Cold out there every day

Groundhog Day

(1993)

This is such a movie-and-sports-filled weekend that I considered giving this annual a pass, but dammit, when it's not even February yet and winter already seems endless, you need to know that escape is possible.

And I noticed something--someone, actually--I'd never noticed before. Late in the film I looked closely at Fred (you, know: Debby's fiancé) and thought, "He looks so soft, but could that be a very young Michael Shannon?" Could be, is, 19 years old in his first theatrical feature (and his last for 3 years). So given Stephen Tobolowsky's memorable role here, and given my current weeknight TV watching, that's two skeevy HBO characters represented in the film.

Music is God

2013 Oscar®-nominated documentary shorts, program A

Crit

OK, I'll readily concede that the chaotic functional form of Karama Has No Walls, about the catastrophic response of regime police and sympathizers to a mostly peaceful sit-in Sana'a, Yemen, in 2011 is grippingly effective; and I will certainly acknowledge the mind-blowing courage exhibited in Facing Fear, about the unlikely alliance in the cause of tolerance between a former skinhead hater and the gay man whom he'd help beat and kick nearly to death years before; and no doubt the two nominees I haven't seen yet (the docs are long for "shorts," so the program is split in 2) will have something to wow me.

But let's face it, platitudes notwithstanding, there can be only one winner, and it's hard to beat a cheerful, cherubic 109-year-old Holocaust-survivor pianist (The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life). Alice Herz grew up in Prague; Mahler and Kafka were friends of the family (Alice and her twin sister would go for walks in the park with Kafka). She became a concert pianist, married a similarly talented cellist Leopold Sommer, had a baby boy; life was beautiful. And then.

Had she not been able to entertain the Nazis, she probably would not be entertaining and edifying us today, but she was assigned to Theresienstadt, the camp used to propagandize how good the Jews had it, and she was skilled enough and lucky enough to avoid being moved along to Auschwitz. She and her son Raphael moved to Israel after the war, and he became a concert cellist.

"It doesn't exist anywhere in our world all bad," she says, and she doesn't just talk a good game. She seems genuinely to see the best in everything--even in Raphael's sudden, mostly painless, terrorless death at age 64. And even in her concentration camp experience.

Someone who saw the film with me complained about some tricky camerawork; I'm sure her criticism is accurate and valid, but I was so captivated, I was oblivious. Maybe not a brilliant film--hard to imagine how you could fail to make this woman unappealing--but what an astonishing human.

Each crime and every kindness

Cloud Atlas

(2012)

All right, I'll admit that the rapidfire serial cliffhanging seemed more gimmicky this time than the first, and the language was no less ordinary the second time around, but good god, if this be failure, what magnificent failure; if this be failure, I wish a lot more directors had the smarts and the stones to fail this big. I'll be spending the nearly 3 hours with this beautiful failure a few more times before I'm done.

Oh, and just for the record: no, I don't think it is a failure.

Still batshit after all these years

The Rocket

Crit

What a jewel: an Australio-Laotian film about a purportedly cursed twin, mangos, unexploded American ordnance, and the biggest James Brown fan in Southeast Asia. Oh, and skyrockets, shot in competition and in appeasement of the gods, and in apparent defiance of the irony of the UXO that litters the land. And what a land, by the way: locations include Thailand as well as Laos, but good golly, how gorgeous the forests and the mountains. The Criterion originally had this listed as a Christmas opening, and I was considering it for that day; it would have been manifestly apt.

This was, by the way, my first film paid for by my new subscription to MoviePass, and while their guidance is less complete than it might be, I think I've pretty much navigated the learning curve now and will be able to use the service problem free henceforth. Thirty bucks a month, plus a $25 initiation fee, maximum one movie a day, 2D only. So at the moment my cost per movie is nearly $60, but that's going to decline pretty quickly. Thanks to Nancy for tipping me to this.

A mess of flowers

Bonnie and Clyde

(1967)

"That snake Malcolm Moss (Dub Taylor)" is how I was going to start this, because Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) says very clearly (her last words, as it turns out), "Isn't that Malcolm?" when she sees the herpetic father of C.W. (Michael J. Pollard) at the side of the road, [spoiler alert!] ostensibly changing a tire on his truck but actually setting up the titular duo for the laws' lead overkill. Equally clear is the name "Ivan Moss" in the end titles and on IMDb. Oh, yeah: and here that is in the "goofs" page.

Anyway, I never forget that this is a great film; everybody who knows anything about film in the '60s knows that. What I do forget, because I always let years pass between screenings (7 this time) is how likable a film it is, or, more to the point, how much I like it. So yes, it was a reasonably legitimate deaccession candidate, but no, I won't be letting it go just yet to some good home other than my own.

Aren't you relieved to know you're not a golem?

Stranger than Fiction

(2006)

Yes, it's just as I thought when I saw this seven years ago: it's a film that's smart and slapdash in equal parts but could have been pathbreakingly brilliant in the hands of Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze. Or maybe Zoe Kazan and Dayton & Faris, who have since done the living fictional creation thing much better. This will always have a place in my heart, though, for giving me the happiest musical surprise of my moviegoing career in the part-of-my-early-'80s-West Virginia-life song (which I recognized the first time at the first chord change) that Harold (Will Ferrell) plays and sings for Ana (Maggie Gyllenhaal).

It's always heartwarming to see a prejudicedefeated by a deeper prejudice

Lone Star

(1996)

No, this wasn't one of those faux-deaccession-candidate screenings that I sometimes do on a Friday night. I was perfectly willing to have this film show me that I didn't need to see it again, but no, instead it reminded me that this is probably my favorite John Sayles film--a misdirection mystery that remains compelling even after the secrets are all familiar. Another thing that remains effective despite my anticipating it for the entire 2-hours-plus running time is the final line, one of maybe a dozen absolutely perfect last lines I know of in film. Anyway, no, you can't have my copy--but you can borrow it if you're close by, and if you've never seen this, you should.

Now we see the violence inherent in the system

Tian zhu ding (A touch of sin)

Crit

Four stories of China: a crime story that begins in blood and stays there; a story of political activism that ends in blood; and two love stories that have blood constantly on their peripheries. Just guessing, but I'm thinking you probably can't see this in a Beijing theater. Too bad, because it has a Tarantino vibe about it that might have a salutary effect there.

Fries with that milkshake?

There Will Be Blood

(2007)

Almost 6 years have passed since I saw this and anointed it the 2nd-best film (and a very close second, behind No Country for Old Men) of 2007, which was followed by the most extensive discussion of a film ever in these pages, with my old grad school buddy Kay Kalinak. I had completely forgotten the domineering score, though much else had stayed with me. Not as blown away by it this time, though it's a fair bet that part of that was having it reduced to a 42" screen--and being way more annoyed by that score than I seem to have been then.

The virtual rain in virtual Spain

Her

Crit

I had of late, though wherefore I know not, lost much of my movie mirth. As much, and as many months, as I had been anticipating this film, I was not wildly eager coming to the theater today. Now, postmovie, I'm in a very odd place, and I don't mean the café seating area at the Criterion. On the one hand, this film has restored my sense of the potential wonder of cinema. On the other hand, I'm half-tempted to quit while I'm ahead rather than stay for the planned second feature. 

But about this. It is several films, all of them wonderful. Most obviously, I suppose, it's the second brilliant riff in recent years on the Pygmalion myth. Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) doesn't create his operating system Samantha (Scarlett Johansson, invisible in one of her best performances), as Pygmalion creates Galatea and Calvin creates Ruby Sparks--but then Henry Higgins doesn't create Eliza Doolittle either. What Theodore does is shape Samantha into his ideal woman, even as she shapes him. 

Which is of course a toxic truth about human relationships, and this story of boy- meets-OS is as human a tale as any ever told. So many ways this could have gone horribly wrong, but writer-director Spike Jonze keeps it smart, keeps it funny, keeps it unsentimental, and keeps it painfully true. If I felt like changing my own rules, I'd name this my new favorite film of 2013.

Mr. Nobody

Crit

Two or three roads, each with various byways, diverged (triverged?) in a yellow wood, and the titular Nemo (Jared Leto) gets to take all of them, and that makes all the difference, or maybe no difference at all, in this extremely smart, if overlong, riff on choice and time and that good old butterfly flapping its wings a half-planet away.

This film has an usual history, as indicated by its release dates. It has apparently never opened in New York, or at least doesn't have a review on the Times website, and yet here it is in the 50-seat DVD-projection screening room in downtown New Haven. Anyway, glad I hung around for it.

Big house, big haunting

Rebecca

(1940)

For the love of god, you one-percenters out there, screen your servants!

I think I've figured out why this is great: by opposing Olivier's grandiose overacting to a perfectly plain, naturalistic style by Fontaine, Hitchcock somehow makes the unbelievably mismatched pair somehow believable. The haunting is about as creepy as anything he ever gave us, of course, but unless we really care about the improbable couple in improbable love, then how invested will we be?

Raise a glass to Joan Fontaine, by the way, who died about a month ago.

George Washington Bridge? Who does that?

Another year in the can, my 60th, more than half of them as a serious-in-need-of-intervention cinejunkie. At my age, I can be honest with you: this exercise is mainly just to remind me what I've liked this year. You're welcome to join me, but I'm not sure why you would.

January is, of course, traditionally a wasteland enlivened only by late arrivals of the year-end Oscar® fodder--but of course by my rules (year of my first screening is all that matters), those are eligible for lauding and listing. My first notable, in fact, was a 2010 release from Greece, the delightfully quirky Attenberg. Highlight of my first (of only 2) M4 was Barbara, love and betrayal in East Germany.

February began my devotion to Michael Apted's amazing "up" series: no reviews for the shorter 7 & 14 installments, but something (typically lots) to say about the features at ages 21, 28, 35, 42, 49, and (new in 2013) 56. I called Amour "the best film of 2012 that I'm aware of." Soderbergh went out with a bang, not a whimper with the Hitchcockian Side Effects.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga is probably not a great movie, but I have a real soft spot for the Herzog doc. And it was the best new thing I saw for most of March, until a trippy downtown double feature of Like Someone in Love and John Dies at the End. Highlight of the 2nd and last M4 was the sexual repression-via-exorcism Romanian film După dealuri (Beyond the hills).

April began with the discovery of Leo McCarey's 1937 Depression riff on King Lear, Make Way for Tomorrow. Habemus papam (We have a pope) was a gentle delight, like Bartleby the pope. Mud, late in the month, was, I guess, the first 2013 studio film of the year about which I got really excited--with another 19-century American hook, this to Huck Finn.

In May, Baz did Gatsby, and I was mostly wowed.

June brought the best is-it-a-documentary? of the year, Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell. Then the International Festival of Arts & Ideas brought Spike Lee and his moving-in-unexpected-ways 1997 doc about the Birmingham church bombings, 4 Little Girls. Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing was gorgeous in black & white. Céline & Jesse came back again, wonderfully, painfully, and, of course, verbally, in Before Midnight.

Scarcely saw anything in July, but a colleague and I agree that Fruitvale Station and Michael B. Jordan's performance therein got robbed, award-nominations-wise.

Initial enthusiasm for Blue Jasmine seems to have dissipated; August is not the time for serious grown-up movies. It's a good time for smart teen movies, though, and The Spectacular Now is one of the best ever. In a World . . . made us want to see lots more of Lake Bell, and then that New York cover came out, and damned if we didn't!

Saw a bunch of stuff in September, but only Nicole Holofcener's Enough Said really made an impression. Damn, but we'll miss the big guy.

October: Captain Phillips: remarkable and unbearable.

November: 12 Years a Slave: remarkable and unbearable. All Is Lost: again; this one evokes another Am Lit classic, The Open Boat.

Reliable December goodies. In Nebraska, Alexander Payne goes to Oz. In American Hustle, David O. Russell goes to the '70s and Jennifer Lawrence takes a hilarious holiday from Panem. And in Inside Llewyn Davis, Ethan and Joel go to the Village in the '60s.

Shall I rate? I suppose it would go something like . . .

9. Mud
8. Beyond the Hills
7. Before Midnight
6. All Is Lost
5. Nebraska
4. Inside Llewyn Davis
3. Stories We Tell
2. 12 Years a Slave
1. American Hustle

Pretty conventional, huh? Best 2012 leftover: Amour. Best weird: John Dies at the End. Oh, and one more thing: the balcony is closed.