The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963, Italia)

Dan Jardine:

Bt broadband packages could be useful in running down one of the many cuts of Luchino Visconti's cinematic adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel. Visconti's original cut was 205 minutes, which was pared down to 185 minutes for its official release, and eventually whittled down to a dubbed 161 minutes for its international release . The Leopard features a poly-national cast (Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, Claudia Cardinale, Terence Hill), and is blessed with some of the most lush production values of Visconti's storied career. The Italian auteur, an avowed Marxist,chose this period piece to explore the decadent world of  its 19th century aristocrats, who are being forced aside by the forces of capitalism and the nouveau riche, in order to draw some ambiguous and troubling lessons for modern audiences. The film continues Visconti's rejection of the neo-realist school from which he was spawned, in order to enter into a more complicated relationship with the cinematic arts. The results are undeniably provocative, and ultimately well-rewarded, winning the Palme D'Or at Cannes.

Ben Livant:

The Leopard is about the precariously obsolete aristocracy during the mid-19th Century bourgeois nationalist revolution for modern Italy.  The main character, the noble patriarch, is the old lion with only so much ability to adapt to the radical transformation taking place, The secondary character. his nephew, is the young tiger with a fully opportunistic talent for accommodating himself to the big changes in motion. This plays out along lines ranging from religious observance to sexual potency and much more in between. It makes for fine drama that Tolstoy would endorse, remarkable for relying not on conflict between the uncle and the nephew but rather on their thorough devotion to each other.  It is the relation between the two of them - to say nothing of the extended family and the larger milieu - that paints the picture of the class as a whole.

 

The 1958 book upon which the 1963 Visconti film is based was a serious cultural landmark for citizens of Italy. Everyone found something in it that they could deem historically inadequate, ideologically offensive and so forth, probably all the easier since it came out after the blue-blooded author was dead. But everyone read it, eh? Wiki tells me that it remains the best-selling novel in the country.  The publication was an event.

 

Naturally, Visconti tries to make the movie an event too. I have to say he is 80/20 successful. Just over three hours long, it's hardly the longest film I have ever seen. But it is long enough to make me mention that bigger isn't always better. The final act in the ballroom, 45 minutes itself, is especially in need of pruning. On the other hand, the film is well-paced and definitely achieves an overall grandeur that is cumulatively impressive. Even though our attention is affixed to a modest number of characters, the epic importance of what is taking place for the entire nation resonates through the imagery, which is period-perfect and what-did-it-cost? sumptuous.  The sets, panoramic exteriors, rich colours, big battle scene and, yes, massive ballroom scene - The Leopard is something to see, that's for sure.

It's not so much something to hear.  There is some good dialogue, but there could be more spoken meat to chew over.  There is one line, however, that is a hardcore dialectical aphorism in its own right and the conceptual centerpiece of the narrative; spoken twice, first by the nephew early on and then by the uncle late in the day. There is also one - for this film - long conversation in a scene just prior to the uncle's repetition of the aphorism that is absolutely great. Think of a still mentally sharp King Lear with refined class consciousness, sophisticated historical understanding and fiercely loyal regional prejudices speaking respectfully to a petty-bourgeois republican with naive faith in the emerging federal parliamentary government.  And there is, lastly, the summative statement about leopards being replaced by hyennas, neither of which are the salt of the earth. 

Years ago I struggled to watch the English-dubbed and shorter version, but quickly gave up. This time, I was bothered by not being able to hear Burt Lancaster speak his lines, but the Italian over-dubbing of his voice did not bug me because I was always busy reading subtitles. Still, I can say on the visual front at least, he gives one of his more nuanced performances and I can understand why he was disappointed by the poor commercial results of the film in America. Claudia Carndinale is very sexy and the actor playing the nephew is sexy too. The acting in general is rather broad. But this feels right for the project, thespians ensuring that they are not upstaged by their fantastic costumes.

The Idiot (Akira Kurosawa, 1951, Japan)

Dan Jardine:

Even with a first rate sky tv package, modern audiences would have a hard time finding this overlooked  film by the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa. Falling in the middle of one of his most creatively rich periods (Rashoman was released the year before, Seven Samurai and Ikiru would follow in 1953 and 1954), The Idiot indulges one of Kurosawa's great obsessions (Russian literature, and the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky in particular), but the final cut, which ran over four hours,  ran afoul of Shochiku Studios, who demanded severe cuts that have cost the film in terms of both narrative and character resolution.

Ben Livant:

The denouement for both the main character and another was so abrupt and perplexing, I made Monica do some research on her handheld device.  An explanation she was unable to locate, but she came upon this general assessment at the site, Criterion Confessions, with which I must agree:

 "The Idiot (166 min. - 1951): The passionate labor of love Kurosawa made after the breakthrough Rashomon, this adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's nineteenth-century novel is a strange mess. Grasping for something lyrical, Kurosawa ends up clutching at a narrative that often slips through his fingers. Transferring the story into his time and his country, he creates a fable for a world whose morals have gone off-center. It's just that the film itself is off-center, too. Despite moments of intense brilliance, The Idiot is scattered and almost too narrow in its structure. Perhaps the director's original four-and-a-half hour cut had far fewer gaps in it, but the final studio version feels riddled with holes.

Kameda (Masayuki Mori) is an epileptic whose lifelong illness and the trauma he suffered in the war have made his mind a tad bit soft. Newly released from a prison camp, where he narrowly escaped execution, he goes to live with his uncle (Takashi Shimura again) in Sapporo, hoping to find some peace and quiet to recharge. Once there, however, his brutal honesty disrupts the social order of the town. His absence of malice and his pure moral thinking, providing a skewed Christ-like example, call attention to the townspeople's own bad behavior. Attracted to the town harlot, Taeko (a smoldering Setsuko Hara), as a healer is attracted to a wound, he becomes embroiled in criss-crossing love lives. Kameda's greatest rival is also his first civilian friend, the primal rich boy Akama (Mifune). As the two wage a mental battle for Taeko's hard, Kameda is also drawn to the more chilling but caring Ayako (Yoshiko Kuga).

The Idiot is essentially a long string of talking-heads sequences that, despite being elegantly framed by Kurosawa's cinematic eye, tend to all run on longer than seems necessary. Motivation switches on a dime, and the story takes the long way around to get anywhere it's going. Yet, as I said, individual scenes can be amazing, and all of the performances are remarkable. The power of the actors kept me glued to the screen, and the marvel of seeing a great auteur digging deep for something meaningful makes The Idiot worth sitting through. Its goals may be mightier than what Kurosawa could get on film, but there is something fascinating about watching him try."

  

Or could it be that the film was simply butchered?  I suspect not.  But even so, Wiki provides information that makes it reasonable to wonder:

  

"Originally intended to be a two-part film with a running time of 265 minutes, the film was severely cut at the request of the studio, against Kurosawa's wishes, after a single poorly-received screening of the full-length version. When the re-edited version was also deemed too long by the studio, Kurosawa sardonically suggested the film be cut lengthwise instead.  According to Japanese film scholar Donald Richie, there are no existing prints of the original 265-minute version. Kurosawa would return to Shochiku forty years later to make Rhapsody in August, and, according to Alex Cox, is said to have searched the Shochiku archives for the original cut of the film to no avail."

Moon (Duncan Jones, UK, 2009)

Dan Jardine:

Moon is a futuristic lunar-set sci-fi drama about a man named Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) nearing the end of his three year tour of duty on a mineral extraction base, eagerly anticipating his impending return to his life back on Earth. While communication with the homeland is possible, it is not without its problems, as the base is located on the dark side of the moon. The set design is unexpectedly low-tech and rather run down, and Sam is the only human aboard the station, hinting at the bare bones nature of the mother corporation’s approach to the task at hand. Clearly, Sky tv packages are unavailable to this man.

This set-up reminiscent of Silent Running, another space age film about the loneliness and deprivation of a life spent disconnected from the world you know and love. Both protagonists bury themselves in work, at least in part to forget what they are missing out on.  However, without revealing too much of the plot, Moon has a little more on its mind than evoking yearning for being removed from the world one loves.  Jones’ film is playing in the fields of Solaris and Blade Runner (good pick up, Jacob) to look at the nature of what it means to be a human, while also casting a hard eye towards the dehumanizing future of the relationship between labour and capital.

And it is a damn fine film as a result. Rockwell gives a sterling performance in the demanding  title role (again, without revealing too much and spoiling the plot) while Spacey provides a soothing yet inevitably discomfiting update of 2001’s HAL (can we ever trust a comforting computer voice again?) Most importantly, Jones explores some provocative themes in a complex and subtle manner, evoking appropriately positive comparisons to the aforementioned stellar sci fi works.

Ben Livant:

I got around to revisiting Moon last night, though it was Max's first trip there. I like it very much. It boasts a solidly endearing performance from Sam Rockwell, as well as an intriguingly offbeat characterization by Sam Rockwell and also at the very end some effective less-is-more contributions from Sam Rockwell. The behavior is human, all too human; yet, never fully human at the same time. This is a weird organic zone to inhabit - to put it mildly - and the actor is to be commended for being in this clone zone alone. Though not quite. Alone, that is. Plus, Kevin Spacey is so indeed. Spacey, that is. Guy's perfect as the benign HAL.

Lovely low- budget sets and charming old-school models work both aesthetically and conceptually, adding to the askew dystopian scenario. If the entire operation looks somewhat shabby, that's because it is. The context is capitalist resource extraction done on the cheap. This involves a degradation of labour so extreme, the deskilling has taken on a literally dehumanizing aspect right down into the biological matter of the worker. Why a person is even still required on site is never addressed. But the default assumption that it should be justified misses the point. There is no fully automated utopia in tomorrow's world, folks. In the future, exploitation has advanced to incorporate a new sub-set of our species.

I may be missing the boat, but I do feel there is a small character-motivational hole in the plot. I do not understand why #2 takes it upon himself to rescue #1. How does he even know that there is another living being crashed and trapped in the massive dune buggy? He just starts chaffing at the bit to defy the lock-down order, to the point of creating an excuse to do so. On the basis of what information does he act? Am I missing the boat on this?

Snooping the net, this is from one of the few "rotten" reviews at Rotten Tomatoes:

"The chief problem isn't that Nathan Parker's insufficiently twisty screenplay... dabbles overmuch in the psycho half of psychodrama.

Or that Rockwell, who's pretty charismatic as he holds the screen for two hours all by himself, ever stumbles while illuminating a fractured personality that is both at war with itself and its own best friend. The actor proves capable of embodying all sorts of contradictory impulses as his character becomes tragically self-aware.

But he can't overcome a plot that goes slack at precisely the moment it should be soaring, or a corporate-villainy premise that practically begs not to be looked at too closely. I'm as willing as the next guy to believe that unfettered capitalism is the sworn enemy of the working stiff, and that The chief problem isn't that Nathan Parker's insufficiently twisty screenplay — based on a story by director Jones (nee Zowie Bowie, son of David) — dabbles overmuch in the psycho half of psychodrama.

Or that Rockwell, who's pretty charismatic as he holds the screen for two hours all by himself, ever stumbles while illuminating a fractured personality that is both at war with itself and its own best friend. The actor proves capable of embodying all sorts of contradictory impulses as his character becomes tragically self-aware.

But he can't overcome a plot that goes slack at precisely the moment it should be soaring, or a corporate-villainy premise that practically begs not to be looked at too closely. I'm as willing as the next guy to believe that unfettered capitalism is the sworn enemy of the working stiff, and that greed can cause a corporation to devalue the humanity of its workers. But start calculating the costs to Lunar Industries of its singular form of devaluing, and Moon's central premise stops making sense."

Clearly, this reviewer is telling me that I was not missing the boat with respect to the plot - although he does not address the detail that specifically concerns me - but just as clearly, I believe he has slipped off the gang plank to the main ship when he questions the premise as economically unfeasible.

In the first trivial place, on what basis can the reviewer "start calculating the costs?"  For all we know in that fictitious future, the price of employing clones is relatively cheap compared to the price of Helium-3.

But the serious issue is his supposedly critical perspective on "unfettered capitalism."  The "corporate-villainy" of Lunar Industries is but the particular representation of the capitalist system generally, which in the future is unfettered to the point of using biotechnology to turn the worker into a literally disposable sub-human.

Moon is a very unusual sci-fi movie.  The "sci" of the genre is usually technologically reductionist, with nary an economic thought.  The exceptions tend to employ an economic McGuffin in the form of some precious material resource or colonial territory , over which there is armed conflict.  Just about always entirely absent are social relations of production.  Humans and other living beings are socially organized militarily, or even politically, but not economically; workers as such.

Whatever the weaknesses of its plot may be, the premise of Moon serves a genuinely substantive economic perspective.  It is the economic perspective of the Rotten Tomatoes reviewer that is comparatively trivial.  He is morally aware "that greed can cause a corporation to devalue the humanity of its workers."  But by concerning himself with corporate profitability rather than the exploitation of labour, he fails to appreciate how this moral theme is in Moon pursued by way of a premise that consistently makes sense.

Jacob is having a hot streak when it comes to mash-up taglines. He called Moon a cross between Blade Runner and Solaris. Wiki says the director, David Bowie's kid (funded by Sting's wife), is hoping to make a sequel. Or was that a prequel? Hey, I'm enthusiastic to see either.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971, USA)

Dan Jardine:

I am passing this copy of McCabe and Mrs. Miller along to you so you can check in with your initial response to the film, formed lo these many years ago, before you became the cinephile we all know and love today, just to see if your larger experience not only with Altman's oeuvre, but also with the greater movements in cinema in general, have led to a greater appreciation of what I consider to be one of Altman's best films.


The year before Altman had released the very good M*A*S*H (which, in one of the best tv deals ever, would become a pretty good series in its own right) and he would follow it up with some underrated work in The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us and California Split before making his one (nearly) undisputed masterpiece, Nashville. There may have been more famed and celebrated auteurs working in America at the time (Coppola, Friedkin, Ashby, Lumet) but there were few making films as wide-ranging and provocative as Altman.

Ben Livant:

Not as total a 180 as I experienced with Full Metal Jacket - changed my mind without having to see the film a second time - but a serious about-face for my personal record book nonetheless. Thank you for tossing this at me when you tossed me 3 Women. What a cool movie! As a kid, all the left academic types at our place were all over it, along with Five Easy Pieces and such. By the time I saw it as a (probably stoned) teenager, I found it slow and boring and so-what. Now, would you know what I was aiming for if I said it was a sort of feminist Deadwood?

Or let me label it the counter-cultural alternative to True Grit, which had come out a year or two prior. One thing is for sure, all of the hoopla about Unforgiven as the deconstruction of the Western, and again about No Country For Old Men as the postmodern tweaking of the genre - Altman was way ahead of the curve. The guns only come out in the last act. But just forget about any high and mighty showdown at the OK Corral. The violence accomplishes nothing. So much for how The West was won.

Altman's signature ensemble improv dialogue is perfect for the tiny frontier community. There is also a Bresson-lite elliptical approach to the narrative that was no doubt exactly what I was unable to process as a kid. This I now found especially effective with respect to the growing intimacy of the two title characters. Not just a less-is-more subtlety, the effect is precisely the opposite of what is established by montage. Rather than time compression, a sense of duration is achieved. Compared to the last scene in which they were together, the present scene shows that they are increasingly closer. In addition to being a fabulous naturalistic portrait of a boondock mining town, M&MM is an elegant love story with wit and charm. No wonder the two leads went on to make Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait in between shacking up in real life.

But the real star of the show is the set and the cinematography. In regard to the latter, Kubrick made a big flicker by shooting Barry Lyndon all in natural light, but damn if this doesn't look to be the case in M&MM; both the exteriors and the interiors, both in daytime and night-time. Plus there is great camera tracking, particularly for the final action sequence which covers the entire town. Which brings me to the "set," which I now put in quotation marks because it is the entire freakin' town, constructed with period authenticity on location. It's spiffy photogenic in its own right. Watching McCabe walk over here or over there, in this door and out that one, it's a kind of a History Channel midway ride on the wood of the Coney Island boardwalk. Altman would create another world-unto-itself-total-village-set for Popeye, another of his films I found underwhelming when it came out...  that I should try again.

3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977, USA)

Ben Livant:

As you handed me this film you said it was Altman's Persona. A couple days before watching it, I brought up the topic of Mulholland Drive. Quite a coincidence. If 3 Women (1977) is a child of that Bergman picture - and even the most basic DNA testing establishes this patrimony - it just as clearly is a parent of the Lynch picture. This retrospective specific connection aside, 3W is certainly Lynch-like in general. Eraserhead came out the same year. Before 3W?[ed. note: the films were released within one month of each other, so it is likely they were filmed at the same time. Something in the water?]  If so, maybe it was an example for Altman of just how bad-dream a movie can be.

Just so happens I flashed on another film from '77 while watching this one, Herzog's Stroszek. The whole hick, dusty American dream gone bad in a decidedly demented bad-dream way; the West gone to seed and people sort of shape-shifting into increasingly vacant versions of each other. The angel of death descends upon Stroszek in the final act and it shows up at the close of 3W too.

Not a big surprise. A foreboding darkness attends 3W from the start.  The character who dies in the end may inspire speculations on why, for those wanting to extract from the film's identity-morphing some feminist line of thought. I can not even begin to attempt this. The whole thing is for me a tepid nightmare, gives us chilly shivers in warm water.

From the dangerous swimming pools at work and the apartment block, to the rhubarb-rhubarb hateful murmuring of the patronizing social environs, and the horrid recipes for plastic food, the burnt-out amusement park as a gathering place for emotional ghosts... and of course, the unspoken ominous undertow of the third woman, who eventually surfaces to leave us with an even weirder tripartite revolving doppelgänger hen house. 3W is a daytime horror movie.

Why did Altman cast Spacek? Because she has just done Carrie the year before. Why did Kubrick cast Duvall in The Shining. Because she had previously been in 3W. It's a horror movie, I say. You can intellectualize subconscious surrealism, blah blah blah, or interpret recurring images in terms of some sort of symbolism, yadda yadda, or regard the incoherence of the events as a metaphor for existential alienation, whatever.  Were you or were you not creeped out watching this film?  I sure was. It's spooky business with no direction home.  Remarkably affecting.

Without ever addressing the issue of insanity, even implicitly, the film is seriously disturbing because it provides no basis for us to determine what constitutes mental stability. Buddhism says the ego, the self, personal identity, call it what you will, Buddhism says it is an illusion. If so, it is a necessary illusion.  For sanity!  And the more disillusioned we are made by 3W, the more frightening it is.  With the sun out.

Doesn't even begin to touch the profound depths of Persona. Much deeper than the flashy surfaces of Mulholland Drive. On par and would make a good double-bill with Kieslowski's Double Life of Veronique; that being the Eros-moist half of the screening, 3W being the Thanatos-dripping compliment. An unsettling, off-kilter mood piece of doom, 3W is hard to like but impossible to forget.


Dan Jardine:

Other than stepping in to come to the defense of my much-beloved Mulholland Dr. (back off, mister) I don't have much to add to this other than: Pretty much!  Just as MD dwells in the disturbed recesses of the damaged psyche of an aspiring starlet in order to address the corrosive role played by the Hollywood dream factory on said dreamers, 3M, while relocating to the American heartland, takes a similar tack, dropping us in the nightmare reality of its similarly unhinged protagonist in order to question...what, exactly? This is the almighty question. The film insinuates itself into your skull, and earwig-like proceeds to consume all you thought you knew of ontological security. 

Weird. Trippy. Horrific. Befuddling. Maddening. Almost certainly great. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: 3 Women

The Hunt (Denmark, 2012, Thomas Vinterberg)

Ben Livant:


As we all know, the difference between the great play and all the not-so-great plays is that the former has a second act at least as good if not better than its first act.  The second act of The Hunt (2012) is not at least as good as the first.  It's better.  The Hunt is a great play. 

The first act is almost unbearable to watch.  The increasing intensity of the injustice reaches a degree of severity that began to affect me physically.  I honestly was not confident that I would be able to stick it out.  To what extent is the life of an innocent man going to be destroyed?  Getting sent to jail starts to look like the best possible option as his whole social world turns against him.  Soon enough it is probable enough that he will kill himself out of despair, as the Scandinavian-style Shirley Jackson story keeps contracting the black hole around him. 

Yet, as certain as we are about the protagonist with respect to the first, single accusation against him, as the reports circulate that there have been other violations in the nursery school, we have to wonder if there is anything factual to them.  Have we been sucker-punched by the narrative?  No.  That we can have any second thoughts about the man is not a sucker-punch but a direct blow.  At us.  To even  entertain the idea that he might be what just about everyone is convinced his is, this is to take a sip of the Jim Jones group-think Kool-aid that has poisoned the town's well. 

At the same time, I believe it is reasonable to grasp at the possibility that he might be guilty.  What a relief it would be if he was!  Please open the escape hatch from this room in which there is almost no ethical air and the walls of  untruth keep pressing inward to crush a decent man to death and us along with him. But no, there is very little to make us abandon our sympathy with him and the suffering just gets worse. 

This tremendous weight bearing down is progressively lifted in the second act.   Exactly what we were praying for in the first act is delivered to us in increments.  The solitary dignity that has just managed  to sustain him so far gains some desperately needed social assistance from his son and his son's godfather who never abandoned him.  He is released from custody because the police determine that the charges against him have been fabricated.  Finally, his best friend realizes the terrible wrong that has been committed.  As this accumulates positively, so does our hope that - ohmigod! - are we actually going to make it out of this movie with a happy ending?  Jesus, I didn't think I was going to get out alive at all. The conclusion of the film pours battery acid in the wound.  Turns out the sucker-punch comes in the second act.  What fools we were to believe that everyone could just let bygones be bygones.  That the water supply of the town would be pure ever after.  That the poison everyone drank wasn't still pumping in their blood and would do so forever more.  And the same thing only inverted for the protagonist, how in hell can he continue to be a member of that club that will have him again?  Forgive and forget?  Forget it!  The entire community - including the virtuous survivor of the collective torture season - is saturated in sin.  Jacob referenced Haneke's The White Ribbon.

 The performance by the lead actor is the sort for which an award should be awarded.  All the acting is very fine - especially from the little girl, wow! - working off a script that is excellent for its lean brutality.  The only other Vinterberg I have seen is The Celebration (1998), which has its strengths but overindulges itself dramatically to the point of grotesque caricature that borders on baroque excess.  The Hunt employs stylistic gestures at moments - particularly in the final scene, allowing the conclusion to resonate with serious metaphoric depth - but it is otherwise a film of austere naturalistic rigor. 

This is in the service of the terrible realism of the premise and the plot.  It would be nice to believe that such a story could never happen in real life.  But just as there are true tragedies of children molested by perverts, there are true tragedies of adults' lives being ruined by some little kid's little lie.  The Hunt is a hard movie.  Really tough.  For as much as we like to think we would never drink from that cup, we would.  We most definitely would. 

Dan Jardine:

Like you, my only experience of Vinterberg before this was The Celebration, a film that I liked a little more than you (I mostly dug its mordant sense of humour and unexpected tonal shifts), but not nearly as much as I like The Hunt, which was the best film of this year's Victoria International Film Festival. 

You and Jacob quite appropriately reference Shirley Jackson and Haneke, I flash on Clouzot's Le Corbeau, but they are all of a piece. The citizenry in small communities turn in on themselves, devouring their own, all while firmly convinced that they are doing the right thing. Again, as you rightly discern, The Hunt tills fresh soil when it moves past this premise to take a cold, hard look at the effect that this feeding frenzy has on the entire community.  A child drops a bombshell that spirals into a sequence of mistakes and errors in judgment by the well-intentioned adults around her, and the subsequent revelation of a series of often unpleasant but honest truths about behaviours that suffer from the terrible affliction of being so recognizably and plausibly human mark much of what makes this film so fascinating, horrifying and ultimately great. Lucas, the poor protagonist (the brilliant Mads Mikkelson) is eventually confronted by a terrifying catch-22: if the girl sticks to her story, he is a dead man. If she recants, it is because she is ashamed. 

How would any of us survive? But survive Lucas does, refusing to let his accusers rest on their comfortable and holier-than-thou laurels. Rather than turn tail, he stands tall, taking their abuse, and returning it in kind. Lucas is particularly concerned with confronting Theo, his closest friend and father of Klara, the accuser (a remarkably naturalistic  Annike Wedderkopp.) Thomas Bo Larsen, who plays Theo, gives the third great performance in this film, conveying his character's agony and confusion with equal parts subtlety and skill.  The film's resolution appears to rest on the successful reclamation of this friendship, but then it takes one final left at Albuquerque. 

Thankfully, we are spared from the ultimate horror of the protagonist's crucifixion, and instead are led to an uneasy resolution. The townspeople allow the exile to return to the fold in a ceremonial celebration that is laden with the weight of communal guilt, anger, distrust and uncertainty, culminating in an unforgettably explosive and dreadful climax. 



Often painful but always riveting, The Hunt is a reason to celebrate, marking the convergence of startling talents and great vision. 
 

Ben Livant:

Perhaps the hardest thing to take is that the little girl does try to recant - more than once!  But everyone around her is unable and unwilling truly to listen to what she is saying.  When her father finally is able and willing, this is the necessary and sufficient condition for redemption all around... we let us ourselves have faith until the grim wake-up call from this false promise.

An essential strategy in the narrative is jumping over a year after we have just been promised that repair and restoration are going to advance.  When the film was done, I was shocked with myself that I was not shocked by the happy reconciliation just minutes before.  How could I have been so naive?   Well, a big part is just that basic need to have a horrible mistake rectified.  But this need is quite brilliantly encouraged in the film by what it does NOT show us over the course of the year prior to the final revelation.

The Hunt a tour de force of dramatic structure.

Dan Jardine:

No kidding. The film certainly crosses its thematic t's and dot's its narrative i's. And to really drive home the point of how we've been suckered into believing that all the necessary healing has been done, we are given that awkward scene of Lucas ferrying Karla across the tiled kitchen floor. We would understand if he called for Theo, or simply waved to her as he left the room, but Lucas has always comes to her rescue, and he does so once again. How could this not signal that it is safe to breathe, that the air has been pumped back into this town's lungs?  

Damn good ending. It reminds us that beneath the citizen's veneer of civility lurks a dark streak of fear and loathing that will require a helluva lot more than twelve months  to paper over. 

Five Stellar Poker Movies

Poker has exploded in popularity over the past decade, and movies have definitely played a part in catapulting these games of chance to the forefront of our leisure activities. Behold this list of stellar films that employ poker in a meaningful way, either to advance the plot and/or develop the characters therein.

The Cincinnati Kid  Set in 1930s New Orleans, this Norman Jewison-directed, Steve McQueen-starring pic centres on a young up-and-comer trying to beat the master, played by Edgar G. Robinson.  Think of this as a slighter version of The Hustler, but on a different sort of felt.

Rounders  Just when  you think you’re out, they pull you back in again. Matt Damon returns to the poker table to aid a friend in debt to dangerous people.  John Dahl’s film is not as sinister or complex as its cinematic cousin, House of Games, but it is fun to see these young Hollywood studs (Damon, Edward Norton, Gretchen Mol) strut their stuff. This is the film largely responsible for the recent explosion in the popularity of Texas Hold 'Em.

Croupier  Clive Owens’ breakthrough in the title role of this Mike Hodges thriller offers a glimpse into the life on the other side of the green felt. The Croupier dreams of using his work in his art (as a writer) but this leads to sometimes predictable (and other times far less so) complications.

House of Games  David Mamet’s sometimes baffling, never less than fascinating glimpse into the dark underbelly of this world where it turns out that winning games of chance involve more skill (and con artistry) than luck.

California Split  The Odd Couple of poker films. This typically narratively loose-limbed, character-driven film by Robert Altman features two unlikely partners in crime, Elliot Gould and George Segal, who end up on the wrong end of debts that necessitate a series of wacky adventures in pursuit of the big payoff in a Reno poker showdown.  

The Runners-up

Casino Royale (2006)

The Gambler (1974)

The Sting (1973)

Maverick (1994)

A Big Hand for the Little Lady (1966)

High Roller: The Stu Unger Story (2003)

Gasland (USA, 2010, Josh Fox)

Ben Livant: 

I asked you to supply me with this doc because more than once over the last couple months Paul has been on me to see it.  He was right to do so.  It is indeed a must-see documentary.  After I get my kids to watch it and we return the disc to you, I will be on you to look at it yourself.

In the meantime, you are spared a review from me because this time out it suffices for me simply to agree with what some other reviewers have already said.  

From Wiki: Robert Koehler of Variety referred to it as "one of the most effective and expressive environmental films of recent years… Gasland may become to the dangers of natural gas drilling what Silent Spring was to DDT.”

Eric Kohn of IndieWire wrote, "Gasland is the paragon of first person activist filmmaking done right… By grounding a massive environmental issue in its personal ramifications, [Josh] Fox turns Gasland into a remarkably urgent diary of national concerns."

Stewart Nusbaumer of the Huffington Post wrote "Gasland... just might take you from outrage right into the fire of action."

The Denton Record Chronicle said “Fox decides that his own backyard in Pennsylvania isn’t his exclusive property... Set to his own banjo music and clever footage, Gasland is both sad and scary... if your soul isn’t moved by the documentary, yours is a heart of shale."

Bloomberg News critic Dave Shiflett wrote that Fox "may go down in history as the Paul Revere of fracking."

After you have seen it, the short Wiki entry on the film is worth reading in full to learn how the gas capitalists have reacted; insisting the contamination is from biogenic gas unreleased by them rather than thermogenic gas released by them.  This is a lie.  But the gas coming out of the water tap is actually only the most visible problem.  All the fracking chemicals leached into the aquifer is the deeper, unseen, truly terrifying pollution.

  Here is the Wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasland.