Boitano

South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

(1999)

I'm sure that that film I saw earlier today must have added at least one Oscar®-bait song that wasn't in the stage version, but I unclefucking guarantee that whatever that sure-to-be-nominated song is, it's not as good as the Oscar®-nominated song from this film, which was in turn no better than the third-best song in the film. And the Miz-inspired medley here--which is maybe the 6th- or 7th-best musical number--pretty much said in 2½ minutes everything that needed to be said about pretentious Broadway musicals.

I snored a snore

Les Misérables

Crit

Seriously? OK, look, I'll admit right up front that (please don't tell my daughter) I'm not really a fan of musical theater, though actually I'm probably a bit more inclined to enjoy musical theater on film. And anybody who knows more about music than I is welcome to tell me that these songs (the lyrics and especially the melodies) are not uniformly mediocre, or that the actors in the film--mostly mediocre-at-best singers--somehow ruined the best songs, or that the best songs were left out of the film version, or whatever, but as I'm seeing it right now, the 7 bajillion people who have loved this on stage must have found something--lots and lots of something--that is wanting here.

Far more interesting than any specific song is the fact that the actors sang as they acted, rather than acting to previously dubbed singing, the idea being that that would give them more flexibility in each reading/singing in each take. Well, yeah, I think that's a good idea, but that doesn't change the fact that most of them have singing-in-the-shower voices, and the lyrics they're acting and the melodies they're singing don't merit the special treatment that the technique provides.

Not counting the 18 or 20 death scenes--'cause face it, who's unaffected by death, especially when the dier is noble (pretty much all of them) or in love or unspeakably young?--I found exactly two sequences moving. About 6 hours in, Samantha Barks as Éponine sings about her unrequited love in a scene shot with minimal cuts (hold that thought); but the real show stopper comes several hours earlier, so early that Fantine (Anne Hathaway) is still alive, a single tight shot of that song about dreaming and tigers inexplicably coming at night. Now, I'm betting that people who love Les Miz reaaaaly love that song, but it's trite tripe--trite tripe that Hathaway makes moving and appealing, largely on the merits of that one-shot performance. And that's what could make a genuinely good musical utterly fantastic via the sing-it-on-film strategy. Yeah, I know: the stakes still are nothing like they are on stage, where you get one chance per night to nail the mother; this may have been Hathaway's first take, but more likely it was her twentieth. Nonetheless, it created a convincing simulation of the immediacy that makes the stage exciting, and the Barks performance got us fairly close, and you wonder why director Tom Hooper didn't go for that more.

But whatever. Sad to think that's my last in a theater of 2012, and I have a pretty good idea of how I'm going to cleanse my palate tonight.

Trailer

• Zero Dark Thirty--Yeah, I'd already seen a trailer for this, several times, but now that it's getting Best Picture buzz, the producers seem to have realized how unseductive that trailer was, and that even an unsmiling Jessica Chastain is more appealing.

Just sayin'

For the second time in less than a week, the Criterion has reneged on a promise to show me a film I wanted to see, first with The Other Son (for which I guess the screening room DVD hadn't yet shown up, but I got to see it a couple of days later), now with Any Day Now, which has apparently been shunted to next week, though earlier today it still appeared as current on the website (it has finally been yanked).

Well, that's OK, 'cause I have some catching up to do from when heroic efforts were still being pursued to resuscitate my laptop. So if you scroll back a couple of weeks, you'll some reviews there that weren't posted on the day.

Different drum

Gift of time M4

Starting on East Houston and circling clockwise, as I always do, I was close to deciding there wasn't anything on the docket to compel me to make an interholiday movie trip to the city. That was before I got to the Cinema Village schedule, containing a film about a rock icon of my youth, a film that had opened right after my Thanksgiving-weekend M4, so I hadn't even considered the possibility of its hanging around for my next trip. Mr. Baker is the raison d'être; the others are just garnishing raisins.

Keep the Lights On

CV

Someday I'll go to a film about a same-sex relationship and not feel compelled to mention that element in the first sentence. But not yet, obviously.

Still, this film makes me optimistic, because it's really a lot less about the lovers being of the same sex than about one of them being a crackhead. Which means an entirely different set of clichés. Writer-director Ira Sachs finesses the clichés by making the narrative telegraphic and non-sequitur-prone, as it leaps from 1998 to 2000 to 2003 to 2006, always returning to the question of whether Paul (Zachary Booth) has changed and whether Erik (Thure Lindhardt) can keep (or restart) loving him. And we care because the people move us.

Beware of Mr. Baker

CV

For those of us who knew Cream and Blind Faith back in the day, the biggest surprise should be that the best and most volatile (tall cotton, that) drummer in rock history would have been around to celebrate a 40th and a 50th and a 60th and bless his cantankerous soul even a 70th birthday. But since I already knew he was still alive, the biggest surprise for me was his passion for polo. Right, like with horses. Seriously. Otherwise, what we have here is a piece of remarkable found art with a kickass soundtrack.

Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel

CV

Huh, go figure: there's no indication that Ms. Vreeland shared Ginger Baker's enthusiasm for polo (though it was certainly much more a part of her milieu than of his), but horses meant at least as much to her idiom. This was one of those I-couldn't-care-less-about-topic-but-golly-look-at-those-Rotten Tomatoes-numbers picks, and as usual with such pics, I'm glad I paid a visit to this alien bedazzling world. And now, back to my unfashionable monde . . .

Tabu

FF

An odd Portuguese melodrama about love, infidelity, murder, and girl-group pop songs in colonial Mozambique. I think I have to confess that I was pretty much M'd out by this point, though that seems dangerously close to admitting that I'm not as young as when I started doing this.

Trailers

• Fairhaven--Black sheep son comes home, unwillingly, for Dad's funeral. Problems ensure.
• Generation P--Oddly, I saw two very different trailers; looks Russianly interesting.
• A Royal Affair--Even odder that they should still be showing the trailer of a film I've already passed on at home.
• Amour--Now showing at FF, so skipping it is a bit of a risk, I suppose, but Michael Haneke's last three films have shown downtown, and the buzz on this one is huge. Of course it'll be a little annoying not to see it until after it wins the foreign-film Oscar®, but I'll survive.
• The Gatekeepers--Shin Bet badasses! Who ya gonna call?

K-Billy's Super '70s Weekend

Reservoir Dogs

(1992)

Yes, it's true: Tarantino used to employ a lot less blood and violence.

What's not to like?

Django Unchained

Crit

A viewer leaving the theater ahead of me wondered aloud what topic Tarantino will tackle "in his third film." Her companion and I were both puzzled, until I realized that she meant the third of his social-conscience films: we've had the Holocaust and slavery, and the implication was (and I've seen this assumption in print, too) that there has to be a social-conscience trilogy, so we've got one more to come. Well, I wouldn't be surprised--the Spanish Inquisition? climate change? talking out loud in movie theaters?--but I also wouldn't assume that the Q man finds anything sacred in the number 3, or even that if he does, he's going to feel obliged to punch the same ticket again.

Frankly, while slavery is unquestionably a Bad Thing in the moral universe of this film, I doubt that the particular Bad Thing is of as much interest to the director as the trappings he gets to bring to bear on it. And damn, they're fine trappings--all his films are buddy movies to some extent, but I'm not sure even Jules and Vincent were as simpatico as Django (Jamie Foxx) and Dr. Schultz (Christoph Waltz) here. Lots of blood, some big explosions, but a surprising amount of love and tenderness. Which is, of course, why I keep saying "Nothing says Christmas like Tarantino."

Trailer

• Oblivion--No, not likely.

Every one

Scrooge

(1951)

Am I the only one who thinks the Ghost of Christmas Past is based of Benjamin Franklin and the Ghost of Christmas Present on Henry VIII?