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.