Colin McEnroe | To Wit

Big Hands I Know You're the One

Last night Mortimer consented to hang out with me, and we decided to watch "Rocket Science" on DVD. Mortimer approached it with reservations because the film has been compared to "Rushmore," and Mortimer is one of America's leading "Rushmore" scholars, able to quote and parse obscure aspects of the film in ways I find a little daunting.

"Nothing can be compared to 'Rushmore'," said Mortimer as I closed the DVD tray to start this film.

True.  But "Rocket Science" is not without its unique charms, although at times it seems almost like an impasto of every quirky, throwaway-laden high-school-is-misery movie you've ever seen.  "Rushmore," "Election," "Welcome to the Doll's House," "Napoleon Dynamite" all seem to have exerted some useful influence on this movie. It's crammed with familiar tropes, including the one about the parental generation coming amusingly unglued one floor up from the teens. "Rocket Science" has layers and layers of jokes, and one of them involves a husband and wife (minor characters) who, for some reason connected to their marriage, spend a lot of time playing a cello and violin arrangement of  "Blister in the Sun," by the Violent Femmes. (This seems like a nod, also, to "Grosse Point Blank.") They're not important in the scheme of the movie, but the cello, briefly, is.  One trope that seems a little overworked these days is the cheerful, supportive Asian sidekick (see "Disturbia"), but "Rocket Science" does, at least, something new and funny with it.

About a third of the way in, I realized I loved this movie. It may be a little imitative, but it has its own dark intelligence. I don't think anybody else ever really used the rapid-fire speech patterns of debaters to such comic effect, and I love the way the script just bulldozes enormous piles of humorous content at you. Roy Blount Jr. once told me that humor should be like a great Christmas where you finish unwrapping a present only to have another one shoved at you right away. This movie doesn't let you catch your breath. I like a movie which makes you laugh hard but quietly, so you don't miss the next joke.

It's also the best movie about stuttering ever. But stuttering is just a metaphor for isolation and lack of confidence. When Hal, the disfluent protagonist, privately scrawls out the answer his teacher his asking for but cannot bring himself to say it aloud, even enduring the teacher's withering scorn rather than risk trying to say "nom de plume,"  half the audience says, "I've done that."

Mortimer (who has done that) loved the movie too, but Hal's agonies rang so true for him at times that Mortimer found himself holding his napkin in front of his eyes rather than behold Hal's latest fiasco.  "Can anything go right?" Mortimer demanded at one point.

Near the end, though, Mortimer resumed his defense of  "Rushmore."

"The reason it's better is that I know exactly how this movie is going to end.  You could never predict the end of 'Rushmore' or even really describe what that ending is," Mortimer announced.

Those of you who have seen "Rocket Science" already know that Mortimer was wrong. If there's a less predictable, more-Rushmorean ending to a teen movie, I don't know what it is.

"When you like a movie, you really like it," Mortimer told me.

"We have to own this," I told him.

And we will.

The Red Eminence

Nobody seems to be mentioning this role in all the tributes today, but -- damn -- I loved Charlton Heston as Richelieu in Richard Lester's two Musketeers movies.

Line of the day

On CBS Sunday Morning, AGLFC sprinkled praise on the new Scorsese Rolling Stones film, although he did pause to observe that Keith Richards "is starting to look like "Freddy Kruger's Gypsy grandmother."

In the words of Jon Stewart ...Thank God for teen pregnancy

Images from last night's Oscars in Hartford 2008 Party.  That's Damon Scott dressed as Anton Chigurh. Damon: "You wouldn't believe what a good parking spot I got."

It's Party Tiiiiiiiime

No use in sitting alone in your room. Come hear the music play.

We'll be at the Emperor at the Linden in Hartford all night Sunday night in a benefit for CARC. Here is how you buy tickets. They're a little steep, but you get a lot for your money and you support some very important work in helping people with AIDS.  EVERYONE IS INVITED.  Even you, Lisa!

There will Be Oscars ...or Will There?

Usually by the time the nominations come out, I've seen at least three of the best film nominees; and it becomes a simple matter to mop up the other one or two. This time, I've seen only "No Country for Old Men" and "Michael Clayton." It never occurred to me I'd have to go see "Juno" in a move theater. Isn't it basically kind of a really good TV show, like "Arrested Development?"

A few random thoughts.

1.  The (nominated) director of  "Clayton" has already said he would never cross a picket line.  All you need is a small critical mass to make it fashionable (and shameful to do otherwise), and you've basically got no ceremony.  Oscabs?  And it's not in the writers' interests to cut them any kind of special one-night deal. Quite the opposite. This could be the year everybody decided to be Marlon Brando. They should send Indians?

2. This was the year the Academy decided it was kind of bored by Denzel Washington, who could conceivably been up in two different categories for varius kinds of work in two movies. Uh-uh.  That has to come as a surprise.

2a. They're also temporarily over Ang Lee. "Lust, Caution" -- an amazing,  full-bodied, Italian roast movie -- didn't show up anywhere.

3. Best Actress category seems a little week; and it's often so. Of the performances, I have seen only Christie's (although I just did some Netflix tinkering to fix that).  They might have thought about Naomi Watts in "Eastern Promises."

4. I'm surprised that "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" didn't make the Best Picture field.

5. "Zodiac" is going to be one of the most underappreciated very good movies of the last ten years.

6. Most of the nominated documentaries are rebukes of the Bush administration. They should almost rename the category.

Away From Her

When my mother's Alzheimer's disease finally obliged me to put her in a care facility, when I found myself making daily visits and growing acquainted with some of the other patients, I was forced to recognize the kind of ruinous beauty of the disease. The same power that draws us to the toppled columns of Greek temples is breathtakingly present in the slowly scattering minds.

I came also to know that Alzheimer's is a snowflake disease: there are as many versions of it as there are patients. As a disease of thought and personality, it interacts very intimately with the people who have it. At times, rather than stealing them away, it makes them more themselves than they have been in a long time -- raking away the the topsoil of social convention and recent memory to reveal the core of the person.

Years ago, leaving the nursing home where my father died, I wrote this:

The people there are, I've decided, strangely beautiful. They drift slowly through the halls like ships, broken-masted or hull-pierced, never to sail again, but bobbing and eddying in the last harbor, sad and lovely fragments of their old selves.

I bring all of this up because I've just watched "Away From Her," a movie of startling beauty and sadness. If you've been avoiding it, don't. It's not grim. It's not bleak. It doesn't shrink from some of the sorrows of the scourge, but it also gets right some of the tenderness and even mirth to be found in the patients and their families.

Julie Christie has already picked up a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Fiona, the patient, but, invoking the Goldman Rule, I have to argue that Gordon Pinsent gives deeper, richer, more important performance as Grant, the bereft, dutiful, heartbroken and ultimately guilty husband. (William Goldman says that, in a movie like ""Rain Man," the Tom Cruise role is the harder job, selling the  Dustin Hoffman character to the audience, reacting to him as we might react.) But Christie too is superb and, for my money, dead on. Those of us in "the community" will recognize a thousand little details that she gets right as she declines before our eyes. She is still, by the way, one of the most beautiful women in the world.  Something should be said, also, on behalf of Olympia Dukakis, whose Marian is one of those characters who has one set of thoughts coming out of her mouth and a completely different set bleeding out of her eyes.

Please adjust your Netflix queues. Get this movie. It has as much heart and grace as anything you'll see in a year.

Diving Bells Are Ringing

This is the weekend of the New York Times's now-annual practice of looking at Oscar-worthy films at least partly in terms of memorable scenes and dissecting those scenes for contents which might enlarge our understanding of those movies. (Happy to see that Manola Dargis shares shares my admiration for "Zodiac.")

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is not one of the movies offered such consideration, but it strikes me that at least two of its scenes could conceivably acquire a kind of revered status. "Diving Bell" is, to refresh your memory, a movie based on a remarkable memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby, a fast-lane French magazine editor and ladies' man who at the age of 43 suffered an inexplicable vascular shut-down -- stroke doesn't really do it justice -- trapping him inside his body and permitting, by way of movement -- only the blinking of one eye. Bauby used the blinking of that eye to dictate a memoir.

The movie is one of inescapably (in a pretty literal sense) male sensibilities, and one of my iconic scenes is a flashback in which our protagonist, played by Mathieu Amalric visits his father, a charming rogue and retired swordsman himself. (Confession: I spent the whole movie thinking, of the father, "He's like a French Max von Sydow!"  It was old Max.)  Father is semi-incapacitated, and son insists on shaving him. The whole scene -- kind of an antidote to Sweeney Todd -- is like a little movie is its own right, a glorious and uneasy melange of tenderness, vulnerability, aggression, bluster and the kind of male love you just don't see in movies very often.

My second scene -- one that's almost over the top -- takes place on the birthday of the now-paralyzed Bauby. Celine, the mother of his children, from whom he has been estranged, sits in his hospital room. She is played by the meltingly beautiful Emmanuelle Seigner, the closest thing to an angel you're going  see on a movie screen. The speaker phone rings, and the caller is the mostly-absent mistress for whom Bauby left his former life-partner.  There is no way for Bauby and his mistress to have a conversation without the jilted Celine translating. So she does.  And for a few minutes, just about every horrible thing that can go wrong (and, I suppose, right)  between men and women floats through the room. It's sort of the bookend of the other scene, in which father and son banter, in a very French way, about the necessity of a complex romantic life. In the compression of the hospital room, those sentiments are stripped of their picaresque trappings and ground down into a very bitter pill.

Allow me two more, random, observations. One is that Bauby's pre-accident life plans had included a novel, a modern re-telling of "the Count of Monte Cristo" with the Count a woman this time. That stifled project invites us to consider what sort of movie this would be if a woman were lying in the hospital bed. Very different, of course. When we are stripped of everything, we consider profoundly what we value. "Diving Bell"  has a wonderful soundtrack with some new Tom Waits songs, but one tune they could have added, also from Sweeney, is "Pretty Women."  Bauby's "wandering eye," the last roving part of him, lingers over creamy white thights and crucifixes dangling over cleavage. The adoration of female beauty is a life sentence and a death sentence. A movie about a woman would have had, I think, kids in the hospital room 90 percent of the time.

Second thing:  BOWTIE CINEMAS! REPLACE THE SCREENS AT CINEMA CITY!  Sorry, but very few movies have made such interesting use of light and focus. Some of director Julian Schnabel's painterly touches are disrupted by the smears ahd Rorschach blotches all over the 167-year-old crappy screen at Cinema City.

Spartans! Today We Make Movie Lists In Hell

  It's hard to rank movies in a behind-the-curve market like Hartford. I thought the best 2006 movie was "Pan's Labyrinth" which I didn't see until 2007.  Also, I'm just a guy who likes movies. I see what I can.  I was able to remember seeing 24 actual 2007 movies. I almost feel like throwing in "El Aura," an amazing Argentinian noir-in-the-woods movie, that didn't come here until March, but it's technically a 2006 film. But it would have given me an even 25.

I'd love to see a few lists from commenters.

Actual 2007 releases I have seen this year ranked in order of esteem:

1. Gone Baby Gone. I am probably the only person not named Affleck who will make this pick, but I even think Ben Affleck's history may have worked against him a bit. Some people may not be comfortable admitting his first directorial effort is this good. Moral ambigiuity, an amazing plot, and about ten great performances, starting with brother Casey's.

2. No Country for Old Men.  I seemed to be laughing more than most people in the theater. There was something very magical in the meshing of Cormac McCarthy's words and Tommy Lee Jones's delivery. Fate. Moral helplessness. Beautifully stark  southwestern images. Woody Harrelson at his best. Bardem.

3. Michael Clayton. Nice, George.

4. Zodiac.  Far from being a conventional thriller, it's a movie about people caught in a years-long, grueling, painstaking state of nervy irresolution, precisely because real life is not at all like a conventional thriller.  Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Chloe Sevigny and Anthony Edwards.   Everybody is good.

5.  The Lookout. Joseph Gordon-Leavitt is the best actor of his generation. I predict this overlooked movie about a brain-damaged hockey star drawn into a criminal plot will be a hit on video.

6. The Lives of Others.  Warrantless wiretapping in the good old days.

7. Darjeeling Limited. I'm a sucker for Wes Anderson who has perfected his own mini-genre of technicolor father-seeking depression.

8. Sicko. A surprisingly affecting meditation on our instinct to care for one another. I could have talked myself into putting this one as high as #3. Why didn't it change America.?

9. The Wind That Shakes the Barley.   The Troubles. Nothing to do with Leona's dog.

10. Lust, Caution.  Sex, death.

11. This Is England. Hunt down this amazing little movie about skinheads in Falklands-era Great Britain.

12. Into the Wild. So many great little acting jobs. Vince Vaughn! Catherine Keener! Hal Holbrook!

But I do want to say: Bart the Bear gives the same performance in every movie. And he's gained more weight than James Gandolfini.

13. Once. People adore this little movie about musical love in working class Ireland. Yes they do.

14. American Gangster. I gotta agree with AGLFC that this movie felt a little chilly, for all of the perfection of Denzel and the intensity of Crowe.

15. Sweeney Todd. Johnny yes. Helena nooooooo.

16. 300. Mortimer, upon exiting the multiplex: "I don't care what anyone says. That was a kickass movie."

17 Romance and Cigarettes. Turturro-directed sort-of musical and a different kind of Bridge and Tunnel role for Gandolfini. Kind of a mess but worth seeing.

18. Live Free or Die Hard. Not quite John McClain as Lear, but he has found a Cordelia in daughter Lucy and Justin Law is a great Fool. A completely satisfying addition to the series.

19. Bourne Ultimatum. Gotta love the whole American torture critique.

20.  Harry Potter and Whatever. We're all getting tired.

21.  Shooter. Actually a pretty cool Mark Wahlberg action movie.

22. Breach. I had to read about Laura Linney's engagement in the newspaper. So screw this movie.

23. Spider-man 3. Fix the series. Fire the leads.

24. Beowulf .  Curry still wearing his 3D glasses. The rest of us have moved on.

UnAmerican Pie

I have almost no family, so on Christmas Day, I get to go to the movies. It's like being temporarily Jewish.

When the four people in front of me at the 1:30 screening of   "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" got up and left about 35 minutes into the movie today, I was tempted to follow them out into the lobby and find out why. There would have been some bad reasons and some good ones. (I mean, for four people to get up a leave and movie together, they pretty much all have to have a pretty big problem with it, unless their plan, from the beginning, was to watch 30 minutes and then duck into "Charlie Wilson's War.")

Bad reasons to walk out: You didn't know it was a musical.  I realize the TV advertising kind of glosses over this fact.  I mean, you never see anybody sing.  Still...you didn't know that? The name Sondheim doesn't mean anything to you?  Another bad reason to walk out is Johnny Depp. I had some real apprehension about him in this role, but he's  not the problem with this movie. He really showed up, and his singing is not at all bad. He even found a musical growl that he uses  effectively -- although perhaps too plentifully. (Another bad reason: You thought it would be sort of "Barbers of the Caribbean.")

Good reasons to walk out: Helena Bonham Carter. She is just plain awful.  You don't need to be a great singer to do this show, but,  it is, for crying out loud, a musical.  (And one with an unusual amount of recitatif and little spoken dialogue.) And she really can't sing.  She's got about a six-note chest voice and, after "la,"   an "upper register" that you learn, very quickly, to dread, especially if you know the score.  She thins out so much on the high notes that she can't put any expression in them.  She's also, frankly, way too hot to be Mrs. Lovett. Mrs. Lovett is, of necessity, amorously overreaching with Todd. Director Tim Burton is HBC's boyfriend. They have kids. There is no way to ugly her up, because the sunken-eyed, malnourished London look of the show is pretty much her look anyway. Unlike most of us, she looks pretty good this way. Even factoring for that, Burton favors her, at times, with some out-and-out glam shots. (She looked worse in "Fight Club.") A possible defense of all of the preceding is that Burton has reimagined the work as something other than a musical full of musical conventions.  But as what? As what has he reimagined it? A  more naturalistic drama in which people make meat pies out of other people? And sing about it? I'm really not sure how Burton sees this whole project.  HBC and Depp are both very deadly and attractive, in an incredibly pale way.  Is this sort of an iron-poor "Bonnie and Clyde?" 

Reasons just to sit there and just to watch it play out:   The incredible music. Disclosure: I'm one of those idiots you see in cars, mouth wide open, hitting (at least I think I'm hitting) some note in a song, belting along with the CD player. About 20 years ago I got into the Cariou-Lansbury original soundtrack and listened obsessively, so much so that I noted today (even though I haven't been near the thing in ten years)  that they dropped a couple of verses from Toby's initial pitch for Pirelli's exlir.  (More notably, they dropped entirely the opening "Ballad" and Judge Turpin's creepy self- flagellation song. )  Speaking of Toby, young Edward Sanders is another great reason to sit and watch. The little dude has a great face and great pipes and loads of presence.  He and Depp are the best things in the film.

Not exactly  phoning it in but:  Is it just me but does Alan Rickman give basically the same performance, over and over?

In the last analysis, I had fun at this movie, but I'm not really a Burton fan. We love the signatures of certain directors. I saw "Darjeeling Limited" in San Francisco and was reminded of how much I just flat-out like what Wes Anderson does. He speaks my language.  I was also reminded, early in this movie, that I really don't speak fluent Burton. First came the high speed zigzag camera through the streets of London. Then came "The Worst Pies in London."  There were too many bugs running around in Mrs. Lovett's pie shop, so that when she picks one up and says -- without breaking the meter of the song -- "What is that?,"  it's not funny.  Too many, too fast, too much, too dark, too pale.  Nothing ever stands out as what it is. That's Burton, to me.  But maybe not to you.

Go see the movie. And then let me know.