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Calling the shots in '06

Yes, folks, it's another year of Ed Koch watching the movies so we don't have to. First up, 007 neglects to shave, with uneven results:

The Matador
It is difficult for me to review this film adequately. It is certainly not a good movie, but it is not really bad. On occasion, because of the fine acting of Greg Kinnear and Pierce Brosnan, it is amusing.

The Post critic, Kyle Smith, gave it one star and summed it up as vulgar, gauche and loathsome, the adjectives being reserved for Brosnan’s character.

Julian (Pierce Brosnan) is a professional assassin. On assignment, he meets Danny (Greg Kinnear) who is a businessman trying to close a very big deal. The movie can't be characterized as a buddy movie, although it has strong elements of such bonding, even a verbal sexual move by Julian on Danny. It also has a strong heterosexual element when Danny attempts before leaving the house one morning to have sex on the kitchen table with his wife, Bean (Hope Davis). Their coupling is interrupted by an act of God.

I like all three of these actors, which is why I went to see the film. While I can't recommend it to you, when it is all said and done, I've seen much worse. And, if you are amused by James bond playing out of character, you might even like it.

Koch also samples some Oscar bait, if you're into that kind of thing, and indulges in a little speculative casting.

Transamerica
A host of films, including "Brokeback Mountain," the story of homosexual cowboys, are now being accepted by mainstream critics and audiences and recommended as solid movies worthy of patronage.

"Transamerica," about the trials and tribulations of a transsexual, is well on its way to becoming a cult film. 

Parts of this movie are quite boring, but it becomes engrossing when we are introduced to the family of Bree (Felicity Huffman) born in the body of a male. Bree is heading to Los Angeles to have her final operation allowing her to physically become the woman she has been emotionally for many years. The second principal character is Toby (Kevin Zegers) a 17-year-old street hustler. It is unclear whether he is homosexual, heterosexual or simply uses sex to earn money. The relationship between Bree and Toby is mysterious and shocking when finally fully disclosed.

The movie is a tour de force for Huffman and Zegers, allowing them to display their enormous acting abilities. It reminded me of the acting in "What’s Eating Gilbert Grape," starring Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio. Both of these terrific actors could have played the principal parts in "Transamerica." Depp with his sensitivity could have portrayed Bree the transsexual and DiCaprio could have played Toby.

"Transamerica" is not a  masterpiece, but it is interesting, particularly if you are keeping tabs on this genre of movie.

He's right about Depp--anyone else catch his red carpet story about playing Barbies with his daughter before the Golden Globes the other night?

Puttin' on the foil

What's up with Slap Shot? That is one grim little movie, my friends. Amazingly, neither the Fesser nor myself had ever seen the cult classic, so I ordered it up on Netflix in an attempt to ease our transistion into another winter spent far from walking-distance hockey games. Now that we've seen it, we're still wondering why this incoherent 70s flick is so beloved.

No, really, why? The cinetrix loves Paul Newman swearing while wearing rust-colored leather suits as much as the next cineaste, but I just don't get this movie's magic. And I'm no prude when it comes to scatology and locker-room levels of sophisticated discourse, either. It can't be the Quebecois jokes. Or the usual sports movie soupcon of homosocial panic. And don't tell me it's the Hanson Brothers. Yes, I hooted with glee during the sequence in which they're first let loose on the ice, but, again, that can't be it, right? Seriously, the narrative skates around coherence and suffers more blackouts than Lindsay Crouse's Lily Braden.

[OK, I liked Lily Braden. A lot. When I start affecting a flask and a van, you'll know why.]

Anyhow, the cinetrix turns to you. Won't you please explain what it is I've missed?

Mutual Appreciation

In Andrew Bujalski's second film, Mutual Appreciation, the twentysomething characters live close to the ground. Sure, at the day jobs that make their New York dreams sorta possible they seem to sit docilely behind desks, impersonating responsibility while watching the clock. But really they're perched on the edge of their seats, waiting for the evening when their real lives can begin again.

When the night finally comes, you most often find them lolling on futons or even on the filthy floor. Chairs are a luxury in these stripped-down lives where the word "money" is prefaced by "beer" or "rent," and the biggest piece of furniture in tiny, overpriced rooms is often a bed.

As you can imagine, all this prone proximity to a bed creates complications. Impish Alan is newly arrived in Williamsburg and is crashing with fellow former Bostonian Lawrence until he finds a band, a place, and a job, in just about that order. Grad student Lawrence is dating Ellie, a low-level employee at an alt weekly, by the looks of things. The film follows the three as they sprawl and drink and talk in various combinations.

In a great, near-silent sequence shot from a very low angle early in the film, we see a room as a landscape of sheets and bodies that eventually separates into Alan on the floor in the foreground and Lawrence and Ellie only inches above it on a futon in the background. The three slowly wake and acknowledge each other with a we're-all-friends-here casualness that is as touching as it is tissue thin. Ellie leaves first, stepping over Alan on her way out the door. This time, anyway.

So what happens? Alan finds a drummer and a place, fends off the attentions of a college DJ, and runs up his credit card debt. Lawrence agrees to participate in a student's staged monologue reading. And Ellie negotiates the space between her boyfriend and his friend with varying degrees of success. While Lawrence is off at an ex's wedding, Ellie abandons the we're-all-friends pretense and admits her attraction to Alan, even as she acknowledges that much of it is rooted in her very rootedness with Lawrence. Will security or curiosity win out?

In perhaps the most deftly observed sequence in a very canny film, Ellie sits with Alan on his bed in his tiny room as she tells him that she wonders what it would be like to kiss some of her male friends. He takes her hand in his and rubs her arm. It's sweet, but in a way that'll have you silently screaming at the screen "No! No! No!" like it was a horror flick. And it is the horror of self-recognition, I suspect, that causes the viewer to squirm. Of course, Alan's the protagonist, and we've been trained for couple formation since the cradle, but we also know that not everyone can be as Gallic about relationships as Jules et Jim.

Ellie doesn't kiss Alan, or at least we don't see her do it, but she does sink down beside him on his too-puffy comforter. As infidelity goes, it's not quite a sin of commission, but there's certainly a sin of omission. We see Ellie leave the apartment the next morning, a chronology that never comes up when she later admits to Lawrence that she and Alan shared a "moment." Can the three of them get past this? Good question.

Bujalski answers it by resisting conventional narrative closure again, as he did in his first feature, Funny Ha Ha. Only the film's stock is black and white. Still, the ending of Mutual Appreciation is as bittersweetly satisfying as that of Linklater's Before Sunset, and as true.

A confession: The cinetrix has a hard time watching Bujalski's films.* Even with years of distance between the cinetrix and the specific moment he chronicles they hit too close to home. And sometimes I don't just know these people, I know these people, too.

It continues to astonish me how Andrew manages to capture these moments as he lives them. I suspect it stems from his genuine affection for the friends he casts. That may be why there are no traditional villains in his films--Bujalski's eyes and ears are finely attuned to the ardor and self-destructive urges in everyone.

*Sometimes physically. My primary VCR shit the bed soon after I received a tape in the mail in September, so I only was able to watch the film yesterday.

Catholic schoolgirls rule

The cinetrix would like to interrupt regularly scheduled film coverage here at Pullquote to send a shoutout to the splendid young women at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in New Orleans, who greeted the visiting W. wearing life jackets over their uniforms to demand Category 5 levees for New Orleans.

Some carried life preservers, while others had put masking tape on their foreheads inscribed with the words "water line."

As Emma Matesky, a 15-year-old freshman, smilingly explained, pointing to her head: "We're literally up to here with this."

Ladies, the cinetrix kisses you. Way to live your faith.

X marks the spot

New Yorkers, I didn't forget you, even if my suggestion for the evening's entertainment might seem slightly less palatable, if not downright sordid. You see, tonight at 7 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble Lincoln Center, Daily News film critic Jami Bernard appears with several of her fellow scribbling contributors to the saucy volume she edited, The X List: The Movies that Turn Us On.

Now, I know that most right-thinking members of the population would rather do anything else than learn which films give which critics a pervy thrill. Critics should be as sexless angels, right? But for the depraved out there--and you know who you are--this is your opportunity to hear notables like Amy Taubin, Charley Taylor, Stephanie Zacharek, Armond White, David Edelstein, and Stuart Klawans 'fess up about which films set their pulses racing. So to speak.

Not surprisingly, The X List makes a great bedside read. Bernard did a fine job of collecting pieces by a wide-ranging variety of critics, but it's the "quickies"--like Gerald Peary coming clean about his underaged Drew Barrymore movie jones--commissioned especially for the book I enjoyed the most. De gustibus.

For those of you far from New York, I promise to put up a teaser later on tonight.

I was nineteen when I saw Behind the Green Door in 1972, the same age as Marilyn Chambers, a Meg Ryan type who played Gloria, the innocent babe abducted and whisked off to a private sex club where onstage she is stripped, caressed by tender women in black cassocks, suckled by a coven of hippies, and penetrated by male trapeze artists in crotchless tights. Thus pleasured, Gloria becomes an avid pleasuregiver, fellating one trapeze artist as she milks the other two, and whipping partners, club patrons, and movie audiences into Chantilly cream.

Was my face red! Then, as now, I couldn't say whether it was from embarrassment, excitement, or some combination thereof. When the lights came up, I recall lacing my boyfriend's fingers into mine and joking, "Now that's process art."

Thirty-three years later, I'm amused that I felt compelled to intellectualize the experience. -- Carrie Rickey

Stay until tomorrow

Angelenos, a viewing tip: Stay Until Tomorrow tonight at the Egyptian Theatre at 7:30 p.m. Director Laura Colella, who's delightful, will be there for a Q&A, too.

It's the cinetrix's contention that more movies should be set in public libraries--they really are freak magnets of the first water, filled with the sort of characters you couldn't make up. I mention this because much of the action in Stay Until Tomorrow centers on the beautiful [and sadly, mostly closed now] main branch of the public library in Providence, Rhode Island, but it spirals outward as far as Paris, rural Italy, and China. It's also a gorgeous-looking film. The opening credit sequence alone is a beautiful hybrid of seventies heist flick aesthetics [blurred freeze frames] and downright Marker-esque documentary footage shot by Colella herself over the years.

The film's discursive narrative path follows that of the rootless protagonist, Nina, who started traveling years ago and never stopped. Self-involved and melodramatic, as befits a former teen soap star with no strings and no connections, she alights in Providence to crash for a while with her childhood friend Jim. Her plan is to dodge an ardent Irish ex-boyfriend and learn Italian for her next acting job.

Jim's a librarian, and Asian, a quiet guy. But not really. See, while we hear Nina's thoughts in voiceovers, the thoughts we hear from Jim are actually those of the Actor Playing Jim, who has an opinion about everything. He grumbles that in the original script she was supposed to be the librarian, but the female director thought that was too cliched--while a stony-faced Asian man of few words isn't? So while Jim may seem stoic as Nina invades first his beautiful apartment and then his workplace, the Actor Playing Jim is constantly scheming for more screen time and a sex scene and truculently reporting that his response to the direction to "do less" was to take half a Valium before shooting.

Jim becomes the viewer's stand-in as Nina and the movie go off on tangents, impatiently wondering what it will take to wrap up the story. And what is the story? Yes, it's about world-wandering Nina and the discontents of the Actor Playing Jim, but it is also an elliptical portrait of the overlapping, interconnected worlds contained within the library. What we come to realize is that the camera could just as easily follow the Russian security guard, the Latino teen gang member learning about the Cultural Revolution, the woman singing fado in a soundproof booth, the junkie shooting up in the bathroom, or the pervert in the stacks. Like the books on its shelves, the library contains multitudes.

At one point, Nina observes that looking at old people is like looking at a pile of unread books. What Stay Until Tomorrow offers is the thrill of possibility that comes with going to the library, randomly selecting one of those books and beginning to read, maybe setting it down to page through another, and skimming the jacket copy on the third. The smart script, also by Colella, constantly plays with words and images and generic expectations, and the performances--by actors whose credits range from Alison Anders to Woody Allen to Raul Ruiz to David Mamet to Bruce LaBruce--are deft and winning. Oh, and there's also a flashback to Nina's time in Paris, shot [permit free] on location--in French.

Really, you should just see the movie.

Programming notes

The cinetrix begins teaching two sections of Intro to Film to the youth tomorrow morning, so she's been busily scuttling around trying to figure out what to screen this semester. If you have any bright ideas or fond favorites from film classes past, speak up. This blog won't write itself, and neither will the syllabus. Believe me--I've tried.

When I was born for the seventh time

If the cinetrix was asked to write an essay on how she spent her winter vacation, she might have to make like some precocious Montessori student/Brown undergrad and silkscreen a tour tee chronicling all the roofs under which she spent at least one night instead. We're talking nine over the course of 18 days, people.

Worse still, to her chagrin the cinetrix realized she spent the longest consecutive stretch of the tour at the annual lit geek confab in DC. [Yeah, we saw Gayatri Spivak eating French fries*--jealous?] The upside, as always, was drinking with old friends and new and trolling the book exhibit. Not only did I reconnect with a fellow former punk rock aerobicizer amid the scholarly tomes, I scored, courtesy of the Penguin people, passes to see Michael Winterbottom's latest: Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. That's right, distributor Picturehouse felt a random buncha English profs was the advance audience to see its adaptation of Laurence Sterne's unfilmable, po-mo before there was even a mo novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

The gamble paid off. A respectably crowd of people passed up cash bars and awkward schmoozing and braved the Metro four stops to a mall. [It will surprise no one to learn that it is easy to spot academics in a mall.] The screen was vast and the seats were comfy. The house fell blissfully dark and a million coproduction ["coooooooproduction"?] credits scrolled across the screen, so many it was funny.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I suppose before I actually deal with the film, I should cop to never reading the book, although I mean to now. As a callow youth, the cinetrix had a hard time taking any literature courses before the 20th C, unless they dealt exclusively with Milton or Shakespeare. How I missed Sterne again in grad school is anyone's guess.

Anyhow, where were we? Tristram is not yet born and the film's about to begin. As you may already know, the excellent, vain Steve Coogan plays Tristram Shandy, also Shandy's father, and, well, "Steve  Coogan." Director Winterbottom cleverly deploys "Steve," complete with reel- and real-life baggage, in a film within the film. Well, it's not much of a film, actually. More of a making-of, really. Characters get dropped and added, depending on the financing. The battle scene looks like shit, and someone's had the bright idea of having Steve deliver his dialogue while suspended upside down, naked, in an enormous womb [which can be glimpsed here]. To top things off, Nino Rota's circus soundtrack for Otto e Mezzo slips in whenever the chaos ratchets up a notch.

Jockeying with Steve and "Steve" for a starring role in this cinematic Tristrapaedia is Rob Brydon, as, of course, "Rob Brydon" but also as Uncle Toby of the damaged goods. Whose boots are taller, whose teeth are whiter, whose Pacino is better--these two will squabble over anything. Off screen, they vie for the favors of two Jennies, naturally--earnest cineaste PA Jennie [the gorgeous Naomie Harris] and the yummy mummy of Steve's child, girlfriend Jenny [the equally delectable Kelly Macdonald]--while Shirley Henderson/Susannah cracks wise on and off the set. The Widow Wadman shows up in the person of Gillian Anderson, there are split screens and sex scenes and Stephen Fry, and even--Alas, poor Yorick!--the black page. Got it so far?

But to deliver a summary or an assessment of the film seems beside the point. Hell, everything about the book and the film is precisely beside the point. The official site has the right idea: imagine toggling back and forth between several open browser windows, a QuickTime movie, and whatever you're supposed to be working on while listening to iTunes, talking on your cell, and flirting with a cube mate, and you'll have a sense of how the movie works. A Cock and Bull Story is wild, wooly, clock-winding nonsense of the highest order, and perhaps the first film that will ever profit from being watched on DVD rather in the theatre--just imagine all the digressive extras!

*To be sung to the tune of "I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus."

The jus is loose*

The new guy on Slate's movie beat, Stephen Metcalf, starts off strong:

Johansson brings the spirit of Hollywood with her wherever she goes these days, and Match Point is no exception. She has grown up so fast (too fast?), from the little anomic mallrat from Ghost World to self-conscious Hollywood royalty, with a permanent magic-hour glow now ladled over her like au jus.

Mmmmm... jus-y. He's off to such a meaty beginning, the cinetrix can't wait for Metcalf's next review.

*"Fatted 'Calf" was the also-ran.