It takes two hands

Winter's Bone

Crit

As someone who has spent a lot of time in rural flyover places and who actually remains in contact with people who--I'm not making this up--live in such places, I get pretty pissed off at drama that exploits the crudest clichés of inbred, violent hillbillies. That said, this is not only saved but elevated by the performances of John Hawkes, Dale Dickey, and especially 19-year-old newcomer (not counting a string of I'm guessing dumb teen flicks I've never heard of) Jennifer Lawrence as a high-school dropout trying to raise her younger siblings and care for her trouble-addled mother in the absence of her crank-cooking father, whose apparent bond-running has endangered the family home. The first half is a Wizard of Oz movie, except that the strange, dangerous world Ree has to explore is just a more bizarre part of her strange and dangerous native land--Kansas neighbor Missouri, as it happens.

Trailers

• The Extra Man--This is the one I couldn't come up with yesterday, but I actually remembered it before seeing it again today: Kevin Kline as a fussy old gigolo, Paul Dano as his protégé.
  

What I am

Solitary Man

Crit

This is like one of those retellings of the Job story, except here instead of God and Satan conspiring to fuck up the righteous protagonist's life, this Job's wounds are all self-inflicted. And since he's played by Michael Douglas, and he's surrounded by the likes of Susan Sarandon, Danny DeVito, Jenna Fischer, and Jesse Eisenberg, you give a shit. A very satisfactory sad-bastard movie.

Sorry, though--I squeezed this in between World Cup matches, and I can't for the life of me recall what new trailer I saw.

Once in a lifetime

Youth Without Youth

(2007)

Another brilliant, beautiful, thoroughly loony Francis Ford Coppola film, which was such a crowd pleaser that it never made it to the hinterlands and closed in the city before I could get to it--unlike his subsequent brilliant, beautiful, thoroughly loony film. I get the impression that Frank's not really hurting for money--either he invested well, or the wine biz is killer.

In this one, Tim Roth plays a frustrated lover and author rejuvenated when he's hit by lightning, which makes an insane-genius-Nazi-scientist very interested. In other words, this is basically Raiders of the Lost Ark with more intellect and lots more philosophy, and with that one brief naked-breasts shot that Raiders was missing. Or it is until it veers off in a completely different, equally fascinating direction.

Catch of the day

Ondine

Crit

Neil Jordan makes magic, Colin Farrell makes sensitive, and Alicja Bachleda makes a very convincing selkie. A delightfully implausible tale, with strong performances also by Alison Barry as the Farrell character's bad-kidneyed kid and Stephen Rea as a bewildered but pragmatic parish priest. With the World Cup, the Mets, and the International Festival of Arts and Ideas competing for my attention, I had to limit myself to one movie home and one away, and this was a happy choice for the latter.

From her to eternity

Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of desire)

(1987)

Long before Bruno Ganz was Hitler, he was an angel in Berlin, and in too-human love.

Didn't realize that Peter Handke helped write Wim Wenders's Whitman poem-cum-It's a Wonderful Life reversal. As beautiful a film as I've seen in a long, long time.

You curse the stars?

Hotel

(2003)

Mike Figgis's entry in the Day for Night genre of movies about moviemaking. Not nearly as good, and not as sexy, though it has more sex in it--and more cannibalism, too. This was a must-see for me before it came out and got lukewarm reviews and disappeared before I could get to the city to see it anyway, reviews notwithstanding. So now I've seen it. That's done.

Only a motion away

Mother and Child

Crit

What makes this good: Annette Bening and Naomi Watts making us interested in thoroughly unpleasant people, and making us believe that encounters with just the right sort of Good at just the right moment can help make a thoroughly unpleasant person less unpleasant, even marginally pleasant. (Kudos also to Jimmy Smits, Elizabeth Peña, Samuel L. Jackson, and Carla Gallo in the multiple role of Good.)

What keeps this from being great: a veritable flood of third-act coincidence and deus ex utero.

Trailer

• Chanel Coco & Igor Stravinsky--Yeah, maybe, I guess, though I like thinking of Coco as Audrey Tautou.
  

Mommie dearest

Leading Ladies

SVA Theatre

If someone you love has ever done something creative--and if you're an uncompromisingly critical faultfinder (sometimes known as "a dick") like me--you know how scary it is to contemplate the possibility that the gods don't parcel out talent according to how much you might love someone, and that the person you love might create something that doesn't meet your critical standards.

So let me just tell you how first relieved, and then exhilarated, I was to discover this film, cowritten by my very own daughter, to be smart, funny, and warm, kinda like her. It is, clinically analyzed, the story of a young woman facing her own desires, and more fundamentally facing herself and her dictatorial mother and her narcissistic twin sister. But as Jen's cowriter, Erika Randall Beahm (who directed the film with her husband), said in the postscreening Q&A, it's not about gay/straight, it's about love. As she didn't say, it's also a ton of fun.

It's playing (with an added screening 6 p.m. Sunday the 13th, SVA Theatre, 333 W. 23rd St. in Manhatten) at Newfest, the NY LGBT film festival, and it's showing next month at QFest in Philadelphia. Like all indie filmmakers making the festival circuit, the Beahms are looking for distribution, and all I can say about that is, I see a bunch of movies that aren't nearly this good. So if there's any justice in the universe . . .

Anyway, look for it--look hard--and see it if you get a chance.

How little we know

To Have and Have Not

(1944)

Oh, this is how the movies used to be: a second-line knockoff, derivative of the star's recent big hit, with some rookie female lead and some Hoosier musician who can't really sing and is just OK on the piano, can be this freakin' good. Maybe it was meant to be.

Bringing up Cloney

Splice

Post

So what if the Alien creature were way cuter and occupied a lot more ambiguous slot on the benignity-to-malignity scale? And what if it turned into an even cuter toddler and ultimately into a hot young woman (albeit with a bald head and a stinger in her tail, if you catch my drift--no, no, actually my drift is purely [well, OK, mostly] literal)? A teenager with fairly typical teenage issues w/ the 'rents, as well as a few unique ones, and an especially complex Electra complex?

Well, you'd have a movie a little like lots of others you've seen but plenty like no movie you've ever seen. And if you had heal honest-to-god actors like Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody in the ham-it-up lead roles, plus the scary-tough-beautiful Simona Maicanescu as their kinda villainous big boss and David Hewlett doing a convincing Tarantino imitation as their dumb, spineless littler boss (yes, swear to god: dude mimics Taratino's acting style), plus the appropriately exotic Delphine Chanéac as the troubled and troublesome teen--well, you'd have some seriously good popcorn fodder.

Sequel looms.

Trailers

• The American--Assassin on his last hit; seems to have little to offer but Clooney, but that's a not-inconsiderable offering
• The Last Exorcism--Pretty sure this will be awful, but gotta admit that the f/x in the trailer got me pretty good.
• Resident Evil: Afterlife--3D!!! Not sure I've ever seen a trailer for one of these before, but it's impossible to deny Milla Jovovich's kick-assedness.
• Lottery Ticket--Well, this is original: someone has a cash windfall, and suddenly everyone wants to get close to the winner. Can't wait!
• Jonah Hex--On the one hand, Josh Brolin vs. John Malkovich; on the other hand, based on a comic book and features Megan Fox.

And the skies are not cloudy

The Little Fugitive

(1953)

What an odd, sweet little film--how the heck did it get in my Netflix queue? Joey is 7, Lennie is just 10, and they live on Woodson Avenue in Brooklyn with their widowed mother, who has to go tend to her sick mother. Lennie and his friends play the sort of dumb, cruel trick on Joey that older siblings and their pals play on younger ones, and Joey becomes the titular runaway, taking $6 and lamming to Coney Island, where just about everything that can be ridden, thrown at, or eaten goes for a dime. (And yet the deposit on soda pop bottles--which no buyers bother to return, leaving them to an entrepreneurial kid Joey studies under--is a nickel, just like today.)

Most of Joey's adventures are thrilling, and all are benign (though nowadays that weirdly friendly man at the pony ride would strike a much scarier note), and the only source of anxiety is whether Lennie will find him and get them both back to the apartment before Mom's train gets her there. Don't worry: I won't spoil it for you.

Why the seagull follows the trawler

Looking for Eric

Crit

I'm gonna give Jennie Tonic the lead on this one, with me interspersed [in brackets]:

OK, I've made criticisms of other films that could fairly apply to this one [I'm guessing first on that list would be plot implausibility, and that's even if you stipulate the Play it Again, Sam-esque apparition of a hero-mentor], but I don't care [nor do I], because it is irresistible. [I had no plans to resist, and I didn't; whether I could have if I'd wanted to, I don't know. I certainly would have been powerless to resist Cantona himself.]