Feliz Aniversário and happy birthday to my beautiful Mom, who inspires me every day to do and be my best and without whom nothing would be possible. Amor pra sempre.

Before I even knew who Martin Scorsese was, I already dug him thanks to this wacky yet oddly unsettling 1985 comedy. Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is a word processor who makes the mistake of stepping outside his life’s safe zone only to realize that Manhattan at night is pretty close to one of hell’s lower rungs. He becomes fascinated by a flaky girl at the café (Rosanna Arquette) and is lured into her apartment, where her artist roommate (Linda Fiorentino) also lives. From there on, it’s a spiral of misunderstanding and chases that make a Kafka novel look like My Pet Goat. Even now that he’s considered America’s greatest director and all, it’s weird how little credit Scorsese gets for his comic talent. Not just here and in The King of Comedy, but also in the profane, volatile give-and-take of everything from Mean Streets to Raging Bull to Goodfellas. Dunne’s work here is really accomplished, a mix of growing terror that gets funnier the more desperate the character gets. And there’s plenty to be desperate about: Teri Garr as a vengeful waitress, Catherine O’Hara leading a lynch mob on an ice-cream truck, Cheech and Chong trying to make off with contraband… For all the neon and hip nightclubs, the city looks genuinely dangerous here. The mix of moods was very startling, because for the first time I realized how things can go from amusing to horrifying in a heartbeat. Everybody’s out to get you: That’s life. But it takes a genius like Scorsese to get laughs out of it.

A little break from movie-watching and reviewing to salute the guy without whom not only Filmerati would not have existed, but I would not have existed. Happy birthday, Dad, and thank you deeply for all the encouragement, wisdom, strength, patience, and support you’ve given me all these years. You’re super.

For All Mankind (Criterion): I remember seeing this Oscar-nominated documentary back in myfirst year of college, as part of my astronomy class. It was projected onto the dome of the planetarium, and I remember dozing off. To be fair, it was very early in the morning, but the truth is that watching spaceships bobbing slowly amid the stars in deep space invariably puts me to sleep. (I’m looking at you, 2001.) So now, ten years later, Criterion re-releases this 1989 film (what, they didn’t have any new ones to send out), and I can appreciate it a little better. The footage, taken from nine Apollo missions to the moon between 1968 and 1971, is in its slow way very beautiful, though I have issues with director Al Reinert’s smooshing of all missions together, so that great astronauts like Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong aren’t even identified onscreen. At least Criterion is generous with extras, loading up the disc with documentaries, soundbites and even a look at astronaut Alan Bean’s paintings.

The Human Condition (Criterion): Jeez, what is it with lofty movie titles this week? First there was For All Mankind, now there’s The Human Condition. Are you sure L’Humanité didn’t get reissued as well? In this three-part epic, Masaki Kobayashi illustrates why he’s not as highly regarded today as fellow Japanese directors like Kurosawa or Ozu. His stuff is heavy, literal and without much rhythm. The sprawling narrative (almost ten hours of it) encompasses military oppression during the Manchurian War, beheadings, the dehumanization process encountering socialism, Chinese peasants caught in barbed wire, and composition after composition full of finicky cloud formations. A lot of people rank this one up there with the works of Satyajit Ray and Visconti, but I believe they’re just being intimidated by the sheer volume of these movies, which pound the impression of greatness into your mind. And in a way it is impressive, but it is also oppressive. Even Erich Von Stroheim would have demanded less grimness.

Grey Gardens (HBO): A lot of great cinematic work these days is being done not in theaters but on cable, and this HBO production nicely illustrates it. The story is one of those cases which seem almost too weird to be true. In the 1970s, a crumbling old mansion in East Hampton was discovered with two peculiar inhabitants, elderly Edith Bouvier Bale and her fiftysomething daughter “Little Edie”; the snippy affection the real-life American Gothic figures felt for each other was captured by the Maysles Brothers in a 1975 documentary, which I’m sure Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore studied closely when preparing for their roles in this film. Knowing that looking at the two actresses buried under crazy-old-lady makeup would be a bit taxing for any audience, director Michael Sucsy includes flashbacks to their youth in the 1960s, so that their decline from comely debutantes (with connections to the Kennedy family, no less) to two kooks lost in a house full of cats has more resonance. Vivid and well-acted.

The Edge of Love (Image): I groused when Keira Knightley appeared with nunchucks and a bleached punk hairdo in Domino, but at least that movie had some energy. Just look at the alternatives: Tedious costume dramas like Pride and Prejudice, Atonement and The Duchess, or decorative blockbusters like the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks. This one falls in the first category, with Knightley again parading WWII-era clothes as one of the girls involved with British poet Dylan Thomas (Matthew Rhys). Sienna Miller plays Thomas’s wife, and Cillian Murphy, who once was an interestingly angular performer but is becoming more pallid with each new role, appears as a troubled soldier. Not much more than a well-upholstered soap opera, done up in fancy duds but with nowhere to go.

The Haunting in Connecticut (Lions Gate): The week wouldn’t be complete without a crummy PG-13 horror movie waiting in the wings. “Based on a true story,” naturally. But so was The Amityville Horror, and that movie didn’t turn out so good. This time around a family has to relocate for health reasons, so they move into a demonically possessed house, which really eases their stress. The scariest thing about it is seeing the talented and still luminous Virginia Madsen running around and screaming. She should instead be screaming about better roles.

The Da Vinci Code has a sequel? Heaven help us! Actually, Angels & Demons, also based on a Dan Brown bestseller and directed by Ron Howard, is a big improvement over that turgid 2006 blockbuster. To begin with, Tom Hanks looks less ridiculous here without his mullet and his unintentionally funny elevator-phobia. He’s back as Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist (really?) who just the other day proved that the chick from Amélie was related to Christ. You’d think he wouldn’t be too high on the Vatican rolodex after that, but they need a specialist to help them with another perplexing crime, so Robert flies over to Italy to aid the authorities. The four top candidates for replacing the recently dead pope have been kidnapped by an underground group known as the Illuminati, who vow revenge and announce that they will be killing one cardinal an hour until midnight, when some kind of doomsday device is supposed to level the city. The movie’s best feature is the pace. Howard keeps things moving at an insane clip, in hopes that the nuttiness of the story (and his overly serious way of presenting it) won’t be noticed until audiences are driving home. It’s also quite a bloody movie, with burnings, eye-plucking, drowning, and brandings really stretching the PG-13 rating. (Sex is off-limits, of course, with Aylet Zurer developing zero sparks with Hanks as the hero’s sidekick.) So, all in all, not a bad show. It’s totally a money project for Howard (who did honorably last year with Frost/Nixon), but he does it with style.

Welcome to Filmerati
 
We are a blog by passionate cinephiles and for passionate cinephiles. We deal with filmographies, top (and bottom) movie lists, film festivals trip reports, and reviews, combined with a different kind of art: cartoons.
 
Filmerati launched in April 2009, and exists to break down barriers between the filmerati, to promote the many visions of cinema, and foster discussion among its members.
 
The filmerati are the ones that live, breathe, sleep and eat movies. Accordingly, our title amalgamates the words “film” and “literati.” Here filmerati will freely participate. A place for movies, directors, producers and actors to be saluted and excoriated.
 
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Enjoy. And to launch our combination of film and cartoons, here’s a quote from a man who understood and appreciated both.
 
“Disney has the best casting. If he doesn’t like an actor he just tears him up.”
Alfred Hitchcock
 
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