If, on the other hand, you don't like piña coladas . . .

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Crit

Despite a surprisingly positive review by A. O. Scott in the Times, I went into this with low expectations, and as is so often the case, I was thus . . . not much disappointed. The other day I commented that everyone in The Wolf of Wall Street seemed to be having fun, and it pained me not to be able to join in. Here, in contrast, no one seems to be having fun, except maybe Kristen Wiig when she gets to sing "Space Oddity."

And can I just say one thing about the ridiculous and undisciplined plot? No one with the experience working with film that Mitty (Ben Stiller, who also directed, if that's what you call it) and his assistant have could possible have failed to notice that a roll of film came into the lab in more than one piece. There's nothing wrong with an implausible plot in a fantasy story, but it needs not to rest upon an implausibility in the reality-grounded portion. Moreover, this is an unnecessary implausibility: either have them notice the gap immediately (that they fail to at first is not important to the plot) or have the roll end with frame 24, with the critical frame 25 having been cut from the end, leaving an apparently intact roll. Misplaying stuff like this is sloppy and stupid and insulting to the people who paid to get in.

Fortunately, I do not demand greatness, or even solid mediocrity, from my final film in a calendar year.

Clenched fist

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

Crit

By-the-numbers biopic enlivened--to the extent is has any life at all--by strong performances by Idris Elba in the title role an Naomie Harris as a fireball Winnie. The best thing that come of the film is if it helps both become bigger stars.

American hustle

The Wolf of Wall Street

Crit

Darn it, everyone seems to have had such fun making this, especially Jonah Hill, and most of my fellow audience members seemed to be having great fun watching it, and it's a fun soundtrack, and doggone it, did I mention how much fun everyone else seemed to be having? I alas, had only intermittent fun. I admired the filmmaking, but it's hardly a surprise that Marty knows how to make a movie. I'll bet he had fun, too.

Trailers

• Bad Words--Jason Bateman (who also directed) as a grade school dropout who enters and thrives in the spelling bee on that technicality. We saw the red band trailer, and I'll be interested to see the censored version. The film will probably be awful, but it's got a chance.

Tales of brave Ulysses

Inside Llewyn Davis

Crit

Well, I'd buy his album--in fact, I might just.

The perfect Christmas Day movie--good music, smiles, exasperation with the protagonist, all in service of a shaggy cat story. Would have been a perfect Jewish Christmas Day had there not been a wait of more than an hour for carryout at Royal Palace. But hah! I'll show them! I'll just have some leftover Christmas Eve wild mushroom-and-four cheese lasagna! So there.

Oh, one cavil about a movie that seems a good bet to make my top ten for the year: wasn't there somebody in the production who knows that geographical numbering of U.S. highways was the opposite of the Interstate system, such that U.S. 90 would not have been anywhere near northern Illinois? In fact, according to Wikipedia, it went/goes from Van Horn, Texas, to Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Hey, maybe the Coens need a script supervisor!

Trailers

• Winter's Tale--Looks like sentiment soup.

The good in most men's hearts

Scrooge

(1951)

I know that other versions of this exist; I just don't know why.

The ice fishing story

American Hustle

Crit

Lots I didn't expect to be saying about this, but number 1 is that Katniss Everdeen gives one of the best comic performances--maybe THE best--in a film this year. It's a role that tiptoes dangerously close to dumb and dangerously close to cliché, but Lawrence infuses it with sympathy and street smarts and life and fall-down hilarity. One of the year's great performances, which I guarantee the Academy will ignore. Another thing I didn't expect to be saying is that this is one of my favorite--almost certainly one of my top 10--films of the year.

You may recall (but probably not) that I did not hop on the Silver Linings Playbook bandwagon, so while I've loved some of David O. Russell's work, I went into this one skeptical. No need. A good love story, a great con story, and--oh, here's another thing I didn't expect to be saying--a fantastic soundtrack not simply dependent on the mostly mediocre music of the real-life story's era (starts on my father's 59th birthday, 4/28/78) but also exploiting some wonderful jazz. Oh, and also--this is certainly the unlikeliest thing I'd be saying--a perfectly Grace Slick-sounding Arabic version of "White Rabbit."

Trailers

• RoboCop--I didn't know about this. Did you know about this?
• The Monuments Men--If I hadn't already been hot for this, the new trailer would have made me hot for it. But come on: how can you not be hot for this?

Orc, barrel, project

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Crit

Well, that was a lot more fun than part I of the cycle, An Unexpected Journey. It would even have been an appropriate entertainment for Christmas Day, but I've pretty much decided to give that slot to the Coens.

Anyway, this one is much better paced than the first and harks effectively back (though chronologically forward, of course) to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, particularly in its effective intercutting of the different geographies and their concomitant narratives. There are also set pieces carried over: Galdalf on a collapsing bridge, a beautiful elf woman's forbidden love (and folk medicine practice), dwarf-tossing. Well, no, that's not accurate: no dwarves are tossed in this film, but given what humiliations and hardships they are put through, I expect they'd welcome a simple heave.

One trivial callback, too: the first face we see is the director's, in what appears to be a precise reshoot of his cameo in Fellowship as a drunkard in Bree. The only thing not new and kind of annoying is the titular dragon's movie-villain-cliché-#1 performance: way too much talk, way too tardy dispatch of his antagonists. But then, I guess if he just ate them all without boasting what he's done and what he's going to do, we'd never get to part III.

Trailers

• Gojira--Just kidding: they're calling it Godzilla. Inexplicably, the trailer was in 2D.
• The Amazing Spider-Man 2--Fx look great; who knows otherwise.
• 300: Rise of an Empire--Fx look great on this sequel, too: almost as great as the dialogue sounds dreadful. Gotta admit, though: I'd follow Eva Green into battle.
• Maleficent--You gotta think there have been days when the two dozen adopted kids were squalling and puking that Angie really felt this way, don't you? This has possibilities; from Disney.

The saint, the flamingos, and the disappearing giraffe

La grande bellezza (The great beauty)

Crit

A heaping helping of Fellini and a soupçon of Last Year at Marienbad in this sort of episodic film that's sort of about a 65-year-old author of a single novelette, based on the great lost love of his youth, who has never written anything else because he has been too busy living in a Felliniesque Roma, which is both the real central character of the film and the best of many excellent candidates for title character. Not much happens, and everything happens, and beauty is.

Sandy

Les Vacances de M. Hulot (Mr. Hulot's holiday)

(1953)

Sorry, but I'm clearly too unsophisticated and too American to appreciate this.

Practically perfect in no way whatsoever

Saving Mr. Banks

Crit

Got just 2 things to say about this: (1) it was great to see Elizabeth McGovern and Rachel Griffiths on the screen again, though the end credits revealed that that wasn't Elizabeth McGovern at all, but rather Ruth Wilson; and (2) I'm glad I didn't save this to be my Christmas Day movie.

Trailers

• Non-Stop--We already knew career intervention was long overdue for Liam Neeson, but must we do the same for My Future Wife Julianne Moore?

There's bound to be talk tomorrow

Elf

(2003)

You know, this really isn't as good as I remembered it, but it's every bit as irresistible. It's much the same story as the one I watched Friday night, certainly another Oz film (though without the usual urgency to return home), and like that one, this would fall flat without a pitch-perfect, fully committed performance by the lead. Having Zooey Deschanel on hand is another good way to overcome the slapdash plotting. I may not need to watch it again any yule soon, but I'm glad I watched it this yule.

Riotous

The Punk Singer

Crit

No, I knew nothing about Kathleen Hanna, nothing about her first band, Bikini Kill, very little about the riot grrrl movement to which she helped give birth. More's the pity, but I see some upcoming additions to the iPod.

For those of you who were similarly ignorant, well, see the damn film, but I'll tell you this much: Hanna overcame the kiss of death that polemics usually plants on pop, doing straight-up unapologetic feminism in a context of straight-up rocking rock. She was SuperGrrrl, unstoppable except by a kryptonite deer tick, and then only for a while. She's now back with a band named for her solo album Julie Ruin, with a The tossed in for good measure.

Le maillot jaundiced

The Armstrong Lie

Crit

Reminds me of Mary McCarthy's famous remark about Lillian Hellman that "everything she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" Documentarian Alex Gibney started making a film about the 2009 comeback by the titular seven-time Tour de France apparent winner (all his victories have been vacated) who became perhaps even better known as a cancer survivor and anticancer crusader. When the PEDs and blood-doping hit the fan, Gibney suspended filming, only to come back to interview Armstrong after he admitted his sins to America's mother confessor, Oprah. But even when telling many unattractive truths, Armstrong seems unable to let go of some of the lies.

I never cared much, but I resent his betrayal on behalf of my older but more naïve brother--a cancer survivor himself--who kept faith with Armstrong as long as it was humanly possible. My takeaway from this is that in an enterprise where everyone cheats, the question is who cheats best. "Everybody" seems at worst a slight exaggeration for the years when Armstrong was collecting yellow jerseys, and while there will never be any way to know for certain, it seems a good bet that if all those races had been absolutely clean across the field, Armstrong still would have won, though it would have taken him a lot longer to do it.

It also occurred to me that the "who cheats best" principle applies to another fiercely contested athletic competition: American politics.

Trailers

• The Invisible Woman--Ralph Fiennes as Dickens (who is perhaps the leading contender for my Mitchell exemption in 2014), Felicity Jones  as the love of his life, not to be confused with his wife.
• Le passé (The past)--Directed by Asghar Farhadi (A Separation), stars Bérénice Bejo (The Artist).

What's fun?

Big

(1988)

Among the most cleverly conceived of Wizard of Oz movies, this might well have just been weird but for the stunning body language of Tom Hanks, who sells 30-as-13 without a wink or a nudge. Another of my dishonest Friday-night deaccession candidates; no way I'm letting this go.

Strike another match, go start anew

The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival

(1963)

This is not a documentary about Bob Dylan being booed at Newport in 1965 for going electric. It is a documentary about the lovefest Dylan enjoyed at the festival in 1963, '64, and '65 (mostly). But tell you what--when he finishes that aggressively electrified "Maggie's Farm," even though you know what's coming, it's a shock. And I wonder how many people were booing Dylan--especially given that when they're asked whether they'd like him to come back out for another song, specifically an acoustic one, there's as much love as there was for the babyfaced Minnesota boy two years earlier, alone with his guitar, or sometimes joined by Joan Baez. Frankly, I think most people were probably booing Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, and it's easy to understand why. There's electric and there's electric, and Bloomfield's guitar and Kooper's keyboard were taking the sound far away from anything that anybody might expect to hear at a folk festival--and far away from any recording Dylan was doing in the studio at the time (or, I think it might fairly be said, has done in the studio ever). In any case, for all the mythic notoriety of the event, all seems to have been forgiven quickly. And why not: damn, that guy could (and, I've heard, still can) entertain.

Tin man

Nebraska

Crit

I have often alluded to but never, it seems, comprehensively articulated my philosophy that the only useful cinematic classification system divides all films into two categories:

1. Wizard of Oz films
2. not-Wizard of Oz films

Tonight, when I articulated my philosophy to my companions after this film, some (well, all) of them challenged me to explain why Alexander Payne's new film is self-evidently an Oz movie while About Schmidt and Sideways are not. Which, of course, made me think a lot more about the sine qua nons of the subsubsubsubgenre. A Wizard of Oz film must present us with

1. a naïve protagonist
2. on a quest that
3. remains the central focus of the film, who
4. encounters much that is strange and frightening, and some that is strange and appealing, in his or her travels,
5. is stymied in the precise focus of the quest, but
6. eventually finds something else, something unsought, often something better, including
7. some sort of enlightenment, one result of which is
8. revision of the quest to simply a return home.

I'd also suggest a sliding scale of Oz-ness for certain elements: the more hapless the quest the Ozzier it is, (high points here, low points in both Schmidt [to prevent a bad marriage] and Sideways [to have a male-bonding wine weekend], but, to be fair, also low points in one of the best and Ozziest Oz movies ever, After Hours [getting laid]); the stranger the encounters, the Ozzier (After Hours makes up a lot of lost ground there, and this, with the bizarre family elements, gets more points than the other two Payne candidates).

Bruce Dern brings a defiant dignity to a character whose mental fog could easily have made him jokey, a bunch of nonprofessional actors play the precise midwesterners I grew up with, and Phedon Papamichael's black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous.