Close To Home (Israel, 2005)

“Close To Home” (aka Karov Labayit) is the story of two very different girls assigned to work together, a plot device normally connected to comedy in the United States, but placed in Israeli hands delivers an ingenious take on the Israeli-Palestinian controversy. The overall tone of the film is hard by virtue of the way the city of Jerusalem is shot, focusing on a landscape of brick, mortar and stone.

Two teenage girls working the young women’s division of the Israeli security corps of the Army are assigned to patrol the streets of Jerusalem. They have entirely different attitudes about their work: Mirit (Naama Schendar) is overly serious and diligent in her work, a little too much so, stopping anybody and carding them. Her partner, the more seasoned and cynical Smadar (Smadar Sayar) realizes that picking a terrorist in the streets is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, so her attitude is more relaxed to the point of delinquency. In several scenes we see Smadar frequently taking breaks at boutiques looking at clothes, goofing off at the hair salon with her hair stylist pals, much to the horror of Mirit.

Because Mirit is assigned as Smadar’s partner she finds herself forced to be a party to these hooky sessions, so consequently they turn in their post-patrol report to their CO, Captain Dubik (Irit Suki), who chews them out in front of their comrades. Several scenes of carding are shown, first on the streets, in a border station where women are strip-searched in front of their children, and on a bus dealing with agitated bus riders, the riders having their backpacks and briefcases searched. You’ll feel annoyed and uncomfortable just watching these scenes, and that’s just the point: security sucks because people are basically just trying to get through the day, until something goes wrong.

And something does: a bomb goes off in the streets and Mirit falls unconscious, saved by a handsome passerby, which is the turning point of the film. Mirit develops a crush on her heroic guy, making her slide into a delinquency comparable to Smadar’s behavior.

MIrit spends more time roving the streets half-inspecting people’s IDs and looking for her guy. When she finally finds him at a café she runs to the ladies room to switch into her street clothes and chat him up. He doesn’t even remember her after she tells him the bombing story, and later on when Smadar goes to his home to get him to visit Mirit in the brig (Mirit fucked up again, believe it or not), Smadar realizes he’s already in a relationship and isn’t interested in even being nice to Mirit.

Ironically we find ourselves sympathizing more with flaky Smadar because she’s more comfortable with her femininity and during the film demonstrates a stronger loyalty to her partner than Mirit does. Mirit is all about saying “No” and Smadar is all about saying “Why Not”.

The film ends with a horrific scene where a citizen resents being carded by our two female soldiers, refusing to show them his card. A terrible argument breaks out, and a mob of Israeli men come to the aid of our girls, jumping on the man and beating him unconscious. The girls, for all their training and authority can’t even control an angry mob from beating the man, and the film ends with both girls riding through the streets of Jerusalem looking numb and not even speaking to each other. Unfortunately, the majority of the beating scene is played out just in voice-overs with no visual. Wonder if that was intentional on the directors’ part or it was forced on them. It still carries a strong punch.

“Close To Home” is an intense film that doesn’t offer answers to contemporary problems, but in showing the problems one can almost see how difficult the situation is. Directors Vardot Bilu and Dalia Hager have made an amazing film that brilliantly demonstrates the immediacy of the dilemmas facing security and how it affects everyday people just trying to get by. The principal three actresses (Schendar, Sayar and Suki) are excellent in their roles.

I would still recommend “Close To Home” even if you don’t have an interest in politics, as it perfectly demonstrates the dynamic between two people who have to work together in spite of their differences and still have to learn a thing or two about growing up in this turbulent, uncontrollable world.

++++++++++++++++++++

I recently saw Mervyn LeRoy’s “East Side West Side”, and it may be the original “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” where everybody ends up pairing at some point with each other. You need a score card to keep up with this one!

James Mason, who’s married to Barbara Stanwyck, gets his flirt on with Barbara’s mom, played by Gale Sondergaard. After a punishingly dull evening with the in-laws James decides to go bar-hopping while Barbara waits for him to come home. He runs into his old flame Ava Gardner, with whom he cheated on his wife with in the past.

Gardner’s new boyfriend punches Mason out in front of Cyd Charisse, who knows Stanwyck personally from the department store she works at. Charisse takes Mason home to medicate him while bragging about her boyfriend, Van Heflin, who’s returning from France.

Cyd asks Stanwyck to accompany her to the airport to greet Heflin. Once he meets Stanwyck, he’s all over her like a cheap suit, completely oblivious to Charisse being in the same room. Stanwyck’s best friend, Nancy Davis (aka Reagan) is throwing a party for Heflin so her husband can woo him into writing for his newspaper. Needless to say, Stanwyck goes alone to the party.

Gardner keeps showing up at Mason’s office and he finally caves in to her seductive charms, because, in his own words, she’s like “liquor to an alcoholic”. While Mason’s guzzling on Ava, Heflin spends all his quality time with Stanwyck.

Stanwyck finally confronts Mason about his tomcatting, so he visits Sondergaard to appeal to her sense of mercy in their relationship. Sondergaard basically tells the previously flirtatious Mason to suck it. When he gets back home we hear that Gardner has been murdered. All fingers point at Mason as the murderer.

Heflin now gets his best detective on, playing a fake drunk act for Beverly Michaels (of Hugo Haas’ “Pick Up” fame). He has a theory she killed Gardner, which is ridiculous because prior to this scene she didn’t appear anywhere in the movie. By the way, at this point Charisse is totally out of the picture, not to be seen from again!

With his name cleared, Mason now gets on his knees begging Stanwyck for forgiveness. Gardner is dead so now he can be the faithful husband she always wanted him to be (!). Predictably, she walks out on him to face a beautiful future with Van Heflin, a man she just met at the beginning of the picture. Women!

On the plus side, any serious student of fashion could learn a thing or two by the wardrobe and art direction of the film, which are absolutely amazing. Every shot looks like it was ripped out of a page from Vogue Magazine. The silhouettes that Charisse and especially Gardner set off have to be seen to believe. Both are mannequin fierce and ferocious!

Stuff I Burned From TCM, Part 9

A number of movies I’ve written about for the past few years have finally seen the light of day on DVD: Overexposed, Rancho Notorious, The Glass Wall, and a few more, so I’m pretty sure this will be the next to last installment of “Stuff I Burned From TCM”. I’ll probably move on to something else movie-related, but until then here are a few more movies that need to see a proper DVD release:

Heat Lightning (1934): Classic hard-boiled Warner Bros. crime film about a pair of sisters working at a motel in the Mojave Desert. Olga’s a frilly girl waitress and her older sister, Myra, (Ann Dvorak) ia a pretty butch auto mechanic. Her cover as a mechanic’s blown once her ex-boyfriend, a sleazy gangster on the run exposes her glamorous gun moll past. Similar in tone to “The Petrified Forest”, but I actually liked this better. A lot of stock Warners players, like Glenda Farrell, Frank McHugh, Ruth Donnelly, and Lyle Talbot are on hand giving their usual great support. Ann Dvorak is brilliant, and this film deserves a decent release.

Ladies of The Chorus (1948): One of the few Marilyn Monroe movies that still hasn't been released to DVD, this low-budget B picture clocks under an hour at 57 minutes. In spite of its brevity it still has tons of padding with several music numbers, some which have Marilyn crooning. Many people have laughed at the casting of Adele Jergens as her mother, probably three years older than Monroe with an unconvincing gray streak dyed into her hair. The plot basically consists of Monroe and Jergens playing a mother and daughter showgirl team and Mom’s reluctance at having her daughter date a millionaire’s spoiled son. The film has all the production values of an old Three Stooges short, no surprise because Columbia Pictures released this film.

The Unholy Three (1930): Lon Chaney’s last film and the talkie version of the Tod Browning silent classic. The talkie version is similar in tone to “Freaks” and Harry Earles is even on hand to play Tweedle Dee the midget. Chaney plays half the film in drag disguised as a kindly old lady pet shop owner, and it’s always amusing watching him tear off his wig, pop a cigar in his mouth and chew out Goliath the strong man. The last line in the film would be his last, “That’s all there is to life… a little laugh, a little tear”, while waving goodbye from a departing caboose. It was as if he’s waving goodbye to the audience, because he died a week after the film wrapped.

Primrose Path (1940): Just like "Heat Lightning" this movie was originally a play, but it moves fast and doesn't seem too talky. Ginger Rogers is a shack-living tomboy from Venice who falls for Joel McCrea, a motorcycle-riding burger flipper down PCH way. He likes the "Portuguese gals" (is Mexican a dirty word?) but falls for the tough dogtown girl. Ginger's mom and stinkbug grandmom, however, are sleazy gold diggers who want Ginger to carry on the family tradition of banging rich bums for their dough. Rogers turns in a performance reminiscent of Barbara Stanwyck in "Stella Dallas" and McCrea turns in another great big galoot performance.

R.I.P. Polaroid

The invention of modern instant cameras is generally credited to American scientist Edwin Land, who unveiled the first commercial instant camera, the Land Camera in 1947, 10 years after founding the Polaroid Corporation. The original purpose of instant cameras originated from his young daughter Jennifer's question, "Why can't we see our vacation photographs now?" Edwin Land's original idea behind instant photography was to create a photographic system that was seamless and easy for anyone to use.

Many people have enjoyed seeing their photos shortly after taking them, allowing them to recompose or retake the photo if they didn't get it right. But instant cameras were found to be useful for other purposes such as ID cards, passport photos, ultrasound photos and other uses which required an instant photo. They were also used by police officers and fire investigators because of their ability to create an unalterable instant photo.

Polaroid's decline began in the mid-1990's when the company lost direction and digital photography began to threaten its core instant photo business. In 1995, an outsider, Gary T. DiCamillo, was hired to lead the company. DiCamillo failed to put in place a successful long-term strategy, and financial mismanagement and slowing sales created a cash crisis. Polaroid declared bankruptcy in October 2001.
By laying off thousands of workers and adopting other cost-cutting measures, the company stabilized and was sold for $237.7 million in August 2002 to a group led by One Equity Partners, a Chicago investment firm. More than 100 employees in research and development at the company's Waltham and New Bedford, Mass. facilities were laid off in 2005. A Polaroid spokeswoman would not comment on the layoffs or severance payments.

Throughout all of Polaroid's transitions employees have suffered. Just before it filed for bankruptcy protection, the company eliminated lifetime health and life insurance for retirees. Polaroid stock, which employees had been forced to buy and hold for a decade became virtually worthless after the bankruptcy. One Equity Partners refused to take over the Polaroid pension plan, saddling the federal government with the obligation and forcing some employees to accept cuts in their monthly payments.
Meantime, many executives were able to cash out of their retirement plans and reclaim deferred compensation before the bankruptcy. Others received bonuses for continuing to do their jobs, and many received shares in the new company that emerged from bankruptcy after the acquisition by One Equity Partners.

Disruptive Innovation And The Bankruptcy Of Polaroid

View more presentations from Christian Sandström. (tags: sandström christian)

Anna May Wong: Daughter of the Dragon

Turner Classic Movies recently screened their Asian film festival, and sandwiched in between annoying Charlie Chan and even more annoying Jackie Chan they showed a magnetic but obscure actress named Anna May Wong. Like Louise Brooks and Lizabeth Scott she fell short of major stardom in spite of the fact that she illuminates a film the minute you see her. She holds her own effortlessly next to Marlene Dietrich in "Shanghai Express", no small feat. She was sexually radiant in a silent film called "Piccadilly" playing a sinister Jazz Age showgirl. Many of her films, good and bad, were screened during the fest. Because of her ethnicity she was cast for the most part as unscrupulous Dragon Ladies, a sheer waste of her talent as most of these pictures were absolute B-movie trash. One of them hit a nerve, though, and it was called "Daughter of the Dragon".

Filmed in 1931, the film begins with Anna May Wong playing showgirl Princess Ling Moy knocking 'em dead in London's West End. Backstage after her show she's promised a meeting with her long lost father, who turns out to be the infamous Fu Manchu(!). She's taken to his hidden lair where he tells her she's the heir to his evil empire. Fu Manchu tells Ling Moy, "I wish I had another son to exact my revenge."
Ling Moy, desperate for her father's approval, vows, "I will be your son!"
There's an overall melancholic need for approval as Ling Moy desires to be accepted by her father, and later by Ronald Petrie, the blandly blonde English gentleman she lusts for.
"Will I ever have golden hair and eyes of blue?" she yearns for his love as much as she does her father's.
"Strange - I find you oddly attractive", is Petrie's left-handed compliment. Just to make sure she can successfully seduce him she relegates his fiancee Joan Marshall, equally blonde and bland, to her evil Chinese torture dungeon.
Of course Scotland Yard, led by Chinese detective Ah Kee shows up on time and heroically saves our two British white bread lovers and kills Ling Moy, but not before she fatally shoots Ah Kee. The film ends with the heroic Chinaman and the dastardly Dragon Lady dead in each other's arms, like a lover's clutch. The message: Chinese women belong with Chinese men, and not with good, upstanding Englishmen.

While I was watching this movie I couldn't help thinking how incredibly dull the good, vanilla-white English were in character and physical appearance, and how the movie only came alive when the exotic and gorgeous Ling showed up on screen. I also asked myself what the significance of showing Chinese torturing the imperialistic British was in this film, and all I could think of was some bizarre payback for the real-life abuse the Chinese suffered building railroads in America just fifty years before the release of this movie. It felt like some form of cinematic revenge.

The great irony about Wong was that although she was always cast as a Chinese woman she was born in Los Angeles, California and never dated Asian men, but American men. In spite of all that she had to play the exotic Pekingese just to make it in the movies. Even in real life she yearned to fit in somehow, just like in "Daughter of the Dragon", and that's why this silly B-movie is bigger than its intentions.

Stuff I Burned From TCM, Part 2

Never count your chickens until the omelettes are broke: in a previous blog post I bemoaned the fact that “Black Legion” would never see the light of day on DVD. After all, it’s Humphrey Bogart joining the Ku Klux Klan. Well, guess what? It’s coming out this February as part of the Warner Bros. Gangsters DVD box set. I don’t know if the Klan can be called gangsters, psychopath hillbillies might be a better description, but Hell, it’s actually getting released. Rockin’ good news. Here’s more crap that needs to get released, and soon:

The Running Man (1963) – Legend has it this movie was a flop because it came out right after the JFK Assassination with the title “The Running Man” starring LEE Remick and Lawrence HARVEY. Good thing Gerd OSWALD didn’t work on the movie.

It’s too bad, because this is yet another great film from Sir Carol Reed, one of the most underrated directors ever (he did “The Third Man”, “Our Man In Havana”, and “Trapeze”, to name a few). Lawrence Harvey and Lee Remick play a married couple who pull a million-dollar life insurance scam and high-tail it to Spain with the money (woohoo!). Alan Bates is an insurance investigator who gives Lee Remick the 3rd Degree in England, so when she runs into him in Malaga he tells her he quit his job as an investigator, or has he? He hounds her like crazy through the picture. Is his pursuit sexual or is he still on the case?

Meanwhile Lawrence Harvey is having so much fun tomcatting in his disguise as a swinging playboy he drives her into the arms of you-know-who. So, you get the picture: it’s a wild romantic suspense adventure. You’ll marvel at Alan Bates’ uncanny resemblance to Noel Gallagher of Oasis.

Bordertown (1935) – Paul Muni plays a Mexican immigrant practicing law who gets disbarred by a rich racist attorney. Muni bolts from L.A. to Tijuana to work as a bouncer in nightclub and ultimately promotes to kick-ass club owner when he runs into the attorney’s wife. Romantic sparks ensue until she plays the race card and then the real sparks begin. While all this is going on the club owner’s wife (Bette Davis) keeps putting the moves on him, and eventually kills her husband to make it legit. You’ll marvel at Paul Muni’s uncanny resemblance to Benicio Del Toro.

Nocturne (1946) – A womanizing composer gets his brains blown out in 1940’s Hollywood and George Raft (playing a cool detective) is on the case investigating it. Every ex-girlfriend he interviews is a Forties hottie and they all say the murdered tunesmith was a dirty dog. Which girl did it? Since Raft can't act his way out of a used condom (just like Vince Vaughn) the biggest star of the film is the stylish Hollywood architecture and Sunset Boulevard location shots. RKO films are trashy fun, and this is no exception.