The Age of Innocence (1993)

When Martin Scorsese decided that  he wanted to make sprawling period romance picture he chose to adapt Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize winning 1920 novel of forbidden love in 1870's New York society, The Age of Innocence. The result is probably Scorsese's least Scorsese like picture, with the arguable exception of Hugo. This is probably also the directors slowest movie, the pace is so un-Scorsese that you might find it off putting, it certainly took me a while to adjust to it. Featuring sumptuous sets, excellent camera work, and the lead actors (Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder) at there best looking, the film is all about slowly seething passions repressed beneath a cool formal exterior. This may be Scorsese's subtlest work. Descriptive narrations presumably from the novel and read by Joanne Woodward work nicely and certainly set the tone, as does one of the last Saul Bass produced title sequence. This movie reminded me a lot of a novel I only recently read, Gore Vidal's 1876, only without the politics. The Age of Innocence was a great opportunity for Scorsese to stretch some of the cinematic musicals he least  gets to use, and is really a unique picture and something of a triumph. Finally I have got to make mention of Miriam Margolyes performance as Mrs. Mingott, a kind of 'dowager empress'  of New York society, what a great character, and wonderful performance. ***1/2

Lee Daniel's The Butler (2013)

An Oscar bate social conciseness film that failed at getting any Academy Award nominations, but that did succeed at becoming a rather successful sleeper hit this last summer. Lee Daniels The Butler (the full title includes the directors name because of a rather silly copyright dispute regarding use of the intended title The Butler), stars Forest Whitaker as Cecile Gaines, an (obviously) black man who spent decades working at the White House as a butler from the Eisenhower through Reagan Administrations. Oprah Winfrey plays Gaines periodically unfaithful and alcoholic wife Gloria, and British actor David Oyelowo plays Cecile's oldest son Louis, who spends much of his life estranged from his father, heavily involved in the civil rights movement and later a Democratic congressman from Tennessee. Cecile's younger son Charlie (Elijah Kelly) is killed as a solder in Vietnam. The movie is a panoramic journey that tells the story of three decades of American civil rights history as counterpoint and later reconciliation between father and son. Too bad its mostly made up.

Taken only loosely from the reminiscences of actual long time White House butler Eugene Allen, the film is full of historical inaccuracies and out right inventions. I didn't know the extent of these departures from fact until after I saw the film, and I'll tell you now its had a big negative impact on how I came to view the picture. I was expecting/hopping for something along the lines of Backstairs at the Whitehouse, a much more truthful account of two generations of black servants at the White House from the Taft through Eisenhower administrations. Instead I get what I can only call an intentionally misleading leftist political polemic. Gaines did not have the traumatic formative experiences depicted in the film, he had only one child who was never a radical political activist or congressman, and the depictions of the presidents in the film are as suspect as there casting is odd (Robin Williams as Eisenhower?  Allen Rickman as Reagan?). Anyway I was going to give this ***, because it did work as a movie and I enjoyed it when I saw it, but I can't approve of something this inaccurate being presenting as for the most part fact based. So I'm giving no formal rating, and just saying I disprove.

Questioning Darwin (2014)

Short HBO documentary on Charles Darwin and his Theory of Evolution, and how fundamentalist Christians in America reject it. Nothing we haven't seen before, film consists of  a nice little bio of Darwin focusing on his scientific pursuits and how they effected his religious views over the course of his life, and Christian pastors and such in the cotemporary United States saying how they reject Darwinism, that its evil, ect.  This episode of Conspiracy Road Trip is perhaps more interesting though and along vaguely similar lines. **1/2

Gray's Anatomy (1997)

Steven Soderbergh directs this 80-minute adaptation taken from a much longer Spaulding Gray monologue. This is different from the other Spaulding Gray monologue films however in that its not a mostly static recording of a Gray performance, instead Soderbergh chops things up, Gray delivers parts of his monologue on different sets and against different backgrounds for dramatic effect. You have Gray shot through distorted glass, Gray with a forest background or Gray with the silhouette of  'the Elvis Presley of psychic surgeons'  performing behind him, and so on depending on the subject matter and themes of the segment of monologue Gray is then presenting. This makes things much more kinetic and fresh, and sets Soderbergh's production apart from the earlier but no less good Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box. ***

Rushmore (1998)

Director Wes Anderson's second feature film is really the one that established him as an off-center auteur, it is also the movie that introduced audiences to Jason Schwartzman (thank you) and launched Bill Murray's second career as a quirky character actor. Schwartzman plays Max Fischer a 15-year old scholarship student at the prestigious Rushmore private school (filmed in part at St. Mark's School of Texas the prep school director Anderson once attended) who spends too much time starting and presiding over extra-circular clubs and not enough time on his studies (Fischer is at the school because he is considered a playwriting prodigy). Max is further distracted from his studies when he develops a strong crush on Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams) a recent widow and new teacher at the school. Max also develops an unlikely friendship with Herman Blume (Bill Murray) a wealthy industrialist and benefactor of the school whose twin sons hate Max. Eventually Herman too develops feelings for Ms. Cross and the two begin an affair, when Max finds out about it he and Blume begin a feud that ratchets up to amusing levels of ridiculousness, but eventually they reconcile.

This film is made less by the plot and more by the assortment of quirky characters, the visual style, and its 'over-aching juvenile fantasy sensibility'. Watching this movie is the first time I think I truly got what Anderson was going for, when I watched The Royal Tenenbaums I didn't quite get it, but Rushmore I sort of loved. This is a story about the odd quirky (there's that word again) kid in high school, as that odd quirky kid might tell it. It's not for everyone but if you click with the movies frequency its a joy to behold.. ***1/2

Flowers in the Attic (2014)

Flowers in the Attic is the second film adaptation of writer V. C. Andrews semi-notorious 1979 best seller of the same name. I remember growing up in the 1980's my mother had a copy of this book, and I was kind of fascinated by its unusual two layer cover, which I think along with the title conveyed that there was something kind of forbidden about its contents. Well that forbidden something is incest, yes this is a brother sister love story, and one even creeper then just that.

Set in the 1950's the story concerns the four Dollanganger children, when their beloved father dies unexpectedly their mother takes them to live at the home of her wealthy and estranged parents who the children have never met before. Well the children will never meet there grandpa because he is old and dying and their presence would apparently disturb him, and their mother (truly the stories most interesting character, more on that later, and in this film adaptation played by Heather Graham) wants to cover up their existence so she can charm her way back into her fathers good graces and regain an inheritance.

So the children are kept isolated in the attic of the sprawling southern mansion of their mothers Foxworth kin. In the end they are in that attic literally for years while the mother supposedly charms her father and waits out his illness. Well that's not everything that's going on downstairs, mother succeeds at charming her father and regaining inheritance but only under certain conditions, paramount among these being that she never had children with her late husband, and if it ever turns out that she did she loses everything. You see the late husband was her fathers half brother, so inbreeding, which is one of the reasons why mothers mother, here played by Ellen Burstyn, queen of the crazy old woman roles, treats the children as poorly as she does, though by the same token it turns out that she does have kind of a moral code that she won't violet, and one that is in fact superior to Heather Grahams, which however doesn't say much and more on that later.

Anyway while stuck in the attic the two older Dollanganger children serve as surrogate parents to the two younger ones, twins about 5 or 6ish at the beginning, the older two maybe 13 and 14 at the start. Anyway older children Cathy and Chris make a garden of paper flowers for younger Cory and Carrie, and then isolated and hormonal as they are strike up a romantic and sexual relationship with each other. Yes eww.  Mothers father meanwhile has died and she has remarried to a younger man who has no idea that she has children so eventually mommy Heather decides that she is going to poison her own off spring.

Again the mother, whose name is Corrine is the most interesting and complex character in this piece. She does, at least at first, love her children, however she seems to need the loving attention of a man, her father then second husband, more, and being possessed of few skills beyond her looks feels worried about how she herself will survive without this male attention. When her children become what she perceives to be an ill surmountable threat to her own well being, she decides its time to take them out, in this case with rat poison laced donuts, and she succeeds in part.

I won't say much else about this film, other then to sum up the obvious, its strange and creepy. One of the reasons why I wanted to see this movie is the presence of Kiernan Shipka s Cathy. This young actress is best known as Sally on Mad Men and is an impressive little thespian. She pulls off her role her aplomb as do the other female leads Graham and Burstyn, the few other actors in the film don't have nearly as much to do. This film is "high trash" from the Lifetime Network and leaves one feeling suitably ill. **1/2

Streets of Fire (1984)

It was after seeing this trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJGo2rvfSuA) that I decided that I just had to see Streets of Fire. What an odd looking movie, what on Earth is it really about, why was it made? We'll I've seen it now and I'm still not sure. The subtitle of the film is ""A Rock & Roll Fable", which I guess accounts for its hard to pin-downness. It's kind of an action drama, some comedy, a musical, the world its set in 6/10th 1980's, 4/10ths 1950's, so there is color television and contemporary sounding rock music, but people keep black and white snapshots and the cops drive Studebakers. The music is catchy and the film climaxes with a hammer fight between Michael Pare' and Willem Dafoe, so those things are awesome, but again I'm still not sure what I saw and for all its weirdness it was slower then I'd expected. The trailer is better then the movie. **

Justice League: Doom (2012)

Animated film has the Legion of Doom hacking Batman's computer system in order to discover the weaknesses of each member of the Justice League so as to neutralize them so that Vandal Savage will be free to launch a solar flare weapon at the Earth thereby frying all electronic technology (save his by virtue of a interphase device that will protect it from the flares rays), thus pushing what remains of civilization back to a primitive state that the Legion of Doom can easily rule, exhale. Fair. **

So Dear to My Heart (1948)

Largely forgotten Disney film is mostly live action with a surprisingly few animated supplement sequences. The story is of a young boy living in circa 1903 Indiana who raises a black sheep from lamb hood to competition in the county fair. Film features Burl Ives, Beulah Bondi, and Bobby Driscoll, who would later service as both the voice and physical model for Peter Pan in the Disney movie of the same name. Unlike Peter Pan however not a lot of people remember this movie, it has had very sporadic video and DVD release and one of the few broadcast entities that remembers it is BYU-TV which is how I saw it. Which brings me to how incredible 'white' this movie is, the only racial minority in the film is the black sheep. I'm not necessarily criticizing this, but the white protestant assumptions of this film now feel staggering in a era of multi-ethnic Disney princesses and lesbian couples on the Disney Channel. Beulah Bondi is extremely patient with that sheep. **1/2