Moon, 4 stars

Yeah, if I were David Bowie's son I probably would have passed on using "Space Oddity" in this film also. The interest both the song and the film show in space exploration and its strange attractions seems to run in the family, and if Duncan Jones progresses as much through his fledgling film career as his father did through his musical career he will one day be an artist of great interest.

**SPOILERS FOLLOW**

In the meantime we have this, a directorial debut which Jones gets a story credit on. More experienced screenwriters were apparently trusted with the actual screenplay, which shows a remarkable ability to delegate that few first-time directors, drunk with newfound filmmaking power, are able to show. The story concerns Sam (Sam Rockwell) who is the lone employee of a mining base on the moon. He putters around the base doing the sort of vaguely pointless, repetitive activities that men alone in space usually do in films, until one day he crashes a moon rover and awakens back at the base, where a solicitous helper robot (Kevin Spacey) seems genuinely concerned for his recovery. Eventually Sam is up and about, suspiciously missing any injuries sustained in the crash. He goes searching for the missing rover and finds it...with his injured self still inside. What follows I will not spoil entirely for you. It combines elements of "Solaris" with elements of (of all things) "The Island". I leave it to you to decide which parts of which were placed where in this film.

Jones has a talent for directing. His ability to coax two fairly opposite performances from star Sam Rockwell shows promise with actors, and the fact that the audience is occasionally moved to laughter bespeaks a rare ability to change tones without inducing whiplash. He has hired the immensely talented Clint Mansell to score the film, although I was less impressed with Mansell's score here than I was with his work for Darren Aronofsky in "Pi" and "Requiem for a Dream". The score wisely chooses to be silent at some pivotal moments and never stoops to the level of "goosing" the audience at surprising points. Jones' directing of the moon-surface scenes are the ones that stand out to me most, a week and a half after seeing the movie. It is sometimes hard to tell if we are seeing miniatures or full-scale moon rovers and antennae, but that adds to the otherworldly idea of a future where mining on the moon is so simple that one man can do it. This is an austere, haunting vision of a future which makes me wish we could clone Duncan Jones and replace so many careless, lazy directors working today.

Boys, 2.5 stars

If anyone knows of a fantasy land where I can transplant the entire cast of a movie into better material, please let me know, stat. This film takes a cast containing Winona Ryder, Lukas Haas, John C. Reilly, Catherine Keener, James Le Gros, Wiley Wiggins (yes, that one), Chris Cooper, Skeet Ulrich, and Maddie Corman and plunks them down into an underwritten teen soap opera about a teen who finds an injured, troubled older woman after a horseback-riding accident and nurses her back to health. No, really, that's the plot. Along the way he falls in love with her, of course, and multiple reveals are made of plot points which seem so insipid that they should have stayed hidden.

**SPOILERS BELOW**

The movie's big mystery is why Patty (Ryder) is so frightened of the police. She refuses to go to a hospital when she is initially found unconscious in a field and later abandons Haas (her new lover) at a carnival when a cop seems too curious about what she's doing there. Flashbacks slowly reveal that she had left a party drunk with a major league pitcher, also drunk, and he had then driven them into a river. She escaped the sinking car but he didn't. If this was told in chronological order it would make for a movie of such resounding stupidity that it would never have been made even by whoever greenlit the existing version. But the movie is almost worth seeing, in a curious way, if you ignore the plot entirely. You can focus on the performances, which are interesting portraits of all involved at pivotal points in their careers. Ryder was on the way down from a career high she would never recapture, as was Haas; Ulrich was a scant two years from his breakthrough in "Scream". Cooper and Reilly were on the rise as well, though their careers are still strong today. Catherine Keener was probably no one's choice for an indie darling in ten years' time, but she has since carved and defended that niche for herself. It is also possible to focus on the script's many random, abandoned subplots. Wiggins, playing Haas' best friend, at one point erupts into anger and breaks his hand punching a wall. This character trait is never explained, never resurfaces, and is only referenced in a cast Wiggins wears for the rest of the film. There is an extended scene in a Spanish class where the only Spanish word Haas can remember is "zanahorias". It is played for a kind of dark comedy, yet the tone is wrong and the scene has no ultimate point. It is as if the screenwriters took a Robert McKee seminar, made a negative of it, and then did everything he instructs you not to do. The film is a perplexing artifact of its time, but when you have to go this far outside the story to find the interesting parts, you're probably better served by something else.

SLIFR quiz

If you, like me, are a reader of several film blogs simultaenously, you will have noticed the meme of a quiz originally posted over at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. I'm finally ready to add my contribution, so herewith my answers:

1) Second-favorite Stanley Kubrick film.
2001: A Space Odyssey

2) Most significant/important/interesting trend in movies over the past decade, for good or evil.
The ease of production and distribution made possible by digital video.

3) Bronco Billy (Clint Eastwood) or Buffalo Bill Cody (Paul Newman)?
I have to pass on this one since I have not seen the movies in question.

4) Best Film of 1949.
The Third Man.

5) Joseph Tura (Jack Benny) or Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore)?
Again I must pass.

6) Has the hand-held shaky-cam directorial style become a visual cliché?
As much as Steadicam, but it can still be used in exciting ways.

7) What was the first foreign-language film you ever saw?
Kamikaze 1989.

8) Charlie Chan (Warner Oland) or Mr. Moto (Peter Lorre)?
I haven't seen the Mr. Moto films, so I pass.

9) Favorite World War II drama (1950-1970).
Closely Watched Trains. If that doesn't count because the war is a bit tangential, I'll go with Judgment at Nuremberg.

10) Favorite animal movie star.
Asta from the Thin Man movies.

11) Who or whatever is to blame, name an irresponsible moment in cinema.
The janitor throwing away master prints of "Greed", thinking they were trash.

12) Best Film of 1969.
The Wild Bunch.

13) Name the last movie you saw theatrically, and also on DVD or Blu-ray.
Theatrically: The Hurt Locker; the last film I finished on home video was Revolutionary Road on Blu-Ray.

14) Second-favorite Robert Altman film.
MASH.

15) What is your favorite independent outlet for reading about movies, either online or in print?
http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com

16) Who wins? Angela Mao or Meiko Kaji? (Thanks, Peter!)
No thanks, Peter. I don't know who these people are.

17) Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei) or Olive Neal (Jennifer Tilly)?
I've got to go with Olive. Jennifer is one of my favorite actresses in any setting, and I'm still not forgiving Tomei for that Supporting Actress win.

18) Favorite movie that features a carnival setting or sequence.
Strangers on a Train.

19) Best use of high-definition video on the big screen to date.
Public Enemies.

20) Favorite movie that is equal parts genre film and a deconstruction or consideration of that same genre.
Body Heat.

21) Best Film of 1979.
This is a genuine tie between Alien and The Marriage of Maria Braun.

22) Most realistic and/or sincere depiction of small-town life in the movies.
Junebug.

23) Best horror movie creature (non-giant division).
Hitchcock's birds.

24) Second-favorite Francis Ford Coppola film.
Apocalypse Now.

25) Name a one-off movie that could have produced a franchise you would have wanted to see.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

26) Favorite sequence from a Brian De Palma film.
Sissy Spacek killing Piper Laurie in Carrie.

27) Favorite moment in three-strip Technicolor.
"Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

28) Favorite Alan Smithee film. (Thanks, Peter!)
I have seen none of the movies that IMDB credits to Alan Smithee.

29) Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) or Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau)?
I haven't seen Bull Durham, but I'm going with Matthau here.

30) Best post-Crimes and Misdemeanors Woody Allen film.
I know I'm going way out on a limb here, but I'm going with The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. Yes, really.

31) Best Film of 1999.
Fight Club.

32) Favorite movie tag line.
I had a hard time deciding between "In space no one can hear you scream" and "Garbo Talks", so I'll include them both.

33) Favorite B-movie western.
Does Lemonade Joe count? For some reason I don't watch B-movie westerns unless they're Czech.

34) Overall, the author best served by movie adaptations of her or his work.
James M. Cain.

35) Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) or Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard)?
Susan Vance.

36) Favorite musical cameo in a non-musical movie.
It's more than a cameo, but I'm bending the rules for Keely Smith in Thunder Road.

37) Bruno (the character, if you haven’t seen the movie, or the film, if you have): subversive satire or purveyor of stereotyping?
I haven't seen the movie yet and would need to see exactly how the subject matter is handled to make this decision. There is a possibility for both or either.

38) Five film folks, living or deceased, you would love to meet. (Thanks, Rick!)
Jean-Luc Godard, Sergei Eisenstein, Marlene Dietrich, Thelma Schoonmaker, Marilyn Monroe

He's Just Not That Into You, 2 stars

Boy, I have now forgotten how this wound up in my queue in the first place. I blame a certain girly emotion which compels me to rent otherwise unappealing, unfeminist trash out of a misguided desire to see a happy ending and love conquering all. (See also "The Holiday".) The happy ending is provided in this particular film, but at the expense of any pretense of believability.

Speaking of believability, it is somewhat remarkable that this movie even exists in the first place. It's based on a book whose title came from a throwaway line in a "Sex and the City" episode. The book itself is not a work of fiction and has no characters. It is instead a collection of witty self-help aphorisms about relationships. (The one time I encountered the book, I turned to a random page which warned me away from having post-breakup sex.) From a book with no characters now comes a film with too many. There are at least four main couples and several peripheral characters, none of whom seem to know how to be honest or even verbalize their desires properly. We have a married music exec who can't keep it in his pants when hot young singers come sniffing for connections. There's the classic woman pushing 40 whose boyfriend refuses to commit to marriage. The film's most annoying couple is composed of a clingy simpering woman who is Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction inexplicably played for laughs. She meets her perfect match in the Mac Guy. Come to think of it, maybe that's what he deserves for so many smarmy, sanctimonious commercials.

If all of this sounds overstuffed and tired, that's because it is. Many talented actors are thrust into the film and left to spin their wheels for the movie's two-hour-plus (!) running time. Jennifer Connelly appears to have wandered here from the set of "A Beautiful Mind"; her weepy, put-upon-wife schtick works less well here when her husband has made the understandable decision to cheat on her with Scarlett Johansson. Jennifer Aniston plays another thinly disguised version of herself, and poor Ginnifer Goodwin (who I hear is actually pretty good in Big Love) is given such a thankless and annoying role that I would actively avoid seeing her in anything again. A pity, because she may well have talent that this film didn't have room for. Overall, the film is offensive, stereotypical, and an insult to intelligent romantic films like Annie Hall or Before Sunrise.

Public Enemies, 4 stars

Ignore the single most frequent criticism of this movie. Johnny Depp is not a complete cipher around which the movie swirls. He is only mostly a cipher, and that is the point. Yes, this is a period piece, and a gorgeously shot and meticulously researched one at that. However, it is also a commentary on the cult of celebrity and its tendency to inflate normal human beings to fill inhuman expectations. Often those whom we make into celebrities are strangely empty vessels for our adoration; the reason for their popularity is a sort of blankness onto which many fans can project their individual desires.

The plot will be familiar to anyone who knows the story of John Dillinger, who robbed banks in the early 1930's, when affection for banks was at a strangely familiar low. He was debonair and charismatic and did a few stints in prison before being shot outside Chicago's Biograph Theater after seeing a gangster film. This near-perfect intersection of notoriety and the media's portrayal of it reminds us why the Dillinger story is so oddly appropriate. Here is a criminal who would have loved the myriad ways of communication available to us today but who was instead born in a time when his physical description was so poorly circulated that he could walk into the Dillinger Bureau of the Chicago police department and, unrecognized, ask for sports scores from the men hunting him. This being a Michael Mann film, there is a foil for Dillinger in the person of Melvin Purvis, an FBI agent trying to make a name for himself. Christian Bale plays this man as so repressed that we can barely imagine him having warm blood, and this performance in my opinion is the low point of the film. Also since this is a Michael Mann movie, there is much well-choreographed gunplay and scenes of men grimly going about their work, whether that work is tracking criminals or counting the take from a robbery. Marion Cotillard, as the sole representative of the fairer sex in most of the film, manages this burden well and seems natural in the period setting, unlike some more minor actors who seem mannered and ill-at-ease. This is a fun film with which to play spot-the-character-actor. The answers to "Is that Stephen Dorff?", "Is that Lili Taylor?" and "Is that Leelee Sobieski?" are all yes, and then some. Most viewers will go into this film knowing what to expect, but those who don't will still find a solid retelling of Dillinger's last years of life, as well as a meditation on who we choose as celebrities and why.

Eagle vs. Shark, 3.5 stars

How the shadow of Napoleon Dynamite grows shorter as time passes. I perused other reviews of this quirky, affecting comedy and found endless comparisons between the two films, which came out within a year or so of each other. However, with a few years intervening, I can truly say that unless I had been primed by those other reviews, "Napoleon Dynamite" would not even have entered my head for comparison.

Our setting is New Zealand. Lily is a cashier in a fast-food outlet at a mall. She is pretty in the way that such service workers often are, a unique attractiveness that ensures that more looks-based professions will never open to her. Compounding this is her shyness and her less-than-hip hobbies, mostly revolving around 32-bit video games and resoundingly average guitar-playing. Jarrod is a clerk at a nearby video game store. Lily loves him from afar in that idealized way that arises from only seeing someone under mall lighting. He likes the same video games she does and fancies himself a formidable physical threat to anything he sets his sights on. One night at a costume party they bond over a fighting game and have unintentionally touching sex. This cements their bond, at least as far as Lily is concerned, and a relationship blooms enroute to Jarrod's hometown, where he aspires to have a showdown with a bully who tormented him in high school.

This is a more realistic, darker film than "Napoleon Dynamite". Perhaps its milieu of unhip fringe dwellers who are legends in their own minds prompted the comparisons, but "Eagle vs. Shark" puts a bit more distance between us and the characters, allowing us to see the gaps between their self-image and the labels the world has placed on them. This added believability is crucial to scenes like the one where Lily discovers that Jarrod has a young child who lives with his parents in his tiny hometown. Such a down-to-earth revelation would be out of place in most quirky-loser movies, but this one deals with it sensitively and with a perfect touch. Jarrod's reaction both masks his obvious emotion and gives us a hint of where his desire to be seen as a hero may come from. This is a small film with small ambitions, but it ably exceeds them. Overall it is touching despite a few false notes, and while not as laugh-a-minute funny as others in its genre, it rings truer.

Last Life in the Universe, 4 stars

I thought this would be my first Thai film. I was wrong; that spot was taken by "Tears of the Black Tiger" two years ago. They are remarkably similar, however, in their shifts of tone and their global influences. "Tears of the Black Tiger" reached through space and time to be influenced by trashy genre films of all countries and decades; "Last Life in the Universe" takes place in the airport-like limbo of foreign service industry workers in many countries, understanding little and understood still less.

Our hero, if you can call him that, is a shy, depressed librarian who happens to witness a horrible car accident in which a beautiful woman he had seen earlier in the day is gravely injured. His concern leads him to follow the girl's less attractive but more interesting sister to the hospital, where the two initiate a bond that results in him becoming her reluctant roommate. The film borrows from a variety of classic plots: at times it veers into the "odd-couple" genre as the neat librarian and the sloppy-haired pot-smoker try to get along. Eventually it becomes the classic opposites-attract love story, but the film avoids a familiar feeling about any of this. Due to gentle, unexpected pacing and the charm of having the characters communicate in three languages (none very well), the film succeeds at creating and holding a mood and then simply allows its characters to wander through it. Magical realism intrudes at times, as in a house-cleaning sequence with unfortunate and probably unintended overtones of "Requiem for a Dream". The characters have room to breathe and explore in the environment of the film, and the effect is gratitude on the part of the viewer for being allowed to wander alongside these finely drawn, interesting souls for a few minutes.

The Flower of Evil, 3 stars

I blush to admit this was my first Chabrol film. I probably should have started with something earlier, or more experimental, or more unified, but there you have it. As fate would have it, I started with a very recent film by a man who has been making films for about half a century.

From subsequent research on the film, I find that it apparently reflects on themes that Chabrol has been addressing for his entire career. You'll have to look elsewhere to find that discussion, though. Since I came to the film clear-eyed and unaware, that seems like the most logical way for me to review it. The plot concerns a French family of some wealth and history. Many dark secrets reverberate in the family home, including a romance between two step-siblings and whispers that Aunt Line may have murdered her own father because he was a Nazi. The film doesn't have a plot so much as a mood. The matriarch is running for a local political position, but this mainly serves as an excuse for more whispering behind innumerable backs. The step-sibling relationship is actually believable and a bit touching, and we root for the young lovers to such an extent that a tragic yet inevitable final twist leaves us hoping their relationship survives.

The film is chilly and reserved, especially considering the passionate topics with which it deals. Everything is kept at arm's length, which seems to be the way the family deals with the same emotions. Everyone drinks their troubles away or has ill-advised affairs rather than confront the emotions running so close to the surface. This was a perfectly serviceable film, quite French in its way, with strong performances and just the right amount of surprise. I've no desire to see this film again anytime soon, and yet you can certainly do worse on a rainy, chilly summer evening.

Dolls, 4 stars

Yes, this is directed by that Takeshi. Coming into this movie I knew its director as the man responsible for "Takeshi's Castle", a Japanese physical challenge show whose low points were then overdubbed MST3K-style by two American comedians to form the SpikeTV show "MXC". However, I had seen none of his films although I knew that he had a successful film career in Japan.

*THERE ARE MANY SPOILERS IN MY REVIEW. I CANNOT DISCUSS HOW AFFECTING THIS FILM WAS WITHOUT GIVING AWAY MAJOR PLOT POINTS.*

This film did not let me down, although the leap from fat men in ill-fitting helmets smacking their faces into giant logs to a stately, quiet drama about the absence of free will was not a small one. This was everything I was not expecting it to be and was instead a well-observed if slightly manipulative meditation on loss and choice. There are three storylines, each dealing with a character who has failed to act decisively at a crucial moment. The first storyline deals with a young man who is very much in love and engaged to the woman he cares so much for. However, he bows to pressure from his parents and breaks up with her to marry the boss' daughter for business reasons. On his wedding day, he hears that she has attempted suicide and does not recognize anyone now. He takes responsibility for her, and as her instability causes them to become more and more outcast, they begin wandering the countryside tied together with a length of red rope. In one of the film's most moving moments, when the couple stands outside the house where they announced their engagement, the girl makes a gesture to show that she recognizes her former love as the man who has been caring for her all this time. I actually gasped aloud a little at the simplicity and tenderness of this moment and how it was handled.

The second, and most moving for me, of the stories concerns an aging yakuza boss who had made a fateful decision years ago to abandon a woman he loved because he felt he could not give her the life she deserved. She tells him she will wait for him every day on a certain park bench and bring a lunch for him in case he ever decides to join her. From the looks of the characters 20 years or more pass, and then the boss decides to see if his former love still waits for him. To his surprise, she has apparently been lunching on the same park bench in the intervening years, still awaiting his return. The moment when he sits beside her and she does not recognize him was for me the most affecting in the film, a nearly perfect reversal of the moment I described above in the first story.

The third and least successful story concerns a Japanese pop star who is blinded one day in an accident that may have been caused by a daydreaming fan of hers who happened to be a traffic cop at a busy intersection. The fan blinds himself in a final effort to be closer to his idol, and one day manages to finagle a meeting with her at last, when he can no longer see her.

The film is gorgeously shot and could serve as a primer in a class called "Shooting Autumn Leaves Attractively Yet Ambiguously". The first two stories are quite affecting and all three make very good points about the role of choice in happiness. This was quite a pleasant surprise considering that I was expecting a crime film, or failing that, a straightforward film of any type. Instead I found a elliptical, nonlinear gem that also opens and closes with two moving scenes of bunraku. While all characters in the film become dolls in their own indecision, the film's effect on us is anything but, reminding us how to be more human than the characters Kitano has created.

What's New Pussycat, 4 stars

You can just tell that Woody Allen wanted the lead role in this film for himself. It is a blessing for the audience that he did not get it. Allen wrote this sex farce himself and makes his film debut in it, but the lead goes to the great Peter Sellers. Allen should probably sue Sellers for copyright infringement for so successfully impersonating the Allen persona that has been the linchpin of Allen's film career since "Annie Hall".

Sellers is a therapist whose patient (Peter O'Toole) is constantly beset by women wanting to sleep with him. Why this is a problem is never fully explained. O'Toole acquits himself ably here, in the first role I've seen him in that requires humor. Sellers and O'Toole eventually wind up at a country chateau with their respective women, and a slapstick farce of the highest order occurs. Of course Ursula Andress shows up in a bikini. Of course there will be bizarre, brightly-colored mid-60s decor everywhere. Of course there will be a scene resembling a bumper-car ride (it is Woody Allen, after all).

The plot of the film takes a backseat to slapstick, wordplay, and an overall tone resembling an early Marx Brothers film plopped down into the swinging '60s. Bosley Crowther, a man completely in tune with films of this period, said that it is as though "the characters were all disturbed children engaged in violent, sex-tinged water-play". To me this was a reason to like the film; I will let you decide for yourself.

Irma La Douce, 2.5 stars/One, Two, Three, 3.5 stars

Over the course of two days last week, I watched two Billy Wilder comedies with vastly different levels of familiarity to the public. Unexpectedly, I found the quality of the movies varied inversely with their reputations and wish that more people knew of the underappreciated "One, Two, Three" while ignoring the bloated and unfunny "Irma La Douce".

"Irma La Douce" was touted as reuniting the director and stars of "The Apartment", a movie that was also disappointing to me compared with what I had heard about it. Jack Lemmon here plays a Parisian cop who is fired for being too honest and proceeds to fall in love with one of the prostitutes (Shirley MacLaine) he had previously arrested. The film is nearly two and a half hours long and changes tone approximately six times. The middle of the film is the most inspired and features Lemmon, now jealous of MacLaine's customers, dressing up as a British lord who monopolizes her attention. These farcical scenes recall the best bits of "Some Like It Hot", with Lemmon rushing around behind everyone's back to avoid being recognized while he changed identities at the drop of a hat. However, the film then takes an utterly baffling turn when Lemmon is arrested for "killing" the lord, and we are actually asked to watch his trial, imprisonment, and jailbreak. MacLaine leaves Lemmon when he hits her during an argument about money, but of course the plot requires that she take him back in the end. The film's morality is murky overall, with Lemmon at one point being feted for being the most successful pimp on the block and seeming to enjoy it without thinking of where his money is coming from. At 45 minutes shorter, this could have been a satirical gem. Instead it is overlong and tries to be too many places at once.

"One, Two, Three", on the other hand, had me in tears at several points and left me wondering why I had never heard of this Wilder film before. James Cagney plays a Coca-Cola executive who is trying to bring the product to East Germany. Cagney's boss' daughter slips through the Iron Curtain one night and marries a Bolshevik, and the rest of the film is spent first trying to cover up the marriage and then attempting to convert the Bolshevik to American capitalist ways. Perhaps this type of humor is not in vogue at the moment; everyone in the film seems quietly assured of American superiority, a position which is not particularly tenable today. However, the jokes crackle and Cagney seems born to deliver them. Able support from the entire cast makes this one to watch if, like me, you're a Wilder fan who is at the point of seeking out little-known works of his to complete your viewing.

In pondering these two films together, it seems that the reason for the difference between them might have to do with Wilder's feelings about their subjects' potential for satire. From his other films we can gather that he is not truly moralistic about sex, seeming to believe that society causes most of the sexual hang-ups that plague neurotic individuals. That makes him a fairly poor choice to direct a film with such a preachy tone as "Irma La Douce"; Irma ultimately learns that she should let her man support her and that women have no business owning and using their sexuality in unconventional ways. However, as a Jew who was personally affected by the Holocaust, I dare say Wilder probably felt a bit more comfortable satirizing postwar Germany and espousing the capitalist philosophy of his adopted country. While "One, Two, Three" is anything but timely, it remains hilarious and a fine example of what Wilder can do at his best.