Movie diary:
Hail, Caesar! (2016) - The Coen Brothers' latest, about a "fixer" in 1950s Hollywood, charged with making sure that everything at the studio runs smoothly. The main plot revolves around the kidnapping of the star of Hail, Caesar! A Tale of the Christ, the studio's current prestige project. The real fun lies in the cast and the loving recreations of various kinds of movies. I enjoyed it a lot, though I'm not entirely sure what to make of it as a whole. Since there are numerous religious themes in the film, and the main character seems to find a kind of salvation in making movies, perhaps it can be taken as a love letter to the artform itself.
After Hours (1985) - A relatively unknown Scorsese film made on a shoestring budget while he struggled to get The Last Temptation of Christ off the ground. The set-up is simple: an office worker meets a woman at a restaurant, and later the same night he goes to see her at her apartment. Various events unfold. What's special about the movie is the way it captures the sensation of a (bad) dream. The situations the hero encounters are ordinary and familar, but the distant, unpredictable behaviour and off-key emotional responses of the characters he meets gradually remove any sense of being on steady ground, of knowing what's going on and what you can do about it. It's a supremely disconcerting movie. Highly recommended.
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) - Seeing a Scorsese movie reminded me that I never got around to this one. It's about a stockbroker (Leonardo DiCaprio) who gets rich through shady deals and ends up going to jail. Thematically and stylistically, it's reminiscent of Goodfellas and Casino, with the same heavy use of voiceover to provide you a sense of insider perspective. What it lacks in comparison to those earlier films is precisely that sense of insider perspective. The movie doesn't give you enough details about the various deals and transactions to make you feel like you're part of them, which means that the endless scenes of DiCaprio giving speeches and partying aren't grounded in anything other than sheer spectacle. Or perhaps the problem is simply that I don't find DiCaprio nearly engaging enough to carry a three hour movie. Towards the end I was looking at anything except his perpetually tense facial expression, like the blinds in the office windows.
The Godfather Part III (1990) - I decided to rewatch this as I'd only seen it once many years ago and didn't really remember it. After seeing it again, I no longer wonder why that is. You can, of course, point to issues with the story, with individual scenes, with actors, and so on, but as a whole the film is not badly made. The deadly problem is that it has no thematic weight. The first two films formed a tragic arc: Michael Corleone tries to escape the world of the Sicilian mafia and forge his own identity in the new world, but is drawn back into it to protect his family, which he then ends up destroying in his pursuit of power. The story is complete at that point, and so Part III amounts to little more than a three hour elaboration on the final shot of Part II, showing Michael's spiritual isolation and inability to escape what he has done. The end result is something rather strange, a movie that is well put together yet feels thoroughly inconsequential. The Godfather Episode III: The Force Awakens?
