Match Point (2005)

Americans love the Horatio Alger story--through pluck and hard work the lowly can become Ferrari drivers. Often erased is the importance of luck to these characters' success.

Allen plays on this in the context of Britain. There the luck of birth is so much more obvious than in the U.S. where everyone self-describes as middle class.

But the fortune of financial gain must sometimes be sustained by crushing others. Jack Lemmon's lesson in The Apartment is perhaps also that of our pockmarked billionaire hedge fund managers.

The definitive film on American gambling, and thus for our current financial crisis, is Altman's California Split with a similar surprise ending. Amid Elliot Gould's champagne popping eyes toward gluttony, George Segal's bewildering nauseous reply says it all: "I'm going home."

Rumor Has it... (2005)

I didn't come here to tell you I can't live without you.
I can live without you.
I just don't want to.

This is the way people talk in Hollywood schmalzville.

I saw this film on the shelf and thought, 'How intriguing, a follow up to The Graduate. Hey it says "Two Thumbs Up" and I like Jennifer Aniston--her punch at McDonaldization in Office Space, the rip on rich White Westsiders in Friends with Money, the surprising darkness of The Break-up even Along Came Polly made me laugh.'

Yeah I like Jennifer Aniston.

But as the opening credits rolled and I saw 'Directed by Rob Reiner' the stink of formulaic triteness shook me like the Aniston character is shaken by air turbulence in her plane seat. A flighty woman who must be reassured by her sweetly funny fiancé--this is going to be a bumpy ride.

Soon we find the tedious but good-hearted widower/father, the free-spirited alcoholic grandmother (you're Mrs Robinson arent you!!??) and of course the wealthy playboy who flies his own private jet.

Echoes of Robert Stack seducing Lauren Bacall in Written on the Wind, but Reiner is no Douglas Sirk, who infused his characters with biblical neuroses, American puritanical rage and the irreparable cruelty of domesticity. Yes, the confession of Dorothy Malone allows a concluding matrimonial reconciliation but not before blood has been shed--and isn't Bacall in the end a substitute for Stack, Rock Hudson's true desire revealed by his utter erotic disengagement from Malone, who he regards too much "like a sister."

But Reinerworld knows its target market, and sexual dysfunction just doesn't sell.

Castle in the Sky (1986)

Did it happen in a dream? Or was it in the middle of my silent drive home from T.O. last night after viewing Miyazaki's 1986 anti-milatarist tale with brother and kids.

Was it sparked by a clip from Cool Hand Luke in a PBS documentary I glimpsed channel surfing Thursday eve?

I was reflecting on Paul Newman's teaming with Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and The Sting, thinking 'but that wasn't Newman's only classic buddy?'.

Perhaps a phantasm of brotherly love, it was nonetheless real. Once again I foresaw the remembrance of a cinematic giant.