More than this, there's nothing

Lost in Translation

(2003)

So what does this have to do with baseball opening day? Well, this a.m. I emailed this article to a friend, after which we discussed how different Japanese culture is from our own. Well, OK, we were a lot more ethnocentric than that, but you know what a stickler I am for political correctness here. Anyway, that make me think it was time to watch this again, especially as it had been in my mind lately anyway. Well, in my mind more than usual. It rarely gets too far away from my mind.

Sorry, Jen: Anthony Lane was right: the wig is pink.

Language of origin is Anglo-Saxon

Bad Words

Crit

This shares considerable mean-spirited DNA with Young Adult, but it lacks that excellent film's courage of its misanthropic convictions, ultimately providing a thoroughly conventional motive for 40-year-old Guy Trilby's (Jason Bateman, who also directed, and who, to be fair, plays a great prick) campaign to enter and embarrass a national spelling bee. But if the destination is a shopping mall, the ride is part funhouse, part whorehouse.

Trailers

• The Signal--Oops: I actually first saw this yesterday, but while taking notes in the dark on Noah, I wrote over and obliterated the title. Could go either way, but my money's on awful.
• A Haunted House 2--I get the sense, from cues apart from anything's actually being funny, that this is meant to be a comedy.
• Neighbors--What happens when a fraternity house moves in next door? Now that's high-concept!
• Draft Day--Speaking of the Reitmans . . . Might not be bad.
• Blended--Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler once made a very smart, sweet, funny romantic comedy together, so I'm not going to say anything about this one.

Two legs bad, four legs good, eight legs odd

Enemy

Crit

I have little to say about the film itself except that if I'd gone to the theater to see 2 films and knew that one was a Darren Aronofsky film but didn't know which one, I'd have left this one pretty confident that I'd already seen it. Which is meant as praise; just see it.

But what annoys me is that when my daughter was here last week, she was talking about wanting to do something dark next, and she has long been nagging me to write something, and dammit, if I were to write something dark for her to direct, this would have been perfect: we could have shot it in Champaign-Urbana (not quite as ugly as Ontario, but we could make do) for maybe 2 or 3 times what Scary Normal cost, depending on whether we actually wrecked a car. No, we wouldn't have been able to get Jake Gyllenhaal or that familiar voice we hear as his mother for that kind of money, and maybe we couldn't have cleared a Jonathan Richman song, and, oh, right, maybe we couldn't even have optioned a novel by a Nobel Prize winner, but dammit, I was reading and loving José Saramago before he was a Nobel laureate, and I'm really pissed at myself for not having read The Double and recognized it as Jen's next project. But to be fair, Denis Villeneuve did a pretty good job with it.

Noah

Crit

Appropriately, it was raining when I walked to the theater, and raining harder when I walked home, and it's raining harder still now. But God hasn't instructed me to do anything about it. Because let's face it, I'm not Russell Crowe. 'Cause let's also face this: that's not a biblical icon up there on the big screen; it's a movie star playing a superhero. Like many of his ilk, Noah gets his first push toward superheroism by seeing his father killed, and his next by confronting bullies and kicking way more ass than he has any right to kick.

Unlike most superheroes, he gets his decisive push from an extremely wet dream, after which he joins Greenpeace and Peta. Well, no, but his impulses do take the form of ecological and animal-rights extremism, to the point that he's certain that God's will is that his family is on the ark only to complete that extremist agenda and then grow old and die without breeding. It's hard to see his lumbering fallen-angel allies, the Watchers, helping him to oppose the Earth-raping industrialists led by Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone) without thinking of the ents vs. Saruman and Sauron and the orcs. Later Noah takes turns as noted biblical figures Abraham and Ethan Edwards.

Bottom line: the animals are more interesting than the people here. But that's not the criticism it might seem, because the animals--100% cgi--are pretty damned interesting, at least until they're all sedated.

Trailers

• Transformers: Age of Extinction--One can only hope the subtitle is not a tease.
• Earth to Echo--I don't know: maybe it was a good idea to mash up ET and The Blair Witch Project.

Why? Is it a soup metaphor?

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Crit

Correct me if I'm wrong, Jennie Tonic, but as I recall, your reaction to this was something very close to "Thank god for Wes Anderson." I can't improve much on that. The word "sensibility" is overused, but good golly, nobody else uses these colors, nobody else uses these miniatures, nobody else uses this blocking, nobody else can float these non-sequiturs. And for all Ralph Fiennes's accomplishments, nobody else has ever made him this charming (or profane). In short, as someone says about Fiennes's M. Gustave, Anderson sustains the illusion with remarkable grace. And hey, when I die, I want to go with the Prussian grippe.

Trailers

• Dom Hemingway--Jude Law as a thug; looks promising.
• Transcendence--Johnny Depp as . . . the Internet?

What makes a man to wander? (rhetorical question)

The Searchers

(1956)

Now that I've finally bought an HDTV, watching this painterly film makes me think that if I get a BluRay player, this will be one of the first discs I get in that format.

If I only had a smoke

Elle s'en va (On my way)

Crit

Oz keeps moving around, and Kansas (Brittany) is never overvalued, but this is clearly a French Wizard of Oz movie, with Catherine Deneuve as perhaps the oldest and certainly the most beautiful Dorothy ever. Her Bettie initially splits for cigarettes, or solitude, or maybe just to get away from her mother, her debt-strapped restaurant, and the longtime lover she has just learned has dumped both her and his wife for a 25-year-old.

As in any Oz story, she has odd and sometimes scary encounters along her way--dart players and an amorous cigarette smuggler at a country and western bar; a kindly African night watchman who lets her crash at his furniture store; her reuning 1969 beauty-pageant compatriots--and she finds someone to share her quest: Charly, the eleven-ish son of her estranged daughter.

A delight.

It's also a job

Bull Durham

(1988)

Delighted to watch this annual with two of my favorite young women, one of whom had never seen it and both of whom have the good sense to find 40ish Susan Sarandon at least as hot as Kevin Costner or babyfaced Tim Robbins. They had to hit the road first thing in the morning, so couldn't actually be guest bloggers, but I hereby invite them to comment.

(It occurs to me that the above might seem provocative, if not grotesquely self-aggrandizing, so perhaps I should make explicit that one of the women is my daughter, the other her Scary Normal lead.)