Uncle Sam fukka

Team America: World Police

(2004)

Credit Ben Brantley's blurb today on the boys' upcoming Broadway musical for my yen to devote the last* of the first† of the twenty-first‡ to Parker and Stone, and the fact that I screened the South Park movie earlier this year for my choosing their later, almost equally brilliant feature.

*day
†decade
‡century, duh

His voice's master

The King's Speech

Crit

As it turns out, this is probably my last movie house movie of 2010, since nothing seems to be opening Friday either downtown or in the 'burbs. Alas.

Probably there are Masterpiece Theatre junkies out there who can do lots more of this than I can, but I got a BBC kick out of seeing the stammering royal's Archbishop of Canterbury played by the best stammering royal ever, and the one scene shared by the best Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet was also a sweet touch. On a weirder note, strange to hear what I've always thought one of the most inspirationally martial pieces of music ever written by a German during the climactic and titular address--you know, the one where George VI is rallying his subjects to rise up again to repel the marauding Hun.

So coincidences and random chitchat aside, how's the film? Topping good entertainment, and Firth is sure to join the ranks of Damaged Guy Oscar® nominees--ranks that include his costar, coincidentally.

Trailers

• Source Code--Actually saw this trailer the other day but forgot; looks like Inception lite.
• Blue Valentine--Oh yeah: my kinda sad bastard movie.

We cut the hair

The Man Who Wasn't There

(2001)

Two eternal associations with this film: with seeing it in a Manhattan theater I can't identify from subsequent Manhattan movie trips, with my still-wife, but after, I believe, the official separation had begun, or if not, very close to it, after it had been decided; and then, with a friend who always used to joke about spoiling a movie for someone who hadn't seen it by saying, "It was so great when the flying saucer came down."

Anyway, not sure why I'd given it 4 Netflix stars in the past, but I've cut that to 3. Which is, still, after all, "Liked It."

The belief that it would make him more dead

True Grit

Crit

Oh, my: for the most part the same story told in 1969, just told infinitely better in every way.

My sense about the language of the earlier version was accurate: many of the same lines are heard here, but there are also many more of what are presumably Portis's words--damn, I do have to put that on my 2011 reading list!

Maybe something else Coenish with dinner tonight?

Trailer

• Transformers: Dark of the Moon--Need I say more?

View from the bridge

It's a Wonderful Life

(1946)

Impossible to watch this this time around without thinking of what I'm currently reading, Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, who, like George Bailey, was determined to shake the dust of his crummy little hometown (New Haven, in Moses's case) and build big, amazing things in a big, amazing world. So is Moses, who is responsible for most of the parks and bridges and roads of New York City and Long Island--and for the destruction of neighborhoods and other environments that his sometimes myopic vision demanded--simply George Bailey without a Mary Hatch to keep him from his dream? That would make this story a little less depressing.

The long grift

I Love You Phillip Morris

Crit

What says Christmas like a gay prison romance? And seeing this today made me think of my Christmas movie eight years ago, Catch Me If You Can, which is largely the same story, only heterosexual. But while it would be inaccurate to suggest that the gay slant isn't important in this one, it would be equally inaccurate to suggest that it's the only or even the main thing that matters. What is notable in this good, not great, film is that the same-sexness of the central couple is incidental to their story and their difficulties. It is as sweet and honest a male-homosexual love story as I can recall being portrayed on the screen--Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor are convincing but thoroughly unclichéd as men who prefer men. Carrey's Steven Russell has issues with truth, it's true--but his roles as husband and father actually involve much more truth than do the roles that land him, repeatedly, in prison. And in the end, a movie truth that may or may not be a life truth prevails: the truth of love covers a multitude of lies.

Prisons, workhouses

Scrooge

(1951)

The tragic tale of a proud GOP conservative filibustered into liberal submission by socialist ghosts.

The pain of it

True Grit

(1969)

Well, hell, yeah: of course they gave Duke an Oscar®--who were they gonna give it to?--Kim Freakin' Darby? Glen Freakin' Campbell?

Buzz has it that the Coens' version (which I'll be seeing in a couple of days) retains a lot more of the language of Charles Portis's novel (whose editor, I just learned, is an author and a friend of mine). Well, if their script is better than this one, I'm ready to put their film--which has actual actors in the cast--in the pantheon right now, along with the novel, because the script I just saw performed, often poorly, is one of my favorite non-Tarantino scripts in a long, long time.

Oh, biggest surprise: the use of the verb "to bust a cap" in exactly the 1990s gangsta sense.

Men with walkie talkies

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

(1982)

Yup, another Jesus movie, complete with postresurrection appearance at the mouth of a tomblike van shrouded and with sacred heart glowing, then an acension before which Mary falls to her knees.

But I actually think of this as one of the best Wizard of Oz movies since The Wizard of Oz. It is also doubtless the first film I ever took my (not quite 6 then) daughter to that included the expressions "douchebag" and "penis-breath." Come to think of it, it was also the first film I took my (then 66 and 63) parents to that included those expressions. Somehow we all survived.

Wings of desire

Black Swan

Crit

Prima ballerina Nina (Natalie Portman) is technically solid, but as her company master (worst. boss. ever.) helpfully points out, she is artistically repressed because sexually repressed. Fortunately, she is also absolutely cuckoo and delusional, always helpful for an an artist. This pic raises as many what-actually-happened? questions as did Inception, but if anything provides even fewer answers.

Darren Aronofsky has never been shy about stirring genre schlock into his intelligent films, and here he gives us an art-house creepy, slashy, supernatchy. Judged by the standards of those genres--i.e., how much I squirmed--it's wildly successful, but I can't really say I liked it much.

Trailers

• Water for Elephants--Fairly screams "from the literary novel of the same title."

Shaved by a drunken barber

Meet John Doe

(1941)

How many movies do you suppose there have been about Jesus? Hell, Capra himself made one five years before this, and another one two years before this, and another five years later, and this has elements of all of those. But part of what makes this inferior to those is just how doggone literal he gets about this one. "You don't have to die to keep the John Doe ideal alive," Barbara Stanwyck's character pleads in the big rooftop scene. "Someone already died for that once. The first John Doe. And he's kept that ideal alive for nearly 2,000 years. It was he who kept it alive in them. And he'll go on keeping it alive for ever and always--for every John Doe movement these men kill, a new one will be born. That's why those bells are ringing, John. They're calling to us, not to give up but to keep on fighting, to keep on pitching."

Good god, as it were.

Sidetracked

Ostre sledované vlaky (Closely watched trains)

(1966)

Ah, the standard coming (as it were)-of-age story: young Czechoslovakian station dispatcher is menaced by Nazis and premature ejaculation. Actually, merely impotence, but the filmmakers accurately sensed that in any language, "premature ejaculation" is funnier.

I'd had this on my DVR hard (as it were) drive for more than 2 years, and why I'd never watched it before I don't know, but in doing so, I got a jump on my 2011 New Year's resolution, about which more . . . well, in 2011, duh.

Such are promises

The Fighter

Crit

Funny that the guy who tries to make his living beating other guys senseless is just about the least-violent, quietest soul in the story. And not coincidentally, Mark Wahlberg, who plays the gentle boxer, is one of the few members of the cast who doesn't throw a dramatic rabbit punch at some point.

 

But Oscar® loves big, and Christian Bale is a lock for a nomination (though whether lead or supporting is a fair question), and Melissa Leo has a shot as well. Not that they haven't earned it, but the best stuff happening on the screen is the least showy, and Wahlberg has become a life master at that.

Trailers

• Thor--That's the Mighty Thor to you. In 3D.
• No Strings Attached--Wait, didn't we just see the woman-who-wants-uncommitted-sex bit last weekend?

Stand by me

Love and Other Drugs

Crit

"Who Wants to See Anne Hathaway’s Breasts?" asks the headline of the Newsweek review. "Must be a trick question," thinks I. No, just a snarky way into another unenthusiastic assessment for a film currently showing a 44% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes.com, 33% from the sites designated Top Critics. So, the upcoming Oscar cohost's extrathespian attributes notwithstanding, I was set to give this a pass--until the New Yorker's David Denby, whose reviews aren't nearly as much fun as Anthony Lane's but tend to hew more closely to my tastes, gave the film as enthusiastic a notice as I've seen for it, concluding with a downright astonishing declaration:

Love and Other Drugs has many weak spots, but what it delivers at its core is as indelible as (and a lot more explicit than) the work of such legendary teams as Clark Gable and Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

Whoa! I mean, whoa! That's a hell of a core then, no? So after that I pretty much had to see AH's breasts and whatever else the film had to show me, right? Well, here's the thing: no, it's not really much of a movie. In fact, if you're not predisposed to love Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, then her character is just another clichéd movie sick girl too selfless to fall in love, and when forced to move to plan B, too selfless to let the one she loves sacrifice himself for her; and he's just another clichéd movie cocksman too selfish to fall in love but who finds himself completed by the first truly remarkable woman he's ever met and gets to win her over with a late speech where he has her at "hello."

But they really are pretty terrific; only one of them is a salesman in the movie, but they both sell a shitload of cinematic snakeoil. The you-should-pardon-the-expression rise of Viagra is really a blue herring, which enables a little preaching about how fucked up the drug companies and the insurance companies are, forcing senior citizens to make bus trips to Canada for affordable generics. It's really just boy-and-girl-meet-cute; well, actually they meet creepy, but they're cute enough to compensate. And any film with both the Kinks and Regina Spektor on the soundtrack earns extra points.

Trailer

• Red Riding Hood--Amanda Seyfried as a sexy young Red menaced by bigger threats than wolf teeth.

Double indemnity

The Lady Eve

(1941)

Barbara Stanwyck as the same dame, Henry Fonda as the priggish snake lover, and a half-dozen of the best character actors in a nearly perfect screwball comedy, written and directed by Preston Sturges.

As a kid, I knew Stanwyck only from The Big Valley, and I didn't take her seriously. But seriously, she makes sexy funny and vice versa about as well as any star of her generation.

A boy's best friend . . .

White Heat

(1949)

From the standpoint purely of screen time, this might be as much police procedural as it is gangster flick, but let me just ask you: do you remember who the character Philip Evans is, or that he was played by John Archer? And if you remember Edmond O'Brien at all, isn't it as the undercover cop who rats out Cody? Face it: even before the final conflagration, Cagney burns so brightly that there's no oxygen for anyone else--except maybe a little bit for Margaret Wycherly as Ma Jarrett, and Virginia Mayo as cinema's most despicable gun moll.

Won't get fooled again

Nothing Sacred

(1937)

Carole Lombard can cover a multitude of sins, but it's hard to see why this is widely accorded "classic" status: there are a few good gags but lots of lame ones, and while I get that standards of racial and ethnic humor were different then--not to mention humor based on violence between the sexes--much of this is just flat out hard to watch.

The nut of the story--fraud as served by journalism--is potentially nourishing enough that this is one '30s screwball that could use a Fox News-era remake.

If history has taught us anything, . . .

The Godfather: Part II

(1974)

It's lonely at the top.

I have an ongoing argument with a friend about whether this is a better film than Part I. I'm not sure he has ever articulated why he prefers the first one, but my vote for this one is based on its adept interweaving of Michael's story with young Vito's. The first film is brilliant storytelling; this is that, and brilliant history as well.

By the way, a New York Times crossword puzzle clue last week was something like "The one who broke Michael Corleone's heart."

And viddy films I would

A Clockwork Orange

(1971)

What happened was, I wasn't finished roasting potatoes, and not having decided on a movie to watch, but not wanting to start one only to have to interrupt it a few minutes in, I decided to begin with salad and a screening of Don Hertzfeldt's wonderfully weird short Rejected. Naturally, once I heard the old Ludwig van on that soundtrack, I was ready for a bit of the old ultraviolent as well.

Among the many brilliances of Kubrick's film is its success in having its didactic cake and dining on some of the illicit thrills of which Alex must ultimately be cured of being cured. The almost (and I'm frankly not sure about the "almost") pornographic treatment of the red, red vino and the in-out, in-out seem calculated to deprive us of the opportunity to credit any good intentions to the repressive conditioning Alex undergoes. The Alex of act 2 is a victim--deprived of his pornographic pleasures even as the moral guardians of the state revel in them--and so the Alex of acts 1 and 3 is a hero whether we like it or not.

Plastics!

Tiny Furniture

Crit

Some time back I was given to understand that the term mumblecore had fallen into scorned desuetude, but it seems to be popping up again for this, and if the spiked heel doesn't fit very well and you wobble around self-consciously on it, . . .

Whatever else you call this, it is a tour de courage by 24-year-old Lena Dunham, who wrote, directed, and stars in this smart, funny, and loosely autobiographical tale of the most hopelessly unfocused recent college graduate since Benjamin Braddock, which, given the general demographic of mumblecore, is tall cotton. Aura, whose milieu, to the extent she has one, is the YouTube video, moves back in with her mother and younger sister, both of whom are vastly and unashamedly more accomplished artistically. Having put herself in such an emotionally unhealthy environment, what else is there for her to do but start and quit an awful job and crush on two worse boys, culminating in one of the ickiest episodes of consensual sex on film? And to top it off, Dunham films her own perfectly ordinary physique as mercilessly as any documentarian could have. Is it art, or just masochism? I don't care, because even the ugliness of this is beautiful.

Kathie’s clowns

Out of the Past

(1947)

“A dame with a rod is like a guy with knitting needles.” It figures that the guy who says that early in a noir film is destined to be plugged by that dame—and he won’t be the last one, either.

Directed by Jacques Tourneur, this may be my favorite noir not starring Humphrey Bogart. Robert Mitchum fills the Bogart role—the not-altogether-honest man struggling to be better for the honest woman who loves him—and Kirk Douglas at his iciest as the crime boss whose trust he betrays (bad idea? ya think?).

And then there’s Jane Greer as the fatalest of femmes—this one makes Bridget O’Shaunessy seem like she just got out of girls’ school.

I actually saw the 1984 remake, Against All Odds, before I even knew this one existed; don’t you make that mistake.

Do you renounce Satan?

The Godfather

(1972)

While watching this tonight, I thought of a 40-something friend who just saw this recently for the first time and thought of all the discoveries she'll make in each subsequent screening. Unless she's a lot quicker than I.

Octopus's garden

Monsters

Crit

It Happened One Night, with enormous menacing semiaquatic cephalopods. And with significantly less attractive and vastly less appealing romantic leads, such that you don't really get the mutual attraction. And without the good writing or Capraesque set pieces or quirky minor characters. And with a fiancé instead of a husband, and with the father in favor of him. But otherwise, pretty much the same movie.

Also a bit of a primer on minuscule-budget sci-fi flicks:

1. show terrified anticipation of your aliens lots more than the aliens themselves;
2. when you do show your aliens, mostly show them in the dark;
3. when you do show them in the light, show only probing tentacle tips or decomposing parts of dead bodies;
4. if you can manage an alien sex scene without its looking ridiculous, go for it;
5. leave yourself plenty of room for a bigger-budget sequel in case this one is an unlikely hit.

No strings

Being John Malkovich

(1999)

I'm not one of these cynical cinephiles who complains that there are no good movies being made any more--hell, I saw three pretty good movies today at the mall. And once in a while I see a film I'd call great--I'd have to look back through this to name the last one, but it happens now and again. But how often do we see something so fucking brilliantly conceived and original that we don't know what to compare it with, that we just watch it agape? And when that happens, how often is it written by Charlie Kaufman?

OK, more or less rhetorical questions, but still. This was his first feature, and it must have been one of the first films I saw in Manhattan, though there's a certain share of sad in that realization.

Evils have left the building

Unstoppable

Post

Hey, if your freight train or your action movie is out of control, who better to save the day than Denzel? This is junk food, but it's tasty junk food, though I must say it's more than a tad annoying that the Bad Thing that happens happens because of union men dicking off. Things aren't bad enough for the unions?

Megamind

Post

A hilarious goof for about the first half-hour, this parody of superherodom and more or less serious treatise on yin and yang stays solidly entertaining throughout, but given that the intended audience isn't exactly the Hustler magazine contingent, you wonder why heroine Roxanne, voiced by the defiantly un-Barbie dollish Tina Fey and as smart as any father and grandfather of a daughter and granddaughter could wish any role model to be, needs to be quite so . . . well, three-dimensional.

Tangled

Post

Sometimes brilliant, sometimes sappy, always Disney--the studio's 50th solo animated feature.

Trailers

• The Eagle--Another ancient Rome movie that looks awful.
• Battle: Los Angeles--Another alien-invasion movie that looks awful.
• Sanctum--Spelunking Aussies in 3D.
• Gulliver's Travels--Didn't laugh once, and as much as I love Jack Black, do we really need to see him in 3D? Incidentally, to answer a question raised by a friend, only Lilliput, apparently.
• Yogi Bear--Also didn't laugh. Oh, god.
• Kung Fu Panda 2--Did laugh, once, at KFP's extended ninja staredown with the audience.
• Never Say Never--Justin Bieber in 3D; the adolescent pheromones were flying!
• The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader--Does this count as Jesus' first 3D film appearance?
• Mars Needs Moms--Or, in Australia, Mars Needs Mums; thanks IMDb.
• Cars 2--No Australian alternate title.

Why I always carry my Swiss Army knife

127 Hours

Crit

What better way to work up a Thanksgiving appetite than to see James Franco cut off his arm with a dull knife?

OK, I'm here to do my part to combat the tendency of referring to this as "the movie where James Franco cuts off his arm with a dull knife." (Incidentally, I'm pretty sure James Franco didn't actually cut off his arm with a dull knife; I think a stunt double cut off his arm with a dull knife. But I digress.) There's a lot that goes on here besides James Franco cutting off his arm with a dull knife. For one thing, because the knife is far too dull to challenge bone, before James Franco (or, let's just say Aron Ralston, the real-life cutter-off-of-his-arm-with-a-dull-knife whom Franco plays) can cut off his arm with a dull knife, he has to break that arm. So there's that.

But director Danny Boyle, no stranger to the unwatchably intense, has sense enough sometimes to get us away from the scene of the impending crime against our sensibilities. This he does via flashbacks--to a failed love affair, to a regrettably unreturned phone message from his mother, to a first boyhood glimpse at the magnificent Canyonlands vistas that have driven (and now threaten to take) his life--and increasingly hallucinatory fantasies about how this might turn out, or what he might be doing right now were he not stuck, per the title of (spoiler alert!) Ralston's book, between a rock and a hard place. And when I say "increasingly hallucinatory," think Scooby Doo. We also get to see the real-life one-armed Ralston, with his wife and baby and with a supercool superheroish prosthetic climbing tool attachment; he still does crazy things in the wilderness, we are told, but now he always leaves someone a note telling where he's going.

It is, in short, a remarkable film, one that may join Trainspotting and 28 Days Later as Boyle films I need to own, and so I would say to you, if you are a James Franco fan, if you have described him as "one of the few boys [you'd] do" (you know who you are), but were planning to avoid this film because he cuts his arm off with a dull knife, I would say to you . . . do not see this; dude, he cuts his arm off with a dull knife! Are you nuts?

The unthin man

Inspector Bellamy

Crit

Claude Chabrol's final film is a spiral of mysteries, criminal, romantic, and familial, but we're less interested in the answers than in the questioning. (Well, one exception: is Françoise (Marie Bunel), the almost-Nora Charles-perfect wife of the titular inspector (Gérard Depardieu), really carrying on an affair with his brother Jacques (Clovis Cornillac), as Chabrol goes to great pains to imply? And if so, does that undercut all he believes in? And if not, what of his suspicion?

Depardieu, the size of a small province, with a nose the shape and texture of a fine smelly cheese, has somehow never been more beautiful--and Bunel's not bad, either. An eminently French film, and I mean that in a good way.

In the year 2026

Metropolis

(1927)

Ages since I'd seen any version of this, so long that I'd mostly forgotten it, so I may not be the best source for testimony re the recently discovered 25 minutes, but I can certainly testify that Herr Lang knew what to do with a camera. The imagery is alternately sentimental, creepy, and inspiring, but uniformly fantastic, literally and figuratively. The special effects are also amazing, except for the times when they're comically primitive, which only serves to show how good they are most of the time. A regrettably sappy final reel is easily ignorable.

The female lead, in a dual role as the impossibly pure (but sexy) Maria (yeah, right, like the Blessed Virgin: subtlety was not one of the things Lang was going for) and the vampish (and even sexier) avatar of the robot, is the Swiss-born Brigitte Helm, 21 in her film debut. Her career lasted only 8 years, but they were eventful years, including the acclaimed L'Argent, which I believe I have on my DVR, and 3 versions--German, French, and English--of an Atlantis film directed by G. W. Pabst. Here she handles the extremes of Una/Duessa beautifully, and the dance she performs (I'll let you guess in which guise) at a nightclub that turns her male audience into animals is just the sort of thing Will Hays had in his filthy little mind.

Character assassination

Abraham Lincoln

(1930)

D. W. Griffith was only in his 50s when he made his first talkie, so he shouldn't have been in his dotage yet, but what better explanation is there for how awful this is? I suppose it's possible that he was just as unprepared as the director in Singin' in the Rain to make the shift to sound. Maybe the likeliest explanation is that the unreconstructed Rebel, while recognizing that an out-and-out slander of Honest Abe would be anathema to most of his audience, subversively took his revenge on the Great Emancipator by making him unspeakably boring. But for some of Lincoln's own words and a game performance by Walter Huston, this would be absolutely unwatchable.

The only marginally dramatic moment in the film--and, bizarrely, the only Civil War action sequence--is Sheridan's ride, a minor episode hyperbolized into a turning point by a hack poet so that schoolboys of my generation would have doggerel other than Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" to memorize.

You really blew the lid off of nookie

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer

Crit

Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. In the finale of Those Bastards! weekend, the reasonably plausible premise that the governor's downfall was engineered by powerful enemies he had made as a crusader is less interesting than:

1. the fresh perspective provided on the eternal question, Why do powerful men risk everything by thinking with their dicks? and
2. the extraordinary range of access the filmmakers had to principals: Spitzer himself, several of those powerful enemies, and the barely-legal, giggle-handicapped madam of the Emperor's Club, as I believe the institution was called.

And apart from some unfortunate cheesiness (especially the use of an actress to portray "Angelina," the governor's regular call girl [notwithstanding the self-aggrandizement campaign of Ashley Dupré], whose extensive testimony is key to the story, but who declined to appear on camera), this is a remarkable and thought-provoking film.

Spitzer, who is not blind to the elements of Greek tragedy in his story, is astonishingly frank in his self-assessment. (He's one of the sympathetic talking heads in yesterday's documentary, too, though there he makes just one oblique allusion to his fatal flaw.) And while not cutting him any slack regarding his hubristic overreaching and his grotesque bankruptcy in the diplomatic skills required of a politician in a democracy, director Alex Gibney convincingly portrays him as a larger-than-life hero who stupidly stubbed his toe, who let all of us down in letting his family and his principles and himself down. On the issue of whether he thinks Joe Bruno and Ken Langone and others with good reason to hate the former state's attorney who seemingly was the one man in law enforcement asking hard questions about life on Wall Street years before the meltdown were behind the unusual federal investigation into prostitution, Spitzer acknowledges, to his credit, that it doesn't matter: that the man most responsible was Eliot Spitzer.

And ultimately, he can't answer the Big Question.

Same as the old bosses

Inside Job

Crit

Those Bastards! weekend, chapter 2; or perhaps I should say chapter 3, since this film was misplattered at my downtown movie theater such that the subheadings came in the sequence I, IV, II, III, V. I was apparently the first viewer to point this out to the management, but then there were only 2 other people in the audience when I saw it, so who knows how many have had a chance to complain.

So how confusing was it, out of order? Aside from a few splice glitches, not very. Mainly what happens is that you get the outrageous information that all these people who dozed through the financial meltdown have been put back in charge of the institutions designed to avert such meltdowns before you get the play-by-play of the meltdown itself.

This is pretty complicated stuff, of course, and I wouldn't recommend viewing the film out of sequence, but it's not like that time the same theater showed me the serpentine plot of The Good Shepherd out of sequence--you think Matt Damon is somehow involved?

Trailer

• Jane Eyre--Confession: I've never read the novel. 2011 is shaping up as another big year for Mia Wasikowska, who's also in Gus Van Sant's Restless. This year was Alice in Wonderland and The Kids Are Alright. Not a bad career so far for a 21yo.

What love triumphant looks like

It Happened One Night

(1934)

So you think this is the perfect film, do you? Well just go to the scene at the first auto camp, when Ellie comes in after her shower and Peter is frying the eggs. Count the doughnuts on the plate, and take note of the other plate piled high with slices of bread. Now look at the table moments later, when Ellie has finished dressing and Peter is serving the eggs. The hell did all that starch go?

Still, I agree: it's pretty damned close to perfect.

The point at which you break

Fair Game

Crit

Greetings, and welcome to Those Bastards! weekend. But first, the obligatory shoutout to Tom McCarthy: OK, dude, you've pocketed a paycheck for one of those brief, unmemorable character roles that anyone could do; now get your ass back behind the camera, where you're damn near brilliant.

OK, today's bastards are Karl Rove and Scooter Libby (a deliciously nasty--no doubt unfairly so, but who cares?--performance by David Andrews) and their bosses in a film that wants very much to be this generation's All the President's Men. It falls a long way short of that--the filmmaking is rote this-happened-then-this-happened--but Naomi Watts and especially Sean Penn give it their best, as the surprisingly (without a doubt intentionally) unappealing Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson. What's good about the film is that, as little as we may like the power couple, as much as we see that Joe is working mostly from ego and never-wrong syndrome and Valerie is calling "no fair" in a game that she has been playing unfairly for 13 years, we still want them to beat the bastards. Badly.

Then again, how hard is it to stir up sentiment against that crew? And the tested couple's reconciliation scene fairly swells with schmaltz--sorta like the "traffic was a bitch" scene in the movie-within-the-movie of The Player--you kinda wonder whether the real folks can watch with a straight face.

Trailer

• The Tourist--Yes, your recollection is correct: I have mentioned this before. That's sort of my point. I've seen this, I don't know, 6, 8, 10 times now (though I never tire of "You look ravenous!" "Do you mean 'ravishing'?" "I do"), and not until this time did I realize: it's North by Northwest in Venice! Depp is even trying to do Grant (though Jolie is much harder-edged than Saint). It's really obvious, but it took me that long.

'Til the cows come home

Tamara Drewe

Crit

I've read neither the graphic novel whence this derives nor the Thomas Hardy novel whence that derives, but this is a hoot on its own merits.

Its hootishness is built on Stephen Frears's direction of standard-issue English countryside sex farce so that the issue becomes unstandard when you least expect it, and it rests in great measure on the wronged-wife moral-center performance of Tamsin Greig, but the clincher is Jessica Barden as the hormone-besotted 15-year-old not just enamored with a rock star but possessed of the devious intelligence and good luck to bring him within reach.

Oh! Noticed in the credits, though not in the film: Patricia Quinn as "Posh Hippie." Another oh: gratifying moment in film: when Tamara is listening to Lily Allen's "The Fear."

Trailers

• Rabbit Hole--Coincidentally, my daughter just declared this a must-see, based on her enthusiasm for the play on which it's based. I'm in on that basis + dir. John Cameron Mitchell.
• Made in Dagenham--Damn, I resent a trailer that gets me misty already. Q: when Sally Hawkins wins the Oscar for her portrayal of a labor-rousing factory worker, will she in her acceptance speech proclaim, "You like me! You really like me!"?

I don't wanna know much about much

An unsuper supernatural double feature.

Paranormal Activity 2

Crit

Gosh, did I really like the first one? Not really, now that I check. OK, when Paranormal Activity 3 is coming, will someone please remind me that I've found both of the first two to be about 3 minutes total scare buried in 90 minutes of quotidian tedium? Thanks.

Hereafter

Crit

Yes, as advertised, Clint gives us one hell of a tsunami to start, and then . . . well, he gives us some pretty people to look at (none prettier than Little Opie Cunningham's daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard), and three Hall of Fame cities (San Francisco, Paris, and London), but not only does nothing much happen, but Eastwood painstakingly moves the three main characters around the chessboard in order to make that nothing happen. I'm sure there are people whose lives have been changed by this film; mine, however, merely became a couple of hours shorter.

Trailers

• The Fighter--Wow! Let's hope they cleared out the cliché barn on the trailer!
• True Grit--Remade by the Coens, with Jeff Bridges in the Duke role? Skeptical, but hey. Maybe I should rent the original.
• The Rite--I'm seeing nothing here to suggest that this will be a sensible alternative to taking another look at The Exorcist.
• Restless--This, on the other hand, looks very promising, Gus Van Sant directing what looks like a sort of unigenerational Harold and Maude.
• Unknown--And this Kafkaesque story of identity theft could be terrific, unless it's dreadful.

Bloody or nothing worth

Who, when, how long?
David Tennant, 2009, 3 hrs.

What sort of Hamlet?
Barefoot and poignant.

What's missing?
Hmm, didn't have my crib sheet with me while watching, so I wasn't thinking about this question. Let me look at some of the ones from the original Elsinore Project 3 years ago . . .

Oh, of course: the Fortinbras subplot ends with the "little patch of ground" sequence of IV.iv; with no F to arrive in V.ii, the play ends with Horatio's "flights of angels" line.

No pirates, but otherwise, it seems pretty much complete in terms of the elements everyone remembers. Some reshuffling, though, and presumably--since it's not a hurried 3 hours--a lot of lines judiciously pruned.

What's changed?
Main thing I noticed was that, with Fortinbras subbed out of the game in the 120th minute, the Stoppardian "R & G are dead" line is given to Horatio and moved to the beginning of V.ii--oh, and right, it actually subs for Ham's whole 80-line narrative re the pair's conspiracy, before the arrival of Osric.

Oh, something else, and this annoyed me: Laertes' foil is referred to as "unblunted" rather than "unbated" both times. I'm not aware of that being a textual variant, and it's grotesquely unpoetic, so the only explanation seems to be a dumbing down of the language--but why that word, rather than one of the many others no longer current in the language? Odd . . . which brings us to . . .

What's odd?
Mostly good stuff, most endemic the surveillance cameras scattered around the castle (I suppose I should mention that it's a more or less modern-dress production), which allow for some interesting POV effects. Funny thing is, though, that we never have any sense than anyone is monitoring those cameras. The surveillance in the play is conducted through one-way mirrors rather than arras (arrases? arrasai?), which means Ham has to shoot the rat Polonius rather than stab him, and I'm sorry, but shooting just isn't as satisfactory.

Flesh?
Too too solid.
Ghost?
A nice touch, unprecedented in my knowledge except in the 2002 Peter Brook production--which had only 13 cast members and so had to do some doubling--is the conceit that the elder Hamlet and Claudius were twins: Patrick Stewart plays both. This is a fascinating strategy because it undercuts all of Hamlet's comments about the vast differences between the two men--especially in the Gertrude's chamber scene, when he forces her to look upon the two faces together. "Uh, gee, Hammy, I dunno--they pretty much look the same to me." Inexplicably, though, Stewart gives the Ghost a Scottish accent. I would have wondered whether he was confused about which tragedy he was in, but Banquo's ghost is mute. It's just a silly, pointless, distracting choice; the fuck were they thinking?
Ham-Gert eros?
Not exactly none, but only in short bursts and almost always overwhelmed by violent impulses.

Other people?
Oliver Ford Davies may be the best Polonius ever, and Gregory Doran's direction of the character really gets to the heart of the eternal paradox that one of the most fatuous characters WS ever created can say things that make so much sense that they've been quoted approvingly out of context for centuries. I guess it would come down to "even a blind squirrel finds the occasional acorn": the blowhard says so fucking much that of course he sometimes makes sense, if only by accident. The I.iii leavetaking by Laertes is wonderful, hilarious, with Ophelia and L exchanging arched eyebrows during P's lecture (Claudius and Gertrude do the same when he bloviates), and finally chiming in with the "neither a borrower nor a lender be" bit, obviously having heard it a zillion times while growing up.

And this is "other people" only in an ancillary all-but-nameless-players sense, but the dumbshow also unscrambles one of the perennial problems of the play: why does Claudius not notice that his guilt is being played out in that sequence even before the spoken play? Often the dumbshow is cut, and if it's not, we are meant to see that C just really isn't paying much attention to the short subject. Here, though, the dumbshow is so farcical that you're looking at the bizarre costumes and makeup and not really noticing the stylized action--unless, of course, you know to do so. And we do get one glimpse of C looking vaguely uneasy, but then he shakes it off--because who could take this silliness seriously? A brilliant approach to a troublesome element.

Fun to return to Denmark, and a very worthy reason to do so.

Ennui fou

Partir (Leaving)

Crit

In declaring her interest in seeing this, the person who joined me declared herself a sucker for the French infidelity genre. Afterward, she declared it too determinedly (and deterministically) French, but my thoughts (unoccupied by anything on screen) as I watched it were that except for the language and the look of the villages, this seemed drearily, drably American, like a poor imitation of Douglas Sirk, steeped--nay, stewed, fairly Crock Potted--in predictable melodrama.

Kristin Scott Thomas is peerless, and Yvan Attal as her necessarily horrible rich husband and Sergi López as her necessarily charming working-class lover both do what they can with the material, but what's to be done? The sex scenes are sexy, I'll give it that, but I'm sorry, sex is not enough. Surprise me just once--give me something to react to, something to think about. Who knew the French could be so dull?

Little back, big tattoo

Luftslottet Som Sprängdes (The girl who kicked the hornet's nest)

Crit

I wonder how many girls and women (and, hell, why not boys and men?) are, even now, roaming the streets of America (and, with what, a 6-hour time difference, Sweden) in Lisbeth Salander Halloween drag? I like to think that if I dressed up for Halloween and weighed 90 pounds less, I'd be comfortable enough with my sexuality to embrace my inner Lisbeth.

In the almost action-free extended episode of Perry Mason that stands as the last of the Swedish film version of the trilogy (unless of course it becomes a tetrology after the uncovered 4th book is published), Lisbeth herself assumes Halloweenish Lisbeth drag, for the courtroom, inexplicably: a spiked fauxhawk that adds at least 10% to her low altitude, and lots of leather and rivets. This is apparently done with full knowledge and consent of her lawyer in what seems to be both a hearing to determine her mental competence and a trial for the attempted murder of her creepy father, and you assume that what's going to happen is that the next day she's going to appear as a scrubbed debutante, the point being that she has complete control over her image and thus the mind that crafts that image. But no, next day she's spraying up the spike again, and therein lies the main problem with the 2nd and 3rd installments of the trilogy, after the astonishing adrenaline of the first film ran out (and, I gather, of the print version as well): we're smarter than it is.

I'm not so sure we're smarter than David Fincher, though, so I'm becoming ever more eager to see his take. Dragon Tattoo, currently filming, with Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig heading a solid B-list cast (I mean that as a good thing), is due next year.

Give it plenty of hoke

Singin' in the Rain

(1952)

A first: I watched this with my 4-year-old granddaughter Veronica, and while we did have to interrupt the screening, it was only because she had to go to preschool; otherwise, I think she would have watched it straight through, rapt.

She had seen the musical numbers before, and I think those are still her favorite parts (duh!), especially "Make 'Em Laugh" (double duh!), but like the rest of us, she also appreciates the quality of the direction and acting and color that hold the thinly constructed plot together. And did I mention that she loves the musical numbers?

The only living boy in London

28 Days Later

(2002)

OK, I'll acknowledge that plausibility is an atypical criterion in rating horror flicks, but one reason why this is my all-time favorite zombie movie is that the premise--that misguided science could isolate and distill a virus responsible for rage--seems a heck of a lot likelier than meteorites animating recently dead people, for example.

Another reason is that the deserted-London sequence early in the film is one of the spookiest bits I've seen in any film, regardless of genre. Yet another is that it's the first zombie film I'm aware of in which the zombies have sprinter speed, which just makes them lots more of a threat than the lumbering dead of George Romero's franchise.

It's also an improbably sweet film--a film about family values. And it's a film that, while touching all the mandatory generic tropes, never really lets you guess where it's going. Ultimately, it's my all-time favorite zombie film because it's an excellent film, full stop.

Half of what I say is meaningless

Nowhere Boy

Crit

The only thing more simplistic than the Oedipal psychology here is the musicology: John's uncle gets him a harmonica just before keeling over dead; his mother teaches him the banjo (cue increasing-proficiency montage); he decides to start a band and his aunt buys him his first guitar; after his skittle band plays a gig, a friend introduces young John to a younger (and left-handed--about which John makes a joke, lest we fail to notice) and more talented guitarist, who in turn introduces a younger yet and more talented yet guitarist, and before you know it, they're off to Hamburg.

It would be a complete waste of time but for the performances of Anne-Marie Duff as the free spirit Julia, barely older in practical terms than the son she abandoned, and Kristin Scott Thomas as Aunt Mimi, the stiff-upper-lip no-nonsense and thus unappreciated in loco parentis, both of whom do the best they can with the clichéd material (and how good to see KST in an English-language film for a change, after all the work she has been doing in France).

Trailers

• The King's Speech--Colin Firth as stammering George VI, Geoffrey Rush as the speech therapist who, I gather, helps save England from Hitler.
• The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest--My relative disappointment with the second in the series notwithstanding, yes.

Uneeq

Freakonomics

Crit

Entertaining in a lo-cal sort of way, but interesting mainly for showing a new way to approach turning a pop nonfiction book into a quasi-documentary. Segments treat topics presumably in Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's book--the socioeconomics of "black" names, cheating in sumo, academic achievement vis-à-vis bribery, abortion vis-à-vis crime--without really teaching me much but making me think it'd be a pretty cool book to read. So, a pretty good commercial, I guess.

Detention

The School of Rock

(2003)

Suggested by a brief clip shown in "Superman," and I thought it would be an antidote, but I guess I'm incapable of fun tonight.

An education

Waiting for "Superman"

Crit

Maybe three-fourths of the way through the film, the narrator intones, "Now that we've established that it's possible to give every child a great education, . . . " Sorry, I don't know what the ensuing independent clause was, 'cause I was so taken aback by the dependent: did I miss the part where "we" established that? This is a smug film that doesn't earn its smugness--a smug and very depressing one.

Director Davis Guggenheim, who banked a lot of goodwill capital with An Inconvenient Truth, adopts the structure of the competition documentaries Spellbound and Wordplay, but the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat in those thrilling films is at least partly meritocratic; here we're simply hoping the children we've focused on will profit from a purely arbitrary system--at the expense, of course, of children we haven't gotten to know.

I would love to know what Guggenheim thinks he has shown here. He jumps on the demonize-the-unions bandwagon, but he admits early on that charter schools per se are not the solution, and that good schools come from, duh, good teachers. But he doesn't begin to tell us how we get good teachers. He pays occasional and incoherent attention to the efforts of Michelle Rhee to reform D.C. schools, but I have no idea what conclusions he expects us to draw from her experiences.

It's just sad, and I despair.

Trailer

• Rango--Depp as lizard. No, it's not a sequel to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; it's animated.

Boxing Wednesdays Wrestling Saturdays

The Set-Up

(1949)

Robert Wise directs a lean middleweight of noir, 72 real-time minutes without an ounce of fat, or at least not until the final repeated line. The setting is Paradise City, which, in case you wouldn't have guessed, is an ironic name--think Potterville in the world into which Harry Bailey was never born. Audrey Totter plays Julie, a good woman married to a good man but a bad pug (Robert Ryan). The fix is in, and Stoker's supposed to be going down, but he's such a loser on his own merits that his manager and trainer don't bother to tell him. The fact that you can guess what comes next doesn't make it any less a gem.

Skype, Goat

Soul Kitchen

Crit

Fatih Akin takes a break from the intensity of Head-On and The Edge of Heaven for a wacky comic romp, and if the elements are conventional (evil forces want to deprive our hero of the enterprise he has worked hard, sacrificing money and romance, to build, but all his friends get together and put on a big show in Dad's barn . . . well, OK, not the last part, but you get the idea), the people make you care what happens even as you know exactly what will happen. Which distinguishes Akin's work from the recent work of some directors I could name.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

 

Crit

Will name, in fact: Woody Allen.

I'm really just not getting anything out of this relationship anymore. Yes, it was magic once, and I still treasure the memories, but it has become excruciating--I actually considered walking out, which is this first time I've had that thought, I believe, since Whatever Works.

Trailers

• Monsters--Another in the unending series of they're-coming-for-us flicks.
• Tamara Drewe--Not getting great reviews, but hey, Stephen Frears.

Let the right horse win

But first, why am I going to four films, only one of which is a must? Let's see, by the numbers . . .

1. Some time back--3 years, maybe?--I was running low on the 2/$13.99 passes to Showcase Theaters that Costco sold, so I bought 10.
2. Bargain matinee prices then were barely more than $7, so obviously, I would use those passes only on full-admission screenings.
3. But shortly after my purchase, Showcase expanded its bargain matinee policy to what I'd been familiar with back in the Midwest: all shows before 6 p.m.
4. This meant that I rarely had an opportunity to use my passes, which was no big deal until
5. The Rave chain bought Connecticut Showcases.
6. I was afraid my remaining passes were now worthless, but recently I learned (thanks, Nancy!) that Rave will honor the passes until mid-December.
7. So, with 8 passes left, I'm in the market for a couple of bursts of serious cinematic excess. Beginning today.

Wait a minute (I say in red. for embarrassment): did I say 7 movies on the weekend and 4 today? How about 3 plus a remedial math lesson today? Let's see . . . if I go to a 109-minute film at 1:35, there should be no problem in catching movie #2 at 3pm, should there? Well, should there?

Golly, I've planned a lot of these multiflick itineraries; there's really no excuse.

Case 39

Post

The test of whether a mediocre scary movie is worth 2 hours of your time plus a coupon you paid 7 bucks for a while back but will be worth nothing if you don't use it soon is whether it has at least one genuinely mindfucking shot. This one does: Emily (Renée Zellweger) is convinced that the ostensibly angelic Lilith (Jodelle Ferland) is indeed the spawn of Satan and has—taking a hint from the girl’s parents, but not buying hardware nearly as sturdy—begun to put bolt latches on the inside of her bedroom door. She drops a screw (naturally), which (naturally) rolls under the crack under the door and out into the hallway (naturally). Emily cautiously opens the door a crack, finds the nearby coast clear, and reaches her hand out gingerly in pursuit of galvanized fastening device.

Camera follows her hand, and there, by the screw, is (naturally) Lilith’s foot. Camera sweeps up and (wait for it) there looms Lilith, still the same angelic-looking Lilith, but magnified by camera angle and probably a distorting lens of some sort so that the adult woman on her knees is looking up at a looming Alice-when-she’s-10-feet-tall. Wonderful shot, brilliantly objectively-normal-pov-creepy moment.

Not a bad flick, but isn’t it about time Adrian Lester got another meaty Hollywood role again like in Primary Colors?

Secretariat

Post

OK, this shovels the schmaltz like Eddie Sweat shoveling oats for Big Red (and, come to think of it, shoveling something else the G rating doesn't let them show), but if the sight of those magnificent animals doesn’t put you in an uncritical mood—and if 31 lengths in the Belmont can ever get old for you—then what are you doing coming to a Disney sports movie in the first place?

Let Me In

Post

This is a good film, and if I had never seen Låt den rätte komma in, this might have blown my mind just as much as that one did. In the event, so little is changed that my snobbish, if-I-can-read-subtitles-while-the-actors-are-speaking-incomprehensibly-why-can't-everyone? reaction was, "This was necessary why?" But in the course of my long postscreening phone conversation with my daughter (who--and feel free to correct any inaccuracies in my characterization, Daughter--was just as impressed by the Swedish original as I was, but so disturbed by it that it might not be accurate to say she "liked" it), I promised her that I would give permission here for anyone less snobby than I (which, let's face it, is just about everyone, witness the compulsion to use the technically correct "I" there rather than the harmlessly more usual "me") to see this one on its own merits, which are comparable if not equal to the original's. (And to be fair, the soundtrack of the Swedish version didn't include Greg Kihn's "The Breakup Song" or Bowie's "Let's Dance.")

One interesting if speculative point my daughter made, though: she feels that the very fact of hearing incomprehensible, harsh, Scandinavian words having to be translated by English at the bottom of the screen added to the distancing, the otherness that the original film worked upon her. I suspect that may indeed be the case, so if you're not just dead (as it were) set against subtitles, Netflix the right one in.

Trailers

• Burlesque—Cher and Christina Aguilera in a movie that wants desperately to be Fosse-esque (you got a better way to spell it?).
• Unstoppable—Tony Scott, runaway locomotive; high enough concept for ya?
• Megamind (3D)—A Dreamworks riff on Superman.
• Harry Potter and the First Half of the Last Book (3D)—Excuse me, but it’s true: Hermione is hot.
• African Cats—From Disneynature, for Earth Day.
• Tangled (3D)—A much expanded but no more persuasive version of the trailer.
• Black Swan--Single White Prima, from Darren Aronofsky.
• The Warrior's Way--Can't say it any better than IMDb's categories: Action. Fantasy. Western.

Arabian nights

By the way, that SEVEN movies this weekend I alluded to before? That's just in theaters; that doesn't count the ones I watch at home.

Au revoir les enfants

(1987)

Another beautiful (and semiautobiographical) work from Louis Malle, set in a Carmelite boys' school whose principal risks everything to shelter Jews from Germans and collaborators in 1944. For the protagonist, the Malle-equivalent, the stake is merely friendship, much more than life and death.

With friends like this . . .

What, you didn't believe that I wasn't going to watch any Metsless postseason baseball? Maybe you'll be convinced once I've gone to SEVEN movies this weekend, some of which I'm not even particularly enthusiastic about seeing.

Catfish

Crit

This one just made me feel kinda icky. When I saw the trailer, I was certain it was a faux documentary, and though it pretends otherwise, I still hope that's the case. If it's true truth, it's just so cruel to the poor, delusional, attention-starved subject. If it's fiction masquerading as truth, then the point of the story is what? That people aren't altogether honest, including, in this case, the filmmakers? Guess what: we had already pretty much figured that out. Credit to one member of my group, who pointed out that this is 90 minutes rehashing a classic New Yorker cartoon.

Trailers

• Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer--What it says is what you get.
• Paranormal Activity 2--Well, the first one was a fun goof, but I doubt very much that I'll feel the need to see this one.

It's the same dame, metaphorically, at least

The Natural

(1984)

Ah, the sad last day of the season for us with no horse in the postseason race, and my choice for elegiac farewell-to-baseball movie is the mythic tale of Knight errant Roy Hobbs, his mystical (and phallic) warclub Wonderboy, two very bad women, and one very good one. A 154-game schedule's worth of hokum, and many have complained about the happy ending, but that's one of the beauties of myth, isn't it? The rules are ironclad, but they don't demand failure.

Deep end

Jack Goes Boating

Crit

Wow--I know it ultimately causes a shitstorm and all, but I want that hookah, yo!

Four good but incomplete and damaged people try to make contact, or even just get by. Critics have not been particularly kind to Philip Seymour Hoffman's directorial debut, but I found it smart and sensitive, and I couldn't help but notice the difference on the vanity scale between Hoffman's self-exposure of his own whalish form and Ben Affleck's ripped, shirtless pull-ups in his current film.

Howl

Crit

Another one not much loved by critics, but to me it's a quirky, brilliant jazz-quartet, riffing between Allen Ginsberg (James Franco, looking maybe not quite Jewish enough) composing the poem, Ginsberg reading the poem in a San Francisco coffeehouse, Ginsberg reading the poem over wild animation, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's lawyer (Jon Hamm) arguing against the appropriately square prosecutor (David Strathairn) in the notorious obscenity trial.

Some critics have found fault with the animation, some have suggested that the courtroom scenes drag, some have even objected to the iconic appearance of Don Draper as Ferlinghetti's lawyers. Well, I how do I put this diplomatically? Those complaints are all fucked. I would go so far as to suggest that this may be the best way to experience a work that is better than I remembered it (and if it's not, then all the higher praise for the film). As to Don Draper, hey, Madison Avenue is one of the dark forces of the poem, and of Ginsberg's life--what better play on that fact than to bring the face that we connect most intimately to the Mad Ave of the era onto the side of heaven?

Trailers

• Somewhere--I'd be all in for Sofia Coppola's new one even if it hadn't already won the Golden Lion in Venice.

Frenemies

The Social Network

Crit

Not surprised that Jesse Eisenberg could nail a despicable character and make you somehow feel sorry for him; for my money, he's the best male actor of his generation. Not surprised that David Fincher could keep us constantly engaged with stuff we often don't completely understand. But two aspects of this film absolutely blew my mind: first, what technology makes it possible for Armie Hammer to play both Winklevii, often side by side, with no visible seam? And second, how come nobody told me how freaking hilarious this thing is--or at least through the first half, when it's the best comedy of the year. Throughout, it's one of the best films. At times stunningly good.

Trailers

Hey, wow, check out the new look on IMDb!

• The Next Three Days--Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks in a prison-breakout flick with a twist.
• Love and Other Drugs--The rise, you should pardon the expression, of Viagra, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway (hey, where have we seen that pairing before?).

Coffee! Gimme coffee! Black coffee! Lots of it!

Stagecoach

(1939)

We can argue about whether this is the best Western ever, but I doubt that you could name a more compact and efficient one, finding room in barely 90 minutes as it does for the hero-outlaw, the drunken doctor, the whore with a heart of gold, the soured but noble gambler, the Indian fight, and the climactic shootout. Clichés, you say? OK, if you will; I prefer to call them tropes, the necessary ingredients of a mythic mural.

The emperor . . .

Prêt-à-porter (Ready to wear)

(1995)

A movie I was ravenously eager to see, until it was released and the reviews appeared. It seems to have inspired belated appreciation since Altman's death, and I thought it was time to see whether it's really so terrible. Well, no, it's not terrible; it's just not very good. Altman's style is to walk a tightrope between creation and chaos, of course, so it's a miracle that he was ever able to pull it off. And there are moments of nasty brilliance here involving the conscienceless photographer played by Stephen Rea, but the marquee pairing of Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren is just painful to watch, and most of the other pairings are cliché catalogues. And what point is Altman trying to make about dog shit on the Paris sidewalks?