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?