The Pruitt-Igoe Myth - 2011 - 3 Stars

Subject:  The history of notoriously ill-fated public housing project Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis
Director:  Chad Freidrichs

The destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe project is a climactic event in the film Koyaanisqatsi, but I'd always wanted to know more about it.  If people lived there, what happened to them?  How could things get so bad that public services refused to go there?

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth combines archival footage with five or six interviews with former residents, most of whom grew up there.  It's a little light on footage however, and several of the shots are repeated.  There's not really a great format in which to present this material, but the director does create a moving montage at the end.    I'm still left with questions, but unfortunately most of them have been answered the same way that these things go:  institutional racism, neglect, wishcasting, and the assurance that everyone involved would benefit except for the actual residents.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - 2011 - 4½ Stars

Actors:  Gary Oldman, Colin Firth
Director:  Tomas Alfredson

I might be being generous, but I have a love of espionage films, even if I am rarely able to follow them well.  The best espionage films play with our own perception of filmic reality - a person tells a story, and as he or she does, we see his story being acted out.  Now what if that person is lying - either changing details or inventing the story out of whole cloth?  And what if the story being told by the director is also a fabrication - it's also a story within a story that we don't yet know about?

Double agents, moles, plants, misinformation, information intentionally leaked, a super-British cast, people looking at one another ominously - it's all great fun.  The thing that's remarkable about films like this is that one misstep and they can fall into being an incoherent mess, but this one manages to give you a lot of the answers if you're willing to go along with it.

30 For 30: Silly Little Game - 2010 - No Rating

Subject:  The beginning of Rotisserie Baseball
Director:  Lucas Jansen

I love sports, I love games, and I love thinking about what particular pro players will accomplish in a given season.  So why do I no longer love fantasy sports?  This documentary does a good job of explaining that to me, as well as giving me a vicarious thrill to experience the beginnings of fantasy baseball.  Imagine how it must've felt before computerized box scores, before Baseball America updated its top 50 prospects every day, before PECOTA and CHONE, tabulating the week's scores by hand.  Calling someone on the phone to offer them a trade.  To a large degree, the 'fantasy' is gone, but the magic is still there for most.

The documentary is jazzed up by some extremely dramatized reenactments, some of which are humorous and some of which fall flat.

Midnight In Paris - 2011 - 2½ Stars

Actors:  Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams
Director:  Woody Allen

Midnight In Paris is the apotheosis of worn-out, late-period Woody Allen - I don't mean apotheosis as the culmination of mediocrity, but it strikes me that perhaps this is the Best He Can Do.  I talk a lot on here about directors in their later years, and while this might be one of Allen's most visually striking films, the story and stakes are set in a land of material and emotional comfort.

Note:  Spoilers Ahead

I'm not going to re-watch this film, but I think if I did, I might see some sort of commentary on the nature of Owen Wilson's character's vision of 1920s Paris - could it be just self-generated hackery?  Are the 20s characters we meet so archetypical because they're coming out of the head of a comfortable Hollywood screenwriter, who has no grasp of subtlety or restraint?  I don't think that's there.  Ultimately the film is imaginative but in the end, it's just another restaging of Woody Allen's constant battle between the woman who flatters all his tastes and the shrew who detests them.

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes - 2011 - 4 Stars

Actors:  James Franco, Freida Pinto
Director:  Rupert Wyatt

Take off your intellect.  No, not all of it, I don't want to see that - just some of it.  You know what I want to see gone, that part that deduces plot holes, incongruities, the part that says 'That would never happen!', the 21st century sad equivalent to Archimedes' 'Eureka!'  I can't tell you how many times in Brooklyn I saw people running down the street naked yelling 'I've successfully deconstructed this film!'.

So that's off, right?  Okay, then settle in for an excellent action film, one which goes far away from the original concepts of the Planet of the Apes, depicting the 'Rise' of said planet.

Note:  Minor Spoilers Ahead

There's a sequence in an ape holding facility that either does a marvelous job with CGI depicting the difficulty animals have with freeing themselves from the captor/captive relationship, or re-imagines the entire history of Prison Film tropes from Rules of the Game to The Shawshank Redemption, putting them in the wordless faces of CGI-generated apes.

Diner - 1982 - 4 Stars

Actors:  Steve Gutenberg, Mickey Rourke
Director:  Barry Levinson

I've watched far, far too many talky films lately - a mistake I realized ten minutes into this one.  I'll call Diner a should-have-come-of-age story - it's about early 20s men making the decisions that will shape their lives, both stuck in childhood and reaching out towards adulthood.  And also endlessly talking.  The style has been aped by all sorts of films since and owes debts to formless films that come before, but the ensemble is solid and the story manages to stay interesting.

Touching The Void - 2003 - No Rating

Subject:  A mountain climbing expedition gone awry
Director:  Kevin MacDonald

As a lazy, uncoordinated person, I've always resented things like mountain climbing - sure, it's an amazing testament to the human will for (mostly) men to stand atop the world's tallest peaks, with both their own singular strength and dexterity and the rest of mankind's ingenuity at their back with hooks, ropes, and boots and the like to aid in their feat.  However, it's also a giant waste of that ingenuity - there's no point other than to just climb up a big rock, while risking one's own life and limb in doing so.

Touching The Void's value as a film is in its reenactment of this harrowing tale - the film capably puts us into the situation via reenactment, letting us imagine what it might be like to be stuck in the same situation.  Yet there's really no imagining it - it's simply amazing that someone who survived it could actually describe what they went through.

Heart Of Glass - 1976 - 2 Stars

Actors:  Josef Bierbilcher, Clemens Schietz
Director:  Werner Herzog

I've seen ten Werner Herzog films now, and one element that runs through all of them is chaos.  Disorder.  The world is inexplicable, the universe a complete accident, and at any moment, something can happen that will change one's reality entirely.

Herzog films succeed when they put this chaos into central characters - Kinski's Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, or Nicolas Cage's Bad Lieutenant, or even Bruno S's Kaspar Hauser.  They fail when they don't really have any action besides people getting heaped miseries and indignities on them.  Heart of Glass is not one of these films, but it is incredibly strange, nonetheless - the entire cast was hypnotized before performing their scenes, or so the story goes.  Some of their actions are fascinating, but in large part, the film is two people standing in a room, neither really talking to the other, and both speaking nonsense.  It's an interesting curiosity, and there are some fascinating images, but the themes explored here are explored in other, better Herzog films.