Murder on a Sunday morning

This documentary tells the trial of Brenton Buttler, a 15 year-old black high school student who was arrested in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2000, for the murder of a tourist white woman. There is nothing special from a technical point of view about how the story is shown, in that respect the documentary feels like a larger version of the true crime series shown on Court TV.

Other than that, this is one of those kinds of stories that, infuriating though they may be, one should watch and think about. During the trial we see how the police did not conduct anything resembling a serious investigation; Buttler was arrested two hours after the crime, was intimidated and physically threatened into signing a confession and it mattered little that his family accounted for him at the time of the murder. Lacking (almost) any evidence, it is disconcerting how the officers involved in the case still insist on their conclusions, unwilling to admit a mistake or something even more serious. The victim’s husband’s visual identification of Buttler is the only evidence the police has, and the defense attorneys also shed doubts on its accuracy.

Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, the director, specializes in documentaries about justice and what he calls societal taboos. Murder was awarded the Oscar for Best Documentary of 2001.

All about Eve

All about Eve was awarded the Oscar for Best Picture of 1950, competing against Sunset Blvd. Both movies deal with similar topics; in both we see an ageing actress dealing with an industry that favors the young. While Sunset Blvd. deals directly with Hollywood, All about Eve sets the story within the theater industry. Anne Baxter plays Eve, a young woman who idolizes Margo Channing, the character played by Bette Davis. Marilyn Monroe has also a small role. Little by little we discover how Eve is unscrupulously setting herself as the next great actress, by lying to and manipulating Margo, her friends, and the press.

The script is excellent, the acting is spotless, and the final scene is unforgetably beautiful. The whole story is quite enjoyable. The only detail I didn’t like was how DeWitt, the theater critic, devolves in a crucial scene into a cartoon villain. Except for this, this is a subtle and carefully crafted movie, and even though I thoroughly enjoyed Sunset Blvd., it is not hard to see why Eve was favored by the Academy.

The good German

I enjoy Steven Soderbergh’s movies, overall. I think he is one of the few mainstream American directors who is constantly trying to innovate, to experiment, and being as prolific as he is, the results tend to be a treat. (There are a few exceptions, of course.)

The good German is shot as if it had been made in the late forties or early fifties. If nothing else, it is a good exercise in style, much more rewarding than remaking Psycho. The story, a noir, concerns an American, his German old flame, Berlin during the Postdam peace conference, and a lot of hypocrisy from almost everybody involved. There is an obvious homage to Casablanca at the end, which I found charming. The musical score works differently from how music is treated nowadays, it is much more present in the sense that it has a shape and a theme and it is almost another character, but it is not intrusive or distracting. Thanks to having watched Sunset Boulevard recently, and a few days later, All about Eve, this was clear to me, although music works differently in these films from how it does in The Good German. (I’ve also recently watched The cabinet of doctor Caligari and Nosferatu, where music plays yet a completely different role.) The camera angles and even the cameras used are in the style of the period, and swipe cuts to shift scenes are common.

Not just the style, but the story itself was interesting. It is clearly a contemporary movie in goals and narrative, with a more daring agenda than a film from the period would have been able to portray. As for the actors, it was very nice to contrast Cate Blanchett’s character with the one she plays in Notes on a scandal; Tobey Maguire plays a character very different from those I am used to seeing him play; and George Clooney was excellent, of course. Very good.

Unknown white male

Douglas Bruce finds himself one day riding the subway in New York without knowing where he is going. In fact, he doesn’t know where he is, he doesn’t recognize any of the buildings. Panic sets in once he realizes he doesn’t know where he took the train, or even his own name. Doug suffers total amnesia, a rare condition in which one forgets everything about one’s life. Well, this is not exactly true: He knows how to talk, and when in the hospital someone asks him to sign, he remembers his signature. This strange and fascinating condition is explored in this documentary that uses footage shot by Doug himself and directed by his (former) friend Rupert Murray.

I found the documentary quite interesting, but I also found it wanting in several respects. Part of it may be due to the simple fact that we still know very little about how memory works, so surprisingly little time is devoted to hard data, to what may be happening—as for why it is happening, nobody knows. Some hypotheses are mentioned, and as the story progresses we get some clues. But part of the problem with the story I think is due to what I perceive as a shortcoming of the director: There are questions that do not get asked, some that beg to be asked, and why they are not seems to be because everybody is so fascinated by what is happening that they assume that filming it is enough. Part of it I think is due to the friendship between Doug and Mr. Murray. Mr. Murray seems to go out of his way to make Doug feel comfortable, while obviously the subject matter may make him uncomfortable. So, at the end of the day, I find the final product a bit awkward. There are a few extras in the DVD that leave me feeling the same (at least there is consistency); I missed (being in Vienna) the controversy on the veracity of the story, so the short section addressing it didn’t mean much to me. There is a long section explaining how a sequence was shot. I found it very curious that the director put so much thought into the visual look of the final product instead of trying to add a bit more substance to it.

I like explorations of memory, and mental problems intrigue me to no end. So this was a good movie overall. It complements well other documentaries in similar subjects, like anterograde amnesia, the disease that Memento popularized. I had the fortune of watching in 2004 an excellent documentary by Koreeda Hirokazu about one such case in Japan, Without memory.

Abril rojo

Abril Rojo is a novel about contemporary violence in Peru, told using noir conventions. There is an undercurrent of humor throughout the story, in spite of its serious and grim subject matter. Its main character, the fiscal distrital adjunto Félix Chacaltana Saldívar, is very unaware of his surroundings, living instead within a fake bureaucratic formalism of laws and paperwork. Set in March and April 2000, during elections, the novel begins with the discovery of the charred remains of a body. Chacaltana finds unusual resistance from the police to investigate the murder and as he tries, obsessively but simple mindedly, to overcome this obstacle, he ends up drawing the attention of the army. What follows is the discovery of a serial killer at large, with gruesome ritualistic murders that represent decades of unrelenting violence.

Santiago Roncagliolo, the author, received the Premio Alfaguara in 2006 for this novel. However entertaining it is, I found two minor problems with it and a bigger one. There are a few grammatical oddities (for example, on two ocassions an incorrect “de que” is present), which seem to be the editor’s fault, overlooking faulty grammar from the narration since the characters speak that way; however, these are surprisingly few. There are many liberties taken with the judicial system and the history of violence in Peru, which seems odd given the intention of the story; these are not so easy to spot and are so integral to the narrative that can be considered part of the framing of the tale and be overlooked. The main problem, the one I couldn’t ignore, is the extravagant nature of the serial killer’s actions. They fit well within the noir conventions the story uses. However, these crimes are so brutal that they distract from the actual, real crimes that the novel wants to highlight and condemn. As a result, the framework ends up hindering the impact of what has actually happened, of what the author presumably expects us to notice and  care about.

That being said, the story is quite satisfying. The ending was so well executed that one could almost forgive the problem I mentioned. I wasn’t aware of Roncagliolo’s work prior to this novel, and will for sure keep an eye on him. Thanks to Rafael Benjumea for suggesting it.  

Notes on a scandal

This is a well written and very well acted movie about two seriously flawed characters. Cate Blanchett plays a high school teacher who starts a relationship with one of her students. Judi Dench’s character is much more interesting. I suppose she is the villain of the movie, but to call her that seems a bit too simple; more precisely, her character is very immature and very damaged; her life seems to have been marked by repression and  guilt, and as a result she doesn’t seem capable to relate to other people at an adult level, instead developing obsessions and elaborate fantasy scenarios about her friendships to cope for the lack of love in her life.  The latest object of her infatuation is Blanchett’s character, and blackmail is the method she uses to keep her close.

All the characters in this movie seem real and unusually detailed, their motivations and actions, however reproachable or dislikable, well thought out. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Sunset blvd.

This movie was a nice find. It is funny and somewhat creepy, and full of small, pretty details.

For example, the opening scene is quite ingenuous, you see a dead man floating on a pool; it looks as if you were at the bottom of the pool, looking up at the man and at the reporters and police.  Filmed in 1950, there were no subaquatic cameras that would have allowed that shot. Instead, the director placed a mirror at the bottom of the pool, and filmed the image reflected there; they had to experiment some with the temperature of the water until the mirror image looked right. 

There are cameos of several silent movie stars (playing themselves) and Cecil B. DeMille plays himself for a few minutes, busy filming Samson and Delilah, with his actual crew.  

The DVD has several small documentaries worth watching. Particularly interesting in my opinion was the piece on composer Franz Waxman, who was in charge of the score. Other documentaries point out the parallels between the cast of the movie and the characters they play, which helps explain the strong reaction the film produced in Hollywood.

Very nice, well worth watching.

Children of men

Children of men is without a doubt the best movie I’ve seen in a while. It is also the most powerful. I’ve read comparisons to Come and see, which I haven’t seen yet, so I now have it in my Netflix queue. It may not be perfect, but I am not sure there are many examples of perfection anywhere and, really, I have nothing to criticize here. I waited for a while for this movie, since I saw the trailer for the first time and I must say it was a most worthwhile wait.

On the surface a science-fiction story about a near future where women cannot bear children and so humanity is slowly waiting to die out, Children of men is really about our very troubled present of intolerance, greed and war. I read an interview with director Alfonso Cuarón where they ask him why he didn’t explain in greater detail how the infertility came to be. It is not true, he says (I didn’t look for the exact quote, but this is its essence), so I didn’t care. That is not what I wanted the movie to be about. In another interview (and this quote I looked up), Cuarón says that “In the end, Children of men isn’t so much about humanity being destructive—its more about ideologies coming between people’s judgment and their actions.”

Cuarón, who also co-wrote the script, displays incredible technical expertise; there are several long and difficult scenes filmed in a single shot, there is also density of information, which is the best term I’ve come up with to describe what I see as scenes where different types of information are conveyed simultaneously by different means (newspaper clips, television images, people talking), a great alternative to the dreaded exposition. Another excellent example of density in this sense is found in the TV series Lost.  

Children of men also looks beautiful, although perhaps this is a strange word to use in the context of the very ugly and mean future it describes. With great work by the main leads, a solid script and incredible cinematography, this is one of the most, if not the most, haunting and interesting films of 2006. (Though, of course, I imagine the much inferior Babel will fair better at the Oscars.) 

Eve’s bayou

I am not sure what to say about Eve’s Bayou; I found it slightly underwhelming. It is a good story, its fantastic elements are well developed and its characters are sufficiently well rounded. Except that, I don’t know why, I found Eve not entirely convincing (the character, Jurnee Smollett was very good).  The “mirror scenes” are somewhat risky, but I think they work well in the context of the story; one needs to accept them literally, which makes them more interesting than as a mere convention.  I would be interesting in hearing opinions about this movie and suggestions on what elements of it I should be paying closer attention to.

Primer

I like science-fiction. That being said, I hesitate about calling science-fiction most of what is classified as such; I guess I mostly identify sf with hard sf. Primer classifies without hesitations. This is a rare gem; it is a challenging film, and multiple viewings are probably required to fully appreciate it. Maybe some of the difficulties are not intentional, and rather the result of the inexperience of the director, this being his first feature film (a small screen telling us the date of some of the scenes would have helped every now and then). But it is worth working through this movie, and slowly unfolding its narrative.

You may have noticed I didn’t say what the movie is about, and I did the same in my previous post. But everybody knows about All the president’s men, I expect. With Primer, on the other hand, I find that part of the charm is to slowly realize what the story is about.