Avez-vous bourbon?

To Catch a Thief

(1954)

Apparently Alfred Hitchcock lured Cary Grant out of retirement with Grace Kelly and the French Riviera. Uh, yeah, that would do it for me.

Guy walks into a confessional . . .

I Confess

(1953)

When I was a little Catholic, way back when, we thought it was awesome that the priest couldn't tell the police anything you told him in confession. Of course, we didn't realize at the time (or, put another way, the priests and nuns didn't bother to tell us) that the same was true not only of rabbis and Protestant ministers ("non-Catholics," as they were called) but even of purely secular lawyers.

Moreover, it didn't occur to even the most warped of us (none of us being as warped as Hitchcock) that if you played your cards right, not only could you commit a heinous crime and get absolution (thus eliminating any consequences in the next life) and protection from the law (ditto this life), but you could actually pin the crime on the poor clerical sap who heard your confession. Is this a great religion or what?

Speaking of warped, given what happens to her, how sick is it that the killer's wife is called Alma, which is, of course, the name of the director's wife?

Six feet under

The Trouble with Harry

(1955)

Oh, this is just completely silly, but that would be fine if John Forsythe weren't as unappealing a leading man as Hitchcock was ever saddled with. Still, the debut of Shirley MacLaine--particularly her giggly take when the Forsythe character proposes to her Jennifer Rogers--almost makes it worthwhile. Oh: that and the gorgeous Technicolor Vermont fall foliage.

Guy walks into a synagogue . . .

The Damned United

Crit

Ah, football footage from before my football time, a wonderful performance by Michael Sheen as the obsessive, hubris-overwhelmed manager Brian Clough, and support from the usual Brit character-actor suspects: Timothy Spall, Colm Meaney, Jim Broadbent. Great fun, and a perfectly straightforward narrative. Which was a good brain-rest ahead of . . .

A Serious Man

Crit

I don't know what the hell to make of this, except that I'm glad to have seen it. Job redux (with an inexplicable opening parable that I suppose can be said to set a mood of ambiguity, but that's kind of a stretch), wherein God's earthly representatives essentially answer all the eternal eternal questions with "don't ask," and only Grace Slick really seems to have a bead on the truth. A long, bizarre, entertaining shaggy Jew story.

Trailers

• Los abrazos rotos (Broken embraces)--New Pedro, so yes, absolutely. Can't see Penélope Cruz without thinking of a friend and former colleague who referred to her as "that little troll."
• Babies--Can't find it on IMDb, but it's about uh . . . babies, 4 of them, from 4 far-flung parts of the globe.
• Up in the Air--Not a huge Jason Reitman fan, but: Clooney.
  

Mr. Thorwald's neighborhood

Rear Window

(1954)

Unusual among Hitchcock's films for posing moral and ethical questions that might actually pertain to viewers' lives (as opposed to "should you kill your spouse and chop the body up into small pieces?"): where does curiosity become voyeurism? is voyeurism in service of right still creepy? and how much right does one half of a couple to make the other half change? Thankfully, none of these questions gets a definitive answer (though the film does come down, if without much gusto, on the side of not killing and dismembering one's spouse).

The evil of banality

Paranormal Activity

Crit

Geez, this sure puts the occasional rat incursion in perspective.

Went to see what all the fuss is about, and I'm damned if I know. I guess I'd have to acknowledge that it's a well-crafted creeper: once the camera-running-overnight-in-bedroom trope is established, we can't help but study the frame--the doorway to the hall and stairs down, the bedsheets--to see what the next goof is going to be, but with the exception of a couple of good funhouse shocks and two genuinely chilling moments, a goof is mostly what it is, and a clichéd one. And matters aren't helped by the thoroughgoing blandness of the female half of the couple, and the nails-on-chalkboard annoyingness of the male. After a while you're not only down with the inevitability of their destruction by the demon, you can't wait.

Oh, one original bit, at least in my experience: the haunting is not of the house but of the person, so wherever she goes, her demon is Mary's-little-lambish. Only a lot more aggressive.

Trailers

• Daybreakers--A world where vampires are in the overwhelming majority, and they're still working on that "true blood" product.
  

No biz like show biz

Stage Fright

(1950)

Well, come on: Dietrich asked in the first few scenes to say "quarrel" and "au revoir," and then later we get to hear her sing Cole Porter's "Laziest Gal in Town"? Jane Wyman showing comic chops that, who knew? And Alastair Sim (his name misspelled in the credits!) auditioning for his Role of a Lifetime a year later. Oh, and a screenplay by Whitfield Cook (who also worked on Strangers on a Train the next year, here working from an adaptation by Alma Reville [Mrs. Hitch] of a novel by the prolific if obscure Selwyn Jepson) that is about as good as in any Hitchcock film (e.g., the romantic semi-dialogue between Wyman and Michael Wilding in the back of a moving car). A wonderful surprise.

Groening imitates art

Strangers on a Train

(1951)

Whoa, how weird is this: the movie ends, and I tune into Fox thinking I'll see what's happening in the baseball playoffs, but there instead, in black and white, are Lisa and Bart on a (playground) merry-go-round, with Lisa wielding a knife trying to get Bart to confess to a murder. Yep--it's the first segment of The Simpsons' Halloween show, and when I rewind it (don'tcha love the DVR?), I find that while it contains a medley of Bernard Herrmann music and a sampler of Hitchcockian moments, the key source text is indeed Strangers on a Train. Spooky or what?

Anyway, I'm thinking this is as close as there is to a flawlessly plotted Hitchcock film, with Raymond Chandler and Ben Hecht contributing to the screenplay adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel. There's nothing I'd change about the film except for the grotesquely inappropriate romantic lead, Farley Granger. But that's more than balanced by the best role daddy ever gave Patricia Hitchcock, absolutely perfect as the love interest's mousy and disarmingly frank sister.

Oh, but I was way off base w/ the notion earlier today about the carousel music: it's the standard "And the Band Played On"--nothing in common with what I heard earlier today save the waltz tempo.

Reduced-laugh diet

Zombieland

Crit

Fear not, oh you who aspire to write the first really funny zomcom: it is still to be done. Voiceover prelude sets the tone: you can just tell that the writers (Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, whoever they are) think this is killer stuff, when in fact it's mildly amusing at best. The one really funny segment--which I'll refer to as the BM sequence, so as not to spoil it--occurs midway through the film and then is just gone, gone, gone.

I almost skipped this on the basis of Manohla Dargis's review until I noticed that it was drawing a huge rating from the Rotten Tomatoes Top Critics. Inexplicable. Next time, I'll believe you, Manohla.

Weird little thing: isn't that familiar carousel tune whose name I don't know the one we hear in Strangers on a Train? I'll find out soon enough, since I'd already planned to watch it tonight.

Trailers

• The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day--Story in today's Times makes both the film and its writer-director, Troy Duffy, sound despicable.
  

Courage of one's convictions

Under Capricorn

(1949)

Period piece set in New South Wales, 1831, shows some promise early on with Hitchcock regulars Jo Cotten and Ingrid Bergman as a sort of Heathcliff and desalinated Cathy (and, from a different story, Margaret Leighton as a heterosexual Mrs. Danvers), but Michael Wilding is far too simpy to suffice as the Other Man, and the story gets bogged down for about the last, oh, 6 or 7 hours.

Révolutionnaire

Coco avant Chanel

Crit

Partly a conventional love story, but in conflict with that is the interesting part, about Gabrielle Chanel's true love, independence. In this telling, Chanel (played by Audrey Tautou, frowning more than in her entire career heretofore) begins with a vision not of making black the new black but simply of doing something on her own, out from under the masculine thumb. Fashion is merely the long-gestated child of her strictly personal dissatisfaction with the frou-frou mode. In hackier hands a drama would have been spun from her affinity for wearing men's clothing and her stubborn resistance against amour, and then the one true (and doomed--yes, that's a spoiler, but no less subtle than we get onscreen) love who finally does come along would have been her hetero savior--thank god the filmmakers don't really care about the battle of the sexualities. A coda in which she stages a fashion show, applauded now as a legend, is the only note false to the film and to the title.

Fatal theory

Rope

(1948)

Technically fascinating--filmed with I guess 5 reels, a virtual single shot broken only by the occasional push into the back of someone's dark suit jacket to cover a reel change. And beyond that, the fictional riff on Leopold and Loeb is better than I remembered from the first time I saw it, at least until the inevitable copout on the James Stewart character, who in the climax recants the pseudo-Nietzschean philosophy that has inspired the young murderers. Would have been far more interesting had he maintained the stance that it's OK for superior men to kill inferior ones and had take the young men to task only on execution, as it were. But you can't do that w/ Jimmy Stewart.

[Sat. p.m.] Remembered this burning question later: why do these people serve champagne in martini glasses?

A very bad wizard

Where the Wild Things Are

Crit

Wow. One-word review? "Sad." When I first came out of the theater, I was thinking (and actually called two people and told them--well, told their voicemails) that the brilliance of this film is that the Spike Jonze-Dave Eggers screenplay is true to 9-year-old logic, without regard for adult expectations regarding narrative and flow. And that's true, mostly. Except that in 9-year-old logic, the imaginative world is where "only things happen that you want to happen." In this sad-monsterd universe, you don't even get that kind of slack in the imaginative world. The sadness you carry with you can't be shaken. Which is just sad.

A gorgeous film, a brave film, and the conveniently named Max Records couldn't be better as Max--I have nothing but good things to say about the film, except don't take any children to it who don't already have a 6-month supply of Prozac on hand.

Trailers

• A Christmas Carol--Another motion-capture animation from Disney; but come on: do we really need another Scrooge?
• The Blind Side--I read the Michael Lewis Times Magazine story excerpted from the book that is the source for this, but Sandra Bullock didn't play the foster mother in that. Still, wouldn't rule it out--certainly a great story.
  

Mourning in America

Capitalism: A Love Story

Crit

At some point in every Michael Moore film, there is at least one moment when he expresses wide-eyed puzzlement that the moneyed and powerful right don't see things his obviously correct way.

But seriously, this is a deeply conservative man, in the sense of deeply believing in all the values we have always been told made this country great. And by the same token, he is a rabidly patriotic man, to a Mr.-Smith-Goes-to-Washington degree. Anyone who accuses him of hating America just isn't paying any attention. And finally, though it hasn't been very evident before, he is a man of deep Christian beliefs. In fact, the one big organization that comes across looking good here is the Catholic Church, at least as represented by the two priests and two bishops we see. Aren't those the values most of those who hate him profess as well?

OK, so there's a minor point of disagreement on this whole capitalism-vs.-socialism thing, but hey, maybe if they'd ever actually talk to the guy, maybe an understanding could be reached. Which is, perhaps, why they never will.

Yes, yes, fish-in-a-barrel. But frankly, to quote my favorite line from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, fuck the fish.

Oh, and probably no one reads this who leaves when the end credits start to roll, but I must convey a special warning against doing so here, lest you miss a mind-blowing rendition of the Internationale.

Trailers

• Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire--Wow! Does this look like the feed-bad film of the year or what?
• The Men Who Stare at Goats--Not yes, hell yes!
• I'd already seen the trailer for The Boat That Rocked, but this is a very different trailer for Pirate Radio, even though it's the same film. Still in, still despite Richard Curtis.

For love or money

Suspicion

(1941)

Hitchcock was famously overruled by the studio in his intent to confirm Johnny's homicidal designs at the end, but I'm not at all sure the film would be better that way. As it is, when the film ends, the story doesn't, nor the source of Lina's suspicion. It's as false a happy ending as can be imagined.

Perfect casting: who but Cary Grant could be attractive enough to overcome his character's obvious red flags, and who but Joan Fontaine could be so convincingly insecure despite her astonishing beauty?

In case I haven't mentioned it, I'm giving over Halloween month to Hitch.

Cri de coeur

Paris

Crit

Yes, this film is aptly named, all right. It's been a long time, but I've seen Paris, and that's what it looks like, and feels like, and all but smells like.

Hey, here's an idea: what if you made one of those everyone's-interrelated movies like Crash or Babel, but instead of welding every single corner to another corner via grotesquely implausible coincidence so that everything holds together like a Tinkertoy skyscraper, you let the connections fit or brush tangentially or just miss, sorta like they do in what we call life? Wouldn't that be a lot better film? Yes, yes it would. And if Juliette Binoche did the funniest striptease in recent cinematic history, that wouldn't be a bad thing, either.

Lots of other familiar French filmic faces in this love letter--wonderful turns by Fabrice Luchini, François Cluzet, and Romain Duris in particular, and kudos to écrivain/directeur Cédric Klapisch, who among other things, knew exactly when to end.

Witness for the prosecution

The Paradine Case

(1947)

A fascinating film, which is not to say a particularly good one. Valli's role, as a shady lady in love with an unattainable man, punishing the straitlaced man who loves her for his role in her love's demise, makes it impossible not to think of The Third Man; Gregory Peck as the defense attorney in a lost cause makes it impossible not to think of To Kill a Mockingbird; Charles Laughton in a powdered wig with a femme fatale on the dock makes it impossible not to think of Witness for the Prosecution.

Meanwhile, the obscure Ann Todd is surprisingly affecting as Gay Keane, the odd woman out in a love triangle (quadrangle?), and the most interesting character by far, though on screen for perhaps only 10 minutes, is Judy Flaquer (Joan Tetzel), Gay's best friend, daughter of the mentor of Gay's husband Tony (Peck): is she too in love with Tony? Or with Gay?

Undercover

Notorious

(1946)

It's no life being Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman): the man she loves (Cary Grant) essentially calls her a slut and a lush, and the man who loves her (Claude Rains) is a Nazi agent, and when he finds out she had bedded and wedded him as a spy, he sets out to kill her. And then there's her mother-in-law . . .

On the other hand, from Bergman's standpoint, a much more rewarding role than the previous year's project w/ Hitch.

Watching only Hitchcock at home this Halloween month, by the way.

Liverwurst

Spellbound

(1945)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know: you can't judge a 64-year-old film by today's standards. So let's just judge it by the standards of, say, 60 years ago and say that its Freudianism is risible, its attitudes toward female professionals grotesque, and its romantic plot junior-high silly. What were they thinking?