The Snake Pit (1948)

Based on author Mary Jane Ward's semi-autobiographical 1946 best seller The Snake Pit is the story of a young woman (Olivia de Havilland, amazingly still with us and will turn 100 in July) who spends the better part of a year in a state mental institution. While modern audiences have likely seen stories about mental illness and depictions of asylums and treatment centers many times before, at the time this film came out it was a pretty new and radical subject matter to build a major motion picture around. One of a number of semi documentary style social conciseness films released by 20th Century Fox in the late 1940's, with A Gentleman's Agreement being probably the best known, The Snake Pit is a little stilted and formal by todays standard but still manages to communicate well something of what serious mental illness must be like and to do so tastefully and with compassion. De Havilland's performance is strong and she is well served by a large supporting cast made up largely of much lesser known performers. When I finished this film I thought it was good but the more I thought about it the more it grew in my estimation, its so straight forward and largely free of flair (with the notable exception of the famous 'snake pit' processed shot which I though was really effective) that it might seem to underplay it potentially sensationalistic subject matter. But here I think its restraint is admirable, this was new stuff for a 1940's audience and it was so effective in what it conveyed that the film is often cited as leading directly to mental health reform in more then two dozen states. While the psychology of the film is mostly Freudian and doesn't address potential chemical and genetic causes for mental disorder, it does address its subject matter with decided empathy and humanizes the afflicted in a way that can still powerfully resonate. We are still making 'Oscar bate' movies around similar subject matter today and this is the movie that went there first. ****

No Way Out (1987)

Kevin Costner vehicle released the same year as the far superior The Untouchables. No Way Out concerns a navy commander (Costner) who enters into a romantic relationship with the mistress (a young Sean Young) of the Secretary of Defense (Gene Hackman). Needless to say this doesn't end well for those involved, Young is killed accidently and Costner finds himself in the unenviable position of being tasked by Hackman with "finding the killer", or rather finding a patsy to take the fall for Hackman. As the investigation continues evidence slowly starts to accumulate that will point to Costner as the mysterious man that Young was seeing behind Hackman's back. Costner then must scramble both to protect himself as well as others like Young's friend Iman who might get caught up in Hackman's chief of staff Will Patton's desperate efforts to save his boss (and secrete gay crush) from ruin. There is also a subplot involving a pork barrel navy sub program and a twist at the end that's either brilliant or stupid, either way it certainly felt tacked on, probably worked better in the book. I found most of this film off putting and derivative, but it coalesced just enough at the end to keep it out of hate territory. **

Hail, Ceaser! (2015)

If you know much of anything about the Coen brothers then you probably know that they are big fans of the films of classic Hollywood. Their filmography bears this out, they've made film noirs (Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn't There, The Big Lebowski), screwball comedies (Raising Arizona, Intolerable Cruelty, The Big Lebowski), a gangster picture (Millers Crossing), a movie about a screen writer (Barton Fink), a Frank Capra movie (The Hudsucker Proxy) and their musical (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) even took its name from the movie-in-the-movie at the center of Preston Sturges 1941 Hollywood satire Sullivan's Travels. So when the Coen's decided to make a movie (or another movie if you count Barton Fink) set largely inside a Hollywood studio of the golden era, it was a natural fit.

Hail, Caesar! will likely never be ranked near the top of the brothers canon, but its a deceptively good film and one of the best love letters to classic studio system Hollywood ever attempted. Set in 1951 Hollywood, at a time when television's ultimately successful threat to the studio system was just beginning to be discerned in the industry, the plot concerns Baird Whitlock (George Clooney, perpetually cast as a buffoon in one of the brothers longest running in-jokes) who is kidnapped late in the production of a movie titled Hail, Ceaser: A Tale of the Christ (one of those sword and sandal religious films that were so popular in the 1950's like Samson and Delilah, The Robe and Ben-Hur) by a group of what turn out to be largely inept communists. While Whitlock's kidnapping is the event the propels forward much of the movie's plot, Whitlock is not the main character, rather the main character is Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) head of production and resident "fixer" at the fictional Capitol Pictures, which by the way was also the name of the studio in Barton Fink so this movie could be seen as being part of the same 'universe' as the earlier film, only set five or so years later.

Eddie Mannix, whose name is obviously a reference to a real person named Eddie Mannix who did essentially the same job as Brolin's character for MGM for decades, is one of the most interestingly complex of the Coen Brothers characters. A devout Catholic Mannix loves his job, in part because of the people, in part because he works in what is essentially a factory for making fantasy's seem real, and in part because its so challenging. In the more outwardly moralistic time in which this movie and classic Hollywood took place a "fixers" job was managing the public images of stars and keeping potential scandals from becoming too public. In this role Mannix is tasked with both getting Whitlock back from his captors and preventing the story from becoming public, which involves fending off the insistent questioning of twin gossip columnists both played by Tilda Swinton.

But getting the captured star back from his abductors is only a part of Mannix's job, in the course of the little more then a day in which the movie plays out Mannix must check the reaction of various faith communities to the studios coming Christ epic, stop a starlet from posing for lewd photos, handle a casting crises on a drawing room drama just starting production, and find a husband for a star pregnant out of wedlock (Scarlett Johansson doing a wonderfully out of place seeming Brooklyn accent as an Esther Williams type musical star). These morally questionable activates inflame Mannix's Catholic guilt and cause him to entertain a job offer he doesn't want from the Lockheed Corporation, as well as bug his priest with daily confessions, though unable to face what's apparently  really gnawing at him he confesses always to minor infractions like sneaking cigarettes while his wife is trying to get him to quite and to "slapping a star in anger".

I liked this plot and I liked this central character but lets be clear that this is not a somber film,  though I often find myself latching on to the darker aspects of Coen brothers films while its the comedy that seems to resonate with most people. The plot in Hail, Ceaser! seems in many ways secondary to what I assume was the brothers primary interest in making this film, getting to play around in old studio system Hollywood. The musical numbers, the veiled references, the character actors with memorable faces, the chance to stretch around the imaginary back lot and soak in the comically heightened essence of a different time, everyone here seems to be having a ball. Among the big stars in smallish roles here are of course the aforementioned Johansson and Swinton, as well as Channing Tatum as a Gene Kelly like dancing star, Ralph Fiennes as a pretentious director, and Joel Coen's wife and muse Frances McDormand is a film editor who looks like Edith Head. But its relative unknown Alden Ehrereich who often steals the movie as genuinely humble singing cowboy star Hobie Doyle, he is so perfect in this part that its almost impossible to imagine there ever being a better role for him, I need to see this guy in another movie just so I can know for certain that he's an actor and not really Hobie Doyle.

Hail, Ceaser! is a movie that's simply going to be most appreciated by classic film buffs of which I consider myself one. While it has a few genuinely interesting things to say and observations to impart its profound in a very subtle way that doesn't take from its more outwardly amusing nature, I didn't really laugh much in this movie but I did often wear something of a knowing smile. Despite some big names in the cast Hail, Ceaser! didn't feel so much like one of the Coen's bigger scale crowd pleasers (like the excellent True Grit), but more like one of the smaller movies they seem to make largely to entertain themselves (like A Serious Man), and if you get that I think that you'll enjoy Hail, Ceaser! ***1/2

Vietnam! Vietnam! (1971ish)

Executive produced for the United States Information Agency by four time best director Oscar winner John Ford, Vietnam! Vietnam! was the last film with which the legendary movie maker was actively involved prior to his death in 1973. Made in support of a 'stay the course' war strategy that had largely been abandoned by the time the film was ready to be released in 1971, I've encountered contradictory information on the internet (big surprise) as to whether or not it actually was released, though the movie apparently sat in government vaults for decades before it became readily accessible on the internet. The roughly hour long documentary is divided into two parts, the first Vietnam! is a depiction of conditions 'in country', including massacred bodies and maimed children, it's at times pretty difficult to watch and was designed to make its American audience angry and want to continue supporting the war. The second part, Vietnam! deals with the political divide about the war in the United States, at first it starts out pretty even handed with propionates and opponents of the war given roughly equal time, however by the end of that segment its quite obvious clips were chosen to imply that the opponents were largely ignorant stooges and propionates far sighted patriots. As unlikely to change minds now as it was then, its still and interesting and kind of surreal artifact of its time.

Invictus (2009)

Clint Eastwood is a very solid, often excellent director, and while there are rare exceptions like Hearafter, I almost always really like his work. Yet at the same time I often find myself lacking any great desire to go out of my way to see one of his movies. Invictus is a great example of this, when I first I heard about it I more or less knew it was going to be good, but I also didn't really want to go out and see it. It's a kind of movie equivalent of eating your vegetables, you know once you do you'll be glad you did, but you often put off doing so in favor of something more immediately gratifying. Invictus tells the story of Nelson Mandela's efforts to bring peace and reconciliation to post apartheid South Africa (in part) by trying to get the national rugby team, historically loved by the whites and hated by the blacks, to win the World Cup and becoming a nationally unifying force. Mandela (here quite logically portrayed by Morgan Freeman and he's just as good as you'd except him to be in the part) helps facilitate this by winning over the teams captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon). So in short Eastwood combines an inspiring civil rights movie with an inspiring sports movie and its well, inspiring. A slightly indirect way of communicating the essence of Nelson Mandala to film, but on the whole an effective one. I particularly like the subplot of the racial integration of the presidential bodyguard, it served as good counterpoint to the sports narrative. This movie is good, I'm glad I saw it, but it's not one of Eastwood's strongest directorial works, I have nothing against it, but I don't feel any great desire to ever see it again. ***

The Hatefull Eight (2015)

Though filmed in 'Glorious 70 Millimeter', as it goes out of its way to tell you, Quentin Tarantino's second western (though I suppose Django Unchained is technically a 'southern') is set largely in the interior of a stagecoach and a one room way station in the snowy Wyoming frontier some years after the Civil War. This 'intimacy in cinemascope' is effectively like making a Delbert Mann movie in the style of David Lean. Taking the now largely unused film stock of an earlier era, as well as appropriating the now octogenarian composer Ennio Morricone, (whose work is synonymous with the Leone spaghetti westerns of the 1960's) to do the music, auteur Tarantino is right off signing his intention to take the tried and true tropes of his chosen genera and run them through his personal filter (and what more could we expect or want of him).

From Kurt Russell doing a damn fine job of channeling John Wayne, to Bruce Dern, himself a former cowboy actor, playing a decaying former confederate general. From Walter Goggins as the new sheriff in town, Michael Madsen as the largely silent stranger, Tim Roth as the (very) eastern dude, to Jennifer Jason Leigh as a very spunky gal indeed. We've seen these folks before, just not quite like this. Samuel L. Jackson breaks convention the most as the black Union veteran who is very no nonsense, yet he's also a cartoonishly skilled gunslinger, something we've seen many times before in westerns. All these variations on well known character types are stuck together for the greater part of three hours more or less just hating on each other.

Tarantino is a skilled craftsman of cinema, in his way with form and subverting it one of the finest perhaps ever. This is an elegantly crafted film, filled with sharp dialogue, wide ranging characterizations, and an atmosphere you can just soak in. Yet it's also probably his most unpleasant movie. Of course his taste for extremely bloody violence is well known, but here it is unusually droll, and either cruller then usual, or it just feels like that because all these characters are really pretty unlikable. The film lacks in its over the top violence what for want of a better term I'll call a kind of joy that is present in the directors other works, though I think you can start to feel it draining in this movies immediate predecessor Django Unchained. More then anything there is one certain scene in this film, and you'll know it if you ever see it, that is so awful, cruel and mean spirited that its just uncomfortable to sit through. All that being said I can't deny the films its artistry, no one makes a movie like Tarantino, though by the end of this movie I was wondering how much longer that will be enough. ***1/2