Red Sea pedestrian

Monty Python's The Life of Brian

(1979)

As many times as I've seen this, and as attuned as I am to the commonest British slang term for masturbation, I've never before gotten r-challenged Pilate's declaration that Biggus Dickus "ranks as high as any man in Rome."

Also: a few weeks ago, on the ESPN telecast of an English Premier League match, after a yellow card was issued to a player for a nasty foul, commentator Steve McManaman pronounced him, like Brian, "a very naughty boy," thus referencing for a select audience (boothmate Ian Darke took a few moments, but seemed to get it) the one postcoital full-frontal-nudity scene. I've never been so proud of Macca.

Rainbow coalition

No

Crit

Whether it's a fictionalized riff, as here, or pretty much straight fact, any story where the audience already knows the ending (spoiler alert: No wins, Pinochet is ousted) has to find a way to introduce some suspense by making us (etymological echo intended) suspend our foreknowledge. My favorite film of this form does so by turning history and journalism into a noirish detective story, complete with a sense of physical threat, not to mention to fate of the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country. It does it so well that every time I watch it--and I'm probably close to double digits by now--I sweat every dead-end lead and unexpected pair of headlights at a Deep Throat meeting.

No tries very hard to be All the Dictator's Men, and in surer hands it might have been. But its strong suit--not to mention the soul of its timeliness--is the ethical issue of campaigning sincerity vs. campaign pragmatism, of selling the right thing for the wrong reason. Unfortunately, that gets tossed to the side midway through. It's a pretty good film that coulda been a contender.

Trailers

• The Sapphires--OK, it's probably just the music, but I found this surprisingly appealing.
• The East--Anticorporate terrorists? Hell yeah! And that was before I noticed that the brilliant and beautiful Brit Marlingcowrote and stars.

Father knows best

An all-IFC, pre-opening day characterization M4

What a beautiful spring day in Manhattan, which I know because I had a half-hour to get outside between movies 2 and 3.

Gimme the Loot

IFC

Note to self: find Marion Williams's cover of "I Shall Be Released."

This wasn't a front-runner for the program today until I was reminded that it's about a pair of graffitist buddies bent on "bombing" the home run apple at Citi Field. Since I'm gonna be at Citi on Monday (and Thursday, and Sunday week, and repeatedly thereafter), and since I hope to see that apple appear with some regularity, how could I skip it?

Glad I didn't. A sweet buddy movie, like Butch and Sundance if one of them had actually been female, thus rendering the existing sexual tension both more and less (because secondary to the partnership) conventional. Nothing amazing or profound, but thoroughly likable and almost certain not to play in New Haven, and that pretty much defines the M4 flick.

The We and the I

IFC

Repeat last sentence from previous review.

My spoiler-avoidance policy kept me from reading much about this, but Michel Gondry seems to have written a script that lets some actual high schoolers portray versions of themselves on the ride home from school--the hour-and-a-half odyssey for some--on the Bx66 bus. What that gives us is a reasonably convincing simulacrum of the life, the cruelty, the confusion, and the innocence-in-spite-of-itself of youth. Ballsy thing for a French dude to attempt, one that could have failed laughably, but it works.

Leviathan

IFC

Whoa, that wasn't Iron Man 3, was it? Often lightless, mostly wordless, this challenges us to know just what is going on on this New Bedford fishing boat. I was sort of under the impression there would be whales (see earlier note about obsessive spoiler avoidance), but even with just various fish (including sea scallops that made me reconsider my all-but-vegetarianism), sea birds, and, oh yeah, some humans, it's a fascinating slice of a foreign life. In retrospect, however, a pic with little light or language is maybe not ideal for the midafternoon slot in an M4 being conducted on < 7 hours' sleep; battled the drowsies from beginning almost to end, and I confess that from time to time I found myself wondering whether any of my Mets tickets were selling on StubHub (they weren't).

Nice Times-underwritten short, Allergy to Originality, riffing on the nothing-new-under-the-sun trope via Wikipedia.

După dealuri (Beyond the hills)

IFC

It's a nice quiet monastery until Alina shows up, intent on rekindling romance with Voichita, who opted for nunhood when Alina split for work and a non-Romanian life in Germany. But Alina doesn't fit, won't fit, doesn't want to fit (except perhaps as a means of getting Voichita back), and the charismatic priest who runs the joint ain't having her evil influence screwing up his good thing. Ugliness, up to and including an exorcism-cum-crucifixion, ensues. A brutal, remarkable watch.

Trailers

• One Track Heart: The Story of Krishna Das--Doc about a chanter.
• Portrait of Jason--Gay hustlerand champion drinker, circa 1965, I'm guessing. (Good guess: the film is '67.)
• Upstream Color--From Shane Carruth, director of Primer; I'm a yes here.
• Simon Killer--Funny, I already don't remember this clearly, but I remember that it looked promising.

Murdered by irony

The Hospital

(1971)

I was thinking I saw this when it was new, but '71 doesn't seem right; maybe I saw it second-run at the drive-in in Macomb, Illinois, where my girlfriend (now first ex-wife) was going to school.

A strange, overloaded satire, with one of the most implausible love stories since the '30s musicals.

Gun crazy

Wh-what ha'ened was . . . As one or two of you might recognize, I'd already posted this, complete with an astonishing 9 trailer notes. But then I guess I made it revert to the draft version on my Galaxy S III by inadvertently opening it there. And I just don't have the appetite for completely reinventing that particular wheel, especially tracking down the IMDb links to a bunch of sequels I have no interest in. So highlights only down there, and a quick take on the second flick (the rev. of the first one was already a complete rough cut).

Spring Breakers

Crit

So the guy behind me in line hears I'm seeing this and declares it the worst film he's ever seen. Then he hears I'm also seeing Admission, and he makes a "meh" noise, and I acknowledge that I'm not expecting much, but I have a Tina jones. And then he says that he prefers the real Sarah Palin, whereupon I say, in a friendly, joshing way, that that makes me glad that he has disrecommended both my films, because we probably don't agree on anything. And then he says, "You should look in the mirror; you won't agree with that!"

Geez! If I have guys trying to pick fights with me in New Haven, maybe I should reconsider tomorrow's M4. As for this, it's not even the worst Harmony Korine movie I've ever seen (this is), but I must confess that I found it hard to detect where the t&a exploitation leaves off and the art kicks in. I will say, though, that James Franco, apart from clearly having the time of his life, may turn in the performance of his life as well.

Admission

Crit

A better, smarter, more serious film that the trailer suggested, with a satisfying ending that unfortunately isn't the ending, there being a goopily sentimental romcommy coda. Solid score by my old friend and upstairs neighbor Stephen Trask.

Trailers

• easily the highlight was Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, in modern dress and luscious black and white. Coincidentally, the night of the day I saw the trailer, a grad school friend saw the film in Toronto, at the Shakespeare Association of America conference, and reviewed it favorably.
• next most notable was the 3rd (at least) trailer I've seen of Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, a trailer that seems addressed directly to us who have been concerned that he seems to have discarded all of Fitzgerald's language.
• one whose trailer was so confusing as to be automatically interesting: Disconnect.
• otherwise, a bunch of no,  mostly god no, with the occasional maybe: Iron Man 3, The Hangover Part III, Kick Ass 2, Pain & Gain, The Big Wedding, Monsters University.

Soy loco

Like Someone in Love

Crit

So that happened.

Most of this film proceeds in a tone of safe entropy--the college student working as call girl goes on call to a grandfatherly retired professor more intent on cooking for her than on having sex with her; the boy who claims to be her fiancé is jealous and possessive and even a bit temperamental, but seems harmless enough, even loving; the old man has people making inconvenient demands on his translation skills--but apart from a lot of driving around, nothing much is going on, except in the characters' heads. As with director Abbas Kiarostami's most recent previous film, Copie confirmé, what matters most is precisely that which is most difficult to get a real handle on, a condition here conveyed by the number of shots that show faces through glass or reflected in glass, identifiable but always distorted. I see that I referred to the previous film as "very nearly brilliant," and that's a fair tag for this one, too.

John Dies at the End

Crit

Holy crap! Remember Bubba Ho-Tep? Well, this is director Don Coscarelli's first feature since that one, ten years earlier, but I'm ready to class it with Repo Man, Wristcutters: A Love Story, The American Astronaut, and Panique au village in the pantheon of genuinely weird, genuinely wonderful films. A new street drug, "soy sauce," is making people prescient and psychic, at least until it takes over their bodies to breed insectlike like denizens of a parallel universe. Thank heavens for Bark Lee, humankind's best friend.

Big cats of the Connecticut wild

Bringing Up Baby

(1938)

Tonight while extending the blog's index backward, I discovered that I hadn't watched three of my all-time favorite comedies since June 2008, That Thing You Do!, Airplane!, and this, and I chose the one that doesn't have an exclamation point in the title.

Has there ever been more musical laughter in the movies than Hepburn's here?

I think this may be the first time I've noticed the one-second cameo by Ward Bond as a cop, but I should know by now that Ward Bond plays a cop in every single film of this era.

End of line

Tron

(1982)

Sensibilities and visual style harking back to Metropolis and forward to The Matrix, but delightfully goofy where those are often ponderously serious. Also, I finally know now where Haman in the Jewbilee episode of South Park comes from!

More famous than Buzz Aldrin

56 Up

Crit

You know, I've watched these films in a really telescoped time period, so these kids really grew up fast! Now they're almost my age, bu they're never going to get any closer. I can't decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

I thought there was going to be a bombshell in this installment, when director Michael Apted paired poor little rich girl Suzy and farmboy Nick, but no, the pairing isn't romantic--each remains married to the same spouse as at 49 (in fact, there was no change in marital status among the subjects from 7 years ago, and one theme in this segment could fairly be settlement into late middle age)--but they had been in touch via email since a couple of episodes ago, and Apted obviously wanted to play with expectations and actuality of the two children from distant classes.

Apart from that tease, the biggest surprise is the return of Liverpudlian Peter for the first time since 28. After his criticism of the Thatcher government in that film, he suffered such "malice" that he declined to participate further, and his self-proclaimed reason for coming back is simply to promote Good Intentions, a folk music trio including his wife. Peter's childhood mate Neil is still all but indigent, but has become more active politically and in his church.

Bruce, I must finally acknowledge, seems unambiguously heterosexual, and as he approaches 60, his sons approach their teens. Andrew and John and Symon and Paul are enjoying their grandchildren. The East Enders all relish their grandchildren as well--Lynn and Tony each have one living in the house (Lynn's was born at 2¼ pounds) while a daughter tries to arrange her life to take the child back--and each provides an interesting gloss to the marital status theme: Jackie and her adult sons are dealing with the double blow of cancer in the father of two of them and his mother; Sue has been "engaged for 15 years"; and Lynn, married at 19, has now been with the same man for two-thirds of her life. Sadly, her job as a children's librarian, tenuous for 3 films, finally ended in the continuing cutbacks. "I'm not political," she says, "but I don't think any of them know what they're doing. There's no left wing Labour Party anymore; Tony Blair saw to that." Gosh, I hope she's not driven away by the same people who harassed Peter.

Finally, Tony, whose infidelities were alluded to earlier, apparently has had a relapse or two, but he acknowledges gratefully that Debbie has always forgiven him, and the look on his face when, near tears, he says he still loves her is just the look of marvel he had when we first heard of her, without knowing her name, when, at 21, he said he'd tried three of the "four Fs," but "I couldn't forget her."

Will there be a 63 Up? Well, maybe Suzy, who declared in 49 that she was finished, should answer that: "I feel a ridiculous sense of loyalty to it, even though I hate it."

Love and war

The Informer

(1935)

Dublin, 1922, and Gypo Nolan (Victor McLaglen)--strong as an ox and half as smart--sells out his best buddy to the occupying Brits for the £20 that will get his girl Katie off the streets and onto a boat with him to America. Except that within a few hours he has spent a big chunk on booze and a bigger chunk on generosity, while his onetime IRA mates watch, and count.

I wanted to like this more than I did--I expected to like it more than I did--but the heavy-handed comic elements don't work as counterpoint to the tragic Judas story, they just sort of muddle the tone. It was one of John Ford's favorites, though, dear to the proud Irish American's heart.

The yetis in Río

The American Astronaut

(2001)

Yes, what did Samuel Curtis (writer-director-composer Cory Abee) do that Professor Hess (Rocco Sisto) can't forgive?

This may or may not be the lowest-budget space sci-fi since the days of Ed Wood, and it may or may not be the best space-cowboy flick at least since Star Wars, but it is certainly the best cowboy space musical with a homoerotic subtext (though it's fair question whether the text is actually sub-).

A rare Cheeseblabbery guarantee: rent this, and if you don't like it, let me know, and your next rental, or your next month of Netflix, is on me.

Next year in Visalia

Bull Durham

(1988)

Youngsters, it's true what we old folks say: as you age, the years whirl past like an Aroldis Chapman fastball; seems impossible that it had been almost a year since I screened this. And yet, it remains as fresh as Opening Day (which is, not that you asked, 23 days away).

We are all killers, or accomplices

The Gatekeepers

Crit

Interviews with the six surviving heads of Shin Bet, which is to say with men once professionally responsible for the security of Israel, which is to say, in the context of political imperatives, professionally responsible for repressing, and on occasion assassinating, Palestinians. No two of the six have exactly the same take on their tenures, of course, but all illustrate (though I'm sure not all would endorse) the remark of one that when confronted with what is necessary to an occupying people, "you become a bit of a leftist."

The most revelatory part of the film focused on terrorism from within, in particular the plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock, which almost certainly would have brought down the wrath of the entire Islamic world on Israel--and whose convicted conspirators were able to pull political and judicial strings to escape with slaps on the wrist.

 

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga

Crit

Another wonderful documentary by Werner Herzog, this one one trapping/hunting/fishing folk from northern Siberia. Happy does not mean happy-go-lucky--nature is notoriously red in tooth and claw, and these people have to operate in that nature, but no one of them seems ever to have worried about a lost cell phone signal or slow download speeds, and there's much to be said for that. Also: puppies!

Oh, and if you're familiar with Herzog's narrative voice, you'll understand when I say it was worth the price of admission just to hear him speak this sentence, when a campaigning politician brings musical entertainment to the village: "Only the young people seem to be able to get into the groove."

Trailers

• The Internship--For the love of god, stop Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson before they bomb again!
• Trance--New from Danny Boyle, so I'm in.
• Mud--Crime (maybe) and punishment on an island in Huck Finn's river.

Nowhere fast

Streets of Fire

(1984)

A rock & roll fable, per the subtitle--a fable set in whatever American city has the densest network of the least-crowded elevated trains. There's a Battery, but it's not that Battery, and there's a Richmond, but it's "the Richmond," and the trains go there, so it ain't Staten Island. Wherever it is (unsurprisingly, Chicago is the location for the els, Los Angeles for most everything else) and whenever it is, it's a rock & roll city of '50s hairstyles and a late-'70s-early-'80s tough chick singer (Diane Lane, whose numbers are so strong that it was a real disappointment to see in the end credits that she was lip-syncing) whose kidnapping by a motorcycle gang led by Willem Dafoe--setting the visual style precedent for the Twilight vampire dude--incites the action. No, really.

A pretty bad film, directed by Walter Hill between 48 Hrs. and Brewster's Millions. Pretty bad, but not boring, and probably not forgettable.

Wouldn't it be nice?

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

(2012)

If the world were about to end, I

• would continue to floss, if only because what if someone who looked like Melanie Lynskey
or Connie Britton or Keira Knightley wanted to kiss me?
• would shoot heroin, duh
• would accept all offered cannabis--let's just stipulate would use virtually any drug available
• would not turn down anyone who looked like Melanie Lynskey unless her personal attributes were extremely annoying
• would not turn down anyone who looked like Connie Britton even if she used impact as a verb and thought irregardless is a word

When this was approaching the theaters, I wanted it to be good, but then it got soft reviews, and I let it pass, and I can see why critics were lukewarm, and it's a fair question whether, if it had not later been recommended by the person in the world I love the most, I would have let it get me as goopy as it did, but it did, and there's no point denying it. Hey, what's so great about "objective"?

One way I'd improve it: have him play something from 69 Love Songs (didn't even know it exists on vinyl!) rather than that lame Hollies song.

Sins of the fathers

Magnolia

(1999)

This still makes me an emotional basketcase, but I was conscious enough this time to wonder: why magnolia?

Sooner or later, we all becamewhat Tyler wanted us to be

Fight Club

(1999)

You might think that my going comatose about halfway through watching this a week ago tonight means that the gimmick has started to get a little stale, but in fact what happened, I suspect, was that my body shut down in denial of my own Tyler Durdenness.