"Accomplishments"
In theaters: While it has a strong biopic feeling, The Brutalist is fiction and the better for it. Things don't just "happen", they are part of a lattice of choices, or "structure". The film filters the immigrant experience through Adrian Brody's Jewish Eastern European architect, a genius of the then-new "modern" style (which I personally find horrendous, but I respect what artists were trying to do at the time). On the one hand, the film is about nativist abuse of immigrants, and on the other, of art's servility to the wealthy elite pushing and pulling against the artist's purity and intent. Art doesn't pay for itself, but patronage/capitalism interferes with art. And age-old story, or pair of stories. At the center of the film is an enormous project, a building that is essentially a reflection of the film (that's not a joke about the outrageous length, which I honestly, did not feel). Final revelations will explain some of this, but even before then, it's clear that this thing is its artist's story - its imposed Christian theme as yet another way to erase his Jewishness (a theme of the film, which informs our understanding of these defiant eyesores, in contrast to Communist brutalism, which is meant to evoke monolithic power), how its patron gets to "sign" the work, etc. Art must whore itself out to survive, but are there secret messages in the art that gives the patron the finger? Visually, The Brutalist enjoys strange perspectives and explorations of shapes in space. Something similar could be said of its soundscape, which prefers jazz and strange sounds to more conventional scores and soundtracks. Fun to see the audience jump on their phones afterwards to find out about these "real" people and coming up empty.
At home: A Prophet proposes a prison story covering one man's full term, door to door, so to speak, and presents the prison experience as a criminal school. Malik (Tahar Rahim) seems to be a kid who got a raw deal, and having no contacts inside, is quickly forced to commit murder for a Corsican gang. As the years go by, he becomes his own man, starts his own schemes, and ends up playing all sides against the middle. What is slowly unveiled is that he's really seeking revenge on behalf of the murdered man who now haunts him. Director Jacques Audlard creates a world sometimes seen through a kind of chiaroscuro, where darkness threatens to smother everything, but he doesn't overdo it. This is a very interesting crime picture in that, though Malik gets (and abuses) "permissions", everything happens in or from prison, so it's not entirely a "prison film". As for the "prophecies", some a self-fulfilling - Malik as master planner - but the rest I'll let you discover and question for yourself.
Despite a number of such films, I don't think of historical biopics when I think of Mike Leigh's work. And despite a brilliant performance by Timothy Spall, I think Mr. Turner is probably the least of them. Leigh's research-to-improvisation technique is used, and therefore the portraiture (though not what Turner is known for) is strong, but in terms of plot, I don't know what the story here is. Characters are shuffled in and out of Turner's life, historical incidents are strung together on a timeline, and personal moments are invented, but what is it all innate of? How does story fit theme? I'm left wanting. Perhaps it's that I really don't care about Turner's love affairs. I'm drawn in much more when the film is looking at the art world and PROCESS, making reevaluate Turner's work, which I'd had misconceived as being from much later in history - they're so... INDUSTRIAL - and rather dirty, smokey canvases. After the film, I'm rather a fan of the growling, grunting eccentric who was well ahead of his time. But the lovelorn maid and sprightly landlady? Excellent performances from Dorothy Atkinson and Marion Bailey, but that's not where my interests lie and feel them distractions to what actually makes the film interesting.
It's hard to absolutely categorize Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers as it's at once neo-realism and acutely emotional opera, so the only moment I think "breaks style" is the rough roto-scoped television bit, which I found highly distracting. Otherwise, the cinematography is pristine, whether the fog-shrouded industrial/urban spaces of post-war Milan, or the tight close-ups on faces where we watch a single tear hang on to an eyelash for minutes on end. Though each of the five brothers who have immigrated to the big city to find their fortunes (or lose their souls) get a chapter heading, but it's all in service of the two morally-opposite leads, the saintly Rocco (Alain Delon) and the venal, jealous Simone (Renato Salvatori). Simone's tragedy is that his younger brother stands to take everything away from him - his boxing opportunities and the woman he loves - but has no claim on either. He doesn't have the discipline or talent for the former, and has to pay the latter to be with him. Rocco's is that he always tries to do the right thing, even if it means sacrificing himself, his love, his ambitions to do so. But his moral purity doesn't work in a corrupt world, and absolute forgiveness only begets more sin, not repentance and redemption. Annie Girardot is the woman caught between them, turned into an object by their decisions, and the most tragic figure of all. It's often melodrama, but the operatic heights and attention to detail makes this the best of melodramas.
Fritz Lang 's Spies (or Spione) sets itself up at such a breakneck speed that you immediately start to wonder if he can keep it up for two and a half hours. And despite the continuous runtime, he manages to make it more exciting than most matinée serials! A master at work, with great editing and inventive shots, giving real production value to this complicated tale of espionage full of moves and countermoves, at the center of which is a romance between a German secret agent and a Russian Mata Hari essentially forced to work against her "love at first sight". The villain is styled like Lenin, but is barely an inch away from a Bond villain, well ahead of his time. A spy runner and spy breaker working against the leads, but a wise Japanese spymaster as well. At that pace, a LOT happens, and I'm not going to pretend I understand everything as it happens - no more or less than a modern race-for-the-MacGuffen action spy thriller - but I felt no confusion by the end, even despite the crazy ending. But even when I felt lost, I was lost in great, great visuals and pure cinema, so no real problem.
[Greenland, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands] Well, if my cat were rating movies, Landscapes at the World’s Ends would score 5 stars. There was something about this experiential document (I'm not sure I would go as far as documentARY), including the sound and movement, that ENTRANCED him in a way no other screen projection ever has, for 25 out of its 30 minutes. When the ambient music by Nordic artist Boreal Taiga started sounding more... "human", I guess... kitty finally tuned out. As a human being, I still appreciate the Antarctic/Arctic diptych, visualized as an on-screen triptych, sometimes making a single image, sometimes three points of view, and a combination of stills, time lapse photography and film, acknowledging the thematic triptych of nature, animal and humanity. Covering landscapes from many islands and countries at the Earth's two poles, I wish credit had been given for what was where, though, of course, it would have broken the spell. All very pretty - the animal photography generally aims for "cute" - but honestly, Landscapes is hardly much more than a travel slide show.
[Saint Pierre and Miquelon] I have a certain affinity with France's North-American territory, Saint Pierre et Miquelon, small islands off the shores of Newfoundland, and its sometimes shared history with we Acadians. I have worked with its natives, and played improv with them, but I've never been there. La France sur un caillou, "France on a Pebble", is a Canadian documentary from 1960, so this surely isn't the modern Saint Pierre, but its 1960s are recognizably OUR 1960s here in the Maritimes, while also looking like France's northern ports (like Brest or Cherbourg) had been transposed onto Newfoundland's dramatic landscape. Shot during Bastille Day celebrations, the film captures the islands at their most active, though it's the empty streets of the next day that speak to me more. And then, as now, that feeling of a remote outpost where life goes on for some, and proposes no future for others. Rurality at its most extreme, the film feels a bit like a letter to France, asking not to be forgotten. Makes more even more curious about how things are there today.
Books: French comics artist Nancy Peña's The Cat from the Kimono is a surreal aggregate of invented legends about a cat who starts life as a kimono print, escapes the garment, and goes globe-trotting after the kimono after it changes owners. Along the way, it intersects with various people and changes their lives, almost incidentally, sometimes giving them visions as if haunting them. It's pretty wild and quite charming. The one story strand I question is the inclusion of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson which doesn't really lead to anything (I don't think they have anything to do with Peña's further books in the series). It's a send-up of the famous characters, but to what particular effect, I can't really parse (and Watson physically looks like another character, creating some confusion). The black and white and sometimes red artwork is beautiful when it evokes Japanese art, and tends to the grotesque caricature (and so very European) once we're abroad, while the cat itself is fun and a kind of playful trickster spirit throughout. And that's the kind of thing one reads cat comics for.
Martin Day's Bunker Soldiers is almost a pure (1st) Doctor Who historical, and I kind of wish it HAD been that. There's an alien menace thrown in that causes more chaos than otherwise - and it thematically fits the story - but Medieval Kyiv, with a Mongol horde fast approaching its walls, is a rich and tense enough setting without what would later be a standard Who-ism. The threat isn't uninteresting, but still just basically a "monster", and it's the human cast that's most interesting. We have feuding sides in the city itself, but Mongols eventually get a voice as well, and there are no outright heroes or villains here, just people acting out of their particular system of values. Notably, Steven narrates some chapters, adding a lot to what, in continuity, would be an outgoing companion (this feels like it's just before The Savages), but it's odd that otherwise, the book is mostly third person omniscient. One wishes that Dodo, arguably the least developed companion in the canon, had been given the same treatment. She gets some things to do, but could be any of the First Doctor's girls. The Doctor himself is superbly written, a defiant negotiator for all sides, ever worried about the Web of Time. I seem to have a wishlist regarding Bunker Soldiers, but it's a more-than-solid entry in the Past Doctors Adventures line.
As one of the completely lost serials, Doctor Who (and) The Smugglers lives best in adaptation. Terrence Dicks brings his pacey, dialog-centric style to the fore in this tale of pirates and smugglers on the Cornish coast, with lots of moves and countermoves pulled off effortlessly by the various factions. Where he makes me long for the restoration of this story is in his depiction of the two incoming companions. It's easy to write off The Smugglers as a low-key historical without any great innovation, but the truth is, this is the first (and only? I think so) story in which the companions are left alone on their first trip for a number of episodes. Ben and Polly are thrown into the action WITHOUT the benefit of the Doctor explaining things and directing them to action. They have each other and that's it. Unusual for Doctor Who, which in this era was still making things up as it went along, and good reason to reevaluate this story. As a short, terse book, it bounces along effortlessly and is a lot of fun.
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