Olympus Has Fallen

Everything in Antoine Fuqua's latest film, Olympus Has Fallen, feels calculated -- and I'm not talking just about the impressively staged seizing of the White House and the near immobilization of the executive branch of  the government that opens the film. Fuqua knows his way around chaos and how to communicate the escalation of calamitous improbability without alienating or pissing off the audience. He's smarter than that and delivers here an entertaining 100 minutes of kick-assery. The populist director of Training Day [2001], Tears of the Sun [2003] and Shooter [2007],  Fuqua has cast a host of Hollywood's more likable faces: Aaron Eckhart as the luckless President Asher, Ashley Judd as his even unluckier first lady, Morgan Freeman (the most likable man in the known universe) as House Speaker Trumball and Gerard Butler (who co-producers this testosterone-y feast of grimacing gun play) as uber-agent Mike Banning, the president's sparring partner and hero. It's strategic, as was an early Oval Office confab that rings like the United Colors of Benneton and includes the president, his female Secretary of Defense (Oscar winner Melissa Leo), the black House Speaker, the Hispanic vice president and a coterie of colorful seconds stationed about the room. The film's villain, Kang (played with brilliant iciness by Rick Yune), is Korean but he's aligned with neither the North nor the South. Kang's manifesto, delivered off-handedly shortly after the White House is taken, contains some reference to the re-unification of his country and the alleviation of starvation and devastation among his people. It's not supposed to make sense beyond giving the evil guy some raison d'etre for his bloody badness. The film is mindless with an astronomical body count but it's enormously entertaining. Leave the kids home.

Rust and Bone

Rust and Bone is a powerfully distressing French film about an orca trainer who loses her legs in an aquatic accident and becomes FWB with an aimless bare knuckle brawler and single father. It features two remarkable, anquishing performances by Marion Cotillard and Armand Verdure and amazing camera wizardry that transforms the able-bodied Cotillard into a double amputee. Wonderful cinematic magic. Directed by Jacques Audiard (The Beat That My Heart Skipped).

Oz the Great and Powerful

Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful is the latest in a series of A-list directors' forays into top tier cinematic wizardry. The most noteworthy entries have been Scorsese's Hugo,  Spielberg's Adventures of Tin Tin and Ang Lee's Life of Pi, which won Lee the Best Director Oscar this year. Sam Raimi may not be as lauded as that trio but in about 30 years he has grown from low-budget horror flick visionary (The Evil Dead [1981]) to small canvas auteur (A Simple Plan [1998] and The Gift [2000]) and blockbuster craftsman (Spider-Man, S-M2, and S-M3). Oz the Great and Powerful is his latest and it has moment of visual sumptuousness and tender homages to the Victor Fleming original Wizard (1939) but in the end, to me, its Disney-fied one-world sentimentality seemed an odd companion to its outsized technological trickery. In other words, it's a stupendous piece of eye-candy that's just not very filling. To that end, the CGI creations of the flying monkey bellhop (voiced by Scrubs' Zach Braff) and the little china doll (voiced by child actress Joey King) are the most entrancing characters in the whole film, which boasts James Franco as Oz, uber-beauty Mila Kunis as Theodora, the good girl gone bad witch; Rachel Weisz as Evanora, Theodora's thoroughly bad witch sister; and Michelle Williams as Glinda, the sticky sweet good witch in a bubble. Yes, do take the kids. There's no blood but some frightening flying mandrills that might spook the really little ones.

Ethan Frome (1993)

Edith Wharton is not a writer I'm very familiar with though I enjoyed Martin Scorsese's elegantly stagy 1993 adaptation of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Age of Innocence, which starred Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder. The same year, British director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) released his adaptation of Ethan Frome, a tale of emotional and psychological entrapment. Madden's film starred Liam Neeson as Ethan Frome; Joan Allen as his distant cousin and later wife Zeena Frome; and Patricia Arquette as Zeena's distant cousin, Mattie Silver, who comes to live with the couple after Zeena falls ill of a host of mysterious ailments. Set around the turn of the 20th century in the snow-covered back country of fictitious Starkfield, Massachusetts, the film opens with a new preacher (Tate Donovan) arriving at this frigid outpost and seeing a grossly hobbled Ethan Frome trudging through the snow. He begins inquiries into this strange, broken man but is told by townspeople to leave the Fromes alone. Undeterred, the preacher goes to the Frome house and hires Ethan as a driver, to model Christian charity to his flock. After being snowed in at the Frome's hovel one night, the preacher becomes even more insistent on knowing the story of this sad and isolated man. How did he come to be so bent and miserable. An acquaintance of the Fromes'  weaves the sad but morbidly fascinating tale of love, duty and disappointment. The three principals (Neeson, Allen and Arquette) give solid performances (especially Allen, a personal favorite of mine) in a film that probes pretty deeply into the core of human despair. Highly recommended but the story, for those unfamiliar, is extraordinarily bleak.  

Hyde Park on Hudson

Roger Michell's Hyde Park on Hudson is a beguiling film that's a study in the art of beguilement. The artist under consideration is Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a terrific Bill Murray) and the object of his attention is a distant cousin, Daisy, (Laura Linney in a wonderfully nuanced performance) who is beckoned by FDR's mother (Elizabeth Wilson) to come to the family home on the Hudson to "entertain" the president while Eleanor (Olivia Williams) is otherwise occupied. It soon becomes apparent how much "entertaining" the president needs and soon Daisy is his constant companion and occasional sleepover mate. Daisy is enamored of and devoted to the charismatic president, who is trying to lead the country through the agonizing depths of what we now call the Great Depression. But her long-held secret relationship with Roosevelt, much like FDR's physical condition, was shielded from public scrutiny. It was understood and accepted, even by the president's other paramours. The central action of this beautiful and revealing motion picture is a visit to the Roosevelt estate by King George (Samuel  West) and Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Colman), the parents of the current British monarch, in 1939 to ask America for help in fending off the inevitable attack from Nazi Germany. The royal visit is a festival of diplomatic near-disasters and faux pas but also includes a  tremendously insightful tete-a-tete between the two world leaders -- one of the finest bits of acting I've seen in a while. Michell, who I only know from his films Changing Lanes (2002) and Notting Hill (1999), has an marvelous eye for period detail, a mischievous wit, and a narrative intelligence that gently reveals what much of world is only now coming to know -- that a much beloved U.S. president, a historic icon and international hero was, in fact, a cad and scoundrel. It's a marvelous tale well-told. Recommended but the subject matter is mature.

Of Their Times

The expression "a product of his time" re Strom Thurmond has been circulating since Mrs. Essie Mae Washington Williams' first announcement that she was the daughter of the senator and his family's housekeeper. But in how many ways was SHE heself a product of her time? My foster mother was teaching at Claflin University just next to S.C. State University when Mrs. Washington Williams was a student there. I asked my foster mother if she had known about Mrs. Washington Williams during those days. She said nearly everyone knew she was Thurmond's daughter but no one EVER said anything about it openly. She described Mrs. Washington Williams as pleasant and dignified. I couldn't get from my foster mother, she was in her late '80s at the time we were talking, why this was the case -- respect? fear?. She wouldn't or couldn't say. I always find myself going back to the fact that it was NOT uncommon for prominent white men to have children by black women back in the day. Some of the children benefited from that paternity but many (most?) were marginalized and without a true place on either side of the color line. And that is what made the mulatto of literature and film so "tragic."

Side Effects

I am unapologetic in my affection for Steven Soderbergh's work. I cannot name a feature film he's directed that I've seen that I did not enjoy -- some more than others, of course, but every one of them I found smart, swift and entertaining. I also thought his collaborative work with George Clooney, the HBO mini-series K Street, was genius. I was in the Soderbergh fan club from 1989's Sex Lies and Videotapes on (though I decided not to see last year's male stripper fantasia Magic Mike because I was getting dangerously close to Channing Tatum fatigue). Even though Tatum was a member of poster quartet for Soderbergh's Side Effects, I went into the picture hoping the woodenness of "the sexiest man in Hollywood" (?) would be offset by Jude Law's ineluctably enticing charisma, Rooney Mara's hypnotic intensity and Catherine Zeta-Jones unvarnished beauty. And it was. But also the Fates were kind as Tatum, an ex-con white color criminal married to an unaccountably depressed woman (Mara), is dispatched in true Hitchcockian fashion in the first reel by his sleepwalking bride, who is having trouble getting adjusted to new meds prescribed by her distracted shrink (Law). The script, by veteran film scrivener Scott Z. Burns (Contagion, The Informant, The Bourne Ultimatum), is arch and cagey, and brimming with misdirection and sly reveals. It's not quite Mamet in the area of the double-cross but it's pretty darn close. I loved it. Highly recommendation but not for the kiddies.

Floyd Collins

Nearly 90 years ago, a Kentucky caver got trapped underground and the media carnival that sprang up around his entrapment led to a Pulitzer Prize for a diminuitive reporter named William "Skeets" Miller, who filed daily first-person dispatc...hes for the Courier-Journal throughout Collins' entombment. Floyd Collins died in the cave on Feb. 13, 1925, just days before rescuers were able to reach him. His tragic story was turned into a scathing film by Billy Wilder, Ace in the Hole, in 1951 and an Off-Broadway musical in 1996. I've used Brucker and Murray's book about Collins, Trapped: The Story of Floyd Collins, in my classes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-b7u4aUs_4

Silver Linings Playbook

David O. Russell knows his way around dysfunction and does that peculiar variety we find in families (witness The Fighter, Spank the Monkey) especially well. His Oscar contending Silver Linings Playbook plumbs the depths of modern day mental illness (bi-polar and other affective disorders) with remarkable insight and humor. It takes a unique vision to be able to see the light side of such personal pain. Russell, who also wrote the screenplay based on the novel by Matthew Quick, tells the story of a manic-depressive young Philadelphia man named Pat (an outstanding Bradley Cooper) who was institutionalized after beating his wife's lover nearly to death. His mother (Jacki Weaver) signs him out of the hospital despite warnings from physicians that Pat is not quite ready. His father, Pat Sr., (Robert De Niro) who has his own mental health issues, is skeptical but quickly comes to feel his son's new-found optimism might come in handy as Pat Sr. makes book on his beloved Eagles. Pat Jr. is less interested in his father's enterprise than he is in getting back with his estranged wife, Nikki, who everybody says has moved on. But Pat does not heed the warnings. In the course of moving closer and closer to an encounter with his wife, Pat meets another damaged party, Tiffany (a wonderfully engaging Jennifer Lawrence), who has been on a promiscuous binge since her cop husband was killed three years before. She convinces him that he could win Nikki back if he enters a dance competition with her, proving he is "focused, collaborative and disciplined." Cooper and Lawrence have terrific chemistry and rhythm in roles that require that they pounce all over each other -- verbally, emotionally, physically. It's enormously entertaining to watch them.  The film itself is thought-provoking and affirming although some some scenes are quite difficult to watch. Highly Recommended but not for children or those disturbed by raw familial aggression.

Zero Dark Thirty

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (2008) won a boatload of awards in 2009, including the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director. Bigelow has not been nominated for an Oscar for directing Zero Dark Thirty, and, though it's a quality picture I won't argue with the Academy's decision. In fact, I suspect the reason the film has been included among the 9 contenders for Best Picture has more to do with its subject matter (the dogged post 9/11 hunt for Osama Bin Laden) than anything else. This episodic movie follows a young female CIA counter-terrorism agent named Maya (Jessica Chastain) as she and her fellow operatives, principally chief interrogator Dan (Jason Clarke), try to pull information out of detainees through torture and intimidation only to be thwarted repeatedly by the prisoner's resistance and Al Qaeda caginess. Shortly after joining the team, which is stationed first in Pakistan and then Afghanistan, Maya discovers the identity of one of Bin Laden's couriers. It is her pursuit of this ghostly figure that lies at the heart of the film. Chastain plays Maya with an edginess that is not altogether inappropriate in the male-dominated field of counter-intelligence, but occasionally feels off-key -- too much profanity, too many threats. But because there is so little conventional character development in this film, I was not able to determine if the ambivalence I felt toward Maya as a person was the script (written by Mark Boal, who also wrote the much tighter and much more graceful Hurt Locker), the directing or the acting. Still, Bigelow is a master at staging close-quarter action sequences and the siege on Bin Laden's compound that ends the film is wonderfully constructed and worth the wait. Recommended but way too intense for children.

Quvenzhane Wallis

This remarkable young lady -- Quvenzhane Wallis -- has been nominated for an Academy Award as BEST ACTRESS for Beasts of the Southern Wild. I'm pretty sure she's the youngest nominee in this category EVER. Do see this amazing film.

http://culturechronicles.blogspot.com/2012/09/beasts-of-southern-wild.html

Holy Motors

Leos Carax's fantastical and puzzling film Holy Motors is a string of surreal and disconnected vignettes set in Paris that revolve around various personalities played by the same actor, Denis Lavant, and that range in tone from the touching to the repulsive. Lavant's M. Oscar, an apparently spectral figure, is an actor and master of disguise who travels from appointment to appointment in a white stretch limousine driven by Celine (Edith Scob). Over the course of 24 hours, M. Oscar contorts his body into that of a crippled beggar, assassinates a banker, kidnaps a fashion model (Eva Mendes), and reunites with a doomed former lover (Kylie Minogue), all in different guises. The film is all unsettling, though entrancingly shot, stream of consciousness with themes of mortality and emotional torpdiness woven into each of M. Oscar's appointments. Carax, who has not directed a feature film since 1999, clearly has a lot on his mind and much of it is on the screen, I suppose, but, in the end, it's nearly anybody's guess what it all means. Explicit nudity and general confusion.

Les Miserables

Tom Hooper (Oscar winner for The King's Speech) has lovingly adapted the musical theater phenomenon Les Miserables (which debuted on the stage in 1980) to the silver screen, using the medium of film to open up the streets of 19th century Paris and the 1832 uprising that is at the center of the movie's narrative while offering greater intimacy to the individual miseries of the story's principals. Hugh Jackman (a movie star who is also a richly talented theatrical performer) lends impressive gravitas to the thankless role of Jean Valjean, the fugitive bread thief who spends the film (and Victor Hugo's novel) bearing his soul and eluding Inspector Javert (an oddly inert Russell Crowe). Over the course of roughly two decades, Valjean, who hides his identity to avoid capture, goes from bitter malcontent to noble saint.  Along the way he adopts an orphaned waif, Cosette (played as a young woman by Amanda Seyfried). Cosette's mother, Fantine, (a riveting Anne Hathaway) was run out of Valjean's garment factory by a lusty overseer, reduced to turning tricks on the docks and dies 30 minutes into the film. Yes, there's a lot going on here, which forces the film (like the stage version) to rely on familiar tropes and a few cliches to keep things moving. But the film's ultimate appeal lies not in the elegance of its plot lines but in the beauty of its score. Claude-Michel Schonberg (music) and Herbert Kretzmer (English adaptor of the French lyrics by Alain Boubill and Jean-Marc Natel) composed a half-dozen semi-operatic musical motifs that tie the action and the characters together. The songs seemingly were crafted to be overplayed (in the style of grand opera) and none of the principal actors holds anything back. Even the featured players like Helena Bonham-Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen (comic relief as the extortionist innkeepers, the Thenardiers) are given ample room to strut and preen. As others have noted, the standout in the film is  young Eddie Redmayne (My Week with Marilyn) as the love-struck revolutionary Marius. He sings with a heartthrob's tenor and his character is featured on several of the film's loveliest songs. His trio A Heart Full of Love with Seyfried and newcomer Samantha Barks as Eponine is a high-point of Act One and his solo performance of Empty Chairs and Empty Tables will leave no one unmoved. On that note, the film is an unapologetic tearjerker but highly recommended nonetheless.

Django Unchained

Quentin Tarantino may know the meaning of understatement but he certainly doesn't  apply it to his films. The best of Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Inglourious Basterds) are American Grand guignol -- intensely dramatic stories of bullets and blood, buckets and buckets of blood.  His films are often structurally complex and frequently surreal and have drawn Hollywood's finest. Tarantino's latest typically incredible tale, Django Unchained, is the story of a runaway slave Django (Oscar winner Jamie Foxx) who is bought and freed by a German dentist / bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Oscar winner Christoph Waltz) so that Django can lead him to a trio of fugitives hiding on a Mississippi plantation. In the course of their getting acquainted, Django tells Schultz he would like help finding and freeing his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who, as luck would have it is at the same plantation. Before they set off, however, Django must learn how to handle a six-shooter and soon displays lightning reflexes and an eagle eye. Django dresses as The Blue Boy and poses as the doctor's valet, while he and Schultz winter out West -- gunning down bad guys without remorse.  When spring arrives, they head south and that is where they encounter Calvin Candie (Leondard DiCaprio) the sadistic (is there any other kind) master of Candieland Plantation (go with it) and his slithering Uncle Tom of a butler Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson). Tarantino stages some terrifically tense and excruciatingly brutal scenes down in Dixie. The entire film is a vulgar and irreverent live action cartoon that has more than a few howlingly funny moments amidst all of the gore (as we've come to expect). Some viewers have raised questions about the use of the n-word in the film and, frankly, I'm amazed that the point has even been raised. The film is set pre-Civil War and so the word seems appropriate. What does seem anachronistic and pointless is the use of M-F by butler Stephen. The effect was way too ghetto for my taste. Highly recommended but it is  an extremely violent affair.

Hitchcock

In the final analysis, Sacha Gervasi's Hitchcock is a love story, which is what is so surprising about the film. One would assume, understandably, from the film's trailers that this is  a biopic of the legendary director Sir Alfred Hitchcock -- which it is, sort of -- and not a probing and intimate exploration of his complex relationship with his wife / confidante / editor Alma Reville, which it is absolutely. Both Sir Anthony Perkins (prosthetically unrecognizable as the Master of Suspense) and Dame Helen Mirren (prim and dutiful) as wife Alma are superb, in every way, as one would expect. The screenplay by John J. McLaughlin (Black Swan) is crafted sharply, with spaces between the lines that reveal almost as much as the dialogue does about the love and envy between these two people who have committed themselves to one another and to the art of filmmaking. Based on the book Stephen Rebello, the movie centers on Hitch's professional crisis after the success of North by Northwest when he was feeling pressure from Paramount to direct something that compared to that winner he'd delivered to MGM.  In a telling moment early in the film, Hitch confesses to Alma that he felt the need to outdo himself and he needed something different, something fresh. That's when the impossibility of making a motion picture out of the book Psycho came to him and became, in time, an obsession as potent as that he had for leggy blondes (apologies to Flight of the Conchords), in this instance, epitomized by Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johannson). This is Gervasi's first feature film and it has a few of the affectations and gaffes of a new director -- insider puns and anachronisms -- but it's a fine picture and is sure to be a delight, especially for movie fans. Recommended.

Anna Karenina

Joe Wright's Anna Karenina is a feast of cinematic elegance and motion. With a screenplay by Tom Stoppard (who won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love) this classic story of a virtuous Russian noblewoman (Keira Knightley) who abandons the love of her kind and patient husband (Jude Law) to answer the persistent entreaties of a dashing young count (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and eventually descends into fatal madness has been structured like a stage play that often bursts out from the proscenium onto snowscapes and verdant meadows. It's an intriguing concept; one I don't believe I've ever seen done quite like this. Stoppard's Shakespeare in Love (1998) blended action on the boards and in the streets, but not like this film. This is ingenious.  By showing the audience the machinery behind the action, Wright and Stoppard appear to be saying quite literally that Tolstoy's tragic tale of facades is melodramatic by design. And what marvelous machinery. A long scene of a seasonal ball at which Anna and her illicit suitor Vronksy meet early in the film is a swirling human carousel of twisting arms and hands. It's brilliantly elegant and erotic, like foreplay in jodhpurs and bustles. Wright -- who is best known for his 2007 film Atonement which also starred Knightley -- has delivered a film that is resplendent and romantic and highly recommended.

Fiddler on the Roof (1964)

A Jewish musical for a family holiday singalong? Why not? The holidays are not just about Christmas, after all. The Bock and Harnick score for Fiddler on the Roof (the eternal story about a devout and befuddled milkman, his wife and their five daughters during the Russian pogroms) is loaded with singable tunes -- Matchmaker, Matchmaker; Sunrise, Sunset; If I Were a Rich Man; Sabbath Prayer, among them. All wonderful. The seminal recording of this show from 1964 features Zero Mostel's Tevye. His duet with Maria Karnilova,  Do You Love Me?, is lovely and sweet and sad and true.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is loaded with the cinema auteur's trademark splendor -- breathtaking vistas, richly fantastic interiors, amazing creatures (this film's demonic orcs seem more three-dimensional), epic battles -- but the true payday for this first entry in another Jackson / Tolkien trilogy, at least for me, were the set pieces that feature some stellar cameos. Yes, yes, Ian McKellen is terrific as the cagey wizard Gandalf the Grey and Martin Freeman (Sherlock and The Office [original U.K. series]) is a beautifully realized Bilbo Baggins, the "burglar / hobbit" recruited by the 13 dwarves pictured here to help them reclaim from a loathsome dragon their mountain home and the mounds of treasure within. In contrast to the Lord of the Rings series, which balanced action and exposition pretty well, some sections of the nearly three-hour film drag but that's to cavil about relatively small matters when what Jackson has put on the screen is so wonderfully entertaining. I was especially delighted by the Troll brothers (William Kircher, Peter Hambleton and Mark Hadlow) as they bickered over the best seasoning for dwarf-on-a-spit, the riddle  scene with Bilbo and Gollum (the ever amazing Andy Serkis) and the Great Goblin's gambol, which featured Barry Humphries (yes, he of Dame Edna Everidge) as the Goblin. The Hobbit has more humorous moments than the Ring trilogy and no romance, unless you count audience members falling under the spell of the dreamy dwarf prince Thorin, played by the towering (6'-2") Richard Armitage. The film is probably too intense for very young children. The orcs are frightening but the dwarves are fun, as is to be expected. Highly Recommended.

Golden Globe nominations

The Golden Globe nominations were announced today, and, predictably, Lincoln appears to be the film to beat with nominations for best picture, director (Steven Spielberg), actor (Daniel Day-Lews), supporting actor (Tommy Lee Jones) and supporting actress (Sally Field) among its seven nods. I'm a bit behind in my viewing as I've not seen many of the other picture nominees -- Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, Lasse Hallstrom's Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Quentin Tarantino's Django, David O. Russell's Silver Lining Playbook, Tom Hooper's Les Miserables or newcomer Sacha Gervasi's Hitchcock.  I've not seen a single one of the best actress performances but I have seen all five best actor performances (which might suggest that women are typically given stronger roles in smaller films) and would rank them Day-Lewis, Denzel Washington in Flight, John Hawkes in The Session, Joaquin Phoenix in The Master and Richard Gere in Arbitrage.The other lead performance in Paul Thomas Anderson's puzzling The Master, Philip Seymour Hoffman, was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, a smart move as he and Phoenix would have cancelled each other out otherwise, even though neither stands a chance of taking the Globe from Daniel Day Lewis, IMO.

Go (1999)

Doug Liman's Go (1999) begins on Christmas Eve and ends the next morning and follows a rag tag band of supermarket clerks and a couple of their customers in a wild ride through the environs of L.A. and Las Vegas in search of drugs and / or sex. Liman, director of Swingers and The Bourne Identity, takes an intricate script by John August and weaves together three tales of woe and intrigue (to borrow from Car Talk) that star, principally, Sarah Polley as Ronna, a luckless checkout girl who wants to try her hand at drug dealing to stave off eviction from her apartment; Desmond Askew as Ronna's co-worker, a British horn dog named Simon who sets out for Vegas with his band of merry men and gets chased out by the mob; and Jay Mohr and Scott Wolf as a pair of a soap opera stars who are also lovers working off drug charges by helping a police sting bring down a major player named Todd Gaines (Timothy Olyphant). Nearly everyone ends up at a  Mary Xmas warehouse rave where scores are settled. It's tons of irreverent late-night holiday fun. Recommended. P.S. A pre-Tom Cruise Katie Holmes is featured as Ronna's wary but willing best friend Clare.

Beautiful Thing (1996)

Because Hettie Macdonald's first feature film, Beautiful Thing (1996), has so much genuine heart, a winning cast of characters, a fresh and respectful treatment of gay youth, and a soundtrack by Mama Cass, one will forgive it's achingly bad third reel. Based on Jonathan Harvey's play, which apparently is still routinely performed in Britain, the film tells the story of two teen-aged Londoners -- Jamie and Ste -- growing up next door to each other in the working class tenements of the Thamesmead district. Jamie is a the bookish loner who lives with his single Mum, Sandra, a barmaid with dreams of running her own pub. Ste is the affable jock who is routinely beaten by his abusive father and older brother. Jamie is smitten with Ste, who is oblivious (or so we are led to believe) until a particularly bad beat down finds the boy bunking next door at Jamie's. Macdonald's staging of the boys' "discovery" is handled smartly, respectfully and realistically, even though one could argue that having "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" from The Sound of Music playing in the background is a bit heavy-handed. The boys' friendships becomes a point of peculiar interest for their nosy neighbor Leah (Tameka Empson), who spends most of the film channeling Mama Cass. The inevitable panicked confrontation between a fearful Sandra and her tearful son, though overwrought, somehow rings true. After that scene, however, the movie careers into a ditch of implausibility following a drug-induced Leah. The final shot of the lads doing a box step in the tenement quad is pure fantasy. For those unaccustomed to London working class dialects, some of the dialogue (not counting universal vulgarisms) might be indecipherable  but that won't keep you from enjoying a different kind of family film. FYI, for fans of Dr. Who, Macdonald went on to direct the highly celebrated Blink episode from 2007, which featured the weeping angels. Recommended.

Six Feet Under (2001-2005)

Leave it to Alan Ball to kick off his terrifically involving (though maddeningly uneven) HBO series Six Feet Under with a fatal car wreck on Christmas Eve. The patriarch of a brittle and self-involved L.A. family, the Fishers, is a mortician who is killed when his funeral coach (a/k/a hearse) is T-boned by a city bus while he reaches for another smoke. (Ball has never met an irony he did not immediately fall in love with.) Nathaniel Fisher (Richard Jenkins) leaves behind his sexually and socially repressed wife, Ruth (Frances Conroy); his emotionally stunted libertine of an older son, Nate (Peter Krause); his closeted and repressed younger son, David (Michael C. Hall); a raging spitfire of a daughter, Clair (Lauren Ambrose) who was reputedly Ball's alter ego and all of their many loves and losses. Regular viewers of the series, which aired from 2001 to 2005, grew to know and love the Fishers and the series despite their pretty obvious flaws (both the Fishers' and the series'). I was devoted to it for the entirety of its run and occasionally reach back to re-watch favorite episodes, among them "Back to the Garden" from Season 2, which features the wonderful Patricia Clarkson as Ruth's airy sister Sarah who invites Clair out to Topanga Canyon for a visit and a little spiritual awakening.

The Time of Their Lives (1946)

Facebook Friends of a certain age might remember when old movies were shown on network television pretty routinely. Staples on Saturday and Sunday afternoons were the comedies of the '40s that featured Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, the Eastside Kids, and Abbott and Costello. Created more as diversions from the stresses of war and want than as art, these films were later broadcast on television because they were cheap and inoffensive family fare. I don't know that any of them has aged particularly well (although Seth McFarlane has gotten quite a lot of mileage out of the Crosby and Hope "Road to ..." movies on Family Guy) but I have a special fondness for Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. My favorite of the dozens of films they released during the '40s and '50s is probably not the best (technically) in their catalog but it's imaginative and a little magical, The Time of Their Lives (1946). The movie tells the story of a humble tinker and a young woman who meet on a colonial estate and are mistakenly killed as traitors by American Revolutionary War soldiers while trying to leave the estate to warn General Washington of Benedict Arnold's treachery. Their bodies are dumped in a well and cursed. For more than 150 years their ghosts are trapped on the property and may only be released to go to heaven if proof of their innocence is revealed. Costello plays the tinker, Marjorie Allen the young woman who was killed with him and Abbott plays both the tinker's rival and later a psychiatrist. The special effects (which were endlessly fascinating back in the day) will seem quaint to some but, unlike today's effects, they won't overwhelm the story. Recommended.

The Big Picture (1989)

Christopher Guest's first feature film, The Big Picture, was about making a movie that is true to your individual vision ... and how impossible that is in Hollywood. Guest, who went on to direct other wonderfully oddball pictures -- Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind -- has crafted a clever and insightful tale about a film student (Kevin Bacon) who after winning a school competition accepts an offer to direct an actual movie at an actual studio.  Despite some major red flags during his first meeting with a studio producer (J.T. Walsh), he descends deeper and deeper into the maw of the beast, compromising his vision, alienating his girlfriend (Emily Longstreth), dumping his friend and cameraman (Michael McKean) and coming close to forgetting why he got involved in the business in the first place. In short, he becomes a typical Tinsel Town D-bag. Guest, a terrific film satirist and chameleonic actor, has made an imaginative and ultimately uplifting film that is actually about more than movies -- as the title suggests.

Claudine (1974)

Diahann Carroll was not the first choice for the title role in John Berry's Claudine (1974), a single mom of six living in Harlem and trying to keep body and soul together on public assistance. The great Diana Sands (A Raisin in the Sun) was originally cast but bowed out when she was diagnosed with cancer. She asked Carroll (TV's Julia) to do the picture, a fresh and refreshing film of a woman caught in a familiar Catch 22 created by the "system" that penalizes welfare recipients for actually working. Unable to make enough to provide for her children, Claudine lies to social service workers about having a job as a maid. It's while working that she meets a kind and cheerful garbage collector Rupert, played by James Earl Jones. Claudine is cautious after being loved then abandoned before but not nearly as wary as her children, who dislike her friend immediately. Eventually, they warm up to him but, as so often happens in life and the movies, reversals and set backs are visited upon the couple and old wounds are exposed anew and no one manages the disappointment well, but none less well than Claudine's oldest, Charles, played by Lawrence Hilton-Jackson (later of Welcome Back, Kotter). The final reel is poignant and, yes, a little sentimental but it works. Both Carroll and Jones are wonderful in this lovingly charming film that wore its dignity like a crown. Carroll was nominated for an Oscar for her performance. She didn't take home the statue but the film is certainly a winner. Recommended..