No animals were harmed

There's Something About Mary

(1998)

This was never a serious contender for deaccession, but it was eligible on the basis of its having been more than 5 years since I'd last screened it. In that time span the roster of actors who later played favorite roles in favorite HBO series grew: in addition to the pair previously recognized--Ted's shrink (Richard Jenkins, Nathaniel Fisher Sr. in Six Feet Under) and Mary's brother (W. Earl Brown, Dan Dority in Deadwood)--one of Mary's trio of girlfriends is played by Khandi Alexander (LaDonna Batiste-Williams in Treme).

Of course, the long time since I last screened this also means that I've never before blogged it, and there's a lot I'd like to say about it at some point, but that's enough for tonight; next time I should talk about the Greek chorus.

Wild Österreich

The Third Man

(1949)

There's something about a manhunt: no matter what evil the hunted has done, no matter how much he deserves to die in the sewer, we can't help but root, if not for him exactly, at least against his hunters. What an amazing film this is.

Thicker

Soshite chichi ni naru (Like father, like son)

Crit

I didn't realize it at the time, but I just pretty much left my blog post on my daughter's voice mail:

Your son is 6 when the hospital calls and tells you that your son was switched with someone else's son; now what do you do? The answer seems pretty straightforward to me, but different people have different answers, and some people have different answers at different times. Maybe it makes a difference if you're Japanese. Maybe it makes a difference if you're an ambitious workaholic. Maybe it makes a difference if you grew up feeling unloved by your own father and kept away from your mother. But it seems pretty straightforward to me.

Beautiful sunsets

Get Shorty

(1995)

Tough summer for this flick last year: in the 9-week span from June 19 to August 20, it lost the author of the source novel and the two best minor characters. Elmore, James, and Dennis, we'll never replace you.

Melancolicky baby

The Roaring Twenties

(1939)

So long since I'd screened this that about all I remembered was Eddie Bartlett (James Cagney) on the steps of the church at the end. I certainly didn't remember how astonishingly vapid was Priscilla Lane as the "nice girl" who breaks Eddie's heart. This makes me want to watch another few episodes of Boardwalk Empire, and I'm not even that big a fan of Boardwalk Empire. Anybody want this?

Under duress

Omar

Crit

Omar is a young man in love with his friend's flirty sister Nadia, sweet and simple. Except that the friend is a freedom fighter who has recruited Omar and his friend from childhood Amjad, and Amjad also loves Nadia, and after the three carry out a mission Omar gets nabbed by the Israelis, who try to recruit him as a collaborator. From there on, things are not only complicated but guaranteed to end badly. A beautiful and painful film from Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now, Rana's Wedding).

Trailer

• From the Rough--Golly, having used up all the underdog sports-movie clichés in the trailer, what club will this have left in the bag? The twists: the sport is golf, and the coach is a young African-American woman (Taraji P. Henson).

A perfectly swell romance

Swing Time

(1936)

Best Fred and Ginger movie ever? Well, the big romantic dance ranks fourth at best, and the comic dance is no. 2 at best, and then there's the blackface number.

However, if you can overlook the blackface (I know: big if), that's probably the best tap number Astaire ever put on film, and two songs without dances might be the best in much smaller categories--call them (1) romantic song with an ironic visual twist and (2) comic attraction/resistance.

And then there's the fact that this actually has a plot--an implausible one, sure, but one that involves more that mistaken or misrepresented identity, which describes the other 3 contenders for best F&G.

So yeah, though I don't think I've admitted this before--and this distinction is not the same as saying it's my favorite--but yeah, this is the best.

Second chance

State and Main

(2000)

So Anthony Lane, in an elegy for Phillip Seymour Hoffman in this week's New Yorker, mentioned Todd Solondz's Happiness, where Hoffman plays a sad obscene-phone-calling masturbator, as a performance that his fans might not want to include in a retrospective.

I disagree, and Happiness is precisely what I would have watched tonight, except that it runs more than 2 hours, and I have an Illini basketball game coming up at 8. I was set to go with The Big Lebowski, but while Hoffman's role there is memorable (Lane singles it out), it is small, and I wanted more.

Ah, I thought--another look as Syncdoche, New York, where he gets a rare lead. But as I was reaching for that, I saw this, just a few slots over, and that was that: it's fair to say that this is Hoffman's only romantic lead in a screwballish comedy, it may be his most straightforwardly engaging role, and it's probably also the film he's in (it's too much an ensemble piece--and too much a Mamet piece--for me to call it "his film") that I love the most.

Oh, but here's something I don't know why I never noticed before: the dry-erase board mishap that sets in motion the confusion about dinner at the mayor's? It's either a huge Mametian joke (probably) or the sloppiest series of continuity errors imaginable. Watch that space closely.

Special delivery

Nueve reinas (Nine queens)

(2000)

What The Sting would be like if it kept us in the dark about who's screwing whom, and how. And if it were Argentinean. By the end, the who questions are answered quite satisfactorily, but the how doesn't bear full scrutiny. Still, it's an entertaining and engaging scam flick, and now I'm ready to deaccession it, so let me know if you want it.

Clockwork

RoboCop

Crit

This is the first film I've gone to that I probably wouldn't have but for the fact that it was "free" via the prepaid MoviePass. I should go into some detail about that card sometime soon, but right now I have paella in the oven, so you'll have to excuse me.

Anyway, I've seen the original only once, so it's not a sacred text that I couldn't bear to see tampered with, and this one was a perfectly OK actioner, though frankly, I'd rather have seen Michael K. Williams in the title role rather than have him playing the thankless Black Buddy Cop role. Speaking of familiar faces from favorite TV series, good to see Deadwood's Zach Grenier and, just for a flash and not credited, but I swear, Nicki Clyne from Battlestar Galatica (a cop in the station, late; one way this makes sense is that she's from Vancouver, where this was shot; also some Toronto; no Detroit, sadly).

Trailers

• 22 Jump Street--OK, all you other candidates for Worst Film of the Year: you are on notice!
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier--Could have sworn it said Winter Solstice.
• The Purge: Anarchy--A dystopic future--long time since we've had one of those!
• Noah--Darren Aronofsky directs Russell Crowe; I'm in.
• Joe--Potentially a great redemption tale, the redemption in question being of Nic Cage's career.

With the rich and mighty . . .

The Philadelphia Story

(1940)

True, I cringe at the bits of antifeminism, but when something is as good as this, well, always a little patience.

Finding God in that hole

2013 Oscar®-nominated documentary shorts, program B

Crit

I still think the film about the blindingly optimistic 109-year-old concert pianist Holocaust survivor will win, because let's face it, the subject herself is just so much more engaging than Ra Paulette, who starts out seeming saintly but emerges as a prickly artist and borderline misanthrope, but Cavedigger gives you more for the eye and for the mind, and is probably the best film of the bunch.

Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall is pretty darned good, too: a look at the hospice program by which the Iowa State Prison not only has made the end more comfortable for the dying but has transformed inmates who volunteer as caregivers.

Click here for program A.

C'est compliqué

Le passé (The past)

Crit

The opening scene, in which Marie (Bérénice Bejo) meets Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) at the airport, and the shot cuts between the two perspectives, each seeing but not hearing the other through security glass, could have been an hommage to the silent film that revealed Bejo to American audiences. Instead, it introduces an unnecessarily and uncharacteristically heavy-handed motif of communication aborted: in our efforts to know, too often we are reduced to guesswork, with inevitable results.

If you want something else to complain about, you might say that the plot, too, is unnecessarily complicated. But oh, what a plot, twirling back upon itself like a double helix, each twist revealing that what you thought you knew was not quite right, and making you wonder whether the same is true of what you just learned.

I'm not much inclined to complain, though, about this remarkable structure of love and denial and guilt and atonement and, most of all, truth and half-truth, lies and half-lies--oh, and email security. A worthy follow-up to writer-director Asghar Farhadi's A Separation.

Trailer

• Million Dollar Arm--I don't need to tell you how much I love a good baseball movie. I do feel compelled to tell you that this looks to be a steroidal slugger's moonshot away from being a good baseball movie. What a waste of Jon Hamm and Lake Bell.

Waters of March

Gloria

Crit

• Pensamiento preliminar número uno: no, the long, skinny one on the Pacific Coast, not the tall, big-shouldered one on the Atlantic. My apologies to everyone I told this is an Argentinean film; it is, of course, Chilean.
• Pensamiento preliminar número dos: it seems that I have become older than "a woman of a certain age."
• Pensamiento preliminar número tres: it was when the cocktail party guests were doing the remarkably professional rendition of the Jobim song that it dawned on me that although I had turned off the upstairs speakers when Sunday-morning Times-reading and Brazilian music-listening time ended, the iPod was still playing, assuming its battery hadn't died, which experience suggested it probably hadn't. (Nor had/has it: 11 hours and 187 songs into its shift, it's playing me a different Jobim song, "Meditação," right now.)

This is another of those movies for which the unimpressive trailer prepared me to disbelieve the all-but-universally enthusiastic reviews, but the enthusiasm is well earned. A smart, funny, sad, joyful (it could be Brazilian!) caution to the young that loneliness, curdled love, and hangovers never get any easier to take, so you'd might as well build up your calluses now. And yes, Paulina Garcia is a wonder.

Trailers

• In Secret--Sexual repression and infidelity in mid-nineteenth-century France; looks pretty soapy.
• Barefoot--Naïf wins society boy's heart; this screams disaster, except that Evan Rachel Wood won my heart in the damn trailer.
• Omar--Palestinian boy in love is forced by the Israelis to become an informer: source, unsurprisingly, of a lot of contention.
• Tim's Vermeer--As is this doc about a science nerd who, knowing nothing about art, sets out to prove a hare-brained theory of composition.

L'ami meilleur de l'homme

2013 Oscar®-nominated animated shorts

Crit

These programs tend to have about the same assortment every year: you've got the dramatization of a beloved children's book, voiced by A-list (or at least B-plus-list) actors (the harmlessly engaging Room on the Broom); the polished Disney and/or Pixar piece (the brilliant if sadistic historical précis of how we watch moving pictures Get a Horse); the lush francophone silent (the machinery parable Mr Hublot); and the expressionist back-to-nature piece (Feral, remarkable for its strategic obscuring of facial details).

What this one has that I don't recall seeing recently is the Japanese ghost story with subtitles that are equally challenged grammatically, syntactically, and logically (Tsukumo [Possessions]). Could not help imagining this as the short in front of the bizarre haunted house "classic" Hausu.
 

My pick? Feral moved me the most, Get a Horse! wowed me the most, but Mr Hublot seems the likely (and worthy) winner. 

As always, we had some bonus films to pad out the program to feature length, the most notable of which was The Missing Scarf, which pushed me near groaning with its New Agey positive messages until veering suddenly and without warning into the darkest nihilistic existentialism. 

2013 Oscar®-nominated live-action shorts

Crit

OK, I've finally seen a nominee (Aquel no era yo [That wasn't me]) that just infuriates me with its inartistic and grotesque didacticism, one that has no reason to be here other than to remind us that hey, you know what? War really is hell. Ugh.

Nothing else ughworthy, but nothing wowworthy either. Avant que de tout perdre (Just before losing everything) is a surprisingly conflict-free day-in-the-life story of a woman escaping with her two children from her abusive husband; Helium is a restatement, as if we needed another, that the best thing we can do for a dying child is tell him a pretty lie; and Pitääkö mun kaikki hoitaa? (Do I have to take care of everything?) is--and I mean this literally and descriptively, not in disparagement--simply a joke, complete with unsurprising punch line.

So I guess my pick, by process of elimination, is The Voorman Problem, about a psychiatrist (real movie sort-of-star Martin Freeman) assigned to assess a prisoner (Tom Hollander) who thinks he's a god. It's not really anything special either, even though the question of "why does this plot element seem so familiar to me?" was answered in the end credits: the story is adapted from a section of David Mitchell's number9dream. The plot element in question is the retroactive elimination of Belgium; bummer guys, and after finally making the World Cup.