Lido shuffle

Top Hat

(1935)

Two things I was thinking while watching this for the umpteenth time:

1. the Family Values crowd must really hate this and its cousin The Gay Divorcee, neither of which treats the sacred institution of marriage very sacredly, and both of which derive fun from a few benign jokes about homosexuality;
2. these could just as easily be eighteenth-century novels with their mistaken identities and the absurd plot complications keeping the love-matched couple apart apparently permanently--only to have them rescued by a deus ex farcica.
   

Sex and drugs, etc.

The Runaways

Crit

Worth seeing for the performances of Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie and Michael Shannon as producer Kim Fowley and especially Kristen Stewart's scary embodiment of Joan Jett (I was afraid she might be too girly to carry it off, but no), but the narrative is a familiar, surely oversimplified straight line, a story we've seen too many times before ever to be surprised.

Trailer

• And to capitalize on the presence of the Stewart audience (actually, there were only two of us there, neither apt to return for this one), the inevitable trailer for The Twilight Saga: Eclipse--yes, that's right: part 3 already, coming in June; sharpen your teeth.
  

That'll be the day

The Searchers

(1956)

Funny thing is, the first time I saw this, I didn't much like it. The second time I saw it, years later, I thought it was just OK. So why did I even bother seeing it a third time? Because the acclaim was so nearly unanimous that I thought I must be missing something. And so I was.

Moral of the story, I guess, is to get this on as big a screen as you can find. Repeatedly, if need be.

"Are you gonna let me in?"

Greenberg

Mad

Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) has one friend (Rhys Ifans's Ivan) and one remarkable woman 5/8 his age (Greta Gerwig's Florence) who likes him, but he works as hard as he can to reduce those numbers. Nobody can play obnoxiously engaging like Stiller, but here he concentrates on the first half of the equation, as writer-director Noah Baumbach (wife Jennifer Jason Leigh, who has a small part of Greenberg's long-ago ex-girlfriend, get co-credit for the story) cultivates his reputation of refusing concessions to happy-ending expectations.

Ifans, who has mostly played adorable goofballs to date, shows some real chops here, as does mumblecore veteran Gerwig, whose imperfect face the camera could not love more. (The opening credits shot, in fact, simply follows her face for no other reason, it would seem, than to seal our infatuation and ensure that we'll stay on her side despite her inexplicable and immediate infatuation with Greenberg.)

Trailer

• Män som hatar kvinnor (The girl with the dragon tattoo)--Zoom! Crash! Bang (and bang?)! Mmm, probably not.
  

A boy's best friend . . .

Madeo (Mother)

Crit

Yoon Do-joon's mother knows he's not the sharpest needle in the acupuncture kit, but he's not capable of having done what he's accused of doing. A mother knows these things. And a mother will do anything--absolutely anything--necessary to protect her wrongly accused son.

Aside from being damn nigh unwatchable at times because the digital cinematography (digitography?) is so dreadful, this is just one terrific damn movie: one riveting character (Hye-ja Kim in the title role), one trainwreck fascinating one (Bin Won as her dim son), and one what-the-hell-is-he-about-exactly? fascinating one (Ku Jin as D-joon's friend, sort of) plugged into a twisty guilt-riddled plot that keeps you constantly off-balance (or if it doesn't you have better balance than I).

This is the third Joon-ho Bong film I've seen (another weird and wonderful mystery, Salinui Chueok [Memories of murder], and the wacky monster flick Gwoemul [The host]), and I'm pretty much in for whatever he sends my way--including the upcoming Hollywood remake of The Host.

Tell 'em I died of the same

Destry Rides Again

(1939)

Is this film brave in combining comedy and tragedy, or is it cowardly in killing off the most engaging romantic interest to clear the path between James Stewart and the boring virgin? Yes, both, I think. But regardless, what a ripsnorting wonder of a Western from the movies' best year, and what a treat to hear Dietrich sing two of her best songs, written by her compatriot Friedrich Holländer with Frank Loesser, "You've Got That Look" and "The Boys in the Back Room."

Hey, I didn't know that. I knew there was a later Destry starring Audie Murphy, but I didn't know the story was filmed seven years earlier starring Tom Mix. Neither of those is available on DVD, though, so you'll just have to settle for this one.

An education

Un Prophète

Crit

Wow! OK, I've changed my mind about Das weiße Band probably having been the film screwed out of the Best Foreign Film Oscar. This is one amazing damned film--amazing in part because I had no idea it would be so inspirational and uplifting. No, really!

In a trajectory reminiscent of Michael Corleone's ascent, Malik (Tahar Rahim) grows up fast, learns fast, once isolationism proves untenable. Drafted by the kingpin of a Corsican prison mob (one of them named, in a half-second crowd-pleasing touch, Corleoni), Malik learns first how to hold a double-edged razor blade more or less safely in his mouth (after which you'd figure everything else would come pretty easily) to facilitate the assassination he must effect or die.

In what is probably my favorite (and certainly least expected) manifestation ever of magical realism, from then on the victim is Malik's friend, sounding board, mentor. Well, one of his mentors: there's also César (Niels Arestrup), the kingpin struggling to retain his crown after most of his gang is moved to prisons closer to home (and thus open to trusting an ethnic outsider); and Ryad (Adel Bencherif) who nudges him closer to Arab and Islamic solidarity.

As with The Godfather, this is the story of someone doing very wicked things, arguably without any choice in the matter. The choice lies in doing wicked things well or badly, and because we can sense what goes into making the "right" choice within that context, we really can't help rooting for our godson to triumph.

You don't say

Silent Movie

(1976)

After a day full of cinematic killing and cruelty and general rottenness, I desperately needed something that would make me laugh my ass off. So tell me: why did I stake my chances on a Mel Brooks movie I'd never seen before? I laughed a couple of times, but my ass is unquestionably still where it was before.

To the North, where we do what we want

Red Riding (1980)

Crit

James Marsh directed part 2, starring Paddy Considine as a detective ostensibly assigned to solve the case of the Yorkshire Ripper but in fact set up to fail. He hastens his failure by connecting the case to that of the Karachi Club murders of 1974--which we saw in part 1 . . . sort of.
What we sort of know from part 1 becomes a teasing theme through the latter two parts, as we learn more about what we really didn't know, and still aren't altogether sure about.
We are sure, however, and remain sure, that at the center of everything is grotesque and indomitable police corruption, against which the merely privately guilty (no one being innocent) are powerless.

Red Riding (1983)

Crit

And we return to little girls missing, or one little girl, rather--which is particularly disconcerting inasmuch as we thought we knew that had come to an end in '74. David Morrissey plays a cop and Mark Addy a lawyer both of whom have just enough vestigial spine left to want to undo what their general spinelessness has allowed to transpire. Anand Tucker plays faster and looser with chronology than either of the other directors, demanding that you remember who's dead to be sure when we're not in the present.
To say that everything is explained at the end would be a gross overstatement, and a disservice to a document that wears its ambiguity proudly, but it does hang together in the end, mostly. Whatever you do, though, don't watch it out of order; more than once today I thought how lost I would be without having seen 1974 first, and that principle was reinforced when the one person with me in the audience for 1983 (yesterday was also a 2-person audience, and at 1980 we were 6, I believe), who had seen 1980 with me but had not yet seen part 1, grilled me on the way out. And now, looking at IMDb, I see that I grossly misled him on one matter of fact, having been grossly misled myself by my own assumption.

Under the beautiful carpet

Red Riding (1974)

Crit

Let me just say that my memories of Yorkshire feature a majestic Gothic cathedral and a lovely bed and breakfast with friendly hosts. Though it's true I didn't stray very far from the A19. (And OK, actually, I don't remember anything about the B&B, but pretty much everywhere we stayed fit that description.) This Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, is a place where the sun never shines, the architecture looks like crime, and very bad things happen repeatedly to the genitals of a man who doesn't mind his own business. (Also occasional very good things, but somehow the bad are more persuasive.)

Julian Jarrold directed the first of the trilogy (wanted to watch them all in a day, but the theater didn't cooperate--but I'm not complaining, 'cause I didn't expect the flicks to show up here at all), and he leaves you looking for a grittier word for "gritty." Andrew Garfield plays a newspaper reporter whose daddy issues seem the main motivation for his hell-for-leather determination to find the truth about a series (or maybe not a series) of disappearances of young girls; Rebecca Hall, who convinces me more every time I see her how good she is, plays one of the grieving mothers, who also has additional issues stacked on the coffee table; and Eddie Marsan appears too briefly as, according to him, the sort of disillusioned reporter that Garfield's character is fated to become.

Robinson for Pappas

Bull Durham

(1988)

The go-to film for a day on which I suffered a crushing sports disappointment. God help me, I'll be following the NIT this year!

Weapons of Mass Distraction;or, All the Nukes That's Fit to Print

Green Zone

Crit

I seriously considered staying home to nurse my crappy cold, but then I thought that maybe Paul Greengrass's shakycam would work a sort of homeopathic magic on my inner ear and cure me. But no.

Look, there's a lot I don't know about what has happened in Iraq over the past seven years, and like all good peacenik liberals, I'm really attracted to the narrative that Very Bad Guys lied shamelessly to foment a completely unnecessary but profitable war while Very Good Guys tried valiantly by ineffectually to make the truth carry the day.

However.

Unfortunately, I have spent a significant portion of my 56 years interacting with actual human beings, very few of whom seem to sport evident halos or horns, and the black and white hats they sometime wear fail frustratingly to correspond consistently to accepted good-and-evil iconography.

As a result, it's hard for me to enjoy black-and-white narrative-qua-narrative. In fact, I sometimes feel a tad insulted. In fact, I sometimes get a tad pissy about it. I've been known to use terms like "intellectually dishonest" or "mindlessly simplistic." Particularly when, within the narrative, one of the points the Very Good Guys are trying to make is that it's not useful to consider all Iraqis to be either Very Good Guys or (more likely) Very Bad Guys. Did no one notice the contradiction?

Oh, and did I mention the script? Have Amy Ryan and Greg Kinnear ever had to read such clichéd dialogue?

Random point #1: what is more disorienting, Greengrass's camera work or Brendan Gleeson's affecting a regionally indeterminate "American" accent?

Random point #2: did anyone else on this side of the Pond notice Greengrass and Matt Damon in the stands at Stamford Bridge during a recent televised Chelsea match? The (Brit) TV announcers didn't, though obviously the engineer did.

Trailers

Sequels, an old standby, and a beloved title appropriated . . .

• Robin Hood--Yeah, I've already blurbed this, but the new radically revised trailer shows a much ballsier Cate-as-Maid Marian, and that in part ramps up my enthusiasm for the project.
• Iron Man 2--I was lukewarm on the original, but red-haired Gwyneth Paltrow is back as Pepper Potts, and Mickey Rourke is the Russian supervillain, so I'm a guarded yes.
• Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps--Gecko sticks. The fabulous Carey Mulligan plays his estranged daughter, the inexplicable Shia LaBeouf plays her fiancé who yearns not to be estranged, and Michael Douglas is back, of course, as The Man.
• Repo Men--It is fair to say, I think, that this is a descendant of the Alex Cox cult classic. Here, though, Jude Law and Forest Whitaker repo defaulted body parts. It goes without saying that such a life must always be intense.
  

Dreißig Minuten

Anonyma: Eine Frau in Berlin (A woman in Berlin)

(2008)

This topped at least one best-films-of-2009 (more or less) list that I know of, and I'm hard-pressed to deny it. Yet it's easy to understand why Germany didn't put it forward as its foreign-film Oscar nomination. As the end credits tell us, the memoir on which the film is based stirred national outrage when it was published in 1959, and the author herself suppressed it (and her identity) afterward.

If this were merely a film about the quest of a woman and a defeated city to survive at any cost the onslaught of rapacious Russians, it would be a powerful document of time and place. But what lifts it above even the best of the war-is-hell subgenre is a shocking turn it takes from that narrative, one that I don't want to specify so that you can be shocked by it too. Suffice it to say that this is one of those miraculous films that repeatedly teases you into thinking you've seen this before and you know where it's going next, then repeatedly yanks the rug out from underneath your conventional expectations.

Astonishing performances, too, from Nina Hoss and Yevgeni Sidikhin, neither of whom I've ever seen before, though I wouldn't be surprised to see at least Hoss again, and a wonderful almost silent turn (save for a memorable song) by one Viktor Zhalsanov as a character known only as "the Mongolian."

Never touch a man's hat

Wild Bill

(1995)

I'm willing to concede that this might have been better actually R-rated and uninterrupted instead of AMC-edited and commercial-break-riddled (I calculate that at least 20 of the 115 theatrical minutes must have been lost), but that could hardly have made the interminable assassination-tease sequence bearable. From what I could see, the only thing worth watching was Jeff Bridges's struggle to make something from a bloodless (which is not to say unbloody) script.

Come the revolution . . .

Doctor Zhivago

(1965)

Here's a puzzler: I saw this several times in my youth, which would lead me to assume that I first saw it when it was new--except that now I see that I was barely 12 when it was released, which would mean that in my Legion of Decency-bound home (doubtless the theme of adultery resulted in a rating, at best, of A-III, Morally Unobjectionable for Adults, if not B, Morally Objectionable in Part) there's no way I'd have been allowed to see it, and I certainly never would have sneaked to it, even if the cinderblock single-screen theater in my little town happened to be open then (possible) and would have gotten such a blockbuster first-run (extremely unlikely).

I remember for certain that my first exposure to it--as was the case for many "adult" movies at the time--came via a MAD magazine satire. In fact, I even remember one joke: when Lara reveals to Komorovsky, "I'm carrying Yuri's baby," Komorovsky responds with something like, "You'd think a big man like that could carry his own baby." Yeah, I know, but I must have found it pretty hilarious then if I remember it 44 years later.

Anyway, I'd been thinking lately that I'd like to see it again, and TCM accommodated me, and this evening I decided it was either this or Gone with the Wind--either Lara or Tara. And I'm happy to report that it was not a waste of 3+ hours.

Publish and/or perish

The Ghost Writer

Crit

A blurb in the trailer for Joon-ho Bong's Mother trumpets it as "the best Hitchcock movie in years," or words to that effect. Well, I haven't seen that yet, but this mystery-thriller is the best new Hitchcock film I've seen in years. And funny, I'd completely forgotten that it was Polanski until the end credits rolled.

The obvious and conventional wisdom is that the Pierce Brosnan character, former Prime Minister Adam Lang, = Tony Blair, but in fact, his DNA includes generous dollops of W (fitness mania, paranoia, homeland security über alles) and Bill Clinton (a wife at least equally formidable to whom he is defiantly unfaithful), and he is even given a Nixonian signature line at one point. Best role for Ewan McGregor since . . . hell, I don't know . . . Moulin Rouge? Trainspotting? A long while, in any case. Maybe he can finally leave Obi-Wan far, far behind.

Trailers

• Cyrus--Possibly excellent, with awkward John C. Reilly falling (duh!) for Marisa Tomei, and Jonah Hill, weirder- and creepier-looking than ever (tall cotton, that) as her dealbreaking, romance saboteur of a son.
• Letters to Juliet--Ooh, this gives me the shivers. Looks like an unconscionable sloppy-sentimental waste of Vanessa Redgrave, Amanda Seyfried, Gael García Bernal, and, OMG, Franco Nero.

Study war no more

Broken Arrow

(1950)

A sentimentalized version of the 1870 Anglo-Apache peace effort in the Arizona Territory, featuring an appallingly goopy love story and white actors in most of the central Indian roles, including the earnest Jeff Chandler as the noblest savage ever, Cochise.

But dammit: James Stewart, OK? And beautiful southwestern locations reminiscent of John Ford country. Those two factors excuse a multitude of sins, and they get a full sin-excusing workout here.

Pulp Levant

Ajami

Crit

Israel on the QT, as first-time writer-directors Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani craft a violent, Tarantinoesque jigsaw narrative of life, love, and death among Jews, Muslims, and Christians. The tribute walks a tightrope over plagiarism, as both a disastrous snort of white powder and a misplaced heirloom watch with fatal consequences play key roles in the chronologically scrambled intersecting multiple narratives. But if you're gonna steal . . .

Bottom line: an impressive, moving, disturbing piece of work on its own merits.