Pilgrim's progress

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

(1962)

In an episode of Mad Men I watched this week, one character tells another of having seen this and having been disappointed that in the end, it turns out just as you thought at first: "John Wayne shot him." Well, yeah, that's the obvious reading, but I read this as a protopostmodernist document that yields no certainty.

The first, ostensibly objective, depiction we get of the shooting seems to show James Stewart's Ranse Stoddard firing a fluky fatal shot; later Wayne's Tom Doniphon narrates a revisionist version wherein he gunned down Lee Marvin's memorable badman from the shadows in cold-blooded murder.

But Doniphon has at least two motives, one self-aggrandizing, one self-effacing, for undercutting Ranse's narrative: he may just want to sting one last time the man to whom he has lost his one true love, Hallie (Vera Miles), or, more likely, he may want to assuage Stoddard's legitimate guilt in the service of sending the territory's best man to Washington. Or he may be telling the truth. Or he may erroneously think he's telling the truth: even in Doniphon's version, Ranse's shot seems sufficiently well aimed to have had at least a chance of providing the fatal wound. And conveniently, the drunken doctor/coroner has no interest in investigating the shooting beyond declaring the outlaw dead.

I think the whole point--and the point of the newspaper editor's portentous summation "When the truth becomes the legend, print the legend," which, if you actually parse it, means precisely nothing--is that fact is often too slippery to pin down. That's not news in 2009, but in the 1962 Hollywood mainstream, it was far hipper than John Ford is usually given credit for being.

More than a butt touch

Management

Crit

Well, this is a funny little bird. Tortuous plot, tortuous mood, and with all the twists it's bound to take a wrong turn from time to time. At points it tiptoes along the quirky-for-quirk's-sake border, but a smart script by Stephen Belber (who also directed) and the unfailing charm of Steve Zahn and Jennifer Aniston keep us in the game, sometimes against our better judgment, and almost always against our sense of logic. As Aniston's character, Sue, says at one point, "That's not how life works." Your point being?

Trailers

Most of there I forgot to record yesterday, but I think I can remember everything: Adam, LeBron, Ali, plus lots of love:

• Adam--Hugh Dancy is the latest entrant in the Afflicted Guy Oscar Sweepstakes: he has Asperger's; she (Rose Byrne) is willing to work with him on that.
• More Than a Game--Documentary about James's celebrated high school team.
• Soul Power--Doc on the concert organized to capitalize on the 1974 Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle; James Brown, Celia Cruz, and B. B. King, among others.
• Paper Heart--I'm confused: is this or is it not a documentary? Michael Cera and Charlyne Yi fall in love, or pretend to.
• (500) Days of Summer--Another you-really-love-me-despite-what-you-think story, this one with Joseph Gordon-Levitt trying to convince Zooey Deschanel.
• Easy Virtue--Never thought I'd hear myself say this, but Jessica Biel actually seems as if she might be able to handle the role of the new American wife considered a slut by the proper English family headed by Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth. Based on a Noël Coward play silently filmed in 1928 by a young Brit only recently repatriated from Germany.
  

War effort

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek

(1944)

Not sure when I've so enjoyed a film while wishing for different leads. How about Garland and Rooney instead of Betty Hutton and Eddie Bracken as the mysteriously pregnant Trudy and her ever-faithful Norval? On the other hand, William Demarest and Diana Lynn are perfect as Trudy's blustering father and far-too-wise-and-cynical-for-fourteen sister. I was going to say that Lynn is about as convincing a fourteen-year-old as Veronica Lake was a boy in another Preston Sturges film, but according to IMDb, Lynn was in fact only seventeen when she made the film.

Fear and loathing

Tyson

Crit

Huh! Who'd have thought I could be convinced that Mike Tyson is a complex, thoughtful, self-critical man motivated more than anything else by childhood fear of being bullied? In multiple interviews Tyson rarely blames anyone else for his multiple meltdowns, and the vigor with which he examines his life must certainly make it worth living, regardless of what most of us may have assumed. Oh, and the fight footage does nothing to undercut his assertion that at his peak, he was the best ever to wear Everlast trunks.

How about you?

Manhattan

(1979)

OK, this was work-related: in the book I'm proofreading, the author refers to a character in this film who gives a tour of the city's architecture. Now I know my Woody well enough to have recognized immediately that he's confusing this with Hannah and Her Sisters, but I thought the responsible thing to do, never mind that I've probably seen this close to a dozen times, would be to confirm my recollection that there's no scene here that could be described thus. Recollection confirmed.

And if I were making my list of things that make like worth living, I might well include that moment when "Strike Up the Band" segues into "But Not for Me" as Isaac sees Tracy again, separated by time, space, and glass doors.

It's just a jump to the left

Star Trek

Crit

You know what word I haven't used much lately? Fun. Well, this is a whole year's worth of adrenalinic, self-referential, mind-warping fun. I'm no Trekkie (or whatever it is that they prefer to be called), but I'm aware enough of the tropes of the original series to get at least the most obvious jokes about what Jennie Tonic calls Star Trek Babies. And I'm a humanist, not a physicist, but I guess I get enough of the weird pseudoscience to sort of get the time-warp. And I've sure as hell seen enough Indy Jones and Star Wars flicks to appreciate the adrenaline rush. All of which equals fun.

Alternate reality: credited as a concept artist (whatever that is) is one Ryan Church, which is the name of one of my favorite New York Mets. Now, I have a compulsion to give esoteric nicknames to my Mets, and when Church joined the team, I immediately translated his surname to the Scots and Middle English version of the word, which led naturally to . . . right: Captain Kirk.

Trailers

Seven of them, seven! Can I even remember them all?

• Let's start with the ones I want to see, both Jews vs. Nazis, one literal, the other figurative: Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds and Shane Acker's expansion of his like-titled Oscar-nominated short 9.
• Next, the ones based on toys: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Ryan Church is a concept artist [whatever that is] for this, too) and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (which, if nothing else, destroys the Eiffel Tower pretty terrifyingingly).
• Let's see, what else? Oh, right, first there's the sequel of a film I didn't like, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian; then the latest keep-pushing-Will Ferrell-before-he-runs-out-of-gas exploitation Land of the Lost; and finally the broad-but-maybe-funny Mike Judge project Extract.

Agita

Broadway Danny Rose

(1984)

Woody in Goombahland.

This seems to be greater than the sum of its parts. Didn't love it when it came out, but I keep returning to it, and it keeps making me smile. And that's enough for me.