A reviewer named Seitz explains why I enjoyed Downton Abbey (the motion picture) in spite of it all.

In dramatic fashion at the last minute on New Year's Eve (well, from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.) I doubled my total of "new release" motion pictures viewed in 2019 -- from one to two.

Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old is a visceral, deeply moving reminder of things that mustn't be forgotten.

We viewed Downton Abbey, the movie. No fresh ground was broken and there weren't any startling insights. I expected neither. I missed at least the last two seasons of the series and maybe more; of course the characters still were familiar to me, sparing the film version from introducing and developing them. I'm no fan of the aristocracies of old, and it's a bit off-putting when the denizens of the "downstairs" defend them. Why ostensibly "democratic" Americans find any of it compelling remains a question for the ages.

And yet, I was entertained, and the explanation comes in this positive review by Matt Zoller Seitz, with whom I'm unfamiliar. He hammers every nail, and the biggest one for me is the second paragraph in the excerpt below, because I'm the kind of viewer who "will travel some distance to see a film in which well-dressed, reasonably thoughtful adults do and say grownup things."

The reason I watch very few movies is because the vast majority featuring "dinosaurs, robots, superheroes, or Jedi knights" (or whole comic book narratives) are of zero interest to me. When I want to escape reality, and like anyone else I do, it's time to put on headphones for music or read a book.

To each their own. I really appreciate this movie review.

Downton Abbey, by Matt Zoller Seitz (Roger Ebert Dot Com)

The star rating at the top of this review is not for people who don't like "Downton Abbey," have never seen it, or grew tired of watching it long before it finished its six-season run. Those viewers will consider this a two-star or one-star or no star movie. The rating is for die-hards who will comprise the majority of viewers for this big-screen wrap-up of the Julian Fellowes drama about nobles and servants in an early-20th century English manor. The rating is also for fans of a certain sub-genre of film and TV: lavishly produced costume dramas about repressed people who might cut loose with a bitchy remark now and again, but only if they're pushed to decorum's edge—or if, like Violet the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith), they're too old, tough, and set in their ways to care what anybody else thinks of them.

Finally, the rating is for the kinds of viewers who will, I suspect, turn this movie into an unexpected smash: those who might not feel obligated to leave their homes to watch blockbusters featuring dinosaurs, robots, superheroes, or Jedi knights, but will travel some distance to see a film in which well-dressed, reasonably thoughtful adults do and say grownup things. Said adults inhabit a tale set in something resembling reality, with banquets, dances, familial intrigue, gown fittings, chaste flirtations, declarations of love, and expertly timed reaction shots of characters silently disapproving of other characters. But the movie omits the Method masochism and "eat this bowl of chaff, it's good for you" bombast that has increasingly become synonymous with Hollywood's Oscar bait ...

Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old is a visceral, deeply moving reminder of things that mustn't be forgotten.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
-- Laurence Binyon

Yesterday we made the trek to one of those garish shopping meccas amid the sprawl of Louisville's eastern suburbs (as they're all equally depressing, I'm never able to remember the exact name of the particular atrocity) to view They Shall Not Grow Old, Peter Jackson's incredible World War I documentary film.

I managed to avoid shedding a tear until the very last bit of the closing credits, where it was written "Filmed on location on the Western Front, 1914-1918." I'm not sure why this simple phrase made me cry, but it did. It may have been the cumulative effect of the voices and visuals; it was so long ago, and they're all ghosts now.

Perhaps Jackson's greatest achievement with this innovative documentary film is to let the restored images and voice-overs tell the story, uncluttered by maps and grand strategies. For instance, have you ever wondered how latrines worked on the front lines? It was elegantly simple, in fact.

To me, the film humanizes the experience of soldiers who we've come to view with some justification as little more than cannon fodder.

It covers the four years in one story arc with the voice-over anecdotes telling of the initial excitement of signing up, the harsh realities of training, shipping out, then finding yourself in a muddy hole combating lice, rats, gas, dysentery, trench-foot, trench-fever, frostbite, the stench of death and, occasionally, the enemy a rifle shot away. The film doesn’t flinch from showing the carnage.

At the end, an added segment finds Jackson explaining how his team managed to do what they did, and for many reviewers, the wizardry involved must be examined; colorization is only a small part of this critique, which I feel is completely justified. You can follow the links below to indulge in it.

However, the historian in me sees They Shall Not Grow Old as an invaluable teaching tool, full stop. A century later, the imperative is people understanding how the far-off Great War continues to impact our lives. As one small example, consider the way boundary lines in the Middle East were drawn at war's end.

By all means, let's revel in the arguments of authenticity implicit in Jackson's directorial decision-making. But let's not take our eyes off the prize.

‘They Shall Not Grow Old’ Review: World War I, in Living Color, by Ben Kenigsberg (NYT)

Peter Jackson's WWI film is a portal into the past, by Russell Baillie (New Zealand Listener)

A Few Thoughts on the Authenticity of Peter Jackson’s “They Shall Not Grow Old” by Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker)

They Shall Not Grow Old review – Peter Jackson's electrifying journey into the first world war trenches, by Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian)

Previously:

Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old: "A visually staggering thought experiment; an immersive deep-dive into what it was like for ordinary British soldiers on the western front."

Apocalypse: Never-Ending War: "A film about the years of fragile peace that followed the Fist World War, the collapse of empires, and the fateful rise of totalitarianism."

A glorious autumn day for "The Ides of March."

Gracious, has it really been six years since this?

George Clooney's “Good Night, and Good Luck” will lure NA Confidential to the multiplex.

Yesterday afternoon, we viewed Clooney's most recent politically-themed work, and found it very good. The campaign platform Clooney espouses in the film as the character of Governor Morris perfectly positions Clooney, Morris or both as the candidate I'd happily favor in 2012, although perhaps there is still hope Barack Obama will embrace them.

The Ides of March – review, by Philip French (http://observer.guardian.co.uk)

The Ides of March is a serious film that reveals Clooney as a director capable of welding his fellow performers into a superb ensemble while sustaining both dramatic tension and moral focus. He's a liberal of a critical kind, and his respect for the audience takes the form of expecting us to understand that in bringing a self-critical searchlight to bear on events surrounding the Democratic party he isn't attacking the liberal left. He's simply addressing himself to the complications and vagaries of electoral politics.

Today's Tribune column: "Foreign films, universal concerns."

BAYLOR: Foreign films, universal concerns.

Admittedly, my tastes in film are narrow. They derive from wearisome experience, because out of every 10,000 cinematic excuses to squander two hours of my life, all but a dozen invariably are absolute wastes of time.

Film: "The Way I Spent the End of the World."

The Way I Spent the End of the World is director Catalin Mitulescu’s surprisingly quiet, nuanced view of Communist Romania’s waning months.

What makes the film quiet and nuanced is that my conscious use of "waning" is appropriate only in retrospect, and quite obviously none of the characters around whom the story revolves in the latter half of 1989 can read the future and foresee the December revolution and sudden fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania’s long-serving, self-anointed Conducator, or leader.

Of all the Eastern European locales where such a coming of age story might conceivably be set, none is more appropriate than Ceausescu’s stunted and strangulated version of the North Korean hermetic kingdom that he had visited in the 1960’s, and subsequently spent decades of serial misrule in an ultimately doomed effort to graft the personality cult of Kim Il Sung onto the pathetically grandiose architecture of Benito Mussolini’s Milan train station, and to situate the result in one of the continent’s least equipped milieus.

As befitting a crazed leader dubbing himself "Genius of the Carpathians" in spite of a peasant background as a semi-literate cobbler, Ceausescu’s dubious praises, as well as those of his even less educated wife, Elena, literally were sung by Romanian schoolchildren prior to the commencement of their daily classes, and it is here that the film’s viewers drop into the lives of 17-year-old Eva (Dorotheea Petre) and her young brother, Lalalilu (Timotei Duma).

As the tale unwinds, the director Mitulescu contrasts the dark and leaden idiocy of the "official" culture of Communism in Romania, as exemplified by the country’s regimented educational apparatus, with the relative normalcy of family life at home, but critically, nostalgia, bathos and the false positives of the Pollyanna principle are mostly avoided.

Eva’s and Lalalilu’s extended family is a loving one, and life is far from wretched, but the unfathomable pressures of existing in an increasingly impoverished and stressful atmosphere are duly illustrated. Random acts of violence punctuate the narrative, the presence next door of a Securitate (secret policemen) officer’s privileged and amorous son has tremendous consequences, and the oppressive political climate has a way of making an otherwise sane patriarch strip to his underwear in a tragicomic rooftop protest that results in his removal by ever-present government flunkies.

Forced by circumstance to make a series of momentous decisions for herself and her family, Eva is abruptly rescued by fate, as Ceausescu’s run of good fortune, which had been exacerbated on more than one occasion by Western nations willing to overlook human rights violations, finally is trumped by a groundswell of resentment. Eva's neighbors watch on television while the elements of the Conducator’s own party cronies, aided and abetted by the military as well as hundreds of thousands of ordinary Romanians, take to the streets. In the end, even all but the most culpable and compromised Securitate elements also melted away, to be rehabilitated in an early post-Communist government almost indistinguishable from the one preceding the Iron Curtain’s collapse.

If we were to locate Mitulescu’s fictional siblings now, they would be 36 and 26, respectively. More importantly, they would be carrying provisional European Union credentials, for the Romania of systematization, Communist party congresses and agro-industrial complexes is in the process of completing its belated switch of ideological sides. Ceausescu’s ever-present photo no longer glowers from classroom walls, but how many of the people from the generation of the sister’s and brother’s parents, aunts and uncles now sometimes look backward with rose-colored glasses?

More than we might think, even if.

The film is much recommended.

"The Death of Mr Lazarescu."

"The Death of Mr Lazarescu" is a much acclaimed Romanian film from 2005 that chronicles what may or may not be the final eight or so hours in the life of an otherwise anonymous, declining 62-year-old Bucharest alcoholic.

The plot is simple. Mr. Lazerescu, a pensioner and resident of one of the Romanian capital's high rise apartment blocks, is taken ill. When the ambulance finally arrives, he is taken on an increasingly grim tour of municipal hospitals by a paramedic who is oddly determined to see the drugged, confused and increasingly incoherent old man treated even if the universal reaction to his condition is dismissive; after all, he's just a superannuated drunk, and hardly worth anyone's effort.

Along the way, we learn a bit about Mr. Lazarescu's hermetic life, indifferent family and quarrelsome neighbors, but see nothing of external Bucharest save for nighttime traffic on the city's crowded thoroughfares.

And so the dying man is shuttled from one hospital and mishap to the next, and the 2.5-hour film, which is hand-held realist and almost documentary-like in format, is unsparing in its depiction of a medical system that while vastly improved since Communist times, remains underfunded and overwhelmed. But if the periodically comedic aspect is jet black, the uncooperative doctors, bored staffers and nearby bureaucrats are cast in shades of gray. They're not so much evil as victims themselves.

There is rampant pettiness and a noticeable absence of the sort of screen-written heroism that mars television medical dramas, yet these are counterbalanced by acts of gentleness and kindness. The last scene is replete with metaphor about rituals of death and dying. I'll not ruin it for you, but merely note its symbolic simplicity and power.

Although "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" is long, it did not bore me. The doomed old man's plight aroused a plethora of buried emotions pertaining to my late father's experiences during his final weeks, especially the descent of both patients into dementia – the film's depiction was much compressed, and the time frames are very different, but the effect indicative that the wounds beneath my scabs are still fresh almost seven years later.

When I began writing this review, I thought I'd address those memories. Now I know I can't, at least yet.

The film is disturbing, warm, harrowing and funny.

In short, essential.

Photo credit: http://www.reelingreviews.com