Sunday, January 28, 2018

Dunkirk & Get Out (Movie Reviews by Bob Racine)


                     Dunkirk (1 hr & 47 min, color, 2017)
Get Out  (1 hr & 44 min, color, 2017)

The first time I saw the very popular movie of the 1940s “Mrs. Miniver”, I experienced an adrenalin rush during the sequence in which the subject of Dunkirk came to the fore.  The title character, a very brave British wife and mother, was played formidably by Greer Garson, a woman who suffers from the German bombing of her home and community during the early days of World War II.  She sees her husband, played by Walter Pigeon, off one morning on a dangerous cruise across the English Channel. The name Dunkirk did not register in my brain at the time. I was eight years old; it was much later in my life that I was filled in on it.  

What I remember most about the way the event was filmed is the note of gallantry with which it was mounted.  Pigeon set out in a private craft along with numerous others to perform a rescue operation and was gone for many hours.  What stood out for me at that early age, with my tender mind hungry for excitement, was the size of the small fleet and the sound they made in an impressive motorized unison advancing over the water.  They looked and sounded like an armada, linked and cruising together and all pointed in one direction.  It was to my child’s sense of adventure a very thrilling sight.  All this manpower was surging forth to deliver a wallop to the sneaky and cruel Germans.  Strength in a gigantic unity!  Chills ran up and down my spine.      

But the real story of Dunkirk is something quite different.  It was May of 1940, right after Hitler’s army had invaded and captured France, that British troops sent to aid the French in the fight found themselves surrounded by the Germans. It is estimated that there were over 300,000 of them, cut off from the French, unable to get home.  An invasion force to rescue them on short notice would have been impossible, and the use of destroyers to pick them up would have been impractical for getting close enough to the beaches without themselves being attacked. The requisitioning of private small crafts was put into play instead, and they came voluntarily from all up and down the English Channel.  Churchill put out the call for them and they showed up in dribbles here and there, not in an organized armada.    

That was the situation at sea, while there was an air war going on overhead and a land war behind enemy lines.  These are the three perspectives from which the largely fictional screenplay is constructed – land, sea and air, the action shifting back and forth between them throughout the movie’s length.  The directorial competence behind the epic is Christopher Nolan aided by his wife Emma Thomas.  They have taken us deep into the tangled threads of this historic rescue operation.  They could have made a documentary, but they have chosen to dramatize the personal lives and struggles of varied characters aiming to get back to England and home.  It is a narrative of heart and soul as well as military engagement.  That is what makes it something very special.     



There was a time when if a movie was clearly and intentionally a comedy, you could tell as much from the ads.  You knew you were in funny-land almost from the moment the projector started grinding out the images or at least starting with a spoken word of dialogue that, if not hilarious, at least had a droll or cockeyed slant to it, signaling more jocular and farcical and ridiculous material to follow.  There was a tilted quality to what you were both seeing and hearing.  You knew it was safe not to take what was happening on the screen too seriously.  This has often been true even with black or grisly humor.  In “Dr. Strangelove” the world is about to come to an end, but the devices are so “far out” that it would be a crying shame if you did not laugh.       

Apparently that policy has been revised, though who has done the revision,  who the agent of change could be, it would be difficult to determine.  “Get Out”, the bizarre story of a 26-year-old black man going to meet his Caucasian girlfriend’s family somewhere on the far edge of suburbia and finding himself walking into a swarm of unearthly oddballs, was one of the movies that competed in the recent Golden Globe Awards in the category of Comedy or Musical!!!  I saw it with the expectation of having a rambunctious good time, but I was almost all the way through the footage before I came upon anything that I would call truly funny.  Instead of humor, it is largely pure horror, especially in the later sequences – bloody and ever so grotesque.  It is a tale of slow entrapment from which our hero must extricate himself.  It kind of reflects upon the current feeling that black flesh is as cheap in some peoples’ eyes as ever.  The idea for the plot is one of singular invention. The fascination is watching how it makes use of faces to set the mood and deliver the scary goods.   Close-ups on just about everybody’s part are the most conspicuous feature.  

It is an extraordinarily well produced, acted and directed movie, as long as you can accept it on its true terms – not as a comedy but as a burgeoning nightmare.  There are brief scattered moments that are darkly humorous, but such moments do not justify calling it a comedy vehicle.   It is currently competing in the Oscars with four major nominations, including Director and Original Screenplay for newcomer Jordan Peele and Actor for Daniel Kaluuya .  It appears to be the sleeper of the year. The film’s future bears watching, as do the careers of all the consistently fine talents that make up the cast.          


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.


Thursday, January 4, 2018

Writing About the Movies (Essay by Bob Racine)


My tour of duty as a movie critic for Mass Media Ministries and its bi-weekly publication (now defunct) back in the 1960s and 1970s gave me occasion, in contact with others in that profession, to find out just how diverse the standards for criticism are.  Not everyone who writes in this genre follows the same policies and principles.  Not everyone defines it the same way.  After taking a few paragraphs in my recent review of “West Side Story” to air out my grievances with Pauline Kael, who electrified readers over the space of three decades until her retirement in the 1980s, it occurred to me that I have not spoken much about my own policies and principles.  That I am about to do.

Frankly I do not know how back yonder I ever kept up with all the first run releases.  It involved a great amount of foot work and hours upon hours of viewing in the dark cushy concealment of theaters.  How the current crop of critics does it now, with production having mushroomed in volume over subsequent decades, is a wonder to me. My writings about motion pictures over the past six years since I set up this blog have been more selective. I would go mad putting in the hours these people do to cover the whole movie scene.  But as limited as my scope has become, I really do not think the basics of my approach have changed.  I would like now to share those basics with you readers.     

What is movie criticism?

For me “criticism” is the wrong word for what I wrote and now write.  I prefer the word “commentary” to the word “criticism”, which is to say I aspire to being thought of as a “commentator” instead of a “critic”.  A critic at the very least is a devil’s advocate, someone who finds fault or imagines having found fault, who holds a body of work to strict standards.  A critic is a judge, someone who passes sentence, makes determinations about a person or thing.  In a court of criminal law, a judge comes into the picture after a charge has been made, as a participant in the prosecution of a defendant who has allegedly violated a law, committed a crime.  A jury in a criminal case sifts through testimony and material entered into evidence and declares a defendant guilty or innocent.  But it is the judge who makes the final determination of punishment in the event that a guilty verdict has been reached. 

I admit that the difference in meaning between these two terms is somewhat thin, but the older I get the more certain I am that the difference is quite real.  At some point in time I suppose I did act more the critic or the judge.  Being expected to establish a viewpoint on a given movie, especially if it is one that is stirring up controversy or unrest in people’s minds, lays you open enough that it is easy to slip into the role of superior jurist and start passing out rewards and disapprovals; you are under pressure from readers who respect you and are eager for your input.  And it is ever so difficult to avoid the temptation to shock or to shake up your audience, maybe even to go on the attack, if something in the film has really rubbed you a little raw.  But it all comes down to what you strive for, whatever your lapses into the judgmental.  One strives to be objective, whether or not one always succeeds.

Let us be very frank!  There is no such thing as complete objectivity.  We who publish printed comments about motion pictures may strive to be objective, but we deal in opinions; make no mistake about it – our own opinions.  There is no escaping it.  So it behooves us to make sure our announced opinions are the result of careful thought.  I could never see a movie one day and then have my review in the paper the next day.  I need more time than that to mull over what I have seen; I would not trust myself to arrive at anything resembling objectivity if that were all the lead-in time I were allowed.  And given that we deal in the issuance of opinions, we must make sure we are issuing an informed opinion, one that draws upon knowledge of the medium as a whole, its history, tradition and a movie’s basic structure.  It helps immensely if the commentator/critic has a background in theater and a familiarity with character creation and the dynamics of performance.  One who has only screened movies spasmodically over a few young adult years and given attention only to her/his favorites has not absorbed enough data or ingested enough emotional or psychological experience to write with any kind of authority on the subject.  A critic should have a wide range of viewing experience.  All kinds and varieties of film should be of interest to him/her.  This person should be a student on the subject of cinema, with trained perceptions, perhaps even a scholarly absorption in it, though the scholarship should not get stuffy.  Movies are for entertainment mostly, a means of escape from the workaday world.  And of course a certain maturity informs opinion.  I was in my 30’s when I worked for Mass Media Ministries.  Earlier than that I do not believe I would have been ready to launch upon a career in the field.      

I approach a motion picture as a work of art.  I am not, nor was I ever a commercial commentator.  That is, I do not let myself be influenced by the politics of Hollywood or by movie moguls who are looking for commentary to serve as publicity for the selling of their product.  It helps if the commentator is employed by a publication that allows a considerable amount of freedom in expression and sophistication in viewpoint.  One can hardly function as a free thinker/writer if editors are forever looking over your shoulder and ready to pounce if you stray an inch from tight strictures or if you are considered too offensive to the publication’s choice readers.  A motion picture has to be judged by a standard that transcends popular notions.  A commentator/critic should not consider herself/himself a performer or entertainer.  That is my objection to the writings of Pauline Kael.  Her language was too flamboyant for my taste.  

I personally like to read the comments of someone who has lived in the story or the material.  If it does not feel lived in, if it does not feel as if the film has reached the heart and soul of the writer, in such a case it sounds to me as if it has only been considered from a point of casual curiosity.  When I write a review, I must remember that it is not essentially the production that I am describing but my experience of that production, that piece of art.  One does not make hurried or flip comments about a new sculpture or a new portrait, especially if it is a departure in form from previous artworks.  The same should apply to screen works.  That is not to say that some movies are not works of obvious vulgarity or obvious amateurishness.  But even in such instances an informed and trained viewpoint does not speak carelessly.  If you do, you run the risk of your words coming back to haunt or bite you at a later date.  

I do not know how many practicing full time critics would agree with me, but I place a high value upon keeping an open mind.  There are films I am sure I would approach differently now than I did when they were new.  I am speaking of a willingness to learn over time; there is always more to take in.  The last thing I want to be called is close-minded. My employers at Mass Media, when I was starting out with them, only asked one thing of me as a guiding policy:  Don’t become God.  I took it to heart and am glad I did, though I suppose I sounded a bit like God on occasion.

It might sound reckless to say so, but there are no set guidelines for movie analysis and comment.  That is one thing just about all of us movie reviewers would agree on.  There is no form to it.  Some of it involves just plain common sense and intelligence.  One who molds clay does not follow any pattern the way a sower does. Cinema is soft, fluid and dynamic; it evolves over time.  There are always surprises that emerge out of the hand of those who approach it experimentally.  And even with those that hue to a tight tradition or seem to, nothing is for sure in terms of the final pay-off.  Nothing is cut and dried; if it were, it would be DOA for certain.  A movie maker is an explorer; each production worth its salt is an investigation.  An artist in any genre follows instinct more so than guideline.       

Reviewing, on the other hand, does require some discipline.  The writer needs to know how to compose a coherent sentence, many of them, in fact.  We obey the rules of grammar and syntax and composition.  But once we have conformed to those, the rest is a swim.  And only those who enjoy the swim keep on keeping on.  


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.