That Obscure Object of Desire - 1977 - 4 Stars

Actors: Fernando Rey, Carole Bouquet

Director: Luis Bunuel

I think that where foreign films can often excel domestic pictures is in their examination of love. I brought up Truffaut/Hitchcock in my review of Husbands and Wives, and I'm going to cite it here again - too often directors think that dialogue is the way to tell the story. So when dialogue is basically reduced to reading, we end up watching instead of listening. Not a word of dialogue is meaningful in this film - it could even be silent for very long stretches.

The plot is so paper-thin that it's difficult to write anything about this film without spoiling it. An older, wealthy man pursues a younger, poorer woman. The film details their time together. There's also a bizarre underlying story about terrorism which I couldn't quite fit with the main story, but I know there's many connections.

One of the drawbacks of the film is that the story is so 'universal' (even though it's not, it's easily generalized to be so) that it is somewhat bland until the second half.

The Apartment - 1960 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Jack Lemmon, Shirley Maclaine

Director: Billy Wilder

Note: Minor plot spoilers

It's hard to know where to begin with The Apartment, a story that is as old as written stories are, yet so carefully updated to modern times. The titular apartment is that of C.C. Baxter (Lemmon), who rents it out to his philandering superiors at the behemoth insurance company he works for. This causes some obvious discomfort for him, and that discomfort begins to grow as the film progresses.

There's some brilliant visual work on display in this film, but what really sells it are the acting performances. Lemmon is superb as the put-upon Baxter, MacLaine excellent as the lovelorn Fran Kubelik, and Fred MacMurray might even outdo both of them as the swaggering personnel manager.

Wilder's detractors cast him as a cynical misanthrope, and I can kind of see that here. Still, aside from some broad performances by supporting players and minor quibbles with the film's ending, this is a stunning achievement.

The Achievers: The Story Of The Lebowski Fans - 2008 - No Rating

Subject: The Big Lebowski's Incredibly Devoted Fan Base

Director: Eddie Chung

I give this film no rating because it deserves none. I'm not quite sure how this ended up on my queue, but I do know that it took over a year for me to see it. It's a documentary about how Lebowski fans throw big parties called Lebowski Fest where people dress in costume, answer trivia questions about the movie, bowl, and generally hang out. There were a few interviews with actors from the film and people who the film is based on, but mostly there were interviews with fans.

What I was ultimately confused about was this film's existence at all. It's generally a community of people talking about how great it is to be a part of that community. Who decided this needed to get made? It's one thing to say 'I like and am really passionate about this thing.' It's yet another to be filmed saying it as part of a documentary. Is my passion about something that important? (Yes, I've noted the irony of writing this on a blog about my passion for movies, so shut up). There's some funny Lebowski-related stuff in here, but what I came away with is that people explaining why they like something is almost always boring. The run-time is also too long at 70 minutes - it should likely be 50.

The Last Detail - 1973 - 3 Stars, 4½ Stars

Actors: Jack Nicholson, Otis Young, Randy Quaid

Director: Hal Ashby

I decided to give The Last Detail two ratings because I think it's unfair to downgrade the films for the limitations of its time and genre. The Last Detail is a 70s 'road' movie in the aimless 70s way - there's a lot of scenes where people sit in a room, on a bus, or in a car, and talk. They don't talk in some sort of stylized speech, they're not throwing out punchlines, and they're not much more vivified than any person you may meet. Some of the time the characters are bored, and so the audience is likely to be bored as well. The plot is paper-thin and doesn't offer very much tension.

However, given the limitations of this genre, The Last Detail is still an engrossing character study. Nicholson gives an outstanding performance, playing basically the same character he plays in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Young and Quaid are similarly outstanding. It's hard to talk about the film's themes, or what it's all ultimately about - everything is so buried in the mundane. Underneath all that, there's a very rich examination of the way people live their lives.

The Postman Always Rings Twice - 1946 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Lana Turner, John Garfield

Director: Tay Garnett

Film noir is often difficult to write about. It's so stylistic and showy that it doesn't exactly relate to our normal lives, unless we are down-on-our-luck private detectives or possibly a femme who may have some fatale qualities. It doesn't say all that much about the world, necessarily. It just promises to be a story of sin where you get thrown in and don't know the end.

The Postman Always Rings Twice ends up being that, but it is a touch long for an older film (113 minutes), and may contain one or two too many twists. It is an interesting examination of love, lust, and trust. Unfortunately our protagonist doesn't have much going for him, and the most interesting male characters are bunted aside. Lana Turner is outstanding as the femme fatale. Hardly a must-see, but an enjoyable watch.

Gran Torino - 2008 - 4 Stars

Actors: Clint Eastwood, Bee Vang

Director: Clint Eastwood

I try not to hear anything about films I intend to see - I'll usually read a review when the film comes out, but other than that, I steer clear of other information. My initial impression was that Gran Torino was Get Off My Lawn: The Movie, a tale about a beleaguered elderly man whose neighborhood is changing all around him. This is partly true, but it's incredibly reductive.

Note: Spoilers Ahead

I want to dislike this movie very much, but Eastwood's performance drives the film. He manages to play an old man as neither doddering nor completely with it, as both inflexible and willing to change, and both callous and sensitive. This kind of performance is needed because the rest of the film is filled with archetypes. Eastwood himself is an archetype - again, he's playing a widowed man as he did in Unforgiven (and as he might have in Million Dollar Baby, I can't recall), and there's some Dirty Harry in his bearing, but he pulls off a unique performance.

I'm not a huge fan of Eastwood's work - there's something incredibly Hollywood about all of the characters in this film, much as there was in Million Dollar Baby. There's also a neatly divided line between good and evil. Still, there's something to be said for a good movie that's not trying to be subtle and that's not about some repressed manchild. Eastwood will be missed when he retires.

Moon - 2009 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey

Director: Duncan Jones

Moon feels like a strange pastiche of the great sci-fi films - there appear to be several allusions to 2001, as well as at least one oblique reference to Tarkovsky's Solaris. Still, despite going over well-worn sci-fi ground, the film is very well acted and shot. Moon deserves a special thumbs up its very cool depiction of the moon - I think the filmmakers got special permission to use the set where they faked the original Apollo 11 landing.

Note: Spoilers Ahead

One thing I did enjoy about the film was that it was not a man v. computer struggle, as I had expected it to be. Kevin Spacey's 'Gerty' is almost human with its screen that shows its 'mood' - quizzical, unhappy, or happy. The computer is perfectly content to be servile - it does not regard Sam Bell as a threat. The first time Gerty talks, we are immediately reminded of Hal, but this computer turns out to be quite different.

The 'happy' ending is totally unearned, but I suppose that sort of thing is bound to happen. Furthermore, the plot itself is completely unrealistic - is it really easier to clone a guy 80 times and keep him totally in the dark about being a clone than sending a new person to do his job? Regardless, it's an interesting look at labor relations, and the sacrifices people can end up making for their families for the promise of a 'better life'.

Another interesting idea was the interaction between the cloned Sam Bells. Neither really has authority over the other, and despite being clones, they're quite different people. There's none of that hackneyed garbage like them hearing each other's thoughts or finishing each other's sentences. Sam Rockwell's performance also helps to define them as two different people.

One last note: Sam Bell calls his daughter from the moon. She is going to put someone else on the line to talk about her mother - it sounds like there's a Sam Bell there, does it not?

Husbands and Wives - 1992 - 4 Stars

Actors: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow

Director: Woody Allen

Woody Allen has written and directed a film every year since 1981. It's an absolutely amazing output; I can't think of anyone with a body of work even close to as all-encompassing as Allen's. Yet his career disappoints me. His films are like jazz performances of the same song - sure, all the notes and beats won't be the same on each performance, but they won't be all that different either. The underlying themes remain the same.

Husbands and Wives should be a tour de force, a career-defining film. Allen is at his most inventive with camera work - the camera swirls around people's New York City apartments, sometimes focusing on the person who's not talking. Allen experiments with jump cutting as well, using that to great effect. There's extended monologues where the camera stays focused on the person speaking for the entire time. It's really great stuff, and would be greater if I hadn't seen most of Allen's 'best work'.

I'm currently reading the book Truffaut/Hitchcock which is merely an interview of Alfred Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut. It's fascinating stuff. Hitchcock says that too many directors rely on dialogue to get their point across. Film is an inherently visual medium, he says, and too often directors forget that. Allen has made so many almost great films, but he lards them up with narration or other fourth-wall breaking devices that allow him to get all his points across. In Husbands and Wives, for instance, there's several scenes where it appears that the characters are either in therapy or being interviewed for a television show. Maybe there just isn't a good visual way to bring across the way that people convince themselves to either accept their lot in life or seek something different; maybe these people have to talk into the camera to really get a sense of how fleeting their feelings are. I don't know. Part of me just wishes that Allen had only made 15 films over the last 29 years - I think his output would be far stronger.

The Rules Of The Game - 1939 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Nora Gregor, Marcel Dalio

Director: Jean Renoir

The Rules of the Game is so ingeniously plotted that it feels like adapted Shakespeare - it is continually twisting and turning as the characters' desires bend and sway and break. Set in pre-WWII France, The Rules of the Game concerns the marital and extra-marital affairs of a particularly bourgeois set and their hired help.

It's really the film's inventive camera-work that's appealing - scenes are stuffed with characters moving in and out of the shot, and Renoir always manages some way to show the most important character(s) in the scene even if they're not talking. The only complaint I'd have is that it is difficult to keep track of all the characters, but still, I think that's part of the fun.

My Own Private Idaho - 1991 - 3 Stars

Actors: River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves

Director: Gus Van Sant

For all its flaws, My Own Private Idaho is clearly made by a talented and inventive filmmaker. A loose adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV set in the Pacific Northwest (and concerning male prostitutes), Idaho... contains scenes bursting with creative life, and scenes that seem to drag on endlessly. Among all the virtuosity, it's hard to get a grip on our main characters until the end of the film. I'd like to label this sort of movie a 'things happen' movie - because that's what happens in this movie. We go from place to place without much investment in our characters. I feel like if one or two scenes were trimmed, and one or two scenes added, this could have been a great film.

On the plus side, I've never seen a less wooden performance out of Keanu Reeves - he actually looks like an actor in this film.

The White Ribbon - 2009 - 4 Stars

Actors: Ulrich Tukur, Susanne Lothar

Director: Michael Haneke

The White Ribbon has 3 strikes against it to any potential viewer - it's foreign, it's in black and white, and it's a period film. Set in the early 20th century, The White Ribbon explores a breakdown in civility within a small German village. The film excels is at making this village and all its characters feel real. There's no one who is too attractive to have been living in an early 20th century village, for instance. It takes a while to get going, and some of the characters are difficult to distinguish from one another, but such is a black and white film where everyone wears drab clothing.

What The White Ribbon really feels like is Dostoyevsky, which is high praise for a film. There's elements of all his works in here; for instance, the reserved way in which the characters comport themselves in public being contrasted with the evil things that people do and have done to them in private. There's the way in which some characters celebrate their own baseness. Haneke explores how class affects people's relations with one another; small towns are a perfect place to do that. One almost comes away from the movie knowing less than when one went in, which is a kind of success.

Unforgiven - 1992 - 4 Stars

Actors: Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman

Director: Clint Eastwood

When we leave behind an old habit or even a way of life, does it remain a part of us? How much of a part of us is it? And what would it take to reawaken that part?

Unforgiven asks these questions and answers them in a roundabout fashion. Great performances from Hackman and Eastwood, as well as all of the women in the film. It's this portrayal of women that tells us Unforgiven is not a typical Western, which is perhaps why it won an Oscar.

Hot Tub Time Machine - 2010 - 3 Stars

Actors: John Cusack, Craig Robinson

Director: Steve Pink

It's hard for me to believe that meta time-machine humor exists, but it does. Hot Tub Time Machine plays around with the tropes established by films like Back to the Future and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure without directly referencing them. There's also an inordinately large special effects budget for this film - they really went all out with the whole Hot Tub Time Machine concept. Regardless, the movie gets some pretty consistent laughs throughout, even if it never had me laughing uproariously.

Note: Spoilers Ahead

Much like The Hangover, I do have a problem with the film philosophically - but I suppose that's ridiculous for a film called Hot Tub Time Machine. Whatever the case, the film's happy ending was not happy for me.

Z - 1969 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Yves Montand, Irene Papas

Director: Costa-Gravas

Z begins with what is probably a famous statement - "Any resemblance in this film to any persons, living or dead, is not accidental - it is INTENTIONAL." I don't really know if the events of Z are true, and it's been 45 years since they occurred. This is helpful, I think, to evaluate the film - I didn't see it from an idealogical standpoint, even though the film unquestionably takes a stand.

Where Z succeeds and a lesser movie could have failed is in its commitment to demonstrating self-interest at every turn - our heroes are not heroes, and our villains not fully villainous. Everyone has their reasons for doing what they did, and their reasons often are less airy than ideology. From a direction standpoint, there's also some brilliantly conceived camera shots; the filmmaker was able to restrain his anger enough to create audacious shots that are too rarely seen in American cinema.

Gates of Heaven - 1978 - No Rating

Subject: Pet Cemeteries

Director: Errol Morris

I've decided to give no rating to Gates of Heaven, because rating such a film is a silly exercise. Gates of Heaven is purportedly about pet cemeteries, but the film is about much more than that. It's a definite must-see for anyone who considers themselves a movie aficionado.

I'd seen Gates of Heaven before, and on the second viewing, it perhaps made less sense. This isn't to say that the movie is confusing, but Morris doesn't guide us along. There's no voice-over narration. He's not an investigator, like he is in many of his other documentaries. He's merely an observer. What he observes is so oddly fascinating that I can't begin to describe it.

Primer - 2004 - 4 Stars

Actors: Shane Carruth, David Sullivan

Director: Shane Carruth

It's almost impossible to give a primer on Primer - I can't tell what the hell happened myself. It's a no-budget film about the implications of scientific discovery. The acting is between passable and bad. The story, however, is fascinating. I don't want to give anything at all away, but the film did remind me quite a bit of the huge-budgeted Inception. Unlike Inception, though, I'm going to have to watch this film a second time.

Badlands - 1973 - 4 Stars

Actors: Sissy Spacek, Martin Sheen

Director: Terrence Malick

Badlands is one of those independent 70s films that rests on the performances of the actors. These films rely heavily on acting because they're scripted in the way that people tend to talk and think - if we (as normal people) had the perfect words for every moment, we'd likely be Hollywood screenwriters. We don't, and so what we can't quite express has to come out in gestures and glances. Spacek and Sheen are perfect at this, and it makes the movie believable. We don't always understand what we do, and sometimes we can't even find the words to rationalize what we've done.

Note: Spoilers Ahead

I thought at first that the film was too similar to Bonnie and Clyde, but the film avoids the histrionics and generational commentary pitfall that that movie fell into. It's not a celebration of violence, nor is Martin Sheen's character necessarily violent. It's hard to know what to make of him by the end - Malick certainly doesn't tell us, nor does he plant a bunch of giant symbols that point the way.

One negative was the voice-over, which seemed necessary but was a touch overused. All in all, I think I'd like this film more if I saw it again.

Kicking and Screaming - 1995 - 4 Stars

Actors: Josh Hamilton, Olivia D'Abo

Director: Noah Baumbach

It's always difficult to rate indies like Kicking and Screaming - I think perhaps I should do away with rating them altogether. These movies are so often piecemeal and overtalkative, but they can also emulate life in a scary way. A film chronicling four graduated college seniors trying to adjust to life outside the comforting embrace of education, Baumbach as writer/director nails all the tropes of Northeastern private colleges. The overeducated using their reasoning skills on total ephemera, the pathetic 30+ year old graduate still hanging around, the ridiculousness of campus life - it's all represented with just the right amount of absurdity. Still, the film overdoes the symbolism of its title, and it never lets us develop much sympathy for any of its characters. Much like college, Kicking and Screaming is a place that's great to spend time for a while, but there's definitely a right time to leave.

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men - 2009 - 3 Stars

Actors: Julianne Nicholson, John Krasinski

Director: John Krasinski

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men was originally a short story by David Foster Wallace that was exactly what its title suggested - invented interviews between an unseen, unheard female and men who tell stories that cast them in a less than noble light. Director John Krasinski selected difficult source material - not only does he have to provide a story around the interviews, but he has to dramatize the interviews as well. He calls on a stable of noted character actors to play the titular men, and the performances are a strength. Still, his use of jump-cutting and inability to put more than a wisp of story around the original work make this a difficult watch for anyone who hasn't already read the original.

The Searchers - 1956 - 4 Stars

Actors: John Wayne, Ward Bond

Director: John Ford

This is a trite observation, but one thing that Westerns such as The Searchers succeed at is presenting things with moral clarity. They can present situations that you or I would never get into as moral questions - what would you do, if faced with this decision? I think it's one reason I don't care that much for Westerns - I'm too larded down by society to ever think I could get into one of these moral situations. So many niggling factors come into the decisions we make now; someone of Ethan Edwards' moral framework not only seems like he's from another time (because he is), but perhaps even another species. However, the moral decisions he makes are still of vital importance, decisions we will be considering long after we've forgotten about the worthless subplots in this film.

Wayne's Ethan Edwards is a classic film character - knowledgeable, contemptuous, quick to anger, and mysterious.

Clockwatchers - 1997 - 2½ Stars

Actors: Toni Collette, Parker Posey

Director: Jill Sprecher

Movies about the minor frustrations of modern life have a hurdle to overcome - monotony doesn't translate well to film. It is anti-film. Luckily, Clockwatchers is unambitious enough that it doesn't tumble into being unwatchable. Detailing the mundane interactions of four temp workers as they struggle with frustration and impermanence, Clockwatchers could be called a comedy. However, it is neither funny nor unfunny. It consists of many setups with no punchline, and punchlines with no setups. Its rhythms are, in short, the rhythms of unedited life.

Plot threads go nowhere and the plot itself is paper-thin. Some of the editing and direction feels off. Still, Clockwatchers sufficiently captures what it's after.

The Ice Storm - 1997 - 3 Stars

Actors: Kevin Kline, Joan Allen

Director: Ang Lee

It's a mystery how a metaphor actually works. When it does, it evokes something real - it feels true to our life, we empathize with it, and it may even unearth feelings or thoughts we may not have known that we had. When it doesn't, it feels contrived and unreal. A false metaphor is a virus that threatens others; they might somehow believe this false thing to evoke real feelings and thoughts in themselves. People need to be warned.

The Ice Storm has all of the pieces to be an excellent drama, but it's in the details that the drama unravels. I don't know if the film should have concentrated on only one story, or condensed some of the stories and lengthened others. I don't know if it's because this is ground that films like American Beauty and Donnie Darko have trod over in my mind. Something about it misfires - it feels untrue.

Overnight - 2003 - 3½ Stars

Subject: Writer/Director Troy Duffy and the making of the film Boondock Saints

Director: Tony Montana

Note: Spoilers below

There's a kind of irony to the ascent of the absurdly successful entertainers and athletes of our day - many of them very sincerely believed that their success was not only possible, but inevitable. Given that this kind of success not only takes hard work but extraordinary luck - the hard work/luck balance naturally being different in entertainment than sports, but still a balance - these people have to possess an extreme amount of self-delusion. Nowhere is this extreme self-delusion better depicted than in the documentary film Overnight, which chronicles Troy Duffy's ascent from Hollywood bartender to self-appointed future rock god and film mogul to embittered failure.

Duffy's career arc and general attitude is a reverse Entourage - not only does Duffy not succeed, but he screws everyone he promised fame and wealth to in the process. There's also a further irony that Harvey Weinstein, Duffy's promoter turned nemesis, has also been kicked quite a bit by the Hollywood system. Success is fleeting - a lesson that Troy Duffy never understands.

Sleeper - 1973 - 3 Stars

Actors: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton

Director: Woody Allen

I'd seen Sleeper before, long ago, when my dad inexplicably began showing me Woody Allen movies at around age 11. I think I'd already seen the comedies I wanted to see at the local video store, so he tried to get me into Allen films. I didn't get it then, but now that I do get it, I'm not sure I wanted to.

Cool stories aside, there's all the hallmarks of a Woody Allen film here - absurd quips, Marx Brothers' homages, feelings of inadequacy, mistrust of anything outside of New York City, and yet it's all set in the year 2173. It makes for one bizarre film, a weirdo pastiche of slapstick humor, quips about 1973 current events, and commentary on dystopias (I guess?).

Sleeper, like Annie Hall and Love and Death after it, relies heavily on the chemistry between Allen and Keaton; Keaton is outstanding at participating in all the absurdity that's put on screen. Many of the gags may fall flat, but it's a movie I still wanted to like.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...And Spring - 2004 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Yeong-su, Ki-duk Kim

Director: Ki-duk Kim

The best stories are often the simplest, for they are the most memorable. Part of the brilliance of a Shakespeare is that the main action of his plays can often be summed up in a sentence. Meanwhile, try summarizing a po-mo novel six months after you've read it. Too often our culture's art, commenting on the disposability and transience of modern culture, emulates its target too well.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...And Spring is one of these extraordinarily simple stories, with an almost fable quality. A Master and an Acolyte live in a small Buddhist temple that sits in the middle of a lake, and this film tells the story of their life together.

Naturally the film can be described with words like meditative or contemplative; the cinematography (and setting) are beautiful. While I'm not sure I agree with the moral teachings of the film, if there are any, I can say that it led me to thinking a great deal about the way the West has taught us to think.

The King of Marvin Gardens - 1972 - 4 Stars

Actors: Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern

Director: Bob Rafelson

Note: Vague spoilers below

The King of Marvin Gardens is a classically 70s slow-moving character study. Chronicling a disaffected loser and his hustler brother working together on get-rich-quick schemes in faded 1970s Atlantic City, the film's plot could be said to be wandering, if it even exists at all. There's a very Cassavetes feel to the film - like Cassavetes films, it also has the slight problem of both trying to depict 'real' life, while also having its characters going through a whirlwind of emotions making grand theatrical gestures - i.e. acting in the way that we think 'actors' stereotypically conduct themselves when off-stage.

Bruce Dern is magnificent as an ingratiating confidence man - his winning smile often fading from his face as his fidgeting hands betray his actual inner state.

Down By Law - 1986 - 2 Stars

Actors: Tom Waits, John Lurie

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Note: Spoilers for this film, and very minor spoilers for Broken Flowers, Dead Man, Coffee and Cigarettes, and Stranger than Paradise below.

I didn't like this film, and I've come to realize that besides Stranger than Paradise, I don't really like Jim Jarmusch films in general. There's several problems that I have with his filmmaking techniques.

1. His use of protagonists with no discernible qualities

Bill Murray's character in Broken Flowers, Johnny Depp's in Dead Man, and John Lurie's in this film and Stranger than Paradise, don't really have much about them. They're sketches of people - malleable throughout the film to whichever shape Jarmusch needs them to take.

2. The unbelievability of these characters

Likewise, it was difficult to believe that Bill Murray's character was a successful businessman who had many torrid love affairs, that John Lurie was a pimp in Down by Law. Bill Murray's character is especially unbelievable - he's this despondent man-child, incapable of joy, it's hard to imagine his wooing of these women. Lurie's pimp is even less believable, in the few minutes that we see him as such, he is comically inept.

3. The union of these characters with goofy, elfin characters from the planet Indie Film

The goofy, elfin character is Eva from Stranger than Paradise, Xebeche from Dead Man, and Roberto in Down by Law; these characters imbue the uninteresting protagonist's life and show them how colorful and joyous life can be. All three are total fictions, their presence in the film mere indie quirk.

4. Jarmusch's insistence on using bad actors/improvisation or both

Jarmusch gets a lot of wooden performances out of people. This may be intentional; I'm not sure. It feels like he loves improvisation, but improvisation requires skilled actors, and Jarmusch so often casts non-actors in and around his films.

5. Stuff just happens for no reason

Each Jarmusch film feels like a shaggy-dog story, where characters decide to do something because the film needs them to. In Down By Law, the characters escape from prison because it's eventually really boring that they're in prison. Likewise with the trip to Cleveland in Stranger Than Paradise - the film is trapped in New York, so it leaves. I suppose this emulates life, but in no-budget filmmaking with lots of improvisation, it all feels very contrived.

Down By Law's main limitation may be its budget, which appears to be almost nothing. This may have forced the director's hand with regard to takes, shooting locations, and even plot.

This diatribe is not to say that Jim Jarmusch should not direct films, or that I didn't really enjoy Stranger than Paradise, but I don't really understand them, in the same way that I don't get a lot of Wes Anderson films. They're character-driven films without anyone who's believable or particularly interesting. I guess I'll have to take a break from them.

The Wild Bunch - 1969 - 4 Stars

Actors: William Holden, Ernest Borgnine

Director: Sam Peckinpah

The Wild Bunch should be required viewing for all of these Tony Scott wannabes filming action sequences with shaky cameras and a trillion cuts all over the place. Peckinpah and editor Louis Lombardo's cutting of this film is amazing - we ARE confused during shootouts in this film, in large part because shootouts are very confusing. Yet we as viewers are rarely unclear about where we are or what, exactly, is going on.

The Wild Bunch lost points from me for an extended action-less stretch of the film that felt self-indulgent. We get some character development, but not enough to justify the lengthy break in plot. Upon second watch, these scenes may make more sense within the framework of the film, perhaps enough to bump this up to a 4 and a half. Still, this film gets an A+ for sheer badassery.

The Informant! - 2009 - 2½ Stars

Actors: Matt Damon, Melanie Lynskey

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Note: Spoilers ahead

The Informant! is an ambitious failure, a film that attempts to throw us down a rabbit-hole where truth and deception battle for supremacy. The film doesn't work because of how twisted around the audience ends up becoming - we're not really that interested in who's lying and why. Ultimately, I suspect the absurdity of the film worked much better on paper - the idea that a person embezzling money would run to the government to expose other crimes sounds quite funny. The idea that the main character would have a lot of voiceover about banal things for the whole film sounds funny, but in execution it's merely amusing at times, unnecessary at others. The film may have been better served by leaving reality altogether, or even by revealing the end at the beginning (a move which I've criticized many times).

As a side note, it was fun to see lots of comedy pros pop up in this film, like Patton Oswalt and Paul F. Tompkins, as well as the guy who played Biff in Back to the Future.

The Dungeon Masters - 2008 - 3 Stars

Director: Keven McAlester

Subject: Dungeons and Dragons players

I love documentaries about obsessive sub-cultures like Spellbound, Word Wars, or episodes of Errol Morris's First Person. There's hundreds of niches around the U.S. for people to crawl into and become a different person. These sorts of documentaries usually highlight how proficient people are within their sub-culture, and how lost and confused they are outside of it.

It's easy to understand the allure of things like Dungeons and Dragons even if one has no interest in playing - it's a world that you can create and live in, a world where challenges are confronted and overcome by reason and chance. God may not play dice with the universe, but in D&D, he most certainly does.

Unfortunately, I think the documentary is a little unfair, and I don't think it does a very good job of getting past the freakish nature of who these people are and how they occupy their time. Their sad-sackness is more played for cheap jokes than pathos.

Re-Review - Greenberg - 2010 - 4 Stars

Actors: Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig

Director: Noah Baumbach

A film like Greenberg should not even show in theaters. A theater is a terrible place to watch a film that is awkwardly funny, where there's no real punchlines, and where at most half the crowd will be laughing.

I've compared Baumbach to Woody Allen, and I think that's a perfectly cromulent comparison. However, one place Greenberg differs from the Allen films I've seen is that at no point does Greenberg purport to be a meta-film - our protagonist is not self-consciously telling us this story. Allen's neurotic hero, in spite of his neuroses, we root for - Ben Stiller's Greenberg leaves us much more ambivalent. As a result, I don't think a film like this can ever really be a great film, but Greenberg does just about as well as it can. It's not moving, but it's always interesting.

I didn't realize the first time just how good Ben Stiller's performance is. While I think it's not that hard to nail a role like this - there's only about three or four moods Stiller has to convey - he nails the movements and the gestures of the character.

A Woman Under The Influence - 1974 - 5 Stars

Actors: Peter Falk, Gena Rowlands

Director: John Cassavetes

A Woman Under the Influence is what I like to call a one-monther. It's the sort of film that one receives from their Netflix account and groans upon seeing that it is a 2 hour and 30 minute John Cassavetes film. It takes a month to mount the resolve to watch the film.

I don't know if A Woman Under the Influence deserves 5 stars, as it is rough around the edges and probably has at least ten minutes that could be trimmed. It is, after all, a Cassavetes film. However, the film tricked me - I thought it was going to be about one thing, when it turns out that it's about something else entirely. I think it might need that time to perform this trick, to have this alteration come about organically.

When writing, it's very tempting to put something in a character's mouth, to have him or her say the thing he or she is thinking. However, Cassavetes understands that that's not generally how people act - they react emotionally, but they keep their thoughts guarded; they say other things. A Woman Under The Influence avoids being on the nose - it lets the characters' emotions speak for them.

The performance of Gena Rowlands as the titular woman is staggering - she avoids caricature in a part where that's almost impossible.

Comedian - 2002 - 2½ Stars

Subjects: Jerry Seinfeld, Orny Adams

Director: Christian Charles

I first saw Comedian as part of a focus group in 2002. Jerry Seinfeld was in attendance - this was, in effect, the premiere of his documentary film. About 20 minutes into the film, several people walked out. Perhaps they were misled into thinking this was a stand-up film, perhaps not - watching the film again, it's not hard to see why they left. It seems they were merely interested in the sausage, not the process that went into making it.

The premise of the film is that Jerry Seinfeld has thrown away all of his old material and is trying to go back on tour as a comedian, even after making millions with his television show. The parts with Seinfeld are engaging, even as annoying as it can be to listen to an incredibly successful person worry about his future success. The film goes off the rails with its 'B' story, which involves an aspiring comic star named Orny Adams. Adams is endlessly self-involved, but the real problem is that he's not funny. On stage he is funny, but off-stage he is painfully neurotic, and painfully unlikable. We see Seinfeld joking around with other comics, even working on bits with them - Adams is merely jabbering to the camera, always about himself, either about minor slights he has suffered, or triumphs he has performed. Finding out that stand-up comics are actually insufferable isn't a surprise, but they also make for a surprisingly poor documentary.

Standard Operating Procedure - 2008 - 3 Stars

Director: Errol Morris

Errol Morris documentaries tend to be about people on the fringes of society, far away from public attention. This has changed in recent years, first with The Fog of War's subject (Robert McNamara) and now Standard Operating Procedure, about the torture in the Abu Gharib prison.

Morris's documentary suffers in part because we've already seen the shocking photographs and have likely come to our own conclusions about the moral character of the torturers. We do get a different and perhaps more sympathetic look at the people involved, and an investigation into how photographs both reveal and conceal information. The film is well-crafted in the way that Morris documentaries always are, but it fails to be truly gripping.

Notorious - 1946 - 4 Stars

Actors: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Notorious's strength is that its suspense makes us shout at the screen. A film with more kiss kiss than bang bang, Hitchcock once again demonstrates that often it is what we do not see, but rather anticipate, that makes us terrified. This is a lesson that modern action directors should have learned from Hitchcock and films like Jaws, but they seem to have cast this aside for an excess of bang bang. Christopher Nolan's Inception is a good candidate for a film that suffers from constant gunplay.

This is a film that suffers from not being shot on location. I think of it as an American The Third Man - but of course, The Third Man was filmed in Vienna, and uses that to wonderful effect.

Slumdog Millionaire - 2008 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Dev Patel, Freida Pinto

Director: Danny Boyle

Note: Spoilers below

Ruminations on the nature of chance and Fate in film often come off as hollow, and Slumdog Millionaire is no exception to that rule. Film is a fantastical creation; we go to films in order to believe the story that's being put up there. Incredible coincidences are a part of many films - we want to believe that our lives are so ordained, that Fate will reach down a helping hand and show us the way (preferably with triumphant music behind us) to true happiness.

Slumdog Millionaire's most interesting conceit is that its protagonist knows the answers to the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? questions because of the amount of suffering he's undergone in his life - that his painful experiences are actually helping him through his Cliff Claven Millionaire round, despite the fact that he is remarkably ignorant.

It's tempting to hate Oscar-winning films, but this is a well-made film. It flatters us in a hateful way, and is clearly derivative of City of God, but stories like this are why we go to movies in the first place. We don't go to see stories about millions of poor people who suffer in silence; we go to see someone beating the odds.

As an aside, it was somewhat difficult to take seriously the love interest in this film after Tasha Robinson at the A.V. Club took apart films where the protagonists pine for childhood love well into adulthood, correctly noting that that behavior is not romantic, it is creepy.

Raiders Of The Lost Ark - 1981 - 4 Stars

Actors: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen

Director: Steven Spielberg

I was amazed to learn that I'd never actually seen this movie. Whole sections of it were a complete mystery. I'd seen films 2 and 3 more times than I can count, given the frequency of their running on cable, but somehow this one eluded me. It's an excellent film; I think 3 is stronger, but this one is certainly a very close #2.

The film succeeds because it does not load itself up with exposition and explanations - one of the most basic film rules is that if a director creates a world engrossing enough, the audience will accept it largely without question; we want to believe, that's what we come to the movies to do. So questions like, 'If the Ark has such power, why did it ever fall into Egyptian hands in the first place?' are only asked by nits such as myself.

Having finally seen this, I am even more disposed to mistrust people who hated the 4th installment based on its subject - perhaps we should realize that we all grew up in the meantime. The 4th film fails not because of its subject matter, but because its world is so familiar that we no longer sink into it.

Inglorious Basterds - 2009 - 1½ Stars, 4½ Stars

Actors: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Note: Spoilers below.

I give this film two ratings because I feel it is unfair to combine my absolute abhorrence of the plot with my appreciation for the superb manner in which Tarantino works within this horrid conception.

The plot is awful for two reasons: the overwhelming presence of the Nazi, and Tarantino's self-congratulatory insistence on having his film revolve around the power of film. Beginning with Nazis: I don't like World War 2 films in general because of the total lack of moral ambiguity much of these films demonstrate. We are turned into Romans waiting for the Germans to be tossed to the lions. No doubt there's some particularly evil and conniving German, with immaculate suit, boundless ambition, and solely propaganda in his heart and head - oh, to see him killed, what glory! Tarantino revels in this - there are few other people whom an audience would tolerate seeing scalped, but Nazis, let's see that brain.

Second, the fact that this film revolves around the movie world in the 1940s is an even poorer choice. We get it: film has the power to transform minds, to make us laugh and cry and think and all of that wonderful stuff.

The film excels at creating and increasing tension - the scene in the bar is particularly impressive, with its game of shifting identity framing the Allies' attempt to disguise themselves. That is a virtuoso scene done by one of our greatest directors. So, too, is the opening scene of the film, an opening that immediately makes us tense. There are other flourishes throughout the movie that show that despite his love for himself and for lifting shots directly out of other films, Tarantino is really good at this whole movie-making thing.

I'm still confused by the scenes of Hitler and Goebbels laughing at the violence in the German film - is Tarantino implicating us as evil by watching his film, as we jam popcorn down our gullets being entertained by his depiction of extreme violence towards our 'enemies'? I have no idea, and I don't really care - Tarantino's film within a film device is just as loathsome a conception as the entire film.

Sunset Boulevard - 1950 - 4 Stars

Actors: Gloria Swanson, William Holden

Director: Billy Wilder

It's a real shame that most of Sunset Boulevard's behind-the-scenes tropes have been taken by lesser entertainments: the reclusive ex-film star, those who enable her fantastical life, and the crippling effect that diminishing fame and obsolescence has had on said film star. Even so, Sunset Boulevard still stands out. Its power mostly resides in Swanson's performance as silent film star Norma Desmond - she plays all the parts, from doting, to self-important, to pathetic, all quite believably.

Not helping the film is Wilder's need to reveal the end of the film at the beginning - he also does this in Double Indemnity, but here it seems to serve two purposes, neither good: it hooks the audience unnecessarily, and it makes the ending more believable. In both films, Wilder fails to trust his lead actor Everyman to hold the audience's attention, here larding up the first quarter of the film with reams of narration. While the overwhelming voiceover is cutely ironic in light of Desmond's insistence that films used to be done better without words, Holden's wry asides age poorly.

Inception - 2010 - 4 Stars

Actors: Leonardo Dicaprio, Ellen Page

Director: Christopher Nolan

Note: There are no spoilers here.

Inception is a terrifically inventive film, showcasing Christopher Nolan's talent for building fully fleshed out worlds. I am hoping, rather hopelessly, that this does not inspire a wave of imitators, but I am almost sure that it will. Nolan locates his film in a place that no one has really tried to do in this full a fashion, and pulls it off with a minimum of hokeyness and a minimum of exposition.

Ideally, this should have been two films, but unfortunately films with this kind of budget need to be brutally successful; they cannot pussyfoot around with greatness. Perhaps two films would have ruined things - the Wachowski brothers built an incredibly elegant house of cards with the opening film to the Matrix trilogy, then spent the remaining two films piling on more cards until it all collapsed.

Tokyo Story - 1953 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama

Director: Yasujiro Ozu

Tokyo Story is like if Curb Your Enthusiasm and King Lear had a Japanese baby together. Or perhaps it's more like an Oriental John Cassavetes film. Whatever the case, I had plenty of time during the film to think of these witticisms - it moves at a jarringly glacial pace. Detailing an elderly couple's trip to Tokyo to visit their grown children, the film is relentlessly mundane as their children take them around the city and are generally inconvenienced by their parents' visit. This pace is absolutely necessary and pays off in the second half. A film that could have very easily devolved into melodrama or mawkishness rises above both. Like Ikiru, it attempts to get at the heart of why we do anything at all.

Buffalo '66 - 1998 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Vincent Gallo, Christina Ricci

Director: Vincent Gallo

Note: Spoilers ahead.

Buffalo '66 would be better if it were in French. It's very much a foreign film - the plot is spare and wanders around, almost all the action of the film is talking, and Gallo lifts without hesitation from directors like Godard and Ozu. This is my second viewing of this film, and one thing I've never been able to get around in the film is Christina Ricci, who has almost no characteristics besides her ability to playfully lie. We know almost nothing about her by the end of the film, besides the fact that she's now attached to the mess of anxiety and repression that is Vincent Gallo's character. Does she follow him out of pity? Does she have a genuine interest in him? It makes less sense to me on a second viewing. If it were a foreign film, I would just attribute her character's bizarreness to the fact that foreign people are either completely crazy or wholly committed to fantasy. Alas, it's in English.

The film does a great job of capturing the shabby, blue-collarness of Buffalo - the bowling alleys, cracking sidewalks, cheap motels and ranch homes. That doesn't help me understand this bizarre film any better, though.

The 39 Steps - 1935 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Robert Donat, Madeline Carroll

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

My totally haphazard old film knowledge fails me when I see a film like The 39 Steps - I should probably not even bother rating such a film. The 39 Steps could be re-named the 39 Deus Ex Machinas - our heroes fall into and out of trouble so fast that we might miss it if we blinked. The film's plot is also exceptionally similar to North By Northwest (regular dude hears some spy shit, has to lam it).

One of the film's strengths is its 86 minute running time - modern directors would've made this 125 minutes, with a jive-talking pop-culture referencing panda and ponderous scenes of exposition where all the nonsense that happens in this movie gets explained - Hitchcock merely lets it all happen. Hitchcock also throws in a few inventive camera shots that suggest his later genius.

Zodiac - 2007 - 2½ Stars

Actors: Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo

Director: David Fincher

Zodiac belongs in a genre I call a theater movie. I suppose all films are theater movies - better experienced on a giant, mind-blocking screen. What's more important about a movie theater is that it's generally time-blocking. We get immersed in the film and time disappears.

On a small screen, however, Zodiac's 2 hour and 40 minute running time is painfully obvious. And while it's a solid thriller that follows the story of the mysterious Zodiac Killer, it is simply far too long for what it tries to accomplish. There has to be a way to tell this story more economically. Fincher stuffs everything in because he doesn't want the film to be merely a police procedural, so we're treated to bone-chilling murders and murder attempts. We're also treated to Jake Gyllenhaal's character, who appears entirely irrelevant until halfway through the film.

If I saw Zodiac in the theater, I'd've given it 3½ stars, maybe 4. 2½ hours of this film, however - Hitchcock correctly noted that any film can always be shorter.

Ratatouille - 2007 - 4 Stars

Voices: Patton Oswalt, Brad Garrett

Director: Brad Bird

It's been a long time since I've seen a Pixar film - I think the last one was the original Toy Story when it came out. I really want to hate Pixar - critically acclaimed and wildly popular? There has to be something insidious going on. Maybe Brad Bird rapes pelicans, or The Incredibles is actually an allegory about Aryan supermen. That all may be so, but they make a damn fine film. Ratatouille is thankfully free of pop-culture winks, it has a simple, timeless story that's told effectively.

Helping me through was the voice of Patton Oswalt, a most unlikely lead voice in a children's animated film, but he is pretty much note-perfect as Remy the Rat.

Dogville - 2004 - 4 Stars

Actors: Nicole Kidman, Stellan Skarsgaard

Director: Lars Von Trier

Dogville opens with a shot set above a 'street' - it clearly isn't a street, but a representation of one. We can see the tops of people's heads as they are in their homes - their homes are labeled Other items around the town are also labeled. I thought this was a cute Wes Anderson way to begin a film - that we'd soon be transported to a real movie set with actual houses, streets, etc. As it turns out, that's the entire film set.

A film with basically no set must rely very heavily on acting, and this film is lucky enough to have amazing actors. Though I give it full marks for the acting performances and utilization of style, the film fails in many other respects. It can also be painful to watch at times. Still, this sort of experimentation should be encouraged, even if it does result in an overwrought and heavy-handed film that runs nearly three hours in length.

Glengarry Glen Ross - 1992 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey, Alan Arkin, Alec Baldwin

Director: James Foley

Glengarry Glen Ross has lost little of its luster since I last viewed it four years ago. A tale of four real estate salesmen in competition to keep their jobs, using every sales deception imaginable, with the least ethical path usually winning out. It's also an acting clinic - watching these great actors alternately squirm and bluster, wince and connive.

Writer David Mamet tries to show the pitfalls of wrapping up one's identity in one's job - for if a person like this is no longer good at their job, what are they? Lemmon's Shelley Levene, who is at points confused, scared, confident, triumphant, pleading, and wheedling, manages to state this central point without saying it.

My Best Fiend - 1999 - 4 Stars

Director: Werner Herzog

Note: Spoilers for Fitzcarraldo ahead

My Best Fiend looks at Werner Herzog's relationship with the legendarily troubled actor Klaus Kinski, with whom Herzog made five films. Kinski's incredible intensity on screen was dwarfed by his intensity off it, as he constantly stormed into rages whenever something was not the way he wanted it.

I get the sense that Herzog is stretching the truth in this documentary - he seems like that sort of truth-stretching sort. Regardless, there is one moment that captures their relationship - as they are filming the famous scene near the end of Fitzcarraldo where the boat is smashing into the sides of the river, a cameraman gets seriously injured when the boat rams into a bank with great force. Kinski and Herzog are unharmed and recounting how far they flew while this cameraman nurses his bloodied hand - there is little concern for him, as both are more interested in telling their experience of what went on. It is this self-absorbed quality that a great artist must have.

The Taking Of Pelham 123 - 2009 - 1 Star

Actors: John Travolta, Denzel Washington

Director: Tony Scott

I don't normally review films this putrid on this blog, but I alighted upon this stunning piece of drivel on television and was compelled to watch it.

Why remake a masterpiece? The original Taking of Pelham 123 is a great film, a gritty 70s New York triumph about an attempted takeover and ransom of a New York City subway train. This movie is a complete disaster, substituting Robert Shaw's taciturn, meticulous terrorist with John Travolta ham, several subplots that are totally unneeded, a bizarre commentary on the nature of Wall Street, and terrible direction - it's as if the director thinks that if the camera stays still for more than three seconds that we will immediately become bored.

Film remakes can have some value - they can provide new interpretations of old classics, or update films for a new generation. One gets the sense in watching this, however, that Gone With The Wind needed a backtalking chimpanzee, or that The Godfather needed a courtroom scene. All Hollywood 'style', absolutely no substance, and utterly forgettable - stick with the original.

The Hangover - 2009 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms

Director: Todd Phillips

The Hangover is rather easy to deconstruct as formulaic and ultimately dis-spiriting. We have Our Hero, who's a real Cool Guy and Loves To Party, and who disapproves of Lame Guy's Overly Controlling Girlfriend. Then we have The Butt Of Jokes who doesn't understand how to act in social situations (his pop culture touchstones are woefully out of date!) and whom our main characters mock endlessly.

That said, Zach Galifinakis steals the show as The Butt Of Jokes. Furthermore, the plot of The Hangover is actually quite good for a comedy film, and is the true strength of the film - like our heroes, we have no idea what happened. I am not a fan of the Todd Phillips oeuvre, but this is probably the best of the bunch. I do still lament the state of film comedy - I have low expectations for anything Judd Apatow will undertake in the future, and certainly no expectations for the Phillips machine.

A Fistful Of Dollars - 1964 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Clint Eastwood, Marianne Koch
Director: Sergio Leone

Clint Eastwood's 'Man With No Name's motivations elude me. Sure, he's a badass, and he's crafty, and he's not altogether concerned with money. And he's a legendary shot. A sense of adventure, perhaps, always up to a challenge; here, to defeat the ruthless men that have also come to the American Southwest to stake a claim for themselves.

Whatever the case, Leone's Yojimbo retelling succeeds in some places. Eastwood's character is supposed to anchor the whole thing, but doesn't quite pull it off for me - in Yojimbo, Toshiro Mifune plays the manipulative savant with Puckish flavor, enjoying every moment even as he risks his life - Eastwood's character is more taciturn, his enjoyment is internalized.

Salesman - 1968 - 3 Stars

Director: Albert Maysles

Salesman covers the travails of five Bible salesman as they go door-to-door trying to hock their $50 picture Bibles to generally poor Catholic families. This is obviously very weighty stuff - the Church has signed off on this practice, and the salesmen make sure to mention the Church and, if possible, the local priest, right away.

While Salesman is no doubt an important documentary historically, it fails to tell a compelling story. The scenes where the men are doing their aggressive pitches to people who cannot afford this product and don't realize they don't want or need it are skin-crawling in a good way, but there's not much else to this film.

Gone With The Wind - 1939 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable
Director: Victor Fleming

Gone With The Wind should probably be longer. It's the rare film that despite its length, it feels like there isn't a wasted scene. Still, some events come across as melodramatic, a pitfall that it's difficult to avoid when adapting from a novel.

The performances are absolutely top-notch - I think they are actually aided by the often cheesy and outdated backdrops the film resorts to using. As in a play, we are forced to focus more on the characters. Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara is perfectly realized; Clark Gable's swaggering Rhett Butler a classic film performance.

A special f-you to the Simpsons for ruining the end of this film for me, though. I suppose that any time I watch a legitimate classic film I will run into this problem - someone has already polluted my brain with satire, parody, or reference.

Satantango - 1994 - 4 Stars

Actors: Mihaly Vig, Putyi Horvath
Director: Bela Tarr

I guess the question surrounding the film Satantango and its gargantuan length - supposedly 7 hours, though I admit I lost count - Is it worth it? Is it a film worth viewing? I say - maybe. It will change your perception of film by the end. You will expect to see, e.g. characters just eating. But you will also be bored at some points, that's a guarantee - the film defies you not to be bored. You will probably become depressed as well - this is far from an uplifting film. Also, if it takes you a month to view it like me, you'll only figure out the names of all the characters by the very end. Oh, and spoiler alert - it doesn't really have an ending.

So if you're up for a 7 hour slog through Eastern Europe that doesn't have a conclusion - go for it. It's unlike just about anything else you've ever seen, and there are a few sublime sequences amid all the squalor and despair.

EDIT: If you think that somewhere down the line, you might want to see this film, watch a film by Andrei Tarkovsky or Gus Van Sant's Gerry first. If you enjoy the ridiculously long takes and floating camera style, Satantango just may be for you.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad - 2007 - 4 Stars

Director: Eddy Moretti

Heavy Metal in Baghdad details the day-to-day struggles of the Iraqi heavy metal band Acrassicauda the difficulties they have merely surviving in 2005 Baghdad, never mind finding time and space to play their music. They are the only heavy metal band in Iraq - at their rare concerts, "People don't headbang, because the authorities think that people nodding their heads in this way are performing Jewish prayers."

I thought of Hoop Dreams and the tribulations of Arthur Agee and William Gates to continue their dream of playing basketball - why do art and sport, two of the most fruitless human endeavors, affect us so when we see them restricted? Even one of the band members, in possibly the most poignant statement of the film, recognizes that there are many other Iraqis who wish to help people, but cannot due to the strife in their country. All these men want to do is to play music.

Julia - 2008 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Tilda Swinton, Saul Rubinek
Director: Erick Zonca

I should explain, based on the number of 3½ star ratings I've been giving out, what that exactly means. In my view, it means a film that takes risks but doesn't quite cohere. It may have a great concept and fail to execute. Alternately, a 3½ star film may take a poor concept and execute it as good as it can be done.

Julia falls in the 'great concept, couldn't quite pull it off' realm. I'm not sure the creators of Julia realized they were making a noir film. As a result, most of the character development comes off as hollow - we're watching a rather convoluted film. When the movie tries to pull back and show us the characters' human side, it's difficult to empathize with any of the main characters. The film also runs long at 140 minutes; I doubt this could be a 90 minute film, but it could easily be a 120 minute film.

However, despite the character issues, Tilda Swinton is phenomenal as the titular character - her performance, at the very least, was quite credible.

In The Loop - 2009 - 3½ Stars

Actors: James Gandolfini, Tom Hollander
Director: Armando Iannucci

In The Loop is an exceedingly British film. Not that people are jamming toffees down their throat while discussing the latest footie match, but its humor is alternately understated and bombastic - most of what is funny comes from what is said.

A political satire mostly in name, In The Loop is more a showcase for its one-liners, callbacks, and call-forwards - it's a dense knot of recurring jokes. There's not any Dr. Strangelove-esque heavy-handedness - in this film, politicians are largely vain, stupid people. There's also not many better targets for satire than vain, stupid people.

I suspect this film gets better on second watch. The punchlines are in no discernible rhythm, and there's just so many of them.

District 9 - 2009 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope
Director: Neill Blomkamp

District 9 asks a real simple question, and it asks it from its moderately inventive faux-documentary opening - What if aliens landed on Earth, and instead of being malevolent and powerful or all-knowing or beautiful, they turned out to be merely squatters? What would we do with them?

Unfortunately with such a solid setup, the film loses the ambiguity of the question along the way, shedding it for gore, propulsive action sequences, and black-and-white morality. It also employs a trick that I can only accept in science fiction films, coming up with one deus ex machina after another. That's the great thing about technology that never existed - all you have to do is invent it in the script, and voila. There's nothing Independence Day bad (the aliens don't use the same OS that we do), but the astute viewer is certainly left with a few questions.

The King Of Comedy - 1982 - 4 Stars

Actors: Robert Deniro, Jerry Lewis
Director: Martin Scorsese

Having everyone know your name - blessing or curse? It's not hard to figure out where Martin Scorsese falls in The King of Comedy. Deniro stars as Rupert Pupkin, the up-and-coming comic whose name people always forget, Lewis as the established late-night talk show host who is harassed by fanatics. Deniro is unbelievably creepy - his permanent cheeriness and amusement, aping those of a talk show guest, are even creepier than his general demeanor in Scorsese films. His character is obsessed with being a stand-up comic on Lewis's show, even though it appears that he's never actually performed his act to a live audience.

Scorsese and writer Paul Zimmerman play around with delusional behavior and the power of fantasy - the notion that fame compensates for the slings and arrows we might suffer in our youth. We're not treated to actual scenes from Pupkin's youth, but to build up into such a steeled lack of self-awareness, it must have been awful indeed. We're often told about famous people who have terrible childhoods - what if you have a terrible childhood and you dream of being famous.. but you're totally untalented?

Gosford Park - 2001 - 3 Stars

Actors: Maggie Smith, Clive Owen
Director: Robert Altman

Gosford Park is a charming film about whose characters I really didn't care at all. There's some pretty standard Altman stuff here - the fact that there are around 20 characters and they are breezily introduced. Gosford Park is ultimately about class warfare in Britain before the fall of the British Empire, which, again, is not a subject I particularly care for. The film does make an interesting study of upper-class society - in this film, it's the servants who know everything and gossip endlessly about their masters; their masters are so reserved and polite that they try not to divulge anything about their true feelings to anyone besides those who must know them most intimately.

Altman makes perfect use of the camera in his study of secrets - the camera tends to move all the time, as though we're there - he is fantastic at making us really seem like an observer to the action.

Satantango - Part 1 -1994

Actors: Mihaly Vig, Putyi Horvath
Director: Bela Tarr

Satantango opens with a five-minute shot of cattle - and it's at this point that you know you are settling in for the long haul. Tarr loves exceptionally long takes with the camera sweeping around the action or following behind or ahead of our characters as they walk.

Like other long-take directors (e.g. Fassbinder, Tarkovsky), sometimes Satantango shows us something that other films will pass over, and other times it's just plain dull. The story is told in parts - the first disc of Satantango has 3 vignettes, all of which concern each other - the characters in Vignette 2 are mentioned in #1, and #3 concerns an observer of all the action. Tarr's story concerns a rather dim and despondent farming community in Hungary - it's a difficult slog, and I guess I'll have to see if it's worth it, as there are still nearly 5 hours left.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story - 2007 - 3 Stars

Actors: John C. Reilly, Jenna Fischer
Director: Jake Kasdan

Walk Hard was not a successful film at the box office, and I suspect that's because it was just a little too good at what it does. A send-up of recent biopics, it skewers the genre without love; it reveals how hollow and silly all of the tropes in these films are. Of course, I've never actually seen these films.

The jokes that don't work are the ones that seem to refer directly to those films - Walk the Line and Ray, for example - these references instantly make the film dated. Still, Walk Hard has some fantastic laughs, and shows the absurdity of trying to capture a person's entire life story in 2 hours.

A Serious Man - 2009 - 3 Stars

Actors: Michael Stuhlbarg, Sari Lennick
Director: Coen Brothers

Note: Spoilers Ahead

Horrible things are always befalling the characters in a Coen Brothers' film. So when we see a character who happens to be holding an ice pick at the opening of the film, we know that that's going to end up in someone's neck or chest by the end of the scene.

The Coens are so meticulous that they almost certainly nail all of the period details from 1970s Minnesota, as well as all the Jewish family foibles. Tremendous, too, is the way the children swear in this film - they're terrible at it, and yet they do it constantly. The Coens are always spectacular in the details.

However, I'm often left confused by Coen films on first watch - I do suspect there's a lot of symbolism that passed over my head. Larry Gopnik's troubles made me wince, not laugh, nor do I think I was supposed to be laughing. But nor did I really care, it's a Coen brothers film, so I figured he'd continue to be tortured, and I'd have to sit there watching it.

Quantum of Solace - 2008 - 3 Stars

Actors: Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko
Director: Marc Forster

The title Quantum of Solace narrowly beat out other choices, 'Jot Of Relief' and 'Iota of Comfort'. It's a terrible, terrible title. Quantum of Solace also happens to be the first Bond film in 20 years which I didn't see in the theater; this is unfortunate because it draws heavily on the plot of Casino Royale, which I saw 4 years ago and don't really remember at all. As a result, I was lost for a lot of the film.

Quantum of Solace also suffers from Tony Scott syndrome - the action sequences have as many cuts as possible. This technique is supposed to make things more manic and action-packed, but to me it's just disorienting. I suppose this more adequately replicates the actual feeling of e.g. being in a speeding boat and shooting at guys while being shot at and navigating through a busy harbor, but my inability to actually follow what's happening causes me to give up on the scene and wait until it's done to see who's alive and who's dead.

Closely Watched Trains - 1966 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Vaclav Neckar, Josef Somr
Director: Jiri Menzel

In most films, we are provided with a kind of logic for what our character is doing. We are therefore able to understand his motivations. Closely Watched Trains does nothing of the sort. Our main character is a blank slate from whose whims we are removed. At the outset, we are told that our protagonist comes from a long line of do-nothings and seeks to follow in their footsteps - one of those hilariously sad Eastern European existences that Gogol and Dostoyevsky captured perfectly. Instead of 'doing nothing', our protagonist does quite a bit, but I at least had no real idea why.

The other characters, on the other hand, are perfectly drawn - the officious Nazi, the pompous station master, the lecherous train dispatcher Hubicka, and his shameless consort Zdena - it is almost as though our protagonist doesn't even inhabit the same world with these people, so withdrawn and odd he turns out to be. In all, though, Closely Watched Trains is a film I enjoyed but that I certainly didn't 'get'.

The Road Warrior - 1981 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence
Director: George Miller

The Road Warrior is both silly and tense, as any good post-apocalyptic film should be. An apocalypse is silly, and predicting what comes after it sillier still - thus we get a blasted desert filled with people fighting over remaining gasoline stockpiles.

Mel Gibson's Max carries on a proud tradition of action heroes who don't say much. Any scenes with exposition are chopped down to their barest essentials, so we can get to scenes with leather-clad, vaguely punk-ish marauders. Questions like, 'How do people find water in this desert?' go happily unanswered, since that's both boring and hokey and doesn't involve people dressed like a Gwar cover band. This would rank high on a list of must-see films for 13 year old boys, where heavy action, gratuitous nudity and a slightly askance view of human nature are needed - all are represented here.

The Hurt Locker - 2008 - 4 Stars

Actors: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie
Director: Katheryn Bigelow

Note: Spoilers ahead

I don't generally like war movies. They're always too long - first we have to be introduced to our characters, then some of them have to die, then some of them have to yell in slow motion while carrying other wounded soldiers, etc. I generally find them to be a gigantic downer with little redeeming value - I'm not entertained.

The Hurt Locker sidesteps some of these problems by not even having a plot. As a result, we're treated to a film that's only 130 minutes, instead of the requisite 160. There's not really scenes where higher-ranking officers call into question the actions of lower-ranking officers, or likewise, and the moral questions raised by war are mostly raised as practical questions in the heat of battle. I don't think this is a film I will ever watch again - its value lies in its superb creation of tension, which obviously dissipates on a second viewing - but it demonstrates that we don't have to know our characters intimately to care about them.

Kentucky Fried Movie - 1977 - 2½ Stars

Actors: Various
Director: John Landis

Kentucky Fried Movie is a series of sketches by the people who brought the world Airplane! Dated jokes abound - there's several references to Deep Throat, blaxploitation films, Hare Krishnas, etc. The most continuous part of the film - a sketch mocking kung fu films entitled A Fistful Of Yen - also happens to be the most tedious. There's some solid ideas here, but it's not really worth an entire movie.

It is interesting to note how parody has advanced in the last 30 years - only the most ponderous parodies (e.g. Meet The Spartans) would feel the need to spell out the references in the way that some are done in this film. Audiences are much more savvy these days.

Ikiru - 1952 - 5 Stars

Actors: Takashi Shimura, Shinichi Himori
Director: Akira Kurosawa

Most films start out with, at the very least, a good idea. This idea is fleshed out, and by the middle of the film, we can see where things are headed. By the conclusion, we merely want the film to be over - we're tired of the idea. The great films, however, take that initial idea and don't let it become stale. They turn it around, backwards, topwise, show us all the angles. And they just don't miss while doing so. Ikiru is such a film.

I don't think I'm spoiling very much by saying this film is about a dying man - the opening twenty seconds let us know that. Kurosawa's masterstroke is the final third of the film, which is told through recollection. I at first bristled at this choice, but it lets us see the true impact of the film's events. The writing and staging of these final scenes is among the best I've ever seen in any film, anywhere.

Extract - 2009 - 2 Stars

Actors: Jason Bateman, Mila Kunis
Director: Mike Judge

I'm beginning to think more and more that Mike Judge got lucky with Office Space. Office Space is an excellent comedy that gets bogged down by its plot, and pads its run-time with those extended slow-motion scenes. Idiocracy, his follow-up to Office Space which got buried by its studio, was a one-note satire. Now we get Extract, a disjointed film that falls apart almost right from the beginning.

This film would have been far better had it not been billed as a straight comedy - its plot really seems more along the lines of Paul Thomas Anderson (of Hard Eight, and especially Punch Drunk Love). There's just not that many laughs here, and the laughs that do come are on ground that Judge has been over and over again. I suppose when one makes a career of repetitive characters, it's tough to find them new repetitions.

The Squid And The Whale - 2005 - 4 Stars

Actors: Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney
Director: Noah Baumbach

Noah Baumbach is like the lovechild of Philip Roth and Woody Allen - he captures the unpleasant moments in life that we gloss over when we discuss the nobler nature of humanity and the irrationality of people who live by logic - in The Squid and the Whale, this supposed logic is accompanied by extraordinary self-delusion.

Daniels and Linney portray a husband and wife, both writers, having marital troubles in Brooklyn, and the effect this has on their two sons, one of whom is in their late teens, and the other who is at an indistinct age (10-12?). This film is supposedly autobiographical - I suspect there were some people quite upset at their portrayal here.

Thieves' Highway - 1949 - 3 Stars

Actors: Richard Conte, Valentina Cortese
Director: Jules Dassin

I'm never sure how films like Thieves' Highway end up on my queue, because I've never heard of this movie before. Whatever the case - Thieves' Highway features some cool camera work and an interesting look at how markets function. However, the plot really makes no goddamn sense at all - it seems to be about a working-class son bent on avenging his father by selling apples at a fair price - and the characters' motivations are quite ridiculous. There's far better classic films than this one.

Up In The Air - 2009 - 3½ Stars

Actors: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga
Director: Jason Reitman

Up In The Air, and this may sound absurd, could have been a really great film. It has a solid hook, it's ostensibly about Our Time and the way We Live and Should We Go On Living This Way, but unfortunately it suffers from one problem: it's (probably) a big budget film. This requires the director to pander to his audience - what could have been a film that explores one man's story and at the same time suggests all of our stories is instead bracketed with footage of real-life people discussing how it is to live in Our Time.

My high praise for the film is that even though it is populated with archetypes, those archetypes felt 'true'.

Greenberg - 2010 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig
Director: Noah Baumbach

Film, as compared to literature or any other medium, seems best disposed to show the workings of the narcissist. Unlike literature, in (most) film we never get any internal reflections - we are working only with what a person says and does. Ben Stiller's Greenberg in the film of the same name is such a person - intractably self-regarding, lost in the past, unable to enjoy any part of life. Things happen to him in the film; will he change? You'll have to see it to find out.

The film is very much in the Woody Allen vein - at least in Woody Allen films, there's his constant one-liners that brighten the misery. There's humor here, but little of it is joyous laughter. In Greenberg, it feels like the laughs are being wrenched out of us. It's a well-made film, but it deals with parts of our psyche that we'd all like to deny - it's often difficult to enjoy experiencing that.

The Cruise - 1998 - 3½ Stars

Director: Bennett Miller

The Cruise follows Timothy 'Speed' Levitch, a notable weirdo and part-time New York City bus tour guide, through his reflections about New York, architecture, love, and life. Levitch's continuous extemporaneous rants, despite his irritating voice and seemingly unbearable self-regard, are inspired and interesting. Weaker are the poems or prepared statements he reads, and 76 minutes is quite long enough with Levitch, but he is full of information on the history of New York as well as a fascinating, oblique take on existence.

The Long Goodbye - 1973 - 3 Stars

Actors: Elliot Gould, Nina Van Pallandt
Director: Robert Altman

When I see a mediocre noir film like The Long Goodbye, it makes me appreciate the great noirs all the more. Obviously this isn't a true noir - it's been Altman-ized and updated for 1970s Los Angeles - but being based off a Raymond Chandler novel and featuring Gould as Philip Marlowe makes it a de facto noir.

Noir plots are supposed to have lots of twists and turns, but this film really doesn't. The Altman-ized characters are a touch too eccentric, and Gould's habit of muttering to himself makes him more nebbish-y than noir heroes, whose appeal is always being one step ahead of the audience in terms of figuring out what the hell is actually going on. We get the sense that Marlowe is just as lost as we are. As a comment on noir films and their relevance to actual life, perhaps this is interesting, but it doesn't make for a great movie.

Deliverance - 1972 - 4 Stars

Actors: Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds
Director: John Boorman

Even though Deliverance is both terrifying and insulting, I enjoyed it nonetheless. It's terrifying because it successfully evokes how close we are to our bestial nature, without jamming it down our throats. It's insulting because its evocation of terror is based on our natural fear of bestial hillbillies, who steal and threaten and (spoiler alert) sodomize. So if it does cast the rural South as an uneducated, lawless lot, it manages to grant all the other characters realistic qualities and temperaments.

There's especially great use of cinematography - we know from other films when the camera is 'within' the eyes of a character, the camera moves in the way a person's head and sight does - Deliverance tricks us into thinking someone's watching. Or are they? The feeling of dread is multiplied.

Shutter Island - 2010 - 4 Stars

Actors: Leonardo Dicaprio, Ben Kingsley
Director: Martin Scorsese

In baseball, a 300-win pitcher is considered historically great. Sportswriters try to trumpet the next 300 game winner when a phenomenal young pitcher puts together 2 or 3 great seasons at the beginning of his career. As it turns out, 300 game winners are not defined by the start of their career, but by the end of it - 300 game winners, in the modern era, are pitchers who pitch very well between the ages of 35 and 40, and perhaps even beyond that.

My elaborate and clunky sports analogy is a setup to discuss Martin Scorsese's place in the film canon. As I see it, many of the truly great artists are like those 300 game winners - people like Beethoven, Kurosawa, Dostoyevsky, and Shakespeare were still pushing artistic boundaries right up to their death; their 'greatest' works came in old age. I wonder if Shutter Island is a step in that direction - as a mindfuck, it's top notch, but mindfucks don't always make great films. In fact, I'd say they never do (and yes, I am including Psycho). So while Shutter Island is a masterful construction, there's only so far a director can go with this sort of film. It's not a genre picture, and Scorsese is using his name to be able to push through a film whose commercial viability would be dubious with another director attached. I am still hoping for greater than this.

Henry Fool - 1997 - 4 Stars

Actors: Thomas Jay Ryan, James Urbaniak
Director: Hal Hartley

More films should be like Henry Fool, but Henry Fool itself is a giant, glorious mess. Concerning a garbageman steered towards writing poetry and the titular ex-con who's doing the steering, Henry Fool asks questions about art's purpose, its effect on those who experience it, and the unfortunate consequences of artistic success.

There's a great film trapped inside this movie - unfortunately Henry Fool veers into self-indulgence with its 137 minute length. However, the film manages to create an interesting little world - this film could have been even looser and longer. It also has the candor to not believe its own bullshit - while it's easy for me to say this film could've been done better, it also could have been done far worse.

Step Brothers - 2008 - 2½ Stars

Actors: Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly
Director: Adam McKay

Spoilers, but c'mon.

Step Brothers seems to be the apotheosis of the man-child genre - I'd think that Ferrell and O'Reilly are too old to play man-children, but not so. Each plays the son of a parent getting re-married, and thus the title - Step Brothers.

The film climaxes at Ferrell and Reilly's bizarre rendition of Con te partiro which seems to indicate that we should be ourselves, and everyone will like us. I'm probably reading into the film too deeply. Sight gags abound - post-Something About Mary, it seems that filmmakers are convinced that showing something disgusting is inherently more humorous than leaving it to suggestion. I don't think this is true, but then again, comedy really doesn't have any boundaries anymore - we're living in an entertainment world where 'everything is suggested'.

As a side note, the man-child genre has to be put to bed - it's almost meta, since comedy is itself a 'boyish' pursuit - it's almost as embarrassing as writers writing novels about writers.

North By Northwest - 1959 - 4 Stars

Actors: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint
Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Note: Spoilers Ahead, but even if you haven't seen the film, you'll already know them

North By Northwest, like Psycho, is a film best seen without any awareness of what's about to happen. In our reference-obsessed culture, this is absolutely impossible - surely North By Northwest's two most iconic scenes are already ruined. In fact, they are ruined enough for us to question the plausibility of both of them, even as we watch them for the first time. The 'airplane' scene is rather incredible, but even our protagonist comments on its absurdity in a later scene. The climactic scene down Mount Rushmore falls prey to typical cinema convention - I was just waiting for the scene to wrap up so the film could end.

Regardless, it's an enjoyable film that asks a real simple question from the very beginning - what if a shadowy, powerful organization thought you were a spy? How could you go about proving that you weren't? It's a deeply paranoid film - sometimes I wonder how Hitchcock's works were so popular. However, the protagonist may as well be named John Everyman - he and everyone else are kept mostly traitless, as they continue deceiving one another.

The plot of the film is masterful overall, despite the scene where several characters nicely provide all of the exposition we need for the film - there's a lot of plot to carry, and a lot of off-screen drama we really cannot be privy to without making the exposition even more tedious. Hitchcock even throws in a MacGuffin, though he invests so little in it that I'm not even sure it's a successful usage of the practice.

Vernon, Florida - 1981 - 2½ Stars

Director: Errol Morris

I used to think that I would watch Errol Morris film a bunch of weirdos reading the phone book. That thought has been extinguished by Vernon, Florida, an extremely loose collection of interviews that Morris did in the Florida town. The film almost functions as an anthropological study of rural people - we see how they spend their leisure time, what they believe in, how they work, and so on.

Like Gates of Heaven, Morris's preceding film, there's something much deeper going on in Vernon, Florida, but I'll be damned if I actually want to find out what it is. Compounding the general inscrutability of the film are the subjects' thick accents, which make them near-incomprehensible at times. The film is also funny, but as a college-educated Northerner, I'd feel like a real asshole if I put on this film to laugh at the people in it. However, restricting my laughter just made viewing the film a tense experience. I don't think it was Morris's intent to make fun of these people, but with so many television shows featuring ill-informed people 'deserving' of our ridicule (e.g. Jerry Springer, the early incarnation of The Daily Show), it's unfortunately my impulse. Mercifully, the film is only 55 minutes long.

Dead Man - 1995 - 3 Stars

Actors: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer
Director: Jim Jarmusch

Jim Jarmusch is cool. His films evoke a kind of cool even if they are often about losers. When it comes right down to it, I can imagine Jim Jarmusch making decisions about the content of his films based on exactly how cool it be. Wouldn't it be cool to have Robert Mitchum in my movie? Yes, it would - put him in. Iggy Pop likes acting, let's give him a role. Oh, and everyone should ask everyone if they have tobacco. Unfortunately, past all the coolness, there's not very much substance - things just kind of happen. I don't know why I'm so disposed to dislike these very open-ended, 'life-like' films - I suppose because we never really get a sense that Johnny Depp's character has anything to him at all. Also grating was Jarmusch's use of fades in and out to begin and end scenes, a technique that worked better in Stranger Than Paradise. The film is very cool, and that's cool - it strikes me as the sort of film that if the viewer is in the right mood, can seem excellent. Evidently I was not in the right mood.

Another 'cool' choice was having Neil Young do the soundtrack - a bunch of twanging, amelodic, distorted guitars that really seemed to add nothing. I suppose it was Young's interpretation of typical Western soundtracks.

The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant - 1972 - 3 Stars

Actors: Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla
Director: Werner Fassbinder

Note: Minor Spoilers Ahead

Roger Ebert's review of Gerry mentions a quote from a film big-shot who told him, "Roger, if nothing has happened by the end of the first reel, nothing is going to happen." This is certainly true of The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, which is the stereotypical 'foreign film' - dialogue-loaded, action-light, meandering, and certainly dull (at times). After fifteen minutes, I had realized that the 'action' of the film had only taken place in a single room, and was convinced that the rest of the film would also take place there - spoiler alert, but I turned out to be correct.

Perhaps it's my gambling nature, but the film feels like a bet - can you have a 2 hour film whose action only takes place in one room, and still make it interesting? The answer is, 'Sort of', and I think Fassbinder would have a push with whomever he made the bet. Fassbinder does manage to make several interesting characters out of this non-action, including the titular Von Kant around whom the film revolves, but a movie that's only dialogue and in a single room had better accomplish that much. It's an intriguing experiment, no doubt, but the film just has too many scenes that lose our attention for me to rate it any higher than 3 stars.