Sic transit

Fruitvale Station

Crit

In retrospect, perhaps it wasn't wise to go to this while in a sort of a postpartum depression the day after an almost-24-hour train ride from vacation with my family in Illinois. The account of the last day in the life of Oscar Grant, fatally shot by a BART transit cop (who apparently grabbed his revolver thinking it was his taser), is slightly less angrymaking than expected (though still plenty that) but far more sadmaking. It's fair to ask whether the real Grant would have charmed us as much as Friday Night Lights' Michael B. Jordan, and to wonder about the convenience of the timing of Oscar's enforcing his decision to go straight for his family by dumping his marijuana stash into the bay, but enough bystanders captured the shooting itself on their phones that it's clear that what happened to the real guy is exactly what Americans pride ourselves on not ever happening here.

Trailers

• Yi dai zong shi (The grandmaster)--Tony Leung as Yip Man, who trained Bruce Lee.
• Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom--The suddenly ubiquitous Idris Elba plays the young revolutionary.
• Captain Phillips--Question: in depicting 21st-century piracy off the Horn, how do you avoid seeming racist, even if your star is Tom Hanks?
• Inside Llewin Davis--Had not heard anything about this, but recognized within 5 seconds of the start of the trailer: Coens. So: of course.

Play it

Casablanca

(1942)

I never saw this until college, probably never saw it from start to end until grad school, but I suspect it is the film I have seen more than any other, and a measure of how much I love it is that I'd be happy to watch it again right now--especially with a certain co-viewer.

Jaeger Meister

Pacific Rim

Crit

Oh, come on, Guillermo: this is just silly. I wasn't expecting another philosophical vampire film or a haunting and sophisticated Spanish Civil War allegory, but I guess I was expecting something at least on the level of the Hellboy flicks. Speaking of which, this really perks up when Ron Perlman shows up, but he's underutilized (that said: don't leave early). Apart from him, the only human to care about is Striker Bell--er, Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba). I sorta felt as if I'd been tricked into seeing a Transformers movie.

Trailers

• Gravity--Seems as if I'd seen a trailer or at least a teaser for this already, but not one in 3D, and not one in which I noticed that it's directed by Del Toro's Amigo Alfonso Cuarón (who, naturally, is acknowledged in the end credits of Pacific Rim, along with Amigo Número Tres, Alejandro González Iñárritu, his patronymic misspelled wit a terminal s, unless we [and IMDb] have been misled all these years).
• 2 Guns--Denzel, Marky Mark, reluctant-buddies movie. Irresistible.

Need a new drug

Contagion

(2011)

OK, I'd never go so far as to say that a plague of zombies is impossible, but I think we can agree that it's a fairly far-fetched prospect, one that we can be mostly entertained and little threatened by. But a virus whose spread is explicable only to the eye of god (or Soderbergh, same diff), that gives people flulike symptoms quickly, then sends them into seizures and kills a quarter to a third of them--hell, that is as easy to fetch as a handshake from a Hong Kong chef who didn't wash his hands after handling a pig that ate a piece of fruit contaminated by a bat. We've already lived through a milder form of this movie more than once; it seems not only possible but almost inevitable that something like this, as bad or worse, is in our future. Which makes this the most terrifying film I've seen in recent years, no less so on second viewing.

Though also entertaining, mostly in the performances by some great actors, many of them rarely seen this millennium (Jennifer Ehle, Elliott Gould), many seen regularly but rarely so unglamorously (Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow), and at least one--Matt Damon--never seen more human and convincing.

Mother Nature is a serial killer

World War Z

Crit

Who among us has not had the terror of being caught in a traffic jam when some horrible thing happens that makes it necessary (though no less impossible) to get away in a hurry?

As you know, I don't read a lot of reviews, so maybe you can tell me: have people been pointing how much of this--viral transmission of zombieness, supermarket shopping spree, high-rise hospitality turning into a merger of families, pilgrimage to a site that promises answers and fails to deliver, a military more concerned with protecting itself than with saving citizens--is stolen from the best zombie flick to date?

This is a good summer popcorn cruncher; I really enjoyed the popcorn, with white cheddar Kernel Seasons on it, and the air-conditioning, which I generally don't approve of, was just fine. Oh, and the movie was sort of entertaining, though Brad Pitt was too much a larger-that-life movie star for me ever to have a remotely serious concern about his safety or his family's. It wasn't a waste of time, though if I'd had other movies or a ballgame to get to this weekend, it would have been close.

Trailers

• The Wolf of Wall Street--Marty and Leo, together again.
• You're Next--Not sure whether it's a supernatural slasher film or just a psychopathic slasher film.

Oom-pah-pah

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

(1936)

A valley between the titanic It Happened One Night and that other Mr. Somebody-goes-somewhere flick, this is a pleasant enough film, but it shows what people who hate Capra are talking about: short on subtlety, long on social sanctimony--er, conscience. Still, I'll watch Jean Arthur in anything.