Newer Weaklings

 After an August spent mostly outdoors, I have started screening some of the 2011 award nominees which are now coming from the library and confirmed what I expected – it was a lean year. Scripts seem to be the weak link. Production values are high, acting is not a problem and direction is adequate, but a movie cannot rise above a poor screenplay. These movies are often too lengthy, probably because the editors couldn’t rearrange and snip an inherently bad script into something better, so they just left it alone. Maybe another manifestation of the problem is the overuse of established actors in cameo and bit parts. Their appearance is distracting from the story, and the money paid for the use of their name in marketing the film would have been better spent paying some good writers to come up with a better script. Ironically, as scriptwriting classes and software have expanded, scripts seem to have worsened.

Here is what I have watched since I posted my last list. [The ratings I give are on my own number system which is explained at the link on the sidebar].

This Is What Democracy Looks Like – 2000 (3.3). Using footage from scores of people who filmed in the streets during the 1999 demonstrations against the WTO at their meeting in Seattle, and integrating subsequent interviews with participants and organizers, this documentary was put together by local media activists and does an inspiring job of presenting what is obviously a more genuine telling of what happened than what was shown by the mainstream media. The prospect that this would become a model for labor, environmentalists and social activists to unite in effective opposition to corporate tyranny enabled by corrupt or incompetent government is tremendously heartening. The reality that it has not yet happened is profoundly disappointing. The special feature interviews with Noam Chomsky and Vandana Shiva are lucid and especially informative. You can watch the movie on line at YouTube.

Foyle’s War – (Seasons One and Two) 2003 (3.2). This British mystery series is stylish as expected and covers an interesting time, the early days of WWII on the home front, when emotions are high and there is fear of a German invasion. Our widowed police detective has to cover murders on the home front while intermeshing with war related matters. The story arc includes his son who is a young RAF pilot, his sergeant who is a disabled war vet and his driver who is a young woman in military service. The stories involve new crimes each episode and all take their time to develop before a clever solution is found perhaps a bit too rapidly to give the viewer a chance to figure it out, especially since the clever police always seem to have a little more information than we do. 

Foyle’s War – (Season Three) 2004 (3.2). The mystery aspects of the series continue in the same vein, but with each episode we are learning about new ways that people coped with and capitalized on (legally and criminally) what took place on the home front in the early stages of the war. The story arc involving the son and the female driver heats up and there is a hint of Foyle opening up to the possibility of an interesting woman coming into his life.

Midnight in Paris – 2011 (2.9). Owen Wilson takes over the Woody Allen role while Woody just directs this romantic comedy about an American writer engaged to the wrong woman, in which the couple visits Paris with her parents and the man ends up wandering around on his own and being taken back in time to Paris of the 20s, where he interfaces with the creative celebrities and meets a woman with whom he is a better match. Despite winning the screenplay Academy Award, the script is nothing new, except for one twist that comes before the predictable ending. The Beauty of Paris is well captured by the cinematography, the celebrity characters are fun and entertaining and the overall experience of the movie is quite pleasing.

The Help – 2011 (2.8). This movie about the struggles of African-American domestics in 1960s Mississippi seems like it was rushed into production to capitalize on the popularity of the novel on which it is based and the presence of a President Obama in the White House. The subject is certainly worthwhile and interesting but for all the extra length of the film there is an uneven feeling that important things were shorted while trivial received too much time. The family relationships of the domestics with their own children and with the men at home or in their own community were barely shown. In fact the role of white men was seriously downplayed, including the omission of scenes of sexual harassment and physical intimidation. The script had no dramatic flow beyond the question of when other domestics would agree to tell their stories to the young white woman who was writing a book about domestics. Some of the problems with the script can probably be traced back to the novel and some are from the adaptation which was done by the director, a rather inexperienced childhood friend of the novelist. The infamous chocolate pie incident was in “bad taste” [pun intended].That the movie is passable is due to the inherent appeal of the domestics themselves and of the fine performances by the actresses who portrayed them.

Moneyball – 2011 (2.7). Using computer generated analysis to identify undervalued baseball players enabled General Manager Billy Beane of the Oakland team to build a top team with a bottom level budget. This story was told in a very good non-fiction book which I enjoyed reading and it could have made an equally interesting documentary. Unfortunately the choice was made to film it as an overlong drama, and it does not work very well. The statistical analysis at the heart of the story is glossed over in the script, but is not replaced by anything dramatic. The significant back story of Beane’s unexpected failure as a player is only touched on piecemeal. The conflict with the on field manager falls flat. Beane’s personal life is barely touched except for a few cloying scenes with his daughter. The resuscitated players, the old scouts, the computer expert and every other character seem to have no personal stories, except for the one old All Star player in the twilight who Beane asks to become the leader in one brief scene and then who then tries to offer leader type encouragement to another player in another brief encounter. Read the book.

Monsieur Lazhar – 2011 (2.7). Surprisingly, a one man play is the basis for this foreign Oscar nominee French Canadian piece about an Algerian immigrant who takes over as teacher for an upper elementary school class whose teacher has committed suicide. The movie takes place in and about the school and in other locations, so it never feels stage bound. The acting is good and the kids are realistically appealing. It is a slow moving film but of reasonable length. There is some drama but it is seriously underdeveloped. This is a very introspective story as the students and teachers awkwardly deal with the death and the immigrant deals with his own issues which he keeps to himself. It would be interesting to see and compare the play.

1981 – 2009 (2.7). In the year of a title the family of a sixth grade boy who is a bit of a dud moves to a new area in Quebec. This movie primarily follows his adjustments to his new school and classmates and secondarily shows the effect of the move on his parents and younger sister. The movie is pleasant enough, perhaps because it liberally borrows bits from other films and TV shows, but the bottom line is there is nothing particularly memorable or informative here. The acting and direction are a little better than the script.

The World According to Monsanto – 2008 (2.7). The filmmaker in this Canadian TV documentary used Google as a source of information about what Monsanto has been doing to effectively take ownership of the world food supply by dominating and aggressively extending biogenetically engineered seeds. Traveling the globe to track down the Google sources, and then  interviewing farmers, activists, scientists and public officials, and showing the damage done by Monsanto, the movie makes a strong case against the corporation. However, sometimes the science is a little technical and repetitious and one wishes some of that screen time had been spent on presenting more about who actually runs Monsanto, such as the Board of Directors, and who are the largest owners of shares and what is being done to attack the company from within, by shareholder resolutions and whistleblower support, and what is being done to try to mount a viable defense against this monolith.

Sliding Doors – 1998 (2.7). Gwyneth Paltrow plays a woman living parallel lives after she misses a subway train in one version and catches her boyfriend in bed with another woman, while in the other version, she misses the train and misses catching him in the act. The script cleverly intertwines the two lives and manages to hold attention, but ultimately does not really have anything to say beyond the obvious.

Once Were Warriors – 1994 (2.2). A drama from New Zealand about domestic violence in a modern day Maori family and a strong woman who manages to rise above it, should have provided an opportunity to celebrate the history of Maori culture, inform viewers of the prejudices and politics that impact the modern Maori, inspired victims of domestic violence to break out of the cycle and shamed perpetrators into mending their ways. This movie did none of these and instead stereotyped the Maori as alcoholic perpetual partiers, ignored prejudice and politics entirely, made the victims unsympathetic and left the perpetrators intact. That this list of failures was accomplished with a bad script, poor direction and amateurish acting should not be surprising, and is certainly disappointing, especially since some people have actually praised this movie.