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?

Nothing that I'd rather be

Levanon (Lebanon)

Crit

Wow, it's like a remake of Das Boot, only with Israeli soldiers in an even more claustrophobic (and wet) place, a tank. It's a world where your ostensible allies, a pair of Phalangists driving a Mercedes, can be lots scarier than the Syrians that you don't know what the hell they're doing in Lebanon anyway, and the closest thing to a kindness that can be mustered is helping your chained prisoner empty his bladder. Riveting and agendaless, unless impressing upon us that war isn't really much fun can be called an agenda.

Bran Nue Dae

Crit

By no stretch can this be called a good film, but its heart is enormous and in the right place, and you'd have to be a bigger Scrooge than I to resist it. The cast is a bunch of people Americans have never heard of . . . plus Oscar® winner Geoffrey Rush, glorying as a Teutonic priest without the restraint of anyone saying, "Maybe a little too broad that time, Geoff; wanna tone it down just a tad?" Everybody is having a blast on this one.

Top men

Raiders of the Lost Ark

(1981)

You know, of all the many times I've watched this before, I've never watched it just to see Nazis' heads explode, but if you see my previous post, you'll understand why I made an exception this time. (Yeah, yeah, I know: no Nazis' heads explode; a mercenary French collaborator's head explodes, and two Nazis' heads melt; close enough.)

True crime

A Film Unfinished

Crit

OK, I'm convinced: I'd been thinking Nazis had been getting kind of a bum rap all these years, but after absorbing this excruciating, brutal wallop to the solar plexus, I believe they really were right bastards. I mean, it's not enough you murder millions of people, but you treat film without the proper respect, too?

There are, I suppose, many possible criticisms of this film, not least of which the apparent surprise that documentarians can have agendas, and that evil documentarians might have evil agendas. But if after seeing all you see here you aren't so overwhelmed with revulsion by the images captured in the titular film that you suspend your critical faculties, you've a stronger stomach than I.

Nobody kills me until I say so

Mesrine: Part 1: Killer Instinct and Part 2: Public Enemy #1

Crit

How do I love this? Let me count the genres. Let's see, there's the innocent-young-soldier-who-sees-too-much-in-the-war-and-comes-out-wrecked-for-a-9-to-5-gig genre, there's the James Cagney-purposefully-crazy-gangster genre, there's the Gun Crazy/Bonnie and Clyde/crime-as-aphrodisiac genre, there's the you-endanger-my-family-while-coming-after-me? (cf. The Godfather: Part II) subgenre, there's the John Ford's-own-Monument Valley-Western genre, there's the prison-break genre (not to mention the broken-in-prison genre; geez, those Canadians maybe aren't as jolly and amiable as we've been led to believe!), there's the how-the-hell-is-the-superhero-getting-out-of-this-alive? genre--and that's all just in Part 1.

Vincent Cassel is appropriately steely/charming/scary as France's celebrity criminal Jacques Mesrine, a relentless shark who knows that he needs to keep moving forward or die.

Rock the Fenway

The Town

Crit

As I said after Ben Affleck's directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, he has the potential to direct a great film someday, but this is not yet the day. This is a strictly-by-the-numbers heist/buddy/love (which gets in the way of the buddies) story, which doesn't bear a moment's thought about key plot elements (uh, so the FBI stopped surveilling after getting the outlaws in their sights and right before their next heist why, exactly? . . . ), but the numbers are pretty good, and anything that lets us gaze at Rebecca Hall (or, for some, Jon Hamm) and Fenway Park has its undeniable merits.

Trailers

• Hereafter--Clint Eastwood directs Matt Damon in one of those interwoven touched-by-big events stories. 
• Fair Game--Naomi Watts in a sexed-up version of the Valerie Plame story.
• The Tourist--Jolie, Depp, Venice, bullets; 'nuff said.
• Life as We Know It--Death would be infinitely preferable.

Out of time

The Wild Bunch

(1969)

Ah, romance: an elegiac (sometimes too self-consciously so) valediction to a bygone way of life, death, killing, dying, and outlawry. It remains a notable bloodfest, but the degree to which it doesn't shock as much as it did 40 years ago is testimony to how much it shook things up--to how much it was also an elegiac valediction to a bygone way of depicting violence in the movies.

Big truths and pissy little bugs

Animal Kingdom

Crit

This has been called an Aussie Goodfellas, and I can see that: haphazard violence, implication of the ostensibly innocent, and a sociopathic loose cannon who will do anything to cover his tracks even if he leaves more obvious tracks in the process. But the pivotal character here, Mama Smurf, fawning and mouth-kissing on the outside, is underneath as icy and lupine a materfamilias since Livia Soprano, who is herself the iciest and most lupine materfamilias since her namesake, the Rome-suckling she-wolf of I, Claudius.

A chilling film with a wow finish.

Trailers

• Mesrine--Oh, yes: posters for both arts in the lobby, too.
• I'm Still Here--Soft review in the Times Friday, but I'm still interested.
• No trailer, but a marquee promise of Blood Noodle, as I'm calling it now.

Nothing funny

Blood Simple

(1984)

We've had Ethan and Joel for more than a quarter of a century now--and Frances McDormand, too--and for all the entertainment they've given us over that time, I think their first feature remains my favorite. Hope the Japanese remake, A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop, comes to town.

Can't believe I never noticed this before, but I was certain tonight when I heard the voice on Meurice's answering machine, and have since confirmed it, that that's another Coen regular, Holly Hunter.

Bringing down Baby

The Leopard Man

(1943)

Producer Val Lewton, director Jacques Tourneur, and a black leopard reunite, and there's even a bit of the atmospheric heavy petting of Cat People, but what this doesn't have is a Simone Simon or much of a story, particularly in terms of suspense about who is masquerading as a homicidal big cat.

You mother chucks lox at Nell

The Last Exorcism

Crit

Of the various ways this might have ended, director Daniel Stamm chose perhaps the least interesting, but until that point, this is a remarkably intelligent pas de deux between scinece and parascience, genuinely creepy on both fronts. One I'd have skipped but for Jeannette Catsoulis's enthusiastic review in the Times--which, I see now in actually reading the whole thing rather that doing my prescreening spoiler-avoiding sampling, I see shares my distress about the final reel and also answers (maybe) a question I'd wondered about while watching: "According to the press notes [Ashley] Bell’s scenes were achieved entirely without special effects; and by the time this creepumentary trips over its own pounding feet, the debt it owes to its ultra-flexible star will be more than evident." Can we get an "amen" and a "hallelujah" for that?

Trailers

Not surprisingly, a bunch of teeny creepsters, two of them new to me:

• Buried--Dude is buried, dig? Not clear whether there's any actual video footage or whether it's all from subterranean darkness, which certainly would be a way to keep the budget down.
• Saw 3D--Wow, huh?

Then who do we shoot?

The Grapes of Wrath

(1940)

As far as I know, the best film set in the twentieth century that John Ford ever made, and certainly the perfect film to watch on Labor Day weekend.

Fortunately, this could never happen again, the landed and privileged allowed to run roughshod mover the rights of the poor and vulnerable. But still, it's good to remember.

La farfalla elusiva

The American

Crit

You expect the first killing, the second not so much, and it prepares you for anything to come. That most of what comes is interior and visible only on George Clooney's face has engendered a lot of critical resistance, but I found it a perfectly serviceable if thoroughly unsurprising nonevil-man-in-an-evil-line-of-work-but-trying-to-get-out story, its watchability boosted by beautiful people, beautiful Abruzziano villages, and the thought of Montepulciano (of which I pray I have a bottle downstairs, because it's Sunday, and it's Connecticut, so I'm not getting a bottle otherwise without risking arrest).

Trailers

• Let Me In--Seemingly scene-for-scene remake of the freezingly haunting Let the Right One In, though the trailer is calculated to make it seem like standard American creepout fare for teens. Richard Jenkins as the "father" and the nortorious Chloe Moretz as the 12-for-a-thousand-years vamp are promising elements.
• Catfish--What was I saying about standard creepout fare for American teens?
• Conviction--Another heartwarming based-on-a-true-story flick, but maybe Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell and an otherwise excellent cast will provide the, uh, conviction to make it watchable.

Femmes fatales

Chicago

(2002)

As good as it gets in terms of translating stage musical to movie musical, in large part because it never forgets that it's a stage musical. Good songs, excellent performances, and surreally staged dances razzle-dazzle us.

The bird

The Maltese Falcon

(1931)

No, seriously: you really should see this first film treatment once, exactly once. It's not terrible, though it is inferior to the version you're familiar with in almost every way. Mainly, it's interesting is some respects. It's pre-Breen, so the sexuality is blunter (Sam has just banged a putative client at the start, and the nature of his relationship with Ruth Wonderly [she never morphs into Bridget O'Shaughenessey here] is perfectly clear), but that's not particularly interesting, merely different.

Ricardo Cortez, who plays Sam Spade, is so awful as to be sacrilegious, but the character too is much less sympathetic than Bogart's. He's just a slimy smarmball, or vice versa. Oddly, that makes it more convincing that he could actually have fallen in love with the devil-woman, but uglier that he throws her over. The speech about "maybe you love me and maybe I love you," one of the highlights of the Huston film, is absent. On the other hand, Dudley Digges as Gutman does some stage business with a flyswatter that Sydney Greenstreet must have admired--he didn't use it as the Fat Man, but later, as Signor Ferrari, he found a place for it.

Oh, and there's this: in this version Miles is shot in Chinatown, and Sam has a conversation with a Chinese witness at the crime scene, in Cantonese, I guess. But that throwaway sequence comes back in a big way that changes absolutely everything about the story, and since you're unlikely ever to see this version regardless of my urging (check the TCM schedule), I'm tempted to tell you, but I won't. I will tell you, though, to look for the Louise Brooks photo on the wall of Sam's apartment.

And if you rent the DVD linked to above, you also get Bette Davis in Satan Met a Lady, the second film version of the Hammett novel, which I've never seen but am told is far worse than the first. Which is, I guess, ultimately the best reason to see this one: so that when someone says "Remakes are always inferior to the original," you can arch an eyebrow and ask, "Ever seen the 1931 Maltese Falcon?"