Mother (Madeo) (2009) - clips are probably PG-13 for language

 

2009. 128 min. R – brief nudity, sex, disturbing images, language
IMDB says... A mother desperately searches for the killer that (sic) framed her son for a girl's horrific murder.

The 73rd Virgin says... This Korean hybrid of Twin Peaks, Psycho, and Memento is amazingly original and entertaining, all on its own. Director Joon-ho Bong made the toweringly great political monster movie The Host a few years back and that’s all the recommendation I needed.

We begin at the moment Mother finally separates from reality. Her hand movements perfectly re-create the same movements she made moments before while doing the unthinkable.


Mother has one son named Do-joon who has “eyes like a deer”, behavioral problems, and short-term memory loss. He is not a brave young man struggling with his affliction; he is a pain in the ass, and Mother is his chief enabler. As the story begins Do-joon has been grazed by a hit-and-run driver in a black Mercedes-Benz. His dodgy friend Jin-tae surmises that the only place a black Mercedes could be going in this town is to the country club, so away they go seeking revenge. Director Bong (if I’m using Korean names correctly) drops in a dozen little clues and red herrings that will resurface later.  Do-joon does not like being called “retard”.


Mother is so well known to the police that eventually a detective looks up and says, “here she comes”, as she drifts from desk to desk leaving little bribes of drinks and gifts for all the policemen. Mother is a low level employee at a ratty little medicinal shop somewhere in South Korea. She does some unlicensed acupuncture on the side for friends and clients. Father is never mentioned. In an oddly wrenching scene she flashes back to when little Do-joon was about five and she attempted murder-suicide by sharing some pesticide with him. That said, now she is utterly devoted to him, even feeding him broth or tea while he stands at a wall and urinates. If this were only about Oedipal urges, it would be only run-of-the-mill creepy.

This is not run-of-the-mill. File under “disturbing images”.


All this is leading somewhere. One night while waiting for his friend, Jin-tae, Do-joon gets drunk and begins following and gently taunting a young girl through a dark maze of sidewalks. At some point she unexpectedly ducks into a dark doorway with a strange sudden sense of purpose – she’s not running – and the director uses David Lynch’s trick of slowly bringing the camera in on the dark doorway while the soundtrack hums ominously. For Lynch, this means entry into another reality; for this movie it means short-term memory loss. We will return Rashomon-style to the scene a few times.

The next morning it’s Twin Peaks all over again as local detectives sip coffee and ponder the young girl’s body draped over a railing while discussing when their last murder case was. From clues left earlier they know that Do-joon was nearby and breezily arrest him and get him to sign a coerced confession. Only Mother and the audience think he is innocent.


She hires the most expensive lawyer in town and follows him around an all-you-can-eat buffet and then takes him to see Do-joon in jail where he is busy doing their little acupressure exercise to improve his memory. I can’t overstate how much fun it is to watch this movie as each tiny detail comes into focus. Notice while the attorney loads his plate with the lunch she is paying for, she is busily chasing around two cherry tomatoes with chopsticks on her own plate.

Later she spills a bottle of water near a sleeping suspect and Bong lovingly films the advancing edge of the water across the floor to where it just b-a-r-e-l-y reaches his sleeping fingertips.

There is a whole other story about the murdered girl, Ah-jung. In fluid flashbacks we discover that she lived with an insane grandmother and made ends meet any way she could, including servicing old men. The scenes of all her classmates reminiscing and laughing are just cold.

A great deal of dramatic time and effort is well spent establishing Ah-jung’s friendship with yet another young girl who hacks her phone to automatically take pictures of her clients. They call it the pervert phone. The pictures on the phone, of course, lead to several more red herrings including the one that will take us back around to the beginning of the movie where Mother is dancing alone in a field.


Even after Mother tries to shift the blame to Jin-tae, he shows a remarkable natural affinity for the more muscular and confrontational aspects of detective work, smashing in one suspect’s teeth while Mother listens in.


I’m not revealing too much by observing that the final scene is one of the most liberatingly weird I’ve ever seen. She gets on a tour bus full of old ladies, performs acupuncture on herself, and then dances madly with the others down the aisle of the bus. Bong and/or his cinematographer shoot most of the scene in silhouette from a separate moving vehicle through the windows of the moving bus with the setting sun in the background. Several times I could see the camera searching for Mother in frame, but I didn’t care. Every home movie-birthday party-soccer game-picnic-cinematographer will be inclined to say “I could’ve done that”, but let’s face it, we never did.


I wish I could crawl in Bong’s head and know for certain why in this fine early scene, he creates a silent female character whose only job is to look tough, put out a cigarette, and slap. Is she us? I hope so. The camera movement keeps us glued.


Courtesy of the Tsarnaeva brothers and their delightful biologicals we’ve received a great big cultural bolus dose of the old adage (that I can’t seem to reference from anywhere on the web), “young men are the same the world over; what shapes society is the women and old men”. Boy, are we in trouble.

Happy Mothers’ Day!!

Persepolis

 

2007. 96 min. PG-13 – Language, violence, intimations of rape and prostitution
IMDB says... Poignant coming-of-age story of a precocious and outspoken young Iranian girl that begins during the Islamic Revolution.

The 73rd Virgin says... Re-watching Argo set me to thinking about this great story, oddly animated in black and white, which began as Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel. The book and the movie are in French, although Satrapi apparently speaks English and, I assume, Farsi from her native Iran. It is also dubbed into English but uses at least two of the same French actresses, Catherine Deneuve and her daughter Chiara Mastroianni, for both versions.

“Marji” is an only child and is doted upon by her parents and her beloved profane grandma. They are upscale left-wing modern intellectuals living under the Shah’s regime in pre-revolution Iran. She is smart, willful and probably spoiled, but since she is immersed in her parents’ world she observes mostly adult behavior from an early age. The movie is very good at showing her bewildered reaction to the combination of well-heeled partying and paranoid fear of everyday adult life. Her late grandfather was long ago imprisoned by the Shah.

Despite the animation this is one of the most convincing portrayals of what amounts to normal life under an abnormally repressive regime. Without preaching of any kind it shows how conveniently anyone with a comfortable lifestyle can adapt to and accommodate repression. These are not unhappy people; it just seems that every adult has a family member or friend who is in prison starving or being tortured with a hoped-for release date at some point in the middle future. They keep track of each other’s detainees like westerners keep track of the neighbor’s kid in college.

Marji becomes enthralled with her charming uncle Anoush, a communist dissident just released from the Shah’s prisons. Everyone hopes for the revolution and when it finally comes in 1979 they are giddy with excitement.

With great story-telling economy, the movie tracks Iran’s descent into murderous theocracy through the eyes of Marji’s frightened and panicky relatives. After all the purges and executions, Saddam’s Iraq senses weakness and begins a war in 1980 that would kill at least one million soldiers before ending in 1988. Again, with great economy, we are shown the human waves of untrained boys being exterminated on the front lines.


So all the above might make you think that you’re watching Z or All Quiet on The Western Front as a cartoon, but the brilliant observational humor and voice acting, and the freedom afforded by animation, give this a remarkably wide dynamic range. Several scenes are wildly funny and warm, juxtaposed with a litany of executions, historical voice-over and moving scenes of familial dissolution.


Eventually Marji infuriates her chadored teachers once too often and her fearful parents pack her off to Vienna at about age 14 to live with a family friend.

The friend turns out to be unreliable, so Marji bounces from a Catholic convent to being the tenant of a deranged retired PhD to an endless string of temporary addresses, all the while becoming more European and disengaged from her roots.


What begins with harmless disaffection and mild nihilism eventually descends into homelessness with unclear intimations of prostitution or maybe sexual assault. After landing in the hospital with pneumonia she calls her parents and asks to come home on the agreement that they ask no questions. So she returns to her war-torn and paranoid homeland and takes the veil.

But even now with depression, pill-heavy therapy and a suicide attempt the movie is very funny and closely observed. Here, God and Karl Marx send her back to life and a musical montage. Later in art class they will study a Botticelli with all the naughty bits blacked out, and will sketch the female form from a model who appears to be wearing a black tent.


Eventually she will marry, continue attending carefully hidden alcoholic parties, and observe more horror. The ending winds down to her adult realization that she will always come from Iran, but probably can’t be Iranian. It is not overly hopeful.

The real Marji as shown in the special features documentaries is a robust, 40-ish, chain-smoking Perso-European good ol’ girl, always in a dress a couple sizes too small, who speaks rapidly and bursts with good humor. She is shown acting out all the parts for the benefit of voice actors and animators with outrageous physical humor and facial expressions.


At only 96 minutes, this seems much longer than it is; not because of boredom, but because of the richness and variety of the story. It lost to Ratatouille as Best Animated Picture of 2007. Ratatouille was great, but this is a masterpiece for the ages, animated or not.

Partition

 

2007. 116 min. Rated R – I guess for the blood and one bare upper back, and mild sexual content. Pretty weak R.

IMDB says... During the turmoil and violence of Partition, a Sikh ex-soldier, haunted by war, offers shelter to a young Muslim woman who has been separated from her family.

The 73rd Virgin says... I came to this expecting a somewhat organic, or to use a more patronizing term, native, exploration of the social upheaval and war in India and Pakistan as the exhausted postwar British were pulling out. What I got was basically a Lifetime Network romance with a couple of scenes of slaughter thrown in for context.

The back story is needlessly convoluted and appears to serve only the purpose of getting two Anglo actors involved, so that one of them may show up later when trouble starts, and so that they may make big unfulfilled  goo-goo eyes at each other every 30 minutes or so. Notably enough, Neve Campbell of Wild Things and Scream fame is Miss Stillwell, a female version of that charming archetype, the old India hand. Stay with me here. Her brother Andrew is off to serve the Queen in 1941, I guess in India and Burma, and his two Sikh assistants are charged with keeping him alive.


A man could do a lot worse than two Sikhs as bodyguards in the Asian theater of war, but Andrew will suffer the same ridiculous fate as hundreds of TV victims before him, that is, his legs pinned under collapsed beams. All this appears to happen in a World War I trench that is mysteriously filling with water from a World War II rain storm.

Anywhooo, Sikh number one, Gian, is guilt ridden, and after the war returns to his village to look worried and sad. Sikh number two, Avtar, assumes a command position in the village militia and sets about attacking bands of helpless Muslims who are forced to emigrate from India into the newly formed Pakistan.


Muslims return the favor by sending an entire trainload of blood-soaked Sikh and Hindu corpses back to India. These two scenes presumably summarize the years of violence that killed roughly a million people.

But finally to the story. In the forest Gian discovers the youngish Muslim, Naseem, who has survived the slaughter. Weary and seeking redemption for all his years of soldiering, he sneaks her into his walled residence and protects her from prying eyes and ultimately from his more rigorously murderous friend Avtar, not to mention his own mother.


This is all engaging enough. Kristina Kruek does a fine panic-stricken refugee bit, and is certainly attractive. Jimi Mistry as Gian is less convincing and too dreamy and emo. Naseem and Gian will do a slow tango of increasing regard for each other and finally some very chaste scenes of courtship and marriage.


And I’m all for that. But if I had to hear Brian Tyler’s score swell up and moan and groan and saw and swoon with endless kettle drum flourishes and cymbal splashes one more time, I was prepared to go full Sikh on the flat screen, or at least the sound system.

Campbell and John Light as Walter will pop up from time to time for some will-they-or-won’t-they significant glances, but after a couple more semi-lyrical interludes Naseem and Gian have a little boy. More significantly, through Miss Stillwell’s efforts Naseem learns that most of her family has survived the slaughter and is living not far over the border in Pakistan. It is possible that Gian may have misled Miss Stillwell about “the girl”. No surprise that Campbell is very good, although her British accent occasionally mutates to something more like Katherine Hepburn.


Naturally Naseem wants to go visit her family and with great perseverance is allowed to cross the border.  This sets up about another hour of endless final conflicts. Gian will look worriedly at sunsets for a few months and then finally go to get her.

The ending, while larded with TV quality symbolism, has a twist I must admit, but also an abrupt voice over. The larger pleasing message of religious tolerance, or downright flexibility, brought on by love or survival, is a bit lost in the swoons.

So why don’t I like it more? As I watched the script make predictable chess moves in order to keep the story moving, and as I noticed the television-ish production values more and more, I began to feel a little bit played, and the story wore out its welcome. There are several scenes where supporting characters appear out of nowhere just to resolve a crisis, including one in which Miss Stillwell agrees to watch their son and then suddenly shows up sans son, just in time. And the score and the pacing are very repetitive and seem to be aimed strictly at female fans of a particular kind of romance novel. And this from a reviewer who takes his period romances pretty seriously.

Only as the credits rolled did I realize I was watching a Canadian made for television movie and all became clear. Pretty disappointing.

A Late Quartet

 

2012, 105 min. R – one serious crotch grind, side boob, very little language

IMDB says... Members of a world-renowned string quartet struggle to stay together in the face of death, competing egos and insuppressible lust.

 

The 73rd Virgin says... I don’t remember the death part.

Christopher Walken reads from T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets with the dubious story that this is what Eliot wrote about Beethoven’s Late Quartets. So the highbrow aura is established quickly.

Since it revolves around a classical music quartet and the entire movie appears to take place within about a six block section of New York City including Central Park, it is tempting to look upon this as American art-house fare. But it’s really part soap opera and part of the increasingly popular genre of “baby-boomers-dealing-with-the-indignities-of-age-that- their-parents-couldn’t-be-troubled-to-piss-and-moan-about”. That’s not to be dismissive. It is very enjoyable and vastly exceeds the sum of its parts.

I’m vaguely aware that there are classical music quartets out there who are the Led Zeppelin’s of their genre, and the fictional, “The Fugue”, is one of them. Walken is the cellist and senior member Peter, Michael Ivanir is Daniel, the first violinist and the Jimmy Page of the group who annotates the sheet music bar by bar with the names of his fellow members; when they should come in and how they should play and how they should bow, etc.; and he controls the entire sound.

Hoffman is Robert, the slightly schlumpy second chair violinist, who for 25 years has wished that he might occasionally be the first. Maybe he’s the George Harrison of the group. Keener as Juliette is the chick bassist - no actually she’s on viola. Robert and Juliette are the married couple with the requisite one gifted child who is moving up the ranks of violin players herself.

The Fugue is reassembling at Peter’s house to begin rehearsals for their 25th season on the road. These people’s lives are perfection. Every wood panel is polished; every piece of bric-a-brac is in its place; the coffee in the French press is rich reddish-brown; their professional skill sets are impeccable. Director Yaron Zilberman frames every shot just so. All is elegance. And suddenly, like Lou Gehrig unable to hit a curveball, Peter can’t get the vibrato right.

In a scene any boomer will recognize, he sits in front of a patient physician who observes him doing some simple exercises and wants to “wait for the tests”. This is brilliant scripting as Peter demands that she offer diagnosis without bloodwork, and then questions how she can be so sure of her diagnosis without the bloodwork.

It’s Parkinson’s disease and all these perfect lives are fixing to change. Robert picks this time to cloddishly demand that he and Daniel begin alternating or sharing first violin parts. Oh, and by the way maybe Daniel would like to be their 23 year old daughter’s private violin instructor. He knows himself well enough to resist at first.

The Fugue’s plan for the season is to play Beethoven’s Opus 131, a seven-part quartet that is meant to be played “attacca”, that is, without pause. Quite a trick for the aged and wobbly Peter.

And that’s about all the framework we need.

It would be easy to lose Keener surrounded by these screen legends but she has an amazingly convincing face. Her wordless expression of anger, disappointment, and resignation when she finds an unfortunate text on her husband’s telephone is perfect. But there is a bit of “Ordinary People” about Juliette, as well. She’s been stepping carefully around herself for quite a while.

Hoffman is a long way from The Master, shedding all the charisma that he usually displays in favor of the overweight jogger and frustrated second fiddle who has committed 25 years of humility to this project - not only to the group but to his family – and now he’s feeling angry and feeling his oats. Somehow the movie makes him sympathetic. It’s striking how good Hoffman is at delivering what is mostly General Hospital dialog.

Michael Ivanir is the least known actor and as Daniel has the least likable part. But after years of chilly self-control, when the first thing over which he has not had control in twenty years hits hard, he falls apart, too. I can’t tell if Imogen Poots as daughter Alexandra is good or not. She has a quirky slow drawl that sounds odd coming out of young New Yorker, and facial expressions that bounce all over the place. But she’s cute as a bug.

But the movie and story belong to Walken. There are still most of his beloved facial tics and odd phrasing, although dialed back a bit. It would be simple and boring to just have him play the part with dignity. Instead we get two brief scenes that sum up his position and state of mind; one is a much-needed jump cut away from the soapy plot line to find him suspended in a ridiculous diaper-like harness above a treadmill machine with his sweatpants half a foot up his ass and a foot above his old man tennis shoes; the other he is sitting in a room full of old sufferers being told by one of those soft-voiced sunny personality professionals how we can all adapt to this condition. He is uninterested in her exercises. Also, when he’s had all he can stand of his band mates’ antics, he kicks them all out of his house and tells one of them “shame on you”. A perfect old man moment.

He has, it seems, 4 or 5 long monologues that are riveting. Some of them I hope will enter the Walken famous quotes catalogTM along with, “more cowbell”, and “He'd be damned if any slope's gonna put their greasy, yellow hands on his boy's birthright”.

There are plenty of imperfect details, plot contrivances and convenient devices, and just as I was checking my watch and hoping for the rinse cycle, the story reverts back to Peter’s condition and the dignified resolution. The Fugue does not hit the top of the Billboard charts; Peter does not play until his fingers are bloody while the crowd looks on in tears; Robert does not bring down the house with a Purple Rain solo.

Instead Peter finds these three relatively young old friends in turmoil, and with fatherly firmness, relieves them of some of it. It is a lovely, dignified end that could have gone badly wrong in the wrong dramatic hands.

Netflix reviews have some musicians carping about the actors’ fingering or vibrato, blah, blah. There appear to be a total of 13 instrument coaches for the actors and two cello doubles. Now you know how baseball fans feel when Robert Redford bleeds through his shirt, or when William Bendix or John Goodman play Babe Ruth. Deal with it.

The additional music is by the eternal Angelo Badalamente who has credits going back to the early 60s. The movie is dedicated in part to his deceased son.

Since Fox/Youtube won't allow clips, I'm stealing Bunched Undies' idea and posting stills.

RIP Roger Ebert

When it comes to movies, he was the best and clearest prose stylist I ever read.

His website may turn out to be almost immortal.

Mao's Last Dancer

2009, 117 min. PG – not much to report

IMDB says... A drama based on the autobiography by Li Cunxin. At the age of 11, Li was plucked from a poor Chinese village by Madame Mao's cultural delegates and taken to Beijing to study ballet. In 1979, during a cultural exchange to Texas, he fell in love with an American woman. Two years later, he managed to defect and went on to perform as a principal dancer for the Houston Ballet and as a principal artist with the Australian Ballet. Written by Anonymous

The 73rd Virgin says... The biggest grossing movie in Australia in 2009 made it to about 120 screens in the US and grossed less than 5 million. The marketing geniuses take a feel-good ballet/sports/overcoming-every-obstacle movie and screw up the distribution mightily, then Fox blocks all clips on Youtube. Can anybody here play this game?

Based on Li Cunxin’s autobiography of the same name, this is a relatively straightforward and not overly dramatic retelling of events that led to his defection in the early 80s, when he joined the Houston Ballet and married a local dancer. As usually happens with filmed biographies, the timeline is compressed and altered for dramatic purposes. This begins in 1981 as Cunxin gets off the plane in Houston and is met by Ben Stevenson, the director of the ballet, his prima ballerina, and her somewhat clichéd Texan husband complete with cowboy hat and pronounced accent.

There is a brief break-in period as Cunxin moves in with Stevenson and begins to get accustomed to Western life. Bruce Greenwood as the living legend Stevenson is fantastic, with kindly, modulated flamboyancy. A long way from Star Trek. In an early scene Stevenson has to gloss over what the word "chink" means. Cunxin is played by Chi Cao who is, needless to say, a professional dancer from China. Otherwise, most of the other parts are played by genuine dancers and/or Australian actors long associated with Bruce Beresford’s movies.

From there we flashback to Cunxin’s impoverished rural life in cultural Revolution era China. These scenes are also somewhat gentle in their depiction of the poverty and near starvation (his website says they ate tree bark some years). Cunxin is the second oldest of seven sons - they are numbered - and is unusually small and flexible. Officials from the cultural ministry fan out across the country to select 40 boys and girls to become dancers to the greater glory of the revolution and the party, and they find him.

Joan Chen of Twin Peaks fame and Tai-Pan infamy is de-glamorized – as much as you can de-glamorize Joan Chen – as his mother. Her teeth are too good; otherwise she is unrecognizable with a subservient, bowing, hesitant demeanor.

The movie takes its time showing Cunxin’s progress through the system, from a local capital all the way to Beijing. There are the requisite scenes of his maladaptation to being away from home and his chafing under the abusive teaching style of Teacher Gao. Teacher Chan however, sees something in the skinny child and takes the enormous political risk of giving him a VHS tape of the Russian defector Baryshnikov. After that he is determined to develop the physique that will allow him to “fly”. In the semi-obligatory musical montage he attaches weights to his legs and begins the practice of jumping up stair wells four steps at a time. Sports movie buffs will be in their comfortable heaven.

The best scenes involve the arrival of the stern female official (Madame Mao, I guess) who politely admires the dancing ability of the young troop but pointedly asks, “where are the rifles?” So we are given a glimpse of some of the outrageously funny, party-approved revolutionary ballet of the 70s, with skilled dancers making enormous leaps while pointing rifles at the enemies of the party and the revolution. Teacher Chan is visibly concerned that ballet and politics do not mix well. Teacher Chan is soon led away to a van while Cunxin watches.

With the death of Mao, and the purging of the Gang of Four, and the reemergence of Deng Xiaoping, China is ready to re-enter the world and this leads to a call for the dancer to best represent the party and its political principles to the starving, backward and underdeveloped West.

Now back in America the story may proceed as described.

Eventually there will be a 21-hour standoff at the Chinese consulate in Houston. Kyle McLachlan kinda moves like a Texan and his accent is good enough as immigration attorney Charles Foster. There are several politely tense scenes at the consulate; one in which Cunxin is forcibly dragged away to a holding chamber while his supporters are left in the lobby making frantic phone calls to local judges and politicians to secure his release. One can feel some sympathy for the embassy staff who know that their careers are going to be severely limited, if not ended, by a high-profile defection, and Stevenson is markedly ambivalent about the defection because he knows he will be blamed.

The yards of text above might lead one to believe there isn't much dancing. In fact, there's a bunch of it. Director Beresford respects the audience enough to show the astonishing physicality of the dancing from the middle distance with a limited number of close-ups. That’s all we really need to appreciate the art and conditioning involved. On additional viewings for this review I realize that it’s just so nice to watch without all manner of close-up emoting.

There is a workmanlike quality to some of the acting surrounding Cunxin’s first marriage, and the big showbiz crisis when he has to dance Die Fledermaus on 3-hours notice.

The movie is fair to his young and ambitious dancer-wife, who understandably doesn’t want to be in his wake or treated like a housfrau, and is so even-handed that the end title card even tells us what she’s up to nowadays.

The Houston exterior locations are real and are not jumbled or falsely presented. I suppose I could take offense that Judge Woodrow Seals is played by long-time Australian star Jack Thompson, but why should I care?

Since I haven’t read the book it’s not fair for me to proclaim certain parts of the ending to be hokey or maudlin. Sometimes real life is hokey as well. A little more irritating is the use of that hoary old device, the dream sequence, to describe Cunxin’s fear that his parents and family are being persecuted back in China. We are never given a clear idea as to whether this actually happened.

It was around this time that Deng Xiaoping appeared at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo in a cowboy hat. This was long before Tiananmen Square and the future of Sino-American relations looked bright rather than just business-like and mutually suspicious.

I’m a little concerned that the scene showing Cunxin and his Australian dancer second wife dancing for the peasants back in his home village  - while striking a pose similar to the old party line ballerinas in front of the red Chinese flag - carries with it the slight odor of compromise in order to get this movie made with Chinese cooperation. Is it hokey or something worse? This is a wild speculative accusation I know.

The web community seems to split into two camps: “conventionally made”, “made-for-TV”, “plodding”, etc, vs “a lot more entertaining than Black Swan.”
The curiously named blog, Ebert Does It Better, sums up the second camp:

“In stark contrast to the dancing portrayed as an assault on the senses and soul that is Black Swan, this movie reveals that even in parts of the world where the politics may darken the human experience, artistic expression can bloom from the soul.”

I haven’t gotten around to Black Swan, but this is a very pleasing, artistically satisfying, and rather happy movie.

The great James Lileks has posted several cards from the Chinese ballet that Richard Nixon had to sit through when he visited China in 1972. This is my favorite:

Says the card: “Party representative Hung Cang-ching teaches the fighters that revolution is not a matter of taking personal revenge but of emancipating all mankind. Her class consciousness raised, Wu Ching-hua follows the company commander in energetically practicing marksmanship and grenade throwing.”

Bruce Beresford, of course, made some big popular movies like Tender Mercies, Driving Miss Daisy and Breaker Morant, and the sadly overlooked masterpiece Black Robe (to your left in The Virg’s Top 20). Joan Chen has directed a couple movies.

I’m rather disappointed in myself in that, having lived in the Houston area for 25 years, I was about 15 minutes into this before I realized it was based on a real character and I should know who he is. I’ve only attended the Houston ballet once, and that was an afternoon matinee of the Nutcracker, so I probably never saw Li Cunxin or his Aussie wife Mary McKendry dance. But I do remember them – now, anyway.

Tom & Viv

1994. 115 min. PG-13 - mild language, adult situations

IMDB says... In 1915, T.S. (Tom) Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood elope, but her longstanding gynecological and emotional problems disrupt their planned honeymoon. Her father is angry because Tom's poetry doesn't bring in enough to live on, but her mother is happy Viv has found a tender and discreet husband. Written by mama.sylvia

The 73rd Virgin says... This is based on a play and as best as I can tell it plays fast and loose with the facts, or at least the timeline of events. It is often quite pretty to look at, and has at least some humorous dialog, but it is very slow and even in pacing, and the main characters are far from lovable. It grossed less than $600,000 in the U.S., even with Oscar-nominated performances from Miranda Richardson and Rosemary Harris.

Thomas Stearns Eliot wants to be British despite his St. Louis, Missouri birth and attendance at Harvard. While studying at Oxford he meets Vivienne Haigh-Wood who is the only daughter of wealthy landed gentry. Over the gentle warnings of her brother, Maurice to, “be kind to Vivienne”, and the belated objections of her parents, they marry too young, and only on his virginal wedding night does Tom discover that normal sexual relations are going to be unlikely and infrequent.

As you can see from the IMDB description, she suffered from what would nowadays probably be a treatable hormonal imbalance. She’s also bipolar and prone to spinning out of control verbally and emotionally at unseemly moments, in a society that never found it charming. Viv also develops a friendship with an easily lead pharmacist who kindly supplies her with concoctions that are as much as 60% ether.


All that being said, this movie supports the notion that Viv served to some extent as Eliot’s muse. In one of the better scenes they sit down to read aloud to her family an early draft of The Waste Land, with the nice historical detail that it was originally entitled, “He Do the Police In Different Voices”. She is more nervous than he and as the reading progresses, Viv’s mother realizes with a sense of betrayal that the lines come from the Eliots’ lives.


So with these scenes to cement the notion of Viv as a valued helpmate, what’s left is to track her long slow decline into what is perceived to be madness or “moral insanity” and the disintegration of the marriage. There are sidetracks into the possibility that she has had an affair with the slippery Bertrand Russell who was a family friend. The historical question remains open to the extent that anyone cares anymore.


I’m not the first reviewer to observe that at the center of the story falls the vacuum, that is, Eliot. The play is really about Viv and her brother with a slight bias towards her brother’s version of events. The film is dedicated to them. And Richardson is so convincing as this out of control personality that we lose track of Eliot’s stifled personality and motivations. His strongest desire aside from being English is to live the quietest life possible in order for his poetic voice to flourish, and that would be a neat trick while sharing a life with someone like Viv.

Eliot was also fumbling toward joining the Church of England, partly out of desperation. As his fame as a poet grows, he becomes a more attractive target, even receiving visits from the Bishop.


Willem Dafoe is fine of course. He has played everyone from Jesus to murderous villains to saintly soldiers to Time Itself, so we can hardly accuse him of not taking chances. He was born to play this. He comes by Eliot’s somewhat spidery countenance naturally, and his voice and accent are perfect. Harris and Richardson are amazing throughout.

Viv eventually becomes so erratic that Eliot accepts a teaching position back in America for a year and they officially separate. The script is overly obscure here, as if everyone should know the timeline from high school English or something. In another good scene, after her father dies, Eliot and Maurice conspire to keep Viv out of the trust that administers the estate.


Maurice has become a man of The Empire, heading off to Africa after WWI, rejoining the regiment for WWII, and eventually becoming police chief of Lagos, Nigeria. He has always stood up for Viv, but behavior like this finally turns him against her continued freedom:


Forcibly institutionalized and perhaps stabilized by some postwar pharmaceutical advances in hormone therapy, Viv is presented to us in the end as a quiet, self-possessed asylum inmate who hasn’t heard from her husband in 10 years. She is still tragically in love with him.

Ageless Bertrand Russell is brought back for the somber coda. He either posits a question, “she is well, Tom?”, or makes a statement, “she is well, Tom”, and Eliot is painted as a bitter husband who uses his wife’s money to pay for her own institutionalization, until her death in 1947.


Again, this is a play, and I suspect the story is much more complicated than this. The briefest stroll through Wikipedia confirms it. She had problems beyond menstrual cycles. Per Virginia Woolf:

“Oh—Vivienne! Was there ever such a torture since life began!—to bear her on one's shoulders, biting, wriggling, raving, scratching, unwholesome, powdered, insane, yet sane to the point of insanity, reading his letters, thrusting herself on us, coming in wavering trembling ... This bag of ferrets is what Tom [Eliot] wears round his neck.”

Since there is a copy of The Waste Land draft that is annotated in Ezra Pound’s hand, a few historians have dismissed Viv’s importance. For what it’s worth, Eliot did not remarry until ten years after her death.

You may have guessed that I’m a bit of an Eliot taster-snob, and I really wanted to like this. Despite the great acting it’s only passable as history, and only passable as British drama, and hardly a chick flick. Perhaps the poet who said a poem was “not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion”, would be impossible to live with and impossible to dramatize.

During World War II the BBC taped many radio broadcasts of luminaries of English literature and thought; C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot among them. Obviously, he wasn’t the first celebrity poet but it says something about the time that work as obscure and challenging as this could’ve ever been packaged up and delivered to the masses with the full expectation that they would admire it. Times change.

Thanks to BBC and his willingness to be a star up until his death in 1965, there is a large store of Eliot reading his own poetry in his crisp, saturnine voice. Since he probably never wrote a poem with predictable rhyming patterns, it is valuable to hear him interpret his own work. HarperCollins audio has allowed a large part of their audio material to exist on the Internet for access. A huge cultural gift.

Rosemary Harris would later star as Spiderman's kindly Aunt May.

Moonrise Kingdom

2012. 94 min. PG-13. Very mild sexual behavior. Smoking.

IMDB says...A pair of young lovers flee their New England town, which causes a local search party to fan out and find them.

The 73rd Virgin says... As noted in my five-sheep review of Wes Anderson’s “The Fantastic Mr. Fox”, whimsy is a delicate and dangerous approach for comedy, and that movie did it perfectly. Trying to bring a similar feel to a live-action movie, however cartoonish in presentation, must be even harder.

Whatever your comfort level with 12-year-olds exploring their underwear-clad sexuality in 1965, there are a lot of laughs in the first 60 minutes.

Sam Shukasky (everyone calls him by his last name) is a runaway Boy Scout (in this movie “Khaki Scout”), who whimsically cuts a hole in his tent to escape à la The Shawshank Redemption, while leaving the tent zipper zipped from the inside, much to the confusion of dim but utterly dedicated Scoutmaster Ward played by Ed Norton.

Sam is a curiously adult-like orphan boy hidden behind crooked spectacles, while in the background his fellow foster children roll up their cigarette packs in their T-shirt sleeves and work on vehicles. Sara is a blank-faced but knowing girl of about the same age. She is already described as “difficult”. They undergo a moment of instant recognition and deadpan love at first sight, and then begin a pen pal relationship which morphs into plans to run away together. Sara favors heavy blue eye makeup around huge but slightly out of kilter eyes inserted above a pugnacious jawline that juts out even further when she’s made up her mind to ruin her mother’s day.

Most of the humor derives from these two adolescents’ flat and matter of fact discussion of the mundane details of their escape plan or of topics far beyond their years. There are a few laugh out loud scenes, especially when he presents her with earrings made of fishhooks and scarab beetles. This is followed by a jump cut to her screaming in pain as he tries to pierce her ears. True to her character, with blood dripping down one side of her face, she says “do the other”. When the couple is later harassed by other scouts, she deploys scissors. Sara has funnier lines. Sam has the less shaded character with lines that mimic adults even more and are therefore less believable and less funny in this fanciful context.

Francis McDormand plays exasperated mothers really well. She and her husband Bill Murray are attorneys who are so distracted that they use a megaphone to communicate with Sara and her countless brothers at the house. Bruce Willis is a “dumb and sad” police Captain Sharp who sneaks around with McDormand and lives in a tiny trailer. All of these doofus adults are called to action to help find the runaways. Only Bob Balaban, who serves as the narrator and also as the Scouts merit badge counselor, for orienteering or something, knows the trail that they’re most likely to be traveling.

I know that Anderson and Roman Coppola were nominated for a screenplay Oscar, and some of the lines are awfully funny, but even with the understanding that this is whimsical, the storyline isn’t much. Harvey Keitel as a rival scoutmaster and Tilda Swinton as a child welfare functionary both seem broad and underwritten and inserted as afterthoughts. Swinton’s all blue outfit is probably funny to somebody “in the know”, but I don’t know who that is. Willis is allowed to play something besides wisecracking tough guy humor but it’s not enough to make the movie, and Bill Murray fans don’t have anything new to appreciate.

In the last third of the 94 minutes, the whimsy runs smack up against the need to actually finish the story, as must always happen in these situations. This movie doesn’t handle the transition very well and I found myself wishing it was over by about minute 75. The individual scenes get more disjointed and the humor gets more stilted, and the whole charming edifice kind of crumbles.

The first 60 minutes would be a funny TV show in the mold of maybe Northern Exposure, but after that, meh.


I must be in the minority, though, because Rotten Tomatoes is at 91% fresh and IMDB is at 7.9 stars. All right then.

Here’s the preview…