The Flat (Rhoades)

“The Flat”

Holds Family’s

Hidden Past

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Like many of you, I’m at the age where older relatives are dying off. That’s when children and grandchildren must clean out apartments and flats and houses, sorting through the detritus of an unknown life, boxing up old clothing, bagging stray papers, trashing the unwanted, keeping the valuable. Or the memorable.

Possessions come with memories attached. Memories of those who possessed them. Sometimes memories of those who inherit these items.

In “The Flat” – now playing at the Tropic Cinema – we witness a Jewish family cleaning out the apartment of a grandmother who has passed away at 98. What are all these keepsakes? What to make of fur stoles? Magazine articles? Letters? Old photographs, faded and blurry?

The grandparents lived during the time of Nazis. And many memories are tied to that terrible era. Photographs depict them immigrating to Palestine in the 1930s, traveling in the company of acquaintances named von Mildenstein.

“For the first time in my life I have a past,” says the grandson.

However, it’s an uncomfortable past. Adolph Eichmann keeps turning up in the references. His mother doesn’t want to look into it.

This Israeli film by Arnon Goldfinger documents this excavation into his family history.

Goldfinger gradually discovers that his grandparents – Gerda and Kurt Tuchler – had a close personal relationship with a high Nazi official who had headed the SS office for Jewish affairs. During Eichmann’s trial, he often mentioned the SS officer who hired him, Baron Leopold von Mildenstein. Goldfinger’s grandparents’ friend.

His mother is “amazed” to learn her parents reunited with the von Mildensteins after the war. After all, her mother’s mother was murdered by the Nazis. So Hannah Goldfinger reluctantly sets out with her son to learn more about this pro-Zionist German who worked for Goebbels’ Ministry. And her parents.

Time Out Tel Aviv called the film “not to be missed” and cited it as one of the 25 most important art works from around the world for 2011.

I’m not sure I’d go that far, but “The Flat” does take family genealogy to a whole new level. As for Arnon Goldfinger, it’s a personal journey into the past. For Jews, it symbolizes the disrupted history of their families and friends.

srhoades@aol.com

Lincoln (Rhoades)

“Lincoln” Reveals

Noble But Nasty

Historical Politics

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Let’s hope that after a hotly fought 2012 campaign for the Presidency of the United States, audiences aren’t burnt out on politics. For Steven Spielberg’s epic “Lincoln” is a fascinating mirror held up to today’s political infighting that’s required to pass measures in the House and Senate.

Although based on historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s insightful book, “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” Spielberg focuses only on a portion of her story, the last four months of Lincoln’s life, particularly January 1865 as he maneuvers to pass the 13^th Amendment to the US Constitution in the House of Representatives.

Three of Lincoln’s cabinet members had run against him in the 1860 election (Secretary of State William H. Seward, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, and Attorney General Edward Bates). These are the men Lincoln must mobilize in order to pass the historic legislation abolishing slavery.

In “Lincoln,” the 16^th President's mostly successful efforts to reconcile these conflicting personalities and opposing political factions are played out against the backdrop of the Civil War.

“I think the movie is wanting to disabuse us of the sense that Lincoln is this high-minded idealist who wouldn’t stoop to using the machine to get votes,” says Lincoln biographer Ronald White. “And Secretary of State Seward – remember, he was Lincoln’s chief rival for the Republican nomination for president – is a shrewd politician. He’s in this with Lincoln; he’s not an unwilling co-conspirator. And he’s willing to do things sort of outside the box that Lincoln perhaps can’t do. Seward delivers the votes on the 13th Amendment in a variety of ways.”

Director Steven Spielberg says, “What permanently ended slavery was the very close vote in the House of Representatives over the 13th Amendment – that story I’m excited to tell.”

Despite all this rhetoric, Lincoln did not start the war to free the slaves, but rather to save the Union. However, he came to realize that he could no longer move forward without a true understanding of liberty and union. So he made the moral decision to embrace the cause.

Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, David Strathairn, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, James Spader, Hal Holbrook, and Tommy Lee Jones, “Lincoln” is a slow but thoughtful two-and-a-half-hour historical drama. It’s currently showing at the Tropic Cinema.

Spielberg’s “Lincoln” reflects the more serious side of the filmmaker (think: “Amistad,” “The Color Purple,” “Munich,” “Schindler’s List” as opposed to “Jurassic Park,’ “E.T. the Extra-terrestrial,” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark”).

This film manages to be at once “a historical piece, a commentary on modern politics, Oscar bait, and a fascinating study of people living in impossibly difficult times.”

Liam Neeson was originally slated to portray Lincoln, but when he dropped out, Daniel Day-Lewis stepped up to the podium. He makes perhaps the best Abraham Lincoln ever to appear on screen.

Tall, top-hatted, and with chin whiskers, Day-Lewis gives us a man from another age, a gnarled Lincoln with a hobbled gait and thin reedy voice. Maybe not the orator’s voice that we expect, but accurate according to historical accounts.

“He is very much deeply invested and immersed throughout the day when he's in character,” producer Kathleen Kennedy describes Day-Lewis’s Method Acting. “I mean, he’s given huge scenes with massive amounts of dialogue and he needs to stay in character … it’s a very, very performance-driven movie.”

Yes, there’s Oscar buzz.

Sally Field holds her own as Mary Todd Lincoln. Spielberg said, “She has always been my first choice to portray all the fragility and complexity that was Mary Todd Lincoln.”

David Strathairn gives us a Secretary of State Seward who is crafty, tough, a political ruffian.

How historically accurate is the movie?

Ronald White, author of “A. Lincoln: A Biography,” says, “The dramatic core of this remarkable four months of trying to pass the 13th Amendment is true. Is every word true? No. Did Lincoln say, ‘And to unborn generations ...’? No. But this is not a documentary. And so I think the delicate balance or blend between history and dramatic art comes off quite well.”

Keys Coalition Against Human Trafficking co-founder Timothy Gratz was disappointed that Frederick Douglass did not make an appearance in the movie.

“I think that’s a point well taken,” says Ronald White. “But what the audience doesn’t fully understand, in the final scene – almost the final scene –  where suddenly African-Americans arrive in the balcony as the final vote is to be taken, that one of those is Charles Douglass, the son of Frederick Douglass. Charles had fought in the famous Massachusetts 54th; he will write to his father after that climactic vote: ‘Oh, Father, how wonderful it is. People were cheering, they were crying tears of joy.’ So that had the potential for more black agency, but it doesn’t come to full fruition in the film.”

As Abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (played by Tommy Lee Jones) summarizes the events, the most liberating constitutional amendment in history had been “passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America” – that being Abraham Lincoln.

Yes, “Lincoln” is a stirring reminder that politics can be noble. At the same time it shows us that the nasty in-fighting of American party politics is not restricted to the modern era.

srhoades@aol.com

Brief Encounters (Rhoades)

Gregory Crewdson’s

Photographs Are

“Brief Encounters”

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

For more than forty years I have collected original photographs by famous photographers – Weston, Penn, Ansel Adams, you name them. But I have never owned a photograph by Gregory Crewdson. Not surprising. Some of his oversized images sell for better than $100,000. Pricey.

But when you examine the images you can see why. The composition is as meticulous as a scene from a movie, a grand staging that sometimes involves a whole town or a manufactured set or a post-production crew manipulating images.

“Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters” – the documentary playing this week at the Tropic Cinema – explores the lensman’s work.

Crewdson’s photographs are more akin to making a movie – well, one frame of a movie – quite unlike those “Decisive Moment” photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson. And yet Crewdson’s images also capture one moment in time, but staged, as mysterious as a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock film, leaving the viewer to wonder what came before or what is about to happen after. The “moment of the picture,” it’s been called.

As a young man Greg Crewdson studied photography at Yale. A documentary approach was in favor at the time, the photographer tasked with looking for a poetic meaning of life, catching a photo “on the run.” But this curious student was taking the train into New York City where he encountered exhibits by photographers like Cindy Sherman, the images comprised of contrived scenes, just the opposite of what he was being taught. He became inspired by the eerie work of Diane Arbus.

So he changed his way of seeing, of photographing. His work took on a cinematic approach. At first he built tableaux influenced by museum dioramas. Then he took to using cranes, photographing streets and other landscapes from an aerie viewpoint. Without permissions, without permits. And finally he was orchestrating detailed compositions of people and houses and streets and towns – everything precisely in its place, like a movie set, a moment where you “don’t have to think about the plot or the storyline or character development” to “get” the photograph.

His photographs reflect “lives of quiet desperation,” although friends describe Crewdson as a “fairly lighthearted easygoing guy who’s awfully funny.” But he has a macabre side, taking joy from swimming in a lake where the body of a 70-year-old unknown man was discovered the day before.

His characters are posed in mid-movement, often seen through windows or doorways, a voyeuristic intrusion that is left unexplained. Brief encounters indeed.

This insightful documentary explains the photographic mission of Gregory Crewdson as it follows him from set to set, photograph to photograph, exhibit to exhibit.

I wish I could afford one of his mysterious images for my collection.

srhoades@aol.com

The Big Picture (Rhoades)

“The Big Picture” Shows

Psychological Thriller

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

What if you suspected your wife was having an affair? What if you noticed the way she exchanges glances with your friend, an out-of-work National Geographic photographer? What if you thought it was telling the way he brushes his fingers along her back at a party?

Would you kill him?

And if you did, would you arrange to disappear – just vanish from a drifting sailboat?

And how would you handle it, if in Yugoslavia a new acquaintance keeps asking about your past, complaining that you reveal nothing of yourself?

Those are questions faced by Paul Exben, a partner in a French law firm, a man with a beautiful wife, two cherub-like sons, and a perfect existence. But is he willing to swap that life for a dead man’s identity?

Romain Duras (you’ll remember him from that charming Gallic comedy, “Heartbreaker”) carries the story as Paul. An accidental actor, he was discovered waiting in front of a high school in Paris by director Cédric Klapisch in the mid ‘90s.

Based on a 1997 Douglas Kennedy novel, director Eric Lartigau has given Duras a fascinating, albeit sometimes farfetched, framework for a mesmerizing performance.  

“The Big Picture” – not to be confused with the 1989 Kevin Bacon comedy – is currently playing at the Tropic Cinema. Its French title was “L’homme qui voulait vivre sa vie.”

That translates as “The man who wanted to live his life,” somewhat ironic in that Paul assumes someone else’s life.

The film has been called “a vagrant, fitful mixture of domestic drama, existential thriller in the vein of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley series, and evocation of the underbelly of new Europe.”

True enough. In a way, “The Big Picture” seems like more than one film, the vignettes in Paul Exben’s life strung together. But taken together, they give us the big picture.

srhoades@aol.com

Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel (Rhoades)

 “Diana Vreeland” Appeals

To More Than Fashionistas

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

In the movie “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar,” the Patrick Swayze drag queen character hands a copy of Diana Vreeland’s autobiography to a thrift-store clerk and tells him to “commit sections to memory.”

Not bad advice for any budding fashionista.

Vreeland served as fashion editor at both Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue.

I saw her once when she was later working as consultant to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A slender woman with great posture, she was the epitome of her dictum, “If you had a bump on your nose, it made no difference so long as you had a marvelous body and good carriage.”

She helped define fashion of the ‘60s – a period that she termed “Youthquake.”

Her story is told in a documentary – “Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel” – currently showing at the Tropic Cinema.

Born in Paris in 1903 to an American socialite mother and British father, young Diana Dalziel enjoyed a life of privilege. With the outbreak of World War I, her family moved to New York where they were accepted into high society. However, she remained a party girl until marrying banker Thomas Vreeland.

Joining Harper’s Bazaar in 1937, she wrote a popular column called “Why Don’t You…?” And later, during her nine tumultuous years as editor-in-chief at Vogue, she energized one of the greatest fashion movements of the last 50 years.

Diana Vreeland (1903 to 1989) was sometimes called the High Priestess of Fashion. She set the pace for the Grace Mirbellas and Glenda Baileys and Anna Wintours that followed. People either loved her or hated her.

Directed and produced by her granddaughter-in-law, Lisa Immordino Vreeland, along with Brent-Jorgen Perlmutt and Frédéric Tcheng, this documentary relies on archival film clips to allow Diana Vreeland to tell the story in her own words.

Immordino Vreeland came across her husband’s grandmother’s diaries in a collection at the New York Public Library. “At certain periods, she was talking about the need to stand out,” says the director. “She would write, aged 12: ‘I need to be original.’ She knew she had to do something special.”

And she did. As Immordino Vreeland puts it, “Diana was a feminist without realizing it.”

You’ll encounter many famous faces in this film, from Anjelica Huston to Lauren Hutton. But Vogue’s current editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and Andre Leon Talley, who worked for Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute, are conspicuously absent. Talley insisted that a well-known fashion scholar interview him, so the directors decided to pass him by. And when he later requested a screener after the movie played Tribeca, “We let him know he could buy a ticket like everybody else.”

“Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel” has been called an “acidic and gossipy cocktail.”

Drink up.

srhoades@aol.com

Anna Karenina (Rhoades)

 “Anna Karenina”

Is a Flawed Beauty

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Ever college student knows of “Anna Karenina,” that great Russian novel by Leo Tolstoy, even if they haven’t actually read it. It begins, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

The 8-part novel’s epigraph is a quote from the Bible: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.” The theme is that no one can build their own happiness on another’s pain.

Time Magazine declared it the “greatest novel ever written.” As did William Faulkner.

There have been more than a dozen movie versions, starring everyone from Greta Garbo to Vivien Leigh to Sophie Marceau. Most film buff’s are familiar with Greta Garbo’s classic 1935 rendition – and maybe have heard of the 1927 version also starring Garbo.

Now we have a new rendition starring Keira Knightley.

As directed by Joe Wright, this British production sticks fairly close to Tolstoy’s story – with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard.

Set in 19th century Tsarist Russia’s high-society, the storyline examines many aspects of love, from the passion (and guilt) between adulterers to a mother’s bond with her children.

As in the book, Anna Karenina questions her own happiness while change comes to her family and friends.

Yes, like the book, it has a tragic ending.

Keira Knightley calls it “definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

She describes the film as “looking at the human condition as a whole. And that’s going from the best of humanity to the worst of humanity often in one character.”

Director Joe Wright was challenged in another way – making this film different than those that had come before. “It just got to a point where I was walking around stately homes in England and I had people saying to me, ‘Well we’ve made three Keira Knightley films here before,’ and in Russia we had people saying, ‘Oh yes, we’ve made seven Anna Kareninas here before,’ and I was going, ‘Oh god, why am I doing this, it is so depressing.’”

The resulting film he likened to “jumping off a cliff.”

Some scenes depict the anti-heroine standing on a stage as her marriage and social status disintegrates.  The cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg are rendered as elaborate stage sets.

“I’m glad how daring Joe has been,” says Knightley, “and I’m glad I jumped off the cliff with him.” However, she admits that “the style will not work for everyone.”

The critics seem to agree. Variety called it technically “glorious,” but “unmistakably chilly” in the storytelling. Digital Spy criticized the narrative momentum, saying the movie chose “a glossy look over probing insights into a complicated character.”

“Anna Karenina” is currently showing at the Tropic Cinema.

It’s director Joe wright’s third film with Keira Knightley. Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” might be seen as failures, what one critic described as “trapped in literariness.”

“Anna Karenina” is more like a form of theater. Yet the highly mobile camera doesn’t allow it to look stagy.

Two-time Academy Award nominee Jude Law, who plays Anna’s husband, calls Stoppard’s script “remarkable.” He adds, “The piece looks at different angles of love and relationships, honestly and openly and without judgment. There is such an elegance to the way Tom writes dialogue. It’s masterful…”

Aaron Taylor-Johnson, with curly blond hair and soulful eyes, is the young cavalry officer who leads Anna astray. “That’s what this film is,” he says, “how far you go for love.”

Knightley observes, “Anna is a great and fallible character, one who speaks to what makes us human; in her, you see the flaws, the heroics, and the terrifying emotions. You care about her, and can’t help but recognize yourself.”

srhoades@aol.com

Flight (Rhoades)

 “Flight” Poised for

Successful Landing

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

We all reveled in that Miracle on the Hudson story, when Captain Chesley Sullenberger safely landed a plane in trouble with amazing grace and skill. Now we have a movie about another miraculous landing – not Sully this time, but a pilot named Whip Whitaker who performs an impossible landing by flipping his plane upside down when faced with an inflight emergency. However, things don’t go as well for Whip as they did for Scully after saving his planeload of passengers.

Denzel Washington takes on the role of Whip in “Flight,” the mystery drama that’s currently playing at the Tropic Cinema.

Seems when our movie captain gets checked out after his astonishing landing, alcohol is discovered in his system. Not good. Hero or not, he could next be landing in prison.

Question is: Did Whip's intoxication cause the crash, or did his stunt-pilot flying diminish the crash impact and save countless lives? And can Whip stay sober long enough to give investigators the answer.

The ensemble cast includes Don Cheadle, John Goodman, Bruce Greenwood, and Melissa Leo.

Director Robert Zemeckis (“Forrest Gump,” “Polar Express”) is himself an experienced pilot who understands “stalls, turbulence and dead stick landings.”

But he had a tough time (forgive me) in getting this film off the ground.

“In today’s Hollywood, you can't make a movie that is about ideas and complex characters for a lot of money,” Zemeckis says. “The development system destroys the possibility of ambiguity. It’s just the way things have evolved. And it’s very disappointing.”

It took 13 years to get the film to the screen. But Sullenberger’s miraculous flying gave Paramount more confidence in making the movie. “What if,” posited Paramount’s Adam Goodman, “Capt. Sully was wasted?”

That fanciful plot twist got “Flight” greenlighted.

This is Robert Zemeckis’s first live-action film since 2000’s “Cast Away.” And made with the smallest budget ($31 million) he’s had since 1980’s “Used Cars.” He and Denzel Washington waved their usual fees and Georgia provided generous tax rebates for filming near Atlanta.

Screenwriter John Gatins (“Real Steel”) based the crash depicted in “Flight” on the 2000 crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 where the pilots attempted to recover from a loss of control by flying the aircraft upside down. That crash, however, had no survivors.

Here, the emphasis is on the human elements, not the aerodynamics.

An alcoholic airlines pilot that you’re rooting for? Denzel Washington can pull it off, if anyone can. He’s had a successful history of playing flawed protagonists, from his Oscar-winning turn in “Training Day” to “American Gangster” and “Safe House.”

Zemeckis agreed that the actor could do it. “What intrigued me the most was how everything and every character was complex – no guys wearing white hats, no guys wearing black hats,” the director said.

Early audience tracking surveys have been positive. And the critics on Rotten Tomatoes have rated it at 88%.

Yes, you’ll like it, once you accept that “Flight” is not a retro ’70s disaster movie, but instead a touching film about a man learning to be honest with himself.

srhoades@aol.com