Pic of the Week: I should find something productive to do with my life…

...but movies make me happy, so there ya go. I haven't had the time that I would like to devote to my first love here of late, what with work, personal drama and football. But I've managed to squeeze in a few in the last few weeks.

"Blowup" (1966)
This one has been on my "You Call Yourself a Film-Lover and You Haven't Seen (Fill in the Blank)???" list for some time. It came out 40 years ago and it doesn't feature Lindsay Lohan, so of course you won't find it at Blockbuster. Thank Heaven for Netflix! Anyway, it's the first English-language film from director Michelangelo Antonioni (who wins my award for the most fun-to-say name of all time). I was all hopped up to see it…and I'm glad I did, not because I loved it, only so I can check it off my list.
"Blowup" is – I think - about the nature of reality. A cynical London swinger art photographer, out for a morning of exploration in a wooded park, takes some pictures. Later, when he's developing the photos, he sees something suspicious. In a sequence so drawn out it would never appear in a modern Hollywood feature, our unnamed protagonist blows up progressively smaller portions of the image until he sees what may or may not be a dead body. Huh – no wonder that unrecognizably young Vanessa Redgrave was so insistent that he hand over his film…clearly something untoward has happened – or has it?
I think this is the movie Stanley Kubrick was trying to make with "Eyes Wide Shut," except that "Blowup" is a million times better. Still, don't expect a linear, easy-to-digest plot. This movie has none of the standard Hollywood three-act character arcs that all of us, even my eight-year-old nephew, know how to be spoon-fed. It's beautiful visually. But still, one of those movies that you won't "get" until you re-watch with the commentary by some guy with a Ph.D. in Film Studies. [Also – don't see if you have a mime phobia. Consider yourself warned.]

"Bright Leaves" (2003)
"Hi, I'm Ross McElwee, homespun documentarian from North Carolina, now living in Massachusetts. I like to pop up on PBS and NPR to guilt-trip artsy-fartsy intellectuals for dropping $7.50 on Tyler Perry instead of supporting me and my brilliant homespun forays into *real* America. One of cousins who's a big classic film buff told me about this Gary Cooper movie from 1950 that's almost certainly based on my tobacco-growing ancestor's losing fight against the Duke family empire. I decided that this would be a unique entry point into a fascinating exploration of the role of tobacco farming in contemporary North Carolina culture, the effects of smoking and in general my incessant need to fetishize my relationship with my video camera.
"So I spend months, possibly years of my life on what might have been a lovely meditation on my family's complicated relationship with tobacco farming, replete with gads of borderline-erotic shots of voluptuous green leaves swaying in the breeze. Unfortunately, I did this interview with the woman whose husband wrote the book on which the Gary Cooper movie was based, and she assures me that it was entirely original story, not in fact based on my family. Rather than admit that my founding theory was erroneous and a waste of time, I decided to place this tidbit at the end of my film, so that you the viewer would have to sit through two hours of my rambling, gorgeously lit footage before realizing that you, too, had wasted your time investing in said narrative. Aren't I homespun and brilliant? Give me a grant."
Okay, so it's not a waste of time, per se. It's a pleasant little movie that has absolutely no throughline beyond giving privileged urban Yankees the opportunity to feel superior those of us who grew up in towns where they still have beauty pageants for every age group. And I don't think McElwee intended the film to be at all condescending; I think it comes from a place of great affection for his home state. But I wonder what the people who aren't "from here" take away from this movie – and I can't help thinking McElwee could have done better.
[This is probably just me, but the scene shot at the NC School of the Arts is incredibly cool – just 'cause I go there regularly – the "this scene was shot five minutes from my house!" factor. But I'm also the person who listens to that Ben Folds Five song "Brick" solely for the line about going to Charlotte – I'm kind of a geek that way.]

"Stranger Than Fiction" (2006)
Another recent movie, so you can find reviews galore. This is one I didn't see in the theatre for some reason, so again, thank Heaven for Netflix. Another entry in my Maggie Gyllenhaal crush-category. This is one of those scripts that you could see winning a billion awards, but as a movie it really works because of the cast. Will Ferrell, especially, in the lead as an accountant whose comically bland existence is rocked when he discovers a strange psychic connection to a novelist who – oops – plans to kill him off, is brilliant. This is surely the film that signals Ferrell's transition into Tom Hanks/Robin Williams/Jim Carrey territory: Now that I've sneaked into your hearts through years of slapstick comedy, it's that much easier for you to identify with my character in a dramatic role. Since I like Ferrell, I'm hoping his trajectory turns out to be more Forrest Gump than Patch Adams.
My observations: great soundtrack. Ferrell is sweet and sexy, especially in his scenes with Maggie. And while I love Maggie here, I'm calling BS on a baker that scrawny. But I can't imagine anyone else in her role – fiery, yet open-hearted enough to give a stiff like Ferrell's Harold Crick a shot. May we all find a little Maggie in ourselves. (I TOLD you I have a crush on her…) I can be forgiven for momentarily forgetting that Queen Latifah's in this movie – her character is so one dimensional, her dialogue so "just what the other character needs to hear in order to proceed" that I started to wonder if there weren't some "A Beautiful Mind" hallucination sh*t going on with her. But nope.

"Fracture" (2007)
I really was looking forward to this, but I'm glad I waited for video. If I'd dropped $7 to see it in the theatre, rather than a portion of my monthly Netflix fee, I'd have been pissed. But I guess it goes well with pizza.
Am I the only person in America who doesn't get Ryan Gosling's appeal? I liked him in "Murder by Numbers," but I think there might've been a slight McConaughey factor going on there (i.e. your actory tics are intriguing because I'm not sick of them yet). Anthony Hopkins phones it in and still kills Gosling. Embeth Davidtz is in a coma for 90% of the movie and she kills him. The only person Gosling blows off the screen is the obligatory model who plays an allegedly hard-nosed attorney who nonetheless sleeps with her subordinate inside of a minute and a half. (Whatever happened to the Hitchcock Blonde? I refuse to believe that in a country of 200 million people, plus a world of what, six billion, that it's impossible to find people who are A) pretty, and who B) can act.)
It's a plot-driven film. And the plot's not bad, except that I quickly tire of movies whose plots dictate what the characters do, rather than the other way around. I'd prefer to see wholey drawn people deciding with realism upon certain courses of action…you know, like in good movies. "Fracture" frustrated me because it could have been that movie with only a little more effort – I was begging for more exploration of Hopkins's character's profession as an aircraft engineer, whose job it is to find the weak spots in machines, as he's so adept at doing with people (the film tells us, but we seldom get to see. I don't like taking a movie's word for it. SHOW ME.). And the resolution was way too "Law & Order: SVU" for me to really respect it. And what's really sad is that this was one of the better Hollywood offerings of the last year.

"Bull Durham" (1988)
Lots of people my age look at that decaying bag of flesh known as Kevin Costner, and we remember back to the distant days of childhood, when we heard our mothers swoon over him, and we think to ourselves, "WTF?" Let me say, I understand. In response, I present you with the following:

ANNIE

What do you believe in?

Crash at the door. Annie's question is slightly taunting. He stops, and speaks with both aloofness and passion:

CRASH

I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, long foreplay, and that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, I believe that there oughtta be a constitutional amendment outlawing astro-turf and the designated hitter, I

believe in the "sweet spot", soft core pornography, chocolate chip cookies, opening your presents on Christmas morning rather than Christmas eve, and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last for three days. Good night.

ANNIE

(breathless)

Oh my...

And I rest my case. This movie made Costner's career, folks, hands down. He was the Clooney and Pitt and every other heart-throb under the sun combined, circa 1988, and that one little monologue is why. Yes, the movie's slow by modern standards. Yes, it prominently features the guy from "Arli$$". But it's hot…so very, very hot. (Though NOT a classic sports movie – more of a chick-flick with baseball intimately involved. But still, the kind of big-tent, women-and-men-will-both-love-it film that Hollywood doesn't do much nowadays.)
[BTW, Tim Robbins narrowly beat out David Duchovny for the role of Susan Sarandon's "dim pretty boy" love interest. And of course, this is the film where Sarandon and Robbins met. I can't help imagining some alter-universe where Sarandon coupled up with Duchovny instead – maybe the "X-Files" conspiracy theories would have taken on a whole new dimension…]
[Further BTW…Sarandon's character, Annie Savoy, is my personal hero, for her love and knowledge of sports, her unabashed sexual confidence and her fabulous retro-cool house paid for solely with her salary teaching part-time at the fictional Alamance Junior College. The woman clearly has gads to teach us.]

Pic of the Week: Has got to be "Bull Durham." I might have to watch it again right now…