Movies Eat the Soul

Win Win

2012-03-10T19:34:00.028-06:00

2011, 106 min., R for language (a very mild R)

IMDB says... A struggling lawyer and volunteer wrestling coach's chicanery comes back to haunt him when the teenage grandson of the client he's double-crossed comes into his life.

The 73rd Virgin says... A slippery uplifting sports drama wrapped in an outer skin of humor. I didn’t catch a single cliché. Giamatti is Mike, a small time lawyer with a failing practice in New Providence, New Jersey, who shares a crumbling building with a small-time CPA (Tambor). They are also the coaches of the high school’s disastrous wrestling team. When one of his clients in early dementia has to give up his house Mike takes over his guardianship and a nice monthly stipend and moves the old man into a care facility rather than helping him move back into his house as he told the judge he would.

This ethical lapse slips into the background for a while as we learn the old man’s daughter is in drug rehab in Ohio and her 17-ish son Kyle (Alex Shaffer in his first movie) has decided to move to New Providence to stay with Grandpa. He’s extremely quiet but not rude or threatening. With nowhere to go he moves in with Mike’s family for a few days and even attends a couple wrestling practices where it is discovered he is more than good.

Mike’s recently divorced friend Terry (Bobby Cannavale) needs a diversion and finds it in this mysterious kid whose wrestling achievements are well documented. He decides to be an assistant coach as well which sets up funny scenes with Tambor and Giamatti.

And then all the clichés simply don’t show up. What a relief. The kid is good but he doesn’t suddenly take the whole team to State. They get a little better.

They get destroyed at a match where the home team has helpfully attached a poster to the ceiling that says “you’re pinned”, so it’s the last thing they see as the hand comes down. Mike’s wife isn’t immediately filled with warmth toward the boy. She tolerates him but generally wants him gone. As good-hearted as Mike may be, he decides to enroll Kyle in high school to get him on the team and lies to him about his grandfather’s situation.

All such sport uplift movies require the hot girl next door, with the emotional maturity and understanding of a 28 year-old, who will 1) mother the hero, 2) have sex with him. This girl never shows up. There are no love interests anywhere. So many sports dramas turn turgid, but thanks to Cannavale’s humorous scenes and Amy Ryan as the very realistic wife, Giamatti and Shaffer are free to do the drama.

When mom gets out of rehab she comes looking for Grandpa’s money. The boy’s reaction is at first suppressed anger and flight, followed by real violence against coach, Mom, and a wrestling opponent. In these scenes, Shaffer’s blank darting eyes, in contrast to earlier less agitated scenes, and Giamatti’s kind and wise read of the situations are convincing.

Non-clichés pile up, and all the while there are casually humorous scenes involving Kyle’s hopeless teammates. And it seems like the story revolves around wrestling specifically because it’s unglamorous. There is one musical montage, but I even tolerated that. The clips don’t do justice to the numerous and convincing wrestling scenes. Shaffer is apparently a recent state high school champ. I wondered how they trained-up an actor so well. I learned a little bit about the athleticism involved and even the scoring, I think.

Eventually the final conflict involving the ethical lapse at the beginning must be resolved. The humor abates for about 20 minutes as this plays out, but still the movie never feels oppressive or manipulative.

My faux uplift detector is locked in at 11 with the knobs broken off. I lost interest in sports-as-life-lesson movies somewhere between “Brian’s Song” and “Rocky”. But I enjoyed every bit of this.

Twilight of the Cockroaches (Gokiburi-tachi no tasogare)

2012-03-07T00:26:00.001-06:00

1989 or 1987, 105 min., Not Rated - mild language, mass slaughter of animated cockroaches, one adult situation.

IMDB says... A colony of cockroaches lives peacefully in a messy bachelor's apartment until his new girlfriend moves in.

The 73rd Virgin says... Before Joe’s Apartment, before A Bugs Life, before Antz, before Honey, I Shrunk the Whatevers, there was this. Granted there have been plenty of tiny beings in film and literature, but not many movies have served the dual purpose of art and humor as well this “Japanimation”, combining rather simple two-dimensional animated cockroaches with live actors and real-world sets.

What is delightful to this film buff is the way this offers artistic touches familiar from other films, implying that it takes itself seriously, but then switches to broad funny cultural references on a moment’s notice. From across the Pacific and across the decades, it’s difficult to know how seriously director Hiroaki Yoshida took this. For instance:

It opens with one of those nice touches by beginning in the middle of the story, at first with complete silence, then with a voice over from 19 year-old roach Naomi (in strapless dress and go-go boots) as she completes a harrowing journey across an apartment courtyard to find the mysterious “Hans”. She is nearly killed by the tenant neat freak, “The Lady Neighbor”. Then come the opening credits with solo piano that set a doleful mood of doom and loss.

From there, we jump to the beginning where she lives a carefree peaceful life with her grandfather and her soft, sensitive fiancé Ichiro. Their roach tribe lives in “The Homeland”, that is, Mr. Saito’s apartment. He is a gourmand and not much of a housekeeper. Naomi and Ichiro sleep in his Nikes. It may be closer to the truth that his wife and child have left him and Mr. Saito is in a between-relationships dirty funk.

Naomi has a nagging suspicion that this existence is fleeting and fragile and she is haunted by stories her grandfather tells of her grandmother and of the “Hosano War”. One night the wounded Hans collapses into the apartment. He is stoic and militaristic with a thousand-yard stare and horrifying stories of how his people, sorry, roaches, survive across the courtyard. Here he is interviewed by relentlessly cheerful newscasters and we also learn of the Homeland roaches’ foundation myth - that their great leader achieved a mutually beneficial and friendly peace with Mr. Saito many years ago after the bitter Hosano War. Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” makes an appearance. Mr. Saito looks like General MacArthur.

Naomi discovers that Hans and her grandfather share sorrowful knowledge of life across the courtyard. Hans goes back and Grandfather tells Naomi of her ancestry. In any other movie, or even in this one with a better looking print, this would be a beautiful scene.

Grandfather also listens to his wife's voice coming through the oracle "Tora", which is a toy bunny left in the courtyard.

Needless to say Naomi resolves to follow Hans. Along the way she stumbles upon a talking dog turd that makes me wish I knew more about mythology in order to figure out what the hell THAT’s about. After nearly drowning and at the end of her strength - in one of those little flourishes that take a movie from odd to artistic - she hallucinates her grandmother’s voice and envisions a worn and tired female face. Whose face is it? Hers? Her grandmother's?

Now with Hans, she sees how awful a roach’s life can be among humans.

As you might guess, Mr. Saito and The Lady Neighbor become romantically linked – we get a roach’s eye view of a seduction complete with giggling roach peeping Toms. Caught out in the open one day, Naomi hides in The Lady's purse and winds up back at Mr. Saito's with her old fiance.

Han's tribe hears of the easy life at Saito's and decides to invade. But by then The Lady has discovered the extent of Saito's roach infestation and the holocaust is on. According to your own taste, this may be the best part of the movie. It loses some of its irony and artifice and turns into an entertaining special effects extravaganza with creative use of animated roaches scurrying through real world sets and doing battle with human actors and their deadly fogs, dusts, sprays and even a little air pistol that shoots ballistic charges of insecticide that will blow a roach’s wings and legs off.

Unfortunately some of the low-light scenes are almost completely blacked out on my copy. The transfer was apparently done with no help from the gamma slider. Be that as it may, the slaughter progresses and the movie returns to an elegiac tone. Grandpa does a kamikaze run in order to drop a final poop on Mr. Saito, Ichiro (Icarus?) finds his inner Hans and learns to fly, but nearly all is lost.

I am jealous of game and anime blogger kidfenris’s superior, spoiler-free review of the conclusion.

The roaches’ world crashes down all around them, the humans show no compunction, and there’s an uplifting little epilogue. Naomi’s affections for Ichiro and Hans are resolved, albeit in a strange way that wouldn’t work with human characters—or any vertebrates, for that matter. Still, the scenes of roach genocide have an undeniable impact, and the film has at least one genuinely unnerving moment when Naomi wanders into a roach motel. She’s stuck on a glue floor among slowly dying bugs, who thrash and starve in a shadowy grave. Nothing deserves to die like that.”

Eventually, the stuck roaches pass Naomi from leg to leg like a mosh pit diver and toss her out the other side into the light (a symbolic rebirth? - discuss amongst yourselves). But later, Director Yoshida anticipates - by about 4 years - Spielberg's "little girl in the red coat" from "Schindler's List" by showing a cute child roach run toward another roach motel and disappear - all in deathly silence.

But these are roaches. Life will go on.
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I dare to dream that those sitting around preparing the Secret World of Arrietty (below) might have given a thought to renewing this oddity. It is apparently out of print and the only legitimate version is an old Streamline Pictures VHS occasionally offered for sale at Amazon. Obviously, it's not streaming on Netflix or Amazon. So write your congressman, kids.

My DVD copy came from a shady Amazon link claiming to have been “remastered”. The lack of artwork - or even printing - on the disk and the dark fuzzy transfer make me think it is just a bootlegged VHS transfer or maybe laserdisc. If you watch the DVD on a computer with VLC you can probably mess with the gamma slider in the dark scenes and have a better experience. It’s anamorphic widescreen and has a Japanese soundtrack and English subtitles so I’m hardly in a position to complain.

Reportedly, this showed many times on Cartoon Network in the 90s but I don’t remember it. If they showed it again, I would be double Tivo'd and ready. Instead I learned of it in the invaluable “Foreign Affairs” from the National Society of Film Critics and rented it on VHS years ago at Houston’s beloved Audio/Video Plus on Waugh. If you don’t already know the Area Code, you’re not cool enough to go there.

In the misty days of yore there was no Netflix and I used a service called “Video Library” - now closed - out of Phildelphia, that would rent and ship VHS tapes. They never could figure out that I had two shipping addresses, my house, and sometimes my mother’s house. Once I noticed that a particular VHS was very slow in getting to me. When I made my weekly call to Mom I learned that she had received a movie and invited a friend over to watch the movie “her son had sent her”. It was Twilight of the Cockroaches. Oops.

Richard Harrington, Vincent Canby, and Carrie Rickey have all reviewed it and somehow resisted the urge to elevate it to great filmic art. I can’t resist. I just love it. Almost every review on the web ends with something like, "you'll think twice before reaching for that can of ...... spray." No, ... no you won't. They're roaches. This movie is about humans in little bug bodies. I’m in no danger of anthropomorphizing roaches. I used to kill them for a living.

I heard no piano music or screams.

Actually Rickey was pretty excited.

“Whether viewed as a diverting action film or as an allegory of genocide, Twilight of the Cockroaches is the most original picture of the year. With its subtle allusions to Hiroshima and Dachau, this comedy has unexpected resonance."

So there. I’m not crazy.

The Secret World of Arrietty (Kari-gurashi no Arietti)

2012-02-26T20:15:00.000-06:00

In US theaters 2012 (2010 in Japan), G, 94 min.

IMDB says... The Clock family are four-inch-tall people who live anonymously in another family's residence, borrowing simple items to make their home. Life changes for the Clocks when their daughter, Arrietty, is discovered.

The 73rd Virgin says... IMDB also shows two different sets of voice actors for US and UK distribution. Do you feel patronized yet?

Anyway, I haven’t read the book, The Borrowers, on which this is based. The movie is lovely work with a mid-tempo plot appropriate for all ages, but without the intense story line of a few of Hayao Miyazaki’s more grown up masterpieces.

At 71 years old, Miyazaki’s fingerprints are on this newest Studio Ghibli film for “planning and screenplay”, which is a bit of step back for the director who reportedly personally hand-drew one hundred thousand cells for Princess Mononoke. The opening credits show Hiromasa Yonebayashi as the director but the visual style is recognizable; from exquisitely detailed plant leaves and worn masonry, to the way an oblong flower rolls slightly when dropped, to how individual rain drops spread on an old smooth rock.

It is somewhat different in that it begins with a 12 year-old boy, Shawn, as the protagonist. But he looks just like all the 8 to 12 year-old girls who are usually Miyazaki’s focus, so it’s not much of a change. He has a heart condition and is in the country in the care of his slightly batty great aunt (I think) to rest up for an operation. His parents are divorced; his mother is away on a business trip. Miyazaki is frequently described as a feminist, but this movie has an almost reactionary undertone observing the damage done by splintering, overworked families.

But the movie isn’t entirely about Shawn. It’s about the tiny Borrowers who live in a nice little apartment disguised as a pile of bricks in the house’s crawl space. And here is where we meet the typical Miyazaki nuclear family of Arrietty, her cheerful if flustered mother, Homily, and her stoic but lovingly gruff father, Pod.

At 14, Arrietty is ready to be escorted on her first borrowing trip where she and Pod will venture out into the house for a sugar cube and a few Kleenex. Along the way, she picks up an abandoned sewing pin and begins to carry it like a sword. In any other movie the sword would be on hand later to be used as a weapon to fight off whatever monsters threaten her, such as the rats in the wall cavities that are presented in a bit of foreshadowing. But here it will have a different use.

On this first borrowing trip they are seen by Shawn. Arrietty drops the sugar cube and they have to beat a hasty retreat back to the crawl space. In the morning the cube and a little note have been left on a crawl space vent. This should be a charming sign of a new human friend, but the whole family knows that “the humans' curiosity cannot be stopped” about Borrowers once they have discovered them, and that this curiosity always leads to tragedy. They know they have to move.

Arrietty and Shawn eventually develop a stand-offish friendship. In an unguarded moment he says with almost offensive acuity that it must be sad for her to know that she might be the last of her kind. In truth, the family doesn’t know how many Borrowers are left in the world. But when Pod is injured while out exploring he is rescued by a suitably adolescent Borrower boy named Spiller – who wears animal skins and face paint and gifts the family a cricket leg to eat – and they make plans to relocate.

We learn that part of the reason for the great-aunt’s battiness is that as a little girl no one believed her when she talked about the little people that live in the walls. A minor complaint is that this leads to a slightly wobbly dramatic conflict where once she realizes that Shawn has had contact with the Borrowers, she becomes intent on capturing specimens for proof. But then she also hires Squeaky Clean Pest Control to do what? I’m not sure.

So this isn’t quite up to Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away standards but it is exciting without terrorizing little kids and entertaining enough for adults and adolescents.
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My first experience with Miyazaki was the children’s masterpiece My Neighbor Totoro from 1988 – before John Lasseter of Pixar and Disney began to make such a fuss over him. Late in his career he was taken under Lassater’s fawning, gushing wing and is now a household name.

I’ve almost become blasé about the beauty of the Ghibli/Miyazaki movies. In total, my children and I must have watched various chapters of the entire canon 150 times. I’m not kidding. There is nothing to compare them to.

Those made for small children involved basically happy stories with only modest crises. And in almost all of them, both parents began the movie alive and stayed that way, too. How these came under the parenticidal Disney logo remains a mystery.

Those made for older children and adults featured fantasy stories, but with complicated flexible antagonists, conflicted heroines, and sometimes quite violent, epic, and doom-clouded storylines, coupled with endings that were still basically happy but left heroines in unresolved conditions, perched between childhood freedoms and adult burdens. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke, have apocalyptically violent climaxes, and Castle in the Sky features a mushroom cloud. Disney productions never came close to these battlefields strewn with bodies of fantastical creatures. Happy endings aside, these were high drama mixed with visuals that still have no equal.

The Secret World of Arrietty sort of falls in between. It is in a beautiful pastoral setting like My Neighbor Totoro, and has no mushroom clouds or violent deaths, but there remains a subdued feel of displacement and abandonment – with a satisfying ending.

Full disclosure – the end credits show serial Oscar-winning sound man Gary Rydstrom as the director of the US version. He is my wife’s second cousin. I have 8mm of him playing in the yard with her when he was about 8. Someday, I am soooo going to cash in on that family connection.

The Next Three Days

2012-02-19T02:11:00.017-06:00

2010, PG13, 133 min.

IMDB says... A married couple's life is turned upside down when the wife is accused of a murder.

The 73rd Virgin says... We meet John Brennan (Russell Crowe) at a restaurant meal with friends, and Lara Brennan (Elizabeth Banks – a bit too hot, successful and young to be married to John who is a graying, slightly frumpy junior college professor) shows up late and flashes a bitchy side. The next morning at breakfast she’s fine, has just given herself her insulin shot, notices a blood spot on her overcoat, and begins to wash it out when the police burst in, cuff her and John (not sure why him) and accuse her of murdering her boss. And leave their baby screaming at the table.

And with perfect pacing the script re-creates the evening, the evidence, the conviction and appeals, and the family’s dramatically altered life as she begins a 20-year sentence. From there it only slows down slightly to introduce us to John’s iconic parents who patiently help care for the child while John keeps working, keeps paying lawyers, keeps going further into debt, and keeps visiting his wife.

Out of desperation he begins Googling prison experts and stumbles on to a book by a jail break artist named Damon Pennington (the movie is dedicated to him so apparently he’s a real person) played in only one good scene by sensei Liam Neeson. Pennington disavows him of any hope of a normal life if he attempts to bust his wife out and then describes for us how hard it will be to pull off.

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Amazingly, rather than giving us fantastic scenes of planning and perfect execution, we get about an hour of John’s stumbling attempts at a plan. The movie does a great job of approximating how damned hard it would be to think of everything. With agonizing nervousness and newbie mistakes John begins to pull together a plan for fake IDs, rental cars, cash acquisition, and escape routes. Crowe’s sorrowful eyes and beefy earnestness are very good in this part. He’s got a plan but jeez it’s a mess and he is feeling his way.

Here he has learned how to make a “bump-key” from a YouTube video and decides to practice with it once at the jail to see if it works. A lady in line in front of him knows what he did, but covers for him, well…just cuz.

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Finally, when Lara’s last appeal has failed, and she is notified that she will soon be going to a more secure prison, he has to act fast. He needs money. This leads him to do something junior college literature professors don’t normally do. Crowe’s last look in the mirror as the movie ends may be there for him to consider that he may have gone over the line here and there.

Here his father has been snooping through his pockets and hands his jacket to him on the way out clearly indicating he knows what’s up.

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The last 50 minutes or so is devoted to their attempted escape and for whatever reason I was completely engaged. There are several red herrings thrown in to hint at how they might get caught. Perhaps the only weakness is the police seem awfully quick on the uptake as tiny bits of circumstantial evidence float up into their busy lives, yet they almost instantly make the right call. But that at least adds to the tension.

A lurking subtext is how we are all as travelers subject to constant scrutiny and interruption. Even a law & order guy like me can feel sympathy for this perfect couple and their difficulty of free movement post-9-11.

The script neatly tells us much about the plan but keeps enough back to give us a slow reveal of a few fresh aspects of it as is necessary to keep the tension and the action moving. Of course, there are laughable lapses of reality in how jails actually work and how people enter and exit customs, but I didn’t notice any of them while watching. IMDB has an entire page of goofs, factual errors, plot holes, etc. Quibbles, quibbles. But having been in downtown Pittsburgh on a night the Pirates are at home when there was a sea of gold and black jackets and hats, I can say that scene is perfect.

This one slipped under my finicky radar in 2010. It would seem to have a fine pedigree with Crowe starring and Paul Haggis directing/screenwriting. They both have significant hits in the past few years, but with an estimated budget of 35 million and domestic gross of 21 million something must have gone wrong. And that’s a pity, because this is a consistently tense and entertaining 2 hour 13 minute movie.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf)

2012-02-16T01:54:00.014-06:00

1974, 93 min. Not Rated – some nudity

The 73rd Virgin says... A 60-ish German lady, Emmi, walks into a bar to get out of the rain. It’s an Arab bar with a German barmaid and the whole place pulses with director/screenwriter Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s beloved red color. Across the room customers stare at her with detachment. On a dare Mr. El Hedi ben Salem M'Barek Mohammed Mustapha, or just Ali, asks her to dance. Ali is a dismissive generic term for Arabs, not as insulting as, say, “darkie”, but maybe closer to “boy”. He is polite, courtly, and rather kind. There is no sexual tension. She’s as homely as a mud fence. They dance to “The Black Gypsy”.

But being a gentleman he escorts her home in the rain and she invites him up for brandy and coffee. The neighbors certainly notice. And Ali’s no fool. His expression here is priceless. All of your darkest fears, or something, staring down the steps at you.

Although she comes from a family of Nazi party members, she is a bit of a free spirit. Her long-dead husband was a Polish foreign worker; her children come to see her but seem to care very little. They talk as if neither of them has had a satisfying conversation in months and so rather than send him a long way home in the rain she fixes up a bed.

They are both deathly lonely. Well, maybe there was a little sexual tension. In the morning she is momentarily horrified but within days they are in love.

After this unexpected beginning the movie turns to more familiar turf describing the almost monolithic societal and familial rejection of the couple. Arabs respond better than Germans. Men respond a little better than women of either race. Only the youngish landlord Mr. Gruber is tolerant once he discovers she is not subletting the apartment. Along the way she almost inadvertently proposes.

She honorably calls her children together to introduce them. They respond poorly. Fassbinder is the ugly little son-in law with the droopy moustache second from left. His slow pan across the faces of all four and then his arrangement of the four at the table, and the silence, builds the tension in what could have been a predictable scene. One son is framed in red as his jaw muscles pulsate. You might also notice the expression on Emmi’s face as she questions why they think she might be ill. It perfectly communicates a mother’s knowledge that she knows her children too well.

Much of the acting seems deliberately still and formal although Brigitte Mira as Emmi is very good, with youthful body language trapped in a boxy old body wrapped in garish polyester. El Hedi ben Salem was not a professional actor but he is warm, and his woodenness works as a stranger in a strange land.

Emmi thinks that things might improve if she and Ali go on a long trip to let things cool down, and she is right. When they return the tension subsides and neighbors at least begin to tolerate the marriage and even to admire how handy it is to have big, strong Moroccan around. And one son needs a favor.

And here is where the movie achieves its specialness. With society no longer arrayed against them, they begin to turn into a fairly typical couple with all the little slights that mean nothing when it’s you & me against the world, but that become a source of irritation when it’s just you & me. She’s a bit bossy and dismissive, and doesn’t care much about his desire for home-cooked couscous. Being a free spirit does not guarantee being unselfish. He responds childishly by staying out late drinking and finding couscous – and whatnot – where he can. In a crushing scene, when a joke is made at her expense, he laughs.

But hatred takes energy and they already work hard at menial jobs. And fear and loneliness are even worse. Fassbinder places them at the bar three times. First, as strangers, then as newlyweds, and then as weary adults who need some peace. And there it ends almost. There is no violence, no death, a little illness, and no real shouting and pointing. And it’s one of the sadder movies I’ve seen.

Sort of the anti-Valentine.

P.S. Fassbinder made at least 40 full-length movies in 15 years. He reportedly made this in 15 days. Ebert provides background on the sad real-life epilogue of Fassbinder and El Hedi ben Salem. If my review seems to follow his, well, it’s not a complicated story.

Crossing Delancey

2012-02-13T23:04:00.002-06:00

1988, PG, 97 min.

IMDB says... A Manhattan single meets a man through her Jewish grandmother's matchmaker.

The 73rd Virgin says... We celebrate the martyrdom of at least three dudes named Valentine - one of them a beheading, with a great romance.

I hate the term chick-flick because it justifies inferior movies through narrow categorization and undervalues great romantic movies like this one.

But this is a chick-flick. One of my favorites. There, I said it. One of my favorites. Maybe I like it because a guy gets all the great lines, for once. The script and Pete Riegert create one of the best male characters in any rom-com. It's so nice to see a male lead who is thoughtful, competent, un-tortured, un-needy. Riegert's steady open-faced gaze rates right up there with Henry Fonda.

Briefly, Isabelle is 33, happy working at a book store, visiting her grandmother (Bubbie?) on the Jewish Lower East Side, and hosting the odd sleepover with a married boyfriend. Her parents "live in Florida with Red Buttons" (semi-famous Jewish entertainer). Her more traditional grandmother is having none of it and has heard from a matchmaker, the warm-hearted but ghastly Mrs. Mandelbaum, whose table manners and habit of referring all matters of clothing and restaurants to her relatives are a funny running joke.

The movie is full of colorful side characters of a kind I will probably never meet. Note the sign for Shapiro's Kosher Wines, "The Wine You Can Almost Cut With a Knife".

I never paid much attention to Amy Irving other than "Carrie" and vaguely remembering she got a tasty settlement out of Spielberg. Here she is very good as a reasonably successful young New Yorker with marriage not in mind. She's spirited but kind of weary. She and her old high school friends bemoan the lack of marriageable men without male-bashing. I don't remember if the term "biological clock" was in common use in 1988, but it's doesn't loom over these proceedings like it does in later romances. One of them has a baby "out of wedlock" but it is viewed as more of a beloved real-world burden rather than as a lifestyle statement.

Isabelle falls under the spell of a married, needy, rakish author named Anton Maes (pron. Moss?), and the rest of the movie concerns itself with whether Sam Posner (Riegert), a somewhat traditional Jew who sells pickles at the same stand that his father did, can woo her in the midst of all this. Here she meets Sam for dinner so she can pass him off to a friend and she can make a graceful exit. The acting on all sides is charming.

Here he escapes Bubbie's apartment after being "invited" by her to come over and clean the windows. Among Reigert's great lines is "I know what ambivalent means."

Next he has to dispatch the occasional sleep-over boyfriend. What's charming is how the defeated and hulking boyfriend breaks the tension. Would that life were this way.

In the next clip I don't know whose idea it was that he should move the vase about two inches after she sets it down, but it is a nifty affectation to show someone who has innate good taste and a sense of detail that one might expect in a successful businessman who deals with the public all day. When he tilts his head and she leans back, the body language is about as lifelike as a movie can get. So finally, after another blown date at Bubbie's apartment where Sam has arrived in one of Mrs. Mandelbaum's cousin's bargain suits and a drunken Bubbie is crashed on the sofa, Sam speaks for nice guys everywhere.

Be forewarned that when most women watch this they reflexively kibbutz about the painful 80s fashion and hair. The jarring soundtrack by The Roches doesn't always fit either, and it has a freeze frame ending perhaps because they didn't quite know how to otherwise end it. A scene in a health club where two soul sisters say mmm-hmm and mmm-mmm about 3 times would probably now be considered racist in a patronizing Woody Allen-ish way and there is a Rasta cab driver who isn't much better. But these are quibbles. A great 97-minute grown-up romance.

Happy Valentine's Day!

P.S. I have no clips of Jeroen Krabbe as Anton, but you would recognize him from The Fugitive and other bad guy roles. He was in a great Dutch-language war movie called Soldier of Orange with a pre-Blade Runner Rutger Hauer. Wikipedia calls Reizl Bozyk (Bubbie) a legend of Yiddish theater. This is her only movie.

Delhi Belly

2012-02-10T17:43:00.001-06:00

2011, 103 min. Not Rated

IMDB says… Three struggling room-mates unknowingly become potential prey of a ruthless gangster.

The 73rd Virgin says... Many Netflix commenters compare this to The Hangover. Fair enough – haven’t seen that. This is pretty funny in the first half, but as so often happens, it loses steam and becomes slow and predictable. There is no nudity, one bit of implied oral pleasuring, and just flat-out non-stop profanity from every character in every situation. It would be forced and off-putting in most American movies, like it was in Pineapple Express, but to uninitiated Western ears it is made momentarily funnier by the profanity being delivered in those crisp, precise Indian accents. The subtitles are mostly unnecessary since the dialog is 80% English spoken more clearly than we’re used to hearing.

We open with a chipper Indian flight attendant, Soniya, receiving a package of unknown contents from a sweaty tourist just off a plane and firm instructions on delivering it quickly. She goes to find her slacker journalist fiancé and two roommates in their pig sty apartment while the credits role and what sounds like Indian emo drones in the background.

She clearly hasn’t gotten the memo about the seriousness of delivering this package and breezily hands it to her fiancé, Tashi, to deliver on his way to a fashion mag reporting assignment.

In the funniest sequence Tashi and his photographer, Nitin, meet another correspondent, Menaka, and the three of them interview this week’s diva sensation, who is bursting with song ideas. All the actors are at least funny, and Poorna Jagannathan is very appealing as the sardonic, westernized Menaka.

The third roommate Arup is a sweatshop graphic artist with a hang-up on an 80s disco kung fu character named Disco Fighter. They also have a landlord problem which provides a back story involving prostitution and blackmail.

We get to see the package slip further down everyone’s priority list as Tashi dumps it on Nitin who sticks it in his motorcycle basket and forgets about it. The next day Nitin buys chicken from a street vendor who has been scratching his privates and Nitin soon develops “Delhi Belly” with all the delightful sound effects, all the quandaries about how to sanitize the crevasse with no running water - but with the tempting presence of a roommates orange juice in the fridge as a backup, etc. You get the picture.

At some point Nitin needs his stool sample dropped off at the doctor and asks Arup to deliver both packages to their respective destinations with predictable results.

So far, so good but from here on out it slows down and loses focus with too many stories to follow and sudden elements of slapstick and several broad recycled plot devices. It is saved somewhat by Arup’s fantasy sequence interruption of his girlfriend’s wedding to a Canadian software engineer, complete with fire-spitting sitars, and a funny sequence involving a cow in the road, but the plot gets slower and broader.

By the end, a roomful of dead people and Nitin’s last trip to the toilet are the last gasp of comedy before the obligatory, but in this case satirical, dance sequence - which is kind of cute and resurrects the awful song from the interview.

This has an average rating of 7.6 out of 10 on IMDB which is awfully high. Maybe "the problem does not lie with my set" and I'm just too old to understand comedy for kids these days, but it’s amazing how quickly this goes from fresh to dull. Maybe I’m too ready to be wowed at the beginning of each comedy and somehow overlook the weaknesses until they pile up later, but this just keeps happening to me. I guess only I can make it stop.

Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year

2012-02-09T02:19:00.002-06:00

2009, 150 min. Not Rated, but only some strongish language to concern

IMDB says... Harpreet Singh Bedi (Ranbir Kapoor) has just graduated, and his marks are, well, let's say a little embarrassing. But marks never stopped him from dreaming of an exciting and adventurous career, and they never will. 'Rocket Singh - Salesman of the Year' is the sometimes thoughtless, sometimes thoughtful story of a fresh graduate trying to find a balance between the maddening demands of the 'professional' way, and the way of his heart - and stumbling upon a crazy way which turned his world upside down, and his career right side up. Welcome to the world of sales, boss! Written by Dubai Internation Film Festival.

The 73rd Virgin says... This begins with charming energy, introducing us to Harpreet Singh Bedi, a Sikh who has just graduated and is determined to become a successful computer salesman. He lives in Mumbai with his loving father or grandfather, couldn’t tell which, who gently scolds him for working too hard and worrying too much. Harpreet goes to work for AYS (At Your Service) Computers and is almost instantly disavowed of any notion of holding on to his rigid ethics in the world of sales. Here he meets a figure recognized the world over: the hot receptionist who really runs the place. She is married and won’t be a love interest. Nice touch.

Potential clients quietly insist on kickbacks, their own service department (one soft-core porn-addicted dude with no desk phone) re-seats a video card and charges the customer 5000 rupees telling him he “fried his motherboard”, sales targets and incentives are constantly shifting, and all of his 20 or so fellow salesmen, and one woman, are constantly guarding their turf and are almost hateful to newcomers. Here is excerpted his “field induction” or one-day training.

Hapreet admirably refuses to give a customer a kickback, and things begin to fall apart. Now treated as a pariah and not allowed to visit any clients, chided by his coworkers and showered with paper airplanes (thus “Rocket”), he has time on his hands. From talking with suppliers and his service department, he realizes that AYS’s huge markup and miserable service could easily be undercut. Here he celebrates his first illicit sale with his grandfather, under the softly judging eyes of God.

Only after being brutally insulted by his boss one last time does he bend his ethics enough to start a hidden company within AYS.

And that’s about it. For the first hour or so it’s fast and funny and interesting to a foreigner. There are a lot of funny and, to Western eyes, jarring juxtapositions of traditional and modern life. The language is exhausting as it veers between 70% Hindi and 30% English with the English spoken so fast and either slurred or clipped as to be another language. Every word is subtitled and needs it, but I didn’t mind at all. It’s (patronization alert) charming.

But as soon as he takes on a few coworkers, it slows waaaaay down and becomes more of a polite but insistent plea for honesty and good business practices. One can imagine it being quoted at business self-help seminars like “Field of Dreams” was endlessly, in the dark and lost 90s. A few lyrical montages with soaring music and a few simplistic examples of how to gain and keep customers with honesty and hard work, and pretty soon it doesn’t really feel like a comedy, or at least a ‘merican comedy, any more. This is probably a mismatch between my expectations and what the movie wanted to be. I wanted more funny, fast-talkin’ Indians, dammit.

The ending is sweet and positive. My wife noticed that in the end the cross-section of characters we are supposed to be rooting for appears to be a multi-ethnic, multi-religion, multi-gender, maybe multi-caste (out of my depth there). Its heart is in the right place but it sure beats a long time. IMDB says it’s 150 minutes, Netflix says 132. Coming off some minor surgery, I didn’t notice who was right (they’re both wrong – 154), but between the Vicodin for the pain and the caffeine for the Vicodin, I was wantin’ it to finish up.

Nice, but only nice.

The Panic In Needle Park

2012-02-04T20:59:00.003-06:00

1971, PG, 110 min.

IMDB says... This movie is a stark portrayal of life among a group of heroin addicts who hang out in "Needle Park" in New York City. Played against this setting is a low-key love story between Bobby, a young addict and small-time hustler, and Helen, a homeless girl who finds in her relationship with Bobby the stability she craves. She becomes addicted too, and life goes downhill for them both as their addiction deepens, eventually leading to a series of betrayals. But, in spite of it all, the relationship between Bobby and Helen endures. Written by E. Schofield <evescho@cafe.net>

The 73rd Virgin says... When fans speak of the early 70s as another golden age of Hollywood, similar to 1939, they never seem to mention this and I don't know why. It comes near the beginning of the” New York” movie phase and exemplifies it. All location shooting combined with the entire city as an extra. Grimy streets, dirty cars, stick ball, graffiti-ed subways, the whole bit. There is no music.

We open with Helen riding the subway and looking sick. We then join her and a young Raul Julia as Marco discussing her quality experience at the local abortionist's place,
“the place was dirty”,
“It's a free scrape”
“No more favors”
I'm pretty sure IMDB is wrong about the PG rating. Kitty Winn does quite a bit of upper deck nudity and much of the action revolves around prostitution and drugs and profanity.

Despite her obvious immersion in the New York lifestyle we learn that Helen is from Ft. Wayne, Indiana, wants to be an artist and has been living with Marco. She meets Marco's acquaintance Bobby, pre-Godfather Al Pacino, and he begins charming her. Bobby is obviously a small time thief which he demonstrates by stealing and pawning a television within minutes of meeting her. It's love at first sight, and she's only mildly curious the first time she observes him shooting heroin. He's not hooked, he's just chipping.

We then get to meet all of Bobby's junkie friends while the filmmakers rub our faces in the hardware and protocols of pre-AIDS heroin culture including an extended and excruciating scene of Kiel Martin as Chico shooting into his arm, blood back flow and all.

After a few idyllic days, Bobby and Helen establish the reality of their relationship when he asks her to go to 119th Street – that would be Harlem – to score for him. This is where we meet the local narcotics officer Hotch (Alan Vint, with his native Oklahoma accent intact). He's not undercover although he drives a beat up VW and appears to be younger than any of his targets. Despite his baby face and idealistic career path, he is completely jaded and sees every interaction with the local junkies as just marking time until one of them screws up enough to betray one of their suppliers. He helpfully describes what a panic is like when the supply has been interrupted and imparts the wisdom that, “a junkie always rats”.

With Bobby saving all his good lovin' for the heroin, Helen is soon bored and isolated enough to begin experimenting on her own. What the movie and especially Winn as Helen communicate so well is the way people are rapidly swept up in the daily search for a high. Even before she is addicted, she lives, eats and breathes Bobby's addiction. You've met people like her. There is so little there, there, that they seem to willfully absorb every pathology around them flying straight into a headwind of common sense.

She saves Bobby from an overdose and still has enough Midwestern values to tell Marcy, the local prostitute not to put the baby in the sink – they all hide in the mop closet while Marcy services a regular – followed by a very funny scene with Richard Bright as Hank, Bobby's more competent brother, riffing on a popular tune of the day, Neil Diamond's/The Hollies' “He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother”.

When Bobby talks his way into a small-time job as the local heroin distributor, we get to follow him into a locked room where we observe professionals at work weighing, sorting, portioning, cutting and packaging the precious commodity in complete silence. I don't understand the first thing about editing, but I'm pretty sure this is good.

Helen will eventually steal his stash that should have been sold to pay the local distributor, she will steal his “wake-up” dose, she will ball his brother and other strangers to maintain an $80.00 per day habit and we will get to watch up close as Pacino flies into PacinoTM rages.

By the end they are talking of marriage while Bobby violently shakes down her tricks. They make one more stab at normality that involves getting a puppy. Nowadays they would just have a baby but it was a more innocent time. But Helen is facing jail time for her frequent busts, Hotch is working on her knowing she will finally give in and we can pretty much tell how it will end. The final scene involving no physical violence but a one-word bit of dialog and cut to black screen is one of the most memorable movie moments of my youth. That black screen shit works.

The whole movie is bleak but surprisingly entertaining. It humanizes addicts as people capable of kindness and community spirit and clear thought but always utterly self-absorbed and self-pitying when the chips are down.

Believe it or not I think I watched this, sans nudity, on TV with my mother back when local broadcast channels showed late-night movies after Johnny Carson or Mary Tyler Moore.

The story is from a book of the same title by James Mills, which I've never read. The screenplay is by the incomparable chronicler of counterculture decay, Joan Didion, and her husband John Gregory Dunne, and was produced by John Gregory's brother, Dominick Dunne, who would later be the incomparable chronicler of celebrity injustice. I don't know anything about the director Jerry Schatzberg, but would observe that there is not an actorly moment in the movie. It all seems completely real. It's like the five of them decided this is the moment the sunshiny 60s end and here is what comes next.

Kitty Winn won Best Actress at Cannes for this role and she really steals the movie from Pacino. The camera lingers on her eyes for minutes at a time while she silently takes in all the devastation around her, and lord help her, she's intrigued, just like us. Her performance is ranked #76 on Premiere Magazine's 100 Greatest Performances of All Time (2006). I would rate it higher. She had roles in the first two Exorcist movies, only appeared in 5 movies in total, did some TV work, and reportedly faded away into a happy marriage and motherhood.

Kiel Martin was an alcoholic who cleaned up and found fame playing alcoholic detective J.D. LaRue on Hill Street Blues and then died young of cancer. Raul Julia got big and then died of cancer. Richard Bright played Michael Corleone's silent assistant, Al, in all the Godfather movies. I don't remember him from anything else but IMDB has seemingly hundreds of his parts listed.

Pacino became Pacino. In my current job I spend much time in less advantaged parts of a large city and in fully a fifth of these houses there is a bedroom where there lives a fat little punk-ass with a flat screen and too many video games, and invariably – invariably – a Scarface poster on the wall. There is never a Panic In Needle Park poster.

The Conspirator

2012-01-28T02:17:00.015-06:00

2010, PG13, 122 min.

IMDB says... Mary Surratt is the lone female charged as a co-conspirator in the assassination trial of Abraham Lincoln. As the whole nation turns against her, she is forced to rely on her reluctant lawyer to uncover the truth and save her life.

The 73rd Virgin says... A lot better than JFK. Now that we have that out of the way, sit up straight and open your textbooks. This is the first film from a new film company called, prosaically enough, The American Film Company, which claims it will make entertaining and accurate films about American history. Fine. Can’t argue with that. Here, they are about three-fourths successful by using Brit actor James McAvoy as attorney Frederick Aiken who is appointed to defend Mary Surratt. She is accused as a conspirator in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and along with her 7 co-defendants will be the first US citizen tried by a military tribunal.

We begin with a pointless scene of Captain Aiken wounded on a Civil War battlefield telling the “medics” to care for his dying soldier first. It doesn’t contribute much and does nothing to really establish any particular horror or atmosphere or even significance of the Civil War. I guess they assume everyone has watched Ken Burns’ documentary. Next he is being introduced around Washington D.C. as the captain who had two horses shot out from under him in one battle, and as an up and coming attorney. This happens to be the night Lincoln is killed and Aiken sees him (I dunno - maybe) carried across the street from Fords Theater to the house where he will die. Secretary of War Stanton (Kevin Kline) takes charge, kicks Mary Lincoln out, tells his assistants to keep Johnson away from the liquor and orders the city more or less locked down.

A few days later Aiken goes to work for Maryland Senator Reverdy Johnson (another Brit, Tom Wilkinson), and he is almost immediately put in charge of Mary Surratt’s defense. He believes her guilty and doesn’t want to defend her. In time he is troubled by her insistence that she is essentially innocent, although she may have had an inkling of what was going on, and, as the trial begins, by the way the War Department seems to be orchestrating the tribunal by tampering with witnesses.

From this point forward we have a surprisingly unsurprising by-the-numbers courtroom drama with stern bulldozing generals on the tribunal, cringing, hateful, lying witnesses, and a crusading handsome young attorney. We even get the socially connected fiancé who begs Aiken to get off the case for her sake. Didn’t see that coming. Aiken is also kicked out of his old Washington gentleman’s club (not a strip joint) and has a shouting and pointing scene with Stanton (I dunno – maybe).

When McAvoy is on screen, or when we are getting a quick and dirty recap of the night of the assassination, we’ve got a movie. McAvoy is charismatic and serious and extremely watchable. Robin Wright has aged to play a dignified, pursed-lipped, not very friendly, unrepentant southern sympathizing Roman Catholic widow who runs the boarding house where her son and John Wilkes Booth and a host of malcontents hatched a plan originally to kidnap Lincoln, which morphed into a plan to kill at least Lincoln, Secretary of State Seward, and Vice President Andrew Johnson. Wilkinson is dull and broad as the old southern Senator Johnson. Kevin Kline is better but their dreary arguments over the Constitution and the nation healing would seem to come from a high school play or have been inserted in order to help 10th grade Civics teachers develop discussion topics. I got the feeling there was a study guide. I was right.

We know how it ends if we’ve ever read anything. I made it through 12 grades of American history without once hearing of a conspiracy to kill Lincoln, but did happen to read on my own time the great, The Day Lincoln Was Shot, when I was about 12. My impression from that book is that Mary was guilty but, yes, her treatment at the hands of the War Department is harrowing and sad. For what it’s worth, Lincoln grew his beard after his first election in part to serve as a disguise so that he could be snuck into D.C. by Pinkerton men. Assassination plots were unrelenting from the day he was elected to the day he died.

Aiken eventually manages to get a writ of habeas corpus, from a federal judge who was one of Lincoln’s pall bearers, in order to force a civilian trial for Surratt but President Johnson cancels it. The movie dodges the irony that he cancels it under the Suspension Act that Lincoln had signed and put into action so aggressively.

Knowing the context of the assassination, just days after Lee surrendered and with dozens of Confederate generals still in the field fighting, and the simple fact that the War Department had every reason to feel like they were at war with these crazy-ass crackers, citizens or not, I’m only a little sympathetic to Mrs. Surratt and not at all to the other seven for their treatment.

Ah, the old moral equivalency trope. Yeah bullshit.

A brief perusal of Wikipedia indicates that this really is historically accurate in the big picture, right down to the questionable witnesses for the prosecution. That said, we should be thankful that Aiken’s closing statement is NOT overly historically accurate. You may read it here. To the extent that I can interpret impossibly flowery 19th century legal-ese, the script does a good job of compressing his main points.

Director Robert Redford and crew do a nice job of showing the world in bright colors rather than sepia tones. These people and this city look like a war just ended and they’re ready to brighten and loosen things up a bit. And they try to establish the sorrow of the country with newspaper headlines and long shots of the train that carries Lincoln back to Illinois for burial. But overall there is something flat and television-ish about the presentation, something static and preachy about the court scenes – despite all the shafts of light and smoke-wreathed witnesses. The essential matter-of-fact dullness of the characters and the predictable nature of a courtroom drama make this only a little entertaining. If you never tire of TV’s Law & Order, this may put you in hog heaven. There is a great, exciting, heartbreaking movie yet to be made in the story of the conspirators. A 1998 TNT movie was a decent try.

Hanna

2012-01-22T21:17:00.019-06:00

2011, PG-13, 111 min.

IMDB says... A 16-year-old who was raised by her father to be the perfect assassin is dispatched on a mission across Europe, tracked by a ruthless intelligence agent and her operatives.

The 73rd Virgin says... Daughter and I were kicking around recent movies we might want to see, but then she went back to school early and left me and the wife alone with this. It starts promisingly with teenaged Saoirse Ronan (the creepy kid sister in Atonement and the unlikeliest prison camp escapee in history in The Way Back) out in a frozen forest hunting a reindeer. She drops it with one shot, almost, and commences to field dress it at which point we discover that, unlike other ungulates, caribou are filled with what appears to be dry smoked sausage. Anyway, her father (Eric Bana) sneaks up on her and announces she should be dead at which point they fight and she almost breaks his neck. We then get some back story about why he has been raising her in a cabin 60 miles from the Arctic Circle. Soon they decide she is ready and they activate the transponder that they know will bring a shitstorm of special force baddies to their cabin. Father and daughter split up and she kills several of them.

With this bracing intro, I’m settling in for a good action flick with likable actors, and a decidedly different take on The Bourne Identity and Le Femme Nikita. My disbelief is suspended and I’m ready to be led. For a while it lives up to these hopes with an interrogation in an unlikely underground BSL3 laboratory in Morocco that turns into another blood bath, but then the Chemical Brothers crank up the untze-untze soundtrack and Hanna escapes through tunnels filled with lights that appear to be there for the sole purpose of flashing arhythmically.

She then meets a hilarious dysfunctional British family who take her across to Spain. The movie spends a good deal of (entertaining) time developing Hanna’s friendship with the pop culture-infused daughter only to leave the entire family as a garishly dangling elephant-in-the-room-style loose end.

Along the way she is pursued by Cate Blanchett, she of a thousand roughly similar American accents, and the always entertaining Tom Hollander as a caricatured German assassin who bleaches his hair and wears too-short shorts or pastel sweat suits. Her father, meanwhile, is pursued by more or less the same people, and we begin to track the decline of the movie from this scene where he manages to find the only unoccupied subway station during a Berlin afternoon rush hour and takes out 6 secret agent men who approach this legendarily dangerous man with guns holstered until it's too late.

From here it’s a long slow slide to a dramatically genericized chase through generic European art house locations culminating in a generic “boss fight” (the Virg had to learn the vernacular from his vidya’-gaming wife) and that’s about it. It finally sinks to the point that Hanna is walking around a deserted carnival (filled with more flashing lights) and looks out the window directly into Blanchette’s leering face. To paraphrase Ebert, this kind of scene requires us to believe that the bad guy had to be standing at the window for minutes or hours just waiting for the hero to look.

The movie goes from an entertaining re-imagining of a genre to aping the dullest forms of the same genre in about 45 minutes. Too bad.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

2012-01-15T19:41:00.012-06:00

2011, R, 127 minutes

IMDB says... In the bleak days of the Cold War, espionage veteran George Smiley is forced from semi-retirement to uncover a Soviet agent within MI6's echelons.

The 73rd Virgin says... I've been looking forward to this since the pre-Christmas previews came out. I haven't read the book or seen the BBC series starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley. According to Jay Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal this covers BBC's multi-episode 324 minutes in about 40% of the time. As such, we arrive knowing George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is a good guy, and little else. It opens with John Hurt as “Control” assigning one of his minions, Prideaux (Mark Strong - again) to go to Hungary and meet with a defecting general in hopes of discovering who is the mole operating at the top of the British spy service, referred to in slang as “the Circus”. Prideaux is shot which precipitates a crisis.

From there we travel back to the padded sound-proof rooms at the Circus where we meet all the old guys in charge – stars Hurt, Oldman, Ciaran Hinds (again), Colin Firth, non-stars David Dencik as Esterhase and the infamously tiny and ugly Toby Jones as Percy Alleline. The disaster in Hungary costs Control and Smiley their jobs and they retire in near disgrace to mournful saxophone music. Smiley looks into the distance a great deal, symbolically gets a new prescription for his glasses and appears to go into shut down mode. Alleline takes over at the Circus.

Meanwhile, “the Minister” who has charge of the spy service is convinced to secretly bring Smiley out of retirement to find out once and for all if there is a mole at the top and who he is. As Smiley re-activates and begins his investigation, another British spy (Tom Hardy) who is assumed to have been a defector returns from Istanbul with a story of how he received intelligence from a beautiful Russian. When he tried to report this back to the Circus, the Russian was betrayed almost instantly adding to the suspicion of a mole at the top.

Confused yet? Bored yet? Placed in time yet? I appreciate that this production expects so much of us. There are no scrolling bottom-of-the-screen bursts of text to identify locations, characters, dates, days of the week, etc. We are supposed to know just by the skylines that we are in Istanbul, Paris, London. We are supposed to spot one date on a memo to tell us we are in 1973 and deep in the cold war with the Soviets. We are supposed to recognize based on one blip of dialog that the head of the Soviet spy service is code-named Karla. Mumbled dialog and character names fly by, nondescript rooms suddenly become headquarters and central to the story.

If you don't mind your Bourne Identity in black wingtips (except one guy's red socks and hush puppies), ugly 70s-style glasses, drab overcoats, long blank glances, and somber music, then welcome home. I cede first place to no man in my fondness for moody character studies and great acting, but there is one bit of spy craft in the entire movie, maybe three shots fired, some bloodshed and not very much tension. No one breaks into a run. There is one funny line from an unattractive retired secretary about how she feels seriously “underf****ed”.

So what's left then, is the character study. Smiley experiences flashbacks, but nobody looks any younger while in them. We know he has an unhappy marriage and an unfaithful wife, but we never see her face, only his almost blank-faced disappointment at her behavior. In his best scene he reenacts for his assistant how he tried to turn Karla into a double-agent but Karla was a fanatic and “the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt”. Several characters are forced to conceal, and then tidy up, their homosexual preferences, which I guess is pretty authentic in context, but in the end the only character we care about is Smiley.

Firth is good as always but Hinds and Hurt and Strong are wasted. Indeed, in the end we don't really know what any of them actually do or how they achieved their status as the only guys who go into the padded sound-proofed rooms. Director Tomas Alfredson is responsible for the very somber and creepy “Let the Right One In” but vampires don't need much of a back story. Cold war spies do.

I hear this is a hit and I'm glad, but I'm plenty snobby enough to believe that anyone under 30, or not used to this kind of production, is going to go from confused to bored pretty quickly as were a couple young women I overheard discussing the movie as we exited. The ending seems to cry out for a sequel as Smiley sews up several loose ends, but others hang. I did not say they hang tantalizingly.

The War Lord

2012-01-07T16:35:00.028-06:00

1965, 122 min.

IMDB says... A knight in the service of a duke goes to a coastal villiage where an earlier attempt to build a defensive castle has failed. He begins to rebuild the duke's authority in the face of the barbarians at the border and is making progress until he falls in love with one of the local women. Written by John Vogel <jlvogel@comcast.net>

The 73rd Virgin says... This Starz offering from the slag heap ended its run on Netflix Instant View service on January 1. Maybe just as well. It’s a miserable fuzzy 4:3 full screen transfer of what looks to be a worn out print. You can almost hear someone press “Record” on the VCR. Stay classy Starz.

Amazon has a widescreen version although I don’t know if the film actually looks any better.
This 1965 Charlton Heston vehicle is a uniquely strange experience that I remember from my youth. At first it just looks cheesy, alternating between very carefully filmed and very pretty distance shots that look like paintings and then cheap full head shots in front of a rear projection screen, all within seconds of each other. The “man of a thousand voices”, Paul Frees, only bothers to use one of them while doing the voice over narration and dubbing in two separate characters.

Based on a play by Leslie Stevens, who mostly wrote for TV, and directed by future Oscar winner Frank Schaffner (Patton), this is set in the 11th Century and tells the story of Chrysagan de la Cruix, a penniless knight who is back from years of fighting all over what would become France. Duke William of Ghent grants him a worn out castle (basically just a single tower) on the northern coast that is frequently under attack by Frisians (Vikings). His job is to take his small band of professional soldiers, secure the coast and subdue the population.

And then a strange thing happens. It gets pretty interesting. The band wanders into a forest where the locals have strung up all manner of perhaps druidic talismans and charms (or as the kid says in Blair Witch Project, “voodoo shit!”). They fight a brief battle with the Vikings and then stumble upon a priest wearing a suspicious vegetative belt around his waist. What’s kinda admirable is the way Heston’s character shows no particular charity or noble sentiment. The villagers are his vassals, and that is that.

As the movie progresses he will slowly grope toward something slightly more nuanced than violent muscular dogmatic Christianity and try to show mercy and wisdom when dealing with his subjects –before screwing up big time.

Heston was a huge star. That he would take on such an ambivalent character at that stage of his career is notable, I think. But if you look at the petty power-wielding cop he played in “Soylent Green” you can see this adventurousness at work again. Whatever you think of his mandible-shattering grimace and tight-lipped stentorian delivery, he could swagger and threaten very well.

But I digress.

The band gets to inspect the miserable little castle, which does not magically expand once they go inside. Note the wacky haircuts, including on Heston. I can’t think of many big stars of any era who would subject themselves to that just for period accuracy.

He has already run across the local chief’s daughter and hot virgin Bronwyn (Rosemary Forsyth). Here we get a moment of unpleasantness when she’s not sure if she’s here for the rapin’ or, as it turns out, to assist in a medical procedure on his wounded shoulder. I was worried about the great Richard Boone, mostly a star of Westerns, as the gruff veteran Bors, but he’s very good throughout. And I still don’t know what Guy Stockwell (younger brother of Dean) is doing with his knife over in the corner. He holds it up over his shoulder as the procedure begins and then takes it down when it’s over. Is it a ceremonial charm to cut the pain? Preparation to kill the girl if she fails? Preparation for self-sacrifice? There are several such flourishes that add a lot of interest.

Later de la Cruix harasses Bronwyn again down by the river and pretty much points her to the shady spot under the tree where he will “lie” with her (cheesy rear-projection again), but she creeps him out with her witchery so he spooks and bails. They also have an intriguing exchange regarding poison plants and mistletoe. Now an old anthro-snob like me can’t help but admire a playwright or a screenwriter who appears to have read Frazier’s “The Golden Bough”. It’s not exactly obscure, but it’s pretty heady stuff for Hollywood, 1965. At a later wedding scene there is a dancer clearly meant to be the Forest King.

Finally he takes his “lord’s right” and hauls her away to have her first before her new husband. There is a long actorly exchange between the priest and Draco about the law, and you remember that this is based on a play. Stockwell is very funny.

Not satisfied with his lord’s right, de la Cruix keeps the woman rather than returning her to her husband and now he’s got all the rebellious vassals and the returning Vikings bearing down on him and his disgusted younger brother working against him. There is an extended 25 minute battle scene featuring a realistic siege tower back before CGI made it easy. You can maybe see at least some of Peter Jackson’s inspiration for the Two Towers and Return of the King battle scenes. It’s slow but reasonably realistic and well done.

The ending trails off a bit and certainly can’t be called rousing, but overall this is surprisingly entertaining, and as mentioned before, is full of odd quasi-brainiac sub-references. A film restoration and cutting around the awful rear-projection scenes would help, but that seems unlikely at this late date.

P.S. As a freshman at Kansas State University - a hundred years ago - The Virg was taught Western Civ by the best professor he ever had, Dr. Albert Hamscher. A world-renowned expert on French history, he took the time to teach one freshman course per year. I seem to remember him in a tweed jacket but that may be a later memory construct. I clearly remember him pacing the front of the room with an unlit plastic tipped cigar while imparting a vast amount of information that has stuck with me since. At some point he sidetracked onto the issue of whether any movies got the Middle Ages right. None did or have, of course, but he did say that one that got sorta close was “The War Lord” and asked if any had seen it. In a lecture hall of maybe 70 students, only The Virg, uber-movie-dweeb, had. Proud moment.

Appaloosa

2011-12-30T16:11:00.000-06:00

2008, R, 115 min.

IMDB says... Two friends hired to police a small town that is suffering under the rule of a rancher find their job complicated by the arrival of a young widow.

The 73rd Virgin says... Haven't read the book or anything by Robert B. Parker, “The Dean of American Crime Fiction”, so they say. Pete Travers of Rolling Stone blurbs the movie hard as “thunderous action and nail biting suspense”. My nails are fine, and I felt no pounding pulse. There are some good shootouts with good sound effects and the believable outcome of whomever is the most meticulous is the most successful.

In most ways this is a very traditional western with casual pacing, a simple story, and well-aged cliches. There are no jump cut edits or modern gee-whiz camera effects. Director of Photography Dean Semler is responsible for the best-filmed “western” I've ever seen, “The Road Warrior”, and this has similarly skilled positioning of the viewer so you know where the characters are and where the action is.

It begins with "Lonesome Dove" meets "El Dorado" in Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch who are aging West Point grads who have been teamed up for gun work, mostly law enforcement, for 12 years. Both are groomed, meticulous, careful of speech, dignified and very good at killing. Director, producer Ed Harris and especially Viggo Mortensen are excellent as the heroes. Mortensen's goofy haircut and persistent tan line from his hat are a nice bit of authenticity. Jeremy Irons, Lance Henricksen and a host of salty character actors are the evil Randall Bragg gang who kill a marshal at the beginning and thus bring these two lawmen to the town of Appaloosa.

It then introduces a deceptively wholesome female in Mrs. French, who apparently feels the need to attach herself to the most powerful man in any room, giving her something of a mob movie doll aspect. I have to admire how Renee Zellweger plays this very interesting character, for a western. Family Guy recently spoofed her “scrunch-face” and she looks like she's in the middle of an allergic reaction, but she's still very good.

I'm used to a lot of horns and strings with my westerns, but this is the first time I've heard a Miles Davis-style trumpet with a wah-wah mute inject a surreal or silly noir-ish element right before a gun fight. Very strange. But as I say, the shootouts are good.

The closing credits begin with a Tom Petty song that's a bit out of place, followed by Ed Harris singing - about an octave lower than his acting voice - his own composition, “You'll Never Leave My Heart”, with explicit lyrics that pretty much describe his relationship with Mrs. French. Very, very strange.

This does not have the over-the-top explicit blood-letting and visceral vengeance of its recent relative “Open Range”, but it's also not as satisfying, which may say more about me than how most viewers will react to it. I was mostly put off by the utterly traditional first hour, but I have to admit, it gets a little more adventurous as it gets near its 1 hour 55 minute closing mark; the gunfights get better and the boys are a little less dignified and more humorous in their discussion of Mrs. French's wandering eye. Three sheep is a little stingy, maybe.

The Nativity Story

2011-12-26T23:25:00.002-06:00

2006, PG, 101 min.

IMDB says... A drama that focuses on the period in Mary and Joseph's life where they journeyed to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus.

The 73rd Virgin says... And there you are. I was pleasantly relieved at how watchable this is. What a lot of pitfalls it could have stumbled into, and yet it is respectful, reasonably entertaining, short, and satisfying for anyone not too uncomfortable with the Gospels of Luke or Matthew, at least.

Yes, there are many mildly dramatic flourishes that are not in “scripture”, for example, a river snake that dumps the pregnant Mary into the drink, day to day indignities and atrocities committed by Roman soldiers and tax collectors, etc. But all the high points are there, and, more importantly, there are no (in my opinion) overtly stupid or politically correct posturings that would anger or offend the deeply churched or deeply agnostic. I'm not good at judging others' ease of angering, so I may be wrong. I would have preferred that Jesus have an umbilical cord - "word made flesh" and all that - but what am I, a pathologist?

The pace remains stately throughout giving time for Keisha Castle-Hughes' pretty but solemn face to register and then tolerate the miracles she has had dumped on her, as well as Oscar Isaac as Joseph to react carefully and then honorably when he discovers his betrothed is knocked up. As her mother observes, “women have been put to death for this”.

What little I remember from grade school tells me the re-creation of life in Nazareth is pretty good. Everyone lives in square rock houses; Mom and Dad sleep on the highest and softest rocks; everyone fears the Romans and lives steeped in Jewish tradition; everyone harvests meager fruits from dry, dusty trees. There are no blondes.

All the acting is fine. Apart from the two principles, we get Ciaran Hinds (again?) as a wily, grasping, King Herod, and Alessandro Giuggioli as his soft-eyed, silent and murderous son, Herod Antipas.

Plus Iranian star Shohreh Aghdashloo as John the Baptist's mother, Elizabeth, and three charmingly generic ethnic wise men to provide what little comic relief is needed. These wise men, only found in Matthew, are more from the medieval or Alexandrian tradition in that they are given names, Melchior, Balthazar, and Gaspar. What would a nativity story be without our favorite nativity characters? (well, supporting characters - whoops!) Especially since Balthazar is played by French bad guy Eriq Ebouaney of “The Horde”. How cool is that?

Finally - and most blessedly - the movies does NOT end with one of those awful hand-in-the-air, minor key soft Christian rock songs about an awesome God. Instead the music remains stately and organic through the end credits. Needless to say, there is a CD of such tripe “inspired” by the film, but it keeps its ghastly paws off the movie.

A classy, affirming production all around. I'm amazed and grudgingly impressed that Hollywood could pull it off.

P.S. Now I read that Keisha Castle-Hughes and her 19 year-old boyfriend had her first baby in 2007 when she was 17. Oh, for God's sake....

Tokyo Godfathers (Originally posted 8/29/11 - Bumped for Christmas)

2011-12-23T23:38:00.050-06:00

2003, PG-13, 91 minutes

The 73rd Virgin says...Three homeless Japanese try to survive Christmas in snowy Tokyo while keeping a foundling infant alive. Along the way they inadvertently save a mobster from being run over by his own car, survive a hit attempt on his son in law by a Mexican waiter in a wig, hide with the waiter's wife, survive a beating by wealthy thrill-seekers, are rescued by denizens of a drag queen bar, prevent a suicide, survive an ambulance running into a building, accidentally give the baby to the psychotic woman who stole it from a hospital, and finish with a big chase scene followed by a Japanese-reggae version of "Song of Joy" as the credits roll.

And those are just the funny parts.

Best Christmas movie ever. Might as well begin with the goofy end to the "Making of" special feature with the voice actress and director Satoshi Kon. It sort of captures the spirit.

Our homeless "family" includes a transvestite named Miss Hana or Uncle Bag, a drunken, debt-ridden deadbeat father named Gin or Geezer, and a sullen teenage runaway, Miyuki, who stabbed her father because her cat went missing.

On Christmas night they find a baby girl abandoned in a heap of garbage bags along with a bus station locker key. Miss Hana has always wanted a daughter so they at first decide to keep it. But as they investigate the belongings in the locker and pick up clues to the identity of the parents, they instead attempt to return her the next day. Much hilarity and drama ensue.

Here they rescue the mobster, discover that the presumed mother was a stripper, and witness a hit.

In an especially disturbing scene Gin is attacked by a group of thrill-seekers, one of whom chats on the cell phone while they beat the homeless senseless. Yeah, I know, Merry Christmas. While that's all going on Miyuki is holed up with the Mexican hit man's wife or something.

Followed by the funniest attempted suicide scene I've seen in a while.

There is way too much material here to summarize, but it's all somehow crammed into 91 minutes. If it seems weirdly grim, I can only say it's a nice relief from most Christmas movies and it still ends with suitable seasonal cheer. This is anime for everyone in that the plot is understandable and there are no shifting dimensions, alien wizards, stoic heroes named Sailor Bebop or any such, just three very funny voice actors (there is no English soundtrack - just subtitles) and a hilarious script that moves fast.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor)

2011-12-23T19:03:00.000-06:00

2009, R, 152 min.

IMDB says… A journalist is aided in his search for a woman who has been missing -- or dead -- for forty years by a young female hacker.

The 73rd Virgin says… Haven’t read the book. I managed to stay engaged in the movie, but not much more. The movie starts with the least interesting of three plots, which involves a noble crusading journalist facing a verdict of libel for his expose of, what else, a wealthy industrialist's nefarious activities. Ham-fisted and dull but short, at least. The journalist now has to accept work investigating the disappearance of a teenaged girl, Harriet Vanger, 40 years ago. This leads to the best parts of the movie including the central plot device of finding clues in old photos. This is well done if not original, as is one character’s misinterpretation of clues mailed to him over the years. The award winning journalist begins the hard work of the investigation with a Google search leading to a tiresome montage with swelling music that would make South Park proud.

Really, nothing is original except the muscular, chain-smoking heroine. I suspect the Hollywood version will make her more supple and take away the cigarettes. Her violent anal rape and subsequent violent anal revenge by proxy hints at something about the Swedish mind-set that I guess I just didn’t need to be made aware of.

The remainder of the plot is clunky and predictable with nothing you can’t see serial killer-wise in BBCs gloomy Wallander series or one of James Lee Burke’s hideously murdered girl-fests, not to mention "Se7en". Near the end the villain even begins monologuing "Incredibles"-style. It’s a good monologue, but jeez.

The likely villains are 1) wealthy, 2) industrialists, 3) Nazis – a trifecta of clichés. 60 years after the last Nazi disappeared into Argentina, the international film community continues to bravely kick their butts, unable to find a new generic group villain on-screen – at least a group that won’t retaliate in real life.

There's lots of good acting, especially Peter Haber as Martin and it's great to see Ewa Froling's haunted face again, so many years after Fanny and Alexander. Otherwise, ho-hum.

Conservative reviewer John Boot reviews the American version here, and quotes Christopher Hitchens,

“Moral righteousness comes in very useful for the action of the novels,” Hitchens wrote, “because it allows the depiction of a great deal of cruelty to women, smuggled through customs under the disguise of a strong disapproval.”

The Mosquito Coast

2011-12-21T23:22:00.007-06:00

1986, PG, 117 min.

IMDB says... An eccentric and dogmatic inventor sells his house and takes his family to Central America to build an ice factory in the middle of the jungle. Conflicts with his family, a local preacher and with nature are only small obstacles to his obsession. Based upon a Paul Theroux novel. Written by Keith Loh <loh@sfu.ca>

The 73rd Virgin says... I had heard this was not one of the great director Peter Weir’s better movies and so I’ve been skirting and dodging it for 25 years. I heard right.

The story itself is not so improbable or fantastic, and maybe it resonated more or seemed more noteworthy in 1986, but there’s nothing unique or compelling in Allie Fox’s determination that the world is going to hell and he will instead go to a fictional upriver Central American settlement with his long-suffering family. The invention that drives him, a kind of Willy Wonka-ish icemaker, fails either dramatic test of credibility or wonder.

After “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”, “Fitzcarraldo”,“How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman”, “Cabeza de Vaca”, hell, even “The Mission”, or Weir’s own “The Year of Living Dangerously”, there may not have been all that much left to say about the prospect of clueless white monomaniacs being “stupid in a no-stupid zone”. Weir seems to be riffing on Werner Herzog in several scenes, even going so far as having Ford and the natives drag ridiculously large tanks and pipes up a hill, a la Fitzcarraldo. The special effects are not that good; especially the multi-colored flames and spark-heavy explosions in one scene which scream, “miniatures”.

Perhaps more off-putting is the normally reliable Harrison Ford’s acting. It’s not that he’s bad so much as there’s just not enough of him. He was perfectly suited to the tough and suffering John Book in Weir’s “Witness”, or, say, the title character in “The Fugitive”, and everyone can like his sardonic but sincere tough guys going back to Star Wars, but here his limitations on the top end of madness helps to sink the movie. He’s not restrained or inward looking enough in the few quiet moments and, to me, he never projects a convincing sense of madness when he needs to. One can look into Klaus Kinski’s eyes in Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo and see the eels squirming around back up in there, but with Ford, he’s just a slightly more manic and fast-talking Han Solo with glasses and long hair. I never really believed he was nuts no matter how nutty his actions. All this sounds snotty, I know, but that’s how it struck me.

To belabor the point, any of Weir’s other male alter-egos, Mel Gibson, Jeff Bridges, Jim Carrey could have carried this better than Ford.

Helen Mirren and the kids are fine in less important parts and Conrad Roberts is great as the kind Mr. Haddy who takes it upon himself to watch over the family when Allie’s selfishness has put them in grave danger. Butterfly McQueen of “Gone With the Wind” makes a cameo as one of the polite natives who help the Foxs get started in the jungle, but she’s only there long enough for a close-up and a couple lines which give us time to say, “hey isn’t that Butterfly McQueen?”. Otherwise she serves no purpose. Andre Gregory as the missionary Reverend Spellgood is broad and one-note.

Ebert views it all somewhat differently - emphasis mine:

Fox is played in "The Mosquito Coast" by Harrison Ford, and it is one of the ironies of the movie that he does very good work. Ford gives us a character who has tunnel vision, who is uncaring toward his family or anyone else, who is totally lacking in a sense of humor, who is egocentric to the point of madness. It is a brilliant performance - so effective, indeed, that we can hardly stand to spend two hours in the company of this consummate jerk.

There have been other madmen in other movies who tried to find their vision in these same rain forests. I think immediately of "Aguirre, the Wrath of God," and "Fitzcarraldo," two movies by Werner Herzog about crazed eccentrics who pressed on into the jungle, driven by their obsessions. Those movies were so much more watchable than "The Mosquito Coast" because they created characters (both played by Klaus Kinski) who were mad with a flamboyant, burning intensity. Allie Fox's madness is more of a drone, an unending complaint against the way things are. It is painful to watch him not because he is mad, but because he is boring - one of those nuts who will talk all night long without even checking to see if you're listening.

I just dunno. I really wanted to like it, but didn’t. Next maybe I'll try Weir's "Dead Poets Society", since I've also been skirting it for years.

The Eclipse

2011-12-17T18:48:00.003-06:00

2009, R, 88 min.

IMDB says...In a seaside Irish town, a widower sparks with a visiting horror novelist while he also begins to believe he is seeing ghosts.

The 73rd Virgin says...Haven't seen the word “spark” used in that fashion in quite a while. Maybe later they pitched woo and made whoopie.

I had no problem with the mix of ghosts, closely observed character-driven romance, and several bits of comic relief. The scenery and interiors and music are beautiful. The characters and human situations are believable. A fair number of Netflix whiners complained about the lack of a story or the unresolved ending (What? No mad dash through an airport followed by kissy-face and tears? How dare they?)

Though I'm loathe to admit it, this is really a modern Gothic romance and ghost story, sorta...I guess, that - other than the ghosts - comes off as authentic. And since the setting is modern and no signals or warnings are provided to show impending ghostly jolts, some short bits are very scary. It sucked me right in.

Ciaran Hinds is Michael Farr, a widower woodshop teacher in the city of Cobh, County Cork, Ireland. It is apparently a very wealthy place since the woodshop teacher drives a Volvo station wagon and lives in a large two-story. He has a cool but respectful relationship with his father-in-law. When was the last time you saw a movie involving a widower and his father-in-law? A wanna be writer who has given up, he volunteers at the annual Cobh Festival of Literature and Poetry as a driver, gopher, lackey.

I haven't seen much of Hinds except as a heavy now and then in some Bond movie and “There Will Be Blood”, and in “Persuasion”. Rather than the towering and dashing Captain Wentworth, he is a beleaguered, paunchy middle-aged widower with a bad-wacky haircut and two adolescent children. And he is great. Just when you think he can't get any more pitiful, there is a slight gleam. And is there anything that better describes widowerhood than chasing two children to bed and then emptying the dishwasher by yourself? When was the last time you even saw someone empty a dishwasher in a movie? No one looks good doing it.

Later he wakes in the middle of the night to an unknown personage in his living room. The scene perfectly describes what it's like to wake to a noise and then takes it one step further – but in complete silence - which is way scarier than music informing us how to react.

Back in daylight Michael attends to his duties as teacher and driver where he meets Nicholas, a world-famous writer, manipulator, and raconteur who alternates between sexual competition with every man he meets, and bleary-eyed conquests of cocktail waitresses, all the time checking his hair and living in terror of his wife. If I hadn't seen former pretty-boy Aidan Quinn's name in the credits, I wouldn't have recognized him.

Between bitching about being late and the dim-witted local yokels, Nicholas reveals that he had dabbled in boxing and discovers the same about Michael. They size each other up in the typical fashion. Later, at a reading by his other writer-client Lena, Michael is transfixed by her writing about ghosts, until Nicholas stumbles in late and breaks the mood. Back before battery-powered steadicams this would have been difficult to shoot.

I haven't seen Iben Hjejle since “High Fidelity”. Apparently she stays busy in Swedish productions. Here she is a refreshing and believable adult female lead. She and the script create a mix of social awkwardness, occasional bad judgment, and decency. It's been a long time.

But sooner or later something has to happen. The genius of the movie is the juxtaposition of the humdrum day to day concerns with disorienting fits of the supernatural. Here Michael drives home and briefly fantasizes about following Lena to her room. And you can almost guess what happens to an Irish Catholic boy after that kind of sin (remember, taking pleasure in thinking about it is a sin, too). He must be visited by the ghost of his father-in-law. Problem is, his father-in-law is still alive. But we then (with no cuts by your reviewer) ricochet to Michael going home to face his 14-year old daughter and discover that his son has snuck out. Most of the music by Fionnuala Ní Chiosáin is somewhat moody piano jazz with occasional bursts of very pretty choral music to provide a sense of place, or peace, or in this case, well....

Several scenes show with almost perfect accuracy his poor daughter trying hard to be an adult in an impossible situation. Note above how we see her in all her braces-laden gawkiness, but the reflection in the mirror could be any married couple screaming at each other about the kids. In her final scene we see her carrying a cute little pink plastic backpack, her childhood at least temporarily re-conferred upon her. Nice touch.

Anyway, as our hero's problem with ghosts sorts itself out, we also get the competition between these two paunchy old bulls over “the girl”. This scene is one of the funniest and most realistic depictions of a fight that I have ever seen. Fighting is tiring and clumsy and it hurts.

Given what he's been up to in mind if not in body, you can probably guess whose ghost visits him last. Offhand, I can't think of many actors (Philip Seymour Hoffman?) who could play this scene with this much fear and grief.

But it's really not a downer movie at all. There are truckloads of guilt and redemption with enough scary oddity to keep me engaged for 88 minutes.

Near Dark

2011-12-03T15:03:00.002-06:00

1987, R, 94 min.

IMDB says, with curious syntax... A young man reluctantly joins a travelling (sic) "family" of evil vampires, when the girl he'd tried to seduce is part of that group.

The 73rd Virgin says... If you need some space from the Twilight series, True Blood, etcetera after endless etcetera, look no further.

I saw this in a theater in 1987 and it is every bit as good and original as back then. Probably the only character-driven horror movie in which all the most interesting characters are monsters. There is almost no horror template (crime, yes, but not horror) for these gleefully amoral, filthy, and permanently amused villains. The RV and vans that they tear around in with foiled-up windows look like public housing. Their clothes are permanently grimy with the gore of their occupation, plus frequent accidental exposures to sunlight which cause parts of their bodies to burst into flames. Compare this to the glacial pace and posturing of Interview with the Vampire. No soul-searching here.

Bill Paxton, Lance Hendricksen, Jenette Goldstein, all recently from “Aliens”, plus 13 year-old Joshua Miller genuinely enjoy their work of harvesting hicks. Jenny Wright is Mae. The word ethereal was invented for her. She was only turned 4 years ago and is less gleeful but just as realistic about the need to feed. “The night has its price”, is how she puts it. Adrian Pasdar is Caleb, a nice farm kid just looking for some action when she decides to turn him and greatly screws up the vampire family unit. Caleb can't bring himself to kill despite repeated warnings and threats from the family. He survives by nursing off of Mae's wrist.

The story itself is no smarter than most horror and much of the ending is a direct lift from director Kathryn Bigelow's husband's Terminator movie. I also had no idea that vampirism could be cured. But like the best action/horror screenplays it manages to pack all manner of background character information into the cracks and corners while the story itself moves along at a nice clip. In snatches we learn that one of the vampires fought for the South, they probably started the Chicago fire, two of them met over a flat tire, one of them fancies himself an old west gunslinger, and probably was, and they no longer really think in years. I could use probably one less scene with Mae and Caleb rhapsodizing about the night, but there is a payoff, and Tangerine Dream's soundtrack fits nicely.

The shootouts are stylish if noticeably filled with dumber than average police, supporting actors are broad and predictable, but Hendricksen and Paxton are just great. Hendricksen reportedly dropped to about 140 pounds and he already had one of the great faces. Paxton is a bundle of creative energy who really, really likes killing.

Finally, the Bar Scene: There is almost nothing in movies or fiction to compare this to in terms of outright horror. You look away not because of the gore, but because of the undiluted gleeful evil on display. These are the most dangerous people, the smartest people, and the funniest people all rolled into one, let loose in our monkey cage to extract as much fun and terror out of the situation as they possibly can. Paxton says he had a migraine during filming and a medic gave him a "B-12" shot before this scene. You can kinda tell. I would feel shabby if I excerpted much. Here is a YouTube link of the first couple minutes. You can watch as much as you want there.

Almost all vampire horror movie development stops with this movie. Put a retroactive fork in us, we were done.

Director Bigelow got her due with an Oscar for The Hurt Locker, reportedly the lowest grossing Best Picture, so her magic continues. Pasdar is still a TV star and I've seen his name as a director of music videos including Paula Abdul of all things. Paxton has gotten a little dull since about the time of "A Simple Plan." Hendricksen was ubiquitous for years, and Jenny Wright became a great mystery by more or less disappearing, some say into a marriage. She did not participate in the 20 year reunion. In the special features section of the BluRay, Pasdar looks directly at the camera and says "Jenny, if you're watching this, we all miss you...I don't know where she is."

There is a not very good 10-minute collection of clips on YouTube. I don't much recommend the clips but the first comment is, “i like when vampires were monsters instead of goth fags. drakula used to be someone you were afraid of not some dude who turned 13 year old girls on.”

Yeah.

Wild Target

2011-12-02T22:04:00.003-06:00

2010, PG-13, 98 min.

IMDB fouls up the synopsis... A hitman tries to retire but a beautiful thief may change his plans.

The 73rd Virgin says... I remember no talk of retirement. This is funnier than any similar American movie of the past decade. Part Prizzi's Honor, part heist caper, part cliched madcap screwball romantic comedy, and with a few surprising bits of cold blooded murder. Other than the urge to crank up the chase music, in order to assure American audiences that something fun is about to happen, this is lovely amoral English comedy.

When Rose (Emily Blunt) double crosses a vicious stolen art collector (Rupert Everett), the legendary Victor Maynard, England's most elegant hit man, is hired to finish her off. Victor comes from a proud long line of upper class hit men. Until recently, he lived with his mother (BBC grandame Eileen Atkins) and she wonders, as he approaches his 55th birthday if he “tends” toward the homosexual.

Victor spends his private time fixing solo gourmet meals (wearing a tie and apron), sampling wine, and practicing his French. But watching the amoral and manipulative - and shall we admit, breathtaking - Blunt blow through life with a natural gift for thievery, he for the first time becomes intrigued, and in an unforgivable lapse of taste and breeding, fails to kill her, and then hires on to protect her.

Harry Potter's Rupert Grint is very funny as Tony, the bumbling soccer yob who happens to have a gift for what Victor politely calls detective work. Victor takes him on as an apprentice, not as an assistant thank you, and with the two in tow he heads off to his hidden country estate where all the furniture is wrapped in plastic and he worries that he may have over-trimmed his favorite Bonsai tree.

Bill Nighy is deathly funny with his upright, shoulders-back posture, perfectly tailored suits, elegant two-fingered grip on his pistol, and complete English stillness. If Peter O'Toole lost most of the inflection in his voice and all the flutteriness, he would approximate Nighy's comic style. He has a strange tic of slightly cocking his head always while keeping his eye on the action, and has mastered the art of ignoring unpleasant comments and the behavior of those beneath him with aplomb.

The story isn't at all original and all the characters fit nicely into the parts and behaviors the experienced movie watcher would expect - except the mother who is concerned that the family's reputation is in tatters.

But when matters come to a head and the art collector hires the odious Dixon and his farcical side-kick Fabian to find and kill the newly formed family, it sets up a final scene at the estate barn that is a masterpiece of droll English humor.

And it has, in context, the funniest punch line I've heard in a while, “Tony, come and see what happens if you don't clean your gun.”

Fantastic Mr. Fox

2011-11-24T02:50:00.001-06:00

2009, PG, 87 min.

IMDB says... An urbane fox cannot resist returning to his farm raiding ways and then must help his community survive the farmers' retaliation.

The 73rd Virgin says... Haven't read the book or seen any previous Wes Anderson movies. This is really funny and it operates out in the delicate dangerous waters of whimsy and quirkiness where so many self-referential comedies have sunk. There are several scenes that would be funny even with limited visuals and live actors, just based on the dialogue, but are equally funny just based on the visuals, which are simple-looking sets, stop motion puppets, and I assume some CGI.

George Clooney voices Mr. Fox like you'd expect as a charming manipulator. He gets the town tart (Streep) pregnant and agrees to give up chicken stealing to become a newspaper columnist. Mr. Fox is feeling poor and decides to buy a nicer hole under a tree over the objections of his wife and his lawyer Mr. Badger (Bill Murray). Badger describes the three villainous farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean who live across the valley. The funniest whimsical bits come when these urbane sit-com families suddenly become wild animals.

The Foxs' son Ash has adequacy issues exacerbated by his father's realistic assessment of Ash's skills, made worse by the arrival of his cousin Kristofferson. Kristofferson knows karate and practices yoga and meditation. Mrs. Fox paints landscapes laden with doomy thunderstorms.

To pay for his new digs Mr. Fox and his possum side-kick Kylie go back to stealing birds from the farmers. Mr. Fox laces blueberries with sleeping pills to knock out the guard beagles. This scene caused consternation among some Netflix commenters who deemed it inappropriate for young children due to chicken necks being chewed.

Sheesh. I'm surprised there are no complaints about the drugs. If your young co-viewers can't handle a chicken's neck being chewed, well...get them some help.

Boggis, Bunce and Bean try shooting at Mr. Fox and digging him out by hand. In the first of several funny scenes between Bean and his assistant Petey, they bring in the heavy metal, but the foxes and their other subterranean friends begin digging under all three farms. Michael Gambon is a hoot as the efficiently murderous Bean. Jarvis Cocker voices Petey.

Finally cornered, Mr. Fox hatches a plan with all the animals for escape and revenge. Several scenes near the end are funny for reasons I don't even understand, including these where he identifies the animals by their Latin names and unique talents, and meets a mysterious wolf while a lone soprano intones over the scene.

Maybe there are a few parts that are too obscure and talky for an average 8-year-old, but the visuals are consistently funny and it does head into emotional areas within the Fox family that most kids will recognize. It's no more challenging than "Up" or "The Incredibles", really, and it's almost as good.

One might expect an ultra-hip film experience to include obscure musical references. Instead there is familiar 60s pop from the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones along with Burl Ives and others. Houston native Anderson then chooses the almost forgotten classic, "Let Her Dance", by the pride of Baytown, Texas, the Bobby Fuller Four, to run over the credits. Like the whole movie, it's unexpected and charming.

Until The End of The World (Bis ans Ende der Welt)

2011-11-23T03:22:00.001-06:00

1991, R, 158 min.

IMDB helpfully sets it up, since I lack the patience... Set in 1999, a woman (Dommartin) has a car accident with some bank robbers, who enlist her help to take the bank money to a drop in Paris. On the way she runs into another fugitive from the law (Hurt), an American who is being chased by the CIA. The charges are false, he claims. They want to confiscate a device his father invented which allows anyone to record their dreams and vision. On the run from both the bank robbers and the CIA, the couple span the globe, ending up in Australia at his father's (von Sydow) research facility, where they hope to play back the recordings Hurt captured for his blind mother. Set in the futuristic year of 1999, a subplot about a damaged Indian nuclear satellite crashing and causing the end of civilization is a puzzling addition to the film. Written by Ed Sutton <esutton@mindspring.com

The 73rd Virgin says... The audacity of rope; that is, having enough to hang yourself.

Coming off the huge success of Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders managed to attract musical giants like REM, Robbie Robertson, David Byrne of Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson to lend songs to the soundtrack, and U2 contributes the impressionist roar of the title song. Add to that William Hurt, Sam Neill, Max Von Sydow, the dowager queen of French cinema Jeanne Moreau, Lois Chiles, Wender veterans Rudiger Volger and Solveig Dommartin and you can see the clout on display.

The clout didn’t last, thanks mainly to this. The estimated cost was $23 million in '91, and the reported US gross was under $800,000. Wender's first rough cut was reportedly 20 hours long. He then compromised mightily and got it down to 8. There is a 5-hour VHS version out there somewhere. This one on Amazon's streaming service is rather long at 158 minutes. You can detect a problem almost instantly as Sam Neill provides the voice over narration that will be required to keep the audience on track should we care to be so kept. With the possible exception of “Apocalypse Now” and “Casino”, narration is only useful as a way to describe a particular character's, or the audience's, attitude. If it is used to move the story, run for the exits.

But, there being no enticing exit from my living room on a Saturday afternoon, I stayed, and indeed there are a few things to like here. Set in the only slightly amusing future of 1999, Wender's story visualizes GPSs, bounty hunters who use something like internet identity searches, Skype video phones on airplanes, online credit ratings, hand-held high def video camcorders, moving holograms (of clocks showing times around the world – how interesting is that?). Here, we see the various software in action including the charming Russian "bounty bear" - and the wearying narration.

Notice the faked monument to the Tienanmen square massacre pasted into this video from Beijing - and the wearying narration.

And the broadly science fiction plot of a camcorder that allows the wearer to record images that will later be interpreted by a computer and transmitted to the optic nerve of the blind is at least interesting. It also leads to a few truly artsy moments when your screen is handed over to beautiful interpretive hi-def images to imitate what the blind person is seeing. Nice. Here Moreau sees her daughter and granddaughter for the first time.

There is also something big-hearted and goofy about a movie that decides to damn the torpedoes and take us from France to Italy to Portugal to Germany, then across Russia and China to Japan, then San Francisco, finally to the Australian outback where we find Von Sydow and Moreau and a bunch of aboriginal scientists in a styrofoam underground lab.

On the down side there is Wender's loss of focus on an actual story. This always happens. It's endearing in many of his moodier, shorter, and more “aggressively boring” (Stephen Schiff's term) movies, but it doesn't fit with a heist caper, a science fiction flick, a love story, an apocalyptic road movie, or any of the other things this one tries to be. When he does focus, it gets a little bland. The American government, of course, wants to confiscate the camera for espionage, and there is the vague threat of a malfunctioning nuclear-tipped Indian satellite weapon that might detonate in the atmosphere and cause a mass response by other nuclear weapons in space and “end the world”. The Americans, again of course, are threatening to shoot it down, thus ensuring the worst possible outcome.

Even more on the down side is, strangely, the acting. Or perhaps the direction of same. Several scenes just don't seem well rehearsed. Bad sound, clumsy - maybe ad-libbed - dialogue, some uncomfortable glances between actors all show up here and there. I've always thought Hurt was pretty good, at least in modern roles, if not in Robin Hood. I even thought he was pretty good in Lost In Space. Here as international man of mystery Trevor McPhee or Sam Farber, he is indescribably off his game, sounding either like he's reading lines off a wall or thrashing around in a very actorly fashion - and, of course, the wearying narration.

Oy.

Neill escapes with his reputation, Von Sydow can read a laundry list with authority, and the French gangsters are a humorous breath of fresh air. Finally, the delightfully named Ernie Dingo shows up as an aborigine bounty hunter named Burt. He's pretty funny.

After many, many, many minutes of Sturm und Drang over whether the video images will be effectively transmitted to the intended recipient, the plot morphs yet again as Von Sydow begins using the camera to record dreams which causes a kind of addiction to one's own dreams, and gives us the unintended hilarity of poor Dommartin crying hysterically while the fatherly Neill makes her go cold turkey by refusing to replace her video player batteries. Maybe it was a joke on Wender's part and I just didn't catch it as it crawled by. About this time my wife wanders through and remembers seeing this maybe 18 years ago and sums it up by saying, “Oh God, THIS movie! Oh God, it is so effing weird.” No truer words...

Spoiler Alert!! Then it ends, yet again, as a kind of outer space eco-fantasy, as one of our characters floats over the ocean looking for “pollution” and the others sing Happy Birthday over video monitors like a modern-day Go To Meeting commercial – aaaaaaand roll credits and crank up the U2.

Wow. Just wow. As with most Wenders movies, words fail. But this time, not in a good way.

Red Road

2011-11-13T01:48:00.000-06:00

2006, 113 minutes, unrated
IMDB says… Jackie works as a CCTV operator. Each day she watches over a small part of the world, protecting the people living their lives under her gaze. One day a man appears on her monitor, a man she thought she would never see again, a man she never wanted to see again. Now she has no choice, she is compelled to confront him.

The 73rd Virgin says… I’m bemused by the synopsis that indicates that this kind of pervasive and completely realistic domestic surveillance is actually protecting anyone. I don’t remember seeing her prevent a crime, but we will leave that rant for another time.

Absent the assistance of the synopsis we start the movie watching a world-weary young woman in her public servant’s polyester sitting in a room watching video feeds from security cameras scattered over Edinburgh, Scotland. She observes petty crime, sad details of lonely lives, random violence, and all the joys of a city that appears to be entirely on the dole and looking for its next bottle of liquor and next interaction with a hooker.

For a while it gets really creepy as she thinks she recognizes a dark figure from her past showing up here and there. We don’t know what darkness he represents and we also don’t know whether she is stalking him for revenge or just as a weird obsession. Then the story morphs into something less predictable but also less taut. To say much more would be a spoiler.

As we realize that what our heroine is watching on all those video monitors is not sinister, just grey and sad, we probably begin to root for her more, but the thriller aspect disappears, despite the best efforts of the blurb writers. Perhaps the pervasive sense of dread that overhangs the early scenes and then slowly dissipates as she interacts with her target is supposed to show her changing state of mind. If so, then good job.

There is probably a political subtext that I’m missing regarding how a low-level domestic surveillor can call in so many favors from her law enforcement buddies, and how that is ultimately a very chilling thing, but that gets lost in her individual drama of revenge and redemption, and, as best as I can tell, never gets addressed.

Since this was made by a production and direction team that was entirely female, the extended torrid full-frontal sex scene qualifies as NOT PORN. But I question whether a male production team could get away with the notion that what our heroine really needs is a “stiff gin and a good rogering” and still win the Cannes Festival Jury Prize as this did.

Kate Dickie is very appealing in the lead. She is obviously fairly youthful, at least when nekkid, but otherwise so haggard and mournful that she is heartbreaking. Well-known bad guy Tony Curran is convincing as an irresponsible yob who may or may not be the bête noire (oh the Virg didn’t do French, did he? Oh yes he did. He went there!) that he appears to be.

There is at least some redemption so that after 113 minutes it almost appears sunshiny. The sad socialist utopia that seemed to be eating into her bones is perhaps less ravenous.

The dialogue is marginally in English, but unless you’re from Scotland, you will need the provided subtitles.

Let The Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in)

2011-10-31T23:59:00.001-05:00

2008, R, 115 min.
The 73rd Virgin says... Here comes the belated Halloween post.

I haven’t read the book, or seen the American remake (Let Me In). This movie is a solemn and chilly, no, downright slow and icy exploration of the care and feeding of a modern-day vampire in what I thought was Sweden, but in one radio voice-over Leonid Brezhnev is mentioned, so maybe they were listening to Soviet radio. I dunno, but it kept me engaged despite its overwhelming Europeaness.

The vampire’s living caretaker is getting old and having trouble bringing home the blood, so to speak, but it’s also about a bullied boy, Oscar, who inadvertently comes under the vampire’s protection while offering a sympathetic ear and a strangely brave calm when he realizes what is up.

Watching the vampire twice struggle with the urge to feed on him is spooky and touching at the same time. For his part, Oscar is intrigued by this haggard looking twelve-year-old girl named Eli (pronounced Elee) who only comes out at night, smells funny, and gets sick if she eats candy.

Anyway, this movie has some stunning visuals without too much gore, especially while solving the problem of removing a body frozen in a pond.

The scariest scenes are shot at middle to long distance with that creepy unknown thing you see at the edge of the frame being what you should keep your eye on. It won’t work in my little-bitty clip box, so find out for yourself. Often we are just watching characters react to what we are afraid is there, or we know what is happening behind the tree or the door, so we don’t have to see it.

Otherwise, the small special effects budget seems to have been spent on some very angry cats.

The final bullying and retribution scene is predictable in outcome, but not in execution. I won't spoil it with a clip, but imagine being underwater in a swimming pool and a slaughter that you can't see or hear is going on above you, but your only clues are the things that fall into the muffled stillness of the pool. Very effective. A really fine 2-hour art house horror movie right down to the subtitles. The "R" rating is achieved with one unpleasant shot.

Gallipoli

2011-10-30T01:39:00.003-05:00

1981 PG 110 min.

IMDB says... sprinters face the brutal realities of war when they are sent to fight in the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey during World War I.

The 73rd Virgin says... From the opening credits with red on black text and Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor moaning away, you know you’re in for a tough ride. But instead it begins with sweeping vistas and brightly lit cheerful people out on the very edge of the British Empire in Western Australia, in 1915. A young impressionable rather Luke Skywalkerish ranch hand Archy (Mark Lee) worships his older adventurer uncle and they both prepare to make Archy the most famous sprinter in the world. Unfortunately, any young man worth his salt as a man and as a rider is being recruited to join the Australian Light Horse and get into the “greatest game of all”, that is, the Great War. England is bogged down in the southern theater trying to invade German-allied Turkey at Gallipoli, and as the soldiers sing, “if England needs a hand, well here it is.”

At Archy’s first race he meets his near match as a sprinter in a worldlier railroad worker, Frank (Gibson), who has abandoned his job and hit the road for adventure. Frank is a bit of a chiseler in contrast to Archy’s gee whiz enthusiasm for life, but as a lark Frank agrees to help the underage Archy fool the recruiters and join up, over the very moving objections of Archy’s uncle and Frank's English-hating father.

The rest of this beautifully filmed and lit movie follows them as they inadvertently drag each other along on the best and worst adventure of their lives. Archie is too young to join up, Frank helps him glue on a beard and fake his age to fool the recruiters. The train they hop drops them in the desert with a two week wait and Archie convinces Frank to cross the desert on foot. Frank can’t ride a horse, Archie convinces him to join the infantry. They briefly split up on their way to training but reunite in time for the meat grinder.

The story is credited to director Peter Weir who takes his time getting the young men to their final destination. There are a lot of breathtaking vistas and light-hearted adventures waiting for them. But, eventually Frank and his infantry mates reach Egypt for basic training, a pretty cool rugby game at the base of the Great Pyramids, an inservice on venereal disease, their first exposure to same, and their first exposure to the British officers who will blithely send the filthy Australians to their likely doom.

When they reach Turkey the movie changes tone, Albinoni rejoins us and you realize it won’t be fun much longer. As they land in the dark in a wonderland of exploding shells and strung up lights, Frank’s face shows profound trepidation, but Archy is all smiles. I frequently defend Gibson’s acting, especially when he was young, and his expressions of stoic soldierly terror, selfishness and remorse are as powerful as anything Hanks managed in "Saving Private Ryan" or Sheen in "Platoon", and many years earlier than either.

What I’d forgotten from previous viewings is just how impressive this production is. A huge number of extras inhabit the trenches, swim in the ocean as shells fall around them, and tease Johnny Turk’s machine guns a few tens of yards away. It’s not quite “The Longest Day”, or “Paths of Glory”, but it’s darned impressive.

As an old “mate”, Archy is able to get Frank transferred to the Light Horse who will not be using, or be anywhere near, their horses. They have become the fodder. It becomes clear that there have been communications breakdowns and the division will need a runner for messages, so naturally one of them gets the job – the other doesn’t.

And then Weir takes over with his uncanny ability to show men in extremis. As each wave of troops gets ready to go over the top to face the implacable Turks, with “nothing up the spout” - no ammunition, just bayonets - they hang watches, wedding rings, last notes home, photographs on any available hook in the trench, Weir, as he frequently does at the moment that most demands your attention, cuts the sound effects for respectful silence, goes to a deep focus shot of people in trouble, and away they go. The final effect is, of course, shattering.

The Eagle

2011-10-23T03:17:00.050-05:00

2011 PG-13 116 min. (unrated cut)
The 73rd Virgin says... A pleasant surprise. In 120 AD a Roman legion crosses into northern England and disappears, losing the legion's golden eagle standard and bringing dishonor to Rome and to the family of its dead commander. 20 years later his son Marcus returns to lead a disheveled and downtrodden cohort of his own. He whips them into shape, performs heroically in a few battles and is badly injured.

There is much to admire here, especially the strange but effective juxtaposition of flat modern language in American English - no one troubles with phony Hollywood British - set in the second century. But it makes sense. There is no reason to substitute high falutin’ British for what would have been frontier Latin, so just let ‘em talk the way soldiers talk. This is especially good for Donald Sutherland as our hero’s uncle. When he fakes an accent in "Pillars of the Earth" or "Pride and Prejudice" he sounds droll and bored. Here he sounds energetic and funny. It works all around.

Also, the action sequences are convincing, especially showing why the Roman infantry ruled the world. Here, they go to the rescue of hostage fellow soldiers.

Since Marcus is now honorably discharged, he has nothing left to do but cross Hadrian’s Wall back into the north and look for the eagle standard that his father lost before. So he takes a slave from the local populous who speaks the language (apparently all the languages) of the northern tribes, and who knows more than he lets on about the fate of the eagle, and off they go.

Channing Tatum as Marcus has a convincing youthful doggedness and believably stubborn Roman pride; even as his entire existence comes down to how much he can trust his slave, Esca, played as rebellious and mysterious, but rigidly honor-bound, by Jamie Bell.

Eventually they find a survivor of the legion's massacre in the ubiquitous form of Mark Strong, last seen riding away from Robin Hood with an arrow through the neck. Even he speaks flat American English as he recounts the gory details and helps clarify Marcus' and Esca's relationship, so to speak.

And eventually they find “The Seal People” who, other than head to toe blue body paint, appear to be Iroquois Indians who happen to speak something like Gaelic. The producers acknowledge that this is a somewhat fanciful addition but it does serve to drive home the bad craziness up north that led Emperor Hadrian to build his wall in the first place.

To a certain extent you find yourself rooting for the Romans even though modern PC would cause you to root for the tribes. It’s a little like rooting for the humans over the Navi or the Nazis over the French resistance. Odd effect.

Anyhow, the battle scenes are well done, the action moves along at a solid pace, the Hungarian and Scottish scenery is very pretty and there is enough tension to keep you engaged. It crosses the line into stupid territory here and there but, unlike Robin Hood, Valhalla Rising, Black Death, etal, it doesn't pitch a tent there. The 13th Warrior comes to mind in terms of engaging well done silliness. I'm pretty sure there are NO speaking parts for women.

The ending lands with the clunk of leaden humor and the alternate ending on the DVD is just as bad. Still this is a pretty enjoyable sword and sandal flick. Three sheep is a little stingy.

Dinosaur Jr. Live In The Middle East (2007)

2011-10-16T03:35:00.007-05:00

2007, 83 min., unrated video
Allmusic.com says... the DVD naturally corrects their one fault live, past and present: they can't be ear-splittingly loud when you control the volume. Instead, the mix is hot hot hot: bassist Lou Barlow's Rickenbacker rips and the distorted edge on guitarist J Mascis's Marshall amp could strip paint off walls, while head-down baldie drummer Murph looks like he's slinging floor beams. Just ungodly!!!

The 73rd Virgin says... Well okay then. The band from Amherst, Massachussetts, nibbled at the edges of wide popularity from roughly 1987 until they petered out in 1997. Their 1988 semi-hit "Freak Scene" is one of the strangest almagams of power pop, speed metal, and alternative folk that you'll ever hear - with a crushing guitar rave-up - and it was three years before Nirvana. Notice how hard they worked at making a professional looking video.

Somewhere along the line they were called Dinosaur, but they were sued by an old hippie band with the same name, so, characteristically, they became Dinosaur Jr. But leader/guitarist J. Mascis and bassist/second fiddle Lou Barlow were constantly at odds so Mascis disbanded in 1989, fired everyone, and then re-formed the next day without Barlow, who for a time was so destitute that he went back to being a hospital orderly.

Mascis and the re-formed Dinosaur Jr returned with several fine if somewhat similar collections, appeared on late night TV a LOT (see YouTube), scraped into the bottom of the charts with songs like "Start Choppin" and the timely, Clintonian, "Feel the Pain", but then just sort of stopped, as a delightfully titled Best of collection, "Ear-Bleeding Country" seemed to mark the end.

Barlow re-surfaced in the 90s with the band Sebadoh who had several minor hits, and then a big hit, "Natural One" from "The Kids" soundtrack, with one of his side-projects, Folk Implosion.

Allmusic.com says of him "arguably the most prolific songwriter of his generation, Lou Barlow has also been one of the most influential". I must admit, I truly had no idea...

Anyway, Mascis made a few solo albums including the notoriously awful Martin & Me, plus a couple more as J. Mascis and the Fog. So when news came that Mascis, Barlow, and drummer Murph were reforming for several concerts in 2005, it was a pleasant, but worrying, surprise. Would this just be another bunch of cash-strapped has-beens slogging for lucre?

True, there was no previous professional video, or even live album, of these three, and Mascis really needs to be captured. Even when young he was one of the strangest Rainman-esque creatures in the rock pantheon, and now that he's taken on the visage of a slightly overweight swami this at least keeps him in one place long enough to be observed.

This video from two 2005 shows - one at a club called The Middle East - is first and foremost a relief. They play with notable energy, regardless of their age. Mascis' voice is as strangled as ever (it has been described as a west Massachusetts drawl), but fans have had twenty years to get used to it. For a long-time but unknowledgeable fan, it's kind of surprising how the squall and thrash of their studio albums hides Barlow's bass. Here he plays with a pick and is really more a loud rhythym guitar while Mascis plays what fans lovingly call "face melter" guitar solos, and drummer Murph just never lets up. The incredibly cramped stage helps, restricting fan participation to some serious head-bobbing. Lawyer avoidance causes me to keep these clips to a reasonable length - but you probably don't mind.

The last 15 minutes switch to a more breathable venue with room for a good old-fashioned mosh pit.

The final encore is a fan favorite of their massacred version of The Cure's "Just Like Heaven" in which Mascis takes one of the most beloved of 80s guitar lines and wah-wahs it into the ground.

If you're not a fan, this probably won't make you one. You won't understand a single lyric, except maybe Barlow's typically soaring repeated chorus on "Forget the Swan" and maybe something like "come on babe". Most of these songs are from their three 1980s albums, so there's really nothing new.

If this was all there was, it would be kind of sweet and sad. Instead they had a Hollywood moment and made IMO the best studio CD of their career and maybe the decade, with 2007's "Beyond", and followed up in 2009 with the almost as good "Farm", with extensive touring to boot.

Below from YouTube is 2009 footage of their most recent semi-hit "Pieces" showing them as pop-savvy and anti-pop as ever. May they rawk forever on.

Robin Hood (2010)

2011-10-16T01:36:00.000-05:00

IMDB says... In 13th century England, Robin and his band of marauders confront corruption in a local village and lead an uprising against the crown that will forever alter the balance of world power.

The 73rd Virgin says... Really? World power? I could care less about the legend or stories of Robin Hood. I don’t care whether he’s Robert Loxley or Robin Longstride or Robin Jones. I don’t care that Queen Isabella of the 1320s should suddenly find herself catting around with wicked King John in 1199. I don’t care that the Magna Carta appears to have been written by a stone mason and signed by a bunch of barons about 60 years before it was presented to the King, (at which point I turned to my wife and said, “well, what the hell, why not?”). I only care a little that Maid Marian should slip her 120 pound frame into about 40 pounds worth of chain mail and swing a ten pound sword at fully armored Frenchmen and change the course of battle. But did it all have to be such a slog?

Ridley Scott appears to have learned nothing from the spotty pacing and loss of momentum which made “Gladiator” something of a disappointment after the first hour. Once again we have beautifully mounted battle scenes at the outset, and Russell Crowe’s manly but inward looking presence. At 45 minutes I’m thinkin’, “not bad, not bad at all.” Then he travels to Nottingham to return a sword to Walter Loxley (long story) and finds himself acting as a stand-in son to Walter and stand-in husband to Marian. Dramatic gears grind and pop and finally strip altogether as the story comes to a halt.

When the movie tries to torque up again, all that’s left in the tank are:
Guys on horses ride one direction, yell at each other in French and English, fight and do awful things in the name of King John, and then ride another direction. Some other guys on horses ride back and forth telling each other what has just been done in the name of King John. Every now and then there’s a party where the merry men sing songs and act like rock stars, sometimes lords and barons stand around and yell about how the King needs the people as much as the people need the King – and then more riding.

Crowe is listed as a producer (Cate Blanchett has no such excuse) which may explain why he allowed himself to be filmed trying to keep these lines interesting.

How a bill becomes a law in 1199.

The final battle scenes beneath the white cliffs of Dover have all the requisite visual quotes from “Gallipoli”, “Lord of The Rings”, “300”, and even, rather suddenly, drop in some of the hyper jerky high def film tricks of “Saving Private Ryan”, before switching back to regular film. It's like they had to try to reference everything once. Oh, and the music sounds a lot like “Last of the Mohicans”.

It’s nice to see Max Von Sydow, as Walter Loxley, still going at 82. I would have guessed he was 110. He doesn’t bother with changing his all-purpose Swedish accent, which is just as well after watching William Hurt mangle an English accent. Matthew Macfadyen is a bit wasted here as the Sheriff of Nottingham. The great Mark Strong, bad guy of the most recent “Sherlock Holmes” and “The Way Back”, is even badder here as the double-crossing Godfrey with his fashionably shaved head and an all-black outfit reminiscent of Darth Vader (and why is he the only guy not wearing his hard hat?). At the end he rides off alone cackling madly with an arrow through his neck, the Sheriff of Nottingham has been humiliated, and Robin, at 2:24:00 is now finally an outlaw, thus setting up the sequel which - prithee to a just and merciful God - will never appear.

Scott has succeeded in remaking the legend to be more clichéd than the legend itself.

The Way Back

2011-10-08T00:25:00.001-05:00

2010, 133 min., PG-13
IMDB says... Siberian gulag escapees walk 4000 miles overland to freedom in India.

The 73rd Virgin says.... In the pointless game of "greatest living director" Peter Weir would be my most frequent choice with the occasional inclusion of the Coens and Scorsese. Imagine my surprise at stumbling across this 2010 movie that seemed to have little publicity or fanfare but had Weir's name on it - his first since 2003's Master and Commander.

Based on a much disputed account called "The Long Walk" by Slawomir Rawicz, later termed more or less a novel, this tells an unbelievable tale of 6 escapees from the Soviet Siberian Gulag who manage to cross all of the driest, coldest, highest, most desolate, and most dangerous places in the world in order to limp out into northern India sometime in the 1940s. As noted, the book itself is greatly disputed and the movie is labeled as "inspired by real events", and the typical disclaimer about "any similarity to actual persons is coincidental" is all in place at the end. Weir has acknowledged that the movie is primarily a work of fiction. To that extent it mirrors his first masterpiece, "Picnic at Hanging Rock", but unfortunately it lacks all but a little of the power or mystery of that movie.

Weir manages to attract the big names of Colin Farrell, not as the hero, but as a committed and brutal Russian thug who still worships Stalin even as he escapes the Gulag, and Weir veteran Ed Harris as an American engineer who idealistically moved to the Soviet Union only to have his son killed and himself arrested as a spy. There is also an utterly silly introduction of a teenaged girl who claims to have escaped from a work farm and who throws in with the group. James Sturgess is "Janusz", the Polish political prisoner who happily has been an outdoorsman his entire life. The movie is supposed to revolve around him, but most of his fellow travelers are more interesting.

There is something strangely travelogue-ish and unemotional about the whole experience. Characters die, but in the proper order as to leave no doubt about who will survive, and, although we experience the grand scenery (some of Lake Baikal looks CGI'd), there is a loss of perspective about just what distances and unmatched remoteness are involved here.

It ends with a pair of marching boots inserted over footage of Soviet atrocities against all of civilization from the 40s through the 80s. I'm grateful for any movie that shows the monsters as what they were, but it still feels like a quick wrap up tacked on to satisfy the demands of time and relevance - or maybe to satisfy one of the dizzying number of money sources behind the production shown below, courtesy of IMDB.

•Exclusive Films
•National Geographic Films
•Imagenation Abu Dhabi FZ
•Monolith Films
•On the Road
•Point Blank Productions
•Polish Film Institute

Maybe this reviewing stuff is harder than I thought. Finding myself unable to adequately describe the problem with this movie, I will borrow from The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "There is nothing that interesting to discover about Janusz, and nothing that interesting for him to discover about himself; even the secrets disclosed about the other escapers don't have much of an impact on the group dynamic. Well, this isn't an overwhelming problem. Weir has put together a good film – oddly, though, considering its scale, it feels like a rather small one."

Well, if this is Weir's last hurrah, it's good enough. But I hope he's got a few more in him.

Babel

2011-09-29T22:56:00.001-05:00

2006, R, 143 min.

IMDB says... Tragedy strikes a married couple on vacation in the Moroccan desert, touching off an interlocking story involving four different families.

The 73rd Virgin says...
Two ways to look at it, I guess. First - a movie about the unbelievable selfishness of adults and how their actions routinely destroy children. Or second - free rifles make bad things happen all over the world. I choose the first. Either way, this is heavy-handed but well-acted. At first I was put off by the conceit, but on reflection I like it more and more.

Two monstrously self-centered San Diego yuppies (Pitt and Blanchett), their abandoned children; the well-meaning but abandoned Mexican nanny; a monstrously self-centered Japanese woman who kills herself off-screen in a way that her deaf and lonely daughter will be the first to find her; and the woman’s disengaged businessman husband; a monstrously clueless Moroccan goat farmer who gives his sons a new rifle with no instruction as to what he has just handed them; all come together to ruin children’s lives or kill them as the case may be.

All potential tragedies begin with what little boys do the first time they are alone with a gun, they shoot at things, in this case a tour bus containing Pitt and Blanchett. The nanny back in San Diego agrees to keep the abandoned children, but she makes the seemingly reasonable decision to take them to her son’s wedding across the border with her drug-addled nephew at the wheel. The scenes at the wedding are a beautiful depiction of how the endless party so easily turns tragic just because there is no adult to say No.

And it goes on. My only plot point problem is how a wounded Blanchett can manage to sit on a bed pan in a filthy hut and roll around on the floor in pain, but can’t get back on the tour bus and go to the hospital for fear of bleeding to death. The most believable character is, oddly enough, the desperate, ignored Japanese teenager coming to grips with adult desires, teenage emotions, crushing guilt, and mourning. The kind-hearted police detective who intervenes on her behalf is the only likable adult in the movie. Wrenching and engaging if a bit fantastic.

The Closet (Le Placard)

2011-09-26T23:08:00.001-05:00

2001, R, 84 minutes

The 73rd Virgin says... Another big sunshiny French sex comedy featuring Daniel Auteuil as Francois, an uninteresting divorced accountant at a condom manufacturing plant who discovers he is due to be laid off. His new neighbor finds him on his apartment balcony ready to jump.

Yes I know, why aren't there more kittens in movies? Anyway, his new friend convinces Francois to try an alternate plan by photoshopping his picture into some old gay bar photos he happens to have lying around, and mailing them anonymously to Francois' employer. With this stroke of genius he is now impossible to fire and becomes more intriguing to his coworkers. Gerard Depardieu, who in 2001 was getting rather too old and fat for this kind of role, is the oafish human resources man, Felix, who also is the company's rugby team coach.

Two pranksters in Felix's department start to fill his head with stories that he is about to be let go for his homophobic jokes, so he begins trying to befriend Francois with a lunch, a pink sweater, etc.

Eventually in an effort to find an incriminating tattoo, Francois' female boss tries to take his shirt off and he now accuses her of sexual harassment. In time Francois is set up as the company's gay pride parade float ornament where he is observed by his estranged wife and son who instantly take a new interest in him as well.

The Depardieu character is too broad and silly, but there are some very funny one-liners and situations, and blessedly only a moment's pathos while his old neighbor reflects on what it means to be gay now versus 30 years ago. A very funny and harmless 84 minutes.

Contagion

2011-09-17T20:21:00.003-05:00

2011, PG-13, 106 min.
IMDB says... A thriller centered on the threat posed by a deadly disease and an international team of doctors contracted by the CDC to deal with the outbreak.

The 73rd Virgin says... The worldwide disaster flick must be the hardest kind of movie to make. Where do you insert small scale human drama without causing half of humanity to roll its eyes while the other half tears up? Where and how to insert the inevitable "guy in the white lab coat" who looks into the middle distance, or into a monitor, and mouths quasi-science for the audience so they can appreciate how the future of humanity is at stake. Add to that, how do you do it all when the agent of doom is a virus, a hand shake, a moist bus rail, a credit card?

My youth is filled with god-awful examples of how not to do it. Without concentrating I can think of Henry Fonda, Joseph Cotten, Sean Connery, Paul Newman, Raymond Burr, ad nauseum standing in a "control room" or something, deciding the fate of a nation, a world, a town.

Well, this is how to do it - Steven Soderbergh and writer Scott Burns have done it better than it's ever been done. There is the cool, low-key tension of Oceans 11 crossed with The Andromeda Strain and what could be a dry as dust medical procedural. Rather than showing the disaster large scale and then narrowing the focus to how it affects individuals chosen to be our proxies, Soderbergh starts on "Day 2", as the title card says, and then gives us a well-known actor who will go from laughing on the phone while coughing, to seizing, to having their cap peeled complete with bone saw sound effects, within the first 10 minutes. Now that he has your attention, he pulls back and lets you ponder how this will happen millions of more times by jumping all over the world showing individuals getting sick, touching things that you will touch, and then mostly dying.

We get the usual "assembly of the crack team of scientists", this time made up of photogenic young women (Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard), old fat guys (Laurence Fishburne, Elliot Gould, and Armin Rohde, who I swore was Tim Curry). Matt Damon is our decent American everyman with a teenaged daughter to protect. When the bad guy is a blameless virus, we need a proxy bad guy in the form of Jude Law as a successful blogger who senses an opportunity and begins promoting a homeopathic alternative to the boring old traditional wash your hands/social distancing/vaccine approach of the CDC and WHO.

Finally, as the guy in the lab coat who will explain how viral proteins interact with the cellular mitochondria, yada, yada, we get Jennifer Ehle in her first big movie role in a while. The lady who could glide through Jane Austen dialogue like a shark through a surfer handles the virology seminar at high speed while staying convincingly serious in the scenes where most disaster movies disintegrate.

Of course there are standard humanizing elements involving doomed family members, scientists, friends, etc., but they are played realistically rather than histrionically, and Damon is good as the shell-shocked husband and father. Soderbergh maintains the cool distance by relegating scenes of riots and societal disintegration to mostly off-screen events, followed by shots of empty health clubs, airports, neatly excavated mass graves, etc. I don't think there's a shot fired.

The script will be called "balanced", which is Hollywood's uncomfortable euphemism for NOT making out big pharma companies, the CDC, and the federal government as monsters. The great final scenes use the photos on the first victim's camera plus a small insertion of filmed backstory to take us back to "Day 1" with real power. The explanation of how the contagion begins to spread will make Soderbergh and Burns beloved of epidemiologists everywhere.

There is a short list of good disease movies starting with, I think, "Panic in The Streets", and "The Andromeda Strain" (1971). This is now the best.

P.S.

Behind a free registration is this article from Dr. Paul Offit reviewing the movie “Contagion”. A key paragraph,

"In Contagion, Dr. Sanjay Gupta interviews a CDC official played by Laurence Fishburne, and he gives Krumwiede equal time. It's interesting that what the conspiracy theorist talks about is people. Krumwiede confronts Fishburne with questions such as "What did you know?" and "When did you know it?" when, in fact, the issues are "How can we identify this virus?," "How can we make a vaccine against it?," and "How can we prevent its spread?" It's an issue of science, not an issue of people. But in this movie, Sanjay Gupta, playing himself, makes it an issue about people -- another example of art imitating life, because Gupta has been perfectly willing to allow antivaccine celebrities to be on his show. In another interesting example of art imitating life, Jude Law [reportedly] actually believes in homeopathy.

In summary, Contagion is an excellent movie in that it is willing to allow science to prevail over drama. It is quite well done, so I recommend it. Thank you."

Metropolitan

2011-09-16T00:57:00.001-05:00

1990, 98 min., PG-13
IMDB says... A group of young upper-class Manhattanites are blithely passing through the gala debutante season, when an unusual outsider joins them and stirs them up.

The 73rd Virgin says... A monotone but charming survey of extremely well off preppies in New York. The title card says "not so long ago" and though these look like modern kids, the dialog and attitude have a certain jazz age feel. I have no idea what era director/writer Whit Stillman had in mind, other than 1990, because I simply have never been around anyone like these characters. For some reason, when it was over, I wanted to watch "Cloverfield".

The dialog is, umm, plentiful, but the characters are engaging in the sense that half of them, male and female, seem to be channeling Woody Allen. The acting is strangely stilted like they were deliberately trying to film a stage play, but that may be because there is so much verbiage to chew through.

Briefly, a group of trust-funded Upper East-siders share a cab with a former trust-funder named Tom from the West side. Tom is somewhat financially stressed, probably thanks to his stepmother, and the group invites him to one of their chatty parties. His quasi-socialist views and blunt expression make him fascinating to the group and he becomes a permanent hanger-on. Taken under wing by the wealthiest of the group, Nick, played by the very funny Chris Eigeman, Tom slowly adopts their values and begins to rely on them for friendship. And that's kinda it.

The final lesson, gently taught, is that such groups don't last forever, and those that think they do eventually find themselves alone and confused by their fate. But there's nothing particularly sad or tragic about the discovery. New groups form.

The Horde (La Horde)

2011-09-11T01:09:00.001-05:00

The 73rd Virgin says... 2009, 90 min., unrated
Four corrupt cops go to a high rise tenement to take revenge on the gang that killed one of their own. After the cops are neutralized and captured by the gang, their tenement comes under sudden attack by zombies. Now they must team up to survive.

Yep, zombies. Like so many action horror movies the first 20-30 minutes shows promising creativity - but from there....meh. Here we get really scary baaad black dudes as the gang. But this is a French movie so the bad dudes aren't standard issue Hollywood trash talkin' homeys, but serious-as-a-heart-attack Nigerians. And, like the best zombie flicks this finds a quick creative way to show how the phenomenon develops without a bunch of exposition. This is all good, and sort of echoes the beginning scenes of the original Dawn Of The Dead in terms of wild brutality and claustrophobia

Also, the heroine (Jo Prestia) is a strikingly post-nubile (IMDB says she's 49) badass, which is inconceivable in Hollywood horror but works pretty well here. Move over Sigourney Weaver.

The whole movie is insanely bloody and violent. But those are the good points. Other than speed and strength, these zombies pretty much comply with the international Codex Zombius in that head shots always kill them, but as the mayhem begins, the heroes get dumber and dumber, always shooting at the chest rather than the head. The jumpy, sloppy HD video attack scenes quickly begin to repeat themselves, and after a while I just got sleepy. It ends as all zombie movies must, with one or two survivors and an uncertain future.

If you've seen one French cop revenge zombie kung fu splatterfest, you've seen them all. If you've never seen one, this might keep you engaged.

In The Electric Mist

2011-09-10T01:28:00.000-05:00

2009, 117 min., R
IMDB says...A detective in post Katrina New Orleans area has a series of surreal encounters with a troop of friendly Confederate soldiers while investigating serial killings of local prostitutes, a 1965 lynching and corrupt local businessmen.

The 73rd Virgin says... Predictably good acting in a predictable swamp mystery. I wish James Lee Burke would find some plot device other than hideously murdered young women. Tommy Lee Jones doesn't seem all that Louisianan to me, but he's still good to watch. Kellie Macdonald brings her "No Country For Old Men" accent over from Texas for one last run-through before heading back to Scotland. I didn't expect much from Mary Steenburgen after all these years, but she's fine as Robicheax's wife.

The dream sequences with Levon Helm as General Hood probably worked better in the book, which I've never read. Here, they seem a little too literal.

Director Bertrand Tavernier is a big name, but this doesn't feel like a big name movie. In the end, this feels like a bunch of Jones' friends decided to knock off a Burke mystery in a hurry, and they did all right, not great.

The Town

2011-08-30T20:48:00.002-05:00

IMDB says...As he plans his next job, a longtime thief tries to balance his feelings for a bank manager connected to one of his earlier heists, as well as the FBI agent looking to bring him and his crew down.
2010, R, 125 minutes

The 73rd Virgin says...Never thought I would see another Ben Affleck movie, but this re-jiggering of "Heat" is pretty darn good. Fairly believable gunfights (except those SWAT guys don't shoot too good), well set-up robbery sequences, convincing relationships between the criminals, etc. Affleck is perfectly acceptable in his home element of Boston, which he clearly loves, and Jeremy Renner is just great like he was in "Hurt Locker". Jon Hamm's businesslike FBI man is a relief after Pacino's scene chewing in Heat.

The female roles are almost as awful as those in Heat - one bank manager, dumb enough to live in Charlestown and date a sand and gravel man with uncommon knowledge of the witness protection program, the other an oxycontin addict. I wish these movies could be made without the impossibly smart and pretty girl who has a high tolerance for murderous armoured truck robbers, but apparently not.

Otherwise, a likable action and caper movie with a patina of seriousness it doesn't really earn.

The Edge of Love

2011-08-28T20:44:00.002-05:00

IMDB says....Two feisty, free-spirited women are connected by the brilliant, charismatic poet who loves them both.
2008, 110 minutes, unrated.

The 73rd Virgin says...Crappy synopsis there IMDB. Makes me want to go take Netflix's. Anywhoo, The title sounds like a satire on soap operas, or maybe not a satire come to think of it, but for some reason I kept watching.

I don't know if Dylan Thomas was quite THIS monstrous in real life and there is a long qualifying disclaimer at the very end of the credits, so maybe he wasn't. The long and the short of it is that he may have set up a WWII vet to be accused of threatening his life and illegally posessing a firearm. This is England after all, where vets aren't trusted to keep arms.

I appreciated the inexpensive but atmospheric re-creation of civilian London during the Blitz. All the characters' casual attitude toward their own safety sets the scene for tawdry envy and boredom-driven adultery. Into this maw swoops Cillian Murphy as the idealistic and romantic Army(?) recruit who is besotted with Knightley's character. Murphy is so improbably pretty that he's rather threatening, like in Batman, especially when he develops a bad case of post war battle-rattle.

All the acting is fine. Keira Knightley is very good, and even sings, according to the credits. Her part requires her to go from hard-bitten damaged goods, to an ambivalent mother, to a supportive wife of a PTSD veteran, but I sorta bought it. The baby she obsessively carries around eventually becomes a shield of sorts (and man, that baby stayed at about 13 months for YEARS). Sienna Miller's part sort of gets lost halfway through, but she's also very appealing as the needy, self-destructive wife of Thomas. Mark Rhys makes it seem reasonable that a smelly, dumpy alcoholic could make it as a womanizer in a simpler time.

The direction and script zig-zag every which improbable way but I cared enough about the characters to stay with it. I'm surprised that Knightley would make another movie so similar to "Atonement" so soon, but here I shall blaspheme and say this movie is better than "Atonement". Not much of an endorsement, I know, but there you are.

"F For Fake" - 1973, and "My Kid Could Paint That" - 2007

2011-08-27T11:47:00.002-05:00

F for Fake is about 70% fascinating documentary and rumination on art, fakery, and hoaxes, and unfortunately about 30% filler involving a hoax on the audience. Orson Welles was, as always, living his version of the high life in Europe, when he happened upon a French documentarian named Francois Reichenbach who was working on a film about a art forger and genius named, maybe, Elmyr de Hory. de Hory's biography had just been published by an obscure writer named Clifford Irving.

So what? Well, Clifford Irving was just months away from launching the hoax of the decade, all but forgotten now, in claiming that Howard Hughes had hired him to write his biography as well. So you have a world class hoaxer writing a, probably, real biography of a world class art forger, just before the hoaxer paints his masterpiece by writing a fake biography on the greatest enigma of the 20th century.

Welles bought the already shot footage from Reichenbach, included him in some additional footage, created a whole new segment about Welles' girlfriend Oja Kodar and her relationship with Picasso, dropped in some rumination on his own days as a starving artist, then as a Hollywood legend, on the nature of anonymity in the great works of man, some hilarious swipes at the notion of "expertise" and how expertise promotes fakery, and away we go.

As noted in Peter Bogdonavich's 6 minute introduction on DVD (worth watching), Welles's editing is "brilliant". Much of the film is apparently blown up 16 mm and it looks it. Welles does sequences in his "editing room", on a few cheap looking stages, in a restaurant with his adoring entourage, etc., but when he tears into the editing, you begin to see the tricks of the trade that will lead to the hyperactive jump cut editing of everything from music videos, TV advertising, reality TV, to History Channel schlock. The clips below just barely begin to tell the story and show Welles' skill. Much of it is very funny, with Welles and Irving only slowly revealing the enormity of de Hory's charm, talent and "crime".

Finally, de Hory gets the last word with "if you hang them in a museum or in your collection of great paintings, and if they hang long enough, they become real", before Welles jumps into one of the loveliest ruminations I've ever heard about art, anonymity, the achievements of man, religion, the whole enchilada, in about 2 1/2 minutes of artfully edited, maybe stock footage, of the cathedral at Chartres.

If the movie ends here, it is a 6 sheeper, but it doesn't. About 18 more minutes are devoted to a related, but less interesting topic.

Which brings us to "My Kid Could Paint That".

Spoiler Alert!! You will learn something shocking about a four year old abstract painter named Marla and her art. You can see how it all happens. Proud parents tell a little white lie about the pedigree of a painting and discover that there is serious money to be made and can't backtrack on the lie. Utterly clueless patrons project all their desires on to this strangely self-possessed little girl to the point of even seeing her as a medium. Just pitiful.

The real fun is trying to figure out who to hate most or who to pity most - the wealthy losers who bought the art, hook line and sinker (my choice), the NYT critic who did the same, the mother who mouths platitudes about wanting her little girl to be normal and happy while allowing 60 Minutes into her life, the father who shows his pride by urging his little girl to "paint the red, paint the red", the artist/dealer who spots the opportunity dropped in his lap and who, late in the movie, brutally oversells one of Marla's painting to a woman who clearly doesn't want it. After the story blows and he is back in his studio doing photorealism, he provides the title of the movie referring to modern art.

They all want so badly to believe in something that anyone who has ever been near a real child knows must be impossible. Not due to lack of genius but due to lack of time and discipline. There is a LOT of art here.

Or maybe it's the director, Amir Bar-Lev, who refuses to ask the obvious question about the nature of art even as he inadvertantly watches Marla's story fall apart on 60 Minutes.

Other than the moody music, this is a straightforward documentary with, unlike "F for Fake", no particular point of view or agenda. Maybe I should admire Bar-Lev's restraint and his willingness to let the audience answer their own questions. To his credit, when reality check time finally comes, all he has to do is cut out all the chattering adults and compare pictures painted while Marla is being videotaped with the earlier pictures for which she is famous. And boom goes the dynamite.

Marla still has a website devoted to selling her paintings - she would be about 11 by now. I have no opinion on its quality or if its "real". Remember de Hory's truth, "...and if they hang long enough, they become real."

I assume Welles is looking up or down on all this and chuckling richly and rooting for the documentary to ask the right questions - so what if it IS faked? Who is the fake, and who is the expert?

District B13

2011-08-20T22:04:00.000-05:00

IMDB says... Set in the ghettos of Paris in 2010, an undercover cop and ex-thug try to infiltrate a gang in order to defuse a neutron bomb.

The 73rd Virgin says... First half-hour, five stars. Last hour, one star. Insane opening sequence featuring a "free-running" sequence with our hero and villains skittering across rooftops, through hallways, over ledges, etc., is about as imaginative as I've ever seen, and the follow-up ultraviolent scene introducing the cop hero is fine. The bad guy actors are really, really good, especially K-2 - and the young hero is at least convincingly young and ripped.

This trailer doesn't really capture the inventiveness of the opening.

I was settling in for a top-notch chop-socky revenge movie complete with spunky cute little sister, ala Jackie Chan Hong Kong fliks, but then....a neutron bomb, an evil government plot, endless jibber-jabber about human rights, blah, blah. Coulda been sooo much better with less imagination and more plot restraint. Fun enough for instant view, I guess.

Happy-Go-Lucky

2011-08-20T21:46:00.003-05:00

IMDB says... A look at a few chapters in the life of Poppy, a cheery, colorful, North London schoolteacher whose optimism tends to exasperate those around her.

The 73rd Virgin says...Our Poppy is charming enough, but ultimately unsympathetic. Any 30-year-old who chatters incessantly and mugs for us and the camera and those around her whenever shes in a new situation should be judged an insecure and self-centered 7th grader, not Happy-Go-Lucky. The flamenco scene is just interminable.

Sally Hawkins is very good at playing an irritating character who thinks she can fix every situation if she disparages those around her gently enough. And yes all the challenges that are supposed to give her more gravity, such as the homeless guy, the bullying kid, the deeply wounded driving instructor, are freeze-dried characters who are reconstituted just in time for the plot.

I'm too uninspired to provide a clip. Here's a clip courtesy of IMDB. Now imagine a lot more of this.

The impossibly sensitive and impossibly hunky boyfriend who shows up in about the tenth reel should get the hell out - now. She will chatter him into his grave.

An Ox's Tale: The John Entwistle Story (2006)

2011-08-12T22:28:00.021-05:00

IMDB says...90 min

An intimate portrait of the legendary bass guitarist for The Who. This documentary includes the last footage ever recorded with John Entwistle, and features interviews with Pete Townshend, as well as other major figures in rock history.

The 73rd Virgin says... A good-hearted low-budget attempt to put an image on a man whose only image was flamboyant clothing, stock-still stage presence, and great bass playing. If you dont know the subject, pick up The Who's "Live at Leeds" and marvel at the delicately rolling thunder of Entwistle and Keith Moon. Also note Entwistle's vocal harmonies with Peter Townsend which are awfully good in themselves, given that he was also busy playing, to my ears, remarkably complex rock and roll bass.

There are a million videos of "My Generation" on TV with the clueless cameraman bouncing around trying to figure out who is playing that weird sounding guitar while Townsend is obviously doing nothing. The Smothers Brother's cameramen actually get it, though. Entwistle is in black.

That said, even the footage in this movie barely notices Entwistle. Peter Townsend continues as the spokesman of rock and roll survivors, at one point acknowledging that he and Roger Daltrey cut back on their lifestyles when The Who retired, but Entwistle never did, which is why he had to perform constantly, and the main reason why The Who kept coming out of retirement to give him another cash infusion.

Townsend's very generous in describing Entwistle's ability to essentially outplay him during improvisational exercises on stage. Entwistle's mother, Queenie, describes his early days, as young as 14, playing trumpet with Townsend in pubs around London.

Townshend also give compelling defense of his decision to carry on with the tour after Entwistle's death and how it feels to perform without him.

In the end, Entwistle comes off as a generous and somewhat irresponsible guy who didn't do much damage and died early because he was worn out. Sad, but with some uplift.

The Young Victoria

2011-07-28T02:24:00.000-05:00

IMDB says... A dramatization of the turbulent first years of Queen Victoria's rule, and her enduring romance with Prince Albert.

The 73rd Virgin sez... Beautiful to look at from beginning to end, and no complaints about the acting, but the story is a mess. Obscure bits of parliamentary history are presented with an apparent urge for the dullest form of accuracy, but then a completely fanciful event is tacked on at the end to no purpose other than to make sure two people, who we already know would eventually have 9 children together, stayed in love.

I, for one, would have liked to know how Albert solved the problem of who washes the outside of the windows and who washes the inside at Buckingham palace. That would have been entertaining and more useful in understanding his apparent brain power and new way of thinking than the intricacies of how ladies in waiting are selected and a bunch of inaudible mumbling from his uncle Leopold in Brussels. A decent love story, but otherwise disappointing and, near the end, just stupid.

Quintet

2011-07-28T02:05:00.002-05:00

IMDB says... Rated R, 1979, 118 minutes

During a future ice age, dying humanity occupies its remaining time by playing a board game called "Quintet." For one small group, this obsession is not enough; they play the game with living pieces ... and only the winner survives.

The 73rd Virgin says... I remember the awful reviews when this was released. I thought I should discover it for myself. Wow, it's awful. If Tarkovsky directed DeNiro in The Love Boat it couldn't be less apt than Robert Altman's and Newman's Own attempt at post-apocalyptic paint-drying. Cheesy sound, cheesy music, cheesy filter over the edges of the lens, Newman reading his lines off a wall apparently. The one special effect involving Rottweiler's always eating something in the background. Heavy. Even the dogs seem bored.

The American Friend (Der Amerikanische Freund)

2011-07-18T01:33:00.003-05:00

IMDB says... Not Rated, 1977, 125 minutes

Tom Ripley, who deals in forged art, suggests a picture framer he knows would make a good hit man.

The 73rd Virgin says... Hard to say why I liked it. Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper are very funny in several scenes, and the scene on the train is pretty much slapstick, but I never really believed Ganz, the picture framer, was dying. And we know so little about him, that it's hard to know why he slips so easily into the role of hitman.

The initial plot device of art forgery is quickly dropped for some kind of broad and ill-defined American mafia war. Perhaps we are supposed to see the irony that he is rigidly ethical about suspected art forgers but more flexible about killing people. And Ganz's wife is so inscrutable and blank and, well...German, that its almost a relief when they get into a slap fight.

I guess the movie feels intelligent and keeps you guessing, and there is some suspense, nice cinematography and very watchable actors. Be forewarned, most fans of the Tom Ripley novels hate this movie. Never read 'em. Don't care. Maybe I'm just a Wenders snob.

Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin / Les ailes du désir)

2011-07-16T23:26:00.032-05:00

IMDB says... PG-13, 1987, 127 minutes

An angel tires of overseeing human activity and wishes to become human when he falls in love with a mortal.

The 73rd Virgin says... Peter Falk died a while back. I can't say I ever paid any attention to "Columbo", although my wife says she watched it. Other than "Princess Bride" the only impact he made on me was in the unlikeliest movie I've ever considered great, "Wings of Desire". If I had to defend each of my top 10 favorites, I could do so effortlessly - except for this one. Seriously, it's about angels. I can't think of a single angel movie I've ever come close to liking. But words fail at describing the cumulative effect of scene after scene of languid, drifting, pearly, black and white camera work and hours of Berliners or Berliner angels droning about what it is like or must be like to be human. The clips below don't really do justice to the whole, but they do focus on Falk's skills (and provide some warning about just how German this movie is gonna get near the end).

It's not even Falk's movie really, but his warmth and humor mirror perfectly with Bruno Ganz's warm and wry angel Damiel. Here is a long scene without subtitles (about 20% of the movie is in English), where Falk sketches a portrait of an extra, while ruminating on the process.

And the scene below that closed the deal for me the first time I saw it in 1987 - notice the casual elegance with which Falk drops his cigarette before he rubs his hands together. That's how a man smokes. This scene didn't make me want to smoke but it did make me think harder about finding good coffee.

Finally, human Damiel tries to sneak into Falk's picture and discovers that Falk came over from the angel side years ago. Apparently every fallen angel gets a suit of armor as their grub stake when they become humans, so they compare notes.

I must admit I agree with Jay Carr when he writes in "Foreign Affairs" (Mercury House, 1991.) "When the angel who turns in his wings and the lady on the flying trapeze finally meet, the moment almost gets away from them in a declaration of love that's marked by a startlingly teutonic earnestness." It is a strange scene even by German standards even though it includes the great line "at last it's becoming serious", which may appeal to women more than men, I'm afraid, but it does communicate a certain finality and relief.

And it runs fully five minutes like this with only two brief cuts - whew. But, in the next scene Damiel speaks for many of us when he says, "I learned astonishment that night". That's more like it.

So ends an almost indescribably romantic, somber, and occasionally funny movie. Below Falk and Wenders briefly describe how his voice overs were done almost as an afterthought.

Bruno Ganz continues to act into his 70s and he did an unmatched Hitler in "Downfall". Dommartin did many of her own less challenging stunts here, although I suspect the shadow shots are the trainer/double listed in the credits. Sadly, she keeled over rather suddenly of a heart attack in 2007 at 47. RIP all around.

Wim Wenders did a victory lap in 1993 with his sequel "Far Away So Close". It's not nearly as good, but it has its moments and is worth a review sometime.

True Grit - 2010

2011-07-15T00:11:00.018-05:00

IMDB says... PG-13, 2010, 110 minutes

A tough U.S. Marshal helps a stubborn young woman track down her father's murderer.

The 73rd Virgin says... Never read the book. The original movie is one of the best of the dying years of the Western. This is even better. It is difficult to overstate the gratitude I feel that the Coen brothers have finally turned their attention to a Western. Not quite "Unforgiven" or "No Country for Old Men", but easily the best movie I have seen in the past couple years.

I assume without knowledge that the lovely contraction-free dialogue is period appropriate. It is one of the best features and is even better when contrasted with Bridges gruff delivery. Kim Darby's Mattie Ross was one of the most unique heroines of the last 50 years, and Hallie Steinfeld fills her shoes. I admire that, as cute as she can be, she is also allowed to be tall and rawboned and gawky rather than just wise beyond her years. The overly precocious teenager is one of the most tiresome movie cliches but she pulls it off thanks to the care with which the lines are written and delivered.

I also admire the Coen's recreation of a beautiful starlit sky projected over Cogburn and Mattie during their last run. Only plains people would bother with this detail, but who sees it knows it. Between the snows of "Fargo", the scrub of "No Country For Old Men", the tornado of "A Serious Man", and this, they acknowledge how landscape affects stories and characters. The Coen's also wisely leave the final shootout and hilarious dialogue pretty much unchanged from the original movie, and finally end it as all real westerns should end, with one figure walking away from a grave.

Black Death

2011-07-15T00:03:00.002-05:00

Netflix sez... (2010) R

Sean Bean stars in this historically rooted horror-thriller as Ulric, a church-appointed knight in the age of the Bubonic Plague's first wave who's tasked with investigating rumors of a woman (Carice van Houten) who can bring the dead back to life. A young monk (Eddie Redmayne) named Osmund is aiding Ulric on his quest to root out the necromancer -- and to determine whether or not she has ties to Satan.

The 73rd Virgin sez... Without having to change costumes, Sean Bean wanders over from "Game of Thrones", and Eddie Redmayne wanders over from "Pillars of The Earth". Both find verdant scenery to chew and greasy sweat to sweat and frothy spittle to fleck. Endlessly filled with bloody gurgles and bright red lawn sprinkler effects, to no particular purpose, culminating in a jump-cut edited drawing and quartering.

There are about twenty minutes, as our ragtag team of evil Christian blood-thirsters comes under the spell of the enlightened but equally vicious pagans, that are really, really spooky - like "Valhalla Rising" wanted to be, but without the giggles. And quite unintentionally, we are allowed to begin rooting for the Christians. Sniffing the burning sulfur of reverse blasphemy, the script closes out with a tacked on voice-over ending that shows the one character guaranteed to NOT become a psychopathic Christian witch-hunter, becoming exactly that. Whew...that was close.

Bean is always watchable and you are drawn in by his character's unquestioning belief in necromancers, demons, witches, etc. Redmayne is actually pretty convincing as the slightly cowardly dogma-questioning monk who accompanies the group in part to find his girlfriend, and John Lynch is a dead-ringer for late period Keith Moon. But the rest is just pointless with some howlingly modern sounding dialogue and voice-over (yes, he actually uses the word "germ" in the intro). Another in a long series of Euro government and private industry funded projects designed apparently to just infuriate Christians, and which consequently never make it to US theaters. Some, like "Agora", have been pretty good. This one blows.

Happenstance (Le Battement D'Aile du Papillon / The Beating of the Butterfly's Wings)

2011-07-10T19:04:00.000-05:00

Netflix sez... 2000 R 96 minutes

When wide-eyed Irène (Audrey Tautou), a horoscope-believing, hopeless romantic, exchanges glances with a young restaurateur on a train, it's love at first sight. But they'll continually intersect -- through dozens of other people's lives -- before they meet. French writer-director Laurent Firode's fanciful, "What if?" film co-stars Faudel, Eric Savin, Lysiane Meis, Eric Feldman and Nathalie Besançon.

The 73rd Vigin sez... This movie keeps working on me. My first reaction was rolled eyes, but as it progressed I realized it was actually kind of wickedly subversive. Maybe I watched a different movie than my Netflix brethren and sistren who found it cute.

The thing I like about it is that all the characters, except maybe the cheated upon wife, are somewhat vicious. All are liars, either pathological or run of the mill. All perform acts of at least thoughtlessness, and more often cruelty. How the hero and shero are brought together by the intervention of a dropped pebble, a pigeon dropping, sand blown out a window, etc. is all rather too fey, but how their random acts of unkindness - she dresses down a smelly homeless man, he drops a cockroach in a fellow immigrant's coffee - finally earn them their broken noses and marginal redemption is rather challenging and unique. The only thing likable about them is their appearance.

So this dreary, tired premise turns out to not nearly as cutesie as one might fear. One great line, "He looks so miserable that I almost like him."

The Host

2011-07-09T02:10:00.000-05:00

Netflix sez... 2006 R 119 minutes

In Seoul's River Han, a giant mutant creature has developed as a result of toxic chemical dumping. When the squidlike monster scoops up the teenage granddaughter of humble snack-bar owner Hie-bong (Hie-bong Byeon), he races to track down the murderous beast. With no help from the authorities, who are convinced the girl is already dead, Hie-bong and his family will have to band together to save her -- and possibly the entire city.

The 73rd Virgin sez... Solid special effects and good acting in what looked like was going to be a tired old mutant monster from toxic waste, etc. plot mode. But when the mutant monster goes tearing through sun-drenched holidayers, it gets quite a bit more interesting. Even more interesting when the dysfunctional family of a missing little girl engages in broad slapstick while trying to rescue her. Her father is a sleepy loser who scratches himself in inappropriate places, her uncle an angry college grad with no career, her aunt a painfully methodical Olympic archer who does everything, including running from cops and aiming at monsters, very slowly, and her loving but befuddled grandfather in charge.

All sorts of unusual plot devices and humor and horror until a poignant, and rather surprising end. Fine monster flick.

Monsters - Reconsidered

2011-07-03T21:36:00.018-05:00

Netflix still sez... 2010 R 93 minutes

Six years after aliens invaded Earth, a security force maintains tenuous control in the Infected Zone straddling the U.S.-Mexican border. Andrew (Scoot McNairy), a photographer, is documenting this war-torn area when he's interrupted by an unexpected rescue mission. Samantha (Whitney Able), daughter of a media mogul who just happens to be his boss, needs an escort home, and Andrew reluctantly takes on the job.

The 73rd Virgin retreats and sez... Maybe I was distracted and watching out of the corner of my eye, or maybe just irritated by the minor distraction of open borders polititics, but for some reason I saw this as a 3-star "tolerable low-energy monster movie with limited but sometimes effective special effects and interesting atmosphere and acting". A few weeks later after mentioning to my wife that she might enjoy it more, we watched it again and the effect was very different. The beginning is straight out of the "Iraq War is a downer playbook", but is effective nonetheless.

The hero is still stupid, but very well played by Scoot McNairy. If McNairy is partly responsible for the dialogue then he's partly responsible for the only major downside of this experience. The heroine, played by one Whitney Able, aside from an unlikely third world trekking outfit, is suitably somber and emotional without being a typically brainless heroine.

Otherwise, this is true art-house monster flickery. The producers, apparently for very little dinero, manage to do the most important thing in any sci-fi/horror movie, that is, create a convincing alternate reality, no matter how silly the premise, and move the story along. See below how they drop a quick Spanish-language public service announcement about wearing a respirator when the jets fly over, but still manage to move the story along with dialog.

My previous review also said, "If Wim Wenders remade Paris, Texas - with monsters, it might look like this." What I missed is that Wenders wouldn't care about moving the story along. This story keeps moving, slowly at times, but manages many nice flourishes that make the pace seem worthwhile. In one of the best scenes the script does a great job of changing the vibe by having the main character say "the vibe just changed", and then using what was probably an existing "Day of the Dead" celebration, and with clever editing, turning it into a believably mournful display of the havoc wrought by the monsters.

Anyone travelling in Latin America has experienced the rapacious ticket-counter dude and here he is beautifully played, and again, advances the story. No wasted exposition. You learn it all from signs and brief conversation.

Later on our hero displays his newly developed soul by deciding to cover a dead child rather than photograph it.

Finally they pass through a destroyed suburb (thank you Galveston) to their final nighttime "aliens sex at the gas station" scene (not included here), which one must admit, is pretty original.

The ending circles back around to the beginning Pulp Fiction-style and we're left to speculate what happens to these characters we've been observing for 90 minutes. A year from now, this might be 5 sheep. For now it is a slightly holey story, beautifully done.

The Best of the Johnny Cash TV Show: 1969-71

2011-07-03T20:45:00.000-05:00

Netflix sez... 1969 NR 2 discs

Airing from 1969 to 1971, "The Johnny Cash Show" showcased the musical talents of the country's best artists; this collection rounds up some its most memorable performances, featuring the likes of Ray Charles, Roy Orbison and Bob Dylan, among others. Country legend and host Cash also performs some of his greatest hits, including "Ring of Fire," "I Walk the Line," "A Boy Named Sue," "Man in Black" and many more.

Cast: Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, John Carter Cash, Bill Walker, Penny Lane, Marshall Grant, Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong, Stevie Wonder, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Linda Ronstadt, George Jones, Waylon Jennings, Tammy Wynette, Marty Robbins, James Taylor, Pete Seeger, Carter Family, The Statler Brothers, Carl Perkins, The Tennessee Three, Mother Maybelle, The Carter Sisters, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Derek and the Dominos, Charley Pride, Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys, Loretta Lynn, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Everly Brothers, Ike Everly, Tommy Cash, Ray Charles, Conway Twitty, Tony Joe White, Glen Campbell, Neil Diamond, Ray Price, Roy Orbison, Chet Atkins, Homer and Jethro, Merle Haggard, Roy Clark, Hank Williams Jr.

The 73rd Virgin sez... Seeing the country and popular music lodestone Mother Maybelle Carter play wicked guitar, in a ridiculous floor length dress so favored by country performers at the time, is more than worth your while. My teenage daughter watched her guitar solo and said "Jesus!". All other performances are either rare or great or both. Even Kristoffersens voice was tolerable 40 years ago. CCR, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and James Taylor almost never appeared on TV back then, and they are all very good here. Young's "Needle and The Damage Done" must have been recorded at least a year before the Harvest album came out, so that says something for the adventurousness of the show.

Joni Mitchell looks uncomfortable around the pillar of genteel testosterone that Cash was, but sings beautifully and respectfully, and Linda Rondstadt is a revelation in more ways than one. A slicked-back Waylon Jennings and the young, silent, smirking Jessi Colter (sp?) on keyboards are a hoot when you consider what they became. Interviews and voice-overs are dull and repetitive, assigning social significance but ignoring the most significant virtue of all, that is, a skilled and respectful performer and musicologist got to program his own music show. And he went with all quality. Very entertaining for any popular music fan.

DISC 2 UPDATE: The second disc suffers a bit with too much June Carter Cash poetry and comedy bits, but there is less blathering about the importance of the show. Derek and The Dominos were together no more than a year, and yet here they are in clear video and full stereo. Astonishing bits of history abound.

Led Zeppelin: The Song Remains the Same

2011-07-02T22:43:00.000-05:00

Netflix sez... 1976 PG 136 minutes

The pioneers of hard rock take the stage -- and blow your mind. Led Zeppelin storm Madison Square Garden in this collection of footage taken from their legendary performances at the New York venue in 1973. Adding to the musical power and drama are hallucinatory fantasy sequences meant to illustrate each band member's mental state. Songs performed in this swirl of sound and vision include "Black Dog," "Stairway to Heaven" and "Whole Lotta Love."

The 73rd Virgin sez... Mostly great music. If you have no use for this kind of white boy blues rock whatsoever, then there isn't much to see here. As a self-inflated teenager, I thought they were everything that was wrong with the culture of the time, at least until "Saturday Night Fever". But sometime in my 30s my ears began to hear what was so obvious to all my high school friends. Jimmy Page's iron-fisted control of their sound and production (his name is in the credits as the sound editor I think), really pays off in relation to the awful sound of so many concert movies.

Almost everything great in 70s blues rock and almost everything hilarious in "This is Spinal Tap" is contained herein. Powerful, if outrageously self-indulgent performances, mixed with godawful set pieces involving Robert Plant with a horse and sword, John Paul Jones in a horror movie knock off, Page climbing some rocks (pretty challenging looking rocks by the way) to meet with a Druid, and John Bonham playing with his cars and his cows.

And yes, there is an interminable guitar solo and an interminable drum solo, while the rest of the band wanders off stage, and Plant's trouser armadillo is in your face a LOT. But Page is a young energetic guitar-god revelation (in high-waisted devil-worshipin' slacks to hide the paunch). To think that 5 years later he would be so strung out that he would have to play sitting down is interesting. And Plant hadn't blown out his voice yet, so he still sounds like it is 1969. Watching manager Peter Grant bust management's chops for letting unlicensed artwork be sold at Madison Square Garden confirms his reputation as a bad dude who would single-handedly trash record stores that carried bootleg LPs. The simplicity of their cramped stage and limited pyrotechnics only brings into relief the remarkable charisma and power of the whole band.

Too long, too stupid, too uneven, but still entertaining. Watching them fly off in their personal 707 at the end pretty much says it all about the era. You can smell the 70s from here. But mostly great music.

The Prestige

2011-06-26T00:19:00.001-05:00

Netflix sez... 2006 PG-13 130 minutes

At the dawn of the 20th century, rival magicians Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) endeavor to reveal each other's secrets. Obsessed by the escalating competition, the two illusionists begin to perform increasingly risky tricks, which soon turn deadly. Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson and David Bowie also star in this taut psychological thriller from director Christopher Nolan.

The 73rd Virgin sez...
Surprisingly lifeless. 2 hours and 10 minutes to determine that all is not what it seems in the world of magic. Multiple trick endings, one of which becomes obvious at about 1 hour and ten minutes and the other that becomes obvious at about 1 hour 30 minutes, that only raise our interest by causing us to ask, "Are they really going to use that as an ending?" Yep. Also, I didn't think Bale could play lumpy and dull, but he nails it here.

So a couple suggestions. If you're going to focus on two amoral characters, then the plot has to move quickly enough to remain interesting, otherwise you start to notice how small they are. And if you're going to reveal the mechanisms of the ending through the dodgy method of flashbacks, you can't reveal the ending with an hour still to go. David Bowie and Andy Serkis as Tesla and his Igor are diverting but not enough so, and as the movie drags along the increasing boostiness of Scarlett Johansson's bustiere probably reveals they knew they had a problem with maintaining interest. It helped, but not enough.

Jesus' Son

2011-06-26T00:01:00.001-05:00

Netflix sez... 1999 R 107 minutes

Nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, director Alison Maclean's reflective drama follows FH (Billy Crudup), a well-meaning drug addict who stumbles backward into redemption. When his longtime love (Samantha Morton) leaves, FH follows her but meets and falls for the older Mira (Holly Hunter). Amid his life's wreckage, a near-fatal car crash and a chance to save a child's life force FH to examine his existence and its meaning.

The 73rd Virgin sez..."Talk into my bullet hole and tell me I'm doing all right". So goes one of the many great one-liners in this jumbled account of a charming and attractive but clueless drug user who everyone refers to as "Fuckhead". It's hard to call him an addict because he has such a hard time finding the resources to stay high. He's not really amoral, in fact he sort of tries to do the right thing, at least relative to the zombies around him.

The movie isn't really a tragedy or even a drama, although people are dropping like flies. It is gritty without being gray and funny without being dismissive of the grim. Sort of the flipside of "The Panic in Needle Park". The split screen scene where Fuckhead and Dennis Leary split a dose of heroin to different effect is rather poignant. So is the ending where this probably permanently damaged loser finds his place at AA and working in a care facility for the handicapped or brain damaged. But even as he touches the closest thing to redemption that he is likely to experience, he is also developing a peeping-Tom habit.

Other than being a bit too fit and muscular, Samantha Morton is about as convincing a druggie as you'll ever see in Hollywood. Her clueless expressions and red, ragged face are just perfect. You can almost see her teeth falling out. Compare this to her role as Ms. Smith in Emma, and be amazed. Jack Black has a couple hilarious scenes, and Billy Crudup's Fuckhead is a perfect imitation of that future-less guy you knew in high school. The Virg is surely not the only ultra-hipster to recognize "...when I'm rushin on my run, and I feel just like Jesus' Son" from "Heroin", but what surprises me is how entertaining this remains even with "all the dead bodies piled up in mounds".