Life Itself; All is Lost

Purely by coincidence, this turned out to be a death-themed post.  Sorry about that.  Here's a picture of a puppy and a kitten.

Life Itself

Roger Ebert is to the amateur movie blogger as Big Papi is to the beer league softball player.  Life Itself, a biographical documentary about the man and his declining months, doesn’t tell us much we don’t already know from watching his shows, reading his reviews and his blog, and following his career.  Nevertheless, it makes us part of the celebration, makes us witnesses to the man.  It’s an insightful, touching film, and I think Roger would have given it a thumbs up.

All is Lost

I watch a lot of movies on the installment plan: 20 minutes on the elliptical here, half an hour in an airport lounge there.  Do not watch All is Lost on the installment plan.

The movie’s about a solo mariner (Robert Redford) sailing his yacht across the Pacific Ocean.  When the yacht collides with a floating shipping container which smashes a hole below the waterline, the mariner handles the situation calmly and competently.  When faced with more, compounding problems, the mariner handles them in the same fashion.  Sometimes, however, life throws more at you than you can handle, calm competence or no.

In a way, All is Lost works as a metaphor for life.  We sail along in our prime, with the wind at our backs and the sun overhead.  Then something goes wrong, then something else, then another thing.  We handle it all as best we can.  We fight against the dying of the light.  But the light is temporary; it’s meant to die.  And calm as we remain, competently as we handle one health scare after another, we degrade, and fail, and sink beneath the waves.

Heavy stuff, I know.  So heavy, in fact, that I found All is Lost rather hard going.  I’m currently in the apogee of my own life, and contemplating my inevitable decline isn’t really my favorite way to spend a couple of hours.  Still, I’m glad I saw this film.  It’s ambitious, and it executes on that ambition.  If Robert Redford was once the perfect embodiment of death, he’s now the perfect embodiment of the process of dying.  You could do with a worse guide to inform you that all is lost.

Bottle Shock

Movies like BOTTLE SHOCK are the reason why I read Roger Ebert. I never saw an ad for the picture, didn’t read about it in any of my other wanderings, would never have known it xisted were it not for Ebert’s review.

I just plain loved it.

Here’s a movie about the 1976 Franco-American wine competition, a promotional event organized by one Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman, CDNW) with the expectation that the American wines would be thoroughly trounced. As it happened, the Americans won in both the white and red categories. The movie assumes you know this going in, and it bathes the entire proceeding, from Spurrier’s first inspiration for the event to the aftermath of the competition, in the warm glow of fond memory.

BOTTLE SHOCK is a “little guys against the world” picture with hints of “coming of age,” “romantic comedy,” and “slobs vs. snobs.” It’s laugh-out-loud funny, utterly charming, and delightful from beginning to end.

Thanks, Roger Ebert. Perhaps I should see this SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE of which you speak so highly.

Local Hero

In his review of LOCAL HERO, Roger Ebert writes, "Nothing is more absorbing than human personalities, developed with love and humor." Mr. Ebert is absolutely right, and LOCAL HERO delivers this with just the right mixture of wisdom and generosity.

LOCAL HERO is the sweet, almost whimsical tale of a young oil company negotiator, the seaside Scottish village he's sent to buy, and the love affair between them. I went in half dreading an anti-industrialization screed, but LOCAL HERO knows what it's about far too well to fall into such a simple and obvious trap. Instead, the film uses its running time to create a sense of people and place, allowing us to observe them and it as the negotiator (Peter Riegert, in a role that makes me wonder whatever happened to Peter Riegert) falls in with the village's rhythms. It's a comedy, but not of the knee slapping variety. It seeks to share a smile with us as we cluck over the people we love, and it seeks to make us feel at home in a place we've never been.

There's nothing in LOCAL HERO for my inner adolescent, but my inner adolescent is in time out after leading me into RUSH HOUR 3. LOCAL HERO is the perfect antidote to that inanity: a charming, thoughtful, observant picture about human personalities, developed with love and humor. As Mr. Ebert says, nothing is more absorbing.

Vitus

Thanks, Roger Ebert!

I'd never have heard of VITUS if Ebert hadn't reviewed it. It didn't pop on CHUD, which is where I go for movie news, and it didn't pop here, which is where I go for movie conversation. If Ebert hadn't given it a few hundred words, it would have disappeared.

But he did give it a couple of hundred words, and he had me sold at "Bruno Ganz," and I'm glad I sat down for it. VITUS is a Swiss film about a kid named Vitus who is so incredibly brilliant that his parents can't even comprehend how brilliant he is. I thought it was going to be a piano-oriented rehash of SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER but, when the film went on to show my that I couldn't comprehend how brilliant this kid is, it took me in a new direction, one I thoroughly enjoyed.

The light in this kid's life is his grandfather, played by the incredible Bruno Ganz. Ganz is one of those everyman-type actors whose comforting onscreen presence belies a sharpness that gives him the ability to act in films in a variety of languages. So far, I've seen him do German (in multiple dialects), Italian, and Greek, all while sounding like a native speaker. Here, he assays Swiss German, and it's extraordinary. As the kindly grandfather and font of vitally important folk wisdom, he gives Vitus the two things he needs: unconditional love and the chance to act like a kid, or act like a grownup, or act however he needs to act. And it's wonderful.

The conflict, well, it's not a "kid against the world" kind of thing so much as it is a story about "kid finding his way in the world." It's sweet, but not overly so, and it holds some pleasant surprises. I liked VITUS enough to re-screen it for my wife. I think she's going to like it, too. I had her sold at "Bruno Ganz."