After midnight

A whore and a horse invited me to a final screening of 2011, but they'll have to be content with being my first 2 of 2012, if that. It feels as if it was a disappointing year at the movies, but I haven't started going back over my posts, so I guess we'll confirm or deny that together. One good thing: I got back to Manhattan a couple of times, and if neither M was one for the ages, it felt good paying $12.50 at IFC and getting falafel and bird's nest in the evening gap. The vast majority of my New York time in recent years has been spent in Queens, and I don't regret that (obviously, or I'd stop going to so many Mets games), but in what's more or less a zero-sum game, that means a cinematic loss.

On the other hand, so many films that back in the day would not have been available except in Manhattan (or on Netflix) now come Relatively Cheap and Incredibly Close, so it's a positive zero sum.

Anyway, I rather like the way I did last year's roundup, when I "propose[d] to judge only films of whatever age that I saw for the first time in 2010 about which I expect someday to say, as codgerdom eats ever more of my brain, 'They don't make 'em like that anymore!'" so let's do the same, except for an annual increment. I'll say before we start that Midnight in Paris was my favorite film of the year (interesting in light of my final paragraph of my 2010 roundup), though probably not the one I'd call the best. That would be . . . Melancholia, maybe? Let's see . . .

Started the year with a Netflix stream of a film I was a fool to miss when it was in the theaters, discovering that Up is just as good as everyone said and more It's a Wonderful Life-ish than anyone had told me. A very different sort of wonderful came from Blue Valentine; I'm currently waiting for hernia surgery, and the kick that film provided produced that sort of feeling. Next a wonderful disc double feature, in lieu of M#, of Fatih Akin's Im Juli and the doucumentarish film embrace of the best L.A. punk band ever, X: The Unheard Music. While we're at it, let's raise one more glass to Pete Postlethwaite.

February: Cedar Rapids was neither great nor particularly memorable, but it gave me some of my best cinematic fun of the year.

A wonderful double feature during the traditional dead zone of March: the Inception-ish The Adjustment Bureau and the trippliy allusive animated Western Rango. In También la lluvia we got some good unabashed lefty anti-imperialism, and then in Copie confirme, a good talky French existential mystery. Even more surprising, a convincing and moving portrait of human virtue, Des hommes et des dieux.

Into April, and Cary Fukunaga's literate and incisive adaptation of Jane Eyre, starring the suddenly ubiquitous (not that there's anything wrong with that!) Mia Wasikowska. A very different sort of young woman on her own, Hanna, was a very pleasant surprise, putting me in mind a bit of Lola rennt. Best thing I can say about Bill Cunningham New York I've already said: "One of those films on a subject in which I have no interest but which I couldn't have enjoyed more if it were about a jazz-playing, fiction-writing baseball star." Meek's Cutoff was Seinfeld without the laughs: a show about nothing.

My only regret about Cave of Forgotten Dreams was that I didn't get to see Werner Herzog's documentary about paleolithic cave art in 3D. Incendies: a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

Seriously? Not until June did Midnight in Paris open here? Meaning that even though my copy came in the mail a few days ago,  if I adhere to my guidelines, I have to wait 5 months to screen it again and see whether it's as delightful as I thought the first time? Anyway, that's it for a two-month stretch during which I had fewer posts than a typical month. (And this June is going to be thin, too, since I'll be helping to make a movie!)

The Guard another in the category of far-from-great-but-great-fun. And that's it for August, so 2 candidates for the summer months.

[Excuse me: notwithstanding the time & date attached to this, it just became 2012, so I had to take a little break to open my Widder C & establish that, yes, I still like her a lot. Yes, that's right: I'm ringing in the new year by blogging. Pathetic.]

September: Not sure Contagion was one of the year's best, but it may have been the scariest, and that counts for something. Higher Ground: Vera Farmiga directs, smartly.

October is, of course, baseball's second-most-sacred month, and Moneyball may be one of the half-dozen or so best baseball movies ever, not that the competition is AL East-ish. And what would late October be without something to scare the bejesus out of us? Take Shelter gives us none; my favorite of Jessica Chastain's 15 movies this year.

A little too late (in New Haven, anyway) for a Halloween creepout came Almodóvar's La piel que habito. And then, from another of my favorite very foreign directors, von Trier's Melancholia, for my money a more interesting cosmic mindfuck than The Tree of Life. And then there's one of my favorite very unforeign directors, Alexander Payne, and The Descendants; I'm already impatient for his next film; I figure 2015. And of the 7 films I saw in 2 trips to Manhattan this year, the weird punkish noir Rid of Me was my favorite.

And because it came out in December, I was thinking of the misanthropic Young Adult as a great double feature with Bad Santa, but Rid of Me would make a nice parley too. Finally, I won't say a word about The Artist.

But let's do a list, not anything as murky as "best," but a top 5 films I expect to return to:

1. Midnight in Paris
2. The Artist
3. Take Shelter
4. Moneyball
5. Higher Ground

In the meantime, happy 2011, happier 2012.

Mass transit, authority

Marked-down interholiday M3

As you know, I like to give logistical tips to readers contemplating their own excessive cineManhattan trips, so here's what I can pass along from yesterday: if you think that the Thursday between Sunday holidays will be a sort of lull time, affording you elbow room on the train and a vacant seat for your coat and hat and backpack at the theaters, well, uh, no. True, my 1:05 show in Cinema Village's tiny theater 2 was not packed, but the 3:50 show in CV's spacious theater 3 was uncomfortably so, and my 7:45 at IFC was nonexistent, for me, at least: my first ever SOLD OUT on the ticket machine.

I had intended to see Porco Rosso, but being denied was just a disappointment, not a disaster, as the nearby Film Forum had 3 worthy candidates at 8 or 8:20. In retrospect I wish I'd opted for a 2nd FF screening of Alain Resnais' weirdly wonderful L'Année dernière à Marienbad or my first-ever big-screen viewing of The Gold Rush, but that M lesson was learned long ago: every yes means one or more nos. I did at least get to discuss Marienbad with a couple of other lobby riders, one of whom had seen it a few days ago and was about to see it again for what she calculated was her 5th or 6th time ever. She insisted that the film demands intense, constant thought, while I perversely suggested just the opposite, that it better rewards passive acceptance of all its absurdities and self-contradictions. Anyway . . .

Miss Minoes

CV

I expected this to be whimsical, but I didn't realize that it's actually a '60s-Disney-type kids romance--that it might be something to give the grandkids, notwithstanding the occurrence of the word "shit" in the dubbed-over-the-Dutch soundtrack, including once from the third-banana little girl. I'll stack up my resistance to foul language against anyone's, but the word is really shocking in a context that is otherwise as G-ratable as can be.

The premise predates Ovid--cat metamorphoses into (extremely cute) human woman--but with an eco spin, the trigger being waste from the deodorant plant of the local sweet-smelling, foul-souled capitalist. In Disney style, what has to be done is (1) exposure of the villain and undermining of his villainous scheme and (2) marriage of the odd couple. But why it works is that we also have what I'm tempted to call a cats of thousands, except that it's really only a dozen or so: real cats with real acting chops. Resist them if you can; I couldn't.

Margaret

CV

Spoiled Upper West Side teen distracts bus driver and causes fatal accident, and her guilt and compulsion to make the driver acknowledge his own dominates every one of the 135 or so remaining minutes of the 150 total. No, wait, that would be a lot duller and less truthful movie. In fact, what happens is that while the accident is ever-present at some level of the psychological substrata of Lisa (Anna Paquin; "Margaret" is from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem read in her English class), she also is preoccupied by school, by sex, by getting high, by getting high and having sex with schoolmates, by getting high in the presence of and maybe having sex with teachers, by her absent father (writer-director Kenneth Lonergan, who gave himself a similarly feckless authority figure to play in his wonderful first film, You Can Count on Me), by her mother whom she often wishes absent.

It is, in short, a big picture about a big moment in a life that already has an unbearable amount of bigness about it. Neither Lisa nor anyone else in the film (well, OK, two exceptions, I guess: Jean Reno as mother Joan's suitor and Jake O'Connor as Lisa's) tries to grab our affection, and so we like them for their prickliness as much as anything (exhibit A: the remarkable Jeannie Berlin as the accident victim's best friend, Emily).

But the big picture has many small pleasures, too: Matthew Broderick channeling that bad teacher who knew no other way of dealing with a provocative but wrong-headed student remark than by declaring the wrongness without giving any credit for the ingeniousness; Mark Ruffalo as the bus driver, cast as villain by Lisa and Emily but as yet another victim by Lonergan; even Renée Fleming, who gives a convincing performance as a Met soprano.

The film opened and closed in a week in the fall to critical and popular resistance, but late in the year critics started to rethink, and the film got a second life when it appeared on some top ten lists. I understand both the resistance and the reassessment. I doubt that this will ever join You Can Count on Me in my DVD library, but I'm glad to have given it 2½ hours of cramped moviegoing--it was as much work as play, but it was rewarding work.

El Sicario: Room 164

FF

My initial plan was for whimsy on either side of the grit of Margaret, but instead I shifted to a quasi-documntary confession of a drug runner who graduated to enforcer and hit man. What's interesting about this is what the filmmakers do to try to make interesting a static disquisition in a motel room. One obvious choice would have been reenactments of the brutal crimes, but that would have risked accusations of torture porn and raised questions about the intent.

So what they do instead is have the actor (I presume) playing the sicario doodle compulsively on an artist's sketchpad, jotting outlines of steps involved in training, for example, or illustrating the proper gunshot pattern for the assassination of the driver of a car, or mapping the logistics of a kidnapping. He is no less compulsive about conserving the pages he's filling at fever pitch--more than once he starts to flip 2 pages at once, but makes a point of turning one page back lest a page be wasted. Odd.

And then Jesus came.

Trailers

• Angels Crest--They do? That missing apostrophe in place names always annoys me. Good cast, including Elizabeth McGovern, always welcome.
• Once upon a Time in Anatolia--Yeah, OK, maybe--but why is IMDb so freakin' slow?

Valkyrie

A Dangerous Method

Crit

Distractions for my never-analyzed and not-recently-therapied psyche:

• Thoughts of the popular Freud action figure.
• Aragorn's surprising career change.
• The cigar.
• Keira Knightley's Russian accent.
• Keira Knightly's bustier.
• The simulated violence perpetrated on Knightley's character, Sabina Spielrein, Jung's patient > colleague > lover, as a creepy prelude to the actual violence I'll see momentarily perpetrated on Lisbeth Salander.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Crit

OK, getting older does have a few advantages; for example, even though I saw the original less than 20 months ago, all of the critical plot twists were almost brand new again. Not sure this was really necessary, but Fincher, Mara, and Craig make a revisit worthwhile. One thing I was very pleased to see: that they didn't think it necessary to move it from Sweden, to set it, say, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. One thing I could have done without (spoiler alert!): Lisbeth's conventional heartbreak at the end--was that in the Swedish film or the novel?

Trailers

• The Iron Lady--I'd seen the teaser several times, but this is the first full (overfull, very long) trailer I've seen, and it filled me with trepidation: am I still going to be able to despise Margaret Thatcher once I've spent two hours with her as portrayed by Meryl Streep?
• Contraband--Yet another you've-got-to-come-back-into-the-outlaw-life-lest-we-kill-your-wife-and-kid pix. Speaking of unnecessary.
• Rock of Ages--Possible: anything that has Alec Baldwin as a fat old club manager and Catherine Zeta-Jones doing musical numbers can't be all bad.
• Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance--Oh, for the love of god, someone please put a stop to Nic Cage.

Sound and fury

The Artist

Crit

Yes, that was a fine choice for the Xmas movie: mostly Singin' in the Rain, but darkened by A Star Is Born, eloquent in its silence, brilliant in its few sounds.

An elderly woman in my audience--perhaps sinking into dementia, perhaps just overexuberant and incapable of allowing so much to pass without spoken commentary--twice shouted out a comment, first, "That's quite a dog" and later, when talkies, marital strife, and the stock market crash have conspired to undo George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), "I wish I could make this stop." I'm sure all the rest of us shared the hope that we'd hear no more from her, but no one could argue with the sentiments. That Uggie is as good a dog as has been in the movies since those two four-letter '30s dogs that make regular appearances in the Times crossword puzzle.

Trailers

• Albert Nobbs--Oh, my, yes!
• W.E.--Oh, my, no!

Maker's Mark

Young Adult

Crit

In case you'd forgotten Monster, here's further evidence that Charlize Theron is not shy about playing ugly--ugly outside, but better yet, ugly to the core. This is like a quadruple episode of Seinfeld, with "no hugging, no learning." Well, some hugging, but it's not pretty. I also thought of another favorite TV series connection, to those moments when Homer gives Bart advice, but I don't want to say any more than that, because it's a wonderful moment just at the point when you fear that writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman are about to cop out. A beautiful, ugliful film.

Trailers

• The Vow--Remember While You Were Sleeping?
• Gone--Remember Amanda Seyfried's career?
• The Lucky One--Remember The Notebook?
• Titanic 3D--Remember Titanic?

Frog got legs

The Muppets

NoHa

Guest blogger today, my best 10-year-old friend Jocelyn:

The Muppets is definitely on my top ten films of 2011 list, but not the first. While admittedly a great show overall, it had its moments. Amy Adams and Jason Segel fit the roles wonderfully [blabitorial note: I couldn't agree more!], and the plot is rich and appealing to children [and to grown-ups, as long as they're not too grown-up], but sometimes it felt like it should have been a little more fast-paced [yeah, I'm with her here, too]. For example, the song "Muppet or a Man" was beautifully written, sung wonderfully and played a prominent role in the film. But it occurred shortly after a very intense scene including the gangster-style oil miner (Chris Cooper), and then all of a sudden, you find Gary and Walter are singing this gorgeous tune, but the audience is not able to enjoy the scene as much as we might have been able to, because instead of fully enjoying the music, the whole theatre is hunched forward in their seats thinking, come on, let's cut to the chase! . . . but other than that slight annoyance, The Muppets is a great movie (ma na ma nop).

Man, this is job is easy when I can get somebody else I agree with 100% to write it--thanks, Jocelyn! The trailer blurbs are from cranky, cynical me.

Trailers

• Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked--Golly, this looks like it could be the best Chipmunks movie yet!
• The Secret World of Arrietty--A Studio Ghibli Borrowers movie; possibilities.
• Brave--Pixar feminism; possibilities
• Mirror Mirror: The Untold Adventures of Snow White--I can definitely get behind Julia Roberts as the wicked witch.
• ParaNorman--Hey, I'm ready for anything that starts with those 9 letters and isn't another Paranormal Activity flick.

That old blonde magic

My Week with Marilyn

Crit

Thoroughly unconvinced. Michelle Williams could make me believe her as Catherine the Great, Jesus Christ, or Moby Dick, but I never for a second believed her as Marilyn; it seemed an example of a great actor assaying the impossible--valiantly, perhaps as well as anyone could, but all in vain. At that she came much closer to the mark than Branagh's laughable Larry.

The best moments in the film come from actors playing people about whom I have no preconceived indelible image--Dame Judi as Dame Sybil (Thorndike), Zoë Wanamaker as Paula Strasberg, and about 2 minutes of Derek Jacobi as the protagonist's uncle, a librarian . . . at Windsor Castle. But the two legends seemed to be playacting at being legendary.

Trailers

• One for the Money--Another cute-chick-with-a-gun flick; where does empowerment cross over into exploitation?
• Wanderlust--Career intervention way past due for Jennifer Aniston, no?

Materials at hand

So-good-to-be-back M5--er, no, 4

Think of me as a footballer, sidelined for 22 months with a bad hamstring tear. Would you expect me to go the full 90 minutes my first time back in the lineup? So I prefer to think of my glass as 4/5 full rather than 1/5 empty; I prefer not to employ the word "abortive." Yet it remains undeniable that I have for the first time I can remember been ejected from a movie theater.

Before that the return-from-long-injury metaphor works pretty well, too: not my best day on the pitch--spent a lot of the day just sort of getting my feet wet or getting my feet planted firmly on the ground or doing whatever else clichéd thing with my feet that you can think of. Started with a perfectly ordinary film, then advanced to one a little more interesting.

But that footballer, if he (or she!) is a good one, whose return was worth waiting out the 22 months' absence, will show one flash of brilliance in his (or her!) 75 minutes, and so this M4-not-5 showed one flash of brilliance.

In all, a good if not profoundly wonderful day at the movies.

Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey

IFC

Didn't really set out to go heavy on the documentaries, it just worked out this way. But I have to say, I really don't get the fuss over this one. OK, yeah, moderately interesting story of a nice guy who fell in love with puppets watching Sesame Street and Captain Kangaroo, cut up his father's fur-lined coat to make his own first puppet, and went on to voice the most annoying muppet ever, but it was more like something I'd have ungrudgingly have devoted 15 minutes worth of New York Times Magazine reading to. I fail to see what's special enough about the guy's story to earn 76 minutes of my Manhattan movie day. We do get a little about how his Elmo obsession cost him a wife and endangered his relationship with his daughter, and if the filmmakers had had the guts to go darker, that might have been an interesting story. Might have been.

Garbo: El espía (Garbo: The spy)

Quad

I guess if I knew my World War II history better, I'd be familiar with the Catalonian spy whose campaign of disinformation was largely responsible for the German leadership's belief that the Allied landing in Normandy was merely a feint to draw attention away from the main invasion in Pas de Calais. That is a great story, and a critical event that helped ensure that the war would not drag on for another several years.

But the incredible part of Juan/Joan Pujols García's espionage career came earlier, when, his offer of service rebuffed repeatedly by British intelligence, he set himself up in Lisbon and fed the German's fiction after fiction--all based on the bigger fiction that he was transmitting his intelligence from London. This was something like 18 months of reporting on a city he'd never seen, and getting away with it. Wtf?

Rid of Me

CV

Filmmakers have gotten a lot of mileage out of starting in medias res (OK, Paul?) and in extremis, then taking us back to a time of calm that seems to have little to do with what we've seen, showing us how we got from A to Q, and taking us past it. Writer/director James Westby works it brilliantly here, as we start with a very bad girl we don't yet know to be Meris making a stunningly aggressive gesture of contempt toward a plain-vanilla blonde who crosses her path at the supermarket.

Cut to a conventional Meris conventionally in love with a conventionally hunky husband, relocating with him, after he has suffered an entrepreneurial disaster, back in his Oregon hometown, where he has a support system of assholes who not only decline to welcome the new wife into the clique but actively campaign for reignition of an old flame.

The "how we get there" is as sane and logical as the "there" is dangerous and over the top, and the accessory bad girl who leads Meris to badness is the sort of character who makes me want to put the film on pause and call my daughter immediately to tell her that even though this will never come to Champaign, she needs to do whatever is necessary to see it. And that's why I make Manhattan movie trips!

Urbanized

IFC

I take back my vote in the recent mayoral election; I want New Haven's mayor to be that guy from Bogotá who talks about the lack, in any constitution he knows of, of the right to park your car. There's nothing surprising or revolutionary here--well, unless of course all the good ideas about city planning we've been hearing now for a couple of decades were actually implemented--now that would be revolution to believe in. But it's still a smart bit of preaching to the choir--easily the best of the 3 documentaries I saw on the day.

Trailers

Oh, but wait: you're still waiting to hear about my ejection, aren't you--my cinematic red card, as it were. Well, this is a fair place to explain, because it was about trailers and the other ancillary crap that IFC habitually shows before its features. You might ask what made me think that I could get from a 6:05 film with a running time of 83 minutes to a 7:45 one, even if the theater doors were literally two steps distant, but here's the thing: I might not have made that assumption and bought both tickets at once but for a bizarre phenomenon that governed my first 3 films, including the opener at IFC. Before Urbanized I had not seen a single trailer! Fluke or new downtown policy, it seemed to suggest that I could safely assume no more than 17 minutes of preliminaries and comfortably slide next door to Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog's death penalty documentary, in time to find a seat.

But in the event, the end titles of Urbanized started rolling at 7:48, and even violating my stay-to-the-end policy, I found the next-door theater packed: the guy why went in ahead of me got one of the 3 empty seats, a second was covered with plastic to indicate brokenness or other condition of inutility, and that left me the seat by the wall in the second row, meaning that in order to reach a location that would result in a stiff neck after 108 minutes (well, plus all the preliminary crap, only 3 minutes of which I'd missed) I was going to have to negotiate (gimpy ankled) a row of maybe 16 backpacks and winter coats (because even though it was 60 much of the day, people do wear winter coats to the movie theater--the fuck's up with that?).

Screw that, I said, and instead I sat on an aisle step most of the way back toward the projection room, squeezing tight against the wall to minimize fire-exit obstruction, but pretty much knowing that someone would come along soon to tell me I had to take either the ostensibly available seat or a refund. Well, I thought, Herzog's documentaries have a pretty fair recent history of making it to New Haven, and I'm really not much into watching under these condition, and moreover, I have to admit, I'm exhausted. So when The Man came, I took the 13 bucks and the F train.

By the way, when I finally did start to see trailers, the first was one I'd already seen at the Criterion, for Pina, and the second was for some old seasonal Capra chestnut starring Jimmy Stewart. But then finally:

• Tonari no Totoro (My neighbor Totoro)--Took me a while to figure out whether this is one of the Studio Ghibli films I've seen; looks enchanting, in the stoned anime way (oh, and also looks very indebted to Lewis Carroll).
• Ma part du gâteau (My piece of the pie)--Another kill-the-capitalists comedy; sure, why not?
• Sleeping Beauty--I've been wondering about whether this is just going to be too creepy to face, but unfortunately I was too distracted by my impending ejection to pay close attention. Pretty creepy, though.

Like clockwork

Hugo

Crit

If the film hadn't put me in such a generous mood, I might ask, with genuine annoyance, why all these Parisians speak with English accents. But it did, so I'm not. A magical love story (and love of books as well as movies--is this made for me or what?) that would have misted me up more only if it had been my Xmas Day movie rather than my day-after-Thanksgiving one.

Trailer

• The Pirates! Band of Misfits--Aardman, so probably pretty good.

As I lay dying

The Descendants

Crit

More than once I've said (approvingly) of Alexander Payne that he doesn't really much like people. I never meant it completely without irony, but it was a plausible shorthand until now. This film comes scarily close to being plausibly described as heartwarming--but wait, I mean that in a good way. Here Payne once and finally makes it clear that, as the nuns exhorted us to do in grade school, he hates the sin but loves the sinners. Almost  every prick or doofus in the film gets a redemptive moment--wins a redemptive moment, earns it. Without, of course, essentially changing. "Yes, people are awful," the film seems to admit, "and yet . . . " A fair cop.

About actors: Is there anyone besides Clooney who could better portray a guy who is still trying to recover from a shot to the solar plexus when he gets kicked in the balls as well? And has anyone since Brando as effectively stolen a scene with a dead (OK, comatose, but you tell me the difference, thespianwise) woman? OK, well, maybe Judy Greer, here (and seriously, isn't it about time for us to see her in something for more than 5 minutes?)? And the kids (Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller, and Nick Krause)? Yes, ever so.

Trailers

• We Bought a Zoo--The new one from Cameron Crowe looks potentially very sappy, but he has a knack for making sappy work. And hell, animals! Including Scarlett Johansson!
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close--Just read and didn't quite love this, so I'm definitely review-dependent, but I must say the trailer convinced me that Sandra Bullock is not, as I had feared, miscast as the kid's mother.
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy--Never read this, but the trailer made me want to, and to see the film.
• The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel--Cute old folks' home in India; good cast, though.

120 degrees of separation

Like Crazy

Crit

OK, this game is hard to play every time out: I guess what this has in common with the last film I watched is a long, arduous march to futility.

Not by chance, I think, that Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones) meet in LA rather than New York--part of the point of her having to return to London (having crucially but believably overstayed her student visa) is, I think, that they're a third of the world, a third of the day, a third of their lives apart, and love is no match for that global mass. We care because this does as good a job as any film I've seen lately of showing young love in all its foolishness and beauty and bittersweetness in a way that resonates even with an old codger. And the telegraphic narrative--a montage of the couple in bed, in different positions and nightclothes, covers the passage of months, and some time jumps occur even more abruptly--which would be confusing and annoying in a lot of films, here perfectly conveys those lost transitions between desperation and fatigue. A lovely, heartbreaking film.

Trailer

• Young Adult--Looks a lot like Bad Teacher.

Loomings

Melancholia

Crit

Let's play What Does This Film Have in Common with the Last Film I Watched? Hmmm, a poser. I guess I'd say the unsurprising surprise discovery of a corpse.

So let's say it's Earth's last day before colliding with a much larger planet that will smoosh us all like bugs. Would you fix pancakes for breakfast? Would you want to spend your last minutes drinking wine and singing the Ode to Joy on the terrace? These are a couple of the least-provocative questions (hell, we haven't even talked about the toxic wedding reception) from provocateur supreme Lars, who, bless his sweet loopiness, never bores us, even when he decides to test-drive his inner Bruckheimer.

The untouchables

J. Edgar

Crit

I'm not as sure as some that Clint's a genius, but he's certainly a grown-up, so while he doesn't dodge reports of his subject's transvestism and homosexuality, he desensationalizes both, providing a reasonable context for the one incident we see of the first and using the second as the basis for a sad story of love and denial and (it seems clear to me) nonconsummation.

Leo is good, but Armie Hammer (the Winkelvii in The Social Network) steals the show as Hoover's more honest (and thus vulnerable, and thus inevitably abused, and thus heartbreaking in his devotion) partner Clyde Tolson. Sadly, the aging makeup on both looks like crap; only Naomi Watts, as the other person (once his mother [Judi Dench] dies) who loves him, ages well--and apparently a lot less than the boys do in the same number of years.

Trailer

• Haywire--Looks like a wanna-DragonTattoo, but directed by Soderbergh, so maybe.

My favorite obsession

La piel que habito (The skin I live in)

Crit

Ah, Pedro: love him or hate him, you can't deny he takes us places we'd never see via Hollywood. About two-thirds of the way through this, I was simultaneously admiring and being repulsed by it, and I was certain I wouldn't be adding it to my personal Almodóvar shelf. Now I'm not so sure. I was, as well, feeling nostalgic for my comfort level while watching those 2 recent flicks I had praised for putting me so on edge--they seemed pretty relaxed compared with this.

And then came the plot twist that completely blindsided me (partly, I'll confess, because of a lack of vision on my part that some people I know don't share), and then . . . I got lots more uncomfortable, then adjusted, and finally I found the weird world the director had put us into more or less normal, leaving me happy to take whatever came from there.

One gripe: the final scene would have been a lot more effective had the suspension point on which it ends come--as it easily could have--just a few seconds into the scene.

Trailers

• The Iron Lady--A long teaser rather than a trailer, with an absolutely brilliant wait-for-it, wait-for-it, wait-for-it reveal.
• OK, seriously, just open Pariah already, so I can stop seeing the damn trailer. I'm pretty sure I'm not a racist and positive I'm not homophobic, but I'm an ironclad bigot against crap high school "poetry"; the film itself might actually be OK, and it's certain to have a lower concentration of that puerile verse.

Helter skelter

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Crit

OK, first time I was ever aware of John Hawkes was in the trailer for Me and You and Everyone We Know, which I saw several times before the film came to town, and I thought he was a dead ringer for a young Dennis Hopper, so though his character looked like a sweet guy in the trailer, I wouldn't have been surprised to have him turn out to be a rapist leader of a murderous cult.

But his character was in fact a sweet guy in the film, and not long after that, he became for me what he will always be: the lovable and reliable best friend Sol Star in Deadwood, and since then I've not wanted to have to not like his character--he can have a few rough edges, as in Wristcutters: A Love Story or Winter's Bone, but I'm no longer prepared for him to be Charlie Manson. Guess I have to get past that.

Remember (gosh, I hope so--it was only a week ago!) what I said about Take Shelter, that it was "the front-runner in the 'I-was-never-comfortable' sweepstakes for 2011"? Well, it still is, but this is a worthy runner-up. And the films are alike in a surprising number of ways: in each, the protagonist behaves in ways that seem bizarre to those who haven't seen what (s)he has seen; in each, the protagonist foresees a catastrophe that no one else can sense; and each film ends on a big question mark: is that catastrophe imminent? Show 'em as a double feature and sell Ambien at the concession stand!

Or I'm gonna fade away

Take Shelter

Crit

When I saw the trailer for this, I thought it looked too M. Night Shyamalan for my tastes, and in fact it is very M. Night--if M. Night grew up smarter and more sophisticated. It has the same sort of supernatural-or-not metaphysical concerns that Shyamalan's films have, but without the "whoops--didn't see that coming" that cheapens his lesser efforts.

Instead, writer-director Jeff Nichols (who??? Jeff Nichols of Shotgun Stories? Jeff Nichols who's not yet 33 years old? right) seems set here on nothing less than plumbing the Old Testament question: how do you really know when you're a prophet? How do you know you're not just the loony your friends and neighbors take you for? And maybe even more important: how does your family know? Can your family know?

'Cause let's face it: you make a big deal of prophesying really bad shit, and there's 2 ways it can go down: (1) you can be wrong, in which case you are indeed just a nutball, which actually simplifies matters for everyone, including you. But what if (2) you're right? Well then, the reward you get for your legitimate prophet status is . . . really bad shit happens, and then you, as much as all the people who didn't listen to you because obviously you were just a loony, have to deal with it.

The genius of this film is that because Michael Shannon invests with such conviction his character's horrible dreams of 10w40 rainstorms and zombies--and Jessica Chastain (in the best of her 25 or so performances this year--where the hell has she been hiding?) so invests her character with love and terror and protection of their deaf daughter--that we're actually rooting for the really bad shit rather than the simple craziness. And how fucked up is that?

The front-runner in the "I-was-never-comfortable" sweepstakes for 2011. And I mean that it a good way.

Trailer

• Pina--I always have to preface every praise of a dance film with a disclaimer that I don't really care much for dance films; this one looks so trippy I won't even bother.

Coated with chlorophyll

Margin Call

Crit

Ahhh, this is why we go to the movies, to escape for a couple of hours into a strange world where thrilling and terrifying and implausible catastrophes occur, then to return to the real world secure in the knowledge that those things could never happen here.

Remember the old joke--I think I had a version of it on a Flip Wilson record when I was a kid--about the guy who picks up his buddy at the airport after housesitting for him, telling him that everything's OK, except that his dog died. The returning vacationer is, naturally, shocked and distressed, and asks to know how it happened, thus triggering a sort of reverse house-that-jack-built narrative in which each disaster ensued from an even bigger disaster, culminating in the housesitter's admission that the house itself has burned to the ground. Well, that joke is as good a metaphor as any for the 2008 economic meltdown, and here at least we get to see the guy (Kevin Spacey, as the Wall Street [actually, inexplicably, 34th Street] sales boss with a conscience, for what that's worth) burying his dog. We also see his ex-wife, played by Mary McDonnell, which I mention only because I love Mary McDonnell (in my current consciousness she's the cancer-doomed accidental president of the airborne Caprican civilization in the first season of Battlestar Galactica) and because she must have the best agent in Hollywood, because she's in just this one, final, maybe 3-minute scene, yet she gets seventh billing, ahead of such major players in the story (and bigger names) as Demi Moore and Stanley Tucci. What's up with that? Not complaining, just sayin'.

Anyway, this is a tightly written, tautly acted and directed gloss on the packaging, discovery, and dispersal of what Jeremy Irons's CEO calls (this is from memory, but it's pretty close) "the biggest, most odoriferous bag of excrement in the history of capitalism."

Just one bigger mystery than how all that could have gone down: what sort of accent is Paul Bettany going for? He's a fine actor, so I assume he's not just lost, as he seems to be, between Manchester and the Jersey (New Jersey, i.e.) Shore, but it's hard to see how someone with that yobbish/thuggish delivery could ever have risen to the position he holds, or how anyone in such a position for 10 years wouldn't have rid himself of it. Bizarre.

Soul on ice

The Black Power Mixtape, 1967-1975

Crit

You know, if I'd been born in Sweden, I would have had a much clearer view from my country's media of this country's warts, and maybe I wouldn't have grown up such a weak-tea liberal, such a limp-dishrag lefty. Then again, I did know a few equally middle-class white guys in grad school who hadn't drunk the Kool-Aid; I thought they were cynical, glass-two-thirds-empty grumblers. Well, who's the cynic now?

Anyway, better late than never seeing '60s black activism without the filter of the liberal INO American media. Golly, you know what? Yeah, Stokely and Angela did say all the shit that Walter quoted at 6 o'clock (I was in the Central time zone, don't forget), but nary a speck of foam flew from their mouths. Moreover, when you see them and hear them, and when they get to establish a context, that dangerous radicalism plays a lot more like simple good sense.

See. This. Film.

Adult education

La Tête en friche (My afternoons with Margueritte)

Crit

Oh, that's what friche means: the French title essentially means "fallow brain," which is exactly what two-t Margueritte (the beautiful near-centenarian Gisèle Casadesus) finds in the good-hearted, lumpy Germain (Gérard Depardieu). Not only does she introduce him to the wonder of words and literature, she supplies his lifelong want of maternal love. It's a wispy little film, but it's impossible not to like a paean to reading.

Who are those guys?

Blackthorn

Crit

The posters tell us that Sam Shepard is Butch Cassidy, and he looks the craggy part, as always. But his acting chops have never been up to carrying a film, and this film needs carrying. For want of a compelling central figure, it leans far too hard on the film we're all familiar with, and that underlies a uniformly unfortunate decision to spend a sizable chunk of the film in the early 1900s of that story rather than the 1927 of Butch's present. Except for introducing Stephen Rea as the Pinkerton agent on their trail, I can't think of one moment in those flashbacks that's worthwhile, and they're all distracting because the chemistry among Butch and Sundance and Etta is so clearly based on the wisecrackers of George Roy Hill's--and the distraction is worse because young Butch (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) has a look about him not of the young Newman but of the young Redford.

The 1969 picture looms in much of the imagery and many of the themes here, as well--especially the trope of pursuit by a large, indefatigable band of enforcers. And ultimately that posse brings the payoff to what has seemed a rambling story, but by that point, I didn't really much care.

Here's a question for those who know more about Latin America than I: would there have been any Iváns in Bolivia in 1927? I was under the impression that the Latino origin of that Slavic version of Juan was the Russian  presence in Cuba after the Castro revolution. But I'm happy to be taught otherwise.