Mad Men - Season 5 (2012)

As a Mad Men die-hard from its inception, I must admit I am tired of its glacial pace and shallow denizens, but having invested in the first four seasons, I am committed to seeing out Season 5, after the 2-year hiatus.

The opening double-episode of the new series was same old same old.  Shallow, vain WASPS who have learnt nothing over 6 years. Don has hit 40 and is as clueless as he was when he stole a dead man's identity.  There was some unusual humor, but I wouldn't describe it as hilarious.  The same old clichés. Hick clients who all look and sound the same, and over-sexed middle-aged white men screwing younger women - anyone for a ruck – wink wink?   Why have a token black and a token gay? Save money and have a gay black guy at a boring party with some mildly arousing sleaze.  Heck, who doesn't like a surprise party? As to the treatment of race, it has an icky Seinfeld-feel.  Almost as loathsome as Larry David's foul-mouthed hanger-on in Curb. But the period detail remains awesome.  Some decent characters are needed fast. 

My best TV show of the current crop has to be Homeland - intelligent and gripping television, where things actually happen and deep questions are posed.

Due soldi di speranza (Italy 1952)

Due soldi di speranza is an engaging neo-realist tragi-comedy from little-kown writer/director Renato Castellani. A story of young love between a chronically unemployed ex-soldier and a willfull firebrand of a girl in an economically depressed village outside of Naples, employs high farce to telegraph the depth of social disadvantage in the immediate post-war years and the hypocrisy of state, church, and peasant mores. A maelstrom of impulsive actions reach a climactic rebellious act, which while glorious is steeped in tragedy.  A deft work with wonderful cameos and authentic vignettes, framed by a cheeky insouciant score from Alessandro Cicognini. The two leads Maria Fiore and Vincenzo Musolino are a delight.

Received a BAFTA for best film in 1954 and director Castellini was awarded the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1952.

Our Friends In The North (BBC TV - 1995)

The British TV drama series Our Friends In The North is compulsive viewing. At £8m it did not come cheap and the BBC took years to find the courage to give the project the go-ahead.

Writer Peter Flannery worked on the script for six years, and he delivers real lives where the tragedy is slow and cumulative and not on a grand scale but no less human or devastating. Quality English-speaking TV drama with a conviction and veracity only the British can deliver. Indeed, nothing since has come close in quality and historic sweep. There is a seething anger with the failure of the political process and the betrayal of progressive aspirations, which 16 years later, is still manifestly justified.

Contemporary popular music is used sparingly but very effectively in conveying not only the zeitgeist but in establishing a sense of time and place, and a shared history that crosses international borders.

There are no heroes and each character is flawed – as we all are – why blame ourselves when we can blame someone else? Still friends after 30 years, but are we? Nothing left to say, and where were we when we needed each other. We leave family behind and then at the end the truth too late. And working people are still the scapegoat and their desolation aways the solution.

A Separation (2011)

Ironically, A Separation, a film about family conflict and social antagonisms, reminds us of what unites us. That for all the mad accumulation of weapons, and hard political rhetoric on both sides of the East and West divide, there are children, old people, wives, husbands, mothers and fathers, all struggling with life’s vicissitudes.

A young middle-class family in Tehran is torn apart by the ambitions of the wife who in seeking more freedom and better opportunities for herself and her 11-yo daughter wants to emigrate. The husband can’t leave an elderly father burdened by dementia. She unsuccesfully petitions for a divorce and then moves out to her parents as she won’t leave Iran without her daughter, who wants to stay with her father.  He hires a poor working woman from the outer suburbs to care for the grandfather while he is at work.

All too human frailties on both sides of the marriage, between the sexes, and across class divisions lead to tragic consequences.  The husband as well as care for his fractured family, must now navigate the maelstrom of a chaotic but not uncaring judicial system.  There are no villains in this story, only real people with problems we can all relate to.  The film-maker does not take sides and leaves it to us to develop our own responses to what unfolds.  In the end a child is asked to make an impossible decision – and we never know her choice – even though she says she has made it, tears streaming down from her hurt tender eyes.  It is the innocents that suffer most: the daughter, the grandfather, and the young daughter of the carer, all buffeted by the passions raging around them.

The film has a deep humanity and an assured veracity that holds you transfixed.  It has an unwavering cultural integrity and an unflinching commitment to realism. The director takes you into the family home with a disciplined hand-held camera and uses the confined space with imagination and flair. His mis-en-scene is richly redolent, with close-ups used to convey emotions with understated clarity. Outside he uses medium long-shots brilliantly: the harrowed carer desperately trying to find the grandfather on a busy street after he gets out of the apartment, and a wonderful scene of the carer and child from the back on a bench waiting for their bus home, the little girl’s legs dangling.

Yet there is something that disturbed me. The wife in leaving her family is selfish.  In our societies we can say this and it has no consequences beyond the immediate circumstances.  But in a society like Iran’s the actions of the wife and other women in the film can be seen – I believe not unfairly  – as troubling.  The patriarchal argument could easily be made that what unfolds in the film is what happens when women are given more freedom.  As an Iranian film I can’t help but feel that it may have a reactionary consequence. Though this hopefully comes not from an intention of the film-maker, but from the script which leaves the wife’s character not as deeply explored as the husband’s.

Beautifully acted with beguiling performances from the children and grandfather.   The young child of the carer is young enough to wear cute clothes and her angelic bewilderment adds color and true pathos.

An essential film.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was a big disappointment. I have read most of Le Carre’s novels, and while critics find his 70s work superior, I prefer his most recent output as it reveals a weary disillusionment, and a greater concern for the tragic ‘collateral damage’ that is inflicted by so-called democratic regimes.

The film is a flashy anachronism suited more to the cold war years. The world has moved on. This is not to say it could not have been better. Rich period detail and an intelligent script are pluses, but the pace is glacial and there is little if any of the tension you would expect from a spy thriller. There is intrigue but the action is plodding. A big mistake was casting a major star Colin Firth in a minor but pivotal role – anyone with half a brain knows who the mole is at the get go.

The denouement is so flat you wonder what the hell you have been doing for the last two hours. The story should have focused more on the mole, Karla (the Soviet spymaster), and Control, very ably played by John Hurt, who we see much too little of. Some unnecessarily graphic gore is really indulgent. Definitely over-rated, and BAFTA is being patently parochial in naming it one of the best films of 2011.

The Tree of Life (2011)

Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is short of a masterpiece but certainly great.  A visually stunning and fluidly cinematic film where the images tell the story.  But the editing is sometimes intrusive with some redundant jump cuts at the start.  The mythic elements are largely superfluous and a touch heavy-handed, as is the reliance on the albeit achingly beautiful musical scoring.  I wonder if limiting the scenario to the essential elements of the story would not have produced an elegiac masterpiece.  Somehow, Sean Penn seems miscast - his angst has an arrogance that undermines the modest filaments of a more simple reality found in the childhood years.  The scenes of thrusting towers of glass and steel are breathtaking but rather weak metaphors.

Yesterday before watching Malick's film I was re-reading Saul Bellow's masterful novel 'Herzog' and a particular passage struck me as very telling, and in retrospect particularly relevant to The Tree of Life.  Herzog is being visited by a fellow academic who is waxing lyrical before Herzog's attractive wife:  "Madeleine, "stuck away in the woods," was avid for scholarly conversation. Shapiro knew the literature of every field-he read all the publications; he had accounts with book dealers all over the world. When he found that Madeleine was not only a beauty but was preparing for her doctoral examination in Slavonic languages, he said, "How delightful!" And it was he himself who knew, betraying the knowledge by affectation, that for a Russian Jew from Chicago's West Side that "How delightful!" was inappropriate. A German Jew from Kenwood might have gotten away with it-old money, in the dry-goods business since 1880. But Shapiro's father had had no money, and peddled rotten apples from South Water Street in a wagon. There was more of the truth of life in those spotted, spoiled apples, and in old Shapiro, who smelled of the horse and of produce, than in all of these learned references."

Similarly, there is more truth in that Texas garden with the modest vegetable patch and scruffy lawn than in all those cosmic pyrotechnics.

Melancholia (Germany 2011)

Lars Von Trier's Melancholia is overall a banal bore, which only fires at the end. Without the drama of Wagner the sumptuous visuals framed by the planetary collision are empty of feeling and devoid of real meaning. It is one part too long. Part two can stand alone – it does not need the tedium and bourgeois antics that mark a thoroughly indulgent first half. Von Trier is pretty conceited for a depressive, pronouncing from a golf-cart that angst is truth and that mal-adjustment is a sort of bravery. Witness the contrived cowardice of the brother-in-law John. Depression if we wax poetic is a profound regret born of the unbearable awareness of impermanence, which comes from a deep compassion and paradoxically a dark anger at the pain such awareness brings. But depression is also a chemical imbalance in the brain. Rewire the brain or get zapped by the bio-chemists and it goes away. The ghost is in the machine not on the golf course or in the manicured gardens of the rich. Melancholia is a weakness not strength. Von Trier is a con-man spruiking art in a bottle. Cheers!

The Ides of March (2011)

I found George Clooney’s latest directorial effort, The Ides Of March, only so-so. Clooney should stick to the knitting. The two young leads were good, with Evan Rachel Wood really impressing, and the script would have worked better with her intern being the focus. Even before the dénouement Clooney playing the presidential candidate appears terribly phoney – come to think of it has there ever been one since Nixon who hasn’t been a phoney? Clooney the celebrity is always in the frame for me, and I can’t take him seriously as a liberal/left-winger because of his blatant hypocrisy. His heart must really bleed for the poor and disenfranchised when ensconced in his pallazzo on Lake Como, after laughing all the way to the bank.

Suzaki Paradise (Akashingo - Japan 1956)

Yuzo Kawashima's Suzaki Paradise is an excellent film bordering on greatness. Actress Yukiko Todoroki’s Osami is the moral anchor for the lives that intersect at her tiny bar, and her performance is affecting, but it is Michiyo Aratama as the shiftless Tsutae that is truly compelling in a nuanced and deeply convincing portrayal as the drifter whore burdened by a decency she seeks to escape but always returns to. Her love for a loser is at bottom and all at once a glorious redemption and a prison. She is the new wave – a lost soul of the burgeoning metropolis – a beat. Kawashima uses brothel jazz on the soundtrack to insinuate this, and places his camera at ground level to look up at his protagonists in a disturbing new way. Aratama has the best line in the film: “You have to live until you die.”

Night Nurse (1931)

The pre-coder Night Nurse has quite a cynical subtext that questions not only medical ethics but the 'good-time' moral apathy of big city life.

Medical and other ethics are discussed quite seriously in the first half in the banter between Barbara Stanwyck's Lora and the bootlegger when she patches him up and doesn't report the gun-shot wound.  In the second half Lora is the only one with principles strong enough to fight for the kid's in her care. Even Joan Blondell's nurse Maloney who shares the care of the kids is prepared to let things ride, as is Lora's doctor mentor, until pushed to become involved by Lora's insistence that something must be done. The dipsomaniac mother is not only a lush but morally bankrupt, and has quite a few gowned women and tuxedo-ed men cavorting with her in her nightly bacchanals.

With the bootlegger's help the kid's are saved, but with disturbing irony, Lora is at the end happy to hook up with him despite her earlier insistence that he give up his 'career', and despite having a pretty good idea of the chauffeur's fate.  Indeed, we find out about the meting out of this rough justice in a final comic scene where the bootlegger steers his car one-armed - the other arm is wrapped around Lorna -  while Lorna shifts gear. Twice she jumps the car in reverse and hits the car behind played as slapstick.  But her moral backsliding is not so funny.

Director William Wellman has hoodwinked us into laughing at an irreverent amoral conspiracy.

Great cinema and an unflinching critique of the zeitgeist.