They ain't afraida no sequel

Ghostbusters 2

(1989)

Ordinarily I would hate to break up a set, but let's face it: I didn't buy the set to have the set; I bought the set to have Ghostbusters, and because the set was really cheap (and may have been the only way at the time to get the film I wanted). This is . . . well, watchable once, or maybe twice with a long gap between, but I certainly don't ever need to see it again. So on the basis of that ringing endorsement, who will take it off my hands? (By the way, The Matrix is still available, too.)

Going green

Ghostbusters

(1984)

Nineteen eighty-four, seriously? No wonder Sigourney Weaver looks 23. Hell, even Larry King looks young! And has Dan Aykroyd ever had a better line than "Listen! . . . You smell something?"

That's all

Sita Sings the Blues

(2008)

My second acquisition from perhaps my best M4 ever (click on the title to link to that--you know that, right?), and I'm so sure you'll love this mash-up of the Ramayana and its modern unhappy-love equivalent (and so confident of the fewness of "you") that if you go to Nina Paley's online store and buy the film and don't love it, I'll give you your 20 bucks back for it. But if you don't believe me, Nina is making it available to view for free, too. Because, dammit, she's not only a gifted filmmaker, she's an Urbana liberal, too! So watch it once on your computer and then buy it--because dammit, liberalism doesn't on its own finance a filmmaking career.

Where the honey is

Ulee's Gold

(1997)

Hey, who remembers that little Jessica Biel played Ulee's teenage granddaughter, her first feature role? Another thing I didn't remember is how clunkily rote this starts and finishes. In between, it's a solid moral thriller, but the draw, of course, is Peter Fonda channeling Pop as the '90s film character who has turned up in the most New York Times crossword puzzles. This is a performance so quietly right that we remember the film as having been better than it was.

There's no saying

Meek's Cutoff

Crit

Thank heaven for Kelly Reichardt, who has the confidence to make movies where nothing much happens, except that everything happens. Here the image is often obscured by darkness and the dialogue by distance both geographical and linguistic. And lack of clarity is precisely the point: whom you can trust, what evidence of your own senses you can trust, who knows? One thing you can be sure of: you've got to have water.

A gorgeous, hard-edged film, with beautiful performances by the entire cast of nine (!), especially Michelle Williams, Will Patton, and, as "the Indian," longtime stuntman Rod Rondeaux.

We never knew we could want more than that out of life

Last Play at Shea

(2010)

The Mets have been telling me for more that a year that I needed to see this, but then they've also been promising me winning baseball for the past several years, so their credibility is only a shade above that of Fred Wilpon's buddy Bernie Madoff. I figured, "yeah, yeah, yeah," boring concert-cum-nostalgia trip flick. But when Ms. Tonic recommended it, that changed the, you should pardon the expression, metric.

And yes, even though I could have done with less Billy Joel autobiography, and even though I was never sentimental over a stadium about which even its defenders famously acknowledged, "Yes, it's a dump--but it's our dump!" this is a surprisingly moving film. Because the point of it is, in a way, that Joel's autobiographies and the autobiographies of all the Brendas and Eddies--not only but maybe especially on his, and Shea's, native Long Island--makes more sense when intertwined with the biography of the place where not only the Mets and (blessedly, getting little attention here) Jets won and mostly lost, but where the Beatles first proved that rock & roll could be played, if not necessarily heard, in a faux-Colosseum.

And that helps me understand, and empathize with, all those Mets fans for whom the abandonment of that dump was a death of something in them. And, I guess, in me, whether or not (assuredly not) I'll ever wear one of those "I'm Calling It Shea" T-shirts to the new place next to the parking lot where the old joint used to be.

Of course, my autobiography is a very different thing from Brenda's and Eddie's--I've been a Mets fan as long as any of them could have been (and longer, in truth, than many of them have been alive, and longer even than more than a few of their parents have been alive), but most of that fandom was from a distance of a thousand miles or so. If I were sentimental about any Mets venue, it would be for the Polo Grounds, which I've seen only on film--and which, incidentally, is shamefully ignored here, as if while waiting for their home in Flushing to be made ready, the team had wandered the road like Philip Roth's Ruppert Mundys. And each of the marriages in that autobiography has a place for the much-married Billy Joel, too--he gave the best concert my first wife and I ever saw together, and The Stranger played in a continuous loop at a New Bedford lobster restaurant where my second wife and I had a leisurely dinner on our honeymoon.

By the way, JT, what I couldn't help thinking of during the trailer for Being Mick was Candy Slice's "Gimme Mick." Ah, Gilda, speaking of New York's lost and holy.

How do you stay at Carnegie Hall?

Bill Cunningham New York

Crit

There is one sad moment in this extravagantly joyful film about an extravagantly joyous man: when intersecting questions of sexuality and Catholicism bring Cunningham up short for a moment, and make us contemplate the sorry denial that has been the price of his lifelong love affair with fashion and his camera. But come on: who wouldn't sacrifice almost anything to get to love what you do every day, every week, to age 80 and beyond? It's a lot to give up, but it's a lot to have, too.

OK, wait, I lied: there's one other moment that might qualify as sad: when a hardworking real estate agent shows Bill (being forced out of his nothing-special upstairs rooms by the bastards at Carnegie Hall) a Central Park South apartment, on the 10th floor or so, with northern views from multiple rooms. Imagine being a Manhattan real estate agent showing an apartment to someone completely unimpressed by a view like that--and by a large-by-Manhattan-standards kitchen and a dining area ("Who wants a kitchen and a bathroom?" he asks earlier, at least 90% seriously).

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.