Halt and Catch Fire: Season 2 (2014-)

Halt and Catch Fire's second season is a smart, compelling take on modern Silicon Valley's origin story. And, given the incredible economic and cultural power Silicon Valley holds in today's world, our origin story.

It follows four people - three makers and one suit - as they scramble, squabble, and build our brave new world amidst much blood, sweat, tears, shoulder pads and cyberpunk squalor. The fact that two women are portrayed as the central hardware and software geniuses is a sly criticism of Silicon Valley's current Vile Sexist Problem. But what's a real relief is that tech sexism takes a backseat to the real core theme of this wonderful show: the creative spirit, as mediated by modern, late capitalist work.

In 1980s Texas, the "Silicon Prairie", companies are just waking up to the economic and social potential of networked computers. While season 1 introduced us to a Dallas electronics company, Cardiff, getting whipped into digital shape by Ayn Randian ubermensch, Joe McMillan (a divine Lee Pace), it was - well, mostly boring. The three makers - cyberpunk riot grrrl Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis), hardware genius Donna (Kerry Bishé), exasperated wife to frustrated goober Gordon (Scoot McNairy) - felt a little flat, and Joe's American Psycho with a heart of gold thing was, yeah, whatever.

Season 2 underwent a radical change in tone - and it pays off. Suddenly, the tired Mad Men stuff was gone: replaced by smart commentary on our earliest digital roots (online communities, copyleft, brogrammers). Donna and Cameron have now joined forces to launch Mutiny, an online gaming/chatroom startup. Leading an army of slobbish brogrammer stereotypes, they clash over visions of the future (will online text-based chat be the future? or multi-player role playing games? ding ding, both!) and clash against the reluctantly ruthless corporate shark that is Joe.

What really impressed us about season 2 though was the incisive looks into modern work. We see modern American work in all its incantations: the "garage startup" aesthetic of protracted adolescence (pizza boxes, action figure office decor, geek fun aplenty), the genteel humiliations and scrabble of cutthroat corporatism, the desperate attempts to preserve the creative under the onslaught of capital. And once again, we at the PPCC are reminded: oh, how we wished work was organized along Renaissance Italian 15th century lines, and we would have bottegas dedicated to great masters created their art, and we would have apprenticeships with great masters, and the wealthy would be patrons of the arts, and we would dedicate our lives to seeking knowledge (science) and beauty (art). WE CAN DREAM.

Anyway. Here's a scene which captures the mood:


They're going to California next (season 3), and we can't wait. We at the PPCC have a long meditation on California festering in our minds, perhaps ready one day for the Internet. Suffice to say, it'll be about Californian secession, Californian arrogance, the way a Whole Earth Catalog + VC bros culture is exported throughout America, "please don't deport my redneck ass", and the fact that this Dead Kennedys song is still so darkly, hilariously true. Mellow out or you will pay. MELLOW OUT OR YOU WILL PAY.

The Intern (2015)

A spiritual sequel to Working Girl, The Intern is a moral, feel-good fantasy that touches on two of our favorite topics: the changing nature of work, and BUSINESS FEMINISM (yyaaaayy). The Intern is more earnest and optimistic than Working Girl, but its scope is also more expansive.

Jules (Anne Hathaway) is the smart, impassioned founder of an exploding, StitchFix-like fashion tech company in Brooklyn. She's firing on all cylinders and her company is a spot-on caricature of today's tech world: giant, open plan warehouse office, army lines of iMacs, endless screens of fashion clothing and code, code, glorious code! Also Millennials, every which way! Millennials being awkward and snarky! Oh, the youths. Oh, you sillies.

Into this silicon spritz world steps 70-year-old Ben (Robert DeNiro), the company's first "senior intern". The film opened with Ben, and he's basically the Platonic ideal of a senior citizen: hale and hearty, handsome and active, there just isn't enough to do for this uber-mensch out to pasture. Wise and funny, warm and gentlemanly, he carries the best parts of a bygone Golden Era where men groomed well and treated women chivalrously - but he's also, magically, unicornly, completely updated in his feminist thinking.

He is - and we hate that we can't find it on Google - what Jungians? Freudians? some psychoanalysts would call the Empathetic Sage Fantasy. You know when shit is tough and your life seems to be sucking and you JUST WISH Obi-Wan Kenobi or Gandalf or some other kindly grandfatherly type would just be in your corner for a while? Fighting your fight for you, calling you "champ"? Ben is that guy. He is that archetype. And while Jules starts drowning under her mountain of work (there are only so many hours in the day!), juggling a young family at home too, she quickly recognizes that Uber-Gandalf has just walked into her life - and everything will now be OK.

The main themes of the film center on being a smart, energetic businesswoman in a world where the glass ceiling is still there and women need to worry about "having it all" and dying alone - and that certainly hit us right here - but there are some very deft sub-themes about what work used to mean, and what it means now. Of course, Ben brings only the best of the bygone era: he is diligent, organized, methodical, and has a laser focus. No nagging notification bells for him; no Internet-eroded attention span! This man knows how to work. He is also humble, gracious, excited about having A Job. It's touching - it's heartwarming - it sets itself as a counterpoint to the (myth?) more modern ideas of "finding your passion". Of course, Jules is following her bizniz passion - the whole movie's about that - but we still appreciate any tiny ways we can find those narratives. (See our Jiro Dreams of Sushi review for much more on Labor Stuff.)

Anyway. Ben also knows how to flirt (just groom!), and there is much gentle mockery of the extended adolescence of Millennial men ("Boys! Boys?!" Jules cries in one scene).

It's indulgent, it's less edgy than Working Girl (which remains primero in our Business Feminism sub-category), but it's joyous and presents a world where we get it all: endlessly scrolling code, free beer in the fridge, the zing of good business, and - as DeNiro says in one wonderful moment - that "bright, beautiful thing" of creating a great biz. On to Warren Buffet next!

Mission Blue (2014)

Sylvia Earle is the reason we stopped eating fish two years ago. Well, that, and learning how to scuba dive. Man - Teddy Roosevelt (or was it John Muir?) was right: exposing yourself to a heavy dose of Mama Nature is really going to shift your perspective. And our scuba diving/marine conservationist/eco-warrior journey followed three distinct steps:

1. Holy shit, is this going to kill us?! Oh my God, we have to cough, how does one cough with a regulator in one's mouth?! (Hint: The magic of regulators is - you just do!)
2. Oh wow, those Pixar people really did their research.
3. FISH ARE FRIENDS, NOT FOOD.

So, back to Sylvia Earle. She is amazing. HUHHHH-MAZING. She is also completely under-known, under-rated, under-appreciated. She is a kickass boss woman marine scientist who headed NOAA (pow pow!), has logged thousands of dives (kaplow!), and now fights for the ocean's right to live, LIVE, LIIIVE. She wrote the wonderful The World Is Blue, delivered a TED talk, founded an ocean conservation org and is both inspiring and fascinating. Mission Blue, a documentary (on Netflix!) by Fisher Stevens (where do we know him from?), follows the evolution of Sylvia Earle from beach-going Florida kid scientist to marine eco-warrior. There's a scene reminiscent of Greenpeace-style activism where Earle, in her late 70s, dons a wetsuit and jumps into the water near a fishing boat. The fishermen - all men - are shouting at her and the other cameramen, and she swims up, taking pictures, filming, as the giant industrialized fishnet pulls an entire school out of the ocean. It's amazing - horrible - inspiring. WHERE DOTH MY WET SUIT GO, I SHALL JOIN THEE!

Another moment in the doc notes that Earle never recognized or acknowledged the glass ceiling. She just did what she did. And, indeed, there's a refreshingly straightforward directness to her. Never is the F-word (feminism) uttered, but her entire life is testament to it: she wanted to do science, dammit! Now she wants to goddamn save the whales! AND SAVED THEY SHALL BE.

Another jarring moment: when Earle wanders the Tokyo fish market. It's the exact same shots as in Jiro Dreams of Sushi, except now our perspective is radically different: rather than the hedonistic, aesthetic appreciation of all that fine, dead fish, we have Earle's tortured gaze at all that over-fished, unsustainable, dead fish. The scenes with the shark fin hunting - where fishermen sliced fins from still-living, writhing sharks and threw them, gushing blood and panicky, back into the water - left the PPCC shaken, horrified.

We loved this documentary, and it's important, and we thought about it for days afterward. But we're already converts: 30+ hours at depths between 15 to 30 meters will do that to you. Will it appeal to the proto-eco-warriors out there? To those that have yet to have their "this blue planet!" peak experience? We don't know. But we do think Earle should be celebrated as the special, inspiring lady she is. Into the hall of heroes you go, Sylvia!

How to Survive a Plague (2012)

Queer history is one of those things we keep meaning to learn more about; since it's essentially a modern civil rights struggle that's run parallel with our lives. We were born in the 80s, came of age in the 90s, and we remember well the fear and stigma (as well as the activism) surrounding HIV/AIDS. The narrative has shifted now, with HIV/AIDS being primarily seem as an "African problem", a problem of international development and public health.

This wonderful documentary, though, is the story of the early days of HIV/AIDS, when it was little understood and terrifying - and its epicenter was Greenwich Village, New York. This was a time when to be diagnosed was a death sentence. We were nudged to watch it after reading about some of the ignorant hysteria and attendant racism gripping some people in the US due to Ebola scares last month; a few people likened this climate to the panic that swept the city during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and its attendant homophobia.

The documentary charts the tireless work of ACT UP, an AIDS research advocacy group. Many of its members were gay men living with HIV/AIDS, and we focus on a group of them - Peter Staley, Bob Rafsky, Spencer Cox, and Mark Harrington - who seemed to have formed the leadership, and also branched off from ACT UP to create the Treatment Action Group (TAG). The doc is plainly presented, with little stylistic embellishments: Most of it is taken from a huge multi-year archive of grainy VHS footage; background music is subtle and low-key. We watch impassioned, town hall-style meetings as the activists debate their strategies. We watch acts of civil disobedience: marches, storming into medical conferences, draping huge banners over the awnings of pharmaceutical companies or the NIH. Sometimes, we zoom in on the personal life of one of the activists and learn more about their story: we at the PPCC were particularly struck by the story of the soulful Bob Rafsky, who had a wife and daughter, came out at 40, and quit his PR job to work full-time with ACT UP. There are a number of scenes which show the family together, happy and celebrating Bob's birthdays, year after year, while his daughter grows taller and he gets thinner. What we rarely see are modern-day interviews (the usual trope in documentaries); and, indeed, this mystery (where are they now? did they make it?) is left as a powerful reveal towards the end of the doc.

We at the PPCC can't stress enough how incredible this doc was, and how it should be essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand activism and civil rights. Sometimes, when you see the giant block of a cell phone, or the fashion, its world feels very different - and it feels so long ago, more than 20 years. Yet in many ways it wasn't so long ago. Many of those cultural symbols - we see a young Bill Clinton on the campaign trail - are still around today. The tentacles of that world reach straight into today. And, unfortunately, much of the same stupid bigotry is around today (the fight for marriage equality in the US seems to regularly progress only to get knocked back; the immoral and narrow-minded intolerance of legislation like Uganda's shameful "kill the gays" bill). The fight's not over yet, neither for gay rights nor for eradicating HIV/AIDS. And it is a fight; one of the most heartbreaking moments in the doc is when Peter Staley, who is alive and well today, reveals the survivor guilt he feels, and likens it to being a war veteran.

"How To Survive a Plague" answers its own titular question in the final half of the film: there's a powerful sequence when we see some of the activists in the present day. They're older, grayer, weary - but they're alive. They made it. And there we have it: the way to survive a plague is to agitate, to fight for your rights, to learn, and to never give up. Highly, highly recommended.

Interstellar (2014)

Interstellar is much as one would expect: the director, Chris Nolan (The Dark Knight, Inception, previously PPCCed The Prestige), directs movies like a late Romantic/Gothic period conductor, full of sound and fury, (often, alas!) signifying nothing. Like, look at these pictures of Glenn Branca, the experimental/art rock guy, conducting his electric guitar orchestra: this and this and this. That's how we at the PPCC imagine Christopher Nolan directing his movies. DARKER. DARKER! FURY AND THUNDER. SOUND THE KLAXONS! And so forth.

Which is to say: it's a lot of fun.

But, as with Inception, it was a bit hollow. Like Inception, Interstellar looks and smells and feels like a Big Concept Movie, and a very handsome one at that, but it doesn't really have a convincing big concept at its core. The movie's built to blow your mind, and - aesthetically - it certainly does, attaining rapturous levels of sublimity (the ocean planet OCEAN PLANETTT). But it doesn't really, really blow your mind. Not the way a good sci fi movie should: you know, the way 2001 blows one's mind with the whole alien/evolution stuff, or the way moments of Battlestar Galactica blow your mind by gesturing towards a gigantic (Mormon?) Divinity that hates robots and loves violent conflict. Or the way Dune blows your mind because it's, well, Dune and WTF is happening to these people!?

Interstellar doesn't really blow any minds. But that's OK. Moments come close. Sometimes very close, such as when freaky real-world physics things (like wormholes warping space-time, and time dilation, and relentless, awe-inspiring Nature - yo, this shit is real) are explored a bit. It's nothing you couldn't find in a Michio Kaku book or a thoughtful episode of Star Trek, but here, on Nolan's BIG CANVAS, these concepts are given the grandeur they rightfully deserve. Seriously, because - wormholes? Respect. Shit that is not to be trifled with. Worship it!

We should probably get to the plot: essentially, the movie boils down to a very classic (almost retro) Golden Age-style sci fi story. Earth is crappy eco-disaster (thanks, Monsanto). Heroic (white male) Hero (here, Matthew McConnaughey) is tasked with sitting on rocket in order to Save Everyone. Rocket blasts off! Choral music!!! Space is amazing. Also dangerous. Einstein stuff. Tragedy of time dilation.

It's actually been a while since sci fi has had such stories (it feels like we've been mostly preoccupied with monsters and cyberspace lately), and so it's oddly refreshing, even nostalgic. J.J. Abrams gestured to a similar nostalgia of Glorious Golden Age Space via the 2009 Star Trek. You know: shots of the chiseled blue-eyed hero shading his eyes in the flare of rockets. It makes you want to give money to NASA, and re-watch Apollo 13, and re-read Red Mars.

Which brings us to two things: (1) the strange, exciting way that Interstellar gets all mystical, even philosophical, and (2) the way it's a big sci fi palimpsest.

On the first point: one of the big spoilers of the film (which we will unfortunately spoil right now) is Hans Zimmer's music. Using repetitive, grandiose motifs, bashed out on a gigantic pipe organ, it feels Biblical and powerful and kind of like a Terrence Mallick film. People apparently complained about the movie's sound, since the blasting pipe organ often drowns out the dialogue. To this we say: philistines! This is like those people that got into a fight during a Steve Reich concert in 1973 (okay, that story is pretty awesome). Don't you get it?! Apparently not. We, instead, loved this. Especially the way the music was so over-the-top, and we couldn't hear the dialogue. Admittedly, we also love Philip Glass and repetitive classical music (especially in films). But we thought Zimmer's music was one of the best parts of the film, a stroke of genius.

On the second point: so, a palimpsest is a story written on top of another story. A document where the faint traces of the previous writing are evident. Interstellar has inevitably been compared to 2001, which is an obvious connection, but we actually found the vibes - especially the moments when characters realized their cosmic insignificance - to be very similar to a different 1970s sci fi film, Solyaris. Like Interstellar, Solyaris is very Romantic, in reverence of nature and our place in it, and infused with the sense of cosmic mysteriousness. The two movies feel so similar in places that we even wondered if Nolan intended this as a semi/sort of update. Nolan is too pop to go really slow, though he does try to keep the pace austere and stately. Solyaris is an unapologetic three-hour grind that is, for those who make it through, deeply rewarding: it features many of the same themes (but zero action, sorry) about unforgiving space and humanity's need to wonder/understand. The story centers around a cosmonaut visiting a lonely science station by a lonely water world, and being - in turn - visited by a ghost/apparition/unknowable copy of his dead wife. Oh my Lord, it's so good. It also features organ music (yay).

Hmm, another very close relative would be Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles.

Should you see Interstellar? Duh, yes, do you even like movies?! But is the science in Interstellar sound? Mostly - Kip Thorne (of Caltech) consulted and even wrote a companion pop science book. It's about as sound as Contact, which - oh, yikes - we recommend, especially if you're excited by science and space travel. And what a surprisingly good trailer (yo, the 1990s had teeerrible trailers). Anyway, yes, watch Interstellar. Worship wormholes.

Tournée (2010)

A lot of things are going on in Tournée (On Tour), though not much happens.

We follow a burlesque troupe of Americans, led by a wiley, scrabbly French manager named Joachim (the wonderful Mathieu Amalric), as they "skirt around the edges" of France (meaning, coastal towns). Things end much as they begin, with existential despair sometimes leavened by a little lovemaking and a little champagne. Joachim is a scraggly has-been TV producer, now running a self-described "girly show". But, much like a slew of Giancarlo Giannini characters (especially this one), it's unclear who's lording it over who in this sexist/feminist mish-mash. The burlesque performers - Mimi Le Meaux, Kitten on the Keys, Dirty Martini, and others (all real-life burlesque performers) - assert that the show is led by them, for them; it's a liberating experience of women taking ownership over their own bodies. It's an emancipation, even as Joachim herds and frets and stresses over logistics and booking venues.

When Joachim is not fretting over the tour, he - ahem - tours through his old French life (fresh, as he is, from an indeterminately long sojourn in the US). We meet old lovers (male and female), old colleagues, and his two kids. And everyone, okay, totally hates his guts - though we never find out why. These ancient grudges lead to some of the comedy's few actually funny scenes, such as when Joachim's son runs away in the middle of the night and then pretends not to know him in front of the police.

The film's about the show, but it's also about the tour of life, and we mostly get a classically French look at existential despair. Joachim and the girls are living a picaresque life on the edges of society - sometimes liberating, sometimes alienating. (This is best exemplified in Mimi le Mieaux, who has moments of coming apart at the seams.) 'Cuz, gosh, don't it all just make you feel so mortal! Boobs sag, eyelashes are fake, and there's a general sense of glitzy decay, of desperate grasping and of fizzling hopes. Joachim himself is a bit of a crumply sad-sack (though we felt Amalric was too young for the part), mostly trafficking in self-pity.

That said, as is usual in these "oh, the abyss!"-type stories, there's a redeeming humanism throughout. You love these characters, even if they sometimes worry about being unlovable. The girls tease Joachim, he yells at them, but there's a real affection as well. It might be senseless grasping across the abyss, but - hey - it's something!

Anyway, Mathieu Amalric directed this as well, but it was really his performance that made us want to watch, and that is the best part of the show. Miranda Colclasure (as Mimi) was touching, and there were some minor roles - the lady in the gas station! or the lady at the grocery store - that were memorable and well-done.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)

We've missed International Worker's Day by a week, but so be it! We are here today with an excellent film for you: a film about work, and Zen, and sushi.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is, on the surface, a documentary about a Michelin-star sushi chef working out of his legendary sushi restaurant at a subway station in Tokyo. Jiro Ono is nearing 90, an implacable perfectionist who creates symphonies with raw fish. We meet some of his entourage: his elder son, Yoshikazu, who is the eternal chef #2 at the legendary joint, and younger son, Takashi, who's opened up a second outlet in one of Tokyo's upscale neighborhoods.

Throughout the documentary, we learn about Jiro's upbringing, his philosophy on work, we follow Yoshikazu as he goes to the fish market every morning, we have a few musings on how to cook the perfect rice or the perfect egg sushi, and, in general, there are a lot of loving shots of glistening sushi settling on the plate in gloriously narrow focal depth. With, we should note, a gorgeous score by Philip Glass and other minimalists.

So, it's very nice. Definitely.

But that's not what the documentary is really about, not for us. Because the doc is really a Zen meditation on the glorious pointlessness, the non-passionate passion of pursuing work - any work. Any thing really. This doc - and Jiro's life - is like zazen (a seated meditation style used in Zen). Just as the Sōtō Zen school thinks that - you know - wanting Enlightenment is a big mistake, and maybe there's nothing beyond this, there's nothing beyond just sitting, so too does Jiro advocate working just to work. That is, you just sit. You sit for the sake of sitting. Not for any reward, not for any benefit. You make sushi just to make sushi. You try to make the best sushi you can, not because your father was a master sushi chef (Jiro's wasn't), or because you dreamed since childhood of fish (Jiro didn't), but because - now that you find yourself behind the sushi counter - you just do it.

It's a powerful message, and it's refreshingly austere and refreshingly anti-"do what you love". The "do what you love" mantra is a very post-1980s American work ethic which claims that everyone should, step 1, identify something which they're passionate about (ideally involving poor African children), step 2, pursue this passion with all their energy and zeal and drive while in their nomadic 20s and 30s, and, step 3, bask in their pure feel-goodness. The "do what you love" mantra manifests itself in, for example, a friend of the PPCC's guffawing when the PPCC (very seriously!) mentioned "salary" as one of the reasons she does her job (seeking a good salary is, after all, antithetical to "doing what you love"). It also manifests itself in the abuse of zero-wage labor, the ridiculousness of the academic job market, and the abandonment (suppression, even) of traditional labor rights issues. It's also, we think, very much perpetuated by those who benefit from The System - i.e. old, rich, white dudes.

Oh, we at the PPCC have MUCH TO SAY ON THIS ISSUE. But we'll spare you.

"But Jiro seems quite passionate!" you might cry. And there's the difference. It's about which comes first: the passion to do job X, or job X. Jiro's philosophy seems to be: find job X, pay bills, do job X well. There's no "finding yourself", there's no thinking about what you "really" want to do. There's just doing. Just sitting. Such Zen! We love it.

Anyway, even if you disagree with our labor rights philosophy (which we will, from now on, call Zen careerism), you will still enjoy Jiro because, well, everyone loves Jiro. Seriously, this is a hit with everyone we've ever seen it with. We've never met anyone who doesn't love this doc. You will love it too. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy the fish.

Highly recommended.

A Separation (2011)

The superb Jodaeiye Nader az Simin (A Separation, جدایی نادر از سیمین‎) is a layered, humanist take on some pretty sad domestic drama. Following two Iranian couples - the intellectual middle-class Nader and Simin, and the struggling working class Razieh and Hojjat - we learn about modern-day Tehran, the difficulties of growing older, your parents disappointing you, and the danger of assumptions.

The film begins with a brilliant long take of Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) at the family court. They're arguing about getting a divorce, and we're going to be spending a loooot of time in these low-level courts, arguing particulars and details while characters attempt to tell the truth, but maybe not the whole truth. Nader and Simin are here to argue about their divorce: she wants to leave Iran, taking their 11-year-old daughter, the owlish Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), with her. He is refusing to leave the country, and is willing to accept a divorce instead. "You know I can't leave because of my father," he laments. (His father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi) is suffering from Alzheimer's and needs near-constant care.)

When Simin moves in with her parents, Nader hires a caretaker for his father - the exhausted-looking, chador-wearing Razieh (Sareh Bayat). She arrives with adorable daughter in tow, but immediately there's problems: religious guilt plagues her when she has to take care of Nader's father soiling himself, and she's also anxious not to let her husband know that she's working here. When, one day, Nader comes home to find her and her daughter absent, and his father, unconscious, tied to the bed, things spiral out of control.

You've probably already got a bunch of assumptions running through your head, just from the way we mapped out the plot: about patriarchal husbands refusing to leave Iran, of poor, put-upon wives struggling to make ends meet. And so on and so forth. The genius of the film is how subtly and realistically we see our assumptions for what they are: bias and ill-informed prejudice. Like Revolutionary Road, you can deeply sympathize with each character, and you can see that they're essentially good people trying to deal with an increasingly complex, messy situation.

The film lightly jabs at those who are a bit too smug in their self-righteousness: Nader being the case in point. He's a calm, measured man with a great relationship with his daughter. Early in the film, we see him insisting that she gas up their car and get the change - teaching her to be independent, even forceful. "Dad, they were all staring," she whispers anxiously. Let them stare, my little emancipated daughter! Indeed, Nader is led by a moral clarity which is at first admirable, but increasingly erodes as the conflict with the other couple gets thornier and thornier. That clarity turns into a high horse. And high horses - they are hard to get down from.

Iranian cinema is famously good, and we're embarrassed to be a PPCC who's only seen this Iranian film. Because, gosh, it's good. Gosh, wow. The acting by everyone is top-notch, with perhaps Shahab Hosseini as the greatest revelation. His performance is brutal, tragic, often hard to take in. And it's maybe the most interesting: as he struggles against the stereotypes that threaten to submerge him. "I swear on this Quran, we're human just like you!" he says at one point, and it's scathing.

Highly recommended. Maybe a perfect film. And please leave reccs for more Iranian cinema in the comments.

La grande bellezza (2013)

Ah, how to explain La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty)! How to convey its cleverness, its beauty, its insightfulness? Oh, how we liked this one. Loved even!

A spiritual sequel, even a spiritual remake, of that pillar of Italian cinema, La dolce vita, La grande bellezza follows Jep (Toni Servillo), an aging journalist and former novelist star who lives the high life in Rome. Sound familiar? The parallels with La dolce vita are numerous and blatant; the film is an homage and an update to that wonderful 1960s film of Italian decay. And if there's one thing Italy's good at, it's decay.

The film opens on a blistering party scene on a rooftop somewhere in Rome. People grind, thrust, guzzle designer beverages and tear off their designer clothes. Insert lots of orgiastic, Calvin Klein wind machine faces. They're also mostly in their 50s and 60s, and they're gaudy, outrageous, luxurious and crazy. Honestly, this scene lasts nearly 15 minutes, and it's solely for a - admittedly wonderful - slow intro to Jep. It is brilliant. Following that, we meander through Jep's life with him: we attend his lavish parties, his avant garde art events, we meet some old friends and make new ones.

And, over and over again, we're confronted with a sort of hedonistic nihilism that makes Rome feel like the end of the world (rather than the center of it, which is how it can sometimes also feel). Most of the scenes seem to take place in that nether hour just before dawn: the streets are empty, and the few people that you do see on the street feel surreal and alien. This is the universe Jep trafficks in, and - like Marcello before him - it's a superficially beautiful, "sweet life" that is slowly eroding Jep's spirit.

Indeed, like Marcello, Jep faces a few shocks of grief and horror, and sometimes his despair shows through the cracks. Because this beautiful life - these beautiful buildings, wealthy people, endless partying - are a vacuum, an abyss, and Jep is trying to crawl out of it to, as he states late in the film, "find the great beauty". Of course, he realizes - and we realize - that there's no great beauty, there's only snatches of transcendental moments, of peak experiences, and then some terrible moments, the "wretchedness of humanity", and then a lot of "blah blah blah". You have to embrace the "fiction" of life and just cling to each other - it's actually a bit more of an upbeat message than La dolce vita (whose message was basically, WOE UNTO US ALL and FISH MONSTER).

Don't ask us about the fish monster. We don't know what the fish monster was about.

It's important to put this film, though, into the context of modern day Italy and - more specifically - Rome. First off, Rome has been in a state of luxuriating decay since, well, forever. Two thousand years ago, the city was also bumping and grinding to phat beats while the moneyed classes stumbled to their vomitariums. Actually, sorry, vomitaria (neutral, nominative, plural). Heck, we just finished reading a Stoic tract by Seneca, and even he was complaining - 2,000 years ago! - about the heedless, desire-driven pointlessness of some of these people's party-all-night lifestyles. So it's kinda a tradition. Of course, at least Rome was the end-all, be-all city 2,000 years ago. The intervening period - le invasioni barbariche (the "barbarian invasions"), the Middle Ages, the Vatican state - between then and now had an even more severe case of decay. Honestly, nothing's more depressing than 18th century Rome. There was a looooong period of neglect and exploitation at the hands of the Church, and, you know, dismantling the Colosseum to build the other stuff.

And modern-day Rome! Ah, what to say of modern-day Rome. We lived there for two years, and both La dolce vita and this film very accurately capture a slice of Roman grandeur and Roman excess and Roman life. The high-end brands. The obsession with "la bella figura". The seductive, enchanting backdrop. The pointlessness. We don't know what it is, but there is something about the city which seems to turn off one part of your brain and activate another: it's hypnotic, drug-like. The two years we spent there still seem like a dream to us - remote and not part of our "real life". A vacation from real life. And we didn't even go to these parties!

And then there's the Problem of Italy. Post-war Italy has been a tumultuous ride of constantly crumbling governments, a political circus, and - yes - the slow sucking of the Italian soul. You could even say this has been reflected in the slow erosion of Italian cinema: from the earnest, powerful glories of post-war neorealism, to the scathing, flirting-with-the-abyss stabbing political satires and commedie all'italiana of the 1970s, to the increasingly vapid and just plain idiotic recent stuff. Quo vadis, bel paese?

Indeed, Italian nihilism is a very widespread thing. The country is seen as "bella e inutile" (beautiful and useless). Unemployment is high, most Italians flee to jobs abroad, the politics are a mess, and - honestly - today the PPCC was surprised to realize that Italy, and not India, is in the G7. How is Italy's GDP so high? HOW?! And then, of course, there's the problem of The Children. Namely, that there are none (the birth rate is 1.41 births per woman). (The film's treatment of children and younger adults is brilliantly eviscerating - from the intense, lunatic 20something, Andrea (Luca Marinelli), who looks like Jesus and insists on talking about Proust, to the screaming, pre-teen, wild-thing daughter of pretentious art parents, who insist on making the girl an art installation in and of herself. Seriously, these scenes made us realize that Children of Men could be about Italy; especially the scene with Danny Huston the art collector and his brain-dead son.)

So it's very common to consider Italy a big, beautiful, broken mess of a country, a place that's gorgeous but infuriatingly stuck. And this stuckness is economic, political, social, but also, well, moral or existential. And this existential decay is the perfect backdrop, of course, for a 65-year-old childless bachelor, drunkenly surveying his millionth roof party, saying, "I love our little dance trains. You know why? Because they go nowhere."

Anyway, because of this - ahem - campanilismo in the film's themes and setting, we're not sure if this will appeal to any and everyone. Maybe, though? Certainly to the international intelligentsia. And that's fine - the film is gorgeously shot, Sorrentino's direction is unique and evocative, and everything is lush. And (like La dolce vita!) it drags a bit in the latter half, as we watch Jep's spiritual decline (or spiritual waking up, if you like), and is probably about 30 min too long. But that's fine, fine, fine.

One additional aside: it blew the PPCC's mind to see Carlo Verdone in the role of Romano. Omg. OMG. This is OMG-worthy because Carlo Verdone was a huge star of populist Roman comedies from the 1980s and 1990s. We saw him on Ponte Sisto once! And he's a natural heir to the earnest, lovable-Roman-with-a-heart-o-gold stock character that was immortalized in the films of Alberto Sordi and (our fave!) Nino Manfredi. Indeed, Verdone even looked like an aging Manfredi, what with the tinted glasses and wounded air. His casting, his character's name, and his subplot were just great, fun meta. Romano is giving up on Roma, people!

Jagten (2012)

Jagten (The Hunt) is from that subgenre of northern European cinema that looks at the eerie small town and the cruel chaos that courses just under the surface.

In Jagten, we're introduced to Lukas (Mads Mikkelsen), a seemingly upstanding, well-integrated, happy-go-lucky member of an anonymous small, Danish town. Lukas is the local kindergarten teacher, and he's playful, upbeat, and fun. He also has his gang of gruff, grizzly Danish bros, who drink and hunt together, and his biggest stressor - for now - is his arguments with his ex-wife regarding their teenage son, Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrøm). Until, of course, Lukas is falsely accused of pedophilia. Then shit really hits the fan.

The film makes it pretty obviously clear that the accusation is false (there are no Rashomony pretentions of, "Well, maaaybe it diiiid happen..." - thank God, really). It has also been foreshadowing, symbolisming, and generally proclaiming the fairly obvious connection between the early scenes of manly deer hunting, and later scenes of the hunt for Lukas. Indeed, the film is fairly heavy-handed in its message: humans are pack animals; they see red when you threaten their young. There's also the seasonal aspect: something reinforced by the film's coda, which seems to hint that Lukas's prey status was a seasonal bloodletting that must happen and may happen again. And it could happen to you! Or whatever.

Honestly, we had high hopes, and they were a little dashed. The acting was, indeed, very fine, and Mads Mikkelsens's Cannes Best Actor win was deserved. We were actually much more impressed by the kids: Lukas's accuser, the dreamy-yet-serious little Klara (Annika Wedderkopp) was an incredible actress and maybe, like, seven? Also, Lasse Fogelstrøm, who played Lukas's teenage son, was soulful and sympathetic. We kinda hoped the film would start to follow his travails, or maybe they could just make a sequel called, Marcus - Kid on the Streets. Because that would be great.

The acting was fine; the cinematography was gorgeous (wow, Denmark); perhaps our beef was with the pacing, and the script. The, well, story. Because the accusation and devolution into pack animal savagery felt artificial. Is this really how kindergartens deal with these types of accusations? By calling in Some Random Dude, having him ask increasingly grisly leading questions while the bewildered kid goes, "Uh, YES." And who were those angry grocers? Why were the grocers so angry? It just felt like, well, because it made good cinema. Especially when the beaten, bloodied Lukas limps out of the store only to - gasp! - be seen by his accusers! CONFLICTING FEELINGS, I SUPPOSE?

Unfortunately, our disbelief was just never properly suspended, and so we eventually started to find things tedious, and fishy, and even silly (the above "martyr limps away" scene being particularly groan-inducing). We counted the minutes for this one to end.

Sorry, Mads!

Also, okay, the film is more about the parents than the kids, but if you want to watch another, better film from the creepy northern European village of cruelty genre that also has the village children turning into a lil' pack o' liars set to destroy the lives of adults, then Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon is much creepier and cooler.

Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

Disney movies, and Disneyism in general, share a couple defining traits:

• First, orphandom and the destruction of the parent/protector. Most Disney hero/heroines we can think of have been parentless or violently orphaned (Mowgli, Dumbo, Bambi, Simba, Aladdin, Nemo), and this is usually a big part of the plot (and legend-ness of these characters - e.g. the death of Bambi's mother, or Simba's father, are epically remembered childhood proxy-traumas - seriously, we at the PPCC can't watch this scene without choking up).
  
• Second, manipulation. Oh my Looord, manipulation.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that Saving Mr. Banks, a Disney film about Disney films, should feature - at its core - parental detsruction and consequent trauma. It follows a prim pedant named P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson), author of the Mary Poppins books, as she battles over creative control - and life philosophies - with the sunny, Zen Fascist-ish forced optimism of the Disney Empire. SMILE, DAMN YOU, SMILE. Or, as the Dead Kennedys put it, ALWAYS WEAR THE HAPPY FACE. MELLOW OUT OR YOU WILL PAY.

It's a tolerable film, though not nearly as self-aware and glorious as the other Disney-on-Disney film, Enchanted. Where Enchanted snarkily lampooned common Disney tropes - most centrally, the Relentless Optimism stuff - Saving Mr. Banks, instead, is fully (blindly?) behind them. As a result, it feels a little lifeless - even a little dishonest. We're meant to believe that the power of Disney - the plush toys, the California sun, the well-manicured everything - will eventually break into and heal even wintry P.L. Travers's heart. A heart, mind you, that was broken long ago by a charismatic, boozey dreamer of a dad, played (ineffectually) by Colin Farrell.

It's also partly a UK-versus-US thing, with each side (Travers and Walt himself (played distractingly by Tom Hanks as Tom Hanks)) being an embodiement of the national caricature: "terminally enthusiastic American"-ness (as the PPCC was once called!) versus drab, rainy, pessimistic Britishness. It's the triumph of southern California optimism therapy (redemption! forgiveness! pat endings!).

What's annoying is that the manipulation does work. We at the PPCC ugly-cried at this, sobbing as Emma Thompson sobbed, choking up as Paul Giamatti (!) the Soulful Driver choked up. Damn you, Disney! But this saccharine emotionalism leaves a bad taste as well, and it can't hide some of the film's flaws. Many characters are only rough, one-note sketches. Both Hanks and Thompson - both very loved by the PPCC - are unable to muffle their starshine: they seem like themselves, not like Disney and Travers. The childhood flashbacks are needlessly protracted: we know that "Mr. Banks" - Travers' father - is meant to, somehow, need saving. Watching his slow decline is (1) very slow indeed, and (2) a little difficult to sympathize with.

One interesting point was the link back to Travers's father's Irishness, and his adherence to a mystical, dreamy philosophy. Oh, Ireland. Oh, Erin.

This world is just an illusion, Ginty, ol' girl. As long as we hold that thought dear they can't break us, they can't make us endure their reality, bleak and bloody as it is. Money, money, money, don't you buy into, Ginty. It'll bite you on the bottom.

It's ironic - tragic even - then that this story is essentially about that daughter giving into that corporate, "money, money, money" spiral. Or maybe the film is a marriage between money and embracing (even manipulating) the illusion? That'd certainly be Disney in a nutshell.

Doctor Who: Midnight (2008)

Some mood music, while you read.

We at the PPCC are huge sci-fi nerds, and yet it has taken us a long (loooong) time to get into that one mighty pillar of sci-fi-ness, Britain's Doctor Who of Britain, starring Britain, co-starring Britishness. Okay, we tease, but, damn, that shit is nationalistic! Which is fine. Most spec fic is notoriously US-centric, after all. Anyway, we're glad we finally initiated ourself. In addition to being nationalistic like crazy sauce, it is also addictive and silly and fun and full of everything.

It's difficult to review a PILLAR, so instead we'll focus on a few things:

• The episode, Midnight, and how it's awesome and a good intro. (Review)
  
• Some Doctor Who themes, and how they run the gamut from awesome to stupid to huh-ness. (Thoughts)

Allons-y, then!  

Episode review: Midnight

Doctor Who episodes seem to come in three varieties:

• Really trashy, ridiculous, and occasionally awful one-off episodes, featuring a Monster of the Week. As some of our friends assured us, "You do know it's a kid's show, right?" (No, we didn't! But now we do. Oh, how we do.)
  
• Really spectacular, mind-bending one-offs.
  
• Mediocre-to-good episodes that are usually redeemed by giving us one more crumb along the Great Path of Understanding the Doctor, usually accompanied by a Great Emotional Moment for the Doctor as well. These are exciting.

Midnight falls into the secondary category. It's the perfect gateway episode; you can watch it while knowing nothing of the Doctor and his Interminable Journey. But, of course, the experience is much richer if you do know a bit, since Midnight takes several Doctory themes, and then subverts them in refreshing ways.

Midnight begins on a fancy, diamondy planet called, uh, Midnight. Which is ironic, since it is brilliant and sparkling and very, very sunny. It is also totally hostile to any form of life; the sun being "x-tonic", which is technobabble for "zapping killer laser beam-like". The Doctor (David Tennant) and his Companion, the wonderful Donna Noble (the wonderful Catherine Tate), are taking a (much-deserved) break on Midnight, which markets itself as a party planet. The Doctor decides to go on a nature tour, while Donna lounges by the pool.

On the nature tour, we're introduced to a variety of Typical Human People: there's the suburban couple (Daniel Ryan, Lyndsay Coulsen) and their sullen teen son (Colin Morgan), the bumbling professor (David Troughton) and his geeky assistant (Ayesha Antoine), the flight attendant (Rakie Ayola; called a "hostess" in the episode, since apparently it's also 1950), and a middle-aged divorcee (Lesley Sharp). After lampooning modern commercial flight (endless, chattering entertainment options, tiny peanut packets, and so on), the journey is underway. The Doctor makes a few friends, people joke, and obviously something horrible is looming on the horizon.

We won't give away the horribleness, because much of the episode's genius is the smart and inventive (and cheaply-produced!) monster that we meet. If it's a monster at all. But it's something straight out of The Twilight Zone or Hitchcock: the fear and tension is slow, subtle, and gripping. One subversion of the Doctor Who routine is that the Doctor is as ignorant as everyone else on the ship (and in the audience) as to what the It thing is. Nothing is supposed to live on Midnight, and yet it seems something has? (Note that we can't even conclusively say that something has. One lovely interpretation of the episode is that there was nothing there at all, and everyone just freaked themselves out.)

A second subversion of Doctor Who's usual stuff is that, for once, humanity isn't celebrated, but instead retreats immediately into the banality of evil. When confronted with something difficult to understand and potentially violent, the passengers become scary and bestial themselves. It's reminiscent of J.G. Ballard's comments on seeing the "ragged scaffolding" of suburban civilization strip away, and how rattling that can be. For Doctor Who fans and the Doctor himself, it's especially rattling: usually, humanity has a big ol' crush on the Doctor, and is always happy to be helped. Here, they're skeptical, paranoid, hostile.

Anyway, the craft in this episode is just brilliant. The dialogue: building up tension, revealing aspects of the It thing's otherness slowly, taking sudden turns. Argh, as a writer, the PPCC burned with jealousy at someone having had such a good idea! The music. The acting: Tennant is always pretty damn good, but his role-reversal during the climax was so well-done. As with Lesley Sharp, especially in the earlier moments of being possessed, when she's/it's "learning". Ah! So good. Bravi, bravi.  

Big thoughts  

First big thought: Doctor Who is Buddhism

In fact, it might be as Buddhist as Groundhog Day, and that's pretty damn Buddhist. Except, whereas Groundhog Day is uplifting because it shows us nirvana (the ultimate happy ending), Doctor Who just grounds the PPCC down with its nihilistic woe. Seriously, how can this be a kid's show? HOW?! It is misery by design.

The most obvious Buddhist links are, first, the regeneration, and, second, the eternal woe. Oh, the woe.

One of the central tenets of Buddhism is that life is suffering, and it tends to repeat again and again, until we can break out of it by building mindfulness and compassion and non-attachment. Once you break out of that cycle of life and rebirth, you turn into Bill Murray - i.e. a Buddha, an enlightened being. In Mahayana Buddhism, there's an intermediate stage, called a bodhisattva - that's someone who delays nirvana, staying amongst the merely-stuck to teach about loving-kindness and being all nice and stuff.

You could argue that the Doctor's a bodhisattva. But we wouldn't. Because while he is pretty helpful and sorta nice and all that, he's also fighting the same battles over and over again: those Daleks never seem to die, do they? Nor does the (wonderful) Master (nor should he!).

Similarly, you'd think the Doctor would have learned, by now, that attachment leads to suffering (second Noble Truth in the ol' Buddhism). But he doesn't - constantly seeking out Companions, and constantly, ahem, effing them over. They never seem to emerge unscathed from their adventures. Seriously, after you've lost various Companions to death, dismemberment and being locked in a parallel universe, JUST STOP, DUDE.

So, it's Buddhism, but it's Buddhism at its saddest: the moment after the First and Second Noble Truths (life sucks, and the sucking will go on forever), and before the Third and Fourth (wait, maybe I should stop all this). To use a Christian analogy, it's like modeling a story on the moment after Jesus dies, but before he's resurrected. It's just miserable, dude.

 IS THIS WHAT YOU TEACH YOUR CHILDREN, BRITAIN?!

Which brings us to the second big thought.  

Second big thought: Doctor Who is Nationalism

 "Oh no," someone gasps. "They're headed towards Earth!"

Cut to outline of the UK.

The ostensible backstory is that the Doctor loves Earth like peanut butter loves jam. And that's fine. But Earth is basically Britain. And not only that - it's England. Scottish David Tennant wasn't allowed to keep his Scottish accent because, of all the regenerations a rogue Time Lord could make, of all the species, the genders, the heights and the everythings, the dude's gotta be a white English male every. single. time. Rumor has it the newest Doc, Peter Capaldi, will be retaining his Scottish accent, but this was - apparently - a major BBC decision.

Sometimes, the nationalism stuff is grating. But we know that we have no leg to stand on; most sci-fi is heavily skewed towards the US, and few people even seem to notice. At other times, the nationalism stuff is hilarious and wonderful, such as when an ailing Doctor - remember, this guy's a magical, super-smart, self-healing, time-traveling alien - is on the brink of death and then healed by the power of a CUP OF TEA. (Seriously, that was brilliant.)

Another wonderful byproduct of the Who's nationalism, is its portrayal of workaday Normal British Folk in all the supporting characters: Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), the London shopkeeper. Donna Noble, who's "just a temp from Chiswick!" And their funny families! Everyone is pretty modest, even mediocre. What's nice about the show is that it celebrates this normality for the inherent brilliance it can conceal.

Third big thought: Doctor Who is fandom

Fandom is nice. Fandom is fun. And Doctor Who has a huge, gigantic, long-lived fandom that seems to go on and on in every direction, and rival the Trekkies in terms of historicity and population density. Many of our good friends are Whovians. Some of the latest Doctors themselves - Tennant and Capaldi - are Whovians. And then you've got things like Adventure Time fans and fun, smart YouTube channel fans, and references all over the place. And the fanfiction! Oh, the fanfiction. We don't even want to go there.

For whatever reason (we still haven't pinpointed it), this miserable, lonely Time Lord has captured everyone and their mom's attention - including ours. The PPCC has basically put everything on hold while we finished off the Tennant years. And now we've still got all of Matt Smith to go - oh God.

There's still so much to say - how Doctor Who compares to Star Trek, especially The Next Generation, since we do think they are two sides of the same (weird) coin. Or the weird moments of transcendental, pulpy space opera in Who - especially when they talk about the Time War (and it sounds like the line-up for a heavy metal festival, "the Could-Have-Been King and his army of Meanwhiles and Never-Weres!"). But we'll leave that to another day, as it's 1AM here and a Time Lord has just regenerated in our laptop!

Out, Out (2008)

There aren't many films made about international development work, even though it's a field ripe for beautiful things to look at and complex things to think about. Sure, there's the relatively meager sub-subgenre of Troubled Diplomat (see A Constant Gardener), the somewhat more entertaining Conflict Journalist films (The Killing Fields). And then, of course, there's the huge Hollywood narrative about Africa - usually depicted as a place full of conflict diamonds, sprawling, Dickensian slums, and lots and lots of Djimon Hounsou.


Oh, Djimon. We love you, you know we do. Also, you should have totally played Anakin Skywalker.
So what's nice about our friend Matt Collins's short/medium-ish film, Out, Out, is that it's one of the few films to tap into this rich, complicated landscape, peopled as it is by the idealistic and world-weary and very well-traveled, where billions of dollars churn hither and thither, and very big promises are made (if rarely kept). Matt zooms into one particular subset of the Development Set, and that is the young, 20something economists who (as Leo rightly noted once) grab their malaria pills and laptops and journey from their Ivy/Oxbridge cocoons to "the field" - Lilongwe, Nairobi, Delhi.

There's an obvious disjoint that happens when you throw these relatively sheltered, relatively wealthy young people into a place like Lilongwe - where Out, Out is set. The constant power dynamics are subtle and powerful; they are hard, it seems, for these people to fully articulate or resist. In Out, Out, we follow a group of expats doing, at first, their usual expaty things. Going away parties, Land Rovers, weekend trips to beautiful resorts and anti-burglary bars on the windows. The characters are quickly sketched - the naive Mark (Andrew Stevenson), who has trouble tying his tie on his first day to work; the sleazy, shifty-eyed Peter (Matt Gordon), preparing to leave Lilongwe for his next assignment; the relatively upstanding couple, Alice (Cynthia Eldridge) and Jeff (Alex Pienkowski).


Peter (Matt Gordon) and Mark (Andrew Stevenson).
Underlying these benign expaty doings is a troubling, constantly compromising current: early in the film, Mark listens to two other expat development workers tell stories about car accidents in Malawi degenerating into mob violence. Already, the way these stories are presented is both strikingly realistic (a friend of the PPCC's was almost a victim of mob violence following a motorcycle accident in India last year) and strikingly removed. These are stories of manslaughter, poor infrastructure, corruption and opportunism. They are told with a sense of remove; a frightened spectatorship. These are "their" problems, and "we" just have to figure out how to stay safe and stay out of it.

Indeed, coming from a protective shell of privilege and well-functioning, paternalistic governments, the shock of facing daily inequality in such a stark way leaves these young people bewildered. The idea that expats should be complicit in this inequality - even actively complicit - is never really brought up (the post-colonial white man's burden of modern-day development work is not often questioned).

Anyway, following their short trip to a nearby resort, the group is - foreshadowed! - involved in a car accident-cum-manslaughter. Suddenly, all the theories dissolve: it's time to make real decisions. Do they stay and see to the victim, and risk becoming victims themselves of the soon-to-appear mob? Do they flee, abandoning the man and, it seems, basic decency? Do they report it to the police? Trust the police? Bribe the police?


The best moments in Out, Out come when a Malawian detective, Ganda (Wavisanga Munyenyembe), arrives at the house to question the group - in particular, Ganda's exchanges with Mark are both illuminating and touching.

Following Ganda's arrival, harsh truths suddenly spill out fast in frantic, hushed conversations behind closed doors, and the group's tenuous sense of moral righteousness - or even friendship - fractures. Newcomer Mark is left to entertain Ganda while the others figure out their next move, and their exchange is brilliant.

GANDA: So, what do you think is wrong with Malawi?
MARK: A lot, I suppose.

Oh, come on, Matt. So blunt!
Obviously shot on a shoestring budget, the film is rough around the edges (and most of the middle too). Establishing shots are rare, and we're often treated to tight close-ups of the actors. This creates a claustrophobic, disorienting feeling: where are we? Who's he looking at? This technique, along with the pacing and slow rise in tension, gives the film a Michael Haneke feel: you know, lots of meaningfully-held, silent shots of an empty road. Lots of dissembling. You're kind of always waiting for something horrible to happen (and it does).

The actors are all non-actors, mostly development workers playing filmier versions of themselves. Nonetheless, they do reasonably well. Things kind of fell apart in the PPCC's head at the end, when the plot really started taking Haneke turns, and we lost the string of what everyone's motives were (especially Ganda's). But the overall message resounded loud and clear; and it fell on the slight-damning end of the spectrum (damning for "us", that is).

Margin Call (2011)

Margin Call is a satisfying, humane film about the financial crisis of 2008. It hits all the usual bases - the absurdity of Wall Street salaries, the social cost those salaries impose by wooing our best minds to work on making up new financial products, the bloated complexity of the products themselves, and the fact that no one often has any idea what they're selling. What it also does is humanize (even satirize) the very imperfect beings that got us all into this mess.

Briefly, the plot centers around a single, enormous Wall Street firm (a stand-in for Lehman Brothers) over one hectic, harried night. At the close of business, all seems well. But then, MIT (!)-educated rocket scientist (!)-turned-financial underling, Peter Sullivan (a divinely beautiful Zachary Quinto), discovers that something is amiss. Actually, that's putting it lightly. He discovers that the company's books are rotten to the core: its risk position exponentially more awful than anticipated, the firm - which thought itself nestled deep in the trunk of glorious fortune - is actually hanging out on a limb. A limb that's just about ready to snap. News travels up the chain of command - from Peter's immediate bosses, Will (Paul Bettany) and Sam (Kevin Spacey), to the very top of the food chain, billionaire CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons). In hasty 3AM meetings, they plan to liquidate everything - despite serious misgivings that this will both end their careers and kill the market.

The rest is, obviously, history. And you can read about it in wonderful books such as Diary of a Very Bad Year, Too Big to Fail, The Big Short and a number of others (which seem to be still coming out - e.g. Griftopia).

A.O. Scott likens Paul Bettany's character to a sergeant in a war film - and it's a brilliant stroke of insight (then again, everything A.O. Scott think/says/writes/does is a stroke of brilliance; we love you, A.O.!). The war film metaphor could be extended to the entire cast: from the thoughtful protagonist-grunt (Zachary Quinto), to the naive/cheeky grunt (Penn Badgley), up to the war-weary and possibly demented colonel (Kevin Spacey) and further up to the definitely demented, corrosively corrupt king-general (a crusty and wonderful Jeremy Irons). It just feels like a war film. This is a man's world: unreconstructed, macho, predatory. (The only female character, Demi Moore, is pilloried - both by the film's narrative, and by the firm itself.) The lines of computers spouting complicated, intimidating graphs could be trenches; Wall Street, a battlefield for the conquering. This isn't the bright, bubbly business whizzing of Working Girl (interestingly, a feminist film) - oh no, the heady, halcyon days of those 80s are over. As are the even headier, halcyoner 90s. It's now a post-2008 world, and watching this house of cards collapse feels both painful and inevitable.

A note about the performances: the film doesn't try to curry sympathy for these people, instead portraying them as over-ambitious, fallible and sometimes even silly. The only noble man is the recently-fired, genius Eric Dale (a self-pitying Stanley Tucci), but he's off-screen for much of the film. Yet, despite the general vibe of soul-sucking David Mamet-style corporatism, you eventually come to feel for these people. There's a lot of absurdity in their office culture, and there's an obvious vulnerability in their idiocy and/or guilt. Indeed, Paul Bettany does his usual swing from swish and sleazy to red-eyed and harried. Kevin Spacey plays along the ambiguity of his character's grief: his dog dies, and he murders the market, and then he cries. But about what? (Note: movies where Kevin Spacey cries can sometimes be God-awful or just barely tolerable. This was the only time where it worked quite well. Cry on, brother!)

Even the cameos are great. For example, Mary McDonnell - Roslin!!! - appears very briefly as Kevin Spacey's ex-wife, and her steely-eyed compassion is a perfect coda: yes, times are hard. And yes, you are allowed to cry about it - for a bit. But then it's time to buck up! Seriously, if anyone can save us, Roslin can. We felt better already.

Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011)

Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (You won't meet life again… right?) is another glam, modernist Hindi film, similar in style to Dil Chahta Hai - but thankfully much less irritating. Okay, we may be the only ones who hate that film.

Moving along! BFFs Kabir (Abhay Deol), Arjun (Hrithik Roshan) and Imran (Farhan Akhtar) run the usual gamut of Nice Guy, Moneyzilla and Comic Relief. Nice Guy Kabir is getting married to (incidentally the Tamil-French girl from Dev D with an interesting name!) Natasha (Kalki (!) Koechlin) and the boys go on a long bachelor party through Spain. Along the way, aided by periodic jolts of adrenaline rushes (scuba diving, skydiving, bull… running) and emotional outbursts of tears, shouts and hormones, the boys grow up and grow closer. The moral of the story: marriage is optional! Also, money is nice but also optional!

The film's heart is in the right place - by which we mean it's gauged the pulse of a common (or certainly common-feeling) trend among young, modernizing Indians: the anxiety of marriage, the difficulty in reconciling traditional obligations with Western notions of romance, freedom, individualism, blah blah. Generally, the earnest, if unimaginative, narrative is fine. But there are definite sections that drag - to whit: Hrithik Roshan puts in a nice, jagged performance as the dark, tormented London financier Arjun. His slow emergence from the shell of Scrooge into the sunlight of Zen scuba diver Laila (a tolerable Katrina Kaif) is a nice, poignant narrative arc. But if the PPCC saw one more shot of a brooding, troubled Hrithik… oh my God.

OH. MY. GOD.

Similarly, Kabir's pre-marital woes and Imran's "missing father" angst were dragged out way beyond acceptable limits of storytelling discourse. Incidentally, Imran's missing father was NOT played by Javed Akhtar, which would have been meta and cool. Instead, he is played by a great pillar of Hindi actingdom, one of the PPCC favorites, and a veteran of Missing Father roles. We'll give you a hint, his name rhymes with Sameer Loudon Bah.

Like the rest of the film, the song/dance stuff was anemic and largely unnecessary, though there was a surprisingly nice flamenco-Hindi fusion bit. Olé! Another unexpected treat was the final Adrenaline Rush of Character Development - Pamplona's running of the bulls - which was filmed with great skill. A further notable sequence, filmmaking-wise, was the boys' skydive: a meditative, enchanting bit.

In other news, Akhtar's Don 2 is in post-production (joy) and we have finally found a lovely fat tome about Vedic India (The First Spring by Abraham Eraly, apparently not out in the US yet? wtffff).

As a kid in our theater cried out upon sensing the incipient final credits: KHATM!

The Company Men (2010)

The Company Men is a fairly sober, paint-by-numbers portrayal of America's economic crises, as experienced by three recently-layed off upper middle class corporate suits. Its main value is less in its execution - which is straightforward bordering on bland - than in its peculiarity: you just don't see economics in Hollywood very much these days.

Indeed, that's endemic to American culture: a complete purging of labor issues and economic strife from the collective cultural consciousness. Whoa, did we just sound like Gramsci? Anyway, this film's novelty value, along with the strong cast, merits a viewing. And it's an interesting follow-up to the much more class conscious Look Back in Anger; here too, class is an issue, particularly the appearance of it. A common statistic (fact!) is that Americans tend to over-identify with the middle class: everyone seems to think they're in it, even when many are not.

In The Company Men, the facade of upper middle classness hides crumbling decay as three mid- to upper-level managers are progressively laid off from their cushy corporate jobs. Bob (Ben Affleck) is young and cocksure, but even his budding symbols of success - the huge house, the Porsche, the golfclubs - become a liability when he can't compete with fresh MBA grads, eager and able to work for lower salaries in a race to the bottom. Phil (Chris Cooper) is the old timey American Dream incarnate; a Vietnam vet who worked his way up from the factory floor to the six figure salary. And then there's Gene (Tommy Lee Jones), the heart and soul of the business and, it seems, the only honest businessman left in America (or Boston, at least).

The film's structure and sympathies mark it as very similar to the Italian film, Il posto dell'anima - except the latter, being, well, Italian, focused much more on working class issues in an explicitly Socialist light. But both films explore the decline and decay of manufacturing jobs in a post-industrial West, and both use the triptych of young - middle - old (which could just as well stand for brash - vulnerable - wisdom) characters. Indeed, in both films, the middle character - Silvio Orlando in Il posto dell'anima, Chris Cooper in The Company Men - is set up as society's sacrificial lamb; the guy who did everything right and yet still lost. "My life just ended," Chris Cooper laments, "and nobody noticed." Indeed, Silvio Orlando was the Ideal Comrade Worker - selfless, honest, hard-working, good-humored. He was like a natural extension of Nino Manfredi's Worker Ideal in C'eravamo tanto amati (OK, we just watched that again yesterday, so we had to find a way to get it in here). And yet he still lost. Similarly, Chris Cooper fought for his country, worked in its factories and climbed the ladder, sending his daughter off to a destiny of Ivy League intelligentsia. But in the end, he gets screwed. (That's not to say the film's ending isn't inherently upbeat, promoting the hard-work can-do attitude of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.)

This focus on the pain of the upper middle class is restrictive, in some senses, but also very contextual; as we said above, most of America identifies with this class. The common laborer - here embodied with a pleasantly low-key, sardonic wit by Kevin Costner as Jack the Carpenter, Bob's brother-in-law - is given a much reduced role. He appears - and is decent, hard-working and honest. But his story is never really told, or even acknowledged.

The cast is uniformly appealing and strong, even if the narrative doesn't allow them much nuance. It was great to see Chris Cooper, who we are most fond of; especially since we've been cultivating a fantasy film in our head starring him as a 1900s Chicago union organizer, David Strathairn as a slaughterhouse laborer and Paul Giamatti as a driven, exploitative yet compelling beef baron. Best movie evar?! You bet. And this one? Decent. Wait for DVD. Cultivate your fantasy Upton Sinclair adaptation instead.


eventually, you will be able to buy the movie here...

The King's Speech (2010)

The King's Speech is a solid film which never attains the greatness to which it aspires. By choosing the easy route, and smothering the darker, crueler core of its story under a tidy triumph, it ends up a good film, where it could have been a great one.

The King's Speech is essentially a sports film, and sports films are usually the same. They start with our hero, the underdog, undergoing a humiliating defeat. After licking his wounds (and it is usually a 'he'), the underdog discovers the key to his reformation and success - usually an inspiring mentor or coach. After a rousing training montage, we build up to the inevitable denouement - usually a rematch with the earlier opponent - which, after some tense last-minute uncertainties, ends in (inevitable) glorious victory.

The best sports films are those that bend the genre - films like Eight Men Out, that open with victory and end with the abyss. Director Tom Hooper is no stranger to such films - just see his work from last year, The Damned United, which used the harsh clarity of defeat to really examine our ambition to win. The King's Speech should have been such an innovative sports film - a film that let our character, King George VI (Colin Firth), wallow in his misery and explore it. Instead, we get the trials and complexities of England's waning royalty under the gathering storm of World War 2 shoe-horned into a feel-good movie complete with Disney-style pop psycho-analysis.

Behold:

Our hero, underdog Duke of York, is second son to King George V (a spot-on Michael Gambon) and an embarrassment to the family. In an age of the radio, where the royal family has been "reduced to ingratiating" themselves into England's living rooms via the "Pandora's box" of wireless technology, the Duke - Bertie to his wife (Helena Bonham Carter) and family - is a terrible public speaker. He suffers from a stutter and paralyzing stage fright. The film's opening defeat shows him giving a cringe-worthy speech to the crowds at Wembley (?) in 1925.

Ten years later, Bertie meets his mentor and coach - the unorthodox, transplanted antipodean Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush - nice to see you again!). Logue insists on equality in the counseling room, and couples his speech therapy with some pop Freud as well. Bertie's stutter will never improve, Logue reckons, if we don't unearth some of the anxieties which eat away at him from the inside. Bertie - clinging to the formalities and automatic distance that his title engenders - rebels. But then comes around. Then, after his father dies and his older brother abdicates in favor of a Baltimore divorcee, becomes king. And then war breaks out. And then he gives his speech.

The best parts of The King's Speech, as we've hinted at above, are the darker parts. Logue's non-speech therapy might be a bit Good Will Hunting, but there is a real edge to seeing the surreal, dehumanizing effect royalty has on everyone involved, not just Bertie - the cavernous palace rooms, the stiff ritualism of family affairs, the easy bullying. Bertie is, of course, the most obviously wounded of the lot - his stutter a paper-thin disguise to the deep insecurities he has been raised to feel. In one harrowing scene, Logue - ever awkward in reconciling his everyman conviviality with the formalities required in dealing with Bertie - attempts to console Bertie shortly after the latter's father's death. Bertie then haltingly describes his gruesome "personal affairs" - up to this point, taboo - and we hear of abuse, neglect, alienation. It's ironic that Geoffrey Rush's performance in this scene - that is, his reactions - almost outshines Colin Firth's. Another excellent detail is the tempestuous anger which Bertie exhibits - and how he explains away his sudden explosions as "one of my many faults".

It's these hints at dysfunction and decay that round out both the character of Bertie and the story of England's royalty under the war. And as war brews and Bertie is faced with his most important public speaking event yet - a cry to rally the troops - we can't help but feel like forcing the complicated private and public issues into one mishmash of "Hurrah for perseverance!" is facile.

Phew.

Anyway, on the purely movie front: Timothy Spall's spot-on Winston Churchill impression was stunning in the lengthier scenes and distractingly funny in the shorter moments, where it began to feel like a caricature. Turning the Archbishop of Canterbury (Derek Jacobi) into a thorny old guard antagonist was uninspired, as were the easy jokes about snobbish, stiff upper lip English royalty looking down on Australians. That said, it was nice, in a meta way, to have Australian actor Guy Pearce, as the dandy older brother and very-briefly-King Edward VIII, speak in the poshest accent ever. Helena Bonham Carter was wonderfully sympathetic as, well, the Queen Mother (what are these people's names, anyway?! Bertie said his at one point and it had, like, ten names in there), while Geoffrey Rush was his usual Geoffrey Rushy self. Colin Firth is a dreamboat as ever, and of course we felt a great rush of tenderness for him, as he was indeed incredibly vulnerable (and often humiliated!). Trivia: He played a WWI vet with a stutter in the glorious A Month in the Country.

Other movie stuff: Tom Hooper's direction was reminiscent of his work in Damned United - canned saturation, geometrical compositions emphasizing dizzying wallpapers, symmetrical perspectives and a tendency to use off-center close-ups. It was nice in Damned United, but we were distracted this time. The use of Beethoven's 7th was DIVINE, I tell you - but then, that music is divine. There was a whole 'nother movie in there. And hearing Bertie describe Hitler as advocating the "primitive doctrine that Might is Right" threw us right back to The Once and Future King - so that's what T.H. White was referring to: Bertie's speech! Oh my God, ARTHUR IS BERTIE, WE SEE IT NOW. Well, that is just something.

So: see it? Yes, definitely, but perhaps wait for DVD.

La tête en friche (2010)

La tête en friche (My Afternoons with Margueritte) tries to be a charming sketch of bittersweet village life, but instead it falls flat. It was just embarrassing.

In a small town somewhere in France, the stout Germain (a gone-to-seed Gérard Depardieu) unwillingly occupies the position of village idiot. Slow to read, slow with numbers and painfully conscious of this, Germain spends his days trying to find simple pleasures - his vegetable garden, his girlfriend, drinks with the mates - and trying to keep at bay the ridicule and disdain of the other villagers and, most especially, his indifferent, shrewish mother (Claire Maurier). Things take an upturn when he befriends the coquettish, patient, 95-year-old Margueritte (Gisèle Casadesus), and they spend their lunches sitting on the park bench, reading Camus to each other. Under Margueritte's loving care, Germain gets (1) the mother he wanted, and (2) the confidence to blossom like a little intellectual flower.

The core of the story is sweet enough, and might have made a charming piece. Instead, things are handled so bluntly that we wondered if the film wasn't trying to go all meta on Germain's bumbling, clumsy ham-fisting. Example: the distracting and unnecessary flashbacks, where a school-age Germain - in the same outfit! and the same haircut! - is regularly mocked by his teachers and mother for being slow. Or Margueritte and Germain's execrably banal conversations. Or the fact that Depardieu, bless him, is about thirty years too old for this part, and his relationship with the beautiful bus driver, Annette (Sophie Guillemin), strains credulity. Or their awful (AWFUL) pillow talk. Or the Italian stereotype, Gardini (François-Xavier Demaison), complete with oily hair and hands flying around.

French films about the honest, humble "la vie est belle!" glory of the village have been done before - and, presumably, there must be some good ones. But all the ones we've seen - this, Chocolat, Amélie - rely on a sort of maudlin sentimentality, as well as a romanticized notion of the rich, golden-toned Frenchness of living in France, that we can't stand. Let Nanni Moretti glorify the mundane and the good life.

The Tempest (2010)

We had been hearing about Julie Taymor's The Tempest for nigh on two years now, ever since Helen Mirren was announced to be playing the role of a female Prospero (called Prospera - catchy!). Imagine our delight and excitement when we learned that they were also adding some of our favorites - Chris Cooper! Djimon Hounsou! DAVID. STRATHAIRN! - to the mix.

However, The (girl) Tempest is a big mess; incoherent and over-the-top visuals coupled with a chopped-up Shakespeare that's barely recognizable. Most people agree (statistic!) that Shakespearean plots don't resonate with modern audiences anymore - twins, shipwrecks, fairies, love at first sight, those wretched proletarian comedy subplots, people being deceived by masks or a pair of pants - ha! We are not so easily duped as those Elizabethan yokels. And that's not why us modern folk usually watch the Bard - we watch it for his epic, fancy talking (so Elizabethan! so complicated! so fancy!). So when you remove the talking, you're left with a lot of silliness. And when you amp up the ridiculous elements with Xena: Warrior Princess-style CGI and loony, masala-style close-ups, the audience (or, at least, the PPCC) feels overwhelmed and eventually alienated. Nothing really could resonate in all that bombastic mishmash.

The plot: Prosper(a) (Helen Mirren), the exiled Duchess of Milan, is living on some random island with her daughter, Miranda (Felicity Jones). She is a great magician, and she uses her dark arts - along with the help of her enslaved fairy, Ariel (a gender-less Ben Wishaw) - to destroy a passing ship in a passing thunderstorm. Onboard are none other than all her political rivals: her conniving brother Antonio (Chris Cooper), King Alonso of Naples (David Strathairn), his brother Sebastian (Alan Cummings) and the kind-hearted consigliere (or somesuch) Gonzalo (Tom Conti). They are all shipwrecked together on one side of the island. On the other side emerges Alonso's son, Ferdinand (Reeve Carney), and - from a third angle - the dim-witted shipmates, Trinculo (a mighty Russell Brand) and Stephano (Alfred Molina). Add the controversial character of Calaban (Djimon Hounsou, in burnt, peely skin) to the mix, and you have the cast. Mostly, the story is about all of them bumping into each other and eventually bumping into Prospera, where they all apologize and Miranda says, "O brave new world! That has such people in it!" The end.

Hacking the text to pieces was really a shame, since so much was lost or garbled - ultimately appearing superficial and daft. Ferdinand and Miranda see each other and are immediately smitten. It's idiotic! OK, that always happens, but here, it's idiotic and inarticulate. This is also a shame, since the cast is really top-notch, and they do quite well given their muted, over-simplified dialogues: Helen Mirren is, of course, amazing in her role, and yes, there is some ephemeral interest in seeing the Prospero-Miranda dynamic become a mother-daughter thing. (It makes the Ferdinand treatment make a bit more sense, at least.) Similarly, Chris Cooper and Alan Cumming do well; while David Strathairn just mopes. Alfred Molina and Russell Brand basically do slapstick, and Djimon Hounsou's interpretation of Calaban is bravely, troublingly close to slave stereotypes. (We've seen productions where Calaban was played as a ghoul-buffoon; here, he's a proud, dignified, angry slave.) Ben Wishaw was fine, though his occasional breasts and lack of genitals distracted.

There were some strange moments, when the music and imagery came together to produce scenes from Dune; we half-expected Helen Mirren to declare, "Yes! For he is the Kwizatz Haderach!" Think fuzzy, reverb-heavy electric guitar slamming down on minor power chords, coupled with epic shots of Prosper(a) standing on cliff precipices.

It's a shame this movie emphasized its million visual ideas (much to its detriment; like the over-stuffed Daywatch) rather than its story or text. Even genuinely striking visuals were lost in the mush; one great moment, for example, was when Ariel explains to Prospera that all the nobles - while given a good scare - emerged scratchless from the shipwreck. In that moment, we see David Strathairn, Chris Cooper, Alan Cumming and Tim Conti suddenly emerge, fully upright, in the rocky ocean, as if the water level itself was decreasing. A quirky, fun visualization of being unharmed! Alas that it was just a brief gem in a messy sea of good, bad and ugly.