40th Five Films, 2007

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Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy) at Clearview Chelsea. The car-bomb scene was far and away the highlight. I thought the confrontation at the end was a little overdone, and the only reason the camera ever follows someone away from a group alone to some corner of a space is for them to be surprised, so the shock wasn't really all that shocking.

The directing seemed workmanlike for the most part and I thought, like the Variety reviewer, that there were a lot of not terribly intriguing narrative threads that led nowhere. Particularly the son and his fantasy novel; his scenes could have been cut, tightening the story, with absolutely no deleterious effect on the rest.

If someone could point out to me which character was not boring, I'd appreciate it. I'd say George Clooney's "fixer" hovers between repressed and tired for most of the time. If you're real into it, you probably read outrage, frustration, and regret into the performance, but I'm not sure the movie around him is strong enough to allow for such a flat performance.
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Before We Fall in Love Again (James Lee) at MoMA. The black-and-white video tones were mostly flat and uninteresting. The deadpan acting was maybe a little too unassuming. The lack of camera movement seemed more like a technical restriction than an aesthetic choice. But the ending was pretty great.
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Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch) at MoMA. This must be one of the most perfect movies ever made. It's also pretty impressive technically for a film from 1932, considering even most highly regarded movies from the early 30's often show a bit of awkwardness around sound and dialogue. The pre-Code production also allows for a lot of hilarious sexual references. There's a lot of distinctly visual comedy, too, from the doors to clocks to the waste-filled gondolas. If anything, the thievery seems almost unbelievably easy, but then this is no heist picture, and we don't really care how someone might actually pick a pocket, just that the characters onscreen reveal the stolen goods with panache.
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The Savages (Tamara Jenkins) at Clearview Chelsea. Reviewers have made much of the elderly father here, noting that he's not lovably ornery or anything like you normally get with characters of advanced age in most comedies. I was thus expecting him to be over-the-top mean, but instead he just kind of makes perfect sense as an unhappy but mostly resigned about the approach of death.

This is kind of a nice contrast, for me, to Michael Clayton. Here I felt like we really were experiencing adult situations with mature characters in a fairly novel way for Hollywood, whereas with the George Clooney vehicle, it seemed pretty well-trod territory.
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Morocco (Josef von Sternberg) at MoMA. I'm not much of a Gary Cooper fan, and this didn't change anything. He looks almost ridiculously young and gaunt here. I guess the idea is that Marlene Dietrich is the only one onscreen that von Sternberg is interested in, and I think that remains the same for the audience. The last scene almost made the stilted dialogue and goofy comedy worthwhile, especially the sound of the wind continuing over the final "End" title.
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