Le Big Mac

Pulp Fiction

(1994)

Except for a rough cut of the 2-minute film my daughter wrote and directed and I produced (i.e., took the crew's sandwich orders for), this 20th-anniversary celebration was the only film I watched while on vacation in Illinois. I still remember seeing that definition fill the screen of the old Showcase Orange (back when it was on south of I-95); and I still remember that Jennie Tonic & I gave it the rare compliment of seeing it a second time in the theater.

Lone Star graffiti

Dazed and Confused

(1993)

Richard Linklater does for 1976 Austin what George Lucas did two decades earlier for 1962 Modesto, and while I enjoy both films, I've never quite been able to see either as the watershed it's generally considered.

Geezers and geysers

Land Ho!

Crit

At last, the long-awaited film that gives old farts permission to be just as crude, sex-obsessed, and immature as we--er, they--were when we--they--were young! My standard careless, spoiler-avoiding scanning of reviews made me think going in that it's an Icelandic film with Icelandic codger buddies, but no, the codger buddies are an Australian and a rural Kentuckian long since transplanted to New Orleans. Iceland itself does star, though, in all (well, a lot, anyway) of its natural splendor. The only false notes are a couple of music-video frolics that seem out of character, and the music itself, which is almost exclusively lame.

A boy and his dog

The Drop

Crit

I admire this film for not feeling the need to explain a telling but overlookable character detail, but perhaps I admire that caginess because, having spent 15 years in Catholic schools, I'm in on the bit

Tom Hardy--oh, right: he was Locke!--is Bob, an achingly earnest American innocent in the tradition of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield; Noomi Rapace is Nadia, the damaged, enduring presumably Romanian-American immigrant (named for Comaneci); and James Gandolfini, in his final role, is, sadly, just pretty much Tony Soprano, though a less volatile one. Nothing very surprising here (at least if you're paying attention, even if you weren't raised Catholic), but nothing that feels like a cheat, either. A solid, enjoyable, eminently missable film.

Trailer

• Wild--A long walk unspoiled by golf.

Masque of the bed death

Eyes Wide Shut

(1999)

I like to think I'm a pretty smart guy, even a relatively sophisticated film viewer, but all I get out of this is that sex is dangerous--or, specifically, that getting access under false pretexts into a mansion where masked, powerful men dally with masked, commodified women is perhaps not the way to solve the trust issues in your marriage. I may not be smart enough to get this movie, but I could have figured that out on my own, and probably in less than 165 minutes.

Disappointments: (1) this was the U.S. theatrical version with the fig-leaf humans curtaining off the serious fucking, and (2) FORTY-FIVE MINUTES of commercials in the 3½-hour IFC timeslot, plus that annoying shape, size, and sound violation of the closing credits, so that they could show more self-promotion, plus a bad comic going into a coffee shop uninvited and unannounced.

First impressions

The Trip to Italy

Crit

Seriously, I'd spend 105 minutes with these guys (Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon) in The Trip Stuck on the Roundabout Northeast of Stoke. Yes, the food looks fantastic, yes, Capri and Tuscany and the Amalfi Coast are if anything even more beautiful than I remember, and yes, the nods to a plot (parenthood, sexual infidelity) are harmless, but what really matter are the puerile buddy humor and the competing De Niro impressions. If you aren't embarrassed by the incontinence of your own laughter, we are very different, you and I.

Why you probably don't want MoviePass

A long-intended review
First, click here for a 2-week free trial; if you love it and experience none of the annoyances I'm about to outline, and if you'll use it enough to save money, by all means go for it--it'll get me a $10 credit.

I signed up in late January, so I've had plenty of time to negotiate the unnecessarily steep learning curve and form an unemotional opinion. And since this weekend I'll achieve a milestone--my per-movie cost using the service will dip below $6 for the first time, and assuming I average 5 uses per month henceforth, it will, barring monthly peeks above the line when the charge hits my credit card--I'm in to stay.

Why MoviePass is more awesome than not for me

1. That's it: cheap movie admissions, nothing else. Though I could add the fact that when I use the card at the Criterion, which is to say virtually every time I've used it these 8+ months, and the vast majority of times I'll ever use it, my Criterion Club card is credited according to the price I'd pay for my ticket, if I were paying for my ticket, thus getting me to my next free admission on that card, thus lowering my overall moviegoing costs even further. But that's just further "cheap." That's it: nothing cool about it, nothing mind-expanding, nothing otherwise pleasurable. Cheap, and ever-cheaper the more you use it, and I use it a lot.

Mitigations of MoviePass's awesomeness, part 1: institutional
When I was told about MoviePass, it sounded magical: pay $30 a month and go to movies free. A better way to put it, I guess, is that it sounded too good to be true. And so I discovered it to be, partly before committing, partly not until I started using it:

1. Before you start paying your $30 a month, you have to pay a $29.99 "initiation fee," so in other words, you start with an extra month's fee to amortize over the coming months. (I actually made a spreadsheet to chart my costs, so I watched my per-movie costs drop from $59.99 to $10, jump back up to $12.86 when my second month's fee came due, then head back down. It dipped under $9 for the first time in early March, under $8 a month later, under $7 shortly after that, and now the $6 barrier is finally about to be breached. But I've used it > 5 times a month on average; most people wouldn't.
2. "Wait," you say, "I read this blog faithfully, and I'm sure Blab goes to more than 5 movies a month." Indeed I do. But I can't use MoviePass for every one. For example, though there was a survey suggesting that they might extend savings to 3D movies, currently those are not covered. Which may not be a big deal to you (personally, I've been to 6 3D flicks since I've had MP), but . . .
3. The service is limited to one film a day. Correction: on the website it used to say you could go to a movie every day, but that was true only if you went to a film with exactly the same showtime every day. Doubtless inundated by complaints of false advertising, they've now corrected that to say one use every 24 hours, meaning that if I use MP to see a Friday postwork flick, as I often do, I can't use it for a Saturday matinee. Since I'm disinclined to go to an evening film, that means that I'm limited to 2 uses on a normal weekend, combining either (1) postwork Friday with Sunday or (2) Saturday with Sunday, making sure that the showtimes are identical or in ascending order. In short, it takes some flexibility out of my itineraries.
4. Oh, one more minor thing: presumably to prevent me from lending out my card so that a friend can see a film I loved, MP can be used only once for any one film.

Mitigations of MoviePass's awesomeness, part 2: logistical
But that's just the rules of the game: more restrictive than I initially imagined, but still, given the frequency I attend movies, well worth the $30 a month plus initiation fee. What irks me is the complications of using MoviePass, some of it by (dumb) design, some of it by crappy soft- and/or hardware. Here's the process I'll follow Saturday or Sunday, when I go see The Trip to Italy at the Criterion:

1. At some point on my walk to the theater, I'll turn on the GPS on my phone and turn off the wifi.
2. I'll load the MP app.
3. I'll select the Criterion from the list of area theaters.
4. I'll select the film and showtime from the theater's list.
5. I'll wait until I'm in the lobby or just a few feet away to click the Check in at the Theater button that appears after step 4.
6. A Checking Location message will appear, and with luck, after a few seconds, a Purchase Your Ticket box will appear.
7. At this point, I can turn off the battery-eating GPS, turn the wifi back on, and close the app.
8. I'm not sure whether the theater's ticket pickup kiosk even works, but because I need to get credit on my club card, I get in the ticket line. (The one time I used the card at another theater, I was able to complete my transaction at the kiosk, though I had to select my film on the screen, rather that automatically imparting that information by swiping my card.)
9. At the ticket counter, I tell the cashier which film I'm seeing and hand her, in addition to my Criterion card, my plastic credit card-esque MoviePass card for her to swipe.
10. She gives me a credit card-esque slip to sign.
11. At long last, I get my actual ticket, yes, for "free."

OK, given that we are said to be living in an age of tech miracles, that seems like a ridiculous number of steps to go through for this automated process (granted, I believe it's the theater, not MP, that requires my signature), but wait! There's more!

1. You're wondering why I have to turn off my wifi, right? Well, it took me a long time to figure it out, but I finally realized that the process was often getting short-circuited by a wifi signal fading in and out; the MP transponder apparently demands a solid signal for several seconds to get the job done. Since I stumbled onto this workaround, my troubles completing the transaction have been much less frequent.
2. Now, when I turn on the GPS and wait a few seconds before loading the app, you'd think it would immediately know exactly where I am, right? But in fact, more often than not, I'm told that there are no theaters in my area and invited to change locations.
3. When that happens, one option for "change" is, oddly, to use my current location. I always try that first, but as often as not, it continues to insist that no, I'm nowhere near the movie theater I'm walking to, or any others. So . . .
4. I then have to type in my friggin' ZIP Code. Which invariably works.
5. After step 4 in the previous list, I'm told to wait until I'm within 100 yards of the theater before continuing. OK, I don't see the point, but that's the rule. Except that I have often been standing in the friggin' lobby before hitting the Check In button and been told that I'm ALMOST THERE!
6. I've only recently discovered that the correct response is to hit Cancel and start over. The intuitive response--backing out to the previous page and trying again--accomplishes nothing; sometimes exiting the apps and starting over does, but sometimes not. This, I remind you, while standing in the lobby of the theater. Several times I've been reduced to . . .
7. calling tech support, which generally goes pretty quickly, and they're able to push buttons in their remote location that get me through step 8 above--except, that is, for the times I've gone to an 11am film and there was no one at tech support. Fortunately, in those cases I was finally able to get the damn thing to work.

So is it worth it for me, somebody who sees enough films to get his per-flick cost below $6, and who also has a fairly high threshold for violent response to frustration? Absolutely. Is it worth it for you? Well, if you see 4 films a month at $12 a pop and have a moderately high frustration threshold, I'd say yeah, probably. But if you see 3 films a month and have a low frustration threshold, I doubt that the savings will be worth the annoyance.

Want two weeks free to compare my experience with your own? Click here. But don't say I didn't warn you.

Chance of a ghost

If I Stay

Crit

First thing I did after watching this was call my daughter to tell her that if she ever writes a family like this, I'm retiring as executive producer. But it didn't even occur to me until after articulating that to myself that in Scary Normal she already wrote an infinitely more palatable version of the same family.

In the present film, the protagonist teenage girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) is comparable to SN's Chelsea, and is the one well-drawn, recognizably human character in the family. And like Chelsea, Mia is the "normal" one who doesn't fit in--the one into classical cello while her ostentatiously hip parents and cloyingly clever little brother groove on dinosaur rock.

But while all three subsidiary characters are objectionable on merit, what really made me happy to see them all killed in a car accident was how written their dialogue sounded, how painstakingly crafted to make them lovable.

This film is drawing sub-50% on Rotten Tomatoes, and I wouldn't have bothered with it at all had not A. O. Scott compared it to The Fault in Our Stars, which I loved. Without going through the whole Lloyd Bentsen-vs.-Dan Quayle shtick, let me just say that this is no Fault. It in, in fact, a sort of cynical riff on two adolescent fantasies: (1) guilt-free family elimination and (2) the sorrow and regret of those left behind by one's own death.

That said, it's not terrible. Moretz is a big part of why it's not terrible; another is rock music ostensibly produced by a band in the story that doesn't suck, a rare accomplishment indeed. I wouldn't go so far as to recommend it, but if you have MoviePass and can see it for free, you may discover that it's not a complete waste of time.

Trailer

• Dolphin Tale 2--Oh. My. God of aquatic mammals. This looks very much as if it could be the worst motion picture ever made.