Dogs Bark

Actually, Every Night - - Swing Time (1936) - - 17 September 2012

An essential. I suppose one could try to figure out if Swing Time or Top Hat was the desert-island Astaire/Rogers DVD based upon some possibly pathological frame-by-frame comparison but that’s someone else’s blog. Aren’t you lucky! Here’s the deal - - it’s a splendid continuum. I slightly do prefer the songs of Kern/Fields over Berlin/Steiner but who can fault “Cheek To Cheek?” Swing Time introduced its Oscar-winning song “The Way You Look Tonight” with one of its best versions and even ended with a cute joke at the song’s expense.  Both movies employed the brilliant Eric Blore (The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels and the real voice of Stewie Griffin) and Helen Broderick (Broderick Crawford’s mom). Neither movie allows a rational plot to distract us from the beauty of Hermes Pan’s (Silk Stockings, Kiss Me Kate) choreography. Supposedly, there were 47 takes of the “Never Gonna Dance” number, causing Ginger’s feet to bleed.

Trivial Pursuit - - Footnote (2011) - - 12 September 2012

Not recommended. Footnote was almost universally loved by the reviewing community and an Oscar nominee for best foreign language film. The movie is beautifully performed, with Isreali stage actors Shlomo Bar-Aba, as an embittered Talmudic scholar and professor, and Lior Ashkenazi as his more successful son, also an academic. Both won Israeli academy awards, as did the film and almost everyone who worked on it. It’s hard for me to articulate what I found cold at the center of Footnote. The jokey, frantic editing (Einat Glaser-Zarhin) and loopy score (Amit Poznansky) was clearly distracting. But I guess the story itself - - its incumbent pedantry - -  is maybe what put me off.  Although I admire scribe/helmer Joseph Cedar’s (Beaufort) grasp of Israeli and Jewish culture and he’s a talented filmmaker; I wish he’d picked a different story.  But that’s not very fair to the movie and its makers . . .  so do as you will.

We’re All Losers. - - The Hunger Games (2012) - - 1 September 2012

Not recommended. There was a big stink in 2008 when Suzanne Collins published her novel, The Hunger Games, whether or not the story was derivative of Koushun Takami’s 1999 story Battle Royale. The respective movies repeated the dust up. My take on this - -who cares? I’ve not read the books, but neither story is particularly original and the reality and reality show conflation is so very played. We know what’s going to happen from the start of this silly movie and that cynicism is rewarded.  James Newton Howard’s (Snow White and the Huntsman) pretentious score also deadens things, along with some very woozy, distracting editing. The plot is further muddled by the arbitrary introduction of fantasy wolves. Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone) is a wonderful actress but herein, not so much. BTW, is she getting typecast as that squirrel-killin’ gal? Hopefully, she’ll stick to a Cobb salad in the inevitable sequels.

An Adventure In Tuscany - - Certified Copy (2010) - - 31 August 2012

Recommended. If men and women have such fundamentally different expectations of love, as seems believed by Certified Copy, then I wonder how anyone could ever stay together for longer than a weekend.  Renowned writer/director Abbas Kiarostami’s first drama shot outside of Iran loops through a relationship between Juliette Binoche, who won an award a Cannes for this effort, and operatic star William Shimell over the course of a long drive through the Tuscany countryside. Shimell’s character has written a book about the value of reproductions and the analogy to their (maybe?) pretend marriage is obvious. Is anyone still afraid of Virginia Woolf? But, cinema of the absurd, notwithstanding, Certified Copy owes more to the puzzle of L'Avventura and the universal mystery of relationship dysfunction. The only leap of faith is anyone falling out of love with Ms. Binoche. But this challenging movie, much like serious romance, is not for the timid.