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.