Like that

Scary Normal

In the unlikely event that you don't know why my opinion might be suspect, click the title link below for full disclosure.

But seriously, trust my unclouded-by-sentiment-and-involvement opinion: this is a beautiful film, beautifully written, beautifully directed and acted and shot: yes, I laughed, yes, I cried, and yes, I found the story--of a young girl trying to figure out who she is, who she might love, and how she can deal with being the weird one out in the world and the only sane one at home--fresh and affecting.

I don't want to start singling out actors because I don't want to name the whole cast, and I found every performance damn near perfect, but I will say that you'll be hard pressed to spend 90 happier minutes than with these two:

Laura Anne Welle, left, as Chelsea, and April Cleveland as Danielle

Everyone I know has a big but

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure

(1985)

Always entertaining, never as exhilarating as when it was new. But nobody's who has seen it can ever hear "Tequila" the same again.

My back pages

Looper

Crit

More accurately "Loopy": a time-travel sci-fi that goes way past never making you believe the premise to never making you care much one way or the other. If I hadn't read so much about the prosthetic transformation of Joseph Gordon-Levitt's designed (but not successfully) to make him believable as a young Bruce Willis, I might not have realized that it was he, and I certainly wouldn't have been so distracted. Thing is, Joe's nose would have had 30 years' worth of chances to get flattened like that--in fact, we even see one moment that might have done it. Sometimes people people think so much that they just don't use their heads, you know?

So blah blah blah, I've got to do this in the past to stop that happening in the future, and meanwhile, Sara (Emily Blunt) fucks Joe (young Joe) one night for no other reason than that you can't have two young movie hotties in a movie together without making it a love story.

Time travel doesn't exist in the present, but it does 30 years from now, at which point I'm coming back to skip this flick.

Trailers

• Red Dawn--No fair showing us Adrianne Palicki and a high school football field and not have it be Friday Night Lights.
• Paranormal Activity 4--No no no no.
• Silent Hill: Revelation 3D--Holy crap, does Adelaide Clemens look like a younger Michelle Williams or what?!
• Lincoln--Well, there doesn't seem to be any missing it, but golly, it looks so Big and Self-Consciously Important. Not sure I realized that it's Spielberg. One early concern: I have nothing against an Englishman playing Abe, but he really ought to sound more like he comes from my native state.

Liability

The Sweet Hereafter

(1997)

Wow, 15 years ago? I guess so, given that Sarah Polley looks even younger than the 18 she was.

Here we are in the weird moral universe of Atom Egoyan, where people grieve and guard their shameful secrets, and even the dead have gaping wounds. About as unsettling a film as you'll see, and I wonder whether I give it too much credit simply because it makes me feel like the ground is shifting under my feet. But give it credit I do.

In the clown's face

Hello I Must Be Going

Crit

Wow--file under "expected to like, but not this much": reminded me in many ways of Tiny Furniture, in part because the adult protagonist has moved back in with her family, in part because Melanie Lynskey is very much a Lena Dunham type, pretty but not waif-thin, so her character has to believe herself in constant need of trimming her ship. But the sex here is much happier, if equally angsty, as Amy, recently dumped by her husband from what she thought was a happy marriage ("I had the carpet pulled out from under me, or the wool pulled over my eyes, or maybe I had the carpet pulled over my eyes"--I guess I should mention how much I like the funny sad writing) finds herself falling into an affair with the teenage stepson (Christopher Abbott) of a potential client of her father's law firm (it's complicated). Nicely drawn characters we care about, and they say smart and funny things: that pretty much defines a flick I like.

Hold 'em

Destry Rides Again

(1939)

This is probably the clearest I've ever seen what is not great about this: virtually all the comic elements not involving Stewart or Dietrich are unfunny at best, offensive at worst. Still, those two are enough--though it becomes ever more difficult to imagine Dietrich without the songs of Friedrich Holländer.

Pick a point

The Master

Crit

Please don't ask me whether I like this, at least not until I've seen it 4 or 5 more times. I know I like the PTA audacity of it, and all the lead performances--Joaquin Phoenix as a loony alcoholic World War II vet, Philip Seymour Hoffman as the equally loony religiophilosophical guru into whose thrall he falls (a thralldom that may be mutual), and Amy Adams as the pointedly sober and nonloony Lady Macbeth behind the guru.

And I know I like the film better than the trailer, which conceals virtually all the humor of the film, especially Hoffman's remarkable comic work. In fact, for all the high seriousness of the film, it can be seen as a romantic comedy, with Phoenix and Hoffman as the leads.

Trailers

• Killing Them Softly--Remember this plot from The Sopranos: dumb crooks rip of big-stakes mob poker game. Seems pretty clear that's never a good idea.
• Cloud Atlas--It may be spectacularly good, it may be spectacularly bad, but it's clearly going to be spectacular. My most anticipated film of the fall, based on what may be my favorite novel of the millennium so far.

Blue

The Kids Are All Right

(2010)

One of my favorites from two years ago, fortuitously shown during a free sample of HBO. More of the plot machinery showed this time around, and it's possible that this won't hold up through repeated screenings, but for now I'm keeping it on the DVR hard drive. There's certainly nothing more that can be asked of the 5 lead actors.

Phantom

Le Dernier Métro (The last Metro)

(1980)

Occupied Paris, Nazis and collaborators out the wazoo, and Mme Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve), a film star in her youth ('cause yeah, she's a pretty haggard-looking old lady by this time), is trying to keep her impresario husband's Montmartre theater alive, Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent), for reasons made obvious by his surname, having fled.

Except that he's really in the cellar, pulling managerial and directorial strings via Marion, less because he doesn't trust his replacements than because he has started to go stir crazy. Meanwhile, for no more evident cause than that they're in a movie together, Marion and actor Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu, and you forget how handsome he was) fall in love.

It sometimes feels a tad by-the-numbers, but hey, pretty people directed by Truffaut, why not?

The salmon mousse

The Meaning of Life

(1983)

When I saw the delightful portrayal of Azraël, the angel of death, in this afternoon's film, I knew there were only two possibilities for tonight's entertainment, and I'd seen The Seventh Seal much more recently. This is another film that I first saw in West Virginia, and it too has a story connected with my covering a state high school championship (track and field, in this case, in Charleston), but it's not nearly as interesting as the Raiders story, and anyway, it's Sunday night and I have to get a good night's sleep before another work week.

Seize the sigh

Poulet aux prunes (Chicken with plums)

Crit

The eight willfully dying days of Nasser-Ali Khan, Iran's greatest violinist, and the backstory that tells us why. A magnificent Persian fable of lost love--beautiful to look at, heartbreaking to take in. Written and directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, based on Satrapi's graphic novel, with a multinational cast of my favorites, all playing Iranians: the Frenchman Mathieu Amalric as Nasser-Ali, the Portuguese Maria de Medeiros as his wife, whose love for him is unrequited, the Swedish-Italian Isabella Rossellini as his mother, and the Moroccan Jamel Debbouze in two small but critical roles: a merchant of miscellany who provides Nasser-Ali a Stradivarius and some opium and, much later, a dervish who stands over his mother's grave. One actual (extraordinarily beautiful) Iranian in a key role: Golshifteh Farahani as Irâne, the love of Nasser-Ali's youth, whose loss is the price of his greatness.

Clown suit

Amber Rose

(2010)

A squirmily moving and disturbingly sympathetic look at child molesters. This is a low-low budget indy, and as such it exhibits some technical and performative clumsiness, but at its best it is gripping and complex, treating as human beings with human suffering a class generally rendered--in movies and in life--as irredeemable monsters. A genuinely remarkable performance by Steven M. Keen as an ex-con left brain damaged by a prison attack. No answers here, but a lot of really tough questions.

Full disclosure: the writer-director Mike Trippiedi is a friend, and I also know his stepdaughter, Jennifer Bechtel, who appears as a sanctimonious neighbor, pretty well.

Housing crisis

The Apartment

(1960)

Billy Wilder on the deaccession dock for the second straight Friday, but I wasn't really expecting to dump this one, and indeed I'm not. It is, though, one of those films that didn't click with me the first time. Hard to say why: it's one of the most grim comedies I know, and that's usually a sure sell for me. And something else that I've come to appreciate only recently: Shirley MacLaine was just absolutely irresistible as a kid. Oh, and you know who else I love? Hope Holiday as Mrs. Margie MacDougall, the lovely lonely woman who picks up C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) at a bar on Christmas Eve because she misses her jockey husband, jailed in Castro's Cuba for doping a horse.

We are meant to thirst

Bill W.

Crit

This documentary about the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, who became an unwilling messiah, is informative if pedestrian, marred by an enormous reliance on reenactment, even though the filmmakers had a wealth of audiotapes and archival film at their disposal. It's fairly strictly personal; don't go looking for any insights into why the organization itself works. Most surprising thing I learned: that Bill experimented, with some success, apparently, with LSD--when it was an experimental "miracle drug," before it became an instrument of what the filmmakers term "abuse"--as a way to get enlightenment about the needs of the alcoholic.

Boulderdash

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Post

I've been thinking a lot about my history with this film ever since learning, a month or so ago, that it was going to have this one-week-only Imax rerelease.

• I'll always know without looking that the film came out when I was in Grafton, W.Va., working for a small-town daily newspaper, because I remember seeing it at the theater in downtown Morgantown, with a schoolteacher named Pam, on one of those awkward is-it-or-is-it-not-a-"date"? things. There was nothing awkward about the cinematic portion of the evening, of course: how could either of us fail to be seduced by the onscreen eros? Really, about the only awkwardness was when we bumped noses in my kitchen the one time (ever) we tried the kissing thing. With more life since than before, I now would guess that Pam was gay (no, the chief cue is not that she clearly had no interest in sex with me)--almost certainly closeted, maybe even to herself, that being the safest place to be in Appalachian coal country at the start of the Reagan era. If I'm right (or even if I'm not), I hope she has had a good life in the almost 3 decades since I've seen her; she was one of the best eggs I knew during my W.Va. exile. But I digress. What surprises me now is seeing that the release date of the film was June 12. Presumably by the summer of '81, secondary markets were getting blockbusters within a week or 2 of the big cities, which would mean I'd been in Grafton a month or less when the film came out, and even in those days, when I wasn't the popcorn junkie I am today, I wouldn't have waited long to see it. Somehow, I would have thought I was more established in the mountains when I met Indy, but the evidence is against me. No wonder I was out with a lesbian and not even realizing it wasn't really a date.
• The second screening involves another woman, Janet. Janet was . . . an important life experience. Why I know that my second screening of Raiders was in February or March 1982 is that the last I saw Janet was when I put her on a plane at the Bridgeport airport shortly after the W.Va. state high school wrestling meet in Wheeling, and February is when that happens. Janet had gone to Wheeling with me, because she didn't want to be taken home to her parents, and she was no condition to be left alone after I'd responded to her Friday night call to me at work to come rescue her from the guy who wanted her out of his house pronto. The call was a surprise because I hadn't heard from her since the holidays, after the last in a series of stormy goodbyes that alternated with steamy reunions over the few months we knew each other. There was, I hasten to add, nothing steamy about this reunion. I had seen Janet in various states of disarray, but I'd never seen her like this: she said it was morphine, and while believing her was never really a percentage play, I had no reason not to on this occasion. If not morphine, it was something soporific; she slept most of the way to Wheeling on Saturday morning, then stayed at the motel all day while I went and did my job. She was awake long enough to answer the phone when it rang: it was my ex-wife in Illinois, with whom reconciliation talks were in progress; nothing ultimately came of those talks, but surprisingly, her calling my room and having a groggy woman answer has little to do with that. By Sunday morning, Janet had enough energy for us to take a long walk around Wheeling--which is, by the way (or was, anyway), a surprisingly nifty little Ohio River town--and on the drive home she made her decision: she'd go to Nebraska, where her brother was in the service, and she'd stay with him, far away from the temptations of home, and get cleaned up once and for all, and get her life turned around. If only she had the money for airfare . . . So I have no idea why Raiders was playing--still? again?--in Bridgeport a few weeks after I put her on the plane; I know only that I took Joey, Janet's 8-year-old myopic, unhappy (go figure) son, whom she'd left behind with her parents, to see it. Seemed like the least I could do to spend some time with the kid, notwithstanding that he wasn't much fun to be around. Janet and I stayed in touch for a while, but I never saw her again. I have often wondered how her life turned out, not to mention Joey's; I wish I were enough of an optimist to believe things went well in the long run.
• I loved the film, so I'd see it from time to time over the years, but after those first two, we were talking indistinguishable home video screenings. Then a few years ago the Criterion opened downtown, and one of their first late-night screenings was of Raiders. It was a print that seemed to have been treated about as roughly as Indy was, and though there was a big, appreciative crowd, something was missing in me. It was like the end of a love affair. Fortunately, a couple of years after that, it was screened one summer night in open air on the downtown Green, which was like starting over. And then a couple more DVD screenings, before I read in the Times that it's getting big. Big. So . . .

Yes, size matters. Though I gotta say the screen struck me as smaller than I remembered Imax, not all that much bigger that a conventional screen at a suburban multiplex these days. Still, this is the biggest and the best I'll ever see (or hear--the sound is amazing, too) this pic, and while there are a handful of long shots with insufficient resolution to produce a big sharp picture, otherwise bigger is better for everything, from the rolling boulder to the herpetic hordes to the Nazi-blitzing Hebraic wraiths to the infinitely cavernous government warehouse. Even Karen Allen's fashion show (was there ever a more ingenious series of plot twists to allow a plucky female lead also show sexy? was there another role in my generation that so combined the boy's fantasy of plucky + sexy?) is surprisingly arresting.

Definitely worth the long bus trip out the Post Road--even through misinformation about showtimes took ParaNorman out of the equation.

Trailers

• Frankenweenie--Is it my imagination, or is there something new from Tim Burton every couple of months?
• Oz: The Great and Powerful--Seriously? I'm a fan of James Franco, but I've never thought of him as wizardly.
• The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey--Well, sure.

Buy some illusions

A Foreign Affair

(1948)

Directed by Billy Wilder from a script he wrote with Charles Brackett, this tries desperately hard to be so much: propaganda for the effort to rebuild postwar Germany at the same time that we're taking pride in having bombed the bejesus out of Berlin; a charming romantic comedy despite the drawbacks of a nothing leading man (John Lund) and a grotesquely miscast Jean Arthur (who could ever believe her as a prig?); and an updated version of Dietrich's shady-but-plucky saloon singer from Destry Rides Again. And Dietrich--as in Destry (and for that matter, in Der Blaue Engel before both crossed the Atlantic), singing great songs by Friedrich Holländer (as Frederick Hollander)--comes close to providing a saving grace.

Night of the jackal

Sleepwalk With Me

Crit

So, we're waiting for the movie to start, and we're talking about cast (yeah, I'd already told him my talking-to-Lauren Ambrose-at-Frank Pepe's story--wait, I haven't told you that story? Well, another time), and he mentions that Carole King is in it, which surprises me, because I'd never seen her in a film, which I say, which surprises him because he has, except it turns out he means Carol Kane, so yeah, of course, and I mention my favorite of the dozen or so films I've loved her in, even citing her character's name (Alison Porchnik) and quoting some dialogue, so that's why I was thinking of Annie Hall even before the film started.

Which made it really easy to see the debt this film owes that one: standup comic talking directly to us much of the time, telling a story about his inability to commit to the most wonderful woman he'll ever know. Except of course that this is lot less about general neurosis and more about the protagonist's chronic sleep disorder, apparently triggered by tension over the impossibility of the relationship.

An interesting film, and one that inevitably makes you wonder just exactly how autobiographical it is (mostly, apparently).

The devil wears Brooks Brothers

Broadcast News

(1987)

A project to be completed by the end of the year: to compile a list of my top ten favorite cinematic portrayals of drunkenness. While watching the one from this that will be high on the list (maybe as high as #2), I immediately thought of three others, including the almost certain #1, but I didn't want to take the time to do full research tonight.

Meanwhile, here's how I feel about this film: if James L. Brooks had been a creative force behind only one piece of dramatic art in his life, this is the one I'd need the most. And I think you know how I feel about that cartoon show he put together with Matt Groening.

Let's stay together

Hope Springs

Crit

I was disinclined to see this, but apart from the general critical praise, a trusted colleague loved it against her expectations, so I was in--and oh, my, so surprisingly good. First, yes, of course, Streep and Jones and Carell are great, duh, and each does wonderful work with just the face. When they're in counseling sessions, Kay and Arnold on opposite ends of the sofa, it's always profitable to watch the face of the one when the other is talking.

But that's to be expected--what I didn't expect is what a brave film it is, well beyond treating a topic, the rekindling of love and romance and even sex in a sexagenarian couple. Far riskier than that are the sometimes almost glacial rhythms of the film--long stretches go by during which nothing happens but talk, or nothing happens but the same emotional logjams that have been happening. And in fact, for a good 30 or 40 minutes it seems like an emotionally-stonewalling-husband fish-in-a-barrel shoot. But that turns out to be a brilliant, dangerous misdirection, and when the cracks start to show in Arnold's armor, the stakes are raised and the blood begins to pump. By false starts and small victories and hard work--that's how the film proceeds, the same way things get better in a relationship.

Oh, and a musical postscript: wouldn't have expected to hear a song in this soundtrack that I just heard in last night's, but darned if we don't have Al Green singing the song whose title I've borrowed for the post's.

Trailers

• Zero Dark Thirty--Geez, a movie on taking out bin Laden already?
• Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away--In 3D, of course.
• Skyfall--Bond is back, and Imax has got him.

Goes to show you never can tell

Pulp Fiction

(1994)

The thing that dawned on me for the first time this time: if not for the high level of sexual tension between Vincent and Mia, which keeps Vincent in the bathroom for an extraordinarily long time lecturing himself on the moral and ethical imperatives of his situation, Mia wouldn't have been left alone with his overcoat long enough to have discovered the heroin, mistaken it for cocaine, and snorted it with potentially fatal results.

Another thing I noticed for the first time, though it's not remotely epiphanic: Laura Lovelace, who plays the diner waitress ("'Garçon' means 'boy'"), is one of two credited musical consultants for the film. Nice work.

Memories are made of this

Robot & Frank

Crit

An amusement that wants to be more but just doesn't have the software for it. Frank Langella is terrific, of course, as a career cat burglar facing age dementia, and Peter Sarsgaard benignly channels HAL as the voice of the other title character, but the film forgets a critical principle in fantasy: make everything not of the fantasy follow normal logic. So don't, e.g., allow a plainly unbalanced complainant to come along first on a police investigation, then on a stakeout and bust. Class this as a likable couldabeen.

Of the people by the people for the people

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

(1939)

Needed a post-GOP convention political palate cleanser, but one thing that hit me harder this time than ever before is what a Fox News-like operation the Taylor machine's media juggernaut is. Keep the free press free, yo.

White rabbit

The Bourne Legacy

Crit

Funnest part of this is when the Manila police are chasing him, though they don't really know why, and they're chasing her because she has seen them first while out getting him medicine and has shouted a warning to him, and while running away from the police, he's also trying to find her 'cause they're clearly becoming more than a team, and meanwhile, unbeknownst to everybody but us, the new and improved killing machine from Bangkok is chasing both of them with a mind to termination with extreme prejudice.

Or maybe the best part is the motorcycle chase that follows, I dunno. Anyway, none of that is the most confusing part, which comes much earlier and involves bloodless murderous bureaucrats setting said extremely prejudiced termination in motion.

Trailers

• Life of Pi--Ang Lee does magic realism? Sure, I'm in--gotta be better than when he did comic book.
• Les Misérables--Anne Hathaway does beaten down & uglied up, and sings? Maybe.