If, on the other hand, you don't like piña coladas . . .

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Crit

Despite a surprisingly positive review by A. O. Scott in the Times, I went into this with low expectations, and as is so often the case, I was thus . . . not much disappointed. The other day I commented that everyone in The Wolf of Wall Street seemed to be having fun, and it pained me not to be able to join in. Here, in contrast, no one seems to be having fun, except maybe Kristen Wiig when she gets to sing "Space Oddity."

And can I just say one thing about the ridiculous and undisciplined plot? No one with the experience working with film that Mitty (Ben Stiller, who also directed, if that's what you call it) and his assistant have could possible have failed to notice that a roll of film came into the lab in more than one piece. There's nothing wrong with an implausible plot in a fantasy story, but it needs not to rest upon an implausibility in the reality-grounded portion. Moreover, this is an unnecessary implausibility: either have them notice the gap immediately (that they fail to at first is not important to the plot) or have the roll end with frame 24, with the critical frame 25 having been cut from the end, leaving an apparently intact roll. Misplaying stuff like this is sloppy and stupid and insulting to the people who paid to get in.

Fortunately, I do not demand greatness, or even solid mediocrity, from my final film in a calendar year.

Clenched fist

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

Crit

By-the-numbers biopic enlivened--to the extent is has any life at all--by strong performances by Idris Elba in the title role an Naomie Harris as a fireball Winnie. The best thing that come of the film is if it helps both become bigger stars.

American hustle

The Wolf of Wall Street

Crit

Darn it, everyone seems to have had such fun making this, especially Jonah Hill, and most of my fellow audience members seemed to be having great fun watching it, and it's a fun soundtrack, and doggone it, did I mention how much fun everyone else seemed to be having? I alas, had only intermittent fun. I admired the filmmaking, but it's hardly a surprise that Marty knows how to make a movie. I'll bet he had fun, too.

Trailers

• Bad Words--Jason Bateman (who also directed) as a grade school dropout who enters and thrives in the spelling bee on that technicality. We saw the red band trailer, and I'll be interested to see the censored version. The film will probably be awful, but it's got a chance.

Tales of brave Ulysses

Inside Llewyn Davis

Crit

Well, I'd buy his album--in fact, I might just.

The perfect Christmas Day movie--good music, smiles, exasperation with the protagonist, all in service of a shaggy cat story. Would have been a perfect Jewish Christmas Day had there not been a wait of more than an hour for carryout at Royal Palace. But hah! I'll show them! I'll just have some leftover Christmas Eve wild mushroom-and-four cheese lasagna! So there.

Oh, one cavil about a movie that seems a good bet to make my top ten for the year: wasn't there somebody in the production who knows that geographical numbering of U.S. highways was the opposite of the Interstate system, such that U.S. 90 would not have been anywhere near northern Illinois? In fact, according to Wikipedia, it went/goes from Van Horn, Texas, to Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Hey, maybe the Coens need a script supervisor!

Trailers

• Winter's Tale--Looks like sentiment soup.

The good in most men's hearts

Scrooge

(1951)

I know that other versions of this exist; I just don't know why.

The ice fishing story

American Hustle

Crit

Lots I didn't expect to be saying about this, but number 1 is that Katniss Everdeen gives one of the best comic performances--maybe THE best--in a film this year. It's a role that tiptoes dangerously close to dumb and dangerously close to cliché, but Lawrence infuses it with sympathy and street smarts and life and fall-down hilarity. One of the year's great performances, which I guarantee the Academy will ignore. Another thing I didn't expect to be saying is that this is one of my favorite--almost certainly one of my top 10--films of the year.

You may recall (but probably not) that I did not hop on the Silver Linings Playbook bandwagon, so while I've loved some of David O. Russell's work, I went into this one skeptical. No need. A good love story, a great con story, and--oh, here's another thing I didn't expect to be saying--a fantastic soundtrack not simply dependent on the mostly mediocre music of the real-life story's era (starts on my father's 59th birthday, 4/28/78) but also exploiting some wonderful jazz. Oh, and also--this is certainly the unlikeliest thing I'd be saying--a perfectly Grace Slick-sounding Arabic version of "White Rabbit."

Trailers

• RoboCop--I didn't know about this. Did you know about this?
• The Monuments Men--If I hadn't already been hot for this, the new trailer would have made me hot for it. But come on: how can you not be hot for this?

Orc, barrel, project

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Crit

Well, that was a lot more fun than part I of the cycle, An Unexpected Journey. It would even have been an appropriate entertainment for Christmas Day, but I've pretty much decided to give that slot to the Coens.

Anyway, this one is much better paced than the first and harks effectively back (though chronologically forward, of course) to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, particularly in its effective intercutting of the different geographies and their concomitant narratives. There are also set pieces carried over: Galdalf on a collapsing bridge, a beautiful elf woman's forbidden love (and folk medicine practice), dwarf-tossing. Well, no, that's not accurate: no dwarves are tossed in this film, but given what humiliations and hardships they are put through, I expect they'd welcome a simple heave.

One trivial callback, too: the first face we see is the director's, in what appears to be a precise reshoot of his cameo in Fellowship as a drunkard in Bree. The only thing not new and kind of annoying is the titular dragon's movie-villain-cliché-#1 performance: way too much talk, way too tardy dispatch of his antagonists. But then, I guess if he just ate them all without boasting what he's done and what he's going to do, we'd never get to part III.

Trailers

• Gojira--Just kidding: they're calling it Godzilla. Inexplicably, the trailer was in 2D.
• The Amazing Spider-Man 2--Fx look great; who knows otherwise.
• 300: Rise of an Empire--Fx look great on this sequel, too: almost as great as the dialogue sounds dreadful. Gotta admit, though: I'd follow Eva Green into battle.
• Maleficent--You gotta think there have been days when the two dozen adopted kids were squalling and puking that Angie really felt this way, don't you? This has possibilities; from Disney.

The saint, the flamingos, and the disappearing giraffe

La grande bellezza (The great beauty)

Crit

A heaping helping of Fellini and a soupçon of Last Year at Marienbad in this sort of episodic film that's sort of about a 65-year-old author of a single novelette, based on the great lost love of his youth, who has never written anything else because he has been too busy living in a Felliniesque Roma, which is both the real central character of the film and the best of many excellent candidates for title character. Not much happens, and everything happens, and beauty is.

Sandy

Les Vacances de M. Hulot (Mr. Hulot's holiday)

(1953)

Sorry, but I'm clearly too unsophisticated and too American to appreciate this.

Practically perfect in no way whatsoever

Saving Mr. Banks

Crit

Got just 2 things to say about this: (1) it was great to see Elizabeth McGovern and Rachel Griffiths on the screen again, though the end credits revealed that that wasn't Elizabeth McGovern at all, but rather Ruth Wilson; and (2) I'm glad I didn't save this to be my Christmas Day movie.

Trailers

• Non-Stop--We already knew career intervention was long overdue for Liam Neeson, but must we do the same for My Future Wife Julianne Moore?

There's bound to be talk tomorrow

Elf

(2003)

You know, this really isn't as good as I remembered it, but it's every bit as irresistible. It's much the same story as the one I watched Friday night, certainly another Oz film (though without the usual urgency to return home), and like that one, this would fall flat without a pitch-perfect, fully committed performance by the lead. Having Zooey Deschanel on hand is another good way to overcome the slapdash plotting. I may not need to watch it again any yule soon, but I'm glad I watched it this yule.

Riotous

The Punk Singer

Crit

No, I knew nothing about Kathleen Hanna, nothing about her first band, Bikini Kill, very little about the riot grrrl movement to which she helped give birth. More's the pity, but I see some upcoming additions to the iPod.

For those of you who were similarly ignorant, well, see the damn film, but I'll tell you this much: Hanna overcame the kiss of death that polemics usually plants on pop, doing straight-up unapologetic feminism in a context of straight-up rocking rock. She was SuperGrrrl, unstoppable except by a kryptonite deer tick, and then only for a while. She's now back with a band named for her solo album Julie Ruin, with a The tossed in for good measure.

Le maillot jaundiced

The Armstrong Lie

Crit

Reminds me of Mary McCarthy's famous remark about Lillian Hellman that "everything she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" Documentarian Alex Gibney started making a film about the 2009 comeback by the titular seven-time Tour de France apparent winner (all his victories have been vacated) who became perhaps even better known as a cancer survivor and anticancer crusader. When the PEDs and blood-doping hit the fan, Gibney suspended filming, only to come back to interview Armstrong after he admitted his sins to America's mother confessor, Oprah. But even when telling many unattractive truths, Armstrong seems unable to let go of some of the lies.

I never cared much, but I resent his betrayal on behalf of my older but more naïve brother--a cancer survivor himself--who kept faith with Armstrong as long as it was humanly possible. My takeaway from this is that in an enterprise where everyone cheats, the question is who cheats best. "Everybody" seems at worst a slight exaggeration for the years when Armstrong was collecting yellow jerseys, and while there will never be any way to know for certain, it seems a good bet that if all those races had been absolutely clean across the field, Armstrong still would have won, though it would have taken him a lot longer to do it.

It also occurred to me that the "who cheats best" principle applies to another fiercely contested athletic competition: American politics.

Trailers

• The Invisible Woman--Ralph Fiennes as Dickens (who is perhaps the leading contender for my Mitchell exemption in 2014), Felicity Jones  as the love of his life, not to be confused with his wife.
• Le passé (The past)--Directed by Asghar Farhadi (A Separation), stars Bérénice Bejo (The Artist).

What's fun?

Big

(1988)

Among the most cleverly conceived of Wizard of Oz movies, this might well have just been weird but for the stunning body language of Tom Hanks, who sells 30-as-13 without a wink or a nudge. Another of my dishonest Friday-night deaccession candidates; no way I'm letting this go.

Strike another match, go start anew

The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival

(1963)

This is not a documentary about Bob Dylan being booed at Newport in 1965 for going electric. It is a documentary about the lovefest Dylan enjoyed at the festival in 1963, '64, and '65 (mostly). But tell you what--when he finishes that aggressively electrified "Maggie's Farm," even though you know what's coming, it's a shock. And I wonder how many people were booing Dylan--especially given that when they're asked whether they'd like him to come back out for another song, specifically an acoustic one, there's as much love as there was for the babyfaced Minnesota boy two years earlier, alone with his guitar, or sometimes joined by Joan Baez. Frankly, I think most people were probably booing Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, and it's easy to understand why. There's electric and there's electric, and Bloomfield's guitar and Kooper's keyboard were taking the sound far away from anything that anybody might expect to hear at a folk festival--and far away from any recording Dylan was doing in the studio at the time (or, I think it might fairly be said, has done in the studio ever). In any case, for all the mythic notoriety of the event, all seems to have been forgiven quickly. And why not: damn, that guy could (and, I've heard, still can) entertain.

Tin man

Nebraska

Crit

I have often alluded to but never, it seems, comprehensively articulated my philosophy that the only useful cinematic classification system divides all films into two categories:

1. Wizard of Oz films
2. not-Wizard of Oz films

Tonight, when I articulated my philosophy to my companions after this film, some (well, all) of them challenged me to explain why Alexander Payne's new film is self-evidently an Oz movie while About Schmidt and Sideways are not. Which, of course, made me think a lot more about the sine qua nons of the subsubsubsubgenre. A Wizard of Oz film must present us with

1. a naïve protagonist
2. on a quest that
3. remains the central focus of the film, who
4. encounters much that is strange and frightening, and some that is strange and appealing, in his or her travels,
5. is stymied in the precise focus of the quest, but
6. eventually finds something else, something unsought, often something better, including
7. some sort of enlightenment, one result of which is
8. revision of the quest to simply a return home.

I'd also suggest a sliding scale of Oz-ness for certain elements: the more hapless the quest the Ozzier it is, (high points here, low points in both Schmidt [to prevent a bad marriage] and Sideways [to have a male-bonding wine weekend], but, to be fair, also low points in one of the best and Ozziest Oz movies ever, After Hours [getting laid]); the stranger the encounters, the Ozzier (After Hours makes up a lot of lost ground there, and this, with the bizarre family elements, gets more points than the other two Payne candidates).

Bruce Dern brings a defiant dignity to a character whose mental fog could easily have made him jokey, a bunch of nonprofessional actors play the precise midwesterners I grew up with, and Phedon Papamichael's black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous.

Another human interest story

Philomena

Crit

If we were making a top ten list of the Roman Catholic Church's suckiest places and times, most of us would rank Spain of the late 14th and 15th centuries number 1, the U.S. in the late 20th century might be midtable somewhere, but surely there would be a place near the bottom for Ireland in the mid-1900s. Expanding on a secular tradition dating to the early 19th century, several Irish convents, under cover of Christian ministry, took in so-called Magdalenes--young women and girls whose commission of carnal sins had become manifest--and exploited the circumstances by engineering lucrative adoptions by wealthy Americans, and by binding the fallen women to years of indentured servitude.

This is not the first cinematic treatment of the scandal--The Magdalene Sisters (2002) was an angrymaking contemporary account--but it's the first that I'm aware of that looks back from the recent past, through the barely fictionalized perspective of a woman (happened to read this while waiting for the film to start) encountering after-the-fact stonewalling eerily similar to another on the top ten list imagined above. And it's certainly the only one directed by Stephen Frears with Judi Dench as the questing mother and Steve Coogan as the cynical journalist who allies himself with her. Subtle? Not particularly. Manipulative? Well, yeah. Did I mind? Not a bit of it.

Trailers

• One Chance--Heartwarming true story of a fat opera lover who scores on a talent show.
• Heaven Is for Real--Heartwarming true story of an adorable little boy who makes an eschatological round trip.
• Labor Day--Heartwarming Joyce Maynard story about a romance between an escaped con (Josh Brolin) and a single mother (Kate Winslet).

Enter the Martini castle

It's a Wonderful Life

(1946)

It may have been 29 Thanksgivings ago that I first saw this, but I think it was 30 years, and that establishes a lot more elegant narrative, that I've been watching this for almost exactly half of my life, so let's go with that.

Thanksgiving 1983 (or maybe '84, but let's say '83) was a different world, so I was channel surfing on the cable and came upon the Charleston contest/swimming pool scene and stayed with it until a commercial, then surfed on. Maybe a half-hour later, I surfed onto the same scene on a different channel, and this time I believe I stayed with it.

In any case, though I got a late start, it has been part of my holiday-season idiom ever since; this was doubtless my twenty-somethingth screening, and it continues to reward me every time. Somehow, "Capra" remains for some a shorthand for simple-minded feel-good films. Whose mind is simple, then?

Oh, by the way, this year's title invokes the allusion of the title of my son-in-law's Xmas music sampler, which is mostly wonderful.

Bird's the word

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Crit

"That didn't suck" is how I began my review of The Hunger Games, almost 20 months ago. Reviews had been weak, and I had really enjoyed the book, and my expectations were low. This time reviews have been enthusiastic, but I thought the middle book of the trilogy was a decline from the first in just about every way, so I didn't know what to expect.

Well, not only does this one not suck, it's pretty terrific, an improvement on the book in pacing and in achieving (for me, anyway) the emotional response necessary to make us want these people not only to live but to carry us forth into the final third (books) or half (film, since as seems de rigueur nowadays for adaptations of trilogies--coincidentally, on that 4/1/12 when I saw The Hunger Games, I also had my first look at the trailer for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2--the third book will be split into two movies).

All the additions to the cast, especially Jeffrey Wright and Amanda Plummer as Beetee and Wiress and Jena Malone as Johanna (yes, the flash-in-the-elevator scene is included, yes, it's very funny, and--spoiler alert--no, we don't get Katniss, Peeta, and Haymitch's pov), own their roles, and while I could complain that Paula Malcomson gets less screen time than Ma Everdeen's role in the book promised, that's certainly one reason why the pacing was an improvement over the first film's as well as over the source.

One fine popcorn muncher, that.

Trailers

• Divergent--Pretty sure this isn't a silent film, but the trailer was until the very last instant, when the projection room finally fixed the glitch. Targeted to the audience interested in stories about touch young chicks (Shailene Woodley here) in dystopia.
• I, Frankenstein--Not to be confused with the 2015 treatment of Mary Shelley's story promised on IMDb, this one seems to plop the monster down in the Underworld franchise, or something like it.
• Vampire Academy--A Harry Potter/Clueless mash-up, could be a hoot, or merely hootable.

You need a montage

Team America: World Police

(2004)

I defy anyone to show me better marionette sex scenes.

Effrayante normale

La Vie d'Adèle (Blue is the warmest color)

Crit

It's reasonably safe to assume that I'm the only person to see this film through the eyes of participation in filming one particular lesbian coming-of-age story that's not in French or 3 hours long. (Have I mentioned, by the way, that the DVD release [lots of fun extras!] is imminent and you can already get the fantastic soundtrack?) So even though there's no comparison, it's up to me to compare them:

• number of leading ladies whom the camera loves: a tie, 2-2. Though I have to admit that if we had this to do over I'd have lobbied hard for blue hair on Danielle.
• awkward dinner with the ostensibly straight girl's house: I give us an edge on this, if only because the spaghetti Bolognese that Adèle's father proudly serves features pasta that clearly has been overcooked and doused in way too much sauce. As nasty as that food got as the takes piled up, I'll take good old American murdered cow and fries.
• dancing: more in La Vie, but that's partly a function of its almost double running length
• classroom scenes: ditto and ditto
• naked portraiture: we show more of the process, they show more of the product--and, it being France (specifically Lille, which is an interesting switch from the usual suspect), nobody gets in trouble
• hot lesbian sex scenes: OK, they kick our chastely draped ass here, and yes, it's a fair question whether the raison d'être of these scenes is more the male gaze than the narrative imperative. Google the title and "controversy" for more than you can possibly want to read about this.
• breakup scene: both are extremely painful to watch, theirs is more cruel and brutal
• reconciliation scene: can't compare them, but the coffee shop meeting in La Vie is very similar to and completely different from the L.A. health food restaurant meeting in Annie Hall.

So, but, wait: did I like the film? Yes, but. I liked that it's very much about sex but also about how life makes it impossible for sex to be enough. I empathized with both characters, though more with Adèle contrite for fucking up than with Emma unforgiving for a relatively small and understandable and in retrospect complementary lapse. But 3 hours? I can give no satisfactory answer to the "why" that must follow from that question.

Nouvelle drague

I Am Divine

Crit

Aware of the calendar all day, I was actually walking to the movie theater wondering how the historic date might fit with a documentary about a great big female impersonator notorious for eating dog doo on screen. Not that far a reach, as it turned out: a clip from an early John Waters film shows a very young Divine in an iconic pink pillbox hat (it's a b/w film, but we know what color it is), portraying a wife in the process of becoming a widow, scrambling out of an open limo and onto the trunk. Golly.

Waters tells us that Divine transgressed against the already transgressive drag culture. Well, yeah, but I guess I was looking to learn a little more. It's a perfectly OK film, worth seeing, but smaller than life, which is precisely what its subject was not.

Hard-hearted woman

Great Expectations

Crit

To those who know of my academic background as well as my cinematic obsession (and you wouldn't be here if you didn't know about the latter), it will seem as strange to you as the realization did to me that not only have I not read the novel, I had never before seen any adaptation of the story save this excellent episode of South Park, which is surprisingly true to the story (though--spoiler alert!--it turns out that the Dickens version includes no robotic flying monkeys).

So I was much more involved in the story itself than all you Dickens buffs, and the best thing I can say about the film--and this is a very good thing indeed--is that I've been contemplating devoting a year to reading a ton of Dickens, and this encourages me further in that ambition. Maybe not 2014--I'm rather leaning toward David Foster Wallace for that calendar year--but sometime in the teens.

One note about the acting: as Miss Havisham, Helena Bonham Carter is every bit as creepy as in any role she's ever performed for her spousal equivalent.

Higher calling

Muscle Shoals

Crit

A story about music and abandonment and love and obsession and divorce. And did I mention music?

Ever wonder why Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones and Percy Sledge and Paul Simon and Dylan and Leon Russell and Etta James and on and on and on and on came to a little shitburg on the Tennessee River in Alabama to make music with a bunch of nerdy white session players? Well, it's complicated, except that it's quite simple: the Swampers had the funk.

But I don't care about their paying props to the Swampers in their sweet-homey big hit, or about what swell boys they were and are, I'm still not down with any band that performs in front of a huge Confederate flag.

Dallas Buyers Club

Crit

Matthew McConaughey's new thing, I think we now know, is updates of Huck Finn. This time he plays the Huck character himself, growing enough to love one member of a despised group without ever coming to see that despising the group itself is inconsistent with his love. But as with Huck, it's a start. Jared Leto is, yes, of course, positively amazing as the transvestite who takes her name from a synthetic fiber.

This is, in the end, I think, a movie about the fact that every damn one of us is living with a terminal disease, and every damn one of is going to go sooner or later, but there's nothing wrong with fighting it all the way.

Out of all the boats in all the oceans in all the world,she rams into me

All Is Lost

Crit

One of the many differences between me and Our Man, the only thing we are given to call the semi-ancient mariner played by Robert Redford (which is particularly poignant given that we know the name of his yacht, the Virginia Jean), is that I'd have been a lot more talkative, starting when container/disaster strikes by quoting Hugh Grant's opening line in Four Weddings and a Funeral. In fact, I'd probably have that line pretty much on a loop--except that another key difference is that I probably would have lasted only long enough to blurt it once.

Our Man finally says that word, but only once, a yawp to the universe that has done exactly that to him. Mostly he's stoic, though. I couldn't help compare him to the men in Stephen Crane's great novella The Open Boat. "If I am going to be drowned--" each wonders,

if I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?

Our Man wastes little time contemplating the unfairness of it all; he's too busy trying to overcome it, small detail by small detail. One way to make a one-character, one-location (albeit an infinitely big location) film fascinating to keep the audience wondering, "What is he doing now, and why is he doing it?" The answer always comes in a few moments, but the wondering and the puzzling keep the film from ever becoming static, and also serve to tell us as much about Our Man  as a constant voice-over might. It's an action film wherein the action is mostly in one man's mind and hands.

Trailers

• Nebraska--Alexander Payne; 'nuff said.

Roll back the stone

The Wise Kids

(2012)

One of my Scary Normal peeps recommended this, so I was prepared to like it, but I wasn't prepared to like it this much, and I certainly wasn't prepared to get most involved with and have the most empathy for the awesome-awesome-Jesus girl (Laura,  Allison Torem), who's freaked out by the discovery that her friend Tim (Tyler Ross) is gay. No, I would have expected to focus on Brea, partly because Molly Kunz positively lights up the screen, but mostly because she's the preacher's kid having a crisis of faith.

Laura's only crises involve the faith of her friends--she's a cocksure a Christian as you've ever sneered at, yet the writing (Stephen Cone wrote and directed) and Torem's portrayal of the character make it impossible to sneer; for me to love someone who believes as Laura believes is something of a miracle in itself.

The uneventful post-h.s.-graduation summer of these three is all the story required. In fact, for much of the film the less convincing parallel plot of the church's closeted music director's temptation and of his wife's sexual frustration seems tacked on, but even that solidifies in the final act, and thankfully the film offers no answers, no finality, no certainty. And that lack of satisfaction is eminently satisfying.

Dmitri, how do you think I feel?

Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

(1964)

Huh! Why was I thinking this was released right before the Kennedy assassination? In fact, its 50th anniversary is almost 3 months away. Though even then people were probably less inclined than usual to laugh about nuclear holocaust.

You know what this is besides brilliant satire with brilliant language? One hell of an action film, that's what. Though, to get a little Hemingway-vs.-Huck Finn, I never have been able to and still cannot stomach the Strangelove/mineshaft crap between the detonation of the first bomb and the "We'll Meet Again" concluding sequence--well, except for General Turgidson's "mineshaft gap" line, of course.

All is lost

12 Years a Slave

Crit

Man, I can't wait for Steve McQueen's romantic comedy, Oh, wait: unless that was Shame. That film made me feel icky, Hunger made me feel hungry, and I left this one feeling as if I'd been kicked in the stomach, kicked really hard. It seems absurd to anoint someone after 3 features as one of the great directors of our time, but dammit, bring out the oil. Oh, and by the way: this is the one all the releases for the rest of the year will have to beat for Best Picture next February.

Trailers

• Black Nativity--Musical based on a work by Langston Hughes, who I'm guessing wouldn't recognize this.
• The Grand Budapest Hotel--Latest from Wes Anderson looks as if it might be all outtakes from Moonrise Kingdom, but is that necessarily a bad thing?
• Gloria--If this were a Hollywood pic rather than a Chilean one, I suspect I'd be a lot more dismissive of it; something about not understanding what people are saying makes them sound lots smarter.

Deaths of salesmen

Glengarry Glen Ross

(1992)

This is stagy as hell, but when you have a playwright and a cast like you have here, you don't really need car chases. Mametian words and syllables, sentences and overlapping sentence fragments; Pacino and Lemmon and Arkin and Spacey and Harris and Baldwin and grotesque, gruesome, grueling desperation; what's not to grimace?

But I've had enough, and it's time for someone else to take my copy--and while you're at it, click here for other giveaways.

Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!

Ghostbusters

(1984)

Has Rick Moranis ever been funnier than this?

28 Days Later

(2002)

I keep waiting for this to reach its sell-by date, the screening when I think, "Well, yeah, this is pretty good, but it's not really as wonderful as I remembered it." Not yet. And good golly, the deserted London sequence . . . if I keep coming back to that, it's because that sequence still wows me, every time.

Oh, but here's something I've been thinking about over the Halloween season: if we ever are infested by zombies, we've certainly seen enough of them in movies and on TV by now to know how to handle 'em, no?

Consumer culture

Halloween

(1978)

Have I ever told you about the first time I ever saw this movie? Not in 1978, when I was married with a small child and unlikely ever to go to a scary movie, but during a second run in 1981, when I was separated and living in a $90/mo. basement shithole apartment in downtown Champaign and the picture showed at the Rialto and, having heard from enough of my grad school colleagues that I should, I went to the late screening on maybe the final night of the run. In any case, I was . . . the audience . . . the entire audience. And then, after watching this eminently creepy film alone, I had to walk alone home to my dark apartment, where I was also alone, and . . . well, you get the idea.

Even tonight, as I near 60 and should be immune to things that go bump in the night, it was still plenty creepy walking around my mostly dark home after watching it, and then walking downtown to the Chinese restaurant to pick up some dinner. It was particularly ill-advised, I think, for someone to have hopped out of his or her car and walked behind me on the sidewalk dragging his or her feet in the dry leaves.

Dawn of the Dead

(2004)

Funny that I never noticed before the extent of the borrowing here from my favorite zombie film, which is on tap for tomorrow night: fast-moving zombies, invocation of a culture of hate, aerial shots of apocalyptic infernos, protective figures gone bad. But hey, this is in Wisconsin, and who ever set a zombie flick in Wisconsin before? Or cast indy darling (and now bigtime writer/director) Sarah Polley in a kickass role or Ving Rhames as . . . well, Ving Rhames? So this remains my second-favorite zombie film.

Mommies dearest

Alien

(1979)

Much was made in 1986 of the distinctly nonfeminist epithet Ripley (Sigourney Weaver, duh) shouts at the climax of the wo-mano a wo-mano showdown in Aliens--the rough equivalent to an African American wielding the n-word--but I don't recall anyone pointing out that she utters the exact same epithet to Mother, the computer on the Nostromo, in this film.

Aliens

(1986)

Halloween season is not the time to watch this; it should be a Mother's Day tradition. This remains the best cinematic rebuttal to the notion that "maternal" and "feminist" need be mutually exclusive.

Oh, incidentally, yes, these were both theoretically eligible for Friday-night deaccession, but forget it: these aren't leaving my collection.

Trapped trapped trapped 'til the cage is full

Cronos

(1993)

Guillermo del Toro's first feature, and much of his toolbox is in evidence: bugs, magical machines, a child in peril both mortal and metaphysical, and Ron Perlman. Last night I watched my all-time favorite vampire movie, but this one is right up there, and while that one has competitors in the subgenre of youthful vamp romance, this one is conceptually sui generis.

Endless love

A Halloween-season supernatural romance double feature.

Wristcutters: A Love Story

(2009)

This:

• has one of the wittiest fantasy premises I've ever encountered (though credit for that goes to the novel it's based on, Kneller's Happy Campers)
• is one of the best Wizard of Oz films I know;
• is one of the best romantic comedies of the millennium to date;
• is the best suicide comedy imaginable;
• is one of my all-time favorite road movies;
• is one of my all-time favorite buddy movies;
• has a terrific soundtrack, which introduced me to Gogol Bordello;
• [spoiler alert] makes me weep happy tears at the end.

I've been plugging this film since I first saw it, and as far as I know, I've converted only my daughter. Seriously, check this out. A smart, funny, sweet, weird, unique film.

Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In)

(2008)

This:

• is my favorite vampire movie, by a couple orders of magnitude;
• is my favorite film about preadolescent (with an asterisk) love;
• has the best mass-transit getaway final scene at least since The Graduate, though it must be said that while that film's final scene is brilliant for its ambiguity regarding the future of an oddly matched pair, there's no ambiguity in this final scene: we've already seen this couple's future.

Hard to imagine a more satisfying seasonal twin bill.

Sin never dies

Carrie

(1976)

Wow: no, I certainly had not ever seen this uncut before: I would have remembered Brian De Palma's slo-mo girls'-locker-room full-frontal-fest, complete with that distinctive lame '70s music that was the aural equivalent of soft focus. I realize that this is at least my second complaint in the past few weeks about gratuitous sex and/or nudity, making me sound like the grumpy old man I am, but come on: is there any reason other than the fact that being able to show pubic hair in a mainstream film was still pretty new in 1976?

OK, now let's dispose of Piper Laurie: she makes Carrie's mother scary in an old-Bette Davis/Joan Crawford movie way, in stark contrast to Moore's honest-to-god (!) scary-human-being portrayal. The only part of Laurie's portrayal that is better--and the credit may go to De Palma--is her orgasmic response to her fatal multiple penetration by kitchen blades, a blend of Saints Sebastian and Teresa.

Overall, this is consistently the lesser of the two films through the dumping of the pig's blood and (apart from the goofy shtick with the firehoses) consistently the better one after that, in part because Peirce seems a little too concerned with justice for those who haven't been shitty to Carrie, but mostly because it gets to the end with much more dispatch. And gee whilikers, that final scene: a scary movie classic.

Mistakes were made

Carrie

Crit

Wow, there's one scary female in this movie, but her only supernatural power is the ability to make My Future Wife Julianne Moore repulsive. The scariest scene of the film is the first one, will Moore alone (well . . . ). The perfectly cast Chloë Grace Moretz isn't scary herself, though she is, obviously, a carrier of scary. Mostly she makes you wish, right until the blood spills, that you could protect her from what you know is coming. And from her nutball mother.

You know, my mother was very Catholic too, though not remotely as scary crazy as Carrie's. But some early scenes, when Mom is playing the humiliation card and the shame card, there was a certain resonance: that might have been me in a not altogether different universe. Is director Kimberly Peirce suggesting that religious devotion always lives just around the corner from religious looniness?

In any case, this was a good beginning to scary movies season, and I believe I may just watch the original film version tonight. I may have seen it from start to end once on commercial TV, but I've certainly never seen it uncut. I think a comparison might be fun.

Trailers

• About Last Night--Golly, it really is: a pretty-young-blacks-folks remake of the pretty-young-white-folks 1986 film based on David Mamet's play Sexual Perversity in Chicago!
• That Awkward Moment--And this could be its Caucasian clone, except for the one African-American couple.
• Endless Love--Don't know, don't care whether this is a remake of the 1981 film. Is it possible that anything with a title like this can be any good?
• Homefront--Tough guys, one of whom has a vulnerable young daughter. Screenwriter: Sylvester Stallone.

Good intentions

The Verona project, part XXII

A long-suspended project revived! Two "to be fair" notes: (1) seeing a Rotten Tomatoes rating in the 20s, and having disliked the majority of versions I've seen, I didn't carry much enthusiasm with me to the theater. And (2) in actual movie-theater darkness, it's lot harder to take the extensive notes I usually take; I'm not sure I can even find them all, much less decipher them. Still, I think it's fair to say that this was not very good.

Who (how old), when, how long? Douglas Booth (19) and Hailee Steinfeld (15, and yes, you have heard that name before), 2013, 2 hours.

What sort of R&J? A pair more pure than passionate, as if both know what is going to have to be done on the wedding night, but they're more comfortable making goo-goo eyes at each other. Booth is adequate to the part (which casts Romeo as a sculptor, incidentally), but Steinfeld, whom I loved in True Grit, delivers at least 75% of her lines in a wooden high-school-kid-reading-Shakespeare-in-English-class galumph.   

Seriocomic scale for first scene? scale of 1 (silly) to 10 (ominous).The film starts getting odd in the opening scene, as we begin with the prologue as writ, but then suddenly are told that the Prince has ordered a joust for Montagues and Capulets to slake their violent tendencies. And so we have Mercutio winning the ring (I dunno: check the jousting rulebook) at Tybalt's expense. So you think that ultraserious opening is in lieu of I.i, but no: later, after meeting both R & J, we get that scene, which clocks in at a full 10, with no dialogue for servants.

"Wherefore": do the film/playmakers know what it means? It's impossible to say: Steinfeld certainly doesn't give any hint of understanding that word, but then "art" and "thou" seem to be just as mysterious to her.   

Carrion flies? Yes! Boy, was I surprised!    

Body count? Five, Lady Montague being spared to look on while hubby shakes hands w/ Capulet.

What (else) is missing? Way too much of WS's language, much of it replaced by silly non-Shakespearean stuff like below.

What (else) is changed? Relative to how many lines are cut overall, some small parts played by good actors are boosted: the Capulets (Damian Lewis [right: Brody on Homeland] and Natascha McElhone), Friar Laurence (Paul Giamatti), and Nurse (Lesley Manville), who here is mostly an eager coconspirator. And because Balthasar is cut altogether, Bevolio has to make the trip to Mantua to take Romeo the bad news about Juliet.

What (else) is odd?

• Benvolio mentioning the possibility of moving in on Rosaline (a speaking part here) now that Hamlet has found his true love; that's the last we hear about it (or her).
• The scene in which Tybalt scolds Juliet for consorting w/ R at the ball.
• The slo-mo sequences: first look at Juliet, Tybalt charging toward the Montagues en route to killing and being killed, . . . hmmm, one other . . . R&J to the altar, maybe? Can't remember.
• Dying Mercutio telling R, re his well-intentioned intervention, that--I am not making this up!--"best intentions pave the way to hell."
• Oh! Almost forgot: after R takes his poison, J awakes, and they vigorously suck face before R dies--which makes nonsensical J's later speculation about whether enough poison remains on R's lips to do her. Then again, she's upset and probably not thinking straight.

On the other hand one unusual element is pretty cool: the film was shot in part in Verona and in Mantua.

End-of-the-play exposition? Not much, but what a weird scene, the Pollyanna Prince saying, "Yet we can take a lesson from their deaths," and Friar Laurence issuing a sort of no-fault declaration that "Their own forbidden love did murder them." Yeesh!  

Trailer

• Pompeii--Man, would I love to see a good film on A.D. 79, but this doesn't look like it.

Love is never equal

Gone with the Wind

(1939)

You know, for a 3¾-hour film, this mostly races along at a breakneck (no equestrian-accidents pun intended) pace. It slows only in the late going, after the squirmiest transition from a rape scene in the history of cinema, and then the slower pace is probably necessary to do justice to the tragicomic irony in the failure of the principles' emotions ever to line up.

This has always been a film I've admired more than liked, but I admire it enough to return to it periodically despite the fact that I could be watching two normal-length movies instead.

Wages of sin

Captain Phillips

Crit

This was so gripping for so long that after a while I just got tired of being gripped, which is, I guess, part of the point: that one element of being a hostage is that after a long stressful period of knowing that life as you know it may be at an end--and that life as everyone knows it could be at an end for you at any moment--that inescapable high intensity may become . . . well, "boring" doesn't really seem the right word, but I don't have a better one.

Consistent with that, the most fascinating five minutes of the film comes after (spoiler alert!) the navy Seals rescue Captain Phillips from the pirates and he finds himself safe but in shock. The release from the intense stress is, counterintuitively, into a different variety of stress: he is unable to cope with the ordeal being over than he had shown himself capable of dealing with the ordeal while it was ongoing.

Suspension bridge

Inequality for All

Crit

Perhaps there's nothing here that we haven't read before, heard before, seen before, but Robert Reich--who makes plenty of height jokes at his own expense--is inch for inch far more compelling than his most obvious forerunner as host of an inspirational documentary about how screwed up things are and how we might be able to get them unscrewed, Al Gore.

See this film, tell everyone you know to see this film, especially your Tea Party relatives, though they probably won't, and let's drum up a groundswell of public opinion for making Robert Reich secretary of labor for life, or perhaps cabinet-level U.S. economics professor for life.

In the basement of the Alamo

Blue Caprice

Crit

If this chilling film about the 2002 Beltway snipers has one failing, it's in making needlessly explicit the principle that hovers over the story throughout: that the phrase "senseless killings," trotted out for this episode as for every mass or serial killing of our time, is itself senseless.

Motiveless malice is at least as rare in life as it is in Shakespeare; that the motive may make no sense to us--that it might not even be clearly articulable by the perpetrators--doesn't negate what may be a perfectly consistent if alien logic. Which, to me, makes it lots scarier than if it were truly senseless.
 

Wadjda

Crit

Maybe this is how a revolution begins: with uptight grown-ups telling a headstrong young girl that she can't ride a bicycle. Warm and wise and gently subversive, the first feature film by a Saudi Arabian woman (Haifaa Al-Mansour) will be a very hard act to follow.

Trailers

• The Book Thief--Looks like more WWII sentimentality.
• Inequality for All--Up-the-1 percent documentary.
• Diana--Tabloid biopic stars Naomi Watts.

Burnin' out her fuse up there alone

Gravity (Imax 3D)

Post

Not gonna waste a lot of your time, just gonna say: I believed it. Oh, and this: if you have a chance to see it in MASSIVE 333DDD, do.

Trailers

• Thor: The Dark World--Of the 3 sequels I saw trailers for, this one looks the dumbest by far.
• The Hunger Games: Catching Fire--Gotta read this soon, I guess.
• The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug--The desolation of smog? This about L.A. freeways?

Ain't nothing like the real thing

Don Jon

Crit

Not really sure how I feel about this. I mean, I didn't like it, but then I didn't hate it enough to decide not to spend another 2½ hours in a dark room watching people drive really fast. But then again, when I came out of the theater, that's exactly what I decided. 

One objection I have to this is that it seems to be a way to show a lot of online porn on screen--seriously, there's a lot of porn on screen--while maintaining deniability about actually purveying porn.

I guess the (you should pardon the expression) bottom line is that almost everyone (excepting MFW Julianne Moore in an odd underdeveloped role as Jon's connection mentor, and maybe excepting Brie Larson as his sister, who provides metaphorical backup to his porn addiction with her own device addiction--to the point that she speaks only once in the film) is just really stupid, and not stupid in an engaging Homer Simpson way, but stupid in a the-story-of-your-growth-is-not-worth-my-eight-bucks way. 

The good reviews and the brilliant Rotten Tomatoes numbers are a mystery. 

Trailers

• Out of the Furnace--Little brother in trouble, big brother gets back into the bad game, yadda, yadda, yadda.
• American Hustle--New from David O. Russell, who for my money--which is very different from the Academy's money and most critics' money--needs to find his groove again.

Ham & cheese

To Kill a Mockingbird

(1962)

Another Deaccession Friday, and I'm ready to dump a beloved classic. I'll stipulate that Gregory Peck is remarkable performing one of the toughest tasks an actor ever faces, coupling saintliness and humanity, and the young man who plays Boo Radley does as fine a job as you could ever ask at portraying a rural southern cliché, but I can't bear those children ever again. So please, someone, take this!

Small world

Enough Said

Crit

The vast majority of filmmakers would take this plot--woman unwittingly becomes close friends with her new lover's ex-wife--and turn it into bad-wannabe-Shakespeare-comedy, slap-happy, implausible, with the compulsory moment when you're supposed to believe but really don't that the relationship is in trouble before everyone smiles at the end and even the exes learn something positive about each other.

Of the minority of filmmakers who wouldn't scotch it up that way, the vast majority simply would never go near such a clockwork, hackneyed premise because--hey, look above: what else are you gonna do with it?

Nicole Holofcener is an infinitesimally small minority of filmmakers. First of all, she takes this ridiculous coincidental setup and makes it perfectly plausible, in part because she parcels the discovery out to the audience along with the protagonist rather than making it Ironic. (OK, yeah, anyone who has read anything about the film knows from the start, and some of those who don't will guess, but what I'm talking about is the lack of creaking stage machinery.)

Another thing a lot of people would do with this material is sort of wink at the brutal betrayal of both friend and lover it is once the woman realizes the coincidence but tries to go on as if she didn't know, 'cause hey, this is your romantic lead, and she can't really do anything despicable. But Holofcener makes Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) painfully culpable in her duplicity--and makes her pay, not in a jokey way, but with the genuine devastation of losing a love and knowing she deserved to.

Oh, and meanwhile, while all this mean, horrible stuff is going on, it is one of the funniest films I've seen in a long time--two parts Holofcener's script, one part the comic timing of one recognized and one less-recognized (the late, lovingly lamented James Gandolfini) master of the art. It's impossible not to confront the imprints of these two actors' indelible television roles, unless you're the one person in the English-speaking world who has never seen Seinfeld or The Sopranos. There is, in fact, a lot of Elaine Benes in Eva (and come on: this is exactly the sort of easy-to-not-do-the-right-thing situation Elaine would find herself in), but I noticed only one moment where Tony Soprano seemed about ready to burst through: after a dinner party at which Eva has drunkenly and spitefully baited Albert in front of her friends. As he drives her home, there it is on his face: that Tony anger--careful, woman, you don't know what you're unleashing. But in fact, he has been the victim of brutality, not the perpetrator, and he holds onto the rage so that it can fester.

Trailer

• 12 Years a Slave--Chiwetel Ejiofor stars in a film based on the true story of a free northern black shanghaied by slave chaser; has a chance to be extremely good.

Happy just to dance with you

A Hard Day's Night

(1964)

Hey, here's something interesting: one of the very few (the only one on Rotten Tomatoes.com) negative reviews of the film--which, coincidentally, I read earlier this year in a wonderful anthology that friends gave me.

Not gonna get a negative review from me, but is there anything to say about this that hasn't been said four zillion times? I was impressed more than ever this time by how innocent the ostensibly anarchic pop-music world portrayed here was. There was nothing innocent about any of the Beatles by 1964, of course, and John at least gets several lines (and a sly, snorty allusion to different sorts of lines) that hint at their naughtiness, but oh, those screaming girls! Close-ups show girls surely no more than 12 (when 12 was much younger than it is now) who are genuinely desperate with a passion that they almost certainly don't begin to fathom. That scared the crap out of parents of 12-year-old girls then, of course, and not unreasonably, but now it seems so sweet. Those girls will be just fine.

A pasture animal waiting for the abattoir

Sideways

(2004)

Funny thing happened en route to watching this perfectly sober again. See, my self-permission to drink is predicated on my being at or lower than a specific weight that morning, and I haven't been close since vacation, so I started this dry tonight. But then came Miles's response to Maya's question (Paul Giamatti and Virginia Madsen) why he's so into pinot noir, and dammit, I just had to hit the Pause button and go around the corner to Mohan's wine store. If you don't understand, well, you don't, but I'm guessing you do.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, the Velvet Crush 2012 I paid sixteen bucks for seems a bit gone, as if it was stored at too high a temperature for a time. Would someone who actually knows anything about wine say the same thing? We'll never know. And it's not as if I'm going to pour it down the drain, but still, a little disappointed. In the wine, not the film.

Those who trespass against us

Prisoners

Crit

What starts as a game of cat and mouse evolves into a game of dog and cat, then a game of animal control officer and dog, then a game of PETA activist and dog catcher . . .

Brutally hard to watch, but pretty damned amazing, pun intended.

Trailers

This Spikey batch of trailers seems to have had a theme of one man (or woman) alone. Along with a new, wow, Bullock-centric promo for Gravity and the old reliable for All Is Lost, we had:

• Her--Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) is so alone after his marriage ends that he falls in love with the voice of a computer assistant (granted, it's Scarlett Johansson's voice, but still . . . ). From Spike Jonze.
• Oldboy--Remake of the superintense Korean revenge tragedy about a man mysteriously kept in solitary confinement for twenty years. From Spike Lee.
• Lone Survivor--Four Navy Seals on a mission in Afghanistan, but the title should come with a spoiler alert.
• Dallas Buyers Club--The exception, this one is all about community, among early HIV-positive diagnosees seeking a medical grail.

Reefer madness

Touch of Evil

(1958)

They tell me this is great, and I won't debate the point, but to me it has always seemed overwrought and terribly dated, what with the marihuana hysteria and whatnot. Not to say it doesn't have its charms, like Joseph Calleia as Menzies, sidekick and best friend to Orson Welles's Hank Quinlan, and Marlene Dietrich as Tana, who speaks those memorable last words about that friendship. But lead couple Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh are pretty much insufferable.

So yeah, I didn't really expect to be deaccessioning this one, but I am: ask and ye shall receive.

Future, tense

Tu seras mon fils (You will be my son)

Crit

This may be the best vinicentric film I've ever seen, and it's certainly the toughest one. Paul de Marseul (Niels Arestrup) is a right bastard of a vintner, who has no use for his son Martin (Lorànt Deutsch), even though the kid is essentially a Gallic Paul Dano, and c'mon, who could resist a Gallic Paul Dano?

Martin can studied viticulture in college, but Paul thinks he lacks the proper nose, and the proper terroir. Fortunately and unfortunately, depending on your perspective, the guy who has both happens to be the son (Nicolas Bridet) of Paul's longtime vineyard manager, François (Patrick Chesnais), who is dying of pancreatic cancer. François gets the benefit of all the paternal warmth denied Martin. It is no accident, I think, that Bridet looks as if he could be Deutsch's big brother, and the quasi-sibling rivalry is amped to a lethal level by Paul's cold-hearted machinations.

A hard but rewarding film to watch, and it made me damned thirsty.

DUI

North by Northwest

(1959)

Gee, it's annoying when I discover that the small point I was going to make this time around is one that I've already made in a previous review. But I can further update the old water-on-portside complaint: I now have taken a train north from NYC more than once, and I can confirm that indeed the track follows right next to the Hudson (portside) for quite a distance.

Oh, here's a question: granted, he's fleeing the bad guys, and granted, his judgment is more than a little impaired, but why does Roger go through all those hairpin turns without once even tapping the brake? I guess I always sort of assumed the baddies had cut the brake fluid line, but of course when the bicycle strays in front of him, he slams on the brakes then. Man, this movie is completely implausible!

Deadheads

To Die For

(1995)

Stuff I'd forgotten:

• that it's based on a novel by Joyce Maynard, who has a cameo as defense lawyer for Suzanne (Nicole Kidman)
• that the screenplay is by Buck Henry, who also plays a crotchety homeroom teacher

Stuff I remembered:

• that it's pretty funny, in a shooting-dumb-people-in-a-barrel sort of way

Stuff that meant nothing to me before:

• that the mother of Larry (Matt Dillon) is played by Maria Tucci, whom I now know to be married to a friend and author of mine, whose name I won't drop here, but through a bizarre coincidence, the film immediately above this in the index of titles is a documentary by their daughter about their son

On balance, a creepily fun entertainment, but I've had enough of it, so it's up for grabs. Click the link below to see what else is still free to a good home.

Can't be touched off the grounds

Short Term 12

Crit

As a rule I don't have much use for films that tread so shakily that tightrope between sentiment and sentimentality, and that telegraph their punches so consistently. But there's something about this slice of group-home life--troubled children tended by people who were children themselves only a week or so ago--that makes me cut it all the slack it needs. That something would be the spot-on performances, by the leads Brie Larson and John Gallagher Jr., but also by every young actor we see, particularly Kaitlyn Dever as Jayden, in whom the Larson character terrifyingly recognizes herself, and Keith Stanfield as Marcus, brilliant but seemingly doomed, as he approaches 18 and automatic ejection into the ugly world whence he came.

I knew where I had seen Larson recently--she was the other girlfriend in The Spectacular Now--but I spent the whole film trying to place the impossibly likable Gallagher, and now I'm going to look him up. Oh! Of course: he's the impossibly likable Jim in HBO's The Newsroom.

Anyway, see this.

Windy city

Clear History

(2013)

Been watching a lot of Seinfeld at dinnertime on weeknights, so had Larry David in my head just when DirecTV gave me a free weekend of HBO, so here you go. Trademark Davidian shallowness, though perhaps a bit more sympathetic than in Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I tried desperately (at least 3 seasons, maybe 4) to like before giving up. And mainly, just very funny.

Speaking of shallow, not to be ripping on the female star every night, but Kate Hudson's breasts are so massive and so unnatural looking in this that I just Googled "Kate Hudson" + "boob job," and yes, apparently I am not the only one to have had the thought.

Classy

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

(2004)

Peter Travers, in his roundup of this fall's movies for Rolling Stone, writes, "If you think 2004's Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy isn't funny, and I mean time-capsule funny, go screw yourself." Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say the film is unfunny--the surreal bits are mostly brilliant, and the rumble of the news teams is the best of the surreal--but time capsule? I guess I have to go screw myself. As is usually the case with comedies based on smart dumbness, this has way too many lulls of just dumb dumb.

And then there's that Applegate woman.  There are quite a few women born in the early '70s capable of great comic acting, but Applegate is not among them. Tina Fey is a year older; can you imagine how good this might have been with her in the role? OK, maybe the jokes about how sublime the character's ass are wouldn't have worked as well, but how big a loss would that have been? Or if you need those jokes, how about Cameron Diaz? Jenna Elfman? Amanda Peet? Applegate returns for the sequel, I see.

Behavior modification

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest

(1975)

No, this wasn't one of those fake Friday night deaccession candidates, where it has been 5 years since I screened something but I know I'm not going to give it away. My thinking tonight was that there must be some reason why I'd let so much time pass without watching this, and it certainly wasn't that I didn't look at the box a few hundred times. I started it thinking this my be the last time.

But no, I'm not ready to give it up quite yet. Much of it is calculated (and very successful, of course) Oscar® bait, but the astonishing cast is enough to carry the day. Call me crazy, but I'm keeping it.

Gruel

Mean Girls

(2004)

Remember? Remember the halcyon days when we could unreservedly root for the Lindsay Lohan character, and believe in her as an innocent seduced to meanness but able to overcome corruption via her innate goodness? When the only limit to her future was her seemingly limitless talent?

A smart script by Tina Fey, though it would have been smarter without the obligatory lesson learning.

Rachel McAdams, by the way, was 25 when she played a high school junior here, and had already had her much more grown-up run in Slings and Arrows. And if right now you're saying "What the heck was Slings and Arrows?" rent it now and thank me later.

The snows of killer Montana

Scarface

(1983)

It's true: though it's impossible to have been unfamiliar with many of the tropes from this film, I'd never seen it before. Now I have, and . . . well, yeah, it's pretty excessive.

Zero calories, loads of caffeine

Game Change

(2012)

I find that I have 2 things in common with Sarah Palin: (1) a deep, abiding passion for Diet Dr Pepper and (2) a tendency to freeze and withdraw when exposure of an area of ignorance makes us look stupid. True, the fact that Germany was on the other side in two world wars is not one of my areas of ignorance (and really, seriously, can that have been true of her?), but still, I know that feeling, and it made me much more sympathetic to her plight than I would have imagined myself capable of being.

And it's not just because the portrayer is My Future Wife Julianne Moore. In fact, my one misgiving about watching the film at all was having to see MFWJM as someone in whom I have invested so much animus, but it was not a problem, because the transformation was so complete that the first time she appears, on a TV screen, I thought, "Oh, OK, on TV they're using actual footage of Palin," until I searched the face more carefully and found traces of Julianneness.

The film is based on a book that in notably unsympathetic to Palin, and you can certainly see why McCain's people found her impossible, yet there's a complexity and--dare I say it?--humanity that makes her story of a sincere if loony ideologue in way above her head trainwreck-fascinating.

One cliché at a time

Sherrybaby

(2006)

Maggie Gyllenhaal is convincing as a parolee trying to stay off drugs and be a mother to her daughter, but there is absolutely nothing original or surprising here, least of all the big reveal that is supposed to shock us and explain much about why Sherry is where and who she is.

Worlds collide

In a World . . .

Crit

A smart and almost thoroughly delightful romantic comedy, driven by a mostly subtle feminist agenda. A couple of unfortunate in-case-you-can't-figure-this-out-for-yourself didactic speeches near the end only slightly dim the glow. Lake Bell wrote, directed, and stars, and let's see (in all 3 capacities) lots more of her, and the Jason Schwartzman-esque Demetri Martin provides perfect colleague/would-be-suitor awkwardness. Oh, and Eva Longoria is a damned good sport.

The World's End

Crit

Half of a hilarious film about a case of arrested development (and selective memory) played by Simon Pegg (who cowrote) seducing his boyhood mates into a very bad idea involving alcohol intake. I'm not really sure what is gained, though, when the film lurches into an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like science fiction plot.

Trailers

• All Is Lost--Robert Redford is the old man in the sea.
• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty--In the old days I'd have said this is a 5, which is to say I'm in barring disastrous reviews. Ben Stiller directs and stars.
• Getaway--Looks like a video game; what's Ethan Hawke doing in this?