What Are We Watching in August?

What's on for your viewing pleasure?

Spiral
"A same-sex couple move to a small town to enjoy a better quality of life and raise their daughter with strong social values. But when neighbors throw a very strange party, nothing is as it seems in their picturesque neighborhood." From IMDB This horror film was pretty creepy but somewhat interesting.

Yellow Rose (2019)
"A Filipina teen from a small Texas town fights to pursue her dreams as a country music performer while having to decide between staying with her family or leaving the only home she has known." Synopsis From IMDB

I thought this was quite good. You really feel for the teen who is now on her own.

Finished on TV the three part series on Ernest Hemingway very interesting, 6 hours in all.

Also watched on TV a two hour documentary about Billy Graham also very interesting.

>4 aussieh: I got the Ernest Hemingway series on my to see list!

>5 JulieLill:

I hope you are able to obtain the series.
I have ordered a copy of his short stories.

Tea With Dames
This was a quite interesting film that brings together four wonderful English actresses to discuss their film careers and show clips of their work. The four women are Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright and Eileen Atkins. I enjoyed it.

Murder Without Conviction (2004) Based on the book The Good Friday Murder by Lee Harris
3.5/5

Recently released from her vows as a nun, Christine Bennett is discovering "life on the outside." After a visit to her mentally-handicapped cousin Gene, Christine becomes embroiled in the investigation of the murder mystery surrounding James and Edward Talley, twin savant brothers accused of killing their mother on Good Friday, 1974.

It was one of those movies that even though the Christine Bennett character was a bit hard to believe she had ever been a nun and her character was a lot on the sappy side....still kept you watching. Not a bad movie and the twins and their abilities were fascinating.

Catherine the Great 2019
This was a mini series on the Catherine the Great who ruled Russia from 1762 - 1796. Helen Mirren played Catherine and I thought it was extremely interesting, not knowing much of her history except that I knew she ruled for years.

Animals 2018
4/5
A very powerful movie, two party girls in Dublin, lots of sex, drugs !!

>10 aussieh: So...I take it wasn't about the zoo?:)

>11 Carol420:

Only human animals.

The Last Vermeer
This is based on the 2008 book The Man Who Made Vermeers by Jonathan Lopez. It relates the story of Han van Meegeren (played by Guy Pearce) who is art forger and who ends up swindling the Nazis. It was very intriguing and I have got to read the book now!

On ABC TV watched the last episode of "Belgravia", a rollercoaster ending, sorry to see it go.

Some time ago, I watched 2 versions of the Scandinavian TV series Bron/Broen (The Bridge, 2011-2018): The Bridge (2013) -- the American TV series w/Diane Kruger & Demian Bichir, & The Tunnel (2013) -- An Anglo-French series w/Clemence Poesy & Stephen Dillane. The basic plot opens with a body found straddling the boundary between 2 countries: US/Mexico & UK/France (pre-Brexit). Investigators representing the 2 countries are assigned. In both, one of the lead investigators is a female on the functioning autistic spectrum. Both Diane Kruger in the U.S. production & Clemence Poesy in the Brit/French give outstanding, moving performances (as do their male counterparts, but the women have the more show stopping turns as far as I was concerned). I would certainly recommend either if you have access.

I've always wanted to view the original, where the border is between Sweden & Denmark but none of my streaming services had it at the time I joined. I'm happy to announce that the original has been made available on Amazon Prime (alas, only available this month as a sample for a subscription to the streaming channel Topic; hopefully I'll get through season 1 of 4), & features Sofia Heli as Saga Noren, the Swedish investigator, & Kim Bodnia* as Martin Rohde, the Danish investigator. I've watched the first episode & am looking forward to see it all, barring a major interruption for surgery in Sept., or issues with my aging smart TV where a patch of dead pixels has appeared.

Via my Britbox subscription (through Amazon), I caught the 2 episode second season of McDonald & Dodds & the season 1 second episode of Grace. The former is a comedy cop partnership, where a hard charging mixed-race city investigator moves to the country & is partnered with an apparently bumbling & preternaturally shy country detective. McDonald (the female city cop) is a bit more likable in season 2 -- she was rather patronizing in the first season. Grace, on the other hand, is pretty grim stuff climaxing in a police shoot-out with cyber criminals in order to save a couple who would otherwise be the stars of an online snuff film. I was going to go back to the doc series Animal Babies but then I stumbled on Bron/Broen -- I'm guessing one is the Swedish & the other is the Danish for Bridge. The Danish cop gives the Swedish desk sergeant a "danish" when Saga brushes off his make-nice offering (the Scandinavian version of doughnuts?); he stands around fidgeting much to his partner's annoyance; turns out he can't sit down due to a recent vasectomy. Expecting much friction between the two.

*Initially I credited to Rafael Petersson; misled by the IMDB listing.

PS. I would avoid Prime's Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic (2010). Not at all what the original intended; apparently derived from a video game with some names cribbed from the poem. No poetry in this one, at least before I logged off after a few minutes. The poet of The Divine Comedy is portrayed as a muscled crusader knight. At the point when he is dropped into Hell with his beloved Beatrice (kidnapped by a demon no less; she who guides Dante through Purgatory to the vision of Paradise in the poem), I exited & went on to better things.

Finished Season 1 of Bron/Broen (The Bridge TV series 2011-13). Fortunately or unfortunately Amazon Prime was only offering it for a limited time & the other seasons required a subscription to their Topic channel. Unfortunately because I wasn't interested in getting another streaming subscription right now so I couldn't see the later seasons; fortunately because Season 1 was quite good & I don't really want to spend time at the moment watching the later seasons. Of the 3 "Bridges" I've seen so far, I like the American version the best, perhaps only because it's like a first love.

Regarding the Scandinavian version, it does seem in retrospect that the motivation for each stagy atrocity seems to be a little weak. Sofia Heli's Saga is fine, maybe the source of more jokes than the American & Brit/French versions. Reminded me of the jokey parts of Arnold in Terminator 2 & the more recent Wonder Woman. The Terminator is like an AI program learning how to be human; Wonder Woman's innocence of early 20th century social norms is endearing. Saga seems to be a combination of the two. Her best moment was her private tear when she realizes her understanding supervisor will be leaving for good, though her desperate attempt to get a car's license number after she is shot twice is pretty good as well. The arc of the story is to show that she is more than some blank slate android joke, more truly human than she appears to be at first glance. Martin, her partner, represents the human all too human side; he certainly feels regret when he messes up, but (perhaps unlike an AI program) he can't seem to analyze why he sometimes does what he does.

TCM (Turner Classic Movies) is having a Japanese directors day; looks like mostly Ozu & domestic dramas. Missed the first 10 min. of Repast aka Meshi (1951). This is probably the first film from the director Naruse Mikio I've had a chance to see. Wonderful, but I suspect it's hard to find. The early marriage of a struggling couple in Osaka. Features Setsuko Hara as the wife. Hara seems to have been in every great domestic Japanese film of this period -- she was, in Ozu's Tokyo Story, the widowed daughter-in-law of the old couple who takes in and cares for them when their surviving son & daughter do not make them welcome. She is justly famous for her subtle acting skills. She can make returning to a doofus of a husband seem like the right, adult thing to do. Will try to catch the whole film if it turns up in Xfinity's TCM archive.

Turns out the Japanese films screened on TCM were all in honor of actor Setsuko Hara. Just saw 2 more of her films, both directed by Yasujiro Ozu: Late Spring (1949) and Late Autumn (1960). In the former, she plays the daughter of a widower who needs a kick in the pants to leave him & get married; in the latter, she plays a widow whose daughter needs a kick in the pants to get married. Both reminded me of Jane Austen novels re-worked for the cultural practices of post-war Japan. The latter 1960 film is more comedy, though the last scene with Hara is a moving, emotional moment. It is echoed by the last scene with the father (Chishu Ryu) in the 1949 movie, but this film is more psychological with all kinds of unspoken motivations & reactions. For me it was like an alternative reality to a novel I re-read recently, Dickens's Little Dorrit. Late Spring is one of Hara's best performances I've seen so far. Apparently she had made 60 odd movies before playing a student who gets radicalized in pre-war Japan in Kurosawa's No Regrets for Our Youth (1946) which marked the beginning of the post-war Japanese golden age of cinema. (Ironically most of her pre-Kurosawa movies were propaganda films for the military government) She retired in the early 60's & refused interviews or pictures (she died at 95 in 2015), which may be why she seems ageless. I read somewhere she was the inspiration for the anime masterpiece by Satoshi Kon, Millennium Actress (2001), a kind of mythologizing of her life. Her status with Japanese audiences was comparable to European & Hollywood stars like Garbo, Dietrich, & Stanwyck. Although her acting style is quite different from Stanwyck's, her prominent nose reminds me of the Hollywood star's physical profile. If anything, Hara is more in the Lillian Gish mode of silent film acting, where subtle facial expression was more important than in the talkies & her Victorian heroine reserve (again, Little Dorrit).

PS: link to obituaries:

Ronald Bergan. The Guardian, Nov. 25, 2015: Setsuko Hara obituary.

Setsuko Hara, Japanese Screen Legend, Dies at 95.

and wikipedia:

Setsuko Hara.

Again from the Setsuko Hara day on TCM, watched The Idiot aka Hakuchi (1951). 2 hr. 46 min (cut from 265 min.) B&W, sound, Japanese w/English subtitles. Directed by Akira Kurosawa, screenplay by Eijiro Hiraita & Kurosawa, from the novel by Dostoyevsky. Cinematography Fumio Hayasak; editing by Kurosawa. Not a particularly good restoration, though it helps that the setting is Sapporo on the island of Hokkaido, the northernmost populated island of Japan, with lots of fog and what seems to be an almost ongoing blizzard.

Haven’t read the Dostoyevsky novel in many years, but 2 scenes really hit the mark for me in capturing the spirit of the Russian novelist. I did not have high expectations for the film – it’s not considered one of Kurosawa’s successful films – but I found it surprisingly gripping, despite the length & muddy state of the photography; I understand the concern of the production company (Shochiku) regarding the length, but I would still have been happy to see the director’s cut on DVD or TV, though I suspect the footage is as lost as it has been for Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons.

Here’s what was left: A war veteran, Kameda (Masayuki Mori), & a gangster, Akama (Toshiro Mifune at his most bearish) meet on ferry going to Hokkaido. Akama is fascinated w/Kameda’s backstory: K. was sentenced to death in a miscarriage of justice, & had a reprieve shortly before he was to face a firing squad. He had a breakdown, becoming subject to epileptic fits, & mentally somewhat childlike (he is the idiot of the film). Like an innocent child, he is always sincere, naïve, & is considered to be “wise.” Dostoyevsky bases some of this on his own life – the firing squad, reprieve, the nervous breakdown, & epilepsy all apply, though he did not become a “wise child” as a result of the experience; he was a working intellectual and far from naïve or innocent, though I believe the experience did have something of a religious impact on his outlook. In Sapporo, Akama & Kameda are both fascinated by a portrait of the prostitute Taeko Nasu (Setsuko Hara) they encounter in a shop window. Akama, who is returning to Hokkaido, has always carried a torch for her. Kameda sees something in her eyes that tells him something about who she “really” is. Kameda is penniless & staying with relatives; Akama rejoins his gang.

Here it gets a little complicated & I hope I am summarizing accurately. Nasu has been the mistress of lawyer Tohata (Eijiro Yanagi) who has helped cheat Kameda out of his inheritance (Kameda is unaware of this) which he has funneled to Ono (Takashi Shimura). Ono has 2 daughters, and one of them, Ayako (Yoshiko Kuga), plays a major role in part 2. Tohata wants to end his association with his woman of ill-repute, & he plans to marry her off to his flunky secretary, Kayama (Minoru Chiaki), for a fee of 600,000 yen. Dostoevsky is a master of dramatic scandal exposed at social gatherings, and Kurosawa channel's D.'s spirit excellently at a birthday party scene, where we learn that Tohata has been grooming Nasu since she was a girl of 14. Akama barges into the party with a package of a million yen intending to outbid Tohata’s 600K for Nasu. Taeko, angered and disgusted by her exposure as a commodity & a ruined woman, and probably incentivized by Kamada looking into her eyes and seeing the beautiful soul under the “soiled” exterior, tosses the money in the fire. The guests seem to be more shocked by the burning of the banknotes than Nasu’s treatment by her former lover. Toyama appears to have attempted suicide & Taeko pulls the money from the fire & throws it in his face. Akama realizes that Nasu is in love or entranced by The Idiot, & tries to murder him, but is scared off when Kameda has an epileptic fit. End of part one.

Part 2’s Dostoyevsky scene occurs after Kameda manages to get two women to fall in love with him: Taeko, and Ono’s daughter Ayako. Ayako insists on confronting her rival, currently living with Akama, and at the height of the confrontation the two women have an epic staring contest as they both insist that Kameda choose one or the other. More suspenseful than a thriller!

Hara acts against type very successfully throughout the entire film – hard to believe she was the gracious & loving daughter/mother/wife of the Ozu & Naruse films in this one – with her black cloak and brooding eyes she could have been the vamp in one of the silents. It all ends in a terrible mess when Akama realizes he can never replace the Idiot in Taeko’s eyes. It’s the concluding act at this point that I suspect was cut from the film. PS: kudos also to Chieko Hagashiyama as Satoko, Ayako’s scheming mother; Hagashiyama is the mother in Tokyo Story, by the way, but in this one she is the one comic note in this film. Eager to take another look at the Dostoyevsky novel!

I found a documentary on Bette Midler on the free shelf at work. It was the The Divine Bette Midler (2005). It was fun to watch. I have been a fan of hers since her first album came out but I forgot a lot of the movies she was in.

From the Holocaust to Hollywood: The Robert Clary Story (2020)
This is a short documentary about his life. Robert Clary is probably best known for his role in the TV series Hogan Heroes and he talks a little about that but it was mostly about his family being put into a Polish concentration camp during WWII. He made it out alive but only 3 of his siblings out of a family of 12 that survived.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Clary

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets(2017, English)
Director & writer: Luc Besson

The plot is simple, and not particularly original, and Major Valerian himself is incredibly annoying, but neither of those facts really matter: this is a film that is so wonderful in its visual imagination that it was a joy to watch.

Premise: The International Space Station grew as modules from more and more nations, and then more and more planets attached, until representatives from all known planets live there. It became too large and heavy to remain safely in orbit around the Earth, so it was cut loose into space: it has become Alpha, the "City of a Thousand Planets" of the title.

Major Valerian and his sidekick, Sergeant Laureline, are taking a virtual vacation when he is hit by some sort of vision of the destruction of a peaceful planet, as part of a war in which they were taking no part. It is seen through the eyes of a princess who did not make it to the bunker in time. (Why? How? These are the sort of questions that are never actually answered; just sit back and go with it.) He comes on to Laureline, she seems irritated, and then they get called away on a mission.

Valerian is the sort of arrogant, smug man-child that Hollywood seems to love. He, naturally, has a long history as a lover, yet is puzzled and disappointed that Laureline is dismissive of his professions of devotion. What makes him bearable is his Sergeant's attitude to him. She appears more technically proficient than him, she repeatedly fishes him out of the messes that his cocky attitude has got him into, and generally is 'not taking any of his crap'.

I do not like romance mixed with my science fiction, but here it turns out to be integral to the plot, not tacked on as 'hero's motivation', or as a sop to appeal to as wide a demographic as possible.

The more I think about the plot, the more questions I have. But this is not the right film for that. Just switch off brain and enjoy.

Although the director, and some of the cast, are French, and this is inspired by the French comic books Valérian and Laureline (by Pierre Christin), the film was made in English.