Rust never sleeps

Iron Man 2

Crit

OK, look, it might not matter to a lot of people that you've destroyed Flushing, Queens, but it just so happens that my favorite team cannot win a baseball game anywhere else, so I really don't appreciate your consigning them to playing .300 ball the rest of the season.

It seems like maybe I pronounced the first entry in this franchise boring. Well, yeah, sorta. So why did I bother to go to the sequel? Hell, I dunno--it's Memorial Day weekend, and it seemed unpatriotic not to go to any movies.

Only thing that got my blood pumping at all--and not just because she's in tighter-than-skin black Spandex--was Scarlett Johansson's Natasha Romanoff kicking some big league ass, dark red hair snaking around like Medusa's in the old X-Men mags. I don't know what her supername is going to turn out to be--seems to be a character that postdates my Marvel time--but I'm ready to see the long-awaited Avengers flick on the basis of her and Sam.

Trailers

• The Last Airbender--Oh, golly, how bad this looks.
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time--Didn't this already release wide? Anyway, no.
• The Twilight Saga: Eclipse--Yeah, whatever.

Trouble 'til the robins come

Blue Velvet

(1986)

Gee, if Friday night's choice of Cool Hand Luke led to an odd coincidence of Harry Dean Stanton appearances on consecutive nights, how about the small role in Luke by a guy I didn't realize was on his deathbed, Dennis Hopper?

So tonight I needed to reach for a tribute flick, and the fact is, I just don't have many Hopper films in my library. Aside from Luke, there's Apocalypse Now, full stop. But then there was this, sitting a long time on the DVR. And while I was a little resistant to the clichéd Hopper-as-psychotic-nutjob role, which he could of course mail in any day of the week (not saying he did, mind you, just that he could), I decided that Hopper + Lynch was a better fit than Hopper + Coppola.

Anyway. Good call, I think. I would never suggest that Hopper was a great actor, but to the extent that he had greatness about him, it was in the ability to project pure evil, as here, while at the same time projecting a pitiable vulnerability, also as here. We'll miss the strange motherfucker.

Plate of shrimp

Repo Man

(1984)

Have I ever told you about the first time I saw this? Actually, I guess I started to, but let's add some detail. It was in a suburban multiplex, which right there tells you something was wrong with the picture, if not with the Picture, if you catch my drift. I was half the audience, and the only half that was laughing. But that was OK, because I was laughing enough for a much bigger audience.

Aside from the no-mindfucks-barred screwiness of the flick, which I probably wouldn't have been ready for 3 years earlier, there was the punk score--Fear, Circle Jerks, the Plugz, Iggy Pop, Black Flag, Burning Sensations doing a song I didn't even realize at the time was Jonathan Richman's--and Harry Dean Stanton (didn't even occur to me tonight that I was going for a HDS weekend--except I'm pretty sure he's not in the Netflix movie that's waiting for me) and Tracey Walter and Zander Schloss and this kid with a Hispanic name who was a dead ringer for Martin Sheen only younger (honest, that's what I thought at the time: I had no idea it was in fact his kid).

Anyway, it became a benchmark for good-weird, and I watched it repeatedly, so often that I finally tired of it, but after giving it a vacation, I found the love rekindled. And it's a deep font for catchphrases, including the one that serves here as the heading, which I rarely go a month without using, even though I then often have to explain it.

Rabbit, run

Cool Hand Luke

(1967)

Heroism in the service of nothing . . . but then sometimes nothing is a real cool hand.

Beyond the performance of Newman, a wonderful repertory cast--and yes, apparently that really was Harry Dean Stanton singing those folk songs so beautifully.

Lady is a mathematician

It took me the better part of the month to get through the Times' Summer Movies section, and there's just too much else (Mets, World Cup soon) going on to do anything elaborate with it here. But quickly, before the first of them opens, here are the half-dozen flicks I learned about from the section that excite me:

The hopes of a summer

• Agora--Alejandro Amenábar (The Sea Inside) directs the luminescent Rachel Weisz as Hypatia of Alexandria.
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead--If nothing else, the best title of the season, and it's gotta be better than Hamlet 2.
• Flickan som lekte med elden--That girl with the dragon tattoo returns, this time playing with fire.
• Cairo Time--MFW Patty as cougar.
• Centurion--Roman Britain, A.D. 117. Oh, hell, yeah!
• Soul Kitchen--Fatih Akin (Head-On, The Edge of Heaven); that's all I need to know.

God bless the child

Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (Amélie)

(2001)

OK, I confess: I have accorded this film less respect than it deserves since finding it irresistible almost a decade ago. It is irresistible, and so is Paris, and so is Audrey Tautou.

I wanna zap your hand

Sins of the Fleshapoids/The Secret of Wendel Samson/The Craven Sluck

(1965/66/67)

OK, I can see the Kuchars (Mike directed these two featurettes and short) as cinematic ancestors of Guy Maddin, only with higher production values, less intellectual sophistication, and even more sexual confusion.

Glad I've seen these, don't need to see any more.

Tu pasión

El secreto de sus ojos (The secret in their eyes)

Crit

The twisty plot and police-procedural sensibility of this put me in mind of my favorite novel of recent years, Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Both Chileans (like the late Bolaño) and Argentinians (like the screenwriter and director Juan José Campanella, not to mention the novelist on whose work the film is based, Eduardo Sacheri) would probably be annoyed to have me conflate their neighboring countries thus, but there you have it.

Anyway, this is a riveting mystery married to a sad, beautiful love story, and regardless of what I may have said earlier about the Oscar deserts of Das weiße Band, there's no gainsaying the worthiness of this Best Foreign Film winner. One of the best films I expect to see this year.

Trailer

• Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work--I wouldn't have thought it possible for anyone to persuade me to spend and hour and a half with the subject of this doc, but it looks like a possibility.
  

Old furniture has ghosts

Please Give

Crit

So, if a character in a movie is shown reading a book by Sarah Vowell, and then later Sarah Vowell shows up in the character's antique furniture store, are we supposed to read the second Vowell as Vowell (she appears in the credits as "Shopper"), or is the real Sarah Vowell inhabiting the same universe as the character being acted by Sarah Vowell?

Another delightfully uncomfortable film from Nicole Holofcener, with perhaps the most affecting performance yet by Catherine Keener as a good person perpetually guilty for not being better. Rebecca Hall plays her perfect foil and continues to show how good acting can be without words. Fine performances too by Oliver Platt and Amanda Peet and Lois Smith (whose face I finally placed before looking her up: she played Adele Stackhouse in True Blood) and, oh, everybody.

Trailers

• Winter's Bone--Daddy has busted bond, and his family stands to lose the house; calling central casting for a bunch of ignorant rednecks!
• Holy Rollers--Jesse Eisenberg as a Hasidic drug mule. No, really!
• Touching Home--One of three sports movies opening in New York today that I want to see (never mind a lukewarm review for this one).
• Get Low--Oh, hell, yeah: Robert Duvall as an old coot who wants his funeral while he's still around, Bill Murray as the undertaker to accommodate him.
  

The clitoris has spoken

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut

(1999)

Damn, this is good. Frankly, I watched it tonight mostly because I was looking for something very short, to get me to bed on time, but this is a damned good comedy and perhaps an even better musical comedy.

Mud, cows, and rubber boots

Frygtelig lykkelig (Terribly happy)

Crit

This is, I believe, the best Coen brothers film I've ever seen that wasn't made by the Coen brothers. Mysteriously guilty Copenhagen cop is temporarily exiled to the boondocks for whatever initially unspecified meltdown he has suffered, and there he find a dangerous woman, her dangerous husband (which of them is more dangerous is hard to say), their spookily beautiful and beautifully spooky daughter, and a bog that is literally and figuratively capable of swallowing all sins. Wonderful.

Michael Rennie was ill . . .

The Day the Earth Stood Still

(1951)

Interplanetary ages since I've seen this, and I was pretty damned impressed. Cheesy, well, yeah--but nicely structured, nicely plotted, and Gort is undeniably the coolest sci-fi robot ever--kicks the metallic asses of those dweebs from Star Wars.

But tell me: if Klatuu is so darned smart (and of course he is), and if he has come to Earth to address the leaders of all nations, not just ours (and he has), and if he knows about the United Nations (and he does), then why the heck does he land in D.C. instead of Manhattan? Just wondering.

Imam the walrus

Kasi Az Gorbehaye Irani Khabar Nadareh (No one knows about Persian cats)

Crit

No, these people are not saying they want a revolution. All they want to do is make some simulacrum of Western pop music. Most of them have no quarrel with Islamic law and custom, and with perhaps one exception, every act we see is laughably tame by U.S./U.K. standards of s & d & r&r. But the ayatollah's regime is not laughing, and the morality police seem incapable of laughter, and so it's all sadder than it is funny.

Ragged, with gaping narrative lacunae, but heartfelt, and you can dance to it. Scarcely a classic of rock cinema, but worth a look.

It's about time you weaned her--she's old enough

The Big Sleep

(1946)

OK, I've changed my mind: now I think Brody did kill the Sternwood chauffeur--I suspect he didn't mean to, but he did, and then the ran the car into the bay to cover it up.

Sins of the fleshapoids

The Exploding Girl

Crit

To the extent this works, it works on the soft, round, intelligent, vulnerable, funny-kind-of-beautiful face of Zoe Kazan, who plays an epileptic college student being dumped by her boyfriend and tentatively courted by her childhood friend. Which raises the question: To what extent does it work? Well, I cared about Ivy and, to a lesser extent, about her goofy pal Al (though I'm not at all convinced that they should try the romance thing), but I couldn't help wishing for some of the breakneck action characteristic of Mumblecore, which this resembles closely. Ultimately, this falls into the category Not a Complete Waste of My Time.

It Came from Kuchar

Crit

The funny thing about this is that the name Ed Wood is never mentioned. Such talking heads as John Waters, Buck Henry, Atom Egoyan, Guy Maddin, Cory McAbee, and Bill Griffith tell us why they love the weird, cheap, funny, troubling films of George and Mike Kuchar, but the only voices we really need to convince us are those of the twins themselves. (Identical or fraternal? That's just one of many questions about what makes them who they are that is apparently unanswerable.) A major hoot.