Go ask Alice

Side Effects

Crit

If this really is adios from Steven Soderbergh, he has gone out with a bang, not a whimper. For those of you who haven't seen this, I don't have much else to say except: do. Those who have can sweep the invisible text below to see what else I have to say about it.

If this really were a Hitchcock film rather than Soderbergh's Hitchcockian one, who would play Jude Law's psychiatrist character? At first I was thinking the creepy James Stewart avatar of Vertigo, but no, in fact, though Dr. Banks gets as manipulative as Scottie Ferguson, he doesn't ever lose touch with reality. Instead, who you'd want would be the Cary Grant of Suspicion: charm to the edge of smarm, to the brink of guilt.

As for Rooney Mara's Emily Taylor, I'm not sure whether any of Hitch's blondes would have fit, since they all turn out all right in the end.

Oh, wait, one more thing for everybody: remember when we didn't think Zeta-Jones could act?

Trailer

• The Last Exorcism, Part II--Mostly liked the first one, but skeptical.

In sickness and health

Amour

Crit

There's good reason why this is not titled "The Stroke" or "Helplessness" or "Despair" or "Diapers" or "Incoherence" or "Fury" or "Brutality" or "Stalking the Pigeon," even though those are all key elements of the film; but unlike those elements, the emotion linked to the title writer/director Michael Haneke chose infuses every frame.

Perhaps the placement of Emmanuelle Riva in the first scene of the film--an audience of 100+ people gathered for a piano recital--was chosen because of scientific research that has found that that's the first place one's eye alights on the cinematic rectangle. At any rate, hers was the face in the crowd that I first saw, one of only two faces that matter. She is Anne, and beside her is Georges, her husband (Jean-Louis Trintignant), and this is the last good night of their lives.

Growing old, it is said, is not for sissies, and neither is this film, but if you can endure it, you will see the best film of 2012 that I'm aware of.

Don't look back

Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus)

(1959)

I'll always remember this as the Carnaval after I returned from the Scary Normal premiere (about which more when I'm not borderline comatose) so exhausted that even some of my favorite samba and some of the most beautiful cinematic visuals I know could keep me from nodding off.

Give me the child

21 Up

(1977)

The third in director Michael Apted's series (but the first of feature length, following the half-hour television documentary Seven Up and the hourlong 7 Plus Seven) following a group of English children into adolescence and now young adulthood and then beyond. The series this year reached age 56, and 56 Up is said to be on its way to a theater near me, so I'm making haste to catch up aging with people who are, after all, just about my own age.

The declared motive motto for the series is the ominous Jesuit boast "Give me the child for his first seven years, and I'll give you the man," but even as early as 21, some of the fifteen or so subjects have begun to put the lie to that maxim, or at least are showing that it's true, but . . .

To be sure, poor little rich girl Suzy, thoroughly unpleasant at 7 and 14, remains thoroughly unpleasant at 21 (to be fair, you have to imagine that her parents are even worse), and her closest male equivalent, John, remains morally convinced of the rightness of the existing distribution of class privilege (but key word there is morally: John at least thinks about these issues, whereas Suzy's head seems never to have had a thought trespass on it). And East End tough Tony, though his dream of being a jockey ended in his teens, remains the same boy who declared at 7 the importance of knowing how to use one's fists.

But John's fellow proto-toff Charles, already wearing jeans and talking guardedly about hippies at 14, has by 21 come to examine the class system critically, perhaps his only point of agreement with John being that those of their privilege background are obliged to stay in England and bring their abilities to bear for the island's benefit. Nick, the only farmboy of the group, has succeeded at Oxford, while the middle-class Neil, perhaps the most exuberant 7-year-old in the bunch, has failed in his Oxbridge ambition, washed out of Aberdeen University in a year, and at 21 seems directionless and depressed to the verge of suicide.

I could yammer on and old (I haven't even mentioned the two boys from the orphanage, or the trio of girls from the East End, or Bruce, who began wanting to be a missionary and now chafes to admit his charitable tendencies), but hey, why don't you just start watching these yourself. The Jesuits may not have it quite right, but what is certain is that any life is the most compelling narrative there is.

Just like yesterday

Groundhog Day

(1993)

Twenty years, huh? OK, let's celebrate by hopping into the time machine and seeing what Roger Ebert thought of it. A mildly positive review, with a couple of sloppy errors ("Capitol" for "Capital"; Rita, who is new on the job, described as Phil's "long-suffering producer") and in general not much depth of thought--but that's sort of like criticizing a referee for missing  tricky call after you've had the luxury of watching repeated replays from all angles and at all speeds.

I'd give you Janet Maslin, too, but the Times site isn't letting me see it. Maybe next year, on the 21st anniversary.

What we've got here is a dead goat

Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts

Crit

• Dood van een Schaduw (Death of a shadow)--Literally. The conceit is that at the moment of death, a sort of photograph of the decedent's shadow, to be displayed Night Gallery-style by a macabre death-art connoiseur, can be taken . . . by a dead person. Ambitious, but really kinda silly.
• Henry--Elderly concert pianist haunted by visions or kidnappers or the past. Tries for poignancy, achieves little that's not obvious.
• Curfew--The standout for me begins with a guy bleeding out in the bathtub from his slashed wrists when the phone rings: his estranged sister, desperate for someone to watch her daughter Sophia for a couple of hours. Bonding between uncle and niece may be inevitable, but it doesn't ring false. Continuity alert: am I mistaken, or does Mom call her kid Sylvia at the end?
• Buzkashi Boys--The moment Ahmad declares that when he grows up he's going to be a famous rider of the wacky Afghan sport of the title (which involves toting a goat corpse while on horseback), we know he's not going to be around for the end credits, and that his pal Rafi is going to have to live on for his friend. The biggest surprise about this film is the beauty of the Afghan mountains--including, honestly, a junkyard mountain of derelict buses.
• Asad--Somali boy torn between the romance of piracy and the entreaties of a surrogate grandfather who would have him follow him in catching tuna. A bizarre, out-of-left-field ending somehow works.

Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts

Crit

• Maggie Simpson in "The Longest Daycare"--Team Groening is reliable if unspectacular, as Maggie battles her longtime unibrowed nemesis over the life of a butterfly. If you were making odds, you'd have to make this cofavorite with the Disney just on reputation, I suppose, though I wouldn't choose either.
• Adam & Dog--Lush backgrounds frame a story of the genesis and evolution of an interspecial relationship, set in Genesis itself. Smart and mostly unsentimental, this one is my pick, I think.
• Fresh Guacamole--Extremely short and extremely clever, if not particularly substantial.
• Head over Heels--A lovely metaphor of the divergence of lives in a long marriage. If this were to win, I'd have no complaints.
• Paperman--As I thought when I first saw this, it's perfectly serviceable Disney.

Bonus tracks

• Abiogenesis--Sci-fi trippy, Genesis from another direction.
• Dripped--Arsophagy: a word I've just coined for the consumption of paintings, by which one takes on characteristics of the works. As the title suggests, this ultimately becomes a Jackson Pollack tribute.
• The Gruffalo's Child--Yes, yes, it's nice to hear all those familiar Brit voices--though also a little odd since, the previous 7 films being essentially silent, I'd heard hardly any voices not belonging to my theatermates.

Impossible dreams

Oscar Nominated Documentary Shorts

Crit

OK, sensible plan to split the 3-plus-hours' worth of doc shorts into two programs, but it would have been an even better plan to give some hint of that plan on the Criterion website. Instead, my comrades and I showed up expecting a bladder-busting, butt-breaking marathon, only to be dismissed after a perfectly reasonable 2 hours. But unlike the theater, I'll exercise truth in packaging by admitting that I saw only the first 3 of the films listed below on Friday after work; I expect to pick up the other two later in the weekend.

• Kings Point--A lonely crowd of seniors in a retirement resort in Florida; as you might already have suspected, getting old and losing loved ones sucks. This is actually a pretty good film that got blown out of the water by those that followed.
• Mondays at Racine--A pair of Long Island sisters whose mother died of cancer open their beauty parlor one day a month for free services for women in treatment. Yeah, not hard to get emotion out of this, but good golly, this is a heart plumber--beautiful, human, funny, excruciating. It would be my front runner, but for . . .
• Inocente-- . . . this amazing portrait of an amazing 15-year-old artist whose exuberantly colorful paintings belie her homelessness, her loving but abusive mother, and the fact that she blames her 6-year-old self for her father's deportation and the loss of the family home. "I have a lot of impossible dreams," Inocente says, "but I still dream 'em." Besides excellence, what these last 2 films have in common is depressing subject matter transformed into uplift.

Saturday

I seem destined not to see these last 2 unless the tech guy arrives and fixes the projector by 7 or so . . .

OK, I admit it: I'm not the cinema warrior I once was. I learned when I came out of the live-action shorts that the projector had indeed been fixed, so if I wanted to wait until the 7:15 screening . . . and get home about 9 . . . still needing to roast potatoes and garlic for an hour to eat with the film I watch every year about this time . . .

Well, I'm sorry, but I didn't, and if you were counting on me to handicap Redemption and Open Heart for your Oscar party, I have failed you. But aren't you old enough now to have learned that sooner orlater everyone does? And anyway, is it likely that either of these is better than Mondays or Inocente? Long shot.