cvairag Reviews

Nightcrawler (2014)

Best LA Film Noir To Date?

[10/10 · 29 January 2019]

When few people we're talking about Nightcrawler, a film that was somewhat initially buried by its release date, I was lamenting that this masterpiece (one of the few American films that have banged my bells in the past decade) barely took home any hardware, while overpriced, badly acted and directed mediocrities were being regularly feted. Well, since the advent of 'fake news' as political jargon that's all changed as the streamers and the dvd crowd has caught up with a film not as shocking to me in its content, but in its level of excellence in almost every category of film making. Needless to say, Gyllenhaal's noted performance represents the ne plus ultra portrait of the conflicted antagonist as protagonist, no easy feat. The guy is simply one of the best players of his generation, and yet, still remains somehow a bit under the radar, perhaps because he is far more artist than celebrity, unlike others, too numerous to mention. What does disturb me still however is what I consider to be a general misunderstanding, on the part of the United States of Amnesia's filmgoing public to what the film is really about. First, I do not see Nightcrawler as a psychological study. It is a crime film. But who's buying this stuff? The public. What Nighcrawler is theme wise is an on point dissection of the horrors of unregulated capitalism and the misguided ethos of of the one-dimensional desperate quest for profit (subsistence in the environment of radically inflated cost of living) as they spill down to the millennial generation through the internet, which becomes almost a character in the narrative, at once Lou's mentor and his alter-ego - like Lear's Fool leading him onto increasingly further depths of depravity in the wasteland of the world of the L.A. night. After all, this is what it takes to establish a successful business, from scratch no less, is it not? In what is in many opinions the state of the art in scripts, this message is entirely driven home by the subtext in a tale that becomes considerably more than the taut specimen of L.A. Film Noir it presents itself as. Both understated and over-the-top, Nightcrawler deals with some of our most firmly entrenched and divisive social problems at a time when the fabric of our society is severely threatened and does not flinch in its facility for speaking truth to power. A great film, when there are few worth watching.

Summer with Monika (1953)

The Fall circa 1953

[10/10 · 29 January 2019]

The late 1940's through the early 1950's, imo, were the very best years for cinema. Before the demise of the big screen, the distilling influence of t.v., the necessity for big budgets - the mandatory interference with the art by folks who really do not belong in the creative process - casting directors, tyrannical studio v.p.'s, credit-jumpers, tabloid paparazzi, the right wing politicizing of lew wasserman and the hollywood blacklisters - particularly in small countries like Sweeden and Japan - one could still create art on the screen in a simple, unvarnished, moving way. Like Kurusawa's magnificent Ikiru filmed around the same time, Summer With Monika is simply one of Bergman's best, and upon many years of reflection, more memorable for me than Persona, Skammen, or other more highly touted, more complex Bergman masterpieces. Though not without idiosyncracies and flaws, the film maybe Bergman's definitive investigation of a question that haunts many of his later undertakings - what is at the root of (god forbid me for saying it) the feminine mystique? Bergman's answer: In the words of no less an expert on the eternal misery of women than Dr. Laura Schlessinger (sans her deplorable politics): "... low or no self-esteem".

The idyllic utterly illusory Edenic summer romance played out in in the last vestiges of an innocence which cannot live in the workaday world, brilliantly, by the gorgeous couple, Lars Ekborg (Harry) and Harriet Andersson (Monika - was there ever a more sensually provocative heroine filmed on screen - and note: entirely without makeup, hollywood diet/workout routine, or skin shop quick fix-it?) is as graphic a peek at Eve's primal first bite as we will ever have in post-modern consciousness. What Arthur Miller (also around this time) termed 'the tragedy of the common man', a homage to the pathos of our eternal suffering, in a provincial romance epic proportion and real, filmed on a shoestring budget, von de seele. By all means see it, one of the great masterpieces of that great era for film, the early fifties. It'll move you.

Embrace of the Serpent (2015)

Instsant Classic

[10/10 · 20 January 2019]

My favorite film of 2015 - by far. The concerns two ethno-biological investigative journeys into the deep Amazon - by an European and an American at the beginning and end of the twentieth century. Ironically, they are guided to their destinations by the same shaman, the surviving member of his tribe, at both ends of his life. A film which says, if not all, a lot about our own culture and the impasse which industrialized society has reached. I particularly enjoyed the filmmakers' attempt to reach beyond material explanations in their analysis og what our world has become and our relation to it as individuals. Best of all, filmed in glorious black and white.

Memoir of War (2017)

Best film made in 2017 that I have seen thus far

[10/10 · 8 October 2018]

As usual, I am at odds with the idiots who inhabit places like Hollywood, and in their ignorance dare to review films of which they have little real understanding and a lot of subjective brouhaha! The film itself is a masterpiece of film making, which unfolds, like Sunset Song, the Scottish film of a few years back, in a thickly imaged, slow-paced narrative, the tormenting loss of a young woman's husband, the destruction of her youthful dreams due to war. We must remember that there is only one war, the war of the rich against the poor, the haves against the have-nots, the propertied against the vulnerable. The woman here is not simply any woman, of course, but Marguerite Duras, who was becoming on of the foremost novelists and screenwriters of the post war era, played to the hilt by Mlle Thierry who with this role comes into her own as of the foremost actresses of her generation. It's as good as Oldham's Churchill, that good. The detail of the film, not easy to achieve, is impeccable, every frame has been thought thru to the max. They deserved the Cannes for film editing with this one at the least. There is one frame, I really don't know how they achieved it, but I felt as if I was looking through a window in metal frame door, and not at the flat screen. I'd never seen anything quite like that. Again, at the end of one frame we hear what sounds like heavy breathing or crying, in the following frame we find that this is the sound of Duras' impassioned pen on the page. Utterly brilliant stuff. They had a great source and made a classic film with too many subtleties to recount here, especially to fans of an overpriced, horribly acted and written films like Bladerunner 2049 which are simply hyped junk with dependably high ratings on popular internet movie sites where folks speak depraved Hollywoodize.

The Square (2017)

Are we losing our humanity? ...Or maybe we never had much? ...or any?

[8/10 · 11 February 2018]

I must confess to struggling to stay awake through the initial setup - let's say the first twenty minutes - and then I awoke barely in time for the first act climax - and found myself laughing hysterically at the top of my lungs at this scene where one of the museum's directors, who looks like she'd just walked out of her weekly session at a Montecito salon and whose last claim to femininity resides in her unequivocal whiteness bred in the unabashed fecklessness of her 'upper middle class' socialization, is interviewing an artist featured at the 'museum' whose sole claim to art is its irrelevance to the relevance our failed ethical afflatus to the current disintegration of our civilization. Anyway, there's this guy in the audience. His mission is to express the unique possibilities for what we really feel about these types of situations. Needless to say, he is ignored, even though he cannot be ignored. The whole thing was like Gregory Corso protesting what he felt to be bad poetry St. Mark's Church back in Greenwich Village long ago, back in the sixties. Or maybe the raunch and roll early seventies. The heyday Jodorowsky and Hunter Thompson. In fact, the rhythm of the dialog - the progression of the plot - et al., is reminiscent of that most famous of all Lenny Bruce jokes: "I offer your honor. I honor your offer. And that's the way it went for the rest of the night, your honor. Off her. On her. Off her. On her. Off her. On her..." ad infinitum. Only it is clear is becoming eminently clear to the post modern audience, long, short, or doomsday clock aficionados that we are well advanced into the final hours and time is running out. The viewers of the film sitting near, mostly sweet young millennial thangs, were somewhat upset with me for laughing that loud, that hard, and that long. And that's the way the showing went with about half the audience laughing at each turn, every so many beats if you will, and not always the same half (accept the ambiguity if you please). The film, among its other virtues, is high comedy, far and away the best I've seen in that beleaguered genre in years. The film is brilliantly directed - top level - and Ostlund has established himself as a top shelf director of the new generation, with Zvyagintsev and very few others with this seering social commentary which speaks with tongues of fire from the screen. Much like Memento, this film plays out on the level of pure philosophic argument in its endgame, and I predict will make a good showing on DVD as a cult classic, esp., here in the USA. Unfortunately, we may not have time for that since abiding by the simple guidelines adumbrated by the suare seems such a difficult task.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Drowned in the subtext

[2/10 · 25 January 2018]

Interesting as the set design and the cinematography of BR2049 were, the current generation will eventually learn that what makes a movie great is not loud and glossy special effects, "surprises", clever romantic play, endless laughs, nor hours of fist fighting, sex, nor truly ghastly horror, nor ghastly car wrecks, but whether or not the story honestly moves you, how deeply, and why. This last quintessential must be achieved on screen in the final minute, or few seconds, of the film. The final frame is the ultimate twist which ties the theme (claim, premise, argument), the plot, the lessons the characters and ourselves had to learn, and their fate into a perfect, eternal, square knot. Voila! If this moment, the ending, is, in any way, blown, the word 'masterpiece' cannot be applied. Few films indeed deserve such an accolade, since this moment, the always elusive, satisfying, tear-worthy ending, is ever more difficult to achieve in the increasingly jaded, cynical, narrow, desperate, inhumane view of the contemporary audience. Few there are who cry in movie theaters these days, a throw-back to a simpler time, as the feature film, as the movie is now referenced, has ceded to the long running T.V. series, Breaking Bad, et al, the primary platform for the narrative constructs which really move our society. When cornered by one of the characters in Adaptation, on one level, undoubtedly Charlie Kaufman's brilliant polemic on screenwriting, no less stern a critic than Robert McKee is asked to give his criteria for a great film in less than thirty seconds. His response: 1) a great ending; 2) the characters must change. The ending of BR2049 is a mess, vague to the point of incoherence, and dependent on a line of subtext that none but the most devout Blade Runner fan could follow. I was neither moved nor edified. The subtext throughout the film was so complex, obscure, and overbearing, that whatever attempt to develop character is drowned along with most of the bad guys. Ryan Gosling's figure, named "Joe" late in the story, is I think supposed to evolve in what early on becomes a existential (lol) - I mean he's a replicant, right? Or not? Boy that brings on some heavy meditating on what it 'means' to be human - search for the self embedded in a good old cops and robbers, good guy chases down the bad guys - maybe... By the final frame I still couldn't figure out who was human - who was replicant - and why this highly speculative, trite picture of an unfortunately imagined future - where liquor seems to be the only substance binding humanity together - had any significance for me the viewer. That's what I mean by coherence. Please forgive the unpolished musings of a "toe tapping" dolt as one reviewer puts it - but I still do not see why I should contemplate this particular picture rather than another to answer the question of what it "means to be human"? What about a movie poses the same question but against a backdrop simple reality such as Kurosawa's humbling masterpiece Ikiru "To Live"? What greater final frame could ever be shot? The problem with most sci-fi dystopian futuristic narratives is that every imagined detail must be accounted for and rarely are. Who says that we'll be living on a diet of holographically disguised maggots living on excrement, as is suggested by BR2049, and why? Reviewers rightly complain of multiple script "holes", even "craters" in BR2049, but it is the glaring subjectivity of their presumptions about what the future will be, common to most all of these narratives that gives one the feeling that they are wasting our time. We and 1984 seem to be the only specimens of the genre which escape this fatal flaw because in every instance the creators have found credible, cogent, and coherent ways to link the possible details of the imagined future to our current reality. And what does the reviewer with the temerity to parade as a professional critic call a "smart script"? Hundreds of pages long without meeting one widely agreed upon criteria for greatness or even basic structure or character development, a script which if anonymously entered into a screenwriting contest would hit the circular file in the first round, an insult to the very idea of craft. The script actually did have a rather healthy gut full of humor even when unaware of it, I suspect - anyway a relief from the ongoing din of the army of tympanis. But the only time I heard the audience laugh was when Deckard dumped out a little booze which his dog preceded to lap off the floor. I kept trying to figure out how Deckard and the dog ate for all those years after the nuclear holocaust - they both looked sort of chubby - but unlike another reviewer, I'm not going to rush back for another viewing because I'm tortured by it all. I'm not.

Stromboli (1950)

The Most Underated Film Ever Made?

[10/10 · 24 December 2017]

Great art only appears once and a while and sometimes it takes a long time to catch up to it. A lot has been made of Journey To Italy, the last of the films that Rossellini made with his muse, the penultimate Ingrid Bergman. They were breaking up at the time after a brief but brilliant affair which cost them both dearly. Bergman was condemned as a slut by the U.S. Senate, much like a woman's right to choose, but the wiser public welcomed the greatest film actress of all time back with open arms. Rossellini lost everything, both the love of his life and his career in one fell swoop. He was posthumously redeemed as the revered father of the European film wave which spread from Italy, to France, England, and finally Germany in the 1970's. Curiously "Journey" is thought of by film analysts as the first "modern" film. As modernity began in the 15th century and ended one morning in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, I think what these "art historians" are trying to say is that "Journey" is the first Post Modern film showing clear tendencies of early Post Modern cinema. Perhaps. But it is the film that Bergman and Rossellini made at the apex of their love, Stromboli, which is truly a masterpiece for the ages. Maybe the first Post-Modern masterpiece as Ikiru was made four years later. Sunset Boulevard would have to be up there too. But Stromboli, as John Howard Lawson says "speaks with tongues of fire" and no one had a hotter one than Ingrid Bergman. I find it impossible to believe that Kobyashi, Igmar Bergman, and the entire French film wave were not under its spell, consciously or not. Like all the great masterpieces every important contemporary issue is touched on, the relation of homo sapiens to environment, alienation and "personal displacement", the horrors of patriarchal madness, our brutal treatment of animals, romance vs. reality, fate vs. free will, the lost connection with the spiritual world of our forebears not least. But what makes Stromboli the transcendent work of art that it is is its unrelenting dramatization of our inability to escape the labyrinthine ways of our own minds and are eventually called to pay the price for our unexpected creations however misbegotten. I must confess that Rossellini was never one of my favorite directors. I loathe many of his "history" films, and boring he can be. But with Stromboli, he bangs the cosmic gong. His direction is nothing short of magnificent, and the tension (yes) is grueling right up until the final ontological resolution, which is somewhat ambiguous, one of the most difficult of feats in all film-making to pull off successfully. Today, few have ever heard of Stromboli, never mind seen it. A deeply felt, powerhouse film of fantastic b&w imagery and some of the greatest acting you will ever see.

Birth of the Dragon (2016)

Bruce Lee's attempt to introduce Kung Fu to the West is opposed by the Master of the Shaolin Monestary who believes that it is far more than a martial art.

[10/10 · 5 September 2017]

I loved it. Profound, at times tragic, a brilliant low budget film which will be generally eschewed by the masses whose hunger for big, noisy, meaningless extravaganza has been honed to a feather edge by the powers that be, and the conditions which are. Superb cinematography, excellent acting up and down the line, some dazzling fight scenes particularly the big one, and a script, solidly structured, with some lines that make you wish you'd brought a notebook to the theater. Most importantly, the film asks what is the purpose of life? This question is often asked by films, yet the struggle to find an answer has rarely been depicted with such precision. Cool and entertaining.

The Truman Show (1998)

One of the Greatest Films Ever Made - A Masterpiece by Any Standard

[10/10 · 12 July 2013]

One of the few Hollywood produced films that WILL stand the test of time as ART - high ART - I'm talk'in Ugetsu, Ikiru, Seventh Seal - the rarefied air - the 'I've been to the mountaintop' of cinematic art...

Now - what happened with the public reception? Many of our nation's best critics realized to one extent or another how great the film was - perhaps not as much its prophetic nature - which, if you saw it originally in the theater - you might try viewing it again - to see.

The featured review is on the right track. 1998 was a bumper crop year for Hollywood film - yet, few in Hollywood seemed to realize it. True, Carry's goofy reputation, if somewhat deserved, caused many to miss the point - but, at the end of the day, all of the latent denial in the American psyche - specifically catered to by the Hollywood elite - produced the most blatant Oscar night debacle in a long history of this tragically repeated motif - great art once again denied the laurel wreath in deference to crass commercialism - in this case two of the greatest English language films ever made, The Truman Show and American History X, shunted in favor of a shameless piece of fluff based on dubious if not downright dishonest premises, Joseph Fiennes' vaunted backside, and the rather gauchely revolting nepotistic spectacle of Gwynnie dancing with Daddy...

Truly, the American public really did not get The Truman Show - it got by most of us - perhaps, it requires repeated viewings - such an incisive critique of the American psyche as it is - where even the most sacred things are trampled under our incessant self-created need for security and the lies we're willing to tell ourselves to perpetuate it. The final conversation between Truman and his life-long 'friend', Marlin, is imo one of the greatest scenes ever filmed - revealing the depth of the corruption of our wayward civilization - enough to make Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor blush with shame.

Weir has made a number of very good+++ films: Dead Poets Society, Last Wave, Witness... but...

THIS IS HIS MATERPIECE A FILM ONE SHOULD SEE AGAIN AND AGAIN. NOT MERELY VG+++ : GREAT.

Hannah Arendt (2012)

Philosophy With A Hammer.................

[9/10 · 1 June 2013]

Folks, this is what Philosophy is all about: taking a stand which is not always popular and being able to justify it for the ages. Hannah Arendt is only in this century beginning to receive her due as the most perspicuous political philosopher of the 20th century. After all, it was Ms Arendt who first observed that post-Hiroshima, a conventional war could never again be fought and won. But rather, all pre-emptive invasions who devolve into occupations - that rather than full-scale war or revolutions - the world would sink increasingly into a mire of entropic violence. Her controversial thesis in Eichmann In Jerusalem - yet another masterpiece of at least five in her canon, is that mass atrocities are not committed by idiosyncratic madmen who erect vast engines of evil in which the followers (citizens of the state) serve as the 'cogs' – but rather the architectonic of evil consists in the actions of rather ordinary people who for various reasons and rationalizations refuse to think about the ramifications of what they're doing. I mention this point because I've studied Ms Arendt's work for over three decades, lived in Greenwich Village when she was teaching at the New School, and when I saw the film premiere at the Santa Barbara Film Festival this past January – I felt that most of the scant audience did not get the point any more than her contemporaries. The film-making is excellent. To dramatize philosophic ideas is challenge in itself. Von Trotta, in the old European style, makes her films with a regular group of actors, and, while the performances were effective throughout, in real life, Hannah Arendt was not nearly so physically engaging and Mary McCarthy quite a bit more – which, I believe had something to do with the development their respective moral characters. All in all, a great, not merely a good, film – and one of the few worth seeing thus far this year – unless, of course, the attributes of fast and furious 6 or iron man 3 overwhelm.