Keep The Lights On (2012)

Gay movies.  Ugh.  They have a built-in audience, therefore they don't have to be good, and ninety-five percent of the time they're not.  As a gay man, I try to imagine the characters heterosexual and ask myself if I'd still be interested in the story.  Usually the answer is no, this time the answer is "meh".   It stars Thure Lindhart as a documentarian and Zachary Booth as a young, drug addicted lawyer who embark on a nine year tumultuous relationship.  Good acting and enthusiastic sex scenes by the two leads barely keep this from becoming one of those depressing relationship movies, like the terminally dreary Blue Valentine.  Plus, I've always wanted to see Zachary Booth naked, ever since first seeing him as Glenn Close's teenage son on Damages (he read "gay" then, yet he still proclaims his heterosexuality in interviews, he must be a very good actor).  Very sincere and ultimately insignificant.  Not a fraction as good as another gay film that came out about a year ago, the fantastic and perceptive Weekend...a film that anyone would find moving, gay or straight.

Compliance (2012)

"Thriller" (more accurately a drama) written and directed by Craig Zobel, and starring the terrific Ann Dowd and Dyan Cannon lookalike Dreama Walker.  Supposedly based on true events, a cop calls a fast food franchise and claims a female employee is a thief and needs to be strip searched.  The clueless manager spends the next few hours inspecting and probing the naked employee in the back office while the "cop" on the phone gives her ridiculous instructions like: "Make her do jumping jacks."

No red flags went up for any of these people...or maybe they did and they ignored them, triggering some base emotions in the participants...there is a lot of grey area in this movie. The good acting, and the details of working in a fast food restaurant, as well as the mindset of doing what you're told in a corporate environment, keep the plot from reaching the point of collapse.  I lasted a month in a place like this when I was nineteen, and an anal probing or two would've been a welcome break.

Seven Psychopaths (2012)

Writer/director Martin McDonagh's follow-up to the marvelous In Bruges (2008).  Colin Farrell plays an alcoholic screenwriter wrestling with the script of a hollow action film called "Seven Psychopaths" who suddenly finds himself in hot water with a murderous gangster, thanks to the shenanigans of his best friend (Sam Rockwell, an out of work actor who kidnaps dogs for money).  Not surprisingly, real-life psychopaths walk among us, and soon Farrell has found the inspiration for his seven protagonists and ends up writing the film we're watching. (This device has been used before, many times, yet I can only recall Adaptation.  If anyone reading this can think of others, I'd like to know, it's killing me.)

Lots of cartoonish violence and many great one-liners, this was a lot of fun.  It's inferior to In Bruges only because that film seemed more focused, and had more sincerity.  The cast is great, particularly Christopher Walken, who for once isn't on autopilot, his best performance in years.  Also starring Tom Waits and Woody Harrelson (a last minute replacement for Mickey Rourke, thank goodness).

Detropia (2012)

Hyped documentary by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, Detropia (a somewhat clumsy portmanteau if you ask me) chronicles the decline of Detroit by following the downtrodden residents as they go about their lives in a dying city.  The directors seem to take a page from Frederick Wiseman's book by just pointing the camera at people as they talk and flounder (This at times reminded me of Wiseman's devastating documentary Public Housing, another kind of "dying city").  While maybe not ethnic cleansing, class cleansing seems to be occurring.  I have a hunch that Detroit has become so cheap to live in that it'll soon be overrun by artist and hippie types, turning it into some sort of Fruitopia.  This isn't focused enough, just an assemblage of footage.  There's a moment in Gary Hustwit's 2011 doc Urbanized that manages to say more in three minutes than this does in ninety:  Wordless footage of a ride on the Detroit Monorail from thirty years ago, then that exact same ride today...it looks like an atom bomb had been detonated.  I'd recommend watching an Urbanized/Roger & Me double feature instead.

Nightmare Alley (1947)

Bland director, bland leading man, I still had high hopes for this one.  It's something of a cult film, and has a few promising credits attached to it, screenwriter Jules Furthman and cinematographer Lee Garmes.  Plus Joan Blondell, an actress who always looked and acted like she was on the rag...she always perks up a film with her sour and exhausted presence.  But this just didn't quite do it for me, Tyrone Power is an actor whose appeal eludes me...too glossy, no depth.   I don't even find him terribly handsome (Tallulah Bankhead was once asked who the best looking woman in Hollywood was, and she replied "Tyrone Power").  And for a screenwriter as talented as Furthman, you could see the ending coming a mile away.  Not good enough.  Also starring doomed actress Helen Walker, who steals the movie playing a butch, evil psychologist.

Side By Side (2012)

Excruciatingly dull and meandering documentary presided over by Keanu Reeves.  This is supposed to weigh the pros and cons of digital versus film in moviemaking, but it's just a bunch of luminaries talking about video cameras, with Keanu explaining how cameras work as if he were speaking to a kindergarden class.  It's not like they didn't talk to the right people, perhaps Mr. Reeves didn't ask the right questions?  I noticed a funny pattern:  Whenever he was speaking to a distinguished cameraman, it would list credits that starred Keanu Reeves over any others.  For instance, legendary Director of Photography Vittorio Storaro (The Conformist, Apocalypse Now) was billed as the DP of Little Buddha.  Listless and unenlightening.

Garbo: The Spy (2009)

Astounding documentary from director Edmon Roch about the first (and one of the only) deliberate double agents (most double agents are found out and then turned).  A Spanish guy who was just looking for a job, he pretended to be an ardent Hitler supporter around Madrid for a few weeks, then marched into the German Embassy in 1940 and offered his services as a spy, saying he regularly traveled to London (a lie) and spoke English (another lie).  They trained him, showing him tricks of their trade and vital encryption codes, and sent him to London.  Instead of hopping a boat to London, he spent 11 months in Lisbon lounging on a beach and using a travel book of England (!) to fool his employers that he was actually in London.  He made up every piece of information he gave them, when they grew suspicious, he would blame a contact (a person he fabricated) for the misinformation.

He was eventually hired by the British (who gave him the code name Garbo, saying he was "the greatest actor on earth") and shipped off to London, where he invented an elaborate network of contacts, each of them paid by the Germans (he had thirty or more completely imaginary contacts).  When his "contact" in Liverpool failed to report a British fleet deployment, he told the Nazis the contact had been ill.  Garbo then placed a bogus obituary in the local newspaper announcing this non-person's death, and not only did they swallow this, they sent a generous pension to his non-existent widow (pocketed by Garbo).

 He would purposely feed lies to the Germans, the Brits would give him enough true but harmless information to make him appear credible, and the Americans would give him vital information, but a few hours too late to do any harm.  His most cunning trick was to convince the Germans that Allied forces were planning on invading the French coast at Pas De Calais, not Normandy, claiming Normandy was the diversion and not the other way around.  They believed him, so much so that two months after D-Day, they still had most of their army poised at Pas De Calais, thus saving thousands of lives, on both sides.  A few weeks after Germany surrendered, he met with his secret Nazi contact in Madrid, who thanked him for his valuable service, handed him a fortune, and Garbo disappeared into thin air, never to be seen again (the Allies arrested the contact minutes after Garbo left).  That week, he was awarded the German Iron Cross (in absentia) and a month later was awarded Master of the British Empire (in absentia), the only person in history medaled by both sides.

The film itself is not anything out of the ordinary, a mixture of talking heads and clips of old spy movies.  But this guy's story is so extraordinary that I was totally enthralled during its breezy 82 minute running time.  Why a narrative film has not been made about this scoundrel is perplexing...perhaps because no one would believe it.