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

Soul on ice

The Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975

Crit

You know, if I'd been born in Sweden, I would have had a much clearer view from my country's media of this country's warts, and maybe I wouldn't have grown up such a weak-tea liberal, such a limp-dishrag lefty. Then again, I did know a few equally middle-class white guys in grad school who hadn't drunk the Kool-Aid; I thought they were cynical, glass-two-thirds-empty grumblers. Well, who's the cynic now?

Anyway, better late than never seeing '60s black activism without the filter of the liberal INO American media. Golly, you know what? Yeah, Stokely and Angela did say all the shit that Walter quoted at 6 o'clock (I was in the Central time zone, don't forget), but nary a speck of foam flew from their mouths. Moreover, when you see them and hear them, and when they get to establish a context, that dangerous radicalism plays a lot more like simple good sense.

See. This. Film.

Parallel synchronized randomness

La science des rêves (The science of sleep)

(2006)

I remember being disappointed in this when I first saw it, and I had the same reaction this time, though at its surreal best, it's as beautiful as a dream can be. As in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry breaks our hearts, but here the payoff is more intellectual than emotional, and it just doesn't seem a fair trade.

Dark continent

About Schmidt

(2002)

This remains my least favorite of Alexander Payne's first 4 features, but that's hardly a condemnation, and this has plenty about it to like, and even more to admire (for one thing: is Kathy Bates the bravest woman ever to step in front of a camera naked, or what?)

But what I really noticed about this, in screening it for the 3rd time, the 1st in several years, is its set-piece connections to Payne's other films: the ill-conceived seduction, the odd injury source, and the last-act educational diorama of Election; the challenged nuptials of Sideways; the critically timed discovery of a wife's infidelity of the new one, The Descendants. Speaking of Sideways, during Warren's Winnebago odyssey he passes a small-town two-screen movie theater, one side of which is closed for repairs, the other side showing twice nightly a Payne film that was then still 2 years in the future. Don't blink.

Adult education

La Tête en friche (My afternoons with Margueritte)

Crit

Oh, that's what friche means: the French title essentially means "fallow brain," which is exactly what two-t Margueritte (the beautiful near-centenarian Gisèle Casadesus) finds in the good-hearted, lumpy Germain (Gérard Depardieu). Not only does she introduce him to the wonder of words and literature, she supplies his lifelong want of maternal love. It's a wispy little film, but it's impossible not to like a paean to reading.

Rue, Brittania

That Hamilton Woman

(1941)

Lord, almighty, how did Nelson ever manage to navigate seas so deep in soapsuds? Newlyweds Leigh and Olivier emote up a broadside of adulterous romance made more sympathetic than you'd think the times would allow. The climactic sea battle is surprisingly rousing, but otherwise this is excessive in every way imaginable, and my hard drive must be pounds lighter for the shedding of it.

Who are those guys?

Blackthorn

Crit

The posters tell us that Sam Shepard is Butch Cassidy, and he looks the craggy part, as always. But his acting chops have never been up to carrying a film, and this film needs carrying. For want of a compelling central figure, it leans far too hard on the film we're all familiar with, and that underlies a uniformly unfortunate decision to spend a sizable chunk of the film in the early 1900s of that story rather than the 1927 of Butch's present. Except for introducing Stephen Rea as the Pinkerton agent on their trail, I can't think of one moment in those flashbacks that's worthwhile, and they're all distracting because the chemistry among Butch and Sundance and Etta is so clearly based on the wisecrackers of George Roy Hill's--and the distraction is worse because young Butch (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) has a look about him not of the young Newman but of the young Redford.

The 1969 picture looms in much of the imagery and many of the themes here, as well--especially the trope of pursuit by a large, indefatigable band of enforcers. And ultimately that posse brings the payoff to what has seemed a rambling story, but by that point, I didn't really much care.

Here's a question for those who know more about Latin America than I: would there have been any Iváns in Bolivia in 1927? I was under the impression that the Latino origin of that Slavic version of Juan was the Russian  presence in Cuba after the Castro revolution. But I'm happy to be taught otherwise.

The real deal

Real Steel

It's guest-blogger day, courtesy of my grad school friend (and Hugh Jackman obsessive) Lisa:

You know of my deep and passionate love for Hugh Jackman, so it should come as no surprise to you that I’d go to see him reading the phone book. I would even have gone to see him in the film that never made it to theaters (or even to DVD), in which he plays a dairy farmer, but I seem to have been spared that ordeal.

I’m no fan of boxing, but as it turns out, Real Steel is actually pretty decent. Yes, it’s an odd combination of Rocky, Field of Dreams, and other father-son bonding movies, and Transformers (though I haven’t actually seen that last one). But Atom, the “junkyard dog” of a robot that Charlie (Jackman) and Max (an adorable kid named Dakota Goyo—and if that isn’t a great stage name, I don’t know what is) restore and train to fight in this near-future’s version of boxing, reminded me of Wall•E, whose mechanical eyes managed to convey powerful human emotion.

Jackman gets to show off his boxing prowess as he trains Atom and when he “shadow boxes” with him during the final match. His moves are real—he started boxing four years ago, and in preparation for this film even trained with Sugar Ray Leonard. Jackman is in magnificent shape—believable shape, not Wolverine super-hyper-real comic book shape. Atom’s surprising and unlikely success in the ring serves as a catalyst for Charlie’s renewed confidence in his skill as a boxer, the growing affection between son and long-lost father, and rekindled love between Charlie and Bailey, whose father taught Charlie to box.

Corny? You bet. But don’t tell me you aren’t cheering for Atom to hold his own against the slicker, bigger, badder, joy-stick-operated Zeus, and that you’re not Rocky-moved when father, son, and robot raise their arms in victory at the end.

Tragic that the flick w/ Hugh as dairy farmer is unavailable, but thanks for this. It's showing downtown, so . . . nah, why even pretend?

"I know I shouldn't be telling you this . . . "

All the President's Men

(1976)

This screening is in recognition of Kenneth H. Dahlberg, a war hero, a flying ace who shot down 15 German planes and was 3 times shot down and captured himself, escaping twice from POW camps. But when his obit appeared in the Times today, his World War II exploits weren't the main focus. It's kinda like that joke whose punch line is "But you fuck one sheep . . . "

Bumper cars

Weekend

Crit

I'd like to be able to describe this as an intense, heartbreaking tale of an affair circumscribed by the titular time period, between a romantic who is repressed and a repressed romantic, without using the word gay. But in fact the g-word is central, as the conveniently parentless Russell (Tom Cullen) is only semi-out ("All my friends know--well, my close friends"), while Glen (Chris New) is politically insistent on confronting the straight world with the injustice of its privilege.

But as the telescoped limit of their time together accelerates the pair's intimacy (an acceleration that somehow manages not to be incredible), the bullshit calling becomes more balanced. The unabashedly romantic Russell comes to recognize that Glen's politics, sincere though they are, have also become a defense mechanism against anything as conventional as love.

A beautiful film, beautifully written and acted, and no qualification is necessary for that assessment.

Fruit of the womb

Citizen Ruth

(1996)

With The Descendants hitting town in a month or so, I've decided to make this a house of Payne. Having watched Election just a couple of months ago, I have only two to go; maybe I'll be down to pinot-eligible weight by the time I get to Sideways.

But seriously, how does a 30-something with scarcely any previous credits assemble this sort of cast? And how does he make such a perfectly wicked film? Dude sprang fully formed from Zeus's forehead, methinks.

I keep forgetting to look when I see the trailer, by the way, but I've just established that Jim Taylor is not in on the script of The Descendants, which will make that Payne's first feature without Taylor's collaboration. I guess the divorce is final. Oh, wait, no: Taylor is a producer of the new one, and of Payne's long-in-development Fork in the Road, which probably isn't a Yogi Berra biopic, but should be.

Last rites

Restless

Crit

Funny thing happened on my way to Weekend. Well on my way downtown, blabbing on the phone w/ my daughter, I realized that the pocket that is supposed to contain money, movie passes, Dunkin Donuts gift card w/ the Mets logo on it, etc., was in fact empty. Not enough time to return home, grab my heirloom money clip (rubber band), and get to the theater in time for the film I'd planned to see, but this one had a slightly later start + trailers, so I audibled.

This has been getting savaged by pros and amateurs alike--a stunning 35% overall rating on RottenTomatoes.com, 28% (7 for 25) from Top Critics. Which would normally be a pretty clear sign to skip it (duh). But Denby didn't hate it in the New Yorker (a nod that RT missed), and A. O. Scott gave it a pretty good notice in the Times, and hell, Champaign-Urbana's own Roger Ebert loved it. Plus, Gus Van Sant.

So? Well, I don't think it sucks, but I can see why a lot of people disagree. Like a lot of Van Sant, it has much younger--one might even say less mature--sensibilities than you'd expect from a guy my age (a year and a half older, actually, but who's counting?). This feels a lot like the film the two central characters would have spun off from the dramatic scene we see them creating. And only a grown-up would insist on the inconvenient reality--to pick the lowest-hanging fruit from a tree lush and ripe--that a young woman less than 3 months from brain-tumor death might get sick occasionally, and wouldn't be apt to look as consistently luminescent as Mia Wasikowska probably can't help looking.

Still, Wasikowska and Henry Hopper (son of Dennis) make it easy to put strict critical standards on the shelf and just play along. I was about two-thirds charmed, I guess. Which is a lot more than I can say for yesterday's flick, which is pulling 82/73 on RT.

Trailers

• The Artist--Looks like a silent A Star Is Born; I'm intrigued, if not altogether sold.

The ideal friend

My Dog Tulip

(2009)

A delightful, melancholy story of unconditional love that will resonate with anyone who has ever been a dog person, even those of us who haven't fit that description for decades. The animation suggests a soberer Triplettes de Belleville, but the narrative is terribly, terribly British.

All honorable men

The Ides of March

Crit

The most depressing thing about this is not the banality of its evil, the bland predictability of its sad, dreary tale of naïveté betrayed, of idealism corrupted. Nor is it my recognition of the cost in blood and treasure of having let my Clooneycrush trump pans by two generally trustworthy reviewers. Nor is it even the terrible waste by Clooney's direction and a script cowritten by Clooney of some of the best acting talent (Clooney included) in the biz today.

No, the most depressing thing about this is how inspirational the message of Clooney's Democratic presidential candidate sounds in the early going, and how unsubtly the imagery of his campaign artwork reminds us of a real-life inspirational Democratic presidential candidate, and the difference between that candidate's message and the actions of the president he became. Now that is depressing.  

Trailer

• Margin Call--I was thinking as I watched this trailer for a film about overweening corporate greed that its sell-by date had passed, that people just aren't all that pissed about it anymore. Then I remembered what's been going on at Zuccotti Park. So maybe?

It's complicated

The Social Network

(2010)

Unusual for me to rescreen something this quickly (a year and a day!) that's not one of my annuals; did I just want to find out whether it reads differently now that I'm one of the 500 million? Not sure, but if so, the answer is Not to any extent that matters. Still a masterfully written, masterfully acted drama about relationships. So no status update required.

War crimes

Traffic

(2000)

Yes, that's right: the way to keep kids from dealing and using drugs is to build lots more lighted baseball diamonds, here and in Mexico, and presumably in Colombia and Afghanistan as well.

I don't really have much to say about this; yes, it's great filmmaking, no, it's not really very convincing. But I remember the first time I saw it, when Jennie Tonic and I were still calling ourselves married and I was regularly visiting her in the city, and we went to some theater on the Upper East Side, I believe (maybe West, but I think East), and stood in a long line, and finally squeezed into two of the last available seats, in the right-hand corner of the balcony.

Then there's this: when I first signed up for Netflix, in July 2003, one of the first things I rented was the 1989 BBC miniseries Traffik, which was the basis for Soderbergh's film, and which I also recommend.

Sabermetrics

Moneyball

Crit

Hey, I saw my two favorite Philip Something Something actors in the same weekend (Baker Hall yesterday, Seymour Hoffman today)--that's probably a first since the last time I saw Magnolia.

And of course much of baseball is about firsts and lasts and mosts and situationals, and I don't know how a nonfan or lukewarm fan will respond to this largely nonfictional account of the first time a baseball man went all in on the theories--already around for two decades by then, and revered by lots of people who only loved the game but had no say in the running of it, ignored and/or mocked by a culture dedicated to the way things had been done since Wee Willie Keeler was hittin' 'em where they weren't--of Bill James. For James and his acolytes, though, this document of revolution is a document of vindication, too: ten years farther down the road, no general manager can afford to ignore on-base average + slugging average, though dinosaurs still roam the sod-clad earth.

Of course, that doesn't change the fact that Billy Beane (played with non-movie-star conviction by Brad Pitt) "is still waiting to win the last game of the season," as the end titles have it. But that proves only that a small budget + privileging intelligence over conventional wisdom can't beat a huge budget + (finally, reluctantly) privileging intelligence over conventional wisdom. The victory of moneyball is that the teams with money are finally playing it too. Which doesn't seem fair.

Non-baseball issues: this may be a breakout role for Jonah Hill, who is the comic heart of the film without once descending to shtick. Have "Jonah Hill" and "subtlety" ever appeared in a sentence before? Let's hope that was the first of many such sentences, and many such perfect performances. And speaking of perfect, Kerris Dorsey, as Beane's daughter (one of, let's see, I can think of 5 females in the film), will break your heart with her guitar. Let's see her again.

OK, time to go check on the playoff games.

Trailers

• Immortals--LOTR-looking special effects in an epic about Theseus. Golly, I'd love it if it doesn't suck!