The Big Sky

The Big Sky (Howard Hawks, 1952) A.B. Guthrie's novel about the exploration (and decimation) of the West by Eastern immigre's is considerably shortened by Hawks and Dudley Nichols, who start at the meeting of Jim Deakins (Kirk Douglas) and Boone Caudill (Dewey Martin) and their adventures of a keelboat going up the Missouri and leave it at that.  Nothing about how Boone's a little savage who ran away from home after nearly killing his father, nothing about the unpleasantness that would follow, or the results of Boone's bad temper.  No, this one's pretty much good times with some rough waters and bad rivals, and everybody gets along famously. It's vintage Hawks, but it ain't Guthrie.  In fact, Hawks eliminates the one character in Guthrie's trilogy ("The Big Sky", "The Way West", "Fair Land, Fair Land") who endure throughout—trapper and guide Dick Summers.

Re-writing is nothing new to Hawks (as a work habit, he'd re-write the next day's script the night before just to keep things fresh, sometimes abandoning the plot altogether if he thought it wasn't going in the right direction).  His great western, Red River, was completed four years previously, he followed it up with a musical remake of his own Ball of Fire with Danny Kaye, gone overseas with Cary Grant to make I Was a Male War Bride, then made his first foray into science fiction (but very much in the Hawks tradition of team-building) with The Thing (From Another World).  The Big Sky is different—the 50's would be something of an experimental phase for Hawks, going deeper into his subjects and philosophies than previously—in that cowboys and cattle aren't the prime motivation.  Fur trading is. And to do that, you don't go by horse, you go by boat and the challenges there are far different and maybe a bit more challenging than crossing the plains.   You go where the water goes and it's never a straight line and there are obstacles around every turn.

Guthrie's story is a bit like the Lewis and Clarke expedition (without the government funding), and both versions for page and film borrow the story of Sacagawea from the Corps of Discovery, whose presence (by coincidence) made acquiring ponies for the rugged trek across the Rocky Mountains from the Shoshones a foregone conclusion.  This came about as, unbeknownst to the Corps, Sacagawea had been stolen from the Shoshones as a child and her translating skills brought her face to face with the standing chief...who happened to be her brother.  In the same way, the character of "Teal Eye" (played by Elizabeth Threatt, in her only film) is brought back to her tribe to help in the fur negotiations.  She also serves as a point of rivalry between Dawkins and Caudill, but it all gets resolved to everybody's satisfaction.  

It fits into the Hawks template of disparate groups coming together for a single purpose: Hawkins finds Caudill, they're looking for Zeb Calloway (Arthur Hunnicutt, nominated for an Oscar for this performance, and he'd be playing, basically, the same role in Hawks' 67' Western El Dorado), who they meet in jail (problem solved, efficiently), then once Zeb is bailed out by the keel-boat Captain "Frenchy" (Steven Geray, and we don't know if he's related to "Frenchy" in To Have and Have Not), and the adventure meanders, like a river, with some tributaries involving a rival fur trading company, Deakins' ability to get hurt (and heal rapidly, apparently, and at one point, Hawks makes a comic episode out of amputating one of the character's fingers!).  He isn't nearly as concerned with ethnic authenticity as John Ford—he does use Ford's Hank Worden as a Shoshone guide as comic relief, but at least he's competent comic relief.

There have been a couple versions of this one floating around, and because it was done for RKO late in its life, and been passed from studio to studio, it's in fairly ragged shape.  Russell Harlan's black-and-white cinematography was nominated for an Oscar, but it's a little dim to see why, given the shape the film is in, even the "complete" version that TCM is running on.  It needs a major restoration, which is hard to come by if the film is in the second row seating of a director's Hall of Fame.  Perhaps one day, maybe, when someone mounts a Kirk Douglas retrospective, or decides to a DVD release of it, at all.

Blue Jasmine

Depending on the Kindness (Enabling) of Strangers
or
Being Entitled to Your Opinion

Blue Moon/You saw me standing alone/
Without a dream in my heart/Without a love of my own/
Blue Moon/You know just what I was there for/
You heard me saying a prayer for/Someone I really could care for/
And then there suddenly appeared before me/
The only one my arms will hold/
I heard somebody whisper please adore me/
And when I looked to the Moon it turned to gold
Blue Moon/Now I'm no longer alone
Without a dream in my heart/Without a love of my own



Woody Allen's 21st century version of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," Blue Jasmine, is a contemporary version of the play's tragedy in an unsympathetic post-Bernie Madoff/Wall Street Bail-Out world, turning it into a moralistic comedy.  It may seem a little misogynistic to be so mocking to someone as Williams' Blanche DuBois who has suffered a cataclysm, but when the someone is as cluelessly entitled and myopic as Allen's Jasmine (nee Jeanette) Francis (Cate Blanchett), there is a very real glee to see them get their, as the term is used in The Magnificent Ambersons, "comeuppance."

It's a brilliant conceit, combining Allen's love for classic literature and forms, tossing his own hang-dog spin onto it, while, for once, being refreshingly contemporary—something Allen hasn't really done of late, as he's had a depressive's obsession with the past for the past couple of decades (no matter how fresh the cast may be).

Allen starts his film (after the standard black background with white credits backed this time by '30's depression era rhythm and blues) with an (unusual for him) CGI shot of a jet approaching the camera, sailing by and moving away.  Jasmine Francis ("I fell in love with the 'Jasmine.' 'Jeanette' has no panache") is on that jet flying from New York to San Francisco to move in with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins—her second film for Allen) for a fresh start after losing everything in her life.  They're both adopted and couldn't be more different (As Sally says "She got the good genes."); Jeanette is all high cheek-bones and au couture, while Sally is low class and all teeth, surrounded by Guido's and roughnecks. Jasmine has suffered a reversal of fortune as her husband Hal (Alec Baldwin) has been caught wheeling and dealing in real estate schemes, ending up in prison, and committing suicide.  Her extended visit delays Ginger's boyfriend Chili (Bobby Cannavale) moving in with her and her two kids by Augie (Andrew Dice Clay), he ex-husband.  There's a bit of a sandpaper quality to Ginger and Jasmine's relationship; when Ginger and Augie were married, they lost a lottery nest-egg investing in one of Hal's "get-rich-quick" investment schemes, something Jasmine forgets when she drama-queens over her own plight, and dismisses entirely when confronted with it.

Jasmine (Blanchett) and Ginger (Hawkins)

So it rankles when Jasmine pulls a Mrs. Madoff and claims victim-hood about the money she's lost. Jasmine has no plans, no prospects, and there are hints of a nervous breakdown after she was found wandering the streets talking to herself.  Now, she's popping Xanax with a vodka chaser and barely keeping ahead of anxiety attacks and comatose fugue states as she barrels through the lower echelons of San Francisco, trying to latch onto opportunities.

She decides to go back to school, learning computers so she can go "into" interior design, taking a job at a dentist's (Michael Stuhlbarg)—for which she is totally ill-suited (anything with the words "customer" and "service" in any combination would be)—to fund the courses.  In the meantime, from her lowly status, she lords it over the family and friends she finds beneath her.  That meaning everyone.

The flip-side to this is that people still find her attractive, as she puts up a great, if shallow, front, speaking of her glory days—which segue into flashbacks of her privileged happy life, only to find that once the flashback has ended, that she's still carrying on the conversation inside the flashback, and whoever she was talking through previously has left.*  It's a clever use of flashback as psychosis, a clever, nearly invisible off-shoot of the film-star (played by Jeff Daniels) stepping out of the film in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Where Allen has been living in the past the last few films, Jasmine is doing the same thing, to her detriment, as, whether in flashback or real life, it comes back to haunt her and take her away from the present and any future she might aspire to.

It's a return to near perfect form without the tricks and conceits that Allen used (during his "earlier, funny" films) and nicely merges the bi-polar extremes of comedy and tragedy that the more mature filmmaker in Allen has aspired to.  It also feels less fussy and musty than the after-taste some of the lesser Allen films have left of late.  After a lifetime of making good films, some classic and some merely pedantic, and eschewing his earlier stylistic tricks, one wonders if, at the age of 78, Allen's best films might still be ahead of him and that's an exciting prospect.


Blue Jasmine is a Full-Price Ticket.

Jasmine in her "fugue" state

* It's a bit like the Larry David monologues-to-the-camera in Whatever Works, only there's no child around to ask "Who's that man talking to, Mommy?"

The Bourne Legacy

Baby, We Were Bourne To Run
Or
Pursued By Our Inner Damons

The "Bourne" series laterals the ball to another player in The Bourne Legacy, the fourth film of the series, which, by now, has nothing to do with the Robert Ludlum books on which they are titularly based (which is fine, as I read the first one decades ago and found it one of the worst reads ever).

When last we left Jason Bourne, he'd jumped into the East River to make a desperate escape from his pursuer/handlers, a nice turnaround from when the series started with him being fished out of the water with no clue as to his identity.  We start there again, but this time, we're Bourne again in another body of water with Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) on a training mission way out in nowhere, Alaska (all the better to see Russia, apparently), while the events of the previous Bourne trilogy play out in the States, sending a panic through the intelligence community and an order to purge the Treadstone Project (or is it Operation Outcome...or Operation Blackbriar...only Tom Clancy could keep track of this...and then he'd start a book-series (ghost-written) on each one!).  Whichever project is being scorched to the Earth, the talents from the previous movies (Scott Glenn, Joan Allen, David Straithairn) are dealing with the ramifications of Bourne's re-appearance, another intelligence head* (Stacy Keach-welcome back, sir) puts another middle-management type (Edward Norton) in charge of damage control (an impossible task in any recent spy film).**

As it becomes readily apparent on Renner's training mission, we didn't know diddly about the Bourne project (whatever name it was), as there are other agents like him, who are not only trained, but drugged to enhance their physical endurance, but also mental faculties (take the green and blue pills, but the yellow one you should really take with water or it gets stuck in your throat, evidently).  Just as Cross is about to rotate stateside, he and another agent get a drone-launched nasty-gram stating unequivocally that the mission is over.

That's how it starts, and goes all over the world, subsequently, even while it doesn't really go anywhere.  Oh, things happen, and things explode and people run around a lot (Rachel Weisz is a really good runner, by the way), but it's mostly just movement without any story momentum.  Most movies have a beginning a middle and an end, but this one is content to merely have a beginning, a middle and a chase.  

Tony Gilroy (who cracked the code for the first film—taking the germ of the idea and stream-lining it into a bare essentials man-on-the-run movie—directed the brilliant Michael Clayton and the disappointing Duplicity, one of those "I-get-the-drift-but-it-doesn't-work" movies) co-wrote this one and directed, employing the same kind of Paul Greengrass "run and shoot" style, but taming it down a bit, so it can be followed, as opposed to experienced in barely discernible flashes.***  It's a risk because the Greengrass adrenaline-fueled style keeps one from asking too many questions about the slowing-down factor of injuries and leaps in story-logic.  All well and good, I suppose, but one still gets the sense that Legacy is half-baked, with the kernel of an idea, some complications to keep things from getting too stale and large holes in the script filled with "a fight breaks out," "a chase happens," and "hero jumps from a fire escape into a window."  These all happened in the previous films, but I'll be damned if I can remember which specific ones—I suspect the answer is: "All of them."  They all blur together as the most memorable things are the action sequences, and there's a remarkable...uh...consistency to them.  The stakes are only the agent's own and most of the film's have very little resolution to them.  Legacy has none.  It just ends.

While one can admire the proficiency with which it is done, there's nothing all that memorable about this one...or the last one.  Even with fresh faces and a new idea of two, it's the same old thing, hardly worth being "Bourne" at all.

The Bourne Legacy is a Rental

  * You know, one could make a case for the excesses of "Big Gov'mint" just by noting the cast of good character actors in the "Bourne" series and all the different intelligence branches and mid-levels.

** Who fixes things in these films-and why haven't the unemployment rates dropped as a result?

*** This helped by a change in the style of Dan Bradley, who seems to have taken a film directing class in the interim, because his second unit direction in the chase sequences actually have some shots that feature relationship perspective going so far as to even including both participants in the chase in the same frame.  That's some kind of break-through after his disastrous work on Quantum of Solace.

The Bedford Incident

The Bedford Incident (James B. Harris, 1965) A veritable Bartlett's fills my head after seeing The Bedford Incident.  For instance, the astronaut's description of his job as "98% tedium punctuated by moments of sheer terror," and Elwood P. Dowd's "You can be 'oh-so-smart' or 'oh-so-pleasant'—I recommend "pleasant."  Then, because the story is basically, "Moby Dick in The Cold War," there are all sorts of Melville quotes...and one bad joke: "Cook 'em, Dan-O."

It's that last one that sticks, though.  The Bedford Incident is, basically, a terrible, terrible joke with a possible several mega-tonnage punchline.  And director James B. Harris, who before making this film was Stanley Kubrick's film-making partner, can't have missed the thought as his ex was making an out-and-out comedy of errors out of the nuclear arms race.  

But where that one took to the air, The Bedford Incident plays out at sea in a cat-and-mouse game between a Soviet nuclear sub and a naval destroyer.  In command is Captain Eric Finlander (Richard Widmark, steely with just a touch of baleful twitchiness that goes full-on berzerkoid in an interview), a determined commander who takes enormous pride in the proficiency of his crew, and in the hunt and pursuit of his targets.  As an advisor is a former Nazi U-boat commander Wolfgang Shrepke (Eric Portman), who was responsible for the most tonnage (ours) sunk during the second World War.    Also on board is reporter Ben Munceford (Sidney Poitier), who serves as an exposition conduit and Royal Pain In The Ass.  Among the crew are Martin Balsam as the ship's new doc, James MacArthur as a too-eager ensign, Wally Cox as the sonar bat, and if you're watching early and quickly, there's a young Donald Sutherland as a garbage analyst—garbage being clues to conditions on the enemy boat, and age-analysis gives tracking position and history.

It shows how extreme the measures are on the Bedford, how detail oriented, how precise, how strategic and how puckered the thought processes go into keeping an eye on the enemy.  And once found, Finlander will pursue chasing Soviet subs out of territorial waters, even forcing them to stay underwater until they're desperate for air, provoking confrontation.  When your Nazi adviser tells you he's scared of your methods, it means you might be going so overboard as to pro-actively lower the life-rafts.

If you're immersed at all in pop-culture, you can see elements of Bedford in such disparate strategy plays as "Star Trek" and The Hunt for Red October.  And such gamesmanship is all well and good in limited skirmishes.  But, when the arsenal is nuclear?  Do you really want a cigarette in a room full of gasoline?  

No, and that the game is played despite the mega-stakes makes the movie and its characters seem not just petty, but a little dim for all the talk of brilliance.  The point of hubris is well taken, but the point was better made as an out-and-out black comedy about short-term, selfish interests in the face of global catastrophe.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

No Crying Allowed
or
They're Tryin' To Wash Us Away, They're Tryin' To Wash Us Away


The film year is over half over, but I don't know if I'm going to see a better, more interesting film than Beasts of the Southern Wild, a hard-scrabble thing shot on 16mm with no recognizable members of the cast, but once seen, they're hard to forget.

Filmed in Lousiana, it tells the tale of a community living in the Delta island of "The Bathtub," living off the land and the cast off garbage of civilization (one particularly inspired use is a barge made of the bed of a flatbed truck).
Every house is a hovel, composed of sidings of various materials around a basic house structure, or, if lucky, a mobile home set high up above any high-water mark of a rising tide.

Among the village lives Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis, an amazing, sternly concentrated performance) living in her Mother's double-wide, under the care of her birth-father Wink's (Dwight Henry) watchful eye.  Hushpuppy keeps an ear out for the changing conditions of the animals in their care, doing a check of heartbeats to make sure everything is beating in their comfortable rhythms.

Those rhythms would be more erratic if they knew what was coming.  When the girl goes down to Miss Bethsheba's (Gina Montana) to learn about stuff ("Y'all better learn how to survive"), she hears tales of melting ice-packs, extinct beasts called aurochs, and the natural ways the world is tied together, that could be pulled apart by disaster.

Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), making the rounds

First sign of trouble is Wink's disappearance.  Hushpuppy keeps the tradition of "feed-up time" among the animals and herself, but when Wink comes back, he's in a hospital gown and won't say where he's been.  It's the first of many disasters that will upend the community and task the residents of The Bathtub.

Hard to classify what Beasts of the Southern Wild is (but that only makes the viewing of which fascinating).  The film is challengingly unspecific in its story-telling—where is The Bathtub?  Is the storm that changes everything Katrina or the Apocalypse?  Are the shredding ice-caps real or projections?  And what of the aurochs, and Hushpuppy's vision of them—are they harbingers or merely more of the fabric?)

The questions haunt, as do so many of the images that director Benh Zeitlin and writer Lucy Alibar weave into the skeins of the film. Is it child-drama or fantasy (and what's the difference, really?)?  There are no easy answers, nothing that hits the nail, other than the interactions of the characters and their very real sense of community that binds them, holds them fast, and allows them to survive and celebrate, even in the face of rising disaster.

The ambiguity is part of the charm.  There's enough specificity, though, to tell a hero's story in the midst of overwhelming odds.  And it's a triumph, both in front of and behind the camera.


Beasts of the Southern Wild is a Full-Price Ticket.

Brain Donors

Brain Donors (Dennis Dugan, 1992) This one had been shuffled to the back-burners of my mind.  I remember it being released and that it was a zany comedy featuring, of all people, John Turturro.  But, in the training class I was in, my love of movies "got around," and intense discussions of films, past and present, started dominating break conversations.  One of my fellow trainees, with an "intense" collection of DVD's—mostly Criterion foreign films—asked if I'd seen Brain Donors (mostly because of my "off" sense of humor), and, no, I hadn't.  It sounded dumb, but funny and a rare DVD was exchanged.

Writer Pat Proft had done quite a bit of work with the Zucker Brothers on the "Naked Gun," and "Hot Shots" series (and, lest we forget, he also wrote the "Star Wars Holiday Special") and they helped produce this weird comedy hybrid of Monty Python and the Brothers Marx and the Stooges Three, but primarily the Marxian doctrine of being insane in an unfair, yet sane world.  Based somewhat on A Night at the Opera (which is acknowledged in the credits), it's about three misfits—lawyer Roland T. Flakfizer (Turturro), Jacques (Bob Nelson) and Rocco Melonchek (Mel Smith)—who conspire to run a ballet company under the nose of the patron's lawyer, who has designs on the rest of the recently-deceased man's estate (not that Flakfizer's motives are any more pure).  

It's hit-and-miss, scatter-shot and ADHD-paced, acknowledging its roots, while also being more of a piece than Proft's other parody films.  Turturro is so aggressively trying to be funny—Groucho was always a much-easier performer—you can almost hear tires screech when he turns a comedic corner, and the other performers—Smith, as a rough Australian, amiably plays 'the ethnic," ala Chico, and Nelson, who manages to straddle the "Harpo" fields of anticness and sweetness—manage to maintain the integrity of their characters, while choreographing around each other very nimbly and at top speed.

For recycled material, it's not bad, although much more ribald than the Marx Brothers could suggest (and thereby seeming less clever).  But, although the story is very familiar, the deviltry (as with the Marxes) is in the details, and there's more than enough cleverness among the witlessness to make it worth watching.  It does generate several laughs.
  

Black Legion

Black Legion (Archie Mayo, 1937) "That means one white boy don't get to play"  The words of John Jordan "Buck" O'Neill in Ken Burns' documentary "Baseball."  He was talking about the integration of baseball in the 1950's, a great thing.  A major-league accomplishment.  "But," said "Buck," "every black player that gets to play, that means one white boy don't get to play..."  "Ya see?"  is how he concluded.

People have been seeing as long as they've had eyes, and as long as the societal see-saw ensures that as one person goes up, another has to go down.  And in that imbalance of opportunity germinates prejudice, disguising jealousy, as if in sheep's clothing, with "principle."

This is the situation that Frank Taylor (Humphrey Bogart, playing a regular "joe," for once) finds himself in, when he finds that his sure-fire promotion goes to a studious young man with a "ski" at the end of his name.  Bitter and isolating himself from his family, his wife and son, he's recruited by a co-worker to join a secret society of white supremacists (who are so discriminating they only prey on other whites).  They run offenders out of town, but not before meting a punishment of whipping, then destroying all the property they own.  The police are a little slow in this burg to follow up on clues, especially when there's a motorcade of guys in robes speeding through the night (they can't trace tire tracks?)—but, as the group is composed of prominent whites in town, maybe some of them have badges under the robes.

For a time, the short-term benefits are great for Frank.  He gets a night out with the boys, drinking and crowing over their nocturnal activities, and he even gets the promotion previously denied him when his rival if given the bum's rush on an outbound train.  Then things start hitting close to home, affecting his home-life and the lives of his friends.  But Frank has sworn an oath of silence not to rat out his prey-mates.  And the contract is non-negotiable. 

"In the name of God and the Devil, one to reward and the other to punish, and by the powers of light and darkness, good and evil, here under the black arch of Heaven's avenging symbol, I pledge and consecrate my heart, my brain, my body, and my limbs and swear by all the powers of Heaven and Hell to devote my life to the obedience of my superiors and that no danger or peril shall deter me from executing their orders. That I will exert every possible means in my power for the extermination of the anarchist, the Roman hierarchy and their abettors. I swear that I will die fighting those whose serpent trail has winnowed the fair fields of our allies and sympathizers. I will show no mercy but strike with an avenging arm as long as breath remains. I further pledge my heart, my brain, my body, my limbs never to betray a comrade and that I will submit to all the tortures mankind can inflict and suffer the most horrible death rather than reveal a single word of this, my oath, before violating a single clause or implied pledge of this my obligation. I will pray to an avenging God and an unmerciful Devil to tear my heart out and roast it over the flames of sulfur, and lastly may my soul be given into the torment that my body be submerged into molten metal... and stifled into the flames of Hell, and that this punishment may be meted out to me through all eternity. In the name of God, our creator, Amen."

Sounds like some contracts I've had to sign recently.  Credit card statements. Creepy stuff, and Frank's spineless enough to fold at any opportunity to stand up.  It's an American tragedy, although whatever punishment he receives doesn't compare to those he's dished out.  There are no heroes in this one, only victims and the Warner Brothers production takes on the topic of vigilantism, domestic terrorism, and prejudice with a semi-soft-pedaled spirit of outrage.  It could be—and probably should be—considerably rougher, but for the time—before World War II and it's institutionalized terror—it's a parable for the common man to "get along," something else that war taught us in the concentrated efforts of allies of every color and faith to band together and truly deliver us from real evil.

Brave

We All Have Our Bear to Cross
or
"A Princess Strives for Perfection"

They used to have a lot of trouble with hair in the early days of digital crafting.  For instance, you remember the monkeys from Jumanji—the hair was short and matted and plasticene looking ("Not good enough, Sonny Jim").

Things have come a long way; Princess Merida (voiced by Kelly Macdonald) in Brave has an unruly hedge of red hair, of all different textures and tensile strength, thatched together, the odd curlicue strands floating, like the representatives of an unruly spirit.  The one girl in the royal Scottish family of Lord Fergus (Billy Connelly) and Lady Elinor (Emma Thompson), she is being groomed, quite radically by Elinor, to be the perfect little princess, a prim and proper consort to one of the sons of the other clans (led by voice actors Robbie Coltrane, Craig Ferguson, and Kevin McKidd)—losers all.  Trouble is, Merida is very much a product of her parents.  The first born, she takes off a lot from her Lord-father, who when we first encounter the family, gives his daughter a bow for her birthday.  A wild shot sends an arrow deep into the forest where Merida has her first encounter with will'o-the-wisps, which her Mother tells her can lead her to her Fate.  As if Merida wants to be led anywhere.  As she grows, she'd much rather take off with her steed Angus, firing arrows at a full gallop on an archery course of her own devising, going on adventures that her potential suitors might blanch at.

But, when forced to play the role imposed on her, Merida becomes defiant, setting in motion a series of events that will prove disasterous to her clam, politically and personally.

To reveal any more would be spoiling the surprises along the way, which are heart-felt, potentially extremely tragic, and ironic all at the same time.  It's a grim fairy tale, conceived by original director Brenda Chapman (Pixar's first female director, although she was let go in the middle of production over "creative differences.")

There are a lot of "first's" here: it's Pixar's first "period" film; their first with a female protagonist, believe it or not (and this has a strong one to start off with, with feminist leanings, and mother-daughter issues); their first "princess" film and their first "fairy tale" of sorts, although it's not based on any story I'm aware of, treading new ground, although the touchstones along the way have all the familiarity of ages-old myth.

And Pixar has re-written their software codes to make a truly complex-looking film.  It's not just the hair, but also the verdant forests, rough-hewn roads, castles, and water effects all have a photo-realism quality, while the cartoon-proportioned people have a fastidiously eclectic design and a malleability of expression far beyond what Pixar's animators have been able to accomplish before.  There are no short-cuts here, but only the pushing of the artistic envelope (and that includes the 3-D effects which looks seamless and flawless with no speed-artifacting) that has been the standard for every production out of this studio.

At the showing I attended there was a technical glitch with the projectors that delayed the film somewhat (pfft...so I missed a couple of previews), and one of the patrons remarked out-loud how much the theater might compensate for the delay.  It left me wondering what sort of compensation is needed besides a great film, flawlessly done. 

Brave is preceded by a magical short, La Luna.  And stay 'til the end as there's a nice little coda.

Brave is a Full-Price Ticket.

Bully

The Bully Pulpit

No man is an island,

Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thine own

Or of thine friend's were.

Each man's death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee.

John Dunne

Bully dredged up such feelings in me, things I hadn't felt in years.  The documentary, which follows several kids (hopefully surreptitiously, I worried that the cameras would just make their situations worse) through their days of being messed with, hassled, punched, tortured, abused by their erstwhile peers in school, recalled my own struggles in school.  A late bloomer, a scrawny kid who always looked too young for whatever grade I was in, I had my share of bullying, frequently by the low members of totem poles of cliques, the low hanging fruit of the popular gangs, the pilot fish, the bottom-feeders of the jocks, the shosh's, who couldn't punch their way up, and so punched their way down.  It always flows downhill.

The kids in the films are solitary, ill-defined.  Not really excellent at things, and maybe at the wrong things.  They're "weird."  And so they're pushed and kicked further into their roles, segregated, marginalized.  Food is stolen from their lunch trays.  Pushed out of chairs.  They're punished for just existing, for taking up space, breathing the same air.

A couple of them find Final Solutions for remedying those situations, leaving devastated heart-broken parents, who find it in themselves to fight back for their absent kids, against the institutions that allowed it, the thugs that took advantage of it, and the attitude that promoted it.  They've gone through all the grief steps of Kubler-Ross...except for one—acceptance.  The kids shouldn't have died, should have spoken out.  But shame, learned helplessness, and depression prevented it.  They never got out of the stage of self-blame, and their only solution was to eliminate the problem—themselves (in their mind)—and in so doing, end their pain.

A good night's sleep couldn't cure it.  Talking it out would have brought embarrassment and no solutions—they would have faced the same stone walls their older and wiser parents can't negotiate after their deaths.  They just took it...until they could take no more.

Efforts like "The Bully Project," and "It Gets Better" and other support systems can change the attitude of the afflicted to a limited degree...but not the attitudes of the afflicting.  That would be nearly impossible; there is no listening to reason for something that can't be defended.

I related.  I was picked on in school (although nothing to what is displayed in Bully).  To cope, I developed a wicked sense of humor—sardonic, and barbed if it needed to be.  I gravitated towards others who stood apart from the "A-Team" and formed a posse of sorts.  There's safety in numbers.  I developed a passive-aggressive attitude, combined with a quick temper, mercurial, fast and over-the-top, partially because it was so repressed and pent-up, but also because it was efficient.  If I was in trouble, it would flash, and if that didn't work, I'd run.  I also developed a chip on my shoulder and an effective sparking glare that would scare people, even girlfriends.  I'm a result of that bullying and the frustration in handling it (or not).  I've mellowed over the years.  But it's still there, under the surface, buried in my thoughts.  Long after the names of the bullies have left my mind, I still remember the slights and how I dealt with them.  I've developed the attitude to just not interact and I still do.  Life is short.  Why waste it in frustration?  Why waste it at all?  I've put away lots of childish things, but the armor developed by the bullying still remains, dormant, but a part of me.

Dormant, maybe, but Bully dredged all this up.  I won't be seeing it again.

Bully is a Rental.

Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey

Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey (Constance Marks, 2011) So, you're a kid. You grow up watching "Sesame Street" and (face it) the real reason you watch it isn't for the educational benefits, it's for The Muppets.  You fixate on the felt fellas and you wonder (once you realize something's going on beyond frame) "How do they do that?" How do you project personality through the hands and the cloth and create the simulation of life?  How do some puppeteers break through and perfect that illusion, while others get by on cute faces and elaborate cloth sculpture?  And for that matter, how does any actor—with or without a familiar riding them—do that?  By projecting personality through the trappings, just as differing actors produce different results through the exact same make-up and costume.  The same goes for voice-acting, too; nobody who's tried to add vocal range to characters once voiced by Mel Blanc can hold a candle to him and are immediately exposed as...different.  Not to get too philosophical here (I mean, we're talking about a documentary about Muppets here) but can "soul" be distinguished no matter how it's disguised?

The answer must be "yes" or else the difference wouldn't be so obvious.  And to prove the point, The Muppets have struggled, after Jim Henson's death and Frank Oz's career advancements, to re-find the "souls" of their characters, finally emerging with a slightly sassier variation of themselves.*  But just as characters evolve over story arcs, so do the people portraying them.  Puppets only fade, and cartoon characters are photographed eternally, but the people behind them advance in years, and at some point retire and leave the characters (because...they're jobs) behind.  And the kids who were first exposed to their creations grow up with their DNA mutated, brains twisted with experience to their movements and characters, and, if they're very, very lucky or obsessed, they may even take on those characters as second generational spawn.  So, the characters begin anew.

Or, perhaps the phrase should be "born again."  Born again, as new souls invigorate the old ones, while the outward appearance remains the same.  

So, the kid who grows up watching "Sesame Street" puts 2+2 together and sums up that Jim Henson is the guy behind (or underneath?  Inside?) "The Muppets" and begins to study everything the man has done in the past, tracing Henson's  growth from sock in hands with split ping-pong ball eyes to the more complex constructions.  The kid says "I can do this!" and so, the lining of Dad's good coat becomes the skin of a character which the kid has enough talent and personality to fill up.

That's really what this documentary—filmed rather perfunctorily, and one would even say artlessly—is all about.  The kid is Kevin Clash, and his inspiration that fueled his great talent, pays off big time for him, when a discarded character (known as "Baby Monster") is literally thrown into his lap by a frustrated "Muppeteer" ("I can't do anything with this guy" is the line), and in his hands (hand?), becomes one of the iconic characters of The Street, surpassing Big Bird and Cookie Monster and all the regulars in popularity.  Lucky.  But, it's luck fueled with inspiration and great talent and heart...and in a performance, that's only a few BTH's away from rocket-fuel.  

Being Elmo is a good show, full of Muppet history, hero worship (on both sides of it), the fulfillment of dreams, and building them anew.  Klass' interviews, spoken straight into the camera (just as the Muppets do), are full of amazement, gratitude, and giving, and the cost of it all is only briefly alluded to.  One can't help but think that the embodiment (if you will) of Elmo probably doesn't see a dime of the money generated from the merchandising of the character he's created.  Oh, sure, he probably has a job for life as an executive at Sesame's "Street" and Workshop, writing, producing, directing, but the hours must be long.  His commitments are many, and the toll it exacts from his family is in stark, ironic contrast to the attention he pays to his millions of fans...just by "Being Elmo."  Glad to see him get to emerge in front of the camera.

Clash's Elmo clashes with Ricky Gervias-The Outtakes

One of the reasons "Elmo" is so popular is Clash's cheeky charm that keeps

the character from getting too treacly—in the grand Muppet tradition.

* Uh...do I have to reinforce that I'm talking about the creators and not the puppets?  Okay, just checking...

Blackthorn

The Long Return of Butch Cassidy
or
"The Blues They Send to Meet Me Won't Defeat Me"

Not that it matters, but this entire movie is pure speculation.

When "Butch" and "Sundance" made their way to Bolivia, they disappeared from the face of the Earth. There've been rumors, speculations, conjectures (and just plain lies), but nothing concrete—or perhaps we should say calcium. No one knows where the bodies are buried, or, indeed, if there are any bodies, and that distinct lack of evidence, is the spine of the movie—that perhaps Butch Cassidy, aka Robert LeRoy Parker, did the exact opposite of what made him famous by abandoning the outlaw lifestyle and going legit as a rancher and horse-trader in Bolivia, running for awhile with Longbaugh and Etta, but eventually finding himself alone (the fate of The Sundance Kid is speculated on and it is an intriguing possibility), finally fading into the Bolivian clay, respectable and unsought.

But, at some point, Parker—or James Blackthorn, as he's called himself in this tale—has the call to go home. Immediate family is the immediate reason, but the long trek from South America through Mexico to the American Southwest makes up the bulk of the film. The selling of stakes, the journey by horse, pursued by Pinkertons, posses and bandits and bad luck, in the company of a young, not exactly trusted, vaquero with a wealth of history and loot, is a perilous trip, and a constant source of loss, until all the man has left are his skills as a rogue, rider and sharp-shooter.

Blackthorn requires a lot of the actor playing Parker or Cassidy or Blackthorn, all measures of the man, and fortunately for the film, which relishes in flat, sun-blasted landscapes (and wouldn't be nearly as interesting without so wily an actor), it's dominated by a seemingly lived-in performance by playwright Sam Shepard. Tall, rangy, sun-scorched and grizzled, his Butch is always resourceful and perpetually prepared for whatever eventuality man and Nature can throw at him. Shepard is sunk down deep in the saddle in the role, squinting at the sun and the behavior of those around him—a lone wolf on the prowl and targetted on his goal, in a path, twisted and gnarled and certainly not on the straight and narrow.

It's a good yarn, if a little too cloistered in incident and character—the spaces may be wide and open, but we keep seeing the same characters over and over— and the kid (Eduardo Noriega) being something of an irritant, and just not interesting enough to be much against the lead. Director Mateo Gil (who wrote Abre Los Oros, The Sea Inside and Agora) has a nice spare style that really pays off in the salt desert scenes, but the best thing about the film is Shepard, who breathes life into the film whenever he's on-screen.

"The Sundance Kid" and "Etta Place" before South America