Fun to run a newspaper

Citizen Kane

(1941)

Golly, I find that this is the first time I've screened this since I've been blogging home screenings, so I can say anything I want to about it without repeating myself. Of course, there is the problem of repeating everyone else who has ever written about the film.

My daughter doesn't like this, though I think she has seen it only once and has not cared to give it a second chance now that she's all grown up. But the fact is, I can understand not loving it--not not admiring it, which strikes me as impossible, but not having it find a place close to your heart. I mean, hell, look at me: I do love it, yet there are several movies I'd watched 4 or 5 times since I last screened this. The heart wants what the heart wants, of course, but somehow I need to get her to sit down with it again. Maybe I should ask her in my will to watch it--hell, she'll have the DVD then.

Surface tension

A Slipping Down Life

(1999)

Less than the sum of its parts, though two of the parts are Lili Taylor and Guy Pearce, two of the most unobtrusively great actors of their generation. The problem is the story, based on a novel by Anne Tyler. Let me put it this way: the decision by Evie Decker to carve into her forehead the name of the oddball charismatic rock singer Drumstrings Casey (think lovechild of Springsteen and Zevon), whom she has barely met, is above the median in clear motivation for characters' behavior. Still, the leads--and John Hawkes as Drum's drummer and manager--make it worth a look, even if you decide, as I did, to deaccession it from your DVR's hard drive.

Death takes no holiday

Orfeu negro

(1959)

Funny, everything I planned to say about this, I seem to have said in previous posts (click on the title link), even down to the Keats allusion. But I'll push that one a bit farther: if beauty is indeed truth, then a sadder beautiful truth is that sadness never ends, but happiness does. Take that with you to Carnaval.

Frenemies

Safe House

Crit

Ah, the old throw-in-with-your-enemy-'cause-someone's-out-to-kill-you-both-and-you've-got-to-get-to-the-bottom-of-it-(by-which-time-your-enemy-will-have-pretty-much-become-your-only-friend) story. Denzel's always Denzel, but unfortunately, Ryan Reynolds seems equally incapable of escaping his ryanreynoldsdom. Will someone please explain this dude's appeal to me?

Cool surprise: getting to see the Cape Town football stadium (built for the 2010 World Cup, natch) up close and personal.

Trailers

Golly, what a lot of 'em!

• The Bourne Legacy--Yeah, Jeremy Renner's good, but Bourne without Damon? That's like Bond without . . . never mind.
• Friends with Kids--No guarantee, but this looks like it might not be completely brainless.
• 21 Jump Street--This, on the other hand, . . .
• Seeking a Friend for the End of the World--Promising high-concepter (see title), with Steve Carell and an initially unrecognizable Keira Knightley.
• Undefeated--Nonfiction methadone for us who miss Friday Night Lights.
• Battleship--Speaking of which, here's Taylor Kitsch again, in another dumb looking action pic (he gets a haircut in this one!).

Legs

Men in Black

(1997)

Free sample of Starz made it possible to see Tommy Lee Jones as a cop for the 2nd night in a row. Funny, but not as funny as I remembered; fun, but not as fun as I remembered. One cool unremembered things: Mets center fielder Bernard Gilkey as himself. One cool thing I never would have noticed before: John Cameron, executive producer of Friday Night Lights, the final episode of which I watched the other night, was first assistant director. Oh, and one indication that my ear has become sensitized to certain tropes: I guessed within seconds of the opening that the music was by Danny Elfman.

Indiana Jones and the prosthetic arm

The Fugitive

(1993)

Yes, this was a serious Friday-night deaccession candidate, but no, I think I'll be keeping it. Holds up remarkably well, even when you know the real bad guy from the start--has action, sex, intrigue, and Julianne Moore--what more could you ask? Well, if you were greedy, you might ask for more Julianne Moore. And if you were delusional, you might ask for sex (or at least action or intrigue) . . . but that way madness lies . . .

White lies

(The earrings of) Madame de . . .

(1953)

Delicious web of ironies in a continental context of flirtation to and perhaps beyond the brink of betrayal. It's all fun and games until someone loses . . .

Downturn

Up in the Air

(2009)

Wow, a very different dynamic knowing up front about the devastating blow that is to fall (though I'm reminded now that I had encountered too many hints about that before I saw the film the first time). Doesn't make it a lesser movie, necessarily, just a very different one--perhaps one where you can't credit Ryan's bravado quite as much from the start. Still powerful in many ways, not least in its sympathetic look into hard times that are still with us.

Time is on my side

Ah, a good day at the shorts--now what to watch long with dinner? . . .

Oscar®-nominated animated shorts

It's unusual for all of these to be good, and I have a weaker conviction than most years as to which is the best, or which will win. Usually I expect the Pixar candidate to carry the day, but I don't think that will happen this year.

Crit

• Dimanche (Sunday)--Beautifully simple drawings (the eyeless crows--basically just long mouths with wings and feet--are the most brilliant manifestation) carry a boy's tale of double vehicular tragedy in Canada.
• A Morning Stroll--Why did the chicken take the downtown 6 train? A delightfully trippy triad told at 50-year intervals, though the punch line is a letdown.
• The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore--I guess this is the one I'd pick, and it might also be the best bet on your party ballot: a surreal world in which books sustain us and are in turn sustained by us, wonderfully inventive and just great to look at.
• Wild Life--The only nominee in this category to use a significant amount of spoken language, and with its fellow Canadian Dimanche, in a minority in having a more or less realistic (and tragic) setting.
• La Luna--Easily the weakest of the five for me, though in this field, that doesn't mean it's not good; just a little too Disney-magical for my tastes.

As always, the animated shorts are so short that we got some Highly Commendeds to round out the program; unlike the usual case, I don't think any of these got cheated out of a nomination:

• Skylight--Cute CGI penguins--and all other creatures great and small--being roasted comically by the hole in the ozone layer.
• The Hybrid Union--Autopropelled autos finding cooperation in a postapocalyptic landscape menaced (or nurtured?) by a moving cloud.
• Nullarbor--Bland and rote Australian car chase.
• Amazonia--More cute animals that might as well be from Disney.

Oscar®-nominated documentary shorts

Another excellent program, with some fairly earned tearjerking.

Crit

• Incident in New Baghdad--The first and the least--it's rare I wish one of these films were longer, but this treatment of a Iraq War veteran's efforts to do the right thing on the scene and in the aftermath ends abruptly when lots more story seems crying out to be told.
• Saving Face--I had read about the lunatic practice of men throwing acid in the face of unwilling marriage partners or recalcitrant wives, but to see the product of those attacks multiplies the horror exponentially. Yet this manages to have an uplifting side as well, in the form of a harsh law passed (and, apparently, enforced) in Pakistan to curb the practice, a miracle-working reconstructive surgeon, and, mostly, the strength of the victims themselves.
• The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom--A film as oddly divided as the title, as the blossoms are given a heavy symbolic burden: of new life, of endurance, of nature's yang (its yin having been demonstrated emphatically in the opening sequences). A sometimes awkward film, but a moving one.
• The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement--But this has to be the winner, and not only because it's all uplift all the time: James Armstrong was there to cut Dr. King's hair and to march across the Pettus Bridge, and he's still around to watch the election returns on election night 2008. A heartthumper of a film.
• God Is the Bigger Elvis--Unfortunately not shown in the program, reportedly because of licensing restrictions, but it sounds awfully interesting.

Oscar®-nominated live-action shorts

Either I was just tired at the end of the day, or there's not much here. And let's face it: 6 hours of movies in a day is not really apt to wear me out.

Crit

• Pentecost--Is it my imagination, or is there something from Ireland in this category every year that takes cheap shots at Catholicism? Not that I'd object if they were better films. One nice bit in this one has the rector giving the altar boys a pep talk as if they were a football team, but otherwise it did nothing for me. To be fair, mine was a minority opinion: big crowd pleaser, and I guess thus a dark horse for the O.
• Raju--German couple adopts Kolkata orphan, then makes an unsettling discovery. Snoozer that might sneak in on liberal sentiment.
• The Shore--Another crowd pleaser from the Emerald Isle, this one from the North. Also, with a relatively big name cast of Ciarán Hinds (always excellent) and Kerry Condon (what's Gaelic for "wooden"?), this is the odds-on favorite to win, though it'd have to do it without my vote if I had one.
• Time Freak--This is where that vote would go: it's slight, and it's pretty much just Groundhog Day compressed, but it's smart and funny, and Michael Nathanson has a goofy charm that makes his more-silly-than-mad scientist irresistible.
• Tuba Atlantic--And then there's always the offbeat bleakly funny tale from Scandinavia, in this case Norway. Maybe longer than it needs to be, but it works; still, I'm guessing it'll just have members of the Academy scratching their heads.

Roy Orbison's glasses

Gummo

(1997)

OK, I've seen a drunk wrestle a kitchen chair, I've seen a mentally challenged woman shave her eyebrows, and I've seen enough tortured and dead cats (whether real or simulated is an emotionally moot point) to last nine lifetimes. I feel as if watching this should come with one of those survival T-shirts like they pass out at epic roller coasters.

I did laugh twice; can't remember the cause of the first, but the second came when one character said, "I knew a guy once who was dyslexic, but he was also crosseyed, so everything came out right."

Pity Xenia, Ohio.

Incognegro

Pariah

Crit

And the award for Trailer That Does Its Film the Worst Disservice goes to . . .

Seriously, I saw the trailer a zillion times, but even the first time it made the film seem like one that relies for your favorable response on Standing for the Right Things--gay-friendly, black-friendly, struggling-youngster-friendly--rather than on telling a compelling story compellingly. Furthermore, the high school "poetry," as cut into the trailer, earned those ironic quotes, full of the sort of vague, bland, abstract language for which school "literary magazines" have been notorious since before I was writing that sort of crap for them.

So even though the reviews have been almost unanimously positive, I went in skeptical, but the film won me over within minutes--maybe the first time it made me laugh, for that was another thing about the trailer: it was unremittingly serious, and dark, and sorrowful. Well, it's a serious film with plenty about it that's dark and sorrowful, but it finds time as well to be light, sweet, warm, even funny. In other words, human.

Alike (Adepero Oduye), aka Lee (though never to her father), is 17 and would be out but for the homophobia of her complacently middle-class parents; mom (Kim Wayans) has a Bible up her butt, and dad (Charles Parnell) is in denial more on general principles. Mom is also meekly subservient, with an undercurrent of anger that needs a vent, all the worse for her gay daughter; dad, meanwhile, is a philanderer with love for his daughters but none left for his wife. "Out" is more than one goal.

Writer-director Dee Rees, whose IMDb photo makes her look about 17 herself, has set a high bar for the next coming-of-lesbian-age story, and anyone making such a film could do worse than study this one.

Some justice

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory

(2011)

No brainer: DirecTV gives me a free sample of HBO right when something they're showing gets nominated for a documentary Oscar®? Sure, I'll watch it.

The West Memphis Three were teenagers when arrested, tried, and convicted of the murders and mutilations of three 8-year-old boys; 18 years and two HBO films by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky that raised an army of crusaders on behalf of the convicts--including the stepfather of one of the victims, once as rabid in his calls for hellfire retribution as anyone; including also, in the case of Damien Echols, the oldest and the ostensible ringleader, a devoted wife--later, the boys are young men, two of them intelligent and articulate young men, the third as simple and soulful as when the police bullied him into a patently false confession.

The subtitle of the third installment is more of a spoiler than I'm prepared to give. All I'll say is that even if this didn't put a notch on your belt for the Oscar® party, you'd be well rewarded by watching yet another account of justice deferred.

El sueño americano

A Better Life

Crit

Ladri di biciclette updated to southern California, a truck, and a undocumented Mexican single father as the victim of the vehicular jacking. The political and emotional decks are both stacked: Carlos (Demián Bichir) is exactly the sort of hardworking immigrant, dedicated to making a better life for his child, that built this country and should still be as welcome as Emma Lazarus could make him, while Luis (José Julián) would much prefer the fútbol pitch (pointedly, his favorite team is Chivas USA, not the Guadalajara parent club) to gang turf, but the environment provided by his school and his neighborhood are making the wrong decision seem inevitable.

Nonetheless, it works, partly because Bichir's prematurely lined face speaks so eloquently about where he has been, how far he has come, and what he would do to protect his own. Director Chris Weitz once exec produced a (not very good) film by his brother Paul called American Dreamz; good to see the family explore that theme with characters we care about, and without the trivializing spelling.

The dancer from the dance

Hable con ella (Talk to her)

(2002)

There wasn't really any question about deaccessioning this, but it met the not-watched-in-5-years criterion, which gave me a good excuse to see a little more of Café Müller, with Pina Bausch herself dancing.

What a strange, amazing movie, which does things to women that no one lacking Pedro's well-established record of love for and devotion to the sex could have gotten away with.

To everything a season

Pina

Crit

You know, if I keep loving dance films, I'm going to have to stop prefacing every review with "I'm not really a fan of dance, but . . . " (code for "I actually am heterosexual, but . . . "?).

I know dance is supposed to be kinetic, but geez! And oddly, I don't feel as if the (excellent) 3D made a significant difference in that respect. What that feature did was allow for the sort of close-ups on faces that would never be possible in a theater, while still allowing a wrap-around depth of field that made me feel as if I had at least one extra pair of eyes and could pay close attention to two or three of four goings-on at once. And yes, these dancers without a doubt dance with their faces.

What makes the dances special--well, one thing that makes them special--is their exteriority: many of the pieces are staged outdoors, in venues ranging from the lip of a rock quarry to the roof of a factory, from a city plaza to a leafy glade. And even many of the indoor venues are glass-enclosed--a swimming pool, a solarium, a moving monorail car (with passengers who may or may not have had any idea what was going on--hard to tell). And then even when the venue was a conventional stage, it sometimes became a simulated outdoors, via soil underfoot or a rainstorm overhead (and yes, the latter dance does quote unabashedly the title dance of Singin' in the Rain).

Lots more I could say: about the variety of music, about the polyglotitude of the troupe (apart from German and English speech, I noticed French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, maybe Ukrainian too . . . though the Filipina-looking woman, unfortunately, spoke German rather than Tagalog), but it's time for dinner and another movie (and I have a pretty good idea it'll be). Just see it, yo.