ROMA

ROMA

          The Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s career includes a rather unusual variety of works.  Like the comedian who has always wanted to play Hamlet, he apparently disdains the successful mainstream Hollywood films he has made, while aspiring to something he believes is stronger, truer, perhaps realer.  In addition to the erotic road movie, Y Tu Mamá Tambien (2001), he directed Children of Men (2006), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), and Gravity (2013), pictures that won both critical praise and box office bucks. 

His new film, Roma, however, brings his focus back to his native country and, according to his own statements, his family history and background.  Its simple story involves a middle class family living in a suburb of Mexico City, the Roma of the title; the family consists of the physician father, the research biologist mother, a grandmother, and three children.  The real subject of the picture, and the character through whose eyes all the people appear and act, is the maid/housekeeper/nanny Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio).  The movie opens with her going about one of her daily tasks, repeated throughout the course of events, and progresses deliberately through the routine of her days—cleaning, making beds, helping the cook, obeying the whims of her sometimes capricious employer (Marina de Taviva), and especially, dealing with the children.

The movie settles into the rhythms of the family’s life, often set against the troubled background of recent Mexican history—the action takes place in the 1970s—showing some of the large and small public events of its time.  A small band of uniformed men, playing a martial tune, marches down their street periodically; a group of apparent paramilitary trainees engage in some sort of ninja exercises; a political controversy ignites a demonstration that explodes into vandalism, violence, and death.

As the country undergoes its struggles and tensions, so does the family.  The father, Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), claiming initially to be attending what turns out to be a very long conference, actually leaves his wife and children for another woman.  Cleo’s boyfriend Fermin (Jorge Antonio Guerrero), one of the militant kung fu fighters, turns out to be a vicious betrayer, who impregnates her, then refuses to acknowledge either her or her pregnancy.  The focus on Cleo and the plight of the mother and family emphasizes the strength of the female and the weakness of the male characters, selfish, cruel, and inadequate. 

Filmed in black and white, at times in an almost documentary style, and somewhat reminiscent of the highly praised Indian film of 1955, Pather Panchali, in its frequent employment of panoramic shots, Roma expands its view from the confines of the family household where Cleo works to the squalid town she visits to confront the angry, faithless Fermin.  Its concentration on the family expands along with the camera’s changing focus, comprehending some of the breadth of the political violence and its intrusion into Cleo’s life. 

Its steadfast fix on Cleo, her endless humdrum chores, her relationship to the family she works for, and the ultimate resolution of the marital problems all combine to make Roma a rather different version of that familiar contemporary genre, the chick flick.  In this movie the women confront and triumph over adversity, even tragedy, and reaffirm the power of the family and their love of the children.  The film shows the inadequacy of the males and the growing strength of the females, a theme far distant from the usual romantic nonsense of the form, and a theme appropriate to the plot, the characters, and to Roma itself.

A Different Kind of Cinema

After yet another summer of comic book movies, superhero movies, and just plain bad movies, most accompanied by paroxysms of praise from the usual unreliable sources, perhaps viewers and reviewers should look for some other kind of cinema.  I do not refer to the much celebrated “diversity,” which seems to translate as women, people of color, or LGBTQ individuals instead of straight white males playing those same superheroes in those same overproduced spectacles, a practice that still fails to make them better films.  A character of any gender or race with superhuman abilities acting against a background of exploding sets or engaging in an extended automobile chase or flying through the air or battling it out with some unlikely villain still fails to make a bad idea better.  Over the last year or so, however, a number of small, mostly unheralded works appeared, attracting too little attention from critics and audiences; none is spectacular in any way, but all are worth viewing.

Aside from their avoidance of stunts, pyrotechnics, and computer generated effects, the element that most distinguishes three recent films is the almost total absence of major stars.  The Florida Project, The Rider, and Leave No Trace tell their small, undramatic stories with simple plots and ordinary people.  The phrase means exactly that—the movies show their subjects apparently playing themselves in the stories of their lives.  If any people on the screen are really professional actors, I don’t imagine that many in the audiences have seen or even heard of them before.   

The only familiar face in The Florida Project, Willem Dafoe plays the manager of a welfare motel where a single mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite) and her daughter Moonee (Brooklyn Prince) live, along with a number of other tenants, barely managing to survive.  The simple, generally straight-ahead plot shows the daily struggle of people scraping by, trying to cope with poverty, joblessness, homelessness, eventually even hopelessness.  In addition to all that they must cope with, they face a bureaucracy that, however well meaning, manages to obstruct and even oppress them.  Focusing mostly on the children who live in the place, the film looks almost as if the director, Sean Baker, simply set up his camera and allowed them to just be themselves, just be little kids; although the film refuses to settle for any kind of satisfying closure, those children, running around the place, annoying other tenants, playing games, eating treats, getting into trouble, yearning for something more, something that they probably will never have, are both sad and quite wonderful.

In some ways even more experimental than the latest art house favorite, The Rider shows once again how well nonprofessional actors can perform on the screen--not amateur actors, who often act their little heads off, but non-actors, again, ordinary people.  Though hardly even flickering on the critical radar screen, The Rider deserves a good deal more attention from reviewers and audiences than it attracted.  In a gritty, naturalistic manner, the movie deals with people essentially playing themselves in the context of their own particular situation; in effect it celebrates the small events that, like it or not, make up the substance of all our lives.  The film chronicles the efforts of a severely injured young rodeo rider, Brady Blackburn, played by Brady Jandreau, to resume his career; Jandreau’s real father plays his father, and his developmentally disabled sister Lily plays his sister Lily.  Hoping that his injury—apparently causing serious brain damage—will improve, he works at a part-time job and occasionally employs his skill as a horse trainer; he dreams, however, of returning to the rodeo.  He frequently visits a friend, Lane Scott, again an actual person, an actual friend, playing himself, a quadriplegic paralyzed from his own accident, in this case riding Brahma bulls.  In a moment that captures the poignancy of the whole situation, Brady talks with his friend, exercises him as well as he can, while in the background a video repeatedly shows Lane riding the bulls and the disaster that ensues, a moment of triumph and tragedy that contrasts with the condition of the two injured cowboys.

The minimalism, the drab naturalism, and the laconic dialogue reflect in their own way the sensibility of the modern Western, the notion of a world long past, where the ambitions of a cowboy, a rodeo rider, an admired celebrity diminish into anonymity, and a promising career dwindles into a job as a cashier in a discount store.  The film, however, also falls into the classic Western mode, paying tribute to an honorable history, with many of the objects and themes associated with the form—horses and riders, of course, panoramic shots of the endless, empty South Dakota prairies, even a tragic shooting with a revolver.  The Rider displays a kind of bleak and understated eloquence in its unsentimental and uncompromising story of a cowboy who only wants to ride his beloved horse and compete in the rodeo.  It offers very little in the way of solutions beyond the vague promise that life, as it must, goes on.

Based on a novel titled My Abandonment, perhaps the most minimalist film of the trio, Leave No Trace confronts a simple and possibly not uncommon situation in an era haunted by homelessness, post-traumatic stress, and maybe even a sense of utter emptiness.  The plot consists merely of the efforts of a father, Will (Ben Foster), and his 13-year-old daughter, Tom (Thomasin McKenzie), to live entirely off the grid, as the saying goes.  Living in a tent in the forests of the Northwest, they spend some of their time eluding the park police, the rest merely subsisting, which seems to suit them well.  The film lacks a back story, so one must assume that Will suffers from some form of PTSD; he visits a veteran’s center, picks up pills, then sells them to a drug dealer for the money to buy their necessities.

When Will breaks his leg, he and Tom find assistance from a small community of somewhat reclusive people like themselves, who also dwell away from cities and towns; though a good deal more normally connected to modern life, the several families understand and sympathize with the plight of the father and daughter.  The period of healing for Will becomes a period of adjustment for Tom, learning about the hospitality and kindness of strangers, coming to understand something of a society she has not really experienced.  The movie ends with a sad yet logical conclusion to the life she and her father have shared.

All three films, as I noted earlier, depart drastically from contemporary cinematic fashion; they deserve some attention, however, in part because of that departure.  They achieve, in a sense, something of an experimental quality in their offbeat subjects, their understated narratives, their refusal to compromise with reality and thus, their honesty.  They also affirm that some filmmakers still dare to try something so old fashioned that it’s brand new—small stories about ordinary people, simply told.

                                     

PLAYER ONE

PLAYER ONE

          In 2045, to nobody’s surprise, the world of Ready Player One looks pretty much like the dystopia envisioned by scientists today—overcrowded, polluted, dangerous, with millions of people living in squalor.  In Ernest Cline’s rich and lively novel Ready Player One, the population mostly survives the general devastation by inhabiting a version of virtual reality, a not unlikely prospect.  Anyone with a computer can create an avatar, some idealized version of themselves, and log into a global virtual world called OASIS, where most of them spend a good deal of their waking lives.

         

         The protagonist of the novel and Steven Spielberg’s adaptation, Wade Watts, participates in OASIS through his ancient laptop, improving his appearance by means of a created persona, his avatar, and calling himself Parzival, appropriate for someone on a quest for something like the Holy Grail.  Inspired by the legacy of the creators of OASIS, Wade/Parzival (Tye Sheridan) and two sidekicks, Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) and Aech (Lena Waithe), pursue a series of cryptic clues, solve riddles, engage in contests, and battle a horde of rivals, some of them avatars, others actual humans, in order to obtain three magical keys and achieve a prize that will transform their lives and OASIS as well.

In addition to the trio’s various complicated adventures, including an ongoing struggle against the murderous head of a corporation attempting to take over OASIS, the film depends upon the book’s profound engagement with popular culture, particularly teen culture from the 1980s.  Thanks to the memories preserved in various electronic devices, Wade possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of comic books, video games, movies, songs, and television shows from that time, all of which aid him in his quest.  He must, for example, play an antiquated game against a created monster to gain access to an important goal; a fan of Back to the Future, he drives the famous DeLorean from that movie in an important race; he finds himself repeating some of actions of the TV shows he has watched over and over (Family Ties is a particular favorite); his sidekick Aech, also an adept, enlists the comic book character Iron Giant in a climactic showdown.

           Although the movie strips down and simplifies many of the novel’s complications, Spielberg manipulates all the avatars, monsters, and battles with his customary skill and the usual assistance of digital technology; in fact, the novel really seems a natural choice for his sort of filmmaking.  In a complex sequence that some people call intertextuality he in effect makes another movie inside his movie.  He places the trio of questers inside a perfect reproduction of The Shining, repeating many of that movie’s most memorable moments, like the ocean of blood by the elevators, the two sinister little girls, the decayed crone, and even the photograph, slightly modified, of the Hotel Overlook’s guests from the past.  It’s a kind of tour de force for a filmmaker who often specializes in such gestures.

Although I generally avoid comic book movies, superhero movies, special effects extravaganzas, and all the other expensive and elaborate claptrap that passes for filmmaking these days, Ready Player One actually works, with its strong story, terrific sets, and rich context of popular culture.  The translation of the novel into the visual medium, probably partly a result of the author himself collaborating on the screenplay, succeeds admirably.  The only surprise about the film is the very limited commentary it has inspired; it deserves more.

PINS AND NEEDLES

          According to press reports, Daniel Day-Lewis learned to butcher for his role in Gangs of New York, toted a 12-pound Kentucky rifle wherever he went when he was playing Natty Bumppo in The Last of the Mohicans, and for his latest picture, Phantom Thread, acquired enough skill at tailoring to design and make a dress in order to play the protagonist, a London fashion designer named Reynolds Woodcock.  The famous Method often engages actors in that sort of preparation, research, and absorption, and apparently Day-Lewis more than qualifies as a Methodist.

From its beginning the film establishes the character of its protagonist as a meticulous and annoying fussbudget, grooming himself carefully, irritably reacting to the small noises of his girlfriend’s breakfast while sketching designs, a process that repeats throughout the picture.  The simple plot takes Woodcock to his country house, where in a restaurant he orders a huge, complicated meal from a waitress named Alma (Vicky Krieps), whose memory for his order, German accent, and general appearance impress him enough to invite her to dinner and bring her back to his house; there he and his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) measure her minutely and judge her a perfect model for his dresses.  He hires Alma and brings her back to his London home, where a fleet of seamstresses work on his designs.

The rest of the movie pretty much revolves around the relationship among the three people, conducted in the midst of and against the background of his work.  The low level of action, the tiresome sensitivity of the chief character, and the puzzling relationship between him and his model make for a rather dull and repetitive series of actions.  After hiring her as a model, he takes Alma as his lover, and she assumes something like a special place in the house, with some competition from Cyril, who manages everything, including her brother’s love affairs.  When their relationship begins to founder, beginning typically with his annoyance with the noise she makes buttering her toast, Alma takes some drastic and surprising steps to cement the bond.

Phantom Thread seems a strange little work to incite the sort of praise the usual ravers lavish on films starring Daniel Day-Lewis, like Gangs of New York and There Will Be Blood.  Then again, the director is the also highly praised Paul Thomas Anderson, who also gave us the ridiculous Boogie Nights and the pretentious nonsense of Magnolia and yes, There Will Be Blood.  Unlike Anderson’s previous “big” movie, this one settles into something like a Henry James novella, with a small, static plot, a limited cast of characters, and a central couple joined in an ambiguous symbiosis, each dependent on the other in a generally unhealthy way.

Whatever his qualifications as a butcher, Indian fighter, or dress designer, Daniel Day-Lewis turns in a generally one-note performance, establishing the essentially unpleasant personality of this selfish, controlling, hypersensitive artist, and pretty much sticking to it all the way through the picture.  As Alma, Vicky Krieps looks nothing like anyone’s ideal as a perfect model; plain, chunky, with the look of a Swiss milkmaid, she would hardly rival the tall, slim, stylized women who display designer creations on runways all over the world.  On top of all that, at least to this untutored observer, even the dresses Reynolds Woodcock designs don’t look all that great either, rather more dowdy than stylish, and certainly not distinctive or memorable, which actually fairly well describes Phantom Thread.

                                     

BILLBOARDS

BILLBOARDS

          Another movie dealing with the American small town, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (one of the weirdest titles in years), explores an intense and ultimately complicated emotional climate that breeds a number of related stories, all growing out of a terrible crime committed before the action begins.  Like last year’s excellent Manchester by the Sea, the film offers no real answers, no real resolution to its problematic events and troubled people, but differs in at least suggesting some faint amelioration of its central character’s attitudes and their effect on others.  More sentimental and, not incidentally, more violent than Manchester, it examines some of the same situations as its predecessors—broken marriages, illness, alienation, and a terrible tragedy that propels the action and the emotion.

          Frances McDormand plays the central character, Mildred, who dominates the movie in every way, so much so that her feelings and behavior open up other plots involving other people in the town, all of them connected to her particular situation.  Understandably devastated by her daughter’s rape and murder seven months before, she simmers in a cauldron of guilt, grief, anger, and bitterness, which boils over into a series of increasingly drastic decisions.  She resurrects the decrepit billboards of the title, posting messages accusing the sheriff (Woody Harrelson) and his department of incompetence and malingering in the search for her daughter’s killer.  The billboards ignite controversy in Ebbings, in effect forcing people to choose sides—most of them against her—in her increasingly public crusade.

Mildred’s plight leads her to some occasionally comical moments, as when she serially kicks a trio of vandalizing high school students in the groin, or calls a reporter a bitch on live TV; she also delivers a devastating lecture to her parish priest when he attempts some sort of consoling visit.  Her frustration finally explodes into a drastic, dangerous attack on the local police station, which almost kills a deputy and in itself makes little sense, damaging the credibility of a work devoted to some vision of small town reality.  The movie also shows a shocking suicide and two savage beatings, perhaps the inevitable result of the anomalous emotionalism that leaches into the hard, tough surface of Mildred’s life and location—her condition affects everyone.

          Intentionally or not, Three Billboards also emphasizes the often melancholy truth that everybody has a sad history, a personal story, most of them disappointing narratives of failure, loss, and that epidemic American disease, loneliness.  One of the local deputies, Dixon (Sam Rockwell), who brutalizes prisoners, lives in a crummy shack of a house with his drunken, dependent mother, and drinks himself sodden on duty; both his sadism and boozing result apparently from the emptiness of his life, his sense of his own inadequacy.  Mildred’s husband (John Hawkes) has left her for a nineteen-year-old, a separation that along with her behavior further alienates her son Robbie (Lucas Hedges, who played a similar role in Manchester By the Sea), a lost, unhappy teenager.

          Oddly, the moral center of Three Billboards shifts from Mildred’s anger and outrage to the plight of the sheriff, dying of cancer; he becomes something like the voice of kindness and sympathy in Ebbing, delivering compassionate advice to all the important people he deals with throughout the movie and even in a way providing a hint of hope for all of them.  His words may signify something like a blessing and even a promise of something better for this troubled community and its unhappy citizens, including the deputy and the grieving Mildred.  If Mildred’s tragedy disrupts the community, his words move toward some sense of restoration and possibly even hope.

          The performances, the setting, the action all meld together successfully, with barely a false note anywhere.  Predictably, Frances McDormand inhabits her character with precision, projecting the grief that turns into anger and violent action, and even managing to create humor in this angry, unforgiving woman, a tough performance in a mostly tough little film.

BLADE RUNNER 2049

BLADE RUNNER 2049

          The first Blade Runner distinguished itself as one of the most brilliantly filmed science fiction movies, with stunning sets that in effect expressed both the advanced technology and the dark hopelessness of its world, our world, in the near future.  Its simple plot involves the search of an ex-cop known as a Blade Runner, for four advanced model androids, known as replicants, who escape from their corporate controllers and seek to extend their limited lifespan, what might be called a negative version of the manufacturer’s guarantee.  In the process of the pursuit and after a climactic battle with the most gifted of the replicants, it becomes apparent that the cop, Deckard (Harrison Ford), is himself a replicant facing the same fate as his quarry.

          Updating the situation to 2049, the new movie once again confronts the familiar situation of the artificially created human in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future.  This time the blade runner is “K” (presumably an allusion to Kafka), played by a deadpan Ryan Gosling.  He works for an irascible police lieutenant (Robin Wright), apparently tracking down recalcitrant replicants, I guess those who, like the rest of us, don’t really want to die.  The film’s plot moves in a most disjunctive fashion, introduces characters without much explanation or context, throws in a quantity of mystical mumbo-jumbo, with a young girl called a Memory Child, some sort of blind prophet, and a vengeful dominatrix called Luv (go figure).  The booming, dissonant soundtrack frequently overwhelms the dialogue, which also contributes to the general confusion.

Unlike his predecessor Deckard, who occupied a dark apartment in the storied Bradbury Building, K lives in an antiseptic domicile with a holographic girlfriend (giant holographs of nude women populate the rainy city); she makes his drinks and dinner, converses with him, and in one sequence melds with a “real” woman so they can all have sex, an act combining the two women in what must be a most satisfying experience.  Harrison Ford, who now regularly reappears in sequels and remakes of his earlier work, returns as a now aged Deckard, dwelling in the dusty ghost town of Las Vegas.  The original blade runner, who with Sean Young had lit out for the territory like Huck Finn, now resides in a deserted casino, amply supplied with booze, accompanied by an alcoholic dog, and entertained with old Sinatra songs.  Like several other people in the film, he promptly beats the hell out of K, but then joins him in something like a rebellion against the oppressing power structure and the vengeful Luv.

          The tacit premise of both the original and the sequel involves the traditional dilemma of the artificially created being, from Pinocchio through Frankenstein’s monster and the robots and androids of so many science fiction movies.  They all simply yearn to be human and they all yearn to possess a soul.  In the original Blade Runner, after the climactic battle with Ford, Rutger Hauer’s character utters a sad, compelling coda of farewell, ending with “time to die,” and his soul in the form of a dove, flies away.  Like him, the replicants of the new movie desire not only a life beyond their artificially allotted time, but emotions and memories and freedom, their own humanity.  Insofar as I understand it, Blade Runner 2049 suggests that some solution to that oddly human wish exists in the future, in what we know as a sequel.

DUNKIRK

DUNKIRK

          One of the most unusual films now playing at a theater near you somehow manages to be something of a blockbuster without actually being a blockbuster, if that makes any sense.  Without any costumed superheroes, acrobatic stunt work, or magical special effects, Dunkirk achieves the sort of power and excitement usually associated with all those summer spectaculars.   A movie without a hero that proceeds in some unusual manipulations of time and space, that in truth deals with a devastating defeat, it in effect violates all the traditional rules of summer films; in addition, it is an intelligent piece of work, which further differentiates it from Guardians of the Galaxy, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Transformers, or any of the other overproduced, expensive trivia that clogs and shakes the cinemas these days.

The film’s frequent and ironic reversal of expectations differentiates it from the usual coverage of the famous evacuation of a thoroughly defeated British army at Dunkirk in 1940.  It begins, for example, with an act of cowardice that defines the unnamed character (called Tommy, a traditional generic term for English soldiers, in the credits), played by Fionn Whitehead.  He flees a skirmish with German soldiers, eventually discarding his rifle, his helmet, his pack, and, together with another sly and equally cowardly soldier, rolls a wounded man onto a stretcher in order to cheat their way onto one of the crowded boats leaving the beach.  Shifting back and forth in time and space throughout, the picture moves to England, barely thirty miles across the Channel from Dunkirk, where a civilian named Dawson (Mark Rylance) decides to take his own boat to France, just before the army commandeers it.  The third thread of the coverage concentrates on Farrier (Tom Hardy), a Spitfire pilot leading two other airplanes in support of the nearly 400,000 men on the beach.

Other ironies proliferate, including the death of a brave young volunteer in a tragic blunder, a rescued airman who resists rescue, and the welcome at home of one of the shirkers as a hero.  Christopher Nolan, the writer and director, bravely refuses to glamorize the material, which actually constitutes a highly unusual achievement, the telling of an epic story without melodrama or even an epic hero; the undeniable heroism lies in the daring actions of all the ordinary civilians who rescued the stranded troops after the rout in France, a rare kind of communal courage at work.  The great story of Dunkirk, of course, involves that immense flotilla of civilian craft that sailed across the Channel to rescue the stranded soldiers, turning one of the greatest military defeats in British history into something of a victory.   Since the water at the beach was too shallow to accommodate most naval ships, smaller vessels were necessary, so pleasure yachts, sailboats, ferries, tugboats, etc. accomplished one of the most unusual rescue missions in history.  The film shows the chaos on the beach, the desperation of the soldiers, and the amazing efforts of the rescuers in constant transitions, moving from the beach to the evacuees, to the boats, to the Spitfires, to the commanding officers dealing with the danger and chaos of the retreat and the departure.
The purely visual methods of the director allow the camera in effect to tell the story, so that the sparse dialogue is hardly necessary.  The camera swoops and scans, comprehending the nonlinear plot, showing various points of view, making Dunkirk a kind of super version of a silent film, really a triumph of the art.  Unlike most films that win the sort of excess that constitutes the stock in trade of reviewers, Dunkirk deserves all the praise it has received.

OBIT

OBIT

          A documentary on the obituary department of the New York Times hardly seems the sort of thing that would shake the walls of the multiplexes, but the new movie Obit deserves some of the same attention and praise lavished on the latest computer assisted adventures of the latest comic book superhero.  Despite its ostensibly unpromising subject, the movie provides a fascinating glimpse into the daily workings of the department, its people, and their conception of their job.

          Proceeding in the tried and true technique of contemporary documentary (though here generally justified by the subject), the director employs a series of talking head interviews with the several writers in the department, who describe the challenges of the job, their methods, and their attitudes toward dealing with death.  The director, Vanessa Gould, also interrupts the narrative with old newspaper headlines and articles—the Times morgue keeper, incidentally, deserves his own film—photographs, and film clips showing moments from the lives of the people the writers memorialize.  The ongoing montage enlivens the story, but also suggests some of the meaning and importance of those lives, in short, the reasons for their deaths receiving a full article in that section of the revered New York Times.

She also follows the day-long progress of one writer, Bruce Weber, on the obituary of someone most people probably never heard of, William Wilson, the first person to serve as the television consultant for a presidential campaign.  After calling the widow for the essential information that the Times demands—cause of death, age, survivors, etc.—he starts the process of research and writing, not all that different from any scholar’s work.  The investigation opens up a window on the past, showing clips of the first presidential debate, the historic confrontation of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, orchestrated largely by Wilson; that debate, Kennedy claimed, won him the election. 

Weber begins the day on the telephone, proceeds through research on his subject, and finishes a long and satisfactory essay just in time to meet his deadline in the late afternoon.  Like any writer, he stalls and stumbles, tries several beginnings, overcomes an array of familiar obstacles, and ends with a work he happily regards as successful.  As he and his colleagues point out, they write a kind of history in uncovering the lives of people who achieved enough to earn an obituary in the newspaper.  They not only record the lives of the famous and distinguished, however, they also often remember the forgotten, those who have slipped away from fame, dropped out of the public gaze, reminding us all that for both the celebrated and the obscure the paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Inevitably, the writers also find that their work brings them into a consideration of death, of their own ends, intimations of their own mortality.  In the process of recording the lives of so many so often, they inevitably confront the notion of the obituary that awaits each of them.  Like Prospero at the end of The Tempest they realize that “every third thought shall be (their) grave.”  Obit may remind us all of that reality.

KING ARTHUR

KING ARTHUR

          Since Shakespeare wrote it and his theatrical company performed it, Hamlet has undergone innumerable interpretations and transformations, from the literal to the bizarre; yet the play, in all its messy brilliance, remains a universally acknowledged masterpiece.  In a similar manner, the great English myth, the story of King Arthur, appears in innumerable incarnations throughout the ages, including dozens of films, from adventure stories to comedies and musicals.  Like the prince of Denmark, the king survives them all, and he will no doubt survive his latest version, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.

Guy Ritchie, who directed the new movie, turned the immortal story into yet another summer spectacular, with a gaggle of monsters, including some pachyderm type beasts and a trio of reptilian women, gobs of magic, and of course, a plethora of computer generated imagery.  His Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) pulls Excalibur from the stone as expected and in fact demanded, but proves reluctant to assume the responsibility of ruling the land now under the control of the evil Vortigern (Jude Law), who controls his people with the assistance of some supernatural powers.  After a long period of preparation and training, Arthur leads an army against Vortigern and, after much slaughter and other assorted difficulties, defeats him.  He ends the film knighting his faithful followers and creating the famous Round Table, a piece of furniture that initially puzzles his knights, and which suggests a sequel as well.

Despite all the spectacular effects, the film adds little to the great legend beyond a number of comical anachronisms.  Arthur speaks of being “proactive,” for instance, a term that I think was not terribly common back in the Middle Ages, along with his use of “razzle dazzle” and another knight’s mistaking the table for a carousel.  Hardly a commanding or charismatic figure, Charlie Hunnam seems flat and dull compared to his adversary, whose character actually dominates most of the action.  On the upside, Arthur introduces the modern concept of diversity to the Round Table, with an African knight, Bedivere, played by Djimon Hounson, and an Asian knight, Kung Fu George, played by Tom Wu.  King Arthur: Legend of the Sword otherwise ranks quite low on the long list of Arthuriads in fiction and film; the great story, always worth retelling, deserves a better incarnation, possibly with some sense of character and action and absent all the magic of contemporary cinema.  It is, after all, a long, long way from Camelot to Avalon.