Uncle Sam fukka

Team America: World Police

(2004)

Credit Ben Brantley's blurb today on the boys' upcoming Broadway musical for my yen to devote the last* of the first† of the twenty-first‡ to Parker and Stone, and the fact that I screened the South Park movie earlier this year for my choosing their later, almost equally brilliant feature.

*day
†decade
‡century, duh

His voice's master

The King's Speech

Crit

As it turns out, this is probably my last movie house movie of 2010, since nothing seems to be opening Friday either downtown or in the 'burbs. Alas.

Probably there are Masterpiece Theatre junkies out there who can do lots more of this than I can, but I got a BBC kick out of seeing the stammering royal's Archbishop of Canterbury played by the best stammering royal ever, and the one scene shared by the best Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet was also a sweet touch. On a weirder note, strange to hear what I've always thought one of the most inspirationally martial pieces of music ever written by a German during the climactic and titular address--you know, the one where George VI is rallying his subjects to rise up again to repel the marauding Hun.

So coincidences and random chitchat aside, how's the film? Topping good entertainment, and Firth is sure to join the ranks of Damaged Guy Oscar® nominees--ranks that include his costar, coincidentally.

Trailers

• Source Code--Actually saw this trailer the other day but forgot; looks like Inception lite.
• Blue Valentine--Oh yeah: my kinda sad bastard movie.

We cut the hair

The Man Who Wasn't There

(2001)

Two eternal associations with this film: with seeing it in a Manhattan theater I can't identify from subsequent Manhattan movie trips, with my still-wife, but after, I believe, the official separation had begun, or if not, very close to it, after it had been decided; and then, with a friend who always used to joke about spoiling a movie for someone who hadn't seen it by saying, "It was so great when the flying saucer came down."

Anyway, not sure why I'd given it 4 Netflix stars in the past, but I've cut that to 3. Which is, still, after all, "Liked It."

The belief that it would make him more dead

True Grit

Crit

Oh, my: for the most part the same story told in 1969, just told infinitely better in every way.

My sense about the language of the earlier version was accurate: many of the same lines are heard here, but there are also many more of what are presumably Portis's words--damn, I do have to put that on my 2011 reading list!

Maybe something else Coenish with dinner tonight?

Trailer

• Transformers: Dark of the Moon--Need I say more?

View from the bridge

It's a Wonderful Life

(1946)

Impossible to watch this this time around without thinking of what I'm currently reading, Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, who, like George Bailey, was determined to shake the dust of his crummy little hometown (New Haven, in Moses's case) and build big, amazing things in a big, amazing world. So is Moses, who is responsible for most of the parks and bridges and roads of New York City and Long Island--and for the destruction of neighborhoods and other environments that his sometimes myopic vision demanded--simply George Bailey without a Mary Hatch to keep him from his dream? That would make this story a little less depressing.

The long grift

I Love You Phillip Morris

Crit

What says Christmas like a gay prison romance? And seeing this today made me think of my Christmas movie eight years ago, Catch Me If You Can, which is largely the same story, only heterosexual. But while it would be inaccurate to suggest that the gay slant isn't important in this one, it would be equally inaccurate to suggest that it's the only or even the main thing that matters. What is notable in this good, not great, film is that the same-sexness of the central couple is incidental to their story and their difficulties. It is as sweet and honest a male-homosexual love story as I can recall being portrayed on the screen--Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor are convincing but thoroughly unclichéd as men who prefer men. Carrey's Steven Russell has issues with truth, it's true--but his roles as husband and father actually involve much more truth than do the roles that land him, repeatedly, in prison. And in the end, a movie truth that may or may not be a life truth prevails: the truth of love covers a multitude of lies.

Prisons, workhouses

Scrooge

(1951)

The tragic tale of a proud GOP conservative filibustered into liberal submission by socialist ghosts.

The pain of it

True Grit

(1969)

Well, hell, yeah: of course they gave Duke an Oscar®--who were they gonna give it to?--Kim Freakin' Darby? Glen Freakin' Campbell?

Buzz has it that the Coens' version (which I'll be seeing in a couple of days) retains a lot more of the language of Charles Portis's novel (whose editor, I just learned, is an author and a friend of mine). Well, if their script is better than this one, I'm ready to put their film--which has actual actors in the cast--in the pantheon right now, along with the novel, because the script I just saw performed, often poorly, is one of my favorite non-Tarantino scripts in a long, long time.

Oh, biggest surprise: the use of the verb "to bust a cap" in exactly the 1990s gangsta sense.

Men with walkie talkies

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

(1982)

Yup, another Jesus movie, complete with postresurrection appearance at the mouth of a tomblike van shrouded and with sacred heart glowing, then an acension before which Mary falls to her knees.

But I actually think of this as one of the best Wizard of Oz movies since The Wizard of Oz. It is also doubtless the first film I ever took my (not quite 6 then) daughter to that included the expressions "douchebag" and "penis-breath." Come to think of it, it was also the first film I took my (then 66 and 63) parents to that included those expressions. Somehow we all survived.

Wings of desire

Black Swan

Crit

Prima ballerina Nina (Natalie Portman) is technically solid, but as her company master (worst. boss. ever.) helpfully points out, she is artistically repressed because sexually repressed. Fortunately, she is also absolutely cuckoo and delusional, always helpful for an an artist. This pic raises as many what-actually-happened? questions as did Inception, but if anything provides even fewer answers.

Darren Aronofsky has never been shy about stirring genre schlock into his intelligent films, and here he gives us an art-house creepy, slashy, supernatchy. Judged by the standards of those genres--i.e., how much I squirmed--it's wildly successful, but I can't really say I liked it much.

Trailers

• Water for Elephants--Fairly screams "from the literary novel of the same title."

Shaved by a drunken barber

Meet John Doe

(1941)

How many movies do you suppose there have been about Jesus? Hell, Capra himself made one five years before this, and another one two years before this, and another five years later, and this has elements of all of those. But part of what makes this inferior to those is just how doggone literal he gets about this one. "You don't have to die to keep the John Doe ideal alive," Barbara Stanwyck's character pleads in the big rooftop scene. "Someone already died for that once. The first John Doe. And he's kept that ideal alive for nearly 2,000 years. It was he who kept it alive in them. And he'll go on keeping it alive for ever and always--for every John Doe movement these men kill, a new one will be born. That's why those bells are ringing, John. They're calling to us, not to give up but to keep on fighting, to keep on pitching."

Good god, as it were.

Sidetracked

Ostre sledované vlaky (Closely watched trains)

(1966)

Ah, the standard coming (as it were)-of-age story: young Czechoslovakian station dispatcher is menaced by Nazis and premature ejaculation. Actually, merely impotence, but the filmmakers accurately sensed that in any language, "premature ejaculation" is funnier.

I'd had this on my DVR hard (as it were) drive for more than 2 years, and why I'd never watched it before I don't know, but in doing so, I got a jump on my 2011 New Year's resolution, about which more . . . well, in 2011, duh.

Such are promises

The Fighter

Crit

Funny that the guy who tries to make his living beating other guys senseless is just about the least-violent, quietest soul in the story. And not coincidentally, Mark Wahlberg, who plays the gentle boxer, is one of the few members of the cast who doesn't throw a dramatic rabbit punch at some point.

 

But Oscar® loves big, and Christian Bale is a lock for a nomination (though whether lead or supporting is a fair question), and Melissa Leo has a shot as well. Not that they haven't earned it, but the best stuff happening on the screen is the least showy, and Wahlberg has become a life master at that.

Trailers

• Thor--That's the Mighty Thor to you. In 3D.
• No Strings Attached--Wait, didn't we just see the woman-who-wants-uncommitted-sex bit last weekend?

Stand by me

Love and Other Drugs

Crit

"Who Wants to See Anne Hathaway’s Breasts?" asks the headline of the Newsweek review. "Must be a trick question," thinks I. No, just a snarky way into another unenthusiastic assessment for a film currently showing a 44% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes.com, 33% from the sites designated Top Critics. So, the upcoming Oscar cohost's extrathespian attributes notwithstanding, I was set to give this a pass--until the New Yorker's David Denby, whose reviews aren't nearly as much fun as Anthony Lane's but tend to hew more closely to my tastes, gave the film as enthusiastic a notice as I've seen for it, concluding with a downright astonishing declaration:

Love and Other Drugs has many weak spots, but what it delivers at its core is as indelible as (and a lot more explicit than) the work of such legendary teams as Clark Gable and Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

Whoa! I mean, whoa! That's a hell of a core then, no? So after that I pretty much had to see AH's breasts and whatever else the film had to show me, right? Well, here's the thing: no, it's not really much of a movie. In fact, if you're not predisposed to love Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, then her character is just another clichéd movie sick girl too selfless to fall in love, and when forced to move to plan B, too selfless to let the one she loves sacrifice himself for her; and he's just another clichéd movie cocksman too selfish to fall in love but who finds himself completed by the first truly remarkable woman he's ever met and gets to win her over with a late speech where he has her at "hello."

But they really are pretty terrific; only one of them is a salesman in the movie, but they both sell a shitload of cinematic snakeoil. The you-should-pardon-the-expression rise of Viagra is really a blue herring, which enables a little preaching about how fucked up the drug companies and the insurance companies are, forcing senior citizens to make bus trips to Canada for affordable generics. It's really just boy-and-girl-meet-cute; well, actually they meet creepy, but they're cute enough to compensate. And any film with both the Kinks and Regina Spektor on the soundtrack earns extra points.

Trailer

• Red Riding Hood--Amanda Seyfried as a sexy young Red menaced by bigger threats than wolf teeth.

Double indemnity

The Lady Eve

(1941)

Barbara Stanwyck as the same dame, Henry Fonda as the priggish snake lover, and a half-dozen of the best character actors in a nearly perfect screwball comedy, written and directed by Preston Sturges.

As a kid, I knew Stanwyck only from The Big Valley, and I didn't take her seriously. But seriously, she makes sexy funny and vice versa about as well as any star of her generation.

A boy's best friend . . .

White Heat

(1949)

From the standpoint purely of screen time, this might be as much police procedural as it is gangster flick, but let me just ask you: do you remember who the character Philip Evans is, or that he was played by John Archer? And if you remember Edmond O'Brien at all, isn't it as the undercover cop who rats out Cody? Face it: even before the final conflagration, Cagney burns so brightly that there's no oxygen for anyone else--except maybe a little bit for Margaret Wycherly as Ma Jarrett, and Virginia Mayo as cinema's most despicable gun moll.

Won't get fooled again

Nothing Sacred

(1937)

Carole Lombard can cover a multitude of sins, but it's hard to see why this is widely accorded "classic" status: there are a few good gags but lots of lame ones, and while I get that standards of racial and ethnic humor were different then--not to mention humor based on violence between the sexes--much of this is just flat out hard to watch.

The nut of the story--fraud as served by journalism--is potentially nourishing enough that this is one '30s screwball that could use a Fox News-era remake.

If history has taught us anything, . . .

The Godfather: Part II

(1974)

It's lonely at the top.

I have an ongoing argument with a friend about whether this is a better film than Part I. I'm not sure he has ever articulated why he prefers the first one, but my vote for this one is based on its adept interweaving of Michael's story with young Vito's. The first film is brilliant storytelling; this is that, and brilliant history as well.

By the way, a New York Times crossword puzzle clue last week was something like "The one who broke Michael Corleone's heart."

And viddy films I would

A Clockwork Orange

(1971)

What happened was, I wasn't finished roasting potatoes, and not having decided on a movie to watch, but not wanting to start one only to have to interrupt it a few minutes in, I decided to begin with salad and a screening of Don Hertzfeldt's wonderfully weird short Rejected. Naturally, once I heard the old Ludwig van on that soundtrack, I was ready for a bit of the old ultraviolent as well.

Among the many brilliances of Kubrick's film is its success in having its didactic cake and dining on some of the illicit thrills of which Alex must ultimately be cured of being cured. The almost (and I'm frankly not sure about the "almost") pornographic treatment of the red, red vino and the in-out, in-out seem calculated to deprive us of the opportunity to credit any good intentions to the repressive conditioning Alex undergoes. The Alex of act 2 is a victim--deprived of his pornographic pleasures even as the moral guardians of the state revel in them--and so the Alex of acts 1 and 3 is a hero whether we like it or not.

Plastics!

Tiny Furniture

Crit

Some time back I was given to understand that the term mumblecore had fallen into scorned desuetude, but it seems to be popping up again for this, and if the spiked heel doesn't fit very well and you wobble around self-consciously on it, . . .

Whatever else you call this, it is a tour de courage by 24-year-old Lena Dunham, who wrote, directed, and stars in this smart, funny, and loosely autobiographical tale of the most hopelessly unfocused recent college graduate since Benjamin Braddock, which, given the general demographic of mumblecore, is tall cotton. Aura, whose milieu, to the extent she has one, is the YouTube video, moves back in with her mother and younger sister, both of whom are vastly and unashamedly more accomplished artistically. Having put herself in such an emotionally unhealthy environment, what else is there for her to do but start and quit an awful job and crush on two worse boys, culminating in one of the ickiest episodes of consensual sex on film? And to top it off, Dunham films her own perfectly ordinary physique as mercilessly as any documentarian could have. Is it art, or just masochism? I don't care, because even the ugliness of this is beautiful.