Kathie’s clowns

Out of the Past

(1947)

“A dame with a rod is like a guy with knitting needles.” It figures that the guy who says that early in a noir film is destined to be plugged by that dame—and he won’t be the last one, either.

Directed by Jacques Tourneur, this may be my favorite noir not starring Humphrey Bogart. Robert Mitchum fills the Bogart role—the not-altogether-honest man struggling to be better for the honest woman who loves him—and Kirk Douglas at his iciest as the crime boss whose trust he betrays (bad idea? ya think?).

And then there’s Jane Greer as the fatalest of femmes—this one makes Bridget O’Shaunessy seem like she just got out of girls’ school.

I actually saw the 1984 remake, Against All Odds, before I even knew this one existed; don’t you make that mistake.

Do you renounce Satan?

The Godfather

(1972)

While watching this tonight, I thought of a 40-something friend who just saw this recently for the first time and thought of all the discoveries she'll make in each subsequent screening. Unless she's a lot quicker than I.

Octopus's garden

Monsters

Crit

It Happened One Night, with enormous menacing semiaquatic cephalopods. And with significantly less attractive and vastly less appealing romantic leads, such that you don't really get the mutual attraction. And without the good writing or Capraesque set pieces or quirky minor characters. And with a fiancé instead of a husband, and with the father in favor of him. But otherwise, pretty much the same movie.

Also a bit of a primer on minuscule-budget sci-fi flicks:

1. show terrified anticipation of your aliens lots more than the aliens themselves;
2. when you do show your aliens, mostly show them in the dark;
3. when you do show them in the light, show only probing tentacle tips or decomposing parts of dead bodies;
4. if you can manage an alien sex scene without its looking ridiculous, go for it;
5. leave yourself plenty of room for a bigger-budget sequel in case this one is an unlikely hit.

No strings

Being John Malkovich

(1999)

I'm not one of these cynical cinephiles who complains that there are no good movies being made any more--hell, I saw three pretty good movies today at the mall. And once in a while I see a film I'd call great--I'd have to look back through this to name the last one, but it happens now and again. But how often do we see something so fucking brilliantly conceived and original that we don't know what to compare it with, that we just watch it agape? And when that happens, how often is it written by Charlie Kaufman?

OK, more or less rhetorical questions, but still. This was his first feature, and it must have been one of the first films I saw in Manhattan, though there's a certain share of sad in that realization.

Evils have left the building

Unstoppable

Post

Hey, if your freight train or your action movie is out of control, who better to save the day than Denzel? This is junk food, but it's tasty junk food, though I must say it's more than a tad annoying that the Bad Thing that happens happens because of union men dicking off. Things aren't bad enough for the unions?

Megamind

Post

A hilarious goof for about the first half-hour, this parody of superherodom and more or less serious treatise on yin and yang stays solidly entertaining throughout, but given that the intended audience isn't exactly the Hustler magazine contingent, you wonder why heroine Roxanne, voiced by the defiantly un-Barbie dollish Tina Fey and as smart as any father and grandfather of a daughter and granddaughter could wish any role model to be, needs to be quite so . . . well, three-dimensional.

Tangled

Post

Sometimes brilliant, sometimes sappy, always Disney--the studio's 50th solo animated feature.

Trailers

• The Eagle--Another ancient Rome movie that looks awful.
• Battle: Los Angeles--Another alien-invasion movie that looks awful.
• Sanctum--Spelunking Aussies in 3D.
• Gulliver's Travels--Didn't laugh once, and as much as I love Jack Black, do we really need to see him in 3D? Incidentally, to answer a question raised by a friend, only Lilliput, apparently.
• Yogi Bear--Also didn't laugh. Oh, god.
• Kung Fu Panda 2--Did laugh, once, at KFP's extended ninja staredown with the audience.
• Never Say Never--Justin Bieber in 3D; the adolescent pheromones were flying!
• The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader--Does this count as Jesus' first 3D film appearance?
• Mars Needs Moms--Or, in Australia, Mars Needs Mums; thanks IMDb.
• Cars 2--No Australian alternate title.

Why I always carry my Swiss Army knife

127 Hours

Crit

What better way to work up a Thanksgiving appetite than to see James Franco cut off his arm with a dull knife?

OK, I'm here to do my part to combat the tendency of referring to this as "the movie where James Franco cuts off his arm with a dull knife." (Incidentally, I'm pretty sure James Franco didn't actually cut off his arm with a dull knife; I think a stunt double cut off his arm with a dull knife. But I digress.) There's a lot that goes on here besides James Franco cutting off his arm with a dull knife. For one thing, because the knife is far too dull to challenge bone, before James Franco (or, let's just say Aron Ralston, the real-life cutter-off-of-his-arm-with-a-dull-knife whom Franco plays) can cut off his arm with a dull knife, he has to break that arm. So there's that.

But director Danny Boyle, no stranger to the unwatchably intense, has sense enough sometimes to get us away from the scene of the impending crime against our sensibilities. This he does via flashbacks--to a failed love affair, to a regrettably unreturned phone message from his mother, to a first boyhood glimpse at the magnificent Canyonlands vistas that have driven (and now threaten to take) his life--and increasingly hallucinatory fantasies about how this might turn out, or what he might be doing right now were he not stuck, per the title of (spoiler alert!) Ralston's book, between a rock and a hard place. And when I say "increasingly hallucinatory," think Scooby Doo. We also get to see the real-life one-armed Ralston, with his wife and baby and with a supercool superheroish prosthetic climbing tool attachment; he still does crazy things in the wilderness, we are told, but now he always leaves someone a note telling where he's going.

It is, in short, a remarkable film, one that may join Trainspotting and 28 Days Later as Boyle films I need to own, and so I would say to you, if you are a James Franco fan, if you have described him as "one of the few boys [you'd] do" (you know who you are), but were planning to avoid this film because he cuts his arm off with a dull knife, I would say to you . . . do not see this; dude, he cuts his arm off with a dull knife! Are you nuts?

The unthin man

Inspector Bellamy

Crit

Claude Chabrol's final film is a spiral of mysteries, criminal, romantic, and familial, but we're less interested in the answers than in the questioning. (Well, one exception: is Françoise (Marie Bunel), the almost-Nora Charles-perfect wife of the titular inspector (Gérard Depardieu), really carrying on an affair with his brother Jacques (Clovis Cornillac), as Chabrol goes to great pains to imply? And if so, does that undercut all he believes in? And if not, what of his suspicion?

Depardieu, the size of a small province, with a nose the shape and texture of a fine smelly cheese, has somehow never been more beautiful--and Bunel's not bad, either. An eminently French film, and I mean that in a good way.

In the year 2026

Metropolis

(1927)

Ages since I'd seen any version of this, so long that I'd mostly forgotten it, so I may not be the best source for testimony re the recently discovered 25 minutes, but I can certainly testify that Herr Lang knew what to do with a camera. The imagery is alternately sentimental, creepy, and inspiring, but uniformly fantastic, literally and figuratively. The special effects are also amazing, except for the times when they're comically primitive, which only serves to show how good they are most of the time. A regrettably sappy final reel is easily ignorable.

The female lead, in a dual role as the impossibly pure (but sexy) Maria (yeah, right, like the Blessed Virgin: subtlety was not one of the things Lang was going for) and the vampish (and even sexier) avatar of the robot, is the Swiss-born Brigitte Helm, 21 in her film debut. Her career lasted only 8 years, but they were eventful years, including the acclaimed L'Argent, which I believe I have on my DVR, and 3 versions--German, French, and English--of an Atlantis film directed by G. W. Pabst. Here she handles the extremes of Una/Duessa beautifully, and the dance she performs (I'll let you guess in which guise) at a nightclub that turns her male audience into animals is just the sort of thing Will Hays had in his filthy little mind.

Character assassination

Abraham Lincoln

(1930)

D. W. Griffith was only in his 50s when he made his first talkie, so he shouldn't have been in his dotage yet, but what better explanation is there for how awful this is? I suppose it's possible that he was just as unprepared as the director in Singin' in the Rain to make the shift to sound. Maybe the likeliest explanation is that the unreconstructed Rebel, while recognizing that an out-and-out slander of Honest Abe would be anathema to most of his audience, subversively took his revenge on the Great Emancipator by making him unspeakably boring. But for some of Lincoln's own words and a game performance by Walter Huston, this would be absolutely unwatchable.

The only marginally dramatic moment in the film--and, bizarrely, the only Civil War action sequence--is Sheridan's ride, a minor episode hyperbolized into a turning point by a hack poet so that schoolboys of my generation would have doggerel other than Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" to memorize.

You really blew the lid off of nookie

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer

Crit

Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. In the finale of Those Bastards! weekend, the reasonably plausible premise that the governor's downfall was engineered by powerful enemies he had made as a crusader is less interesting than:

1. the fresh perspective provided on the eternal question, Why do powerful men risk everything by thinking with their dicks? and
2. the extraordinary range of access the filmmakers had to principals: Spitzer himself, several of those powerful enemies, and the barely-legal, giggle-handicapped madam of the Emperor's Club, as I believe the institution was called.

And apart from some unfortunate cheesiness (especially the use of an actress to portray "Angelina," the governor's regular call girl [notwithstanding the self-aggrandizement campaign of Ashley Dupré], whose extensive testimony is key to the story, but who declined to appear on camera), this is a remarkable and thought-provoking film.

Spitzer, who is not blind to the elements of Greek tragedy in his story, is astonishingly frank in his self-assessment. (He's one of the sympathetic talking heads in yesterday's documentary, too, though there he makes just one oblique allusion to his fatal flaw.) And while not cutting him any slack regarding his hubristic overreaching and his grotesque bankruptcy in the diplomatic skills required of a politician in a democracy, director Alex Gibney convincingly portrays him as a larger-than-life hero who stupidly stubbed his toe, who let all of us down in letting his family and his principles and himself down. On the issue of whether he thinks Joe Bruno and Ken Langone and others with good reason to hate the former state's attorney who seemingly was the one man in law enforcement asking hard questions about life on Wall Street years before the meltdown were behind the unusual federal investigation into prostitution, Spitzer acknowledges, to his credit, that it doesn't matter: that the man most responsible was Eliot Spitzer.

And ultimately, he can't answer the Big Question.

Same as the old bosses

Inside Job

Crit

Those Bastards! weekend, chapter 2; or perhaps I should say chapter 3, since this film was misplattered at my downtown movie theater such that the subheadings came in the sequence I, IV, II, III, V. I was apparently the first viewer to point this out to the management, but then there were only 2 other people in the audience when I saw it, so who knows how many have had a chance to complain.

So how confusing was it, out of order? Aside from a few splice glitches, not very. Mainly what happens is that you get the outrageous information that all these people who dozed through the financial meltdown have been put back in charge of the institutions designed to avert such meltdowns before you get the play-by-play of the meltdown itself.

This is pretty complicated stuff, of course, and I wouldn't recommend viewing the film out of sequence, but it's not like that time the same theater showed me the serpentine plot of The Good Shepherd out of sequence--you think Matt Damon is somehow involved?

Trailer

• Jane Eyre--Confession: I've never read the novel. 2011 is shaping up as another big year for Mia Wasikowska, who's also in Gus Van Sant's Restless. This year was Alice in Wonderland and The Kids Are Alright. Not a bad career so far for a 21yo.

What love triumphant looks like

It Happened One Night

(1934)

So you think this is the perfect film, do you? Well just go to the scene at the first auto camp, when Ellie comes in after her shower and Peter is frying the eggs. Count the doughnuts on the plate, and take note of the other plate piled high with slices of bread. Now look at the table moments later, when Ellie has finished dressing and Peter is serving the eggs. The hell did all that starch go?

Still, I agree: it's pretty damned close to perfect.

The point at which you break

Fair Game

Crit

Greetings, and welcome to Those Bastards! weekend. But first, the obligatory shoutout to Tom McCarthy: OK, dude, you've pocketed a paycheck for one of those brief, unmemorable character roles that anyone could do; now get your ass back behind the camera, where you're damn near brilliant.

OK, today's bastards are Karl Rove and Scooter Libby (a deliciously nasty--no doubt unfairly so, but who cares?--performance by David Andrews) and their bosses in a film that wants very much to be this generation's All the President's Men. It falls a long way short of that--the filmmaking is rote this-happened-then-this-happened--but Naomi Watts and especially Sean Penn give it their best, as the surprisingly (without a doubt intentionally) unappealing Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson. What's good about the film is that, as little as we may like the power couple, as much as we see that Joe is working mostly from ego and never-wrong syndrome and Valerie is calling "no fair" in a game that she has been playing unfairly for 13 years, we still want them to beat the bastards. Badly.

Then again, how hard is it to stir up sentiment against that crew? And the tested couple's reconciliation scene fairly swells with schmaltz--sorta like the "traffic was a bitch" scene in the movie-within-the-movie of The Player--you kinda wonder whether the real folks can watch with a straight face.

Trailer

• The Tourist--Yes, your recollection is correct: I have mentioned this before. That's sort of my point. I've seen this, I don't know, 6, 8, 10 times now (though I never tire of "You look ravenous!" "Do you mean 'ravishing'?" "I do"), and not until this time did I realize: it's North by Northwest in Venice! Depp is even trying to do Grant (though Jolie is much harder-edged than Saint). It's really obvious, but it took me that long.

'Til the cows come home

Tamara Drewe

Crit

I've read neither the graphic novel whence this derives nor the Thomas Hardy novel whence that derives, but this is a hoot on its own merits.

Its hootishness is built on Stephen Frears's direction of standard-issue English countryside sex farce so that the issue becomes unstandard when you least expect it, and it rests in great measure on the wronged-wife moral-center performance of Tamsin Greig, but the clincher is Jessica Barden as the hormone-besotted 15-year-old not just enamored with a rock star but possessed of the devious intelligence and good luck to bring him within reach.

Oh! Noticed in the credits, though not in the film: Patricia Quinn as "Posh Hippie." Another oh: gratifying moment in film: when Tamara is listening to Lily Allen's "The Fear."

Trailers

• Rabbit Hole--Coincidentally, my daughter just declared this a must-see, based on her enthusiasm for the play on which it's based. I'm in on that basis + dir. John Cameron Mitchell.
• Made in Dagenham--Damn, I resent a trailer that gets me misty already. Q: when Sally Hawkins wins the Oscar for her portrayal of a labor-rousing factory worker, will she in her acceptance speech proclaim, "You like me! You really like me!"?

I don't wanna know much about much

An unsuper supernatural double feature.

Paranormal Activity 2

Crit

Gosh, did I really like the first one? Not really, now that I check. OK, when Paranormal Activity 3 is coming, will someone please remind me that I've found both of the first two to be about 3 minutes total scare buried in 90 minutes of quotidian tedium? Thanks.

Hereafter

Crit

Yes, as advertised, Clint gives us one hell of a tsunami to start, and then . . . well, he gives us some pretty people to look at (none prettier than Little Opie Cunningham's daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard), and three Hall of Fame cities (San Francisco, Paris, and London), but not only does nothing much happen, but Eastwood painstakingly moves the three main characters around the chessboard in order to make that nothing happen. I'm sure there are people whose lives have been changed by this film; mine, however, merely became a couple of hours shorter.

Trailers

• The Fighter--Wow! Let's hope they cleared out the cliché barn on the trailer!
• True Grit--Remade by the Coens, with Jeff Bridges in the Duke role? Skeptical, but hey. Maybe I should rent the original.
• The Rite--I'm seeing nothing here to suggest that this will be a sensible alternative to taking another look at The Exorcist.
• Restless--This, on the other hand, looks very promising, Gus Van Sant directing what looks like a sort of unigenerational Harold and Maude.
• Unknown--And this Kafkaesque story of identity theft could be terrific, unless it's dreadful.

Bloody or nothing worth

Who, when, how long?
David Tennant, 2009, 3 hrs.

What sort of Hamlet?
Barefoot and poignant.

What's missing?
Hmm, didn't have my crib sheet with me while watching, so I wasn't thinking about this question. Let me look at some of the ones from the original Elsinore Project 3 years ago . . .

Oh, of course: the Fortinbras subplot ends with the "little patch of ground" sequence of IV.iv; with no F to arrive in V.ii, the play ends with Horatio's "flights of angels" line.

No pirates, but otherwise, it seems pretty much complete in terms of the elements everyone remembers. Some reshuffling, though, and presumably--since it's not a hurried 3 hours--a lot of lines judiciously pruned.

What's changed?
Main thing I noticed was that, with Fortinbras subbed out of the game in the 120th minute, the Stoppardian "R & G are dead" line is given to Horatio and moved to the beginning of V.ii--oh, and right, it actually subs for Ham's whole 80-line narrative re the pair's conspiracy, before the arrival of Osric.

Oh, something else, and this annoyed me: Laertes' foil is referred to as "unblunted" rather than "unbated" both times. I'm not aware of that being a textual variant, and it's grotesquely unpoetic, so the only explanation seems to be a dumbing down of the language--but why that word, rather than one of the many others no longer current in the language? Odd . . . which brings us to . . .

What's odd?
Mostly good stuff, most endemic the surveillance cameras scattered around the castle (I suppose I should mention that it's a more or less modern-dress production), which allow for some interesting POV effects. Funny thing is, though, that we never have any sense than anyone is monitoring those cameras. The surveillance in the play is conducted through one-way mirrors rather than arras (arrases? arrasai?), which means Ham has to shoot the rat Polonius rather than stab him, and I'm sorry, but shooting just isn't as satisfactory.

Flesh?
Too too solid.
Ghost?
A nice touch, unprecedented in my knowledge except in the 2002 Peter Brook production--which had only 13 cast members and so had to do some doubling--is the conceit that the elder Hamlet and Claudius were twins: Patrick Stewart plays both. This is a fascinating strategy because it undercuts all of Hamlet's comments about the vast differences between the two men--especially in the Gertrude's chamber scene, when he forces her to look upon the two faces together. "Uh, gee, Hammy, I dunno--they pretty much look the same to me." Inexplicably, though, Stewart gives the Ghost a Scottish accent. I would have wondered whether he was confused about which tragedy he was in, but Banquo's ghost is mute. It's just a silly, pointless, distracting choice; the fuck were they thinking?
Ham-Gert eros?
Not exactly none, but only in short bursts and almost always overwhelmed by violent impulses.

Other people?
Oliver Ford Davies may be the best Polonius ever, and Gregory Doran's direction of the character really gets to the heart of the eternal paradox that one of the most fatuous characters WS ever created can say things that make so much sense that they've been quoted approvingly out of context for centuries. I guess it would come down to "even a blind squirrel finds the occasional acorn": the blowhard says so fucking much that of course he sometimes makes sense, if only by accident. The I.iii leavetaking by Laertes is wonderful, hilarious, with Ophelia and L exchanging arched eyebrows during P's lecture (Claudius and Gertrude do the same when he bloviates), and finally chiming in with the "neither a borrower nor a lender be" bit, obviously having heard it a zillion times while growing up.

And this is "other people" only in an ancillary all-but-nameless-players sense, but the dumbshow also unscrambles one of the perennial problems of the play: why does Claudius not notice that his guilt is being played out in that sequence even before the spoken play? Often the dumbshow is cut, and if it's not, we are meant to see that C just really isn't paying much attention to the short subject. Here, though, the dumbshow is so farcical that you're looking at the bizarre costumes and makeup and not really noticing the stylized action--unless, of course, you know to do so. And we do get one glimpse of C looking vaguely uneasy, but then he shakes it off--because who could take this silliness seriously? A brilliant approach to a troublesome element.

Fun to return to Denmark, and a very worthy reason to do so.

Ennui fou

Partir (Leaving)

Crit

In declaring her interest in seeing this, the person who joined me declared herself a sucker for the French infidelity genre. Afterward, she declared it too determinedly (and deterministically) French, but my thoughts (unoccupied by anything on screen) as I watched it were that except for the language and the look of the villages, this seemed drearily, drably American, like a poor imitation of Douglas Sirk, steeped--nay, stewed, fairly Crock Potted--in predictable melodrama.

Kristin Scott Thomas is peerless, and Yvan Attal as her necessarily horrible rich husband and Sergi López as her necessarily charming working-class lover both do what they can with the material, but what's to be done? The sex scenes are sexy, I'll give it that, but I'm sorry, sex is not enough. Surprise me just once--give me something to react to, something to think about. Who knew the French could be so dull?