Thicker than water

Shadow of a Doubt

(1943)

Hitchcock's favorite Hitchcock film is not mine, but I certainly have a much fuller appreciation of it--and of Teresa Wright, who is not the callow little simp I remembered--this time around than the last. Unusual maintenance of suspense in a context where you can't be altogether certain of what you're in suspense of.

Wonderfully fey performance by Hume Cronyn, whose persistent uninvited appearances in the Newton household have a useful payoff.

Sorceror's apprentice

Is Anybody There?

Crit

I seem to say this a lot: thoroughly predictable, overly sentimental, but redeemed by the remarkable performances of _______ and _______. This time fill in the blanks with Michael Caine as the guiltily bereaved codger and formerly Amazing magician Clarence and Bill Milner as the death-obsessed young loner Edward, oppressed by having to live in an old-folks' home (and there's no point euphemizing it to "retirement community" or "managed-care facility"--it's an old-folks' home). The two begin as mutual antagonists, but then . . . oh, I don't want to spoil it for you. But suffice it to say that growth and learning ensue.

Milner, who also starred in Son of Rambow, is such a dead ringer for Nicholas Hoult that I thought they must be the vanguard of an English family of Culkins.

Sugar-free Red Bull

Death Proof

(2007)

I don't know whether women really talk like this when they're alone together, but I sure would like to think so. As for whether they really drive this fast and take chances like this, well, that's really Zoë Bell's job.

The better half of Grindhouse holds up well, though in its uncut version it plays maybe 10 minutes too long. One of the most interesting things about it remains the structure, which teases us for 50 minutes into expecting a different movie with a different cast, then kills that cast off without a second thought. No problem: the second cast is at least as engaging, especially Tracie Thoms and the real Rosario Dawson. And, of course, as the evil center that makes everything work, Kurt Russell.

Just whistling Dixie

CSA: Confederate States of America

(2005)

A terrifically promising start as a Ken Burns-style counterfactual documentary based on the premise of the other side's having won the War Between the--er, rather, the War of Northern Aggression. Unfortunately, the 90-minute film has only about 15 excellent minutes, plus a lot of painfully obvious commercials, news spots, and politically commentary. Worth a look for the concept, but ultimately a member of the I Wanted to Like It More Than I Did club.

Truth will set you free

American Violet

Crit

Well, OK, look: sometimes, things really are black and white, good and evil, and pathological racism is as good a place to look as any. A committed performance by Nicole Beharie as a single mother wrongly charged with drug trafficking; a very strange performance by Tim Blake Nelson, who, after several roles as a dim rural southerner, seems uncomfortable as a Jewish ACLU lawyer; and a grounding performance by Will Patton, a lawyer who takes Dee's case even though he has to live in the white Texas community.

My first recollection of Patton is as the psychotic bodyguard in No Way Out; he has aged well, with a beautiful small role in Wendy and Lucy as well as this one.

Trailers

These are actually from the sports movie last week; forgot to record them:

• Rudo y Cursi--Are you kidding me? The stars of Y tu mamá también in a soccer movie produced by Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Guillermo del Toro? I couldn't be inner.
• Tyson--Documentary by James Toback, looks remarkable.
  

I'd rather be blind

Gin gwai (The eye)

(2002)

First saw this on an M4, and I'm glad to report that my initial assessment was accurate: for eighty minutes or so, this is an exceptionally good example of the atmospheric creepie genre, and then suddenly in the final reel it lurches into Hiroshima/Dresden/Trang Bang apocalypse territory. Pang Brothers, as they are credited (Oxide Pang Chun and Danny Pang) direct Lee Sin-Je, utterly convincing as a young woman, blind since age two, who after corneal transplants sees not only dead people but the mouthless Grim Reaper himself. The only low mark I would give the film is for the completely unnecessary love story.

NB: don't confuse this either with its two sequels or the English-language remake (starring Jessica Alba, fer crissakes).

Jardín de los sueños

Sugar

Crit

Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, the husband-wife creators of Half Nelson, combine baseball and immigrant mythologies without ever striking a clichéd note. Algenis Pérez Soto, a nonactor player who really is from San Pedro de Macoris, perfectly conveys the eroding confidence of a player who has never failed before being dropped into a different baseball world and, not incidentally, small-town Iowa. And even we immigrants from that region can relate to his difficulties as a first-time MetroCard user. Pay close attention to the number he wears the last time we see him in uniform.

I think, though I haven't been able to establish for certain, that the first-time actor who plays Álvarez and was the film's baseball consultant, is the same José Rijo who pitched, sometimes brilliantly, for the Reds in the late '80s and early '90s.

L'appartement

Irma La Douce

(1963)

Billy Wilder, Shirley MacLain, and Jack Lemmon together again, but this time it's just tiresome, and I don't think it was because I was already tired. And why does it have to be so long? And why do all those Parisians talk like Americans?

Was David O. Selznick crazy?

Real Life

(1979)

Albert Brooks's directorial debut, an intermittently funny An American Family-style faux doc,the slow and unsuccessful parts of which are all redeemed by one of the most brilliant endings in cinema history.

The fire next time

Easter weekend H6

That's H as in Hitchcock: a freebie (well, except for the popcorn) rainy-day film festival in my own bunker, part of the austerity campaign to pay for my Mets tickets.

The 39 Steps

(1935)

Inexplicably, I didn't find this wonderful when I first saw (or maybe even second--can't remember whether this was its second or third chance), but I've gotten over that bit of myopia. Donat is a perfect "wrong man," in a film that looks ahead in ways both thematic and logistical (spies spiriting some mysterious state secret from the country, a knife in the back inspiring a train trip on which the [eventual] love interest is encountered and the police intrude) to my favorite Hitch, North by Northwest. If anything, this is even less logical and more twisted, with a series of love-interest McGuffins, as well as the state-secret one: the sequence with the repressed Scottish farm wife is as sad in its sum and its conclusion as anything Hitchcock ever gave us. And then it's gone: get over it.

Young and Innocent

(1937)

Now, this is a mystery: I would have confidently listed this as a Hitchcock film I'd never seen, but from the first moments, I recognized that I had indeed seen it, and in recent years. But I have no idea under what circumstances: I certainly didn't Netflix it or see it on a revival-house screen, and it has been ages since I would have sat down in front of the TV and started watching a movie unplanned.

In any case, another good if not great example of the wrong man escaping the police and going on the run to find the evidence to clear himself, in the company of a young woman whose mistrust is clearly temporary. Nice twist here is that her father is the chief constable. Also interesting is that the film gives us one of the few Hitchcockian acknowledgments of economic conditions of the era.

Maybe it was that postdivorce stretch when I taped a few films from TCM? I remember hitting Woody Allen heavily, but maybe there was some Hitch too. That would be about right chronologically--but maybe it's best just to keep it a mystery.

The Lady Vanishes

(1938)

This was the first pre-Hollywood-era Hitchcock film I ever saw, and it remains one of my favorites, from the laughably fake opening miniature set to Dame May Whitty's laughably daft spy to the laughably English cricket fans played by Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford to the laughable love match between Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood. In short, Hitchcockian perfection in terms of letting the laughs rise above the suspense.

Rebecca

(1940)

Equal parts mystery and horror film, with Judith Anderson's Mrs. Danvers one of cinema's all-time scariest monsters. Olivier is a force of nature early, sweeping the round-shouldered, plainly beautiful, unnamed character of Joan Fontaine off her feet, then being gradually sucked into the vortex left by the first Mrs. De Winter's sinking boat. A long time since I've seen this film, which was long unavailable on DVD; probably won't ever be as long again.

Foreign Correspondent

(1940)

Awkward, sprawling, confused political suspenser-turned-actioner and, finally, shameless call to American arms. McCrea is fine doing McCrea-type false-bravado charm, less so as the hero of a who-do-you-trust spy story. Robert Benchley added dialogue and appears as . . . well, Robert Benchley.

Saboteur

(1942)

Speaking of the Algonquin Round Table, Dorothy Parker is one of three credited screenwriters here, but I defy anyone to find any Parkeresque bite in this goopy collection of didactic patriotic speechifying. Robert Cummings fails miserably in his attempt to be James Stewart, and Priscilla Lane is doomed to be Priscilla Lane, whoever that is, and the whole thing is just an ordeal of patience, a wait for the climactic Statue of Liberty sequence, which, frankly, is itself rather anticlimactic. Ugh; never again.

Lucky bastard

Tom Jones

(1963)

First time I saw this was as a senior in high school, fall of '69, an English class assignment, which I fulfilled while visiting my great-aunt in San Antonio.

It's gotta be hard to do picaresque on film--can you think of another example as good? E.g., why don't we have a memorable film of Don Quixote?

Nobody gets to come

This Film Is Not Yet Rated

(2006)

Director Kirby Dick is shocked, shocked, to learn that the MPAA ratings board and appeals board are anonymous star chambers, concerned more with sex than with violence. As part of the choir, I don't mind the sermon, but I didn't really learn anything I wasn't pretty sure of already.

Candlesticks always make a nice gift

Bull Durham

(1988)

After a field trip to my team's new home in Flushing, what else could I choose to watch?

I reconsecrated myself to God's game two springs ago, after several years of lukewarm fandom, and even though my team has stomped on my hopes each of the past two Septembers, I'm as excited about the new season as when I was a kid. Hell, as I've already mentioned, baseball is even going to cut into my moviegoing this season--no greater love . . .

The right wrong man

Blackmail

(1929)

Another wonderful early Hitch: the guilty leading lady, as in Sabotage, and the climactic chase to the top of a monument, as in Saboteur, plus the perverse humor characteristic of Hitchcock from A to Z.

His first talkie, and broadly overacted, as was the style of the day, but at its best when it seems a silent, as in the first eight minutes and much of the late going, like the chase sequence through the British Museum. A very nearly great film.

Big-ass panda

Adventureland

Crit

A film ill-served by it's teenflick-looking trailer, this is another entry in what seems to be a growing subgenre of The Graduate-for-Gen X (except that it's set in 1987, and the "older woman" isn't really older, though equally inappropriate). Two of my favorite young actors star: Jesse Eisenberg and the skewed beauty Kristen Stewart. Smart and touching, if only marginally fresher than the corn dogs left unrefrigerated since yesterday morning.

Trailers

• Dance Flick--Oh, golly, no.
• The Proposal--Saw a shorter version of this earlier, but apparently was so horrified that I put it out of my mind before getting home. Sandra Bullock plays harriden boss, Ryan Reynolds her put-upon assistant. When her visa is threatened (she's Canadian), she creates the fiction of an impending wedding, and, gosh, well, hilarity just has to ensue, doesn't it? Amd maybe true romance too, you think? Was this one of those French sex farces first? Ooooh, ugh. And while we're on the subject, can someone explain Reynolds's appeal? He has a pivotal role as inappropriate heartthrob in Adventureland as well, and I'm at a loss as to whence derives the throb.

Twenty dwarves

Bugsy

(1991)

Visionaries have always had it tough, haven't they? Beatty, always at his best as a lovable murderer, is equal parts charm and terror as the man who invented Las Vegas, while his soon-to-be wife is still working on her acting chops. Anyway, it's good to see a story that focuses on Jewish mobsters instead of letting the Italians have all the fun.

Do you believe?

The Great Buck Howard

Crit

It's a metafilm: John Malkovich, who plays an Amazing Kreskinesque mentalist reduced to playing Bakersfield, has himself been reduced to giving life to cinematic Bakersfields like this: a perfectly OK movie that has a certain small charm despite its scaffold of clichés and its utter predictability, but which I'll have forgotten in a week and would already have forgotten but for Malkovich's ability to turn weak, repeated comic set pieces--Buck shakes hands vigorously enough to separate shoulders; Buck declares his love for every town he plays without ever actually naming the town; Buck pitches a hissy when he doesn't get his way--into something that makes you, if only briefly, give a shit.

Excuse me if I seem grumpy, but two people were laid off and five others had their hours cut this week at my workplace--friends of mine who did their jobs well--and I'm getting a little tired of filmmakers mailing it in. If you can't tickle me or frighten me or sicken me or make me think, why are you wasting my time?