The wrong key

Dial M for Murder

(1954)

Hey, this is a lot better than I remembered. Yes, it depends on an implausible clockwork plot, but you say that as if it were a bad thing. Robert Cummings spends most of his time trying to play James Stewart, who would indeed have been a better choice for the role, but there's a nice dynamic of guilt for the relatively innocent parties that helps us suspend our disbelief. Ray Milland is an appropriately oily villain, and Grace Kelly is, well, Grace Kelly. (She would have been 80 yesterday, by the way.)

And let's talk about John Williams, excellent here and in The Paradine Case and To Catch a Thief, though this is the first time I've given him any credit. A born Brit-police-inspector-on-film.

A film that not only could not be made now, when phones can go anywhere, but couldn't even have been made ten years later, when everyone had an extension phones in the bedroom.

Un altro film senza speranza

Otto e mezzo (8½)

(1963)

This is all kinds of weird, dude, but it's beautiful, too. As the man says, sometimes you just have to let art wash over you. Marcello Mastroianni plays a version of Federico Fellini, struggling to put together a film from bits and pieces of his past and present. But that's like saying Moby-Dick is about a guy chasing a whale. As always, everything boils surreally down to sex, music (mind-blowing bricolage of a score by Nino Rota), and Catholicism.

What-evah!

The Man Who Knew Too Much

(1956)

OK, I'll admit: it may be my visceral abhorrence of Doris Day and my intense hatred for that fucking song-no-don't-make-me-listen-to-it-again-arrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Please! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!!!!!!!!!

OK, I'm better now. As I was saying, I have points of resistance to this film that are perhaps not strictly critically objective. Still, I think even beyond that, it's a rather gimmicky mishmash, clearly inferior to the original version.

One interesting element: Bernard Herrmann in front of the camera for the only time, conducting the London Philharmonic.

Bless the beasts and the children

The Men Who Stare at Goats

Crit

Too goofy to be taken seriously, not consistently funny enough to be a completely satisfying hoot.
Ewan McGregor seems uncertain what movie he's in (understandable, given its schizoid character), but Clooney, Bridges, and Spacey soldier on admirably, and more successfully than the material deserves. And there are a lot of goats.

An Education

Crit

From the stills I'd seen, I was concerned that 20-something Carey Mulligan wouldn't convince me of her sixteenness, in a film where her sixteenness is crucial. Not to worry: she is spot-on throughout as the unusually-sophisticated-but-still-16-16 Jenny, and even as the answer to her key dilemma is painfully obvious to us, we can see (and feel) why it's not for her. And why she manages to blink out all the danger flares that flash whenever David (Peter Sarsgaard, perfectly cast) flips the vulnerable grin switch.

One thing, though: the event that finally tells her (and us) why it is necessary to run away as fast as her field-hockey-fit legs can carry her is a really clumsy bit of plotting that would get red-penciled in Screenwriting 100. Uh-uh. Would. Not. Happen.

Trailers

• A Single Man--Funny, a gay friend of mine knows My Future Wife Julianne Moore ("Julie," he calls her) and pronounces her sometimes too beautiful to carry on a conversation with. So you can sympathize with Colin Firth's character, who, though gay, is apparently expected to carry on more than a conversation with her here. Maybe "sympathize" isn't the right word.
  
• Bronson--Gosh. It sure doesn't look boring.
• The Crazies--I never thought I'd say this, but maybe it's time to let zombies rest for a while.
  

I don't care how you brigham . . .

Wagon Master

(1950)

Too many, too much: too many major characters, too much plot--so much that the Navajo are relegated to minor annoyance--and way too much music.

Finally, about midway through the sub-90-minute running time, the bad guys show up (and you think, "Oh, right: from the prologue; I wonder whether that prologue was added later so they wouldn't come clean out of the blue?") and the plot gets clarified. And then it's a pretty good plot, though the bad guys--the Cleggs--are really just the Clantons from My Darling Clementine, right down to the paterfamilias's mourning, then joining, his boys.

And this: how many movies portray westward-migrating Mormons as heroic?

Oops, sorry; never mind

The Wrong Man

(1956)

Based on actual events, Hitchcock's story of an innocent man accused, tried, and eventually released when the mistake is discovered--after the police have pretty much ruined his life and driven his wife to the loony bin. Henry Fonda at his this-can't be-happening-to-me best.

Ghosts

Aruitemo Aruitemo (Still walking)

Crit

A lovely elegiac film that proves that the Japanese can have as much guilt and bitterness about a premature death in the family as the Americans and French can. Disconcertingly, the patriarch and his wife and their perpetual condition of cold war seem to have been based on my parents.