Mother

I’ll level with you: I watched Mother curled up on the couch, wracked with stomach cramps while my body either expelled or adapted to some new microbe I ingested at an Arabian Shawarma shack.  Perhaps I’m not the most reliable person to consult regarding this film.

Yet I enjoyed it, as best I could.  Mother tells the tale of the mother of a mentally retarded young man who has been accused of murdering a schoolgirl.  This sounds like the setup for a standard detective story, but here’s the twist: Mother is a little, well, off.  She seems awfully devoted to her son and sufficiently unhinged that I wouldn’t want to stand in her way. 

The film delights in hooking us into the mystery while creeping us out with its protagonist.  I attribute its success to Hye-ja Kim, who plays Mother.  She’s canny yet naïve, loving and ruthless (I first wrote loving but ruthless, but those traits often go together.).  She’s fascinating, and Kim does an amazing job of bringing her to life. 

I don’t wish gastrointestinal difficulties on anyone.  But if, like me, you have a weakness for roadside grills, you can do worse than Mother to get you through it.  Enjoy, I guess.

Dinner for Schmucks

I hated Dinner for Schmucks.  Hated it, hated it, hated it.  The movie’s a fraud.

Here’s the deal.  Paul Rudd is career-oriented guy on the way up.  This means, of course, that by the end he’ll throw it all away and only then be ready for true love because he’s in a romantic comedy.  Steve Carrel is an idiot.  I’m talking about a deeply, deeply stupid man.  For Rudd to ascend to the next rung on the socioeconomic ladder, he must find an idiot and bring him to the titular dinner, where rich people mock idiots for their amusement.  Because that’s the kind of thing rich people do because they’re in a romantic comedy.

Ok so far.  We know where this will go: Carrel will reveal himself to be a font of wisdom and courage, Rudd will find his moral compass and get the girl, and we’ll all feel better about ourselves because the film will confirm our suspicion that we aren’t rich because we aren’t morally bankrupt. 

But here’s the underlying structural problem of the film:  it wants us to sit in judgment on those who laugh at the stupid, but it devotes almost all of its running time to laughing at the stupid.  It’s like Dinner for Schmucks is saying, “They can’t laugh at dumb people, because it’s morally wrong.  We, however, can laugh all we want because, well, because we paid our money, godammit, and we want comedy.”

I didn’t laugh.  I just felt alternately sorry for and angry with everyone involved in this film.  How stupid do you have to be read this script and not see its profound hypocrisy?

Winter's Bone

WINTER’S BONE is one of the scariest, most horrifying films I’ve seen all year.  And it isn’t even a horror movie.

Ree Dolly lives in a dirt road cabin in rural Missouri.  Just seventeen, she cares for her two younger siblings and her catatonic mother.  Her father’s a felon, a meth cooker, and he posted the cabin and land for his most recent bail bond.  The sheriff comes around to tell her that her dad jumped bail.  She has about a week to either find him or clear off.  Nobody cares that she and her charges have nowhere to clear off to.

None of which is scary or horrifying.  It’s sad, and it’s compelling, but the scary and horrifying part comes later, when she starts looking.  See, Ree Dolly has deep roots in Southern Missouri.  She’s related, one way or another, to nearly everyone who might know where her father is.  Problem is, she’s from an extended family of drug makers, drug dealers, and drug takers.  Her people, the only people she has, treat her with hostility, suspicion, and fear.  Yes, there are some bright spots, but this young woman lives in a universe so full of secrets and violence that even her closest allies think nothing of threatening and intimidating her not because they have particular cause to, but because it’s the only way they know how to deal with people.

WINTER’S BONE combines this poisonous social atmosphere with the cold, icy, wet, and dead milieu of wintertime among the rural poor in Southern Missouri.  Ree’s increasing desperation combines with the brutality of her physical and social worlds to create a sense of claustrophobia, hopelessness, dread, and even fear.  When her quest culminates in an episode of jaw-clenching, gut-roiling horror, we’re left aghast and destroyed.

This is amazing stuff.  Jennifer Lawrence gives Ree such hard-edged, desperate, and even mean humanity that we feel for her and we root for her, even though we may not necessarily like her.  The supporting cast, particularly Deadwood’s John Hawkes as an uncle who’d be a nightmare in anyone’s family and Dale Dickey, a second or third cousin who’s even worse, flesh out a world of bitter, hard, and variably moral people that felt utterly authentic and absolutely scary.

As I think of it, I can’t recall a foot WINTER’S BONE puts wrong.  This film will find a place on my top ten of 2010.

City Island

There’s this island in the Hudson. It’s called City Island, and it’s technically part of the Bronx, but it seems like a whole other world from the rest of that borough. It’s bucolic, with fishermen and working class folk living alongside newcomers who must have paid in the millions for the waterfront homes they’ve purchased there.

There’s a family on this island, the Rizzos. The parents yell at the kids and at one another, everybody smokes in secret (thinking everyone else has quit), and they seem to have settled into a comfortably dysfunctional groove. Andy Garcia, the father in the tableau, has a secret: the illegitimate son he abandoned long ago. Now, the grown-up son is in trouble. Garcia brings him home. Revelations impend.

The illegitimate son serves two purposes in this film: he provides dramatic tension (For how long can Garcia hide his past?) and dramatic complication (Will the son, unaware of his bloodline, sleep with his stepmother or half sister or both?). These keep us interested while everyone else in the family finds themselves and their collective identity. Not to say that finding oneself and one’s collective identity is inherently boring, but there’s nothing like a bomb under the table to keep those not directly involved in the finding interested in the proceedings.

And how do the proceedings go? Well, they struck me as quite writerly. Everyone harbors a dramatic secret. There’s a quirky neighbor. Nobody stutters or says the wrong thing – in fact, they all seem to speak in modulated tones of the writer’s voice.

That’s not to say this is a bad film. I liked this family and I cared about how they’d (inevitably) work things out. Garcia’s terrific, Julianna Margulies (as the Mater) provides a carefully tuned performance, and Emily Mortimer (as one of many catalysts) is every bit as good you’d expect. But they never felt quite real, going through their crises on their charming little island. Nevertheless, I wish them well. Warts and all, they’re a lovely family.

The Girl Who Played with Fire

I’m having trouble with The Girl Who Played with Fire.  I liked the two leads, I enjoyed seeing more of Sweden, a country I’ve only passed through on my way to other places, and I found the villain sufficiently monstrous.  But I’m still not entirely sure what happened.   I don’t understand how the ball got rolling.  I mean, one minute, Noomi Rapace’s character is living in the sun, happy as can be.  The next, she’s back in cold, cold Stockholm.  Why did she return, other than a dramatic imperative that a popular character must return to the site of its home market?  And the villains, how do they know each other, really? 

Either the source material’s weak or this film got butchered for a US release.  Either way, you’re going to have to work through a bit of muddle so you can enjoy the sleuths, who are well drawn, the settings, which are lovely, and the mystery itself.  Perhaps you can explain it to me.

Shinjuku Incident

In Shinjuku Incident, Jackie Chan plays an illegal immigrant to Japan. He (literally) washes ashore with no papers, no money, no chances. He steals shoes. He hides from the police. Eventually, he links up with other illegals and begins to form a life. But it’s hard, doing nasty and dirty work for wages far below minimum. Perhaps there’s an easier way – those gangsters seem pretty well fed. Chan takes a few tentative steps into crime, just to get by. Turns out, the man has courage and leadership skills. And we can see the arc from there.

We’ve seen movies like this before. Shinjuku Incident’s unique contribution is its Tokyo setting, its subculture (formerly rural Chinese illegal immigrants), and its star. This isn’t a stunt movie – Chan is more likely to pick up a pipe and start flailing than kick anyone in the face. Rather, it’s a bullet for Chan’s resume as a serious actor. Elastic and amazing as the man may be, that middle is getting thicker and those joints are getting creakier – there’s just no way around it. Fortunately, the man doesn’t embarrass himself. He uses his likeable persona to keep us on his side as his dealing grow increasingly shady, and he gives us character’s moral evolution in natural, lifelike steps.

Yes, he’s about ten years too old for the part as it’s written (or, perhaps, for the women cast as his love interests), but what’s a little vanity in a major film star? He works in the role, and the film works because of him, and Shinjuku Incident shines a light on a whole new subculture. Not bad.

Bardelys the Magnificent

Bardelys the Magnificent, a silent from 1926, features good stunts, one of the most wonderfully sneering villains I’ve ever seen put to film, and a lead actress whose technique appears so modern that she could roll into a contemporary romantic comedy without missing a beat.

John Gilbert plays Bardelys, a Don Juan type of character in pre-revolutionary France.  The ladies love him, the men don’t mind him because he’s such a nice guy, and even the King thinks he’s got it all going on.  But there’s trouble in Paris. The villainous Chatellerault (Roy D’Arcy) has returned after being spurned by the fair Roxalanne de Lavedan (Eleanor Boardman).  Chatellerault, shamed by his failure, challenges Bardelys to a bet: if Bardelys can marry Roxalanne in two months, he’ll cede all his properties to the famed paramour.  If not, Bardelys, loses everything.  Bardelys takes the challenge, and the laws of drama take over from there.

So, what makes Bardelys the Magnificent worth your time?  Not Gilbert, who’s fine and all, but lacks the charisma of a Douglas Fairbanks or a Rudolph Valentino.  I mean, yeah, he can fence with the best of them and seems a decent fellow, but I sensed that the film assumed he’d be an audience favorite while he struck me as a second rater.  The stunt work, while not spectacular, is quite nice.  The fencing matches look good, the acrobatic bits look natural, and the action set-pieces give the impression of carefully designed and executed stunts.  If that’s your thing (and it is mine), you’ll surely enjoy it.  The villain, well, now we’re getting into it.  Roy D’Arcy blew me away.  This guy mastered the moustache twirl, the disdainful sneer, the deep insecurity covered by haughtiness and volatility.  And hey, he can even do a pretty good pratfall when asked.  D’Arcy’s Chatellerault ranks right up there with Hans Gruber in the pantheon of great screen villains.  But you wanna see something that’ll really blow you away?  Check out Eleanor Boardman as Roxallane.  Her performance stands out not just from this film, but from silent film in general, because she’s doing something completely different.  While nearly all silent film acting seems aimed at the rafters, with big gestures and expressions to ensure everyone’s comprehension, this actress carries and expresses herself naturally.  When she shrugs, when she smiles, when she doubletakes, she looks like a real person and not a Silent Era Actress.  It surprised me, it refreshed me, and it delighted me.  I thought it was about the coolest thing ever.

So if you like silents, check out Bardelys.  You’ll predict the story and you may not warm to the lead, but I guarantee that you’ll delight in the villain and love Eleanor Boardman.  This is a good time at the movies.

Temple Grandin

Some time ago, I wrote about my eldest son, who has a kind of high-level autism called Asperger Syndrome. Upon reading those words, a friend recommended Temple Grandin, an HBO biopic about a woman whose autism gave her the ability to become one of the world’s foremost experts on animal husbandry and an internationally known authority on both ranching and autism. I loved every minute of it.

Claire Danes plays the titular Temple Grandin, a young woman who grew up so wildly different that many of her earliest memories centered on her status as an outsider and a misfit, someone clearly brighter than those around her yet unable to cope with the everyday demands of social interaction. I’ve seen Ms. Danes in a number of roles, and nothing I’ve seen her do prepared me for this. She plays Temple Grandin like someone who really gets autism, who understands the subtleties of understanding that lurk behind the somewhat clumsy autistic exterior.

The adults in her early life include Julia Ormond as the strong-willed mother who refuses to institutionalize her deeply challenged little girl; Catherine O’Hara as the aunt who changes Temple’s life by inviting her to her Tuscon ranch one summer; and David Strathairn as the high school science teacher who not only sees past Temple’s social and communications handicaps and perceives her amazing gifts of memory, calculation, and perception, but figures out how to unleash them. These are actors we know and like, and I bought them in their roles.

Ok, HBO hires good actors – we already knew that. The great thing about Temple Grandin is Grandin herself. This is an amazing woman who inspires not through her fearlessness, but through the remarkable strength she brings to overcoming her fears. Doors scare her, so she came up with a mantra to help her pass through them. She doesn’t like to be touched, so she came up with another way to get the comfort of a hug. She can’t intuit appropriate behaviors, so she learned appropriate (enough) actions for most social situations.

This is neat, neat stuff. I’m going to recommend it to the parents of autistic kids with whom my wife and I meet. I’m recommending it to you, as well. Temple Grandin will enlighten you. It’ll entertain you. It’ll make you want to be a better person. What more could you ask from a movie?
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Addendum: I just read this on Wikipedia. “At the 62nd Primetime Emmy Awards, the film, nominated in 15 Emmy categories, received five awards, including Outstanding Made for Television Movie and Best Actress in a Drama for Danes. Grandin was on stage as the award was accepted, and spoke briefly on the microphone to the audience. Coincidentally, the 2010 Emmy Awards happened on Grandin's birthday.”  Now, how cool is that?

Le Trou

Le Trou (The Hole), directed and co-written by Jacques Becker, is a flat-out nailbiter: perhaps the best “prison break” movie I’ve ever seen.

La Santé Prison, Paris, 1947. A young man who may or may not be guilty of attempted 1st degree murder, find himself in a new cell. The residents don’t trust him. They’re planning an escape. Will the inmates of the cell work together, or wind up at one another’s throats? Will they overcome the obstacles to escape, or will the sophistication of the prison’s architects be too much for them? Will succumb to chance? Even if they do succeed, what’s the next step in their plan?

The film succeeds because it gives us time to get to know the men in this cell. We know they think they’re doomed if they don’t escape, but the filmmakers wisely refrain from telling us the details of their crimes. All we know is that they seem like nice enough fellows, and they want out. Once we know these people and come to like them, director Becker gives us something that’s essentially a heist movie in reverse. He walks us through the plan, then makes us hang on every step, every detail.

So here we have a film that makes us want to watch men chip at concrete for five minutes at a throw, wondering if this will be the strike that breaks them through or alerts the guards. In fact, Le Trou keeps afloat a wonderful sense of tension throughout, never showing its hand about the final outcome and keeping us on edge right up to the very end. This is a riveting picture, entirely successful and well worth watching. Enjoy.

The Bugs Bunny / Roadrunner Movie

Clip show,

It’s a clip show,

We’re recycling all your favorite bits.

Clip show,

It’s a clip show,

Where we show you nothing but the hits.

The clip show is the cheapest, most commercial type of tv program there is.  To market a clip show as a movie is just plain crass.  I mean, fine, rip me off with cheap remakes of beloved classics.  Endow favorite characters with new traits that change their nature and the tone of the work.  But just splicing together a bunch of old bits and calling them a movie?  I’d be furious if my kids hadn’t laughed all the way through it.  Ok, I’ll admit it – my wife and I laughed through a fair amount, as well.  “It’s duck season!  Rabbit season!  Rabbit season!  Duck Season!  BLAM!”  never gets old.

Yes, The Bugs Bunny / Roadrunner Movie is a clip show, but the clips are amazing.  If your kids aren’t familiar with Loony Toons, here’s a great place to start.  For that matter, here’s a great place to start if you want to familiarize your kids with classical music.  There’s a whole bit that’s essentially one long Leopold Stokowski joke.  There’s an 8-minute riff on ‘The Ring of the Nibelung.’  There’s so much good music here that even if you choose to read on the couch while your kids watch the picture, you’ll groove along on your ears alone.

So yeah, clip shows = cheap cash-ins.  But when you have clips like these, go for it.  The Bugs Bunny / Roadrunner Movie delighted my entire family.

Ichi

Remember Zatoichi, the blind swordsman? You know the guy: 27 films, 112 television episodes, and even a Takashi Miike - directed stage production. He’s a masseur, he’s a swordmaster, and he’s the baddest blind dude in the land.

So, what if he had a protégé, something of an adopted daughter, also blind and a goze (a sort of officially sanctioned, blind itinerant musician)? What if they’ve separated and she’s on a quest to find him? What if she gets caught up in a conflict between bandits and villagers? Oh, and what if the actress who plays her is blessed with remarkable beauty?

What we’re talking about here is a 99% chance of awesomness.  Sadly, welcome to the 1%.

The actress appears never to have handled a sword, and she mustn’t even be a very good dancer, because director Fumihiko Sori never shows us a decent duel. We get succession of closeups, sprays of digital blood, and young Ichi’s strangely clean blade returning to its sheath. That’s it. Sure, other characters battle reasonably well, but the film isn’t entitled Other Characters. It’s entitled Ichi, and I don’t think it’s too much to expect for an actress playing a master swordswoman to be able to actually, y’know, handle a katana. But that’s not all. If the protagonist can’t use a blade, the antagonist can’t use his face to convey things like, oh, actual human emotion. All he can do is snarl and laugh menacingly, while trying to look threatening in costumes so silly Elton John would laugh them off the stage.

Ichi seemed like a sure thing, but they dropped the ball. Fortunately, you have 140 other outings of (a very similar) character to enjoy. Have at it.

Mildred Pierce

Holy smokes, what a great movie!

Joan Crawford plays Mildred Pierce in one of her finest performances.  She’s smart, tough, and driven, with just enough blind spots to make her interesting.  It’s such a fine performance because so much of it is Crawford herself – smart, tough, and driven is woven into her DNA.

Here’s the setup:  there’s been a murder.  Crawford’s a suspect.  The interrogation serves as a framing device, giving Crawford the chance to tell us her story and of the events – all of the events – that led up to a fateful night, gunshots, and a man on the floor.

Crawford’s story?  That of a newly-single mother, determined to give her daughters the finer things that she never had.  Pierce never relents in her drive, reveling in its positive consequences (anything  that’ll make a sidekick of Eve Arden is, by definition, a positive consequence) and blinding herself, at least for as long as she can, to the negatives.

This could be melodramatic stuff and, indeed, Mildred Pierce doesn’t shy from melodrama.  But the cast plays it straight, the movie looks fabulous (NOTE: How much better could we all look if only we had Silver-Age lighting directors to illuminate us?), and I found myself, perhaps for the first time in my life, actually rooting for a Joan Crawford character.

Mildred Pierce is just a flat-out terrific picture.  Rumor has it that HBO’s working on a remake, with Kate Winslet in the lead.  While Winslet Can Do No Wrong, she has her work cut out for her.  If the program turns out to be half as good as this film, it’ll be worth watching.

One, Two, Three

I like James Cagney.  I like Billy Wilder.  I like humor that pokes fun at all things German.  So why didn’t One, Two, Three, a Billy Wilder comedy about a Coca-Cola executive in Cold War Berlin work for me?  I think it’s a matter of pitch and pace.

‘Sabre Dance’ plays over the opening credits of One, Two, Three.  Having begun on this manic pace, the film never slows down.  Cagney spends most of the movie yelling at people, the comic foil spends all of his time yelling at people, and everyone’s so busy running around and shouting to the rafters that there’s never a moment to revel in comic silliness.

What a bore.

In a Lonely Place

In a Lonely Place showcases a brilliant Humphrey Bogart performance in a role that amuses, challenges, and delights us – right up to the moment when it conflicts with our modern sensibilities and throws us out of the picture.

Bogart plays Dix Steele (say it fast), a screenwriter who’s on the outs with the studios and the ins with the sauce. When he brings home a good-natured and ambitious young hat-check girl to help him with a project, we think we’re in for a romantic comedy. Bogart’s quite funny in his scenes with her, and he wins us over with his cynicism and wit. But things take a turn for the worse and he’s soon involved in a murder investigation. Did he do it? Maybe he could. Will he work his way out of it? Perhaps. We’re in.

That is, we’re in right up to the moment when a police detective reads his rap sheet. The rap sheet involves beating a girlfriend until he broke her nose and put her in the hospital. I think this is supposed to show his troubled past and his capacity for violence, but we’re still supposed to feel some measure of sympathy for the man. Unfortunately, I have no sympathy for domestic abusers. This led me to change my position from “I hope things work out” to “Screw this guy, and screw anyone who sticks by him.”

So I was lost. The gorgeous cinematography and the first-class performances meant nothing to me. The conflicts and resolutions wasted my time. I didn’t care enough about the character to want to see him exonerated, and I wasn’t sufficiently convinced of his guilt in the murder case to want to see him hanged. I was just plain out.

Perhaps, in its day, In a Lonely Place worked all the way through. After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that corporal punishment of one’s spouse was considered a manly duty. Today, however, I look at a man who hits a woman who can’t him back and all I see is a coward and a rat.

I have no time for either.

The Secret of Kells

Ah, what a beautiful film.

The Secret of Kells centers on Brendan, a young monk in Kells, an Irish monastery and fortress against the invading Norsemen.  The abbot cares about one thing: building a wall big enough and strong enough to keep the Norse at bay.  Yes, there’s a scriptorium, but that seems almost an afterthought.  The illustrators there are workingmen.  They await the coming of a true master.

When one arrives, fleeing the Norse who’ve overrun his island monastery and bearing an illuminated manuscript that will one day become the (real life) Book of Kells, Brendan goes right to him.  What, after all, is the point of a monastery that ignores things monastic?

Ok, so there’s your hook.  But the secret of The Secret of Kells lies not in the story but in the presentation.  Its animation feels like illumination, with an overlapping 2-D style reminiscent of Sita Sings The Blues.  It weaves designs of Celtic symbology with Latin influences and brings to life many of the motifs of both.

This is a beautiful, imaginative film – the kind that, as a father, I’ll be able to watch over and over again, seeing new things each time.  If you value quality animation, you’ll love this film.

Red Beard

At first, I thought that Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard could as easily have been entitled ‘Hero Doctors.’ Red Beard is the head of a small charity clinic serving the rural poor in late Tokugawa-Era Japan, just before the Meiji restoration. We see him mostly through the eyes of Dr. Yasumoto, a recent grad on his way up before his exile to this backwater facility, and he is as heroic as can be. He leads his team. He saves lives. He comes up with funding. He does all the things Hero Doctors do.

But there's more going on here than that. Kurosawa understands that the laws of cinema dictate that Yasumoto will come to love the clinic and the people it serves. While he spends enough time on that story to create a binding narrative, he seems much more interested in the lives of the rural poor, their victories and losses and the beliefs that govern their world. Red Beard takes many long detours from Yasumoto’s tale to explore his patients’ lives. This gives the (three hour long) film a sense of pace and place, taking the time to immerse us in an entire community, not just the individual challenges faced by one guy.

Toshiro Mifune, surely one of cinema’s greatest talents, plays the eponymous Red Beard with just the right balance of authority and humanity. Yuzo Kayama does a fine job of getting us on the callow Dr. Yasumoto’s side and walking us through his character’s development. The clinic feels like a real clinic, the people like real people (Ok, we have to overcome the fact that some of the bit players were unwilling to get Tokugawa-era haircuts and went for wigs instead, but big deal – these were contract players, and Toho Studios had many concurrent productions running nearly all the time.), and the village, though it must have been a studio, like a real village.

Don’t be put off by Red Beard’s running time. Treat it like a book: watch a couple of chapters a night and enjoy the experience. Time with Akira Kurosawa is always time well spent.

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies

I giggled like a ninny for nearly the entire running time of OSS 117:  Cairo, Nest of Spies.

There are 146 OSS 117 novels.  The series, chronicling the adventures of Franco-American superspy OSS 117, began in 1949, went through three authors, and saw its last published novel in 1992.  The French made seven OSS 117 films from 1964-1970, part of the Eurospy genre that ripped off and riffed on the success of James Bond.  OSS 117 is supercool.  He gets the job done.  He’s so awesome that Ian Fleming essentially ripped off the OSS 117 novels to create 007.

And in 2006’s OSS 117:  Cairo, Nest of Spies, he’s a meathead.  A charming meathead, no doubt, but one so delightedly and blindly French (the American part of the character’s heritage doesn’t make it into this adaptation) that he hands out photos of then-president René Coty (the film’s set in the mid-‘50s) to incredulous Egyptians as keepsakes and tokens of his patronizing goodwill.  It’s a one-joke movie, but the picture grooves along on such a fun retro vibe of smug delight in all things French that we can’t help but groove along with it, snigger at 117’s blockheadedness, and generally enjoy a spy caper so outlandish and silly that there’s not much to do but have a great time.

The filmmakers do a wonderful job of creating an era, paying attention to details from the cut of a suit to the proper period footage for the rear-projections in driving sequences.  The move looks and feels like a film made in the early ‘60s, and everything pops in a color process we’re just not used to seeing in a new print.

So not only is the movie funny, it’s technically adept and well made all around.  I look forward to OSS 117: Lost in Rio.

Leaves of Grass

Tim Blake Nelson’s Leaves of Grass is a funny and sad and phenomenal. I enjoyed almost every minute of it, with one glaring exception.

Here’s the setup: Edward Norton plays identical (genius) twins. The protagonist twin got out of rural Oklahoma, dropped his accent, and “made it” as an academic philosopher at Brown University. The other stayed in his hometown, revolutionized hydroponic marijuana cultivation, and became, in the good twin’s words, “a criminal and all-around fuckup.”

As you may imagine, Good Twin hasn’t been ‘round in a very long time.

But events conspire to bring Good Twin back to Oklahoma and, before you know it, you’re in Doc Hollywood territory. Surely, the down home charms of country folk will speak to GT’s soul. Surely, a little twang will find its way back into his voice. Surely, there’s an Oklahoma Dreamgirl just waiting to steal his heart.

And that’s where the film puts a foot wrong. Keri Russel, as the Oklahoma Dreamgirl, doesn’t sell her part. She’s a poet who moved back to the small town because that’s the kind of thing that poets do. But every time she recites, she sounds like a woman reciting poetry and expecting you to dig it because, well, it’s poetry. She’s a poet who talks of passionate living, but brings no passion to her delivery of her life’s work. She yanked me right out of the movie.

But that’s it. That’s the one fly in the ointment. If you can overlook Russel’s performance, you get to enjoy Tim Blake Nelson as a henchman with a heart of gold, Richard Dreyfuss as a bloviating drug kingpin, Susan Sarandon as a mom who thought being a cool mom was all it took, and even The Wire’s Steve Earle as a Very Bad Man.

Will it speak to you? I don’t know. I do know that Tim Blake Nelson is a serious talent, able to bring rural America to life without trivializing it or condescending to it. I look forward to seeing what he does next.

Bad Day at Black Rock

Bad Day at Black Rock is the best western I’ve seen in ages.

It’s the 1950s.  A one-armed man (Spencer Tracy) gets off a train in Black Rock, a dusty town somewhere in the Mojave Desert.  It’s the first time anyone’s gotten off the train in Black Rock for years, and people there don’t cotton to strangers.  Lee Marvin doesn’t like him.  Ernest Borgnine doesn’t like him.  Robert Ryan doesn’t like him.  They invite him to leave.  He declines.  And away we go.

Bad Day at Black Rock succeeds because it’s a slow burn.  It works a quiet tension between Tracy and the people of the town, one that winds more and more tightly as Tracy penetrates to the town’s mysteries, learns just why he’s not wanted.  As the film progresses and we learn more about Tracy and Black Rock, we find ourselves shutting out our world and plunging into its.  The film is so immersive, so fascinating, so tense that we lose track of time.  It’s brilliant.

There’s more going on here than another good thriller, however.  Nevertheless, I’m going to keep mum about it.  If you don’t know Black Rock’s secrets, I don’t want to give you a hint.  If you do, well then, you know.

Ripley's Game

John Malkovich is an absolutely outstanding Tom Ripley in Ripley’s Game.

Thirty, maybe forty years on from the unsure young Tom Ripley of The Talented Mr. Ripley, this Ripley is a man in full. He lives the live to which he aspired in Talented: a fabulous Italian villa, a sophisticated and respected lover, and all the amenities of the arriviste American in Europe. Here’s a man who has long since made peace with his sociopathy. He is who he is, and he won’t cause you any trouble - unless you piss him off.

This Ripley still improvises. He still trusts to Providence. He’s just been doing it so long and been lucky so long that he’s become a master. But he’s still a fraud, and John Malkovich captures this sense of the classy, smooth operator who, in some vague way, is not quite right. We’re never comfortable around Malkovich, and we’re never comfortable around Ripley. Even when he seems to be on our side, we’re pretty sure he’s on his own side and that’s that.

So when he gets down to work and the dominos begin to fall, it’s ever so much wicked fun to watch Ripley be Ripley. Here’s a guy who starts someplace beyond where everyone else stops, a guy so secure and powerful in his sense of self that we can’t help but root for him and glide along with him. If you enjoyed Matt Damon in Talented, I think you’ll love this older, wiser, colder iteration of the character in Ripley’s Game. It’s a great role, Malkovich is great it in it, and Ripley’s Game is a whole lot of wicked fun.