HenryFool Tagged Articles at Cinematical

It's Monday -- the beginning of the work week, the end of fun, the day that elicits groans from coast to coast, country to country, pole to pole. To perk up the monotonous weekday grind, Cinematical is now kicking off a daily pick from AOL's /SlashControl. In other words: Every day we will pick an excellent, notable, time-wasting, or terrible-but-good must-see movie that you should watch today. Why bother? Because it's free. You don't even have to offer up your first born. Simply use these picks to increase your cinephile clout, or to reintroduce yourself to a flick you haven't seen in years.

I almost decided to go the way of Dolly Parton to kick things off, but then decided to be slightly more serious and infinitely more cinematic with Hal Hartley and Henry Fool. (Yes, the one that inspired be to write a Scenes We Love back in March.) This 1997 film won Hartley Best Screenplay at Cannes in 1998, and it confused but intrigued Roger Ebert. Now you get the chance to decide for yourself.

The black comedy follows the young Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) as he lives through a lower-class Queens existence -- a life that immediately changes with the arrival of Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan). A faux-intellectual rogue, Henry strikes up an affair with Simon's sister Fay (Parker Posey) while teaching Simon how to become a writer. Soon, Simon is thrust into a world of infamous literary notoriety as Henry's own past catches up with him.

But Henry Fool is one of those films that fails to live in brief descriptions. It only thrives as a moving piece of art, so:

Watch Henry Fool for free over at /SlashControl.

One of the most overlooked actors in the world of cinema is Thomas Jay Ryan, also known as Henry Fool. In Hal Hartley's world, he was a Fool by name, but only in the most dynamic and classic sense. Ryan served us one of the most dynamic and irresistible characters that quirky cinema has seen. He's an actor that oozes presence, and it's one of Hollywood's biggest oversights that this man can't get a big, and dramatically engaging break.

Writing about Henry Fool, I want to call it a masterpiece, and I don't use that phrase lightly. The film is wonderful, but it is more about the world that was created, and how Fool's adventures can morph from serious poetry and child rearing to spies, intrigue, and explosions (in Fay Grim). In Fool, Ryan even makes the simplicity and awkwardness of grammar seem intriguing, and below, you can watch him teach Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) the differences between there, their, and they're.

Yes, the scene taps into my writerly inclinations, but it's also a wonderful example of Ryan's skill -- taking such a simple notion and thought, and expressing it Just. So., punctuating thoughts with a simple tapping of the piano key, and deliberate pauses.

"There will be no peace before Israel is safe within its borders," a captured female terrorist deadpans about halfway through this film -- you almost expect her to pop gum, she says it so casually. A straight-faced spoof of espionage films in particular and serious intentions in general, Fay Grim is also a sequel to 1997's Henry Fool, from writer/director Hal Hartley. Fool followed the adventures of a Queens trio: aspiring writer Simon Grim (James Urbaniak), his half-asleep Martian sister, Fay (Parker Posey), and a drifter named Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan), who walks into the Grims' lives claiming to have authored a multi-volume literary masterpiece called 'Confessions.' When Simon's writing ambitions start to net results in the real world, Henry's dream of being discovered as a some kind of working-class Chaucer falters. He eventually drifts on the next town, another adventure, but leaves Fay with a son. That's where we meet her now, years later, being dragged to a principal's office because the son has been caught with a pornographic viewfinder. "You're grounded, like, forever," she tells him.

The viewfinder, it turns out, was actually sent to the boy by the long-disappeared and presumed-dead Henry, and is itself a ludicrous piece of spycraft and the keystone of a worldwide conspiracy that involves the CIA, the Turkish government, Cuba, Islamic terrorists, the French government and Israel-Palestine. I think Denmark and Sweden were also implicated somehow, but it becomes hard to keep up. The feds, represented hilariously by Jeff Goldblum (he tells one fellow agent, "Carl, go take a walk in the rain") spin a tall tale for the impressionable Fay about how Henry's 'Confessions' were actually a deeply coded text that, if found and read properly, can unlock untold political secrets, but the truth is that they want to draw out Henry himself, believing him to be closely linked to an Osama bin Laden-type figure.In no time at all, Fay is whisked off to Paris on a mission to find Henry. To get herself in spy-mode, she takes to wearing a long coat and lingerie underneath and even assumes a catchy spy alias -- Emily Hopper.