Very Short Review: Senna (2010)

18 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by percivalhenry in Sports, Very Short Review

Tags

We rented this documentary based on the enthusiastic reviews I remembered reading when it came out. I’m a sports fan, but I’ve never been particularly interested in auto racing or Formula 1, and my knowledge of Aryton Senna – the three-time world champion who died in a 1994 crash – was pretty rudimentary. I can confidently say I now know much more about Senna than I did, although I’m not sure the film was otherwise very fulfilling. It’s never boring, but it also never escapes the sports documentary genre in the way that made “Hoop Dreams” or “When We Were Kings” so compelling. “Senna” is told in straight chronological order with no narrator, using tons of racing and interview footage from Senna’s brief, meteoric career. Born to a wealthy Brazilian family, Senna was a phenomenon, racing and winning from a young age with spectacular style. The film is its most riveting as he tears around the tracks in Monte Carlo, Tokyo and Interlagos, Brazil, often from the vantage of a camera perched above his shoulder. As he advanced up the Formula 1 pecking order, Senna won an army of fans and made high-profile enemies, which snarled him in various dramas that played out on video. He was also handsome, charming and articulate in English, which helps the film’s cause of presenting Senna as the sympathetic victim of the corrupt world of auto racing. Cast as the villains are his chief rival, the canny Frenchman, Alain Prost, and the cynical head of the racing association, Jean-Marie Balestre, also a Frenchman, who appear to conspire to confound the brash Senna. We never hear from Prost or Balestre outside the contemporary footage, and this one-sided narrative is the film’s greatest weakness. We gets hints that Senna’s aggressive style meant he was not universally beloved by other drivers, mostly seen in a testy interview with former champion Jackie Stewart, but it’s not enough to dull the hagiographic shine. The film ends with long shots of Senna’s funeral, and interviews with weepy fans, one of which who said with Senna’s death, there would be “no joy” in Brazil. The movie forgets to mention Brazil’s soccer team won the World Cup that year.

Very Short Review: Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

17 Saturday May 2014

Posted by percivalhenry in Very Short Review

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

movies

“Cave of Forgotten Dreams” crosses Discovery-channel type documentary with philosophizing art house cinema. While not as gripping as his earlier “Grizzly Man,” it is similarly a canvas for German filmmaker and eccentric Werner Herzog’s ruminations about life and death, man and nature. Here, he is given rare access to film the Chauvet cave in France, rediscovered in 1994 after being completely sealed off by a landslide for 30,000 years. The natural formations of the cavern are spectacular but the real star is the paintings of prehistoric mammals, rendered with amazing vitality and sophistication. Long sections of the movie are devoted to simply filming the art in changing light. Herzog doesn’t dwell on the motivations of the painters, declaring them unknowable, and instead focuses on the abyss of time between us and them. In one section of the cave, carbon dating reveals two similar paintings were completed almost 5,000 years apart, a seeming instant for the artists but an incomprehensible gulf for us. The movie was filmed in 3D, to better capture the art on the cave’s undulations and ridges, and while it still worked in the conventional 2D, I wish I had seen it in its intended format. Herzog closes with an odd, whimsical coda about mutant albino crocodiles invading the cave, which didn’t make much sense but reminds us the film isn’t journalism but a personal vision, and he’s showing us the world as he sees it.

Very Short Review: Man of Steel

11 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by percivalhenry in Uncategorized, Very Short Review

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

movies

As a longtime collector of comic books, I’m pre-disposed to like super hero movies. This one was a challenge. A retelling of Superman’s origin from Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen), Man of Steel is big, bulky and disjointed, with key points of the story told through distracting flashbacks. A long opening chunk of the movie is set on Krypton, where Superman’s father Jor-El (played by Russell Crowe) has been re-imagined as an action hero, flying a winged beast through a collapsing city and battling the evil General Zod over the future of their dying race. In this telling, young Kal-El becomes a symbol of Jor-El’s hope for the species, and Zod vows to hunt him down. If you accept superhero stories are a form of American mythology, there should be room for new interpretations and you can’t get too hung up on any one version being correct. The problem with this approach, though, is that Jor-El never recedes into the background (he reappears after his death as a sort of helpful ghost who engineers plot points) and Superman becomes a pawn in his own story. Structurally, the plot – which ties Superman’s origin to the climactic battle with Zod – obscures the development of much else we associate with the Superman, so we never see Clark Kent at the Daily Planet, his youth is told in flashbacks, and Lois Lane (played with style by Amy Adams) is crammed awkwardly into the narrative. The movie is all first and third acts. Man of Steel also suffers from a gloom that feels borrowed from the last Star Trek movie, and particularly, the Dark Knight trilogy. In the comics, there’s the idea that Gotham City is New York south of 14th St., and Metropolis is the city north of 14th. That tonal difference should be reflected in the characters and their stories. Here, the clouds rarely part and when Superman plays earnest and sincere – asking a skeptical humanity to trust him – he comes across as a naive simpleton.

Very Short Review: Frances Ha

07 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by percivalhenry in Very Short Review

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

movies

Saw this on DVD the other night. It was fun and breezy, with enough uncomfortable moments to make it interesting. And I liked the idea of a female loser, which is rare in movies. But star Greta Gerwig seemed too old for the role of an aspiring young dancer, and the whole project, shot in black and white, had the feel of a film student’s first feature, financed with credit cards, not the work of a veteran (Noah Baumbach) with dozens of titles under his belt.