Last Friday, I saw Death at a Funeral. First thing on Saturday morning, I went to a funeral. Happily, the funeral was not as funny at the movie. It wasn’t funny at all. Everything happened according to plan. There was none of the alarming, sidesplittingly funny mayhem that fills Frank Oz’s instant classic.
I'm a fan of Parker Posey, but I went to see Broken English primarily to see Melvil Poupaud. I seen him in only two other movies. In one, Le Divorce, he plays a finky husband who walks out on his family, much to the chagrin of his aristocratic family. Then, in Le temps qui reste, he plays a snotty fashion photographer who is humanized by the process of dying from cancer. He is tall, but so lean that he seems not quite filled out, and accordingly vulnerable. When he composes his mouth just so and opens his big brown eyes, he erases the difference between thinking and feeling. The stillness of his motion suggests that everything needing to be worked out has been worked out. He is a very interesting actor, and he is suited down to the ground for a film by anyone with the name "Cassavetes."
You think that the fumes of a movie set in downtown Manhattan and the center of Paris would follow me to my favorite NoLIta bistro on Prince Street (the film was showing at the Sunshine), but I was so engrossed by Alexander Waugh's Fathers and Sons at lunch that I was transported to Somerset - a county that I have yet to visit in person.
Reading A O Scott's robustly unfavorable review of Laurent Tirard's Molière yesterday morning, I reconsidered seeing the picture, but in the end I stuck to my plans. My response was so different from Mr Scott's that I can only conclude that his French isn't very good. I will say that Molière is a movie for people who are already familiar with the great French writer's oeuvre. It is witty in a way that the English rarely are and we Americans never. This is not to say that it's empty or stylized; if anything, it fills Molière's classical vessels with strong contemporary sentiment. Perhaps that is what Mr Scott meant by saying that the movie seems "designed for immediate obsolescence." But I loved it.
¶ Molière.
What I love most about IMDb is its power to relieve those headaches that come on when I'm sure that I've seen an actor before, but can't for the life of me place him or, more usually, her. It's more usually her because women can transform themselves utterly simply by radically rethinking their hair. I don't know how long it would have taken me to figure out that Julie Gayet, who appears in Patrice Leconte's Mon Meilleur Ami, is also in Un Monde Presque Paisible, Michel Deville's intensely lovely 2002 feature.
Daniel Auteuil is certainly keeping busy. He was in four movies last year, of which two, La Doublure and Mon Meilleur Ami, have been released here. Why does it take so long? Are subtitles that difficult to whip up?
I already know what I'm going to see next week. Barring unforeseen obstacles, my Friday movie will be Molière, starring Romain Duris.
Okay, here's what happened. I had a long and, in his word, "bibulous" lunch with Éduoard on Thursday. Among other things, we talked about Transformers, which I couldn't believe he'd been to see. But his copain had wanted to go. "I've seen much worse," he confided, and then he went on to tell me about a very funny scene involving the actress Julie White. Well, how bad could the movie be?
Getting home shortly past six, I was in a dangerously effervescent state of mind. Kathleen was going to work late, but the idea of spending the evening alone was bleakness itself. Unable to rustle up a dinner companion, I decided to go to the movies. The only thing showing up here that I hadn't seen was - Transformers. So I went, and I had a great time. It was definitely a movie to see after a long and bibulous lunch in a not-overcrowded theatre.
I fully planned to see something less CGI-assisted on Friday morning, but after a late dinner with Kathleen at which we got to know a neighbor who happened to be sitting outside the restaurant where we met ("May I join you?" "Sure!"), I didn't get to bed until late, and when I woke up I was suffering, if not the hangover I deserved, a complete lack of endorphins. Leaving the apartment was inconceivable. At the same time, I had no idea what there was to write about Transformers. It was too difficult to think about. I pulled up the covers and read R K Narayan's delightful 1958 novel, The Guide.
¶ Transformers.
At the 10 AM showing of Ratatouille at the Orpheum yesterday, there were lots of kids, and they seemed to have a grand time, but I frequently made up a laughing party of one. As someone familiar with French cooking and nearly capable of speaking French myself, I was impressed by the film's gentle and understated Francophilia. As befits an action comedy, Ratatouille is unencumbered by explanatory sermons, but instead of wallowing in cliché it simply presents the French ambiance in an attractive, almost enviable light.
Ratatouille was preceded by a droll Pixar short, Lifted. Call it an amuse-gueule. Oh, and the movie was screened without a hitch for a change.
¶ Ratatouille.
No matter what the reviews said, I was bound to see Evening. I don't miss Meryl Streep's movies, ever (a statement that is not inconsistent with the fact that I have not seen all of them). And I was hugely curious about her daughter, Mamie Gummer. What would Meryl Streep's daughter be like? A lot like her mother, is the answer. A lot. Glenn Close as a forbidding matron was too delicious to pass up. I've become a fan of Claire Danes lately, too. Toni Colette, Natasha Richardson, and Eileen Atkins were all icing on the cake. A Newport wedding in the Fifties. How bad could it be?
It took longer than I thought it would for me to like the movie. That's probably because it wastes no time on exposition: you have to figure out relationships as best you can. Once you do - for me, the moment came in the scene where Lila dances with Harris on the night before her wedding - the movie becomes tender and poignant. Whether or not it really makes sense is a question for afterward, when the film is over. That, I find, is when too many people make up their minds about movies. They sit in a café and try to make sense of what they've just seen. If they can do this easily, they're happy about the film. If they can't - if questions about character, motivation, or sheer plausibility begin to sprout, they will feel confused, and probably decide that the film wasn't all that good. That's why I believe that you can't really make up your mind about a movie until you've seen it a second time. Until then, I try to hold on to what I felt in the theatre. What I felt in the theatre was my handkerchief, with which I was constantly wiping away tears.
(Of course, I cry during previews if they're done right.)
¶ Evening.
When you look at the list of movies that Téa Leoni has made since Flirting With Disaster (1996), you have to decide between the following propositions: (a) Ms Leoni has a terrible agent, (b) she exhibits unguessed-at tics that make her hard to work with or (my favorite, c) they don't know what they're doing in Hollywood. Even Lucy at her sassiest couldn't deliver lines with such deadly, you're-probably-too-dumb-to-diagram-this-sentence aplomb.
Finally, she's got a part that she deserves, falling for a hit man played by Ben Kingsley. In an early scene, she smiles beatifically, but as a rule she doesn't look amused when she's cracking jokes. As romantic comedies go, You Kill Me is, if not dark, then very grave. These are real people we're talking about - or so it seems. So it really seems. I myself don't go to the movies in search of real people. I live on 86th Street, and there are plenty of real people right outside my front door. I have been known to find the "real people" effect mightily tedious in the theatre. So there's a extent to which I like You Kill Me despite itself. Always a funny feeling.
Just thinking out loud, but I wonder if I ought to have a rating system. Oh, not to measure what I thought of the movie. But rather to suggest how enthusiastically I'd recommend it, and to whom. Knocked Up, for example, is a slam-dunk example of a movie that everybody in this country ought to see (and elsewhere, too). Le Valet is the perfect movie for anyone who likes Gallic farce - and that's a lot of New Yorkers. You Kill Me is the sort of picture that garners every shade of appreciation and dislike.
There's no getting around the really strong performances, though. Ben Kingsley has effectively acted his way into a stratosphere beyond criticism. I hope that someone will give Téa Leoni the chance to do the same.
It has been interesting to watch the face of Pascal Greggory, a major supporting actor in French film who often has leading roles in ensemble pieces, change with age. He used to have good looks of a very distinctive nature; in certain shots, he looked vaguely monstrous. Nowadays, he looks a lot like a finer-featured Bruce Willis. He exudes the same wary weariness. He is one of the many top-notch stars who make Olivier Dahan's La Môme a solid achievement as well as "a major motion picture."
The genius of this film is that it presents a true diva, in a scenery-eating role, that nonetheless never slights the other actors. Mr Dahan makes sure that you know that Édith Piaf did not live in a vacuum of egotism. Marion Cotillard, in the title role, may be at the center of every scene, but it's only the center that she occupies. There's plenty of room for the others.
The narrative line of La Môme is rather complex, and if I were truly diligent I would see it again before writing about it. When I acquire it on DVD, I promise to revisit it.
In the men's room of the Angelika, after the movie, some geezer in a stall was actually singing "Je ne regrette rien." His command of the lyrics was not commendable.
PS: I think that A O Scott's review in the Times is wrong, wrong, wrong, and I hope that what I've had to say about the movie will counter his hastiness.
Perhaps the clearest way of announcing my substantial recovery from Thursday's crisis is my essay on Knocked Up, Judd Apatow's new hit. It could not have been written by a depressed person or a psychotic person or even a drunk person. It did take too long to write; I'm far from the top of my game. While I feel well enough, Kathleen tells me that my face looks drawn, and I'm sure that she's right.
But for Paul Rudd (who was also in Mr Apatow's first movie, The 40 Year Old Virgin), the actors were unknown to me before I saw the film. That's very unusual for me, and I'll sometimes avoid movies whose stars are unknown, not because I demand name brands but because unknowns are so often the best that an indifferent project could attract.
¶ Knocked Up.
I hadn't expected to see Waitress. The trailer was a bit hyperglycemic for me. All that pie! All those Southern accents! Waitresses working in a diner-like restaurant. And Keri Russell is really just too pretty.
But there I was, casting around for something to see last night. Ordinarily, of course, I see movies on Friday morning, as early as possible, but yesterday I had a very important engagement elsewhere. I thought I'd look for something in the later afternoon, but by the time that came around I was a bit tired and wanted only to go home and read.
Kathleen, however, instead of working until ten o'clock, scheduled a facial for seven. She was out at a little past eight. But even though she went back to the office to tidy up some things, she wanted to go to the movies. I was in no mood to leave the neighborhood by that time, but I was confronted with unusually limited choices. Across the street, they're showing Shrek III in all four auditoriums. At the Orpheum, a further four theatres have been dedicated to showing off Johnny Depp. So, in the end, Kathleen and I met at Burger Heaven at nine and strolled over to UA East at ten.
(I rarely complain about movie theatres because I rarely have any reason to. But conditions were poor at the UA East. The women's bathroom had overflowed shortly before our arrival, and the auditorium felt airless and almost-too-warm all the way through the film. Boo!)
¶ Waitress.
As a rule, I stay away from horror/slasher flicks. Who needs to have all that gore sloshing around in one's imagination? I'm familiar with the argument that these films provide young men with a ritual opportunity to display their unflinching bravery while girlfriends burrow into their shoulders with awestruck admiration. I'd have flunked. I well remember going to the men's room seven times (at least) when I saw Alien, in Nashua, New Hampshire, in 1979.
But Severance attracted me for two reasons. One, Toby Stephens. Mr Stephens is the son of Maggie Smith, but I didn't know he existed until I rented a video about the late Princess Margaret, The Queen's Sister. Mr Stephens plays Anthony Armstrong-Jones, Lord Snowdon. I've since read that he prefers the stage to the screen. If that's actually the case, then his participation in Severance is hard to explain.
Or perhaps it isn't. Severance is a first-class satire that is long on menace and short on actual horror. If it were a porn movie, you wouldn't see anybody's privates. A great deal is left to the imagination, which, in my case, certainly rose to the occasion. I was glued to my seat, however, because the movie is also very funny.
The second draw was basic: an eleven-o'clock screening at the Angelika. Once I leave Yorkville, the Angelika is the easiest theatre to get to in all of New York. (The 86th Street East, across the street from my apartment, is showing Shrek III on all four screens. What's one to do?)
I still can't believe that I went to see Severance.
Leaving the theatre after watching a movie for the first time is a highly variable experience. Having seen Avenue Montaigne, for example, at the Angelika, in Soho, and then walking out on to Mercer Street toward a favorite bistro for a croque monsieur, I felt that the only difference between the film's world and mine was the local language. Walking out of the Orpheum, right into the heart of Yorkville, after George Rule - now, that was as traumatic a shift as anything short of a plane crash can be. Let me just say that George Rule is very much set in the mountains of Idaho. There are few spots on the globe that seem as distant from my little neighborhood.
Had I been out of my mind to pay to see something starring Lindsay Lohan? In the struggle for sanity, I began writing the film up right there on the sidewalk, and I had worked out a lot of what you'll find at the other end of the following link by the time I'd walked the long block home. To answer my question, no, I had not been out of my mind.
¶ Georgia Rule.
Sometimes location determines which movie I see on Friday, but I'm very glad that it did today, or I'd have missed Fracture. I had no idea how gripping it would turn out to be - and how interesting. Ordinarily I give lawyer-movies a wide berth. Aside from Anatomy of a Murder, there's nothing duller than courtroom scenes, and although the law is presented more realistically now than it used to be, it still necessarily omits the COLOSSAL TEDIUM that the practice of law entails. Fracture avoids each and every pitfall of the genre. And yet it has a comfortable familiarity about it that both promises and delivers certain satisfactions. And, I have to say, Ryan Gosling's performance is every bit as impressive as Anthony Hopkins's.
Ignorant of all this wonderment, I chose the movie because it was showing on 86th Street. I wanted to go to the Met afterward, for lunch and another look at the new Greek and Roman Antiquities Galleries. For that reason alone, I almost went to see Lucky You, because it began at eleven. Fracture didn't start until an hour and a half later, and I actually took a taxi to the museum to be sure that I'd get there before the cafeteria stopped serving cheeseburgers. I actually considered such offerings as Disturbia and The Invisible. Every now and then, it's important to see something that's off your charts - in the wrong direction.
I looked at a lot of Greek pots, some of them rather lewd. Satyrs often sprout erections - you can tell that they're satyrs because of their pony tails and their squished, unheroic profiles - but there's a late pot in which a tumescent gent is actually approaching a couched female.
I also took another look at Gentile Bellini's portrait of Sultan Mehmet II, the conqueror of Istanbul. The portrait belongs to the National Gallery, London, so I'm trying to drink it in. The sultan's nose is so aquiline that you might miss the irregularities of his mouth, partly concealed as it is by his beard. His eyes manage to be both "humanistic" and sinister.
This season's Roof Garden installation, which opened the other day, is a show of large sculptures by Frank Stella. One wonders how they got these mammoth bits of welding up there. Then one looks out of the spring-green carpet of Central Park's treetops, soaking up the brilliant sunshine. Then one walks home.
¶ Fracture.
After the movie on Friday, I went to Jacques Dowtown for lunch. It's on Prince Street, and very charming. I didn't get there until the bartender had gone on lunch break, so I had to be content with Sancerre. Memo to self: if movie starts late - the first showing of La Doublure (The Valet) at the Angelika was at noon - come back uptown for a croque.
Yesterday, I went down to the Angelika to see Year of the Dog, Mike Smith's eccentric but very funny movie about a woman whose life is undone by the loss of a dog. I don't think that I've ever really noticed Molly Shannon before, doubtless because I haven't watched Saturday Night Live since the late 1970s.
But it was Peter Sarsgaard who stuck in my mind. What a protean actor he is! In Jarhead, I thought he must be Kiefer Sutherland's younger brother. His interesting drawl, I suppose, is the legacy of a childhood in southern Illinois. When I got home, I had to see something else with him in it, and I hit upon The Dying Gaul, Craig Lucas's extremely powerful romantic triangle, with Patricia Clarkson and Campbell Scott. I think that it's Mr Sarsgaard's finest performance. He makes grimness unusually interesting.
As long as I was in the neighborhood, I went to McNally Robinson on Prince Street and bought Hermione Lee's new biography of Edith Wharton. I had intended not to, at first. I read R W B Lewis's biography when it came out in 1975, so I know the story. But the rave reviews reminded me how much I'd enjoyed Ms Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, another book that I thought somewhat unnecessary when it appeared. And I realized that over thirty years have passed since the Lewis book was new.
I also yielded to an impulse and bought Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts. I don't know that I'm going to like it, but I've bit into it. The book in my pile that I really want to read is Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris, but I'm saving it as a treat.
It seems that I go to nothing but foreign movies.
It's a good thing that I went to see what's advertised here as Black Book on Wednesday evening, because there wasn't time on Friday for going to the movies. I had the house to clean. Later today, we're heading across to Hudson for a gathering of Kathleen's cousins, three of whom (sisters to boot) will be in the same place for the first time in a while. Tomorrow, I'll be cooking and then serving.
Update: Owing to illness in New Jersey and extreme fatigue here, we won't be going anywhere today, but one of Kathleen's cousins has come into the city and will stop by for a visit, with her daughter and her niece, both of whom were children when I saw them last. One of them I haven't seen since she was a very little girl indeed. Now she's taking a college tour with her mother.
This week's movie was Susanne Bier's Efter brylluppet (After the Wedding), starring Mads Mikkelsen, with Rolf Lassgård, Sidse Babett Knudsen, and Stine Fischer Christensen. After the Wedding is a deeply affecting film about family and regret, and about the natural limits of benevolence.
It's also impossible to say more than that without giving away the plot, so stop here if you want to be surprised by the movie.
On the strength of Anthony Lane's rather strong review, a 10:15 showtime, and sheer proximity, I went to see Mike Blinder's Reign Over Me yesterday. I expect that it's going to be a very big hit. It's not often that I like a picture that would also entertain the staff at a trading desk, and I can't wait to talk about it with people who have seen it.
It's nearly two, and I've just come back from breakfast across the street, where we watched stragglers from the St Patrick's Day parade drift down 86th Street. The parade terminates at Lexington Avenue these days, not Second, so we're spared most of the drunks and detritus, not to mention the motor coaches and traffic barriers. Kathleen will give me an eyewitness account of the moraine when she gets to the office. When we parted after breakfast, she headed for the bank and the subway, right in the thick of things.
Ordinarily, I'd be dusting and vacuuming and listening to one of Bach's Passions, but I'm feeling sheepish about not having seen the Eric Rohmer film, L'amour l'après-midi, known here as Chloe in the Afternoon. The movie that I saw yesterday, Chris Rock's I Think I Love My Wife, is said to be a remake. I don't know why I've seen none of Mr Rohmer's films aside from L'anglaise et le duc, but I've not always been as enthusiastic about French movies as I am now. In any case, that's what I'm about to do - see L'amour l'après-midi.
***
Watching L'amour l'après-midi, a grave, talky, but extremely interior film, I wondered how it had ever held the interest of a brash American comedian, much less inspired him to remake it as a comedy. And what a fascinating remake I Love My Wife is! If you set aside the interpolations that make it funny, the newer picture is remarkably faithful to the original in terms of scenes, sequence, visual details, and, not least of all, dénouement. But the result of this fidelity is to emphasize the vast difference between the respective protagonists' romantic adventures, as well as the gulf between French cinematic sensibility thirty-five years ago and its American counterpart today.
Another puzzle: what would I have thought of L'amour l'après-midi if I hadn't seen I Think I Love My Wife?
It was back to the Angelika again yesterday, this time for Avenue Montaigne. This time, though, I'd done a little homework. I'd recently learned that one of my favorite neighborhood bistros, Jacques, has a branch on Prince Street in NoLIta, so that's where I went afterward. While I enjoyed my croque monsieur, I read Diane Johnson on a new Turgenev biography in The New York Review of Books. I decided that it was time to read Turgenev, so on my way back to the train I stopped at McNally Robinson, where I bought two novels by the Russian author. I also bought something I've meant to get for a long time, the Penguin Montaigne. It seemed especially apt today.
Two movies. I saw two movies yesterday. I saw one in the middle of the other. I was up early and all that, and I'd narrowed the Friday Movies thing down to two movies showing in the hood, but I didn't want to see either of them. They were just convenient. That was Thursday night. In the morning, I felt a little stronger, a little more Angelika-prone. I reupped the Google. The Important Movie was showing at a good time. I reupped the Google during a bathroom break that I took in the first third of Idiocracy. Time to turn off the tape and boogie là-bas. Went to see The Lives of Others. I did my pathetic little Angelika block stroll: Being a visitor from the Upper East Side, get off the first car at Bleecker Street and walk underground to Broadway and Houston. Climb the stairs, cross the street, walk a block. When the movie's over, exit onto Mercer Street and turn right. At Bleecker - you're on the street now - turn right again, and keep walkin' 'til you find yourself with the strangest choice ever presented by the MTA: which entrance to the Uptown 6 is the right one? They are most suspiciously equidistant. Back at the manoir, I scoped the rest of Idiocracy.
Happily, our new doorman is an idiot, so when the Video Room people came for the one-night pickup, the DVD couldn't be found. Will Howard charge me? He didn't last time. The DVD was right there where it was supposed to be when we asked after it, and I brought it home. Then I thought: interesting scenes of the future for Kathleen to see!
And I was so right. She has been keeping herself going on coffee for really rather too long, and it seemed unlikely that she'd fall asleep comme d'habitude. Selected scenes from Idiocracy weakened her nicely. Afterward, reading Joan Acocella on Marguertie Yourcenar put her out.
Controlled demolition, man.
Two movies. I saw two movies yesterday. I saw one in the middle of the other. I was up early and all that, and I'd narrowed the Friday Movies thing down to two movies showing in the hood, but I didn't want to see either of them. They were just convenient. That was Thursday night. In the morning, I felt a little stronger, a little more Angelika-prone. I reupped the Google. The Important Movie was showing at a good time. I reupped the Google during a bathroom break that I took in the first third of Idiocracy. Time to turn off the tape and boogie là-bas. Went to see The Lives of Others. I did my pathetic little Angelika block stroll: Being a visitor from the Upper East Side, get off the first car at Bleecker Street and walk underground to Broadway and Houston. Climb the stairs, cross the street, walk a block. When the movie's over, exit onto Mercer Street and turn right. At Bleecker - you're on the street now - turn right again, and keep walkin' 'til you find yourself with the strangest choice ever presented by the MTA: which entrance to the Uptown 6 is the right one? They are most suspiciously equidistant. Back at the manoir, I scoped the rest of Idiocracy.
Happily, our new doorman is an idiot, so when the Video Room people came for the one-night pickup, the DVD couldn't be found. Will Howard charge me? He didn't last time. The DVD was right there where it was supposed to be when we asked after it, and I brought it home. Then I thought: interesting scenes of the future for Kathleen to see!
And I was so right. She has been keeping herself going on coffee for really rather too long, and it seemed unlikely that she'd fall asleep comme d'habitude. Selected scenes from Idiocracy weakened her nicely. Afterward, reading Joan Acocella on Marguertie Yourcenar put her out.
Controlled demolition, man.
I'm all for formulaic movies, so long as they've been sanded down here and there and stamped with loving cleverness. Music and Lyrics is such a movie. Mass audiences will enjoy the romance, and savor the comedy of then-and-now pop styles. Sharp viewers will treasure the profusion of coherent details. Everybody's happy.
"Whoa, it's Stifler's Mom."
I'll see Jennifer Coolidge in anything. No one is funnier just standing still. The clip above does not come from Epic Movie, but can you tell me what she's saying?
Find out here.
What a situation! There were only three movies out there that I was thinking of seeing, and my first choice, Because I Said So, got an awful review in yesterday's Times. So did Factory Girl, my second choice. I even considered Epic Movie, at least until I discovered its MetaCritic rating, a perilously low 17. Although Factory Girl, the movie about Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol, and - oops! - a Bob Dylan-like figure, scored a 37 to Because I Said So's 30 (how abysmal is that?), the latter movie won my admission, partly because it was showing at eleven, right across the street, and partly because I'm crazy about Diane Keaton these days. (She has really shed Georgia Mozell, the creepily self-absorbed sister in Hanging Up.) I wound up liking Because I Said So very much. It occurred to me that today's critics are unlikely to be the parents of grown children, and therefore unable to sympathize with Ms Keaton's overprotective mom. I knew exactly what she felt, even though I knew she was going to have to change her ways. (In the end, love of another kind changes them for her.)
Call it a "chick-flick" if you must, but Because I Said So very well may feature the breakout performance of Gabriel Macht, a boy from the Bronx who seems at times to be channeling George Peppard, who shone at a time when "boyish" meant anything but "immature."
Read more about Because I Said So at Portico.
Yesterday, I saw the movie that I wanted to see last week, but didn't because of the 12:30 starting time. (I wanted to go to the Museum afterward for lunch and a look.) In other words, Guillermo del Toro's El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth). It was an instance, not common for me, of seeing a film against my "better judgment" and being very grateful that I've done so. As a rule, I've found Spanish films something of a stretch, and Laberinto's fantasy elements looked to be somewhat off-putting. I didn't read the reviews when they appeared, but slowly caught the very favorable buzz: this is a movie that everybody wants to see. It will keep us all chattering for years to come.
El Laberinto del Fauno tucks a strange and dark fairy tale into a brutally realistic episode from the Spanish Civil War. (It is presumably fictional but not far from the awful truth.) A girl who is absorbed by fairy tales accompanies her pregnant mother up into the Pyrenees so that the expected child can be born at the camp of its father, Capitán Vidal. The captain, whose vicious ruthlessness feeds on fascist narcissism, is in charge of a major assault on a band of recalcitrant holdouts. The movie forces you to confront the brutality of the Civil War by killing off most of the characters in which you've invested some care: don't expect anyone in particular to survive. Suffice it to say that the captain's campaign is something of a losing battle.
Ofelía, the girl, soon finds herself attended by pixies (they morph from long, scary-looking beetles) and led into an ancient labyrinth near the captain's HQ. Here she meets the Faun (I don't think I'd have called him "Pan"), a friendly figure who tells her that she must undergo three ordeals in order to find out whether she embodies the spirit of the underworld princess from her favorite story. Many viewers, I'm sure, will conclude that Ofelía is deeply deluded, her mind broken by severe environmental stress (for starters, she certainly doesn't care for the captain). That's one way of resolving the tension between fantasy and realism. I'm happy to let that tension vibrate: perhaps the fantasy is as real as anything. What makes Laberinto so powerful is the degree to which the captain's dreadfulness is matched by the terror of Ofelía's ordeals. The tone of the film is, for the most parts, uniformly grueling, but many moments of intermittent charm keep it fresh and engaging.
The four principal actors are superb. Ivana Baquero is a wonderful Ofelía, with an open, tenderly pretty face that recalls Kate Beckinsale's in Cold Comfort Farm. Sergi López, whom I could swear I've seen in something, is magnificent as Capitán Vidal, a man of demented pride who can set his face at an almost wrinkle-free repose. Maribel Verdú plays Mercedes, the captain's principal servant, as a woman onto whose face the dolorousness of the Civil War has been etched. Doug James, who hails from Indianapolis and who apparently is no stranger to prosthetic costumes, acts the part of the Faun, which I assume to have been dubbed in Spanish. Adriana Gil and Alex Angulo are also very good as Ofelía's mother and the local doctor, respectively.
Coming out of the theatre, I could only think of what would happen had this film been set during World War I, in Turkey - the time of the Armenian genocide that official Turkey finds it impossible to acknowledge. El Laberinto del Fauno is unflinching about the atrocities that brought Francisco Franco to power and kept him there until his death. In the space of a generation, Spain has joined the rest of modern Europe, but Laberinto reminds us that nothing turns the coal of fear into the diamond of beautiful insight more predictably than ardent oppression.
You wouldn't think that Shawn Levy's Night at the Museum would be a difficult film to appraise, but in fact I'm going to have to see it a few more times before I can tell just how worthy it is of being bracketed with Galaxy Quest (1999). Galaxy Quest appears to be a satire of Star Trek, but its real target is American entertainment in general, and all of its brainy details show up, in one way or another, the brainlessness of mass showbiz. Night at the Museum is not a satire, and its details are not exactly brainy. But it builds on its jokes quite cleverly, and its goofiness is disingenuous. You can tell that (the uncredited) Owen Wilson was involved. Bullshit is hauled offscreen before it can pile up.
The story is simple enough. Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) is an failed entrepreneur whose son, Nick (Jake Cherry), can't bear the disappointment that his Dad has become. Finally without options, Larry swallows his pride and looks for a job. He lands the night watchman slot at the Natural History Museum, a failing institution on Central Park West (only on the outside to be confused with the American Museum of Natural History). During his first night on duty, he discovers that the creatures on display come alive at night. Keeping the mayhem from getting completely out of control is so exhausting that Larry almost quits. On the second night, Larry shows up prepared, but it turns out to be a mistake to give the Neanderthals a cigarette lighter, and in the morning he is almost sacked by the museum's director, Dr McPhee (Ricky Gervais). Given one more chance, Larry decides to share the wonder with Nick, whom he smuggles in at closing time. At the appointed hour, nothing happens, because the three daytime security guards (Dick van Dyke, Mickey Rooney, and Bill Cobbs) have stolen an Egyptian plaque bearing the curse that keeps things lively. I can't for the life of me remember what happens next, but all hell breaks loose. The next morning, the director is appalled by television reports of a T Rex footprint in the snow in Central Park and of the Neanderthals waving torches from the museum's cornice, but changes his mind about firing Larry when he discovers that attendance is way up.
Night at the Museum abounds in stellar cameo performances. Anne Meara (Mr Stiller's mother) is kindling-dry as a skeptical employment agent; Paul Rudd is maddeningly unctuous as Nick's stepfather. Mr Gervais is a sort of British Nathan Lane, with Brylcreem for blood, and he splutters through his part with unsmiling glee. The girls - Carla Gugino as Rebecca, Larry's girlfriend-to-come; and Mizuo Peck as Sacajawea - aren't given very much to work with, but Ms Gugino is savvy and Ms Peck knows how to make her character's grave composure funny. My favorites were Mr Wilson as Jedediah and Steve Coogan as Octavius. This duo is a pair of warring diorama figurines who spend every night trying to break into one another's window. Jedediah belongs to a display about the transcontinental railroad, which is just what you'd expect to see next to the Roman Forum, and his raving macho is beautifully matched by Mr Coogan's visible agony - oh, how he hates his Roman drag, especially the plumed helmet. I have a feeling that some of the ersatz Hunnish lines spoken by Michael Gallagher as Attila are going to creep into those crevices of society already receptive to Animal House. The character played by Robin Williams almost throws a monkeywrench into the machinery when he confesses that he is really a wax dummy from Poughkeepsie and not Teddy Roosevelt, but by the time Rebecca is getting help on her dissertation from its subject, Sacajawea, most viewers will have forgotten the slip.
There should be no need to state that Ben Stiller has a ball.
Venus, the new film directed by Roger Michell and written by Hanif Kureishi, is not the soft and sweet movie promised by the trailer. I don't believe that a fully honest trailer would have done anything but unnecessary damage to this honest and beautiful film. After all, it's one thing to be lured by a spry Peter O'Toole to a movie about ageing and facing death, and quite another to be lured by ageing and facing death to see any movie whatsoever. In the second case, there isn't going to be much of a lure at all, and trailers are designed as lures. Sometimes the only alternative to a misleading trailer is no trailer at all - unthinkable. In the case of Venus, no harm was done.
Peter O'Toole, born in 1932, is not really an old man yet, so unless he has suffered a premature decline, his performance in Venus is a great piece of acting. At the beginning, Mr O'Toole's character, Maurice, is in somewhat better shape than his pal, Ian, also a elderly actor (Leslie Phillips, b. 1924), but in the middle of the story Maurice undergoes prostate surgery, and then insists on leaving the hospital before he has quite mended. Equally befuddling is his intoxication with Jessie (Jodi Whittaker), the daughter of Ian's niece, a girl who has ostensibly come down to London to take care of him. Ian, who doesn't seem to like women, can't bear Jessie once she arrives - and no wonder. She eats snacks and drinks beer (and stronger) more or less without interruption, a regime at odds with her objective of becoming a model - a conflict that the film declines to explore. Indeed, Venus does not take its title character (Jessie) very seriously. She is more flawed goddess - but then what goddess wasn't? - than real girl. Curiously, this approach works better than the alternative would have. Mr Michell and Mr Kureishi, by putting us in the place of an ageing man who knows that he's submitting to Eros for the last time, give Jessie an integrity that she mightn't have had otherwise. Maurice knows, and we know, that his interest in Jessie is essentially carnal, and when Jessie bats off his advances, demure as they are, we share Maurice's guilty knowledge that he is something of a vampire, feeding on Jessie's youth. Being a goddess, moreover, means that Jessie is not averse to well-behaved, strictly regulated adoration. A more ordinary young lady might be helplessly revolted by Maurice's attentions.
The early scenes of Venus are droll; there is almost nothing from the second half of the movie (as I recall) in the trailer. Ian is a fusspot, and given to elaborate exchanges of insults with Maurice, who, one gathers, always had the bigger career (he's still working). One suspects that it would kill Ian to laugh. The other two people in Maurice's life are sunnier but still very bracing. There's Donald (Richard Griffiths), who's very good at ego-deflation, and Valerie (Vanessa Redgrave), Maurice's ex-wife. Maurice and Valerie have arrived at being on good terms, but she never lets him forget what a shit he was to leave her, decades ago, with three children under six. He cannot deny that he always put his own pleasure first. At their last meeting, Valerie divines that Maurice is aflame again.
It's in the post-surgical scenes that Maurice falls apart. His decay is presented with the lightest of hands. All we need is a glimpse of his catheter bag to know how dreadfully his freedom and dignity have been compromised. There are a few crashes and breakages, but Maurice's condition is expressed primarily is slow, stiff movements, and facial expressions clouded by pain. Sometimes the scene is simply hard to read. Mr Michell favors underlighted sets in this picture, and he makes them work for him. There are gorgeous moments when Jessie's face appears to loom out from Vermeerian shadows. Maurice may be impotent and incontinent, but his longing for Jessie only burns more brightly.
The crisis occurs when Jessie tries to introduce her own proper boyfriend (Bronson Webb) into the picture. Actually, the boyfriend is anything but proper. He's a scowling man of few words who smokes a lot and affects disdain. In fact, he can't even provide Jessie with a place where they can be alone. So he has the bright idea of getting Jessie to ask Maurice for the loan of his flat - would he mind going for a long walk? Besieged by a chaotic chorus of voices from shows that he has done, Maurice returns to the flat perhaps a tad too soon, and one thing leads to another. This time, the crash is not funny at all, but a sickening, humiliating racket.
The last ten minutes of the film teeter between the predictable and the new, finally coming down on the side of the latter with a marvelously evocative scene that shows us just how much - and it's a lot - Jessie has learned from Maurice. It is the kind of learning that only a love affair, consummated or not, can confer. It is more than learning how to pose like the Rokeby Venus. It is learning to feel the erotic tides that surge through Velásquez's great painting, a masterpiece that, in its quirky, shambling, candid way, Venus lives up to.
The Holiday may be a feel-good movie, but as a Nancy Meyers feel-good movie it's sufficiently dry and verbal to render the fantasy settings and outcomes interesting. Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslett are so unalike that they give us two movies, and their stories are told in different tonalities as well. Amanda (Ms Diaz) is a neurotic producer of movie trailers who starves her boyfriends of attention and then throws them out when they're unfaithful. It takes her about ten nanoseconds after her arrival in an English cottage to meet cute with Graham (Jude Law), the brother of the woman, Iris (Ms Winslett), with whom she has swapped homes for the holiday. Amanda and Graham fall immediately into each other's arms and then spend the rest of their half of the movie trying to have a good time without getting too serious, because Amanda will be returning to Los Angeles in a week or so. When Amanda cries for the first time since her parents' divorce (she was fifteen), she knows that she has met Mr Right, and she asks the driver to turn the car round.
I pointed out Amanda's profession because Ms Meyers plays with it amusingly, interrupting Amanda's reveries with imagined trailers about her own romantic ineptitude. I might add that the one "actual" trailer that we see - Amanda's latest production - "stars" Lindsay Lohan and James Franco. Mr Franco fires big guns with both hands without looking totally ridiculous - and that's the laugh. You realize that the action is ridiculous. This is how Ms Meyers works. She makes us register our derisive reactions to cinematic clichés without actually prompting them.
Iris, meanwhile, experiences a more layered holiday, and love sneaks up on her. Her meeting cute is with her neighbor, Arthur Abbott (Eli Wallach). Arthur is a retired screenwriter on a walker, and once he befriends Iris, he prescribes a list of movies for her to watch that all feature women with "gumption." Iris's problem, you see, is that she is the "best friend" in her romances, never the "leading lady." This has enabled her to suffer the on-again, off-again attentions of Jasper, a bedroom-eyed Lothario that it can't have been a stretch for Rufus Sewell to play. Arthur, in turn, benefits from Iris's warmth and enthusiasm; it's not an overstatement to say that she brings him back to life. This is where the film could have been unendurably bathetic, but Mr Wallach's wary good humor acidulates the water. Meanwhile, Miles (Jack Black - he cleans up fairly well here), a composer of movie scores, circles in gently but intently. Like Iris, he puts up with too much abuse in his love-life. When Iris and Miles discuss this similarity, they seem to make a pact; and when, not much later, they manage, simultaneously but in different locations, to break the cycle, it's because each of them has drawn strength from the other. Their union at the end might be rather too much the legion of the decent (we are spared any of this couple's lovemaking, although we see the other one in bed), but that's what feel-good movies do: they make unlikely matchings seem plausible, if only until the credits roll.
The difference between the two love stories is well exemplified by each woman's experience of the other's home. Amanda's sprawling Beverly Hills mansion, loaded with comfort, allows Iris to open up and delight in her life. Iris's exiguous Surrey cottage, with its stingy mod cons, forces Amanda to face her devils - although she would have left after her first night if Graham hadn't shown up. Iris's story is a comedy of healing; Amanda's is a screwball comedy.
Repeated viewings of Nancy Meyers's Something's Gotta Give have given me some idea of what it must have been like to sit in Depression-era movie palaces and float away on Hollywood dreams. It isn't just the opulent housing and the great wardrobes. Ms Meyers is fantastically creative with the passage of time and the covering of distances. If she introduced a genii-loaded lamp into the action, her stories would not be any less improbable. But she knows that we're on to her, and she keeps us distracted us with treats. No filmmaker is as dead serious about light entertainment, and none makes it so seriously satisfying.
John Curran's The Painted Veil is a great big conventional movie about romance and reconciliation set against a dramatic background, and as such it will be dismissed by filmgoers who prefer edgier fare. Its story, from a novella by W S Maugham, is sheer opera: having discovered his wife's infidelity, a British MD serving as a laboratory scientist in Shanghai blackmails his wife into accompanying him into the heart of a rural cholera epidemic (the year is 1925). On her remote hillside, the wife grows up, volunteers at the orphanage, and eventually wins back her husband's love, but of course it is Too Late. The movie is shot with the cinematic equivalent of big Verdi arias, and anyone who likes grand old Hollywood dramas will fall in love with it. The sugarloaf mountains of the Guilin region of Guangxi Province provide China's most picturesque scenery. Diana Rigg, as a French nun, is almost as craggy and every bit as beautiful. Edward Norton is very fine as the cuckolded doctor; there are things in this film that the actor has not done before. Liev Schreiber is droll as a suave cad, and Toby Jones demonstrates that he can be terrific even when he's not impersonating Truman Capote. The movie belongs, ultimately, to Naomi Watts, and for the same reason that Up at the Villa belongs to Kristen Scott Thomas and Being Julia belongs to Annette Bening: Maugham wrote great women's stories. They're period pieces now, but they still work. They were notorious for their sexiness when they were new; now they're simply and easily adult. Ms Watts is, perhaps for the first time, wholly adult. She's young and foolish but she is not a girl. This is a movie for grownups.
Speaking of adult, I saw The Painted Veil at the Angelika. As I was walking back to the subway along Bleecker Street, I saw a grotesque advertisement on the side of a building. Between the cellphone and my palsied hand, I couldn't hope for a clear picture, but this is clear enough. The legend reads "Happy Holidays from Adult Swim." Those huge mouths, full of too many teeth, are fascinating and monstrous.
Not in the best of moods, I set out yesterday for the movies without being absolutely sure where I was going. It was ten o'clock. If I could find a cab, I'd cross town to see For Your Consideration, a film that Kathleen forbade me to see without her but which I wasn't willing to wait for DVD to see, at 10:30. It was playing across the street from here on Thursday, but then it disappeared (Friday marks the changing of the guard). If I couldn't find a taxi, then I'd see Borat, which I really don't want to see at all, at 10:10. If, thanks to looking for a taxi, I was too late for Borat, I'd go to Casino Royale at 10:15. I don't want to see Casino Royale in the theatre, either. Although I'm a big fan of Daniel Craig, I have no use whatever for James Bond.
These options simmered right up until ten past ten, when, at the corner of 86th and Third - right across the street from the AMC complex where Borat and Casino Royale were showing, I spotted a free cab. So I got to see For Your Consideration after all, at the AMC complex at Broadway and 84th.
Boy, did the critics screw up on this one! Lavishing mostly tepid reviews, they failed to see what I was in fact expecting, an even stronger distillation of the essence of parody that Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy have been producing in a remarkable string of films, Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind. Every moment of For Your Consideration is electrically amusing. Filmmakers have been making fun of Hollywood for years, but never before, I think, has a movie focused, as this one does, on the eagerness with which Hollywood's victims surrender to its ministrations. Nobody fights back. Nobody goes home, worldly-wiser, in the way that Lynn Bracken returns to Arizona at the end of LA Confidential. All one can say of Marilyn Hack, the character at the center of For Your Consideration, is that it's a pity that she's still alive at the end.
Catherine O'Hara is beyond brilliant as Hack, so painfully good that she appears to have crucified her face for the sake of the story. It's the kind of story that Americans hate: crazed by the promise of fame, a more or less well-adjusted person goes off the rails. Hack is an instant-coffee version of Norma Desmond, and although Ms O'Hara is much funnier than Gloria Swanson, she is no less serious. In another totally remarkable performance, Parker Posey allows her face to be more conventionally lovely than it has ever been before - this is to say, more blandly beautiful. And then she lets us drink this face in as it drinks in the awareness that, in Hollywood, pretty faces are a dime a dozen. And, finally - because I can't praise everyone in the show; we'd be here all day - I want you to know that, if you think that you have seen Jennifer Coolidge do airhead to perfection before, you are mistaken. While I hope that Hollywood will eventually make it up to Ms Coolidge by letting her play the Nobel Prize-winning operator of a particle accelerator or, in the alternative, the editor of The New Yorker, I think that the bimbos that she has impersonated for Guest & Co are as delicious as a box of treats from the chocolatier, Belgique. And while we're talking about nailing roles for life, nobody, but nobody is a bigger asshole than the assholes that Fred Willard plays. His hairstyle, in For Your Consideration, deserves its own billing.
Do not miss this movie!
As announced, I went to see History Boys yesterday. I saw a slightly later showing, though. Arriving at the M66 bus stop near Lexington Avenue, I saw that the block between Lex and Third was blocked off by construction. It was far too cold to hang around for the (unlikely) possibility of a bus, so I sped to Park, where I took the first cab I saw, even though it was going uptown - the wrong direction.
In the taxi, I called my friend Nom de Plume. She had a hard day in front of her, stuck at home waiting for gas and cable to be installed in her new-to-her Brooklyn apartment. When she answered the phone, though, it was with a joyous note that told me that the gas and cable people had come and gone. I offered to wait for the next