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?