Category: Film Review

Times are tough in her one-woman restaurant and when the offer comes to cook for a senior official in Paris for a couple of years at an incredible salary, Hortense takes the bait. I particularly liked the stunned silence when she is told that Joël Robuchon recommended her. (It is like being recommended by Zeus, a higher being.) Soon enough she realizes she is cooking for the President of France (loosely based on François Mitterand) in the Élysée Palace at 55 rue de Saint Honoré.
Recommended for adults.

There are some insights into the workings of the Building and its many thousands of employees, with some amusing, perhaps alarming scenes for taxpayers, examples of the waste caused by a ten minute delay in a departure for the airport. There is the inevitable tension between different departments within the household.

Hortense’s mission is to cook for the President in a simple way to give him a contrast to the formal, state dinners with their elaborate sauces, etc. Yet she has no way of knowing what the President likes, since she has no access to him, so she examines his plate when it is brought back from the table and infers from that.
The men in the main kitchen, they are all men, resent the existence of this small private kitchen in the residential wing do all they can to undermine it. All too believable. They would do this in any case but that the private cook is an unknown women triples their efforts.
She struggles, not always with success, to limit cost, achieve the highest quality, and stay within the dietary regime of the dying President. Meanwhile, the boys in the main kitchen carp, grudge, cheat, backbite, undermine…
It is great fun, plenty of food to drool over, and I also liked her brief excursion to the Antarctica research station to cook for the crew. There she talked to the diners, learned what they liked, enlisted their help in securing items, and enjoyed it a lot more than than the starched, constrained, combative, zero-tolerance, macho environment at Numero 55. Yes, strange though it may seem the Palace was presented as much more macho than the research station on the edge of the world, which by contrast seemed much more like a family, a large and noisy one to be sure.
While the ‘Tastes of the Palace’ makes perfectly good sense, for reasons unknown the distributor of this film have called it ‘Haute Cuisine’ in English. It is a title at odds with the major theme about food, namely that simple food is best when made from the best available produce. No doubt an advertising agency thought Haute Cuisine would appeal to some regardless of the intellectual coherence of the film.

Upon the recommendation of Jerry, guide and driver in West Arnhemland, we watched on DVD the four-part ABC documentary ‘First Footprints.‘ * * * * Highly recommended.
It is an engrossing examination of aboriginal life on Greater and Lesser Australia since time immemorial. Well, to be more specific, the 60,000 years before 1788.
It is part travelogue and part archeology with some ethnography, too, all with a light touch that lets the evidence speak for itself.
What the evidence shows is how aboriginals coped with the changing climate and the coming of the first boat people from England. They dealt with rising sea levels, epic droughts, and a changing fauna. Resilience is the word that applies.
It explores the development and transfer of technology within and among the peoples of Australia through time. A technological breakthrough in one part of Australia would be communicated to another part, three thousand kilometers away in a very few years, evidence of a continuous trade across tribal boundaries. If Joe figured out how to chip a stone tool in Sydney harbor, that knowledge would be in evidence in Geraldton within a generation.
There was so much that new and surprising to me that I cannot recount it here. We will have to watch them all again one day the better to take it in.
There is evidence of fish farming and settled agriculture in Greater Australia before the rising waters separated New Guinea and the Torres Islands. How did these primitive people do it before those advanced Europeans arrived to save their souls with gun powder and whiskey? I mimic the dreaded Erich van Däniken. The answer, Erich, is that they figured it out.
I though EvD several times on our recent tours through West Arnhemland and Kakadu because of the elongated human figures I saw in some rock art.

I could hear the egregious Swiss voice saying, ‘What else could they be but aliens!’ The answer Erich is artistic license. Check with Salvador Dali about watches!
‘First Footprints’ is also very informative about rock art, though it is never enough to satisfy me. I wanted more detail about the cosmology and less ‘Isn’t it great!’ expostulations from our guides. While I am carping, I would also have liked more about the social organization that underlay the art, the fish farming, the trade, and so on. Though perhaps we just don’t know, though surely everyone at the ABC knows how to speculate with pompous authority, or is that skill confined only to the News department.
The URL is http://www.abc.net.au/tv/firstfootprints/

An understated tale of redemption in face of the absurdity of life. Wry humour, pathos, and friendship across barriers are the motifs. Now that Roger Ebert is no longer there, I try to view movies as he would. He would like this I am sure.

Ricardo Darín is, as always, impeccable as the wary and weary Ricardo. He is subdued, defeated, grumpy, sullen, grey, grizzled, ragged, prissy…. He counts the nails in a box, in every box, delivered to his hardware store. The count is short, as frequently it is. On the telephone he complains in a tirade that seems an often repeated performance well out of proportion to the offense. When the supplier tries to make amends with some free extras in the next delivery, these he refuses and sets about counting the nails in this delivery. Take that! What is at stake is not the nails but the principle! But what principle?
When not counting nails, at the end of the day Roberto compiles newspaper cuttings into albums that demonstrate the absurdity of life. He subscribes to a lot of newspapers to find these stories. Some of the stories are hilarious, as long as it is not you. In each case Roberto pictures himself in the victim’s role. Get it? In time even the absurd opening scene is explained. (During the credits this explanation is vindicated, so keep watching.)
Maria throws herself at him but he cannot let anyone touch his emotions because, as the evidence in the albums shows, it will turn out badly, everything turns out badly, even having a shave in a barber’s chair. Then the Chinese, Jun, pops up and somehow gets inside the shell, and stays. In time Roberto learns he is not alone in his misery. In time he learns that life goes on and there is no escaping from it. He learns this from Jun’s persistence in the face of even greater adversity.
If you have no emotions then no one can hurt you, this seems to be Roberto’s approach to life. But Jun has even less than he has, so Roberto helps him, reluctantly, then for a moment the tables are turned and Jun comes to his rescue. Now Roberto has to stay the course. And there is Chinese take-away.
Some of the comic scenes are overdone like the one at the Chinese Consulate but who cares. The film oscillates from realism to parody but it does not go to either extreme.
With any and everything from Argentina I look for the Dirty War. This one refers to the Falklands War. And once again here the police are malevolent, a staple of Argentine films, and perhaps a reminder of the Dirty War. Also the newspaper that has the picture that starts the album is Italian, not Argentine because, I assume, of censorship in Argentina.
Civic Video in Newtown has one copy.

Recommended for adults.
A stranger enters a small, close-knit, inward-looking, isolated community. As the locals react to him the papers over the cracks give way and old animosities flare, pent up desires surface, suppressed hopes roil, unspoken truces are broken, irritations long ignored are scratched. The ructions spring from ambition, from dominance, from emotions, from lust, from insecurity, it matters not the origin once they are loosened.

It is a common trope in westerns. Examples include ‘Shane,’ ‘Red Harvest,’ ‘The Quiet Man,’ ‘Bad Day at Black Rock,’ ‘Bus Riley is Back,’ ‘The Wild One’, ‘Suddenly Last Summer,’ and many more, including ‘As It is in Heaven’ (2004), this delightful film from Sweden. There is much singing and dancing, but also wife-beating, shotguns, fistfights, car smashing, and a lot more.
The world renown musician Daniel has a heart attack and leaves the international music grind, buying an abandoned schoolhouse in his home town, which he left at age seven. He has long since adopted a stage name as his own, so to the locals he is a stranger, a famous stranger to be sure.
Little by little he is drawn into the local church choir where he returns to the fundamentals of music like breathing, projecting, relaxation, and so on. The choir is the reactor that leaks emotional radiation. Those who hold apart from the choir suspect demonic doings there, and a mole confirms that. Among those who participate there are old rivalries, conflicts, and trouble at home from spending so much time practicing.
Daniel has no wish to become involved in any of this but it is inescapable in such a small community. The characters are well rounded though the two villains are the least developed, the jealous and envious parson and the wife-beating truck driver. The changing Nordic seasons contribute to the story. Along the way love is explained.
Despite frictions and cross purposes the choir hangs together, shielding the wife from the thuggo, accepting the retarded Toré, matching up an elderly couple, and recruiting more young people. These successes infuriate the parson…. It is Gabriella whose courage inspires the others to persevere when the centripetal forces threaten.
It has a marvellous end that draws together the larger theme explaining why a great musician found it so satisfying to work with this village choir from the remote north of Sweden. Bicycle riding is a metaphor for facing fear for Daniel and despite his worldly successes he, too, has fears.
I could not find a review by the Dean, Roger Ebert. If he missed it that is too bad because he would have liked it.

An art history student’s thesis research is presented through the cinematic conventions of a mystery. Recommended for adults. If you like X-Men XV do not watch this movie.
The student notices female figures in Watteau paintings: always these figures have their backs to the viewer. The more she studies them, the more she sees them in many of Watteau’s paintings, and the more it seems to be always the same woman with her back turned. Who is she? Why is she always there, with her back turned?
A little tension is added to the plot with a thesis supervisor who discourages the quest. We discover he pursued the same line once and it came to nothing. Is he simply trying to steer her onto safe ground, or is he, brusk and uncommunicative, hiding something?
Then there is the mime in square outside the print shop where she works; he is young and handsome but begs for a living. They meet and she discovers he is a deaf mute but through him she finds a painting similar to a Watteau by an obscure painter called Opener.
With the single-mindedness and doggedness of an obsessive only child she tracks down this similar painting and acquires it (by selling a treasured watch from her deceased father). She has also tracked down every site in Paris that Watteau painted (miraculously most are still to be recognised these hundreds of years later) and lived, though this latter information is scarce. She also researches the people in his paintings. She triangulated onto the actress Charlotte Desarmes as the mystery woman, a prospect rejected by the supervisor as unsubstantiated.
She persists and persuades a friend to x-ray the Opener painting and voila there is a Watteau beneath it, as her supervisor is the first to acknowledge. It seems there was no Opener, but it was a second name that Watteau used for some of his painting when Charlotte rejected him. He could not bear to destroy his work but he did paint over it.
Her travels through libraries, archives, auctions, Parisienne sites are entertaining to us nerds. The silent boy friend remains a cipher. The landlord never gets the rent. Her mother remains at a distance, a reluctant banker at times. The boss at the print shop is sympathetic but has a business to run. Indeed all of the supporting characters are positive, if sometimes upset, distracted, or angry. I liked that. I find the cynicism of Hollywood cheap and no substitute for plot, story, or character. By ‘positive’ I do not mean singing and dancing but not cunning, malicious, sinister, predatory, sneering or anything like that. Just people going about their business; such people are seldom to be seen in Hollywood anymore because they do not interest fourteen year old boys.
But an obsessive would probably use them as she does with few qualms, especially when the trail is hot.
The supervisor has the best line: express your passion in your life, your work needs detachment and perspective. Of course, it bounces off the knight on the quest but they are words to live by.
I was interested to see the techniques and technology used in the research shown here. I found the image of the lion subdued by love very charming, and it is the key that opens the way to Opener. (Could not resist that.)
I did quite see what either the French or English title meant to the story, respectively, ‘That which my eyes have seen’ and ‘The vanishing point.’ I was also surprised when this penurious student produced a Visa card to pay 400 euros.
Thank you SBS television.

Free from the timetable of classes and meetings, and more meetings, I have given in to the temptation of Dendy’s classics and gone to several movies on Monday morning, while Kate goes off to good works. Today it was “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) With Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Erich von Stroheim, and Nancy Olson, along with Jack Webb (of Dragnet) before he got his teeth straightened. To see it on television is nothing compared to the wide screen: Marvelous. A very excellent print that gives us the crisp light and dark and many shades between that only black-and-white can do.

Leaving aside all the lore and gossip, the parade of celebrities, the contrivances of staging that swimming pool scene, after all that it is Gloria Swanson who dominates everything, and not just the scenes she is in, but through her presence manifested in the house and its furnishings, in the soul of von Stroheim, and seen or unseen clutching always at Holden. It offers a parallel love story of two women and one man. The man is Holden and the women are the aging relic Swanson and the fresh-faced ingenue Olson. He disappoints both because at his core, well, he has no core, though Olson shows him the way out and after he sacrifices himself to drive her away, he seems resolved to break the cancerous link with Swanson. Or is he…. we will never know.
It is a talkie, of course, and Swanson has some remarkable lines penned by the one and only Billy Wilder, and she by turns spits, drawls, mumbles, hisses, and declares them, all with lift of the chin, the bulge of the eyes, and turn of wrist. An Oscar does not seem a high enough award. With her increasing histrionics von Stroheim is the perfect foil, a rigidly controlled man whose unrequited love drives him to accept every humiliation with the merest flicker of an eyebrow.
Hollywood eats its own, and in 1973 Holden reprised this film in reverse as an older man captivated by a much younger woman who barely notices him in “Breezy,” and it was directed by Clint Eastwood.
No one ever says it better than the dean of movie reviews Roger Ebert:
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-sunset-boulevard-1950
Cut-and-paste the link above to see his comments.

Après le gym I often pass through Civic Video on the way home. It is a short cut of sorts with some added benefits. The other day I saw ‘The Sound of My Voice’ on the shelf. It caught my eye because (1) there was only one specimen there and (2) the cover art was arresting. One of my criteria for considering a video is that it is not there in dozens of copies. Figure that out. For the cover art, have a look.

Once in hand I realized it was the same crew that made ‘Another Earth’ (2011) , and I was hooked. I have commented on ‘Another Earth’ in another post.
I watched ‘The Sound of My Voice’ the other night, and have no idea what to make of it. It is studied in its ambiguity and enigmatic in its approach, and I like that. Subtle, open-textured, mysterious, and in no hurry. That kept me interested. It seemed to me it was a variant, on a micro-budget, of ‘Contact’ (1997). In ‘Contact’ the aliens approach humanity in a surprising way. In ‘The Sound of My Voice’ the surprising contact is from the future….or is it? That is the ambiguity.
There are many discussions in the ether, e.g. IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Facebook and more.
Cut and paste this link to find it on The Internet Movie Data Base:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1748207/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
More importantly, there is a measured review from Roget Ebert, the greatest, at http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-sound-of-my-voice-2012
Better yet see it for yourself. It will leave you thinking and it is a vote against Hollywood. Two good things there.

Good Trekkies that we have been since 1966, off we went to the Dendy Newtown last night to watch Start Trek: Into Darkness in 3D. Trekkies will have to see it. But many of them will be disappointed. Everything those who promote it say is true: it is high energy, it is fast and furious, it is action-packed, it has some etched characters…

It is also true to say that it seems to have been created by writers with arrested development and targetted at twelve year old boys. No doubt that is a winning formula.
It is also true to say that it quite indistinguishable from three other movies currently showing in the Dendy chain: Man of Steel, Iron Man 3, and Escape from Planet Earth. It is loud, it is trivial, it is superficial, it is one-dimensional, thoughtless, inconsistent, with a leaky plot and inexplicable action and eighty (80) minutes of gratuitous violence… It lacks the gravitas of even a Marvel Comic.
What is worse, the local reviewers seem to think that it is an authentic representation of Star Trek and thus the reason there are Trekkies like us. WRONG!
Star Trek the Original Series featured more than one meeting where the assembled staff tried to think of ways to do things, debated over a table the limits of their orders, and then went away to think about it, because thinking takes time. In many episodes not a shot was fired or a punch thrown by the crew of the Enterprise.
Thinking time in Into the Darkness is 5-6 seconds. That is perhaps indicative of how decisions were also made about the film. Or is it the reality of Bush Junior White House?
Moreover, many episodes of Star Trek: Original Series posed questions about life and humanity from start to finish. I will cite only one example: The Devil in the Dark (Season 1, Episode 25 in March 1967). There are plenty of others from Original Series, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise, too. Of course, to cater to the television audience there is action, as well.
Into the Dark has many allusions to the Star Trek lore. The villain of the piece is Khan, played by Ricardo Montalban in ‘Space Seed.’ broadcast in February 16, 1967, and he reprised the role in the 1982 film. In 1967 the issue was returned soldiers. He was a great villain, as is Benedict Cumberbatch in this outing. That issue of returned soldiers remains relevant — Iraq and Afghanistan — but not when it is only an excuse for more fisticuffs.
This Captain Kirk is everything his mentor says he is, except for the potential for greatness. He is as arrogant, opinionated, and uninformed as a radio shock jock. Admittedly, he is far more handsome than any shock jock I have seen in the jungle.
There were certainly things for a Trekkie to like. The opening sequence is dazzling, albeit pointless. The Mr Spocks dialogue was delicious. And the actors were excellent at creating those familiars: Uhura, Chekov, Sulu, McCoy, Scottie, Spock, and Kirk, as well as Khan. They could do it, now if they had just had something interesting to do.

We watched this documentary about the redoubtable Diana Vreeland last night. Recomended for adults.

I knew nothing about Vreeland but thought the distaff side might be interested, so I borrowed it from the local Civic Video on spec. What I found was a force of nature who had no taste whatever but had drive, pride, intelligence, wit, and a capacity to learn. Her attitude seemed to be: be what you are. And strut it. She joined all of that to an enormous appetite for the world, realized through the no-expense-spared camera shoots she did for her magazines. All of this, in some measure, she passed on to those who looked at the editions of her magazines.
She was the long time editor of Harper’s Bazaar and then Vogue. She was one of the models for the demanding editor in ‘The Devil Wears Prada.’
In the boundless energy, enthusiasm, and bullying she reminded me of Lyndon Johnson. She was likewise as profligate.
Perhaps the most amusing part of the story is her last assignment at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where her shows, and shows they were, brought in masses of paying customers. Those successes condemned her in the eyes of the other curators, numbering her days there. It was easy to imagine meetings where curators argued that having people crowding into the Met was undesirable! I expect they did, though veiled and subtle in public.
http://www.dianavreeland-film.com

On a fine Sunday afternoon with blue sky and green grass aplenty we sat in a dark room and watched “Kon Tiki (2012). Recommended for adults.
Thor Heyedal’s greatest contribution is that he believed those primitive people had the wit and willingness for such a colossal undertaking. I said ‘primitive people’ to mimic that great scourge of reason, Erich von Däniken who always says in response to his own rhetorical question: “How could these primitive people do it?” by saying the aliens did it. Heyedal is a wonderful antidote to that drivel. Moreover, they did not just go with the flow but also charted their travels with the stars.
The film has something for everyone. Some intellectual weight, a cast of handsome Aryans, some light relief, and plenty of adventure and action. Though some viewers may conclude that it all came down to Heyerdal’s will power and conviction and not to the evidence he had before he started and that would be a shame. He did have evidence, and faith does not move ocean currents.
No doubt the moronic fault-finders will find that which they seek and miss the point.