Popup book

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

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

But first . . .

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

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

And so . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to America

Remote Area Medical

Crit

The titular organization was founded to help people in South America deprived by poverty and distance from medical care, but as this documentary, set in Appalachian Tennessee, shows, the focus has pulled back to address the Third World as it exists within our own borders.

Bad teeth (and not always, as people tend to assume, says a woman about whom I'm sorry to say I'd already assumed thus, because of crystal meth), bad pumps (a 61-year-old who says he last saw a doctor when he was about 16 registers a blood pressure reading of 220/160), bad lungs (a smoker since 16 has her first-ever chest X-ray at 50 or so, and it shows scary spots), bad eyes, bad everything that can go bad in human physiology--RAM drops in with the focus and efficiency of Navy Seals and changes lives a weekend of free medical care at a time.

Way beyond inspiring, way beyond disturbing--especially when you think that this is the sort of duty accepted by governments of most developed countries, not left to the charity and organizational genius of people like Stan Brock, RAM's founder.

Wild

An  unusually political M4

Deux jours, une nuit (Two days, one night)

IFC

How to make this work: Sandra, laid off from her job after receiving treatment for depression, goes coworker-to-coworker, asking each to vote for her reinstatement, and thus against his or her own €1k bonus?

Well, it helps if Sandra is played by someone like Marion Cotillard, capable of conveying the embarrassment and the shame and the hopelessness of the process. Even so, this is something I can imagine being more successful in the hands of a brilliant short story writer.

She's Beautiful When She's Angry

CV

I still occasionally will see a successful young entertainer quoted as declaring herself "not a feminist." Any female, at minimum, and better, any human who rejects the label needs to watch this documentary, which collects a wealth of first-person reports from the women's movement's resurrection in the '60s, alongside but often bizarrely in conflict with the other freedom movements of the time.

Leviafan (Leviathan)

FF

Infidelity, venality, religion, religious hypocrisy, vodka, kleptocracy--right, all the standard ingredients of the Russian epic. Oh, and whales, too, whales dead and alive. The Job story, if Job were pretty much an asshole and drank way too much.

Arrête ou je continue (If you don't, I will)

FF

Marital exhaustion leads Pomme (Emmanuelle Devos) to stay in the literal and metaphorical forest when Pierre (Mathieu Amalric) leaves the literal, if not the metaphorical. 

For anyone with as big a crush as I have on both these actors, the terminal loss in translation, the insurmountable sadness, the same-magnetic-pole repulsion are heartbreaking. If this were a Hollywood movie, dammit, there'd be a way to make it right. 

Trailers

• Queen and Country--Brits in the Korean War.
• Timbuktu--And then the Islamists come to town.
• Il capitale umano (Human capital)--Sex and corruption in Italy? Say it ain't so!

Intel inside

The Imitation Game

Crit

So this Cumberbatch fellow everyone seems to be all gaga about, whom I'd scarcely seen before? He's really quite good as Alan Turing, sometimes referred to as "the homosexual who won World War II," though I think "the homosexual with Asperger's who won World War II and also invented the computer" would be more accurate.

A perfectly solid slice-of-biopic strengthened by the return to the sort of getoutatown-with-your-gender-limitations role that made me first love Keira Knightly. Yes, yes, I'm sure the process is vastly oversimplified for us not-mathematical-genius ticket buyers, but I'm even surer that failing to oversimplify would have been a fatal error.

Trailers

• The Woman in Gold--Based on the true story of a Holocaust survivor's quest to recover from the Austrian government of a Nazi-stolen portrait of her aunt . . . oh, a portrait by Gustav Klimt.
• Chappie--Another adorable robot story.

O, brother, who art thou?

Big Eyes

Post

Tim Burton's least weird film in . . . well, maybe ever . . . stacks the deck so effectively in favor of kitsch expressionist Margaret Keane that it's almost possible to believe that her paintings had artistic merit. Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz make it work, mostly. 

Top Five

Post

Chris Rock goes ethnically different Woody Allen, as has been widely noticed, but, as I've not seen mentioned, also snags a huge page from Preston Sturges,  specifically from Sullivan's Travels. 

And except for about 15 minutes at the start of the 3rd act, when it goes off the rails because the necessary romantic comedy complication takes the form of something that absolutely would never happen in the world of journalism of which the New York Times is the bedrock, he does fine things with that page. 

One of the film's many strengths is Rock's confidence in the script and in himself and Rosario Dawson--never better--to deliver that wonderfully talky script such that you never want them to shut up, except maybe to make out.

And the most subversive of Rock's many nods to his comedic ancestors of every ethnicity is the massacre of "Smile" by DMX, an in joke that is plenty funny even if you don't know that the music was composed by Charles Chaplin.

A nearly great film. Oh, but one thing: if you have zero sense of humor about JFK, you might want to go for your popcorn refill when Rock's Andre Allen (spoiler alert!) takes the stage at the Comedy Cellar.

Trailers

• Selma--Yes, of course, though I gotta say it seems weird to have Englishmen playing 3 key roles.
• The Age of Adaline--Looks like a distinctly inferior Benjamin Button.
• Fifty Shades of Grey--Opening on Valentine's Day, natch!
• Paddington--Looks awful.
• Get Hard--Wait, did I say Paddington looks awful?
• Unfinished Business--Wait, did I say Get Hard looks awful?
• The Boy Next Door--What was she thinking?
• Hot Tub Time Machine 2--Anything worth doing (which the first one was, marginally) is worth overdoing.

Wishes are children

Into the Woods

Crit

Thoroughly enjoyed the whack-a-mole scavenger-hunt portion of the film, right up through the fake happy ending. The dark and complicated part that follows--which is, of course, most of the point--seemed too long, even draggy, and too light on the Sondheim lyrics that inject momentum whenever they're heard. Still, a perfectly acceptable Christmas afternoon screening.

Trailers

• Cinderella--This appears to be a straightforward live-action-and-special-effects version of the Disney classic (which made the Cinderella portion of the feature even more off-kilter, of course). Highlights seem to be Helena Bonham Carter as the Fairy Godmother and . . . the awesome glass slippers (which, the FG assures Ella, and really quite comfortable).

Reversal

Foxcatcher

Crit

Channing Tatum is Mark Schultz, Olympic gold medalist in freestyle Not Smiling; Steve Carell is John du Pont, a clueless Richard Cory with serious mommy problems. It's a marriage made in wrestling hell, and Mark Ruffalo is David Schultz, the big brother caught in the cross-hand. Look for an Oscar® nomination for Carell's prosthetic nose. No, but really, it's a queasy-making film with powerful performance.

Trailers

• a teaser for the Oscar®-nominated shorts, in theaters at the end of January.
• Red Army--Olympic hockey on the other side; a documentary.

Hammer and nail

Wild

Crit

A beautifully made and brilliantly edited film, and another great performance by Reese Witherspoon, who at 38 can still channel her inner Tracy Flick for flashback scenes. But I hope you're not asking me to like or admire Cheryl Strayed, author of the source memoir; I'll go as far as respect, but that's it.

Trailer

• Far from the Madding Crowd--Carey Mulligan follows 48 years in Julie Christie's footsteps.

There and back again

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Crit

Yeah, OK: insomnia last night, wine at the company holiday party today, so drowsiness was preordained. Still, I just felt (while awake) that I'd seen all this before. I'm ready to leave Middle Earth now, and I hope Peter Jackson is too.

Trailer

• Focus--Will Smith crime comedy. This may be the first trailer I've seen for an actual 2015 release. What will open downtown on Christmas Day??!!? Inherent Vice, I hope! Though I'll settle for Mr. Turner.

Grit

The Homesman

Crit

It's impossible not to associate this riveting story of a frontier female defiant of the limitations on her sex, embarked on a sacred mission with the coerced assistance of a rough-about-the-edges, rough-through-and-through coot, with another story that fits the same description--would be impossible even if the recent incarnation of Mattie Ross, Hailee Steinfeld, didn't show up in a small role near the end.

The film is unembarrassed by its debt to True Grit, employing key visual and thematic tropes, and its refusal to apologize makes the reliance easier to accept. Harder to accept are the independent assessments by two male gazes of a character played by Hilary Swank as "too plumb damn plain" and "plain as an old tin bucket," but even that works, because Swank's Mary Bee Cuddy, for all her protofeminist independence, knows she's plain, knows the rules, and, age thirty-one, pursues matrimony like the last berth on Noah's ark.

And in the end, it's not True Grit at all, but it is another dark, unpredictable tale on its own quest. This is the second big-screen feature Tommy Lee Jones has directed, each with a quest at the center, and I have no idea where he'll ask us to follow him next, but I'm there.

The book of right-off

The Babadook

Crit

This is addressed to my friend Lisa, who has an impressive collection of pop-up books: sorry, but you weren't around, and I couldn't wait to see it. Moreover, I don't know how high your tolerance for scary movies is, but I should tell you that this is the scariest film I've seen as an adult, a brilliant fogging of psychology and supernatural. The setup is this: Samuel (a perfectly cute/creepy Noah Wiseman) is a deeply disturbed not-quite-7-year-old, the disturbance arising from the fact that his father died in a car accident while taking his mother (Essie Davis) to the hospital to give birth. Without giving too much away, it also develops that Amelia is not quite the unconditionally loving mother she first seems. Into this standard haunting environment (locked basement door, dog occasionally barking at mysterious noises, cockroaches bursting from a hole behind the fridge) comes the worst children's pop-up book ever, or at least the one best calculated to keep anyone in the house from enjoying a night's sleep. And so it gets worse from there.

An absolutely terrific (in every sense) film, written and directed by Jennifer Kent, her first feature after a long and uneventful acting career. It is so good that I recommend that you skip it.

Ahead of the curve

Frank

(2014)

OK, let's compare that perfectly adequate biopic with this ambitious, weird, ambitiously weird, weirdly ambitious not-really-a-biopic-but-not-altogether-not-not-either, about a different sort of afflicted genius with an extra load above the neck.

Frank, too, seems in search of a theory of everything, but in the music of the spheres rather than in the spheres themselves. The oddness takes an unfortunately conventional turn late in the game, but until then this is as uncomfortable as anyone could wish.

My degeneration

The Theory of Everything

Crit

The convenient thing in making a film about history's second-most-famous ALS sufferer is that your narrative arc draws itself: promise, then tragedy, then tragic heroism, then triumph. The only surprise here is that a biography of someone so cosmically ambitious could itself be so atomically unambitious, not counting the ambition to rack up a few Oscar nominations via the time-tested route of the afflicted-guy movie.

Wait, I take that back: I had a huge surprise even before the film started: my MoviePass worked!

Anarchy in the KS

Vi är bäst! (We are the best!)

(2013)

This puts me in mind of Those Glory Glory Days, another film about teenage girls devoted to a "boys' pastime." There it was football (aka soccer), here it's punk, in the early '80s, when it was rumored to be dead, but 13-year-olds in Stockholm and 29-year-olds in Grafton, W.Va., were struggling to disprove that canard.

Bobo and Klara, with no skill but plenty of angst (i.e., the perfect punk DNA), recruit the Christian classical guitarist Hedvig--who has in common with them only the sine qua non: unpopularity--to join their nascent band. They survive parental repression and a Yoko Ono moment in an exhilaratingly empowering narrative. Loved loved loved it.

Persian white

Popcorn-for-Thanksgiving M3

OK, don't worry about my state of mind (or don't worry about it any more than usual), but after 3 movies that I enjoyed, I decided I'd rather head home and watch the Illini game only a couple of hours after it occurred than hang around for the 3D Godard film, especially since I realized that I'd thrown away my chance of using MoviePass, since 3D flicks aren't covered.

Why hadn't I already used MP on one of the 2 earlier films I'd seen at IFC, you ask? Because I was running so late that I entered the theater for the first one moments after the feature had begun, and the second while the short was in progress. Given my experiences with MP, I decided that using it for the one film of the day for which I wouldn't be rushed was the (as it were) ticket, but then I remembered the restriction too late.

Of course, I thought I'd try anyway, but the app informed me that it didn't have the theater's showtimes, and the thought of navigating that kink in the system--to try for a ticket to which I wasn't entitled--was more than I could contemplate

But hey, good news/bad news re ticket costs: when I checked my ticket stubs, I found that the cashier had TWICE assumed me to be eligible for the senior price of $10, so I saved $10 even without MP

And that's about all I have to say about my M3. Oh, wait, right: the movies:

Citizenfour

IFC

All right, I'm convinced: Edward Snowden may technically be a traitor, but that doesn't stop him from being a patriot in spirit. An extraordinarily static documentary that somehow manages to be fascinating, largely by playing on the tension between secrecy and transparency.

Le Jour se lève (Daybreak)

FF

Yes, Jean Gabin had a great face, and it's hard to imagine a better victim-of-circumstances protagonist, but it was hard for me to get past the implausibility that the police would let a killer hole up in his room long enough to flash back through the entire narrative that brought him to his fatal circumstance.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

IFC

I'm sorry to announce that this will not be Iran's submission to the Academy in the Best Foreign Film category. But damn, it oughta be.

The Girl, for whom no name is ever heard, has no explicit backstory, though it's clear that she likes rock & roll and prides herself on maintaining standards of morality consistent with being a vampire.

Beautiful black & white cinematography, strong soundtrack (including someone called Kiosk, who can fairly be described as the Farsi Tom Waits), a stunning, almost silent star (Sheila Vand, who undoubtedly spoke more words in the history lecture that opens Argo), and a touching love story with a Graduate final shot. Oh, and a character with some seriously badass tattoos. Oh! And a great damn cat!

Trailers

• Zero Motivation--A comedy about female Israeli soldiers.
• Arrête ou je continue (If you don't, I will)--Mathieu Amalric + Emmanuelle Devos = hell yeah.
• Leviafan (Leviathan)--Angry Russians.
• Risate di gioia (The passionate thief)--Mario Monicelli retrospective at Film Forum.
• Song of the Sea--Selkies, animated.
• Yume to kyôki no ôkoku (Kingdom of dreams and madness)--Documentary about Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.
• The Babadook--Hfs! The trailer scared the crap out of me. In!
• Goodbye to All That--Divorced dad has girlfriends.

Hearts and minds

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, part 1

Crit

People, come on: did you not notice the "part 1" in the title? Were you not expecting to be left in an awkward plot place? This is the closest to a riot breaking out that I've ever seen in a movie theater, including one young woman right behind me who would not be mollified by her boyfriend's logic and just wanted to get out of the theater right now, apparently in hopes that the sooner she left, the sooner she'd be offered part 2.

Difficult to make this semistory work, and the film does what I'd call an honorable, workmanlike job of it. I suppose I'll be back for part 2 (maybe right in front of the young woman in the previous paragraph), but the impulse will be obligatory closure, not anticipatory excitement.

Probably the first film I've ever seen whose locations were all in Georgia (our state, i.e.) and France.

Whiteout

Force majeure

Crit

Think of it as Macomber facing a big scary avalanche rather than a big scary animal.

Most of us, I suspect, never have the opportunity to learn what we would do if faced with potentially lethal physical danger. We'd like to think that we'd fall toward the right end of the hero-to-coward continuum, but it's one of those things you can't really have a dress rehearsal for, and most of us don't know.

This is about a man who is tested and fails, and it's less about the failure than about how you deal afterward with the wife and children who saw you run, with the world that has no idea or only a secondhand idea of what you've turned out to be, and how you reorder what you now know about yourself. And yes, being Swedish, the answers are as excruciating as you'd imagine.

Straight, no chaser

Rosewater

Crit

First, let me say that I've never been so fond of Leonard Cohen. I noticed in the end credits that the music supervisor was Linda Cohen, but I've been unable to establish whether the surname is coincidental. It's not exactly a rare name.

Jon Stewart nails it in his debut as screenwriter and director, adapting Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari's memoir, Then They Came for Me, of his Kafkaesque imprisonment and torture by the Ahmadinejad regime. We've seen prison and solitary confinement and torture in movies before, but I'm not sure we've ever seen as good an articulation of the  rhetorical question: who is the more imprisoned?

Whiplash

Crit

First, this: what sort of example does a film set to have two characters in an early scene chatting in the movie theater where Rififi has just started?

But wow. Another torture story, though one in which the victim is a lot more complicit in the process. Andrew (Miles Teller, whom we loved in The Spectacular Now) is an insanely driven drummer at Juilliard-in-all-but-name, and Fletcher (J. K. Simmons, who has been a wonderful character actor for ages without ever being remotely as scary and repulsive as this) is the abusive-for-the-art director of the institution's marquee jazz band. All you need to know is this: I came out of the first fine film of the day deeply affected by the protagonist's ordeal. I came out of this absolutely exhausted from the stress and anxiety--this a film where some blood does get spilled, the worst of it from excessively vigorous drumming. Holy christ, what a film. A lock right now for the year's best list.

Trailers

• Foxcatcher--Yes; would have been an apt completion of a torture triplet.
• Mr. Turner--Not big into art, but (1) Mike Leigh, (2) Timothy Spall, (3) hell yeah.

Dylan's dream

Interstellar

Crit

Well, that was certainly trippy, and certainly of an extremely high quality in every way. But it's one of those films I admire more than like, and unlike most Christopher Nolan pictures, it's one I doubt I'll ever feel compelled to revisit. I may be wrong: it's does have that daddy-daughter thing going, and I'm a sucker for that. On the other hand, I felt pretty uncomfortable hearing all these scientists talking about a "they" who were apparently making the salvation of humanity possible, but the less said about that, the less spoily.

Trailers

• The Interview--More silliness from Franco, Rogan & Co.

Failure to launch

Laggies

Crit

Well, duh: why wouldn't you prefer hanging out with cool teenagers to growing up when all the adults in your world, including those nearest and dearest to you, are either assholes or douches? But the damn near genius of this film is that it shows regression to an immature past self as a route out of stasis in an immature current self. The cliché monster makes an inevitable third-act appearance, but a smart story and a terrific cast make that sin forgivable. A very pleasant surprise.

By the way, not that the title really needs explanation, but if you don't pay close attention, you'll miss the one articulation and gloss of the term.