Vitamin C

Presidents Day weekend M5

OK, I broke a seat at IFC, but otherwise this was a pretty nearly perfect Manhattan movie day: everything I saw was at least rewarding, and one was the quintessential why-I-do-this film. Not only that, but I got to spend some good between-movies time with a friend I hadn't seen for a while, and he spotted John Waters.

Atlantic City

IFC (1980)

No, I'm not going to say anything about lemons, except to remind you that, when taken internally, all citrus fruits help to protect against scurvy. I will say this about Susan Sarandon: this may have been her peak moment for beauty (not that the decline has been dramatic, mind), but she was still working on her acting chops. What a strange coincidence that the accent she adopted as North Carolinian Annie Savoy in Bull Durham eight years later seems identical to her Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, accent here. Then again, it's not as if Burt Lancaster is Brando. Louis Malle doesn't make it work by casting great actors or coaxing great acting performances. He does it with camera work and sound (much of it jazz), and by creating a world populated by sad people too dumb to realize they're not happy, or at least that they're not about to be happy. The small-time hoods here remind me a lot of the film that started my Malle jones, Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the gallows).

Wallace Shawn turns up as a waiter, his first work for Malle, just a year before My Dinner with Andre.

Oscar®-nominated animated shorts

IFC

If the foreign-film committee is more screwed up than ever, the shorts committees seem to have gotten more sense since the last time I saw all the nominees, two years ago. The live-action picks in particular have improved, but there wasn't a film in the two programs' ten that I would write off as a waste of time, and I couldn't say that of the 2005 noms.

• "Même les pigeons vont au paradis" (Even pigeons go to heaven)--The weakest of the animated bunch, basically just an ironic (and anticlerical) joke, but a good-looking one, with an evident Triplettes de Belleville influence.
• Moya lyubov (My love)--A conventional story (girl loves boy, boy loves girl but also thinks he maybe loves other, very different girl), but by far the most visually arresting of the films, an Impressionist canvas in motion. It would get my vote if I had one despite the lack of a compelling narrative--actually, none of these films has that anyway. But my guess is that it won't get the Oscar.
• Madame Tutli-Putli--Great-looking stop motion, with a feel of the Team America marionettes without the yuks and the visible strings. The disturbing, surreal story makes this a dark horse for the O.
• I Met the Walrus--The soundtrack, we are told (and I have no reason to disbelieve it), is a recording that a teenage fan made of an interview with John Lennon in 1969 after sneaking into his Toronto hotel room (presumably during the Plastic Ono Band's Live Peace gig there). The animation is a sort of faux free form from the words, suggesting John's own minimalist drawing style. Not a great film, but it's a trip to hear John's voice and his brilliantly naïve thoughts on speaking peace to power.
• Sergei Prokofiev's Peter & the Wolf--This is the one I expect to win: you got your high-cultural soundtrack, you got your youth rebelling against domestic and political authority, you got your cute cat, crow, and goose, and finally, you got your animal-friendly revisionism. Don't get me wrong: it's good; it's just not what I'd pick.

Oscar®-nominated live-action shorts

IFC

• Tanghi argentini--Basically, an O. Henry short story: pleasant, forgettable.
• Om natten (At night)--A powerful and mostly unsentimental, unclichéd story of three young women who become friends by virtue of spending time together on the cancer ward of a Danish hospital. In the absence of a Holocaust candidate this year, bet on this to win.
• Il supplente (The substitute)--A delightfully jokey palate cleanser after the previous intense film: substitute teacher mixes abuse with . . . well, abuse in dealing with his classroom of Italian teens, who--guess what?--teach him something! Fun, but zero chance to win.
• The Tonto Woman--My pick, and not just because it's based on an Elmore Leonard story. The titular character is so named because she was kidnapped by Tonto Apaches on her wedding day (not the film's only debt to The Searchers), and her chin was tattooed, but she defiantly insisted that they "do it right," leaving her as a sort of parody of a sideshow bearded lady. The look is comical at first, but the more we see her and know her (along with the Leonardian outlaw-hero), the less we can imagine her without the markings, which ultimately, for me, at least, became sexy. I have one narrative quibble, but I tend to be forgiving when the whole moves me.
• Le Mozart des pickpockets (I don't need to translate this, do I?)--This will probably win if the Danish cancer pic doesn't: has a profoundly cute kid, two buffoonish adults who become his de facto parents, and even a hint of political sympathy for the North African "other" in France.

Die Stille vor Bach (The silence before Bach)

2 Boots

Or, call it Thirteen (actually, I lost count) Short Films about JSB; this is one of those things that defies me to describe it in a way that will make you understand that it was a thrilling cinematic experience rather than a confusing, boring waste of time. See, we start with a player piano moving and rotating along an otherwise empty floor, seemingly on its own power; then we cut to five, maybe ten minutes of a blind piano tuner . . . uh, . . . tuning a piano. See what I mean?

After that, we start to get some actual narrative elements, shaping what I suppose might be called (speaking of a description that will make it sound unwatchable) a sort of impressionistic intellectual biography of Bach, and the narrative threads multiply and eventually begin to return and intersect, but there's never really anything that you'd call a "story."

If I knew anything at all about Bach, I suspect I'd recognize in the structure something like thematic manipulations of which he was a master, but I don't, so all I recognized was something that's a perfect example why a dark room with images flashing before me is one of my favorite places to be in the world.

By the way, Netflix is listing this, but don't hold your breath; according to the Times review, the Catalonian director Pere Portabella has never allowed any of his films to be released to video. Oh, also note: despite the German title, it was made in Spain.

Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias (The year my parents went on vacation)

Sun

Wow, did they have me in mind when they made this film or what? It appeals to the soccer junkie in me (set in 1970, with footage of some of the sensational goals that propelled Brazil to its third World Cup), the samba junkie in me, the lefty in me (young boy's parents have to leave the country in haste to avoid the right-wing government's crackdown on dissidents), the Jewish wannabe in me (the boy is a goy, but he spends his parents' "vacation" in his paternal grandfather's Jewish enclave in São Paulo) . . . and it's a fine film even aside from all that--probably one I'll need to add to my football film collection.