Mood, timing, context? This movie hit me just right. Or, rather, these movies–as this is another anthology loosely arranged around a city, emphasis on “loosely.”** Each is a fable, tone and approach very much tied to the sensibilities of each director (Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon-Ho). Gondry follows a young couple fresh to the city, struggling to adapt–until one finds an intriguing, bittersweet way to conform to the city’s design. Carax is easiest to summarize and the the looniest, loosest, and least coherent of the fables: a (white, red-bearded, crazed) man emerges from the sewers and raises havoc. Bong focalizes around a young hikikomori, a form of agoraphobic retreat, who finds himself enraptured by a pizza deliverywoman. I just loved them all, with a caveat: scratch the surface and they aren’t perhaps rich or deep in complex subtext. (more…)

Based it on Jim Thompson’s _A Swell-Looking Babe_. Elias Koteas chews up the scenery, and he’s pretty much a kick to watch. Philip Baker Hall wanders in and out of a few scenes bigfooting it as Tacoma’s crime king Mr. Ish. It’s too long, and a little too strangely stylized (like its art designers all came off work on “The Red Shoe Diaries”), and it has an absolute aggravation in the form of a) a mentally-handicapped brother for Koteas’ sad-schlump protagonist and (I hate that kind of bullshit plot device, especially when) b) the actor playing the role is flat lousy. But then every few lines there’s some strange bit of Johnsonian absurdity, like William Blake drank a lot of Mad Dog and watched 34 hours of Looney Tunes and bam: I enjoyed it. Hit Me.

I almost tossed this into a comment on the Bronson/Majestyk post, as this is another gritty, casually-paced exemplar of a ’70s crime film. However, while that film certainly works, this film carefully, slyly sneaks into classic territory. You may think its depiction of a few subplots of Boston hoodlum subculture is simply on the same back-alley route, attentive to the grime and tough talk, en route to a few bang-up chases or gunfights. But we’re thrown into events, never given the narrative road-map: it’s like we’ve plopped down into a few late-fall, slate-grey days in the life of a shitty little cul-de-sac of criminal subculture in Boston, 1973. Everybody here seems to be nursing a hangover, the action is rarely overt (and even during a couple of heists, the emphasis is on unease rather than suspense), and all the violence is sublimated in dialogue that pops and pisses and moans and snarls without really ever taking the easy path to patter.

And the performances…. damn. Robert Mitchum is the heart of the film, but his Eddie Coyle–a sad sack tagged for a booze-truck heist, looking to avoid leaving his family for even that short stretch–is wandering around, doing a job here, having a drink there, unsure what’s what. Richard Jordan plays a slimy, sort of self-satisfied Treasury agent running a few informants; Peter Boyle is a barkeep hooked deeply into the crowd; the many lowlifes circling around are each perfect, particularly Alex Rocco and Steven Keats.

Without spoiling anything, I’ll note that the film ends with a short, opaque bit of dialogue–ostensibly some kind of philosophy-of-crime analogy that only sort of makes sense, but serves the purpose of all the conversations in the film: each guy wants something from the other guy, and they talk as if they’re really exchanging and transacting, even as they each carefully try to avoid giving anything away, grasping to get as much as they can. It’s a helluva good film.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is the dumbest yet most insanely self-confident 12-year-old you ever knew. This kid has Attention Deficit Disorder and an uncomfortable repertoire of cheap ethnic “gags.” For the first 30 minutes or so, I was willing to say: hey, at least it’s outrageously excessive in every dimension. For the next hour, I was willing to say: hey, it’s excessive. In the last 31 hours of its run-time, I kept asking Max if he had to go to the bathroom, just so I could take a break. I don’t hate this film–I *wish* it really had something like outrage on its mind. But, like 12-year-olds, it will scribble or mutter something “bad” then run around and bug the shit out of you, able to annoy but rarely breaking the skin, intent on its “intensity” but its effect is more to numb than to arouse. Even with its leering (12-year-old) attention to its skinny young vixens it is the opposite of arousing. But, verily, shit did explode.

This came up as a stray comment on some other post, but HBO’s In Treatment is a fine, fine show — the premise is that each season (I’m just about done with Season 1, and 2 is on now) follows one therapist (the excellent Gabriel Byrne) week by week in his sessions with four different patients (and in his own session with his therapist, the quite good Dianne Wiest). Listen, it’s therapy — if you find the psychoanalytic tedious, then the show may grate, as it can be a bit schematic in the long-run structure of these separate treatments’ story arcs. But the acting, oh lord, the moment-by-moment fascination and allure of such great conversation, such subtle and sharp attention to how people LISTEN to one another… it’s great. And we just watched an episode, late in season 1, where the father of one of Byrne’s patients comes in, and it is about the finest acting I’ve seen in some time. Glynn Turman plays the father, and some of us will recall him as The Wire’s first outsized corrupt fox of a mayor Royce…. It would be impossible, I suppose, to just rent disc 8 and watch this show, but if you commit to the season, which is itself worth the time, this episode will astound you.