Cloud atlas

Groundhog Day

(1993)

Every year at this time I watch the same movie, over and over and over again, and yet every year it's different. This year, for example, with more snow on the ground than I've ever seen, suicidal-Phil's depressive maunderings about neverending winter are particularly resonant.

Homeschooled

Kynodontas (Dogtooth)

(2009)

A. O. Scott ordered me today (well, technically tomorrow, in a Sunday section that comes on Saturday) to stream this Oscar®-nominated Greek film, and you know me: I can't say no to the Times.

One very strange and probably very good film, about a couple who shelters their (teenage? older?) son and two daughters to an absurd (and absurdist) extent, providing incongruous definitions for words that might jangle their complacency and never letting them stray from the grounds of their suburban home (the title comes from an article of faith: a child is ready for the father's freedom of a car only when one or the other ["it doesn't matter"] canine teeth falls out and grows back).

This might all work, in its way, but for the need to provide a sexual outlet for the son. The security guard from the father's plant--taken blindfolded to and from the house--becomes an inadvertent snake in the garden by providing one of the daughters videos of Jaws and Rocky. And how ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm . . . ?

I'll give Scott the last word, because it's a good word: "a creepy, funny, elegantly shot allegory of something very weird in human nature (Language? Power? Sex? Family?)."

Prince of Serendip

The Bad and the Beautiful

(1952)

It's All About Eve in reverse: everybody knows Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) is a selfish, manipulative bastard, but the irony is that his selfish manipulation leads to his victims' triumphs over their own weaknesses and fuels their successes. Like Eve (released 2 years earlier), this started as a play, and shows it; like Eve, it has all the subtlety of a starlet's bustline; like Eve, it's far more fun than it has any right to be.

Unlike Eve, it includes a delicious tribute to the first and best collaboration between producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur, Cat People.

Busy being born

Easy Rider

(1969)

Another film I was too young to see when it was brand new (though I'm pretty sure I saw it within a couple of years, somehow), and the strongest association I have with it is listening to the extremely groovy soundtrack, in my first car, on, yes, my 8-track tape deck. My second-strongest association was with Jack Nicholson's hilarious perfomance, and that stupid football helmet.

Last time I saw more than a few minutes of this was more than a quarter of a century ago, when, at 15 or so years old, it seemed frightfully dated and just not very good. But I was so much older then, etc.; I'm a lot less inclined now to judge its age lines harshly. Much of it remains barely watchable, but the search for America is golden. Hell, if nothing else, what a kick to recognize Phil Spector as the boys' coke connection, and to see (I wouldn't have recognized her without the credits) 25-year-old-and-cuter-than-the-legal-limit Toni Basil.

Lost in dissolution

Somewhere

Crit

Even when you're a bigtime movie star with money to burn, you get to the point where driving fast is no fun, cigs are no fun, booze is no fun, pills are no fun, and even twin blonde pole dancers are way less fun than you'd have thought. And that's when you need to get your 11-year-old--grounded and practically perfect in every way, despite the fact that her father is never around and not much when he is, and her mother has unidentified issues of her own serious enough that she needs to split for an unspecified length of time--into your life, because she is fun. And a damned good cook, to boot.

It's a film that you rather expect to be about growth, but it gets only to the point of recognizing the need for growth, without the thing itself. It reminded me of one of those New Yorker short stories that presents a slice of an unsatisfactory life and then gives way to the book reviews. Coppola (who, omg, turns 40 this year) takes her time, dwelling on static shot after static shot, and it's great to look at, but it's hard to tell whether there's some there somewhere.

And what are we to make of the fact that the bandanna-short skirts over cotton panties that the aforementioned 2blonde wear in their 2nd (!) appearance are essentially the same as the standard figure-skating getup that daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning, really 11 when shooting began, and luminescent) wears just a few film minutes later? Aside from the assumption (think back to the unforgettable opening shot of Coppola's best film) that the director, sensibly enough, has a thing for cotton panties?

Trailers

• Hanna--Speaking of luminescent young actors, Saoirse Ronan is trained and dispatched by her father (Eric Bana) to settle a score with his old boss (Cate Blanchett), by which I do not mean suing for back pay. Could be chilling or just comically awful.

The longest and saddest death speechanyone had ever heard

Synecdoche, New York

(2008)

Yes, it remains brilliant, and yes, it remains enormous in every sense, and yes, it remains painful. But what the hell has Charlie Kaufman been doing for the past 3 years?

Biggest end-credits surprise: that's Robin Weigart (Calamity Jane in Deadwood) as adult Olive.

People like us

Another Year

Crit

In the latest from Mike Leigh, Tom and Gerri, and eventually their son Joe and his girlfriend Katie, selfishly hog all the love and happiness, leaving none for anyone else, particularly sad-sack friends Mary and Ken. Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen are brilliant as one of the happiest middle-aged couples in recent memory, and Lesley Manville and Peter Wight are excruciating to watch as the mismatched matched pair of train wrecks.

Trailers

• Barney's Version--Reviews have been mixed, but it's been so long since I've seen Minnie Driver that I'm in.
• Of Gods and Men--Goats! And Trappist monks in Algeria, 1995. Looks good.

Blue-eyed Indian

Hombre

(1967)

Another of the '60s films I knew first as MAD magazine parodies--"Sombre," in this case. (I'm sorry I can't provide a link to that piece, but through the miracle of Wikipedia, I can at least tell you that it was issue no. 115, December 1967.)

The movie itself is essentially a slow-moving Stagecoach, except here the Apaches (mostly off-camera) are the good guys, victimized by the Gatewood-like Dr. Favor (played by Fredric March), and the menaces are just nasty white men (with a token Mexican). The goodest guy, of course--the pariah-with-a-heart-of-gold Ringo Kid role--is white by blood (with "limpid blue eyes," I can still recall from MAD) but Apache under the skin.

Not a bad film, but not one I need to own, so . . . anyone want it?

Café au sang

White Material

Crit

What a strange, confusing, disturbing film. The exquisite Isabelle Huppert stubbornly clings to a failing coffee plantation in an unnamed African country even though (1) civil war is making life hell for blacks and double-hell for whites, (2) the place belongs not to her but to her weak ex-husband, who is eager to be shut of it, and his dying father, whose position is ambiguous, and (3) surely Paris would offer her easier access to the team of psychologists needed to keep her bad-seed son from going completely Jared Loughner.

One of those films I respect and admire a lot more than I really like.

Sweet science

Boxing Gym

Crit

This is the film for people who say, "I hate boxing--it's just one guy trying to slug another guy senseless." It might not make those people like the sport any better, but it will at least make them less ignorant. As is his wont, Wiseman spares us commentary, instead letting us spy and eavesdrop, and we hear a lot more about violence (including the Virginia Tech shootings, which had just taken place) than we see. Various footwork drills--including one that involves bouncing lightly around a tractor tire, the point of which is to train the fighter not to cross his (or her! several women train at the gym) feet when moving laterally--and lots of work on combinations, the trainer calling out punch sequences and parrying them with special flat gloves, testify to the scientific aspect that the sport has always claimed.

Part science, part dance. The essential difference between this film and Wiseman's La Danse is that those ballet dancers are all adepts, while the boxers here range from 4-year-olds and overweight 50-somethings to a few who actually do turn the occasional buck with the gloves. But if either of my grandchildren ever decides to step into the ring, I hope they find someone like Richard Lord to teach them how to walk out of the ring on their own power.

Yo, fantasma

El espinazo del Diablo (The devil's backbone)

(2001)

Had a really difficult time picking a movie tonight, but finally the del Toro appetite-whetting I got last Sunday carried the day. The violence of this film always surprises me, but the beautiful eeriness of the ghost story never disappoints me. It might fairly be said that the characters are black and white, either heroically saintly or irretrievably wicked, but it is, after all, archetypal myth, a genre not really known for its subtle moral gradations. Bottom line: it works.

Having a good time somewhere

 

Rabbit Hole

Crit

Was it just that I recognized "I don't know what your rules are; I don't want to get scolded again" as a direct quotation from my mother, or does Dianne Wiest act all those young whippersnappers off the screen? In truth, all the performances are excellent, and the script embodies a rare truth about mourning. Another rough one to watch (would have been a very bad idea to double-feature this with Blue Valentine), but this one, without pulling, you should pardon the expression, any emotional rabbits out of its hat, allows us some hope at the end--the hope, essentially, of putting one foot in front of the other.

Trailers

• Biutiful--A bit of the critical blush seems have gone off the González Iñárritu rose, but I'm in nonetheless.
• The Beaver--Oh, god, Jodie, think it over! One friend theorizes that this is Foster's acknowledgment of the time in Robert Downey Jr.'s career when he needed rehabilitation and Mel as producer got him The Singing Detective; this, then, is a pay-it-forward. But whatever the reason, is looks so disastrous.
• The Lincoln Lawyer--Feh.

I'll follow the sun

No Manhattan trip this 3-day weekend, but at least a home double feature--of a pair of excellent films of whose existence I was unaware 2 weeks ago.

Im Juli (In July)

(2001)

I didn't know Fatih Akin had directed a feature before Head-On (2004) until a friend said that she had a Netflix disc of this. I asked for a report, and when she said that she thought it might be her favorite of his films and asked whether I'd like to take the disc and then drop it in the mail, . . . I first thought, no, already have full cinematic plate . . . until I remembered that the weekend was a triple.

It might not be my favorite of Akin's films, but it certainly is the sweetest, the happiest of them I've seen--and provides a context for the kind of wacky Soul Kitchen, which seemed to come from a completely different place from Head-On and The Edge of Heaven. Nerd student-teacher Daniel (Akin regular Moritz Bleibtreu) goes on a quest for love, not realizing that he has already found it in his own back yard (and seriously, the ideal woman [Idil Üner], the scary woman [Branka Katic], and the right woman [Christiane Paul] are as striking a female trio as you'll see outside of a representation of the Graces).

Not only a sweet love story but also a beautiful travelogue, shot on location in Hamburg, Budapest, and Istanbul.

X: The Unheard Music

(1985)

God, look at that date: it's a quarter of a century old. Found this while trolling for the still-unavailable-on-disc The Decline of Western Civilization. I guess it really was shown in theaters--here's a Janet Maslin review of its opening at the Waverly (now the IFC)--but I don't recall its showing up in Champaign. Janet doesn't seem to have dug the music much, but for someone who thought in 1982 and still thinks today that X was the best American punk band by far, this film--part documentary, part concert film, part music video, part polemical tract, and every moment visually and aurally fascinating--goes into the pantheon of rock & roll movies.

Habeas corpus

Grand Theft Parsons

(2003)

OK, start with the concept: Graham Parsons's faithful friend and road manager steals his corpse to fulfill the terms of a pact the two had made, that the survivor would free the soul of the first to die by cremating him in the desert outside Joshua Tree, California. Sounds impossible to make dull, no? No. Perhaps the one element of note is a fairly restrained performance by Johnny Knoxville as Phil Kaufman. I didn't say a good performance, mind you, but at least it's not embarJackassing.

The one you shouldn't hurt at all

Blue Valentine

Crit

So if Einstein was right, we all fall in love and break apart simultaneously, except that if time is a fiction, so is simultaneity, I guess. Which is just a dumb joke to distance me from the emotional gut-kicking administered by this time warp of love, omega to alpha. "I feel bruised," said one of my after-work movie posse, and yeah, I can get behind that. Beautifully structured, sensitively shot, and miraculously acted by Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, it is without a doubt one of the best films I'll see this year, but please don't make me see it again anytime soon, and please let me stop thinking about it now.

Trailers

• Cedar Rapids--Came in in the middle of this one (this is what happens when you go with people), but it looks like another lame yuk-it-upper. But just the notion that a movie could be titled Cedar Rapids . . .
• The Adjustment Bureau--And for this one I had to triangulate from stars Matt Damon and Emily Blunt because the projector went out of whack right before the title appeared (and twice during the film, by the way): looks like Amélie meets Bourne.

Getting the bugs out

Cronos

(1993)

Yes, I'm trying to deaccession DVDs this year, but this is one I've been wanting to own for some time, so even though I had to pay Criterion Edition prices when it was finally rereleased, I had to have it--notwithstanding that I now see it's available for streaming on Netflix.

This is how we met Guillermo del Toro, and elements of his signature are already in place: the child who can endure more shock than anyone at home in the real world ever could, the eerily beautiful visual style (including the museum-salon-style long rooms and hallways), the skewed-Catholic moral vision. And of course the fantasy universe that is partly from familiar myth but mostly from his own wonderfully weird imagination: here, vampirism enabled not by another vampire but by a machine invented by a 16th-century alchemist (did I hear someone's ears prick up there?).

Del Toro regular Federico Luppi plays the antique-shop owner who develops a taste for blood, and Hellboy-to-be Ron Perlman is the comical heavy. Oh, and Jabba the Hutt appears to have gotten a comeback gig as the larva that lives inside the machine and filters the blood.

Domo arigato, Kobayashi

OK, the Times finally arrived at 8:55, but I'm still going to take a few minutes to do what I was going to do if it hadn't: tip a cap to one of the best character actors of our time, Pete Postlethwaite, dead far too young, of cancer.

Here's the best thing I can say about Postlethwaite, and you who know me know that this is a very good thing indeed: when I would catch a glimpse of him in a trailer, my enthusiasm for the film automatically rose, whether from "no" to "well, mayyyybe" or from "oh, yes" to "oh, yes!"

My first keen awareness of him on the screen was not as the wrongly accused Giuseppe Conlan in In the Name of the Father (for which he got his only Oscar nomination) but as the inexplicably named messenger Kobayashi in The Usual Suspects. Brassed Off (currently unavailable on disc, it seems) is the only lead role I can recall for him, and while he was brilliant in that little gem, it's probably just as well that he kept to the periphery--not the ace starting pitcher or the put-it-away closer, but the guy who comes in to get a left-handed batter out with the game in the balance in the seventh inning. OK, it's silly to use a baseball metaphor for a man so very not-American, but the point is that he brought a little bit of perfection to every role. Most recently, for example, The Town was nothing like a great film, but Postlethwaite's portrayal of a gentle florist façade over a vicious gangster was one of the elements that made it 2 fun hours. He shows up in both the Elsinore Project--as the Player King in Mel Gibson's Hamlet--and the Verona Project--as Friar Laurence in Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (I always get a kick out of typing the full title)--and those roles provide a nice précis to the Postlethwaite presence: a small role, but a tricky one, and an essential one, one that, done badly, can cut the heart out of the piece. I'll resist the temptation to say that his loss cuts out the heart of my cinematic world, but the precedent of my articulating at some length an appreciation--and including a photo!--should make it clear how much I feel his passing. For more, see the Times obit. The early online version of that bio revealed that he had been active in protesting the Iraq War and that his Green convictions extended to having a wind turbine on his Shropshire farm. I hope that those tidbits were edited out in the name of space, not of accuracy: when you admire someone without having any idea whether anything about him or her is admirable besides the work, it's always comforting to learn of a shared belief.

Marketplace of ideas

Agora

(2009)

I'm a sucker for Roman Empire stuff, I'm a sucker for Rachel Weisz, I'm a sucker for proto-Copernican astronomy (well, OK, not really so much), but this is just a mess. Late-4th-century Alexandria, and the Christians, not far removed from underdog status, are now bloodthirsty, book-burning misogynists (no comment). Hypatia is a brilliant atheistic philosopher trying to puzzle out the mysteries of the small-h heavens. And maybe it's a brilliant wedding of structure and subject that director Alejandro Amenábar can't seem to figure out which story should be revolving around the other, and whether that orbit should be circular or parabolic, but chaos seems to have been the clockmaker.

Oh, and also two men are (duh!) madly in love with Hypatia, including her slave, but her philo is reserved for sophia. I wanted to like it, I tried to like it, but I guess it just wasn't in the stars.

If you knew

A couple of weeks ago, I alluded to my then-planned media-related New Year's resolution, and this is it: On Fridays this year (why Fridays? Just seemed like a good idea to take care of housecleaning at the start of the weekend. Every Friday? Not necessarily. Most Fridays? Probably) I will be nominating candidates for deaccession from my collection.

One set of candidates will come from my DVR hard drive, specifically from the movies that have been there at least 2 years, since when I got the new toy, I went a little crazy. This won't affect you, because after watching the movie I'll simply delete the film from the drive (or, in rare cases, specify that I want to keep it), and that will be that.

But you can help me with the other set of candidates. Because when the DVD player was a new toy (and during some periods since), I also yielded to excessive acquisitiveness, such that I own films I haven't watched in years, don't much look forward to watching, and in some cases haven't even removed the shrink wrap from. So some Fridays I'll be selecting a DVD of a film that I haven't seen for 5 years or more, I'll watch it, and unless that screening convinces me that I need to keep it (rough rule of thumb: do I anticipate watching it at least twice more in my remaining time on the planet?), I'll slug it "DVD (giveaway)," and you'll have a chance to claim it on waivers, absolutely free, first-claimed, first-served. If no blog readers claim it on the weekend, I'll take it in to work and put it on the take-me-home table.

Peggy Sue Got Married

(1986)

A perfect example of a DVD I bought because it was cheap and I remembered liking the film, but come on, do I really need to own it? Particularly having just discovered that I can stream it from Netflix? So it's yours for the asking. And it is a pretty good time-travel/Oz/Wonderful Life kind of film, at least until Coppola runs into a brick wall on the how-to-get-her-back-to-the-present plot point.

What elevates it is that it gives only a nod to the change-the-past-change-the-future issue that often bogs down the genre but pays more attention to how to address the regrets of the present in the present. And Kathleen Turner has never been more appealing, not even in Body Heat.

Sphinx?

Never mind the countdown night before last, now we're down to the last few hours of an 11-day break from the demands of gainful employment and gainless diet, and so I pour my last bourbon for a while and contemplate cinema 2010. Yes, there are as always things I've thus far been deprived of, by geography and M4-deferring poverty, that I expect would contend for the "Best of" list if anyone were paying me to see everything by year's end, but nobody is, and so this year I propose 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!"

Of course, codgerdom already has a foothold--or a canehold, if not yet a walker-leg-hold--I'm 57 now, as old as my father was when I became a father (I was the youngest, so he was already a grandfather several times over; but I collected my 2nd grandchild this year). As I've whined before, I was cinematically deprived as a small-town child, so I don't really have the treasured-films-of-childhood collection of the cinephile who grew up in a city with first-run theaters. I guess the film I saw most often as a (Catholic; duh) child was The Sound of Music, released the year I turned 12. (Coincidentally, the eldest von Trapp girl, named not Leisl but Agathe, died Tuesday, 16 going on 98.) So count backward from now to 1965, and then an equal number of years backward from then, and you see that when I was a kid, 28-year-old Mary Pickford starring as Pollyanna was equally ancient history as 30-year-old Julie Andrews starring as Maria von Trapp is now. Except, of course, that the algorithm of ancientness has become so accelerated, even more so (I hope, I pray) than my own ancientness, that you might as well say Pollyanna and S of M are now equally ancient, which means I'm eating my own ancient tail, or something.

So what's my point? Have you not been paying attention? Have you forgotten that you're dealing with a bourbon-consuming senescent? It's your job, not mine, to determine my point. It's my job to tell you what I've dug (it's a generational term; you might find it in Urban Dictionary) in the past 1/57th of my life. What can I remember without going back over the year's blogging? Inception, for sure--but was it sound and fury signifying a miscast role for Juno? True Grit, but I just saw it a few days ago, and I just saw the 1969 version a few days before that, so how much credit is due? Toy Story 3, but I'm a grandfather and a sentimentalist, so there may have to be a Boehner discount for those tears. Cairo Time, but . . . well, you know.

So, let's sift through the year . . .

January, first (of, what, 2?) Manhattan trip produced 2 amazers, Sweetgrass and Fish Tank, the former a perfect example of why people who don't live near Manhattan and who don't take my recommendations (or the recommendations of someone similarly warped) just don't get as much out of the movies as the movies have to give; the latter a sad-bastard flick for the ages.

February, the leftover White Ribbon, quite simply one of the most excruciatingly wonderful awful films I've ever suffered. I'll pretty much see anything Michael Haneke wants to show me, even knowing that I'll hate it 30-40% of the time.

March, 2008's A Woman in Berlin, about which I seem to have used the unusual adjective "miraculous." Also the brutally amazing Red Riding trilogy. And Un Prophète, which seems to have blown me away even more than the Haneke. Incidentally, I seem to have used the headline "An education" 3 times in 2010, all in tribute to the Carey Mulligan film, of course.

April started with a concert stunner whose existence I had been unaware of, The T.A.M.I. Show, from 1964, and I'm going to keep telling people from my generation about it until you've all seen it, dammit! A few days later I finally saw F. W. Murnau's 1927 Sunrise; oh, my--the best of an very good M4, maybe the last one ever (oh, that way madness lies!). And can it really be that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and both sequels all came to America in one year? Well, this is the one that remains worth seeing.

May: Terribly Happy: from my wispy review of this Danish flick: "the best Coen brothers film I've ever seen that wasn't made by the Coen brothers"; 'nuff sed. And The Secret in Their Eyes, the Argentine (Argentinian?) Best Foreign Film winner of 2009. But Nicole Holofcener's Please Give made it worthwhile to see an American movie this month, too.

June: hey, it's my bully pulpit, so sue me for giving another plug to Leading Ladies, still looking for distribution. Though even as a loving father I must confess that the best film I saw that month was 1987's Wings of Desire. And then there was the astonishing Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone--like it, loved her.

July? I'm crying already, just typing in Toy Story 3. And my brain's hurting already, just typing in Inception. Who the hell won the World Cup final anyway? It wasn't France, I know that, but they have this to boast of: Wild Grass.

The Happiness of August was Life During Wartime. And speaking of life during wartime, Steven Soderbergh's 2008 Che is worth a 4-hour look if you're an unreconstructed lefty. But I think I'm just gonna come right out and say my favorite film of the year is the quiet, understated symphony of sexual tension Cairo Time. OK?

September was Mesrine, whose star Vincent Cassel I didn't recognize as the starfucker/starmaker of Black Swan until it was pointed out to me, but it makes perfect sense.

Don't hate me 'cause I'm popular: The Social Network is one of the best films of the year, notwithstanding its accessibility. And to salvage my art house cred, let's put Howl in here too. But what's Halloween month without a creeper, even if Let Me In gets in only as a pointer to the Swedish original?

November: OK, I'd seen Metropolis before, but not this Metropolis. Stunning. As is, in a much squirmier way, 127 Hours.

December: I don't think it's any secret that I digs me some mumblecore. So: Plastic Furniture. Nor that I loves me some Coen. So: True Grit.

And so, if I never tell you what I think about any more movies, we'll always have Paris. And Cairo. OK?

Ahoy, there, Captain Cook!

Up

(2009)

Well, I expected it to be good, else I wouldn't have made it my first watch of the new year, but what I didn't expect was that it would be It's a Wonderful Life, only without the annoyingly gender-conventional undermining of the spirit of adventure--this version provides two much more satisfactory channelings of that spirit.

That said, apart from an opening and a close that provide genuine transport, it's no more than pretty good Pixar entertainment.