“The cinema is always as perfect as it can be”

After the jump: brief notes on the last five screenings I attended.

Wanted (2008)

Monday, 7/7/08, SouthSide Works Cinema, Pittsburgh. This film works only if you think that the life of an assassin is inherently superior to the life of an accountant. Not digging it. You could, I suppose, argue that this an allegory for the present situation in Iraq, with Morgan Freeman’s Sloan standing in for President Bush, but why would you want to do that? And what would you do with the ending? The scene in which Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) confronts his boss (Lorna Scott) is deplorable. Possibly the worst movie I’ve seen so far this year.

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Reprise (2006)

Friday, 7/11/08, CineMagic Manor Theater, Pittsburgh. Quibbles: At least two of Phillip’s (Anders Danielsen Lie) countdowns seemed designed to make us think he’s committed suicide; I can justify this, but should I? Is the bit with Henning (Henrik Elvestad) at the end necessary? These are a few of the lingering reservations that keep me from proclaiming Reprise “the year’s best film so far!” It has a lot more vitality than its nearest competition, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon (2007), so maybe. . . .

This is the second terrific film about the “literary life” that I’ve seen this year; it would look great on a double bill with Starting Out in the Evening (2007), the first one. It’s a bit disconcerting to me that the fictional characters from a foreign land in this film have the same taste in music as me.

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Jellyfish (2007)

Saturday, 7/12/08, Regent Square Theater, Pittsburgh. This film means well, showed me something I’ve never seen from Israeli cinema before (not that I’m an expert on Israeli cinema), and has its moments (Noa Knoller’s Keren’s metamorphosis from a caricature to a character in her lonely hotel room), which means, I think, that I believe its directors (Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret) show “promise” and that I forgive it for being cluttered, ungainly, and in turns incoherent and incredibly, unfortunately obvious.

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The Iron Giant (1999)

Sunday, 7/13/08, Schenley Park, Pittsburgh. This is a perfect film for outdoor screenings: its fairly straightforward animation, uncluttered compositions, and bold color palette stand out against the sky. I want to say that the more complicated bits are left for the end when it’s dark enough to see them, but a 71A that simply never showed up caused me to miss the first twenty minutes of the screening and I don’t quite remember if this is true. Grr. The Iron Giant has officially unseated Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) as the best film I’ve ever seen in Schenley Park. Director Brad Bird’s suggestion that none of our Cold War era enemies, either real (the Soviet Union) or imagined (the Martians), were as much of a threat to us as we were to ourselves is pretty audacious.

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Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

Monday, 7/14/08, SouthSide Works Cinema, Pittsburgh. Intermittently . . . not brilliant, but very, very good; the bit with the elemental, for instance, is wonderful. There’s clearly a lot of great stuff going on here, and probably in the first Hellboy (2004), too. I’d guess that for Guillermo del Toro’s champions these are his most fertile movies. I respect Hellboy II, but I didn’t enjoy watching it. I was wowed by the creatures, but in between when I was supposed to be amused or moved I was often bored or, occasionally, annoyed. He remains, for now, other people’s auteur. The two human agents in the scene in which Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and company investigate the incident at the auction seem to exist primarily to show us what’s not going to happen to our protagonists; they’re not the only minor characters (King Balor’s guards) who appear in the movie just so that they can be killed. I don’t like to see lives wasted, even fictional ones. Worth reading: A.O. Scott’s New York Times review.

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2008 Movies Watched at Home: Joy Division (2007)

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