Category Archives: Movie

Seymour: An Introduction

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Seymour Bernstein

Seymour Bernstein

This documentary (trailer), filled with beautiful music, is an étude of acclaimed concert pianist Seymour Bernstein and a joy, start to finish. Bernstein retired so he could pour his musical ideas into the vessels of his students. And not just musical ideas; his philosophy is that having access to emotion in music encourages access to emotion and satisfaction in other aspects of life. We see him providing pianists of all ages with just the right amount of subtle guidance to dramatically elevate their performances, encourage them to compose as well as play, and, apparently, achieve harmony in life in general.

Scenes take place in the one-room apartment he’s had for 40 years on the upper East Side of Manhattan, near Central Park, in various venues where former students interviewed him, NYU Master Classes, in the piano testing room of Steinway New York, and finally, its main floor rotunda, where he plays a concert to an audience of former students, colleagues, and fans. The interactions with students, former students, and other musicians are revealing, and none more so than his conversations with the film’s director, actor Ethan Hawke.

Hawke met Bernstein serendipitously at a dinner and discovered in him a person with whom he could discuss the anxieties of performance, and the disconnect between good work and success and Bernstein, with what seems to be characteristic generosity, shared his insights. He certainly did not reach his current eminence without his own challenges. When he was young, his father would say, “I have three daughters and a pianist,” which felt like a rejection of him as a son and pained him mightily.

As a young man, he served in the U.S. Army in Korea and teamed up with a talented violinist and a tenor and, despite their commanding officer’s skepticism, put on a concert for the troops—most of whom had never heard “serious” or classical music before. “They wouldn’t let us off the stage,” Bernstein says with glee, even 60 years later. The concert was so successful a tour of front-line camps was arranged. The memory is also bitter, because Bernstein remembers the war dead, and the pain of seeing those body bags has hardly faded.

Except for these memories, the movie is strongly up-beat, with a man doing what he loves and people (students, audiences, moviegoers) responding to his skill and passion. As Detroit News critic Tom Long says, “The great joy of the film, whether you know piano or not, is watching Bernstein teach.” This is a man you will be glad you got to know. The film ends with a typically modest and inspiring Bernstein statement: “I never thought that, with my two hands, I could touch the sky.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics give it a 100% rating and audiences 89%.

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Woman in Gold

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Klimt, Woman in Gold

Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt (photo: wikimedia)

In Woman in Gold (trailer), Helen Mirren, chameleon-like, inhabits the body and personality of Maria Altmann, niece and heir of a prominent Jewish family in pre-WWII Vienna. The family’s best-known member today is Maria’s aunt Adele, whose portrait Gustav Klimt painted in 1907.

The painting was appropriated during the Nazi era and for many years hung in the Austrian state’s famous Belvedere Gallery, as “the Mona Lisa of Vienna.”

After her sister’s death, Maria finds correspondence suggesting the painting was perhaps not left to the government of Austria in her aunt’s will, as it claimed, and therefore not rightfully Austrian property. She hires a family friend’s son, Randol Schoenberg (played by Ryan Reynolds), a young down-on-his-luck Los Angeles attorney, to look into the matter. Schoenberg, grandson of the composer—another refugee from Nazified Austria—is out of touch with his family’s past and slow to recognize the significance of Maria’s quest.

Initially unwilling to take on the case, he is gradually drawn into it. Their bureaucratic battles with stonewalling Austrian officials soon unite the pair, and they are joined by a crusading Austrian journalist, Hubertus Czernin. Formidable legal and bureaucratic hurdles stand in the way of Maria being reuniting with the painting—“When you look at this painting, you see a work of art,” Marie tells a reunification commission, “I see my aunt.”

The story is another in a long line of mostly not happy stories of stolen art works in World War II, brought to renewed public awareness by movies and books like The Monuments Men and Pictures at an Exhibition. The opportunity to reunite beloved works of art and their owners is rapidly disappearing, yet this beautifully filmed movie, directed by Simon Curtis, shows the importance of continuing these efforts.

Because this film is based on a true story, and I for one remembered how it ends, a certain inevitability about the outcome guides the plot. Perhaps this is what has caused reviewers (not me!) to find it dull, though they find the actors captivating. The movie’s Rotten Tomatoes critics rating is a paltry 49%, but audiences were more in my camp, giving a rating of 88%. As a result of the audience reception, the film’s distributor announced yesterday that it will greatly expand its national distribution. If you like stories that touch on beauty, truth, and justice, you will like it, too!

Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem

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Ronit Elkabetz, Gett, Israel

Ronit Elkabetz and cast in Gett.

The Israeli movie Gett (trailer) is the story of Viviane Amsalem and her five-year struggle to obtain a divorce (gett) through Israel’s Orthodox rabbinical courts. The only roadblock: her husband says “no,” and under Jewish religious law, a divorce cannot be granted unless the husband agrees. The entire movie takes place in the courtroom and just outside it, as witnesses come and go and the couple and their lawyers face off, in confrontations that rapidly switch between absurdity and tragedy.

This may sound as if there’s not much action, but there is plenty going on emotionally. Except for the lawyers’ confrontations, much of the power of the film comes from the way feelings simmer (mostly) below the surface, through the outstanding performances by the wife (played by Ronit Elkabetz) and husband (Simon Abkarian). He is torturing her in front of the three rabbis who serve as judges, who alternately don’t see it, don’t acknowledge it, and don’t act when they do. This also makes the film a cautionary tale about the difficulties of male-dominated religious courts, intent on shoring up a patriarchic system and oblivious to individual and women’s rights.

Not surprisingly, in real life, Israel’s rabbinic judges claim the movie misrepresents them, which, as Israel’s oldest daily newspaper Haaretz says, “misses the underlying point: that the rabbinical courts will not approve a divorce unless the man agrees to it,” citing a 2013 survey that one in three women seeking divorce in Israel is “subject to financial or other extortion by her husband.” The term for these truly “desperate housewives” is “chained women.”

Lest you think the problems of chained women are confined to the Jewish State, in 2013 in New York, criminal prosecutions resulted when rabbis kidnapped and tortured several estranged husbands to persuade them to approve their divorces. (Although the United States regulates marriage, divorce, and remarriage through the secular laws, for these proceedings to be religiously recognized, Orthodox Jews must also have them approved in rabbinical courts.)

Elkabetz and her brother Shlomi directed the film, which was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 72nd Golden Globe Awards and won the Israeli Film Academy Ophir Award for Best Picture. Rotten Tomatoes critics gave it 100% positive ratings (47 critics), and audience approval was 87%.

Wild Tales

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Erica Rivas, Wild Tales

Érica Rivas in Wild Tales

This 2015 Argentinian film (trailer), directed by Damián Szifron, is a collection of six unconnected short stories, with both comic and catastrophic elements and carrying the tagline “we can all lose control.” The six very different stories describe “how I would extract my revenge if only I had the nerve.”

The excellent ensemble cast keeps the unexpected happening . . . as people go to the surreal brink of absurdity and tragedy—and keep going. They carry out the vengeful urges we all feel in moments of betrayal, in flashes of road rage, facing overwhelming temptation, or confronting mindless bureaucracy.

The first very short tale involves a casual conversation between two airplane passengers, strangers to each other, who happen to discover they both know a would-be musician named G– Pasternak. One is a woman who once broke up with him and the other, a classical music critic who savaged Pasternak’s early work. A passenger sitting in front of them turns around, saying, “Pasternak?” She was his elementary school teacher, and says he certainly had problems. After a few more people who’ve wronged poor Pasternak pipe up, the music critic stands and asks, “Is there anybody on this plane who does not know Pasternak? And who paid for their own ticket?” There is not. I leave the rest to your imagination. And his.

The funniest story involves an explosives expert trying to reason with the local parking authority, and one of the most satisfying has a bride take her revenge on the groom who cheated on her. It’s a wedding no one will ever forget! Said Eric Kohn in indieWIRE, “While adhering to an internal logic that makes each punchline land with a satisfying burst of glee, the movie nevertheless stems from genuine fury aimed a broken world.”

Be sure to catch the opening credits, where the names of key cast and production crew members are shown with photos of wild animals reflecting on their personas. The director, I noted, was a fox.

An Academy Award nominee for best foreign language film last year, this is one of those rare movies where Rotten Tomatoes critics and audiences are in perfect agreement: 93%.

Boyhood

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Boyhood, Ethan Hawke

Ellar Coltrane & Ethan Hawke in Boyhood

Probably every American interested in film saw Boyhood (trailer) long before I did last week, but somehow I missed it in theaters and, as Boyhood emphasizes, time passes . . . ! From the beginning, the idea of a film following the same actors over a protracted period was both interesting and risk-laden. What if some calamity or professional conflict overrode the cast’s ability to continue? I wonder whether director Richard Linklater cast his daughter Lorelei in the film as a partial insurance policy against that eventuality? She plays as the main character’s annoying older sister Samantha. Quite nicely, too.

Cast intact, filming proceeded off and on for a dozen years, following Mason Evans, Jr. (played by Ellar Coltrane), from ages six to eighteen, and the continuity of characters across situations, levels of maturity, and the ups and downs of life makes for a compelling narrative concept. All the main parts are well acted, including the kids, the parents (Ethan Hawke and Academy Award-winner Patricia Arquette), and the mother’s problematic husbands. The script grew organically, evolving based on what went before (like life), as well as on experiences in the real lives of the actors.

Ethan Hawke, who plays Mason’s biological father, is a person of local interest, having grown up about a mile from where I live. (A few local junior high girls helped answer his fan mail in the early years.) The stage was set for this feat of filmic time travel in Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight trilogy, in which Hawke also starred, and he calls this latest film “human time-lapse photography.”

While many wonderful things can be said about the slow unfolding of personality that the movie conveys, to me it was about a half-hour too long (at 2 hours, 45 minutes), perhaps because I felt insufficiently engaged with the characters at any age. Having shot footage at all these different ages and stages, it’s as if the filmmakers felt obliged to use more of it than they absolutely had to.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 98%; audience rating: 83%.

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Whiplash

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J.K.Simmons, Miles Teller, Whiplash

J.K.Simmons and Miles Teller in Whiplash

Another Oscar movie (trailer) with a Princeton connection. Director Damien Chazelle was “inspired by” his musical experience at Princeton High School to explore how the drive to excel can become all-consuming. Not that the character Fletcher, superbly played by Oscar-winner J. K. Simmons, the tightly wound and sadistic studio band leader, mirrored Chazelle’s own band leader (“fear inspires greatness”), he is at pains to say, but still . . . Chazelle wanted the film to explore the line between a healthy passion and an obsession, and, boy, did he do that, garnering five Oscar nominations in the process.

Miles Teller is terrific as the young drummer pushed to the limits of his skills and endurance—and beyond—by teacher Fletcher, “sworn enemy of the merely O.K.,” says Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. Characteristically, Fletcher says, “There are no two words in the English language more harmful than ‘good job.’” The Hank Levy tune “Whiplash” is the rack of a tune upon which the drummers in Fletcher’s jazz band are broken.

Here’s a movie where I really felt the tension—it made me clench my fists to the point where my hands, too, were almost bleeding. The playing of the drums enters your skull, and your heart must keep time. If you missed it in theaters, Netflix has it!

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 95%; viewers, 96%. “Bring a welder’s mask to ward off sparks,” advised critic Donald Clarke in the Irish Times.

A Coffee in Berlin

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coffee, creativity

(photo: farm3.staticflickr.com)

The title of this award-winning 2014 German film (trailer) is a tease, since the protagonist spends the day the movie describes trying—and failing—to score a cup of joe. Would he had gotten it, and he might have been better prepared for his frustrating encounters with girlfriends, his dad, the creator of an unintentionally hilarious performance art piece, and some drunken toughs, among others. He doesn’t want any of these interactions to go the way they do, but he is “a victim of inertia,” says Washington Post reviewer Stephanie Merry, a young man who, so far, has chucked his opportunities into an ocean of cool.

Jan Ole Gerster’s debut film, starring Tom Schilling as Niko (originally titled Oh, Boy), has created a likeable if drifting protagonist and given him situations punctuated with sometimes absurd humor. You want Niko to pull himself together and for the sparks of empathy we see to flame into action. One of those flames occurs near the end of the film, when he hears a rambling, drunken tale about people who really had it bad. Great musical score by Cherilyn MacNeil and The Major Minors.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating is 72%–considerably lower than other reviewers give it (or I would)–with 75% of audiences liking it.

Get Ready for Oscar II – Live Action Shorts

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5330266850_a1678cfde1_o_convertedIt’s great that these notable short films are finding more screens to be soon on in movie houses and at home via disc and streaming (via vimeo). Short films are a low-budget way for new directors to show their talent and occasionally lead to bigger and better deals. On Friday, I posted capsule reviews of the five Academy Award nominees for Best Short Documentary, and here’s my take on the five nominees for Best Live Action Shorts—“a diverse and satisfying two-hour program,” says Peter Debruge in Variety. Notably, none of the nominees are from the United States.

  • Aya (Israel and France, trailer) – the longest of the bunch, at 39 minutes, is the comic story of a chance encounter between a young woman waiting at the airport and an arriving passenger. Rotten Tomatoes provides this insightful sentence: “She, charmed Makraioto woven minute before it, is in no hurry to correct him their.” To decode this a bit, the man mistakes her for his assigned driver, and she is in no hurry to correct him there. Directed by Oded Binnun and Mihal Brezis.
  • Boogaloo and Graham (UK, trailer) – These are the names of the chickens lively Belfast children Jamesy and Malachy have raised, delighted in their pets and dreaming of running a chicken farm, until changes in the family threaten to shake up the chicken coop. Reportedly, the charming 14-minute movie has received requests from 80 film festivals around the world to show it. Directed by Ronan Blaney and Michael Lennox. My sentimental pick for the Oscar.
  • Butter Lamp (France and China, trailer) – Nomadic Tibetan families pose for an itinerant photographer and his assistant in front of absurd and symbolic backgrounds, with the true background to the scene not revealed until the end. In only 15 minutes, this unconventional and memorable film captures the impact of globalization on Tibetans and the erosion of their traditional culture. Directed by Hu Wei.
  • Parvaneh (Switzerland, trailer) – in this 25-minute film, an Afghan girl living in a Swiss refugee camp encounters bureaucratic difficulties when she tries to send money home to her ailing father. Only an unlikely friend can help. An award-winning student film, Swiss-Iranian Talkhon Hamzavi directed.
  • The Phone Call (UK, trailer) – a shy woman working in a help line call center receives a call from a mystery man that will “change her life forever,” the movie’s promotion says, a “gather ye rosebuds” outcome only modestly hinted at. Featuring Sally Hawkins and Jim Broadbent, who handle the telephone call beautifully and movingly, with Edward Hogg and Prunella Scales. “You’ll wonder how it can do in 20 minutes what some full length features can’t in two hours,” says Casey Cipriani for Indiewire. Directed by Mat Kirkby. Perhaps the more likely Oscar recipient. [And the winner!]
Sally Hawkins, live action short film,The Phone Call

Sally Hawkins in The Phone Call

Mr. Turner

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JMW Turner, painting

JMW Turner, “The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons” (1834 or 1835), approx. 36 x 48 inches.

Because J.M.W. Turner is one of my favorite painters, I was eager to see this biopic (trailer). The problem with biographies—unless they stray into fictional exaggeration—is they are stuck with the life the subject actually led. And Turner (played by Timothy Spall) led an undramatic one, on the surface. His struggles took place internally, as revealed in his art, which was both unconventional and prodigious—nearly 20,000 individual oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Such intense preoccupation allowed the development of his talent, true, and fostered his eccentricities and a certain selfishness, also true, but left little material for the dramatist intent on exposing juicy interpersonal relationships to delve into.

By the time the movie begins, Turner is already a successful painter and a man of independent means, so we miss the likely fiery relationship with the shrill woman (Ruth Sheen) who is the mother of his two grown daughters. “Still doing those ridiculous sea paintings?” she asks, when she comes hectoring him for money. The principal conflict we see is between him and the early Victorian painters who dominated the Royal Academy of Arts. Turner’s paintings, which can seem abstract and modern today, were so far ahead of their time (remember, he died more than 160 years ago), the traditionalists had no language for them.

Still, his works were not completely unappreciated. Some of the most amusing parts of the film are the scenes with the other artists and critics and with Turner’s most influential advocate, John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire), later the prominent British art critic and social commentator. At the time of the film, he was in his mid-20s, struggling to appear erudite and pausing between each word as if to be sure to bring forth exactly the right one, yet gleeful in being a contrarian.

Mike Leigh cast actors he’s used before—not just Timothy Spall, grunting and growling, but also Marion Bailey, Lesley Manville, Martin Savage, and others. We’ve seen them in previous Leigh movies—from Vera Drake to Topsy-Turvy—and they create a believable ensemble around the principal. Deserving special praise is Dorothy Atkinson as Turner’s adoring and mostly ignored maid-of-all-(and I do mean all)-work, increasingly disfigured by some rashy skin condition.

If the film is a few brushstrokes short on typical interpersonal drama, see it for the beauty of the cinematography. Scene after scene recreates the diffuse and misty light that Turner—“the painter of light”—sought out, when the whole sky partakes of the brilliance of the sun. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 97%; audiences 60%.

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Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

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Michael Keaton, Birdman

Michael Keaton in “Birdman”

Given this movie’s underlying premise, I should say up-front that I have a love-not-love relationship with it. Yes, the acting is terrific. Given a script with substance, Michael Keaton, Ed Norton (truly amazing), and Emma Stone all received Oscar nods. I’m also big fan of Amy Ryan, who plays Keaton’s wife in one of her trademark low-key performances, of the kind she perfected in The Wire. The story itself, however, of a middle-aged man’s struggle to find himself amidst the debris of his messy family affairs and dwindling career is, for me, less interesting. (Trailer here)

In telling it, Mexican director Alejandro G. Iñárritu pays homage to magical realism of the South American kind (an armful of calla lilies appears on a monument somewhere to Gabriel García Márquez at every showing of this movie). What appears to be happening on the screen—Michael Keaton levitating in the lotus position or, yes, flying—can be accepted on either a literal or a metaphorical basis, or both, depending on the viewer’s taste and tolerance.

In the story, Keaton is a Hollywood has-been (a former superhero called Birdman) tackling Broadway for the first time, directing and starring in a production of the Raymond Carver short story, “What we talk about when we talk about love.” The play is in rehearsal, and whether it will be successful is a toss-up. It looks unlikely. Meanwhile, Birdman himself keeps appearing like a nudgy pal, alternately flattering and browbeating Keaton and trying to lure him back into the gloriously popular action movies of his youth.

The Carver story recounts an alcohol-soaked evening when two couples try to sort out what love is, a question that has baffled sober people from time immemorial. Because of his own extreme vision of love, the ex-husband of one of the characters shot himself but “bungled it,” says the play. Later, he died. This might be a clue to the movie’s unwinding or not, because the extent to which the play-in-production is supposed to illuminate the movie is deliberately ambiguous. (I didn’t understand the subtitle, either, as it seemed to me that the characters were all too knowing.)

Numerous possible explanations (waking dreams, fevered thoughts, daydreams) could explain some of the action—especially the Michael Keaton character’s flying—which if you’re not overly hung up on trying to explain it rationally is thrilling. This is a movie that you have to decide to “just go with it” or face frustration. But the acting—and the bird costume!—is worth the price of admission. Liked the drumming. Rotten tomatoes critics rating 92%; audiences 84%.

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