trailer tuesday

this week's entry for franco amurri's film proves that even harvey keitel can have monkey trouble (1994).

i suppose that means it's autumn

because today we say so long to summer. everyone wave goodbye.

here are the films she selected for me this week, for posterity's sake:

ponette (1996)
a little princess (1995)
mary and max (2009)
peggy sue got married (1986)
ladies and gentlemen, the fabulous stains (1982)
kicking and screaming (1995)
benny & joon (1993)
the house of yes (1997)
dogtooth (2009)
kings of pastry (2009)
hoop dreams (1994)
the pride of the yankees (1942)
microcosmos (1996)
free willy (1993)
wendy and lucy (2008)
me and you and everyone we know (2005)
y tu mamá también (2001)
dirty dancing (1987)
road, movie (2010)
last night (1998)

it was a red-letter week, most certainly. she was the first queue participant bold enough to appeal so brashly to my loins as well as my brains. it was easily the most erotically charged list i have seen so far. whereas previous lists have held a good number of surprises for me in the realm of kids entertainment, this week we were definitely traversing adult territory. lucky for me, sex and death are typically at the top of my hit parade. she also set a new standard this week for making me openly weep, which i am sure she finds satisfying, though not perversely. it was quite the emotional roller coaster ride and i am richer for it. thank you, summer. i appreciate all the work you put into it and for having the nerve to put me through the wringer.

the queue is taking october off, as that is my birthday and i am not watching anything i don't feel like. yes, the whole month is my birthday. i don't mess around. the queue will be back in november with my favorite contrarian, joe turner, at the helm. i guarantee that is going to be good. in the meantime, i'll see you guys around. as always, thanks for reading.

it happens every summer: day seven

here we are again, another day seven. we only have two films left, as different as night and day. up first is dev benegal's road, movie (2010).

in an effort to get out from under his responsibilities to the family hair oil business, restless twentysomething vishnu seizes upon an opportunity to take a cross-country trip to deliver an ancient truck. it is no normal rickety 1942 chevy, as it turns out. it has been outfitted as a mobile cinema. as he makes his way across the indian desert with his celluloid cargo he picks up a trio of travelers - a boy who works at a roadside tea stand, an older gentleman as adept at repairing things as he is at doling out wisdom and a beautiful nomadic woman wandering in search of water. they cross paths with a corrupt, sadistic police office and a ruthless gangster who is in control of all the water in the region, making it out of these scrapes thanks to the magic of the movies and vishnu's father's hair oil, respectively. as in the tales of scheherazade, the quality of the movie they show on a given night is their ticket to surviving and thriving another day. they go forward on faith, finally arriving at the fair they are in search of. in the manner of all great road movies, their travels forge a bond between them that can only dissolve bittersweetly, as all trips must eventually arrive at their destination. i really wanted to like this more than i did. it certainly wasn't bad but it just didn't move me that much, especially considering the subject matter. the desert is definitely beautiful and a roving movie theater or a traveling fair that sprouts out of the dust makes for a magic that is engrossing and entertaining. my problem was with the lack of an arc. for all their traveling, i felt no one really went anywhere. the attempt to generate danger, drama and transformation ultimately only results in something pleasant and mild. the notion of a traveling cinema, though, appeals to me like you wouldn't believe. i want a truck like that one of these days. what a beautiful dream - roaming the highways, going from town to town, stopping somewhere new every night and bringing the wonder of movies into people's lives. this film may not have been all i had hoped but now, when i win the lottery, i certainly know what i am going to do with all that money.

and finally, fittingly, we end with don mckellar's last night (1998).

it chronicles the last few hours in the intersecting lives of a group of people living in toronto who are literally facing the end of the world. an apocalypse, the nature of which is never elaborated upon, is going to culminate at midnight and we follow this disparate bunch of characters as they go through their rituals and prepare to meet oblivion, each in their own way. a family celebrates a christmas that is never going to come, supplies are gathered to complete a farewell dinner/suicide pact, a debut concert is performed, jobs are done right to the end, parties are thrown like it's new year's eve and a sexual marathon is in full swing, checking off every act that can be squeezed in to these final fleeting moments. the lack of mayhem is the most striking thing you immediately notice. the general atmosphere of lawlessness you would expect, while alluded to, stays far in the background. the gravity of the situation seems to have settled something in most of these people. they truly seem acutely aware of the fact that there is no more time to waste. the overall tone is one of resignation and, really, what else would it be? there is no more negotiation to be done. sandra oh is particularly good in this, i thought, determined to go out under her own steam only to see her obstinance ultimately yielding to an end that is richer and more profound. the real power in a film like this, if it's well done, as this one truly is, is reflected in just how many questions you ask yourself in the hours, days and weeks after the credits roll.

where would you want to be at the appointed hour?
whose face is the very last one you want to see?
what phone calls would you have to make?
whose door are you knocking on to consummate those things that have gone years unspoken before it's too late?
most importantly, if you would change everything so drastically, why aren't you living the way you want to right now?

thank you, summer. i can't think of a better place to end things.

big top starlite

we had a beautiful night tonight for this month's starlite screening. lauren made perfect end-of-summer skewers of grilled fresh pineapple, strawberries and nectarines and our three ring extravaganza started with robert mckimson's looney tunes classic acrobatty bunny (1946), followed by mystery science theater bringing down the tent on the short here comes the circus (1946). our main attraction was federico fellini's la strada (1954).

giulietta masina's face has to be considered one of the greatest in cinema history, so expressive and odd and beautiful. it struck me this evening while watching the film how unfair and inaccurate it is that her character in this film is so often described as simple. i think the more appropriate word would be pure, an angel inhabiting the body of harpo marx. as always, it was great to share this with an audience and i am eternally grateful to my friends for being such thoughtful and attentive viewers. you guys are wonderful to share movies with. double thanks to lauren this evening for being worth two smiths all by herself!

i am still working on the halloween edition of starlite. if you know me, you know i have made and remade the lineup in my head about a thousand times by now. halloween is always my favorite and i promise an excellent double feature for the occasion. as soon as we can nail down a date and i can commit to a program i will make sure and post all the pertinent details here and on the facebook page. i look forward to seeing you guys there.

it happens every summer: day six

day six of the queue finds us navigating the perilous terrain of human connection. we start the day with miranda july's me and you and everyone we know (2005).

july's directorial debut charts the beginning of a relationship between artist christine, played by july herself, and recently separated shoe salesman, and father of two boys, richard, played by vitagraph favorite john hawkes. starting from them and spinning delicately outward we are introduced to a small community of people. there are his sons, whose online chat sessions illuminate a great deal that's both funny and disturbing about people's loneliness and the lengths they go to to alleviate that. there is a pair of teenage girls, classmates of his oldest son, who are precariously balanced at that point where sex is transforming from schoolyard rumor to real world practice. there is his coworker, who doesn't quite have the wherewithal to be a dirty old man and there is the curator of the museum where christine is attempting to have her work displayed who seems disconnected from every aspect of her life except when anonymously divulging her most secret desires to complete strangers. all of these characters go about their labors in one another's orbit, struggling, consciously or otherwise, to have one basic need fulfilled - to find just that one person that truly understands them. it's obviously central to christine and richard's budding romance but it's just as vital for the other characters as well, be they a six year-old boy or the elderly folks christine takes to run errands. there are going to be people that dismiss this as too precious, and there is a whimsical sensibility that dangerously skirts (socks would be a better article of clothing to use here but it doesn't function as a verb) that line a time or two, but what keeps it from tipping is july's unflagging sincerity. she stares straight at you with those perfect eyes and does not blink, much less wink. all the points at which the garden-variety manic pixie dream girl would have shown up and won the day are studiously inverted, exemplified best by the scene where she first talks her way into his car and he throws her out, responding at a gut level not to her whimsy but her borderline creepiness. it doesn't hurt when you have john hawkes on your side, either. the versatility he displays going from being the last hard man in winter's bone (2010) to the floundering, newly-single dad here is something most actors would give their eye teeth for. it's impressive and touching, watching him slowly stumble his way out of sadness to the point where he's willing to risk himself again. i wish this would have been programmed next to kicking and screaming (1995) earlier this week so noah baumbach could have looked over and seen how to use his keen powers of observation for good instead of evil. so he could see listening instead of talking, liking instead of self-loathing and trying instead of quitting. he makes me never want to talk again. miranda july makes me want to talk to everyone.

from there we hit the road with alfonso cuarón's y tu mamá también (2001).

diego luna and gael garcía bernal are a pair of friends from mexico who are in that pivotal summer between high school and the first year of university. their girlfriends are gone touring europe and they restlessly hit the road with maribel verdú, a spanish woman who is a few years older and has, for reasons of her own, decided to go along on this unlikely journey. once in the car, the conversation soon turns to the unavoidable - sex and death - and the conversation soon turns into the unavoidable sexual entanglements. she has sex with both boys and it threatens to undo their friendship as jealousy, desire, resentment and revelation propel them toward one last encounter which finds them in uncharted territory. the tone of the film is set from the very first frame, as it opens with both boys having a frantic farewell coupling with the aforementioned girlfriends. once you get to the airport a few minutes later and the boys see the girls off, only to immediately begin scheming ways they can play while the cat's away, you have all the major story elements here in these opening scenes - unflinching eroticism, immaturity, selfishness, clumsiness, sexual double standards and a lack of understanding just waiting to be cruelly ambushed by experience. it says quite a bit that cuarón can keep me this interested in the fate of these characters that i really don't like very much. they're dumb, average, horny stoner kids and the way they believe things work is informed mainly by their drive to get drunk, high or laid. this is the point that most all coming of age stories lose me. as i have said before, i just can't relate to how many people apparently find these silly, hollow experiences to be transformative. i know i can't have been the only kid out there wanting something substantial during those formative years but the overwhelming volume of these stories tells me i must have been in a distinct minority. i think they way he periodically brings in a narrator to offer social and historical context for their journey is brilliant and it definitely gives me something to hold on to, a way to see their trip as part of a much larger cultural tapestry. the complexity of maribel verdú's performance also offsets the one-dimensional annoyance of the boys and their inability to deal with everything from their betrayals of one another to their attraction to each other. she is as selfish as them in some ways, yes, but it is motivated by a sad knowledge rather than a blissful ignorance. she is simultaneously striving to satisfy her own desires, impart some wisdom and find a measure of peace. you are willing to follow the story to the end for her sake and it's good that you do. once you become attached to her and then are forced to let her go you are left with that fleeting feeling that is the essence of summertime. i was sad to see her go.

we end the day with emlie ardolino's surprise runaway hit and pop culture juggernaut, dirty dancing (1987).

a young girl and her family are on vacation at a resort in the catskills in 1963, in an america that, though no one knows it, is on the verge of coming apart. into this borscht belt enclave strolls dance instructor johnny castle, and baby, as the girl is affectionately/dismissively known, feels a stirring in her loins unlike anything she has noticed prior to now. being an outsider in her own peer group, she wanders over to the other side of the tracks, hobnobs with the staff and finds herself pressed into service as a dance partner when johnny's current partner has to miss a date because of a hastily arranged and, subsequently, poorly performed abortion. johnny and baby take their partnership beyond the dance floor and daddy's little girl isn't a girl anymore. daddy business and class warfare yet again, you ask? indeed, indeed. baby stands up for johnny when he is falsely accused of theft by a jealous former paramour and has to expose their affair to provide him an alibi. daddy is not pleased. johnny gets the axe and hits the road, but not before taking the stage at the season-ending talent show to tell everyone that baby is more than meets the eye with both a stirring speech and a dance routine. times of lives are had. i must give credit where credit is due. there are some surprising and refreshing elements here. it is nice to see a somewhat frank treatment of a young girl's sexual awakening in such a mainstream film. it's nice to see the girl be an equal participant in her love affair and be the hero. she is conscientious, loyal, loving and level-headed. and the inclusion of even a mention of the horrors women went through in the years prior to roe versus wade is a substantial issue for what is essentially a feel-good dance film to take on. so we take these small victories where we can find them. this doesn't, however, exempt the film from being completely predictable and, with an exception or two, very badly acted. i know that generations before and after have done the same thing, but there is no generation like eighties kids who so frequently, and incorrectly, substitute "this is good" (frequently "awesome") for "i like this, this means a lot to me". whether it's the goonies (1985), john hughes' garbage, back to the future (1985) or this, we shouldn't get the two confused. they are very different things. for example, real men (1987) came along at a time in my life when i found its absurdities hilarious and i still have a real soft spot for it but there is no way i am going to try to convince you it is a good movie. fish tank (2009) is a good film about a young girl's sexual awakening - powerful, not obvious and extremely well acted. so how can we use the same adjective to describe something which we know is clearly not those things? hostel (2005) and turistas (2006) are a valuable part of the conversation when considering how horror films are a century-long reflection of society's anxieties in general and specifically of how americans think about how the rest of the world perceives them post-bush administration but are they "good"? no. and if you're trying to convince me that the thoughtful elements of dirty dancing, and not simulated sex on the dance floor and patrick swayze's black tank top, are the main reason why the film has made over 200 million dollars then i am going to call you a liar right to your face. or at least deluded. still and all, i can't be mad at it. it tried, and succeeded, to go beyond the modest boundaries usually set for films like that. call it a draw.

well, that most bittersweet part of the queue has come again. the part where i can see the finish line, when things are drawing to a close. the end is nigh.

for all of us.

it happens every summer: day five

day five finds us playing host to a menagerie. we begin with claude nuridsany and marie pérennou's fascinating nature documentary, microcosmos (1996).

using specially developed cameras, this filmmaking team explores life among the tiniest denizens of a meadow to astounding effect. the narration is almost non-existent and explanation or analysis is never offered. instead, what you have is sequence after sequence of some of the most exquisitely photographed routines of daily insect life you'll ever see. caterpillars, beetles, spiders, moths, mosquitoes, ladybugs, and on and on, doing what they do in vivid color. i love insects. i am endlessly fascinated by them, with their perfect geometry, all segmented, symmetrical and bright. they strike me as a perfect union of biology and mechanism, half living thing, half machine. on the one hand, so devoid of any motivation other than survival and subsistence, efficient and diligent in their toil. on the other hand, such beautiful examples of nature's greatest architecture. this movie really lets you indulge your appreciation of those things (assuming you have that to start with). employing time-lapse, slow motion and enhanced sound effects, it turns the infinitesimal routines of these insects into high drama and high art. something as simple as the amount of surface tension in a dew drop becomes fraught with suspense. and the colors explode off the screen. it's not a traditional nature documentary in any sense but i would certainly like to see more like it. i appreciate not having a human narrator trying to tell me what a snail might have on its mind or ascribing motives to a colony of ants. i would often rather just sit up close and watch and this is perfect for that - intimate observation of a tiny universe. just beautiful.

next, we go from the meadow to the sea with the smorgasbord of manipulation that is the appropriately named simon wincer's free willy (1993).

a troubled kid, in and out of foster care, is assigned a job at a sub-par aquatic theme park as punishment for vandalizing the place. he befriends an orca whale who is rightly upset about being held in captivity by this rinky-dink operation. when it's discovered that the owner of the park is plotting to kill the whale to collect the insurance money, the kid, an indian and tank girl take matters into their own hands and set out to return willy to the sea and his family, who are hanging around right outside in the bay. hoo boy. where to start? the first, and most obvious, problem this thing has is the casting director. i have never seen a kids movie so full of unlikely and/or unlikable performers in my life. michael madsen as the infinitely patient, loving foster father? that ought to give you some idea. i am not sure what foster care agency is handing out kids to mr. blonde but they need to invest in more thorough background checks. michael ironside, who knows his way around playing a heavy, is on hand to be the bad guy but ends up saddled with lines like "because we don't have theft insurance on the whale, that's why!". the most egregious example, though, is the kid. he is a jerk. starts a jerk and, i'm convinced, stays a jerk. not once throughout this entire thing did i find myself pulling for him or giving a tinker's damn about what happened to him. if you're going to make something so obvious at least give me some personality to hang my hopes on. i felt less like freeing this whale was something noble he needed to do than it was just one more thing he was going to get his way about. it's a real shame because i thought this might be one of those pleasant surprises the queue drops on me and there is no place i would rather be than in the ocean. it should have been easy to make me like this. i did like the whale and i am glad he made the jump, if only because it means he won't have to be around any of these people anymore. ultimately, though, any goodwill this beautiful creature might have generated was completely undone by this, the ending credits. skip ahead to 4:24 if you don't feel like sitting through the whole thing.

so now, on top of everything else, i have to listen to michael jackson crying? that's the last straw. free cole-y!

to the rescue comes kelly reichardt's wendy and lucy (2008).

wendy carroll and her lab mix, lucy, are on their way from indiana to alaska where wendy hopes to find work. what little money they have quickly running out, they break down in oregon and bad luck takes root like a particularly tenacious weed. wendy is picked up for shoplifting dog food for lucy and by the time she is released lucy is long gone from where she was tied up in front of the store. she spends some anxious hours waiting to hear if the pound has picked her up and, in the meantime, the repair bill for the car necessitates getting rid of it altogether. lucy is found, eventually, but the reunion is heartbreaking, as wendy's desperate financial straits and lack of a vehicle make it impossible to take lucy with her. it's not so much a narrative as an extended observation of hard times in this land of plenty, which is what kelly reichardt excels at. it is spare and elliptical and it allows you to fill the spaces with your own experience. michelle williams is quietly becoming the best actress of her generation. she certainly seems to be willing to take more risks than most of her contemporaries and manages to do so without being ostentatious. she subtly communicates so much in this film that you don't even realize until it's done how completely you understand her character. the supporting players are great as well, particularly will patton and wally dalton. as melancholy as it is, i also found it incredibly heartening, for a couple of reasons. first, her sorry circumstances expose a lot of the fundamental good in the people she crosses paths with, all people of modest means themselves. barring the vigilant grocery clerk that busts her for stealing, there is not one person she encounters that doesn't cut her some kind of break and their humanity is encouraging. i never thought i would be emotionally wrecked by someone giving another person seven dollars, but damned if i wasn't. it's the little things that make you believe in people and everyone involved in this production seems to have an innate understanding of that. the second reason that makes me hopeful for the character is that she leaves her dog. it may seem contradictory, and certainly feels terrible, but i think it's the first truly responsible decision we see her make. because of the kindness of strangers, because of wendy's pragmatism, because every dog has her day, i prefer to think that both of them are eventually going to be ok.

tomorrow is all about connection and a vitagraph favorite returns.

nothing ever hurts like you think it will.

it happens every summer: day four

during day four we are going to take a look at the nature of competition, with all its ephemeral glories and inevitable broken hearts. we start in france with chris hegedus and d.a. pennebaker's kings of pastry (2009).

the setting is the meilleurs ouvriers de france competition. this is the pinnacle of the pastry world. every four years the greatest pastry chefs in the world convene here to compete for the coveted blue, white and red collar and to determine who is france's greatest craftsman. we pick up with a number of the competitors, primarily jacquy pfeiffer, returning to france from his adopted home of chicago, regis lazard, who suffered misfortune previously in the competition, and philippe rigollot, who has basically trained for this his entire life, as he grew up in his mother's bakery. the format of the documentary itself isn't much more than the most elegant kitchen-based reality show you have ever seen. fortunately, the drama is built in to something like this. it's impossible for it not to be riveting knowing how much effort and dedication went into the preparations and how crucial this event is in all of their lives. but you really need to see these creations, astounding and completely edible. they can tell you better than i can about what's beautiful about this movie. the level of artistry on display here is simply unbelievable.

there is a certain specific joy in watching someone who is the best in the world at what they do. hegedus and pennebaker's unprecedented access to this competition offers a brief glimpse of what is exalted in us when we give everything in pursuit of our art.

for some, though, their competition is a very practical matter. that is the crux of steve james' hoop dreams (1994).

the film follows the divergent fortunes of two kids from chicago, arthur agee and william gates, as they chase their dream of playing basketball in the nba. what started out being a thirty minute short ended up being nearly three hours long, culled from almost six years' worth of footage. i am glad they spent the time because there is no way you could have adequately compressed a story this valuable and multifaceted into half an hour. it encompasses issues of class and race, of potential riches and ruin and of exploitation and and transcendence. so much is riding on these kids and the sacrifices that they, and everyone around them, make that it is, in a manner of speaking, a matter of life and death. if they hit this lottery, it means at least a shot at a way out of crippling poverty and a piece of the american dream that is utterly foreign to them. if they don't make it, it's just more of a never-ending cycle of violence and degradation in their own community and, possibly worst of all, the slow death of a lifetime of deadend jobs with all the time in the world to think about what might have been. as we watch these kids grow up, and watch their stock rise and fall over and again, we watch an ever-expanding web of boosters, coaches, recruiters and relatives all trying to get a piece of these youngsters. it is appalling and terrifying to see just how much pressure these kids have to bear. when you think that these two stories are representative of hundreds, maybe thousands, of kids like them, who are now being approached as early as elementary school, it boggles the mind. you can only hope that they can keep their heads, avoid injury and make it out of high school relatively unscathed. it's a tall order, though, as the school systems in their neighborhoods aren't exactly equipping them to make the kind of decisions they're faced with and the school systems that can advance their careers only seem to see them as commodities. it really is an epic story. much like the first film, it is also about the relentless pursuit of a dream. it's just a very different type of food these kids are trying to put on the table.

we end the day with a look at one of the greatest competitors in the history of baseball in sam wood's the pride of the yankees (1942).

it's lou gehrig's story, from his humble beginnings right up to his farewell speech that makes me cry every damn time i hear it, tracing his path from rambunctious son of hard-working immigrants to his golden years with the yankees, cut so tragically short by fatal neuromuscular disease. it is almost impossible for me to be objective about this movie. i love baseball and i love lou gehrig. there is so much about him that i admire - he never took a day off, he let his work speak for him, he wasn't arrogant, he was devoted to his wife and mother and he was a gentleman, on and off the diamond. yes, he was just a man and he has been much-mythologized, but he was the closest thing to the living embodiment of hard work and fair play that i think we ever saw on such a grand stage. gary cooper does right by him here, though the scenes where he's playing a college-aged gehrig are stretching it a bit. there is good, playful chemistry between him and teresa wright as his wife, eleanor. walter brennan is downright excellent, playing against type here and babe ruth even shows up playing himself. it is an essential slice of twentieth century americana. yes, it is sentimental. it was released a year after gehrig died and they weren't going to do anything to sully his memory. if i didn't know better, i would go so far as to say it was sanitized but, by every account i have ever heard, he was just that good of a guy. and this is that good of a movie, once it gets going. it manages to avoid most of the maudlin pitfalls of melodrama and even handles things like gehrig's reunion with the boy he inspired to walk again with a surprising amount of restraint. it is a very fitting monument to one of the game's all-time greats and the boy scout in me recommends you put it in your queue right now.

tomorrow finds us shifting our focus from humans to the animal kingdom.

what are the chances that tomorrow also ends with a tearful farewell?

it happens every summer: day three

day three, an ever-increasing cycle of familial madness, begins with a film that i haven't seen since its original theatrical release, jeremiah chechik's benny & joon (1993).

it's the story of benny and joon pearl, a big-hearted, blue-collar guy and his highly functioning mentally ill sister that he has been caring for on his own, with the help of a succession of housekeepers, since they lost their parents when they were young. into this picture ambles sam, an eccentric young man enamored of cinema in general and the work of buster keaton and charlie chaplin in particular. as benny struggles with the decision to put joon in a group home, sam and joon fall in love, threatening the already unstable household. i think i remembered pretty much exactly what everyone who has seen this remembers - johnny depp's graceful physical comedy as sam and that damned proclaimers song. i realized watching it today that i didn't remember anything else because everything else in it is so whisper light. joon's mental illness is treated so cursorily that we aren't even told what she suffers from. it's hinted that sam's eccentricities are, at least in part, a mechanism with which he deflects attention from his diminshed capacities and/or a learning disability, but the only clue to that are a couple of instances where we view his kindergarten scrawl. everything here is presented in broad strokes and primary colors and follows exactly the arc you think it's going to. there are no surprises here and certainly not the gravity befitting a story about serious mental illness (and it is serious if you are considering even some mild form of institutionalization) and navigating a world that so often leaves behind those dealing with learning disabilities. i know it's a romantic comedy and depp's routines are all about injecting a bit of magic into a complicated world but it's ineffectual when that world is so candy-colored to begin with. even the best part of the film - depp's homages to keaton, chaplin, et al. - feels like it was wasted on almost the entire target audience for the film. if you are prone to this hallmark-style presentation, i am guessing you haven't spent a lot of time digging into the history of silent cinema and what all this probably amounts to for 98% of this movie's fans is just a dreamy guy doing adorable things. chechik's credits prior to this consist primarily of commercials and music videos and upon discovering that i wouldn't exactly say you could have knocked me over with a feather. you could certainly knock this movie over with one, though.

next, we up the ante in the crazy family sweepstakes with mark waters' deep black comedy the house of yes (1997).

after slogging through a couple of genres i have no love for yesterday, it was nice to get this today and revel in its bitterly funny mixture of drawing room drama, home for the holidays disquietude and long day's journey into night staginess - all things i have a fondness for - resulting in an old, dark house of psychosexual dysfunction. quite obviously adapted from wendy macleod's play, it is the story of a tumultuous thanksgiving weekend with the affluent and mad pascal family. eldest brother marty is bringing home his newly betrothed, a donut king waitress from pennsylvania (josh hamilton, parker posey and class issues for the second time in forty-eight hours), to meet the family. arriving just ahead of a hurricane, they find themselves at the center of a storm inside as well, respectively dealing with sexual advances from the brilliant, cutting and unhinged twin sister who is obsessed with the jfk assassination and the pathological, manipulative and inept younger brother. it doesn't take long before the incestuous history between marty and jackie-o, as his twin sister is known, that is hinted at early on is confirmed. their favorite childhood game of acting out the jfk assassination long ago blossomed into a sexual ritual for them which they partially justify by being twins, as, in their minds, it's practically like having sex with yourself. neither marty nor his fiancée exactly put up much of a struggle and the seductions take their toll on the fragile peace and false sense of security that accompanies the eye of every hurricane. in the cold light of day, marty seems to recognize that his relationship with lesly is possibly his last chance to escape the lunacy of his family, but before that can happen jackie-o insists on one last game of assassination. you know this is not going to end well. jackie-o is not going to lose marty even if keeping him at home means buried in the backyard next to daddy. parker posey is the standout here, going from broken and lost to a viper in a pink chanel suit in the blink of a bipolar eye. tori spelling is also well cast in a role that takes full advantage of her normalcy. the movie is at its best when giving posey room to work, fully exercising the malicious glee behind her eyes. it is a sly, wicked and sharp-tongued look behind closed doors and i enjoyed it a great deal. the insular world of virginia's upper crust breeds a lot of skeletons in those genteel closets, including some with webbed feet.

taking the madness that develops among a family in isolation to its terminal point, we close the show with yorgoth lanthimos' beautifully perplexing dogtooth (2009).

this greek import is a difficult one to synopsize and still impart any of what makes it so effective. a husband and wife have raised their children to young adulthood in an environment that resembles a compound more than a home. the children, never named in the film, have obviously lived their entire lives on the grounds. they have received a lifetime of instruction designed to mislead them and keep them in fear of what lies beyond the walls of the family's residence. in their world, ordinary housecats are man-eaters, planes are the size of toys (since their parents plant them in the backyard whenever a jet sounds overhead) and everyday words don't mean what the rest of us know them to mean. it's a hybrid of prison and the most extreme homeschooling environment you have ever seen. it plays almost like science fiction, as if the parents long ago decided to use their offspring to conduct a brutal, radical and lifelong sociological experiment. as often happens in these scenarios (as if there has ever been a scenario quite like this) the introduction of an outsider is the catalyst for a great unraveling. the father, who is the only one who ever leaves the house, brings a woman who works as a security guard, christina, at his factory home to sexually service his son. in the context of his experiment, it is just one more biological function that needs addressing. when the son's performance is unsatisfactory for the security guard she tricks the oldest daughter into performing oral sex on her in trade for a sparkly headband. i use the word trick but that's not entirely accurate. it doesn't convey the mechanical, joyless nature of the transaction. since the daughter has received no moral tuition, the act has little context for her. a lick here is the same as a lick anywhere else and the favor is an even exchange, as far as she is concerned. what begins to undo everything is the day the daughter insists on trading this service for a pair of videotapes in christina's bag. jaws (1975) and rocky (1976) expose her to a world heretofore unknown and a seed of agitated discontent with her situation is planted. the father can't allow christina to come back after this and, wary of the influence of strangers, the parents decide that one of the sisters will act as the son's sexual surrogate. after an episode where the blindfolded son fondles the sisters to determine which he would prefer, the duty falls upon the elder. the ensuing explicit session between the siblings marks the beginning of the end and she soon resorts to knocking her canine tooth out with a dumbbell, as this is what she has been taught is the sign of maturity that will grant her access to the outside world. throughout, the compositions are off-kilter, with heads frequently cropped and disembodied voices speaking from outside the frame. this, combined with the lovely, gauzy cinematography, results in a dreamlike ambiance that makes these episodes more a puzzle than repulsive. it is a luminous piece of provocative, experimental filmmaking quite unlike anything i have ever seen and it raises a good deal more questions than it answers. is it even possible to fault the children for indulging their murderous or libidinous impulses when they have received no tutelage that makes them appreciate the consequences of those actions as everyone else understands them? when does art cross the line from depicting depravity to indulging in it? is morality a dungheap, everyone standing on their own to shout about everyone else's? this is definitely not for everyone, and that is unfortunate, but i feel like i have seen something we very well may look back on as revolutionary.

tomorrow we move back toward more traditional, but no less entertaining, fare as we spend a day exploring the spirit of competition.

true blue.