LATE-NIGHT DOUBLE FEATURE PICTURE SHOW. I watched One, Two, Three and You Can Count on Me last night. Very scattered thoughts follow.

One, Two, Three (Billy Wilder satire on Coca-Cola exec in divided Berlin) wasn’t really my thing–lots of rapid-fire yelling to make the script seem wittier than it is. Hanns Lothar, as the exec’s assistant of dubious wartime background, was terrific, stealing scenes from James Cagney left and right. (So to speak.)

But the opening scenes really worked for me, because of their bad taste. I mean this: The humor in the movie is often really skin-crawling in its breezy evocation of the Nazi and Soviet terrors. It isn’t usually very witty, unexpected, or penetrating humor–stuff like, the Coke exec’s wife responds to her husband’s demands with a wry, “Yes, mein Fuhrer”–but it’s really, really tasteless, and that’s exactly the right move. It’s the humor of a society rebuilt on bad conscience, harsh power differentials which nobody talks about unless they need to make threats, and a ferocious need to look away, to focus on the surface rather than any underlying horrors. The jokes in this movie are the opposite of a Truth and Reconciliation Committee. It’s a terrific atmosphere, and I think I’m hoping for something similar when the first season of the new Battlestar Galactica finally surfaces in my Netflix queue.

You Can Count on Me is a comedy-drama with about 10% of the former to 90% of the latter. It’s small-town realism about a brother, a sister, and the sister’s son, all of whom (and really all of the other characters) are adrift and seeking a purpose, something greater than a mere escape.

I want to say I Netflix’d it because Terry Teachout said it was such an accurate picture of small-town life. I’m certainly not the person to ask about that aspect… but I usually don’t like realist movies, and I liked this one a lot. The characters and their dilemmas are believable and compelling; the movie is almost two hours long, but never seemed to drag. The director’s commentary, which I watched afterward, is only intermittently interesting, but it did explain that the director doesn’t share certain perspectives which nonetheless get portrayed with quiet tenderness in the movie.

I don’t know that I have anything interesting at all to say about this movie, but it was very good. And it continues my Matthew Broderick streak–I have never yet seen him in a bad movie!