Final cut

Me & Earl & the Dying Girl

Crit

The latest entry in the thriving subgenre of films about teens with terminal diseases based on YA novels that, notwithstanding the clichéd easy tearjerk subject matter, are intelligent and genuine and genuinely moving is all that, but it hadn't occurred to me going in that another thriving subgenre was in play: the film set in a city that is treated with love and insight . . . and is Pittsburgh!

In 1993 it was surprising just to see an aerial shot of the Confluence in Groundhog Day; seven years later the Iron City was a character in Wonder Boys (based on a novel by Pittsburgher Michael Chabon). In the past half-dozen or so years, we've had Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Adventureland, Love and Other Drugs, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and The Fault in Our Stars (a member of the other subgenre here, of course), and those are just the ones I've seen (and doesn't count the ones where the city stands in for another city presumably more expensive to film in). It's fair to say that Pittsburgh has pushed into the top 5 U.S. cities most loved by the movies; New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles will probably always top the list, but Pittsburgh may be jostling with Chicago for 4th.

And I'm in favor: I have long had a soft spot in my heart for Pittsburgh, where I first heard Elvis Costello live, first caught a baseball at a big league game, first went deep in debt to buy my first decent sound system. And a good friend is a proud Pittsburgher, which provides a booster shot for my boosterism.

Trailers

• He Named Me Malala--Documentary about you know who. Looks unmissable.

Panic

Heaven Knows What

Crit

Junkie life from the inside--based on an apparently fictiony memoir by the lead actor, Arielle Holmes--provides a perspective I would love to describe as empathy, but I have to confess that what it really makes me feel is deeply smug relief that my life never wandered across the path of heroin and urban poverty and love remotely as self-destructive as what Harley feels for Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones, in a vampirically creepy role). An intensely unpleasant film that is doubtless good for us to see.

N.W.A*

Dope

Crit

It's time for another installment of The Caucasian Tourist: ten months ago it was Dear White People, which ended up being my favorite film of 2014. This look at young stereotype-flaunting-and-flouting African Americans (well, one has only 13 percent African heritage, per Ancestry.com, but still . . . ) is only my second-favorite film of the weekend, but then it was a kickass cinematic weekend.

Malcolm (Shameik Moore) and his mates Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) and Jib (Tony Revolori) are geeks--they make music (as Awreeoh; say it aloud), ride skateboards and bikes, and get good grades--who find themselves fish out of their depth when it falls to them to sell a pair of huge bricks of Molly to provide deniability for the rightful owner.

A smart, funny, heartfelt film that earns its didactic epilogue.

*aptitude

Trailers

• Straight Outta Compton--The story of the other N.W.A(.)
• Rock the Kasbah--Bill Murray as a rock promoter in Afghanistan. Naturally.
• Self/less--From the solidus that brought us Face/Off.
• We Are Your Friends--Oooh, this looks like a bad young-white-people movie.

Almost blue

Inside Out 3D

Crit

I hate to say this, because it sounds like hyperbole and I'm not even sure myself whether the afterglow will fade, but while watching this, I felt as if I was watching one of the best films I've ever seen.

That judgment may not stand; this one certainly will: it is one of the smartest treatments of psychology in the history of cinema (by a strange coincidence, one of the dumbest, Spellbound, was playing next door), and maybe the smartest treatment of memory. (Perverse double feature: this and Memento.)

But if you want to take your kids, I should warn you: they will be traumatized. Maybe not so much by the film itself--though there's some seriously scary shit going down--but certainly by the spectacle of their parents alternating between hyenaesque guffaws and bansheelike wails. In fact, the film will probably inspire many children to study psychology, to try to figure out what the hell is up with Mom & Dad.

Trailers

• Shaun the Sheep--From Aardman's; 'nuff said.
• Hotel Transylvania 2--I don't remember a first one, but this doesn't look awful.
• Pan--Live-action Neverland backstory.
• Also teasers for Zootopia and The Good Dinosaur (premise: what if that meteor had just missed?).

Raised by (reservoir) dogs

The Wolfpack

Crit

A stranger-than-fiction documentary about six brothers whose Peruvian-immigrant father would not let them out into their Lower East Side neighborhood (their midwestern mother homeschooled them) but provided them experience of a sort, bringing home hundreds of VHS tapes, the movies on which became the boys' lives. Inside their apartment prison, they act out scenes from their favorite films, recording their own versions.

Darker abuse is hinted at, against mother and boys, but somehow they have survived, even thrived in some respects. One by one they seized their freedom, though all still lag, understandably, in socialization skills. When last we see them, they are making their own original movie, about a man who sees the world in all its joy and pain pass by his window. And for what it's worth, even their father accepts a role in their film.

Dances with raptors

Jurassic World Imax 3D

Post

I needed this much in the same way that I sometimes need to eat an entire big bag of Cheetos in a single sitting, and the guilty, kinda sad gratification was much the same. I'm not sure what the analogue is for orange fingers, but if I come up with anything, I'll let you know.


Anyway, it was just as advertised: smart dinosaurs, dumb people, and a jokey antifeminism whose joke isn't funny enough to be forgivable.


In retrospect, I really didn't need this bag of Cheetos, in fact would have been better off without it, but it's too late to do anything about it now.

Trailers

• The Man from U.N.C.L.E.--Hey, I didn't even care about the TV show, though my big sisters insisted that we watch it.
• The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, part 2--Well, I must, mustn't I?
• Ant-Man--Yes, I'm inclined in favor of this bit of Marvel obscurantism.
• Everest--Sentimentality because it's there.
• Also saw expanded versions of trailers I'd seen before, a Terminator one that gives away an important plot point and an Imax 3D one for The Walk that makes this platform look like the way to see it if it's going to be seen.

Plummet

Sunshine Superman

Crit

The ostensibly inspiring story of Carl Boenish, pioneer BASE jumper, which is to say jumper from buildings, antennae, spans, and multiple high outcroppings from Earth, his penultimate of which, with his wife, Jean, set a record for the highest such successful jump, his last of which, a day later, solo, was fatally unsuccessful. 

Key word "ostensibly." I admire the pursuit of worthwhile efforts for which I lack the requisite intelligence and/or physical capability and/or sand, and I would class BASE jumping among those pursuits, but frankly, Boenish seems to have been a manifestly silly man, and his death--on a jump he had established days before was undoable--seems to have been effectively if not literally a suicide.

Spy

Crit

Well, yes, this is as consistently hilarious as advertised. I have just one thing to say: Jason Statham: who knew?

Trailers

• Paper Towns--Yet another potentially excellent film based on a YA novel.
• Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation--Yeah, whatever. Actually, looks  fun.
• Trainwreck--I'd read about this and wasn't sure I approved, but I laughed more at the trailer than at some feature ostensible comedies, so . . .
• Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials--Sequel to something I never considered seeing.
• No Escape--Owen Wilson and Lake Bell in a thriller.

Wasn't made for these times

Love & Mercy

Crit

With outer demons like that, who needs inner demons? 

Golly! I expected to like this bifurcated biopic of Beach Boy Brian Wilson (Paul Dano plays young Brian, John Cusack an older one, a much-discussed casting and structural strategy that bothered/distracted me not a whit), but I never imagined I'd be sitting here listening to Pet Sounds and telling you this was one of my favorite films of the year, and one of the most remarkable filmic combinations of terror, tears, and thrills that I've ever encountered. 

That listening to Pet Sounds thing, incidentally, is a yardstick of how your general sensibilities jibe with mine: if you can watch this film and not feel compelled to listen to that album at your next opportunity, . . . well, I won't say we don't have anything to talk about, and I would never suggest that our being very different people reflects badly on you, but we are, then, very different people. 

Because the thrill--the element I loved the most in a film whose every element I loved--comes in the scenes during which that one-of-the-five-best-albums-in-rock-history is being shaped, sans vocals, in the studio. Breathtaking.

The terror comes from Brian's abusive father (Bill Camp) and especially from his later Svengali Dr. Eugene Landry (Paul Giamatti), who makes Murry Wilson, who killed 95% of the hearing in Brian's ear with an early blow, then withheld all approval from the young genius, look positively angelic. The tears come with Brian's suffering at the hands of those father figures, and the hope offered by the woman who sells him a Cadillac (Elizabeth Banks, in a role that reminds us that she can do more than crack wise) and stuck around through the deepest shit to be his wife, and mother of five children, today.

I can imagine an intelligent viewer hating everything about this film that I love; I can't imagine anyone being lukewarm toward it. And that's the best thing I can say about any work of art.

Trailers

• The End of the Tour--Jesus! After this came the trailer for Amy, and I thought, "Are we getting all the dead-tragically-young trailers?" and sure enough, next was Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Anyway, this is Jason Segel looking and sounding pretty damned amazing as David Foster Wallace, with Jesse Eisenberg as his interviewer and Anna Chlumsky as his wife. It would take the worst reviews ever to keep me away. Though I don't think I could take it as a double feature w/ Amy.
• Ricki and the Flash--Meryl as a rocker (and Mamie as her daughter) could be a disaster, but I hope not.

So what

I'll See You in My Dreams

Crit

First thought: this must have been an especially challenging film from which to cut a trailer, and I admire the sensitive decisions the trailer cutters made in terms of what to reveal and what to reserve. The result is a trailer that deceives a bit, but defensibly. Because . . .

Second thought: yes, this is a romance between Carol (the luminescent Blythe Danner) and Bill (Sam Elliott, who's pretty damned luminescent himself--and his character's boat is named for a Miles Davis song), but it also has more going on, more interesting stuff, like the question of what, exactly, is left as one approaches the end of a good life long lived.

Third thought: oddly, not particularly is Carol's interaction with her bridge-playing, golfing, speed-dating, and dope-smoking buddies, though they're played by actors I'm always happy to see, June Squibb, Rhea Perlman, and Mary Kay Place. The problem, I think, is that their exchanges sound too written, too much designed to sound what like four old broads would talk about. I wanted to love the other three characters, but there was nothing there to make it happen.

Fourth thought: that the title song is not the song we assume it will be, given that the protagonist is a torch singer of a certain age, who karaoke-croons "Cry Me a River" (and no, not à la Joe Cocker), is probably a joke on the sweet but callow young character who writes it and on Carol, andcertainly a joke on us.

Final thought: take it from someone with a history of rodential agonistics, you will never in a million years catch a rat like that. 

Trailers

• Learning to Drive--My future wife Patty Clarkson's character is far from Happy-Go-Lucky.
• Pawn Sacrifice--Tobey Maguire as Bobby Fischer; I'm in.
• Irrational Man--Woody's new one, with Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, and Parker Posey.