Aka apatosaurus

Bringing Up Baby

(1938)

I should take another look at What's Up, Doc? When it came out, in 1972, it was one of the funniest films I'd ever seen; it wasn't until several years later, when I caught part of Baby on TV, that I realized where the best of it--including the characterizations of the in-over-his-head scientist and his ditzy would-be love interest--came from.

I'm always surprised to be reminded that this film isn't perfect onscreen (as it is in memory)--I could do without Barry Fitzgerald's drunken Mick shtick, e.g., and two or three fewer Charlie Ruggles double takes wouldn't hurt, either. But Hepburn and Grant are perfect, and watching this makes you wish they'd done a half-dozen screwballs together and makes you wonder why Kate in particular got so few opportunities to do physical humor.

Bitter honey

Before the Rains

Crit

If there's anything that fiction and the movies have taught me (having no experience of the principle in my own life, of course), it's that infidelity--that venial wrong so delicious that it seems as if it must be right--inevitably leads to a spiral of worse and worse wrongs, stripping the adulterer of everything he holds dear.

Thus for Linus Roache's Henry Moores, who is the very model of a preindependence plantation-owning Good Englishman: he loves one Indian like a brother and another (played by Nandita Das, from Deepa Mehta's Fire and Earth, so duh) like a wife, and his loves are utterly sincere. Just a couple of problems: she has a husband, and Henry has a wife (the radiant Jennifer Ehle, best known to American audiences as Elizabeth Bennet to Colin Firth's Darcy), who is as perfect as he appears to be. Oh, and one other little problem: for all the apparent equality in their relationships, T.K. and Sajani both call Henry "Sahib."

Inevitably, the Good Englishman does increasingly bad things, until he is revealed as a morally bankrupt representative of a morally bankrupt and decaying system. The humanity of the characters makes the film much less rote than I'm probably making it sound, but still, there's little here we haven't seen before.

Trailers

• Religulous--You know, I actually have a great deal of respect for religious faith in the abstract, and for many thinking believers I know. But I gotta say: you offer me a couple of hours of Bill Maher being a smartass about religion, and it's hard to imagine skipping it.

Young Tyler Durden

Kalifornia

(1993)

Someone recommended this to me, but fortunately, I don't remember who. Not as bad as it could be, but not nearly as good as it might have been in the hands of someone capable of lifting it out of a swamp of cliché and providing some legitimate insight into the seductiveness of evil. I mentioned to someone at work (someone with an inexplicable David Duchovny fixation) that I was going to see this, and she said, "Brad and Juliette chew up a lot of scenery." True dat.

Comme une pierre

I have forfeited the carbon-footprint moral high ground; specifically, I have driven off the moral high ground cliff in my rental Chevy Silverado.

I was waiting at the door when Enterprise opened at 9 this morning, but they simply didn't have any cars. (Yes, I did think of that episode of Seinfeld, as a matter of fact.) The only vehicle they could put me in--and to do that someone had to drive me to another lot, way the hell out in Woodbridge--was this big, hulking, assholemobile of a pickup truck. I was close to saying, "No, just drive me home," but let's face it: I needed to go to Costco, I needed to go to Trader Joe's, I needed to go to Wine & Liquor Warehouse, and I needed to go to Edge of the Woods to stock up on Quorn fake-chicken patties. Plus, I wanted to go to a couple of movies, one on the edge of town and one 15 miles away. So yes, I am an asshole, but just for the weekend.

The Rape of Europa

Cine

And another thing that pisses us off about the Nazis, especially Hitler (it's always Hitler, isn't it?) and Göring: they stole one shitload of art from all over Europe, and it has been a real bitch getting everything found, say nothing about repatriated.

Now that we're used to Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, it's hard to evaluate documentaries that effectively if colorlessly tell their stories, but this one taught be stuff I didn't know, reminded me of things I did, introduced me to some memorable characters (like the [Christian] Austrian who tries to track down descendants of Jews whose appropriated Torahs, menorahs, and other religious artifacts couldn't be returned to their owners for depressingly obvious reasons), and occasionally moved me (like when the same Austrian arrives on Staten Island with a pair of Torah crowns, having first described the reaction of the inheritors when he jingled the bells of the ornaments over the phone).

One cavil about the commentary, read by Joan Allen: it's a grotesque understatement to refer to "decimated" Jewish communities of the Shoah.

Roman de Gare

Mad

Very promising Hitchcockian start, a satisfying resolution of the first round of ambiguities, but a third act that lacks the surprise twist or double- or triple-twist we had seemingly been promised. And the conclusion is just plain unbelievable.

Trailers

• The Duchess--I loves me some Keira, but this looks like something we've seen too many times before.
• Brideshead Revisited--I never visited the first time, but the same comment applies to this.

Jesus in a green beret

Apocalypse Now

(1979/2001)

What was I thinking? Watching a 3½-hour movie when I had to get up at regular workday time so that I could work out before picking up my rental car for an errand-running, driving-to-movies day? The error! The error!

Even though the title above doesn't reflect it--because I think that's a silly word when used w/ gravity as Coppola does and can be carried off only with a touch of irony, the way Updike uses it--this is the 2001 director's reconstruction, including the slapstick theft of Colonel Kilgore's surfboard, the dreary second scene with the Playmates, and the very French scene at the French plantation, full of French politicophilosophical (do the French distinguish?) discourse and drug-laced French seduction. When I first and second saw this version, the first two restored sequences struck me as unnecessary and heavy-handed, especially the piling on of ridiculousness on the Duvall character, but I found the plantation scene intriguing and erotic. Well, I still find it erotic, but I'm pretty much ready to revert to the 1979 version--except I can't, 'cause it's not on the disc I have.

Still, it's one of the great shaggy dog stories of cinema history.

Maybe for a hundred more

The Searchers

(1956)

OK, look, here's the thing: call 'em "Comanche" or "Vietcong" or "insurgents," it doesn't matter whether we have any business being there in the first place. If we've been told that we need to be there, and the Others think we don't belong there, they're going to to everything they can to keep us from staying there, including murder, rape, and whatever else we define as "savagery" when it's done to us, as "warfare" when we do it to others.

And that means that once those rules are established, it doesn't matter whether we belong there or not; if we want to live, we answer savagery with savagery; we answer kill with kill.

One other lesson from this film is that what we (which is to say we men, because we with cocks get to decide who the enemy is) fear most is the cock, and the spunk, of the Other, because their cock threatens the supremacy of our cock, and their spunk dilutes ours. Why else would we resist so the military aptitude of you the cockless?

And that is why this is a great film: not because it shows that Ford can film Monument Valley as magnificently in color as in black and white; not because it shows that John Wayne really is capable of something that we can reasonably call acting; but because more than a half-century ago, someone was able to make sense of Fallujah.

Sex and the Circe

The Lady from Shanghai

Crit (1947)

Golly! I had no idea there were any noirs this good left that I hadn't already seen. A convoluted plot that keeps us guessing whether it's a double-, triple, or quadruple-cross, razor-sharp dialogue (and if Welles takes most of it for himself, that's not such a bad thing, and if his brogue is never altogether convincing, well, that's not a hanging offense either), some good scenery chewing by the Welles regular Everett Sloane and the utterly obscure Glenn Anders, and as fatale a femme as you could ever ask for in the second-most-beautiful Hollywood actress ever to marry royalty. And then there's that climactic funhouse-mirrors sequence. Classic; why has it been hiding from me all these years?

Sex and the City

Crit

I always thought that one of the best decisions in the planning stages of the series was half-hour, not hour, and indeed, for about a half-hour, I was having fun (estroporn wedding-dress montage notwithstanding), but the sprinter was never meant to run a marathon, and the next half-hour, and the next half-hour, and the next half-hour, and the next almost-half-hour showed all the signs of severe oxygen deficit (though I'll grant that Jennifer Hudson brings some fresh air to the second half). Men fail two of the women for no other reason than that the plot demands it (well, unless "that's what men do" counts as a reason)--we've got to get the quartet to Mexico, after all--and then the last loose end is tied up by a deus-ex-utero device. Maybe if you wait for the DVD and watch it over five sittings . . .