..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

..Wilmington on DVD ..MCN Weekend

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, My Sister's Keeper, Cheri ... and more
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Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen(Two-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; Michael Bay, 2009
   
This might better be called “Transformers: Revenge of the Hasbro Action Toys,”  because that’s who the real stars are: those indefatigable ultra-complicated toy robots, the good Autobots and the bad Decepticons, who bash and smash and mash and thrash each other for two-and-a-half hours against spectacular U. S.; French, Jordanian and Egyptian locales, while the poor humans involved -- including anxious Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), foxy Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox), snarling agent-turned-deli-guy Simmons (John Turturro) and obnoxious college kid hedonist Leo (Ramon Rodriguez)  -- run around with scared or pugnacious expressions, getting the same ultimately short shrift Raymond Burr and Takashi Shimura got as they mulled things over while ‘50s Tokyo was menaced by Godzilla, King of the Monsters. (For my money, ‘Zilla would have eaten these Decepticons alive.)
    
Oh, well … Despite undeniable technical virtuosity of the most extreme sort from director Michael Bay and his crew, this robot toy sequel has been bashed, mashed, thrashed and trashed by the critics as well, few of whom have been showing much respect for the skill it takes to making toys come alive, even as the humans around them keep behaving like frantic toys. The chorus of nix-sayers has a point. Why should you care more whether a ‘bot gets squashed by a Megatron (voiced by Hugo Weaving) and whether Sam makes it with the local sex-bot , than whether Simmons makes a good pastrami on rye and whether Sam and Leo make it in one piece from the local fraternity bash to the depths of the Sphinx?
    
Bay is a director whose name instantly summons up a whole film style or trend: his thrillers are mechanically expert and emotionally somewhat vacant and cliché-riddled, extremely violent yet cartoonish. I think he’s talented -- and his readiness to collaborate on Criterion editions of his movies shows he’s a bit of a buff. But I wish he’d stop making so many movies like this one, and try more films without a single physical fight and nary an explosion.
      
The cast is mired in the robo-fights, helpless onlookers, transfixed by children‘s games amok. And writers Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman seem to have exhausted themselves dreaming up wisecracks for the robots, few of which are worth the effort to hear above the mass carnage and nonstop din of  the action scenes. As for the rest of the cast, Kevin Dunn and Julie White (as the Witwickys) take obnoxious, addled parenthood to new lows, and the various military guys act like “Be All You Can Be” TV ad clones looking for a better gig. The whole movie, for all its undeniable technical skill, has all the humanity and humor of an Erector Set and Tinker Toys gone mad. But it’s probably the only time you‘ll get to see  a movie villain tear up a pyramid peak or coitus interruptus with a tentacled robot.        

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My Sister’s Keeper (Three Stars)
U. S.; Nick Cassavetes, 2009
     
Who would have thought that that the filmmaker son of indie radical John Cassavetes would become one of the American movies’ more reliable of sentimental middle class weepies? My Sister’s Keeper, adapted by Cassavetes and writer Jeremy Leven from Jodi Picoult‘s book about a family coping and suffering as their eldest daughter Kate (Sofia Vassilievski) battles cancer, is movie that‘s hard to watch without crying -- thanks to Cassavetes‘ (The Notebook) unabashed romanticism and effective tear jerking and the excellent heart-on-sleeve cast: Cameron Diaz and Jason Patric as steadfast parents Sara and Brian, Abigail Breslin as younger sister Anna (who was conceived partly to supply organs, parts and bone marrow for her desperately ill sister, Alec Baldwin as celeb lawyer Campbell Alexander (whom Anna hires in a bizarre court case against her parents, and Joan Cusack as hard-nosed but soft-hearted Judge De Salvo, a stern, perceptive jurist who handles the hearing.
       
It’s Anna’s decision to sue that makes the movie unusual for its kind. She‘s fighting to regain control of her body and get medical emancipation from her mother’s furious insistence that she keep providing body parts (in this case, a kidney) for her stricken sister. That gives the film drama, but it also frankly destroyed much of my sympathy for Anna. I’d be happy to donate a kidney to save the life of someone I loved, and I suspect many others would too -- or at least we want to believe we would. Even the last minute revelation that illuminates Anna‘s thinking doesn’t make up for the emotional confusion that her seeming stubbornness creates.
     
There‘s no denying that the film gets to you, though, especially when Vassilievski turns her radiant, dying, angelic face toward the camera and the light. Baldwin and Cusack deploy their considerable comic gifts to help balance the pathos, and Diaz is a dynamo of obsessed mother-love. Of course the movie is manipulative. Most tearjerkers, even the good ones, are. But it’s nice to see a sentiment-laden film with a cast this good and a subject this human.


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Cheri (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.-U.K.; Stephen Frears, 2009
     
I like Stephen Frears, sometimes very much (The Grifters, Bloody Kids, The Hit). But one movie of his that I’ve always found a bit overrated was his 1988 Dangerous Liaisons, scripted by Christopher Hampton from his play of the Choldlerlos de Laclos French epistolary novel about upper class sexual games. Here, Friars and writer Hampton once again tackle a French erotic classic, Colette‘s romantic roman  Cheri -- and I liked it even less. The main reason: Rupert Friend as Cheri, the young lover of Michelle Pfeiffer’s fetching lady of love and leisure Lea de Lonval, and the son of Kathy Bates‘ maddening Madame Peloux, is the most charmless, least compelling romantic hero I’ve seen in quite a while. A literary-based romance, especially one with currents as dark as this, ought at least to convince you of the couple‘s passion. In this case,  I could barely stand to see the two of them together on screen. What did this languid clown do to deserve Pfeiffer?
    
The film, as if in compensation for this emotional lack or thinness (others may disagree) is quite beautiful to look at. But it lacks emotional resonance or conviction. And what’s worse is that it makes love into what Colette’s Gaston thought it, in the Minnelli movie of Gigi: a bore. If you want a real period French romance, check out The Earrings of Madame de…  below.   
         
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The Hurt Locker (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; Kathryn Bigelow, 2009
    
Bigelow‘s Iraq bomb disposal thriller, from a  script by ex-embedded journalist Mark Boal, is as good as they say. More next week.

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In the Dream  (Three Stars)
U. S.; Jeremiah Zagar, 2008
    
Intermittently powerful and moving family documentary about outsider artist and Philadelphia muralist Isaiah, his constantly supportive and eventually cheated-on wife Julia, and his sons, including  filmmaker Jeremiah, who shot this movie. I didn’t like the murals, but I respected the family’s determination and devotion to art. One feels for them.

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The Girl of Monaco  (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
France; Anne Fontaine, 200
    
This catchy French neo-noir about a famous but repressed bourgeois defense lawyer (Fabrice Luchini), his enigmatic murder trial client (Stephane Audran), his expert bodyguard (Roschdy Zem) and the  nymphomaniac TV weathergirl and leggy femme fatale Audrey (Louise Bourgion) who crashes into his life and seems destined to wreck it, starts very well and gets you on the hook, especially when the bodyguard and Audrey are dueling over the attorney. Despite its Monaco setting, the movie is not visually strong, but the actors are mostly super-fine and the show is engrossing, until the bizarre surprise ending, which I thought was ridiculous.

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Jerichow (Three Stars)
Germany; Christian Petzold, 2008
    
This brusque, neatly made German thriller about a deadly triangle involving Turkish-German snack-shop entrepreneur Ali (Hilmi Ozer), his wife Laura (Nina Hoss) and his invaluable handyman-driver Thomas (Benno Fuermann), is a frosty, ice-cold neo-noir treat itself. The movie works its Wendersish-Fassbinderian riffs by rephrasing and re-examining the central plot and theme of James M. Cain’s hardboiled sex and crime classic The Postman Always Rings Twice (memorably filmed by Tay Garnett) in 1946, with John Garfield and Lana Turner, and by Bob Rafelson and writer David Mamet in 1981, with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange), paring them to the bone, and turning the endangered hubby character (Cecil Kellaway for Garnett, John Colicos for Rafelson) into a more conflicted, compelling and finally even tragic figure.
     
Petzold has an analytic style that eschews obvious emotion; one watches these damned people like rats in a maze scrambling toward a trap door. I may be alone in preferring the Rafelson version to the others, but, despite Petzold’s lucidity and calm control, I didn’t much care for the ending of Jerichow. It struck me as too obviously contrived and phony/melodramatic. But the movie does reveal yet another dark example of noir‘s endless renewal possibilities -- even though here, the postman doesn’t even ring once.    

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The Earrings of Madame de… (Four Stars)
France; Max Ophuls, 1953
    
Max Ophuls, the great, wondrous German-American-French filmmaker --  the acknowledged cinematic master of period roance and the moving camera -- is an inexhaustible subject, a filmmaker of such unique style and brilliance, and with such a fascinating life history -- a Jewish exile on the run from the Nazi regime and a great filmmaker in three different languages (German, French and English) -- that he should be known and loved much more than he is -- by all movie buffs and not just the Stendhalian happy few.
     
Indeed, the estimable movie-loving critic Andrew Sarris has ranked two Ophuls pictures,  at various times, as his personal choice for the best movie of all time: first 1955’s Lola Montes and later on, the 1953  The Earrings of Madame de…, an ironic and stunningly visualized romance based on the novella by Louise de Vilmorin. (De Vilmorin, another Madame de…, wrote a crueler tale than Ophuls, and was critical of his film). Perhaps Sarris made that change because Lola Montes, for all its undeniable visual brilliance, had a casting problem (Martine Carol’s Lola), and was a financial and critical flop in its day, only re-evaluated in later years.
    
But The Earrings of Madame de… has always been rightly regarded as a triumph and later as a classic: the height of that special “Ophulsian” style and technique which combines fluid, moving camerawork with eloquent, witty and heartrending scripts, sumptuous period décor with consummate acting.
      
Blessed with a really magnificent lead trio -- France’s longtime romantic superstars  Darrieux and Boyer (who first broke hearts together in Anatole Litvak‘s 1937 Mayerling), along with the Italian matinee idol and supreme neorealist Vittorio De Sica (maker of the classics Umberto D. and Bicycle Thieves) -- it’s the tale of a frivolous and flirtatious Parisian society women, discreetly called “Madame de…” or Louise (without her surname), who sells a pair of diamond earrings, a wedding present from her husband, General de…, to repay her debts. To cover, she pretends the jewelry was stolen.
    
This begins a roundabout, perverse and finally tragic journey for the earrings and the people who own them. Madame de…‘s jeweler, M. Remy (Jean Debucourt), in order to protect her from embarrassment and himself from a fencing charge, secretly sells them back to the general, who then tries to dispose of them by giving them as a farewell present to his mistress, Lola (Lia de Leo).
     
Lola (whose name may be a hint at Ophuls’ next project, Lola Montes), gambles them away in Constantinople, and they fall into the hands of a handsome, lady-killing Italian diplomat, Baron Fabrizio Donati (De Sica). Donati meets and woos Madame de… He wins her heart, loses his own, has to leave her to avoid scandal and the general, and finally, unknowingly, makes Madame de… a present of her own earrings.
      
And, where before she sold them away to M. Remy almost thoughtlessly, because she disliked them, now they become infinitely precious, a token from her lover. Deprived of the jewelry again by her initially tolerant but now increasingly angry husband -- a crack shot who will eventually challenge Donati to a duel -- she becomes ill, desperate, fragile.  A once superficial, selfish and casually seductive woman, she is consumed by passion. Her lover and the earrings which symbolize that love, have now become, tragically, everything to her.
      
The Earrings of Madame de… begins like Ophuls’ La Ronde, as a witty love roundelay. Gradually, it deepens and darkens into tragedy. And, throughout the film, Ophuls dazzles us with a display of cinematic and romantic splendor -- capped by the film’s high point: a stunning montage of ballroom scenes, in which Darrieux and De Sica, as Madame de… and Donati, dance themselves into love and fatal obsession in a seamless string of waltzes that flow together like a candle-lit river of passion. One watches this dance and this movie, entranced. (In French, with English subtitles.

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Letter from an Unknown Woman (Four Stars)
U. S.; Max Ophuls, 1948

Ophuls‘ Letter From an Unknown Woman is, along with Casablanca, one of the great Hollywood Golden Age movie romances and one of my own all-time favorites -- and both those films share a screenwriter: Orson Welles’s early War of the Worlds collaborator and the later blacklist victim Howard Koch.
       
Koch, like Ophuls, was Jewish, which gave both men a special perspective on the convulsions of the WW2 and postwar eras. And Unknown Woman itself is based on a novel by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, whose Jewish roots and identity are considered by some the key to understanding all his work. (Despairing of Hitler’s rise in Europe, Zweig and his wife committed suicide in Brazil in 1942.)
     
Be that as it may, Letter from an Unknown Woman breaks my heart every time I see it. Like Madame de… it’s a masterpiece of style, décor and brilliantly fluent and mobile camerawork. But its story is even more moving. Told in flashback, it’s the poignant tale of a handsome, gifted but dissolute pianist named Stefan Brand  (played by Louis Jourdan, later of Gigi), who intends to escape in the night from a deadly morning appointment: a duel with a furious aristocrat whom he doesn't know.  
     
As Stefan waits out the hours, he is handed a posthumously delivered letter by his mute servant, played by the black-listed Hal Smith. (The name “Stefan Brand,” by the way, suggests both Zweig‘s real first name and his Anglicized pen name “Stephen Branch.”) Preparing to flee, Stefan casually reads the letter from the unknown woman and discovers that he has been loved for much of his life, from afar, by a woman named Lisa (Joan Fontaine), who first saw him in her apartment building as a little girl, and became infatuated with both his beautiful classical piano playing and perhaps his reckless Casanova lifestyle.
   
Adoring Stefan from afar, Lisa tried to make herself into the same kind of elegant society lady she saw trooping up to his boudoir, night after night. And one magical evening-- staged by Ophuls with the same bittersweet poetry and glamour as the waltz montage in Madame de… -- Lisa meets him, is wooed by him, makes love with him, and is ultimately impregnated by him. For her, it was the greatest night of her life, the only real romantic night of her life. For Stefan, it was simply another conquest, and he leaves her immediately, and forgets her -- until the night he reads the letter, and is shattered by it.  The ending of Letter from an Unknown Woman  beautiful and sad, could wring tears from a stone .
      
It’s an unforgettable experience, as are most of the movies, later or earlier, of Max Ophuls, born Max Oppenheimer in the Saarbrucken, and for much of his life, an escapee from Hitler‘s Nazi regime, looking for a new home. Finally Max found it, in his dream Paris, his dream Vienna, and in the hearts of generations of moviegoers. Letter from an Unknown Woman, like Lola Montes and The Earrings of Madame de… is one of the great classics of the cinema. Sadly, all three are also too often unknown by the same huge audience that justly loves Casablanca. But we shouldn‘t let them remain in the shadows. Like Stefan, we must open the letter and read it.   
   
Both these films are screened this week at The Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 164 N. State St., Chicago. Call 312-846-2600.

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Read Michael Wilmington on DVDs

- Michael Wilmington
June 25, 2009

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