This is sanguine tap

What We Do in the Shadows

Crit

I was perhaps too ambitious for this film, predicting that it might become my all-time third-favorite vampire movie. The film itself holds no such lofty ambitions, notwithstanding the periodic levitation by the four mismatched Wellington, N.Z., undead flatmates. Its ambition extends no farther than goofy gory fun, and it drives a stake through that comedic heart--wait, wrong metaphor, implying that it kills comedy, when in fact I mean the opposite, that it's right on target. Well, you try keeping your metaphors in line when assessing a vampire comedy.

Honi soit qui mal y pense

Timbuktu

Crit

Showtime temperature in Timbuktu: 75 degrees.

The biggest surprise in this deservedly Oscar®-nominated film about a jihadist-repressed community is that its central tragic event has almost nothing to do with that repression--maybe the constant stress of the situation contributes, but even that's arguable.

Still, there's little here to recommend such a regime. Some of the jihadists are perfectly honorable men (I need hardly add that they are all men), but between the good men's inflexibility and the opportunistic fellow travelers' hypocrisy, there's little room for decent, simple people to live and be left alone. Suffice it to say that I want no part of a society where sex, drugs, and rock & roll are all haram.

Oh: the most elegant and disconcerting football (you know: football) sequence you'll ever see.

Martial arts

In the next theater, the hit flick about a S&M couple with time on their hands:

Mr. Turner

Crit

I am really a lowbrow when it comes to the fine arts. Oh, yes, I've been to lots of great art museums, and I've experienced moments of transport at some of them. but mostly what I associate with art museums is sore feet from lots of standing. If I had to stand for 2 hours to watch a movie, I wouldn't be a big fan of this medium either.

So while many people have eagerly anticipated seeing how Mike Leigh incorporated famous paintings by J. M. W. Turner in the visual makeup of his film, I, too ignorant of Turner's work to recognize the specific allusions, eagerly anticipated the wonderful character actor Timothy Spall having the opportunity to carry a film on his broad and rough-hewn back.

I know next to nothing about the real Mr. Turner--whether rumbles and growls made up much of his verbal idiom; whether he was garrulous only with his father and his fellow artists, calculatedly cordial with potential patrons, and all but wordless with the adoring servant whom he used (roughly) as a sperm receptacle; whether he neglected and denied his daughters by a woman who apparently was his common-law wife for years, and whose surliness seems richly earned; whether he finally found loving contentment and something like a relationship of equals, with an elderly, twice-widowed innkeeper. But certainly in the future when I think of Turner, and when I see his work, it's the Turner of Leigh and Spall I'll think of. And that's one reason why I love the movies. Getting to sit down to watch them is another.

Trailers

• '71--English soldier left behind in Belfast during the Troubles.
• Relatos salvajes (Wild tales)--Argentinean anthology about extreme behavior, nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar®.
• The Walk--Breathtaking sweeping close-ups of those iconic vertical elements of a pair of towers that no longer exist get your attention immediately. Robert Zemeckis revisits, in 3D, the story told pretty much perfectly in the 2008 documentary Man on Wire.

Excitable boy

Mommy

Crit

Stevie (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) is a troublesome child--maybe not quite Damien troublesome, maybe not even Clockwork Alex troublesome, but with anger and control issues that certainly place him on that continuum. And then there are his mommy issues. And then there's his mommy, Diane, "Die" (Anne Dorval), and her issues. And the mysterious, loving, stammering high school teacher on sabbatical who lives across the street, Kyla (Suzanne Clément), and her complement of issues.

I have nothing worthwhile to say about the film, but I do have two worthless things to say about it: (1) it's so creepy and uncomfortablemaking as to be beyond even my generally high threshold for those qualities, and (2) the climactic sequence is directly ripped off from the final episode of Six Feet Under.

Good intentions

Thanks to my old, old, old friends Doug & Heidi for the heads-ups re the free streamability of these two Oscar®-nominated documentaries, a moving short and an amazing feature. The link at each title will take you to the film, except note that Last Days is available only through Sunday, Feb. 8; I believe it is to air on PBS April 28, right before the 40th anniversary of the evacuation of Saigon.

Last Days in Vietnam

(2014)

Like everyone of my generation, I remembered some broadcast images and had a vague sense of the facts of the U.S. evacuation from Saigon as North Vietnamese troops bore down on the city, but this film is a stunning education about the events of those end days in 1975--the misjudgments, the betrayals, the heroism, and the flat-out luck, both spectacularly good and disastrously bad, that got Vietnamese friends of the American war effort (i.e., traitors from the perspective of the winning side) taken out of or left behind in the soon-to-be Ho Chi Minh City. Mouth agape a sizable percentage of the time.

The short subject was Nasza klatwa (Our curse), a film made by young husband and wife Tomasz Śliwiński and Magda Hueckel about their son Leo, born with congenital central hypoventilation syndrome, "Ondine's curse,"  which will probably keep him on a ventilator for his probably very short life. The film is notable for its honest and unsentimental portrait of the family, and (I say this as a good thing) for the feel of a fiction short.

Inexperienced

Jimi: All Is by My Side

(2014)

Behind every great man . . .

Hayley Atwell (as Kathy Etchingham), Imogen Poots (as Linda Keith), and Ruth Negga (as a groupie identified only as Ida) perform serviceable backup as the women behind the embryonic genius, but André Benjamin is positively electric as Jimi Hendrix en route from Seattle to Manhattan to London to Monterrey. John Ridley wrote and directed this underrated biopic.

Impulse

First, my heartfelt apologies to my literally countless followers who were counting on me to tell them at the time I've backdated this post to whether these programs were worth seeing. Cooking for and watching the Super Bowl put paid to an already crowded weekend, and during the intervening week, well, . . . I just didn't.

And by the way, don't look for documentary shorts recommendations from me, as those programs have gone away from my downtown theater after just a week. I'm hoping to get to stream them at some point, but I'm not banking on it.

2014 Oscar®-nominated animated shorts

Crit

A perfectly honorable and adequate collection of films, with no embarrassments and no standouts,  in either writing or animation. Feast is the Disney offering, and it's always dangerous to bet against Disney, but this dog's-eye (and -palate) view of romance, an unwelcome turn to veganism, and breakup is the slightest of the 5 thematically. Me and My Moulton, a memoir of childhood, rises only to the level of "pleasant" (and for the record, a 3-legged chair is apt to be at least as stable as a 4-legged one).

The Bigger Picture treats two adult sons and their elderly mother, who loves the one who has devoted himself to her care less than the one who has lived his own life. A dark horse for the Oscar, depending on how many voters the theme resonates with. The 2-minute A Single Life is about the brevity of it all, like a side of a 45 (ask your parents, kids).

Which leaves the probable winner,  perhaps deservedly so: The Dam Keeper is about bigotry, bullying, friendship, misunderstanding, and redemption; you can hardly go wrong there, right? And the dreamy, sort of colored-charcoal-drawing-style animation is the most engaging of the bunch.

As always, these films are so short that we get to see a few extras as lagniappe: Sweet Cocoon (the trials and evanescent rewards of pupal metamorphosis); Footprints (a  gun-totin' vengeance quest into the unknown/the soul); Duet (yet another riff on the eternal love triangle: boy-girl-dog); and Histoires de bus (Bus story) (slice of school-bus-driving life). Like the nominees: all pleasant enough.

2014 Oscar®-nominated live-action shorts

Crit

I think I liked all the live-action shorts better than any of the animated, though a cynic might fairly point out that the two programs share a certain safeness. I wonder whether the nominees have in general become more family friendly in the past few years, since they have become readily available to families?

Case in point: Parvaneh is about a young Afghan immigrant to Switzerland, who lacks proper ID and is too young to wire home the money she has been (under)paid for her sewing. She trusts her money to someone we clearly see as manifestly untrustworthy (there was an audible groan in the theater), but guess what (spoiler alert)? The girls become friends, and everyone learns. Still, the film is irresistible, in part because the moon-round face of the title role's Nissa Kashani is irresistible.

La lampe au beurre de yak (Butter lamp) appears to have no agenda beyond making us smile, and it succeeds effortlessly: a photographer hangs backdrops of various landmarks--Tiananmen Square, the Great Wall, a temple famous enough that I'd know its name if I were Tibetan--and shoots ordinary folks in front of them. Again, the faces carry the day.

The Phone Call has  more heft, even if it revolves around a set piece: woman on suicide hotline trying to keep depressed caller alive. What keeps the film alive is the work of two great English actors, Sally Hawkins and (never seen) Jim Broadbent, plus writing that seems more real than this trope usually gets.

Boogaloo and Graham is about a young mum and dad, their two sons, and the boys' pet chickens. Heft is added here by time and place: Belfast, during the Troubles. But that's really (spoiler alert again) an illusion-of-danger red herring in the most conventional film of the program.

I have no idea which of these films will win the Oscar®, and it wouldn't be a gross miscarriage of justice for any of them to take it, but my pick, with room to spare, is the last and the longest, Aya. The setup is the hoariest of romantic comedy tropes: boy meets girl under conditions of mistaken identity, and the film is comic, and it is romantic, but if it's a romantic comedy, it's unlike any member of the genre I (or you) have ever seen. Aya (Sarah Adler--blessed with yet another face to die for, and an actor's instincts in using that face to communicate everything and nothing wordlessly) is at the airport (in Tel Aviv?) to pick up we-don't-know-who. Through a rather Rube Goldbergian machination, she finds herself holding a sign suggesting that she's the driver for Mr. Overby (Ulrich Thomsen), a Danish pianist bound for a music competition in Jerusalem, where he is to be a judge. Inexplicably--but not unbelievably, and this is the miracle of what she does with her face: is she attracted to him, or just to the idea of doing something on impulse?--she does not disabuse him of his natural mistake, and drives him to his destination. En route, they begin, barely, to know each other. This one I will not spoil, except to say that the conclusion is simultaneously immensely satisfying and un-. It's the one short I saw all day that I'd call genuinely brave. So I guess it has no chance to win.