The one you shouldn't hurt at all

Blue Valentine

Crit

So if Einstein was right, we all fall in love and break apart simultaneously, except that if time is a fiction, so is simultaneity, I guess. Which is just a dumb joke to distance me from the emotional gut-kicking administered by this time warp of love, omega to alpha. "I feel bruised," said one of my after-work movie posse, and yeah, I can get behind that. Beautifully structured, sensitively shot, and miraculously acted by Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, it is without a doubt one of the best films I'll see this year, but please don't make me see it again anytime soon, and please let me stop thinking about it now.

Trailers

• Cedar Rapids--Came in in the middle of this one (this is what happens when you go with people), but it looks like another lame yuk-it-upper. But just the notion that a movie could be titled Cedar Rapids . . .
• The Adjustment Bureau--And for this one I had to triangulate from stars Matt Damon and Emily Blunt because the projector went out of whack right before the title appeared (and twice during the film, by the way): looks like Amélie meets Bourne.

Getting the bugs out

Cronos

(1993)

Yes, I'm trying to deaccession DVDs this year, but this is one I've been wanting to own for some time, so even though I had to pay Criterion Edition prices when it was finally rereleased, I had to have it--notwithstanding that I now see it's available for streaming on Netflix.

This is how we met Guillermo del Toro, and elements of his signature are already in place: the child who can endure more shock than anyone at home in the real world ever could, the eerily beautiful visual style (including the museum-salon-style long rooms and hallways), the skewed-Catholic moral vision. And of course the fantasy universe that is partly from familiar myth but mostly from his own wonderfully weird imagination: here, vampirism enabled not by another vampire but by a machine invented by a 16th-century alchemist (did I hear someone's ears prick up there?).

Del Toro regular Federico Luppi plays the antique-shop owner who develops a taste for blood, and Hellboy-to-be Ron Perlman is the comical heavy. Oh, and Jabba the Hutt appears to have gotten a comeback gig as the larva that lives inside the machine and filters the blood.

Domo arigato, Kobayashi

OK, the Times finally arrived at 8:55, but I'm still going to take a few minutes to do what I was going to do if it hadn't: tip a cap to one of the best character actors of our time, Pete Postlethwaite, dead far too young, of cancer.

Here's the best thing I can say about Postlethwaite, and you who know me know that this is a very good thing indeed: when I would catch a glimpse of him in a trailer, my enthusiasm for the film automatically rose, whether from "no" to "well, mayyyybe" or from "oh, yes" to "oh, yes!"

My first keen awareness of him on the screen was not as the wrongly accused Giuseppe Conlan in In the Name of the Father (for which he got his only Oscar nomination) but as the inexplicably named messenger Kobayashi in The Usual Suspects. Brassed Off (currently unavailable on disc, it seems) is the only lead role I can recall for him, and while he was brilliant in that little gem, it's probably just as well that he kept to the periphery--not the ace starting pitcher or the put-it-away closer, but the guy who comes in to get a left-handed batter out with the game in the balance in the seventh inning. OK, it's silly to use a baseball metaphor for a man so very not-American, but the point is that he brought a little bit of perfection to every role. Most recently, for example, The Town was nothing like a great film, but Postlethwaite's portrayal of a gentle florist façade over a vicious gangster was one of the elements that made it 2 fun hours. He shows up in both the Elsinore Project--as the Player King in Mel Gibson's Hamlet--and the Verona Project--as Friar Laurence in Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (I always get a kick out of typing the full title)--and those roles provide a nice précis to the Postlethwaite presence: a small role, but a tricky one, and an essential one, one that, done badly, can cut the heart out of the piece. I'll resist the temptation to say that his loss cuts out the heart of my cinematic world, but the precedent of my articulating at some length an appreciation--and including a photo!--should make it clear how much I feel his passing. For more, see the Times obit. The early online version of that bio revealed that he had been active in protesting the Iraq War and that his Green convictions extended to having a wind turbine on his Shropshire farm. I hope that those tidbits were edited out in the name of space, not of accuracy: when you admire someone without having any idea whether anything about him or her is admirable besides the work, it's always comforting to learn of a shared belief.

Marketplace of ideas

Agora

(2009)

I'm a sucker for Roman Empire stuff, I'm a sucker for Rachel Weisz, I'm a sucker for proto-Copernican astronomy (well, OK, not really so much), but this is just a mess. Late-4th-century Alexandria, and the Christians, not far removed from underdog status, are now bloodthirsty, book-burning misogynists (no comment). Hypatia is a brilliant atheistic philosopher trying to puzzle out the mysteries of the small-h heavens. And maybe it's a brilliant wedding of structure and subject that director Alejandro Amenábar can't seem to figure out which story should be revolving around the other, and whether that orbit should be circular or parabolic, but chaos seems to have been the clockmaker.

Oh, and also two men are (duh!) madly in love with Hypatia, including her slave, but her philo is reserved for sophia. I wanted to like it, I tried to like it, but I guess it just wasn't in the stars.

If you knew

A couple of weeks ago, I alluded to my then-planned media-related New Year's resolution, and this is it: On Fridays this year (why Fridays? Just seemed like a good idea to take care of housecleaning at the start of the weekend. Every Friday? Not necessarily. Most Fridays? Probably) I will be nominating candidates for deaccession from my collection.

One set of candidates will come from my DVR hard drive, specifically from the movies that have been there at least 2 years, since when I got the new toy, I went a little crazy. This won't affect you, because after watching the movie I'll simply delete the film from the drive (or, in rare cases, specify that I want to keep it), and that will be that.

But you can help me with the other set of candidates. Because when the DVD player was a new toy (and during some periods since), I also yielded to excessive acquisitiveness, such that I own films I haven't watched in years, don't much look forward to watching, and in some cases haven't even removed the shrink wrap from. So some Fridays I'll be selecting a DVD of a film that I haven't seen for 5 years or more, I'll watch it, and unless that screening convinces me that I need to keep it (rough rule of thumb: do I anticipate watching it at least twice more in my remaining time on the planet?), I'll slug it "DVD (giveaway)," and you'll have a chance to claim it on waivers, absolutely free, first-claimed, first-served. If no blog readers claim it on the weekend, I'll take it in to work and put it on the take-me-home table.

Peggy Sue Got Married

(1986)

A perfect example of a DVD I bought because it was cheap and I remembered liking the film, but come on, do I really need to own it? Particularly having just discovered that I can stream it from Netflix? So it's yours for the asking. And it is a pretty good time-travel/Oz/Wonderful Life kind of film, at least until Coppola runs into a brick wall on the how-to-get-her-back-to-the-present plot point.

What elevates it is that it gives only a nod to the change-the-past-change-the-future issue that often bogs down the genre but pays more attention to how to address the regrets of the present in the present. And Kathleen Turner has never been more appealing, not even in Body Heat.

Sphinx?

Never mind the countdown night before last, now we're down to the last few hours of an 11-day break from the demands of gainful employment and gainless diet, and so I pour my last bourbon for a while and contemplate cinema 2010. Yes, there are as always things I've thus far been deprived of, by geography and M4-deferring poverty, that I expect would contend for the "Best of" list if anyone were paying me to see everything by year's end, but nobody is, and so this year I propose 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!"

Of course, codgerdom already has a foothold--or a canehold, if not yet a walker-leg-hold--I'm 57 now, as old as my father was when I became a father (I was the youngest, so he was already a grandfather several times over; but I collected my 2nd grandchild this year). As I've whined before, I was cinematically deprived as a small-town child, so I don't really have the treasured-films-of-childhood collection of the cinephile who grew up in a city with first-run theaters. I guess the film I saw most often as a (Catholic; duh) child was The Sound of Music, released the year I turned 12. (Coincidentally, the eldest von Trapp girl, named not Leisl but Agathe, died Tuesday, 16 going on 98.) So count backward from now to 1965, and then an equal number of years backward from then, and you see that when I was a kid, 28-year-old Mary Pickford starring as Pollyanna was equally ancient history as 30-year-old Julie Andrews starring as Maria von Trapp is now. Except, of course, that the algorithm of ancientness has become so accelerated, even more so (I hope, I pray) than my own ancientness, that you might as well say Pollyanna and S of M are now equally ancient, which means I'm eating my own ancient tail, or something.

So what's my point? Have you not been paying attention? Have you forgotten that you're dealing with a bourbon-consuming senescent? It's your job, not mine, to determine my point. It's my job to tell you what I've dug (it's a generational term; you might find it in Urban Dictionary) in the past 1/57th of my life. What can I remember without going back over the year's blogging? Inception, for sure--but was it sound and fury signifying a miscast role for Juno? True Grit, but I just saw it a few days ago, and I just saw the 1969 version a few days before that, so how much credit is due? Toy Story 3, but I'm a grandfather and a sentimentalist, so there may have to be a Boehner discount for those tears. Cairo Time, but . . . well, you know.

So, let's sift through the year . . .

January, first (of, what, 2?) Manhattan trip produced 2 amazers, Sweetgrass and Fish Tank, the former a perfect example of why people who don't live near Manhattan and who don't take my recommendations (or the recommendations of someone similarly warped) just don't get as much out of the movies as the movies have to give; the latter a sad-bastard flick for the ages.

February, the leftover White Ribbon, quite simply one of the most excruciatingly wonderful awful films I've ever suffered. I'll pretty much see anything Michael Haneke wants to show me, even knowing that I'll hate it 30-40% of the time.

March, 2008's A Woman in Berlin, about which I seem to have used the unusual adjective "miraculous." Also the brutally amazing Red Riding trilogy. And Un Prophète, which seems to have blown me away even more than the Haneke. Incidentally, I seem to have used the headline "An education" 3 times in 2010, all in tribute to the Carey Mulligan film, of course.

April started with a concert stunner whose existence I had been unaware of, The T.A.M.I. Show, from 1964, and I'm going to keep telling people from my generation about it until you've all seen it, dammit! A few days later I finally saw F. W. Murnau's 1927 Sunrise; oh, my--the best of an very good M4, maybe the last one ever (oh, that way madness lies!). And can it really be that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and both sequels all came to America in one year? Well, this is the one that remains worth seeing.

May: Terribly Happy: from my wispy review of this Danish flick: "the best Coen brothers film I've ever seen that wasn't made by the Coen brothers"; 'nuff sed. And The Secret in Their Eyes, the Argentine (Argentinian?) Best Foreign Film winner of 2009. But Nicole Holofcener's Please Give made it worthwhile to see an American movie this month, too.

June: hey, it's my bully pulpit, so sue me for giving another plug to Leading Ladies, still looking for distribution. Though even as a loving father I must confess that the best film I saw that month was 1987's Wings of Desire. And then there was the astonishing Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone--like it, loved her.

July? I'm crying already, just typing in Toy Story 3. And my brain's hurting already, just typing in Inception. Who the hell won the World Cup final anyway? It wasn't France, I know that, but they have this to boast of: Wild Grass.

The Happiness of August was Life During Wartime. And speaking of life during wartime, Steven Soderbergh's 2008 Che is worth a 4-hour look if you're an unreconstructed lefty. But I think I'm just gonna come right out and say my favorite film of the year is the quiet, understated symphony of sexual tension Cairo Time. OK?

September was Mesrine, whose star Vincent Cassel I didn't recognize as the starfucker/starmaker of Black Swan until it was pointed out to me, but it makes perfect sense.

Don't hate me 'cause I'm popular: The Social Network is one of the best films of the year, notwithstanding its accessibility. And to salvage my art house cred, let's put Howl in here too. But what's Halloween month without a creeper, even if Let Me In gets in only as a pointer to the Swedish original?

November: OK, I'd seen Metropolis before, but not this Metropolis. Stunning. As is, in a much squirmier way, 127 Hours.

December: I don't think it's any secret that I digs me some mumblecore. So: Plastic Furniture. Nor that I loves me some Coen. So: True Grit.

And so, if I never tell you what I think about any more movies, we'll always have Paris. And Cairo. OK?

Ahoy, there, Captain Cook!

Up

(2009)

Well, I expected it to be good, else I wouldn't have made it my first watch of the new year, but what I didn't expect was that it would be It's a Wonderful Life, only without the annoyingly gender-conventional undermining of the spirit of adventure--this version provides two much more satisfactory channelings of that spirit.

That said, apart from an opening and a close that provide genuine transport, it's no more than pretty good Pixar entertainment.