Less Hat, Moorhead

HOLMES FOR THE HOLIDAYS

2009-12-25T10:19:49Z

A Very Merry Christmas to all from Your Humble Narrator, The Wife & Lily! Check out The Wife’s annual creation:

(photo credit: Moi)

This pic doesn’t remotely do it justice, I’m afraid. It’s possibly the prettiest Christmas Tree I’ve ever seen.

Here's a bit of seasonal Sting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-vZ8FDvnW8

Here are quick takes on a couple more movies opening here in Phoenix today:

Crazy Heart: Jeff Bridges is entirely convincing as country singer Bad Blake, once a star, now a broke, drunken has-been. The movie, directed by Scott Cooper from a novel by Thomas Cobb, isn’t a downer, though—Bridges makes Bad a deeply likable wreck, & when he falls in love with a Santa Fe music journalist (Maggie Gyllenhaal) & her little son (Jack Nation) & tries to clean himself up for them, you root for him. Though Robert Duvall plays a supporting role & Colin Farrell sings impressively as a hotshot up-&-comer who idolizes Bad, there really isn’t all that much to the movie apart from the star’s performance. But that’s plenty.

Nine: Rob Marshall uses the same gimmick that he used on Chicago—the ol’ musical-happening-in-the-main-character’s-head bit—to translate the 1982 Broadway adaptation of Fellini’s 8 ½ into a movie. Once again, Marshall’s directorial touch is flawless, but this time the source material isn’t that captivating, & the result is a finely-crafted, well-acted bore. Daniel Day-Lewis is the Felliniesque Italian movie director who, stuck for an idea for his next film, ruminates on the women in his life, among them some of the great beauties now in movies: Sophia Loren (as his mother), Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson & Judi Dench. The best number is “Be Italian”—it’s the only really good number, I’d say—& Fergie, of Black Eyed Peas fame, steals the movie with her lusty performance of it.

Sherlock Holmes: Robert Downey, Jr. & Jude Law play the longtime Baker Street companions in the latest from Guy Ritchie. Conan Doyle purists won’t like it, since it’s not really a mystery—it’s more of a swashbuckling buddy picture, wired up with Ritchie’s feverish, forward-lunging style. But the stars are charming company, & there’s real visual imagination both in the design & the imagery. The script doesn’t shy away from the same-sex-marriage aspects of the Holmes-Watson relationship, though it isn’t (apparently) sexual or romantic—Holmes is plainly & spitefully jealous over Watson’s intention to get married (to Kelly Reilly; who could blame him?) & move out. It’s a flashy, silly film, but I had a blast watching it.

By the way, if you’re in a Holmesian mood but don’t care to brave the multiplex on opening day, the ever-marvelous Turner Classic Moviers is showing a marathon of Holmes movies today, starting at 6 pm (Phoenix time). Selections include Billy Wilder's 1970 The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, & the moody 1939 Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce version of Hound of the Baskervilles.

Details:

http://www.tcm.com/index.jsp

FOX & FRIENDS

2009-12-24T07:43:45Z

For the last few weeks I’ve been cramming, watching movies I hadn’t yet caught up with in anticipation of the Phoenix Film Critics Society Awards vote I had to cast this past weekend (see Tuesday’s posting for the PFCS award winners). So here is a quick tour through some of what I’ve seen:

Fantastic Mr. Fox: Lots of George Clooney this year. He’s triumphed with Up in the Air, & again, flawlessly providing the voice of the title character in this stop-motion animated adaptation of (& expansion upon) Roald Dahl’s book from director Wes Anderson. Fox is a daring chicken thief at heart, but he becomes a newspaper columnist at the request of his wife (Meryl Streep) when she becomes pregnant; alas, his larcenous urges recur. This stylized, sophisticated work is arguably not a kids’ movie—it’s for older or smarter kids, anyway—nor is it for those whose patience is tried by Anderson’s sly, low-key style. But I think it’s his funniest, most focused work since his great Rushmore, & the animation is enchanting.

The Men Who Stare at Goats: More Clooney; this one concerns a small-potatoes journalist (Ewan McGregor) in Kuwait who stumbles into an acquaintance with an oddball (Clooney) who claims to be part of a “psychic soldier” corps in the U.S. Military. Despite a superb cast—Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Lang & Stephen Root are also in it—an interesting premise & some weird & amusing scenes, the movie never takes off; this directorial effort by the actor & producer Grant Heslov is an unfortunate misfire.

Up: This dreamlike animated tale concerns a crotchety old widower (voiced by Ed Asner) who turns his house into an airship & sets sail for South America in search of the adventures he & his late wife always dreamed of. He’s joined, to his annoyance, by a little boy, & later by a big flightless bird & a sweet dog who can talk, electronically, through his collar. The strand involving the sinister explorer voiced by Christopher Plummer isn’t well-developed, but otherwise this is close to a perfect movie. Squirrel!

Julie & Julia: Amy Adams is food blogger Julie Powell, Meryl Streep is the redoubtable Julia Child, & the movie flips back & forth between the stories of their gustatory matriculation. As cinema it’s negligible, but Streep is sublimely hilarious & charismatic.

A Serious Man: The Coen Brothers do for the Book of Job what they did for Homer’s Odyssey in O Brother, Where Are Thou? Their Job figure is a ‘60s-era college physics professor (the excellent Michael Stuhlbarg) whose life falls humiliatingly apart through no discernable fault of his own. It’s a fascinating, painfully funny film, but my favorite scene was a Yiddish prologue before the credits, set in a 19^th-Century shtetl, suggesting that the poor man’s troubles may stem from a curse placed on his family by a genial Dybbuk, played by the great Fyvush Finkel.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: An improbable movie—a semi-remake of Abel Ferrara’s 1992 cult fave, reset in Nawlins in the aftermath of Katrina, starring Nicolas Cage in the title role & directed by, get this, Werner Herzog. More improbably still, it’s really good—a highly imaginative & often erotic long-dark-night-of-the-soul melodrama. Cage does his thrashing, eye-bugging stuff, but in context it works beautifully, & there are scenes that you haven’t seen in another crime movie. The ironic Hollywood ending is slightly anticlimactic, but otherwise this film kicks significant ass.

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire: Much of the reticence toward this film seems to center on its subject matter, the horrifying abuse of the title character, an obese black inner-city teenager—not any dispute of the story’s plausibility, just a revulsion toward its depiction. Of the heavy-handed approach of director Lee Daniel there can be no question, but you aren’t likely to see better acting in a movie this year, not only by Gabourey “Gabby” Sidibe as Precious but also by Mo’Nique as her venomous mother & by Lenny Kravitz & Mariah Carey (first-rate!) in smaller roles.

The Blind Side—John Lee Hancock’s deft touch for “wholesome” material enlivens this account, based on a true story, of the adoption of Michael Oher, a poor & uneducated black youth, by an affluent white family in Memphis, & how it led to a successful football career at the University of Mississippi & the NFL (he’s currently with the Baltimore Ravens). Sandra Bullock brings a thoughtful yet comic touch to the role of the impulsively well-meaning Mom. This is an extremely square movie, & though I enjoyed it, I suppose I felt the same reflexive distrust that a lot of critics did at its depiction of salvation for a black kid via the intercession rich Republican-Christian white folk. But then I read the New Yorker review’s complaint that the film “offers a vision of anti-racism devoid of liberalism” (horrors!), & it lightened me up. After all, one of the commonest leftie complaints about conservative evangelicals is that they so often seem indifferent to, or even at odds with, Christ’s teachings on charity & tolerance. If that’s the case, should an example to the contrary be discouraged?

Me & Orson Welles: Zac Efron is the Me, a precocious (& fictitious) kid who stumbles into the role of Lucius in the famous modern-dress production of Julius Caesar directed by & starring Welles at the Mercury Theatre in 1937. I’m sucker for all those legendary Welles stories, but even so I found this movie, based on Robert Kaplow’s 2003 novel, irritatingly formulaic coming-of-age stuff. It’s redeemed, though, by the performance of the amazing young British actor Christian McKay, who nails the voice & mannerisms of Welles. There are also amusing supporting turns by Ben Chaplin as George Coulouris, Eddie Marsan as John Houseman, Leo Bill as Norman Lloyd & handsome James Tupper as Joseph Cotten.

Finally…in memory of my grammar-cop Mom, I have to ask: Shouldn’t it be Orson Welles & I?

WIN COLUMN

2009-12-22T17:11:21Z

Phoenix Film Critics Society, of which Your Humble Narrator takes pride in being a founding member, has announced its 2009 Awards. Some of this list reflects my voting--I'm particularly pleased at Moon's award for Overlooked Film--while some does not, but there are lots of movies on it worth seeing...

Best Picture
Inglourious Basterds

Top Ten Films of 2009 (in alphabetical order)
Avatar
District 9
(500) Days of Summer
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Precious
Sherlock Holmes
Star Trek
Up
Up In The Air

Best Director
Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

Best Performance by an Actor in a Lead Role
George Clooney, Up In The Air

Best Performance by an Actress in a Lead Role
Meryl Streep, Julie and Julia

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
Mo'Nique, Precious

Best Acting Ensemble
The cast of Inglourious Basterds

Best screenplay written directly for the screen
Up

Best screenplay adapted from another medium
Up In The Air

Best Live Action Family Film
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

Overlooked Film
Moon

Best Animated Film
Up

Best Foreign Language Film
Broken Embraces

Best Documentary
Capitalism: A Love Story

Best Original Song
"Weary Kind" from Crazy Heart

Best Original Score
Up

Best Cinematography
Avatar

Best Film Editing
Avatar

Best Production Design
Avatar

Best Costume Design
The Young Victoria

Best Visual Effects
Avatar

Best Stunts
Star Trek

Breakout on Camera
Gabourey Sidibe, Precious

Breakout Behind the Camera
Neill Blomkamp, District 9

Best Performance by a Youth - Male
Jae Head, The Blind Side

Best Performance by a Youth - Female
Saoirse Ronan - The Lovely Bones

RIP LUANNE...

2009-12-21T03:37:29Z

...& RIP also Brittany Murphy, the gifted & funny actress who gave her voice, & who has passed on 32...

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/12/20/arts/AP-US-Obit-Brittany-Murphy.html

Murphy also gave a classic performance in 1995's teen favorite Clueless, as the title-condition-bound Tai...

THE SWAN SONG OF BERNADETTE

2009-12-18T08:28:37Z

RIP to the beguilingly beautiful Jennifer Jones, star of Portrait of Jennie, The Song of Bernadette & the juicy Duel in the Sun, who has passed on at 90…

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/movies/18jones.html

Though the young Australian Sam Worthington technically holds the title, the real star of Avatar is Pandora, the world on which it mostly takes place. In his first fiction feature since Titanic, James Cameron has created his own exotic globe of dense yet luminous fairy-tale forests teeming with strange creatures & mystical secrets. He’s also brought humans there, & with them, alas, dramatic clichés.

The indigenous humanoids on Pandora, an earthlike moon in orbit of a colossal planet, are the Na’vi, a race of tall, svelte, blue-skinned people with catlike eyes, noses, ears & tails.

The Na’vi are Noble Savages in the mythic tradition, a generally peaceable warrior culture that lives in harmony with the environment. They’re even equipped with an organ that plugs them into direct symbiotic connection with the horselike galloping creatures & dragonlike flying creatures on whose backs they ride.

The tribe has had the poor luck, however, to live in an enormous tree situated over a rich vein of the mineral that the human colonists are on the planet to mine—Cameron has rather cheekily named it “Unobtanium.” As a result, the military-industrial complex sends a spy to win the Na’vi’s trust, & this is the title character.

In the Hindu tradition, an Avatar is a deity in a physical body; in this film it’s a Na’vi clone remotely controlled by the mind of a human. The Avatar of the title is Jake Sully (Worthington), a Marine who’s been crippled from the waist down & relishes the freedom of his new Na’vi bod. Jake is theoretically there to assist two other Avatars (Sigourney Weaver & Joel David Moore) in research & to help negotiate terms with the natives. But he’s secretly there to gain military intelligence for the rabid Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), on behalf of his corporate master (Giovanni Ribisi).

Bet you can’t guess what happens: Once Jake spends some time with the Na’vi & gets to know them, he starts to wonder if he’s playing for the right team. Getting close to the rather fetching young Na’vi (Zoe Saldana) who’s assigned to train him in the tribe’s ways doesn’t impede this change of heart.

Avatar has been much anticipated, in part because of its supposedly revolutionary CGI special effects, & indeed it’s undeniable that on a visual level, it’s a thrilling spectacle. The flora & fauna & landscapes of Pandora stir & delight the imagination. I loved the plants that look like Dale Chihuly’s glass sculptures & snap shut at the touch, the great thundering herd animals with the hammerhead-shark faces, & the big predator that looked like a giant Doberman from hell. The visit to the dragon rookery & Jake’s first solo flight are classically executed sci-fi flourishes, & so are many other sequences.

Yet for all Cameron’s exuberance, Avatar doesn’t quite satisfy. It lasts for more than two & a half hours, & while at any given moment there’s something interesting onscreen to watch, the movie still feels overblown. It could probably be cut by forty minutes or so without losing a major plot point or a cool scene.

Furthermore, the special effects aren’t as seamless as we might hope. While the “Pandoran” settings are splendidly evoked, the Na’vi themselves, though alluring in conception, aren’t always rock-solidly convincing; at times they suggest video-game graphics.

But the most disappointing aspect of Avatar is Cameron’s uninspired sense of drama. His parable-like plot about exploitation of versus harmony with nature is perfectly virtuous & admirable, but it’s also one-dimensional & unsurprising. Cameron’s formidable talents have created a Brave New World, but he’s used it to tell a Stale Old Story.

YES, LILY THERE IS A SANTA CLAUS...

2009-12-17T05:29:01Z

Lily made a new pal recently...

Santa, who was making a personal appearance at the PetSmart near our home, kept referring to the handsome lady taking the pictures as "Babe," & she kept irritably reminding him "You're Santa!" Who knew Mrs. Santa doubled as a photographer?

(photo credit: Mrs. Santa)

DAUGHTERS OF ANARCHY, & OTHER MATTERS...

2009-12-13T09:56:27Z

Assorted stuff:

My niece Kerri used to play football in Erie, now she's with Central Florida Anarchy in the Women's Football Alliance...

Check them out here...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNEvMEC9jRE

Insult to injury department: My beloved hometown of Erie is sure getting some national exposure this year; first it was thought by the makers of The Road to be a fine location for a film set in a devastated & lifeless earth, & now it's turned up in a Saturday Night Live sketch. Near the end of this week's show, the "Erie Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce" was mentioned as one of the only sponsors the PGA could get since Tiger's departure.

This video kicks ass:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFM140rju4k

Here's a site with an intriguing concept: open debate...

http://www.debateitout.com/

Finally, RIP to the ever-jaunty Bat Masterson himself, Gene Barry, who has passed on at 90...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/arts/television/11barry.html?_r=2&ref=obituaries

TERMINALS OF ENDEARMENT

2009-12-11T07:45:29Z

Opening today in Phoenix, & coming soon to an awards show near you, is Up in the Air. Jason Reitman’s comedy-drama is airport-newsstand existentialism—fast, light-hearted & punchy as a USA Today cover story, yet intriguing & thought-provoking & emotionally engaging, even, perhaps, beyond its own ambitions.

Our hero Ryan Bingham, played by George Clooney at his brisk & effortless best, is sort of the ultimate business traveler. He lives in the air, in airports, in hotels & in the office suites he briefly visits to do his job. Said job, for most of us, would be appalling: he’s an itinerant hatchet man, traveling from town to town firing people. He treats it as a sales job—he’s selling his victims on the idea that what’s happening to them isn’t a disaster but an opportunity, & he takes pride in his glib & skillful pitch.

Ryan also has a sideline, a motivational routine called “What’s In Your Backpack?” These allegorical encumbrances include, in his opinion, not only possessions but also intimate relationships, & he pushes the message of emptying one’s backpack. He lives this example, spending as little time as possible in his featureless apartment in the Midwest. He has no wife, no real girlfriend, no close friends & no wish to be closer to his sisters back in Wisconsin. His great aspiration is to be one of the very few people to hit 10 Million frequent-flyer miles. He’s like the opposite of Anne Tyler’s Accidental Tourist—he’s only ever accidentally at home.

Aside from the horrror of the actual work, this lifestyle, non-celibate & bustling but otherwise somehow monastic in its discipline, has a certain superficial appeal. But it’s the sort of thing that movies must inevitably disrupt. Thus the story concerns Ryan reluctantly being pulled into the vortex of other people’s lives.

Early on he meets the unflappable, languidly sexy Alex (Vera Farmiga), who shares his nomadic values, & they become occasional lovers whenever they’re able to connect in a city. Less welcome is Natalie (Anna Kendrick, Bella’s non-vampiric pal in the Twilight flicks), an eager-beaver youngster who is attempting to take the termination business virtual. He drags her out on the road with him to prove to her that the business requires the face-to-face human touch, though it’s clear that he’s really just trying to avoid being grounded. Finally, he must soon make the dreaded trip back to his hometown for the wedding of his sister (Melanie Lynskey) to a sweet clod (Danny McBride)—marriage, family, home, everything he recoils from in one trip.

The manner in which these three strands are intertwined isn’t especially unexpected, but Reitman, adapting a novel by Walter Kirn, shapes the individual scenes for comic surprise, & he doesn’t try too hard for profundity. The pace is swift, the dialogue is sly, & Eric Steelberg’s coolly metallic cinematography gives an eerie beauty to the generic locations.

Best of all are the performances, not just Clooney’s but also those of Kendrick & especially of Vera Farmiga, an actress who never impressed me before, but who does career-making work here. Her low voice & her mature, slightly melancholy features are touched with an amused, insinuating playfulness, & she saunters off with every scene she’s in.

In short, I enjoyed Up in the Air thoroughly, & could probably sit through it again, & yet ever since I saw it I’ve been trying to decide why I mistrusted it. Perhaps it’s because, Clooney’s excellence notwithstanding, Ryan somehow isn’t a convincing character. He’s more like a hypothetical construct—what if you decided to live as a pure, unconnected loner? But he’s also clearly an intelligent, well-read, warm, stylish man with a smooth line for the ladies & a middle-ager’s sense of perspective, & all this doesn’t seem to connect to the way he lives.

This is solid dramatic strategy, of course. A guy who really was this hermetically sealed wouldn’t be nearly as good company as George Clooney. For Ryan’s glamour to be plausible, it’s hard not to conclude it’s self-conscious, a show intended either to impress other people or to impress himself—either vanity or narcissism motivates him.

Clooney chooses vanity, & this is what makes him endearing & thus saves Up In the Air, even if it takes some of the gravity out of the film’s spiritual musings. Clooney has tended to be at his freest as an actor when he’s played clowns & dunces & overconfident gooneybirds, roles that allowed him to send himself up, & in a subtler way that’s what he does here.

He steers us away from seeing Ryan as a dramatic cipher by making him, to use the tiresome movie-critic term, quirky—his comic eccentricity comes out when he suddenly demonstrates enthusiasm for the history of airport terminals, say, or for the perks he’ll enjoy when he hits his frequent-flyer goal. It’s to the star’s credit that we feel protective of Ryan instead of contemptuous—we don’t want this ridiculous fellow to get hurt when he touches down.

NOT-SO-PRIVATE SNAFUS

2009-12-10T08:46:32Z

These are pretty freakin' funny...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/08/the-funniest-facebook-sna_n_383847.html?slidenumber=UtmAF0Ldses%3D#slide_image

EASTWARD HO

2009-12-08T07:20:04Z

This evening The Wife & I went to Toys R Us for a quick Christmas shopping trip, & I happened upon this: an unusually scowly Barbie, as the Wicked Witch of the East from The Wizard of Oz....

Who knew? No wonder her green-skinned sister was so angry--maybe that's what the Ruby Slippers would have done for her? What a shame this young lady got clobbered by Dorothy's house...

This is without a doubt the sexiest doll I've ever seen. The hottest touch: the stripey stockings!

BOXXING DAY

2009-12-05T06:11:06Z

If, like Your Humble Narrator, you're a fan of the "Women in Prison" genre, you may wish to head over to Tempe Saturday night. My pal the Midnite Movie Mamacita is presenting Cody Jarrett's loving homage Sugar Boxx...

For details you can check out my short article about it in this week's Phoenix New Times, on Page 36, or here:

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/events/sugar-boxx-1516234/

The Wife & I spent the fine, chilly afternoon wandering around the Tempe Festival of the Arts, which continues Saturday & Sunday. We had lunch at Gordon Biersch--I had a delicious bison burger--& we obtained this splendid & all too apt piece of agitprop:

Also: In anticipation of the Wolf Man remake slated for early next year, Universal has posted a bunch of pictures & clips from their monster classics. If, like Your Humble Narrator, you're a sucker for the ravishing black-&-white world of those movies, you'll want to check them out:

http://www.thewolfmanmovie.com/legacy/

A GOOD RIDE HOME SPOILED

2009-12-03T06:19:13Z

There's one thing--only one thing, really--I've always liked about Tiger Woods: I like that he's both a black guy & the best golfer in the world, because it drives rich white shitheads out of their fucking gourds, whether they admit it or not. I know that this is the case, because while my interest in golf begins & ends with Caddyshack, I have always enjoyed eating in golf course diners, & I've overhead rich white shithead conversations on the subject.

Apart from this one agreeable aspect of his existence, though, Tiger has always struck me as one of the more charmless & least interesting of major world celebrities, so while his troubles don't surprise me at all, I am startled by the intensity of the fascination with it.

Speaking of Caddyshack, yesterday on that excellent cable channel Boomerang, I saw a Snooper & Blabber cartoon...

...from 1959 in which the lads were engaged by an old rich guy to rid his yard of gophers. Snooper's final attack is remarkably reminiscent of Bill Murray's explosive final salvo against the gopher at the climax of 1980's Caddyshack.

Check it out here & tell me if I'm right:

http://fliiby.com/file/255149/y3wn44vn5e.html

WHERE THE TAME THINGS ARE

2009-11-30T07:32:22Z

Over the last few days I saw a couple of movies I'd been wanting to catch up with:

Where the Wild Things Are: Maurice Sendak's masterpiece certainly didn't seem to me like it had a feature film in it--not just because of the book's brevity but because the very act of turning this beautiful, incantatory blast of childhood revelry into a coherent feature-length narrative seems, almost by definition, to tame it. But I would love to have been proved wrong.

Not this time, alas. This adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze from a script he wrote with Dave Eggars, begins very promisingly, but once Max leaves the real-world frame story & sails off to the title location, the movie goes off the rails, quickly & badly. The WTs are beautifully realized on a technical level, but on the level of characterization, for some reason Jonze & Eggars chose to turn them into envious, melancholy, anxiety-ridden sorts. They're kvetchers, bellyachers--they might even be called whiners, I'm sorry to say. The movie has some magical moments, like when Max allows himself to be swallowed whole by one of the WTs & finds a raccoon residing quite comfortably in the gullet. The great Catherine O'Hara gives a fine performance as the voice of the ever-aggrieved Judith (the long-haired WT with the rhino horn), & she had my favorite line, after observing something perplexing: "I don't get it--Oh wait, I do: It's stupid." It's tempting to offer this as a summation of the film, but it would also be unfair. WTWTA is a not-even-close miss, made by talented people.

One last complaint: The movie omits the cool sea-monster that menaces Max's boat in the book. Why?

The Informant!--Matt Damon plays the title role in this dramatization of the true story of Mark Whitacre, the corporate whistleblower in a '90s-era FBI price-fixing case against Archer Daniels Midland. As the probe slogged on over the years, the Feds--represented here by Scott Bakula & Joel McHale in funny deadpan turns--gradually came to realize that while Whitacre's allegations against ADM happened to be true, he was in general a pathological liar, & worse.

Director Steven Soderbergh ironically evokes the style of a '70s-era thriller, & Damon's in excellent form. The movie bogs down a bit in the later scenes, in which we're shown Whitacre getting caught in lie after lie after lie--it becomes an ordeal, & the banal conference-room milieu doesn't offer any relief, either. Even so, this is a remarkable story, & the telling is both hilarious & poignant.

BUYDAY

2009-11-27T10:04:54Z

Hope everybody had a splendid Thanksgiving. The Wife & I did; we chowed down on a classic turkey dinner at Farrelli's while watching The Informant!, about which more another time.

Now it's time for Black Friday, the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. In observance of how retail fever symbolically kills the festivity of the Holidays--& how, last year on Long Island, it literally killed a human being in a Wal-Mart stampede--I plan to watch Black Christmas.

In this deeply messed-up Canadian horror movie of 1974, sorority sisters Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder & Andrea Martin are menaced by a slavering maniac at Yuletide (the French-Canadian version had the much more elegant title Un Noel Tragique).

Though it's no more realistic than any other slasher movie, Black Christmas has a pervasive luridness that makes it a really queasy, unsettling piece of work, and somehow the queasiness is magnified by the fact that it shares a director, Bob Clark, with that warmest, funniest, most beloved of Christmas movies, A Christmas Story. It might be called “The Anti-Christmas Story.”

I may also try to squeeze in Black Friday:

This corny melodrama from 1940, available on DVD on The Bela Lugosi Collection from Universal, is perhaps most remembered for a bit of studio ballyhoo: Lugosi agreed to be hypnotized in order to play his death scene, with the idea that we would see him truly suffer the terrors of murder!

I hasten to add, by the way, that my distaste for the retailer’s Black Friday doesn’t mean that I won’t accept presents bought for me today…

ODD GENTLEMEN OUT

2009-11-26T05:57:20Z

Need to cheer up after The Road? The latest film from Jared and Jerusha Hess of Napoleon Dynamite fame has opened here at the Valley Art in Tempe today. Called Gentlemen Broncos, it’s a weird comedy about creativity, plagiarism &, of course, teenage awkwardness—so profoundly weird that it’s certainly not for all tastes.

This time the hapless hero is Benjamin Purvis (Michael Angarano), a nice teenage kid with a perpetually pained look on his face. Small wonder he wears such an expression—a homeschooler, he lives with his nice but addled single Mom (Jennifer Coolidge) in small-town Utah, in a sad little house that might have been designed by Buckminster Fuller on a really off day. His Mom ekes out their living by designing & selling awesomely ugly nightgowns. Benjamin is likewise a creative sort: he writes stories—& illustrates them, in something like Napoleon Dynamite’s “Liger” style—in spiral-bound notebooks, sci-fi fantasy epics in which his Freudian miseries percolate just below the surface.

Benjamin attends a workshop for young writers at which he meets a celebrated fantasy novelist, Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement). A colossally pompous poseur with an accent that sounds like a thick blend of Tim Curry, Rupert Everett & Jeremy Irons, Chevalier also turns out to be a thief, filching the story that Benjamin turns in, changing a few names & peddling it as his triumphant comeback novel.

But it isn’t only from this despicable quarter that Benjamin’s vision is exploited—he also suffers the humiliation of having his tale adapted into a pitiful movie version by ambitious but inept local filmmakers. The Hesses then show us Benjamin’s yarn—a space opera in which his intrepid hero Bronco (Sam Rockwell) struggles to regain his purloined testicle from the Cyclops-guarded fortress of a mad scientist—in three alternating versions: the one in Benjamin’s head, the glitzier & campier one in Chevalier’s birdbrain, & the low-rent realization by the wannabe-moviemakers. This story-within-the-story counterpoints Benjamin’s own travails as he tries to reclaim his intellectual property.

Angarano, the boy-hero of 2008’s The Forbidden Kingdom, is such a likable kid that I couldn’t help but suffer with him, & Clement, from Flight of the Conchords, is such a splendidly odious popinjay that I longed to see him defeated. Coolidge is touching as the bedraggled, desperately upbeat Mom, & Mike White has a riotous supporting part as Dusty, a snake-toting “Guardian Angel” (roughly the equivalent of a Big Brother) from Benjamin’s church, who wears his blond locks like an Old Testament prophet & carries a snake on his shoulders. His first conversational gambit with Benjamin when they’re left alone is: “Your Mom’s smokin’ hot.”

Fair warning: Judging from the conversation afterward, most of the other critics at the screening of Gentlemen Broncos I attended seemed to actively hate the film. All I can say is that for several long stretches it convulsed me with laughter. Even though I enjoyed parts of the Hess sophomore effort Nacho Libre, I found Gentlemen Broncos much funnier.

My brother told me that he watched Napoleon Dynamite, the first time, “like a German shepherd,” tilting his head quizzically from side to side. He eventually came to love the film. Maybe if enough viewers get themselves past the German shepherd stage, Gentlemen Broncos will find its audience.

ROAD RULES

2009-11-25T08:52:21Z

Something horrendous has happened, & the Earth, or at least the part of it that we’re shown, appears to be dying. Several years in, it’s always cold & rainy, under a gray blanket of clouds & billowing wildfire smoke. The forests are leafless & lifeless, & the creak & groan & crash of falling trees is a constant background sound.

The animals & birds are gone, but there are still a few people left, & they’re hungry, so they’ve resorted rather matter-of-factly to cannibalism. Even so, most of them are starving. This, according to The Road, is how the world ends—not with a bang but with a long, painful, inglorious whimper.

Directed by John Hillcoat from a script by Joe Penhall—and shot, in part, on Presque Isle (where else but Erie would you go for that kind of desolation?)—the film follows a man (Viggo Mortensen) & his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) wandering south through this wretched landscape toward a coastline, in search of other “Good Guys,” people who haven’t gone cannibal. The boy seems to believe his father’s assertion that the two of them are “carrying the fire,” that is, the spirit of decency & dignity. The father is inwardly close to despair, but refuses to surrender his son to it.

A variety of episodes, most of them horrible, ensue. The pair crosses paths with marauders committing atrocities that, by their appalling ring of plausibility, make the scenes in the average horror movie look like children at play. The father’s only purpose is to keep his son safe, but the boy, born after the catastrophe struck, is a sweet-natured kid whose instinct is to share their meager resources with others, like the nearly blind old stranger (Robert Duvall) they meet hobbling up the road toward nowhere in particular.

Just in time for a festive, fun-filled Thanksgiving—and just weeks after the release of the laugh-out-loud apocalypse 2012—comes this potent & shocking post-apocalyptic vision, from Cormac McCarthy’s austere novel, a 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner. The theory, maybe, is that if you see it today you’ll be all the more thankful for dinner tomorrow.

In any case, the movie, though brutally sad & scary, isn’t a bummer. Hillcoat, the Australian who directed The Proposition, endows this potentially pretentious & repulsive material with some of the tragic, even exalted, flavor that McCarthy gets across with his language.

In no small part, Hillcoat is abetted in this achievement his cinematographer, Javier Aguirresarobe, the Spaniard whose work is also the best thing about the current Twilight movie, & whose nuanced camera makes the blasted scenery bleak but not boring. But Hillcoat owes even more to Viggo Mortensen. It’s taken me a long time to warm up to this distant, diction-challenged actor, but after Lord of the Rings & Eastern Promises I couldn’t deny his abilities, & in The Road he’s plain magnificent—with his haunted, harrowed face & his emaciated body, he makes the father’s desperation, & his awful courage, utterly convincing.

A little surprisingly, The Road turns out to be one of the best films of the year. Its horrors aren’t cheap & sophomoric, & the faint (very faint) glimmers of hope in the late scenes don’t feel like a Hollywood ending. The movie, after all, is driven by the father’s inability to shake the possibility that something worth finding might be around the next bend in the road, & in this context his unkillable hope is both a pitiable burden & a thrilling heroism.

DOWN IN BIRDLAND

2009-11-24T07:32:39Z

There are countless well-loved Christmas movies, but Thanksgiving movies are a rarity. I’m not much of a fan of 1995’s Home for the Holidays, but I often steer people toward What’s Cooking? (2000), Gurinder Chadha’s delightful, too-little-known multi-cultural Turkey Day comedy. In case you’ve already seen it, though, here are a few more Thanksgiving titles:

Hannah & Her Sisters: Possibly Woody Allen’s best film, this 1986 tale of the inter-marital affairs & career & religious crises of a Manhattan show-business family begins with a Thanksgiving dinner & ends with another one. Mia Farrow, Michael Caine, Dianne Wiest, Barbara Hershey, Julie Kavner, Max Von Sydow & Allen himself, among many others, are at their best here.

Planes, Trains & Automobiles: For many people in the mobile American society, part of the lore of Thanksgiving is simply the struggle of traveling home in time to celebrate it. This challenging odyssey seems to have especially captivated the imagination of the late John Hughes, who had a hand in two films about it. He wrote & directed this episodic 1987 comedy, in which upper-middle-class executive Steve Martin, trying frantically to get from New York to Chicago in time for dinner with his family, finds himself forced to travel with buffoonish salesman John Candy. The gags are uneven, but the great Candy is lovable as ever, & Martin makes a fine straight man for him.

Dutch: Hughes also wrote the script for this 1991 comedy, directed by Peter Faiman. It’s also about a road trip home; Ed O’Neill plays the working-class title character, who’s pressed into service driving the snotty private-school son (Ethan Embry) of his girlfriend (Jobeth Williams) from Georgia home to Chicago for the holiday. Wacky adventures ensue.

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving: Kids will enjoy this half-hour Peanuts special from 1973, & you probably will too. I especially like Vince Guaraldi’s funky song “Little Birdie,” which accompanies Snoopy & Woodstock setting up for dinner. It’s a little disturbing, though, to see Woodstock eating turkey at the end of the show…

PLUG

2009-11-22T08:19:16Z

Erie folks: My guitarist/songwriter nephew Zack Orr is headed to Erie from Portland, Oregon for Thanksgiving, & is slated to play a gig with his old pal Tim Sul at Nelson's in Erie Wednesday evening. Check them out; it'll be the best show in town on "Wasted Wednesday"...

http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091119/ENTERTAINMENT0301/311199924/-1/SHOWCASE

Here's a scene from 1967 the Frank Sinatra film Tony Rome, posted for no other reason than that it's one of the greatest scenes in the history of Western drama...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGwdIKUKzZc

IT'S JUST A PHASE

2009-11-20T09:35:15Z

At the screening I attended earlier this week of Twilight Saga: New Moon, the theatre was packed to the seams with quivering fans of the supernatural teen-romances, popularized first as a series of novels by Stephanie Meyer. Before this second movie adaptation started, a DJ worked the crowd by asking the fans whether they regarded themselves as members of “Team Edward” or “Team Jacob.” Each team had partisans of shrieking enthusiasm.

For the uninitiated: The Twilight tales center on a teenage girl, Bella, who is loved by a teenage vampire (well, he’s actually over a hundred years old, but he’s stuck in his teens) of Edwardian elegance named, appropriately enough, Edward. She’s also adored by Jacob, a buff young Native American kid who, it turns out, is a werewolf. I had the good luck to attend the screening with an actual 14-year-old girl, the very nice daughter of a friend. We observed the first two contestants in the DJ’s trivia contest: A young woman in a man’s plaid shirt & a young woman in a lacy jacket.

“So the Team Jacob girls are the sort that wear plaid, & the Team Edward girls are the sort that wear lace, right?”

“Exactly,” she said.

”And you?” I asked. She was wearing a coat and scarf.

”Team Edward,” she said firmly.

”Could you have gotten all those questions right?” I asked her after the competition.

“Oh, yeah,” she said.

I saw Twilight, the film from the first book, last year, & found it a handsome but not quite interesting piece of work. My young companion avowed that the new film is better than the first one, & I guess I’d agree, but it was still slow going for me.

In New Moon, directed by Chris Weitz from a script by Melissa Rosenberg, Edward dumps Bella for her own safety—he can’t kiss her for fear of drinking her blood, & her connection to him & his benign-to-humans family, the Cullens, makes her a target of other, more predatory bloodsuckers. Bella’s utterly devastated by the loss, & soon resorts to risky behavior because she finds that an adrenaline rush will conjure up Edward’s specter (which reproves her for her recklessness). She gradually bonds with the good-natured Jacob, but just as she’s starting to adjust to Edwardlessness, Jacob dumps her little ass, too—again, for her own safety, since he’s realized his own shape-shifting lupine nature.

For me, I’m afraid this made for a pretty heavy dose of teenage bereavement. It doesn’t help Kristen Stewart, who plays Bella, to have little to play but grief. Stewart’s a very beautiful young woman, no doubt about it, & at times her sober face has a lovely gravity. But at other times she just seems a bit blank & slack-jawed, like she’d taken a croquet ball to the back of the head. She acts her heart out, but she’s in almost every scene—after a while it starts to seem like she’s in every shot—& she has a hard time finding much variety. She makes too many puffy, startled little sounds, like “huh,” in reaction to whatever she sees.

As for Edward, aka Robert Pattinson, with his mussed hair & sideways-cocked head & heavy-lidded gaze, he looks like he just rolled out of bed, & is trying to wake up.

Taylor Lautner, who plays Jacob, at least comes across like he doesn’t need a stimulant. So put me down for Team Jacob, I guess.

Despite its plodding, unvarying pace & its anticlimactic final quarter, there are compensations to New Moon, certainly. For one thing, the movie, like virtually every member of its cast, is stunningly good-looking. The camera movement is supple, & Javier Aguirresarobe’s cinematography paints the Pacific Northwest scenery in mythically rich colors.

The werewolves, when we finally get a look at them, are pretty great too—CGI effects that, for a change, have real wonder & warmth & canine personality. But it’s my painful duty to report that when Jacob & his pals are in human form, they hang out together shirtless & barefoot (with matching tattoos!), wearing only jean shorts. This is presumably an economic measure, to cut down on their Old Navy bill should they suddenly shapeshift & explode their clothes. Somehow the locals in this chilly-looking town don’t seem to find this singular style choice odd.

Here, & at several other points, the movie tips over into camp, but that’s not a bad thing. Michael Sheen turns up late in the story & makes a spectacle of himself as a foppish vampire aristocrat, & he transfuses some life into the proceedings, & there’s a shot of Bella & Edward running in slo-mo together toward the end that even cracked up the fangirls.

I was glad to see this glimmer of perspective from them (& from the movie), because when you strip away the supernatural gimmickry & the tempestuous melodrama & the subtextual attempt to glamorize teen abstinence (probably the most successful such attempt ever), the theme of New Moon is simply that Breaking Up Is Hard To Do. & so it most certainly is, whether you prefer the swanky vampire types or the studly werewolf types. So it is, even if you're not a teen. So forgive me if I sound like I’m patronizing New Moon—if it salves a single teenage (or sheepish adult) heart, it’s doing far more good than all the words I’ve written here.

FOLLOW YOUR BLISH

2009-11-18T04:57:17Z

This past May, when the extravagant new J. J. Abrams “reboot” of Star Trek hit theatres, it took my mind back to an even earlier reboot of the series—a literary reboot. Between the show’s cancellation in 1969 & the launch of the animated series in 1973, Star Trek was a publishing phenomenon, as the Trek episodes were adapted by James Blish into a highly successful string of short-story anthologies for Bantam. In those days before home video, these books were the only alternative geeks had to reruns.

Blish, much-admired by sci-fi enthusiasts for his 1958 novel A Case of Conscience, cranked out 12 Star Trek collections between 1967 and his death in 1975 (the last collection was completed by his wife, J.A. Lawrence). I spent a great deal of the ‘70s poring over them when I should have been doing schoolwork, and Blish’s original story Spock Must Die! (1970), was, I think, the first full-length novel I ever bought for myself.

Feeling a wave of Trek nostalgia in the wake of the current movie (out today on DVD), I decided to revisit Blish’s version. I easily found three of the short-story collections and Spock Must Die! at a couple of used bookstores, for well under ten bucks all together.

It was great fun rereading them. In the anthologies, Blish appears to have been working from earlier drafts of the episodes—many details, and at times even titles, are different from the TV versions.

In the novel Spock Must Die! the transporter generates a doppelganger of the title character, and the story involves trying to tell which is the real and which the ersatz Vulcan. The first chapter opens with McCoy holding forth on questions of identity and the reliability of memory that would have interested Scotty’s countryman David Hume, and it’s almost certainly the only Star Trek tale in which Uhura employs Eurish, Joyce’s version of the invented language in Finnegans Wake, as a code.

The real amusment in Blish’s Trek books, though, is in the eyebrow-raising style, which at times borders on Mickey Spillane: “Kirk wasn’t a man to be fazed by female tantrums.” Uhura is referred to as “The Bantu girl,” and at one point gives a “fat African chuckle.”

The passages where hasty composition and hasty editing show up in the prose offer amusement, too, as in: “A loud hum broke the silence. Its pitch increased to a whine…and the whole cave moved bodily under their feet, descending as a descending elevator descends.” I let out a fat Anglo-Saxon chuckle at that one, laughing as a laughing reader laughs.

Also out on DVD today is Bruno...

...Sasha Baron Cohen's attempt to top Borat. Also, The Exiles...

This fascinating 1961 documentary-style indie chronicles one Friday night in the lives of a group of Native Americans, played by non-professional actors, living off the rez in the old Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles. While we watch them party, drink, dance, gamble & brawl, we listen to them talk, in quiet, ruminative voice-overs, about their sense of alienation & sadness. Directed by Kent MacKenzie with breathtaking cinematography by Erik Daarstad, Robert Kaufman & John Arthur Morrill, it’s a heartbreaking portrait of a people, & a visually ravishing portrait of a departed L.A. Check it out.

R.I.P. LOCAL; R.I.P. GLOBAL...

2009-11-17T06:51:49Z

Yesterday I walked out my front door to a grim & unnerving sight, lying on the gravel next to the front walk: a baby bird, decapitated. It appeared to be a nestling chick, still covered with downy fuzz, but on the large side. I'm guessing a pigeon. The head was a ragged blossom of gore, so candy-apple bright-red that for a second or two I actually thought it was a flower. I'm assuming (& I hope) it was a thoughtul gift from one of the ubiquitous feral cats around here.

RIP also to Edward Woodward, who has passed on at 79...

http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSTRE5AF2A820091116

Popular in the title role of The Equalizer on '80s TV, he was even better as the hapless policeman in The Wicker Man (the 1973 original, that is), & he was the best Ghost of Christmas Present I ever saw, in the 1984 George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol. He never retired: He was in the Simon Pegg comedy Hot Fuzz two years ago, & appeared on the Brit soap EastEnders this year.

This evening The Wife & I had dinner at Marie Callender's, & for dessert we enjoyed a tasty mandarin orange muffin. On the check, it read:

MUFFIN--MANDARIN

Wouldn't that be a great name for a Bond girl? As in: "Mr. Bond, allow me to introduce my associate, Muffin Mandarin. She will see to all of your needs..."

DUMBSDAY

2009-11-13T08:45:02Z

According some interpretations, reportedly questionable, of the ancient Mayan calendar, that culture had December of 2012—the exact date is debated, but sometime around the Winter Solstice—set aside for Doomsday. The premise of Roland Emmerich’s new film 2012 is that the Mayans nailed it.

If this is the case, then Emmerich & company have done humankind a profound disservice. This grandly inane movie is almost certainly the least frightening cataclysmic vision ever, & it’s hard to imagine anyone over the age of ten taking it seriously. It’s the end of the world as we know it, but you’ll feel fine.

To some extent, I knew this going in. I had already laughed out loud at the lengthy special-effects set-piece scene shown in the trailer & TV ads, in which the everyman hero, limo driver & struggling sci-fi writer John Cusack, frantically drives his family to the Santa Monica airport while the surface of the greater L.A. area buckles away just behind the car like a ruined soufflé. Cusack pilots the car around, over or even straight through one collapsing edifice after another, & despite the extravagance of the visuals, the sequence carries absolutely no sense of real danger or threat—it feels, rather, more like an externalization of the emotional state you’re in when you’re running late for an important meeting.

In the film, this scene arrives, I’d guess, maybe forty minutes in. Up to that point, the story’s other hero, pure-hearted geologist Chiwetel Ejiofor, had unfolded some reasonably effective pseudoscientific babble explaining why planetary alignment and solar eruptions were about to make the earth’s core throw a tantrum. But once Cusack & company’s wild Buster Keaton ride begins, any claim on our authentic eschatological dread simply caves in faster than the earth’s crust. Funnier still, Emmerich is so fond of this chase gag that he offers it up two more times in the course of the film.

Thus 2012 starts to seem like a sort of Epcot Center of the Apocalypse: we see Yellowstone Park destroyed, then Vegas, then Washington D.C., then Rome, and so forth. I can’t say I found the spectacle boring, but it hasn’t a whiff of horror or pity, or even much variety—as with other thrill rides, the various episodes of ruination start to seem much the same.

Another part of the reason why there’s so little true power to 2012 may be that it’s apolitical & amoral. Humans aren’t the cause of this—it isn’t happening because of environmental hubris, or out-of-control technology. There’s no suggestion that this is even the Wrath of God come upon us for decadence—about all we seem to be guilty of is ignoring the Mayan calendar, & even if we hadn’t, we couldn’t have stopped it.

Laughable though the picture is, I hung in there with 2012 for the first two hours. The large cast is full of capable hands: Amanda Peet as the ex-Mrs. Cusack, Thomas McCarthy as her new, plastic-surgeon hubby, Danny Glover as the President, Thandie Newton as the First Daughter, Oliver Platt as a skunky White House official, Woody Harrelson as an Art Bell-style mad talk-radio prophet, & such other usual suspects as George Segal, Blu Mankuma, Jimi Mistry & the ever-reptilian Stephen McHattie. I was especially amused by Zlatko Buric’s slowed-down Boris Badenov tones as a shady Russian bigwig.

But as the movie slogged on into its final half-hour, it ran out of fun for me. The climactic scenes, with Ejiofor passionately insisting that there’s room for more people on the international survival ark on which he has a berth, & Platt taking the con position, followed by a long struggle to get the ark’s jammed door closed, are gruelingly tedious.

The movie’s major distinction, perhaps, is commercial: The very last lines of 2012 are a product placement. Some things even Doomsday can’t destroy.

FLICK DRAW

2009-11-12T06:07:41Z

Check out this movie quiz in the form of excellent drawings by Paul Rogers:

http://drawger.com/paulrogers/?article_id=9135

RIP to the hilarious Carl Ballantine, who has passed on at 92:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/arts/television/11ballantine.html?_r=2&ref=obituaries

BONUS OFFER!

2009-11-11T06:08:03Z

Yesterday I saw a piece of advertising with a line of copy that struck me as painful because probably accurate. At an AM/PM gas station/convenience store was a sign promoting special on burritos, 2 for $2. It read:

SO NICE YOU'LL TASTE IT TWICE

Quite possibly more than twice, I bet...

BIG BOO-BOO

2009-11-07T10:27:45Z

My pal Dewey sent me this article from Variety...

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118010941.html?categoryid=13&cs=1

...breaking the thrilling news that a Yogi Bear feature film is in the works with Dan Aykroyd in the title role, & Justin Timberlake--that's right, Justin Timberlake--as Boo Boo...

Don't get me wrong, Timberlake seems like a nice young man, & he's shown he has a good sense of humor on Saturday Night Live. But I question whether he has the range for an acting assigment like this. Boo Boo strikes me as the sort of role that you don't just give to anybody.