The Real Flowers

A beautiful young woman and young man impulsively embark on a love affair, swiftly followed by marriage, before World War II disrupts their lives forever. 1970's I girasoli (Sunflower) is a very simple story that wouldn't work nearly as well as it does if it didn't star Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. Director Vittorio De Sica deserves credit, too, for letting these two play off each other so naturally.

The first part of the movie is such a pleasure to watch. Watching Loren and Mastroianni arguing and making love on the beach or making a frittata in a little rustic kitchen.

Then he's called to war, to fight the Soviet Union, and is lost in the snows of Russia. Years after the war, convinced he survived somehow, she goes to the Soviet Union and searches for him.

The result is a fairly simple little tragedy. Most of what's valuable in this film continues to be the chemistry between Loren and Mastroianni. But they are captivating.

It's also interesting to see so much location footage in Italy, Russia, and Ukraine from a prominent neorealist director.

I girasoli is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Spectral Surface

I reread Daniel Clowes' Ghost World last year and, ever since then, have been meaning to watch the 2001 film adaptation again. I finally got around to it last night and was surprised how effective it was.

The comic does a much better job of capturing adolescence and some of the humour in the film is much too broad. In the comic, it's clear to see how Enid and Becca use their cynical humour as a defense mechanism, a shield for their insecurities. The film moves the balance a bit so that it seems the world Enid lives in deserves her disgust. In doing this, it goes a little too broad sometimes. The phony blues band that's more popular than the real blues legend at a club is too obviously a caricature. Enid, speaking in a mock confidential tone to a customer about how he should supersize his soda would likely have been met with friendly laughter from the patron rather than stunned confusion.

There are also problems with the film's structure. Particularly in the end, it feels like crucial dialogue is missing in Enid's scenes with Illeana Douglas and Steve Buscemi.

But the film's assets outweigh its flaws. I like how Illeana Douglas' high school art teacher is both a subject for the film's mockery as well as a genuinely intelligent, positive influence on Enid's life. Her insistence that art with a political message is more important than amusing cartoons is funny and slightly sinister, especially now, considering what the landscape of popular art looks like.

I feel like I've become Steve Buscemi's Seymour character in some ways. Certainly I identify with him a lot more than I did twenty years ago. He can't find anyone to connect with because he can't find anyone who appreciates how he values blues and antique American culture--except Enid. It reminds me of how frustrated I've been in trying to find a live, flesh and blood person who likes movies as much as I do. Or even understands why I value them. It's the kind of thing you wouldn't think would be as rare as it is. Even some people who I used to think kind of got it seem to have grown cold to it in the past ten years. Movie tastes, both in Japan and in the US, even when it comes to some of the better movies, have shifted to the doggedly unsubtle. That title, "Ghost World", has never felt more apt.

I guess I'd say I sympathise more with Enid in the movie than Enid in the comic although I think she's better written in the comic, if that makes sense. In the film, she's someone with an itch she can't scratch or even identify, only she knows that the things Becca wants and her father wants don't make sense to her. There's something of value to be attained just beyond her grasp but the best she can do to reach it is a scattershot experimentation. Dying her hair green one day, invading a sex shop, dancing to a Bollywood movie in her room.

Thora Birch looks amazing in the movie. Her high contrast wardrobe suits her perfectly even as it out-comic books the comic book. Scarlett Johansson plays a very different Becca compared to her comic book counterpart and has to be the wet blanket for most of the movie. But I think this conflict introduced between her and Enid nicely illuminates the underlying issues.

Ghost World is available on Amazon Prime.

The Cleanest Money

After years of people recommending it to me, I finally started watching Ozark a few days ago. Two episodes in I'd have to give it a resounding, "Not bad."

One of the latest in the long line of shows influenced by Twin Peaks, this one also has a heavy dose of The Sopranos. The basic concept, of a man from the city finding revelations in a small, rural town filled with dangerous and eccentric characters, is more like Twin Peaks, but the focus on his family dynamic and his relationship with organised crime feel more like The Sopranos.

Jason Bateman and Laura Linney play Marty and Wendy Byrde--he's a money launderer for a Mexican cartel and she's his faithless spouse. Together with their two kids, they suddenly move from Chicago to a rural town in Missouri because the cartel has figured out Marty's coworkers have been skimming some of the cartel's funds.

Instead of the mystery of a beloved teenage girl's murderer, the question motivating the drama, at least so far in season one, is how much longer the cartel is going to let Marty live and whether or not the job he's currently doing for them, laundering 8 million, is even doable in such a small town.

Like most Twin Peaks imitators, and Twin Peaks itself when David Lynch wasn't around, it never gets the quirky townsfolk quite right. Lynch has the kind of talent for making people who are bizarre yet feel 100% authentic. The elderly man (Harris Yulin) who, for awkwardly contrived reasons, lives in the basement of the Byrdes' new home, is spotted walking naked to the lake at one point for a punchline.

Maybe it's more like Green Acres, the southern characters feel about that authentic. Everyone on the show is either a genius or a caraciture. But for the former category, it does make for some clever plotting. I was certainly compelled to keep watching as Bateman tried, and sometimes succeded, at swimming faster than the other sharks in the first episode.

Ozark is available on NetFlix.

Rabbit Courage

Not all the things we liked as kids look so good when we're older, whether it's He-Man or Good Luck Trolls or, like the protagonist of 2019's Jojo Rabbit, Adolf Hitler. True, being a Nazi fanboy has direr connotations than being an avid Pog collector, but filmmaker Taika Waititi wisely sees the same rules of youthful foolishness likely applied. Employing a tone frequently reminiscent of Wes Anderson, Waititi made a good comedy about the innocent absurdity that can exist concurrently with malicious horror.

As Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, "As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too." As young Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) takes to Hitler Youth training with gusto, he meets silly adult Nazis played by Sam Rockwell, Alfie Allen, and Rebel Wilson. Wilson's character, Fraulein Rahm, never breaks stride in her devotion to the cause, even later in the film when she's packing kids off with explosives. She maintains the manner of a secretary whose mind is never entirely on her boring job yet her devotion to the concept is beyond question.

The film's most interesting character is Sam Rockwell's Captain Klenzendorf whose fervour for the National Socialist Party has worn out with age and experience along with assorted other kinds of youthful idealism and slavishness. He designs his own uniform at one point with ridiculous crimson fringe and a plumed helmet that doesn't so much proclaim his loyalties as much as it says, "Fuck this noise, I'm doing what I want."

Jojo's mother, played by an especially sharp and charming Scarlett Johansson, is a more straight forward, secret anti-Nazi, and Jojo discovers one day a Jewish girl his mother's been hiding in the wall. Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) threatens and mocks the boy and he, of course, is horrified by her. But like most kids who spend a lot of time together on the playground, no taunts or factionalism can quite outlast the influence of shared experience and hormones.

Waititi himself plays Jojo's imaginary friend in the film, a version of Adolf Hitler, whose childlike recriminations and articulations of moral support seem much more like a kid's construct than the bloody dictator, though there's understandably some overlap between the two. Waititi's performance is very funny.

It's a very sweet film that says some rather dangerously innocent and insightful things about human nature.