Busy bein' born

Don't Look Back

(1967)

Ah, little Bobby, embryonic, insistently enigmatic, genius through Plexiglas. Strangely, I feel as if I've seen much of this already, perhaps because I've seen 65 Revisited. Ah, but still, what a time--and by the way, who broke the fucking glass on the sidewalk?

Undergraduates

Låt den rätte komma in (Let the right one in)

Crit

OK, I've never seen Fanny and Alexander, but I suspect that it would not be inapt to say that this film is to Twilight as F&A is to Home Alone. Twilight is a perfectly OK Hollywood teenage-vampire-love story, populated with pretty 90210ish faces and centered on a moral and existential dilemma that we can intellectually respond to, even if the pretty actors don't really convince us that it's any more than an academic exercise. This, on the other hand, is a beautiful, heartbreaking, heartbreakingly beautiful story of 12-year-old love, notwithstanding that one of the 12-year-olds has been 12 for a long time and has unconventional dietary requirements, and the pair's responses to that complication is so real that we, well, bleed for them.

The films have much in common (that "12 for a long time" line occurs in Twilight, as I recall, except that the number is 17), most particularly the central vampire's irresistible attraction to the central nonvamp, and the vamp's recognition of and resistance against the dangerous implications of that attraction. Where Twilight's vamp is part of a loving and protective vamp family, Rätte's has a loving and protective nonvamp father figure who does everything he can to protect her from the most gruesome consequences of her condition. (Funny, only as I wrote that sentence did it occur to me that "father" can hardly be an accurate description of his relationship to this ageless being. Which in turn may answer the question implicit in the Graduate-allusive final scene. Hmmm . . . ) The nonvamp's divorce dynamic is also similar.

That the lovers are preteens, though, and haven't the foggiest notion of what romance entails--Eli first suggests to Oskar that they simply stay as they are, then asks, "Do you do anything special?" when going steady; when he says no, she replies, "OK, then--we'll go steady"--and that, while beautiful in their own way, they lack Hollywood gloss (Eli, in fact, looks and smells a little funky when separated too far from her last meal), makes us believe in them and care for them in a way that I couldn't, at any rate, for Twilight's teens.

Then, too, where the good vamps in Twilight are sissified "vegetarians," feasting only on nonhuman blood, Eli needs to bite a neck now and again, and that's a messy thing. Notably, though, in this version of the vampire myth, apparently a victim who suffers a normally fatal injury after the bloodletting is spared joining the undead, and Eli is careful to administer that mercy, except once when she is interrupted. (Other elements of traditional vampirism are present: as in Bram Stoker's novel [but not, to my recollection, in most films], the vampire must be invited in before crossing a threshold the first time; the vampire can scramble up vertical surfaces with ease and even fly short distances; and cats hate, hate, really hate vampires.)

Seeing Eli's face smeared with her victim's blood, and seeing the sadness in Lina Leandersson's face in the aftermath of the meal, is worth all the prettiness of Twilight put together. Leandersson is, I see, a first-time actor (IMDb is silent on her actual age, but 12's probably pretty close), as is Kåre Hedebrant; hope we see lots more of them, and of director Tomas Alfredson. In fact, how do you say "sequel" in Swedish?

Trailers

• Slumdog Millionaire--You notice that when some form of the word million is in a Danny Boyle title, the film's a lot sweeter and more sentimental than when it contains words like grave or spot or smaller numbers, like 28? Though actually there's sweetness in all of them--it's just not on the surface. Anyway, in the face of lukewarm reviews, I'm in if it comes downtown, which seems likely.
  

Torn 'twixt love and duty

High Noon

(1952)

A prescient allegory of George W. Bush's unilateral stand against Saddam "Frank Miller" Hussein, necessitated by the cowardice of the townspeople/French.

Another of those films that I used to love, then tired of, then thought it time to revisit. Well, it is a masterfully structured film, no doubt about that, economical almost to a fault, and it minimizes the thespian shortcomings of Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. But the politics, whether applied to appeasement of the Russians, as in '52, or to the neat twenty-first-century updating that writes itself, makes it hard to love.

On the other hand, I can't wait to see W contemptuously throw his badge in the dust and ride off with Laura in their buggy on 20 January.

La mort n'a pas des excuses

Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I've loved you so long)

Crit

If there's an Oscar for conveying emotion in the first tenth of a second of a film without a word, let's just go ahead and give it to Kristin Scott Thomas, whose sadness from opening shot to the end is ineffable--and rarely referenced in her few words.

Fact is, though, that as perfect as Scott Thomas is as the just-out-of-prison Juliette, everyone in the cast is remarkably good, from Elsa Zylberstein as her sister Léa (who really does look like her sister sometimes) to Lise Ségur as Léa's adopted Vietnamese daughter P'tit Lys to Jean-Claude Arnaud, amazingly, expressively wordless as Léa's stricken father-in-law.

The only thing that keeps the film from being great is that the secret of Juliette's crime, when it comes, just seems a little too Lifetime-movie-ish. But that doesn't undercut the performances, which are more convincing than the denouement.

Piecework

Blast of Silence

(1961)

Wow: mega-gritty, astonishingly economical (sub-80 minutes), Manhattan-location story of a hit man who thinks he sees his one chance to get out of the game and settle down with a good woman. Only one guess as to his success.

Written and directed by the star, Allen Baron, who spent almost all of his subsequent career directing the cheesiest TV (Room 222, Night Gallery, The Brady Bunch, Love, American Style, Fantasy Island, Charlie's Angels, The Dukes of Hazzard, The Love Boat)--if it was '70s crap, he was there. This film has about as much in common with an episode of Charlie's Angels as . . . well, I'm sorry, there's just no comparison, except, I suppose, in involving homo sapiens behind the camera, if not necessarily in front of it. Baron resembles a young De Niro a bit, by way of George C. Scott.

Wonderful edgy (in every sense, but mostly in the sense of nervousmaking) modern jazz score by Meyer Kupferman. One of those movies--sort of like when I discovered Ascenseur pour l'échafaud a few years ago--that I have to slap my forehead and wonder why I'd been ignorant of it all these years.

Armies of the afternoon

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29

Crit

In 1968, when I was 14, the Tet offensive ended significant U.S. popular support for the Vietnam War, and, essentially, Lyndon Johnson's presidency; Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis; Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles; Chicago police bashed in young people's skulls and a party's soul; Richard Nixon was elected president; and then a football game was played in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Young fans of college football might be surprised to know that Harvard-Yale ever meant anything to anyone who didn't spend four years in Cambridge or New Haven, but it is so. By '68, though, that era seemed to be past--except that Yale somehow managed to attract a running back good enough to star for the Dallas Cowboys afterward, and a quarterback who could throw, run, and lead (and who had enough personality to become a character in a comic strip being started by another Yalie at the time), and the Elis entered the final game improbably ranked 14th in the nation, and heavily favored to complete a perfect season at the expense of the Crimson. But even more improbably, Harvard was 8-0 also--the first time since the teens both teams had brought perfect records into what they like to call The Game.

Only one could remain perfect, though, and with Calvin Hill and God, as teammates called Brian Dowling (before Garry Trudeau started calling him BD), on the Yale roster, the Elis made it clear which team would leave 9-0 by taking a 22-0 lead in the first half. With 4 minutes left, Yale was driving toward a score that would pad its 29-13 lead, and even the fumble that short-circuited that drive didn't really matter: Harvard was 86 yards and another touchdown and two two-point conversions away from tying, and the clock showed 3 minutes left.

The title of the film (lifted from a Harvard Crimson headline the next day--a better headline than I ever wrote in my 13 years of writing pretty good headlines) is a spoiler, of course, but even knowing that, you won't believe what transpires. Two people in the audience with me were at the game, and one commented after the film that it was so effective that she kept hoping maybe it would turn out differently this time.

The filmmakers--who, granted, would have to work hard to screw up material like this--do a masterful job of interweaving the television footage with interviews of players (including Dowling, a Harvard guard named Tommy Lee Jones, and Frank Champi, the backup Harvard quarterback sent in to mop up after Yale built its insurmountable lead). The politics of the time is a big part of the text--one Harvard defensive back, Pat Conroy (not the author), was a 24-year-old Vietnam vet, and other members of both teams held predictably conservative views, but most seem to have been antiwar, at least by November 1968, and some--like Dowling--were avowedly apolitical, and just wanted to be left alone to play the game.

The flip side, of course, is the admission by more than one participant that this was "just a game." Right: just a game people still talk about and replay and argue officiating calls from and agonize over 40 years later. Well, see the film before you judge their priorities.

I can tell when you're acting

Long Day's Journey into Night

(1962)

Wow. For the first hour-plus of this nearly three-hour film I was appalled by Katharine Hepburn's grotesque overacting as Mary Tyrone. Ralph Richardson's too, as James--but at least he had the excuse of playing a ham actor who can't stop being a ham even off the stage. Mary is a Catholic-school girl-become-hophead who has no reason to be so large, but she is, for an hour, seventy, maybe eight minutes. And then.

And then she plays a high-on-morphine scene with first the maid and then James that is just mind-blowingly heart-crushing--maybe fifteen minutes, maybe less . . . and then (contrary to the play) she completely disappears until a short final scene.

But how in the hell could she be so embarrassingly bad for so long, then suddenly flip a switch into magnificence? Does the director, Sidney Lumet, get the blame? The credit? It's a mystery.

The play, incidentally, contributes mightily to my livelihood, and that of everyone at Yale University Press. A brief version of the rather sordid reason why can be found at Answers.com.

Neck tease

Twilight

Crit

Oh, those teenage boys, they're all the same: they kiss your neck, maybe even nibble on it lightly, but when you're dying for the big chomp, they go all it-just-wouldn't-be-right on you.

Assuming that the film is faithful to the first book, I can see why the series is hugely popular with teens, especially teenage girls: it makes abstinence not only cool but tragic. That's about the most brilliant marketing imaginable.

Of course, the textual abstinence here is vampirism: our hormonal heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart, the wonderful fresh face from Into the Wild) falls hook, line, and aorta for a member of a family of "vegetarian" vamps--which is to say they dine on only nonhuman animals. They represent a majority of their kind in the film, but one suspects that in the sequel (which has already begun, in the final shot of this one), we'll get a more accurate representation of the demon-graphics, and that those who can't or won't resist the taste of human blood will predominate.

Looking back on what I've written, I find that it sounds dismissive, sounds as if I hated the film. Not at all: it's completely goofy, but it's far from terrible. I guess I just regret that it made me feel so grown-up and logical and cynical. I would have preferred to have had as much trouble resisting it as Edward (the inexplicably hearthrobby Robert Pattinson) has resisting Bella's carotid.

Trailers

• Valkyrie--Actually, I first saw this trailer last weekend, but I guess I couldn't keep two Cruises in my head simultaneously; this one looks like MI4.
• Coraline--Animation in the style of director Henry Selick's Nightmare Before Christmas; another replay of The Wizard of Oz.
• Knowing--Looks like another plea for career intervention from Nic Cage.
• Adventureland--The brilliant Jesse Eisenberg (Roger Dodger, The Squid and the Whale) teamed with Kristen Stewart (about whom I thought during the trailer, "Where have I seen her? Is she the girl from Into the Wild?" and yet when the feature started, I didn't realize that it was the same girl) in another wacky-teen-life comedy from Greg Mottola (Superbad). Skeptical, hopeful.
  

C'est seulement un égratignure

Lancelot du lac

(1974)

Gee, whiz--I was already thinking it might be fun to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail the same weekend as this, even before a knight gets his head lopped off and blood spurts from his empty neck in the opening scene. The stuff the Python boys directly ripped off is limited mostly to the sanguinary opening and close, but the whole thing was clearly fresh in their minds when they took on Arthurian legend a year later. It never occurred to me before, but the oddest omission from MP&tHG is the central adultery, which you'd think they'd have loved cheesing up. Or maybe they just thought they couldn't out-fromage M. Bresson. Luc Simon and Laura Duke Condominas are plenty pretty as Lance and Guinevere, but while they talk a lot about how hot they are for each other, they generate zero heat and seem in fact more the stereotypical French existentialist philosophers than the stereotypical French tourtereaux.

Apart from that, an interesting and very strange film. Bresson is far more interested in legs--human and equine--than in faces. There must be a reason, but I'm damned if I can imagine what. Another unusual touch is his insistence on the practical awkwardness of armor: every knight clinks when he walks.

Divorce Hitchcock style

Mr. & Mrs. Smith

(1941)

Back in the day, when my first VCR was new and so was AMC, I used to tape zillions of movies there. Then TCM came along, and was better, and I taped zillions more. Then I realized that I wasn't really watching many of those movies, and then AMC started showing commercials, and then I got a DVD player and became snobbish about watching movies on tape and built a sizable disc collection while getting rid of most of my tapes.

Then last week I got DirecTV and a DVR, and then I discovered that I had IFC in my basic package, which inspired me to record a couple of movies, which is so much easier than setting up to record on a VCR (and no, I'm not one of those people whose VCR has flashed 12:00 since I first plugged it in), and that in turn inspired me to take another look at AMC and TCM, and that in turn led to recording about a dozen films to be shown in the two weeks then showing on the schedule.

I don't know how this will really affect my viewing habits, but I do know that if I never watch any of the dozen or so films other than this one, they will never take up any physical storage space, and the digital space they're occupying won't be an issue for a long time, and when it becomes one--hey, I'll get another chance to record those films, and it'll be just as easy the next time, so it won't hurt to delete 'em. Oh, brave new world . . .

Anyway, while Hitchcock employed screwball elements with some regularity (think drunk-driving scene in North by Northwest, or backscratcher scene in Rear Window, or even potato-truck sequence in Frenzy), this seems to have been his only full-length essay of the genre, and while it's no Bringing Up Baby or His Girl Friday, it's not bad. And good lord, was there anybody better at screwball dame-ism than Carole Lombard? No, there was not.

It's not exactly a feminist tract--screwball was very good at giving feminism a voice and then silencing it with a timely and appreciated sock to the jaw--but what are you gonna do?

There are nearly thirteen million people in the world . . .

Synecdoche, New York

Crit

Two things:

My all-time favorite Chas. Addams cartoon shows a man in a barber chain, sitting between facing mirrors. His image appears in an infinite regression, each smaller than the last but otherwise identical to it, and thus identical to all the others. Except for one, in the middle distance, where the face of a werewolf stares back, only to revert to form in the next iteration. It's kinda like that.

In Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., God plays dice with the baseball universe, is drawn into it more than he'd intended, then withdraws, whereupon the universe continues without him. It's kinda like that.

It's also kinda like Charlie Kaufman's own Adaptation, only with less masturbation and more ambition. Lots more ambition, like the Pentateuch to Adaptation's story of Cain and Abel.

This is, I think, a great antiexistential document. The trouble with life is not that it's meaningless; the trouble with life is that it has far, far, far too much meaning--some of us are condemned to see the world in the color of a turd. Not prepared yet to call it a great film, but I am prepared to say that it'll probably keep me awake tonight and other nights, and that's something.

Said Jennie Tonic, who of course got to see it weeks ago when it opened in New York, not that I'm bitter or anything:

I think the fact that you can't quite evaluate it when you come out is the whole point of it. I think it's brilliant. But it doesn't give you what you expect out of a movie. It's both surreal and realistic in a way I want to call "unrealistic," not in the sense of nonrealistic, but . . . well, just see it. Several times. I think you just have to see it several times, because it's your life, and that's how you have to live your life. It's hard to judge it as a movie.

Trailers

• Waltz with Bashir--Not sure I knew this is animated; has potential, but I'm sticking to my 3.

Disconnected

Billy the Kid

(2007)

Documentary about a 15-year-old with more than the usual social troubles--may have Asperger's, though the word is never mentioned. I know I should have been moved by his efforts to fit in while being true to himself, and by his doomed first steps into the romantic universe, but frankly, I was just bored. Or maybe it just hit too close to home.

What just happened?

Quantum of Solace

Crit

Bond meets girls, Bond beds girl, girl meets icky end. As usual.

This is a perfectly OK entertainment, but I had no idea what was going on half the time; then again, when it slows down to a pace suitable for philosophy is when it stops being entertaining, so keep it zoomin', I say.

Occurred to me that Bond is essentially a U.S. Marine. He doesn't visit the Halls of Montezuma or the shores of Tripoli, but he does fight his country's battles in the air, on land, and sea.

Most interesting cast credit is the last one: Perla de las Dunas Receptionist: Oona Chaplin. That's the granddaughter of the original Oona and Charles, daughter of Geraldine, great-granddaughter of Eugene O'Neill. She's the second granddaughter of Charlie and Oona I've noticed in end credits this year, and she has a sister, Carmen, who also acts, but I haven't seen her in anything yet.

Trailers

• Star Trek--Origin story; looks promising.
• The Day the Earth Stood Still--Still don't like the idea of Cruise, still holding the line at 3.
• Seven Pounds--Will's hard to resist; tending toward 4.
  

Eparlarua

The Shining

(1980)

Hey, I lived with a writer for many years, and she may have gotten cranky sometimes, but she never came after me with an axe. Well, OK, once, but in her defense, I had been hogging the computer playing Civilization for five hours when she needed to make revisions.

This is another of those films I used to love and then suddenly didn't anymore, so I wanted to give it another chance. Fact is, it's just not very good. Yes, it has one of the most fantastically creepy evil-of-banality scenes in horror film history, when Wendy finds Jack's manuscript, and Shelley Duvall's performance throughout makes you wish she'd been in more horror flicks, but mostly it seems labored and trite. And LOUD. And PORTENTOUS. In case you're too dim to figure it out yourself, we'll crank up the MUSIC and the SOUND EFFECTS so you'll know that SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT. Jesus! Give us some fucking credit!

And another thing: twice Jack asks the ghost bartender for bourbon, and twice he's served Jack Daniel's. C'mon--was there no one on the set who could set the Limey director straight on this misconception?

LOSTTIME

Little Miss Sunshine

(2006)

Is it just me, or has Steve Carell been wasted in most of his career? Abigail Breslin, too, but at 12, she probably has time to recover. Well, OK, at 46, so does Carell, but he really needs to do more stuff like this and less like Get Smart and Dan in Real Life and Evan Almighty.

Isn't it, just?

Happy-Go-Lucky

Crit

Wow: just read the Netflix summary while I was copying the link: "Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is a perpetually cheerful 30-year-old London teacher. When her beloved bike is stolen, she decides to take up driving, and is paired with Scott (Eddie Marsan), an instructor who's her polar opposite. Their relationship is strained until Poppy's bright personality attracts a co-worker, making Scott unexpectedly jealous. Alexis Zegerman and Karina Fernandez co-star in Mike Leigh's effervescent comedy." Well, yeah, that's pretty much what happens, but it's completely beside the point.

The point is, more or less, the title. That maybe it's possible to be, more or less, happy-go-lucky. Leigh is better known for making what my son-in-law calls sad-bastard movies, and while Marsan's character is as sad a bastard as you'll find--and Fernandez's flamenco teacher has her issues as well--Hawkins's character is as advertised. We're invited to imagine chinks in her armo(u)r, to wonder what it costs her to maintain that smile, and that openness to the sad bastards of the world, but there's no evidence that her stance is anything but genuine--which is mostly charming, and a little annoying.

Ultimately, what we have here is a slice of a breathtakingly engaging and sweet, but not saccharine, life.

Trailer

• Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I've loved you so long)--Yes, definitely if it comes here, and maybe even if it doesn't.
  

Such stuff as dreams are made on

Shakespeare Behind Bars

(2005)

An astonishing film about an astonishing annual program--staging Shakespearean plays at a medium-security prison in Kentucky. The play being mounted while the cameras roll is The Tempest, and the volunteer director guides the inmates to a reading of the play as a document of redemption and forgiveness--something they all need, of course, not least each from himself.

These are murderers and child molesters--we hear detailed confessions from several of the men we get to know best--but when they act Shakespeare, they are noblemen, sprites, and--yes--unashamed animals. One veteran of the program says that his first assumption was that criminals would be natural actors, because they all knew so well how to lie, how to seem to be what they're not; eventually, though, he discovered that what acting really entails--and why it challenges convicts no less than anyone else new to the craft--is digging down to the truth of that person on the page.

Maybe these guys are dissembling, and maybe the program hasn't been part of a genuine rehabilitation, but I defy any viewer not to be heartbroken by each denied parole. These are men with a role to play for good in the world; I hope the world, which had every reason to lock them up, doesn't throw away the key.

. . . and thirst after righteousness . . .

Flow: For Love of Water

Crit

Number of seats in theater 9, the larger of the Criterion's two DVD screening rooms: 30.

Number of seats filled for the 2:10 show: 7 (which is to say about as big a crowd as I've been part of in one of the tiny theaters).

Number of viewers who left, presumably on bathroom breaks, during this film about water: 2.

Number of viewers I saw drinking from a Dasani bottle just as we were being told that bottled water is less regulated than U.S. tap water, that there's less reason to believe that bottled water is purer than to believe the reverse: 1.

Number of girls whose ages I estimated at 8 to 10 (young enough that I seriously considered asking their father/big brother whether they weren't perhaps in the wrong theater) in the audience for this very serious documentary about, among other scary and infuriating things, how multinational corporations like Suez and Vivendi and Coca-Cola and Nestlé steal our water (and the water of nations much poorer than ours) and sell it back to us (and to people much poorer than us): 2.

Number of languages requiring subtitles: at least 7 (Spanish and French; Xhosi, Zulu, and I believe one other African language; Hindi (at least 2 dialects, I think); and heavily accented English.

Number of indications of restlessness by the young girls (or, for that matter, the audience as a whole): 0.

Number of the proposed article to be added to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in order to establish that "everyone has the right to clean and accessible water, adequate for the health and well-being of the individual and family, and no one shall be deprived of such access or quality of water due to individual economic circumstance": 31 (take 31 seconds or less and sign the petition here).

Date the film will be available on DVD: 12/9. See http://www.flowthefilm.com/ for more info.

Right as rain

Vera Drake

(2004)

"What shall I watch tonight," I wondered, "with the early dinner I'm going to have so that I can get up at 5 and get my workout and shower in before the DirecTV guy comes, possibly as early as 8, to make it possible for me to see my beloved Fighting Illini men's basketball team 11 times more this season that I would have with Comcast?" Yes, it was a complicated question, but Jennie Tonic wisely suggested that I choose something that would challenge me without putting me off my dinner.

I thought about those parameters on the way home and realized in a flash that I had the perfect fit: something I'd owned for years and contemplated watching several times without ever being able to bring myself to remove the shrinkwrap. Something, moreover, from a much-admired writer-director whose latest film I am eager to see later this weekend (the star of which film, incidentally, has a small but critical role here).

Imelda Staunton is so astonishing as the title character--a simple good woman (happy-go-lucky, if you will) upon whom the weight of the world and the world's unnuanced, uncompromising laws fall, aging her two decades in a second and leaving her beaten and broken and as sad as any person you've ever seen in or out of the movies--that you may forget how perfect the entire acting ensemble is, everyone delivering one of those non-actorly acting performances that characterize Leigh's best films.

A couple of characters here you wouldn't want to spend much time with, but no villains--certainly not the police, who are, after all, pursuing a good they believe in every bit as sincerely as Vera believes in hers--and as a heroine only a good human being whose motive is simply to "help out young girls."

11/9 postscript: it occurred to me today while watching Happy-Go-Lucky that Vera Drake, which I saw at the York Square Cinema, may have been one of the last program of films to show there--one of the titles that remained on the marquee for months thereafter, along with the management's farewell. Or I may be misremembering.

It's the holidays: piss off

The brief Times Holiday Movies section, which has lots of overlap from the Fall Movies section a couple of months ago. As then, I've stripped Dave Kehr's comments down to a fair-use sampling, but herewith links to his full wrap-up, divided into November and December/January.

As usual, I'm joined by Jennie Tonic.

November 5

• Tussenstand (Stages)--Dutch depression; 4. 2.

November 7

• The Boy in the Striped Pajamas--Another feel-good Holocaust flick (and I see they've dropped the Brit spelling of pyjamas); 2. 3.
• Gardens of the Night--Creepy child-abuse flick; 3. 3.
• The Guitar--Directorial debut of Amy Redford; yep: daughter. Poster featuring Saffron Burrows will be on many dorm room walls. 3. 4.
• JCVD--2. 3.
• Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa--No. 2.
• Otto; or, Up with Dead People--Per Kehr, "a comic fable about a young gay zombie . . . who finds himself cast in a German avant-garde horror movie"; well, hell, 4. 3.
• Pray the Devil Back to Hell--3. 3.
• Repo! The Genetic Opera--4. 2. TWO?! How can you be a 2?!
• Role Models--Having seen a trailer, I've dropped from "soft 3" to 2. 2.
• El cielo gira (The sky turns)--3. 4.
• Soul Men--Soft 3. 3.
• The World Unseen--3. 3.

November 12

• Slumdog Millionaire--OK, Danny Boyle, but still, 3. 3.

November 13

• Dinner with the President: A Nation's Journey--I should really be interested, I suppose, in "a documentary portrait of contemporary Pakistan, as a country divided by class, religion and cultural ambitions"; I mean, jeez, it's probably the most important place in the world right now; seriously, get interested! And yet, soft 3. 3.

November 14

• The Beautiful Truth--Barely 2. 2.
• Un conte de Noël (A Christmas tale)--Strong 4. 4 (Amalric).
• Dostana--Sort of a Bollywood I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry/Three's Company? Soft 2. 2.
• The Dukes--No, Not of Hazzard. Of doo-wop: 3, wanting to feel more 4ish. 3.
• Eden--3. 3.
• Das Haus der schlafenden Schönen (House of the sleeping beauties)--May I take the liberty of replaying our previous responses? 2: creeparama! 2, blech.
• How About You--Yet another dysfunctional-family holiday flick; Imelda Staunton's a plus: soft 4. 3+.
• Nobel Son--3. 3+.
• Quantum of Solace--Yeah, sure, 4. 4.
• We Are Wizards--3. 2.

November 19

• Harvard Beats Yale 29-29--5 (see the previous seasonal blurbs if that's a puzzler). 3.
• Special--2. 2.

November 21

• Nerakhoon (The betrayal)--3. 4 (but definite, because of NY immigrant).
• Bolt--3. 1.
• I Can't Think Straight--Lesbian Romeo and Juliet in London; hopeful 3, despite horrible pun of title. 4.
• Lake City--3. 3.
• Twilight--OK, Dr. Debs: you've persuaded me (it certainly wasn't the Times story) to come up to 3. 2.
• Were the World Mine--OK, maybe this is more than fair use, but I must quote Kehr at length: "Cast as Puck in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a gay high school student discovers the recipe for Shakespeare’s love potion and uses it to spread gender confusion throughout his conservative small town"; can you say "either fabulous or fabulously bad"? A hoping-against-hope 3. 3; intriguing.

November 26

• Australia--Maybe it'll be lots better than I fear, but for sure I'll be glad to stop seeing the trailers; skeptical 3. 3-.
• Four Christmases--Seen a trailer now, and notwithstanding Reese and Vince, 2. 3 (cast could charm).
• Milk--5. 4.
• Transporter 3--No. 1.

November 28

• Antarctica--Just a short hop from Australia. Except, of course, that that looks relentless hetero, while this is "a comedy about a brother and sister, both gay, who try to resolve their romantic conflicts with the aid and advice of an overbearing mother, played by the drag performer Noam Huberman under his stage name, Miss Laila Carry." Well, gotta be a better mom than Travolta; 3. 3.
• Rome & Jewel--Gave this a Shakespearean 3 earlier, but now that I've decided to do for Romeo and Juliet this winter what I did for Hamlet last, 5. 3.

December 3

• Staub (Dust)--3. 2.

December 5

• Cadillac Records--Oh, hell, yeah: strong 4. 4.
• Frost/Nixon--4, verging on 5. 4.
• Punisher: War Zone--No, and stop asking me! 1.
• Los cronocrímenes (Timecrimes)--Intriguing but unlikely: hopeful 3. 3.

December 10

• Wendy and Lucy--4. 4.

December 11

• Herbert--"Postmodernist comedy" with a paranormal twist; sure: 4. 3; interesting.

December 12

• Che--The 5est 5 of the season. 5, but prepared for disappointment. Yes, well, revolutionaries must always be.
• Dark Streets--4, as much on the soundtrack as anything else. Hm. 4?
• The Day the Earth Stood Still--Still 3, but leaning toward conditional acceptance of Keanu in the Michael Rennie role. Story in the Times mainly makes me think I should Nf the original, which I haven't seen in decades. 3.
• Delgo--Huh? 2. 1.
• Doubt--Trailer looks terrific; strong 4. 4+.
• Fados--4. 4.
• En la ciudad de Sylvia (In the city of Sylvia)--3. 3.
• Nothing Like the Holidays--Pushed back from 14 November: sign of editing trouble, or just an attempt to avoid the November yulelogjam of holiday flicks? Doubtful 3. 3.
• Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi--2. 2.
• The Reader--4, and I intend to read the novel by then. 4, I guess.
• What Doesn't Kill You--Hopeful 3, maybe even soft 4. 3–; same old crap.
• While She Was Out--Skeptical 3. 2.

December 17

• Gran Torino--Did we know Clint was doubling-down this season? This sounds a little like a repentant Dirty Harry; hopeful 3. 3.
• The Wrestler--Buzz on this has been huge, particularly for Mickey Rourke's performance; directed by Darren Aronofsky, strong 4. 3.

December 19

• The Brothers Bloom--4. 3.
• Nothing But the Truth--Skeptical 3. In fact, let's just say 2: it'd be different if Farmiga starred and Beckinsale was in a supporting role rather than the reverse. 3.
• Seven Pounds--3. 3-.
• The Tale of Despereaux--3. 3.
• Yes Man--Jim, get help, now; 2. 3-.

December 24

• La Graine et le mulet (The secret of the grain)--3, and still pissed off about the whitebread title rendering. 4.
• Theater of War--3. 3.

December 25

• Bedtime Stories--Adam, get help, now; 2. 3–; isn’t this basically Night at the Museum? No, you're confused: see, there's no museum. It's more like Night in the Kids' Bedroom, so way creepier.
• Entre les Murs (The class)--4, but still pissed off about the whitechalkdust title rendering. 4.
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button--4, looks like the Xmas Day lunch front-runner. 4, I guess.
• Hurricane Season--Doubtful 3. 3-.
• Marley & Me--Ditto doubtful 3. 3+, because dog.
• The Spirit--3. 2.

December 26

• Last Chance Harvey--Hopeful 3. 4.
• Revolutionary Road--Hard 4; maybe I should try to read this in the next few weeks also. 3.
• Valkyrie--Worried 4. 4.
• Waltz with Bashir--3. 3.

December 31

• Defiance--As I've carped repeatedly, don't like the trailer; 3. 3+.
• Good--Hopeful 4; I do like the Viggster. 3+; so 2009 is going to be the Year Against Nazis? Never could have happened pre-Obama.

January 9

• Bride Wars--Why would Anne Hathaway go from Rachel to this? Generous 2. 2.
• Venkovský ucitel (The country teacher)--3. 3+.
• Not Easily Broken--2. 3.
• Serbis--3. 3.
• Üç maymus (Three monkeys)--So I guess this will be only a quarter as good as that other flick? Still, hopeful 3. 3.
• The Unborn--Oy vey; 2. 2.

January 16

• Kirschblüten--Hanami (Cherry blossoms--Hanami)--Soft 3. 3.
• My Bloody Valentine 3-D--Oh, let's just not mess around w/ any numbers here; just say no bloody way. 1.
• Notorious--First it was Spellbound, now another documentary filmmaker steals a mid-'40s one-word Alfred Hitchcock title; next, Lifeboat, about the post-election night GOP; 3. 4, because shot in my ’hood.
• Paul Blart: Mall Cop--Well, something has to be the worst studio film of 2009, doesn't it? 1. 3. THREE?????!!!!!!! Oh, christ, go online and watch the trailer right now!

Follow the funny

Dick

(1999)

Caught between an audience who might like a Kirsten Dunst-Michelle Williams flick but had never heard of Watergate and an audience to whom a Watergate comedy sounded appealing but weren't interested in seeing a couple of bubbleheaded kids clearly on a career road to nowhere, this opened on 1,522 screens in August 1999, made $2.2 million its opening weekend (some $24 million behind The Sixth Sense), and closed in 5 weeks after making back less than half of its $13 million budget. Which is, perhaps, not a crime on a scale with wholescale burglaries, bribes, and obstruction of justice, but still . . .

Dunst and Williams, then 17 and 18, respectively, play spacy 15 perfectly, and Dan Hedaya has the (title) role he was born to play. The premise is so delicious that I'm not even going to mention it, in case one person reason this doesn't already know: just rent the damned thing and thank me later.

Nothing's riding on this . . .

All the President's Men

(1976)

Certain movies (Groundhog Day, Life of Brian, Casablanca, for example) I attach to a certain part of the calendar. This one is different; this one I watch when events--especially political events--leave me in need of reassurance that if I can't necessarily ever count on the good guys winning, at least I can take solace that occasionally the bad guys lose.

So why this, why now?

As a measure of how confident I am. See, I've been saving this for many months, against the possibility that I'd need it after election day. I just don't think I'm going to need it then--but I still wanted to see it. So.

If Bad Things happen Tuesday, well, I guess it'll be my fault; I guess my overconfidence will have jinxed things. But frankly, if bad things happen Tuesday, I don't think a movie will be much comfort anyway.

The countercuckoo's nest

Changeling

Crit

Sometimes I think it would be good to be able to see movies in a vacuum, or at least a near-vacuum: you tell me Eastwood directs, Jolie stars, Malkovich has a good, meaty, non-self-parodying role, I'm there, and I just watch the damn movie, blissfully unaware of the lukewarm reviews and the reflexively resentful Oscar buzz for Jolie. But it doesn't work like that in the real world, where I feel compelled to read at least the first and last paragraphs of every Times review, plus whatever Lane or Denby or Ansen writes. (On the other hand, that saves me for falling for "Levinson directs, De Niro stars, + self-parodies by Bruce Willis and Sean Penn = What Just Happened?" [52% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.com].)

So. Yes, as she did in A Mighty Heart, Jolie makes you forget about all the Brangelina crap and just buy into her character's unbearably nightmarish ordeal. And Clint is about as good as Little Opie Cunningham at the old heartstring tug. And it's a treat to see Malkovich playing someone uncreepy for a change--though it takes us a while to trust in the uncreepiness of his publicity-hungry minister whose agenda turns out to be just what he says it is.

But that's kinda the problem here--or the biggest one: the late-'20s hats are fabulous, but they're all either black or white. I seem to recall some moral ambiguity in earlier Eastwood films, but a memory of that is all you get here, from start to end. And end. And end. And end. Which is the other big problem: like Christine, the film plods on relentlessly long after most of us would have hung it up. In Christine, it's an admirable, if sad, trait; in the film, it's just frustrating.

Extra credit: the film mentioned near one of the ends of the film (and whose title appears on a marquee at the final end) is the first film and the one alluded to in the title of this post is the second ever to do what?

Trailers

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button--Angie in the feature, Brad in the trailer. Curiously (but not coincidentally), I read a story about this just before leaving for the theater in the Times Holiday Movies section. Unfortunately, my Scribner's edition of The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald doesn't include the source tale--but apparently the movie doesn't owe much to the story anyway, and as it happens, I read a novel this year that does seem pretty close to the story on film, so. Anyway, 4.
  
• The Reader--Speaking of novels, I've had this one on the shelf for more than a decade; maybe it's time to read it now. 4.

And now if you'll excuse me, it's time to pour some bourbon and raise a glass to Studs.