by ·Comments Off on Juno (2007, Jason Reitman)

A new movie that did not start at the end, and had opening credits! What’s the world coming to?

This year’s little miss sunshine indie-rock dream-team cast: Ellen Page from Hard Candy, boyfriend Michael Cera from Arrested Dev./Superbad, parents Allison Janney (West Wing?) and JK Simmons (Spiderman’s boss), and adoptive parents Jason Bateman (Arrested Dev.) and Jennifer Garner (Elektra). Ellen gets knocked up and gives the baby for adoption but restless Bateman breaks up his marriage so Garner gets baby by herself and Ellen starts hanging with Cera again, the end.

Waaay overbaked dialogue written by a showoff blogger and a cutey sitcommy setup made it the darling oscar-nom hit of the year. Movie is either a hateful, opportunistic, love-desperate mockery of teen pregnancy, abortion, adoption, marriage and parenthood… or, as Katy says, it’s great for being a funny and clever movie (which it is) which portrays real behavior and choices not commonly seen at the movies.

I’ll decide later.

by ·Comments Off on Michael Clayton (2007, Tony Gilroy)

As with “Before The Devil” which I saw the same day, it’s a bit of classical hollywood storytelling without a very innovative story. This one I loved, however, and “Devil” just seemed okay.

Directorial debut by Gilroy, writer of the Bourne trilogy and junk like “Armageddon”. Starts at the end (not quite the end), and don’t know about opening credits beause I was a few minutes late. Opens with the only calm moment in George’s few days (few weeks? I forget), his pulling off the road and wandering into a field to admire some horses. George is middle of the shot with his look of tired awe, on one side of the frame a horse very close, on the other George’s car idling down on the road. Just when I’m thinking “what, are they trying to show George as being caught between nature and technology?” the car fuckin explodes and the movie begins.

George is the company fixer at a law firm run by the awesome Sydney Pollack (Eyes Wide Shut) and is called in to deal with his good friend, the awesome Tom Wilkinson, who has gone nuts in the middle of a multi-year class-action suit defending a horrible company who hurt a buncha people… a company with a legal team run by the awesome Tilda Swinton. So it’s already shaping up to be a pretty awesome movie. Tom gets killed (set up as suicide) and George loses his faith, ends up with Tom’s evidence against the company he was supposed to defend, and presents it personally to Tilda in one of the most gratifying, well-deserved righteous climax scenes I can recall. What’s next is even better, with George just on fire, going downstairs and out to a cab, driving off in one long shot, camera fixed on his face as the closing credits roll and we watch George veeeerrry gradually loosen up, realizing that he’s won.

by ·Comments Off on Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007, Sidney Lumet)

Starts in the middle, no opening credits.

Only awards it’s winning this year are for ensemble acting. Phil Hoffman is the debt-ridden drug-addict stealing from his employer and about to get caught, and Ethan Hawke is his spineless loser brother behind on alimony payments and sleeping with Phil’s wife. Their aged jewelry-store-running parents are Albert Finney (ugh, amazing grace) and Rosemary Harris (spiderman’s mom). Hawke’s ex-wife is Amy Ryan (from Keane) and Hoffman’s cheatin’ wife is Marisa Tomei (In the Bedroom).

So yeah, a real good cast (esp. an awesome Finney). Movie just seemed alright, though. Your standard crime story of desperate men getting a little greedy, going deeper and deeper over their heads, ending up with a lotta death and no money.

Phil coordinates the crime to knock off his parents jewelry store but delegates the actual holdup to Hawke, who hires a guy who shoots (and is shot by) their mom. Mom dies, dad wants revenge, goes to a known diamond fence (cool Leonardo Cimino, who was playing old-man roles twenty years ago), tracks down his own sons. The brothers are blackmailed by the girlfriend of the dude who died, so Hoffman wipes out the girl’s brother and Phil’s own drug dealer, gets himself shot and hospitalized where Finney fuckin’ kills him in the hospital bed. Ethan runs but is too big of a loser to get away.

Movie comes off kind of unengaging, shot not as coolly detached as “Little Children” with its silly narrator, but not exactly sympathetic either. Comes down to a sweet old couple with some extreme fuckup kids who destroy the family. Kind of depressing. Wouldn’t call it a must-see movie.

by ·Comments Off on White Mane / The Red Balloon (1953/56, Albert Lamorisse)

The Landmark theater of course played these Academy-ratio films in widescreen, ho-hum.

WHITE MANE, b/w, boy who lives on the marshes in southern France with his father and little brother (played by director’s son / star of Red Balloon) loves a wild horse, wants to capture it. Nearby ranchers also want to capture it. After a chase, boy rides the horse into the river and floats away, swept out to sea.

RED BALLOON, bright color, boy finds balloon which magically follows him around the city. Adults conspire to keep him away from his balloon, and other kids want to steal and destroy it. When the kids are successful, balloons from all over the city fly over and lift the kid up over Paris.

Jimmy says both movies are about the perils of acquisition. Both have somewhat the same ending… the kid getting (more or less) what he’d desired, a sense of freedom and imminent danger.

The two won a bunch of awards at Cannes, and Red Balloon got an original screenplay Oscar beating out The Ladykillers and La Strada. Remarkable for a movie with almost no dialogue. The two share excellent camerawork and primitive post-synched sound. I haven’t heard of anything else by photographer Edmond Séchan. Lamorisse made some other lesser-known children’s movies, including the earlier “Bim” and a widescreen Red Balloon sequel “Stowaway in the Sky”. The documentary he was filming over Iran when he died in an accident got an Oscar nomination after its completion. Best of all, he invented the board game RISK in ’57.

by ·Comments Off on The Savages (2007, Tamara Jenkins)

I wonder who was impressed by this? I guess reviewers are calling it “honest” and “human”. Jenkins’ “Slums of Beverly Hills” was authentic and funny, from what I can remember, but much more a typical Sundance indie-flick than a great promise of a new artistic voice. Here’s another autobiographical family portrait, more uncomfortable and sad than funny (but it still had its moments of humor). You want to give her credit for making a film about parents getting old, having to be put in a home, with kids not knowing what to do… but not so much credit that the movie can get away with being as uninteresting as this one ultimately is. Mostly consists of Phil Hoffman and Laura Linney underacting in totally drab settings, and I expect that I’ll have forgotten it by March. Has the bad fortune to come out the same year as “Away From Her”, which dealt more with the issues that I thought Savages would be dealing with… in fact, Savages is more about kids not wanting to deal with an elderly father who they never liked or got along with in the first place. The father’s shuffling from his girlfriend’s house (she dies in the prologue) to a home to a hospital to his death is all done reluctantly and with a minimum of effort. When the old man dies, the dark clouds disperse! Frustrated writer Linney suddenly has offers to publish her plays and Hoffman is bright and alert and everyone’s happy. I dunno, a pretty alright movie and not a waste of two hours, but I won’t go out of my way to watch her follow-up nine years from now.

by ·1 Comment

Worst JL movie I’ve seen so far. I can’t believe this was the (directorial) follow-up to “Nutty Professor”.

Lewis is of course the title patsy. A famous singer/entertainer dies, and his handlers don’t know what to do with themselves. They want to continue their partnership, keep doing what they were doing, but how can they without a star to support? Enter clumsy bellboy Lewis. His character is sweet but SUCH a loser that it’s impossible to suspend enough disbelief to believe that the handlers would unanimously adopt him instead of taking maybe an hour to look around, or more likely holding a casting call.

Hardly ever funny, the romantic bit seems forced, movie’s sole reason to exist seems to be so Lewis could work with some high-class supporting actors, so here they are:

Everett Sloane (Disorderly Orderly, The Enforcer, Citizen Kane)
Phil Harris (Anything Goes, The Jungle Book)
Keenan Wynn (Piranha, Laserblast, Point Blank, Parts: The Clonus Horror)
Peter Lorre (M, Maltese Falcon, Mad Love)
John Carradine (The Howling, Frankenstein Island, Red Zone Cuba)

Ina Balin (The Projectionist 1971) is the girl, the heart of the picture, and Scatman Crothers gets one good scene.

Jerry is called the “king of comedy” once, and Ed Sullivan refers to having Martin & Lewis on the show before.

a patsy:
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L-R: Lorre, Wynn, Lewis, Carradine, Balin, Sloane, Harris
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this was his final film:
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the mushy flashback scene:
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funny ending, dismantling the set:
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UPDATE: Senses of Cinema calls it “a discourse on comedy” and points to the scene where Jerry almost but never quite breaks all the priceless vases as an example of defying comedic expectations. See attached comment for a more thought-out opinion than mine.

by ·Comments Off on Walk Hard (2007, Jake Kasdan)

Somewhat-funny comedy with some good moments, but mostly made me wonder when it would be over. Did not leave in a good mood, and things only got worse from there.

Tim Meadows was the funniest part. Harold Ramis funny too. Dewey Cox’s love interest is in the American “Office”. Everyone’s favorite scene was Dewey’s meditation with The Beatles: Jason Schwartzmann, Jack Black, Paul Rudd and Justin Long (of “live free die hard”). John C. Reilly good, but not awards-good.

Katy liked the songs.

by ·Comments Off on Meet Me In St. Louis (1944, Vincente Minnelli)

“Personally, I wouldn’t marry a man who proposed to me over an invention.”

The biggest MGM hit of its time, featuring original (original!) songs “clang clang went the trolley”, “meet me in st. louis”, and “have yourself a merry little christmas”. With the awesome Judy Garland (of Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy).

Seven-year-old Margaret O’Brien (Tootie) was second and third billed in three major 1944 movies, and won an honorary Oscar for this one. I’ll bet no seven-year-old has done as well in a single year since. Neither has Margaret, who starred in two big pictures in ’49 then disappeared to television.

At least two girls are trying to get husbands (Judy nabs the next-door neighbor at the very end, after trying hard for the whole movie) and, along with little Tootie, are blowing every little thing way out of proportion, as girls tend to do. Some excellent side plots, such as Tootie’s Halloween challenge to “kill” an intimidating neighbor (throw flour in his face). Halloween was much more anarchic and fun back then – the kids build a bonfire out of furniture in the middle of the street. The title refers to the world’s fair, which the family sadly is going to miss because Dad got a big promotion and is moving them all to New York. Happy ending: he picks his hysteric family over job advancement, Judy is to be married, and Christmas is merry after all.

Silent star Mary Astor (Two Arabian Knights, The Palm Beach Story, Maltese Falcon) played the mother. The other sister, who nobody seems to care much about, older than Tootie by a few years, was in Leo McCarey’s The Bells of St. Mary’s the next year. I could swear oldest sister Rose looked familiar, but no she hasn’t been in anything else I’ve heard of. Servant woman Katie became famous as “Ma Kettle” in ten movies over the next ten years. Handsome boy next door John Truett worked through the seventies, when he appeared in The Boy Who Stole The Elephant and A Matter of Wife… and Death. Grandpa Harry Davenport (“Mr. Jarr” in a whole bunch of 1915 comedy shorts) also appeared in William Dieterle’s Hunchback of Notre Dame and a bunch of films with “Heaven” in their titles. And Leon Ames, the father of the Smith clan, was in a bunch of good films by name directors over the next ten years, including Little Women which featured four main St. Louis cast members, had a recurring role on Mr. Ed, and in his eighties appeared with Margaret O’Sullivan in Peggy Sue Got Married. June Lockhart appears briefly. I thought she was a big name, but I guess she’s best known for TV roles in Lassie and Lost In Space, later appearing in Troll and CHUD II: Bud The Chud.

The third feature, and first in color, by musical master Minnelli, who married star Judy Garland the following year. Produced by Arthur Freed, who wrote the song “Singin’ in the Rain”.

IMDB trivia sad note for Katy: “Van Johnson was supposed to play John Truett, but Tom Drake took over.”

More sadness: “The book on which the film is based originally ran as a weekly feature in the New Yorker Magazine in 1942. For the film many of the actions attributed to Tootie were actually done in real life by [author Sally] Benson’s sister Agnes. Also in reality Benson’s father moved the family to NYC and they never did come back for the World’s Fair.”

I liked it a lot.

DEC 2023: Watched again in HD… perfect movie.

by ·Comments Off on Sweeney Todd (2007, Tim Burton)

N.P. Thompson: “the most numbingly inert movie musical ever made”.

Watched it twice in a week, the second time with good sound.

Barber is imprisoned and wife-snatched by judge, returns years later (with young sailor) for revenge, kills blackmailing rival barber, finds then loses interest in own daughter, starts meat pie business with neighbor, mistreats and tries to kill young assistant, kills judge, neighbor, and (accidentally) own wife, is killed by assistant while young sailor rides off with barber’s daughter.

Loving the songs, especially “not while I’m around,” “pretty women,” “I’ll steal you joanna,” and “these are my friends”. The actors all do wonderfully, and the ol’ Burton goth murk is back with a vengeance. Katy disliked the horror aspects and wished that any character besides the two kids in love was a likeable protagonist, someone she could root for, and not a horrible corrupt monster. I thought the two kids were plenty enough brightness in the black, black. I wouldn’t call it numbingly inert, but for a musical it doesn’t exactly pop off the screen. Maybe Thompson will dig the 3-D re-release.