Cold out there every day

Groundhog Day

(1993)

This is such a movie-and-sports-filled weekend that I considered giving this annual a pass, but dammit, when it's not even February yet and winter already seems endless, you need to know that escape is possible.

And I noticed something--someone, actually--I'd never noticed before. Late in the film I looked closely at Fred (you, know: Debby's fiancé) and thought, "He looks so soft, but could that be a very young Michael Shannon?" Could be, is, 19 years old in his first theatrical feature (and his last for 3 years). So given Stephen Tobolowsky's memorable role here, and given my current weeknight TV watching, that's two skeevy HBO characters represented in the film.

Music is God

2013 Oscar®-nominated documentary shorts, program A

Crit

OK, I'll readily concede that the chaotic functional form of Karama Has No Walls, about the catastrophic response of regime police and sympathizers to a mostly peaceful sit-in Sana'a, Yemen, in 2011 is grippingly effective; and I will certainly acknowledge the mind-blowing courage exhibited in Facing Fear, about the unlikely alliance in the cause of tolerance between a former skinhead hater and the gay man whom he'd help beat and kick nearly to death years before; and no doubt the two nominees I haven't seen yet (the docs are long for "shorts," so the program is split in 2) will have something to wow me.

But let's face it, platitudes notwithstanding, there can be only one winner, and it's hard to beat a cheerful, cherubic 109-year-old Holocaust-survivor pianist (The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life). Alice Herz grew up in Prague; Mahler and Kafka were friends of the family (Alice and her twin sister would go for walks in the park with Kafka). She became a concert pianist, married a similarly talented cellist Leopold Sommer, had a baby boy; life was beautiful. And then.

Had she not been able to entertain the Nazis, she probably would not be entertaining and edifying us today, but she was assigned to Theresienstadt, the camp used to propagandize how good the Jews had it, and she was skilled enough and lucky enough to avoid being moved along to Auschwitz. She and her son Raphael moved to Israel after the war, and he became a concert cellist.

"It doesn't exist anywhere in our world all bad," she says, and she doesn't just talk a good game. She seems genuinely to see the best in everything--even in Raphael's sudden, mostly painless, terrorless death at age 64. And even in her concentration camp experience.

Someone who saw the film with me complained about some tricky camerawork; I'm sure her criticism is accurate and valid, but I was so captivated, I was oblivious. Maybe not a brilliant film--hard to imagine how you could fail to make this woman unappealing--but what an astonishing human.

Each crime and every kindness

Cloud Atlas

(2012)

All right, I'll admit that the rapidfire serial cliffhanging seemed more gimmicky this time than the first, and the language was no less ordinary the second time around, but good god, if this be failure, what magnificent failure; if this be failure, I wish a lot more directors had the smarts and the stones to fail this big. I'll be spending the nearly 3 hours with this beautiful failure a few more times before I'm done.

Oh, and just for the record: no, I don't think it is a failure.

Still batshit after all these years

The Rocket

Crit

What a jewel: an Australio-Laotian film about a purportedly cursed twin, mangos, unexploded American ordnance, and the biggest James Brown fan in Southeast Asia. Oh, and skyrockets, shot in competition and in appeasement of the gods, and in apparent defiance of the irony of the UXO that litters the land. And what a land, by the way: locations include Thailand as well as Laos, but good golly, how gorgeous the forests and the mountains. The Criterion originally had this listed as a Christmas opening, and I was considering it for that day; it would have been manifestly apt.

This was, by the way, my first film paid for by my new subscription to MoviePass, and while their guidance is less complete than it might be, I think I've pretty much navigated the learning curve now and will be able to use the service problem free henceforth. Thirty bucks a month, plus a $25 initiation fee, maximum one movie a day, 2D only. So at the moment my cost per movie is nearly $60, but that's going to decline pretty quickly. Thanks to Nancy for tipping me to this.

A mess of flowers

Bonnie and Clyde

(1967)

"That snake Malcolm Moss (Dub Taylor)" is how I was going to start this, because Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) says very clearly (her last words, as it turns out), "Isn't that Malcolm?" when she sees the herpetic father of C.W. (Michael J. Pollard) at the side of the road, [spoiler alert!] ostensibly changing a tire on his truck but actually setting up the titular duo for the laws' lead overkill. Equally clear is the name "Ivan Moss" in the end titles and on IMDb. Oh, yeah: and here that is in the "goofs" page.

Anyway, I never forget that this is a great film; everybody who knows anything about film in the '60s knows that. What I do forget, because I always let years pass between screenings (7 this time) is how likable a film it is, or, more to the point, how much I like it. So yes, it was a reasonably legitimate deaccession candidate, but no, I won't be letting it go just yet to some good home other than my own.

Aren't you relieved to know you're not a golem?

Stranger than Fiction

(2006)

Yes, it's just as I thought when I saw this seven years ago: it's a film that's smart and slapdash in equal parts but could have been pathbreakingly brilliant in the hands of Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze. Or maybe Zoe Kazan and Dayton & Faris, who have since done the living fictional creation thing much better. This will always have a place in my heart, though, for giving me the happiest musical surprise of my moviegoing career in the part-of-my-early-'80s-West Virginia-life song (which I recognized the first time at the first chord change) that Harold (Will Ferrell) plays and sings for Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal).

It's always heartwarming to see a prejudicedefeated by a deeper prejudice

Lone Star

(1996)

No, this wasn't one of those faux-deaccession-candidate screenings that I sometimes do on a Friday night. I was perfectly willing to have this film show me that I didn't need to see it again, but no, instead it reminded me that this is probably my favorite John Sayles film--a misdirection mystery that remains compelling even after the secrets are all familiar. Another thing that remains effective despite my anticipating it for the entire 2-hours-plus running time is the final line, one of maybe a dozen absolutely perfect last lines I know of in film. Anyway, no, you can't have my copy--but you can borrow it if you're close by, and if you've never seen this, you should.