New Films Reviewed

It's been more than a month since I've posted one of these roundups - it's been an odd month. I didn't watch anything in July, on vacation - but since I came back, I have kept up a pretty steady stream of films. Nothing like Sam Juliano - but there's nothing like the big pre-code series he's talking about to keep me that busy... What is keeping me busy is taking advantage of my last month of 4-at-a-time Netflix - and a nice series of revivals in town. In the last couple weeks I've seen screenings of Baby Face, It's a Gift, 3:10 to Yuma and The Man Who Fell to Earth - new films have had a hard time competing with that. Still - I've managed a few new films...

Tabloid 10/15 - funny, engaging, strange story of a woman, Joyce McKinney, a former beauty queen who fell for a Mormon, went to England and kidnapped him, maybe, raped him, maybe - maybe he ran off with her for a randy weekend and had second thoughts, or was brainwashed, or rekidnapped - maybe... In the end, they - she - became a huge Tabloid Scandal in England - manacled mormons and naked pictures and prostitution and what not... Errol Morris tells this tale - or gets many of the participants, especially McKinney, to tell it - and the sequel - when she turned up again, in 2008, paying to have her dog cloned in Korea... All this is quite entertaining, very funny - and she is a remarkably entertaining character, though apparently a genuine nut case - Morris knows how to let people tell their tales.... the whole business seems a bit slight, but well worth the watching.

Friends With Benefits - 9/15 - another try at a decent rom com, this one with the leads breaking up with the latest in a string of losers (though they are kind of losers too) - they hit it off fast as pals, and then start sleeping together, with no strings. This works well enough for a while, but sooner or later, they start looking for more - with other people? with each other? It's an odd film, a bit hard to really figure out. Enjoyed it, beginning to end, but felt like a couple things weren't quite there. There's too much talk about romcoms and such - too explicit in its need to act out the old Umberto Eco bit - "like they say in the movies, I love you madly"... That and - unlike all the other comedies I've seen this year - this says nothing whatsoever about money, or work. I can't convince myself that that should matter - but I can't convince myself it doesn't, either. Maybe I'm condemning this for not being a different film - maybe. Still - all those films - Cedar Rapids, WIn Win, Bad Teacher, Bridesmaids, even Larry Crowne - are about money, work, status - they are - interesting that way. This one? while the surface is quite good, it lacks that particular subtext, and - sometimes - any other subtext as well. (There are big subplots with both families - which have some nice moments, but seem to have been imposed on the film - and both of which turn into lessons on Letting Your True Love Get Away. Yeah yeah, so much for undermining Hollywood cliches, huh?) Anyway - I can't stop without noting that I really enjoyed the leads - Justin Timberlake has the makings of a real actor, I think; and Mila Kunis is great. I think, especially after the fact, that they sell the material more than it deserves - the script is funny enough, but they make it work better than it might deserve...

Road to Nowhere - 11/15 - Monte Hellman's return after 20 plus years without a film - a noirish tale about a politician and his girlfriend, who is actually a double for the woman she's supposed to be (Velma Duran) - they steal 100 million, fake their deaths.... No, not quite - the film is actually about a film being made from that story - Road To Nowhere, too, directed by Mitchell Haven, written by Steve Gates... In this film (within the film) the girl hired to play the lead role (Velma) in the movie might have been the girl already playing Velma in the underlying story... Except - how much of this is in the movie in the movie, and how much is the plot of the movie about the movie of the story, I don't know... Just to add to the fun - at the end of the film, people get shot (allegedly in the diegetic reality of the movie we're watching) - the director of the film (in the film) then picks up a camera (as directors, especially of films within films, are wont to do, even in the most extreme circumstances) and films the carnage - and, turning round the room, films the "real" crew of the "real" movie... (Hellman, who was visiting for this screening, says this was improvised by the actor - he had a camera in the scene, and picked it up and shot what he shot - and the editor used the footage from the shot, to uncanny effect. It is certainly a cool shot.) It is all very clever, this movie - packed with quotes, open and covert - clips from The Lady Eve, Secret of the Beehive, The Seventh Seal - references to Vertigo obviously, and probably more - Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive? At least, strong similarities. It is, in any case, a great looking film, shot with a digital still camera, of all things - it looks digital, but a gorgeous kind of digital, with deep, rich textures, superb low light qualities... I suppose in some ways it is, in fact, too clever for its own good - there's a sense, I think, that the convolutions of the narrative is a cover for the banality of the plot - and the convolutions themselves are not that extraordinary... But this is a very mild quibble - if the narration covers for the lack of plot - it does so very well - it keeps you quite engaged in the story, all the levels of the story (and the surfaces - faces and spaces and such) - it is a very neat piece of work.

The Future - 8/15 - new Miranda July film, a rather dull indie drama - twee, though more damning, it's empty, built around two utterly passive characters... They are scheduled to pick up a cat from a shelter in 30 days - after that, they don't know if the cat is supposed to live 6 months or 5 years - this brings them face to face with the fact that they are coming up toward middle age.... So - they have crises - they quit their jobs - he starts canvassing for some kind of environmental outfit selling trees; she sets out to to create 30 dances in 30 days. He instead of working spends most of his time hanging out with an old man that he suddenly realizes is himself in 50s years - she starts up an affair with the father of a little girl they met at the animal shelter. Somewhere in here - he can stop time and does - then?... All this - there are a couple moments where things click - the time stopping bit is, in fact, stunning - a great piece of filmmaking. But - most of the rest is - not that bad, just centered on people who are very hard to give any trace of a good god damn about - with nothing special to look at...