Lady's choice: Bunny and the Bull

When my wife springs a choice on me for movie night, I like to have her just press play so I can try to guess the movie before the title comes up. With her previous two choices, I did pretty well -- I got both right off the bat. Granted, only guessing The Visitors was actually impressive, because I got it from about the first ten seconds of the movie. Bright Star was not so impressive, because she told me to open my eyes while it was still on the DVD menu screen. The menu screen didn't actually contain the title, but it did contain the still image of two lovers embracing from the poster, which was familiar enough for me to identify it instantly.

When we watched Bunny and the Bull last night, I would have been guessing all night. Except of course that the title was the very first thing that appeared on the screen.

This is a long way of saying that we watched a movie I'd never even heard of last night, and I loved it.

Bunny and the Bull, a 2009 British independent romantic comedy from writer-director Paul King, can best be described as a magical realist road trip. But that's really only capturing part of what is so great and unique about it.

Basically, we open on a reclusive man named Stephen (Edward Hogg, unrecognizable from Anonymous) bound to very strict daily routines, who hasn't left his house in a full year. Over the course of the narrative, we learn why he's reluctant to go out into the world, through a series of flashbacks to events that occurred immediately before his self-imposed house arrest. These events involve a road trip through Europe featuring his best friend Bunny (Simon Farnaby), a lothario who always calls him "dude," and the foul-mouthed Spanish woman (Veronica Echegui) they pick up along the way.

It's the style of the flashbacks that makes the movie so visually arresting. If Stephen dreams himself away into the takeout box from the fast food chain Captain Crab, he remembers a scene that occurred inside an actual Captain Crab restaurant, only its facades and other environmental elements are all made from the materials of the takeout box. This aesthetic choice informs all the flashbacks and works terrifically, a seamless blending of the the funny and charming actors with these fake (but not preciously so) sets, with even a little animation thrown in for good measure. If you are trying to think of something that would be similar, think The Science of Sleep. But it's different enough that I wouldn't want to carry the comparison all the way through.

Anyway, I don't have anything really profound to say about this movie, I just wanted to post something today to recommend it to my readers. It's currently available on Netflix streaming, and it's about 100 minutes long.

I also wanted to just say that it's nice to be reminded that cinema can continue to surprise you with hidden gems like Bunny and the Bull, which I feel like I should have encountered or had recommended to me before now. The deeper you get into any area of culture, the less likely you think you are to be surprised by something. For example, a real music enthusiast can be prone to depression from time to time, I bet. They think they know the music world so well that they've already considered every band that might theoretically appeal to their tastes, so now they'll have to wait for new bands to be formed to find something new.

I would never claim that level of familiarity with cinema, but I'm quite pleased to make discoveries like Bunny and the Bull nonetheless. Reminds me how much is still out there, waiting to be discovered.

Lady's choice: Play ball!

This morning at approximately 3 a.m. Los Angeles time, the Oakland A's and the Seattle Mariners played the first regular-season game of the 2012 baseball season.

No, it wasn't some kind of weird publicity stunt. Well, it was a publicity stunt of sorts, but not the kind you're thinking of. See, it wasn't 3 a.m. in Japan, where the first two games of the season will be played, as they have been a handful of times over the past decade.

The night before this first game, to celebrate the ceremonial arrival of spring that this first game traditionally represents, my wife and I watched Major League.

That probably wouldn't have been her choice -- but that's why our bi-weekly Tuesday night movie series is all about alternating who gets to choose. It's called Lady's Choice Movie Night, but as I've described in the past (and will probably have to again), I serve as the "lady" in this scenario once a month. It's really not worth going into. All you have to know is that it doesn't involve me dressing up in her clothing or anything.

But I wasn't just forcing my wife to watch something that would probably hold little appeal for her, because the ground rules of this movie series allow me to. She's not a sports fan, but she's a big fan of sports movies -- a much bigger fan than I am, in fact, so in that sense I was actually kind of throwing her a bone. (For a fuller discussion of my feelings about sports movies, see here.) "It's all about the human drama," she said last night, explaining the genre's appeal to her.

Well, there's plenty of human drama in Major League -- not to mention plenty of laughs, plenty of swears and plenty of actors who are still nearly as familiar today as they were back in 1989.

But let's start with those swears. On this viewing in particular I appreciated how damn much the characters in this movie swear. They elevate profanity to an art form. That's undoubtedly accurate when you're looking inside the locker rooms of professional athletes, but that doesn't mean Major League would be made like this if it were made today. Made today, Major League would be PG-13 and might have a smattering of naughty words. But it probably would not have a single f-bomb. And in fact, as I was discussing on Facebook earlier today, nearly every classic line in the movie contains an f-bomb -- with the notable exception of Bob Uecker's famous quip "Juuuust a bit outside." Forthwith:

"Who's THIS fucking guy?"

"Nice catch. Don't ever fucking do it again."

"If you ever tank another play like you did today, I'm going to rip your nuts off and shove 'em down your fucking throat."

"I say 'fuck you' Jobu. I do it myself."

"Strike this motherfucker out."

You get the idea.

Yet what's so wonderful about this movie is that it's not the least bit mean-spirited. That's just how we've changed as a movie audience in the past 23 years. Major League probably has at least 50 f-bombs in it -- isn't it funny how I'm still saying "f-bombs" even though I just wrote out the word "fuck" five times -- yet it's incredibly light-hearted and fun. It seems hard for us to imagine that kind of balance today. Movies that relied on such profanity would seem to be showing off, or trying to emulate Quentin Tarantino. Unlike Major League, which is just plain realistic.

Okay, not entirely realistic. I could certainly quibble with parts of the movie. Like, how would Pedro Cerrano ever keep a starting job all year if word spread around the league that he couldn't hit a curveball to save his life? Or, in order to pull off his big move at the end of the movie -- spoiler alert -- Jake Taylor would have to show bunt on the brush-back pitch from The Duke that knocks him to the ground. Yet he doesn't.

These things don't matter, and you wanna know why? Because Major League also has one of the tightest scripts around. It's incredibly detail-oriented, yet the details are always there to show us more about the characters and the "inside baseball" (an appropriate use for that term) we're seeing on screen. They are never belabored, and there are numerous short scenes that tell us plenty without even any dialogue. My wife even said that watching Major League gave her ideas about how to make her own script, on which she's stalled around page 40, even tighter. It's a point A to point B to point C type of screenwriting that blows you away with both its efficiency and its unexpected depth.

Let's take Rene Russo's character, Lynn, for example. Stop and think about how many times she appears in this movie. She's in like five scenes. Five! Yet you know a ton about Lynn and her relationship with Jake, because each scene accomplishes exactly what it needs to accomplish. There's no way you get to the end of that movie and realize she may have only had ten minutes of screen time. She feels like a full-on co-star, a fully developed romantic lead. Credit that to David S. Ward, a name I don't really know, who is nonetheless both the writer and director of this wonderful movie.

I also enjoyed realizing how many stars were in this movie, and how they were truly the right stars, perfectly complementing each other in the truest sense of the word "team." You've got the ever-reliable Tom Berenger as the aging catcher with bad knees. You've got fleet-footed Wesley Snipes as the hot shot outfielder who invites himself to spring training. You've got Corbin Bernsen as the primadonna with the big paycheck who will no longer sacrifice his body. You've got Dennis Haysbert, much more famous now than he was then, as the voodoo-practicing slugger who defected from Cuba. And you've got one of the most notorious personalities of the past year, Charlie Sheen, as an ex-con with a bad attitude and a haircut that looks like he lost a fight with a weedwacker. This is to say nothing of the delightful Russo, the hilarious Uecker and James Gammon, the salty old manager, who will be sorely missed after dying in July of 2010. (Odd -- he was 70 when he died, making him only about 49 in Major League. He plays at least ten years older than that.)

Oh, and I said something about laughs. Yeah, we were laughing consistently. Both of us. And this was at least my fifth time seeing the movie.

More than anything, though, I was interested to see Major League again because the former host of the Filmspotting podcast, Matty Robinson, unabashedly touts this movie as his favorite of all time. Think about that for a second. He is (or was) the co-host of a highfalutin podcast where, for example, they spent a half-hour dissecting, analyzing and gushing about The Tree of Life. Yet this modest little baseball comedy from 1989 is his favorite movie of all time.

Last night's viewing reminded me that Mr. Robinson might not be so crazy.

Lady's choice: Choix de la dame

It was my wife's turn to pick the movie again last night, as part of our bi-weekly Lady's Choice Movie Night series. (I'll probably have to keep explaining this every post, but "lady's choice" is not gender specific. It's an inside joke I explained in detail here.)

Although it's fun if the movie can be a surprise to the off-week person right up until we watch it, sometimes that's just not possible. Like, for most of my weeks, I'll probably be scheduling a DVD to arrive from Netflix. Since she gets those emails from Netflix, she'll know what's coming. She, on the other hand, will choose from our instant queue most weeks, meaning I can be totally fooled. After she floated the idea of watching Gomorrah a couple nights ago, I was expecting that might be the choice. But she decided that the 2 hour and 17 minute running time might kill us last night, so her ultimate choice was indeed a surprise after all.

In fact, I had her press play on the movie without me knowing what it was, so I could see how quickly I could guess. I'm proud to say I got The Visitors (or Les Visiteurs) within the first five seconds. (It helps that I've grown pretty familiar with the 150 titles we have in our instant queue.)

Well, I'm certainly glad we didn't watch a 2 hour and 17 minute foreign film, because a 1 hour and 47 minute foreign film proved long enough for me. See, my son had given me another miserable night the night before, and even though we started watching around 8:15, I was ready to pack it in for the night at the half-hour mark. Fortunately, I struggled through, because it's against the very spirit of this film series to cop out of a movie for any reason. Pleading exhaustion is just not cool. (So if I'm fuzzy on the details of the last 20 minutes of the film, forgive me.)

Actually, The Visitors was an interesting choice for me because I had already seen its Hollywood remake, the 2001 film Just Visiting. Which also stars Jean Reno and Christian Clavier as 11th century knights who are transported to the present day by a sorcerer, but features such American-friendly presences as Christina Applegate and Tara Reid. And I actually had a limited affection for that widely reviled film, so seeing its source material seemed like a natural fit for me.

And it was -- to a point. The exhaustion was definitely a factor, but I also assumed I was missing some of the finer wordplay due to the fact that the knights are actually speaking in old French, which was not necessarily being translated very well in the subtitles. Both of us -- my wife is basically fluent in French, and I'm actually pretty good -- were picking out mistranslations that didn't even seem like they needed to be translated incorrectly for American audiences to understand.

But overall I found it funny enough, considering. The woman who played Applegate's role, Valerie Lemercier, had terrifically snappy comic delivery that just made her a joy to watch. (Interesting, though, how relatively plain-looking Lemercier is -- you would never see that in a Hollywood movie.) She also has a put-upon husband (Christian Bujeau) whose annoyance with the visitors is pretty comical. (But he has to tolerate them on some level -- since his wife is Reno's descendant, the physical similarity causes them to conclude he's a long lost uncle with amnesia.) Unfortunately, much of the humor put forth specifically by Clavier as Reno's manservant is pretty broad and physical, and didn't work as well for me.

When I wasn't sure how well the whole movie was working for me overall, it occurred to me to wonder whether there was a ceiling for how funny you could find a comedy that's not in your native tongue. I quickly surveyed my favorite foreign films, and few if any of them are comedies. Then I thought about the converse, about whether the French and other foreigners find American comedies to be particularly funny. Which got me thinking about Jerry Lewis, whose films I am watching this month as part of my Getting Acquainted series. The fact that the French love Jerry Lewis could have something to do with the fact that very little of his comedy is linguistic in nature -- the physical stuff translates much better.

This thought momentarily disappointed me -- it made me question the idea that cinema can be a universal language. But then I quickly remembered that I have seen an absolutely hilarious foreign film -- in fact, a French film -- just within the past month. Having enjoyed Jean Dujardin so much in The Artist, we watched his second collaboration with director Michel Hazanavicius, the spy spoof OSS 117: Lost in Rio, streaming off Netflix about three weeks ago. (The first OSS 117 movie -- subtitled Cairo, Nest of Spies -- had temporarily disappeared from Netflix instant, though it is back now.) We were in fits during Lost in Rio, and not just because of Dujardin's undeniable gifts with physical comedy. In fact, the wordplay was some of that movie's funniest bits.

Okay, so maybe The Visitors just doesn't scale the heights of what a French comedy can offer.

Or, maybe I was just on the verge of slipping into a coma the entire time.

Lady's choice: Gentleman's choice

In our third installment of our bi-weekly Tuesday movie-watching series called Lady's Choice, I finally got to make my first pick of the movie to watch.

But it almost didn't happen.

My wife had had a hard day, and I could tell when dinner time was approaching that she hadn't remembered about movie night. I thought it seemed almost mean to bring it up. We should just engage in a couple hours of clearing shows off the DVR and then go to bed.

But I couldn't help myself, and found myself sheepishly mentioning it.

I did clarify that it was okay if we didn't watch the movie I'd chosen, but I kind of feel like the purpose of a series like this is to push through come hell or high water. The very idea of the series is that once a month -- only 12 times a year -- each of us has to accept a movie chosen by the other person to watch, regardless of what it's about or whether they're in the mood for it. (The alternating 12 times, it's your choice so you should theoretically be psyched for it.) Trusting the other person's judgment is implicit, and veto power should be reserved only for extreme circumstances.

So that logic prompted me to bring it up. If she wanted to use her veto power, I wouldn't have held it against her.

But she didn't, so we started a nearly two-hour movie at 8:15 -- which in itself seemed ambitious with people who are tired and possibly cranky. You might say we were already running on empty when we started Running on Empty.

Running on Empty is a film I loved when I was about the age of the character River Phoenix plays in the movie. I don't think I related to his character, per se -- my family lived in the same house my entire childhood, and my parents were never on the run from the FBI. But there's no doubt that the emotions his character experiences, as he approaches adulthood and wrestles with whether he can permanently sever ties with his wanted parents in order to forge his own life, were something that struck me, and were key to my appreciation of Sidney Lumet's film. Phoenix was nominated for best supporting actor for his work, and Christine Lahti, Judd Hirsch and Martha Plimpton also give really good performances. (One scene with Lahti and her own father, whom she never sees, just kills me.)

I knew the film would have extra interest for my wife because a) she loves Lumet's work, and b) we currently watch Plimpton on the Fox show Raising Hope (where she's great). It turns out there was one additional layer of interest I hadn't anticipated, in that Lahti's character's father is played by a guy named Steven Hill, who had a recurring part on Law & Order, which my wife used to watch. Hey, when springing a movie from 1988 on somebody without any idea whether it has aged well, it helps to be able to explain/defend your choice.

So did it age well, and did she like it?

Yes on both accounts. I don't know about aging "well" -- I must admit I was distracted several times by Lahti's 80s mom jeans, with the tall waistlines -- but the important part was that the drama felt as solid to me as ever. I was a bit puzzled by the arc of my wife's reaction to the movie, however. When we paused after about a half-hour, she volunteered that it was indeed quite good. By the end, though, I had to milk that same admission out of her -- she wasn't proactively forthcoming about it like I expected her to be. Expected her to be because I think of the film's final scene as a powerhouse that gets me every time. (And this time was no exception.)

Oh well, I'd say it was probably a good start for my half of the themed movie night. Especially considering the difficult circumstances of our viewing.

And at the very least, I scratched the itch of having wanted to revisit this movie myself for several years now.

I mean, as much as I want my choice to work for her, I'm at least guaranteed of knowing it'll work for me.

Lady's choice: Valentine's Day Edition

For Valentine's Day, and for the second night in our bi-weekly Tuesday Lady's Choice Movie Night series, I had what may have been a first:

I started watching a movie without knowing what it was.

Okay, there was that time in that hotel when pressing a button repeatedly on a non-responsive remote control accidentally ordered us Balls With Fury. (Which we quite enjoyed.) But this was the first time someone had curated a movie-watching experience for me, without me knowing what it would be.

See, it was my wife's choice of movie again -- she chose two weeks ago, as you will recall from this post. Getting to choose again was to make up for the way I had dominated our viewing agenda in January, in my push to finish up my 2011 rankings. And she had a choice for Valentine's Day, but she wanted it to be a surprise. Which was quite possible, since the Netflix account is in her name, and she gets the emails notifying us which movies have been shipped. I did actually have a little Netflix business to transact on Monday -- I added The House of the Devil to our instant queue -- but I was sure to avoid the through-the-mail queue. And so moments before the movie started, I still didn't know what it was.

Really, I'd have liked her to carry through the idea one step further. When she saw that the title didn't appear on the DVD menu, she told me to open my eyes. I was familiar enough with the image in the poster above to immediately know what it was. Too bad, as I'd have loved the chance to see if I could guess which movie it was before the title actually appeared on screen. (Don't know if I would have -- I'd forgotten that Jane Campion directed this film until last night.)

Bright Star is beautifully shot and quite powerfully acted, I think. I've been a fan of Ben Whishaw since his admittedly minimalist performance in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and I sung the praises of Abbie Cornish back in this post. But the real surprise in terms of the actors was Paul Schneider, erstwhile of the first and second seasons of Parks and Recreation and the early movies of David Gordon Green. I had to look him up afterward to make sure he wasn't Scottish, because he did an incredible Scottish brogue. I also learned, to my surprise, that The National Society of Film Critics bestowed their 2009 best supporting actor award on Schneider for this performance. He had to share the award with Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds ... but damn, Waltz won everything that year, making the feat impressive indeed. (Of course, it also highlights the quirks of this critics' group -- Schneider didn't get an Oscar nomination.)

Despite its evident strengths, Bright Star was, however, too long and too slow. We'd had wine with our pasta dinner, and it was really dragging us down. We probably needed a 90-minute movie rather than a 120-minute one. But we also probably needed a movie that felt like it went somewhere a little faster than this one did, and brought us a bit closer to the characters than the proximity we achieved here.

But there was one moment that was absolute perfection, both in terms of the holiday and my personal cinematic interests. I've written before that I love what I call Wax Stamp Movies. These are movies that either actually feature letters that are sealed by wax (usually red wax), or have the kind of production design that would include such a wax-sealed letter. Set between 1818 and 1821, Bright Star is such a movie. In fact, there were a half dozen different instances of wax stamps appearing on screen.

One in particular stood out. Fanny Brawne, played by Cornish, receives a prank Valentine card from Mr. Brown (Schneider). It's given to her as a way of mocking her, as their mutual contempt is thinly veiled. But it has the effect of making the lovestruck John Keats (Whishaw) jealous. Anyway, this couldn't have been a more perfect moment for our Valentine's Day, making Bright Star an unexpectedly perfect choice for our second Lady's Choice Movie Night. So of course I had to take a picture of the paused image, which you'll see below.

Hope you had a great February 14th.

Lady's choice

After closing out my 2011 rankings last week, I was determined not to see another 2011 film for at least a couple weeks.

But last night I couldn't help myself. See, it was "lady's choice."

You may think I'm referring to my wife and her gender when I say "lady's choice," and in this case, I am. But "lady's choice" could also refer to something I'm choosing.

Before you think I spend my nighttime hours in drag, let me explain. "Lady's choice" has become a phrase that gets thrown around our household all the time. On one particular evening in the last couple years, my wife asked me what I wanted to watch on the DVR. Because she'd had a bad day -- but maybe also because I wanted to win points -- I deferred to her and said "lady's choice." I always think of this as a phrase that might be used by a dealer or pit boss in a fancy casino. So I used it kind of whimsically, but it caught on.

Now, "lady's choice" basically translates as "I'll defer to you." And my wife uses it (almost) as much as I do.

A couple weeks back, we decided to start a "Lady's Choice Movie Night." Every second Tuesday, one or the other of us will get to choose a movie to watch, and it will be 100% our choice. She or I will get to be a total dictator, and the other person just has to sit there and take it. (Oops, that just got dark.) We'll be benevolent dictators -- there'll be no attempts to screw the other person with a genre we know the other person hates. But neither will there really be the chance for the off-week person to opt out. She'll just have to trust me, and I'll just have to trust her.

Why didn't we think of this years ago?

For me, it's win-win. Even in weeks I'm not choosing, I win. Because for me, watching a movie at all is a victory, and I'll watch literally anything that's out there. Watching a movie is a victory over the demanding grind of keeping up with our TV shows.

So my wife kicked off the series last night with the 2011 film Megan is Missing, which was in our Netflix instant queue. Because I so dominantly set the watching agenda in the month leading up to the closure of my 2011 rankings, she's actually going to get the first two picks in Lady's Choice Movie Night. She'll be picking again on Valentine's Day, as it happens.

As for the specific movie that got us started, well, I'm not sure how much I want to say about it. It's in the found footage genre, I'll tell you that.

I don't know if I want to recommend it to you, and I don't know if I even want to tell you the reasons why I don't know if I want to recommend it. I vastly preferred not knowing anything about it going in. However, you need to know enough about it to know that you might not want to see it. Let me just say that it is very confronting. I hope that could mean a couple different things to you. If you don't think you want to be confronted, don't see it. However, if me talking around it in this way has only whetted your appetite, then see it. Just don't blame me if you decide you wish you hadn't. (I'll say one other thing: Since you can tell from the title it involves a missing girl, it was a rather ironic first screening for a series centering around "lady's choice.")

So I must say I'm looking forward to what she chooses on Valentine's Day. My wife is not what you would call a huge romantic -- I'm much more likely to fill that role -- so it will be interesting to see what she chooses on a night when we want to watch something related to love and romance. She may not be a huge romantic, but on Valentine's Day, she buys in.

My first choice, on the penultimate day of February? Well, I'll tell you now that I plan to use this series mostly to watch movies I've already seen but she hasn't. That seems to me like the most logical interpretation of me choosing the movie, and there are plenty of movies I want her to see if we could only find the time. Well, we've found it now. And I plan to start with Sidney Lumet's Running on Empty, which you may remember as the movie where River Phoenix got an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. (It also stars Judd Hirsch, Christine Lahti and Martha Plimpton.) I'm curious to see if it holds up. She loves Lumet, though, so I'm throwing her a softball to start, something she should definitely like. (If it holds up, that is.)

And if she wants to interpret the series as continuing to clear out random titles, like Megan is Missing, from our instant queue, then more power to her.

After all, it's lady's choice.