And an island never cries

Trolljegeren (Trollhunter)

(2010)

Saturday morning tweak. Why no Friday night deaccesssion? Well, look, I didn't want to watch this last night--I wanted to watch it, of course, but Netflix inaccessibility screwed me midweek when I wanted to adjust my queue to get my next Big Love disc. And let me ask people who still use Netflix for disc rental: do they seem to be dragging their feet on turnarounds of late? I used to routinely get a new disc on day 2 after mailing the old one; now it's always day 3. I know they want to encourage the move to streaming--and I'd gladly go that way if everything I want were available--but would they really do it so hamhandedly?

A Norwegian entry in the low-budget faux-documentary tradition of The Blair Witch Project, cynical college filmmakers get in way over their heads--literally, in this case. Silly but delightful, and major props for having the gumption to show us a lot of trolls, and a wide variety.

Ratiocination

Cosmopolis

Crit

Saturday morning tweak--do I really have to start balancing a notepad and pen on my knee in the dark? It's just one sentence, but it's a sentence I like.

Don't get into that limo--that guy is a vampire!!!!

OK, yeah, I know: it's really just Robert Pattinson playing a completely unrelated role . . . though it is true that he's a pale, light-averse bloodsucker. This is based on a Don DeLillo novel of which I read only the excerpt that appeared in the New Yorker, but the combination of DeLillo and Cronenberg may explain how it can be a comedy while looking nothing like a comedy and having almost nothing to do with comedy. It's Waiting for Godot for the Occupy age. It's a comedy punctuated with sex and violence (including a signature Cronenbergian microsecond image) and the longest prostate palpation in the history of cinema and (I hope) the world.

"But did you like it?" you want to know. Yeah, I'd kinda like to know that myself.

The nest egg

Lost in America

(1985)

I should make a list of films that didn't really do it for me first time, then later joined the pantheon of my favorites: this, Bull Durham, The Gay Divorcee . . . those are the ones that come to mind immediately, but there must be others.

I was considering Broadcast News tonight but went with this because I didn't really have time for the other's 2-hour-plus running time . . . and didn't even think of the Albert Brooks connection until the film was almost over . . . and then flashed back to having made the same choice, also without considering the cast coincidence, the previous time I screened this.

Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters

Almost Famous

(2000)

Lots of people liked this better than I did when it was released, but the only other opinion I cared about was my daughter's: I thought I owed her another screening of a movie she loves.

And maybe now I owe her another, because I still didn't really connect with it, but it's also true that I was about as distracted as I've been in recent memory while watching a film.

This I'll say: I get intellectually, if not emotionally, why many love it, and I'll readily concede that the near-universal misperception that Kate Hudson was destined to become someone we'd long be thrilled to see on the screen is entirely understandable. But at bottom, I still find nothing surprising here, nothing that makes me see any of these familiar tropes in a new way. Sorry.

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."

A stately pleasure dome

The Queen of Versailles

Crit

Who'd'a thunk that a woman who, despite having brains enough to get an engineering degree, would opt to become a beauty queen and a serial trophy wife, packing on several pounds of pectoral silicone and landing with the man in the process of building the biggest timeshare empire in the world, helping him plan a 90,000-square foot palace, could come off as such a sympathetic figure? Not so her husband, who pretty much deserves everything bad that happens to him, and doesn't deserve her loyalty to him.

A film about money and credit and collapse and indomitability and refusal to accept reality and . . . dog shit, a surprising, appalling quantity of dog shit.

A baaad mother--

Shaft

(1971)

Forty-one years ago I was a little too young and way too white to see this, and it's just as well. An older man, one more steeped in cinema, can appreciate director Gordon Parks's meticulous grounding of his story and his protagonist in the private-eye tradition: the maverick who's almost as big a pain in the ass to the police as to the bad guys, not excepting his one friend on the force. And a much older Caucasian whose whiteness has eroded at least a bit over the years can at least imagine what a thrill it must have been for a black audience, maybe especially a young black audience (but maybe not), just 3 years after Dr. King's assassination, to watch a black dick with all the insouciance of generations of Spades and Marlowes, but not caring about all those white dicks, just reveling in the racial pride of this bad motherfucker's fuck-you to the man. Even Isaac Hayes's Oscar-winning theme song, which to a 17-year-old central Illinois white boy was just sort of academically cool; there seemed a tincture of minstrelsy about it that was supplied not by the source but by the audience. Contextually, it's an amazing song, part of an amazing score (also Oscar nominated) for an amazing film, and thanks to DirecTV for the free sample of Cinemax that encouraged me to scrape off a few more barnacles of residual racism.