That's all

Sita Sings the Blues

(2008)

My second acquisition from perhaps my best M4 ever (click on the title to link to that--you know that, right?), and I'm so sure you'll love this mash-up of the Ramayana and its modern unhappy-love equivalent (and so confident of the fewness of "you") that if you go to Nina Paley's online store and buy the film and don't love it, I'll give you your 20 bucks back for it. But if you don't believe me, Nina is making it available to view for free, too. Because, dammit, she's not only a gifted filmmaker, she's an Urbana liberal, too! So watch it once on your computer and then buy it--because dammit, liberalism doesn't on its own finance a filmmaking career.

Where the honey is

Ulee's Gold

(1997)

Hey, who remembers that little Jessica Biel played Ulee's teenage granddaughter, her first feature role? Another thing I didn't remember is how clunkily rote this starts and finishes. In between, it's a solid moral thriller, but the draw, of course, is Peter Fonda channeling Pop as the '90s film character who has turned up in the most New York Times crossword puzzles. This is a performance so quietly right that we remember the film as having been better than it was.

There's no saying

Meek's Cutoff

Crit

Thank heaven for Kelly Reichardt, who has the confidence to make movies where nothing much happens, except that everything happens. Here the image is often obscured by darkness and the dialogue by distance both geographical and linguistic. And lack of clarity is precisely the point: whom you can trust, what evidence of your own senses you can trust, who knows? One thing you can be sure of: you've got to have water.

A gorgeous, hard-edged film, with beautiful performances by the entire cast of nine (!), especially Michelle Williams, Will Patton, and, as "the Indian," longtime stuntman Rod Rondeaux.

We never knew we could want more than that out of life

Last Play at Shea

(2010)

The Mets have been telling me for more that a year that I needed to see this, but then they've also been promising me winning baseball for the past several years, so their credibility is only a shade above that of Fred Wilpon's buddy Bernie Madoff. I figured, "yeah, yeah, yeah," boring concert-cum-nostalgia trip flick. But when Ms. Tonic recommended it, that changed the, you should pardon the expression, metric.

And yes, even though I could have done with less Billy Joel autobiography, and even though I was never sentimental over a stadium about which even its defenders famously acknowledged, "Yes, it's a dump--but it's our dump!" this is a surprisingly moving film. Because the point of it is, in a way, that Joel's autobiographies and the autobiographies of all the Brendas and Eddies--not only but maybe especially on his, and Shea's, native Long Island--makes more sense when intertwined with the biography of the place where not only the Mets and (blessedly, getting little attention here) Jets won and mostly lost, but where the Beatles first proved that rock & roll could be played, if not necessarily heard, in a faux-Colosseum.

And that helps me understand, and empathize with, all those Mets fans for whom the abandonment of that dump was a death of something in them. And, I guess, in me, whether or not (assuredly not) I'll ever wear one of those "I'm Calling It Shea" T-shirts to the new place next to the parking lot where the old joint used to be.

Of course, my autobiography is a very different thing from Brenda's and Eddie's--I've been a Mets fan as long as any of them could have been (and longer, in truth, than many of them have been alive, and longer even than more than a few of their parents have been alive), but most of that fandom was from a distance of a thousand miles or so. If I were sentimental about any Mets venue, it would be for the Polo Grounds, which I've seen only on film--and which, incidentally, is shamefully ignored here, as if while waiting for their home in Flushing to be made ready, the team had wandered the road like Philip Roth's Ruppert Mundys. And each of the marriages in that autobiography has a place for the much-married Billy Joel, too--he gave the best concert my first wife and I ever saw together, and The Stranger played in a continuous loop at a New Bedford lobster restaurant where my second wife and I had a leisurely dinner on our honeymoon.

By the way, JT, what I couldn't help thinking of during the trailer for Being Mick was Candy Slice's "Gimme Mick." Ah, Gilda, speaking of New York's lost and holy.

How do you stay at Carnegie Hall?

Bill Cunningham New York

Crit

There is one sad moment in this extravagantly joyful film about an extravagantly joyous man: when intersecting questions of sexuality and Catholicism bring Cunningham up short for a moment, and make us contemplate the sorry denial that has been the price of his lifelong love affair with fashion and his camera. But come on: who wouldn't sacrifice almost anything to get to love what you do every day, every week, to age 80 and beyond? It's a lot to give up, but it's a lot to have, too.

OK, wait, I lied: there's one other moment that might qualify as sad: when a hardworking real estate agent shows Bill (being forced out of his nothing-special upstairs rooms by the bastards at Carnegie Hall) a Central Park South apartment, on the 10th floor or so, with northern views from multiple rooms. Imagine being a Manhattan real estate agent showing an apartment to someone completely unimpressed by a view like that--and by a large-by-Manhattan-standards kitchen and a dining area ("Who wants a kitchen and a bathroom?" he asks earlier, at least 90% seriously).

One of those films on a subject in which I have no interest but which I couldn't have enjoyed more if it were about a jazz-playing, fiction-writing baseball star.

Neo, this is loco

The Matrix

(1999)

Yeah, OK, I get this now, it's all perfectly clear, so as spectacular as the effects are, I don't need to see it again. Who wants my copy?

First, do no harm

Hævnen (In a better world)

Crit

The eternal question: what's a pacifist to do when faced with a world where some sonsabitches just need to be pounded to death or blown up? The answer seems to be that it's OK to countenance counterviolence violence as long as it's by children or Third Worlders. This is a film that wants to be courageous but ultimately wimps out, and everyone good lives happily ever after.

Trailer

• Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold--Ah, good old wacky Morgan Spurlock is back, chomping into advertising as if it were a Big Mac w/ supersized fries and a shake. Hell, yeah, I'm in.

Bright side

Life of Brian

(1979)

You know the scene where the crowd under Brian's balcony demands to see him, and his mother finally relents and agrees to let him come out for a minute, but no more, and he comes out and talks a bit, and then his mother pulls him back inside, and the crowd says, in unison, "That was never a minute," and she says yes, it was? Well, it's really about a minute, seven seconds.

Next year we'll talk about the unusual pattern of exposure and concealment of naughty bits in that sequence.

Inferno

Taxi Driver

(1976)

I was busy having a baby when this came out, so I never saw it until some years after, at which point I thought I probably didn't ever need to see it again. Fortunately, I've toughened up since. But what the hell is there to say about it that hasn't been said?

Got milk?

Léon: The Professional

(1994)

No, really, I didn't plan this as Pubescent Girl Assassins Weekend; not consciously, at least.

Had I seen this in '94, would have made a similar prediction for Natalie Portman to the one I made yesterday for Saoirse Ronan--say, that someday she'd be squaring off against Michelle Williams for an Oscar™? I don't think so--she's good here, but it would have taken someone more perceptive than I to see how good she'd become.

Mainly, if I'd seen it 17 years ago, I think I'd have said "good cast, silly film." Gary Oldman's sociopathic corrupt cop is essentially Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, only with less restraint.

Over the rainbow

Danny Deckchair

(2003)

Huh! Certainly didn't realize when I chose this that I'd be seeing Rhys Ifans and Miranda Otto together again, as in Human Nature a couple of weeks ago. Both are delightful in this feelgood Oz movie with as much heft as a helium balloon and a plot as substantial as that balloon's skin.

As the twig is bent . . .

Hanna

Crit

I confess I had my doubts, strong reviews notwithstanding (and now I see that its Rotten Tomatoes Top Critics number is just 57%, which I'm very glad not to have known before going, 'cause I might not have), but zowie! This is a ballsy young chick who makes Buffy the Vampire Slayer look like Buffy from Family Affair. I liked the film so much that I'm going to start with my quibbles: first, the deep dark secret that's kept from us until near the end is a serious anticlimax. And as is so often the case with movies about the person we care about running away from the evildoers, the final reel is a little too much of the same thing.

But apart from that, it has the same sort of adrenaline-drip effect of Lola rennt, and looks and sounds even better (e.g., there's no flamenco segment in Lola; more movies should have Romany music in them, dammit!). And if Franka Potente looks spectacular, Saoirse Ronan (remember the little liar in Atonement?) has the face of a blue-eyed Aryan angel (of death), and can act, as well. I predict that there will be more than one year when she and Dakota Fanning will be vying for the same Oscar™.

Moreover, even the clichés here are shot so as to make them almost fresh. And the good-people-who-should-never-have-crossed-paths-with-our-hero--specifically a family on holiday from . . . Australia? Hammersmith? actually, I don't think they all have the same accent . . . anyway, they're exactly what the film needs when they show up, and teen daughter Sophie (Jessica Barden, last seen and loved in Tamara Drewe) is just what Hanna needs, having led, you might say, a bit of a sheltered life.

Trailers

• The Debt--Three young Mossad agents in search of a war criminal in 1965; Helen Mirren leads an excellent cast, and John Madden directs. Looks good.
• Captain America: The First Avenger--I'd love to be able to say this looks good, but it looks pretty run-of-the-comic-book-mill. Still, I'll hope.
• Warrior--Oh, I don't think so.
• Anonymous--About time we got a classy-looking Shakespeare-authorship-denial flick--hells yeah!

The women

Casa de los Babys

(2003)

Well, I've confirmed one suspicion anyway: when I first saw John Sayles's treatment of genetic imperialism at the late lamented York Square Cinema, the English subtitles were missing from the first couple of reels not because Sayles was forcing us stumblers in Spanish to deal with the uncertainly of communication that partly defines the relationship between the U.S. women in the film and the residents of the unnamed Latin American country to which they come to adopt babies. No, it was because the distributor mistakenly sent the York Square a couple of reels sin subtitulos, and the theater's management was too dim to get the error corrected.

Actually, I confirmed two suspicions, the other being that it didn't really matter much if you got every single word of that stretch: Sayles is pretty inscrutable regardless. The film is certainly not an endorsement of exploiting poverty in the name of saving one baby at a time from it, but neither does it shy from the undeniable truth that well-intentioned people of means are in fact able to provide advantages that are out of reach to any of the past-adoption-age children we see squeegying windshields and huffing paint fumes. The sometimes unsubtle Sayles is content to leave us in the middle of complexity here--which is sort of satisfyingly frustrating.

Les parapluies de change

Potiche

Crit

OK, I've now seen a movie open with Catherine Deneuve jogging. That scene evolves into a nature scene from a Disney animated feature--if Disney had shown rabbits humping. I only wish that after that I had had as much fun as Deneuve, but I'm afraid I just don't get why you'd make a film in 2010 that's not just set in 1977 but seems to have been made then, complete with bad music (I've also now seen Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu dancing at a disco; I didn't know whether to laugh or weep) and clumsy feminism (the title is slang for "trophy wife"). In fact, it almost feels like late-'70s TV--you expect the laugh track to kick in at any moment. The stars ensure that it's not altogether without charm, but even a French comedy needs more than charm, or at least more than a little charm.

Another turn

The Others

(2001)

This is a first-rate scary movie, in part because it's hard to say as it goes along who's the scariest: the mostly unseen "intruders," mother Grace (Nicole Kidman), or young daughter Anne (Alakina Mann). (Anne's brother Nicholas [James Bentley] is far too wimpy to be scary, and the servants [Fionnula Flanagan, Eric Sykes, and Elaine Cassidy] are mysterious but not really scary. We won't discuss the missing-and-presumed-dead-a-couple-of-years-after-the-war father.)

A couple of minutes into this I thought, "Hey, I never thought about this when it was in the theaters, but wasn't there a film many years ago, based on Henry James's novella of the supernatural The Turn of The Screw, in which children and domestics also featured prominently?" Well, no, actually--I was thinking of The Innocents. But it turns out, according to Wikipedia, anyway, that Turn was indeed an influence cited by this film's writer-director Alejandro Amenábar.

The madwoman in the attic

Jane Eyre

Crit

Just finished reading the novel--for the first time in my long book-reading life--this week, so I have it as fresh in mind as possible, and am in good position to judge the filmmakers' decisions in squeezing a fat Victorian novel into 2 hours. Give director Cary Fukunaga an A+ on capturing the tone of Charlotte Brontë's insistently intellectual effusion of emotion. Also very nearly perfect is Mia Long-Polish-Surname as Jane: regular readers (both of them) know that I give high marks for wordless acting, and although Jane is as verbal as a good Victorian protagonist must be, Fukunaga exploits Wasikowska's brilliance in making her face a seemingly unchanging mask that nonetheless conveys precisely what she's thinking and--more to the point--feeling.

One narrative choice makes the sprawling material much more tamable: we begin with Jane's flight from Thornfield and collapse at the door of Moor House. Then we flash back to her childhood, her time at Lowood (which is, sadly, portrayed as unremittingly hellish, but I understand the need to elide the angelic Miss Temple--for that matter, the whole Lowood segment might well have been cut, but for the loss of Amelia Clarkson, a fine match for Wasikowska as young Jane), and thence to Thornfield and all that happens there. Or lots of it, anyway.

The hints of a presence upstairs are much condensed, as is the role of Blanche Ingram as the presumptive future Mrs. Rochester, and that's a shame, but the one really odd choice by the filmmakers is making Bertha, in her one brief appearance, not the haggard witch into which she is supposed to have descended in more than a decade of confinement but the ultrahot Valentina Cervi, who shows her insanity mainly by having unkempt (and really sexy) hair. OK, she does spit a fly at Jane--that's a nice crazy touch.

Haters of hackneyed narrative devices of 18th- and 19th-century novels will be pleased to see that the one huge coincidence of the novel is missing (though that has the effect of making Jane's economic gesture less arguably a product of her cool logic, and its beneficiaries' acceptance of it less believable), displeased to see the wildest metaphysical device present (though in a much muted form).

In all, a very faithful--and, more important, very good--adaptation of a justly loved literary work. But seriously, if you, like I a month ago, have never read the novel, do. And how'd I do, by the way, avoiding or at least finessing spoliers? I tried really hard.

Trailer

• The Conspirator--Huh! I've been watching Ken Burns's The Civil War again, so I'm particularly receptive to a drama about the treason trial of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright). Unfortunately, it stars James McAvoy, whom I still just don't get, as her unwilling defense attorney.

Respect the streak

Bull Durham

(1988)

Can I just tell you how much I've been needing baseball this spring? Maybe it's to do with the but-if-it-had-to-perish-twice winter we're still trying to get out from under (forgot to check today, and I'm not going out there now just for this, but as of yesterday there was still a little pile of January snow next door), but I think it's something even more elemental than that. Expectations for my beloved team are the lowest they've been in years, so it's certainly not because I assume triumph that will salve the disappointment that my beloved basketball team has left me and my beloved football (you know: with the feet) team now seems destined to leave me. And it's certainly not that I expect to lose less money this year on resale of my unused tickets than I did last year. Maybe it's that my team is in its 50th season and I'm in the late innings of my own game. Anyway, I've been savoring the prospect of my annual screening of this, holding off until the end of the season's first weekend--on the day that my team's winning pitcher is someone who, like Crash Davis, has been observed reading a book without pictures.

This film is not perfect, but rare is the poem longer than a sonnet that's perfect, and this film is a poem.

Technical fall

Win Win

Crit

I was aware that the weight limits had been refined since I was covering the Grafton High School Bearcats wrestling team in West Virginia almost 3 decades ago--a team coached by (I am not making this up) Orville Wright. (Incidentally, here's something occupying memory space in my brain that could, in theory, be devoted to something useful: early-'80s high school weights? 98, 105, 112, 119, 126, 132, 138, 145, 155, 167, 185, and heavyweight [technically called "unlimited"].) What I didn't know, but trust to be true, and not just something tossed in for purposes of plot, is that a match no longer proceeds from the lowest weight through heavy but rather starts at a weight chosen at random--a clever and significant improvement.

So what about the movie? Well, you know what a fan I am of Tom McCarthy as a director, and what's good here is very good, not least the performance of the young real-life state wrestling champion Alex Shaffer, whose deadpan genuineness made me think of a young Sean Penn (Spicoli minus the haze, as it were). But I had serious problems with the inciting incident of the story, wherein the protagonist, an idealistic lawyer played by Paul Giamatti, does something grotesquely unethical (and significantly immoral and almost certainly illegal as well) for money, something that nothing else we see of his character suggests that he'd be capable of. And then, after he spends about 5 screen minutes late having to be apologetic and ashamed in front of everyone whose opinion matters, everything turns out all right. Plenty to like, but finally disappointing.

Trailer

• Snow Flower and the Secret Fan--Golly, looks schmaltzy.

Gipsy swans

Strictly Ballroom

(1992)

My daughter has been at me to watch this for years--though the "why tonight" is that I both needed a DVR deaccession candidate (something that had been on the hard drive for more than 2 years) and something short, so that I could watch it ahead of the Mets' opener. This fit.

The verdict? Well, it’s very Baz, very young Baz, for better and worse. The first act is cliché-packed, with little to get our attention other than the rare female lead ugly duckling who really starts out . . . well, unattractive.

That would be Fran, and the plot, the central duo’s dance routine, and the film kick in when we meet her Romany family, and they take her partner Scott into their flamenco heart. It started to tug at me then, and by the final act, I couldn’t resist. Good goofy Bazfun.