Give a man a fish . . .

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Crit

Ah, fathers, sons, and raw tuna. A film strikingly similar to yesterday's Footnote, except that it's a documentary, and the father's expertise is in sushi, and he has won all the accolades his life's work merits, and he has two sons who follow directly in his footsteps, and the Oedipal (and fraternal) competition is benign. But otherwise, pretty much the same film.

Here's all you need to know about Jiro Ono's restaurant: it has ten seats, and reservations must be made at least a month in advance, and they serve no appetizers, only sushi, and Le Guide rouge has given it 3 stars. That established, it's redundant to say that the sushi is incomparably beautiful, made with exacting care from the best fish available at the market daily (we get to see a tuna auction!), and, duh, more delicious than any sushi you or I have ever eaten. Yup, it's one of those hungrymaking films.

Bus stop

Ghost World

(2001)

This started to spread out from the LA/NYC openings in early August 2001, so I can't tell you whether it reached New Haven before 9/11, but I can tell you that it was a different world then anyway, a world in which Scarlett Johansson was still pretty much a kid, no pillowlips yet, and still capable of being a distant arresting-screen-presence second to Thora Birch (and what has happened to her since the promise of American Beauty and this?).

One of those films whose DVD I bought when I buying the DVD of anything I'd liked if it was cheap, but it turns out to be odd and depressing and good enough to keep, though if it were available to stream on Netflix, I was probably going to deaccession it as planned. Based on a comic book by the odd and depressing and good Daniel Clowes, cowritten by Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff--and Enid's artwork is by Sophie Crumb!

A blessing on your house

Hearat Shulayim (Footnote)

Crit

Ah, fathers, sons, mothers, wives, and Talmudic scholarship. This is tragedy in a damn near Aristotelian sense: a great (in his way) man strives, sees triumph so close that he hubristically assumes it his, then is cheated out of the deserts of his life's herculean labor by perverse fates. Destruction in this case takes a sort of reverse Oedipal spin: his son Uriel, who follows in a skewed parody of Eliezer's academic footsteps--and wins the renown his father was denied--becomes the target of the envy and bitterness that poison his life.

Through a bizarre (one might unkindly say implausible) confusion, Uriel has the opportunity to make a heroic sacrifice on his father's behalf, which inevitably makes everything worse, even as it inspires perhaps Eliezer's most impressive research effort.

A film so beautifully painful that it put me in mind of Woody Allen's distinction between life that is horrible and life that is merely and blessedly miserable. And as a bonus, a few minutes of Fiddler on the Roof in Hebrew!

Linoleum

Next Stop Wonderland

(1998)

What I had most effectively forgotten about this since last seeing it 5 years ago: how much smoking there is. Other orality, too: gum chewing, a good deal of drinking, a little kissing. But the smoking--I guess what my sensitivity to that, this time and never in the past, is really about is how little smoking there is in movies nowadays, especially among sympathetic lead characters (and especially especially, I suspect, sympathetic lead female characters).

What I never forget and what always annoys me: a continuity error in the spelling of Alan's surname, which first appears on his plumber father's toolbox as Monteiro (e-before-i being a Portuguese orthographic standard, and that presumably being the family's heritage) but later on his truck and work overalls as Montiero. This is a bigger deal than it might be in a film in which Brazilian music and sensibilities were less central.

What I keep wondering: what has become of Connecticut filmmaker Brad Anderson? I guess the answer is that he's been doing a lot of TV, including episodes of The Wire, Treme, and Boardwalk Empire. Also (something else I'd forgotten), there was the 2008 film Transsiberian, which was . . . well, . . . interesting. IMDb has him in preproduction on The Hive, with Halle Berry and Abigail Breslin; OK, we'll see.

Meanwhile, this remains one of my favorite, and one of the smartest, romcoms of the past couple of decades, and if Hope Davis is no longer My Future Wife, she remains one of my favorite Former Future Wives.

Honor among thieves

The Asphalt Jungle

(1950)

Deaccession? Oh, hell, no! Here are some of the things I'd forgotten since first seeing this, shortly after acquiring it as part of a Warner noir collection, which would have been about seven years ago:

• that John Huston directed it;
• that Marilyn Monroe plays the young squeeze of the corrupt lawyer Emmerich (Louis Calhern);
• that a young Strother Martin appears in a police lineup (actually, I'm not sure I noticed that the first time: he's there for just a moment, he's uncredited, and I wasn't absolutely certain it was he until checking IMDb just now);
• that the script, by Huston and Ben Maddow from a novel by W. R. Burnett, is as grittily perfect as a noir could be;
• and that Sterling Hayden brings heartbreaking honesty and, yes, ethics to his portrayal of "hooligan" Dix Handley.

Handley, the hired muscle, is low man in the heist hierarchy, but he shares with the brains of the operation--Sam Jaffe's Doc Erwin Riedenschneider--the moral center of the action. Meanwhile, the voice of law and order is carried by John McIntire as the smug, self-righteous, just-this-side-of-smarmy police commissioner. The film must have had enough plausible deniability to satisfy the Hays Office, but it's hard to imagine anyone watching this and hoping that Commissioner Hardy's (!) men will track down Dix and Doc.

Hey, you could put somebody's eye out with that!

Crazy Horse

Crit

Beautiful young dancers with pert breasts and virtually identical buttocks and names like Baby and Lumina and Zula gyrate partly naked in a self-conscious Paris institution, while Frederick Wiseman and we watch and listen. I confess that other things equal, I'm more interested in looking at beautiful seminaked women than in watching ballet practice or pugilistic training, but I'm probably more likely to return to those Wiseman treatments than to this one. Oddly, what was most interesting about this was the dynamic of stationary light-pattern projections onto moving bodies--oh, that and the transvestite auditioner--oh, and the rolling-buttocks-dunes effect immediately preceding the boring June Taylor-esque Désir finale.

Can't help myself

Keane

(2004)

I'd been avoiding watching this for so long that it actually would have qualified as a Friday night deaccession, but I chose it tonight because I was running late and needed something short. And while it was as intense and hard to watch as I was expecting, it offered a little more potential for redemption and a lot more sweetness than I'd anticipated.

William Keane (Damian Lewis) haunts Penn Station looking for his daughter, a task made impossible by (1) its having been 2 years since she disappeared there and (2) his being completely unhinged. There seems little question that (1) is not cause of (2), though whether the reverse is true is unclear. In fact, (2) is so emphatic that for a long time I wondered whether (3) there was no lost daughter in the first place.

I'm pretty sure I don't believe that in the end, given the relationship that develops between Keane and a motel neighbor and her small daughter, played by two favorite actors I had no idea were in the thing, Amy Ryan and Abigail Breslin. (Keane also has a coke-and-sex interlude with a clubber played by Tina Holmes, whom I remember fondly as Maggie in Six Feet Under.) Thence the sweetness, thence the unsure staggering steps toward redemption, maybe. Glad I finally watched it.

The needle and the damage done

Rundskop (Bullhead)

Crit

Between this and In Bruges, you gotta figure whoever's in charge of molding Belgium's image has his work cut out for him--or maybe is just doing a crap job to begin with. I mean, come on: who knew there even was a "hormone mafia"?

Jacky's family raises cattle, which means they use banned hormones to accelerate maturity and add bulk, which in turn means that they have to deal with some nasty villains. Moreover, because of a horrifying injury at puberty, Jacky's hooked on the stuff too; as a result, the sensitive, tortured young man is also a ripped roid rage waiting to be unleashed. A fascinating picture of a foreign world, and a convincing and sympathetic character study.

Father cooks best

Yin shi nan nu (Eat Drink Man Woman)

(1994)

An affecting, if somewhat formulaic, saga of an emotionally repressed widower and his master-chef skills that keep his three grown daughters at home. One of the truly gorgeous food movies, and probably an unwise choice for the night before I'm cooking for guests myself.

By University of Illinois film school product Ang Lee. A close call whether to deaccession or not, but I decided yes--and then discovered I can stream it from Netflix anyway. So . . . a taker?

Causeway effect

Jeff, Who Lives at Home

Crit

Don't see this for Jason Segel's portrayal of the title character, a saintly lost man who is endearing in a movie but whom you would beat to death with a ball peen hammer if you had to spend 24 hours with him; don't go to see nice guy Ed Helms prove that he can play a thoroughly convincing asshole; don't go to see Judy Greer demonstrate yet again that she has the chops to carry a film, if only someone in Hollywood would pay attention; don't go to see Rae Dawn Chong's most memorable performance since Choose Me; hell, don't even go to see Lake Pontchartrain's most prominent gig since sloshing over the levees after Katrina.

No, go to see the meatiest role in I don't know how long for Susan Sarandon. I just saw her 41-year-old self less than a week ago, of course (and for that matter, right before leaving work I heard her 28-year-old voice intone the memorable line "God bless Lili St. Cyr"), but the 64- or 65-year-old version who made this film is as gorgeous as any woman could be, and if she's had work done, it's the smoothest work I've ever seen. But forget the looks: surprisingly, her third-tier character gets to have a life crisis of her own, even apart from the one her sons cause her, and gets to have exciting romantic possibilities.

Not a great film, but a beautiful one.

Oh, and a bonus: after the film, I met a 17-year-old self-described movie nerd named (no way! see the film and you'll understand how perfect this is) Kevin, who does a sort of YouTube version of this. I'll check back after the evening film & we can see what he has to say about Jeff.

Trailers

• The Five-Year Engagement--Segal again, with the romcom-ubiquitous Emily Blunt.
• Sound of My Voice--A little bit of Martha Marcy May Marlene, with young, naïve investigative reporters on the scoop.
• Dark Shadows--Burton, Depp, and '70s soap-opera camp; what could go wrong?
• G.I. Joe: Retaliation--Oh, sure.

Joy and verve and poetry

Bull Durham

(1988)

After a meltdown by my college basketball team, I needed my cinematic spring training fix a little earlier than usual. But I guess I'm still sour, because I feel compelled to point out two things that always bother me in a damn near perfect film:

• I don't mind the visual hyperbole of Nuke's wild pitching--hitting the bull, nearly hitting the play-by-play announcer--but stats are sacred in baseball, and when Coach Larry announces that in his first start, the rookie has walked 18 and struck out 18, it sticks in my craw. Even a quarter of a century ago, no young phenom would be allowed to throw the 126 pitches in his debut that those 2 stats demand, even if those were the only batters he faced, and even if every walk came without a strike and every strikeout came without a ball--in reality, to compile those totals, he'd have had to be well over 200 pitches, which is just silly, and an unnecessary false note.
• And when Annie comes to Crash's boarding house, he's drinking Southern Comfort; sorry, I can't imagine him choosing to drink that sweet shit.

Not perfect, but still a Hall of Famer.

Right of way

Falja e Gjakut (The forgiveness of blood)

Crit

The chaos! The insanity! The sudden unpredictable lurching directional shifts! The vomiting!

No, not in the movie, on the walk to and from the theater, on sidewalks packed with green-clad celebrants of what I like to call the Festival of Drunken White People (though in fact, the drunken people are not altogether homogeneous--and most, I suspect, would object, perhaps violently, to being called homo-anything). Inevitably, the once innocent "Kiss Me, I'm Irish" T-shirts now have the "Kiss" crossed out and replaced with "Blow," or don't even bother with that much subtlety and go straight to "Fuck."

But the movie: well, even if I'd seen a few Albanian films, I suspect this would be the best. A man is killed for the stupidest of reasons (well, maybe not the stupidest: that would be for wearing a "Fuck Me, I'm Albanian" T-shirt), and as a result one of the perpetrators receives an 18-year jail sentence, but because his brother and accomplice flees, the offended family has a formal, if extralegal, right to exact revenge on one of the fugitive's sons, so they--teenaged Nik and his young brother--become shut-ins, unable to leave their home safely.

Their mother and sister, Rudina, inherit the responsibility of supporting the family, immune by sex--in theory, at least--from feud harassment. The stress on all of them--including Klinsmann, the horse who pulls the cart from which Rudina sells the bread the family bakes--is palpable. Nik's behavior veers from bored frustration to irrational destruction to a climactic heroic gesture, and the barely visible cracks in Rudina's determination to shoulder a task far beyond her years are heartbreaking. A wonderfully affecting film.

A trip to the dentist

The Paleface

(1948)

Maybe I was subjected to too much Bob Hope in my youth ever to consider him anything but the un-hippest, most reactionary comedian of my father's generation. Many people apparently consider this funny. I half-smiled once, I believe; I certainly never laughed. And casting Jane Russell as Calamity Jane is a blasphemous violation of Robin Weigert.

Let them eat cake

W ciemności (In darkness)

Crit

Moral murkiness in the sub-Ghetto sewers of Lvov, as sanitation inspector/entrepreneur Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz)--think poor (and smellier) man's Oskar Schindler--first exploits the Jews hiding in his domain, then becomes increasingly sympathetic to their plight, and increasingly altruistic as a result.

Director Agnieszka Holland has been doing a lot of work in recent years on American TV, including 3 episodes each of Treme and The Wire. I don't know what that has to do with making a Holocaust film, but it seems not to have hurt, anyway.

Trailers

• Bully--Documentary on a hot topic.
• Serbuan maut (The raid: Redemption)--Korean action flick.

Lemme see your shoe

Inside Man

(2006)

Was wowed by Spike's bank-heist joint when it was new, bought the DVD, found it pedestrian when I screened it at home. That was 5 years ago this month, making it just eligible for Deaccession Friday, but hey, while it didn't exactly wow me again, it did impress the hell out of me, so you're just gonna have to rent it or get your own copy. I'm keeping mine.

By the book

Se7en

(1995)

Funny. I'd been thinking for quite some time that I should test my initial dismissive--nay, revulsive--reaction to David Fincher's early medievalist serial-killer creeper, and it came up regularly on AMC's schedule, but I didn't want it dismembered by long commercial breaks, so I waited until it showed up on IFC . . . which now has long (4-minute!) and frequent commercial breaks (165-minute slot to accommodate a 127-minute film, and who knows how much they trimmed?). Talk about your deadly sins!

Anyway, when this was new, I was blown away by the opening titles but found the film despicable, pretty much pornographic. Was that one of those where-my-head-was-at-that-day judgments? Don't know, but this time I was impressed, the inescapable revulsion serving only to draw me closer to the standard issue cop team of the wizened, on-the-brink-of-retirement veteran (Morgan Freeman) and the idealistic, impulsive youngster (Brad Pitt). Even forfeiting the virginal surprises, I was carried along effectively by the turns of the plot, and fortunately, I didn't remember clearly the outcome of the will-he-or-won't-he climax.

But more than anything, here's what I was thinking: this is an LA that outsewers the NYC of Taxi Driver (well, actually, it's one of those Fincherian nowheres: mostly LA, with a desert outside, but also with a conspicuously noisy subway, which exists only to sink us another circle or two into hellishness), yet by the time it was released, weren't the rates of violent crime already coming down dramatically nationwide? So now I check, and yes, 1995 was the third year of the precipitous decline that would continue until 1999, then turn more gradual. So it might be said that Fincher released a film that already didn't mean as much as it had when he started it and stands even more now than then on technical and performative merits. Fortunately, those merits are pretty damned meritorious.

Mr. Funny Shoes

Mimic

(1997)

Didn't like this when it was new, but that was before I realized that Guillermo del Toro was one of my favorite contemporary directors, so 15 years on, I decided it was time to give his big-bugs-under-Manhattan second feature another shot (of Raid?).

Sorry, still no: a few hints of the tropes he uses effectively elsewhere, especially his go-to birth-canal corridors (here, subway tunnels), but too much of this seems lifted directly from Alien and Aliens, and Mira Sorvino, though she had recently copped an Oscar for Mighty Aphrodite, can't hold a tough maternal candle to Sigourney Weaver.

Del Toro's long-awaited next film, by the way, is the space-aliens attacker Pacific Rim, starring fellow Arsenal backer Idris Elba (right: Stringer Bell). Scheduled for a May 2013 release. Scheduled for me tomorrow night: another film I didn't like first time, by a director who has since become one of my favorites.

Wanna shoot the whole day down

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Crit

Golly--cinematic contraception: many couples are going to go home from this with lowered libido, elevated emphasis on birth control, or both. If this had somehow managed to be a big box office hit, I'll bet you could track the blip in the birth rate late in the year.

This is one of those spawn-of-Satan stories, only without Satan or any supernatural element. We're given a hint that Eva (Tilda Swinton) sends some bad postconception vibes to her uterus, and she certainly becomes a hater when the kid cries nonstop for the first couple of years of life. So maybe she can be blamed for bending the twig, but this is one seriously bent twig, and innate evil seems a likelier, if less satisfying, explanation.

At one point, after his latest bit of wickedness, Eva asks Kevin why, and his answer tracks pretty closely the "he can see no reasons 'cause there are no reasons" of a certain Boomtown Rats song: "There is no point: that's the point." And after his apocalyptic bit of wickedness, his answer is no more of an answer: "I used to think I knew; now I'm not so sure."

The main practical takeaway from this for me, frankly, is that if a John C. Reilly-type dude can land a Tilda, perhaps I should be looking harder for love; after all, the procreation thing has long been off the table anyway.

Killer queen

The Manchurian Candidate

(1962)

Everyone should see John Frankenheimer's well-crafted, unsubtle, programmatic tale of Cold War commie brainwashing once; no one should see it twice; I've now seen in thrice. Any takers?

Slushy

Thin Ice

Crit

Greg Kinnear does moral bankruptcy as well as anyone we have, but here he drills that niche so deeply that he finds himself inhabiting an insurance agent too horrible and too stupid (duh: has he never seen any of the hundred previous everything-you-do-to-dig-out-from-under-the-consequences-of-your-first-crime-only-buries-you-deeper movies?) for us to give two frozen farts about, and thus it's impossible to care about the film, either.

Alan Arkin can't make it better by playing another of his loopy old codgers; only when Billy Crudup is onscreen, as a volatilely sociopathic locksmith, do we see anything resembling life. In the end we get what is meant as a big payoff, but it turns out that the policy has been canceled for nonpayment of dues.