Movie of the Day: "When Harry Met Sally" (1989)

This all time great romantic comedy classic is also my favorite New Year's Eve movie. You've probably seen it, but this is one of those that's incredibly easy to watch again and again, at least for me. Billy Crystal is Harry and Meg Ryan is Sally of course, as the two friends who meet in their twenties and spend the next 12 years arguing over whether men and women can ever really be friends. Directed by Rob Reiner but written by Nora Ephron, it's really Ephron's movie, because the dialogue sparkles back and forth perfectly between Harry and Sally and even though some say it's a bit of a knockoff of Annie Hall, if it's true it's one of the great knockoffs of all time, because it stands clearly on its own, even 25 years later. See it again. And Happy New Year everybody! See you in 2014!

Original Trailer:

REVIEW: "American Hustle" (2013) Christian Bale, Amy Adams. Dir. David O. Russell

American Hustle is a dizzying array of spectacularly colorful characters interacting with each other in various ways through varying combinations of cons and cons on top of cons- it may be a puzzle to keep up with, but it's a grandly entertaining time at the movies, and David O. Russell's best film to date. Russell's coming off a hot streak lately, with The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook both popular hits that took traditional genres (boxing movie and romantic comedy) and gave them a new spin in the form of Russell's specialty- a kind of manic energy he infuses in his actors by directing them in an improv heavy manner where he shouts new lines from off screen as they work take after take. It's a method that gives his films a unique feel, but this one in particular feels most unique of all, because he's not so boxed in by the genre trappings of what the last two films ultimately were at their core.

The movie is based on what was an actual scandal in the 1970's, known as ABSCAM, where an FBI agent used a con artist to entrap several corrupt politicians in New Jersey, but Russell gets around the true story aspect by stating flat out at the beginning, "some of this really happened." How much is a question mark, but it doesn't really matter at all, because he takes the character of Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), based on the real life con artist Mel Weinberg, and creates several fictitious ones around him in order to conduct romantic triangles, emotional entanglements, crushed friendships and hilarious interactions that are the real focus of all of his films- as he said himself to Christian Bale once, "I don't give a damn about plot- I'm all about character." I would advise you to keep that in mind while watching this, because it comes across, and the delight we feel in seeing these characters interact is really what the movie's all about, and what makes it so special.

Whatever plot there is involves Rosenfeld and his mistress/partner-in-crime Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), who are coerced by FBI agent Richie DeMaso (Bradley Cooper) into going after the mayor of Atlantic City, Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), who's actually a goodhearted guy with genuine intentions, and whose shady mob ties are only employed to help the people of his city. One of the more intriguing undercurrents in the film is how Irving, Sydney and Carmine all come across as the real good guys in the story, while the crusading FBI agent feels more like a villain in the way he attempts to entrap (through some very ethically questionable procedures), the crooks and congressman he's targeting. Rosenfeld's wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) is the wild card in their schemes, as the unhappy yet irresponsible mother to Irving's adopted son, and she gets a lot of the loudest, most attention grabbing lines, which she plays perfectly (even if for me she was a little overhyped, as I didn't find that Lawrence necessarily stole the movie from anyone else in the cast).

All the actors are a blast, with Christian Bale and Amy Adams best in show, giving their characters depth and layers, piled under the various disguises and bogus identities they live to show off. One of the best scenes in the movie is early on, when their characters meet and fall in love while dancing in a laundromat, entranced by all the different outfits circling around them, representing their one wish to be, as Adams' Sydney puts it, "someone other than who I was." That description applies for just about every character on one level or another, whether through actual fraudulent identity, elaborate costume changes (Irving's first scene shows him putting together the world's most complicated combover) or simple personality shifts. Amy Adams does a great job at living two characters- herself and Lady Edith Greenslee, the British noblewoman she makes up as her alter ego, whom she cleverly keeps slipping in and out of.

The film is Russell's most vibrantly alive to date, with the atmosphere, costumes and setting of 1970's New Jersey hurling itself at you so fiercely that you can practically taste the hairspray in the air- all while the soundtrack kicks in with perfectly timed renditions of 70's hits as the camera swirls in circles, capturing the very essence of the manic lives these people live in the wake of other well known government corruption scandals of the decade. On first watch, you can take this film as an entertaining con movie, a kind of companion piece to the The Sting in all its twists and revelations- but upon further reflection it reveals more layers than you might at first realize, and you wonder whether the film itself was playing an elaborate con disguising greatness as goodness, the way its characters get lost in their own false identities. It's a question worth pondering, and worth asking again.

* * * 1/2

Movie of the Day: "The Apartment" (1960)

Today's movie is Billy Wilder's The Apartment from 1960, a movie that I consider to be absolute perfection. It stars Jack Lemmon as C.C. Baxter, a poor shmuck who's constantly used by his associates at work for his bachelor apartment, so that all these married men can have their affairs in a safe place. One of those affairs is Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) who, like Baxter, is also being used by a married man. When she tries to commit suicide in the apartment it's Baxter who takes care of her, and a perfect friendship is born. Billy Wilder was one of the best writers in movie history, and his dialogue is so perfect in this one it's a joy just listening to it. A smart, cynical and yet ultimately optimistic story about sad people prone to holiday blues (this is also set between Christmas and New Year's) learning how to take a step forward in life. As I said, it's perfection.

Original 1960 Trailer:

BOX OFFICE 12/27-12/29: 'Hobbit' Tops Again; 'Frozen' Holds On Strong

The Hobbit sequel landed in the top spot for the third weekend, earning $29 million over the three day frame, and bringing its total to $190 million, below the last movie's $221 million total at this point last year. The movie's doing well though, despite its track to become the first Middle Earth film to earn less than the previous one, and is still on course to earn quite a bundle overseas. Meanwhile, Frozen had a very impressive 46% spike in its sixth weekend in release, coming in second with $28 million and raising its total to $248 million, on its way to outgross Gravity ($254 million) and Monsters University ($268 million) before the end of its run. Disney's definitely back in the groove with their Disney princesses, after the success of Tangled and now Frozen- obviously a movie that targets the young girl demographic can make just as much money as the young boy demo.

Anchorman 2 came in third with $20 million for the three day, which raises its total to $83 million and will pass the $85 million gross of the first film in the next couple of days. And in fourth was American Hustle with $19 million, another promising haul for a $60 million gross with plenty more to come after the Oscar nominations come in, which always guarantee a film a boost at the box office. Finally, The new opener Wolf of Wall Street is a bit of mixed bag, coming in fifth with $18 million and $34 million since opening on Christmas Day, but the movie received a pretty bad "C" Cinemascore, which indicates that audiences (at least initial ones) were expecting something very different. Still, with the holiday break and likely awards buzz the movie may hold on despite negative word of mouth.

Top 5:

1. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug- $29.9 million
2. Frozen- $28.9 million
3. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues- $20.2 million
4. American Hustle- $19.6 million
5. The Wolf of Wall Street- $18.5 million

In various other openers this week, the biggest bomb was 47 Ronin, the $175 million Keanu Reeves starring epic, which earned just $9 million over the weekend, and Universal has already announced it will take a writedown for its failure. Ben Stiller's Secret Life of Walter Mitty earned $13 million over the three day frame and $25 million since Christmas, along with a "B+" from audiences, while the Robert DeNiro-Sylvester Stallone movie Grudge Match tanked, opening with just $7 million. Another bomb destined to delight people was the total failure of Justin Bieber's latest concert movie Believe, which took in $2 million, 93% less than the opening of his last one. And we're now in the time of holdovers for the next few weeks, as the studios save only their worst films for the January box office month, which usually belongs to the Oscar movies, as televised awards start rolling in. See you in 2014 everybody!

REVIEW: "Rush" (2013) Chris Hemsworth, Daniel Bruhl. Dir. Ron Howard

I've never been interested in car racing, NASCAR or otherwise, and the good news is, you absolutely don't have to be to love Rush, the story of the epic rivalry between Formula One racers James Hunt and Niki Lauda, during the 1976 season.  Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Bruhl give terrific performances as the lead characters, and director Ron Howard shows he can make a movie that's completely different from anything else he's ever done.

Howard has always been a competent if un-flashy director who's made some good movies but lacked a kind of personal touch on the material. Now with Rush, working from a smart script by Peter Morgan (who wrote The Queen and Frost/Nixon), and more importantly, with Slumdog Millionaire cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, he fashions a thrilling, intensely visceral cinematic experience that's undoubtedly the best movie about car racing ever made (not that the competition's hugely fierce- but let's just say it blows Days of Thunder out of the water). Formula One racing is a sport that's incredibly popular in Europe, but all but ignored here in the U.S. (Americans prefer NASCAR), which may explain why the film didn't do well at the box office in the fall, but it's unfortunate, because the story is universal and exciting, even if you don't know a thing about Fomula One.

In the 1970's, James Hunt and Niki Lauda were the two best drivers in all of the sport, and the 1976 season is best remembered for the rivalry between them and the heated competition for the world championship. It was a perfect story to play up in the press, given that the two men had polar opposite personalities and for lack of a better word, really did hate each other. Chris Hemsworth shows off more range than he normally gets to in the Thor movies as Hunt, the hard-partying playboy who lacks discipline and focus, but makes up for it in raw talent and aggressiveness behind the wheel, while Daniel Bruhl is fantastic as the simmering, complicated Lauda, an antisocial jerk who buys his way into races but is a mechanical genius and a technical master at what makes the cars work best on the track. Both guys are good here, but Bruhl in particular commands your attention every time he's onscreen and has the advantage of getting the more complex character to play.

The script is fast-paced and smart enough to take the rivalry seriously between the two men, with Morgan throwing in enough intelligent dialogue about the nature of these drivers to make his points, while whipping back and forth from one insanely exciting race to another as the season progresses. The camera puts a soft focus on the atmosphere of 1970's Europe and projects a perfect sense of time and place, while the racing scenes are filmed with a kind of pulsating energy to make us feel as though we're right there in the car with them. I have a feeling the effectiveness of these scenes is mostly owed to Mantle, although it'd be unfair to cheat Ron Howard out of the credit, but this is so different from his past work that you wonder where the sudden energy and vivid realism came from. Whatever the collaboration, the movie is a tremendously entertaining, visceral piece of work, and one of the most exciting times at the movies all year.

***

Movie of the Day: "About a Boy" (2002)

A perfect choice for the week between Christmas and New Year's, this movie is a delightful comedy about a thirtysomething man who befriends a 12-year-old kid, and one teaches the other one how to grow up (hint: it's not the kid who needs the lesson). Hugh Grant plays Will, the single, irresponsible adult in what's probably his best performance ever, and Nicholas Hoult is Marcus, who's a bit of an outsider and plagued by a manic-depressive single mother (Toni Collette), nursing suicidal tendencies. That sounds depressing, but the movie's both funny and poignant, and qualifies as a New Year's/Christmas movie because of several holiday party scenes. One of my favorites.

Trailer:

Movie of the Day: "Holiday" (1938)

This is a lesser known classic from the 1930's, starring two of the greats, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. It's often overshadowed by their other famous pairings in Bringing Up Baby (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940), but this one is just as good, a classy family get together on New Year's Eve. Cary is engaged to Kate's sister and comes home to meet her folks, but of course the sister is all wrong for him and he falls for Kate instead. Lew Ayres is hilarious as her drunken brother Ned, and Edward Everett Horton is another standout in support (he was kind of like the Paul Giamatti of the 30's). George Cukor was Katharine Hepburn's favorite director, who helmed several of her other classics, including The Philadephia Story, Adam's Rib, and Pat and Mike. Check this one out for New Year's, it's as sparklingly fizzy as a glass of champagne.

No trailer for this one, so here's a scene from the movie:

REVIEW: "Saving Mr. Banks" (2013) Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks. Dir. John Lee Hancock

Saving Mr. Banks is a fine family film hampered by some very clumsy flashback structure, and a story that may hold more resonance for students of film history and devotees of Mary Poppins than for average moviegoers. Since I happen to be among those Mary Poppins fans, I did enjoy the behind the scenes re-telling of the work that went into putting the movie together, but the main thread of the film simply isn't interesting enough to warrant being put on screen in the first place. Emma Thompson plays P.L. Travers, the author of the original Mary Poppins books, who in 1961 was courted by Walt Disney for two weeks in Los Angeles, in a struggle to obtain the film rights in order the make the 1964 classic. It was a fight they'd been having annually for the past twenty years, with Travers simply refusing to hand over her art for someone else to recreate. But in the early 60's, she was running out of money and finally forced to reconsider for financial reasons.

While in L.A., she put up quite a fight to make the film come out the way she wanted, barking orders at the writers, dismissing just about every idea that did make it into the movie (music, animation) and generally making everyone's, including Disney's, life miserable for a short time. The internal struggle she's going through over giving up the rights comes back to the source of her inspiration for the story, her own father's troubles when she was a child growing up in Australia. And this is where the biggest hurdle of the film comes in, as almost half the movie is made up of extended flashback scenes to Travers' early 1900's childhood in the outback, almost all of which are tedious and emotionally thin. Colin Farrell is her troubled, alcoholic father, the inspiration for the character of Mr. Banks in Mary Poppins, and he does a fine job in the role, but these scenes have the unfortunate occurrence of interrupting, nearly without fail, something far more interesting going on in the present.

The best scenes in the film are Travers' clashes with the screenwriter and songwriters of the movie, where they attempt to hash out the concept of the film and first introduce the memorable songs that will be soon be immortalized in our memories. Disney's in-house songwriters, the Sherman Brothers, played by B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman, are key to the humor and tongue-in-cheek playfulness of these scenes, and the battles with Travers can be humorous, but every time you start to become invested in this part of the film you're suddenly thrown back to Australia, where the movie falls flat for a pretty good length of time. Less flashbacks would have greatly improved the pacing of the movie and director John Lee Hancock should be blamed for failing to iron out the kinks in the screenplay (as well as the unconvincing, clear as day California backgrounds standing in for what's supposed to be turn-of-the-century Australia).

The actors themselves are very good though, and the performances of Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks do make the movie come alive in the present day setting. Thompson plays Travers very well as the cranky, fussy, uptight British woman she is, but the problem is that this character is almost impossible to make likable in any way. Some of her fussiness is amusing, but over time she becomes downright unpleasant and a pain to spend time with, even as a member of the audience. The only reason she's at all relatable is due to Emma Thompson's acting, which reveals the depth of her emotional pain as plainly as possible. And Tom Hanks is terrific as Disney, portrayed as a plainspoken midwesterner who seems to put on an act of cheeriness and charm when he's trying to get what he wants, but later shows off the hidden depth and manipulative nature of Walt as a businessman above all else. It's a clever angle to play up in order to humanize a man who's ultimately become more of a symbol and a brand, even by 1961.

The screenplay does try to make some points about the clash between art and finance, and brings up questions about whether the price of a person's integrity over their artistry is really ever worth it, and for those reasons this is worth seeing. But the awkward structure and fairly boring direction do not allow the movie to rise above merely serviceable in the end, despite the potential in the script and good performances from the actors.

* * 1/2

Movie of the Day: "While You Were Sleeping" (1995)

Merry Christmas everyone! On Christmas Day, we continue our Movie of the Day series with films that celebrate not only Christmas, but the week between Christmas and New Year's, as the holidays roll on through the end of the year. There are some good New Year's Eve movies to get to, but for today While You Were Sleeping is the perfect, old-fashioned romantic comedy that happens to take place on Christmas and then through the rest of the holiday season, including New Year's Eve. The adorable Sandra Bullock is at her most loveable here, as Lucy the lonely ticket taker at a Chicago tollbooth. In a mix-up requiring a little bit of sustained disbelief, when the man she rescues from a mugging fall into a coma, his family believes her to be his fiance and adopts her as one of them. But then of course, she falls for his older brother (Bill Pullman). It's a perfectly charming, wistful romance, carried by Sandra Bullock's innate likability and essential niceness- perfect for the holiday season.

Trailer:

Movie of the Day: "A Christmas Carol" (1951)

This Christmas Eve, I recommend the all time best version of A Christmas Carol, the film from 1951 starring Alistair Sim (known as simply Scrooge in the U.K.). To me there are two reasons this is the very best filmed version of the classic story- one, it includes the most from the actual book, and two, Alistair Sim's Scrooge really is the screen's greatest. I think that Sim is the main reason that most who watch this movie think it stands the test of time so well- he's so nasty, so mean, so very miserable at the beginning, that you wonder how this man could ever win you over with his transformation, and then he does it. Somehow, Sim makes that transformation real and more wondrous than in any other telling of A Christmas Carol. You believe his joy and his total conversion to a charitable, giving man through all the little nuances in his performance- once you see this film, you realize having that character down so completely is the most important part of telling this story, no matter how it's done. The ghosts, the Cratchits, all the rest of it isn't nearly as essential as having the perfect Scrooge- he's the essence of this tale, and Alistair Sim captured him in a way that had never been done, before or since.

Original 1951 Trailer:

Movie of the Day: "A Christmas Tale" (2008)

A Christmas Tale is a complicated, sprawling, ambitious movie about a dysfunctional family coming back together for Christmas, some members of whom are estranged from each other, and others who are in decades old love triangles with their various spouses. The great Catherine Deneuve plays the aloof matriarch who is dying of cancer and needs a bone marrow transplant from one of her grown children, but the movie's not really a downer at all. There are plenty of comedic elements, some morbid for sure, but the film's not interested in wrapping everything up in a bow- the message is that families are complex, simultaneously hard and easy to get along with, and people can change all the time from hatred and fist-fighting one minute, to laughter and tears in the next. The movie encompasses all these tonal shifts, and the standout in the cast is Mathew Amalric as the nutty black sheep middle child. Our last alternative Christmas movie this week, as tomorrow's recommendation will be a more traditional choice for Christmas Eve.

Trailer:

TRAILER: "Tim's Vermeer"

A new trailer for Penn and Teller's Oscar shortlisted documentary Tim's Vermeer, about an inventor's quest to recreate the 16th century paintings of Johannes Vermeer: