Another brick in the wall

The Squid and the Whale

(2005)

Inspired to watch this yesterday while on the stair machine reading the New Yorker profile of Noah Baumbach and his love-and-writing partner Greta Gerwig, some of which is about his parents' reaction to this autobiographical treatment of their breakup and its effect on teenaged Noah and his younger brother.

As painful as this is to watch, it remains for me one of the best examples of the limning of characters simultaneously unbearably awful and irresistibly engaging. Part of that is great acting, of course, particularly by Jeff Daniels and Jesse Eisenberg and also, to a lesser extent (only because her character is less awful to begin with), by Laura Linney, but I think the lion's share of the credit goes to the writer-director. Domestic dysfunction in Park Slope at its most train-wreck compelling.

Lies on the Mississippi

Mud

Crit

You've probably read in a review that this has an oblique hint at Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer in it. Well, that really understates the matter: this is the story Mark Twain would tell, if he were alive today, about a 21st-century Huck and Tom who get tangled up with an adult amalgam of the pair of them (actually, two such amalgams, though the second isn't immediately apparent) while living on a river and in a world not much changed from the 19th, except for one little three-letter word--sex--which of course changes everything.

In Life on the Mississippi (which, if memory serves, he wrote between The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and in fact was working on the latter simultaneous with Life), Twain writes about something he calls Sir Walter Disease: the malady to which southerners were particularly prone of reading the world through the distorted lens of Scottian romanticism. Twain blamed much of what had gone wrong with the South--slavery and the plantation system, a code of "honor" often worked out in dueling and lynching, and the Civil War itself--on the thrall of its population to the mythology of Scott's novels, and he wasn't kidding, or was only just.

The two central characters in Mud--the title character (Matthew McConaughey) and his young acolyte Ellis (Tye Sheridan)--have bad cases of Sir Walter Disease (as did Tom and, when letting Tom do his thinking for him, Huck), and in their cases the disease manifests in idealization of Woman and the inevitable devastating disappointment that that misapprehension invites. And as in Huck Finn, devastating disillusionment brings a certain wisdom, not to mention elevation of the already strong impulse to get away from the world as is, to "light out for the Territory."

In case I haven't made it clear, this film delighted me as few have this year.

Trailer

• Rush--Psychodrama and Formula 1 racing, based on the Niki Lauda story.

Deddum

Room 237

Crit

I confess: for the first hour or so, I thought this was just five loonies explicating their loony theories about the subtexts hidden by Stanley Kubrick in The Shining: revelation of his role in faking the Apollo 11 moon landing; sexual dysfunction; Minotaurs; and two holocausts, both Hitler's and the U.S. government's against Native Americans.

Then, suddenly, I realized: every interviewee used both the word "and" and the word "a"! And what key sentence in the film uses those exact same words? "All work AND no play makes Jack A dull boy"!!!!! Coincidence????

Fall semester 1972, first session of a course in Renaissance and Elizabethan literature. John Schleppenbach, brand new Ph.D., tells us that he believes in all mythologies. From which I deduce that his meaning is that all is the only alternative to none. Or at least I deduce that 40 years later and a thousand miles away, and no way of asking him to confirm or deny. OK, that's not true: I could email him. But the point is, I remember what he said. Or the point is that he made a straightforward statement that could be spun into a variety of meanings without having to bother with what he actually meant.

Going into this, I thought I'd have infinite capacity to be amused by ingenious silliness, but it turns out that it got old for me pretty quickly, and the 102 minutes dragged.

I would prefer not to

Habemus papam (We have a pope)

WHC

I missed this at the Criterion when I was on the Scary Normal set, so this was a welcome opportunity not only to see it, but to see it for free!

And what a delight! I expected it to be witty and entertaining, but I had no idea that Michel Piccoli's reluctant pope, Cardinal Melville, would be so sweet, and his conundrum so moving. Anyone expecting any cutting-edge anti-Catholicism will come away disappointed. Yes, the College of Cardinals is a bunch of goofy old men, and yes, writer-director Nanni Moretti, who also plays the first of two psychoanalysts commissioned to treat the pope for his pastoral paralysis (the second is the estranged wife of the first), has fun with set pieces that range from droll (Moretti's character i session with Melville, the two encircled by cardinals) to raucous (a volleyball tournament pitting the cardinals against one another, continent by continent) to surreal (the cardinals in the finest funny-hatted drag invading a theater where the pontiff on the lam is trying to enjoy The Seagull), but never is he humor anything but affectionate. A bittersweet charmer.

Little red non-Corvette

Butterfield 8

(1960)

I confess that I didn't watch this straight through, 'cause Matt Harvey was pitching for the Mets, but near as I can tell, Gloria (Elizabeth Taylor) is a magical mix of sexuality and toxicity, and Liggett (Laurence Harvey, no relation to Matt) is as bad an actor as the actor who plays him. And there are other characters in the cast, but they don't mean anything--oh, except for the little red Sunbeam Alpine convertible Gloria drives. I think the main thing we need to know about this film is what Robert Osborne told us at the start: that Taylor, though she won an Oscar for her performance, hated the film, in fact turned it down at first, until she realized that it would let her complete her MGM contract so she could take the $1 million gig from Fox to play some Egyptian tart.

Pyrrhic defeat

The Curious Case of Curt Flood

(2011)

The best big league center fielder of my youth played for the team I rooted for when the Mets no longer had a realistic chance of competing for a pennant--which in those days was usually mid-April--but when that team traded him to another, he said no, in thunder, and his reward for most of the rest of his life (he died of throat cancer at my age now) was the exacerbation of all the problems that already existed, for him and for many ballplayers: a tenuous homelife, a precarious handle on financial matters, and a deep and abiding taste for alcohol.

Curt Flood was the right man at not quite the right time, and his rebellion set the stage for the crippling of the reserve clause barely half a decade later, but though he took his case all the way to the Supreme Court (where by all accounts former Justice Arthur Goldberg presented one of the most inept oral arguments in the institution's history), his crusade was, technically, at least, a failure.

I try to remember what my baseball-crazy teenage self felt about Flood's principled stance, but that was a long time ago. I'm reasonably sure I didn't simply adopt baseball's stance that Flood's success would destroy baseball--if I had, he would have been anathema, and I'd remember that. But as good a civil rights game as I talked for a 15-year-old in a little town with no African-Americans, I'm pretty sure I lacked the vision to see the issue in those terms. In short, like most of his colleagues (even, heartbreakingly, as we see in the film, his best friend on the Cardinals, Bob Gibson), I probably just lay low and waited for the storm to pass.

Letheal attraction

Trance

Crit

The story is completely implausible, the motivations absurd, but Danny Boyle does atmosphere about as well as anybody in the biz--and you have to tip your hat to anyone who can come up with an art-historical excuse for showing us Rosario Dawson naked (and even for teasing us with several naked-but-no-naughty-bits bits).

Trailer

• The Way, Way Back--Great cast, looks like a lot of other successful teen angst pics, may be a little too charming for its own good.

Centrifugal, centripetal

The Place Beyond the Pines

Crit

The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the sons. The sins of the mothers, and mothers in general? Not really all that important.

This is a film in desperate motion to be more gripping, more emotionally true, and more interesting than it actually is.

The roar of the greasepaint

Twentieth Century

(1934)

I'll stipulate that John Barrymore and Carole Lombard are great actors, and it's fun to watch them chew the scenery. For a while. Not necessarily for two hours. This is one of those films that I don't get why people find it great.

Pop licks now

The Sapphires

Crit

Time for another installment of Dr. Blab's Advice to the Marginally Talented Filmmaker: look, you give me a few appealing characters, some of whom sing good renditions of Motown classics, and I'm gonna cut you a lot of slack. Even if your plot is nothing but cliché and predictability--even if you use Vietnam as a place to pretend to kill off a love interest when it's perfectly obvious that you will do no such thing--I'm gonna click 3 stars ("Liked It") in Netflix. But the moment you show us Bobby Kennedy telling a crowd that he has very sad news to report . . . NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. is not a prop for your little jerry-built narrative. It's not a piece of stagecraft you slot in to allow the singers to hear an inspiring speech about how African-American soldiers need to be given something to hold onto or they might start wondering what they're doing in Southeast Asia. ("Should we go on?" one of them asks. Gee, I wonder whether they will?)

Fortunately, a few minutes later everyone's smiling again, and we don't even remember that Dr. King was shot. I'm sure I've seen in some point in the 5+ decades of going to movies a more cynical exploitation of one of the epochal tragic moments of my life and my country's, but I'll have to think about it for a few days and get back to you on when. Shameless. Unforgivable.

Trailers

• Unfinished Song--Ugh. Looks grotesquely sentimental, and anyway, we've seen a good nonfiction version of the old-folks-singing-young-songs bit, though I don't remember the title.
• Kon-Tiki--Spoiler alert: they make it across the Pacific!

Serpent's tooth

Make Way for Tomorrow

(1937)

Wow! I had read about this--Anthony Lane's book, maybe?--some time ago, but it was a colleague's recent recommendation that got it to the top of my queue, and thanks to her. This is, in my experience, a unique film, and a quietly great one.

Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi play Mr. and Mrs. Lear, essentially, and while none of their five children is quite Regan-or-Gonerilesque, neither is any of them remotely Cordelia-like. The septuagenarian parents are rendered homeless by the Depression, and while most of the kids have reasonably good intentions, they also all have their own lives and their own families, and screenwriter Viña Delmar and director Leo McCarey are honest enough to depict the old folks as . . . well, as difficult to be around as even old folks we love can be.

Not sure how I'd have reacted to this had I seen it when I was in my 30s or 40s, but, barely a decade from my own 70s, I found it sobering. During the couple's final evening in Manhattan before Bart has to board a train to California to stay with the child who is perhaps least willing (though it's a tight race) to house one parent and is--like all her siblings--adamant that she can't handle both, strangers are more hospitable to them than are their own children, and the sequence defines "bittersweet." And the ending would have been a slap in the face to any audience, but I can barely imagine how it would have been greeted during the same era when Fred and Ginger were kicking up their feet--always in unison at the fadeout.

I'm not naïve enough not to realize that there are many great films I still haven't seen, but it's always gratifying to discover one. If you're unfamiliar with this, familiarize yourself.

Items in the mirror . . .

Jurassic Park (1993; 3D Imax rerelease)

Post

Yes! That is the way that film ought to be seen, with a 3-dimensional, 3-story-tall HFST rex! I don't have any particular affection for the film, but it seemed like a spectacle worth taking a long bus ride on the Post Road for, and oh, yes, it was. The retrofitted 3D is about as good as it can be, and the Imax is BIG.

Trailers

• After Earth--The Smith father-son bit isn't enough, and it seems to be all there is.
• Star Trek into Darkness--Yeah, whatever.
• Oblivion--Apparently this was made for the Imax screen, and the same trailer I've seen before looks lots better there. Which is not to say I'm apt to see the film.
• Iron Man 3--First time I've seen a full trailer for this, and in Imax 3D it looks as if they're desperately trying to make it look worthy of Imax 3D.
• Man of Steel--Geez, looks so dark: what is this, a Batman movie?