tony-mastrogiorgio

Filling in the Blanks (2023)

He put asterisks on his parents' headstone?!?!?!

First, the positives: You can't help but sympathize with the guy's situation. Finding out your dad is not your dad is going to be disorienting at least. Finding out he's an anonymous sperm donor and that you have other half siblings, well, yeah, I get it. People are going to react in different ways and I wouldn't pass judgment on someone's initial emotional reaction.

Now the bad stuff: Beyond that initial reaction, how about a little human sympathy and understanding? He has none for his parents. He's angry at them and borderline vindictive. The idea that he is even debating telling his dying father that he knows the painful secret he obviously wanted to keep is astonishing. He refers to his dad as "asterisk" and even puts the asterisk on his gravestone. Sorry, but that is a putz move by a big baby.

Some of his other half siblings have more interesting, grownup reactions. They talk about the deep shame that men were conditioned to feel at the time (late 50s - early 60s) about being infertile. Some of these men must have been motivated by love of their wives who clearly wanted to be mothers. They agreed to something far outside the norm for people at the time. (Similarly, many people concealed adoptions from their children back then.) This guy shows zero interest in seeing any of this through his father's eyes and emotions. He's angry at a man for...what? Agreeing to let him be born through his mother? For giving him life, raising him, and providing for him? For agreeing to bring his siblings into the world too? It's natural to be interested in the biological connection to a stranger and to half siblings. I'm happy for him that he got to expand his family in this way. Toward his own parents, he's a vindictive clown - and he's totally unaware of it. He actually thinks sticking an ill-tempered, self-absorbed letter to his parents in the wailing wall - a site his mother held sacred - is supposed to be an emotionally uplifting ending.

I almost never post negative reviews. Making a film or writing a book is hard. Revealing your life story is hard. But I got angrier and angrier at him as the film went on. I would much rather have spent that time with his half-sisters who clearly have more mature insight into their situation.

Accomplice (2010)

Small, slight, brilliant and moving

In 2010, Hal Hartley made several short films. It's easy to imagine that his initial burst of indie filmmaking and the recognition and opportunities he'd enjoyed had run their course. His expectations about filmmaking were probably smaller, more private.

On a television screen during several shots, Jean-Luc Godard talks about his smaller audience - as he put it later, making films for 100k of his closest friends. The film itself is a perfect distillation of Godard's post 1980s filmmaking: an off screen voice from a phone call setting off a plot; the plot an excuse for imagines, comments, and emotions; the framing of shots, the television showing Godard; even the sound of a tape being rewound abs fast forwarded clearly nodding to (and likely lifted from) Godard's Historie(s) su Cinema. The final nod comes in the end credit which stats Godard "used without permission"

It's a nod to a major influence, but Hartley is clearly making a similar comment about his own filmmaking. He has reached a stage where the filmmaking is no less serious, the art no less focused, but the expectation is changed. He acknowledges making films for a small and smaller circle.

With that context in mind, the effect is moving and honest. It packs more in three minutes than most filmmakers do in hours...

Being the Ricardos (2021)

If you look, you'll find a good movie and great performances

Aaron Sorkin has become one of those filmmakers people love to bash. It's a weird phenomenon that requires acting like the given filmmaker's flaws are his or hers alone while simultaneously ignoring any strengths.

Sorkin has his flaws and they occasionally the ones ascribed to him by his detractors. He also has considerable strengths. The biggest flaw in Being the Ricardos is the framing story - contemporary interviews with characters involved in events of the main story. The frame is unnecessary and badly acted. (Except Linda Lavin, at times.) The payoff for the frame is weak and doesn't justify it. Also, the first scene or two with Lucy and Desi is weak. After five minutes you might reasonably think this isn't going to work.

Once Kidman and Bardem find their rhythm, the movie is very, very good and they deliver award caliber performances. Just get beyond the negative hyping and get past the first few minutes. The dynamics between the people making the show (writers, directors, producers, co-stars) are interesting and sharply drawn, and the navigating between network and sponsor higher ups is as well. The emotional climax to Lucy and Ricky's relationship is very good.

Bottom line: what's good in it is very good. And what doesn't work isn't enough to stop you from watching it and enjoying it.

The Arbor (2010)

Powerful, with an innovative approach that adds to the power. (Some details, but not really spoilers)

The film begins with text explaining that you will hear the recorded words of the people depicted, but you will see actors lip syncing them. Your first reaction may be: why?

The answer is in the watching. Done as a traditional documentary, The Arbor would be powerful. Andrea Dunbar grow up in horrible circumstances on a housing estate in Braford, England, Remarkably, she wrote a play as a teenage, followed by a second play and a film script, capturing her life, with traces of humor. Unfortunately she was an alcoholic, had three children by three different fathers, and died of an embolism, in the words of one of her daughters, "at home" - the local pub.

The film follows the lives of her children, especially Lorraine, a half-Pakistani child who manages to recreate all the horror of life she was born into, and then some.

The lip syncing technique allows the film to put the testimony in different context, some times in the places where the events occurred (or similar enough) and sometimes in an invented space that adds power to them. For example, after Lorraine reads a speech a character based on her made in a play about her mother's life, we see her other family members sitting scattered across an empty theater, giving their reactions (from support, to anger, to questioning). The approach places them together in a way a straightforward documentary would not. It also allows the film to place characters within the visual consequence of their actions.

I'm not doing it justice. The material is liberated, amplified, made more real through the innovative technique. Highly recommend this unique fascinating film. Also recommend you keep tissues around...

1917 (2019)

Dissenting view: technical achievement, mediocre movie

I have a special fondness for movies that set technical limitations and still achieve full bodied, engrossing story telling. For example, Stephen Knight's Locke is one man, in a car, by himself - and it's riveting. Die Hard takes place (mostly) in a single blinding. 1917 sets a limitation for itself by presenting the movie as a single continuous shot. (It's really at least three, but that's beside the point.)

The rationale is that this would immerse the viewer in the experience of the war. And despite Deakins skill in pulling off the achievement, I think it does the opposite. It's awkward at times, distracting, and gives up the foundational language of film: the power of editing. Some thoughts:

• Cutting focuses our attention, shifts our point of view, can put us both inside and outside the experience of the characters.

• The long shots of the characters walking toward the camera in the trenches are off putting. They are completely unlike the way we experience reality - how often do we hold a steady gaze on a single point while walking in real life? It's meant to be subjective and immersive, but it's the opposite.

• Things get better outside of the trench when the camera has more movement, but get worse in the ruined village, a sequence that looks more like a video game with new pursuers appearing in the channel behind him.

• The monotony of the single tales had me looking around the frame for the bodies in the mud, pressed in the trench walls, etc. - impressive art direction, but distracting, pulling me out of the story.

The bodies sticking out of the mud were supposed to be horrifying, but they struck me as antiseptic. And one reminded me of Davy Jones ship in the second Pirates movie, which made me laugh inappropriately.

The real problem is that we have scene this movie before. The plot is the same as Saving Private Ryan, or even Thin Red Line or the Naked and the Dead, which were also built around a single mission. I think Mendes tried to overcome a familiar story with the single take idea. I also think that he can't resist sentimentalizing the story and reaching for unearned emotion.

The flaws of the movie are seen in the far to brief appearance of Mark Strong, who is strong, grounded, real, everything the rest of the movie is not. A more cinematic approach, and a story more grounded in human experience, and built out of characterizations like Strong's, would have been much more interesting.

As it is, 1917 is a mildly interesting experiment with a conventional story at its center.

Book chon bang hyang (2011)

Fascinating film about how we write our lives...

This is me second Hong Sungsoo film. The first, Alone on the Beach At Night, was very good with an excellent performance by Kim Min-hee..

This is in similar territory. In real life Sungsoo had an affair with Min-hee, which became a tabloid scandal. He has apparently made several films set in and around the film world dealing with fictional variations of their story.

In The Day He Arrives, a former director returns to Soule to see an old friend and encounters a combination of former acquaintances, and new people, some of whom know him by reputation.

In very subtle ways events replay with variations. People seem unaware of previous conversations, encounters are slightly too dramatic and revealing, women react - more or less like they might be in a movie.

The movie never directly says that it's about constructing stories but there are hints. We see him writing, we hear him doing voice over that seems no more aware of other events than characters are. The overall sense is of the director character reworking his entangled life and trying to put it into a story.

Just as the real director. Hong Songsoo is doing in film after film. Highly recommend this moving, intelligent film

The Clock (1945)

Lovely, wonderful- deceptively great movie about two lonely people

A top line description says this is a romantic comedy. And so it is: a soldier on leave in New York City meets a girl. They fall in love and get married before he ships out to the war.

But the movie, intelligently directed and wonderfully acted, never loses sight of how lonely the two main characters are, how aware they are the randomness of how they came together and the risk they are taking being in love.

Two scenes stand out. They get separated in a crowded subway and realize with real despair that they have no idea how to find each other. The emotion in the scene and when they find each other is real, not rom com cute. Toward the end of the movie, they are married. It's the morning after wedding, their only night together. They silently pour coffee, married, yet still strangers, facing an enormously uncertain future as he ships off in the morning. The war hangs over the scene the way it hangs over the entire movie.

Their wedding ceremony itself, In a closed government office with the words drowned out by trains, followed by a meal in a cheap dinner, manages to be funny while staying consistent with the undercurrent of loneliness. It is an wonderfully mature romance, closer in tone to Lost in Translation than a typical rom com.

One more note: New York City should have been billed as a co-star. It captures the feel of the city as few movies ever manage.

Baal (1970)

Brilliantly captures Brecht's complex attitude toward his protagonist

Brecht wrote his first version of Baal at 20 (!) in response to another play. It was both a deliberate indulgence in the then- current expressionistic romantic hero worship of German theater (written, he claimed, because he knew it would make money) and a vicious comic mocking of it. Baal, a drunken, horrible SOB, is also a poet capable of moments of beautiful, startling images.

Brecht reworked the play but I don't know if he ever resolved his contradictory attitudes about his character. He's vulgar and horrible, yet yet an artist capable holding life, death, beauty and vulgarity in a single image. We are not meant to admire him, but we cannot ignore his flashes of vulgar, cruel brilliance.

How do you capture the contradictory tension in a film? It begins with the right actor, and Fassbinder is brilliant. His affinity for and understanding of Brecht is astounding. (Had he lived, he might have equaled Brecht's accomplishment through his own films.) He never for a moment softens Baal as weaker actors might have.

Filming in a straightforward realistic manner would have encouraged hero worshipping and invited sympathy, as it always does. The hand held camera, the jump quality, the setting, the music for the songs all brilliant reinforce the currents of comic, vulgar, venal horror and beauty. It's raggedness knocks us off balance - and it's what the play demands.

Baal was a brilliant start to Brecht's career, and it is great in moments. (He wrote a dozen greater plays at least.) The film isn't entriely successful either, but it is a vital, occasionally brilliant attempt to explore Brecht's complex, contradictory protagonist. Absolutely worth watching if you are fascinated by Fassbinder, Brecht or the New German cinema of the 70s and 80s.

Snitch (1998)

One of the most overlooked flicks of recent years

Eventually, Monument Ave will get its due. It is a terrifically realized slice of hoodlum life, a story about a near escape from a cycle of hopeless violence and dis pear. Dennis Leary proved he could act right here.

It also suggests, along with the better-than-it-had-a-right-to-be Beautiful Girl, that Ted Demme was just tapping the surface of potentially great career when he died. He and Leary may have combined on a handful of classics if Demme had lived.

As much as I like The Departed and Mystic River, this is the movie that really captures the gangster life in South Boston. If you like movies like Force of Evil, Friends of Eddie Coyle and other hard-edged crime pictures, check it out.

The Last Detail (1973)

The greatest performance from one of America's greatest actors

How is The Last Detail not in the top 100? In represents one of the heights of 70s film making, a film absolutely impossible to imagine being made today. It is profane, raunchily funny, ragged, ultimately bleak and brilliant. I cannot think if any independent film of recent years that matches it for honesty, devotion to the art of acting and willingness to go where its characters lead.

The film represents a brilliant collaboration between the actors, writer (Robert Towne) and the underrated director (Hal Ashby). The actor's rehearsed, improvised and found the core of their characters, all of which was used by Towne in revising the script and by Ashby in finding and filming the emotional core of each scene.

To watch The Last Detail again and to see Nicholson's brilliance in it is to be reminded why people once thought that film could important. Any serious student of film and acting needs to watch it.

Fire in the Sky (1993)

A Very Under rated film

(I tagged this as having spoilers but I don't think it really does. That's more or less a precaution) A lot of reviews--both here and in the media--were hung up on whether the story was 'true' or not. My feeling is...who cares? It is probably 'true' enough in the sense that this is what Travis Walton believes happened to him but whether or not it has external reality should have nothing to do with your enjoyment of the film.

And it is enjoyable, placing us outside the events so that we (and James Garner's character who is the audience's surrogate for the most part) don't know what really happened. It builds nicely and logically until we relive the experience subjectively through one of the characters. The final coda is the events effect on the participants.

It is well done, well acted and the finale is scary especially for the feeling of helplessness it evokes. I have always expected this film to enjoy a revival--as soon as people start accepting the movie for what it is: a well told story.

The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

Perhaps the saddest comedy ever made

A wonderful film, filled with great understated performance and sharp, intelligent dialogue. What really distinguishes the film, however, is that undercurrent of sadness throughout. The story is underscored by affairs, loneliness, suicide, disappointment, the fear of losing ones job in a world where that had disastrous consequences. Most of all it was set in a world that no longer existed, having been ripped apart by the beginning of World War II. In fact, the film is barely a comedy at all if you compare the percentage of serious scenes to the comic scenes. Yet funny it is--listen to Margaret Sullivan's harsh dismissal of Jimmy Stewart and watch his pained expression as he replies that her comments were a remarkable blend "of poetry and meanness". It's funny, pointed, and sad all at once. A remarkable achievement and one of the ten greatest screen comedies ever made.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

Far and Away, the Best of the Three

If the only criteria you have for a Harry Potter movie is absolute fidelity to the book, then you will be disappointed in this one. But if you understand that the filmmakers (especially screenwriter Steve Kloves) need to condense the increasingly long novels into acceptable screen time while preserving their essence, then you are at the right stating point.

They condense and take some liberties, but this movie looks and feels like Hogwarts in a way that the first two never did. It has a beautiful texture and look. The film is content to let magical things happen along the edges and the background without having to land heavily on each moment. The result is that you feel so much more a part of this world then you did previously. The three leads have improved wonderfully and I can now imagine them having post-Potter careers.

There is no point in recapping the plot. If you are interested in the movie you no doubt read the book. Accept some differences from the sources, however, and you will enjoy the best Otter yet.

Shrek 2 (2004)

Merely Good--Not inspired

Shrek was funny, fresh, and slightly off kilter. It was a breath of fresh air and that rarest of all animals: a kids movie with genuine laughs for grown ups.

Shrek II has plenty of great gags and visual jokes--but that is all they are. Just gags. The freshness is gone, and the story carries little weight. In the first movie, the jokes were funny AND they revealed character and moved the plot. Here they are one unconnected laugh after another.

You will enjoy Shrek II. It is funny. You will probably laugh more often than your kids. But it is just not special, surprising, engaging movie the original was.

Stone Reader (2002)

Enjoy it for what it is.

It seems those few critics and IMDB (and Amazon) reviewers who criticized it--occasionally while still giving it a favorable mark--are intent on complaining about what the movie ISN'T rather than what it is. Sure, the fictionalized shots of guys getting the book in the mail, etc., violate The Great Ethics of Documentary Films brought down from Sinai by Moses. (You know, Thou Shalt Not Recreate). And, yes, he does meander a bit and delay the pay off, but...so what?

This is more a conversation about books than a movie in any conventional sense. Complaints that some many interviews don't move him towards the goal of finding Dow Mossman miss the point that the interviews are themselves interesting conversations about the love of good books. Visiting Sealy (the NY Times reviewer who inspired him to read the book) doesn't solve anything--but who wouldn't want to hang around with him a couple of days discussing great reads? Of course, when he finds Dow, what do they do? They immediately talk about books! Love of books permeates everything here, most poignantly and surprisingly in the clearly emotional response the agent Carl Brandt has to being reminded of what he considers a great book and reflecting on a missed career.

Let's put it this way: if you love books, if you love talking about novels, if you get a thrill of excitement when you over hear a conversation about a book you love, then you will enjoy The Stone Reader. It is not conventionally well made, but thank heavens for that. It could be "better", but I doubt it could be more enjoyable.

The Accidental Tourist (1988)

An excellent film that may be fading from memory

Quick: what movie am I describing?

An eccentric writer is rescued from emotional isolation by a working class woman with a chronically sick son. A small dog plays a key role in the story.

Chances are you thought of As Good As It Gets, with Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt. The comparison is interesting for a number of reasons. FOr one, it shows how essentially the same logline or story concept can be treated very differently. But more interesting is that the comparison shows the lack of depth in the admittedly enjoyable As Good As It Gets.

Take for example, the children. Hunt's son suffers from chronic allergies and she is constantly frazzled with worry about him. Having introduced this heavy theme, you might expect the story to revolve around this emotional issue. Instead, Dr. Harold Ramis shows up unexpectedly (summoned by Nicholson) and--a bad joke about HMO's later--the boy is cured.

In Accidental Tourist, William Hurt plays the writer of travel books for people who hate to travel. He gives them tips on how to travel in their own portable cocoon. Yet his life is shattered (before the film begins) when his son is gunned down at a McDonalds in a random shooting. This withdrawn man withdraws even more, finishing off his marriage. Yet when Geena Davis forces her way into his life he begins to connect again. But she has a chronically sick boy. (She explains, almost blithely, at one point the number of things that could kill him or put him in the hospital.) There is a wonderful moment when Hurt finds the lonely boy walking home from school (being ignored by his friends). They chat a moment, then Hurt's voice over (which frequently quotes from his travel books in ironic contrast to the story) says, "Business travelers should never take along something they couldn't bear to lose." As the voice over says that, the little boy's hand slips into Hurts and they walk home together.

It's a small, wonderful moment. There are no miracle cures from super doctors. Instead there is the acceptance that love requires risk, that you have to accept the possibility of loss. It's a deep, mature, moving film, wonderfully acted, that also manages to be funny without sacrificing any of its depth. It is Lawrence Kasdan's best film and deserves renewed interest.

PS: The similarities between As Good As It Gets and The Accidental Tourist cannot have escaped James L Brooks attention. After all, he cast Kasdan in a cameo as Nicholson's shrink. Yet as far as I know, I have never seen a critic comment on the similarities.

Into the West (1992)

One of the best Irish Movies

This is a deceptively complex movie. The basic plot outline of the Traveler boys stealing their horse back and leading police on a cross country chase suggests a simple boys adventure tale. And so it is. But it is also a commentary on Irish society. After all, it is a policeman and an industrialist who combine to steal the horse and change its name from the Irish Tir na nOg (based on an ancient legend) to National Security. (Do you really need me to point out the obvious symbolism there?) The subtext of the movie is about Ireland's beleaguered unique culture and identity fighting to assert itself. Of course, if you choose to focus solely on the plot and the humor, you'll have a great time. But if you look beneath the surface, you will find so much more.

Bringing Out the Dead (1999)

I am in the minority on this...

but this just may be Scorsese's best film. It is certainly the most effective love story he ever wrote. (Or should I say the most effective love story between a man and women?)The trick is recognizing that it's a love story in the first place. Cage, who squandered his acting chops after Leaving Las Vegas, is brilliant here. He plays a paramedic who has been beaten down by the nightly horrors he sees into a walking dead man. Yet, terrifyingly for him, a spiritual essence still sparks within him. Too bad: it is far easier to be dead in the world he inhabits. As a walking dead man, he would feel no pain, but he is haunted by the memory of people he couldn't help and desperate to reach out and connect with someone, to find peace within himself. Despite the parade of horrors, this is Scorsese's most affirming, spiritual film, and the last shot is his most beautiful.

In a Lonely Place (1950)

Terrific--one of Bogart's Best

Anyone looking for a murder mystery or thriller will be disappointed. Yes, it has those elements, but In A Lonely Place is about the personality of a writer. Dixon Steele is an artist whose contradictions resolve themselves only when he is writing and only when he is writing something he is interested in. As soon as he steps away from his typewriter he is bitter, angry, self-destructive, violent. In its way, this is as good a portrait of an artistic personally you will ever see.

That Girl from Paris (1936)

A light, enjoyable movie

It does have one scene of note. Pons plays an opera singer hiding out with a jazz band. The band knows nothing of her identity. She sabotages their singer (Lucille Ball in an early role) and is forced to go on stage as a substitute. Well, she only knows opera; the band only knows jazz. She sings "The Blue Danube" with both her and the band segueing from classical singing to jazz and back. It's a really delightful number, very inventive. If the movie is ever on TCM or AMC, it's work a look just for that