Little back, big tattoo

Luftslottet Som Sprängdes (The girl who kicked the hornet's nest)

Crit

I wonder how many girls and women (and, hell, why not boys and men?) are, even now, roaming the streets of America (and, with what, a 6-hour time difference, Sweden) in Lisbeth Salander Halloween drag? I like to think that if I dressed up for Halloween and weighed 90 pounds less, I'd be comfortable enough with my sexuality to embrace my inner Lisbeth.

In the almost action-free extended episode of Perry Mason that stands as the last of the Swedish film version of the trilogy (unless of course it becomes a tetrology after the uncovered 4th book is published), Lisbeth herself assumes Halloweenish Lisbeth drag, for the courtroom, inexplicably: a spiked fauxhawk that adds at least 10% to her low altitude, and lots of leather and rivets. This is apparently done with full knowledge and consent of her lawyer in what seems to be both a hearing to determine her mental competence and a trial for the attempted murder of her creepy father, and you assume that what's going to happen is that the next day she's going to appear as a scrubbed debutante, the point being that she has complete control over her image and thus the mind that crafts that image. But no, next day she's spraying up the spike again, and therein lies the main problem with the 2nd and 3rd installments of the trilogy, after the astonishing adrenaline of the first film ran out (and, I gather, of the print version as well): we're smarter than it is.

I'm not so sure we're smarter than David Fincher, though, so I'm becoming ever more eager to see his take. Dragon Tattoo, currently filming, with Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig heading a solid B-list cast (I mean that as a good thing), is due next year.

Give it plenty of hoke

Singin' in the Rain

(1952)

A first: I watched this with my 4-year-old granddaughter Veronica, and while we did have to interrupt the screening, it was only because she had to go to preschool; otherwise, I think she would have watched it straight through, rapt.

She had seen the musical numbers before, and I think those are still her favorite parts (duh!), especially "Make 'Em Laugh" (double duh!), but like the rest of us, she also appreciates the quality of the direction and acting and color that hold the thinly constructed plot together. And did I mention that she loves the musical numbers?

The only living boy in London

28 Days Later

(2002)

OK, I'll acknowledge that plausibility is an atypical criterion in rating horror flicks, but one reason why this is my all-time favorite zombie movie is that the premise--that misguided science could isolate and distill a virus responsible for rage--seems a heck of a lot likelier than meteorites animating recently dead people, for example.

Another reason is that the deserted-London sequence early in the film is one of the spookiest bits I've seen in any film, regardless of genre. Yet another is that it's the first zombie film I'm aware of in which the zombies have sprinter speed, which just makes them lots more of a threat than the lumbering dead of George Romero's franchise.

It's also an improbably sweet film--a film about family values. And it's a film that, while touching all the mandatory generic tropes, never really lets you guess where it's going. Ultimately, it's my all-time favorite zombie film because it's an excellent film, full stop.

Half of what I say is meaningless

Nowhere Boy

Crit

The only thing more simplistic than the Oedipal psychology here is the musicology: John's uncle gets him a harmonica just before keeling over dead; his mother teaches him the banjo (cue increasing-proficiency montage); he decides to start a band and his aunt buys him his first guitar; after his skittle band plays a gig, a friend introduces young John to a younger (and left-handed--about which John makes a joke, lest we fail to notice) and more talented guitarist, who in turn introduces a younger yet and more talented yet guitarist, and before you know it, they're off to Hamburg.

It would be a complete waste of time but for the performances of Anne-Marie Duff as the free spirit Julia, barely older in practical terms than the son she abandoned, and Kristin Scott Thomas as Aunt Mimi, the stiff-upper-lip no-nonsense and thus unappreciated in loco parentis, both of whom do the best they can with the clichéd material (and how good to see KST in an English-language film for a change, after all the work she has been doing in France).

Trailers

• The King's Speech--Colin Firth as stammering George VI, Geoffrey Rush as the speech therapist who, I gather, helps save England from Hitler.
• The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest--My relative disappointment with the second in the series notwithstanding, yes.

Uneeq

Freakonomics

Crit

Entertaining in a lo-cal sort of way, but interesting mainly for showing a new way to approach turning a pop nonfiction book into a quasi-documentary. Segments treat topics presumably in Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's book--the socioeconomics of "black" names, cheating in sumo, academic achievement vis-à-vis bribery, abortion vis-à-vis crime--without really teaching me much but making me think it'd be a pretty cool book to read. So, a pretty good commercial, I guess.

Detention

The School of Rock

(2003)

Suggested by a brief clip shown in "Superman," and I thought it would be an antidote, but I guess I'm incapable of fun tonight.

An education

Waiting for "Superman"

Crit

Maybe three-fourths of the way through the film, the narrator intones, "Now that we've established that it's possible to give every child a great education, . . . " Sorry, I don't know what the ensuing independent clause was, 'cause I was so taken aback by the dependent: did I miss the part where "we" established that? This is a smug film that doesn't earn its smugness--a smug and very depressing one.

Director Davis Guggenheim, who banked a lot of goodwill capital with An Inconvenient Truth, adopts the structure of the competition documentaries Spellbound and Wordplay, but the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat in those thrilling films is at least partly meritocratic; here we're simply hoping the children we've focused on will profit from a purely arbitrary system--at the expense, of course, of children we haven't gotten to know.

I would love to know what Guggenheim thinks he has shown here. He jumps on the demonize-the-unions bandwagon, but he admits early on that charter schools per se are not the solution, and that good schools come from, duh, good teachers. But he doesn't begin to tell us how we get good teachers. He pays occasional and incoherent attention to the efforts of Michelle Rhee to reform D.C. schools, but I have no idea what conclusions he expects us to draw from her experiences.

It's just sad, and I despair.

Trailer

• Rango--Depp as lizard. No, it's not a sequel to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; it's animated.

Boxing Wednesdays Wrestling Saturdays

The Set-Up

(1949)

Robert Wise directs a lean middleweight of noir, 72 real-time minutes without an ounce of fat, or at least not until the final repeated line. The setting is Paradise City, which, in case you wouldn't have guessed, is an ironic name--think Potterville in the world into which Harry Bailey was never born. Audrey Totter plays Julie, a good woman married to a good man but a bad pug (Robert Ryan). The fix is in, and Stoker's supposed to be going down, but he's such a loser on his own merits that his manager and trainer don't bother to tell him. The fact that you can guess what comes next doesn't make it any less a gem.

Skype, Goat

Soul Kitchen

Crit

Fatih Akin takes a break from the intensity of Head-On and The Edge of Heaven for a wacky comic romp, and if the elements are conventional (evil forces want to deprive our hero of the enterprise he has worked hard, sacrificing money and romance, to build, but all his friends get together and put on a big show in Dad's barn . . . well, OK, not the last part, but you get the idea), the people make you care what happens even as you know exactly what will happen. Which distinguishes Akin's work from the recent work of some directors I could name.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

 

Crit

Will name, in fact: Woody Allen.

I'm really just not getting anything out of this relationship anymore. Yes, it was magic once, and I still treasure the memories, but it has become excruciating--I actually considered walking out, which is this first time I've had that thought, I believe, since Whatever Works.

Trailers

• Monsters--Another in the unending series of they're-coming-for-us flicks.
• Tamara Drewe--Not getting great reviews, but hey, Stephen Frears.

Let the right horse win

But first, why am I going to four films, only one of which is a must? Let's see, by the numbers . . .

1. Some time back--3 years, maybe?--I was running low on the 2/$13.99 passes to Showcase Theaters that Costco sold, so I bought 10.
2. Bargain matinee prices then were barely more than $7, so obviously, I would use those passes only on full-admission screenings.
3. But shortly after my purchase, Showcase expanded its bargain matinee policy to what I'd been familiar with back in the Midwest: all shows before 6 p.m.
4. This meant that I rarely had an opportunity to use my passes, which was no big deal until
5. The Rave chain bought Connecticut Showcases.
6. I was afraid my remaining passes were now worthless, but recently I learned (thanks, Nancy!) that Rave will honor the passes until mid-December.
7. So, with 8 passes left, I'm in the market for a couple of bursts of serious cinematic excess. Beginning today.

Wait a minute (I say in red. for embarrassment): did I say 7 movies on the weekend and 4 today? How about 3 plus a remedial math lesson today? Let's see . . . if I go to a 109-minute film at 1:35, there should be no problem in catching movie #2 at 3pm, should there? Well, should there?

Golly, I've planned a lot of these multiflick itineraries; there's really no excuse.

Case 39

Post

The test of whether a mediocre scary movie is worth 2 hours of your time plus a coupon you paid 7 bucks for a while back but will be worth nothing if you don't use it soon is whether it has at least one genuinely mindfucking shot. This one does: Emily (Renée Zellweger) is convinced that the ostensibly angelic Lilith (Jodelle Ferland) is indeed the spawn of Satan and has—taking a hint from the girl’s parents, but not buying hardware nearly as sturdy—begun to put bolt latches on the inside of her bedroom door. She drops a screw (naturally), which (naturally) rolls under the crack under the door and out into the hallway (naturally). Emily cautiously opens the door a crack, finds the nearby coast clear, and reaches her hand out gingerly in pursuit of galvanized fastening device.

Camera follows her hand, and there, by the screw, is (naturally) Lilith’s foot. Camera sweeps up and (wait for it) there looms Lilith, still the same angelic-looking Lilith, but magnified by camera angle and probably a distorting lens of some sort so that the adult woman on her knees is looking up at a looming Alice-when-she’s-10-feet-tall. Wonderful shot, brilliantly objectively-normal-pov-creepy moment.

Not a bad flick, but isn’t it about time Adrian Lester got another meaty Hollywood role again like in Primary Colors?

Secretariat

Post

OK, this shovels the schmaltz like Eddie Sweat shoveling oats for Big Red (and, come to think of it, shoveling something else the G rating doesn't let them show), but if the sight of those magnificent animals doesn’t put you in an uncritical mood—and if 31 lengths in the Belmont can ever get old for you—then what are you doing coming to a Disney sports movie in the first place?

Let Me In

Post

This is a good film, and if I had never seen Låt den rätte komma in, this might have blown my mind just as much as that one did. In the event, so little is changed that my snobbish, if-I-can-read-subtitles-while-the-actors-are-speaking-incomprehensibly-why-can't-everyone? reaction was, "This was necessary why?" But in the course of my long postscreening phone conversation with my daughter (who--and feel free to correct any inaccuracies in my characterization, Daughter--was just as impressed by the Swedish original as I was, but so disturbed by it that it might not be accurate to say she "liked" it), I promised her that I would give permission here for anyone less snobby than I (which, let's face it, is just about everyone, witness the compulsion to use the technically correct "I" there rather than the harmlessly more usual "me") to see this one on its own merits, which are comparable if not equal to the original's. (And to be fair, the soundtrack of the Swedish version didn't include Greg Kihn's "The Breakup Song" or Bowie's "Let's Dance.")

One interesting if speculative point my daughter made, though: she feels that the very fact of hearing incomprehensible, harsh, Scandinavian words having to be translated by English at the bottom of the screen added to the distancing, the otherness that the original film worked upon her. I suspect that may indeed be the case, so if you're not just dead (as it were) set against subtitles, Netflix the right one in.

Trailers

• Burlesque—Cher and Christina Aguilera in a movie that wants desperately to be Fosse-esque (you got a better way to spell it?).
• Unstoppable—Tony Scott, runaway locomotive; high enough concept for ya?
• Megamind (3D)—A Dreamworks riff on Superman.
• Harry Potter and the First Half of the Last Book (3D)—Excuse me, but it’s true: Hermione is hot.
• African Cats—From Disneynature, for Earth Day.
• Tangled (3D)—A much expanded but no more persuasive version of the trailer.
• Black Swan--Single White Prima, from Darren Aronofsky.
• The Warrior's Way--Can't say it any better than IMDb's categories: Action. Fantasy. Western.

Arabian nights

By the way, that SEVEN movies this weekend I alluded to before? That's just in theaters; that doesn't count the ones I watch at home.

Au revoir les enfants

(1987)

Another beautiful (and semiautobiographical) work from Louis Malle, set in a Carmelite boys' school whose principal risks everything to shelter Jews from Germans and collaborators in 1944. For the protagonist, the Malle-equivalent, the stake is merely friendship, much more than life and death.

With friends like this . . .

What, you didn't believe that I wasn't going to watch any Metsless postseason baseball? Maybe you'll be convinced once I've gone to SEVEN movies this weekend, some of which I'm not even particularly enthusiastic about seeing.

Catfish

Crit

This one just made me feel kinda icky. When I saw the trailer, I was certain it was a faux documentary, and though it pretends otherwise, I still hope that's the case. If it's true truth, it's just so cruel to the poor, delusional, attention-starved subject. If it's fiction masquerading as truth, then the point of the story is what? That people aren't altogether honest, including, in this case, the filmmakers? Guess what: we had already pretty much figured that out. Credit to one member of my group, who pointed out that this is 90 minutes rehashing a classic New Yorker cartoon.

Trailers

• Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer--What it says is what you get.
• Paranormal Activity 2--Well, the first one was a fun goof, but I doubt very much that I'll feel the need to see this one.

It's the same dame, metaphorically, at least

The Natural

(1984)

Ah, the sad last day of the season for us with no horse in the postseason race, and my choice for elegiac farewell-to-baseball movie is the mythic tale of Knight errant Roy Hobbs, his mystical (and phallic) warclub Wonderboy, two very bad women, and one very good one. A 154-game schedule's worth of hokum, and many have complained about the happy ending, but that's one of the beauties of myth, isn't it? The rules are ironclad, but they don't demand failure.

Deep end

Jack Goes Boating

Crit

Wow--I know it ultimately causes a shitstorm and all, but I want that hookah, yo!

Four good but incomplete and damaged people try to make contact, or even just get by. Critics have not been particularly kind to Philip Seymour Hoffman's directorial debut, but I found it smart and sensitive, and I couldn't help but notice the difference on the vanity scale between Hoffman's self-exposure of his own whalish form and Ben Affleck's ripped, shirtless pull-ups in his current film.

Howl

Crit

Another one not much loved by critics, but to me it's a quirky, brilliant jazz-quartet, riffing between Allen Ginsberg (James Franco, looking maybe not quite Jewish enough) composing the poem, Ginsberg reading the poem in a San Francisco coffeehouse, Ginsberg reading the poem over wild animation, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's lawyer (Jon Hamm) arguing against the appropriately square prosecutor (David Strathairn) in the notorious obscenity trial.

Some critics have found fault with the animation, some have suggested that the courtroom scenes drag, some have even objected to the iconic appearance of Don Draper as Ferlinghetti's lawyers. Well, I how do I put this diplomatically? Those complaints are all fucked. I would go so far as to suggest that this may be the best way to experience a work that is better than I remembered it (and if it's not, then all the higher praise for the film). As to Don Draper, hey, Madison Avenue is one of the dark forces of the poem, and of Ginsberg's life--what better play on that fact than to bring the face that we connect most intimately to the Mad Ave of the era onto the side of heaven?

Trailers

• Somewhere--I'd be all in for Sofia Coppola's new one even if it hadn't already won the Golden Lion in Venice.

Frenemies

The Social Network

Crit

Not surprised that Jesse Eisenberg could nail a despicable character and make you somehow feel sorry for him; for my money, he's the best male actor of his generation. Not surprised that David Fincher could keep us constantly engaged with stuff we often don't completely understand. But two aspects of this film absolutely blew my mind: first, what technology makes it possible for Armie Hammer to play both Winklevii, often side by side, with no visible seam? And second, how come nobody told me how freaking hilarious this thing is--or at least through the first half, when it's the best comedy of the year. Throughout, it's one of the best films. At times stunningly good.

Trailers

Hey, wow, check out the new look on IMDb!

• The Next Three Days--Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks in a prison-breakout flick with a twist.
• Love and Other Drugs--The rise, you should pardon the expression, of Viagra, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway (hey, where have we seen that pairing before?).