Ain't nothing like the real thing

Don Jon

Crit

Not really sure how I feel about this. I mean, I didn't like it, but then I didn't hate it enough to decide not to spend another 2½ hours in a dark room watching people drive really fast. But then again, when I came out of the theater, that's exactly what I decided. 

One objection I have to this is that it seems to be a way to show a lot of online porn on screen--seriously, there's a lot of porn on screen--while maintaining deniability about actually purveying porn.

I guess the (you should pardon the expression) bottom line is that almost everyone (excepting MFW Julianne Moore in an odd underdeveloped role as Jon's connection mentor, and maybe excepting Brie Larson as his sister, who provides metaphorical backup to his porn addiction with her own device addiction--to the point that she speaks only once in the film) is just really stupid, and not stupid in an engaging Homer Simpson way, but stupid in a the-story-of-your-growth-is-not-worth-my-eight-bucks way. 

The good reviews and the brilliant Rotten Tomatoes numbers are a mystery. 

Trailers

• Out of the Furnace--Little brother in trouble, big brother gets back into the bad game, yadda, yadda, yadda.
• American Hustle--New from David O. Russell, who for my money--which is very different from the Academy's money and most critics' money--needs to find his groove again.

Ham & cheese

To Kill a Mockingbird

(1962)

Another Deaccession Friday, and I'm ready to dump a beloved classic. I'll stipulate that Gregory Peck is remarkable performing one of the toughest tasks an actor ever faces, coupling saintliness and humanity, and the young man who plays Boo Radley does as fine a job as you could ever ask at portraying a rural southern cliché, but I can't bear those children ever again. So please, someone, take this!

Small world

Enough Said

Crit

The vast majority of filmmakers would take this plot--woman unwittingly becomes close friends with her new lover's ex-wife--and turn it into bad-wannabe-Shakespeare-comedy, slap-happy, implausible, with the compulsory moment when you're supposed to believe but really don't that the relationship is in trouble before everyone smiles at the end and even the exes learn something positive about each other.

Of the minority of filmmakers who wouldn't scotch it up that way, the vast majority simply would never go near such a clockwork, hackneyed premise because--hey, look above: what else are you gonna do with it?

Nicole Holofcener is an infinitesimally small minority of filmmakers. First of all, she takes this ridiculous coincidental setup and makes it perfectly plausible, in part because she parcels the discovery out to the audience along with the protagonist rather than making it Ironic. (OK, yeah, anyone who has read anything about the film knows from the start, and some of those who don't will guess, but what I'm talking about is the lack of creaking stage machinery.)

Another thing a lot of people would do with this material is sort of wink at the brutal betrayal of both friend and lover it is once the woman realizes the coincidence but tries to go on as if she didn't know, 'cause hey, this is your romantic lead, and she can't really do anything despicable. But Holofcener makes Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) painfully culpable in her duplicity--and makes her pay, not in a jokey way, but with the genuine devastation of losing a love and knowing she deserved to.

Oh, and meanwhile, while all this mean, horrible stuff is going on, it is one of the funniest films I've seen in a long time--two parts Holofcener's script, one part the comic timing of one recognized and one less-recognized (the late, lovingly lamented James Gandolfini) master of the art. It's impossible not to confront the imprints of these two actors' indelible television roles, unless you're the one person in the English-speaking world who has never seen Seinfeld or The Sopranos. There is, in fact, a lot of Elaine Benes in Eva (and come on: this is exactly the sort of easy-to-not-do-the-right-thing situation Elaine would find herself in), but I noticed only one moment where Tony Soprano seemed about ready to burst through: after a dinner party at which Eva has drunkenly and spitefully baited Albert in front of her friends. As he drives her home, there it is on his face: that Tony anger--careful, woman, you don't know what you're unleashing. But in fact, he has been the victim of brutality, not the perpetrator, and he holds onto the rage so that it can fester.

Trailer

• 12 Years a Slave--Chiwetel Ejiofor stars in a film based on the true story of a free northern black shanghaied by slave chaser; has a chance to be extremely good.

Happy just to dance with you

A Hard Day's Night

(1964)

Hey, here's something interesting: one of the very few (the only one on Rotten Tomatoes.com) negative reviews of the film--which, coincidentally, I read earlier this year in a wonderful anthology that friends gave me.

Not gonna get a negative review from me, but is there anything to say about this that hasn't been said four zillion times? I was impressed more than ever this time by how innocent the ostensibly anarchic pop-music world portrayed here was. There was nothing innocent about any of the Beatles by 1964, of course, and John at least gets several lines (and a sly, snorty allusion to different sorts of lines) that hint at their naughtiness, but oh, those screaming girls! Close-ups show girls surely no more than 12 (when 12 was much younger than it is now) who are genuinely desperate with a passion that they almost certainly don't begin to fathom. That scared the crap out of parents of 12-year-old girls then, of course, and not unreasonably, but now it seems so sweet. Those girls will be just fine.

A pasture animal waiting for the abattoir

Sideways

(2004)

Funny thing happened en route to watching this perfectly sober again. See, my self-permission to drink is predicated on my being at or lower than a specific weight that morning, and I haven't been close since vacation, so I started this dry tonight. But then came Miles's response to Maya's question (Paul Giamatti and Virginia Madsen) why he's so into pinot noir, and dammit, I just had to hit the Pause button and go around the corner to Mohan's wine store. If you don't understand, well, you don't, but I'm guessing you do.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, the Velvet Crush 2012 I paid sixteen bucks for seems a bit gone, as if it was stored at too high a temperature for a time. Would someone who actually knows anything about wine say the same thing? We'll never know. And it's not as if I'm going to pour it down the drain, but still, a little disappointed. In the wine, not the film.

Those who trespass against us

Prisoners

Crit

What starts as a game of cat and mouse evolves into a game of dog and cat, then a game of animal control officer and dog, then a game of PETA activist and dog catcher . . .

Brutally hard to watch, but pretty damned amazing, pun intended.

Trailers

This Spikey batch of trailers seems to have had a theme of one man (or woman) alone. Along with a new, wow, Bullock-centric promo for Gravity and the old reliable for All Is Lost, we had:

• Her--Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) is so alone after his marriage ends that he falls in love with the voice of a computer assistant (granted, it's Scarlett Johansson's voice, but still . . . ). From Spike Jonze.
• Oldboy--Remake of the superintense Korean revenge tragedy about a man mysteriously kept in solitary confinement for twenty years. From Spike Lee.
• Lone Survivor--Four Navy Seals on a mission in Afghanistan, but the title should come with a spoiler alert.
• Dallas Buyers Club--The exception, this one is all about community, among early HIV-positive diagnosees seeking a medical grail.

Reefer madness

Touch of Evil

(1958)

They tell me this is great, and I won't debate the point, but to me it has always seemed overwrought and terribly dated, what with the marihuana hysteria and whatnot. Not to say it doesn't have its charms, like Joseph Calleia as Menzies, sidekick and best friend to Orson Welles's Hank Quinlan, and Marlene Dietrich as Tana, who speaks those memorable last words about that friendship. But lead couple Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh are pretty much insufferable.

So yeah, I didn't really expect to be deaccessioning this one, but I am: ask and ye shall receive.

Future, tense

Tu seras mon fils (You will be my son)

Crit

This may be the best vinicentric film I've ever seen, and it's certainly the toughest one. Paul de Marseul (Niels Arestrup) is a right bastard of a vintner, who has no use for his son Martin (Lorànt Deutsch), even though the kid is essentially a Gallic Paul Dano, and c'mon, who could resist a Gallic Paul Dano?

Martin can studied viticulture in college, but Paul thinks he lacks the proper nose, and the proper terroir. Fortunately and unfortunately, depending on your perspective, the guy who has both happens to be the son (Nicolas Bridet) of Paul's longtime vineyard manager, François (Patrick Chesnais), who is dying of pancreatic cancer. François gets the benefit of all the paternal warmth denied Martin. It is no accident, I think, that Bridet looks as if he could be Deutsch's big brother, and the quasi-sibling rivalry is amped to a lethal level by Paul's cold-hearted machinations.

A hard but rewarding film to watch, and it made me damned thirsty.

DUI

North by Northwest

(1959)

Gee, it's annoying when I discover that the small point I was going to make this time around is one that I've already made in a previous review. But I can further update the old water-on-portside complaint: I now have taken a train north from NYC more than once, and I can confirm that indeed the track follows right next to the Hudson (portside) for quite a distance.

Oh, here's a question: granted, he's fleeing the bad guys, and granted, his judgment is more than a little impaired, but why does Roger go through all those hairpin turns without once even tapping the brake? I guess I always sort of assumed the baddies had cut the brake fluid line, but of course when the bicycle strays in front of him, he slams on the brakes then. Man, this movie is completely implausible!

Deadheads

To Die For

(1995)

Stuff I'd forgotten:

• that it's based on a novel by Joyce Maynard, who has a cameo as defense lawyer for Suzanne (Nicole Kidman)
• that the screenplay is by Buck Henry, who also plays a crotchety homeroom teacher

Stuff I remembered:

• that it's pretty funny, in a shooting-dumb-people-in-a-barrel sort of way

Stuff that meant nothing to me before:

• that the mother of Larry (Matt Dillon) is played by Maria Tucci, whom I now know to be married to a friend and author of mine, whose name I won't drop here, but through a bizarre coincidence, the film immediately above this in the index of titles is a documentary by their daughter about their son

On balance, a creepily fun entertainment, but I've had enough of it, so it's up for grabs. Click the link below to see what else is still free to a good home.

Can't be touched off the grounds

Short Term 12

Crit

As a rule I don't have much use for films that tread so shakily that tightrope between sentiment and sentimentality, and that telegraph their punches so consistently. But there's something about this slice of group-home life--troubled children tended by people who were children themselves only a week or so ago--that makes me cut it all the slack it needs. That something would be the spot-on performances, by the leads Brie Larson and John Gallagher Jr., but also by every young actor we see, particularly Kaitlyn Dever as Jayden, in whom the Larson character terrifyingly recognizes herself, and Keith Stanfield as Marcus, brilliant but seemingly doomed, as he approaches 18 and automatic ejection into the ugly world whence he came.

I knew where I had seen Larson recently--she was the other girlfriend in The Spectacular Now--but I spent the whole film trying to place the impossibly likable Gallagher, and now I'm going to look him up. Oh! Of course: he's the impossibly likable Jim in HBO's The Newsroom.

Anyway, see this.

Windy city

Clear History

(2013)

Been watching a lot of Seinfeld at dinnertime on weeknights, so had Larry David in my head just when DirecTV gave me a free weekend of HBO, so here you go. Trademark Davidian shallowness, though perhaps a bit more sympathetic than in Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I tried desperately (at least 3 seasons, maybe 4) to like before giving up. And mainly, just very funny.

Speaking of shallow, not to be ripping on the female star every night, but Kate Hudson's breasts are so massive and so unnatural looking in this that I just Googled "Kate Hudson" + "boob job," and yes, apparently I am not the only one to have had the thought.

Classy

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

(2004)

Peter Travers, in his roundup of this fall's movies for Rolling Stone, writes, "If you think 2004's Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy isn't funny, and I mean time-capsule funny, go screw yourself." Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say the film is unfunny--the surreal bits are mostly brilliant, and the rumble of the news teams is the best of the surreal--but time capsule? I guess I have to go screw myself. As is usually the case with comedies based on smart dumbness, this has way too many lulls of just dumb dumb.

And then there's that Applegate woman.  There are quite a few women born in the early '70s capable of great comic acting, but Applegate is not among them. Tina Fey is a year older; can you imagine how good this might have been with her in the role? OK, maybe the jokes about how sublime the character's ass are wouldn't have worked as well, but how big a loss would that have been? Or if you need those jokes, how about Cameron Diaz? Jenna Elfman? Amanda Peet? Applegate returns for the sequel, I see.

Behavior modification

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest

(1975)

No, this wasn't one of those fake Friday night deaccession candidates, where it has been 5 years since I screened something but I know I'm not going to give it away. My thinking tonight was that there must be some reason why I'd let so much time pass without watching this, and it certainly wasn't that I didn't look at the box a few hundred times. I started it thinking this my be the last time.

But no, I'm not ready to give it up quite yet. Much of it is calculated (and very successful, of course) Oscar® bait, but the astonishing cast is enough to carry the day. Call me crazy, but I'm keeping it.

Gruel

Mean Girls

(2004)

Remember? Remember the halcyon days when we could unreservedly root for the Lindsay Lohan character, and believe in her as an innocent seduced to meanness but able to overcome corruption via her innate goodness? When the only limit to her future was her seemingly limitless talent?

A smart script by Tina Fey, though it would have been smarter without the obligatory lesson learning.

Rachel McAdams, by the way, was 25 when she played a high school junior here, and had already had her much more grown-up run in Slings and Arrows. And if right now you're saying "What the heck was Slings and Arrows?" rent it now and thank me later.

The snows of killer Montana

Scarface

(1983)

It's true: though it's impossible to have been unfamiliar with many of the tropes from this film, I'd never seen it before. Now I have, and . . . well, yeah, it's pretty excessive.