Midnight in Paris

Best Woody Allen film in years. A highly entertaining and touching meditation on people who feel they were born in the wrong time period. It's a very personal subject for me because ever since I was a teenager I have felt that I was born in the wrong time. I won't describe the plot of this film because it's best not to know but Owen Wilson was somehow perfect as the Woody-stand-in, I think because he has his own set of tics and nervous habits so that when he delivered the stammering Woody Allen dialogue it sounded very natural. Other good things: Beautifully shot, tons of small funny performances, including a stand-out single scene from Adrien Brody, a perfect ending (you can say what you want about Woody Allen but he has always known how to end a movie). All these good things are only slightly marred by the overly simple and shrill character of Inez, played (very well) by Rachel McAdams. It's a minor fault in a minor masterpiece.

Super 8

J. J. Abram's homage to early Spielberg is like two movies jammed together. One is a heartfelt ode to childhood, about a group of middle schoolers making a zombie movie with a super 8 camera. The second is a monster movie, kind of a more mean-spirited ET. I loved the former and was pretty immune to the latter. They never really meshed, and I never cared about (or was scared by) the monster story. But the kid actors, in particular Elle Fanning as the only girl in the group, and Riley Griffiths as the dedicated zombie movie director ("Production values!") were my standouts. I almost wish the movie had just been about the kids, their dead-end town, and the making of that movie. The monster seemed tacked on. Imagine if at the end of Stand by Me the body that they'd hiked into the woods to see came alive and chased the kids for half an hour. That's what this felt like to me.

Film Frames Friday

Hint: You can count on me.

X-Men: First Class

Truth is, I've been sick of comic book movies (i.e. superhero movies) for a long time now. They just don't float my boat. Super heroes never really have, not even when I was a kid. I was always more taken with Tintin, or Indiana Jones, or James Bond (I know these are all variations of super heroes but they don't have super powers, so there's the difference). But I do like X-Men movies, enough that I own the first one on DVD, but not quite enough that I went to see the last couple of movies. But as soon as I saw that the new X-Men movie was going to star Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy plus it was going to be set in the 1960s, I knew I was going.

And it was worth it. The first half of this very good film was amazing. We get the back stories of Professor Xavier and Magneto, leading up to the formation of the Westchester, NY school. The early scenes with Fassbender hunting Nazis (in particular a showdown with a couple of "pig farmers" in Argentina) are easily my favorite movie sequences I've seen in a long while. McAvoy is good too as the too-moral professor. What else is good? Well, about half the young mutants, about half the villains, and about half the action sequences. The problem with these movies is that eventually all the characters have to put on costumes and become involved in an over-the-top set-piece. So the second half is pretty good but I truly loved the first half, especially some of the set-design, an obvious homage to one of the greats, Ken Adams, he of early Bond fame and Dr. Strangelove.

Poetry Monday

Song of the Master and Boatswain

by W. H. Auden

At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s

    We drank our liquor straight,

Some went upstairs with Margery,

     And some, alas, with Kate;

And two by two like cat and mouse

The homeless played at keeping house.

There Wealthy Meg, the Sailor’s Friend,

    And Marion, cow-eyed,

Opened their arms to me but I

     Refused to step inside;

I was not looking for a cage

In which to mope in my old age.

The nightingales are sobbing in

    The orchards of our mothers,

And hearts that we broke long ago

    Have long been breaking others;

Tears are round, the sea is deep:

Roll them overboard and sleep.

Film Frames Friday

Hint: X marks the spot.

OSS 117 - Lost in Rio (2009)

There have now been two movies starring Jean Dujardin as the French spy OSS 117. The first film, Cairo: Nest of Spies, came out in 2006 and it was a fairly amusing 1960s spy spoof, more similar in tone to an early Pink Panther film than an Austin Powers. I liked it enough that I decided to check out the sequel, Lost in Rio, which I found a lot funnier than the original. Maybe I've just grown more enamored of Dujardin, who is a gifted and subtle comedian, but it was also just a better film. Like a lot of movies of its ilk some of the set-pieces grow pretty tired pretty fast but I can honestly say that alone in my office watching this on my laptop I guffawed out loud at least four times.

Another thing I love about these movies, both of them, is how flawlessly they have managed to recreate the look and feel of not just James Bond films, but Matt Helm films, and Derek Flynt films, and the whole '60s spy genre in general. And Dujardin has an uncanny physical knack of mimicking Sean Connery, especially the way he walks across the room. No easy task: that's a pretty great walk.

It's possible that Dujardin (and his costar from Cairo: Nest of Spies, the lovely Berenice Bejo (above)) might both become household names pretty soon. Their new film, a silent comedy called The Artist got rave reviews at Cannes. You heard it here first.