Descendants

A.O. Scott of the NY Times reviewed it two weeks ago: The emotional trajectory of “The Descendants” is familiar enough. It is about the fracturing and healing that take place within families. Matt needs to bond with his children, make peace with his wife and deal with the pesky politics of entitled cousins. As he works his way through these challenges and others, including a confrontation with his wife’s lover (Matthew Lillard), a lively and complicated mesh of plots and subplots takes shape, but the most striking and satisfying aspects of “The Descendants” are its unhurried pace and loose, wandering structure.

It does move at a leisurely pace, without dragging, not hurrying the action to fit a preconception.

 To call “The Descendants” perfect would be a kind of insult, a betrayal of its commitment to, and celebration of, human imperfection. Its flaws are impossible to distinguish from its pleasures. For example: after what feels as if it should be the final scene, a poignant, quiet tableau of emotional resolution and apt visual beauty, Mr. Payne adds another, a prosaic coda to a flight of poetry. Without saying too much or spoiling the mood, I will say that I was grateful for this extra minute, a small gift at the end of a film that understands, in every way, how hard it can be to say goodbye. 

“The Descendants” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Bad language, impossible situations.


In the New Yorker, Anthony Lane makes a comparison to From here to Eternity, and ends his review with a nice twist of that line, in assessing that closing scene. Death, which has loomed ahead throughout, begins to drift away behind them, and the film completes its journey: from eternity to here. ♦

 From left, George Clooney, Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller in "The Descendants." More Photos »

Fox Searchlight

The young actors did great work. Sid is a stoner, yet has an additional dimension that some people miss: he is not a boyfriend in the romantic sense, but simply a friend who is a boy, a young man; what he shares with Alexandra is a sublime friendship, an abiding loyalty.

Very enjoyable.

Rent

How It Went

Not too well, from the sounds of it. The first paragraph of the review is startling.

Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007, but one gets the sense from Charles J. Shields’s sad, often heartbreaking biography, “And So It Goes,” that he would have been happy to depart this vale of tears sooner. Indeed, he did try to flag down Charon the Ferryman and hitch a ride across the River Styx in 1984 (pills and booze), only to be yanked back to life and his marriage to the photographer Jill Krementz, which, in these dreary pages, reads like a version of hell on earth. But then Vonnegut’s relations with women were vexed from the start. When he was 21, his mother successfully committed suicide — on Mother’s Day.

Oops.

Vonnegut’s masterpiece was “Slaughterhouse-Five,” the novelistic account of being present at the destruction of Dresden by firebombing in 1945. Between that horror (his job as a P.O.W. was to stack and burn the corpses); the mother’s suicide; the early death of a beloved sister, the only woman he seems truly to have loved; serial unhappy marriages; and his resentment that the literary establishment really considered him (just) a writer of juvenile and jokey pulp fiction, Vonnegut certainly earned his status as Man of Sorrows, much as Mark Twain, to whom he is often compared, earned his.

Yikes.

Vonnegut and the other great “comic” (or if you prefer, ironic or tragico-comical-ironic) novelist of World War II, Joseph Heller, are getting their biographical due, almost simultaneously.There are some odd synergies. The two met years after their wars, onstage at a literary festival in 1968, and became great friends and eventually neighbors. Heller’s war was up in the air, as a bombardier in the nose cone of a B-25. Vonnegut’s was at ground level, as an infantryman in the Battle of the Bulge, and ultimately beneath ground level, in the basement of Schlachthof-Fünf during the firebombing. In a detail that struck me as, well, weird, Vonnegut’s breakthrough moment while he was trying to get a handle on how to write his novel came during a visit to a war buddy — in Hellertown, Pa. More ironic is that both World War II novels ended up being Vietnam novels.

Fascinating review. I read Vonnegut. And I saw him once, on the stoop of a townhouse on 48th Street (I think it was), around the corner from 3rd Avenue; he'd come outside, with a little white poodle, I think, smoking a cigarette, and sat on the stoop. He saw me recognize him, and shrugged.

White Wedding

Fun film. Started out strong and funny, weakened at the end, especially in its use of predictable and wooden stereotypes. Nonetheless, even in its use of two-dimensional white supremacists, the film makes good points

I am comic

A documentary about comedy that breaks the golden rule: if you have to explain it, well, it just ain't funny. Alas, this wasn't very funny. Many comedians do a schtick, or are interviewed, about being comedians. For some reason, Ritch Shydner becomes the focus of the film: having not performed for years, he decides to make a comeback, and the film documents it. Bad idea.

The one really funny bit was Tommy Davidson doing a simulated broadcast if Spanish-language news, with comments in English interspersed. It was hilarious.

The movie was not.

Frozen River

Takes place in the days before Christmas near a little-known border crossing on the Mohawk reservation between New York State and Quebec. Here, the lure of fast money from smuggling presents a daily challenge to single moms who would otherwise be earning minimum wage. Two women - one white, one Mohawk, both single mothers faced with desperate circumstances - are drawn into the world of border smuggling across the frozen water of the St. Lawrence River. Ray and Lila - and a New York State Trooper as opponent in an evolving cat-and-mouse game.

 Nice acting, gritty story. Seeking to save enough money to buy a double-wide trailer, Ray stumbles upon the smuggling of human being across the Mohawk reservation as a way to skirt the law. Chinese, and Pakistanis are put into the trunk of her car, she is given half of the money on the Canadian side, and gets the other half when she delivers the human cargo. A sort of loyalty develops between the two women,both of whom are single mothers and don't have great prospects in life, as they accumulate enough money to reach for a piece of a dream.

Conviction

A working mother puts herself through law school in an effort to represent her brother, who has been wrongfully convicted of murder and has exhausted his chances to appeal his conviction through public defenders. 

Hilary Swank plays the sister, Sam Rockwell the brother, and Minnie Driver her law-school chum and research partner. The accents are notable, and good, the pace taut, and it is a good movie.

The Last Voyage

Caught this one on TCM last night, already started. A ship is going down. The captain, played by George Sanders, appears hesitant, unsure, inflexible, as he tried to deal with many decisions at once. His accent, and that of his assistant, are both English, and contrast strongly with the Yankee informality of the rest of the uniformed crew. Edmond O'Brien plays the chief engineer (Walsh), for whom saving his men becomes paramount as the tragedy deepens. Robert Stack plays Cliff Henderson, whose wife, Laurie (Dorothy Malone), is trapped by a fallen beam.

Woody Strode plays Hank Lawson, a crew member who does help Henderson rescue his trapped wife. Eventually, once his men are safe, so does Walsh. They cut the steel, so Mrs. Henderson can escape, just in time. Lawson walks around shirtless the entire time, and he is quite well built.

Strode was a decathlete and football star who went on to become a pioneering black American film actor. He was nominated for a Golden Globe award for best supporting actor for his role in Spartacus in 1960.

I was struck by the film for a couple of reasons: it seemed almost the template for future disaster films; and Strode had a dignified role, and some body. For 1960, a good film, but only to a certain extent. The ;last line of dialogue spoken is by Henderson, who says, as Lawson is about to be pulled into a lifeboat, says, now this is a man I want to help. Wooden, stiff; could have had a little more emotion.

The narrator was Charles Laughton, not a favorite. Dorothy Malone, who had played the Acme Book Shop Proprietress in The Big Sleep, and would go on to lay in Peyton Place, was in her bleached blonde phase already. I remember, some years ago, realizing who she was on watching the Bogart film, again, and being astounded by the difference between her looks in 1946 and 20 years later.

Up Periscope

Saved Friday night. James Garner plays what amounts to a Navy SEAL sort, who has been assigned to slip into a Japanese-held island from which the enemy is transmitting, take pictures of their code, and slip out. He is transported on a submarine commanded by a hard-bitten (yet something of a sensitive soul of a) captain played by Edmond O'Brien. Everyone smokes. The medic is played by Ed Byrnes (Cookie of 77 Sunset Strip). The film works.

Love me or leave me

Cast: Doris Day, James Cagney, Cameron Mitchell, Robert Keith, Tom Tully
Director: Charles Vidor
Writer: Daniel Fuchs and Isobel Lennart
Running Time: 122 min.
Genre: Drama, Musical
Rating: No Rating
Synopsis: One of the gutsiest movie musicals of the 1950s, Love Me or Leave Me is the true story of 1930s torch-singer Ruth Etting, here played by Doris Day. While working in a dime-a-dance joint, Ruth is discovered by Chicago racketeer Martin The Gimp Snyder (fascinatingly played with nary a redeeming quality by James Cagney). The smitten Snyder exerts pressure on his show-biz connections, and before long Ruth is a star of nightclubs, stage and films. Ruth continues to string Snyder along to get ahead, but she can't help falling in love with musician Johnny Alderman (Cameron Mitchell). After sinking his fortune into a nightclub for Ruth's benefit, Snyder is rather understandably put out when he finds her in the arms of Alderman. Snyder shoots the musician (but not fatally) and is carted away to prison. Upon his release, Snyder finds that Ruth is still in love with Alderman; he is mollified by her act of largesse in keeping her promise to perform in his nightclub at a fraction of her normal salary. No one comes off particularly nobly in Love Me or Leave Me, even though the still-living Ruth Etting, Martin Snyder and Johnny Alderman were offered full script approval. The fact that we are seeing flesh-and-blood opportunists rather than the usual sugary-sweet MGM musical stick figures naturally makes for a more powerful film. In his autobiography, James Cagney had nothing but praise for his co-star Doris Day, and bemoaned the fact that she would soon turn her back on dramatic roles to star in a series of fluffy domestic comedies.~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

I enjoyed it. This review captures the film quite well. Doris Day pulled off the songs; her voice had a little, even more than little, resonance and vibrato to it (a couple of times I thought of Sara Vaughn), not the usual limited range and sweetness of so many other musicals.

Tremé

Watched last two episodes last night. Enjoyable. Not great, but certainly excellent for television.

TR

Originally broadcast on PBS television series, the American Experience. One incongruity: David McCollough is a talking head in the program, not its narrator. Yet nothing can take away from Theodore Roosevelt. In turn maddening and inspiring, he is truly bigger than life. Some of his views are appalling, yet he is the president who started to conserve the national resources of this nation: in a day when developers were planning to "improve" the Grand Canyon, he declared it a national treasure. He busted trusts, yet was an unrepentant capitalist.