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.

Georgia on my mind

The Gold Rush

(1925)

OK, no review needed, but this is a rare instance when I have the chance to perform a useful service: if you rent the DVD from Netflix or from any store that has the Chaplin Collection edition, do NOT rent the main disc. Instead, get the bonus disc: that is where you'll find the original silent version. The one on the first disc features an unsilenceable and annoying narration--never mind that it's by Chaplin himself, it is nonetheless unnecessary crap.

I don't know what you get if you stream it from Nf, but I suspect the worst.

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?

And back again

Lord of the Rings: part III, Return of the King

(2003)

OK, without a doubt the big question on my mind after screening this is How long had my subwoofer been turned off? followed closely by How could I have watched 9 of the trilogy's 11 hours, complete with the Epic Battle Scenes that the MPAA card promised in explaining the PG-13 rating, without noticing that my subwoofer was silent?

Otherwise, my judgments of earlier screenings remain unchanged: notwithstanding the comic bookishly wooden dialogue, the theatrical version was an incredible achievement and the extended version is even better. If I had 11 hours to spare more often, I might come back even more frequently--but with the damn subwoofer on from the start, please!

And it was your world

The Concert for Bangladesh

(1972)

Oh, right: this was the time of All Things Must Pass, which in the original vinyl edition, which I stubbornly treated to as if it were a Beatles album, there was about one listenable side out of six (including a jam disc that even I couldn't listen to more than a few times). Fortunately, either George himself or the director chose mostly the good songs, and in the one exception, "Beware of Darkness," one verse's worth of Leon Russell spices it up nicely.

When Russell or Billy Preston or Ringo gets the spotlight, we're definitely in the B-zone, but then Dylan comes on for 5 terrific songs. I've never seen him live but have heard that he's mumbly and surly, but he was neither here--the adjective I'd choose would be godlike, and I mean that in a good way.

One annoying bit: that old fake encore after the musicians have left the stage before playing one song that everyone in the joint knows they're gonna hear, in this case the theme song for the whole gig.

One pleasant reminder: that Eric Clapton, the consummate team player, has the highest ratio of attention merited to attention demanded in the history of rock & roll, if not the history of music.

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.

One . . . ah . . . thing to rule them all

Lord of the Rings: part II, The Two Towers

(2002)

Sex! Du-uuuh! How can someone as sex-obsessed as I not have gotten it before that it's all about sex? I mean, I've always noticed (how could you not?) that the most menacing persistent image, Sauron's eye, is a huge pudendal cleft, but until tonight it had never dawned on me just how much of the trilogy's imagery is devoted to the one ring being teasingly caressed by a finger or by a dagger or sword or other substitute phallus. In fact, to be indelicate, more than "sex," it's all about pussy, notwithstanding that the most enduring love relationship is straight (as it were) out of Leslie Fielder's homoerotic playbook ("Come Back to the Raft, Frodo, Honey"?).

What a relief to have puzzled that out. And speaking of sex, I expect the majority of fanboy nerds fall in love with Cate Blanchett's Galadriel, with the more callow falling for Liv Tyler's Arwen. And there's nothing wrong with that pointy-eared pair, mind you--I don't want to be accused of anti-elvish prejudice--but for me, there's no competition with Miranda Otto's Eowyn. (Incidentally, apart from those three, is there a woman who gets 5 lines of dialogue in the whole freakin' trilogy?)