Stand by me

Love and Other Drugs

Crit

"Who Wants to See Anne Hathaway’s Breasts?" asks the headline of the Newsweek review. "Must be a trick question," thinks I. No, just a snarky way into another unenthusiastic assessment for a film currently showing a 44% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes.com, 33% from the sites designated Top Critics. So, the upcoming Oscar cohost's extrathespian attributes notwithstanding, I was set to give this a pass--until the New Yorker's David Denby, whose reviews aren't nearly as much fun as Anthony Lane's but tend to hew more closely to my tastes, gave the film as enthusiastic a notice as I've seen for it, concluding with a downright astonishing declaration:

Love and Other Drugs has many weak spots, but what it delivers at its core is as indelible as (and a lot more explicit than) the work of such legendary teams as Clark Gable and Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

Whoa! I mean, whoa! That's a hell of a core then, no? So after that I pretty much had to see AH's breasts and whatever else the film had to show me, right? Well, here's the thing: no, it's not really much of a movie. In fact, if you're not predisposed to love Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, then her character is just another clichéd movie sick girl too selfless to fall in love, and when forced to move to plan B, too selfless to let the one she loves sacrifice himself for her; and he's just another clichéd movie cocksman too selfish to fall in love but who finds himself completed by the first truly remarkable woman he's ever met and gets to win her over with a late speech where he has her at "hello."

But they really are pretty terrific; only one of them is a salesman in the movie, but they both sell a shitload of cinematic snakeoil. The you-should-pardon-the-expression rise of Viagra is really a blue herring, which enables a little preaching about how fucked up the drug companies and the insurance companies are, forcing senior citizens to make bus trips to Canada for affordable generics. It's really just boy-and-girl-meet-cute; well, actually they meet creepy, but they're cute enough to compensate. And any film with both the Kinks and Regina Spektor on the soundtrack earns extra points.

Trailer

• Red Riding Hood--Amanda Seyfried as a sexy young Red menaced by bigger threats than wolf teeth.

Double indemnity

The Lady Eve

(1941)

Barbara Stanwyck as the same dame, Henry Fonda as the priggish snake lover, and a half-dozen of the best character actors in a nearly perfect screwball comedy, written and directed by Preston Sturges.

As a kid, I knew Stanwyck only from The Big Valley, and I didn't take her seriously. But seriously, she makes sexy funny and vice versa about as well as any star of her generation.

A boy's best friend . . .

White Heat

(1949)

From the standpoint purely of screen time, this might be as much police procedural as it is gangster flick, but let me just ask you: do you remember who the character Philip Evans is, or that he was played by John Archer? And if you remember Edmond O'Brien at all, isn't it as the undercover cop who rats out Cody? Face it: even before the final conflagration, Cagney burns so brightly that there's no oxygen for anyone else--except maybe a little bit for Margaret Wycherly as Ma Jarrett, and Virginia Mayo as cinema's most despicable gun moll.

Won't get fooled again

Nothing Sacred

(1937)

Carole Lombard can cover a multitude of sins, but it's hard to see why this is widely accorded "classic" status: there are a few good gags but lots of lame ones, and while I get that standards of racial and ethnic humor were different then--not to mention humor based on violence between the sexes--much of this is just flat out hard to watch.

The nut of the story--fraud as served by journalism--is potentially nourishing enough that this is one '30s screwball that could use a Fox News-era remake.

If history has taught us anything, . . .

The Godfather: Part II

(1974)

It's lonely at the top.

I have an ongoing argument with a friend about whether this is a better film than Part I. I'm not sure he has ever articulated why he prefers the first one, but my vote for this one is based on its adept interweaving of Michael's story with young Vito's. The first film is brilliant storytelling; this is that, and brilliant history as well.

By the way, a New York Times crossword puzzle clue last week was something like "The one who broke Michael Corleone's heart."

And viddy films I would

A Clockwork Orange

(1971)

What happened was, I wasn't finished roasting potatoes, and not having decided on a movie to watch, but not wanting to start one only to have to interrupt it a few minutes in, I decided to begin with salad and a screening of Don Hertzfeldt's wonderfully weird short Rejected. Naturally, once I heard the old Ludwig van on that soundtrack, I was ready for a bit of the old ultraviolent as well.

Among the many brilliances of Kubrick's film is its success in having its didactic cake and dining on some of the illicit thrills of which Alex must ultimately be cured of being cured. The almost (and I'm frankly not sure about the "almost") pornographic treatment of the red, red vino and the in-out, in-out seem calculated to deprive us of the opportunity to credit any good intentions to the repressive conditioning Alex undergoes. The Alex of act 2 is a victim--deprived of his pornographic pleasures even as the moral guardians of the state revel in them--and so the Alex of acts 1 and 3 is a hero whether we like it or not.

Plastics!

Tiny Furniture

Crit

Some time back I was given to understand that the term mumblecore had fallen into scorned desuetude, but it seems to be popping up again for this, and if the spiked heel doesn't fit very well and you wobble around self-consciously on it, . . .

Whatever else you call this, it is a tour de courage by 24-year-old Lena Dunham, who wrote, directed, and stars in this smart, funny, and loosely autobiographical tale of the most hopelessly unfocused recent college graduate since Benjamin Braddock, which, given the general demographic of mumblecore, is tall cotton. Aura, whose milieu, to the extent she has one, is the YouTube video, moves back in with her mother and younger sister, both of whom are vastly and unashamedly more accomplished artistically. Having put herself in such an emotionally unhealthy environment, what else is there for her to do but start and quit an awful job and crush on two worse boys, culminating in one of the ickiest episodes of consensual sex on film? And to top it off, Dunham films her own perfectly ordinary physique as mercilessly as any documentarian could have. Is it art, or just masochism? I don't care, because even the ugliness of this is beautiful.