Love of truth, truth of love

An Honest Liar

Crit

A warm and engaging documentary about the magician the Amazing Randi, his longtime mission to debunk claims of psychics and mystical charlatans (especially his righteous vendettas against spoon bender Uri Gellar and faith healer Peter Popoff), and his truth-complicated personal life.

The fundamental ontological riddles of our time

Bull Durham

(1988)

God I love this game; god, I love this film. And I really needed both (while posting this, I'm actually listening to Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez call today's Nationals-Mets game in Florida), as it freakin' snowed a-freakin'-gain today. Mets' opener in 9 days, home opener (at which I will of course be) in 16 days. A lot of snow to melt before then; rose goes in the front, big guy.

Post coitum omne animal triste est

It Follows

Crit

What I expected going in was something nearly as scary as The Babadook and nearly as weirdly creepy as Under the Skin, but in fact, the mood here--clearly no accident--is Halloween. Though the setting is an eminently safe northern suburb of Detroit, the home neighborhood could be Haddonfield, and if the sweep of fallen leaves in the opening shot doesn't say October emphatically enough to you, check out the house number of the first victim of whatever "it" is: 1492. And if that's not enough, toss in a few b&w scary movies being watched on TV.

Wonderful logic: "it" is the variously embodied (usually strangers, but sometimes even more scarily not) manifestation of a curse passed along via coitus. Once you're "tagged," as it were, the force is always walking (critically, walking, slowly) to you, and if it reaches you, it will kill you if it can. You can see it, as can those previously affected, but no one else can--but the uninfected can touch and be touched by the fully corporeal being. And once you pass the curse along, you're still not off the hook, because if it kills the target, then the one who sexually transmitted the dis-ease to that target becomes the target again.

I think you can see the ethical issue. There's that, there's some beautiful exploitation and misdirection of horror film cliché and trope, a wonderful rescue-attempt illustration of the law of unintended consequences, and lots of good old-fashion eek. Damn, we are in a good time for scary flicks!

Trailers

• Heaven Knows What--A documentary-ish look at East Village drug culture; looks excruciating if not unwatchable.
• Unfriended--Embarrassing video posted, teen commits suicide, comes back to haunt her false friends online. Yawn.
• Adult Beginners--In the searching sibling tradition of You Can Count on Me and The Skeleton Twins.
• Ex Machina--A much extended trailer from the one I'd been seeing, suggesting that that one didn't get the dystopic vibe across adequately.
• Mad Max: Fury Road--Charlize Theron in a Mad Mad flick? And no Mel Gibson? Hell yes!

Россия-Матушка

Red Army

Crit

The simple take on this sports documentary is that it demonstrates that the Soviet system, when true to its ideals of selfless collectivism, worked perfectly, and when it descended into cynical cronyism, everything came apart at the seams. Also, that an American movie is best off with a star, like prickly Slava Fetisov, star defenseman on what may have been the best quintet ever to lace on skates, later the senior member of another Russian five who helped bring a Stanley Cup to Detroit, and now a politician back in the homeland, who has served a stint as minister of sport.

Yale hockey fans: stay to the end of the thank-yous and look for the big yellow smiley face, a nod from director Gabe Polsky to his college coach.

Trailers

• Lambert & Stamp--Who are they.
• Monkey Kingdom--Disney Nature's cute but serious Earth Day film.
• Little Boy--Wow, does this look like heartwarming goo.
• Desert Dancer--The sentimental side of Iranian repression.

Best served cold

Relatos salvajes (Wild tales)

Crit

My second Oscar®-nominated film of the weekend, this one Argentina's candidate for best foreign film. Aptly named, this wicked suite of stories about violent impulses acted on with gusto, never again flies quite as high as the pretitle segment, a beautifully compact tale worthy of a seriously perverse O. Henry, but each tale of the redress of affronted justice is satisfying to one degree or another, and the finale, about a wedding gone very, very wrong, is a worthy bookend.

Trailers

• The Water Diviner--A clunkily titled film starring Russell Crowe as the bereaved title character.
• The Salt of the Earth--Yet another Oscar® nominee, a Wim Wenders documentary (codirected with the subject's son) about the photographer Sebastião Salgado.
• Merchants of Doubt--A documentary about professional liars engaged by climate change deniers and others with a vested interest in deception.

Pinnipedestrian

Song of the Sea

Crit

My second Irish Oz movie in a week. The other was a lot scarier and a lot better. 

I'm sure this film--nominated for an animated feature Oscar®--about a half-human, half-selkie child trying to find her destiny or whatever, has warmed many a heart and charmed many a stony cynic. Not, alas, this stony cynic or his cold heart. A second-rate Disney playbook ripoff, complete with absent parent.

Not in Derbyshire anymore

'71

Crit

As the annual green-themed Festival of Drunken White People* raged outside, I, English interloper, went to a green-vs.-orange-themed film, perhaps the most brutal Wizard of Oz movie I've ever seen.

Private Hook (Jack O'Connell), wet-behind-the-ears provincial Brit kid, is left behind by his unit when a Belfast patrol goes terribly wrong. Hook spends the rest of the film trying (1) to survive the night and (2) trying to get back to safety, a tall order given that, while a few people he encounters are sympathetic to his plight, the majority want him dead, including some who are ostensibly on the same side.

As a citizen who sews up his wound, and who has bitter recollections of his own time in the military tells him, the institution is "posh cunts telling thick cunts to kill poor cunts."

*Technically, the first adjective is imprecise, as many people of color participate nowadays; I stand by the second adjective, though, 100%.

Trailers

• The Gunman--Another old guy (Sean Penn) makes an action pic.
• An Honest Liar--Specifically, the Amazing Randi; having recently read a New Yorker story about the deceptions the great debunker suffered in his personal life, I am in.

You can't take the sky from me

Serenity

(2005)

Don't get me wrong: when I saw this 10 years ago, with zero background in the criminally short-lived Fox series Firefly, I thought it was a kickass hoot. But now that I've watched the series (and worked out to most of the DVD commentaries), what a rich and fulfilling experience this screening was. That Joss Whedon was able to reassemble the entire cast, 3 years after the series was canceled, tells you how they felt about the project's worth. They were right.

I regret the sound of breaking glass

Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem

Crit

Some shit religious advisers shouldn't be able to tell you:

• What you can eat;
• what you must wear on your head;
• what you may and may not wear on your anything else;
• when you may and may not drive;
• under what circumstances you may and may not appear in public;
• what words you must not use when expressing righteous anger; and, more than anything else,
• what you must endure in the name of marriage, and how long you must continue to endure it.

You may accuse me of secular humanocentrism, but this is a screamingly maddening picture of the medievally gender-stacked deck that we play with when old men in funny funny hats get to listen to God and make the rules. It could be imams or bishops, but in this case, it's the rabbis who interpret the laws that govern divorce proceedings among the Orthodox in Israel and, for all I know, everywhere--a cinematic experience that is to frustration what Surround Sound is to sensory overload.

There's an opera out on the turnpike

The Last Five Years

Crit

What we have here is Sunset Boulevard, and the corpse face-down in the pool at the start is the relationship. The rest of the film is a chronologically scrambled lead-up to the fatal bullet.

Took me a while to concede that singing the story of a young couple in love and then not was more effective than speaking it, but it finally worked for me.

Jamie's dream of success as a novelist comes true in spades; Cathy's acting career is a constant struggle. And therein lies one force driving them apart. But it's a lot more complicated and real than that: she is delighted by his success, and is fine for a while being  part of his train, but how long can that last? And even as he continues to believe in her, how can she keep believing in herself, evidence to the contrary? And then there are the other women.

The chronological skips have them challenged, then happy, then miserable and then happy again, with the payoff of the jumble on the heartbreaking finale. Both are wrong, both are right, and together they are depressingly doomed. Just your standard musical romance, I guess.

Basque to the future

Laura B, back from our 51st almost state, has something to share with us:

Star Wars, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

Orange

Ocho apellidos vascos (Eight Basque surnames / Spanish affair)

San Juan, Puerto Rico

What do these two movies have in common? They’re the last examples of my paying $7.50 to see a movie in the theater. That’s it. I thought $7.50 was outrageous in 1980, but a super-bargain in 2015. Times change.


Ocho apellidos vascos translates as Eight Basque surnames. For some reason the movie powers changed the title to The Spanish Affair for the English-language audience. Annoying, but don’t let that stop you from seeing this film. It’s chock-full of stereotypes, but not what you’d expect.

The Spanish film reviewers were harsh in their criticism, thinking it too offensive for the general public. The Spanish audience LOVED it; I imagine from Bilbao to Gibraltar all sighed a collective breath of fresh air. What’s been hidden under years of post-Franco oppression (and let’s face it, Franco was pretty oppressive himself) is finally let loose for all to look at and laugh at.

Amaia, jilted by her would-be husband, decides to head south to Seville to raise some hell. Rafa, a local who has never left Andalusia, falls. In a bit of a stalker fashion, he follows Amaia back to Euskadi, and the brawls and insults follow. It is hilarious to watch something so foreign, so disconnected, so distasteful unfold before your eyes. When the bigotry is not your own, it adds a level of understanding about your own held beliefs. If that doesn’t get you, the smoky sex scene will. I haven’t seen anything like that in the theater since before 1980, whoa.