The play's the thing

Murder!

(1930)

You don't have to have seen a couple dozen Hitchcock films to know that the woman found in a daze with a bloody fireplace poker and a dead woman at her feet is innocent. Much of this is murky, but much is wonderful--a bit, for example, where police interviews with actors are repeatedly interrupted by their cues. And as seems to be the case with many of these early films, there are delightful foreshadowings of later films--most notably, here, to the guilt hallucination in Strangers on a Train.

Let's misbehave

Easy Virtue

Crit

A perfectly inoffensive entertainment based on a play by Noel Coward (filmed 80-odd years ago as a silent by a young Englishman--I really should Netflix that version).

Jessica Biel struck me in the trailer as better than I thought she was capable of being, but in the event that's true only when she's called to be brazen; sensitive and wounded she doesn't do as well.To the extent that the film is carried at all, it's carried by the grownups--Kristin Scott Thomas, Colin Firth, and Kris Marshall as the butler (think Jeeves but with Bertie's taste for the sauce)--and by the period segment of a soundtrack inexplicably adulterated with songs from the past three decades.

Eat shit and die

Food, Inc.

Crit

A sort of Inconvenient Truth for the gastrointestinal system and the food chain, and nearly as disturbing, which is to say nearly as good, and structured much the same: a series of intellectual left jabs and right crosses punctuated by the occasional emotional knockout punch.

The film admirably demonstrates that food giants treat their workers (largely illegal immigrants with zero political leverage) just as humanely as they do the animals they cram into tiny quarters and stuff with hormones and food for which the animals aren't evolved to digest. Oh, and us? Well, we get to ingest feces carrying e-coli.

In a sort of mantra of frustration, we are told that "[Giant corporation] refused to interviewed for this film," Tyson, Perdue, Smithfield, and Monsanto serially filling the blank. All are cited for examples of corporate bullying, of course, but none as jaw-dropping as Monsanto's successful legal efforts against farmers who never bought or planted the company's patented soybean seed but whose neighbors did, thus resulting in fields contaminated with pollen carrying Monsanto DNA, the seed bearing which the farmers then had the temerity to clean and plant. Huh? you're saying. Right.

The quintessential remark from the film, which applies to so many examples of public policy and personal behavior, is delivered by a hands-on chicken, beef, and pork farmer, who observes that we are amazingly skilled at "hitting the bull's-eye of the wrong target." Oh, ain't we, though?

Eating sand

My Dinner with Andre

(1981)

Golly, here's an end credit I didn't expect to see: Additional Production Services by Troma, Inc.

Otherwise, this was pretty much what I expected, for better (mostly) and worse: two white New York liberal artsers talking for 110 minutes: philosophizing, quasi-philosophizing, pseudophilosophizing, and (at best) telling marvelous stories of the shaggiest imaginable dogs. Andre Gregory, whose #2 highlight of his film career is probably as John the Baptist in The Last Temptation of Christ, has the perfect face and delivery to convey what may be absolute sincerity or absolute full-of-shitness, and Wallace Shawn is, well, Wallace Shawn. They wrote the film together, and Louis Malle directed.

Noplace like home

Away We Go

Crit

Je suis un Montréaler! Well, anyway, that's what my neighborhood stands in for. A loving look at a house about a block down the street, and a look across the street to a house that's not exactly across the street, but hey, it's the movies. And the New Haven Preservation Trust plaque, complete with elm tree, isn't even CGI'd out. When the first glimpse of the 'hood appeared, fully a quarter of the fairly sizable crowd cheered.

Oh, and I liked the film better than I expected, having had my expectations lowered considerably by reviews. But good god: you know those stories where the key credibility problem is why the hell would such a together woman settle for such a megalosermeister? Well, here it's more like why would she ever have let the restraining order lapse after spending 5 minutes with him? Though I should acknowledge that someone else in my crowd--someone with a pair of Ys, which may or may not be significant--inexplicably found John Krasinski's Burt just as charming as Maya Rudolph's Verona.

But it is largely an exercise in fish-in-barrel shooting. What makes it tolerable, aside from the spectacular Rudolph, is that husband-and-wife screenwriters Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida make the fish talk pretty entertainingly.

Driving blind

O'Horten

Crit

A sixty-seven-year-old Norwegian train conductor retires, meets and loses a couple of new friends, finally takes a chance. Not much there there, yet Bent Hamer (Factotum, Kitchen Stories) uses the face and the quiet of Bård Owe to make it all matter. Wonderful turn by Espen Skjønberg as a dipsomaniac genius found in the gutter, who provides the essential metaphor of the film.

The Brothers Bloom

Crit

The best con, we are told beginning (yes, that familiar voiceover voice is Ricky Jay's) and end, is the one in which everyone gets what he or she wants. Ditto the best con movies. I desperately wanted to love this, but despite the wonderful cast, I eventually just wanted them to get on with it, con or not con, elope or not elope, whatever.

Trailers

• The Stoning of Soraya M.--Iranian antifeminism; maybe, but hard not to be black & white w/ this subject matter.
• The Hurt Locker--Kathryn Bigelow reminds us that possession of an actual penis is not a prerequisite for blowing things up. Maybe.

Padres y hijos

Tetro

Sun

Yes, right: no M-multiples during the entertainment-dollar-draining baseball season, but with a Fox Game of the Week-mandated awkward 4:10 game time this week, I saw no reason not to sample a pregame single. Damned glad I did.

The narrative gets out of control and a little flabby in the late going, but Daddy Coppola's latest is a fantastic visual poem throughout; I don't often notice camerawork per se, but if Mihai Malaimare Jr. and Walter Murch don't get Oscar® noms for cinematography and editing, respectively, the Civil War was fixed.

Newbie Alden Ehrenreich, while credible as kin to Vincent Gallo, evokes a young Leo DiCaprio for the first two-thirds of the film, then morphs via the cockiness of success + a goofy hair curl to a young Jo Cotten. Both associations work for the character. And then there's Maribel Verdú, who is always as welcome on the screen as in my dreams. Did I mention that this is a gorgeous freakin' film?

Serial dissatisfaction

Hannah Takes the Stairs

(2007)

Hannah (Greta Gerwig, co-screenwriter with director Joe Swanberg, among the other genre regulars) is always the cutest girl in the room, and finds that not to be necessarily a good thing. The film begins with her breaking up with boy #1 and ends with her playing a trumpet duet (no, that's not a euphemism) in the bathtub w/ boy #3, moments after breakup #2. She diagnoses her condition well, but that doesn't help her change, and it's a fair question whether she really wants to.

I guess we're not supposed to call this mumblecore anymore, but it is, and it's a pretty good one. Also: it may just be poor color correction, but Gerwig seems to have eyes of a color I've never seen before in a human; light brown, I guess I'd call 'em.

No, I just had some ice cream

The Merry Gentleman

Crit

What sort of hitman rights a fallen magus in a churchyard crèche? The kind who, one enchanted work evening, meets a stranger across an uncrowded street through his rifle-mounted scope.

A film more interesting than good, Michael Keaton's directorial debut, in which he stars with Kelly Macdonald. There's little to complain about in the direction, but Ron Lazzeretti's script has people behaving oddly without really cluing us why.

On the other hand, the script includes one of the funniest jokes in history (see post title for punch line), which is not only told but deconstructed in painstaking/painful detail. You wonder who is responsible for the beautifully enigmatic ending. Of the film, i.e., not the joke.

One other strangeness: much of the film was shot in Chicago, but Keaton is careful to keep the sense of place so vague--those silly license plates from nowhere, e.g., and pains taken to avoid landmark architecture--that until the second glimpse of a subway car destination window, I wasn't certain we were in the Midwest, say nothing of the midwestern city I know best. Wonder why?

Trailers

• Bakjwi (Thirst)--Korean vampire flick? Oh, hell yes! But probably not as my one pre-Mets game Manhattan flick tomorrow.
• Moon--Sam Rockwell in a spin on 2001? Oh, hell yes!
• Whatever Works--If I'd seen the trailer without knowing who the director is, I'd have said no; as it is, I say only if it comes downtown.
• La fille de Monaco--The French often make this sort of tripe palatable, but I'm skeptical.
  

We'll always have the Casbah

Pepe le Moko

(1936)

So that's what Rick Blaine did before Paris: he was a jewel thief.

Tough, self-sufficient guy with a complicated relationship with the local gendarmerie in French north Africa eventually risks it all for une femme. There are other elements that the Epstein brothers lifted, including some dialogue that eventually explains Ugarte's trust in Rick, but then this one isn't altogether original, either, swiping a key plot element from Romeo and Juliet.

Another film that while watching I marvel at the waste of never having seen it before.

Good housekeeping

L'Heure d'été (Summer hours)

Crit

A matriarch dies and her children deal with the emotional and material aftermath; the obvious possibilities are tedium on one end or grotesque emotional tectonics on the other, but this (need I say French?) film finds a calm, recognizable drama. A good choice for my return to the movie theater after a two-week granddaughter-visiting absence.