News You Can Bruise for 2013 April 1

(2) Mon Apr 01 2013 09:25 March Film Roundup: Okay, look. I don't see movies just for their entertainment value. I dig film as an art form. But my permit to dig is premised on an amateur understanding of film as a narrative art form. If you want to present an endless stream of disconnected images, let's do an installation piece, because I want to decide for myself when I've had enough. I'm not going to be your captive for fifty minutes. (I'm looking at you, Andy Warhol.) And all that aside, I'm not gonna see a movie called Trash Humpers (2009), when the nicest thing the folks doing the screening can say is that it "rewards the open-minded viewer with moments of astonishing and unexpected poignancy."

Which is to say that I skipped most of the museum's highly avant-garde March offerings. I also got this book I have to work on. So not many movies in this roundup. Let's-a go:

• Fallen Angel (1945): Decent noir with a fake mystery and an interesting twist at the end (in terms of which characters got what they wanted and how, not in terms of plot). John Carradine appeared as a classic comedic noir conman, but he had to appear in twenty other movies, so he left after the first reel, much to Fallen Angel's detriment.

  Turns out a noir film is my popcorn movie. I'll go see any number of them but I'm not expecting great things from them. PS: there is no popcorn allowed in the museum theater.

• Horse Feathers (1932): Still really funny, but this is the first viewing where I noticed that the Marx Brothers' general disrespect for society encompasses a lot of misogny. It's not just Harpo chasing the choir girls. In fact, Groucho's the worst. It doesn't help that there's no Margaret Dumont here to take up the flag of society and fight back. But Chico filling bottles in the speakeasy will never get old.
• Ikiru (1952): Watched on Hulu during the free Kurosawa weekend. Highly recommended. A little heavy-handed at the beginning, but it really started paying off when the main character died. (Not a spoiler.) At that point I saw a masterful display of one of the most difficult and most important things that fiction can bring to our attention: the mechanics by which we all construct narratives for our lives in which we're the good guy making good things happen.

  Bonus: everyone referred to Takashi Shimura's character as "Kacho", deepening my belief that Game Center CX is a workplace satire in the vein of Ikiru.

• Wreck-it Ralph (2012): I'm not sure who gave Disney the idea that it's okay to use other people's intellectual property in their movies, but it gives good results. Wreck-it Ralph is a by-the-numbers Disney narrative, but the fact that it's a movie about arcade games and their by-the-numbers narratives leaves quite a bit of room for subversion and criticism, in service of the larger goal of feel-good entertainment. As with Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, I thought the original characters were a lot more interesting than the famous cameos, to the extent that I continually wished the famous cameos would butt out and let the original characters get on with it.

  (The worst cameo was Sonic the Hedgehog's infodumpy PSA near the beginning. Awful! But! What if it was a sly reference to those dumb PSAs at the end of the old Sonic cartoons? Does an obscure reference deserve respect even when deployed as a cheesy infodump? OH THE DILEMMA)

  The museum showed this in 3D, and I was apprehensive about the extra D. I can report that it neither caused me headaches nor made me want to see all movies in 3D from this point on.

• 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967): The French New Wave eludes me again. There's one great scene in this, in which the conspiratorially-whispering narrator (Godard himself) deconstructs the subject-object distinction to the extent that he loses the ability to make directorial decisions, and lets the camera linger on some trees for a while. There's a few other good bits, and lots of Ballardian imagery. Makes me want to watch Alphaville even more. But... eh. Eh, I say!