January 2004

• House of Sand and Fog (1/4, Orange [2003])–Obviously, this is plotted in such a way as to make it seem as if relatively small mistakes have inevitable catastrophic consequences, but I could never make myself not see the stage machinery. Good performances, but the material just doesn’t hold up.
• The Cooler (1/19, Orange [2003])–A wild fantasy that stays true to itself and thus works. Alec Baldwin pushes Sean Astin off my list of Best Supporting Actor nominees, and it’s great to see Bill Macy get a chance to carry a film. His putty face is used to perfection here.
• The Triplets of Belleville (1/24, Providence [2003])–Talk about wild fantasy! An indescribably and marvelously bizarre animation about song, cycling, slavery, sacrifice, and cuisine, among other things. No description can suffice; just see it.
• Monster (1/25, Madison [2003])–Arnold, the theater manager, tells me that Roger Ebert called Charlize Theron’s "the greatest acting performance in the history of cinema." I don’t know about that, but it was certainly something beyond mere excellence. And I don’t agree with the pans of Christina Ricci’s work, either: I think she simply nailed a vacant, unattractive character. One scene (you’ll know it) taught me that, contrary to my assumption, I do have a turn-away-from-the-screen threshold.
• Girl with the Pearl Earring (1/31, Orange [2003])–As much as I like Scarlett Johansson, she’s just too twenty-first-century a presence not to be miscast as Vermeer’s maid and model. The film itself is pretty and inoffensive, a reasonable translation of what I understand to be (without having bothered to read it, of course), a novel with modest pretensions to literariness.

February 2004

• The Fog of War (2/1, YSC [2003])–Wow. For anyone who was young and antiwar in the sixties, this is a must-see. McNamara comes across not at all as the simple evil we attributed to him, but as a complex, intelligent, and extraordinarily right-thinking man, but not what would seem to follow from that, one who was simply buffeted by forces beyond his control. He manifestly was partly in control of those forces, but, as the Watergate saying goes, mistakes were made. He is extraordinarily honest about acknowledging the mistakes now, and in fact says that he recognized them as mistakes then, tried to guide LBJ away from them, but what is odd is that he seems not to have been tortured by the mistakes, nor to be tortured by them even today. He comes across as an outwardly honest man who is so repressed that he can’t be honest with himself. Except that any formulaic description, that one included, is inadequate to describe what’s going on in this film. Also worth noting is the occasional sound of the director’s voice–the only voice other than McNarama’s that we hear. Morris’s interjections come in an agitated, screechy voice that jars us away from McN’s calm, level pronouncements. The result is to remind us that there is a creative force guiding what sometimes seems just a 90-minute speech. Occasional graphic tricks–handwritten numbers from a casualty list fall from a bomb bay into the sky in the image that will certainly stick with me the longest–perform the same function, as if Morris needs sometimes to say, "Hey, wait a minute–this is not just Bob McNamara’s story, it’s mine, it’s ours." A profoundly disturbing and remarkable film.
• The Dreamers (2/13, YSC)–This is three films, really: an erotic film that is marvelous, with three beautiful bodies in various permutations, backed by a lush Parisian apartment; an allusive film that is similarly marvelous, a collage of film and music that made me smile more than I can recall ever doing at a film I ultimately didn’t like much; and finally, a film of ideas that is thoroughly puerile. Of course, puerility is the point: these are just children, and like all of us, they’re under the illusion that these ideas they’re having, these words they’re using to articulate those ideas, are original. Oddly, they’re not much better as sex than at thinking, and their cinemaphilia takes the form of an ongoing trivia game, but because the erotics and the allusions are visual and aural, the naVveté underlying them doesn’t undercut them; the ideals, however, rely on language, and simply knowing that the language is supposed to be banal doesn’t relieve its banality. In short, a wonderful film to watch and hear, a disappointing one to think about. Incidentally, I went to the first screening at the York Square–always a good policy, since the theater’s ill-maintained projection equipment autoedits a film throughout its run–and, after starting 25 minutes late (presumably because of slow courier service from New York–or at least that was the excuse I got the last time this happened), it broke down 3 times.
• Osama (2/14, Union Sq.)–A Western viewer of a film based on sexual disguise unavoidably brings to bear a cultural history of farce, from at least Shakespeare (there must be some obvious Greek or Roman antecedent I’m forgetting) through Some Like It Hot and beyond, so one hurdle in watching this drama about an Afghan girl whose mother and grandmother cut her hair and dress her in her dead father’s clothes so that she can go out and earn their bread, women being barred from the workplace by the Taliban, is understanding that there’s absolutely nothing funny about this charade. Actually, that’s not quite true: some humor peeks through even from the Afghan perspective, but while we know that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon aren’t going to be machine-gunned if their disguises slip, we don’t know that about "Osama," so even the humor has a deadly edge. A chilling film that makes no attempt to provide a happy ending, or any ending at all–it stops, like every episode of life, as if the filmmaker simply ran out of film.
• Trilogy: After Life (2/14, Ang.), On the Run, and An Amazing Couple (both 2/14, Vil. E.)–Technical Difficulties Weekend continues, as everything at the Angelika is running 15 min. late (but that doesn’t stop them from showing the traditional 10 min. of trailers), which, combined with the Times’ misinforming me about the next film’s starting time (I hustled from Houston & Mercer to Second and 12th in record time, arriving with a couple minutes’ bathroom time before the 4:45 show–except that luckily, in buying my ticket from the machine [no waiting on line for me!], I noticed that the 4:45 show had started at 4:30), made me miss the start of that one–but no problem: I already knew from the one I’d seen what happened there. This is a wonderful exercise in narrative triangulation: the three stories, listed as a drama, a thriller, and a comedy (actually a traditional French sex farce), involve the same characters and take place over the same timespan, but each focuses on different characters–a conceit that reflects the truism that in life, each of us is the star in our own film, and everybody else is simply a supporting character. The same scene pops up in two–or, rarely (I can think offhand of only one example), all three--films, but often it is shot from a different angle, revealing different information (such as that a hidden third character can hear the conversation between two people who seemed, in another version, to be alone). The effect is confusing and exhilarating, and I can’t imagine watching the films, say, two weeks apart. One of the bits of great fun in putting together the puzzle is seeing, say, why the headlight of one character’s Jag is missing–a piece of evidence that was shown and then dropped in another film. Incidentally, I watched them in the reverse order of their French release (On the Run was released first here), but the director has said that that shouldn’t matter, that he’d love to hear different reactions of people watching in any of the six possible permutations. For my part, I was very glad I watched the sex farce last, not only because it ended my M4 on a much cheerier note than would have, say, Osama, but because there were aspects of that film that would have seemed unforgivably silly without the logic of the other two narratives to make sense of them. Another "incidentally": I’d been fretting my slow pace of moviegoing after last year’s record performance, but looking back at last year, I see that I didn’t see my 10th film until my first M4, on 1 March. Of course, I’m assuming that M4s will be rarer this year, what with my having spent all my money, but at least this one gets me up to a more than respectable pace, and I intend to see #12 today. [11]
• 50 First Dates (2/15, NoHa)–Not hard to guess how this was pitched: Memento meets Groundhog Day. But as bad as that idea may sound, the humanity of the script and the actors makes this worthy of being mentioned in the same breath with those films. Sandler’s performance is–dare I say it?–low-key, and Barrymore is perfect in a role that calls for her to be a little clueless all the time. It’s sort of a Farrelly film, less uproarious and less dependent on bathroom humor. In fact, although there are elements played strictly for yuks, Lucy’s condition is not among them: it is something that has severely challenged a family, and Henry’s sympathy with that allows both the family to let him in and us to let the movie in. And so at some point, you start praying that the film won’t forfeit everything it has, against all odds, earned by solving everyone’s problems with some clichéd another-bonk-on-the-head solution. Instead, it offers something so original and so chilling that I was still tearing up a mile away from the theater.
• My Architect (2/21, YSC)–A very interesting documentary that would be more effective if less personal, I think. The film is a search for clues about the strange triple life the architect Louis I. Kahn. Kahn married young and lived with his wife until he died, but (at least) twice he had long affairs with women he worked with, fathering a child with each. (His marriage produced one child.) One of the illegitimate children was the filmmaker, which provides the impetus to the film but also its Achilles’ heel. The film investigates many intriguing questions–not only that of how a man could juggle three lives like this, but also about the very nature of "family"–but because it investigates them from the inside, too often the emotional moments seem staged and self-serving. The filmmaker, Nathaniel Kahn, is not particularly appealing, which might matter less if another consciousness were driving the film but which in the event keeps us (or me, anyway; obviously others feel very differently about it) from caring as much as we otherwise might. Still, a worthwhile film. By sheer coincidence, in the evening I watched the just-out DVD of Stone Reader, a film that had barely missed the cut in an early M4, which is also a documentary search by the filmmaker for a mysterious and missing figure–the author of a single extraordinary novel–who occupies his thoughts. In part because this filmmaker is more engaging, in part because there is, in theory, at least, much less at emotional stake, I found this film much more satisfying.

March 2004

• Touching the Void (3/7, Orange)--Wow, this sure puts a nagging cold in perspective. Half documentary, half reenactment, it's the story of two brash young mountain climbers' assault on a previously unscaled peak in Peru. They scale it, but one of them breaks a leg on the descent (the audience reaction to his description of this excruciating event is worth the price of admission); afterward, moral and physical limits are pushed to the utmost. Remarkable film.
• Starsky and Hutch (3/13, Branford)--Well, I'm sure I would have gotten more out of this if I'd ever seen a single episode of the TV show, but as much as I like Stiller & Wilson, I didn't get many chuckles out of this.
• Spartan (3/15, Orange)--Mamet's action pic! Lots of fun, and lots of surprises, with Kilmer appropriately wooden in the lead role.
• Passion of the Christ (3/16, Orange)--Well, the first thing to say, I guess, is that it was better than I expected. Felt like I had to see it for myself, since most reviews are by definition agenda-driven. Next, the anti-Semitism thing: I don't think so, though I can see how a Jew could think so, just as I can see how a devout Christian could think it a great film, which it's not either. I was taught the same thing as a boy that Mel was: it's not just the Jews, it's not just the Romans: we all killed Christ. I was taught that every time I gave free rein to an "impure thought," I was hammering in another nail. And I think that's what's going on here. (Incidentally, the Jews aren't the nastiest ethnic group portrayed, by far: the Romans portrayed here are the most vicious Italians on film since The Godfather.) I believe that what Mel set out to do was to graphically illustrate the sacrifice made by Christ in the idiom he's most at home in: grotesque violence. And I think he did that very effectively. It was impossible for me, a devout nonbeliever, not to feel for the poor bastard. If I were a lukewarm believer, it might have made me a stronger one, and that is precisely the goal. Incidentally, it turns out that Aramaic sounds a lot like Middle Earth Elvin.
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (3/23, Orange)--A wonderfully ballsy pic, thematically much like 50 First Dates. The idea seems to be that soulmates will find each other, even if their brains have no record of each other--and, in this case, even if the mated souls aren't particularly attractive to those who aren't mated. It's a philosophical tour de force, one I may need to own.
• Battle of Algiers (3/24, YSC [1966])--It's impossible to see this film now without reading it through the lens of Israel and Palestine, and its brilliance is that it makes both sides--and neither side--sympathetic. You can't be on the side of the Algerian freedom fighters--whose tactics are pretty much exactly the same as the Palestinians'--without getting where Hamas is coming from. And that makes this very uncomfortable to watch, very disturbing.
• Goodbye Lenin (3/26, YSC)--A look at appearance vs. reality from an unusual perspective: a doctrinaire East German mother of two goes into a coma just before the Wall falls, and her son engineers her perception of the world such that she is unaware of the change. The goofiness of that summary does apply, but there's a little more going on than that, and because we care so much about the characters, we're inclined to accept the goofy at face value. [20]
• Bubba Ho-Tep (3/27, Cine [2002])--I've been chasing this across the Eastern Seaboard for months. Talk about high concept: Elvis Presley and JFK (played by Ossie Davis--one of the strategies used to conceal him was dyeing his skin black) team up to combat a soul-sucking demon from ancient Egypt who is terrorizing their nursing home. Very low-budget, ver low production values, but it gave me a very good feeling: it's the sort of film Jennie and I used to lobby for when we volunteered for Film Fest New Haven.
• Never Die Alone (3/28, NoHa)--Went to this on the basis of an unexpectedly good Times review, and it was not an uninteresting view of a rather clichéd slice of urban black life, but ultimately that's what it is: a vicious drug dealer searching for redemption.

April 2004

• Hellboy (4/3--NoHa)--And went to this on the basis of a good Times review and the fact that it was directed by Guillermo Del Toro (Cronos, The Devil's Backbone). It's a very smart, very funny comic-book movie, but ultimately it doesn't rise above that, and I couldn't really see that Del Toro brought anything to the material that a lot of other directors couldn't have brought. There is one laugh-out-loud line, though without the benefit of Ron Perlman's dead-on deadpan delivery, it will no doubt fall flat: a beast has slimed him, touching him "for a second," and when a fellow superhero examines him, he reports, "a one-second touch, three eggs implanted." Hellboy barks, "He didn't even buy me a drink!"
• Bon Voyage (4/16, YSC)--Was describing this to people before seeing it as "a French sex farce," but in fact, there's not much sex. It's actually a thriller, and a pretty good one, set in France just before and after the onset of the German occupation.
• Kill Bill Vol. 2 (4/17, NoHa)--Was really anticipating this, having loved Vol. 1 (in contrast to most critics). But (again in contrast to most critics) I really felt let down. It just seems all over the map thematically, ending up in a treatise on self and family that just seems way out of left field--or out of a completely different movie. I'll probably still buy the pair on DVD, when the pair is available as a pair, on the hopes that I'll continue to like 1 and will grow to appreciate 2.
• The Return (4/18, YSC)--A quite remarkable Russian film about a man, who has been inexplicably absent from his wife and two sons (one a teen, one a preteen), inexplicably showing up one day and taking the boys on a trip, which is actually a mission on which he is to retrieve a mysterious buried box. The most likely explanation would seem to be that he has been in prison and that this is loot, but all the evidence is circumstantial, and that's not what matters anyway, except that the mystery further complicates his already complex character, and his excruciating relationship w/ the boys, who are understandably bitter about his long absence. Very human, and a wonderful performance by the younger boy.
• Spring Summer Fall Winter . . . and Spring (4/23, YSC)--A beautiful tone poem--yeah, I know that sounds pretentious, but what are ya gonna do? A Korean film focusing on life lessons learned by a young Buddhist monk from his master on an isolated island.
• Dogville (4/24, Orange)--More interesting than good, and it's hard for me to urge anyone to go out and sit through a 3-hour experiment in narrative and brutality, but I'm glad I went. It's sort of Lars Von Trier's Our Town--in fact, it just occurred to me that it even used that play's device of an unnamed narrator (here, John Hurt, whose voice over starts the very different Hellboy, though he then appears in that one as a character) with an unexplained connection to the town. But as dark as Out Town ultimately becomes, this takes as a starting point.
• Intermission (4/30, YSC)--Another one of those everybody-has-a-story-and-the-stories-all-eventually-intersect stories, but carried off with enough Irish brio (or whatever the Irish version of brio is--craigh?) that it works despite the formula. Most stunning opening scene set in a diner since Pulp Fiction.

May 2004

• I'm Not Scared (5/8, YSC)--Probably the most Spielbergian European film I've ever seen, and I don't mean that in a negative way: Spielberg's standard themes of childhood fragility in the face of the sordid adult world, here set in southern Italy. Very effective. [30]
• Young Adam (5/9, Orange)--Was going to skip this but went on Jennie's admittedly mild recommendation. What I learned: (1) despite the climate, people in Scotland fuck outdoors a lot; (2) there's only one good-looking guy in the whole country, and it's his responsibility to service all the attractive women, even the marginally attractive ones.
• Troy (5/15, NoHa)--As expected, mostly excellent action scenes, mostly dreadful dialogue. Worst problem is that Pitt and (especially) Bloom are so quintessentially 21st century that it's impossible to take them seriously when they speak. No, I take that back: worst problem was that the theater had no large popcorn bags, meaning that my salt intake was inadequate to absorb my large Diet Pepsi, meaning that bladder anxiety kicked in less than an hour into a 16--minute movie.
• Super Size Me (5/21, YSC)--We have found the new Michael Moore. A very Mooresque documentary shows in hilariously hideous detail what happens if you eat nothing but McDonald's for a month.
• Strayed (5/28, YSC)--The exodus from Paris in front of the German, young widow and her two children are helped by a young man who is not what it seems. Wanted to like it more, but everything just seems so scripted: fated to happen by unseen forces (the filmmakers). Much more French than good.
• The Agronomist (5/30, Vil. E.)--The start of a record-setting M5! Documentary by Jonatahn Demme about Jean Dominique, who ran Haiti's lone genuinely independent station for 40 years, minus two exiles. A good portrait, but what elevates the film to something special is all the film footage of the man himself, who is extraordinarily animated, energetic, alive. Which makes the one trick Demme plays remarkably effective: not until late in the film do we learn that Dominique was finally gunned down outside his station by gunmen sent by political enemies. So you leave the theater in an odd combination of sad and uplifted.
• Godzilla (5/30, Cin. Vil. [1954])--Yep, restored to its pre-U.S. release state (goodbye, Raymond Burr). It was perhaps overpraised in the Times, hence my attendance. Yes, it's true that scenes of a city in flames are as resonant in post-9/11 America as in postwar Japan, and yes, it's true that the sound--the drum-pounding score and the unearthly screech of the monster--is wonderful, but otherwise it's still just a cheesy fright flick. The most surprising thing for me, having recently watched King Kong again, was how vastly more sophisticated were the special effects in that 1930 film. Which is to say sophisticated at all.
• Springtime in a Small Town (5/30, Cin. Vil.)--A first: this was shown on the same screen I'd just seen Godzilla on. A Chinese film, very quiet, and with a certain charm, but nothing special. A standard love triangle, including a sympathetic husband who is ill (though it's never really clean exactly how ill). Adding a fourth angle is the husband's 16-year-old sister (played by a positively radiant actress: the most memorable element of the least memorable film I saw that day), whom he would like to marry off to his old friend who is smitten with his wife. Passion, repression, guilt, yadda, yadda, yadda.
• The Five Obstructions (5/30, FF)--Without a doubt, the best of the year's films I have seen so far. Lars Von Trier challenges his mentor, Jorgen Leth, to remake his 1967 short "The Perfect Human"--essentially a study of banality--five times, each under certain restrictions imposed by Von Trier. Because of their mentor-student relationship, which the nature of the exercise reverses, and because "The Perfect Human" was one of the films that inspired Von Trier to be a filmmaker, there is a huge dose of oedipal energy here: Von Trier is avowedly determined to force Leth to make a "crap" version of his great short. But for every road block Von Trier throws in his way--making no cut longer than a half-second, making a film in "the worst place in the world," incorporating animation (which both directors loathe), making a film with the rule of no rules--Leth manages either to finesse it out of the way or, more often, to make a virtue of the necessity. It's fun watching the bits of his shorts, but it's more fun watching the interplay between the two filmmakers, Leth invariably in despair over what Von Trier is asking of him, Von Trier invariably frustrated by his failure to trip up his filmic father figure. I expected the film to explore the artistic process in an interesting way, but I was a little afraid that it would be pedantic and humorless; instead, I laughed more than I have at some purported comedies this year (Starsky and Hutch, e.g.). Wonderful film--this and The Agronomist are exactly why I do these all-day movie trips.
• Smiles of a Summer Night (5/30, FF [1955])--A Bergman comedy! The master's take on A Midsummer Night's Dream, and in turn the source for Woody Allen's Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. And for me also reminiscent of 18th-century comedies of wit & double entendre. A lot of fun, in any case. This was not planned--going in, I had forgotten almost everything about The Agronomist and Springtime except that they were on my list of things to see--but I wound up seeing no two films in the same language, and The Agronomist features 3 prominently: English, French, and Kriyòl; the others: Japanese, Chinese, Danish, and Swedish. and also, of course, two films nearly as old as I.

June 2004

• Love Me if You Dare (Jeux d'enfants) (6/4, YSC)--Two children prod each other to outrageous behavior via alternating dares, and the behavior carries into adulthood. A film I admired more than really liked, because it takes the chance of presenting us with two central characters who are prickly at best, and sometimes despicable. Uses the Sunset Boulevard device of an opening voiceover narration by a dead guy. [40]
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azabakan (6/5, NoHa)--Saw it mostly because of the director, to see what the sensibilities of Y tu mamá también would bring to the Harry saga. It was perfectly OK, but I seem just not to be interested. I will say this: #3 is a damn sight better than #2, which I rented and watched so that I wouldn't be subject to any narrative gaps.
• The Day After Tomorrow (6/6, NoHa)--Went to this on Jennie's . . . well, "recommendation" would be an overstatement; went to it because she said that the negative reviews demonstrated nothing but ignorance of what to expect from a summer disaster thriller. I agree: the special effects did their job on me, and it was worth my $6.25. The story is absurd and the writing puerile, but hey: it's a summer disaster thriller!
• The Control Room (6/11, YSC)--A remarkable documentary about the Arabic satellite TV station Al Jazeera, specifically as it operated during the recent war in Iraq. Al Jazeera has been demonized, of course, by U.S. government officials (and some in the media) for presenting a slanted, pro-Arab view of events, but the representatives of the station, and the film, make a good case for throwing the same accusation back at U.S. media, with the difference that they claim not to have a point of view. The film has three real heroes: the president of the station, a reporter, and, surprisingly, a U.S. Army press liaison, who actually grows and learns in the course of the film. See this if you get a chance: one of the best things I've seen this year.
• The Mother (6/19, YSC)--The rare cinematic love story between a middle-aged woman and a younger man. Deals with illusion, self-delusion, and grudging acceptance of reality in a way that somehow manages to keep a sense of humor and not become just drearily depressing. A fine film, and a courageous performance by the woman who plays the title character.
• The Terminal (6/20, NoHa)--OK, Spielberg's a master of it, and Hanks is a good vehicle, so I can't deny that I got a little weepy, but this is a really disappointing film: sentimental pap without adequate focus or plausibility. One thing you have to do when your premise is implausible (Kafka's Metamorphosis is the benchmark) is to make everything follow naturally within the confines of that premise. Here, though, too much stuff just seems to follow because it has to for the needs of the plot. Particularly annoying are the evil-until-crunch-time immigration officer played by Stanley Tucci and the idiotic romantic subplot. Ugh.
• Coffee and Cigarettes (6/23, YSC)--Aptly titled series of vignettes in which people (usually just two) discuss everything and nothing while consuming the titular conversational stimulants. It doesn't always work, but the best bits are gems--Jack White explaining his Tesla coil to Meg under the terrifying gaze of a garishly colored portrait of Lee Marvin, e.g. Sort of like Seinfeld for the art-house crowd.
• Napoleon Dynamite (6/25, YSC)--A pleasantly quirky portrait of a more-or-less pleasantly quirky young Idahoan; quirkiness for quirkiness' sake.
• Fahrenheit 9/11 (6/26, Orange)--I applauded at the end; let's just leave it at that.

July 2004

• Since Otar Left (7/2, YSC)--Similar thematically to Goodbye, Lenin, but at the same time more plausible and less fun. A French-Belgian film, but the first two-thirds or so are set in Tbilsi, a first glimpse for me.
• Spider-Man 2 (7/3, NoHa)--Better villain, equal webslinging special effects, similar Mary Jane wet-shirt scene (with a sort of PG-rated beaver shot thrown in for good measure), so in all a more satisfying product than #1 (though there is an ominous suggestion at the end that the Green Goblin will be back for #3--and incidentally, is it wise so early in the franchise to reveal Spidey's "secret" identity to half the Tri-State population?). Side note: the blatant product placement of Joe's Pizza at 323 Bleecker had nothing to do with my going there the next day during a break in my M5; I returned there because I liked the mushroom-sausage sliceI got there on the previous M5. I did notice, however, that they had just hiked their prices, and when I suggested that there was a connection to the newfound fame, the uncomfortable chuckling behind the counter seemed to confirm my suspicion. [50]
• Dodgeball (7/3, NoHa)--A hoot, in the Zucker/Farrelly tradition of the smart/dumb flick. Favorite running gag: "ESPN 8, the ocho." Favorite cameo: Lance Armstrong.
• The Story of the Weeping Camel (7/4, Vill. E.)--An absolutely beautiful film: beautiful Mongolian vistas, beautiful Mongolian yurt interiors, beautiful Mongolian faces (human and camel). A Disneyesque story of a mother camel that refuses to nurse her colt--nothing, in other words, that will change your life, except to the extent that looking at beauty changes your life. Downside: I miscalculated its likelihood of coming to New Haven: days after I spent $10 to see it, it opened at the Cine 1-2-3-4. Upside: I've been recommending it to everyone I talk to.
• The Hunting of the President (7/4, Ang.)--The first of three consecutive lefty or left-leaning documentaries, and the weakest. It was fun to hear about the vast right-wing conspiracy that tried to bring down Clinton, but I wouldn't have wanted to watch it in an audience that covered the political spectrum and then have had to defend it against the righties' attacks. Fortunately, righties were unlikely to be in the audience. Pretensions of All the President's Men, but more the feel of those In Search of . . . "documentaries" that used to be on cable TV.
• Imelda (7/4, FF)--A surprisingly sympathetic portrait of Imelda Marcos--or, rather, the most damning material comes from her own mouth, so the filmmakers have the luxury of seeming to be sympathetic. Interesting, but insubstantial--like Imelda herself?
• The Corporation (7/4, FF)--The next great lefty documentary after Fahrenheit 9/11--and, not coincidentally, the Canadian filmmakers have taken a very Michael Mooresque approach to their subject, and even enlisted him as a talking head. The titular corporation is not the CIA, as several I've mentioned it to have assumed, but the institution of the small-c corporation--its structure, its mindset, and what the filmmakers see as its inherently damaging (to its employees, to economies, to the environment--you name it) nature. One surprising hero emerges: the CEO of the world's largest carpet manufacturer, who has an epiphany and begins to move his corporation in the direction of sustainability, while preaching that gospel to his peers. See this one if you get a chance--and don't be scared off by the 145-minute length.
• I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (7/4, Ang.)--Went to this despite a lukewarm Times review because I'm interested in the director and in the star, Clive Owen (Croupier--but see also just below), but I have to admit that the review was pretty much right: just unsatisfactory in its characters and the working out of its ostensibly mystery-noir plot.
• Facing Windows (7/9, YSC)--An Italian film compared with Rear Window, but while the mystery element is interesting, it falls flat at the end with an after-school-special moral of "don't be satisfied just to survive; go out and make something happen in your life."
• King Arthur (7/10, NoHa)--Completely implausible, but it worked for me, in large part because Clive Owen just flat out sells it: a remarkable acting performance in a stock schlock role. I am now advising people: if you see only one hokey mytho-historic blockbuster this summer, this one is way less embarrassing than Troy.
• The Stepford Wives (7/11, Orange)--A robot of a film, every moment programmed for parodic humor by a force unconnected to the human funny bone. The original was schlock, but at least it had a point; this one is a waste of time and talent--not one of the good-to-excellent actors involved comes across as the only person who could have played his or her role. Hollywood cynicism at its dreariest.
• Before Sunset (7/17, Cine)--If you haven't seen the beautiful Before Sunrise, it will take you a while to figure out why you should be interested in listening to these two guarded, preening 30-somethings flirt for an hour. So rent the earlier movie, watch it, and then you'll understand why their defenses are up, and why it takes them so long in the newer (and sadder but wiser) film to allow themselves to be themselves, and why we should care. This is as real a fictional film as is easily imaginable--for better and for worse. These are people we know, maybe people we've been, and it hurts to watch (and listen), but the rewards are worth it. One disappointment: the lovely Ms. Delpy is about as inept a songwriter as she is an engaging screen presence. [60]
• The Bourne Supremacy (7/24, NoHa)--Warning! Shaky-cam action movie! I'm ordinarily not much attuned to cinematography, but it's absolutely impossible not to be conscious of it here: not only is the camera hand-held, but the aperture is wide open so that there's almost zero depth of field, so not only is everything jumping around, but most of it's jumping around out of focus. Still, that said, a rousing popcorn romp, though I didn't have popcorn because I had my heart set on the real butter at the Landmark Sunshine at the start of the next day's M5.
• A Home at the End of the World (7/25, Sunshine)--This got a weak review in the Times, and it does descend into sentimentality now and again--if you really need to pee, leave immediately when the Robin Wright character announces her pregnancy; the only important plot point you'll miss in the Lifetime-channel feelgood montage that follows is that they buy a house near Woodstock--but any weakness in the story are overcome by first-rate acting performances; who knew Colin Ferrell could be so sweet and vulnerable? Michael Cunningham wrote the screenplay from his novel, and though I haven't checked, I suspect the book predated The Hours,where the theme of sexual fluidity gets more mature treatment. Still, you'd have to be pretty cranky not to find this engaging.
• Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (7/25, Cin. Vil.)--Inspiring portrait of the activist historian's career-long quest to show his students that history is not something you study but something you do what you can to shape. Remarkable film. Narrated (lightly) by the un-Bournelike Matt Damon.
• Bukowski: Born into This (7/25, Cin. Vil.)--Funny, sad, maddening portrait of the poet, to whom the same adjectives can be applied.
• My Mother Likes Women (7/25, Two Boots)--Almodóvar-esque subject matter--mom introduces her three adult (sort of) daughters to her new love interest, wackiness ensues. Almodóvar would have done it more deftly, and the (you should pardon the expression) fairy-tale ending would have been less obvious, but it was impossible for me to resist the film's sweet charm, particularly that of the middle daughter, who does everything possible to sabotage the happiness she's clearly destined to have. The happiest surprise of the M5.
• Ju-on (7/25, Ang.)--This has a subtitle, but I'm not going to bother to look it up; let's just say it's This Will Creep the Fucking Bejesus Out of You. To the extent that there's really a premise, it's explained at the beginning that ju-on is the spirit of rage that survives after a violent murder and infects those who come near it. And there's probably some film or psychology student in Japan already writing a dissertation about the film's deeper meaning, but the best thing I can say about it is that I was glad I had a 2-hour train ride before I was going to try to get any serious sleep. The film is, to quote the Rosanna Arquette character in Pulp Fiction, fuckin' trippy.
• The Manchurian Candidate (7/31, Savoy)--Almost as schlocky a story as the original, but excellent performances by all the leads, along with some brilliant subliminals--voiced-over TV announcements, "crawls" at the bottom of TV screens--make it gripping. And it contains one of the creepiest oedipal scenes on record.

August 2004

• Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (8/4, Orange)--What happens when the members of a heavy metal band gets in touch with their inner feelings? This documentary answers the question I would have bet no one had ever asked. A wonderful film, if overlong and unfortunately full of Metallica music.
• Maria Full of Grace (8/4, YSC)--An unsentimentalized, unsensationalized picture of how the drug trade preys on the poor and helpless. Reportedly the acting debut for the woman who plays the title character, and whether that's true or not, it is an amazing performance.
• The Door in the Floor (8/7, Orange)--A very different film--and a better one--than the trailer suggested, though it turns oddly Coenesque at a critical moment. Not that there's anything wrong with Coenesque--and Lebowski veteran Bridges makes it almost work--but it's just not in keeping with the tone of the rest of the film. [70]
• Collateral (8/8, NoHa)--The coldest film of the year, it gets a heartbeat only in the clichéd last-act chase. Still, the icy direction by Mann and the performances by the two leads, particularly the subzero Cruise, make it worth watching.
• Intimate Strangers (8/14, YSC)--I expected this to be a wacky French mistake-identities sex farce, but in fact, the mistaken identity doesn't persist long, and it is a lot more serious and believable than I imagined. The lead actor, who looks a little bit like Eric Idle, had a remarkable capacity for telling a lot with a silent face. Even the unbelievably happy ending is forgivable.
• Garden State (8/15, Orange)--Two things: (1) for about the first 3/4 of the film--specifically through the shout into the abyss--this engaged me emotionally more than anything since Lost in Translation; (2) it proved that, contrary to what we might have believed from the last two Star Wars films, Natalie Portman really can act. I look forward to seeing her, Julia Roberts, and two men I'd be hot for if I were gay, Jude Law and Clive Owen, in Closer, though I don't know whether that means less far away or the opposite of an opener.
• We Don't Live Here Anymore (8/28, Orange)--Wow, not exactly the feel-good movie of the year for someone still bearing the scars of divorce. A good, tough film, and fine ensemble acting. Then afterward, my car wouldn't start, and between the jump start and tow that were necessary that day, and the new alternator the next day, it was a $500 movie.

September 2004

• Vanity Fair (9/4, Orange)--Not great, but a very good job of insinuating a 21st-century feel into a 19th-century story without being untrue to the spirit of the novel. Witherspoon is surprisingly good and does not suffer from the bane of most young actresses in period pieces: I believed in her.
• Remember Me, My Love (9/5, Sunshine)--Extraordinarily sad Italian family film feints toward a relatively happy ending, then plunges back into sadness amid apparently joy. The face of the lead actor tells the whole story in the final shot.
• End of the Century: The Ramones (9/5, Ang.)--Wonderful documentary about the band that invented punk. The excitement of the music outweighs the sadness of seeing Joey, Dee Dee, and Joe Strummer, all gone now. Learned afterward that Film Fest New Haven is showing the film, though I probably wouldn't be able to get to it anyway. And let's face it: more appropriate to watch it on Houston Street than in New Haven.
• Bush's Brain (9/5, Cin. Vil.)--I bagged the possibility of 6 flicks in one day (ultimately settled for 4 anyway) in order to see this documentary about Karl Rove. Infuriating, of course, but it doesn't rise above preaching to the choir. Seemingly 2/3 of it is interviews with the coauthors of the book on which it's based.
• Bright Leaves (9/5, FF)--Wonderful personal documentary by Ross McElwee (Sherman's March) about his (and his cinephile cousin's) hypothesis that the Gary Cooper character in the '40s film Bright Leaf, about conflict in the post-Civil War tobacco business in North Carolina, was based upon McElwee's great-grandfather. The film ends up being about heritage of all varieties, including the heritages of jealousy and guilt. Brilliant.
• Hero (9/6, Orange)--Crouching Tigerish historical epic about the unification of China in the 3d century b.c. Gorgeous cinematography, as each segment in a Rashomon-like series of alternative narratives, is steeped in a different dominant color. [80]
• Criminal (9/10, YSC)--American remake of the Argentinian classic noir Nine Queens, which I saw a couple of years ago at the same theater. That was a great film, and this is virtually a scene-for-scene remake, so it is great fun, but something's lost in knowing the outcome.
• Reconstruction (9/11, Linc. Pl.)--Danish narrative mind game designed to prove something that a narrator says at the beginning and again at the end: that even though it's just cinema (and, implicitly, even though the filmmaker is beating us over the head with the artificiality of it all), it can still make us feel. And indeed it does. It's a Wonderful Life is a surprising presence here.
• Red Lights (9/11, Linc. Pl.)--Three films in one, it starts as a Bergmanesque up-close treatment of a marriage in excruciating ruins, switches to a sort of comic noir version of Vanished, and then ends up Hitchcockian. Oddly satisfying for all its genre sampling.
• Cellular (9/12, NoHa)--This is the sort of pulper that I'll probably skip once I'm carless, and for at least 15 minutes I wished I'd skipped it today. But there came a time at last when the outrageous implausibility was overcome by the adrenaline momentum and I surrendered, and I pretty much enjoyed it from that point on.
• Shaun of the Dead (9/25, Orange)--A likable zombie comedy in which at least one character who really matters to us gets bitten and has to have her head blown off. So right there we're saying it's not too concerned with playing it safe. Still, can't say I loved it: very funny at its best, but rarely the sort of no-holds-barred Stone-and-Parker (think Cannibal: The Musical) horrible hilarity that a film like this needs to succeed.
• Bright Young Things (9/25, YSC)--Wasn't feeling English enough when I saw this, I guess. You'd think something that combines cynicism and romanticism as this does would be right up my alley, but I never really connected with it. Bonus: the first I've seen of Margaret Tyzack since she played Antonia, mother of the title character, in I, Claudius.
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (9/26, NoHa)--This was a weekend for slight disappointments, I guess--maybe it has something to do with the gallstones I'd had rattling around me all week. The technology is admirable, but there doesn't seem to be a human pulse here. And zero chemistry between Law and Paltrow. And too little of Jolie.

October 2004

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November 2004

• P.S. (11/5, Criterion)--First day of the glitzy new five-screen art house downtown, and though the film had not been well reviewed, I'm enough of a sucker for Laura Linney that I thought it worth the $9.25-even-at-4:45 p.m. (!) price of admission. The place has more of a multiplex feel than an art-house feel--hard to believe you're at a movie theater in downtown New Haven--but let's face it: there's nothing inherently wrong with cleanliness and comfortable seats with cup holders. The film's pretty much a stinker, but the worst thing was that they turned up the house lights and stopped the projector just as the end credits started to roll. The best thing is that when I mentioned this at the front desk on the way out, the manager happened to be there, and he thanked me with a comp.
• Alfie (11/6, Orange)--Yes, I find Jude Law about as charming as it's possible for a heterosexual male to find him, but I just never cared enough about his character here for anything to matter. I found the film boring, which is about the worst criticism I can level.
• Being Julia (11/7, Orange)--Another whom I've come to find more and more attractive as she ages: Annette Bening. This is not a great film, but it's a lot of fun, and it's a tour de force for Bening, a wonderful, Oscarworthy performance. Jeremy Irons is brilliant, too, but generously stays out of Bening's way.
• Sideways (11/12, Criterion)--My nominee for best film of the year so far? Yeah, I think it may be. I am so glad that Paul Giamatti seems to have established that someone less attractive than I can be a leading man--and then, too, I'm glad because he is so damn good. Brilliant script, brilliant direction: Alexander Payne is four for four--in fact, think about this: About Schmidt may be my least-favorite of his films! Be on the lookout for the childhood picture of Miles (Giamatti) with his dad: it really is a photo of the actor with his famous dad. [110]
• Bridget Jones 2 (11/13, Orange)--Well, I laughed out loud a few times, but this is about as cynical a capitalization on the success of the first film as can be imagined: plausibility, not just in terms of plot but in terms of how members of the genus homo sapiens think and behave (the plausibility of which was one of the strengths of the first), goes completely out the window in the service of the three main characters, plus a red-herring fourth, behaving in ways meant to be amusing but in fact mostly just annoying. The new Times reviewer, Manohla Dargis (late of the L.A. Times), tried to warn me, but I gathered that because she just objected on inflexible feminist principle to everything Bridget, she may not really have been able to detect whether the film was any good. Oh, one gain in realism from the first film: Zellweger really is a bit of a tub this time; in the first one she looked damn near perfect to me, a lot better than her stick-legged wraith in Chicago.
• Enduring Love (11/20, Crit.)--At last, Rhys Ifans's capacity for creepiness has been unleashed. A tone-perfect film about obsession and revulsion with a soupçon of attraction.
• Undertow (11/21, Crit.)--OK, it's time to admit it: Dermott Mulrooney really can act, if only in a fairly narrow bandwidth. His character here provides a wonderful Flannery O'Connoresque grounding; once his character is killed off, it becomes a much more conventional escape-and-pursuit story--effective but nothing special.
• Ae Fond Kiss (11/26, Quad)--A devoutly Muslim Romeo, a lukewarm Catholic Juliet, wth Glasgow standing in for Verona. Nothing much to the story, but the performances make it new. The male lead is played, I believe, by the actor who played Juliette Binoche's hunky Sikh in The English Patient.
• Tarnation (11/28, Crit.)--Somehow put me in mind of Ginsberg's Howl: at the same time blatantly rough and self-consciously artistic--and I mean that in a good way. The filmmaker's video memoir (assembled on an iMac) of life with and without his mentally disturbed mother (at least part of whose disturbance seems to have resulted from her parents' decision to allow her to undergo a long regimen of electroshock therapy). Devastating.
• Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (11/28, Crit.)--Maybe unfair to have seen this right after Tarnation. It just didn't live up to its billing for me: fun to look at, but not bearing much thought. Spirited Away remains the only Japanese animation that has really grabbed me.

December 2004

• Donnie Darko (12/3, Crit)--I finally saw this for the first time only a year or so ago, via Netflix and a 26" Trinitron, and I was underwhelmed. The director's cut, on the big screen, impressed me a lot more. Jake Gyllenhaal should have been around during the stoner age of film: his face does a remarkable job of expressing gradients of disorientation, confusion, fear, and goofiness.
• Kinsey (12/4, Orange)--Fine performances by all, perhaps best by my future wife Laura Linney. The surprise of the film is its humor, and its good humor. The catastrophic failure comes during the end credits, where thanks are given to the institution that employed Kinsey for most if not all his academic career, "University of Indiana." As someone who once referred to the "University of West Virginia" in print, I can assure you that the folks in Bloomington feel just as strongly about word order.
  Finding Neverland (12/5, Orange)--Sweet but not oversweet, filled with sentiment but not much sentimental. Depp, Winslet, Christie, and the boy who plays the real-life Peter are wonderful, and I had not known until the opening credits that Kelly MacDonald was in it, but as soon as I saw her name I knew she must be the stage Peter, perfectly cast.
• Guerrilla (12/18, YSC)--Documentary about Patty Hearst and the SLA, well reviewed but surprisingly flat, even boring at times. Note that this was my first trip to the old downtown art house since the early-Nov. opening of the new downtown art house. [120]
• Sponge Bob Squarepants (12/19, NoHa)--Never seen an episode of the series, so I brought in only what I'd read about it. It was cute, but I could have survived without seeing it.
  Spanglish (12/19, Orange)--OK, I'm a sucker for James L. Brooks (Broadcast News is probably one of my top ten of all time--top twenty at worst), and though this is undeniably schmaltzy, who does schmaltz better? Amazing performance by Téa Leoni in an even more thankless role than she had in Flirting with Disaster, and here's a sentence I never imagined I'd write: I liked Adam Sandler in two films this year! And Paz Vega? Well, let's just say that I didn't feel a crying need for a prettier Penélope Cruz, but I'm not complaining.
• Meet the Fockers (12/23, NoHa)--Really liked Meet the Parents (though the DVD buy was strictly a surge of mindless consumerism), really like all the stars of the original except for the boring Teri Polo, really like Hoffman, and though I can't say I really like Babs, it was good to see her again, but good god, what a cynical piece of crap this is. Ugh.
• Lemony Snickett (12/23, NoHa)--Another one I came to with only theoretical familiarity with the context, and another I enjoyed but was never in danger of falling in love with. Good-looking pic, especially (1) the amazing face of the girl who plays 12-year-old Violet, and (2) the end credits, which are the best at least since the last Harry Potter.
• Alexander (12/24, Orange)--I guess "Not as bad as everyone said" is not the sort of blurb they're looking for, but that's my take. Battle scenes are good, Jolie is wonderfully (and appropriately) campy, and Ferrell, if not perfectly cast, does well. But good god, it's long! Bonus for the I, Claudius fan: an early scene in which the wrestling instructor is played by Brian Blessed, who was Augustus in the Masterpiece Theatre series.
• Bad Education (12/24, YSC)--I don't believe I've read or heard anyone pointing this out, but from the Saul Bass-esque opening credits, accompanied by Bernard Herrmann-esque music, it's clear that this is Almodóvar's Hitchcock film. (I believe he even makes the obligatory cameo appearance, as a pool skimmer with odd, face-obscuring headgear.) Unfortunately, Hitch is hard to do (favorite counterexample: Mamet's Spanish Prisoner), and though I seem to be in the minority here, I liked this less than Talk to Her or All About My Mother. Which is not to say I didn't like it, only that he has raised my expectations so high now that it's going to be tough for him not to disappoint me a bit. It should be said, though, that Gael García Bernal is as hot as a woman as he is as a man.
• The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (12/25, Crit.)--Another case of too-high expectations: I enjoyed this a lot, particularly the performances of Wilson and Blanchett (each of whom I saw in another film over the long weekend!), but this didn't match the Wes Anderson standard of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. Certainly contains the best running musical gag of the year, though; I won't spoil it for you.
• The Aviator (12/26, Orange)--For an hour, maybe an hour and a half (like Alexander, this is almost 3 hours long), I was calling this one of the best films of the year, but as Hughes's planes do more than once, it runs out of fuel and lands awkwardly, though nonfatally. Absolutely loved Cate as Kate--a performance as spot-on perfect, if less extended, as Foxx's in Ray. But when she disappears, the pic just can't compensate for her absence. Leo, who in the trailers looked too callow to carry it off, acquits himself admirably. A noble failure of a film.
• The Incredibles (12/30, Orange)--I liked Nemo less than I expected because I was expecting Toy Story quality; then Nemo lowered my expectations enough for me to like this one more than I expected. The political stance of the film has been much commented on, but I'd like to point out that no brand of liberalism I ever signed up for holds that everyone is the same; it holds, rather, that everyone deserves an equal opportunity to maximize his or her talents. Another fine end-credits sequence, though not as good as Snickett's.
• The House of Flying Daggers (12/30, Orange)--As expected, gorgeous but rather soporific when concentrating on its romantic subplot. We don't really much care about the politics, either, except for a knee-jerk assumption that we should root for the rebels. Just show us the action, and the amazing color palette. [130]
• Beyond the Sea (12/31, Crit)--I was a little afraid that I might be ending 2004 with the worst thing I'd seen all year, but it turned out not even to be the worst thing I saw in the last week and a half (viz. Fockers). Yeah, it's a vanity project, but given that, it's not bad. Whether you think Bobby Darin's worth a biopic or not, you have to pretty much concede Spacey's the one to make the pic.