Under The Volcano - 1984 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Albert Finney, Jacqueline Bisset
Director: John Huston

A portrayal of an alcoholic diplomat set to live out his days permanently drunk in a jerkwater Mexican town in the late 1930s, Under The Volcano feels like a Graham Greene novel improperly adapted to film. There's lots of attempts at providing subtext as well as hint at larger forces at play - there's references to the coming war between Germany and Britain - but these were either ineffective or were simply beyond me on the first viewing. They feel like literary elements that don't quite translate to the screen. Even so, the main story of the film works for me.

One great thing about movies where characters spend most of their time wasted is that they get to talk in the backwards, wandering, half-logical way that drunks often will - it really gives a screenwriter a chance to jam a lot of gold in the character's mouth.

Head-On - 2004 - 4 Stars

Actors: Birol Unel, Sibel Kekelli
Director: Fatih Akin

Head-On is the sort of meandering foreign fare that bites off more than it can chew. Set in Munich, it involves a Turkish man marrying a Turkish woman as a favor so that she can leave her parents' home. Numerous complications arise from the agreement.

I always mistrust my approval of foreign films because they often involve cultures with which I am totally unfamiliar. As a result, it's impossible for me to declare things trite or improbable with regard to character interactions. Head-On certainly strains credulity at many points, intentionally so, but it tells a fascinating story of love and jealousy.

The Conversation - 1975 - 4 Stars

Actors: Gene Hackman, John Cazale
Director: Francis Ford Coppola

I like directors who know when to slide in the subtext, rather than beating us over the head with it. Coppola manages this feat in The Conversation - the one time in the film that a television is turned on, Richard Nixon is referred to. This is a film made in Nixon's America, where people were being recorded talking about recording other people; paranoia about surveillance had to run high. Hence The Conversation, a film about a surveillance expert who is unusually concerned about his own security.

The Conversation excels, in a similar fashion to Big Fan, by keeping all of our attention on the protagonist, who is either in every scene or listening to them. Coppola doesn't allow the film to be about larger themes, e.g. Nixonian paranoia - he expects us to read those into what's going on.

Gene Hackman is far from one of my favorite actors, but he's hardly recognizable here as an isolated security wonk - quite far from his turn as a belligerent cop in The French Connection. Hollywood often struggles the right actor for these parts (e.g. Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind), but at no point did I have the impression that Hackman is a wealthy, successful actor pretending to be a schmuck.

Thank You For Smoking - 2005 - 3 Stars

Actors: Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello
Director: Jason Reitman

It's been a long time between films - Olympic men's hockey and Deadwood have taken up my leisure time of late.

Thank You For Smoking is rather terrible as satire, or perhaps all satire is terrible - the protagonist's spends so much of his time talking his way through argument after argument about the benefits (or lack of harm) in cigarette smoking. However, the film is populated with character actors I like - J.K. Simmons, Sam Elliott, William H. Macy, even Deadwood's Kim Dickens - and there's a fair amount of laughs even amid all the misfires. Overall, the film is utterly forgettable, but it proved a welcome diversion for 90 minutes. Is that not all we can ask of comedies?

As a side note, there were no instances of smoking in the film. I understand why, given the film's content, but I think it's a detriment.

After Hours - 1985 - 2½ Stars

Actors: Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette
Director: Martin Scorsese

After Hours is one of the least recognized films in the Scorsese canon, and with good reason - it's utterly forgettable, more of an exercise in filmmaking than an actual film. It's goofy and dark and one of those homages to New York, kind of the late-night version of Quick Change - who knows who you may meet on a Soho street! There's a few inspired bits - a punk club called Berlin with cages, barbed wire, and guards surveying the crowd is hilarious, both as a sight gag and mockery of New York chic - but manic taxi drivers and the loopiness of arty New Yorkers isn't exactly going over new ground in 1985, much less today.

I suppose the film's loose plot and general surreality is mimicking the randomness of dreams, but too often dreams are uninteresting to anyone besides the dreamer. I think I've used that line before on here, which means that I am uninteresting.

Funny People - 2009 - 4 Stars

Actors: Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen
Director: Judd Apatow

I've heard Funny People described as overstuffed, ambitious, plodding, direction-less; it deserves most of this criticism. It is very difficult to sustain an audience's interest for an 140 minute comedy - luckily, at bottom, Funny People is in many ways not a comedy. It is an exploration of what makes comedians tick - difficult to pull off without being preachy, I think Apatow manages it quite well.

One thing that upset me about the film was that Apatow basically swung for the fences here - the film is surprisingly ambitious for someone who's printed money in Hollywood for the last five years - but Apatow wasn't entirely sure people would get his film, so he threw in a ton of celebrity cameos that are extraordinarily 'safe'. They don't belong in this film, and will instantly date the movie.

Vertigo - 1958 - 4 Stars

Actors: Jimmy Stewart, Kim Novak
Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Note: Minor spoilers ahead

I'm not sure why I doubted Hitchcock (and frequent commenter Huntronik) about this film - halfway through I thought this the dumbest Hitchcock film I'd ever seen. All of the stupidity is necessary to set up the end, however; which end may delve deeper into the human psyche than any Hitchcock film I've seen. We are all of us a few flights of fancy away from madness, I suppose.

I don't know if Vertigo is a full success, at least not for me - it succeeds in messing with the viewer's head. The goal of the film seems to be to get us inside a film character's thoughts in a way that we just cannot in a play or even in a novel. Hitchcock brings it off, but not completely - a few false notes strike along the way. Still, a superb experiment in film by a true master; I don't think I'll forget about Vertigo anytime soon.

There Will Be Blood - 2007 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Spoilers ahead - I will assume you've seen the movie.

I first saw There Will Be Blood in the theater in January of 2008, and ever since then I have been dying to see the film again. I came out of the movie thinking that the first 2 hours were some of the greatest ever committed to film, and that the final 30 minutes were a debacle that nearly spoiled the rest of it. After a second watch, I'm not so sure about that - the film is so heavily symbolic that despite the absurdities and suspension of disbelief we have to go through in the final act, they are necessary to complete the symbolism of the film.

Symbolism is always difficult to talk about because we tend to think of things in terms of what they ARE - i.e. use the word IS a lot - we have a hard time talking about the fact that symbolic things both are what they are, and represent other things at the same time. So were I to say, Daniel IS pure capitalism, he's also a character in the film who acts in a certain way, and so on. Let's just keep that in mind.

Daniel Plainview represents pure capitalism. In the first bit of the film, we see him elated over his discovery of valuable stuff even as he has severely injured himself - he rejects bodily pains and pleasures. We see him deceive some people, attempt to deceive others, all for profit.

Eli Sunday ostensibly represents pure religion. It is unclear to me whether he is a charlatan - Plainview certainly thinks so, but I'm not sure. Perhaps he is - perhaps his charlatanism is in the service of the Lord. We don't really see that, but we do see in the final scene that he is made to utter words he shouldn't, had he totally firm principles. Much more on the last scene later.

H.W. seems to me outside of this world, pulled by the dual forces, but symbolically he is deaf to them - they have little or no power over him. While we see that in his adult life, he is a capitalist and an oilman, he's also married to Eli's sister, and his final statement in the film mentions God. He is religious, but not overly so, and he is a capitalist, but not overly so. Both Eli and Daniel are celibate, he is not. He is seemingly averse to both their pitfalls.

The final scene represents capitalism's bloody triumph over religion - religion won't fight back, plus it needs capital to prosleytize and grow. Eli makes reference to his failure in business - perhaps he lacks the deceit to succeed. Daniel makes Eli like himself - he makes him lie in order to get his way - only to crush Eli because Eli has nothing to offer him.

I think we're supposed to see this playing out on the grand stage of America - that this final battle is Anderson's way of showing that religion and capitalism are competing forces and that capitalism has won the battle for our souls. Blessed is he who can ignore both. I'm not totally sure I agree with that - and if so, it's a rather commonly made point.

Regardless, everything else in the film is top-notch - the acting, the production, the writing. I still think it could've been better.