Love in a gondola

The City of Your Final Destination

Crit

A conundrum: is My Future Wife Laura Linney the only actor in this thing who manages to infuse her cardboard character with something resembling human life, or is her character the only one who seems to have any blood pumping through her veins because she's played by MFW Laura Linney?

Well, who cares? From the massive dose of Exposition Concentrate we are fed in the opening 90 seconds to the lovers' final rainstorm embrace to the completely pointless epilogue, this is a textbook negative example of the show-don't-tell principle, and the clockwork plot reminds us that the thing about a clock is that you can look at it and know at a glace what's coming next.

Still, I rarely rate something one star ("Hated It") on Netflix, and I was content to give it two ("Didn't Like It"), but it lost star #2 during that epilogue, with persistent conversations by two couples during the overture to an opera, essentially sending the message "Talking during the show is OK and only stodgy twerps object." Oh, no, that just won't do.

Trailers

• Io sono l'amore (I am love)--One of those foodie love stories, starring Tilda Swinton; how bad can it be?
• El secreto de sus ojos (The secret in their eyes)--Digging up an old crime; maybe gripping, maybe schlocky, hard to tell.
  

Suntory time

Lost in Translation

(2003)

OK, I recognize that this is not official critical language, but this film just makes me feel so fucking good. And no, I won't deny that part of the reason for that is the man-of-a-certain-age-in-an-impossible-intimate-but-not-intimate-that-way-relationship-with-someone-who-looks-like-Scarlett Johansson element of it--duh!--but more than that is just the heartbreaking truth of relationships impossible for whatever reason. And why does that make me feel good, exactly? Hey, did I ever claim to be a model of emotional balance?

This thing I noticed this time that I'd never noticed before: a thank-you to John Lydon, obviously for the karaoke use of "God Save the Queen."

Love-and-money simple

The Square

Crit

Aussie stuntman Nash Edgerton directs a slickly crafted noir--a chunk of Blood Simple, a crucial element of The Player, and as A. O. Scott points out, a whole lot of every film in which someone takes a bag of cash that doesn't belong to him (or her) and things go less smoothly than expected. The film does a brilliant job of keeping you guessing who's done what and why, and how it's all going to shake down for the wicked but sympathetic protagonists. Oh, and it opens with what may be the best sequence of auto eroticism I've ever seen--or, rather, mostly heard, since it's shot at an angle through the car's side windows, and the glass is throwing off early-morning glare. We see almost nothing, but there are those who see--and the reaction shot is priceless.

How sharper than a serpent's tooth

Tôkyô monogatari (Tokyo story)

(1953)

A film from the year of my birth--which is to say 8 years after my father's generation bombed the everlovin' bejesus out two Japanese cities to bring the Emperor to his knees . . . yet it is a full 40 minutes until there is any hint that this is a nation that has been involved for generations in anything more contentious than a train queue. For that span, we have a rather boring Nipponese Ward and June Cleaver whose worst worry is that Beaver and Wallette are not quite as dutiful as a son and daughter might be wished in the best of all possible worlds (which this otherwise seems to be).

Then, finally, not quite a third of the way through, we discover that the young woman they're visiting on an evening when neither child has time for them is their widowed daughter-in-law, whose husband was drafted and died, yes, 8 years earlier.

And guess what? It turns out that the worst thing Ward and June (OK, actually Shukishi and Tomi Hirayama, subtly and sweetly played by Chishû Ryû and Chieko Higashiyama) have to worry about in a postwar world is . . . that 3 of their 4 children (not counting the dead one, about whom the reviews are mixed but mostly positive) are jerks to one degree or another.

On the other hand, their daughter at home (Kyôko Kagawa) and the daughter-in-law (Setsuko Hara) are Cordelia x 2, so kife, take it all around, it pretty OK.

Bittersweet quotidian, with only one real event of note, but it contains the whole lives of a loving couple, their family, and their troubled but resilient nation.

All the Führer's men

Män Som Hatar Kvinnor (The girl with the dragon tattoo)

Crit

Reading A. O. Scott in the Times this morning (Brutal Truths About Violence) almost turned me away from this, but in the end, I needed a dose of movie-theater popcorn w/ Kernel Season's Parmesan-garlic topping, and if that meant gratuitous and possibly misogynistic, even pornographic violence, well, sometimes popcorn comes with a price.

Well, all due respect, A. O. is one sick fuck if he finds anything remotely titillating in the rape sequence; the events and the aftermath are repellent, disgusting, and downright grotesque, and the revenge sequence is about 70% practical calculation and no more than 30% gratuitous revenge, which is a fair breakdown, given the provocation.

That aside, it is a terrific action/suspense film with one of the most complicated and fascinating female characters I have seen in a long time. In the late going, the film gets too talky, telling us stuff we ought to be able to figure out for ourselves (and it also veers a little too close to an episode of Dexter), but not until the final reel do you start to realize that, indeed, this sucker is 2½ hours long.

I'm in for the sequels that seem certain to follow (the literary basis being part of a series), assuming Noomi Rapace will be back. By the way, the Swedish title, which apparently we squeamish Americans were thought incapable of handling, translates "men who hate women."

Trailers

• The Kids Are All Right--Yes. Just yes. Yes.
• Please Give--I'll follow Nicole Holofcener anywhere, and I'm starting to feel the same way about Rebecca Hall.

Shitting Tiffany cufflinks

Full Metal Jacket

(1987)

Better part of a decade since I last saw this, and that time I thought the Parris Island stuff was mind-blowing, the in-country stuff merely ordinary, but this time I'm a little more impressed by the Vietnam half. Still, it's hard to erase the image of Vincent D'Onofrio's "Private Pyle" armed in the platoon head, crazy eyes rolled back in his skull. There's nothing in the heart of darkness that can compare to that.

A heartbreaking work of staggering genius

Today's Man

(2008)

Full disclosure: the father of filmmaker Lizzie Gottlieb and her subject and brother Nicky is my author and friend.

But that changes the way I react to this only in personal ways, I think, not in critical ways. The nub of this hourlong documentary, for me, is a recognition, a revelation, that someone with Asperger's Syndrome, for all his difficulties with grasping the individual challenges of others, can understand his own challenge from the outside as well as from the inside--which strikes me as terrifying, as something that would simply paralyze me. Yet Nicky takes it, literally, as a matter of fact: that that is the way most people's minds works, and this is the way mine works. There are many heroes in this story, but none more heroic that the one who stares down a cognitive tunnel knowing that there are wonders outside the tunnel forever hidden to him, yet remains happily at home with what he can see.

The dead

The Eclipse

Crit

Half of this film is a perfectly predictable love triangle: Good Man (Ciarán Hinds), Good Woman (Iben Hjejle), and Asshole She's Inexplicably Involved with (Aidan Quinn); quadrangle if you include Good Man's Late, Much-Lamented Wife.

The uninteresting half, though, is necessary to the requirements of the excellent half: the creepy, weird, unpredictable, and genuinely frightening ghost story. Still, you wish Quinn's bestselling American novelist weren't drawn quite so simplistically; that wasn't necessary. Gorgeous location shooting in coastal Cobh, County Cork.

The man I used to be

A History of Violence

(2005)

Hard to watch in so many ways (yes, definitely including the episode on the stairway). About all I have energy to say tonight is that I have no idea what a real person would do upon discovering that the man's she'd known and loved for the better part of two decades had been, before that, not just someone she didn't know but someone she'd never have wanted to know, someone she'd have avoided at all costs, and someone she'd have done everything she could to keep her children away from (children fathered, of course, by the man she did know, or thought she knew), but if anyone could imbue the role with all the confusion of this sentence any better than Maria Bello does here, I'd sure like to see it (yes, including in the episode on the stairway, but perhaps most economically and most beautifully in the final dinner-table scene).

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly

Vincere

Crit

At last, the answer to the eternal question: was the young Mussolini a hottie?

A funny thing happened on my way to not liking this: Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), whose immediate and enduring passion for Il Duce quickly becomes as tiresome as it is inexplicable, finally did to me what she could not do to the father of her child: she wore me down, she won me over, she convinced me that she was worth loving and believing in. A spectacular performance by Mezzogiorno, and, as Benito senior and, later, junior, exceptional work as well by Filippo Timi.

The film itself plays some interesting games, using the Futuristic milieu as a backdrop, and veering occasionally nearly into surrealism. Contemporary newsreel footage (which reveals, among other things, that Timi looks nothing like Mussolini) and clips from commercial films including Chaplin's The Kid are folded in effectively. And there is one shot--of Ida climbing the fence of the asylum as snow falls outside--that is as arresting as any I've seen lately.

Cross to bear

Life of Brian

(1979)

I don't know--what with the Catholic Church doing its damnedest to . . . well, do its damnedest, there might be a real future for the cult of Brian.

Family affairs

Pre-Opening Day M5

What makes the perfect M? Well, it's best when the weather is really nice--when I'm able to repeat my motto, "It's far too nice a day to be outside." It's good if I get in to Grand Central with enough time to walk downtown, so that in fact I do absorb some fresh air, and better yet if the itinerary includes multiple venues at some distance, ideally including one long east-west trek. A rare bonus is getting to five films yet getting back to New Haven shortly after midnight, so that I'm not a complete zombie the next day. And, of course, all the films should ones I'm happy in retrospect to have included.

And this last M trip before baseball season--which is to say probably the last before Thanksgiving--was perfect.

Barbe bleue (Bluebeard)

IFC

Yeah, it's based on a fable about a guy who serially murders his wives, but in many ways this is an uncharacteristically gentle film from Catherine Breillat. For one thing, there's a parallel/frame story--one little girl reads the fable to her older but less precocious sister--that, regardless of where you stand on cute little girls (I generally favor standing on the forehead, myself), cannot but be described as enchanting: little Catherine (coincidental name? I think not) charms you whether you like it or not.

For another, the fable itself is nuanced à la another fable, "Beauty and the Beast": Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas) is a wistful loner, and his love for Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton; and if you see the film, you're going to wonder what I wondered, so I'll just go ahead and tell you: according to IMDb, she turned 16 late last year; yikes!) is undeniably genuine, his willingness to postpone consummation of the marriage poignant (touching in its untouchingness, as it were). And she, though a little more complicated, seems also to love him to the extent that her girlishness allows.

Which suggests that the previous brides she finds dripping blood from meathooks behind the forbidden door also genuinely loved a man who genuinely loved them. But things (or one particular thing--though in a serial scenario like this, you have to wonder what fatal thing the first wife did) happened. Which makes it a lot meatier, if you will, than the bare-bones fable.

Pranzo di Ferragosto (Mid-August lunch)

FF

Oy! Talk about irresistible! This Italia-indy, directed and co-written by Gianni Di Gregorio, one of the cowriters of the brutal Gomorra, no less, sets up a farcical situation ripe for a Hollywood remake--because Gianni (the director) can't both pay his bills and take care of his elderly mother, he gets roped into tending three other elderly women so their caretakers can take a holiday from Rome. Wackiness ensues, but delightfully and comfortingly human wackiness, among nonactors whose performances are as perfectly weathered as their faces. Nothing really happens--call it Codgercore--and that's all that needs to happen. Beautiful!

Breaking Upwards

IFC

What better praise can I give this lower-than-a-year's-rent-in-Williamsburg-budget gem than to say that its breakup moved me as much as any breakup since my own most recent one?

Director Daryl Wein and costar Zoe Lister Jones based their screenplay on life, so it remains to be seen whether they can score with full-bore fiction (and with a real budget), but what starts here as "cute" ends up heartbreakingly real. Andrea Martin does her best work since SCTV as Zoe's mother, and the vaguely familiar-looking veteran Peter Friedman (his 2nd credit on IMDb is for voicing in several Muppet Show episodes) is nearly as good as Daryl's father.

L'Épine dans le coeur (The thorn in the heart)

CV

Reviews have been lukewarm at best, which I suspect reflects critics' refusal to let Michel Gondry not be wildly creative, even for a moment. I'm not sure why anyone would have any objection to spending an hour and a half with Gondry's Aunt Suzette and her titular son Jean-Yves or revisiting the places where she used to teach and some of her former pupils. It is an intensely personal story--maybe that's it; maybe there's discomfort in being invited in on this contentious family story.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

FF (1927)

Golly! How and why have I not seen this before? Wait, that's a boring question; here's a better one: is there any genre, or any aspect of life, that F. W. Murnau leaves out? What begins as a noir story of infidelity and murder takes turns through screwball comedy, romance, redemption tale, and the mellowest of melodrama, yet it never loses its way, or loses its grip on us. An impossibly youthful Janet Gaynor (probably 20, if IMDb is to be trusted) plays the virtuous-without-being-simpy wife (rather, Wife, that being the character's name), George O'Brien the unvirtuous but salvageable Husband, Margaret Livingston the dangerously slutty Woman from the City.

Subtlety is not a hallmark of the time, but Murnau manages nonetheless to avoid being simplistic. The film is also a model of title cards minimizing--just as silent films are about to be pushed aside.

Trailers

• Surviving Desire--Revival of a 1991 Hal Hartley film; looks possible, but the likelihood that I'll have a non-Netflix shot at it seems slim.
• Mercy--Scott Caan writes about love without having experienced it; steps must be taken. Dad is played by Dad.
• Handsome Harry--Road/atonement picture; good cast includes Campbell Scott, Steve Buscemi, John Savage.
• Kasi az gorbehaye irani khabar nadareh (No one knows about Persian cats)--Who needs sex and drugs--give us some Iranian rock & roll!
• Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo--Documentary about the Japanese insect trade. Oh, yes.
• Alle Anderen (Everyone else)--Sexy German thriller?
  

Andromeda strain

Clash of the Titans

Crit

Ooh-weee, that wasn't very good, was it? I went in with no illusions, buying in only because the downtown theater just added 3D projection, but even the lowest expectations couldn't save this from being a stinker, barely half the movie the good-bad original was.

Not the slightest interesting use was made of the 3D, and there was little variety in the conceptions of myth: a bunch of wicked creatures with dangerous tails, and a Kraken whose face looked a lot like the Stygian witches'. The closest thing to invention is making Pegasus the black sheep of his white family. The whole thing is oddly static, as if the filmmakers didn't want to be tarred with the nothing-but-special-effects brush. But given that there is nothing but the special effects, and that the special effects are nothing special, you don't have to be Billy Preston to figure out the math.

The single pleasant, though very brief, surprise: the appearance of Polly Walker, who played the delightfully slutty Atia in HBO's Rome, as Cassiopeia.

Hot Tub Time Machine

Crit

Well, that's amusing enough, though I don't quite understand the widespread enthusiasm for it.

The usual issues of time-travel films pertain, especially the notion that a small change back then could change everything in the present you're trying to get back to--particularly a change that might interfere with someone's conception. But one of the blessings of the film is that it doesn't take anything too seriously, and it may be unique in suggesting that a random change back then might actually make life better today.

Mostly, this is a vehicle for actors, and all four principals--John Cusack, Craig Robinson, Rob Corddry, and Clark Duke nail their parts, as does, hilariously, Crispin Glover (who is, of course, a link to another central document in the time-travel genre). Hell, even Chevy Chase is palatable, in what is essentially the Don Knotts role from Pleasantville.

Bass Ackwards

Crit

Linas (Linas Phillips, who also directed and co-wrote) bears a striking resemblance to Martin Prince (I won't insult you by adding identifying information that would suggest that you might not know who Martin Prince is). He's in love with a married woman, living with friends who are ready to have him leave, and making what bucks he makes as a wedding videographer, in lieu of the film career he wants.

He borrows (steals? it's really not clear) a VW Short Bus from the alpaca farmer he works for momentarily, then drives east, toward Boston and his parents and/or New York and a former life. Talky adventures and friendships ensue. Call it Ramblecore. It's as beautifully shot as that much America has been shot lately, and though it's ultimately a whole lot of not much, somehow it works.

Trailers

• A Nightmare on Elm Street--Uh, no.
• The Losers--Shoot 'em up, blow 'em up, with a little sex.
  

Honor thy godfather

The T.A.M.I. Show

(1964)

I had never heard of this film or the concert it documents until reading this in the Times a couple of weeks ago, whereupon I popped it to the top of my Netflix queue. Good move.

I haven't seen these people young in ages, and some of them I never saw this young. Mick, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, Brian Wilson--geez, even Keith was young and--dare I say it?--handsome (or "cute," I guess, in the idiom of the time). Incidentally, someone really should have told Jan and Dean or whoever wrote the opening-credits song that the Stones weren't from Liverpool.

Not that Merseyside wasn't well represented: Gerry and the Pacemakers got a handoff of "Maybelline" from Chuck Berry, then traded songs with him for the first long set, and later Billy J. Kramer did four numbers, three of them written by members of another fairly prominent Liverpudlian band. That absent band was the only British invader bigger at the time (October 1964) than the Pacemakers, though the Stones were on their way, else they wouldn't have gotten to close--and while Richards was quoted to the effect that going on after a gut-ripping performance by James Brown was the biggest mistake of their career, they seemed to survive it OK.

And the boys did a nice set--would have been a great close to the concert had they been following a mortal. They started with a nod to Berry, with "Round and Round," making them the fourth act, including Chuck himself, to perform a song credited to his authorship. That wobbly articulation is designed to include the Beach Boys' "Surfin' USA," bizarrely performed three-quarters of an hour or so after Berry opened the concert with "Sweet Little Sixteen." This was after Berry had threatened a lawsuit over the obvious melodic plagiarism, and Brian Wilson and the group agreed to credit him as the composer and cut him in on royalties.

The Beach Boys, incidentally, are one of the few acts whose performance can accurately be called dull. Surprisingly exciting, on the other hand, were Lesley Gore's rendering of her feminist anthem "You Don't Own Me" and something called "Hey Little Bird," by the only act I was completely unfamiliar with, the Barbarians. These guys were proto-Ramones, which I guess explains why the Cape Cod group didn't get a lot of play on WLS in Chicago and KXOK in St. Louis, which were the only rock stations of note in my listening area.

Another great and weird pair of elements of the concert is that, if you looked only onstage, you'd have thought the fight for integration had been won, at least in Santa Monica. If you looked only at the audience, on the other hand, you'd say (as I did repeatedly, in fact, aloud; hey, I watch a lot of movies alone), "Where are all the black people?"

Anyway, not the greatest rock concert film ever, but a lot closer to the top than you'd have imagined, if you were as ignorant of its existence as I was.