campbellharper Reviews

Mystic Pizza (1988)

Much more than mediocre

[8/10 · 11 November 2022]

Everything I've seen about this movie led me to think it would be a mediocre, run of the mill Hollywood movie of its time. But it's really much more than that. It's a full-fledged drama in its own right that consistently makes interesting, creative choices throughout.

Any praise of the movie has to start with the plot, and I assume the literary source material was reproduced with fidelity. To put it plainly, the three main plots that make up this movie are nuanced, just straight nuanced. Each of them is a bit of a stock set-up, such as Julia Roberts' plotline where the poor girl dates a rich boy, but it never feels like they're just going through the motions. They treat each plot as if it hasn't been done before, give it the attentive rendering it deserves, and let us feel a whole range of things about what's going on.

The characters themselves are very unexpected. You think you know them at a glance, but they continually surprise you. Here the dialogue is a great asset. The characters never say dumb things just to establish a plot point; everything they say expresses their personality, their way of seeing the world. And whoever wrote it has a real ear for actual speech.

Strange to say, this movie is realistic. The main characters are all poor Portuguese-Americans in small town Connecticut. Although obviously the clothes and all that are more expensive than these poor girls would actually be able to buy, the characters really do live, talk, and think like people in their situation do (speaking from experience!). This is Hollywood as a tidier-up of reality, not as pure fabrication.

And best of all, the movie maintains all of these things for its whole duration. I was impressed from the get-go, and things just kept continuing in a satisfying way. So often movies (especially in the 90s) would cut short anything creative or interesting that cropped up in the first half of the movie, and channel it all into formulaic mush. But the ending is as real, as unexpected, and as nuanced as the beginning was.

So believe you me, this movie deserves a lot more than the measly 6.3 stars that it has at the moment!

A Month in the Country (1987)

Understated would be an understatement

[8/10 · 8 June 2022]

I feel ambivalent about this film, mostly because so much of what's good about it seems to verge on self-parody. Take the premise: a man goes to a sleepy Yorkshire village to spend "a month in the country." He's been hired to restore a painting in the church. While he's there he meets a few interesting characters, gets a sense of the social lay of the land, has some brushes with love, and generally gets to chill out.

What bothers me about this premise is that people already come to British period films for a cozy, soothing experience where understated social interactions are paired with picturesque landscapes. "A Month in the Country" takes this to such an extreme that it almost embarrasses me.

Now, it has some reason to be so soothing, since one of the main themes is healing. The protagonist was in the First World War and was obviously very traumatized in it. This month in the country is like a mental health vacation for him. (And can't we all enjoy fantasizing about taking a mental health vacation --- one that actually improves our mental health?)

I suppose my real discomfort with the film is that so much talent and vision were put into something that feels like the cinematic equivalent of ASMR.

Well, those are my qualms, but I liked the movie a lot, so I should say something about that. The degree of suggestive understatement in this film is unreal. Instead of a traditional plot, events are left to hang in the air, rarely picked up again later (or, when they are picked up again, treated with a bit of a slant). As the film goes on and these images and moments pile up, a complex texture of insinuation begins to run beneath every scene. The gist of this is partly thematic, pertaining to healing and religion (which is the film's other big theme), but I'm happy to say it's not overwhelmingly so. I find films that are too thematic tend to feel airless and unreal. No, the thinking behind the meandering events of "A Month in the Country" seems to have been that life is unpredictable and will throw things at you that you don't exactly know what to do with. This is the old Chekhovian plotless plot trick (although I would prefer to trace it back further to Turgenev, who also wrote his own "A Month in the Country"), but novelist J. L. Carr and director Pat O'Connor make it shine here.

I enjoyed this movie a lot and I'm sad, actually, that nothing like this gets made anymore. It seems as if people have lost the knack for this level of subtlety.

Os Verdes Anos (1963)

Gorgeous but Bad Ending

[7/10 · 3 November 2021]

Now that's beautiful filmmaking. The words "cinematography" don't do justice to the visual splendour on show here. It's not just that the shots are well-composed and the locations beautiful (we see some of Lisbon's abundant architectural and natural beauty) --there's a sense of atmosphere that pervades the whole film and makes every shot feel emotional, meaningful. The pace is leisurely, just right, and along with the low-key story helps us soak it all in. I also have to nod towards the beautiful string accompaniment, never intrusive but always lovely.

But the ending... (I promise no spoilers). I was willing to go along with the story, which is a bit thin but works great as a pretext for the visuals and atmosphere. But we never really understand the characters. We just see them go on with their lives. The ending just seems to come out of nowhere in a totally gratuitous way. It's the kind of thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, lowers my opinion of the people behind the camera, and makes it hard for me to recommend it to others without reservations. But all the same, it's a beautiful little neorealist gem.

Betty (2020–2021)

A good show

[8/10 · 1 June 2020]

I'm seeing a lot of very negative reviews here. I can kind of understand where people are coming from. The show has a really loose structure, and the acting sometimes falters a bit. I was pretty skeptical at first myself.

Still, I'm shocked, because overall I really enjoy this show. The thing about it is it's really trying to show us how things are. Sometimes people talk about "representation" like it means sticking non-white, non-straight, non-male characters in where they weren't needed. But in a case like this, representation is clearly just representation, i.e. realism, i.e. trying to portray how things really are.

So unlike a lot of other shows or movies set in NY, this show gives me a clear sense of what it would actually be like to live there. The characters fit into the setting like a hand in a glove. You can understand each character as a part of the overall world. These aren't just disembodied bits of biography.

And I feel like people in general don't get just how hard it is to portray a social milieu. It's a sense of what everyone around you is thinking, how they'll react to things, stuff like that. It's much easier, but less satisfying, to have the characters exist in their own closed-off bubble. This show is so good at represented the overall society the characters live in.

It also conveys the sense of being a freewheeling young person really well. The characters move around the world eager to find something new. They bump into people randomly -- and it doesn't feel like the screenwriters are just pulling strings willy nilly. It's such a fun, breezy feeling, leaving me feeling good after watching the show. And it only works because the world they move through feels so real.

Finally, the skating aspect is cool. I don't know anything about skating, but for this show skating is clearly not just a prop. They want you to like skating as much as the characters do.

The Last Thing He Wanted (2020)

I actually liked this movie. Also I actually understood what was going on.

[10/10 · 5 March 2020]

Okay, so this movie is BOMBING. Apparently people hate it. But, you know, most people aren't saying they don't like it period, they're saying that they couldn't follow it. I could follow the movie, and I liked it a lot. I want to spend this review trying to give the (spoiler-free) background that will help the story make sense. Hopefully with a bit of background, people will be able to make some sense of it, and might enjoy it as much as I did.

"The Last Thing He Wanted" has an urgent story to tell about politics, power, and violence. It is packed with a crazy amount of details, which is overwhelming, but they are all true (or fictionalized details that are close to the truth). The author of the original novel, Joan Didion, was a journalist like the main character. You need to approach this as a kind of exposé of how politics worked in the 80's and still works today, not as a piece of escapism.

In the 80's, the Reagan administration was heavily involved in Central America and the Caribbean. "The Last Thing He Wanted" is mostly concerned with Nicaragua. At the time, a leftist Sandinista government was in power there. As part of the Cold War, the US was supporting a group of "Contras," armed forces fighting against the Sandinistas. The problem is that the Contras were, as it says on Wikipedia, "engaged in a systematic campaign of terror" against the populace.

Reagan was vocal in his support of the Contras. Elena (played by Anne Hathaway) quotes him early in the movie, mentioning that he had said "I too am a Contra." However, the extent of US involvement there was kept mostly under wraps. The CIA and other organizations were involved in all kinds of secretive business, including what would eventually be the "Iran-Contra Scandal," something I don't have space to explain here.

The whole plot of "The Last Thing He Wanted" plays out against this backdrop. As the movie begins, Elena is investigating the atrocities committed by US-backed soldiers. She's trying to crack open the case so that the government is held accountable. In a very early scene, Treat (Ben Affleck), who I think is in the CIA, discusses with another Washington type whether they should allow her to keep working or not.

Their conversation alerts us to the shadiness of the CIA and other US government agencies in this movie. They want to control the conversation in America so that they can act with impunity in Central America. In other words, the question of American democracy at home and foreign policy abroad are inextricable. Elena wants democracy at home and accountability abroad, and that puts her at odds with Washington.

So, in the main plot of the movie, when Elena is back in Central America, we are stuck in the middle of all kinds of conflicts. Are the people she is dealing with Sandinistas, Contras, or unaffiliated? Are they connected to the US government, and if so, do they know she's an investigative journalist? Could they be connected to other foreign governments?

The situation depicted in "The Last Thing He Wanted" is so relevant, because it's this exact problem which is at the heart of politics today. Now, voters in America are disenchanted with a government they see as unresponsive and unaccountable. Likewise, the world at large is eschewing American leadership, partly out of distrust. Both of these facts can be traced to just such situations as these.

If you want to dig a bit deeper into the present political moment, learn more about the world of "The Last Thing He Wanted"! Even if you never like the movie, it's important to understand. Once you know the historical background, I think you'll find the movie much more rewarding, too.

The Last Thing He Wanted (2020)

A Film That Hasn't Found Its Audience

[10/10 · 4 March 2020]

Just tonight I watched "The Last Thing He Wanted" with my family -- two younger siblings (16 and 18) and my mom (60). All four of us loved it. We were all talking happily about it after it was done. I had heard vaguely that it was getting bad reviews, but I hadn't actually read any. Now I'm on IMDb and I'm seeing all these one star reviews. I decided to make an account just to give my own opinion.

This movie is hard to follow. That's something everyone here is mentioning. But it seems to me like it wasn't THAT hard to follow. It's only about as convoluted as "The Big Sleep" or "Funeral in Berlin," which don't have rock bottom ratings.

That makes me think that this film just hasn't found its audience. I think a lot of people came here looking for action scenes, and got bored with this mainly dialogue driven movie (which was adapted from a novel). I found the movie very tense and thrilling throughout, so that the action scenes came as exciting escalations of the ever-present tension. But if the dialogue is not hooking you, you probably won't be feeling the tension much in the first place.

And the dialogue is a big thing. I have no doubt I wouldn't have been able to make sense of the movies without having the subtitles on. The characters talk fast and reference a lot of names (of places, people, and organizations). It expects you to keep up with this rapid fire pace. To be fair, this is just one of the pitfalls of adapting a novel. There are so many words, and if the actors spoke more slowly they'd never be able to fit the whole story in one movie.

I think the pacing was truly admirable. Most novel adaptations either have dumb time-skips where you miss important information, or have summary-style scenes where all the interesting dialogue is cut out to leave the plot-relevant information, or have scenes that plod on much longer than they should. "The Last Thing He Wanted" goes at a clip, really rushing from thing to thing. But each point is actually made very well in each scene, and the rush of it becomes pretty exciting. You have no time to stop and think while your life is at risk, and you have no idea who to trust. This ends up demanding a lot of focus from the viewer. I think my family enjoyed it so much because we saw it as kind of a game. We pointed things out to each other and tried to make connections between things.

I can understand reviewers who were unpleasantly surprised to find that there isn't much action here, and that the fast-paced dialogue requires a lot of concentration. That isn't everyone's cup of tea. But I also get the sneaking suspicion that people are just frustrated that this movie doesn't spell everything out about the historical background. It frustrates me because the historical background is one of the most urgent things about the movie.

Some movies will start with the ABCs because they know their audience doesn't know much about the subject matter. For instance, movies like "Hotel Rwanda" are like an introduction to their subject matter. It doesn't assume that you know very much about the Rwandan genocide. It wants to tell you about it.

But if you're always starting from basics, you never get anywhere. Sometimes there are important things to say AFTER you've learned all the basics. That's the kind of movie "The Last Thing He Wanted" is. It expects you to have some familiarity with the political background.

And believe me, you should WANT to know more about the political background. Because this stuff is the background of our own lives today. This movie is basically about how America behaves as a superpower -- how it acts at home and how it treats other countries around the world. The way it acts today is not much different. If you try to learn a bit about the background and then keep that in mind while you watch this movies, YOU WILL LEARN SO MUCH THAT IS SO IMPORTANT! Of course, I can't guarantee that you'll like it. But this information is valuable in its own right.

Basically, the backdrop for this movie is the Reagan administration's involvement in Central America and the Caribbean. The Cold War was still on, and a group of left-wing Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua. Reagan opposed this government and backed anti-Sandinista "Contras". He supplied these Contras with arms and funding, and also spoke out publicly in their favour. The problem is that the Contras, to quote Wikipedia, "engaged in a systematic campaign of terror" -- these were not just freedom-loving citizens who opposed leftism, but brutal armies. At the same time, the US government was getting involved in similar ways in El Salvador, Grenada (a Caribbean island), and many other places across the world.

Besides the moral problems associated with backing the Contras, there were also the nefarious ways that the government did it. It was not by any means a straight-forward affair -- the CIA and other government agencies acted in almost total secrecy, and a lot of shady dealing got mixed in with the declared actions the Reagan administration was taking.

This is the central dynamic of "The Last Thing He Wanted." The shady backroom stuff can't be disentangled from what the government is officially doing. Anne Hathaway's character, Elena, is a journalist who documents the things that the government wants kept secret. Early on in the movie, Ben Affleck's character debates with another Washington guy about whether or not to "allow" her to keep doing her journalism there. The other guy thinks it will help to make things seem more unstable in Nicaragua, and thus give legitimacy to American operations there. Affleck's character, Treat, thinks it's too risky to have the truth come out.

The question hanging over the whole film is, who is out to get who? When Elena (Hathaway) starts to get involved in her father's smuggling operation, she doesn't know who is connected to the Sandinistas, who is connected to the Contras, who is perhaps only trying to make money off of drugs, and who is connected to the US government. For people connected to the US government, we have to wonder, do they know Elena is a journalist and care about that, or is she only relevant because of the smuggling thing?

Basically, everyone's motives are completely tied up with the political situation at the time. But, let's be real, the world hasn't changed that much. It's exactly the kind of high-handed treatment of other countries which are, in theory anyway, sovereign, which makes China, Russia, and other countries so recalcitrant about accepting US leadership. If this is how the US treats Nicaragua, why wouldn't they treat China the same way?

It's also the same attitude which led to the (second) Iraq war. Now, I need hardly remind you that the Iraq war is a huge reason why people are so jaded about politics today. People were lied to on a massive scale, and bought into a costly and painful war over what turns out to have been nothing important. It has given both Republicans and Democrats a sense of powerlessness and cynicism (one of the things which helped elect Trump). Moreover, American prestige has never recovered, and the international well of goodwill for America has become very shallow.

Well, that's my little history lesson (and I don't claim to be an expert on any of this stuff). But it gets to the heart of what matters today. The world still works the way it does in "The Last Thing He Wanted," and unlike a movie, you can't just give it one star and tune it out.