Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, Aviva Kempner

A documentary about the life and radio/television career of Gertrude Berg, creator and star of shows featuring the eponymous Molly Goldberg. Though we are not the film's target audience, there's much to like about this quirky retelling of one of broadcast entertainment's early successes.  Interweaving photographs, interviews, footage from Berg's television show, as well as unrelated movies, the film fills in a forgotten gap in the early days of radio and television serials. The film's narrative arc peaks when her co-star, Philip Loeb, is blacklisted and forced off the show, thereby explaining both the eventual demise of her show and its loss to the nation's collective cultural memory.  

Her shows captured the near-mythic story of a middle-class (recent) immigrant family living in a closely knit community of a Bronx tenement, where windows facing the airshaft served as the primary conduit for gossip, advice, and care.  By depicting Jewish traditions and showing Jewish families as patriotic Americans, she helped make East European Jews appear less threatening and more in line with mainstream values. 

In making the case for restoring Berg to the pantheon of broadcast pioneers, the documentary sometimes resorts to hyperbole, making me in retrospect suspicious of what seemed to be otherwise credible claims for her importance.   

I got the feeling that Kempner had a difficult time omitting anyone who'd agreed to be interviewed on camera. Hence the film's repetitive nature and tangents that didn't lead anywhere. Kempner probably hoped to bring her audience closer to Berg's world by using contemporaneous films to illustrate the condition of the turn-of-the-century NYC immigrant. Instead, the effect was to add a layer of unnecessary confusion, making viewers never certain if we were watching authentic or fictive images.  

For anyone interested in early broadcast history OR whose relatives grew up in the NYC boroughs. Recommend with caveats.    

The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow

The movie opens with its premise projected on a black screen.  "War is a drug."  And for the next two hours, we watch an adrenaline junkie stringing out a one life-threatening situation after another--and dragging his co-dependents along with him.  Primarily focusing on a bomb-defusing trio--James, Sanborn, Eldridge (played superbly by Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, and Brian Geraghty)--the film develops complex characters and doesn't resort to war-buddy or patriotic sentimentality.   

With a son preparing to start Army basic training within the month, I've been working to prepare myself psychologically.  In order to dislodge unsubstantiated preconceptions, I've been trying to absorb as much about this war as I possibly can.  This movie confirmed one of my greatest fears: not the dangers of war and combat but the dangers of bad leadership.  In addition to the war junkie who leads his men into unnecessary danger, we're also given brief glimpses of an officer whose moral bearings are skewed.  When he coldly disregards the military's conventions for treating prisoners of war, we're reminded why the American military is having such a difficult time ending this war.

This film is violent from start to finish, but not gratuitously.  Bigelow shows us a lot, but not so much that we think we can afford to turn away.

Highly recommend--but with a warning that the contents are disturbing.

Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare

I'm a devotee of free Shakespeare summertime productions. I never saw a live performance of a Shakespeare play before I was in college. And then the first one I did attend was a free, outdoor performance at Hermann Park's Miller Theater, one of the first produced by the Houston Shakespeare Festival.  I don't remember the play--partly because the acoustics were so poor that I couldn't follow the play at all--but I do remember the quiet joy of walking over to the park with cheerful friends, a light meal, a bottle of wine, and a blanket, and then feeling the cool gradually creep through the park.  In the summer, after sunset holds Houston's best hours, and the experience seemed a complete luxury. 

After only two summers, I moved away and hadn't see another Shakespeare production--in a park or theater--for another fifteen years, when I rounded up the neighborhood grade-school-aged kids (mine included) and took them to see Twelfth Night in a Lubbock, Texas park.  The whole evening was absolutely enchanting.  T & K still laugh when they remember the yellow stockings.

A summer or two later, my children and I had just moved to New Haven. Our first excursion was to see the Elm City Shakespeare Players' production of The Tempest in Edgerton Park.   Ever since, my summer hasn't been complete unless I've seen Shakespeare in a park.

Tonight, for the first time, I saw Shakespeare in a zoo, an apt setting for Midsummer Night's Dream: a peacock perched above the proscenium and trumpeted throughout.  This production was extremely audience friendly, with plenty of exposition added to ensure even the most novice audience member could follow the narratives.  Unlike my first experience with outdoor theater 30 years ago, the performers were well miked, allowing for everyone to easily understand the dialogue.  And, as I've come the love, the evening air was delightful, the audience appreciative, and the company of friends warm. 

Very family friendly; recommend.

Unmistaken Child, Nati Baratz

For a gentle two hours, we watch as Tenzin Zopa, a Tibetan monk, searches in the valleys of Nepal and Tibet for the reincarnation of his master, Geshe Lama Konchog. In an apt symmetry, Tenzin returns to the valleys where Lama Konchog often retreated, to the same village of his birth, from where the master had once taken the young Tenzin. So the master becomes the child, the child the master.

There is no omniscient narrator, only Tenzin at the beginning recounting his feelings of depair at the death of Geshe La. Thereafter, the viewer is an eavesdropper on the very intimate project of locating and identifying his beloved master. The film's most joyful scenes feature Tenzin playing with the child, clearing demonstrating his deep devotion to the master.

Not surprisingly the most visually "authentic" moments are in the mountain villages, accessible only by foot. Except for the occasional Nike shirt or modern gadget, these peoples live in ways that probably have not changed much in the past century. Equally "authentic" are the scenes in the Buddhist temples. Inside the monks' quarters, however, it's like a shrine to Walmart consumerism, not in the quantity of goods--though there's more than I'd expect--but in the quality of the goods: the same shoddily made stuff found at discount retailers in the west.

Though the cinematographer had great vistas, mysterious interiors, and fascinating faces as his subject, the quality of the film was little better than a home video.

Recommend.

The Stoning of Soraya M., Cyrus Nowrasteh

An extraordinarily compelling depiction of the barbaric practice of stoning, this film's strength lies in its subject matter. As befits the subject matter, there is nothing subtle in this film. The male antagonists are clearly identified within the first minute, and our understanding of them seldom strays from first impressions. The men, particularly Soraya's husband, Ali, seldom rise about caricatures. On the other hand, the female protagonists remain defiant victims throughout. Their virtues are never questioned and our sympathies for them never waver. An important source of the tension is the time and place: 1980s rural Iran, where Sharia law rules but memories of more western practices have not faded. Though I tried to resist, it's easy for a western observer to believe the unrelieved misogyny in Iran after the Islamic revolution.

The film's climactic stoning scene of the stoning is one of the graphic scenes of violence I've ever witnessed: Soraya, buried up to her chest in a pit, with only her torso and head above ground, in becomes a fixed target for the villagers' stones collected by the children. Rather than a general melee of stones, the film depicts a slow process, wherein the men closest to Soraya--her father, husband, and sons--are chosen to pelt the first stones: each man knows exactly the damage he inflicts. Eventually, the process devolves into a free-for-all.

This grim scene is followed by an unnecessarily clever, even comic, getaway for the journalist.

Despite its flaws, the film deserves our attention.

Recommend.

The Girl from Monaco, Anne Fontaine

A comic legal caper about a Parisian lawyer definding a client in a high-profile murder case in Monaco. The film makes it clear that he uses his spare time chasing skirts rather than preparing for court the next day. He's trail--and then accompanied--the entire time by a bodyguard hired by his client's family. Most of the attorney's energies are used to chase the local TV weathergirl, and yet the real chemistry is between the attorney and his bodyguard.

Recommend.

Whatever Works, Woody Allen

Another in a long-line of cinematic love-songs to NYC, Whatever Works features Larry David as Boris Yellnikov, ultimate New Yorker whose chance encounters with runaway members of a Christian Mississipppi family allows them to discover their repressed selfs and, hence, themselves. As the movie implies, only in NYC could individuals be given the opportunity to be true individuals.

For the first third of the film the look and the acting are flat. I became more engaged when the ever sunny Melody (played by Evan Rachel Wood) began to espouse Boris' nihilism--and the film continued to pick up speed with the arrival of first her mother (Marietta played by Patricia Clarkson) and then her father (John played by Ed Begley, Jr.). Marietta finds happiness as an art photographer in a menage a trois; John finds a gay lover. Even Boris, the self-proclaimed genius physicist, finds happiness with a psychic.

Recommend.