Netflix Instant Play Picks of the Moment

Snake Eyes (1998)

2012-01-21T12:47:00.000-06:00

It's easy to roll your eyes or shrug when it comes to, respectively, Nicholas Cage and Brian DePalma. I feel no need to point out their uneven, sometimes reckless careers, their stubborn unwillingness to behave, their bizarre turns as actor and director. But together in Snake Eyes something almost perfect happens--and sure it's reckless and bizarre, like the man said; but also (as each has managed before and since) so aggressive in knowing this that I grin and more than bear it. From the famous opening sequence--a continuous shot that could be a pretty good short-subject thriller on its own--to the determined use of space--that mazelike convention center buffeted by winds and bad guys--to Cage's own headlong rush into everything DePalma throws at him--including Gary Sinise, following up his krazy kidnapping kop in 1996's Ransom (where Sinise was able to withstand a ride on another madman's roller coaster, the always-caffeinated Mel Gibson*)--Snake Eyes conjures, one more time, the Cage/DePalma alternate universe of sight, sound, and Outer Limits emoting that means nothing except a little world made deliriously by two of the stalwarts of this kind of good craziness.

*And don't look to me if you want Mel-bashing; I'm with Robert Downey, Jr. on this; hug the cactus, people: http://youtu.be/-zI1V1yQ30U

The Thin Red Line (1998)

2012-01-13T11:08:00.002-06:00

As we head toward the Oscar nominations, I'm hoping Terence Malick's The Tree of Life isn't overlooked. In some ways it is a "difficult" movie—shifting from the cosmic to the mundane with nary a violin crescendo to warn us, its narrative structure committed to the conceit that what we are seeing is all memory, personal as well as collective-unconsciously. For others, though, it's what Roger Ebert recently in a blog entry on the movie Contact referred to (with some affection) as "New Age woo-woo." I was knocked out by The Tree of Life, joining others who couldn't help comparing it to 2001—another acid test of one's tolerance for High Woo-Woo.

Anyway, in case you're following the Oscars but not Malick's career, you might want to check out The Thin Red Line, Malick's 1998 film about, among many other things, the battle for Guadalcanal in the Pacific during WWII. The cast is extensive—including Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, George Clooney, Adrien Brody, James Caviezel, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, Elias Koteas, John C. Reilly, John Travolta, and Tim Blake Nelson (whew!)—but to this he adds a larger cast, the same one he features in The Tree of Life: Nature herself, cloud and insect, ocean and leaf. This is a "war movie" (almost) in the same way that his current picture is a "family drama"—although The Thin Red Line does seem more grounded in recognizable combat film conventions, from chain-of-command infighting and sweeping battle scenes to G.I. Joes and their stories and hopes and fears. Still, it is almost three hours of meditation on war as much as it is war movie. But, as with all of his (few--five since 1973!) films, one's patience is rewarded. Like any "true" artist, he goes where he will; we follow if we choose, no matter to him.

True Grit (2010)

2012-01-06T14:28:00.000-06:00

Just passing along some good news: one of the best films of recent years, True Grit, is on Instant Play. It's a beautiful movie--its landscapes not as dramatic as the 1969 version, but photographed so well, the characters and action framed in spaces that look nothing like "scenery." And it's maybe one of the Coen bros.' most morally complex films, in that the justice enacted is fraught with losses, and the plucky young heroine forced to see each one, and learn to live with them. Besides, the narration is typically Coen-perfect, and Jeff Bridges rolls himself up into a ball bigger and messier than the Dude's. All in all, one of those rare occasions when a remake makes perfect sense.

Parents (1989)

2012-01-05T10:20:00.000-06:00

I've decided to revive this site--and the strongest motivation is the return of this dark comedy. Parents satirizes an easy target--1950s-style suburbia--but does so with an old-school "sick humor" attitude that is reminiscent of not only the '50s but the kind of humor that decade inspired--pure E.C. comics/Mad magazine "humor in a jugular vein." I'm not entirely happy with the climax, but 90% of this movie is as creepy, funny, lurid, and at times downright nightmarish as one could wish--if one harbors such dark wishes.

Again, it's good to be back--although maybe I've should've chosen a less unsavory movie to kick off the new year. Oh, well: Enjoy Randy Quaid at his skinny-tie (and waistline!) best, along with Mary Beth Hurt as perky as Barbara Billingsley with a cleaver (heh-heh-heh)--and Sandy Dennis, who doesn't even have to try to fit right into this kind of material.

Leaves of Grass (2009)

2011-05-24T08:41:00.003-05:00

To call Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass a "serio-comedy" touches only the surface of a seriously funny movie. It asks Big Questions from diametrically opposed positions--passionate/impulsive and rational/controlled--and accepts the merits of both sides, resulting in what might be a third view--and I won't bore you with my vague conclusions. Instead, let me point out one of the movie's great treats: two Edward Nortons, the actor playing twins--both geniuses, one a philosophy prof, the other a hydroponic pot-growing wizard. Their lives collide following the prof's self-imposed estrangement from his family--including Susan Sarandon doing what she does so well: playing crazy, just enough to keep her distance from the real world while understanding it all too well. His rocky (and that's putting it mildly) road home makes for what can only be described as a screwball tragedy--maybe.

The writer-director behind this bifurcated plan is Tim Blake Nelson, a pitch-perfect character actor--as Delmar in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, delivering one of the great lines of the movies: "Them syreens did this to Pete. They loved him up and turned him into a horny toad"; and the enigmatically pleasant Gideon in Minority Report--among other welcome appearances. We even have the treat of his turn as Bolger, the pot-dealing twin's partner, drawing out his Oklahoma accent like a nice fishing-rod he'd like to show you--got it when he was a boy and it's still in good shape. Nelson is a gifted artist, and his direction matches the swerving tone of Leaves of Grass step by reckless step.

This Is England (2006)

2011-05-07T20:13:00.003-05:00

Who remembers the Falklands War? They're small islands off the coast of Argentina; both Argentina and the U.K. claimed them. The Argentinians occupied them in April 1982, and about two months later the conflict was over, with the U.K. maintaining control, more or less.

The victory made Margaret Thatcher popular, but left some scars on both sides. The 2006 movie This Is England offers one boy's story--his father among the few hundred soldiers who died in the conflict, leaving the boy to navigate grief and adolescence while the punks and rude boys made way for the new skinheads who loved being white more than they did the saving sounds of Toots and Maytals and turned every town into a Ghost Town. The movie charts Shaun's sweet and sad, sometimes harrowing attempts to find his father in the New England that the hard 1980s built.

Thomas Turgoose as Shaun is as natural an actor as you could hope for. His early good times with his new, older mates--still playing in the fields, giving Shaun a sense of home, young skins and their pretty girls all the brothers and sisters he needs--are an idyll he certainly deserves, as temporary as it may be.

But an old friend of Shaun's new circle returns from prison, his head still shaved but his mind cleaned out, leaving nothing except the half-understood--but full-blown committed--politics of hatred. And sadly, Shaun finds a home here, too, and the film becomes a near-nightmare. Loss and hate and hard times is too strong a mix for Shaun, and he's left with only himself to decide what he's going to become.

Don't get me wrong: The early sequence is actually heartwarming, propelled by music and, as The Beatles put it, "that magic feeling--nowhere to go." And this makes the shift downward even more jarring: We want Shaun to mend with his friends. But he has a hard road ahead, and This Is England makes him travel far--almost like Francois Truffaut's alter ego, Antoine Doinel, in The 400 Blows, in that both boys are cut loose, and run to the sea. I'll let you decide what Shaun finds there.

Live Clash, "This Is England": "I got my motorcycle jacket / But I'm walking all the time."

Mesrine, Part 1: Killer Instinct (2008)

2011-05-05T08:36:00.006-05:00

Jean-François Richet—who directed the tight, tough 2005 remake/re-imagining of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13—presents a big two-part film about Jacques Mesrine, a notorious French criminal (think Dillinger crossed with Joe Pesci's Tommy in Goodfellas) whose exploits (at least in this first part) span much of the globe, from Algeria in the late 1950s to France to Quebec to Arizona—then back again. Along the way, he robs, tortures, kidnaps, murders, goes to prison, gets out, abuses his wife, loves her (and others), all the while inventing himself as a celebrity/political radical, prison reformer (with automatic weapons), and Gallic Clyde Barrow. Vincent Cassel—always good, particularly in Brotherhood of the Wolf and The Crimson Rivers (in which he manages to be as cool as Jean Reno, and that's saying something)—plays Mesrine without apologies, neither sympathetic nor demonic, his violent temperament constructed without prejudice. We're left to observe Mesrine as-is.

The best thing I can write about this movie is that I was sorry it was over. When some people read a good book, they speed up, hungry for each page. Me, I slow down. But I was greedy with Mesrine, and didn't pause it to leave the rest for another day. No, I held out to myself the promise of Part 2: Public Enemy No. 1 and finished up Part 1, sorry to see it go. I haven't watched Part 2 yet, but let this review stand for both. This is about as straightforward as gangster pictures come, moving with confidence and speed, like Mesrine himself robbing two banks in one minute.

NOTE: In my haste, I neglected to mention the supporting cast, headed by the always-charismatic Gerard Depardieu, along with two women—Elena Anaya (the abused wife) and Cécile De France (Mesrine's steel-plated Bonnie)—who effortlessly match the pace of their ferocious male co-star.

Little Fugitive (1953)

2011-04-23T16:30:00.003-05:00

Back in 1953, when Little Fugitive was a brand-new movie, the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther (for almost thirty years writing (often-enlightening) reviews encased in quaint tut-tuts and dry observations) ended his review with "All hail to 'Little Fugitive' and to those who made it. But count it a photographer's triumph with a limited theme." And he was mostly right, especially for us watching today: the triumph is the film's preservation of early-'50s NYC, particularly Coney Island, as the little boy--tricked by his older brother into thinking the little "tad," as Crowther put it, had murdered him--makes his way through a series of mild adventures, his fears forgotten in a world of shooting galleries, pony rides, and merry-go-rounds--after he collects empties and cashes them in. His adventures are slight, but that's the point: The Little Fugitive is one of a handful of movies that lowers the camera to see kidhood without condescension or (too much ) sentiment.

Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, and Ruth Orkin wrote, photographed, directed and produced; the little boy, Joey, is played by a non-actor, Richie Andrusco (as was his brother). And aside from a few NYC stage actors, the rest of the cast plays itself: New York City, that is, and that Island that's as eager to please as Pinocchio's, but without donkeys.

The Fall (2006)

2011-04-21T13:47:00.004-05:00

Tarsem Singh (or simply "Tarsem" over the last few years) has directed only two pictures since 2000--and that first one was The Cell, a movie whose plot matters infinitely less than the terrible beauty of its images and the astounding commitment of Vincent D'Onofrio to the persona he crafts, like some alternate-universe lead in an opera written by H.P. Lovecraft.

With The Fall, Tarsem does not flinch under the threat of his earlier picture, but decides to edge closer to Tim Burton than David Lynch as he explores the most needful thing of all: the yearning for narrative, for life to lose its messy edge and follow a straight line for once. The injured silent-era stuntman and the little girl with the broken arm collaborate on the same story--but to different ends. Of course, the story has its own ideas, and draws everyone in (and here we should turn and give a little bow to Terry Gilliam, who knows more than any of us the value of a ripping yarn-within-a-yarn-within-a-yarn-within ...)--and Tarsem follows the fairytale, building an almost-satiric Wonderland of Extraordinary Gentlemen (including Alexander the Great and Darwin) in a world that Tarsem swears is real--all actual locations, no special effects. If he's telling us the truth, then we really do live in a story, no matter how duplicitous the storyteller/Black Bandit may be, no matter how dangerous the stunts actually are.

This is not a film for everyone. Some might find it too weird, others to obvious. But if you look closely and long, and listen to one more story, you'll be reminded of the real draw of the movies--and of paintings and ballads and bedtime tales: They pretend to be windows we can look out of, but are really special mirrors for seeing ourselves and the important things still living behind us.

Restrepo (2010)

2011-04-20T16:15:00.005-05:00

NOTE: I posted this without knowing that Restrepo's co-director, Tim Hetherington, had been killed in Libya. My Sicilian grandfather, who was sent to fight in World War I, told me he never killed anyone. "I had no argument with those men," he said, "but they wanted me to shoot. So I shot over the Germans' heads, and everybody was happy." My prayer for Mr. Hetherington and his family and friends is that we should all be so happy. In the meantime, I am sure that everyone who knew him will keep his name in their mouths, "familiar as household words," and "in their flowing cups freshly remembered."

In Restrepo, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington go to Afghanistan and stick close to, as the Internet Movie Database informs with its usual completeness, "The Men of Battle Company 2nd of the 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team." And watching them dig in, goof around, freak out, sing and cry and stare into space, I found myself caught between the reality that movies insist on and the one I'll never see--and how, as with scenes of active combat, the two of them are so often the same. That is, what I know of combat I know from the movies--but this is not a "movie" (or a TV series, like the excellent Generation Kill); it's a "documentary."

But watching Restrepo is like watching Full Metal Jacket or Jarhead or The Hurt Locker--even Saving Private Ryan or Apocalypse Now, as extravagant as those movies are. Restrepo engenders an interesting confusion: Does it look like a fictional film because I've seen so many, or is it Restrepo's actual soldiers who've seen the same films and have learned how to behave? This may simply be the most hair-raising home movie ever made--you know how you get when someone turns on the camera at the family get-together: one is "on," so one "acts"--up, usually.

But I don't think that's necessarily what happens in Restrepo--actually, I think it's the opposite: the movies have clouded our vision of the real horror and boredom of warfare, and Restrepo brings us face to face with our seen-that-even-though-I-haven't-done-that smugness. This is so much The Real Deal that even that expression sounds phony--as phony as a non-combatant's "understanding" that War Is Hell. The triumph of Restrepo is that it ignores us, chooses instead to let itself be itself. We're just along for the ride, so we better stay out of the way when the shit starts to fly.

The Devil's Backbone (2001)

2011-04-19T07:40:00.003-05:00

Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone is an excellent addtion to a strange but compelling sub-genre: Spanish rural/isolated locale Gothic mood-pieces--with children. This goes back at least as far as The Spirit of the Beehive in 1973--although no overt supernatural elements are present in this one, unlike The Orphanage (2007) or del Toro's own Pan's Labyrinth (2006). It may be a mini-genre, but its potency hasn't waned--and The Devil's Backbone may be the best of its type.

Like Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone is set during Spain's civil war in the late 1930s. Looming fascism in both films serves as a kind of specter haunting this corner of Europe, its brutal will always ready to exert itself even on children. But the orphanage of The Devil's Backbone withdraws for a time from the larger world and literally goes underground--and under water, to achieve effects that are at once chilling and beautiful. It's a ghost story, but one that rises to affect the political and personal worlds of the orphans, the left-wing Republicans (the side that Bogart fought with in his backstory in Casablanca--the losing side, as Louis noted) who run the orphanage, and the fascist Nationalists whose unexploded bomb in the orphanage's courtyard serves as a threat that cannot be withdrawn.

There's mystery and mysticism, politics and poetry, all of it mixed in without apologies. The Devil's Backbone may not be as aggressive as Pan's Labyrinth, but its subtleties make it the better Gothic, a world of secrets and regrets, with the strange justice ghosts so often require.

Ballad of a Soldier/Ballada o soldate (1959)

2011-04-18T23:10:00.004-05:00

Alyosha, the young World War II soldier in Ballad of a Soldier, and Shura, the equally young girl, meet as stowaways on a train, the war set aside for a moment. The two of them are impossibly innocent, their faces smooth and childlike, shining softly. The whole movie is like this, a simple and beautiful song. The Russian camera loves to sink down so that it can peer upward at its subjects, almost shyly--the effect, though, is not of a demure glance but a fully orchestrated requiem, the sky filling the background, the Earth curving into the distance.

The size of everything around them--particularly the deprivations of the war, the ragged gaping holes and tired faces, rutted roads, the houses turned inside-out--is matched by their big round eyes, gazing at one another--but the soldier wants to gaze at his mother: Rather than accept a medal for bravery, he had decided to take a short leave to fix her roof. The war follows him, tugging at his sleeve the whole way. It's a sentimental film, but so honest in the effort that you're willing to let it shine like the young lovers glowing like Old Hollywood, Soviet-style.

Mafioso (1962)

2011-04-07T12:59:00.004-05:00

Sicilian Antonio in Mafioso takes his Northerner wife Marta to meet the family. They sit down and eat and eat and eat. Marta lights a cigarette, and everyone stares--they'd never seen a woman smoke. She explains she likes to have one after a meal, and they all burst into laughter: that was merely the first course. A pile of squid-inked spaghetti comes out, there under the hot sun, and the meal must continue.

Antonio crows his joy at such abbondanza--but for Marta it's just Sicily always giving you more than you really want. And his family treats her coldly, the Sicilian flat look delivered without active malice, just a habit of being. However, they eventually figure out what they want from her--pliability so that they can work out their own schemes--against their own son, no less--so they cozy up and win her over.

Antonio, however, is not excused from the table, and has to take extra helpings, until he himself is dressed and trussed and arranged on the platter for the old men who stare him down by muttering, "honor"--but he has no choice, and thus no honor. Mafioso works surprisingly well as a prelude to the ethics of The Godfather, in which the world beyond Sicily is alien, even the rest of Italy, and the illusion of family masks inherited grudges and dogged greed. Antonio's time away had appeared to him something he'd really made, something he could live in--but on his return he finds that he hasn't made anything, that it had been some silly dress-up game, that Sicily was always the only real thing in his life.

And all he can do is obey and be dismayed, the life he'd prepared as a successful businessman in the comfortable boot of Italy now dry chalk in his throat. You can see it on his face once more at the end, as he takes another walk through his factory, everything still purposefully clamoring, his co-workers still admiring him--never guessing that a miserable, dead criminal smiles at them, holds a clipboard to his chest and disappears into his Milanese disguise.

Isolation (2005)

2011-04-04T14:22:00.005-05:00

How to describe Isolation? Imagine if Ridley Scott were all set to direct Alien--then the budget went south. So he re-sets the film on a small farm in the middle of Irish nowhere, and substitutes H. R. Giger's mad-love shape-shifter with, um, cows. Sort of.

The result is yet another British Isles horror surprise. From 28 Days Later (2002) to Dog Soldiers (2002), from Shaun of the Dead (2004) to The Descent (2006), from The Disappeared (2008) to The Reeds, (2009) (and sorry, but only The Disappeared is on Instant Play right now--although all these titles are available from Netflix), it seems the Brits are back, with a vengeance--and a monster or two, and some hauntings and flesh-eaters, and ...

Isolation's director, Billy O'Brien, makes a picture you can hold in one hand--if you're crazy enough to open your palm. In some ways it's the real surprise in the bunch, if only because it's so simple--as was Alien, even John Carpenter's The Thing (which Isolation also resembles), if you look past their budgets--and with horror, sometimes simple is best. O'Brien gives us a few characters, a villain and a surprise or two, sets it on a farm where no help is forthcoming, then lets this nasty little contraption give you the willies, the creeps, the jumpin jives.

As long as you give in to its premise--gene modification (the post-millennial response to '50s radiation-mutation) gone terribly wrong--Isolation provides a good Dark Ride--dark as the inside of an old barn at midnight, sloppier than a mid-Autumn farmyard. It's a triumph of hand-made, animatronic ick that understands that horror's playground lies between the viewer's need to know and the desire to look away.

Ponyo (2008)

2011-03-31T09:04:00.007-05:00

It comes as no surprise that the man who started Pixar, John Lasseter, loves the films of Hayao Miyazaki, sometimes called the Disney of Japan--but unlike Pixar and Disney, Miyazaki's medium has always been cel animation, as meticulous as Pinocchio (1940), with an eye for the rhythms of nature--rain, flowing water, wind on a grassy field--and a willingness to work in bright pastels--especially in Ponyo (2008), the most accessible of his films for smaller children. As with most of his other films, Miyazaki invents a mythology for Ponyo, one related to a love for nature, but also--as in the sometimes deadly serious Princess Mononoke (1997) (his only PG-13-rated film)--recognizing humanity's place in nature, as problematic as it can be.

In Ponyo he imagines a kind of Father Nature of the sea, Fujimoto,* who disdains humanity and seeks only to fill the seas with as much life as he can draw from his alchemical vials. But he loses one of his (many many) goldfish "daughters," Ponyo, who makes it to land and becomes more or less human. I will not divulge too much plot; suffice it to say that, although elements of Ponyo might feel like Finding Nemo or The Little Mermaid--or the aforementioned Pinocchio--let alone any number of his other films, as always Miyazaki produces something original, with enough beauty and rushing action--and half-whimsical, half-hallucinatory sequences (the flooded town and boat trip makes for yet another of his unforgettable waking dreams)--to keep children's attention--a tricky feat these days.

At the same time, Ponyo once more explores a recurring motif in Miyazaki: the search for the parent, the child who waits for his or her family to return--but in the meantime also leaves, often on a quest to find a companion beyond the parents. Ponyo becomes a love story, and is told with such exuberant innocence (if that's possible) that all the other loves--the magician/scientist for the teeming life of the sea, the husband for the wife, the mother for the child, the child for the little old ladies in the nursing home (and their love for him)--weave together, all because Ponyo saw her chance and headed for land.

Generally, if one has never seen a Miyazaki film, the best advice is to begin with My Neighbor Totoro (1980) or the startling Spritied Away (2001)--my favorite; but Ponyo (aside from being only one of two Miyazaki titles on Instant Play) works well, again especially for the wee ones, as a glimpse into a world that shines somewhere adjacent to the one we know.

*Voiced in the English version by Liam Neeson; most of Miyazaki's English-dubbed films feature familiar voices--here the cast includes Cate Blanchett, Noah Lindsey Cyrus, Matt Damon, Tina Fey, Frankie Jonas, Cloris Leachman, Lily Tomlin, and Betty White.

My Bodyguard (1980)

2011-03-28T16:21:00.003-05:00

Please don't make me use the word "'tween" as I recommend My Bodyguard; just believe me when I promise this movie looks at that period between childhood and adolescence without irony, without condescension--instead, almost as a fable, in which Goliath befriends David.

We may have heard this odd-couple/underdog story too often, here in 2011--but My Bodyguard set the modern standard thirty years ago, especially with its excellent cast, beginning with Chris Makepeace (ironic, yes?), who as the set-upon new kid is suitably average--in a good way, the level-headed one who is surprised and confused by the bullying. But the real standouts are the supporting players: Matt Dillon, still in mini-Brando mode (and again, I mean that as a compliment: early on, Dillon was working on a kind of lanky mulishness, half-amused by the world, half-suspicious of it), is the bully. A surprise, because the real hulk in the picture is played by Adam (no relation to the brothers) Baldwin, who in seven years would steal brutal scenes in Full Metal Jacket (also on Instant Play) before moving on to the role he was born to play, Jayne Cobb in the immortal TV series Firefly. (And this, too, is on Instant Play, you lucky person--Can you hear the Josh Whedon geeks genuflect?) But I can still recall watching Baldwin back in 1980 finding a friend and shedding his sorrow--and I was certain he would do remarkable things. Of course, as it often does with the talented, Hollywood fumbled Baldwin for too long. Still, here he is, just a big kid but managing to evoke Lennie from Of Mice and Men, at least in his mute misunderstanding of his place in life.

My Bodyguard lacks some of the snap of other coming-of-age movies such as American Graffiti or A Bronx Tale, but it still provides just enough uplift to make you happy to have survived your 'tweens--darn; almost made it.

Sweet Land (2005)

2011-03-25T15:48:00.002-05:00

In the rural Minnesota of Sweet Land, post-Word-War-I anti-German sentiment ostracizes mail-order bride Inge (Elizabeth Reaser). She cannot even attend, let alone get married in, her husband-to-be's church. Structured as a family memory, the film looks through Inge’s eyes at those who reject her, while managing to ask us in the present to reconsider our own attitudes--in which, for instance, “official language” acquisition becomes more important than the quality of the newcomer's character. And of course the irony is that these are Norwegian farmers--Torviks and Frandsens and Thorwalds--their own voices soft with fading accents, and isolated as only Upper Midwest farmers can be.

But Sweet Land operates only peripherally as social commentary. The film remains a personal story of all-but-despair, resolution, and the blind persistence of love. The performances are affecting--Reaser is a shining light, her fiancé is played by Tim Guinee (who reminds of Nathan Fillion--take note, ladies and others who find him dreamy) with an Old Hollywood boyish charm suitable for suitors, Alan Cummings grins and squints affectingly as the best friend--and John Heard's Reverend is especially compelling: He scowls at Inge's foreignness, denies her any opportunity for respectability--but does so without movie-villain hardness. Instead, he is almost kind, as though he's simply waiting for her to repent for a sin she didn't commit, and be welcomed in her humility.

The fact that she refuses false humility--and chooses instead honest pride--is the film's heart, as beautiful as the sweeping fields and sky the movie is in love with, Nature spread over this (at first) melancholy story and trying Her best to provide moments of sun and shade as needed.

Carlito's Way (1993)

2011-03-18T12:57:00.003-05:00

Depending on whom you talk to, Brian DePalma's Carlito's Way is either an old favorite or an obscurity. Unlike star Al Pacino's other crime films, this one is often overlooked--at the least, it seems to have dropped out of basic cable rotation. But in some ways it's one of DePalma's best movies--and definitely among its stars' (Pacino and Sean Penn) best performances. Penn especially has a ball immersing himself in his red-afro'd '70s coked-up mob lawyer. And Pacino drops the surreal Latin accent of DePalma's Scarface and wears his jet-black hair and beard as easily as the soft but precise and almost melancholy cadences of his Puerto Rican ex-con/neighborhood legend. Its Godfather III-ish plot--a crime world "pulls him back in"--provides many opportunities for Pacino to add layers to his character--and allows the movie to move into Penn's world, where he walks the highwire without a net, clutching Carlito's sleeve the whole time.

Along the way, DePalma allows himself some directorial flourishes, but he is surprisingly restrained: For better or worse, this picture eschews the controlled hysteria of his earlier thrillers--or later ones such as Snake Eyes (1998) and Femme Fatale (2002)--most of them a lot of fun; but what makes Carlito's Way memorable is the actors', not the director's, flourishes. And the mood of the picture tones things down: Carlito's "way" is old school--and, to the ferocious young guns he has to deal with, old hat. His neighborhood is gone, and every favor received feels like a threat, while every favor given, as Carlito puts it, "gonna kill you faster than a bullet."

Don't get me wrong; this is not a "quiet" picture, not with this bunch. It can be garish and brutal, fast and funny (Carlito in the courtroom is a hoot--and Penn just doesn't stop being a hilarious, dangerous nebbish)--and the rest of the cast pitches in as well: Wait for Viggo Mortensen as a wheelchair-bound, miserable rat, not to mention John Leguizamo's balls-out up-n-comer, Benny Blanco, while Luis Guzman, as usual, is solid as a stocky rock. All in all, despite its two-plus hours, Carlito's Way keeps moving, almost episodic (like the more frenetic Scarface), but nonetheless pushed forward by Carlito's efforts to step back from his own life and live.

Return to Me (2000)

2011-03-16T10:26:00.004-05:00

Having lived in the Midwest for going on twenty-five of my fifty-plus years, I think I'm entitled to have a crush on Bonnie Hunt. She's bright and unassuming, almost bland--but underneath there's often (harmless) mischief at work. Her appearances on David Letterman's show capture this perfectly, two Midwesterners sharing a more or less private joke on the rest of the country: that, for all their goofiness, they too have figured out a few things--while all-but-flirting, happy to see a familiar face--in her case, the classic Chicago neighborhood kid, the perky blond who's not a dope or pest, the pal you still want to date.

I've glanced at her as a talk show host and performer, but it's her one effort as a theatrical film director that really shines. Return to Me does not ask us to do more than enjoy assured performances and melt a little into a mild conceit: that a man (David Duchovny) can find himself inexplicably falling in love with a woman (Minnie Driver) because, you see, she received the transplanted heart of the man's dead wife; it calls to him, and he follows. Can you picture this in black and white, sometime in the early 1940s, with maybe Myrna Loy and William Powell taking a break from the Thin Man? You might be more likely to forgive its contrivances; but Hunt's movie gives you all the opportunities you need to time-travel without guilt, its tone honest in the wish that such dreams can come true, without fanfare or smirking.

She is helped immeasurably by the performances. Minnie Driver is confident, as always, in her ability to be just as sweet as she needs to be--and also to pull back when necessary. And David Duchovny makes me mourn the movie career he should have had over the past decade, his blandness waiting to show some cracks and let him yearn a little, let him raise those pretty eyes to almost fill with tears. Again, I can feel Hunt's personality slip in: quietly sentimental and eager to make someone happy.

And then there's Carroll O'Connor (in his last film appearance) and Robert Loggia and David Alan Grier--and Bonnie herself--playing Dads and buddies, a TV family she would work with over the next decade. And maybe that's it: the benefit of the TV-movie vibe, which at its best (from Marty to Brian's Song to Something the Lord Made) gives us economy, sure-footed-ness, and general plot satisfaction. Return to Me is certainly satisfying, a nice evening with friendly, gently feisty Chicagoans who know true love when they see it, eventually.

I Like Killing Flies (2004)

2011-03-15T12:26:00.006-05:00

While not the original "Soup Nazi" of Seinfeld fame,* Greenwich Village restaurateur Kenny Shopsin, the subject of Matt Mahurin's 2004 documentary I Like Killing Flies (the film is better than the title), has been known to eject patrons for arriving in a party of more than four or ordering just coffee. And he shouts a lot--a lot--and scowls and growls. But more than that, he has cultivated a monumentally kvetching persona, a man who has a complaint for every human weakness, real or imagined--and best of all, an ingenious analogy for every occasion. (His comparison of fusion cooking to, shall we say "adventurous," sexual activity is hilarious--and all but certain to ruin your appetite--depending on your appetites, that is).

In the same cramped and cluttered location for over thirty years, Shopsin's offers what seems to be an endlessly inventive amalgam of foods, featuring Dali-esque selections of soups and pancakes. The Shopsin's website provides (aside from links to outré products such as a "Chinese cleavage clamp"--I will say no more) a PDF of its menu--which seems to change with Kenny's mood swings, of which there are many. It's as crowded as his old restaurant (the film documents the change of location after they lose their lease) and features such offerings as duck breast potato curry, pecan chicken wild rice cream enchiladas, ricotta and carmelized banana pancakes, and sandwiches such as the "Jewboy" (BBQ pulled brisket, grilled onions, swiss cheese)--and of course the "Jihadboy" (beef, pomegranate, olive, feta, pistachio, tahini)--and over fifty soups, literally hundreds of offerings.

But this is half the feature, as they say. The real star is Kenny himself, as ready to pontificate as cook, delivering a stream of profane wisdom that he has obviously crafted over the decades, like Louis Armstrong in his prime, into what can only be called an orchestrated improvisation. And despite his nonstop tirades, in the end he emerges as a lover of not only the sound of Kenny Shopsin's voice but of every hungry fool who's ever crossed his path. When he finally gets around to his general view of humanity, he manages to make you feel good that "everybody's a piece of sh-t"--because in Kenny's eyes it's a blessing, an opportunity to admit fault (oh, the cold comfort of this Jewish comfort food) and to feel good about the little good one can do, despite such a scatological shortcoming.

The noise and grime and jangled claustrophobia of Shopsin's is perfectly captured by the visual style of I Like Killing Flies; Mahurin tosses his low-end video camera around the place, cutting and freeze-framing like a caffeinated Scorsese, getting us close--almost too close--to the delicious, vertigo-inducing world Kenny and his family have wrought. At least with Kenny as God, you know you won't go hungry--as long as you're a party of four or less.

*That would be Al Yeganeh, according to Wikipedia.

Big Night (1996)

2011-02-25T10:15:00.004-06:00

Movies about food work best when the food is not a metaphor, but is actually food. Does this make Julie and Julia a better film than Chocolat? Sort of--if only because the former makes you want to cook, while the latter makes you want to--well, I'm not sure. Feed dainties to Johnny Depp? Assert independence from petty provincialism? OK; but a movie about food should be a movie about food--and Big Night is certainly that, as it observes food so closely it approaches the fascination of Food Network in its unflagging insistence that one should not simply watch, but do. Cook, that is.

And Big Night goes one delicious step farther: It explore the relationship between food and family, the ways in which food can reflect the harmonies and breakups, the deep-rooted affections and deep-seated resentments of family life. But it never makes food a metaphor; instead, food remains the catalyst, the vehicle for the brothers' love and grudges, their misguided dreams and opportunities. And the relationships extend to their friends and customers, their rivals and hoped-for lovers who crowd in on this "big night" when all their hopes ride on the perfect Italian mega-meal.

And, like the Timpano itself, that big drum of southern Italian ecstasy,* the movie adds one more layer: the setting, Atlantic City in the '50s, when everyone ended up on the boardwalk, both blue and white collars taking a look at the Atlantic Ocean, the way it held out its hand to show you the piers and restaurants waiting. More could have been made of that milieu, but the hints of this world outside the restaurant--captured by the elusive non-presence of Louis Prima and His Orchestra--are enough.

And of course, one more layer, the cast. Shouldn't Stanley Tucci and Tony Shaloub make more movies together, and shouldn't Ian Holm, Isabella Rossellini, and Minnie Driver step into those other movies to offer more promises and veiled threats? The brothers in particular are so carefully shaped, so perfect together--even in conflict--that one almost could imagine this movie without a restaurant, without eating. Almost.

*And here is the recipe for Big Night's signature dish, straight from Stanley Tucci's family kitchen: Mangia!

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)

2011-02-20T15:06:00.003-06:00

I'm glad Woody Allen is still making movies, but I join those who hold a special fondness for his work in the 1980s, which seemed to come from a much older director, someone looking back at a long life. There is a gentle sense of loss, even a nostalgia, in many of them. From Stardust Memories (1980) and Zelig (1983) and Broadway Danny Rose (1984) (my favorite Woody Allen picture, if I were forced to commit), to The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and Radio Days (1987), Allen mourned with quiet affection lost eras, folly without consequence, the desire to reinvent ourselves. He was kinder than the hard times the movies were made in--and maybe that was the point: After two terms of Reagan, in which anything failed to trickle down, at least we could still go to the movies.

But at the end of the decade he picks up some dirt and spits in his hand and rubs the paste in our eyes to make us see. Crimes and Misdemeanors examines the loss of not only guilt but also meaning, and shrugs at our efforts even to document the collapse. Following various characters' trajectories, Allen gives himself something close to the Russian novels that seem to run beneath the surface of his less-comic movies, at once expansive and claustrophobic, as more and more lives slip into the same small cellar to confront each other in the dark.

His documentarian, Cliff Stern (a name that puts me in mind of Sisyphus), tries to preserve a beloved philosopher's work--while enduring a better-paying gig: profiling Lester, played with such self-satisfied smugness by Alan Alda that everything smug and self-satisfied the actor had ever done is finally both exposed and forgiven. Allen gives Stern a suitably jaundiced eye for the kind of amused disgust he can write so well--but the jokes are on him, bitterly: His documentary subject, Prof. Louis Levy, his only ray of hope, commits suicide--while Sam Waterston's gentle Ben goes blind. And then the final blow: Martin Landau's beloved ophthalmologist, Judah, has his mistress (Angelica Huston frazzled and doomed) killed by the inimitable Jerry Orbach, his bad suits matched only by his hooded vulture eyes.

The worst slip away unnoticed, the good are discarded, the indifferent let alone. Allen leaves the '80s without a shred of dignity, almost bored with itself and way beyond good and evil. It's interesting to note that his follow-up picture is Alice, a sweet assertion starring Mia Farrow--the two of them soon to sink into the hole themselves.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

2011-02-14T09:15:00.004-06:00

I often hesitate before recommending a Werner Herzog film, if only because he is so assertive about going his own way. He doesn't make films to please you, but himself--which I always admire; but you have to be willing to hop on board--often while the train's moving, jump in the boxcar, pray you don't stumble--and hang on tight.

But I can never resist him--even when at first blush I hesitate, as with The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. I'm reminded of my initial uncertainty about the Coens' remake of True Grit: Is this trip really necessary? Then I saw the trailer--I was so skeptical I broke one of my rules: Never watch the trailer if you admire the director; save all the fun for the movie itself. But I checked it out, and had to admit that remakes can be worthwhile after all.

But Herzog's Bad Lieutenant is only peripherally similar to Abel Ferrara's film, in which he and Harvey Keitel get medieval on our asses for an hour and a half--certain our souls need a good roto-rootering--and grimly go about their work. Yes, Herzog's movie is scary and weird--but in a giddy sort of way, veering from one piece of puzzling evidence to another, a cop movie turned into a bizarre pinata, with everyone taking a wild swing at it.

I'll leave the plot to you. For me, the real feature--aside from Herzog's trademark insanity--is Nicolas Cage, standing up and reminding us how crazy-good he is, past all expectations otherwise lowered by his comic-book/action-hero poses, still willing to invite us to his happening, freaking us all out. Have fun, kiddies.

Companion piece: a second Herzog cop movie, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, in which Michael Shannon takes his turn at bat, and smacks the ump a good one, then runs the bases backwards, and moons the Commissioner, and tears off all his clothes, and so on. Cage has a not-so-evil twin.

Halloween Roundup, Instant Play Edition #3: The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

2010-10-28T08:45:00.006-05:00

What's the story? That with his Poe films Corman went from a one- to two-week shooting schedule and suddenly felt like an auteur? How true does that have to be for The Masque of the Red Death to hold our attention? Poe certainly inspired Corman to ease up a bit on his mad huckster's pace, to give Vincent Price the opportunity to re-invent himself as the first straight-faced camp actor, to drench the screen in color with House of Usher four years before Mario Bava saw the palette possibilities of Blood and Black Lace.

And mentioning Bava and The Masque of the Red Death in the same breath is fitting: Both Blood and Black Lace and Corman's picture were released in the same year, 1964, at the the cusp of a shift in American movies, a lurid path leading to Bonnie and Clyde and George Romero and the MPAA ratings. And both find enclosed worlds--couture for Bava, Prospero's multi-colored palace for Corman--to indulge their unsavory cravings in relative privacy. Most of all, the two films play at Ten Little Indians-style elimination rounds, relishing each new demise, snickering at the losers--maybe Masque more than Blood and Black Lace, thanks to Price's Prospero, who takes stage center, no mystery here as to whodunit, the culprit bowing and smug.

By the time the Red Death shows up, each bright and ugly room taking its turn, the last of the guests swept out of the way, Masque can moralize all it likes: It's already had its fun, and given us permission to giggle and grimace our way through the most flamboyant Halloween ball this side of Castro Street. Maybe it's that mustache, but Price certainly seems ready to play for whatever team will have him--until it's too late for games as the morality of melodrama catches up with him.

Halloween Roundup, Instant Play Edition #2: Pulse/Kairo (2001)

2010-10-26T14:10:00.002-05:00

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo/Pulse (2001) sustains the dim glories and subterranean uncertainties of the expressionist/noir vision. The movie is offhand in its exposition, incidentally plotted, like Caligari or Cat People, and demands that the viewer constantly strain to see exactly what is that in the frame's periphery, and why is it so scary? Like so many of its late '70s-early '80s American progenitors, Pulse features young friends in peril, and holds out thwarted hopes of rescue and safety, until the world itself grows indistinct and silent, while everyone recedes into a whispering gloom.

In his indispensable book, An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (at least indispensable to me, reading it when I was twelve years old, ready to marry a monster from outer space, if only she'd have me), Carlos Clarens points out that narrative gestures may be perfunctory in the horror film, but one must forgive such lapses with a barely apologetic shrug. After all, as Clarens writes of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur's approach, "for the night creatures themselves, these films substituted our dread for them." So the last special effect is produced by the viewers, consuming indistinct objects but never completely understanding them, even as they are held in the hands and brought up to the face, as close as one's shadow, and in the deepening gloom indistinguishable from the self. Pulse eventually sees the whole world this way, a place without stories, just the open sea and the fog rolling in.

Halloween Roundup, Instant Play Edition #1: I Bury the Living (1958)

2010-10-25T09:44:00.002-05:00

There is a big man at the center of I Bury the Living: Richard Boone, with his beefy frame and heavy features reminding me of Victor Mature, but without a trace of vanity. Here, he's a small-city department store executive--part of a group that takes turns managing the local cemetery--but this civic quirkiness is nothing: the whole picture's odd, from Boone squeezed into a business suit to the giant map of the cemetery itself, dotted with little pins (white if the owner is alive, black when they die), most of the picture set in the dingy little shed with the map and a dying gray light. No wonder, reluctantly drawn to this duty, that Boone starts to believe that, if he puts a black pin on the plot of someone still alive, they die--and he believes this because they do.

It's a story as contrived as any Twilight Zone contraption; but the director (Albert Band, director, writer, producer of many B movies) forces it to work, laying down thick expressionistic bricks, a solid job that keeps us in that dingy room at the cemetery where the map hangs, large and pulsing, almost alive, the pins gigantic in closeup, spread out on a Salvador Dali plain--while the room itself shrinks, fills with fog and smoke and shadow, as though the 1920s had never left the screen.

And Boone handles himself well, wrestling some real panic out of his bulk, a big man undone by, as he puts it, a strange feeling he has carried with him all his life, that he is reliving things--or making them happen. The resolution is at first more Hardy Boys than Jung, but the sense of a ghost-world lingers, as Boone, his overcoat lost, wanders off, speaking softly: "I think I can find it myself."

I've adapted this from an entry in another of my blogs, The Constant Viewer.

The Gleaners and I (2000)

2010-10-03T19:14:00.007-05:00

My Sicilian grandmother spent all her adult life as a city-dweller, but she never forgot how to glean. She'd visit us in the New Jersey suburbs, staying at my aunt's house next door. We had an apple tree we never tended, so it produced fruit sporadically--and the apples themselves were puny, eventually dropping to make a sweet-sour mash under the tree by late autumn. But in September she'd wander into the yard, bending over and finding some fruit worthwhile enough--cut off the bad parts, scold away a worm or two. We could shake our heads at her all we'd like, but eventually we'd get little folded-over cookies with sweet apples in the middle--and she could never bake enough of them for her grown grandchildren.

The Gleaners and I is a documentary/personal essay by the New Wave filmmaker Agnes Varda, whose impish face is half-glimpsed a few times along the way, a field gnome watching Millet's after-harvest gleaners make their way toward us, past us, and into town, where dumpsters and markets wait. While the film sheds some light on the time-honored practice of picking through the leftovers, it becomes something else: a reflection on the cast-off and the junked, the physical pleasure of finding something good in the muck, the satisfaction of a free meal, and the pride in leaving nothing to waste.

And so gleaning becomes a metaphor, of course--for work, for the generous heart of true justice, for friendship and naturally for art/film itself, presented as collage/montage, the accidentally-on-purpose patterns formed by found objects, the sudden glimpse of oneself filming, at one point Varda's dangling lens cap another performer, a free-jazz dancer--and even her camera is an apt gleaning tool: a small camcorder, easy enough for anyone to use, easy as bending over and finding an apple worth eating and a heart-shaped potato.

Varda narrates with an assured combination of philosophical coolness and open-hearted glee, each profile punctuated by sly humor and genuine delight, her curiosity about the variations on gleaning insatiable--her little bowl haircut sliding across the frame as she watches us gleaning her gleaning the gleaners. Like much of the New Wave, this late entry is as much about movie-making as it is a movie--but Varda is an old pro rejuvenated by the little camera in her hand, and she plays like a talented child: Just watch/listen to her ruminations on her wrinkled hands, and those same hands playing a forced-perspective game with freeway trucks, grabbing them and squeezing as she passes each. The Gleaners and I takes the eco-idea of "sustainability" and makes it an everyday possibility--but one infused with French introspection and solid rural/urban know-how. We can all sustain, she tells us, as long as we learn to bend a little.

Blood Simple (1984)

2010-09-07T12:51:00.006-05:00

Blood Simple, Joel and Ethan Coen's first film, provides an accurate prediction of their careers as filmmakers. The movie is funny and dark, self-reflexive and compelling--but also sometimes off-putting and unpleasant. And it marks the debut of Frances McDormand, whose firm jaw and wary eyes grow into wisdom by the time she confronts full-blown human venality, Coen-style, in Fargo (1996). But back in the mid-'80s she seemed as poleaxed as anyone, hating her husband--played by Dan Hedaya, an actor who all but begs for our scorn--and drawn to a hapless bartender. Everybody gets simple after a while, given all that blood.

Except for maybe M. Emmet Walsh's private eye, the supposed observer who becomes the prime suspect, showing the bush-league baddies what real corruption looks like. In many ways it's Walsh's picture, grimy and calculating, glib and world-weary--but not as wise as he needs to be. The final sequence is suspenseful and raw, like late Hitchcock, with more than a touch of their buddy Sam Raimi's panicked glee over imminent doom.

Blood Simple is interesting as a self-assured debut for the Coens and McDormand; but more than that it stands on its own as a rough-edged noir that warns us what happens when bored, sloppy double-crossers fall in love.

Son of Rambow (2008)

2010-09-06T12:04:00.003-05:00

As much a movie about movie-making as it is a heartfelt assertion of friendship and family, Son of Rambow surprised me with its willingness to be both subversive and sentimental. In the end, it works.

The movie reminds me of Bill Forsythe's '80s films--the man who practically invented the modern British whimsy-movie, populated by assertive and/or bemused eccentrics, such as Gregory's Girl (1981), Local Hero (1983), Comfort and Joy (1984), and Breaking In (1989). Like Forsythe, writer/director Garth Jennings enjoys the periphery, the places and people off to the side, living unconventional lives--at first played out in relative freedom, eventually challenged by the larger world. In Son of Rambow, two outsider boys--one the child of strictly religious parents, the other a dedicated troublemaker (and aspiring film-maker)--are united in the desire to make a Rambo movie. The plot enjoys its characters and relishes its situations with such honest affection that one is drawn into the game, eager to follow the boys as they discover the joys and sorrows of cinema and friendship.

This kind of PG-13 family movie is rare. It doesn't get lost in the cynical urge to walk to the brink of an R rating, to market a product; instead, it trusts its offbeat plot and characters to take us where it wants to go. The result is indeed fine product, but untainted by the missteps of movies concerned only with demographics. Son of Rambow is as irresistible as its movie-within-a-movie; you'll agree with bad-boy auteur Lee: "This has been my best day of all time."

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005)

2010-08-18T15:03:00.003-05:00

In the dim past of cinema history, a kind of Early Cenozoic when movies did not yet have the capacity for speech, Georges Méliès found "Un petit diable," a little devil--lost now, but I'm sure as startling as any of his astronomers and imps, rocketships and submarines, living playing cards and posters--555 films in seventeen years that asked us not to believe, but to see. His films still can captivate--maybe more so now than then, since their scratched and grainy jump-cut surfaces have taken on a sputtering glow, a surreal non-logic. The last hundred years have accustomed our eyes to the dark, and we see things in his little magic tricks that breathe their own life.

The inheritors of this visual legacy have never forgotten their first glimpse of that dream-cinema. Jean Cocteau, Luis Buñuel, Dziga Vertov, Joseph Cornell, Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Jan Svankmajer, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Guy Maddin, David Lynch--who am I leaving out? Many many more, I'm sure, all of them--including big shots like Stanley Kubrick and Terry Gilliam--children of the first magician, Méliès reborn everywhere you look.

And for the Quay brothers, looking is everything. They have been making alternate-universe animations for more than thirty years; but as strange as their world is, it has become familiar to anyone who's seen certain Kafka-Goth music videos of the '90s, or watched the world unspool in CGI-driven ads, or simply sat through even the tawdriest post-Millennial horror film, infused with Japanese swirls of hair and sudden lurching camera jumps, layered soundtracks indebted as much to the anxiety-dream soundscapes of a Quay brothers short as they are to the wheezing-slaughterhouse tape loops of The Exorcist. Whether we know it or not, we're all surrealists now.

So don't be afraid to be confused, even bored, by the Quay brothers' The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, one of two feature-length films they've made. It combines the fable-logic of another pair of brothers, the Grimms, with the insect-skitters of the Quays' own classic shorts (which you can rent from Netflix). Just be warned that all you can expect to do is look at this movie; "understanding" it is almost a waste of time. Each moment makes sense--inside of itself, if you watch closely enough--but as a whole it doesn't matter. I have inferred a meaning from The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (and what an apt Magic Realist title, sounding like one of Gabriel García Márquez' "tales for children"--"The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" comes to mind); but any meaning inferred is as much my fault as the film's. The real effort is to resist meaning, to allow the animations, the floating arias, the tantalizing fade-outs, the mysterious utterances, to be themselves, whatever that is. Learn to watch: This is definitely not interactive cinema, but the triumph of two-dimensional film, all surface--and all mesmerizing.

Behold! Méliès' "The Temptation of St. Anthony" (1898):

Just Around the Corner (1938)

2010-08-17T14:33:00.005-05:00

So you* love movies, you've seen a million of 'em--you even respect them, more or less, and accept The Cinema as an art form, perhaps the most important of the past hundred years. In recognition of their stature, you try to watch "classic" films, the kind that make the all-time-greats lists. Consider the latest Sight and Sound/British Film Institute best-of, compiled only once a decade; the most recent is from 2002:

1. Citizen Kane
2. Vertigo
3. La Règle du jeu/The Rules of the Game
4. The Godfather, Parts I & II
5. Tokyo Story
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey
7. The Battleship Potemkin
7. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (tied with Potemkin)
9. 8½
10. Singin' in the Rain

I'll bet you've seen at least some of them--and good for you: By and large, these movies are not only "important" but "entertaining," at least because they're well-made, with compelling story-lines and performances. So they're not only good for you, they're good.

But does your cinephilia demand you watch a movie from the number one box-office draw of the late 1930s? That would be Shirley Temple--and of course you know her name and are certain you've seen a few of her pictures--but I'll bet what you're remembering are snippets from compilation shows, montage tributes to the Golden Age of Hollywood, little moments captured in amber--tinged with gold, to be be sure, but fading.

Well, here's your chance to cross one more cinematic obligation off your list with Just Around the Corner; but this is more than taking your medicine. This "happy little ditty" stands near the end of Shirley's girlhood--she was all of ten years old when it was released--and knows without a doubt that it's a "Shirley Temple Movie," providing ample opportunity for pluck and luck and song, with generous measures of the kind of sentimentality requisite for one of her vehicles.

Added to the usual heart-string-tugging is a typically Twentieth-Century-Fox take on the Depression, acknowledging it exists but blaming it mostly on a lack of "confidence" in zealous entrepreneurship bankrolled by the right tycoon to save the day. Shirley's architect father is reduced to fancy handyman in the very building he designed (a suitably Deco series of curves and sweeping lines), while his dream project lies waiting for the necessary backer--here provided by an Uncle Sam lookalike whom Shirley befriends, assuming he's the real Uncle Sam, "a tough old bird."

Along the way, we get improbable musical numbers, an encounter with dese-dem-dose versions of Our Gang, a boy-meets-loses-gets-girl secondary plot--and Bert Lahr "singing" in his usual surreal warble. And two more presences, irreplaceable, unforgettable: Franklin Pangborn and Bill Robinson, the two of them lifelong experts at what they need to do: one spluttering, the other gliding effortlessly amid lesser lights--although Shirley gets it, and has her usual fun following him; talk about artists at their height.

I'll confess that my affection for Shirley Temple movies stems from family viewing habits when I was a kid: channel 48 in Philadelphia ran Bowery Boys, Blondie, and Shirley Temple on Sundays, so if you wanted a movie you watched what you could get. My sister loved Shirley, and like most siblings in a one-TV family, I learned to defer. And good for me: I understand Shirley better than I otherwise would've, her hard work looking easy, her place in cinema history never in the High Culture Top Ten, but packin' 'em in their seats when needed; like the song says,

"Just around the corner,
There's a rainbow in the sky,
So let's have another cup of coffee,
And let's have another piece of pie."

Irving Berlin's song was almost cruel in 1932; but in Just Around the Corner, it could look back at the decade and start to shrug it off--just in time for the next weight to carry. But that's another Instant Play Pick: Battleground, anyone?

*This "you" does not include fellow film geeks; we've already watched more movies than we should.

Moon (2009)

2010-08-05T11:07:00.003-05:00

If you already know Moon--and enjoy old-timey, puzzle-solving SF--you don't need me to encourage you to watch it. But the movie did kind of slip in and out--so what a treat for those of you who don't know it.

Look at the good stuff: Sam Rockwell in virtually every scene; Kevin Spacey as a maybe-he's-HAL-from-2001 computer/robot--and speaking of Kubrick's milestone, a production design that hearkens to 2001's black-and-white Lego geometry (in a movie filmed at Kubrick's haunt, Shepperton Studios); all in a film directed by David Bowie's son (I wish my middle name were "Zowie").

The film itself deals with a tried-and-true SF concept: the isolated human (here, at a mining base on, you guessed it, the Moon) facing a mystery--with only his own wits and a reticent artificial intelligence (and all the Asimovian paradoxes that come with such intelligence) to depend on. It's cool to look at, intriguing, and sometimes funny--which brings us back to Sam Rockwell, about as dependable an actor a filmmaker could hope for. Once Rockwell accepts a gig, he gives it everything, no irony, no easy outs. He reminds me of Nicolas Cage--at least when the latter isn't just bouncing around special effects; and like Cage, Rockwell brings a nuanced, off-center quality--in other words, he makes us believe he hasn't read the script, and isn't sure what even he himself might do next. And if that weren't enough, Spacey once more plays his voice like a musical instrument of subtle range, keeping us guessing even when he tells the truth.

Despite Rockwell's and Spacey's assertive presence, Moon remains a solid SF story, its look and attitude crisp and engaging, its plot (again, aside from some inevitable cheats) both reflective and suspenseful. I'll admit I'm always eager for a solid dose of Golden Age SF; but even if you're not a like-minded geek, Moon will draw you in to its low-gravity center.

Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)

2010-07-25T16:08:00.005-05:00

I was four years old at the start of the 1960s, in high school by 1970, so it's no surprise that the movies I saw then remain with me like no others. In the early '60s, pop culture was a generally comforting mix of innocent '50s fluff and the kind of flat-footed irony expressed by Mad magazine's brand of furshlugginer social satire; you could still find bug-eyed monsters in a Saturday matinee and a self-consciously imaginary surf's-up vacation at the drive-in--even though a Cold War nervous condition made the cameraman's hand shake a little. The old pros of Hollywood, led by Bette Davis, could be spotted as crazy ladies cackling in haunted houses à la What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, while the French New Wave was breaking on U.S. shores, encouraging both the nascent indie film culture and Hollywood itself to join the In Crowd.

And just as we rounded the final turn of the decade came 2001, which made a promise about the movies--that they contained their own version of infinity, something that really lasts--a promise that I think Kubrick helped keep, at least a little. But back then, when I was thirteen, it was simply a Happening, cooler than anything I'd ever seen, my first techno-vision, a dream about gadgets. I began to recognize that there'd always be two kinds of movies for me: the ones that build an almost unconscious web of memories, and sudden nuclear events that blasted everything, forcing us to start all over.

I'll admit I still feel cozier with memories than Ground Zero. Both in the movies--usually at the drive-in--and on TV, I'd watch blurry little pictures that seemed to become "shadowy recollections" even as I sat in front of them. Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake Is Missing falls under this category, a strange, sleepy psycho-thriller with (for me, at least) two quintessential '60s faces: Carol Lynley's and Keir Dullea's, both of them so bland and smooth as children's that even their panic and madness seems like a wistful reflection. The black and white cinematography, the sighing, woodwind-infused soundtrack, the false reassurance of Laurence Olivier as a policeman--and most of all the plot, the Vanishing Person mystery--here, a child that no one even admits exists; all of it floats around in one's head like a recent dream, fading the more you try to remember it.

It is a movie about absence: Bunny is missing, and her mother is the prime suspect--and what she is suspected of is inventing Bunny--and where all this goes I'll let you see. I admit I'm not entirely happy with the ending, when it finally decides to become a thriller; but until the (admittedly, still weird) climax, the real pleasure of Bunny Lake Is Missing is the dark fairy tale situation, Bunny the invisible changeling, with Keir Dullea--let's not forget that he would play 2001's Dave Bowman in just a couple of years--himself looking like a child, his little smile a bit flat, not quite reassuring.

Intermission (2003)

2010-07-24T16:19:00.004-05:00

All right: You've long given yourself permission to be sick and tired of serio-comic-tragic movies built of intricately interwoven lives/plots. But before you leave that busy little corner of cinema for good, watch Intermission, an Irish film that draws in Cillian Murphy, Colin Farrell, Kelly MacDonald, a mustachioed Shirley Henderson, and the always-dependable Colm Meaney*--plus many more--into a kidnap-romance-heist-farce that also manages to be a movie about waiting for one's life to resume--or resolve itself.

Given the strangeness of the characters and the complexities of their relationships and schemes, Intermission could've easily fallen into terminal Irish whimsicality. But between its U2-tinged soundtrack--with a nice turn by Farrell on "I Fought the Law"--and the nastiness of even some of the local children, the movie never gets too cute. Even as a love story--which it mostly is--Intermission knows that love can stink, but also that most of us are ready to give up everything (even love itself, if you know what I mean) to take that leap into another's arms.

The cast helps in this effort enormously, never winking at the camera, always sprinting full-tilt along the whoopsy-daisy plot--of which there's enough for three or four pictures, but Intermission doesn't feel bloated or forced. It just keeps its hands on the wheel, stubbornly refusing advice, taking the corners a bit too fast--but that's where the fun is.

*Almost fifteen years before Juno, Meaney delights in Stephen Frears' The Snapper, in which he plays a clueless Da who has to learn how to be a good father to his pregnant daughter.

Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961)

2010-07-19T10:26:00.006-05:00

In his cheerfully titled 1929 book, Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud points out the three sources of human suffering: the world itself, with its storms and earthquakes, the dangers of climate and geology; our own bodies, which--despite our best efforts (he tells us we have become a "prosthetic God," capable of artificially repairing bodily damage)--will one day let us down--and along the way give us great grief; and the most significant (and unfortunately "least regulated") source of pain, our relationships with each other. He concludes that "the universe is opposed to the program of the Pleasure Principle"--that is, our urge to be happy is constantly thwarted by the fact that we are alive.

In Cleo from 5 to 7, Agnès Varda relieves Cleo of one of those sources of pain: the world itself, which in this film is Paris, stripped of all pain, glowing with early-'60s, black-and-white beauty. Cleo is awaiting the results of a cancer biopsy, and spends her two hours wandering through the city, her realtionships, and her thoughts. Varda makes a meditative film that--because it is a "feminine" meditation--is both frank and wistful, as honest as it is uncertain. In Varda's hands, the French New Wave is almost serene, shaped by the urge to understand oneself and one's place in a painful life.

It's easy to fall in love with Varda's films: If you're a woman, she treats you with understanding and respect; and if you're a man, she allows a glimpse into that secret garden at whose gate we so often fumble, the flowers at our fingertips but untouched without help. And Varda provides more than a hint; it's as though I keep hearing her murmur, "You're getting warmer," as I follow Cleo from 5 to 7 in a dream that's more wish-fulfillment than I could've managed on my own.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008)

2010-07-17T12:08:00.011-05:00

Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (1997) made people uneasy; perhaps it was his determination to make a film about the Holocaust that forced out some laughs--almost unbearable, the choking feeling of laughing and weeping at the same time. It was a movie you did not so much watch as drowned in--a cinematic waterboarding. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas also tries to see that horror from an oblivious child's point of view--but it does not dare to laugh; instead, it allows the Holocaust to unfold slowly before the (German) child's eyes, an intriguing puzzle the boy never quite solves.

Along the way, however, we are given a view of the Final Solution as a family concern, both Nazi and Jewish--and, like Benigni's picture, the decision to make genocide a personal matter takes Schindler's List one step farther, away from mass extinction to the death of individuals--millions, eventually; but in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas they die one at a time, and we are asked to know them first, and to understand what it means to be one person in the midst of the twentieth century's defining moment of shame and loss. Understand that this is a movie about the worst we can do to one another--but it is touched by the hands of parents, whose love and helplessness tell us as much about the concentration camps as we can take while still reassuring ourselves we're just watching a movie.

Breakdown (1997)

2010-07-05T12:08:00.004-05:00

Director Jonathan (Terminator 3) Mostow does a pretty fair Hitchcock impression with Breakdown, its plot improbabilities forgivable in light of the tension he creates. And he's lucky to have Kurt Russell as the hapless-hubby good guy--and maybe even more so to have the immortal J.T. Walsh as his villain. Imagine The Vanishing without any psychology, just suspense, in a desert landscape where everybody is either fly-specked-clueless or in on the shenanigans.

Russell trusts Walsh with his wife (Kathlenn Quinlan, another welcome face)--and thanks for small errors: Russell's search for the missing Quinlan, and the weirdo motives for her disappearance, make for a final act that strains credulity--but again, those B-actors (and I mean that as a compliment) know what to do with extreme material: let it be and ride--which Kurt, who's always looked like a surfer, is particularly good at (he's the only reason to watch Grindhouse), and he and his co-stars stick with the plot and deliver a popcorn-good time.

Umberto D. (1952)

2010-06-28T14:42:00.003-05:00

My grandfather was a quiet man, a tidy little fellow who sat on his front porch on Mifflin St. in South Philadelphia, his vest and shirt buttoned to the top, his chin pointing the way with certainty--and everyone on his block knew they could trust him. And while Grandpop saw through most people, he maintained his own Sicilian counsel; you might guess his approval or displeasure by a shift in the temperature of his look, but that was about all--and often just about enough. While he lived, he worked; and while he knew what was wrong with the world, he let it alone as much as he could.

The little old man in Umberto D. wanders around in my head together with my grandfather, little men passed by, but trying to keep their shirts buttoned--except Umberto is losing everything--home and dignity both torn up beneath his very feet. All he has is Fike, his little dog--"a mutt with intelligent eyes," as he puts it, the two of them children--even younger, it seems, than the pregnant girl he befriends, and whose little round face is often wet with tears. It is a sad world they live in, with a slow approach to the big finish--Umberto deciding to End It All, having kept his own counsel for so long only Fike knows.

The director, Vittorio de Sica, was very good at balancing a commitment to observe life unadorned and a desire to sympathize with those who led the lives he asked us to watch. This balancing act lies at the heart of the Italian neorealists, who wanted so badly to record life--but after all, they themselves lived in Italy, and so could never entirely stop hearing an opera playing softly but insistently in the background, encouraging them to find grandeur in the everyday. Umberto D. so easily reminded me of my grandfather not only because of the little man and the Italian words, but because of de Sica's understanding that we all hear that music rising in our lives, making them more than points on a line, but notes on a staff.

This post is adapted from an entry of The Constant Viewer. (Maybe more xeroxed than "adapted.")

Mon oncle (1958)

2010-06-21T08:59:00.000-05:00

Father's Day is over, and I was having too much fun to write--so I guess it makes sense that for a (post-)Father's Day Pick of the Moment I should choose a film that sidesteps fathers in favor of an uncle. Jacques Tati's Mon oncle features every child's dream relative: an indulgent uncle who remembers what it means to be a child--if only because in many ways he remains one. In three pictures, Tati molds his own version of Chaplin's Little Tramp: M. Hulot, tall and quiet, a solemn stork in a trench coat who seems always to be leaning in a slight breeze, his hat still firm but his pipe a bit off-center in his mouth, while his umbrella stays tucked under his arm, safe from stray winds. He lives in a corner of Paris that may exist only in his mind, where the year is inexact and beautifully pale and streaked, an old photograph one can live in.

Hulot's Paris fits him, this silent-movie character otherwise stuck in The Paris of Tomorrow, screeching gadgets in a house as bright and flat and cold as poured concrete and plastic. His sister and husband see life from the comfort of an Eames chair--except without the comfort. And Hulot flees from this as quickly as he can, taking with him his young nephew, who can't wait to climb over the low crumbling wall with his oncle to get to the Old Paris, where scruffy bushes and ramshackle houses sit in soft dust, while the noisy neighbors argue without rancor.

There's a nice bit at chez Hulot: He swings open his window, hears a bird burst into song; he swings the window in and hears the twitter abruptly end; opens it again, hears the song--and notices that his open window reflects the sun onto a bird in a cage. He leaves it open so that the overjoyed little fellow can make his noise. It seems an image of Hulot himself, in a small world getting smaller--a cage he does not notice, except when he travels to his well-to-do suburbanite relatives and sees with some concern that they, too, are trapped, by their own excess.

But Hulot still has a little time left, a small corner where he can jaunt along, part owl, part stork--a bird himself. Tati has lovingly crafted a fantasy-memory, a Paris any child (or I) could live in right now, as long as it holds the real world at bay, umbrella raised like a sword, pipe jutting in half-smiling defiance.

By the way, the other full-length Hulot films are M. Hulot's Holiday (1953) and his masterpiece, Playtime (1967)--both also available on Instant Play. And the French animator, Sylvain Chomet, who directed 2003's The Triplets of Belleville (not on Instant Play, but available through Netflix), this year is releasing The Illusionist, based on an unproduced Tati script. It is gaining attention because of its autobiographical nature--but whether or not you know the inside story, it's sure to be another welcome addition to both Chomet's and Tati's bodies of work.

(NOTE: This post is adapted from a diary entry in The Constant Viewer. Just keepin' me honest.)

Odd Man Out (1947)

2010-06-16T14:18:00.000-05:00

Carol Reed's Odd Man Out is the first in a trifecta followed by The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949) (the last is also available on Instant Play). But the closest comparison I can make to Odd Man Out is John Ford's The Informer (1935) (not on Instant Play, but worth putting on your Queue)--although the Ford picture has an inverse plot: While Ford's Gypo Nolan (Victor McLaglen in a justly deserved Oscar-winning performance; Ford also won for Best Director) is forced to play Judas as he wanders drunkenly through his own Nighttown, all fog and sold souls, Reed's film follows an IRA-styled nationalist (James Mason) who wanders what must be Belfast after being shot during a robbery. However, even though Mason's Johnny McQueen is a staunch martyr, he too falls into the same surreal mist as McLaglen's, slowly dying in a city that also eventually turns its face from him.

Another strange echo of Odd Man Out can be heard in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995), with Johnny Depp's wounded accountant, Bill Blake, making his way through a different wilderness, absurd and indistinct in its meaning. Reed's picture, though, works not so much as existential philosophy ("not that there's anything wrong with that") as it does a eulogy for Johnny McQueen's efforts to remain a code hero--the man of his word surrounded by liars. It's a weird noir--although that seems a bit redundant: all noirs are weird. Still, Odd Man Out wants to open not only Johnny McQueen's soul but Northern Ireland's wounds, viewed as stigmata, signs of loss and promise. I'll leave it up to you to decide if we're left more with loss or promise--but don't expect a neat answer from Reed; as in his following two pictures, Odd Man Out observes closely, but in the end keeps its own counsel.

Hollywoodland (2006)

2010-06-14T13:32:00.000-05:00

Hollywoodland insists we remember the original wording on that big sign we all know, thirteen poison letters that, as Kennth Anger mythologizes in Hollywood Babylon, had to be shortened because frail things like Peg Entwistle had jinxed the sign by using it to commit suicide. (On a side note, Entwistle died shortly after making a film entitled Thirteen Women.)

This lingering aura of violent loss surrounds Hollywoodland, as it seeks answers to fatal questions about faded fame and un-kept promises. George Reeves, who played Superman on TV in the 1950s, dies from a gunshot wound, and an obscuring mist quickly settles in, despite the best efforts of Adrian Brody's sad private eye, Louis Simo, who is suffering his own losses as a divorced father. The film shifts between Simo's efforts to discover whether Reeves had been murdered and Reeves' own life as an aspiring actor and unhappily famous TV star. While the Reeves scenes have more punch to them, Simo's slow walk down the Boulevard of Broken Dreams serves as a telling counterpoint. We are not surprised that his investigation, like Reeves' life, seems to go nowhere.

One of the lasting pleasures of Hollywoodland is the cast. As always, Brody is a perfect nervous schlub, a guy who splutters and stumbles, pitching forward into the plot like a silent film comedian; imagine Buster Keaton in a film noir. As studio head Eddie Mannix, Bob Hoskins' American accent once more satisfies, and Diane Lane as Toni Mannix--cheating on Eddie with Reeves--is given the fullest opportunity yet to channel her inner Gloria Grahame. And the film's first-time director, Allen Coulter, had previously helmed a dozen Sopranos episodes, so he was ready for a tale of duplicity and brutal anxiety.

But special notice must be made of Ben Affleck's George Reeves. I'm not sure why we're supposed to laugh at Affleck--all right, some will sneer, "Gigli," but a deeper resentment seems at work here. The "Bennifer" crap is a manufactured response to an imagined affront--or maybe a real one: Sometimes I suspect that one night Affleck simply flipped off the wrong paparazzo. The good news is that, after three years of this nonsense, he gathers all the sheepish grins and burning resentments, puzzled grins and you-got-me shrugs, and carefully portions them out in his portrayal of George Reeves, sliced up and served as a turkey sandwich at Musso and Frank's, just another story to tell while waiting for the bill. I don't know if Hollywoodland is the best movie about that town, but it may be the saddest.

Anytown, U.S.A. (2005)

2010-06-10T11:16:00.000-05:00

This documentary about a mayoral election in Bogota (rhymes with "Vigoda"), New Jersey--a town a local police officer describes as a cross between Norman Rockwell and the Bronx--begins with Tip O'Neil's famous pronouncement, "All politics are local." Director Kristian Fraga revitalizes the old bromide by immersing you so deeply into Bogota's teapot-tempest that by the end you'll want to move there just to register to vote.

While the issues seem small and the arguments personal--and they certainly are, sometimes embarrassingly so (extending to two of the candidates’ legal blindness--and it’s not your fault if you notice the irony)--Fraga maintains a wry sense of proportion that neither enshrines nor trivializes the contest; in fact, the film watches the campaigns very carefully, allowing us to draw comparisons to not only our own local elections but the Big Show of national politics.

And Anytown U.S.A. never forgets Tip O'Neil's observation: Throughout the course of the film we are privy to every petty squabble and knock-down-drag-out, and attention is paid to all the candidates, so that our allegiances swing from one to the next as their personalities and aspirations impose themselves on us. By the end, we have a clearer understanding of the kinds of decisions we make when we vote, the almost-whims that can swing us from one candidate to the other--and the deep-seated loyalties that can blind us to the "truth"--and those quotation marks, this documentary teaches us, must never be forgotten, as we involve ourselves in a (democratic) process that is not only local but always personal.

By turns satiric and sentimental, ironic and intimate, Anytown, U.S.A. neither takes itself too seriously nor condescends to its subject. Add it to the short list--including Primary (1960) and The War Room --of great film records of the fickle heart of democracy.

High and Low (1963)

2010-06-08T11:52:00.000-05:00

A movie like Akira Kurosawa's High and Low makes me yearn for a pre-home-video world, where you'd go out and see a movie like this with friends, then sit around all night talking about it. Still, in those days one had to depend on the luck of geography and circumstance to make that happen--and besides, this is a site devoted to instant access, immediate opportunity.

So get some friends together to watch High and Low--the more (post-viewing) talkative, the better.

In some ways, High and Low is Kurosawa's most "Shakespearean" film--even though he himself directed versions of Shakespeare plays: Macbeth in Throne of Blood, King Lear in Ran. But with High and Low (based on a crime novel by Ed McBain), Kurosawa follows the Shakespearean urge to explore the fullest range possible of human relationships within a single narrative. Kurosawa's film gladly accepts the burden of a dual plot and a host of characters to achieve this goal, and the result is a complex interweaving of the personal and the public, the idiosyncratic and the civic. Part exploration of class, part exposé of business, part police procedural, part family drama, part test of friendship--one could go on; suffice it to say that High and Low's title should tip you off that Kurosawa is shooting wide.

And speaking of shooting, this is also a gorgeous picture to look at, its black-and-white world belying the complexities of its characters' motives and trajectories. While Kurosawa shines in his "epics"--swords and flames, alarums and excursions for everyone--he also made a number of pictures that adapt the epic to living rooms and boardrooms, offices and back yards. With Ikiru--which I'll get to one of these days on this site--High and Low exemplifies Kurosawa's ability to see the struggle for heroism as everyone's challenge.

And by the way, make sure to watch this while the watchin's good: it seems that Mike Nichols is remaking it, with a David Mamet screenplay, so it may be pretty good--but I think you should first have Kurosawa in your head.

Elevator to the Gallows (1958)

2010-06-07T14:55:00.001-05:00

Before Zazie dans le métro, before Lacombe, Lucien--and way before Pretty Baby and Atlantic City, Louis Malle directed a hardboiled existential thriller, Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, that manages to be exciting and loaded with ennui at the same time.

An executive loves his boss's wife, kills the boss, tries to beat a hasty retreat--but is stuck in the elevator. Down at street level, a French James Dean and his girlfriend steal the murderer's car and get into their own trouble--for which the murderer is blamed. All the while, the luminescent Jeanne Moreau, like some beautiful deep-sea creature, drifts through Paris at night, her inner monologue of love and despair counter-pointing the panic and casual brutality of the main plot.

Or is there a main plot? The above speaks only to the bare skeleton of this layered picture. Consider the background of the killer: ex-Legionnaire, paratrooper in Indochina and Algiers, a real cold-blooded customer for the dirty work of a confused empire. And the joy-riding punk and his girlfriend, at once amoral and touching. And of course Moreau herself, commanding the picture just by wandering around, the archetype of the French lover who knows that love and death make their own dark tryst.

Malle handles all of this not without a little misstep--or maybe sidestep--here and there, but the plot(s) is/are so strange and claustrophobic, the mistakes so fatal, the acting so cool and loose--or cool and tightly wound, depending on what's up in their what-next world--that all is forgiven, and Malle leaves us with a movie that stays in one's mind like all the great images of the French New Wave: washed in rain, alternating between hope, acceptance and despair, and intercut with dark and light like those faces in Ezra Pound's station of the Metro, "Petals on a wet, black bough."

Matinee (1993)

2010-06-04T15:47:00.000-05:00

There's a certain kind of cinema that's all about anticipation. The movie itself (usually with the word "attack" or "terror" or "wild" in the title) is less than memorable--unless you saw it when you were under, say, 14 years old or so; the build-up was everything. The Coming Attraction, the poster, the schoolyard speculations and rumors--all these gave you more than your money's worth. At the heart of the movies is the joy of imagining what you will see, then re-imagining what you have.

Joe Dante understands this just about as much as anybody. Since Piranha back in 1978, most of his horror films have been in large part homages to/parodies of the genre, filled with references to classic B pictures, the sendups always affectionate. In 1993, he finally received the chance to bring this tendency to the forefront with Matinee, courtesy of a William Castle/Roger Corman/Samuel Z. Arkoff-style director/producer, Lawrence Woolsey, who finds himself debuting his latest feature, Mant ("Half man, half ant, all terror!"), during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Nuclear annihilation was never so much fun, not even in Dr. Strangelove.

Everyone who loves this movie remembers the salient features:

1. Woolsey's picture, the above-mentioned Mant, scenes from which Dante presents in loving, laughable detail.

2. John Goodman as Woolsey, in a performance that I still hear echoes of in everything fine he's since done.

3. Cathy Moriarty as his jaded but patient companion. If she'd handled Jake LaMotta this way in Raging Bull, he wouldn't have dared to lay a finger on her.

Dante gets just about everything right, from the achingly bad "family musical" the mother would rather the young protagonist see than all that horror stuff, to the joyful chaos of a Saturday matinee. I have mixed feelings about the finale--although, to tell you the truth, the details are a bit fuzzy: I haven't seen this picture in a while, since its availability has been woefully spotty. But it remains in my memory as a re-imagined masterpiece--so much so that I know another viewing will not entirely diminish its charms.

I'm keeping it safe in my Instant Play Queue for this weekend--and you should, too. It's not available through Netflix on disk, but it's ready and willing to watch now, as real as the gimmicks Woolsey uses to keep 'em in--and jumping out of--their seats.

Trucker (2008)

2010-06-03T08:25:00.000-05:00

I'd like to begin this Pick of the Moment for Trucker by quoting Roger Ebert, at whose Ebertfest I first saw this film:

"There's one of those perfect moments in Trucker when I'm thinking, This is the moment to end! Now! Fade to black! And the movie ends. It is the last of many absolutely right decisions by the first-time writer-director James Mottern, who began by casting two actors who bring his story to strong emotional life. Both of them show they're gifted and intelligent artists who only needed, as so many do in these discouraging times, a chance to reveal their deep talents."

When I read that first paragraph, I knew I was going to see something special. What Roger (and I'm sorry for the namedropping, but between his blogging and tweeting and clubhouse-ing, he encourages that kind of thing) was promising was a perfect movie--and that does not necessarily mean one for the ages, Top Ten topper, King of the Canon; no, simply one that knows what it wants to do, and makes "absolutely right decisions" to do it.

Trucker is that kind of perfect movie. The actors Roger refers to are Michelle Monaghan (Mission: Impossible III, Gone Baby Gone, Eagle Eye) and then-twelve-year-old Jimmy Bennett (young Kirk last year, one of the sons in Evan Almighty); and they never misstep, never go for the easy flourish that would make their characters more recognizable as types--and so less interesting as characters going somewhere. Monaghan is the titular trucker, Diane, who has no time--and less emotional energy--for her son, who lives with his father and knows exactly what she is: as he puts it, a bitch. But her husband (Benjamin Bratt, pitch-perfect, from the soft accent he rolls around--like a sad Woody Harrelson--to his sickbed posture--not strong, but still smiling a little for his son's sake) has cancer, and she's forced to take in her son.

You can predict where this is going, but plot surprises do not matter here. Instead, Trucker wants to bring life to a familiar plot, and the actors take control of this urge and never overreach. I was especially happy to see Nathan Fillion (fellow nerds don't need to be reminded he was the charming Capt. Reynolds on the coolest SF TV show just about ever, dude, Firefly) as Runner, Diane's almost-boyfriend. Casting the low-key, self-effacing--but also pretty-boy charming--Fillion is yet another perfect decision by Mottern: We want Diane to choose Runner, but he's married, and there's enough hesitation on both sides to make for another movie. But Trucker is more than a character study, because Mottern wants his plot to matter--and he wants us to care about what's happening--and so character, performance, plot and direction need to work together. Mottern pulls this off, and effortlessly. I haven't seen such a satisfying film in a long time.

Ugetsu [monogatari] (1953)

2010-06-02T15:47:00.000-05:00

Ugetsu is Kenji Mizoguchi's retelling of Akinari Ueda's "Tales of a Pale and Mysterious Moon After the Rain"--a title both stilted and beautiful, like the film's Lady Wakasa, lovely as only an Asian ghost can be, hiding in the woods like a fawn, but still the doom of anyone who gets too close.

Two simple but ambitious men--one a potter who pursues wealth, the other a would-be samurai who seeks glory--endanger their families for the sake of their desires, while ghosts possess and spirits soothe, until ambition is humbled beneath the Buddha’s yearning for a middle path of compassion amidst suffering.

The men in Ugetsu who seek fortune and glory are indeed successful, but of course at a bitter price, paid in a dreamlike marketplace, where Genjuro's babble of commerce is hushed by a beautiful, gliding ghost; and on the battlefield, where the clatter of warfare delivers a general's head to an accidental samurai, Tobei. Their gains and losses, captured by a mist-shrouded camera, provide an illustration of the calm insistence that one must enter another's suffering to end one's own--as well as the other's.

Mizoguchi devotes the middle portion of his film to Genjuro's possession by Lady Wakasa. She is many things, not the least of which is respite from the storms of ambition--as well as its prize: a beautiful, Geisha-like patroness who murmurs love over both Genjuro and his blue-tinged pottery. It is an essay on beauty, love, and delusion. And then Mizoguchi draws us down to the core, as he lingers on the child in the story, Genichi, and the women who suffer, Miyagi and Ohama, whose fates are mirrored by the tale of Lady Wakasa, abandoned as her noble house fell, lost like Miyagi and fallen like Ohama. The challenge is for all of them to accept their true need--to show compassion and thus to love and be loved.

In the West, we had to invent something called "Magic Realism" to introduce the natural and the supernatural to each other so that they could get along and build stories together. Ugetsu reminds us that others have long made room for both, ghosts and potters comfortable with each other, at least for the sake of the story.

NOTE: As I've done before, this is adapted from something I wrote for The Constant Viewer. Just keeping me honest.

Eraserhead (1976)/Carnival of Souls (1962)

2010-06-02T08:31:00.000-05:00

It's difficult to write about Eraserhead or Carnival of Souls, particularly out here on the interwebs, because every midnight-movie geek on the planet has been there--and yes, done that. But not only did I want to point out that these movies are now on Instant Play, but I think they work well as a double bill.

Although David Lynch certainly went places--as strange as they may be--since his "student film," Eraserhead, while Herk Harvey, the director of Carnival of Souls, returned to educational films (It's fitting that Harvey's next credit after Carnival of Souls is Pork: The Meal with a Squeal; sounds like a Lynch short), each of them followed his vision all the way, and produced, as the tagline for Eraserhead puts it, "dreams of dark and troubling things."

And what are these dreams? Both pictures confront mortality, our resistance to having to grow up only to die. I must confess, the older I get, the scarier Eraserhead seems, a horror-film metaphor for meet-the-parents anxiety, as well as the uncertainties of one's own parenthood, the loss of youth and the regrets of missed opportunity, the yearning for both a return to innocence and an immersion in experience--and in the end the suspicion that none of this is within our control--like that most frightening of clichés: "Trapped in a world they never made!" Lynch hand-crafts an alternate universe, expressionistic and nauseating in its Freudian observation of instinctual urges beaten down by by neurotic hesitation/guilt, an aural-visual "happening" that denies all 1960s promises of freedom and rubs our noses in '70s malaise.

Now there's a ringing endorsement. Enjoy Your Feature Presentation!

But don't get me wrong: While Eraserhead may be a movie you will want to see only once, it has its own "dark and troubling" beauty; after all, Lynch and his cohorts spent more than four years building it, moment by moment, and it shows. The miniatures, the practical/special effects, the sets, the lighting--and above all the rich black and white cinematography: all these things combine simply to serve the film. There is nothing that doesn't belong here, no decorative elements, no lookit-me fireworks.

And in the end, Eraserhead may just be serving a Higher Purpose after all--this is when you may roll your eyes; but despite all its gory goo, its permeating sense of dread, the picture moves toward reconciliation with its horrors, even a kind of apotheosis--OK, I will not go so far as to assert it's an elevating experience--oh, why not: For me it is, as "surly bonds" are broken and Henry finds himself in--here it comes--Heaven. There is an irony here, of course (as the Woman in the Radiator sings, "In Heaven everything is fine"), but in the end I think the movie respects Henry's desires, and wishes it could help him. It's usually at a point like this that I bring up Pinocchio, as important in its own way as Citizen Kane in its examination of the desire to "become" something. There is a real Blue Fairy mood in the final scenes of Eraserhead, one that the movies, especially American ones, find hard to resist. It's possible that Henry becomes a real boy--which removes him from the muck-n-mire the rest of us share.

Speaking of muck: Enter Carnival of Souls, another Gothic parable, set in a bleak, salt-flat middle of nowhere. But what matters most is the almost entirely internalized geography it spreads before us, the shadowland of its protagonist's mind. Mary Henry goes for a joyride that ends badly--and from the moment of her coolly observed emergence from the water into which the car had plunged, as she steps along a little spit of sand, Mary slips away, closer to the pallid face and pale invitation of the Other Side. She refuses to die, to admit she’s not so much being pursued by ghosts as reclaimed by them. A church organist without faith, she fades (as do the sounds and human contact of the world around her), fluttering like a small bird held in soft, cold hands.

At the center of the movie is Mary's dance with/of the dead, which has a surprising resonance--an almost cruelly impartial observation of a nightmare, with its matter-of-fact slow decline, its relentless delivery of Mary into the hands of those pale revelers. It begins with the simple fact of universal mortality, and refuses to provide any reprieve.

And, like Eraserhead, it is beautifully directed, its sound editing, lighting and camera placement perfect. It looks exactly the way it needs to, and manages to overcome its budgetary weaknesses simply by staring at its subject without blinking. As the dead rise from the black water, or dance in delirious speed--and as Mary flees under the dark skies and shadowed streets, as the camera looks over, down and up, always holding just long enough to see, but not to break the mood, Carnival of Souls joins Eraserhead on the short list of films that move like dreams. Its very detachment becomes an invitation to the danse macabre, and its meager resources force us into the narrow passage Harvey demands we follow, back to the car wreck, the spit of sand, and the thing we've known all along, but had to be told--because we want it so little: that Mary needs to go the way of all flesh. It is a movie that, like Thomas Gray's poetry, tells me to see the world as a graveyard, and ultimately is not so much cruel as clear in that vision; in the end, almost with kindness, it "leaves the world to darkness and to me.”

While these may not be the happiest of movies, their complementary look and mood invite not only comparison but double-billing. So be brave, hold someone's hand, and walk through--as they say on Futurama--The Scary Door.

NOTE: The section on Carnival of Souls is adapted--all right, copied--from a piece I wrote for my other blog, The Constant Viewer. If you must steal, steal from yourself. You will have a tendency not to press charges.

Tender Mercies (1983)

2010-06-01T09:43:00.000-05:00

Even as a little filigree along the frame of a movie, Robert Duvall satisfies. When he shows up as Karl's father in Sling Blade I immediately settled in, certain he was going to do something worth remembering--and it was, the mumbling, cornered vermin he evoked as expertly crafted as his crotch-grabbing, napalm-smelling Col. Kilgore (the name alone like some minor villain out of Dickens), his few minutes on screen still as quotable as Here's-looking-at-you-kid.

In a starring role he can be almost overwhelming. Even in something as "easy" as Secondhand Lions--the ease coming not only from the sentimental script but his costars--given enough space, Duvall takes over--no, that's not right; he's too generous to dominate. OK, he rises to the occasion, all the way to the brim. The scene at the bar with the punks in Secondhand Lions is ready-made--Eastwood would've had fun with it--but Duvall brings an extra touch of weariness to the moment, his paunch sticking out as he once more faces a foolish world. Showy, but irresistible.

You are now duly warned: A Duvall leading role can take a lot out of you. It appears he knows this in Tender Mercies, so instead goes for our weak flank: We do not get what we expect. His washed-up C&W performer, Mac Sledge, is almost not even there. He slips in the back door--like the Very Old Man with Enormous Wings in Gabriel García Márquez's "Tale for Children"; but he does not arrive to irritate and confound. Sledge wants merely to disappear with some dignity, but this decidedly quiet movie won't let him fade away. Instead, he is given the opportunity to take a few small, monumental steps back toward others. Tess Harper as Rosa Lee (and Ellen Barkin in the role that made me love her forever) joins Duvall in this world waiting to begin; the ending, which seems so inconsequential, becomes for me one of the most moving final sequences in film, a dry Texas coda that makes a small but essential promise to Mac and his family.

I suppose when it comes to memorable Duvall performances nothing can match Sonny in The Apostle (1997). But that was Duvall's picture all the way--as star, director and writer--and he gave it everything he always wanted to give us. In Tender Mercies, he serves Bruce Beresford and Horton Foote--but Beresford knows what to do with Duvall and Harper: While we lose Sonny's terrier yelps and help-me-Jesus stares, Tender Mercies gives us Whispering Bobby, his head down, ready to keep taking it if he has to, but hoping for a little something more.

The Crimson Rivers/Les rivière pourpres (2000)

2010-05-30T19:42:00.000-05:00

I recall Tom Hanks on a talk show plugging The Da Vinci Code and being appropriately geeky over the fact that he not only got to see the Mona Lisa after hours, but that Jean Reno was with him.

Is Reno the coolest man in movies? Faithful Reno-philes will simply murmur Ronin, and close the case. But how often can you watch Ronin? (Don't tell me; my own number is embarrassingly high.) So, if you want all-Reno, all the time, turn to The Crimson Rivers, a twisty-curvy mondo-weirdo thriller that sends Reno--and aint-he-also-cool Vincent Cassel--clambering around the French Alps in search of a--well, I won't spoil it for you, even though the movie itself does some of that for us: Its plot is a bit untidy, its ending a little off-center.

But who cares? Reno and Cassel are fun to watch, the Alps look great--and the murders are satisfyingly Se7en-ish. Besides, do you really want to get your Reno-fix by watching Godzilla again? (All right, a cheap shot: I actually like that one, especially when Reno spits out the "French" roast coffee.)

This Sporting Life (1963)

2010-05-30T15:00:00.000-05:00

David Storey adapts his angry-young-man novel This Sporting Life, with Richard Harris as Frank Machin, the rugby Raging Bull whose only desire is to satisfy himself--but he doesn't know what he wants, so he simply digs in (always at his sport, like De Niro's Jake LaMotta) and crushes anything in his way--including his almost-love, played by Rachel Roberts (so good a few years earlier opposite Albert Finney in another angry-young-man drama, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning)--and Roberts, like Cathy Moriarty in Raging Bull, is well-suited to keeping up with her growling, all-but-remorseless costar.

The film has grittiness to spare--the rugby scenes are muddy and brutal, as though the viewer were in the pileup--and the requisite sense of mute anguish (and not-so-mute: What would a Richard Harris movie be without sudden outbursts?) provides a long hard look at the heart of tragedy: Choice is a limited resource--every choice means one less--until only one remains, and that one is doom. Here, it's the rugby field, where Machin pushes like Sisyphus against his rock, getting nowhere.

I'm struck by how often I'm attracted by movies that remind me of King Kong, the "great ape" (Machin is called this at one point) that swipes at every obstacle, rages against what it hopes is the Other but that ends up being the Self. And as awful as such monsters are, they break my heart, like Jake LaMotta in his jail cell, insisting against all evidence to the contrary that he's not that bad.

The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)

2010-05-28T08:20:00.000-05:00

Disclaimer: I'm a fool for the Coen brothers, so this isn't a "review"--I mean, I like The Hudsucker Proxy.

The Man Who Wasn't There is one of the Coen brothers' period pieces--like almost half their films--and they work hard to reproduce the essence of film noir: claustrophobic immobility in the face of a random disaster that is spurred by one reckless act. (I think that covers it.) In fact, the mood hones so closely to the quiet desperation of noir, and the details of its late-'40s milieu are so closely observed that, like The Hudsucker Proxy, The Man Who Wasn't There threatens to become parody. But, like their more recent A Serious Man, an air of detachment rescues the film from self-conscious homage/pastiche.

As so often, the Coens are very lucky/smart in their casting. Billy Bob Thornton's granite-faced barber strikes just the right note of ambiguity: he is a victim but also a perpetrator, wronged but also perilously wrong. Not since Sling Blade--OK, maybe Friday Night Lights--has Thornton delivered such a controlled performance. (And kudos to the Brothers for recognizing the Boris Karloff who hides behind Thornton's face, the sad monster you both pity and scorn.) As for the rest of the cast: I'll let you discover the pleasures of their performances, everyone infected with Coen-commitment, as though they'd been rehearsing for these roles for a long time.

Yes, it's an unhappy movie moving haltingly about in a dim and uncertain space--the flying saucer scene remains one of the Coens' great elusive (allusive?) moments. But, if you want to see what may be the best adaptation of an imaginary James M. Cain novel, The Man Who Wasn't There should be--there, that is, in your Instant Play Queue.

The Awful Truth (1937)

2010-05-27T11:06:00.000-05:00

Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Ralph Bellamy, and Asta (the Wonder Dog from the Thin Man series--plus Bringing Up Baby): The cast alone makes this worth watching--and they're all young and fresh-faced--even mopey Bellamy, only in the picture (as he is so often) to help the plot go from boy-loses to boy-gets-girl.

Grant will fast-talk and caper like this in other pictures, most notably with Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell; but in The Awful Truth he's up against Irene Dunne--and he'd better not be fooled by the good breeding and calm demeanor. Dunne's Lucy Warriner knows how to counter-punch, and the two of them play out this thwarted-divorce version of a screwball comedy with nimble, even athletic moves. The bit with the hat and the dog, and Dunne's pretending to be Grant's sister, and the business with the door in the cabin at the end--little of it makes sense, but all of it works, one snappy moment after another.

Watching these late-'30s-early-'40s comedies, I forgive myself--and them--if the plots and characters run together in my mind. I think they're meant to, if only because the term "formulaic comedy" is a little redundant: Half the pleasure of comedy is repetition, the familiar pattern realized--and, in the best of them, re-imagined--while the performers heroically run themselves ragged in the attempt to keep things fresh. Nothing is more fun than watching great comic actors like Dunne/Grant/Bellamy trying to out-think their own material, and that's all we need to know about The Awful Truth.

(See The Awful Truth at Netflix HERE.)

Not One Less (1999)

2010-05-26T20:39:00.000-05:00

Yimou Zhang, the director of Raise the Red Lantern and House of Flying Daggers, turns from cold opulence and bamboo wire-fu spectacle to make this teacher’s favorite movie about teaching, Not One Less (1999). A small rural school keeps losing students to work opportunities and sports recruiters. Teacher Gao is leaving for a time, and he instructs his thirteen-year-old substitute not to lose any more—not one less.

Of course, that is exactly what happens, and young Wei must travel to the city to fetch her wayward charge. Raising the money to do so provides her students with a living arithmetic problem—how many bricks does the class have to move to buy a bus ticket?—and a chance to literally broadcast their concerns to urban China.

While the film’s semi-documentary feel and use of amateurs lend charm, the ending—which directly addresses the audience via title cards that document the plight of rural education in China—has struck some as heavy-handed. But by the time we get to this PSA, Zhang has earned our attention: the Bicycle Thieves-like wandering in the city, searching for the lost child, is as touching as the growing solidarity of Wei’s class. She becomes a teacher, they become students. It’s as simple as the performances, and as profound as any of life’s milestones. I particularly appreciated the movie’s willingness to expose Mei’s weaknesses—and its brave assertion that our hearts should not be embarrassed to feel the rush of pity and hope.

Find Not One Less at Netflix here.

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

2010-03-31T23:51:00.000-05:00

It's interesting to note that more than one film combines the Spanish Civil War with the secret life of children--as though the War itself were a child's game, played in the woods without parents to oversee, interfere, or protect; someone could get hurt. Pan's Labyrinth (2006) comes easily to mind, but so does another Guillermo del Toro picture, The Devil's Backbone (2001).

I don't know enough about Spanish cinema to explore this too far--but The Spirit of the Beehive seems far enough. At its core is the experience of movie going--the child's experience of seeing James Whale's Frankenstein--and if you're lucky you recall how mysterious the movies could be in your partial understanding, how dim but lasting in your memory. The film itself is beautiful to look at--or at least beautifully atmospheric--in the service of the attempt to film experience as memory. At times it reminded me of René Clément's Forbidden Games (1952), about France and World War II, as seen from down there among the table legs, the orphan and her temporary brother assembling the pet cemetery in the barn.

The Spirit of the Beehive has its barn as well; this one, though, seems something else than a memorial. Maybe a doorway of sorts--perhaps to adulthood, but certainly one of many portals leading to a miniature Gothic, an expanding place of secrets. As G. M. Hopkins says to the little girl, Margaret, in his poem "Spring and Fall," "What heart heard of, ghost guessed." Holy Ghost for him, I think; but in The Spirit of the Beehive, I'm not so sure.

Inland Empire (2006)

2010-03-30T22:33:00.000-05:00

In the conclusion of his Message on his website, The David Lynch Foundation, David tells us,

Thank you very much for your interest. And please remember that Consciousness-Based education is not a luxury. For our children who are growing up in a stressful, often frightening, crisis-ridden world, it is a necessity.

Of course, Lynch is intimately familiar with this world: He filmed much of its salient features in Inland Empire, with Laura Dern as his Lewis & Clark/Klaus Kinski, the two of them stepping into the deep woods with a small light, so that the image is grainy and smeared, fraught with anxiety and imminent horror.

Inland Empire is another Lynch film that shows you what happens when you don't meditate--or maybe when you do, "diving within"--too far, breaking on through to the other side, turning so quickly as you stand before the mirror that you see the back of your head--and there is a wound there, an opening you'd never noticed, and nothing seeps out--oh no, you seep in.

I have nothing definite to say about this film; some will assure you it has a plot, it reveals a pattern, it makes sense, if you squint just so. I can't go that far. But I will say it works for me as a perfect Instant Play movie, each scene searchable, so that they stand alone as small experiments in tonal narrative and sonic atmosphere, not so much a movie as an exhibition, a long look inside. I had to take it off my Queue; it kept calling to me, like The Fly, in a high-pitched voice filled with terror and entreaty, drawing me--the opposite of silencio, so important in Mulholland Dr., here abandoned. At the end, everyone gets together to dance and sing, Nina Simone hysteria yelping undulations up to God--Who comes into the room in flashes, illuminating Laura's smiling face.

For All Mankind (1989)

2010-03-29T21:40:00.000-05:00

John F. Kennedy certainly understood Frederick Jackson Turner, whose "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" famously concludes,

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance ... and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted ... . The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom ... . Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. and ... the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. ... And now, ... the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

Kennedy, however, wanted no part of a closed frontier, at his inauguration announcing, "We stand on the edge of a New Frontier--the frontier of unfulfilled hopes and dreams, a frontier of unknown opportunities and beliefs in peril. Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space ..." A little later in the decade Capt. Kirk called it the "final" one--"a new sea," as Kennedy put it--words Al Reinart uses to open and close his impressionistic documentary of the Apollo missions--"because there is new knowledge to be gained and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all mankind."

For All Mankind knows that space is not only a frontier but, as the re-release posters for 2001 announced, "the ultimate trip": Renart's film looks on silently as some of the most amazing things occur, and listens carefully to every sappy/sentimental/transcendent word the Apollo astronauts had to say. The images are at once familiar and re-imagined--as a shared experience, a "restless, nervous energy" that is much of what Turner had to say, and more: humbled in the face of silent travel at 25,000 miles an hour, the Moon in the little window looking back in, the sight of the lunar lander as the astronauts rover back, the knowledge that the Earth is "this thing out here ... that's alive."

Reinart splices together the various missions, leaving us with an idea--or at least a feeling--but not history, exactly. Or maybe the distilled moonshine of history, crystal clear in a mason jar, a warm kick under cold stars.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)

2010-03-28T10:39:00.001-05:00

NOTICE: Good news: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is back on Instant Play.

Sidney Lumet, still barreling along, directs another misbegotten robbery movie--and this just a year after the satisfying Find Me Guilty, in which Vin Diesel reminded us he is one charming guy.

No charm, though, is evident in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. The brothers--Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke--who decide to rob their parents' jewelry store are so morally constipated they cannot express one clear thought. Instead, they simply doggedly advance, and screw everything up, and spend much time paying, the kind of thing Lumet is good at--I remain an admirer of Prince of the City, especially Treat Williams' breathless would-be hero.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead has a few smeared lines, but between the cast (which also includes Albert Finney and Marisa Tomei) and the appalling mess those brothers make, their own dog day afternoon waning, Sidney Lumet once more makes a crime movie that's about a lot more than crime--and that knows there are all kinds of crimes, enough to go around for all of us.

The Dark Corner (1946)

2010-03-27T08:35:00.000-05:00

Henry Hathaway (Call Northside 777/1948, Kiss of Death/1947) directs The Dark Corner with many requisite dark corners--and that's no joke: Half the time the characters disappear into darkness, become shadows on the wall--sometimes one person manages to find a bar of light to stand in, but the darkness creeps up on him anyway; but again, despite the persistent gloom, the movie is full of life--especially in one's ears. It's a noisy picture, with a real New York all around: trains squealing and buses hissing, car-horns honking, kids playing, and many many radios supplying a musical score. Hathaway works hard to paint the screen black, then surprises us with all those people and their clacking, crying, whistling, singing selves. What a relief it was, in a movie that tried to drag everybody into its dark corner.

--Except for the private dick's secretary/Girl Friday, played by Lucille Ball as one cute tomato with wide-eyed, matter-of-fact pluck. It took me fifteen seconds to like her, and just a few more to depend on her: I felt that as long as the movie didn't kill Lucy there'd be hope the shadows would recede.

The private eye, Mark Stevens' Brad Galt, needed all the hope he could manage. And that was another pleasant surprise: a gumshoe with the jitters, playing tough but inside frazzled--the girl noticing it before we did. Of course, we also get the usual suspects: the smooth blackmailer, the Oscar-Wilde-ish rich guy (Clifton Webb leaning hard on his accent as he complains that he hates the dawn because "the grass looks like it's been left out all night"); the wife he dangles like a watch-fob, bright and necessary; and once more, William Bendix as the muscle, his white suit smeared with ink, his instincts perfect but his reflexes a bit too slow to keep up. But it's Galt's game to lose, and Lucy's picture--except for all those Caligari shadows and the hubbub of the city, a window away but of no real help as the bodies pile up.

Shameless Plug: This is adapted from my Big Blog, The Constant Viewer.

Altered (2006)

2010-03-26T11:16:00.000-05:00

Eduardo (Blair Witch Project) Sanchez directs an SF/horror film the old-fashioned way: with an improbable plot, hand-made gore effects, and a generous measure of suspense and shocks. Altered's mood varies from thrill-ride fun to grim, from wide-eyed panic to action-heroic--with welcome doses of humor and good-ol'-boys(-n-girl) characters that are surprisingly non-annoying; the script knows they're rednecks, but doesn't laugh at them.

If you can stand the gore and enjoy horror comics and The X-Files, this one is comfort food. And it's the kind of direct-to-video title Instant Play was made for; one can only hope that Altered inspires more would-be grindhouse auteurs.

I'm sorry to note that I wanted to recommend another low-budget horror gem, Splinter, but it's off the Instant Play--although you can rent the disc. Please, Netflix, extend those licenses!

Grey Gardens (1975)

2010-03-25T15:37:00.000-05:00

Before you watch the Drew Barrymore-Jessica Lange HBO docudrama, Grey Gardens, check out the Maysles brothers' documentary of the same name. Albert and David follow aging Big Edie Bouvier (of the Jackie O. Bouviers) and her daughter, Little Edie, as they wander around Grey Gardens, their Shirley-Jackson-esque American Gothic estate, planted in the midst of East Hampton.

But the Edies have aggressively turned their backs on the Hamptons — and the rest of us, lost in their mutual dependence and resentment. The Maysles brothers' films are famous for getting uncomfortably close to exploitation, but as I watched Grey Gardens I found myself moving beyond the queasy pleasures of voyeurism to a sense of tragedy, as though Death of a Salesman had somehow shed all its pretensions and murmured, "I told you so": The American Dream sits in a room filled with rubbish and cats and croons a sad song no one wants to hear — and dances with its eyes closed, so it doesn't have to see.

If you want losers to laugh at, Grey Gardens will feed that need and make you a worse person. But if you can manage pity and fear, then it will make you a better one for enduring it.