Boitano

South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

(1999)

I'm sure that that film I saw earlier today must have added at least one Oscar®-bait song that wasn't in the stage version, but I unclefucking guarantee that whatever that sure-to-be-nominated song is, it's not as good as the Oscar®-nominated song from this film, which was in turn no better than the third-best song in the film. And the Miz-inspired medley here--which is maybe the 6th- or 7th-best musical number--pretty much said in 2½ minutes everything that needed to be said about pretentious Broadway musicals.

I snored a snore

Les Misérables

Crit

Seriously? OK, look, I'll admit right up front that (please don't tell my daughter) I'm not really a fan of musical theater, though actually I'm probably a bit more inclined to enjoy musical theater on film. And anybody who knows more about music than I is welcome to tell me that these songs (the lyrics and especially the melodies) are not uniformly mediocre, or that the actors in the film--mostly mediocre-at-best singers--somehow ruined the best songs, or that the best songs were left out of the film version, or whatever, but as I'm seeing it right now, the 7 bajillion people who have loved this on stage must have found something--lots and lots of something--that is wanting here.

Far more interesting than any specific song is the fact that the actors sang as they acted, rather than acting to previously dubbed singing, the idea being that that would give them more flexibility in each reading/singing in each take. Well, yeah, I think that's a good idea, but that doesn't change the fact that most of them have singing-in-the-shower voices, and the lyrics they're acting and the melodies they're singing don't merit the special treatment that the technique provides.

Not counting the 18 or 20 death scenes--'cause face it, who's unaffected by death, especially when the dier is noble (pretty much all of them) or in love or unspeakably young?--I found exactly two sequences moving. About 6 hours in, Samantha Barks as Éponine sings about her unrequited love in a scene shot with minimal cuts (hold that thought); but the real show stopper comes several hours earlier, so early that Fantine (Anne Hathaway) is still alive, a single tight shot of that song about dreaming and tigers inexplicably coming at night. Now, I'm betting that people who love Les Miz reaaaaly love that song, but it's trite tripe--trite tripe that Hathaway makes moving and appealing, largely on the merits of that one-shot performance. And that's what could make a genuinely good musical utterly fantastic via the sing-it-on-film strategy. Yeah, I know: the stakes still are nothing like they are on stage, where you get one chance per night to nail the mother; this may have been Hathaway's first take, but more likely it was her twentieth. Nonetheless, it created a convincing simulation of the immediacy that makes the stage exciting, and the Barks performance got us fairly close, and you wonder why director Tom Hooper didn't go for that more.

But whatever. Sad to think that's my last in a theater of 2012, and I have a pretty good idea of how I'm going to cleanse my palate tonight.

Trailer

• Zero Dark Thirty--Yeah, I'd already seen a trailer for this, several times, but now that it's getting Best Picture buzz, the producers seem to have realized how unseductive that trailer was, and that even an unsmiling Jessica Chastain is more appealing.

Just sayin'

For the second time in less than a week, the Criterion has reneged on a promise to show me a film I wanted to see, first with The Other Son (for which I guess the screening room DVD hadn't yet shown up, but I got to see it a couple of days later), now with Any Day Now, which has apparently been shunted to next week, though earlier today it still appeared as current on the website (it has finally been yanked).

Well, that's OK, 'cause I have some catching up to do from when heroic efforts were still being pursued to resuscitate my laptop. So if you scroll back a couple of weeks, you'll some reviews there that weren't posted on the day.

Different drum

Gift of time M4

Starting on East Houston and circling clockwise, as I always do, I was close to deciding there wasn't anything on the docket to compel me to make an interholiday movie trip to the city. That was before I got to the Cinema Village schedule, containing a film about a rock icon of my youth, a film that had opened right after my Thanksgiving-weekend M4, so I hadn't even considered the possibility of its hanging around for my next trip. Mr. Baker is the raison d'être; the others are just garnishing raisins.

Keep the Lights On

CV

Someday I'll go to a film about a same-sex relationship and not feel compelled to mention that element in the first sentence. But not yet, obviously.

Still, this film makes me optimistic, because it's really a lot less about the lovers being of the same sex than about one of them being a crackhead. Which means an entirely different set of clichés. Writer-director Ira Sachs finesses the clichés by making the narrative telegraphic and non-sequitur-prone, as it leaps from 1998 to 2000 to 2003 to 2006, always returning to the question of whether Paul (Zachary Booth) has changed and whether Erik (Thure Lindhardt) can keep (or restart) loving him. And we care because the people move us.

Beware of Mr. Baker

CV

For those of us who knew Cream and Blind Faith back in the day, the biggest surprise should be that the best and most volatile (tall cotton, that) drummer in rock history would have been around to celebrate a 40th and a 50th and a 60th and bless his cantankerous soul even a 70th birthday. But since I already knew he was still alive, the biggest surprise for me was his passion for polo. Right, like with horses. Seriously. Otherwise, what we have here is a piece of remarkable found art with a kickass soundtrack.

Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel

CV

Huh, go figure: there's no indication that Ms. Vreeland shared Ginger Baker's enthusiasm for polo (though it was certainly much more a part of her milieu than of his), but horses meant at least as much to her idiom. This was one of those I-couldn't-care-less-about-topic-but-golly-look-at-those-Rotten Tomatoes-numbers picks, and as usual with such pics, I'm glad I paid a visit to this alien bedazzling world. And now, back to my unfashionable monde . . .

Tabu

FF

An odd Portuguese melodrama about love, infidelity, murder, and girl-group pop songs in colonial Mozambique. I think I have to confess that I was pretty much M'd out by this point, though that seems dangerously close to admitting that I'm not as young as when I started doing this.

Trailers

• Fairhaven--Black sheep son comes home, unwillingly, for Dad's funeral. Problems ensure.
• Generation P--Oddly, I saw two very different trailers; looks Russianly interesting.
• A Royal Affair--Even odder that they should still be showing the trailer of a film I've already passed on at home.
• Amour--Now showing at FF, so skipping it is a bit of a risk, I suppose, but Michael Haneke's last three films have shown downtown, and the buzz on this one is huge. Of course it'll be a little annoying not to see it until after it wins the foreign-film Oscar®, but I'll survive.
• The Gatekeepers--Shin Bet badasses! Who ya gonna call?

K-Billy's Super '70s Weekend

Reservoir Dogs

(1992)

Yes, it's true: Tarantino used to employ a lot less blood and violence.

What's not to like?

Django Unchained

Crit

A viewer leaving the theater ahead of me wondered aloud what topic Tarantino will tackle "in his third film." Her companion and I were both puzzled, until I realized that she meant the third of his social-conscience films: we've had the Holocaust and slavery, and the implication was (and I've seen this assumption in print, too) that there has to be a social-conscience trilogy, so we've got one more to come. Well, I wouldn't be surprised--the Spanish Inquisition? climate change? talking out loud in movie theaters?--but I also wouldn't assume that the Q man finds anything sacred in the number 3, or even that if he does, he's going to feel obliged to punch the same ticket again.

Frankly, while slavery is unquestionably a Bad Thing in the moral universe of this film, I doubt that the particular Bad Thing is of as much interest to the director as the trappings he gets to bring to bear on it. And damn, they're fine trappings--all his films are buddy movies to some extent, but I'm not sure even Jules and Vincent were as simpatico as Django (Jamie Foxx) and Dr. Schultz (Christoph Waltz) here. Lots of blood, some big explosions, but a surprising amount of love and tenderness. Which is, of course, why I keep saying "Nothing says Christmas like Tarantino."

Trailer

• Oblivion--No, not likely.

Every one

Scrooge

(1951)

Am I the only one who thinks the Ghost of Christmas Past is based of Benjamin Franklin and the Ghost of Christmas Present on Henry VIII?

Isaac and Ishmael

Le Fils d'autre (The other son)

Crit

I had no idea this would be such a perfect yuletide film: a Semitic boychild (actually, two here) born in fractious circumstances (during the Scud-dodging Tel Aviv January of Bush I's Gulf War) ushering in peace, love, and understanding.

The premise here is a cheesy relic of 18th-century novels--babies switched at birth--but in the context of an Israeli and a Palestinian family, the goofiness of the premise is trumped by questions of what constitutes family, what constitutes motherhood, what constitutes Jewishness, what basis is demanded for class hatred. It's a beautiful, wrenching tale, and if one might fairly complain that the working out of the complexities is an unrealistically simple conclusion, that one won't be me.

Midlife critical mass

This Is 40

Crit

I may have said this before, but Judd Apatow has made a nearly great film here, incising the fine line between love and hate with an X-acto blade and suturing to every laugh (of which there are many) an equal and opposite grimacing groan. And then after tough and tough and tough and tough, just when you fear he's going to go soft on devoted combatants Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann), he . . . goes soft on 'em.

Still, a much better film than most people would make from this raw material, and the performances of teen Maude and teeny Iris Apatow suggest that the Apatow household is a damn good repertory company. And then there's Albert Brooks finding yet another interesting way to be a character that only he could play.

Trailers

• Admission--Fey and Rudd, directed by Paul Weitz; got a better formula for irresistible?
• The Heat--God, this looks so dumb that I'm ashamed to admit how much I laughed. Melissa McCarthy kicks that canard about women not being funny right in that funny part of the male anatomy to be kicked in.

Goblins and trolls and orcs, oh my!

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Crit

I was really hot for this, was planning to make the long bus ride out to hell (aka the Connecticut Post Mall) to see it in Imax 3D, but given that I really didn't have that much extra time to invest in a picture already pushing 3 hours, I allowed myself to be dissuaded by the lukewarm-at-best reviews. And I gotta say: the only better decision would have been to let myself be dissuaded from seeing it at all.

Peter, what a snoozer you have wrought. What's an adjective like "glacial" only lots slower? That's what the pacing is like (not surprising, given the decision to inflate a kids' book into a Big Important Trilogy). How can anyone make this stuff boring?

One aspect I found interesting (though not interesting enough to invest the time in parts 2 & 3 unless someone writes a review that begins "Forget the godawful sloggy first installment, . . . ") is the obvious Israelite connection of the dwarves' quest for their promised land. Unfortunately, while I found Gimli simpatico in those other Tolkien flicks Jackson made, here I find the race so uniformly intolerable that I'm forced to confront the possibility that I made be an anti-Dwarfite.

Trailers

Oddly, 3D films but 2D trailers before a 3D screening.

• Jack the Giant Slayer--Seems unlikely, though Bryan Singer directed, so maybe.
• Man of Steel--Huh! Why hasn't anyone ever thought of making a movie about Superman before?

Pretty is as pretty does

Young Adult

(2011)

A nasty gem from the end of last year, one of my favorites, and the one thing I want to say about it this time around is that if This Is 40 had stayed as true to itself to the very end as this one did, . . . well, it probably would have done about the $16 million total this did rather than the $12m 40 did in its first week, and I'd have liked it better but the producers would have hated it.

Two little Hitlers

It's a Wonderful Life

(1946)

Had an epiphany while watching this this year. You know how unfair to George it has always seemed that Mary literally preempts his wish from coming true (I wouldn't want to blame her for Peter Bailey's stroke, exactly, but the timing is suspicious, and the end result is unequivocal), and that she generally takes it upon herself to know what George really wants, since he clearly can't be trusted to get it right?

Well, I realized this time that it's straightforward karmic retribution: it's George who first overrides Mary's self-determination by putting coconut on her ice cream after she has unambiguously declared that she doesn't like coconut and doesn't want coconut. Hey, George: the payback is a motherfucker.

Corruption keeps us safe and warm

Syriana

(2005)

This is what happens when you get to be my age: I was looking for a "soft" deaccession candidate--one I didn't really expect to turn loose of but that had passed the 5-years-since-I-last-screened-it threshold to make it eligible for the night. When my eyes lit on this, I thought, "No, that's not even five years old, and I've screened it once since it was in the theater." Well, uh, no . . . you can see the release date above, and it was closer to 6 years ago than to 5 when I screened it the second time. Oh, it's a long, long time from May to December . . .

The labyrinthine tale of spycraft, oil thirst, Islamism, and good old fashioned skulduggery holds up well, and if anything, the assassination from afar is even a scarier and more nauseating notion now that we voted for the president who thinks it's OK than it was 7--that's right, 7--years ago.

Everybody gets corrupted

Manhattan

(1979)

Ah, so true: they're writing songs of love, but not for me. Perhaps not as reliably heartbreaking a film as yesterday's, but plenty brutal in spots. Brutal and rapturous.

Express

Anna Karenina

Crit

All the world's a stage--well, a stage and a train station--in Tom Stoppard and Joe Wright's audacious adaptation of Tolstoy. Anna's fate is repeatedly foreshadowed, and indeed, for two-thirds of the 2-plus hours, the film maintains a dizzying locomotive momentum, shifting between stage sets and exteriors (most memorably, a stage door that opens onto a vast, snowy steppe) with such facility that it gives the impression of being a single tracking shot. The staginess that gave me pause in the trailer is in fact grand, gloriously goofy theatricality, which facilitates the conveyance of plot via shorthand.

I get the mixed nature of the reviews--many viewers will be unable or unwilling to go along with the film's central histrionic conceit--but I found it about two clicks shy of brilliant.

Trailers

• The Guilt Trip--Yeah, pairing Seth Rogan and Barbra Streisand as son and mother oughta ensure a popular and critical disaster.
• Safe Haven--Nicholas Sparks novel; need I say more?

We need the eggs

Annie Hall

(1977)

No apologies: a stay-at-home matinee with a double helping of popcorn for the only movie I'll see this birthday (my 59th, the director's 77th), after which I'm going to devote the rest of the day to a little reading and a lot of sports, including my first full screening and archival recording of an epochal event that occurred one half-year ago tonight. Don't worry, though: hyperconscious of creeping decay, I did my full Saturday workout this a.m.; decrepitude takes no holiday, so neither must I.

OK, I take it back: one apology, for using this forum to lay a rare passive-aggressive trip (no, really: ask her) on my daughter, who saw this--or maybe saw only part of it--years ago, was unimpressed, and has never given it a second chance:

Look, there are four ways this can go down: you can watch it now, be reconfirmed in your opinion that I have vastly overrated it, and not have me bother you about it anymore. Or you can watch it now, discover it to be every bit the painfully perfect dissection of love that I claim it to be, and henceforth share my delight in it, along with appropriate allusions to it. It can, in short, become yet another element of the private language of the best parent-child relationship I've ever experienced (and one of the best for you, too, I'm pretty sure).

Or you can not watch it again until after the reading of my will, where I will make that my only demand, and be reconfirmed in your opinion that I have vastly overrated it, which won't matter then. Or you can wait until after I'm gone to discover how wonderful it indeed is, and regret not having discovered that while I was still around to share in your delight.

I'm just sayin'. Love, Dad

Darn that dream

Alice

(1990)

At the start of Woody Allen's birthday weekend, I wasn't really serious about deaccessioning this, as I remembered its having grown in my estimation the past couple of screenings, but this time I found it less than the sum of its parts, and so, yes: it's free to the first taker.

It's not bad, mind you--Mia Farrow adeptly portrays the titular one-percenter coming to realize how empty in her Upper East Side lot, Alec Baldwin is predictably winning in a small role as the ghost of Alice's young love, and Bernadette Peters steals her one scene and practically the whole film as her muse. But the battle lines are drawn pretty one-sidedly, the end is rushed, and the magic isn't nearly as magical as it's meant to be.

Revelation

Killing Them Softly

Crit

A very well-made unpleasant film, with scenes of physical and emotional torture strung out to brutal length, as well as intimate studies of the poetics of ballistics. What makes it work is the almost Elmore Leonard-esque wiseguy dumbguy language--that, and the cool bravado of Brad Pitt's hitman.

But here's a practical question: if you're filming in and around New Orleans, why would all the place names mentioned be in greater Boston? And then, if you're intent on presenting New Orleans as Boston, why would you let us see highway signs at the intersection of U.S. 11 and 90?

Trailers

• Broken City--Russell Crowe as the comically coiffed corrupt mayor of New York, Mark Wahlberg as his lackey with a conscience.
• Dark Skies--Poor Keri Russell; it has come to this; call it Parastupid Activity V.
• Wait a minute: Dark Skies, Broken City--Wasn't that Jay McInerney's first novel?

Quintessence of dust

Black Saturday M4

The most awe-inspiring element of my first Manhattan movie trip in months came about via a film I didn't see, a Japanese animated feature called The Mystical Law, which had a couple of young woman (including the director, I suspect) at Cinema Village in support of its weeklong run. As I waited for the film I was there for to seat, one of the women interviewed a 13-year-old audience member from their film's previous screening.

She started off the young man (who looked much younger than 13, in fact) with a softball, "How did you like it?" He gave the hoped for response, but with a spin at the end, commenting that the conclusion was unconvincing, declaring as it did that we must pray for the world to be saved. It seems the idea that holding your hands in a certain way while reciting prescribed words didn't resonate with him.

OK, I'm with him, and I'm impressed. But it gets better. She asked another simplistic question, "What was your favorite part?" and again he refused to give a simplistic answer. "My favorite idea was the oneness of the world." OK, seriously? Thirteen?

Finally, she asked whether he believes in aliens. He considered the question a moment, then began, "I believe in extraterrestrials, but . . . " and I'm thinking, no, he's not going to make that distinction. Yes, yes, he was: "I believe in extraterrestrials, but to call them 'alien' makes it sound like they don't belong."

Jesus! I hope I'm that smart and sophisticated if I ever get to be 13 again. Also, I'm really glad this wasn't at the start of the day, because the films on the agenda would have had a hard act to follow. As it was, while there were no Hall of Famers, the lineup was full of good, solid players, maybe an All-Star or two. And it seems extremely unlikely that any will ever reach New Haven. So a successful day.

Barrymore

VE

First, let me say: SIX DOLLARS! SIX FREAKIN' DOLLARS for your ticket before noon! (Though they will then get $ 13.75 from you for your large corn & soda.)

This is one of those odd stage-cinema mergers the point of which is perhaps less to tell you something about the subject than to reconfirm your appreciation of the actor embodying that subject. In which case, mission accomplished. Funny, this is the first time in ages I've seen Christopher Plummer in a film and been reminded of what I saw him in first, repeatedly. We've discussed this before, right? I don't have to go into it again, right? Suffice it to say, Catholic kid, early '60s, OK?

Anyway, I'm guessing no one would have guessed then that he'd have the chops to play a Barrymore (multiple Barrymores, actually--John mimics the old man and Ethel, too, and while I have no way to gauge the accuracy of those takes, or of Plummer's John, for that matter, I can testify that Plummer's John Barrymore does a bangup Lionel Barrymore. A limited film, but a fine one of its ilk.

Price Check

IFC

Ah, Ms. Posey, you have come back to indy, and indy still loves you. A potentially conventional story of a good man and good husband seduced in more ways than one by his crazy, obsessive boss, but the film is smart enough to use the potential for conventionality only as a tease en route to something more interesting and infinitely sadder (though conventionally happy, too).

The Central Park Five

IFC

The notorious gang-rape case that gave crypto-racists the word "wilding" as a convenient label for savage "urban" depredation gets the justice-deferred treatment from the second-generation documentarian Sarah Burns.

There's a lot of angry-making here, but I think the angriest-making point is one articulated by the history professor Craig Steven Wilder (disconcerting surname, that, in this context) that "Their innocence never got the attention that their 'guilt' got." Which, as a onetime journalist, I heard on corrections with much lower stakes. Police, prosecutors, press, even the majority of the Harlem community, were all so invested in what Ed Koch called "a test of our legal system," and on mutual congratulations for passing that test, that "we walked away from our guilt."

Chasing Ice

CV

Photographer James Balog's frustrating, exhilarating, heroic quest to document the deterioration of the Northern Hemisphere's glaciers into Slushies. That quest is challenged by brutal weather, equipment that can't stand up to said weather, and a gimpy knee that shouldn't stand up, full stop.

The point is climate change, of course, but the surprise is the terrible beauty--"the miracle, the horror," he says--that the planet's literal meltdown displays.

Trailers

• Waiting for Lightning--Yeah, that sounds like a good idea: dude's gonna jump the Great Wall on a skateboard.
• In Our Nature--Fathers, sons, and their lovers.
• Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet--Rocking in spite of ALS.

Holy crap! A postscript

Sunday morning, and, ahead of making a return trip to the city to meet an author/friend for lunch, I'm getting a Diet Dr Pepper and preparing to read a bit of the Times when my doorbell rings. "What the what?" I think. "I don't do 'social' on Sunday a.m." I go to the door, expecting to see Sunday-dressed Jehovah's witnesses, but there's just one man, in casual dress, unknown to me.

I feign welcome as I open the door, and he greets me warmly and says, holding up something that looks a lot like my wallet and my driver's license, "This is you, right?"

Well, yes. I had no idea it was missing, but it must have slid out of my hip pocket on the train. Funny, I'd almost gone back to check to see whether I'd left anything on the seat, but it was one of the new cars, and the big Amtrak-style restroom was between the door I was standing at and the seat I'd occupied, and I didn't.

Naturally, I was gobsmacked, so much so that I turned into my mother and hugged the guy, so much so that though I gave him all the money that was in the wallet, which was only about eight bucks, it didn't occur to me to get his name & address so I could send him more. Best I could do was to wish him an extra Thanksgiving, because he had certainly given me one. Now I feel bad about rewarding him so lightly--but not, I confess, as good as I feel to have come through this apparently unscathed.

Nearer, my gods, to thee

Life of Pi

Crit

No, I didn't read the novel--I'm not particularly a fan of magical realism--and I might not have seen the film but for Ang Lee. And while I'm sure many are finding it magical (and perhaps real, as well), I didn't for a moment. It is visually impressive, without a doubt--though even that element didn't work as well for me as it might have had the theater not been too crowded to permit me to view from the optimal 3D zone. In all, I'm willing to concede that I was a little too grumpy to give the film a fair shot at winning me over. But the bottom line is: meh.

Trailers

• Epic--Speaking of meh . . .
• Parental Guidance--Crystal and Midler: stop them before the kill comedy again.

Mean to me

Sita Sings the Blues

(2008)

The purpose behind this screening was to establish whether this is appropriate for my favorite 11-year-old, whom I always give a DVD for Xmas and her birthday. And I'm not sure: the source material, the Ramayana, is about the demigod Rama's ill treatment of his faithful and devoted wife based on his false suspicion of sexual infidelity after she has been kidnapped by his enemy. So you think: clearly not appropriate for an 11-year-old. Except, (1) the emphasis of Nina Paley's gorgeous animated film is not on sex but on love and cruelty and prefeminist female helplessness in the face of both, and (2) this is an exceptionally smart and mature 11-year-old.

So I'll run this past her mother, maybe have her take a look at the iffiest segments. The kid has to have this someday, because I have no doubt that she'll love it, but maybe it's a little early.

Does that make me crazy?

Silver Linings Playbook

Crit

Never thought I'd use "David O. Russell" and "programmatic" in the same sentence, but this is straight out of the romcom playbook--girl loves boy, boy is saving himself for another who isn't interested, audience sees from the get-go that girl & boy are written in the stars--and the addition of bipolarity and depression to the mix doesn't meliorate the roteness much. What does make it watchable, even marginably ejoyable, is the commitment, you should pardon the expression, that Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper bring to their cute crazies.

Nothing free but the grace of God

True Grit

(2010)

Surely the best script ever in a Western, the Coens working closely with Charles Portis's novel to create a not-quite-Shakespearean but nonetheless giddily stylized diction that allows the ample humor to underpin the drama rather that distract from it.

What need of one more corpse?

Lincoln

Crit

A good Hoosier friend of mine and I like to spar over our respective claims to this Kentucky native ("Just look at the license plates," I say), and here is a Lincoln well worth a civil war. This is a great, grand film, and the Anglo-Irishman who plays the Ohio Valley's all-time favorite son sets a standard for the role that no actor in his right mind will ever attempt to challenge. The Lincoln that Spielberg gives us (abetted by Tony Kushner, whose script is based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin's magnificent Team of Rivals) is a consummate politician, in a context in which that is not a slur. And the western yarn-spinning that typically has been treated as something a little fey is here shown to be integral in articulating and understanding his political powers. His genius, or part of it, at least, was in being so thoroughly human that no human heart, no matter how innocent or cynical, was beyond his ken. Far from cornpone relics of backwoods lack of sophistication, his tales of the logical behavior of simple folk get to the nub of precisely the sophistication that allowed him to cobble together the unlikeliest but absolutely vital coalition to get the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery forever, through a fractious House of Representatives.

Something else we see here as never before, at least in my experience, is a nobility attached to Mary Todd (Sally Field, in a performance that might just make us like her, really like her, again); we are reminded that being married to a genius, or a saint, is a decidedly mixed blessing, and we tunnel well beneath the rote cantankerous madness that has long been her caricaturization.

When I read Goodwin's book, I so fell in love with the man I'd always loved that I didn't want mid-April 1865 to come; I'd have been happy to have her end the book at Appomattox. In the film, we see him hurriedly getting ready for an evening out when he'd rather stay in, and we're hoping he's not en route to Ford's Theatre. (We've had a foreshadowing of that fatal trip already, with Mary in dangerous dudgeon over eldest son Robert's enlistment.) So when we see "Oriental" garb onstage, and realize that such costumes have no place in Our American Cousin, we are relieved, if only momentarily. But the last of Spielberg's many wise choices is to spare us "sic semper tyrranis" and take us quickly past "Now he belongs to the ages" in order to close with words spoken the month before, the last of Lincoln's best speech, maybe the best speech ever by an American statesman, at his second inaugural:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Is it asking too much for our leaders a century and a half later to at least consider that spirit of reconciliation?

Trailer

• The Lone Ranger--Depp as Tonto? Armie Hammer as the Masked Man? Hell, yeah, kemo sabe!

Up in the air

The Descendants

(2011)

I had forgotten--or maybe I just failed to notice the first time, though with Morgan Freeman's narration, that's hard to imagine--that the movie the King family gathers under a blanket on the sofa to watch in the poignant final scene, otherwise almost silent but for the sound of spoon on ice cream bowl, is March of the Penguins, a quietly perfect coda, the theme of the handoff of parental responsibilities providing an answer to Matt's comment early on that he's "the backup parent, the understudy."

I was a little afraid when this came out that it would benefit too much from my Alexander Payne halo effect, but if anything, I think I gave it insufficient credit first time around. This is a gorgeous film in every way (not least in the Hawaiian expanses of blue and green). As for Clooney, I think someone should cast him as Job. No, not a modernization of the story, with some poor schmuck having his wife knocked into a coma by an accident, then finding out she'd been cheating on him--no, I mean a faithful rendition of the Old Testament story of God fucking over his faithful servant every which way. No one could do it better.

He'd always wanted a pool

Sunset Boulevard

(1950)

No, even though it's Friday night, I wasn't the slightest serious about deaccessioning this, but I was surprised to discover that I hadn't watched it in more than 7 years. Some call this overcooked, but I love almost everything about it--hell, I can even tolerate the excessively wholesome Nancy Olson as script reader Betty, who becomes Joe's (young Bill Holden's second recent appearance on my screen) more appropriate love interest.

But dammit, there have been few braver performances in the movies than Gloria Swanson's autoparody as Norma Desmond, and Erich von Stroheim as her director-turned-husband-turned-still-devoted-butler plays sad as sadly as anyone ever has. If it's not ultimately a great film (and I'd argue that point with some if not total conviction), it's got enough greatness about it to suffice.

If our instruments go out of tune . . .

A Late Quartet

Crit

A good-looking film, a well-made film, a well-acted film, a thoroughly rote film: a familiar dynamic of love and obsession and conflict, and the only surprise is that the inevitable love affairs begin and end so abruptly.

Loved the music, though. As you know, my brow is very low, so I don't have any idea how long op. 131, but I could swear I read somewhere that we got to hear the whole thing uninterrupted; not so, by a long shot. OK, now I've checked the length, and at < 40 minutes, it could be done. Not saying it could be done with an effective dramatic dynamic, but I'm not sure it couldn't, either, and as I've suggested, I don't think much of the existing dramatic dynamic. I think I'd have liked that movie more than this one.

Time on their sides

Charlie Is My Darling

(1966)

Man, I'd have kicked Brian out of the band, too, the supercilious git.

A bonus from DirecTV, which sent me a message that it would be on Saturday at 9, inspiring me to set up to record it even though the programming guide said I'd be getting in in the middle of Something to Talk About. A documentary with a complicated history, this makes me wish there were something analogous for the Beatles. Don't get me wrong: I love A Hard Day's Night, but even its concert footage is essentially staged, and if the behind-the-scenes here are certainly not candid--it's safe to say that Mick Jagger has never been unaffected by the camera's gaze--it's a lot closer, with Keith and Mick working on new songs between takes on Beatles and Elvis songs, than the calculated cleverness of AHDN (and again: that calculated cleverness is wonderful). As for concert footage, not only is it wonderful, but it includes a genuinely scary example of the police being completely unprepared for what happens when teenage hormones--male no less than female--rage.

Maybe the best moment, though, is when Mick expresses surprise that the whole thing has gone on longer than the year or year and a half he'd expected. At the time of that interview, it had gone on for 3 years; now the group is about to start a tour in celebration of its 50th anniversary, and if the past 3 decades have been essentially as the world's best Stones cover band, that's not the worst gig around, or the least valuable.

Agent down

Skyfall

Post

It's his sled! Skyfall is his sled! Well, sort of.

I'm here to tell you: size matters. If you have a chance to see this on Imax, do not imagine for a moment that the extra $3 or whatever will not be worth it. It's worth it!

But this would still be a pretty remarkable film even on the moderately big screen. Is it sacrilege to talk about theme in a Bond film? All of the Daniel Craig generation have emphasized Bond's vulnerability, the flip side of which is that he's not superhuman; he's a very human being doing things requiring the will to reach into the super, a very different thing. And that theme is present here again (along with the trope of extreme sadism that has characterized at least two of the villains--my scrotum still aches when I contemplate that scene in Casino Royale), but what this film (is it sacrilege to call a Bond movie a "film"?) is really about is time--time lost, time wasted, time regretted, and, in various ways, the past recaptured, if repurposed.

The usual gritty Bondean and M-ean performances from Craig and Judi Dench, a deliciously wicked turn from Javier Bardem (is there a better sicko in the movies today? and do you expect to see a better seduction attempt this year than that between his Silva and Bond?), and not nearly enough of Naomie Harris (she of 28 Days Later), but a clear indication that she'll be around in the future of the franchise. And don't believe reports that director Sam Mendes has drained all the humor; it's just English humor.

Trailers

• The Hobbit: Long Subtitle--Yes, I've already mentioned this when I saw the standard 2D trailer and again when I saw the 3D, but Imax raises the stakes even farther: I'll be seeing it big & deep if I can.
• Jurassic Park--Yes, it returns, in Imax 3D; yes, I think that sounds like a fine idea.
• Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters--They're grown up & sexy (Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton) & maybe a tad too close.

The examined life

It's Such a Beautiful Day

(2012)

So this arrived in the mail today to depress me. This barely-a-feature by the brilliantly warped animator Don Hertzfeldt, bearing the title of the last of three shorts (the others: Everything Will Be OK and I Am So Proud of You) released between 2006 and 2011 and then synthesized into a disturbing whole, didn't come to New Haven and played in Manhattan for only a week, so, with full confidence in the man who brought us Billy's Balloon and Rejected, I plunked down about three IFC admissions for this plus an earlier collection of shorts.

Good call: the life and lingering death of a woefully ordinary man: beautiful, brutal, sadly funny, and--did I mention?--profoundly depressing. In a good way, I guess.

Cruel to be kind

Smashed

Crit

I'm not quite sure why this is so effective--there's nothing in the treatment of alcoholism that we haven't seen a million times before, from silly charm to sloppy (and sleepy) sex to embarrassing release of bodily fluids to lies, lies, lies to the death of careers and relationships to the testimonies of the 12-step-program. And yet somehow it seems fresh, credit to director James Ponsoldt and his cowriter Susan Burke, and to Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Aaron Paul as the title couple, happily married, happily drunk. Until Kate is not.

Even the dynamic of the drinking couple who split on the issue of stopping has a long history, but maybe every drunken unhappy family is drunkenly unhappy in its own way. As is hammered home when she comes home hammered late on, Kate's thirst for Charlie's love is as desperate as--and inextricably intertwined with--her thirst for whiskey. (By the way, am I the only one who finds it a false note whenever an experienced drinker in a movie asks for "whiskey" at a bar? That's like asking for "food" at a restaurant--there are so many choices; wouldn't she want Basil Hayden's or Glenmorangie 18-year or even Jack Daniel's?)

Painful, true.

Trailers

• Stand Up Guys--Pacino as the hood just out of a long stretch in the joint, Walken as his best friend, and the guy whose job it is to put him down. Could be great.
• De rouille et d'os (Rust and bone)--Maybe the orca ate your baby. Or Marion Cotillard's legs.

An awful sadness to come

The Sessions

Crit

Hard to imagine anyone disliking this, but let's face it: rooting for a guy paralyzed by childhood polio to find the sex and love he hopes for is pretty easy. But for a bunch of A-team actors--William H. Macy, a largely naked Helen Hunt, Moon Bloodgood, the trio of Deadwood alumni John Hawkes (as the real-life iron-lung-bound Mark O'Brien), W. Earl Brown, and Robin Weigert, plus, as a special TV nostalgia bonus, a cameo by Rhea Perlman--this might easily have devolved into some pretty gooey schmaltz. With that all-star team, though, it makes you feel good without challenging you a whit, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Trailers

• Stoker--Unfortunately, not a biopic of the author of Dracula, but rather a creepy incesty-looking thing with a great cast (Kidman, Wasikowska, Matthew Goode).
• A Late Quartet--Speaking of great casts. This is probably going to be widely acclaimed and wonderful, but it looks like medicine on the stage.
• Hitchcock--This, on the other hand, promises to be great wicked fun, unless (or perhaps even especially if) it's a disaster.

Trois, douze, merde!

Holy Motors

Crit

Golly, I didn't realize that to get to a movie on my biennial post-Election Day holiday, I was going to have to brave snow and swirling winds. Good thing this didn't hit my region about 36 hours earlier--especially since my satellite has gone out, which didn't happen during Sandy (or Irene). But this brilliant film was well worth the effort.

I had read that it was surrealistic, and that's certainly the case, but that doesn't mean it lacks a plot. After a prologue in which a man apparently wakes from a dream only to find himself in another--unlocking a door to a movie theater with his socket-wrench middle finger--we meet M. Oscar, who, judging by his opulent home, his attire, and the stretch limo waiting for him, seems to be a financier.

"Many appointments today?" he asks his driver. Nine, she tells him. He has a phone conversation, the gist of which seems to be a need for more firepower in his security detail. So far, he could be an older version of the protagonist of Cosmopolis. Then he starts combing out the long gray wig.

His appointments, it develops, involves making himself up, costuming himself, and getting into character to appear in the world as a stooped old beggarwoman, a motion-capture actor for an erotic martial arts/sci-fi film, a sewer-dwelling floraphage in a cemetery where the headstones invite passersby to visit the deceased's website (yeah, it starts to get a tad weird at this point). A labeled entr'acte, in which Oscar leads a rock-and-roll accordion band, turns out to be yet another appointment, as is an assassination after which he begins to trade identities with the target, only to be assassinated in return, and in identical fashion.

So yeah, surreal; also thrilling, compelling, though also about 20 minutes too long. And it contains one of the best musical surprises imaginable for someone who rummaged West Virginia discount stores' cutout bins in the early '80s for alternatives to the crap he'd been listening to for the past decade or so--the best such surprise since Wreckless Eric's "Whole Wide World" in Stranger than Fiction.

Everything a big bad wolf could want

Red Riding Hood

(2011)

Golly. Good golly. I remember when I first saw the trailer for this, thinking that the odds were against it, but that it could really be terrific, and rooting for that. Then when it came out and the reviews were poor, I dismissed it--until it showed up during a week of free Cinemax. Though I must confess that if I'd checked Rotten Tomatoes and seen its stunning 11% rating (20 for 188) overall, 6% (2 for 36) among Top Critics, I might not have bothered to record it.

Well, I've seen worse, but I've rarely seen less coherent or more all-over-the-map. There's just not much good to be said about it.

Tarantino and General Tso

Remember when I used to have a huge post for the NY Times' thrice-yearly big movie preview sections? Well, not gonna do that here, but I am going to give you links to the paper's round-ups of November, December, and January releases in the current Holiday Movies sections, and I'm gonna tell you briefly which flicks I'm hot for in advance.

In November, the biggie is Skyfall--and I do mean biggie, 'cause I'm renting a car next weekend, ostensibly for my farewell trip to Costco before letting my membership lapse, but also to facilitate getting to an Imax screening of the new Bond; I blame my Maniel Craig crush. Other probables: Lincoln (duh), Barrymore (C. Plummer as? oh, yeah), Irvine Welsh's Ecstasy (Thanksgiving weekend M4?), Life of Pi (all on Ang Lee, not because I'm a fan of the book--never read it--or much of a fan of magical realism in general), The Central Park Five (can I trust the Burns factor to bring it to New Haven, or should I include it in that M4?), and Beware of Mr. Baker (Ginger, i.e.; an unlikely probable, actually, since it opens right after my M4 and isn't apt to travel well).

All us pseudo-Jews will be going to see a brand-new movie on Christmas Day: I wouldn't rule out seeing Les Misérables at some point--especially as January looks typically wastelandish--but on the day, it has no chance against Django Unchained. Earlier in the month, I'm looking at Hyde Park on Hudson, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and Michael Haneke's Amour.

One good German

Ha-dira (The flat)

Crit

What Arnon Goldfinger knows about his grandmother before she dies, leaving her family to clean out the Tel Aviv apartment to which she and her husband had emigrated from Berlin in 1937: that she never made any attempt to learn Hebrew, that she never stopped considering herself German, that the décor and extensive library in the flat made it "Berlin in Tel Aviv" for him.

What he learns in the process of dealing with the piles of gloves, purses, and scarves left behind--and the books, all in German! ("No one reads Shakespeare," a dealer tells him. "No one reads Balzac. Goethe? Forget it")--is that she has also kept a vast trove of documents dating back to the couple's days in Germany. And from newspapers and magazines and personal letters in this archive, the filmmaker makes about as shocking a discovery as a Jew could make: that his grandmother and Zionist grandfather had been friends with an SS officer and his wife until emigration . . . and then, making regular trips to Germany after the war, had rekindled that friendship.

And those, incredibly, are just the beginning of the discoveries. A truly remarkable documentary.

Rough cut

All That Jazz

(1979)

Next time I'm in Midtown I should see whether I can find 61 West 58th Street--Joe Gideon's address, as we see repeatedly on his Dexedrine vial. Google Maps suggests that Quality Meats and an apartment house called the Coronet share 57, but the luggage shop next door, on the corner, has a Sixth Avenue address, and once we cross the avenue, we seem to jump to 3 digits.

Dead souls

Flight

Crit

Whip Whitaker gives a whole new meaning to "high-functioning alcoholic": strapping into the captain's seat for a short hop from Orlando to Atlanta still drunk from the previous night, a condition he has self-medicated with a line or three of cocaine, and later tossing back two airline bottles of vodka after an initial bit of aeronautical derring-do to find a crease of calm weather amid a storm, Whitaker suddenly has the plane go rogue on him but manages a miraculous landing that saves 98 of the 104 people on board. (A presumably realistic note that I never knew before: flight-biz people, when aggregating passengers with crew, use the term "souls" to count all the lives in the pilot's hands, a disconcerting bit of metaphysics.)

This is how it happened: we see for ourselves that despite his presumptive impairment, Whitaker does everything that a sober pilot could possibly do, plus he does more, 'cause he's Denzel, goddammit! We know from the testimony of others who know a lot more about it than we do--and by a simulator reenactment with a dozen experienced pilots, all of whom go 0 for 104 in soul-saving--that what he has done is off-the-charts spectacular. So he's a hero, but all crashes must be investigated, and the blood taken from him while he's unconscious has a tale to tell: .24% alcohol, triple-drunk per most states' highway laws.

So the film morphs from a great 15-minute fx action flick into one that plumbs moral, ethical, and logical issues: which facts will drive the investigation, and which facts should? And which impulses and ambitions will drive the life of a man who has already lost a wife and gone a long way toward losing a son to the bottle and the powder, who has lost something like a love to the crash, and who finds another something like a love, who is herself trying to quit being a junkie? And but for a sappy, tacked-on envoi, those issues are allowed free play, spared easy answers. Yet another (yawn!) great performance from Washington, and one of the best things Robert Zemeckis has given us. And, from John Goodman's Harling Mays ("I'm on the list"), the best ad hoc ride to the rescue since Winston "The Wolf" Wolfe helped Vincent and Jules deal with the Bonnie situation.

Not made of stone

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

(1939)

Yes, everyone knows how poignant and stunning Charles Laughton's performance is in a role that Lon Chaney made his own in the silent version 16 years earlier, but what I want to talk about is: has any supporting actor ever had a better year than Thomas Mitchell had in 1939? Not only did he win the Oscar® in that category, but this was no better than his 4th-best role, maybe 5th-best, pending my taking another look at Only Angels Have Wings.

Eight bits

Wreck-It Ralph

Crit

The life of an Donkey Kong-generation arcade villain ain't all fun and games. From the Bad Guys Anonymous meeting early on ("one game at a time") to the apocalyptic showdown between bad and evil, this is consistently smart enough to make you forget--or at least not worry about--how often Disney/Pixar (a distinction that no longer has a difference) has already made you weepy with essentially the same story, an odd couple of misfits finding fulfillment in their mutual devotion.

What makes this one special is not the strong 3D or the wild color palette but the conviction of the four principal actors, all readily recognizable from their voices--John C. Reilly as the musclebound title character, Sarah Silverman as the "glitch" Vanellope in Sugar Rush, Jack McBrayer as Ralph's nemesis in the eponymous game Fix-It Felix Jr., and Jane Lynch as the busty, wasp-waisted commando leader Calhoun in Hero's Duty--as well as the game environments they inhabit. (In what may be a personal record for Silverman, her character's language sinks no lower than a scatological pun on the name of Calhoun's game.)

Randomly, the best takeoff imaginable (and we've all imagined it, sort of) of the marching soldiers outside the Wicked Witch's castle in The Wizard of Oz. And finally, in a meta sense, it's hard to resist the notion of McBrayer's nerdy 30 Rock character romancing someone played by one of the outest real-life lesbians in the biz--priceless.

Oh, and almost forgot: a lovely romantic short, Paperman--bet on an Oscar® nomination.

Trailers (all 3D)

• Rise of the Guardians--Santa (with a Russian accent?), the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, etc., as superheroes.
• The Croods--Another entry in the rebellious little girl subgenré.
• Despicable Me 2--What do you call those paper noisemaker/whistle dealies you blow on at midnight on New Year's that unfurl a couple of feet? Oh, just click on the link, scroll down to the promo video, and watch it--it's worth having to sit through the 15-second pre-promo promo.
• Also saw 3D versions of trailers I'd already seen for Oz: The Great and Powerful (the 3D looks great) and The Hobbit (the 3D looks needless), as well as a trailer for the 3D reboot of Monsters, Inc.

Blood, lust

Cat People

(1942)

Maybe the best no-budget horror film ever, the semigreat Jacques Tourneur directing the definitive Val Lewton production, in which nothing supernatural is actually seen--only shadows and suggestions and aftermaths--but it scares the bejesus out of you nonetheless. About the only thing that could make it better would be David Bowie's great theme song from the otherwise misbegotten remake--a song whose hook gets to the thematic heart of both films.

Creatures of the night

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

Crit

That was fun. I actually like the film on its own merits, think it's a smart parody with some great music, bravura performances by Tim Curry and Richard O'Brien, and, when all else fails, young Susan Sarandon in various stages of undress.

But you want to know about the crowd, and the crowd was good: probably between 50 and 75, with--judging by the lack of response from the audience at large--probably a majority of them virgins (though no one paid the price for his or her virginity). The players were few (and, stunningly, sans Frank-N-Furter or Riff-Raff) but enthusiastic, and especially well equipped with props: rice, squirt guns, toast, "Great Scott" toilet paper. One could carp that their participation consisted almost entirely of well-aged chestnuts, and that some of the best of those have been inexplicably dropped (I almost yelled "Meatloaf again?!" myself), but come on: there are some young people keeping alive a cult classic nearing its 40th birthday--and entertaining a bunch of virgins, one of whom may be thinking that wearing fishnets and a bustier in front of a crowd might be kinda fun. In other words, it's still inspiring some not just to dream it but to be it.

Planned parenthood

Rosemary's Baby

(1968)

You know what struck me most this time? What a quaint time it was when we carried around little notebooks filled with handwritten addresses and phone numbers--phone numbers we'd look up and dial (and wait for the click-click-click-click of the dial to return to home position before doing it at least six more times), sometimes right out in public, though with the semiprivacy of a plexiglass box, outside of which there were often people impatiently awaiting their turns.

Also, I thought: I don't care what Guy (John Cassavetes) or Frank thought, Rose/Mia's haircut was brilliant, and it probably didn't hurt Vidal Sassoon any, either.

Finally (but I always think this), one of my favorite lines in the movies: "He has his father's eyes."

Now I think I'll go do the time warp again.

Nights of the comet

Cloud Atlas

Crit

Golly, is there a way to review this without using the word "narrative"? I suppose I could just say "Fuck, yeah!" over and over again; that's what I said (but just once--well, twice, 'cause he didn't hear me the first time) to my buddy at the theater with whom I exchange assessments. The novel on which this is based is probably my favorite of the millennium so far, and that's always a scary proposition, but I'd read enough of David Mitchell's own comments to quell any concern that directors Tom Tykwer and Lana and Andy Wachowski had failed to "get" the book. Moreover, I could see from the trailer that the film was spectacular, though there seemed to be room for it to be spectacularly bad.

Not to worry: imperfect, yes, much of the narrative (see: just not doable) complexity is sacrificed to the recognition that it's not a 30-hour HBO series. (Yes, it's still almost 3 hours; no, it doesn't seem remotely that long.) And a few lines of dialogue creak a bit--though frankly, I had guzzled so much of the Kool-Aid by then that even some of the hoariest lines got me teary. And yes, it's a gimmick to have the same actors appear in different roles across the centuries-long sweep of the six connected-but-distinct . . . uh . . . stories (and also across racial and gender lines), but it also makes perfect sense in thematic terms, and it provides some of the most exhilarating (and sometimes hilarious) moments of recognition (some of them not fully appreciated until the end credits).

One thing did worry me: I was afraid that viewers who haven't read the novel might be so lost in the scrambled . . . uh . . . you know . . . that they'd never go all in on the ride, but my theater buddy told me that the vast majority of thumbs up he's been seeing have been from those who haven't read it.

Impossible to compare with Ruby Sparks and Moonrise Kingdom, but vying with those two for top spot on my 2012 list so far.

Prometheus burned

Frankenstein

(1931)

I forget how great this is. It's clear where lie the sympathies of director James Whale, who knew a little about being an outcast, but I think the dimwitted producers must have thought they were making a film about how humanity triumphs over its own hubris and the beast thence born. But really--with the exception of little Maria, the only person to show the "monster" any compassion, and then Maria's grieving father, is there a person born of woman who demands or receives from us anything better than superior tolerance (for Baron Frankenstein [Frederick Kerr] and maybe for Elizabeth [Mae Clarke])? The rest, especially the men of science--Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive), his former mentor Dr. Waldman (Edward Van Sloan), and his hunchbacked assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye)--are right pricks, two of whom get what they deserve and the third much less. Henry's critics tell him that he's playing God, and in fact, that is the problem--not that he's usurping the Creator's lifegiving power, but that he's behaving like the God of most believers' experience: a sadistic, pitiless manipulator.

Karloff's mute, nameless protagonist, on the other hand, is one of the most heartrending victims in cinematic history, given by his creator only enough resources to make of life a hell on Earth.

Strange bedfellows

Coriolanus

(2011)

Ralph Fiennes directed and starred in Shakepeare's story of the worst and angriest politician ever, whose war heroics could have made him a god in Rome at the price of a little humility toward the people. Instead, his pride earns him banishment that deepens his contempt and turns him traitor. An adamantine portrayal of the adamantine general, with Vanessa Redgrave scarily intense as Volumnia, his mother and primary love interest; Gerard Butler as Aufidius, his sworn enemy and secondary love interest; and the beautiful and ubiquitous Jessica Chastain as Virginius, his wife and tertiary love interest. Filmed mostly in Serbia and Montenegro.

Don't forsake the Motor City

Detropia

Crit

Wow, that was hard, notwithstanding the couple thousand new Volt jobs for GM at the end and the influx of young (exclusively white, from what we see) artists who can, in one city in the county, spend $50K and buy a home and a studio under one roof. Those two developments are what passes for good news, but there are heroes: a video artist (homegrown, pre-influx), the owner of a tavern a couple of blocks from a GM plant, the president of UAW Local 22--even Mayor Dave Bing (yeah, I know his name 'cause he was a star guard for the Pistons many years ago), comes across as a well-meaning guy trying to look past the standard solutions, all of which have been tried and have failed. But it's people vs. rust, and rust, as we all know, never sleeps. Brutal.

Also another reason to root for the Tigers in the World Series, even if the evil Cardinals are not their opponents.

Reborn free

Born Yesterday

(1950)

Guest blogger tonight, my grad school friend Lisa . . .

The image of the "dumb blonde" has never taken on such poignancy and dignity as it does in George Cukor's Born Yesterday. Billie, played by Judy Holliday, is the kept woman of a crooked, egomaniacal, brutish "businessman" (Broderick Crawford) who is in Washington, D.C., to work a deal to the left of the law with a complicit congressman. Harry is concerned that Billie will embarrass him (and yet they are perfectly matched in their gaucheness, though even at first Billie is aware that she is clueless, and Harry has no such awareness). He asks Paul, a newspaper reporter played by a handsome William Holden, to "educate" her. Through Paul's tutelage and encouragement, Billie starts to awaken to the world around her, but more importantly, she begins to recognize that she is in a dead-end, no-win, abusive situation with Harry, and that Harry, formerly a "big man" in her eyes, is a common criminal and a loser. She helps Paul take some crooked contracts to expose Harry's dishonest dealings, and leaves Harry to go off with Paul.

We see Billie gain in confidence and attractiveness as her vacant stare becomes a focused gaze and her sense of self-worth increases. And this is a comedy, after all, so Billie never stops delivering malapropisms. But the message is loud and clear--no one is the property of another, and one's self-determination is a right and a privilege. This film, made in 1950, was definitely an oldie but a goodie.

Nicely done, Lisa, and thanks--it's good to have a night off!

Thicker than water

28 Days Later

(2002)

You forget how quiet so much of this is--how idyllic, how beautiful--when the infected aren't chasing people trying to eat them. I'm not sure I ever realized before how much that quiet contributes to this being not only my favorite zombie movie ever but one of my favorite films of the past decade, full stop. And if anything, I liked it more on this, my fourth or fifth screening, than ever before. Brilliant, in both the British and the American sense.

Wag the Persian cat

Argo

Crit

I was course grown up (technically, at least) when all this was going down, so I do remember the hostage crisis well, but what I remember more vividly came probably the last year before the revolution, when Iranian students, wearing masks to avoid identification by Savak, would regularly gather on the University of Illinois quad to chant, "Down with the fascist puppet, down with the shah!" I was there to see history happening, but all I thought was that it had a pretty good beat.

This is a smart film, and I say that not just because it avoids the obvious pitfall of mispronouncing Hamilton Jordan's surname. (And by the way, Kyle Chandler really is a dead ringer for Jordan, isn't he? It didn't occur to me until later to think, "Coach Taylor!") I'd read that director Ben Affleck is self-effacing in his treatment of star Ben Affleck, which I guess means there's just one shot of him shirtless, but what I like about his work is that he recognizes that sometimes, when you have one plot element that's completely absurd and another that's a literal matter of life and death, sometimes it's best to sequester the two. The funny parts of this are straight out of Wag the Dog (which I might just have to watch tonight), with the ominous subtext as sub as can be; then, having served as bridge between the prologue and the thriller proper, the comic elements have the good sense to go away.

What's left is a story only slightly more unbelievable than the documentary I saw Friday, and apparently only slightly more unfactual.

Trailers

• Gangster Squad--As I recall, in L.A. Confidential we only hear Mickey Cohen's name; here we get to see him played by Sean Penn.

The blood stays on the blade

Gangs of New York

(2002)

Been watching Copper on BBC America and have been mostly unimpressed by a series that seems clearly derivative of and inferior to this: same time, same place, but from the POV of the police, who are, after all, just another gang.

So watching this again confirms its superiority to the TV series (whose derivativeness--is that a word?--needs no proof), but also confirms that my initial lukewarm reaction to it when it came out was not stingy. It's an OK film, visually impressive, excessively grandiose, with what must have been a welcome opportunity for Daniel Day-Lewis to rehearse his overacting ahead of There Will Be Blood. It's one of those Marty-a-little-too-much-in-love-with-himself deals that we've seen from time to time.

Inventir amour

Jules and Jim

(1962)

I might as well admit it: I'm just never going to be French. I like the French, and I like Truffaut more than most of them, but I just don't get how love works for them. This is usually described as a love triangular, but it's really a three-dimensional love pentagonal solid. In America, we'd simply call Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) crazy and institutionalize her. But for the French, it's not fun until someone loses and eye, or something even more precious. Perhaps it would have made more sense with a bottle of Bordeaux.

Cool fact

Searching for Sugar Man

Crit

You sort of expect Rob Reiner to turn up as the interviewer, so implausible is this documentary about a guy from Detroit who cut a couple of brilliant but unbought albums in the early '70s, then disappeared, only to become a rebel icon for antiapartheid Afrikaners, who adopted his antiestablishment ethos and were crushed to learn of his on-stage suicide--either by self-immolation or by hangdun--but continued to buy the records, probably a half-million of them over the years. And then, of course, the discovery that he was still living in the same house in Detroit where he'd been for 40 years, working construction and building-preservation, close to his three daughters, and oblivious to his bigger-than-Elvis, bigger-than-the-Stones fame in South Africa.

I mean, come on.

I only wish I could report that I was blown away by Rodriguez's music. I like it--lyrically Dylanesque, vocally very Feliciano--and I may buy Cold Fact, the first album, but the story rather dwarfs the music. And like Reiner's stuff, it evokes laughter, but laughter of sheer joy, not of hilarity. Sorry for the spoilers, but you will leave the theater happy.

Trailers

• Smashed--I actually saw this before, but forgot to blog it. It seems to ask what happens when out of a couple of drunks, exactly one decides to get clean and sober. A possibility.
• Promised Land--Van Sant directs Damon; hey, worked last time.
• Hyde Park on Hudson--I'd seen a teaser for this, but the full-scale trailer makes it look even more appealing; The King's Speech on our side of the Pond.

Like you're gonna live forever

Eight Men Out

(1988)

You know, when I notice stuff like Eddie Collins (Bill Irwin) batting right-handed, and Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn) pitching out of the windup with a runner at first, and Ray Schalk (Gordon Clapp) flashing his pitcher a sequence of signals even though there's no runner on second to steal a straight one-finger-for-the-fastball-two-for-the-curve, I have to remind myself that there's just a shitload of complexity to keep track of in this simple game, and that doesn't change the fact that this is one of the best baseball films ever, and certainly the one that best balances the game's place in American mythology with its place in the real, nitty-gritty world. And the coda, with Joe Jackson (D. B. Sweeney, who gives one of the best portrayals of tragically profound ignorance I've ever seen) playing ball under an assumed named somewhere in the swamps of Jersey, is an elegy triumphantly sad. And as it happens, elegiac is how I want my baseball right now.

I ate my twin in the womb

Pitch Perfect

Crit

Holy crap, I almost skipped this, which would have left a slot open in my list of funniest flicks of the year. And probably the best presentation of a studio's logo (Universal's), the instrumental accompaniment actually supplied a capella.

The plot is the same one we've seen in every academic competition story ever, but plot, schmott--what matters here are the tunes, and the giggles, and especially the giggles inspired by the tunes (like when you hear the intro to Lily Allen's "Fuck You" and wonder how they're gonna save the PG13 rating).

Hell, this may even inspire me to watch The Breakfast Club again, and I never thought I'd say that. Special mention, by the way, to the hilarious work by Elizabeth Banks and John Michael Higgins as the competition announcers. Oh, and speaking of hilarity, be very quiet whenever Lilly (Hana Mae Lee) speaks.

Stars in Shorts

Crit

I've admitted often (including Friday) that I'm not very good at anticipating narrative surprises, which makes me confident in saying that the surprise twists in several of these are abysmally unsurprising. A fairly weak collection altogether, though the finale sent me out smiling.

• The Procession--A mildly amusing joke, an out-of-place driver in a funeral procession distractedly stopping at a red light and thus losing--along with the half of the cars behind his--the route. Lily Tomlin fun as the overbearing mother--and always a welcome sight.
• Steve--A would-be Albee-esque playlet, with a loopy neighbor (Colin Firth) becoming increasingly impossible.
• Not Your Time--The model here is Bob Fosse, and especially All That Jazz, but if you're stealing from Tiffany, don't try to sell us costume jewerly.
• sexting--Interesting for Julia Stiles's bravura single-take delivery of a six-minute-plus monologue, but unfortunately, the speech isn't interesting, and the twist here is painfully obvious.
• Prodigal--This appears to be an X-men origin story, and the credit to Marvel in the end credits backs that guess. But seriously: was there no one involved in the making of this film who knows what the titular word means? Because it seems pretty clear that they were under the impression that it's synonymous with "prodigy."
• After School Special--Written by Neil LaBute (as was sexting), this is supposed to have not just a surprise but a transgressively shocking ending. But duh--we saw it coming, as it were.
• Friend Request Pending--Ah, but here's the jewel: Judi Dench in a beautiful tone poem about the fact that social networking makes teenagers of us all.

Trailers

• Playing for Keeps--Will this become a new favorite soccer flick? Probably not.
• Identity Thief--Melissa McCarthy in the title role, Jason Bateman as the victim, so I wouldn't rule out hilarity, but . . .