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.