Next time, take the express

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

(1974)

Oh, this is just silly, but at least it provided a few cheap thrills, which is more than I can say about the ostensibly brainy films I saw at the multiplex earlier in the day.

Zero points for guessing how the Martin Balsam character is going to give himself away, but points for guessing which passenger is the undercover cop and major points for foreseeing the Robert Shaw character's emergency exit plan.

Tony Scott's remake is due out in the new year, w/ Denzel in the Matthau role (he must get tired of that comparison) and Travolta, I gather, as the heist mastermind. Hard to imagine why a remake would be necessary except perhaps to adjust for the now-comical economics of a million-dollar ransom demand and being able to ask of the kidnapped riders, "What do they expect for their 35 cents?"

Bêtes noires

Year-end bring-the-bastard-down double feature

Frost/Nixon

Post

Way disappointed in this: far too melodramatic, and unnecessarily so, given the drama inherent in the material. I suspect there's more truth about Nixon in Dick.

What a year for Toby Jones, playing enabler to the two most hated presidents of my lifetime.

Valkyrie

Post

Less disappointed in this because my expectations are lower: just kinda bored. And watching von Stauffenberg's wife, children, and secretary stare worshipfully at Tom Cruise got old really fast.

Trailers

• State of Play--Good cast led by Russell Crowe as a newspaperman, so I have to be a 4, but I saw the trailer twice and less than 24 hours later had to remind myself what it was about, which can't be a good sign.
• My Bloody Valentine 3-D--Oh, golly, how long have we been waiting . . . ?
• And how disappointed am I to have gotten to the end of the year without seeing a trailer for Hotel for Dogs? It opens in just 23 days!

The measure of an unmade grave

The Verona project, part X

Who (how old), when, how long? Clive Francis (18) and Angela Scoular (19), 1965, 1¾hr.

What sort of R&J? A Romeo who is under the impression that he is playing Hamlet; a Juliet who is better than the production.

Seriocomic scale for first scene? In this version the scene begins after the comic lines; some blood is shed, but no fatalities.

"Wherefore": do the playmakers know what it means? Yes, though the sequence is delivered with odd cheer, almost giddiness, as if Juliet doesn't really think the Montague issue is that big a deal.

Carrion flies? No.

Body count? The full six.

What (else) is missing? This isn't an interesting production, but it is the one so far for which it would perhaps be most interesting to track line by line what is cut, what included. Since the runtime is but an hour and three-quarters, lots and lots is cut, of course, much with an axe rather than a scalpel, but then unusual things survive, such as the Nurse's repetition of her husband's declaration that Juliet, once she has grown herself some ballast, will fall on her back rather than on her face. Also, the scene in which Capulet reproaches his marriage-resistant daughter plays out at length--but the one before that, where she bandies with her mother over the "revenge" against Tybalt's murderer, is truncated--and the Nurse is excised from the scene altogether. Gone also is the scene in which Romeo tells Nurse of the wedding plans, but only after he and his friends taunt her--and then Nurse doesn't tease Juliet before giving her the news. And on and on: the Mercutio-Tybalt duel scene begins with Benvolio's "By my head, here come the Capulets," and that seems to reflect the general practice: cut the comic exchanges that don't directly advance the plot. Which strategy, of course, drains much of the life from the play, and encourages the melancholy-Veronan stance of R.

What (else) is changed? Not much changed, apart from truncations: the scene in which Romeo buys his fatal poison, e.g., ends with his first line to the apothecary. Oh, here's something interesting: III.iv, wherein Capulet promises Juliet to Paris, takes place at Tybalt's bier rather than chez Capulet.

What (else) is odd? Much, but the oddest, to me, is that the Romeo-Juliet morning-after-the-wedding-night scene takes place in vertical posture: they're standing on the balcony, never in bed. In fact, everything that suggests that sex will take place or has taken place ("Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds . . . And bring in cloudy night immediately") is missing (as is the Juliet-Nurse interview that follows those lines). Also a little odd: Romeo, after dying with a kiss, falls on Juliet's right boob--but when she wakes, she doesn't notice the weight.

End-of-the-play exposition? No, but the excision is awkward, since the Prince reads Romeo's letter and confirms that it "doth make good the friar's words," which the Friar hasn't actually spoken.

It's a pretty poor production, take it all around--I might in fact judge it even worse had I seen a version this weekend that didn't suck altogether.

Vows

Doubt

Crit

Interesting that the did-he-or-didn't-he question is almost completely unimportant to us; what matters is the mechanics of doubt and faith and certainty. Of course, for those of us whose parents entrusted us to the care of warped, repressed dictators, there's interest too in seeing how they got that way, and I think I understand a little of the mechanics of that as well. Streep and Hoffman chew their scenery admirably, Viola Davis steals her one scene, and Amy Adams seems a bit at sea (more than her character is supposed to, i.e.). And Shanley, what's the damn deal with those shots where the camera is tilted 30 degrees?

Trailers

• Sunshine Cleaning--Amy Adams again, which always means possibility.

West-of-Florida story

The Verona project, part IX, Beneath the 12-Mile Reef

Who (how old), when, how long? Robert Wagner (22) and Terry Moore (23), 1953, 1¾hr.

What sort of R&J? Spongediving, and thoroughly unappealing (and in Wagner's case, about as convincingly Greek as Kirk Douglas a couple of years later in Ulysses).

Seriocomic scale for first scene? No equivalent scene; it's 17 minutes before the conflict is established between Greeks and "Conchs" (i.e., gen-u-wine Americans), another few minutes before the first confrontation, which is not at all comic but not at all threatening.

"Wherefore": do the filmmakers know what it means? Not applicable.

Carrion flies? N.A.

Body count? One: Mike Petraikis (Gilbert Roland), father of Tony (the Romeo character, Wagner), dies from a serious case of the bends only indirectly attributable to the conflict.

What (else) is missing? Pretty much everything.

What (else) is changed? Pretty much everything, for the drabber.

What (else) is odd? Have you ever seen an octopus in an aquarium? No, you haven't, right? Because they're always hiding, right? Because they're scared shitless of us, right? So what inspires one to attack Tony here?

End-of-the-play exposition? Rather, end-of-the-play reconciliation of everyone w/ everyone else. Oh, golly, it's heartwarming.

There's precisely one thing interesting about this film: in 1953, four years before West Side Story opens on Broadway, we have at least the bare bones of the R&J story played as a turf war between "Americans" and immigrants--and the Romeo character is named Tony (actually Adonis here, Anton in the Laurents/Bernstein/Sondheim version). Oh, and there's a scene here where everyone makes nice when the cops come that is revived in the later incarnation.

Mortification

Ha-Sodot (The secrets)

Crit

Starting with a funeral and ending with a wedding, this only occasionally goes where you expect it to, and then not by the expected path. The one consistent theme is the role of woman in Orthodox Israeli society, but along the way we also visit love and tears, selfishness and denial, guilt and atonement, kabbala and klezmer. Some scenes seem familiar--the secret mystical ritual from the teen spook film, the fumbling embrace from the lesbian awakening film, the fiancé pontification from every New Comic plot ever--but in context they're all fresh, since all are in service of the central question: what can life in this world hold for a young woman who knows she's smarter than every man around, with the progressively less persuasive exception of her father (and who has in any case seen the consequences for her mother even of her well-meaning father's smothering love)?

Thankfully, the film makes no attempt at definitive answers to any of its questions (well, aside from the fiancé's being irredeemably assholish and well dismissed).

Some want of wit

The Verona project, part VIII

Who (how old), when, how long? Alex Hyde-White (22) and Blanche Baker (25), 1982, 2¾hr.

What sort of R&J? Bland, bland, bland; Baker performs like an unpromising high school student. She delivers exactly one line--Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?--with conviction. The rest might as well be silence--much would be better thus.

Seriocomic scale for first scene? 5, I suppose: it's not silly at all, but neither is it deadly.

"Wherefore": do the playmakers know what it means? Yes, I'll grant that Baker's wooden reading of the sequence makes it clear that she knows that the "wherefore" leads to the "Deny thy father."

Carrion flies? Yep; but Hyde-White renders the bizarre bit uninteresting.

Body count? This is interesting, for in a nearly complete production, somehow Lady Montague is spared. The other 5 all die, though.

What (else) is missing? Until late in the fourth act, I was under the impression that the production was virtually if not literally complete. But from that point on, there's a lot of truncation: almost all of the musicians' scene sequence that ends the act, e.g., and much of the dialogue (and the presence of Paris's page) from V.iii, the play's final scene.

What (else) is changed? The end of V.i, wherein Romeo visits the apothecary, is presented as a visual flash-forward while he recites the lines describing his earlier impressions of the man (who thus gets to speak no lines, but just hands off the vial).

What (else) is odd? I guess the oddest (and most ominous) thing is that the biggest name in the cast belongs to the woman who plays the Nurse, and that name is . . . Esther Rolle. Her performance is scarcely dy-no-mite. Oh, another odd thing: Romeo's poison is so fast-acting that although he can say "Thus with a kiss I die," he can't actually get his mouth near J's face before expiring.

End-of-the-play exposition? In perhaps the smartest decision in the production, the Prince cuts off Friar "I will be brief" Laurence's long-winded account and leaps straight into his final scolding of Montague and Capulet.

This is about as close to a complete waste of time as Shakespeare gets.

The whole grand configuration of things

It's a Wonderful Life

(1946)

My, god, there's jazz in Pottersville! And stride piano! And . . . and . . . Negroes!

Excellent essay last week in the Times by Wendell Jamieson on the complex epistemology of the film--you're better off reading him than me.

OK, if you're still here, yesterday I said something technically inexplicable about the last two of my hardy annuals; this is the penultimate, even though I happened to watch it last this year, because it's attached only to the season, not to Christmas Day. I can watch it pretty much any time from Thanksgiving on; some years, in fact, I think I've actually watched it in the week between Xmas and New Year's, though that's pushing it.

What I noticed this time that I'd never noticed before: during the you've-never-been-born nightmare, after George socks Bert the cop and Bert, a much less responsible law-enforcement agent for the want of George Bailey's moral influence, starts shooting wildly down Main Street, his random bullets actually take out the S and the V of a POTTERSVILLE neon sign.

Oh, by the way, if you've always been unsatisfied by the conclusion, click here.

My back pages

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Crit

Well, that was a perfectly OK Xmas flick: smart, beautifully shot, a little sentimental but not grotesquely so, but the notion that David Fincher and Eric Roth have served up some sort of profound meditation on age and aging is, well, backward.

I was expecting more from the special effects--young-but-old-looking Benjamin was an impressive incorporation of Brad Pitt's features, old-but-young-looking Benjamin not so much. But holy cow: I was certain that wasn't Cate under the crone makeup in the frame story, but unless IMDb isn't listing nonagenarian Daisy, it must have been Cate. Notwithstanding, the frame, with a wooden Julia Ormond as Daisy's daughter, is awful, goofily, pointlessly bringing Hurricane Katrina into the story. And the other aging effects on Blanchett are less convincing. Oh, and hey: here comes another Fanning down the pike: Elle as 7yo Daisy.

As to the two-ships-passing-at-middle-age story, well, it's done better than in The Confessions of Max Tivoli; I had a pleasant Xmas afternoon in a packed movie theater. But let's not get too excited: it's just a slick entertainment.

Oh, and on the implausibility scale, having a central character who ages backward pales in comparison with having him describe a character played by Tilda Swinton not only as "not beautiful" but as "plain as paper." Oh, please.

Trailers

• Last Chance Harvey--Opened elsewhere to ho-hum reviews today; iffy even if it comes downtown.
• The Ugly Truth--Looks ugly indeed; Heigl needs a new shtick, maybe a new agent.
  

An undigested bit of beef

Scrooge

(1951)

OK, I'm gonna start this in the afternoon, because when this ends tonight and my throat is raw from tears, I'm not gonna want to share. This is the last of the calendar-specific of my annual watches, though tomorrow's is the second-to-last (I'll try to remember to explain that then). This one has to be Christmas Eve; if I have visitors, they either watch with me or fall asleep in from of the TV while I watch. In recent years I've been preceding it with How the Grinch Stole Christmas (if you really have to ask "which version," you can click on the link, but come on!), which is essentially the same story, of course. Have I talked about how many of my annuals are tales of redemption?

Also, accept no substitutes: no doubt the performances of Reginald Owen, Albert Finney, and George C. Scott all have something to recommend them, but for my money, if it ain't Alastair Sim, it might as well be Mickey Mouse or Mr. Magoo (the latter of which, in fact, if the first I recall ever seeing). Oh, and I don't care what the DVD or VHS box says: the title is what appears on the screen at that first burst of creepy music; it is not A Christmas Carol. Get over it.

OK, I'm in an appropriately Scroogey frame of mind now; I'll be back later if I have anything to add. . . .

Oh, how many perfect pieces of art are there? How better a place would the world be if everyone watched this once a year?

Plus court d'eau

Some philosophizing that I intended to include at the start of the Slumdog rev. but forgot: Christmas Day is sacred to me, in that, like all good Jews (or wannaJews, as I characterize myself), I demand an appropriate film for my Xmas matinee entertainment (and later, good Chinese food for dinner). But this Xmas, I think you'll agree, presents a problem in that respect.

Opening downtown on Xmas: lots of choices, but none a clear-cut Harry Potter or Lord of the Ring winner (or even a Catch Me If You Can--a Spielberg film opening on Xmas? Oh, my people were out in force that day!). Mostly what my son-in-law calls sad-bastard movies: The Reader (the Holocaust is a good Xmas picker-upper; besides, I just read the novel and didn't love it, and the reviews have been pretty weak); Doubt (another good holiday-spirit mood: did the priest boof the young student or did he not? revs haven't been good for this, but I'll see it--but not on Xmas); Valkyrie (a plot to kill Hitler; a feel-good Xmas movie only if they succeed; plus: Tom Cruise); The Spirit (which they've added since the last time I checked: hot Scarlett in a pulp-comic book flick might be fun, and I liked Sin City, but I don't want to put all my chips on it); and Ha-Sodot (The Secrets), which I do want to see, but not on Xmas. And then there was Benjamin Button. I read a novel this year that was exactly this plot and was disappointed in it, and the trailer hasn't erased my skepticism; still: Blanchett and Swinton, so I was assuming I'd be in, barring terrible revs. But I was too skep. to bank on it for Xmas. Which left the already open Slumdog and this one. Initially I thought, gotta go Slumdog on Xmas: probably not great, but at least a feel-gooder. But I changed my mind late, deciding that certainty of quality trumped non-sad-bastardness.

In any case, it meant no Xmas Eve film, 'cause then I would be banking on one of the Xmas openers. And then yesterday I checked Rotten Tomatoes.com, where Button is getting a stunning 89% in early reviews. True, one of those is by Rex Reed, but still . . . So Conte today, Button tomorrow. Geez, it's hard being me. You want to hear my dinner plans now?

Un Conte de Noel (A Christmas tale)

Crit

Wow. Am I getting squeamish in my old age? I still watch the needle go in when I give blood, but there were some penetrative medical procedures here that that gave me some serious willies.

As I recall, the reviews I've read of this take at face value that Junon (Catherine Deneuve) and Henri (Mathieu Amalric) don't love each other, but I read their relationship as much more complex than that. I don't think a mother and son can so directly and good-naturedly exchange declarations of indifference without sharing an understanding that they might not call love but that functions much like that emotion.

In any case, this is one of those subversive French films that delights in giving American audiences hints to glom onto that the final scene will be one of tearful reconciliation between mother and son, between sister and brother--I mean, hell, it's got Christmas in the title, doesn't it? Well, I can guarantee that my audience was not left unsatisfied by the lack of a pat ending, since I was it.

Wherefore

The Verona project, part VII, Rome & Juliet

Who (how old), when, how long? Mylene Dizon (29) and Andrea Del Rosario (about the same, I guess; turns out she's an international model who has appeared on the cover of Maxim, but she's apparently secretive about her age), 2006, 2¼hr.

What sort of R&J?Filipina lesbians. As it turns out, this is scarcely a riff on Shakespeare's play at all. Aside from the names of the protagonists (whose love is not star-crossed, only culture-crossed), the only connections to R&J I noticed were (1) the line, spoken by Rome of Juliet, "She speaks"; (2) a crucially misdirected message of sorts; (3) a late scene in a cemetery; and (4) Juliet in a death-seeming coma near the end.

Seriocomic scale for first scene?As is the case with most of the rote questions, there's no analogue in this film.

"Wherefore": do the film/playmakers know what it means? --

Carrion flies? --

Body count? Juliet's father (Flores, not Capulet--an interesting choice of names, since it's Rome's occupation as a wedding planner [including, of course, flower choices] that sets the plot turning), disabled apparently by a stroke since before the start of the action, suffers a fatal heart attack, apparently in response to the discovery of Juliet's relationship with a woman, or (I'm inclined to see it this way) in response to his wife's hysterical response to that discovery. Nobody else dies, but as suggested above, Juliet flirts w/ death.

What (else) is missing? Let's just wrap everything up here: it would be easy to dismiss this as a badly written parable of intolerance, with grotesquely bad interludes of junior-high-level "poetry" and with sound that sometimes seems to have been recorded on a portable cassette player. That would not be incorrect, but it would be incomplete. For one thing, as bad as the sound is, the camerawork is that good: it has as lush a look as the best indies I've seen. More to the point, if by "badly written" you mean pedestrian language, yes, definitely (and even though it's about 75% subtitled Tagalog, there's enough English for me to feel pretty confident in that assessment). But if you mean badly plotted and predictable, well, not so fast. And if you mean lacking in any sort of intellectual or emotional appeal worth appealing, no, I'd say not. The setting of the story in a weirdly Catholic culture distances the theme of intolerance from 2008 California and Arkansas, say, but in doing do provides a useful perspective. To have a character ask what's so damned wrong with loving whom your heart tells you to love, and why people can't accept that, and why God can't accept that--well, that may seem pretty simplistic, but really, do you have a better way of articulating the question? I didn't love the film, and I doubt I'd ever see it again, but it choked me up once or twice, and that I did not expect.

What (else) is changed? --

What (else) is odd? --

End-of-the-play exposition? --

Whaddya know?

Slumdog Millionaire

Crit

Spoiler alert! The answer to the question asked over the opening titles is (D).

Danny Boyle, he of the messy masterpieces Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, goes to messy Mumbai and makes an ingeniously plotted Well-Crafted Film. Well, that's OK; good luck resisting it anyway.

In amongst the Big Themes like Destiny and Eternal Love and shit, there's one really interesting one: the randomness and unpredictability of what we know. More than once I've been praised for my knowledge of one trivial fact or another by someone with zillions of useful facts at his or her disposal that are not part of my package. But it's the card on the table that gets the attention--and in this film, it's the card on the table that takes the trick.

I'd say something about the final Who Wants to Be a Millionaire question in the film, but that really would be a spoiler. But if you see it, you'll know what I wanted to ask: so answer in a comment.

Trailer

• The Wrestler--I haven't bitched lately about a trailer that gives away too much, but this is a tmi classic. I'm in for the film, of course.

Enter ghost

Fanny och Alexander (Fanny and Alexander)

(1982)

OK, now I can make the comparison I made at the start of a post a couple of weeks ago, and I stand by it. This really is lots better than Home Alone. I should have watched it a year ago, because much of this is a riff on Hamlet--a riff that might be a tad more subtle, I might add. Christmas movie in which the day is saved by a Jewish moneylender, which is a nice touch. Mostly it's childhood through the Bergmanian lens of death and faithlessness. It's also well over 3 hours long, which, frankly, was kinda much more me the day after an exhausting M%--but at least it wasn't the 5-hour+ uncut TV version. My latest candidate for the most beautiful woman in the movies ever: Ewa Fröling, who plays the titular kids' mother.

Voglio la donna

Holiday season M5

A unconscionably long time between Ms, and since the calendar doesn't provide an actual 3-day weekend this yule, I had to steal one. But what a one, the definition of what I do this for: foreign, indy, revivals of classics I'd never seen, and every one a gem. (Let's see: one film with more than a handful of lines in English, that one from Australia; one film by an American director, that one almost entirely in Japanese.) And I discovered the perfect place in the IFC/Film Forum neighborhood to grab a quick sandwich and maybe a nice beverage and, if so inclined, an ass-kicking dessert (try the Dirty): Sweet Revenge, 62 Carmine Street, east of Seventh Avenue.

Höstsonaten (Autumn sonata) (1978)

IFC

Why can't we all just get along? Bergman directs Ingrid Bergman as a faded concert pianist and Liv Ullmann as her daughter, who is convinced that nothing she has done has ever been good enough for Mom. After a little preliminary sparring, they essentially go at each other with emotional steel wool for the last hour. Halvar Björk is quietly perfect as Eva/Liv's husband, who tries to disprove daily/lives with the consequences of her conviction that she can never truly be loved. A four-star sad-bastard film. Ingmar was Oscar-nominated for the screenplay, Ingrid as Best Actress.

The Black Balloon

CV

It's hard enough to be an Australian teenager anyway without having an autistic brother prone to making fecal art or masturbating at the dinner table when your girlfriend is visiting. A film that has moments as excruciating as any but manages to end with some hope but without any foolishness. Twenty-seven-year-old Luke Ford is convincing as the 18-or-so Charlie, Rhys Wakefield is heartbreaking as the younger brother who simply can't always love Charlie for better or for worse, and Gemma Ward not only is spot-on as the girlfriend but is also a dead ringer for Big Love's and Mamma Mia!'s Amanda Seyfried, which ain't a bad thing. And as the boys' mother, Toni Collette is Toni Collette, which is all you need to know.

Aanrijding in Moscou (Moscow, Belgium)

CV

Boy (29-year-old trucker) and girl (41-year-old mother of 3, whose art-professor husband is off having his midlife crisis with a 22yo student) meet collision-cute in a parking lot, and in the midst of shouting mutual abuse, something clicks for him when she tells him an unwelcome but undeniable truth about himself. Through all the complications, as many horrifying as comic, that ensue, this never abandons its unlikely screwball-comedy heart, and just like so many of those, which work seemingly in spite of the stage machinery, it simply does. Stephen Holden in his Times review likened Barbara Sarafian's look here to "Frances McDormand with Joni Mitchell hair," and I can't improve on that. The best movie I've seen with a largely Flemish script in I don't know how long.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

FF

Director Paul Schrader, there for a postscreening Q&A: "I wondered who would come out in a blizzard on the Friday night before Christmas to see a movie in Japanese about a gay, fascist writer. Here"--extending an arm to the absolutely packed house--"is the answer." (The "blizzard" was an exaggeration: he should have seen the New Haven I came home to.)

Went in knowing the basics of Mishima's life and death, and having read two or three of his short stories and seen the very sexy Sarah Miles-Kris Kristofferson film of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea long, long ago. Not having paid much attention, I expected a documentary, but instead, what a got was something that I suspect Schrader would be amused rather than outraged to hear likened to All That Jazz. Both films are about art and sex and death and fame and the web of interconnection among them, and both combine episodic pieces of biographical narrative (some of it more fictionalized than others--obviously ATJ is all ostensibly fiction, but we know it's really Bob Fosse's premature suicide note) with thematically articulate scenes from the protagonist's art, all building toward the wow finish. And both play the bio/fiction parlay about as effectively as it can be played. The quintessential M film: something I'd barely heard of that I now can't imagine having done without for so long.

Amarcord (1974)

FF

Speaking of which. Well, no, different deal here: obviously, I've known about Amarcord forever, but not all of my experiences with classic Fellini films that everyone worships have been fulfilling, so I'd just never gotten around to making myself sit through this one. What a moron I was.

A semiautobiographical portrait of the director's hometown, it is long on eccentrics but blessedly short on outright freaks. Just gorgeous in every way, hilarious, heartbreaking, visually stunning from moment to moment, and: as much as I hated the Nino Rota score I heard the day before, this one is just wonderful, stealing nicely here and there from "Stormy Weather" and "La Cucaracha" but mostly comprising the familiar phrases Danny Elfman stole for Pee-Wee's Big Adventure.

Trailers

• Shadows (1959)--More teaser than trailer, Cassavetes.
• Made in U.S.A. (1966)--Also a trailer, a very clever silent one, Godard.
• Wendy and Lucy--You had me at "Wendy."

Give me, give me! O, tell me not of fear!

The Verona project, part VI

A number of things I hate about this inexplicably much-loved version:

1. The MUsic. Good christ, I don't know whether Nino Rota is to blame, but virtually all the music is too loud, too dramatic, too much. And when the masque grinds to a halt for a vocal of the love theme . . . yuck! The music swells at all the obvious moments: at the first kiss, e.g., and then enough to drown out "My only love, sprung from my only hate"--kinda important line, methinks.
2. The banishment of most of Shakespeare's comedy. Did Zeffirelli not notice that this is often a very funny play? Apparently so--I should check my post on his Hamlet . . . well, no, I don't seem to have said that it was humorless, but I also don't find any mention of any of the humor in that play. Part of the problem is that funny lines are simply cut--see remarks below about the opening scene, e.g. But part of it is that the "humor" that survives seems mostly frantically forced. It's fair to play Mercutio as manic-depressive, but if you play him as simply angry and humorless, you're not doing the play. Even the Queen Mab speech is angry. He gets a laugh or two before his fatal duel w/ Tybalt (an extraordinarily dull swordfight, by the way--and the comparative liveliness of the succeeding Tybalt-Romeo tilt suggests that John McEnery [Mercut.] simply couldn't handle a blade), but all the comedy of his death scene comes from precisely the tragic source: his friends' failure to recognize the gravity of his wounds; for his part, he is simply angry (though he pronounces "A plague on both your houses" only once--or at least three times fewer than Romeo calls himself fortune's fool after poking Tybalt [a grotesquely lush Michael York]) .
3. The pointless changes and omissions. Look, I don't think that every line is necessarily sacred, but why would you cut "It is the East, and Juliet is the sun"--half of what may be Shakespeare's most famous couplet ever? Is it so you can get more of that damned song in the previous scene? Why would you leave Rosaline unmentioned until Friar Laurence chides Romeo for his inconstancy, thus leaving the impression that pre-Juliet, Romeo has simply been in love with . . . love? (This is true, of course, but contrary to what any courtly lover would project--which is to say that his love for R may have been a complete sham, but he still needed a Rosaline as the receptor of his pro forma love rays.) When the Nurse brings tidings of the duel, why would you deny Juliet that excruciating moment of uncertainty about who exactly Nurse is describing as dead? And why would you deny her that moment of cursing her beloved husband before cursing herself for her curse? I mean, c'mon, Zeff: there are things that are important, dig?
4. The overacting, the underacting, the acting acting. There is one actor who pretty consistently merits the Bard's words, and that is the teenage Juliet, who is mostly at least good, and who, once Nurse turns on her, telling her that Romeo is as good as dead and she might as well marry Paris, turns the character into a remarkable independent feminist hero. It's in the text, but it's rarely played, and Zeffirelli deserves some credit for that. On the other hand, he deserves the blame, then, for not leading into that with that wonderful double-entendre banter with her mother at the start of the scene about wanting Romeo close at hand. That sequence--one of my favorites in the play, and one that sets the stage for her feminist rebirth--is cut altogether. Likewise, Friar Laurence offers the sleeping potion without any threat by J of suicide--and worse, she never has a moment of doubt about whether the potion is really a poison.

Who (how old), when, how long? Leonard Whiting (17) and Olivia Hussey (16), 1968, 2¼hrs. Whiting is not as bad as he seems likely to be at the start, when he often seems uncomprehending of his own lines, but he's mostly just a pretty boy.

What sort of R&J? They can't keep their hands and mouths off of each other! But again, this is sort of an easy '60s way to show what the language is perfectly capable of expressing without the over-the-top and culturally inappropriate physicality.

Seriocomic scale for first scene? See above re "lack of comedy": all of the comedy is cut or blunted in this scene, so I'd say 9.

"Wherefore": do the filmmakers know what it means? Absolutely: Hussey reads that sequence beautifully. She accents the second syllable of wherefore, e.g.: nonstandard, but legitimate in context.

Carrion flies? No: that scene is comically hacked, beginning w/ R blubbering on the floor. On the other hand, after Nurse arrives and Romeo feigns suicide, Friar Laurence not only calls him woman and animal but actually pops him one in the face.

Body count? 4: Paris (perhaps the most ludicrously vapid and effeminate Paris ever, incidentally) is a no-show at the crypt, and Lady M survives as well.

What (else) is missing? I've covered the worst. Romeo makes no on-screen trip to the apothecary, but I'd call that a fair omission.

What (else) is changed?

• Capulet calls to Peter when he wants to send his invitations (a conflation made in the Cukor version)--but the scene is cut before the servant arrives, making the text change pointless. Presumably an editing issue.
• When Capulet tells Tybalt to chill after the latter has recognized Romeo at the masque, Zeff bizarrely gives Lady C the lines "You are a princox, go / Be quiet," and even more bizarrely has her deliver them ironically, actually serving as an incitement to Tybalt. Then she continues the speech, but to her husband: "For shame! I'll make you quiet." There's no textual justification I know of for any of that.
• The Romeo-Nurse scene, in which they arrange the marriage logistics, ends in the church, with Romeo throwing a kiss to the icon of the crucified Christ.
• When Romeo leaves Juliet's balcony for the last time, she does not say "Methinks I see thee, now thou art below, / As one dead in the bottom of a tomb," but Hussey's eyes convey that sense beautifully for a moment. (Incidentally, when R rises from bed moments before that, his naked, back-to-the-camera stretch before the window struck me as the obvious source for a similar moment in Life of Brian.)
• OK, this is just sooooooo Hollywood: Friar Laurence sends Friar John with his message for Romeo about the death scam and the escape plan, but John gets locked in a plague house, right? No, in this version what happens is that he sets off on the world's slowest donkey, and when Romeo's servant Balthazar sees Juliet "dead," he hops on his horse and simply overtakes the slow-assed ass. If only Friar L had used DHL . . .

What (else) is odd? My favorite! Notice the head count above. And yet the Prince still says he has "lost a brace of kinsman." Uh, Zeff: "brace" means two, as in Mercutio and Paris. He's lost only one kinsman in this version, dude.

End-of-the-play exposition? Blessedly, no: just a double funeral procession and minimal scolding by the Prince.

Oh, there are some nice moments: Juliet's waking at the crypt is betokened by a close-up on her hand, first moving slightly, then gaining animation; sweet. But mostly it's just soggy, labored. And while this is probably not the fault of anyone on the film crew, the color is horribly muddy in the DVD version; if this is as good as so many deluded people consider it, it deserves a remastered DVD version. Just don't shop it to me.

Ex cathedra

The Bishop's Wife

(1947)

Yeesh! Live by the DVR, die by the DVR. I must have had a zillion chances to record this flick in the days of VCR, but I was never sufficiently motivated. But when I was scrolling through the upcoming movie offerings, I thought, "Oh! The Bishop's Wife! I should record that! After all, it's a Christmas classic!"

Christmas crappic is more like it. OK, you start with a brilliant holiday film from a year earlier, you poach three minor members of its cast (Karolyn Grimes [Zuzu/Debby], Robert J. Anderson [young George/nameless obnoxious kid], and Sarah Edwards [Mrs. Hatch/Mrs. Duffy]) and the essentials of the plot (good man in an impossibly tight spot right before Xmas prays for help and gets sent an angel), and then you screw up everything you possibly can: instead of the most engaging actor on the planet, have the good man played by iron-rod-up-his-butt David Niven; instead of the charming Donna Reed, have the good man's wife played by the quintessentially vapid Loretta Young; and to cap it, instead of a harmlessly bumbling guardian angel played by Henry Travers, cast the sexiest man on the planet as a seductive angel with whom the wife can sorta fall in love, but in a clearly innocuous way.

Ugh! Give 'em credit for this, at least: the great film they ripped off had been pretty much a flop; it took some smarts to know enough to steal from it.

My mother used to watch Young's TV show religiously when I was growing up, which meant that I watched it a lot too. Even as dumb as I was, the attraction was a mystery to me. It wasn't until years later, when I learned that Young had stayed in a miserable marriage because of her inflexible Catholic faith that it made some sense. Now the mystery is: if she was devoutly religious and thus presumably not boning producers left and right, how did she have a career at all? It sure wasn't on her acting skill.

The us-es out there

Milk

Crit

The real challenge for this film was not whether it could be moving and inspiring but whether it could be as moving and inspiring as its trailer, which is hands-down the best I've seen this year. Well, yes, it can. Is. Penn is perfect, everyone in the cast is excellent (I finally get my daughter's infatuation w/ James Franco), and though I might cavil a bit with the tape-recorder-memoir frame, it's hard to argue with Van Sant's structure of the story.

Impossible to watch the climactic sequence of the campaign against a California-wide ballot measure that would have allowed school districts to fire teachers for no other cause than homosexuality without thinking of this year's victorious Proposition 8, overriding the state supreme court ruling that legalized gay marriage (among other antigay votes in other states). But it's worth noting that Prop. 8 succeeded, barely, via a perfect political storm: a strangest-of-bedfellows de facto alliance of Catholics, Mormons, and an understandably enthusiastic voting bloc with an unfortunate history of cultural conservatism and homophobia. Can you say "last stand"?

Still, it wouldn't hurt if the next Harvey Milk were to come along.

Trailers

• Duplicity--I guess it's appropriate that after seeing today's film to admit that I find Clive hotter than Julia. Looks like a perfectly silly film that might be tons of fun. Soft 4.
  
• Entre les murs (The class)--OK,I know you're sick of my rants about distributors that take wonderfully poetic, evocative foreign-language titles like, say, Between the Walls and "translate" them into bland, generic English-language titles, so I'll spare you this time around. I'll just say I'm in.
  

Livin' large

Bolt

Post

A very good, very conventional story of love and family. The inspired element is the premise: a TV dog who actually thinks he has all the superpowers his character has. In other words, this is based in great part on the actual scientific fact that dogs are loyal, brave, and moronic.

Yes, it's true what you've heard: the hamster steals the show. Waste-of-time short, "Tokyo Mater," starring characters from Cars. Oh, and by the way: if you're going to see this, there's no particular reason to insist on the 3D version: it was OK, but the story's the thing.

Cadillac Records

Post

Like every other film about the music biz, whether based on fact or purely fictional, this is about (1) the inspiration, (2) the meteoric rise, (3) the self-destructive behavior (including, as a matter of course, [A] substance abuse, [B] love abuse, and [C] professional-relationship abuse), and (4) the sad decline, but still (5) the legacy.

What makes this worth seeing, despite the clichés, are the performances, particularly by Eamonn Walker in a relatively small but thrilling role as Howlin' Wolf; Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters; Beyoncé Knowles as Etta James; and Adrien Brody as Leonard Chess. And, of course, the music.

Trailers

• Monsters vs. Aliens--Some nice stuff for us old farts, like a George C. Scott-in-Strangelove takeoff; wouldn't rule it out.
• Up--Cranky old guy's house takes off with balloons; I assume it must be based on some much-loved kids' book.
• Notorious--No, not a Hitchcock rerelease; it's about B.I.G.
• Gran Torino--I'm not one of those Clint-can-do-no-wrongers, but this looks pretty damned good.
• Madea Goes to Jail--What does it say when the "trailer" seems actually to be outtakes?
• Not Easily Broken--Good title, but I'm skeptical.

Worms' meat

The Verona project, parts IV (Romeo & Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss) and V (Romeo & Juliet: A Monkey's Tale)

Who (how old), when, how long? Animated seals (or sea lions--the filmmakers don't seem to be aware that there's a difference; in fact, mustachioed Montague appears very walrusy, while the Prince resembles nothing more than a manatee), 2006, 1¼hrs; live macaques, 2007 (Animal Planet), 3/4. As for age, it's fair to say early sexual maturity in each case, whenever that might be for the respective species.

What sort of R&J? Pinniped and simian, respectively.

Seriocomic scale for first scene? In the seal pic, the scene relies as much on West Side Story as on Shakespeare's play, with both the comedy and the danger relying on the successively stronger troops mustering on each side. The monkey pic doesn't really have that scene, only "Tybalt," a member of the temple troop in the Thai city of Lapburi, explaining the generations-long enmity between his aristocratic clan and the market moneys in the squalid slums across a nigh-unpassable road: "They did bite their thumbs at us" (shot of market monkey doing just that).

"Wherefore": do the film/playmakers know what it means? Emphatically no: in the seal pic it comes up repeatedly, always as if the word means where; in the monkey pic just once, but ditto.

Carrion flies? No, though the monkey pic probably could have worked it in, what w/ the slum's squalor and all.

Body count? In the seal pic, Mercutio seems actually to have been dispatched, but he returns at the end to prod the drugged young lovers awake; in the monkey pic, a literal plague descends upon both houses, but specific deaths are not delineated.

What (else) is missing? Actually, what's surprising is how much Shakespeare survives, especially in the seal pic. Yes, these are both (particularly the cartoon) essentially for little kids, but a lot of the language of the play works its way into both pieces. The about-to-apparently-die pinniped Mercutio (though most of his Shakespeare in the piece is random quotation from other plays) tells Romeo, "Look for me tomorrow and you will find me a grave . . . seal," and the voice of wisdom (Friar Laurence here, about which more below) tells the two seal tribes (here separated by color: the Capulets are white, the Montagues brown; and oddly, all the other aquatic species share the two groups' prejudice against mixing their blood), "We are all punished."

Much more of the narrative frame is omitted from the monkey pic--after all, they were working with actual animals, so it must have been harder to fit characters. The only named characters are the titular pair and Tybalt. Still, an apt line now and again: "These violent delights have violent ends."

What (else) is changed? In the context of the story involving pinnipeds and fish, it is odd to say that the oddest change is that the Prince (a grotesquely huge seal or sea lion with an even more grotesque schnozz), after warning off the warring parties in the opening scene, becomes a sort of Malvolio: it is he who falls repulsively for Juliet and to whom Capulet agrees to marry her, and so after having dignity in the opening scene, he is an ominous and ridiculous character thereafter. The kids do go to Friar Laurence (no freakin' idea what he's supposed to be: some sort of furry quadruped with a long tail) to get married (he makes some rather audience-inappropriate jokes about their sexual eagerness), and J gets the coma potion from him, but in this version, when Romeo kisses her, she still has enough in her system that it knocks him out too--so they have their seeming tragic death but both get to survive.

The monkey story's happy ending comes when the humans in the town have a big festival of food, which the monkeys from both sides of the street can share in peace. By this time both the titular characters have gone off to make babies elsewhere.

What (else) is odd? Gosh, tough call: the Titanic tribute (don't ask)? The shark chase? The monkey skipping town on a train? Pretty much the whole of each film is pretty odd.

End-of-the-play exposition? Nothing of the overlong and tedious nature that WS gave us, no.

Can't say I'd ever see either of these again, but Sealed is something I wouldn't mind having my 2yo granddaughter see as her introduction to the story (though, of course, she wouldn't get the parts that really rely on it). And it's always fun to see monkeys. In short, not the wasted evening I feared it might be.

If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully

The Verona project, part III

Yes, yes, I did intend to screen everything I'll be blogging this weekend--just not quite so soon; I wanted to view a few more conventional renditions before . . . well, you'll see. But Netflix mistakes were made, and once that happened, I decided to make it a sublime-to-ridiculous weekend.

And good golly, this one is sublime. Look, I know less about ballet even than I do about opera, if that's possible, and I simply chose the top-rated Nf balletic version (there are several) and the top-rated operatic version (there are at least a couple) just so's I could get a little high culcha in the mix--I certainly never expected to like the ballet, and I certainly didn't expect to be transported by it. And frankly, I don't have time for another interest in my life, so it's a little disturbing. But there you are.

Who (how old), when, how long? Wayne Eagling (33 per Wikipedia, and he looks it in close-ups but could be mid-20s from a distance) and Alessandra Ferri (20 but could pass for 13), 1984, 2¼hrs. Royal Ballet, recorded at Covent Garden, music by Sergei Prokofiev.

What sort of R&J? Appropriately passionate. His asking, near the end of the first balcony scene, "Wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?" would ring pretty false here, because they take pretty much the full serving of satisfaction. Eagling is perfectly OK, but Ferri is absolutely perfect: in her first scene with the Nurse, she is charmingly barely adolescent, simply playing with her lifelong confidante. Then her parents bring in Paris--a useful plot accelerator, given that there are no words--and she suddenly feigns adulthood, in part to flirt, but mostly, one suspects, to be a good daughter by marketing herself well. To achieve this effect, she dances entirely en pointe--until he and the 'rents leave, whereupon she reverts to her childlike danceplay with Nurse. It is one of many wonderful scenes in the ballet. Another, by contrast, is when J first dances for R, at the ball: this time she dances sometimes on her toes, sometimes in the juvenile-coded balls-of-her-feet mode: if when on commercial display for Paris, she consciously and artificially projects herself as something she's not, for Romeo she displays both the girl she still is and the woman she's becoming. Which is, of course, precisely what we (and he) love about her.

Seriocomic scale for first scene? 7ish, I guess, only because there's a stack of a half-dozen corpses at the end, though truth to tell I didn't notice them accumulating, and the swordplay (Romeo is involved in this version) struck me as thoroughly undangerous until Montague and Capulet weighed in against each other--that was ominous, but the Prince arrived almost immediately after. This scene too is much changed to accommodate the narrative needs of a wordless play: it begins with Romeo wooing Rosaline, who is unimpressed and involved with another, who draws on Romeo, cooling his ardor temporarily at least. Then Romeo, Benvolio, and Mercutio cavort with a trio of strumpets--without question the best addition to the story. It is when Tybalt and his kinsmen arrive in the square and drag the whores away from the good guys that the brawl begins.

"Wherefore": do the film/playmakers know what it means? Not applicable.

Carrion flies? Ditto.

Body count? Five: all but Lady M. (But in truth, the ballet ends when Juliet dies, so there's no mopup scene; who knows whether Lady M has died?)

What (else) is missing? Notwithstanding the loss of all that magnificent language, there is astonishingly little missing from the story that is missed. It's generally not a good idea to edit the Bard, but the cuts here come across as economical, not stinting, and the changes as useful for the narrative and perfectly in keeping with the spirit. One problem is that we see no message sent to Romeo to go awry, which relates to another problem I'll discuss below. We don't see Romeo buy his poison, but when he withdraws the vial from his belt, duh.

What (else) is changed? Well, they dance a lot more. One troublesome change: as I said, much is adapted for the sake of the narrative, and I'd say that the mythical viewer with no knowledge whatsoever of the story would have little trouble knowing precisely what's going on throughout, until . . . "How," I wondered, "does one pantomime 'This is going to make you fall asleep as if dead for 42 hours, whereupon you'll wake and I'll make sure Romeo is there'?" Well, apparently they had no answer: Friar Laurence has the dram waiting for J when she arrives (no need for her to threaten suicide with the dagger to persuade him to provide the potion), and this is one point--a key one, obviously--where if you don't know the story, you're just going to be stumped. Both the previous scene and the following one are played with Paris on hand (again, useful for the narrative), and in the latter she seems caught between resistance and muscular inability to resist, making me think she must already have downed the dram--but no, that's still to come.

Another key change, which mitigates Romeo's blood-guilt: Tybalt's fatal attack on Mercutio is cowardly and unsporting, as he stabs him in the back immediately after M has restored his sword to him rather than pressing his advantage at having disarmed him. Mercutio's death is one of the most magnificent and perfectly textual sequences of the ballet, as he balances jocularity with the grim truth.

What (else) is odd? Perhaps the oddest is the breakneck rush to the finish: the final scene, besides jettisoning the Prince's scolding and the reconciliation of the families, jettisons every character but the 3 who die--and the time between Romeo's appearance and Paris's death at his hands is (I am not kidding--I went back and timed it) 12 seconds. In fact, from R's appearance until J's death is no more than 5 minutes. In that span, though, before Romeo's fatal draught, there is one more fabulous dance, between the star-crossed lovers. Yes, that's right: that requires that she still be as dead, and indeed she is: he tosses and swings her like a rag doll, to heartbreaking effect.

End-of-the-play exposition? Nada.

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

By the book

The Verona project, part II

Who (how old), when, how long? Christopher Neame (28) and Ann Hasson (looks to have been early 20s, though the fact that her age isn't given either on IMDb or on the minibiography on the DVD suggests that she may have been older), 1976, 3¼hrs.

What sort of R&J? Very Royal Shakespeare Company--like the entire company, the performances are thoroughly competent without ever achieving transport--until III.v, the scene in which Lady Capulet comes to Juliet's chamber right after Romeo has left: from that scene on, Hasson (who mysteriously seems to have done a little TV and nothing else) raises her performance and the production to another level. One interesting element of Neame's early performance is that this Romeo seems cognizant of the fact that his lovelorn sighs for Rosaline are purely conventional--though like a good courtly lover, he follows the conventions faithfully. Oh, he bears an unfortunate resemblance to Malcolm McDowell (Alex and Juliet?); Hasson, for her part, looks a bit like Jennifer Ehle, only with Janeane Garofalo's chipmunk cheeks.

Seriocomic scale for first scene? 4--neither particularly silly nor ominous: worst damage done is when Tybalt stabs as innocent foodselling female bystander in the cheek.

"Wherefore": do the playmakers know what it means? Indubitably: Hasson delivers the speech with conviction.

Carrion flies? Yep.

Body count? The full 6.

What (else) is missing? Scarcely anything is missing; I noticed a few lines at the start of one scene, so doubtless there are handsful dropped here and there, but this is essentially the full text.

What (else) is changed? Nothing significant.

What (else) is odd? It is a distinctly un-odd production. I suppose this category's as good a place as any to observe that Capulet is portrayed as easily the most sympathetic of the adult characters--until he explodes at J's refusal to marry Paris (in that same III.v). That he is so gentle and loving until then, of course, makes his abuse all the more painful for us, as well as further ratcheting up Juliet's already abject grief.

End-of-the-play exposition? Yes, well, there's a downside to including the whole text.

A very pleasant surprise, given that the Netflix average rating is only 2.6 stars; makes me wonder what those people are looking for. (Are they the same people who give the Zeffirelli version an average of 3.7?) It's interesting that this seems to have appeared on British TV just two years before the BBC presented its version in what I like to call its Every Damn Play the Bard Wrote series. But while the leads were fairly obscure, the cast has its share of the Beeb repertory company of the time, including at least two actors who appeared in the exactly contemporary I, Claudius: David Robb (Tybalt here, Germanicus there) and Patsy Byrne (Juliet's Nurse here, the poisoner Martina there); I think I noticed a couple others, but the IMDb cast lists are incomplete.

Drove, he said

Australia

Crit

Years ago, at the Assembly Hall in Champaign, Illinois, a talented but wildly erratic Illini guard followed, as he so often did, a slick pass with an egregious turnover. "Oh, Brooks," cried a frustrated fan near me, "you do something good, and then you go and do something bad." The poignant artlessness of that complaint came to mind today. Oh, Baz. Is there a filmmaker today who works so hard with the apparent goal of making us not take him or his creations seriously? The comic-book silliness of the first 15 minutes or so had me squirming in my seat, convinced that I'd let mixed reviews trick me into a time-waster. And then he goes and does something good. I have no recollection what, exactly--the remaining 2½ hours were such a constant whiplash of pleasure and dismay that it's hard to itemize (though the first 2 [of 4!] end-credits songs represent a take-with-you-from-the-theater nadir: a simpy but blessedly short piece of sentimentality presumably written by the director [couldn't catch it in the credits] and sung, I think, by the female lead] seems like the lowest we can go, until a tell-the-story ballad by Luhrman and Elton John, among others, digs a deeper sewer).

In sum, it's a glorious mess, all over the antipodal map. The Wizard of Oz is its explicit touchpoint, but the 1939 film it leans on far more heavily is the one about a stormy romance that begins on the eve of war and then takes us into the inferno in the capital. That one, you'll recall, shares an imperative of repatriation, not because there's no place like home but because land is the only thing that lasts.

It also seems to share an ambition with the upcoming Che to be a double feature, not just in length but in coming to one perfectly plausible conclusion only to take off again on a related but distinctly different story.

Trailer

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button--I guess what I saw before was just a teaser; but the full trailer still leaves me skeptical.

I can tell her age unto an hour

The Verona project, part I

Who (how old), when, how long? Leslie Howard (42 [!!]) and Norma Shearer (33 [!]), 1936, 2hr. Juliet's age is, mercifully, not specified. Directed by George Cukor (36).

What sort of R&J? Shearer desperately tries to be girlish; Howard is, of course, girlish without even trying. It's hard to imagine how anyone thought this could be a good idea, but to their credit, they're both game. Juliet's headstrong and horny character is played down a bit, probably in service of Shearer's youth simulation, the one major exception being in the morning-after nightingale/lark sequence, when she breathily makes it clear that she wants more.

Seriocomic scale for first scene? At least a 7, as people actually seem to die in the melee (though no one identifiable, so it doesn't affect the official body count). The silliness is supplied by Andy Devine, who plays his usual goofy cowboy as Peter, servant to Juliet's Nurse. That character isn't in this scene in the play, so he stands in for Sampson to deliver the thumb-biting lines of that Capulet servant. (Very little of that opening dialogue survives.) Devine also stands in later for the unnamed illiterate servant sent to deliver Capulet's invitations to the masque (a list which, bizarrely, includes Mercutio [later: duh, that's not bizarre but simply textual: I forget that Mercutio is not Romeo's kinsman but the Prince's {as is Paris}]).

"Wherefore": do the filmmakers know what it means? The evidence is not at all conclusive.

Carrion flies? Nope.

Body count? 5 of 6: Lady M survives. Mercutio and Tybalt, incidentally, are played by John Barrymore (age 53) and Basil Rathbone (43), respectively, so we get some good swashbuckling in their duel. Barrymore also delivers the Queen Mab speech beautifully--in a single take! One suspects it wasn't the first time he'd done it.

What (else) is missing? Most notable to me are Juliet's wonderful double entendres in III.v when she seems to be telling her mother that she'd like to get her hands on Romeo to avenge Tybalt's death but what she's really saying is that she'd just like to get her hands on Romeo again. Also, when Romeo threatens suicide, Friar Laurence's scolding of him becomes politically correct: in the play he chides him as womanly and bestial, but here he calls him only an animal.

What (else) is changed? Easily the weirdest change is that Friar John, dispatched by Laurence with the crucial message to Romeo, telling him that Juliet's death has been faked, is actually shown stopping to give succor to a sick person and then being locked into the plague house; he even calls for help as Romeo's servant Balthasar rides past carrying R's letter to J. In the play, of course, John simply tells Laurence how his mission went awry.

What (else) is odd? After the wedding, a weird pullback from Juliet's balcony, then a cut to doomed Mercutio in the piazza. For the postslaughter wedding night, several sexual ecstasy clichés: swelling music, a sky full of stars, an orchard full of phallic trees. Then cut to the chamber, where they're ostensibly in full embrace--except that, the Hays Office calling the shots, Romeo has both feet on the floor. (On the other hand, a genuinely surprising amount of the play's bawdy language survives--the Hays folks must have thought "prick" couldn't really mean what they thought it meant.) Oh: and J's waking in the crypt plays as distinctly Bride of Frankenstein.

End-of-the-play exposition? No: cut from crypt to Capulet and (unwidowded) Montague reconciling before the Prince.

Overall, better than I expected, but far from great--there's very little that's special to balance the grotesquerie of the overaged casting. The masque has some interesting moments, though: an amusing "joust" between "horsemen," and then later, when J is supposed to be dancing w/ Paris, she keeps getting distracted by the new dude she's seen, and Paris has to keep leading her back. It's one of the few moments of convincing romantic transport in one of the title characters.

There are also a couple of nice shots, most notably when the Nurse is walking Juliet down the hallway to her chamber after the masque, and as they proceed, a servant comes just behind them, snuffing the candles in the hall. Poignant imagery for the quintessential snuff romance.

And lest I forget (as in fact I almost did): most surprising name in the credits? As "literary consultant," William Strunk--right, as in The Elements of Style.

Oh, and a word about the DVD. It has become commonplace to include a contemporary short and a cartoon on the DVD of a film from this era. My experience is that usually the cartoon is a hoot and the short is simply hootable. Here, though, the cartoon, "Little Cheeser," about a juvenile mouse who wants to be a tough guy, is 7 minutes or so of treacle until finally, in the last couple of minutes, we get some wonderfully surreal action. But the live-action one-reeler, "Master Will Shakespeare," is a one-reel biopic with an astonishing amount of actual nonbullshit information--and it's directed by a name that surprised me even more than Strunk's: Jacques Tourneur, younger than either of the feature's stars, and with Out of the Past and all those wonderful Val Lewton films far in his future.

Before remembering

Plus tard, tu comprendras (One day you'll understand)

Crit

What an aptly named film, because none of the three of us who saw it together understood as we left the theater, but with each contributing a question or an observation that hadn't occurred to the others, we came to a much clearer comprehension after our postcinema discussion.

It is, in essence, the story of France's grotesquely mixed record vis-à-vis the Holocaust, played out in one family, the mixture of French Catholics with Russian Jews. It is also an intensely personal mystery story, as much for the audience as for the protagonist,Victor (Hippolyte Girardot, whom I'll be seeing again in another couple of weeks in Un conte de Noël, along with Emmanuelle Devos, who plays his wife here). Jeanne Moreau, 80 now, still beautiful, is perfect as the Jewish grandmother who has her reasons for not wanting to talk about the past.

A unique Holocaust film, which has become a rare label.