Cars

I missed the chance to take my kids to see CARS in the theater - I was out of the country at the time. We caught up with it last week and, while it isn't the best movie Pixar has ever done (that honor goes to THE INCREDIBLES, which is one of the best movies ever), it's better than every other animated feature released this year.

The movie follows your basic 'hotshot from the city learns a thing or two while stuck in the country' format. It's reasonably funny and reasonably compelling, but it's technically astounding. From sunlight through dust to falling water to cars bouncing on old axles, CARS is a masterpiece of animation. It's simply beautiful to watch, and I take my hat off to all those at Pixar who helped make this happen.

So, I'm saying to rent CARS. You'll like it, your kids will love it, and you'll all be dazzled by it. Enjoy.

The Santa Clause

How can anyone dislike THE SANTA CLAUSE? It has a cheerful story, it's easy to follow for even the youngest viewers, and it has enough of a sense of fun to keep young and old hooked for its brisk running time.

In THE SANTA CLAUSE, Tim Allen plays, well, Tim Allen. This time, he's a divorced dad trying to do right by his son and not feel too threatened by his ex-wife's new husband. On Christmas Eve, Santa falls off Tim's roof and disappears, leaving only his suit behind. Time grabs the suit, stumbles into Santa's sleigh, and he's off and running as the new Santa Claus. Of course, there are all kinds of issues, including custody battles, as he adjusts to his new life, but everything's pretty mild, the kids stay hooked, and everyone goes home happy.

In short, THE SANTA CLAUSE is pablum. It's tasty pablum, however, and just thing to have in the background this Christmas season.

Superman Returns

Here's the problem with SUPERMAN RETURNS: Superman has no character arc. He's the same guy at the end of the movie that he was at the beginning, and that lack of an arc leaves a hole where we expect a story.

Sure, SUPERMAN RETURNS has other issues: it feels unoriginal, its lead gives the impresssion of a guy doing a Christover Reeve impression, and we never sense that its protagonist is in any real danger. Those don't break the deal, however. Superman's lack of a journey, and the insignificant journeys of those around him, do. You cannot tell a story without character development and call it a story. You can call it a sketch, you can even call it an experiment, you can even call it late for dinner. But you can't call it a story.

I wanted to like SUPERMAN RETURNS. I really did. But the movie failed to hook or hold me, and I don't intend to see it again. Bummer.

Rocky Balboa

I took the whole family, +1, to ROCKY BALBOA. The +1 was my college roommate, and we entertained each other with ROCKY trivia prior to the show. OK, so I know enough about the ROCKY franchise to engage in a trivia battle. Additionally, I celebrated my older boy's first birthday with a ROCKY marathon and intend to do the same for my younger boy (Go, gender-role indoctrination!). In other words, I'm ROCKY BALBOA's target demographic. And I loved it.

From Bill Conti's classic music to Rocky's humble wisdom to a training montage that's the best I've seen since ROCKY III, ROCKY BALBOA delivers everything the hardcore fan could want. The real surprise lies in the film's appeal to the casual fan: one of the fun parts of this Christmas has been watching DB trying to convince her skeptical sisters that this is one movie they should see in the theater.

Here's the setup: Rocky is doing ok. He's a beloved Philadelphia sports figure; he owns a retaurant that, if not bustling, appears to be making the rent; and he's maintained his relationships with Paulie and his son (though the son is trying to pull away). Sadly, however, he feels empty. His beloved Adrian has passed away a few years earlier, he's not as close as he'd like with his son, and he feels like he's just going through the motions. What he really misses, even though he doesn't yet realize he misses it, is boxing. Events conspire to renew his interest in getting back into the sport, and it isn't long until that great montage is upon us.

ROCKY BALBOA uses that setup to give us a meditation on dignity, perseverance, and age. It gives us a Rocky who understands that life isn't about how hard you can punch, but how many punches you can take and keep on going. This Rocky may be the world's dumbest sage, but a sage he is as he inspires those around him to listen to their best selves, to stand as tall as they can, and to keep coming back. Rocky embodies these principles with a doggedness, humility, and grace that speaks to the theatrical audience as clearly as he does to his own fictional audiences. You can't not identify with this character. You can't not want to emulate this character. And you can't not cheer for this character even as he climbs into the ring for what you're certain will be a fatal match against an opponent so clearly superior that you need to forcibly suspend your disbelief to even accept that anyone would let the bout take place.

Sure, ROCKY BALBOA has its flaws. The movie sets up character arcs for Rocky's opponent and for a local tough on which it never capitalizes. Rocky's relationship with his son feels rushed and incomplete. And I could've used more drama in the actual fight. But I'm picking nits, here. ROCKY BALBOA is as good as ROCKY movies get, and that can be very good, indeed.

What a pleasant surprise.

A Room With A View

Several weeks ago, I wrote that life is too short to re-see A ROOM WITH A VIEW. I was wrong.

The fact is, life is too short, so we should see A ROOM WITH A VIEW at every opportunity. As each minute of watching the walking bobble-head known as Helena Bonham Carter make a Baxter out of Daniel Day Lewis stretches into an eternity, the glacial passage of time makes us feel that life, rather than fleeting, is a long, tedious trudge of geologic proportions.

I want to see this movie on my deathbed. It'll make me feel like I'm living forever.

Little Miss Sunshine

We meat Greg Kinnear's character early in LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE. He's
giving a motivational speech to an offscreen group and, while the
subject matter is a bit thin, he's swinging away. Since I do a fair
bit of public speaking, I immediately identified with him.

Maybe that's why I found LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE to be so hard to watch.
The movie spends its running time punching Kinnnear's character, a
father trying to put a hopeful face on hard times, directly in the
nose so many times that he eventually gives up and gives in. Movie
people call that kind of behavior "letting go" and seem to think it a
good idea. I just found it sad.

I found nearly the entire movie sad, so much so that I don't know why
people think of LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE as a comedy. It's a movie about
flawed people enduring trying situations and relationships, and it
makes us feel more sad than entertained.

Eternity and a Day

You know what's worse than watching a terrible movie your child
adores? Watching a supposedly fabulous movie that your wife adores
and that you just don't get.

Martin Scorsese presented Theo Angelopolous with the Golden Palm for
ETERNITY AND A DAY in 1998, and a film prof introduces the movie with
a bunch of gushing praise that DB made me watch while I burped the
baby and tried to amuse the older boy, so I suppose it's pretty good.
Additionally, DB routinely stopped and rewound certain shots and
scenes, oohing and aahing over the film's craftsmanship, a move which
made me feel all the more disconnected. All I saw was a muddy print
of a film telling a story I didn't understand about characters I
couldn't keep straight. Was Bruno Ganz kissing his daughter in that
one scene, or was it his mother or his dead ex-wife? And what was he
doing on that boat? And is he alive, dead, or something in between?
And what was the story on those musicians on the bus?

I left ETERNITY AND A DAY bored, baffled, and feeling like a complete
dolt. Somebody, please, explain this movie to me and tell me why I'm
supposed to like it. Until someone does, this will be one of those
titles that'll leave me scratching my head.

Shall We Dance

Here are a few direct quotes from my recent viewing of SHALL WE DANCE on TCM:

"Oh, my God. Look at that. This is what human beings are capable of."

"The pyramids, the moon landing, and this. Thank God for the medium of film to preserve this ... this ... beauty."

"When the aliens come and ask why they shouldn't eliminate mankind, I'm going to show them the 'Let's Call the Whole Thing Off' sequence."

"OK, those masks are creepy. Nothing's perfect."

Now, that's a movie.

Madagascar

My 6yo has been dying to show me MADAGASCAR. Tonight, I made the time to sit down and watch it with him.

Here's the worst thing about watching a terrible movie that your child adores: there's no escape. You can't pick up a paper; you can't check your e-mail; you can't strike up a conversation with your significant other. Your child is monitoring your attention like Big Brother, and brother, you'd better be paying attention.

MADAGASCAR assumes that New York and New Yorkers are inherently interesting. They aren't. MADAGASCAR assumes that pop-culture parody is more interesting than character - based comedy. It isn't. MADAGASCAR thinks racial and cultural stereotypes make for great entertainment. They don't.

Here's the story: a lion, a zebra, a hippo, and a giraffe all live at a New York City zoo. They're happy. Their needs are met by the attentive and competent staff. They have everything they want. Except for the zebra. The zebra's pen sits opposite a frescoe of zebras frolicking in nature, and said zebra hatches a plan to escape and see the wilderness for himself. One thing leads to another and, before you know it, the friends wind up on the island of Madascar - an place which, though it holds a population of over 18 million and has a serious deforestation and desertification problem, looks like that island from "Lost" and doesn't appear to have a single human within its borders. Some of the animals want to go back to New York, some love it on the island, and everyone has to figure out a how carnivore is supposed to get along with his herbivorous friends without
zookeepers bringing him steaks every night.

The movie feels NYC-centric. Its animals are proud New Yorkers, and MADASCAR thinks that jokes about which train runs to Connecticut generate big laughs. The movie so thoroughly roots itself if NY culture that one wonders whether anyone involved in the financing or production of this film ever step foot outside of Mahattan. I've passed through and flown over New York a few times - I mean, I can find the Museum of Natural History - , but I'm not particularly vested in that city or its denizens (In the collective. Shari and Andy are both great.). I didn't empathize with the animals' love of their metropolis and I didn't find the NYC-centric gags (Look! The police horse has a Brooklyn accent!) particularly amusing.

The movie, a Dreamworks production, loves pop-culture parody and references. After the towering success of the SHREK films, they've probably written it into the corporate bible. Problem is, those kinds of jokes age extraordinarily quickly. Many of them already felt passe, and many of them would've made me grown had I been watching alone. (Which I wouldn't have. At least, not past the first twenty minutes.) MADAGASCAR is supposed to be a comedy. It made my child laugh, but the gags that they mixed in just for me simply did not work.

Finally, we have stereotypes. Oh, how I love 'em. But the fat hippo as sassy-black-Big-Momma? Who are these people?

I'll tell you, MADASCAR hurt. But a dad's gotta do what a dad's gotta do.

The Accountant

THE ACCOUNTANT won the Academy Award for best short film of 2001. Someone gave it to me for Christmas (so I opened it early – sue me) for reasons I don’t entirely understand.

THE ACCOUNTANT’s biggest revelation is the fact that the guy who played the preacher in “Deadwood”’s first season now owns an Academy Award, as does one of the guys who play sleazy cops in “The Shield.” They produced and acted in the picture, and the guy who played the preacher actually wrote it. Good for him!

Here’s the setup: a down-on-his-luck farmer calls asks a shady accountant, who may or may not be demonic, to come take a look at his books and try to figure out a way to save the family farm. The finance-man’s recommendations are unconventional. They may damn the farmer. But they may work.

THE ACCOUNTANT hooks us with the strangeness of its titular character, and it keeps us through its natural and empathetic feel for its characters and their lives. It’s the kind of movie that provides a few chuckles, a few revelations, and a number of things to discuss after the show. If you happen to catch it on IFC, give it 38 minutes. It’s worth a go.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

If BEERFEST was mildly disappointing, TALLEDEGA NIGHTS was crushingly
bad. I sat through the entire excruciating affair with a stone face,
utterly unable to buy into the comedy on any level.

Ricky Bobby is a boring, one-dimensional character. His nemesis,
played by emerging favorite Sacha Baron Cohen, is a boring,
one-dimensional character. In fact, every character in this movie is
boring and one-dimensional.

TALLADEGA NIGHTS tries so hard to be wacky and over-the-top that turns
out a wild misfire. Not only that, but it's insulting: it's one thing
to make a little extra money through product placement; it's another
to stop the action for a full-blown commercial thinly disguised as a
"joke" I want my money back.

Beerfest

I wanted to love BEERFEST. I think SUPER TROOPERS is one of the best comedies out there and I’m one of the few people in America who actually owns the CLUB DREAD DVD. I think the Broken Lizard guys are fun to watch, they come up with great ideas, and they’re generally funny as hell.

BEERFEST, however, felt a little off. Sure, I laughed a few times, but something about the movie felt perfunctory. Its structure is so blatantly formulaic that even its copious gratuitous boob shots can’t keep us hooked in, the DAS BOOT gags get old fast, and the whole affair limps from one joke to the next with all the enthusiasm of an underprepared freshman checking all Bs on a multiple-guess exam.

Nevertheless, I did manage to laugh a few times, and there is something to be said for gratuitous boob shots. I didn’t love BEERFEST, but I guess I liked it ok.

I hear Broken Lizard is going to set its next comedy in Ancient Greece. Hopefully, I’ll be able to give that picture more than this faint praise.

Rudy

What’s not to love about RUDY? It speaks to powerful American archetypes and values, it’s competently plotted and paced, and it sells its characters every step of the way.

RUDY’s one of those movies I’ve long felt that I should see, but I couldn’t quite muster the will. I imagined it would be treacly and pandering, and I don’t particularly care about either the University of Notre Dame or its football program. When I finally dug in and gave it a go, RUDY hooked me from the moment an authority figure told the scrappy hero what he couldn’t do – what ambitions were beyond realization for a youngster of his means and talents. I strongly identify with that situation, and I was right there with Rudy as he put his thumb in the eye of The Man through a combination of hard work and perseverance. I suspect that the movie resonates with a wider audience because RUDY’s story is the classic American story, that of the underdog who succeeds against all odds.

The nature of that success helps sell the movie. RUDY doesn’t face an obstacle, go through a handy montage, and quickly triumph over his opponents while winning the girl. He fails again and again and again, questioning himself and the value of his goal, but he keeps at it like a terrier at a rat. His triumph isn’t the sudden victory of the naturally talented or magically transformed; it’s the triumph of hard work over natural talent, of tenacity over nearly everything. It speaks to us because we can so readily identify with Rudy. How many of us are super-geniuses or fantastically gifted athletes? How many of us have gotten where we are through our willingness to work a little harder, study a little more, run a little farther than the next guy?

The story moves along briskly. Rudy dreams of playing football for Notre Dame, but he’s told that he isn’t college material and he believes it. Four years after high school, he’s stuck working in a steel mill until he realizes that if he doesn’t get to work on his dream, it will never happen. He heads to South Bend and tries to enroll at Notre Dame. He’s rejected and settles for the local junior college, where he does absolutely everything he can think of to get in to Notre Dame. After multiple rejections, he asks his priest, “Is there anything more I can do?” The answer is no – he’s doing everything he can and it doesn’t seem to be good enough. Nevertheless, he perseveres and finally gets accepted. Next stop: the football team, where he barely makes the practice squad. Will he ever get to suit up and take the field, even though he’s smaller than the other guys? The answer is obvious, but that doesn’t keep us from coming along on every step of the journey, rooting for the underdog Rudy as he overcomes the myriad challenges and scores the little victories that add up to success.

Sean Astin, as the titular character, does fine work here. He’s hopeful and determined, and we feel for him in his failures and successes. He’s backed by a solid cast which includes Ned Beatty as a millworker father, John Favreau as his tutor, and Charles Dutton as the groundskeeper who acts as a sort of surrogate father for Rudy, giving him a pat on the back or a kick in the ass, as required.

I wasn’t expecting to particularly enjoy RUDY. I saw it for cultural awareness. What a pleasure, then, that its combination of message, structure, and performance worked so well. RUDY is a real treat.

Apocalypto

I respect APOCALYPTO more than I liked it.

Don't get me wrong: there's plenty to like about the movie. It's your basic "hunted man" picture, and that's a formula that's nearly impossible to botch. Problem is, APOCALYPTO is just a "hunted man" movie. I guess I was expecting something more: a meditation on Mayan civilization, perhaps, or at least a deeper journey into that culture.

Here's the setup: Jaguar Paw is doin' all right. He's the heir apparent to his father's tribal chiefdom. He's a good hunter, a good guy, and a good husband and father. He essentially embodies a tribal Mayan version of rustic virtue. Then, slavers from the city show up. They burn down his village, capture him and his friends, and drive them to the corrupted city for sacrifice. During the raid, Jaguar Paw managed to hide his family. He has to escape and get back to them, and to do so he has to evade the hunters who track him every step of the way.

As I said, it's a perfectly good "hunted man" picture, and I liked it fine. The respect part comes in with APOCALYPTO's realization of Mayan culture. The scenes in the corrupted city are nothing short of breathtaking, as the film imagines, down to the last detail of architecture and costume, what Mayan civilization may actually have felt and looked. It's awesome, and awe-inspiring, and I wound up appreciating and respecting its ambition and audacity more than anything else.

I liked APOCALYPTO just fine, but I tip my had to its ambition and audacity. It's worth seeing for that alone.

Clerks 2

CLERKS 2 felt like Kevin Smith just gave up and said, "Screw it. I'll give the people what they want." It's only differences from the original are that it's filmed in color and it isn't quite as funny.

You know the setup: the titular clerks are now fast-food workers who, you know, have antics. The get in trouble. They crack wise. They have a touching moment of heartfelt conversation and clarity.

The movie's funny, periodically, but there's something stale about it. It's like watching a catskills comedian who simply doesn't get that the world has moved on - you may laugh from time to time, but you mostly feel sorry for it.

What a bummer.

Deja Vu

I liked DEJA VU well enough, but I never lost track of time and I never got swept away.

DEJA VU should be the kind of movie that I go for: a thriller with a science fiction twist. It has a clever script, a likeable cast, and a healthy respect for the laws physics (not that it lets those laws get in the way of the story, but it does at least tip its hat to them). It's script is of the type whose scientific genius, when calling for more power for his time-travel gizmo, shouts, "I'm gonna need more cowbell!" It stars the reliable Denzel Washington, who really needs to do a romantic comedy for a change, and noted time travelling veteran Jim Caviezel makes a fine, if rather one-dimensional, foil. Its understanding of the physical universe struck me as plausible, which is rare for a time-travel movie, but there's something about it ...

I never really bought Washington as an ATF agent with an expertise in explosives. I was ready to, but then the film uses him as the audience surrogate for the exposition about time-warping device. By forcing him to ask dumb questions and come off as anti-intellectual, the film makes him dumber than he could be and still do his job. Additionally, I never felt for the distressed damsel, a woman whose sole character trait appears to be that she looks good in underwear. Finally, the movie itself jumped and danced and exploded so much that it kept reminding me that it was a movie and not a portal into its particular sliver of space-time.

My God: what's happening to me? I'm digging movies about the Queen of England's bad week more than movies about stuff blowing up. Before I know it, I'll start listening to soft rock.

The Queen

Hellen Mirren can do no wrong.

Think about it - when have you seen a poor Mirren performance? Whether scheming against Arthur
solving mysteries, selling calendars, or ruling England, she's always absolutely believable and engaging.
Thus, it comes as no surprise that Helen Mirren is brilliant - absolutely brilliant - in THE QUEEN, a
Stephen Frears film that gives us Elizabeth as character study at the height of England's grief for
the just-killed Diana Spencer.

THE QUEEN balances Elizabeth's story with that of Tony Blair, the newly-elected Prime Minister whose view
of his sovereign, and of himself, matures over the course of the film. Blair's 10 Downing Street is shown in
frank contrast to the Queen's Balmoral and Westminster, setting it up as a stand-in for the New England
in its struggle and accomodation with the Old England the Queen represents. It's neat stuff, and it's well
executed, and I stayed thoroughly involved for every minute of it.

But what really makes this production stand out is Mirren's Queen. She's a fully developed character, totally committed
to her sense of herself, her office, her stoicism, and her duty as she sees it. In this role, Mirren's a mistress of the
subtle gesture, the emotion behind the control, and her performance is nothing short of delightful.

I don't particularly care about the Queen of England, to tell you the truth. I'm not English and I never "got" the
royals worship that's so common here in the States. But THE QUEEN made me care about Elizabeth and her world in a personal
way, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

What a winner.

The Constant Gardener

THE CONSTANT GARDENER disappointed me. It had an excellent script and a first-class cast, but it was hobbled by photography and music so distracting that I spent more time thinking about how annoyed I was than I did actually engaging with the film. Bummer. Danny Huston did provide one very bright spot, however. After enjoying his performance in SILVER CITY as a good guy who's trying to be bad, it was fun to watch him flip the characterization on its head for this picture.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

I didn’t expect to like BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGSOF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN. I’m not a fan of the comedy of discomfort, and by the time the film got its release, its titular character had become overexposed. Nevertheless, I had to stay up late to recalibrate my body clock for something I’m working on, and it was either BORAT or HAPPY FEET.

While I didn’t laugh all through BORAT, I laughed through a great deal of it. Cohen has this way of making his character both so charming and so offensive that I couldn’t help myself: “I hope your President Bush drinks the blood of every man, woman, and child in Iraq!” may very well be the funniest line of 2006. Additionally, I loved the way he drew Americans into validating his faux-Kazakhstani stereotypes while validating the stereotypical way in which different regions of the country view one another.

I’m surprised to say it, but BORAT is that rare comedy that gives plenty to laugh about and plenty to chew on. In fact, the more I think about it, the better it gets. It’s easily my biggest surprise of 2006.

Casino Royale

CASINO ROYALE is the first James Bond film I’ve liked since Timothy Dalton left the franchise. But something about it bothered the hell out of me.

Don’t get me wrong: Pierce Brosnan was a fine Bond, keeping the character just this side of self-parody while clearly having fun with the role. Problem is, he was a fine Bond in terrible movies. Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist? Invisible cars? “He’s the best there is”? Give me a break – he’s one of nine. Sure, I saw every one of his movies, but I walked out disappointed every time. It got to the point where, as with Star Wars, I was ready to leave the franchise behind. Daniel Craig, on the other hand, got lucky with his first film in the role. CASINO ROYAL’s stunts looked practical, its villains seemed plausible, and its story seemed reasonable. This gave the film a sense of urgency that the others lacked, and it helped to keep me entertained throughout its running time.

But here’s the thing that bothered me: I finally realized that the Bond franchise is basically wealth porn. It dangles before us, bright and shiny, a world of fabulously wealthy people living fabulous lives in fabulous locations. Even its working stiffs, its spies and accountants, get to live fabulously on their governments’ tabs (he writes, looking around his serviceable but decidedly non-fabulous government-funded hotel room). It equates wealth with conspicuous consumption, two things that have proven, time and again, to be fundamentally incompatible, and it does so while burying us in advertising for watches, cars, beverages, hotels, and nearly every other consumable a profligate spender might reasonably purchase. I have a problem with wealth porn, because it encourages the kind of irresponsible behavior that leads to people purchasing vehicles whose value outweighs that of their retirement plans, all for a taste of what they perceive to be “the good life.” Why did this particular installment trigger that connection? I suspect that it was the sight of James Bond driving to a posh location alone in a Ford, then driving away in a fabulous sports car, beautiful woman at his side, because he had basically won the lottery. My first reaction? “Frack! I need to win the lottery!” (Legal Disclaimer: So I can put the beautiful woman to whom I’m married in a fabulous sports car. Let’s make that perfectly clear.) My second reaction? “What am I thinking? I need to make another contribution to my Roth IRA!”

So while I enjoyed the movie, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was selling me an attractive lie. It’s the blemish on an otherwise entirely enjoyable film. I wouldn’t let a little wealth porn turn you away.

The Incredibles

THE INCREDIBLES is a perfect movie. It has humor, it has pathos, it has action. It has a wonderfully creative design, a fully realized world, and terrific music that builds on a solid script.

You know how some movies are billed as "fun for the whole family"? THE INCREDIBLES really is. The movie offers several characters that provide an "in" to the story, it builds and sustains tension in interesting and creative ways, and it manages the perfect balance between providing enough danger to keep things interesting, while never scaring the kids into believing that the heroes are in really big trouble.

It had been a few years since last I saw this movie, and I wondered if it would hold up. It did. THE INCREDIBLES is a genuine classic.

Godzilla vs. Megalon

MST3K'S take on GODZILLA VS. MEGALON kept me laughing from beginning to end. It's the most fun I've had with a Godzilla movie in quite some time.

I'd never before seen an MST3K version of a film. I prefer to watch good movies, if I can, but this was the last unseen Godzilla picture in the Netflix inventory, and did feature the titular Megalon, as well as Jet Jaguar and Gigan, so I had to give it a shot.

As is the case with most Godzilla movies of its ('70s) era, it's insufferably bad. MST3K's riffs on the material, however, elevated it to near-masterpiece level. It's the funniest thing I've seen so far this month, and I recommend to anyone who's a little burned out on giant Japanese monsters.

Lady Vengeance

I was all set to love Chan Wook Park's LADY VENGEANCE. I thought SYMPATHY FOR MISTER VENGEANCE was excellent, and I think OLDBOY is one of the best films of the decade. When the beautifully stylized opening credits rolled, I sat back and got ready to wrap myself in the world of a master.

But here's the problem: people have been telling Park (Or is it Chan? I wish we could all settle on a Western standard.) that he's a genius, and he's starting to believe them. LADY VENGEANCE spend so much time cycling into and out of normal narrative time, its subnotes are so cute, and its flights of fancy so indistinguishable from mental instability, that LV fairly screams, "Look at me! I'm the work of a genius, dammit! A genius!" I could not immerse myself in its world because it couldn't quite decide in which world it wanted to immerse me. I could not empathize with its protagonist because by the time the film gave me enough material to do so, I had ceased to care. I could not enjoy the film because the film gave me no cause to do so.

LADY VENGEANCE is the kind of film in which the production designer seems to struggle with the lighting guy, who struggles with the cinematographer, who struggles with the director, who struggles with the actors. They're all trying to one-up each other, all trying to showcase their Genius. But they forgot about me, Joe- Guy -on -the -Couch -Whose -Back -Hurts -from -Raking -Leaves. Entertain me, people. Make me think. Hell, dazzle me. But don't distract me with your Genius.

Just tell me a story.

X-Men: The Last Stand

X-MEN: THE LAST STAND makes up for its abundance of fireworks by minimizing its sense of fun.

The first two X-Men movies weren't masterpieces, but they rocked along reasonably well. They had some laughs, they had some fights, they had some things to think about. X3 has no laughs, too many fights, and enough things to think about for at least three breathless college essays.

The whole thing just feels like an exercise in action filmmaking, but a film like THE HIDDEN BLADE so eclipses it even in purely action-related terms that it can't fully succed even in that limited arena.

X3 is a mediocrity. I can't muster up much more to say about it than that.

District B13

If martial arts movies are basically dance movies with fake blood, DISTRICT B13 (the Americanized title of BANLIEU 13, a French martial arts picture) B13 is the kind of dance movie in which the editing gets in the way of the dancing.

The plot - well, nevermind. Who remembers the plot to SWING TIME? The fighting and acrobatics deliver plenty of thrills and not a few "rewind" moments, but the film's frenetic editing so detracts from the beauty and awesomness of the choreography and its execution that, by the climax, I wanted to put a brick through someone's AVID computer.

Nevertheless, B13 delivers on its audience's expectations. It offers enough of people kicking other people in the face, and doing so in new and creative ways, that it's sure to please action and martial arts fans. Just don't expect to know whether you're watching the result of athleticism and precision or clever editing.

The Hidden Blade

Maybe you can’t trust my comments on THE HIDDEN BLADE, Yoji Yamada’s follow-up to THE TWILIGHT SAMURAI. You see, I’m a sucker for samurai movies – I have been since THE SEVEN SAMURAI. Feudal Japan captures my imagination: the code of Bushido, the architecture, the stark aesthetic of Kendo. The last time I was in Japan, I must have logged 500 miles on the local trains in the greater Tokyo-Yokohama megalopolitan area. A guy can burn out on Europe’s gothic cathedrals pretty quickly, but there’s no such thing as one too many Zen shrines.

THE HIDDEN BLADE tells the tale of Katagiri, a samurai living at the end of the Edo period. It’s less than a decade before the fall of the Shogun and Meiji restoration, and Edo’s long traditions of honor and duty have become more a tool for controlling the samurai class than the living code of the Shogunate. Katagiri believes in these traditions to the core of his being: he takes pride in the fact that his father had committed seppuku for an error that was the man’s responsibility, but not his fault. As Katagiri comes to realize that he serves a system that is unworthy of him, his life becomes increasingly complicated. One of his boyhood comrades and fellow samurai has been convicted of treason, casting the shadow of suspicion on all the samurai of his rural village. Additionally, Katagiri find himself at the center of a local scandal involving himself and an angelic servant girl he rescues from an abusive household.

As audience members, we come to care for Katagiri and his circle. These are honorable people in dishonorable times, making the best decisions of which they are able. The film takes the time to fully invest us in its world and its people, and it moves at a deliberate (though not dull) pace that both evokes its era and adds impact to the swift decisions that can mean the difference between life and death. Yamada films THE HIDDEN BLADE in a graceful, formal manner, calling attention to himself only through the deftness of his touch and the grace of his choices.

Sometimes, a movie seeks only to pass the time. Sometimes, a movie seeks only to entertain. Sometimes, a movie aspires to art. THE HIDDEN BLADE is the latter, and it succeeds.

That is, if you can trust me.

Brain Dead

BRAIN DEAD is cheesy fun. It’s the story of a brain surgeon who performs a highly unethical operation on a man the government suspects of having a secret deep inside his cerebellum. When the surgeon goes to work, so does the movie, weaving in and out of reality in layer upon hallucinogenic layer until the viewer shares in the characters’ disorientation.

I saw BRAIN DEAD by accident: I thought I was getting BRAINDEAD, the early Peter Jackson film. B D, was made by Adam Simon and stars Bills Paxton and Pullman, and it’s 90 minutes of over-the-top, vaguely horrific imagery that manages to do what it intends: set a paranoiac gloss over everyday events that’s creepy enough for spookiness, yet not too creepy for fun.

Sahara

I don’t have much to say about SAHARA. It’s a bit of mindless fluff, a by-the-numbers action adventure that puts hero, sidekick, and love interest through various trials on their way to saving the world. If SAHARA has one thing to recommend it, it’s seeing William H. Macy in his role as a retired admiral and all-purpose ass-kicker who backs the hero at just the right time.

SAHARA’s loud, predictable, and utterly devoid of any originality whatsoever. That said, it’s the perfect companion for an afternoon of paying bills and folding laundry. You can leave the room for a few minutes and, when you return, instantly intuit everything you’ve missed. It does what it does, and that’s about that.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

STAR TREK IV is everything I love about Star Trek packed into 109 minutes of pure fun.

ST4 begins with a mysterious probe heading toward Earth and rendering powerless everything in its path. Coincidentally, the Enterprise crew is about to embark for Earth, where they will face court martial for a host of crimes, not the least of which is forcing audiences to sit through the tedious STAR TREK III. Naturally, the crew will save the day and save themselves, so they can inflict upon us the truly horrific STAR TREK V, but that's just the plot. That's not what makes ST4 a winner.

ST4 (the most successful film of the series, as I recall) focuses on the thing that made Star Trek unique: the apparant camaraderie among its crew members. The Enterprise crew, far from having become a bunch of hoary old retreads, is a well-oiled machine, so comfortable working together that they can take the time to enjoy the ride. The film maintains a perfect tone of light entertainment, all while calling attention to an issue that, while perhaps more glamorous in its day, remains no less relevant in our own. The science is vaguely implausible, yet waived aside so blithely that we don't ask too many questions: it does what it's supposed to do: impart a sense of wonder without overwhelming us with jargon.

STAR TREK IV touches on important themes, such as the value of friendship and the importance of conservation. But the thing I always loved about STAR TREK, the thing that brought me back after more than twenty years, is its sense of fun and delight. STAR TREK IV has it in spades, and I enjoyed the heck out of seeing it again.

Eight Below

I went into EIGHT BELOW with low expectations. It was a Heroic Dog movie, after all, and those generally run from kitschy to depressing. Additionally, I thought that Bruce Greenwood played a villain. I like Bruce Greenwood; I didn’t want to see him play a villain.

What a pleasant surprise. While EIGHT BELOW begins slowly, it quickly picks up steam and keeps us involved in the adventure right through to the end. Here’s the short version: scientists must leave a team of sled dogs behind when they evacuate their Antarctic research station in the face of a coming storm. The movie, which is loosely based on a true story, chronicles the team’s struggle to survive and their human master’s struggle to mount an expedition to save them.

Paul Walker plays the master, and he builds on his fine work in RUNNING SCARED to deliver a character whom we accept as an Antarctic dogsledder and audience surrogate in our concern for the dogs. The dogs are heroic, of course, and though they do engage in behavior that runs counter to my understanding of sled-dog dynamics (As a former malamute owner, I have a passing interest in the subject.), they manage to hold our sympathy and win our respect.

Frank Marshall made EIGHT BELOW in Canada, but the film looks like he shot it in Antarctica. It’s stark, forbidding, and beautiful, and I can’t wait to see this thing in high definition.

Ultimately, I liked everything about EIGHT BELOW. And Bruce Greenwood doesn’t play a villain, after all.

Godzilla's Revenge

GODZILLA’S REVENGE (1969) is the worst kind of cynical filmmaking. Toho Studios made this movie for about $3.95 by blending archival footage from GODZILLA VS. THE SEA MONSTER with a quick and simple story of a little boy whom Godzilla inspires to stand up to bullies. The non-archival footage looks and feels cheap, right down to the holes in the Minilla costume used when the boy imagines he’s on Monster Island.

Sure, the movie turned a profit – how could it not, given the cheapness of the production? But the whole things smells of killing the goose that laid the golden egg. It’s a testament to the durability of the character that the series managed to limp along for another six years before it went dormant for the next 9.

What a waste.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

I think I was supposed to watch FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! through a prism of ironic detachment, but I don’t care for movies that require me to be in on the joke to enjoy them. FPKK is a ridiculous story about ridiculous people behaving in ridiculous ways, and it’s played so far over the top that it makes suspension of disbelief impossible.

You know that actor’s rule about going to anger? About how it’s the easiest emotion to portray, but it’s also a dead end because once you start yelling, there’s no where else to go? No one told that to FPKK’s lead character and villain, a vaguely Elvira-esque go-go dancer who spends so much of the film spitting mad that she becomes uninteresting. It’s too bad, really. The script gives her some great one-liners, but she can’t even make these gems go. As for the rest of the cast, I’ve seen community theater amateurs essay more nuanced performances.

FPKK has nothing going for it – absolutely nothing at all. Here in the internet age, it can’t even work up much in the way of prurient interest. I hated it.

Ararat

With ARARAT, Atom Egoyan applies his considerable skills to the Armenian Genocide, an issue that's clearly of profound importance to him. He weaves together multiple storylines and timelines (a technique that seemed revolutionary with his first film and now feels pedestrian) to generate dramatic tension while he builds a two-hour long testament to a war crime committed long ago and far away.

It's an artfully made film, and I cared for its characters, many of whom are longstanding members of Agoyan's repertory company. But here's the problem, articulated by Elias Koteas (he plays an actor who lands the role of Jevdet Bey, a major player in the genocide) in conversation with a young man of Armenian descent:

Koteas: Look, I was born here. So were you, right?
Young man: Yeah.
Koteas: This is a new country. So let's just drop the f^cking history
and get on with it.

The young man feels the pain of the genocide like it happened yesterday. He carries that pain like Serbs carry the pain of their defeat at the Field of Blackbirds in 1389, transmuting into a kind of impotent rage. In fact, most of the ethnically Armenian characters in the film carry that rage, and I can't help but think that that rage is precisely the kind of thing that keeps cultures locked in cycles of retribution.

How much better a place might the world be if we could just drop the f^cking history and get on with it?

Memories of Murder

MEMORIES OF MURDER, set in the mid-eighties, follows a pair of detectives as they try to figure out who is behind a series of grisly killings.

It's a police procedural, pure and simple, though it comes with a twist unlike any I've seen before. It's a solid picture, but it didn't blow me away.

Just a datapoint for your decisionmaking.

Crash

I finally saw CRASH last night, and I'll add my voice to the general chorus of disdain.

I don't require that the films I see have people like those I know in real life. I don't require that they have characters who speak like those I know in real life. I do, however, require that, unless the movies feature balrogs or wookies or toupeed actors screaming "Khaaaaaann!", they have people that could, conceivably, walk the earth.

I'm sure Paul Haggis is a nice man, but his film feels like something written by a guy who never leaves his gated community. People just don't talk about race the way these people talk about race. White politicos don't complain about "these friggin' black people;" they simply forget to plan for their evacuation. Coincidence does not, in fact, pile on coincidence like a poorly constructed Jenga stack. CRASH does not take place in a world I recognize.

Kinky Boots

KINKY BOOTS takes Ejiofor from "actor of note" status to "can do no wrong" status, right there with Emma Thompson, Toni Collette, and Edward Everett Horton. He takes a pleasant and occasionally funny story of plucky entrepreneurship and infuses it with energy and warmth.

KINKY BOOTS tells the story of a Northampton shoe factory that's in big trouble. Joel Edgerton plays a young man who has just inherited the venerable institution, only to discover that it's on the verge of bankruptcy. When a drag queen called Lola (Ejiofor) inspires him to go into the 'women's boots for men' business, he bets the factory on the idea. Various plots and subplots get resolved, some people find happiness, etc., and the movie rocks along pleasantly for an hour and a half. Without Ejiofor, it'd be a perfectly nice movie, the kind of thing that'd appeal to the CALENDAR GIRLS crowd (and I mean that in a good way). With Ejiofor, however, it's fabulous.

Ejiofor's can make Lola simultaneously confident and fragile, happy and heartbroken, joyous and deeply pained. He's a lousy singer and not much of a dancer, but he carries his nightclub numbers with such gusto and joy that we can't help but delight in them. He so thoroughly embodies his character that the guest with whom we saw it couldn't imagine him in any other kind of role - she thought Ejiofor had been discovered in SoHo's club scene. The guy is just plain fun to watch, as he was in MELINDA AND MELINDA, SERENITY, DIRTY PRETTY THINGS, and INSIDE MAN.

I can't wait to see what he does next.

A Room with a View

Several weeks ago, I wrote that life is too short to re-see A ROOM WITH A VIEW. I was wrong.

The fact is, life is too short, so we should see A ROOM WITH A VIEW at every opportunity. As each minute of watching the walking bobble-head known as Helena Bonham Carter make a Baxter out of Daniel Day Lewis stretches into an eternity, the glacial passage of time makes us feel that life, rather than fleeting, is a long, tedious trudge of geologic proportions.

I want to see this movie on my deathbed. It'll make me feel like I'm living forever.

3-Iron

If you're planning to see 3-IRON, I'd like you consider doing me a favor: watch it with the sound turned off. I want to know if the movie packs the same wallop with no sound at all.

I think it will. 3-IRON is basically a silent movie, anyway. Its lead characters say less than four lines of dialogue throughout the film, and its director (Kim Ki-Duk, who also wrote it) is confident enough to let our eyes linger on his actors, trusting them to emote (or us to project, perhaps) without the crutch of explanatory dialogue. It's a wise choice. When you have actors who are capable of showing us how they feel, there's no need to have them tell us, as well.

What happens? Jae Hee is a young man with a strange life: he breaks into empty homes, stays the night while the inhabitants are away, then disappears before their return. To pay his freight, he cleans the places up, does minor repair work, and even does the laundry. (How strange it must be to return from a trip and find your house inexplicaby neater, with all your gadgets working!) One gets the sense that these homes need him if they are to become the homes they're meant to be. One day, he enters a home that practically vibrates with need, for it's the home of Lee Seung-yeon. Lee is broken, you see.

As with all serious films, what happens and what it's about aren't exactly the same thing. 3-IRON is a film about the heart, and about need, and about the worlds we create for ourselves. It's beautiful, and heartfelt, and true, and I loved it. Enjoy.

Birdman of Alcatraz

In Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), Burt Lancaster plays a hard man, a remorseless killer, who slowly finds his way to humanity. It's an excellent film about redemption and dignity, and it showcases some great performances, but that's not what I want to talk about.

Its central theme is a celebration of the rugged individual, and the importance of staying true to onesself in the face of pressure to conform. It shares this theme with The Great Escape (1963), Cool Hand Luke (1967), and Easy Rider (1969). My thumbnail analysis leads me see these films as an adaptation of the classic rugged individualistic formula for the post-Eisenhower era, precursors and, ultimately, embodiments of the countercultural movement that swept the nation in the late '60s.

OK, so sometimes I have to release my inner English major. Regardless, BIRD MAN OF ALCATRAZ is thought provoking stuff and well worth the time.

Cinema Paradiso (1988)

I saw this movie years ago and so began my love for Italian film. The story centers on the life of a boy, Salvatore ("Toto"), in a small town without a father in post-WWII Sicily and his love for the movies. After Toto fails as an altar boy, the local projectionist takes him under his wing and becomes a surrogate father. Toto eventually takes over the job, falls in love for the first time, and leaves town - only to return for the projectionist's funeral. This movie is beautifully executed. I particularly loved how Tornatore pays tribute to the neo-realists by showing footage from those films. Phillippe Noiret, who is always outstanding, plays the projectionist. Ennio Morricone composed the music.

Don't Move (2004)

Directed by and starring Sergio Castelli, Don't Move is the story of an esteemed surgeon, Timoteo, recalling a tempestuous love affair he had with a troubled and lonely young woman (played by Penelope Cruz). As Timo's daughter suffers a serious moped accident, the potential loss of his daughter stirs the memory of the actual loss of his former mistress. The movie didn't quite work for me because I didn't like Timoteo. I needed to see more of his good side in order to sympathize with him. Being a surgeon just wasn't enough. He seemed to have a good life - money, a great career, a fetching and accomplished wife. I wondered why he had an affair in the first place and why the violence was necessary. Cruz's performance is excellent. I give this movie 2 1/2 stars.

The Departed

When THE DEPARTED’s final credit rolled, I looked at my watch and thought, “Where did the time go?” Scorsese’s film, which clocked in at over two hours, raced by and I enjoyed every single minute. And yet, much as I liked it (and I really, really liked it), I think INFERNAL AFFAIRS is a better picture.

INFERNAL AFFAIRS, the Hong Kong Thriller remade in THE DEPARTED, stars Andy Lau and Tony Leung in the Damon and DiCaprio roles, respectively. The movies are nearly identical, with one major exception: moral ambiguity. In THE DEPARTED, Matt Damon’s character is a gangster in his heart. His decisions come from a position of self-interest and cold analysis of his situation. In INFERNAL AFFAIRS, Lau’s character began as a gangster, but he’s spent so much time on the right side of the law that he’s no longer playacting: he has conditioned himself to goodness and there’s a very real part of him that genuinely wants to become good. In THE DEPARTED, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is noble at heart. He’s so filled with horror at the demands of undercover work and sublimated fear of death that he turns to pills just to help him maintain his equilibrium. In INFERNAL AFFAIRS, Leung’s character kind of likes being a gangster: he’s grown used to it and, though he’d like to come in, we have a sense that he could continue to thrive in the underground world to which he’s become accustomed.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s a lot to like about THE DEPARTED. It’s a Scorsese picture, so of course it looks and sounds great. The cast is phenomenal, the story brisk, and situations involving. It’s a four-star movie, no doubt about it. But I like a little more moral ambiguity in my movies. INFERNAL AFFAIRS wins by a nose.

My Man Godfrey

The 1936 version of MY MAN GODFREY achieves its modest goals. It mixes comedy with social commentary in easily digestible portions, and it maintains a light, airy atmosphere that keeps things floating along.

Here's the setup: Godfrey Smith (William Powell) barely survives as a ragpicker at the city dump, but he has his dignity. When a group of socialites descend upon the dump looking for a "forgotten man" to use as a contest token, he stands on his dignity and refuses. In the proocess, he cathes the eye of the bitchiest socialite's sweet sister (Myrna Loy), who hires him to serve as the butler in her comically dysfunctional household.

MY MAN GODFREY uses the reliable tropes of bowing to simple wisdom and mocking the rich, and it succeeds largely to the pairing of Powell and Loy, who clearly enjoy such powerful onscreen chemistry that it's great fun to watch them play off of one another. While the film suffers from Loy's character seeming to dumb and her mother too shrill, it rocks along quite pleasantly for its entire running time.

I never laughed out loud, but I did smile throughout. MY MAN GODFREY certainly makes for a pleasant night at the movies.

United 93

UNITED 93 is the most harrowing time I've had at the movies since THE BICYCLE THIEF.

I don't know if I can attribute that to the strengths of the movie itself, or whether the reaction stemmed from my memories of the events of that day. I do know that UNITED 93 makes few missteps, using a documentarian style and low-key presentation to provide an immediacy to its proceedings. Additionally, UNITED 93 nailed the atmosphere and procedures of aircrft, air traffic control rooms, and military command posts - venues in which I've had some experience.

I spent roughly the first half in the movie in profound foreboding and the second half in profound horror. At no point did I lose interest or full investment in the proceedings, and I credit this to director Paul Greengrass's clear vision and directorial eye. UNITED 93 doesn't find scapegoats or go for easy stereotypes. Rather, it shows us how things were and, in those cases in which the reality remains unknown, it shows us how things plausibly could have been.

I loved this movie. Loved it. And I never want to see it again. Just like THE BICYCLE THIEF.

King Kong (2005)

Jackon's KONG summoned my inner carnie: "See the Amazing Shiksa! Her ligaments are made of industrial-grade rubber! Her spine is of pure titanium! She can run for miles without breaking a sweat; she doesn't bruise; and she's impervious to cold!" I'm all for suspending my disbelief, but KING KONG wanted me to believe that Anne Darrow was a frakking cylon, for Pete's sake.

The other elements of the movie didn't fare much better. Rather than capture my imagination, Skull Island made me wonder how a necrocentric civilization could possibly sustain an economy sufficientely vibrant to support all those major construction projects. The CGI had me wishing for more practical effects. The carnage reduced the sense of fun while drawing a sharp distinction between redshirts and stars. The whole long mess had me looking at my watch time and time again.

What a colossal disappointment.

Gene Kelly: Anatomy of a Dancer

GENE KELLY: ANATOMY OF A DANCER is your standard biographical documentary, interweaving clips and talking heads to give us an overview of its subject's life. While the film's structure lacks inspiration, it benefits from the plethora of great clips from which it draws.

GKAD didn't teach me anything, but it did entertain the heck out of me. With the lamentable exception of a clip from XANADU, this documentary has it all. I'd label it a must-see for Kelly fans.

The Indian in the Cupboard

THE INDIAN IN THE CUPBOARD is condescending and dull. It's the kind of movie in which the juvenile protagonist is given a skateboard, then seems nearly as happy about the helmet and kneepads that come with it. It feels like the kind of movie well-meaning parents would show their kids, when everyone knows the best kids' movies are at least a little subersive: Huck Finn wouldn't have been caught dead wearing a helmet and kneepads.

Here's the story: a boy receives a plastic indian on his birthday (It's given to him by a boy of on subontinental descent - oh, the subtext!). Through the power of magic, the toy turns into a very small, but very real, Iroquois who seems to have been magically imported from his own space and time. Life lessons ensue and, while they bored me, they kept my boy duly interested.

It's just that after the recent delight of the imaginative SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW, THE INDIAN IN THE CUPBOARD felt so pedestrian, so uninspired, that I simply couldn't get into it.

Bummer.

D.O.A.

What a great hook: a man walks into a homicide detective's office to report his own murder. How'd he get there?

I suspect that the strength of that hook accounts for D.O.A.'s lasting fame, as the film itself plays out as a rather pedestrian detective thriller. Edmond O'Brien, our unfortunate protagonist, lurches from clue to clue, urged on by desperation, but his clues only lead us from one moderately interesting suspect to the next.

Don't get me wrong. I liked D.O.A. just fine. I'm unclear, however, on why it achieved classic status. Beyond its great hook, there isn't much there.

Children of Paradise

You know how some things give people allergic reactions? Some things give me aesthetic reactions - a tightening in the back of my throat and sense of euphoria. I know I’m experiencing world-class art when I have an aesthetic reaction.

I had an aesthetic reaction to CHILDREN OF PARADISE. From the opening scene showing a fantasy Carnaval on the streets of old Paris to the pantomimes that made my breath catch in my throat to the heartbreaking conclusion, CHILDREN OF PARADISE sings “masterpiece” from every frame. It’s a story of love and hope, of inhibition and the lack thereof, of, well, of everything. It’s three hours long, and I confess that I sometimes fast-forward through particularly long subtitled films. I couldn’t fast forward through any of CHILDREN OF PARADISE, because so much happens with its actors’ faces that I couldn’t bear to miss a single delightful beat.

CoP draws its structure from a love pentagon centered on Garance, a beautiful woman who makes her way in the world using all the tools available to her. Many men give her their hearts, but she loves only one. How those loves unfold, and how the lives of those who love develop (or not) over time, provides the grist for enough drama to last far longer than the film’s brisk three-hour running time. The drama doesn’t carry this movie, howver. The performances do. From the sensitive idealist to the self-proclaimed scoundrel to the ambitious actor to the self-important dandy to the protective spouse to Garance herself, these people aren’t characters on a screen but real, living souls who evoke our tenderness, revulsion, and (most importantly) identification.

Cinematographers Roger Hubert and Marc Fossard give CHILDREN OF PARADISE a fantastical, better-than-life look, creating several images so excellent that they inspired me to hit the pause button so I could enjoy them at leisure. This entire movie looks great (and sounds great, too!), a testament to the mens’ excellent craftsmanship as well as the meticulousness of the good folks at Criterion, who released the DVD.

CHILDREN OF PARADISE looks great. It sounds great. Hey, it is Great. I have the aesthetic reaction to prove it.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW, as seen through the eyes of a six-year-old boy:

First ten minutes – character and setting introductions: “This movie is boring.”

Second ten minutes – giant robots attack: “Wow! Giant robots! Cool!”

Shortly thereafter – during montage of global newspapers detailing giant robot attack: “Hey, the Japanese newspaper has Godzilla fighting the robots! Rewind it, Dad! Rewind it!”

Somewhere around the halfway mark – Sky Captain lands aboard a flying aircraft carrier: “This movie keeps getting better and better!”

Ten minutes after that – “Look, Dad! Dinosaurs! This movie has everything!”

End credits – “Wow, that was one of the best movies ever!”

YMMV, depending one the audience with whom you see it, but what’s not to like about SKY CAPTAIN? It features a bold and exciting vision of an alternate reality; it’s chock full of cool gadgets, neat characters, and fun situations; and it’s a flat-out great time at the movies.

The 6th Day

THE 6TH DAY combines bad filmmaking with bad science fiction to make the worst film I’ve seen in months.

In THE 6TH DAY, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a charter jetcopter pilot who gets in the crosshairs of an evil corporate mastermind with a god complex. Thus begins your basic chase-thriller, but with a twist: the picture is set in the near future, and the evil corporate mastermind likes to clone people for fun and profit. Is Schwarzenegger’s clumsily named Adam a clone or an original edition? Will he live long enough to bring down the evil mastermind’s dastardly scheme? Have you ever been to the movies before?

THE 6TH DAY is bad filmmaking on so many levels that I’m having difficulty deciding where to begin. Do I start with the horrifically glaring product placements that make suspending disbelief impossible? How about the mechanical, by-the-numbers script that telegraphs absolutely everything that will occur in acts two and three in the first fifteen minutes? Of course, there’re always the wooden performances, ghastly set design, and glaring continuity errors, but that seems like piling on. Tell you what – let’s handle this by focusing in one bad judgment that’ll give you a sense of the wrong-headedness of the rest of the production. The evil corporate mastermind (Aside: Ever notice how studio films, which are paid for by corporations, love to use corporations as villains? Do you find the hypocrisy as insulting as I do?) needs a brilliant scientist to actually do his work. THE 6TH DAY employs Robert Duvall in the role, and it’s about the worst choice imaginable. Duvall is making an entirely different movie than everyone else involved in this train wreck, and his character’s pathos, humanity, and fundamental decency so overcome the weakness of his arc and dialogue that he single-handedly shows us what might have been. Like the men in the Plato’s Cave Analogy, we’d have been better off ignorant: Duvall’s brilliance makes everything around him look like nothing more than shadows on a wall, and his casting reflects the same kind of poor judgment that permeates every facet of the production.

THE 6TH DAY is bad science fiction because it steals whole concepts and conceits from other works without bothering to credit them or toss them a nod in any way. Additionally, it weasels out of crafting a compelling vision of the future by telling us that it's taking place in "the near future - sooner than you think." Of course, what vision it does muster looks just like everyone else’s vision of the future - silly wigs, but with more product placement. And its technology – well, it’s simply counterintuitive and unbelievable.

What a disappointment.

Roman Holiday

I adored ROMAN HOLIDAY. The concept is a no-brainer: put two of the most beautiful people on Earth together in one of the planet's most beautiful cities. The genius, however, is in the execution. There are no false notes in this movie, and I found it to be a refreshing counterpoint to the popular notion of the paramount importance of romantic love.

I saw this one on the couch with my wife and child. When it was over, my child immediately wanted to see it again. Before he went to sleep, asked if we could keep the movie forever. "Why?" I asked.

"It's my favorite movie. It's even better than GODZILLA."

So there you have it, folks. Better than GODZILLA. Praise just doesn't get much higher than that.

Ghostbusters

I've decided that GHOSTBUSTERS is a classic.

I sat down and watched this picture with my family this weekend, and I wondered how it would hold up after 20 years. Well, it was still funny, it was still exciting, and it was still a great time from soup to nuts.

I just might plunk down some money and buy this one.

The Rules of the Game

Plot, character, and so on are enough. I enjoyed the heck out of RULES OF THE GAME.

I don't know why, but I find it much easier to identify with pre-War French aristocrats than English aristocrats of nearly any era. Perhaps it's because the English were on top for so long, while one senses that after Waterloo, the French had to settle for self-delusion. These people don't put me off because I know that their entire world is about to come crashing down around them.

THE RULES OF THE GAME features a character who feels passionately about collecting musical instruments and devices. In a major scene, he opens the curtains on his prized possession, a complex musical machine featuring an array of players whose music goes from harmony to discord and back again. At the machine's apex, we see the figure of a nude woman, painted reclining against a hazy backdrop. Just as this depiction of feminine sexuality serves as the machine's focal point, so feminine sexuality (and masculine reaction to and interaction with it) serves as the focal point of a film in which a multitude of chracters bang and blow on their respective instruments in a sometimes melodic, sometimes cacophanous display.

This picture has so many interweaving plots, subplots, and concerns that it'd take 5,000 words just to describe them all. This could lead to a bewildering tangle of narratives, but THE RULES OF THE GAME creates such interesting and diverse characters that we have no problem keeping them and their stories straight. It helps when the film has no wasted frames.as I mentioned before, there are no wasted frames. Since there's always something happening, our minds don't have time to wander. Instead, we're forced to focus, to keep up, and the effort proves to be worth the reward. Be it keeping an eye on the background characters while the foreground players attract the most attention or simply enjoying the precision with which doors open and close and actors make their entrances and exits, THE RULES OF THE GAME keeps us entertained while conducting us ever deeper into the minds and hearts of its people. It climaxes with a bang, it closes with a wallop, and it entertains from beginning to end.

Even the most hypofrancophiliac among us couldn't help but enjoy it.

Be Cool

In BE COOL, John Travolta's Chili Palmer is so cool he's certifiably insane.

The movie could play this for laughs, but its mistaking of psychotic disregard for one's personal safety serves as just another mistake in a long list of them. BE COOL begins amusingly enough, but it quickly descends into a tedious mishmash of cheap jokes, lame stereotypes and jokes that would be thrilled to elicit even a thud.

How can this be? GET SHORTY is great fun, and Elmore Leonard's literary sequel keeps the laughs coming. Somehow, however, BE COOL just doesn't get it. Ah, well.

My Best Girl

MY BEST GIRL is an excellent picture.

Here's the setup: Mary Pickford plays Maggie Johnson, a stock clerk at Merrill's Department Store. When Charles Rogers's Joe Grant hires on, sparks fly and it isn't long before the two are hopelessly in love. But there's trouble: Joe Grant is actually Joe Merrill, scion of the wealthy merchant family, and he's engaged to a high-society girl. Will Pickford and her working-class sensibility triumph over the objections of Merrill's family and the dicates of upper-crust society? Does the sun rise in the morning?

Ok, so the storyline isn't exactly unique to the genre. What sells this movie, however, is Pickford's brilliant comic performance as the put-upon Maggie, a young woman trying to fulfill her responsibilites while carving out a little happiness for herself. Pickford is a mistress of the doubletake, and she excells at keeping the film's comic tone alive through all its twists and turns. When she shifts gears and goes for straight drama in the climax, we buy it and ride along with her. MY BEST GIRL absolutely hooked me.

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? begins with the familiar Fox logo and opening music, but with a twist: Tony Randall stands in the lower-left corner of the screen, playing along with the music. After the flourish, Randall takes center stage and introduces the movie, setting a flippantly po-mo tone that HUNTER manages to maintain throughout its running time.

HUNTER has such a simple and durable premise that 'Bewitched' worked it for eight seasons: an adman fears losing his job unless he can land that big contract. In this case, Tony Randall plays the leading nebbish and Jayne Mansfield plays the poor man's Monroe who holds the keys to his success. The jokes come nonstop, and some of them actually manage to be funny.

HUNTER depends on the audience's acceptance of Mansfield as some kind of feminine ideal. I find her to be phenomenally annoying, and her greatest talent appears to be her ability to get upstaged by every player around her, including her dog. That's not all bad, and even works when she's delightfully upstaged in the finale. Nevertheless, this movie feels tissue-paper thin. Of course, that can work in a comedy, and WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? rocked along in its reasonably amusing groove right through to the end. I chuckled a few times, laughed out loud at the climax, and generally felt like I got my money's worth.

Oldboy

The more I think about OLDBOY, the more I like it.

I knew the movie's premise going in: a guy's imprisoned for 15 years with no explanation, no words from his captors, and no clue why such a fate has befallen him. Upon gaining his freedom, he sets out to exact his revenge. Armed with this knowledge, I expected a Korean version of the THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, only with much worse food. Initially, OLDBOY reinforces this expectation, even referencing the novel at one point. Before long, however, the film subverts both the Monte Cristo story and many of the tropes of popular narrative film, taking us to wholly unexpected places. Events pile on events, decisions on decisions, and soon we find ourselves in a story that has more in common with Aeschylus than Dumas. Gripping, provocative, and thoughtful to the end, OLDBOY succeeds on every level.

Cavite

So two guys wrote up a script, bought a digitial camera and a couple of tickets to the Philippines, and set out to make a movie. They called it CAVITE.

CAVITE has a workable premise: a man is forced to do accede to a criminal's wishes to saave his family. The twist is that the criminal is an Abu Sayyef terrorist, the man is a secular Filipino muslim, and the setting is Cavite, a city somewhere near Manila. It's a reasonably effective, though shakily shot, thriller. Its protagonist wins our sympathy, its antagonist seems brilliant and effective, and the picture goes through all the paces of the modern thriller.

Unfortunately, CAVITE isn't particularly thrilling. We can see what it's trying to do, and we can pity it for not quite succeeding. Its protagonist, while sympathetic, isn't comopelling. it antagonist, while brilliant and effective, is supernaturally so. Think of CAVITE as a particularly good student film or fun project, and you may enjoy it. Approach it with the standards you'd apply to a professional trail, and you'll probably come away disappointed.

Picnic at Hanging Rock

The first and most important thing film must do is entertain. Whatever its insights, whatever its contribution to the art form, a given film must hook and hold the viewer throughout its running time. Granted, this prerequisite assumes a degree of subjectivity, as that which hooks and holds one viewer may distract and bore another. I can live with that.

Roger Ebert talked me into viewing PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK. In one of his Great Movies columns, the critic paints a portrait of a mysterious, haunting, perceptive film that both hypnotizes and engages the viewer. I found it tedious and uninvolving. I simply did not care about its characters, it milieu, its insights, or much else about it. Perhaps it's the class warrior in me: why should I care about rich Victorians? Perhaps its the chronological ethnocentrist in me: why should I care about the geographically and chronologically limited ramifications of Victorian sexual and sociological norms? Perhaps it's the animal in me: I saw the movie at five in the morning, while waiting for an airplane to get fixed so I could take it flying - I didn't care much about anything other than getting another cup of coffee. And another. And another. Oh, and maybe a donut.

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK may well be a stunning masterpiece, but it didn't hook me and it definitely didn't hold me. Ah, well.

Kontroll

KONTROLL begins with a representative from Budapest's subway system, self-consciously reading from a clipboard as he voices his belief that audiences will see the film's depiction of the subway and its denizens as allegorical, rather than literal. Additionally, he states that he was happy to have permitted the film's use of the subway, as the young writer & director, Nimrod Antal, was profoundly concerned with issues of good and evil.

I don't know if that guy is an actor or not, but what a great way to set up a movie. By announcing that it's an allegory about good and evil, the film distances us from an immediacy it might otherwise have. Why is this a good thing? Well, our rational side is willing to overlook a disjointed story, a lack of compelling characters, and the production's unremitting ugliness because it's on the lookout for allegories of good and evil. Rather than reflect that a particular sequence doesn't move the story along or provide any real insight into its participants, it's thinking, "What does this mean?"

Here's the setup: Bulscu (Sandor Csanyi) is the leader of an underdog squad of Kontrollers, ticket checkers on Budapest's honor-system subway. He's smart, attractive, likeable, and sleeps on the floors of deserted platforms in the middle of the night. He appears to have no real home, and he may be a schizophrenic killer. With a setup like that, you'd be right to expect a straight-up thriller. Antal takes his story in a different direction, however, using his premise to examine the lives of people who exist at the fringes of society. It's an interesting experiment, and the conceit gives the shoestring production a thematic justification for looking as scruffy as its characters.

Is it interesting? Yes. Does it make one forget about the passage of time? Yes. Is it good? I'm not sure. I'm still trying to figure out what it means.

Brick

I enjoyed the heck out of BRICK. The movie does so many things right, it's hard not to.

First, we have the location. It's hard to imagine a less threatening, more sterile city than San Clemente, CA. It's the kind of clean-scrubbed, utterly dull town that made me itchy to get out of California. BRICK makes San Clemente feel like the scariest city on Earth, all the more so for its surface sheen of wholesomness.

Second, we have the dialogue. It's a stylized form of speech, a noirish banter that no one would actually use, but which we wish they did. The speech could easily descend into self-parody or throw off the entire picture, but it does just the opposite: it takes us into a parallel world that's familiar enough to be relatable but just different enough to be unsettling.

Fourth, we have the performances. I didn't recognize any of the players, but knew going in that the protagonist is the kid from ANGELS IN THE OUTFIELD, all grown up. They were terrific, and not in the terrific-for-kids sense. The cast took to the stylized dialogue and fanciful situation and played it dead straight, giving the proceedings a tension and danger that even one wink would've have dissipated.

Fifth, we have the music. IMDB credits Nathan Johnson and Larry Seymour with the score, and they do a masterful job here. The music, like the dialogue, isn't normal. It fits its milieu, however, keeping us off-balance and tense. While it did call attention to itself, it did so in the most positive way, making me seriously consider purchasing a score for the first time in a very long time.

Rian Johnson, a first-time filmmaker, did BRICK on a shoestring and edited it with his home computer. With a debut like this, I can't wait to see what this guy can do with a little studio money behind him.

What a treat.

Blade: Trinity

It helps if you go into BLADE: TRINITY with low expectations. You'll need them. Exepect Wesley Snipes to deliver a one-note performance. Expect ridiculously pathetic vampires who couldn't terrorize a Sunday-school class. Expect choppily edited fight scenes that make it virtually impossible to recognize what's going on half the time. Oh, and expect lots and lots of intrusive product placements - seriously, if there was an award for product placement, BLADE: TRINITY would win, downtown.

If you do all this, you'll probably enjoy BLADE: TRINITY. The movie delivers pretty much exactly what you'd expect: cheesily menacing vampires, lots of people jumping around and kicking other people in the face, and a throbbing soundtrack that's always reminding you to have fun, fun, doggonit! With the exceptions of Parker Posey, gamely trying and failing to portray a menacing vampire leader, and Ryan Reynolds, who seems to think he's in BORDELLO OF BLOOD, the actors and stuntmen are just fine. The production values areprofessional, and the whole thing comes off as a reasonable entertaining exercise.

Just know that you're going to get pretty much exactly what you expect.

Point Blank

POINT BLANK is such a guy movie, they soaked the film stock in testosterone before putting it in the camera. Then they punched the lens a couple of times, just to toughen it up. This is a movie about money, broads, guns, cars, respect, and power: the source material for Mel Gibson’s PAYBACK, but with twice the grit. What a picture.

On the off chance that you’ve never before encountered either PAYBACK or POINT BLANK, here’s the setup: Lee Marvin’s been double-crossed and left for dead by a, erm, business associate who uses the money from a grab-and-go to buy his way in to the local mob. Marvin wants his money back, and there’s your movie. But this isn’t just a Bronsonesque revenge thriller; that’d be pedestrian. It’s a full-on neo-noir picture featuring femmes fatale, double- and triple- crosses, and shadowy figures who’d never waste their time telling you it’s Chinatown – buy a map, you pansy.

John Boorman directed POINT BLANK as only his second feature, but you wouldn't know it. The movie feels like the work of an old pro, and Boorman's crisp, no-nonsense direction keeps things stripped down to their basics, letting the players shine and the story move. And those players do shine. Lee Marvin had always cultivated the persona of a man who eats steel and shits bullets, and he puts that persona to excellent use here. When he tells a man, “I’m going to kill you,” we believe it - and we thank God that he isn’t coming after us, too. Angie Dickinson, who plays a woman straight out of a Dashiell Hammet novel, hits all the right notes: smooth and harsh, seductive and dangerous. She's perfect: pure movie magic in, well, nothing at all. And the villains - don't get me started.

In fact, everything about this movie is great. Even the print on this particular edition is perfect. It looks and sounds crisp, and it has every earmark of a painstaking restoration. Not only is POINT BLACK fun to watch, it’s beautiful, too. Yep, in your face and unblinking, POINT BLANK is one of the best guy movies out there. Enjoy.

Returner

I thought RETURNER was reasonably entertaining. Had I stumbled on the movie while flipping through the channels on a hotel TV, I probably would have enjoyed it (Hey, it worked for BIKER BOYZ.). While trying to keep my eyes open on the Metro after staying up too late watching season one of "Arrested Development," however, I just couldn't get into it.

While the movie has a fun premise, I found the villain to be ridiculously unbelievable and not nearly as cool as he thought he was. The fight scenes cut so clumsily between actors and doubles that they took me out of the moment, the Western cast was ridiculously bad, and the film's climactic moment depends on audience agreement that Transformers are, in fact, cool. Transformers weren't cool when I was a kid, and they aren't cool now.

Still, RETURNER has a breathless quality to it that's undeniable. After a wild night of dinner in a hotel restaurant and setting the alarm clock, it'd be a treat to find this movie on the Sci Fi channel.

Y Tu Mama Tambien

There's a lot to like about Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. It tackles serious concerns in a serious way, it gives us honest and multidimensional characters, and it manages to infuse the tropes of the road trip movie with a pathos and insight not normally found in the genre. Unfortunately, however, it failed to capture my imagination.

Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN is a story about two young men and one fully adult woman. It blends coming of age, sexual maturation, and class concerns seamlessly, but it does so on a level so accessible that it opens itself to accusations of oversimplicity. Yes, we get that the young need to find themselves, intellectually and physically - we've been there. Yes, we get that rich and poor inhabit entirely different worlds - what else have you got? And yes, we understand that the world is soaked in tragedy - so what? This is a movie that, on first viewing, seems far too easy to decode. Perhaps there's more to it, but I saw this one solo and am stuck with my own impressions.

While Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN's insights may seem all too obvious, the film still earns significant credit for fully realizing its characters. Sure, the adolescents are horny kids, but they're horny kids with real hearts, concerns, and questions about themselves and their place in the world. Sure, the woman is the very personification of the madonna-whore, but she's given a level of humanity and an internal (and internalized) journey that's far more profound than that normally found in coming of age films. I didn't really like these people. I didn't really relate to these people. But I believed in these people. And that ain't bad.

Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN is basically a road trip movie, but it's a movie that understands the tedious nature of the road trip, that uses the tropes of the genre to great effect, and that feels for every character on the screen. As its trio of protagonists pass through their various challenges, the film uses those challenges and situations to explore the nature of maturing sexuality and, hell, maturing period. This film "gets it" in a way that so many do not.

So, why did Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN fail to capture my imagination? It clobbered my out of the trap with its lfrequent voice-overs. It's as if the film didn't trust me to intuit pathos and, instead, beat me over the head with it. See this nice spot? People died there long ago. See these nice people? Those nasty capitalists will drive them from their home soon. OK, ok. I get it. Life is hard. Additionally, I had a philosophical problem with some of the movie's assumptions, especially the assumption that freer sex leads to greater happiness. Granted, the film did address the issue forthrightly in its denoument, but even that felt like it was too little, too late.

So, there it is. I respect Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. I admire Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. But I don't particularly like Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. I guess you can't have it all.

Akeelah and the Bee

Concerning AKEELAH AND THE BEE's poor box office showing, Elizabeth wrote that "a large pt. of this audience probably has already seen SPELLBOUND." That's what put me off the movie, but I finally broke down under the pressure of its positive reviews and queued it up. I enjoyed the heck out of it.

AKEELAH AND THE BEE faithfully adheres to the sports movie / inspirational tale formula, but that formula has been around so long because it's so unerringly effective. Akeelah is a spelling prodigy from a rough part of L.A. who follows her dream to the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. Will she grow? Will she find worth in her own eyes and the eyes of others? Will she win? Come on - you've been to the movies before. More importantly, does it work? Yes, as a matter of fact. It does.

Keekee Palmer is fine as Akeelah, and Angela Basset and Laurence Fishburne both do fine work here. The movie even offers a few treats to the SPELLBOUND crowd, working some familiar faces from that excellent documentary into the fictionalized version of the Bee, but the star of this movie is the formula. And it always hits its mark.

Double Indemnity

Double Indemnity has been on my Netflix queue forever. Actually, it's been sitting in the "pending release" portion, as no one had been willing to pony up for a DVD release. Finally, Turner Classic Movies stepped up and released a beautiful print of the film. It was worth the wait.

Not only does Double Indemnity look great, it sounds great. Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler put together a cracking good script with quotable lines, and Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck deliver them with gusto. This is a fun movie in a couple of ways.

Here's the setup: Fred MacMurray is morally flexible insurance man Walter Neff. While making a routine sales call, he meets Barbara Stanwyck, who plays Phyllis Dietrichson. It's a classic Stanwyck performance: she's sexy, she's hard-edged, and, oh, she's bad news as only Chandler can imagine bad news. Before long, Walter's masterminding a complex insurance scam / murder plot, but it won't be long before everything goes awry. I'm not giving anything away, incidentally - the movie begins with a shot and bleeding Walter confessing to a dictaphone.

Since, like Sunset Blvd., Double Indemnity begins by giving away the fate of its protagonist, the question isn't whether the movie will surprise and astonish us. The question is whether it'll make us enjoy the journey. Will it? Well, it depends. Do you like noir? Do you like, MacMurray, Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson? More simply, do you like movies? If you can answer "yes" to any of the above, I bet you'll like Double Indemnity.

EDIT: A friend who works for TCM assures me that this DVD was a Universal, not TCM project from the get-go. I was thrown off by the film's introduction, which features Robert Osbourn on the TCM set. I must still have been thinking about that anklet.

Layer Cake

I liked LAYER CAKE from the very beginning, but the ending made me love it.

LAYER CAKE, written by J.J. Connolly, directed by Matthew Vaughn, and starring Daniel Craig, works from an ancient formula. You know the one: the drug dealer / jewel thief / pickinick basket swiper wants to get out of the game, but first must make One Last Score. So, how does LAYER CAKE rise above its formula? It doesn't, really. Rather, the movie executes it so well that one can't help but be caught up in the twists, turns, doublecrosses, and mounting desperation Daniel Craig's dealer feels as he tries to outsmart the dangerous idiots who surround him.

I've never seen Daniel Craig before, but let me tell you: this guy's got it. I believed that this guy could could be simultaneously brilliant and stupid. I believed that he was a thinker, a leader, the kind of guy who could survive the drug trade well into his thirties. Craig doesn't have to carry the entire movie, however. The supporting cast (featuring Colm Meaney, Michael Gambon, & Sienna Miller) is spot-on, the music's note-perfect, the editing is great (look for some creative and fun transitions), and the dialogue's fun to listen to.

And the ending, oh that ending. Pow! What a winner.

Howards End

Back in college, a girl I was seeing dragged me to A ROOM WITH A VIEW. The movie, all 36 hours of it, was painfully, excruciatingly long. I promised myself I'd never see another Merchant-Ivory picture again. Well, time dimmed the promise, as it often does, and I queued up HOWARDS END a short while ago.

I liked it. I really liked it. If I had to boil down my reasons, I'd find Emma Thompson's Margaret Schlegle. She begins the movie an engaged, joyful, dynamic woman. As time wears on and her choices tell on her, we see that she's put herself in an ever-shrinking box. We've seen that type of character before, but Thompson's triumph comes from her endowing Margaret with the self-awareness to know whom she is, whom she was, and whom she may become.

Thompson's dedication to her character's full humanity is of a part with the entire film's approach to its characters, its settings, and its situations. HOWARDS END is populated with real people, with real problems, who make real decisions. At no point do we hear the plot's gears grinding, and at no point do we lose our investment in these people. Time with HOWARDS END is time well spent.

But I still won't give A ROOM WITH A VIEW another go. Life's too short.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

I like the combination of the real and the fanciful in THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU. Elegance, insight, and grace infuse the (only?) real element of the film, the inner life of Steve Zissou; while the fanciful element shines with vision, creativity, and an edge toward fancy.

Steve Zissou is a man in the process of losing his illusions. His business is crumbling, his partner is leaving, and his crew yearns for the days when he had the energy to make illusions seem real. As the movie pares this character down to his vital core, it creates an increasingly fantastical world for him to inhabit. How fitting that his moment of enlightenment should come in the most fantastical scene of them all.

Holy cow, did I like this movie.

The Ruling Class

THE RULING CLASS is two movies with a common theme. Unfortunately, I didn't care for either one.

The first movie is an English country farce in which Peter O'Toole, who firmly believes that he's Jesus Christ, returns from his voluntary stay at a lunatic asylum to assume the title and holdings of 14th Earl of Gurney. The 13th Earl was a big fan of autoerotic asphyxiation, a compulsion that's played for every laugh it can get. That's right, folks: accidental suicide as comedy gold. Somebody approved this. Anyway, O'Toole shows up, private crucifix and all, and proceeds to turn life upside down at the Gurney estate. There's your first movie.

The second movie is a horror picture complete with seduction, murder, and the undead. Gurney visits a House of Lords that's filled with cobwebs, ghouls, and lawyers, and it's supposed to get under our skin. But it doesn't, really. It just falls flat, and it falls flat because it's such a hamhanded hammering at the two movies' common theme that it had me wishing the producers had just printed up a circular to hand out at entrances to the Tube.

The common theme is this: the English class system is bad. It values lineage over ability, and it makes for a ridiculous social and political construct. There: I've just save you two hours.

Now, I don't mind message movies. I do, however, mind movies that are nothing but message, particularly if it's a message I don't care about. I'm not English. I don't care about the English class system. While I'd be happy to watch a movie about people who happen to be a part of that system, I'm not too excited about a two hour commentary on the system itself. My excitement reaches new lows when said movie's comedic bits aren't funny (I didn't so much as crack a smile.) and its horrific bits aren't scary (I didn't feel even the slightest chill.).

What a disappointment.

My Dinner with Andre

I don't think I can approach MY DINNER WITH ANDRE with anything like a critical eye. (Yeah, yeah, I know. Since when have I had a critical eye?) Here's the problem: Andre is a dead ringer for a friend of mine named Dan. He looks the same. He dresses the same. He speaks in the same cadences. He's deeply, profoundly engaged with life, and he loves to share his ideas with his friends, even when he exasperates them.

Dan's been dead for three years, now. I miss him. MY DINNER WITH ANDRE was, in a weird way, like getting an extra couple of hours with the guy. I don't know when I'll see the movie again, but it's good to know that it's out there. Maybe when I'm ready for another conversation.

Technical note: the disk I saw was of a very bad print. If there's a special edition out there, you might want to go with that.

The Pianist

I got a postcard from Germany the other day. The photo was of people wearing silly folk costumes against a beautiful background. The message read, "Liebe grüsse und alles gute sowie viel freude mit eurem neuen familien!" While watching The Pianist this morning, that postcard kept coming back to me. It represented the latest variation on perhaps the greatest cognitive dissonance in my life: that between my wonderful, loving German friends and relatives, the culture and language I associate with holidays and early childhood; and the monsters the Germans became under the iron rule of the Nazi party. I've read the books and seen the movies and had the conversations, but the question still remains: how is it possible that my people were once those people?

Consequently, watching THE PIANIST was like getting punched in the face for two and a half hours. The movie follows an affluent young Jewish man of Warsaw, the titular pianist, as he scrambles to survive the coming, then occupying, then disintegrating German horde (played, incidentally, by actors who look like me and my relatives). We see him assisted and betrayed, in denial and disillusioned, as his world literally crumbles around him. Adrien Brody delivers a star-making performance, fully investing his character with all the humanity he deserves. His oppressors, the Nazis and their collaborators, are also fully realized in their monstrosity. It's a brilliantly made film, perhaps someone with more distance would enjoy the heck out of it. For me, it was agony. I have no desire to see it again.

Blood Simple

I enjoyed BLOOD SIMPLE for its audacity, for the skill with which is was made, and for the memorable performance of M. Emmet Walsh, a character actor whom I'd seen a million times but whose name never stuck until now. (Run, sentence, run!)

BLOOD SIMPLE, the Coen brothers' first movie, is a Texas noir with a sleazy bartender, a sleazy bar owner, a sleazy bar owner's wife, and a sleazy detective. That's a lot of sleaze, and the amazing thing about this movie is how it makes you care about these people as they betray, slay, and dismay one another through the course of the picture's tight 96-minute running time. There isn't a thing about this movie I don't like, from its performances to its photography to its pacing to the labyrinthine story. This picture's a treat.