Right-of-way

The Station Agent

(2003)

OK, seriously, look: I'm a misanthrope who likes trains and walks everywhere, and while I'm not technically a little person, I do feel just as impotent in the face of the forces of the universe as does Fin (Peter Dinklage). So why can't My Future Wife Patricia Clarkson nearly run over me in her vehicle (though of course I'd hope that in real life her vehicle would not be an SUV, even a smallish one, as here).

My god, I love this film--and yes, I chose it this evening because I needed some more Patty after today's Cairo Time, but Dinklage and Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Williams are also all indispensable, as is the score by my former neighbor Stephen Trask. It is, quite simply, exactly what independent film--screw that: what film, full stop--is supposed to be. And 99.9% of all films could take this hint from the final scene: leave 'em wanting more; leave 'em wondering more than knowing.

Pyramid scheme

Cairo Time

Crit

Let's talk about sexual tension. 'Cause see, the movies are all about letting us experience vicariously all sorts of experiences we'll never have the opportunity to experience in real life. But sexual tension--that painful, hopeful sense that things are going in a certain direction, but the uncertainty about how far in that direction things will go, whether they'll go all the way--is something we all have experienced once or twice or a thousand times, and something the movies rarely give us.

Oh, Fred's character may not know whether he'll get to dance cheek-to-cheek with Ginger's character after the final reel, but it's always obvious to us. This is one realm in which real life will almost always be more suspenseful than reel life. Which is one reason why this is one of my favorite films in a long while. There's no denying that Juliette (My Future Wife Patricia Clarkson, in one of the finest [in every sense] performances of her career) and Tariq (the Sudanese-born Alexander Siddig) are having a "romance," but given that she sincerely loves her husband (a UN official whose duties are keeping him from joining her on her first trip to Cairo), and so does his friend and former colleague Tariq, they have every reason to resist the urge they share. At one point Tariq draws near, and Juliette pulls away . . . then draws closer . . . then says, with excruciating ambiguity, "Let's go."

Another thing that makes the film special is that Ruba Nadda (who has directed nothing else I've ever heard of, though I must say the short I Would Suffer Cold Hands over You sounds intriguing) knows what a treasure she has in the faces of her leads. I've pretty much decided that MFW Patty's face is the best in the movies today, and Siddig's is not too shabby for a guy's. Nadda regularly lets each act quietly with his or her face alone, and those faces say as much as any words could.

A beautiful, heart-wrenching gem of a film.

Kill or be killed

Mickey One

(1965)

Beatty does his best Brando and Arthur Penn his best Fellini in a gritty, semisurreal tale of a smalltime standup comic on the run from Detroit mobsters.

If you've ever been a lady to begin with

The Cooler

(2003)

The language isn't Mametesque, but everything else about this sad-sack loser's story is, including said sad-sack loser and his antagonist being played by Mamet regulars Bill Macy and Alec Baldwin. One of those stories that begins with an implausible premise--Macy's Bernie Lootz is a genuine bad-luck charm, whose touch can kill a gambler's hot streak, and that makes him a valuable property to Baldwin's casino boss Shelly Kaplow--and once you buy into that, everything else makes sense.

Shelter from the storm

Kisses

Crit

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out whether this is a Wizard of Oz movie or a non-Wizard of Oz movie, but finally I decided that what it is is an anti-Wizard of Oz movie: Oz (Dublin) may not be perfect, but it's a tragedy to have to go back to Kansas (a mind-numbingly dreary working-class suburb). Actually, Huckleberry Finn is a closer analogue: Huck is Dylan and Jim is his next-door neighbor Kylie; they even spend a chunk of their first hours of escape not on the River Liffey but on a canal garbage dredge. And in this version, Leslie Fiedler's repressed homoeroticism becomes fumbling preadolescent heteroeroticism. But they have just as much trouble getting out from under "sivilization." Untrained actors Shane Curry and Kelly O'Neill make the children real. A quiet gem.

End-credits mystery: what part of this was filmed in Göteborg, and why? Wait, correction: Trollhättan, Västra Götalands län, though it was filmed by the Göteborg unit.

An education

Born Yesterday

(1950)

Judy Holliday's classic smart dumb girl; merely perfect.

Burning down the house

Get Low

Crit

A mystery story that's not really much of a mystery, but who cares when you get to spend 100 minutes with Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Bill Murray, Bill Cobbs, and the surprising Lucas Black? It's all about the people. One of the most perfectly suited roles Duvall has ever played, which is saying a lot.

Trailer

• You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger--Woody Allen's latest, with the usual excellent cast.

Believe in mankind

Che

(2008)

Easy to see why Steven Soderbergh's 2-part 4 1/2-hour portrait of the revolutionary met with mixed critical response and popular response so unmixed that it barely escaped New York and LA: it's an epic, yes, but an understated epic, a quiet epic. Then too, saints tend not to be interesting, and make no mistake: whether or not you happen to worship at his church, this was a saint. Credit Soderbergh and Benicio del Toro for making uncompromising dedication to a cause human.

Jon Lee Anderson, who wrote a masterful biography of Che a decade or so ago, is listed as "chief consultant," and Soderberg's good-luck charm Matt Damon appears in a single short scene and has maybe two lines.

Get a life

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Crit

Ah, one of those movies you like and desperately, desperately, desperately wish you could love, but love just isn't there. It showed me things I've never seen in the movies before, and for that I'm in favor, even though some of those things are things I suspect I'd have seen were I a chronic player of video fighting games like the characters in the film. And one reason I can't love it is that while seeing reasonably naturalistic movie action segue surreally into a fight featuring superpowers and wild effects is pretty cool the first time, the premise of the story is that Scott has to do it seven times (more, in fact, including false starts and redos), and that just becomes tedious.

Trailers

Good golly, what a lot of them, but Windows 7 has complicated the pasting in of links, so you're on your own finding out what IMBd can tell you about them.

• Skyline--Boring title for what looks like a run-of-the-mill the-aliens-are-coming flick.
• Going the Distance--Drew Barrymore in a drab-looking romcom.
• It's Kind of a Funny Story--Might be: Boden & Fleck direct disturbed, institutionalized boy-in-like story.
• Jackass 3D--No, I wish I were making it up, but I'm not.
• Devil--More goofiness from M. Night Sham.

Wouldn't it be nice

Eat Pray Love

Crit

Good lord, 45 minutes of eating, 45 of praying, 45 of painstakingly learning to love again; thank god it wasn't Eat Pray Love Change Your Oil; I couldn't have taken another 45 minutes.

Thoroughly unimaginative, thoroughly unsurprising script, wherein every seven minutes, like clockwork, a peripheral character tells Liz (Julia Roberts, who should fire her agent immediately) Something She Needs to Know. Gah!

Three things make it tolerable: the scenery (though the Rome we see--including even the food--is Rome for Cliché Lovers); Richard Jenkins, who manages to sell the most gloppy dialogue; and the surprise of hearing João Gilberto sing "'S Wonderful."

Trailer

• How Do You Know (no question mark sic)--Despite James L. Brooks and a promising cast, I'm skeptical.

Sex and books and rock & roll

Pleasantville

(1998)

Another in the category of I-didn't-appreciate-it-fully-when-it-was-new-but-now-it's-a-favorite.

One of the most conceptually brilliant films of the late 20th c., but an excellent film beyond concept. But good god, when is Gary Ross, who directed Seabiscuit five years later and nothing in the 7 years since (though IMDb shows a couple of things upcoming) going to prove this wasn't a fluke?

We deal in lead, friend

The Magnificent Seven

(1960)

This was, I believe, supposed to be the big break-out English-language role for Horst Buchholz, and it might have been had he been able to tone down the accent into something less weird. A few years later, of course, he might have been able to parlay his film career into a governorship.

Not ashamed to say it: I like this even better than Seven Samurai.

Loving life and ready for war

The Other Guys

Crit

Yes, everyone's right: pretty damned funny, and the chemistry between Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg fairly screams sequel. Sadly, the payoff for the running joke about Wahlberg's Detective Hoitz having accidentally shot Derek Jeter that I read about last weekend in the Times will appear only in the DVD version. If you're as old as I am and paying attention (and later you don't even have to be paying close attention), there's another good baseball joke in the film, involving the isn't-that-rare-glimpse-of-him-always-welcome Michael Keaton.

Restrepo

Crit

Documentary stripped down to bare bones, like the military life it portrays: there's no room for politics, there's room only for as direct a movement as possible from point A to point B, from beginning to end--of the film, or of the stay in the hell that is the Korangal Valley of Afghanistan. Yeah, I know "objectivity" is never really possible when someone's pointing a camera, but you settle for the illusion of it as an accurate portrayal of what we ask our young men and women (though all men here) to do for whatever we're getting out of it.

Trailers

• The Green Hornet--Oh, ho! I was lukewarm on this action-hero update starring Seth Rogen until just now, when I noticed that it's directed by . . . Michel Gondry??!? Well, that changes everything.
• The Expendables--Stallone directs Schwarzenegger (briefly, one guesses), Willis, and (duh) Stallone in what seems to be as aptly titled a film as will be released this year.
• Red--Willis here, too, but the cast also includes, as kick-ass over-the-hill comic-book heroes, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, and, oh, yes, Helen Mirren, whom we've been waiting to see in an action film. Promising.
• The Social Network--Jesse Eisenberg in the genesis story of Facebook; promising.

Horsestuff

A Day at the Races

(1937)

Yeah, I know, I'm supposed to find this stuff hilarious. But let's face it: the typical Marx Brothers movie is not enough clever wordplay from Groucho and Chico, not enough genuinely funny slapstick from Chico and Harpo, a tedious romantic plot involving two completely uninteresting non-Marxes, and some abysmal musical numbers that leave us weeping for the next Marxist incursion.

The difference in this one is that even the Brothers aren't very funny. There is one positive exception as well, that comes just when you've despaired of being entertained at all: a musical number that comes from nowhere and actually redirects the course of the action it's so good. It's a not-altogether-racist (at least until the end, when the Brothers assume blackface--except for Harpo, who becomes a black-and-white cookie--to elude the law) song-and-dance "All God's Chillun Got Rhythm" by The Crinoline Choir.

Loaded with weapons

Life During Wartime

Crit

The funniest and best film about sexual perversion since Todd Solondz's Happiness; this is a several-years-later look at the same characters, though none of the same actors. Solondtz has played the same-role-different-actors game before, of course, within a single film (Palindromes), but where it felt kind of gimmicky there, here it seems a sensible comment on changes the years enforce--though the film also comments on how little the saddest of these bastards have changed.

Solondz always gets the best from his actors, and Ciarán Hinds, Shirley Henderson, Allison Janney, Ally Sheedy, Charlotte Rampling, and, yes, Paul Reubens do some of their best work here, though the last three's appearances on the screen are regrettably brief. And having just finished watching the 5-year run of The Wire, I was of course pleased to see Michael K. Williams, aka Omar.