Winter Soldier
Aphoristic money-line movie reviewing, for consumables viewed late December, early January:
Beyond Tomorrow (1940): Begins as deliciously crusty Christmas fable, de-evolves into trite showbiz morality play, but with elderly ghosts. Not helped in the least by the DVD-makers’ gambit of cutting necessary scenes from the film and packaging them as an "extra scenes" supplement.
National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007): Is acquainting my kids in a fun way with all-American history and iconography worth this agony?
The Golden Compass (2007): De-anti-Christian-ized and pumped full of digital hormones, it made as much narrative sense as a unicorn-&-rainbow dorm poster.
Chameleon Street (1989): The ideas still stand, but the self-aggrandizment and clueless filmmaking fall flat as old soda.
The District (Nyocker!) (2004): Hungarian animator Aron Gauder has mastered a hilarious fusion between digital animation, rotoscoped caricature and grotesque psychedelia, and it’s the most entertaining animated feature seen anywhere since The Triplets of Belleville. And the only animated satire for aeons.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007): Loving and self-glorifying. It never, after all, gets out of that chair and bed; Schnabel may be honing a distinctive filmmaking personality here (call it wistful eulogization, three films about three dead creative minds), but I was hoping for the winged moment that never came, despite the hotties.
Klimt (2006): Old-party historical surreal-ization of a rather uneventful biography. Ruiz dresses it up with nudes and masquerades.
Charlie Wilson’s War (2007): Like Primary Colors, Nichols’s other dressed-to-impress political "satire," this terribly witty claptrap ignores the realities of the Soviet Union, the Cold War, U.S. politics, and the invasion of Afghanistan just as it claims to be savvy about all of the above. "Let’s kill Russians," indeed.
Mafioso (1962): What’s wrong with spaghett’ with squid ink? Chortlesome and, eventually, coolly ironic, if a little overappreciated by American critics otherwise emaciated in January ‘07.
Quiet City (2007): So delicate it could crumble if someone opens a window. For reasons to do with its amateurishness as well as its melancholy realism.
Four Daughters (1938): Depression schmaltz, except it has the percolating Lane sisters (really, only Priscilla made honey), May Robson releasing genuine-sounding barbs as an old aunt, and the brand new John Garfield, seething as the screen’s very first Angry Young Man, and leaving his heelprint in America’s forehead.
Any chance I get (your quasi-recommendation of "Mafioso" will do) I plug those other Sicilian screwball comedies of the 1960s, "Divorce Italian Style" and "Seduced and Abandoned". Both are by Pietro Germi and both star the epitome of Italian virgin/whoredom, Stefania Sandrelli in her blossoming prime. And tell me that Haskell Wexler didn't outright steal "Seduced" DP Aiace Parolin's style for the mortuary interiors of "The Loved One".
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Just saw Charlie Wilson's War again tonight, on the grounds that it was 2 for one night at the local second-run theater, we'd seen everything else and wife was not going to spend another night on the couch watching TV. Hoffman still hilarious, politics an even worse outrage than first time around. It's repellent to see a movie made by someone who thinks that life and death issues are basically just a comedic chess game--that's Nichols for you, amazing how old a sophomore can get. The blink-and-you'll-miss-them comments about Wilson's involvement with the Contras particularly get my goat, in a movie that flaunts its sorrow for maimed atrocity victims. It all reminded me of that Samuel Johnson comment about how you shouldn't take it seriously if a butcher tells you his heart bleeds for his country.
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