Tag: What the Cats Missed

When You Have 'Splainin' To Do and Don't Know It

Published on by D. G. Hart30 Comments

The Big Kahuna is not necessarily the movie to see on Christmas Day. The options for the Harts are to re-watch Family Man (which is a very clever retread of It’s A Wonderful Life set in contemporary New Joisey) or Metropolitan, both with Christmas themes. (Unfortunately, the copies that we own of each are in VHS, which means having to find the old video cassette player — chore one — and then reckon with the existing shelves and wires — chore two on steroids.) If neither of these is available for free at Amazon Prime, we may trot out My Architect, a wonderful documentary about the Philadelphia architect, Louis Kahn, made by his illegitimate son, Nathaniel. What does My Architect have to do with Christmas? Not much, except that at holidays we turn nostalgic and Philadelphia’s presence in the movie reminds the Harts of our life there. (At the risk of going stream of consciousness, a recent viewing of Stories We Tell, by Sarah Polley, another poignant documentary about fathers and mother, reminded the Harts of My Architect and put us in the mood.)

Speaking of nostalgia during the holiday season, an outing to Ann Arbor yesterday allowed us to see a double-feature (for the price of two admissions, mind you) of Nebraska and Saving Mr. Banks. Nebraska has its charms, as do most of Alexander Payne‘s movies (among them Sideways, About Schmidt, and Descendants). But Saving Mr. Banks stole the show. I for one cannot get enough of Emma Thompson. But the portrayal of a proper Londoner (via Australia) having to reckon with Hollywood was priceless. It was in several respects the flipside of My Week with Marilyn, a movie about Marilyn Monroe’s starring in a Sir Laurence Olivier production, filmed at Pinewood Studios, The Prince and the Showgirl. (Seeing Kenneth Branagh play Olivier is wonderful.) Watching the clash between English formality and American casualness in both these movies is priceless.

This is a long-winded way of making available to Oldlifers — and especially Roman Catholic critics of Oldlife errors — a clip from The Big Kahuna that is arguably the best scene from a movie that gets evangelicalism right and portrays it surprisingly sympathetically. (For those pressed for time, the really poignant lines come around minute 2:50 and run for a minute or so.) And what the movie gets right is a born-again innocence that exalts in its own righteousness without noticing the log protruding from an outlook that overlooks the fundamental tension of the Christian life — being both saint-and-sinner. The scene also exposes the sort of self-righteousness that we often see in Protestants who convert to Roman Catholicism — an exaltation of the “true” church while ignoring all the warts that make Rome less than appealing and the claims of converts less than believable. Modesty is incumbent on all Christians. But for those with a church whose past is as tainted as Rome’s is (give Protestants time, we only have 500 years experience), such modesty is not simply becoming but necessary. The way Phil looks at Bob in this clip is the way I often feel when reading Jason and the Callers.

What does any of this have to do with Christmas? Nothing, really. No problem, though, it’s a secular holiday and I am grateful for the time off to watch movies.

Less Is More

Published on by D. G. Hart21 Comments

After finishing a class on Hollywood and the Civil War in which I watched for the first time Gone with the Wind — a movie that was much more agreeable despite its length than I would have expected — I am still of the conviction that a small movie has as much appeal as the Hollywood blockbuster. Frances Ha, which the Mrs. and I watched over the weekend, arguably has more charm on a much smaller scale than most of Hollywood’s major productions.

It is movie about a young woman who is struggling to find her way in New York City as a dancer without great talent or a level head. What keeps Frances going is a close friendship with another woman, Sophie, who has a decent job but is easily prone to poor decisions under the influence of romance. When Sophie, with whom Frances shares an apartment, falls for a man and moves in with him, their friendship hits the rocks and Frances needs to find a place to live in an expensive city with few prospects for making enough to pay the rent. She eventually loses her position as a minor player in a dance company, cannot afford to live in the city, and barely holds on to her dignity. To keep it she foolishly takes a weekend trip to Paris that she pays for with a credit card that some lender offers to sucker her into paying interest.

Rather than being a sad tale or a story of the triumph of the human spirit — Frances does eventually prevail in an ordinary way — Frances Ha is a simple narrative about young adults and what they go through before achieving a measure of maturity stability. It has the feel of a Whit Stillman movie, like Last Days of Disco. It also resembles the characters in Lena Dunham’s HBO series, Girls, except that Frances and Sophie are not nearly as sexually depraved or bored as Hannah and Marnie. The movie is shot in black and white, and several of the sequences resemble images from the heyday of French movies from the period of Francois Truffaut’s influence in which Frances skips or runs through the streets of New York, either in a state of glee (having recently received a rebate check from the IRS) or panic (needing to find an ATM to pay for a meal at a restaurant that does not take debit cards).

Again, it is a small film. But rather than highlighting the particular temptations that afflict young women either in the days of disco dance clubs or during the sexually charged ethos of the hookup culture, Francis Ha explores the age old theme of friends who see their relationship threatened by boyfriends or jobs. It feels as much like my own experience while living with a good friend who started to spend more time with a girlfriend than with me — can you believe it? — or my wife’s own disappointments as a twenty-something with a best friend/roommate who vacated the friendship and apartment for the charms of a man.

It is not brilliant. Nor is it profound. But in its own charming way, Frances Ha shows the joys and sorrows of life between the order provided by parents and college and the stability of an income and the ability to pay your way. If you do not care for chick flicks or movies low in special affects, Frances Ha will likely disappoint. But if ordinary life has enough affect for you, it is a movie well worth seeing (as is Noah Baumbach’s other films, The Squid and the Whale, and Greenberg).