Since I still have many movies of 2014 to write about and it's now 2015 and all that biz, I'm going to take a speed dating/hot dog eating contest/Irish exit from the keg party hit-it-and-quit-it approach to the remaining films I saw in a theater and give my one- or two- or three- or four-sentence appraisal of the ones my procrastinating ways neglected. Here's the second of a few batches.
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Russ Meyer)
Everything I said about Meyer's Up! in the last post applies here, too, except the budget is a lot higher, there's not as much sex (though this is a bit like saying there's not as much tin foil in the world's biggest ball of tin foil because you took off five or six pieces of tin foil), there's a lot more rock and pop music, the satirical target is Hollywood instead of rednecks and Nazis, the tone is darker and more perverse yet it feels more accessible to a general audience, and the montage editing is even zippier and more reminiscent of comic books and classic cartoons. Roger Ebert's screenplay is so funny, so weird (sample line of dialogue: "You will drink the black sperm of my vengeance!"), and so innately attuned to the midnight-movie/cult/exploitation mindset that it's odd how much of a blind spot he had for those kinds of films as a critic, regularly panning some of the best and most notable psychotronic-oddball-freakout-cult-weirdo-drive-in-B-movie movies.
Je t'aime, je t'aime (Alain Resnais)
We lost Alain Resnais last year, which is sad not only because he's emblematic of an artistic generation that is slowly but steadily leaving this astral plane, but also because he was still making great movies. However, the death of an old man is not a tragedy, to paraphrase another deceased old man, and Resnais left an astounding body of work, of which this restored 1968 film is a solid example. Je t'aime, je t'aime is a melancholy piece of science fiction about the tense but symbiotic relationship between memory and narrative, and how we move around the fragments of our memories to create the stories of our lives.
Life Itself (Steve James)
Speaking of Ebert, this documentary about his life from the talented Chicago-based filmmaker Steve James (Hoop Dreams) is a little too uncritically fond of its subject and uses an effective but fairly conventional mixture of fly-on-the-wall and talking-heads interview footage, but otherwise is a funny, entertaining, and moving portrait of a guy who was a lot of things: a small-town Illinois son of working class liberal Catholics, a Chicago newspaperman, a movie lover, a critic, a popular TV personality, an arrogant clown, a recovering alcoholic, a husband, a screenwriter for Russ Meyer, a cancer survivor, and a sick man nearing the end of his life. Ebert let James film him in personal, unflattering, and difficult circumstances, and this film's greatest value is in its honest and compassionate look at subjects people in this country love to avoid: illness, aging, and dying.
Boyhood (Richard Linklater)
I really loved this movie, despite some nitpicky quibbles with the occasional line of dialogue, but I feel like I don't have anything to say about it at the moment, now that it's nominated for a bunch of Oscars and won some Golden Globes and was at or near the top of a ton of best-of-2014 lists. I hope the film's virtues don't get lost in a sea of hype and overpraise and the inevitable backlash, and I'm sympathetic to a few detractors who put forth the idea that a film focusing on the sister or the mother instead of the son would have been more worthwhile. (I want all three of those movies to exist, if I could have my way.) At the risk of adding my enthusiasm and praise to an already giant and ever-growing pile, I'm really impressed and touched by what Linklater's done here. There's a lot of beauty and sadness and warmth in seeing these characters and the actors who play them age 12 years onscreen. I like how Linklater focuses, mostly, on the small moments that actually define and shape our lives, instead of the big events that mostly don't. Even though it's his longest film, it feels like one of his most focused, pared to its essentials. Films nominated for the big awards, even the really good ones, always get more attention than they deserve, but I'm glad this one's chiseled through. It's actually about people and living and the passage of time, and not the usual Oscar staples like American exceptionalism, self-congratulatory celebrity backslapping, insincere and mawkish inspirational uplift, middlebrow art-as-display-case, the Cliff's Notes lives of notable famous people (aka the parade of indistinguishable biopics), the noble terminally ill/disabled/no-makeup/prosthetic-nosed tragic hero who overcomes obstacles, bloodless literary adaptations, etc.
