Reviews
Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)
A young woman who'd walk giggling to the gas chamber
If you were charmed by the zany, irrepressible antics of Roberto Benigni in "Life Is Beautiful," that Italian film that attempted to put a smiley-face on the Holocaust, you're sure to like Poppy, a 30-year-old woman who never stops grinning (broadly, toothily) and cracking jokes (and cackling at them) and fidgeting and in general acting like a child on a sugar high. In fact, you'll probably fall in love with her, which is what director Mike Leigh says he thinks anyone of any sense would do.
Personally, I found Poppy moronic, grating, and generally pretty insufferable -- but then, I'd probably feel the same about anyone who never shuts up, who never stops giggling, and who even smiles goofily when (at the start of the film) she discovers her bicycle's been stolen. Maybe her penchant for throwing back her head and whinnying with laughter, no matter what the situation, is philosophically commendable, and maybe she's a living saint (the movie would like us to think so), but she brings out the sourpuss in me, the impatient adult that wants to say "Grow up" and "Keep quiet" and "Get serious."
Mike Leigh famously makes improvisational films, which is one reason actors enjoy working with him. And some of his films -- "Topsy-Turvy," "Career Girls," maybe "Secrets and Lies" -- are among my favorites. Yet he's also made some of the most tiresome and preachy films (and stage plays) I've ever had to sit through. This one -- and I'm relying, in part, on interviews with Leigh and the cast -- clearly endorses Poppy's world-view; she's seen as a Free Spirit and praised for her unjudgmental friendliness, openness, emotional generosity, compassion, love, enlightenment, blah blah blah. To me, she typifies a sort of squishy let-me-give-you-a-hug attitude that pervades the modern British nanny state.
It's interesting that Eddie Marsan's character, who doesn't fit in and who expresses disapproval of things like modern-day moral slackness, multiculturalism, and lack of discipline, is soon revealed as a complete malcontent, paranoid, and conspiracy nut. Leigh's right-of-center characters all tend to be caricatures.
As if to accentuate the relentlessly saccharine tone of the film, it is punctuated by a horribly winsome, indie-ish flute soundtrack that seems to stand back and declare, as we watch Poppy flutter about London, "Awww, ain't she just the cutest thing?"
By the way, Sally Hawkins herself, the actress, IS awfully cute (I remember being quite intrigued by her in one of the director's dreariest movies, "All or Nothing"), and I strongly suspect, judging from things he's said, that the middle-aged Leigh has more or less fallen for her -- which is, God knows, understandable -- and has created this movie to celebrate and expand upon a certain happy-go-lucky aspect of Hawkins's own personality. I can't help wishing that, instead of inflicting this movie on us, he'd contented himself with simply having an affair with her.
Låt den rätte komma in (2008)
Sweden -- a nation of gentle dimwits
A few things this movie teaches us about Sweden:
Swedish adults are a gentle, dim-witted breed with an average IQ of 70.
They don't react overmuch when their suburb is the scene of a gruesome murder... or two... or more. As one reviewer put it, "The townspeople seem just a bit too sanguine about having a mass murderer in their midst." You think?
When murders occur, they don't call in the police.
In fact, there apparently ARE no police in Sweden. You can start killing off the inhabitants one by one and the rest will continue to go about their daily business. Murders -- even murders in which the victims are butchered and drained of blood -- get headlines in the local papers but are not, it seems, investigated.
When an adult Swede witnesses a gruesome murder from his apartment window, he just watches in silence and then broods about it for days on end. He doesn't go to the police.
When friends of the victim learn that this man has witnessed the murder and hasn't gone to the police, they grumble a bit in a mildly Scandinavian way, but they don't yell at him, or argue with him -- and they don't go to the police either.
(Sorry, I forgot -- there ARE no police.)
When, after several murders, a Swedish man sees his wife attacked outdoors and knocked to the ground by a young vampire girl, he boots the girl off, then attends entirely to the wife, not even looking up, allowing the girl to leave the scene.
The corridors of Swedish schools are pretty much deserted. The same goes for Swedish hospitals.
Swedish boys of twelve are able to slice their own hands with hunting knives without flinching, and then to watch their blood drip onto the floor while smiling sweetly.
Despite the way it taxed my credulity, I enjoyed this unusual movie. I thought the two strange, spooky, taciturn young leads were terrific, and I'd certainly like a mysterious dark-eyed waif like Eli for my special friend and protector. But as I said to my date near the end, "Who'd have thought that Swedes could be so creepy?"
Space Rangers (1993)
A guilty pleasure
Sure, this series was kind of hokey, and sure, the characters were -- as one of the IMDb comments points out -- rather cartoonish. And there's no denying that the stories were highly derivative; you'll find deliberate echoes of "Star Wars," "Star Trek," "Aliens," and a host of old space operas from the early days of TV.
But that's pretty much the point. I'm old enough to remember those early shows -- "Captain Video," "Captain Midnight, " "Tom Corbett," "Space Patrol" -- and "Space Rangers," when I saw it back in '93, had the same kind of unpretentious charm, along with likable (if thoroughly stereotyped) characters, colorful aliens, and plenty of action. It also had a terrific, pounding opening theme by Hans Zimmer (it is on my iPod even as I write this), as well as the pulchritudinous six-foot-tall Marjorie Monaghan as a pilot (so easy on the eyes) and -- in a brilliant bit of casting -- the diminutive Linda Hunt as the Rangers' commander, possessor of one of the most soothing, intelligent voices in the Solar System.
The fact that the show had an obviously low budget seems somehow appropriate; it gives "Rangers" yet another connection to "Tom Corbett" and its ilk.
I was never a fan of "Star Trek"; it seemed just a bit too slick, smug, and preachy. Sure, it was probably, quote-unquote better than "Space Rangers," but I preferred the latter, and I still remember how surprised and disappointed I was when it was canceled so abruptly.
Frozen River (2008)
Realistically bleak locale -- but not much else rings true
I'm afraid I side with Michael McGonigle and "Turfseer" and "zetes," who, as of this writing, have offered up the only negative appraisals of this film (and extremely perceptive ones at that).
Aside from an excellent performance by Charlie McDermott as a resourceful 15-year-old, "Frozen River" has one major virtue: the bleak, wintry, impoverished upstate New York setting, which lends the movie its tone. It was apparently shot in Plattsburgh, and let's just say the town does not come off as a garden spot. I've lived and worked in places like that, and they definitely aren't charming in the winter -- especially if, as in this film, you concentrate on shabby trailers, bare front yards, clapboard general stores, slate-grey skies, and lonely, icy roads. Which is fine, by the way; it's a genuine slice of northern America, raw and poor and forbidding, and I assume it is this setting that's mainly responsible for the acclaim the movie has received -- this and the landscape's human equivalent, Melissa Leo's hard, unglamorous, unyouthful face.
That raw, hardscrabble locale is certainly what attracted me to the film. And in fact, "Frozen River" seems to have been given something of a pass by critics because of its gritty look, because it gives a starring role, for a change, to an unglamorous middle-aged actress, and because it displays familiar liberal sympathies (for impoverished single moms, Native Americans, and desperate illegal Third World immigrants, including two very attractive young Chinese women).
Unfortunately, bleak look aside, "River" was a well-intentioned disappointment. For one, it's all too predictable: You KNOW that when Ray (Melissa Leo's character) tosses a Pakistani couple's suspicious bundle out the car window into the snow, she'll later learn there was a baby inside; you know that the baby will eventually be returned alive (Ray's the heroine, for God's sake, not a baby-killer); you know that Ray and Lila, the Mohawk woman, are going to overcome their mutual hostility as the film progresses and that, in a show of transracial solidarity, they'll bond and learn to respect each other; you know that something's going to go wrong on that "one last smuggling run" the two women are compelled to take.
I concur with my three fellow IMDb commenters that the Pakistanis' passivity in handing over their baby to strangers -- and in the face of its apparent death -- seems downright unbelievable; ditto Ray's unseen husband's running off at Christmastime with the family's meager savings; ditto Ray's inability to put decent food on the table in this era of food stamps; ditto a clumsy, unconvincing scene in which Lila, previously denied her baby, simply strolls into her mother-in-law's home and, ignoring said mother-in-law, silently walks off with the child. Too many scenes, like this one, just come off looking amateurish.
But the main problem I had is with the unrealistically spare dialogue -- as if the director/screenwriter had scribbled down a few bare bones of conversation in the expectation that her actors would improvise, build upon them, and flesh out the scenes, only to have the actors stick to those few curt words.
People who live in rural communities and small towns TALK to one another. They talk a lot -- often too much, I've found. They tell stories; they ramble on. They're known for it down south, but they do it up north as well. They are amiable and humorous; even when they have something serious to say, they say it with a smile. It's how they get along, especially in a somewhat inhospitable environment, because they have to rely on one another. It's what cements a community. In short, people up there are generally friendly. (In fact, let me go further: Assuming circumstances don't compel them to be otherwise, human beings as a species are generally friendly.)
Yet filmmakers -- with some unconscious class condescension, I suspect -- are always depicting their northern rural characters as curt and taciturn and dour, as if the filmmakers assume that these people are as hard-bitten as the landscape. (In "Affliction," a similarly unsatisfying movie set in a wintry small town, this time in New England, I recall that most of the characters treated the hero -- a disgraced onetime local law-enforcement officer, played by Nick Nolte -- with rudeness and undisguised contempt. And it simply didn't ring true. First, you don't keep dumping on someone Nick Nolte's size; second, people want to be buddies with cops and sheriffs, even former ones; third, the entire populace seemed improbably sour and nasty.)
Repeatedly, in "Frozen River," we're shown what passes for "conversations" that consist of a few muttered words back and forth, whereas in real life there'd be lots and lots of talk. One weirdly perfunctory scene has a Mohawk man demand that Ray's teenaged son apologize to an old woman the boy has tried to scam. The boy mumbles "Sorry" and walks away; the man instantly accepts it and drives off with the woman. It's a clueless screenwriter's idea of how a scene like that might play out among taciturn rural types; it's utterly fake, unconvincing, and, again, amateurish. And a crucial scene at the end, in which Lila arrives at Ray's trailer with her child and simply barges in on the son without explanation and with practically no words exchanged, seems almost ludicrous, as if the screenwriter had just plain run out of inspiration.
The Search for the Nile (1971)
Yes, bring the damned thing back!
I too have been wishing for years that this excellent series were available on DVD or video. It featured vivid, memorable performances that, to this day, color my impressions of Burton, Speke, and Livingston, and I still remember the mounting suspense as the first two of these explorers prepare to debate their theories of the source of the Nile before (if memory serves) the Royal Geographical Society. Maybe we're all getting spoiled, because it sometimes seems as if virtually everything is accessible today via Netflix or the Net... but here's a series that, it seems, has a built-in audience, a superb reputation, and some genuine educational value, yet all of its fans are forced to rely on decades-old memories of it. Making it available would be a true public service!
The Savages (2007)
Crude, hammy acting by Laura Linney...
... made this garden-variety indie film almost unwatchable for me. Which is surprising, as she usually turns in a perfectly decent performance. (Linney was vastly overrated in an earlier indie, "You Can Count on Me" -- it was her costar, Mark Ruffalo, whose acting was dead-on perfect and who really carried the film -- but she's usually not this inept.) Actors are eager to be thought of as smart and so generally have a hard time playing "stupid" or "naive" with any real conviction; look at how gratingly over-the-top awful Frances McDormand and George Clooney were in "Burn After Reading," or look at how crudely John Mills played the village idiot in "Ryan's Daughter" (which of course netted him an Oscar!). Mills screwed up his face and maintained a puzzled squint throughout that film, but normally actors playing stupid tend to let their jaws go slack (as if dumbfounded) and widen their eyes like gullible kids -- and both are ploys that Linney resorts to in "The Savages," in which she plays not only dumb but Insufferaby Winsome.
Ironically, an actress who has seemed heavy-handed in the past -- Margo Martindale, who played the selfish white-trash mother in "Million-Dollar Baby," a caricature that almost sank that movie -- was excellent here as a nursing-home administrator. (It just goes to show that director Tamara Jenkins can, at least at times, evoke more subtle performances than Clint Eastwood, who unfortunately seems to wallow in stereotypes lately; witness the cartoonishly racist civilians that populated "Flags of Our Fathers.")
For the record, Philip Hoffman was superb, as usual, but his character came off too frumpy, slobbish, and pathetic; college instructors have a bit more style, even the lowly, struggling academic he was supposed to be. And Philip Bosco seemed much too young, virile, and fit to play the demented father; he sounded, at times, as if he were channeling Alan Arkin in "Little Miss Sunshine" and was just as unfunny and off-putting.
The Eagle Has Landed (1976)
Brave, honorable, resourceful Nazis vs. bumbling imbecilic Americans
There's a certain sort of militaristic, maladjusted creep -- I've met a few in my time -- who's fascinated by Nazis to the point of idolatry. (Often, too, he's an expert on German regalia, uniforms, weaponry, etc.) Guys like this must love "The Eagle Has Landed," because the Nazis in it are -- with a few exceptions -- paragons of courage and virtue. (The few exceptions are, as usual, the Gestapo and the SS. As in another popular sympathy-for-the-Nazis movie, "Das Boot," these branches make convenient villains, serving as a contrast to the clean-cut good-guy Germans who just happen to be fighting for the Fuhrer because...well, they're patriots, that's all; they have absolutely nothing against Jews, and they despise those slimy fanatical Gestapo bastards -- honest!) The Michael Caine character in "Eagle" actually incurs punishment for trying to save a Jewish woman's life (how heroic can you get?); later, rather than shoot an unwary American sentry, he simply knocks the man unconscious. One of Caine's men dies rescuing a little English girl from drowning. The Germans take English villagers hostage but honorably let them all go unharmed, then die together fighting for the Fatherland rather than surrender.
Meanwhile, the Americans are headed up by Larry Hagman, playing a cartoonish officer straight out of the Three Stooges. When he learns that Nazis have landed in England to kidnap Churchill and are holding hostages in a nearby church, he -- get this! -- refuses to inform central command; you see, he wants the glory all to himself. He and most of his men end up dead, sometimes in Keystone Kops style. (One jeep goes hurtling off a road into a river; Hagman himself puts on a surprised, comic, almost cross-eyed face when he gets shot and tumbles down a flight of stairs.)
England herself fares little better. One muscular villager is a hostile lout whom Donald Sutherland, as an England-hating IRA agent, effortlessly beats to a pulp, and does so without losing his impish Irish grin. (In real life, said lout would have kicked the reedy Sutherland all over the set.) Sutherland trades a few romantic quips with a village lass played by Jenny Agutter; they have maybe five or six minutes of conversation (fully clothed, which is rare for Agutter), whereupon the lass falls so deeply in love with the IRA man that she shoots the English lout dead and proceeds to betray her fellow villagers -- indeed, her entire country. I suspect that some scenes developing the relationship may have been cut; still, shame on Agutter, Caine, and every other Briton involved in this production. If Britain were as feckless as this, its citizens would now be speaking German (or Gaelic).
A few commentators have mentioned this movie's similarity to a little-known English film called "Went the Day Well?" It was made during the war, on a much tinier budget, in black and white, without any international stars (unless Leslie Banks qualifies as one), but its characters are better drawn, and it's far more suspenseful and about a thousand times more charming.