After midnight

A whore and a horse invited me to a final screening of 2011, but they'll have to be content with being my first 2 of 2012, if that. It feels as if it was a disappointing year at the movies, but I haven't started going back over my posts, so I guess we'll confirm or deny that together. One good thing: I got back to Manhattan a couple of times, and if neither M was one for the ages, it felt good paying $12.50 at IFC and getting falafel and bird's nest in the evening gap. The vast majority of my New York time in recent years has been spent in Queens, and I don't regret that (obviously, or I'd stop going to so many Mets games), but in what's more or less a zero-sum game, that means a cinematic loss.

On the other hand, so many films that back in the day would not have been available except in Manhattan (or on Netflix) now come Relatively Cheap and Incredibly Close, so it's a positive zero sum.

Anyway, I rather like the way I did last year's roundup, when I "propose[d] to judge only films of whatever age that I saw for the first time in 2010 about which I expect someday to say, as codgerdom eats ever more of my brain, 'They don't make 'em like that anymore!'" so let's do the same, except for an annual increment. I'll say before we start that Midnight in Paris was my favorite film of the year (interesting in light of my final paragraph of my 2010 roundup), though probably not the one I'd call the best. That would be . . . Melancholia, maybe? Let's see . . .

Started the year with a Netflix stream of a film I was a fool to miss when it was in the theaters, discovering that Up is just as good as everyone said and more It's a Wonderful Life-ish than anyone had told me. A very different sort of wonderful came from Blue Valentine; I'm currently waiting for hernia surgery, and the kick that film provided produced that sort of feeling. Next a wonderful disc double feature, in lieu of M#, of Fatih Akin's Im Juli and the doucumentarish film embrace of the best L.A. punk band ever, X: The Unheard Music. While we're at it, let's raise one more glass to Pete Postlethwaite.

February: Cedar Rapids was neither great nor particularly memorable, but it gave me some of my best cinematic fun of the year.

A wonderful double feature during the traditional dead zone of March: the Inception-ish The Adjustment Bureau and the trippliy allusive animated Western Rango. In También la lluvia we got some good unabashed lefty anti-imperialism, and then in Copie confirme, a good talky French existential mystery. Even more surprising, a convincing and moving portrait of human virtue, Des hommes et des dieux.

Into April, and Cary Fukunaga's literate and incisive adaptation of Jane Eyre, starring the suddenly ubiquitous (not that there's anything wrong with that!) Mia Wasikowska. A very different sort of young woman on her own, Hanna, was a very pleasant surprise, putting me in mind a bit of Lola rennt. Best thing I can say about Bill Cunningham New York I've already said: "One of those films on a subject in which I have no interest but which I couldn't have enjoyed more if it were about a jazz-playing, fiction-writing baseball star." Meek's Cutoff was Seinfeld without the laughs: a show about nothing.

My only regret about Cave of Forgotten Dreams was that I didn't get to see Werner Herzog's documentary about paleolithic cave art in 3D. Incendies: a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

Seriously? Not until June did Midnight in Paris open here? Meaning that even though my copy came in the mail a few days ago,  if I adhere to my guidelines, I have to wait 5 months to screen it again and see whether it's as delightful as I thought the first time? Anyway, that's it for a two-month stretch during which I had fewer posts than a typical month. (And this June is going to be thin, too, since I'll be helping to make a movie!)

The Guard another in the category of far-from-great-but-great-fun. And that's it for August, so 2 candidates for the summer months.

[Excuse me: notwithstanding the time & date attached to this, it just became 2012, so I had to take a little break to open my Widder C & establish that, yes, I still like her a lot. Yes, that's right: I'm ringing in the new year by blogging. Pathetic.]

September: Not sure Contagion was one of the year's best, but it may have been the scariest, and that counts for something. Higher Ground: Vera Farmiga directs, smartly.

October is, of course, baseball's second-most-sacred month, and Moneyball may be one of the half-dozen or so best baseball movies ever, not that the competition is AL East-ish. And what would late October be without something to scare the bejesus out of us? Take Shelter gives us none; my favorite of Jessica Chastain's 15 movies this year.

A little too late (in New Haven, anyway) for a Halloween creepout came Almodóvar's La piel que habito. And then, from another of my favorite very foreign directors, von Trier's Melancholia, for my money a more interesting cosmic mindfuck than The Tree of Life. And then there's one of my favorite very unforeign directors, Alexander Payne, and The Descendants; I'm already impatient for his next film; I figure 2015. And of the 7 films I saw in 2 trips to Manhattan this year, the weird punkish noir Rid of Me was my favorite.

And because it came out in December, I was thinking of the misanthropic Young Adult as a great double feature with Bad Santa, but Rid of Me would make a nice parley too. Finally, I won't say a word about The Artist.

But let's do a list, not anything as murky as "best," but a top 5 films I expect to return to:

1. Midnight in Paris
2. The Artist
3. Take Shelter
4. Moneyball
5. Higher Ground

In the meantime, happy 2011, happier 2012.

Georgia on my mind

The Gold Rush

(1925)

OK, no review needed, but this is a rare instance when I have the chance to perform a useful service: if you rent the DVD from Netflix or from any store that has the Chaplin Collection edition, do NOT rent the main disc. Instead, get the bonus disc: that is where you'll find the original silent version. The one on the first disc features an unsilenceable and annoying narration--never mind that it's by Chaplin himself, it is nonetheless unnecessary crap.

I don't know what you get if you stream it from Nf, but I suspect the worst.

Mass transit, authority

Marked-down interholiday M3

As you know, I like to give logistical tips to readers contemplating their own excessive cineManhattan trips, so here's what I can pass along from yesterday: if you think that the Thursday between Sunday holidays will be a sort of lull time, affording you elbow room on the train and a vacant seat for your coat and hat and backpack at the theaters, well, uh, no. True, my 1:05 show in Cinema Village's tiny theater 2 was not packed, but the 3:50 show in CV's spacious theater 3 was uncomfortably so, and my 7:45 at IFC was nonexistent, for me, at least: my first ever SOLD OUT on the ticket machine.

I had intended to see Porco Rosso, but being denied was just a disappointment, not a disaster, as the nearby Film Forum had 3 worthy candidates at 8 or 8:20. In retrospect I wish I'd opted for a 2nd FF screening of Alain Resnais' weirdly wonderful L'Année dernière à Marienbad or my first-ever big-screen viewing of The Gold Rush, but that M lesson was learned long ago: every yes means one or more nos. I did at least get to discuss Marienbad with a couple of other lobby riders, one of whom had seen it a few days ago and was about to see it again for what she calculated was her 5th or 6th time ever. She insisted that the film demands intense, constant thought, while I perversely suggested just the opposite, that it better rewards passive acceptance of all its absurdities and self-contradictions. Anyway . . .

Miss Minoes

CV

I expected this to be whimsical, but I didn't realize that it's actually a '60s-Disney-type kids romance--that it might be something to give the grandkids, notwithstanding the occurrence of the word "shit" in the dubbed-over-the-Dutch soundtrack, including once from the third-banana little girl. I'll stack up my resistance to foul language against anyone's, but the word is really shocking in a context that is otherwise as G-ratable as can be.

The premise predates Ovid--cat metamorphoses into (extremely cute) human woman--but with an eco spin, the trigger being waste from the deodorant plant of the local sweet-smelling, foul-souled capitalist. In Disney style, what has to be done is (1) exposure of the villain and undermining of his villainous scheme and (2) marriage of the odd couple. But why it works is that we also have what I'm tempted to call a cats of thousands, except that it's really only a dozen or so: real cats with real acting chops. Resist them if you can; I couldn't.

Margaret

CV

Spoiled Upper West Side teen distracts bus driver and causes fatal accident, and her guilt and compulsion to make the driver acknowledge his own dominates every one of the 135 or so remaining minutes of the 150 total. No, wait, that would be a lot duller and less truthful movie. In fact, what happens is that while the accident is ever-present at some level of the psychological substrata of Lisa (Anna Paquin; "Margaret" is from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem read in her English class), she also is preoccupied by school, by sex, by getting high, by getting high and having sex with schoolmates, by getting high in the presence of and maybe having sex with teachers, by her absent father (writer-director Kenneth Lonergan, who gave himself a similarly feckless authority figure to play in his wonderful first film, You Can Count on Me), by her mother whom she often wishes absent.

It is, in short, a big picture about a big moment in a life that already has an unbearable amount of bigness about it. Neither Lisa nor anyone else in the film (well, OK, two exceptions, I guess: Jean Reno as mother Joan's suitor and Jake O'Connor as Lisa's) tries to grab our affection, and so we like them for their prickliness as much as anything (exhibit A: the remarkable Jeannie Berlin as the accident victim's best friend, Emily).

But the big picture has many small pleasures, too: Matthew Broderick channeling that bad teacher who knew no other way of dealing with a provocative but wrong-headed student remark than by declaring the wrongness without giving any credit for the ingeniousness; Mark Ruffalo as the bus driver, cast as villain by Lisa and Emily but as yet another victim by Lonergan; even Renée Fleming, who gives a convincing performance as a Met soprano.

The film opened and closed in a week in the fall to critical and popular resistance, but late in the year critics started to rethink, and the film got a second life when it appeared on some top ten lists. I understand both the resistance and the reassessment. I doubt that this will ever join You Can Count on Me in my DVD library, but I'm glad to have given it 2½ hours of cramped moviegoing--it was as much work as play, but it was rewarding work.

El Sicario: Room 164

FF

My initial plan was for whimsy on either side of the grit of Margaret, but instead I shifted to a quasi-documntary confession of a drug runner who graduated to enforcer and hit man. What's interesting about this is what the filmmakers do to try to make interesting a static disquisition in a motel room. One obvious choice would have been reenactments of the brutal crimes, but that would have risked accusations of torture porn and raised questions about the intent.

So what they do instead is have the actor (I presume) playing the sicario doodle compulsively on an artist's sketchpad, jotting outlines of steps involved in training, for example, or illustrating the proper gunshot pattern for the assassination of the driver of a car, or mapping the logistics of a kidnapping. He is no less compulsive about conserving the pages he's filling at fever pitch--more than once he starts to flip 2 pages at once, but makes a point of turning one page back lest a page be wasted. Odd.

And then Jesus came.

Trailers

• Angels Crest--They do? That missing apostrophe in place names always annoys me. Good cast, including Elizabeth McGovern, always welcome.
• Once upon a Time in Anatolia--Yeah, OK, maybe--but why is IMDb so freakin' slow?

And back again

Lord of the Rings: part III, Return of the King

(2003)

OK, without a doubt the big question on my mind after screening this is How long had my subwoofer been turned off? followed closely by How could I have watched 9 of the trilogy's 11 hours, complete with the Epic Battle Scenes that the MPAA card promised in explaining the PG-13 rating, without noticing that my subwoofer was silent?

Otherwise, my judgments of earlier screenings remain unchanged: notwithstanding the comic bookishly wooden dialogue, the theatrical version was an incredible achievement and the extended version is even better. If I had 11 hours to spare more often, I might come back even more frequently--but with the damn subwoofer on from the start, please!

And it was your world

The Concert for Bangladesh

(1972)

Oh, right: this was the time of All Things Must Pass, which in the original vinyl edition, which I stubbornly treated to as if it were a Beatles album, there was about one listenable side out of six (including a jam disc that even I couldn't listen to more than a few times). Fortunately, either George himself or the director chose mostly the good songs, and in the one exception, "Beware of Darkness," one verse's worth of Leon Russell spices it up nicely.

When Russell or Billy Preston or Ringo gets the spotlight, we're definitely in the B-zone, but then Dylan comes on for 5 terrific songs. I've never seen him live but have heard that he's mumbly and surly, but he was neither here--the adjective I'd choose would be godlike, and I mean that in a good way.

One annoying bit: that old fake encore after the musicians have left the stage before playing one song that everyone in the joint knows they're gonna hear, in this case the theme song for the whole gig.

One pleasant reminder: that Eric Clapton, the consummate team player, has the highest ratio of attention merited to attention demanded in the history of rock & roll, if not the history of music.

Valkyrie

A Dangerous Method

Crit

Distractions for my never-analyzed and not-recently-therapied psyche:

• Thoughts of the popular Freud action figure.
• Aragorn's surprising career change.
• The cigar.
• Keira Knightley's Russian accent.
• Keira Knightly's bustier.
• The simulated violence perpetrated on Knightley's character, Sabina Spielrein, Jung's patient > colleague > lover, as a creepy prelude to the actual violence I'll see momentarily perpetrated on Lisbeth Salander.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Crit

OK, getting older does have a few advantages; for example, even though I saw the original less than 20 months ago, all of the critical plot twists were almost brand new again. Not sure this was really necessary, but Fincher, Mara, and Craig make a revisit worthwhile. One thing I was very pleased to see: that they didn't think it necessary to move it from Sweden, to set it, say, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. One thing I could have done without (spoiler alert!): Lisbeth's conventional heartbreak at the end--was that in the Swedish film or the novel?

Trailers

• The Iron Lady--I'd seen the teaser several times, but this is the first full (overfull, very long) trailer I've seen, and it filled me with trepidation: am I still going to be able to despise Margaret Thatcher once I've spent two hours with her as portrayed by Meryl Streep?
• Contraband--Yet another you've-got-to-come-back-into-the-outlaw-life-lest-we-kill-your-wife-and-kid pix. Speaking of unnecessary.
• Rock of Ages--Possible: anything that has Alec Baldwin as a fat old club manager and Catherine Zeta-Jones doing musical numbers can't be all bad.
• Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance--Oh, for the love of god, someone please put a stop to Nic Cage.

One . . . ah . . . thing to rule them all

Lord of the Rings: part II, The Two Towers

(2002)

Sex! Du-uuuh! How can someone as sex-obsessed as I not have gotten it before that it's all about sex? I mean, I've always noticed (how could you not?) that the most menacing persistent image, Sauron's eye, is a huge pudendal cleft, but until tonight it had never dawned on me just how much of the trilogy's imagery is devoted to the one ring being teasingly caressed by a finger or by a dagger or sword or other substitute phallus. In fact, to be indelicate, more than "sex," it's all about pussy, notwithstanding that the most enduring love relationship is straight (as it were) out of Leslie Fielder's homoerotic playbook ("Come Back to the Raft, Frodo, Honey"?).

What a relief to have puzzled that out. And speaking of sex, I expect the majority of fanboy nerds fall in love with Cate Blanchett's Galadriel, with the more callow falling for Liv Tyler's Arwen. And there's nothing wrong with that pointy-eared pair, mind you--I don't want to be accused of anti-elvish prejudice--but for me, there's no competition with Miranda Otto's Eowyn. (Incidentally, apart from those three, is there a woman who gets 5 lines of dialogue in the whole freakin' trilogy?)

One zing to fool us all

Lord of the Rings: part I, Fellowship of the Ring

(2001)

Not until after I'd decided on this as my Xmas-night watch did it occur to me that it had been a Jewish Xmas movie originally, 10 years ago today. That day was notable for not being solitary, and it was an altogether enjoyable movie-and-Chinese day, until it turned into one of the weirdest unpleasant experiences I've ever had. Fortunately, that didn't happen until nearly a year later, and no, much as I would like to give you the details, I just can't. I'd tell you what I learned from it if I'd actually learned anything from it--all I really took away from it is that any friendship that can be spoiled without your having any idea what really happened must not have been a friendship that really needs to be mourned.

Oh, so the movie--I've seen it often enough that it's starting to make sense to me, which I'm not sure is a good thing.

Sound and fury

The Artist

Crit

Yes, that was a fine choice for the Xmas movie: mostly Singin' in the Rain, but darkened by A Star Is Born, eloquent in its silence, brilliant in its few sounds.

An elderly woman in my audience--perhaps sinking into dementia, perhaps just overexuberant and incapable of allowing so much to pass without spoken commentary--twice shouted out a comment, first, "That's quite a dog" and later, when talkies, marital strife, and the stock market crash have conspired to undo George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), "I wish I could make this stop." I'm sure all the rest of us shared the hope that we'd hear no more from her, but no one could argue with the sentiments. That Uggie is as good a dog as has been in the movies since those two four-letter '30s dogs that make regular appearances in the Times crossword puzzle.

Trailers

• Albert Nobbs--Oh, my, yes!
• W.E.--Oh, my, no!

You're a mean one

Scrooge

(1951)

I watch this every Christmas Eve, but only after watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and this year I noticed something about that shorter version of A Christmas Carol that I'd never gotten before: for someone who presumably avoids this society he finds noxious, the Grinch knows an awful lot about the Whos' Christmas celebrations, even down the the games and musical instruments they receive as gifts and the foods served at their banquet. Does that not suggest that he has always subconsciously yearned to join the festivities? Which makes this a significantly different story from that of Scrooge, who has apparently been content for years to confine himself to his mercantile world.

Anyway, "perfect": big word. It's not a word I'd apply to my favorite film of all time, much as I love it. But it's hard to find anything about this film to cavil about. OK, here's one thing: I'm a little uncomfortable when the redeemed Ebeneezer teases Bob Crachit on Boxing Day, pretending that he's about to sack the poor guy before revealing that, no, in fact everything is going to be better. For the underclass, jokes about unemployment are distinctly unfunny. But otherwise, I can't think offhand of a single moment I'd change. And it sure cleans our my tearducts!

A stove boat

Moby Dick

(2010)

Well, geez, how could I not watch this? But I wonder: is it even remotely possible to do the novel justice in 3 hours? Probably not, but before a minute of this attempt passed, I had a pretty good idea it wasn't happening, when Ishmael, a liberal by 1851 standards, but hardly an abolitionist, frees Pip from his master. It seems that the makers of this film were under the impression that the novel has insufficient humanity, so right after the Ishmael-as-abolitionist scene, we get some heartwarming homelife with Ahab's wife (Gillian Anderson) and son. As the Pequod is weighing anchor, Mrs. A beseeches first mate Starbuck (Ethan Hawke), "Take care of him," and Starbuck answers, "I will"--this all inaudible but easily lipreadable, of course.

It's notable that the protagonist of the novel, he whom we call Ishmael, is played by an unknown (to me, at least), Charlie Cox, while the biggest names--William Hurt, Anderson, Hawke, and Eddie Marsan--play Ahab and those closest to him, his mate and his first two mates. Oh, and then there's Donald Sutherland for a minute as Father Mapple and former hobbit Billy Boyd for two minutes as Elijah. The best non-name is Raoul Trujillo, whose Queequeg is the closest we ever get to the spirit of the book.

Not surprisingly, the film is best when it takes its language directly from Melville; sadly, it does so only a dozen or so times, Hell, Ahab doesn't even get to fling his fatal harpoon to his wonderfully defiant last line.

[Next morning] Can't believe I forgot to mention the most inexplicable decision of the filmmakers, to promote the mutinous Lakeman Steelkilt from protagonist of a story Ishmael tells about another whaler to important character in a distracting Pequod subplot (and as a result to make the benign Stubb the Lakeman's malignant antagonist). Perhaps the strategy was to have something happen, because precious little does--the narrative is not quite PETA-friendly, but only one whale is killed--and yet when a barrel starts leaking, it is somehow still an enormous project to find the leak in one whale's worth of barreled spermaceti. Those misguided readers who don't like the novel sometimes complain that the action is too often interrupted by information about sperm whaling. Well, you'll learn little about whaling from this film, but that material isn't excised to the gain of action.

Seven veils

Forgotten Silver

(1996)

Brilliant, if accidental, timing, watching this shortly after Hugo. That was fiction based on early cinema fact; this is convincing "documentary" about fictional early cinema. Knowing that it was a "mockumentary," I made a point of paying attention to when the first veil falls away: not until more than 7 minutes in, meaning that even attentive viewers would (or at least could) have been carried along for about one-seventh of the TV-slot film. And indeed, what's beautiful about this film is that it doesn't chuckle and pat itself on the back, like, say, This Is Spinal Tap (and don't get me wrong--I love that film). Instead, a young Kiwi filmmaker named Peter Jackson, who had by this time introduced us to Kate Winslet but not to Gollum, had the confidence to go with the soft sell: the film is funny, but not guffaw funny; it's smart funny, wise funny, with a reverence for what is being parodied. All young filmmakers with an impulse to try too hard should watch this and see what you get when you let your material lead you where it wants to go.

There's no place like home

Meet Me in St. Louis

(1944)

A blood-curdling tale of parental abuse about a family whose father who wants to uproot them from St. Louis and pack them off to--shudder--New York! The most traumatized of the children acts out through acts of assault with baking goods, mass transit vandalism, and neigehomicide, but in the end, everyone muddles through somehow.

Vincente Minnelli directs his wife to be, taking great care not to let audiences forget her signature role from 5 years earlier: the central theme is the same, and several of Esther's lines (and Garland's readings of them) echo Miss Gale's--not least the final appreciation of the World's Fair, delivered with familiarly breathless wonder: "Right here where we live--right here in St. Louis!" Margaret O'Brien plays Esther's delinquent little sister and, like the ketchup the housekeeper is making at the start, cuts the cloying cuteness with enough vinegar to be digestible. And three of the songs--"The Boy Next Door," "The Trolley Song," and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"--have a rightful place on any collection of Garland's best.

One oddly ironic line: Mr. Smith early in the film jokes about quitting his job and pitching for the Baltimore Orioles. In 1903, when the character speaks, the Orioles were a minor league team, and that was still the case when the film was made. But if the film had been made 10 years later, that line would have been a cruel allusion to the American League team that had been the St. Louis Browns until moving east in 1953. What did Minnelli know? . . .

The horror

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse

(1991)

Yeah, yeah, I really needed to use deaccession night to free some space on my DVR hard drive, but the problem is, Netflix won't stop sending me discs. I switched more than a week ago from 1-disc-at-a-time-unlimited to streaming only (same price, $7.99, so you can switch any time without paying more or having to wait 'til the end of a billing period), but since then they've twice sent me discs. And what am I gonna do, send 'em back unwatched? So it's theoretically a bonanza, as I'm getting twice the service I'm paying for, but practically speaking, it's not without its inconvenience--plus, I keep worrying that after the 10 days or whatever passes when I'm obliged to have returned the disc I'd just watched when I switched, they're going to try to charge me 20 bucks or whatever. As I've mentioned before, it's hard being me.

Anyway, life imitates art imitating madness in this documentary--much of the footage shot by Eleanor Coppola--on the making and near-unmaking of Apocalypse Now. It's mostly fascinating, but unsurprisingly, the most riveting section concerns the director's bout with despair over needing to film an ending that he has no clear plan for with an actor whose time on set is limited to 3 weeks (at $1 mil per), who doesn't understand who his character is supposed to be (in part because he has never read Heart of Darkness), and from whom, it develops, a performance can be coaxed only by allowing him to improvise on a series of thematic questions. If you take away nothing else from the film, you'll always be glad you've heard Brando say, "I swallowed a bug."

Oh, and it's also great fun to see little 4- and 6-year-old Sofia.

Maker's Mark

Young Adult

Crit

In case you'd forgotten Monster, here's further evidence that Charlize Theron is not shy about playing ugly--ugly outside, but better yet, ugly to the core. This is like a quadruple episode of Seinfeld, with "no hugging, no learning." Well, some hugging, but it's not pretty. I also thought of another favorite TV series connection, to those moments when Homer gives Bart advice, but I don't want to say any more than that, because it's a wonderful moment just at the point when you fear that writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman are about to cop out. A beautiful, ugliful film.

Trailers

• The Vow--Remember While You Were Sleeping?
• Gone--Remember Amanda Seyfried's career?
• The Lucky One--Remember The Notebook?
• Titanic 3D--Remember Titanic?

Nothing?

Dear Mr. Blab: no movies at all this weekend, even on DVD or DVR or streamed? Why, Santy, why?

It's complicated. But I'll be back next weekend, I promise--well, unless I get picked for a jury in a trial that goes long and gets me sequestered.

The gypsy in me

Catch Me If You Can

(2002)

First saw this on the Christmas Day of its release, which, looking at the year, I realize was my first official postdivorce Christmas-as-a-pseudo-Jew Christmas (and I recall that the theater demographics for this Spielberg film gratifyingly reinforced the cliché I was embracing). Another first was that it was my introduction to Amy Adams, and seeing her yesterday in The Muppets helped to inspire this screening.

It remains a sad, funny film about fathers and sons and truth and consequences and the Yankees' pinstripes. A perfect holiday-season depression film, and a perfect holiday-season antidepression film as well.

Frog got legs

The Muppets

NoHa

Guest blogger today, my best 10-year-old friend Jocelyn:

The Muppets is definitely on my top ten films of 2011 list, but not the first. While admittedly a great show overall, it had its moments. Amy Adams and Jason Segel fit the roles wonderfully [blabitorial note: I couldn't agree more!], and the plot is rich and appealing to children [and to grown-ups, as long as they're not too grown-up], but sometimes it felt like it should have been a little more fast-paced [yeah, I'm with her here, too]. For example, the song "Muppet or a Man" was beautifully written, sung wonderfully and played a prominent role in the film. But it occurred shortly after a very intense scene including the gangster-style oil miner (Chris Cooper), and then all of a sudden, you find Gary and Walter are singing this gorgeous tune, but the audience is not able to enjoy the scene as much as we might have been able to, because instead of fully enjoying the music, the whole theatre is hunched forward in their seats thinking, come on, let's cut to the chase! . . . but other than that slight annoyance, The Muppets is a great movie (ma na ma nop).

Man, this is job is easy when I can get somebody else I agree with 100% to write it--thanks, Jocelyn! The trailer blurbs are from cranky, cynical me.

Trailers

• Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked--Golly, this looks like it could be the best Chipmunks movie yet!
• The Secret World of Arrietty--A Studio Ghibli Borrowers movie; possibilities.
• Brave--Pixar feminism; possibilities
• Mirror Mirror: The Untold Adventures of Snow White--I can definitely get behind Julia Roberts as the wicked witch.
• ParaNorman--Hey, I'm ready for anything that starts with those 9 letters and isn't another Paranormal Activity flick.

O.K.

My Darling Clementine

(1946)

Tonight I got to wondering: what sort of Champagne you suppose they could get in Tombstone in 1882?

This may not be the best Western ever made, but it's certainly one of the most beautiful b/w ones. Then again, I'm not so sure it's not also the best.

It happened una notte

Roman Holiday

(1953)

Reporter shields runaway heiress to protect his story, only to fall in love--yes, derivative and formulaic, but with Audrey Hepburn at her freshest (24 years old, in her first starring role), Gregory Peck doing his best to channel Gable, and Rome a natural as itself, you have to be pretty cranky to resist. Released in the year of my birth.

That old blonde magic

My Week with Marilyn

Crit

Thoroughly unconvinced. Michelle Williams could make me believe her as Catherine the Great, Jesus Christ, or Moby Dick, but I never for a second believed her as Marilyn; it seemed an example of a great actor assaying the impossible--valiantly, perhaps as well as anyone could, but all in vain. At that she came much closer to the mark than Branagh's laughable Larry.

The best moments in the film come from actors playing people about whom I have no preconceived indelible image--Dame Judi as Dame Sybil (Thorndike), Zoë Wanamaker as Paula Strasberg, and about 2 minutes of Derek Jacobi as the protagonist's uncle, a librarian . . . at Windsor Castle. But the two legends seemed to be playacting at being legendary.

Trailers

• One for the Money--Another cute-chick-with-a-gun flick; where does empowerment cross over into exploitation?
• Wanderlust--Career intervention way past due for Jennifer Aniston, no?

Scurvy little spider

It's a Wonderful Life

(1946)

Watched this early in the holiday season because I don't yet feel very holiday-ish, and I thought this might help (and after all, the first time I saw it, or most of it, in a couple of televised chunks, was on Thanksgiving Day not quite 30 years ago), and maybe it will turn out to have helped, but for now I'm distracted by the burning question: Where do Eustace and Tilly fit in?

Right, and then that's another whole issue: I'd noticed before that the third man at the building and loan is named Eustace, but I never noticed the name of the woman there until tonight, and that only after spying a desk nameplate reading "Matilda Bailey." So Eustace, Tilly? Coincidence? Probably not, probably a New Yorker joke by hip screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. But it provides a nice symmetry to the assumption that Bert the Cop and Ernie the cab driver are the sources of the Sesame Street characters' names.

Anyway, having wondered how the hell Tilly is related to George, I paid close attention to her thereafter and noticed that at least once she addresses Uncle Billy by that name, and at least once as just Billy--not proof that she's his niece, but pretty strong evidence that she's not his child. So, George and Harry's sister? Didn't seem particularly likely, but likelier than that there would be another brother of Peter and Billy who is invisible, especially since you could watch the film a dozen times or more and never realize that Tilly was a Bailey even if you caught that Tilly was Tilly.

So I paid close attention to the end credits, which list not only "Cousin Tilly" but also "Cousin Eustace." So as unlikely as the explanation is, it's apparently right. But how odd that the characters would be related but overlookably so, via someone of whose existence no other evidence survives.

Materials at hand

So-good-to-be-back M5--er, no, 4

Think of me as a footballer, sidelined for 22 months with a bad hamstring tear. Would you expect me to go the full 90 minutes my first time back in the lineup? So I prefer to think of my glass as 4/5 full rather than 1/5 empty; I prefer not to employ the word "abortive." Yet it remains undeniable that I have for the first time I can remember been ejected from a movie theater.

Before that the return-from-long-injury metaphor works pretty well, too: not my best day on the pitch--spent a lot of the day just sort of getting my feet wet or getting my feet planted firmly on the ground or doing whatever else clichéd thing with my feet that you can think of. Started with a perfectly ordinary film, then advanced to one a little more interesting.

But that footballer, if he (or she!) is a good one, whose return was worth waiting out the 22 months' absence, will show one flash of brilliance in his (or her!) 75 minutes, and so this M4-not-5 showed one flash of brilliance.

In all, a good if not profoundly wonderful day at the movies.

Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey

IFC

Didn't really set out to go heavy on the documentaries, it just worked out this way. But I have to say, I really don't get the fuss over this one. OK, yeah, moderately interesting story of a nice guy who fell in love with puppets watching Sesame Street and Captain Kangaroo, cut up his father's fur-lined coat to make his own first puppet, and went on to voice the most annoying muppet ever, but it was more like something I'd have ungrudgingly have devoted 15 minutes worth of New York Times Magazine reading to. I fail to see what's special enough about the guy's story to earn 76 minutes of my Manhattan movie day. We do get a little about how his Elmo obsession cost him a wife and endangered his relationship with his daughter, and if the filmmakers had had the guts to go darker, that might have been an interesting story. Might have been.

Garbo: El espía (Garbo: The spy)

Quad

I guess if I knew my World War II history better, I'd be familiar with the Catalonian spy whose campaign of disinformation was largely responsible for the German leadership's belief that the Allied landing in Normandy was merely a feint to draw attention away from the main invasion in Pas de Calais. That is a great story, and a critical event that helped ensure that the war would not drag on for another several years.

But the incredible part of Juan/Joan Pujols García's espionage career came earlier, when, his offer of service rebuffed repeatedly by British intelligence, he set himself up in Lisbon and fed the German's fiction after fiction--all based on the bigger fiction that he was transmitting his intelligence from London. This was something like 18 months of reporting on a city he'd never seen, and getting away with it. Wtf?

Rid of Me

CV

Filmmakers have gotten a lot of mileage out of starting in medias res (OK, Paul?) and in extremis, then taking us back to a time of calm that seems to have little to do with what we've seen, showing us how we got from A to Q, and taking us past it. Writer/director James Westby works it brilliantly here, as we start with a very bad girl we don't yet know to be Meris making a stunningly aggressive gesture of contempt toward a plain-vanilla blonde who crosses her path at the supermarket.

Cut to a conventional Meris conventionally in love with a conventionally hunky husband, relocating with him, after he has suffered an entrepreneurial disaster, back in his Oregon hometown, where he has a support system of assholes who not only decline to welcome the new wife into the clique but actively campaign for reignition of an old flame.

The "how we get there" is as sane and logical as the "there" is dangerous and over the top, and the accessory bad girl who leads Meris to badness is the sort of character who makes me want to put the film on pause and call my daughter immediately to tell her that even though this will never come to Champaign, she needs to do whatever is necessary to see it. And that's why I make Manhattan movie trips!

Urbanized

IFC

I take back my vote in the recent mayoral election; I want New Haven's mayor to be that guy from Bogotá who talks about the lack, in any constitution he knows of, of the right to park your car. There's nothing surprising or revolutionary here--well, unless of course all the good ideas about city planning we've been hearing now for a couple of decades were actually implemented--now that would be revolution to believe in. But it's still a smart bit of preaching to the choir--easily the best of the 3 documentaries I saw on the day.

Trailers

Oh, but wait: you're still waiting to hear about my ejection, aren't you--my cinematic red card, as it were. Well, this is a fair place to explain, because it was about trailers and the other ancillary crap that IFC habitually shows before its features. You might ask what made me think that I could get from a 6:05 film with a running time of 83 minutes to a 7:45 one, even if the theater doors were literally two steps distant, but here's the thing: I might not have made that assumption and bought both tickets at once but for a bizarre phenomenon that governed my first 3 films, including the opener at IFC. Before Urbanized I had not seen a single trailer! Fluke or new downtown policy, it seemed to suggest that I could safely assume no more than 17 minutes of preliminaries and comfortably slide next door to Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog's death penalty documentary, in time to find a seat.

But in the event, the end titles of Urbanized started rolling at 7:48, and even violating my stay-to-the-end policy, I found the next-door theater packed: the guy why went in ahead of me got one of the 3 empty seats, a second was covered with plastic to indicate brokenness or other condition of inutility, and that left me the seat by the wall in the second row, meaning that in order to reach a location that would result in a stiff neck after 108 minutes (well, plus all the preliminary crap, only 3 minutes of which I'd missed) I was going to have to negotiate (gimpy ankled) a row of maybe 16 backpacks and winter coats (because even though it was 60 much of the day, people do wear winter coats to the movie theater--the fuck's up with that?).

Screw that, I said, and instead I sat on an aisle step most of the way back toward the projection room, squeezing tight against the wall to minimize fire-exit obstruction, but pretty much knowing that someone would come along soon to tell me I had to take either the ostensibly available seat or a refund. Well, I thought, Herzog's documentaries have a pretty fair recent history of making it to New Haven, and I'm really not much into watching under these condition, and moreover, I have to admit, I'm exhausted. So when The Man came, I took the 13 bucks and the F train.

By the way, when I finally did start to see trailers, the first was one I'd already seen at the Criterion, for Pina, and the second was for some old seasonal Capra chestnut starring Jimmy Stewart. But then finally:

• Tonari no Totoro (My neighbor Totoro)--Took me a while to figure out whether this is one of the Studio Ghibli films I've seen; looks enchanting, in the stoned anime way (oh, and also looks very indebted to Lewis Carroll).
• Ma part du gâteau (My piece of the pie)--Another kill-the-capitalists comedy; sure, why not?
• Sleeping Beauty--I've been wondering about whether this is just going to be too creepy to face, but unfortunately I was too distracted by my impending ejection to pay close attention. Pretty creepy, though.

Like clockwork

Hugo

Crit

If the film hadn't put me in such a generous mood, I might ask, with genuine annoyance, why all these Parisians speak with English accents. But it did, so I'm not. A magical love story (and love of books as well as movies--is this made for me or what?) that would have misted me up more only if it had been my Xmas Day movie rather than my day-after-Thanksgiving one.

Trailer

• The Pirates! Band of Misfits--Aardman, so probably pretty good.

As I lay dying

The Descendants

Crit

More than once I've said (approvingly) of Alexander Payne that he doesn't really much like people. I never meant it completely without irony, but it was a plausible shorthand until now. This film comes scarily close to being plausibly described as heartwarming--but wait, I mean that in a good way. Here Payne once and finally makes it clear that, as the nuns exhorted us to do in grade school, he hates the sin but loves the sinners. Almost  every prick or doofus in the film gets a redemptive moment--wins a redemptive moment, earns it. Without, of course, essentially changing. "Yes, people are awful," the film seems to admit, "and yet . . . " A fair cop.

About actors: Is there anyone besides Clooney who could better portray a guy who is still trying to recover from a shot to the solar plexus when he gets kicked in the balls as well? And has anyone since Brando as effectively stolen a scene with a dead (OK, comatose, but you tell me the difference, thespianwise) woman? OK, well, maybe Judy Greer, here (and seriously, isn't it about time for us to see her in something for more than 5 minutes?)? And the kids (Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller, and Nick Krause)? Yes, ever so.

Trailers

• We Bought a Zoo--The new one from Cameron Crowe looks potentially very sappy, but he has a knack for making sappy work. And hell, animals! Including Scarlett Johansson!
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close--Just read and didn't quite love this, so I'm definitely review-dependent, but I must say the trailer convinced me that Sandra Bullock is not, as I had feared, miscast as the kid's mother.
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy--Never read this, but the trailer made me want to, and to see the film.
• The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel--Cute old folks' home in India; good cast, though.

These precious days

Radio Days

(1987)

A really odd film, pointedly limited in its appeal but dedicated to the titular era, and blessedly so. It's never going to be anyone's favorite Woody Allen film, but the participation of some of his repertory company in minor roles--a small part for Mia Farrow, tiny ones for Jeff Daniels, Tony Roberts, and (vocalist for one Cole Porter song) Diane Keaton--suggests how much more heart mattered than head.

And (and  tall cotton, this): maybe the best soundtrack of any Allen film.

120 degrees of separation

Like Crazy

Crit

OK, this game is hard to play every time out: I guess what this has in common with the last film I watched is a long, arduous march to futility.

Not by chance, I think, that Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones) meet in LA rather than New York--part of the point of her having to return to London (having crucially but believably overstayed her student visa) is, I think, that they're a third of the world, a third of the day, a third of their lives apart, and love is no match for that global mass. We care because this does as good a job as any film I've seen lately of showing young love in all its foolishness and beauty and bittersweetness in a way that resonates even with an old codger. And the telegraphic narrative--a montage of the couple in bed, in different positions and nightclothes, covers the passage of months, and some time jumps occur even more abruptly--which would be confusing and annoying in a lot of films, here perfectly conveys those lost transitions between desperation and fatigue. A lovely, heartbreaking film.

Trailer

• Young Adult--Looks a lot like Bad Teacher.

Occupate Via Appia

Spartacus

(1960)

Let's play What Does This Film Have in Common with the Last Film I Watched? Hell, I don't know--something about keeping a private world intact while the public world is going to hell? For me, this is about blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo finally getting a screen credit and depicting men not naming names--or, rather, claiming rather than naming names. The scene that everyone remembers is less than a minute long, but if it doesn't move you, you're immovable.

Loomings

Melancholia

Crit

Let's play What Does This Film Have in Common with the Last Film I Watched? Hmmm, a poser. I guess I'd say the unsurprising surprise discovery of a corpse.

So let's say it's Earth's last day before colliding with a much larger planet that will smoosh us all like bugs. Would you fix pancakes for breakfast? Would you want to spend your last minutes drinking wine and singing the Ode to Joy on the terrace? These are a couple of the least-provocative questions (hell, we haven't even talked about the toxic wedding reception) from provocateur supreme Lars, who, bless his sweet loopiness, never bores us, even when he decides to test-drive his inner Bruckheimer.

Nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat

Miller's Crossing

(1990)

Let's play What Does This Film Have in Common with the Last Film I Watched? The song "Runnin' Wild," though here the vocalist is a man, and we don't see him (so maybe he does look like Marilyn, but I'm guessing not), and he doesn't seem to be playing a ukulele.

Not sure why we didn't see this when it was in theaters; not sure why I didn't much care for it when we saw it a few years later. Not paying close enough attention? I dunno--seems a pretty fair Coen spin on double-cross gangster noir. Maybe I held against it the minuscule role for Frances McDormand--she's onscreen for less than a minute, I'd guess--which is about as long as Gabriel Byrne is off of it.

Anyway, an intended deaccessioning, but I've decided to keep it.

St. Valentine's Day mascara

Some Like It Hot

(1959)

"There are laws, conventions; it's just not being done!" Joe admonishes Gerry, who has accepted a marriage proposal from the millionaire Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown). Well, yeah, but fewer laws and weaker conventions now, and it is being done in increasing numbers. How cool is that?

One of those films that is always a pleasant surprise--Curtis is as entertaining impersonating Cary Grant as he is in Josephine drag, Lemmon's postproposal intoxication as Daphne is priceless, and Monroe was never more . . . well, just more. And, of course, as has often been pointed out, Brown gets to deliver one of the half-dozen or so greatest last lines in the history of the medium.

Skin deep

Shi gan (Time)

(2006)

This is what Vertigo would be like, if the obsession were mutual and lots more obsessive. I thought about it a lot in the early image-shaping scenes of the Almodóvar yesterday. It doesn't quite rate the 5 stars I gave it when I first saw it, but it certainly merits its place on my top-ten foreign list for 2007 (U.S. release)--it is, I find, the only one of those 10 I've yet returned to. The atmospherics are remarkable and consistently unsettling, and the erotic sculpture garden (based on one on Jeju Island, I guess, but more sophisticated than the images I can find of that one) is worthy of its own film.

The untouchables

J. Edgar

Crit

I'm not as sure as some that Clint's a genius, but he's certainly a grown-up, so while he doesn't dodge reports of his subject's transvestism and homosexuality, he desensationalizes both, providing a reasonable context for the one incident we see of the first and using the second as the basis for a sad story of love and denial and (it seems clear to me) nonconsummation.

Leo is good, but Armie Hammer (the Winkelvii in The Social Network) steals the show as Hoover's more honest (and thus vulnerable, and thus inevitably abused, and thus heartbreaking in his devotion) partner Clyde Tolson. Sadly, the aging makeup on both looks like crap; only Naomi Watts, as the other person (once his mother [Judi Dench] dies) who loves him, ages well--and apparently a lot less than the boys do in the same number of years.

Trailer

• Haywire--Looks like a wanna-DragonTattoo, but directed by Soderbergh, so maybe.

My favorite obsession

La piel que habito (The skin I live in)

Crit

Ah, Pedro: love him or hate him, you can't deny he takes us places we'd never see via Hollywood. About two-thirds of the way through this, I was simultaneously admiring and being repulsed by it, and I was certain I wouldn't be adding it to my personal Almodóvar shelf. Now I'm not so sure. I was, as well, feeling nostalgic for my comfort level while watching those 2 recent flicks I had praised for putting me so on edge--they seemed pretty relaxed compared with this.

And then came the plot twist that completely blindsided me (partly, I'll confess, because of a lack of vision on my part that some people I know don't share), and then . . . I got lots more uncomfortable, then adjusted, and finally I found the weird world the director had put us into more or less normal, leaving me happy to take whatever came from there.

One gripe: the final scene would have been a lot more effective had the suspension point on which it ends come--as it easily could have--just a few seconds into the scene.

Trailers

• The Iron Lady--A long teaser rather than a trailer, with an absolutely brilliant wait-for-it, wait-for-it, wait-for-it reveal.
• OK, seriously, just open Pariah already, so I can stop seeing the damn trailer. I'm pretty sure I'm not a racist and positive I'm not homophobic, but I'm an ironclad bigot against crap high school "poetry"; the film itself might actually be OK, and it's certain to have a lower concentration of that puerile verse.

North by East Village

Date Night

(2010)

Two brilliant TV comedians gives us about the 23 minutes of a small screen half-hour's worth of entertainment, mostly front-loaded, with some good bits in the end-titles outtakes and a very brief bump from James Franco about 2/3 of the way through. In between, a ponderous Wizard of Oz story, with a huge debt to the film that inspired me to classify all films as Wizard of Oz films or Not-Wizard of Oz films, After Hours. It also steals its potentially fatal misidentification in a tony dining/drinking establishment directly from Hitchcock.

Oh, "HBO?" you're asking; a free sample from DirecTV a while back; this was one of only two films, I believe, that seemed remotely worth recording.

Now I try to be amused

The Wizard of Oz

(1939)

If you check out the recent YouTube video of choice among Facebook parents and grandparents of small children, you'll understand immediately why I've been thinking of this film. Great bonus of old rockers breeding anew: they get involved with Sesame Street!

So let's have some audience participation: of the many, many logical non-sequiturs and self-evident inaccuracies in this nonetheless nearly perfect film, what is your favorite? This is mine:

Dorothy: You know, we were just wondering why you couldn't come with us to the Emerald City to ask the Wizard of Oz for a heart.
Tin Man: Well, suppose the Wizard wouldn't give me one when we got there?
Dorothy: Oh, but he will! He must! We've come such a long way already.

Apart from this embodying a bizarrely naïve logic that suggests that deserts are invariably rewarded in kind, it shows a huge leap in optimism since Dot's answer to the Scarecrow's parallel question:

Scarecrow: Do you think if I went with you this Wizard would give me some brains?
Dorothy: I couldn't say. But even if he didn't you'd be no worse off than you are now.

Yes, that's good down-to-earth Kansas farmgirl logic there; clearly by the next scene so much Technicolor has leaked into her brain that she has lost touch with her roots.

Helter skelter

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Crit

OK, first time I was ever aware of John Hawkes was in the trailer for Me and You and Everyone We Know, which I saw several times before the film came to town, and I thought he was a dead ringer for a young Dennis Hopper, so though his character looked like a sweet guy in the trailer, I wouldn't have been surprised to have him turn out to be a rapist leader of a murderous cult.

But his character was in fact a sweet guy in the film, and not long after that, he became for me what he will always be: the lovable and reliable best friend Sol Star in Deadwood, and since then I've not wanted to have to not like his character--he can have a few rough edges, as in Wristcutters: A Love Story or Winter's Bone, but I'm no longer prepared for him to be Charlie Manson. Guess I have to get past that.

Remember (gosh, I hope so--it was only a week ago!) what I said about Take Shelter, that it was "the front-runner in the 'I-was-never-comfortable' sweepstakes for 2011"? Well, it still is, but this is a worthy runner-up. And the films are alike in a surprising number of ways: in each, the protagonist behaves in ways that seem bizarre to those who haven't seen what (s)he has seen; in each, the protagonist foresees a catastrophe that no one else can sense; and each film ends on a big question mark: is that catastrophe imminent? Show 'em as a double feature and sell Ambien at the concession stand!

Too much

Edmond

(2005)

"Controversial one-act play by Mamet" was the clue for 56-across in the Times crossword today, which I took as a sign that the film version should be my Friday-night deaccesion. Which is appropriate, because Edmond (the charming William H. Macy, in what must be the most repulsive role of his career) is looking for signs everywhere, in his appointment time at the office next Monday, in the tarot cards turned by a storefront seer, in the hat (identical to one his mother wore) on the head of a subway rider. And which is also appropriate because it's good to have this poisonous, hateful film about a stupid racist, misogynist lunatic off of my hard drive, which it must have been polluting for almost 2 years.

How stupid? He expects a hooker to take a credit card; he expects a private dancer to remove the plexiglass partition; he expects to beat the 3-card monte dealer; he expects a waitress who looks like Julia Stiles to take him home. Actually, implausibly, that last comes true, though it turns out not to be the wisest decision for either of them. After which Edmond continues to wander a New York pre-Giulianian in its sleaze but 21st-century enough to offer free phones from its storefronts--in short, the ugliest of all Apples, one that makes you long for the Travis Bickle version.

I'll never tell whether he gets his comeuppance, but I will say that I didn't much care one way or the other.

The legacy of Burke and Hare

The Body Snatcher

(1945)

Lewton's adaptation of a Robert Louis Stevenson story, directed by Robert Wise, set in the early 19th century and concerned with the moral ambiguity of grave-robbing to facilitate medical dissection. Doctor and educator Toddy McFarlane (Henry Daniell) traverses that gray area, enabled by cabman and resurrectionist John Gray (Karloff), who is not overly particular about whether the corpses he resurrects have actually shuffled off their mortal coil in the first place. Bela Lugosi has a terminally thankless role as Gray's blackmailer, too dimwitted to fully consider how that strategy is apt to play out.

Cuckoo's nest

Bedlam

(1946)

Had to happen eventually: Lewton's fixation on the psyche take us to the 18th century and the London asylum whose name was corrupted into a synonym for insanity. An early masque of "loonies" anticipates Marat/Sade, and Boris Karloff plays the sadistic "apothecary general" ripe for comeuppance at the hands of his charges.

Also watched the box set's documentary, Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy, with talking-head tributes by thrillmongers from Billy Friedkin and George A. Romero to Guillermo del Toro and Neil Gaiman. In the process I realized that there are still 2 features in the set I've never screened, not just 1, so tomorrow I'll complete not the set but at least the Karloff chapter of Lewton's oeuvre.

Or I'm gonna fade away

Take Shelter

Crit

When I saw the trailer for this, I thought it looked too M. Night Shyamalan for my tastes, and in fact it is very M. Night--if M. Night grew up smarter and more sophisticated. It has the same sort of supernatural-or-not metaphysical concerns that Shyamalan's films have, but without the "whoops--didn't see that coming" that cheapens his lesser efforts.

Instead, writer-director Jeff Nichols (who??? Jeff Nichols of Shotgun Stories? Jeff Nichols who's not yet 33 years old? right) seems set here on nothing less than plumbing the Old Testament question: how do you really know when you're a prophet? How do you know you're not just the loony your friends and neighbors take you for? And maybe even more important: how does your family know? Can your family know?

'Cause let's face it: you make a big deal of prophesying really bad shit, and there's 2 ways it can go down: (1) you can be wrong, in which case you are indeed just a nutball, which actually simplifies matters for everyone, including you. But what if (2) you're right? Well then, the reward you get for your legitimate prophet status is . . . really bad shit happens, and then you, as much as all the people who didn't listen to you because obviously you were just a loony, have to deal with it.

The genius of this film is that because Michael Shannon invests with such conviction his character's horrible dreams of 10w40 rainstorms and zombies--and Jessica Chastain (in the best of her 25 or so performances this year--where the hell has she been hiding?) so invests her character with love and terror and protection of their deaf daughter--that we're actually rooting for the really bad shit rather than the simple craziness. And how fucked up is that?

The front-runner in the "I-was-never-comfortable" sweepstakes for 2011. And I mean that it a good way.

Trailer

• Pina--I always have to preface every praise of a dance film with a disclaimer that I don't really care much for dance films; this one looks so trippy I won't even bother.

Quarantine

Isle of the Dead

(1945)

This is ridiculous: I've had this Val Lewton box set since at least 2007, yet until tonight there were still 3 features and the documentary on the producer that remained unwatched; Halloween weekend is the time to fix that.

Again, Lewton's favorite theme: sexy young woman (Ellen Drew) who isn't sure herself whether she's the evil supernatural creature the circumstantial evidence suggests she might be. Here superstition and prejudice, in the person of Madame Kyra (Helen Thimig) abetted by General Pherides (Boris Karloff)--oh, did I mention that the film is set in 1912, during the First Balkan War, for no particular reason?--conspire with medical and psychological pathology to make it seem all too plausible that Thea is a vampirish vorvolaka.

It's no Cat People, but it's not bad, with a particularly creepy live burial sequence.

Coated with chlorophyll

Margin Call

Crit

Ahhh, this is why we go to the movies, to escape for a couple of hours into a strange world where thrilling and terrifying and implausible catastrophes occur, then to return to the real world secure in the knowledge that those things could never happen here.

Remember the old joke--I think I had a version of it on a Flip Wilson record when I was a kid--about the guy who picks up his buddy at the airport after housesitting for him, telling him that everything's OK, except that his dog died. The returning vacationer is, naturally, shocked and distressed, and asks to know how it happened, thus triggering a sort of reverse house-that-jack-built narrative in which each disaster ensued from an even bigger disaster, culminating in the housesitter's admission that the house itself has burned to the ground. Well, that joke is as good a metaphor as any for the 2008 economic meltdown, and here at least we get to see the guy (Kevin Spacey, as the Wall Street [actually, inexplicably, 34th Street] sales boss with a conscience, for what that's worth) burying his dog. We also see his ex-wife, played by Mary McDonnell, which I mention only because I love Mary McDonnell (in my current consciousness she's the cancer-doomed accidental president of the airborne Caprican civilization in the first season of Battlestar Galactica) and because she must have the best agent in Hollywood, because she's in just this one, final, maybe 3-minute scene, yet she gets seventh billing, ahead of such major players in the story (and bigger names) as Demi Moore and Stanley Tucci. What's up with that? Not complaining, just sayin'.

Anyway, this is a tightly written, tautly acted and directed gloss on the packaging, discovery, and dispersal of what Jeremy Irons's CEO calls (this is from memory, but it's pretty close) "the biggest, most odoriferous bag of excrement in the history of capitalism."

Just one bigger mystery than how all that could have gone down: what sort of accent is Paul Bettany going for? He's a fine actor, so I assume he's not just lost, as he seems to be, between Manchester and the Jersey (New Jersey, i.e.) Shore, but it's hard to see how someone with that yobbish/thuggish delivery could ever have risen to the position he holds, or how anyone in such a position for 10 years wouldn't have rid himself of it. Bizarre.

Mess transit

Speedy

(1928)

The first Harold Lloyd film I've ever watched. Yes, really.

I read this as a call for centralized municipal control of mass transit at a time when rival companies fought for New York turf; a stirring call for big government, if not outright socialism.

No, not really, though the main villain is a capitalist train baron trying to force out the last of the horsecar operators. Lloyd plays the employment-challenged prospective son-in-law of Pop, the horsecar man, and it's not much of a spoiler to reveal that he saves the day with the assistance of a brilliant dog, a platoon of plucky Civil War veterans, and some improbable good fortune.

But what's really fun about the film is its loving location portrayal of the city, from Luna Park to Yankee Stadium, with plenty of Manhattan, including Penn Station and Washington Square, in between. How and why we see all these places--and how and why Speedy ends up taxiing Babe Ruth to a big game in the Bronx--are questions best left alone. Sometimes you just gotta let art wash over you.

Seriously? Nobody want a free Titanic DVD? Nobody wants The Matrix? Absolutely last chance!
Click here for the films I'm deaccessioning. If you see something you want, let me know, and it's yours. Anything unclaimed by 24 October goes in to the freebie table at work (except maybe for Dogma, whose extras I'm still milking for workout fodder).

Spill the wine

Sideways

(2004)

OK, look, I never denied it: my cinematic critical standards are only slightly less unsophisticated than my critical standards in wine, but when a film contains two of the all-time great scenes of self-mortification (Miles drunk-dialing his ex, Miles guzzling from the spit bucket) and a scene of connection so beautiful and true (Miles and Maya talking wine on the porch) that it makes me teary even without having had any wine (oh, don't ask why; oh, don't ask why), what more can you ask?

I guess you could ask for sad, funny truth throughout, humanity crushed like a grape and sometimes gone a little vinegary, and that's here too. And two or three breakout acting performances--and, let's just say, a whole that comes as close to perfection as maybe the best director of his generation has come so far. Damn, this is a good pour.

But now I've had all the Payne I can take until at least 18 November, when The Descendants has its limited release; "just how limited" is a question that figures to nag me until the 15th, when I should be able to check the downtown weekend openings.

Knight's gambit

Det sjunde inseglet (The seventh seal)

(1957)

(OK, I'm going to pretend there are a lot of you . . . ) Does everybody remember how the Friday night deaccession routine works? Specifically, does everyone understand that there's a big difference between (1) screening a DVD I haven't watched for at least 5 years that I suspect (usually with reason) I might as well give away and open up some shelf space and (2) screening a film that has been on my DVR hard drive unwatched for at least 2 years, in order to free up some electronic space?

In case 2, it's not that I expect to react blahly to the film; it's just that (1) if I found it necessary to record it so long ago, then why haven't I gotten around to watching it yet? and (2) if I was able to record it once from TCM or IFC (or, on the rare occasions when I want something they're showing enough to tolerate having to FFwd past commercials, AMC), chances are it'll be there again later--or, for that matter, will be streamable from Netflix.

All of which is a prelude to saying that I knew that I thought this was kickass the first time I saw it, but it was the sort of thing I needed to be in the mood for, and I hadn't been in the almost 3 years since recording it. (Today, of course, I got in a Swedish mood with my postwork movie.)

And kickass it is--both brutally existential and surprisingly sweet and lovely, even sometimes funny. Max von Sydow, in his 20s and unnaturally blond, is heartbreaking as the desperate-to-believe knight Antonius Block, and if there has ever been a better Death in cinema than Bengt Ekerot, I haven't seen him. (I seem to recall noticing this the last time: his look is without any doubt the source for the Emperor in the Star Wars trilogy. Of course, the character is also the source for the final segment of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, and lots of the medieval stuff here turns up in MP & the Holy Grail.) Positively lush b&w cinematography by Gunnar Fischer, who was apparently a regular on Team Bergman. Oh, and I should mention that no "deaccessioned" label appears below because I decided at the last that it's worth 2 hours of hard-drive space to be able to watch this again whenever I feel like it.

The director, by the way, is name #0000005 on IMDb, and I've always assumed that the really low numbers were the people who first came to mind when the site was in utero. Care to guess the 4 people with even lower numbers? Click the numbers below for the answers. (I would have guessed only #2, but I approve across the board.)

0000004
0000003
0000002
0000001