How can you not be romantic about baseball?

Moneyball

(2011)

It's a double-trick question, of course. The answer is that you can't if you care at all. Hell, the reason I watched this tonight is that I was all gaga about the Mets' first spring training game of the year, and about the great work by our latest pitching prospect--chockablock, in short, with that hope that springs eternal, regardless of logic and evidence. But the other half of the trick is that counting on "baseball people" thinking with their sentiment is what makes moneyball work.

Also, how can you not be romantic about daddy-daughter stories, especially when the daughter is not only adorable but also artistic?

OK, now I have a decision to make, that doesn't really have anything to do with Brad Pitt, no matter how it seems: do I now finish watching the film I started last night before going comatose?

How he did

Koch

Crit

Another documentary where I was waiting for the obviously gay guy to come out. Well, no, I wasn't really waiting for that this time. In any case, unlike Bruce in the Up films, it's too late now for the mayor to surprise us by marrying a woman and fathering a couple of kids.

Koch clearly cooperated in the making of this film, and it hits less hard than it might--but I believe that the last time we hear the words "Ed Koch" in the film, they are preceded by a man-on-the-Manhattan-street's "fuck." And if he is given full credit for the housing initiatives that highlighted his second term, the three factors that brought him down in his third term--widespread corruption in his administration, accusations by Act Up and other gay activists that he failed to respond effectively to the AIDS epidemic, and his ham-handed handling of the Yusef Hawkins murder by white thugs in Bensonhurst--also get full play.

It's a portrait of a man, ultimately, who, regardless of the reality of his love life ("none of [our] fucking business"--fair enough, of you reject, as he did, the notion that by declaring himself, he could have helped the cause of equality), he had a lifelong love affair--sometimes stormy, sometimes unrequited--with his city. On that score, at least, he was out and proud.

Family

35 Up

(1991)

If the dominant demographic theme of 28 Up was wedding bells, here we hear the knell of loss: parents lost, husbands shed. But in fact, as far as we know (without explanation, neither Paul's orphanage mate Symon nor Neal's fellow Liverpudlian Peter appears in this installment except in archival footage), the divorce rate among this cohort remains remarkably low, and the two divorces--forJackie and Sue, two of the three East End girls--have been balanced by marriages by the two upper-crusters who declined to appear in 28, John and Charles.

Charles again opted out, but while adding a wife he has moved up to producer at the BBC. John, on the other hand, has an intriguing reason for coming back in front of the camera. Still a successful barrister, he has married the daughter of a former ambassador to Bulgaria, which turns out to have been his mother's ancestry, and while he remains steadfastly Tory, he has become committed to the welfare of that country, and he hopes that his appearance on the program will raise consciousness for that cause.

Cracks have appeared in Suzy's marriage, and she has become increasingly complex and appealing. But the cracks we (clearly, I was not the only one to notice) perceived in the marriage of nuclear physicist Nick and the equally ambitious Jackie were apparently illusory--or at least that's what Nick (now an associate professor; I expect him to be full at 42) says; Jackie has opted out of the series, along with 1-year-old Adam.

Toff Andrew has moved into corporate law and become a partner; East Ender Tony still drives his own cab, now on shifts with his wife, and his childhood ambition to be a jockey now manifests in the ponies he keeps for the 4 children.

The only never-marrieds are Neal and Bruce. Neal, one of the most exuberant of the 7-year-olds, has made some progress battling his demons. He's still on the dole, but he's settled in a council flat in the Shetland Islands, where he acts in the village pantomime (Beauty and the Beast this year; last year he directed the show, but because of his insistence on his own dramatic vision, he was not invited back to that role this year), writes plays, and is trying to organize a professional touring company for the islands. It would not be a surprise if he has become successful on his own terms by 42, but neither would it be a surprise if he doesn't reach that age.

Bruce certainly is a career success on his own terms: still teaching math, he is spending a year in Bangladesh, and though he brushes off the suggestion, it's hard not to see the 7-year-old who hoped to be a missionary and help Third World people "be, more or less, good." But I still see a tragedy in Bruce's personal life: he admits to "teenage-like crushes on people," but he remains careful not to specify a gender, an evasion that I suspect reveals far more than it conceals. Yes, yes, I know: he's not really our friend, he just plays one in the movies, and he doesn't owe us full disclosure, but his closetedness seems too profound to exist only when the camera is running. I'm hoping that at 42 he'll be in love and settled, but I'm not optimistic.

42 Up

(1998)

For the first time director Michael Apted asks participants the Heisenbergian meta-question of what the series has meant to them. Working-class Jackie says it had made the 14 of them family; upper-class Andrew says he'd never let his own son participate in such a program; his boarding school chum John says (or, rather, said without being asked in 35; for the second time in three installments, he has opted out) that the exercise is torturous; and Suzy (whose evolution has been among the most rewarding) says the same. But Aussie Paul acknowledges that it's a kick in the positive sense as much as in the negative; University of Wisconsin nuclear physicist Nick jokes that his ambition is to become as famous for a scientific discovery as he is for the series, "But that's never going to happen, Michael"; and Tony, who has moved from the East End to a house in Woodforde, Essex, but still shares shifts in his cab with his wife, contrasts the usual cabbie's bonus of finding a Paul Gascoine in his hack with his own experience of having fares regularly recognize him as a celebrity.

Notable developments in the lives of the two biggest puzzles: Neal, back in London, has been elected and reelected as a Liberal Democrat member of the Hackney Borough Council. He has received a B.A. in open university to teach English as a second language. That said, he remains unemployed and on the dole, but when Apted asks, "What's the most enjoyable thing in life for you right now?" he replies, stunningly, "I think it's looking to the future." Oh, and also, he read a prayer at . . .

Bruce's wedding! To Penny, a colleague at the East End Catholic girls' school to which he moved on his return from Bangladesh. "He's not the kind of man you'd ever have any doubts about," she says. Hmmm.

Back on the active roster is Symon, Paul's orphanage mate, and the only person of color in the 14. He was, by 35, divorced from Yvonne, the mother of his 5 children, and now he's married to Vionetta, with whom he has a 4-year-old son, Daniel (named for his never-present father; his anger over the abandonment has, he says, finally turned into boredom), as well as a stepdaughter she brought to the marriage.

Nick's marriage still seems solid--Jackie, burned by her portrayal in 28 (which to me seemed simply the portrayal of a woman who wasn't going to settle for being a helpmeet), still refuses to participate, but we learn that she too is a professor (of journalism) at UW, where, yes, Nick is now a full professor. The farm is getting away from the family--it's too much for his aged father, and neither brother is interested--and we return with him for a nostalgic trip to the Yorkshire Dales, a place whose beauty he proclaims "magnificent but rather grim."

Also solid, after 23 years, is the marriage of Lynn, who was initially the least prepossessing of the trio of East End girls, the one whose ambition at 7 was to work at Woolworth's. Budget cuts have ended her long tenure in a mobile library, but she now is a librarian who oversees class visits and has various administrative responsibilities. Her husband, Russ, cooks dinner during the week, and Lynn takes over on the weekend. She has quietly become the pleasant surprise of the series.

Her childhood pal Jackie, who before 35 had divorced the husband she had wed at 19, then quickly borne a son from a "brief but sweet" relationship, now has 2 more boys and has moved to her partner's native Scotland--except that Ian quickly becomes her ex-partner, and she's on her own with 3 children and rheumatoid arthritis, surviving with help from the state and a mother-in-law.

Tony has improved his family's lifestyle a bit beyond his earning power, and has also risked his marriage more than once via infidelity; a big change in the next 7 years would not be a big surprise.

And then Suzy, whose domestic contentment seemed in jeopardy at 35, continues to stretch: faced with the prospect of an empty nest and the consequences of her decision to be a stay-at-home mother rather than pursue a career, she is now training to be a bereavement counselor, for which she is uniquely suited, since she still grieves not only for her parents but for their marriage, which ended when she was 14, leaving her in a deep emotional hole from which she has heroically emerged.

49 Up

(2005)

Perhaps I've been wrong about Bruce, who now has 2 sons and finds himself "contented and reasonably happy." In any case, I love these people, but I've really had enough of them for a while. OK, I'll mention that Paul has had psychiatric treatment for his low self-esteem, that his daughter became the first in either family to attend university, studying archaeology, and that he has begun to run marathons. And I can't fail to mention that Nick has hit a hardware snag in his research, about the same time that his marriage to Jackie ended, but that he has found love again with Chris, an education professor at the University of Minnesota, about whom he says, without a great deal of exaggeration, "I don't want to be superficial, but she's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen." Or that Symon and Vionetta have become foster parents, that Tony remains married and financially overextended, having built a vacation home in Spain, and that John has returned to the series and continues to work for humanitarian aid to Bulgaria.

Lynn, asked my Apted whether, after 30 years of marriage, she's in love, tears up and answers, "Very, very much." But budget cuts further threaten her work as a children's librarian, doing some of her most rewarding work with handicapped children. Her childhood friend Jackie has a burst of anger at Apted, accusing him of underrating her throughout the series, but if he and we underrated anyone early on, it was this heroic East Ender.

And Neal's painstaking rebound has continued--we even seen him driving a car, which surprises him as much as us. He has left London and is on the Cumbria County Council, in the extreme northwest. He has some part-time earnings and an increased participation in the church, but he remains the only one of the 14 not to have walked down the aisle.

And finally, Suzy, so unpleasant at 7, at 14, and at 21, saying that for the first time she feels "happy in my own skin," but that after seven films, she is bowing out. I just checked the 56 Up website, and indeed, it looks as if I'll get to find out whether she stuck to that resolution on 1 March, when it's scheduled to open downtown.

Mobility

28 Up

(1985)

The biggest success story in the 4th installment of the series is probably the American immigrant: Nick, the farmboy, is an assistant professor in nuclear physics at the University of Wisconsin. His wife is also an academic, and they are one of several couples navigating the marital politics of the mid-'80s. For me, the years between 21 and 28 took me from married, childless, and in graduate school to divorced with a child and working as a sportswriter in Appalachia. The majority of the Up cohort went from single to married in those years--8 of the 14 joining the 2 who had already taken the plunge by 21. And in at least one case--the heretofore consistently unpleasant Suzi--marriage and motherhood has effected a nearly miraculous personality change; she has become interesting and interested.

Coincidentally, 2 of the 4 who remain unmarried declined to be interviewed for this installment, 2 of the trio of public school toffs. The eternally conservative John has succeeded in becoming a barrister, and is engaged to be married; the eternally rebellious Charles has become a journalist, an assistant producer with the BBC.

The other two unmarrieds are the most disquieting stories. Bruce, who at 7 wanted to be a missionary and remains the most outwardly devout of the group, has a satisfying teaching position (coincidentally, in the East End school attended by Tony, the would-be jockey, who has grown up to be a cabbie), but he shows every sign (visible at least from age 14) of being barricaded in the closet.

Then there's Neil, for whom it could be considered a triumph to be alive, as depressed and lost as he seemed at 21. Oddly, he seems a bit less gloomy at 28, but the main hope for him is that, after 7 peripatetic years on the dole, his circumstances have bottomed out. He's clearly intelligent and as thoughtful as any of the 14, and his critique of middle-class suburbia is hard to argue with. Yet it's cringe-inducing to hear him say, "I can't see any immediate future at all"--though he's quick to acknowledge that he has spent time among those with even less future.

On the other hand, working-class pals Jackie, Lynn, and Susan remain as resilient as ever, and as impatient with the series' insistent curiosity about class. Says Jackie, "We don't think about class until this program comes up once every seven years."

If all goes according to plan, those years are going to fly for me tomorrow: since I want to switch from streaming to disc when my billing period ends next week, I'd like to clear my Up decks this weekend. Three more installments will take them to 49, and 56 Up is said to be coming to town next month.

Go ask Alice

Side Effects

Crit

If this really is adios from Steven Soderbergh, he has gone out with a bang, not a whimper. For those of you who haven't seen this, I don't have much else to say except: do. Those who have can sweep the invisible text below to see what else I have to say about it.

If this really were a Hitchcock film rather than Soderbergh's Hitchcockian one, who would play Jude Law's psychiatrist character? At first I was thinking the creepy James Stewart avatar of Vertigo, but no, in fact, though Dr. Banks gets as manipulative as Scottie Ferguson, he doesn't ever lose touch with reality. Instead, who you'd want would be the Cary Grant of Suspicion: charm to the edge of smarm, to the brink of guilt.

As for Rooney Mara's Emily Taylor, I'm not sure whether any of Hitch's blondes would have fit, since they all turn out all right in the end.

Oh, wait, one more thing for everybody: remember when we didn't think Zeta-Jones could act?

Trailer

• The Last Exorcism, Part II--Mostly liked the first one, but skeptical.

In sickness and health

Amour

Crit

There's good reason why this is not titled "The Stroke" or "Helplessness" or "Despair" or "Diapers" or "Incoherence" or "Fury" or "Brutality" or "Stalking the Pigeon," even though those are all key elements of the film; but unlike those elements, the emotion linked to the title writer/director Michael Haneke chose infuses every frame.

Perhaps the placement of Emmanuelle Riva in the first scene of the film--an audience of 100+ people gathered for a piano recital--was chosen because of scientific research that has found that that's the first place one's eye alights on the cinematic rectangle. At any rate, hers was the face in the crowd that I first saw, one of only two faces that matter. She is Anne, and beside her is Georges, her husband (Jean-Louis Trintignant), and this is the last good night of their lives.

Growing old, it is said, is not for sissies, and neither is this film, but if you can endure it, you will see the best film of 2012 that I'm aware of.

Don't look back

Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus)

(1959)

I'll always remember this as the Carnaval after I returned from the Scary Normal premiere (about which more when I'm not borderline comatose) so exhausted that even some of my favorite samba and some of the most beautiful cinematic visuals I know could keep me from nodding off.

Give me the child

21 Up

(1977)

The third in director Michael Apted's series (but the first of feature length, following the half-hour television documentary Seven Up and the hourlong 7 Plus Seven) following a group of English children into adolescence and now young adulthood and then beyond. The series this year reached age 56, and 56 Up is said to be on its way to a theater near me, so I'm making haste to catch up aging with people who are, after all, just about my own age.

The declared motive motto for the series is the ominous Jesuit boast "Give me the child for his first seven years, and I'll give you the man," but even as early as 21, some of the fifteen or so subjects have begun to put the lie to that maxim, or at least are showing that it's true, but . . .

To be sure, poor little rich girl Suzy, thoroughly unpleasant at 7 and 14, remains thoroughly unpleasant at 21 (to be fair, you have to imagine that her parents are even worse), and her closest male equivalent, John, remains morally convinced of the rightness of the existing distribution of class privilege (but key word there is morally: John at least thinks about these issues, whereas Suzy's head seems never to have had a thought trespass on it). And East End tough Tony, though his dream of being a jockey ended in his teens, remains the same boy who declared at 7 the importance of knowing how to use one's fists.

But John's fellow proto-toff Charles, already wearing jeans and talking guardedly about hippies at 14, has by 21 come to examine the class system critically, perhaps his only point of agreement with John being that those of their privilege background are obliged to stay in England and bring their abilities to bear for the island's benefit. Nick, the only farmboy of the group, has succeeded at Oxford, while the middle-class Neil, perhaps the most exuberant 7-year-old in the bunch, has failed in his Oxbridge ambition, washed out of Aberdeen University in a year, and at 21 seems directionless and depressed to the verge of suicide.

I could yammer on and old (I haven't even mentioned the two boys from the orphanage, or the trio of girls from the East End, or Bruce, who began wanting to be a missionary and now chafes to admit his charitable tendencies), but hey, why don't you just start watching these yourself. The Jesuits may not have it quite right, but what is certain is that any life is the most compelling narrative there is.

Just like yesterday

Groundhog Day

(1993)

Twenty years, huh? OK, let's celebrate by hopping into the time machine and seeing what Roger Ebert thought of it. A mildly positive review, with a couple of sloppy errors ("Capitol" for "Capital"; Rita, who is new on the job, described as Phil's "long-suffering producer") and in general not much depth of thought--but that's sort of like criticizing a referee for missing  tricky call after you've had the luxury of watching repeated replays from all angles and at all speeds.

I'd give you Janet Maslin, too, but the Times site isn't letting me see it. Maybe next year, on the 21st anniversary.

What we've got here is a dead goat

Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts

Crit

• Dood van een Schaduw (Death of a shadow)--Literally. The conceit is that at the moment of death, a sort of photograph of the decedent's shadow, to be displayed Night Gallery-style by a macabre death-art connoiseur, can be taken . . . by a dead person. Ambitious, but really kinda silly.
• Henry--Elderly concert pianist haunted by visions or kidnappers or the past. Tries for poignancy, achieves little that's not obvious.
• Curfew--The standout for me begins with a guy bleeding out in the bathtub from his slashed wrists when the phone rings: his estranged sister, desperate for someone to watch her daughter Sophia for a couple of hours. Bonding between uncle and niece may be inevitable, but it doesn't ring false. Continuity alert: am I mistaken, or does Mom call her kid Sylvia at the end?
• Buzkashi Boys--The moment Ahmad declares that when he grows up he's going to be a famous rider of the wacky Afghan sport of the title (which involves toting a goat corpse while on horseback), we know he's not going to be around for the end credits, and that his pal Rafi is going to have to live on for his friend. The biggest surprise about this film is the beauty of the Afghan mountains--including, honestly, a junkyard mountain of derelict buses.
• Asad--Somali boy torn between the romance of piracy and the entreaties of a surrogate grandfather who would have him follow him in catching tuna. A bizarre, out-of-left-field ending somehow works.

Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts

Crit

• Maggie Simpson in "The Longest Daycare"--Team Groening is reliable if unspectacular, as Maggie battles her longtime unibrowed nemesis over the life of a butterfly. If you were making odds, you'd have to make this cofavorite with the Disney just on reputation, I suppose, though I wouldn't choose either.
• Adam & Dog--Lush backgrounds frame a story of the genesis and evolution of an interspecial relationship, set in Genesis itself. Smart and mostly unsentimental, this one is my pick, I think.
• Fresh Guacamole--Extremely short and extremely clever, if not particularly substantial.
• Head over Heels--A lovely metaphor of the divergence of lives in a long marriage. If this were to win, I'd have no complaints.
• Paperman--As I thought when I first saw this, it's perfectly serviceable Disney.

Bonus tracks

• Abiogenesis--Sci-fi trippy, Genesis from another direction.
• Dripped--Arsophagy: a word I've just coined for the consumption of paintings, by which one takes on characteristics of the works. As the title suggests, this ultimately becomes a Jackson Pollack tribute.
• The Gruffalo's Child--Yes, yes, it's nice to hear all those familiar Brit voices--though also a little odd since, the previous 7 films being essentially silent, I'd heard hardly any voices not belonging to my theatermates.

Impossible dreams

Oscar Nominated Documentary Shorts

Crit

OK, sensible plan to split the 3-plus-hours' worth of doc shorts into two programs, but it would have been an even better plan to give some hint of that plan on the Criterion website. Instead, my comrades and I showed up expecting a bladder-busting, butt-breaking marathon, only to be dismissed after a perfectly reasonable 2 hours. But unlike the theater, I'll exercise truth in packaging by admitting that I saw only the first 3 of the films listed below on Friday after work; I expect to pick up the other two later in the weekend.

• Kings Point--A lonely crowd of seniors in a retirement resort in Florida; as you might already have suspected, getting old and losing loved ones sucks. This is actually a pretty good film that got blown out of the water by those that followed.
• Mondays at Racine--A pair of Long Island sisters whose mother died of cancer open their beauty parlor one day a month for free services for women in treatment. Yeah, not hard to get emotion out of this, but good golly, this is a heart plumber--beautiful, human, funny, excruciating. It would be my front runner, but for . . .
• Inocente-- . . . this amazing portrait of an amazing 15-year-old artist whose exuberantly colorful paintings belie her homelessness, her loving but abusive mother, and the fact that she blames her 6-year-old self for her father's deportation and the loss of the family home. "I have a lot of impossible dreams," Inocente says, "but I still dream 'em." Besides excellence, what these last 2 films have in common is depressing subject matter transformed into uplift.

Saturday

I seem destined not to see these last 2 unless the tech guy arrives and fixes the projector by 7 or so . . .

OK, I admit it: I'm not the cinema warrior I once was. I learned when I came out of the live-action shorts that the projector had indeed been fixed, so if I wanted to wait until the 7:15 screening . . . and get home about 9 . . . still needing to roast potatoes and garlic for an hour to eat with the film I watch every year about this time . . .

Well, I'm sorry, but I didn't, and if you were counting on me to handicap Redemption and Open Heart for your Oscar party, I have failed you. But aren't you old enough now to have learned that sooner orlater everyone does? And anyway, is it likely that either of these is better than Mondays or Inocente? Long shot.