Boitano

South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

(1999)

I'm sure that that film I saw earlier today must have added at least one Oscar®-bait song that wasn't in the stage version, but I unclefucking guarantee that whatever that sure-to-be-nominated song is, it's not as good as the Oscar®-nominated song from this film, which was in turn no better than the third-best song in the film. And the Miz-inspired medley here--which is maybe the 6th- or 7th-best musical number--pretty much said in 2½ minutes everything that needed to be said about pretentious Broadway musicals.

I snored a snore

Les Misérables

Crit

Seriously? OK, look, I'll admit right up front that (please don't tell my daughter) I'm not really a fan of musical theater, though actually I'm probably a bit more inclined to enjoy musical theater on film. And anybody who knows more about music than I is welcome to tell me that these songs (the lyrics and especially the melodies) are not uniformly mediocre, or that the actors in the film--mostly mediocre-at-best singers--somehow ruined the best songs, or that the best songs were left out of the film version, or whatever, but as I'm seeing it right now, the 7 bajillion people who have loved this on stage must have found something--lots and lots of something--that is wanting here.

Far more interesting than any specific song is the fact that the actors sang as they acted, rather than acting to previously dubbed singing, the idea being that that would give them more flexibility in each reading/singing in each take. Well, yeah, I think that's a good idea, but that doesn't change the fact that most of them have singing-in-the-shower voices, and the lyrics they're acting and the melodies they're singing don't merit the special treatment that the technique provides.

Not counting the 18 or 20 death scenes--'cause face it, who's unaffected by death, especially when the dier is noble (pretty much all of them) or in love or unspeakably young?--I found exactly two sequences moving. About 6 hours in, Samantha Barks as Éponine sings about her unrequited love in a scene shot with minimal cuts (hold that thought); but the real show stopper comes several hours earlier, so early that Fantine (Anne Hathaway) is still alive, a single tight shot of that song about dreaming and tigers inexplicably coming at night. Now, I'm betting that people who love Les Miz reaaaaly love that song, but it's trite tripe--trite tripe that Hathaway makes moving and appealing, largely on the merits of that one-shot performance. And that's what could make a genuinely good musical utterly fantastic via the sing-it-on-film strategy. Yeah, I know: the stakes still are nothing like they are on stage, where you get one chance per night to nail the mother; this may have been Hathaway's first take, but more likely it was her twentieth. Nonetheless, it created a convincing simulation of the immediacy that makes the stage exciting, and the Barks performance got us fairly close, and you wonder why director Tom Hooper didn't go for that more.

But whatever. Sad to think that's my last in a theater of 2012, and I have a pretty good idea of how I'm going to cleanse my palate tonight.

Trailer

• Zero Dark Thirty--Yeah, I'd already seen a trailer for this, several times, but now that it's getting Best Picture buzz, the producers seem to have realized how unseductive that trailer was, and that even an unsmiling Jessica Chastain is more appealing.

Just sayin'

For the second time in less than a week, the Criterion has reneged on a promise to show me a film I wanted to see, first with The Other Son (for which I guess the screening room DVD hadn't yet shown up, but I got to see it a couple of days later), now with Any Day Now, which has apparently been shunted to next week, though earlier today it still appeared as current on the website (it has finally been yanked).

Well, that's OK, 'cause I have some catching up to do from when heroic efforts were still being pursued to resuscitate my laptop. So if you scroll back a couple of weeks, you'll some reviews there that weren't posted on the day.

Different drum

Gift of time M4

Starting on East Houston and circling clockwise, as I always do, I was close to deciding there wasn't anything on the docket to compel me to make an interholiday movie trip to the city. That was before I got to the Cinema Village schedule, containing a film about a rock icon of my youth, a film that had opened right after my Thanksgiving-weekend M4, so I hadn't even considered the possibility of its hanging around for my next trip. Mr. Baker is the raison d'être; the others are just garnishing raisins.

Keep the Lights On

CV

Someday I'll go to a film about a same-sex relationship and not feel compelled to mention that element in the first sentence. But not yet, obviously.

Still, this film makes me optimistic, because it's really a lot less about the lovers being of the same sex than about one of them being a crackhead. Which means an entirely different set of clichés. Writer-director Ira Sachs finesses the clichés by making the narrative telegraphic and non-sequitur-prone, as it leaps from 1998 to 2000 to 2003 to 2006, always returning to the question of whether Paul (Zachary Booth) has changed and whether Erik (Thure Lindhardt) can keep (or restart) loving him. And we care because the people move us.

Beware of Mr. Baker

CV

For those of us who knew Cream and Blind Faith back in the day, the biggest surprise should be that the best and most volatile (tall cotton, that) drummer in rock history would have been around to celebrate a 40th and a 50th and a 60th and bless his cantankerous soul even a 70th birthday. But since I already knew he was still alive, the biggest surprise for me was his passion for polo. Right, like with horses. Seriously. Otherwise, what we have here is a piece of remarkable found art with a kickass soundtrack.

Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel

CV

Huh, go figure: there's no indication that Ms. Vreeland shared Ginger Baker's enthusiasm for polo (though it was certainly much more a part of her milieu than of his), but horses meant at least as much to her idiom. This was one of those I-couldn't-care-less-about-topic-but-golly-look-at-those-Rotten Tomatoes-numbers picks, and as usual with such pics, I'm glad I paid a visit to this alien bedazzling world. And now, back to my unfashionable monde . . .

Tabu

FF

An odd Portuguese melodrama about love, infidelity, murder, and girl-group pop songs in colonial Mozambique. I think I have to confess that I was pretty much M'd out by this point, though that seems dangerously close to admitting that I'm not as young as when I started doing this.

Trailers

• Fairhaven--Black sheep son comes home, unwillingly, for Dad's funeral. Problems ensure.
• Generation P--Oddly, I saw two very different trailers; looks Russianly interesting.
• A Royal Affair--Even odder that they should still be showing the trailer of a film I've already passed on at home.
• Amour--Now showing at FF, so skipping it is a bit of a risk, I suppose, but Michael Haneke's last three films have shown downtown, and the buzz on this one is huge. Of course it'll be a little annoying not to see it until after it wins the foreign-film Oscar®, but I'll survive.
• The Gatekeepers--Shin Bet badasses! Who ya gonna call?

K-Billy's Super '70s Weekend

Reservoir Dogs

(1992)

Yes, it's true: Tarantino used to employ a lot less blood and violence.

What's not to like?

Django Unchained

Crit

A viewer leaving the theater ahead of me wondered aloud what topic Tarantino will tackle "in his third film." Her companion and I were both puzzled, until I realized that she meant the third of his social-conscience films: we've had the Holocaust and slavery, and the implication was (and I've seen this assumption in print, too) that there has to be a social-conscience trilogy, so we've got one more to come. Well, I wouldn't be surprised--the Spanish Inquisition? climate change? talking out loud in movie theaters?--but I also wouldn't assume that the Q man finds anything sacred in the number 3, or even that if he does, he's going to feel obliged to punch the same ticket again.

Frankly, while slavery is unquestionably a Bad Thing in the moral universe of this film, I doubt that the particular Bad Thing is of as much interest to the director as the trappings he gets to bring to bear on it. And damn, they're fine trappings--all his films are buddy movies to some extent, but I'm not sure even Jules and Vincent were as simpatico as Django (Jamie Foxx) and Dr. Schultz (Christoph Waltz) here. Lots of blood, some big explosions, but a surprising amount of love and tenderness. Which is, of course, why I keep saying "Nothing says Christmas like Tarantino."

Trailer

• Oblivion--No, not likely.

Every one

Scrooge

(1951)

Am I the only one who thinks the Ghost of Christmas Past is based of Benjamin Franklin and the Ghost of Christmas Present on Henry VIII?

Isaac and Ishmael

Le Fils d'autre (The other son)

Crit

I had no idea this would be such a perfect yuletide film: a Semitic boychild (actually, two here) born in fractious circumstances (during the Scud-dodging Tel Aviv January of Bush I's Gulf War) ushering in peace, love, and understanding.

The premise here is a cheesy relic of 18th-century novels--babies switched at birth--but in the context of an Israeli and a Palestinian family, the goofiness of the premise is trumped by questions of what constitutes family, what constitutes motherhood, what constitutes Jewishness, what basis is demanded for class hatred. It's a beautiful, wrenching tale, and if one might fairly complain that the working out of the complexities is an unrealistically simple conclusion, that one won't be me.

Midlife critical mass

This Is 40

Crit

I may have said this before, but Judd Apatow has made a nearly great film here, incising the fine line between love and hate with an X-acto blade and suturing to every laugh (of which there are many) an equal and opposite grimacing groan. And then after tough and tough and tough and tough, just when you fear he's going to go soft on devoted combatants Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann), he . . . goes soft on 'em.

Still, a much better film than most people would make from this raw material, and the performances of teen Maude and teeny Iris Apatow suggest that the Apatow household is a damn good repertory company. And then there's Albert Brooks finding yet another interesting way to be a character that only he could play.

Trailers

• Admission--Fey and Rudd, directed by Paul Weitz; got a better formula for irresistible?
• The Heat--God, this looks so dumb that I'm ashamed to admit how much I laughed. Melissa McCarthy kicks that canard about women not being funny right in that funny part of the male anatomy to be kicked in.

Goblins and trolls and orcs, oh my!

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Crit

I was really hot for this, was planning to make the long bus ride out to hell (aka the Connecticut Post Mall) to see it in Imax 3D, but given that I really didn't have that much extra time to invest in a picture already pushing 3 hours, I allowed myself to be dissuaded by the lukewarm-at-best reviews. And I gotta say: the only better decision would have been to let myself be dissuaded from seeing it at all.

Peter, what a snoozer you have wrought. What's an adjective like "glacial" only lots slower? That's what the pacing is like (not surprising, given the decision to inflate a kids' book into a Big Important Trilogy). How can anyone make this stuff boring?

One aspect I found interesting (though not interesting enough to invest the time in parts 2 & 3 unless someone writes a review that begins "Forget the godawful sloggy first installment, . . . ") is the obvious Israelite connection of the dwarves' quest for their promised land. Unfortunately, while I found Gimli simpatico in those other Tolkien flicks Jackson made, here I find the race so uniformly intolerable that I'm forced to confront the possibility that I made be an anti-Dwarfite.

Trailers

Oddly, 3D films but 2D trailers before a 3D screening.

• Jack the Giant Slayer--Seems unlikely, though Bryan Singer directed, so maybe.
• Man of Steel--Huh! Why hasn't anyone ever thought of making a movie about Superman before?

Pretty is as pretty does

Young Adult

(2011)

A nasty gem from the end of last year, one of my favorites, and the one thing I want to say about it this time around is that if This Is 40 had stayed as true to itself to the very end as this one did, . . . well, it probably would have done about the $16 million total this did rather than the $12m 40 did in its first week, and I'd have liked it better but the producers would have hated it.

Two little Hitlers

It's a Wonderful Life

(1946)

Had an epiphany while watching this this year. You know how unfair to George it has always seemed that Mary literally preempts his wish from coming true (I wouldn't want to blame her for Peter Bailey's stroke, exactly, but the timing is suspicious, and the end result is unequivocal), and that she generally takes it upon herself to know what George really wants, since he clearly can't be trusted to get it right?

Well, I realized this time that it's straightforward karmic retribution: it's George who first overrides Mary's self-determination by putting coconut on her ice cream after she has unambiguously declared that she doesn't like coconut and doesn't want coconut. Hey, George: the payback is a motherfucker.

Corruption keeps us safe and warm

Syriana

(2005)

This is what happens when you get to be my age: I was looking for a "soft" deaccession candidate--one I didn't really expect to turn loose of but that had passed the 5-years-since-I-last-screened-it threshold to make it eligible for the night. When my eyes lit on this, I thought, "No, that's not even five years old, and I've screened it once since it was in the theater." Well, uh, no . . . you can see the release date above, and it was closer to 6 years ago than to 5 when I screened it the second time. Oh, it's a long, long time from May to December . . .

The labyrinthine tale of spycraft, oil thirst, Islamism, and good old fashioned skulduggery holds up well, and if anything, the assassination from afar is even a scarier and more nauseating notion now that we voted for the president who thinks it's OK than it was 7--that's right, 7--years ago.

Everybody gets corrupted

Manhattan

(1979)

Ah, so true: they're writing songs of love, but not for me. Perhaps not as reliably heartbreaking a film as yesterday's, but plenty brutal in spots. Brutal and rapturous.

Express

Anna Karenina

Crit

All the world's a stage--well, a stage and a train station--in Tom Stoppard and Joe Wright's audacious adaptation of Tolstoy. Anna's fate is repeatedly foreshadowed, and indeed, for two-thirds of the 2-plus hours, the film maintains a dizzying locomotive momentum, shifting between stage sets and exteriors (most memorably, a stage door that opens onto a vast, snowy steppe) with such facility that it gives the impression of being a single tracking shot. The staginess that gave me pause in the trailer is in fact grand, gloriously goofy theatricality, which facilitates the conveyance of plot via shorthand.

I get the mixed nature of the reviews--many viewers will be unable or unwilling to go along with the film's central histrionic conceit--but I found it about two clicks shy of brilliant.

Trailers

• The Guilt Trip--Yeah, pairing Seth Rogan and Barbra Streisand as son and mother oughta ensure a popular and critical disaster.
• Safe Haven--Nicholas Sparks novel; need I say more?

We need the eggs

Annie Hall

(1977)

No apologies: a stay-at-home matinee with a double helping of popcorn for the only movie I'll see this birthday (my 59th, the director's 77th), after which I'm going to devote the rest of the day to a little reading and a lot of sports, including my first full screening and archival recording of an epochal event that occurred one half-year ago tonight. Don't worry, though: hyperconscious of creeping decay, I did my full Saturday workout this a.m.; decrepitude takes no holiday, so neither must I.

OK, I take it back: one apology, for using this forum to lay a rare passive-aggressive trip (no, really: ask her) on my daughter, who saw this--or maybe saw only part of it--years ago, was unimpressed, and has never given it a second chance:

Look, there are four ways this can go down: you can watch it now, be reconfirmed in your opinion that I have vastly overrated it, and not have me bother you about it anymore. Or you can watch it now, discover it to be every bit the painfully perfect dissection of love that I claim it to be, and henceforth share my delight in it, along with appropriate allusions to it. It can, in short, become yet another element of the private language of the best parent-child relationship I've ever experienced (and one of the best for you, too, I'm pretty sure).

Or you can not watch it again until after the reading of my will, where I will make that my only demand, and be reconfirmed in your opinion that I have vastly overrated it, which won't matter then. Or you can wait until after I'm gone to discover how wonderful it indeed is, and regret not having discovered that while I was still around to share in your delight.

I'm just sayin'. Love, Dad