The first day of the rest of your life

Groundhog Day

(1993)

I feel as if I've just seen this.

I feel as if I've just made that joke.

Monday will be our first Groundhog Day since Harold Ramis left us, and though the scale says I'm not allowed to have a drink, I'm raising a toast to the man who made this wonderfulness happen.

Blood for oil

A Most Violent Year

Crit

So imagine Macbeth, but in New Jersey, January or February 1981, and the thanes sell fuel oil, and Macbeth bought out his gangster father-in-law's fuel oil company, but though Lady Macbeth (aka Anna Morales, played with maximum cleavage by Jessica Chastain) is just as bloodlusty as Shakespeare wrote her, Macbeth himself (Spanish-accent-on-the-second-syllable Abel, Oscar Isaacs) has been hijacked by Hilary Mantel and become Thomas More, whose laces are as strait as anyone's, though the angle of the straits may not match anyone else's. Abel, in short, insists upon doing "the most right thing"--i.e., the thing that conforms to but does not exceed the standard corruption of his industry.

Well, somebody's gonna get hurt for sure.

Trailers

• Child 44--Somebody's killing children in Russia in the year of Stalin's death (and my birth, not that there's any connection).
• True Story--A journalism story, based on an actual series of events that started at the New York Times; do you even have to ask whether I'm in?
• Ex Machina--Her's Samantha gets a body; written and directed by Alex Garland.
• While We're Young--Trailer looked kinda could-go-either-way, until it mentioned Noah Baumbach.
• Danny Collins--Pacino plays basically Billy Joel, looks like.

A wonderful life

Still Alice

Crit

Golly! And I thought The Babadook was terrifying.

I have been lucky not to have to watch anyone near to me sink ever deeper into dementia. I have been lucky, but who's to my loved ones will be as lucky?--and that prospect is way more terrifying that any existential evil a popup book can conjure.

You know how people start bolting the theater as soon as the end credits start? There were only a half-dozen of us, but no one budged until the MPAA logo went by--no one could budge, I think: just standing up was an effort, so roundhouse-punched we all felt. One could quibble about elements of the film, but with My Future Wife Julianne Moore at the center of it (and, for that matter, with Kristen Stewart, who, if you keep her away from vampires and lycanthropes, can really act, revolving around that center), it probably accomplishes as much in terms of Aristotelian catharsis as it would have with a subtler, better modulated script.

Does Julie finally get the statue she has long merited? Is there a better working actor who doesn't have one? I know: two very different questions, and anyway, I profess not to care about that stuff. But still.

The Sword of Exact Zero

The Lego Movie

(2014)

I hate to admit that my son-in-law was right, but he told me that this was worth the bus ride out the Post Road to the cineplex in hell, and it would have been. Except for the last act: can't remember whether he warned that the brilliant, kinetic, verbal spectacular suddenly turns into a gooey splurt of sentimental Kragle down the stretch. But while it's regrettable that it couldn't close the deal, it had built up plenty of surplus goodwill by then.

Only voices I recognized: Liam Neeson's and (duh) Morgan Freeman's, though I assumed Shaq was Shaq. Oddly, I was pretty sure they'd gotten Michael Keaton and Adam West to do Batman and Bruce Wayne, respectively (both are in fact the wonderful Will Arnett), but that line of thinking didn't lead me anywhere near guessing that Lando Calrissian was voiced by Billy Dee Williams.

The good mother

Cake

Crit

Ah, the calculus when a film has been badly reviewed while its star's performance has received raves: how good does the anticipated performance have to be to get me there despite the low expectations for the film itself? How low must the expectations for the film be to keep me away despite the reports on the performance? Sometimes it might come down to: how much else is there to see this weekend? In this case, the answer to that was: nada.

And no, it's not a great film--it's predictable, formulaic, except where it veers occasionally in an unexpected and fairly nonsensical direction. And yes, Jennifer Aniston is excellent as a grieving mother in pain as much physical as psychic, and in thrall to the drugs that dull the physical pain but only exacerbate the psychic. Ultimately, I think her performance makes a mediocre film watchable much more than the mediocre film undercuts her performance--but why choose: see her performance in a good film that convinced those who were paying attention more than a decade ago that she could act: The Good Girl.

Trailer

• Still Alice--How much longer must we hinterlanders wait for this?

Terminal velocity

American Sniper

Crit

This was not a film I was eager to see so much as it was one I felt obliged to see, given the consensus acclaim. And my enthusiasm was dampened further when I saw the astonishing box office numbers for its first weekend of wide release: how many of those 90 million, I wondered, went to see brown Allah worshipers get their brains blown out, and did I want to align myself with that demographic?

Well, fuck all that liberal navel gazing: this is, without a doubt, the best work Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper have done, by an order of magnitude, an astonishing plumb of the depths of complexity and ambiguity by a simple mind haunted by its own inability to incorporate ambivalence. The worst thing Cooper's Chris Kyle has done in the first 30 years of his life, as far as we know, is steal a pocket Bible from his church as a boy. The Bible goes with him for four tours of duty--a total of about 1,000 days--in Iraq, where his gift for snuffing a life from distance is put into unquestioning, unquestionable service of God, country, and his comrades in arms.

The cost is exacted when he returns Stateside, but in body only, his psyche still "in country," a hemisphere away from his wife and children. We've seen that phenomenon before, of course, but we've never seen it sold quite like those hunted blue eyes of Cooper sell it.

I've paid no attention to the Oscar® nominations until just now, and I'm glad to see Cooper has been nominated--and he should win, though the other 4 performances were certainly Oscar®-worthy too. But how the hell does the picture get nominated as Best Picture but Clint doesn't get nominated for direction? Well, with 8 BP noms and only 5 for BD, I guess part of the answer is simple mathematics. Or maybe what cost him a nod was three seconds late in the picture that only a film school freshman could have thought was a good idea (you'll know it immediately when you see it), or the ten seconds a few minutes later that a bright sophomore might have included. I was annoyed by both of those bits, but also sort of grateful, because I would have hated to have to call the film perfect.

Untimely ripp'd

Ho/NoHo M5

Subway platform, steel drum, familiar tune . . . Recognition (for full appreciation of irony, think about the pitch of a typical steel drum): "All about That Bass." Smile.

Macbeth (1948)

FF

The most praise I can give Orson Welles's film of one of the top 4 Shakespearean tragedies (top 5 if you include Antony and Cleopatra) is that the look of it is a match for the language. Every frame (shot not by Welles's go-to guy Gregg Toland, who died the year the film was made, but by John L. Russell) is like a rich charcoal drawing. The worst criticism I can level is that the wildly overacting Jeanette Nolan, playing a Lady Macbeth who seems constantly on the cusp of orgasm, should have gone over a cliff much earlier.

Streamlined to a sub-2-hour runtime, the film sacrifices virtually all of the play's comedy, including the wonderful porter scene. And I gather the studio originally dubbed out the Scottish accents, though they're intact in this version.

Il capitale umano (Human capital)

FF

A lush, beautiful Italian Rashomon, wherein greed is not good, sanity is tenuous, and love may our may not be redemptive.

Nothing very groundbreaking or earthshaking there, but it has an effective momentum and enough mystery to carry you along, though the way a critical discovery is plotted will make you scream out in annoyance at the unbelievable manipulation.

Garbanzo Gas (2007)

AFA

My first trip ever to Anthology Film Archives, at Second and 2nd. Why, I'm not sure. The venue has two theaters and a sort of rec center lobby. Downstairs is a standard NYC art-house screening room; upstairs is a cavernous, rakeless auditorium (though the screen is hung high enough that the lack of rake is not problematic).

This movie took me back to the days when I used to screen entries for Film Fest New Haven, except that apart from the sheer fascination with how bad a picture could be for 75 whole minutes, I probably not have gotten past the first 10 or so.

Then again, if I'd stopped that early, I'd have encountered only 2 of the plots, the one about the cow selected by lot to win an all-expenses-paid one-day "vacation" in a crappy motel before going to the slaughterhouse, and the one about 2 pathetic gigolos who ripped off their meal ticket so that they could see a boxing kangaroo on the motel TV but missed the match because they were fighting over the remote and are now going to kill themselves at checkout time. 

I could tell you the other 2 plots, but then I'll have to lobotomize you. But I will say that every dollar of the budget is visible on the screen, and I'm pretty sure that number runs into 3 figures. Oh, and there's a Message: eat your vegetables, not your cows.

Que ta joie demeure (Joy of man's desiring)

AFA

The hell was that? It was sorta like if Frederick Wiseman made Modern Times. Or not.

Factory workers in Montreal work, and things get made, and on rare occasion someone says something, and that something is always worth listening to. And then the little boy comes in and plays the violin, and smiles, and then it's over, and though you were sometimes bored, now you wish there were more.

Giuseppe Makes a Movie

AFA

A wonderful look at Giuseppe Andrews, the quasi-brilliant lunatic responsible for Garbanzo Gas. Say what you will about the laughably bad production values, dialogue, plotting, music, and acting, you can't question Andrews's enthusiasm or his dedication--Scorsese, I'm guessing, never cleaned up the ass of an incontinent senior actor, for example; Andrews apparently does so at least once a picture.

And the acting: well, most of his actors are jobless, some are homeless, most have issues with alcohol and/or other drugs, one has demons from multiple stints in Southeast Asia (Vietnam Ron, with long gray scraggly hair, a long gray scraggly beard, and no upper from teeth, plays Cow in Gas), and one craps his pants with some regularity (as it were). That this troupe is a de facto loving family made me think of the movie gang in Scary Normal, of course, and that made me a lot fonder of Giuseppe than I could have been from just seeing his own work.

Eve of destruction

The Search for General Tso

Crit

The biggest nonsurprise in this ethnoculinary documentary is that I left the theater contemplating a one-meal moratorium from vegetarianism (though if I succumbed to the temptation to order the titular dish [and I won't], I'd ask for a sugar-free version).

The second-biggest surprise (spoiler alert) is that the filmmakers actually find not just General Tso himself (a real-life Hunanese patriot or reactionary, depending on your perspective) but the origin of the dish.

The biggest surprise (do I have to repeat this? BIG freakin' spoiler alert!) is that the dish actually originated in China . . . sort of.

An excellent hungrymaking examination of America, assimilation, and red Hunan peppers.

Selma

Crit

A pasty-white liberal could not have asked for a better viewing context: the vast majority of seats in the theater were bought up by a predominantly black cultural club, such that (1) the place was packed and (2) I was in a tiny complective minority.

I could quibble that the portrait of Dr. King (David Oyelowo) is unabashed hagiography (he womanizes; end of human frailty) or that there's nothing remotely subtle or ambiguous in the film; I could complain that two of the three Brits cast in central roles fail to conjure the vivid recollections of my youth (Oyelowo is Dr. King for me, but Tom Wilkinson and Tim Roth are two fine actors pretending to be Lyndon Johnson and George Wallace, respectively; neither comes close to an accurate accent, and Wilkinson occasionally drifts into the anodyne vocal patterns he has adopted in the past for American roles--though one thing is does get right is Johnson's exploitation of his stature to invade shorter men's airspace)--I could quibble, and I have.

I could even say that the most transporting sequence is the original footage from the final, successful crossing of the Pettus Bridge. What I cannot do is deny the transport. It is manipulative, deck-stacking propaganda, but it is manipulative, deck-stacking propaganda at its finest.

Trailers

• Project Almanac--Teens fuck with past, thereby fucking up present.
• Terminator Genisys--He's baaack, seriously, in an alternate-history (notice a common theme?) reboot.

Naima

Ida

(2014)

Poland, early '60s, Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), days away from taking her vows, is shipped off by her Mother Superior to be nanny to the children of a widowed baron--oh, wait, no, that's not right--to meet her only living relative, a cynical aunt (Agata Kulesza) who had refused to take her in when she was orphaned and is now an alcoholic, sexually indiscriminate judge for the Communist state.

It becomes a journey of discovery--that she is Jewish, that her name is Ida, that her parents were murdered in the war, that the circumstances of their death might be discoverable, and that that vow of chastity might be a lot bigger sacrifice than she'd ever dreamed before she heard Coltrane.

The second of three films I'm seeing this weekend from my list of top five missed last year, and I have no hesitation labeling this one extraordinary. I'm usually oblivious to technical matters, but watch how Ida migrates from the corners of the squarish black-and-white frame to the center as she migrates from the periphery of consciousness to the center of her self. A gem, beautiful in every way.

Smoke and fog

Inherent Vice

Crit

OK, now I've seen my most anticipated 2014 film that didn't open here until 2015, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't put me on the spot about whether it's great, or even whether it would have been on my top 10 list had I seen it in time. I feel sort of a contact high, fuddled by the secondhand smoke from private investigator Doc Sportello's (Joaquin Phoenix) ever-present joint.

I can say I laughed a lot. I can say I was thoroughly engaged, though less by the questions of what has become of Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts, one of maybe a half-dozen top-flight actors who get a single scene) or whether snitch Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson) can be rehabilitated into hearth and home than in how Doc and the bereaved Lt. Det. Christian F. "Bigfoot" Bjornsen (Josh Brolin) resolve their personal crises. I can also say that the soundtrack kicks ass.

If pressed, I guess (1) probably not, but (2) yeah, in the middle or lower.

Trailers

• American Sniper--I'd love permission to give this a miss, but said permission seems not to be forthcoming.
• McFarland USA--Sports inspiration from Disney.

$59.60

It Happened One Night

(1934)

I was inspired to watch this tonight by a grad school friend's report that he showed it for the first time to his teenage son, who pronounced it probably his favorite movie, even while pointing out its continuity flaws. I was impressed by David's powers of observation, and I still am, even after discovering that I'd noticed one of the errors the last time I'd watched (click on title link).

Presumably, David, being young and having killed few of his brain cells, will remember having noticed the error even if he doesn't watch the film again for almost 5 years.

Upload

Her

(2013)

Often when I've loved a film enough at first sight to preorder the DVD asap, I return to it after the one-year recommended rest period eager to see whether I disagree at all with my initial impression (if you're new here or you've not heard me mention this before, a previous review, when one exists, can be accessed via the title link).

Answer: not a whit. However, one addition: in marveling a year ago at the performances of the lead actors (including the unseen one, regardless of her billing), I neglected to mention what an extraordinary treatment Amy Adams gives to Amy, the quietly pining friend whose relatively thankless function is to give Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) a flesh-and-blood sounding board and shoulder to cry on.

Popup book

As I rule I'm doing this on New Year's Eve, which means I don't have to go to work tomorrow, which (along with the bourbon) makes me nice and unstressed. This time, though, I'm doing it at cocktail hour on the last day of the winter break, so I'm already thinking about when to stop for dinner to ensure that I get to bed early enough to be well rested for the one-day workweek and the pile of work I need to accomplish therein.

So if I knock off and don't post until the 2nd, don't hate me. Well, don't hate me for that, anyway. Same rules as in recent years: I just kinda meander back through my posts; some call it impressionistic, some call it lazy.

But first . . .

Top five 2014 films I'm eager to see in 2015:

1. Inherent Vice
2. Selma
3. Mr. Turner
4. Ida
5. Listen Up Philip

And so . . .

• January is when I finally got to see Her, which if not ultimately my favorite 2013 film, was right up there. The Rocket was an unanticipated treasure.
• Traditionally sterile February brought Gloria, which made at least one best-of list, though not mine.
• March was The Grand Budapest Hotel: Wes is more. Oh, and the dark and creepy Enemy, which for my money is the better dark and creepy Jake Gyllenhaal flick this year.
• April, aka the cruelest month in Malaysian martial arts/cop/action flicks, brought the excruciating Berandal (The raid 2). Also Under the Skin, which I will always pair with Her: in a span of a few months, one of the most beautiful women in the movies, also possessed of one of the sexiest voices, had one role in which the visual was absent and another in which the aural is minimized, and she gave two of the best performances of my 2014 in those two films.
• In one day in May, I saw the astonishingly high-concept Locke and my second-favorite vampire flick of the year, Only Lovers Left Alive.
• June was mostly World Cup, duh, but I did see The Fault in Our Stars, the second teen film starring Shailene Woodley that has grabbed me (2013's The Spectacular Now being the other). And in a very different brain segment, La danza de la realidad (The dance of reality) by Alejandro "wtf?" Jodorowsky.

Excuse me: I need to refresh my drink, but it's not 6 yet, so I may be able to finish tonight.

I'm back; this part of the program is brought to you by Jim Beam (long story).

• Snowpiercer? Seriously? Yes, and July, with the Cup having some off days as it wound down, opens with a mass transit bang. Then La Vénus à la fourrure (Venus in fur), which was excellent, but a couple of months later Scary Normal star Laura Anne Welle got the role at the Station Theatre in Urbana, making me queasily glad that I wouldn't be around to see her so scantily dressed in this, no matter how good I'm sure she'd be.
• Boyhood, in August, is the first 2014 film I'm 100% confident in calling great, Richard Linklater's masterpiece, which is tall cotton. Get on Up, which I expected to be a routine biopic, surprised me.
• Why on earth did I go to only 4 films in September? Why none is worth mention here is a different question.
• October's Gone Girl may actually be the most morally reprehensible film of 2014, but it's certainly one the films that inspired the more worthwhile conversation. Pride, one of the year's best? Nah, but one of the most lovable! Dear White People--hey, based on how much it made me feel, this may just be my #1 for the year!
• November: Ordinarily I don't put negatives in here, but Birdman? Yeah, good flick, but genius? Top ten? Not on my watch. And Interstellar? Ditto. Whiplash, on the other hand--extreme dissent from my YUP author David Thomson notwithstanding--ripped my drum kit. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, on (can this be true?) my first M4 of the year, moved me, as  did Citizenfour.
• December: I watched it on DVD, but the beauty of the 21st century is that Vi är bäst! (We are the best!) is still a 2014 film, one of the best. The same rules apply to Frank, though I confess it didn't move me as much. The fucking Babadook, on the other hand, scared the fucking shit out of me in a way that no film has done in a long, long time. Also, The Homesman seems to me an underrated great film. And Top Five a nearly great Woody Allen film.

So, top 10? Well, pending the 5 that I cited at the start, let's say:

1. Dear White People
2. Boyhood
3. Gone Girl
4. The Babadook
5. Grand Budapest Hotel
6. Locke
7. Under the Skin
8. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
9. Only Lovers Left Alive
10. Vi är bäst!