gimlet_eye Reviews

Remember the Goal (2016)

My Favorite Endurance Sports Movie, so far

[8/10 · 6 August 2023]

The title I've given this review may seem a bit back-handed or gratuitous (like the commercials for Christianity embedded in the movie), because there's very little competition in this space. In fact, the only other fairly recent movies about distance runners that come to mind are McFarland USA (2015, with Kevin Costner), and Saint Ralph (2004, with Campbell Scott). These are both well made movies, with star actors that I like, but, like most sports movies, they fail to dig into the technical as well as the psychological guts of the sport. Most sports movies are movies about underdogs triumphing in the end (in fact this is a formula that many reviewers are heartily tired of), but the ones I like best also feature coaches who have the insight to imagine a radically different approach that challenges orthodoxy, and the moral fortitude to pursue it and stake their all on the outcome.

Hence my love for such true story based movies as Moneyball (2011, with Brad Pitt), Coach Carter (2005, with Samuel L. Jackson), and even Draft Day (2014, with Kevin Costner).

Although this movie is strictly fiction (and Christianized fiction at that), and can be criticized for various improbabilities, the coach in this movie likewise embodies most of the virtues of the ideal man of Kipling's poem, If (including, literally, filling "the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run") - even though she is a comely young woman. And as with the other movies of this sort that I've listed, this one is charged with genuine suspense because you wonder how in the h--- the protagonist is going to pull off his/her plan - which, of course, I will not disclose as that would be spoiling.

And finally, although I am not a Christian myself, I am also not a disrespecter of Christianity, and, unlike certain other reviewers who are alienated by the Christian themes of faith, hope, and love (maybe because Christianity was shoved down their craw in their youth, or otherwise out of unrecognized envy), I congratulate the director, Dave Christiano (whose IMDB bio acknowledges his didactic Christian intent) on the appropriateness both of the behavior and of the Christian parables his protagonist invokes.

Could this short, low-budget, movie be better? Sure, with a bit more time to develop the specifics of training, and the depth psychology of the relationships, and perhaps to smooth over the improbabilities with circumstantial exposition, such as one would find in a book.

But for those non-Christians who find the same sort of virtues in this movie that I do, it's sequel, The Perfect Race (2019) which features the same coach protagonist translated to a college environment, is also a must view.

Crossing the Bridge (1992)

Coming of age in 1975 Detroit

[8/10 · 4 February 2022]

This is a coming of age movie written and directed by Mike Binder. As with much fiction, and especially movies that are framed by the later perspectives of a participant narrator (here one of the principal characters, Mort Golden) I expect that Binder's creation is to a considerable degree autobiographical, and I see that he was in fact born in Detroit and would have been just a few years younger than Mort.

Set in Detroit in 1975, it features Mort and two close friends from high school, all aged about 21, and of very different personalities but united by their common situation: largely rootless and morally adrift in a decadent urban environment (that extends across the Ambassador Bridge into Canada), and still driven primarily by the testosterone that nature has presumably bestowed on the male sex to ensure that the community has a sufficient supply of young warriors to defend it. However, there is no functional community here, no adequate fathers in the picture, and no organizational structure like the military draft to discipline and direct the easily provoked aggressions of these young men, and to provide them with a recognizable path to adulthood. So instead they are drifting gradually into a life of crime.

It has been said that the primary imperative of society is to tame young men. In support of this proposition, the vast majority of crimes of violence are perpetrated by young men, principally of the ages of 17-25. Mostly these are crimes of impulse, and in the absence of skills and planning they often result in run-ins with the law or its surrogates, or alternatively with hardened criminals for whom the young men are no match. These experiences can be sufficiently painful to shock them into the beginnings of maturity, but fortunately, one way or another, the vast majority of young men do survive and one way or another find their way out of this potential or actual criminal phase of their lives. Scientific research has found that the brains (and therefore the psyches) of young men are generally slower to mature than those of women, slower in particular to establish the impulse control that the frontal lobes crucially feed back to our underlying emotion-drived animal brains, our core selves. Whether this delay is a direct consequence of the much higher testosterone levels that all biological males have compared to all females, or whether it just the testosterone speaking for itself, hasn't, to my knowledge, been established.

These general remarks are meant to elucidate the themes and backdrop of this movie, which, as I write, is grossly under-rated on IMDB at 6.3. I expect that this is in part because these three candidate musketeers are for most of the movie quite unlikable, and the milieu they inhabit is grungy and decadent. Then too, the movie is the conventional hetero male equivalent of a "chick flick", so probably lost some ratings points by viewers who weren't able to relate.

But the characters and their lives are real and believable, and if the dramatization of their story is largely an exercise in literary and dramatic realism, it is nonetheless effective, has the ring of authenticity, and in place of the conventional happy Hollywood ending, concludes on a satisfyingly hopeful note.

Children of Men (2006)

The movie is one thing; P.D. James's book another

[7/10 · 1 June 2016]

"Children of Men" is a very well done movie based on the essential premise of P.D. James's book of the same name, and I have nothing to add to its many glowing reviews here, though there is perhaps a bit to subtract. Although the author is said to have thought well of the movie, the only thing it has in common with the book is its premise: a world some 20 years in the future in which no children have been born for some 18 years since - which changes everything, in ways that provoke the speculative imagination.

However, the director and chief writer of this film, Alfonso Cuarón, has reduced James's character-driven exploration of civilization's slipping hold on humanity to a conventional English dystopian action adventure story, punctuated with a few touching human dramatic moments, but hardly differentiated from the similarly denatured film version of Orwell's political philosophical book, "1984". James was one of our best (and maybe last) novelists of moral sensibility, whose great strength was her ability to create full-fledged modern characters with all their complexities and contradictions, yet not one of her characters is to be found in the film: only their names have (rather inexplicably) survived the transition.

Missing also is James's trenchant and balanced dramatization of the moral dilemmas of governing a degenerating society, or simply of surviving morally intact in such a society. And there is nothing dystopian, because nothing imaginary, about the social decadence that James was writing about. The soon to occur infertility pandemic that forms the premise of both book and movie, but which is exploited in the movie merely to create poignant human mini-dramas, is in the book essentially a metaphor for the state of modern civilization. Consequently, the book, which I think is one of James's best, owes as much to Swift as to Orwell.

The movie is exciting in places, and moving in others. The book, however, may have much to teach you about human character, and I guarantee that it will make you think.

Saint Ralph (2004)

The miraculous transforming power of love

[8/10 · 22 February 2015]

An adolescent is a young adult struggling, at first fitfully, and at last urgently, to escape the chrysalis of childhood into adulthood. It is a process that is at best awkward, and at worst destructive and even self-destructive.

Ralph is an adolescent of 14 who is prematurely confronted with issues that even a boy of 17 or 18 would find daunting. He is, in essence a secret orphan who undertakes to support himself (through deceit and petty crime) in the desperate hope that by retaining his autonomy that he will somehow be able to rescue his dying mother from her fate as long as he remains in control of his own. To Father Fitzpatrick, the strict and narrow-minded priestly headmaster of the Catholic parochial school Ralph attends, the boy appears to be nothing but an authority-defying rebel, who is to be tolerated and allowed to remain on the schools rolls only out of a formal, obligatory kind of charity that recognizes the anguish of losing one's last parent. The authorities, however, have no idea that Ralph is living on his own.

Ralph, though young and naive, is an intelligent, intuitive boy, who not unreasonably sees his own life hanging by the thread of his mother's life, and in any case he loves her deeply. His mind and soul is thus, given his thoroughly Catholic upbringing (his adolescent chrysalis is a typical Catholic one), fertile ground for a belief in miracles.

And this isn't just an inspirational movie: it is a story about the possibility and meaning of miracles, which lie at the heart of Christianity, especially in its traditional Catholic form.

That might seem to limit the movie's appeal to those of us who don't believe in miracles (at least in this modern scientific age), and the generally very positive, but at the same time slightly puzzled and critical, reactions to this movie, I think reflect this dilemma. In particular, the criticisms revolve around the miraculous, and therefore categorically unrealistic, goal that Ralph adopts as his personal quest: not just running the Boston Marathon, but winning it.

To put it still more starkly, it would seem that either this is a movie that speaks primarily to Catholics who yearn for a revival of the passionate beliefs that once infused their religion, or that if the movie is intended for a more general audience, that it is significantly flawed by its unrealism.

However, just as it is possible for a modern educated person (not necessarily a Christian either) to salvage the fundamental meanings of the fantastic Bible stories by reading them metaphorically, so it is possible to experience this movie as an inspirational fable that speaks to all of those who seek personal transcendence. And understood in this way, "Saint Ralph" emerges as a drama about personal transcendence through love - real Christian caritas, not formal, Pharisaic charity.

Ralph himself is the fountainhead of love in this story. Yet he is in every other way a typical 14 year old male adolescent, a bit more rebellious and independent than most, perhaps, but a boy just about any of us can identify with. But he discovers in the course of the burgeoning crisis in his young life that he has a vast, heretofore untapped, reservoir of overflowing love, and at the same time an unexpected capacity for faith in himself. And this love indeed works miracles of a kind that even a non-believer can believe in and appreciate.

Ralph's love spreads out from himself, first to his one or two friends, then to his would be mentor and father figure, Father Hibbard, who has been in grave danger himself, under the influence of his despotic headmaster, Father Fitpatrick, of hardening into a desiccated life as a mere functionary within a system. Hibbard reluctantly, but duteously, accepts his headmaster's commandments to stifle and regulate his own intellectuality and passions, even, directed as they are to his chosen mission in life: to develop and foster the minds, characters, and spirituality of his young charges. And in accepting this discipline, no doubt formally required by his religious order, Hibbard has kept himself on track to become another Father Fitzpatrick - a petty tyrant hated and feared, presiding over a barren realm of decorum and order, whose own residue of love is dispensed in carefully measured teaspoons.

However, as Ralph's overflowing love begins to transform him into a great runner, it becomes transformative also for Father Hibbard, who like Ralph begins defying his headmaster, at first in secret, and eventually openly. In the end Ralph's love, spreading out in widening ripples, conquers all.

In short, Ralph can be seen to be the modern secular equivalent of a saint, although his inspirational story is told with the faintest tinge of irony.

I think that this was the intention of the creators of this movie, and if their story requires somewhat of an imaginative transformation that may not be congenial to all viewers, and certainly poses some unnecessary difficulties that may reasonably be accounted flaws, I think that the movie is on the whole a considerable success. Long distance running is a classic metaphor for life, and the movie ably captures, largely through its cinematography, the triumph of faith and joy over pain that can be achieved in that sport, which I believe from my own personal experience, comes just about as close to miraculous self-transcendence as one can hope to achieve in this life.

The Young Lions (1958)

You may want to read the book and skip the movie

[5/10 · 24 November 2014]

This is a pretty good movie, with two first rate actors (Brando and Clift), and if it hadn't been based on a first rate book by best-selling author Irwin Shaw, I'd have rated it a bit higher. I realize that a movie is not a book, but when a book has high merit and a distinctive character, and is then bowdlerized in typical Hollywood fashion, the resulting film cannot just be judged on its own merits.

Shaw's book is considered one of the great WW2 novels (though many "elite" critics have characteristically dissed him because his books were popular), but it's more accurate to think of it as a book about anti-Semitism set in the context of America's war with Germany, than as simply a war novel. At the same time, The Young Lions is a long book, indeed, an epic, rich in both incident and observed detail, with many well realized episodes of combat and wartime crime, barbarity, and horror. It's a story of three young men of disparate backgrounds (ironically dubbed "young lions"), two Americans and one German, drawn together by fate, much like the characters in War and Peace, which this book resembles in many ways, though it has more focused themes.

All three of these men are in their own way exceptional, and they rather epitomize than typify certain elements of the cultures they represent.

The German, Christian Diestl, is meant, both in the book and the movie, to represent the mythic "good German". Diestl is good looking, attractive to women, and athletic (an expert skier and part time ski instructor), and he is reasonably well-mannered, well-educated, and cultured in the Germanic mode, though he is no intellectual. Diestl is also, however, somewhat naively politically active, and is in fact (in the book but not the movie) an avowed Nazi, but only after several years as a communist, and given Hitler's persecution of the communists in the 1930's there's more than a suggestion that Diestl has switched allegiances to survive.

The American, Noah Ackerman (played by Montgomery Clift), is the typical, largely assimilated, second generation American Jew—not overtly religious, but introverted, intellectual, and subtly alien. In the book, he is called out to California to attend his dying father, a reprehensible man and a caricature of a refugee Eastern European Jew, for whom Noah feels only revulsion. After his father's death, he removes to NYC and obtains a low-level job there.

Finally, the Michael Whitacre character (played by Dean Martin) is a middling journeyman in the artsy NY theatrical business, loosely married to a more successful movie actress, and generally at loose ends in his life, and already tending toward dissolution in his early 30's. He too is attracted to communism, or at least to a die-hard communist whom he meets at a NYC theatrical party, in town to raise money from the feckless show biz set for the Republican cause in Spain for which he fights. Michael's problem is that he has talent but no character, and nothing that he believes in very much, including himself. As a result of his anomie, he is doing what he can to evade the war, and the inevitable duty that he feels as a man and citizen, yet he's not really a coward, any more than the next man of imagination.

If these thumbnails already seem a bit different from their opposite numbers in the movie—more complex and problematic—I am here to tell those who haven't read the book that their significant evolutions in the course Shaw's epic, through seven wartime years (horribly telescoped in the movie) are vastly different from the realizations of these characters in this rather routine Hollywood WW2 movie, despite the distinguished acting by Clift and Brando.

I've hardly broached the deliberate sanitizing of the book's major theme, anti-Semitism, American as well as German, which is at most hinted at in the movie. For starters, Whitacre's half-hearted show business infatuation with communism, and Diestl's overt Naziism, and earlier communist background have been scrubbed from the movie by its Hollywood creators, who were at the time living through the HUAC and McCarthy era. Also, the overt American anti-Semitism that Noah encounters, the loathsome caricature of his dying Jewish father, etc. have all been meticulously expunged or retouched. I don't remember a single word or phrase suggestive of American anti-Semitism being uttered beyond the one time identification of Noah as a Jew.

But the evisceration of one of the book's major themes, pervasive anti-Semitism, isn't the only unforgivable distortion. Shaw's novel has also been largely gutted of its character development. In the book, we have three young men of different backgrounds being sucked into a common war between their countries and cultures, but each is primarily fighting his own personal war: Noah, provoked by discrimination he encounters in the army, is intent on proving that he is a better man and soldier than those of his fellows who despise him as a Jew; Michael, to become a man in the larger senses of the word; and Diestl to measure up to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Hardenburg, a German superman.

In the movie, Michael's only issue is to prove that he's not a coward; Noah that he's a regular American guy, despite his somewhat exotic and intellectual bent; and Diestl that he's still a decent person despite the horrors he has experienced as a dutiful German soldier. At the end of the movie, Diestl is ground down by war, but morally he has hardly evolved at all, yet in the book he slowly degenerates into a monster.

The book is far darker and disturbing, but also more absorbing and rewarding, than the movie, as one becomes invested in each of these characters, their personal crises, and their ultimate fates, and for those who have a taste for old-fashioned adult fiction on the grand scale, my recommendation is to read the book and skip the movie.

Random Hearts (1999)

A Movie about Betrayal, Trust, and Honesty

[9/10 · 21 May 2014]

This is the most ludicrously underrated movie out of the thousands I've looked at on this site. I can understand why most American moviegoers would not like it, as it is very nearly unique. The only movie I've seen that it might be likened to is Brief Encounter (the original English version with Trevor Howard, please), but this film is more subtle and interesting than the English classic.

Random hearts is a story about two people, a man and a woman, whom the fates have mockingly drawn together for no better reason than their shared nightmare of betrayal, yet as it turns out their very different personalities perfectly complement each other in their efforts to cope and to find the antidote to their poisoned lives - which turns out to be perfect honesty with respect to each other, and integrity with respect to themselves.

The movie itself is as honest and integral as its protagonists learn to be. Contrary to what some have said, the plot is both plausible and realistic, and all the little opportunities for over-dramatization that most American directors and actors cannot resist, are studiously avoided. And since the protagonists are intelligent but not particularly articulate, still less self-aware (which is what the movie is about), meanings and dramatic passages are mostly conveyed visually, and by first rate acting and direction, rather than editorially, via the script. Overall, the tone is one of somber realism, which creates the ideal backdrop for the subtly dramatic re-emergence of the underlying humanity and vitality of the characters, in the wake of their mutual trauma.

I believe my characterization of this movie makes it fairly self-evident why so many Hollywood-conditioned viewers find this movie flat, boring, and unsatisfying, and I suppose that they also feel cheated because this is not a typical Harrison Ford movie, any more than Bridges of Madison County is a typical Clint Eastwood movie. Yet both of these films are among the best that either actor has ever done.

Many seem to see the casting of Kristin Scott Thomas opposite Ford as bizarre, but I see it as brilliant. A principal theme of this movie is to probe for the common humanity that often underlies superficial differences of background, personality, and presentation, and to remind us of what is truly important in our character and our relationships.

Keeping the Faith (2000)

The great ones get better with each viewing

[9/10 · 16 May 2014]

For once I have nothing to add, or take issue with - either with the best reviews here, or with the movie itself. This film is a gem, and Edward Norton, perhaps the most talented actor of our generation, turns out to be a genius of a filmmaker as well. But everyone involved with this film deserves praise, starting with the other leads, Stiller and Elfman, backed up as they are by solid performances by the other actors.

I rarely rate any movie as high as 8, but the only reason I don't give this one a 10 is that it makes no pretense of being anything more than it is: a true romantic comedy, with neither aspect slighted, and with a satisfying feel good resolution that manages to dodge most of the trite clichés of the genre.

The only thing I take issue with is the gross under-rating of this movie by those who can't see beneath the surface humor to the love, the artistry, and the good feeling with which it was put together.

Mr. Baseball (1992)

Bridging the culture gap, with humor and warmth

[8/10 · 9 December 2013]

I generally agree with the overall user ratings at this site, or at least find them plausible, but I find the 5.7 rating for "Mr. Baseball" (1992) even more ludicrous that the 7.8 accorded to it's imitator, Bill Murray's "Lost in Translation" (2002).

I call the latter Bill Murray's movie, because like most of his movies it is at bottom little more than a situation comedy contrived to create funny scenes, with deadpan Murray as the straight man. The situation, of course - the essential culture clash that all gaijin cultures have with the Japanese - is inherently funny, so "Lost in Translation" is undeniably a funny movie, but it has virtually no plot, and the other characters, though played adequately by Scarlett Johanson, and Giovanni Ribisi, are little more than props for Mr. Murray. However, the movie (Dir: Sophia Coppola) is finely crafted and that counts for something. And I suppose that artful cinematography and other cinematic esoterica have impressed the critics, and that their views have bled off into those of the hoi polloi, and given them cover for their racist guffaws at the silly Japanese.

Meanwhile, the standard sports movie plot of "Mr. Baseball" has provided its critics with an excuse to dismiss the movie because it annoyingly succeeds in actually bridging the cultural gap, without in any way sidelining the inherent humor in the situation - which doesn't, as it turns out, need any kind of exaggerated boost from Mr. Murray's brand of snide. "Mr. Baseball" actually provides insight into the Japanese culture, and thereby also into our own American culture, which IMO is the chief benefit of foreign travel, and it manages to stop just short, at the end, from the improbable contrived Hollywood ending. All in all, "Mr. Baseball" manages to artfully and plausibly traverse the tightrope of our expectations, and on my own subjective "rewatchable" scale, it beats "Lost in Translation" all hollow.

Touchback (2011)

A celebration of classic Americanism, and a first-rate movie

[9/10 · 4 April 2013]

It's easy to see why this indie masterpiece should have garnered only about a 6.0 rating (from 1,425 IMDb viewers, as I write). For one thing, it's a thoroughly derivative film, in fact a virtual remake of a beloved Hollywood classic (which I shall not name here because to do so would itself be a spoiler), but with all the characters, plot details, and the specific setting, changed. As we all know, most remakes are shameless ripoffs of the original inspired film, and even the best of them must walk a tightrope between being too much the same (in which case why remake it) and too different (thus alienating the aficionados of the classic). And of course remakes are easy meat for jaded critics of the lesser sort, who crave novelty for its own sake, and who for whom first-rate film-making and high craftsmanship, are inadequate compensations for boring them with familiar material. Although I am a music lover, I tend to feel that way about opera, and for that reason would never presume to write about it since I obviously don't "get it".

Many of these would-be sophisticates have felt obliged to diss this film for being too schmaltzy or cornball, forgetting that the beloved classic was similarly laced with schmaltz and cornball clichés, yet somehow rose above its own deliberately embraced limitations, through sheer excellence in movie making. Well this one does too, and I prefer it for it's relative realism, and restraint. Compared to the original, which feels like an adapted stage play (which it may well be), this is a true movie, whose greatest strengths include a pervasive and haunting musical background to prolonged, wordless, cinematographic pans of small town life, the land, and the people who work it.

This movie presents as yet another inspirational sports movie, and while its central character is a high school football hero, and sequences from "the big game" frame the movie, as in all the better inspirational sports movies the game is merely a metaphor for life. This is a flashback movie, and much of its emotional impact turns on poignant juxtapositions of then and now - an over-familiar cinematic conceit, perhaps, but one which is here made to seem both natural and inevitable.

Some have complained either that the ending is predictable (we know what choices the protagonist is going to make), or on the other hand, that the film's ending leaves too much up in the air. I would say that these contradictory gripes indicates that just the right balance has been struck on that account. And even if there are no great plot surprises (except, perhaps, for the sheer fittingness of the ending), the drama and suspense of the protagonist's voyage of self-discovery are sustained in a low key throughout the film.

Some may be disappointed that the hero is inarticulate - the strong, silent, type - but that is his character, and it too is sustained consistently and realistically by the script, which cleverly offloads most of the film's verbal messages to his coach, whose profession it is to instruct and to move, through words.

The only flaws that I can see are a number of small lapses in realism, that football fans will pick up on, and in particular the distracted behavior of the quarterback on the field, continually searching the stands for guidance or inspiration from the woman in his life, even in the midst of calling and running plays. That, of course, is nonsense: no player capable of performing as the football hero here does, would be so distractible, and the points of this sequence could have been made otherwise.

To sum up, this is a character drama, not really a football movie, and for the superficial movie-goer who is addicted to suspenseful, action- driven plots featuring stick-figure representations of humans, this mostly somber, realistic, but also nostalgic, movie is a guaranteed turnoff, and I advise such people not to waste their time with it - or to contaminate the ratings of a film that deserves so much more.

This initially ponderous and depressing film, lightly disguised as an American sports melodrama, turns out to be an inspirational film after all, and it may be the most deeply American film I have ever scene - certainly this side of the 1960s. Thus, it is pretty much guaranteed to alienate, or simply to bore, the majority of professional critics, and in general those who think of themselves as belonging to the modern Liberal "elite" who rule the media these days. But for the minority of Americans for whom morality and traditional character and family values aren't altogether passé, this is a realistic but sympathetic exploration, and in the end a celebration, of rural American small town life, and no one need be ashamed to open their hearts to it, whatever the critics may say.

Melancholia (2011)

Melancholia is an Allegory for Our Times

[9/10 · 25 September 2012]

Gee, I read the first 20 or so reviews of this movie, and not one of them seemed to get its point. This is not a movie about melancholia (the old-fashioned term for what we today call clinical depression and treat rather effectively with drugs): it's a movie about denial.

WARNING: My development of this theme herein might be construed as spoiling, and in any event, I think that this movie requires that one watch it without preconceptions, and all the way through - if you can. I can agree with the many other viewers that this may be a trial: the movie is incredibly slow-paced, virtually plot less, and, yes, depressing, but its purpose is precisely to put one into the mind of first one sister, Justine, the depressive, and then Claire, who is exasperated by her sister's ennui bordering on fugue. But those with the patience are likely to find the whole experience rewarding nonetheless. Others have complained about the apparently amateurish art-house camera-work, and I can understand their irritation (though I didn't particularly notice this myself, so caught up was I in the mood), but there is compensation and reward for all in the amazing cinematography, framed from the beginning by a nine-minute sequence of almost still-life scenes (enough to drive away most of those who are guaranteed not to appreciate this picture, I would think).

So I precede with my possibly spoiler-infested review.

One viewer complained about the titling of the first part of this movie "Christine", and the second part "Claire", for the two sisters, and wanted to recast the titles to identify the substance of the scenes, replacing "Christine" (the name of the sister who is the bride) as "The Wedding", but this movie is structured as a two part character study, presenting the different "takes" of the two sisters on the situation they have in common, in the manner of Kurasawa's "Rashoman", and the titling is perfectly appropriate.

Another viewer said that the planet Melancholia which threatens apocalypse in this movie was an obvious metaphor for depression, when instead it's practically the only reality in the artificial (but at the same time prosaic) dream world through which the characters float. Even Claire's husband, and her sister Justine's brother-in-law (the character well played by Kiefer Sutherland), who invokes reason and science in a rather muddy way to reassure his wife and his child, and even himself, that doom isn't certain, turns out to be a denier in disguise.

It is understandable that so many viewers would become fixated on the depressive state that Christine sinks into, especially for those with either first or secondhand experience of depression, and I expect that this encompasses a majority of those who have made it into their 40's and beyond. But not all depression is of the chronic, clinical kind, or responds to anti-depressive drugs, just as not all suicide is irrational. Life can occasionally deal one such a devastating hand that severe depression or suicide is actually an understandable and even reasonable response, and that, as it turns out, is the case with the depressive sister, Christine, who turns out to be sort of a one-eyed king in the country of the blind.

Hopefully I have at least sketched out what I think the film's theme is adequately for those who have seen the film, without giving it all away to those who haven't. I would just like to sum up by saying that I found Melancholia haunting, disturbing, and thought-provoking, and a perfect allegory for our times here in the second decade of the 21st century. The blue planet Melancholia is well on its way.

School Ties (1992)

A 1950's prep school drama of acceptance and prejudice

[8/10 · 22 May 2011]

I think it's a mistake to judge this film as a message film. It's not essentially about anti-Semitism, still less about prep schools. What adolescent male peer group isn't riddled with prejudice of one kind or another, absorbed unthinkingly from adult society, and even without such baggage, what young male peer group isn't prone to creating invidious distinctions of its own between the "in" group and the dweebs or nerds or whatever? Or even to hounding those who are hopelessly different? As for the school administration, give them credit for doing their best precisely to promote fair-mindedness and individual moral responsibility on the part of their charges. And note that in the end the honor system, and the school's way of handling it, worked, although not, perhaps, in the way it was expected to.

This film is best compared, not with such focused anti-semitic message movies as Gentleman's Agreement, but with the likes of 12 Angry Men, which is a film about prejudice all right, but about as many kinds of prejudice as there are jury members. If this film falls short of 12 Angry Men as a film about prejudice (and it does - I give 12 Angry Men all 10 stars) it is because its subjects are partially formed boys and not men, and one might say the same about the actors, although both individually and ensemble they did a superlative job given their inexperience.

Both these excellent films are about people and how they handle prejudicial baggage, both as individuals and as a group, and their merit as dramas doesn't depend on any particular messages, if there are any. One comes away from both films uplifted. In 12 Angry Men, despite all the ranting, and the ugliness, it appears at the end that justice has probably been done, and the judicial system shown to have worked (a view that today seems quaint and nostalgic). In School Ties, you can bet that many of the boys who have gone through the climactic ordeal have been broadened and improved by it, even as others will never change - they will just harden into the attitudes of their peer group, and their class. That's human nature.

Arguably the boy who has been most broadened and improved by it is David Greene himself: he has learned to recognize and to stand up manfully to the prejudice he will be encountering in adult life as he makes his way up in the world. Sadly, he has also acquired chip-on-the-shoulder prejudices of his own, as he ungraciously rejects the chastened and conciliatory overtures of the headmaster and the school chaplain. But that too is human nature, and the way of the world.

Just a few final personal comments. I matriculated at just such an elite prep school in 1954; in fact Middlesex School, where much of the film was shot, was our chief sports rival. I only attended the one school, so I hesitate to comment on the typicality of the fictional school in the movie, but I suppose that each school had (and has) its own character - although in the 1950s and 1960s, all drew the majority of their students from the same narrow socioeconomic pool. Still, our school was most definitely open to boys of varied social and economic backgrounds (provided their aptitude test scores were exceptionally high) and it has become much more liberal since (not to mention coeducational), so to regard these schools generically as hotbeds of prejudice or snobbery would be to embrace a stereotype no less invidious than the ones invoked in the film.

In fact, having spent five years at my school, I graduated from it still unaware of the specific religious backgrounds of any of my fellow students, and even (so naive were we then) with no awareness that certain students, viewed in retrospect, were undoubtedly gay. Somehow, even though the school was denominational and Protestant, and chapel attendance was required, not three times a week, but "every day and twice on Sundays", all but the main Sunday service contrived to be non- denominational, and the school's evident aim was to foster spirituality in general, and moral behavior in particular. I believe there were a number of Catholics, and a few Jews, who sometimes attended their own denominational Sabbath services in town, and there were a few students of other races and nationalities (and I'm sure no quotas), but such prejudice as there was turned more on class than on religion or ethnicity or race, per se.

There was, in my day, a subtle distinction between the boys of old money and "good family" who had contributed many of their sons to the place over generations (not to mention money to the endowment fund), and the rest of us who were there to make it (perhaps with scholarship aid), sink or swim, on our own - like David Greene. But the school administration, and the masters, took particular pains to eradicate such attitudes, or at least to balance them with a high sense of noblesse oblige, in just the way this was articulated in the fictional headmaster's chapel invocation. And I must say that I have encountered far more, and more injurious, prejudice of all kinds in real life than I ever experienced at the school, which as an institution endeavored always to stand for something better, and genuinely seemed to care at least as much about the character of the young men it turned out, as about their academic attainments and the colleges they got into.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Puerile tripe

[1/10 · 15 August 2010]

One-dimensional comic book characters; a disjointed plot - really just a series of vignettes, each with a predictable violent ending, signifying nothing; punctuated randomly with adolescent humor; and accompanied by trashy music which would undercut what is going on, if anything were going on.

I guess it's supposed to be a parody or something but if so it never quite rises above the level of Mad Magazine.

Brad Pitt gets to mug yet again. Waltz and Laurent get a promo out of it. I hope they go on to better things with a real director.

There is recognizable craftsmanship in the parts, but a movie is a whole, not merely a sum of the parts, and it must be judged accordingly.