I am he and you are he and you are we

Synecdoche, New York

(2008)

Gee, seeing that it has been nearly 6 years since this came out makes me empathize even more with Caden. Where did those years go?

This is about the grandest, most hilarious Whitmanesque shaggy-dog tragedy imaginable.

Speaking of nearly 6 years, Charlie Kaufman supposedly has a TV movie called How and Why coming this year (maybe on Fx?), and a feature in the works called Anomalisa. So, OK.

Pawns in the game

A Most Wanted Man

Crit

Ah, Phil, Phil, Phil. There were times when just looking at him up there and knowing I'd never again see him do something I've never seen him or anyone else do quite that way before bought me pretty damn close to tears. The picture itself is an OK spyworld vehicle, but I don't think it's just sentimentality that makes me say Hoffman elevates every scene he's in, which is about 95% of the scenes in the film.

And best of all are his half-dozen or so scenes with Robin Wright, as a CIA operative who is essentially Claire Underwood, which is to say she's essentially Lady Macbeth. Hoffman and Wright go at each other like baseline sluggers in tennis, like longtime lovers who know each other's every move and know how to feign surprise--like, in short, great actors, and great spies. I used to think Wright was in over her head in everything of substance I saw her in, much like I now feel about Rachel McAdams. Can McAdams grow up to be as good as Wright?

Dead man running

D.O.A.

(1950)

One of those classic high-concept films that is far more clever than actually good, and the way it is most not good is in the unbearably clichéd and mechanically simplistic love story. That element is unnecessary to the story of man poisoned by a person unknown for a reason unknown--but fortunately with a "luminous toxin" that will take "a day, two days, a week at most" to kill him, giving him time to solve his own murder. The only conceivable reason for the romance is that the film runs only 83 minutes as is, and without the kissing and the reluctance to commit, it would have fallen dangerously close to an hour.

Be all you can be

Lucy

Crit

Huh! Who knew that watching 2001: A Space Odyssey a week ago was prep for the climactic sequence of this? Is this as ambitious or as smart as Kubrick's take on human possibility and the lifespan of the universe? Well, that's not a fair question; it would be just as fair to ask whether Kubrick was capable of the sort of delightful loony, blissfully faux-intellectual head trip that Luc Besson delivers at his best.

Anyway, it's not just 2001. The obvious jumping-off place for the narrative is D.O.A., with the critical difference that the substance introduced into Lucy's system against her will, contra Nietzsche, will both kill her and make her stronger. Finally, after the cosmic-biography-and-light-show tribute to Kubrick, the film ends with an obvious but nonetheless satisfactory nod to The Grapes of Wrath.

This is not Scarlett Johansson's best role of the past 12 months, or even her 2nd-best, but hey, she's had a pretty terrific 12 (or even 7) months. Here Besson has clearly demanded that, once her character gets the drug, she be as affectless as possible. An interesting choice, and I get it, but it would have been nice had she been allowed to chew a little scenery in a role where ravenous scenery consumption would have made perfect sense. Still, if Luc did not exist . . .

Trailer

• Dracula Untold--It would be hard to overstate my appetite for fresh takes on the Drac story, but this just looks like a dumb, plodding, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink waste of time. Hope I'm wrong.

Supple and imaginative

Those Glory Glory Days

(1983)

We've seen sports-obsessive boys agonizing over tickets to the big game many times, and the main thing that's different about this girls' take on the theme is that it foregrounds the innocent, oblivious sexuality at play, which makes me wonder whether we'd find the same tingle in the boy-crushes in those stories if only we thought to look for them.

Gaze

La Vénus à la fourrure (Venus in fur)

Crit

I rarely flog Yale books, but you won't be able to buy this for months anyway, so what's the harm? I just edited a terrific little manuscript by the heavyweight film writer David Thomson--Why Acting Matters, in our Why X Matters series--and the timing for seeing this film could not have been more perfect, because it's all about . . . Acting!

Set in a theater, involving only two people (the always engaging Mathieu Almaric and Emmanuelle Seigner, who got the role on merit, not just because she happens to be married to the director, one Roman Polanski), the film is based on an acclaimed play by David Ives (who cowrote the screenplay with Polanski, and also contributed to the English subtitles of the French film), which is in turn based on the 19th-century Austrian novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, whose name is the source of a particular variety of sexual pleasure. Got all that?

Thomas has written a play based on Sacher-Masoch's novel, not, he insists, on anything to do with his life--but he's Acting! Vanda shows up hours late, she says (but she's Acting!), for her 2:30 audition for the part of, yes, Vanda, the play's dominatrix (who's Acting!). She's ignorant and empty-headed (Acting!), but when she finally persuades David to hear her read--and, critically, to read with her--he discovers that she is a brilliant natural (Acting!) actor, perfect for the part, and perhaps for more than that. He's engaged (Acting!) and not interested in Vanda's extrathespian appeal (Acting Acting Acting!), and though he allows her to direct him to a truer reading of Severin, he emphatically doesn't share that character's need for sexual humiliation (you know).

The rare film for which "stagy" is a compliment; an orgy of sexual frustration whose ultimate central theme is introduced early but seems like a misdirection, such that its misdirection-seeming is itself a misdirection.

Don't put your lips on that thing!

2001: A Space Odyssey

(1968)

First impetus for watching this was seeing the recent Planet of the Apes sequel; second impetus was a friend's report of having seen it in a 70mm print.

I was 14 when this came out, and I remember that, as with many films of the era, I read the Mad magazine parody before seeing the film (the monolith was likened to the box the U.N. Secretariat building came in; an ape in the opening sequence says it's inspiring him to do intelligent things. "Like what?" another ape asks. "Like getting out of this film"). Then when I saw it, it was in Beardstown, Illinois, with my brother. He's 9 years older, so we didn't hang much; it's the only time I remember just the two of us seeing a movie together.

It blew my mind then, and it blows my mind only a bit less now.

Primates with guns

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Crit

What this film teaches us:

• Prejudices notwithstanding, we're all pretty much alike at bottom. I'm sorry, but it's true.
• As suggested by Genesis, specifically the story of Cain and Abel, the treachery gene expressed itself very early in our evolution.
• The use of personal pronouns is a critical marker in intellectual development.
• The law remains in effect that every cinematic season must include at least one film with the Band's "The Weight" in the soundtrack.

Left unclear until at least the next sequel is how long it will take the apes to establish a government and, more to the point, to develop a soccer team capable of competing for the World Cup. In the meantime, congratulations to die Mannschaft, whose crisp passing and shrinkwrap defending made me less ashamed of my homo sapiens membership than I might otherwise have been.

Trailers

• Into the Storm--Wow--best sound I've ever heard from a trailer, I think.

Soldiers and soldier's wives

Fort Apache

(1948)

Nineteen forty-eight, on the heels of glorious military victory and shivering from an increasingly cold war, seems an unlikely time for a critical examination of the thin margin between valor and vainglory, which is another reason why this is one of John Ford's most complex films and one of his greatest accomplishments. But hey, I really just watched it in honor of the recently departed Shirley Temple. Or not.

Beasts of Brixton

Attack the Block

(2011)

Sometimes first impressions are right, and this really is as terrific a low-budget sci-fi flick as I thought it was the first time. Writer-director Joe Cornish, overdue for a follow-up, is apparently working on a historical drama called Section 6.

The Germans have outlawed miracles

Casablanca

(1942)

Usually I like to get a little closer to Bastille Day before my annual screening of my all-time favorite film, but after rooting for the Germans against the French in the World Cup today, I felt the need to restore some balance.

I've noticed this before, but I don't think I've ever mentioned it: get a load of the louche portrait of Hitler hanging in Strasser's office when he fields Renaud's call late in the film. Portrait of the dictator as a young Oscar Wilde.

Night of the living pets

Frankenweenie

(2012)

The first experiment goes perfectly, as Victor sparks his beloved mutt Sparky, killed by a car, back to life. The next experiment, performed with less pure motives, is more spectacular but ultimately less successful, and once every kid in the neighborhood gets hold of the secret, and science loses all connection with the heart, mistakes are made. Fierce and outsized mistakes, a dead turtle becoming Gamara-like, sea monkeys becoming Gremlinesque, and a cat named Mr. Whiskers, just as annoying in life as the name suggests, morphing into a fanged, batwinged harpy.

It's a pleasant enough flick, but I feel sorry for all the little kids who saw this and then were crushed to know that their own dead Spunkies and Tiges are staying dead for the duration, and hooking them up to car batteries is, at best, going to have no effect whatever. What a ripoff.

My favorite part of the movie, I think, was the Karen O song in the end credits, at the same time an original piece of ear candy and an hommage to the Mickey and Sylvia classic "Love Is Strange."

Wandering steps and slow

Snowpiercer

Crit

Part Brazil, part Road Warrior, part Soylent Green, part Star Wars, part Clockwork Orange . . . well, let's just say part every dystopian revolution flick and every postapocalyptic disaster flick of the past half-century, but what a stunning pastiche it is. It never lets you get comfortable, but it does occasionally let you think you know roughly where it's going. However, you're wrong: though the setting adheres to its schedule with ultra-Mussoliniesque fidelity, the flick goes exuberantly off the rails. Like Joon-ho Bong's earlier The Host and Mother, this film defiantly eats sushi and does not pay.