Much Ado About Nothing

Back when Joss Whedon's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was on TV and I was a big fan, I remember reading about how Whedon would throw parties where the cast would come round and they would drink wine and perform Shakespeare for their own amusement.  Watching his enchanted staging of Shakespeare's fin-du-siecle (1599) screwball comedy, "Much Ado About Nothing," is a bit like being at one of these parties.  It's festive, and indeed on screen the wine flows constantly, warding off any unwanted sobriety.  There's a bit of a wink: the actors are playing in the dress-up box here, while at the same time inhabiting the characters fully.  The modern-dress action plays out in a modern house and in its gardens and woods.  This is not Padua, obviously.  It's a fantasy, and the lovely black and white imagery removes us further from reality.

Whedon made "Ado" quickly to recharge after he felt he was losing himself at the helm of the gigantic "The Avengers," which was fitfully fun and funny but which didn't really evince much directorial personality.  This picture has that seemingly tossed-off quality you can't get without years of honing a craft.  The "dance" of the guests at this country house party feels off-the-cuff, but the blocking and choreography must have taken some doing.  "Ado" has an intrictately constructed farce plot that is the true model for my favorite writer, P.G. Wodehouse.  Instructively, Shakespeare threw plausibility right out the window.  The absurd plot involves mistaken identity, seduction, disgrace, staged death.

But you know the story.  As always, it revolves around our witty couple, Beatrice and Benedick, who swear they've no use for love.  They're just friends who enjoy bickering and teasing each other.  Benedick is the confirmed bachelor, Beatrice the saucy proto-feminist.  They agree on but one point: marriage is the death knell. 

Here they're played by Alexis Denisof and Amy Acker, whom I used to enjoy when they were part of the ensemble on Whedon's TV show, "Angel."  Can American TV actors do Shakespeare?  The proof is on the screen.  I rate their timing up there with Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson.  Denisof is very funny as Benedick, wearing a steely expression until love blooms in his breast and his visage opens up in humility and heart, revealing a big softie.  Acker is a playful and high-spirited Beatrice, always with an intelligent gleam in her eye.  They are good with the banter, the physical comedy, the wisecracking wordplay, the music of the language.  Shakespeare's language was meant to be performed, and sometimes it takes hearing his words aloud to remind us just how funny he was.  The audience with whom Karolyn and I saw this movie laughed a lot.

The others players are all here.  The evil Don John (Sean Maher), a prisoner of his brother, Leonato (Clark Gregg), still schemes his evil schemes along with his partner-in-crime, Conrade (a sultry-corrupt, heavy-lidded Rikik Lindhome, from the comedy duo Garfunkel and Oates).  Fran Kranz plays the gallant but shy Claudio, who loves Leonato's daughter Hero (a fetching Jillian Morgese).  Reed Diamond plays Don Pedro, Claudio's friend who woos Hero on his behalf while masked.  Nathan Fillion and Tom Lenk are very funny indeed as the bumbling, clueless policemen, Dogbody and Verges.          

Of course Beatrice and Benedick love each other.  We can see it right away.  Watching them figure it out is a great pleasure.  (Cynics fall the hardest.)  Of course, their friends will have to trick them into seeing the love that is already there. 

And as always, the story ends with plans to marry: Hero and Claudio, Beatrice and Benedick.  Like that eternal scene on the side of Keats's Grecian urn, Shakespeare's happy, happy lovers will forever dance.  In fact, Whedon has set Shakespeare's own fanfare to music, using it as a backdrop to an evening party by the pool.  It's a song that perhaps sums up his worldview:

"Then sigh not so, but let them go,

   And be you blithe and bonny,

Converting all your sounds of woe

   Into hey nonny, nonny."

Rating: ****

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

--July 7, 2013

Before Midnight

I felt butterflies going into “Before Midnight.”  “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset” are two of my all-time favorite films, you see, and I didn’t want them to blow it now.  For me those pictures are magical and somehow personal, maybe because I’m the same age as Jesse and Celine (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy).  Richard Linklater, the director, co-writes the pictures with Hawke and Delpy in what has become an unplanned series, and I am happy to report that with the supremely moving “Before Midnight,” they never make a false step.  While there is some sadness, there is much more of the joy of life here.  Or rather, this is a movie that understands that the two are twined.   

Those first two films are about moments when you have to make a choice that could change your entire life.  You’re in your mid-20s.  Do you ask the beautiful young woman you’ve just met to get off the train with you in Vienna?  If you’re her, do you get off?  The young man does have a charming line about how you could think of it as an experiment in time travel.  (Pretend it’s years later, he says.  You’re married, but the marriage doesn’t have the same spark.  You start to wonder about the guys with whom you didn’t take up along the way.  Well, I’m one of those guys.  Here’s your chance to go back and see). 

Now it’s nine years later.  Do you miss your flight and stay in Paris with your one true love?  Staying means upending your life and the lives of others, but you know she’s the one, you know that much in your bones, have in fact known it since that night (even though you hadn’t seen her since). 

In “Before Midnight” what Jesse and Celine face is not so much choices as the consequences of choices.  They’ve been together for nine years now.  They’ve got two young daughters.  Once again, they go for a walk and talk.  Or, as Jesse puts it, “How long has it been since we walked around bullshitting?”  He’s still her disheveled dreamer.  There’s still sex banter, and they still come upon bits of magic: I love the little ancient chapel. 

Yet this film explores new ground.  The image, the illusion of the other has become a real person.  They struggle in their relationship to shake off their own mythology.  Jesse, as excited by ideas as ever, has another novel under his belt, “That Time,” a companion piece to “This Time,” his mythologized version of “the night.”

"Before Midnight” is serene in its unspooling of the ribbon of time.  Linklater's direction can feel like a lucid dream.  But then, in a very natural, almost casual way, the “Before” movies have always been about time. “Before Sunrise” was about an enchanted evening where time seemed to be suspended.  “Before Sunset” unfolded in “real time” and Jesse spoke about his idea to write an entire novel that took place in the space of one pop song, in the moment when a man discovers that “time is a lie”: it’s all happening, all at once.  

We open on Jesse putting his pubescent son on a plane back to the boy's mom, Jesse’s ex-wife, after a summer together.  Jesse yearns for a connection; that the boy seems to confide more in Celine confuses him.  It also eats at him that his son lives in Chicago while they live in Paris.  He returns to the car where Celine waits with the girls.  As they talk and drive in an extended take, we get all this and more, and we enjoy the interplay between these two smart actors.  We also get that Celine, who works as an environmental campaigner, is feeling dissatisfied, is considering a new job offer. 

Jesse and Celine are on a sun-kissed Greek island for the summer, at a kind of idyllic writer’s colony.  There is soccer during the day and evenings of food and wine.  The children pick tomatoes from the vineyard, and the women happily prepare wonderful meals from fresh peppers.  Meanwhile the writers, in this case the men, kick ideas around in the open air as the Mediterranean sparkles beyond.  This is pretty near a perfect representation of my idea of the “good life.”  But then the male ego would think so, wouldn't it?

I adore the happy, convivial alfresco dinner scene.  It is the proverbial “feast of reason and flow of soul.”  They talk about many things, especially sex.  Around the table is a couple from every stage of life.  (It’s all happening, all at once.)  There is a nubile couple in their 20s (Ariane Labed and Yiannis Papadopoulos).  Jesse and Celine represent middle age (and how funny it sounds to say that).  So does another couple played by Athina Rachel Tsangari and Panos Koronis: playful, affectionate, they have a cheerfully contentious relationship. 

Finally, there is an older man and woman (Walter Lassally and Xenia Kalogeropoulou), companions, still resonating with the days, still radiant, still happy, though each has lost his or her spouse.  The woman mostly listens.  When she does speak, she tells a story about her faltering efforts to hold on to the memory of the man she loved.  Her story is so honest, so full of joy and sadness, that the table is momentarily silent in the face of its beauty.  We’re just passing through, she concludes.  

Linklater frames her between the backs of Jesse and Celine's heads.  "We’re just characters in that old lady’s dream,” as Celine said in “Before Sunset.”  (I've always felt that line was itself a playful reference to Linklater’s “Waking Life,” with its animated Jesse and Celine.) 

The film culminates in an extended setpiece, a fight scene in the hotel room that is emotionally extraordinary: excruciating, breathtaking and also deeply, laughter-on-the-edge-of-tears funny.  People are talking about Delpy leaving her (quite pretty) middle-aged breasts exposed, as sex turns to fighting.  They should be talking about how much truth Hawke, Delpy and Linklater get on the screen, how much recognizable human experience.   

We’re watching two people fight, yes, but these are not just any two people.  We think of Jesse and Celine as icons of some kind of romantic dream.  This scene is going to feel very personal for a lot of people, because (a) we watched them find each other, and (b) we see so much of ourselves in it, as men and women.  

 

Celine storms out and Jesse discovers her at a table by the water, still furious.  I have a time machine, he says in his roll of the dice to get her back: I’m that guy from the train.  Do you remember me?  And then she says the words that get to the heart of what it’s all about: I remember someone who made me feel like I wasn’t alone. 

I’m that guy, Jesse insists.  I’ve been traveling through time, and I have a letter from your future self.  He reads it to her, and it's a beautiful letter, I thought, not that it mollifies her immediately: that would be too pat.  However, when Celine finally returns to joking around--the jokes that contain so much truth, and some pain, but also acceptance and forgiveness--my eyes were hot with happy tears.  This time machine, she asks him: would it work better if we were both naked?

“Before Midnight” is something perhaps more modest than a romantic dream.  After all, Jesse and Celine are mature adults now.  Yet it’s somehow all the more resilient and resonant for it.  The melancholy is deeper, but so is the joy.  At one point they sit and watch a sunset.  “Still here,” she says.  “Still here.”  And finally, “Gone.”  We’re just passing through.  The day will close, but at the end of this film, Jesse and Celine make the choice that they will see it out together.  

Rating: ***** 

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

 --June 6, 2013

The Great Gatsby

 

Director Baz Luhrman’s new film tells the story of a rich man who grew up dirt poor, a dreamer called Gatsby, in the Roaring Twenties.  These were the “crazy years,” the years of jazz, flappers, dancing, youth rebellion and Art Deco.  The movie's good entertainment, but it pretty much skates along this shiny surface.  It is framed by a device which has Nick Caraway compose what some consider the Great American Novel from a sanitarium, where he’s been committed for “morbid alcoholism.”  As a way of illustrating that Caraway was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stand-in, this isn’t bad; still, it feels unnecessary.  Caraway is played by Toby McGuire, whose vacancy is starting to register less as sweetness than as absence.  

Luhrman is a showman and a visionary, and either you go with his vision or you do not.  He wrote the “Gatsby” screenplay with Craig Pearce, his co-writer on manic projects like “Moulin Rouge” and his very rock ‘n’ roll version of “Romeo + Juliet”.  Like those movies, "Gatsby" is full of playful time-travel, especially musical.       

This is creative in the way it grapples with the key idea of presenting the past as a modern world.  Yet, not unlike Sofia Coppola’s Maria Antoinette, it's not as brash and bold in this as we’d perhaps hoped.  We do get a burst of Jay-Z's “Izzo (H.O.V.A)” when Gatsby’s gleaming yellow Duesenberg pulls up alongside a carful of African-American revelers as they careen across the Queensboro Bridge.  Here Luhrman is saying that rap is the modern equivalent of jazz in the 20’s: an African-American music that electrified the larger culture.  Mostly, though, Jay-Z’s score is tastefully blended in, perhaps rather too tastefully. 

We do get a gorgeous panorama of New York when Caraway exclaims, “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”  Problem is, all the New York scenes are CGI.  My objections are the usual ones: CGI imagery is untethered, weightless, there’s no physicality.  It looks like a comic book.    

Even the ballyhooed orgy scene is not as debauched as one might hope, though I did dig the jazz man on the balcony blowing his axe, the camera swooping.  We feel the wild feverish heat and energy of the big city at night, back when the city was the very heart of the Jazz Age. 

How about the 3D?  At times it brings you into Gatsby’s opulent world.  You’re among the crush of bodies shuffling down the grand entrance hall of his mansion, spilling out onto a tableaux of glitter and action and light.  And it was fun to enter a secret speakeasy chockfull of misbehaving senators, where Gatsy confers with the man who threw the 1919 World Series, Meyer Wolfsheim (the renowned Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan).

What of the green light?  It still hovers out over the glistening waters, sometimes flaring before our eyes.  When Gatsby reaches for it, the 3D enhances the physical and spiritual distance. 

From their billboard, Dr. Eckleburg's famous glasses still survey the Ashes, that desolate area in between Long Island and the city, where sultry, doomed Myrtle (Isla Fisher) still languishes in her room above the garage.     

My favorite moment, though, was the introduction of Nick’s cousin, Daisy (Carey Mulligan).  In a conversation on the way to the theater, Karolyn reminded me that in the book Daisy is always in white.  (My baby is an English teacher, after all.)  At the Versailles-like grounds of the East Egg mansion of Daisy's husband, cruel Tom (Joel Edgerton, reminding me of a young Harvey Keitel), we are ushered into a geometric, pavilion-like chamber.  Billowing all around us are curtains of flowing white.  Over the top of a chaise-longue, Daisy’s bejeweled hand lolls.  We go over the top and there she is.  It's a vision in white.  (There we also meet Jordan, charismatically played by Elizabeth Debecki.  She's something of a love interest for Caraway, not that the rather sexless Maguire seems very interested in her.)      

The basic problem with 3D, though, is insurmountable.  It works by tricking the brain, and the result is a headache. 

He's still a fascinating character, Gatsby.  Noboby really knows where he got the money to buy his great mansion across the bay from Daisy, hoping to lure her with the bright lights.  He was a soldier in the world war (and an assassin for Kaiser Wilhelm, is the whispered rumor).  Gatsby is a man who invented his identity himself.  He may be a fake, a bootlegger, but there’s something innocent about him.  His love is pure.  He’s a dreamer, which is to say, an American.    

As Gatsby, Leonardo DiCaprio is okay.  His performance slightly evokes Orson Welles, which mostly made me muse on what a great Gatsby Welles would have made.  That said, you can almost see Gatsby dreaming when DiCaprio delivers the line, preserved in the script, that sums up what the book is all about.  ‘“You can’t repeat the past,” says Caraway to Gatsby.  

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”’ 

Whether you can or you can’t, it seems we try.  First as farce, then as tragedy, Marx might have said.  This movie isn't quite either, unfortunately, but it's good entertainment.      

Rating: ***

--May 17, 2013

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

The Company You Keep

“These are things I am not proud of, and I find it hard to speak publicly about them and to tease out what was right from what was wrong. I think that part of the Weatherman phenomenon that was right was our understanding of what the position of the United States is in the world. It was this knowledge that we just couldn't handle; it was too big. We didn't know what to do. In a way I still don't know what to do with this knowledge. I don't know what needs to be done now, and it's still eating away at me just as it did 30 years ago.”  -- Mark Rudd, “The Weather Underground” (2002)

As someone interested in the history of revolutionary movements in the United States, I find the case of the Weathermen (or Weather Underground) an abiding fascination.  My college buddy from Denmark, Ole, wrote his thesis about them: “Bring the War Home,” he called it.  Now, I wasn’t born until 1971, but from what I've heard his title sums up what they were about.  They wanted to make it impossible for people to knock about as if the murderous Vietnam War wasn’t going on.  Throwing bombs, they decided, was the only way to do it.  They could be brave: they were willing to get their heads cracked.  They claim to have been very careful not to hurt human beings.  Still, people got hurt: they managed to blow up two of their own when one of their bombs went off in a Greenwich Village townhouse.  

It seems so obvious today: Hey, don't go around throwing bombs!  (It seems that it was obvious at the time as well, to many who otherwise shared the Weathermen's analysis on Vietnam and U.S. imperialism).  I guess what fascinates me is how it came to seem like a good idea to some young people of conscience.  “The Company You Keep” is a thriller, but at heart it asks the same kinds of questions the Weathermen have been asking themselves ever since. 

In the world of this move, the Weathermen staged a bank robbery in which one of their ski-masked members murdered a guard.  (This is probably based on the real-life Brinks truck robbery of 1981 perpetrated by a handful of leftover Weathermen.)    

Jump to 30 years later.  Living as a fugitive, Susan Sarandon has invented an identity as a suburban soccer mom.  She has decided she must turn herself in.  In one of my favorite scenes of the year, she explains her reasons for coming out of the closet.  Sarandon’s wise performance touches on so many things here—sorrow, empathy, but also flashes of anger and defiance.   Her interviewer is Shia LaBeouf, pretty good as a callow, doe-eyed young local journalist striving for the big scoop.  While he stands for nothing in particular, she sees something in him, some kind of spark of integrity.       

When we meet Robert Redford, he is a happily-practicing local lawyer with an 11-year-old daughter (Jackie Evancho).  When LaBeouf discovers his secret identity as one of the Weathermen from the robbery, Redford goes underground.  First he must shepherd his daughter to his brother (Chris Cooper), with whom he hasn’t spoken in decades, all the time staying one step ahead of a FBI man (Terrence Howard).  

We believe Redford as a lawyer.  Once he's on the run, we see weary regret in the crags of his face, but also the palimpsest of the charismatic young radical.  There's a poignancy to the golden boy in autumn.          

Redford runs to clear his name, showing up in the lives of a network of people from his past who can point him in the direction of Mimi, the woman who still haunts his dreams.  Nick Nolte rings true as a good-humored, raspy-voiced old wreck of a working-class radical.  Richard Jenkins is memorable as a popular professor who is not at all happy to see his old friend.  We first see him lecturing about social change, considering a number of theories, Marx included.  You can almost hear him arguing with his younger self.  The script, quite good, is by Lem Dobbs, from the novel by Neil Gordon.  Thanks to incisive writing, in just a few moments we understand their relationship: comrades who disagreed even at the time.  We were a peace movement, for Christ’s sake, exclaims the professor.  Still, he’s there for him when the chips are down.  Just like he always was.   

In Big Sur we find Mimi (Julie Christie, still striking), an unreconstructed revolutionary and major grass dealer living with Sam Elliot in an open redwood house high above the sea. When she learns Redford is on the run, she takes off as well.  Almost instinctively, they know where they will meet: at the deserted lakeside cabin deep in the woods where they’d hidden out 30 years ago.  (It might have been more effective had Mimi not been revealed until the end.)  Over a fire they rekindle the past, and he asks her to come forward to clear his name.

Meanwhile, LaBouef investigates a mystery involving the police officer who investigated the bank robbery (Brendan Gleeson), who has a beautiful adopted daughter (Brit Marling), about 30 years of age.  Hmmm. 

Amanda Kendrick plays a young FBI officer who is offended by Sarandon’s justifications for the bombings.  She’s too young to understand what a horror Vietnam was.  After listening to Sarandon in the scene I mentioned, her only response is, well, terrorists justify terrorism.  At first her words annoyed me.  Then I realized she had a point.  Maybe the worst of the Weathermen did embody that bottomless nihilism that Philip Roth so memorably tried to understand in "American Pastoral."  I think, though, that for most of those kids human life mattered profoundly.  That’s why they got into it in the first place.        

The weakness of “The Company You Keep,” finally, is the way it ties everything up with a neat bow.  Making Redford turn out to be innocent feels a bit like a betrayal of the emotional heart of the movie, which was with people for whom comforting answers were not easy to find.  It's a movie, true, but the happy ending seems like a sidestep after what had been an honest look at people--sometimes heroic, sometimes tragic--for whom redemption is elusive.  If you have a conscience, how do you live with something that you can't swallow and you can't spit up?     

Rating: ***

--May 6, 2013

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

Room 237

As much as I love movies, I own only a few.  “The Shining” is one of that handful.  It’s not even that I’d say it’s Stanley Kubrick greatest achievement; there’s just something about it that makes me keep coming back.  The new documentary “Room 237” tries to tease out what's behind that strange tidal pull, and if anything deepens it.  The movie makes the Overlook Hotel into a kind of three-dimensional system, a roamable area we can explore ourselves, looking for hidden meanings.  

It’s fun to hear a theory about a movie, and it’s especially fun to see the evidence in the frame as the movie plays.  In "Room 237," while we hear the voices of some of the wildest theorists of “The Shining,” we never see them.  Instead their commentary is illustrated by clips, not only from "The Shining" but from movie history (Murnau’s “Faust” is used memorably).   This disembodied effect is a bit unsettling, but it allows for the film to be about the theories, not the eccentrics themselves.

Now, some of the theories are of the sort you might hear advanced by someone on the train sporting a beanie with a propeller on top.  There's the contention that Kubrick faked the Apollo moon landing footage for the U.S. government, and “The Shining” is his elaborately-coded admission/apologia.  Or the belief that the film is about an alien race that is sexually aroused by human beings.  As evidence for this latter, director Rodney Ascher freezes the frame on Stuart Ullman shaking hands with Jack.  At the exact moment their hands meet, Ullman’s mid-body happens to merge with the spine of a binder on his desk, and schwing!  He suddenly appears to be very happy indeed to see Jack.  

One fellow insists that Kubrick’s face can be seen in the clouds right after his name appears in the opening credits.  We strain our eyes, but no heavenly Kubrick reveals himself, even though Ascher steps the frames of that great opening helicopter shot.

On the other hand, some of the analyses are really quite illuminating semiotic analyses.  One man contends that the film is about the white man’s violent world conquest.  His first clue was that Native American-head logo on containers of Calumet Baking Powder stacked in the pantry.  It is about the blood-soaked past, the way "civilization" commits atrocities and then shoots them down the memory hole and stands behind a pretense of proper manners.  (To paraphrase the exchange between Jack and Grady in that blood-red bathroom: Jack: I know you, Grady.  You chopped your wife and kids up into little pieces.  Grady, in the deferential, plummy tones of a good valet: I don’t have any recollection of that, sir.) 

It’s just like pictures in a book, as Mr. Halloran says to Danny.  (Or: history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake, per Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus).

One fellow insists that the film is Kubrick’s great metaphor  for the Holocaust.  1942 was the year the Nazi death machine ramped up, and he finds the number "42" everywhere in "The Shining."  Multiply 2x3x7 (Room 237) and you get 42.  Wendy walks past 6 crates of 7-Up.  Danny wears a shirt emblazoned "42."  There are 42 cars in the Overlook parking lot.  Etc. etc.

A woman theorist believes that Jack is a Minotaur.  Indeed, in a certain light and a certain angle, Jack Nicholson’s head does look very much like a bull. 

Like many of the theorists, this woman seems to keep a model of the Overlook’s floor-plan in her head like a 3D tic-tac-toe board.  They are aware of how the characters' movements on the various levels line up, and even how each level represents a character’s level of consciousness, so that when Danny rolls his big wheel around on different floors he's rolling through Wendy's consciousness or Jack's. 

 

She draws our attention to the “impossible window” in Ullman’s office.  There is no way it could be there: there is a hallway behind the office.  One reason I had never noticed details like this--the supernaturally glowing window--is that I’ve always seen “The Shining” on a TV screen.  The imagery from “The Shining” in “Room 237” is glorious and demands to be seen on a big screen.  It is like being immersed in the film for the first time.   The gilded grand ballroom, the Gold Room, glows with a ghostly grandeur.  (We learn that Kubrick read deeply about Colorado history and the gold rush before shooting.)  For the first time we can see the red Volkswagen crushed under the semi that Halloran passes on the highway.  (Kubrick did this, we learn, as a way to show that he has "crushed" his source material, the Stephen King novel: in the book, Jack drives a red VW.  In the film he drives a yellow one.) 

One theorist proclaims that "The Shining" is a film that is "meant to be played both forwards and backwards at the same time."  In an extraordinary sequence, the filmmakers try it out: we watch the film played backwards and forwards in a double exposure blend.  This can lead to fascinating dialectial results: Danny watching TV mashes up with Jack and Grady's murderous bathroom discussion [they are controlling Danny, you see].  When Danny stands, he appears to dangle between the two men [he is their pawn].  The TV frames the men’s mouths [they are speaking to him] and the windows behind the TV frame their faces [they appear to be wearing masks]. 

All coincidence, you say.  And maybe so.  But what gives it all that tiny, tantalizing spark of plausibility is the fact that Stanley Kubrick really did never put anything in the frame by accident.  He absorbed everything he saw and read and was able to distill it in his art in this very pure form that seems to tap into deep underyling patterns, something primal and collective in human life.  And he really did treasure balance and harmony and symmetry.  Hey, maybe he did orchestrate "The Shining" so it could be played forward and backward at the same time.  There's that playful glint in his eye that won't let you discount the possibility entirely.    

Rating: ****

--April 17, 2013

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)