The Dude abides

Sleepy, with a sugar hangover. Wore a crown home last night: won the prize (also biscuits, which I kept, and tea, which I gave to a colleague) for correctly calling the number of Oscars® The King's Speech would win and (the tiebreaker) getting 3 of the 4 specifics. Was runner-up for the pick-the-winners pot of gold, with a respectable 16 for 24 to host Donna's 18. (Coincidentally, the same scores topped the standings for at least one party in Champaign, Illinois, where my daughter placed 2nd to my son-in-law.)

So the show? Yeah, pretty bad; I thought the kids would be lots of fun, but I was wrong. Franco was especially disappointing: seemed to be in a different time zone or something.

Not scandalized that Melissa Leo proved that you really can buy an Oscar®, but she certainly didn't make herself any friends with her speech. Firth's was as classy and as self-deprecating as we knew it would be.

Happiest-to-be-wrong: God of Love's win.

Earlier in the day, saw, at my guests' request, 2 more movies than I'd expected to see on the weekend:

The Big Lebowski

(1998)

The rare film that makes me smile more with each subsequent viewing. I hope I'm not around for it, but when it's Jeff Bridges's turn to be elegized in that part of you show where everybody keeps saying "Oh, right: I forgot he died!" he won't be shown as Rooster Cogburn or Bad Blake or any of his future nominated roles; he'll be sipping a White Russian in the Dude's bathrobe.

A Damsel in Distress

(1937)

Damn! Only reason I recorded this is that I was thinking it was the source of Astaire's sublime drunken "One for My Baby" dance, but within minutes I realized: no: The Sky's the Limit.

Nothing sublime here, except maybe the teenaged face of Joan Fontaine. Apparently she couldn't dance a lick, though: only one romantic dance number, and her steps are distinctly Not Falling Down 101 level. A couple of good Gershwin songs, but Burns and Allen annoy as much as amuse. Never again.

De l'autre côté du miroir

Orphée

(1950)

OK, I've been faithfully deaccessioning every Friday so far this year--until this week and next, this because this is the only night I have to watch a movie this weekend, and I thought it would be fun to watch this ahead of next week's pre-Carnaval Orfeu negro, next because I'm going to want to get a Netflix disc into the mail that Saturday so that I can get my next Big Love disc in time for my week's school-night viewing.

But do I really have to explain myself to you? Geez, I do and I do and I do for you . . .

Anyway, had no idea this was the middle of a trilogy, and given the 30-year gap between Le sang d'un poète and this, I'm not sure I buy it. In fact, I didn't buy it, I recorded it . . . oh, never mind.

So it's a more mythic time than the Heroic Age, a time when people take poetry so seriously that it can inspire them to violence. Perhaps stranger, a time when the French are very close to having rock & roll even though we're just starting to figure it out here.

A beautiful, weird dream of death and art and infidelity and disobedience and sacrifice. It's Cocteau, it doesn't have to make sense. In fact, it probably shouldn't.

Slinger

Spider-Man

(2002)

Some films you love because they show you something new every screening; some, like this one, you love because they never change. As was true 9 years ago, the best thing about this for me remains the astonishing animation of the gravity-free webslinging that made the Marvel Comics Spider-Man of my youth so . . . well, yeah, amazing.

Didn't realize what in my subconscious led me to this tonight until I started watching, then realized that it was probably my just having finished David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, about a nerdy, bullied kid who becomes sort of a superhero, at least in terms of his world, but instead of getting bitten by a genetically altered (radioactive in the comics, dammit) spider, he has to bite inside for his great power (and the great responsibility that comes with it).

Soup simple

San qiang pai an jing qi (A woman, a gun and a noodle shop)

(2010)

For the most part, this is best when it hews closest to its source, Blood Simple. Two exceptions: the kung-fu noodle-dough throwing early, and the locations throughout, colorful hills and valleys as gorgeous as anything in the U.S. Southwest. Some annoying broad comedy gets in the way of both the creepiness and the humor that the Coens put there in the first place; worst offense is the conversion of Meurice, the coolest character of the original, into Zippy the Pinhead.

All is forgiven in the climax, however, where the arrow assault on the lovers actually improves upon the original.

Monte Cristo

Barney's Version

Crit

A sad story of unrequited, then requited, then unrequited love, as Barney can never give up on his soulmate even though at first he's married to someone else and at the last she is, while he's slouching toward dementia. In between, though, he has her--and, naturally, takes her for granted, being a self-absorbed 5-year-old at bottom. Oh, and in case that's not sufficient plot for you, he's also suspected of murdering his best friend after finding him in bed with his second wife.

Paul Giamatti makes us care about the mostly unlikable Barney, and Rosamund Pike makes us understand the unwavering conviction of his love.

Trailers

• Incendies--Brother and sister learn at the reading of their mother's will that they have another brother and their father is alive, and they're ordered to search for them. Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin looks like a Middle Eastern Frances McDormand.
• In a Better World--A Danish film about violence and family, I guess.

Shadow of a doot

Niagara

(1953)

Very like a third-rate Hitchcock, except that the heroine is the brunette, and the blonde is a baddie. Joseph Cotten does his best as the sympathetic murderer, but Max Showalter (billed as Casey Adams, but who cares why?) is, for no clear dramatic reason, cinema's most annoying husband ever.

Shot largely on location, 'cause how else you gonna do the Falls, but the later river locations look suspiciously southern. And the climactic miniature shots are every bit as cheesy as echt Hitch.

Mr. Lippy goes to Iowa

Cedar Rapids

Crit

OK, you're not from the rural Midwest, so you probably think the insurance agent played by Ed Helms is a parody. Trust me: no. I know that guy; hell, with a few different rolls of the dice, I am that guy.

There's nothing brilliant or profound or original here--I mean, hell, even the flaming fart was done in South Park, though here (spoiler alert!) it's nonfatal--but I don't know when the last time was I've had so much fun in the movie theater. If what you need at the movie theater is a hoot and a half (mostly not of the fart variety, flaming or otherwise, I hasten to add), this is the place. A lot of Fridays I come home from watching something so bleak that I need a comedy with dinner, but hey, tonight I can watch something bleak at home!

Trailers

• Take Me Home Tonight--Uh, no, but thanks for asking.
• Win Win--The third from Tom (now Thomas) McCarthy, starring Paul Giamatti and Amy Ryan, so hell yeah!

Same person, no difference at all

Orlando

(1992)

When this was new, almost 20 years ago, Tilda Swinton was new to me as well, and I was wild about her, not so much about the film. But I was younger and dumber and, I suspect, less comfortable with the notion of sexual fluidity. Now I find it an extraordinary piece of work--I'd certainly forgotten how funny it is--that unfortunately lands with a thud when a young and callow Billy Zane turns up. Fortunately, that's near the end, and he can do little damage but to clunk up a couple of scenes.

Shipbuilding

The Company Men

Crit

No surprise: the bastard who made $22 million in salary and half a billion in stock and options when breaking up the corporation he and a friend had built from nothing is . . . Craig T. Nelson! Also no surprise: Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper steal the film from nominal star Ben Affleck.

In short, not a bad film, but no surprises.

Bless me, Father

Seventeen films screened today! I've come to expect the live-action and animated shorts programs about this time of year, but something new has been added.

Oscar®-nominated live-action shorts

Crit

• The Confession--It's a Catholic thing: a too-innocent boy needs a sin for his first confession, and things go terribly and predictably wrong.
• Wish 143--As my companion for the other two programs pointed out, it's funny how the shorts fall into thematic clumps. Here is another young man eager to sin, with a priest in a key supporting role. A cancer comedy, one of only two in this program worth watching, and a dark horse for the award.
• Na Wewe--Genocidal war is bad. Could win, though, if the voters go with their mushy liberal consciences.
• The Crush--Another schoolboy farce, improved only marginally by Irish accents.
• God of Love--Easily the best of the lot, and the only pure comedy, but probably won't win.

Oscar®-nominated animated shorts

Crit

• Madagascar, carnet de voyage (Madagascar, a journey diary)--Lovely watercolor animation, and lemurs!
• Let's Pollute--Nice joke, though at 6 minutes, it outstays its shelf life.
• The Gruffalo--It's just a children's book being read, really, with the title character ripped off from Where the Wild Things Are.
• The Lost Thing--Another theme bump, with another large, ostensibly nonexistent beast, this one sort of an oversized hermit crab in a Kool-Aid pitcher. I guess this is my favorite, though I didn't love any of the nominees.
• Day and Night--Pixar, showed before Toy Story 3, I believe. Blah, but never bet against Pixar.

As always, the animated shorts are so short that 5 of them come to barely an hour, so we got to see a couple of Highly Commendables, or whatever they call 'em:

• Urs--House is falling apart, so man carries his mother to the Promised Land. Or something.
• The Cow Who Wanted to Be a Hamburger--Only brilliant thing I saw all day: fantastic artwork, clever concept, beautifully realized.

Oscar®-nominated documentary shorts

Crit

First time I've had a chance to see this program--which is the main reason I went, given an unenthusiastic Times review.

• Killing in the Name--Terrorism? Also Bad.
• Sun Come Up--Global warming? Aw, you guessed!
• The Warriors of Qiugang--Pollution? Yup, also bad. One disturbing shared quality of the doc shorts is the self-congratulation of the swell people who come along to confront the problem.
• Poster Girl--Without a doubt the nominee that hit me hardest, about a young woman who went to Iraq at 17 and will be trying to come to grips with that experience forever. Sad, stealth-funny, moving, and in the end surprisingly uplifting. However, . . .
• Strangers No More-- . . . it's got no chance in hell against this feel-good juggernaut, about a school for refugee children in Tel Aviv, which teaches its students Hebrew the first week and nuclear physics the second. OK, I exaggerate, but it is a pretty astonishing institution. But hell, making an appealing film about a place like this is as challenging as making a cute puppy video. If I were a student there, by the way, I would make an effort every day to be sent to the principal's office.

96 tears

Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (The princess and the warrior)

(2000)

Hey, wait a minute: I don't know much German, but I know enough to recognize that they've reversed the nouns in the English title. I guess it's just for sound: "the warrior and the princess" is less mellifluous.

It would be an exaggeration to say that this film falls short of Lola rennt because Franka Potente's hair isn't the same unnatural red, but the facts are: it's blond, and she's relatively bland. A bigger problem with the film is genre overload: it's a heist film, it's a psychological thriller, it's an exercise in guilt expiation, it's a cuckoo's nest dramady, it's a ghost story, and eventually it's a love-on-the-lam caper. Not a bad film, but a classic MITG (more interesting than good).

Moths on the ceiling

Biutiful

Crit

Yes, it as advertised: beautiful but skewed. Alejandro González Iñárritu this time contents himself with a single narrative, sad when not unbearably heartbreaking: the dying days of a man (Javier Bardem) with good intentions but a limited palette, who tries to do right by his two small children, his bipolar, alcoholic, promiscuous estranged wife (Maricel Álvarez--according to IMDb, in only her second film, and her first since 1997--in a performance almost as affecting as the one for which Bardem earned an Oscar® nomination), and the Chinese and Senegalese workers he helps to come illegally to Barcelona to make a subsistence living, which is to say much better than they can do at home.

But cancer is eating Uxbal, body and soul, and the best he can do is try to get his affairs--especially the care of his children--in order. As everyone has pointed out, Bardem's face is a dirge here, with even the occasional part of a smile painful--perhaps even more painful than the rest.

Damn, but there have been some hard-to-watch films of late. I guess tonight I'll dismiss all the sadness by watching a sports-and-entertainment extravaganza!

Wheel turning round and round

Lola rennt (Run Lola run)

(1998)

Huh! Honestly, all I was thinking when I chose this was, "I need something wildly entertaining tonight to make up for the drearily unentertaining thing I subjected myself to this afternoon." I wasn't thinking about watching something that does well the narrative reprises that Void does for no discernible reason other than to extend the running time. And I certainly wasn't thinking of the fundamental similarity between this and last Sunday night's film.

In fact, one of the kickiest things about the film--apart from the 80-minute shot of adrenaline, and Franka Potente's rrrrrrrred! hair--is the way the story triply plays out, such that, like Phil Conners (but without the logic that that context provides), Lola learns from the earlier iterations of her narrative, knowing how to take the safety off the handgun the second time around, leaping over the scary stairway dog in the third. How can she learn from something that can't have happened if what's happening now is happening? Hey, go spoil some other movie's fun!

Whoa! Just checked IMDb to confirm that director Tom Tykwer was also Potente's director in The Princess and the Warrior, which I've had on my DVR for ages. Yes, he was, but the whoa! is for the discovery that his next is an adaptation of the wonderful David Mitchell novel I've just read, Cloud Atlas, starring Natalie Portman as Sonmi-451, Halle Berry as Meronym (but wait, spoiler alert: my understanding was that Meronym is Sonmi-451), Tom Hanks as Dr. Henry Goose, and Ian McKellen rumored as Timothy Cavendish. Woo-hoo!

Cautionary note: the Wachowski brothers are listed as screenwriters, along with Tykwer. Except am I the last to know that the Wachowski brothers are now brother and sister, that Laurence is now Lana?

Go back, Jack

Soudain le vide (Enter the void)

Crit

What the fuck?! How can this piece of doo be raking in 71% on Rotten Tomatoes, Top Critics and civilians both? If I read all the reviews I'd have my answer, and perhaps I'd understand that I'm just too dim to understand the wonderful things going on. But life, in stark contrast to this 143-minute film (which, damn! I could have streamed on Netflix!), is too short.

I'm sure that everyone who likes it mentions the swooping camerawork, which is, yeah, kinda interesting--like a sniffing dog, scrutinizing every hole--but the narrative is from hunger. In the early going, it seems to be about Drugs, Sex, and Death; then it seems more about Drugs, Death, and Sex; then Death, Drugs, and Sex; then Sex closes with a thrust, making the final trifecta Death, Sex, and Drugs. Each of those topics is capable of being fascinating, of course. None is here. And since there's only one marginally appealing character, and he's marginal . . . well, I didn't walk out (half the audience of six did, but too late to really salvage much of the wasted time), but I thought about it repeatedly.

Something has to be the worst film I see every year; I pray that this front-runner wins the 2011 prize.

Skin deep

The Phantom of the Opera

(1925)

And if old-loves-young is doomed, what of ugly-loves-pretty? . . .

Yeah, the unmasking is way creepy, and the restored color sequence at the masque ball is stunning, but what could have been effective as a straightforward riff on the Persephone myth gets muddled by enough red herrings to supply the St. Malachy's Fish Fry. What's the point of the mysterious Ledoux? Who the hell is the Strangler? And does the Phantom insist on calling himself Erik, ignoring the indisputable fact that "the Phantom" is far more fearsome? Clearly, he had never read a Marvel comic book.

I'm guessing much of the clutter is a function of inept adaptation from the novel (free for your Kindle!). There's much to applaud here, but skillful narrative is not on the list.

Thank heaven for little girls

 

L'Illusioniste

Crit

I must have misremembered what I read about this: I was thinking the girl Alice was made younger than Jacques Tati wrote her, in order to negate any possible interpretation of a romantic connection between her and the elderly title character. What I must have read is that the character was made older so that the undeniable romantic connection would be less creepy.

It's still a tad creepy in the early stages of his buying things to make her life better, when she seems willing to--seems to expect to--render carnal payment for his favors. Soon, though, the relationship resolves into a perfectly chaste April-November love, and we all know--some of us better than others--that those are always doomed.

So, a sad, beautiful, mostly wordless tale, far less manic than the film that brought Sylvain Chomet to our attention, but in the same muted palette suggestive of a world not quite ours.

Trailers

• The Tree of Life--Looks every bit as portentous as the title suggests, directed by Terrence Malick.
• Beginners--Looks very Woody Allen, right down to Leon Redbone singing "Stardust" in the trailer.