in 1989 at her Cambridge Massachusetts home during an interview with Sid Lerner, my co-writer of our coffee table book “From the Desk Of: Work Styles of the Famous.” At the time, Child worked tentatively on one of the early computers, but had an IBM Selectric as a back-up. She died in 2004. Her devoted husband Paul was in a nursing home at the time. “Cooking is such a jolly profession,” she told Sid. “I’ve been cooking for more than 40 years, and there’s still so much to learn .” © From the Desk Of: By Hal Drucker and Sid Lerner. Photograph: © Sing-Si Ltd.
5) Julie and Julia
This movie has the imprimatur of Nora Ephron, as writer, director and co-producer. It is her most refreshing work since When Harry Met Sally - a clever juxtaposing of Julia Child (Streep) and her supportive husband Paul (Stanley Tucci), and Julie Powell (Amy Adams) and her equally encouraging husband Eric (Chris Messina) when Powell determines to prepare all 524 of Child’s recipes from her famed cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and to do a daily blog about her progress. The middle-aged Julia and Paul are depicted, as sexually active with an impromptu removal of the latter’s suspenders or a more calculated dual-in-the-bathtub sequence which they photograph and employ as a Valentine’s card. Amy Adams, the young nun in Doubt, is – well – fetching as Powell. Streep has Julia down pat in voice and Childian mannerisms. And she does so without falling prey to gross caricature. Ephron underscores that distinction by running Dan Ackroyd’s imitation of Child on SNL. My only quibbles (or shall I say, nibbles?) about the movies are 1) It’s length (the introduction of Julia’s taller and older sister, marrying and having a child by a much smaller guy could readily have been cut). 2) Tucci’s age. In many ways he is as versatile as Streep. However, I kept thinking that this middle-aged guy was played by someone a month older than my son. On the other hand Laird Cregar and Orson Welles famously played much older men when they were in their twenties. 3) I found it disquieting that in the initial scene Tucci appears slightly taller than Streep, while in later scenes in the kitchen she towers over him, owing to nose-bleed-inducing four-inch heeled platforms . Note from Sing-Si Schwartz’s photo, that the authentic Child wore only déclassé, albeit functional, athletic shoes. The New York Film Critics Circle chose Meryl Streep for best actress. It was her fourth award from the group.
George Clooney and Vera Farmiga in “Up in the Air.” Dale Robinette/Paramount Pictures
6) Up in the Air
In the world of frequent flying there are no free rides. Unless you are Paramount Pictures who sticks it to the audience with more “product placements” than a NASCAR jump suit. The American Airlines and Hertz logos stick out as unobtrusively as Dolly Parton’s cleavage. As for the plot , George Clooney is Ryan Bingham, the suave corporate hired gun, who flits around the country 323 days of the year, to do the bidding of Fortune 500 Human Resources directors who are too chicken to do what he does with practiced insouciance … terminate with a smile. The man enjoys the “friendly skies” so much that removing his shoes at security is almost a Zen ritual. More than one friend has said to me, if it weren’t for Clooney this would be a lame movie. Which is like saying, if it weren’t for Cary Grant, North by Northwest would be a dud. Much credit goes to the young director Jason Reitman who tight-ropes between comedy and calamity with the adroitness of Preston Sturgess, while providing Clooney with a formidable love interest, the canny business traveler Alex Goran, played deliciously by Vera Farmiga who comes thisclose to appropriating the screen, the way that - well. – Eva Marie Saint does in the Pullman car sequence of North by Northwest . Others who shine in the flick are Jason Bateman as Craig Gregor. the pragmatic body counter for whom Bingham works but sees rarely in person and Anna Kendrick, as Bingham’s ultra-young colleague Natalie Keener who offers a master efficiency plan to Gregory to do the downsizing from the business end of a computer, sans travel, sans frequent flyer points, sans everything, a notion that Bingham appears to equate – as you would anticipate - with water-boarding. The New York Film Critics picked George Clooney for Best Actor.
Nina Hoss in Max Färberböck’s film “A Woman in Berlin.” Strand Releasing
7) A Woman in Berlin
Less known than the systematic rapes of the Sabines by the Roman, the Nankingese by the Japanese and the endemic abuses of girls and women in the Congo and Rwanda, were the rapes that took place in 1945 in the German capital by Red Army occupiers. This thoughtfully prepared film, written and directed by Max Färberböck is based on a 1959 diary, which was suppressed by the East German government and resurfaced in 2003. There is little notion of quid pro quo vindictiveness on the part of the rank and file occupiers. Nor, are they depicted as ogres. Färberböck has a facility for projecting unruffled objectivity with the excesses of hormonally driven young men. The title character, portrayed brilliantly by a beautiful Garboesque actress named Nina Hoss, rationally vows that she will be in full command of with whom she sleeps, and in fact seeks out a protector in a soulful major named Andrej (Evgeny Sidikhin). Their tactful relationship sets the tone for their constituents to exercise a de facto diplomacy. In German with English subtitles.
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Penélope Cruz in “Broken Embraces.”
8) Broken Embraces
Penélope Cruz is a cinematic treasure. She has earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her hot-blooded temptress in Woody Allen’s vastly amusing Vicky Cristina Barcelona and she has shown surprising musical comedy virtuosity in Rob Marshall’s Nine. In both movies she has demonstrated a complete command of English – not parroted – but a complete intellectual understanding. On looks alone, she would succeed admirably on the big screen. Her association with the great Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has been symbiotically successful. All About My Mother and Volver were in my estimation, triumphant. Here, a film director (Lluís Homar), writes, lives and loves in darkness, skilled at using his disability as a tool of seduction. Fourteen years before, he was in a brutal car crash on the island of Lanzarote. In the accident, he loses not only his sight, but Lena (Cruz), the love of his life. A film noir buff, he uses two names: Harry Caine a pseudonym comprised perhaps of Orson Welles’ Harry Lime from The Third Man and Michael Caine’s The Ipcress File with which he signs his literary works, stories and scripts; and Mateo Blanco, his real name, with which he lives and signs the films he directs. After the accident, Mateo Blanco reduces himself to Harry Caine. If he can’t direct films he can only survive with the idea that Mateo Blanco died on Lanzarote with his beloved Lena. He has erased from his biography any trace of his first identity, Mateo. The question for the audience to determine is was it indeed an accident? Part of the intrigue and comedic sidelight of Broken Embraces are three or four sequences in which Mateo Blanco is directing a movie entitled Girls and Suitcases, freely based on Almodóvar’s 1987 film comedy, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown which first brought him to prominence in the U. S. In Spanish with English subtitles.
Cruz in Nine. David James/ The Weinstein Company.
9) Nine
As the liner notes for Nine properly point out, Rob Marshall, billed as Director, Producer, Choreographer for Nine, together with cinema mogul Harvey Weinstein, helped resuscitate the Hollywood musical (think of Richard Gere tap dancing) with Chicago, which improved on both the Kander & Ebb original Broadway version and the spare production still running after umpty-ump years on the Great White Way. Nine, which composer/lyricist Maury Yeston adapted from Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, is at times force-fed with dance numbers Cinema Italiano and Be Italian showcasing Kate Hudson and Fergie to their disadvantage. It is nevertheless an impressive visual and aural experience. Its spectacular cast is headed by Daniel Day-Lewis as the Felliniesque Guido Contini, Penélope Cruz as his mistress ,the vivacious film star Claudia (like Day-Lewis, is there nothing she can’t do on the screen?), Nicole Kidman and Judi Dench in juicy roles. Marion Cotillard (who did Edith Piaf on the screen) is lovely and soulful as Guido’s wife Luisa in my favorite song from the show, Yeston’s glorious My Husband Makes Movies, (which Karen Akers introduced in the original). Nicole Kidman sings my second favorite song In a Very Unusal Way– and very well, indeed. Dench as Contini’s long-time assistant Lili, is worth the price of admission for her saucy and very funny rendition of Follies Bergère. Sadly, much of Sophia Loren’s part of Guido’s Mamma seems to have wound up on the cutting room floor, though she does a creditable job with Yeston’s Guarda La Luna. |
