Materials at hand

So-good-to-be-back M5--er, no, 4

Think of me as a footballer, sidelined for 22 months with a bad hamstring tear. Would you expect me to go the full 90 minutes my first time back in the lineup? So I prefer to think of my glass as 4/5 full rather than 1/5 empty; I prefer not to employ the word "abortive." Yet it remains undeniable that I have for the first time I can remember been ejected from a movie theater.

Before that the return-from-long-injury metaphor works pretty well, too: not my best day on the pitch--spent a lot of the day just sort of getting my feet wet or getting my feet planted firmly on the ground or doing whatever else clichéd thing with my feet that you can think of. Started with a perfectly ordinary film, then advanced to one a little more interesting.

But that footballer, if he (or she!) is a good one, whose return was worth waiting out the 22 months' absence, will show one flash of brilliance in his (or her!) 75 minutes, and so this M4-not-5 showed one flash of brilliance.

In all, a good if not profoundly wonderful day at the movies.

Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey

IFC

Didn't really set out to go heavy on the documentaries, it just worked out this way. But I have to say, I really don't get the fuss over this one. OK, yeah, moderately interesting story of a nice guy who fell in love with puppets watching Sesame Street and Captain Kangaroo, cut up his father's fur-lined coat to make his own first puppet, and went on to voice the most annoying muppet ever, but it was more like something I'd have ungrudgingly have devoted 15 minutes worth of New York Times Magazine reading to. I fail to see what's special enough about the guy's story to earn 76 minutes of my Manhattan movie day. We do get a little about how his Elmo obsession cost him a wife and endangered his relationship with his daughter, and if the filmmakers had had the guts to go darker, that might have been an interesting story. Might have been.

Garbo: El espía (Garbo: The spy)

Quad

I guess if I knew my World War II history better, I'd be familiar with the Catalonian spy whose campaign of disinformation was largely responsible for the German leadership's belief that the Allied landing in Normandy was merely a feint to draw attention away from the main invasion in Pas de Calais. That is a great story, and a critical event that helped ensure that the war would not drag on for another several years.

But the incredible part of Juan/Joan Pujols García's espionage career came earlier, when, his offer of service rebuffed repeatedly by British intelligence, he set himself up in Lisbon and fed the German's fiction after fiction--all based on the bigger fiction that he was transmitting his intelligence from London. This was something like 18 months of reporting on a city he'd never seen, and getting away with it. Wtf?

Rid of Me

CV

Filmmakers have gotten a lot of mileage out of starting in medias res (OK, Paul?) and in extremis, then taking us back to a time of calm that seems to have little to do with what we've seen, showing us how we got from A to Q, and taking us past it. Writer/director James Westby works it brilliantly here, as we start with a very bad girl we don't yet know to be Meris making a stunningly aggressive gesture of contempt toward a plain-vanilla blonde who crosses her path at the supermarket.

Cut to a conventional Meris conventionally in love with a conventionally hunky husband, relocating with him, after he has suffered an entrepreneurial disaster, back in his Oregon hometown, where he has a support system of assholes who not only decline to welcome the new wife into the clique but actively campaign for reignition of an old flame.

The "how we get there" is as sane and logical as the "there" is dangerous and over the top, and the accessory bad girl who leads Meris to badness is the sort of character who makes me want to put the film on pause and call my daughter immediately to tell her that even though this will never come to Champaign, she needs to do whatever is necessary to see it. And that's why I make Manhattan movie trips!

Urbanized

IFC

I take back my vote in the recent mayoral election; I want New Haven's mayor to be that guy from Bogotá who talks about the lack, in any constitution he knows of, of the right to park your car. There's nothing surprising or revolutionary here--well, unless of course all the good ideas about city planning we've been hearing now for a couple of decades were actually implemented--now that would be revolution to believe in. But it's still a smart bit of preaching to the choir--easily the best of the 3 documentaries I saw on the day.

Trailers

Oh, but wait: you're still waiting to hear about my ejection, aren't you--my cinematic red card, as it were. Well, this is a fair place to explain, because it was about trailers and the other ancillary crap that IFC habitually shows before its features. You might ask what made me think that I could get from a 6:05 film with a running time of 83 minutes to a 7:45 one, even if the theater doors were literally two steps distant, but here's the thing: I might not have made that assumption and bought both tickets at once but for a bizarre phenomenon that governed my first 3 films, including the opener at IFC. Before Urbanized I had not seen a single trailer! Fluke or new downtown policy, it seemed to suggest that I could safely assume no more than 17 minutes of preliminaries and comfortably slide next door to Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog's death penalty documentary, in time to find a seat.

But in the event, the end titles of Urbanized started rolling at 7:48, and even violating my stay-to-the-end policy, I found the next-door theater packed: the guy why went in ahead of me got one of the 3 empty seats, a second was covered with plastic to indicate brokenness or other condition of inutility, and that left me the seat by the wall in the second row, meaning that in order to reach a location that would result in a stiff neck after 108 minutes (well, plus all the preliminary crap, only 3 minutes of which I'd missed) I was going to have to negotiate (gimpy ankled) a row of maybe 16 backpacks and winter coats (because even though it was 60 much of the day, people do wear winter coats to the movie theater--the fuck's up with that?).

Screw that, I said, and instead I sat on an aisle step most of the way back toward the projection room, squeezing tight against the wall to minimize fire-exit obstruction, but pretty much knowing that someone would come along soon to tell me I had to take either the ostensibly available seat or a refund. Well, I thought, Herzog's documentaries have a pretty fair recent history of making it to New Haven, and I'm really not much into watching under these condition, and moreover, I have to admit, I'm exhausted. So when The Man came, I took the 13 bucks and the F train.

By the way, when I finally did start to see trailers, the first was one I'd already seen at the Criterion, for Pina, and the second was for some old seasonal Capra chestnut starring Jimmy Stewart. But then finally:

• Tonari no Totoro (My neighbor Totoro)--Took me a while to figure out whether this is one of the Studio Ghibli films I've seen; looks enchanting, in the stoned anime way (oh, and also looks very indebted to Lewis Carroll).
• Ma part du gâteau (My piece of the pie)--Another kill-the-capitalists comedy; sure, why not?
• Sleeping Beauty--I've been wondering about whether this is just going to be too creepy to face, but unfortunately I was too distracted by my impending ejection to pay close attention. Pretty creepy, though.