Rendez-vous

Les Triplettes de Belleville

(2003)

Obsession, devotion, crime, action, music, and a big old dumb dog! This remains one of the most delightfully twisted films of the millennium, and one of the most delightfully twisted animated features full-stop. A hard one to watch when you're not drinking wine, though.

Do the right thing

Serpico

(1973)

Ah, those were the days: when an Al Pacino performance could be described as almost restrained when stacked up against the scenery chewing of costars like Tony Roberts and Cornelia Sharpe. Incidentally, has anyone ever pointed out that, like Superman, Serpico gets involved only w/ women whose name starts w/ L? In fact, one is even named Leslie Lane--coincidence?

Two nights in a row I've been pleasantly surprised to see M. Emmet Walsh show up in what I was watching, and sorry to find his role so small (in this case, one short scene).

Sinners in the hands . . .

Das weiße Band: Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The white ribbon)

Crit

. . . and if all that wasn't enough, then somebody shot Archduke Ferdinand. The latest from Michael Haneke (who has previously mindfucked me in a good way with La Pianiste [The piano teacher] and Caché and in a dreadful way with his U.S. remake of his own Funny Games) is a remarkable whodunit (and later, a wherewent'em) set in a little pre-Great War Austrian village whose seemingly innocent bucolic nature takes a severe Children of the Corn turn.

In the end you're left wondering . . . well, lots of things, but certainly not why the film is nominated for the foreign film Oscar (Caché got screwed out of a nomination on a technicality, as I recall). Having read too much about the film, I was looking ahead to it as a necessary ordeal, but while there is much that's hard to watch, it really is good old-fashioned moviemaking at its best.

Trailers

• Madeo (Mother)--Latest from Joon-ho Bong looks way intense.
• The Yellow Handkerchief--In the can since 2008, finally released to unhappy reviews.
  

Recidivism

Raising Arizona

(1987)

What do Werner Herzog and the Coens have in common? They're capable of creating a universe so freakin' weird that when they turn Nic Cage loose, we cheer. This is just so far beyond the pale that it has no right to work, and yet who would change a thing?

Eiger sanctioned

Nordwand (North face)

Crit

Wow, yeah, this is compelling all right, when the guys are up there on the mountain in an impossible situation, with blizzard and avalanche and frostbite and unwise earlier decisions to cope with, but just because something's based on a true story doesn't make it exempt from melodrama, and this is melodramatic out the whatever-the-German-is-for-wazoo. Speaking of German, my favorite thing I learned from this film is that Wednesday = Mittwoch (aka Humpday).

What I like about Christmas

Go

(1999)

Didn't love it when it was new, was persuaded by my daughter to reevaluate, don't like it much now, though (1) I must confess that it's another example of competency from Katie Holmes; (2) it's good to see a pre-Seth Bullock Timothy Olyphant; and (3) Sarah Polley is always worth watching.

Blind fucking cheetahs

Oscar®-nominated animated shorts

Crit

Most persistent theme in this collection is crime by women; next is probably lost love late in life.

• French Roast--Pleasant enough exploration of grotesquerie and irony--with a female criminal.
• La dama y la muerte (The lady and the reaper)--An energetic, trippy treatment of old age ready for death, but for the busybody medical profession.
• A Matter of Loaf and Death--The Wallace and Gromit entry, thus wild and wonderful, and a lock for the Oscar. Another lawbreaking woman here (though sorry, that's a bit of a spoiler).
• Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty--More grotesquerie, more female criminality, in the old fairy who curses the christening and in her real-life double, the granny telling her terrified grandchild a bedtime story that concludes with a promise of death upon sleep. A wonderful piece.
• Logorama--Talk about trippy: multinational commercial symbols dominate foreground and background of this crime and natural disaster story. The criminal is male this time, a fast-food-peddling clown.

The rest are not nominees, but were added to pad the program to feature length:

• Partly Cloudy--Here's your Pixar (thus Disney) pic, and annoying as its early cuteness is, it won me over with its portrayal of the stork who draws the short feather, baby-delivery-commisionwise.
• Runaway--Criminal female here is a cow on the track, who wreaks havoc on a train. Well animated and fun.
• The Kinematograph--Striking visually, clichéd thematically.
  

Dead guy flour

Oscar®-nominated live-action shorts

Crit

Well, you've got an Irish film set in Ukraine and a Danish film set at the Chelsea Hotel, you've got one excellent film, three pretty good ones, and only one embarrassingly awful one (pretty good percentages by recent standards), and you've got nary the remotest Holocaust connection anywhere. So in theory the field is wide open.

• Kavi--A poverty-stricken young Indian boy is abused by his 100% evil brickmaking boss, though he is blessed with angelic parents and the arrival of professional do-gooders. The only way this can possibly have been nominated for best anything is by the filmmakers' somehow convincing committee members that a vote against it was a vote for slavery. Well, I'm going to take a courageous stand here: slavery is a very bad thing, and we should do all we can about the 17 million slaves worldwide invoked in the end titles, but notwithstanding that, this film is crap: trite, badly acted, badly directed, boringly shot, and without an iota of artistic merit. It is thus the second-likeliest nominee to win the Oscar.
• The New Tenants--A dramatic-irony-stricken young gay man is abused by his lover and by a series of doorbell ringers in this weird, wonderful piece reminiscent of a Sam Shepard play in the seemingly random arrivals and fatal departures of one character after another, each bringing along or (taking away) a crucial element of the building narrative. Should win, hasn't a chance in hell. Features appearances by the only two actors I recognized all afternoon, Vincent D'Onofrio and Kevin Corrigan.
• Miracle Fish--A poverty-stricken young Australian boy is abused by schoolyard bullies and one of those dreamlike where-the-hell-has-everybody-disappeared-to? scenarios. Very effective in keeping the viewer off-balance up until and even past the crucial reveal, and the climax comes and goes in a blink, so pay attention, dammit! But ask yourself a practical question at the end: given what we've seen, where the hell has everybody disappeared to (crucially not the same question as "What has happened to them?")?
• The Door--A radiation-stricken young Ukrainian girl is abused by Chernobyl and the Soviet regime's inept response to same. Another unabashed heartstring-tugger, but this one has the merit of excellent, spooky production values and a little bit of mystery. It is, in fact, what it will no doubt be called: haunting. If there's any justice in the universe, this will win. Of course, if there were a lot of justice in the universe, the best film would win, but that's a different proposition.
• Istället för abrakadabra (Instead of abracadabra)--A reality-stricken young Swedish magician is abused by a prop, his unsympathetic father, and himself. Clearly delightful to some in my audience, though I'd stop at thoroughly entertaining and engaging, the most likable of the set. I suppose it could be a dark horse if the heartstring vote gets split evenly.
  

If Alex Trebeck bought a nude painting of me . . .

Short Cuts

(1993)

An even more-sprawling-than-usual Robert Altman film, and another one of those multistory meditations on infidelity and death (which may in fact be the same thing), this one based on stories by Raymond Carver. And I don't know--the cast is great (including not only one of my Future Wives but three other Favorite Movie Women), each of the stories is compelling, and Altman is Altman--so why don't I love it as I love, say, Magnolia, which clearly owes a lot to this film's structure, including the climactic Big Natural (or maybe Unnatural, in the case of the later film) Catastrophe that pulls the rug out from under all the narratives?

I dunno, but I will say that it's a pretty good way to spend 3 hours.

Dark, black night

Killshot

(2008)

Here's a mystery. No, not the film: it's a pretty good crime story based on an Elmore Leonard novel, a pretty good one. The mystery is that a pretty good film based on a pretty good Elmore Leonard novel, produced by the Weinsteins, with a very good cast and directed by an A-lister, seems to have gone, if not quite straight to video, then close to it, opening on 5 screens last January and closing after week 2 with a U.S. gross of $17K. Here is the most convincing account I've found, though I take exception to the scathing treatment of Gordon-Levitt, whose manic stupidity I found consistent with the character Leonard created, and Dawson, whose performance, not to mention her crater-faced makeup job, I found quite brave for a glamour girl.

I suppose one can quibble about how persuasive an Indian Mickey Rourke makes, but there's no gainsaying that, as in the novel, we are confronted with an ostensibly empty-souled death machine whose humanity we nonetheless can't ignore and can't fail to respond to. And if there's anyone better than Diane Lane at conveying I-don't-think-I-love-you-anymore-but-I'm-not-absolutely-certain, I don't know who it might be.

Great film? Nah. Better than dozens and dozens that get far better treatment from their studios every year? Oh, hell yeah. But don't take my word for it; rent the friggin' thing and see what Hollywood geniuses consider fit for the slag heap.

Can you butle?

My Man Godfrey

(1936)

Had the pleasure tonight of showing this to someone who had never seen it before, and while under those circumstances, one might wish that Carole Lombard were just a tad less hysterical and that the few moments of didacticism from William Powell a tad more subtle, but there's not much else I'd have different. It may not be a perfect film, but it's a perfectly wonderful one.

Laika, lost in space

Mitt Liv som Hund (My life as a dog)

(1985)

Having avoided Lasse Hallström's latest in the wake of eviscerating reviews, I thought it was about time to see this one, which I missed when it was in the theaters a quarter of a century ago.

And my, yes, it's a keeper, not a weeper--a beautiful, unsentimental treatment of a boy's temporary, then permanent, loss of his mother--and his dog! Inexplicably, the only feature for Anton Glanzelius, who is devilishly-grinningly brilliant as the protagonist, Ingemar.

Lev and death

The Last Station

Crit

I confess I've never been able to summon any enthusiasm for James McAvoy, so that might explain in part my lack of investment either in his character Valentin's romantic subplot or in his more central conscientious struggle between ideology and humanity.

But then, I've always been a big fan of former New Havener Paul Giamatti, and I don't care anything about his Rasputinesque grasp for the soul of a great one either. Both actors, as well as Kerry Condon, as Valentin's love, seem misplaced in prerevolutionary Russia, supernumerary outliers to the story that we care about.

That would be the story of a man and woman who have lived together for 48 years despite their both being impossible to live with, he because he's a semiwilling icon of iconoclasticism, she because she's a reactionary hyperromantic. And I'm not sure there's really all that much interesting about the Tolstoys' story as it's told here, except as Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren sell it. Face it: you're just along for the ride with two actors you'd follow anywhere, even to godforsaken Astapovo station.

By the way, no one reading this is probably inclined to leave the theater before the last of the credits have rolled, but even if your bladder is bursting, stick around for these end titles, which include some wonderful film footage of the real Lev Nikolaevich and Maria Andreevna, as well, one suspects, as some of the other principles in the story we've just seen.

Trailer

• Nordwand (North face)--German and Austrian climbers scale the Eiger in 1936, and I guess we're suppose to care because there's a war coming, though I don't recall mountain climbing being a big tactical weapon either for Axis or Allies.
  

Poughkeepsie

The French Connection

(1971)

OK, wait a minute: the car is 120 pounds overweight? But there's 60 kilos of heroin under the rocker panels. This sounds very much like someone saying, "What's a kilo? Like, 2 pounds, right?" No, more like 2.2: the car should be 132 pounds overweight. See, this is why you should have paid attention in math class.

Otherwise, this sucker's damn near perfect.

12 steps

Crazy Heart

Cine

Nope, sorry, I'm not on the bandwagon for this by-the-numbers hard-living-artist-saved-by-the-love-of-a-good-woman phone-in. Yes, Jeff Bridges nails it, but he doesn't show us anything here he hasn't shown us for umptyleven years, and as much as I love Maggie Gyllenhaal, if the Academy is going to start handing out Oscar nominations for undistinguished, workpersonlike performances, then it needs to think about expanding the acting categories to 10 slots apiece, too, maybe 15.

Plus, maybe I've just lost track with falling in love, but can it really be that easy under the best of circumstances, to say nothing of when the guy's a complete mess and twice the woman's age? Age--maybe that's part of the problem I have with this: twice Bad tells us that he's 57 years old, as if that explains why he seems ancient; is ancient really that close?

Well, if nothing else, good to see the Cine again, and to eat its popcorn.

Trailer

• Date Night--Carell and Fey in a North by Northwest-style mistaken-identity comic farce? Oh, hell, yeah! Laughed my ass off at the trailer, not because the lines were necessarily funny but because these two are just so. fucking. good.
  

To die for

La Grande Bouffe (The big feast)

(1973)

Back to Netflix after another 3-month vacation (my available DVR space is over 30% now, thank you), and my return rental is on the recommendation of a friend I met on the train after my most recent M4; thanks, Yana--you were right: I needed to see this.

But good golly--this ain't exactly your run-of-the-mill joyful food and sex flick, is it? If you labeled it, I guess you'd have to label it a comedy (or at least a tragicomedy), and the food does indeed look gorgeous, but it's really the antithesis of the dining-table-as-altar films like Babettes gæstebud and Big Night and Tampopo and Como agua para chocolate: here the music of the kitchen (and of the bedroom--or garage, or sculpture garden, or wherever the coupling happens) is a dirge. Think 130 minutes of Mr. Creosote.

Moreover, with all the farting, the grotesque plumbing breakdown, the dessert-related sex, and a trick with a Bugatti carburetor that puts a whole new twist on the concept of auto-eroticism, you'd think it was a contemporary American movie for teenage boys. And yet it works, mostly, to the credit of four of the best European actors of our time, Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret, and Ugo Tognazzi.