Naima

Ida

(2014)

Poland, early '60s, Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), days away from taking her vows, is shipped off by her Mother Superior to be nanny to the children of a widowed baron--oh, wait, no, that's not right--to meet her only living relative, a cynical aunt (Agata Kulesza) who had refused to take her in when she was orphaned and is now an alcoholic, sexually indiscriminate judge for the Communist state.

It becomes a journey of discovery--that she is Jewish, that her name is Ida, that her parents were murdered in the war, that the circumstances of their death might be discoverable, and that that vow of chastity might be a lot bigger sacrifice than she'd ever dreamed before she heard Coltrane.

The second of three films I'm seeing this weekend from my list of top five missed last year, and I have no hesitation labeling this one extraordinary. I'm usually oblivious to technical matters, but watch how Ida migrates from the corners of the squarish black-and-white frame to the center as she migrates from the periphery of consciousness to the center of her self. A gem, beautiful in every way.

Smoke and fog

Inherent Vice

Crit

OK, now I've seen my most anticipated 2014 film that didn't open here until 2015, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't put me on the spot about whether it's great, or even whether it would have been on my top 10 list had I seen it in time. I feel sort of a contact high, fuddled by the secondhand smoke from private investigator Doc Sportello's (Joaquin Phoenix) ever-present joint.

I can say I laughed a lot. I can say I was thoroughly engaged, though less by the questions of what has become of Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts, one of maybe a half-dozen top-flight actors who get a single scene) or whether snitch Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson) can be rehabilitated into hearth and home than in how Doc and the bereaved Lt. Det. Christian F. "Bigfoot" Bjornsen (Josh Brolin) resolve their personal crises. I can also say that the soundtrack kicks ass.

If pressed, I guess (1) probably not, but (2) yeah, in the middle or lower.

Trailers

• American Sniper--I'd love permission to give this a miss, but said permission seems not to be forthcoming.
• McFarland USA--Sports inspiration from Disney.

$59.60

It Happened One Night

(1934)

I was inspired to watch this tonight by a grad school friend's report that he showed it for the first time to his teenage son, who pronounced it probably his favorite movie, even while pointing out its continuity flaws. I was impressed by David's powers of observation, and I still am, even after discovering that I'd noticed one of the errors the last time I'd watched (click on title link).

Presumably, David, being young and having killed few of his brain cells, will remember having noticed the error even if he doesn't watch the film again for almost 5 years.

Upload

Her

(2013)

Often when I've loved a film enough at first sight to preorder the DVD asap, I return to it after the one-year recommended rest period eager to see whether I disagree at all with my initial impression (if you're new here or you've not heard me mention this before, a previous review, when one exists, can be accessed via the title link).

Answer: not a whit. However, one addition: in marveling a year ago at the performances of the lead actors (including the unseen one, regardless of her billing), I neglected to mention what an extraordinary treatment Amy Adams gives to Amy, the quietly pining friend whose relatively thankless function is to give Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) a flesh-and-blood sounding board and shoulder to cry on.

Popup book

As I rule I'm doing this on New Year's Eve, which means I don't have to go to work tomorrow, which (along with the bourbon) makes me nice and unstressed. This time, though, I'm doing it at cocktail hour on the last day of the winter break, so I'm already thinking about when to stop for dinner to ensure that I get to bed early enough to be well rested for the one-day workweek and the pile of work I need to accomplish therein.

So if I knock off and don't post until the 2nd, don't hate me. Well, don't hate me for that, anyway. Same rules as in recent years: I just kinda meander back through my posts; some call it impressionistic, some call it lazy.

But first . . .

Top five 2014 films I'm eager to see in 2015:

1. Inherent Vice
2. Selma
3. Mr. Turner
4. Ida
5. Listen Up Philip

And so . . .

• January is when I finally got to see Her, which if not ultimately my favorite 2013 film, was right up there. The Rocket was an unanticipated treasure.
• Traditionally sterile February brought Gloria, which made at least one best-of list, though not mine.
• March was The Grand Budapest Hotel: Wes is more. Oh, and the dark and creepy Enemy, which for my money is the better dark and creepy Jake Gyllenhaal flick this year.
• April, aka the cruelest month in Malaysian martial arts/cop/action flicks, brought the excruciating Berandal (The raid 2). Also Under the Skin, which I will always pair with Her: in a span of a few months, one of the most beautiful women in the movies, also possessed of one of the sexiest voices, had one role in which the visual was absent and another in which the aural is minimized, and she gave two of the best performances of my 2014 in those two films.
• In one day in May, I saw the astonishingly high-concept Locke and my second-favorite vampire flick of the year, Only Lovers Left Alive.
• June was mostly World Cup, duh, but I did see The Fault in Our Stars, the second teen film starring Shailene Woodley that has grabbed me (2013's The Spectacular Now being the other). And in a very different brain segment, La danza de la realidad (The dance of reality) by Alejandro "wtf?" Jodorowsky.

Excuse me: I need to refresh my drink, but it's not 6 yet, so I may be able to finish tonight.

I'm back; this part of the program is brought to you by Jim Beam (long story).

• Snowpiercer? Seriously? Yes, and July, with the Cup having some off days as it wound down, opens with a mass transit bang. Then La Vénus à la fourrure (Venus in fur), which was excellent, but a couple of months later Scary Normal star Laura Anne Welle got the role at the Station Theatre in Urbana, making me queasily glad that I wouldn't be around to see her so scantily dressed in this, no matter how good I'm sure she'd be.
• Boyhood, in August, is the first 2014 film I'm 100% confident in calling great, Richard Linklater's masterpiece, which is tall cotton. Get on Up, which I expected to be a routine biopic, surprised me.
• Why on earth did I go to only 4 films in September? Why none is worth mention here is a different question.
• October's Gone Girl may actually be the most morally reprehensible film of 2014, but it's certainly one the films that inspired the more worthwhile conversation. Pride, one of the year's best? Nah, but one of the most lovable! Dear White People--hey, based on how much it made me feel, this may just be my #1 for the year!
• November: Ordinarily I don't put negatives in here, but Birdman? Yeah, good flick, but genius? Top ten? Not on my watch. And Interstellar? Ditto. Whiplash, on the other hand--extreme dissent from my YUP author David Thomson notwithstanding--ripped my drum kit. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, on (can this be true?) my first M4 of the year, moved me, as  did Citizenfour.
• December: I watched it on DVD, but the beauty of the 21st century is that Vi är bäst! (We are the best!) is still a 2014 film, one of the best. The same rules apply to Frank, though I confess it didn't move me as much. The fucking Babadook, on the other hand, scared the fucking shit out of me in a way that no film has done in a long, long time. Also, The Homesman seems to me an underrated great film. And Top Five a nearly great Woody Allen film.

So, top 10? Well, pending the 5 that I cited at the start, let's say:

1. Dear White People
2. Boyhood
3. Gone Girl
4. The Babadook
5. Grand Budapest Hotel
6. Locke
7. Under the Skin
8. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
9. Only Lovers Left Alive
10. Vi är bäst!

Welcome to America

Remote Area Medical

Crit

The titular organization was founded to help people in South America deprived by poverty and distance from medical care, but as this documentary, set in Appalachian Tennessee, shows, the focus has pulled back to address the Third World as it exists within our own borders.

Bad teeth (and not always, as people tend to assume, says a woman about whom I'm sorry to say I'd already assumed thus, because of crystal meth), bad pumps (a 61-year-old who says he last saw a doctor when he was about 16 registers a blood pressure reading of 220/160), bad lungs (a smoker since 16 has her first-ever chest X-ray at 50 or so, and it shows scary spots), bad eyes, bad everything that can go bad in human physiology--RAM drops in with the focus and efficiency of Navy Seals and changes lives a weekend of free medical care at a time.

Way beyond inspiring, way beyond disturbing--especially when you think that this is the sort of duty accepted by governments of most developed countries, not left to the charity and organizational genius of people like Stan Brock, RAM's founder.

Wild

An  unusually political M4

Deux jours, une nuit (Two days, one night)

IFC

How to make this work: Sandra, laid off from her job after receiving treatment for depression, goes coworker-to-coworker, asking each to vote for her reinstatement, and thus against his or her own €1k bonus?

Well, it helps if Sandra is played by someone like Marion Cotillard, capable of conveying the embarrassment and the shame and the hopelessness of the process. Even so, this is something I can imagine being more successful in the hands of a brilliant short story writer.

She's Beautiful When She's Angry

CV

I still occasionally will see a successful young entertainer quoted as declaring herself "not a feminist." Any female, at minimum, and better, any human who rejects the label needs to watch this documentary, which collects a wealth of first-person reports from the women's movement's resurrection in the '60s, alongside but often bizarrely in conflict with the other freedom movements of the time.

Leviafan (Leviathan)

FF

Infidelity, venality, religion, religious hypocrisy, vodka, kleptocracy--right, all the standard ingredients of the Russian epic. Oh, and whales, too, whales dead and alive. The Job story, if Job were pretty much an asshole and drank way too much.

Arrête ou je continue (If you don't, I will)

FF

Marital exhaustion leads Pomme (Emmanuelle Devos) to stay in the literal and metaphorical forest when Pierre (Mathieu Amalric) leaves the literal, if not the metaphorical. 

For anyone with as big a crush as I have on both these actors, the terminal loss in translation, the insurmountable sadness, the same-magnetic-pole repulsion are heartbreaking. If this were a Hollywood movie, dammit, there'd be a way to make it right. 

Trailers

• Queen and Country--Brits in the Korean War.
• Timbuktu--And then the Islamists come to town.
• Il capitale umano (Human capital)--Sex and corruption in Italy? Say it ain't so!