Dead shark

Annie Hall

(1977)

Hmmm, that's odd: I didn't weep this time.

It's producing!

Wag the Dog

(1997)

It holds up well through repeated viewings, but now that it has become part of the culture and part of our political mindset, what the hell remains to be said about it? Anybody out there in comment land have anything to add?

Harry, I want you to sell me a condom!

Monty Python's The Meaning of Life

(1983)

You know, sometimes I think fish and bare-breasted women really are the meaning of life.

Do you wanna dance

Antepenultimate day of the aughts TS*3

But first . . . say what??? This from today's Times story about 2010 releases of films that have been in the can for a long time:

That slightly older films have clustered in the coming quarter also owes something to a frenzy of activity that preceded the three-month writers’ strike that began in late 2007. Studio executives stockpiled scripts, then quickly shot a spate of films that are still working their way through the system.

Green Zone was part of that surge, as were The Wolfman and Repo Men, a pair of 2008 movies set for release by Universal in the next few months.

Excuse me? Repo Man? How could one of my all-time favorite weird films be remade and I be completely unaware until reading a story about its been sitting around for two years waiting to be released? No, idiot; don't you read for a living? It says Repo Men, idiot, plural: sci-fi about repossession of artificial organs set for April release.

Oh. Anyway . . .

La Danse: Le Ballet de l'Opera de Paris

Crit

It's a baseball cliché that the human arm isn't designed to throw a ball 95mph or to impart such torque that the ball curves sharply on its 60-foot route. I've watched enough baseball that--while I'm still impressed, make no mistake--I no longer drop my jaw when I see what the human arm is capable of when it has been trained to ignore nature. I guess aficionados of the dance must get to that point, too, with the rest of the body.

Not me, though: carefully limiting myself to only as much ballet as appears in enthusiastically reviewed films, I am happy to remain in awe. But what does it say about one's day at the movies when by far the smartest script and the best dialogue come from an unscripted show-don't-tell Frederick Wiseman documentary?

The Young Victoria

Crit

Can I just go on record here as not being enchanted by Emily Blunt? She was bitchily fun in The Devil Wears Prada, but as the spunky young queen here, she's just a character in a soap opera unable to raise the project above its soapy dialogue.

Sherlock Holmes

Crit

Mishmash of Dan Brown and Harry Potter; depend on Holmes to dispel the nonsense. Fisticuffs and explosions, no extra charge. Sequel promised. No. Just no.
*Temple Street

Trailers

• The Last Station--Movin' on up with the Tolstoys! A. O. Scott hated it, David Denby and most critics loved it. I guess I'm in.
• Cop Out--Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan in the early front-runner for the worst film of 2010. Shit! It's directed (but not written) by Kevin Smith!
• The Bounty Hunter--Oops! Cop Out's lead didn't last long!
• Inception--Seems very Matrixy.
• Clash of the Titans--Holy Harryhausen! What to think about a CGI remake of one of the great cheesy F/X flicks of all time? next? Jason and the Argonauts: The Kingdom of Hades? Oh, yeah, I guess so.

M is for the murders that she gave me . . .

Kill Bill: Vol. 2

(2004)

If I overrated vol. 1 when it was released, I stand by my initial assessment of this: one big anticlimax. If anything, I overrated it too.

Thanks for the barbecue

Second-day-of-Kwanzaa M4

OK, mark this date on your calendar, because today I am a happy man, filled with warmth, nay, almost love, for my fellow humans. Mostly the filmmaking humans, granted, but still--there's some serious spillover. This is as warm and as fuzzy as I get.

Partly because these were four of the best movies I've seen all year, partly because only one can even arguably (and I would. Argue otherwise, i.e.) be termed a sad-bastard movie, partly, perhaps, because it had just been so damned long since I'd M'd and I guess I didn't fully appreciate how much I'd missed it--I don't know, but the day was just so freakin' much fun, you know? Like just nearly 100 percent good times? (There were those two separate people who bitched at 3 separate people/twosomes for sitting in front of them, but while I did want to ask why we can't all just get along, I let go of it as soon as the enchanting film began.)

And the funny thing is, the weather was so unexpectedly gorgeous--sunny, temps in the 50s, I'm sure--that I was tempted to blow off at least one flick and finally haul my ass to the High Line. I might have done had it not been--what, 9, 10 months since my last Manhattan movie excessathon? Since before baseball season, anyway. Thank god I didn't waste any extra time outside! Because:

Ricky

IFC

In the inevitable American remake, there will be lots more madcap Ricky-flying adventures, in CGI--it'll be set in New York or San Francisco or Chicago or some other city chockablock with landmarks for Ricky to fly over and around and through (here I'm thinking St. Louis), and it won't be nearly as good because it won't be as much (or as real) about the effects on the rest of the family of having a flying baby in the house. And there won't be this weird, subtle sense that the whole story is from the older sister's perspective, that she somehow invented or is responsible for her baby brother's wings.

But speaking of unexpected wings, the part of the building that used to hold a coffee shop is now screens 4 and 5, the latter of which is where this showed: 20-odd seats, DVD projection, I believe--seats and layout comparable to screen 3 upstairs, otherwise comparable to screens 8 and 9 back home.

Politist adjectiv (Police, adjective)

IFC

In the American version of this . . . oh, forget it: there could never be an American version of this. Or, rather, every police procedural is the American version of this, except that the two versions show almost none of the same stuff. Here we get the godawful tedium of a pursuit and stakeout, and your mind wanders, and you think, mustn't the cop's mind wander too? And we get frustration with the bureaucracy--OK, there's a little overlap there, but remember, this is a bureaucracy sired by Stalin (I guess I should mention that it's Romanian).

Mainly we get the conflict between the letter of the law and conscience, and if that comes up sometimes in the American police procedural, when have we ever tried to resolve it with a dialectical exercise based on dictionary definitions? And when I say that the grammar and usage bits are among the highlights, and say, moreover, that I mean that as praise . . . well, have I ever steered you wrong?

Panique au village (A town called panic)

FF

Holy fucking shit--this is one of the trippiest movies ever. Take the manic disregard for comic restraint of early Pee Wee Herman, an animation idiom influenced by the Mr. Bill shorts from early Saturday Night Live, logic straight from Dada, and a touch of SpongeBob undersea décor.

Plot: three toys--Horse, Cowboy, and Indian--share a house as best friends. (No, it's not like that. No, really. Well, yeah, Cowboy and Indian share a bedroom, but in twin beds--and Horse has the major hots for Madame Longrée, the red-maned music teacher.) C & I, having forgotten H's birthday, order 50 bricks online to build him a barbecue--except that the zero key accidentally gets held down and they order 50 gazillion-dillion-momillion bricks. Then, after that, things start getting strange. Like with weird submarine bat kinda creature things.

OK, look: I haven't inhaled in . . . well, I don't know how long, but that's purely a function of age, not of having inhaled at an interval any nondamaged brain would be able to keep track of. But jesus! If you were gonna inhale, if you were gonna inhale before a movie, this would be the one.

By the way, JT--did the online brick vendor not put you in mind of Towelie?

Sita Sings the Blues

IFC

OK, if my blown-away threshold had not just been blown to the sky before this, this would have blown me away. As it was, it merely awed me: ballsy autobiographical breakup journal-cum-Indian tale of Ramayana-cum kickass introduction to the kickass '20s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw (I know, right?). Gorgeous look, gorgeous sound (even when Hanshaw's not singing).

What makes the Indian stuff great (that's Slurpee Indian, not casino Indian, as in Panique) (he pauses; he wonders, Is there any chance anyone reading this will think I'm really . . . oh, fuck it) is the interplay of 3 talking heads discussing (1) textual variants in the myth and (2) problems with myth logic and especially with myth vis-à-vis modern consciousness, especially but not exclusively feminist consciousness. Which are (2, i.e.) many and varied.

And filmmaker Nina Paley (who, according to Leal Elementary School graduate JT, is a Leal Elementary School graduate [the one in Urbana, Ill., not the one in Cerritos, Calif.]) bravely sets her own distinctly unfeminist reaction to rejection in parallel to Sita's, which ends up redeeming her sorry situation.

Trailers

• Hausu (House)--Billed as the "first horror/fantasy film"; hard to tell which of the risible bits are supposed to make us laugh.
• Chugyeogja (The Chaser)--Oddly, this plugs itself by pointing out that it is being Americanized by the makers of The Departed--which you would think means Scorsese, no?
• A Film with Me in It--Wacky Brits, accidental gory deaths.
• Fish Tank--Creepy stepfather/stepdaughter sex, looks like.
• Auf der Suche nach dem Gedächtnis (In search of memory)--Autobiography of Eric Kandel.
• Garbage Dreams--Poor kids in Cairo.
• Sweetgrass--Sheep!
• Pranzo di ferragosto (Mid-August lunch)--Wacky old Italians.
  
• Das weisse Band: Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The white ribbon)--Michael Haneke's latest, getting tons of buzz.
  

Some things you never get used to

High Fidelity

(2000)

Saw this for the first time at Cobble Hill Cinemas on Court Street. Go ahead: ask me why I first saw it in Brooklyn; I'll be glad to tell you the whole story. Hell, I might give you my Top Five All-Time Breakups list.

Currently rereading the novel; surprised by how faithful the adaptation is (well, aside from its being set in Chicago rather than London, but come on: would you want anyone but John Cusack in the lead role, and having chosen Cusack, would you want to transplant him from his natural habitat?) through the first two-thirds of the book, up until Laura's father dies, but my recollection is that the film finds a much better ending than Hornby did, endings being something he struggled with early on.

Speaking of faithful to the novel, I'm pretty sure the "top five things I miss about Laura" list isn't from the book, but I love the scene in the film so much that it convinces me that it must be, or at least ought to be. And Iben Hjejle really does have a top-five, world-filling laugh. I know I've said this before, but I wish she'd work in English-language films more.

Wouldn't it be nice if we were . . . uh, let's not go there

It's Complicated

Crit

Excuse me a minute--I have to do this right now before I forget, being, after all, a man of a certain age . . . yes, OK, Gabby Adler, daughter of Jake (Alec Baldwin) and Jane (Meryl Streep), is played by Zoe Kazan, whom I have indeed just seen, as the fiction-writing ingenue in Me and Orson Welles.

OK, now that I've taken care of that, let's fill out the scorecard for this tale of December-December romance: the stars are 4+ years younger than I (Baldwin, though his character is 2 years older), 4+ years older (Streep), and 8+ years older (Steve Martin). Gee, I guess it's not as bad as I thought.

As for the film itself, Manohla Dargis singlehandedly overcame my Nancy Meyers skepticism, and I am grateful to both of them, as well as to everyone named above. The dramatic parts ring true if not, for the most part, original, but the comic parts of this are absolutely hilarious, except when Meyers relies, as it seems she must at least once in every film, on some bit of half-assed completely out of place plotting. Baldwin plays . . . well, he plays the only character he has been playing since 30 Rock began, the profoundly self-unaware amoralist, and I for one have no problem with that. And there's a smile Martin scrunches his face into at one point when his character is stoned (it's complicated) that you'd swear was drawn by a caricaturist. Why, hell, I even liked John Krasinski's character and found him funny, which may be a first.

Trailers

• Valentine's Day--Another of those zillion-star romcom omnibuses. Omnibi?
• Robin Hood--Wow, didn't know about this! Ridley Scott directs Russell Crowe, and Maid Marian is . . . Cate Blanchett! Oh, yes. Yes, indeed.
• Leap Year--Hmmm, two February sort-of-holiday movies that I'll wager will not displace the best such ever. This looks probably awful, unless Amy Adams and Matthew Goode can save it.
  

Three magi and a baby

3 Godfathers

(1948)

John Ford's thoroughly silly, irresistible Christmas fable, in which a trio of no-excuses bank robbers, led by John Wayne as Bob Hightower, happen upon a helpless widow about to have a baby. Generous measures of tragedy, comedy, and stolid heroism ensue--with a real honest-to-goodness tiny baby, one Amelia Yelda, grabbing far more screen time than a baby would ever be allowed these days.

I'm guessing that the place-name Piney Woods mentioned here is the source of the character by that name in Mark Harris's Bang the Drum Slowly. That character is fond of "The Cowboy's Lament" ("Streets of Laredo"), which here is the central theme in a typically rich Fordian score.

Director's cut

Los abrazos rotos (Broken embraces)

Crit

Ah, nothing says Christmas like the latest Almodóvar. There's nothing particularly new here--love, obsession, betrayal, make-believe, movies--but then Mozart used the same dozen notes over and over again, didn't he?

An odd, twisty plot that ultimately makes sense, if it isn't ever really as convincing as it is satisfying.

Penélope Cruz--aka "that little troll," per JGK, who should be grateful that I disguise him behind initials, though he may be getting a little tired of having me mention this every time I mention her--continues to earn A's in Almodóvar's films, having gradually worked her way up to the B+/A- level in English-language ones. And if this is what a troll looks like, where do I get my green card?

Trailer

• Un prophète--Arab boy makes good in French prison.
  

Pudding singing in the copper

Scrooge

(1951)

Someone at the company holiday party who asked me what my favorite Christmas movies are pointed out, when I told her my Xmas Eve viewing tradition, that now Jim Carrey has starred in versions of both stories. True. Small world.

Sign that the apocalypse is nigh: click here if you dare.

But look, if it weren't for that damned "Barbara Allen," I wouldn't get so weepy.

What I realized this time that I'd never noticed before: the guy who doesn't mind attending Scrooge's funeral as long as there's food ("I must be fed, or I stay at home!") is Peter Bull--the Russian ambassador in Dr. Strangelove. Moreover, IMDb tells me he's also the narrator: "Jacob Marley was as dead as a doornail . . . "

Your backpack

Up in the Air

Crit

Surprised not to see an end-credits thank-you to Alexander Payne for permission to use Omaha geographically and thematically. It is a Payneful film indeed, and a painful one, easily the best and most grownup of Jason Reitman's 3 films to date. Like Payne, Reitman takes us in a direction that seems to forecast one conclusion, then plays it much smarter, and much more true to life. I actually wish I hadn't encountered hints about that reversal (and so have already done you a disservice if you hadn't yet encountered same), because I suspect the surprise would have hit me with all the force with which it hits George Clooney's Ryan Bingham.
A film for recessionary times economic and emotional.

Trailers

• The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus--How can I not have seen a trailer of this before? Looks trippy, but the buzz is not promising.
• Remember Me--Father/son, father/daughter story.

A prima donna scorned

Torn Curtain

(1966)

My god! That's Maria von Trapp! That's Mary Poppins, for god's sake, naked under the covers with a man she's not married to! Is nothing sacred?

Hitchcock's only film with either Paul Newman or Julie Andrews is not the disaster it is often portrayed as, but it really could have used better editing--what should have been a sleek 105-minute thriller plods at 128 minutes. Given the cast, it's just nothing special.

Two narratives diverged on the Brooklyn Bridge

Uncertainty

Crit

In principle, this is invigoratingly adventurous filmmaking. In practice, it's hard not to wonder which of the many ambiguities are just sloppiness.

We begin in media ponti, where Bobby (the always excellent Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Kate (the less so Lynn Collins) face a Big Decision. Having said that he's fine with either choice (and thus, crucially, establishing it as an A/B proposition), Bobby tosses a coin. They look at the result and go tearing off in opposite directions, and, as it turns out, into distinct (and, formally if not literally, mutually exclusively) stories, one set in Manhattan, the other in Brooklyn and Queens--but both characters are in each, and their relationship is the same.

But what is the choice? Well, in the Long Island story (Green--an ingenious and useful color coding helps the viewer always know immediately which story he's in), the answer is simple: abortion or baby? And the Green narrative follows an arc we've seen often, and one, moreover, that most of us are familiar with in life, secondhand if not first-.

But in the Manhattan story (Yellow), I'm not really sure. Is it what to do with the Trio they find in a cab at the start? That's certainly the question that occupies them, and the possibilities are potentially rewarding but also life-threatening. But that's not a coin-toss A/B proposition, not by a long shot. Moreover, it doesn't lend itself to the calm contemplation of the opening scene, as the pregnancy issue does. So is it the same pregnancy question in Manhattan, and the risks and rewards of the found Trio simply a fantastic approach to answering it?

Seems doubtful, for aside from there never being any direct mention of it, as there eventually are in Green, there's a lot of action-movie-ish running and jumping that you would think would elicit a nod to her delicate condition if her condition were delicate. So how the hell does that story work, vis-à-vis the more real-life-conventional one?

Not that that question necessarily has to be answered. But in a film that seems to be implying a well-wrought if somewhat warped symmetry--an A/B coin flip--you can't help but wonder whether you're just too dim to get it. And there's another major asymmetry of setting at the end that seems just wrong as well.

An interesting film, and clearly a thought-provoking one, but I have a sneaking suspicion there's less to it than meets the eye.

King of another world

Avatar

Post

Gee whiz, there can hardly be any question about James Cameron being an asshole, right? I mean, if you have any doubt, just read this. And so logically I would expect film critics, who are, after all, human underneath it all, to look for any chance to rip him a critical new one. So when he has a half-billion-dollar special effects movie, I'm looking for a serious this-is-shitstorm.
I'm certainly not looking for a 30-for-32 score from Top Critics at Rotten Tomatoes. I mean, that says to me that they just can't help loving it. And now I know why.
It's Lord of the Rings, it's every cowboys-and-Indians movie, it's Zululand, it's Vietnam, it's Iraq, it's Star Wars, it's Apocalypse Now--and it's also as original as a sci-fi movie can be in the post-science-fact era. It's feminist, it's ecopolemic, it's anti-imperial, it's the best impulses of John Ford and Francis Coppola and Oliver Stone--Christ, what is it not?
Oh, and did I mention that it's one of the most gorgeous fucking films I've ever seen--or that the alien race Cameron has invented is the most gorgeous alien race ever invented for the pictures? Did I mention that his new 3D technology may or may not reinvent the medium, but his use of it it the most exciting 3D I've ever seen, if only for the tiny details: flying insects in the foreground, e.g.?
A-fucking-mazing.

Invictus

Post

Unfair to have seen this right after the soulfuck of Avatar, and in retrospect unfair to see it right after reading the book it was based on, John Carlin's Playing the Enemy. We've seen far too many fantastic, unbelievable, inspirational stories in the movies for this to be the proper medium for a fantastic, unbelievable, inspirational story that happens to be true. If you've read the book, you know that there are in fact important elements downplayed in the film, probably because they're just such feel-good clichés--the embrace by the mostly Afrikaner Springboks of the new Xhosa national anthem, e.g., or the symbolic force of Mandela's appearing before the championship game in the green and gold jersey.

Lest I mislead you, this is a fine movie, and the inevitability of Morgan Freeman's playing Mandela is well requited. But this is one story best told on the page. See the movie, but read the book too.

Trailers

• The Book of Eli--Denzel, postapocalypse; that's a pretty good start.
• Kick-Ass--Teenage superhero wannabes.
• Knight & Day--Cruise and Diaz in another one of those action-fish-out-of-water pics (cf. From Paris with Love) must have seemed like a good idea to somebody.
• Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief--21st-century teen demigods; oh boy.
• Alice in Wonderland--Hadn't seen the 3D trailer before, and I gotta say: seems more magical this way.
• Shrek Forever After--Actually called The Final Chapter or some such in the trailer: definitely promises to be the end of the sage, thank god.
• Extraordinary Measures--Weepy.
• Green Zone--Bourne, but without the amnesia.
• Why Did I Get Married Too--Actually, that's Tyler Perry's WDIGWT; need I say more?
• Edge of Darkness--What do you suppose happens when a widower ex-cop played by Mel Gibson loses his daughter to an assassin's bullet meant for him?

Comeuppance

The Magnificent Ambersons

(1942)

Huh! This seems to be still unavailable in a Region 1 DVD, certainly one of the half-dozen best American features of which that's true. Notoriously taken away from Welles and grotesquely (to his mind) recut, but it's hard to imagine how much better it could be than it is, apart from the final sequence--the comeuppance sequence--which is far too abrupt and in its abruptness betrays a sentimentality that I suspect was far more digestible in Welles's cut.

Tim Holt, as the snotty George Amberson Minafer, gives the performance of his life--which is not high praise, coming from me, but Welles coaxed perfection from him. One of the first roles for Anne Baxter, not yet 20.

Boy, genius

Me and Orson Welles

Crit

Hated "Me," loved (while hating) OW. Put another way, there is an excellent movie here about the birth of the Mercury Theater and about its mad mother-father-god and about the mere mortals in that god's thrall. And then there's a soggy, cliché-ridden coming-of-age story that the interesting story revolves around: about the callow boy whipped into a maelstrom of forces beyond his ken, the theater, betrayal, love. I mean, come on: what's the point of Zac Efron being at the center of any story not aimed at 13-year-olds?

The unknowns Christian McKay and James Tupper are convincing as Welles and Jo Cotten, though Eddie Marsan, always terrific in Eddie Marsanish roles, is just far too Eddie Marsan to be a believable John Houseman--when he goes for haughty indignity, he rises only as far as petulance.

Another splendid performance by Claire Danes, who, would you believe, turned 30 this year and actually has if not lines at least creases in her face that finally prove she's no longer a teenager? In fact, her perpetual teen status beautifully offsets her role here as the sharkishly ambitious faux-ingenue who devours the genuinely ingenuous Efron character. It is really time for her to get an honest-to-god movie-carrying, larger-than-life role.

Oh, one more thing: wonderful soundtrack, and a generally fine job of putting us in 1937.

Clusterflock

The Birds

(1963)

What keeps this from being topnotch Hitch? Well, there's Rod Taylor, of course--a 34-year-old poor man's Cary Grant, who would have been perfect in the day but who had by this time gone and gotten himself 59.

I used to think Tippi Hedren was an impediment, but I've rather come around on her. The hairstyle is awful, of course, but she can't help its having been 1963. And she's no actor, really, but acting isn't called for in the role so much as a wounded hauteur, which she handles nicely.

The real problem is that the story, as genuinely frightening as it is, simply has no momentum: birds attack, they stop; birds attack again, they stop again; birds mass, then attack, then stop. Rinse and repeat. On the other hand, that lack of momentum may be the key to one element that is top notch, the inconclusive conclusion.

One thing I've noticed at least the past couple of times I've seen this is how Blanche DuBois-esque the traumatized Melanie (Hedren) is in the final scene, when being guided past the massing birds to her car. This is particularly poignant in that she's being guided by Jessica Tandy, who created the role on Broadway. And in another small-world touch, do you suppose Hedren, in her first starring role, asked to have the character share a given name with her 6-year-old daughter with Peter Griffith? There's no Melanie in Daphne du Maurier's source story.

Japanese steel

Kill Bill: Vol. 1

(2003)

Noticed in end credits: Uma's stunt double is Kiwi Zoë Bell, who plays stunt woman Zoë Bell in Death Proof. This was her first work in a feature film.

When this came out, I incautiously pronounced it Tarantino's best yet and committed to Vol. 2 and the combined DVD that I was sure would follow, with additional footage. Well, in the first place, the notion that this is better than Pulp Fiction is just silly. In the second place, Vol. 2 turned out to be a sizable disappointment.

Still, this is pretty damned good, if for nothing else than the exhilarating joy of females kicking ass. Which, of course, has become a Taratino theme, after early justifiable criticism of the short shrift female characters got in his films, when they were there at all.

No more unnecessary jumps

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Crit

Golly, this is one weird, hilarious Werner Herzog film. How weird? Well, Nic Cage apparently was given over-the-top carte blanche, yet if anything, his performance is a tad too restrained for the film. Just a tad.

Cage, like Harvey Keitel in the original, plays, well, a bad lieutenant, one not altogether bereft of a moral code, but one who has higher priorities than right behavior, mainly cadging heroin and cocaine from the precinct evidence room. The scene with the clearest parallel in Bad Lieutenant, a power-play shakedown of callow upper-class party kids, may be even creepier than its analogue, and that, as my friend who grew up just a few crack-vials' throws from New Orleans would say, is tall cotton.

There is one critical difference between that film and this one, and I'm not talking about the iguana hallucinations. (To be clear: that's hallucinations by a human of iguanas that aren't there, not hallucinations by iguanas.) But if I told you what the critical difference is, then I'd have to, I don't know, plant evidence with your DNA on it at a murder scene or something. Just see the damn movie. Maybe get high first.

Oh, but not so high that you can't answer this quiz question afterward: what obvious error occurs in the presentation of Terry's climactic sports bet (with a bookie played by the always-good-to-see Brad Dourif, by the way)? (Answer below in invisible ink.)

Terry has fixed the star running back for "Louisiana," the nonexistent university to which the cop is devoted, to make sure his team doesn't cover a 6-point spread. That makes sense if Terry is going to bet on Texas in the game, but in fact, when he lays down the bet, he clearly tells his bookie "on Louisiana." I thought maybe it was supposed to be his error, which would have a payoff later when he wins a bet he thought he'd lost, or vice versa, and though he does indeed win a bet he thought he'd lost, that's not why, and he is paid off as if he had bet against Louisiana. Oops.

The whole vast configuration of things

It's a Wonderful Life

(1946)

Huh! I am surprised to see that last year I had the same idea for the post title, and further surprised to see that last year I got the quotation wrong.

What I noticed this year that I don't recall ever noticing before: it's obvious that Mary Hatch's wish when she breaks the glass in the old house is that George's plans for his life should be fucked in favor of hers, but did I ever realize before that the immediate effect is to kill Peter Bailey? He must have his fatal stroke at just about the moment she flings her rock. Jesus, she's Medea! If George had run off to New York w/ Violet, we can pretty much guess what would have happened to the kids.

All in the family

Sabrina

(1954)

Well, that's interesting: one character who's not transparent, whose motivations are ambiguous, and he's played by Bogart.

Hepburn, 25 and in her second starring role, is every bit as irresistible as advertised, and the film follows her meekly, but the denouement is no less unbelievable for that.

Sam I am not

Brothers

Crit

Funny what feelings films inspire. This one gave me a thought I don't remember having before: that it is really a good thing that I have only one child, because I am a born comparer, a born weigher, and if I'd had two children, how would I have avoided making one feel second-best?

Yes, the original was an amazing film, but this one stands up quite nicely, thank you, with moving, convincing performances across the board, the most surprising by 10-year-old Bailee Madison. The one performance that isn't quite what it might be is the location: in the original, dark, cold Denmark is a character in its own right, making the sads sadder and the scaries scarier. Here the locale is Minnesota, inexplicably played by New Mexico, which sometimes feels a bit like a stunt double.

Trailers

• Season of the Witch--Huh--who'da thunk: Nic Cage in a schlockfest!
• Crazy Heart--Lotsa Oscar buzz for Jeff Bridges, but the trailer looks pretty déjà vu.
• Greenberg--Noah Baumbach directs his own script (w/ a story contribution by Jennifer Jason Leigh) about a 40ish slacker (Ben Stiller). In other words, hell, yeah!
• From Paris with Love--Is it just me, or does Travolta's skinhead look so huge that you think he must have a full head of hair under a cap? Anyway, brainless-looking action pic, with Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the in-over-his-head sidekick.
  

Insect or man, death should always be painless

Psycho

(1960)

Yes, this is a great oddball suspenser, the mother of all slasher films, but my favorite part is tucked away early in Marian's flight, when she imagines dialogue from Sam, her boss, her coworker, the lecherous client she has ripped off, the used-car dealer, the state trooper . . . Marian knows the people in her life, even those in her life only momentarily, and moreover she knows people, and how people think and talk. She has already demonstrated a flair for language ("Are you unhappy?" "Not inordinately"), and it seems clear to me that if she can escape the mess she's gotten herself into without a long prison term or some other disaster, she has a real future as a novelist.

Two civilized countries fighting over a ball

Phorpa (The Cup)

(2000)

Just an excuse to talk about today's World Cup draw and the building tension and excitement of the 27-week countdown to 11 June? Well, maybe a little.

But also a delightful little slice of life of Tibetan Buddhists in exile in a monastery in India. It's July 1998, and the host team, with golden veterans like Zinedine Zidane, Patrick Vieira, and Manu Petit, as well as a young, innocent striker named Thierry Henry, is on its way to its first and so far only World Cup championship. A young troublemaking monk cajoles some mates to sneak out to watch the matches on TV at a public house, and eventually prevails upon the abbot to let them rent a set and a satellite dish for the final.

The acting and production values are raw, but the ambience is as appealing as a saffron robe.

Dustin' crops where there ain't no crops

North by Northwest

(1959)

I revise my longtime complaint about a factual error: it's not Lake Erie we're implausibly supposed to be looking at on portside of a westbound train; it's the Hudson River that we're seeing for an implausibly long stretch of time. (I've never taken a train upstate from NYC, so I don't know whether the Hudson is really to the west, but I'm willing to stipulate that.)

Also, as he's preparing to get on the plane, Vandamm (James Mason) gives Leonard (Martin Landau) a message for "your knife-throwing friend" (Adam Williams), who is standing right there.

But hey, might as well complain that that Indiana farmer Thornhill (Cary Grant) meets at the bus stop has an inexplicable New England accent or that Eva Marie Saint can't actually act. A few imperfections don't keep this from being Hitchcock's most nearly perfect film, right down to the song playing when Roger first enters the Plaza (listen for it).

Oh, but it didn't have a perfect trailer: I had that on while opening my wine and getting my pizza ready, and I noticed that it gives away the mystery of George Kaplan, which you're not supposed to find out about until 40 minutes in.

The shirt smelled of anger

The Messenger

Crit

Another good Iraq War film unlikely to be much seen. Woody Harrelson, god love him, pretty much just plays Woody Harrelson again, and some of the dialogue comes from the Army/Navy Surplus store, but Ben Foster shows some chops--particularly the ability to work effectively with silence--that we haven't seen before.

Arrrrrr!

Jamaica Inn

(1939)

The movies' best year + one of the movies' best directors = another bland period piece, this one about 19th-century wreckers on the Cornish coast, who lure ships onto the rocks, kill all the survivors, and divvy up the booty. Notable as the first starring role for Maureen O'Hara (playing, guess what?--a spunky young Irish lass!)

One

Magnolia

(1999)

Following up my new favorite Wes Anderson film with my old favorite P. T. Anderson film, and what do I see but what appears to be Wes's (and Mr. Fox's) brown corduroy jacket on John C. Reilly?

Whether you go for the symphonic structure or the deconstruction of "coincidence" or the frogstorm, can you name a single actor in this film, from the always great Reilly and Bill Macy and My Future Wife Julie (as I now call her) Moore to the sometimes suspect Tom Cruise and the really-a-magician-not-an-actor Ricky Jay, who does not give the performance of his or her career here? OK, Felicity Huffman and Michael Murphy, I'll give you those two. But what a repertory of tours de force. Moore's scene at the pharmacy counter is a moment that breaks my heart from a distance, and every time I see it again, I'm stunned to discover that if anything, I've underrated it.

One of the great films of my time as an easterner.

Oh, and another thing: why do we see so damned little of Melora Walters? I guess I need to catch up on Big Love.

What the cuss?

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Crit

Step aside, The Royal Tenenbaums, there's a new favorite Wes Anderson film on the block.

As with Where the Wild Things Are, it's hard to know exactly who the audience is for this movie ostensibly but not really made for kids. But unlike the sad, sad, Wild Things, this is a cussin' laugh fest, even as it tackles issues well above the 8-year-old's pay grade. The stop-action animation is very good, but the long-shot tunneling shots--a bit reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's Python stuff on the rare occasions he didn't overcook it--is just berserkly funny. Brilliant.

Trailers

• Tooth Fairy--Yes, I love Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, but this looks pretty disastrous, except perhaps when compared with . . .
• Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

Bleed on me

Raging Bull

(1980)

What better way to greet the holiday season that by watching two guys just whale the living shit out of each other?

I don't know what to say about this film. I mean, I think I get it. Intellectually, I recognize the magnificence of the sort of opera-cum-Greek tragedy that Scorsese has made from the life of a violent, dimwitted, and psychotically jealous man, and I recognize De Niro's achievement, including the physically harmful lengths to which he went to become Jake LaMotta.

I just don't find myself caring about his story as much as, say, about Travis Bickle's. Not sure why not; just don't.

Feels good to be a gangsta

Office Space

(1999)

One of those films that, over the (only 10, after all) years, I had been multiply accosted with the incredulous "You've never see ________ ??!!!?" trope. OK, so now I have, and I can see the appeal, especially for young people relatively new to the realization that omigod, working at a job I don't like and often hate is my fate for the rest . . . of . . . my . . . fucking . . . LIFE!!! I'm fortunate to hate my job only rarely and actually like it sometimes, and in any case, the rest of my fucking life isn't nearly as long as theirs, so I find it amusing but hardly life changing. Provides further evidence, if any was needed, that, in the right vehicle, Jennifer Aniston is one of the best comic actors of her generation.

True lies

The Yes Men Fix the World

Crit

My first thought when I discovered that these guys could continue to punk greedy corporations even after showing their faces a few years ago in The Yes Men was "Don't these corporate yahoos go to kneejerk liberal documentaries in the art houses?" Well, astonishing though it may seem, apparently they don't.

Dow, Halliburton, and HUD are the deserving punkees this time, and even the liberals' newsletter, aka the New York Times, gets a poke (motto atop fake front page: "All the news we hope to print"). Like the boys themselves (ostensibly real names Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno), I have little faith that they actually can fix even a little bit of the world, but I'm sure glad they're trying. And I'm glad that, like their stylistic godfather Michael Moore, they can make me laugh while doing it.

Bronson

Crit

Some men are born to violence, some men achieve violence, and some men have violence thrust upon them. Charlie Bronsen, né Mickey Peterson, is a bit of all three in Nicolas Winding Refn's beautifully loopy bash-o-pic of England's Most Famous/Violent Prisoner, who makes surreal art with bare knuckles. Owes a lot to A Clockwork Orange, but owes even more to the bravura performance by Tom Hardy, who appears in virtually every scene--about half of them smeared with blood and/or body paint--and does everything but cover Sid Vicious covering Paul Anka's "My Way."

Dark roots

Vertigo

(1958)

Hey, so how many Hitchcock movies for me is this in the past year or so? Hang on a sec . . .

Looks like 31, dating back to Mr. and Mrs. Smith about a year ago, before I'd decided to watch all the Hitch I could this year. This is one of the ones I know best, and it's one of the most nearly perfect (though I wouldn't have fallen for the scam with Kim Novak as the bait; she always seems kinda horsey to me; then again, James Stewart's makeup makes him look at least a decade past his actual 50 years).

Hitch often gets credit from people who haven't really paid attention to It's a Wonderful Life for discovering the darkness in Stewart. As anyone who paid attention to the previous sentence knows, that's not the case, but geez, he's creepy here. Gets what he deserves, yo.

Bonus also for one of the best Bernard Herrmann scores and one of the best Saul Bass title sequences.

Gonna need a bigger budget

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

(2003)

OK, students who claim to love film, your assignment is to watch (either in a 3-hour chunk, or 1 hour at a time, courtesy of the IFC Channel, as I did over the past 3 weeks), A Decade Under the Influence, then this.

Frankly, I don't know what possessed me to imagine that there would be little overlap between these two takes on American film at the moment when the studio system went pfffffft!, but hey, guess what: there's little overlap between these two takes, etc.

Decade is more dedicated to the art; Riders hits much harder on the sex and drugs and other excesses (split-screen Polly Platt-Cybill Shepherd catfight, anyone? Marty boning Liza?? Seriously?!? Dennis Hopper [no predication required]? And can I just say that I've fallen in love w/ Margot Kidder all over again? Oh, and that I've just put You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again in my Amazon Shopping Cart?

Anyway, if you can watch these documentaries and not wonder why it has been so long since you've watched Harold and Maude or Mean Streets, then what are you even doing at this blog?

No Happy Meal

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

Crit

As with Lars von Trier's Antichrist, which I took a pass on for its 2-week downtown run, I was resistant to this one because I feared it wouldn't give me enough back to compensate me for how lousy I'd feel coming out. It finally took a 24-for-27 Rotten Tomatoes Top Critics consensus to get me to the theater, and I gotta say, sometimes democracy is a very good idea.

Is it unrelentingly hellish? Pretty much, yeah; there's a little relenting, such as when the title character (played by the never-acted-before Gabourey Sidibe, who, at the risk of parroting even the 3 critics who didn't like the film, is remarkable) asks the social worker played by Mariah Carey (and who the hell knew she could act?) the question that has followed her for her whole career, "What kind of color are you, anyway?" But not very damned much relenting (though bizarrely, it got a whole lot of laughs at the most squirmy moments from a sizable segment of a sizable audience; would be interesting, but perhaps not safe, to converse with the people who thought it was a comedy).

But what makes it bearable--yes, even (must . . . steel . . . self . . . to . . . use . . . word) uplifting, is that the humanity relents even less than the hellishness. Great, believable performances across the board, led by Mo'Nique as the villain of the piece for whom your heart finally breaks; if she doesn't win every supporting actress award available, God didn't make pigs' feet and collards.

Speaking of which, I can sympathize with the protest that the film trades upon a host of ghetto stereotypes, but "trades upon" is not the same as "exploits." The bottom line is that the film takes no prisoners, and if that's not something to go to the movies for, what is? A teenage vampire abstinence flick?

Trailer

• Brothers--Oh, right! Just realized when I was grabbing the IMDb link why this looks so familiar! It's a remake of the gripping 2004 Danish film Brødre, directed by Susanne Bier. This one is directed by Jim Sheridan (who, omigod, has a production of I, Claudius in production!) and stars Natalie Portman as the short side of the fraternal triangle, with Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal finally cast as the brothers we've thought they looked like all along. Question is, can you make this work without Denmark, which was a dark, cold character in the original.
  

Zed's dead, baby

Pulp Fiction

(1994)

So, what's your favorite continuity error? Mine is the moment when the guy comes out of the bathroom w/ the hand cannon, intent on blowing away Jules and Vincent, who have just blown away Brett (for the second time). Before the guy pulls the trigger, check out the wall behind our boys.

But I didn't start noticing stuff like that until I'd seen it 5 or 6 times and pretty much had it memorized, and when I did, that was just one more pleasure I could count on.

El amigo mejor del hombre

Amores Perros

(2000)

Got a better directorial debut for the decade about to end? I can't think offhand of one to beat it since that of Tarantino, to whom González Iñárritu owes a lot here, especially in the final segment (though perhaps not the most heartbreaking scene in that part).

It had been 5 years since I'd last watched this, and I had to screen it again because this week someone asked me about one of the 3 segments, which I remembered vividly but didn't associate w/ this film until Jennie Tonic pointed me to it. How I could remember so much about the segment but not know that it came from one of my favorite films of recent years is a mystery of the mid-50s mind, I guess. Best not to think about it too much.

But hey, here's a Q for someone who knows Mexico City: is there a skyscraper there that could be mistaken at a distance for the Empire State Building? Because in the breakneck opening sequence and again in the reprise of that sequence, we get a long shot of something that looks very ESBish. Is this a directorial joke or a real local landmark?

The wrong key

Dial M for Murder

(1954)

Hey, this is a lot better than I remembered. Yes, it depends on an implausible clockwork plot, but you say that as if it were a bad thing. Robert Cummings spends most of his time trying to play James Stewart, who would indeed have been a better choice for the role, but there's a nice dynamic of guilt for the relatively innocent parties that helps us suspend our disbelief. Ray Milland is an appropriately oily villain, and Grace Kelly is, well, Grace Kelly. (She would have been 80 yesterday, by the way.)

And let's talk about John Williams, excellent here and in The Paradine Case and To Catch a Thief, though this is the first time I've given him any credit. A born Brit-police-inspector-on-film.

A film that not only could not be made now, when phones can go anywhere, but couldn't even have been made ten years later, when everyone had an extension phones in the bedroom.

Un altro film senza speranza

Otto e mezzo (8½)

(1963)

This is all kinds of weird, dude, but it's beautiful, too. As the man says, sometimes you just have to let art wash over you. Marcello Mastroianni plays a version of Federico Fellini, struggling to put together a film from bits and pieces of his past and present. But that's like saying Moby-Dick is about a guy chasing a whale. As always, everything boils surreally down to sex, music (mind-blowing bricolage of a score by Nino Rota), and Catholicism.

What-evah!

The Man Who Knew Too Much

(1956)

OK, I'll admit: it may be my visceral abhorrence of Doris Day and my intense hatred for that fucking song-no-don't-make-me-listen-to-it-again-arrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Please! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!!!!!!!!!

OK, I'm better now. As I was saying, I have points of resistance to this film that are perhaps not strictly critically objective. Still, I think even beyond that, it's a rather gimmicky mishmash, clearly inferior to the original version.

One interesting element: Bernard Herrmann in front of the camera for the only time, conducting the London Philharmonic.

Bless the beasts and the children

The Men Who Stare at Goats

Crit

Too goofy to be taken seriously, not consistently funny enough to be a completely satisfying hoot.
Ewan McGregor seems uncertain what movie he's in (understandable, given its schizoid character), but Clooney, Bridges, and Spacey soldier on admirably, and more successfully than the material deserves. And there are a lot of goats.

An Education

Crit

From the stills I'd seen, I was concerned that 20-something Carey Mulligan wouldn't convince me of her sixteenness, in a film where her sixteenness is crucial. Not to worry: she is spot-on throughout as the unusually-sophisticated-but-still-16-16 Jenny, and even as the answer to her key dilemma is painfully obvious to us, we can see (and feel) why it's not for her. And why she manages to blink out all the danger flares that flash whenever David (Peter Sarsgaard, perfectly cast) flips the vulnerable grin switch.

One thing, though: the event that finally tells her (and us) why it is necessary to run away as fast as her field-hockey-fit legs can carry her is a really clumsy bit of plotting that would get red-penciled in Screenwriting 100. Uh-uh. Would. Not. Happen.

Trailers

• A Single Man--Funny, a gay friend of mine knows My Future Wife Julianne Moore ("Julie," he calls her) and pronounces her sometimes too beautiful to carry on a conversation with. So you can sympathize with Colin Firth's character, who, though gay, is apparently expected to carry on more than a conversation with her here. Maybe "sympathize" isn't the right word.
  
• Bronson--Gosh. It sure doesn't look boring.
• The Crazies--I never thought I'd say this, but maybe it's time to let zombies rest for a while.