John Favreau & Company have turned out a must-see film. When you get around to it.

The most glorious reunion in film history — and a hell of a lot of fun, too!

Kathleen took yesterday off (no one has ever needed a four-day weekend more), and asked me to take her to the new blockbuster as my Friday movie. I didn’t even think of saying ‘no.’ We were warned by the ticket-seller that there were two groups of schoolkids in the theatre, but that sounded more like a draw than a detraction, and indeed they made the movie-going experience just about perfect. The low cricket of chitchat that accompanied the expository passages dropped to dead silence whenever the movie got quiet (ie menacing), while the more alarming narrative developments were met with giddy shrieks and squeals.

Erik watches Phillip. We should be watching Erik. Joachim Trier’s Reprise feels like the last chapter of a Bildungsroman, but one written today, not a century ago: Woody Allen has worked his way into the germ stream.

This very beautiful movie, full of small brilliant moments, is so beautifully cast that you will be far too lost in the characters to resent any “messaging.”

It is inconceivable to me that a better movie will appear in 2008.

As a rule, I am quite happy to see movies by myself and to think about them afterward in solitude. Today’s moviegoing was an exception. It was only after I left the theatre that its impact seriously flooded my eyes, and I wished to hell that I could talk about it with someone.

Last Friday, I had about the best excuse going for not seeing a movie in the morning. Scroll down if you doubt me.

Here’s the movie that I might have seen if I’d had no better plans. It’s hard to say: the calculus for choosing a film on Friday is not, as you might expect, movie-based. Location has a lot to do with selection, with my desire to leave the neighborhood as the leading factor.

In case you’re too harried/hurried to click through, let me say that Roman de Gare seemed a lot more like the French movies of old than other recent offerings. It was, in short, more French — if I may risk coming off rather like Stendhal’s Prince Korasoff, French to his fingertips, but in the style of fifty years ago.

Surely one of the loveliest pictures of the year — and so quietly saturated with luxe that it took me eight or ten hours to realize that I was not taking the waters at a grand resort.

¶ Hors de Prix (Priceless) , at Portico.

How wrong-headed will this marketing campaign turn out to be? It promises a jaunty comedy — Ellen Page promises one all by herself — but Smart People both sweeter and sadder in tone than that.

The poster for Stop-Loss portrays these principal characters as outlaws. They’re anything but, and the power of Kimberly Pierce’s film springs from deep roots in the patriot country of Central Texas. Read about Stop-Loss at Portico.

Oh, so cute. For some reason, my Web server balks at the umlaut in the title of this week’s movie, Die Fälscher. I think it’s the server. The Web log took it in stride.

Did I ever tell you about the time I saw Deborah Kerr play Candida, in the West End? That was in 1977; you do the math. If she were not already an independently-established entertainer, Raven-Symoné would not be allowed to flaunt her full figure alongside her character’s genuinely undernourished sidekicks, played by Brenda Song and Margo Harshman, in College Road Trip. She would certainly not be the star of this movie. She might not even be in it.

And yet. And yet…

The maddening thing is that I don’t have time to watch Sexy Beast just now. I’m almost convinced that, if not quite so flatly historical as The Bank Job, it drew on many of the same famous crime’s elements. It’ll have to wait for the weekend. Both movies are super, in their different ways. The Bank Job is certainly a lot easier on the gut.

The Bank Job, at Portico.

Who says there’s no honour among thieves? “You have to stick to your principles.” Pretty upstanding for a last line of dialogue, wouldn’t you say?  

¶ In Bruges.

Well, I liked it. But it will be weeks before I figure out why.

¶ The Other Boleyn Girl.

Plaza Mayor, Salamanca/Wikipedia 

To paraphrase Dr Johnson, he who is bored by Vantage Point is bored by both life and the cinema. As befits a movie that begins with explosions, this excellent little film about a big subject has no settled center of gravity. Gravity, in fact, is precisely what’s blown up. We watch, fascinated, as it reasserts itself over the course of the story.

¶ Vantage Point.

To take my mind off an Internet muddle yesterday — it was the day for them, as both Édouard and George Snyder reported — I went to the movies on Thursday night instead of Friday morning. This not only cleared up Friday morning for dealing with the muddle, but it got me out of the house on Thursday night, when all I’d have done at home was stew.

It was Valentine’s Day, which is probably why Universal opened Definitely, Maybe, but the theatre was packed not with couples but with twosomes, threesomes, and foursomes of women. The laughter was unusually free of a bass line. There was plenty of it, though.

My early feeling is that Ryan Reynolds, the star of Definitely, Maybe, is going to follow in the footsteps of such film greats as Clint Eastwood, Nick Nolte, and Harrison Ford, pretty boys all when they were in their twenties. Someday Mr Reynolds’ contribution to Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle will be as forgotten about as Mr Ford’s to Apocalypse Now and The Conversation. 

¶ Definitely, Maybe.

The copper roof in the middle belongs to Marymount, another Fifth Avenue school attended by Kathleen. She still wound up married to me.

“And then I did it unconsciously.” Fool’s Gold is not without its sublime moments. Unswervingly dopey, it is unafraid to be magical — if you know anything about what Kate Hudson’s character calls the “third thing.” PG-13!

¶ Fool’s Gold.

A small confession: I wrote an important part of today’s piece before I saw the movie. In fact, I woke myself very early morning, thinking that I would lull myself to sleep by thinking what I would say about Diane Lane but becoming so involved in the syntax that further snoozing was out of the question. As I was tucked under the covers, unequipped with writing materials, I forgot almost all of my finer points, but the spirit of my remarks stayed with me, and were only confirmed by Ms Lane’s latest film.

Once upon a time, telling you how much older I was than the actress in question would have made only me seem old. Now that I am sixty, those days are over. We shall draw a veil.

¶ Untraceable.

Union Square at the worst time of the year.

This week, I shall be very brief. I went to see There Will Be Blood because I hoped that it would disprove my discomfort with this year’s Academy Awards nominations. Three of the five best-picture nominees are intensely violent, male-centered dramas. (I say this without having seen No Country For Old Men.) A fourth, Atonement, offers a distinctly unsympathetic critique of the male hierarchy of class background, but it is not without its cataclysms. Only Juno resists this rampant guyism.

There Will Be Blood turns out to be about nothing more than how awful a man can be — and how symphonically that awfulness can be represented on the screen. Potential background stories about such things as the imaginative poverty of the American frontier, cavalier attitudes toward workplace safety, or the anaerobic deadweight of extractive economies are muddled by the protagonist’s bewilderingly inconsistent sociopathy. What this film boils down to is the virtuosity of Daniel Day-Lewis’s acting — and of the men and women of the film’s Makeup Department.

What was the Academy thinking?

View from the lobby of the Kip’s Bay AMC Theatre.

Once upon a time, there was a simplicity about Woody Allen movies. People from the “coasts” got his jokes, and everybody else said “huh?” Those days are over. Ever since his wooing and wedding the third Mrs Allen, the audience has been further divided over the incest issue. (I said “issue”!) By this time, of course, the jokes in Woody Allen movies were few and far between.

Which may be why his latest film is such a triumph. There is not a funny line in the script, really, but, rather like Charlie Chaplin, Mr Allen shows that he can do funny without laugh lines.

¶ Cassandra’s Dream.

MP3      RSS