Captain Phillips – 8.4

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A remarkable film that involved me intellectually and emotionally from start to finish. Director Paul Greengrass set up an equality between the American captain and the Somali pirate at the outset, by showing both men leaving family and embarking on their collision course. Muse, in an Oscar-worthy supporting role, was never a bad guy: every man in his village wanted to go with him – it was an act that was accepted by their desperate society; and even moreso it was required by the warlord above them. His courage and Captain Phillips’s were certainly equal; and they both used their brains. If Captain Phillips won the battle, it was only because he had more worldly experience, plus the technology and firepower of the U.S. Navy behind him. Without condoning piracy, the movie made you sympathetic to the pirates: it was the Americans who tricked and lied and killed in cold blood – understandable in the circumstances, but not the kind of heroism we’re used to cheering at the movies. In short, at every stage of the movie, I had to check on my feelings: whom was I rooting for, and why? The film was also wonderfully shot and edited; I felt the claustrophobia of being on the tanker and I felt I was living through the crisis almost in real time.
Two caveats only: Tom Hanks was wonderfully expressive, but he never convinced me that he was either a ship captain or a New Englander. And although the story came from real life and must be accurate, we could never understand why the ship’s owner, let alone its insurer, would send it through pirate-infested waters without a security guard or two who could have easily gunned down the pirates before they had a chance to board.

Wadjda – 7.8

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A sweet film about one spunky girl’s efforts to break through the repression of women in Saudi Arabia. By making her statement an attempt to acquire, and ride, a bicycle, the director kept the rebellion personal, low-key, understandable and touching. And by making the repressers women, not men, there weren’t villains to root against, just Saudi society. In all, it was a fascinating insight into another culture, somewhat stilted, but a small gem.

We’re the Millers – 6.5

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Jennifer Anniston was way too good for Jason Sudeikis, let alone this movie, although she was seriously unconvincing as a stripper. Still, as spoofs go, there were plenty of cute, fun moments. I never looked at my watch, or worried that anything bad would actually happen.

The Way, Way Back – 7

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Lots of cute moments, most supplied by Sam Rockwell as the cool-dude amusement park assistant manager (although technically he didn’t seem to be managing anything, no one else was, either). The limp 14-year-old dealing with parents and girls is a tried-and-true trope, and it didn’t fail here, but the story otherwise never rose above the banal.

The Conjuring – 5

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Moral of the movie: don’t move into a haunted house. Backup advice: once in a haunted house, move out as fast as you can. The pseudoscientific demonologists, especially the lovely Vera Farmiga, added a nice touch to the otherwise plebeian story, but I lost track of the various daughters and the opportunity to make something of them and their plight was lost. In sum, strictly a time-passer, but I’ve seen much worse.

Hannah Arendt – 2.5

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What is it with cigarettes and movies? Although smoking has not been a part of “the world I live in” for 40 years or more, 80% of the movies I see have a scene with a character who lights up. Is this the only way to tell us we are in the 1950s, or that someone is stressed, or bored, or – in the case of Hannah Arendt – is “thinking”? And since this movie is all about “thinking,” there is nary a scene that does not involve Hannah and/or other characters lighting up or just lying there, puffing away. Even Mr. Shawn gets in on the act. The cigarette intrusions got to be quite distracting, not that there was that much to distract from. The American characters were all portrayed as a German director would portray them, which added a farcical element to what strived to be a deeply philosophical film. The crux of the trouble, though, was that the story turned on Arendt’s alleged condemnation of Jewish leaders in connection with the Holocaust without indicating where this theory came from. Thus, we had to weigh the pros and cons of this argument without any underlying facts. What did come through – also interestingly from the German director – was the rabid irrationality of the Jewish community, in Israel and America, an attitude that persists in the so-called “Jewish lobby” today with similar consequences. Barbara Sukowa gave a serious performance, smoking aside, but the actors around her came across as amateurs.

Farewell, My Queen – 8

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This French film brilliantly thrust us inside the Versailles court of Louis XVI: as the camera trailed through the candlelit corridors of power you could almost smell the perfumed wigs and taste the personal agendas. Needless to say, the suits and dresses, above all Marie-Antoinette’s, were sensationally beautiful; but by relying heavily on close-ups, director Benoit Jacquot avoided the distance one usually feels in costume dramas. And by focusing exclusively on a mere lady-in-waiting, the assistant reader to the queen, the film reduced one of history’s most important events, the French Revolution, to a story of people. Through Sidonie’s eyes, we

Pina – 6

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     The best use of 3-D I’ve seen yet: it was unobtrusive – no dancers kicking legs into our space – and simply made the dances come alive. Like the documentaries at the Film Festival, there was no plot and no dramatic arc, just a series of dances and interviews with the dancers. It didn’t take long to catch on to the choreography of Pina Bausch, even for someone like me who’d never seen it before, and her artistry is certainly worthy of respect, even admiration. But well before the movie’s end I was checking my watch, wondering how much longer it would be before I could congratulate myself for having absorbed this experience.

The Descendants – 7

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This George Clooney vehicle started slowly then gradually built to a moderate walk – an apt metaphor since the film had two scenes of Clooney running, something his agent should guard against. There were travelogue scenes of Hawaii and an unconvincing subplot about the disposal of a Hawaiian estate, but the film’s thrust was the coming together, or healing, of Clooney’s initially dysfunctional family. For me, the nugget that made the movie watchable was the maturation of 17-year-old Alexandra, who began as a brat then turned into a young adult when her father started to treat her as one. Her sidekick Sid also grew, from preposterous to understandable. But the movie depended on Clooney, and he never seemed engaqing or terribly realistic as a father, cuckolded husband, lawyer or wearer of Hawaiian shirts.

The New World (2005) –

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I feel I should approach this more as an opera, or a symphony, than a movie. Fugue and elegiac are the first words that come to mind, although I am not sure of their meaning. The wide screen at the Walker was filled with image after image taken from a Bierstadt painting, or in the case of the Indians, from a George Catlin. The music soared and swelled; it not only provided emotion for every scene, it could have been listened to with eyes closed. The story itself was not one to take seriously – any more than an opera’s. Battles were fought to the death, but eveyone seemed fairly alive five minutes later. With Indian eyes peering everywhere, the king’s favorite daughter had no trouble creeping off for illicit sex with a white hostage. And then with realistic scruffiness all around, her choice of a husband came down to Colin Farrell or Christian Bale.
Although based on historical incident -which worked heavily against the movie in its final 20 minutes – the plot bore an uncanny resemblance to Avatar, which separated it further from reality. Both films, of course, posed the same existential question: can Western man live in peace? If we come across an alien race, will we try to coexist, or will we see a new potential food source? Terrence Malick’s films, of which the newest, Tree of Life, has just won top honors at Cannes, are meditations so unlike other films that they should almost be considered “out-of-competition,” sui generis artworks to be experienced in a different frame of mind.