Oops

Obvious Child

Crit

The best abortion romantic comedy I've seen, though not the best abortion comedy. I'd have liked it a lot more but for two factors. First, the impossibly sweet and generous boy is played by Jake Lacy, who is a dead ringer for Timothy Simons, whose Jonah on Veep is impossibly unsweet and ungenerous. OK, that's my problem, not the film's.

A more legitimate complaint, I think, is that Donna (Jenny Slate), while she has a certain charm off stage, seems to think that confessional humor need only be confessional to be humorous. It seems to be an item of faith of the film that, with one grotesquely drunken exception, she is a very funny standup comic. Not being able to maintain that faith made it hard for me to extend her the slack that she requires to be either likable or particularly interesting.

Gaby Hoffmann, as Donna's doctrinaire and preachy yet somehow not off-putting best friend, steals the show, as she steals every show she's in. Maybe I should just start pointing it out if she doesn't steal the show.

You're eating my donkey!

La danza de la realidad (The dance of reality)

Crit

Let's see: does writer/director/costar/autobiographical subject Alejandro Jodorowsky leave anything out here? There's the Odyssey, the New Testament, and Cold War-era anti-Semitism and right-wing Chilean politics. There's opera and melodrama and an inventive homeopathic plague cure. There's Stalinism and bestiality (in spirit, if not in fact) and blackface-and-body incest (in spirit, if not in fact).

There is grotesquerie and there is awesome magnificence. It makes no sense, and it makes every sort of sense, and it is, if not the best, certainly one of the most memorable films I'll see this year.

Mister Nice Guy

Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon

Crit

"I spent my whole life trying to help people become famous," says the titular rock/entertainment/superchef agent, "but there's absolutely nothing that's healthy about fame."

Gordon, whom I'd never heard of and you probably hadn't either, comes across as a saintly but delightfully human JewBu (a Jew who embraces Buddhism, Michael Douglas explains) who hung out with Jimi and Janis and Groucho, who gave us Alice Cooper (with whom his relationship remains as loving as is possible without actual penetration) and Anne Murray, and whose most treasured accomplishment may be cooking for the Dalai Lama (DL sniffs the air . . . "Yak butter tea?" he asks. Gordon confirms. DL smiles: "That's why I left Tibet").

As schlubby-looking a man as ever graced the planet, he has loved and been loved by countless beautiful women ("Shep likes the ladies," says director and producer Mike Myers, and everybody else in front of the camera confirms it). His one disappointment is never having a relationship that survived to the babymaking stage, but he has been a surrogate father to many, and in particular to four grandchildren of one of his loves.

I'm guessing you could find people to say negative things about the guy if you wanted to,but Myers clearly loves him too much to have had any interest in whatever muck there might be to rake, and I have no complaints. A hagiography for my generation.

Down in the flood

Night Moves

Crit

Forgive me for not providing my usual long, exquisitely detailed review, but just going to a movie has already put me one World Cup match behind, so I have to get to the DVR.

But somebody reading this needs to go see this (yes, I'll say that much: a disturbing, quality film) and tell me whether I'm wrong in thinking director Kelly Reichardt needs to fire her editor (Kelly Reichardt). To wit:

• Did I just imagine the ecoterrorists saying that they had a thousand pounds of fertilizer and needed five hundred, rather than the reverse, which is obviously what was meant?
• And when they get in the getaway truck after doing their deed and drive away, are we not seeing a static scene through the rear window rather than the rear projection that should be there?

Weird. genuinely weird.

Get away from her, you bitch!

The Fault in Our Stars

Crit

Walking home from this, I was trying to think how I could describe how I felt. It took until I got home and got out in the park for a while with a gin & tonic, but I finally decided: I felt as if I'd undergone emotional chemotherapy.

A cancer kids story, a young love story, a parents-and-child story--a story, in short, that braves a whole shitload of cliché potholes and sentimentality potholes but miraculously, like the car Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort) pilots so badly, arrives at its destination in much better condition than merely unscathed.

A very funny, unrestrainedly weepy film that earns its tears as honestly as it earns its laughter. A gem, and following (500) Days of Summer and The Spectacular Now, the completion of a triple crown for a screenwriting team (Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber) that I'll henceforth pretty much follow anywhere.

Trailers

• The Book of Life--Animation style looks very interesting.
• The Maze Runner--Huh! Young people isolated and forced to play a game of life and death; how original!

Fathers and brothers

My Darling Clementine

(1946)

Maybe if I've seen a film many times and have nothing new to say about it, I should just leave it unblogged.

Every time we say good-bye

Edge of Tomorrow

Crit

I know someone who is not otherwise an idiot who finds Groundhog Day boring because of the repetition. This film, which clearly was pitched as GD-meets-The Matrix, holds up pretty well during the repetitions; it doesn't become boring until that part stops being at the heart of the story. Rotten Tomatoes numbers for this are in the high 80s, but I'm with the minority report from one Joe Williams of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "Edge of Tomorrow has neither an edge nor a vision of tomorrow that matters today."

Trailer

• Guardians of the Galaxy--A superhero movie with the tongue-in-cheek take on the genre that made many of us love Marvel back in the day; unfortunately, it doesn't look very funny. Hopes, but few expectations

Melting pot

Casse-tête chinois (Chinese puzzle)

Crit

It's those wacky kids from L'Auberge espagnole and Les Poupées russes (Russian dolls) again, and now they're all kind of grown up and living in or visiting New York and they have the problems grown-ups have--raising children after divorce, balancing the spark of infidelity against the warmth of commitment, confronting the existential conundrum of 11th Street intersecting with West 4th Street--but they remain the same people we had deeply mixed feelings about before (the opening credits show a triptych of stills of each principal).

It's a likable film, if not a particularly credible one--and really, did we need a French bedroom farce scene? These folk may not repay our enduring attention as well as Jesse and Céline, but hey, they're mostly French and they're all beautiful, so you make allowances.

350 miles east of LA

Out of the Past

(1947)

Ah, my favorite Bogey-less noir, screened tonight in honor of a good friend who seems to be in the middle of his own noir; here's hoping he ends up with the right dame and not a belly full of lead.

Ass flocked

A Million Ways to Die in the West

Crit

In January, when I signed up for MoviePass (yes, I know: I still haven't provided my promised review of the product; it's coming, it's coming!), I vowed that I wouldn't go to a bunch of films just because the card made it effectively free, and I haven't. (After all, there's no such thing as a free movie: once I've walked to and from the theater and blogged it, it has cost me > 3 hours of my life, which is a lot dearer than the $8 for a bargain matinee.)

But sometimes, you just have to. Sometimes, despite Rotten Tomatoes numbers in the 30s, you have to play a hunch, even if in your heart you expect it to be pretty awful. And so today I took my MoviePass and my low expectations downtown, and . . . laughed my ass off. And not only that: from the opening credits backed by John Ford's Monument Valley, to the explicit debunking of the genre's romanticism, to the fond embrace of same, this is as smart a sendup of the Western as I've ever seen.

Now once, I'd have said both of those things about Blazing Saddles, which I have of late found literally unwatchable, so maybe this won't hold up. But hey, for now I will readily proclaim this well worth the money I didn't spend (and wouldn't have spent) to see it.

Trailers

• As Above, So Below--Young people in metaphysical peril (yawn), but the setting--the catacombs below Paris--somehow makes it seem potentially smarter.
• A Walk among the Tombstones--This looks as it may be a cut above the programmers Liam Neeson has been paying the rent with lately.