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.