C- sex drama

• Wrtten by Malgorzata Szumowska and Tine Byrckel
• Directed by Malgorzata Szumowska

Let’s get the expectations raised by this French/Polish co-production’s NC-17 rating out of the way first. Yes, there is a lot of sex, and a lot of nudity (both male and female). And no, I didn’t find anything in Elles to be erotic.

Which is odd, because the film stars Juliette Binoche, who could be erotic cleaning a cat box.

In this self-important yet shallow drama, she plays Anne, a freelance journalist and apparently full-time housewife. While her husband is away at work and her two son in school, she spends her time cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and interviewing two young college students moonlighting as prostitutes (Anaïs Demoustier and Joanna Kulig).

She’s working on an article about these young women–why and how they started selling their bodies, how they feel about it, what it’s like to lie to everyone close to them. The film also shows them with their various clients in scenes that stop just short of hardcore. Until quite late in the picture, we’re not sure whether these sex scenes are flashbacks, cross-cutting, or Anne’s fantasies, sparked by the the stories that the prostitutes tell her.

And if there’s anything Anne needs to escape into, it’s fantasy. Her teenage son smokes pot, skips school, and rebels against everything. Her younger son is addicted to video games. Her relationship with her husband is in serious trouble, although the filmmakers never bother to tell us the nature of their problems.

That’s the film’s biggest problem: We never really get to know who Anne is and what’s eating her inside. She’s clearly suffering from depression. Whenever she’s home, she mopes around looking glum. She occasionally takes a masturbation break, but that doesn’t cheer her up much. She just looks sad as she cleans rooms, fights with kitchen gadgets, cooks a dinner for guests she doesn’t like, and wanders around their large, luxurious Paris flat. (Her husband’s job must be quite lucrative. I can tell you from personal experience that freelance journalists don’t make that kind of money.)

She only comes alive when she’s with the prostitutes. She clearly enjoys being with these young women, and hearing about their sex lives. They become her friends–apparently her only friends.

The movie itself comes alive only with one of the prostitutes–the one played by Demoustier. She’s upbeat and  seems to genuinely enjoy getting paid for sex, but the lying involved is getting to her. She has a boyfriend, and he thinks she works in a fast food joint. You know that relationship is headed for a disaster. She also has some interesting johns, including one begins a little foreplay and then starts crying.

Elles would have been a better film if it had stuck to that character. As Anne, Binoche does her best, which is always excellent. But director/co-writer Szumowska didn’t give us enough information about her to make Binoche’s performance work. She’s a brilliant actor, but here she’s trying to emote in a vacuum.

Szumowska had an interesting idea, a great cast, and the willingness to embrace explicit sexuality. Too bad she didn’t make a good film.

D+ Character-driven comedy

• Written by Lawrence and Meg Kasdan
• Directed by Lawrence Kasdan

I hate watching good actors, some of whom I’ve admired for decades, struggle through a bad script. That made Darling Companion a very difficult movie to sit through. Here we have a character-driven comedy almost entirely lacking in either fully developed characters and laughs. If it were not for the inspired cast, which includes Diane Keaton, Kevin Kline, Dianne Wiest, and Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss, the movie would have been an entire loss.

As it was, it came pretty close.

Darling Companion tries to explore the long and not-altogether happy marriage of Beth and Joseph Winter (Keaton and Kline). But it’s not just about them. Thrown into the mix we have Joseph’s sister (Wiest), plus her boyfriend (Richard Jenkins) and her son (Mark Duplass). And don’t forget the Winter’s Roma (gypsy) housekeeper, Carmen (Ayelet Zurer), thrown in to give us some ethnic stereotyping.

All of these characters all have their conflicts, which are supposed to be interesting.

In Akira Kurosawa’s disappointing final film, Madadayo, he devotes half an hour to the search for a missing cat. Here, the Kasdans expand on this very bad idea, and build the entire picture around the search for a missing dog. You see, Beth rescued and adopted the dog a year ago, against Joseph’s wishes. Now he’s responsible for the mutt running off into the woods. Everyone joins in on the search, which takes them all around a picturesque Rocky Mountain town.

Would you be surprised to learn that everyone’s relationship problems get healed through the act of searching for a missing canine? Me, neither.

Despite its painful predictability, Darling Companion has one genuine surprise. The third-act resolution turned out to be even more idiotic than I expected.

Early in his career, director/co-writer Lawrence Kasdan had a big success with this sort of low-key, character-driven, ensemble material with The Big Chill. He hasn’t succeeded in repeating it here.

I saw Darling Companion at a press screening prior to its local premiere in the 2012 San Francisco International Film Festival.

B+ Documentary

• Directed by Jessica Yu

How do you judge a political documentary? Artistic and technical merit? How well it argues its case? Is it entertaining? How important is the subject? Do you agree with what it says?

Jessica Yu’s examination of the water crisis looming over the human race does reasonably well on all of those criteria. On most them, and especially the first and last ones, it hits the ball out of the park.

Water covers most of this planet’s surface, yet the human race is rapidly running out of safe drinking water. Unless you’re deep in denial, this shouldn’t come as a surprise, and this documentary makes it that much harder to remain in denial. (Of course, if you are in denial, you won’t see the movie. That’s another problem with political documentaries.)

With the help of original and stock footage, news clips, startling graphics,  informative animation, and experts speaking directly into the camera (including the real Erin Brockovich), Yu shows us how, as more water is tapped upriver, communities downriver are doomed, how industrial pollution is making the water we have unsuitable for consumption, and how global warming is making the problem worse.

Many of the stories are heart-breaking. We meet farmers who have had to give up because there is no water for their crops and livestock, and communities with huge cancer rates, courtesy of the industrial plants that share their water table.

The future looks even worse. As water levels drop in the Colorado river, Hoover Dam will stop producing electricity and Las Vegas will become a ghost town. So will Los Angeles. The American way of life will cease to exist.

Many so-called solutions won’t really help. Desalinization (removing salt from sea water) costs a fortune and burns huge amounts of fossil fuels. And America’s favorite personal solution–bottled water–is a scan. It’s no more safe than what comes out of your faucet.

Yu shows us one economical fix that could help solve the problem, but it’s a hard sell: recycled sewer water. There’s nothing wrong with it, we’re told, and it’s probably safer than what you’re drinking. But people’s visceral reaction will be difficult to overcome.

The film’s funniest sequence involves marking experts trying to find ways to sell such recycled water as bottled drinking water. Jack Black comes in to pitch "Porcelain Spring."

Yu either has a bigger budget than Micheal Moore, or she’s a genius at stretching a buck. The movie’s opening credits use expensive-looking flashy graphics of the sort you’d expect on a network commercial or a superhero movie. The graphics continue throughout, and even the talking heads are well lit and made up. All of this gloss, along with the occasional humor,  help make Last Call at the Oasis watchable, but no less frightening.

I saw this documentary at the 2012 San Francisco International Film Festival.

A thriller

• Written by Lars Gudmestad and Jo Nesbø, from the novel by Ulf Ryberg
• Directed by Morten Tyldum

Shit happens, sometimes literally, in this scary, effective, funny, gruesome, and utterly entertaining thriller from Norway.

Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) leads the good life. He’s a headhunter–in the modern, corporate meaning of the term. He helps large companies find the right executives to run them. In other words, he helps rich and powerful people become richer and more powerful. He has an extremely expensive house, and a a tall, blonde, stunningly beautiful wife whom he showers with expensive gifts.

In fact, his lifestyle is so lavish that even his high salary can’t pay the bills. So he moonlights as a burglar, breaking into homes and stealing expensive paintings. He knows that he can’t keep doing that forever. Eventually, he’ll either steal a painting so valuable it will fix him for life, or something will go wrong.

Something goes wrong. Multiple somethings. People turn up dead. Before long, avoiding the police is the least of his worries.

The filmmakers play masterfully with our feelings about Roger. He doesn’t start out as a likeable character. He’s dishonest, materialistic, and totally self-centered. This allows the audience to enjoy his suffering–at least for awhile. But as things keep getting worse, and as it becomes clear that someone is trying to kill him, we begin to care about him. By the time he has to bury himself over his head in shit, he has our sympathies.

Warning: This movie has several very violent scenes. The body count isn’t unusually high for a modern thriller, but some of the dead bodies are particularly gruesome. Roger himself is shot at, badly shaved, attacked by a large and vicious pit bull, forced to grab an assailant’s butcher knife hard by the blade, and has a freshly-shot, dead, and bleeding body dropped on him. All this is done with a dark humor that relieves the horror. And on more than one occasion, he walks away from a scene that he could not possibly walk away from in real life.

But that’s okay. This isn’t real life. But it’s one hell of a fun movie.

I saw Headhunters at the 2012 San Francisco International Film Festival.

A- Oslo, August 31
Anders, a recovering drug  addict living in a halfway house in the country, gets a day’s leave to return to Oslo for a job interview. The trip will also give him a chance to catch up with some friends. But he’s lost, has no idea how to reconnect with the outside world in a safe way, and feels threatened by constant temptation. Over the course of the day and night, his story moves from difficult but hopeful to harrowing and depressing. Filmmaker Joachim Trier takes us on a journey into Anders’ world and, even scarier, his mind. It’s one thing to read about drug addiction. Oslo, August 31 makes you feel the strain of wavering between a difficult recovery and a lifelong disaster.

You’ll get another chance to see Oslo, August 31 next Friday night at the SF Film Society Cinema. But don’t worry if you miss that one; the film has been picked up by Stand Releasing for a theatrical release.

A By the Fire
So sad. By the Fire starts out simply examining a couple’s daily life. Daniel is a middle-aged farm worker. He’s not desperately poor–he has a modest house, a cellphone, and a truck. Best of all, he shares a deep, loving, empathetic, and passionate relationship with his wife, Alejandra. But she isn’t well, and Daniel slowing becomes her caregiver as well as the breadwinner. As the months go by, it becomes clear that her time is limited.

By the Fire slowly becomes a study of a man watching over his wife’s death. He has to continue working, but as his domestic responsibilities increase, he frequently must leave his work at the ring of his cellphone. And each time it rings, he takes a little longer to answer it. He puts on a stoic face, but you can see that he’s torn apart inside, both by the increased responsibility and the fear of losing the person he loves.

Writer/director Alejandro Fernández Almendras lets the story tell itself visually, in a loose, unhurried way. Alejandra’s disease is never discussed in detail, and Daniel avoids talking about his feelings. Almendras is so confident in his filmmaking abilities that he can hold the camera on a playing kitten for an extended time.

A real treasure.

You have two more chances to see By the Fire–Sunday, April 29, 3:00, and Wednesday, May 2, 3:00. Both are at the Kabuki. There are no plans for a theatrical release.

B Coming of age drama

Written & Directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari

You have to adjust yourself to the slow pace of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s story of a young woman simultaneously facing her budding sexuality (at the rather late age of 23) and her father’s mortality. The static and low-key opening scene of two women kissing in the most awkward way possible sets the tone: Be patient, and you’ll be rewarded with the acquaintance of a few unique individuals, as well as some genuine and human laughs.

In fact, Attenberg has the funniest sex scene i have ever seen—and it’s entirely character-driven. As well as being funny, its poignant, sweet, and innocent. It’s also surprisingly graphic (not quite hardcore) and surprisingly erotic.

Marina (Ariane Labe) is 23, a virgin, and living with her sick father. She’s ambivalent about sex, and disapproving. She uses the word slut to describe her best friend Bella (Evangelia Rando). When her father admits that he has not been celibate since her mother died, she’s disappointed.

Marina loves animal documentaries—especially those starring celebrity naturalist David  Attenborough. The film’s title comes from Bella’s mocking mispronunciation of the name. She also loves to imitate the animals, by herself, with Bella,or with her father, with whom she’s very muich dependent on emotionally. The two young women also love to do these bizarre and rather silly dance-like walks together.

But she still lives with her father, is scared of other men, and doesn’t want to detach herself. She has some growing up to do.

I saw Attenberg at the 2011 San Francisco International Film Festival.

B Pop-culture documentary

• Directed by Morgan Spurlock

Morgan Spurlock’s latest documentary will disappoint his fans, which is odd because it’s all about fandom.

In this documentary, Spurlock doesn’t experiment with diet or sell himself to corporations. He doesn’t even put on a Batman costume. In fact, Spurlock never appears on camera and you never hear his voice. The film is entirely upbeat and apolitical. The subject is one that many find strange and eccentric, but few worry about: fans of comic books, video games, and sci-fi/fantasy movies.

The film follows professionals, fans, and fans hoping to become professionals as they prepare for and attend Comic-Con, a large convention for comic book fans. Except that Comic-Con isn’t just about comic books, anymore. It now attracts fans of just about everything involving sci-fi, fantasy, and regularly reoccurring characters. These fans often refer to themselves, affectionately, as geeks.

I have never been to Comic-Con or a similar convention, but I have some insight into the mindset. I used to be married to a comic book geek, and both my son and future daughter-in-law qualify. And I’ve been active in other subcultures that encouraged dressing in costumes and pretending to be someone else.

Spurlock explores the convention and the subculture by following several attendees. Two struggling artists attend the show hoping that they can show their work to professionals and kick start their careers. A costume designer brings friends and elaborate outfits for a competition. For the well-aged owner of a comic distribution company and his young assistant, Comic-Com is part of their business, and they worry about the bottom line. Young lovers, who met at last year’s convention, attend this one while the boy plans an elaborate and very public proposal.

That proposal makes Comic-Con Episode IV‘s best moment. It’s crazy, but it’s also sweet and romantic, and very much involves Kevin Smith. But then, I may be especially susceptible right now to elaborate marriage proposals between young geeks. (Why? Go back two paragraphs and figure it out.)

In addition to its central characters, the movie contains short interview segments by a number of people, many of whom are major celebrities inside (and even outside) of geekdom. These include the aforementioned Smith, Josh Whedon, Matt Groening, Seth Rogen, and the god of geekdom: Marvel Comic’s Stan Lee.

Whedon and Lee "Present" the film, so you can expect a positive view of the subculture. It revels in costumes and enthusiasms, ignores the sore feet and bad, over-priced food (part of any convention), and does its best to dispel the myth that geeks are just a bunch of overgrown boys who can’t get laid. On the other hand, by including a professional and two hope-to-be professionals amongst its subjects, the movie shows us that while comic books can be a fulfilling hobby, they’re also a very difficult way to earn a living.

I found the film entertaining for the most part, but lightweight and not particularly deep. I occasionally found myself checking my watch and wondering when it would be over. If you’re curious about this subculture or subcultures in general, it’s worth catching. But if you go because you’re a Morgan Spurlock fan, you’re going to be disappointed.

Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope opens Friday for a one-week run at the Vogue. Spurlock will be there himself on Sunday for Q&A.

B- Holocaust drama

• Written by Alain-Michel Blanc and Ismaël Ferroukhi
• Directed by Ismaël Ferroukhi

I had two reasons to see Free Men, despite my general tiring of Holocaust dramas.

First, at a time when Muslims are vilified, and when Muslims and Jews are portrayed in the media as natural enemies, it’s important to challenge these stereotypes. A story of Muslims among the righteous gentiles–those who risked their own lives to protect Jews from extermination–thus seems timely and necessary.

Second, I’m drawn to stories about ordinary people who, through force of circumstances, become heroes. There’s something inspiring about an initially selfish protagonist who, faced with an unacceptable evil, puts his or her own life on the line to help total strangers. (As I write this, I have not yet seen In Darkness, another recent Holocaust drama with a similar theme.)

In Free Men, the protagonist with the moral dilemma is Younes (Tahar Rahim), an Algerian immigrant and black marketer in Nazi-occupied Paris. When he’s arrested for his crimes, the police (who are collaborating with the Nazis) give him an offer he can’t refuse: He can go free and continue to work the black market if he regularly visits the Grand Mosque of Paris and reports on what he sees.

He finds plenty to report, but can’t bring himself to report it. The mosque is acting as a haven for Jews and other refugees, and is even supplying Jews with new papers identifying them as Muslims. Younes befriends one of these "new Muslims," a talented and charismatic singer named Salim Halali (an actual historical figure, played here by Mahmud Shalaby). Soon he must decide between the safety of collaboration or doing what is right.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers fail to make Younes an interesting character until quite late in the film. In Rahim’s performance, he comes off as flat and formless. Salim, a hedonist who loves the attention and sex that come with musical popularity, isn’t all that intriguing either, initially. Both characters take some interesting turns as the story develops.

Another problem: A basic plot point– the police’s expectation that Younes will inform–disappears too quickly and easily. It’s as if the screenwriters put their protagonist in a dangerous situation, then arbitrarily ratcheted down the danger.

The film really should have been about Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit, another historical figure, played here by the great Michael Lonsdale. The head of the Mosque, he’s an expert diplomat who hobnobs with French officials and SS officers, while secretly doing what he can to save lives. He’s a worldly, diplomatic, religious, and tolerant man daily putting his life on the line for what he clearly sees as God’s work.

Free Men makes some important points. It shows us how an ordinary person can become extraordinary when faced with evil. It counters western society’s prejudicial views of Islam. And it’s a reasonably entertaining, suspenseful motion picture. But it could have been so much better.

Free Men opens Friday at the Lumiere and  Shattuck.

Napoleon is huge in every sense of the word, from its 5 ½-hour runtime to its vistas crammed with thousands of extras to its epic subject matter–Napoleon Bonaparte’s life from childhood through his emergence as France’s ruler and his conquest of Italy. With that conquest, the picture literally goes huge, expanding the screen to three times its original width. Yet the picture finds time for intimacy. A young boy cries over the disappearance of a pet. A teenage girl struggles with a crush on man far outside her reach. A peasant struggles to hide his illiteracy.

Plenty of epics have intimate moments. But no other film I’ve seen uses the camera and the editor’s scissors quite like Napoleon. Gance put the camera on a pendulum and swung it over heated political arguments. He cut so swiftly that many shots are almost subliminal. He used double exposure (which had to be done in the camera back then) to show us the same incident from different angles, or to place a face over an action scene.

And then, more than five hours into the movie, the masking beside the screen opens up like a curtain, and 25 years before Cinerama, the screen goes wide. The result is breath-taking.

Like Cinerama, Gance’s Polyvision used three synchronized projectors to create an immersive, widescreen cinematic experience. Except that here the screen is angled rather than curved, and there’s no real attempt to hide the join lines. The illusion is problematic, and the projectionists appeared to be constantly adjusting frames to make the panels line up. When a horse rides across the screen in the background, it disappears briefly between the right and center panels. But when it rides across near the camera, the illusion is all but perfect.

Gance didn’t limit Polyvision to panoramic shots. He also used it to put three separate images onto the same giant screen. You might, for instance, have a close-up of Napoleon in the center, and his fighting army on the sides.

Yet none of these innovations feel like mere showing off. The technique was always in the service of the story.

And the presentation, underwritten by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, was always in the service of the film. To properly present Napoleon, they had to build a special three-part screen, as well as masking that would conceal two of those parts and then open up on cue. They also had to build three special projection booths.

Let’s not forget the music. I’ve been a fan of composer/conductor Carl Davis since PBS started broadcasting British transfers of silent films. Yesterday, I got to hear him conduct an orchestra live for the first time. His score, which leaned heavily (and appropriately) on Beethoven, added zeal, depth, and beauty to the film. When a character on screen was playing a musical instrument, we heard that instrument. A bass drum provided explosions, and nothing was missing.

My wife, herself a classical musician, knows some of the performers. They told her that Davis was wonderful to work with. I already knew he was talented; it’s nice to find out he’s a nice guy, too.

Another new experience for me: I’ve seen many silent films with tints–more than I can tell you. But this was the first time I actually saw a tinted print. In the past, the tints were always recreated on color film–or, more often, on video. But Kevin Brownlow printed the restored Napoleon on black-and-white film, then added the tints by running the print through a dye bath, more accurately recreating the original prints.

The effect was outstanding. The tints were far more vibrant than anything you could create on color film. At the very end, Gance (and Brownlow) combined tints with Polyvision, tinting the left strip of film blue and the right one red, while leaving the middle one untinted. The result was a giant Tricolor flag with moving images of Napoleon’s Italian victory. Even the Francophobes  in the audience applauded.

Which brings me to what I didn’t like about Napoleon: For all of its technical and artistic brilliance, it’s jingoistic, blindly patriotic, and unquestionably pro-war. Yes, I’ve read that Gance was a pacifist, and that he planned to be more critical in the five planned but never produced sequels. But I have to judge the film he made, and it borders on fascism. It treats military prowess as the greatest virtue, and assumes that France has a natural right to attack neighboring countries. It treats the title character, a man who unleashed war and destruction across Europe while crowning himself emperor in the name of an anti-monarch revolution, as a near god. The last time I saw a film with so many extras looking adoringly at the protagonist, it was about Jesus.

In his defense, I should mention that Gance shows us a handful of horrors-of-war images. But these are minor compared to his jingoistic call for imperialism in the name of revolution.

Napoleon’s thematic problems don’t take away from its amazing artistry–an artistry that could never be reproduced on any home-based entertainment system. It plays two more times next weekend. If you miss it, you will almost certainly never again get another chance.

Note, 3/25/2012: I have altered this post, adding the above photo and the sentence that precedes it.

B Political thriller

• Written by Bráulio Mantovani and José Padilha
• Directed by José Padilha

Captain Roberto Nascimento (Wagner Moura) strongly believes in killing "scumbags." And as an officer in Rio’s militaristic Special Police Operations Battalion (BOPE), he gets plenty of chances. This violent, gun-happy, rightwing cop is going to learn a lot over the course of this crime thriller–a huge box office hit in its native Brazil.

Nascimento is both the movie’s protagonist and its narrator. We see everything from his point of view. When Nascimento’s voice-over encourages the audience to hate someone, you have to wonder if the filmmakers feel the same way.

The street gangs and drug dealers don’t seem to bother him anywhere near as much as Diego Fraga (Irandhir Santos), a liberal professor who wants to address the root causes of street crime and opposes excessive violence. To make matters worse, Fraga is now married to Nascimento’s ex-wife and heavily influencing his semi-estranged son.

A prison riot changes both men’s fortunes for the better. Fraga goes into politics, and Nascimento is promoted into a powerful desk job. Once there, he can finally allow the police to wipe out the drug trade once and for all by whatever means he’s willing to use–and he’s willing to use all of them. The result? He unintentionally replaces one set of thugs with a new, better organized, and more violent group of criminals, and this time they carry badges.

José Padilha knows how to direct action scenes. The many gunfights, chases, and other physically exciting moments are fast-paced and entertaining in a well-done but conventionally Hollywood way.

Be warned: This is an extremely violent picture. Blood flows freely from gunshot wounds, fistfight wounds, and whatever other wounds Padilha could think of. Even the "good guys" commit shockingly violent acts on people unable to defend themselves, although the bad guys (no need for quotes) do far worse.

Although it’s not being advertised as such here in the States, Elite Squad is a sequel. The original Portuguese title even contains a 2. The film worked fine for me despite my never having seen the original.

It opens Friday at the 4-Star.