Bêtes noires

Year-end bring-the-bastard-down double feature

Frost/Nixon

Post

Way disappointed in this: far too melodramatic, and unnecessarily so, given the drama inherent in the material. I suspect there's more truth about Nixon in Dick.

What a year for Toby Jones, playing enabler to the two most hated presidents of my lifetime.

Valkyrie

Post

Less disappointed in this because my expectations are lower: just kinda bored. And watching von Stauffenberg's wife, children, and secretary stare worshipfully at Tom Cruise got old really fast.

Trailers

• State of Play--Good cast led by Russell Crowe as a newspaperman, so I have to be a 4, but I saw the trailer twice and less than 24 hours later had to remind myself what it was about, which can't be a good sign.
• My Bloody Valentine 3-D--Oh, golly, how long have we been waiting . . . ?
• And how disappointed am I to have gotten to the end of the year without seeing a trailer for Hotel for Dogs? It opens in just 23 days!

Vows

Doubt

Crit

Interesting that the did-he-or-didn't-he question is almost completely unimportant to us; what matters is the mechanics of doubt and faith and certainty. Of course, for those of us whose parents entrusted us to the care of warped, repressed dictators, there's interest too in seeing how they got that way, and I think I understand a little of the mechanics of that as well. Streep and Hoffman chew their scenery admirably, Viola Davis steals her one scene, and Amy Adams seems a bit at sea (more than her character is supposed to, i.e.). And Shanley, what's the damn deal with those shots where the camera is tilted 30 degrees?

Trailers

• Sunshine Cleaning--Amy Adams again, which always means possibility.

Mortification

Ha-Sodot (The secrets)

Crit

Starting with a funeral and ending with a wedding, this only occasionally goes where you expect it to, and then not by the expected path. The one consistent theme is the role of woman in Orthodox Israeli society, but along the way we also visit love and tears, selfishness and denial, guilt and atonement, kabbala and klezmer. Some scenes seem familiar--the secret mystical ritual from the teen spook film, the fumbling embrace from the lesbian awakening film, the fiancé pontification from every New Comic plot ever--but in context they're all fresh, since all are in service of the central question: what can life in this world hold for a young woman who knows she's smarter than every man around, with the progressively less persuasive exception of her father (and who has in any case seen the consequences for her mother even of her well-meaning father's smothering love)?

Thankfully, the film makes no attempt at definitive answers to any of its questions (well, aside from the fiancé's being irredeemably assholish and well dismissed).

My back pages

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Crit

Well, that was a perfectly OK Xmas flick: smart, beautifully shot, a little sentimental but not grotesquely so, but the notion that David Fincher and Eric Roth have served up some sort of profound meditation on age and aging is, well, backward.

I was expecting more from the special effects--young-but-old-looking Benjamin was an impressive incorporation of Brad Pitt's features, old-but-young-looking Benjamin not so much. But holy cow: I was certain that wasn't Cate under the crone makeup in the frame story, but unless IMDb isn't listing nonagenarian Daisy, it must have been Cate. Notwithstanding, the frame, with a wooden Julia Ormond as Daisy's daughter, is awful, goofily, pointlessly bringing Hurricane Katrina into the story. And the other aging effects on Blanchett are less convincing. Oh, and hey: here comes another Fanning down the pike: Elle as 7yo Daisy.

As to the two-ships-passing-at-middle-age story, well, it's done better than in The Confessions of Max Tivoli; I had a pleasant Xmas afternoon in a packed movie theater. But let's not get too excited: it's just a slick entertainment.

Oh, and on the implausibility scale, having a central character who ages backward pales in comparison with having him describe a character played by Tilda Swinton not only as "not beautiful" but as "plain as paper." Oh, please.

Trailers

• Last Chance Harvey--Opened elsewhere to ho-hum reviews today; iffy even if it comes downtown.
• The Ugly Truth--Looks ugly indeed; Heigl needs a new shtick, maybe a new agent.
  

Plus court d'eau

Some philosophizing that I intended to include at the start of the Slumdog rev. but forgot: Christmas Day is sacred to me, in that, like all good Jews (or wannaJews, as I characterize myself), I demand an appropriate film for my Xmas matinee entertainment (and later, good Chinese food for dinner). But this Xmas, I think you'll agree, presents a problem in that respect.

Opening downtown on Xmas: lots of choices, but none a clear-cut Harry Potter or Lord of the Ring winner (or even a Catch Me If You Can--a Spielberg film opening on Xmas? Oh, my people were out in force that day!). Mostly what my son-in-law calls sad-bastard movies: The Reader (the Holocaust is a good Xmas picker-upper; besides, I just read the novel and didn't love it, and the reviews have been pretty weak); Doubt (another good holiday-spirit mood: did the priest boof the young student or did he not? revs haven't been good for this, but I'll see it--but not on Xmas); Valkyrie (a plot to kill Hitler; a feel-good Xmas movie only if they succeed; plus: Tom Cruise); The Spirit (which they've added since the last time I checked: hot Scarlett in a pulp-comic book flick might be fun, and I liked Sin City, but I don't want to put all my chips on it); and Ha-Sodot (The Secrets), which I do want to see, but not on Xmas. And then there was Benjamin Button. I read a novel this year that was exactly this plot and was disappointed in it, and the trailer hasn't erased my skepticism; still: Blanchett and Swinton, so I was assuming I'd be in, barring terrible revs. But I was too skep. to bank on it for Xmas. Which left the already open Slumdog and this one. Initially I thought, gotta go Slumdog on Xmas: probably not great, but at least a feel-gooder. But I changed my mind late, deciding that certainty of quality trumped non-sad-bastardness.

In any case, it meant no Xmas Eve film, 'cause then I would be banking on one of the Xmas openers. And then yesterday I checked Rotten Tomatoes.com, where Button is getting a stunning 89% in early reviews. True, one of those is by Rex Reed, but still . . . So Conte today, Button tomorrow. Geez, it's hard being me. You want to hear my dinner plans now?

Un Conte de Noel (A Christmas tale)

Crit

Wow. Am I getting squeamish in my old age? I still watch the needle go in when I give blood, but there were some penetrative medical procedures here that that gave me some serious willies.

As I recall, the reviews I've read of this take at face value that Junon (Catherine Deneuve) and Henri (Mathieu Amalric) don't love each other, but I read their relationship as much more complex than that. I don't think a mother and son can so directly and good-naturedly exchange declarations of indifference without sharing an understanding that they might not call love but that functions much like that emotion.

In any case, this is one of those subversive French films that delights in giving American audiences hints to glom onto that the final scene will be one of tearful reconciliation between mother and son, between sister and brother--I mean, hell, it's got Christmas in the title, doesn't it? Well, I can guarantee that my audience was not left unsatisfied by the lack of a pat ending, since I was it.

Whaddya know?

Slumdog Millionaire

Crit

Spoiler alert! The answer to the question asked over the opening titles is (D).

Danny Boyle, he of the messy masterpieces Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, goes to messy Mumbai and makes an ingeniously plotted Well-Crafted Film. Well, that's OK; good luck resisting it anyway.

In amongst the Big Themes like Destiny and Eternal Love and shit, there's one really interesting one: the randomness and unpredictability of what we know. More than once I've been praised for my knowledge of one trivial fact or another by someone with zillions of useful facts at his or her disposal that are not part of my package. But it's the card on the table that gets the attention--and in this film, it's the card on the table that takes the trick.

I'd say something about the final Who Wants to Be a Millionaire question in the film, but that really would be a spoiler. But if you see it, you'll know what I wanted to ask: so answer in a comment.

Trailer

• The Wrestler--I haven't bitched lately about a trailer that gives away too much, but this is a tmi classic. I'm in for the film, of course.

Voglio la donna

Holiday season M5

A unconscionably long time between Ms, and since the calendar doesn't provide an actual 3-day weekend this yule, I had to steal one. But what a one, the definition of what I do this for: foreign, indy, revivals of classics I'd never seen, and every one a gem. (Let's see: one film with more than a handful of lines in English, that one from Australia; one film by an American director, that one almost entirely in Japanese.) And I discovered the perfect place in the IFC/Film Forum neighborhood to grab a quick sandwich and maybe a nice beverage and, if so inclined, an ass-kicking dessert (try the Dirty): Sweet Revenge, 62 Carmine Street, east of Seventh Avenue.

Höstsonaten (Autumn sonata) (1978)

IFC

Why can't we all just get along? Bergman directs Ingrid Bergman as a faded concert pianist and Liv Ullmann as her daughter, who is convinced that nothing she has done has ever been good enough for Mom. After a little preliminary sparring, they essentially go at each other with emotional steel wool for the last hour. Halvar Björk is quietly perfect as Eva/Liv's husband, who tries to disprove daily/lives with the consequences of her conviction that she can never truly be loved. A four-star sad-bastard film. Ingmar was Oscar-nominated for the screenplay, Ingrid as Best Actress.

The Black Balloon

CV

It's hard enough to be an Australian teenager anyway without having an autistic brother prone to making fecal art or masturbating at the dinner table when your girlfriend is visiting. A film that has moments as excruciating as any but manages to end with some hope but without any foolishness. Twenty-seven-year-old Luke Ford is convincing as the 18-or-so Charlie, Rhys Wakefield is heartbreaking as the younger brother who simply can't always love Charlie for better or for worse, and Gemma Ward not only is spot-on as the girlfriend but is also a dead ringer for Big Love's and Mamma Mia!'s Amanda Seyfried, which ain't a bad thing. And as the boys' mother, Toni Collette is Toni Collette, which is all you need to know.

Aanrijding in Moscou (Moscow, Belgium)

CV

Boy (29-year-old trucker) and girl (41-year-old mother of 3, whose art-professor husband is off having his midlife crisis with a 22yo student) meet collision-cute in a parking lot, and in the midst of shouting mutual abuse, something clicks for him when she tells him an unwelcome but undeniable truth about himself. Through all the complications, as many horrifying as comic, that ensue, this never abandons its unlikely screwball-comedy heart, and just like so many of those, which work seemingly in spite of the stage machinery, it simply does. Stephen Holden in his Times review likened Barbara Sarafian's look here to "Frances McDormand with Joni Mitchell hair," and I can't improve on that. The best movie I've seen with a largely Flemish script in I don't know how long.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

FF

Director Paul Schrader, there for a postscreening Q&A: "I wondered who would come out in a blizzard on the Friday night before Christmas to see a movie in Japanese about a gay, fascist writer. Here"--extending an arm to the absolutely packed house--"is the answer." (The "blizzard" was an exaggeration: he should have seen the New Haven I came home to.)

Went in knowing the basics of Mishima's life and death, and having read two or three of his short stories and seen the very sexy Sarah Miles-Kris Kristofferson film of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea long, long ago. Not having paid much attention, I expected a documentary, but instead, what a got was something that I suspect Schrader would be amused rather than outraged to hear likened to All That Jazz. Both films are about art and sex and death and fame and the web of interconnection among them, and both combine episodic pieces of biographical narrative (some of it more fictionalized than others--obviously ATJ is all ostensibly fiction, but we know it's really Bob Fosse's premature suicide note) with thematically articulate scenes from the protagonist's art, all building toward the wow finish. And both play the bio/fiction parlay about as effectively as it can be played. The quintessential M film: something I'd barely heard of that I now can't imagine having done without for so long.

Amarcord (1974)

FF

Speaking of which. Well, no, different deal here: obviously, I've known about Amarcord forever, but not all of my experiences with classic Fellini films that everyone worships have been fulfilling, so I'd just never gotten around to making myself sit through this one. What a moron I was.

A semiautobiographical portrait of the director's hometown, it is long on eccentrics but blessedly short on outright freaks. Just gorgeous in every way, hilarious, heartbreaking, visually stunning from moment to moment, and: as much as I hated the Nino Rota score I heard the day before, this one is just wonderful, stealing nicely here and there from "Stormy Weather" and "La Cucaracha" but mostly comprising the familiar phrases Danny Elfman stole for Pee-Wee's Big Adventure.

Trailers

• Shadows (1959)--More teaser than trailer, Cassavetes.
• Made in U.S.A. (1966)--Also a trailer, a very clever silent one, Godard.
• Wendy and Lucy--You had me at "Wendy."

The us-es out there

Milk

Crit

The real challenge for this film was not whether it could be moving and inspiring but whether it could be as moving and inspiring as its trailer, which is hands-down the best I've seen this year. Well, yes, it can. Is. Penn is perfect, everyone in the cast is excellent (I finally get my daughter's infatuation w/ James Franco), and though I might cavil a bit with the tape-recorder-memoir frame, it's hard to argue with Van Sant's structure of the story.

Impossible to watch the climactic sequence of the campaign against a California-wide ballot measure that would have allowed school districts to fire teachers for no other cause than homosexuality without thinking of this year's victorious Proposition 8, overriding the state supreme court ruling that legalized gay marriage (among other antigay votes in other states). But it's worth noting that Prop. 8 succeeded, barely, via a perfect political storm: a strangest-of-bedfellows de facto alliance of Catholics, Mormons, and an understandably enthusiastic voting bloc with an unfortunate history of cultural conservatism and homophobia. Can you say "last stand"?

Still, it wouldn't hurt if the next Harvey Milk were to come along.

Trailers

• Duplicity--I guess it's appropriate that after seeing today's film to admit that I find Clive hotter than Julia. Looks like a perfectly silly film that might be tons of fun. Soft 4.
  
• Entre les murs (The class)--OK,I know you're sick of my rants about distributors that take wonderfully poetic, evocative foreign-language titles like, say, Between the Walls and "translate" them into bland, generic English-language titles, so I'll spare you this time around. I'll just say I'm in.
  

Livin' large

Bolt

Post

A very good, very conventional story of love and family. The inspired element is the premise: a TV dog who actually thinks he has all the superpowers his character has. In other words, this is based in great part on the actual scientific fact that dogs are loyal, brave, and moronic.

Yes, it's true what you've heard: the hamster steals the show. Waste-of-time short, "Tokyo Mater," starring characters from Cars. Oh, and by the way: if you're going to see this, there's no particular reason to insist on the 3D version: it was OK, but the story's the thing.

Cadillac Records

Post

Like every other film about the music biz, whether based on fact or purely fictional, this is about (1) the inspiration, (2) the meteoric rise, (3) the self-destructive behavior (including, as a matter of course, [A] substance abuse, [B] love abuse, and [C] professional-relationship abuse), and (4) the sad decline, but still (5) the legacy.

What makes this worth seeing, despite the clichés, are the performances, particularly by Eamonn Walker in a relatively small but thrilling role as Howlin' Wolf; Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters; Beyoncé Knowles as Etta James; and Adrien Brody as Leonard Chess. And, of course, the music.

Trailers

• Monsters vs. Aliens--Some nice stuff for us old farts, like a George C. Scott-in-Strangelove takeoff; wouldn't rule it out.
• Up--Cranky old guy's house takes off with balloons; I assume it must be based on some much-loved kids' book.
• Notorious--No, not a Hitchcock rerelease; it's about B.I.G.
• Gran Torino--I'm not one of those Clint-can-do-no-wrongers, but this looks pretty damned good.
• Madea Goes to Jail--What does it say when the "trailer" seems actually to be outtakes?
• Not Easily Broken--Good title, but I'm skeptical.

Drove, he said

Australia

Crit

Years ago, at the Assembly Hall in Champaign, Illinois, a talented but wildly erratic Illini guard followed, as he so often did, a slick pass with an egregious turnover. "Oh, Brooks," cried a frustrated fan near me, "you do something good, and then you go and do something bad." The poignant artlessness of that complaint came to mind today. Oh, Baz. Is there a filmmaker today who works so hard with the apparent goal of making us not take him or his creations seriously? The comic-book silliness of the first 15 minutes or so had me squirming in my seat, convinced that I'd let mixed reviews trick me into a time-waster. And then he goes and does something good. I have no recollection what, exactly--the remaining 2½ hours were such a constant whiplash of pleasure and dismay that it's hard to itemize (though the first 2 [of 4!] end-credits songs represent a take-with-you-from-the-theater nadir: a simpy but blessedly short piece of sentimentality presumably written by the director [couldn't catch it in the credits] and sung, I think, by the female lead] seems like the lowest we can go, until a tell-the-story ballad by Luhrman and Elton John, among others, digs a deeper sewer).

In sum, it's a glorious mess, all over the antipodal map. The Wizard of Oz is its explicit touchpoint, but the 1939 film it leans on far more heavily is the one about a stormy romance that begins on the eve of war and then takes us into the inferno in the capital. That one, you'll recall, shares an imperative of repatriation, not because there's no place like home but because land is the only thing that lasts.

It also seems to share an ambition with the upcoming Che to be a double feature, not just in length but in coming to one perfectly plausible conclusion only to take off again on a related but distinctly different story.

Trailer

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button--I guess what I saw before was just a teaser; but the full trailer still leaves me skeptical.

Before remembering

Plus tard, tu comprendras (One day you'll understand)

Crit

What an aptly named film, because none of the three of us who saw it together understood as we left the theater, but with each contributing a question or an observation that hadn't occurred to the others, we came to a much clearer comprehension after our postcinema discussion.

It is, in essence, the story of France's grotesquely mixed record vis-à-vis the Holocaust, played out in one family, the mixture of French Catholics with Russian Jews. It is also an intensely personal mystery story, as much for the audience as for the protagonist,Victor (Hippolyte Girardot, whom I'll be seeing again in another couple of weeks in Un conte de Noël, along with Emmanuelle Devos, who plays his wife here). Jeanne Moreau, 80 now, still beautiful, is perfect as the Jewish grandmother who has her reasons for not wanting to talk about the past.

A unique Holocaust film, which has become a rare label.

Undergraduates

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

Crit

OK, I've never seen Fanny and Alexander, but I suspect that it would not be inapt to say that this film is to Twilight as F&A is to Home Alone. Twilight is a perfectly OK Hollywood teenage-vampire-love story, populated with pretty 90210ish faces and centered on a moral and existential dilemma that we can intellectually respond to, even if the pretty actors don't really convince us that it's any more than an academic exercise. This, on the other hand, is a beautiful, heartbreaking, heartbreakingly beautiful story of 12-year-old love, notwithstanding that one of the 12-year-olds has been 12 for a long time and has unconventional dietary requirements, and the pair's responses to that complication is so real that we, well, bleed for them.

The films have much in common (that "12 for a long time" line occurs in Twilight, as I recall, except that the number is 17), most particularly the central vampire's irresistible attraction to the central nonvamp, and the vamp's recognition of and resistance against the dangerous implications of that attraction. Where Twilight's vamp is part of a loving and protective vamp family, Rätte's has a loving and protective nonvamp father figure who does everything he can to protect her from the most gruesome consequences of her condition. (Funny, only as I wrote that sentence did it occur to me that "father" can hardly be an accurate description of his relationship to this ageless being. Which in turn may answer the question implicit in the Graduate-allusive final scene. Hmmm . . . ) The nonvamp's divorce dynamic is also similar.

That the lovers are preteens, though, and haven't the foggiest notion of what romance entails--Eli first suggests to Oskar that they simply stay as they are, then asks, "Do you do anything special?" when going steady; when he says no, she replies, "OK, then--we'll go steady"--and that, while beautiful in their own way, they lack Hollywood gloss (Eli, in fact, looks and smells a little funky when separated too far from her last meal), makes us believe in them and care for them in a way that I couldn't, at any rate, for Twilight's teens.

Then, too, where the good vamps in Twilight are sissified "vegetarians," feasting only on nonhuman blood, Eli needs to bite a neck now and again, and that's a messy thing. Notably, though, in this version of the vampire myth, apparently a victim who suffers a normally fatal injury after the bloodletting is spared joining the undead, and Eli is careful to administer that mercy, except once when she is interrupted. (Other elements of traditional vampirism are present: as in Bram Stoker's novel [but not, to my recollection, in most films], the vampire must be invited in before crossing a threshold the first time; the vampire can scramble up vertical surfaces with ease and even fly short distances; and cats hate, hate, really hate vampires.)

Seeing Eli's face smeared with her victim's blood, and seeing the sadness in Lina Leandersson's face in the aftermath of the meal, is worth all the prettiness of Twilight put together. Leandersson is, I see, a first-time actor (IMDb is silent on her actual age, but 12's probably pretty close), as is Kåre Hedebrant; hope we see lots more of them, and of director Tomas Alfredson. In fact, how do you say "sequel" in Swedish?

Trailers

• Slumdog Millionaire--You notice that when some form of the word million is in a Danny Boyle title, the film's a lot sweeter and more sentimental than when it contains words like grave or spot or smaller numbers, like 28? Though actually there's sweetness in all of them--it's just not on the surface. Anyway, in the face of lukewarm reviews, I'm in if it comes downtown, which seems likely.
  

La mort n'a pas des excuses

Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I've loved you so long)

Crit

If there's an Oscar for conveying emotion in the first tenth of a second of a film without a word, let's just go ahead and give it to Kristin Scott Thomas, whose sadness from opening shot to the end is ineffable--and rarely referenced in her few words.

Fact is, though, that as perfect as Scott Thomas is as the just-out-of-prison Juliette, everyone in the cast is remarkably good, from Elsa Zylberstein as her sister Léa (who really does look like her sister sometimes) to Lise Ségur as Léa's adopted Vietnamese daughter P'tit Lys to Jean-Claude Arnaud, amazingly, expressively wordless as Léa's stricken father-in-law.

The only thing that keeps the film from being great is that the secret of Juliette's crime, when it comes, just seems a little too Lifetime-movie-ish. But that doesn't undercut the performances, which are more convincing than the denouement.

Armies of the afternoon

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29

Crit

In 1968, when I was 14, the Tet offensive ended significant U.S. popular support for the Vietnam War, and, essentially, Lyndon Johnson's presidency; Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis; Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles; Chicago police bashed in young people's skulls and a party's soul; Richard Nixon was elected president; and then a football game was played in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Young fans of college football might be surprised to know that Harvard-Yale ever meant anything to anyone who didn't spend four years in Cambridge or New Haven, but it is so. By '68, though, that era seemed to be past--except that Yale somehow managed to attract a running back good enough to star for the Dallas Cowboys afterward, and a quarterback who could throw, run, and lead (and who had enough personality to become a character in a comic strip being started by another Yalie at the time), and the Elis entered the final game improbably ranked 14th in the nation, and heavily favored to complete a perfect season at the expense of the Crimson. But even more improbably, Harvard was 8-0 also--the first time since the teens both teams had brought perfect records into what they like to call The Game.

Only one could remain perfect, though, and with Calvin Hill and God, as teammates called Brian Dowling (before Garry Trudeau started calling him BD), on the Yale roster, the Elis made it clear which team would leave 9-0 by taking a 22-0 lead in the first half. With 4 minutes left, Yale was driving toward a score that would pad its 29-13 lead, and even the fumble that short-circuited that drive didn't really matter: Harvard was 86 yards and another touchdown and two two-point conversions away from tying, and the clock showed 3 minutes left.

The title of the film (lifted from a Harvard Crimson headline the next day--a better headline than I ever wrote in my 13 years of writing pretty good headlines) is a spoiler, of course, but even knowing that, you won't believe what transpires. Two people in the audience with me were at the game, and one commented after the film that it was so effective that she kept hoping maybe it would turn out differently this time.

The filmmakers--who, granted, would have to work hard to screw up material like this--do a masterful job of interweaving the television footage with interviews of players (including Dowling, a Harvard guard named Tommy Lee Jones, and Frank Champi, the backup Harvard quarterback sent in to mop up after Yale built its insurmountable lead). The politics of the time is a big part of the text--one Harvard defensive back, Pat Conroy (not the author), was a 24-year-old Vietnam vet, and other members of both teams held predictably conservative views, but most seem to have been antiwar, at least by November 1968, and some--like Dowling--were avowedly apolitical, and just wanted to be left alone to play the game.

The flip side, of course, is the admission by more than one participant that this was "just a game." Right: just a game people still talk about and replay and argue officiating calls from and agonize over 40 years later. Well, see the film before you judge their priorities.

Neck tease

Twilight

Crit

Oh, those teenage boys, they're all the same: they kiss your neck, maybe even nibble on it lightly, but when you're dying for the big chomp, they go all it-just-wouldn't-be-right on you.

Assuming that the film is faithful to the first book, I can see why the series is hugely popular with teens, especially teenage girls: it makes abstinence not only cool but tragic. That's about the most brilliant marketing imaginable.

Of course, the textual abstinence here is vampirism: our hormonal heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart, the wonderful fresh face from Into the Wild) falls hook, line, and aorta for a member of a family of "vegetarian" vamps--which is to say they dine on only nonhuman animals. They represent a majority of their kind in the film, but one suspects that in the sequel (which has already begun, in the final shot of this one), we'll get a more accurate representation of the demon-graphics, and that those who can't or won't resist the taste of human blood will predominate.

Looking back on what I've written, I find that it sounds dismissive, sounds as if I hated the film. Not at all: it's completely goofy, but it's far from terrible. I guess I just regret that it made me feel so grown-up and logical and cynical. I would have preferred to have had as much trouble resisting it as Edward (the inexplicably hearthrobby Robert Pattinson) has resisting Bella's carotid.

Trailers

• Valkyrie--Actually, I first saw this trailer last weekend, but I guess I couldn't keep two Cruises in my head simultaneously; this one looks like MI4.
• Coraline--Animation in the style of director Henry Selick's Nightmare Before Christmas; another replay of The Wizard of Oz.
• Knowing--Looks like another plea for career intervention from Nic Cage.
• Adventureland--The brilliant Jesse Eisenberg (Roger Dodger, The Squid and the Whale) teamed with Kristen Stewart (about whom I thought during the trailer, "Where have I seen her? Is she the girl from Into the Wild?" and yet when the feature started, I didn't realize that it was the same girl) in another wacky-teen-life comedy from Greg Mottola (Superbad). Skeptical, hopeful.
  

There are nearly thirteen million people in the world . . .

Synecdoche, New York

Crit

Two things:

My all-time favorite Chas. Addams cartoon shows a man in a barber chain, sitting between facing mirrors. His image appears in an infinite regression, each smaller than the last but otherwise identical to it, and thus identical to all the others. Except for one, in the middle distance, where the face of a werewolf stares back, only to revert to form in the next iteration. It's kinda like that.

In Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., God plays dice with the baseball universe, is drawn into it more than he'd intended, then withdraws, whereupon the universe continues without him. It's kinda like that.

It's also kinda like Charlie Kaufman's own Adaptation, only with less masturbation and more ambition. Lots more ambition, like the Pentateuch to Adaptation's story of Cain and Abel.

This is, I think, a great antiexistential document. The trouble with life is not that it's meaningless; the trouble with life is that it has far, far, far too much meaning--some of us are condemned to see the world in the color of a turd. Not prepared yet to call it a great film, but I am prepared to say that it'll probably keep me awake tonight and other nights, and that's something.

Said Jennie Tonic, who of course got to see it weeks ago when it opened in New York, not that I'm bitter or anything:

I think the fact that you can't quite evaluate it when you come out is the whole point of it. I think it's brilliant. But it doesn't give you what you expect out of a movie. It's both surreal and realistic in a way I want to call "unrealistic," not in the sense of nonrealistic, but . . . well, just see it. Several times. I think you just have to see it several times, because it's your life, and that's how you have to live your life. It's hard to judge it as a movie.

Trailers

• Waltz with Bashir--Not sure I knew this is animated; has potential, but I'm sticking to my 3.

What just happened?

Quantum of Solace

Crit

Bond meets girls, Bond beds girl, girl meets icky end. As usual.

This is a perfectly OK entertainment, but I had no idea what was going on half the time; then again, when it slows down to a pace suitable for philosophy is when it stops being entertaining, so keep it zoomin', I say.

Occurred to me that Bond is essentially a U.S. Marine. He doesn't visit the Halls of Montezuma or the shores of Tripoli, but he does fight his country's battles in the air, on land, and sea.

Most interesting cast credit is the last one: Perla de las Dunas Receptionist: Oona Chaplin. That's the granddaughter of the original Oona and Charles, daughter of Geraldine, great-granddaughter of Eugene O'Neill. She's the second granddaughter of Charlie and Oona I've noticed in end credits this year, and she has a sister, Carmen, who also acts, but I haven't seen her in anything yet.

Trailers

• Star Trek--Origin story; looks promising.
• The Day the Earth Stood Still--Still don't like the idea of Cruise, still holding the line at 3.
• Seven Pounds--Will's hard to resist; tending toward 4.
  

Isn't it, just?

Happy-Go-Lucky

Crit

Wow: just read the Netflix summary while I was copying the link: "Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is a perpetually cheerful 30-year-old London teacher. When her beloved bike is stolen, she decides to take up driving, and is paired with Scott (Eddie Marsan), an instructor who's her polar opposite. Their relationship is strained until Poppy's bright personality attracts a co-worker, making Scott unexpectedly jealous. Alexis Zegerman and Karina Fernandez co-star in Mike Leigh's effervescent comedy." Well, yeah, that's pretty much what happens, but it's completely beside the point.

The point is, more or less, the title. That maybe it's possible to be, more or less, happy-go-lucky. Leigh is better known for making what my son-in-law calls sad-bastard movies, and while Marsan's character is as sad a bastard as you'll find--and Fernandez's flamenco teacher has her issues as well--Hawkins's character is as advertised. We're invited to imagine chinks in her armo(u)r, to wonder what it costs her to maintain that smile, and that openness to the sad bastards of the world, but there's no evidence that her stance is anything but genuine--which is mostly charming, and a little annoying.

Ultimately, what we have here is a slice of a breathtakingly engaging and sweet, but not saccharine, life.

Trailer

• Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I've loved you so long)--Yes, definitely if it comes here, and maybe even if it doesn't.
  

. . . and thirst after righteousness . . .

Flow: For Love of Water

Crit

Number of seats in theater 9, the larger of the Criterion's two DVD screening rooms: 30.

Number of seats filled for the 2:10 show: 7 (which is to say about as big a crowd as I've been part of in one of the tiny theaters).

Number of viewers who left, presumably on bathroom breaks, during this film about water: 2.

Number of viewers I saw drinking from a Dasani bottle just as we were being told that bottled water is less regulated than U.S. tap water, that there's less reason to believe that bottled water is purer than to believe the reverse: 1.

Number of girls whose ages I estimated at 8 to 10 (young enough that I seriously considered asking their father/big brother whether they weren't perhaps in the wrong theater) in the audience for this very serious documentary about, among other scary and infuriating things, how multinational corporations like Suez and Vivendi and Coca-Cola and Nestlé steal our water (and the water of nations much poorer than ours) and sell it back to us (and to people much poorer than us): 2.

Number of languages requiring subtitles: at least 7 (Spanish and French; Xhosi, Zulu, and I believe one other African language; Hindi (at least 2 dialects, I think); and heavily accented English.

Number of indications of restlessness by the young girls (or, for that matter, the audience as a whole): 0.

Number of the proposed article to be added to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in order to establish that "everyone has the right to clean and accessible water, adequate for the health and well-being of the individual and family, and no one shall be deprived of such access or quality of water due to individual economic circumstance": 31 (take 31 seconds or less and sign the petition here).

Date the film will be available on DVD: 12/9. See http://www.flowthefilm.com/ for more info.

The countercuckoo's nest

Changeling

Crit

Sometimes I think it would be good to be able to see movies in a vacuum, or at least a near-vacuum: you tell me Eastwood directs, Jolie stars, Malkovich has a good, meaty, non-self-parodying role, I'm there, and I just watch the damn movie, blissfully unaware of the lukewarm reviews and the reflexively resentful Oscar buzz for Jolie. But it doesn't work like that in the real world, where I feel compelled to read at least the first and last paragraphs of every Times review, plus whatever Lane or Denby or Ansen writes. (On the other hand, that saves me for falling for "Levinson directs, De Niro stars, + self-parodies by Bruce Willis and Sean Penn = What Just Happened?" [52% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.com].)

So. Yes, as she did in A Mighty Heart, Jolie makes you forget about all the Brangelina crap and just buy into her character's unbearably nightmarish ordeal. And Clint is about as good as Little Opie Cunningham at the old heartstring tug. And it's a treat to see Malkovich playing someone uncreepy for a change--though it takes us a while to trust in the uncreepiness of his publicity-hungry minister whose agenda turns out to be just what he says it is.

But that's kinda the problem here--or the biggest one: the late-'20s hats are fabulous, but they're all either black or white. I seem to recall some moral ambiguity in earlier Eastwood films, but a memory of that is all you get here, from start to end. And end. And end. And end. Which is the other big problem: like Christine, the film plods on relentlessly long after most of us would have hung it up. In Christine, it's an admirable, if sad, trait; in the film, it's just frustrating.

Extra credit: the film mentioned near one of the ends of the film (and whose title appears on a marquee at the final end) is the first film and the one alluded to in the title of this post is the second ever to do what?

Trailers

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button--Angie in the feature, Brad in the trailer. Curiously (but not coincidentally), I read a story about this just before leaving for the theater in the Times Holiday Movies section. Unfortunately, my Scribner's edition of The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald doesn't include the source tale--but apparently the movie doesn't owe much to the story anyway, and as it happens, I read a novel this year that does seem pretty close to the story on film, so. Anyway, 4.
  
• The Reader--Speaking of novels, I've had this one on the shelf for more than a decade; maybe it's time to read it now. 4.

And now if you'll excuse me, it's time to pour some bourbon and raise a glass to Studs.