Dolphin culling for the international oceanic entertainment industry takes place in Taiji, Japan. Only young female bottlenose dolphins are chosen. Because dolphins are perceived to enjoy interactions with humans, supplying dolphins for theme park life is sanctioned and extremely lucrative. It’s a very rational basis for a business.

This is The Cove in a nutshell. What are the consequences of this rationale, not just for another species, but ourselves?

Ric O’Barry, who captured and trained dolphins in the 60′s for the television series Flipper, over time and much soul searching realized that this isn’t how these creatures were meant to live. They exist in a constant state of stress in captivity. He now spends his life as an advocate for closing down this industry, but in Taiji he discovered something worse than capturing and selling a few dolphins. What he and filmmaker Louis Psihoyos, a National Geographic photographer and writer, find and how they show it to the world make for a fine film, more nuts and bolts investigative journalism than enviro-rant.

There’s been criticism of the film, of course, surprisingly from people on the same side as O’Barry saying it didn’t address animal rights across the globe, especially American attitudes towards all species that are exploited. These critics, bloggers mainly, have slipped into their own rationale that we have to be deeply concerned all the time about all things and it needs to be shown every moment.

But a filmmaker’s rationale is this: I have one story to tell. Interesting, unexpected things will happen, questions will be raised but other people will have to address them. My focus is this subject, this event and this alone is what I’m committed to. Devoid of Michael Moore‘s ham-standing, Psihoyos gets down to the business of here’s what we’ve seen, here’s what we believe and here’s how we’ll get the job done.

Throwing emotion into a rationale can skew it towards failure, usually because anger or fear is at the core of the reasoning. The Cove does have emotion as a touchstone of its rationale, but that emotion is more guilt at human hubris and folly and a need to make amends. – [DVD]

Documentary

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 12/8/09

Even in the sound byte era, it’s a slight if not unkind and incongruous tagline.

Frears’ best work has delved into how individual identity, gender and cultural shifts affect personal relationships and survival in society. Witness the aforementioned films and Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette, Prick Up Your Ears, The Grifters or The Hit.  The last two, though genre flicks, get downright noir gritty with those themes. Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (still not on DVD…) especially layers sexual and familial politics atop a London erupting in street clashes and social unrest.

But in the case of Chéri, that tagline is appropriate.

In Dangerous Liaisons, the cool, measured step of the principals through an acidic salon society allowed for an expert dissection of the human heart even as sexual one-upmanship left no one claiming check and mate.

But Chéri, based on Colette‘s book of the same name, just flirts with surface. The surface of sumptuous Paris at the end of the belle époque and the surface of love that ends tragically.

Michelle Pfeiffer is Lea, a former courtesan who’s done well for herself. Aristocratic assignations in the past, she’s become “a woman of a certain age” and enters into a long, mutually loving relationship with a much younger man, Chéri, the son of a friend who’s also retired from the profession. After six years together, a marriage has been arranged for him and he must leave her. They find the clock they could ignore while they were together has kept perfect time. Neither one wiser, just older and muddled as to how they should carry on.

Chéri can be very much enjoyed as a period piece. The film has wit and heart and Pfeiffer really tries in the role, even shining at times, but everyone is enjoying themselves a little too much in the décolletage and lace so it’s reduced to playing pouty youth or dowdy matron. Caricature as character, even if precisely written and fleshed out, becomes cartoon. Colette was writing about barriers coming down and women who set trends and made no apologies for their lives. Frears’ Chéri doesn’t quite join her at the barricades. – [DVD]

Drama

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 10/20/09

In the early 70′s, from interviews with fellow dancers, Michael Bennett wrote “A Chorus Line”. He created characters who tell their own stories trying to make it through a final audition just to have a job in the chorus. To keep dancing a little longer. Showing the sweat, dedication, and the grime that’s under the glitter. The narrative thread of their striving became the spectacle.

Every Little Step is a film about a recent revival of “A Chorus Line”. I’m not a fan of musicals per-se, Cabaret and All That Jazz are exceptions, but I enjoy nuts and bolts documentaries. I wouldn’t sit through a behind the scenes look at any “dancing-with-the-reality-based-survivors-cawing-and-srutting-for-celebrity-stars” if you paid me. An honest attempt to look at craft? How something is created? I’m there.

Callback, rejection. Romantics, realists and ego even at the bottom rung of art. It’s most interesting to see archival footage of actors performing in an original production, and then auditions of aspirants. Very different generations. Very different takes. Paul’s monologue about his character’s turning point as a dancer, gay man and finding out how his parents feel about him is a testament to a young actor who’s done his work, honed his skills but in the end just communicates honesty and humanity.

Who would you rather be? A dancer whose vocation can mean a daily dose of dashed hope? A producer who makes choices about careers that mean you may have to cut the same person again and again at different tryouts in different productions up and down Broadway?

Obviously, being a dancer means Every Little Step will be more resonant. But it’s hard work in small as spectacle and worth watching. – [DVD]

Documentary

Rated: PG-13

Directors: Adam Del Deo, James D. Stern

DVD Release Date: 10/13/09

Silent Light

Richly complex yet spare at all levels, Carlos Reygadas (Japon, Battle in Heaven) has made an opalescent wonder of a film, reminiscent of Last Life in the Universe (Japan 2003), Songs From the Second Floor (Sweden 2000) and the films of Terence Malick in that you want to absorb completely each masterful, painterly scene. The story is one of serenely tangled hearts.

Reygadas has an immaculate compositional sense. The film opens with dawn breaking. Starlight fades, and as the sun comes up, the camera gradually moves across the hills and drinks in the perfection of the changing light. The entire film is slowly paced, but not sluggish. We’re given time to bask in static shots of the landscape that reminds you of an Andrew Wyeth egg tempera. The motion of a moving pickup truck, the view through the windshield, a cloud of dust that draws the eye away and back. More like a finely choreographed dance than driving a dirt road through farmland.

Dialogue is terse yet beset with meaning and heartbreak and is paired with action that wraps more layers of meaning in each scene and maintains clarity. The family is swimming in the languid water of a cistern fringed with lustrous green grass. As they shampoo their children’s hair, Johan offers a compliment to Esther. It’s meant with sincerity, respect, contrition for his errors and possibly a remnant of his love for her from long ago. There are tears. But it’s in Miriam Toews‘s (a Canadian writer playing Esther) level gaze back at Johan that reveals he’s only opened wounds wider. A remark meant in affection cruelly cuts both parties. Marianne is told it’s time to close the door to a van where Johan and his children sit. The camera is Marianne’s POV. You don’t see her, or her reaction. The camera lingers on the door long enough for sadness to descend, or what the audience feels as sadness. She’s closed off from Johan, his family and her life as it could have been or now will be. Then she walks away in long shot, but not how you would expect. Not slumped in penitence, but also not unapologetic. She just walks back to work. Back to living. Even the film’s ending could be seen as deliberately abstruse in the hands of a lesser filmmaker but I found it fitting, rapt and lucid.

Reygadas offers no real explanation of the Mennonite faith but he’s eminently respectful in portraying these people and you truly feel a part of their lives. He has a sure hand with his actors who are non actors. Everyday people speaking of profound matters. A stiffness to their words but also a lyricism.

And at no time are their eyes on heaven. Their eyes are fixed firmly on each other. The burden of heaven and life is in every moment. They know where heaven is. There’s no need to look up. – [DVD]

Drama

Not Rated

DVD Release Date: 9/8/09

I think it will be a three way split of disappointment: people expecting it to be a combination of Crash and Dangerous Minds; people with baggage, good and bad from their teenage years; lastly, parents who recognize and may have gone through some of the problems that exist in any education system in any country at this time in history. I believe viewers will have a hard time wanting it to be something it isn’t.

As always, it’s hard to watch, let alone enjoy a film. To just let an interesting premise unfold. With a subject like this, people in the Crash camp will be hoping for some all-encompassing statement on race relations set in a Parisian neighborhood. Something to feel good and hopeful about, in a bittersweet way. If you allow your schoolyard memories to have a say, you’ll apply value judgments on teachers, parents and students and find yourself saying “good” student, “bad” teacher, “indifferent” parent. And if you’re a parent, what you see in this film will be all about hope. Hope that your child only has great teachers and is a great student and at the end maybe feeling slightly dashed in that hope.

All that having been said, I liked and enjoyed this film for what I feel it was. A year in the life of a classroom of students. Kids on the way to becoming adults. Cocksure, anxious, hormonal, under pressure to achieve and assimilate into whatever France is trying to define itself as in the new millennium. There are flawless scenes of give and take between teacher and students, sometimes built around an odd, sarcastic respect. There are no inspirational film contrivances depicting halcyon school days. François Bégaudeau (who is playing a version of himself from his own autobiographical novel) is not Mr. Chips, or the Nick Nolte loose cannon of Teachers. He’s a teacher with flaws. We don’t know him away from the school. That’s the point. There’s also no short-sighted administrator to rail against. Rather a system shambling along and all concerned having moments of being shortsighted in how to reach and educate these children.

Other reviews have talked of the confined space of the classroom, the claustrophobia, the tension, but I didn’t feel this. At least not to the degree that it seemed to be part and parcel of the film. I just felt a constant energy. Francois is teaching grammar, after all, and each stalling, questioning curve ball his students lob he strives to turn into a teachable moment. As happens with any teacher, good, bad or great, success and failure ping pongs back and forth in those moments.

The film’s shortcomings are that there are scenes with a staginess to them. Early on, a teacher goes into a frustrated rant about his students. For all their stalling to learn, a student can suddenly be shown as brighter or with more depth than is probable for the character. Portraying the mishmash of cultures that make up the school, parents at conference time are sort of “cookie-cuttered” as characters. Immigration and assimilation are immense concerns in France and others felt this cut a huge swath of subtext in the film. My take is that the performances are so naturalistic, just as teenagers will really do, they’ll pick a fight using something as an excuse they really don’t understand and only think they should believe in at this point in their lives. Their own background, or their attempts at being an individual. We try to define ourselves.  We defend ourselves and others. Others decide to respect us or we decide to respect them. Maturity and pride in who you are mean not reacting to button-pushing for it’s own sake. By the same token, others need to open their eyes a little and look at our reasons for reacting a certain way. Witness the scene where a young man talks about how he respects another student’s mother and the stymied reaction he gets. Throughout the film, it’s these kids’ performances that keep raising astute questions about themselves and this system.

People will be disappointed with this film because the hard case children weren’t reached, tests weren’t passed as well as could be, and a French neighborhood doesn’t end up a happy melting pot. It’s not a film that really even raises questions. As a good teacher does, it starts the learning process just offering the subject, then you’re supposed to ask the questions.

Full disclosure: So people can decide if I’m full of beans about any of this, I was a Preschool teacher for 16 years and have a stepdaughter and two grandkids. – [DVD]

Drama

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 8/11/09

That’s not to say I’ve gone so far as to seek out interviews with director Fred Durst about his thought process on The Education of Charlie Banks. That would get in the way of my naptime. Also I’d have to go into what made John Ford, John Huston, or Ida Lupino tick, and how that plays into the films they made, and Durst doesn’t belong in that cadre.

Durst wants to be an everyman-renaissance man. Musician/record label executive/director. A guy from a working class background who made good and now, at this late date with his window of opportunity long closed and on celluloid no less, wants to offer insights and observations about the world.

A guy who wrote a song about nookie.

Making knuckle dragger music doesn’t preclude anyone from growing as an artist, attaining wisdom, branching out. And we all have guilty pleasures in any of the arts. Heck, I’m a Thin Lizzy fan and have been known to put on Madonna’s Ray of Light or The Night Chicago Died by Paper Lace.

By adding director to his hyphenate, Durst has attained nothing with this film.

The Education of Charlie Banks is slightly grittier than an after-school special and just as tedious. Starting in the 70′s and ending in the 80′s. Mick critically injures two guys at a party. A neighborhood nebbish, Charlie, witnesses the fight, turns Mick in, then rescinds his testimony. In part because he admires Mick. In part because a mutual friend of the two, Danny, talks with Charlie about friends having your back. Charlie’s father is very disappointed in him. Very disappointed. Mick never finds out who turned him in. Then Charlie and Danny are off to college three years later, doing well in their studies thank you, and Charlie likes a congressman’s daughter. Then Mick shows up to stay in their dorm room. His reason for being there is off kilter. Charlie is tense. Mick is charismatic. Drama and learning about life ensue.

There’s no chemistry or connection between any of the characters. Nothing rings true in the friendships or romantic interests. It’s a point and shoot and point and write exercise. This flat scenes goes here, she says a stale line there and…..done. The whole film feels like a surface existence Durst wanted for his own life. Sensitive tough guy. Ivy league and street savvy.

This film got in the way of my naptime. – [DVD]

Drama

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 06/30/09

In 1964, at a Catholic school in the Bronx, there is certainty. Sister Aloysius is the Principal, a rock of vigilance and discipline. Sister James, a young teacher, believes that kindness is the foundation of the church. Father Flynn is convinced that change must happen for the church to be effective. But now, there are incidents that point to something improper between Father Flynn and the school’s first black student.

As someone who was brought up very lazily Protestant, I’m fascinated by people who really wrestle with faith. These can be real people or characters in film or literature. They can be cynical and lapsed in their faith, or frothy in the description of belief. Thoughtful consideration of the meaning existence, not the cookie-cutter stamp of “thou shall and shall not”. Faith isn’t blind belief based in fear of being wrong. It’s realizing that a moral gray area can be a sieve that strains a belief, may even change it, but then reconstitutes it as something stronger to be used every day. Faith can be a living, breathing thing. And then by fault or distraction, faith, in anything, can wriggle away from us.

Doubt, the film, seems distracted. I assume the film is slimmer than on stage. The themes are more ambitious than just a whodunit, and a stage play can stretch out with language and character interaction. But in the film, scenes of life at school seem tacked on, offering background but not really feeling like part of the film. And though none involved sink to two dimensionality, Meryl Streep, as Sister Aloysius, is becoming a scene chewer like Pacino. Likewise, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Father Flynn and Amy Adams as Sister James have their actorly moments. But it’s a few minutes of screen time, with Viola Davis as the young boy’s mother, that shift the film’s moral centerpoint. Whether it was Streep consciously being generous as an actor or the reaction of the character of Sister Aloysius, it’s a truly fine “back-off” moment that succeeds in turning the film in a new direction. But then it just doesn’t gather steam.

The ending of Doubt is oddly pat, but ambiguous, with a sudden twist of consequence. I’ll give Shanley points for trying. As a man who must have wrestled with his faith at some point, he offers no smug answers for any of the characters’ actions. The film just doesn’t succeed completely. But its intent may have been only to get you to wrestle with doubt and faith a little. – [DVD]

Drama

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 4/7/09

The boy, Oskar, lives with his divorced mother. He’s intelligent, has no friends and harbors violent revenge fantasies against his tormentors. Adults in the neighborhood offer no protection as they exist in their own shut-off spheres or in the camaraderie of an alcoholic fog. This creature, Eli, fragile yet impervious to cold and by turns controlling, methodical and lost, connects with Oskar. There is bloodshed, humor, empathy, pity and the beginnings of a romance.

Director Tomas Alfredson has crafted one of the best horror films of the last decade, or in my opinion in any genre. Ask my girlfriend. I don’t gush over films. But after seeing Let the Right One In at IFS on campus, I immediately wanted to see it again. She can’t stand films like this, but she put up with my enthusiasm.

American Astronaut (2001) was the last time I was this excited after seeing a film. Both completely different, but startlingly original. The closest vampire film comparison to LTROI would be Claire Denis‘ Trouble Every Day (2001), and as much as I admire that film, LTROI is so much better.

Recent horror films end up being cruelty for cruelty’s sake. The evil portrayed is obvious and cartoonish, or there’s an overabundance of shape-shifting special effects. LTROI eschews all that for mood, story, performance, setting. In a dense texture of amorality and fantasy, LTROI allows us to see the pain and void at the center of every character and how deliberately cruel we are to ourselves and to those around us just by shutting ourselves off. Oskar has gone to visit his father. A drinking buddy drops by. In a few moments of film, you see all that is wrong with the adults in Oskar’s life.

Lina Leandersson as Eli is otherworldly. Easily one of the most poignant, emotive performances I’ve ever seen. With no back story, we still know this existence was thrust upon her, against her will. The ache of time is anchored in her small frame. A mass of contradictions, as human now as she once was. In the midst of horrific acts that mean a burden of survival and guilt for all her days, there is no joy, but she’s the most alive and feeling person in the film. Alfredson complements this performance with the most subtle of effects. Watch her jump to the ground when she first meets Oskar. No swooshing twenty foot leap. Gravity hesitates just enough. Oskar decides to test one of the rules for being a vampire. Every emotion at play on Eli’s face make you feel what she’s going through, just for Oskar’s sake.

Continuity errors occasionally pulled me out of the moment, so LTROI isn’t perfect. No film is. Pan’s Labyrinth had mistakes. Or would you really want to penalize the genius of the classic fairy tales because of a typo?

And be warned, this is a horror story and at times not easy to watch. But LTROI tale is perfectly told. It’s oddly serene and still. It’s also masterful and dynamic, romantic and bittersweet. – [DVD]

Drama/Horror/Romance/Thriller

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 3/10/09

But actors and actorly moments are all just plot devices to move the grafted-on story along. Feisty comrades-in-arms yelling “just walk away again”, the media not getting it right or outright lying, people trying to do good work for bad organizations, and all concerned making boneheaded decisions, political and personal, with the required button-pushing moments designed to elicit outrage. With all that has happened in the last 10 years, or for that matter at any time in history, how can we really be surprised anymore about greed and human nature? If you want to know about the protests, watch the documentary This Is What Democracy Looks Like. Heaven knows there’s enough newsreel footage in Battle In Seattle anyway.

Lazy scriptwriting aside, Battle In Seattle never really lags, so it’s possible to be drawn in, but it’s a case of preaching to the choir while they shout slogans back through a bullhorn. Director Stuart Townsend seems to think he’s being fair and trying to tell at least most sides of the story. Some scenes end up being distracting because you can tell it’s a small group of actors and not the masses of people taking to the streets.

Do I have anything against someone believing in a subject and trying to get a message out there? No. Do I believe that you should regroup, retrench and rethink if all you have is a message with second rate writing? Yes.

Do we really need a Crash lite?

Unfortunately most of what came out of the WTO protests was that governments learned how to lock out protesters more efficiently. “Fool me once…” etc. To this day a lot of people still do the work, putting their beliefs on the line and trying to make the world aware of injustice. We most definitely are more aware. But as recent events show, it’s “…fool me twice and fool me again and yet again another time…” – [DVD]

Action/Drama

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 3/10/09