Welcome to America

Remote Area Medical

Crit

The titular organization was founded to help people in South America deprived by poverty and distance from medical care, but as this documentary, set in Appalachian Tennessee, shows, the focus has pulled back to address the Third World as it exists within our own borders.

Bad teeth (and not always, as people tend to assume, says a woman about whom I'm sorry to say I'd already assumed thus, because of crystal meth), bad pumps (a 61-year-old who says he last saw a doctor when he was about 16 registers a blood pressure reading of 220/160), bad lungs (a smoker since 16 has her first-ever chest X-ray at 50 or so, and it shows scary spots), bad eyes, bad everything that can go bad in human physiology--RAM drops in with the focus and efficiency of Navy Seals and changes lives a weekend of free medical care at a time.

Way beyond inspiring, way beyond disturbing--especially when you think that this is the sort of duty accepted by governments of most developed countries, not left to the charity and organizational genius of people like Stan Brock, RAM's founder.

Wild

An  unusually political M4

Deux jours, une nuit (Two days, one night)

IFC

How to make this work: Sandra, laid off from her job after receiving treatment for depression, goes coworker-to-coworker, asking each to vote for her reinstatement, and thus against his or her own €1k bonus?

Well, it helps if Sandra is played by someone like Marion Cotillard, capable of conveying the embarrassment and the shame and the hopelessness of the process. Even so, this is something I can imagine being more successful in the hands of a brilliant short story writer.

She's Beautiful When She's Angry

CV

I still occasionally will see a successful young entertainer quoted as declaring herself "not a feminist." Any female, at minimum, and better, any human who rejects the label needs to watch this documentary, which collects a wealth of first-person reports from the women's movement's resurrection in the '60s, alongside but often bizarrely in conflict with the other freedom movements of the time.

Leviafan (Leviathan)

FF

Infidelity, venality, religion, religious hypocrisy, vodka, kleptocracy--right, all the standard ingredients of the Russian epic. Oh, and whales, too, whales dead and alive. The Job story, if Job were pretty much an asshole and drank way too much.

Arrête ou je continue (If you don't, I will)

FF

Marital exhaustion leads Pomme (Emmanuelle Devos) to stay in the literal and metaphorical forest when Pierre (Mathieu Amalric) leaves the literal, if not the metaphorical. 

For anyone with as big a crush as I have on both these actors, the terminal loss in translation, the insurmountable sadness, the same-magnetic-pole repulsion are heartbreaking. If this were a Hollywood movie, dammit, there'd be a way to make it right. 

Trailers

• Queen and Country--Brits in the Korean War.
• Timbuktu--And then the Islamists come to town.
• Il capitale umano (Human capital)--Sex and corruption in Italy? Say it ain't so!

Intel inside

The Imitation Game

Crit

So this Cumberbatch fellow everyone seems to be all gaga about, whom I'd scarcely seen before? He's really quite good as Alan Turing, sometimes referred to as "the homosexual who won World War II," though I think "the homosexual with Asperger's who won World War II and also invented the computer" would be more accurate.

A perfectly solid slice-of-biopic strengthened by the return to the sort of getoutatown-with-your-gender-limitations role that made me first love Keira Knightly. Yes, yes, I'm sure the process is vastly oversimplified for us not-mathematical-genius ticket buyers, but I'm even surer that failing to oversimplify would have been a fatal error.

Trailers

• The Woman in Gold--Based on the true story of a Holocaust survivor's quest to recover from the Austrian government of a Nazi-stolen portrait of her aunt . . . oh, a portrait by Gustav Klimt.
• Chappie--Another adorable robot story.

O, brother, who art thou?

Big Eyes

Post

Tim Burton's least weird film in . . . well, maybe ever . . . stacks the deck so effectively in favor of kitsch expressionist Margaret Keane that it's almost possible to believe that her paintings had artistic merit. Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz make it work, mostly. 

Top Five

Post

Chris Rock goes ethnically different Woody Allen, as has been widely noticed, but, as I've not seen mentioned, also snags a huge page from Preston Sturges,  specifically from Sullivan's Travels. 

And except for about 15 minutes at the start of the 3rd act, when it goes off the rails because the necessary romantic comedy complication takes the form of something that absolutely would never happen in the world of journalism of which the New York Times is the bedrock, he does fine things with that page. 

One of the film's many strengths is Rock's confidence in the script and in himself and Rosario Dawson--never better--to deliver that wonderfully talky script such that you never want them to shut up, except maybe to make out.

And the most subversive of Rock's many nods to his comedic ancestors of every ethnicity is the massacre of "Smile" by DMX, an in joke that is plenty funny even if you don't know that the music was composed by Charles Chaplin.

A nearly great film. Oh, but one thing: if you have zero sense of humor about JFK, you might want to go for your popcorn refill when Rock's Andre Allen (spoiler alert!) takes the stage at the Comedy Cellar.

Trailers

• Selma--Yes, of course, though I gotta say it seems weird to have Englishmen playing 3 key roles.
• The Age of Adaline--Looks like a distinctly inferior Benjamin Button.
• Fifty Shades of Grey--Opening on Valentine's Day, natch!
• Paddington--Looks awful.
• Get Hard--Wait, did I say Paddington looks awful?
• Unfinished Business--Wait, did I say Get Hard looks awful?
• The Boy Next Door--What was she thinking?
• Hot Tub Time Machine 2--Anything worth doing (which the first one was, marginally) is worth overdoing.

You are now in Bedford Falls

It's a Wonderful Life

(1946)

Decided I'd make no special effort to watch this, that if I missed a year for it, it was probably due for a rest. But damn, I'm glad I watched it: even with my attention distracted my email and Facebook, it was an extraordinarily rewarding screening. Damn, it's depressing; damn, it's inspiring.

Wishes are children

Into the Woods

Crit

Thoroughly enjoyed the whack-a-mole scavenger-hunt portion of the film, right up through the fake happy ending. The dark and complicated part that follows--which is, of course, most of the point--seemed too long, even draggy, and too light on the Sondheim lyrics that inject momentum whenever they're heard. Still, a perfectly acceptable Christmas afternoon screening.

Trailers

• Cinderella--This appears to be a straightforward live-action-and-special-effects version of the Disney classic (which made the Cinderella portion of the feature even more off-kilter, of course). Highlights seem to be Helena Bonham Carter as the Fairy Godmother and . . . the awesome glass slippers (which, the FG assures Ella, and really quite comfortable).

Is the pudding still singing in the copper, Peter?

Scrooge

(1951)

First Dickens I ever read, in my high school library, was a dramatization of this, done, I believe, by the man himself. Between then (1969 at the latest) and this year, the only other Dickens I read was Bleak House. This year, though, I declared Dickens year and read a shitload of Dickens, including, in the pat 48 hours, the short story/novella that was adapted for this film. So now I know . . .

Well, first, I've never seen an earlier film adaptation of this, so I don't know whether the makers of this film deserve all the credit, but there are lots and lots of changes in the Ghost of Christmas Past segment, and all of them for the better:

• in the novella, Fan is explicitly younger than Ebeneezer; in the film, he is the younger, and his mother died giving him life, which makes a neat parallel with Fan and her son Fred--and her deathbed scene, the most sentimental scene in the film, is also missing in the text;
• Ebenezer's betrothed, Alice, marries and has a daughter in the novella, but no moviegoer wants to know that the protagonist has no chance at love, so here she becomes an unmarried do-gooder; we also have a scene with her before Scrooge becomes a dick, which makes his initial love more credible;
• all of the business stuff is new: Fezziwig's business failure; Scrooge's meeting Marley; Scrooge and Marley's power play to seize the business; Marley's deathbed scene--none of it is in the source text, all of it is critical to the film's depiction of who, exactly, Scrooge is.

Except for Scrooge declaring himself "too old" for redemption, the interaction with the ghosts of Christmas Present and Future are essentially as in Dickens's text--the film's main contribution being the addition of the tearjerking "Barbara Allen" to the soundtrack--but the filmmakers recognized better than the master that the key to redemption is the past.

God, what a grand film!

Reversal

Foxcatcher

Crit

Channing Tatum is Mark Schultz, Olympic gold medalist in freestyle Not Smiling; Steve Carell is John du Pont, a clueless Richard Cory with serious mommy problems. It's a marriage made in wrestling hell, and Mark Ruffalo is David Schultz, the big brother caught in the cross-hand. Look for an Oscar® nomination for Carell's prosthetic nose. No, but really, it's a queasy-making film with powerful performance.

Trailers

• a teaser for the Oscar®-nominated shorts, in theaters at the end of January.
• Red Army--Olympic hockey on the other side; a documentary.

People are jerks

Inside Llewyn Davis

(2013)

Guest blogger Laura Burrone:

Full disclosure, I’m an unashamed, full-on, complete fan(atic) of the Coen brothers and incapable of an unbiased opinion. Now that that’s out the way, what the heck was that? I want to like this movie, but about midway through the story it was clear that there wasn’t a likable character among them. Even the cat is not himself. It’s a dreary story, with music that makes you want to jump off of the Verrazano Bridge (a nod to John Goodman’s character), but only just so. You can’t take your eyes off this movie, and you can’t wait for the next song. How did they do that?

Maynard Ferguson, not Ulysses

Maybe they Coens have the perfect formula for movie-making. Take various parts of amusing, horrifying, and bewildering but always leave a delicious taste in the mouth and you have the secret to their success.

Hammer and nail

Wild

Crit

A beautifully made and brilliantly edited film, and another great performance by Reese Witherspoon, who at 38 can still channel her inner Tracy Flick for flashback scenes. But I hope you're not asking me to like or admire Cheryl Strayed, author of the source memoir; I'll go as far as respect, but that's it.

Trailer

• Far from the Madding Crowd--Carey Mulligan follows 48 years in Julie Christie's footsteps.

There and back again

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Crit

Yeah, OK: insomnia last night, wine at the company holiday party today, so drowsiness was preordained. Still, I just felt (while awake) that I'd seen all this before. I'm ready to leave Middle Earth now, and I hope Peter Jackson is too.

Trailer

• Focus--Will Smith crime comedy. This may be the first trailer I've seen for an actual 2015 release. What will open downtown on Christmas Day??!!? Inherent Vice, I hope! Though I'll settle for Mr. Turner.

Grit

The Homesman

Crit

It's impossible not to associate this riveting story of a frontier female defiant of the limitations on her sex, embarked on a sacred mission with the coerced assistance of a rough-about-the-edges, rough-through-and-through coot, with another story that fits the same description--would be impossible even if the recent incarnation of Mattie Ross, Hailee Steinfeld, didn't show up in a small role near the end.

The film is unembarrassed by its debt to True Grit, employing key visual and thematic tropes, and its refusal to apologize makes the reliance easier to accept. Harder to accept are the independent assessments by two male gazes of a character played by Hilary Swank as "too plumb damn plain" and "plain as an old tin bucket," but even that works, because Swank's Mary Bee Cuddy, for all her protofeminist independence, knows she's plain, knows the rules, and, age thirty-one, pursues matrimony like the last berth on Noah's ark.

And in the end, it's not True Grit at all, but it is another dark, unpredictable tale on its own quest. This is the second big-screen feature Tommy Lee Jones has directed, each with a quest at the center, and I have no idea where he'll ask us to follow him next, but I'm there.

The book of right-off

The Babadook

Crit

This is addressed to my friend Lisa, who has an impressive collection of pop-up books: sorry, but you weren't around, and I couldn't wait to see it. Moreover, I don't know how high your tolerance for scary movies is, but I should tell you that this is the scariest film I've seen as an adult, a brilliant fogging of psychology and supernatural. The setup is this: Samuel (a perfectly cute/creepy Noah Wiseman) is a deeply disturbed not-quite-7-year-old, the disturbance arising from the fact that his father died in a car accident while taking his mother (Essie Davis) to the hospital to give birth. Without giving too much away, it also develops that Amelia is not quite the unconditionally loving mother she first seems. Into this standard haunting environment (locked basement door, dog occasionally barking at mysterious noises, cockroaches bursting from a hole behind the fridge) comes the worst children's pop-up book ever, or at least the one best calculated to keep anyone in the house from enjoying a night's sleep. And so it gets worse from there.

An absolutely terrific (in every sense) film, written and directed by Jennifer Kent, her first feature after a long and uneventful acting career. It is so good that I recommend that you skip it.

Ahead of the curve

Frank

(2014)

OK, let's compare that perfectly adequate biopic with this ambitious, weird, ambitiously weird, weirdly ambitious not-really-a-biopic-but-not-altogether-not-not-either, about a different sort of afflicted genius with an extra load above the neck.

Frank, too, seems in search of a theory of everything, but in the music of the spheres rather than in the spheres themselves. The oddness takes an unfortunately conventional turn late in the game, but until then this is as uncomfortable as anyone could wish.

My degeneration

The Theory of Everything

Crit

The convenient thing in making a film about history's second-most-famous ALS sufferer is that your narrative arc draws itself: promise, then tragedy, then tragic heroism, then triumph. The only surprise here is that a biography of someone so cosmically ambitious could itself be so atomically unambitious, not counting the ambition to rack up a few Oscar nominations via the time-tested route of the afflicted-guy movie.

Wait, I take that back: I had a huge surprise even before the film started: my MoviePass worked!

Anarchy in the KS

Vi är bäst! (We are the best!)

(2013)

This puts me in mind of Those Glory Glory Days, another film about teenage girls devoted to a "boys' pastime." There it was football (aka soccer), here it's punk, in the early '80s, when it was rumored to be dead, but 13-year-olds in Stockholm and 29-year-olds in Grafton, W.Va., were struggling to disprove that canard.

Bobo and Klara, with no skill but plenty of angst (i.e., the perfect punk DNA), recruit the Christian classical guitarist Hedvig--who has in common with them only the sine qua non: unpopularity--to join their nascent band. They survive parental repression and a Yoko Ono moment in an exhilaratingly empowering narrative. Loved loved loved it.

Persian white

Popcorn-for-Thanksgiving M3

OK, don't worry about my state of mind (or don't worry about it any more than usual), but after 3 movies that I enjoyed, I decided I'd rather head home and watch the Illini game only a couple of hours after it occurred than hang around for the 3D Godard film, especially since I realized that I'd thrown away my chance of using MoviePass, since 3D flicks aren't covered.

Why hadn't I already used MP on one of the 2 earlier films I'd seen at IFC, you ask? Because I was running so late that I entered the theater for the first one moments after the feature had begun, and the second while the short was in progress. Given my experiences with MP, I decided that using it for the one film of the day for which I wouldn't be rushed was the (as it were) ticket, but then I remembered the restriction too late.

Of course, I thought I'd try anyway, but the app informed me that it didn't have the theater's showtimes, and the thought of navigating that kink in the system--to try for a ticket to which I wasn't entitled--was more than I could contemplate

But hey, good news/bad news re ticket costs: when I checked my ticket stubs, I found that the cashier had TWICE assumed me to be eligible for the senior price of $10, so I saved $10 even without MP

And that's about all I have to say about my M3. Oh, wait, right: the movies:

Citizenfour

IFC

All right, I'm convinced: Edward Snowden may technically be a traitor, but that doesn't stop him from being a patriot in spirit. An extraordinarily static documentary that somehow manages to be fascinating, largely by playing on the tension between secrecy and transparency.

Le Jour se lève (Daybreak)

FF

Yes, Jean Gabin had a great face, and it's hard to imagine a better victim-of-circumstances protagonist, but it was hard for me to get past the implausibility that the police would let a killer hole up in his room long enough to flash back through the entire narrative that brought him to his fatal circumstance.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

IFC

I'm sorry to announce that this will not be Iran's submission to the Academy in the Best Foreign Film category. But damn, it oughta be.

The Girl, for whom no name is ever heard, has no explicit backstory, though it's clear that she likes rock & roll and prides herself on maintaining standards of morality consistent with being a vampire.

Beautiful black & white cinematography, strong soundtrack (including someone called Kiosk, who can fairly be described as the Farsi Tom Waits), a stunning, almost silent star (Sheila Vand, who undoubtedly spoke more words in the history lecture that opens Argo), and a touching love story with a Graduate final shot. Oh, and a character with some seriously badass tattoos. Oh! And a great damn cat!

Trailers

• Zero Motivation--A comedy about female Israeli soldiers.
• Arrête ou je continue (If you don't, I will)--Mathieu Amalric + Emmanuelle Devos = hell yeah.
• Leviafan (Leviathan)--Angry Russians.
• Risate di gioia (The passionate thief)--Mario Monicelli retrospective at Film Forum.
• Song of the Sea--Selkies, animated.
• Yume to kyôki no ôkoku (Kingdom of dreams and madness)--Documentary about Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.
• The Babadook--Hfs! The trailer scared the crap out of me. In!
• Goodbye to All That--Divorced dad has girlfriends.

Hearts and minds

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, part 1

Crit

People, come on: did you not notice the "part 1" in the title? Were you not expecting to be left in an awkward plot place? This is the closest to a riot breaking out that I've ever seen in a movie theater, including one young woman right behind me who would not be mollified by her boyfriend's logic and just wanted to get out of the theater right now, apparently in hopes that the sooner she left, the sooner she'd be offered part 2.

Difficult to make this semistory work, and the film does what I'd call an honorable, workmanlike job of it. I suppose I'll be back for part 2 (maybe right in front of the young woman in the previous paragraph), but the impulse will be obligatory closure, not anticipatory excitement.

Probably the first film I've ever seen whose locations were all in Georgia (our state, i.e.) and France.

Whiteout

Force majeure

Crit

Think of it as Macomber facing a big scary avalanche rather than a big scary animal.

Most of us, I suspect, never have the opportunity to learn what we would do if faced with potentially lethal physical danger. We'd like to think that we'd fall toward the right end of the hero-to-coward continuum, but it's one of those things you can't really have a dress rehearsal for, and most of us don't know.

This is about a man who is tested and fails, and it's less about the failure than about how you deal afterward with the wife and children who saw you run, with the world that has no idea or only a secondhand idea of what you've turned out to be, and how you reorder what you now know about yourself. And yes, being Swedish, the answers are as excruciating as you'd imagine.

Straight, no chaser

Rosewater

Crit

First, let me say that I've never been so fond of Leonard Cohen. I noticed in the end credits that the music supervisor was Linda Cohen, but I've been unable to establish whether the surname is coincidental. It's not exactly a rare name.

Jon Stewart nails it in his debut as screenwriter and director, adapting Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari's memoir, Then They Came for Me, of his Kafkaesque imprisonment and torture by the Ahmadinejad regime. We've seen prison and solitary confinement and torture in movies before, but I'm not sure we've ever seen as good an articulation of the  rhetorical question: who is the more imprisoned?

Whiplash

Crit

First, this: what sort of example does a film set to have two characters in an early scene chatting in the movie theater where Rififi has just started?

But wow. Another torture story, though one in which the victim is a lot more complicit in the process. Andrew (Miles Teller, whom we loved in The Spectacular Now) is an insanely driven drummer at Juilliard-in-all-but-name, and Fletcher (J. K. Simmons, who has been a wonderful character actor for ages without ever being remotely as scary and repulsive as this) is the abusive-for-the-art director of the institution's marquee jazz band. All you need to know is this: I came out of the first fine film of the day deeply affected by the protagonist's ordeal. I came out of this absolutely exhausted from the stress and anxiety--this a film where some blood does get spilled, the worst of it from excessively vigorous drumming. Holy christ, what a film. A lock right now for the year's best list.

Trailers

• Foxcatcher--Yes; would have been an apt completion of a torture triplet.
• Mr. Turner--Not big into art, but (1) Mike Leigh, (2) Timothy Spall, (3) hell yeah.

Wise blood

Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction

(2012)

I'm sure I'd seen the guy in a dozen movies before then (well, no: a quick scan of IMDb suggests that the number was only about a half-dozen, though supplemented by lots of TV appearances), but the first time I was ever really aware of Harry Dean Stanton was in Repo Man, of whose place in my cinepsyche I have given a fragmented account. Since then, I've never seen enough of him, notwithstanding his ubiquity, never gotten enough of that cracked-desert-earth face and the weird, sad stories it tells, even when the just-a-couple-more-cigarettes voice is silent.

This is a documentary, I suppose, 'cause what else are you going to call it, but really it's a conversation, with song--an extension of a featurette on the Criterion Collection's Repo Man. Harry Dean remembers, Harry Dean philosophizes, Harry Dean dismisses the interviewer's interpretations, and Harry Dean sings another old song, beautifully (in the same way Harry Dean's face is beautiful). And again, at < 80 minutes, not enough.

Dylan's dream

Interstellar

Crit

Well, that was certainly trippy, and certainly of an extremely high quality in every way. But it's one of those films I admire more than like, and unlike most Christopher Nolan pictures, it's one I doubt I'll ever feel compelled to revisit. I may be wrong: it's does have that daddy-daughter thing going, and I'm a sucker for that. On the other hand, I felt pretty uncomfortable hearing all these scientists talking about a "they" who were apparently making the salvation of humanity possible, but the less said about that, the less spoily.

Trailers

• The Interview--More silliness from Franco, Rogan & Co.

Preserve, protect, defend

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Failure to launch

Laggies

Crit

Well, duh: why wouldn't you prefer hanging out with cool teenagers to growing up when all the adults in your world, including those nearest and dearest to you, are either assholes or douches? But the damn near genius of this film is that it shows regression to an immature past self as a route out of stasis in an immature current self. The cliché monster makes an inevitable third-act appearance, but a smart story and a terrific cast make that sin forgivable. A very pleasant surprise.

By the way, not that the title really needs explanation, but if you don't pay close attention, you'll miss the one articulation and gloss of the term.

When we talk about

Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Crit

A heaping helping of All That Jazz, a hint of The Player, and plenty of slapstick as lubricant. Genius? Well, yeah, I think there's some genius in there somewhere, but then there's also an anticriticism rant and a bit of off-screen slap and tickle that don't really attach anywhere, as well as an oh-so-obviously thematically connected declamation of Macbeth's "Tomorrow x 3" speech that doesn't belong anywhere near genius. As one character is described, it's a great mess.

Trailers

• The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel--The sequel looks every bit as irresistible as the first one, which I resisted.

Relo

Beetlejuice

(1988)

Bonus Halloween-season screening, since I got a late start, and to prepare myself for anther over-the-top Keaton performance tomorrow, but I gotta say: surprised how bland and unfunny this is. Yes, the involuntary calypso scene is wonderful, and Keaton's commitment can't be denied, and it's a hoot to see Goulet and Cavett as self-important assholes, but it's just not a very interesting pic. It's as if Burton is trying too hard to give us something Burtonesque. Sorry.

I'm only sleeping

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The cabinet of Dr. Caligari)

(1920)

You'll probably be surprised to learn that I'd never seen this universally acclaimed silent classic. I may watch it again sometime, but it won't be for the psychological insights, which are rudimentary at best, or the acting, which is overdone according to the era's standards.

No, there's just one element of this film that I found stunning--but for that element, "stunning" is inadequate. There is not a single set that doesn't merit intense study, each with its own surreal geometry. I'm sure it's not literally true that there are no parallel lines to be seen anywhere, but they are rare--even doorjambs are rhomboid or triangular--which is impractical carpentry, I expect, but astonishing filmmaking. See this film, if for no other reason, to see it.

Career opportunity

Nightcrawler

Crit

Ah, the latest entry in the fast-growing subgenre of Creepy Jake. Here Jake is Louis Bloom, petty thief, inspired to a career change when he happens onto a wreck on the highway being filmed by freelancers.

If you just glanced at a synopsis of this film, you might think that it works the ambiguous border between news coverage and news exploitation (or news management, or news manufacturing), but no, there's no ambiguity here, or any journalistic ethics either. Louis is all ambition and self-help platitudes, unencumbered by even the most rudimentary moral sense. Which renders this a competent entertainment that provides nothing to engage with. For maximum enjoyment, your brain should be as disengaged as Louis's heart and soul.

Trailer

• Rosewater--Oppression of journalists, Iran division, written and directed by Jon Stewart.

Haunted

El espinazo del Diablo (The devil's backbone)

(2001)

Ah, a good old-fashioned ghost story with a Spanish Civil War background; early Guillermo del Toro.

Somebody to love

St. Vincent

Crit

I'd never call 102 minutes spent with Bill Murray wasted, but this may be about as close as it gets: a comedy that's intellectually lazy and emotionally sloppy, that buys most of its laughs and all its tears on the cheap--or maybe on the abilities of a formidable cast to make chicken salad from canned sardines. Murray does a bad Brooklyn accent as the titualar mistanthrope with a hidden heart of gold, Naomi Watts does a bad Russian accent as the hooker with a hidden heart of gold, and Chris O'Dowd does an excellent Irish brogue as the priest with an ostentatious heart of Crosby. O'Dowd actually provides some of the best laughs but none of the plausibilty the film desperately needs. What there is of that comes from an unusually restrained Melissa McCarthy as a mother who has left her cheating husband and is caught between imperatives economic and domestic; unfortunately, her son (the blameless newcomer Jaeden Lieberher), who inevitably bonds with the grump next door and liberates his humanity, is standard issue troubled kid number 14.

Breeze

Keep on Keepin' On

Crit

When Clark Terry was a young man with a horn, he eagerly pursued his education, graduating from "the Count Basie prep school to the University of Ellingtonia," and soon he himself felt a tug toward teaching--specifically from a skinny 12-year-old named Quincy Jones. Some 70 years later, Terry is still mentoring young jazz musicians, including a blind pianist named Justin Kauflin whom Jones has signed for his orchestra.

This is the sort of lovefest that can easily get goopy, but "beautiful"--Terry's favorite word--applies equally to the movie and to the man, who, on the topic of his own ongoing education, promises on the long-overdue occasion of his Grammy lifetime achievement award, "I'm 90 years, but I'm gonna keep at it 'til I get it right!"

To Eyre is inhuman

I Walked with a Zombie

(1943)

Don't be fooled by the National Enquirer-style title, and try not to pay much attention to the drab, plebeian language--or the drab, plebeian leading man. How this vodou riff on Jane Eyre works is via the dark, shadowy atmospherics that were the stock-in-trade for producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur. Not a great film, but a pretty effective one, and if you're looking for a 68-minute shiverer, this is an excellent choice.

Whatever the fuck the right thing is

Dear White People

Crit

What a thrilling, exuberant, ironic, ambiguous, ambivalent, messy, funny, sad, scary, discomfiting gem of a film. A population of stereotypes is dropped into an ecosystem of race and rhetoric, some grow, some shrink, but except for the 3 outright villains--2 of them white, 2 of them university administrators--everybody becomes a genuine, complex person, with a personal and political turf of his or her own. A clueless white person would be inclined to predict that Justin Simien, writing and directing his first feature, will become his generation's Spike Lee. But I won't.

Funniest meta-moment: hearing Dean Fairbanks, played by small-screen whore (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) Dennis Haysbert, warning his son not to be one of the hordes of young black men scrambling to get on TV.

Rubik's cube

Låt den rätte komma in (Let the right one in)

(2008)

Since screening this last Halloween season, I've read the novel on which is based, from which I learned that:

• the title is lifted from a Morrissey song;
• novelist John Ajvide Lindqvist tells a story well, if not with any stylistic flair (yeah, the translator might be at fault, but I doubt it);
• director Tomas Alfredson turned a long, detailed novel into a masterfully economical film, whose only arguably critical omission
• is hinted at a few times, most graphically in perhaps the film's oddest visual quarter of a second (necessarily missing from the mostly faithful and perfectly-adequate-if-you-just-refuse-to-read-subtitles U.S. remake Let Me In).

Glad I read it, and when the sequel novella Let the Old Dreams Die comes to the States in paper, I'll be glad to learn what happens to Oskar and Eli after the elopement that concludes this story, but the novel is serviceable prose; this film is devastatingly beautiful poetry, and I'll continue to return to it regularly.

A family affair

The Green Prince

Crit

Too implausible to be fiction, a documentary love story--a long, complicated love story that passes through all stages of manipulation, mistrust, and risk--between the son of a Hamas leader and the Shin Bet agent who recruited him as an informer.

All that you can be

28 Days Later

(2002)

Well, no, I couldn't really fit Inglourious Basterds into the Halloween theme, but I did find something with significant participation by the military.

Watched the DVD's alternate ending for the first time since using it for workout fodder years ago. Bleak. Maybe truer, but not as satisfying; they made the right choice.

I seem not to be able to post on this without the phrase "my favorite zombie film of all time"; so: there.

Hitler's chocolate bar

Fury

Crit

Show of hands: who else sees this title and automatically thinks, "The story of a horse, and  boy who loved him"?

Another show of hands: who else always wants to stick another r in this word?

Oh, by the way, the title character is a tank.

I'm not a big fan of war; I'm not even a big fan of war movies, but they serve the function of demonstrating why we've hardly ever lost a war. It's because we have Brad Pitt and they don't, whoever they happen to be in any particular war. And Brad Pitt, besides smirking like Brad Pitt and cracking wise like Brad Pitt, is humane enough to arrange a sweet virginity shedding between a callow piano-playing private and a music-loving German girl yet pragmatic enough to force that same private to murder a helpless prisoner lest he get his comrades killed by being unable to "do his job" (a job that everyone in the tank, now less callow private included, later agrees is the best job he's ever had). And mostly because Brad Pitt, as he'd already proved in Inglourious Basterds, excels at killing Nazis (and presumably other enemies he might come across), and at inspiring his men to do likewise.

I wonder whether I can watch Basterds under the aegis of Halloween month?

Back into the fruit cellar

Psycho

(1960)

Something I'd somehow never fully appreciated before: what a spectacular job Anthony Perkins does in Norman's parlor tête-à-tête with Marion (Janet Leigh), talking about Mother, taxidermy, and the traps people are born into; it's the heart of the film, and more to the point, it's Norman's heart on display.

Something I'd somehow forgotten: how intensely unpleasant the shower scene remains, after all these screenings. It's easy to see why the popularity of baths soared in the early '60s.

Sweet and sticky

La Chambre bleue (The blue room)

Crit

My favorite acteur français, Mathieu Amalric, cowrote (from a novel by Georges Simenon), directed, and stars in the most unhurried 75-minute murder mystery you'll ever see. Not only is it a whodunit, it teases us for almost the entire length re exactly whom it was done to. The only thing that's clear is that both Esther (Stéphanie Cléau) and Julien (Amalric) have motives (respectively, love and maybe love but certainly the best sex he's ever had) to have conspired in the doing.

Notable also as the only French film I've ever seen, and maybe the only film I've seen full stop, in which a character's job is selling and maintaining John Deere farm implements.

His father's eyes

Rosemary's Baby

(1968)

Hey! Why didn't somebody remind me that it's October, and that I watch scary movies all Halloween month long? Now I've wasted an entire weekend and two-thirds of the next! I may have to sell my soul to the devil to catch up!

Too true to tell

Kill the Messenger

Crit

You know me, Al: a sucker for a good journalism story, or maybe even one that's not all that good. I'm thinking about watching All the President's Men tonight, or maybe Broadcast News, and I'm wondering how much longer I have to wait for the second-season disks of The Newsroom.

And this was up to my not-particularly-exacting standards for a journalism flick: a reporter who values the story more than anything except, maybe, his family; a story whose enormity gets away from him; and the obsession that makes the heroism tragic. 

Clichés? Hey, this is journalism, not literature. Take your critical standards somewhere where they matter.

Trailers

Thought I sensed a theme here. First up was

• Blackhat--followed by
• Black Sea--and then my second look at The Imitation Game, a Black Bear production. But then came
• Inherent Vice--which certainly has an element of black comedy about it, but that's a stretch, and then
• John Wick--which is comic book nourish, but I'm clearly grasping at straws now.

Chasing Amy a bit farther

Since posting my review of Gone Girl, I've been thinking a lot about the film, in ways that even to describe would constitute a spoiler. So if you want to know what I've been thinking and don't need or want to avoid spoilers, I recommend Maureen Dowd's column today in the New York Times. Click here to read it; the criticisms of the film line up pretty solidly with what I have come to feel. She (supplemented by Gillian Flynn and Ben Affleck and David Fincher) supplies a powerful counterargument, though I'm not sure it convinces me.

In any case, it has been a while since a Hollywood flick has made my wheels turn as much as this one has, and if that's not a recommendation that you see it, I don't know what it. Then read the Dowd column.

Ψιλμ μαύρο

The Two Faces of January

Crit

Greetings from Patricia Highsmith Land, where ugly people, though often beautiful on the outside, kill ineptly, then gallumph away from the consequences. This story, a first cousin of Strangers on a Train, is told with splendid atmospherics, on locations ranging from the Parthenon to Knossos to the Istanbul souk, but it all comes across as a bit half-baked.

Pits and perverts

Pride

Crit

Oh. My. God. Simplistic. Sentimental. Manipulative. Stacks every deck. Telegraphs every punch. And oh, by the way, rare was the minute I wasn't laughing or crying or both, with chest-aching force. I loved, loved, loved this film, and if my daughter's voicemail weren't crap, I would already have exercised my one cinematic demand per year and ordered her to see it.

Granted, the buttons it pushes are among my favorites--gay activism, union activism, and anti-Thatcher activism--but it pushes them so skillfully, and so lovingly. And if it had offered nothing else, hearing Pete Seeger sing "Solidarity Forever" at the start and seeing Dominic West (right, The Wire's Jimmy McNulty) dance with flamboyant abandon would have sealed the deal. As joyous a film as I expect to see this year.

Trailers

• The Wedding Ringer--Attention, filmmakers: the competition for Worst Film of 2014 is now closed.
• Laggies--This could be awful, too, but it could also be lots of fun.
• The Theory of Everything--And this had me in tears just from the trailer.

No fear of the flame

Lawrence of Arabia

(1962)

This remains perhaps the definitive text on seduction: the seduction of blood, of influence, and especially of renown. Peter O'Toole was never more appealing or scarier, and I was struck on this viewing by how much coded (and sometimes maybe not all that coded) allusion there is to Lawrence's sexuality. Maybe one of the first films to suggest that being gay might not be so terrible.

Walk, about

Tracks

Crit

Truth is, seeing those camels did nothing for me as much as give me a yen to watch Lawrence of Arabia tonight, and if I'm going to screen that 4-hour trek across the desert on a school night, I need to get an early start. But not quite this early, which is a good thing, because an unfunny couple of things happened on the way to seeing this flick, leaving me with a couple of outraged emails to write:

1. Unsurprisingly, given past experience, especially since returning from vacation, when I'd had to call customer support twice in two uses, my MoviePass wouldn't behave. Except this time, no customer support was available (I suspect, notwithstanding the Varick Street business address, customer support is based on the West Coast, because I've been unable to raise them once before for pre-noon Eastern Time help), so after trying and trying and trying, I surrendered to cashing in some more of the 1,000+ Criterion points I was told I had before cashing in 200 for a ticket yesterday. But . . .
2. the cashier told me I couldn't. Something about "lifetime points," usable only for the concession stand (yeah, like I'm ever going to have a small popcorn). Can't remember whether I've mentioned this before, but this is not my first screwing re loyalty points, and while my loyalty is pretty much enforced by proximity and transportation limitations, I'm not feeling very loyal at the moment.

Do I have anything to say about the film, you ask? Well, yeah: I enjoyed it, particularly the gorgeous Australian landscapes, but I'm pretty stunned by the 80% Rotten Tomatoes rating; I didn't really find that much there there. Continuing my everything-is-connected filmic weekend, this is another child scarred by a parent's suicide, though she seems equally devoted to the dog that had to be put down when she was sent to live with an aunt and the one that accompanies her across the desert, such that late in the film, when she breaks down and sobs, "I miss her so much," the antecedent of that pronoun is not at all clear.

Another quietly strong performance by Mia Wasikowska, another obnoxious and/or endearing performance by Adam Driver.

Trailers

• The Imitation Game--Alan Turing and the Enigma machine, a story that has needed telling on film for a long time.
• Big Eyes--Amy Adams as the painter behind those once-ubiquitous kitsch waifs; Christoph Waltz as the slimeball husband who cheats her out of (saves her from?) recognition.

Genius envy

The Social Network

(2010)

I see I've never before commented on the perfection of the long opening scene, Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) working hard to turn a girlfriend (Rooney Mara) into an ex-girlfriend. It's not a flashy scene: a bar, lots of talk, mostly alternating shots of Eisenberg's face and Mara's, but it tells us everything we're going to need to know about the only character whose real-life avatar can't possibly be flattered by his portrayal.

And another thing: Mara appears in only a couple of other scenes; what did Fincher see in her that remotely suggested Lisbeth Salander? The guy has Zuckerbergian vision.

Chasing Amy

Gone Girl

Crit

Ah, David Fincher--dude can tell a circuitous, fucked-up story, though in this case a lot of credit must go to Gillian Flynn, who wrote the screenplay based on her own novel. Which makes the student of narrative in me wonder whether the story is structured the same there, because the structure of the film is perfect, except for not knowing where to end.

Not a whole lot nonspoilerish I can say except that almost nothing is as it seems. Also, I was thinking of another recent film that this plot reminds me of, which I thought was directed by either Fincher or Steven Soderbergh, but IMDb tells me I've misremembered that, and I can't even remember the title of the film, so no spoiler worries there. Oh, wait: I'm wrong again: it was Soderbergh, so don't click here if you don't want to be reminded of the film I'm thinking of.

Interesting pair of coincidences re what I saw yesterday: adult boy-girl twins at the center of each, and Boyd Holbrook appears as a skeevily sexy dude in each.

Day of the dead

The Skeleton Twins

Crit

Milo (Bill Hader): failed actor, gay; Maggie (Kristen Wiig): a serial adulterer pretending to be perfectly happy with her husband, Lance (Luke Wilson), who, let's face it, is the sweetest douche in the history of cinema. Both are permanently scarred by their father's suicide and their mother's bubbly indifference; both are scarred, too, by an incident in their youth in which one did something--either protectively or vengefully, but in any case life-alteringly--which the other has been unable to forgive in the ten years since.

The plot is mechanical--reconciliation made possible by simultaneous suicide attempts--but the characters are real and sad and lovely: each is the only person the other can ever love, which is awkward in so many ways.

Separation trial

Love Is Strange

Crit

I found myself using the word "underwhelmed" when relating my reaction to this, and upon review, I stand by that adjective, with the stipulation that I use it in a much more positive sense than I usually would. What I mean is that, once the diocesan shit hits the fan and George (Alfred Molina) is sacked from his Catholic school teaching job for marrying his long, long, longtime lover Ben (John Lithgow), everything that ensues is less catastrophic than inevitably ordinary: a home lost, enforced separation while staying with family and friends, the tensions that arise from that circumstance. I guess I was expecting car chases and menacing meteors, but no: it's just decent people being fucked with by an inhumane and hypocritical hierarchy. Like always.

Footnote: does Charlie Tahan, who plays Ben's nephew Joey, look like a younger Steve Zahn or what?

Le Big Mac

Pulp Fiction

(1994)

Except for a rough cut of the 2-minute film my daughter wrote and directed and I produced (i.e., took the crew's sandwich orders for), this 20th-anniversary celebration was the only film I watched while on vacation in Illinois. I still remember seeing that definition fill the screen of the old Showcase Orange (back when it was on south of I-95); and I still remember that Jennie Tonic & I gave it the rare compliment of seeing it a second time in the theater.

Lone Star graffiti

Dazed and Confused

(1993)

Richard Linklater does for 1976 Austin what George Lucas did two decades earlier for 1962 Modesto, and while I enjoy both films, I've never quite been able to see either as the watershed it's generally considered.

Geezers and geysers

Land Ho!

Crit

At last, the long-awaited film that gives old farts permission to be just as crude, sex-obsessed, and immature as we--er, they--were when we--they--were young! My standard careless, spoiler-avoiding scanning of reviews made me think going in that it's an Icelandic film with Icelandic codger buddies, but no, the codger buddies are an Australian and a rural Kentuckian long since transplanted to New Orleans. Iceland itself does star, though, in all (well, a lot, anyway) of its natural splendor. The only false notes are a couple of music-video frolics that seem out of character, and the music itself, which is almost exclusively lame.

A boy and his dog

The Drop

Crit

I admire this film for not feeling the need to explain a telling but overlookable character detail, but perhaps I admire that caginess because, having spent 15 years in Catholic schools, I'm in on the bit

Tom Hardy--oh, right: he was Locke!--is Bob, an achingly earnest American innocent in the tradition of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield; Noomi Rapace is Nadia, the damaged, enduring presumably Romanian-American immigrant (named for Comaneci); and James Gandolfini, in his final role, is, sadly, just pretty much Tony Soprano, though a less volatile one. Nothing very surprising here (at least if you're paying attention, even if you weren't raised Catholic), but nothing that feels like a cheat, either. A solid, enjoyable, eminently missable film.

Trailer

• Wild--A long walk unspoiled by golf.

Masque of the bed death

Eyes Wide Shut

(1999)

I like to think I'm a pretty smart guy, even a relatively sophisticated film viewer, but all I get out of this is that sex is dangerous--or, specifically, that getting access under false pretexts into a mansion where masked, powerful men dally with masked, commodified women is perhaps not the way to solve the trust issues in your marriage. I may not be smart enough to get this movie, but I could have figured that out on my own, and probably in less than 165 minutes.

Disappointments: (1) this was the U.S. theatrical version with the fig-leaf humans curtaining off the serious fucking, and (2) FORTY-FIVE MINUTES of commercials in the 3½-hour IFC timeslot, plus that annoying shape, size, and sound violation of the closing credits, so that they could show more self-promotion, plus a bad comic going into a coffee shop uninvited and unannounced.

First impressions

The Trip to Italy

Crit

Seriously, I'd spend 105 minutes with these guys (Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon) in The Trip Stuck on the Roundabout Northeast of Stoke. Yes, the food looks fantastic, yes, Capri and Tuscany and the Amalfi Coast are if anything even more beautiful than I remember, and yes, the nods to a plot (parenthood, sexual infidelity) are harmless, but what really matter are the puerile buddy humor and the competing De Niro impressions. If you aren't embarrassed by the incontinence of your own laughter, we are very different, you and I.

Why you probably don't want MoviePass

A long-intended review
First, click here for a 2-week free trial; if you love it and experience none of the annoyances I'm about to outline, and if you'll use it enough to save money, by all means go for it--it'll get me a $10 credit.

I signed up in late January, so I've had plenty of time to negotiate the unnecessarily steep learning curve and form an unemotional opinion. And since this weekend I'll achieve a milestone--my per-movie cost using the service will dip below $6 for the first time, and assuming I average 5 uses per month henceforth, it will, barring monthly peeks above the line when the charge hits my credit card--I'm in to stay.

Why MoviePass is more awesome than not for me

1. That's it: cheap movie admissions, nothing else. Though I could add the fact that when I use the card at the Criterion, which is to say virtually every time I've used it these 8+ months, and the vast majority of times I'll ever use it, my Criterion Club card is credited according to the price I'd pay for my ticket, if I were paying for my ticket, thus getting me to my next free admission on that card, thus lowering my overall moviegoing costs even further. But that's just further "cheap." That's it: nothing cool about it, nothing mind-expanding, nothing otherwise pleasurable. Cheap, and ever-cheaper the more you use it, and I use it a lot.

Mitigations of MoviePass's awesomeness, part 1: institutional
When I was told about MoviePass, it sounded magical: pay $30 a month and go to movies free. A better way to put it, I guess, is that it sounded too good to be true. And so I discovered it to be, partly before committing, partly not until I started using it:

1. Before you start paying your $30 a month, you have to pay a $29.99 "initiation fee," so in other words, you start with an extra month's fee to amortize over the coming months. (I actually made a spreadsheet to chart my costs, so I watched my per-movie costs drop from $59.99 to $10, jump back up to $12.86 when my second month's fee came due, then head back down. It dipped under $9 for the first time in early March, under $8 a month later, under $7 shortly after that, and now the $6 barrier is finally about to be breached. But I've used it > 5 times a month on average; most people wouldn't.
2. "Wait," you say, "I read this blog faithfully, and I'm sure Blab goes to more than 5 movies a month." Indeed I do. But I can't use MoviePass for every one. For example, though there was a survey suggesting that they might extend savings to 3D movies, currently those are not covered. Which may not be a big deal to you (personally, I've been to 6 3D flicks since I've had MP), but . . .
3. The service is limited to one film a day. Correction: on the website it used to say you could go to a movie every day, but that was true only if you went to a film with exactly the same showtime every day. Doubtless inundated by complaints of false advertising, they've now corrected that to say one use every 24 hours, meaning that if I use MP to see a Friday postwork flick, as I often do, I can't use it for a Saturday matinee. Since I'm disinclined to go to an evening film, that means that I'm limited to 2 uses on a normal weekend, combining either (1) postwork Friday with Sunday or (2) Saturday with Sunday, making sure that the showtimes are identical or in ascending order. In short, it takes some flexibility out of my itineraries.
4. Oh, one more minor thing: presumably to prevent me from lending out my card so that a friend can see a film I loved, MP can be used only once for any one film.

Mitigations of MoviePass's awesomeness, part 2: logistical
But that's just the rules of the game: more restrictive than I initially imagined, but still, given the frequency I attend movies, well worth the $30 a month plus initiation fee. What irks me is the complications of using MoviePass, some of it by (dumb) design, some of it by crappy soft- and/or hardware. Here's the process I'll follow Saturday or Sunday, when I go see The Trip to Italy at the Criterion:

1. At some point on my walk to the theater, I'll turn on the GPS on my phone and turn off the wifi.
2. I'll load the MP app.
3. I'll select the Criterion from the list of area theaters.
4. I'll select the film and showtime from the theater's list.
5. I'll wait until I'm in the lobby or just a few feet away to click the Check in at the Theater button that appears after step 4.
6. A Checking Location message will appear, and with luck, after a few seconds, a Purchase Your Ticket box will appear.
7. At this point, I can turn off the battery-eating GPS, turn the wifi back on, and close the app.
8. I'm not sure whether the theater's ticket pickup kiosk even works, but because I need to get credit on my club card, I get in the ticket line. (The one time I used the card at another theater, I was able to complete my transaction at the kiosk, though I had to select my film on the screen, rather that automatically imparting that information by swiping my card.)
9. At the ticket counter, I tell the cashier which film I'm seeing and hand her, in addition to my Criterion card, my plastic credit card-esque MoviePass card for her to swipe.
10. She gives me a credit card-esque slip to sign.
11. At long last, I get my actual ticket, yes, for "free."

OK, given that we are said to be living in an age of tech miracles, that seems like a ridiculous number of steps to go through for this automated process (granted, I believe it's the theater, not MP, that requires my signature), but wait! There's more!

1. You're wondering why I have to turn off my wifi, right? Well, it took me a long time to figure it out, but I finally realized that the process was often getting short-circuited by a wifi signal fading in and out; the MP transponder apparently demands a solid signal for several seconds to get the job done. Since I stumbled onto this workaround, my troubles completing the transaction have been much less frequent.
2. Now, when I turn on the GPS and wait a few seconds before loading the app, you'd think it would immediately know exactly where I am, right? But in fact, more often than not, I'm told that there are no theaters in my area and invited to change locations.
3. When that happens, one option for "change" is, oddly, to use my current location. I always try that first, but as often as not, it continues to insist that no, I'm nowhere near the movie theater I'm walking to, or any others. So . . .
4. I then have to type in my friggin' ZIP Code. Which invariably works.
5. After step 4 in the previous list, I'm told to wait until I'm within 100 yards of the theater before continuing. OK, I don't see the point, but that's the rule. Except that I have often been standing in the friggin' lobby before hitting the Check In button and been told that I'm ALMOST THERE!
6. I've only recently discovered that the correct response is to hit Cancel and start over. The intuitive response--backing out to the previous page and trying again--accomplishes nothing; sometimes exiting the apps and starting over does, but sometimes not. This, I remind you, while standing in the lobby of the theater. Several times I've been reduced to . . .
7. calling tech support, which generally goes pretty quickly, and they're able to push buttons in their remote location that get me through step 8 above--except, that is, for the times I've gone to an 11am film and there was no one at tech support. Fortunately, in those cases I was finally able to get the damn thing to work.

So is it worth it for me, somebody who sees enough films to get his per-flick cost below $6, and who also has a fairly high threshold for violent response to frustration? Absolutely. Is it worth it for you? Well, if you see 4 films a month at $12 a pop and have a moderately high frustration threshold, I'd say yeah, probably. But if you see 3 films a month and have a low frustration threshold, I doubt that the savings will be worth the annoyance.

Want two weeks free to compare my experience with your own? Click here. But don't say I didn't warn you.

Chance of a ghost

If I Stay

Crit

First thing I did after watching this was call my daughter to tell her that if she ever writes a family like this, I'm retiring as executive producer. But it didn't even occur to me until after articulating that to myself that in Scary Normal she already wrote an infinitely more palatable version of the same family.

In the present film, the protagonist teenage girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) is comparable to SN's Chelsea, and is the one well-drawn, recognizably human character in the family. And like Chelsea, Mia is the "normal" one who doesn't fit in--the one into classical cello while her ostentatiously hip parents and cloyingly clever little brother groove on dinosaur rock.

But while all three subsidiary characters are objectionable on merit, what really made me happy to see them all killed in a car accident was how written their dialogue sounded, how painstakingly crafted to make them lovable.

This film is drawing sub-50% on Rotten Tomatoes, and I wouldn't have bothered with it at all had not A. O. Scott compared it to The Fault in Our Stars, which I loved. Without going through the whole Lloyd Bentsen-vs.-Dan Quayle shtick, let me just say that this is no Fault. It in, in fact, a sort of cynical riff on two adolescent fantasies: (1) guilt-free family elimination and (2) the sorrow and regret of those left behind by one's own death.

That said, it's not terrible. Moretz is a big part of why it's not terrible; another is rock music ostensibly produced by a band in the story that doesn't suck, a rare accomplishment indeed. I wouldn't go so far as to recommend it, but if you have MoviePass and can see it for free, you may discover that it's not a complete waste of time.

Trailer

• Dolphin Tale 2--Oh. My. God of aquatic mammals. This looks very much as if it could be the worst motion picture ever made.

His mistress's voice

The Truth About Cats and Dogs

(1996)

Well, this isn't remotely as good as I remembered it, but it does demonstrate emphatically why Janeane Garafalo went on to become the Carole Lombard of her romcom era.

Seriously, what the fuck happened? She's barely sufficiently not-conventionally-beautiful for the critical Cyrano trope of this highly implausible plot to work, sort of, but with all due respect to Uma, who could be in a room with both their characters and not be drawn irresistibly to the real Abby? Why has Garafalo not had a huge career? She turns 50 next month, so it sure ain't happening for her now. What a Hollywood waste.

Big Twinkie

Ghostbusters (1984)

Crit

It' true, I still owe you an in-depth review of MoviePass, and I think that's coming soon, around the time I reach an important milestone with the service, but for now suffice it to say that I probably would not have gone to this 30th anniversary rerelease two months shy of my 12-month standard between screenings (as Dr. Venkman [Bill Murray] says of not having sex with possessed clients, it's more of a guideline than a rule) if I hadn't been able to do it at the cost of nothing but going to a film later in the day than I typically do on Saturday.

Which would have been too bad, because this is a film that to a surprising degree rewards a big-screen viewing again, no matter how well you know it. And having phoned my daughter on the walk to the movie theater and discussed taking her to see this when she was 8, I was particularly attuned to the scary bits and finally have to admit that while it is funnier than scary, it's a lot scarier than I've ever given it credit for.

Trailers

• Annie--Talked to my daughter about this on the walk home, and we agree: great cast,looks awful.
• Dumb and Dumber To--What's surprising about this trailer is all they were able to get away with without getting a red band.

To have loved and lost

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

(2004)

Had pretty much decided to watch this, rules be damned (see today's earlier post, plus the title of my previous post for this film, linked above, for clues to why), but was stunned to discover that it was technically eligible for Friday night screening anyway, six years having passed since I'd screened it. Stunned because I love the film so much, but maybe not so stunning, 'cause gawd, the uncompromising truth of how sick we get of those we love and how fatal that fatigue can be is so freaking painful to watch.

As for my seeming neurological symptoms earlier in the day, they seem to have gone away, at least for now.

Stepford Inn

The One I Love

Crit

Oh! It all makes sense! Director Charlie McDowell is actually Charles Malcolm McDowell, his middle name provided by his father. His mother is Mary Steenbergen, who provides the telephone voice of a character's mother, which of course makes his stepfather Ted Danson, who plays the couples therapist who refers Ethan (Mark Duplass) and Sophie (Elisabeth Moss) to the sprawling love nest where all the weird shit happens.

To wit: each encounters a Doppelgänger of the other, at first unknowingly, and then with different agendas. I would be hard-pressed to explain the precise metaphysics at work here, but it is certain that only one person from each pair of doubles can leave. It's not an unsatisfying film, but it's one of those you wish the likes of Charlie Kaufman or Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry had been involved in.

But on another topic: if this is my last post, it is because something has eaten my brain. It started nibbling about 1:30 this afternoon, and it continued to nosh during the movie. Actually, that doesn't seem the right metaphor, though it's difficult for me to describe what is happening. Maybe the best metaphor is that the TV feed of my consciousness is getting occasional blips from a program unrelated to the one I'm tuned to, though that's not quite it, either, because I'm never conscious of the blip except in retrospect, though then it is indeed as faint as a pirate TV signal. And it seems that the blips happen only when I'm concentrating on something else, so not for the past hour or so, during which time I've been obsessing on it. No, I did not knowingly ingest a psychoactive drug; I'd be having a lot more fun with this if I had. As it is, it has a perversely enjoyable element, and it is by no means terrifying (though check back with me later for an update on that).

Gethsemane

Calvary

Crit

Implausibility is piled upon implausibility, from the setup (in the confessional of a village church in coastal County Sligo, a nonpenitent tells of having been raped by a priest beginning at age 7, and of his plan to kill his confessor in a week precisely because he's a good priest) to the timing (the priest's daughter from a prevocation marriage arrives for a visit after a suicide attempt) to the setting (a breathtakingly beautiful land seemingly populated by the oddballs from a stack of Flannery O'Connor stories--thus plenty of suspects for the audience to weigh [the priest knows who his promised killer is]). It's a clockwork plot, and not much about it makes sense.

And yet: Brendan Gleeson plays the priest with a conviction and sympathy I couldn't resist, Kelly Reilly plays his daughter ditto, and an ensemble including Chris O'Dowd, Aiden Gillen, and M. Emmet Walsh creates eccentrics that are appealing if not necessarily believable. Oh, and did I mention that it's largely a very funny comedy?

A film I liked much more than I know I should.

Trailer

• Birdman--If these were the old days, when Jennie Tonic and I used to rate just-learned-about films from 1 (would take the best reviews imaginable to get us there; example of a 1 we ended up loving: Babe) to 5 (would take the worst reviews imaginable to keep us away; example of a 5 we ended up skipping: Prêt-à-porter), this would be a 5.

Grand illusion

Magic in the Moonlight

Crit

I see it clearly: a man and woman, not lovers but clearly on the heavily trod romcom road from mutual antagonism to passion. They run into an observatory to escape a rainstorm, and that interval accelerates their progress toward couplehood. Oh, wait: that's not the future I'm seeing; it's the past.

There's a good movie in here somewhere, maybe even an excellent movie, about faith and fakery and science, and given the excellent films Woody has made in recent years, I'm not about to suggest he's not the one to have found that better movie. But look, the guy is pushing 80. I'm sure he doesn't have sex as often as he did when he was 35; I doubt that he plays clarinet at Michael's Pub as often. Should he maybe think about making a film every other year rather than cranking them out as if they were coming off the GM assembly line? After all, even the GM assembly line is not as prolific as it was in the '70s.

Trailers

• Love Is Strange--Yes.

Silver watch

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

(1949)

This will never be as good as Fort Apache--there Wayne had Fonda to play off of; here his biggest rival is an otherworldly gorgeous Monument Valley. This is also a little less complex in its treatment of the Indian wars: Fonda's Custer-like colonel in Fort Apache is noble but vainglorious; in this film, nothing suggests that the recently deceased Custer was anything but an iconic hero.

On the other hand, the love story is marginally less sappy.