Tulpan

Roger Ebert loved TULPAN, a film about a young sailor, recently discharged from the Russian Navy, who returns to the steppe of his native Kazakhstan to find a bride, buy a yurt, and settle down to herd sheep. In his review, the critic writes, "What does this sound like to you? Ethnographic boredom? I swear to you that if you live in a place where this film is playing, it is the best film in town. You'll enjoy it, not soon forget it, and you’ll tell your friends about it and try to persuade them to go, but you’ll have about as much luck with them as I’m probably having with you. Still, there has to come a time in everyone’s life when they see a deadpan comedy about the yurt dwellers of Kazakhstan."

That sounded like a challenge. After reading those words, how could I not see the film?

For my trouble, I got ethnographic boredom. Look, I don't think I'm ever going to the Kazakh steppe. I can't think of a reason why the Navy would send me, Delta doesn't fly there, and I'd rather go to Venice or Tokyo or Berlin in my free time than sign up for one of those bull$#!^ ethnovacations that cater to the Whole Foods Market crowd. So I looked to TULPAN to take me to a place I don't know, introduce me to people whose lives feel foreign to me, and let me walk a mile in their shoes for an hour and a half. The film did take me to the Steppe. It did introduce me to people whose lives felt foreign to me. But it didn't make me walk in their shoes. Why not? Because it didn't give me a reason to care.

Asa struck me as your basic callow youth, with nothing much to make him engaging beyond an ethnographic interest in his culture. His relatives were rough and hardworking, as I'd expect. The steppe looked like the steppe in MONGOL. And that was pretty much it. The film offered me nothing more on which to hang. I didn't laugh. I didn't cry. I didn't wait in suspense. I just sat there, looking at my watch.

Roger Ebert has introduced me to more great films than I can count, but TULPAN isn't one of them. It's all I could do to stay awake.

Yes Man

I liked YES MAN. I didn't love it, but I enjoyed as a lesser entry in the style of comedy I'm coming to think of as the Apatow school. It doesn't have a villain, its third-act crisis is organic to its story, and its characters mean well. Hey, it's even reasonably funny. I laughed three or four times.

Would it have been better with Jason Segel in the lead instead of serial over-actor Jim Carrey? Sure. Am I beginning to despair of seeing Zooey Deschanel in something that requires her to do more than act cute? Yeah. But there it is.

YES MAN tells the story of Carl, a guy who works at a bank in Brea, yet flits from Griffith Park to Balboa Park without a second thought. He's nearly fifty, yet he acts like a guy who's closing in on thirty. His improbably young and attractive ex-wife left him because he always says no. He's about to lose his improbably young and attractive best friend because he always says no. And he's never getting out of his bullet-in-the-head job because he always says no. But one day, he allows a nutty friend (Whom you can tell is genuine because he dresses like a hippie. In American films, genuine people always dress like hippies.) to talk him into attending a self help / quasi religious seminar dedicated to getting people to say yes. So far, so good. I can get behind a life-embracing ideology - I just don't want to smell like patchouli oil. This ideology requires no patchouli oil and it's led by Terence Stamp, which is pretty cool. Further, it requires neither a significant monetary outlay nor kneeling before Zod. Carl chooses well: he goes for it and embrace the culture of Yes.

Before you know it, the guy's in the middle of a full-bloom midlife crisis. He gets a new improbably young and attractive girlfriend. He learns to play the guitar. He takes flying lessons. He goes to all-night parties where one can assume he makes the other attendees uncomfortable because he's old enough to be, like, their dad, man. He's ridin' the groove train, baby, and he's livin' like he'll never run out of Viagra and Motrin.

That's your setup, and it's a perfectly fine frame upon which to hang a series of jokes and gags that should make you smile from time to time, grin occasionally, and even laugh if you're an easy touch like me. But Carrey's gotta embrace the fact that America's tired of watching him mug his way through pictures. Settle down, Jim, and insist on the rewrites that'll make it seem as if you weren't shoehorned into a younger man's story. Do that, and I'll invest much more in your character. And when I really invest in your character, that's when the real laughter comes.

The 400 Blows

You may or may not like or care about the French New Wave. The name François Truffaut may make you feel uncomfortable, like a reminder of some long-forgotten, yet uncompleted, homework assignment. Or maybe you avoid black and white films, or subtitles, or foreign pictures in general.

But don’t skip THE 400 BLOWS because you’re daunted or put off by any of the above, because THE 400 BLOWS is one of the best movies about childhood I’ve seen. Director Truffaut clearly remembers what it is to be a child: to hang on every gesture, every overheard word of his parents because those gestures and words constitute the weft and weave of his security; to feel the frustration and anger of unjust punishment because of one’s powerlessness to resist it; indeed, to make life-changing decisions not because you’re particularly good or evil but because they seem like a good idea at the time and, hey, you’re a kid – what do you know?

Antoine Doinel, 13, serves as the film’s subject. He’s a lower-class kid. His mother’s a tramp and his stepfather’s a nice enough guy who, at some point, ignored his own best judgment and married a tramp. At the beginning of the film, his martinet of a schoolteacher punishes him unjustly. He resists in the only way he can and gets caught. And away we go.

But the key to this film lies not in its story, interesting as that may be. The key lies in its observation of Antoine’s viewpoint. Watch him watch his parents, his teachers, his friends. Watch him decide whom to follow and whom to betray. Watch him realize (slowly though the realization may come) that the real world is upon him and the time for games is just about over. Watch him prioritize and decide, and watch his developing relationship with honesty.

Watch it all, and remember how it was for you. Imagine how it is for your kids. Don’t let the pedigree or the vintage or the foreignness deter you: THE 400 BLOWS is worth your time.

Sugar

Recently, I read book entitled Odd Man Out, by Matt McCarthy. The author had played college baseball at Yale and was recruited by the Angels. He survived spring training and made it to Single A. When the season began, he pitched to win. By the time the season ended, he was pitching not to lose. The next year, he was in grad school.

SUGAR’s like that, but with a critical difference. Its pitcher is an undereducated Dominican. Grad school is not an option. His family is counting on him. He’s desperate not just to make it, but to not fail. And minor league baseball is like a death march, an endurance contest where one injury or one bad month or pissing off the wrong guy means the eponymous Sugar is just another loser selling third-rate cell phone chargers on the one corner of his dusty little Dominican town. Every time a guy quits, or gets fired, or just disappears, we hear about how he’d “had enough” and was “looking forward to freedom.” But once you’re off that train, it keeps rolling and you can never get back on.

SUGAR captures that desperation and ambition and pressure. It feels like a documentary and its understated approach adds to its drama. Its actors seem unstudied, its places realistic, and its sense of how it feels to have the world riding on one’s shoulders absolutely true. This is a compelling, honest film about baseball and about being young, talented, and desperate. I’m glad I saw it.

Before the Rain

We humans, all around the world, we have so much in common. We love to divide ourselves into tribes and find reasons to kill one another.

BEFORE THE RAIN is a film about people killing one another in Macedonia. The Christians hate the Muslims for atrocities committed under Muslim rule. The Muslims hate the Christians for atrocities committed under Christian rule. UN observers observe, and they bury the dead, and people in nice places like London natter on about standing up for peace. But as one Macedonian observes, “Look around the world. Peace is the exception, not the rule.” And you know what the saddest part is? This film could have been set in Sudan, or in the Kashmir, or in the Colombian mountains, or on the wrong side of the tracks in virtually any major city in the world.

BEFORE THE RAIN tells its story in three parts. The first, “Words,” centers on an Orthodox monk and the refugee whom he shelters. It’s about what we say and don’t say, and how the right or wrong word is life or death. The second, “Faces,” tells the story of a London photo editor and the men she loves, and why. It speaks to the gap between the civilized and uncivilized worlds, and how that gap is often smaller than we wish to acknowledge. The third, “Pictures,” is about intentions and the conflict between human aspiration and human nature. The chapters work as individual stories, but together they create a heartbreaking film about not just ethnic strife in Macedonia, but about elements of the human condition that have been rending hearts ever since the first primate picked up a stick and used it to club some other primate from the next tribe over.

What a sad, beautiful, compelling movie.

Goodbye Solo

An old man gets into a cab. He gives the driver $100 and tells him that he’ll pay him $1000 to pick him up in one week, drive him to a cliff, and leave him there.

The man is William, played by Red West with all the wear and all the fire that one might expect from Elvis’s old fixer. The cabbie is Solo played by Souleymane Sy Savane in a performance that takes a standard issue Noble Immigrant role and fills it with life.

The film is a quiet study of two men, one fatigued and one indefatigable. Their scenes together, in the cab and out of it, are filled with a quiet power. Demonstrating once again that the human face is the most interesting subject in the world, GOODBYE SOLO takes the time to allow us to get to know these faces, get to know the people behind them. It works, for we find ourselves hanging on every word. We find ourselves hoping, for both men.

This is a good movie, sure and steady, with organic developments and a strong sense of place. I’m glad I saw it.

Terminator Salvation

If there’s something McG wishes he could retcon out of the original TERMINATOR, it must be Kyle Reese saying, “The Resistance was winning. We were overrunning SkyNet when the machines sent back a Terminator to kill you before you could bear John Connor. And John Connor sent me back to save you.”

See, TERMINATOR SALVATION is all about an assault on SkyNet. And we know that the Resistance doesn’t overrun SkyNet until Kyle Reese is at least in his late twenties. So it can’t work, right? Right?

Still forget that niggling complaint. And forget the facts that CGI stunts are (by definition) dull, one of the heroes is a murderer, and Christian Bale’s “gruff guy” schtick is getting old. Anton Yelchin and Moon Bloodgood have great screen presence, and Sam Worthington makes for a fun hero even if his role forces him to retread stuff that Battlestar Galactica did three years ago. The goods balance the bads in this picture, leaving us with a reasonably effective action picture that achieves its goals of (a) blowin’ up stuff real good and (b) giving us all another opportunity to bask in the glory that is Michael Ironside.

So, y’know, TERMINATOR SALVATION is ok. Not great, not terribly bad, and worth the money if you see it for free. I’m not complaining. I got what I paid for.

Crank: High Voltage

I’m not gonna tell you that CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE (CRANK 2, henceforth) is a good movie. I’m not gonna tell you that I liked it anyway. But I am going to tell you that I respect it.

CRANK 2 is loud, jumpy, vulgar, violent, sexist, racist, crude, and offensive in nearly every imaginable way. I respect its absolute dedication to loudness, jumpiness, vulgarity, violence, sexism, racism, crudeness, and offensiveness. CRANK 2 does nothing by half measures: it goes so far over the top that it forgets where the top is and shoots for the moon.

As faithful fans may recall, CRANK ends with its hero (Chev Chelios: what a great movie name!) falling 1000 feet out of a helicopter. And blinking. CRANK 2 goes from there to a world of kaiju heroes battling in a world of miniatures, severed heads kept alive in aquariums (with voice synthesizers that say, “$^%& you, Chev Chelios!”), and ridiculous amounts of nudity and violence that I’d term gratuitous if nudity and violence weren’t the whole point of the movie.

If this sounds like your thing, have at it. I saw it for two reasons. First, it was free and I had nothing else to do. Second, I grudgingly respected the first installment for its dedication to being just plain wrong. So I’ll be there for CRANK 3. I know it’ll be bad. I know it’ll be offensive. But some train wrecks I just can’t help watching.

All About Eve

I’ve been expanding my horizons.

I’ve noticed that I see an inordinate number of guy movies. Advertise something in which some stuff blows up real good, or somebody kicks somebody else in the face, or someone intones, “I’m getting too old for this $#!^,” and it’s likely to find a place in my rental queue. Some of them are quite good. But it’s not enough to only seek out that which seeks us out. Thus, I’ve queued up a number of films that skew female. And I’ve learned that most chick movies go on my nerves.

So many chick movies, particularly romantic comedies, aren’t about women at all. They’re about stunted children, little girls in women’s bodies who still believe in ridiculous, destructive Brontean romanticism. How does that not get old?

Imagine, then, the thrill, the delight of seeing ALL ABOUT EVE for the first time. Here’s a movie about women, actual women, the kind of women you can sink your teeth into, the kind of women who can sink their teeth into you. Bette Davis, in the performance of a lifetime, is Margo Channing, a queen of Broadway and monarch in life. She’s smart, she’s proud, she’s tough, and she knows the ropes. She’s also too old to play the romantic lead much longer: her cheeks are starting to sag and all those cigarettes are catching up with her. Anne Baxter is Eve Harrington, who begins the story as what we’d refer to today as a stalker. She’s pretty and young and bright. She worms her way into Margo’s life, studies her, becomes her. Fasten your seatbelts. We’re in for a bumpy ride.

Pawns and victims include critic Addison De Witt, played by George Sanders in an Oscar-winning performance; Celeste Holm; Hugh Marlowe; Thelma Ritter; and even a very young (but already sparkling) Marilyn Monroe. These people feel like real people, with real problems and agendas of their own. Seeing them clash and jostle in the wake of powerhouses Davis and Baxter adds depth and texture to the story, making every minute of this film’s 2:18 length feel vital and real.

Movies about women don’t have to be chick movies. ALL ABOUT EVE proves that. Bring on the next.

State of Play

STATE OF PLAY is a political thriller, a journalism thriller. It begins with two deaths, which lead to more deaths, which lead to two reporters racing against time to uncover the byzantine twists of a story which isn’t what it seems even after they’ve realized that it isn’t what it seems. It’s a good story, well told, with sophistication and surprises; and it makes Washington as exciting as it seemed when I first moved here.

Russell Crowe, who Can Do No Wrong, and Rachel McAdams play reporters from the fictional Washington Globe. He’s an old school, ink-stained bastard of the highest order, and she, well, she writes the blog. Helen Mirren is their publisher, Jeff Daniels is the Minority Whip, and Ben Affleck and Robin Wright Penn are a straying congressman and the wife who stands beside him at the Press Conference of Shame. Why bother telling you this? Because these are high caliber performers, the kind who merit putting a film on the rental queue for their names alone. There are some weaker performances farther down the credits list, but don’t let them pull you out of the story.

For that matter, don’t let the story pull you out of the story. Early on, you may think it’s just another jeremiad against the political punching bag of the day. But give it time. Let a surprising Jason Bateman performance work on you, and see where things go. I think you’ll be pleased.

I understand that STATE OF PLAY is an adaptation of a BBC series with Bill Nighy and Kelly MacDonald, among others, so I’ll end with a question: have you seen it? Should I?

A Dirty Shame

A DIRTY SHAME is a comedy, I think. It isn’t funny, which kind of works against it, but it is outlandish. So if outlandish is your thing, there you are.

It’s a sex addiction farce that centers on sexual practices in which, to the best of my knowledge, no one engages. The sexual practices are supposed to be outlandishly funny, but they’re actually just ridiculous. There are some practices in the film in which people actually engage, but they’re handled with such wide-eyed wonder that it seems like the picture was made by people who’d only read about sex in books. This is the kind of sex comedy an early adolescent may find amusing because he or she doesn’t know any better.

Yes, there’s a heavyhanded lesson about tolerance and, yes, the film does have a sweet, sweet heart, but it failed to pass the first test of the comedy. It failed to bring so much as a smile to my lips.

Maybe next time, Mr. Waters.

The Aura

THE AURA is about a guy, a simple guy, kind of a sap, who gets in way over his head. There’s a girl, of course, and guns, and money. Lots of money.

In other words, it’s a noir picture. It’s also Argentine, which is pretty cool since that makes it the first Argentine noir picture I’ve ever seen. The sap is sufficiently sappish, the girl is sufficiently girlish, and so forth, and the whole thing really catches fire in the last 45 minutes. Problem is, it’s a two hour long picture. Act One takes forever and Act Two takes nearly as long. Act Three, that last 45 minutes, is solid, but even it could have been a bit shorter. Here’s a movie that has all the elements it needs but that could have benefitted from one more, supertight, edit.

It’s that edit that keeps this film from excellence and renders it, instead, to the vault of pretty-goodness. Still, if you like noir, and you’re interested in seeing an Argentine take on the genre, THE AURA ain’t bad.

Words and Music

"Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Songbook" is the soundtrack of heaven. I discovered it in the CD collection of a girl I was dating in 1989. I married the girl and, twenty years later, we still have the CD. So when I heard that there was a Rodgers and Hart biopic and that it was pretty doggone good, into the queue it went. I wanted to learn about these guys and their music.

I learned that the music is good, but it’s really the performer who makes it live.

WORDS AND MUSIC follows the Rodgers and Hart career arc, but it's more a retrospective, with moments of story serving mostly to segue between performances by distinguished artists of the day. But here's the problem: in the hands of wrong people, R&H's music goes from smart and sly classics to dated pop. Lena Horne is great and all, but her rendition of “Lady is a Tramp” in the film just can’t stand up to Ella’s on disc. June Allyson’s “Thou Swell” is a wet noodle compared to Nat King Cole’s in “Live at the Sands.” And don’t even get me started on comparisons with Sinatra.

Don’t get me wrong: the movie’s ok, particularly if you’re interested in even a fictionalized biopic of Rodgers and Hart. It’s just that nearly every time someone sang, I found myself comparing the performance with that of a better artist. All things considered, I prefer to remember Rodgers and Hart with the help of Fitzgerald and Cole and Sinatra, not the folks behind this picture.

Written on the Wind

Sooner or later, I had to get to Douglas Sirk. This is a director of influence, discussed and referenced decades after his passing. I've been putting him off because he worked in a time (the early Technicolor era) and a genre (melodrama) that doesn't appeal to me. But his work is seen as multilayered, with pulp for the matinee audience and cutting social commentary for the dinner-and-drinks crowd, and any student of the art form has to see him sometime. So what did Douglas Sirk have to say to me?

He had to say that America really, really needed rock 'n roll.

WRITTEN ON THE WIND's surface gloss is one of vapidity. It's shallow, finding joy in glittery handbags and hand blown glassware and gauzes and mind-numbingly plastic choral music - it's trying too hard to buy class, when real class comes from within. But look beneath the polish and you'll find all those old needs and emotions which have colored human drama since we figured out to get a steady supply of food, water, and shelter. You can't live on polish - it's too slippery. You need the grit of humanity, the anger and the love and the biology and all the rest. You need to embrace it, because it's the only way to get any real traction.

That's where rock and roll comes in. America needed it because it needed to put aside the postwar happy face and get back to the hard business of living. It needed Berry to remind it how to dance, Elvis to remind it how to love, The Beatles to rejuvenate it, and The Doors to help it find the dark places of its soul. All these things that Sirk criticizes, all these attitudes he laments, all the silliness he lampoons, they needed rock 'n roll to clean them out and ground America in reality once again.

Sirk had a lot to say. I'm glad I took the time to listen.

The Counterfeiters

THE COUNTERFEITERS (Die Fälscher), is the story of Salomon Smolianoff, a real-life convicted counterfeiter who, with along with other Jewish inmates of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, were forced to carry out Operation Bernhard. It's based on the memoirs of Adolf Burger, another prisoner who plays a critical role in the film.

Operation Bernhardt was directed by, and named after, Schutzstaffel Sturmbannführer (SS Major) Bernhard Krüger, who set up a team of 142 counterfeiters from inmates at Sachsenhausen concentration camp at first, and then from other camps, especially Auschwitz. Beginning in 1942, the work of engraving the complex printing plates, developing the appropriate rag-based paper with the correct watermarks, and breaking the code to generate valid serial numbers was extremely difficult, but by the time Sachsenhausen was evacuated in April 1945 the printing press had produced 8,965,080 banknotes with a total value of £134,610,810. The notes are considered among the most perfect counterfeits ever produced, being almost impossible to distinguish from the real currency. (Wikipedia: Operation Bernhardt)

It's the best history lesson about this particular episode of the War that has been committed to film. Unfortunately, it isn't a particularly gripping film. The picture's framing story tells us that its protagonist will survive, so the next hour and a half is merely an exercise in seeing how he does it. Sure, his conscience evolves. Sure, there are ethical dilemmas about the merits of saving one's own skin versus throwing a wrench into the Nazi war machine. But there isn't much we haven't seen before, and the film never fully captures our imagination.

If you're a history buff, I recommend this THE COUNTERFEITERS for its depiction of Operation Bernhardt. Otherwise, while it's a good film, I wouldn't counsel you to go out of your way for it.

The Lady Eve

The Lady Eve has the wrong title. The title should be Barbara Stanwyck Kicks Ass and Take Name for an Hour and a Half. Well, perhaps that's a bit much. How about Barbara Stanwyck is Better Than You, or Hey Moron, Why Aren't You in Love with Barbara Stanwyck Yet?

Whatever you call it, Preston Sturges's screwball comedy about a naive millionaire and the fraudsters out to fleece him is utterly, delightfully, hilariously brilliant. This is a movie that works spoken, physical, and character-based comedy into every scene, creating laugh-out-loud moments from sophisticated banter, pratfalls, and even simple moments like the unguarded shuffling of a deck of cards or the presentation of a lei.

Henry Fonda is the millionaire, a child of privilege on the return voyage from a long expedition up the Amazon. He's young, he's clumsy, he's idealistic, and he's so ridiculously, adorably, unstoppably in love that if you, dear reader, don't root for him, then you have an iron heart. Barbara Stanwyck is one of the fraudsters, the pretty girl who specializes in lovestruck rich morons. I've been crushing on Stanwyck since I saw Ball of Fire in 1982, and I've gotta tell you that her performance in this film eclipses even that classic. Stanwyck dominates every moment of The Lady Eve. She steals every scene she's in, and she steals every scene she's not in because even when none of the other characters are talking about her, they're talking about her. Her energy, her charisma, her combination of looks, brains, and balls (There's really no other way to put it: this dame's got big brass Bill the Goat balls.) sells Fonda's slackjawed lovesickness and sells her character's wit and audacity.

Toss in spot-on supporting comic performances from hall of famers Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette, William Demarest, and Eric Blore, perfect direction, editing, and scoring, and you have as good a screwball comedy as anyone has ever run through a projector. And, again, Stanwyck. What a performer. What a performance.

What a movie.

The Mutant Chronicles

Where do you go after a movie like 8 1/2? When you've just had a gourmet meal, what do you eat the next time you get hungry?

You go to a genre picture like THE MUTANT CHRONICLES for the same reason you go to McDonald's after that gourmet meal. When you've had a transcendent experience, you need to reset. Otherwise, you won't give perfectly fine but otherwise average fare its due. You'll be measuring it against that masterpiece, and it'll come up short.

And THE MUTANT CHRONICLES is as greasy a burger as you could want after the feast of 8 1/2. It's poorly written, poorly edited, poorly scored, poorly acted, and poorly conceived. It's an uncomfortable mishmash of WWI, zombies, and apocalyptic science fantasy set in a steampunk world that doesn't understand that automatic weapons create more and worse tissue damage in less time than swords. It has lame prophecies, halfhearted fu, and John Malkovich reading his lines from the back of a prop. It's just plain bad in every way, a nice counterpoint to 8 1/2 and a good way to ensure that the subsequent pictures on my Netflix queue get a fair shake.

So, yeah, I'm recommending it, after a fashion. If you spend all your time in the best restaurants, you need to remind your palette what bad tastes like. THE MUTANT CHRONICLES does the trick.

8 1/2

8 1/2 may the best film ever made.

If not, it is the best film about art ever made. Released in 1963, it would have been as relevant in 1889, the year after ROUNDHAY GARDEN SCENE, as it would be if it premiered tomorrow. It's a film that encompasses everything that art is about, or at least is supposed to be about. It's about the tension between truth and fiction, between art and commerce, between awareness and narcissism. And it's about everything that life is about. It's about commitment and betrayal, about memory and currency, reality and fantasy. It's about who we are and who we want to be, about ourselves and our self-constructs. It is, simply put, magnificent. It is the apotheosis of film and the indictment of the thin gruel we, as filmgoers, so regularly accept.

OK, so that's what it looks like when my mind is blown.

But this feels like a film I could see a thousand times. Not only is it a multisensual feast, but it probes, really probes, into the beating heart of life in a way no film I'd previously seen ever has. The photography complements the music complements the finely crafted story complements the performances complements the ideas that form the core of the work. 8 1/2 reveals Fellini at the height of his power, grappling with elemental dilemmas that have confronted man since he became self-aware. Mastroianni is incomparable. Cardinale and Aimée are revelatory. Every single thing about this picture is perfect. My only regret is that I've waited this long to see it.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

The Great War was supposed to end all wars. World War II was supposed to finish the job and put a stop to the Hun threat once and for all. Then the Cold War settled in, like a damp winter day, and it was Germany Germany Germany all over again.

This is the world of John le Carré, of George Smiley, of THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. It’s always winter here. Disillusionment permeates everything. Spies don’t drive sports cars, win at baccarat, and jump speedboats over islands. In the words of Alec Leamas, the film’s protagonist, “They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives.”

Richard Burton is Leamas, Section Chief of MI6’s Berlin bureau. He keeps losing men to Hans-Dieter Mundt, his opposite number in the Stasi. Perhaps it’s time for him to come in from the cold, to take a nice desk job in, say, the Banking Section back at Headquarters. Besides, George Smiley has an idea …

And so begins two hours of weary, bleary, tension. Of technicians who see the world not in shades of gray, but in varying levels of darkness. Of too much alcohol and too much time, of too much conscience or not conscience enough. Richard Burton, at the center of it all, is a world-weary force, a man who has been so long on the job that he can’t even tell if it’s a job any more. He’s magnificent, and the film is a marvel of care and maturity.

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD works. It works on every level. I feel weary just thinking about it. I think that’s good.

Mortal Kombat

Recently, a friend asked whether all films I like make me suspend belief. I responded that I hesitate to say that all films I like do one thing or another, but that yes, that’s generally the case.

MORTAL KOMBAT is among the reasons why I hesitated. This film is so poorly acted, so lazily choreographed and shot, so lame in so many ways that it requires an act of conscious will to suspend one’s disbelief for its running time. I love it anyway.

Here’s why: there’s a bit during which Johnny Cage, who is essentially Jean Claude Van Damme, is fighting a villain who can make lizard heads on chains fly from his palms. The fight begins in a beautiful grove, then magically transports to a kickass set that appears to be made of old sailing ship parts, plaster skeletons, cobwebs, and red gel lights. Cage lays down the fu just fine, but then he finds a pullup bar conveniently placed near a platform. He goes on to do a full Tribute to Gymkata, flips onto a platform, then does a nifty jumpkick to the villain’s head. That’s just awesome. Later in the fight, the villain turns into a flaming skeleton, a la GHOST RIDER, which is also awesome. Then Cage finds a way to blow up the flaming skeleton and does a classic “leap away from the rear projection fireball.” Among the debris that comes fluttering down is, you guessed it, an autographed photo of Johnny Cage, inscribed to his “Biggest Fan.” I say that if your biggest fan is a recently exploded flaming skeleton, then your career is going GREAT!

So yeah, it’s lame. Christopher Lambert is a lousy Basil Exposition. Robin Shou spends too much time on his hair. Bridgette Wilson, Talisa Soto, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa are terrible actors. The fu isn’t good enough to merit long takes. But Linden Ashby (as Cage) acquits himself well; the creature design, particularly for the multiarmed warrior Goro, is quite good; the sets and locations are fantastic and beautiful; and the soundtrack is thumpin’.

All things considered, MORTAL KOMBAT is way more fun than it has any right to be.