Positively 3rd Street

Labor Day weekend M5

Got burned on my 4th of July weekend M4: 75% of the films later came to downtown New Haven. So beginning with this one, I return to a more stringent policy toward the Landmark Sunshine, pretty much taking it out of the mix, as has been the case with the Angelika for some time. So this trip I stay on the 3rd Street Axis: three at IFC (even though, against all odds, My Winnipeg from last trip came to town--as far as I know, Guy Maddin's first theatrical appearance in New Haven), including one revival, and two at Pioneer 2 Boots, whence I don't recall anything ever making it the 75 miles up the shoreline.

The result was one of the best Ms ever--everything at least good, with one so memorable I may just need to own it. Moreover, I had time between the IFC and 2 Boots segments of the itinerary to settle in for a couple of excellent slices of pie at the latter's pizza joint, then go for a nice Alphabet City stroll, seeing several of the neighborhood's stunningly beautiful pocket gardens en route to and from the East River. It occurred to me, and I have since confirmed, that my walk took me farther east than I'd ever been on foot in Manhattan (and nearly as far east as there is to go, of course).

My final film started 15 minutes later than advertised and was c. 20 minutes longer, the result being that I exited the theater needing to teleport myself to Grand Central in 10 minutes to catch the 11:22 train home. Conscious of my carbon footprint, I've been restricting teleporter use to genuine emergencies, so instead I walked uptown to catch the 12:22. I walked up Avenue A as far as it goes; the first thing someone like me notices in such a nighttime walk is that I was significantly older than virtually everyone else on the street; the second thing I noticed was that I was significantly less tattooed and pierced than most. Ah, I love this city!

Trouble the Water

IFC

Spike Lee set the standard for mainstream Hurricane Katrina documentaries with When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts on HBO, but Carl Deal and Tia Lessin--piggybacking on the realtime home video of the amazing (self-declared, but it's hard to argue) Kim Rivers, aka BlackKoldMadina--have set the standard in the guerrilla doc division. The film focuses on the experiences of Rivers and her extended (and extending) family as they ride out the storm, pull things back together afterward, flee to Memphis, then come back to what is, undeniably, irresistibly, home.

A moving work, which can't help but stoke the old angers and revive the old sorrows, but is ultimately about surviving, prevailing.

Vredens dag (Day of wrath) (1943)

IFC

OK, first of all, how did Denmark even manage to have a film industry in 1943? And then how did Carl Theodor Dreyer manage to put together the most stunning cinematic study of witch mania I've ever seen?

The minister Absalon is a godfearing man whose one slip was to circumvent the punishment of a confessed witch who happens to be the mother of the young woman he loves. Suffice it to say that this turns out to be a bad decision. What makes the film exceptional is that it portrays the central issue through the seventeenth-century lens of the characters (someone coming out of the theater with me commented astutely that the look of the film creates the illusion that it's an artifact of a contemporary film industry), but everything also makes perfect sense when viewed through the lens of twentieth-century psychology. Young Anne (Lisbeth Movin--her last film role was as the widow in Babettes gæstebud [Babette's feast]) is at the least bewitching in the metaphorical sense, and it is easy for all in the story--Anne included--to believe that the talent is literal.

La Fille coupée en deux (A girl cut in two)

IFC

As I was watching this, I was thinking, "am I the first to notice the connection to the Evelyn Nesbit-Stanford White story? But now I see that the answer is no--it's even mentioned in the middle of Manohla Dargis's Times review, the problem being that I tend to read just the lead and the end of a Times review.

The least of the five films on the itinerary, but it's a pretty high bar. Ludivine Sagnier, of course, is always worth seeing, but the scene stealer is Marie Bunel as Gabrielle's mother--let's see more of her.

And a semantic question? Why is a title whose translation is straightforward tweaked in the English version from "The girl" to "A girl"? There's a difference, yo. No one ever sang about a man in a flying trapeze. Was it an attempt to minimize the echo of the lurid 1955 The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (Joan Collins as Nesbit, Ray Milland as White, and Farley Granger as Nesbit's husband and murderous protector Harry Thaw)? If so, it's not a very effective minimization.

Maria Bethânia: Música é perfume (Music is perfume)

2 Boots

Oh, great: more music I have to buy. Bethânia, the sister of Caetano Veloso, sings the music of her brother and other Brazilian songwriters in a rough, gravelly voice--one songwriter likens it to the abrasion between stones en route to becoming sand. The film follows her through the creation of the album Brasileirinho and the associated concerts, and--well, you just fall in love. And emotionally beautiful film, even though technically it looks as if the filmmakers depended on donations of reel-end bits of film.

Youssou N'Dour: Return to Gorée

2 Boots

A more ambitious music documentary, this one follows the titular artist on a tour from his native Senegal to Atlanta, New Orleans, New York, and Luxembourg (!) to assemble a troupe of musicians to help him demonstrate the connections between his native land's music and that of the diaspora, mostly jazz. The payoff (sadly underrepresented) is a concert at the Gorée prison, where kidnapped Africans waited three hundred years ago to be loaded onto slave ships bound for the New World.

N'Dour is a Muslim, and he struggles to find a fit with Christian spirituals, but it's a story of accommodation, and of faith in the same music, if not in the same rite. One of the most affecting moments comes in Brooklyn, where Amiri Baraka makes a poetic contribution to a recording session, breaking in the middle to sing the lines that brought my M5 full circle: "Wade in the water / God's gonna trouble the water."

Trailers

• Astonishingly, two IFC films without trailers, and there are rarely if ever trailers at 2 Boots, so only four for the day. But before I catalogue those, I should mention the short I saw at IFC, "Looking Glass," a fairly obvious ghosty thing. Also, I can't fail to mention the bit of promotional film for an IFC-related festival that was running soundlessly nonstop premovie on each screen, if only to ask how in the clip related to Fay Grim, indy darling Parker Posey could be identified in the caption as Jennifer Jason Leigh.
• Nights and Weekends--A defiantly mumblecore trailer for a film by Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg, who made Hannah Takes the Stairs, currently #23 on my Netflix queue; Swanberg also directed LOL, which I didn't like much. 3.
• Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell--Another documentary about a musician I'd never heard of, but this one doesn't seem much up my alley; 2.
• Moving Midway--Potentially fascinating doc about the physical (including real estate) legacy of slavery; 4.
• Un secret--Potentially soppy French melodrama, but Mathieu Amalric makes it at least a soft 4.

Rashomation

Hoodwinked

(2005)

Great concept: "Little Red Riding Hood" as a police procedural, with each of the four principles allowed to give his or her side of the story. Unfortunately, the writing isn't nearly as clever as the concept, and the animation, which clearly aspires to Wallace-and-Gromitesque irresistibility, falls into an unfortunate gap between that sort of low-tech wit, the rich texture of classic Disney, and the gee-whiz realism of Pixar.

Misunderstood

The Criterion, which is still showing The Dark Knight, presents an informal weeklong Ledgerfest, four films in one of the tiny DVD-projection screening rooms--a beautiful use of the theater's most recent expansion. The other films are Brokeback Mountain, I'm Not There, and Monster's Ball, and if I weren't doing an M5 tomorrow, and if the Mets weren't in a pennant race, I'd have gone to one or two of those. As is, I'm settling for the one I hadn't seen before:

Ned Kelly (2004)

Crit

And I wasn't really missing much by not having seen it. Beautiful location shooting in Victoria, Australia, but the moral vision is strictly black and white: Ned never shoots at any cop without giving the cop a free shot at him first, he agonizes over the killing that the nasty English (or co-opted Irish) cops force upon him, he robs from the rich to give to the poor (burning a few mortgages on the side) . . . well, you get the idea. A waste of my time and of Ledger's, but I can afford it more, still being alive and all.

Father knows best

Trollflöjten (The magic flute)

(1975)

OK, I'll readily acknowledge that I am a philistine, but doesn't this pretty much violate every rule of drama? Like, for example, that your protagonist should be kinda interesting, and that we should have some emotional investment in his quest? Like that you don't give away the whole mystery of who's good and who's evil less than halfway through? Like that big actions should have some sort of payoff (rather than, say, Monostatos's blackmail threat against Pamina going nowhere; or the Queen of the Night's massed army lasting more than five seconds against Sarastro's forces; or the climactic walk through hell [also about five seconds' worth] raising at least a frisson of fear)?

What did I like? Loved the Papageno/Papagena story--Håkan Hagegård, who plays the comic birdcatcher, put me in mind of Sean Astin's Samwise Gamgee--and all the really goofy parts, like the dragon, and the man-sized bat (isn't that another opera?), and the flute-enchanted animals. Liked the look of it and the sound of it--and I guess that's supposed to be more important than silly things like logic. Loved the through-the-fourth-wall stuff with the overture and the intermission--I'm sorry there's no commentary track or "making of" featurette for me to work out to so that I might find out how many cameras Bergman had to use during the overture for the wonderful shots of audience members, lingering on this one, then cutting rapidly (and in tempo) through a half-dozen. I found it interesting, too, in notoriously monochromatic Sweden, that Bergman makes a point of showing us a multiethnic Colors of Benetton audience.

The screenplay of J. Alfred Prufrock

Adaptation

(2002)

Ah, Charlie Kaufman, ah, Spike Jonze--what have you done for us lately? Kaufman has screenplays for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to his credit since then, plus the opening-in-October Synecdoche, New York. Jonze, who hasn't directed a theatrical release since this, has Where the Wild Things Are (which he adapted with Dave Eggers from the Maurice Sendak classic) set for release next year, and IMDb lists Ripley's Believe It or Not!--a biopic starring Jim Carrey as "in talks." But I'm greedy--and I'd like to see them on the same bill again. (Rumor has it that Jonze is seeing Michelle Williams, who is in Synecdoche, so maybe she can broker a deal.)

Boobolotry

Elegy

Crit

Based on Philip Roth's The Dying Animal, and though I've never read the novel, the Rothian themes are familiar: lust, age, irrational jealousy, fear of inadequacy, and the terrifying thrill of the young, beautiful, easily objectifiable woman. Look, unlike a (heterosexual male) friend of mine who once famously referred to her as "that little troll," I really enjoy looking at Penélope Cruz, and yes, at her naked breasts. But even with a woman director (Isabel Coixet, who has the rare double of also serving as the music supervisor), I can't help but see the final excuse for dwelling lovingly on Cruz's chest as characteristic more of Portnoy-era Rothian puerility than of the guy who has written American Pastoral and The Human Stain, among other grown-up novels, in the past decade. I invite correction, but it seems to me that the only way a woman would make the request that leads to the shirt shedding is if she is so accustomed to being objectified that she has internalized objectification.

Random, mostly cranky, notes:

• What the hell is My Future Wife Patricia Clarkson doing naked in bed with Ben Kingsley?
• Vancouver???!!! Jesus, Toronto's bad enough, but now cinematic Manhattan has moved to Canada's West Coast!
• Are we really to believe that someone as cosmopolitan as Kingsley's David Kepesh doesn't know how to pronounce Castillo?
• Didn't recognize her in her first, daylight, scene, but then with night lighting (her second and, sadly, final scene, though her agent got her major billing in the end titles), it hit me: Debbie Harry!
• What does it tell us when the voice of reason in a film comes from Dennis Hopper?

Trailers

• The Women--Trailer answers the biggest question I had: yes, apparently it does maintain the no-men approach of the 1939 original; still, without George Cukor, looks iffy: 3.
• What Just Happened?--Barry Levinson directs a great De Niro-led cast in one of my favorite subgenres: the ain't-Hollywood-fucked-up? flick.
• Just for fun, and to gauge how desperately Disney is marketing the flick, I'm going to try to keep track of the number of times I have to sit through the Morning Light trailer: that's 2.

A real Boy Scout

The Spanish Prisoner

(1997)

I can't tell you why this film breaks my heart, 'cause if you haven't seen it you should, and you should be able to have your heart broken into little pieces and puréed in the Cuisinart, too, but let me just say that the first time I saw it, it was one of the great heartbreaking experiences of my cinemaphiliac career, and even now, knowing from the start, I am pained by it.

Mamet's Hitchcock film, and the master himself did better maybe two or three times. The brilliant MacGuffin is an unspecified "process" that Joe Ross (Campbell Scott, in maybe the fourth or fifth film I'd seen him in, but the first time I really connected with him) has invented for a company that does something equally unspecified. But whatever, it's very, very important--worth scads of money, hyperintricate machinations, lives. If Hitch had made it, he would have cast James Stewart in a role not unlike Stewart's in the preobsession half of Vertigo: a simple, honest, intelligent-but-streetdumb patsy for the puppetmasters, particularly his boss (Ben Gazzara) and the mysterious Jimmy Dell (Steve Martin, in perhaps his best film performance ever). And the conclusion is every bit as satisfyingly implausible as Hitchcock would have given us.

Bonus this time: wondering "Who is that familiar face playing FBI agent McCune?" then following the end credits to see that it was Felicity Huffman, then 34, looking nothing like a man, and, when the film hit the festival circuit in September 1997, just married to Bill Macy, already a Mamet mainstay.

Black ice

Frozen River

Crit

In Bush's America, the American Dream has become a new doublewide trailer with a Jacuzzi to replace the decaying singlewide that Ray (the magnificent Melissa Leo) and her two boys live in. But her compulsive gambler of a husband has run off with the balloon payment for the new home, so becomes first a reluctant, then a relentless partner in the alien-smuggling business of a young Mohawk Indian (Misty Upham) who has family issues of her own. As to the Chinese Dream of those being smuggled in, shackled by five-figure debts to their snakeheads, see Take Out.

A remarkable debut for writer-director Courtney Hunt, who keeps the moral and legal issues in play throughout, while making it clear that the imperative of keeping alive the dream trumps all other considerations. Kudos also to Charlie McDermott, who plays Ray's teenage son, a psychic open sore.

Trailers

• Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (I served the king of England)--Looks like one of those memories-of-when-I-was-young-and-didn't-understand-what-was-important films; Czech.
• The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas--Germans speaking with inexplicable English accents, son of Nazi commandant making friends with concentration camp inmate his age. Looks gooey.
• Morning Light--Can you say "self-congratulation," Mickey? Roy E. Disney exec produced this Disney documentary about a bunch of inexperienced sailors given the chance of a lifetime to take a 52-foot sloop from Australia to Hawaii. Their sponsor? Why, Roy E. Disney, coincidentally enough!

Disappeared

Crónica de una fuga (Chronicle of an escape)

(2006)

A gritty, sometimes excruciating view of existence in a detention center of Argentina's military junta in the late 1970s, based on a book by one of the victims of the state-run kidnapping-and-torture terrorism. It's good to know that no one in the Western Hemisphere is running roughshod over prisoners' rights like this anymore.

Fightin' Irish

Rio Grande

(1950)

The last and least of the Ford-Wayne cavalry triad, but in one respect by far the best: the love story, involving not annoying virginal pups but grown-ups who know that love is not just a thrill but also a constant negotiation and a sometime battleground, is easily the strongest of the three films, one of Ford's strongest overall. Of course, Maureen O'Hara is no Shirley Temple, and the Duke is no John Agar, and that helps.

Bonus note for my niece Angie: the song "San Antone" was written by one of your idols, Dale Evans. And if you're interested in a fine full-length academic study of the music in Ford's westerns, my old pal Kay Kalinak has just the book for you.

Terroirism

Bottle Shock

Crit

I guess it's probably impossible to avoid a cheesy wine metaphor, so let's say that while the trailer suggested this would be a slightly fizzy table wine, in fact it strives for the complexity of a premier grand cru. It shoulda stayed in the carafe.

The love story is lame, the father-son story is trite, the climactic blind tasting is anticlimactic even if you don't know the true story on which the film is based. The best chemistry is not between the blandly blond Rachael Taylor and Chris Pine or between Taylor and Freddy Rodríguez but between Alan Rickman and Dennis Farina--let's get those boys together again soon. But by far the best thing about the film is the erotically tender aerial cinematic caress of the vines of Napa and Sonoma--those shots are the ones that made me thirsty.

So what did you think, Doctor Debs?

Trailers

• Nobel Son--Rickman as an asshole again--a really toxic one, in this case, being scammed by the son who justifiably hates him. Maybe.
• The Lucky Ones--Planes, Trains and Automobiles, only serious, and with demobilized soldiers (Tim Robbins, Rachel McAdams, and Michael Peña. Doubtful.
• Rachel Getting Married--I must apologize: in yesterday's post I reported having seen an unmemorable trailer for this while on vacation; I don't know where that came from, but today I really did see a trailer for it, and it looks very promising--it could do for Anne Hathaway what Pieces of April did for Katie Holmes: convince us (incorrectly, in Holmes's case, it seems) that she really can act.

Not fade away

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

(1949)

Maybe it's that's I'm old(er), but the middle Ford cavalry tale worked this time as well as or better than it ever has. This time Wayne is a captain on the verge of retirement, and he and the director capture perfectly the elegiac quality of the looming event. And Captain Brittle certainly speaks for Ford when a subordinate complains that the army won't be the same without him: "The army's always the same; the sun and moon change, but not the army." (Or something like that: IMDb really lets me down on quotes from these films.)

Apocalypse kapow

Tropic Thunder

Crit

An intermittently hilarious mess--the comedic strategy is to throw a lot of shtick and see what sticks. Downey continues to make a career of being way better than his context, while the usually cuddly Jack Black is damn nigh unwatchable. Oh, and yes, Tom Cruise's bald asshole studio exec is just as sensational as you've heard--and no, it's not anti-Semitism, it's anti-Hollywoodism.

Trailers

• Lakeview Terrace--In 48 Hrs. Eddie Murphy's Reggie Hammond tells a redneck in a bar, "I'm your worst fuckin' nightmare, man: I'm a nigger with a badge." In this film, Samuel L. Jackson is the worst nightmare of a liberal interracial couple: a racist, bullying African-American cop who happens to live next door. Note to Sam's friends: it may be time for career intervention.
• Sex Drive--Think American Pie (or, I don't know, maybe American Pie 3: The Wedding), only without the wit and biting social commentary.
• Eagle Eye--Stars Shia LaBeouf; need I say less?
• The Brothers Bloom--Saw this yesterday, actually, but I forgot: basically, looks like Ocean's 3, with Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo, and the ever more adorable Rachel Weisz.
• The Express--And these next few I saw on vacation. This one's based on the story of Ernie Davis, who followed Jim Brown to Syracuse and became the first black Heisman Trophy winner. Dennis Quaid plays another wizened sports dad, this time coach Ben Schwartzwalder. A sure heart-tugger, and it might actually be good.
• Rachel Getting Married--I was all ready to say no to this romcom starring Anne Hathaway, but then I noticed it's directed by Jonathan Demme, so who knows?
• Miracle at St. Anna--Looks grotesquely sentimental, but behold the magic words: a Spike Lee joint.

No questions

Fort Apache

(1948)

The first and best of John Ford's cavalry triad, maybe the best cinematic treatment of the Indian wars full-stop, certainly decades ahead of its time in sociohistorical consciousness of the terms of the conflict and the share of blame falling on the white man. It also goes a long way toward disproving the conventional wisdom that John Wayne couldn't act, though it does nothing to suggest that the postpubescent Shirley Temple had any business in front of a camera, or that John Agar was ever in any danger of committing drama. Their young love story could have been happily cut and the film brought in 15 minutes shorter and better.

Finally, the most interesting and bizarre element--looking ahead to the "print the legend" epilogue of Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance--is the coda in which Wayne's Kirby York, now in command of the regiment we've seen nearly wiped out by the Custeresque blundering of Colonel Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda), feeds the fatuous mythmaking of the ignorant press. "No man ever died more valiantly," York says (or words to that effect), and here he's on fairly solid ground: Thursday was a terrible tactician in the face of an enemy he didn't understand and treated with racist contempt, but he didn't lack for courage and refused an opportunity to escape his doomed men's fate. But then you almost see York screwing up his own courage for the Big Lie: "Or brought greater honor to the regiment." Well, honor in the sense of Rick Blaine's "Yesterday they were just two German couriers; now they're 'the honored dead'": if dying for a cause is honor, no matter how stupidly the death is offered up, then the regiment was bathed in bloody glory under Thursday.

And yet the cavalry and the army come off looking good: after laboring to praise Thursday, York then segues effortlessly into the most trite platitudes about the institutions, and you get the idea that Ford buys them too. I guess the idea is that slinging horseshit (done literally earlier in the film, incidentally) about the occasional Custer, the occasional Thursday, is a small price to pay in service of the greater truth about the honor of the army. Interesting, whether true or not.

La Sagrada Familia

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Crit

Who knew that today's postwork getaway would be a companion piece with last week's? But while the lives of quiet desperation lived by most men is the subtext of Man on Wire, here the theme is in the foreground. And while it's a theme that has been mined by many, this is a particularly refreshing take on it, with Javier Bardem's hedonistic Catalan artist seducing . . . well, just about everyone, including the audience, but never quite convincing us--Apollo steadfastly resisting Dionysus, if you will. Still, Dionysus is pretty damned good, and a hell of a lot more fun than Apollo, and the film's great strength is that it doesn't decide for us, and it never preaches. Woody's moralistic critics will see it as self-absolution, but he's actually pretty tough on some of his old selves here. And another promising development: to the extent that there's a stand-in for his traditional nebbish, the role is filled by the titular women, mostly Vicky (Rebecca Hall), but in one memorable scene (return flight from Oviedo) by Christina (Scarlett Johansson).

Oh, and then there's also Barcelona. Oh, my, yes, there is. See it.

Trailers

• Ghost Town--Ricky Gervais in a send-up of The Sixth Sense? Oh, hell, yes!
• How to Lose Friends & Alienate People--OK, I like Simon Pegg, but this just looks flat awful.

Sex, drugs, rock & roll, and dismemberment

Party Monster: The Shockumentary

(1998)

OK, let me be clear about this: where does a shockumentary fall in the continuum from documentary to mockumentary? To the left of schlockumentary? To the right of crockumentary? (Of course, the jockumentary, à la Hoop Dreams, is on a whole different scale; ditto 24, the weekly tick-tockumentary.)

I just finished reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, so it's probably a good idea to counteract the impulse to begin ingesting illicit drugs with reckless abandon; this works quite nicely, thank you: sweet young boy from South Bend winds up on Rikers.

B for "boy" or E for "error"?

Take Out

Crit (2006)

OK, this has a compelling if obvious plot: undocumented Chinese immigrant has to come up with $800 in a day or his loan shark's muscle will do Very Bad Things to him--worse than the thump with a hammer in the back they've already given him as an effective reminder of his obligation. He comes up with $650 from a couple of sources, leaving him $150 to net in a single shift's food delivery shift (his PR is $90).
How that is going to shake down is pretty much inevitable, though, and how this really works is as a (more desperate than usual) day in the life of somebody many of us encounter weekly without giving much thought to. (OK, some of us give a lot of thought to him, including our personal carbon footprint [which itself includes the question of whether he drives or, as here, bicycles]; a perceived obligation to fetch anything within walking distance ourselves, as part of the Price We Pay; an unwillingness to treat someone as a coolie, no matter how generously we tip; but a recognition [which this film certainly enhances] of how important those generous tips are to him. Some of us think about him, as about everything else, way too fucking much.)
And it is a day fascinating in its tedium and frustration (including rain and a flat tire that you can see coming all the way from the book of Job) and (of course) lousy tips. Actually, it's hard to track some of the tips: some are clearly lousy, some apparently not; but whatever Ming Ding receives he takes with the same stony silence, despite his friend and colleague's attempt to teach him to smile broadly and insincerely and say "Thank you very much!" Until the end of the workday he displays emotion only after being forced to make an extra (and thus time-wasting, and thus tip-opportunity-denying) trip because he has been given chicken instead of the ordered beef.
Anyway, bottom line: for god's sake tip generously; if you can't afford 20%, you can't afford to have food delivered.

The Wackness

Crit

Another surprisingly appropriate double feature: the young protagonist here also needs desperately to raise a huge amount of money in a hurry, though in this case it's because he's far more grown up than his deadbeat parents, and thus his thriving pot dealership is the family's only hope to avoid eviction from their Upper East Side apartment.
There's other stuff, too: first love, psychotherapy, the magic of mix tapes (it's 1994), but if it weren't for Ben Kingsley's convincingly unhinged stoner shrink, there wouldn't be much there here.

Trailer

• Frozen River--Looks intense, and it seems like I already have a positive Jennie Tonic response, but I can't find it; anyway, I'm in if it comes to town.

Contra mundo

Brideshead Revisited

Crit

The very Catholic are very different from you and me. OK, me maybe not so much.

Never read the book, never saw the BBC miniseries, read a couple of reviews, but was somehow unprepared for the sheer . . . Catholicity of it. Unprepared in particular to be struck so close to home by Emma Thompson's portrayal of Lady Marchmain as a woman who wants only to protect her children from the world's wickedness, and so of course alienates the ones with brains, if not quite permanently enough.

Trailer

• Blindness--On the one hand, the novel is my favorite by my favorite living novelist whom I don't know personally (and now I see that the screenplay is by Don McKellar of Twitch City and Slings & Arrows . . . well, "fame" isn't quite the word) and the film stars My Future Wife Julianne Moore; on the other, Manohla Dargis pissed all over the film when it showed at Cannes, and the trailer suggests that what was magical in the book may indeed be simply mechanical in the film. Still, hard to imagine my giving it a miss.

An inconvenient moose

The Last Winter

(2006)

OK, look: I like Ron Perlman as much as the next guy, but unless he's wearing red body armor and sawed-off horns, you're in trouble if he's your lead. This is one of those films that inexplicably gets into and then to the top of my Netflix queue; sometimes they're good. Sometimes they're notable for being filmed largely in Iceland and having lots of cool diacritics in the end credits.

That said, it's one of the best ecohorror films I've ever seen. So far.

Beau comme ça

Man on Wire

Crit

Christ, what a boring, empty, safe life I live. And I'm sorry, but if you're wasting precious moments reading this, the same is true of you. That being the case, thank Thoreau for people like Philippe Petit and thank the U.K. Lottery Fund for films like this.

Make no mistake, Petit was (and presumably is) a conscienceless, manipulative, singleminded, irresistible demon--or, as the person I saw this with put it, an artist. He is a master at getting people to do exactly what he needs to have done to facilitate what he wants to/must do, and while they later talk about what "we" accomplished, the first person plural does not seem to be in his vocabulary. To be fair, "we" weren't on a cable stretched between the World Trade Center towers a quarter of a mile above oblivion. But to be fair, without the logistical and emotional support of his girlfriend (about to become his ex-girlfriend), a few friends (apparently now all ex-friends), and a couple of new acquaintances along for the ride, he wouldn't have been there either. The astonishingly tawdry--understandable, but tawdry--fashion in which he thanks them gives a bitter aftertaste to a story you'd been able to convince yourself until then was all about uplift.

As for the Elephant in the Middle of the Living Room, well, as every review I've seen points out, 9/11 is never mentioned but always present. Most chillingly, early on we see a familiar scene of Ground Zero chaos--except that it's the site of WTC construction, not destruction, giving the sense of those wacky film-run-backwards sequences of the car uncrashing through the barn door or the egg reassembling itself and leaping from the floor.

Trailers

• Elegy--One of two upcoming films (Woody's Vicky Cristina Barcelona being the other) with the magical 2PC casting combination (Penélope Cruz and My Future Wife Patricia Clarkson), but I'm a yes based on David Denby's New Yorker review. Btw, if you do not already share my love for Patty, read this.


• Bottle Shock--Good cast, wine; 4.


• Henry Poole Is Here--Actually the second time I've seen the trailer, and I suspect my skepticism will increase with each subsequent viewing, but I'm always predisposed in favor of the Wilson boys (Luke here).

Fear, loathing, and other comic elements

Mind-altered postvacation double feature

Pineapple Express

Crit

For the love of god, don't make the mistake I made--don't, under any circumstances, see this film without the laugh-inducing filter of cannabis haze. 'Cause honest to god, it's just not very damned funny, or any damned good, on its own merits. I laughed perhaps a dozen times, briefly, then waited stonefaced (no, seriously) for the next. Ugh.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Crit

This, on the other hand, is a terrific introduction to someone whose life and work I have inexplicably neglected. I mean, anyone who can be praised by both George McGovern and Pat Buchanan (not to mention an ex-wife and a sudden-but-inevitable-bullet-rendered widow) has to have had something going on, no?

Here I go again

A family-friendly S[as in Savoy, or suburban]3

The end-of-vacation multiple-film day debuted two Augusts ago, when my son-in-law and I caught the comically awful Snakes on a Plane early and my daughter (days after motherhood) saw the poignantly comic Little Miss Sunshine in the afternoon. This time around, we started with all four of us (including granddaughter Veronica), then sent Mom home with the kid so that the boys could watch one, then sent Dad home with the kid for the father-daughter-fake granddaughter (long story) finale. And if there was no LMS on the itinerary, there was at least a gloriously bad flick--much more fun-bad than SOAP--on the docket.

Surf's Up

Savoy

Yeah, OK: animated penguins on surfboards (or, lacking the real thing, ice floes). Veronica loved it, her parents liked it a lot, and Grampus was generally amused (and gratified when he finally figured out, near the end, that that was Jeff Bridges's voice he'd been puzzling over for the past hour.)

Space Chimps

Savoy

Who the hell is Neil Genzlinger and why does he get the opportunity to declare, in The Paper of Record, a piece of ape poo like this "hilarious"? Civilians on the Times website should get his paycheck: "Both my kids hated it. Not funny, they said. I agree"; "The critics who love this movie might be suffering from a case of the low-setting bar"; "Stereotypical 'kid's movie' . . . the visual equivalent of Doritos and Diet Coke." I confess I laughed a few times--"I picked the wrong week to quit eating bananas" was a nice nod to the grown-ups, though of course it whooshed over the heads of the primary audience--but yeesh, mostly borrrr-ring. To quote another Times poster, you, Mr. Genzlinger, "have lost all credibility for every review hereafter."

Mamma Mia!

Savoy

Oh, golly! Here, in contrast, the Times (in the person of one of their front line, A. O. Scott) got it just right: it's a pretty awful flick, but if you're concerned about that, you are so missing the point. I mean, for god's sake, the end-credits musical numbers alone provide your recommended annual allowance of pure helium fun. My only complaint is that they should have bagged the 25% or so of the film that features spoken dialogue; it drags painfully (not that "drag" is necessarily a bad thing in an Abbanian context), and it would have been better just to go whole-hog opera. Of course, that would have meant scraping the barrel ever harder for a couple more songs, and they'd already exhausted everything even marginally listenable, but still: art requires sacrifice!

Bot encore

WALL·E

Savoy

Wanted to see whether granddaughter Veronica would find enough in the visuals to dig this, and knew her parents would love it. Answer: about an hour's worth, then gone. Ah, well--I suspect the DVD will find its way into their library for another chance later.

As for me, I reacted to it almost exactly as before, though I must confess that it does not seem to be one of those films that reveal something new on subsequent viewings.