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.