The one and only end-of-the-world buddy movie

As others have noted, The World's End makes up a third in what seems to be an Edgar Wright - Simon Pegg trilogy of zaniness and over-the-top British humor and genre-bending parody, and it's perhaps the funniest and weirdest of the 3 (Saun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) - what appears initially to be a story of a drinking binge, as Pegg (Gary King) engineers a school-days reunion, pulling together five high-school pals to re-enact a legendary pub crawl they undertook in their home town some 20 years before. The friends are estranged, haven't seen one another in at least a decade, skeptical, bored, a very unlikely group to come together for this debauch, esp Andy, who's now a nondrinker and a stick-in-the-mud moralist as well. But they do get together and begin the odyssey - a pint in each of the 10 pubs along the Golden Mile, ending they hope at the eponymous World's End. For the first half-hour or so, this seems a prototypical buddy-reunion movie, albeit with the very quick verbal wit typical of much British comedy; eventually, though, things get very strange and we're in a different genre altogether - this pub crawl becomes a zombie movie - about robot-like creatures trying to take over the planet and destroy humanity - I kid you not. Very few could bring off this transformation while maintaining the humor and the pace, but Wright-Pegg have shown they can and they do it again here. In this case, without belaboring the point, there's also a message and a theme: a lash-out against the homogenized corporate culture that is taking over so much of our lives - one of the first laments is how the pubs all look alike, the Starbucksization of British pub life; as we learn more about the zombies - or, since the guys agree they're not robots but can't figure out what to call them other than "them" (leading to a very funny exchange about pronouns) - the guys settle on calling them "blanks" until they can think of something better, and the world ends up calling "them" "blanks" (example of the weird verbal humor) - the plot to take over the world begins with numbing us through cell phones, tables, the Internet - haven't you noticed these things suddenly popping up everywhere, one of "them" warns? So it's not exactly a parody but a very unusual mash-up and take on Night of the Living Dead and the many other zombie movies (a quick wiki search will show that there have been hundreds) and movies about the apocalyptic end of the world (ditto).

Lousy movies about poets

Kill Your Darlings is not what you might expect, which is to say it's not about Hemingway but about Alan Ginsberg - a writer for whom, well, let's say I think most of his darlings survived. I thought I might like a movie about Ginsberg's days at Columbia, a portrait of the artist as a young man, and a look at the nascent beat generation - Kerouac, Burroughs, and, central to the movie if much less so to 20th century american literature, Lucien Carr. Unfortunately, my interest in and affection for these writers made me like the film less rather than more - I can accept that these guys were young writers with grandiose ideas and an antic spirit, but this movie makes them seem like, act like, a bunch of prankish high-school kids. I hated the overly determined scenes, so typical of a bad biopic, in which topics and ideas are artlessly put forward by having our hero confront a obvious targets and straw men - the tweedy English prof who argues that all literature must have meter and rhyme. Much better would be to dramatize Ginsberg's intelligent interactions with a truly smart prof and critic, such as Trilling. In the end, couldn't manage to watch the whole picture - leaving me thinking it's a movie only for those who love the Beats and they'll probably hate it (to paraphrase a famous review of a movie about Search for Lost Time). Why do poets make such lousy subjects for movies? Remember the dreadful Bright Star, about Keats - declaiming love sonnets and coughing blood? Anyone working on a TS Eliot biopic - Coffee Spoons? KYD is by no means a dreadful movie, just a let-down - you can use your time better by reading Ginsberg, or any poet, for 90 minutes.

A Goodfellas wannabe, that ain't: American Hustle

I know it's an Oscar favorite and a five-star across the board from major daily critics, but I found American Hustle to be long, dull, and confusing. Apparently it's loosely based on the facts and events of the ABSCAM scandal and honestly I would rather it were closely based on those facts and events - I'd like to know more about that event, now washed from (my) memory. As it is, this movie comes across as a Goodfallas wannabe - same era (set in 1978), same loose connection to actual events, punk L.I. hustler turned informant, mob doings set against backdrop of domestic strife, contrast between tough street scene and split-level suburban life, even the Italian-Jewish dynamic - but in any comparison, AH comes up way, way short - not even close to the tension, excitement, humor, and insight of its forebear. I'll say, Bradley Cooper and a few of the other leads (Louis CK) do a good job with what they've got; Jennifer Lawrence always brings something to any film she's in. I do admire attempts to cast against type, but then the miscast actor has to surprise us and show us they can carry it off - Amy Adams is so badly miscast from the get-go as a small-time grifter that she throws the whole film off track. The plot is a mess, so many betrayals and and stings it's hard to keep it straight and finally do we care? Not really, because we, or at least I, don't buy into the characters - the FBI agent who falls for the moll, the small-time hoodlum able to scam numerous mokes in a loan-shark scheme (people paying him a $5k finder's fee to get them a $50k loan - are you kidding me? No one would do business with this guy - he's so obviously a con artist). I know there's a sucker born every minute, but still ... And the final sting - when the FBI is hoist on its own petard so to speak - well, won't give it away but will just say that M. saw through the flaws in it in about 2 seconds - yet nobody in the movie was able to smell a rat? Movie does a good job re-creating the 70s era - the hair, the glitz, the music, the dancing - but who really wants to go back there anyway? There might be a 90-minute OK entertaining movie lurking inhere somewhere, but in its aspirations and its attempt to be the definitive gangster movie of our time this film so over-reaches and is so jumpy and disjointed, with little continuity from scene to scene - J Lawrence starts off as an agoraphobic stay-at-home mom and before we know it she's flirting w/ mobsters in a club, Jersey politician supposed to be smart and shrewd and powerful and believes this two-bit gangster is clean and his best friend and working in the interest of his constituents, and I could go on - that by the end I was completely uninterested and numb with boredom. Goodfellas may be too violent for some, for many in fact - but I'd watch it again any day and cannot say the same for American Hustle, sorry.

Love and Fame to Nothingness: Cutie and the Boxer

Zachary Heinzerling's 2013 documentary, Cutie and the Boxer, is very low key - in the style of many fine recent documentaries the cinematography is completely transparent, we just watch the two artists at the center of the film as their life unfolds over several weeks - there are no interviews, with them or with anyone else, they only occasionally address the camera, other than for some well-integrated archival video or film that the artists must have provided, it's all just unmediated (seemingly) observation. What we're seeing is a somewhat elderly couple, both immigrants from Japan to NYC, who met in NY when he, Ushio Shinohara, a struggling artist, was about 40 and she, Noriko Shinohara, was about 20. Today, he's 80, she 60. Both still struggling. They live in a rented apartment in near squalor, and the studio they use is a cramped and crowded mess. His main artwork seems to be supersized constructions made with mostly salvaged cardboard boxes - replicas of motorcycles and other machinery. In my view, the works are quite ugly - but who knows what will attract an dealer? Her work is mostly a cartoon, with characters based on her and her husband, called Cutie and the Boxer - following the story of their life and struggles. It looks pretty good, and not all that different from many, many other graphic novels out there seeking a readership. He's clearly the star - though that's a big issue in their marriage, as she feels very much in his shadow. It would be one thing if he were a major, successful artist - but he's obviously lived through a serious drinking problem and has squandered much of his talent, his money, perhaps his life. But things are changing, as he is working to mount a show at a NYC gallery - where in particular his "action paintings" attract attention: these are paintings in which he literally soaks boxing gloves in buckets of paint and then punches the canvas or paper, creating various designs. Each covers a whole wall - and takes him about 2 1/2 minutes to complete. Make of that what you will. In what to me was the most telling scene, a buyer for the Guggenheim comes to see his work and she's interested in these paintings - and we get a real glimpse of how the art market works - it's all about connections and speculation and following the crowd. As she, Alexandra, notes, it's as if she's running a start-up. Though the whole enterprise feels fraudulent to me - the guy devotes his life to these painstaking sculptures and then winds up in a major museum collection with stuff he slams together in minutes?- at least he may at last get some $, and recognition, very late in life. That will please Noriko, but will not salve her wounded ego - though maybe this film will draw a publisher to her works as well (she does share a gallery showing w/ Ushio, but in a side room). The film does a fine job of leaving these questions and issues unresolved, and in making us think about art and about fame in a new way.

Should note that over past few days we started two movies that we abandoned: Berberian Sound Studio, about a sound engineer recruited to work on what may be the world's worst horror film - was kind of funny for a while, but the joke wore thin and film seemed to be headed nowhere in particular; and the 1990 The Grifters - which now seems ridiculously dated, slow-moving, noncredible, and miscast in every lead character. 

Remembrance of Things Past?: The Swedish film Together

The very fine, funny, and surprisingly moving Swedish film (ca. 2000), Together, perfectly captures the mood of its time - 1975 - and of its place: the film is about a small Stockholm commune of political and sexual progressives; many American viewers will well remember houses such as this one, with posters of Ho and Che on the walls, Jimmi Hendix on the stereo, chickpeas on the menu, couples uneasily trading mates and crossing gender barriers, the various liberations from clothing and hygiene, the tense and endless debates about global politics, the sexual warfare over who would do the dishes, the disregard for material possessions, the accusations against those seeking "bourgeois" comforts, the inevitable splits and rifts over issues of ideology and jealousy. What Americans won't quite get is the particularly doctrinaire nature of Swedish radicalism of that era - having lived there during the time, I know that these groups were fewer in # than in the U.S. but much more unflinching and serious-minded - in the U.S. there were so many things to easily oppose - the war of course, and racism, and LBJ and RMN - that it was pretty easy to lightly wear a mantle of progressive and radical views and "lifestyles." Harder to do so in the near-socialist and egalitarian state of Sweden - so their animus was more fierce and in a way more abstract. The beauty of this film is, from out of all this chaos, several plot lines to develop - as we watch several of the characters grow, evolve, change - some leave the commune, others join. The emotional center of the film are the two children of the abused wife whose brother brings her into the commune for her safety - watching their adjustment struggles in this very alien, at first, setting is very moving and sorrowful. There's lot of sorrow, joy, and humor throughout, culminating in a riotous free-form soccer/football "match" at the end that brings a lot of the people - vastly different in so many ways - "together." Very good film - wish more people had seen it, but that would have required a U.S. remake, which was/is not likely to happen.

Hannah Arendt and the Brooklyn Dodgers

Has anyone ever done this before? May I be the first? Let us compare Hannah Arendt with - Jackie Robinson. Near contemporaries, I bet they knew absolutely nothing about one another. Each a subject of a recent biopic, I bet M. and I may be the only two people to see both. And yet - there are similarities, both between them and between the two movies, 42 and Hannah Arendt. Both suffered discrimination and even oppression, both stood up for their beliefs, both alienated many people by doing so, both exhibited bravery in the face of challenge and hatred. JR, however, did so in the popular arena of sports, with the backing of a brave and wise mentor and with the support of his people - he felt he was standing up for the entire black race in America. For Arendt, as we learn from the film, the playing field was quite different - a European refugee, a world-renowned scholar of political theory, she took on a journalistic assignment, covering the Eichmann trials for The New Yorker - as the film makes plain it was a risk for editor Shawn to hire an academic for such a prominent and time-sensitive assignment. Arendt insisted, in her reporting, to include a section on Jews who abetted the Holocaust by collaborating with the Nazis. Though it appears, at least from this movie, that her critique was accurate, many readers accused her of blaming the victim or worse. So the film is not about her standing up for Jews but about how her stubborn idealism made her a pariah - many of her closest friends turned their back on her. In that sense, HA is a pretty good film about a moment of social trauma in U.S. history that's now barely remembered. In fact, I'm surprised anyone could get backing to make a film about a German-American philosopher of totalitarianism. No chance this would knock Catching Fire off the top spot in weekend gross. That said, I wish it could have been a better film dramatically and cinema-graphically. Just like 42, HA is a kind of leaden - lots of very didactic conversations that are there to obviously make a point, and not enough drama or emotion. In fact, many key elements are left unexplored - would have liked to know a lot more about her relationship with that Nazi professor Heidegger. And would like to know more about what made her tick emotionally, not just intellectually - to see her actually wrestling with how she should, or should not, write about the collaborators, for example; or to see more of her loneliness after her estrangement from many close friends. One thing that HA does and that 42 did not do was use archival footage effectively - this movie integrated actual footage of the Eichmann trial very well into the contemporary narrative. This movie does preserve, in amber, a nearly forgotten chapter in the history of journalism and of Judaism.

My favorite films

New Year's Even discussion last night led to the provocative and seldom-asked question: What is your favorite movie of all time? Such a difficult question, really, because the scope of movies is so broad, comparisons across genres are so quirky, and favorite is a surprisingly elusive concept. Favorite doesn't necessarily mean "best." There are probably movies we recognize as great that we don't necessarily love, and movies we love that we recognize as deeply flawed. I think, thought, that "favorite" movies of all time have to be ones we've enjoyed repeatedly on re-viewings and that we expect to and anticipate enjoying again in the future. Off the top of my head, a few films came to mind last night. First, Rules of the Game, which I consider perhaps the best film ever made and one that I've enjoyed re-viewing numerous times. I can join the legions and say that I have watched Citizen Kane numerous times and enjoyed it repeatedly; ditto for Some Like It Hot. For pure schmalz and sentiment, how can you not like It's a Wonderful Life? And what would our world be w/out Duck Soup? I've also enjoyed several viewings of Annie Hall - it holds up so well over time. Another one that I was just blown away by on re-viewing was The Godfather - when I came back to it for a second viewing I expected to be entertained by the overall story line and found instead that every single scene was stunning in composition and presentation - many great parts that combined to make an even greater whole. Others in the gathering offered their personal favorites, including, from EP, Wild Strawberries (which should more accurately be called The Wild Strawberry Patch) and , from JP, The Lives of Others, which she said was her favorite in recent years. I haven't re-viewed too many recent pictures, but I believe two, both of them (like Lives of Others) very dark, will hold up to the test of time: Pan's Labyrinth and The Secret in Their Eyes. And can there be a more smartly plotted film than The Sixth Sense? Two of us agreed on their worst film of all time (this doesn't mean trashy films that are obviously meant for the garbage bin but films that aspire to greatness): FK and I would put Kurosawa's The Lower Depths at the top (or bottom) of that list (with Daughters of the Dust in the running, too.) To show the oddity of film-making, though, The Seven Samurai could be another one of my all-time favorites.