Cheeseblabbery

White lies

2012-02-12T21:01:00.015-05:00

(The earrings of) Madame de . . .

(1953)

Delicious web of ironies in a continental context of flirtation to and perhaps beyond the brink of betrayal. It's all fun and games until someone loses . . .

Downturn

2012-02-11T22:59:00.000-05:00

Up in the Air

(2009)

Wow, a very different dynamic knowing up front about the devastating blow that is to fall (though I'm reminded now that I had encountered too many hints about that before I saw the film the first time). Doesn't make it a lesser movie, necessarily, just a very different one--perhaps one where you can't credit Ryan's bravado quite as much from the start. Still powerful in many ways, not least in its sympathetic look into hard times that are still with us.

Time is on my side

2012-02-11T20:19:00.002-05:00

Ah, a good day at the shorts--now what to watch long with dinner? . . .

Oscar®-nominated animated shorts

It's unusual for all of these to be good, and I have a weaker conviction than most years as to which is the best, or which will win. Usually I expect the Pixar candidate to carry the day, but I don't think that will happen this year.

Crit

Dimanche (Sunday)--Beautifully simple drawings (the eyeless crows--basically just long mouths with wings and feet--are the most brilliant manifestation) carry a boy's tale of double vehicular tragedy in Canada.
A Morning Stroll--Why did the chicken take the downtown 6 train? A delightfully trippy triad told at 50-year intervals, though the punch line is a letdown.
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore--I guess this is the one I'd pick, and it might also be the best bet on your party ballot: a surreal world in which books sustain us and are in turn sustained by us, wonderfully inventive and just great to look at.
Wild Life--The only nominee in this category to use a significant amount of spoken language, and with its fellow Canadian Dimanche, in a minority in having a more or less realistic (and tragic) setting.
La Luna--Easily the weakest of the five for me, though in this field, that doesn't mean it's not good; just a little too Disney-magical for my tastes.

As always, the animated shorts are so short that we got some Highly Commendeds to round out the program; unlike the usual case, I don't think any of these got cheated out of a nomination:

Skylight--Cute CGI penguins--and all other creatures great and small--being roasted comically by the hole in the ozone layer.
The Hybrid Union--Autopropelled autos finding cooperation in a postapocalyptic landscape menaced (or nurtured?) by a moving cloud.
Nullarbor--Bland and rote Australian car chase.
Amazonia--More cute animals that might as well be from Disney.

Oscar®-nominated documentary shorts

Another excellent program, with some fairly earned tearjerking.

Crit

Incident in New Baghdad--The first and the least--it's rare I wish one of these films were longer, but this treatment of a Iraq War veteran's efforts to do the right thing on the scene and in the aftermath ends abruptly when lots more story seems crying out to be told.
Saving Face--I had read about the lunatic practice of men throwing acid in the face of unwilling marriage partners or recalcitrant wives, but to see the product of those attacks multiplies the horror exponentially. Yet this manages to have an uplifting side as well, in the form of a harsh law passed (and, apparently, enforced) in Pakistan to curb the practice, a miracle-working reconstructive surgeon, and, mostly, the strength of the victims themselves.
The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom--A film as oddly divided as the title, as the blossoms are given a heavy symbolic burden: of new life, of endurance, of nature's yang (its yin having been demonstrated emphatically in the opening sequences). A sometimes awkward film, but a moving one.
The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement--But this has to be the winner, and not only because it's all uplift all the time: James Armstrong was there to cut Dr. King's hair and to march across the Pettus Bridge, and he's still around to watch the election returns on election night 2008. A heartthumper of a film.
God Is the Bigger Elvis--Unfortunately not shown in the program, reportedly because of licensing restrictions, but it sounds awfully interesting.

Oscar®-nominated live-action shorts

Either I was just tired at the end of the day, or there's not much here. And let's face it: 6 hours of movies in a day is not really apt to wear me out.

Crit

Pentecost--Is it my imagination, or is there something from Ireland in this category every year that takes cheap shots at Catholicism? Not that I'd object if they were better films. One nice bit in this one has the rector giving the altar boys a pep talk as if they were a football team, but otherwise it did nothing for me. To be fair, mine was a minority opinion: big crowd pleaser, and I guess thus a dark horse for the O.
Raju--German couple adopts Kolkata orphan, then makes an unsettling discovery. Snoozer that might sneak in on liberal sentiment.
The Shore--Another crowd pleaser from the Emerald Isle, this one from the North. Also, with a relatively big name cast of Ciarán Hinds (always excellent) and Kerry Condon (what's Gaelic for "wooden"?), this is the odds-on favorite to win, though it'd have to do it without my vote if I had one.
Time Freak--This is where that vote would go: it's slight, and it's pretty much just Groundhog Day compressed, but it's smart and funny, and Michael Nathanson has a goofy charm that makes his more-silly-than-mad scientist irresistible.
Tuba Atlantic--And then there's always the offbeat bleakly funny tale from Scandinavia, in this case Norway. Maybe longer than it needs to be, but it works; still, I'm guessing it'll just have members of the Academy scratching their heads.

Roy Orbison's glasses

2012-02-10T22:16:00.000-05:00

Gummo

(1997)

OK, I've seen a drunk wrestle a kitchen chair, I've seen a mentally challenged woman shave her eyebrows, and I've seen enough tortured and dead cats (whether real or simulated is an emotionally moot point) to last nine lifetimes. I feel as if watching this should come with one of those survival T-shirts like they pass out at epic roller coasters.

I did laugh twice; can't remember the cause of the first, but the second came when one character said, "I knew a guy once who was dyslexic, but he was also crosseyed, so everything came out right."

Pity Xenia, Ohio.

Incognegro

2012-02-10T20:00:00.000-05:00

Pariah

Crit

And the award for Trailer That Does Its Film the Worst Disservice goes to . . .

Seriously, I saw the trailer a zillion times, but even the first time it made the film seem like one that relies for your favorable response on Standing for the Right Things--gay-friendly, black-friendly, struggling-youngster-friendly--rather than on telling a compelling story compellingly. Furthermore, the high school "poetry," as cut into the trailer, earned those ironic quotes, full of the sort of vague, bland, abstract language for which school "literary magazines" have been notorious since before I was writing that sort of crap for them.

So even though the reviews have been almost unanimously positive, I went in skeptical, but the film won me over within minutes--maybe the first time it made me laugh, for that was another thing about the trailer: it was unremittingly serious, and dark, and sorrowful. Well, it's a serious film with plenty about it that's dark and sorrowful, but it finds time as well to be light, sweet, warm, even funny. In other words, human.

Alike (Adepero Oduye), aka Lee (though never to her father), is 17 and would be out but for the homophobia of her complacently middle-class parents; mom (Kim Wayans) has a Bible up her butt, and dad (Charles Parnell) is in denial more on general principles. Mom is also meekly subservient, with an undercurrent of anger that needs a vent, all the worse for her gay daughter; dad, meanwhile, is a philanderer with love for his daughters but none left for his wife. "Out" is more than one goal.

Writer-director Dee Rees, whose IMDb photo makes her look about 17 herself, has set a high bar for the next coming-of-lesbian-age story, and anyone making such a film could do worse than study this one.

Some justice

2012-02-04T21:19:00.000-05:00

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory

(2011)

No brainer: DirecTV gives me a free sample of HBO right when something they're showing gets nominated for a documentary Oscar®? Sure, I'll watch it.

The West Memphis Three were teenagers when arrested, tried, and convicted of the murders and mutilations of three 8-year-old boys; 18 years and two HBO films by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky that raised an army of crusaders on behalf of the convicts--including the stepfather of one of the victims, once as rabid in his calls for hellfire retribution as anyone; including also, in the case of Damien Echols, the oldest and the ostensible ringleader, a devoted wife--later, the boys are young men, two of them intelligent and articulate young men, the third as simple and soulful as when the police bullied him into a patently false confession.

The subtitle of the third installment is more of a spoiler than I'm prepared to give. All I'll say is that even if this didn't put a notch on your belt for the Oscar® party, you'd be well rewarded by watching yet another account of justice deferred.

El sueño americano

2012-02-04T18:33:00.000-05:00

A Better Life

Crit

Ladri di biciclette updated to southern California, a truck, and a undocumented Mexican single father as the victim of the vehicular jacking. The political and emotional decks are both stacked: Carlos (Demián Bichir) is exactly the sort of hardworking immigrant, dedicated to making a better life for his child, that built this country and should still be as welcome as Emma Lazarus could make him, while Luis (José Julián) would much prefer the fútbol pitch (pointedly, his favorite team is Chivas USA, not the Guadalajara parent club) to gang turf, but the environment provided by his school and his neighborhood are making the wrong decision seem inevitable.

Nonetheless, it works, partly because Bichir's prematurely lined face speaks so eloquently about where he has been, how far he has come, and what he would do to protect his own. Director Chris Weitz once exec produced a (not very good) film by his brother Paul called American Dreamz; good to see the family explore that theme with characters we care about, and without the trivializing spelling.

The dancer from the dance

2012-02-03T22:27:00.000-05:00

Hable con ella (Talk to her)

(2002)

There wasn't really any question about deaccessioning this, but it met the not-watched-in-5-years criterion, which gave me a good excuse to see a little more of Café Müller, with Pina Bausch herself dancing.

What a strange, amazing movie, which does things to women that no one lacking Pedro's well-established record of love for and devotion to the sex could have gotten away with.

To everything a season

2012-02-03T20:06:00.047-05:00

Pina

Crit

You know, if I keep loving dance films, I'm going to have to stop prefacing every review with "I'm not really a fan of dance, but . . . " (code for "I actually am heterosexual, but . . . "?).

I know dance is supposed to be kinetic, but geez! And oddly, I don't feel as if the (excellent) 3D made a significant difference in that respect. What that feature did was allow for the sort of close-ups on faces that would never be possible in a theater, while still allowing a wrap-around depth of field that made me feel as if I had at least one extra pair of eyes and could pay close attention to two or three of four goings-on at once. And yes, these dancers without a doubt dance with their faces.

What makes the dances special--well, one thing that makes them special--is their exteriority: many of the pieces are staged outdoors, in venues ranging from the lip of a rock quarry to the roof of a factory, from a city plaza to a leafy glade. And even many of the indoor venues are glass-enclosed--a swimming pool, a solarium, a moving monorail car (with passengers who may or may not have had any idea what was going on--hard to tell). And then even when the venue was a conventional stage, it sometimes became a simulated outdoors, via soil underfoot or a rainstorm overhead (and yes, the latter dance does quote unabashedly the title dance of Singin' in the Rain).

Lots more I could say: about the variety of music, about the polyglotitude of the troupe (apart from German and English speech, I noticed French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, maybe Ukrainian too . . . though the Filipina-looking woman, unfortunately, spoke German rather than Tagalog), but it's time for dinner and another movie (and I have a pretty good idea it'll be). Just see it, yo.

5:59

2012-01-28T20:26:00.013-05:00

Groundhog Day

(1993)

What can I say that I haven't said after one of the past four annual screenings? That the first tears tend to come about the 51-minute mark, the moment we hear Ray Charles? No, said that in 2009. That it was actually filmed in Woodstock, Illinois? No: 2010. Why, I even wondered what I could say about it that was new that same year.

So maybe next year, instead of trying to think of what to say, I should just copy and paste the five posts I'll have accumulated then. Because there's no question I'll be watching it again about a year from now.

The makings of a man

2012-01-28T17:24:00.023-05:00

Albert Nobbs

Crit

OK, I have to use an expression here, and I'm not trying to be coy or cute, so I don't want to hear any titters out there: this is a fairy tale. A fairy tale for better (a few scenes of delightful magic) and worse (a sort of zero-sum simplicity, when the subject matter deserves more). Close is twitchily, neurotically wonderful in the title role, of course (and would you believe that I still haven't looked at the full list of Oscar® nominees, though I've given a once-over to the major categories, so know that she got a nod), and so is Janet McTeer as the other woman in the story passing as a man, who becomes Albert's friend and (because happily married to a woman) role model. McTeer's name always sounds familiar, but her IMDb page suggests that she has worked mostly on stage and British TV, and that I've scarcely if ever seen her in anything before, but I hope to see her again.

Location, location, location

2012-01-27T21:53:00.000-05:00

Poltergeist

(1982)

When will people in scary movies get it through their thick skulls that it's never a good time to take a bath or shower? Just stay dirty until you see the end credits start to roll.

This is better than I remembered from the last time I watched it, 5-6 years ago, which in turn was probably 3-4 years after I bought the DVD way cheap, during one of the phases of my life when I was buying the DVD of every movie about which I had moderately positive memories as long as I could get it way cheap. Though the special effects are hokey, there are quite a few convincing scares--better than I remembered, but still deaccessionable, free to the first claimant.

Important things I'd forgotten:

the Spielberg connection: not only did he produce, he contributed the story and cowrote the screenplay. Furthermore, the suburban setting is identical in spirit and look to that of the same year's E.T., though if we're to credit the flora and the mention of I-74, this probably takes place in North Carolina.
that the family's motel-savvy, hickey-wearing 16-year-old daughter was played by the tragic Dominique Dunne (actually 22 when the film was made, but with no more birthdays ahead of her).

2012-01-22T20:14:00.000-05:00

Bend It Like Beckham

(2002)

Been a bad sports day: two of my three beloved teams lost, and while the other one won't lose a game that matters for more than 10 weeks, it's possible that the NFL team I care about only enough to watch when they get close to a Super Bowl, and then only to start watching a couple of hours after kickoff and fast-forward between plays, is already being thrashed.

So it's only fair that I get to enjoy one triumph--though I confess that I almost couldn't bring myself to hear that titular name and see that iconic face so indelibly associated with the team that beat my Gunners today.

Anyway, this remains completely hokey and completely charming, and I still can't watch the happy ending dry-eyed.

Unrevolutionary

2012-01-21T21:19:00.000-05:00

Cairo Time

(2010)

My favorite film of 2010 holds up perfectly, and while it's impossible to watch it today without thinking of what has happened in and to that strange, beautiful, chaotic city in the past year--the hope, the doubt, the trepidation--it's surprising how little that changes here.

It's also surprising to be reminded how much this is a mystery, building toward resolution of the question of how Juliette will and will not betray her husband with Tariq. Knowing the answer to that did change the film: change, but not damage.

The first time I saw this, I finally resolved that My Future Wife Patricia Clarkson has the best face in the movies today, and not only did a second viewing confirm that opinion, but it made me realize that I'd give up all my other future wives to see that face daily henceforth.

The emperor of ice

2012-01-20T22:18:00.000-05:00

La marche de l'empereur (March of the penguins)

(2005)

So here was my thinking when I considered this for Friday night deaccession: if I so loved this when it was new that I felt compelled to buy the DVD, but that DVD was still in its shrinkwrap 6 years after I bought it, how badly do I really need to own it? Why not watch it again, then offer it first to my granddaughter, then, if there's already a copy in her house, put it up for grabs?

Well, I am still going to offer it to Veronica, but if she doesn't take it, I'm going to keep it for a while longer. It really is an amazing story, remarkably filmed, with the cutest damn chicks in the ornithological world, and if the narrative is a tad heavy on anthropomorphization, at least it's nonscientific in the voice of God and Nelson Mandela. (I actually checked the English subtitles, hoping that they would perhaps be based on the original French soundtrack, but no: they were just the same words Freeman was reading. In fact, the French subtitles also matched Freeman's narration, so maybe the French were equally anthropomorphic, and the English narrative is an accurate translation. Seems as if I read differently sometime, but I might be thinking of another film.)

In a heat, in a sulk

2012-01-20T19:50:00.001-05:00

Shame

Crit

First off, is it just me, or is that a really big cock?

If Brandon (Michael Fassbender) were a food addict, he'd weigh about 800 pounds; if he were an alcoholic, he'd be a sixpack-for-breakfast guy; if he were a compulsive gambler, . . . well, hold that thought.

As it is, Brandon craves coming. He knows nothing about how to love, and he especially knows nothing about how to love his sister (Carey Mulligan), who is--as his partnership choices and his dysfunctions and his fraught relationship with her make clear--the one person he wants to love in the worst way. What he knows how to do is to fuck, and to wank, and while we see no proof, he gives compelling oral testimony that he knows how to give compelling oral testimony.

It's all hideously joyless, of course. And the climatic compulsively self-destructive sequence reminded me of nothing so much as another filmic portrayal of addiction, The Gambler. No, not the know-when-to-hold-'em-know-when-to-fold-'em Gambler, the 1974 picture starring James Caan. It has been a long time, so I may not have the details exactly right, but according to my recollection of the climactic scene in that one, Caan's character, having gambled and lost everything, gambles all he has left by bursting into a Harlem brothel and shouting racist invective. Brandon's self-immolation is perhaps not as foolproof, but it's just as sad.

One final random note: want to make clear that a character is an asshole? Have him make some remark about "elevator music," then let your audience realize that he's talking about Coltrane.

Trailers

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen--Two of our prettiest people, Emily Blunt and Ewan McGregor, in an inspiring story of faith, hope, and blah blah blah.
Moonrise Kingdom--Gotta admit, the start of the trailer, with its budding preadolescent romance, made me think "too cutesy." Then they said the magic word: Wes Anderson. Roman Coppola cowrote the screenplay with Anderson, and the cast includes Bill Murray (of course), Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Bruce Willis in what looks like one of those roles he's good at . . . need I go on? A big hell yeah.
Jeff Who Lives at Home--Looks very, very possible: slacker brother, asshole brother, and a mother who looks like Susan Sarandon. Good cast, written and directed by the Duplass brothers.

Saints' day

2012-01-15T23:59:00.219-05:00

MLK weekend M4

It's unusual to encounter the word "hagiography" in two reviews in a single Friday Times, and even more unusual for me to go see both films thus characterized. As I said my good-byes on my way out of work that day, I told some of my colleagues, "Do something to honor Dr. King this weekend," which was sort of a joke and sort of not, and while I can't claim to have given the birthday boy any thought in framing my itinerary, it's undeniable that his spirit is present in half the films I saw--and even his image in one of them.

La Promesse (1996)

IFC

Igor is no saint (though he does share with Lula an apprenticeship as a machinist)--the first thing we see him do is steal a wallet from a customer at the gas station where he works, and he is clearly and uncomplainingly on his way to becoming his father, a construction contractor and slumlord who exploits his illegal immigrants/tenants perhaps slightly less that some such exploiters. But when one worker is fatally injured in a jobsite accident and extracts from him the titular promise--to take care of the wife and infant son he has just brought from their native Burkina Faso--Igor takes his responsibilities to heart, even at the expense of his complicated but loving relationship with Roger.

The film rises about its clichéd deathbed-promise premise on the the performances of Jérémie Renier as the adolescent Igor, Olivier Gourmet as his myopic father, and Assita Ouedraogo as the fiercely determined widow (whose widowhood is concealed from her).

Lula, o Filho do Brasil (Lula, the son of Brazil)

Quad

Not a documentary, but documentarish, as Stephen Colbert might say, this is a straight-line, episodic account of the rise of Luiz Inácio da Silva from the poverty first of the Brazilian back country and then of São Paulo to national prominence as a union activist, though it ends before his unlikely ascendancy to the presidency of the country and his brilliant tenure in that office.

He is depicted in saintly terms, but the brighter halo is worn--and arguably the central role of the fictionalized account borne--by his mother, Lindu (Glória Pires, a veteran of Brazilian TV). If Lula is, per the subtitle, Brazil's son, by the transitive principle his mother is Brazil, and Brazil could hardly ask for a more positive embodiment. When Lindu dies, the story is over.

Jodaeiye Nader az Simin (A separation)

FF

No one and everyone is a saint in this extraordinary tale of moral complexity and personal tribulation: Simin's (Leila Hatami) imperative is to remove her 11-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, in a heartbreakingly perfect performance) from Iran (why is not made explicit, but the implication is that it is to escape the theocratic system of whose machinations we get more than a glimpse); Nader's (Peyman Moadi) is to care for his Alzheimer's-muddled father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi); these irreconcilable differences are the basis for divorce proceedings neither wants. So the story is impossible even before the woman Nader hires to care for his father leaves him tied to the bed for what we later learn was a medical emergency, and Nader as a result pushes her, she falls and miscarries, and each side sues the other in the shari'a courts.

Brutally painful and profoundly beautiful--the sort of film that makes you wish for a magic wand to wave and make everything turn out OK for everyone. But that's not going to happen, as the excruciatingly long final shot makes clear: we watch Simin and Nader wait to learn the results of the story's final Sophie's choice, Termeh's announcement of which parent she will live with.

Sing Your Song

IFC

Harry Belafonte has many virtues, but modesty is perhaps not the most prominent. It would be wrong to say that he takes credit for popularizing King and the civil rights movement, or that he claims to have sprung Nelson Mandela from Robben Island, or even that he believes that he ended hunger with "We Are the World," but it's probably fair to say he'd be disinclined to concede a greater role to anyone else.

Still, the man has been on the right side of just about every question in his three-quarters of a century, and he has given literal and figurative voice to his rightness, and if he wants to crow, well, he has earned the crowing.

The film itself is much stronger in the first half, showing his seemingly logical evolution from concerned entertainer to activist. After the terrible events of 1968--the assassinations of King and Bobby Kennedy, the self-destruction of the Democratic Party in Chicago--chronology becomes scrambled and activism becomes a bit of a smorgasbord, but never is there any hint that Belafonte's motives are not pure. And the fight goes on, now on behalf of children in prison. Lula's mother taught him, we are told, never to give up. Belafonte's mother had much more ambition for her son: to wake up every day with an agenda for making right something that is wrong.

Trailers

Crazy Horse--Just read a feature about this in the Times: Frederick Wiseman's latest documentary, about the legendary Paris strip club. Hell, yeah!
This Is Not a Film--A film about a film that can't be made by banned Irani filmmaker Jafar Panahi. Yes.
Gianni e le donne (The salt of life)--Looks like a charming sequel to Pranzo di ferragosto.
How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?--Potentially interesting architecture doc.
La guerre est déclarée (Declaration of war)--Love, parenthood, and cancer.
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth--The broken promises of urban renewal in St. Louis's most notorious project.

A Philadelphia/Delray Beach story

2012-01-14T22:16:00.000-05:00

In Her Shoes

(2005)

I believe I saw a sneak preview of this, and here was my initial reaction:

Guaranteed Oscar nominations (and all well deserved) for the film, Hanson, and Collette, and I’m giving the Best Supporting Actress statuette right now to Shirley MacLaine—and I say that as someone who has never been a Shirley MacLaine fan. Diaz is also excellent, but the Academy will never take seriously someone who appears in so much of the film in panties and T-shirt.

None of that happened, of course (well, except for the Academy not taking Diaz seriously), and having screened it for the second time since, I'm still at a loss to explain why: it is a touching portrait of sisterhood, with its mutual love and mutual jealousy, and a painfully real portrayal of one sister's belated growing up and of both sisters' rocky road to self-love. And the story of reunion with their lost grandmother, which could easily have seemed extraneous, finds a place in the heart of everything. One of my favorite films of the millennium. What the hell did win Oscars that year? Oh, please. The supporting actress field was solid 1 through 5, but the winner was the least impressive of the nominees to me, and I'd put MacLaine's performance up against any of them. Best Actress, on the other hand, was a bit of a joke: with the possible exception of Felicity Huffman, Colette was better than any of them. Best Picture, meanwhile, went to what got my award for Most Overrated. Shoes was definitely robbed.

The philodendron story

2012-01-13T23:13:00.000-05:00

Desk Set

(1957)

Have you ever wondered whether every bottle of champagne opened in a movie has either been agitated or stored at 80 degrees? I weep when I see all that precious bubbly fluid wasted.

This is not Kate's best cinematic champagne buzz, but it's not bad, and like her best, it involves flirtation with the "wrong" man, except that since this one is played by Spence, and there's no Cary Grant equivalent, there's never any doubt that he's really Mr. Right, once all the confusion about whether the huge computer he's moving into the Reference Department that Bunny runs at the Federal Broadcasting Network (you know: in the old FBN Building, overlooking Rockefeller Plaza) is going to cost Bunny and her staff of 3 their jobs. Perfectly benign, perfectly forgettable, and once I realized that the 2½-hour time slot was just because I recorded it back when I would still take something from commercial-riddled AMC, the 103-minute actual running time was about right, too. (Yes, your math is correct: 103 minutes of movie, 47 minutes of nonmovie.)

We come in peace, and to jam

2012-01-08T20:59:00.000-05:00

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

(1977)

OK, that is, I believe, three chances I've given this film over the years to enchant me, to enthrall me, to delight me. More than any of those, it bores me. Well, occasionally Richard Dreyfuss amused me, and it was fun to see Bob Balaban with hair, and Melinda Dillon distracted me with those "I know her--what is her name" self-queries, until it turned out at the end that her name was completely unfamiliar (though IMBd has just reminded me why she looks so familiar: she has a small but important role in Magnolia). Anyway, I don't think it's ever happening for me with this one; I give up.

It's only a paper moon

2012-01-07T21:43:00.000-05:00

eXistenZ

(1999)

Felt like another hit of Jennifer Jason Leigh after last night's flick, another shot of David Cronenberg after last week's A Dangerous Method, and, I guess, another dose of York Square nostalgia, also after last night's.

I commented last night that I was surprised by how little of Kansas City I remembered from my first screening, and tonight I was even more surprised, because I felt like I remembered this one pretty well. What I did remember--a recollection so vivid that it overpowered the rest, I guess--was the weird Cronenbergian sexual penetration-as-game participation trope. But there's a lot beyond that that's weird and interesting, in a thoroughly comic booky nonsensical way. Which I mean as a compliment, incidentally.

Got this as part of a 3-day freebie of Showtime's group of channels.

Loyalties

2012-01-07T19:14:00.000-05:00

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Crit

OK, I think I get most of it, but this demands as much unwaveringly intent attention as anything I've seen since, I guess, Inception. Except, of course, that this takes place in a completely different sort of frighteningly surreal world than that one did. One thing I did come away certain of: Gary Oldman is better than I've ever given him credit for.

Trailers

Being Flynn--Great cast (including MFW Julie) and Paul Weitz to write and direct, but it's one of those son-in-search-of-father things, so the schmaltz potential is high.
Safe--Jason Statham protects a little girl from violent bad people; need I say more?

Sax and violence

2012-01-06T22:24:00.000-05:00

Kansas City

(1996)

Astonishing how little I remembered of this movie that I saw (at the York Square Cinema, RIP) when it was new, less than 16 years ago--and I certainly didn't remember liking it this much. Tempted not to deaccession it, but with a free sample of Showtime for the next couple of days, I need to free some space on my DVR hard drive.

This may be one of the best concert movies ever, with '90s jazz stars playing '30s jazz giants; the highlight is an extended tenor shootout between Craig Handy as Coleman Hawkins and Joshua Redman as Lester Young. James Carter, Ron Carter, Don Byron, Olu Dara, and Geri Allen (yes, even a woman!) are also in the Hey-Hey Club jam session--one hell of a soundtrack.

Oh, and what distinguishes this from other great concert films is that there's a narrative plot attached, a Stockholm-syndromed kidnapping of a politician's wife (the wonderful Miranda Richardson) by the wife (the equally wonderful Jennifer Jason Leigh) of a petty crook who had made the mistake of pissing off the city's black crime boss played by Harry Belafonte (I think this is the only acting I've ever seen him do, but I'd pay to see him again).

Brilliantly inevitable climax, but can someone explain to me how the scane that proceeds from the film's final gunshot makes any sense?

Career opportunities

2012-01-01T17:25:00.000-05:00

Sleeping Beauty

Crit

Hey, wait a minute: this isn't the scary Disney movie of my youth! In fact, while I haven't seen the entire Disney oeuvre, I'm pretty sure none of his heroines ever made money by taking a soporific and lying naked in bed while creepy old men do almost whatever they wish ("We have one rule," says the not-particularly-wicked [contextually speaking] queen of the institution: "no penetration.") So as I say, it's not a scary Disney movie, but it's pretty scary nonetheless, not least in its presentation of a college student who is on the one hand so desperate for money that she works a couple of conventional jobs, assists in a lab experiment that provides the film's first stomach-churning unpleasantness, and apparently (we see no money exchanged, but I pray she wouldn't fuck such awful boors for free) turns straightforward tricks, but on the other hand has such contempt for that money that she burns a $100 (Aussie) note from her first big payday from the Eyes Wide Shut-type house.

The film's main value for me was in illustrating that while I'm of an age where I have some regrets about various opportunities that never presented themselves to me, at lest I don't feel bad about not having the kind of money that would make it possible for me to slaver over a beautiful naked zombie. I'm not as sick a fuck as I might be!

After midnight

2011-12-31T23:59:00.142-05:00

A whore and a horse invited me to a final screening of 2011, but they'll have to be content with being my first 2 of 2012, if that. It feels as if it was a disappointing year at the movies, but I haven't started going back over my posts, so I guess we'll confirm or deny that together. One good thing: I got back to Manhattan a couple of times, and if neither M was one for the ages, it felt good paying $12.50 at IFC and getting falafel and bird's nest in the evening gap. The vast majority of my New York time in recent years has been spent in Queens, and I don't regret that (obviously, or I'd stop going to so many Mets games), but in what's more or less a zero-sum game, that means a cinematic loss.

On the other hand, so many films that back in the day would not have been available except in Manhattan (or on Netflix) now come Relatively Cheap and Incredibly Close, so it's a positive zero sum.

Anyway, I rather like the way I did last year's roundup, when I "propose[d] to judge only films of whatever age that I saw for the first time in 2010 about which I expect someday to say, as codgerdom eats ever more of my brain, 'They don't make 'em like that anymore!'" so let's do the same, except for an annual increment. I'll say before we start that Midnight in Paris was my favorite film of the year (interesting in light of my final paragraph of my 2010 roundup), though probably not the one I'd call the best. That would be . . . Melancholia, maybe? Let's see . . .

Started the year with a Netflix stream of a film I was a fool to miss when it was in the theaters, discovering that Up is just as good as everyone said and more It's a Wonderful Life-ish than anyone had told me. A very different sort of wonderful came from Blue Valentine; I'm currently waiting for hernia surgery, and the kick that film provided produced that sort of feeling. Next a wonderful disc double feature, in lieu of M#, of Fatih Akin's Im Juli and the doucumentarish film embrace of the best L.A. punk band ever, X: The Unheard Music. While we're at it, let's raise one more glass to Pete Postlethwaite.

February: Cedar Rapids was neither great nor particularly memorable, but it gave me some of my best cinematic fun of the year.

A wonderful double feature during the traditional dead zone of March: the Inception-ish The Adjustment Bureau and the trippliy allusive animated Western Rango. In También la lluvia we got some good unabashed lefty anti-imperialism, and then in Copie confirme, a good talky French existential mystery. Even more surprising, a convincing and moving portrait of human virtue, Des hommes et des dieux.

Into April, and Cary Fukunaga's literate and incisive adaptation of Jane Eyre, starring the suddenly ubiquitous (not that there's anything wrong with that!) Mia Wasikowska. A very different sort of young woman on her own, Hanna, was a very pleasant surprise, putting me in mind a bit of Lola rennt. Best thing I can say about Bill Cunningham New York I've already said: "One of those films on a subject in which I have no interest but which I couldn't have enjoyed more if it were about a jazz-playing, fiction-writing baseball star." Meek's Cutoff was Seinfeld without the laughs: a show about nothing.

My only regret about Cave of Forgotten Dreams was that I didn't get to see Werner Herzog's documentary about paleolithic cave art in 3D. Incendies: a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

Seriously? Not until June did Midnight in Paris open here? Meaning that even though my copy came in the mail a few days ago, if I adhere to my guidelines, I have to wait 5 months to screen it again and see whether it's as delightful as I thought the first time? Anyway, that's it for a two-month stretch during which I had fewer posts than a typical month. (And this June is going to be thin, too, since I'll be helping to make a movie!)

The Guard another in the category of far-from-great-but-great-fun. And that's it for August, so 2 candidates for the summer months.

[Excuse me: notwithstanding the time & date attached to this, it just became 2012, so I had to take a little break to open my Widder C & establish that, yes, I still like her a lot. Yes, that's right: I'm ringing in the new year by blogging. Pathetic.]

September: Not sure Contagion was one of the year's best, but it may have been the scariest, and that counts for something. Higher Ground: Vera Farmiga directs, smartly.

October is, of course, baseball's second-most-sacred month, and Moneyball may be one of the half-dozen or so best baseball movies ever, not that the competition is AL East-ish. And what would late October be without something to scare the bejesus out of us? Take Shelter gives us none; my favorite of Jessica Chastain's 15 movies this year.

A little too late (in New Haven, anyway) for a Halloween creepout came Almodóvar's La piel que habito. And then, from another of my favorite very foreign directors, von Trier's Melancholia, for my money a more interesting cosmic mindfuck than . And then there's one of my favorite very unforeign directors, Alexander Payne, and The Descendants; I'm already impatient for his next film; I figure 2015. And of the 7 films I saw in 2 trips to Manhattan this year, the weird punkish noir Rid of Me was my favorite.

And because it came out in December, I was thinking of the misanthropic Young Adult as a great double feature with Bad Santa, but Rid of Me would make a nice parley too. Finally, I won't say a word about The Artist.

But let's do a list, not anything as murky as "best," but a top 5 films I expect to return to:

Midnight in Paris
The Artist
Take Shelter
Moneyball
Higher Ground

In the meantime, happy 2011, happier 2012.

Georgia on my mind

2011-12-30T21:17:00.000-05:00

The Gold Rush

(1925)

OK, no review needed, but this is a rare instance when I have the chance to perform a useful service: if you rent the DVD from Netflix or from any store that has the Chaplin Collection edition, do NOT rent the main disc. Instead, get the bonus disc: that is where you'll find the original silent version. The one on the first disc features an unsilenceable and annoying narration--never mind that it's by Chaplin himself, it is nonetheless unnecessary crap.

I don't know what you get if you stream it from Nf, but I suspect the worst.

Mass transit, authority

2011-12-29T23:55:00.185-05:00

Marked-down interholiday M3

As you know, I like to give logistical tips to readers contemplating their own excessive cineManhattan trips, so here's what I can pass along from yesterday: if you think that the Thursday between Sunday holidays will be a sort of lull time, affording you elbow room on the train and a vacant seat for your coat and hat and backpack at the theaters, well, uh, no. True, my 1:05 show in Cinema Village's tiny theater 2 was not packed, but the 3:50 show in CV's spacious theater 3 was uncomfortably so, and my 7:45 at IFC was nonexistent, for me, at least: my first ever SOLD OUT on the ticket machine.

I had intended to see Porco Rosso, but being denied was just a disappointment, not a disaster, as the nearby Film Forum had 3 worthy candidates at 8 or 8:20. In retrospect I wish I'd opted for a 2nd FF screening of Alain Resnais' weirdly wonderful L'Année dernière à Marienbad or my first-ever big-screen viewing of The Gold Rush, but that M lesson was learned long ago: every yes means one or more nos. I did at least get to discuss Marienbad with a couple of other lobby riders, one of whom had seen it a few days ago and was about to see it again for what she calculated was her 5th or 6th time ever. She insisted that the film demands intense, constant thought, while I perversely suggested just the opposite, that it better rewards passive acceptance of all its absurdities and self-contradictions. Anyway . . .

Miss Minoes

CV

I expected this to be whimsical, but I didn't realize that it's actually a '60s-Disney-type kids romance--that it might be something to give the grandkids, notwithstanding the occurrence of the word "shit" in the dubbed-over-the-Dutch soundtrack, including once from the third-banana little girl. I'll stack up my resistance to foul language against anyone's, but the word is really shocking in a context that is otherwise as G-ratable as can be.

The premise predates Ovid--cat metamorphoses into (extremely cute) human woman--but with an eco spin, the trigger being waste from the deodorant plant of the local sweet-smelling, foul-souled capitalist. In Disney style, what has to be done is (1) exposure of the villain and undermining of his villainous scheme and (2) marriage of the odd couple. But why it works is that we also have what I'm tempted to call a cats of thousands, except that it's really only a dozen or so: real cats with real acting chops. Resist them if you can; I couldn't.

Margaret

CV

Spoiled Upper West Side teen distracts bus driver and causes fatal accident, and her guilt and compulsion to make the driver acknowledge his own dominates every one of the 135 or so remaining minutes of the 150 total. No, wait, that would be a lot duller and less truthful movie. In fact, what happens is that while the accident is ever-present at some level of the psychological substrata of Lisa (Anna Paquin; "Margaret" is from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem read in her English class), she also is preoccupied by school, by sex, by getting high, by getting high and having sex with schoolmates, by getting high in the presence of and maybe having sex with teachers, by her absent father (writer-director Kenneth Lonergan, who gave himself a similarly feckless authority figure to play in his wonderful first film, You Can Count on Me), by her mother whom she often wishes absent.

It is, in short, a big picture about a big moment in a life that already has an unbearable amount of bigness about it. Neither Lisa nor anyone else in the film (well, OK, two exceptions, I guess: Jean Reno as mother Joan's suitor and Jake O'Connor as Lisa's) tries to grab our affection, and so we like them for their prickliness as much as anything (exhibit A: the remarkable Jeannie Berlin as the accident victim's best friend, Emily).

But the big picture has many small pleasures, too: Matthew Broderick channeling that bad teacher who knew no other way of dealing with a provocative but wrong-headed student remark than by declaring the wrongness without giving any credit for the ingeniousness; Mark Ruffalo as the bus driver, cast as villain by Lisa and Emily but as yet another victim by Lonergan; even Renée Fleming, who gives a convincing performance as a Met soprano.

The film opened and closed in a week in the fall to critical and popular resistance, but late in the year critics started to rethink, and the film got a second life when it appeared on some top ten lists. I understand both the resistance and the reassessment. I doubt that this will ever join You Can Count on Me in my DVD library, but I'm glad to have given it 2½ hours of cramped moviegoing--it was as much work as play, but it was rewarding work.

El Sicario: Room 164

FF

My initial plan was for whimsy on either side of the grit of Margaret, but instead I shifted to a quasi-documntary confession of a drug runner who graduated to enforcer and hit man. What's interesting about this is what the filmmakers do to try to make interesting a static disquisition in a motel room. One obvious choice would have been reenactments of the brutal crimes, but that would have risked accusations of torture porn and raised questions about the intent.

So what they do instead is have the actor (I presume) playing the sicario doodle compulsively on an artist's sketchpad, jotting outlines of steps involved in training, for example, or illustrating the proper gunshot pattern for the assassination of the driver of a car, or mapping the logistics of a kidnapping. He is no less compulsive about conserving the pages he's filling at fever pitch--more than once he starts to flip 2 pages at once, but makes a point of turning one page back lest a page be wasted. Odd.

And then Jesus came.

Trailers

Angels Crest--They do? That missing apostrophe in place names always annoys me. Good cast, including Elizabeth McGovern, always welcome.
Once upon a Time in Anatolia--Yeah, OK, maybe--but why is IMDb so freakin' slow?

And back again

2011-12-28T16:16:00.000-05:00

Lord of the Rings: part III, Return of the King

(2003)

OK, without a doubt the big question on my mind after screening this is How long had my subwoofer been turned off? followed closely by How could I have watched 9 of the trilogy's 11 hours, complete with the Epic Battle Scenes that the MPAA card promised in explaining the PG-13 rating, without noticing that my subwoofer was silent?

Otherwise, my judgments of earlier screenings remain unchanged: notwithstanding the comic bookishly wooden dialogue, the theatrical version was an incredible achievement and the extended version is even better. If I had 11 hours to spare more often, I might come back even more frequently--but with the damn subwoofer on from the start, please!

And it was your world

2011-12-28T00:17:00.000-05:00

The Concert for Bangladesh

(1972)

Oh, right: this was the time of All Things Must Pass, which in the original vinyl edition, which I stubbornly treated to as if it were a Beatles album, there was about one listenable side out of six (including a jam disc that even I couldn't listen to more than a few times). Fortunately, either George himself or the director chose mostly the good songs, and in the one exception, "Beware of Darkness," one verse's worth of Leon Russell spices it up nicely.

When Russell or Billy Preston or Ringo gets the spotlight, we're definitely in the B-zone, but then Dylan comes on for 5 terrific songs. I've never seen him live but have heard that he's mumbly and surly, but he was neither here--the adjective I'd choose would be godlike, and I mean that in a good way.

One annoying bit: that old fake encore after the musicians have left the stage before playing one song that everyone in the joint knows they're gonna hear, in this case the theme song for the whole gig.

One pleasant reminder: that Eric Clapton, the consummate team player, has the highest ratio of attention merited to attention demanded in the history of rock & roll, if not the history of music.

Valkyrie

2011-12-27T18:50:00.070-05:00

A Dangerous Method

Crit

Distractions for my never-analyzed and not-recently-therapied psyche:

Thoughts of the popular Freud action figure.
Aragorn's surprising career change.
The cigar.
Keira Knightley's Russian accent.
Keira Knightly's bustier.
The simulated violence perpetrated on Knightley's character, Sabina Spielrein, Jung's patient > colleague > lover, as a creepy prelude to the actual violence I'll see momentarily perpetrated on Lisbeth Salander.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Crit

OK, getting older does have a few advantages; for example, even though I saw the original less than 20 months ago, all of the critical plot twists were almost brand new again. Not sure this was really necessary, but Fincher, Mara, and Craig make a revisit worthwhile. One thing I was very pleased to see: that they didn't think it necessary to move it from Sweden, to set it, say, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. One thing I could have done without (spoiler alert!): Lisbeth's conventional heartbreak at the end--was that in the Swedish film or the novel?

Trailers

The Iron Lady--I'd seen the teaser several times, but this is the first full (overfull, very long) trailer I've seen, and it filled me with trepidation: am I still going to be able to despise Margaret Thatcher once I've spent two hours with her as portrayed by Meryl Streep?
Contraband--Yet another you've-got-to-come-back-into-the-outlaw-life-lest-we-kill-your-wife-and-kid pix. Speaking of unnecessary.
Rock of Ages--Possible: anything that has Alec Baldwin as a fat old club manager and Catherine Zeta-Jones doing musical numbers can't be all bad.
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance--Oh, for the love of god, someone please put a stop to Nic Cage.

One . . . ah . . . thing to rule them all

2011-12-26T21:46:00.000-05:00

Lord of the Rings: part II, The Two Towers

(2002)

Sex! Du-uuuh! How can someone as sex-obsessed as I not have gotten it before that it's all about sex? I mean, I've always noticed (how could you not?) that the most menacing persistent image, Sauron's eye, is a huge pudendal cleft, but until tonight it had never dawned on me just how much of the trilogy's imagery is devoted to the one ring being teasingly caressed by a finger or by a dagger or sword or other substitute phallus. In fact, to be indelicate, more than "sex," it's all about pussy, notwithstanding that the most enduring love relationship is straight (as it were) out of Leslie Fielder's homoerotic playbook ("Come Back to the Raft, Frodo, Honey"?).

What a relief to have puzzled that out. And speaking of sex, I expect the majority of fanboy nerds fall in love with Cate Blanchett's Galadriel, with the more callow falling for Liv Tyler's Arwen. And there's nothing wrong with that pointy-eared pair, mind you--I don't want to be accused of anti-elvish prejudice--but for me, there's no competition with Miranda Otto's Eowyn. (Incidentally, apart from those three, is there a woman who gets 5 lines of dialogue in the whole freakin' trilogy?)

One zing to fool us all

2011-12-25T23:03:00.000-05:00

Lord of the Rings: part I, Fellowship of the Ring

(2001)

Not until after I'd decided on this as my Xmas-night watch did it occur to me that it had been a Jewish Xmas movie originally, 10 years ago today. That day was notable for not being solitary, and it was an altogether enjoyable movie-and-Chinese day, until it turned into one of the weirdest unpleasant experiences I've ever had. Fortunately, that didn't happen until nearly a year later, and no, much as I would like to give you the details, I just can't. I'd tell you what I learned from it if I'd actually learned anything from it--all I really took away from it is that any friendship that can be spoiled without your having any idea what really happened must not have been a friendship that really needs to be mourned.

Oh, so the movie--I've seen it often enough that it's starting to make sense to me, which I'm not sure is a good thing.

Sound and fury

2011-12-25T20:03:00.025-05:00

The Artist

Crit

Yes, that was a fine choice for the Xmas movie: mostly Singin' in the Rain, but darkened by A Star Is Born, eloquent in its silence, brilliant in its few sounds.

An elderly woman in my audience--perhaps sinking into dementia, perhaps just overexuberant and incapable of allowing so much to pass without spoken commentary--twice shouted out a comment, first, "That's quite a dog" and later, when talkies, marital strife, and the stock market crash have conspired to undo George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), "I wish I could make this stop." I'm sure all the rest of us shared the hope that we'd hear no more from her, but no one could argue with the sentiments. That Uggie is as good a dog as has been in the movies since those two four-letter '30s dogs that make regular appearances in the Times crossword puzzle.

Trailers

Albert Nobbs--Oh, my, yes!
W.E.--Oh, my, no!

You're a mean one

2011-12-24T23:59:00.024-05:00

Scrooge

(1951)

I watch this every Christmas Eve, but only after watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and this year I noticed something about that shorter version of A Christmas Carol that I'd never gotten before: for someone who presumably avoids this society he finds noxious, the Grinch knows an awful lot about the Whos' Christmas celebrations, even down the the games and musical instruments they receive as gifts and the foods served at their banquet. Does that not suggest that he has always subconsciously yearned to join the festivities? Which makes this a significantly different story from that of Scrooge, who has apparently been content for years to confine himself to his mercantile world.

Anyway, "perfect": big word. It's not a word I'd apply to my favorite film of all time, much as I love it. But it's hard to find anything about this film to cavil about. OK, here's one thing: I'm a little uncomfortable when the redeemed Ebeneezer teases Bob Crachit on Boxing Day, pretending that he's about to sack the poor guy before revealing that, no, in fact everything is going to be better. For the underclass, jokes about unemployment are distinctly unfunny. But otherwise, I can't think offhand of a single moment I'd change. And it sure cleans our my tearducts!

A stove boat

2011-12-23T23:17:00.001-05:00

Moby Dick

(2010)

Well, geez, how could I not watch this? But I wonder: is it even remotely possible to do the novel justice in 3 hours? Probably not, but before a minute of this attempt passed, I had a pretty good idea it wasn't happening, when Ishmael, a liberal by 1851 standards, but hardly an abolitionist, frees Pip from his master. It seems that the makers of this film were under the impression that the novel has insufficient humanity, so right after the Ishmael-as-abolitionist scene, we get some heartwarming homelife with Ahab's wife (Gillian Anderson) and son. As the Pequod is weighing anchor, Mrs. A beseeches first mate Starbuck (Ethan Hawke), "Take care of him," and Starbuck answers, "I will"--this all inaudible but easily lipreadable, of course.

It's notable that the protagonist of the novel, he whom we call Ishmael, is played by an unknown (to me, at least), Charlie Cox, while the biggest names--William Hurt, Anderson, Hawke, and Eddie Marsan--play Ahab and those closest to him, his mate and his first two mates. Oh, and then there's Donald Sutherland for a minute as Father Mapple and former hobbit Billy Boyd for two minutes as Elijah. The best non-name is Raoul Trujillo, whose Queequeg is the closest we ever get to the spirit of the book.

Not surprisingly, the film is best when it takes its language directly from Melville; sadly, it does so only a dozen or so times, Hell, Ahab doesn't even get to fling his fatal harpoon to his wonderfully defiant last line.

[Next morning] Can't believe I forgot to mention the most inexplicable decision of the filmmakers, to promote the mutinous Lakeman Steelkilt from protagonist of a story Ishmael tells about another whaler to important character in a distracting Pequod subplot (and as a result to make the benign Stubb the Lakeman's malignant antagonist). Perhaps the strategy was to have something happen, because precious little does--the narrative is not quite PETA-friendly, but only one whale is killed--and yet when a barrel starts leaking, it is somehow still an enormous project to find the leak in one whale's worth of barreled spermaceti. Those misguided readers who don't like the novel sometimes complain that the action is too often interrupted by information about sperm whaling. Well, you'll learn little about whaling from this film, but that material isn't excised to the gain of action.

Seven veils

2011-12-22T20:28:00.023-05:00

Forgotten Silver

(1996)

Brilliant, if accidental, timing, watching this shortly after Hugo. That was fiction based on early cinema fact; this is convincing "documentary" about fictional early cinema. Knowing that it was a "mockumentary," I made a point of paying attention to when the first veil falls away: not until more than 7 minutes in, meaning that even attentive viewers would (or at least could) have been carried along for about one-seventh of the TV-slot film. And indeed, what's beautiful about this film is that it doesn't chuckle and pat itself on the back, like, say, This Is Spinal Tap (and don't get me wrong--I love that film). Instead, a young Kiwi filmmaker named Peter Jackson, who had by this time introduced us to Kate Winslet but not to Gollum, had the confidence to go with the soft sell: the film is funny, but not guffaw funny; it's smart funny, wise funny, with a reverence for what is being parodied. All young filmmakers with an impulse to try too hard should watch this and see what you get when you let your material lead you where it wants to go.

There's no place like home

2011-12-18T21:41:00.000-05:00

Meet Me in St. Louis

(1944)

A blood-curdling tale of parental abuse about a family whose father who wants to uproot them from St. Louis and pack them off to--shudder--New York! The most traumatized of the children acts out through acts of assault with baking goods, mass transit vandalism, and neigehomicide, but in the end, everyone muddles through somehow.

Vincente Minnelli directs his wife to be, taking great care not to let audiences forget her signature role from 5 years earlier: the central theme is the same, and several of Esther's lines (and Garland's readings of them) echo Miss Gale's--not least the final appreciation of the World's Fair, delivered with familiarly breathless wonder: "Right here where we live--right here in St. Louis!" Margaret O'Brien plays Esther's delinquent little sister and, like the ketchup the housekeeper is making at the start, cuts the cloying cuteness with enough vinegar to be digestible. And three of the songs--"The Boy Next Door," "The Trolley Song," and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"--have a rightful place on any collection of Garland's best.

One oddly ironic line: Mr. Smith early in the film jokes about quitting his job and pitching for the Baltimore Orioles. In 1903, when the character speaks, the Orioles were a minor league team, and that was still the case when the film was made. But if the film had been made 10 years later, that line would have been a cruel allusion to the American League team that had been the St. Louis Browns until moving east in 1953. What did Minnelli know? . . .

The horror

2011-12-16T23:00:00.000-05:00

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse

(1991)

Yeah, yeah, I really needed to use deaccession night to free some space on my DVR hard drive, but the problem is, Netflix won't stop sending me discs. I switched more than a week ago from 1-disc-at-a-time-unlimited to streaming only (same price, $7.99, so you can switch any time without paying more or having to wait 'til the end of a billing period), but since then they've twice sent me discs. And what am I gonna do, send 'em back unwatched? So it's theoretically a bonanza, as I'm getting twice the service I'm paying for, but practically speaking, it's not without its inconvenience--plus, I keep worrying that after the 10 days or whatever passes when I'm obliged to have returned the disc I'd just watched when I switched, they're going to try to charge me 20 bucks or whatever. As I've mentioned before, it's hard being me.

Anyway, life imitates art imitating madness in this documentary--much of the footage shot by Eleanor Coppola--on the making and near-unmaking of Apocalypse Now. It's mostly fascinating, but unsurprisingly, the most riveting section concerns the director's bout with despair over needing to film an ending that he has no clear plan for with an actor whose time on set is limited to 3 weeks (at $1 mil per), who doesn't understand who his character is supposed to be (in part because he has never read Heart of Darkness), and from whom, it develops, a performance can be coaxed only by allowing him to improvise on a series of thematic questions. If you take away nothing else from the film, you'll always be glad you've heard Brando say, "I swallowed a bug."

Oh, and it's also great fun to see little 4- and 6-year-old Sofia.

Maker's Mark

2011-12-16T19:37:00.029-05:00

Young Adult

Crit

In case you'd forgotten Monster, here's further evidence that Charlize Theron is not shy about playing ugly--ugly outside, but better yet, ugly to the core. This is like a quadruple episode of Seinfeld, with "no hugging, no learning." Well, some hugging, but it's not pretty. I also thought of another favorite TV series connection, to those moments when Homer gives Bart advice, but I don't want to say any more than that, because it's a wonderful moment just at the point when you fear that writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman are about to cop out. A beautiful, ugliful film.

Trailers

The Vow--Remember While You Were Sleeping?
Gone--Remember Amanda Seyfried's career?
The Lucky One--Remember The Notebook?
Titanic 3D--Remember Titanic?

Nothing?

2011-12-11T17:12:00.000-05:00

Dear Mr. Blab: no movies at all this weekend, even on DVD or DVR or streamed? Why, Santy, why?

It's complicated. But I'll be back next weekend, I promise--well, unless I get picked for a jury in a trial that goes long and gets me sequestered.

The gypsy in me

2011-12-04T21:32:00.000-05:00

Catch Me If You Can

(2002)

First saw this on the Christmas Day of its release, which, looking at the year, I realize was my first official postdivorce Christmas-as-a-pseudo-Jew Christmas (and I recall that the theater demographics for this Spielberg film gratifyingly reinforced the cliché I was embracing). Another first was that it was my introduction to Amy Adams, and seeing her yesterday in The Muppets helped to inspire this screening.

It remains a sad, funny film about fathers and sons and truth and consequences and the Yankees' pinstripes. A perfect holiday-season depression film, and a perfect holiday-season antidepression film as well.

Frog got legs

2011-12-04T18:10:00.000-05:00

The Muppets

NoHa

Guest blogger today, my best 10-year-old friend Jocelyn:

The Muppets is definitely on my top ten films of 2011 list, but not the first. While admittedly a great show overall, it had its moments. Amy Adams and Jason Segel fit the roles wonderfully [blabitorial note: I couldn't agree more!], and the plot is rich and appealing to children [and to grown-ups, as long as they're not too grown-up], but sometimes it felt like it should have been a little more fast-paced [yeah, I'm with her here, too]. For example, the song "Muppet or a Man" was beautifully written, sung wonderfully and played a prominent role in the film. But it occurred shortly after a very intense scene including the gangster-style oil miner (Chris Cooper), and then all of a sudden, you find Gary and Walter are singing this gorgeous tune, but the audience is not able to enjoy the scene as much as we might have been able to, because instead of fully enjoying the music, the whole theatre is hunched forward in their seats thinking, come on, let's cut to the chase! . . . but other than that slight annoyance, The Muppets is a great movie (ma na ma nop).

Man, this is job is easy when I can get somebody else I agree with 100% to write it--thanks, Jocelyn! The trailer blurbs are from cranky, cynical me.

Trailers

Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked--Golly, this looks like it could be the best Chipmunks movie yet!
The Secret World of Arrietty--A Studio Ghibli Borrowers movie; possibilities.
Brave--Pixar feminism; possibilities
Mirror Mirror: The Untold Adventures of Snow White--I can definitely get behind Julia Roberts as the wicked witch.
ParaNorman--Hey, I'm ready for anything that starts with those 9 letters and isn't another Paranormal Activity flick.

O.K.

2011-12-03T23:46:00.000-05:00

My Darling Clementine

(1946)

Tonight I got to wondering: what sort of Champagne you suppose they could get in Tombstone in 1882?

This may not be the best Western ever made, but it's certainly one of the most beautiful b/w ones. Then again, I'm not so sure it's not also the best.

It happened una notte

2011-12-02T23:09:00.000-05:00

Roman Holiday

(1953)

Reporter shields runaway heiress to protect his story, only to fall in love--yes, derivative and formulaic, but with Audrey Hepburn at her freshest (24 years old, in her first starring role), Gregory Peck doing his best to channel Gable, and Rome a natural as itself, you have to be pretty cranky to resist. Released in the year of my birth.

That old blonde magic

2011-12-02T20:03:00.000-05:00

My Week with Marilyn

Crit

Thoroughly unconvinced. Michelle Williams could make me believe her as Catherine the Great, Jesus Christ, or Moby Dick, but I never for a second believed her as Marilyn; it seemed an example of a great actor assaying the impossible--valiantly, perhaps as well as anyone could, but all in vain. At that she came much closer to the mark than Branagh's laughable Larry.

The best moments in the film come from actors playing people about whom I have no preconceived indelible image--Dame Judi as Dame Sybil (Thorndike), Zoë Wanamaker as Paula Strasberg, and about 2 minutes of Derek Jacobi as the protagonist's uncle, a librarian . . . at Windsor Castle. But the two legends seemed to be playacting at being legendary.

Trailers

One for the Money--Another cute-chick-with-a-gun flick; where does empowerment cross over into exploitation?
Wanderlust--Career intervention way past due for Jennifer Aniston, no?

Scurvy little spider

2011-11-27T21:15:00.007-05:00

It's a Wonderful Life

(1946)

Watched this early in the holiday season because I don't yet feel very holiday-ish, and I thought this might help (and after all, the first time I saw it, or most of it, in a couple of televised chunks, was on Thanksgiving Day not quite 30 years ago), and maybe it will turn out to have helped, but for now I'm distracted by the burning question: Where do Eustace and Tilly fit in?

Right, and then that's another whole issue: I'd noticed before that the third man at the building and loan is named Eustace, but I never noticed the name of the woman there until tonight, and that only after spying a desk nameplate reading "Matilda Bailey." So Eustace, Tilly? Coincidence? Probably not, probably a New Yorker joke by hip screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. But it provides a nice symmetry to the assumption that Bert the Cop and Ernie the cab driver are the sources of the Sesame Street characters' names.

Anyway, having wondered how the hell Tilly is related to George, I paid close attention to her thereafter and noticed that at least once she addresses Uncle Billy by that name, and at least once as just Billy--not proof that she's his niece, but pretty strong evidence that she's not his child. So, George and Harry's sister? Didn't seem particularly likely, but likelier than that there would be another brother of Peter and Billy who is invisible, especially since you could watch the film a dozen times or more and never realize that Tilly was a Bailey even if you caught that Tilly was Tilly.

So I paid close attention to the end credits, which list not only "Cousin Tilly" but also "Cousin Eustace." So as unlikely as the explanation is, it's apparently right. But how odd that the characters would be related but overlookably so, via someone of whose existence no other evidence survives.

Materials at hand

2011-11-26T23:59:00.187-05:00

So-good-to-be-back M5--er, no, 4

Think of me as a footballer, sidelined for 22 months with a bad hamstring tear. Would you expect me to go the full 90 minutes my first time back in the lineup? So I prefer to think of my glass as 4/5 full rather than 1/5 empty; I prefer not to employ the word "abortive." Yet it remains undeniable that I have for the first time I can remember been ejected from a movie theater.

Before that the return-from-long-injury metaphor works pretty well, too: not my best day on the pitch--spent a lot of the day just sort of getting my feet wet or getting my feet planted firmly on the ground or doing whatever else clichéd thing with my feet that you can think of. Started with a perfectly ordinary film, then advanced to one a little more interesting.

But that footballer, if he (or she!) is a good one, whose return was worth waiting out the 22 months' absence, will show one flash of brilliance in his (or her!) 75 minutes, and so this M4-not-5 showed one flash of brilliance.

In all, a good if not profoundly wonderful day at the movies.

Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey

IFC

Didn't really set out to go heavy on the documentaries, it just worked out this way. But I have to say, I really don't get the fuss over this one. OK, yeah, moderately interesting story of a nice guy who fell in love with puppets watching Sesame Street and Captain Kangaroo, cut up his father's fur-lined coat to make his own first puppet, and went on to voice the most annoying muppet ever, but it was more like something I'd have ungrudgingly have devoted 15 minutes worth of New York Times Magazine reading to. I fail to see what's special enough about the guy's story to earn 76 minutes of my Manhattan movie day. We do get a little about how his Elmo obsession cost him a wife and endangered his relationship with his daughter, and if the filmmakers had had the guts to go darker, that might have been an interesting story. Might have been.

Garbo: El espía (Garbo: The spy)

Quad

I guess if I knew my World War II history better, I'd be familiar with the Catalonian spy whose campaign of disinformation was largely responsible for the German leadership's belief that the Allied landing in Normandy was merely a feint to draw attention away from the main invasion in Pas de Calais. That is a great story, and a critical event that helped ensure that the war would not drag on for another several years.

But the incredible part of Juan/Joan Pujols García's espionage career came earlier, when, his offer of service rebuffed repeatedly by British intelligence, he set himself up in Lisbon and fed the German's fiction after fiction--all based on the bigger fiction that he was transmitting his intelligence from London. This was something like 18 months of reporting on a city he'd never seen, and getting away with it. Wtf?

Rid of Me

CV

Filmmakers have gotten a lot of mileage out of starting in medias res (OK, Paul?) and in extremis, then taking us back to a time of calm that seems to have little to do with what we've seen, showing us how we got from A to Q, and taking us past it. Writer/director James Westby works it brilliantly here, as we start with a very bad girl we don't yet know to be Meris making a stunningly aggressive gesture of contempt toward a plain-vanilla blonde who crosses her path at the supermarket.

Cut to a conventional Meris conventionally in love with a conventionally hunky husband, relocating with him, after he has suffered an entrepreneurial disaster, back in his Oregon hometown, where he has a support system of assholes who not only decline to welcome the new wife into the clique but actively campaign for reignition of an old flame.

The "how we get there" is as sane and logical as the "there" is dangerous and over the top, and the accessory bad girl who leads Meris to badness is the sort of character who makes me want to put the film on pause and call my daughter immediately to tell her that even though this will never come to Champaign, she needs to do whatever is necessary to see it. And that's why I make Manhattan movie trips!

Urbanized

IFC

I take back my vote in the recent mayoral election; I want New Haven's mayor to be that guy from Bogotá who talks about the lack, in any constitution he knows of, of the right to park your car. There's nothing surprising or revolutionary here--well, unless of course all the good ideas about city planning we've been hearing now for a couple of decades were actually implemented--now that would be revolution to believe in. But it's still a smart bit of preaching to the choir--easily the best of the 3 documentaries I saw on the day.

Trailers

Oh, but wait: you're still waiting to hear about my ejection, aren't you--my cinematic red card, as it were. Well, this is a fair place to explain, because it was about trailers and the other ancillary crap that IFC habitually shows before its features. You might ask what made me think that I could get from a 6:05 film with a running time of 83 minutes to a 7:45 one, even if the theater doors were literally two steps distant, but here's the thing: I might not have made that assumption and bought both tickets at once but for a bizarre phenomenon that governed my first 3 films, including the opener at IFC. Before Urbanized I had not seen a single trailer! Fluke or new downtown policy, it seemed to suggest that I could safely assume no more than 17 minutes of preliminaries and comfortably slide next door to Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog's death penalty documentary, in time to find a seat.

But in the event, the end titles of Urbanized started rolling at 7:48, and even violating my stay-to-the-end policy, I found the next-door theater packed: the guy why went in ahead of me got one of the 3 empty seats, a second was covered with plastic to indicate brokenness or other condition of inutility, and that left me the seat by the wall in the second row, meaning that in order to reach a location that would result in a stiff neck after 108 minutes (well, plus all the preliminary crap, only 3 minutes of which I'd missed) I was going to have to negotiate (gimpy ankled) a row of maybe 16 backpacks and winter coats (because even though it was 60 much of the day, people do wear winter coats to the movie theater--the fuck's up with that?).

Screw that, I said, and instead I sat on an aisle step most of the way back toward the projection room, squeezing tight against the wall to minimize fire-exit obstruction, but pretty much knowing that someone would come along soon to tell me I had to take either the ostensibly available seat or a refund. Well, I thought, Herzog's documentaries have a pretty fair recent history of making it to New Haven, and I'm really not much into watching under these condition, and moreover, I have to admit, I'm exhausted. So when The Man came, I took the 13 bucks and the F train.

By the way, when I finally did start to see trailers, the first was one I'd already seen at the Criterion, for Pina, and the second was for some old seasonal Capra chestnut starring Jimmy Stewart. But then finally:

Tonari no Totoro (My neighbor Totoro)--Took me a while to figure out whether this is one of the Studio Ghibli films I've seen; looks enchanting, in the stoned anime way (oh, and also looks very indebted to Lewis Carroll).
Ma part du gâteau (My piece of the pie)--Another kill-the-capitalists comedy; sure, why not?
Sleeping Beauty--I've been wondering about whether this is just going to be too creepy to face, but unfortunately I was too distracted by my impending ejection to pay close attention. Pretty creepy, though.

Like clockwork

2011-11-25T17:41:00.001-05:00

Hugo

Crit

If the film hadn't put me in such a generous mood, I might ask, with genuine annoyance, why all these Parisians speak with English accents. But it did, so I'm not. A magical love story (and love of books as well as movies--is this made for me or what?) that would have misted me up more only if it had been my Xmas Day movie rather than my day-after-Thanksgiving one.

Trailer

The Pirates! Band of Misfits--Aardman, so probably pretty good.

As I lay dying

2011-11-24T16:10:00.000-05:00

The Descendants

Crit

More than once I've said (approvingly) of Alexander Payne that he doesn't really much like people. I never meant it completely without irony, but it was a plausible shorthand until now. This film comes scarily close to being plausibly described as heartwarming--but wait, I mean that in a good way. Here Payne once and finally makes it clear that, as the nuns exhorted us to do in grade school, he hates the sin but loves the sinners. Almost every prick or doofus in the film gets a redemptive moment--wins a redemptive moment, earns it. Without, of course, essentially changing. "Yes, people are awful," the film seems to admit, "and yet . . . " A fair cop.

About actors: Is there anyone besides Clooney who could better portray a guy who is still trying to recover from a shot to the solar plexus when he gets kicked in the balls as well? And has anyone since Brando as effectively stolen a scene with a dead (OK, comatose, but you tell me the difference, thespianwise) woman? OK, well, maybe Judy Greer, here (and seriously, isn't it about time for us to see her in something for more than 5 minutes?)? And the kids (Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller, and Nick Krause)? Yes, ever so.

Trailers

We Bought a Zoo--The new one from Cameron Crowe looks potentially very sappy, but he has a knack for making sappy work. And hell, animals! Including Scarlett Johansson!
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close--Just read and didn't quite love this, so I'm definitely review-dependent, but I must say the trailer convinced me that Sandra Bullock is not, as I had feared, miscast as the kid's mother.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy--Never read this, but the trailer made me want to, and to see the film.
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel--Cute old folks' home in India; good cast, though.

These precious days

2011-11-20T21:00:00.002-05:00

Radio Days

(1987)

A really odd film, pointedly limited in its appeal but dedicated to the titular era, and blessedly so. It's never going to be anyone's favorite Woody Allen film, but the participation of some of his repertory company in minor roles--a small part for Mia Farrow, tiny ones for Jeff Daniels, Tony Roberts, and (vocalist for one Cole Porter song) Diane Keaton--suggests how much more heart mattered than head.

And (and tall cotton, this): maybe the best soundtrack of any Allen film.

120 degrees of separation

2011-11-20T15:20:00.032-05:00

Like Crazy

Crit

OK, this game is hard to play every time out: I guess what this has in common with the last film I watched is a long, arduous march to futility.

Not by chance, I think, that Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones) meet in LA rather than New York--part of the point of her having to return to London (having crucially but believably overstayed her student visa) is, I think, that they're a third of the world, a third of the day, a third of their lives apart, and love is no match for that global mass. We care because this does as good a job as any film I've seen lately of showing young love in all its foolishness and beauty and bittersweetness in a way that resonates even with an old codger. And the telegraphic narrative--a montage of the couple in bed, in different positions and nightclothes, covers the passage of months, and some time jumps occur even more abruptly--which would be confusing and annoying in a lot of films, here perfectly conveys those lost transitions between desperation and fatigue. A lovely, heartbreaking film.

Trailer

Young Adult--Looks a lot like Bad Teacher.

Occupate Via Appia

2011-11-19T23:46:00.008-05:00

Spartacus

(1960)

Let's play What Does This Film Have in Common with the Last Film I Watched? Hell, I don't know--something about keeping a private world intact while the public world is going to hell? For me, this is about blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo finally getting a screen credit and depicting men not naming names--or, rather, claiming rather than naming names. The scene that everyone remembers is less than a minute long, but if it doesn't move you, you're immovable.

Loomings

2011-11-19T16:18:00.019-05:00

Melancholia

Crit

Let's play What Does This Film Have in Common with the Last Film I Watched? Hmmm, a poser. I guess I'd say the unsurprising surprise discovery of a corpse.

So let's say it's Earth's last day before colliding with a much larger planet that will smoosh us all like bugs. Would you fix pancakes for breakfast? Would you want to spend your last minutes drinking wine and singing the Ode to Joy on the terrace? These are a couple of the least-provocative questions (hell, we haven't even talked about the toxic wedding reception) from provocateur supreme Lars, who, bless his sweet loopiness, never bores us, even when he decides to test-drive his inner Bruckheimer.

Nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat

2011-11-18T21:18:00.000-05:00

Miller's Crossing

(1990)

Let's play What Does This Film Have in Common with the Last Film I Watched? The song "Runnin' Wild," though here the vocalist is a man, and we don't see him (so maybe he does look like Marilyn, but I'm guessing not), and he doesn't seem to be playing a ukulele.

Not sure why we didn't see this when it was in theaters; not sure why I didn't much care for it when we saw it a few years later. Not paying close enough attention? I dunno--seems a pretty fair Coen spin on double-cross gangster noir. Maybe I held against it the minuscule role for Frances McDormand--she's onscreen for less than a minute, I'd guess--which is about as long as Gabriel Byrne is off of it.

Anyway, an intended deaccessioning, but I've decided to keep it.

St. Valentine's Day mascara

2011-11-13T21:02:00.028-05:00

Some Like It Hot

(1959)

"There are laws, conventions; it's just not being done!" Joe admonishes Gerry, who has accepted a marriage proposal from the millionaire Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown). Well, yeah, but fewer laws and weaker conventions now, and it is being done in increasing numbers. How cool is that?

One of those films that is always a pleasant surprise--Curtis is as entertaining impersonating Cary Grant as he is in Josephine drag, Lemmon's postproposal intoxication as Daphne is priceless, and Monroe was never more . . . well, just more. And, of course, as has often been pointed out, Brown gets to deliver one of the half-dozen or so greatest last lines in the history of the medium.

Skin deep

2011-11-12T23:08:00.026-05:00

Shi gan (Time)

(2006)

This is what Vertigo would be like, if the obsession were mutual and lots more obsessive. I thought about it a lot in the early image-shaping scenes of the Almodóvar yesterday. It doesn't quite rate the 5 stars I gave it when I first saw it, but it certainly merits its place on my top-ten foreign list for 2007 (U.S. release)--it is, I find, the only one of those 10 I've yet returned to. The atmospherics are remarkable and consistently unsettling, and the erotic sculpture garden (based on one on Jeju Island, I guess, but more sophisticated than the images I can find of that one) is worthy of its own film.

The untouchables

2011-11-12T17:14:00.029-05:00

J. Edgar

Crit

I'm not as sure as some that Clint's a genius, but he's certainly a grown-up, so while he doesn't dodge reports of his subject's transvestism and homosexuality, he desensationalizes both, providing a reasonable context for the one incident we see of the first and using the second as the basis for a sad story of love and denial and (it seems clear to me) nonconsummation.

Leo is good, but Armie Hammer (the Winkelvii in The Social Network) steals the show as Hoover's more honest (and thus vulnerable, and thus inevitably abused, and thus heartbreaking in his devotion) partner Clyde Tolson. Sadly, the aging makeup on both looks like crap; only Naomi Watts, as the other person (once his mother [Judi Dench] dies) who loves him, ages well--and apparently a lot less than the boys do in the same number of years.

Trailer

Haywire--Looks like a wanna-DragonTattoo, but directed by Soderbergh, so maybe.

My favorite obsession

2011-11-11T19:22:00.057-05:00

La piel que habito (The skin I live in)

Crit

Ah, Pedro: love him or hate him, you can't deny he takes us places we'd never see via Hollywood. About two-thirds of the way through this, I was simultaneously admiring and being repulsed by it, and I was certain I wouldn't be adding it to my personal Almodóvar shelf. Now I'm not so sure. I was, as well, feeling nostalgic for my comfort level while watching those 2 recent flicks I had praised for putting me so on edge--they seemed pretty relaxed compared with this.

And then came the plot twist that completely blindsided me (partly, I'll confess, because of a lack of vision on my part that some people I know don't share), and then . . . I got lots more uncomfortable, then adjusted, and finally I found the weird world the director had put us into more or less normal, leaving me happy to take whatever came from there.

One gripe: the final scene would have been a lot more effective had the suspension point on which it ends come--as it easily could have--just a few seconds into the scene.

Trailers

The Iron Lady--A long teaser rather than a trailer, with an absolutely brilliant wait-for-it, wait-for-it, wait-for-it reveal.
OK, seriously, just open Pariah already, so I can stop seeing the damn trailer. I'm pretty sure I'm not a racist and positive I'm not homophobic, but I'm an ironclad bigot against crap high school "poetry"; the film itself might actually be OK, and it's certain to have a lower concentration of that puerile verse.

North by East Village

2011-11-06T20:55:00.022-05:00

Date Night

(2010)

Two brilliant TV comedians gives us about the 23 minutes of a small screen half-hour's worth of entertainment, mostly front-loaded, with some good bits in the end-titles outtakes and a very brief bump from James Franco about 2/3 of the way through. In between, a ponderous Wizard of Oz story, with a huge debt to the film that inspired me to classify all films as Wizard of Oz films or Not-Wizard of Oz films, After Hours. It also steals its potentially fatal misidentification in a tony dining/drinking establishment directly from Hitchcock.

Oh, "HBO?" you're asking; a free sample from DirecTV a while back; this was one of only two films, I believe, that seemed remotely worth recording.

Now I try to be amused

2011-11-05T22:32:00.046-04:00

The Wizard of Oz

(1939)

If you check out the recent YouTube video of choice among Facebook parents and grandparents of small children, you'll understand immediately why I've been thinking of this film. Great bonus of old rockers breeding anew: they get involved with Sesame Street!

So let's have some audience participation: of the many, many logical non-sequiturs and self-evident inaccuracies in this nonetheless nearly perfect film, what is your favorite? This is mine:

Dorothy: You know, we were just wondering why you couldn't come with us to the Emerald City to ask the Wizard of Oz for a heart.
Tin Man: Well, suppose the Wizard wouldn't give me one when we got there?
Dorothy: Oh, but he will! He must! We've come such a long way already.

Apart from this embodying a bizarrely naïve logic that suggests that deserts are invariably rewarded in kind, it shows a huge leap in optimism since Dot's answer to the Scarecrow's parallel question:

Scarecrow: Do you think if I went with you this Wizard would give me some brains?
Dorothy: I couldn't say. But even if he didn't you'd be no worse off than you are now.

Yes, that's good down-to-earth Kansas farmgirl logic there; clearly by the next scene so much Technicolor has leaked into her brain that she has lost touch with her roots.

Helter skelter

2011-11-05T17:04:00.039-04:00

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Crit

OK, first time I was ever aware of John Hawkes was in the trailer for Me and You and Everyone We Know, which I saw several times before the film came to town, and I thought he was a dead ringer for a young Dennis Hopper, so though his character looked like a sweet guy in the trailer, I wouldn't have been surprised to have him turn out to be a rapist leader of a murderous cult.

But his character was in fact a sweet guy in the film, and not long after that, he became for me what he will always be: the lovable and reliable best friend Sol Star in Deadwood, and since then I've not wanted to have to not like his character--he can have a few rough edges, as in Wristcutters: A Love Story or Winter's Bone, but I'm no longer prepared for him to be Charlie Manson. Guess I have to get past that.

Remember (gosh, I hope so--it was only a week ago!) what I said about Take Shelter, that it was "the front-runner in the 'I-was-never-comfortable' sweepstakes for 2011"? Well, it still is, but this is a worthy runner-up. And the films are alike in a surprising number of ways: in each, the protagonist behaves in ways that seem bizarre to those who haven't seen what (s)he has seen; in each, the protagonist foresees a catastrophe that no one else can sense; and each film ends on a big question mark: is that catastrophe imminent? Show 'em as a double feature and sell Ambien at the concession stand!

Too much

2011-11-04T22:16:00.000-04:00

Edmond

(2005)

"Controversial one-act play by Mamet" was the clue for 56-across in the Times crossword today, which I took as a sign that the film version should be my Friday-night deaccesion. Which is appropriate, because Edmond (the charming William H. Macy, in what must be the most repulsive role of his career) is looking for signs everywhere, in his appointment time at the office next Monday, in the tarot cards turned by a storefront seer, in the hat (identical to one his mother wore) on the head of a subway rider. And which is also appropriate because it's good to have this poisonous, hateful film about a stupid racist, misogynist lunatic off of my hard drive, which it must have been polluting for almost 2 years.

How stupid? He expects a hooker to take a credit card; he expects a private dancer to remove the plexiglass partition; he expects to beat the 3-card monte dealer; he expects a waitress who looks like Julia Stiles to take him home. Actually, implausibly, that last comes true, though it turns out not to be the wisest decision for either of them. After which Edmond continues to wander a New York pre-Giulianian in its sleaze but 21st-century enough to offer free phones from its storefronts--in short, the ugliest of all Apples, one that makes you long for the Travis Bickle version.

I'll never tell whether he gets his comeuppance, but I will say that I didn't much care one way or the other.

The legacy of Burke and Hare

2011-10-30T21:17:00.000-04:00

The Body Snatcher

(1945)

Lewton's adaptation of a Robert Louis Stevenson story, directed by Robert Wise, set in the early 19th century and concerned with the moral ambiguity of grave-robbing to facilitate medical dissection. Doctor and educator Toddy McFarlane (Henry Daniell) traverses that gray area, enabled by cabman and resurrectionist John Gray (Karloff), who is not overly particular about whether the corpses he resurrects have actually shuffled off their mortal coil in the first place. Bela Lugosi has a terminally thankless role as Gray's blackmailer, too dimwitted to fully consider how that strategy is apt to play out.

Cuckoo's nest

2011-10-29T22:55:00.027-04:00

Bedlam

(1946)

Had to happen eventually: Lewton's fixation on the psyche take us to the 18th century and the London asylum whose name was corrupted into a synonym for insanity. An early masque of "loonies" anticipates Marat/Sade, and Boris Karloff plays the sadistic "apothecary general" ripe for comeuppance at the hands of his charges.

Also watched the box set's documentary, Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy, with talking-head tributes by thrillmongers from Billy Friedkin and George A. Romero to Guillermo del Toro and Neil Gaiman. In the process I realized that there are still 2 features in the set I've never screened, not just 1, so tomorrow I'll complete not the set but at least the Karloff chapter of Lewton's oeuvre.

Or I'm gonna fade away

2011-10-29T18:28:00.000-04:00

Take Shelter

Crit

When I saw the trailer for this, I thought it looked too M. Night Shyamalan for my tastes, and in fact it is very M. Night--if M. Night grew up smarter and more sophisticated. It has the same sort of supernatural-or-not metaphysical concerns that Shyamalan's films have, but without the "whoops--didn't see that coming" that cheapens his lesser efforts.

Instead, writer-director Jeff Nichols (who??? Jeff Nichols of Shotgun Stories? Jeff Nichols who's not yet 33 years old? right) seems set here on nothing less than plumbing the Old Testament question: how do you really know when you're a prophet? How do you know you're not just the loony your friends and neighbors take you for? And maybe even more important: how does your family know? Can your family know?

'Cause let's face it: you make a big deal of prophesying really bad shit, and there's 2 ways it can go down: (1) you can be wrong, in which case you are indeed just a nutball, which actually simplifies matters for everyone, including you. But what if (2) you're right? Well then, the reward you get for your legitimate prophet status is . . . really bad shit happens, and then you, as much as all the people who didn't listen to you because obviously you were just a loony, have to deal with it.

The genius of this film is that because Michael Shannon invests with such conviction his character's horrible dreams of 10w40 rainstorms and zombies--and Jessica Chastain (in the best of her 25 or so performances this year--where the hell has she been hiding?) so invests her character with love and terror and protection of their deaf daughter--that we're actually rooting for the really bad shit rather than the simple craziness. And how fucked up is that?

The front-runner in the "I-was-never-comfortable" sweepstakes for 2011. And I mean that it a good way.

Trailer

Pina--I always have to preface every praise of a dance film with a disclaimer that I don't really care much for dance films; this one looks so trippy I won't even bother.

Quarantine

2011-10-28T21:44:00.000-04:00

Isle of the Dead

(1945)

This is ridiculous: I've had this Val Lewton box set since at least 2007, yet until tonight there were still 3 features and the documentary on the producer that remained unwatched; Halloween weekend is the time to fix that.

Again, Lewton's favorite theme: sexy young woman (Ellen Drew) who isn't sure herself whether she's the evil supernatural creature the circumstantial evidence suggests she might be. Here superstition and prejudice, in the person of Madame Kyra (Helen Thimig) abetted by General Pherides (Boris Karloff)--oh, did I mention that the film is set in 1912, during the First Balkan War, for no particular reason?--conspire with medical and psychological pathology to make it seem all too plausible that Thea is a vampirish vorvolaka.

It's no Cat People, but it's not bad, with a particularly creepy live burial sequence.

Coated with chlorophyll

2011-10-28T19:52:00.000-04:00

Margin Call

Crit

Ahhh, this is why we go to the movies, to escape for a couple of hours into a strange world where thrilling and terrifying and implausible catastrophes occur, then to return to the real world secure in the knowledge that those things could never happen here.

Remember the old joke--I think I had a version of it on a Flip Wilson record when I was a kid--about the guy who picks up his buddy at the airport after housesitting for him, telling him that everything's OK, except that his dog died. The returning vacationer is, naturally, shocked and distressed, and asks to know how it happened, thus triggering a sort of reverse house-that-jack-built narrative in which each disaster ensued from an even bigger disaster, culminating in the housesitter's admission that the house itself has burned to the ground. Well, that joke is as good a metaphor as any for the 2008 economic meltdown, and here at least we get to see the guy (Kevin Spacey, as the Wall Street [actually, inexplicably, 34th Street] sales boss with a conscience, for what that's worth) burying his dog. We also see his ex-wife, played by Mary McDonnell, which I mention only because I love Mary McDonnell (in my current consciousness she's the cancer-doomed accidental president of the airborne Caprican civilization in the first season of Battlestar Galactica) and because she must have the best agent in Hollywood, because she's in just this one, final, maybe 3-minute scene, yet she gets seventh billing, ahead of such major players in the story (and bigger names) as Demi Moore and Stanley Tucci. What's up with that? Not complaining, just sayin'.

Anyway, this is a tightly written, tautly acted and directed gloss on the packaging, discovery, and dispersal of what Jeremy Irons's CEO calls (this is from memory, but it's pretty close) "the biggest, most odoriferous bag of excrement in the history of capitalism."

Just one bigger mystery than how all that could have gone down: what sort of accent is Paul Bettany going for? He's a fine actor, so I assume he's not just lost, as he seems to be, between Manchester and the Jersey (New Jersey, i.e.) Shore, but it's hard to see how someone with that yobbish/thuggish delivery could ever have risen to the position he holds, or how anyone in such a position for 10 years wouldn't have rid himself of it. Bizarre.

Mess transit

2011-10-23T22:58:00.038-04:00

Speedy

(1928)

The first Harold Lloyd film I've ever watched. Yes, really.

I read this as a call for centralized municipal control of mass transit at a time when rival companies fought for New York turf; a stirring call for big government, if not outright socialism.

No, not really, though the main villain is a capitalist train baron trying to force out the last of the horsecar operators. Lloyd plays the employment-challenged prospective son-in-law of Pop, the horsecar man, and it's not much of a spoiler to reveal that he saves the day with the assistance of a brilliant dog, a platoon of plucky Civil War veterans, and some improbable good fortune.

But what's really fun about the film is its loving location portrayal of the city, from Luna Park to Yankee Stadium, with plenty of Manhattan, including Penn Station and Washington Square, in between. How and why we see all these places--and how and why Speedy ends up taxiing Babe Ruth to a big game in the Bronx--are questions best left alone. Sometimes you just gotta let art wash over you.

Seriously? Nobody want a free Titanic DVD? Nobody wants The Matrix? Absolutely last chance!
Click here for the films I'm deaccessioning. If you see something you want, let me know, and it's yours. Anything unclaimed by 24 October goes in to the freebie table at work (except maybe for Dogma, whose extras I'm still milking for workout fodder).

Spill the wine

2011-10-22T23:51:00.035-04:00

Sideways

(2004)

OK, look, I never denied it: my cinematic critical standards are only slightly less unsophisticated than my critical standards in wine, but when a film contains two of the all-time great scenes of self-mortification (Miles drunk-dialing his ex, Miles guzzling from the spit bucket) and a scene of connection so beautiful and true (Miles and Maya talking wine on the porch) that it makes me teary even without having had any wine (oh, don't ask why; oh, don't ask why), what more can you ask?

I guess you could ask for sad, funny truth throughout, humanity crushed like a grape and sometimes gone a little vinegary, and that's here too. And two or three breakout acting performances--and, let's just say, a whole that comes as close to perfection as maybe the best director of his generation has come so far. Damn, this is a good pour.

But now I've had all the Payne I can take until at least 18 November, when The Descendants has its limited release; "just how limited" is a question that figures to nag me until the 15th, when I should be able to check the downtown weekend openings.

Knight's gambit

2011-10-21T22:50:00.000-04:00

Det sjunde inseglet (The seventh seal)

(1957)

(OK, I'm going to pretend there are a lot of you . . . ) Does everybody remember how the Friday night deaccession routine works? Specifically, does everyone understand that there's a big difference between (1) screening a DVD I haven't watched for at least 5 years that I suspect (usually with reason) I might as well give away and open up some shelf space and (2) screening a film that has been on my DVR hard drive unwatched for at least 2 years, in order to free up some electronic space?

In case 2, it's not that I expect to react blahly to the film; it's just that (1) if I found it necessary to record it so long ago, then why haven't I gotten around to watching it yet? and (2) if I was able to record it once from TCM or IFC (or, on the rare occasions when I want something they're showing enough to tolerate having to FFwd past commercials, AMC), chances are it'll be there again later--or, for that matter, will be streamable from Netflix.

All of which is a prelude to saying that I knew that I thought this was kickass the first time I saw it, but it was the sort of thing I needed to be in the mood for, and I hadn't been in the almost 3 years since recording it. (Today, of course, I got in a Swedish mood with my postwork movie.)

And kickass it is--both brutally existential and surprisingly sweet and lovely, even sometimes funny. Max von Sydow, in his 20s and unnaturally blond, is heartbreaking as the desperate-to-believe knight Antonius Block, and if there has ever been a better Death in cinema than Bengt Ekerot, I haven't seen him. (I seem to recall noticing this the last time: his look is without any doubt the source for the Emperor in the Star Wars trilogy. Of course, the character is also the source for the final segment of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, and lots of the medieval stuff here turns up in MP & the Holy Grail.) Positively lush b&w cinematography by Gunnar Fischer, who was apparently a regular on Team Bergman. Oh, and I should mention that no "deaccessioned" label appears below because I decided at the last that it's worth 2 hours of hard-drive space to be able to watch this again whenever I feel like it.

The director, by the way, is name #0000005 on IMDb, and I've always assumed that the really low numbers were the people who first came to mind when the site was in utero. Care to guess the 4 people with even lower numbers? Click the numbers below for the answers. (I would have guessed only #2, but I approve across the board.)

0000004
0000003
0000002
0000001

Soul on ice

2011-10-21T19:37:00.001-04:00

The Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975

Crit

You know, if I'd been born in Sweden, I would have had a much clearer view from my country's media of this country's warts, and maybe I wouldn't have grown up such a weak-tea liberal, such a limp-dishrag lefty. Then again, I did know a few equally middle-class white guys in grad school who hadn't drunk the Kool-Aid; I thought they were cynical, glass-two-thirds-empty grumblers. Well, who's the cynic now?

Anyway, better late than never seeing '60s black activism without the filter of the liberal INO American media. Golly, you know what? Yeah, Stokely and Angela did say all the shit that Walter quoted at 6 o'clock (I was in the Central time zone, don't forget), but nary a speck of foam flew from their mouths. Moreover, when you see them and hear them, and when they get to establish a context, that dangerous radicalism plays a lot more like simple good sense.

See. This. Film.

Parallel synchronized randomness

2011-10-16T21:15:00.000-04:00

La science des rêves (The science of sleep)

(2006)

I remember being disappointed in this when I first saw it, and I had the same reaction this time, though at its surreal best, it's as beautiful as a dream can be. As in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry breaks our hearts, but here the payoff is more intellectual than emotional, and it just doesn't seem a fair trade.

Dark continent

2011-10-15T21:44:00.001-04:00

About Schmidt

(2002)

This remains my least favorite of Alexander Payne's first 4 features, but that's hardly a condemnation, and this has plenty about it to like, and even more to admire (for one thing: is Kathy Bates the bravest woman ever to step in front of a camera naked, or what?)

But what I really noticed about this, in screening it for the 3rd time, the 1st in several years, is its set-piece connections to Payne's other films: the ill-conceived seduction, the odd injury source, and the last-act educational diorama of Election; the challenged nuptials of Sideways; the critically timed discovery of a wife's infidelity of the new one, The Descendants. Speaking of Sideways, during Warren's Winnebago odyssey he passes a small-town two-screen movie theater, one side of which is closed for repairs, the other side showing twice nightly a Payne film that was then still 2 years in the future. Don't blink.

Adult education

2011-10-15T17:13:00.001-04:00

La Tête en friche (My afternoons with Margueritte)

Crit

Oh, that's what friche means: the French title essentially means "fallow brain," which is exactly what two-t Margueritte (the beautiful near-centenarian Gisèle Casadesus) finds in the good-hearted, lumpy Germain (Gérard Depardieu). Not only does she introduce him to the wonder of words and literature, she supplies his lifelong want of maternal love. It's a wispy little film, but it's impossible not to like a paean to reading.

Rue, Brittania

2011-10-14T23:16:00.044-04:00

That Hamilton Woman

(1941)

Lord, almighty, how did Nelson ever manage to navigate seas so deep in soapsuds? Newlyweds Leigh and Olivier emote up a broadside of adulterous romance made more sympathetic than you'd think the times would allow. The climactic sea battle is surprisingly rousing, but otherwise this is excessive in every way imaginable, and my hard drive must be pounds lighter for the shedding of it.

Who are those guys?

2011-10-14T19:54:00.000-04:00

Blackthorn

Crit

The posters tell us that Sam Shepard is Butch Cassidy, and he looks the craggy part, as always. But his acting chops have never been up to carrying a film, and this film needs carrying. For want of a compelling central figure, it leans far too hard on the film we're all familiar with, and that underlies a uniformly unfortunate decision to spend a sizable chunk of the film in the early 1900s of that story rather than the 1927 of Butch's present. Except for introducing Stephen Rea as the Pinkerton agent on their trail, I can't think of one moment in those flashbacks that's worthwhile, and they're all distracting because the chemistry among Butch and Sundance and Etta is so clearly based on the wisecrackers of George Roy Hill's--and the distraction is worse because young Butch (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) has a look about him not of the young Newman but of the young Redford.

The 1969 picture looms in much of the imagery and many of the themes here, as well--especially the trope of pursuit by a large, indefatigable band of enforcers. And ultimately that posse brings the payoff to what has seemed a rambling story, but by that point, I didn't really much care.

Here's a question for those who know more about Latin America than I: would there have been any Iváns in Bolivia in 1927? I was under the impression that the Latino origin of that Slavic version of Juan was the Russian presence in Cuba after the Castro revolution. But I'm happy to be taught otherwise.

The real deal

2011-10-12T13:00:00.000-04:00

Real Steel

It's guest-blogger day, courtesy of my grad school friend (and Hugh Jackman obsessive) Lisa:

You know of my deep and passionate love for Hugh Jackman, so it should come as no surprise to you that I’d go to see him reading the phone book. I would even have gone to see him in the film that never made it to theaters (or even to DVD), in which he plays a dairy farmer, but I seem to have been spared that ordeal.

I’m no fan of boxing, but as it turns out, Real Steel is actually pretty decent. Yes, it’s an odd combination of Rocky, Field of Dreams, and other father-son bonding movies, and Transformers (though I haven’t actually seen that last one). But Atom, the “junkyard dog” of a robot that Charlie (Jackman) and Max (an adorable kid named Dakota Goyo—and if that isn’t a great stage name, I don’t know what is) restore and train to fight in this near-future’s version of boxing, reminded me of Wall•E, whose mechanical eyes managed to convey powerful human emotion.

Jackman gets to show off his boxing prowess as he trains Atom and when he “shadow boxes” with him during the final match. His moves are real—he started boxing four years ago, and in preparation for this film even trained with Sugar Ray Leonard. Jackman is in magnificent shape—believable shape, not Wolverine super-hyper-real comic book shape. Atom’s surprising and unlikely success in the ring serves as a catalyst for Charlie’s renewed confidence in his skill as a boxer, the growing affection between son and long-lost father, and rekindled love between Charlie and Bailey, whose father taught Charlie to box.

Corny? You bet. But don’t tell me you aren’t cheering for Atom to hold his own against the slicker, bigger, badder, joy-stick-operated Zeus, and that you’re not Rocky-moved when father, son, and robot raise their arms in victory at the end.

Tragic that the flick w/ Hugh as dairy farmer is unavailable, but thanks for this. It's showing downtown, so . . . nah, why even pretend?

"I know I shouldn't be telling you this . . . "

2011-10-09T21:39:00.000-04:00

All the President's Men

(1976)

This screening is in recognition of Kenneth H. Dahlberg, a war hero, a flying ace who shot down 15 German planes and was 3 times shot down and captured himself, escaping twice from POW camps. But when his obit appeared in the Times today, his World War II exploits weren't the main focus. It's kinda like that joke whose punch line is "But you fuck one sheep . . . "

Bumper cars

2011-10-09T17:52:00.037-04:00

Weekend

Crit

I'd like to be able to describe this as an intense, heartbreaking tale of an affair circumscribed by the titular time period, between a romantic who is repressed and a repressed romantic, without using the word gay. But in fact the g-word is central, as the conveniently parentless Russell (Tom Cullen) is only semi-out ("All my friends know--well, my close friends"), while Glen (Chris New) is politically insistent on confronting the straight world with the injustice of its privilege.

But as the telescoped limit of their time together accelerates the pair's intimacy (an acceleration that somehow manages not to be incredible), the bullshit calling becomes more balanced. The unabashedly romantic Russell comes to recognize that Glen's politics, sincere though they are, have also become a defense mechanism against anything as conventional as love.

A beautiful film, beautifully written and acted, and no qualification is necessary for that assessment.

Fruit of the womb

2011-10-08T21:42:00.000-04:00

Citizen Ruth

(1996)

With The Descendants hitting town in a month or so, I've decided to make this a house of Payne. Having watched Election just a couple of months ago, I have only two to go; maybe I'll be down to pinot-eligible weight by the time I get to Sideways.

But seriously, how does a 30-something with scarcely any previous credits assemble this sort of cast? And how does he make such a perfectly wicked film? Dude sprang fully formed from Zeus's forehead, methinks.

I keep forgetting to look when I see the trailer, by the way, but I've just established that Jim Taylor is not in on the script of The Descendants, which will make that Payne's first feature without Taylor's collaboration. I guess the divorce is final. Oh, wait, no: Taylor is a producer of the new one, and of Payne's long-in-development Fork in the Road, which probably isn't a Yogi Berra biopic, but should be.

Last rites

2011-10-08T18:06:00.000-04:00

Restless

Crit

Funny thing happened on my way to Weekend. Well on my way downtown, blabbing on the phone w/ my daughter, I realized that the pocket that is supposed to contain money, movie passes, Dunkin Donuts gift card w/ the Mets logo on it, etc., was in fact empty. Not enough time to return home, grab my heirloom money clip (rubber band), and get to the theater in time for the film I'd planned to see, but this one had a slightly later start + trailers, so I audibled.

This has been getting savaged by pros and amateurs alike--a stunning 35% overall rating on RottenTomatoes.com, 28% (7 for 25) from Top Critics. Which would normally be a pretty clear sign to skip it (duh). But Denby didn't hate it in the New Yorker (a nod that RT missed), and A. O. Scott gave it a pretty good notice in the Times, and hell, Champaign-Urbana's own Roger Ebert loved it. Plus, Gus Van Sant.

So? Well, I don't think it sucks, but I can see why a lot of people disagree. Like a lot of Van Sant, it has much younger--one might even say less mature--sensibilities than you'd expect from a guy my age (a year and a half older, actually, but who's counting?). This feels a lot like the film the two central characters would have spun off from the dramatic scene we see them creating. And only a grown-up would insist on the inconvenient reality--to pick the lowest-hanging fruit from a tree lush and ripe--that a young woman less than 3 months from brain-tumor death might get sick occasionally, and wouldn't be apt to look as consistently luminescent as Mia Wasikowska probably can't help looking.

Still, Wasikowska and Henry Hopper (son of Dennis) make it easy to put strict critical standards on the shelf and just play along. I was about two-thirds charmed, I guess. Which is a lot more than I can say for yesterday's flick, which is pulling 82/73 on RT.

Trailers

The Artist--Looks like a silent A Star Is Born; I'm intrigued, if not altogether sold.

The ideal friend

2011-10-07T21:50:00.000-04:00

My Dog Tulip

(2009)

A delightful, melancholy story of unconditional love that will resonate with anyone who has ever been a dog person, even those of us who haven't fit that description for decades. The animation suggests a soberer Triplettes de Belleville, but the narrative is terribly, terribly British.

All honorable men

2011-10-07T19:28:00.000-04:00

The Ides of March

Crit

The most depressing thing about this is not the banality of its evil, the bland predictability of its sad, dreary tale of naïveté betrayed, of idealism corrupted. Nor is it my recognition of the cost in blood and treasure of having let my Clooneycrush trump pans by two generally trustworthy reviewers. Nor is it even the terrible waste by Clooney's direction and a script cowritten by Clooney of some of the best acting talent (Clooney included) in the biz today.

No, the most depressing thing about this is how inspirational the message of Clooney's Democratic presidential candidate sounds in the early going, and how unsubtly the imagery of his campaign artwork reminds us of a real-life inspirational Democratic presidential candidate, and the difference between that candidate's message and the actions of the president he became. Now that is depressing.

Trailer

Margin Call--I was thinking as I watched this trailer for a film about overweening corporate greed that its sell-by date had passed, that people just aren't all that pissed about it anymore. Then I remembered what's been going on at Zuccotti Park. So maybe?

It's complicated

2011-10-02T21:33:00.012-04:00

The Social Network

(2010)

Unusual for me to rescreen something this quickly (a year and a day!) that's not one of my annuals; did I just want to find out whether it reads differently now that I'm one of the 500 million? Not sure, but if so, the answer is Not to any extent that matters. Still a masterfully written, masterfully acted drama about relationships. So no status update required.

War crimes

2011-10-01T23:34:00.000-04:00

Traffic

(2000)

Yes, that's right: the way to keep kids from dealing and using drugs is to build lots more lighted baseball diamonds, here and in Mexico, and presumably in Colombia and Afghanistan as well.

I don't really have much to say about this; yes, it's great filmmaking, no, it's not really very convincing. But I remember the first time I saw it, when Jennie Tonic and I were still calling ourselves married and I was regularly visiting her in the city, and we went to some theater on the Upper East Side, I believe (maybe West, but I think East), and stood in a long line, and finally squeezed into two of the last available seats, in the right-hand corner of the balcony.

Then there's this: when I first signed up for Netflix, in July 2003, one of the first things I rented was the 1989 BBC miniseries Traffik, which was the basis for Soderbergh's film, and which I also recommend.

Sabermetrics

2011-10-01T19:44:00.000-04:00

Moneyball

Crit

Hey, I saw my two favorite Philip Something Something actors in the same weekend (Baker Hall yesterday, Seymour Hoffman today)--that's probably a first since the last time I saw Magnolia.

And of course much of baseball is about firsts and lasts and mosts and situationals, and I don't know how a nonfan or lukewarm fan will respond to this largely nonfictional account of the first time a baseball man went all in on the theories--already around for two decades by then, and revered by lots of people who only loved the game but had no say in the running of it, ignored and/or mocked by a culture dedicated to the way things had been done since Wee Willie Keeler was hittin' 'em where they weren't--of Bill James. For James and his acolytes, though, this document of revolution is a document of vindication, too: ten years farther down the road, no general manager can afford to ignore on-base average + slugging average, though dinosaurs still roam the sod-clad earth.

Of course, that doesn't change the fact that Billy Beane (played with non-movie-star conviction by Brad Pitt) "is still waiting to win the last game of the season," as the end titles have it. But that proves only that a small budget + privileging intelligence over conventional wisdom can't beat a huge budget + (finally, reluctantly) privileging intelligence over conventional wisdom. The victory of moneyball is that the teams with money are finally playing it too. Which doesn't seem fair.

Non-baseball issues: this may be a breakout role for Jonah Hill, who is the comic heart of the film without once descending to shtick. Have "Jonah Hill" and "subtlety" ever appeared in a sentence before? Let's hope that was the first of many such sentences, and many such perfect performances. And speaking of perfect, Kerris Dorsey, as Beane's daughter (one of, let's see, I can think of 5 females in the film), will break your heart with her guitar. Let's see her again.

OK, time to go check on the playoff games.

Trailers

Immortals--LOTR-looking special effects in an epic about Theseus. Golly, I'd love it if it doesn't suck!

A bigger boat

2011-09-30T23:39:00.043-04:00

Titanic

(1997)

Somebody with some nautical expertise explain this to me:

Iceberg is spotted, belatedly, dead ahead;
Order goes out clearly: "Hard to starboard" (at which point I think: I know what that means; that means to the right);
Pilot (or whatever you call the dude at the tiller [or whatever you call the steering wheel]) cranks the wheel counterclockwise, or to the left (at which point I think: maybe on a ship, turning the wheel one way steers it in the opposite direction, but no . . . );
Ship (as predicted in an earlier bit of exposition) responds slowly to the redirection, but ultimately moves . . . to the left, to what I've always thought was port.

So who will dispel my ignorance?

And who will take this leaky 194-minute behemoth off my hands? The perfect candidate for deaccession on a night when I have nothing to get up early for but a soccer match (coincidentally, from the same city that was Titanic's home port, and one that produced better damn musicians than theme-song-vocalist Celine Dion), and anyway, through the magic of DVR, it will wait if need be.

It's hard to believe I actually liked this in the theater, though I know I did (though even then, the Celine D. song made me want to violate policy and run screaming from the theater while the end credits were still rolling). This is the 3rd time I've seen it, and on each subsequent viewing the pie-chart wedge of "likes" has become narrower and less sustaining. Those are a pretty couple of kids, I'll admit that, but god, what lame writing, and has there ever been starker testimony to the metastasis of sentimentality in Hollywood than the Oscar nomination given to the woodenly arch Gloria Stuart, whose only actual accomplishment was continuing to draw breath throughout the shoot?

OK, perhaps that's excessive, but I have now given a total of 10 hours of my life to this waterlogged turkey, and I'm a little bitter. Never again.

The big C

2011-09-30T19:38:00.000-04:00

50/50

Crit

I really wanted to like this--Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, and Anna Kendrick are among my favorite youngsters in the movies, and Anjelica Huston is one of my favorites in the dwindling demographic of Older Than I--and it was a pleaser of a larger-than-usual 5 p.m. crowd, so I felt really curmudgeonly, but from the stacked deck (I'm using that expression a lot of late, aren't I?) of the Doctor with the Bedside Manner from Hell to the blithe tolerance of behavior from the Rogen character ranging from grossly insensitive to reprehensible right down to the childish destruction of a piece of art produced by a former loved one now a hated one, I just failed to find my place.

Coincidentally (no, I swear: it's a coincidence; there's nothing to be read into it), I've just started watching The Big C, and while yeah, sure, I admit that the mere presence of Laura Linney carries weight that no one in this film can approach, it's just a lot smarter and subtler and, well, more grown-up, and that's not just to do with the ages of the patients.

Trailers

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1--Bellamary's baby! "He has his father's teeth . . . "
Like Crazy--Young, pretty people in love, with visa problems.
Man on a Ledge--Misdirection heist.

Until you use me up

2011-09-25T21:38:00.014-04:00

Never Let Me Go

(2010)

Another one I ignored when it was in the theater because critical response seemed lukewarm, but which gained ground among the critics in the rear-view mirror. And indeed it was worth seeing, sci-fi with a deliciously creepy concept--clones reared as medical parts farms--played out by a trio of fine young actors.

Losing my religion

2011-09-25T17:07:00.031-04:00

Higher Ground

Crit

At least one review I read congratulates first-time director Vera Farmiga for refusing to condescend to the Christian subjects of her film, but that very assessment is condescending, and while I'm as capable as any nonbeliever of condescending to belief, I would say that what Farmiga deserves congratulations for is simply not stacking the deck, in either direction; how many films about faith can you say that about?

We meet a few Christians who are selfsure to the point of smugness, but such people occur naturally in the general population, not excluding in, say, my own liberal atheist cohort. Most of the Christians we meet are decent, some are lovely and funny and wise, and all are, at bottom, human. And Corinne, Farmiga's character, wants faith desperately but can't find it. Her quest is the heart of a beautiful, moving, and occasionally surreal film.

A most unusual day

2011-09-24T22:38:00.000-04:00

North by Northwest

(1959)

Apart from all the other ways this is nearly perfect, its treatment of sex is remarkably frank for an American studio film in 1959. My favorite Hitch, and one of my favorite films.

Mistakes were made

2011-09-23T21:24:00.000-04:00

Meet the Parents

(2000)

Another DVD I acquired during that phase when I was buying everything I remembered liking that was available cheap. But I remember thinking this Job-as-aspiring-son-in-law tale was really hilarious when I saw it in the theater. Watching a few years later, I found it funny; now I find it mildly amusing. So who wants it?

Fearful symmetry

2011-09-18T21:24:00.010-04:00

The Hangover

(2009)

Yeah, this is a pleasant enough evening's entertainment, but I'm damned if I can imagine how it made anyone's "Best of" list. Are we really so desperate for bromance? Or maybe we're just so happy to see Heather Graham again. And it's true that Tyson's tiger is pretty cool. But still . . .

Who's afraid of the French shewolf?

2011-09-17T22:42:00.000-04:00

The Lion in Winter

(1968)

What a genuinely bizarre film, whose conceit is that people in 1183 are blessed/cursed with a thoroughly modern awareness that they're savages living in a dark age. It's mostly a vehicle (excuse might be a more accurate term) for O'Toole and Hepburn to play Albee's George and Martha in medieval drag, and they seem to have lots of fun doing it.

But can she cook?

2011-09-17T16:58:00.001-04:00

Nannerl, la soeur de Mozart

Crit

The title character has genius. As much as her kid brother? Who knows? No one can ever know, and no one could ever have known, with the possible exception of their impresario father, who exploits Nanerl's harpsichord skills as a sort of a dog-standing-on-its-hind-legs sideshow to the headliner. (The narrative is fictionalized, but that Papa Mozart was a money-grubbing fame-hound is well documented; in the film he fudges both children's ages by a year, the better to emphasize their precocity, particularly Wolfy's.)

Repressed by her father (who forbids her to pursue her aptitudes for violin and composition--pursuits that obviously require possession of a penis) and by her culture, she muddles along as best she can for as long as she can, with a boost from accidental friendships with two children of Louis XV. One of those friendships, with the Dauphin Louis, becomes a romance that promises better results than it delivers. The historical overtitles of the final shot are manifestly depressing.

Picaresque

2011-09-16T23:50:00.000-04:00

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

(1961)

A very young Albert Finney plays a good-hearted but sexually irresponsible young man who turns out to be the natural heir of his protector Squire Alworthy . . . oh, wait, no: wrong flick. This one is set in modern times, and Finney's Arthur is an assembly-line worker in a dreary factory in Nottingham. But apart from being a tad less naïve--and discounting the fact that his competitive consumption scene is much less sexy--Arthur is pretty much Tom Jones updated.

, he bled

2011-09-16T19:45:00.000-04:00

Drive

Crit

Holy red-dyed Karo syrup, Batman! I'm not particularly squeamish, and I suppose one reason I don't read many reviews carefully is that I don't want to be told whether a film is a bloodbath or not, I only want to be told whether it's worth my seeing it or not, and lead and last grafs of the reviews took care of me there: it is definitely worth seeing. But holy cow--I would have thought at least this would be primarily an adrenaline-pumping fast-driving movie, with maybe some violence and blood in it. I think it's fair to say, though, that this is a violent bloody film with some exciting fast driving and a little bit of character development in it, so I'm just telling you: if spurting blood and bone-stomping are dealbreakers for you, stay the hell away. And at least one other member of my viewing party would say the same.

On the other hand, if you want to see (again) how good Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan can be with about 15 lines of dialogue each, if you want to see whether AMC stars like Bryan Cranston and Christina Hendricks can make it work on the big screen (yes, they can--and Hendricks shows herself to be completely without vanity), if you want to see whether Ron Perlman's head is becoming ever more rectilinear, or if you're committed to screening the entire oeuvre of Jet-all-the-way Russ Tamblyn (look fast--he's the doctor!), then go for it.

Trailers

Dream House--Looks pretty much like a creepout waste of newlyweds (which I just learned--thanks, Nancy) Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz.
Paranormal Activity 3--Supernaturally unnecessary.
The Rum Diary--Depp as Gonzo, redux; Fear and Loathing in Old San Juan?

Stepping out

2011-09-11T21:33:00.000-04:00

Leading Ladies

(2010)

Still very proud of the cowriter I spawned, and still very impressed by the production as a whole, now available on DVD. One of my favorite sequences is the lovers' first dance, which blends eros and sweetness about as well as they can be blended. Smart, fun.

Take two aspirin . . .

2011-09-11T15:16:00.000-04:00

Contagion

Crit

So, this is the guy who gave us Ocean's Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen, right? This is scary in lots of the same ways that 28 Days Later is, except that instead of a threat that none of us has ever seen in real life, it's something that all of us are familiar with in a much less virulent state--and so it's that much scarier.

Another odd and admirable feature of the film: it features several of the sexiest women in the movies in some of their least sexy roles, especially Kate Winslet, in one of her best performances, but one guaranteed to yield no awards.

Trailers

Abduction--Trailer starts with Taylor Lautner (and I'm embarrassed to say that I recognized him and know his name) musing about his mysterious background, and for a full minute I thought it was the next Twilight flick. No, in this one he's not a werewolf (as far as I could tell), but he does have some secret; didn't really pay enough attention to know what.
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows--Didn't like the first in this franchise, but good reviews and Noomi Rapace might get me there.

Charm your way across the Khyber Pass

2011-09-09T22:16:00.007-04:00

The Man Who Would Be King

(1975)

Ah, Connery, Caine, Kipling, and Kamp. Fun.