Love will tear us apart

24 Hour Party People

(2002)

To complete a Michael Winterbottom/Steve Coogan, sort of history: the tentative rise and emphatic fall of TV journalist and recording and club impresario Tony Wilson and of his passionate belief in Manchester as the galactic omphalos of punk.

Razing Caine

The Trip

Crit

Testosteronic comic competition on the road, with beautiful food not taken remotely as seriously as the nuances of the nasality of late Michael Caine. If you would not laugh at the reaction to an impressionist by a man who professes disdain for the art but can't resist correcting the flaws he perceives in the mimic, you won't laugh at this. I did.

Our father

The Tree of Life

Crit

So many ways to begin. For example, . . .

If I could give one piece of advice to a movie character, it would be to shy away from any film that begins with an epigraph from the Book of Job, and not just Job but Job quoting one of God's pissiest "fuck-you-I-don'-gotta-show-you-no-stinkin'-badge" speeches. Just leave now; it's not going to be fun. Or . . .

This is a lot like Monty Python's The Meaning of Life except without the vomiting, gratuitous display of bouncing breasts, and laughs. Or . . .

Wait a minute: I thought it was the eldest son who is killed at 19, but the eldest is clearly Young Jack, no? But he turns into Sean Penn as an adult. So who died? Or . . .

Pretty cool birth-of-Earth and dinosaur scenes, huh? Or . . .

Well, you get the idea. The point is I have no idea where to begin, where to go from there, and what's worth saying. Did I like it? Well, that's complicated--yeah, in a way, but I doubt I'll ever go out of my way to see it again (though you never know). Did I admire it? Oh, hell, yeah! Did I find it one of the most ambitious pieces of cinema that has rolled into town in ages? Check! Also one of the oddest? Check, and I might lose the "one of."

I pretty much grew to hate the trailer and was essentially bullied by the reviews into seeing it, so I'll add my bullying to theirs: if you care about movies, you have to see it. Just don't expect it to try to make you like it.

Trailers

• Another Earth--These first two seem to have been chosen to get us ready for the feature. Potentially megadumb premise here is that there's a planet up there just like ours peopled with just-like-each-of-us.
• The Future--Latest from Miranda July, which means I almost certainly will not be indifferent toward it.
• Pariah--Black Brooklyn teen lesbian.
• The Descendants--Alexander Payne directs George Clooney? Need you even ask?

Wilde thing

The Canterville Ghost

(1944)

Golly, what hokum: Margaret O'Brien is unbearably cute, Charles Laughton is the titular phantasm, condemned in the 17th century for the cowardice that is the family heritage, and Robert Young as the Yank soldier who must redeem the line. The suspense over whether he will get the job done is as intense as that over whether O'Brien will get an adorable fadeout. Based on a short story by Oscar Wilde, and pushing it to 95 minutes leaves in flabbier than Laughton, especially in the opening, where a backstory that could have been handled sufficiently in 90 seconds is stretched to an excruciating 12 minutes or so.

Kick, ass

Wu Hu Zang Long (Crouching tiger, hidden dragon)

(2000)

The why of this is easy: we were supposed to hear Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble live on the Green tonight, but miserable weather drove us indoors, so we settled for a YYM soundtrack. But what a great film: 100% action and 100% romance: has a more perfect date flick ever been made?

Love fades

Annie Hall

(1977)

Yes, it's true: Fridays this year are generally deaccession nights, but after watching Allen's best in ages today, I couldn't come down from that to something I was watching out of duty.

Little thing I never noticed before: Christopher Walken's named spelled Wlaken in the end credits.

Big thing I can't believe I never noticed before, I mean, geez, I've seen this probably a dozen times or more, and it's really pretty obvious and has no doubt been mentioned by countless critics, but it finally hit me: it's Pygmalion.

Maybe part of why I was oblivious is that I've always resisted the notion that Alvy really educates Annie, that she really was an unlettered midwestern rube. But yeah, she really pretty much is; and yeah, she needs what he provides as much as vice versa. And then, after he's gotten rid of her Cockney accent and made her watch The Sorrow and the Pity a few times--i.e., when he's given her all he can-- . . .

L'Âge d'or

Midnight in Paris

Crit

My face hurts. You know how when you're young and in brand-new-best-ever love, and you smile so much that your face hurts? That's how I feel in the wake of my favorite Woody since Annie. A familiar concept freshly and brilliantly realized, as Woody manqué (maybe the best ever) Owen Wilson's screenwriter/novelist wannabe Gil finds himself among the expatriate community of Paris, circa 1920. Who knows what those people were really like to be around, but who can say the portrayals of Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Scott (Tom Hiddleston) and Zelda (Alison Pill), and Cole Porter (Yves Heck) aren't note perfect? Hell, just hearing Adrien Brody's Dalí say "rhinoceros" makes it real for me.

In fact, one of only two complaints I have--and it's not much of a complaint, because it's on an irrelevant point--is that the inevitable insight that we have to live each in our own age is thoroughly unconvincing, because we'd trade antibiotics any day for the Jazz Age and Belle Epoque Parises that we see.

A more serious reservation is that the film would be more satisfactory (which is to say, pretty much perfect) if Gil's 21st-century fiancée were not so slam-dunk wrong for him (or for anybody with any sensitivity). Why not make the choice more of a challenge? Though to give Allen his due, making any character played by Rachel McAdams unappealing has such a high degree of difficulty that a director can be forgiven just for the attempt to pull it off--and all the more when he succeeds so completely.

Trailers

• A Better Life--An immigrant father and son seek the titular commodity. Looks awfully goopy, but the fact that Chris Weitz directed gives it some cred.
• Take Shelter--He sees live weather conditions; Jeff Nichols writes and directs something very Shyamalanny.

Miss Pommery 1926

The Philadelphia Story

(1940)

My second film of the weekend in which champagne is something not without its consequences, for which grown-ups must take responsibility, but also not without its rewards. Why can't we all just get along?

What separates us

X-Men

(2000)

Yes, I was in the mood for more mutants after watching the new one today. Also wanted to see whether the reprise of the concentration camp scene that opens the new one is as exact a duplication of the scene that opens this one as struck me while watching this afternoon; yeah, it's pretty damn close--the original might be a little muddier. One thing I didn't have in mind but was a nice reminder--and another clever use of the future vis-à-vis the new film's past--is the Xavier voiceover at the very outset of the first film: "Mutation: it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet." It's not much of a spoiler to point out that in the new film young (and infinitely less responsible) Charles uses that very speech as a pickup line at pubs.

Muppet babies

X-Men: First Class

Crit

Dear Lisa--I address this to you because you forced me against my will to see the dreadful X-Men 3: The Last Stand, then didn't even try to persuade me to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine, though you saw it, for reasons (or a reason) that will become obvious momentarily to readers over your shoulder.

So I'm here to tell you (and you, and you) that this reboot of the series is rollicking good fun, never mind that your beloved Hugh appears only in a don't-blink (but absolutely perfect) cameo. (Had I been involved, the cameo would have been exploited for a couple of seconds more, but I can't tell you about it until you've seen the film or are certain you're not going to, so it follows in invisible ink--to see it, double-click the space to define the paragraph.)

After the end credits, we should have seen this: interior, the bar Charles and Erik visited earlier. On the same stool occupied then, we see a familiar form crumpled over, face down. Slow push in to the unconscious man's fist, where we see the glint of his partly extruded claws.

Lots of nice foreshadowing of stuff we already know about here--we really didn't need multiple jokes about Charles Xavier's lush head of hair, but the first look at a familiar helmet on the wrong head (and the why of the helmet) is brilliant, and some care is taken to establish the motivations for the various mutants to line up w/ Xavier or with Magneto.

I've never been a fan of the callow James McAvoy, but since the young Charles is himself callow (though always brilliant, of course)--a college man of the late '50s and early '60s who (are they allowed to do this in the movies anymore?) enjoys a drink but never lets the drink get the better of him--the casting works well. And heartthrob Michael Fassbender--last seen as Rochester in Jane Eyre--is convincing as Erik, except for the question of why a Polish Holocaust survivor has an Anglo-Irish accent.

Trailers

• Green Lantern--Actually surprised by how promising this looks.
• Rise of the Planet of the Apes--And this looks splendid.
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo--And this will give you whiplash--it's so music-video helter skelter that even though I recognized Daniel Craig repeatedly, I was too disoriented to realize what I was watching until near the end. So I can't really report yet whether Rooney Mara is an adequate successor to Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth. But it certainly seems to have some adrenaline pumping through it, and I'm inclined to trust David Fincher if not to get it right at least to get it interesting.

OK, so now I have heard nothin'

The Jazz Singer

(1927)

Wow, I've been avoiding this for . . . well, not my entire adult life, which is what I was thinking earlier, but since I entered the VCR era, more than a quarter of a century ago. "Sometime I should watch that trailblazing Jolson flick, right? I mean, shouldn't I?"

Then as the years passed, I learned that it wasn't all that trailblazing, that sound in movies had been around since there had been movies. I also encountered many discouraging words about the film itself.

Still . . .

Well, now I've seen it. And it's pretty damned bad--slow-paced, sloppily shot, and Jolson! Good god, could he be any smarmier? You want to slap him, even before the point when you'd get black shoe polish on your hand with the slap (and then, yeah, way more so). If you too have long thought you owe it to yourself to see this, you don't, unless you've been very naughty.