Resistance (2020)

Written and Directed by Jonathan Jakubowicz

There could be some popular resistance to this movie. It is about Marcel Marceau and what do people think of mimes?
Marceau is played by Jesse Eisenberg. Jesse Eisenberg as a mime?!?
But the movie is a very good, gripping, story of The Resistance, and of Jewish people in France attempting to survive in Nazi controled Vichy France.

The movie pulls no punches in showing the brutality of Nazi fascist brutality. It starts off in 1938 with a Jewish family living in Munich, Germany. The Nazis storm into their home and murder both the mother and father in the street after beating and kicking them. Their young daughter looks on.

Then we are in Strasbourg, France where the daughter, Elsbeth (Bella Ramsey), comes in with many other Jewish refugee orphaned children.
Here we meet another Jewish family, young Marcel and his family. Marcel is an actor and the artist type. He even paints. There are the rather standard scenes of the generation gap with his disapproving bearded father. His brother Alain (Félix Moati) brings Marcel into the project of a scout youth group who meet the refugee children at the bridge into Germany and shelter them in Strasbourg which is still free in 1938, before the German invasion.
(It should be noted that in reality Marcel Marceau was very young, 15 years old in 1938, and is never over 22 years old in the course of the events presented in the movie. Jesse Eisenberg is much older than the role at age 37. But Jesse Eisenberg is a great movie star and that brings in viewers and therefore production financing. This is a big budget movie. He also puts his heart into the role and is perfect as the everyman, not macho type. leading man in the role.)

Marcel feels the essential need to enter The Resistance after the Nazi invasion. He puts aside for now his personal artistic needs although he uses pantomime to connect with the children.

A critical and perhaps most important scene in the movie is a conversation between Emma (Clémence Poésy) and Marcel about what they can now do in The Resistance. It is between armed resistance, attempting to kill and defeat the Nazis, and saving the children, with escape and survival.
This is a thought provoking scene.
Can hate be killed off soldier by soldier and hater by hater? There are so many of them. It brought up current events when again hatred is empowered by celebrity and government. The haters remain, perhaps many millions of them, but they are essentially followers of authoritarians, and at least temporarily, disempowered when leaders are removed from government seats. At least that is the hope.  

The story action goes on to some very tense and suspenseful scenes of living and escaping Nazi fascist hateful forces. We even see Klaus Barbie (Matthias Schweighöfer) who has a very tense scene with Marcel.

This is not so much, or not only, a biopic of the great mime Marcel Marceau and his legitimate youthful wartime heroics, but rather an intense journey into the heart of part of the France Resistance and in that a very successful and well done righteous adventure. We can only hope that at least in the USA it doesn’t happen like this here. Although viewing this one can’t help but think that it could.

Seen on a public library loaned DVD 

American Ultra. (2015)

American Ultra. (2015)

Directed by Nima Nourizadeh

Written by Max Landis

This movie reunites Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg for what I think is the first time since the delightful Adventureland. These two play very well together. They are like Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor with a high level of screen chemistry that they are hard to resist. (I was watching them a couple weeks ago on TCM)

Adventureland was more or less a teen coming of age rom-com, a good one. To reunite they make a very good choice with American Ultra. It retains some of the rom-com elements but puts it all into a CIA conspiracy sci-fi  action movie. I thought it worked and that if they wanted they could continue with this in sequel.

There is a lot of violent action and blood. It is mostly a sort of lucid chamber music violence, not the big confusing orchestrated violence commonly found in mega budget product.

And the stars get some very well done two character scenes together. We also get an amusing performance by the great John Leguizamo ( yes I'm the person who thinks The Pest is a good movie), as Mike’s pot dealer buddy.

A really fine entertainment product.

The End of the Tour (2015)

The End of the Tour (2015)

I tend to avoid biopics. They, as movies, generally have to focus of melodramatic moments. It is very hard to get inside someone via a picture show. They are mostly about celebrity actors and music stars, and usually I could care less what their lives were like. If I like someone’s work I probably don’t want to watch some actor pretending to be them and  going through all the biopic stuff such as drinking/drugging, beating/being beat by an intimate, going up and falling down, etc.

I have never read David Foster Wallace. Before viewing the movie I had not seen or heard an interview of him. I was aware of him in the sort of pop media way. And of course aware of the dramatic ending of his young life. I entered the viewing of this movie as a direct innocent as far as his own words, mode of speech, and even what he looked like, so I can’t say what a Wallace reader or “fan” would think of the movie.

I found the movie completely engaging and it stimulated an interest in Wallace. It is in essence a conversation, an interview between the writer and David Lipsky who has been sent to do a profile of him for Rolling Stone magazine. They talk and talk and talk, and it is makes for my idea of great entertainment, conversation about ideas and the culture we find ourselves living in. The Wallace character, though the script and actor Jason Segel,  is a guy who kind of thinks like me in some ways and it was good to see that expressed in a movie.

I went into the movie with a positive feeling about movie star Jesse Eisenberg. I can’t think of a movie with him that I didn’t like. OK I bailed out of The Social Network (ha! A biopic), and never watched the superhero movie he’s in, whichever one that was.. So if a potential viewer can’t stand Jesse Eisenberg, whcih I can understand, they might not bother with this movie. And his cigarettes smoking was delightfully unconvincing.
Anyway, good movie.