March 2017 book and film review, continued

FILMS

MOONLIGHT (2016) D- Barry Jenkins and Mahershala Ali.
A teenage boy hides from his bullies in an abandoned house, where he is discovered by the local drug dealer. Something about the boy touches something in the dealer, who decides to protect him. He takes him home, which is clearly an improvement on the lad's own home, where he gets little help or support from his crack-addicted mother.
            The boy grows into a young man, and, with only one real role model available, decides to become a dealer himself. And he starts pumping iron, transforming himself from the class nerd to one serious dude you wouldn't dream of messing with.
             Made for less than $2 million, Moonlight achieved the feat of (allowing for inflation) becoming the cheapest film ever to win best picture Oscar. The accolade is well deserved. This is a brilliant film, well written in a way that avoids all the cliches (no one gets their head blown off, for instance), sensitively acted by everyone and thoughtfully directed. There's a lot of hand-held work at the beginning, which is a bit dizzying, but it soon settles down into a moving and powerful movie.

DR MABUSE, SPIELER (1922) D- Fritz Lang. In post-war Germany, a master criminal manipulates everyone around him by a process of trickery, fakery and hypnosis on his quest to become the greatest criminal mind of his age.
          The German word spieler has three meanings: "player", "gambler" and "puppeteer", and all three of these meanings are needed to encompass this extraordinary character, brought to life by Fritz Lang in his first feature film. What emerges in this 4 1/12 hour extravaganza is an expressionist masterpiece, beautifully designed by one of Germany greatest auteurs. I hate to make any criticism of a film of this stature, but it is too long, by anything up to an hour. Hang in there though. You won't be disappointed, though you might want to see it in two parts, as we did.

THE TESTAMENT OF DR MABUSE (1933) D- Fritz Lang
A detective is assauted by a gang of thugs and admitted to hospital. There he notices his doctor appears to be preoccupied by another patient, a certain Dr Mabuse (Rudolph Klein Rogge, reprising his role from the silent film of 11 years before). But then inspector Lohmann (Oscar Berger) starts wondering if this mysterious man might be connected to a series of crimes on the outside. He begins to investigate, only to find Dr Mabuse is in fact dead. Or is he?
             11 years on from the expressionist classic that made Fritz Lang's name, cinema has entered the era of the talkies. But the strange, claustrophobic atmosphere that characterized the original is as strong as ever in this classic of German film. The plot is convoluted and contains many false trails, but holds your concentration as we go on a marvelous, mad-cap ride into the mind of fiction's cleverest and most evil super-villain.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA (2011) W/D- Nouri Bilge Anadolu'da.
As night falls in the Turkish hinterland, two police cars drive around the remote roads searching for a buried body. Aboard are two handcuffed prisoners who can't remember where they buried it: they were blind drunk at the time. Maybe it was near a water fountain. Why they don't wait for daylight to make their search is unclear. But they don't: they journey from one water tap to the next, finding nothing.
          As they drive from one possible burial site to the next, the policemen discuss various subjects: children and how they let you down, the problems of urination as one grows older, whether suicide is a legitimate life decision, even which is the healthiest yoghurt.
           Finally day breaks and hopes rise that soon they will find the right fountain and dig up the body in question.
           This is a strange and intriguing film. The nighttime segment of the movie is deeply fascinating, but the pace changes as day breaks, as of course it does in real life, but here the effect is to weaken the impact of the piece. Which is such a shame with a film that promised so much. Still worth a watch though.