Hiatus

Hi folks,

I'm in the middle of a move right now.  Thus, I don't have time to keep the blog up to date.  Please feel free to browse around - you may find something that piques your interest.

Ip Man 2

Ip Man 2, while not quite as good as Ip Man (reviewed here), still ranks as a thoroughly successful martial arts picture.

Donnie Yen reprises his role as Ip Man (Ip is his surname, Man his given name.  If he were in the US, he’d call himself Man Ip.).  He and his family are refugees in Hong Kong, their pre-war lives of affluence in mainland Foshun nothing but a memory.  The first film indicated that Ip was a smart businessman, but even a smart businessman needs a little starting capital.  For Ip, that means offering lessons in Wing Chun. 

Soon, Ip’s standing before a gathering of the martial arts masters of Hong Kong, offering to fight any challengers for the right to be called Master.  This is a fantastic sequence, even better than the film’s climactic fight against a cocky English boxer.  It combines comedy (two Masters conferring, “You wanna go first?”  “No, I think you should go first.”) with class and grace, showing us Masters fighting hard, but pulling their punches so as not to do any real damage.  The battles convey a sense of respect and sportsmanship, with Ip bowing to each defeated opponent and telling him, “Thank you for letting me win.”  When Sammo Hung himself, as the Big Boss, takes center stage against our protagonist, the film delivers a real treat.  Hung has always been a big boy – he was the “fat one” during his days at Peking Opera – and it’s a real delight to see a man who’s pushing 250 lbs trading moves with the younger, fitter Yen.

So if Ip Man 2 still has Donnie Yen and even puts fight choreographer and director Sammo Hung in front of the camera, why doesn’t it measure up to Ip Man?  Simply put, the stakes aren’t as high.  In Ip Man, the hero tries to keep his family alive during the Japanese occupation of China.  In Ip Man 2, he’s just another immigrant trying to make it in a new town.  Nobody’s pointing a gun at him.  Further, the fights use more wire work, which is a distraction in the quasi-realistic world Ip Man 2 tries to create.  Combine that with a greater reliance on fast-paced editing in the fight sequences, and we have a film that, rather than the brilliance of its predecessor, merely checks in as very very good.

But hey, I’ll take very very good every time.  Ip Man 2, while not a masterpiece, is still better than most martial arts films on the market.  I’d happily watch it again.

L'illusionnist

The Illusionist is absolutely lovely.

The film concerns an aging French stage magician.  He practices an art that has gone out of vogue in a world that has passed him by.  What happens to him is, well, lovely.

The Illusionist, not to be confused with the very fine Edward Norton movie of the same title, has little dialogue.  It could have been a Chaplin film, with that Chaplinesque combination of comedy and pathos, all told with movement and photography and music.  In this case, however, the film uses a style of animation (it was nominated for Best Animated Feature in 2010) that recalls watercolors.  This gives it a soft and pleasing aesthetic, and it helps evoke a world just a little bit past, just a little bit mysterious.  The film’s music complements its visuals, accentuating and playing with them, giving The Illusionist a life beyond the screen.

My mind keeps coming back to the same word: lovely.  Lovely animation, lovely music, lovely everything.  I love it.

Somewhere

Sofia Coppola is one of the most audacious artists working in film.

Her latest, Somewhere, has the barest hint of a three-act structure.  It doesn’t seem to care where its people go.  Nothing blows up, nobody falls in love, the fate of the world hangs not in the balance.  Basically, Coppola uses it to explore ennui.  It is absolutely fascinating.

In Somewhere, Stephen Dorff plays a movie star who appears to live at the Château Marmont, a swanky hotel in West Hollywood (Fun fact: I used to know a guy who’d been mayor of West Hollywood.  His name was Steve Martin, and he was a lawyer who always had a funny story about some sex-related case he’d worked on.  We called him Steve Martin the Sex Lawyer.).  He has an ex-wife, a daughter, several hangers on, and a brother whose company he enjoys.  He has unlimited access to sex, drugs, and all the accouterments of the high life, and he’s empty inside.  He doesn’t love his work, he isn’t very good at sex, and he’s lost interest in pretty much everything but his daughter.  This is a film about a guy who’s going through the motions.

So what makes Somewhere fascinating?  What makes us care about some lazy rich guy’s ennui?  Coppola’s observational power does it.  When we watch Somewhere, we feel like one of Wim Wenders’s angels, looking on sympathy as this fragile human puts his faith in things and drugs and sensations.  We feel for him as he comes to realize that they are nothing, that the finest food and drink are ashes in his mouth, that he is dead inside.  We hope that he’ll find his way, that he’ll learn that detachment is a wall that doesn’t keep the world away from him, but him away from the world.  We urge him, silently, to engage: to engage the daughter who loves him, to engage the work for which he’s suited, to engage not living, but life.

Perhaps he will.  I don’t know.  But I do know that Coppola brought me into his world, as she has brought me into the worlds of people before him.  She made me care.  She made me engage.  She made me evaluate facets of my own life (he writes, from yet another empty hotel room).  Her steady gaze makes me not just look, but see.  I expectantly wait her next film and the opportunity to see once more.

Blue Valentine

I couldn’t wait for Blue Valentine to end.  The film, composed as a juxtaposition between the blossoming romance of a young couple and the stagger toward divorce of that same couple a few years on, felt too authentic, too sharp.  I felt like I was privy to the bedroom conversations of real people, and I felt like I was sticking my nose in their business.

Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling play the couple in two phases of their lives: young people with poor life management skills and older people with poor communications skills.  As young people, Williams is the kind of woman who chooses the wrong men, and Gosling is the kind of man who can unwittingly destroy the dreams of a smart, ambitious woman.  As older people, they’re a couple who talk past one another, who drink too much, who have become poison.  These were the kind of people I avoided when I was in my twenties, and they’ve grown into the kind of people I avoid in my forties.  I wanted nothing to do with either of them.

Williams and Gosling are very good at playing their roles, but they played people I didn’t want to be around.  I didn’t want to watch them fall in love because, even without the spoiler built into the film’s structure, I knew how things would work out for them.  I didn’t want to watch their relationship fall apart because I felt like that was their personal business and I shouldn’t get involved.

To steal a phrase from the brilliant Les Phillips, I think that Blue Valentine was the best Blue Valentine it could be.  But given the choice, I’d rather not have spent two hours with these people.

Get Carter

You know who’s a bad dude?  Michael Frickin’ Caine is a bad dude.

In 1971’s Get Carter, he’s a thug with the London mob whose his brother up North just died in car wreck after downing a bottle of scotch.  Problem is, his brother didn’t drink scotch.  Carter, played by Caine as a very smart, very evil man, wants answers.

You could go anywhere with that setup, a reality acknowledged by showing Carter reading a Raymond Chandler novel on the northbound train.  Here, the film goes for the slow burn.  Carter doesn’t know what happened to his brother, but he’s willing to us his nose for lies and his comfort with aggression to find out and seek revenge.  Most of the film, consequently, is a detective story with a very bad man as the detective.  As we piece together the circumstances of the mysterious death along with our protagonist, we find ourselves weighing various possibilities, trying to stay ahead of the players, wondering what’ll happen next.

Anchoring all this is, of course, Michael Caine.  He invests us in his self-described villain through the force of his personality and makes us actually care about whether this murdering thug lives or dies.  It’s a remarkable performance, and yet another indication why Caine is one of the finest screen actors of his or any generation.

Though Caine anchors the film, Get Carter is about more than Caine.  It’s about a grimy, bleak, sullenly desperate time and place and the people who live there.  It’s about men and woman who’ll do anything to get what they think they want.  It’s about a fatalistic world-weariness that breathes, “Yeah, mum and dad beat the Nazis.  And I’m stuck here.”  The film’s look and style reflect this attitude, and they make Caine a fish that swims very easily in these murky waters.  Get Carter doesn’t rush to conclusions and it doesn’t care for fast talkers.  It just has Caine, a hard man in a hard part of town looking to punish some hard people.

And when he does, look out.  This is one bad dude.

Kiltro

Kiltro is an Chilean martial arts film starring Marko Zaror, who played the villain in the exceptionally good Undisputed III: Redemption.  It has an elderly dwarf in a Yoda role who is both a martial arts master and sufficiently self aware to tell the hero, “I can’t fight the villain because I’m old.  And I’m a dwarf.”  It has a Ben Kenobi figure who’s a broken down drunk, yet suffers no withdrawals when he repairs to the desert to train Zaror for the big showdown (Complete with an “If you can snatch the pebble from my hand” homage!).  It has a pretty girl whose only function is to be rescued.  It has fanciful sets, a training montage, and henchmen in makeup that’d embarrass Stardust-era Bowie.  It’s terrible.

I know, right?  How can such a film be terrible?  Well, if a martial arts picture is dance movie with fake blood, it requires two things: rousing fight routines and an interesting protagonist to lead us from one routine to the next.  Kiltro has neither.

Kiltro’s fights display some flashes of creativity, such as a “circle” fight (one in which a group of opponents circle a central fighter) that involves more than one opponent attacking at a time.  However, they can’t surmount an amateurish choreography and editing that make the performers look more like enthusiastic stuntmen than martial artists.  This film features no extended takes and, when we do get to see more than one kick or punch strung together, they’re blocked so poorly that we feel we could march an entire high school band through the gap between attacker and defender.

And Kiltro’s protagonist, the aforementioned Marko Zaror?  We’re supposed to see him as a high-kicking Romeo dashing to the rescue of his Juliet, but he comes across as a sullen, hulking stalker with a violent streak.  Kiltro wants us to root for this guy, but I only wanted to put a restraining order on him.  Now, I’ll be more fair here than I was in my Thor review: the character’s whole arc is about his evolution from violent stalker to violent hero.  But I couldn’t root for him at the end of the film, either.  Even after he’d trained in the desert, snatched the pebble, and rescued the girl (Spoiler!), he still came across as kind of a dumb, scary dude.  Zaror just didn’t have it in him to play anything else.

If you’ve read this far, I know that it’ll kill you to pass on a movie featuring a self-aware Chilean Yoda.  But learn from my mistake:  leave Kiltro on the rack, where it belongs.

The Book of Eli

The Book of Eli is a western – a post apocalyptic western, sure, but a western nonetheless.

Denzel Washington plays a Man With No Name who wanders into a dusty Western town in search of water and supplies.  He carries a MacGuffin, and town honcho Gary Oldman wants it. 

Cue the bloodshed.  It’s as if Sergio Leone directed The Road.  Your enjoyment of this film will hinge on your fondness for Washington, Oldman, and bloodshed.  It also helps if you don’t like cats.  I like Washington, Oldman, and bloodshed, as long as the blood is fake; and I don’t like cats.  I walked away a happy guy.  You might, too.

Get Low

Get Low: it looks great, it sounds great, and you aren’t going to find better actors than Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Bill Murray.  Yes, the story’s thin, but you can’t always have it all.

In Get Low, Duvall plays an old hermit who lives in the woods.  He’s the man people fear, the one the kids whisper about around the campfire.  He’s tired of being whispered about, and hires funeral director Bill Murray to hold his funeral while he’s still alive.  He wants to give the townspeople a chance to tell their stories right out loud.  Could this be because Sissy Spacek, a presumed old flame, has returned to town after a long absence?

It’s no spoiler to say that Duvall’s character is more than meets the eye.  We wouldn’t have much of a film, otherwise.  As the drama unspooled, however, I found myself caring more about the actor than the character.  I felt like I was watching a great performer at work, and I dove into the film from that perspective.  In the film’s climax, Duvall gives us both barrels: I still recall this thing he does with voice and hands, and I challenge you not to be blown away.

This isn’t a great film, but it’s worth your time if you’re fond of these actors.  I am, and I walked away happy.

The Shining

There’s so much to love about The Shining that I don’t know where to begin.  This is the scariest ghost story ever put to film.  Its twin girls have become legendary.  “Here’s Johnny” brings Jack Nicholson, not Johnny Carson, to mind.  We remember Scatman Crothers not as a musician, but as a chef.

But there is one thing, one thing about which I hadn’t given much thought to prior to my last screening.  Musically, The Shining is extraordinary.  Yes, we all remember “Symphonie Fantastique” and the opening credits.  But think back to Jack and Danny in the bedroom, when Danny asks his father if he’d ever hurt him.  The music is another voice in the room, not just underlining the dialogue but mimicking, feeding off, building it into something more than two guys talking.  Or think about Wendy and the manuscript and the scampering strings like rats running up and down your spine.

So I wonder: is there a musical commentary track to The Shining out there somewhere?  I’d love to hear Gordon Stainforth, who edited preexisting music to replace the unsuccessful original score, walk me through his choices scene by scene, beat by beat.  His work is masterful, and I’d love to learn more about it.

Now that I think about it, I’m going to do a deep dive on The Shining.  I’m going to read what I can and watch whatever commentaries are out there and sink my teeth into this one.

It’s worth it, because The Shining isn’t just one of the best horror films ever made.  It’s the best, and it’s worth the effort.

Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go is basically Parts: The Clonus Horror, but for chicks.  Is has the same premise as Parts, but it goes for melancholy romance instead of horror thriller.

It would have been better as a horror thriller.

Never Let Me Go, which is about three clones and their love triangle, is supposed to make us cry as they try to find happiness in the face of mortality.  It made me think about how much better it would have been if they’d set out to confront an unnaturally long-lived Peter Graves.  This is a drab, depressing, ultimately dull film, and I wish I had a clone so it could have sat through it instead of me.

Bummer.

The Fighter

Recently, I looked through a buddy’s photos from Afghanistan.  Mark Wahlberg had come to his base to premiere The Fighter, and one of the photos showed the movie star carrying all his own gear out of the back of the C-130 on which he’d flown in.  Wahlberg, apparently, was a great guy: eating with the junior Marines, making time for a word and a photo with all who asked, and generally making his momma proud.

I’m sure Wahlberg went all the way to Afghanistan because it was the right thing to do.  It also worked as a promotional strategy, because I rented The Fighter the day I saw those photos.

It’s a hell of a good movie, but it’s hard to watch.  Wahlberg plays Mickey, a small time boxer in a family devoted to small time boxing.  His older brother Dicky (Christian Bale, phenomenal here) may have knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard once upon a time, but now he’s a pathetic crackhead.  His mother (Melissa Leo, unrecognizable after Frozen River) seems intent on managing him into oblivion.  The rest of the circus that comprises his family doesn’t seem much better.  Then Wahlberg meets Amy Adams (Enchanted, Charlie Wilson’s War), a local bartender and very tough broad who shows him another way.

I know what you’re thinking: “Why would I see this movie?  If I want to spend time with a dysfunctional family, I’ll go home for Christmas.”  See it for the performances.  See it for Mickey, a fighter who must learn to stop worrying about making everybody happy.  See it for Dickey, an ex-fighter who may never learn that it’s impossible to be a cool guy who also smokes a little crack on the side.  See it for their mother, who believes she’s the proud matriarch of a noble clan when, in fact, she’s a 70-year-long train wreck that’s about 2/3 of the way through.

The Fighter works, and it works because of these great performers.  Seeing this movie is like seeing a master class in the art of acting, and I enjoyed it for that alone.  All that, and Mark Wahlberg’s a good guy.  What more do you need?

The Secret in Their Eyes

The Secret in Their Eyes: this is how you make a good movie.

The picture, winner of the 2010 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, weaves the story of a murder investigation with the developing relationship between two of the people working the case.  I know, it sounds like something you’ve seen on screens, large and small, in numbers beyond measure.  But stay with me.

The key to this film lies in the fact that it’s about people who think and feel.  Most films, it seems, are about people who speak and act, and we sometimes wonder if they say or do anything that doesn’t directly advance the plot of their collective story.  The Secret in Their Eyes, by contrast, presents us with complete and plausible human beings.  Yes, they’re complete and plausible human beings involved in an investigation, but in some ways that comes second.

And since we know them and since we care about them and since we believe in them, we buy into this film.  We connect with its people and go along with all its twists and turns, its reveals and surprises, and in the end we’re left with a movie that’s more than good – it’s satisfying, the way spending time with interesting people is satisfying.  This is how you do it right.

Thor

I didn’t care about Thor, so I didn’t care about Thor.  Since I didn’t care about Thor, I didn’t care about Thor’s antagonist, his love interest, his friends, or his problems.  You know who I did care about?  Agent Coulson, the guy who appeared to be Samuel L. Jackson’s #2 at SHIELD, which was sorta the FBI for superhero stuff.  He played a minor role in Thor, but I’d go to see a movie about him.

Here’s the problem: Thor (a totally ‘roided out Chris Hemsworth – I mean, really: compare a photo of him from the Star Trek reboot with a photo of him from this film) is a god.  Yeah, the film presents him as super sci fi bs alien, but he’s basically a god.  Not only is he a god, but he’s a dick of a god.  He’s obnoxious and egotistical and has a lot to learn.  The film is all about him learning to not be such a dick, but so what?  Show me a movie about a guy who isn’t a dick in the first place.

Natalie Portman plays Thor’s love interest, a graduate student in physics with her own ‘roided out Land Rover, her own supercool lab, and her own sidekick.  When I was a grad student, I could barely afford ramen.  How was I supposed to care about this magic princess scientist, doing research in her fantasy world?  Now, fine, I know what you’re thinking: this is Natalie Portman we’re talking about.  I don’t contest that she’s an absolutely outstanding actress, but this film gives her nothing to do, really.  Any reasonably competent, age-appropriate actress could have played this role (that is, pretty girl who digs ‘roided out guys who are dicks).  I doubt I’d have believed in any of them.

Thor’s friends?  Hey, they’re gods, too!  One’s a younger version of Xena, one looks like a youthful Cary Elwes with silly facial hair, one’s a glutton, and one’s just a guy with a mace who doesn’t even do anything cool.  I couldn’t relate to any of these gods.  If I met them socially, I wouldn’t like them and they wouldn’t like me.  Why should I care about them?

Loki’s the antagonist, here presented as Thor’s brother and, essentially, the nerd to Thor’s jock.  Problem is, he’s a god, too, so his problems also aren’t my problems.  What are his problems?  I’m not entirely sure (Well, he does wear a goofy helmet, and there have been times in my life when I could relate to that.).  Is he consumed with jealousy?  Is he ambitious?  Self-hating?  How ‘bout just plain evil?  I don’t know, and neither does the film.  It keeps changing.

Ok, so I didn’t like the characters.  What was so bad about Thor’s problems? I didn’t feel like I had a dog in the fight.  Since I didn’t care about Thor, I didn’t care whether he or Loki sat on the throne of Asgard.  Yeah, there was some stuff in there about evil frost giants, but I didn’t see them as a threat to Earth, so what exactly were the stakes for me?  I’ll tell you: zippy.

And yet, Thor manages to stay marginally entertaining for a couple of hours, thanks primarily to Kenneth Branagh’s direction and the presence of one Agent Coulson of SHIELD, assayed by Clark Gregg.  Coulson’s an actual human being, a disciplined and efficient government agent bringing cold federal processes to a fantastical world of heroes and monsters.  Now, that’s interesting.  I want to know more about this guy: where does he come from?  How’d he get into this business?  What does he think of all this craziness?  There’s your movie.

Generally speaking, I enjoy spectacular action movies.  I wanted to get into Thor.  It looked pretty, lots of stuff blew up real good, and Natalie Portman did bite her lip once or twice.  But I needed more.  I needed some skin in the game.  I needed to care.

The Last Airbender

I approached The Last Airbender with good will and low expectations.  I’d seen and loved the three-season animated series, and I’d heard that the film was terrible.  Nevertheless, I wanted to give it a shot. 

It was fine.

The film errs in trying retell the entire first season of the animated series in an hour and a half, leaving us with a movie that feels more like a highlight reel than a self-contained narrative.  It also takes itself ever so seriously, eschewing comic relief or any sense of joy in favor of portentiousness.  Further, it tries so hard to make us believe in the tormented nature of its villain that the guy comes off as not particularly villainous at all – that’s no fun!

And yet, hey, I like these characters.  I enjoyed seeing their world presented in live action.  I’d have stuck around for the two sequels, had this film made enough money to justify them.  We don’t get enough kid-friendly action movies in the marketplace, and I was willing to enjoy The Last Airbender for trying to fill that niche.

Yes, it didn’t entirely succeed, but I still found it a pleasant way to spend an hour and a half.  Really, you could do worse.

Last Year at Marienbad

How do I get you to see Last Year at Marienbad without telling you anything about it?

This film rewards ignorance.  It doesn’t want you to know its synopsis, or what someone else thought about it, or why you should see it.  It’ll put you in a place where you may feel disoriented, uncomfortable, perhaps not entirely sane.  It’s not doing this because it’s a bad movie.  Alain Resnais does not make bad movies.  It’s doing this because it knows exactly, precisely what it’s about.

It’s stunningly beautiful and demands that you see it on the silver screen, but will abide a small-screen showing if you have no choice.  Its music will haunt you.  Its performances will stay with you.  It will tease you and delight you and make you glad that you watch good films.

And that’s it.  I’m done.  If you’ve seen Last Year at Marienbad, you know what I’m talking about.  If not, queue it up immediately and thank me later.  This film is just that good.

A Woman Is a Woman

One could view A Woman Is a Woman (Une Femme Est Une Femme), Jean-Luc Godard’s second film, as a bold experiment in filmmaking or so much self-important hoo-hah.  I think it’s both.

Here’s the deal:  Godard’s first film, Breathless (written off here), was a huge success, marking him as a major innovator of the French New Wave of filmmaking.  I think the experience empowered Godard and compelled to keep innovating, to keep finding new ways of telling a story.  With A Woman Is a Woman, however, his new way includes silly, distracting tricks and unflattering cinematography of ridiculous people making poor decisions.

What kind of silly, distracting tricks?  Early in the film, the lead character (Anna Karina – more on her later) passes behind a pillar and undergoes an instantaneous costume change, one on which she comments.  Thereafter, we notice every time she passes behind an obstruction, waiting a beat to learn whether she changes again.  It pulls us out of the movie.  Later, Karina and her dumber-than-rocks boyfriend have an argument with a silly gimmick: they aren’t speaking, so they pull books off their shelves and show one another words from the covers to express their feelings.  Give me a break.

What kind of unflattering cinematography?  In his later Vivre Sa Vie (appreciated here), Godard uses black and white film to make star Anna Karina an epic beauty of endless fascination.  Here, his choice of garish color accentuates Karina’s nicotine-stained teeth and makes us recoil every time she smiles.

And what kind of ridiculous people making poor decisions?  I can’t even describe the plot of this film without sounding needlessly condescending, so you’re going to have to discover that for yourself, should you feel so inclined.  Let’s just say that I couldn’t believe that any sane woman would do the things Karina does in this film, and I’m not sure whether Godard expected me to.

So why call this a bold experiment, or even anoint it as hoo-hah, when it seems so obviously a failure?  I think we can do so because Breathless indicated a filmmaker capable of crafting a coherent and well-designed film, and Vivre Sa Vie indicated a filmmaker capable of crafting a masterpiece.  I think Godard was in control of his material, and I think he was feeling sufficiently self-important to try new ways of telling a story and showcasing characters.  Sometimes, experiments fail: A Woman Is a Woman was such a time.

Unstoppable

I can't top Joe Lefors's thoughts on this film.  With his permission, here they are:


I just watched this movie, and it was awesome.
Things that could not stop the train:
*The fat guy from Remember the Titans and other movies where he played a fat guy.
*HUD from Cloverfield.
*A redneck welder with a large pickemup truck.
*Many, many people on walkie-talkies.
*A horse trailer.
*A train full of schoolchildren.
*A device specifically constructed to stop trains that will not stop.
*Rosario Dawson's saucy attitude.
*Helicopters.
*A dude being lowered from helicopters.
*MACHINE GUNS
*Boxcars on the tracks.
*A sharp turn in the tracks.
*Another train attached to the back of the train.
Things that could stop the train:
*DENZEL
*That guy who played Captain Kirk in the GayGay Abram$ Star Trek where the ship was built on land 

Easy A

In Easy A, Emma Stone plays the daughter of Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson.  I was already a Stanley Tucci fan and a Patricia Clarkson fan – I’m now an Emma Stone fan, as well.

Here’s the setup:  Stone plays Olive, a nerdy high school girl who’s embarrassed to admit to her best friend that she stayed home all weekend.  She concocts a story about a first sexual experience with a college boy, and she soon finds herself with a “reputation.”  One thing leads to another, and before she knows it she has a client list of social outcasts for whom she provides stories of imaginary sexual acrobatics in return for things like Bed Bath & Beyond gift cards.  As one can imagine, things spin out of control.

Holding it all together is Ms. Stone, who gives Olive a sweet combination of brains, comic sensibility, and pluck.  Stone, who was fantastic in Superbad and Zombieland, rolls into the A-list here, holding her own with Tucci and Clarkson and lighting up every minute she holds the screen.

Easy A is funny and brisk and thoroughly enjoyable, and much of that is due to Stone’s Charisma.  I understand she’s going to play Gwen Stacy in the new iteration of Spider-Man.  For the first time, I’m interested.

Black Orpheus

What a bold gambit: retell the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, set it in Brazil at Carnival, and infuse it with the rhythms of one of South America’s most vibrant cultures.  And what a payoff.

First, to recap the Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice (Thanks to Edgar and Ingri Parin D’Aulaire’s Myths of the Greeks and Romans.  If you don’t own a copy of this book, there’s something wrong with you.):  Orpheus, the great musician, loves Eurydice so deeply that when she dies, he goes all the way to Hades to bring her back.  The Lord of the Underworld permits her to follow Orpheus to the land of the living, on one condition: if he turns back to look at her, she’ll be lost forever.  Can he resist the temptation and gut out the journey to the surface, knowing that Lord Hades is a master of the doublecross?  Go buy a copy of the book and find out for yourself.

Black Orpheus spends much of its running time setting up the love between Orpheus, a trolley conductor, and Eurydice, a country girl come to Rio to escape a menacing gentlemen she lost in the backcountry.  The couple make an average looking pair, but I challenge any man to look upon Eurydice deep in sleep, her contented face haloed with tousled hair, and not see the great love of his life at the moment he knew he loved her.  Orpheus does.

But the man from the country finds them, finds them both.  He moves like a dancer and wears a death’s head mask and we’re not sure if he’s entirely corporeal.  But we do know that Eurydice’s time draws nigh, Carnival or no, and Orpheus’s quest will soon begin.  When it does, the film detours into a quasi-nightmare world, one of ferrymen and Cerberus and Eurydice, poor Eurydice, begging Orpheus not to look behind him.  It’s captivating and disturbing and unforgettable, and it works on every single level.  Black Orpheus will intrigue you and it will haunt you.  It will make you want to purchase a copy and press it into the hands of your friends. 

See it soon.