Relo

Beetlejuice

(1988)

Bonus Halloween-season screening, since I got a late start, and to prepare myself for anther over-the-top Keaton performance tomorrow, but I gotta say: surprised how bland and unfunny this is. Yes, the involuntary calypso scene is wonderful, and Keaton's commitment can't be denied, and it's a hoot to see Goulet and Cavett as self-important assholes, but it's just not a very interesting pic. It's as if Burton is trying too hard to give us something Burtonesque. Sorry.

Masque of the bed death

Eyes Wide Shut

(1999)

I like to think I'm a pretty smart guy, even a relatively sophisticated film viewer, but all I get out of this is that sex is dangerous--or, specifically, that getting access under false pretexts into a mansion where masked, powerful men dally with masked, commodified women is perhaps not the way to solve the trust issues in your marriage. I may not be smart enough to get this movie, but I could have figured that out on my own, and probably in less than 165 minutes.

Disappointments: (1) this was the U.S. theatrical version with the fig-leaf humans curtaining off the serious fucking, and (2) FORTY-FIVE MINUTES of commercials in the 3½-hour IFC timeslot, plus that annoying shape, size, and sound violation of the closing credits, so that they could show more self-promotion, plus a bad comic going into a coffee shop uninvited and unannounced.

The snows of killer Montana

Scarface

(1983)

It's true: though it's impossible to have been unfamiliar with many of the tropes from this film, I'd never seen it before. Now I have, and . . . well, yeah, it's pretty excessive.

One cliché at a time

Sherrybaby

(2006)

Maggie Gyllenhaal is convincing as a parolee trying to stay off drugs and be a mother to her daughter, but there is absolutely nothing original or surprising here, least of all the big reveal that is supposed to shock us and explain much about why Sherry is where and who she is.

Capital punishment

Monster's Ball

(2001)

What I remembered about this: the racial text, and the hot sex.

What I didn't remember about this: the function of the Heath Ledger character, and how universally transactional sex and even love are in the film. It's not enough that Hank (Billy Bob Thornton) is a white male and thus has two power-hierarchical legs up on the black female Leticia (Halle Berry), but his financial security and her relative poverty put him in a position to come repeatedly to her rescue. It's hard to hear dialogue like

"I want to take care of you."

"Good, 'cause I need to be taken care of."

A film more interesting than good, ultimately, and interesting in kind of skeevy ways.

Strange fascination

The Breakfast Club

(1985)

OK, I'll readily grant that even when this was new, I was way past the target audience age, but to concede that that is why I didn't like it at all then and don't like it at all now--having given it the second chance that I was sure it deserved, given that people dear to me who are by no means idiots find great value in it--would be to claim that I stopped at some point feeling like a misfit.

No, the reason I don't like it is that it is an obvious, formulaic story told mechanically, with clichés instead of characters, and zero surprises. Sorry, but this is one lazy, brainless motion picture.

The blood stays on the blade

Gangs of New York

(2002)

Been watching Copper on BBC America and have been mostly unimpressed by a series that seems clearly derivative of and inferior to this: same time, same place, but from the POV of the police, who are, after all, just another gang.

So watching this again confirms its superiority to the TV series (whose derivativeness--is that a word?--needs no proof), but also confirms that my initial lukewarm reaction to it when it came out was not stingy. It's an OK film, visually impressive, excessively grandiose, with what must have been a welcome opportunity for Daniel Day-Lewis to rehearse his overacting ahead of There Will Be Blood. It's one of those Marty-a-little-too-much-in-love-with-himself deals that we've seen from time to time.

Inventir amour

Jules and Jim

(1962)

I might as well admit it: I'm just never going to be French. I like the French, and I like Truffaut more than most of them, but I just don't get how love works for them. This is usually described as a love triangular, but it's really a three-dimensional love pentagonal solid. In America, we'd simply call Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) crazy and institutionalize her. But for the French, it's not fun until someone loses and eye, or something even more precious. Perhaps it would have made more sense with a bottle of Bordeaux.

Liability

The Sweet Hereafter

(1997)

Wow, 15 years ago? I guess so, given that Sarah Polley looks even younger than the 18 she was.

Here we are in the weird moral universe of Atom Egoyan, where people grieve and guard their shameful secrets, and even the dead have gaping wounds. About as unsettling a film as you'll see, and I wonder whether I give it too much credit simply because it makes me feel like the ground is shifting under my feet. But give it credit I do.

Phantom

Le Dernier Métro (The last Metro)

(1980)

Occupied Paris, Nazis and collaborators out the wazoo, and Mme Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve), a film star in her youth ('cause yeah, she's a pretty haggard-looking old lady by this time), is trying to keep her impresario husband's Montmartre theater alive, Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent), for reasons made obvious by his surname, having fled.

Except that he's really in the cellar, pulling managerial and directorial strings via Marion, less because he doesn't trust his replacements than because he has started to go stir crazy. Meanwhile, for no more evident cause than that they're in a movie together, Marion and actor Bernard Granger (Gérard Depardieu, and you forget how handsome he was) fall in love.

It sometimes feels a tad by-the-numbers, but hey, pretty people directed by Truffaut, why not?

What reasons do you need?

Bowling for Columbine

(2002)

After the incident by the Empire State Building today, this seemed the logical choice among the films that had been sitting on my hard drive for more than 2 years, and an excellent choice it was, an even better film than I remembered--and, by Michael Moorean standards, not grotesquely unfair. Even the interview with Charlton Heston, which I remembered as being a cruel fish-in-a-barrel shoot of a senile old man, this time seemed at worst a borderline legitimate low blow. Also: I gotta get that Joey Ramone "What a Wonderful World."

Weed or wildflower

A Love Song for Bobby Long

(2004)

Recommended by a friend, this sat in my Netflix queue for maybe a couple of years and then on my DVR hard drive for a couple of more. It's a compilation of clichés--southern clichés, with the subset of New Orleans clichés, alcoholism clichés, writer's block clichés, academic corrosion clichés, parent-child estrangement clichés, education-of-the-ignorant/innocent clichés--you name it. And yet the commitment of John Travolta, Scarlett Johansson, and Gabriel Macht to this store-bought gumbo makes it almost palatable.

La carte de la race

La Fille du RER (The girl on the train)

(2009)

Jeanne and Franck meet Breathless cute, on rollerblades, and while we, and her mother (Catherine Deneuve) suspect there's something not quite on the up & up with him, Jeanne doesn't want to know. So when the inevitable occurs, she concocts a half-baked story about being the victim of an anti-Semitic attack (though she's not Jewish) on the Paris suburban transit. Why? For love, for attention, for control over her own narrative.

A weirdly engaging story, quintessentially French in its messily intersecting plotlines and its contempt for easy moral stances.

By the book

Se7en

(1995)

Funny. I'd been thinking for quite some time that I should test my initial dismissive--nay, revulsive--reaction to David Fincher's early medievalist serial-killer creeper, and it came up regularly on AMC's schedule, but I didn't want it dismembered by long commercial breaks, so I waited until it showed up on IFC . . . which now has long (4-minute!) and frequent commercial breaks (165-minute slot to accommodate a 127-minute film, and who knows how much they trimmed?). Talk about your deadly sins!

Anyway, when this was new, I was blown away by the opening titles but found the film despicable, pretty much pornographic. Was that one of those where-my-head-was-at-that-day judgments? Don't know, but this time I was impressed, the inescapable revulsion serving only to draw me closer to the standard issue cop team of the wizened, on-the-brink-of-retirement veteran (Morgan Freeman) and the idealistic, impulsive youngster (Brad Pitt). Even forfeiting the virginal surprises, I was carried along effectively by the turns of the plot, and fortunately, I didn't remember clearly the outcome of the will-he-or-won't-he climax.

But more than anything, here's what I was thinking: this is an LA that outsewers the NYC of Taxi Driver (well, actually, it's one of those Fincherian nowheres: mostly LA, with a desert outside, but also with a conspicuously noisy subway, which exists only to sink us another circle or two into hellishness), yet by the time it was released, weren't the rates of violent crime already coming down dramatically nationwide? So now I check, and yes, 1995 was the third year of the precipitous decline that would continue until 1999, then turn more gradual. So it might be said that Fincher released a film that already didn't mean as much as it had when he started it and stands even more now than then on technical and performative merits. Fortunately, those merits are pretty damned meritorious.

Mr. Funny Shoes

Mimic

(1997)

Didn't like this when it was new, but that was before I realized that Guillermo del Toro was one of my favorite contemporary directors, so 15 years on, I decided it was time to give his big-bugs-under-Manhattan second feature another shot (of Raid?).

Sorry, still no: a few hints of the tropes he uses effectively elsewhere, especially his go-to birth-canal corridors (here, subway tunnels), but too much of this seems lifted directly from Alien and Aliens, and Mira Sorvino, though she had recently copped an Oscar for Mighty Aphrodite, can't hold a tough maternal candle to Sigourney Weaver.

Del Toro's long-awaited next film, by the way, is the space-aliens attacker Pacific Rim, starring fellow Arsenal backer Idris Elba (right: Stringer Bell). Scheduled for a May 2013 release. Scheduled for me tomorrow night: another film I didn't like first time, by a director who has since become one of my favorites.

Surface tension

A Slipping Down Life

(1999)

Less than the sum of its parts, though two of the parts are Lili Taylor and Guy Pearce, two of the most unobtrusively great actors of their generation. The problem is the story, based on a novel by Anne Tyler. Let me put it this way: the decision by Evie Decker to carve into her forehead the name of the oddball charismatic rock singer Drumstrings Casey (think lovechild of Springsteen and Zevon), whom she has barely met, is above the median in clear motivation for characters' behavior. Still, the leads--and John Hawkes as Drum's drummer and manager--make it worth a look, even if you decide, as I did, to deaccession it from your DVR's hard drive.

Roy Orbison's glasses

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.

Sax and violence

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 scene that proceeds from the film's final gunshot makes any sense?

Nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat

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.

Too much

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.