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.
  

I don't care how you brigham . . .

Wagon Master

(1950)

Too many, too much: too many major characters, too much plot--so much that the Navajo are relegated to minor annoyance--and way too much music.

Finally, about midway through the sub-90-minute running time, the bad guys show up (and you think, "Oh, right: from the prologue; I wonder whether that prologue was added later so they wouldn't come clean out of the blue?") and the plot gets clarified. And then it's a pretty good plot, though the bad guys--the Cleggs--are really just the Clantons from My Darling Clementine, right down to the paterfamilias's mourning, then joining, his boys.

And this: how many movies portray westward-migrating Mormons as heroic?

Oops, sorry; never mind

The Wrong Man

(1956)

Based on actual events, Hitchcock's story of an innocent man accused, tried, and eventually released when the mistake is discovered--after the police have pretty much ruined his life and driven his wife to the loony bin. Henry Fonda at his this-can't be-happening-to-me best.

Ghosts

Aruitemo Aruitemo (Still walking)

Crit

A lovely elegiac film that proves that the Japanese can have as much guilt and bitterness about a premature death in the family as the Americans and French can. Disconcertingly, the patriarch and his wife and their perpetual condition of cold war seem to have been based on my parents.