Hanna

Hanna is a spy/action thriller with almost none of the usual spy movie tropes, but whether you like spy movies or not, it will keep you glued to your seat. Hanna is one of those movies that reaches out and grabs you by the throat and pulls you in right away.

There is plenty of action and adventure in Hanna, also exotic locales, villainous villains and oddball characters, form the self-punishing perfectionist who is hunting down the main character Hanna, to the retired clown who tries to help her out. The fleshing out of even minor characters is what gives this movie depth and weight.

There is no secret code and no doomsday device in this movie; the fate of the world (or the United States, or democracy) is not at risk. The only thing at risk is Hanna herself. And that is enough.

You will like Hanna. She is smart and earnest and resilient. She speaks several languages fluently and has a world of book-learning, but Hanna is not your typical James Bond: she is a naive 16-year-old girl. She has been raised in the remote northern European forests by her father with no outside contact. She has never had a friend.

And suddenly Hanna is plunged into the world, and into a dangerous mission that requires her to travel from the Sahara to Germany on foot, and without papers. Hanna has no weapons and no gadgetry; she even has to scavenge clothing. What Hanna does have is her wits, her skills and a steadfast sense of purpose.

Saoirse Ronan, who plays Hanna, beautifully balances Hanna’s character between a vulnerable and naive 16-year-old and a trained killer who can snap your neck with her bare hands. Hanna escaping from prison will have your heart racing; Hanna bonding with her new friend will melt it. This is a great movie if you are looking for strong female role models that are not cartoonish in abilities and proportions.

The Final Member

Normally I wouldn't write a review of a documentary, but what I look for in a movie is good story, and this documentary tells a story. That the story is true only makes better.

The Final Member is the story of a collector, Sigurður Hjartarson, who needs only one piece to complete his collection. What he needs is not rare, but it is difficult to obtain: no one who has one really wants part with it. Hjartarson is aging, his health is declining and he wants to complete his collection before he dies.

 Hjartarson began collecting as a teenager in 1974. Thirty years later his collection grew so large, that, with his wife’s help (and insistence) he moved it out of his house and started a museum.

The Icelandic Phallological Museum. Sigurður Hjartarson collects penises.

At this point you might think this is a mockumentary. It is a real museum: http://phallus.is

There are two men willing to give Hjartarson their penises. One is Páll Arason, famous Icelandic adventurer whose member enjoys quite a reputation in his homeland. He plans to leave his penis to Hjartarson when he dies.

The other is American Tom Mitchell who covets the spot as first (if not only) human specimen in the museum. Mitchell has always known that is penis, Elmo, was destined for greatness. He is so eager to get Elmo into the coveted spot in the museum that he considers having Elmo removed and sent to Iceland before he dies in order to beat out nonagenarian Arason.

This movie runs the gamut from ridiculous to sublime and back again. There is lots of dramatic tension. Will Mitchell come through on his proposed contribution? Will Arason’s shrinking member meet the legal length (a whole story in itself)? Can Mitchell find a doctor who will perform a phallectomy? Which man’s member will take pride of place in the collection?

The story is never about penises: it is about human beings. It shows us something about ourselves (whether we have penises or not). You will be entertained, but you may also be moved. Devotion, no matter how silly the thing one is devoted to, is still an emotion we can all identify with.

On IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2318701/?ref_=ttpl_pl_tt 

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Think the world needs a Vagina Museum too? You aren’t the only one: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/vagina-museum?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=atlas-page. Just think, if these two museums got together, what other little museums they could spawn?

Netflix’ Dorian Gray

Most book lovers will cringe when presented with the movie version of a book. There are a few exceptions. I am not sure if Netflix’ Dorian Gray is one of them or not.

Dorian is a pretty and naive young man who arrives in London to claim his inheritance. Aside from a few hazy flashbacks of violence at his Grandfather’s hands as a child and a talent for piano, we know nothing about his life before London - it is almost as if he didn’t have one.

Beautiful Dorian has been seized upon by artist Basil Hallward as a subject. Basil has just completed a portrait of Dorian, with which Dorian is enraptured. Basil is clearly obsessed with drawing and painting the young man, but Dorian is growing bored of being an artist’s model.

Enter Lord Henry (Harry) Wotton.

Harry, an atheist and hedonist, and liberally seasons the movie with Wilde’s witticisms. We get a measure of his character early on when he casually burns a rose petal in the candle flame: other pretty things should beware.

Harry sets out to corrupt Dorian as an experiment in human nature, beginning with gin and prostitutes. The movie isn’t full of gratuitous sex, but we get enough of a look into brothels and opium dens and see what was available to Londoners in the late 1800s. Especially Londoners with money, social standing and good looks, who prove to be able to get away with a lot that people who are older, uglier and poorer would not - like schlepping dead bodies in trunks across London in the middle of the night.

And not only does Dorian have looks, youth and money—he has a magical portrait which absorbs the effects of any sin, crime or damage. If Dorian cuts himself, the portrait bleeds; if he is cruel, his face remains serene and mild, but the portrait changes; Dorian does not age, but his portrait turns into the likeness Riff Raff on a bad day. When Dorian commits an act of callousness and cruelty, his portrait reacts with signs of corruption in the visceral sense: a worm wriggles out of the corner of his painted eye and falls to the floor, where Dorian stomps on it in disgust (a really great scene). Dorian sees the magical portrait as carte blanche to commit any sin, any crime, and take any risk.

Harry sets out to corrupt Dorian, but the student soon outstrips the teacher, progressing from a youthful love affair with a girl far below his social standing, to opium, sadomasochism, and finally murder. He leaves England to seek sensations and pleasures that cannot be had on the sceptered isle.

Twenty years later when Dorian returns his friends are shocked that he has not aged. It seems that the portrait cannot absorb everything, however. Maybe it’s full. Dorian is bitter. He tells Harry, “Pleasure is not the same thing as happiness.” Dorian sees ghosts and is dogged by a would-be assassin.

Just as Harry sought to corrupt Dorian, Harry’s now-grown daughter, a New Woman of 1910’s, sets out to save him and Dorian resolves to be good. But is that enough to redeem his soul?

So, here we have an entertaining movie, well acted, interesting characters, great period sets and costumes. Dorian is corrupted by the father and redeemed by the daughter. Evildoers are punished; the innocent escape. It has a nice story arc, and a satisfying ending.

And then there is The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. This books suffers from too many words (to paraphrase the Archduke in Amadeus). A liberal seasoning of Oscar Wilde’s paradoxes and witticisms is entertaining; page after page of them is like being bludgeoned with the OED. Wilde proves himself a playwright rather than a novelist: his scenes are either all dialogue or monologue, or they are stage direction. All in all I would rather watch the movie.

But....

Wilde’s book has insight that the movie lacks, and which makes the movie amateur by comparison. In the movie Dorian learns that debauchery is bad and that you have to be good to deserve the good things in life. Very black and white, very Puritan, and not very thoughtful.

In the book Dorian’s crimes are not those of debauchery. Oh, he screws around and smokes opium, but that isn’t the point. His sins are in the way he treats other people. He is callous and cruel. He ruins young girls and leaves them to a life of prostitution (it is Victorian England, remember). His male friends (with the notable exceptions of Basil and Harry) are shunned by society, estranged from their families, broken, and some commit suicide. And through it all Dorian remains unscathed and unrepentant. It is his constant and selfish search for pleasure and his refusal to own his reprehensible actions that leads to him to self-destruct.

Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray gives us a portrait of someone with borderline personality disorder in a time when that term wasn’t even coined. Netflix' movie Dorian Gray is a morality play we’ve seen before.

On IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1235124/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

I am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House

I am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House is a movie in which nothing happens.

Hospice nurse, Lily Saylor (Ruth Wilson), moves into a large, sunny house in Maine--”the house at the end of Teacup Road”--to care for an elderly writer who had lost her mind, but is really no trouble as a patient. Teacup Road? What could be scary about that?

What sets you up is the incongruity of the opening scene, and many scenes that follow. We begin with a monologue in which Lily solemnly talks about ghosts, and we see a pretty woman in Victorian dress walking slowly backwards across the screen in the dark. Wilson has great delivery for the line (about ghosts), “this is how they rot.”

When Lily arrives at the house at the end of Teacup Road, on a July day the house is clean and sunny and not the least bit frightening, but the man who brings her (lawyer?) doesn’t seem to want to go any farther into the house than the front door. The patient, someone who should clearly not be left alone, is alone in the house.

Reality in this movie, is just off-kilter enough not to be trusted. Things molder and decay, including (briefly) the heroine’s arms. There's an inconsistency with the dates. She arrives in July at one point mentions 11 months passing, but the lawyer says he is happy all the vacation people are leaving (implying it’s late August). Time does not seem to pass in this story. The heroine makes a telephone call that is interrupted by the ghost yanking the cord out of her hand. More disturbing than that is that our heroine picks up the phone and seems to begin the conversation over again with a slight variation, as if she is play-acting the call. You wonder if there is really anyone on the other end of the line.

Lily’s nervousness will set you on edge too. She admits that she is timid, too scared to read the horror novels her author-patient once wrote. She moves through the house, arms and sweater wrapped around herself, as if she is expecting a bogey man to jump out at any minute.

This is an understated horror that doesn’t rely on gore or monsters to frighten, and as such the little things are magnified. The ghost, Polly, is very pretty, but her body is put together wrong. Mold on a wall is ominous, as is the repeated song on an audio cassette playing, at odd times, in the patient’s room. The little incongruities add up to a surreal experience.

If you have a hard time making sense of all of it, or reconstructing the timeline of exactly what happened, it is because Lily, our narrator, has the same problem. Go back to the beginning and listen to her opening monologue again, and you will understand why.

On IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5059406/?ref_=nv_sr_1